The crowning moment
The BBC’s New York correspondent asks if US politics is permanently down the crapper.
(My answer without reading further would be hell yes.)
Trump’s victory rally in the East Room of the White House the morning after his acquittal, where Republican jurors stood to applaud, may well come to be seen as a definitive moment – when the party of Reagan truly became the party of Trump.
But the party of Reagan was nothing to brag of. (Neither was the party of Clinton; it just wasn’t as bad as t’other one.) Reagan was elected because he was once a Hollywood B-actor. Not a good reason. He lacked Trump’s venom so in that way he was miles ahead, but the cheery lack of relevant knowledge and mental capacity was very trump.
Striking, too, was how the Attorney General, William Barr, got up from his seat at the event to clap and salute Trump’s legal team, suggesting the wall that should exist between prosecutors at the Justice Department and political operatives at the White House has been flattened.
Ick. I missed that.
So the East Room revelry felt like the crowning moment in the fifth wave of Republican radicalisation. After Goldwaterism in the mid-Sixties, Reaganism in the Eighties, Gingrichism in the Nineties and the Tea Party in Noughties, this was the triumph of Trumpism. His first tweet after his acquittal drove home this point – an animation of election placards reading Trump 2020, Trump 2024, Trump 2028, etc, etc, an age of Trump stretching endlessly into the future.
In other words he’s promising a totalitarian future ruled by him (when burgers made from the fresh brains of infants have made him immortal). No escape.
For me, though, the moment that encapsulated the era came when Trump awarded the presidential medal of freedom to the conservative radio host, Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing talk show host is a high priest of polarisation. Few conservatives have done more to pave the way for Donald Trump. With that primetime ceremonial, the president revealed the chronic state of America’s disunion.
The problem with Limbaugh isn’t just “polarisation,” it’s more the venom and hatred and contempt: the trumpism.
Nick Bryant ends with a question: ” Is the United States beyond the point of repair?” We know it’s not really a question though.
Or he’s planning an American monarchy, eventually to pass the crown on to Ivanka, whose own most promising sprog will doubtless be groomed to succeed her, and so-on, ad infinitum.
Nah, by him. He doesn’t grasp the concept of mortality.
What a terrible article. Nick Bryant and the BBC should be ashamed of it. The bothsiderism, the apathy, the stagnation. In times like these, you have two options; you fight or you yield. I will not surrender. Not to Boris Johnson and not to Donald Trump.
I am tired of niceness, of taking the high road when they drag the bottom. I’m sorry, Michelle Obama, I admire you greatly, but the high road is a dead end. You cannot fight tyranny while retaining decorum.
I’m tired of optimism, of complacently quoting Martin Luther King about the arc of the moral universe. The arc only bends towards justice if we bend it. It is not inevitable.
I’m tired of mockery taking the place of action. Yes, humor can be one of the tools with which we can fight. But we can’t let it obscure the horrors that are already taking place, of people who have already died at the hands of the Trump administration. Of the rocketing use of food banks in the UK, the cuts that have fallen primarily on women, children, and the disabled.
I will lose the right to vote in the UK by the time of the next election, assuming it completes a full term. But I am still a British citizen, and I will fight against the rack and ruin of my home country. Here in the US, I will gain the right to vote in a few months. Too late to vote in the primary, but since Tennessee doesn’t hold its primaries until March, the race might be over by then anyway.
But I will vote in the general, for whoever the Democrats pick. Even if I don’t really like them, even if I don’t think they will make a good president. Again, I live in Tennessee, in a blue dot surrounded by ruby red, so my vote for president won’t count for much anyway. That doesn’t matter – I can still help support the races down-ballot, which may turn out to be more important anyway.
I won’t give up hope. I won’t lie down and die. I will fight with my teeth bared and my fists clenched. My grandparents, who fought in the trenches, packed munitions, and built tanks, would expect nothing less.
I didn’t read it as bothsideserism, but I take your point about the apathy. Strength to your sword arm.
The Age of Moral Bankruptcy, brought to you by the hateful ignoramuses of the Trump Organization (a subsidiary of the WWE).
Voting in protest is all we can do, none of the current candidates have escaped the shit slinging politics of the twitter toilet culture. The high ground is obscured by the foggy swamp you have to wade through to get there, in which no one can navigate unscathed. I am particularly unhappy about how the toxicity is so contagious, and I see how it negatively affects me personally. It takes no small amount of effort not to be sucked in by the outrageousness nastiness, but I will not embrace the Dark Side. Sorry folks, some of us can still think for ourselves, whether you like it or not.
Keep up the good fight Claire.