An Apology:
This author may have been a little bit too harsh by placing the word accomplishments in quotes when referring to Trump’s biggest policy wins, biggest accomplishments during his four-year tenure.
A piece in the Washington Post today highlights some of Trump’s most memorable policy proposals and wins:
• Faster flushing toilets because “people have to flush their toilet 15 times.”
• More powerful shower heads because Trump wants his hair “to be so beautiful,” because his hair “has to be perfect. Perfect.”
• Fewer or no energy-efficient lightbulbs because they make Trump look orange.
• Dishwashers and washing machines that can “consume unlimited amounts of water and energy” and that “allow the water to really pour out,” respectively, according to the Post.
Finally, while Fintan O’Toole, below, points out that Trump did nothing about our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, we must be fair and recognize perhaps the “yugest” and most noble infrastructure miracle in mankind’s history, Trump’s Southern Border Wall.
Original Post:
It is the end of another year – a not-so-great year. It is also the end of a horrific era – the four-year Trump regime.
It is tradition to look back at the past year and laugh or cry, or a little bit of both, and to, with lots of hope and anticipation, look forward to the New Year and to make some predictions -— hopefully good ones.
Having experienced the disaster that was 2020 in many respects, I was not planning to reminisce. I am even hesitant to say “Auld Lang Syne” too exuberantly, or to tempt fate by making hopeful predictions for 2021.
However, as luck would have it, a TMV reader – Susan Rappoport — forwarded me an article from the Irish Times that I must share — parts of it – with readers.
The article is written by famous author, journalist, literary critic, historical writer, and political commentator Fintan O’Toole.
In the latter role, O’Toole writes incisive pieces highly critical of his own Irish government and is not shy of criticizing other governments and politicians, including his neighbor to the East – the United Kingdom – and especially that government across the Atlantic headed for the past four years by Donald J. Trump.
O’Toole has written scores of pieces about Trump’s politics, character, demeanor (“malign, self-obsessed, reckless of truth and decency, revelling in the harm he has done and can still do to the norms and institutions of democracy…”) and even his hairstyle (“[it] has been toned down”).
Observations about Trump’s hairstyle and “demeanour” are part of O’Toole’s most recent article, “Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands,” in which O’Toole summarizes Trump’s major 2020 “accomplishments” as follows:
The power of his instinct was that he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US.
That instinct proved sufficiently well attuned that he got nearly 75 million votes in November, even while his malign incompetence was killing his own people. He got those votes, moreover, having made it abundantly clear that he would never accept the result of the election unless he won. They were votes for open autocracy.
But O’Toole goes back even farther in time. To the 2016 transition period when “Trump was able to upend American politics before he was in office.” When “Trump took a single action that was scarcely noticed at the time but that, more than any other, defined his presidency.”
O’Toole is referring to the “the political destructiveness and the personal brutality” with which Trump humiliated Chris Christie and literally trashed his meticulously prepared transition plan, “the crucial details of how a Trump administration was going to work.”
“That action had both the political destructiveness and the personal brutality that would become familiar as the primary weapons in Trump’s armoury,” O’Toole writes, adding: “With Trump, the personal and political could never be separated and both were equally at work here. The personal was silverback gorilla stuff, humiliating Christie was a sadistic pleasure and a declaration to established Republicans that Trump was the boss of them all now.”
To those who hoped that “[t]he sheer weight of the office would alter [Trump],” that “‘the ‘adults in the room’ would keep him under control,” that, at worst, “Trump would do nothing. He’d sit around eating cheeseburgers and making calls to Fox News, while the serious people got on with serious things,” O’Toole notes they grossly underestimated Trump, adding “He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.”
Finally, O’Toole points out that Trump didn’t do anything about the crumbling infrastructure nor “start a war” for “all his belligerence and violently nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric.”
O’Toole gives two reasons for this:
His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.
…a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea. It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.
But what does O’Toole predict for 2021 and beyond?
That is the part of his article that is most ominous and perturbing.
Alluding to Trump’s legacy that he has “successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself,” O’Toole concludes:
In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of “the government”.
Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.
On this, I am with cartoonist Bob Englehart — and with millions of Americans — that 2021 will once again bring sunrise to America.
