Goodbye, President Scumbag

Where he came from, where they're going

No doubt I’ll still have some White House scenes to write starring Trump and his associates during the transition — and, who knows, maybe afterward, when he decamps for Mar-a-Lago full-time and runs, I would imagine, a kind of spider-hole alt-government of crackpots and grifters with Rudy Giuliani as his eminence grease.

But now that the stake has finally been driven through his heart, and media and social media are at last treating his ravings as ravings rather than as official pronouncements from a Head of State, I thought I’d give out some thoughts I’ve had for a while about the Meaning of Trump that I have been reluctant to release heretofore, when the field was overcrowded with such musings.

Though conservative reactions to the 2020 election and Trump’s truculent refusal to acknowledge the result have been, in the main, hilarious, it has been interesting to see some of them attempt to describe his presidency as something almost normal. The editors of the New York Post, for example, on their way to yet another “Why won’t he concede like the great statesman we know him to be?” conclusion, portray as Trump’s own brilliant governance not only his ultra-right-wing judicial appointments, but also his tax policy and foreign policy “decisions” (“has created the contours of a new Middle East by recognizing the reality on the ground” etc.).

But Trump has never had any actual policies besides the single one we all saw from the very beginning: That as long as the Republicans let him grift and steal, he would in return wave through their policies. It is an open secret that “his” judges were groomed by the Federalist Society and implanted by Mitch McConnell. And “his” foreign policy has just been a series of wingnut wet dreams like the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; his own contributions have been limited to public meetings with foreign leaders that had no result except to convince those leaders of his ignorance and fecklessness. (Kim Jong-Un didn’t unveil new nuclear missiles last month because he found Trump’s buddy-buddy talk impressive.)

As for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that was such an obvious payoff to rich constituents that so blatantly contradicted every bullshit Republican complaint about deficit spending that even some learned-helplessness Democrats are talking about ignoring them when they try it again.

In fact Donald Trump has never had any policies; he could not articulate a policy position any more than he could throw a fastball or hop a mailbox. That’s not why he was elected. Recall that in 2020 the Republican Party disdained to even bother to craft a platform of policies. His followers — who were in 2020 demographically very similar to what they were in 2016, but outnumbered this year by young and black voters — were not voting for a platform in 2016 either.

What they were voting for was vengeance on the people they hated. They sometimes pretended their vengefulness was excited by some real injury Democrats had done to them — usually an economic injury they blamed on trade policies that were actually bipartisan, or the decline of coal that was the fault of technology rather than ideology, or Obamacare making them get health insurance they could never have afforded at all before (thought admittedly the small businessman who didn’t have to buy insurance for his employees before the ACA suffered a real injury, notwithstanding the benefit to his employees).

If such concerns were sincere, they might have explained a campaign to nominate and elect Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. But instead they nominated and elected a TV game show host whose hallmarks as a public figure were palpable self-regard and a sadistic pleasure in humiliating others.

They voted for him because he was the opposite of the people who had held power before. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were smiley and slick and full of talk about what was good for America — including a new weird “diversity” thing which nascent Trumpkins could only interpret as putting someone else’s interests before their own, which for conservatives is a cardinal sin.

Cruz and Rubio and the other Republicans opposed Democrats’ policies, for whatever that was worth, but they did not sufficiently oppose the people who made and voted for them — in fact in many ways those Republicans resembled those same smiley, slick, diversity Democrats; sure, they might use some of the old code terms like “reverse racism” and “affirmative action” that Republicans have used for decades to beat back the blacks and Hispanics, but you just knew they weren’t the kind of people who’d use racial slurs when they knew the coast was clear. (Besides, weren’t Rubio and Cruz Hispanic themselves? And didn’t Bush have a bunch of them in his family?)

Trump, though — they knew he used those words. He even came close enough in public — calling Mexicans rapists and Obama a Kenyan — that they could believe, if they were lucky enough to hang out at Mar-a-Lago with him, that he’d say those words in their presence.

I know many of his voters said they thought as a “businessman” Trump would do a better job of running the U.S., but only the dumbest of them could have believed that Trump, never known for philanthropy or generosity of any kind, would have shared any of the benefits that accrued from such superior governance with them. Trump is only a successful businessman in the sense that he has succeeded in avoiding paying for goods and services he has received. He habitually stiffed contractors, lied to customers, and when his enterprises collapsed he abandoned them to bankruptcy. Anyone with half a brain, even if they admired Trump, must have known that he succeeded by cheating everyone else — and that he would cheat them given the chance.

But that was okay with them. That’s why his hugging-the-flag thing was such a big hit with his fans — it was a gag, a put-on; none of them believed that he really loved anything other than himself, and they enjoyed the joke of him pretending to. How it must have burned those Democrats, who thought love of country was something more than a scam!

No, they weren’t voting for a businessman or an entertaining celebrity or a better way of life. They didn’t vote to support or oppose policies — they never cared about policies. They weren’t even voting for racism, exactly, though it was a given that any candidate they voted for would have to be at least quietly racist.

What they were voting for was a scumbag. They didn’t want to just beat the opposition, they wanted to nullify it entirely by making the leading representative of the nation a selfish, bigoted, ignorant piece of shit. That’s why their immediate response to victory in 2016 was a torrent of fuck-your-feelings, suck-it-up-snowflakes insults and abuse, and why Trump, who if nothing else knew his audience, himself periodically put out provocative statements like “very fine people on both sides” and “stand back and stand by” and his absurd “patriotic education” proclamation — not out of anything resembling a principle, but to assure his followers that he was indeed the scumbag they believed him to be, who would be vicious just to be vicious. And if he did that, he could cheat them all he liked. Hell, they’d happily die of the virus that Trump in his fuck-your-feelingness allowed to rage across the country, so long as they knew their death would help Trigger the Libs.

Now that Trump has been beaten, his fans are poleaxed; they’re so unable to accept the outcome that even the credentialed leaders of their party — including, ha ha, Ted Cruz — are forced to play along with their absurd fantasy of a fraudulent election. Eventually Cruz and Lindsay Graham will quietly slip from this absurdity to the more normal intransigence that is Republican policy whenever a Democrat is in charge, but the base will not; they’ll certainly nurture their delusion throughout the Biden presidency and in 2024 may re-nominate Trump who, after four years’ marinating in resentment and racism, will emerge as even more of a scumbag than before. If he’s unavailable due to ill health or imprisonment, I doubt these voters will return to the weak tea of Josh Hawley or Ben Sasse; maybe Roger Stone or Bernie Kerik can get the nomination. (Or Ivanka. Nominating a totally unskilled anti-abortion woman would be an even better burn on liberals than Amy Coney Barrett!) In any case, I can’t see them returning even to the pretense of electing someone who seems to love their country and the people in it. Say, wasn’t Osama Bin Laden’s niece a Trump supporter?