How do you describe a man who falls below the norm in almost every measure of human merit or virtue? What words do you use to depict his cumulative deficits of (in alphabetical order): attentiveness, beneficence, candor, diplomacy, efficiency, feeling for others, goodness, humility, intelligence, justice, kindness, leadership, modesty, nobility, openness, propriety, questioning, reason, subtlety, tenderness, unbiasedness, veracity, and warmth?
Donald J. Trump is below normal for presidents on virtually every measure of merit or virtue you can name. On things like veracity, kindness, giving credit where due, working well with others, nurturing subordinates, and simple humanity, he’s way below normal. On intelligence and reasoning ability, who knows? He surely didn’t go to great lengths to keep his college test scores and grades secret because they were stellar.
Anyway, the point is not his failings on one or two measures of merit and virtue, or even his far-below-par marks on many. It’s his demonstrated deficit on virtually all of them.
You can’t describe him in one word or phrase. Words fail. Many have tried. Fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called him a “fucking moron.” But that just sounds crude, like Trump himself. Nobel-Prize-winning economist (and brilliant columnist) Paul Krugman recently called him an “incompetent, delusional blowhard.” That’s more accurate, and far more elegant, than Tillerson’s attempt. But it still sounds like an Eskimo, who’d never seen one before, trying to describe a Category 5 hurricane.
Analogies and metaphors fail, too. We have no recent precedents. To find someone as actively and extremely abysmal on so many measures of human merit and virtue, you have to probe the mists of history and legend. Nero. Caligula. These names stand for outrageously cruel, stupid and useless tyrants who unfeelingly let their people bleed.
But perhaps there’s a better one: Commodus. To get the full feel for the man and his times, you have to read a short summary. Except for all the actual blood and gore, they sound not far from present-day America.
Ancient Rome’s period of decay lasted for centuries. Few but scholars know it today because it makes uninteresting reading. It’s detailed, violent, pointless and uniformly depressing. It’s an endless, dreary tale of human crabs crawling over each other in a bucket, vying for power, influence, wealth and sex, with no real rules or order and virtually no memorable achievements. It led ultimately to Rome’s fall and the Dark Ages. Its denouement took half a millennium, and the recovery to the Renaissance a full millennium.
Is that what awaits us? Could be. It all depends on our ability to communicate.
There are things that we have today that ancient Rome did not. Important things. Among them are police forces, universities, and three branches of government, not just two (the courts were not independent in the Roman Empire). But by far the most important are newspapers and the Internet, or, if you will, “journalism.” We have people—lots of them—trained and paid to report accurately what’s going on and what our elite and leadership are saying and doing. Their most important job, now often ignored, is putting it all together and telling us what it means.
A sordid and dreary power struggle of murder, assassination, conspiracy and treachery could go on for centuries in declining Rome because there was no way to keep track of it in real time. Not only were there no words; there were no channels. What people knew depended on what those close to them knew and were willing to tell. The “elite” took their pick of the rumors and self-interested stories they were told, and what they “knew” fixed their actions and eventually sealed their fates.
It was every man and woman for himself or herself, every family for itself. This dreary state of affairs lasted for centuries.
Today we can do so much more. The various “fact-checkers” that have catalogued Trump’s lies and misstatements, led by the Washington Post, are just the beginning. A habit of lying and making things up, as he did in saying we have Covid-19 tests available for all, is just a single one of Trump’s myriad faults, failings and vices. It may not even be the worst.
It’s hard to keep them all front of mind because they, like the man himself, are chaotic, often unrelated and seemingly random. We need an encyclopedia, not just words, to recount the randomness, evil and incompetence of this man.
Here are just a few things journalists should start cataloguing and indexing, in video clips if possible: (1) every case of Trump preening while taking credit for achievements of others, or non-existent “achievements;” (2) every case of Trump getting his own orders wrong, as he did in his eleven-minute Covid-19 address; (3) every case of his insulting, mocking, belittling, or scorning someone far beneath his office, thereby demeaning the office and all of us; (4) every case of his insulting, belittling or offending a foreign leader, whether friend or foe; (5) every case of his attributing misfortune to his political opponents, or of making some misfortune political that is not (e.g., Covid-19); and (6) every case of his making a lackey kiss his ring after he had done something outrageous, immoral and probably illegal, and of the lackey doing so. (Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell will play big roles here!)
Cataloguing and indexing all this is tedious, dull, dreary and unexciting work. Maybe Bloomberg can use some of his billions to put talented, detail-oriented youth to work on it. But it must be done. To shirk it is to invite us all to plunge, deeper and deeper, into Trump’s all-encompassing psychopathology.
If we let that happen, our species may re-experience the age of Nero, Caligula and Commodus. How might that dismal era have played out with nuclear weapons, psychoactive drugs, genetic modification, nanoparticles, a viral pandemic, and ever-accelerating climate change? I really don’t think we want to find out. If we don’t nip the “Trump phenomenon” in the bud this time, he may be the first of many of his kind, just as during Rome’s long decline.
The law won’t help us. As we learned so poignantly with Trump’s recent acquittal, the law means nothing when good men refuse to enforce it. In the end, our Constitution is just a piece of paper. It all hangs on us, the people.
The only thing that will save us is sunlight, the best disinfectant. We must trust in the people’s ability to tell the difference among good men, bad men, and a uniquely bad man and to vote accordingly.
It’s journalism’s job to help us see that difference. So far, the job it’s been doing rates a grade no higher than D+. When it reports everything Trump’s says, including his lies, exaggerations, boasts, credit-grabs and other false claims, it serves as his megaphone, not his corrective. Even with analysis and/or refutation, some garbage that emerges his fevered brain deserves only cataloguing for future reference, not wide dissemination.
The problem is not just his gross misuse of the “bully pulpit.” It’s the vast amount of real-time information that now assaults all of us. Trump consciously exploits that huge volume by trying to control it with his simple delusions. Many of us are incapable of digesting the real facts and reaching our own conclusions; we just don’t have the time or interest. So Trump’s “narrative,” however false or delusional it may be, becomes the “truth” for many, simply by default.
Journalists are among the few in our society who have the information, knowledge and experience to offer a truer alternative to Trump’s “alternative facts.” To reach the desired audience, that alternative has to be at least half as simple, clear and definitive as Trump’s Tweets. Editorials and complex, detailed “news analyses” are simply not enough, at least not for the millions already inveigled into plunging into Trump’s psychopathology.
Everything the “king” says is not worthy of note. Only things that have discernible effects are. Slavishly reporting everything he says or Tweets propagates his psychopathology, exaggerates his reach, and plays right into his game. That’s the job of Fox and Rush, not real journalists. If our journalists can clean up their act before the general election, we just might collectively dump this vile antithesis to virtue and get back to something resembling our parents’ and grandparents’ America.