Thoughts on the Passing of Donald Trump
By the late afternoon of 20 January 2021, President Donald J. Trump will have passed away, and then, eventually, natural causes will do their work. Some will rejoice, and some will mourn. I will do neither. He was a vindictive, rapacious, narcissistic, hateful little man, and the sooner we can rid ourselves of his malignant and grotesque shadow, the better. We owe his memory nothing, but we also owe ourselves nothing for having endured his mockery for so long. We put him in that position because we have become, and in some ways always were, a monstrously foolish, inept, and unserious people.
If Donald Trump had any truly great accomplishments, winning the Presidency was not among them. He never did win the presidency — not really, not by the will of a majority the people. He pried his way in like he did with so many other things, by bending rules, breaking them where he could get away with it, hurling insults, and, primarily, by taking advantage of structural faults in the system — faults he could identify only because his sycophants and enablers made their collective, native evil seem erudite to the many who don’t know better.
His own party members’ Senate report on the matter concluded that his campaign had substantially sought aid via interference in our elections from enemies of the state, and despite that he still couldn’t win the popular vote. So, he lied about that, as he lied about everything else: how much money he made, where he has or has not put his penis, how big his inauguration crowd was, where President Obama was born, how much he cared for others and the quality of others’ lives, how smart he was, how well respected he was, whether he won in 2020. He knew he was a con man, but he was too self-absorbed to suspect he should feel shame, and too indecent to be capable of shame anyhow. In keeping with his narcissism, he had nothing but contempt for the citizenry of the U.S. precisely because so many of us fell and wanted to fall for his hideous schtick.
In a discussion with his cabinet about immigration, he said that he didn’t want people from “shithole countries,” like Haiti or Ghana, but preferred Norwegians. A couple of years later during the coronavirus pandemic, his incompetence turned the U.S. into a shithole country and Norway wouldn’t accept us even as visitors. And then, despite saying for months, and after 200,000 Americans had died from it, that the virus was no big deal, he got it and had to be hospitalized. But he was so grotesquely dishonest that there were immediately as many suggestions his diagnosis was a lie and an election strategy as there were sincere worries about it from those either hoping he could still compete or hoping it wouldn’t cause a surge of sympathy.
Donald Trump was a fascist, racist, nativist, white nationalist hatemonger, and he made no secret of it. From some of his earliest real estate dealings to his attacks on the Central Park Five to his idiotic questioning of President Obama’s citizenship to the very origins of his presidential campaigns to his praise of Scandinavian genes, he made perfectly clear to everyone able to endure the sound of his voice that he looked down on and actively sought to hurt both non-white people, and, though they seem not to have realized it, most white people.
His first campaign speech impugned Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers; he mocked people with disabilities; he encouraged people at his rallies to assault protesters; he said there were “very fine people” among murderous neo-Nazis; he joked about his fame enabling him to get away with what any normal person understands to be sexual assault; he bellowed about voter fraud while openly encouraging it among his own supporters; he sent federal troops to beat civil rights demonstrators whom he vilified as looters; he encouraged white goon gangs to intimidate voters. When Justice Ginsberg died, he installed someone to try to guarantee himself a fraudulent victory.
Democratic norms? Basic fairness and decency? Sound respect for the Constitution? Representing the people? Grow up.
Donald Trump did one thing that, despite his best efforts, may somehow help us in the long run: He reminded us how awful we can be, and indeed how awful many of us have always been and remain under the now tattered cloak of civility. It is too charitable to describe this as lancing a boil. It’s more like he scrubbed away some of the encrusted gunk so he could show it off, bizarrely thinking we should be proud of the disfigurement of which he was emblematic. Luckily there were enough of us who were horrified to see how deep the infection runs.
But that is all. No one has cured anything. We’re still merely confused by it, or at least acting confused. Our nation has a brain tumor that prevents us from really believing that we are all equal; have inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that governments exist to secure those rights. Too many seem content to reduce such principles to raw, amoral power.
In his scathing eulogy for Richard Nixon, Hunter S. Thompson wrote:
“He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.”
Trump may be Nixon’s apotheosis: nastier, even more craven, possibly more dangerous and yet, paradoxically, less intelligent. That is one of many contradictions at the heart of this moment that we’d better disentangle, and that no mere election can fix.
Let us neither mourn the passing of Trump’s like from our government nor pity ourselves for the moral and political wreckage they leave in their wake. Let us take a bath, go for antibiotics and chemotherapy, and live through this as though we do intend to recover together.