America at a decisive crossroads
As it stumbles toward the midterm elections like an elephant with a stake in its foot, America and its democratic ideals have reached critical mass. The canons of decency, and so far gentlemanly behaviour, which once defined the presidency and which were once assumed or taken for granted, are under assault in the era of Trump. And it is not just about Trump and his evisceration of the office of the presidency. America is becoming a soulless nation whose social fabric has been so torn that it will cause irrevocable change in the country for ill in years to come.
At the time of writing another mass shooting has taken place in the country. This time it is members at worship in a Jewish synagogue who are the victims. This latest shooting has been met with a marked resignation because Americans have been down this road too many times and yet the authorities seem impotent to do anything to cauterise it. The resignation and increasing cynicism is that people do not expect anything to be done about the problem. They wonder quietly or loudly as to when and where the next shooting massacre will occur.
Meanwhile, the country is saddled with a chief executive who, by his public utterances, does not seem to understand that he is fuelling the fire for such violence to continue. An adjective that is used constantly to describe the presidency under Trump is “unprecedented”. This is so for we have never seen a president who is this bombastic, who is willing to lie about issues, and who will publicly ridicule his opponents on the basis of their intelligence, their looks, or their ancestry. Even the physically challenged are not spared from the inanities of Trump. We have never seen a president who accepts chaos as an ideological principle and who has presided over the most chaotic Administration from the very start of his presidency.
We have never had a president who, by his own admittance, delights in groping women in their private parts and who has to be legally battling porn stars in the public space. And we have never had such a president, because there was a time in the country when even a whiff of public scandal, especially a sexual scandal, would be a disqualifier from office. Trump plays to the worst common denominator of the American experience; not only by demonising his opponents in the most atrocious ways possible, but by making false equivalences in behaviour that should be condemned. He seeks to establish a moral equivalency between a person who sends bombs to prominent citizens with those who shout at Republican politicians at a restaurant. While doing this he seeks to exonerate himself from his own angry and publicly hostile persona by blaming others for the incivility and hostility in the country.
President Trump does not seem to understand that, as president, he has been called to a higher bar than any other citizen in the country. That is why he is given the protection of a Secret Service and other privileges which no other American citizen can ever enjoy. Yet, almost every day he flies in the face of the honour and decency of the office which Americans have given him the privilege to have. He is bereft of empathy when he should show it. Two former presidents and their wives, a vice-president, a former secretary of State, and other important citizens are sent letter bombs and, at the time of writing this piece, the president has not had the decency expected, even by protocol, to call even the past presidents to commiserate with them and their families on what could have been a tragic event. Instead, he attends a campaign rally and makes light of the event by bringing in false equivalencies and attacking the press.
No other president has so often, and publicly, referred to the press as an enemy. In the polarised culture that America has become, the president is not mindful that such hostile rhetoric could be endangering the lives of journalists. He clearly does not seem to care if they should be set upon. It would serve them right for criticising him. He does not and perhaps cannot show empathy when it is demanded. This lack of empathy is true to the nature of the man who occupies the White House and characterises the kind of Administration he has sought to conduct.
There is probably no problem with a real estate millionaire who has swagger, is braggadocios, narcissistic, and believes in his own triumphalism. And I say “millionaire” as I believe that if his true liabilities should be known, and if his true ownership of resources established, he would come out at best at $500 million. Yes, I know this is conjecture on my part, but you get the drift. No one really knows, because he has not revealed his tax returns to the public.
While the citizens might not be concerned with his personal affectations, idiosyncrasies and inclinations, they should be with the ways in which he besmirches the office of the presidency. They should be concerned about the hostile rhetoric and the chaos which attends the way the president governs. They should be concerned about truth-telling, which can build the kind of trust in the viability of the country’s institutions, especially that of the presidency. They should be concerned about his dalliance with dictators around the world, especially Vladimir Putin.
Trump is a political aberration with which we will have to live for the next two years. During that time he can do a lot of damage. Whatever he can do he will do for he is not constrained by any moral sense concerning his actions, but only those which will support his transactional inclinations. He is who he is, and at this stage in his life he is not an oak tree that can be bent. There is hardly any merit in lamenting his lack of empathy or his indecency in office. He has demonstrated repeatedly that none of this matters to him. His psychic engagement with reality will not allow him to act outside of who he is. So ,in a sense, he is trapped and he is trapping the nation in his own confused world.
And he is being shamelessly aided and abetted by his own party in the Congress, who seem more interested in retaining and exercising power than they are to the danger that Trump poses to the health of the nation. They are co-conspirators in the country’s descent into incivility and chaos. This is why the November 6 elections are crucial to the country. It is not only to stop the march of Trumpism, or even to defend the democratic traditions of the country. These are important, but it is to fight for the very soul of the nation which is at a decisive crossroads. If the status quo remains the same, America after the elections will be irrevocably changed for the worst.
Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest and social commentator. Send comments to the Observer or stead6655@aol.com.