Goodbye, Asshole
For four years now, everything has been worse. Even the best, happiest, most hopeful days of 2017–2020 have been marked by a relentless undercurrent of pain and fear, and the terrible knowledge that our federal government was in the hands of a dangerous, malicious nitwit. Even before Donald Trump became one of American history’s deadliest villains, by dramatically exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic which has killed more of us than any event since the Civil War, he’d spent three years doing brutal damage to our institutions, our discourse, and even our humanity.
If everything has been noticeably worse for four years, on the basis of Donald Trump’s sickening, destructive presence in the White House, let’s not forget to appreciate the sunshine ahead. It will be easy to forget, because times will remain tough. The virus is raging; the economy is in freefall; our society is in tatters; I could go on. But when we go to sleep on January 20, Donald Trump will no longer occupy the office of the United States Presidency. It will be over. Not over in every sense, of course — yes, I know, Trumpism will live on in the form of demented white nationalists and future Republican demagogues; and yes, I know, Trump and his enablers must be brought to justice. But let’s remember to set that aside, for a moment, every morning, take a deep breath, and enjoy the wonderful reality that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, rather than Donald Trump and more Donald Trump, run the executive branch of our nation’s government. That will be better.
January 2021 is all about Wednesdays. The Capitol riot was Wednesday, January 6, two weeks ago as I write this. Donald Trump was impeached for the second time, for inciting the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, on the following Wednesday, January 13. And today, Wednesday, January 20, the United States will have a President — an imperfect, but capable and well-intentioned President — for the first time in four years which have felt like forty. And that’s not all: Four years after the rightful first female President of the United States won the popular vote by three million, a woman is our Vice President. She is brilliant, formidable, Black, and Asian, and will cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, which will be controlled by the Democratic Party because the newly blue state of Georgia just replaced its two Trumpy Senate Republicans with Democrats — one Black, one Jewish. Oh well, white nationalists, apparently Jews will replace you!
These details are worth savoring, not only because of the genuine and hard-earned progress they represent, but because they are specific repudiations of Trump’s vision for America. It’s not just that we win and they lose; it’s that our representative government will represent us a little more accurately. It’s not just that we’ll be spared the grotesque daily spectacle of the Trump Show; it’s that fewer people will suffer and die. Politics is always serious. The stakes are always higher than ever; it’s always the most important election of our lifetimes. But this time, my friends, we have really been to the brink. And to appreciate our narrow escape — and to survive whatever lies ahead — we can’t redact the Trump years from our memories. We can’t “back to normal” ourselves into complacency.
MSNBC has been airing a promotional spot for its Inauguration Day coverage, showing a series of clips from previous inaugural addresses: George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama — then we cut to a photo of Joe Biden and the network’s Inauguration Day graphics. I’m glad when Trump is excluded from this kind of thing, and I believe his inclusion would seem absurd and inappropriate. And there’s an understandable public urge to rewind, as suggested by the popularity and ascendency of Obama’s Vice President. But, of course, we must continue to confront the many traumas of the Trump years, because we must prevent there from being more Trump years in the future. We don’t edit him out of history. We have to keep him there, pinned in place like an entomological specimen, with a giant asterisk that educates generations of American children about the dark time with the bad man.
ILLEGITIMACY
The concept of illegitimacy has haunted Donald Trump throughout his wretched existence. He was never really a legitimate businessman, developer, or mogul; he was never a legitimate millionaire or billionaire; he didn’t actually build the buildings or write the books which bore his name (and bored his readers). If he improved 1000% in every area he might rise to a level that could be called mediocre. He was a bad pop culture joke from the eighties, a character from Mad magazine. It was only as a reality television performer that he achieved anything like legitimate success, and he did this by showcasing his crudeness and stupidity, in a way that some read as knowing self-caricature. Others, as always, bought the act and went along with Trump’s image of himself, because it flattered their own self-images: The patron saint of greedy, malicious, ignorant assholes. The personality itself is noteworthy only for its prominence. Trump is a very specific, very ordinary kind of New York douchebag. We got plenty of those, which is why we know not to vote for them.
The old Trump — the New York Trump — sometimes dabbled in political commentary, often from a position of racial hatred, as in his persecution of the exonerated Central Park Five. Every now and then he would threaten to run for president, and the entire world would point at him and laugh derisively. The notion of a Trump presidency was regularly invoked in satire, as a shorthand for the collapse of the United States and its legitimacy. When Trump emerged as a half-serious 21st century politician, it was with a baseless and flagrantly racist challenge to the legitimacy of President Barack Obama.
Fueled by the power of the “birther” lie, Trump himself became a candidate, then a nominee, and then a president, of highly dubious legitimacy. His illegitimacy derived partly from his dramatic loss of the 2016 popular vote; no “winner” has lost by that much in the history of the republic. Trump’s apologists, and even some of his critics, shrug this off with a reminder that for better or worse, the electoral college is how our system works. Yes, but if it does work, that’s because as a rule, historically, the electoral vote has reflected the popular majority. We all know that the electoral college is a problem for Democrats, but the real problem is that that’s the problem, when the problem should be that the inability to win the popular vote is a problem for Republicans. Nevertheless, presidents derive their legitimacy from the idea that they were chosen by the people. Donald Trump was decidedly not. This is both inarguably true, and a credit to the decency and wisdom of the American majority.
And while we’re crediting the decency and wisdom of the American majority, let’s celebrate Trump’s historic unpopularity. The fervor of his most avid supporters, and the wild overrepresentation of Republicans in Congress, have created the illusion of an evenly-divided populace, but this is simply not true. Only 25% of Americans are Republicans, and significant majorities have always rejected Trump and Trumpism. This is measured not only by his two popular vote losses, or his two impeachments in the House; over the course of his one term, Trump’s approval rating has never reached 50%. Gallup shows an historically low approval average of 41%, down to 34% as he leaves office; Pew has him at 29%. (Four years ago, Obama finished his second term at 59%.) Don’t let the loudness of Trump’s supporters fool you; he leaves office the most despised and disgraced figure in modern political history. For those who consider him to have been president at all, he is the least popular president we’ve ever had.
The other pillar of Trump’s illegitimacy was, of course, the intervention on his behalf by a hostile foreign power in the 2016 election (and beyond). Trump and his supporters claim that his obvious fealty to Vladimir Putin is somehow “a hoax,” as are the many ties and encounters between his campaign and Russian operatives. They also claim, absurdly, that the Mueller report “exonerated” Trump and found “no evidence of collusion.” This is a viewpoint available only to those who didn’t read the report, or any accurate coverage thereof — or those who know better but are lying, like then-Attorney General Bill Barr. (Yeah, remember that guy? He was still in office one month ago.) In plain fact, as any responsible adult citizen of this country should know, the Mueller report specifically “applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of ‘collusion.’” It found no conclusive evidence of a conspiracy. But it found, and documented, ample evidence that Putin and Russia meddled with our election, on Trump’s behalf. This is a fact no reasonable person disputes, in the U.S. intelligence community or elsewhere. The Mueller report, despite its limitations and disappointments, resulted in thirty-seven convictions, indictments, and guilty pleas.
Finally, Trump’s “presidency” was illegitimate because he consistently failed to conduct himself in a manner befitting the President of the United States. This isn’t about virtue, or policy. An American president can pass a catastrophic tax plan, or restrict immigration, or wage wars — there’s a whole litany of truly reprehensible things an American president can do, without compromising his or her legitimacy in holding the office. But all those “norms” and “standards” that every other president or presidential nominee has upheld, contain an important aspect of presidential legitimacy. So it turns out there’s no law that says you have to release your tax information, or divest from your business interests; nor are there clear legal processes, short of Congressional action, for disciplining a “president” who breaks existing laws (see the Hatch Act, the emoluments clause, etc. etc.). But we recognize our presidents, those we like and those we dislike, by their fealty to these norms, standards, and laws. I despised George W. Bush, but I watched his speeches. Trump has never deserved our attention or our respect. We’ve paid attention to him only in horror, with the feeling that the next thing he says or does might just kill us all.
And now, Trump leaves office having waged and lost a fraudulent challenge to his successor’s legitimacy, just as he entered it assailing his predecessor’s. That’s how it always is with Trump; he accuses his enemies of the thing he’s guilty of. He tries to steal the election while accusing his opponents of trying to steal the election. He attacks every president as illegitimate in an effort to legitimize himself. When Trump lied about Barack Obama and the 2008 and 2012 elections, he won a devoted following among the racist right; when he lied about Joe Biden and the 2020 election, he incited a mob of domestic terrorists to attack the U.S. Capitol. As always, Trump’s lies are not just about their immediate topics; they’re also a smokescreen, to make people throw up their hands and stop caring, and stop paying attention. “All politicians lie!” says one Trump supporter I know, excusing all of it; but nobody can name another American politician in recent memory, certainly not at the presidential level, who’s lied even half as much, or half as brazenly, as Trump.
Trump’s nonsense challenge to Obama’s legitimacy became all the more abhorrent when Trump himself became a president of genuinely questionable legitimacy. And today, when his supporters repeat his ludicrous claims of election fraud, in lieu of offering evidence (which doesn’t exist), they resort to : “Well, you’ve spent the last four years calling Trump illegitimate!” In other words, this is just something people say; whoever is in power at the moment, that means it’s the other side’s turn to cry illegitimacy. This cynical game has degraded the presidency itself. There’s a high cost to the wrong candidate taking office, as the last four years have made painfully clear.
STUPIDITY
There’s been far too little serious discussion of Donald Trump’s stupidity. There’s been plenty of unserious discussion; along with his racism, narcissism, and ridiculous hairdo, Trump’s stupidity is his most prominent feature, and it’s therefore a popular subtopic for late-night comedians, political cartoonists, and others. But, perhaps for this reason, serious analysts have generally avoided close examination of Trump’s intellectual inadequacy. Most journalism reasonably accepts the foregone conclusion that he’s not a smart person, but it rarely bothers to connect this fact to his political success or his executive failures.
The dictionary defines stupidity as “behavior that shows a lack of good sense or judgment,” or “the quality of being unintelligent.” And in Donald Trump, we have a man who in forty years as a public figure has rarely, if ever, demonstrated the ability to read, write, speak, or think on an adult level. There is no argument that Trump is an intelligent person, only that he has “a certain kind of genius,” as the most charitable appraisals have it — that he is an idiot who has some communication skills which are effective on certain audiences. So, even those who claim that Trump is smart base their claim on the universal perception that he is not.
Trump himself has repeatedly declared himself to be a smart person, and he never sounds dumber than when advancing this: “I’m, like, a really smart person,” he said in 2015; “Trust me, I’m, like, a smart person,” he said in 2017. His self-description as “a very stable genius” has already passed into legend. Have you ever heard an actual smart person say anything like this, let alone repeatedly, for years? Being smart is like being tall: if it’s true, it’s obvious. You don’t go around telling people, “I’m, like, a tall person.” For a more accurate assessment of the Trump intellect, ask Trump’s own associates. They think he’s “dumb as shit” (Gary Cohn), “not only crazy, [but] stupid” (Tom Barrack), “less a person than a collection of terrible traits” (Cohn again), “an idiot” (H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, Sam Nunberg, Steve Mnuchin, Reince Preibus), and “a fucking moron” (Rex Tillerson).
But the story is not just about Trump’s extravagant personal stupidity; it’s his role in a party which has been trending away from intellectual complexity for a long time. From Ronald Reagan, to Dan Quayle, to George W. Bush, to Sarah Palin, to Donald Trump, the Republicans have spent the last four decades systematically lowering expectations of intellectual fitness for national office. I hasten to add that not every elected Republican is stupid, as indeed not every Republican voter is stupid. But this is a real and serious problem. We could never have seen Trump’s name on a presidential ballot had Palin’s name not appeared on one eight years earlier; Palin couldn’t have been considered a viable running mate for McCain without the example of the similarly challenged George W. Bush.
The Republican Party, aware that a significant portion of its base abhors the sound of smart people speaking intelligently, has simply removed intellectual aptitude from its list of presidential requirements, and even argued that inarticulate and unserious thinkers are preferable candidates, because they “don’t talk like politicians.” They “talk like real people.” This is snobbery, and I hear an expression of distaste not for “politicians” but for big words and big ideas. Barack Obama talks like a real person, a thoughtful, knowledgeable, real person — exactly the kind of real person whom other real people might choose to represent them. If your first thought when listening to Donald Trump is, “He talks like a real person,” you should stop spending so much time with people who talk like that.
There’s nothing wrong with being plainspoken, or not being an intellectual. Luckily, not everyone needs an advanced intellect; not every job or pursuit requires one. Human happiness obviously doesn’t. Intelligence is morally neutral. Intelligent people are not always articulate, and vice versa. But favoring smart political leaders is like favoring tall basketball players: they have an obvious, important advantage, which dramatically increases their chances of being good at their job. During the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, I took comfort in the knowledge that the President of the United States was highly intelligent — smarter than me, to say the least. The trauma of the Trump years derives partly from the knowledge that the man in the White House isn’t just uninterested in doing his job honorably; he’s intellectually incapable of it.
ATROCITY
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and then when he improbably and illegitimately achieved the presidency, we made many dark and dire predictions about what a Trump presidency would be like. We were right.
The reality of the last four years has been exhausting, as we’ve so often remarked; in so many ways, it’s been unpredictable, unstable, and unusual. Yet each atrocity, from family separations and concentration camps at our southern border, to the mass death resulting from Trump’s mishandling of (and indifference to) the coronavirus pandemic, to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, has occupied a sickening limbo between the unthinkable and the expected. Every aspect of this nightmare has been, in the common phrase, shocking but not surprising.
I wish we could say it wasn’t as bad as we feared it would be. If we can say that at all, it’s only because some of Trump’s darkest attacks on our country have, like most Trump projects, failed. He did try to eliminate undocumented immigrants from the census; he did try to eliminate the Affordable Care Act; he did try to build his stupid wall; he did try to turn us into a military state; he did try to steal the 2020 election; he did try to start a civil war. As many have pointed out, dangerous as Trump was, he would have been a lot more dangerous if he were competent.
But the incompetent Trump was plenty dangerous — and is responsible for the largest loss of American life since the Civil War itself. Trump and his defenders are fond of the odd boast that Trump “didn’t start a war” — though, as Trav S.D. has pointed out, this is a strange claim to make while inciting a civil war.
What’s remarkable is that Trump has presided over an American holocaust without a new major overseas entanglement. You know the terrible numbers as well as I do: We have about 4% of the world’s population and about 25% of its COVID-19 cases; the pandemic has hit us harder than it’s hit any other developed nation; we have now lost more Americans to COVID-19 than we did in World War II; we lose more every day than we did on 9/11.
To be clear, there would have been a coronavirus pandemic regardless of who was in the White House. Trump didn’t create the virus, of course — that would require skills — but he has made it exponentially worse and more deadly for Americans than it ever had to be or should have been. It feels like years ago, not months ago, that he was calling the virus “a hoax,” deriding mask-wearing as “politically correct,” and insisting that children were immune. The good people at Trump Death Clock have developed a reasoned metric for determining which portion of American COVID deaths can be directly attributed to Trump and his administration’s mishandling of the crisis; at the time of this writing, their formula has the blood of 238,307 Americans on Trump’s hands (out of 397,179 total American casualties). There was a brief period during which Trump at least wanted us to think he cared about all of this, but after he lost the election, he abandoned even the posture of concern. For the last two and a half months, he’s ranted endlessly about the election and his attempts to overturn the people’s will (again), never even acknowledging that thousands of us are still dying, on his watch, every day.
But this Trump Pandemic — this Trump Holocaust — is only the worst of the atrocities committed against Americans by this fake president. There are many others. Elsewhere, there will be fuller accountings of the regime’s crimes against decency than I can produce here. They will include the abandonment of the Kurds, of refugees and asylum-seekers; they will include violence against Black Lives Matter protesters defending their lives and indigenous protesters defending their homes. They will include Trump’s apparent approval of Russian bounties on American troops; his indifference to the torture and murder of Jamal Khashoggi; his “love” for brutal dictators and peculiar, disturbing subservience to Putin; his systematic dismantling of the State Department, the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, and decades of regulations designed to protect our people and our environment; and his outrageous remarks about American troops (you know, those suckers and losers).
Perhaps the most morally disgusting phenomenon of this morally disgusting administration has been its policy of family separation, and the internment of children in what are accurately called concentration camps, at our southern border. The most commonly-quoted number of children who have been taken from their parents, whose crime was seeking freedom from oppression in the United States of America — 5,500 — is now over a year and a half old. Notably, beginning the long process of correcting this barbarism is among Joe Biden’s day-one priorities.
Just in case any rational mind on Earth contained any trace of doubt that Donald Trump and the people who work for him are evil: Our government has executed three times as many prisoners in the last six months as it has in the previous sixty years. Because when “actively abetting” our worst public health crisis in a century isn’t quite enough, nothing soothes the damaged soul like a killing spree. (“Hang Mike Pence!” screamed Trump’s terrorists, who erected a gallows outside the Capitol on January 6.)
…
Imagine if he had won (i.e., managed to steal) a second term. This would then be an essay about the end of American democracy, not the end of the Trump administration. We’d be recounting the horrors of the last four years not to make sure we remember and correct them, but because we’d know we were on the brink of something even worse.
We are on the brink of something better. Or, at least, we are in a moment of potential to make the Trump years an ending rather than a beginning.
We’ve really been through something. We’re still going through it.
Four years ago, through a terrible concurrence of grotesque accidents, one of the worst events in our history happened to us. It kept happening, for four years.
Donald Trump was President of the United States.
I never once referred to him as such in the present tense.
