Trump: the monster at our American door

I woke up before sunrise yesterday, and headed down the Pacific Coast Highway thinking about the CNN abomination in New Hampshire.  What is it that America saw on Wednesday night? What did the world see? 

CNN built a set for Donald Trump, and filled a room with his voters and sycophants. Next, CNN introduced Donald Trump and he walked out onto the set to rapturous applause. Then the tsunami hit.

It was a tsunami of lies that hit the truth like a wave of water crashing into a beach full of thatch huts. Everything was washed away in an instant. Certainly, Kaitlin Collins was. She was engulfed and drowned. There was nothing she could do. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

John Smith was the captain of the Titanic, and is best remembered for going down with the ship that “God himself could not sink.” A cottage industry bloomed in the aftermath of the disaster where Smith’s famous “last words” were stamped on anything that could be sold. Smith did go down with the ship — though it is doubtful that his final exhortation to “be British” actually happened.

In any event, George Bernard Shaw pointed out during the period of Smith’s fevered posthumous lionization that he should perhaps be best remembered as an incompetent who plowed his ocean liner into an ice field, on a moonless night, absent enough life boats, at full speed. Shaw’s basic premise was that what happened wasn’t very surprising, given how reckless the journey had been.

Of course, no ship was sunk and no audience members drowned during the Trump fiasco, but one couldn’t help but hear Smith’s faded words echoing through the CNN control room as network president Chris Licht faced the ice ahead with a steely “straight ahead, maximum speed” order. He strapped Kaitlin Collins to the bow, and arranged his panels in a version of Frederick Fleet’s crow’s nest where his contributors could be the first to see the debacle at hand.

What was the moment of impact like when the RMS CNN hit the ice? The look on Jake Tapper’s face said it all. The CNN panel after the event, which included Tapper, Dana Bash, John King, Wolf Blitzer and others, was notable because of that look — and Tapper wasn’t alone. It looked like shame to me. I can’t really remember seeing a moment when so many serious journalists and commentators looked genuinely shocked and ashamed in the immediate aftermath of an event produced on their airwaves.

During the final months of the Second World War the Nazi regime’s crimes were laid bare at the sites of the liberated concentration camps. Dwight Eisenhower directly ordered every German civilian between ages 15 and 80 into the camps to bury the dead and bear witness to what was done in their names. What type of people were they? Ordinary. They were the type that would laugh out loud in the comfort of a crowd with the man who was just found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation, while he defamed his victim some more.

There are reams of studies about mass killings that follow on inevitably from mass movements and charismatic leaders who insist on their own reality and infallibility. The crowd that CNN assembled was ominous in this regard. Clearly, a great many individuals within the audience have ceded their individuality to a collective consciousness that celebrates, venerates and wishes to impose Donald Trump on the rest of us — like it or not. New Hampshire’s motto is “Live Free or Die.” Those weren’t “Live Free or Die” people. They were group thinkers at best who have subordinated their agency and good sense for the purposes of belonging to a community that fronts the worst cause in America since Jim Crow and the Confederacy. Whatever Trump’s crowd may be like one-on-one is besides the point. It is their collective intent and their leader’s malice that are the issue. It always has been, and it always will be.

Whether the right analogy is tsunami or shipwreck the results are the same — an ocean of metaphorical floating debris bobbing on the waves.

Here is how Mehdi Hasan so accurately described the scene:

Donald Trump is a political extremist who is a direct threat to the peace, prosperity and future of the United States. He leads a movement that teems with malice,
menace and lies. It is an un-American movement that seeks to impose control over the majority — by whatever means necessary. Trump is seeking political power and doesn’t care about democracy, human rights or the US Constitution. He is a pathological liar and sociopath who has divided, incited and provoked an insurrection. He lacks character, integrity, judgement, decency, morality and a scintilla of patriotism. There is nothing normal about him or his cause. He is the monster at our American door.

There are no words to describe the current wretchedness of America’s political and media institutions. They are like shattered glass on the floor — broken, smashed and irredeemable. Wednesday night was a grotesque debutante hour. The American people got to see the coming out of whatever it was produced by the hideous union of American politics and media as an entertainment proposition. Certainly it wasn’t news. It was extremist schtick, mixed with propaganda, fronted by CNN. Even the most dim-witted amongst us has to understand the reason why trust between the American people and the American media has been incinerated. It’s not on the level.

A great threat has gathered since January 6, 2021. It is going to make another charge and try to take power through the US presidential election in 2024. Should Trump and his campaign succeed American democracy will wither and die quickly. The rule of law will collapse and an era of political persecution and prosecution will begin. Our children will not grow up in the America of our memory. They will live in the world of Trump’s fever dreams and whims. People will ask, “How did it happen?” I don’t know what many will say, but hopefully someone, somewhere, will offer a helping hand. They’ll say, “Go ask Chris Licht. He was a journalist. He’ll know.”

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