We plan, Trump laughs
You tire of the perpetual motion by which Donald Trump makes wild and juvenile pronouncements that offend the sensibilities but never amount to anything.
You seek to de-obsess and decompress. You write instead of significant matters at home—a state Supreme Court election, a local congressional race and improved practices in a local sports hall of fame.
You put together an outline for the opening day of the spring term of the retiree class. You are heartened that you can begin by talking about an imminent debate in that congressional race. You will follow that with a discussion of the bullying of local television stations, including one locally, by the right-wing owners.
You relegate any Trump discussion to the final third of the 50-minute session, mainly to say that his approval rating has risen a few points since news of his alleged dalliance with a porn star and his spate of firings of employees who disagree with him.
Mainly, you want to conclude by saying Trump ought to fire more people and have more sex.
Then you sleep later than usual on Wednesday morning. You tune into no Morning Joe or public radio before heading out to lead the aforementioned class by the aforementioned outline.
As you stand in front of the class about five minutes before it is to begin, a man in the audience of a progressive political persuasion asks if you have any money left in the stock market.
You ask what he means and he, incredulous, says you must have not heard. The Chinese had retaliated overnight against the Trump administration’s punitive tariffs. The Dow Jones—by 9:55 a.m. East Coast time, 8:55 where we stood—was down nearly 500 points. And the retaliatory tariffs by the Chinese would work their greatest hardship on mid-American Trump states, including Arkansas, owing to punitive levies on soybeans.
So much for the happy outline.
You remind a friendly Republican in the audience that you’d said time and again that global issues—military, economic, diplomatic—are too complex to be addressed at the American presidential level by bluster, bloviation and daytime television-caliber drama.
Maybe, he says, but, “He’s a dealmaker and he’ll bargain something out of this.”
What we have here is a classic microcosm of Trumpian America in 2018. Best-laid plans are blown up while we sleep by surges of global upheaval. One man sees a frightfully mad president. One man sees a method to the madness.
A public commentator wanting to take a respite from Trump … can’t.
Either you think the tactics of international real estate dealmaking are ill-applied to governing in general and international relations particularly, or you think they’re worth trying after eight years of Barack Obama’s no-drama professorial sensitivity to ramifications and others’ interests.
As for the class itself, a woman wants to know what we think about Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to visit the White House. A man asks whether the caravan of wild ruffian Central American refugees bound through Mexico toward our porous border really exists.
Trump, Trump and more Trump. Presidential-level dialogue with Putin is to be desired, just as president-level dialogue with Cold Warriors like Khrushchev and Brezhnev was to be desired. What’s to be feared is the naïve man-crush our guy seems to have on their guy. But … maybe that’s a bargaining tactic. And the wild ruffians from Central America were raging on Fox but dispersing on other channels.
It’s all according to what you hear, or, more precisely, what you infer from inflections real or imagined by preconceptions.
I say during class that Trump’s base is sticking with him despite Stormy Daniels, and that no element of that base is more loyal than religious conservatives, who obviously aren’t emphasizing personal behavior but, instead, resentment of what they see more broadly as liberal society’s decline.
A woman asks why I speak so disdainfully of Trump supporters when she knows many who are well-educated and may not even go to church.
Does she infer something beyond what I uttered? Or do I signal subliminally something beyond what I uttered?
Who the heck knows anymore?
After class, a retired advertising executive encourages me to abandon Trump as a subject—“because we all know what that is”—and discuss instead that Jan Morgan’s right-wing challenge to Asa Hutchinson will provide a report card of our state’s ability to govern itself maturely and responsibly.
I will do my best to oblige, although I intend to set the alarm for 4 a.m. Wednesday to check the Hong Kong market and monitor unfolding global calamities.
By the way: The stock market Wednesday had mostly recovered by 4 p.m.
The late Warren Zevon saw all this coming. In his song describing relationship woes (as recorded by Linda Ronstadt), it says: “He was a credit to his gender. Put me through some changes, Lord, sort of like a Waring blender.”
These days we’re all apt to get pureed before breakfast.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.