It can and probably should be said that during the first eight months of Donald Trump’s presidency, much has gone well.
Trump has proven himself spectacularly inept at governing—which, from the point of view of those who don’t want to see him succeed in his destructive agenda, is good news.
His plan to build a wall that Mexico will pay for is as shattered as Humpty Dumpty. His promise to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” has failed, following his epiphany that health care is complicated, which he insists “nobody knew.” His desire to shower huge tax breaks on the wealthy faces an uncertain future as “tax reform.”
Trump has presided over a White House teeming with turmoil and strife, stoked by his own lack of discipline. He has compiled a Cabinet of corporate raiders, climate-change deniers, and professional sycophants, flanked by his grifter family and a succession of combustible PR flacks. He has embarrassed himself repeatedly on the global stage, where he is widely seen as a buffoon, as he is in his own country.
His associates have been caught in lie after lie regarding their contacts with Russian operatives trying to tilt the 2016 election in his favor, creating billowing clouds of smoke amid his scoffing insistence on the absence of fire. His party has achieved virtually nothing in the way of legislative successes, despite having control of the Oval Office and both houses of Congress. (Chided The Daily Show, “You’re the only team on the field but you’re still losing.”) He’s lashed out at his allies in the Republican Party, rewarding their obsequiousness with contempt.
Trump’s presidency has been characterized by habitual dishonesty, bad judgment, proud ignorance, and preening self-interest, producing an astonishing level of incompetence. He can’t even give a talk to a group of Boy Scouts without being inappropriate. It took two days of outraged reaction before he managed to find something bad to say about neo-Nazis, after one of them murdered a counterdemonstrator. He did so grudgingly, without conviction, before reconnecting with his true feelings and praising the “very fine people” who stormed Charlottesville carrying torches, brandishing weapons, and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” As commentator Eugene Robinson succinctly expressed, the President “has no moral center whatsoever.”
Trump has made himself so toxic that even the heads of corporations that stand to profit from his administration’s deregulatory and tax-cut schemes backed away from serving on White House business councils. And while most Congressional Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, continue to stand by their man in the White House, there are growing signs of revolt.
Trump’s presidency has been characterized by habitual dishonesty, bad judgment, proud ignorance, and preening self-interest, producing an astonishing level of incompetence.
“It’s time to stop trying to teach this President, a seventy-one-year-old man who knows better, and it is time to start denouncing him,” declared former Representative David Jolly, Republican of Florida, after Trump’s star turn as a neo-Nazi sympathizer. He called on Republican leaders in Congress to cease working with Trump and for the party as a whole to “begin a primary movement against this President.”
Two factors have combined to set the stage for a failed Trump presidency. The first is that the guardrails of American democracy have worked to restrain the careening impulses of a reckless chief executive.
Federal courts have, at least initially, blocked Trump’s ham-handed attempts to keep Muslims from entering the country. Congress took steps to prevent him from firing his Attorney General. The military balked at implementing a ban on transgender servicepeople based on a series of Trumpian tweets, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointedly declaring, “We will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect,” although the President is still pushing his hateful agenda. Police associations blasted Trump’s unnecessary encouragement that officers rough up people they arrest. The media, derided by Trump as “the enemy of the American people,” have shown admirable resolve in standing up to the President, documenting his duplicity and pulling at the corners of the scandals that threaten to engulf him.
The other check on the President’s abuse of executive authority has come powerfully from the American public. The Women’s March, held the day after the Inauguration, drew more than four million people throughout the United States, more than any other protest in our nation’s history. Trump’s cruel decision to slam the door on Dreamers, like his Muslim ban and attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, is being met with mass opposition. Nearly 6,000 chapters of the new anti-Trump group Indivisible have sprung up across the country, and that’s just one of many groups seeing an outpouring of interest from citizens who regard principled resistance to Trump as a moral imperative.
As Naomi Klein notes in her important new book, No Is Not Enough, “All of these acts of solidarity and expressions of unity reflect the fact that, after decades of siloed politics, more and more people understand that we can only beat Trumpism in cooperation with one another—no one movement can win on its own. The trick is going to be to stick together, and have each other’s backs as never before.”
That won’t be easy, and there is no cause for celebration. No matter how inept Trump happens to be, the vast power of the presidency will continue to let him do great damage to the environment, our already frayed traditions of civil discourse, and our institutions of democracy.
With a few polygraphic jerks of his pen, Trump has rolled back protections for the environment, workers, immigrants, transgender students, and nursing home residents. His Department of Homeland Security has ended Obama’s program to block the deportation of undocumented persons whose children are citizens or permanent residents. His Justice Department is arguing that civil rights law does not protect workers against job discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Trump has needlessly escalated tensions with Iran and North Korea, heightening the risk of conflict, and ramped up the war effort in Afghanistan. He has employed chaos as a strategy of governance, creating distractions to cover for his failures. He will continue to disparage the courts, the press, and the rule of law—anything that provides a check on his power. And he will inevitably use the crises he creates to consolidate power and ram through parts of his agenda.
“The real test,” Klein writes, “will be whether the bravery and solidarity seen so far can be sustained when people are being told they are in imminent danger.” This will surely come to pass, whether due to a terrorist attack or Trump’s own eagerness to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
To truly trump Trumpism and get to a place where better things are possible, we must hold tight to two difficult ideals that The Progressive has fought to uphold: an absolute commitment to freedom of speech, and an absolute commitment to nonviolence. This is a time for true courage, and actual sacrifice.
To truly trump Trumpism and get to a place where better things are possible, we must hold tight to two difficult ideals that The Progressive has fought to uphold: an absolute commitment to freedom of speech, and an absolute commitment to nonviolence. This is a time for true courage, and actual sacrifice.
We will be tested, we will be provoked, and yes, we can blow it. Every smashed window or thrown punch, every shouted-down speaker or trashed (as opposed to democratically relocated) monument to our nation’s bigotry, can and will be used against us. Those who succumb to baser instincts in their disgust of Donald Trump will play directly into his hands.
And then there is the matter of the Trump supporter. The President’s approval ratings are historically low but, considering how he has behaved, remain astonishingly high. A third of the country looks at this President and thinks he is doing a good job. Really? How can this be?
How can people who consider themselves religious accept a man who boasts about committing—and allegedly has committed—sexual assault? How can patriots who care about their country abide his obvious inability to care about anything but himself? (Trump even treated his empathy-free visit to Hurricane Harvey-ravaged Texas as a campaign event: “What a crowd, what a turnout!”)
In short, what on Earth has happened to our fellow Americans?
It’s an important question, and it deserves thoughtful consideration. For even when Trump is finally out of office, we will still be left with a populace that narrowly elected him. We must not allow his divisiveness to define our future.
Elsewhere in this issue, Noah Phillips writes of his travels around the country, meeting with Trump supporters. It’s a critical exercise, one we should all be doing in our own communities. It is, as Phillips finds, surprisingly easy and not nearly as dispiriting as we may suspect.
The truth is, the vast majority of those who voted for and still support Trump are much better people than he is. Most are motivated not by hate but by hope. They just happened to be taken in by a con artist.
Progressives should be making an effort to reach out to Trump’s supporters, not to persuade them to see the error of their ways—although many will doubtless do so—but to understand them better as fellow citizens. In the end, like it or not, we are all in this together.
Bill Lueders is managing editor of The Progressive.