"Of course we will have fascism in America, but we will call it democracy.”—a prophecy attributed to Louisiana governor Huey Long by literary scholar Harold Bloom
“If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?”—St. James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem, brother of Jesus called the Christ (James 2.15-16)
“But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue [only], but in deed and in truth.”—St. John the Theologian, I John 3.17-18
“I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic…”—John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, in a letter
Not long ago, I had an epiphany, like a moment out of a James Joyce short story. My realization was simply this: the Republican Party, my friends, does not, in actuality, care one iota—not one jot nor one tittle—about us, the people of the United States of America. This realization came to me while I was watching the news, and they were discussing extending the time limit on the legal provision which had recently helped out so many thrown onto unemployment by granting them an extra $600 per week in assistance. Many in the Republican Party were opposed to extending the length of this lifeline which had been thrown to the American people during this time of unprecedented crisis, and one spokesman for the party summed up what I now believe to be the real perspective of that organization and its members when he said, essentially: we’ll never get the economy back on its feet if everyone is sitting home watching Netflix.
His comment put me in mind of the words of Stephen Hawking, one of the great scientific minds of the last century: “What a jackass.”[1] Harsh words, but I can find none better to convey my response to what I had just heard. Here was the party that so often acts as if Jesus Christ is their highest-ranking dues paying member, and they were in flagrant violation of the principles taught by his disciples, quoted at the top of this essay—or perhaps they should have just recalled Christ’s own words, as conveyed by St. Paul to the elders of the church at Ephesus, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20.35).
That was the moment that I realized there was no hope: the party of Lincoln had been so thoroughly captured by its worst elements, fully embodied in its elevation to the presidency of—to quote another description of Sheldon Cooper—“a colossal asshat,”[2] that the only hope must lie in the opposition party, flawed though some of their ideology be.
Now, let me say near the start of all this that I have a confession I must make: I hate politics. And from my experience, the feeling is mutual. I think it is because my thinking is slow, deep, and idealistic, while politics is full of swift, pragmatic, wheeling and dealing. I have no patience for the process of politics, since once I have thought something through, I know what I want, and see no logical reason I should settle for anything else.
So you see, I am no politician.
But that is precisely why you should listen to this unpolitical plea for politics; because right now, we don’t need more politics. We need vision. Right now, our world is on fire, in more ways than one, and the President of the United States, who should be leading the charge—both in this country and around the world—to douse the flames, instead, is fanning them, pouring lighter fluid on them, and then tweeting while it burns, like some neofascist Nero (although he is at least slightly less incestuous than Nero was, and so not half as funny[3]). But the scary part is this: that this country is actually in danger of reelecting this man for another four years; so my rather idealistic and unpolitical message for you is this: if you are planning on voting to reelect Donald Trump, then I respectfully suggest that you do not fully understand what a catastrophic and chaotic choice that would be. Unless, of course, like some of our global neighbors, American chaos and catastrophe is what you are aiming for.
So if, like me, you care about this country and this world—and I choose to believe that you do—let us consider our situation, starting with this rather obvious fact: our current Commander-in-Chief is, as I said, an asshat, and an idiot; as are, apparently, the rest of the Republicans that he is leading like lemmings over the cliffs of his insanity (I know what you’re thinking: inconceivable! But to that I say: you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.). Now, mind you, Before 2016, I had never voted for any candidate who was not a Republican; I admired conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke (and see no reason not to continue to admire them); and I still believe that most basic principle of conservativism as I understand it—as axiomatic as the second law of thermodynamics, of which physical principle it is the political expression: that things can always get worse—and they probably will, if we are not careful—so change, though inevitable, and a potential source of good, should not be allowed to happen randomly or impulsively, because that is how history becomes, first tragedy, then farce.
But Donald Trump is no conservative, nor are any of those who gleefully follow him. He is no preserver of history and tradition (unless, of course, he can make money off them); how can he be, when he knows and understands neither? All he knows is money, power, and his own self-aggrandizement, which knows no bounds. By his own admission—and this is coming from one of his staunchest supporters, Newt Gingrich—he decided to run for President because it would be “a lot more fun” than buying a new yacht (see the introduction to Gingrich’s book Understanding Trump for this). Since his inauguration, he has used his position as president to increase his own personal wealth and power, and also that of his family, who have played a role in his administration so deeply nepotistic as to take us several large steps closer to making our supposedly meritocratic democracy into a blatant oligarchy.
Now is the time to apply the brakes to these trends, namely, by letting Mr. Trump hear those two words that he himself made so famous: You’re fired! And, really, why not? Give me one good reason that a man with the track record of Donald Trump should have his contract renewed for another four years. His verbiage is full of vulgarity, violence, vitriol and vituperation. He blames and demonizes others, as individuals and groups, and never takes responsibility for anything, ever—credit, yes; responsibility, no. Like some 12-year-old[4] punk on a playground, he claims to know the most about everything and to be the best at everything; he claims credit for everything good, but refuses to take responsibility for anything bad. Donald Trump is, to put it simply, a bully.[5] But like many bullies, he is all bluster, in desperate need of constant praise and validation.
Sometimes, there is a moment or an event in a president’s tenure that will define his presidency: a war; a terrorist attack; a financial or medical crisis. For George W. Bush, of course, it was September 11, and how you interpret his response to that event likely shapes your view of the man as a whole, for well or ill. For Donald Trump, that event is Covid-19, and on this point—if nowhere else—he has been a miserable failure.
Consider, in the last year, America has been under siege by this disease, and the result has been more American deaths than all the Americans killed in Vietnam and Iraq combined. Of course, we cannot blame the president for all these deaths, as if to say that if someone else had been president, no one would have died; but his handling of the matter has been tragically bad, and the result is that the United States, with just four percent of the world’s population, has had nearly—if not, by the time you read this, more than—a third of all Covid deaths worldwide. At the start, New York was one of the epicenters; but with firm and intelligent leadership at state and local levels, they were able to turn the situation around, and they are now leading the way in showing us all how to “flatten the curve.” By contrast, at the national level, we have had a complete lack of leadership from President Trump. At first he dismissed the matter as a hoax, with his family suggesting that it was all fabricated to prevent large gatherings, and so rob our chief demagogue of his greatest power in an election year, his ability to draw large crowds of the mindlessly cheering masses (this is typical of the thinking of an autocrat: worldwide pandemic? It must be a conspiracy by my enemies to make me look bad. At this point, we should say: dude, get over yourself—but that, alas, is precisely what this man is completely incapable of doing.).
Many of the flaws in Trump’s character and thought were on full display at the recent Republican National Convention. First, of course, is his response to the pandemic. Throughout this year, Mr. Trump has been repeatedly at odds with his own top medical man, Dr. Anthony Faucci. As Dr. Faucci has struggled valiantly to lead the fight against the deadliest pathogen mankind has faced in a hundred years, Trump has done his best to oppose the good doctor, and to deny the uncomfortable reality of the situation, like any 12-month-old would. He may be an idiot, but he is smart enough to know that this pandemic makes him look bad, and his mishandling of it makes him look even worse. So what does he do? He does what he always does: he denies an uncomfortable reality, until it cannot be ignored anymore; then, when denial no longer works, he tries to walk away from responsibility, blame everyone else he can conceivably blame, and when that does not work, he spins the situation to try to make himself look good. That has been his m.o. for decades, through three marriages, two divorces, countless infidelities, and five children he practically ignored until they were adults, and so old enough for him to start bullying them too—not to mention his many multiple bankruptcies, some so recent that he filed for them after entering the Oval Office.
Consider that in his speech at the convention, he first remarks about the pandemic lockdown, “I guarantee, on November 4 [i.e. the day after the election], it will all open up.” How can such a thing be, unless all of it—including all the sickness and death that prompted it—was merely a scheme designed to thwart the President’s bid for reelection? He then goes on to blame the poor handling of the pandemic on the governors of the various states, calling them “ill-prepared.” Finally, he actually tries to paint himself as a hero, claiming that his (unspecified) actions had prevented millions—yes, millions—of deaths.
And so we see the Donald Trump method for dealing with a crisis: Step one: ignore it, deny it, call it a hoax, and cast yourself as its victim. Step Two: when you can no longer deny the crisis, act; but take no responsibility for the harm done. Instead, blame everyone else. Step 3: claim that without your decisive action, the problem would have been so much worse.
The president’s convention speech reminds me of one of my favorite moments from the old Seinfeld sitcom. One of Jerry’s fellow comics had recently converted to Judaism, and he suspects the man of doing so just so he can tell certain types of jokes. When he shares his concern that this man converted “just for the jokes” with a catholic priest, we hear the following exchange:
Priest: And this offends you as a Jewish person?
Jerry: No; it offends me as a comedian!
I feel much the same way about Mr. Trump’s speech. It offends me, not as a Christian or a Catholic or an American—it offends me as a logician! I teach writing, which means I try to teach my students about how to properly reason and argue. And this speech violates one of the simplest canons of reasoning: you can’t have it both ways. To imply early on that the entire pandemic is a hoax, then to claim that your own actions have saved millions of lives in this time of crisis—this is to claim two completely contradictory things. You must pick, sir! And when you make these two totally contradictory claims in one speech, you demonstrate both the incoherence of your own thinking process (and I use the term loosely) and insult us, your audience, by implying that you think us too stupid to notice what you are doing.
And by the by, if you want to see how much contempt our current president has for the general population of this country, watch the section of his speech where he talks about the supposed dangers of mail-in ballots; you will see him openly mock the average American as so dimwitted and suggestible that they would merely sign a document casting a vote for Joe Biden just to get a pollster off their doorstep. Take it from someone who has spent 40 hours a week since late August knocking doors for the U.S. Census: a lot of people won’t even open their doors to a stranger right now, much less sign a document he shoves under their nose. On this point, Mr. President, as on so many other points, you do not understand the American people.
For his failure in handling coronavirus alone, this President deserves to have his electoral ass handed to him.[6] We need to defeat the lie peddled by Mike Pence at the Republican National Convention that, “In the midst of this pandemic…the leadership of this President shone forth.” When I hear that, I sense the shade of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where a loyal party man can believe that two plus two is five, if that is what the party asks of him; I am not sure what is more frightening; the idea that a man who claims to be a Christian, as Mike Pence so blatantly does, can tell such a bold-faced lie with a straight face, or the possibility that he has so thoroughly drunk the Trump Kool-aid that he really does love Big Brother after all.
But before I go too far down that road and get my metaphors completely mixed, let me shift to another image that comes to mind: Donald Trump as Tom Wilson in Back to the Future[7], and Pence as the chief of the toadies that follow him. It really is an excellent image, since few words better describe Donald Trump than this one word: bully—unless it is the closely related word “braggart.” The two terms fit him perfectly. He boasts incessantly, making overblown claims along the lines of, “No one knows more about/does X more than me.” He does this even when it is absolutely obvious the claim is false, such as “Nobody reads the Bible more than me.”
Then he mocks those who oppose him. He calls political opponents by demeaning nicknames (“Crooked Hillary,” “Sleepy Joe,” “Pocahontas”) and openly mocks ordinary citizens of whom he is a public servant. This is classic bully behavior, and the best way to put an end to it is with a thorough ass-kicking (in the voting booth, of course; you’d never get past those secret service guys to do it for real).
So, Donald Trump is a bully and a braggart, a self-obsessed idiot who must always be the center of attention and the best at everything, no matter what sort of Orwellian double-speak he and his supporters have to engage in to make it appear so. And we all saw how, at the first presidential debate he attempted to dominate the night by continually talking over both his opponent and the moderator. But my favorite moment—aside from Joe Biden’s “Will you shut up, man?” (If I did not yet love Joe Biden, I do now)—was when Biden said something about the president being “smarter,” and the president said, “don’t ever use that word with me.”
Oh dear. Looks like we found a sore spot in the strongman’s armor. I half wish Biden had pressed the point; I suspect we might have been treated to the spectacle of the President of the United States attempting to assault someone on national television. He looked that irked by the suggestion that this self-proclaimed “very stable genius” was not indeed a genius (and to judge by his response, he’s none too stable either).
Which leads me to a sort of controlling metaphor to organize all these observations about Donald J. Trump: he is a supervillain, though one of the more pathetic sorts (Leonard Snart he is not). I must confess I did not see this until I was reading Joy-Ann Reid’s The Man Who Sold America, Where she opens up with the brilliant observation: “To truly understand Donald Trump…you just need to have grown up on Batman.”
Her observation was paradigm-altering for this lifelong fan of both the DC and Marvel comic universes. She is, of course, absolutely right. In fact, if you took Marvel’s Wilson Fisk, and transplanted him to DC’s Gotham City, gave him Lex Luthor’s megalomania (but none of the brains), then added that thing that makes every Gotham villain special—an eccentricity-cum-insanity which inevitably lands them in Arkham Asylum—you would have something very much like Donald J. Trump. He looks and acts like a Gotham villain; like Lex Luthor in some versions of his mythology, he has lifted himself from businessman to U.S. President; like Christopher Nolan’s Joker, he is an agent of chaos; and like every good Gotham villain, he is a bit batty.[8]
And how. We have already noted how he must always be the center of attention and the best at everything—a boastful Septuagenarian adolescent desperately trying to prop up a towering, teetering ego—but then there is his purely subjective relationship with the truth. We have generally come to accept that all politicians lie, but Donald Trump does it obsessively. He will lie about any detail, no matter how minor, if he thinks the lie “sounds better.” He even once told his wife to say that she was from Austria, rather than Slovenia for precisely this reason (although why one should prefer sharing a birth country with Adolf Hitler rather than, say, Slavoj Žižek is beyond me; and it’s not like Americans know enough about European political geography to care).[9] Like many a narcissistic personality, Donald Trump will say anything, make any claim or any promise, if it makes him look better or gets him what he wants.
Let’s put it all together. Trump is a bully and a braggart; a pathological liar about the smallest of things; he openly mocks his political opponents and the people of this republic; he tried in his first debate to dominate the narrative by talking over the two other men present. In his convention speech, he said, “I took over a country whose military was depleted” (note the confusion of the corporate and political realms; one does not “take over” the United States upon assuming the Presidency). He has called the press “the enemy of the people.” Are we seeing a pattern here?
It’s funny to compare President Trump to a bumbling Gotham supervillain, or to Sheldon Cooper, the man his roommate described as “one lab accident away from being a supervillain,”[10] but the truth is that what Donald Trump really is a wannabe dictator. All the signs are there: arrogance and narcissism (and touchiness about any implication that he is not “smart”); mockery of both his political opponents and the citizenry themselves; the demonization of the free press as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”; the attempt to control the truth by a combination of incessant lying and talking over others when they attempt to speak. And then, of course, these words, from his convention speech: “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.” Here we find the true villainy of this man peeking out from behind the curtain. He is preparing for a no-lose scenario where, if he does not win the election fair and square, he can call foul and challenge its legitimacy. What we are seeing now is the possibility, as John Bolton—former U.N. ambassador and former member of the Trump administration—warned us, of a president who refuses to leave office if he loses.
And so, my excellent friends, I plead with you. Do not vote for this man. He may be on the right side of a few moral controversies, but that is only because he is doing what he thinks will get him reelected. How can a man call himself pro-life who has arranged for the abortion of his own illegitimate offspring (read All the President’s Women, about the man’s frankly predatorial behavior towards women, and if you are a woman, or care at all about women, you will be unable to support this man with a clear conscience)? And aside from this matter, what other good has he done, that we should reelect him? Think, if he has been willing to behave as he has so far, with the possible loss of reelection restraining him, how will he behave once that limit is removed? What would Donald Trump be like as a lame duck president?
One shudders to think. Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
When I was watching the Republican National Convention recently, it occurred to me, “If this had been an episode of Sesame Street (but to associate this sort of clownish buffoonery with the legacy of Jim Henson would be an insult to a great man; Uncle Jim, forgive me[11]) at its opening, it should have said, “The RNC is brought to you by the letters ‘O’ and ‘Z,’ and by the emotion ‘fear.’” Because nothing captures the tone of that event better than the word fear, especially the fear of being found out embodied in the immortal words of the Great and Powerful Oz: “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” The entire event was an exercise in misdirection, meant to turn your attention away from the utter screw-up of how this administration has failed to handle the coronavirus pandemic, and focus your thought on the imaginary fears of what would happen if the evil Democrats were to win the presidency (shudder! Gasp!). But fear is the tool of the autocrat and the dictator, not of a respectable man running for reelection on the merits of his prior performance. Perhaps the most shameful moment in this very shameful performance was when Trump told his audience: “They [the Democrats] want no guns, no oil and gas, and no religion.”
I guess that’s why they selected a lifelong catholic with four children and seven grandchildren, who attends mass every Sunday. Now, let us put aside the matter of guns (they are harder than swords to beat into plowshares, but such a vision should shape the trajectory of our thought on the matter), and of oil and gas (it’s the 21st century; what are we doing still burning the remains of animals to fuel our civilization?); how does Trump justify saying that the Democrats want “no religion”?
Okay, so maybe some do; and they clearly do not share the evangelical vision of so merging God and country that Old Glory, rather than Christ, comes to be seen as “the author and finisher of our faith” (for an essay examining how Mike Pence performs exactly this sort of blasphemous merger, see here: <https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/old-glory-god>). But given the man they have chosen to lead them, I seriously that a Democratic victory will result in “no religion.”
In fact, let’s compare the two men on this point, shall we? How do Trump and Biden speak about the Christian faith, to say nothing of any other religion? Well, I have in my personal library the book, Bartholomew: Apostle and Visionary, a biography of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, to which Joe Biden contributed a “reflection.” Here is what the Roman Catholic Mr. Biden had to say about the highest ranking clergyman of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church (note the use of the plural first person pronoun “our”):
I was immediately taken by his warmth and spirituality. It envelops you. He
radiates grace and conviction. But what impressed me most was the way his All-
Holiness embodies our Christian faith—thoroughly and completely. To put it
simply, he is one of the most Christlike men I have ever met.
Now what about the President? Well, we all know of his blunderous mispronunciation of “2 Corinthians” as “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians”; he has repeatedly rejected as “fools” and “idiots” those who follow Christ’s advice to “turn the other cheek,” preferring instead the principle of vengeance and “getting even” (which he says he loves to do, and his behavior shows it[12]). But the truly revealing stuff comes from the time he came to address the Great Faith Ministries Church in Detroit.[13] While waiting through a two-hour service, the presidential hopeful was heard to utter the following: “This is the longest I’ve been in church in my life…When is this going to end?...G-d, how much longer do I have to sit here?” But the best moment is this passage: “I had a lot of organizational things to do, so I got up to take care of them. He grabbed my wrist and said, ‘You can’t leave me with these people.’ The look in his eyes was like a lost child.” That is the man so many Christians in this country have come to see as the last best hope for Christian civilization.
Please.
Here is a man who seems downright frightened of Christians in a group; is it any surprise that the most Chris Wallace could get him to say in denunciation of the white supremacist Proud Boys was “stand back and stand by”? Is it any wonder that he lets the powerbrokers in this country run roughshod over any sort of regulation, and that he speaks of and to autocrats in places like Russia and North Korea like a starstruck fanboy?
Donald Trump is a poseur. He talks tough but has no follow through. And now that his position is on the line, he will do anything—and I mean anything—to hold on to power. We cannot let that happen. Do not let his empty rhetoric sway you. We are not in danger of entering a new dark age of Christian persecution if Joe Biden is president. And even if so, who are you not to be persecuted? The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; judging from how so many in this country seem terrified of the slightest threat to their well-heeled security (whether from foreigners or other dark folk, or maybe just from those uppity millennials, who, after borrowing $100,000 to get through college, actually expect a job that pays more than $10/hour), perhaps we could use a little persecution to separate the wheat from all the chaff.
Now, I’m not saying that Joe Biden is perfect, or that a Democratic victory would not bring in its own problems, but this is not politics as usual. If Donald Trump is not defeated in November, 2020 may mark the last truly free election this country ever has. Next stop, Democracy, Huey Long-style.
[1] The Big Bang Theory 7.20, “The Relationship Diremption.” He was, of course, commenting on the behavior of Sheldon Cooper, whose narcissistic selfishness and inability to think about anyone but himself has its real-life, no-longer-funny-because-now-it’s-true counterpart in President Trump.
[2] “What? I said ‘hat.’”—Scott Lang, Ant-Man. The description of Sheldon is from “The Griffin Equivalency” (2.4).
[3] I should note that I had already written these lines before I discovered the new book called American Nero. The comparison is fairly obvious.
[4] According to one source, Charles Krauthammer at first described Trump as an emotional 11-year-old, but then revised his analysis down a full decade; Trump, he declared, was emotionally younger than Cindy Lou Who---for he was no more than 1 (though the comparison to Dr. Seuss’ creation is mine, not Krauthammer’s).
[5] I am put in mind here of the words of Don John in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing:“The word is too good to paint out [his] wickedness. I could say [he] were worse; think you of a worse title and I will fit [him] to it.”
[6] To those among my friends who find the occasional vulgarity of my language in this essay off-putting, I say: a time of planetary crisis is no time to fetter our prophetic denunciations with verbal standards dreamed up in some imaginary 1950’s America. Let us get over our semantic anxieties and get on with the task of saving our country.
[7] Take your pick of Wilson’s roles therein: Biff, Griff, or Bufford—or all three—whichever you choose, Trump is a bully and Pence is his chief toadie.
[8] See what I did there? Gotham. Batman. Batty.
[9] For this point, read Rick Reilly’s book Commander in Cheat.
[10] “The Panty Piñata Polarization” (2.7).
[11] Hey, one whole side of my family are Hensons; we could be related—you don’t know.
[12] For these quick points, see the opening pages of David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse Than You Think.
[13] For the following, see Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged, page 134.
