Eight Things We’ve Learned Under Donald Trump

How to convince yourself that we’re all somehow wiser and better off for the awful four years we've just experienced.

by Rich Herschlag

After four years of chaos culminating with the past few weeks of looking into the chasm, it may seem absurd to attempt to boil everything down to a few insights. In fact it is absurd, but after what was essentially a marathon hostile takeover of the U.S. government coupled with a long toxic infiltration of an already troubled American culture, the illusion of closure is now upon us. I would like to take the opportunity provided by that illusion to set down a thousand or so words to convince myself—and maybe even the weary reader—that we’re all somehow wiser and better off for it.

1. The Constitution doesn’t explicitly cover everything

One of the most insipid movies and TV shows of my early childhood was called “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.” But the title holds some wisdom to this day. The phrase expresses a parent’s exasperation at his or her inability to spell out every conceivable form of prohibited behavior by a child. This has been the please-don’t-eat-the-daisies presidency. What is collusion and is it explicitly illegal? How do we define extortion of a foreign head of state and how is it punishable? Can a president pardon himself? Exactly what happens if a president refuses to leave office?

When you watch constitutional scholars debating these things ad nauseam while the president simply and transparently commits these very same sins, you know who has won. In the coming months we are going to have to pass a series of federal laws that not only render explicitly illegal the things Trump did with impunity, but also the things he ran out of time to do. New federal law number 53—an outgoing president under investigation must remain in the United States.

2. Tyranny can metastasize anywhere

We got a not so little taste of what it was like in Germany toward the end of the Weimar Republic or El Salvador in the late 1970s. First the idiots jump on the bandwagon and we say it’s nothing. Then the zealots, and we claim it’s just a byproduct of longstanding frustration. Then some otherwise rational folks we used to get along with get on the boat and we realize the ship has already sailed. The scariest part is that in a reflective moment we can envision a certain type of friend, relative or coworker living in Berlin in 1936 getting in bed with the Brownshirts and having a perfectly reasonable defense. In the end, it’s not so much about specific policies as it is about human susceptibility.

3. The GOP died a while ago

The gradual racial, cultural, regional, and educational shifts in the United States were sending pangs of death to the Republican Party as far back as the late 1990s and were noticeable to anyone who was either listening out of genuine concern or was paid to listen. The gerrymandering, voter suppression, and dog whistle politics that ensued led directly to the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 and to Republicans having literally no written platform in 2020. The final pulse check for the cadaver is this: When random Trump supporters are interviewed, do you hear them even mention the Republican Party?

4. Democracy is not a natural state of affairs

That thing Churchill said about democracy being the worst possible form of government with the exception of all the others rings truer today than ever before. Hashing it all out on a daily basis and giving equal time to people who you’re sure don’t know what they’re talking about is such high maintenance. At a certain point, human beings just want to be right. They want to be on the winning side. They want things to be the way they want them to be, or at least some version of it. At that point, not only do the ends justify the means but the effort normally put into intelligent rationalization ceases. To value democracy one has to value the notion of a noble defeat. In a nation addicted to video games like Hatred and Slave Trade, such people are getting harder and harder to find.

5. American racism runs deep

When I got up for kindergarten the morning of June 6, 1968, I found my mother at the Zenith black and white television in the living room set crying her eyes out. She sobbed that Robert F. Kennedy had been killed and that coming so soon after Dr. King’s assassination she couldn’t take it anymore. She went on to try to explain racism to me, but I was lost. There were all these people with white skin who hated all these people with brown and black skin and all I could think was it sounds crazy and can I watch the “I Spy” rerun before school.

Today I’m still a little lost. Reading books by Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, and Cornel West has taught me a great deal about the methodologies of racism and its effect on Black Americans without ever providing an intuitive understanding of its essence. Somehow, I cannot seem to get firmly inside the racist brain, and to be honest I’m not sure I want to. But what I need to understand—what every decent human being needs to understand—is this inscrutable, irrational form of hatred is at least as present as it ever was and is now poised to destroy the 21st century like it did most of the preceding centuries.

6. Bullying works for a long time

I grew up in the same borough—Queens—as Donald Trump, and in our neck of the woods there was no shortage of bullies. There was one guy who was a few years older and used to have all this extra money because he had been a child actor on TV commercials and his divorced parents stupidly gave him the cash. That cash was used to purchase the services of bodyguards from tougher neighborhoods. “Adam” would appear at our pickup softball games flanked by bodyguards, grab the softball, chuck it over the fence, and ask us what we were going to do about it. Typically, my friends and I froze.

I loathed Adam to the point where a decade later, returning from college much bigger and  stronger and with a bit of combat experience, I anticipated running into this scumbag at a bar, explaining who I was, and decking him. But I heard through the grapevine Adam had been humbled by life, had one day fallen in an elevator accident that destroyed his ability to taste or smell, and was now barely holding it together working on a loading dock. As soon as I heard this, all the air went out of my vendetta.

Adam was my boyhood Donald Trump. Trump is an Adam who was never sufficiently checked by life—an oversight for which I may never forgive God. All bullies know a surprising percentage of people will go along with their game for a combination of two reasons—one, it’s painful to be the lamb ready for slaughter; two, winning feels so much better than losing. To see this childhood phenomenon play out so clearly on a national stage has been terrifying. Do we have a simple solution for the next effective bully? Sadly, we do not.

7. Ethics are a handicap

When I was 14 my father told me that when your competitor lacked ethics it was roughly equivalent to a 20-point boost in his IQ. Being idealistic back then I argued. Today, I think the IQ boost is more like 40 points. This certainly helps explain why Trump vanquished so many individuals who on paper are so much smarter than he is. That is—almost anyone standing in his way.

In the end, most of us believe in some sort of karma. For some it is rooted in a literal belief in an omnipotent being. For others, it is based more on the economics of life, which eventually point out who—despite his claims to the contrary—is actually destroying the herd. Nonetheless, when one is so reckless that he cares for neither of these concepts and only for the expedient accumulation of wealth and power whatever the human cost, he is free in this world to ascend farther in one hour than you and I are able in an entire lifetime of fastidious, conscientious focused labor.

8. We are not that exceptional

I just got finished watching the Borat sequel. I have seen the original at least a dozen times and am a big fan, but the subsequent movie film was a letdown. Not for any lack of cleverness or skill in mockumentary making, but because in 2006 the fictional version of Kazakhstan was laughable and the uncovered similarities between our real nation and the movie version of the other were eye-opening. Today, we are Kazakhstan. The seedy Giuliani arc aside, my vicarious pleasure watching Sacha Baron Cohen beat the dead horse that today is my country was severely limited this time around. In 2021, the joke is entirely on us.

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No, Trump Did Not "Break" The GOP. It Was Already Broken.

Trump just told them that it was OK to put their pointy hoods on in public.

Image: Michael Harriot (The Root/FMG)

by Justin Rosario

As predicted, now that Trump has one foot out of the door, the press is striving to build the following narrative: Everything that happened in the last four years was entirely the fault of one Donald J. Trump. Before Trump, the GOP was a party with principles, vision, and integrity that did not have a massive problem with racism.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post by Dan Balz trying to sell this very narrative:

Who knows today what Republicans really stand for beyond lower taxes and less regulation? Where are they on health care after failed efforts to agree on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, or on debt and deficits after a presidency that added record levels to the national debt? Where is the party on immigration or climate change? Where are Republicans on confronting income and wealth inequality or racial injustice? Where are they on the U.S. role in the world, on the use of force, on human rights, on trade with other nations?

That was last week. Or was it from 2012? 2008? 2000? Take out the ACA quote and this could have been written almost anytime in the last 20 years. Republicans haven’t stood for anything other than lower taxes and less regulation this entire century.

This narrative tells us that Republicans were also victims, albeit willing ones. That they traded away their party for judges and tax cuts. That they made a Faustian bargain. That they realized, too late, that they had made a mistake.

But now that Trump is gone, sort of, we have to hope they can pull themselves together and move past his toxic influence and regain their honor. Or that we have to withhold our desire for “revenge” (aka “accountability”) so Republicans can heal because it’s in the best interests of the nation. 

This is complete and utter nonsense. All of it. Every word.

Journalistic Amnesia

Balz’s question about debt and deficits is particularly insulting. This is his bio at the end of the article: “Dan Balz is chief correspondent at The Washington Post. He has served as the paper’s deputy national editor, political editor, White House correspondent and Southwest correspondent.” 

One would think with such a broad range of experience, Balz would be more familiar with the history of American politics. Yet he seems to have forgotten that after Republicans exploded the debt and deficit under both Regan and Bush 41, they magically transformed into fiscal hawks under Bill Clinton, the Democratic president. Then they exploded the debt and deficit again under Bush 43 before having yet another magical conversation to fiscal hawkery under Obama the Democrat….

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