Reflections on Trump in Retreat: Remission Doesn't Mean Cure

By In the National Interest Archives
Cover image for  article: Reflections on Trump in Retreat: Remission Doesn't Mean Cure

Novelists who write political fiction will forever bemoan Donald Trump. Whether their oeuvre is thrillers or serious stories, Trump's exit from the White House after his failed coup d'état is a testament to the old saw: you just can't make this stuff up.

But if Trump has dimmed the prospects for future fictional bestsellers, the coincidence of his departure only two days after the country honored Martin Luther King offers an opportunity for writers of all sorts: the arrival of a president whose administration is pledged to pursue the values King championed and Trump abhors.

Trump's defeat, of course, will not undo his damage. Its measure: the insurrection fomented two weeks ago that put the destruction in plain sight. Like December 7th and September 11th, two dates that carry meaning beyond their events, January 6th is more than the day of Capitol Hill's desecration. For Americans who never thought their democracy fragile, it conjures the moment they saw that its demolition is only one demagogue away.

Nothing that happened should have been a surprise. Like crack dealers who give away free hits to build a clientele, Trump peddled hatred from day one -- decrying immigrants, Blacks, reporters, opponents. The vitriol became applause lines that his almost all-white audiences loved. It would have been a wonder if his rallying call on January 6th had provoked anything less than the mayhem his far right extremists in the crowd had already planned.

Whether or not Trump's second impeachment produces a Senate conviction, his carcinogenic politics will metastasize. The diagnosis is obvious. For one thing, Trump has devoted four years to building a base of support, including a mob that can deliver violence as well as votes. Charlottesville's rioting and Lansing, Michigan's capital where gun-toting goon squads marched, previewed the Capitol Hill assault. January 6th will have its violent sequels as well.

Trump's final day in Washington sent that instruction to his menagerie of militias from their commander-in-chief. The requested pomp -- a 21-gun salute, ersatz crowd, and red carpet to Air Force One -- presumably helped assuage the aspiring authoritarian's angst over lost trappings. But self-pity wasn't the reason for the tasteless farewell. Like Il Duce's balcony scenes or Stalin waving from atop Lenin's Tomb, Trump's strongman imagery was his message: stand back and stand by.

Trump's caudillo-like cancer in the body politic also is enabling opportunistic infections to flourish. The Republican Party is their Petri dish, where racism, xenophobic grievances, and religious zealotry are feeding growing national divisions as well as its "base." Ironically, fear dominates Republican politicians as well as their party line. With the mob at the door two weeks ago, two-thirds of their House members still voted to endorse Trump's stolen election lie that ludicrously as well as illogically somehow put them in office but denied Trump his.

The party's post-election trauma testifies to Trump's continuing impact. From the terminally ambitious Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to Marjorie Taylor Green, the bizarre QAnon quisling in the House, Trump wannabes are continuing to peddle his lies. With 90 percent of GOP voters still supporting the ex-president, more mouthpieces are on the way. For example, in Georgia where Trump lost in November, his loyalists want to throw out their Republican governor and secretary of state. Both dumbfounded them after the November election when they actually counted votes and followed the law.

The media business that caters to Trump's crowds already is moving to monetize the Republicans' post-election appetite for mendacity. Fox News is adding even more opinion to its daily TV line-up. A purge this week at its digital operations axed a veteran editor who had infuriated Trump by calling Arizona correctly for Joe Biden on election night along with a dozen others. Whatever line existed between news and opinion on the network's web site, the fiction that Fox features real journalism obviously also is going out the door.

For all Trump's seclusion in his final months, his faithful have had no doubt about his wants and needs. Obsessed with his election loss, he has pushed the massive lie that he and they were denied victory in November. As Andreas Kluth wrote last week, Trump's mendacity is a menace because of the incessantly repeated big lie. Consider the claim Germany didn't lose World War I but was "stabbed in the back" by Jews and traitors, Kluth argues. The Nazis leveraged the lie into power. As if on cue this week, Trump vowed in his farewell that "his movement is just beginning."

How far Trump can go as a former president, of course, remains to be seen. Twice impeached, under investigation by a bevy of prosecutors, and with a business to run, politics could well take second place to self-preservation. Contemptible or not for their complicity in the Capitol Hill insurrection, Cruz, Hawley, and other would-be successors also may chisel away chunks of his converted. Indeed, Fox News' propagandists and others even further to the right are putting extra chairs on their studio sets to give them their on-air try.

Trump's seditious speech on June 6th wasn't the first to feature the National Mall in attempting to bring crowds that could help change history. On January 18, 1968 another movement met to draw up a plan to use the venue to do just that, including a mass march in Washington DC. The objective: a campaign for jobs, a fair wage, education, and a new cooperation among people of all colors and backgrounds to gain a decent life, respect, and dignity.

Some in the room that day spoke up, calling the demands too ambitious. Martin Luther King disagreed. King wanted to focus the nation's attention on economic inequality and poverty. He put it this way at the staff meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "Let's find something that is so possible, so achievable, so pure, so simple that even the backlash can't do much to deny it."

King knew well the deep divisions in the country. But he saw the National Mall as a place to bring people together to address their cause. King didn't live to see the thousands of women who trooped onto the mall that Mother's Day in May as the first wave of the Poor People's March on Washington. His celebration on Monday and Trump's departure on Wednesday couldn't be a better coincidence to highlight King's goals, or those of a new president and his administration as they begin their effort to find a cure for the nation's diseases.

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