Trump, the improv president

One thing you have to say for Donald Trump—he’s spontaneous. He’s a far cry from the standard carefully scripted politician. You often hear from his supporters that “he tells it like it is.” Well, no, actually, he hardly ever tells it like it is. He almost invariably tells it like it isn’t. But he does it in a refreshingly carefree, spontaneous, unrehearsed sort of way, often on Twitter, and he mixes his messages with such wild randomness, accusing Barack Obama of tapping his phones one tweet and mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Apprentice ratings the next, it’s pretty obvious you’re getting the raw, uncensored version of what’s going on in his astonishingly childish mind. That uncalculated, spontaneous “Here I am, what you see is what you get, take me or leave me” quality, in such sharp contrast to the standard politician’s prepackaging on such predictable display with Hillary Clinton, accounts for much of the charm he worked on the people who voted for him. It’s refreshing and entertaining and dangerous.

What we see and what we have gotten with Donald Trump is a grown man with the emotions of a ten-year-old, the interests of a bored housewife and the moral compass of a carnival barker. This is a man who took to Twitter eight times over the span of a month in 2012 to weigh in on the subject of Kristin Stewart’s love life. There’s an almost endearingly unpretentious quality to that behavior. It shows that in one sense at least he is in fact a man of the people. He doesn’t just feed the common low-brow American obsession with the personal foibles of celebrities, he shares it. Lots of us have flipped through People or Us at the dentist’s office and glanced at the gossip, but who actually goes to the trouble of tweeting about it? What a regular irregular guy.

Part of the problem with Donald Trump’s spontaneity is that he is now in a position to initiate a nuclear war. That is not something that should be done spontaneously. Trump is still the featured attraction on a reality show. Only now the reality is that a profoundly disturbed, emotionally retarded egomaniac is the most powerful person on the planet and capable of destroying it. His presidency is a freak show. It’s a thrill-a-minute roller coaster ride. It’s funny and dramatic and great entertainment unless perhaps you’re a member of a minority group fearing for your life amid the racist hatred his ascent has unleashed in our country, or a child of undocumented immigrants fearing deportation, or perhaps a rancher in Kansas whose cattle just got incinerated in a giant wildfire while the climate denier you voted for was busy trying to gut the EPA.

Just exactly what price the rest of us pay to watch Trump’s tour de farce as a President Geek figuratively biting off the heads of live chickens remains to be seen. For now, for most of us, it seems like a morbidly fascinating comic horror show, and forty years from now those of us who last that long may look back on it fondly for its sheer entertainment value. But the power of the presidency is no joke. Putting it in the hands of a spontaneous buffoon may prove to have been the opening act of a solemn and in retrospect depressingly predictable tragedy.

               

               

                 

By the way, about that wretched refuse of your teeming shore...

The Department of Homeland Security has decreed that the north side of Donald Trump’s border wall be “aesthetically pleasing” and that it blend with its surroundings. Just the north side of it. They’re not worried about the side facing Mexico. Wouldn’t want that side to look too attractive. In fact, they’d probably want to make it look about as repulsive as they can, maybe with huge photos of Donald Trump grinning his obnoxious smug grin. Or they could line it with video screens showing endless loops of Trump mocking that reporter with Aspergers. But thank God our side’s going to be aesthetically pleasing. What a pleasure it will be to drive down to the border and see an aesthetically pleasing monument to xenophobia stretching endlessly across the aesthetically enhanced desert.

Our hugely amazing president has assured us repeatedly that Mexico will pay for the wall, and if you believe that, I have a wall eighteen to thirty feet tall, financed entirely by Mexico, that runs the length of the Mexican border I’d like to sell you. But even if by some dodgy unneighborly bit of Mexican malfeasance we end up getting stuck with the tab, the money we spend on the wall will be well spent, especially that share of it spent on its aesthetically pleasing design. Think how proud we’ll all be to pass on to future generations this gorgeous legacy in concrete and steel, and how much more fitting a symbol it will be of us and our values than the Statue of Liberty, whose role as a symbol of our country it must effectively replace. Maybe in keeping with the goal of aesthetic pleasure, Trump’s aesthetes can throw in a plaque somewhere bearing stirring poetry addressed to the world at large, like maybe …

Give us a select few of your well-heeled and competitively situated, with thousands of dollars to pay naturalization fees and robust skill sets guaranteed to boost the economy, and maybe some doctors from India. And forget whatever crap you may have heard about your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. You can keep your huddled rapist radical Islamanarco nonwhite terrorist taco-munching masses.

Logically the plaque would have to go on the Mexican side, but in the unlikely event we do end up footing part of the bill, to get our full money’s worth of aesthetic gratification it should probably go on our side. Maybe another one on the Mexican side could translate the verses into Spanish so bad they drive prospective border crossers away.  

Food for thought for a brain on a really meager diet

Some food for thought, or for sitting there gazing at nothing in glassy-eyed slack-jawed confusion, while it’s almost still Saint Patrick’s Day in California:

Saint Patrick was not Irish.

Saladin, the great Islamic commander during the Crusades, was not Arabic.

Catherine the Great was not Russian. Neither was Stalin.

Napoleon was not French.

Hitler was not German. Nor was he entirely Aryan.

There are several other people I could add to this list if I could remember them. Later maybe I will.

So what were they?

Saint Patrick was British, Saladin Kurdish, Catherine the Great Prussian, Stalin Georgian, Napoleon Corsican, and Hitler Austrian. Recent DNA analysis of saliva samples from several dozen of Hitler’s relatives tends to confirm long-held suspicions that he had Jewish ancestry.

Of course for years Donald Trump maintained vociferously that Barack Obama was not American, a position he repudiated, without explanation or apology, for reasons of political expediency during his disastrously successful presidential campaign. Being Donald Trump means never having to say you're sorry. Or having to by normal standards of common decency but refusing to. I wish I could tell you that Donald Trump wasn't American, much less our president. One of the many ironies of the great unfolding freak show of which he is at once the main attraction and the guy standing outside the tent with a bullhorn, is that he would very likely not be American if his grandfather Friedrich Trump had not had the huge misfortune to be deported from Bavaria in 1905. Having grown up there and run off at age sixteen to the US and then to the Klondike in Canada, where he made a tidy profit catering to the needs of gold miners, Friedrich later married a fellow Bavarian, Donald's grandmother Elisabeth, and settled with her in New York. But they did not stay settled long. She got homesick, so they moved back to Bavaria. Friedrich sought to reestablish his citizenship there, but his application was denied on the grounds that he had failed to perform compulsory military service and to have his name stricken from the registry in his hometown of Kallstadt. So the Trumps returned to Queens and begat Donald's father, Fred, with whom Donald would systematically decline to rent apartments to black people seventy years or so later. And now, another forty or so years after that, the grandson of a pair of deportees, if he keeps even a small part of one of his main campaign promises, is set to touch off one of history's greatest mass deportations. It's a measure of his humanity that he seems to relish the prospect.

Where is this Republican handbasket taking us?

The Environmental Protection Agency sets standards for tailpipe emissions. States can apply for an exemption from those standards, but only to impose more stringent ones. California, due largely to the Los Angeles area’s historically bad smog problem, has for years had such an exemption. Under Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA—or, as the head of the Sierra Club has aptly described him, the arsonist in charge of the fire department—that exemption is likely to be revoked.

If it is, that revocation will be in keeping with one of the cardinal principles of the modern Republican Party: to favor the rights of states to regulate their own affairs free of oversight by the hated federal government—except when Republicans control the hated federal government, and then to hell with states’ rights.

There are of course exceptions, but by and large Republicans are remarkably consistent in this inconsistency. Whether the issue is imposing vehicle emissions standards in California, or drilling for oil off the coast of California, or recounting votes in Florida, or standardized testing of school kids, or sanctuary cities, or fracking, or smoking marijuana, big-government-bashing Republicans are generally just fine thank you with federal power when they’re the ones wielding it.

By a similar token they take a dim view of welfare but not when it comes in the form of crop subsidies to white farmers in red states. They’re all for religious liberty when that means allowing merchants to discriminate against gay customers, but when the religion in question is Islam, they clamor for immigration barriers and support spying on mosques. Many of the same Republicans who embraced the invasion of Iraq under transparently false pretenses fourteen years ago now embrace a president who says it was all a catastrophic blunder—a blunder, one might add, much of the cost of which the Bush administration declined to include in the Pentagon’s budget. They financed that war for almost six years largely through supplemental appropriations, not unlike teenagers with a credit card. And then at their 2012 convention the Republicans had the gall to display a pair of huge clocks tracking the deficit as if they themselves had had nothing to do with creating it.  

All of this hypocrisy leaves you wondering what the Republicans really do stand for. If you judge from the chanting at some of their more recent conventions, what they believe most fervently in and get most excited about is oil drilling and incarcerating Hillary Clinton.

Obviously, there’s more to core Republican values than they let on with their chanting. For one thing, there’s cutting taxes. That’s one thing they generally are entirely consistent about. They purport to put country first, but actually among their first priorities is finding ways to avoid footing the bill for it.

Another is a huge military. Other agencies of the government are bloated. The military, no matter how big it may be, is pretty much invariably undersized, and during every Democratic administration it either vanishes entirely or falls into such a state of disrepair it has to be rebuilt.

Another is gun rights, or, as Republicans like to say, Second Amendment rights, though in citing that amendment, they generally omit any reference to the introductory clause about a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state. Conservatives generally purport to be strict constructionalists, meaning they think the Constitution should be applied strictly in keeping with the intent of the men who wrote it. But in the matter of bearing arms, the obvious intent of those men in citing a well regulated militia gets no shrift at all. Excising half the sentence, we are left with an absolute those men obviously never intended. If any of them could be transported to 2017 and told his amendment made it unassailably legal for a nut case to walk down the street brandishing a hand-held nuclear weapon or juggling anthrax-laced water balloons, he might have a thing or two to tell the NRA and its legions of fawning Republican devotees. Like maybe where they could stick their preposterous mangling of the Second Amendment.

Still another is opposition to regulations. Obviously we do have some unnecessary, annoying, economically debilitating and generally obnoxious regulations. Just as obviously we need some regulations, some we have and some we don’t have but should. No, the government shouldn’t be able to tell me what color to paint my house, but neither should a mining firm be able to install a copper smelter next door. Nor should my neighbor’s kid be allowed to practice on his drums at 3 in the morning with his window open. The Republicans used to bill themselves as the party of law and order. That slogan still applies, but you don't hear it much anymore. They talk more these days about being against regulations. That's all well and good, but there’s a fine line between law and regulation. You can draw a distinction between the two, with the standard disparaging references to unelected bureaucrats, but you can’t logically endorse the one and forswear the other without at least taking the trouble to do that drawing. It’s just too glib and easy and hollow to make the law out to be sacred and regulation evil. It smacks of demagoguery. Obviously we need some rules. To hear a lot of Republicans railing against regulations, you’d think they were anarchists.

And then there are family values. Somehow the man the Republicans have chosen to lead their party and the nation seems an unlikely champion for a party that makes so much noise about family values. Or used to. Just as the Republicans, in embracing Southern white voters alienated from the Democratic Party over its embrace of the civil rights movement, have pretty much had to relinquish the banner of Abraham Lincoln, they have rather abruptly, in embracing Donald Trump, stopped making the case for family values. That’s a hard case to make when your top guy is a self-proclaimed molester of women and at least wannabe adulterer, each of whose three marriages has featured a prenup agreement.

I could go on. There’s free trade, on which their standard bearer takes a position very different from the traditional Republican one. There’s Russia, whose people Republican and Democratic Cold Warriors alike demonized for half a century or so after World War II and whose current leader, no less a thug than many of his Soviet predecessors, our current misleader seems so strangely smitten by. Amid all this contradiction and all the ugly know-nothing nativism that has engulfed the Republican Party recently, you can’t help but wonder, what does it mean to be a Republican these days, and just exactly where do the Republicans, under the bizarre schoolyard bully buffoon they’ve saddled us with, propose to take us?

The rebranding of the Republican Party

          Remember the Party of Lincoln? You might if you’re old enough and not suffering from dementia. That’s what the Republicans used to call themselves. That was their brand until about fifty years ago. They were proud of it and would remind you of it over and over again during their conventions. They were the party not just of our most hallowed president but of arguably the most beloved leader of any nation ever, a good, honest, polite and humble man who read books and loved Shakespeare and education and went to great lengths to provide himself with one, who spoke respectfully even of his bitterest enemies and who was thoroughly and selflessly devoted to exercising his power in the service of his country, democracy and common decency.

          The Republicans hardly ever call themselves the Party of Lincoln anymore, and that makes sense because they no longer are. They stopped being the party of Lincoln about the time they swapped geographic bases with the Democrats and became the party of the Solid South. For most of a hundred years, from the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when the federal government basically washed its hands of local politics and protecting the freed slaves in the states of the old Confederacy, until the 1960s, the Solid South was solidly, or almost solidly Democratic. It was not always entirely solid. In the 23 presidential elections from 1876 through 1964, only one Southern state, Arkansas, voted Democratic every time. But by and large the South voted reliably and predictably Democratic the whole time that black people in it languished under Jim Crow segregation that consigned them to degradation, humiliation and poverty.

          Then came the civil rights movement and the ensuing backlash, which produced the most remarkable change in American political history, the abrupt transformation of the South from a Democratic bastion to a Republican one. Some observers, generally to the left of center, attribute this shift to the so-called Southern Strategy, a scheme supposedly hatched during the Nixon administration to appeal to the racial sentiments of resentful white Southerners. Republicans dispute that there ever was such a strategy. Their standard explanation for the shift attributes it largely to traditional Southern family-values conservatism and to resentment, not of black people in the South, but of sneering pointed-headed, brie-eating, wine-sipping white elitists in the Northeast and California who look down on NASCAR, want to confiscate everyone’s guns and equate a Southern drawl with stupidity and the KKK. Race, by this account, has had nothing to do with it.

          The truth, as it generally does, lies somewhere in between. The Republicans did not instigate the mass migration of white Southerners into their party—the Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey prominent among them, did that by realigning their party’s fundamental position on civil rights—but the Republicans saw the shift happening and pointedly did nothing to discourage it. And while racism probably does not account entirely for the shift, it has obviously been a factor and probably the dominant one. White Southerners may be no more racist overall than white Americans elsewhere, but the vast preponderance of racist violence directed at black people over our history has happened in the South. People change, sometimes for the better, but only a fabulist would maintain that all the racism that generated that violence has magically vanished. If you think all the electricity in the air at Donald Trump rallies anywhere last year was generated by a swaggering foul-mouthed thrice-married, four-times bankrupt formerly pro-choice sex offender, gambling mogul and tax evader tapping into his supporters’ family values, you’re not seeing what you probably don’t wish to acknowledge. All those Confederate battle flags are not mere expressions of Southern pride, least of all the ones you see outside the South. The South does not have a monopoly on racism in our country, but it still has plenty of it, and much of it there and elsewhere, the occasional Tim Scott or Bobby Jindal notwithstanding, has gone into the Republican Party.

          You can dispute that all you want, but the shift in Southern political affiliation and the concomitant near extinction of the slogan Party of Lincoln are obvious enough, as is the connection between the two. You can’t be the Party of Lincoln in the South and win among white people there. Lincoln’s the guy who drove old Dixie down. Too many white Southerners are still fighting the Civil War for invoking the name of Abraham Lincoln to be a winning political strategy there for another millennium or so.

          The really bad news in all this for the Republicans and the rest of us is that they are now in the process of giving themselves a new brand, and the branding iron they’re using is white hot. They are now and for a long time to come will be the party of Donald Trump. They should be ashamed of course, but morality aside, they should be smart enough to see what they’re doing to themselves and the consequences of it. Having embraced racially driven voter immigration into their party for fifty years or so, they have allowed that party to transmogrify into something as close to a European fascist party as we have ever had on a large scale in this country. They’ve become a party dominated by nativist know-nothings, propagandists, racists and science deniers, and headed by a childish and astoundingly hypocritical bully whose every whining allegation of fakery and failure can be far more accurately applied to himself. With the exception perhaps of Huey Long, who never quite gained traction outside Louisiana, Donald Trump is a public figure like none we’ve ever seen before in our country. Embracing someone like Trump leaves a scar. The Republican Party is disfiguring itself. It will bear the Trump brand for a long time to come, or until it withers and dies under that brand, whichever comes first. Either way, the Republicans are doing themselves and the country they profess such devotion for a profound disservice. We need a responsible conservative party to advocate genuine conservative principles in this country. The Republicans are emphatically no longer such a party.

Making America a great deal less great

Under the Ming Dynasty in the early fifteenth century, Chinese fleets ventured into the Indian Ocean seven times, going at least once as far as East Africa and returning with a giraffe among various other exotic beasts to grace the imperial court. Some of their ships had compartmentalized hulls, an innovation that might have saved the Titanic five hundred years later. Some were more than six times the length of the Santa Maria, the flagship in which Christopher Columbus would bump into the West Indies later that century. The Chinese were the leading naval power in the world and in a position, had they wanted to, to colonize much of it. But after those seven voyages, the Chinese government made a deliberate decision to focus inward. Long-distance sea voyages were actively discouraged. By 1500 building an ocean-going junk of more than two masts in China was a crime punishable by death. So it fell to the Europeans to dominate the Age of Discovery and colonize the New World along with much of the Old. But for China’s sudden retrenchment almost six hundred years ago, Americans might be speaking Mandarin today.

          Under Donald Trump, the United States seems poised to undergo a comparable turning inward and to relinquish in a comparably abrupt manner its global leadership. Much of what Trump has called for with regard to foreign policy and economic strategy—downplaying our alliances and diplomacy, imposing tariffs and building a wall on the border with Mexico—would push us that way. The emphasis on nationalism, on us versus them, the impulse to isolate ourselves behind a protective physical barrier and dwell in an insular, homogeneous sort of Fortress America, is incompatible with sustaining our international leadership.

That leadership dates from World War II, and our exercise of it has not always been enlightened. But by and large, if you look at the big picture over the last century or so, the short list of our biggest enemies, comprising Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, is one we can be proud of. If you can judge a country by its enemies the way you can a man by his friends, enemies like those make us look pretty good. As hypocritical as our conduct has often been since World War II, the world is vastly better off for our having won it (or helped the Soviets win it—they suffered something like thirty times as many casualties as the United States and Great Britain combined), and for our having proceeded to win the Cold War. We have often betrayed our democratic principles, largely by way of fighting street fights with the Soviets by proxy in Third World back alleys. But the world at large has enjoyed more than seventy years of comparative peace under our tutelage. Totalitarianism has been put down. Democracy has generally flourished. Overall, times have been good.

But now we have an administration that seems hell-bent on shedding the complicated burden of engaging with the world and leading it and imparting our values to it, in favor of circling our wagons and brandishing our guns in sullen isolation. Trump’s plan to make America great again, if he succeeds in implementing it, will in fact lessen us. Our cultural, political and philosophical sway over other nations will dwindle as our engagement with them does. If Trump gets his way, we’ll pay more for goods from abroad, and people there will pay less attention to us. We’ll be stronger militarily and weaker every other way. The American century, proclaimed by Henry Luce in 1941, will have ended somewhat less than a century later.

And whose time will come next? Who will take our place? Someone will. International politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Vladimir Putin, the tough guy Trump seems to have a man crush on, would love to, but economically Russia’s just not up to the challenge. It seems more likely that the Chinese, with their huge population, dynamic economy, strong work ethic, enormous savings (much of it invested in US Treasury notes) and growing military power will take up where they left off six hundred years ago. They’ve already returned in force to East Africa, where Chinese businesses have made major investments. Their space program is accelerating as ours stagnates. They’re making major strides in renewable energy while Trump and the “Drill, baby, drill” Republicans march us backwards into a smog-enshrouded fossil fuel tar pit.

For all its faults, by lots of measures the United States is great and always has been. If they get their way, Donald Trump and his weird little black shirt brain trust—and the Republican Party, so much of which seems so happy about getting hijacked by a race-baiting demagogue—will not restore us to greatness, they will strip us of it and leave us diminished.