Donald Trump is Destroying America On His Way Out
Tags: Babies, Coronavirus, Health, Life

Donald Trump is Destroying America On His Way Out

Image Credit: Carlos Barria

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Caligula, reclining and being fed grapes, installed his horse in the Senate. Donald Trump is golfing while America collapses.

Like so many tyrants before him — would-be and true — Trump, in the throes of inevitable defeat, has become a mad king. He’s lost the plot. He’s lashing out in impotent rage, when he’s not sulking in infantile resentment. All that while a desperate America thrashes in the throes of crisis after crisis. He’s every bit the equivalent of a modern day Caligula or Nero. And like so many mad kings before him, the damage he’s doing as he loses power may be even greater than the damage he did when he had it.

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Let’s start with Covid. Maybe you think I’m depressing? Maybe you think I overstate things. Good, don’t take it from me. Take it from the Atlantic, that establishment bastion of WASPy understatement. According to them, Trump’s response to Covid amounts to “negligent homicide.” It’s not an unfair description. Americans don’t seem to grasp, really, just how devastating Covid has been. Maybe that’s because they’re busy, wearily living through the nightmare.

Covid in America is so bad that 9 of the world’s top 10 hotspots are all American states. 8 of them are red states. Because so many red states became hotspots, America never defeated Covid. Instead, it’s followed a kind of weird, ominous stair-step pattern. The steps aren’t waves, really — they never crest and fall. They’re more like three tsunamis, each piled atop the next.

Hence, a quarter of a million Americans are dead — and counting.

And things are about to, probably, get much, much worse. Why? Because Americans, who aren’t taking Covid seriously enough — maybe not you, but as a society — are travelling en masse, as they usually, do, for Thanksgiving, the holidays, Christmas.

Covid in America got this bad essentially because of three things. One, red states had super-spreader events. Two, almost no state had a proper, Asian-style, lockdown. And three, the combination of those led to Covid spreading like wildfire.

Now imagine Thanksgiving. Millions of people travelling. Crammed into cars, buses, airplanes. Stuck in airports and train stations. Overheated, unventilated places. Boom. There’s never been a more perfect way for a pandemic to spread.

Thanksgiving in America is going to be something beyond a super-spreader event. A hyper-spreader event will be more like it.

And that is squarely due to Donald Trump. He minimized, he denied, he lied, and we now know that he knew full well that it was a lethal disease all along, as Bob Woodward has reported. So America, to this day, is probably the only nation in the world that doesn’t have a national Covid strategy. But you can’t beat the pandemic without one. Americans — enough of them, at least — think of freedom as free-dumb: the right to carry a gun and spread a deadly disease.

Whose fault is that? On one level, history’s. On another level, the President’s. Leadership is educating people when they are being malicious, ignorant, and careless. But Trump, being the epitome of all that, only encouraged his army of American Idiots not to take Covid seriously. Hence, the bizarre, jaw-dropping phenomenon of Covid patients on their ICU death-beds lashing in rage out at nurses because they still think Covid doesn’t exist.

Contrast that with, say, Jacinda Ardern — who called upon “team New Zealand” to unite and not just fight the viurs, but wipe it out. Can you imagine Trump calling on Americans as a team? To do anything remotely positive, like wiping out a deadly virus?

Americans don’t know — and don’t seem to care nearly enough, even the good and intelligent ones — about a simple fact of reality. With good leadership, America should have somewhere between hundreds and low, low thousands of deaths — that’s what nations like Singapore and New Zealand and South Korea had, per capita. Trump’s recklessness means 98% of 250,000 deaths were needless. Is that, like the Atlantic says, negligent homicide? If it isn’t, then what is?

After hyper-spreader Thanskgiving, sadly, that number is going to explode. Trump is going to do as much damage as he possibly can. He’s a moron, but he’s not a dummy: he knows, remember, Covid is deadly. And there he is golfing, while two thousand people a day die. That’s not just some kind of tantrum or laziness or self-indulgence. It’s more like a deliberate act of surreal and horrific violence by a head of state.

If only Americans would see it as such.

Then let’s come to the transfer of power. The pundits say that Trump’s coup isn’t succeeding, but they’re wrong. A coup can succeed in three ways, absolutely, mostly, or partially. Absolutely means that power is transferred to the tyrant — Trump’s failed on this score, true. But that’s the lowest possible bar.

“Mostly” means that a coup corrodes democracy enough to seriously delegitimise and weaken it. Almost 70% of Republicans believe that the election was stolen — from them. How do you square that with a democracy? Trump has been spreading disinformation and misinformation furiously, lying at light speed, to accomplish just this goal — if he can’t hang on to power, then at least he can corrode democracy enough to leave it a smoking wreck.

Think of the post-Trump future. How do you govern a society where 70% of the other side believes the election was stolen from them — and that’s just the beginning? When they won’t take the Covid vaccine, so the nation will never have immunity? When they’ve stopped believing in science, because praying the gay away will save them? When they actively support racial supremacy and think of minorities as hated subhumans? When they turn a blind eye to mass death at the scale of a nuclear bomb, which is what 250,000 dead are?

How do you govern a nation like that — a place that’s been turned into a Land of Idiots? The short answer: not very well, and maybe not at all. That’s the point. Trump will happily take this consolation prize of the coup mostly succeeding. It’s pretty good, from his point of view — which is the abuser’s. Why do abusers beat their significant others — hardest when they finally try to leave — to the point that that’s when they face the greatest risk of the most harm? Because the logic is “if I can’t have you, then nobody will.”

Abusers are willing to destroy what they pretend to love, so that he or she is forever their possession. So that their capacities for self-governance and agency and self-determination are ruined, forever, as much as possible. Sound familiar? It should. That’s exactly — exactly — what Trump’s doing to American democracy on his way out. He is trying to abuse it, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. He seems to be doing real violence, with negligence on Covid. He’s brainwashing his Army of Idiots with a cannonade of lies every day — so that they never believe in themselves as citizens of a democracy again. If I can’t have you, America, nobody will, he’s saying. And he might just be succeeding.

Now let me come to what a coup “partially” succeeding means. There’s a certain government official whom by now you might have heard of — the head of the GSA — who’s single-handedly holding up the transfer of power.

So Joe Biden has had to crowdfund it.

Think about how absurd that is — the President-Elect of the United States of America has to crowdfund money for transferring power, hiring people, vetting them, planning, even just moving expenses — because his predecessor won’t turn the funds over to him. Comical? Ludicrous? Surreal? All those and more. It’s like if Schitt’s Creek went to Washington DC.

Trump’s pettiness knows no bounds because he knows that whatever level his coup succeeds on is still a success. If he can withhold funds from Biden, and thwart the transfer of power, he can eke out the illusion that Biden stole the election for a while longer. He can keep his Army of Idiots believers. He can keep the charade going, and that is what tyranny is, always a charade — because a handful of people can only control many, many more than them through the illusion of power.

Meanwhile, the GOP is mostly going along with all this. It’s true in some limited way that GOP officials have resisted Trump’s electoral college tampering — so far. There is still plenty of time to go. And the media is giving them credit for winning the election — which is effectively giving old white dudes credit for doing something minorities did. So the wool is pulled over even the good Americans’ eyes. They don’t fully understand just how much damage Trump is doing to democracy on his way out.

How much damage is that? Trump has normalised burning democracy down, in an attempt to retain power. Think of the lunacy of the last few months. Trump declaring victory on election night. The sophisticated coup which went into action on election day. The endless lies, the refusal to concede, the constant inversions and suspensions of reality. The electoral college tampering, the judicial challenges, the intimidation, the calls to put “militias” on “stand by.” All that’s now probably what the GOP’s going to do, all over again, from now to eternity. It’s not a party that’s interested in democracy anymore — and what Trump has done on his way out is to solidify that into a governing approach. That’s not my opinion, by the way — the world’s leading scholars of authoritarian collapse are the ones who say the GOP’s now a party that’s more against democracy than for it.

So how is America to be governed, when Trump has legitimised the GOP being the anti-democracy party, not just the opposition of The Democrats? When he’s made it perfectly acceptable, at least within the GOP, to do everything from tampering with electoral college, to lying a thousand times a day, to declaring victory on election night, to refusing to concede and accept the President-Elect? How is America to be governed when the GOP and the Americans behind it, which is still about half the country, have had authoritarianism legitimised by Trump, right down to seizing power by whatever means are available?

Trump’s coup has been very, very successful on all these levels. It hasn’t been absolutely successful — as in another Trump term, despite the wishes of American democracy. But it has been successful in a darker way, perhaps a more dangerous one still in the long run. It’s corroded the norms, rules, codes that govern American democracy, especially in its most crucial moments, like the transfer of power. It’s hardened the Army of Idiots in Red States who want to live in something like a theocratic authoritarian supremacist apartheid state, not a democracy, like 1980s South Africa by way of 2000s Iran. It’s shattered whatever tiny remnant the GOP had left as a party of democracy, and made it a fully authoritarian party.

All that’s a satisfying enough consolation prize for Trump for a good reason. It sets up next time. Maybe Trump runs again — or maybe one of the little Trumps do. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Trump has left American democracy a wounded animal. A desperate and wretched thing, bleeding from the limbs, in shock. And a wounded animal is all that much easier to kill, the next time around.

If you don’t understand that, think about this. The entire rest of the world — all of it — is utterly spellbound, aghast, shocked, bewildered, staggered. That Americans are now people who seem to shrug and accept mass death. Whom authoritarians can inflict mass death on, and get away with it. That puts them among history’s most broken, defeated, weakest nations. 250,000 Americans have died. Another tsunami is to be piled atop that. Trump’s golfing. I don’t think the world is wrong.

A wounded animal is easier to kill. Remember that. Trump knows it. That’s what he — and his movement — are thinking. Even as the pundits say that the coup is failing. Sometimes, you lose a battle — but inflict enough damage to win the war.

Mad kings do the most damage on the way out, too, for just that reason, just like abusers. Better to leave a nation a weakened, ruined thing, that nobody else can have — if you can’t hold onto it anymore yourself.

Umair

November 2020