Trump grows ever more dangerous
U.S. president is not the foolish moron Mencken foretold
“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”
– H.L. Mencken, journalist and social critic, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.
My thanks to Donna McCullough of Niagara Falls for alerting me to the column that the prolific and vitriolic Mencken wrote nearly a century ago.
It is tempting to declare that Mencken was prescient — that in Donald Trump, the United States finally does have a “downright fool” and a “complete narcissistic moron” for president.
Narcissistic, for sure, but Trump is neither a fool nor a moron. He might have seemed that way in the beginning. But as he moves through the second year of his presidency, he takes on a more alarming presence. He may be ill-informed (not that he cares), but he is not stupid. He is shrewd, cunning, manipulative (and almost certainly crooked — but that’s another matter).
He is a master of propaganda — repeat a lie often and loudly enough and the people will come to believe it. He is equally a master of the politics of disruption — if a legitimate issue threatens him, he will create a new, usually phoney, issue and use Twitter and his apologists at Fox News to promote it until the genuine issue fades from public consciousness.
He understands power. A complete outsider barely two years ago, he has succeeded in taking possession of the Republican party, cowing its milquetoast establishment and commandeering its congressional agenda.
The Democrats are intimidated. They dare not try to impeach him lest a display of political backbone cost them seats in this fall’s midterm elections and an opportunity to win control of Congress.
Add to this a realistic fear among sensible members of both parties that, if they were to impeach Trump, they would be left with someone arguably worse: President Mike Pence, a doctrinaire ideologue and Christian zealot. So prudence dictates they leave Trump be.
The problem with leaving him be is that he is becoming ever more dangerous. He treats international relations as though they are a shell game. He declares one thing to Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-UN when they meet face-to-face, then rolls back on his words when he gets home. Conciliatory and co-operative one day, he becomes theatrically uncompromising and threatening the next.
Justin Trudeau got a taste of that at the G7 summit in June. But Putin and Kim are ambitious oligarchs with nuclear weapons. To play them like participants in a TV reality show is foolhardy.
Finally, Trump’s open warfare on the news media. He was back at it again last week in Pennsylvania, inciting a wildly partisan crowd of 10,000 in Wilkes-Barre with cries of a “fake, fake, disgusting media.”
A CBC report described the scene: “Then … the jacked-up crowd turned toward the journalists whose job it is to cover him, listening as the man holding the highest elected office in the land denigrated them as ‘disgusting.’
“Middle fingers flew. Someone walked by the media workspaces fluttering a “CNN sucks” banner. … From their workspaces ringed by Trump supporters, members of the Washington press corps said they saw an attack on the news outlet as a swipe at their collective, constitutionally protected rights as a free press.”
These scary attacks have been building since February 2017 when Trump started labelling journalists “the enemy of the people.” Sadly, many Americans believe him.
Trump has reasons for not liking a lot of the reporting he sees, but that does not make it fake or dishonest, or the journalists who cover him “disgusting.”
The media is not perfect. Journalists are not saints. The overwhelming majority strives to do an honest day’s work, speaking or writing truth to power.
Truth, however, is an intruder at a White House not even Mencken could have imagined.