by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I’m sure just about everybody reading this is feeling as relieved as I am that after January 20, 2021 Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States.
I’ll be able to cast him back into the fading-celebrity oblivion I had him in before that infamous day in mid-2015 when he rode down the gold-plated escalator at Trump Tower and started his campaign with racist attacks on Mexican immigrants. I won’t have to worry about what kinds of trouble he’s going to get the country into with one of his racist, sexist or just plain crazy tweets. I won’t have to look at that pasty face and bloated body on my TV anymore. And I won’t have to hear that whiny voice, alternately hectoring, bullying and self-pitying, either unless I really want to -- which I won’t.
I literally ran into the jubilation on the streets of San Diego the morning of Saturday, November 7. Cars were driving down University Avenue in both directions as I waited for the #10 bus to take me from my home in North Park to my bank in Mission Hills, where I was going to get laundry quarters. A run that usually takes a few minutes lasted nearly an hour because the streets were so crowded with celebrators, many of them carrying flags: U.S. flags, rainbow Queer Pride flags, at least one Transgender flag. I thought I’d better warn my husband Charles, whom I knew would have to take the same route just about an hour later to get to his job at the Mission Hills Vons. I called him to tell him to leave for work early, which he did -- but he was still late.
The impending end of the Trump Presidency lifts a great weight off this country -- or at least the slightly over half of the electorate who rejected him both times. Charles reported (and backed it up with pictures he’d taken on his cell phone) that his store had sold enormous amounts of alcoholic beverages of all kinds and price ranges to people who wanted to drink to the redemption of America. (The highest-priced booze actually sold better than the rest.) There’s a spirit of celebration in the air that the U.S. had its closest brush since 1789 with the potential loss of its republican government and its becoming a dictatorship.
And at least one of the reasons that happened was the sheer blandness of Trump’s opponent, former vice-president Joe Biden. I must say I was acutely skeptical of Biden’s ability to win the election precisely because he was so bland. His campaign speeches were so dull I thought his slogan could be, “Make America Boring Again.” I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary (as I had in 2016 as well) and resented the way the party bosses at the Democratic National Committee used Biden’s sweeping victory in the South Carolina primary -- fucking South Carolina, a state there was no way the Democrats could carry in November -- as an excuse to drive out the other “moderate” candidates, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, so voters wanting a less-Left alternative to Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would have only one choice, Biden.
My poor husband had to get used to hearing me yell at the TV every time Biden got another party endorsement, “Joe Fucking Biden?” I even wrote a song parody to the tune of “Bye, Bye, Birdie” called “Bye, Bye, Biden,” which implored, “Dems, dump Biden/For someone who can win.” I had already been convinced that Biden’s political career had been collateral damage of the Trump/Ukraine scandal that led to his impeachment, since Biden’s son Hunter had joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite zero experience or knowledge in the energy business, and Joe Biden had lobbied the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor that was investigating Burisma.
It’s true that there were extenuating circumstances in Biden’s case that didn’t exist when Trump tried to use U.S. aid to blackmail the current Ukrainian president into giving him dirt on the Bidens. A lot of other people, including the European Union and anti-corruption activists in Ukraine, had wanted to get rid of that prosecutor because they thought he was too easy on corruption. But I thought the bare fact that Hunter Biden had joined the board of a foreign company in a business he knew nothing about, and the implication that they’d put him on their board to curry favor with his dad, who was still vice-president of the U.S. when all this happened, would devastate Joe Biden politically
Fortunately, I was wrong. Trump’s last-minute attempt to elevate “Hunter Biden’s laptop” to a media obsession the way he and other Republican propagandists had with “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” in the 2016 campaign fell flat. Instead of falling for it and reporting Hunter Biden’s laptop as the issue of the campaign the way they had with Hollary’s e-mails, most of the media either ignored it completely or fingered it as Russian disinformation. In the face of a viral pandemic that had already killed 230,000 by election day and, after a brief slowdown, was once again spreading at catastrophic rates, voters in the U.S. chose Biden’s very ordinariness -- his stability, his predictability, his humanity -- over four more years of Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride.
Split Verdict: GOP Gains in Congress, States
Despite Trump’s defeat (albeit by the same razor-thin margin that had elected him in the first place in 2016), November 3, 2020 was actually a pretty good night for the Republican Party. The Republicans kept their majority in the United States Senate -- which, given majority leader Mitch McConnell’s success at keeping any bills from the House of Representatives from even being debated in the Senate, ensures that Biden will be able to do precious little of anything. And the Democrats kept their House majority but saw half of their previous 40-seat margin evaporate.
What’s more, the Republicans kept a strong position in state legislatures -- which is especially important in a year ending in zero, since that’s when the legislatures that will control redistricting are elected. In 2018, 65 percent of Wisconsin’s voters wanted Democrats to represent them in the legislature -- but the Democrats only won 45 percent of the seats due to intense partisan gerrymandering. It’s highly likely that the Democrats will lose their House majority in 2022, partly because the last two Democratic Presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, lost their House majorities in their first midterms and partly because this redistricting will be the first conducted under a Trump-rigged census which went out of its way to undercount core Democratic constituencies -- poor people, young people,people of color.
Already the current Right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted a case that questions whether undocumented immigrants should be counted in the census. The Constitution is crystal clear that the census, as defined in Article I, section 2, subsection 3, must count, and apportion House members based on, “the whole Number of free Persons” in each state. But if the current Supreme Court rules that undocumented immigrants somehow don’t count as “free Persons,” it will devastate the representation of immigrant-rich states like California and make the federal government even more unrepresentative and undemocratic than it is now. It will also vastly improve the Republicans’ chances of winning a long-term Congressional majority.
The Republicans were able to hang on to the Senate and win seats in the House in 2020 because, to put it bluntly, America remains a center-Right country. Democrats with an inflated sense of just how much progressive reform the American people would stand for got a rude awakening by just how close some of the House contests were. Abigail Spanberger, who won a seat from the Republicans in 2018 and barely hung onto it in 2020, warned House Democrats in a November 5 conference call that got leaked (https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/06/politics/abigail-spanberger-house-democrats-2020-election/index.html), "If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022," Spanberger said bluntly. "That's the reality."
Spanberger identified two huge danger zones for Democratic House candidates -- and the party as a whole -- in 2022 and beyond. One was the demand of some in the Black Lives Matter movement to “defund the police.” Almost nobody who uses that slogan literally means that they want to cancel all funding to police departments. Mostly people who call for “defunding the police” want parts of the police budget redirected to crime-prevention programs. Sometimes it means asking whether the sorts of police departments we now have -- with their top-down, militaristic, authoritarian command-and-control structures and their internal cultures that seem to reproduce the perception that the lives of Afriican-Americans and other people of color somehow “matter” less than those of whites -- really serve to keep all Americans safe and secure..
But that’s not what a lot of American voters hear when they encounter the phrase “defund the police.” As Spanberger explained, “The number one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely re-won, was defunding the police. And I've heard from colleagues who have said 'Oh, it's the language of the streets. We should respect that.' We're in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we're talking about. If we don't mean we should defund the police, we shouldn't say that."
The other buzz-word Spanberger wants her fellow Democrats to abandon is socialism. It’s true that a lot of younger voters -- including those who were born after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union fell -- aren’t as afraid of socialism as other voters. Indeed, many young people have more fear of capitalism, which as it’s been practice in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has shrunk their employment opportunities, saddled them with huge student debts, either eliminated their access to health care or left them dependent on their parents for it, and in general made them the first generation in American history likely to have a lower standard of living than the one before it.
But socialism is still a hugely negative term through most of America -- and that’s one reason Donald Trump tried to win re-election by tarring the entire Democratic Party with the S-word. “[W]e need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again,” Spanberger said. "If you put all of the messages [that cost the Democrats House seats in 2020] into a single broad category, it would be the extreme leftward lurch of the Democrat Party. That was messaged in different ways in different districts. In New York state, bail reform was extremely unpopular and meshed well with defund the police, so a public safety angle was the most effective. In some districts, it was 'Medicare for All' and the loss of private health insurance. In a number of suburban districts, we talked about pocketbook issues like higher taxes under Biden. And in other districts, we focused on the extremism of the 'Green New Deal.' And in south Florida especially, it was socialism more broadly. All of those messages fit within the rubric of extremism."
New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Spanberger in a way that encapsulates the ongoing dilemma of the Democratic Party: how to appear progrssive enough to motivate its base while not going so far to the Left as to alienate swing voters. "You can't just tell the Black, Brown, & youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet or not have their reps champion them when they need us," she tweeted. "Or wonder why they don't show up for midterms when they're scolded for existing. Esp[ecially] when they're delivering victories. … I'm happy to cede ground on things that aren't working in some areas! But finger-pointing is not gonna help. There's real workable & productive paths here if the party is open to us."
The 2020 election was a warning from the American people to both major political parties that this remains a center-Right country. The so-called “swing voters” rejected Donald Trump -- both his ideology and his personality -- as too destabilizing, too radical, too dangerous. But they also rejected the Left. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination largely because he wasn’t calling for a “political revolution.” He was seen as safe, unthreatening, within the norms of American politics instead of too far over on either side.And in November the people removed Trump from the presidency but they put constraints on Biden just to make sure he doesn’t go too extremist and too crazy in support of his party’s base, either.
The Continuing Power of “Trumpism”
Nor is America necessarily done with the ideological movement that brought Donald Trump to power in the first place. What has been called “Trumpism” is simply a more radical and more open version of what America’s amazingly resilient radical Right has been after since it emerged as a political force in the late 1930’s. It began as a reaction to the Franklin Roosevelt administration, which -- under huge pressure from mass movements of the Left of a size America has never experienced since -- vastly expanded the power of government to regulate the economy and the workplace. The biggest thing they object to (and still do!) is Social Security in particular and the whole idea of taxing the rich to help the not-rich in general.
The radical-Right movement that began in the late 1930’s has slowly and steadily -- though with some interruptions -- built up its power and influence. It has also survived an extraordinary number of catastrophes that should have killed it. It survived the tacit -- and in some cases open -- alignment of some of its early leaders with the fascist cause in Germany, Italy and Spain, much to its embarrassment when the U.S. ended up fighting World War II against Germany, Italy and fascism in general. It recovered after World War II when Stalinist Russia emerged as America’s new existential geopolitical enemy and the radical Right could tell us, “We told you so.”
The radical Right survived the disgrace of its first national political figure, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), in 1954. It survived the landslide defeat of its first Presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), in 1964. It took such great advantage of the political and social turmoil of the 1960’s that within just four years of Goldwater’s loss, Right-wing candidates Richard Nixon and George Wallace had won 57 percent of the Presidential vote between them versus Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. They did it by exploiting the racial and cultural prejudices of America’s working class to smash the Democrats’ New Deal coalition and build a new ruling one on the basis of veiled but tacit white supremacy and opposition to the counterculture and rebellious youth in general.
In 1980 the radical Right finally elected Ronald Reagan as President on what amounted to the old Goldwater program, but with a more polished, professional and effective spokesperson pursuing it. In 1987 Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had limited the ability of radio and TV stations to be openly partisan -- and the result was the virtual takeover of the AM radio band by Right-wing talk shows that gave the radical-Right’s adherents its marching orders on what political candidates and causes to support or oppose.
In 1996 the political consciousness of talk radio was brought to cable TV via the Fox News channel. The Fox hosts either came from the world of talk radio or spoke the same way -- a constant hectoring of its audience; snippy, insulting dismissals and nasty nicknames for anyone who disagreed; the endless repetition of the same propaganda phrases in the “Big Lie” technique developed by Nazi propagandist Dr. Joseph Goebbels; and the construction of a media “bubble” in which its audiences could live by persuading them that theirs were the only news sources their listeners or viewers should trust.
As I wrote in these pages in 2016, Donald Trump was the first Presidential candidate to talk like a talk-radio or Fox News host. What’s more, while it may seem odd to use the word “honest” about a President who told an estimated 15,000 lies while in office, the fact is that Trump was honest about the way he intended to govern and the fact that he was concerned only about the people, geographic areas and constituencies that had elected him. Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond had concocted the “Southern Strategy” of 1968, in which the Republicans picked up the mantle of white racism the Democrats had dropped, in private. Trump not only made racist appeals,he did it openly, offering at best token criticisms of white supremacy while savagely attacking the Left (and in the process making amorphous coalitions like Antifa look far more powerful than they actually are).
Trump brought the voice of talk radio and Fox News to the White House, and his supporters ate it up. In fact, they still do. In a November 4 Los Angeles Times column called “Even If He Loses, Trump Has Won” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-11-04/trump-election-win-lose), Nicholas Goldberg wrote that the fact that nearly half the American electorate voted for Donald Trump twice is “an assertion by those voters that, yes, this is who we really are — and that what the United States has become over the last four years is really what we want it to be. Their votes send a message to the world that this bizarre and untrustworthy man didn’t weasel his way into the most powerful job in the world by fooling the great American people. Rather, he was — and remains — the conscious choice of too many.”
In other words, over 67 million Americans lived through the horrors of the Trump presidency -- the family separations, the travel bans, the open racism,the allegations of sexual assault, the sucking up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, the open corruption (including the personal grafting of Trump insisting that his Secret Service details stay at hotels he owned, thereby taking money from the American people and literally putting it in his pocket), the impeachment for attempting to bribe Ukraine into supplying (or inventing) dirt on his principal opponent, the firing of dedicated long-time civil servants and their replacement by hacks whose only qualification was “loyalty” not to the Constitution, but to the person of Trump, the non-transparency about his own finances, and, worst of all, the utter failure to respond to a worldwide public health crisis and protect Americans from COVID-19 -- and said, “Yes! “We’re fine with all that! We want four more years of it!”
What will Donald Trump do after he leaves office -- assuming he can’t weasel his way out of defeat by a series of incoherent court challenges? I can’t imagine he’ll go gently into that good night and settle into a dignified retirement like George H. W. Bush. And having entered politics not to do anything for other people but merely to salve and soothe his incredible ego and enrich himself financially, he certainly won’t continue to look for other ways to serve the American people the way Jimmy Carter (like such other one-term Presidents like John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover) has.
No, I suspect Trump will set up a shadow Presidency of his own. He will still communicate to a large -- though, hopefully, steadily dwindling -- legion of followers on Twitter. He will probably try to organize huge rallies, though without the power of the Presidency to impose them on cities with public-health policies against them he’s unlikely to hold too many of them. I’m convinced he will try to run for President again in 2024 -- he will regard his defeat this year as an insult that must be avenged -- and that will split the Republican Party wide open between his acolytes, who will still be yelling, “Trump! Trump!,” and equally Right-wing but saner party activists, leaders and donors who will think, “No, we don’t want to go there again.”
Meanwhile, it will fall to Joe Biden to clean up after all of the messes Trump will leave behind. He will have to formulate some sort of rational response to COVID-19 -- while still acknowledging that the time we could actually have addressed the pandemic and brought it under some kind of control has long passed. He will have to try to fulfill his promise to extend the health-care protections of the Affordable Care Act against a Republican Senate and a Supreme Court likely committed to its abolition. He will try to reach out to the kinds of Republican Senators and Congressmembers with whom he used to form those across-the-aisle friendships -- and he will find that the Republicans who were willing to meet and work with him are all retired or dead.
Joe Biden has promised to bring sweetness and light to an America that has lived in darkness and acid for so long many Americans have come to regard that as its natural state. He will have to fight for science in an America where virtually half the people have rejected it, not only on COVID but the even more important, long-term, issue of human-caused climate change. He will have to govern in a way that appeases enough of the issue concerns of the Democratic Party’s progressive base while remaining true not only to his own centrist instincts but the center-Right position of the American body politic. And he will have to do this all in his first four-year term because if he doesn’t, he isn’t likely to have a second one -- either because he’ll retire (he sent out contradictory signals during the campaign as to whether he’d run for re-election or not) or America’s conservative instincts will reassert themselves and defeat him.
