Trump: Tragedy and farce

A presidency that began with deceit and delusion is ending with an apotheosis of deceit, delusion, and death.

The president strives to deceive the people into believing that he won the election but that it was stolen from him through fraud carried out through a phantom conspiracy.

There was no big conspiracy, not even small-bore localized fraud. The president’s motley crew of lawyers—a collection of minor league attorneys and over-the-hill advocates like Rudy Giuliani who hasn’t practiced in court for two decades—have been unable to produce any evidence of electoral fraud and have been laughed out of court by thirty judges. Even Attorney General William Barr, Donald Trump’s rescue St. Bernard, has said there is no evidence of systemic voter fraud.

In the absence of any evidence of a conspiracy, or even of small scale local electoral fraud, Trump’s advocates have concocted any number of ludicrous conspiracy theories, even one involving Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president who died in 2013!

When even these lunatic trial balloons deflated, Trump and his enablers resorted to thuggish tactics, including, among many other things: pressuring the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia who oversaw what he said was a clean election to resign; calling electoral officials in Pennsylvania to the White House to get them to reverse their certification of the election; and firing Christopher Krebs, the federal official in charge of electoral cybersecurity, who had declared this was the most secure election in history.

If these tactics do not resemble those of a criminal syndicate enough, there was worse. There were Mafia-style threats. Gruesome: From Trump associate and TV lawyer Joe DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor, there was a call for Christopher Krebs to be dismembered and taken out and shot at dawn. This was after Dr. Scott Atlas, who recently left the administration, called for Anthony Fauci to be decapitated. All for simply telling the truth. Shades of the Galileo trial.

There were many other anonymous death threats against electoral officials and their families, who are now under police protection. The wife of one official got what were described as a “sexualized threats.”

We are witnessing an orgy of rage and frustration by those who thought they were by rights in the driver’s seat forever and found out their choices are shoot the driver or walk home. With honorable exceptions, especially Republican judges, secretaries of state, and electoral officials, the GOP chose the first option.

The Republican Party has actively or tacitly supported what amounts to an attempted coup. A party willing to perpetrate such a betrayal of democracy should be forever discredited, dissolved by desertion and denunciation.

But the Republican Party has bases founded on interests and sentiments that have little to do with democracy. Someone recently wrote that this country is suffering from two addictions—an addiction to greed and an addiction to hate—and the Republican Party is a coalition of the rich addicted to greed and the not-rich addicted to hate.

What cements this union between the haves everything and the haves little is that they are overwhelmingly white and afraid of being overwhelmed by the numbers, the languages, the cultures and the political power of all the “others” of color. The irony is that all these “others” represent multiple identities and views. By lumping them all together as one big Other and acting toward them as the immune system reacts toward pathogens, the greed/hate/fear faction has forced the “others” to unite in defense; they made a figment of their fear a political reality.

Addiction and fear are more powerful, than conviction and blood is thicker than water. This explains why there has not been widespread Republican revulsion against this administration’s multiple cruel outrages and brazen assaults on democracy.

It may or may not have been Karl Marx who said that history repeats twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. The election of Donald Trump was a tragedy the consequences of which we are still living with: hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID deaths, cruel policies, racist agitation, xenophobia, management by vindictiveness, favoritism for the rich, a tsunami of lying and misinformation, and general chaos and incompetence.

Trump’s exit follows the same script played as farce. Hallucinatory conspiracy theories, a proposal by a Trump lawyer that a military commission be organized to investigate the election, and a plethora of other wild, crazy, and illegal or extra-constitutional remedies to give Trump a second term by whatever means necessary.

Failing that, the president is working overtime to leave behind scorched earth: Speeding up federal executions, rare in the past; reducing already shrunk environmental regulations to the vanishing point; purging federal employees and changing the rules to make purging civil servants easier in the future. In sum, translating the full depth and breadth of his malevolence into policies brimming with malice and mischief.

Describing the aftermath of the London plague of 1655, Daniel Defoe wrote:

“It was not the least of our misfortunes that with our infection, when it ceased, there did not cease the spirit of strife and contention, slander and reproach, which was really the great trouble of the nation before.”

The agent of our infection will soon leave but he is racing to leave behind the environment of strife, contention, and slander that is the habitat in which he thrives.

Then we will have a daunting task for us ahead. Recovering from Donald Trump will take the effort, the endurance, and the clarity needed to recover from a world war, a dictatorship, a plague, and a natural disaster combined.

We need a Marshall Plan to rebuild the American economy, this time with a focus on equality. It is doable. We did it in Europe. In Japan, we brought about markedly more economic equality through agrarian reform.

We need the kind of political reform we used in Japan to help them build their democracy and in Germany to crush fascism for generations. As part of this, anything that can be done under the law and the Constitution to damage and weaken the Republican Party should be done without guilt or scruples. It deserves it. The GOP has for decades, and especially in 2020, shown itself to be undemocratic and, with its racist and xenophobic ideology, the closest thing we have to a fascist party.

We need, finally, to do a serious reassessment of our value system. “America First” is a national declaration of a value system that pervades our institutions: selfishness, raw self-interest. That works perversely in the best of times. In a pandemic, it is a formula for disaster. But will we learn and apply the lesson?

Judge for yourself whether we learned from the London plague of 1655:

“…then there was when died five or six thousand a week, so entirely negligent were the people at that time in the great and dangerous case of health and infection, and so ill were they able to take or accept of the advice of those who cautioned them for their good.”