This article in the Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole is one of the best analyses of the reign of Mad King Donald that I have read.
His hairstyle has been toned down. His demeanour – malign, self-obsessed, reckless of truth and decency, revelling in the harm he has done and can still do to the norms and institutions of democracy – has not.
This continuity is ominous. Trump was able to upend American politics before he was in office. There is every reason to think he will still be able to do so after he is replaced by Joe Biden on January 20th.
It is useful to go back to the period in 2016 when Trump was where his successor is now: the victor in the election but still not president. For it was in this interregnum that Trump took a single action that was scarcely noticed at the time but that, more than any other, defined his presidency.
That action had both the political destructiveness and the personal brutality that would become familiar as the primary weapons in Trump’s armoury. It consisted merely in ordering a load of ring-binders full of carefully compiled documents to be dumped.
It was the day after Trump’s victory party, held of course in the garish Trump Tower in Manhattan. Chris Christie, who was still governor of New Jersey, a successful Republican in a heavily Democratic state, was the man with the 30 bulging binders.
In them was the transition plan, the crucial details of how a Trump administration was going to work, including shortlists of pre-vetted candidates for all the top jobs in the administration, as well as timetables for action on key policies and the drafts of the necessary executive orders.
It had taken a team of 140 people assembled under Christie’s chairmanship nearly six months to create the plan.
Fired with immediate effect
When Christie arrived at Trump Tower, he was met by Trump’s then consigliere, Steve Bannon. Bannon told Christie that he was being fired with immediate effect “and we do not want you to be in the building anymore”. His painstaking work was literally trashed: “All thirty binders”, as Christie recalled in a self-pitying memoir, “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again”.
With Trump, the personal and political could never be separated and both were equally at work here. The personal was silverback gorilla stuff, humiliating Christie was a sadistic pleasure and a declaration to established Republicans that Trump was the boss of them all now.
The political message was one that took longer to sink in. A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.
At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.
Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained.
Too many people did not get this. It is hard, after such a relentless barrage of outrage and weirdness over the last four years, to remember what the broad consensus about Trump was at the beginning of 2016.
It was that he wouldn’t be nearly as bad as he looked. To adapt the old saw about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, he had campaigned in Gothic horror but he would surely govern in the realistic novel…
At worst, Trump would do nothing. He’d sit around eating cheeseburgers and making calls to Fox News, while the serious people got on with serious things.
All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.
The big question to be answered about Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war.
One of the things that was genuinely appealing about Trump in 2015 was that he said something that everyone knows but that American politicians avoid acknowledging because it is too downbeat.
This truth is that the infrastructure of the richest country in the world – the roads, railways, bridges, dams, tunnels – is woefully substandard. Trump said this and promised to fix it. Polls showed that two-thirds of voters approved.
Did not start a war
But he didn’t fix it. He presented a plan in 2018 for a relatively tiny $200 billion investment (supposedly to be supplemented by $1.5 trillion of private money). It went essentially nowhere.
The other thing he didn’t do is war. For all his belligerence and violently nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, Trump didn’t start a new war or escalate an existing one, which makes him unusual among modern presidents.
Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?
His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.
But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.
It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.
He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.
Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.
This right-wing anarchism extended, of course, to global governance: the trashing of international agreements, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, sucking up to the leaders of mafia states, and open contempt for female leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May.
With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.
Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers.
In this nexus, the madder the better. Power is proven, not when the sycophants have to obey reasonable commands, but when they have to follow and justify the craziest orders.
Wild swings of position
There is no fun in getting your minions to agree that black is black. The sadist’s pleasure lies in getting them to attest that black is white. The “alternative facts” that Trump’s enabler Kellyanne Conway laid down at the very beginning of his administration are not just about permission to lie. They’re about the erotic gratification of making other people lie absurdly, foolishly, repeatedly…
This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.
In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of “the government”.
Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.
And I am concerned that Trump’s end of the transition coming out will be as bad as his was when he came into office. The only thing protecting us from massive disruption is hard-working federal employees who will do their best to make it work. (There is only so much they can do, however.)
There is one reason why Trump did not start a war with one of the traditional enemies of the United States–his handler, Vladimir Putin wouldn’t allow it. Nothing was ever going to happen in the Trump maladministration without Vlad’s approval.
Vlad’s Agent Orange, aka Moscow’s Asset Governing America (MAGA), did, however, after months of calling the Coronavirus a hoax and saying that it was just going to go away, float calling himself a “wartime president” while holding press conferences that were less about the virus than, of course, about the greatness of Trump, Glorious leader who shines more orange than does the sun. But if he was at war, it was, of course, against his own people. In that, and only in that, he was quite successful.
And he has a network of people to support him in doing this. I am sure there are plenty to step in his place when he tires of the game. Every voter should watch this Frontline expose on Trumps ties to Info Wars. I have seen cars in my local grocery story parking lot with “Info Wars” bumper stickers and also walked past a man in Target with a face mask with the same logo.
Trump speaking on the Alex Jones show in 2015: Quote, “Your reputation [Alex Jones’s] is amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. I think we’ll be speaking a lot but you’ll be looking to me in a year or two years, let’s give me a little bit of time to run things, but a year into office you’ll be saying, ‘Wow, I remember that interview, he said he was going to do it and he did a great job.”
The future president of the most powerful nation on earth was giving praise and credibility to a far right wing conspiracy nut!!! This is the stuff of science fiction.
Part of that interview is in this Frontline video. It’s totally completely nuts. Trump’s conspiracies about Obama not being born in the US to Ted Cruz’s dad having something to do with JFK’s assassination – came directly from Jones. Repeating those two conspiracies alone should have immediately disqualified him.
He was wearing a face mask?!
Of course, above comment should have been under beachteach’s at 12:45 PM.
Ha! Yup. It’s mandatory in stores here now.
This article makes the inexplicable understandable. Thank you for posting.
Here was my stab at that.
INT. OVAL OFFICE – DAY
Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk. Camera back to reveal Rod Serling standing D.R.
SERLING
His name, Mr. Little. A man with little education, little taste, little knowledge, little concern for other people. Neglected as a child, he grew into a black hole of neediness. And so he used Daddy’s money to build big, erected his name in Midas-gold letters across the landscape–his every action screaming, “I am worth something.” Everything became a zero-sum game. If someone else failed or was worse off, he was better, a “winner,” and so he cheated and harassed and ridiculed the unfortunate, the stranger, the down and out; appealed to the basest instincts of the basest among us; huffed and puffed and blew himself to gigantic proportions, at least in his own little brain. A twisted, malignant, metastasizing tumor of need and narcissism and knee-jerk nastiness, Mr. Little doesn’t know much, but the biggest thing he doesn’t know is that he just stepped over into a place where everything is bigger than he is, where everything is just beyond the grasp of his little mind and his little hands. He just stepped over into . . . The Twilight Zone.
Stalin used to do the same thing. He commonly hosted drinking parties at his dacha near Moscow at the end of the work day. These would often go on into the wee hours of the morning. At these, he would play lots of cruel games. For example, he would make some completely absurd pronouncement and wait for everyone to agree with him. Then he would contradict himself, and everyone would agree with that. And if anyone present disagreed with him, that person would cease to exist. It’s this sadistic pleasure that was captured in Orwell’s 1984, in which the Party, represented by O’Brien, finally makes Winston see that 2 + 2 = 5 and that Winston loves Big Brother. We don’t just blow your brains out, O’Brien tells him. That wouldn’t be any fun. We first reduce you to absolute servility, absolute obeisance. Then we blow your brains out.
Trump is an extraordinarily insecure, malignant narcissist and psychopath. That’s not so strange. Such people exist. What is completely strange is that an entire political party and 46.9 percent of the U.S. electorate looked at this and said, “Give me more of that.” The Repugnican toadying is explicable. Trump’s utter incompetence enabled them to rape the environment and consumer protections to the benefit of their wealthy donors. The Trump electorate is another story. It’s a cult and a kakistocracy. That it’s a cult is shown by the fact that disciples are absolutely impervious to evidence. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/a-dummies-style-guide-to-becoming-a-cult-leader/
If you read a typical local or regional newspaper (not the op eds – just the news) or watch the evening news – it is reported in a way that is so neutral…. that Trump (contrary to some right wingers stating otherwise) is portrayed as a normal leader. You have to dig deeper to see really see and understand evidence to the contrary.
One of the many ironies, huh? The “fake news” has been part of the problem, enabling his insanity by normalizing it.
Great piece by Fintan O’Toole. He absolutely nails it.
Thanks for this brilliant piece on Trump’s chaotic term. As we count down the last few weeks of Trump’s term, we hope he will keep at least one of his promises. He stated earlier that if he lost, we wouldn’t see him anymore. I doubt this will be true. He will likely continue to be a thorn in Biden’s side. His ego and continuous fund raising scam will demand he get attention.
The only way to stop him is for him to be tried and convicted and jailed. Biden needs to understand this.
Biden is a conciliator. He avoids controversy. I am willing to bet that he does not pursue Trump for his actions. He will be happy to leave that to New York city and state prosecutors.
IF Trump makes it through his term without starting a war, he will be among the very small minority of Presidents in over half a century (Republican or Democratic ) who did not.
That would be a positive, whatever the reason.
Of course, many Americans don’t give a damn if their President starts a war and don’t even care once it becomes obvious that they were lied to.
Agree wholeheartedly w/your last paragraph, Some DAM. As long as the war is in a far-off place & all the civilians–including children, infants, mothers & fathers are killed in a country not ours, who cares?
(Besides Bernie, who consistently–as he does so on so many vital points–brings up Iraq–again & again & again.)
It always takes an onlooker to make the sharpest point–well-said by Fintan O’Toole. But–“a stake through his heart?”
WHAT heart?
How about his stomach?
O’Toole is always on point. The Irish despise him. He screwed them over a golf course deal, but it is deeper than that. They got his number right away. I was sitting in the Abbey Theatre in the summer of 2017, talking to the man next to me during intermission. He said, in the most serious of tones… “We think your President is the devil.”
Wonderful anecdote, Carol! Thanks for sharing!
As Bob said, O’Toole nails it.
There are other pundits who have noted Trump’s consistency, & pegged the early, mistaken assumptions of GOP (& others) that he’d grow in office, or could be trained, or at least contained. O’Toole captures better than most the thread that characterizes & holds together Trump’s seemingly contradictory displays and positions.
But the takeaway, for me, is here: “The power of his instinct was that he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US… his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of ‘the government’.” I sense there’s great value in reaching back even before neoliberalism & the move to the right of our “center.” I’ll admit I haven’t the historical background to verify it, it just rings a bell. Food for thought.
I’m listening to Democracy Now about the horrific story of Blackwater mercenary’s brutal killing of innocent Iraqi civilians.Don the ‘ConDecending’ King pardoned 4 of those convicted killers. That’s one of the grossest pardoning I ever heard. It just makes me so sick and disgusting.
O’Toole’s observations are superbly accurate. However, some might challenge the appropriateness of Christie as an example of a victim of Trump’s cruelty given bridgegate, Bridget Kelly thrown under the bus and Christie’s private use of a state beach that he closed to the public.
O’Toole could have delved deeper into the American psyche elaborating on his point about “nativism, racism and fear of government”. The lesson Americans learned in 2016 and had confirmed in 2020 is that more than 45% of their fellow American voters want unfairness practiced so as to protect historic, demographic entitlement.
Greater concentration of wealth and its concomitant economic deprivation will inevitably lead to the election of strong men who promise protection of entitlements. We can expect Putin’s prestige to grow in the U.S. because the wealthiest 0.1% own the media and Vlad’s style of oligarchy is what has been implemented here.
Trump is not yet finished annoying us. But hope springs eternal that there will come a time.
I think this is the best advice ever. “Those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his (Trump) heart.”
I volunteer to make the stake. I’m a woodworker. I have the tools and would make the stakes from ironwood, but since Trump doesn’t have a heart, a conscience, or a soul, how can anyone put a stake through what doesn’t exist?
You could put a stake through his Twitter finger.
Hard working federal employees, oh really. I guess there are a few. Our government is too big, too intrusive.
It took Trump to get you snowflakes to pay your fair share for NATO.
The only thing you lefties do is none stop separating the people who work from their money. It seems you feel entitled to other people’s money.
You lefties produce nothing but angst.
Your good at tearing things down and woeful at building.
Gene,
We “lefties” don’t invade and threaten to destroy the US Capitol. Unlike Trumpers, we are patriots, not Insurrectionists. We know and respect the Constitution. We don’t want to overthrow the government, like you Trump traitors.
What you do is Burn Loot and Murder.
All summer long and I think still going on in Oregon, is nothing but destruction.
Your in-crowd burns down police stations, private businesses. You feign self righteousness.
You’re like the Soviet and bolsheviks back 1917, just drooling to put a commissar in every aspect of life.
I haven’t burned, looted or murdered anywhere or any time.
Your hero is a liar and a fraud and several prosecutors will file charges against him in the next few days.
He never pays taxes! Haha.
My friends didn’t lay siege to the Us Capitol. We didn’t murder a US Capitol police officer. We didn’t threaten to murder Pence or Pelosi. We didn’t vandalize our sacred Capitol.
You Trump lackeys did all that. You and your ilk are traitors and criminals.
My readers and followers respect the Constitution. We have read it.
Your illiterate hero Trump has never read the Bible or the Constitution.
Have you?
No American condones what went on at the Capitol. We believe in reasoning and logic. We trust what our eyes are showing us. We know right from wrong.
How should I describe you? Perhaps a single word describes you, Contradiction.
There was over 700 buildings in Minneapolis destroyed this past year. But what do you say, mostly peaceful protests and so it goes.
You and others like you, want to deny the second amendment, while releasing 90% of gun criminal violators in NYC.
Have you ever built anything? With your great intelligence, you know it is rhetorical, it is resounding No.
Trump didn’t need the job as president. He was already quite successful. He turned the Commodore and the Grand Central neighborhood around after it was left to rack and ruin. He actually employed people giving them paychecks to support their families. He rebuilt the Wollman rink after the city of NYC failed to get the job done. These are only two examples, I’m sure of know of many more projects he successfully pulled off, all the while employing people for provide for their families, for which they also pay taxes to contribute to a better landscape.
What has Biden done in 47 years of service? He has allowed his son to be in the positions to steal for him and his family, board of directors of Amtrak. What were his qualifications? Did he have a Lionel train as a child? Board of directors of Burmisa, oh yeah knowledge in that area. Ah, the Chinese, what does he know about China, some of the dishes in Dim sum? What Hunter does know is cocaine and other drugs.
You talk about the constitution as if it is a comic book. Your circle of readers and followers is not as large as you may think. You only delude yourself. You are the poster adult for the phrase “There’s no fool like an old fool”.
As Mark Twain so abled noticed about you, “There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”
You clearly show up in the second group.
I can’t respond to all your lies but will respond to this one. Trump was never a successful businessman. He had multiple bankruptcies. He frequently refused to pay people who worked for him and forced them into bankruptcy. Remember Trump University? A fraud. Remember Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump Airlines? They all failed. He is deeply in debt to the banks now. He is well known in NYC as a fraud and a cheat and a con man. His greatest success was getting his name into the gossip columns, always with a beautiful woman. When they didn’t write about him, he called and disguised his voice and pretended to be his own publicist. He is a bona fide liar. You are his dupe.