Month: September 2020

TRUMP’S NEW ELECTION PLAN: “GET RID OF THE BALLOTS”

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, comes now another reason to forgo a good night’s sleep: What happens if Donald Trump loses the election but refuses to leave the White House?

The punditry class has been quaking over this diabolical conundrum for weeks, largely out of boredom. After all, stories about Trump ignoring a deadly virus, encouraging racial unrest, destroying environmental protections and sexually assaulting women have gotten quite stale. So let’s entertain a new disaster, like whether The Donald can force himself on us for four more years. 

The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman filled the current issue’s cover story, “The Election That Could Break America,” with a frighteningly persuasive argument that, in the author’s words: “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result.”

A few days later, someone else presented a far stronger case in support of Gellman’s dystopian narrative.  It came from Trump himself.  He is now refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of an election loss. The president of the United States actually stood before a news conference and insisted that we need to “get rid of the ballots.” He was presumably talking about mail ballots. Polling shows that 37 percent of registered voters plan to vote by mail, and most are Biden supporters.  Trump, who votes by mail, contends – without evidence – that Democrats somehow plan to rig the election through mail ballots. 

So here we are, a tad more than a month before election day, and the incumbent candidate is demanding to either eliminate or not count mail ballots because of what only he sees as rampant election fraud. It’s not too hard to imagine Trump, with full support from his obsequious  attorney general, sending federal marshals into swing states to impound mail ballots before they are counted. 

Although the Constitution unambiguously provides that a president’s term “shall end” at noon on January 20, here’s Gellman’s what-if:  “. . . two men show up to be sworn in, and one of them comes with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.”  

Here’s how Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, responded to that question in The Atlantic piece: “We are not prepared for this at all.”  The professor’s observation aptly applies to everything about Donald Trump. We were not prepared for his election. We were not prepared for his presidency. And we are certainly not prepared for what may well be the country’s most fraught and chaotic transfer-of-power-exit.  

In crafting our democracy, our founders covered many exigencies. One that they missed was what to do when a president is so deranged and delusional that he has zero understanding of reality.  As journalist Bob Woodward, after 18 interviews with Trump, said last week, “I don’t know, to be honest, whether he’s got it straight . . . what is real and what is unreal.”  

Donald Trump’s reality is whatever makes him feel good about himself at the time, regardless of clearly observable evidence to the contrary.  We learned this about him in the first few minutes of his presidency.  It rained during his inaugural speech, but he falsely insisted later that, just as he began to speak, the clouds parted to allow the sun to shine down upon him. If we had selected the president by lottery, if we had randomly handed the keys to the Oval Office to some poor schlub off the street, the odds are enormously high that he or she would have been able to tell the difference between rain and sunshine.

Instead, we ended up with a delusional narcissist, totally untethered from science, the English language, basic facts, and a nation-in-crisis yearning for competent leadership. Our source of angst and despair in this autumn of 2020 is not about the appointment of conservative judges, tax cuts for the rich, or the decimation of environmental protections. Policy in a democracy is all about politics; to the victors go the spoils. 

This pain we feel now is much different.  It’s about the raw, gnawing fear of what more is to come from this acutely deranged man, who has never met a boundary of decency and decorum that he hasn’t demolished or leaped over. Never has a leader had a wider gap between vision and reality. 

This is, after all, the guy who looks past the seven million COVID infections and 203,000 deaths and says, as he did in Ohio this week, that the virus “affects virtually nobody.”  He’s the guy who threw paper towels at hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans and called the island “the most corrupt place on earth,” and then this week claimed that he was “the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.”  He’s the guy who criticized the Obama administration for not stockpiling any ventilators while 19,000 of them were sitting in storage. He’s the guy trying to force government scientists to skip safety steps in releasing a coronavirus vaccine before the election, while the Trump National Doral Miami resort opens its doors for an early October conference of the nation’s anti-vaccine movement. 

To be sure, Donald Trump is not the first person seemingly incapable of grasping reality. The difference between him and his delusional cohorts is that he is in the White House while the others are either hospitalized or under close supervision.  A review of the medical literature shows that many delusional patients insist that they are the president of the United States.  Unlike Trump, however, they do not have access to the nuclear codes.

The only remedy we have in this nightmare is to vote. Even then, there is no guarantee that a Biden electoral victory will be enough to trigger a peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of our democracy for more than two centuries. Still, the bigger the Biden margin, the bigger the likelihood that non-delusional forces in our system will find a way to ship Trump off to Mar a Largo in January.  

Since reality doesn’t matter to him, The Donald can bask away in the Florida sun and insist he is still president. Just like his hospitalized counterparts. 

TRUMP & COVID ARE THE KILLERS OF NORMALCY

Riddle me this: What’s the difference between Donald Trump and the novel coronavirus? Other than the fact that the virus doesn’t lie, discriminate or emit offensive tweets, not much. 

If you were expecting a pithy one-liner, my sincere apologies. Alas, there is nothing funny about the destructive duality of Trump and this pandemic.  Together, they are responsible for the most powerful and tenacious one-two punch ever leveled against our norms, values and way of life. 

Not that long ago, most of us were living relatively stable lives. Sure, we had our problems: racism, misogyny, income inequality, climate change, among many others. We dealt with those matters mostly through elections, by voting for folks who share our values.  Meanwhile, kids went to school and parents went to work. Weekends were for shopping, barbecuing and a movie. Summers were for vacation trips, crowded beaches, fairs and festivals.  Despite our periodic frustrations with the government, we believed that our founders endowed us with a democracy inherently respectful of our rights, liberty and humanity.

Then along came Trump and the killer virus he tried to cover up.  Suddenly, our relatively ordered lives, along with the norms and traditions that held us together, are nowhere to be found.  Instead, we are on edge and out of sorts.  Life seems upside down and inside out. Stuff we used to count on and take for granted has vanished.  It feels like we are bobbing in a psychic sea of anomie and entropy, struggling to keep our heads above water. 

Sociologists tell us that norms are essential to maintaining social order (here, here and here). They take the randomness out of everyday life by instilling in us a sense of predictability. Norms mean we don’t grab an item out of another customer’s grocery cart; we knock or ring a doorbell before entering someone’s  house; and although we may not agree with our president’s politics, we assume he (and eventually “she”?) will protect us and our country from harm.

To be sure, norms change periodically as they adapt to evolving culture and technology. Think gay marriage, #metoo, not buying Twitter followers. For the most part, norm modifications gradually grow into acceptance. The problem comes when huge chunks of our normative lives are suddenly upended, leaving us without a trace of social equilibrium. 

This is happening to us on two fronts. First, our president is obliterating every norm and symbol of our democracy, turning America from a beacon of hope into an unrecognizable cauldron of chaos and despair.  Secondly, our own lives have been diminished and fractured by the contents of that very cauldron.

The crisis has been building for years.  We probably should have seen it coming when we elected a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women, and labeled Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. Although we missed those signals, Trump handed us a gem of a clue when he had babies snatched from their mothers’ arms and put into cages on our southern border.  Even then, as abhorrent as that behavior was, it was hard to imagine the normative evisceration that lay ahead.

Yet, day in and day out, this 45th president shreds one touchstone of decency after another. He traffics in racist putdowns. He affirms white supremacists. He threatens to jail political opponents. He lies constantly. He solicits foreign leaders to tamper with our elections. He hurls words like “dumb, stupid, terrible and dishonest” at those who disagree with him. The list is endless.  Donald Trump has managed to discard every standard of presidential behavior that our country holds dear.

Like an addict falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of the bizarre and aberrant, this president’s decline is rapidly accelerating.  More norms fall every day.  We just learned from The Atlantic that the commander in chief refers to dead and wounded soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”  Thanks to journalist Bob Woodward, we now know that Trump deliberately lied to the American people when he said the novel coronavirus was nothing to worry about. He knew its lethality and did nothing to stop it.

There is so much more. He is:

  • Supporting white supremacist and conspiracy theory groups.
  • Encouraging armed right wing militias to take on Black Lives Matter protests. 
  • Using the Justice Department to defend him in a rape suit.
  • Pressuring security analysts to doctor their reports to protect his political position.

The cumulative weight of all this norm-busting behavior not only adds to the anxiety of most Americans, it leaves us with the inescapable apprehension that our president will stop at nothing in serving his interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on the rest of us.

More directly, we feel the angst and pain from the normative destruction in our own lives.  The pandemic, of course, would have torpedoed many of our daily norms, even under the best of leadership.  But we had the worst.  As a result, we’ve spent the past six months fighting over masks, social distancing, covid testing, school closings and Clorox injections. Our ultimate escape – a vaccine – is now in peril because of the fear that our president will push through a snake oil remedy just in time for the election.

As the number of cases and deaths continue to mount, much of our lives remain on hold. The rituals that connected us and filled life with meaning and richness now live only in our memories. We avoid family gatherings. We don’t hug anymore. We wait to bury the dead, and then limit the number who can attend a funeral. We avoid stores, and burden minimum wage workers to get us our supplies. We don’t look forward to a lot because we have no idea when this nightmare will end.  

Although this dystopian saga has depleted our supply of norms, it has been rich in the production of ironies, the biggest of which is this:  Donald J. Trump entered our lives by promising to Make America Great Again. He damn near destroyed it. 

Now comes Joe Biden, our only shot at – in the words of Langston Hughes – “Making America, America again.”