Two articles out this week offer a pair of crucial complementary perspectives on the state of emergency we find ourselves in. In this piece, Salon's Andrew O’Hehir argues for the importance of accepting that, rather than being an utter anomaly, Donald Trump may as well be stamped with the words “Made in America.” He writes, “Donald Trump is the culmination of a long historical process in which all those things and many more — all the flaws and contradictions of American democracy and American society — have crystallized in a single figure. In a sense, we have to accept him before we can move past him. He is our creation, an accurate if gruesome reflection of the state of our nation.” O’Hehir’s formulation is left open-ended in this article, but should be seen in the context of his many acute articles over the course of the election season in which he elaborates on Donald Trump’s existence as a media entity, his status as America’s first “white president,” and the many ways in which Donald Trump was able to exploit the festering weaknesses and conflicts of our politics and society.
I’ve come to think of Donald Trump as a figure who embodies an unleashing of the white American id. His blatant racism, his undisguised misogyny, the sheer lowest-common-denominator nature of his practice of power (bullying, lying, humiliating), his apparent disregard for contemplation or introspection, his refusal to acknowledge mistakes. There’s a consciencelessness to the man that can’t be ignored — he comes across as pure want, pure need, without an eye to whether these assertions might come back to haunt him later (as I believe they will). Various pieces of reporting have observed the way he riffed off crowd reactions during the campaign, as if absorbing and internalizing the rawest feelings of his audience — though I have no doubt that there was not always a great distance between what excited the crowds and what excited him.
So what does it mean, then, if we also accept Andrew Sullivan’s assertion that Donald Trump suffers from a verifiable form of mental derangement, that he is, to put it crudely, mad? Trump supporters push back that at worst, the president is merely crazy like a fox, always cannily working towards a purpose. Obviously Donald Trump is a narcissistic, egomaniacal personality — but is he clinical? Does he truly suffer from a mental illness? Without an actual diagnosis — which we will never get, as it would require Trump’s cooperation — we are only left with speculation amid inconclusive evidence. But for the sake of building an opposition to Trump, the more important fact is the following: actions that may or may not reflect the existence of mental instability are actually virtually indistinguishable from the actions of a power-obsessed president with authoritarian inclinations. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what motivates Trump so long as we are clearly able to assess his actions — and to date, he has acted in ways that are a repudiation of basic American principles. When he says that millions of people voted illegally in the last election, costing him the popular vote, does he really believe this? There is no way for us to know (and to be honest, for me, it is less chilling to believe that he is self-deluded than that he would knowingly speak such a democracy-corroding falsehood), but what we know for sure is that these words are a lie that lays the groundwork for further voting restrictions.
Sullivan also takes up another topic that bears further contemplation. He writes, “With someone like this barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind [. . .] One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago.”
His first observation hit me in the gut, because this is indeed what has been happening to all of us — Trump has essentially gotten inside our heads, forcing us to contend with him on an ongoing basis. Since the election I’ve been thinking that it’s far better that people are upset by Trump than accept him as normal — but it’s disturbing to realize that in dominating the national psyche, he’s already achieved a sort of authoritarian victory.
But while I agree with Sullivan’s second point in theory — that a free society means being able to be free of politics for long stretches at a time — I have to register a pretty hefty dissent on the grounds of reality. For as long as I’ve been on this earth, it seems to me that at no point has there been a moment when Americans could afford not to think about politics for much of the time. From Watergate, to the retrograde Reagan administration, to the hollow successes of the Clinton administration and absurd Republican impeachment efforts, to 9/11 and the financial crisis, not to mention a Cold War that kept the specter of nuclear annihilation hovering over civilization for many of those years, we have continuously experienced an urgent need to be aware of politics.
Now, I don’t want to totally overstate my point, because Sullivan is making a solid observation here — we truly are in a state of affairs where, out of a combination of fear and outrage, you don’t want to miss a day of news, and that really is no good at all. It’s actually kind of scary. I love politics, and even I have reached a point where there is too much of it; it does not really make me happy that everyone now seems as interested in politics as myself, because the situation is so dire. But, to bring things back around to the O’Hehir piece, our current crisis has been long in the making, and Trump has fed off existing conflicts and weaknesses in our nation; one of the big ones is a society that has been all-too depoliticized over the years, accepting things like the evisceration of the working and middle class, resegregation of American society, and an unending war on terror with not nearly the appropriate levels of outrage and resistance, much less public articulation of these enormous problems staring us all in the face. The price we are paying for not thinking about politics enough before is having to think about it all the time now; it’s a price we’d better be willing to pay.