We’re primed for convolutions because the slow-cooked hate runs so deep on both sides.
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I have a confession to make. Back when Donald Trump was president, by the third year of his term, I wanted the stock market to tank. Bigly, on his watch.
I wanted this in spite of the fact that I’m of retirement age and a tanking stock market would cost me and my partner a good part of our modest nest egg.
I wanted the economy to tank too: prices up, employment down, a nice bout of stagflation or deep recession. And I wanted foreign setbacks as well — maybe not World War III, but enough Benghazi-ish bad news to hang a heavy stone around his neck.
I hardly wished for COVID-19 but took real solace in its political impact, especially as Trump predictably prioritized saving “his” economy; dissed his own experts; hawked hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, bleach, and bright light; and thus mortally bungled our nation’s pandemic response. When he himself was stricken, I didn’t pray for his swift and complete recovery.
I’m confessing all this not from a guilty conscience but for the light it may shed on just how Stage IV the American cancer is.
Because I doubt I am alone in my malevolence. I suspect that, in fact, I am in good (or bad) company.
We Didn’t Start This Fire
We can begin with the MAGAs, millions and millions of them, who prayed for nothing more fervently than to see Joe Biden fail. Trip, fall, stutter, forget, screw up the economy, be embarrassed on the world stage.
Being persuaded by Trump that Biden was illegitimate, having “stolen” Trump’s “sacred landslide” in 2020, of course made this implacable hostility come easier, as they seized on what they could (the laptop, Kabul, the price of eggs) in a remarkably competent and scandal-free administration . And, having finally got their be-careful-what-you-wish-for wish on June 27, with Biden’s debate debacle, the evil eye turned on Kamala Harris without so much as blinking.
It’s not a stretch to say that a big chunk of the country craved Biden’s failure more than America’s success. And that sentiment was shared, if not stoked, by plenty of GOP officeholders in thrall to Trump and the MAGA faithful (Exhibit A: The killing, by Senate Republicans at Trump’s bidding, of a long overdue bipartisan border security bill).
It should come as no great surprise that the MAGA hate was mirrored on the anti-MAGA left, a fearful symmetry. From what I could tell, the thoughts I confessed to, millions of others, from progressives to never-Trumpers, were thinking too. We all wanted Trump — president or candidate — to fail and fall, even at real cost to ourselves, and to the nation. Inevitably, the nihilism and tribalism spread, as cancers will do. Such is the dynamic of a political total war.
Before Trump
There has always been political disagreement and strife in this nation. It is the way democracies are built, the principle on which they operate. Show me a healthy democracy and I’ll show you some rough and tumble politics. The early 19th century’s so-called “Era of Good Feelings,” something of a misnomer to begin with, was notable mainly for its brevity.
I’ve had strong feelings about various Republican leaders ever since I can remember: Even in childhood, I knew better than to trust Richard Nixon. And yes, I cried when Ronald Reagan was elected, old enough by then to see for myself the bitter turn of tide augured by that honeyed voice. I knew George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” for the bullshit it was; protested at his first inauguration, and again before our invasion of Iraq; questioned and challenged the suspect results from Ohio that gave him his reelection victory; and penned a mock-epic poem about his presidency.
But when push came to shove, through all of that, I wanted what was best for our country and the planet even if it came at the price of the reputation burnishing and political advancement of a leader I hadn’t voted for, who stood for principles and policies I vehemently opposed.
The 300-Pound Peg in the Ground
That prioritization ended with Trump — for me and for millions like me on both sides. This happened because, from the very beginning, Trump made it all about himself. Wanting insatiably to be loved, striving desperately to fill a psychic bucket with a giant hole in it, he made himself the peg in the ground over which Americans would be forced to take sides and, as he has exhorted, “Fight, Fight, Fight!”
He has done this by telling lie after lie — dividing believers from unbelievers. He has done this by ceaseless othering, scapegoating, and threatening — dividing communities, races, genders, lifestyles, and values. He has done this by stoking fear and resentment and converting them into contempt. He has called forth derision, mockery, hatred, rage — relentlessly.
He has tapped into a latent thirst for revenge and embodied it in himself: “I am your retribution.” Political opponents become enemies of the state (and l’etat c’est moi!), to be put out of commission, crushed, in keeping with his undisguised admiration for the unchecked powers of role-model dictators like Vladimir Putin.
What began with his leading chants of “Lock her up!” as he campaigned against Hillary Clinton in 2016 has only intensified. He has called for Biden and Harris both to be removed from office under the 25th Amendment and for Harris to be disqualified from running against him — just because. In a terrifying echo and preview of a totalitarian police state, he has urged calling out the National Guard or the active-duty military to “handle” his opponents on “the lunatic left” (aka “the enemy from within”), including uncooperative judges and journalists.
He has assaulted our culture’s norms, the rule of law, and democracy itself — sometimes with enough vagueness to confer plausible deniability, but increasingly with a flaunting specificity worthy of history’s worst monsters.
He has done all this, so very obviously to those of us not taken in, with not a gram of concern for the public good, least of all for the welfare of those besotted MAGA masses who comprise his base. Like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump would, I am certain, sacrifice his country (at least) for his own needs — whether for power, glory, money, or freedom from prosecution and incarceration.
How aware he is of how evil he is is a question for the psychologists. My guess is not very. The psyche, even of normal individuals, is generally quite adept at self-justification and denial, and Trump strikes me as profoundly, if not uniquely, nonreflective.
But it really doesn’t matter, does it? Because evil is a phenomenon. You either see it or you don’t. He either appalls you or he doesn’t. You either hate him or you worship him. At least that describes a majority of the American people. Like it or not, and surrealistic as the plot is, this is his opera we’re stuck in.
Parasols and Picnic Baskets
Yes, I know there are millions of people in between (who, electorally speaking, are thought to hold our fate in their hands). And it would seem, to a fly on the wall at a restaurant, supermarket, bowling alley, or stadium — just about anywhere, that is, outside the fever swamp of social media — that Trump and politics are the last thing on anybody’s mind. Everything else is talked about, hardly anyone seems especially politically engaged, and, divided as they may be, people (with occasional exceptions, like family confrontations at holiday dinners) get along just fine.
Perhaps that ethos is strong enough to carry us through November and whatever lies beyond. Perhaps those of us who have our noses pressed perpetually against the political and electoral glass see, because we are over-engaged, a phantom battle over a phantom peg.
But my spidey-sense tells me that the fear and loathing are no mirage but quite real and general all over America; that conditions are ripe for serious, violent conflict; that Donald Trump will not hesitate a second before triggering that conflict; and that a nation full of peg-warriors — like so many MAGAs and like me — will trend ungovernable no matter what the result of this “existential” election.
If you doubt this, my first request is that you look into your own mirror, as I looked into mine, and tell me what you see. Did you want the market, the economy to tank on Trump’s watch? Was it your quiet hope that he would fail — even if it cost you or others or the nation dearly? And if not then, what about now? If that is in fact where we’re at, alas, it’s later than we think.
The question of what one would sacrifice to bring down a tyrant, or even a potential tyrant, is as old as history. I believe the true danger posed by Trump’s reelection bid, and the damage he has already inflicted, can be measured by the radical reordering of priorities that I, and many like me, have experienced.
Yes, most Americans remain, on the surface, passive and politically disengaged, ostensibly sick of it all. This is something of a paradox and may be dangerously misleading. Recall that, at the first battle of the Civil War in 1861, Washington’s finest came out to the banks of Bull Run with parasols, blankets, and picnic baskets to observe the festivities. We know where that went.
I am wigged out by the ominousness of what I believe is likely to ensue between now and springtime. Either Trump will win and, drunk on it, plunge headlong into the dictator’s doom loop. Or he will find himself losing and call out (alongside the lawyers, congressional allies, and high-placed shills) the MAGAs — active duty and reserves — to save him from his fate.
I felt compelled to write personally and frankly about my own mind state because that is all I know for sure, but, daring to extrapolate, I sense we’re primed for convolutions because the slow-cooked hate runs so deep on both sides.
To be sure, many won’t be willing to sacrifice a loaf of bread, Monday Night Football, or a round of golf. But I sense there are those who, when push comes to shove, would give far more, maybe all they have — even their lives (think Claus von Stauffenberg; think the Minutemen; think Hamas). There’s no point in saying I know how it’s going to unfold — there are far too many variables and uncertainties (which is why you can cut the tension with a knife). But there’s a real danger, I believe, of conflict hitting critical mass.
We have since World War II — or perhaps better to say since the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests — lived as a nation in a profoundly unheroic trough. There’s been far more watching than doing in this Age of Entertainment, and America has through soft degrees grown fat and unhappy, a consequence in no small measure of the fat being so inequitably distributed.
But the warrior mode, the willingness to sacrifice, latent and buried deep, can be revived — for good or for ill — and we may be on the verge of such a revival. Unfortunately, the famous Yeats lines about the best and the worst seem destined to direct it.
My purpose in this piece has been to forecast this weather, so we can be prepared, at least mentally, for the gathering storm.
