Lessons learned in Twilight of the Anti-Trump Idols
Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency and especially in the COVID era, there was a quest for figures that could be held up as embodiments of everything Trump’s opposition wanted to restore: reason, technical competence, idealism. Over time these figures took on the character of familiar dramatic archetypes — the Good Republican, the Tough Blue State Governor, the Wise and Sophisticated Europeans.
The first month of the Biden era has been a hard time for these characters. A few have come through more burnished than before; if Mitt Romney was a Good Republican before, now he’s pretty much the Best. But elsewhere we’re seeing archetypes of anti-Trumpism exposed as idols — not just fallible but failing, not just imperfect but corrupt.
You may have noticed, for instance, the long-overdue collapse of the heroic story around Andrew
Ross Douthat Star Parker Jonah Goldberg TBA
Pat Buchanan Marc A. Thiessen George Will
Cuomo, the Tough Blue State Governor par excellence, whose pandemic news conferences inspired such fawning media coverage — from late-night hosts who declared themselves admiring “cuomosexuals” — that the governor wrote a book about “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic” while the pandemic was still going on.
For the sake of the heroic story, the fact that Cuomo and Bill de Blasio jointly botched New York’s initial response to the coronavirus was airbrushed out of the televised hagiography. The fact that the governor shipped potentially contagious patients back to nursing homes was reported on but didn’t dent Cuomo’s reputation. And the bullying, berating side of Cuomo — well, that was portrayed as the seriousness a reeling country needed. Only now is the more complete Cuomo story taking hold.
The wheel has also turned for the Wise and Sophisticated Europeans, whose governments were once portrayed as having vanquished the pandemic with science, while Trump’s America was a failed state where the coronavirus held illimitable dominion over all.
That trans-Atlantic contrast diminished when Europe experienced its own autumnal wave, but now, in the race to vaccinate, the whole narrative has been reversed. America’s vaccine program looks far better than Europe’s catastrophic nonrollout.
This twilight for the antiTrump idols should be a teachable moment.
I wrote last week, at
Rush Limbaugh’s passing, about how the success of the conservative media has often been bad news for conservatism. One can also say, though, that the conservative media’s retreat into a dream palace has made portions of the mainstream-cum-liberal media stupider — slow to scrutinize their own narratives or acknowledge the importance of stories that might vindicate the right.
But the other thing to recognize here is that the press was not wrong to desire heroic leaders or institutions that Got the Pandemic Right. The attempt to wish those leaders and institutions into being is a media failure, but the fact that the media looked for them is not.
In the failure to find them and in the substitution of figures later exposed as corrupt or incompetent, we can see again the importance of thinking about how we got Trump in the first place.
Our society’s sickness may be particularly acute in Trump worship, but the affliction is more general. The stink of failure hangs over the liberal and cosmopolitan as well as the populist and provincial. As we hopefully approach the end of this particular emergency, it’s not only Trump’s enablers but a wider range of leaders and authorities who should feel shame at the shocking number of the dead.