So now the cur has caught the car and the world waits to see what he will do with it . . . and it with him. As he begins the business of governing, Donald Trump will experience the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance occasioned by the gap between his Republican Convention bloviation, “I alone can fix it” — a starkly irrational thought, even for a post-modernist — and the reality of life in a democracy where separation of powers cuts him down to size. Beyond that, he will confront a landscape where more citizens think ill of him than good, where his level of public trust is unprecedentedly low and mired in cement, and where blame quickly trumps fame . . . We are in for a long slog, but so is he. I’ll bet on us.
The Mitchell Report: The Postmodern Presidency in Its Infancy
1/3/2017
Dear Friends,
That was then. This is now. So, what’s changed in five months?
Everything and nothing.
Donald Trump is now President. His favorable/unfavorable numbers are at historic lows. His patent characterological traits — mercuriality, volatility, infantility, insatiability, importunity, among others — are on daily display, showing congruity with the symptomatology of a malignant narcissistic personality disorder. As mental health literature shows, the arc of this malady bends not toward progress, but tacks toward heightened emotional intensity and psychological turbulence.
No good can come of an enraged Donald Trump, and particularly an enraged Donald Trump qua POTUS.
Foolishly, he has fired three federal law enforcement officials (Preet Bharara, Sally Yates, James Comey) who brought him unwelcome news, failed to take his phone calls, or were unresponsive to verbal cues about the need for loyalty or expressions of ‘hope’ for letting investigations-in-progress die a natural death.
As a result, he has tweeted and trumpeted his way into the sights and search mechanism of a special prosecutor, all of his own volition, even if he and Newt Gingrich see it as Salem-on-steroids.
Despite Trump’s assurances to both an American network television anchor and a Russian foreign minister that it was he who made those decisions:
"I was going to fire Comey-- my decision. There is no good time to do it, by the way," Trump told NBC News’s Lester Holt. “I was going to fire regardless of recommendation."
“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
His most recent tweet-storm tells a different story:
“I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt”
He has alienated friends and allies around the globe and seen his political stock tumble at home and abroad; demonstrated an uncanny and perplexing fondness for autocrats and human rights violators; serially contradicted the counsel of national security advisers on NATO’s Article 5, the Saudi-Egyptian-Emirati embargo of Qatar, the Paris Accord; and engaged in several ad hominem attacks on his own Department of Justice.
And not to be outdone by anyone or anything, President Trump presided over his first cabinet meeting this past week in a pantomime that could have been fodder for Saturday Night Live or standard operating procedure in Pyongyang.
And yet, he perseveres.
For how long and how successfully are open questions, whereas the ‘why’ is less so.
Donald Trump has triumphed because he offered something to segments of American society that no one else could . . . or would. And they, in turn, found him an acceptable alternative in a political race that featured two candidates with historically high unfavorability ratings. Beyond that, he chose to declare for office at a moment where the disdain and contempt for the status quo was acute, palpable, and redolent of sound and fury.
Here’s how UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild describes the Trump phenomenon in her National Book Award-winning study — “Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: A Journey to the Heart of Our Political Divide” — a five year personal journey in the homes, churches, and communities of Louisiana bayou country, light years away from her own bastion of liberalism in Berkeley.
“‘Collective effervescence,’ as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called it . . . is a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected . . . People gather around what Durkheim calls a ‘totem’ — a symbol such as a cross or a flag. Leaders associate themselves with the totem and charismatic leaders can become totems themselves. The function of the totem is to unify worshippers.”
Hochschild’s insight shines a bright light on the totemic effect of Donald Trump himself, the ‘Make America Great Again’ red cap, those thundering invitations to engage in politically incorrect speech and conduct, and even the TRUMP air force, often serving as backdrop to his rallies.
And she notes:
“Trump is an ‘emotions candidate.’ More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions. His speeches — evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift — inspire an emotional transformation.
“His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life. Many have become discouraged, others depressed. They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they now feel hopeful, joyous, elated . . . As if magically lifted, they are no longer strangers in their own land.”
In a related observation, Hochschild notes the essentiality of having a quarry for the anger and effervescence:
“One way of reinforcing this ‘high’ of a united brother-and-sisterhood of believers is to revile and expel members of out groups . . . In nearly every rally, Trump points out a protestor, sometimes demonizing them and calling for their expulsion . . . Such scapegoating reinforces the joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the ‘bad one’ helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the ‘good ones,,’ the majority, no longer strangers in their own land.’
Trump persists also because he is seen by many as emblematic of an America that once was, and that is vanishing due to preferential treatment for what Hochschild calls ‘line cutters,’ a term that captures the sense of victimhood her newfound bayou friends feel deep in their bones.
“Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans — all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is the Fox News deep story.”
As if that weren’t enough, Trump appeared at a watershed moment described by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt in a recent Commentary magazine article, “Our Miserable 21st Century:”
“It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.
Social mobility has always been the jewel in the crown of the American mythos and ethos. The idea . . . was that people in America are free to achieve according to their merit and their grit . . . Nearly two decades into our new century, there are unmistakable signs that America’s fabled social mobility is in trouble—perhaps even in serious trouble.
“We are witnessing an ominous and growing divergence between three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, output, and employment. Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose, America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less nowhere.
Finally . . . a December 2016 report by the “Equal Opportunity Project,” a team led by the formidable Stanford economist Raj Chetty, calculated that the odds of a 30-year-old’s earning more than his parents at the same age was now just 51 percent: down from 86 percent 40 years ago.”
Hence, the sound that millions of people throughout the country have been hearing is the requiem for the American Dream, and while the vast majority of them are part of the country’s bedrock, Donald Trump’s exhortations to them were base, bogus, and dishonorable. They weren’t the ‘deplorables,’ but their candidate, now President, and his aides were.
Yet this is not the lead story, enormously disruptive and disquieting though it surely is.
The paramount provocation that all Americans should be focused on, irrespective of political ideology, party affiliation, or personal animus, is about the persistent and prolonged intervention of Russia in the 2016 elections. Here’s how former FBI Director James Comey articulated it in his Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, responding to a question from Senator Joe Manchin (D - WV):
The reason this is such a big deal is, we have this big messy wonderful country where we fight with each other all the time. But nobody tells us what to think, what to fight about, what to vote for except other Americans. And that’s wonderful and often painful.
But we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion and lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act.
That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it. It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally. They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world. They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them. So they’re going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible.
That’s what this is about, and they will be back. Because we remain — as difficult as we can be with each other, we remain that shining city on the hill. And they don’t like it.
So, if the ‘WITCH HUNT’ reveals that crimes have been committed in this election cycle and the post-election period, including the opening months of the 45th presidency, they will pale in comparison to the revelation that neither POTUS nor his Attorney General have spent a moment on this momentous issue, before or since taking office.
That is a scandal of historic import, going well beyond maladministration, proportionate with collusion or obstruction, and tantamount to ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors.’
It’s well past time for recalcitrant and faint-hearted Congressional enablers, who are worried more about their 2018 electoral fortunes than whether democracy is under attack from a foreign power, to reread the text of the oath they have taken upon entering public office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
Time’s a-wasting.
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