Some of the most often heard statements from veteran pundits and grizzled politicos this week are variants of, “Welcome to Donald Trump’s World” and we are living, “at the dawn of the Era of Trump.” They’re offering these comments as greetings or warnings, depending on where they perch on the political spectrum. Personally, I think they’re all more than a bubble off plumb.
I say this because, when you scratch beneath the massive unearned ego and the Tweetspeak schoolyard taunts, you discover that Donald Trump is nothing so much as America’s first Potemkin Village President. There is a bombastic patina tinged with just enough racism, sexism, homophobia, class warfare rhetoric, bumper sticker “solutions,” (and just plain not being Hillary Clinton-ness), to motivate enough disquieted Americans in enough states to power him to the 46th best Electoral College landslide (out of 58, and the worst popular vote loss), of any winning presidential candidate in U.S. history. But, when you step behind the buffoonish, clementine-colored facade, you find – nothing. A void so devoid of knowledge, understanding and human empathy, it threatens to dwarf even Sarah Palin’s empty intellect. It is an altogether new thing. A Trumpian cerebral vacuum.
You want proof that the Donald’s inventory of core beliefs is on eternal back-order? Scroll back through the campaign to when he was for punishing women who get abortions, and then he was opposed to the very thought of it. And then he was for it, and then he was against it again, conditionally. He took four different positions in two days. Or how about when he was against North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law and then he was okay with it - again, all in the same day. He believes nothing, listens to almost no one and learns from an even smaller circle of people. He communes with his spiritual and intellectual Sherpa every morning when he watches himself shave in the bathroom mirror. Yet, he will fight to the death to defend whatever he just finished saying. It is irrelevant – to him, at least – whether what he last uttered comports with provable facts or whatever he said an hour, a day or a year ago. His life is unhaunted by hobgoblins of consistency. Trump decides what to say next based on whatever he guesses his audience next wants to hear. He is, in every sense of the term, a quintessential real estate salesman.
“You don’t want Mexican neighbors? Don’t worry, we’ll build a wall. You don’t want to pay for a wall? Hey, we’ll make the Mexicans pay for it. After all, one side of it will be facing them. You’re allergic to Muslims? No problem! We’ll stop any more from coming in and we’ll put a bell on the ones that are already here. You’ll hear them coming from a mile away. We’ll even spray for cockroaches and lesbians. No extra charge. What’d ya say, do we have a deal?”
The problem with having a candidate, and now a president, like that is that nullity doesn’t survive in the American political zeitgeist. You put a hollow shell in the Oval Office and the people around the chief executive will fill him in nanoseconds with every political wish and public policy goody on their bucket lists. And therein hides the Kraken. President Donald Trump has surrounded himself with many of the ne’er do wells, outcasts and should-be outcasts who helped him win the election. Because he hasn’t any of his own beyond self-aggrandizement, their priorities will festoon his administration’s order of battle.
That's why it would probably be more accurate to call, “Trump World,” “Pence World.” The new Vice President is the only successful political veteran and experienced Washington hand in the new President’s inner circle. (I’m discounting Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Counsellor to the President Kellyanne Conway because they’ve both spent their careers as little more than non-ideological, hired paladins, champions of whatever cause or candidate was signing their paychecks at the time.) No, the meat of the President’s policy agenda will come from the ideologues in his inner sanctum, and Pence is first in that queue.
Mike Pence is, before anything else, a theocrat. Living a Christian life is only step one in his raison d’etre. In his mind, he exists to make Christendom triumphant over secular America. To him, freedom of religion means the freedom of every American to live by the values and prejudices of Pence’s faith. Whether everyone wants that or not, matters not. Pence knows best. This is why, in whatever public trust he has been entrusted with – as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives or Governor of Indiana - he has done everything he could to expunge any public policy that doesn’t jibe with his Christian worldview (like killing federal funding for AIDs research and Planned Parenthood, even though that organization is a vital provider of public health services and medical care in many places throughout the country). It’s also why he’s moved Heaven and Earth to insinuate ostracism of LGBTQ Americans into public law at the state and federal level. That has included, as Governor, signing a “religious freedom” law that would have protected anyone who operated any kind of public accommodation if they refused service to gay, lesbian and transgender Americans on religious grounds. The national public uproar was such that Pence and the Indiana Legislature were forced to hastily amend the law to defang its most offensive provisions.
The bottom line – if Vice President Pence stays true to form, he will dedicate much of his time and energy to washing away our sins through new federal regulations and laws. And I wouldn’t want to bet a vital organ that he won’t exploit his proximity to, and unique influence over, the Potemkin President to accomplish this.