Fuckery
The Trump Years, So Far...
I grew up on comic books and science fiction where writers used the concept of multiple universes existing side-by-side as a frequent plot device. Recently the multiverse has seen a resurgence as a way to explore alternative storylines for legacy franchises such as Spiderman and Star Trek. Watching politics today, I wonder if there is a plane where the Trump presidency is conservative, populist, sometimes mean but mostly silly, and incompetent. Too bad that’s not the universe where we live.
In our universe, Donald Trump ran as an economic turnaround artist who promised to slay inflation, and raise incomes and investment in America. Instead, he fired 300,000 Americans from their middle-class government jobs, launched trade wars with our allies, levying tariffs that raised prices on American goods to exact political favors from our friends. Fifteen months after Inauguration Day, prices are still up.
Trump promised to go after the hardest, toughest criminals who were in the country illegally and most Americans agreed that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Even his promise to shut down the border, which had a dreadful impact on refugees and asylum seekers, wasn’t a deal breaker for many. Instead, we got masked agents swooping down on friendly neighbors, construction workers and even American citizens at Target, just because they had brown skin. When Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, two middle-American citizens got killed by a couple of those DHS agents in Minneapolis, it was clear the tough on immigration experiment had gone off the rails.
The President promised no new wars. “I’m going to keep us out of wars,” he said. Instead, Trump put us into an intractable war with Iran. Americans have died and been wounded. Our bases were damaged. The Iranian regime is still in place. They still have their nuclear material. They now share control of the Straits of Hormuz, which wasn’t true before the war. What was the point?
I don’t reflexively root for Trump’s loss here. I’ve spent my entire adult life in and around the presidency and I know how intertwined the President is with the image of America abroad. America needs an exit that will preserve some part of our resolve and reliability as a partner to our allies on the global stage. It’s time for Trump to pull a bipartisan group of legislators and foreign policy professionals together, along with our allies to map out a strategy to achieve the best possible end. That’s harder because Trump threatened to invade Greenland, a NATO ally, is pulling troops out of Europe, reportedly to punish the German Chancellor, and dismantled USAID, the premier agent of US humanitarian assistance and soft power. No way to build alliances.
In an alternate universe where Trump stuck to his campaign promises, he might still be pasting his name on every building he can find -- the way we tagged our kids backpacks, blankets and water bottles before sending them off to preschool. It would be kind of silly and a sign of executive pettiness, but ultimately, it’d be more annoying than destabilizing. But that’s not the universe we live in.
In our universe, one of my CNN colleagues dropped an F-bomb in a televised debate last week and tilted the media axis for a couple of days. His response to the other guest was unfair in my opinion, but he wasn’t the first to use the F-Word recently. Since President Trump has been back in office, he swears on social media and public events regularly. Cable news has gotten more comfortable with people swearing too. Sometimes hosts do it to quote the President. Other times TV personalities drop swear words for emphasis.
Perhaps our universe can right itself and the news that moves won’t be someone unfairly using an F-bomb to avoid an uncomfortable situation. Instead, we’ll get far more worked up about the President cynically manipulating language to preserve his option to keep dropping actual bombs for reasons we can’t name, in a war we didn’t agree to, but costs us more money every day, by people who can’t even effectively manage the contact list on a text chain. But even though the war in Iran is terribly unpopular, that’s not the world we live in.
In this universe, destabilizing events happen with ever more frequency and we’re all just becoming inured to the fuckery.