It is time, plain and simple, to give up the thought that anything good is to come out of Trump’s next three and a half years.
Patrick Lawrence
O.K, the Gulf of Mexico will remain so named, and the Government Publishing Office on North Capitol Street in Washington can stand down: The “Gulf of America” idea is no longer much of a kick.
In the same line, Greenland will remain a Danish possession. Canada will still be called Canada, and Canadians can continue to think of themselves as gentler and more courteous than the nation of yahoos on their southerly border.
Only a few weeks ago there were those among us who anticipated the demise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the course of this spring. No, NATO’s future is secure; its grand headquarters in Brussels will not be turned into a hospital, as some people, possessed of the old “irrational exuberance,” foretold in the Trump regime’s early days.
Ditto the European Union: If anything, the technocrats in Brussels and the central bankers in Frankfurt stand to gain power as the Continent drifts into its version of neoliberal authoritarianism.
And the Deep State: not going anywhere, this sprawl of invisible, undemocratic power. The headquarters building of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a few blocks from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue: No again, Trump’s people will not turn it into an exhibition hall dedicated to institutionalcorruption.
The Trump White House doesn’t say much about these sort of things these days. They were all fun, but fun things become un-fun when, like windup toys, they stop going along as the springs go slack.
True enough, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, the C.I.A. propaganda front The New York Timesinsists on describing as a producer of “independent journalism” — Jeez, I mean really — may be headed for the Museum of Cold War Artifacts now that Trump is defunding it. But I am in wait-and-see mode on this one.
When distractions wear out, there must be new distractions. This is the Trump regime’s m.o., you see.
We’re now reading about Trump’s plan for a hyper-technologized missile shield system he is calling Golden Dome. This is all about satellites in space, hundreds of them, and advanced rockets that will activate when enemy projectiles are detected.
“When distractions wear out, there must be new distractions.”
Trump’s people put the cost of Golden Dome at $175 billion, which means the true cost will be some multiple of this figure. The Congressional Budget Office says $500 billion is more like it. Trump promises to get this done in three years. Defense technology people say this kind of thing will take two decades to develop.
I have in mind the old Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” debacle of the Reagan years. I am interested only in how long it will take for Golden Dome to prove another irresponsible fantasy and how much money will be wasted between now and then.
His Second Term So Far
How shall we think of Donald John Trump now that he is a few months in office and the lay of the land comes clear? Who is he? What makes him tick, as the old cliché goes?
The drift among those who make America run and will go along with anything so long as it is profitable, is that there is no denying, rejecting or subverting Trump this time around. You have to sidle up to the man — dinners at Mar-a–Lago, Oval Office sessions, and so on — to make it these next four years.
This turn in thinking has been evident since the 2024 campaign season. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg went to Mar-a–Lago to dine with Trump and all the liberals gasped? The chief executive at Meta proved merely the first to put his forehead to the palace floor.
You can generally count on the liberal cliques, especially the corporatists out in Silicon Valley, to get it wrong. During his first term they did everything they could think of to subvert Trump. Those who once tried to sink his ship now clamber up to the first-class deck.
This is upside down. Trump had a few sound ideas —decommisioning NATO, ending the forever wars, a renewed detenté with Russia — during his first attempt to be president. Now he trades in idiocies and cannot get done the only good idea — better ties with Russia — that remains from his first term.
A few months into his second four years Trump proves a dangerous figure in all sorts of ways — dangerously stupid, dangerously incompetent, dangerously erratic, dangerously distracted — and so must be subjected to damage control to the fullest extent.
“Now he trades in idiocies and cannot get done the only good idea — better ties with Russia — that remains from his first term.”
Courts of law already prove key to this imperative. A coherent “movement” in the 1960s sense of this term appears out of the question — Americans seem too atomized, privatized, and alienated for any suchthing to materialize — but let’s not forget that the 1960s were unimaginable during the 1950s.
There is no knowing what Trump will say or do Tuesday based on what he says or does Monday. He once wanted to get America out of its wars of adventure and altogether out of other nations’ business. Now he boasts that a $1 trillion budget for the military-industrial complex is on the way.
It is time, plain and simple, to give up the thought that anything good is to come out of the next three and a half years.
I have come to three different ways to reckon with how one might best understand who the occupant of the White House truly is such that one’s expectations of our 47th president remain in line with reality between now and Jan. 20, 2029.
It is possible to be 78 and still count as a hyperactive child. Trump demonstrates this to my satisfaction, anyway.
Think of a child on Christmas morning, flitting from one toy to the next, maybe fascinated briefly even by the boxes they came in. Everything’s a mess in no time.
Now think of Trump’s record these past four months — Greenland, the Gulf of America, I-just-had-an-excellent-call-with-Vladimir-Putin, Putin-is- absolutely-crazy, etc.— and ask yourself how much difference there is between the two.
There is the question of a democratic society, even one that was collapsing long before Trump came along.
“There is no knowing what Trump will say or do Tuesday based on what he says or does Monday.”
I look at Trump and cannot help but think of a World War II correspondent named Mark Gayn, improbable as this may seem. Gayn covered Tokyo after the surrender and described what he saw during the Occupation in his book Japan Diary (William Sloane, 1948).
Apart from a brief experiment early in the 20th century, the Japanese had no experience of democracy — no experience, no understanding of it, no idea how it worked. In the autumn of 1945, Gayn observed with acuity, many Japanese consequently thought democracy meant “you can do whatever you want,” as he put it. A certain social and political chaos resulted in the Occupation’s first months.
This, too, is Trump. Trampling the Constitution, which I doubt he has read, ignorant or abusive — or both — of principles such as checks-and-balances, storms of executive orders that may as well begin, “I want…”
This is a man with no evident idea of the limits governing the president as well as the rest of us. “I can do whatever I want” appears to be his operating principle.
Contempt for Expertis
If you look at Trump’s cabinet — Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi among the most obviously unqualified — you have to conclude Trump holds experts and the notion of expertise in near-total contempt.
This is true of Trump himself, of course: he who can end a war in 24 hours, he who can bringmanufacturing back to the United States — he who altogether can make America great again.
True enough, experts deserve much if not most of the malice and mistrust Trump expresses in behalf of many, many people. This is because a goodly proportion of them, having discarded all thought of disinterest, have long abused their capacity to influence policies and events in the cause of their own or someone else’s gain.
We now live in a society wherein elites and any kind of elitism, as well as experts and expertise, are prevalently — fair to say — discredited. This is a problem. Trump and his dreadful gathering of incompetents are not the answer.
The other week Maggie Hassan, a Democratic senator from the great state of New Hampshire, asked Kristi Noem, “What is habeas corpus?” You have to figure Hassan saw the secretary of Homeland Security for all she is and is not.
“Well,” Noem replied — and this is in Senate hearings, mind you — “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”
At which point Hassan cut her off, having made her point. It is mine, too: Good enough to mistrust experts, given what many of them have done with their training and their elevated positions. Not good enough to proceed as if a healthy society can do well without them.
The Trump regime, in short, faces us with a truth that seems to have fallen by the wayside over many years. No polity can do well without qualified experts. It requires experts who have the principles and moral scruples to make use of their qualifications and learning in the cause of the commonweal.
Trump, in his disdain, has a baby-and-bathwater problem, to put this point another way.
It is the same with elites, I may as well add. “Elitism” may be a condemnation for many people, but not where I live. Please don’t make me imagine what life would be like in a society wherein there is no elite. The thought reeks of what we used to call “ultra-left adventurism.”
I refer here to an elite that, as with experts, understands the responsibilities they bear in consequence of their privilege and their positions. And I mean their positions in society, not atop it.
It is the wrong kind of experts Donald Trump will deliver to us these next three and some years. He can carry on all he wishes about the capacity of Everyman to get complex things done. But such displays will not make America any more democratic.
In my view all the hollow posturing will, in net terms, confirm the influence of just the sort of experts Trump and his crew purport to eschew — not least those at the Pentagon and other institutions vital to the imperium.
I wish I could end this column with something like “Good night and good luck,” but there’s no matching Ed Murrow for freighting a phrase, and this one belongs to him in any case. “Bon courage” was Dan Rather’s signoff for a brief time, an attempt at gravitas swiftly booed off the air for its pretentiousness.
“M.I.C., see you real soon” is the best I can come up with.
C. Consortium News
