Afterthoughts

Dang. I’d been planning to begin this week’s column with a riff on that laughably large ear bandage Trump sported at his coronation, and, having seen his cult fashioning similar ones, to note the similarity to farmers tagging the ears of their sheep. Probably, I’d have puzzled that, next day, he wore a small Band-Aid appropriate to the injury he incurred.

Maybe he realized, despite seeing his flock lower to the occasion, how ridiculous it looked to everyone else. As a former trauma surgeon, I’d never have applied that honker to such a minimally injured ear. Nevertheless, he was very lucky and that’s a good thing. I don’t minimize the seriousness of the close call; just the crazy that came after.

So I’d also have reflected on miracles. If defined as evidence of divine intervention, and if God saved Trump from death, then it’s no less miraculous that He made Mr. Comperatore die. Same for late-discovered survivors of earthquakes that kill hundreds. You can’t see saves as godly and not the killings. So, maybe there are no miracles. Were I reckless enough, I’d have proposed that to think He would choose an amoral man like Trump to lead us is disrespectful of God. Blasphemous, even.

I’m sure I’d have mentioned the similarities between Kim Jong Il’s ceremonial appearances and Trump, when he wasn’t nodding off, smiling beneficently as sycophants like Tucker Carlson and Hulk Hogan (!) praised him, deified him, one after another. Likely, I couldn’t have avoided noting that, halfway through Trump’s endless, rally-repetitive acceptance speech, the faithful were scrolling their phones or walking out.

President Joe Biden’s magnanimous decision to withdraw from contention is the reason I’d have said none of that. MAGA Republicans won’t, but present company and future historians will agree that President Joe Biden is one of the most, if not THE most effective president since FDR.

Assuming the reins of a devastated economy while a mishandled pandemic was requiring refrigerated morgue trucks outside overwhelmed hospitals, as unemployment was soaring and businesses were closing, he turned it all around, creating millions of jobs, lowering Covid-rebound inflation – never as high in the US as in other developed countries – to a third of its maximum.

Record numbers of small businesses have been created. Decaying infrastructure is being rebuilt. And, had Trump not shepherded his sheep into blocking it, President Joe Biden’s negotiated, bipartisan deal would have made significant progress on border issues.

It’s a remarkable, proud legacy, with a terribly sad ending. Compared to Trump’s venality, President Biden’s decency, placing country above self, couldn’t be more obvious.

Concerned he might not be the one to beat Trump, who, notwithstanding MAGA credulity, historians will agree was one of the if not THE worst president ever, President Biden’s decision to withdraw speaks of patriotism and selflessness. I hope he makes a barnburner of a speech at the Democratic convention.

While we await whatever mess Democrats and pundits will make of their nominating process before selecting Kamala Harris, we know for sure their convention won’t be the festival of falsehoods foisted by Trump’s fraudulent fluffers.

After Speaker-of-Sorts Mike Johnson testified that theirs is the party of law and order, and before his party nominated a convicted criminal, adjudicated rapist, defrauder of New York State of millions of dollars, and recidivist scammer, they welcomed, to delirious cheers, a convict caravan: Manafort, Stone, Navarro, J6 insurrectionists. If he weren’t still serving time, Bannon would have been similarly received.

Came then the strategic lies: Crime rates; energy production; EVs; gas prices; rampant “migrant crime,” the fakest of fakes.  And the one Trump hopes to ride to the White House: election fraud. To which he, the oldest presidential nominee ever, has added another, nearly as pernicious: that he knows nothing of Project 2025.

He knows. Praising the world’s worst dictators, to replicate whose regimes the Project aims, he knows. If elected, he’d follow its marching orders toward a government by and for its billionaire advocates, himself as figurehead, secured by permanently diluted elections.

Continuing its election interference, Russia is praising Trump and, now, his V.P. pick. The former Republican Party would have been appalled to see their nominees praised by America’s enemies and lauded at home despite – or because of -- their disqualifications. In the graves of the respectable old guard, rotations must be continuous.

Money and endorsements are flooding in for Kamala Harris, breaking records. Trump might hide from debating her, but he and his surrogates aren’t hiding their awful, desperate misogyny and racism when attacking her, with worse to come. To which I say, bring it!

Something reminiscent of optimism is nibbling at worry for our country. Too soon to say; but Trump is still Trump, an aged, diminished, fourth-grade name-caller, repeater of lies and incomprehensible digressions. If cultists can’t see it, it’s true nevertheless: he’s become even more unfit for office than he was eight years ago. 

All They've Got

It’s doubtful Trumpists want their children and grandchildren to die of the carcinogens he has deregulated. Because it’s likely they share other human characteristics, too, we assume they, like the rest of us, prefer a livable planet for their progeny; unflooded cities, temperatures compatible with human life, oceans able to support sea life. 

If forced to make the choice, one can’t doubt most Trump voters would choose the health of their grandkids over the pleasure of seeing undocumented children in cages at our borders, shouting “Lock her up,” or calling Democrats stupid names.

It’s pretty certain that, faced with the known consequences, they’d rather see money spent on education, roads and bridges, sustainable energy – maybe even childcare and programs aimed at helping people overcome poverty – than on enriching the already rich and tax cuts that increase our national debt while doing little for everyone else. 

Those would be logical choices for any thoughtful person, if Fox “news” were turned down and Trump stopped tweeting long enough for people to hear themselves think.  

Though Trump’s capacity for empathy is congenitally absent, we presume it’s present in many of his previous voters. It’s possible they could come to understand how having large numbers of people struggling without hope is a threat to our economy, democracy, and, therefore, eventually to themselves. 

Willingness to think beyond the short-term and past their current cloistered comfort is all that’s required. The ability was once inseparable from American greatness. Their current unwillingness is what separates Trumpists from everyone else.  

The point is this: except for conspiracy theorists, the already-rich, and people who need someone to hate in order to validate themselves, there’s nothing at the core of today’s Republican Party to attract “regular” Americans. Party leaders know this. 

Which is why they’re focused on making voting as hard as possible for likely Democratic voters, and on pre-discrediting election results, should they lose. Not to mention turning attention away from their absence of ideas and toward the tiny part of our population throwing rocks at police.  

First, it was egregious gerrymandering. When some plans were struck down by courts, they turned to voter ID laws, aimed at disenfranchising minority voters “with surgical precision,” as an ethical judge wrote while disallowing North Carolina’s. 

Undaunted, encouraged by SCOTUS gutting the Voting Rights Act because there’s no racism, red states set about removing polling places in minority neighborhoods, forcing citizens to travel far and stand in line for hours.  

But they forgot about voting by mail, which circumvents their favorite suppression methods. Quickly, that time-tested, virtually fraud-proof way of voting, used for decades by US citizens overseas, especially military members, and by several states, was declared corrupt. Despite being used by Trump et uxor and White House staffers, including those repeating his lies about it.  

Ah, but Trump came up with an answer to that, too: unable to force states to abandon vote-by-mail (he’s suing some), he called upon another ultra-rich, inexperienced donor; this time to delay mail by gutting capacity. 

Now, seeing states distributing ballot drop-off boxes that don’t require the USPS, he’s lying about them, too. Classic Trump: claiming Democrats are trying to “steal the election,” when it’s he and his doing just that.  

Not satisfied with Republican plans to deploy intimidating “poll watchers,” (and affirming his disregard for the Constitution), Trump threatened to send troops to polling places, too; sowing distrust of voting and Squaring the circle of repression he’s been employing since day one. As in Red- and Tiananmen-Squaring.  

They’ve admitted they have nothing else. In remarkable capitulation, Republicans wrote no party platform for this election other than pledging unconditional, abject fealty to Dear Leader. They’ll run on the fact that he kept the Obama recovery going (till he didn’t), neglecting to mention that, unlike President Obama, Trump did so by way of exploding deficits and damaging deregulation. 

Otherwise, as their convention demonstrated, it’ll be Trumples all the way down: ignoring the current economic pain of millions and the consequential future problems we face, in favor of peddling fear of, hate for, and lies about Democrats. By the outhouse-full. Plus “up-is-down” fabrications about the pandemic and the economy.

The contrast with the DNC was stark, as Trumpists set aside reality, literally calling Trump their savior. It’s beyond a cult: it’s religion turned upside down. Under Trump, Republicans have become prostrate idolaters, eschewing positive ideas in favor of outright lies. Trump’s incendiary doomsday demagoguery ties directly to the violence we’re seeing from rightwing militias. 

Calling him “the savior of Western civilization,” Trumpists are, in fact, all but ensuring its downfall. Cheering Trump’s flagrant, confident mendacity and his televised law-breaking, their convention proved it.

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