Trump will win again

Did you ever wonder how the President of the United States could stand up in front of a group of servicemen deployed in Iraq and say, “You just got one of the biggest pay raises you’ve ever received. You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years — more than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one”, when absolutely nothing in that statement is true?

Or how he could tell White House reporters , “We’re putting in a resolution some time in the next week and a half to two weeks [and] we’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent,”  when no such legislation was pending and no lawmakers, Democrat or Republican, have any idea what he’s referring to?

These are just a couple of recent examples out of many thousands where Trump just made shit up, blathered or tweeted it, and has not only never been held accountable or even seriously questioned, but has gained politically while being supported by FoxNews and Republican lawmakers.

It’s baffling to anyone who expects the president to speak the truth as he understands it, or at least a deftly-spun version of it. It’s baffling to someone with principles, or someone who has any shame at all. It’s baffling to just about everyone except career grifters, pathological liars, and Donald Trump.

Once you fully understand that Trump has no principles or shame, and is a career grifter as well as a pathological liar, it’s possible to see the bizarre genius in his method.

It doesn’t matter to Trump if there is no actual pay raise or tax cut. What matters  is that the people who are ultimately disappointed by the broken promise will understand that he isn’t the bad guy in this story. It’s someone else’s fault, you see, because Trump tried his best to deliver. He stood right in front of us and told us he would do these things. He fought for them. If he lost the fight, he can’t be blamed – he’s our hero and standard-bearer. It was Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, or Crooked Hillary, or that foreign-born illegitimate Muslim “president” that preceded him. Trump was the only one who ever tried to do the right thing! The liberals and the fake news media and George Soros conspired against him so they can implement their anti-American agenda!

Trump is ultimately going to win this silly “border wall” fight. Even if he loses. The important thing is to be seen as fighting hard against the forces that want to destroy America. And when the government finally does re-open, with or without his $5.7 billion, he’ll claim victory, insist the wall is already built and that Mexico paid for it, and so on. To his staff, he’s already said, “the country will not remember the shutdown, but it will remember that he staged a fight over his insistence that the southern border be protected.”

The brilliance of Trump is that he knows exactly which buttons to push and how to push them. And he doesn’t care who gets hurt or what’s best for the country or whether our system of government survives or if our position in the world is diminished to  pariah/rogue state/laughingstock. He only cares that, in the end, he “wins”.

Earlier this week, there was a disturbing story about blatant racism in a GM plant in Ohio, complete with “whites only” bathrooms, nooses hung in the shop, wide use of the “n-word” during the workday, and all manner of threats and intimidation. This isn’t the Jim Crow south we’re talking about here, but the modern, corporate, industrialized heart of America. In 2019.

There’s a tendency for us here in the Northeast, or elsewhere in the Blue States, to shrug this situation off as an outlier, and believe that most Americans see it as abhorrent. This is where Trump has us beat. He knows this thinking is pervasive. He knows that just under the surface, the majority of Americans have no particular problem with the culture in that GM plant, but are too savvy to let on. Trump knows he can appeal to these people and how to do it.

It’s coming into sharper focus now exactly how and why Trump allowed Steve Bannon and the “alt-right” to influence him so strongly during the campaign and in the first year of his presidency. He heard what they were saying and understood the power of the message. He saw they were on to something big, and even if the most egregious manifestations of it cried out for his condemnation, he never capitulated.

Don’t believe me? Watch this clip from “American History X”, where the Edward Norton character whips up his disciples into a mini-Kristallnacht rampage against a Korean storekeeper.

The language, arguments, imagery, sense of grievance and “white nationalism” is exactly what comes through in Trump’s rhetoric about the southern border and the threats to “our country”. It could have been written by Steve Bannon and recited by Trump verbatim in any of his MAGA speeches about “The Wall”.

Every president we’ve ever had until the current one, from whatever part of the political spectrum, understood that this thinking is a low-grade infection that has always been present in the American body politic. And every one understood the importance of pushing back against it. It’s been 50 years since this kind of thing has represented a remotely viable political platform on the national stage (I’m thinking now of George Wallace in 1968), but even then it was thoroughly, if not unanimously, repudiated by the vast majority of Americans.

Something has changed. We are being led by a demagogue, a career grifter and pathological liar. Even if the Republicans in congress come to their senses and finally push back, a horrifying reality has been revealed: 60 million Americans thought and still think a Trump administration is a good thing. When he is finally dragged, kicking and screaming, from the Oval Office, they will still be our neighbors.