President Brain Worms
Donald Trump's stupidity has molded America, just as America's stupidity molded him. What comes next is going to be even dumber.
Let’s get one thing straight. I am not the nation’s foremost expert on Donald Trump. The world’s greatest Trump Understander is one David Roth, who has been cursed with the exact sort of insight and brain worms necessary to fully comprehend the President. Everything written herein does not come close to David’s exhaustive work on the ways in which the leader of the free world’s brain resembles the New York Mets, cottage cheese, or both.
But this essay isn’t necessarily just about our big boy in charge either.
Donald Trump did not rise up out of the ether and magically turn America crazy. He is a product of hundreds of years of hatred and ignorance, a towering monument to every reactionary instinct produced by the nation. He is the natural result of decades of modern Republican politics built upon centuries of fetishization of the rich and powerful, and of the lengths the white aristocracy will go to protect themselves.
Perhaps it is fitting that such an avatar of impotent rage would be so very dumb. The President is a baffling yet startlingly familiar version of stupid. We’d all met a Donald Trump at some point in our lives before this particular Donald Trump wound up sitting in the Oval Office. Maybe it’s someone we’re related to, or a coworker. Someone who’s entirely too online and has the media literacy of a pomeranian, someone who has developed a chemical need for paranoid fear mongering Facebook posts from questionable sources. Someone who blames their troubles on a group of others, you know, those people.
The difference between those Donald Trumps and this Donald Trump is that this Donald Trump was born into heaps of money and possesses an unquenchable desire to have his name on important things and be on television. This cocktail of highly flammable chemicals, when ingested by people who were still very mad that a Black man had been elected President, propelled Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Four years later, more than 100,000 people have died during a criminally mishandled pandemic and Trump’s administration has systematically eroded liberal environmental and immigration policies. He has fundamentally sculpted our judicial system, possibly beyond repair barring an unprecedented effort to remove hundreds of federal judges that would trigger a massive legal battle.
All of this has happened under the direction of a man who placed a call to WWE to make sure Vince McMahon was still alive after the company staged a gag where McMahon’s limo blew up with him inside. The bombing was, of course, a blatant stunt. Our fearless leader thought that McMahon really had been assassinated on live television.
Trump’s failure to understand how professional wrestling works, or that nuking a hurricane would not in fact stop the storm from making landfall, are not the causes of his bigotry. Hate is stupid, but does not require that the person expressing it be unintelligent. Similarly, doing the remarkably harmful things that Trump has done does not require that the man in the big chair be a tapioca-brained oaf with an addiction to Lou Dobbs.
The sentiments that Trump and his aides have worked to codify into policy are not new or unique. They are the end goal of a Republican party that has worked for decades to empower whites, christians and the rich. Trumpism merely removes some of the dogwhistles and niceties that used to partially mask the raw cruelty of conservatism.
Are we truly to believe that Bush-era ghouls like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove didn’t share the same goals as the people working in the White House now? Rove has even taken to advising Trump lately. Are we to believe that the Republicans in Congress didn’t believe in the things they’re voting for now when they voted for them under previous administrations? It’s simply that Trumpism has given them the leeway to say what they actually mean. The rhetoric of conservatism has gotten more openly spiteful because Trump has given them cover to start taking the mask off.
The willingness to be open about things also extends to the party’s streak of anti-intellectualism. As I said earlier, you don’t need to be stupid to be racist. There are plenty of brilliant people who are also racist. You’d be hard pressed to find many of them among the GOP in Washington (although I’d argue that Mitch McConnell is at least a bit smart).
The funny thing about idolizing the uneducated and uninformed as the Real Americans is that eventually some of those Real Americans start getting themselves elected. This is how you wind up with guys like Louie Gohmert and Jim Jordan influencing decisions that mean life and death for millions of people, how we’re a few months away from QAnon believers likely gaining seats in Congress, and how we got President Trump. The culture wars are politically popular, and the biggest and dumbest crusaders have naturally found themselves on the front lines.
That anti-intellectualism is how mask-wearing and social distancing became political footballs and not no-shit-Sherlock policies, and why people are currently being infected by the truckload in some states. It’s why Trump proposed injecting people with Mr. Clean on national television, and why people applauded when Trump freely admitted at a rally in Tulsa (with not a mask in sight) that he’d ordered a slowdown in COVID-19 testing. You see, the more you test the more cases you find, and that’s bad optics.
All of this will outlive Donald Trump. He’s permanently changed things. The sort of brain-warping that he has ushered in can’t be undone. He’s encouraged bigots to be open and violent about their beliefs, and the conspiracy-mongering has tangibly altered the landscape of Facebook. Trump might be defeated in November, or he might serve another four years. But whoever comes after him will deploy the same playbook, because it clearly works. They just might not be as much of an idiot.
Look no further than Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley as proof. They’re out-and-out fascists like Trump, but can speak in complete sentences and walk and chew gum at the same time. They’re smart. They’re polished. They’re absolutely unhinged. They can tap into the same groups as Trump while playing nice for the camera, and be rewarded for doing so by cable news and spineless centrists who are clamoring for a return to more civil politics. These centrists love to say how much they miss George Bush, who is responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis and left New Orleans to die while setting up a surveillance state and gutting the educational system. And to be clear, Bush himself was quite stupid too.
Trump is an imbecile. He’s a very familiar kind of imbecile who is quite proud of his ability to say mean words on television while wearing his big boy pants.. If these past four years are any indication, we’re in store for a lot more of that stupidity. The good news is that this is a winnable fight. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.