What everybody knows about Trump’s America
Everybody knows that Donald Trump is the accidental president. He was elected with just 46.1 per cent of the popular vote — the lowest of all but two presidents — having received almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He is president because he narrowly won the Electoral College, America’s 18th-century anachronism.
Everybody knows that Trump was not the victim of “widespread voter fraud,” as he says. His victory in the college was not “a landslide,” as he boasts. He won 30 states, with 306 of 538 electoral votes, 46th lowest of 58 elections.
Everybody knows Trump is an illegitimate president, whose popularity has not broken 50 per cent in his 21 months in office. He seems to owe his victory largely to meddling Russians.
Everybody knows that Trump has no interest in the consensus and compromise the office demands; his way is divide and rule. His cabinet lacks a balance of sex, race, colour and faith, he insults the Democrats and tries, relentlessly, to erase the legacy of his popular predecessor. Trump speaks only to his base. It makes him belatedly and conveniently conservative.
Everybody knows, in that slavish loyalty to his constituency of older, less-educated white men, that Trump would name two unreconstructed conservative men to the Supreme Court. Of course, he would.
Everybody knows that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation was a farce. At every turn, the Republicans protected him from real scrutiny — refusing to release documents, limiting the FBI investigation into his alleged sexual assault, discrediting Christine Blasey Ford, rushing the final vote.
Everybody knows that the Republicans stole a seat on the high court when, in 2016, they refused to consider Barack Obama’s moderate nominee. Slyly, they kept the seat open until Trump was inaugurated. Because the Democrats foolishly abolished the filibuster for judicial appointees when they last controlled the Senate, they were helpless.
Everybody knows that the florid-faced Kavanaugh lied to the Senate on the reality of his colourful adolescence — his drinking, his partying, his view of women. He knows it, too, and so does his sad-eyed wife.
Everybody knows his testimony was theatre — practised and contrived. It was a performance scripted by Trump from the book of Joe McCarthy’s Roy Cohn — deny, cry, sigh, lie, deny. It takes a groper to know one and in Kavanaugh, Trump had his boy.
Everybody knows that what should have disqualified Kavanaugh was his distemper, indiscretion and bias. It is why 2,400 law professors consider him unfit for the court, as does John Paul Stevens, the former high-court justice. They abhor the scorched-earth tactics of the white patriarchy led by the mumbling Mitch McConnell.
Everybody knows that Sen. Susan Collins is a naïf who is finished in Maine, while the principled Lisa Murkowski will survive in Alaska. The real heroine here is Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who voted against Kavanaugh. She will lose her seat but not her dignity, which was abandoned by Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. His ersatz anger in defence of Kavanaugh may make him Trump’s attorney general.
Everybody knows that this is about power and partisanship. It is about filling the court to constrain, in the future, a liberal president and Congress seeking gun control, campaign finance reform, muscular voting rights, access to abortion. The outrage, the theatrics, the character assassination — all were to control the court at all costs.
Americans, most of whom oppose Kavanaugh and Trump, see through this. They see this as the tyranny of the minority through politics raw and rigged. As Leonard Cohen sings, “Everybody knows ... that the dice are loaded ... that the war is over and good guys lost ... that the boat is leaking and the captain lied ... that the fight was fixed, and the poor stay poor and the rich get rich ...”
And so now America sinks deeper into tribalism and bitterness over its court, its congress and its president. Brett Kavanaugh is the primal scream of a white male establishment in eclipse. One day there will be a reckoning — and revenge and redemption, too. It will, finally, “disclose what everybody knows.”