Friday Thoughts
There are two magazines that I have read faithfully since the 1980’s: Vanity Fair and Esquire (I gave up on Sports Illustrated about 10 years ago. Do I miss it? Occasionally, but not much anymore). Esquire for their humor and politics, Vanity Fair for their 20,000-word articles.
In the October issue of VF, the mag asked six presidential scholars, including Jon Meacham, Robert Dallek and Garry Wills to evaluate the current occupant. Their consensus is pretty much the same. He is not fit to be President.
Meacham, draws on Kennedy’s learning his lesson from the Bay of Pigs in his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. There is a famous picture of Kennedy and Eisenhower walking after the botched invasion. Even though Kennedy had ripped Ike during the 1960 campaign, he respected him. They had both served in the military and Eisenhower knew of the plan before he left office. As they walked through the Rose Garden, “Eisenhower asked a crucial question. “Mr. President, before you approved this plan [for the invasion], did you have everybody in front of you debating the thing so you got the pros and cons yourself and then made the decision, or did you see these people one at a time?”
Kennedy answered, “Well, I did have a meeting,” with the CIA (their operation, after all) and the Joint Chief’s. Meacham continues, “He would never do that again: decisions required care and questioning, and Kennedy was humble enough to learn from his mistakes. The haphazard planning of the Bay of Pigs would give way, in October 1962, to a crisis-management apparatus known as ExComm, the executive committee of the National Security Council. As the Missile Crisis unfolded, Kennedy resisted being seduced by any one faction of advisers. He knew that each came to the table with preconceptions and interests of his own. Only the two Kennedys — the president and the attorney general — had the ability to see the whole. Would Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, rise to such an occasion?”
“(T)he president and the attorney general.” Hell, Trump doesn’t even like his Attorney General. And how did Jared the dullard get involved in this? Say Russia makes a move on the Baltic's or North Korea obliterates the Opening Ceremonies at the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, how would 45* respond? The writer notes: “In an interview with Megyn Kelly last year, (2015) Trump professed to being Too Busy To Bother With Whole Books, insisting, “I read passages. I read areas. I’ll read chapters.”
Yes, like he reads the Bible. “Two Corinthians.” All this time, I thought Reagan and Bush the Lesser were ignorant. I shudder to think what Trump might do in such an occasion. At least Reagan knew how to charm even his most ardent opponent and Bush tried to be compassionate (which, to be fair, he does come across as a fairly humble man). Trump shows no sense of humility. If there is an adjective beyond obtuse, that’s what he is.
Dallek goes back to Franklin Roosevelt and his early time in the depths of the Great Depression to bring hope to a nation who had seemingly lost it. He does bring up FDR’s ignorance, deliberate or not, of African Americans, but to wit:
“If these miseries — dividing the country between haves and have-nots — were not enough, there was also a cultural rift between rural fundamentalist America and multi-ethnic urban modernists. There were divisions over Prohibition, immigration, and evolution. The famous 1925 Scopes trial, in Dayton, Tennessee, pitting Chicago’s Clarence Darrow against Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan, and the split at the 1924 Democratic convention that forced the party into 103 ballots to choose a nominee, remained very much a part of the national political memory in 1933.
But Roosevelt, unlike Trump, who defends neo-Nazis and white supremacists, reached across cultural and political lines to remind Americans that they were one nation joined in a common struggle — first to save the country’s economic and political institutions from collapse, and then to save liberal democracy from assault by Germany and Japan.
Roosevelt’s ability to bring the country together was built, first of all, on a series of New Deal measures — Social Security, unemployment insurance, guarantees to bank accounts, rural electrification, minimum wages and maximum hours, and conservation of natural resources — that went a long way toward humanizing America’s industrial system. These measures did not themselves bring an end to the Depression — industrial mobilization for global war accomplished that — but his administration’s reputation for easing the perils of economic collapse made F.D.R. and the New Deal enduringly popular. In addition, through his appointments to high office Roosevelt brought previously marginalized groups — Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Catholics, Jews — into the mainstream of the country’s life. African-Americans never received the same sort of overt support from F.D.R. — Eleanor was another story — and he courted southern segregationists. An executive order by Roosevelt prohibited racial discrimination by private businesses with government contracts, but it was Harry Truman who de-segregated the armed forces. American blacks did benefit from the New Deal’s economic and social measures and abandoned the Republican Party for the Democrats.”
Look no further than today’s issues, income inequality, stagnant wages, the continued bashing of people of color, the forgotten, disabled and elderly and things haven’t changed much. Except now, Trump is trying to do away with the “administrative state,” as it were and looks to put up barriers rather than opportunities.
Roosevelt once said he want to comfort the afflicted and confront the affluent. Roosevelt was born of privilege, but afflicted with polio and knew from what he was taking about. Trump was born into the Upper Middle Class and forced himself into the nouveau riche by branding his name on everything. His attempts to forcibly enter the National Football League by suing them (and then attempting to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014), his open contempt of anyone who beats him or makes him look ‘bad,’ like Mike Tollin did in his 2009 documentary on the USFL, “ He never lets humanity get in the way of personal gain. He’s the same guy who looks down on anyone in his way, whose audacity and narcissism knows no bounds.”
Garry Wills, a noted history professor at Northwestern, as well as an editor-at-large for Esquire (and their lead politics writer for nearly 25 years), who, quite correctly, much as I have been doing in the last eight months, observes that this man is in the same realm as Richard Nixon. Wills calls it the “default comparison.”
Wills famously broke with William F. Buckley following the 1968 election and, in writing a book about old T, R&R, ended up on Nixon’s enemies list. So, he knows a thing or two about the trickster.
Of course it’s the default comparison. Unless you want to go to Woodrow Wilson or Andrew Jackson there is no other fair resemblance. To wit:
“There are some superficial resemblances between Trump and Nixon. Trump, like Nixon, has bottomless reserves of self-pity. Nixon, like Trump, was contemptuous of the press. But the dynamics in their cases are entirely different. Nixon pitied himself because the press fawned on the Beautiful People — jet-setters of the time. (How is it fair that fate made John Kennedy handsome and left me looking goofy?) Trump pities himself because the press will not pay unanimous homage to the most beautiful person in the world (who has the biggest jet of all). Trump openly loves himself as much as Nixon secretly loathed himself.
Another resemblance is their humorlessness. Senator Al Franken, an expert on laughter, noted early on that Trump does not laugh easily, if at all. He can sneer at Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary, but others, not he, are supposed to laugh at this. Nixon, who was not spontaneous at anything, could not laugh spontaneously. Esquire magazine ran an annual feature with the caption “Why is this man laughing?” next to an awkward picture of Nixon in mad cachinnation. Nixon was too guarded to laugh (“Are they laughing at me?”). Trump is too pompous to break his mien of majestic superiority. There is a kind of rough equality in laughter, a sense that we are joining the club of humanity.
The worst thing journalist Murray Kempton could say of any man was that “he has no sense of sin.” Nixon knew he had sinned but pleaded that it was in self-defense against all the anticipated sins of his enemies. Trump admits the Bible is a good book, but he cannot read it, since his name is not in it. A friend of mine used to say of an acquaintance that he had “an overdeveloped instinct of self-preservation.” That was true of Nixon. He had to mount defenses against anticipated attacks from all sides. In Trump, the need for self-adulation has overwhelmed his sense of self-preservation. He will do things to assert his magnificent magnificence, which only exposes him to greater peril (including the peril of looking ludicrous). He sees things no one else does: Muslim crowds cheering the Twin Towers down, record crowds at his own inauguration, all the “illegal” voters bussed into New Hampshire, the many blacks and Muslims who like him. He erases from his mind anything that does not please him at the moment. He promised to give up all his business ties, as so much “peanuts” compared with the office of the presidency. (He has given up nothing; in fact he is busily adding to his riches.) He would, we were told, be so hard at work in the White House he could not go near a golf course. He would release his tax returns — but only when an elusive audit was completed or when Hillary released all her e-mails. Apparently we are to learn the full horror of what we have put in the Oval Office only when he leaves it.
“HE POSSESSES A MONSTROUS PETTINESS, ONE OF MANY ANOMALOUS COMBINATIONS HE PULLS OFF.”
He claims a right to insult anyone or anything with impunity — whether it is women like Rosie O’Donnell, or war heroes like John McCain and Humayun Khan, or institutions like our “so-called” judges, or generals (he knows more than all of them), or NATO or the U.N., or scientists bringing off the “hoax” of climate change. It is tragically easy to think a man so petty he cannot be a deadly threat. But his is a monstrous pettiness, one of many anomalous combinations he pulls off — joining flashiness and furtiveness, from a man constantly on display yet hiding key dealings. He is a reticent blabbermouth. How to tally up the lies, to pick apart all the conflicts, to curb with the letter of the law a moral blindness on this scale? The truth is gradually dawning that there is no parallel to this thing we have lodged in our sacred Oval Office. He is that rarest of things, a true nonpareil.
Where will it end? The different legal procedures being explored — indictment, impeachment, mental disqualification — run up against his popular support. He has only a third of the country behind him, but its members have heavily invested their pride in his untouchability. They are a fierce and focused third of the country, against a diffuse and distracted two-thirds. Perhaps the only way an unparalleled menace can be countered is with an unparalleled and massive wave of moral revulsion. More people are growing ashamed of what we have done.
What did we expect when we let a man of dicey business dealings enter the White House without revealing his tax returns? How could we? People who have crawled to him are feeling the sickness of shame. Many do not want to work for him. He has a government of empty offices. Formerly reputable Republicans are wearying of the strange defenses they have felt bound to invent for him. Marches against him must increase in size and frequency. More people must resign from office on principle. More people must explain why they refused his offers of government positions. He degrades women. He degrades races and religions. He degrades us. The nation needs purification. May it come before it is too late.”
Then, of course, there is the man who succeeded Wills at Esquire, Charles P. Pierce, wrote back in June “It is time for him to go.”
There are too many obstacles for this President to overcome. Wills, Meacham and Dallek (as well as the others) all just scratch the surface of the depth of the madness of Donald Trump. The man has no empathy, no sense of shame, of sin, of anything except what benefits him. Perhaps he will resign, but I think it’s more like he’ll be forcibly removed from office as a result of Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Ultimately, this president* will go down in history as the worst person to occupy the office. He has sullied the country’s standing throughout the world and enraged everyone, including his base, here at home. If, indeed, he is the 21st century’s version of Nixon, aka History’s Yard Waste, then Trump is History’s Waste of Time.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/historians-on-trump-presidency
