“Very Fine People” (After Charlottesville)
Even someone as pessimistic and obtuse as me can sense that things feel qualitatively different for many of us after Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville, at least in the short term. Perhaps people — the people we need to deliver us from all this (in the right direction…) — are slowly waking up. Not the usual suspects — the easily-outraged or the flashy Resisters — but the non-ideological, non-committed Trump supporters out there (his base will never vote against him). I sort of doubt it’s ever going to be enough, but maybe it’s a start.
But Frank Bruni has an article in today’s NYT (“The Week When President Trump Resigned”) that still seems delusional to me.
He says:
Trump resigned the presidency already — if we regard the job as one of moral stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with self-regard, if we expect a president’s interest in legislation to rise above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic etiquette to be part of the equation.
But this misses the point in the way so many centrist and leftist commentators here do: his base elected him to do pretty much exactly what he’s doing (and not doing), and without electoral reform, they’re still powerful enough to hold sway over the rest of us. The same issue of the same paper even has a long article on how his supporters think he’s doing just fine…. The big question is whether enough of Trump’s fellow-travelers (especially the only weakly-supportive ones) might vote against him and his epigones next year and thereafter. I am (as always) pessimistic.
And later:
In Axios, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei noted that the president had “systematically damaged or destroyed his relationship with — well, almost every group or individual essential to success.” They then listed these “methodically alienated” constituencies: “the public,” “CEOs,” “the intelligence community,” “every Democrat who could help him do a deal,” “world leaders,” “Europe,” “his own staff.”
Well, yes — those are almost all the sorts of people his base would love to see pissed-off and alienated (except that nebulous thing, “the public” — just who might that be? Does it include his supporters?). Who’d a thunk it?!
Interestingly, in the paper version I first read (yes, I still get the paper version for sentimental reasons, I guess), he wrote:
He made clear that conflicts of interest didn’t trouble him. He opened the White House door wide to unmoored and unserious people, Bannon among them.
To describe Bannon as unmoored and unserious is about as delusional as it gets. The problem for people like Bruni is that Bannon’s deadly serious — and well-moored. Just not in the way Bruni might like.
(The online version of this paragraph is significantly different:
He made clear that conflicts of interest didn’t trouble him, drawing constant attention to Trump properties and incessantly pointing out that nothing in the law of the land compelled him to divest his business interests.
He opened the White House door wide to unmoored and unserious people, most recently Anthony Scaramucci, who, during his nanosecond as communications director, disparaged Bannon as someone engaged primarily in a limber act of self-gratification. That was on the record. Then Bannon disparaged his administration adversaries as being so threatened by him that they were “wetting themselves.” That was on the record, too.
which seems better to me, but still…).
In all this, in some sense, though, Bruni’s right: Trump has resigned the presidency, whether he knew it or not. But the presidency he resigned wasn’t the presidency he ran for, nor is it the presidency he’s living, and it doesn’t (yet) make much difference.
But Bannon (in other interviews and articles) is also right: if the Left goes only for the racism trope, we’ll probably lose. Go for the broader decency thing, though, and maybe we’ll start winning again. Maybe. It’s time to reclaim the word “decency” from the Right — there’s nothing decent about Nazism, racism, White supremacy, or domestic terrorism.
