Trump Changed America’s DNA
"If today you gave the United States a socio-political 23andMe test, a lot of Nazi ancestors would turn up."
by Rich Herschlag
He’s just some dude. His IQ is middling on a good day, and there hasn’t been a good day since 1998. He’s slovenly, unkempt, and a wellspring of laughable malapropisms. His personal life is a disaster. He’s a convicted felon. He’s probably broke. He’s a run-of-the-mill bully from Queens, New York, where I grew up. Most of the bullies who in the 70s, took my brand new Spalding baseball and threw it into the service road of the Grand Central Parkway for pure spite, wound up living very unremarkable lives, and a lot of them expired relatively young in deaths of despair.
What made this run-of-the-mill bully from Queens so special? Money, for one thing. Other than that I’m still not sure. But what I have only recently come to grudging terms with is the profundity of Trump’s influence on our very being. Yes, after my own six trying decades on this planet filled with good intent and endless, sleepless striving, as much as it hurts I have conceded that Donald Trump has had more of an effect on America’s essence in a typical nanosecond than either I or a dozen of my well meaning, hard working friends from the old neighborhood have had cumulatively throughout the entire course of our lives.
But it’s not just me and my hapless buddies from back in the day. It’s true for the remarkable statesmen decorating our history books—Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Kennedy, Reagan. Sure, these notable politicians drove events and policies. And granted these were in many instances highly notable events and policies. But we as a people were still recognizable afterwards. Today we are not. Trump changed our very DNA. This is the metaphor I have chosen for the way we think of ourselves, relate to others, and the business of living itself.
The change is deep and possibly indelible. Towering figures of the American tableau—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Elie Wiesel, Samuel Gompers, Thurgood Marshall, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Jonas Salk, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Sanger, Nikola Tesla—they all gave it a good shot, God bless ‘em, transforming the way many of us think about various specific concepts. But Trump changed our very essence in a tiny fraction of the time and while glomming Big Macs.
Some will say I overstate the case. Fake news. Here is a brief discussion of the fundamental change we have undergone in a few short years of mindless tweets and misspelled threats.
Dignified Losing is Dead
Back in Little League in the 1970s I learned an important lesson again and again. No matter how venomous the invective between teams during the game, once it was over—and I mean not more than a few seconds after—the vibe changed dramatically. Quicker than you could hit a fungo to left field we went from arch enemies to peers, inhabitants of the same organization with the same cause. The mood shift was palpable. Walking across the diamond and shaking hands wasn’t a forced act. It felt natural. It was a relief. In its various incarnations it was a sacred American ritual. And it made me want to play the following game sooner, perform better, and ultimately shake hands with more vigor.
Well, Trump killed all that. Not necessarily on the field but to a degree everywhere else and reaching an ugly pinnacle in the halls of Congress. It’s not merely that we’re a nation of sore losers. Almost half of us can’t even admit we lost in the first place.
Shame is Dead
Fornicating with a porn star—or anyone for that matter—in the immediate aftermath of your wife’s bearing your child—was at one time (like way back in 2014) a game changer, deal- breaker, and something a man would spend the rest of his life apologizing for with tail planted firmly between legs. So were extortion, fraud, rape, and treason. We were largely a nation of citizens who could eventually be cornered by evidence and do everyone the favor of hanging out the white flag. Just ask the ghost of Richard Nixon. Today, we live by a toxic corruption of the old FDR adage: The only thing we have to be ashamed of is shame itself.
Core Conservatism is Dead
People who knew me ten years ago often considered me to be a conservative Democrat, at least on the fiscal side. I warned of the dangers of diluting the currency, especially for the destructive effect it had on the broad working class. I described the exponentially ballooning federal deficit as something that could burst and take us all down. I feared the trillions borrowed from countries like Saudi Arabia and China would ultimately put our foreign policy in a series of highly compromising positions. With some nuance I advocated for increasing immigration for the purpose of mutual economic benefit but only for accomplishing it all legally. When sincere conservatives spoke, I listened. Even on social issues where I was generally considerably left of center, I almost always had something to learn.
Trump has taken intellectually honest conservatism and bastardized, polluted, and distorted it beyond recognition. MAGA conservatism is about lynching folks the old fashioned way; threatening people’s lives old school; spewing hatred traditionally. Core conservatism is dead. And honest, productive policy debate across party lines died with it.
Respect for the Law is Dead
As much as I try to embrace humanity I know from experience if there is neither a universally respected legal system nor a potent enforcement system, an outlaw contingent will take over and we will revisit the Wild West. Given that the Trump Republican Party proposes to eliminate the FBI and expresses open hostility toward jury trials, O.K. Corral may already be here.
General Respect for Evangelicals is Dead
There was always something to be said for grounding one’s morality in Higher Law. Marriage has been the bedrock of stable societies for countless centuries. Although a couple of the Ten Commandments appear to need updating, a moral code generally frowning upon murder, theft, false testimony, and even envy has long been integral to democracies, and the notion that these codes emanate from a Higher Power—whether or not you take it literally—tends to elevate the human spirit.
Today, the Higher Power evangelicals believe in is Donald J. Trump. It’s sad to see generations of hard won spiritual self-discipline eviscerated in a few short years by a third rate con artist who can’t keep it in his pants. While hundreds of years of persecution by the Roman Empire only strengthened Christianity, Trump gutted the religion from the inside in about the time it takes to graduate divinity school.
Facts are Malleable
When Joseph Goebbels reincarnated as Kellyanne Conway a few decades ago we were already living on borrowed time. Today there are not merely alternative facts. There is alternative math, alternative physics, alternative chemistry, alternative astronomy, alternative climatology, and alternative forensic evidence. People are indeed entitled to their own facts and often take an extra helping or two. These days when I’m trolled on social media for saying something outrageous—like the COVID vax saved millions of lives—I am often reduced to a mirror image of the other side’s inanity as I ask, again and again, What is 1 + 1 ?
Empathy is Sentimentality
What moved Abe Lincoln from a reluctant, practical acceptance of slavery to a strong conviction against it was not so much intellectual calisthenics but rather an epiphany when gazing upon the suffering of enslaved people themselves. Without empathy this nation might have skipped right over the 13th and 14th Amendments and settled the Civil War with a revised national map. More recently, I grew up in an era of in loco parentis, where your mom and dad effectively had eyes and ears all over the neighborhood because their kids were their neighbor’s kids and vice-versa.
As a young man in my ’76 Dodge Aspen with 175,000 miles on it I pulled over for many stranded travelers and knew if ever I was the one stranded, not more than ten minutes would likely go by without help from a stranger and four wheels. Today, we are all metaphorically stranded on a highway as indifferent Americans whiz by and play Candy Crush Saga. Even the most grotesque tribalism masquerading as community is falling by the wayside as the Marjorie Taylor Greene wing of the Republican Party begins ever so discretely to eat their young.
Am I Overreacting?
Is my DNA metaphor on target? In absolute terms probably not. DNA signifies permanent genetic characteristics, and one may argue that at some point post-Trump, the fundamental nature of the United States of America might revert back to some semblance of what it was pre-Trump.
However, it’s not that cut and dried. The field of epigenetics studies the interaction between nature and nurture on a chromosome level. In addition to the genes that exist as part of someone’s root biological makeup, there is the all-important factor of which genes are activated and which are not. This is heavily influenced by one’s environment and helps explain why identical twins can grow far apart in both appearance and behavior.
In other words, the age old nature-nurture question is not binary but rather endlessly interactive. By analogy, the concept’s relevance to the American national character signifies both that the Trump mutation is “genetically” substantial and that it could at some point mutate back. Whatever the case, if today you gave the United States a socio-political 23andMe test, a lot of Nazi ancestors would turn up.
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Rich, you have stated succinctly the essence of the problem, especially notable in sociology, that it is far easier to destroy and devolve rather than to build and evolve. The loud and constant appeal to greed, tribalistic identity, and winner-take-all unscrupulous politics is, as you eloquently demonstrate, effecting changes to our social behaviors and expectations, activating or reactivating previously suppressed traits and expressions in a manner that provides cover, if not acceptance for both proponents and adherents alike.
Despite past progress, and even after any contemporary successes against this societal cancer, the threat will always be with us - hard wired, only awaiting the stimulus that triggers its resurgence. The systemic error is complacency - a failure to "consolidate the objective" as the military says - illustrated in one instance and form by the ridiculous (or tragically premature at best) proclamation of the "end of history" a few decades ago. How naive!
Despair and its cousin, cynicism, are not the answer, however, nor are they justified in any respect by history, even in own time (the past 6-7 decades). But reestablishing social virtue today is greatly complicated by the capture of evangelicals and other religious traditions who appear to have taken Satan's third offer - power - despite the opposite lesson taught by their revered, but obviously unread and unheeded, holy book. Despite their voluntary defection, however, achieving virtue in society is possible without them. Universal values, common among both religious and humanist traditions, point the way forward. It is not an easy path, but one to which a previous generation dedicated their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. We can do no less.
Wow, this is an amazing essay. The thing is, the people who ruin community spaces, what we'd call Trumpism today, have always been there. There's always been a contingent of parents in youth sports who won't admit to losing, a very small percentage of men who use community meetings to find women and children to sexually assault, and conspiracy theorists like the man who spent a Little League game telling me about chemtrails. They can spoil almost any community event. When I think about what happened to the Lions, Knights of Columbus, bowling leagues, and school board meetings, I think that the organization probably defended their bad actors instead of thinking of the rest of us, and that drove decent people away. You'd think organizations would've learned from the Catholic Church priest scandal, but nope, everyone seems to be doubling down on defending their sex offenders while whining about rainbow flags. When places aren't safe for decency, moral people leave. Nowhere in Trump's orbit is safe for decency or decent people.