Faith, but fury too, for Donald Trump at home
Reality. We all used to know what it meant. The world as it is. Objective facts that provide the foundation for rational – not emotional – judgments and actions. But the old definition of reality has taken a serious beating during the nearly three years Donald Trump, the reality-show president, has been in office. Partly because Trump himself seems to live in a reality separate from the one most of us inhabit. Partly because too many people still can’t accept the objective facts of his presidency.
This reality car crash will be on full display on Wednesday when Trump attends the Nato heads of government meeting in Watford, while in Washington
the House judiciary committee takes over hearings from the intelligence committee, the next step towards his inevitable impeachment. Pictures
of pomp and ceremony and outrageous Trump behaviour will be juxtaposed with testimony about his high crimes and misdemeanours.
Trump’s presidency has revealed the reality of what America has been for some time: a hopelessly divided nation whose institutional structures are rotten. The economy is riddled with corruption. Education is in a wretched state.
The Washington press corps has proved itself incapable of reporting the Trumpian reality. Reporters too often indulge in clickbait speculation about his mental and physical health. They report as fact gossip about who is about to quit the administration and blow the whistle on him. So far none of the generals and other high-ups humiliated and forced out of his cabinet or as chief of staff have done so. Washington journalists continue to feed a commercial model of journalism where it is understood that reporting objective facts doesn’t pay the bills. Speculation and rumour leading to online traffic do.
And, of course, Trump supporters don’t interact with the mainstream press; they live inside the Fox News filtered facts zone, a separate reality.
In politics, Trump’s Republicans have become a dangerous faction as defined by James Madison in the Federalist Papers. They are a single-minded group whose actions are “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.
But that didn’t happen after Trump was elected. It was a process that has steadily unfolded over the last quarter of a century. In the last seven presidential elections the GOP has won the popular vote just once. Yet the Republican faction acts as if America is essentially a one-party – their party – state.
Republicans have relentlessly refused to work at the most basic bipartisan level with Democrats. They have deliberately tried to wreck Democratic presidencies, culminating in Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to give a hearing to Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.
Although the GOP’s elites resisted Trump initially, it should be no surprise that they have come around to backing him blindly. He delivers for them and