Lessons from 2020

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From: Luis Alberto Padilla Menendez <luisalberto.luispa@...>
Date: Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 03:44
Subject: A political obituary for Donald Trump_The Atlantic
To: I R I P A Z <iripaz@...>


A Political Obituary for Donald Trump



The effects of his reign will linger. But democracy survived.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 ISSUE
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2021/01/>, *The Atlantic*

*George Packer* <https://www.theatlantic.com/author/george-packer/>


------------------------------

Staff writer for *The Atlantic*



                  To assess the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency, start
by quantifying it. Since last February, more than a quarter of a million
Americans have died from COVID-19—a fifth of the world’s deaths from the
disease, the highest number of any country. In the three years before the
pandemic, 2.3 million Americans lost their health insurance, accounting for
up to 10,000 “excess deaths”; millions more lost coverage during the
pandemic. The United States’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom
House’s annual index
<https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores> dropped from 90
out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that of
Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international
organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted
into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of
barrier were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the
parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S. officials remain
unknown.

                  Trump reversed 80 environmental rules and regulations
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html>.
He appointed more than 220 judges to the federal bench, including three to
the Supreme Court—24 percent female, 4 percent Black, and 100 percent
conservative, with more rated “not qualified” by the American Bar
Association
<https://www.americanbar.org/groups/committees/federal_judiciary/ratings/> than
under any other president in the past half century. The national debt
increased by $7 trillion, or 37 percent. In Trump’s last year, the trade
deficit was on track to exceed $600 billion, the largest gap since 2008.
Trump signed just one major piece of legislation, the 2017 tax law, which,
according to one study, for the first time brought the total tax rate of
the wealthiest 400 Americans below that of every other income group. In
Trump’s first year as president, he paid $750 in taxes
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html>. While he was
in office, taxpayers and campaign donors handed over at least $8 million to
his family business
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ballrooms-candles-and-luxury-cottages-during-trumps-term-millions-of-government-and-gop-dollars-have-flowed-to-his-propertiesmar-a-lago-charged-the-government-3-apiece-for-glasses-of-water-for-trump-and-the-japanese-leader/2020/10/27/186f20a2-1469-11eb-bc10-40b25382f1be_story.html>
.

                  America under Trump became less free, less equal, more
divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and
deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump’s years in
power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or
misleading statements
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_3>.
Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of
tens of millions of people. Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning
the atmosphere like radioactive dust.



                  Presidents lie routinely, about everything from war to
sex to their health. When the lies are consequential enough, they have a
corrosive effect on democracy. Lyndon B. Johnson deceived Americans about
the Gulf of Tonkin incident and everything else concerning the Vietnam War.
Richard Nixon’s lifelong habit of prevaricating gave him the nickname
“Tricky Dick.” After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans never fully recovered
their trust in government. But these cases of presidential lying came from
a time when the purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal,
make a disaster disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular
goal. In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their
leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never
lie to you,” and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to
Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular.

                  Trump’s lies were different. They belonged to the
postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but
reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life,
clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air,
dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose
was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the
public. He was stunningly forthright about things that other presidents
would have gone to great lengths to keep secret: his true feelings about
Senator John McCain
<https://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/trump-attacks-mccain-i-like-people-who-werent-captured-120317>
and
other war heroes; his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his
desire for law enforcement to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his
effort to extort a foreign leader for dirt on a political adversary; his
affection for Kim Jong Un and admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive
view of white nationalists; his hostility toward racial and religious
minorities; and his contempt for women.

                  The most mendacious of Trump’s predecessors would have
been careful to limit these thoughts to private recording systems. Trump
spoke them openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but
intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that
would otherwise have constrained his power. To his supporters, his
shamelessness became a badge of honesty and strength. They grasped the
message that they, too, could say whatever they wanted without apology. To
his opponents, fighting by the rules—even in as small a way as calling him
“President Trump”—seemed like a sucker’s game. So the level of American
political language was everywhere dragged down, leaving a gaping shame
deficit.

                  Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many as 50 daily in the
last fevered months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his unconcealed
brutality. Lying was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he said
aloud what he was supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again
about matters of settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the
better. Two days after the polls closed, with the returns showing him
almost certain to lose, Trump stood at the White House podium and declared
himself the winner
<https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-tweets-outrage-vote-count-df13d922b6249ff6c23d5021ae314e37>
of
an election that his opponent was trying to steal.

                  This crowning conspiracy theory of Trump’s presidency
activated his entitled children, compliant staff, and sycophants in
Congress and the media to issue dozens of statements declaring that the
election was fraudulent. Following the mechanism of every big lie of the
Trump years, the Republican Party establishment fell in line. Within a week
of Election Day, false claims of voter fraud in swing states had received
almost 5 million mentions in the press and on social media. In one poll
<https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/09/republicans-free-fair-elections-435488>,
70 percent of Republican voters concluded that the election hadn’t been
free or fair.

                  So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds
of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon
isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic
institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump
believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a
different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a
mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding
power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.

                  For his opponents, the lies were intended to be
profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor
debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and
again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked
incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and
abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.

                  For believers, the consequences were worse. They
surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling
themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter
swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from
@realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting
their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After
the election, as charges of voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew
Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist, tweeted
<https://twitter.com/mattsheffield/status/1324908316548493313?s=20>: *“Truth
for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t
even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the
sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that
liberals are evil.”*

                  How did half the country—practical, hands-on,
self-reliant Americans, still balancing family budgets and following
complex repair manuals—slip into such cognitive decline when it came to
politics? Blaming ignorance or stupidity would be a mistake. You have to
summon an act of will, a certain energy and imagination, to replace truth
with the authority of a con man like Trump. *Hannah Arendt*, in *The
Origins of Totalitarianism*, describes the susceptibility to propaganda of
the atomized modern masses, *“obsessed by a desire to escape from reality
because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its
accidental, incomprehensible aspects.*” They seek refuge in “a man-made
pattern of relative consistency” that bears little relation to reality.
Though the U.S. is still a democratic republic, not a totalitarian regime,
and Trump was an all-American demagogue, not a fascist dictator, his
followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him.
Defeat won’t change that.

                  Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he
did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses toward
elites. In a democracy, who gets to say what is true—the experts or the
people? The historian Sophia Rosenfeld, author of *Democracy and Truth*,
traces this conflict back to the Enlightenment, when modern democracy
overthrew the authority of kings and priests: “*The ideal of the democratic
truth process has been threatened repeatedly ever since the late eighteenth
century by the efforts of one or the other of these epistemic cohorts,
expert or popular, to monopolize it.”*

                  Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators,
government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped
create the populist backlash that empowered Trump. His reign of lies drove
educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the
more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve it (the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, election pollsters). The war between
populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to
persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.

                  Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party
that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an
opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism. He leaves behind a
society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example
licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his
policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our
minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the
agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy
depends.

                  But we now have the chance, because two events in Trump’s
last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the
truth. The first was the coronavirus. The beginning of the end of Trump’s
presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation
<https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/03/12/donald-trump-coronavirus-address-march-11-2020-sot-vpx.cnn>
for
the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be
completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie
into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it was too personal and
frightening, too real. As hundreds of thousands of Americans died, many of
them needlessly, and the administration flailed between fantasy, partisan
incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized
that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed.

                  The second event came on November 3. For months Trump had
tried frantically to destroy Americans’ trust in the election—the essence
of the democratic system, the one lever of power that belongs undeniably to
the people. His effort consisted of nonstop lies about the fraudulence of
mail-in ballots. But the ballots flooded into election offices, and people
lined up before dawn on the first day of early voting, and some of them
waited 10 hours to vote, and by the end of Election Day, despite the
soaring threat of the virus, more than 150 million Americans had cast
ballots—the highest turnout rate since at least 1900. The defeated
president tried again to soil our faith, by taking away our votes. The
election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the
lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is
the legacy of Donald Trump.
------------------------------

*This article appears in the January/February 2021 print edition with the
headline “The Legacy of Donald Trump.”*

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