The Trump Syndrome

Years ago I read a short story about Napoleon, “The Curfew Tolls,” by Stephen Vincent Benét. Its theme was that Napoleon’s fate would have been different had he been born fifty years before his actual birth. In Benét’s story, Napoleon is a major of artillery who dreams of greatness, but the times were not ripe for his true fate, and he dies young without having achieved renown or power.

Today we have the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, despite his 2016 campaign platform of arrogance, racism, lies and insults instead of rational argument.

Why then was he elected? The answer lies in the moment: We were stuck in militarily-engagement in the Middle East; the threat of “terrorism” dominated our political discourse; a widening economic disparity infected a recovering economy. It was a moment when a bellicose bully outside the so-called “political establishment” could insert himself into the political process and be embraced by a sizeable swath of the population — the vast majority of whom, against their own self-interests, were white male members of the working class.

You hear the pundits say that Donald Trump has captured the Republican Party. Not so. The Republicans were on the road to Trumpism years before he stepped into the ring. The keynote to their sharp right turn was the statement by Mitch McConnell during the early days of Barak Obama’s administration. He said openly and before microphones that the Republicans will do everything possible to prevent Obama from serving a second term.

And so we were saddled with the emergence of the Tea Party and the House’s Freedom Caucus, and the Congressional reign of obstructionism the likes of which we had never seen before. The resulting Republican-driven stalemates in Congress soured segments of the population on “Washington,” and provided a perfect moment for a Donald Trump to step in with his slogan “Make America Great Again.”

You may recall that in the 1930s there was another rabble-rouser who took advantage of his country’s political and economic instability, becoming its leader and leading it to military aggression and eventual devastation. He too had a slogan, similar to Trump’s: “Deutschland Uber Alles.”
Though the Republicans failed in their efforts to prevent Obama from winning a second term in office, they succeeded in blocking many of the reforms his administration put forward. His most notable achievement, the Affordable Care Act, muscled through because the Democrats held a majority in the Senate during his first two years. But the obstructionism of Newt Gingrich in the House and McConnell in the Senate took their toll during Obama’s tenure as president.

As with that Benet story, conditions have to be ripe for notable or notorious events to occur. Trump’s election may have been aided by the Russians, and by Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, but his unlikely nomination over those of “establishment” politicians came about because his bombast suited the mood of Republican voters who were tired of the roadblock in Congress. Why not give this guy with the funny hair a shot. And so they did.

I suspect that Trump’s nomination and election came not only as a surprise to McConnell and company, but they were fearful that he appeared to be a loose cannon, coarse and vulgar, and perhaps not manipulable enough to be in the forefront of their right-wing agenda. But they quickly learned that feeding his ego, despite his craziness (“Mexico will pay for the wall,” “Keep out all Muslims”), would go a long way toward helping them do their dirty work. As for the frequent accusation that the Senate Republicans lack spine, the accusers have the wrong part of the human anatomy. They lack the thing that beats in the chest.

What the Republicans and their titular leader didn’t count on was a virus with no political agenda. Its only aim was to infect and kill as much of the world’s population as possible. More than any other cause for President Trump’s unraveling, and for his incompetence and deceit to be felt and witnessed, it was Covid-19.

The election is only weeks away. The damage Trump and his willing enablers in Congress have done is enormous — domestically and internationally. When Trump is defeated — and, hopefully, the Senate is once again led by Democrats — it will take time and effort to rectify most aspects of that damage. Unfortunately, we will still be faced with the viral scourge that at this writing has taken over 200,000 American lives, many of those because of a president who chose political expedience over public safety.