Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker
article from October 14, “How Alarmed Should We Be if Trump Wins Again?” describes
two reactions to Trump’s campaign for the presidency. He talks about the
minimalists who normalize the ex-president by minimizing the damage he might do
in a second term and the maximalists who present a frightening picture of what
a Trump win might mean. In the end, he comes down unequivocally on the side of
the maximalists. Here’s a lengthy quote from near the end of the article:
“Think hard about the probable
consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised
to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented
figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an
ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular
vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile ‘all Americans.’ He
will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon
and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby
guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of
committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with
an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was
largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S.
Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he
begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large
corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of
the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?
“Trump will certainly abandon
Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and
against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the
spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the
fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any
positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against
this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too
exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a
democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An
oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed
watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty
of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards
would sue him, and win.
“What any plausible explanation
must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a
spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney
cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the
villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in
others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts
of people who’ve slighted them. (‘They’ll never laugh at me again!’) They
nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult
following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon.
Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in ‘King
Lear’ and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their
self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in
power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in
fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they
hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and
virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he
truly has a better city in mind.
“Trump is a villain. He would be a
cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a
break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his
admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will
tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so
absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so
unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror
at his return to power. One outrage succeeds another until we become exhausted
and have to work hard even to remember the outrages of a few weeks past: the
helicopter ride that never happened (but whose storytelling purpose was to
demean Kamala Harris as a woman), or the cemetery visit that ended in a
grotesque thumbs-up by a graveside (and whose symbolic purpose was to cynically
enlist grieving parents on behalf of his contempt). No matter how deranged his
behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune.”
Basically, he’s saying that the
minimalists haven’t been paying attention. Trump is not harmless, as those who worked
in his previous administration know very well (see my previous post for links
to statements by former staffers, family members, and Republican officials who
oppose him). It saddens me to no end to know that the LDS vote will give Trump Utah’s
Electoral College ballots. Yes, I’ve heard all the excuses, and they all ring
hollow.
