In his US diary, our columnist goes from Stormy Daniels to Marty Morrissey... a heady cocktail
IT’S ridiculous to blame Irish Catholics for gifting President Trump an enormous political victory and securing Brett Kavanaugh a seat in the US Supreme Court. Neither can American-Irish Catholics be culpable for the bitterest divisions in living memory across the United States nor the GAA censured for Kavanaugh’s sexual aggression. And it would be grotesque to fault the Jesuits for his binge drinking.
Responsibility for his predatory sexuality and teen spree drinking, according to his peers, goes back to a cult film – a movie that persuaded the pampered sons of America’s most privileged they could do anything without consequence.
Personally, I’m more convinced that a character defect and kegs of beer kick-started Kavanaugh’s hedonism rather than Catholicism, his Irishness – or the 1978 hit movie Animal House.
Yet his boorish delinquency would be forgiven if Kavanaugh manned up to his teenage excesses. His persistent denials, obfuscation, obvious untruths and nakedly partisan politics as an adult showed an absence of emotional intelligence in a Senate hearing. That shortcoming outweighs any of his academic or legal achievements.
KAVANAUGH played Gaelic football and kept faith with his Irish Catholic heritage attending one of the most expensive schools in America – a Jesuit high school in Washington. But as a freshman at Yale University in 1982 he allegedly sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford (at the time a 15-yearold wearing braces on her teeth).
His roommate as a freshman at Yale University, Jamie Roche, was convincing saying Kavanaugh had perjured himself at a US Senate hearing. Roche also recalls him being regularly falling-down drunk and vomiting.
Kavanaugh continued to plead his innocence and insist he was truthful and politically impartial in an op-ed article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. President Trump blames objections to Kavanaugh’s confirmation on the women accusing him and the Democrats’ dirty tricks.
There is more than a reasonable doubt about his criminal guilt of sexual assault. But emerging information throws a serious question mark over his credibility and integrity. Kavanaugh has failed miserably in any test of the character and temperament required for a lifetime appointment to the US’s most senior judicial post. If he chooses, he can serve on the Supreme Court until 2050, or longer.
Yet Republicans remind Democrats how they rallied behind President Bill Clinton when he was accused of predatory sexual behaviour before and during his time in the Oval Office. And Democrats remind Republicans that Brett Kavanaugh was a zealous lawyer who relentlessly pursued Bill Clinton’s sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky when he was working for the special prosecutor trying to impeach the then-President.
The Trump White House is probably more heavily influenced by traditional American-Irish Catholics than any other ethnic group. Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly, adviser Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer et al have been the most welcoming in history to us. Visiting Irish media have had unprecedented access to the White House and Oval Office on St Patrick’s Day during Trump’s presidency.
TRUMP’S Irish advisers go to some lengths to be best friends with modern Ireland but are also repelled by recent abortion and same-sex marriage reforms. In reality, modern Ireland is far removed from the sepia-tinted land of oppression and rigid Catholicism from which the ancestors of Trump’s Irish team emigrated.
Back in Ireland few know and less care that more Catholics vote for Republican Party candidates now than Democrats. Those Democratvoting Irish Catholics in US cities who left their neighbourhoods for neat suburbs became Republicans when they prospered. And the majority became more conservative politically.
Seven judges in the US Supreme Court are now Catholic-born; the other three are Jewish. Irish Catholics are strongly represented in business, finance, the professions, politics and the law – the US elite.
This political convulsion about Kavanaugh will pass although other serious scandals and revelations about Trump and his ilk will continue. The Mueller inquiry into the President, Russia and election meddling is a crisis-in-waiting – but Trump and the Republican Party are trying to close it down.
But the current bitter divisions across the US are more vicious and politically partisan than the rift that split the country over civil rights and Vietnam 50 years ago. After World War II most Americans were sure they would do better than their parents and an average worker with training joined the middle class – for what was known as a ‘high-wage, middleskilled job’.
But as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warns: ‘In the early 2000s, most high-wage, middle-skilled jobs disappeared. Now there is only a high-wage, highskilled job and a low-wage, lowskilled job. And that has fractured the middle class and left a lot of people behind.’
Those left behind are Trump’s most loyal supporters.
The US’s political battles are being fought on many fronts:
There is a running battle between rural small-town America and the globalised sophisticates in cities whom ‘rednecks’ believe look down on them;
Many white working-class Americans feel they’re losing out to minorities and liberals who embrace multiculturalism;
Traditionalist American men are convinced women challenging their role as leaders are emasculating them.
Many of the arguments sundering the US also simmer in Europe – and in Ireland the squeezed middle grows more resentful.
Demographics have put the US Republican Party into inevitable decline. Trump is no more Republican than he is aligned to a political or any other principle.
God Bless America: it wants our goodwill and we must learn about how to provide for our own increasingly disenchanted squeezed middle. And pray that disenchantment does not manifest itself in an Irish version of Trump in the US or Brexit in Britain.