Trump’s everyday squalor rotting nation from within
The United States is in the middle of a very unfortunate experiment in how disoriented a great nation can become before it loses its moorings entirely.
At times, politics seems fairly conventional with Republicans and Democrats arguing about health care and tax cuts, as they long have done. But former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama reminded us last week that there is nothing normal about this moment. They issued searing, overlapping condemnations of Trumpism without naming President Trump. Former commanders in chief of opposing parties don’t do this unless the country faces an emergency.
Our disorientation is reflected further in the way honorable men and women allow themselves to be pushed into defending the indefensible and twisting noble concepts into cheap and ultimately shameful talking points. These are designed to get the president through one more news cycle or around some controversy that he could easily quell if he had any familiarity with the words “I’m sorry.”
In the realm of political commentary, the now daily detonations set off by a man who sees the “common good” as the pursuit of suckers drown out any serious discussion of the problems his voters thought he might try to solve.
We can’t even have predictable if necessary partisan and ideological debates. These are blocked by self-involved spectacle and ruthless attacks against any who raise their voices to criticize the president. As Bush put it, “We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty . ... Disagreement escalates into dehumanization.”
This is why all except the most blind Trump partisans had to be heartsick over the performance of White House chief of staff John Kelly. The retired Marine Corps general, who has devoted his life to service and suffered stoically when he lost a son in combat, stepped out as a hatchet man against Rep. Frederica Wilson.
It was Wilson, a Florida Democrat, who revealed that the president had told the mother of the late Sgt. La David T. Johnson that the slain soldier knew “what he signed up for.” Kelly could not back up Trump’s claim that Wilson had “totally fabricated” the president’s conversation. So he resorted to a vicious rebuke of the African-American congresswoman.
Kelly didn’t even have the decency to use Wilson’s name, and he compared her to noisy “empty barrels.”
Thus is our world turned upside down: A genuine patriot is reduced to the role of propagandist for a boss whose idea of “sacrifice,” as Trump once explained on ABC News, was running a business from which he profited.
We are numbed to the squalor that we see daily. It’s common to hear the president called a “disrupter.” But unlike tech world heroes to whom the label is typically applied, he builds nothing, creates nothing and only moves a majority of our fellow citizens toward either rage or a sense of helplessness.
But helplessness is not an option and rage alone will change nothing. By speaking up, Bush and Obama have sent a signal that we cannot sit by and allow our system of self-government to disintegrate before our eyes. The burden is especially great on those who hoped that by serving this man, they could serve their country. Alas, John Kelly has shown us that this is simply not possible.