The Trump effect

Call it the Trump effect, that giant sucking sound we have been hearing for the last 15 months. It is the sound of all the air being sucked out of the room where democratic politics, rational policymaking, and civic debate once happened.

The United States was once a society striving to be decent to its most vulnerable—the poor, the sick, the elderly. It was a nation trying to repair decades of harm done to Native Americans, African Americans, women, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and all the rest marked as “other.”

Now, all that has gone into the black hole at the core of Donald Trump’s being, a place where all honesty, compassion, and fairness is compressed and encased, a tiny space from where neither light nor the milk of human kindness can emerge. Unless, as Stephen Hawking learned, the black hole explodes.

I will never tire of thrashing Donald Trump. Before he died, The Nation’s Alexander Cockburn used to title his column “Beat the Devil.” That’s the idea. But that’s the not main purpose of this column. The Donald Trump regime and the right-wing Republican juggernaut have in a short time inflicted such pain, committed such injustices, transgressed against so many key American values, created such chaos and confusion, as to overshadow more fundamental crises in U.S. society. These crises predate Trump, but everything his administration is doing is bound to aggravate them.

One example: Life expectancy in the United States has declined for the last two years. That’s unprecedented, an ominous sign. Life expectancy is a key indicator of the overall wellbeing of a people.

Dropping life expectancy was a leading indicator of the crises to come after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet case, the blame is mainly placed on the rise of drug use, rampant alcoholism, crime and AIDS. Less stressed, although key, was the dissolution of the state social and health infrastructure, which in its present state is to utterly unable to deal with multiple crises.

Finally, as the USSR vanished from the map, a climate set in that the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “anomie.” It happens when a long-established worldview, a value system, a set of norms and expectations, suddenly dissolves, with nothing to replace them. Disorientation and despair result, setting the stage for multiple social and epidemiological maladies. It’s the moment at which, “all that was solid melts into air,” as Marshall Berman wrote about capitalism’s effect on feudalism.

In the United States, rising mortality is mostly blamed on the opioid crisis, one that Donald Trump has declared an emergency, but one he has not spent a nickel to combat. Opioid overdoses are an important cause of excess deaths, but not the only one and it doesn’t function in a vacuum. Economic distress, which peaked during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and which has been overcome only partially, also causes deaths to increase.

A more overarching factor is, as in Russia, anomie. The decimation of the middle class, the residential displacement of millions of people because of soaring housing costs, uncertainty about health insurance, the devaluing of manual work, are disorienting and disheartening. Opioids and suicide are ways—dysfunctional for sure—some people use to try to escape the despair.

Other measures of health also point to serious social problems. Infant mortality is higher in the United States than in many other rich countries. Infant and maternal deaths at childbirth are twice as high for African Americans than for whites. Diseases like black lung, once on the decline, are increasing, including among younger miners. With the Trump administration touting coal and undercutting health regulations, the problem will worsen.

Two generations ago, older Americans had the highest rate of poverty of any age group. That situation changed radically because of reforms begun by the New Deal and given additional impetus by the Great Society. Even conservative Republican presidents like George W. Bush added an element to the safety net for the elderly, a prescription drug benefit.

The current crop of Republican leaders are the first politicians to systematically undermine the security of the elderly, among other things by cutting Medicaid, which funds a large chunk of nursing home care for the middle class.

The aging of the population guarantees that costs associated with long-term care will continue to rise, and the ideology of the current take-no-prisoners GOP means they will avoid taxing the rich to pay for the care of the old. The Republicans care little to make people’s “golden years” as comfortable as possible. They care more that those with the gold get to keep it and get more.

Beside taxing the rich, the cost of an aging population can be partially offset by an infusion of young people into the labor force. But this administration seems intent on preventing such an infusion by restricting immigration and persecuting immigrants. These young people would for decades contribute to the economy and the strapped social security fund. An inhumane and stupid policy.

Anomie is intermeshed with all these problems. What can be more disconcerting that not knowing whether you will have health care in your older years or if social security will provide you even a modest income?

But the most blatant example of anomie, if not necessarily the most harmful, is the Trump administration itself. Unpredictability, backstabbing, slander, lying, maddening chaos are trademarks of a universe in which long-held norms of decency are brazenly violated, even celebrated. And it’s only getting worse. In the Trump mindset a third of the world is made up of shithole countries. In his war of words with James Comey, a man of probity and integrity, Trump had the temerity to label his adversary a “slime ball.” By all credible accounts—and I don’t include in that the right-wing propaganda mills like Fox (Faux) News or Breitbart—Trump is and has always been a slime ball while Comey is a tough-as-steel square shooter.

The tragedy is that while Trump is engaged in vicious attacks on everybody via Twitter, a medium that allows so few words (characters) that only a twit would use it as his major source of communication, the country’s grave problems are ignored or made worse. That’s why if today there is a traitor in the house built by George Washington and saved by Abraham Lincoln, his name is Donald J. Trump.

[Photo at top of an exploding black hole.]