After watching the full Montana rally, my chief conclusion is that Donald Trump is now the most effective American politician based on results. He has created a symbiotic relationship with his supporters that nothing seems able to crack. The Republican Party has now become Trumpian in its identity, but not tribal. Even tribes have factions. Trump has maintained a 90% approval rating through every scandal, every insult, every example of corruption and cruelty. The Party has become idolatrous. Trump is the politician who can never do wrong, whom one must always defend no matter what. If not yet a god, he has certainly acquired two of the the trappings of deification — blind obedience and loyalty.
His rallies provide the entertainment and the visuals, the mockery of all who dare to oppose Trump and the sense of being both rebellious and a part of some larger movement.
All previous Presidents have gone quiet for periods of time while on vacation or even just conducting the day to day affairs of the office. The news cycle went on but we did not hear their voices. Trump has changed all that. His utter voracity in seeking attention, especially using Twitter, means that his voice never leaves us. Day after relentless day, it inhabits our waking hours (and for many of us, our nightmares too).
Every day, through Twitter, he instructs his supporters how to see any event or issue. Every day. He tends them with his attention. They belong within his use of “we”. His enemies are their enemies. His people are the only ‘real Americans’.
These ‘real Americans’, Trump Republicans, are not coming back to any state close to what used to be democratic political normalcy, and much of that is not Trump’s fault. For many years Republican leaders have portrayed Democrats as the enemy. They have relentlessly fear mongered, gerrymandered and voter suppressed their way to power. They will not give that power up. Trump is an outlier in style, not in substance. Deregulation, serving all the desires of the wealthy, trashing the environment and wildlife, doing that ol’ time racist dog whistle, smashing the ability of unions to represent their members, crushing the lives of the poor — these are all contemporary Republican habits of mind and policy. Its tax policies are designed to create a permanent oligarchy as a ruling class. It believes in white nationalism, in nativism, in the rule of the minority over the majority. It embraces a Christian, patriarchal plutocracy.
His supporters have created in themselves both a bifurcated conscience and use of reason.
In their everyday lives, almost all of them are certainly men and women of goodness who try to live by codes of decency and kindness and honesty. But their Trumpian, ‘world’ conscience allows for state orchestrated cruelty and bigotry, for rampant dishonesty and dishonor, and for corruption of every kind. This is especially worrisome. Vicious attack by insult by slander by racist innuendo, Trump is teaching his people how to hate whomever he tells them to hate.
Once more, in their normal lives, his supporters certainly manage all the complexities and challenges of modernity as well as anyone else using the tools of logic and evidence as second nature. But they choose to abandon those tools in the presence of Trump’s rhetoric. They become believers in conspiracy theories, they accept Fox propaganda and absurd talking points without question, they ignore, obscure, tut-tut, engage in ‘whataboutism’. They become apologists. They wrap themselves in a system of belief that is incomprehensible to non-believers.
History shows clearly, again and again that men and women with such a conscience and such a chosen gap in their reasoning have done terrible things to those their leader deems unworthy or enemies. We are not there yet, but the ground is being prepared.
The real winners in all this are the Party’s donor base, the 1%, the very wealthy who funnel dark money into races at every governing level in every state. Their ultimate goal is unchallenged economic power. A lengthy excerpt from another writer describes what I believe they want:
Meanwhile, those in power will celebrate how much they deserve their wealth and how little anyone else deserves. And they will grab for more. You’d think they’d be happy: America now has the highest income inequality in the industrialized world. But even that is not enough. The greed is insatiable. And it is a greed not just for wealth but for domination—for permanent entitlement. What they want is to be served. At restaurants. On golf courses. In corporate offices. There is no form of protest they will respect: loud or silent, formal or spontaneous, civil or rude. Written petitions or marches on the streets. They don’t care. Those in power have been very clear about what they do care about. “We have more money and more brains and better houses and apartments and nicer boats,” Trump said Wednesday in a speech to his supporters, because he cannot help but say what he really means. “We are the elite.”
Donald Trump is our arsonist President, the one who wishes to set aflame any last vestiges of unity as Americans because it serves his political ideals. He wishes to set aflame laws protecting equal justice regardless of economic status or color or gender. He wishes to set aflame our ties to democratic Europe. He wishes to burn to the ground protections for public lands and wildlife. In his 545 days in office he has already gathered the dried wood, puffed together the tinder, applied the match and happily watched the dignity of the Presidency erupt into a devouring, oxygen sucking storm.
To me, there is nothing funny about him. I cannot watch Baldwin’s SNL imitation or listen to comedians slice up his daily, dangerous senselessness. He leads a brain dead, ravening Party bereft of any new idea except a desire to feed on more and more power. Whenever he leaves office, he will leave devastation in his wake.
There will be no ‘healing’ after Trump. Therapeutic nostrums will be of no use. His Party is not going to change. They will become more ruthless. In response, I expect the Democrats will as well, that they too will become more adamant, more demanding of ideological purity, more furious. Whatever middle once existed in American political life is gone.
The next fifty years will be ugly. Climate change will create unprecedented moral and political challenges — mass migrations, water scarcity, food problems. Robots are absorbing more and more jobs. Our sclerotic political system cannot handle the problems we face now. We are coming to the end of post-war American stability. I have no idea what will emerge from the struggles to come. Anyone who says that he or she does is a fool or a con.
*Mitch McConnell is the best political strategist even though he may well be “the worst American of the 21st Century“.
