I had driven down to Florida to see my parents only a few short weeks ago, and now was making my way back to my home in Massachusetts. In the time between these two multi-day road trips, however, my attitude toward how best to make use of the time behind the wheel had done a complete 180. On the drive down, in mid-September, I had been desperate to avoid thinking about anything related to the election, if I could possibly avoid it. We had two months still to go, and if I could have put myself into a deep space-style cryo-sleep, the way they presumably will for future trips to Mars, I would gladly have done so. "Wake me when it's over!" was my philosophy.
Now, we had less than two full weeks left, and it felt as if the grains of precious time were slipping through my fingers. A few days from now, either the curse might be lifted at last, or an even longer and darker night would settle over America. Either way, it was plainly my patriotic duty to understand the moment of history we were passing through fully while it lasted—whether that was for the sake of chronicling for posterity an episode of temporary madness our country had endured (a "parenthesis" in history as some optimistic intellectuals later wished to dub Europe's fascist period after the war had ended)—or in order to say I did not walk into the new even more hideous era with my eyes shut.
I therefore took advantage of this three-day odyssey to play over my speakers what seemed a kind of "greatest hits" of the Trump administration—the recent-ish books providing insider-y takes on the working of the collection of crooks and con artists that currently run this country's executive branch. I have missed so many of the milestones in this genre along the way (never finished Woodward's first book, e.g.; never touched Comey's), and I suddenly felt that I didn't want to pass out of the Trump era (if we are indeed reaching its end, please God, dear God) without having quaffed of any of this stiff, gut-tightening brew. Therefore, I fired up the "Audible" app to listen to Peter Strzok's book, followed by the one published last year by the Fusion GPS team—the folks who brought us the Steele dossier.
What strikes one above all when hearing or reading these books—or really any time one forces oneself to contemplate the totality of the administration that is hopefully coming to its end—and my point is that during this road trip I was finally forcing myself to do so again, after having for months ardently sought not to do so—is just how impossible it is to overstate the criminality, venality, cruelty, and odiousness of this president and the people he has chosen to surround himself with. In Trump there is a lodestar of viciousness, a solar system of sleaze with him at the center. There is just such a heaping mountain of moral sludge that this man emits. And then, infinitely worse, there is his pattern of getting away with it.
This is the mystery that, in their different ways, the Strzok book and the Fusion GPS book are both struggling to confront. How is it that Trump can be such a hypocrite, such a liar, such a grifter and con man—and seemingly never be held accountable for it? The Fusion GPS authors describe how, during Trump's ascent through the GOP primaries, the details of his decades of connections to organized crime figures—his ties to the Italian mafia and later to Russian gangsters from the former Soviet Union—were reported in the Washington Post and other major outlets—only to be passed over in silence by Trump's political rivals, who were afraid of falling prey to his direct bullying during the debates.
Trump's background was littered with enough fodder to fuel what would have been weeks-long scandals for other politicians. In 1993, the Clinton administration was rocked by "Nannygate" simply because Bill's nominee for Attorney General had previously employed two undocumented workers. Trump—who staked his whole brand on stigmatizing immigrants—had demonstrably exploited the labor of undocumented employees when it suited him, paying Polish workers under the table and then lying about it afterward. Very far from the worst of Trump's sins, but exactly the sort of two-faced hypocrisy that used to consume media reports 24 hours a day. Now, it came and vanished, when the story did break, because new distractions and scandals almost immediately replaced it.
Trump is able to get off scot-free each time, it would seem, by the sheer magnitude and copiousness of his crimes. In contemplating this phenomenon, the phrase that sprang to mind for me was one of Brecht's: when crimes pile up, they become invisible. I knew the quote from an advocacy report that used it for an epigraph, so I went to dig up the original in context. The full line by the great German Marxist playwright and poet reads (at least in one translation, by John Willett): “The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. [...] But when a thousand were butchered [...] a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible."
Yes. Wrongdoing that might end another politician's career if it happened even once, Trump does a thousand times until it becomes unremarkable. Barack Obama, speaking in Philadelphia the other week, played a "what-if" game of supposing that some of the revelations about Trump had instead concerned his own administration. "What if it had turned out I had had a secret bank account in China?" he asked. "Do you think Fox News would have let that one go easily? They would have called me 'Beijing Barry.'" This is the fundamental injustice of Trump that never stops giving. His venality and criminality is already baked into the brand. People know it's there, so simply pointing it out has no effect. "He engages in outright fraud, nepotism, is in bed with organized crime!" one cries. It makes no impression.
Then, Trump turns around and is able to derive enormous leverage by merely insinuating that his opponent is guilty of some infinitely smaller violation of the same principle. Trump's businesses are largely fraudulent operations that exist to enrich himself and the immediate members of his family, while creating no value for anyone else, and which were built through ties to the Italian and Russian mobs, and he has refused to cut ties to any of these operations while serving as president, creating mammoth conflicts of interest, you say? Maybe so, but Trump is able to plant the thought that Hunter Biden engaged in implicit influence-peddling while his dad was Vice President (in a way that seems never to have influenced the prior administration's policy under Biden's watch) and it somehow sticks more in the mind.
During the last presidential debate, Trump called Biden's family a "crime family." Yet plainly Trump should be talking about himself. His family is the crime family. For god's sake, practically the entire original leadership of his campaign team has been criminally investigated, charged, indicted, and convicted since Trump came into office. Trump during the debate tried to make hay of Democrats' craven missteps on immigration and criminal justice policy in the past, which are real—yet which morally pale in comparison to Trump's statements calling for a death penalty for nonviolent drug offenders, his "zero tolerance" family separation policy, his current practice of blocking all asylum seekers at the border, and on and on.
We are plainly seeing the Brecht effect at work. Trump's crimes pile up, and we fall silent. A single crime, or just a single instance of hypocrisy—an iffy choice that looks questionable in hindsight—that sort of thing is easy enough to grasp and condemn. Hunter Biden shouldn't have capitalized on his dad's name at that Ukrainian company! we say with confidence. The Obama administration shouldn't have reintroduced family detention! True, true.
But can we try to remember that Trump's family engages daily in far more far-reaching and insidious influence-peddling? That Trump himself was impeached in Congress for literally bribing a foreign official with U.S. military equipment to undertake a politically-motivated investigation of his opponent and to disseminate bogus Russian disinformation? That Trump has continued to practice family detention and has tried to expand it into a universal and indefinite practice—that this, indeed, is what he really means by his crowing about ending so-called "catch-and-release"? How can these much bigger things be so much harder for us to keep in mind than the much smaller accusations Trump levels against his opponents?
The fate of Peter Strzok is itself an instructive example. The crime he was investigating during his time at the FBI was the unfathomably vast travesty of the Russian government's attempt to use disinformation and division to get Trump elected president, the Trump campaign's knowledge of and willingness to accept this election interference in his favor, and their subsequent efforts to lie about it and obstruct efforts to investigate the interference. Yet Trump was able to make use of a handful of texts that Strzok had privately sent to his wife expressing dislike of the president to suggest that he, Strzok, was the corrupt one; that he, Strzok, was the threat to national security—indeed that he was a "traitor," in Trump's words.
And somehow, Strzok's texts lodge more firmly in the public consciousness than the findings of the Mueller report and later Senate inquiries confirming the fundamental validity of the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign. More firmly than the odious lack of concern for his fellow Americans evinced by Trump's willingness to welcome, encourage, and lie about Russian campaign interference. Why? Why did Strzok's text seem to people like a lack of patriotism, but not Trump's attempt to cover up a Russian effort to sabotage a U.S. election, just because he thought it made him look bad?
Perhaps in the end it's because it hurts the soul to contemplate the enormity of Trump. We like to get outraged about relatively minor ethical lapses, to wax indignant about smaller and more fixable abuses, because paradoxically these things confirm our sense of moral progress. If these are the things we have to be angry about, then clearly we're doing alright as a society! If "Nannygate" is our big concern, then obviously 99% of things must be going pretty well. We therefore feel that evil has already been routed, and we are merely in the mopping-up stage of the operation. Tying up a few loose ends in our effort to create a more perfect union. Purging the last vestiges of personal influence and inhumane practices from the institutions that administer our government.
To think about Trump, by contrast, is to acknowledge that we have a much bigger problem on our hands. A rat gnawing at the heart of the Republic; a moral corruption and stink at the very center of the body politic. We are not up to facing this, so we look away. Trump does not fit our image of ourselves as the quintessential liberal democracy, so somehow, most days of the week, we do not see him.
Case in point: a friend was sharing with me a recent article by Daniel Dennett in which he apparently took for granted that "Western people" had an ethical value system that does not tolerate "nepotism." He was talking about a theory propounded recently by a cognitive scientist that suggests people in Western democracies literally think differently than people elsewhere. One of the traits he identified as distinguishing the two human groups is that—allegedly—"we [Westerners] are individualistic, think analytically, believe in free will, take personal responsibility, feel guilt when we misbehave and think nepotism is to be vigorously discouraged, if not outlawed."
Do "we" think this, Daniel Dennett? Do we now? Perhaps he has missed the fact that the Western free world, the biggest economy in the erstwhile liberal democratic sphere, is currently led by a mobbed-up real estate developer who has appointed members of his own family to White House positions—indeed, who just staged a Republican National Convention in which he seems to have purged every member of the party not abjectly committed to his personalistic rule and/or not a member of his own immediate family.
Ah, perhaps he says, but that is just a passing aberration. That's not who we truly are. I guess on November 3 we'll find out.
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