By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Thursday, August 17, 2017
After Charlottesville, Donald Trump’s presidency is entering
a new phase, and it is his own fault. It was Trump who decided to throw away
prepared remarks on Saturday in favor of an equivocal statement that once again
proved racists are the only group he can’t quite bring himself to condemn. It
was Trump who decided to read a less equivocal statement on Monday, even if he
read it in a tone that suggested his aides had a bayonet at his back. And it
was Trump who gave a press conference yesterday in which he telegraphed his
resentment of Monday’s statement while raving at the press about how there were
some good and decent folks among those chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
The president will now be forced to choose between the
Steve Bannon wing of his White House and nearly everybody else who works for
him. The rumor mill has lately suggested that Bannon’s firing is imminent.
Bannon is the impresario behind Breitbart.com who went on
to become Trump’s chief political strategist. Critics and admirers alike often
try to guess what he really believes. They just can’t quite bring themselves to
see that a spade is a spade. There is something cosmically funny and
noncredible about the pockmarked and corpulent former Goldman Sachs honcho
fostering an alt-right movement that curates fascist social-media accounts obsessed
with bodybuilding, detests the influence of finance, and whispers that
“physiognomy is real.” Bannon’s 2014 speech to a conference in the Vatican
showed that he can “clean up” his own views when it suits him. Late last year,
he protested to the Wall Street Journal
that he has “zero tolerance” for “racist or anti-Semitic ideas.” On occasion,
he has even hinted that the politics of Breitbart.com are partly the product of
Machiavellian cynicism rather than sincerely held belief.
It’s astonishing how many people indulge this theory or
find it exculpatory, how many people want to be in on the joke or the scam.
Perhaps we should judge people by what they do. The website he edited,
ostensibly dedicated to political and cultural coverage, had a section dedicated
to “black crime,” which is to say it had a section dedicated to fomenting
racism against African-Americans, nakedly advertising itself as such.
The results of Bannon’s political and entrepreneurial
project are coming in. Has it resulted in an enlightened America First foreign
policy, with trade barriers protecting a robust manufacturing economy and
providing employment to men of all races, who can in turn feed their thriving
families? No, it has not. It’s given us a dysfunctional administration and a polity
even more divided than before.
In Charlottesville white racists, nakedly advertising
themselves as such, chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil”
last weekend. Some of them were armed and outfitted like teenage spree-killers
on their way to kill their classmates and themselves at school. Some of them
wore red ball caps and chanted “Heil Trump.” One of them rammed his car into
protestors, injuring a score of them and killing at least one.
Shockingly, after a white racist emerged from a small sea
of MAGA hats to murder someone with his car, people who run businesses and go
to charity events and genuinely see themselves as civilized adults demanded
that Trump fire the chief political strategist who has indulged white racism
for fun and profit. So far, Trump hasn’t complied.
The whole theory behind a successful Trump presidency was
that he could unite conservative populists with mainstream, business-oriented
Republicans, somehow managing to make the worst aspects of each group cancel
each other out. The populists would check the greedy self-dealing of the
business types, and the desire for respectability would prevent the populists
from acting on their darkest animosities. This was always a pipe dream. It
would have been impossible even if the man at the top was a political genius of
great cunning and self-control. Instead, we have Trump, and almost the opposite
case obtains: Our head of state is trying to micromanage the social opprobrium
falling on neo-Nazis and all Republicans can think to do with their power on
the Hill is cut taxes and social benefits.
Canning Bannon will hurt Trump. There’s a distinct
possibility that he would return to his career of internet pamphleteering and
maneuver his battleship of populist media against the president. Having turned
against Bannon after turning on Jeff Sessions and Reince Priebus, Trump would
be inclined to stick with kith and kin. My friend John Zmirak fears that “Trump
minus Bannon equals Jeb!” and says, correctly, that “Jeb!” is not what people
voted for. But seeing the results of Trump plus Bannon makes me wonder: Maybe
people should have voted for Jeb instead.
The Trump administration is politically wounded in a
serious way. Trump’s own decisions have now led him to the point where he must
begin to choose between the moderates with money and the populists, when he’s
always needed both. America’s silent majority, the “normies” who used to say
that they work hard and play by the rules, are baffled by a president who can’t
even do the easiest thing imaginable: read a script that says all the right
things.
If you’re an elected Republican with ambitions for the
highest office in the land, you’d be well-advised to reset your target date to
2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment