Ramble-Grumbles about Trumpian Intractability

Despite a pretty good day, my general funk deepens.

Impeachment seems destined to become a tribal identity contest. Those of us convinced the president is guilty gesture repeatedly, exasperatedly at the evidence and wonder how anyone could think Trump innocent of corruption and incompetence. Trump's defenders may have retreated from "no quid pro quo" to "yeah, quid pro quo, but everyone does it!", but they remain constant in their insistence that the impeachment inquiries are a coup. The Senate GOP's latest anti-impeachment resolution, symbolic though it may be, signals what everyone already knows: impeachment will die a quick death in the Senate, no matter what. The DOJ's opening of a criminal investigation into the origins of the Muller probe promise to throw enough chaff into the air to confuse anyone not already engaged and committed.

It'll be red versus blue, not Trump versus evidence. Even Trump's red-leaning critics are, by and large, still "Yeah, but he's better than a Democrat."

I can't deny a lot of my animosity toward Trump is rooted in red/blue, them/us dynamics.

But the reality of motivated reasoning isn't the only thing going on here. Trump is really, truly, objectively operating out of the normal range of any president in living memory. There's just no legitimate comparison with Obama or Bush or Clinton. Even Nixon managed to govern without daily public, narcissistic rants. Nor did Nixon comport himself internationally as an ill-educated boob. I mean, the White House had to confirm that the Erdogan letter wasn't a parody. They had to de-satire-ize the president's own letter!

The rational defense of Trump--behind the distraction, he's giving us what we want--doesn't quite work with me. Sure--you get your judges and justices appointed, and that's not nothing. But in other arenas of governance he's a disaster! International relations? The long-term economy? And just plain character, a model for our children to look up to. There's no sense of the right calling Trump out for the kind of mean, petty, and deeply irresponsible discourse that makes up his whole rhetorical style. Trump himself won't stand for it. His rants aim at his critics. He talks like a cartoon supervillain--but not the scary kind, the sadly inept kind. I mean, that's the best defense The Wall Street Journal can summon: he's too inept to impeach.

But none of that matters. The base supports Trump for reasons that aren't rational. His combativeness is for them a signal of strength. He's saying what they've wanted to say to all those people who call them stupid or bigoted for denying climate change, wondering why white men are so put upon, or hating taxes.

Actually, I get at least two strands from the comment threads I read. On one hand, Trump is seen just as he sells himself: a kind of outsider/house cleaner, clearing out the festering wound that is "government" and replacing it with American Greatness. Trump isn't just pragmatically right; he's a good man unfairly smeared by people who hate goodness. Others, though, readily admit that Trump is an agent of chaos, that he's rude and unrefined and even a bit willfully ignorant. He's less a cleansing treatment and more like chemotherapy. He'll burn out the badness of Washington. And if he burns the place down while re-arranging the furniture? Well, all the better. It needs to go.

"Savior" and "agent of destruction" aren't obvious bedfellows--except in certain forms of American evangelicalism. I'm not sure that a wedge strategy to split the salvationists from the nihilists would actually work.

Hm. Gotta think more on that.

Funk out!