Your bag is empty.
One week before Christmas 2019 President Donald J. Trump became the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.
His avarice, greed, lack of self-control and inability to follow the Constitution got him to this point. His narcissism, lack of respect for the rule of law and despotic nature also served him in his quest for infamy.
Insomuch as Trump has always wanted his name written in the history books, he should be happy right about now.
But his recent activity also shows he’s frustrated, bitter and out of control. On the eve of the historic vote in the House of Representatives Trump sent a six-page letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that reads like a multitude of recent presidential tweets combined with some of the monologues Trump has delivered at rallies, pool sprays and appearances on the White House South Lawn.
The letter makes mention of hoaxes, alludes to witch hunts (“More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials”) and takes the Democrats to task for ruining the country. It’s filled with lies and inaccuracies, but in a mere six pages it captures the essence of Donald Trump and his presidency in 2019. Reality isn’t in the offing when the president writes, “There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. Unfortunately I don’t know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.”
Both threatening the Democrats and claiming to be a victim of their dastardly deeds, Trump’s letter is surely one of the most convoluted and troubling things ever written by a president.
When it comes to his impeachment, Trump always paints himself as a victim—and at the same time bullies his opponents into submission.
Trump is the guy who claimed his inaugural crowds were the greatest ever, so reality has never been his strong suit. In his current crisis, he asked a foreign power to interfere in the coming election to suit him personally. He confessed to it. He released memos of conversations with the president of the Ukraine that proved it. His acting chief of staff said we should get over it, and his ambassador to the European Union told us everyone was in on it. And Trump denies it.
He claimed the Democrats worked with foreign powers to throw the 2016 election. In his world the Democrats colluded with foreign powers to rig the election… for Trump! To sell the idea, the president has frequently thrown out words like “Deep State” and blamed the FBI and the U.S. intelligence agencies for conspiring against him. This QAnon-fed conspiratorial fiction is sold every time Trump opens his mouth and his followers buy it—and in some cases they have inspired it. Trump has some convinced the Democrats have been hunting him “probably before I was elected,” as he said in a recent White House pool spray.
A source there told me recently the Democrats and Hillary Clinton purposely threw the election just so they could impeach Trump with a larger goal of destroying the GOP. “But it will never work,” I was told.
Of course it won’t work. It’s fiction.
For Trump loyalists the impeachment isn’t a reason to abandon him; it’s a reason to rally around him. Go Team Trump!
But selling fiction is what the Donald does. He fancies himself a political Don Rickles. But he lacks the man’s stage presence and pathos while presenting us poorly written material. You can see it in his letter to Pelosi as he berates Democrats on the Russian “hoax,” crying that they didn’t recant their claims, ask to be forgiven or apologize in the first place.
When it comes to his impeachment, Trump always paints himself as a victim—and at the same time bullies his opponents into submission. This tactic makes it necessary to ask, “Under what circumstances is it okay to criticize or question the president?”
For some it is evidence the president has had a psychotic break. They may be right. But whatever his mental state is, Trump and his supporters in this last year have displayed a growing ability to embrace fiction that supports authoritarian rule. The fact that so many in the GOP have sold their souls in order to remain in power is a frightening example of how personal gain can be used to sell out the greater good.
Trump has effectively neutered the watchdogs of the press with repeated screams of “Fake News”—a term he freely admits he uses to make sure people don’t believe it when bad things are written about him. Thus we plunge even lower.
Donald Trump is destined to be the first president in history to attempt to be re-elected after being impeached. Should he win, the United States we learned about in history books will become a fiction and the new reality will be a country that more resembles modern Russia than the Republic for which we stand, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
But as I’ve said many times this year, Donald Trump is not an aberration of the system from which he sprang. He is the epitome of it.
We stare at the abyss of extinction as a species while insulting each other over what brand of God we worship. Trump fans the flames.
He has capitalized on divisiveness, corrupted reality and reduced politics to a game. Trump loves the WWE and he garnered a national following with a reality show. The two are not unrelated; they are indicative of Trump’s love of the game. And Americans love their games. We see everything as a game. We follow the NFL and the AP basketball poll, cheer for our favorite MLB team and wear jerseys of our favorite athletes. These are things that matter to us, and they inform how we in the press cover politics, how people follow politics and who we cheer for in the political arena.
Tribalism is at the heart of the game, and so Trump followers are still on the team, ready to weather any storm as any loyal fan would. Did Trump lie? Did he cheat? Did he sell us out? It matters little. Team Trump is on board. Facts be damned. It’s first and ten. Do it again. Witnesses came forward condemning Trump? Hey, it’s a blitz—find your check down and get the first down. To Trump fans it’s enjoyable to watch. Who doesn’t love it when your favorite team wins against the odds? For Trump loyalists the impeachment isn’t a reason to abandon him; it’s a reason to rally around him. Go Team Trump!
We have no one but ourselves to blame for such venal attitudes, but we often don’t acknowledge our blind spots. So while many say we are in the middle of one of the most contentious times in our history, we do little to change the game. We merely blame others. The Internet and social media catch a lot of the blame for our divisiveness, but in truth the chasm in society already existed. Current technology doesn’t heighten it so much as reveal it.
No Child Left Behind, a gift from President George W. Bush, accounts for much of the problem: It created an entire generation of Americans who were taught to pass tests in lieu of thinking critically.
Every child was left behind and, as George Carlin famously noted, it has left us “just smart enough to run the machines.” Meanwhile, the gulf between those who have and those who have not has continued to expand and both sides of the great political divide continue to jab at each other, unwilling or unable to understand reality.
Pelosi’s response? More divisiveness. She holds impeachment over Trump’s head like a modern sword of Damocles.
There are astrophysicists and even some theologians who speculate that we may be living in a “Matrix” universe—a simulation that sits on a child’s laptop somewhere—and that nothing matters and nothing is real. That’s the consequence of seeing everything from the gamer perspective. Lost in that mindset is the fact we are losing our planet.
Trump’s policies have exacerbated our problems regarding climate change, racism, sexuality, the chasm between the rich and the poor, pollution, disease, global political stability and free speech, and he has thrown our government into chaos. We stare at the abyss of extinction as a species while insulting each other over what brand of God we worship. Trump fans the flames.
The Democrats impeached him, but the Senate as we come to the end of the year shows no plans to remove the malignancy from office. Trump’s fiction, it seems, will conquer reality. Pelosi’s response? More divisiveness. She holds impeachment over Trump’s head like a modern sword of Damocles and threatens to refrain from sending the impeachment for a vote in the Senate until Mitch McConnell promises a fair trial. This has Trump in tirades, but he soldiers on.
If history shows us anything, it is that the tyrant never succeeds—though he may appear to do so for a while. In the end people like Trump always fail. The question is this: How many will he take down with him?
How many will cheer him even as he is exposed for the lying, craven coward he is? And what will be the fate of those who believe politics should be about facts, not fiction?
The fate of the United States and the world hangs in the balance as we head into 2020. That’s the kind of drama Trump savors. But the reality is we’re not in the Matrix. We’re not on a television show.
Our future remains our own—if we grasp reality.
Happy New Year.