Deconstructing the Futility of Trump.
Lessons in the words coming out of the White House.
An item in the morning Times caught my eye. Representatives from the National Rifle Association had met with the president after a hurried late-night trip to the White House. A day earlier Donald Trump flabbergasted his own party with statements that sounded downright liberal on the issue of gun control. According to the report, his thinking was returned with all due dispatch to the approved party orthodoxy.
“POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA #MAGA.” With that smug tweet the NRA’s chief lobbyist assured us the presidential cow was back in the barn.
The NRA need not have fretted overly much. Their people in congress were already working to shelve any real legislative effort that might come in response to the killings of seventeen people at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Mr. McConnell and company made ignoring the surviving Parkland students and their pleas for action look as easy as drowning puppies in a burlap sack.
Still, the words of the president at a televised round table to address gun violence in our schools are revealing.
“You’re afraid of the NRA, right? This, to the Republican senators attending the meeting. He went on, saying the NRA has “great power over you people, they have less power over me.”
Then, “Take the guns first, go through due process second.”
Not the sort of thing the NRA is used to hearing from the politicians they spend so much money to elect.
Some took the statements as the basic background level of chaos and incoherence we’re growing accustomed to in the current White House. Others heard in the president’s language yet another example of his disregard for the rule of law.
I heard something different. Maybe it’s because I spend my days as a writer laboring in the salt mines of language. The way the president said what he said stuck in my ear. To me it sounded like a rare moment of honesty.
Here was a president whose vocabulary normally consists of capitol letters and superlatives, flailing about for words to actually address the problem at hand. We’ve seen Mr. Trump at full boil before, but it’s so often directed at matters that inflame only his own ego. For a fleeting moment on national TV we had a glimpse of him absorbed in the problems of the people he was elected to lead, instead of absorbed in himself.
It made me wonder. How might this presidency have turned out differently? What if the writing of the inaugural address had not been entrusted to the grim Stephen Miller? What if Mr. Trump’s first words as our new president had been addressed to the nation as a whole, not solely to the hyperpartisans gathered on the Capitol Mall? What if Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan had been looking forward instead of backward, and engineered an honest bipartisan effort to reform taxes and healthcare? What if a new president energized by his surprising electoral victory had insisted on such?
A leader more given to the hard work of introspection might ask such things. He would find himself confronted by the futility of trying to govern using the same rudely divisive politics that got him elected. He might look at what hasn’t been working. Maybe consider some correction to his modus operandi.
That, I suppose, would be the Hollywood script.
We’re operating more on the level of reality TV. It’s harder to predict the arc of the story from here.
I’ll hazard a guess.
The temperature is nosing toward fifty degrees outside my window in the far southeastern tip of Minnesota. I saw two robins at the side of the path today. Overhead the geese are returning in noisy waves, and soon the farmers will be out furrowing the fields.
Spring has crept into the air. The cycle turns, as it always does.
I think a thaw is creeping into our politics as well. Its first voices are the remarkable students of Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Instead of talking to grief counselors after the terrifying butchery at their school, they got on busses to Tallahassee and Washington and started talking to politicians. They asked that some greater good come from the great evil done at their school.
So far, the prospects for meaningful gun legislation at the Federal level have not brightened. But the students’ voices were heard in gun-friendly Florida, home state of the Parkland massacre. Florida’s Republican governor just signed a reasonable gun bill into law. It’s a start. For a generation of students just coming into voting age, the gun issue is taking on moral dimensions that feel a lot like the Vietnam War did when I was their age.
The NRA instantly filed a lawsuit to reverse the Florida law, defining the moral low ground on the issue. The gun people always make the same argument: you can never say with 100% certainty a specific law would have prevented the last gun tragedy. But that’s not the point. We all understand no legislation can banish the Grim Reaper from our lives or our schools. We’re just hoping to dull the blade he keeps swinging our way.
To hear the earnest voices of the Parkland students is to believe their lives are worth the effort, even if it means some experimenting with the actual legislation. That’s the moral high ground. Its clarity will have a lot to do with any detoxifying that happens in the nation’s politics. Imagine it spreading to things like climate change and immigration policy, where the party currently running the nation’s affairs has been equally intransigent in their adherence to the moral low ground. Cracks start to happen in the party line. The truth makes its way in. Forces the cracks wider. The cycle turns, as it always does in the slow, awkward process of democracy.
This, maybe more than anything else, is where Trumpism ultimately fails. The writer in me listens to the language. At the heart of the president’s populist rhetoric there is always an expectation for some permanent turning of the tables. Like when the Bolsheviks threw out the Russian aristocrats. There is no sense for the natural ebb and flow of a democracy. No acknowledgement a loyal opposition can even exist. It was bound to end up in quicksand.
Still, in that brief moment at the presidential roundtable on gun violence we had a glimpse of a functioning Trump presidency. It came and it went. It revealed much. Mr. Trump ran as a reformer beholden to nobody. It turns out he’s beholden to the unbending deals his party has made with devils like the NRA. He’s beholden to his own need to project his fears and insecurities onto the nation as a whole.
There’s a lot of zeal for the coming midterm elections. The president would be wise to count himself among those feeling it. A good shellacking might finally be the antidote to his frustrations, if it managed to divert some of the malign impulses coming from his own party and personality issues. It would leave the president with a stark choice. Work with the opposite party, which has given him some of his best moments so far. Or become increasingly irrelevant, like a boy king in some strange American Regency administered by a Democratic congress.
Either scenario feels like a hopeful reawakening, for the nation at least if not for the man elected to govern it.
The students are leading the way. As I write this hundreds of thousands of them descended on Washington for the March For Our Lives rally. They were joined by sister rallies all around the world. There is a news account from Dahlonega, Ga., where 20-year-old Marisa Pyle said through a red megaphone, “We’re going to be the generation that takes down the gun lobby.” Look at the pictures from the rallies. Watch the film of Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez standing fiercely silent in front of the crowd for the six minutes and twenty seconds that the shooting had gone on at her school. I don’t think anyone is going to convince these young people they’re wrong.
Meanwhile over at the White House, no one was home. The president had decamped to his estate in Florida to play golf and view events through the soothing filter of Fox TV. Maybe he’s already irrelevant. He’d spent the previous week in hot water for firing advisors and tweeting insanities. The refrain we keep hearing from his people is don’t listen to what the president says, watch what he does. But how in a democracy is a president supposed to do anything, if no one is listening to what he says?
Most often the workings of the Trump administration are portrayed by the media as farce. I’m beginning to wonder if the more appropriate dramatic metaphor is tragedy.
