Reckoning with Trump’s Supreme victory
The thing about President Donald Trump is not that he lies a lot, although he does. It’s not even that lying for Trump is like breathing, a reflex, an action that requires no thought or decision, although it is also that. The real breathtaking thing is the president’s general approach to truth, fact, reality. Trump attacks them the way a sculptor his raw material. He pounds on it, chisels away at it, takes a hammer to it, tortures it, transforms it. He shapes it to conform to his own changing interests, desires, delusions.
The last few days have given us a good sample of his madness and his method. One day he says Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was credible in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A few days later he questions her credibility, mocks her story.
Which Trump to believe, last week’s or this week’s?
Then, at Brett Kavanaugh’s official swearing in as the newest Supreme Court Justice, Trump said Kavanaugh had been “found innocent.” That last claim was the kind of grotesque distortion not even a master sculptor like Botero would try. In American trials, defendants are not found innocent but not guilty. Similar, but not equivalent. Then again that was a hearing, not a trial. Had it been a trial it would have been declared a mistrial because of a hung jury and the massive bias of the jurors.
The final result was hardly a vindication of Kavanaugh. The Committee was divided. The Senate was divided. The country was divided. It was a manifestation of raw power, as Senator Kamala Harris said in the wake of the razor-thin vote. That and the Republican steely will to power that always overcomes any concern for truth, justice or the interest of the people.
Trump’s lies about the outcome of the Kavanaugh hearings is characteristic rather than exceptional. Last week we read in the pages of the New York Times the extent to which Trump’s dishonesty is not of the moment or situational. It is the practice of a lifetime, and like much of Trump, inherited from his father. Not genetic but acquired within the social medium where he was formed, and in which his father loomed big. And when I write formed rather than raised I am not revealing an interference from my Spanish with my English. To raise a child requires a human quality that I doubt Trump’s parents possessed given the result. The same for medium rather than environment. I imagine Trump taking in all the bad qualities of his father almost by a process of osmosis.
Reading the Times, which dedicated an entire section to the story, nothing strikes you as hard as the realization that Trump’s life story, the one he has been making up as he goes along, is a web of lies. The narrative of a self-made man is a brazen lie. Trump became rich because he picked the right father. Call it merit, if you dare. His money comes not from smarts, or skills, or hard work but from the luck of the draw—the random rules of probability. Out of this blind process he has invented a fake autobiography of well-earned personal triumph, made up a persona of a very able businessman with unique skill. He never tires of telling the tale or playing the role, patting himself on the back constantly. He could have made Muhammad Ali at his loudest sound humble.
Spain’s great playwright Calderón de la Barca wrote “Life is a Dream.” Trump’s life is a fraud.
The Times story not just demonstrated that the Trumps’ wealth, including father, son, and grandchildren, was acquired mainly through fraud, specifically scheming to pay much less in taxes than they were legally required to do, cheating the government and the citizens who had to pay higher taxes to make up for Trumpian trickery. Lowering the taxes of the rich now is merely legalizing what the Trumps had been doing unlawfully for a long time. Power corrupts etc., but Trump was corrupt before he had any power.
What prompted this column is that ascension of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court requires a deep reckoning with the fact that this nation has derailed disastrously. No one wants to say it but I will. A big part of that has to be laid at the feet of the American people. And it has to be laid, especially, at the feet of the “default Americans,” white people. Without them the Republicans would have been out of business a long time ago. Good riddance it would have been.
I reserve the highest dose of venom for white men. They voted 2-1 for a candidate who based his campaign on vile, racist, xenophobic pronouncements. For those two of three of you, a virulent plague on both your houses.
What to say about white women, a majority of whom gave Trump their vote, albeit by a smaller margin than the men. You voted for a candidate that has belittled and abused women all his life and who has boasted about it.
Tell me that race doesn’t matter very much anymore: 50-plus percent of white women voted for Trump; 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton. When I hear talk about racial reparations for centuries of oppression, I have a fantasy. Since blacks and women were disenfranchised for most of American history, reparations should include a period, say a generation, where only black women could vote. In that case, I would welcome giving up my right to vote. Gladly. Enthusiastically.
Dream on but go vote on November 6 anyway.
