Why Was This The Straw That Broke The Trump Campaign?

In the aftermath of the release of Donald Trump’s tape admitting sexual assault, notable Republicans and centrists have been deserting him in droves, with many people saying it’s the end of the Trump campaign. But the swiftness of the reaction has people wondering why this in particular, after all of Trump’s controversial statements, seems to have been straw that broke the camel’s back.

From the right, this has taken the form of “but rappers say worse things all the time!” This is an argument so overtly disingenuous and subtly racist that it’s not even worth the time of a rebuttal, except perhaps for Leslie Knope doing “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

From the left, the criticism is this: Why is this, of all the things Trump has done, been the one to turn conventional wisdom against him? Jamelle Bouie at Slate provides a quick rundown of the awful things Trump has proposed in the service of white nationalism, and concludes that this time, Trump has actually offended voters relevant to the GOP. (Meanwhile my social media is filled with the superficially “woke” variation of this, that the only reason is that he went after white women.)

I have a couple major issues with these arguments. First, I think they assign far too much value to the rationality of Republicans and centrists, when the general response when the tape leaked was so swift it isn’t possible it was a rational weighing of pros and cons.

But second, and more importantly, I think these arguments misconstrue, sometimes deliberately (especially with the rap thing), reason for the outrage. American politics are built on certain myths, and Trump’s endorsement of sexual assault remove him from the ability to work within them.

The particular myth is this: as a culture, we believe that the Presidency should be filled by a good person.

America has always had a belief in its fundamental goodness: it was the first nation to be built on the principles of classical liberalism, a force for democracy and freedom across the globe, and so on. In most American textbooks, pretty much every US citizen who’s mentioned is treated as a hero, except for Benedict Arnold and Joe McCarthy. The President is supposed to embody this, at one level.

But the United States has also had huge moral issues. Slavery, the Indian Wars, the carceral state, and imperial wars abroad have all prevented the USA from being the embodiment of good in the world that it claims to be. And, I think, at a certain level Americans understand this. The Presidency is not supposed to be a good person in charge of a good nation doing good things. Many of the choices the President makes are supposed to be bad choices, seeking the lesser of two, or three, or ten evils, and making America the best possible thing it can be.

In short, the American political system and mythology underlying that system believes that the Presidency is an impossibly difficult job, and only a person of strong moral fiber can be trusted to make the least worst decisions.

Let’s take an example: the next President is going to have to make decisions about what to do with Syria. They have four basic choices. 1) Attack Assad, potentially provoking Russia and aiding ISIS, Assad’s chief rival. 2) Attack ISIS, aiding Assad. 3) Attempt to support “moderate rebels” in the hopes of building up a preferable third option, despite this strategy not having worked for years now. Or 4) do nothing, letting the cards fall where they may, despite the inevitable bloodshed and oppression, and acknowledging that the United States has a unique responsibility to the region thanks to decades of intervention that is being abrogated. There are no good answers, but the President will have to make this decision.

This is why, every eight years, the media reports with glee on how Presidents age by the end of their time in office. Here’s Time Magazine with a slideshow on the subject, saying “From LBJ to Barack Obama, a look at what the toughest job in the world can do to a person.” We want to take a good person and break them, in the “toughest job in the world.”

(Speaking of Obama, his ability to seem like an essentially good person, even as the manager of the American Empire, is why he’s ending his second term with the highest approval ratings in decades.)

You may have noticed that I’m not addressing policy or party at all here. This is somewhat intentional. Another crucial part of the American myth is that our politicians and heroes all have the best of intentions in trying to make America better (or greater, as the case may be). There are going to be disagreements as to how, of course, and that’s fine, but as long as a politician can reasonably claim to be serving the greater good, they can get a pass.

So with Trump’s descent into white nationalism, even as it involves despicable policies, and he pushes for it in crude, rabble-rousing terms, his defenders can say “this is for the greater good of the United States.”

Now, a crucial part of American mythology is that these are reasonable people having reasonable disagreements. So even if it’s apparent that this is bigoted, impractical, and downright nasty, it is essential for America’s perception of itself that institutionalizing discrimination against Mexicans and Muslims can be treated as an argument for making the country better. Or, this is why Hillary Clinton’s apparent moral failures with her e-mail server is a scandal treated as far more important than her support of the Iraq War that has killed or displaced millions of people.

It’s probably worth noting that I do not endorse this perception of politics. I think there are advantages to keeping the world’s richest empire stable, which isn’t nothing. But the level of national self-deception necessary to maintain the idea that our leaders are good people even when they support horrible policies is possibly unsustainable in the long run. Most notably, because it allows lying authoritarian scumbags to manipulate the system into taking control of one of the two major parties.

So here’s why Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comments were the breaking point: there’s no greater good. There is no possible way to spin this as any kind of moral good. Donald Trump, at the least, endorsed sexual assault, and probably even admitted it. It wasn’t for American jobs. It wasn’t so that he could employ people and pay taxes. It was simply a horrible man saying horrible things.

And with that, Trump disqualified himself from the Presidency, according to American mythology. There is no possible way that he could be considered a moral person at any level after this. And yes, Trump should have been considered immoral for supporting immoral policies over the past years, but that’s not the system we’re in. The system we’re in has to create a veneer of functionality and legitimacy to work. Trump finally proved that he couldn’t do that, even at the most basic level. And so the system finally rejected him.