As Americans, we tend to carry around characterizations of Presidents in our heads, with perhaps the brightest being JFK’s Camelot. I can’t put a real finger on LBJ’s, although perhaps Vietnam vets might supply a fine epithet; Nixon was a common crook; Ford maybe a bulldog, but because of his abbreviated term, it’s faint. Carter, his impotence on Iran, although ameliorated by post-Presidency performance; Reagan’s really a bit of a tug of war between conservatives who remember the shining city on a hill and the fall of Communism, and liberals who remember his negligence when it came to HIV research. Bush I engaged in Iraq War I, and won it, while Clinton, sadly, is remembered for his blow job and subsequent impeachment, which no doubt gave momentum to the radicalization of the GOP. Bush II is remembered for discredited policies, controversy over torture, and simply general failure. Obama is too soon gone from the job, but I suspect, once the partisan furor dies down and the far-right returns to discredit, he’ll be seen as thoughtful and mostly effective, although, like any President, he’ll have his failures – I suspect historians will point out his impotence when it came to North Korea, but the Iran deal will be seen as effective if it’s left alone.
Which all leads up to Trump. While some may see it as premature to begin exploring the post-Trump period – assuming we even get there in a condition we can recognize as normal – a couple of strong themes stand out. Some folks will point at Bannon and the allied host of appointees and advisors who appear to be mostly incompetent, mostly ideologically driven creatures who are about to run smack-dab into reality. Others will point at the constant lies which Trump and his team indulge in; speaking as an American independent who is not viewing them through the cloudy partisan lens, but through the skeptical lens of the independent, I’ll evaluate on my own terms lens, it’s truly discouraging to see the leader of one of the major political parties so married to version of reality so tilted towards making himself magnificent. Steve Benen brought this into full focus for me today. After noting that once again Trump has announced our crime rate is at a 45 year high, when it’s actually at a 50 year low, Steve says:
We were surprised because it’s not true. In terms of the evidence, Trump has this exactly backwards. The president who boasted the other day about his skills as a leader who calls his own shots, “largely based on an accumulation of data,” seems incapable of understanding basic and straightforward crime figures.
Source: PolitiFact
Kellyanne Conway, asked to explain her boss’ repeated lies on the matter, said yesterday, “I don’t know who gave him that data.” …
All joking aside, the broader point here goes beyond the president’s incessant lying about the U.S. murder rate. The larger significance has to do with why he’s so fond of this specific falsehood.
For Trump, the potency of fear has become more than a campaign tool; it’s now a governing mechanism. Note, for example, that the day before he lied about the murder rate, the president also lied about a media conspiracy to hide information from the public about terrorist attacks.
The White House has a series of goals, and Trump World has apparently concluded that demagoguery is the way to reach those goals.
NBC News’ First Read team had a good piece along these lines yesterday: “[I]f you take the White House at its word, what it wants is wall-to-wall coverage for every knife attack and every wounding. Why do they want that? What goal does that accomplish? So the White House wants the public to feel more terrorized? To what end?”
The answer, evidently, is the implementation of Trump’s priorities. He wants a Muslim ban, so we must be afraid at all times of terrorism. He wants a border wall, so he urges us to fear illegal immigration. He wants expanded new police powers, so he insists we believe his interpretation of crime data, even if it’s the opposite of the truth.
But I’m not going to concur with either of these views, because they really only speak to facts; Americans respond much better to a good story. I think, at the end of his term, whether it’s four years from now, or four months, a majority of the citizens are going to look back and wonder, Why did any of us trust him?
Trump will be the President who taught US to, as Reagan said, trust but verify. Liberal or conservative, we now have the tools to get the facts to check the President’s assertions, which they always use to justify policies, good and ill. We let him hoodwink a significant number of us, partly for various reasons ranging from he promises what I need (without a plan) to apparently he heralds the end of the world, hurrah! (immature drama queens doomed to disappointment, just like the last batch) to simply he says what I want to hear about the world (again, an immature attitude – the world is what it is and you should learn to deal with it and not listen to only those sources that say it’s different – I’m a little crabby today).
Many of us – in fact, a majority of the voters – appear to have this figured out, but I fear we’ll have to go through a major lesson plan to drive the point home for a lot of folks who haven’t been paying attention and swallow news uncritically.
At the end of the day, is has to be trust but verify. Ironically, a good Russian proverb. Sigh.
