One of those broad-consensus, everyone-knows-it truisms of the Trump era is that the insults and attacks this president perpetrates upon our country are so ceaseless and numerous that we are collectively benumbed and overwhelmed, barely able to react to one as the next comes hurtling at us through the media. Ancillary to this consensus is a critical debate about how the media can best serve the public in its coverage of Donald Trump — should it highlight every single offense, even at the risk of overwhelming its audience and its own reporting resources, or go in the opposite direction, giving less play to his most provocative maneuvers and more to the larger context of the great political forces and trends of our time?
But an important question has been obscured by the mixed reality and perception of Trump’s ability to overwhelm our capacity to process things, and by the related debate over how the media might best cover him: what’s actually the point in writing about Trump? I don’t say this to be flippant or provocative, or to sound despairing. I get the overall reason: to inform the public, as all news is ostensibly meant to do. I am thinking here more specifically of opinion and analysis of the Trump administration. After all, there is no doubt that the public is deeply polarized for and against Donald Trump. If you are writing a piece that argues for the nefariousness of this presidency, you will likely not have the satisfaction of convincing very many people to your side, as those people probably won’t read you anyway, seeing as our political polarization extends to choices of personal media diet and the tendency to place ourselves in self-reinforcing opinion bubbles.
Another way of posing this question is, What is there left to say? What more do we need to write about this vile man and his lickspittles in the GOP? Isn’t it true that the people who are already convinced to oppose him can be convinced no further, and that those who support him obviously won’t be persuaded to change their minds at this late date? For the anti-Trump reading public, the question is complementary: What is there left to know? Why torture ourselves with yet more analysis of what Trump does and why he does it?
I think there are several persuasive responses to this question of why an exhausted populace should still engage with critiques of Trump and his enablers, and why the analyses are still worth writing. The first is that, despite the deliberate strategies of chaos and seeking to overwhelm media coverage through sheer volume of offense and distraction, an overall picture has formed over the last couple years that was not at all readily apparent at the time of the president’s election. I think relatively few among us believed that Donald Trump would, three years in, be presiding unabashedly over a white supremacist presidency, with the more or less complete acquiescence of his entire political party. While this possibility was latent in his election, the reality that has emerged urgently requires description, and to be made known to as many Americans as possible. And the complicity of the GOP I just noted is another major subject that citizens are well-served to learn about, as this essential fact makes clear that we face not just a Donald Trump problem, but a Republican Party problem. In turn, Trump and the GOP together pose not simply a white nationalist threat, but an authoritarian challenge to American democracy, built on the president’s demagoguery and the GOP’s willingness to break the structures of our democracy in favor of white rule.
But though these are vital understandings for anyone who wishes to be an informed citizen, being an informed citizen is only the prelude to what all news and critiques of the Trump administration should push toward: citizens taking action to change this country for the better. And we cannot make the changes we need unless we’re aware of the full challenges we face. Just as we’re not going to push past the horror of the Trump administration without fully reckoning with the GOP’s authoritarian inclinations, we also need to engage in a full public airing of the menace of white nationalism and white supremacism with an eye to discrediting and destroying these noxious ideologies.
Indeed, sometimes I half-jokingly (and sometimes, not-so-jokingly) wonder if I should end every piece with a tagline along the lines of “Organize. Vote. Mobilize. Call Your Congressperson. Call Your Senator.” as a reminder that political action needs to be the end goal - not simply as a means to knock the GOP out of office, but as a way to affirmatively hash out, collectively, what type of country we want to live in, and work to make it a reality. One obvious point that gets short shrift is that Americans of good conscience are desperate for hope, desperate to do something to make a difference. Doing one’s duty by trying to understand our political crisis can be deeply demoralizing and even debilitating, and there is really no better remedy than taking informed democratic action alongside our fellow Americans to improve matters.
Somewhat unexpectedly, what got me thinking the thoughts above was an essay by Rhonda Garelick, titled Surrogate Angels of Death, in which she performs a close reading of the now-infamous photograph of Donald and Melania Trump posing with Paul Anchondo, the two-month-old infant whose parents were killed by the white nationalist terrorist in El Paso last weekend. Because the reaction of so many who have seen this photo is a combination of visceral revulsion and disorientation, Garelick’s piece is remarkable for holding its gaze on this grim tableau for longer than most of us have been willing to bear.
The photo falls into the long line of Trumpian provocations and outrages that I started off talking about, that steady stream said to benumb us with its rapidly alternating slide show of depravity and cruelty. Garelick understands that, given this oversaturated environment, she can best communicate what she wants to by careful attention to perspective. And so she begins the piece by asking us to put ourselves in the place of the baby’s dead mother:
Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you. Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband. A photograph is taken, for posterity.
Not only does Garelick introduce context, but she does so through an act of moral imagination, asking us to see through the eyes of a dead woman. She allows this overt framing drop away as the piece continues, but this initial invitation to see matters from an unexpected perspective counter-intuitively provides grounding in the face of the moral disgrace she proceeds to describe: the vapidity of the Trumps, the least family-oriented couple to occupy the White House in recent memory, taking the place of Paul’s parents; the appalling thumbs us; the thousand-watt smiles; the fatal link between Trump’s rhetoric and the shooter’s decision to kill. Additionally, Garelick sees a connection to the separation of children from parents along the border; noting that “the abuse and kidnapping of children of color are recurrent themes in this administration,” she sees the photo as a symbolic kidnapping of baby Paul, that stands in for the larger crisis upon us:
All of these ghastly truths make themselves felt in this single photo of the vacuous and smug Trumps masquerading as kindly hospital visitors, seeking to comfort the El Paso survivors. Posing for this photograph, the Trumps remove any last doubt about their dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life [. . .]
Injured, confused, squirming away from Melania’s brittle embrace, and straining toward what’s left of his family, Baby Paul now stands in for all the children — indeed, all human beings — who, like him, have been harmed and are being held against their will by a white supremacist president.
What broke through to me — what made reading this piece “worth it,” despite the fact that I have no position left to be changed vis-a-vis Donald Trump, nor could be persuaded to despise him more than I already do, nor more inspired to fight to put things right — is that Garelick helped me see that at the bottom of so much of our political crisis is a crisis of our shared humanity. The Trumps, with their “dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life,” have little in common with the vast majority of Americans. The president is a broken man, rich in money but impoverished in those things that most of us know are what count in life: kindness, empathy, fellow feeling, a moral compass. And in turn, the white nationalism on which this administration centers is similarly impoverished, rooted in a denial of our common humanity for the sake of a self-defeating belief that the way to make America great is to deny the basic equality of most Americans.
Gorelick’s article has helped me fight back my own doubts about the power of persuasion in these polarized times. At the bottom of this administration’s sins are violations of our common humanity so basic that only the most unreconstructed white supremacist should be immune to arguments against white nationalism. To use a baby as a prop for a hospital photo shoot — a baby already discharged from the hospital, yet brought back to please a president, an infant who had bones broken as his parents sought to save his life with their own falling bodies — when you, as president, have done more than any other single human being to incite acts of violence such as the one that left Paul an orphan? Words are necessary to mark this moment, but they also begin to fail before the spiritual emptiness they seek to describe. Trump is betting that millions of Americans are as rotten at the core as he is; hope lies in still seeking to persuade these Americans that they are better than this. Against this president’s wholesale manipulation of the media and the cynical effort to divide Americans against each other, we retain this advantage: a belief in our common humanity that cuts through serious but relatively shallower political divisions, and an ability to build solidarity by seeing through the eyes of others.