In France this past weekend, Donald Trump alienated his allies, undermined national interests, and displayed a level of heedlessness and foul temper that would have embarrassed Richard Nixon.
Excerpt: "Speaking to the Daily Caller, a right-wing Web site, Trump declared, without a crumb of proof, that the reason for the Republican losses in the election last week was people dressing up in disguises. Seriously. “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I’ve been saying for a long time,” Trump said. “I’ve had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
Trump’s Rages and the Case for Optimism
If Donald Trump were not so unbalanced, were he not exacting such immeasurable damage on the domestic welfare and the national security of the United States, you might find it in yourself to feel a tinge of sympathy for one so lost. Since his failures in the midterm elections, his unwinding has accelerated. The President of the United States rages daily on the heath, finding enemies in the shapes of clouds.
Speaking to the Daily Caller, a right-wing Web site, Trump declared, without a crumb of proof, that the reason for the Republican losses in the election last week was people dressing up in disguises. Seriously. “The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes, which is what I’ve been saying for a long time,” Trump said. “I’ve had friends talk about it when people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again.”
Foreign leaders who have tried to soothe Trump, to locate his human core, have an equally difficult time searching for rationalism in the White House. They find, over and over, to their grief, that Trump is unreachable, lost in his dark reveries and conspiratorial fantasies. The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided to call Trump last Friday, when he was en route to Europe, on Air Force One. Her goal, according to the Washington Post, was “to celebrate the Republican Party’s wins in the midterm elections—never mind that Democrats seized control of the House.” Trump replied to May’s gesture with an “ornery outburst,” berating her at length for failing, in his estimation, to help him contain Iran and to reverse unfavorable international-trade agreements.
The next day, in France, Trump did what he always seems to do on foreign trips: he alienated his allies, undermined national interests, and displayed a level of heedlessness and foul temper that would have embarrassed Richard Nixon. On the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, Trump was scheduled to make the short trip from Paris to the site of the Battle of Belleau Wood, which was fought in June, 1918. There were nearly ten thousand American casualties at Belleau Wood, a legendary battle in the history of the Marines. Many of those marines are buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where the commemorative ceremony was held. Trump blew it off. It was raining. The President, it was reported, does not like the rain. The grandson of Winston Churchill declared Trump “pathetic.”
The unwinding accelerates daily. The unhinged tweet storms; the thunderbolts of blame and insult; the firing of Jeff Sessions and the appointment of a hyper-obedient acting Attorney General; the invective hurled at the press (and particularly at African-American reporters); the fact-free rants directed at firefighters trying to put out conflagrations amplified by climate change; the obvious fear of looming investigations and the special counsel’s report. . . . There is no question: the President is losing what last shred of poise he might have possessed.
It was, from the start, impossible to imagine Trump carrying out the duties of state, practical or ceremonial, with any sense of deliberation or dignity. A little more than two years ago, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to watch President Obama give a memorial address on Veterans Day. It was a brilliant fall day. Thousands of vets and their families had come, as they do every year. It was a distinctly melancholy occasion, and not only because of the surroundings, the heavy fact of having so many war dead around you. Just two days before, Obama had met with Trump, the President-elect—their only one-on-one meeting.
At Arlington, Obama carried a wreath to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and then, in a speech at the amphitheatre, he said, “Veterans Day often follows a hard-fought political campaign, an exercise in the free speech and self-government that you fought for. It often lays bare disagreements across our nation. But the American instinct has never been to find isolation in opposite corners. It is to find strength in our common creed, to forge unity from our great diversity, to sustain that strength and unity even when it is hard.
“It’s the example of the single most diverse institution in our country—soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coastguardsmen who represent every corner of our country, every shade of humanity, immigrant and native-born, Christian, Muslim, Jew, and nonbeliever alike, all forged into common service.”
Seventy days remained in Obama’s Presidency. One had to imagine Trump at Arlington and at other solemn moments like it. When Trump took power, his first instinct in office was to divide, to issue the “Muslim ban,” to unleash a toxic cloud of rhetoric intended to undermine what his predecessor had called, at Arlington, “our great diversity.” On Veterans Day, Trump, in all his petulance and lack of understanding of his own office, did what he had done in France. He passed. He did not go to Arlington.
The midterm elections did not suggest at all that Trump is finished, that he has no chance to be reëlected and prolong this degrading chapter. He still has the capacity to energize a significant and powerful base of voters. He still holds the Senate; his capacity to deepen his mark on the Supreme Court and on lowercourts remains. Trump will surely start devising ways to slime the committee chairpeople in the House, particularly those who are likely to lead investigations into his activities—Maxine Waters, Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, Elijah Cummings—and those who will, after New Year’s Day, start announcing their candidacies for the Presidency. Trump’s ferocity as a campaigner is not to be underestimated, and, sensing his own imperilment, he is bound to campaign with even less consideration for the bounds of decency than he did in 2016 and 2018.
And yet the election results, which continue to accumulate, are not on Trump’s side; his furies make plain that—his declarations of glorious victory to the contrary—he understands this. The Democrats won back at least seven governorships and made serious inroads in state legislatures.They performed well not merely on the coasts but in crucial parts of the Midwest, the Southwest, and even the South. The cities and the suburbs are not with him. The Democrats took at least thirty-four seats back in the House and, of course, flipped the chamber, so that committees will now all be chaired by Democrats.
The House Freedom Caucus, which has been so influential, has lost its footing. The voices of women, particularly Democratic women, have been amplified in Congress like never before.
Finally, the elections, over all, made it even more evident than before that the Republican Party has made its pact with a President who is losing support and, in demographic terms, losing the Party’s traditional advantages. The advantages that it continues to hold have less to do with popular support than with the inequities of gerrymandering and the structure of the Senate and Electoral College.
For two years, certain institutions and forces of American life have, imperfectly, fitfully, resisted the autocratic and anti-constitutional instincts of the Trump Administration. Judges, investigators, civil-society organizations, protesters, government officials and ex-government officials in possession of a conscience, and the press have done important work. The election, which nearly everyone understood as a referendum on Donald Trump, has had the most powerful effect of all, and it has led to his current unwinding.
There is no overestimating the damage that Trump has done and will continue to do. He will go on, at best, ignoring the perils of climate change, the evidence of a future that is our present, from the wildfires of California to the swamping of New Orleans, Houston, Puerto Rico, and the state of Florida. He will go on, at best, ignoring the mortal peril of gun violence and the fiscal peril of heedless financial policy. He will go on trying to frighten Americans about “caravans” and “terrorists” infiltrating the country. And he will go on undermining invaluable international institutions and alliances.
But there has always been a case to be made for hope. And the case was made, most powerfully, at the ballot box. When the President fantasizes that the vote was a fraud, the result of criminals dressed in one hat, then another, one shirt, then another—well, that rhetoric of desperation is a signal that maybe, just maybe, a change is on the way.
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