comes from Roger Cohen and appears in today’s New York Times. It is titled Trump's Corruption of the American Republic and I assure you that if you are worried about using one of your five free articles from the paper (although you can clear cookies for more) this is well worth it.
Cohen begins with a paragraph in which he is NOT saying Trump has YET destroyed the checks and balances upon which our Republic relies, but that he
has so soiled the discourse that a kind of numbness has set in, an exhaustion of outrage that allows him to proceed with the unthinkable.
The next paragraph is key:
The greatest danger from a man so unerring in his detection of human weakness, so attuned to the thrill of cruelty, so aware of the manipulative powers of entertainment, so unrelenting in his disregard for truth, so contemptuous of ethics and culture, so attracted to blood and soil, was always that he would use the immense powers of his office to drag Americans down with him into the vortex.
Cohen follow by noting that we have now experienced so many examples of what Trump has done to distort our public discourse that we are becoming inured, that the response of many now is merely to shrug.
Could we say our outrage tank has been nearly emptied?
But there is much more to this excellent column.
Consider the construction of the very next paragraph:
The appalling becomes excusable, the heinous becomes debatable, the outrageous becomes comical, lies become fibs, spite becomes banal, and hymns to American might become cause for giddy chants of national greatness.
Cohen notes the important of ethics to the continuation of the American experiment, and how Trump’s clear admiration for the ability of strong man rulers to distort our processes points at a loss of any kind of ethics. He recognizes how much we may need to depend on Jim Mattis, a man who knows what war is, to restrain Trump from acting on his bellicose rhetoric especially to North Korea.
I said this was a reaction to the State of the Union this past Tuesday. Cohen considers that speech poor to mediocre, and one paragraph from his specific reaction is critical:
It equated the 128 countries — not “dozens,” as Trump said — that voted against his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital with “enemies of America.” It hinted at a McCarthyite purge of any federal employee deemed to have failed the American people. It betrayed presidential rapture at reviving the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the place where a fair trial went to die
Let’s focus on the first sentence of what I just quoted. Imagine a world where in fact we literally consider those 128 countries as our enemies. Add to that the context created by the Nunes memo, where many countries might be more reluctant to share intelligence that could be critical to our safety. How does that make this country and the people in it safer?
In the commentary about the SOTU to which I listened or which I read, I do not remember anyone focusing on how many countries Trump had just labeled as our “enemies” nor do I remember anyone offering examples of those who voted against us (you can read the full list here, which included most of the other members of NATO, for example, Denmark, Germany, Belgium (where NATO is headquartered), Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, Slovenia, Iceland, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Slovakia, Montenegro, Lithuania, Luxemborg, etc. It also included strong US allies like New Zealand and Japan, to say nothing of countries in the Middle East upon whose assistance we depend.
As the spouse of a Federal employee (albeit one on the Congressional side) and the teacher of several dozen students with parents who are Federal employees, the McCarthyite purge implied in the speech (which Lawrence O’Donnell did flag in real time) bespeaks a mindset where the entire federal workforce is suppose to be responsive to the whims and vagaries of the putative dictator who currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, only a few miles from where I write this.
As for Gitmo? It is an abomination, a stain on the reputation and image of this nation. It is also horridly expensive as compared to incarceration in something likea Supermax (with those institutions being as offensive to the American idea of justice).
Given how some commentators reacted to the speech without properly parsing and analyzing it, and given the response by the American public, which want to believe things can return to normal (whatever that word might mean to some individuals), perhaps the most succinct thing Cohen has to offer is this:
Trump has lowered expectations. He has inured people to the thread of violence and meanness lurking in almost every utterance; or worse, he has started to make them relish it. He has habituated Americans to buffoonery and lies. He calls himself a “genius.”
If so, his genius resides in the darkest realms of the human psyche.
We should not underestimate that “genius” because it has enable Trump to continue a half century of violating rules and norms with few personal consequences, personally or financially, and put him in a position where (a) he is personally enriching himself through the campaign and now the Presidency in violation of laws and Constitution even as he in business; and (b) he is destroying the underpinnings of our democracy as what is apparently an agent — witting or otherwise — of one of our two great strategic enemies (Russia) while ceding our role as the world’s economic leader to the other (China).
Cohen rightly notes that Trump does not have Storm Troopers (although one might argue that ICE is functioning like a hybrid of the SA and the SS) and is himself not YET like Hitler.
But perhaps it is because Cohen is of Jewish heritage that he feels he must warn of us of what could be happening.
So I will close as he does:
No, Trump is not Hitler. Still, it’s sobering to read some of the headlines from 1933, when the Nazi leader became Chancellor. In The New York Times just after the election: “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.” From The Daily Boston Globe, the same day: “Hitler Voices Mild Program.” From The Times: “German ‘Adventure’ Watched in Britain.” This story spoke of doubt as to whether “history will fix the new Chancellor as a mountebank or a hero.”
And our very own mountebank made a very conciliatory speech this week — did he not?