For Donald Trump, what began as farce is ending as tragedy

TomDispatch

 

Marilynne Robinson, a novelist I admire, offers a glimpse of our Trumpian present and future at the Guardian. Tom

"A kinder fate might have cast Donald J Trump as a maitre d’ in the world of swank, careful to save the best tables for his best customers, warmly responsive to a good tip, the ultimate outsider as insider, being and also impersonating a man whose fondest memory of youth is the first time he heard “I Did It My Way.” But fate was not kind. It made him a billionaire of sorts with a trick of putting his name on vodka bottles and casinos, of growing richer through bankruptcies and bad debt, of enthralling the tabloids. And yet, despite all this, Manhattan seems to have remained unimpressed. A tower almost as tall as he said it was, remarkable hair, and yet he was the baffled outsider trying to figure out what he was getting wrong. What began as farce is ending as tragedy.

"Fate truly outdid herself when she made him president of the United States. From this pinnacle of attainment he was able to look out over a vast world that was largely and unshakably certain he did not belong there. It would be easier to grant the pathos of his situation if his response to it had not been so largely bitterness and rage, and if his great office had not magnified his petulance into a force that could destabilize the republic.

"The attack on the US Capitol, perhaps satisfying as revenge, was still a serious miscalculation. Trump told his mob once again that he had been cheated out of re-election, then sent them off to the Capitol where his defeat, an accomplished fact, was being formalized and finalized in deference to law and tradition, two sources of exasperation that had nagged him since he first set foot in the Oval Office. Which, by the way, is not all that spectacular.

"The attack expressed nothing but rage. That monosyllable, “Trump”, which has appeared in many odd places over the years, was shouted in the Rotunda. It flew on banners. What was meant by it, beyond the fact that the mob acted out of fealty to one man, is open to debate. Authoritarian movements seem always to be able to pass themselves off as populist. To know what this vandalism, threat, desecration meant it will be important to know who the perpetrators were, what lives they put aside to come to Washington and stage this tantrum-by-proxy.

"Say that their motives are summed up in the word Trump, that they identify with the rage that lies behind his ridicule and bullying and his destructiveness. There always are people like that, and now they can find each other on the internet. Trump himself is resounding proof that there is resentment material comforts do not assuage. We have learned that self-pity can be weaponized, that physically healthy white men who, historically, may have enjoyed successes largely because the deck was stacked in their favor, and who now must endure the spectacle of high achievement among those the deck had always been stacked against, can feel personally, mortally injured. This is flatly contemptible, a fact which may be germane to our present situation, not only in accounting for their deep affinity with a man who was a millionaire from toddlerhood, who seems, before his presidency, rarely to have had a problem not anticipated in a non-disclosure agreement. Trump whines and laments and begrudges, any impulse of compassion swallowed up in his own neediness. He did not start this scourge of self-pity, but he is its epitome, its apotheosis.

"The best traditions of this country were built on self-restraint. To defend the constitution, the duty so frequently invoked in every crisis, means to honor a code of law that constrains law – respecting religion, speech, the press, peaceable assembly. These are precisely the things that, historically, governments have controlled fiercely. While it is not surprising that the Founders took it for granted that they and their kind would be running the new government, this makes it only more remarkable that they did such a brilliant job of tying their own hands. The constitution is a masterpiece of brevity, a mere slip of a thing, in part because later generations have shown such restraint in amending it. A vast, distinctive civilization has sprung up from it, a polity that enacts its loftiest rituals of government in business clothes, to the sound of a gavel. At best, this sustains a system of checks and balances, of self- and mutual restraint. And this in turn is sustained, at best, by a reverence for the old decorum of acknowledging and accepting limits.

"At present, we are being reminded that our system depends on the willingness of half, often more than half, of the electorate to accept the legitimacy of a government they did not choose. Lincoln’s election is a great proof of the disaster that can come when legitimacy is not conceded. Considerations of this kind ought to check self-interest and resentment. Perhaps these were instilled with the old cultivation of soul, or with ideas of dignity and courtesy. Democratic citizenship may be an art we are forgetting how to practice, and Trump, in his furious impatience with boundaries invisible to him, with customs and norms he can never understand, may offer a glimpse of our future.

"To compare our extremists to early European fascists is fair, to a point. Action Française and the Nazis used bands of thugs to terrorize and kill journalists and civil officials, to make a place for themselves in the public mind, where they planted the notion that they were the true, essential, Frenchmen and Germans. They claimed to speak and act from a kind of authenticity that nullified law and reason, that shamed the cosmopolitanism that exposed their nations to foreign ideas and influences. Trump says to his crowds, “You are the real people, you are the people who built this country.” Narrowing the meaning of American, as he does incessantly, he makes a minority, white people who sympathize with him, into a Volk. They sense that the vote was rigged, they say, which gives the much-debunked claim the standing of truth, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

"Well, Trump is about to enjoy the distinction of a second impeachment. He has fallen into the snares of Washington, the outsider candidate who thought he had become the ultimate insider until he realized he could actually be ghosted by those of his innermost circle who had anything to lose by association with him. He is not without friends, however. There are Rudy Giuliani, and the thousands who cheered as they ransacked the center of government. They might break into the Senate chamber, but they will never take a step into Mar-a-Lago."

LINK