Tag Archives: Donald Trump

A Pity-Party for the Man From the Penthouse

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                              wikipedia.org

His utterances come with a vast victimology that ranges from the press, to former friends and GOP allies, to loyal members of his cabinet.

Our President seems unnaturally sustained by a rhetoric of grievance.  Any event that calls for a public comment includes lines that alert us to his belief that he has been the victim of grave injustices. It hardly matters where he is: speaking to the boy scouts, holding a press conference with foreign leaders, in the comfortable womb of a Fox News, or acting out a kind of sundowners syndrome in reverse, with incoherent morning tweets mixing self-pity and verbal abuse. And so one morning we learn that it’s “sad” that even Republicans “do very little to protect their President.” (Tweet of July 23).  That self-referential quote is typical and also concerning in its switch to the Nixonian third person.  With these kinds of utterances comes a vast victimology that ranges from the press, to former friends and opponents, to loyal members of his own cabinet.

Presidents typically emphasize transcendent values in their comments.

This is all uncharacteristic coming from the person who holds what was until recently the position of “leader of the free world.” And its 180 degrees from where a President’s traditional public rhetoric should be.

Presidents typically emphasize transcendent values in their words. John Kennedy’s quotable Inaugural Address called on Americans  to fulfill the nation’s basic goodness. Trump’s will be remembered for his offensive description of America as a dystopian land of “carnage,” a tasteless dig at his predecessor seated a few feet away.

I can remember when the nation was shocked to hear a president level criticism of an American industry. Presidents didn’t do such things. The occasion was the 1962 decision of United States Steel and others to raise the price on its basic product.  President Kennedy feared it would feed inflation. In a press conference he bristled with frustration at the news.  He thought he had an understanding with company leaders, but was blindsided by the announced price rise anyway. His annoyance was the headline of the day.

Even so, we don’t remember JFK as an angry man. The steel issue consumed no more than a few moments in a press conference. Instead, we remember the countless times he used the presidential pulpit to celebrate American institutions, innovators and ordinary citizens. He had the grace and apparent modesty to let his actions speak for themselves.  And we had the sense that he was bigger than his small frame; a charismatic if cautious tactician able to absorb setbacks without demanding that others notice.

For many younger Americans like myself Kennedy was also the model of cool, the presidential equivalent of a musician like Miles Davis or the young actor Ben Gazzara. Their personas were slightly enigmatic and their words were measured, understated to let their talent do most of the talking. They are a long way from the needy billionaire installed in the White House who is defined by his daily whining.

The Appeal to Fear

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                                commons wikimedia

For our times we can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

If historians were looking for a label to characterize the dominant theme in our public discourse these days they could do no better than call it “The Age of Fear.”  It may be true that crime rates in most parts of the country have generally fallen, and that the chances of being the victim of terrorist attack are less likely than getting struck by lightning.  Nonetheless, we live in an age where too many voices in our political and news-gathering systems depend on fear as their most reliable theme. Acts of terrorism like the recent attack in Manchester England are sufficient for cable news networks, among others, to go into narrow and repetitive coverage.  Jerky cell phone videos add all of the video they need to endlessly mull  the imagined ghosts in the room, with the added effect of overstated  conclusions that we are not safe and terrorism is rampant.

The same thread is endlessly recycled by the President, who uses much of his public rhetoric to focus on threats allegedly coming from undocumented immigrants, Syrian refugees, Muslim extremists, Mexican drug smugglers,  Chinese banks, Australia, Germany, to mention just a few from his long list. We learned that we were in for a three-alarm Presidency when Donald Trump broke tradition in his inaugural address to rehash warnings that were endlessly recycled to his followers on the campaign trail.  He talked of the “American carnage” of too few jobs, insecure borders, abuse at the hands of our allies and more.  The speech was significantly out of the norm: less a ritual celebration of the transfer of presidential power than a victim’s list of grievances against others. And it surely resonated then as it does now with too many Americans with who have little patience to deal with the complexities of modern life. They do not know that the world is generally more understandable and actually less threatening if understood in 2000-word clarifications rather than 20-word rants.

Because we are hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization.

We can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism and reset it in our times: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel.  It’s easy if not responsible for a demagogue to conjure malevolent ghosts in our midst.  This is the rhetorical thread that connects figures from the margins of our civil life as diverse as “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace and any number of public figures who built a political base by motivating concerns about “Them.”  Using this thread usually provides an unearned advantage. Those nameless others inside and beyond our borders are almost always portrayed as  immoral, unclean or dangerously powerful.  The irony is that most Americans have no right to claim a nativist ideology.  Our ancestors came from somewhere else.  Even so, it thrives.

Fear appeals gain a natural advantage from the human impulse to fantasize about what we do not fully know or understand.  Fear always builds from the predicate of potential harm we can imagine. Because we are creatures hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization.  As any lover of film-noir knows, another person’s shadow is all we need to envision the worst.  It follows that verbalizing threats against survival is easily rewarded.  The beneficiaries may be political scoundrels, cable news companies, and various agents who have seemingly simple solutions to sell: everything from home security alarms to firearms to grotesque projects like a massive border wall.