A
Nation’s Shame
November
4, 2020
As I write these
words on November 4, 2020, we do not know who won yesterday’s presidential
election. Some news reports say it is more likely that Biden will win than that
Trump will, but we just don’t know. We do know this. Over 67 million Americans
and counting voted to reelect Donald Trump. So far he has carried twenty-four
states. A few states remain undecided. Former Vice President Joe Biden has won
the rest. Thus the majority of the voters in a plurality of the states plus DC
have voted for Trump. He is unlikely to receive the majority of the popular
vote, though he’ll fail to receive it only by a very small amount. He is
certainly behind in the national vote total only because Biden carried California,
the state with by far the largest population of any state. Many of us had hoped
that this election would have produced a strong repudiation of everything Trump
is and everything he stands for. It did not, and it will not have even if Biden
is the eventual winner. We Americans must wrestle with that stark reality and
what it means for the current status and the future of our country.
Who is this
Donald Trump for whom so many Americans voted? What does he stand for? What
policies does he represent? We’ve had more than five years of experience with
him as a candidate and as president, so we have no excuse. Who he is and what
he represents are on full display before us. They have been for quite some
time. I’ll look here both at who Trump is as a person and at what kind of
politician he is. One of the frustrations of doing that is that it simply isn’t
possible for me to remember and write down every scandal or every outrage he is
associated with. So I do not contend that what follows is the complete or final
word on how awful Trump is both as a person and as a politician. And of course
who he is as a person and who he is as a politician overlap. For what it’s
worth, here goes.
Here are some of
the more important things about Donald Trump as a person. He is a man who brags
of grabbing women “by the pussy,” his crude word not mine. He has been sexually
unfaithful to at least two of his three wives. He sees women mostly as sex
objects there for the pleasure of men like him. He is an inveterate liar. People
who keep track of such things say he has lied publicly something like twenty thousand
times since he became president. He simply doesn’t operate within the
categories true and false. The truth or falsity of what he says matters to him
not at all. He is a racist who calls white supremacists fine people. He took
the presidential oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the US Constitution,
yet he violates the rule of law at will, sees the US Attorney General as his personal
lawyer rather than as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States
that the Attorney General is supposed to be, and disregards the oversight
function of Congress. He has no commitment at all to American democracy. He has
called for supporters to commit felony voter intimidation and is trying to stop
at least Pennsylvania from completing its count of legally cast ballots. As a
businessman he fails to pay his debts and forces people to whom he owes money
to sue him to recover even a portion of what he owes them. He has defaulted on
so many loans that only one bank in New York will lend him money. It has not
yet been proven that he has committed bank or tax fraud, although he has
certainly been accused of it and is under investigation for it. He has no
empathy for anyone at all or at least not for anyone outside his immediate
family. The only human suffering he feels is his own. He prefers authoritarian
and even dictatorial national leaders like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un to
democratic ones. I am in no position to assess Trump’s mental health, but I
wouldn’t be surprised if he were found to be a sociopath or to have borderline
personality disorder. We’ve had flawed men as president before, Richard Nixon
being Exhibit A in support of that assertion. We’ve never had anyone like
Donald Trump. I pray that we never will have anyone like him again.
He is if anything
a worse politician than he is a person, although being worse at anything than
Donald Trump is at being a person certainly isn’t easy. As a president he has
been an unmitigated disaster. Domestically he has pursued the tax policies of
his Republican predecessors that have, as I recently saw stated, turned
millionaires into billionaires and the working class into the working poor. He
seems to be hellbent on destroying the environment. He and his minions have repealed
every environmental regulation they could. He pulled us out of the Paris
climate accords. He is more than willing to destroy planet Earth so his rich
supporters can make even more money.
He refuses to
denounce racism and white supremacy. He has called white supremacists “fine
people.” He calls peaceful protestors for racial justice rioters. He gives dog whistles
to right-wing extremists, even those devoted to violence. He encourages them in
their racial hatred and violent proclivities. He didn’t condemn the white supremacist
Proud Boys for their violence. Instead he told them to “stand back and stand by,”
an undeniable dog whistle telling them that the time would come when their
violence against peaceful, justice-loving people would be called on to defend
our racist culture and institutions.
Then there’s the
disgusting way that has responded to Russian interference in the 2016 election
in support of his candidacy and the Mueller investigation into that
interference. He called a hoax and fake news. He fired his first Attorney
General because that man, hardly a paragon of political virtue himself, quite
properly recused himself from overseeing that investigation. Trump committed
numerous acts of obstruction of justice in his response to that investigation.
The Mueller report lays them out in considerable detail. The Department of
Justice didn’t indict him for them only because of a misguided DOJ policy
against ever indicting a sitting president for anything thereby putting the
president above the law at least during the president’s term of office. He had
the Attorney General he was finally satisfied would do his bidding rather than
uphold the law, William Barr, declare falsely that it exonerated Trump of
obstruction of justice, which it very clearly does not. Trump was elected with
Russian support, and his businesses are up to their eyeballs in questionably
legal Russian money.[1]
He has not condemned Putin for offering bounties to Taliban fighters for dead
American soldiers. We do not yet know whether or how Russia has influenced
Trump’s decisions as president, but there is little doubt that it has done so
at least to some extent.
One of the
greatest disgraces of Trump’s administration has been its handling of
immigration issues. One of the first things he did as president was to impose a
ban on people from several mostly Islamic countries from coming into the United
States. Courts frequently overturned that ban. He called immigrants rapists and
murderers though the crime rate among them is significantly lower than it is
among American citizens. In the 2016 campaign he said again and again that he
would build a wall all along the US-Mexico border to keep people seeking asylum
out of the country. He claimed over and over that Mexico would pay for the
wall. Those promises were absurd on their face. The border wall Trump envisions
would do next to nothing to keep people out, and there was never any chance
that Mexico would pay for it as the Mexican government made perfectly clear.
Trump has managed to build pieces of this wall though Congress appropriated no
money for it. It has kept no one out, but it has had negative environmental
effects by blocking the movement of wildlife. He sometimes claims that the
whole wall has been built. It hasn’t.
Far worse than
Trump’s nonsense about a border wall is what he has done to immigrant families
who made it across the border seeking asylum. In what is nothing less than a
crime against humanity and the greatest scandal of a scandal-filled
administration Trump’s immigration officers have taken children, some of them
still nursing, away from their parents and locked them up in what amounts to
cages. For this crime Trump and his advisor Stephen Miller, who thought up this
outrage, deserve to spend the rest of their lives in jail. There may be other
immigration officials who do too. Even if everything else Trump did as
president were admirable, his tearing families apart and keeping children in
cages would fully justify removing him from office and putting him in jail for life.
Then there is the
disastrous way Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. We know from Trump’s
own recorded words that he knew in February, 2020, what a threat to public
health the nouvelle coronavirus is and how easily it is transmitted. Yet he
lied to the American people about it, saying that the virus would somehow
magically disappear. He disparaged the scientists who told the truth about the
virus and interfered with the CDC’s public statements about the pandemic and
how people should act in response to it. His administration left response to
the pandemic up to the states with little or no guidance or help from the
federal government. Trump kept urging the states to end the shutdown and
isolation orders many of them had issued and to reopen the economy because he
thought the economic hit from the pandemic hurt his chances of reelection. It
is impossible to know how much of the illness and death the coronavirus has
caused is attributable directly to Trump, but the numbers must run into the
millions of cases and tens of thousands of deaths at least (and perhaps 100,000
or more). Trump’s administration has handled the coronavirus pandemic worse
than has the government of nearly any other country on earth, a fact that on
its own should be enough to deny him reelection.
All of these
things about Donald Trump and a great many more establish one undeniable fact.
Donald Trump is an American fascist. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Reich Minister
of Propaganda, would be proud of Trump’s embrace of the big lie as a tool of
policy. He would also nod approvingly when told of the way Trump gaslights
people into believing things that simply are not true. Trump prefers
authoritarian government to constitutional democracy. His domestic policies benefit
only the wealthy. He pursues an “America First” foreign policy of isolationism
and unrestrained American power. He cares nothing for the rule of law. He approves
of extremist bigotry and violence when they suit his purposes. He despises a free
press because it tells the people the truth about him and his administration.
There is every reason to believe that he would use force to take and retain
power if he thought he could get away with it. He pursues a conservative
economic ideology when all the evidence shows how destructive it is. He serves
up imaginary enemies, usually immigrants, for gullible, bigoted, fearful
Americans to blame for their problems in much the same way (though so far
without the hellish consequences, thank God) that Hitler served up the Jews as
an easy target for angry and fearful Germans. He has no real allegiance to this
country, only to his own power. He is an American fascist. About that there
simply is no doubt.
All of these sins
and failings of Donald Trump are of public record. I didn’t need access to
secret information (which in any event I don’t have) to state them. Yet over 67
million Americans and counting voted to reelect him. There is only one possible
explanation. All of our country’s talk about being a nation devoted to equality,
justice and the wellbeing of our people is nothing but lies. Those Americans
who voted to reelect Trump demonstrated beyond any doubt that they embrace his
racism, authoritarianism, and personal immorality. Shame is not strong enough a
word to characterize what the American people did yesterday. That will remain
true even if Donald Trump is not reelected. Healthy, caring, moral people truly
committed to something other than their own narrow self-interest do not vote
for anyone remotely like Donald Trump, yet more than 67 million Americans did.
They have no excuse. The truth is there before them plain and simple. They either
chose not to see it or they willingly accepted it as representing their values.
They voted their fear and hatred and showed no commitment at all to what we
have always said are American values. Shame on them. Shame on us. Shame on the
United States of America. Will we ever live down the shame of having made
Donald Trump president even once? Maybe, with time, but only if he loses the
current election. If he wins it we are lost for a very long time to come. For
the sake of our people, for the sake of the people of the world, good Lord let
him lose.
[1] For
proof of that assertion see Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Russian
Roulette: The Inside story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald
Trump (New York, Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2018).
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