Deadfall at Tanner Creek in the Columbia River gorge
The hourly duel between deception and dissent
First and foremost, thanks again for your continued patience with my recovery from knee replacement surgery. Honestly, I still have a ways to go. As those who’ve had this procedure know, it can be an hourly struggle with both the acute and weirdly sporadic pains emanating from a load-bearing joint that would rather be left alone. ‘No pain, no gain,’as the saying goes, and the siren song of pain still has the loudest voice in the room, barking and yodeling, even when unprovoked.
I’d like to surmise that physical pain and the collateral discomforts at least provide a distraction from the daily chaos and anguish of a democracy struggling to rescue our shared values and our humanity. But that’s not actually true. The real challenge (at least for me) is to be present and hopeful even on my worst days and to engage others—especially the dear souls trying to help me get through this—with a good attitude and a sense of humor.
Each of us have a community of family and friends who have different pursuits, fears, and satisfactions. Our networks link with others in various ways—through work, church, school, etc. Ideas and humor resonate, as does frustration and grief. I’ve been struck by how the venality and cruelty of Trumpism has cut people I know to the core and how our experience aligns with scores of people I’ve not yet met but who obviously share the same depth of awareness and sense of betrayal.
The betrayal is both societal and personal, and it affects each of us differently. But the collective mass of it is real, and something that is only now taking shape, not just in protests but in all the ways we’re challenged to focus ever harder on refashioning and reinvigorating the society we want to live in and bequeath.
A couple days ago I was listening to a conversation between historian Heather Cox Richardson and Sarah Longwell. Longwell is an intriguing character—the publisher of The Bulwark, a mixed media enterprise that gives voice to former Republican office holders, conservative writers and political strategists who’ve openly rebelled against Trump and Trumpism. She is gay, has a folksy sense of humor, speaks plainly, and listens well—indeed her specialty is assembling and interviewing focus groups across the political spectrum.
Like most of her colleagues at The Bullwark Longwell would still be a loyal Republican were it not for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that has not only purged the party of dissenters but simply adopted Trump’s MAGA talking points as its governing platform. Trumpism radiates conspiracies, divisiveness and grievances in all directions. In contrast, Longwell exudes good will and a sincere interest in understanding where people are coming from, whether they step forward to vote, or choose not to vote.
Near the end of their conversation Cox Richardson made note of a campaign speech Abraham Lincoln gave in 1958, before the outbreak of the Civil War, in which the future president challenged his audience (and the nation) to honor the human rights heralded in the Declaration of Independence.
Longwell smiled and replied with a personal story from her young life as a modern Republican.
“I just have stacks of these pocket Constitutions,” she said.
The “pocket”Constitutions, she explained, had been mailed or otherwise delivered to her after she’d identified herself to Republican-leaning think tanks and outreach organizations as an active, young, conservative Republican.
The she brought the story full circle:
“And, yet, today watching Republicans ignore the Constitution has been one of those deeply demoralizing and yet unmooring elements because it was so ingrained in me, as a young conservative, about how important fidelity to the Constitution was.”
What Longwell meant by “unmooring” is that she knew to leave the Republican Party because it had betrayed her by so fully embracing Trump. She could see that the autocratic powers Trump demands (and which his Republican enablers are all too willing to pursue on his behalf) are the same abusive powers the drafters of the Constitution rebelled against at the nation’s founding.
Obviously, not every young Republican made the same choice. But Longwell’s dramatic course correction, and her work, illuminates the central (and, one would hope—lethal) contradiction of Trumpism. A person, and a movement, inevitably corrupts itself when trying to be in two radically different places at once—in this case, supporting Trump’s grifting, populist grievances, racism, and half-baked power grabs while posing as American patriots who possess a divine monopoly on virtue.
The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell in her conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson
In late 2018 Rebecca Solnit wrote a column for The Guardian. making the case that the Civil War never ended, and that Donald Trump is America’s first Confederate president.
Step ahead nearly seven years and her case is all the more compelling. The House of Representatives is being guided by a Speaker—Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson—who actively promoted the debunked conspiracy claims that voting machines had been rigged against Trump in the 2020 election. There is no patriotism to be found here. Only opportunism. Johnson is a white, Christian nationalist who professes to see his power and Trump’s power as fulfilling a batshit prophesy knitted with patriarchy, theocracy and racism. (My mother knew Jesus, and Jesus would want nothing to do with this heresy).
Solnit’s thesis has a truer ring with each passing day—the recognition that Trump elevates the supposed virtues of a meaner, whiter, and more predatory America and aims them, like grapeshot, at anybody and anything in his way. Pundits often search for a broader interpretation or coherent explanation of Trumpism. My personal favorite is the fundamentalist Christian rationalization that while Trump’s egregious and profane behavior is abhorrent he is nevertheless a heaven-sent tool for their ambition of a post-democratic American theocracy. Talk about burning the village with hell-fire to save it….
Today’s post is available, in full, to all readers. Please support this project with an annual, paid subscription at the link above… tjc
Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize winning scholar best-known for her explorations and reporting on authoritarian movements gave a lengthy interview last week to Simon Rosenburg, a prominent political strategist and blogger. The interview came in the wake of Trump’s harried decision to send B-2 bombers to try to destroy deeply entrenched Iranian uranium enrichment facilities. Rosenburg sought her opinion as regards Trump’s strategy.
“My assessment is something I've said before,” Applebaum replied, “and it's worth constantly repeating because people have trouble believing it. I don't think Trump has any strategy at all. In other words, he doesn't have a geopolitical theory that he's working from.”
There is no Trump “endgame” on Iran, she insisted, because Trump is entirely driven by impulse.
“(A)ny decision he makes is one that is affected by his perception of how to be the winner in that particular moment,” she explained. “He lives in a kind of eternal present where he is always in combat against somebody, whether it's the Iranians or whether it's the CNN, you know, or whether it's a judge or whether it's some other critic. And he always needs to somehow emerge as the winner.”
Joanna Coles, a top editor at The Daily Beast, had the same question, at about the same time. She put it to author Michael Wolff in an interview last Thursday. Wolff has written four books on Donald Trump in the past eight years. The books are rooted in interviews with Trump associates and staffers which, for obvious reasons, were conducted with promises of anonymity. (To no surprise, Trump started his second term threatening to push a “NICE NEW LAW” to make it illegal for journalists to use anonymous sources.)
Early in the interview Wolff winced and shook his head as he described the daily hostility of the work environment Trump creates and the humiliations those who serve him invariably endure when the boss needs someone to blame. His close observations about a fractious and impulsive decision-making process squared with Applebaum’s perception about the dominating force of Trump’s needs for conflict and, as Trump himself put it during his 2020 campaign, his penchant for “retribution.”
“One of the things that Trump has done, one of the historical breaks, is that he's made it all about single individuals,” Wolff said, “so therefore personality becomes as powerful as ideology.”
“This is what I’ve been trying to illuminate,” in his books he told Coles, and then gave examples about how “absolutely thrilled” Trump is to be received as the most important person in the world, and to be able to set aside the advice of others to act on his own needs and whims.
“It is truly at a level that I don’t think we’ve even begun to comprehend—a government of one. A government of one.”
“And it’s a real estate guy from Queens,” Coles injected.
“No,” Wolff replied. “It’s a reality TV star.”
It was the 19th century British historian, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton—better known as Lord Acton—who famously observed— “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
This is what has become of Trump and his regime. It literally began on day one with the brashly ridiculous (and easily disprovable) claim that the crowd at his January 2017 inaugural exceeded that at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Branding journalists and journalism as “fake news” is a core Trumpian strategy. The populist chant enhanced Trump’s mystique with his MAGA base, even as it led, and continues to lead, to bizarre distortions of reality.
Take, for example, the recent effort by Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security director Kristi Noem to portray rather ordinary protests in Los Angeles as a dangerous uprising requiring the presence of federal troops. One purpose was to make it appear as though the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, and the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, were responsible for fomenting widespread rioting when, in fact, it was a largely peaceful protest. This to justify Trump’s dispatching the National Guard and even U.S. Marines to Los Angeles.
This is what Noem told reporters once she arrived in Los Angeles: “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this Governor Newsom and this mayor placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.”
This incredulous statement—that Homeland Security was in LA to rescue the city from its elected leaders—may have gotten more attention were it not for federal officers dragging California’s senior U.S. Senator, Alex Padilla, from the room where Noem was speaking and wrestling him to the floor to be handcuffed after he identified himself and tried to ask Noem a question.
Yet even the bizarre spectacle in Los Angeles was eclipsed by the attack Trump and his controversial Secretary of Defense—former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth—leveled against journalists following “Operation Midnight Hammer,” the attempt to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment facilities with earth-penetrating bombs on June 22nd.
Let’s set aside, for the moment, the geopolitical controversies and ramifications about whether the raid was a good idea. Let’s just look at how Trump and Hegseth handled the legitimate questions about whether the mission succeeded on its own terms to deal a crippling blow to Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium to nuclear weapons specifications.
By all accounts the mission was flawlessly executed by pilots commanding the B-2 bombers with their payloads of 30,000 pound “bunker busting” bombs. That was good enough for Trump and Hegseth. Before a damage assessment had even begun they flatly declared the key underground facilities harboring the uranium enrichment centrifuges and nuclear material had been “completely and totally obliterated.”
That spawned a question that even a middle school journalism student would know to ask: “how do you know that?”
To no surprise, the question was quickly served by Fox News’s long-time Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffen, a former colleague of Hegseth’s from his recent past as a Fox News commentator. Hegseth’s response was to try to publicly humiliate her:
“Jennifer, you’ve been about the worst, the one who misrepresents the most intentionally what the president says.”
Griffen cocked her head in disbelief and briskly responded with a defense of her reporting.
She was not the only one Hegseth assailed in his defense of Trump’s claim of total “obliteration.” Here’s more of what he said:
“Because you, and I mean specifically you the press, specifically you the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump, because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope, maybe they weren't effective…So let's take half truths, spun information, leaked information, and then spin it. Spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours?”
CNN was a main target. Here is how CNN’s Anderson Cooper responded, point by point.
The exchange is important, though it’s hard to imagine it will change anything, especially among the MAGA faithful. Trump’s battles with the press are simply a manifestation of his fundamental emptiness and dishonesty.
Last Wednesday, he doubled down all the more, sending letters to CNN and The New York Times threatening to sue them for defamation if they don’t retract and apologize for reporting he deems “false,” “defamatory” and “unpatriotic.”
—tjc
