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- “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”—William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5.
What do you do with a man who says 18,000 false or misleading things, publicly, in less than three years, three months? That’s over 15 per day, more than one every two hours!
What do you do with a man so vain and self-obsessed that he utters 260,000 words of self-praise and self-pity in just a few months? Does it matter that he does so while in charge of the nation’s response to its greatest threat since the Great Depression and World War II?
If he were just your crazy uncle, you’d make a place for him in your attic. You’d stock it with a bed, a bathroom, a TV and stereo (with earphones!), and a stash of bargain-basement scotch. Then you’d do all you could to keep him away from the children. Or you’d institutionalize him and pay the cost in dollars instead of emotional wear and tear.
When that man is president of the United States, it’s a lot harder to ignore him. The people who work with him try to “handle” him, from the bottom up. That’s not easy. Ask Rex Tillerson or General Kelly or Mattis.
Trump’s Republican lackeys and sycophants are now trying to keep the “chaotic disaster” (President Obama’s words) of Trump’s pandemic response from sparking an electoral rout in November. The workers in a West Wing now under siege by virus have to keep the president—who won’t take precautions, won’t wear a mask and won’t ever shut up—from infecting everyone, both with the virus and with professional despair.
But outside the White House and the GOP’s den of iniquity, it ought to be a lot easier to keep sane. My own plan is pretty simple. I don’t ever watch or listen to Trump live. I would sooner chew ground glass or swim a mile in my own vomit.
When I come across his name in a “print” medium, whether on line or on dead trees, I read the headline only. If the headline includes the words “Trump says . . .” or words to that effect, I prepare to move on. If the headline is unclear or ambiguous, I read the lead sentence and maybe the lead paragraph, but nothing more. Then I do move on, unencumbered by the pressure of another man’s insanity weighing on my consciousness.
At age 74, my time is growing short. I spend some of it thinking hard about what’s worth spending time on, and what’s not. To me, nothing that Trump says but doesn’t put in writing in an executive order is worth listening to, let alone worrying about. Much of the time he “walks it back,” contradicts it, or later says it never happened.
As I review the last three years, one thing is crystal clear to me. By virtue of his undeserved office, Trump has sucked more people into his personal insanity than any unhinged leader in human history. The reason is simple: Nero, Caligula, Commodus, Ivan the Terrible and Louis XIV never had TV, radio, or the Internet, let alone Fox, Sinclair and Rush, to magnify their insanity and pretend it’s rational.
With his constant and relentless distractions, lies, “spin,” bragging, complaining, insults and bigotry—and with the nation’s felt need to respond to every word—Trump has undoubtedly induced the most colossal waste of intelligence, time and resources in human history.
Take just one example of thousands: Trump’s suggestion that Covid-19 sufferers apply sunlight or disinfectant internally. How many articles have been written about this bit of self-evident insanity? How many more about his and others’ attempts to “walk it back,” downplay it, claim it never happened, or bury it in an avalanche of self-praise, distractions and trivia?
Some promising Ph.D. student in political science or “communications” (today’s euphemism for propaganda) should tote up all the time, energy, column-inches and minutes of video or audio clips wasted on this useless and dangerous bit of logorrhea. Next he or she should use a bit of arithmetic to estimate how many person-hours, nationwide, have been cast down the same abattoir. Finally, he or she should extrapolate that waste of human time, energy and resources to the 18,000 falsehoods and the 260,000 words of recent self-praise and self-pity.
Grad students should do this work, not reporters. Reporters have already wasted far too much of their valuable time—and ours—reporting the utterly useless in excruciating detail. (The bare cataloguing, however, must go on, for the sake of posterity, if there is one.)
Even the parable of the naked emperor fails to capture the magnitude of the problem. Our would-be emperor is not just naked. He’s sucked our media—and through them, all of us—into chronicling, reviewing, assessing, debating and contesting every single description of every single claimed button, epaulet and bit of lace on his non-existent clothes.
For the United States to survive as a society based on reality and on reason, let alone a democracy, this must stop, and soon. If our government worked according to our Constitution, Trump would have been sidelined under Amendment 25 long ago. Or he would have been removed after his well-justified impeachment last year.
But our Republicans have clutched this failed vessel to their bosoms as if made of priceless porcelain. They see him as their only hope of maintaining their precarious hold on power achieved through forty years of lies and appeals to greed.
That strategy might have continued to work in normal times. But these are not normal times. A “strategy” of hiding persistent insanity and breathtaking incompetence cannot rise to the challenge of a global pandemic and the global replay of the Great Depression that it portends. The suffering and deaths the pandemic causes are too hard to “spin.”
Now, as noted recently by two pundits (Paul Waldman and E.J. Dionne Jr.), the GOP lemmings and lackeys are beginning to smell an electoral rout to rival Lyndon Johnson’s of Barry Goldwater in 1964. So they already seem to be reverting to the same “strategy” they used with Barack Obama in 2009. They are talking up debt and the deficit—in an era of negative interest rates!—on the way to skimping on government stimulus and recovery aid, so they can blame the resulting suffering on the Democrats likely to come back into power next year.
That’s the real political story emerging as the 2020 campaign is just getting off the ground. That’s what reporters should be investigating, analyzing, and reporting in great detail.
Grad students’ study of the immense dead loss caused by the “tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing” can await the chance to inform our distant progeny. Perhaps it can help our successors, on a new and virgin Earth-like planet, to construct an idiot- and corruption-proof Republic more durable than the one our Founders left us.