President Trump’s most significant, and ominous, achievement in his first year in office is the corruption of the Republic. I don’t mean that he has succeeded in destroying the checks and balances on which American freedom rests. I mean that he has so soiled the discourse that a kind of numbness has set in, an exhaustion of outrage that allows him to proceed with the unthinkable.
The greatest danger from a man so unerring in his detection of human weakness, so attuned to the thrill of cruelty, so aware of the manipulative powers of entertainment, so unrelenting in his disregard for truth, so contemptuous of ethics and culture, so attracted to blood and soil, was always that he would use the immense powers of his office to drag Americans down with him into the vortex.
Trump is succeeding in this. He is having his way, for all the investigative vigor of the free press he derides, for all the honor of the judiciary that has pushed back against his attempts to stain with bigotry the law of the land. Slowly but surely, the president is getting people to shrug.
The appalling becomes excusable, the heinous becomes debatable, the outrageous becomes comical, lies become fibs, spite becomes banal, and hymns to American might become cause for giddy chants of national greatness.
This is happening before our eyes. My grandson, Raphael, was born Feb. 1, in Gallup, N.M. Hours old as I write, he’s my fifth grandchild; they’re all four or under. I worry about what country they will find.
Today the idea of America, empty if stripped of ethical foundation, is under assault from a man who envies the pliant courts, the adoring media, and the license to kill of dictators across the world. Ethics? Please.
Trump itches to press that button. The thing about kicks is you have to keep upping their charge. “You’re fired” worked for a while. But nukes are a whole other level. Trump wants to see North Korea’s Kim Jong-un writhing like an irradiated butterfly on a pin. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who knows what war is and where war leads, is the nation’s best defense against madness.
Trump gave a poor-to-mediocre State of the Union speech. Its essence, after a few picayunes of the all-Americans-are-one-team variety, was the pursuit of “unmatched power” against an ungrateful or hostile world of “unfair trade deals” and would-be migrants destined for murderous gangs.
It equated the 128 countries — not “dozens,” as Trump said — that voted against his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital with “enemies of America.” It hinted at a McCarthyite purge of any federal employee deemed to have failed the American people. It betrayed presidential rapture at reviving the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the place where a fair trial went to die.
Many commentators swooned. It was enough that Trump did not go on walkabout. For NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, “It was optimistic; it was bright; it was conciliatory.” Frank Luntz, a respected Republican pollster, thought that only one word qualified: “Wow.” He tweeted that the speech was a “brilliant mix of numbers and stories, humility and aggressiveness, traditional conservatism and political populism.” Jake Tapper of CNN discerned “beautiful prose.” Even the Washington Post saw “A Call for Bipartisanship” (its initial Page One headline) lurking somewhere. Three in four American viewers approved of the speech, according to a CBS News poll.
Trump has lowered expectations. He has inured people to the thread of violence and meanness lurking in almost every utterance; or worse, he has started to make them relish it. He has habituated Americans to buffoonery and lies. He calls himself a “genius.”
If so, his genius resides in the darkest realms of the human psyche.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump is reported to have exclaimed in recent months, frustrated by what he sees as the failure of his attorney general to protect him from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Cohn, Trump’s ruthless former lawyer, was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s top aide for the hysterical investigations into Communist activities in the 1950s. Where, in other words, is my attack dog ready to shred the special counsel Robert Mueller and the rule of law?
Trump has no storm troopers. The United States is not Weimar. Its democratic institutions remain strong. Still, the Republic has been corrupted in ways that may prove hard to reverse, especially if Trump becomes a two-term president.
No, Trump is not Hitler. Still, it’s sobering to read some of the headlines from 1933, when the Nazi leader became Chancellor. In The New York Times just after the election: “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.” From The Daily Boston Globe, the same day: “Hitler Voices Mild Program.” From The Times: “German ‘Adventure’ Watched in Britain.” This story spoke of doubt as to whether “history will fix the new Chancellor as a mountebank or a hero.”
And our very own mountebank made a very conciliatory speech this week — did he not?
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ROGER COHEN>
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