WHAT WE LOST WITH TRUMP
Everything Trump Touches Dies Becomes More True Each Day
In our new “Sunday On The Square” literary tradition, we’re sharing an excerpt from Rick Wilson’s 2018 book, “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” No book in the Trump era has proved more prescient. It will be read in years to come by anyone seeking to understand how America took such a terribly wrong turn. Rick coined the truism that became his book’s title, and #ETTD has been in heavy and accurate use ever since.
DONALD TRUMP IS A TERRIBLE president. That’s not an aesthetic judgment. That’s not a partisan judgment. It’s a simple tally of his incompetence, recklessness, and the costs he’s imposing on the nation he was elected to lead.
I’m not talking about the usual Washington problems but the bigger, more sweeping costs we face as a nation. The predicate of Never Trump wasn’t simply that he couldn’t be president; it was that he shouldn’t be president. A brief look at the tally of our diminished state follows.
LEADERSHIP
Presidential leadership has that ineffable, know-it-when-you-see-it quality, a quicksilver property that ebbs and flows with the arc of lives and fortunes of the men who hold the highest office in the land. It’s either there or it isn’t.
We saw it in George Washington, not just in the battles he waged and won and the example he set as a leader, but in his dignified departure from power and his return to Mount Vernon after sacrificing so much for so long. He led during the time of our greatest early adversity and never let the power of office or position overtake him.
Sometimes it’s a determination to do the right thing, damn the consequences, the anger, and dissent it will cause. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation almost ended his presidency and eventually cost him his life, but he never wavered. He led in word and action, demanding incalculable sacrifice to prevent incalculable harm to the Republic.
It was John F. Kennedy’s call rallying a nation facing down communism, that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
It was Ronald Reagan, standing tall and resolute before the Brandenburg Gate, rapping out the cadences of the end of 70 years of Soviet oppression, confident that our way of life, our values, and our system were superior to communism.
It’s FDR in the well of the House, dragging a nation from the opiate stupor of comfortable isolationism and unleashing our military and industrial might in a devastating war to end the threat of Nazism, fascism, and Japanese militarism.
It doesn’t always come from a crafted, perfect speech.
Sometimes, it’s a haggard, strained George W. Bush mounting a fire truck in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, throwing his arm around a firefighter, and telling a grieving, angry nation, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
These are just a handful of examples in the long, brilliant catalog of American presidential leadership. Their styles were different, but all were grounded in our national character. Their leadership skills rose to meet the responsibilities of the office.
Leadership takes two things Donald Trump notoriously and evidently lacks: character and an ability to engage in political acts that go beyond oneself. He is almost completely obsessed with the spectacle of Trump, the performative presidency that is about his ratings, his appearance, his coverage. These are small, shallow things and anathema to selfless national leadership.
To be sure, every president has pondered his legacy and his role in history. They are still human, after all. But Donald Trump ponders only how Fox & Friends covers the previous day. Presidential leadership has never before been about tweeting, preening, or boasting. It hasn’t been an endless exercise in self-fellation until now.
DIGNITY
Who could have imagined that a man of Donald Trump’s spectacular vulgarity, vanity, and gimcrack gold-leaf aesthetic would turn out to be a president without a shred of dignity? Who would have thought a man with a grasp of history derived solely from movies and television would be unable to channel the wonder and power of this nation in times of crisis?
Who could imagine that a serial adulterer with a desperate need to have his manhood validated and who engaged in a string of risible, sleazy affairs would become an international laughingstock?
Who could have foreseen that the faux billionaire up to his ample ass in debt to God knows who would look at the White House as a way to nickel-and-dime the taxpayers and the GOP into bumping up his revenue stream at his hotels and golf courses?
Spoiler: everyone, ever.
Those of you who hoped the awesome power and majesty of the presidency would draw Trump away from decades of tawdry, low behavior were in for a rude surprise. George Washington embodied presidential dignity in a way that was transferred by some providential magic to almost every man who has held the highest office. Not so with Trump.
Henry Cabot Lodge once wrote of our first president:
Washington cared as little for vain shows as any man who ever lived, but he had the highest sense of personal dignity and of the dignity of his cause and country. Neither should be allowed to suffer in his hands. He appreciated the effect on mankind of forms and titles, and with unerring judgment he insisted on what he knew to be of real value. It is one of the earliest examples of the dignity and good taste which were of such inestimable value to his country.
Donald Trump is like a monster from the laboratory of a jackass mad scientist, built to represent the perfect antithesis of Washington’s example. In almost every aspect of his demeanor, speech, and affect, Trump is a clownish figure, a deserved magnet for mockery. From his absurd hair construct to his ludicrous ego to his pathetic, whiny need to have his alpha-male status affirmed every moment, Trump is the least dignified president since William Howard Taft held a Jell-O-wrestling contest on the South Lawn.
His Liberace-meets-Saddam decorating style has always screamed out, “Not Quite Our Class, Dear,” and his personality is the very opposite of commander-in-chief material. Trump is the living, shitty embodiment of a culture that’s more Real Housewives and less Shining City on a Hill.
No man is perfect in this regard, but even by the standards of today, Donald Trump’s grasping, horrid ego reduces him to a clownish figure, easily, eminently, and, most importantly, deservedly mockable. He is always too conscious of how he looks on the small screen of the television rather than the vast stage of the world; everything about him screams need, insecurity, false bravado.
Why does dignity matter in the president? Because at some point in every administration, history comes knocking. Tragedy strikes. The nation looks to the man they elected to lead them and whispers, “Now what?” Large and small, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, crises require a president to be a moral leader, to guide, to heal, to comfort, to direct the painful energies of a hurt nation into a positive direction. Trump can’t stop looking in the mirror, a self-obsessed Narcissus in a fright wig.
TRUTH AND FACTS
Post-truth American politics goes beyond the traditional best-spin model of political communications both parties have embraced for generations. Setting the Trump campaign’s endless torrent of bullshit aside for a moment, the tragedy of a presidency and a party that will argue endlessly and fruitlessly about basic, incontestable facts is a truly terrible sign of the corrosive nature of this man and his machine.
I’ve been behind the glass watching enough focus groups to know that very few Americans trust anyone in Washington. Their hatred of politicians is transpartisan. Their baseline position is that Washington is full of lying liars who lie. Trump took that to levels no one could have imagined before, and we’re going to regret it at home and abroad.
On the domestic front, no one in Washington trusts Donald Trump, not even his staff, his allies in Congress, and certainly not anyone else in the legislative or political process. He’s a serial liar of such infamy that any promise he makes is known at once to be conditional, ephemeral, and deniable.
More Americans believe Donald Trump is dishonest than believe that of any president since Nixon; roughly two-thirds of Americans view him as being untrustworthy across almost all survey data sources. That’s hardly a distinction any resident of the Oval Office desires.
Facts, as Reagan famously said, are stubborn things. Truth and honesty are vital pillars of presidential leadership; they create an ineffable reservoir of goodwill for the moments when the man in the Oval Office can’t tell Americans all the details of a military or law enforcement operation. They are a buttress against attacks on his programs, his intentions, and his statements.
Leadership demands trust. Trust that the president will keep his word, do as he promises, and deliver on commitments. Donald Trump, the Münchhausen of presidents, is a notorious serial liar and fabulist. He is a man who has boasted about his own dishonesty in life, marriage, and business.
VISION
Describe Trump’s vision for America without using a slogan. I’ll wait.
You might argue that Trump has a kind of negative vision, a mental landscape of threats, horrors, imagined enemies, Fox News bogeymen, and other members of his nightmare closet, but beyond his infamous, vague catchphrase “MAGA,” there’s not much to latch on to when it comes to presidential vision. His base quite evidently loves having their fear centers endlessly stimulated by his constant drip of apocalyptic, conspiratorial rhetoric and revels in triggering the snowflake libtard RINOs, but Trump’s actual vision for America is a dimwitted slogan, not a plan. “Make America Great Again” is a retrospective, pessimistic throwaway, a callback to an imagined past. It’s superficial boob-bait that isn’t matched up against a plan, a program, or a vision beyond L’état, c’est Trump.
Left or right, most presidents have some kind of endpoint, some shape of the American landscape they want to see. It’s the fundamental programming layer of their plans, policies, and rhetoric. Trump’s MAGA line is as dazzlingly superficial as the rest of his mental processes, and aside from a Wall to stop Mexicans and some form of amorphous swamp-draining, you’d be hard-pressed to lay out a Trump doctrine. Domestically, it’s a mishmash of news of the week. Internationally, Make America Great Again is translated as “Cede American leadership to Russia.”
One person in Trump’s orbit understood the need to articulate a broader vision than “Look at my bigly hands, America,” and it was Pollyanna Conway. From time to time, she could convince him to read words on a teleprompter or draft a tweet for him that made him look a little less self-absorbed, but Trump’s vision is for his brand, his company, and his bottom line, not the United States of America.
OPTIMISM
For Americans, the future is always coming, shiny, amazing, and prosperous. The Founders were, at their base, optimists. Every generation of Americans has held onto the idea that we’re getting better, moving toward the music of our better angels, fixing the bugs, hacking in new code, and building a better tomorrow. The Down-note Trumpism is fundamentally pessimistic; it’s a picture of America in decline, of evil foreigners beating us at trade, of problems only a strongman can solve, and the idea that the amorphous “left” is winning all the battles. This isn’t Reagan’s sunny optimism; it’s depressingly small and limited in scope. The Trump Train stops in a podunk future that looks like 1930, not 2030.
Big, visionary, prospective leadership has always been informed by the bullheaded optimism that defines this country. We aren’t just passengers; we’re builders, dreamers, doers, fighters. No challenge is too big. No problem is too complex. Every time the world thinks we can’t, we do. “America, fuck yeah” has become “Daddy, save us!” in the age of Trump.
It’s one of the things I find most depressing about Trump. He’s trained his docile followers to believe in an America that is weaker, sadder, and smaller than we really are. I remain militantly optimistic about America, our rich talent, and our amazing, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, crazy, passionate people. It’s too bad a central tenet of Trumpism is to run down the people of this country and describe a nation so lost and weak it requires an authoritarian strongman.
FOCUS
Donald Trump has the attention span of a gnat on meth. If he was stonked to the gills on Adderall, he might achieve the attention span of a toddler. This is a man with a notoriously shallow intellect and a marked inability to stick to a consistent line of thinking. It’s hard to determine if he simply can’t remember what he said at any given moment, or whether the bright-and-shiny objects around him are too much of a distraction.
Because his governance style is a combination of tabloid beefing, tweet rages, and pick-the-worst-policy games, it takes the hallucinatory belief by his followers that Trump is merely playing multidimensional chess, pursuing some secret, brilliantly considered scheme to MAGA . . . right up until he changes the subject again. In Trump we will never have a president able to marshal his and the nation’s attention on any challenge. This is a feature of Trumpism, not a bug.
He depends on the constant, endless chaos and static of exploding our attention span, pinballing from one crisis to the next. You can imagine him saying, “I don’t want to talk about Mueller. How about I bomb Syria instead?”
UNITY
Trump has divided us in ways no American of good faith can countenance. He is the ultimate us-versus-them president, a man who stokes partisan tribalism, racial animosity, and political division for sport. He relishes division.
He flirts with racial forces that no sane president would do anything but rebuke and shun. He refuses to make even the most tangential moves toward bipartisan harmony. He encourages a paranoid, constant war with the media. He wrecks the rule of law, ignores the traditions of presidential leadership, and never fails to stoke division when he should bring the country together.
The only unity emerging in the era of Trump is on the negative side: he has drawn people together in vocal, constant, furious anger. No modern political figure, left or right, has had more people hate him with a mad, burning passion than Donald Trump.
Well said Rick. Your always thoughtful, clear-eyed, insightful, and often humorous comments are much appreciated in these dark times. Keep up the good fight!
I agree with everything you said in your assessment of Trump. I read an article, published by Reuters within the last day, that discussed the Trump’s fiscal cuts to aid that was designed to help the farming industry. The article specifically focused on a young (age 27) 4th generation dairy farmer in West Virginia. His business produces milk and cheese, and his primary customers are school systems and food pantries. Because the Trump administration has cut/diminished grants to these entities, they can no longer purchase the dairy farmer’s product. Not only does this harm the farmer, but there are children who will suffer nutritionally.
I am originally from West Virginia, although I have not lived there for 40 years. I cherish my memories of growing up there. If you want to arouse my rage, doing harm to the people in the place I call home will set it off. For over 100 years, West Virginians have been looked down upon, ridiculed, whatever. Very few things piss me off more. I can’t begin to describe what I would like to do to Trump and his minions. But I know that is not the answer. That is why I am here, I am looking for some entity to coordinate an effective plan to stop him in his tracks. He needs to be IMPEACHED! What do we have to do to see this happen?