Everyone should have known that a Donald Trump was coming. Richard Hofstadter explained how such a person was inevitable in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and in the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964) – which explored our curious distrust of people who know more than we know, a culturally established distrust of experts and expertise. If you’re so smart how come you’re not rich? Maybe there was a time when being well-educated and insightful, and full of ideas, or at least able to discuss the ideas of others intelligently, or at least know there were ideas floating around out there somewhere and they mattered, and that made you cool – or maybe that was France. That wasn’t America, except for the eight years of Obama – but America decided they’d had enough of that, and of him. America became America again.
Obama, with all his degrees and having taught constitutional law and all the rest, was out of touch with the real America. Donald Trump was not. He was appropriately paranoid. He told America that everyone is out to get us. He told America to sneer at the rest of the world – to get angry and get tough. The world was laughing at America. He also said that the rest of America – the blacks and the gays and the urban hipsters and the fancy-pants experts and the goofy scientists and all “politicians” in general – were laughing at real Americans. Mexicans and Muslims were laughing too.
He could fix that. Donald Trump pretty much promised to unite the country against Muslims and “Mexicans” and those Black Lives Matter thugs, who want to kill policemen, and Colin Kaepernick, and gays too, and urban hipsters and the fancy-pants experts and those goofy scientists and “Hollywood” – whatever that means – and against anyone who doesn’t consider Jesus Christ his or her personal savior – with the exception of a few Jewish folks like Jared and his daughter. He’d unite real Americans against such people – real Americans, not those who live in big cities or on the coasts – rural Americans – those whose education ended in high school and hadn’t been ruined by socialist atheist college professors – the only real Americans. He’d put Hillary Clinton in jail too.
That was what he was selling. That’s what just enough people in just the right places bought. He won. But he has to win again, and the polls show that won’t happen, unless he does something. So he’s doing something. He’s revised his strategy. He has a new message. All those other Americans – African-Americans, and Muslim-Americans and Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans and college-educated urban Americans and gays and transvestites too – if they are even Americans at all – hate America and they hate YOU – specifically. He will save the country from them. And he will personally save you.
Of course, put like that, this seems absurd. The Washington Post’s David Nakamura (not a very American-sounding name) puts it this way:
In his inaugural address, President Trump sketched the picture of “American carnage” – a nation ransacked by marauders from abroad who breached U.S. borders in pursuit of jobs and crime, lured its companies offshore and bogged down its military in faraway conflicts.
Nearly three and a half years later, in the president’s telling, the carnage is still underway but this time the enemy is closer to home – other Americans whose racial identity and cultural beliefs are toppling the nation’s heritage and founding ideals.
Trump’s dark and divisive forty-two-minute speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota late Friday served as a clarion for his campaign reelection message at a time when the nation – already reeling with deep anxiety over the devastating public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic – is also facing a cultural reckoning over the residue of its racially segregated past.
So it was time to pick a fight about the nation’s (generally white) heritage and founding ideals:
As he has so often during his tenure, the president made clear that he will do little to try to heal or unify the country ahead of the November presidential election but rather aims to drive a deeper wedge into the country’s fractures.
For Trump, that has meant defining a new foil. If his 2016 campaign to put “America first” was focused on building a wall to keep out immigrants and shedding alliances with nations he believed were exploiting the United States, the president is now aiming his rhetorical blasts at groups of liberal Americans who, he believes, constitute a direct threat to the standing of his conservative base.
And that generated two speeches:
At Mount Rushmore, under the granite gaze of four U.S. presidents, Trump railed against “angry mobs” pursuing “far-left fascism” and a “left-wing cultural revolution” that has manifested in the assault on statues and monuments celebrating Confederate leaders and other U.S. historical figures, including some former presidents, amid the mass racial justice protests of recent weeks.
“Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America,” the president declared.
“We are now in the process of defeating the radical left – the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters,” Trump told guests Saturday during an Independence Day celebration on the South Lawn of the White House.
In making the case that a radical and violent ideology underpins much of the social justice movement that propelled the nationwide demonstrations, Trump has dropped virtually all pretenses that he supports millions of peaceful protesters who have called for broad reforms to address what they see as systemic racism and a culture of brutality in police departments.
And that was that. All that stuff about systemic racism and a culture of brutality in police departments was suddenly liberal bullshit. The white folks cheered. That was so last week:
Trump made no mention Friday of the victims of police violence, including more than half a dozen black families he met with in the Oval Office last month before he signed an executive order to create national training certification guidelines for law enforcement agencies and establish a database to track police brutality cases.
Instead, he warned of a “growing danger” to the values of the nation’s founders – a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”
He boasted of federal authorities apprehending hundreds of looters and vandals, even though the number is lower. He warned of “violent mayhem” in streets of cities run by “liberal Democrats.” He celebrated the arrest of a “ringleader” in the unsuccessful attempt from demonstrators to topple a statue of President Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favorite past president, in Lafayette Square across from the White House. And he asserted that schoolchildren were being taught to “hate their own country.”
So, his vastly outnumbered base, the only real Americans left these days, were being attacked by the sixty or more percent of fake Americans who actually hate American and want to destroy America once and for all. That’s not an exaggeration:
“This was a deeply divisive speech aimed at what Trump sees as real Americans versus anarchists,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. “That’s not just bigotry to the outside world, but now he’s really attacking millions of Americans as worthless, as socialists, as anarchists.”
Brinkley should not have been surprised. This is the paranoid style in American politics in action once again:
Trump exploited the nation’s culture wars after taking office, lambasting African American athletes for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and failing to clearly denounce a white supremacist march in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a counterprotester.
But heading into 2020, the president who had promised to “make America great again” was preparing to run for reelection on a message of economic renewal, touting record stock markets and historically low unemployment rates. He was pointing to the construction of 200 miles of new barrier walls along the U.S.-Mexico border and renegotiated trade deals with Canada, Mexico and China as evidence that he had made good on his 2016 promises.
The Trump campaign began rolling out a new motto: “Keep America Great.”
His mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic upended those plans.
Yes, everything fell apart, so it was back to the basics:
At Mount Rushmore, Trump appeared to make an oblique reference to Biden after touting the legacies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the presidents carved into the cliffs above him.
“No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart,” Trump said. “No person who remains quiet at the destruction of this resplendent heritage can possibly lead us to a better future.”
In a video message Saturday, Biden offered a more hopeful contrast to Trump by casting the racial justice protests of recent weeks as part of the nation’s long-standing struggle “between two parts of our character – the idea that all men and women, all people, are created equal, and the racism that has torn us apart.”
“American history is no fairy tale,” added Biden, who cited George Floyd, the black man whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May sparked the national outcry.
It isn’t a fairy tale? Trump has just screwed most Republicans, as Robert Costa and Philip Rucker explain here:
President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.
Trump simply went too far:
Although amplifying racism and stoking culture wars have been mainstays of Trump’s public identity for decades, they have been particularly pronounced this summer as the president has reacted to the national reckoning over systemic discrimination by seeking to weaponize the anger and resentment of some white Americans for his own political gain.
Trump has left little doubt through his utterances the past few weeks that he sees himself not only as the Republican standard-bearer but as leader of a modern grievance movement animated by civic strife and marked by calls for “white power,” the phrase chanted by one of his supporters in a video the president shared last weekend on Twitter. He later deleted the video but did not disavow its message.
None of this overt stuff was supposed to happen, and it’s happening at just the wrong moment:
Over the years, some Republicans have struggled to navigate Trump’s race baiting and, at times, outright racism, while others have rallied behind him. Bursts of indignation and frustration come and go but have never resulted in a complete GOP break with the president. Trump’s recent moves are again putting Republican officeholders onto risky political terrain…
Trump’s repeated championing of monuments, memorials and military bases honoring Confederate leaders has run up against the tide of modernity and a weary electorate that polls show overwhelmingly support the Black Lives Matter movement – a slogan that Trump said would be “a symbol of hate” if painted on Fifth Avenue in New York.
No one else feels that way now, so Republicans will have to say yes, everyone feels that way, or they’llpiss off Trump and lose his base in their next election:
In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, a massive statue of Stonewall Jackson was dismantled to the cheers of onlookers and the ringing of church bells in recent days, and even in Mississippi, the state legislature voted to remove the Confederate battle emblem from its state flag.
On Capitol Hill, some Republicans fret – mostly privately, to avoid his wrath – that Trump’s fixation on racial and other cultural issues leaves their party running against the currents of change. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis, these Republicans fear he is not only seriously impairing his reelection chances but also jeopardizing the GOP Senate majority and its strength in the House.
“The Senate incumbent candidates are not taking the bait and are staying as far away from this as they can,” said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican operative and chief strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has invested heavily in keeping GOP control of the Senate. “The problem is this is no longer just Trump’s Twitter feed. It’s expanded to the podium, and that makes it more and more difficult for these campaigns.”
Cue the gloating:
Racial animus and toxicity were woven throughout Trump’s 2016 campaign. Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama White House political director who is now president of the Open Society Foundations, credited Trump with understanding “that there is a constituency – a deep constituency, a solid constituency, a resolute constituency – in the electorate for these views.”
The difference now, four years later, Gaspard argued, is that the sentiments of many Americans about justice and disparity appear to have evolved.
“The Republican Party under Donald Trump has become a party wandering aimlessly in the street talking to itself and responding to itself, and all the rest of us have become the pedestrians trying to avoid that guy,” Gaspard said.
But that guy has jammed them:
Trump has not made it easy for embattled Republicans to duck him. He reaffirmed Tuesday that he would veto this year’s proposed $740 billion annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders – an amendment that has bipartisan support.
Trump has made it clear to these Republicans – stand with him – stand for the Confederacy and the white man – stand against most of America now – or your career is over. This is his party, but this is also all he’s got going for himself now:
Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who has done extensive research on racial divisions, argued that Trump is likely to continue to play to “white resentment politics” because it is the only strategy that could stave off further erosion of his support.
“Without white resentment, there is no rationale for Donald Trump,” Belcher said. “Without that, what reason do his supporters have to be with Donald Trump if he’s not going to be your tribal strong man? He started there and will end there.”
What’s this about Trump as a tribal strong man? That’s not so farfetched. Philip Kennicott, the art and architecture critic at the Washington Post looks at the symbolism here:
The likeness of the faces on Mount Rushmore is rudimentary, and they lack even a semblance of expression. Like the pyramids in Egypt, the giant presidential faces make their statement through monumentality alone. And like the attractions that line the highways that generations of Americans have traveled – on their way to places such as Mount Rushmore – it is kitsch: gigantic, colossal, nationalist kitsch.
So, it was a perfect setting for the speech Trump gave there Friday, full of bland generalizations about the greatness of American culture, punctuated by dark declarations of a fundamental rift in American society. This was a speech loaded with references to scale, in all four dimensions, to things that are vast and great and immortal. And it was an effort to scale up particular grievances into broad national rifts, to claim that protesters who seek equal treatment and dignity for African Americans are not protesting against police violence, but rather seek to dismantle America and western culture.
For that he needed something REALLY BIG but maybe not this:
Mount Rushmore was conceived as a tourist attraction in the early 1920s, and carving of the four faces – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt – began in 1927. The perceived need for a collective history, for monuments at the national scale, was particularly strong in this period, and in the years after, as the United States suffered a deep and lasting Depression, and as totalitarian ideologies gained ground and conquered almost all of Europe. Democracy, it seemed, demanded its own brand of unifying kitsch, something as powerful and effective as the enticing, mass-media lies that demagogues in Germany, Italy and Spain were selling.
Democracy at the time needed big statues to match what Hitler and Mussolini had going for them over in Europe, but there’s a danger there:
The psychology of giant art parallels the psychology of giant, ideological political systems. It is not meant to be looked at closely and only “reads” if the viewer is kept at a certain distance. It dwarfs those who view it, which not only inflates the power of the thing represented but also demotes the individual power of the spectator. It makes our agency seem irrelevant and meaningless.
It also implicates the viewer in the illusion far more intricately than other kinds of art. It must be seen from one perspective, from a certain distance, and if you violate those demands – if say, you get close enough to look up Jefferson’s nostrils – you see just how contrived and blunt the work is.
That means that this was just the place to be contrived and blunt:
Trump’s rhetoric is to ordinary political discourse what Mount Rushmore is to sculpture. It only functions at the macroscopic level, eliding detail and nuance. Trump generalizes because generalization is a way of scaling up every claim such that it can no longer be measured against actual experience. Even people who might be susceptible to his most racist claims – that, for example, Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists – will likely number among their general acquaintance immigrant friends, neighbors, colleagues and fellow parishioners who do not embody any of the slanderous generalizations the president has leveled at them. For Trump’s rhetoric to be effective, we must always keep real people at a distance and think only in the generalizations of caricature and stereotype.
One passage from Trump’s speech makes this explicit. In an effort to equate critical assessment of American history with anti-Americanism, Trump focused on the idea of scale, arguing implicitly that Americans are looking at their history too closely. When you begin to understand men such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as mortal and flawed figures, you lose what Trump sees as the grand narrative arc of America. Seen up close, history becomes “a web of lies” and “every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”
So go big and keep it contrived and blunt:
The power of Trump’s rhetoric can only be increased by scaling up the grievance he is selling, making it seem all-encompassing, and heightening the supposed conflict between us and them. On Friday, Trump also used Mount Rushmore to make cultural conflict seem an ineradicable part of American life. With frequent reference to things that are immortal, permanent, ancient and lasting, Trump offered a grim view of the American future, with his supporters always angry, always wary, always at war with people who look too closely, who scrutinize too critically the giant myths embodied behind him.
But there’s a problem with that:
The only way to increase the power of monumental sculpture is to increase the size. And yet with each effort to outdo the last attempt at gigantism, the whole game begins to feel a little silly, and sad. Even the pyramids in Egypt, impressive as they are, seem to hector us across the ages, with Ozymandian futility. After you’ve enjoyed the awe and spectacle of the Great Pyramid, outside of Cairo, you may think: What a terrified little man the pharaoh Khufu must have been.
That might have been Trump at Mount Rushmore, and Charles Blow adds this:
Trump stood at the base of Mount Rushmore and said, “Seventeen seventy-six represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph not only of spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy and reason.” He continued later, “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”
To be clear, the “our” in that passage is white people, specifically white men. Trump is telling white men that they are their ancestors, and that they’re now being attacked for that which they should be thanked.
The ingratitude of it all!
Max Boot understands this:
All dictators and would-be dictators need enemies – the more villainous the better – to justify their seizure of power. President Trump, an aspiring authoritarian, based his 2016 campaign on fomenting fear of Mexicans and Muslims. In 2018 his midterm campaign was based on (unsuccessful) scaremongering about caravans of refugees from Central America. So how will he stampede voters into supporting him this year?
The Islamic State’s caliphate no longer exists and, because of the pandemic, the U.S. borders are closed. There are no more caravans – or immigrants of any kind – for him to inveigh against. Terrorism continues to be a problem – white supremacist violence is on the rise, and last December a Saudi gunman with al-Qaeda links killed three service members in Pensacola, Fla. – but it no longer excites the kind of attention it once did.
There are bigger things to worry about – notably, a pandemic that has killed more Americans than those who died in all of our post-1945 wars combined and has caused unemployment to rise to its highest level since the 1930s. But, even as case numbers are hitting new highs, Trump has neither the ability nor the aptitude to battle this enemy. His response amounts to a combination of wishful thinking (“I think that, at some point, that’s going to sort of disappear, I hope,” he said last week) and fatalism (the White House’s new message is “Learn to live with it”).
In his Friday night speech at Mount Rushmore, Trump unveiled a new set of enemies that he prefers to battle instead until November. His supporters ignored the actual dangers they face as they packed in, mainly without masks, to listen to Trump inveigh against largely imaginary foes.
Those imaginary foes are two thirds of Americans who really don’t hate America. They want to talk. They’d like some changes. What’s so hard about that?
Don’t ask. The paranoid never answer.
Just Above Sunset 