The Tragedy and Waste of the Trump Presidency

 It's been only a few days since the Trump presidency ended, and I, and I suspect many others, haven't really gotten used to the idea of waking up each morning to find no breaking scandal or outrage. It is still a welcome novelty to have a president who is focused on the nation rather than himself, a novelty that will surely wear off soon enough, and one that clearly has not struck the fancy of patient folk like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson. It is so soothing to have no rage tweets each morning, nor any wonder about what presidential norm or tradition may next be shattered.

I could write a lot about the sins of omission and commission of the last president, and dwell for a long time on his fatal flaws and less than glorious claims to history as the only president impeached twice and the only one to seemingly encourage an insurrection. I could spend many wordy paragraphs on the inexplicable failures of the Republican Party and their abdication of all responsibility and moral rectitude. But I thought it may be more interesting to look for a minute at the sadder side of the last four years and the unique fortune that was Donald Trump's for the taking but which opportunity he sadly neglected to even consider much less reach out and seize. Trump was a unique figure in US history, a unicorn of sorts though perhaps a flawed and narcissistic unicorn and one particularly dangerous to be left around virgin maids; a man that I called "lightning in a bottle" a few weeks ago. Few presidents have had more opportunity to shape the world into a fundamentally different place, and perhaps none have done less to seize the opportunity. 

Donald Trump, amongst all the standard bearers of the party in the past two decades, was not beholden to the party. He rose to prominence by staking out a radical position, well removed from the familiar grounds of the party establishment. This is not to praise his role in questioning Barack Obama's birthplace, but simply acknowledges that Trump was not a part of the establishment. Most American politicians love to claim the role of outsider but Trump was one to whom the term truly applied. He won the primaries by bucking the party, refusing to commit to supporting the winner if he lost and mounting wild attacks on his opponents. Few stalwarts endorsed him early, especially when Jeb Bush was the anointed favorite of the party elite. Yet Trump won, and that placed him in an unique position of ruling a party he despised openly, and therefore free from the bonds of compromise and deals that typically pave the way to victory. Trump owned his party in a way that literally no other leader has ever done, and he owed nothing to the party leaders. He was free to be the presidential candidate he wanted to be.

During the election campaign and later, he continually showed his disdain for GOP orthodoxy. He promised to raise taxes on the rich, an absolute heresy amongst modern Republicans, even claiming that he would personally pay more in tax under his proposed system. Yet when the tax bill finally passed and became law, it was a warmed over mixture of the usual tax breaks served up during every GOP reign. While many groups saw a reduction in their tax bill, it would be hard to say that it ever raised the burden on the  richer sections of society. Generally, itemized deductions became less attractive, which is a good thing, but  there seems to be a consensus that it was corporations that gained the most. It is also fairly safe to say that the tax cuts did not pay for themselves nor did they boost the economy beyond the very short term. So while not quite a tragedy for the middle class, the Trump tax cuts were a waste of billions of dollars and a taste of the Trump presidency to come, where campaign promises were ignored and the GOP establishment got exactly what they wanted all along.

It was on rebuilding America that Trump truly failed. His party has stubbornly opposed spending money on infrastructure, even to the point of preventing others from funding it, but Trump rode in promising to rebuild America, and gild it, no less. Again, Trump the candidate promised grandiose plans for repairing Americas faltering bridges and highways, and less coherently promised to restore American manufacturing. Plans with eye-popping arrays of zeroes were floated, or at least the names of said plans were floated. Yet, when the time came to make good, Trump's trillion dollar inventment plan was orders of magnitude less and depended on magical private capital to fill in the difference, no credible reason being offered for why private investors should open their purse strings. This was more than a broken promise. This was a golden opportunity lost. Trump could have joined forces with his political foes, and used his even then considerable sway over his own party to push a real investment in the nation's future and he passed on it in favor of empty gestures and bombastic claims of great success to mask the most complete failure. Not only would this have benefited America, it would have made political sense as well, splitting his opposition and widening his coalition.

It is perhaps unfair to include healthcare here amongst his missed opportunities, not because he made the slightest effort but because it was always so obvious that he had absolutely no idea about the subject nor any interest in learning. But unlike a neurosurgeon whose motto is, "first do no harm", Trump attacked the existing systems with all the concerns of a particularly deranged bull in a shop full of delicate porcelain chinaware. He could have left the provisions of the Affordable Care Act in place, having discovered what most Democrat leaders already knew well, that America's healthcare system is really complex. But hatred for his predecessor drove him to push for repeal of the ACA, and only a late crisis of morality by John McCain stymied him from gutting it and plunging the country into crisis. But failure didn't chastise him any more than his brief glimpse of the complexities and his own ignorance, and he worked to destroy through executive action what he had failed to topple through legislation. Needless to say, the amazing plan he promised from the early days of his candidacy failed to ever materialize, being nothing more than a figment of his fevered imagination.

Trump rose to power on the strength of his opposition to immigrants, the central pillar of his appeal to a broad and confusing mixture of Americans. A forgiving critic may claim that he opposed only illegal immigration, but reality begs to differ. His public tirades attacked people as much for their background as their means of arriving here, and his actions included massive restrictions on the avenues for legal immigration. He fanned the flames of xenophobia with his promises of a wall to seal off Fortress America from the scourge of brown skinned immigrants. As a member of that dangerous brigade, I am more than a little opposed to his actions, of course. But it was precisely his ownership of the issue that gave him opportunity. It is well known that such knotty issues can sometimes be solved only by those who have established their  credentials on the subject. Like Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon on peace with Palestine, like Bill Clinton on Welfare reform, or Ronald Reagan on raising taxes, Trump could have used his perceived hardline stance to negotiate a real and broad solution in a way that no one else could. George Bush and Jon McCain tried but could not bring the radical side of their party to the table; Marco Rubio abandoned his attempts and fled at the first sign of opposition from his right. But Trump was the radical wing of the party. He could have made a grand bargain, and such was his hold on the party that they would have had no choice but to follow along. His supporters would have believed him if he switched position and claimed that a comprehensive reform bill was the way to end illegal immigration. This was a man who made the GOP, the party of Ronald "Tear down this wall" Reagan, amend their party platform in favor of Russia and Vladimir Putin. He could have sold the final bill anyway he liked and his supporters would have gone along for most part; the few who broke ranks and called out the emperor's lack of garments would find that they no longer commanded the same attention when attempting to compete with Trump and the Democrats would have stayed out of his way, if they had enough to cheer on their own side. But Trump never once attempted to rise above his baser instincts, he never sought to unify the nation through compromise nor find common ground with his opponents. Instead he doubled and tripled down on his xenophobic and racist behavior, and pursued meaningless aims like a border wall (effectiveness or rather lack thereof being just the icing on his rotten cake) even to the extent of stripping the military of housing funds to build a few miles of barrier of debatable efficacy. It was a situation and a moment crying out for a statesman, but instead of a Trajan we got Nero.

Trump was  a man who won the rare opportunity to rise above himself, to become far more than any of us expected (in part because we expected so much less of him than of Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton), a man presented with a moment is history where he could have changed the nation for the better. But in the end he failed because of who he was. He rose because he was the most political of outsiders, reading the angst of a vast swath of the populace and riding the wave to the White House. He failed because he was the most venal of politicians, catering only to the lowest common denominator amongst his supporters and whipping up the basest emotions rather than rising to a nobler calling and drawing them along with him. This was the  tragedy of Donald Trump, that when Fate called he was true to his inner self and his true self was every bit as mean and small as ever we had feared.

The Flames of Wrath

 When I departed the shores of my native land some twenty years ago, I expected to miss some aspects of life in the old country and I was not disappointed in my expectations. What I did not miss was the violence and death that stalked our elections, and that I naively believed I had left well behind. Till now. This past month and more, it has been increasingly obvious that this nation I now call my residence was hurtling towards a cliff and that the leaders of the executive branch of government were busy pushing it forward ever faster instead of making any attempt to stay its course towards mayhem and destruction, aided and abetted by their allies in the legislature. On a wintry afternoon in the first week of the new year, the United States found itself on the edge of the cliff and staring down into the flames of chaos and as this week turns, it is far from clear if we have reeled away from the precipice or whether we are still tethering there, arms windmilling and wondering if the slightest mistake will send us hurtling down into the abyss. 

For as long as I can remember, the world has looked, rightly or wrongly, to the United States as an example of how a democratic republic should function. Unlike the United Kingdom, with its centuries long history and tradition that helped them develop their democratic institutions, the USA was a better example to newly independent nations emerging into the light of freedom, especially when for nations that had suffered years under European colonial rule but also for nations that had fallen under dictatorships or communist rule during the Cold War. To be sure, the Philippines may have taught us a thing or two about American colonialism, but we saw that less and were generally enamored of the brighter image, of a nation that cast off colonial rule and forged its own destiny by adopting a progressive and revolutionary government where the power resided with the governed populace. And while the US model was flawed, it always seemed to be trending forward leading towards a better, brighter future for all. And one thing that was never even questioned was the transfer of power from one administration to the next. Even when the 2000 election transfixed the world and opened our eyes to the myriad oddities of the US electoral system -  electoral college, no national or even state-level system, archaic and non-uniform - on the far side of the world, I never doubted that there would be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power. It was one of our greatest sources of pride in India that our own young republic had managed a similar tradition and that no matter how deep the political or personal differences, a losing government graciously yielded to its vanquisher, while an unsuccessful challenger ruefully accepted its loss, and this in contrast to most other nations in the neighborhood and further abroad.

In 2016, I never expected Donald Trump to defeat Hilary Clinton but I sensed that something had changed forever in his continuous talk about how the election was rigged against him (it wasn't!) and his refusal to accept the results unless he won. I suspected that he was simply setting up for his defeat, as a way to avoid that he had lost to a woman; I also suspected that Russia expected no more than to create divisions, to cast doubts and de-legitimize the incoming president, and were as surprised as anyone else when Trump tapped into a deep vein of rural discontent and rode it to victory. Four years of corruption and ineptness later, President Trump returned to the same playbook, railing about rigged elections though the electoral college actually favors him and the Republicans fully control or at least share power in all the battleground states, sowing division and hatred, lying shamelessly with absolute disregard for reality or truth. And when he finally came up short, to the tune of seven million votes, he refused to accept his defeat and did all that I had expected in 2016, except that his actions were now the actions of the President of the United States.

From the moment it became obvious that Biden had restored the Democrat's "blue wall" in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and flipped Georgia and  Arizona to cement his victory, Trump went into overdrive with ludicrous claims of fraud and after barely a moment's hesitation, the elected congresspeople of his party swung into line. Some of them tried to have it both ways, neither endorsing Trump's false claims but not repudiating them either nor acknowledging the obvious victory of president-elect Joe Biden. Others were less bashful and leaned into the president's dangerous narrative, claiming to share his beliefs of dead voters, fake ballots and other fake assertions. And through their self-serving acts of omission and commission, they fanned the mistaken belief of Trump's more fervent believers that their champion's victory had been stolen by nefarious actions. Rather than highlight the fact that Trump's lawyers had never stood by their claims of fraud in court nor brought any evidence before the courts in even one of more than five dozen chances. But his supporters never saw, or at least never acknowledged the sixty to one record in court challenges. They were fed an unvaried diet of lies on their preferred source of propaganda (it is impossible to pretend that these are news services), amplified on Twitter and Facebook and other less social media. Rather than let them move through the stages of grief, the president trapped his supporters in denial and as the clock counted down to the end of his inglorious term of office, they finally reached anger, and finally on January 6th, it boiled over in a way that we had never imagined but should have seen coming all the way from 2016.

When an angry, armed mob storms the Capitol, chanting their intent to hang the vice-president, it is impossible to call this anything other than an insurrection. It failed, partly because this was a mob led by a morally corrupt coward, a man who embraced them while things seemed to go his way but denounced them and threatened them with dire consequences as soon as it became obvious that he would have to pay for his role in the violence. A fanatical supporter, an Air Force veteran was shot dead, while a policeman was beaten to death and three others died of indirect causes and the death toll was no larger only because the mob had no plan beyond storming the Capitol and stopping the pro-forma certification of the winner of the election win. Had they actually encountered Democrat or the small number of Republicans who accepted reality, though, things may have been much, much worse. The rioters were largely drunk on lies and white privilege and no one explained their attitude better than Elizabeth from Knoxville, who was shocked that police used mace on her while she was storming the capitol as part of a"revolution". But while the execution may have been ludicrous and their attitude lends itself to mockery, the anger is real enough. When millions of people buy passionately into so dangerous a lie and believe that they have been wronged and robbed, they are not going to easily accept that they were in the wrong and quietly accept that they have lost. When many of them have come to believe the wildest of conspiracy theories and come to view the situation as a pivotal point of history with themselves as the guys in white hats, and when so many of them are also owners of weapons of war, the potential for violence is beyond possible and almost certain. Trump and his Congressional enablers have sown the wind, and while Mitch McConnell may have decided to hop off the crazy train now, the situation is now beyond their control and it is the nation that must reap the hurricane. Opportunists like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Trumpists like Matt Gaetz, the owner of Devin Nunes' cow, Mo Brooks et al, and conspiracy-crazed newcomers like Representatives Boebert and Greene might seek to ride the wave they've helped unleash, in reality they control it as much as a rider on a tiger - if they ever try to pivot back towards reality, they will find themselves considered traitors and hated even more than perennial enemies of this movement. Mike Pence has experienced it already, as have others like McConnell and Lindsey Graham. Even the nominal leader of this movement, Donald Trump himself, is now irrelevant and his feeble calls for peace are likely to be ignored; many of his supporters have dismissed these messages as coerced or fake and have vowed to continue with whatever it is they believe they are doing.

Donald Trump has to answer for so many sins against this nation, from gutting the Affordable Care Act without any alternative to destroying the postal service, from stacking the courts with hundreds of unvetted, and often, unqualified judges to politicizing the civil service, from destroying the environment to turning his back on combined action on climate change, from disparaging the US intelligence services in favor of Russia's (in all but name) dictator to stealing housing funds from the military to fund a mostly meaningless, ineffective and environmentally disastrous border wall. He is arguably culpable in the death of four hundred thousand victims of Covid-19. But this is the deepest and most lasting wound he has inflicted on his own country. He has sown the grapes of wrath and now he will skulk away into ignominious obscurity leaving us to harvest the bloody results.