In case this isn’t obvious to anyone yet, history is not going to treat the Trump administration kindly.
The staggering level of corruption is the most galling daily reminder of its total lack of integrity, but the other two enduring traits that will cause even its most die-hard supporters to eventually look back on this period bitterly are its comprehensive ineptitude and its obvious duplicity.
As something of a fair-weather populist back in 2016, Trump promised ramped-up infrastructure spending, universal high-quality health coverage, the rooting out of corruption in government, extrication from foreign military entanglements, and a number of other macro policy priorities which, if actually implemented competently at the federal level, would have done genuine good for both his voters and the country as a whole.
As it turns out, these promises were nothing but platitudes—applause lines doled out alongside the constant stream of hateful invective to give Trump’s campaign a veneer of respectability and to coax the vanishing well-informed Republican voter to hold their nose and go along with his alarmist nativist know-nothing nastiness.
Not only has Trump failed to advance a positive agenda in support of any of these causes; he has instead taken repeated and deliberate steps to undermine most of them. But the people who see this betrayal for what it is are unable to convince his acolytes that any of this is actually happening, because in our current sad reality, everyone is apparently entitled to their own “facts,” blind partisan loyalty is valued above reasoned argument, and El Trumpo has convinced his assorted minions not to believe their own eyes and ears (once again, fuck you very much Kellyanne Conway; you are a disappointment to your family and your nation).
If you’re getting ready to defend this fake President on any of these counts, ask yourself a brief series of yes or no questions first, and answer them honestly:
Has he passed an infrastructure bill of any magnitude? No.
Expanded health coverage for the masses? Quite the opposite.
Eliminated or even measurably decreased governmental corruption in any way at all?
Perhaps he has at least removed us from Iraq or Afghanistan? Nope, neither. He kinda sorta pulled us out of Syria, but then quickly backtracked, and now seems confused about the whole situation. In any case we’re still there, and despite receiving praise for authorizing the killing of a key ISIS leader in Iran, Trump balanced this accomplishment out by pulling the US out of the painstakingly negotiated Iranian nuclear deal. The turmoil in the Middle East is now arguably worse than it was before, and the US has almost entirely ceded its role in subduing the widespread unrest in the region. Mission emphatically not accomplished.
As usual with Trump, time has worn away the gold varnish to show his true colors (mostly greens and grays, think of rotting meat that’s been out in the sun for 2-3 weeks and you won’t be far off). We should not be surprised. He has spent the past 5 decades breaking his promises; why would he stop now?
Sadly, beyond lining his own pockets and those of his wealthy comrades with his unfunded plutocratic farce of a tax bill, his only sustained policy initiative has been to malign and antagonize our top trading partners. These and other actions have cost American jobs, raised prices for companies and consumers alike, and strained trade relationships that have flourished for generations.
The unavoidable truth is that Trump and his peculiar brand of pompous mendacity are simultaneously failing to advance any substantive agenda and adding unneeded fuel to the political discourse dumpster fire. It’s all pain no gain for ~95% of us.
As has become the norm over the past several election cycles, consensus has been sacrificed in favor of conflict on the altar of profit. Trump is the latest and greatest manifestation of this phenomenon, but he is not the first product of this deeply corrupted system, and he certainly won’t be the last unless we do something about it.
In order to reverse our descent into incivility and repair our faith in the institutions of American government, we need a new approach.
Rather than submit to the prevailing media narrative frame of the Red Team and the Blue Team pitted against each other in an eternal struggle for political dominance, we should instead focus on finding the sweet spots where unbeatable supermajorities of the entire population agree on common goals, and then aggressively pursue those goals over all partisan and corporate opposition.
The Democrats have at least tried to rally support behind some of these priorities, but just like the Republicans, they fail when they prioritize the ideological approach over the practical one. It doesn’t need to be this way.
To wit, everyone wants a good-paying job and a safe, healthy environment in which to pursue their preferred interests and support their loved ones.
We all want to live in a country with first-class transportation, infrastructure, and technology, and the accompanying employment opportunities and quality-of-life improvements these features bring with them.
Last but certainly not least, we all want to see America continue to grow, to flourish, and to maintain its status as a shining beacon of freedom and progress for the rest of the world.
We have achieved these goals in the past and we can decide to fight for them again, but we are lying to ourselves if we don’t admit that we are currently failing to live up to these hallowed ideals. The distractions that pass for news and the frenetic online one-upmanship that we mistake for substantive debate have caused us to stray from the path toward greater peace and prosperity for us all. In order to find our way back, we must make a conscious course correction. We are better than this, and we need to remember how to act like it.
So let’s cast aside our addiction to entertainment and affirmation, and forge a path toward enlightenment through information.
We are a nation of survivors and strivers, doers and dreamers, caregivers and conquerors. We are at our best when we are competing not amongst ourselves but instead against the greatest challenges of our time.
We declared our freedom from the greatest empire the planet has ever seen, wrote the blueprint for modern democracy, then fought the bloodiest battle in our history to eradicate the scourge of human slavery from our land. We vanquished the Nazis, liberated Europe, and rode rockets to the fucking moon. And then, just because we could, we built the strongest economy the world has ever seen, established untouchable global military supremacy, and funded much of the research that led to the creation of the internet.
Surely we can agree that this is not where we want our story to end, and that the next decade would best be spent conquering the coronavirus and cancer, preserving the planet for our children, and building the best damn roads, rails, and communication infrastructure the world has ever seen. But we can’t do any of that if we decide to focus our energies on fighting with each other instead.
We can win together if we try. We will lose together if we don’t.
