Who’s the real American psycho?
Trump’s bad but don’t beatify the other malefactors
Donald Trump is running wild — and running scared.
He’s such a menace that it’s tempting to cheer any vituperative critic and grab any handy truncheon. But villainizing Mr. Trump should not entail sanitizing other malefactors.
And we should acknowledge that the president is right on one point: For neocons, journalists, authors, political hacks and pundits, there is a financial incentive to demonize the president, not to mention an instant halo effect. Only Mr. Trump could get the pussy-hat crowd to fill Times Square to protest Jeff Sessions’s firing.
We make the president the devil spawn and he makes us the enemy of the people and everybody wins. Or do they? To what extent is lucrative Trump hysteria warping our discourse?
Mr. Trump may not be sweaty and swarthy, but he makes a good bad guy. As with Nixon and Watergate, the correct moral response and the lavish remunerative rewards neatly dovetail.
Even for Washington, the capital of do-overs and the soulless swamp where horrendous mistakes never prevent you from cashing in and getting another security clearance, this is a repellent spectacle. War criminals-turnedliberal heroes are festooned with book and TV contracts, podcasts and op-ed perches.
Those who sold us the “cakewalk” Iraq war and the outrageously unprepared Sarah Palin and torture as “enhanced interrogation,” those who left the Middle East shattered with a cascading refugee crisis and a rising ISIS, and those who midwifed the birth of the tea party are washing away their sins in a basin of Trump hate.
The very same Republicans who eroded America’s moral authority in the 2000s are, staggeringly, being treated as the new guardians of America’s moral authority.
They bellow that Mr. Trump is a blight on democracy. But where were these patriots when the Bush administration was deceiving us with a cooked-up war in Iraq?
Michelle Obama has written in her memoir that she will never forgive Mr. Trump for pushing the birther movement. Yet the Pygmalions of Palin, who backed Mr. Trump on the birther filth, are now among the most celebrated voices in Michelle’s party.
The architects and enablers of the Iraq war and Abu Ghraib are still being listened to on foreign policy, both inside the administration (John Bolton and Gina Haspel) and out. NeverTrumper Eliot Cohen wrote The Washington Post op-ed after the election telling conservatives not to work for Mr. Trump; Max Boot, who urged an invasion of Iraq whether or not Saddam was involved in 9/11, is now a CNN analyst, Post columnist and the author of a new book bashing Mr. Trump; John Yoo, who wrote the unconstitutional torture memo, is suddenly concerned that Mr. Trump’s appointment of his ghastly acting attorney general is unconstitutional.
MSNBC is awash in nostalgia for Ronald Reagan and W.
So it’s a good moment for Adam McKay, the inventive director of “The Big Short,” to enter the debate with a movie that raises the question: Is insidious destruction of our democracy by a bureaucratic samurai with the soothing voice of a boys’ school headmaster even more dangerous than a selfdestructive buffoon ripping up our values in plain sight?
How do you like your norms broken? Over Twitter or in a torture memo? By a tinpot demagogue stomping on checks and balances he can’t even fathom or a shadowy authoritarian expertly and quietly dismantling checks and balances he knows are sacred?
Mr. McKay grappled with the W.-Cheney debacle in 2009, when he co-wrote a black comedy with Will Ferrell called “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush.” In the Broadway hit, Mr. Ferrell’s W. dismissed waterboarding as a Bliss spa treatment and confided that he had once discovered Mr. Cheney locked in an embrace with a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.
When Mr. McKay was home with the flu three years ago, he grabbed a book and began reading up on Mr. Cheney. He ended up writing and directing “Vice,” a film that uses real-life imagery, witty cinematic asides and cultural touchstones to explore the irreparable damage Mr. Cheney did to the planet, and how his blunders and plunders led to many of our current crises.
With an echo of his Batman growl, Christian Bale brilliantly shape-shifts into another American psycho, the lumbering, scheming vice president who easily manipulates the naïve and insecure W., deliciously played by Sam Rockwell. While W. strives to impress his father, Mr. Cheney strives to impress his wife, Lynne, commandingly portrayed by Amy Adams.
Before we had Mr. Trump’s swarm of bloodsucking lobbyists gutting government regulations from within, we had Mr. Cheney’s. Before Mr. Trump brazenly used the White House to boost his brand, we had Mr. Cheney wallowing in emoluments: He let his energy industry pals shape energy policy; he pushed to invade Iraq, giving no-bid contracts to his former employer, Halliburton, and helping his Big Oil cronies reap the spoils in Iraq.
The movie opens at Christmas, but it’s no sugary Hallmark fable. It’s a harrowing cautionary tale showing that democracy can be sabotaged even more diabolically by a trusted insider, respected by most of the press, than by a clownish outsider, disdained by most of the press.
After a screening of “Vice” Thursday, I asked Mr. McKay which of our two right-wing Dementors was worse, Mr. Cheney or Mr. Trump.
“Here’s the question,” he said. “Would you rather have a professional assassin after you or a frothing maniac with a meat cleaver? I’d rather have a maniac with a meat cleaver after me, so I think Cheney is way worse. And also, if you look at the body count, more than 600,000 people died in Iraq. It’s not even close, right?”