Trump’s Apocalypse

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The most remarkable thing about the dueling political “conventions” held the last two weeks in August — the Democrats from August 17-20 and the Republicans from August 24-27 — is how apocalyptic they both were. If you listened to the Democrats, you heard that Donald Trump is a monster whose second term, if he gets one, will destroy American democracy and make the U.S. over into a quasi-fascist dictatorship. People of color will be slaughtered willy-nilly by law enforcement, armed paramilitary squads will patrol America’s cities and take people into custody at random, women will lose control over their bodies, and equal protection, due process and freedom of the press will end up on the scrap heap of American history. If you listened to the Republicans, Donald Trump is a savior, the only leader who can keep hordes of bloodthirsty socialists, anarchists and newly released criminals from overrunning the streets and murdering large numbers of people. The Republicans accused the Democrats of wanting to bring about an American dystopia that would make The Hunger Games look like Disneyland, and would force us all under big-state control that would run our private lives (except our sex lives, which Republicans believe should be under big-state control) and destroy America’s economy.

The Republicans held far more of their convention in traditional venues — big spaces filled with crowds, mostly of people closer than six feet apart and not wearing masks — than the Democrats. Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination for President in a small auditorium with a backdrop of American flags and only a few bored-looking note-takers in attendance. Donald Trump accepted his nomination before a crowd of 1,500 enthusiastic Republican faithful on the White House lawn — capping a week in which virtually all the big events were held on federal government property. Politicians running for re-election generally have enough of a sense of morality, ethics and law to keep their governing separate from their campaigning. Not Donald Trump. Like a royal family, he regards the property of the U.S. government as his own, to do with as he sees fit. He requisitioned the Mellon Center — a federal property that happens to be just a block away from a D.C. hotel Trump owns — for most of the convention’s speeches. He had himself and vice-president Mike Pence speak from the White House lawn, with fireworks after Trump’s big speech August 27 spelling out “TRUMP 2020” over what news commentators atavistically called “the people’s house.”

It’s not the people’s house, according to Donald Trump. It’s his house. Trump has already made it clear that he has no intention of leaving it even if America’s voters tell him to on November 3, 2020. He has pre-emptively denounced the election as “rigged” and particularly targeted the use of mail-in ballots, which he says without evidence are inherently fraudulent. In fact, Trump is so scared of mail-in ballots he installed one of his biggest donors and fundraisers, Louis DeJoy, to sabotage the entire United States Postal Service so people can’t get mail ballots in on time to be counted. The fact that this is also causing economic havoc and threatening people’s lives — a lot of older people rely on the mail to deliver medications — doesn’t bother Donald Trump.

All the horrors of Donald Trump and Trump’s America were on full view during his convention. Despite the parade of African-Americans practically shuffling on stage and saying, “Yassuh, boss” to Trump, the convention was overwhelmingly white. Two of the most prominent “ordinary people” on stage (actually in their living room) on Monday night were Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis couple who brandished items from their extensive gun collection at Black Lives Matter protesters who were peacefully walking past their house — and became Right-wing heroes for doing so. The McCloskeys, who are facing felony prosecution for threatening other people’s lives, said that if Biden and the Democrats were elected they would “end suburbia.” The Democrats put the roll call that formally nominated Joe Biden on national TV and let America see the dazzling rainbow of Americans — African-Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans — who are part of their coalition. The Republicans held their roll call behind closed doors in the arena in Charlotte, North Carolina where they had originally planned to stage the whole convention, and when they finally showed clips of it on TV about the only non-whites announcing their states’ and territories’ votes for Trump were from places like Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands where they’d have had a hard time finding white people to do it.

And the message throughout the convention was Us vs. Them, Good Americans vs. Bad Americans, people who belong here vs. people who don’t. It’s true that Trump’s us-vs.-them portrayal of Americans is nothing new for the Republican Party. It goes back at least as far as the end of World War II, when the U.S. “party line” towards the Soviet Union abruptly changed from Our Wartime Allies to Our Bitter Enemies. Republican politicians seized on the threat of Communism not only to regain power after losing five Presidential elections in a row from 1932 to 1948 (four of them to the same person, Franklin D. Roosevelt) but to discredit their liberal enemies by linking all Democrats to the Communists.

Either Democrats were actively in league with the Red enemy or they were “soft” on it, Republicans said. Either way, the only way to keep America safe from Communism was by electing Republicans — and getting rid of the regulations and controls that Democrats had put in place during the Great Depression to stop the business abuses that had led to the economic collapse. Anti-Communism brought into being the Libertarian ideology that has slowly but surely become orthodoxy in the Republican party — the idea that Social Security, Medicare and other programs that tax the rich to help the not-so-rich are immoral; that businesses should be allowed to do whatever they want regardless of what that does to workers, consumers or the environment; and that the only alternatives are pure lassiez-faire capitalism or Communist tyranny.

The “Real Americans”

In 1970 political scientist Samuel Lubell published a book called The Hidden Crisis in American Politics. According to Lubell, the hidden crisis in American politics was that Richard Nixon had become the first President in U.S. history deliberately to divide the American people for purely political gain. Previous Presidents, Lubell argued, had either sought to unite Americans and bring them together around a common cause; or when they had divided them, had done so for an idealistic purpose: Abraham Lincoln taking on the Southern slave power to stop slavery’s expansion, or Franklin Roosevelt reforming the economy to end the Great Depression and prevent another one.

Nixon won the Presidency in the first place as a result of the torment and turmoil of the 1960’s. The decade had begun hopefully, with strong but nonviolent activism among African-Americans demanding first-class citizenship and legal and economic equality. Democratic President John F. Kennedy proclaimed that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and seemed to symbolize a new, fresh American spirit where we could go to the moon and do other things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Though he was killed in November 1963, his successor, the far savvier Lyndon Johnson, pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, holding out the promise that America’s 350-year debt to its Black citizens was finally at least starting to be repaid.

Then it all unraveled. African-Americans didn’t think the changes were happening fast enough and rejected the leadership of civil-rights icons like Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis. Their new heroes — Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver — said that America was such a violence-prone nation that the only language the whites in charge would ever understand was the power of the gun. Meanwhile, President Johnson — a progressive on domestic issues but a hard-line anti-Communist hawk on foreign ones — got the U.S. involved in an unwinnable war in Viet Nam in which up to 500,000 U.S. servicemembers were fighting at one time — and ultimately 60,000 died.

Under the stresses of the 1960’s — the civil-rights struggle, the Viet Nam war, the assassinations, the rise of the hippie counter-culture and its mockery of the values of hard work and self-sacrifice older Americans believed had built this country — American politics flipped on its head. The Democrats abandoned their historic mantle of the party of American racism — slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan — and the Republicans eagerly took it up. The so-called “Party of Lincoln” (which actually dumped Lincoln — he ran for re-election in 1864 on a “National Union” ticket after the Republicans refused to renominate him) became the party of the old Confederacy: George W. Bush carried all 11 former Confederate states (South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee) in both 2000 and 2004, and in 2016 Trump carried them all except Virginia.

In 1964 President Johnson won an historic landslide against a far-Right Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, with 61 percent of the nationwide vote to Goldwater’s 39 percent. Goldwater won only six states, but five of them were Southern — the beginning of the transformation of the South from “solid Democrat” to “solid Republican.” In 1968, Richard Nixon and Right-wing independent candidate George Wallace between them won 57 percent of the popular vote to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. Because Wallace got 14 percent of the vote and therefore the major parties’ nominees appeared to have come close to a tie, a lot of analysts missed the point of the election: the “New Deal coalition” that had enabled the Democrats to win seven of the nine Presidential elections between 1932 and 1964 had come to a sudden end, and the U.S. now had a Right-wing political majority cemented by white Americans’ racism and hatred of the counter-culture.

That Right-wing majority has continued to hold to this day, though moderate Democrats have still been able to win Presidential elections occasionally. The key task of a Democratic nominee since 1968 has been to win enough votes in the South to put those states in play. Of the three Democrats who’ve actually won the Presidency since 1968, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did that by being white Southerners themselves and Barack Obama did it by being Black, and thereby mobilizing enough of the Black vote while the 1965 Voting Rights Act was still in full effect to carry some Southern states despite huge white opposition. (This analysis is one reason I thought that for sheer electability, regardless of his political position within the party, the candidate with the best chance of beating President Trump in 2020 was Hillary Clinton’s running mate, white Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — and why I was disappointed that he was one of the few national Democrats who didn’t run.)

Based on a coalition that seems internally inconsistent — radical Libertarians who want a “small government” that leaves business and the economy, and evangelical Christians who want a “big government” that directly polices people’s decisions about the most intimate aspects of their lives — but has shown remarkable staying power since Ronald Reagan brought evangelical voters into the GOP in 1980, the modern-day Republican Party has built much of its appeal on the idea that there really are “two Americas,” but only one counts as “real Americans.” “Real Americans” are career-minded people who work hard, sacrifice, don’t complain about economic or racial discrimination, go to church, get married, have kids and don’t have sex for any reason other than to have kids. Most of the Republicans’ “real Americans” are white, though they’ll admit people of color into those ranks as long as they lift themselves up by their bootstraps and don’t complain either about economic inequities or racial discrimination.

In 2008, when Sarah Palin was running for vice-president on John McCain’s Republican ticket, she made speech after speech extolling the virtues of “real Americans” — and commentators started noticing that the list of people she considered “real Americans” seemed to get smaller every time she spoke. Like much of the evil within the Republican Party, the divide-and-conquer rhetoric Lubell had warned about in 1970 — their tendency to divide the country and service only their base, declaring the rest of the country as beyond the pale of “real American”-ness — has only got worse with Donald Trump. As with so much of the Republican message — its racism, sexism, active hatred of the environment and worship of businesspeople and “The Market” — Trump has said bluntly, forcefully and openly what previous Republicans said only in coded “dog whistle” language.

Trump’s acceptance speech on August 27 — like the remarks of virtually everyone else who spoke at the Republican convention — was full of us-vs.-them rhetoric portraying the Democrats as monsters and Trump as the anointed hero who alone can save “real Americans” from them. “If the Democrat Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners, that is up to them, but I, as your President, will not be a part of it,” he said. “The Republican Party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep America Safe.

“Last year, over 1,000 African-Americans were murdered as result of violent crime in just four Democrat-run cities,” Trump continued. “The top 10 most dangerous cities in the country are run by Democrats, and have been for decades. Thousands more African-Americans are victims of violent crime in these communities. Joe Biden and the left ignore these American Victims. I NEVER WILL. If the Radical Left takes power, they will apply their disastrous policies to every city, town, and suburb in America. Just imagine if the so-called peaceful demonstrators in the streets were in charge of every lever of power in the U.S. Government.”

(In case you’re wondering why the above quotes from Trump’s speech read like one of his tweets, only longer — complete with eccentric capitalizations and hysterical ALL-CAPS thundering — it’s because I’m quoting from the official transcript the Trump campaign and the Republican Party sent to the media in advance. You can read it for yourself at https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/28/politics/donald-trump-speech-transcript/index.html.)

The Mutability of the Past

“Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and is in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”
— George Orwell, 1984

During the past five years — the duration, so far, of the Age of Trump in American politics — I’ve frequently recommended George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 as the book you most need to read to understand Trump, Trumpism and how they have laid the groundwork for America’s transition from bourgeois democracy to all-out dictatorship. I first realized this when I read an article in the July 25, 2016 New Yorker in which Jane Mayer interviewed Tony Schwartz, the ghost-writer who actually wrote Trump’s best-selling business memoir The Art of the Deal. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true,” Schwartz told Mayer.

I immediately recognized the philosophy behind that quote as something Orwell called doublethink: “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and believing both of them.” Orwell explained that the officials of his all-powerful dictatorship, the “Inner Party,” used doublethink “to tell deliberate lies while completely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality while all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” A lot of people have tried to describe Trump’s cavalier attitude towards the truth and willingness to lie shamelessly and with apparent sincerity even about things on which the facts are well known — but no one has done so as incisively as George Orwell in a book published nearly 70 years before the Trump presidency.

The 2020 Republican convention was a virtuoso exercise in doublethink and what Orwell called “the mutability of the past” — the ability of an authoritarian regime to rewrite the past in whatever form suits their needs at the moment. In the Trumpworld, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is history. (One speaker, former Reagan, Bush and Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow, referred to it in the past tense even though it’s still killing thousands of Americans every day.) Police shootings of unarmed African-Americans either aren’t happening at all or are defensible responses to a community that has to be policed with a firm hand.

Hurricane Laura, which in the real world is cutting a devastating swath through western Louisiana and eastern Texas (and, with a cruel irony, seemed to go out of its way to target Lake Charles, an inland community to which many New Orleanians fled after Hurricane Katrina in 2005), is just another nasty little storm. I particularly felt bad for Kim Reynolds and Joni Ernst — Governor and U.S. Senator, respectively, from Iowa — who described the devastating wind event that swept through their state this year and the flooding that overtopped their levees the year before, and while I felt terrible for the Iowans who were devastated by these catastrophes, I also yelled at the TV, “Can you say … climate change?”

But the very suggestion that human activity might be changing the climate and making catastrophic weather events worse is anathema at a Republican convention, especially in the Trump era. Reynolds and Ernst didn’t mention climate change as a possible cause of the vicious weather devastating their state because they were practicing another Orwellian mind discipline, crimestop: “the faculty of stopping short, as if by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Since Big Brother Trump hath decreed that the whole idea of human-caused climate change is a hoax dreamed up by the government of China to destroy the American economy (even while Trump, doubleplusgood doublethinker that he is, also sees China as the number one foreign exploiter of the American economy they’re seeking to destroy), no politician from Trump’s party can acknowledge it even when the evidence is right in front of their noses in the catastrophes that are ruining their constituents’ lives.

The Republican convention portrayed the Trump years as one of uninterrupted economic triumph during which the stock market soared to new heights (ironically, Trump is making the same mistake George W. Bush and Barack Obama did: trying to “sell” voters into keeping their parties in office by citing the stock market when it has little or nothing to do with the actual American economy), unemployment — especially among women and people of color — fell to new lows, rich individuals and corporations responded to the sweeping 2017 tax cuts by reinvesting in the economy and creating new jobs (actually they bought back their own stock or found other ways just to keep the money), and America was on its way back to greatness when that pesky little virus from China came over and screwed up everything. But don’t worry: we’ve already vanquished the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic and soon we will be able to, as Mike Pence rather awkwardly ended his convention speech, “make America great again … again.”

It’s true that Orwell’s Inner Party had one huge power Trump and the Republicans don’t. The Inner Party had an elaborate infrastructure by which they could physically seize all records telling a story of the past different from the one they wanted the people to believe at that moment, and fabricate new records in accordance with the Party’s newest mutated version of the past. (One irony of the technological advances since Orwell’s time is that, as more past records are stored digitally as computer files instead of on paper, those wholesale rewrites of the past have become considerably easier than they would have been then.) Trump still faces a more-or-less free press that, when he makes a particularly outrageous claim — like having had more spectators at his inaugural than any other President — news outlets could show photos of the meager crowds at Trump’s 2017 inaugural compared to the throngs at Obama’s in 2009 and thus expose Trump’s lie.

But as Trump advances his dictatorial agenda in a second term — assuming he wins one, either fairly or by simply refusing to leave office and getting the U.S. military to back him — we can expect more direct attacks on the freedom of the press. One macabre press briefing Trump gave at the White House about a month ago started with Trump’s boast that that very morning he had been on the phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Almost nobody noticed it, but I got the message loud and clear: Trump was saying to the reporters who regularly cover him, including the ones he thinks work for news outlets out to “get him,” “My good buddies are leaders who have journalists killed.”

If Donald Trump is elected to a second term as President — and, despite the polls showing Biden leading him both nationally and in most of the so-called “swing states,” I strongly suspect he will be, both because he and his Republican allies in state governments are rigging the election on his behalf and because the polls consistently underestimate his level of support — all the gloves will come off. Those 10 “Democrat cities” will be subjected to long, drawn-out occupations by paramilitary forces the way Portland was earlier this year. “Peaceful protest” will become a thing of the past, as the streets of America’s cities are patrolled by unmarked, unnamed Federal troops who, instead of shooting rubber bullets, will be equipped by Presidential fiat with real ones.

Donald Trump has never liked democracy. He’s also never liked people of color; again and again he’s made it clear that he doesn’t consider the children of non-white immigrants to be “real Americans.” Under a second Trump term, police killings of African-Americans and other people of color will rise to levels we haven’t envisioned in our wildest nightmares. Despite his pro forma pledge at the end of his August 27 speech to “protect Medicare and Social Security,” he has already promised to end the federal payroll tax — the financial basis for both those programs — and he’s setting up the political conditions to put an end to all entitlement programs the way Republicans in general, and Libertarian Republicans in particular, have long dreamed.

From the two greatest influences in shaping Donald Trump’s character — his father, Fred Trump, and his corrupt legal advisor Roy Cohn — Trump learned that compassion and empathy are signs of weakness. As Tony Schwartz told Jane Mayer in his 2016 New Yorker interview, “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’ — recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular.” Trump’s vision of the future, like that of Orwell’s Inner Party and O’Brien, its spokesperson in the novel, is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Whether it’s separating children of immigrants from their families and putting them in cages, or telling police officers not to be careful about banging suspects’ heads as they arrest them and put them in cars, Trump is not only cruel himself, he advocates and likes to see cruelty in others because he equates it with the values he’s been taught to revere: strength, toughness, manliness. (And yet this is also a man who got a doctor to declare him unfit for military duty so he wouldn’t have to show any real courage in combat in Viet Nam.) As Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote August 3, 2020 (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-08-03/pandemic-trump-cruelty-covid19-coronavirus), “In his statements and the actions of federal agencies under his control, as well as the positions held by his Republican congressional caucus, the strategy is clear: Use the [SARS-CoV-2] pandemic to make America a crueler place. … He has exploited the pandemic to divide the American public by turning state and local efforts to stem the contagion into partisan purity tests. His pronouncements about such fundamental policies as mask-wearing and social distancing have been consistently contradictory. When the facts contradict Trump’s claims, he lies about them or attacks the truth-tellers, even when they’re members of his own team.” (Doublethink again!)

And, right after Orwell had Party spokesperson O’Brien say that the future was “a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” he had him add, “And remember that it is forever.” I’m convinced Trump expects his rule literally to last forever. Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump In the White House documented that he’s grooming his daughter Ivanka to succeed him in 2024 — unless he can get the U.S. Constitution amended to repeal the 22nd Amendment and stay in office himself. (In one convention session he responded to chants of “Four More Years” from the crowd by saying, “Let’s make them really crazy: ’12 More Years!’” His audience faithfully went along with him.) I think Trump’s long-term plan — to the extent that he ever “plans” anything — is that there will never be another American President not named Trump.

Quite a number of other countries have fallen for Right-wing populist appeals similar to Trump’s — Russia, Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom (particularly depressing because it means the three countries most instrumental in defeating the original fascists have now been taken over by neo-fascists), Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, Brazil — and with the possible exception of Italy, which finally got rid of Silvio Berlusconi, none of them have yet reverted to normal bourgeois democracies. Unless Donald Trump is defeated for re-election on November 3, 2020 — and defeated by so overwhelming a margin in both the popular and the electoral votes it will be clear even to him and his most credulous supporters that he’s lost — the U.S. is almost certain to go down the path of authoritarianism and decadence on which Trump has set us.