Cracks in the stone wall

This was the week that Donald Trump’s stone wall started to crack.

It’s a wall built to make the world safe for falsehood and delusion. Until now, the wall has been astonishingly successful in obscuring, distorting, and twisting the truth. Last week was the moment the edifice of lies began to shake.

First and foremost, this was the week in which retired military leaders decided to push back hard against Donald Trump’s insults. General James Mattis for one, a four-star general who Trump appointed Secretary of Defense and later fired, signaled he was not going to take any more insults from the president.

Trump, in one of his rants, said Mattis was the “most overrated general in the world.” In a speech, Mattis’s response was one for the ages. “I earned my spurs in combat. Trump earned his in a doctor’s note.”

It was a pointed reference to Trump’s avoidance of military service during the Vietnam war for medical reasons. Trump’s excuse is as flimsy as it gets, and Mattis saw through it. While hundreds of thousands of young men were, on penalty of prison, being forced to take part in a senseless war, America-firster Trump got off with a note by a physician who turned out to be beholden to his powerful father. It was perhaps the first documented instance in which Trump cheated to continue to lead la dolce vita. It would scarcely be the last.

Mattis was not through with Trump yet. Mattis openly mocked Trump, saying that seeing that Trump had called the acclaimed actress Meryl Streep “overrated,” he, Mattis, was “the Meryl Steep of generals.”

This kind of derision mainly used to come out of the mouth of Hollywood liberals during award ceremonies. Coming from a military hero, it takes on a different gravity. It is astonishing to learn how many former top military officers, who tend to be conservative, have zero respect for the president.

Other former military commanders were even harsher and more direct than Mattis. Admiral William H. McRaven, former commander of the United Special Operations Command and the man who directed the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, wrote a New York Times Opinion column bearing the title “Our Republic is Under Attack from the President.” McRaven concluded that “if President Trump doesn’t demonstrate the leadership America needs, then it is a time for a new person in the Oval Office.”

This is serious stuff. Trump is used to preying on vulnerable people, like those desperate for a college degree who got only debt from his bogus university. Trump likes to pick on brown and black people like representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her crew, and even that didn’t work. Trying to push around people like General Mattis and Admiral McRaven is on a different level still. These are tough, well-weathered people who push back hard.

Then there were the veteran professional diplomats who were not intimidated either. They gave sworn depositions for the congressional impeachment inquiry that were extremely damning of Trump on Ukraine. Ambassador William Taylor testified that Trump wanted to get Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to publicly announce investigations that the U.S. president could use to smear Joe Biden and weave a false narrative about who meddled in the 2016 election.

There were also several self-inflicted wounds last week. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney gave a hallucinatory news conference where he confirmed that there was indeed an abortive quid-pro-quid involved in the Ukrainian arms for political dirt deal. Then he tried to take it all back. Nobody believed him. And, in his apparent desperation, Donald Trump, a rich, racist, entitled white man tried to cast himself as the victim of a “lynching” by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Only the pathetic Lindsey Graham went there with Trump. In another sign of desperation, this was the week Trump rebuked Republicans in Congress for not defending him hard enough.

But perhaps not all is lost for Donald Trump. He can still count on the overwhelming support of some voters, especially reactionary Republicans in the South and racists everywhere. Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina, a state that contains way more than its share of Republicans, reactionaries, and racists, is still in Trump’s corner.

The 2020 election is a test of the character of the American people. Will they choose lunacy, lies, and cruelty for the sake of the defense of white Anglo-European supremacy, the illusion of a good economy, and the satisfaction of punishing “those people,” who, in their imagination are immoral, lazy folks of color that refuse to stand on their own two feet?

I am not sure of the answer and, after the 2016 election, I will never underestimate the level of resentment and delusion among those 48 percent of the American people who voted for a brazen bigot in 2016. I never imagined that there were so many Americans who would welcome being screwed as long as the “others,” the blacks, the immigrants, the Latinos, the shiftless poor they concoct in their nightmares, are punished much worse.

Trump’s hard titanium base, the core of the core, are people who would be willing to lose an eye as long as those they consider sub-human, who should be sent where they came from even if they were born here, lose both eyes. These are the people beyond redemption, even if, or especially if, they are Evangelicals.

I think Trump will lose big in 2020 but I thought that in 2016 too. After being disappointed so many times by the white American electorate, I am not so sure this time. This is the electorate who elected George W. Bush, who coddled the rich and could not string two sentences together to save his life. They elected Donald Trump, who has favored the rich even more than Bush, and who cannot even read a teleprompter correctly.

When so many Americans repeatedly vote for SOBs and idiots, an unknown but not insignificant number of U.S. voters must be SOBs and idiots too. How many? The 2020 election will tell us.