PMC Commentary

The "cultural vacuum" of Donald J. Trump

"When we are without art, we are a diminished people — myopic, unlearned and cruel."

So ends Dave Eggers' essay, "A Cultural Vacuum in Trump’s White House." Unlike previous chief executives of the modern era, this president, notes Eggers, has refashioned the White House into a culturally barren hovel. "In the 17 months that Donald Trump has been in office, he has hosted only a few artists of any kind," recalls the novelist. "One was the gun fetishist Ted Nugent. Another was Kid Rock. They went together (and with Sarah Palin). Neither performed."

And yet, like Martin Luther (forgive me), there Trump stands, he can do no other. For he and his presidency are immutably myopic, unlearned and cruel, which likewise diminish us as a people. The free expression of the creative imagination in all its resplendent forms is the very antithesis of Trumpism, which seeks the basest denominator of the nation's most boorish communities.

Even a glance at Trump's residential interiors — made up as gaudily as a New Orleans whorehouse — offers insight into the man's dullness of taste and deficit of cultivation.

His unaesthetic awfulness goes much deeper than that, of course. Trump almost jauntily concedes that he rarely reads, thus he has squandered not merely the transcendent joys of a Halberstam, Whitman or Roth, but the cerebral treasures of a Halberstam, Whitman or Roth.

I once heard the literary critic Harold Bloom say that he reads voraciously because he wishes to learn the vast reflections of the human condition (all of which can be found in Shakespeare alone, if you wish). Trump, on the other hand, has spent most of his adult life pursuing nothing but lifeless mammon. It shows. He knows the cheap banter of a huckster and the argot of a vulturous swindler, but superficiality is as deep as his uncurious brain can go.

Why does Trump disdain those whom he calls the "elite"? Because he's jealous as hell.

America's authentic elite are aristocrats not of material wealth (commonly inherited) but of merit, innate talent and refined achievement — all the qualities that Trump lacks in toto. Society's elitism can be found in your autodidactic postman as well as our famous painters or renowned musicians; persons of true accomplishment, not carnival barkers who so callously screw subcontractors. Trump's singular merit, I gather, is that he knows just how unaccomplished he is — for which he compensates by bullying, bravado and bullshit.

That, and $10,000 portraits (which he probably considers "real" art) surrounded by framed, fake Time magazine covers. Incurable self-aggrandizement is the surest sign of a crude, insecure man. And they don't come any cruder than Donald J. Trump — a swaggering mass of myopia, ignorance and cruelty.

All of it white-housed in a cultural vacuum. Perfectly said, Mr. Eggers.

 

Mr. Nice Guys? Oh Lord, I hope not.

Ron Klain, a 2016 HRC adviser and chief of staff to two Democratic vice presidents, has penned another of those ubiquitous "What Democrats must do to win in 2018." He suggests three "pathways," which I have tightly condensed:

"First, Democrats have to show voters that they are fighting for them, not merely against Trump…. Second, our best argument may not be about the outrageous things Trump has done but, rather, about the things he promised to do that he has not done [such as introducing an infrastructure plan]…. Third, we should promise voters a different kind of Congress if we get control: a true 'people’s Congress.'"

All solid, modest suggestions; nothing there to quibble with in terms of a positive program. What Klain omits from his prospectus, however, is that inescapable enormity in today's political landscape, which is to say, the undecided voter — especially in midterm contests — is virtually extinct.

The 2018 congressional elections will be decided by base-voter turnout — and that of course means ginning up enthusiasm on both sides. For Dems, promising their voters such programmatic trinkets as, for instance, "more transparency and openness in how Congress is run" and "fewer perks for members" is quite unlikely to motivate the base to rush to the polls in November. What will motivate is deeply driven antipathy toward those rubber-stamping Republican goons in Congress and, needless to say, their mob boss in the White House.

In politics, it is a psychosociological fact that prodigious negativity is a winner. (Just ask the Republican pols in power, who haven't had a fresh policy idea since … hell, I can't even recall.) Klain seems to reject this thundering political truism when he writes that "Voters know whom we are fighting against. We need to talk more about whom we are fighting for." As a civics textbook entry, I'd give Klain an A+. As a giver of political strategy, I'd boot him out of the war room.

Yes, negativity gets old, really fast. And voters claim to detest it. But it works. It sticks. The winners of the 2018 midterms will be the guys who fought in the gutter with the greatest verve. That is perhaps a pitiable statement about democracy, but it is what it is. If Democrats prefer to teach goo-goo civics, they should get out of politics.

 

Egads. They just can't help themselves.

Since Fox Business Network has only five or six viewers, the odds of 100-percent audience receptivity to Larry Kudlow's assertion this morning are pretty high.

"The deficit … is coming down, and it's coming down rapidly," said Kudlow to host Maria Bartiromo, "who," reports CBS News, "did not appear to challenge him on that statement."

Kudlow is, as you know, Trump's "top economic adviser." Therefore there's little reason he would be familiar with any fiscal facts.

"The federal deficit in fiscal year 2017 was $666 billion.... It is projected to be $804 billion in 2018 and $981 billion in 2019…. The CBO issued a grim report Tuesday on the country's fiscal future, finding the GOP tax law is expected to add $1.84 trillion to the deficit over the next decade."

Of course there's the outside possibility that Kudlow is indeed familiar with those facts. But, alas, he dwells in that peculiar land of gossamer Trumpian integrity, which means fidelity to lying like there's no tomorrow.

 

In Annapolis, a larger tale, perhaps

Yesterday, at 6:03 p.m., a reporter with Annapolis, Maryland's Capital Gazette tweeted, "We … don’t know anything about motive in this incident" — the "incident" being the gruesome shooting of seven of the newspaper's employees, five dead. Later it would be revealed that the shooter was one Jarrod Ramos, whose motive was disgruntlement with what he claimed was the paper's defamation of, ironically enough, his "character."

The lag in news as to motive didn't stop the plucky reporters at Fox News, however, from looking for something spectacularly political on a national level. The network's Trace Gallagher informed anchor Neil Cavuto, "We checked in earlier, Neil, with the ideological bent of the Capital…. Doesn’t really seem to have a major ideological bent, if that plays into the motive at all." So, no evident "ideological bent," but hope remained. (Later, Cavuto rather responsibly shut down that line of investigation. "Eyeing through it on the Internet," he reported, "I don’t notice any rabid editorials or polarizing coverage. It just seems like a very solid local paper.")

Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reported, "The far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos" decided this was a superb time for some political "humor," which, in Milo's case, entailed this message to reporters everywhere: "I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight." (After all, according to the president of the United States, journalists are "the enemy of the people," hence Milo was just being a Trumpian patriot.) Subsequently he claimed that his message was "a 'joke' that was never meant to be widely distributed." What a wag.

Still, not to be outdone — not even by the psychotic version of Milo Minderbinder — Fox News' Sean Hannity, in possession of no relevant information whatsoever, vomited this on his radio program:

"It's so sad that there are so many sick, demented, and evil people in this world. It really is sad…. You know, as I've always said, I mean honestly — I've been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric. Really Maxine [Waters]? You want people to create — 'call your friends, get in their faces,' and Obama said that too. 'Get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls,' and wherever else she said."

That there was zero association between Rep. Waters' encouragement of nonphysical protests and a deranged 38-year-old male shooter bothered Mr. Hannity not. But, that's his m.o.; he conjures fantasies and ignores reality — the latter being, most recently, what his BFF said Wednesday night at his North Dakota rally: "Maxine. She’s a beauty. I mean, she practically was telling people the other day to assault [untrue]. Can you imagine if I said the things she said?"

The NY Times: "Trump is wrong that he, himself, has never encouraged violence. During the 2016 campaign, he urged his supporters to 'rough up' protesters, lamented the 'old days' when protesters would be 'carried out on a stretcher' and explicitly told supporters to 'knock the crap out of them.'"

I'm beginning to have visions of Weimar Republic street brawls in Annapolis, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. Donald Trump's fascistic proclivities become more evident each day, and there is no extant force to curb his appetite for ever greater power. When a shooting at a medium-market newspaper evolves, in minutes, to the sensationalist far-right level of a Reichstag fire, it seems ever more manifest that the forces of power that do exist will stop at nothing to crush all democratic opposition.

 

The hate positively oozes from the right

I've no idea what possessed me to do this (except a fevered delirium), but I just visited a blog scribbled by a gentleman you all know. Here's what he wrote today:

"If the ultra-Leftie Justice Ginsberg [sic], who is 85, can be persuaded to retire, or better still, fall down the marble steps of the Court, then a traditional conservative SCOTUS should be guaranteed for a couple of decades" (my emphasis).

This particular, ahem, writer has accused liberals and leftists and center-leftists of being out of civil bounds. Yet that sort of hateful, inhuman, "witty" drivel is what he treats his ideological readers to. Any guess as to who he is?

 

Thanks everyone for your good wishes. I'm pulling out of this funk slowly. This afternoon, a few belts of hooch helped. I had to do something. It's not a path to recovered health I'd recommend to anyone — nor will I continue it — but today, it helped. Once I forced myself to struggle out of this godawful ailment and read some news — a shooting in Annapolis, unholy Supreme Court decisions and, above all, Trump now seems to believe he's a legitimate president of the United States — I screamed out like Hans Solo in Star Wars VI, recovering from carbonite sickness: "Luke? A Jedi? I'm out of it for a little while and everbody gets delusions of grandeur."

(p.s.: My ignorance has been corrected by an astute reader. It's Han, not Hans, Solo. My apology to George Lucas.)

 

This bloody war will end quickly

The NY Times:

"With the Republican majority already on a 51-49 knife’s edge, senators and strategists from both parties said the clash over the balance of the Supreme Court would immediately overwhelm a campaign that to date had largely revolved around President Trump’s conduct and issues surrounding the economy, immigration and health care.

"The summer and fall will be consumed by the fight over Mr. Trump’s proposed replacement."

Who's kidding whom? Kennedy's seat won't be cold before McConnell rushes Trump's far-right nominee through a hearing and confirmation. This will be a long-dead issue by November.

Any decent, reputable president would calm the storm and reassure an anxious nation by announcing Merrick Garland as his choice. But we don't have a decent, reputable president. We have a gangster who would prefer a bloody mob war rather than dividing ideological territories peacefully. That's what he and his goons thrive on. 

 

I'm sorry, I need one more day of recuperation. I'll be back. Thanks for your understanding.

***

Thursday: I'm afraid the above still stands. Perhaps tomorrow.

 

"The administration has no idea what it’s doing"

Trump is getting his little body parts caught in the wringer. So he's turning to his old friend, a Twitter tantrum:

The Washington Post called that passage in the second tweet — "ultimately [Harley] will not pay tariffs selling into the E.U. — "cryptic." But it's not cryptic. It's just a con job — a Trumpian fantasy that all tariffs between the U.S. and the E.U. will be reduced, someday, to zero.

Paul Krugman writes that to comprehend Trump's gibberish, "you need to understand two crucial points.

"First, the administration has no idea what it’s doing." He cites a 2016 white paper on trade distributed by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and trade czar Peter Navarro, which "was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks….

"Second, this administration is infested … with conspiracy theorists."

When these two collide — the ignorance and the bogeyman network — the Trump administration "will start seeing villains under every bed," continues Krugman. "It will attribute the downsides of trade conflict not to its own actions, but to George Soros and the deep state…. The point is that the politics of trade war will probably end up looking like Trump politics in general: a search for innocent people to demonize."

It already has. To sell motorcycles in Europe, what choice did Harley have? It was facing a 31 percent tariff — up from 6 percent; a retaliatory increase by the E.U. Trump's response was that he "fought hard for them," but they "wave[d] the White Flag" — "they quit!" So the scapegoat, in this case, is the victim, which is usually the case. And of that, we'll see more.

 

POTUS, now a restaurant critic (of a restaurant he's never eaten at)

From Trump, and then Jonathan Chait:

True enough, but if we were to try to keep score of all the Trump administration's hypocrisies, we'd be running in circles and chasing our tails like drunken pugs.

I'm more interested in how Trump discerned that The Red Hen has "filthy" canopies, doors and windows, and why he believes the restaurant "badly needs a paint job." He didn't, and he doesn't, of course. But if Trump hates a movie star, then he or she is overrated; if he hates a major newspaper, it's failing and full of third-rate journalists; if poor countries don't suit his racist, Fifth Avenue tastes, they're shitholes. So naturally if a restaurant evicts one his professional liars, it's filthy and badly in need of a paint job.

I've known fifth graders who are more emotionally mature.

 

As the Post puts it, "For the last time …"

The Washington Post:

The slow and steady recovery that President Barack Obama kick-started with the stimulus has continued under Trump — just a little slower and a little steadier than before. Indeed, as you can see [above], the economy added almost 3.5 million jobs in Obama's last 16 months in office, compared with just under 3 million jobs in Trump's first 16 months.

Whenever I work up the nerve to scan Twitter, I notice that Trump supporters devote at least as much space to bashing Obama as they do praising their president for his fabulous jobs record. I have never understood their compulsion to denigrate Obama on this score. On the whole, are they 1) simply unaware of President Obama's superior record? or 2) just lying about Trump's record? or 3) merely trying to bait the knowledgeable tweeters among us?

I suspect the answer is #1: They are mind-boggingly ignorant of Obama's record. I say this, I admit, because of scant anecdotal evidence. About six months after Trump's election, on Twitter I had to point out to a triumphalist Trump supporter that Hillary had actually won the popular vote. Later he came back and proudly announced — meticulous and honest scholar that he was — that he had done some research and learned that Hillary had indeed won the popular vote. He had done some research. For six months, mind you, this Trump supporter had lived in wholesale ignorance of what had been headline news.

I was dumbfounded; I hadn't fully realized, till then, just what a little, enclosed world these people were living in.

 

New Q. on Harley-Davidson's job application: "Do you speak German?"

Turns out, trade wars are rather easy to win — by the other guys.

Announced Harley-Davidson today: "Increasing international production to alleviate the EU tariff burden is not the company's preference, but represents the only sustainable option."

In plain English, Trump's idiotic steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on the European Union — which has retaliated, in part, by increasing its tariff on U.S. motorcycles from 6 to 31 percent — have caused Harley-Davidson to move some production out of America and into Europe.

Meanwhile, Europe's retaliatory tariff will add $2,200 to the cost of Harley's motorcycles, which, to remain competitive, the company has decided to eat.

So congratulations, Harley-Davidson and your Trump voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Missouri — Harley's production homes. You are among the first to help Make Europe Great Again.

 

For the GOP, alarms are sounding

Currently running in the broadly reviled MSM (reviled broadly by the fringe) are two opinion pieces that the brighter meerkats among the Republican Party (scurry, sniff, flinch) will pin up in their offices as pre-obituaries for their suffocating party.

One, "Why We Are Leaving the G.O.P." (NYT), is penned by Susan Bevan and Susan Cullman, the national co-chairwoman and co-chairwoman emeritus, respectively, of the organization, Republican Majority for Choice. "We can no longer support a Republican Party that is shutting down low-cost health care clinics offering cancer screenings, basic health services and much-needed family planning services" for women, they write. "The far right was [is] more interested in conflating abortion and birth control for political purposes. It is fiscally disingenuous to deny birth control coverage and then bemoan unintended pregnancies and abortion."

Fiscal disingenuity defines the GOP in general. One look at last December's tax bill confirms that proposition. For eight years Republican lawmakers decried President Obama's deficit spending — which, from his Republican predecessor, he cut in half — only to pass a stimulus package in an already hot economy, adding debt of $1.5 trillion.

"Our organization … is shutting its doors," write Bevan and Cullman. "The big tent has collapsed for good" — because the party's weighty hypocrisies have brought it down.

Also running is George Will's Stage 2 of his anti-Republican crusade. Stage 1 was his withdrawal from the party; his next step is to encourage independents and "temperate" Republicans to "Vote against the GOP this November."

Two recent saliences brought Will to this point. First was Sen. Bob Corker's quite reasonable proposal; the Senate should approve any of Trump's tariffs imposed for "national security" reasons. Notes Will, "All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution’s structure." But the Senate shot it down, preemptively. Second — and this was the real kicker (my emphasis) — "the Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control." Congress is, or should be, there not as a co-branch of Trump's government, but as a co-equal branch — as a check. No longer.

Vigilant Republicans would do well to take note of such disaffections. Their present-day reasoning is that they can't, for the Republican Party is now the party of Trump. Hence to vote against Trump is to vote themselves out of office. But the walls are closing in, or rather the tent is collapsing. As HuffPost reported late last year, "The percentage of Americans who consider themselves Republican or lean that way has dropped [5 points] since Donald Trump was elected president, a Gallup poll found. Those identifying with the Democratic Party have held steady." As Trump's outrages persist, so will these intersecting trajectories.

 

Christianity, on the right

Yesterday, Man of God Mike Huckabee tweeted this ...

to which, he attached this "jocular" photo of Pelosi's committee:

It would be a waste of my time and yours to rhetorically wring my hands over the malevolence with which today's right wingers practice their "Christianity." Mr. Huckabee gets hypocrisy bonus points for being an ordained pastor; here is a heavenly mediator for the masses vomiting up the miscellaneous malignities of Hell. Pseudoconservative religionists such as Huckabee no longer even attempt to conceal their hatreds, their callousness, their debaucheries of the mind.

By and large, the Christian religion of the contemporary right is a belief system of vileness — by popular demand. Or did the Huckabees of the right luridly impose it on their ovine followers? Whatever. By now, it is what it is — a symbiotic coven of profoundly unChristian impulses in which not all of us are the children of God, loved equally by God. Some are mere props — poster boys to score cheap political points.

What to make of this politico-theological state of affairs? As noted, hand-wringing is pointless. I'm no Christian myself, nonetheless the accelerating depravity and ultimate decay of an ancient, pervasive Western tradition seems — and this is an understatement — an immense cultural affliction. A political philosophy once meant to respect and conserve tradition is, in its own depravity, proving the death of it. That Christianity was, at any rate, destined to go the route of Minoanism or Ashurism in 100, 500 or 1,000 years lessens not the torment of pseudoconservatism's massive upheavals inflicted on modern society. Stable societies don't bear rapidity of change gracefully; only slow, incremental shifts in their traditional institutions undergird a culture's health and longevity.

And those, the contemporary right is assailing from all angles, including religion. For a salubrious, agreeable future, it's either them or us.        

 

I'll be posting a bit later today. See you soon.