For a blog aiming to offer a voice based on America’s bedrock common ground, talking about Donald Trump is risky. On any polarizing topic, two sides deem you either “with us or against us.” The slightest inadvertent slip will alienate someone, and everyone then forgets what your idea really means, reducing it instead to just one more partisan political football. Perhaps it’s better not to risk triggering the polar politics.
Yet not to address the question of Donald Trump is to ignore the overriding dynamic of public discourse today. No voice is relevant if it ducks that question. Ducking to avoid the risk is also cowardly.
Most important for this blog’s purpose, this nation is the vessel of a creed of unalienable rights, stated in the Declaration of Independence. Two political factions tout their stances as fundamental values, but those are at best interpretations, broad scale images of means to realize the ends of our founding creed. Their contest is really, more and more, about partisan positioning, not national purpose.
The politics that make the topic of Donald Trump another battlefield between the political poles amount largely to the same old partisan trench warfare. But not entirely.
Recall that Donald Trump vanquished a full field of Republican competitors for the GOP nomination in 2016. He successfully painted them as weak, “low energy,” and boring, and he talked in a raw and direct – crude – language that no serious Presidential contender uses. In short, he ran as the ultimate outsider to a feckless establishment. And then he beat the ultimate symbol of insider-ness, Hillary Clinton.
Our division of red vs. blue, left vs. right, masks another division. All the nation’s institutional managers, all the voices commenting on public affairs, all the rule makers from TSA to social media watchdogs, all the experts on public topics, all the lawyers, are people of some status whose work holds sway over our lives. The official language of government says they answer to the public, but the answering is diffused through layers of law, regulation, and administrative habit. This managing class, regardless of anyone’s politics, talks a certain way, goes to the same schools (The Supreme Court may be called 6-3 conservative vs liberal, but it is 4-4 Harvard vs Yale in law degrees, with one Notre Dame.), and feels that their functional expertise confers some moral sanction.
Any operators for an institutional system may be dedicated simply to the system’s technical functioning. But those operators, like anyone else, have their own professional interests. Our managing class passes their laws, programs their computers, drafts their regulations and writes their system specs, and expects reward and respect; they’ve done their jobs. Ordinary people then must contend with the results: forms to fill out, regulations to digest and obey, phone banks of ill-trained “service” personnel, monitored by a media run by the same expert class. There is no recourse against what feels like a unified, selfish, callous establishment of self-serving snobs.
Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters may include a lot of dislocated malcontents. But the sentiment that made him a political force is something we all share, with some reason. He’s the outsider ridiculing the insiders. And in 2016 HE BEAT THEM ALL. He is the comeuppance to the credentialed, low-energy, high-authority, jargon-spewing system operators.
Trump happens to have taken the red side of the political divide, but his real power is different. He does turn on conservatives; as it happens a lot of those who cross him look like establishment types. Meanwhile, the blue side wraps their objections to him in partisan terms, so that when Trump says that indictments against him are politically motivated, he’s not wrong. The merits of a case against him may be real, but many motives are just what he says. The problem is not what Trump represents politically. Much of his policy stance, particularly his anti-establishment appeal, has a legitimate place in our discourse.
The problem is him.
Trump respects no person, no law, no idea, no fact, no morality, except as it suits his personal wants and whims. We all know that. His alleged breaches of the Espionage Act do not suggest that he was out to subvert national security. He was out to wave classified documents around as a matter of self-aggrandizement, and any breach of laws perhaps enhanced that effect. It’s about him, and he will turn on anyone, follower or foe, who crosses him. He is not out to demean women, he just wants to display sexual prowess. He did not fight the 2020 election result to destroy democracy. He was out to win. No piece of paper, call it a Constitution or anything else, can be an excuse not to win.
Even the most abjectly craven of our other politicians will be restrained by the Constitution. That may often be because they are the weaklings Trump calls them, or at least inhibited enough to limit their breaches, the better to hide them. Laws are written for those who are moral or meek enough to obey. For the rest, we need law enforcement. And no one, whatever their intent, is above the law.
There are voices who carry the conservatism of most Trump voters. There are some who see the need for wholesale overhaul of our politics and institutions. Donald Trump’s success points out the longing for that overhaul. But his base actually doesn’t need him. He mobilized them but he didn’t make them. They made him. And the partisan sins of many of his antagonists are real, but so are his disqualifications. He is a political gift to his supporters’ foes.
America conceived itself on self evident truths that pertain to all persons. No one who cannot understand or doesn’t care about principle can lead this nation.
Common Conviction 