The Great Pretender

 

Discussions of Donald Trump as President focus heavily on his lying. NY Times reporters Linda Qiu and Michael D. Shear highlighted “131 false or inaccurate statements” he made in a 90-minute speech in Wisconsin this month. It might be more useful to consider that speech as one big lie repeated in airport hangars across the country. Another way to think about these performances is to see Trump as the Great Pretender.

He has been pretending his entire adult life. After taking half a billion dollars from his father, he has pretended to be an extraordinarily successful businessman. He plastered his name on buildings all over the world, found people to write books touting his business genius, and finally landed a role playing a billionaire on “The Apprentice”.

Despite occasional public hints that his failures overwhelmed his successes, Trump’s mastery of publicity and ability to find willing lenders hid the reality of commercial bumbling and colossal losses. Only after years of dogged digging into his finances by the press do we discover the truth about Trump – he was and is a business failure, pretending to be great.

All along Trump has pretended that he is extraordinarily smart, a rare genius. He has claimed to know more everything than anyone else: about ISIS, campaign finance, courts and lawsuits, the visa system, drones, trade, taxes, money, infrastructure, technology, and construction. But he has shown none of the usual signs of high intelligence. He rarely reads. His language is simple and repetitive. Others wrote his books. He did not do well in college. More relevant to the immediate moment, he has shown no ability to adapt to the extraordinary circumstances of this election year. Some of his public interventions have been extraordinarily stupid, such as his first debate performance and his rejection of another stimulus bill.

Trump pretends that he has accomplished things that have not happened. He also loves to take credit for the achievements of others. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker counted 156 times over the past two years that Trump took credit for the Veterans Choice Act, passed during Obama’s presidency with the leadership of John McCain. That’s more than once a week.

Trump pretends that any concern for the environment is stupid. This pretense goes far beyond his claims that climate change is a hoax. He pretends that low-wattage light bulbs and low-flow toilets don’t work, and that wind turbines are unreliable and kill birds. He doesn’t say much about the specific anti-pollution regulations his administration has revoked. Of course, he also pretends to be an excellent steward of the environment.

Trump pretends to be not just smart and successful, but greater than any person could be. He describes himself as a genius. He pretends that “Nobody has ever done for the black community what President Trump has done.” He pretends to be the most presidential of all Presidents except perhaps Lincoln.

Trump has pretended for years that he had a health insurance plan much better and much cheaper than the ACA that he and Republicans have tried to destroy. Both he and Mike Pence repeated this fiction in the debates this month. There is no plan and there never was a plan. This pretense involves protecting people with pre-existing conditions, which has proven much too popular to eliminate. But Trump’s embrace of the concept of “herd immunity” shows how little protection he offers to Americans with pre-existing conditions that make the coronavirus especially dangerous to them.

Sometimes, usually when he thinks that his words won’t be broadcast, Trump stops pretending. He wasn’t pretending when he said he thought US soldiers who had died in combat were “losers” and “suckers”. He wasn’t pretending when he bragged about grabbing women by the “pussy”. Afterward he pretends he didn’t say those things.

In the song by the Platters, “The Great Pretender”, Tony Williams admitted that he was just pretending because the truth was too hard to accept. Trump admits to no pretense. He can’t give up the role of the great man he is playing, the greatest man ever.

Instead of leadership, Trump provides pretense. Now Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, has ripped even that mask off, when he said that the Trump administration is not trying to control the coronavirus epidemic.

Trump golfs and lies at rallies, while Americans die. He has been pretending to be president for four years. Soon the pretense will be over.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

October 27, 2020

So Much Winning

Winning was one of Donald Trump’s most frequent themes long before he became a candidate in 2015. Every issue was placed into a frame of winning versus losing, with himself as the ultimate winner. What kind of person adopts that as public creed, outside of competitive athletes and chess players, who actually play games with a winner and loser? That was an unheeded warning already in 2016.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised that under his leadership Americans would “get bored with winning.” His fans would grow “so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’ I’m going to say, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning.’” In an op-ed for “USA Today” in April 2018, he wrote about the economy, “And most important, the American people are winning.” The next month, he told graduates of the Naval Academy, “Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning — you got to win.... Victory, winning, beautiful words, but that is what it is all about.”

What is all about winning? War and the Olympics? A college coach who tells that to his players might face a public outcry. Not because of any new “cancel culture”, but because it was never right in the first place. So what does Trump mean by saying that people would beg him to stop winning?

He certainly didn’t mean foreign policy, where competition and cooperation battle each other. By asserting that we are competing against everyone to make America first, Trump squandered in a few years the worldwide cooperation that has taken decades to build. The incidents demonstrating Trump’s disrespect for the leaders of our closest allies are too many to enumerate. His disrespect for the people of other countries, not just “shithole countries”, but all countries that are not the US, has turned the world’s people against America. People in 13 countries allied with us, from Canada to Denmark to the UK to South Korea, rate Trump at the bottom of the short list of world leaders. 83% have no confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, placing him behind Putin and Xi. Across all 13 countries since 2000, the proportion who had a favorable view of the US was highest under Obama and now is lowest in 2020, having dropped by nearly half in every country. The friends of America are no longer so friendly. That’s losing.

Our enemies are stronger now than when he took office. Iran is closer to having a bomb. North Korea has built new missiles. China is destroying the remnants of democracy in Hong Kong.

Those enormous losses developed since he took office. His earlier financial losses have only gradually come to light, now that someone finally got a look at his tax records. Trump told the IRS about nearly $1 billion in financial losses from his companies in the 1990s. From one of America’s richest families, in recent years he was able to convince only one bank, the deeply troubled Deutsche Bank, to lend him money, after defaulting on many previous debts. Maybe Trump can call getting huge sums from banks and then not paying them back “winning”, but to the rest of us that’s losing.

Maybe by “winning” Trump means conning people out of money, but not going to jail. Then he’s a big winner: Trump had to pay $25 million to 7,000 former Trump University students; he admitted in court that he used funds from the “charitable” Donald J. Trump Foundation to pay off his own debts and buy a portrait of himself; he was found guilty of cheating the Polish workers who demolished the Bonwit Teller store in Manhattan, a beloved Art Deco landmark, to make way for Trump Tower.

Then there are the simple business failures: his 4 bankruptcies; losing $135 million at his golf courses since 2000; losing $55 million at his Washington hotel since he has been President, despite forcing the global elite to stay there to get into his good graces. All told, the businesses Trump owns have lost money since 2000.

Maybe he just means the other cons he pulled successfully, like getting into college by paying someone else to take his SATs or getting out of the draft with a note from a friendly doctor.

He didn’t mean that his Party is winning. In the 2018 election, the large Republican House majority was decimated. Now the Republican Senate majority is in jeopardy. Maybe he means setting a record for the coming and going of Cabinet secretaries and close advisors.

In the most important battle of all, where losing means losing one’s life, Trump has presided over 220,000 coronavirus deaths, while proclaiming victory every month. By Inauguration Day 2021, there will probably be over 400,000 deaths.

Let’s give Trump credit for some important wins. ISIS has been pushed back, but not eliminated, as he often claims. Many, many conservative judges have been confirmed. Regulations that protect our health have been wiped out. Billionaires won gigantic tax cuts, paid for by the rest of us. Does that make anyone bored with winning?

Trump is not only a loser, but he has no idea how to win. He has squandered every opportunity to create a winning campaign this year, most notably being unable to turn his coronavirus episode to any advantage. His insistence on holding wild campaign rallies that both threaten to infect his supporters and turn off possible uncommitted voters has led to the opposite of winning. He has been unable to articulate any plan for a second term.

Except as a Halloween costume, the Trump SO MUCH WINNING T-shirt is not worth much.

Where has he been winning? Trump’s greatest triumph is the image of himself as a successful man. Trump is not a winner, but he performed one on TV. His lavish lifestyle has been funded, not by his own businesses, but by selling his image, by flamboyant spending of his father’s money, and by licensing his name.

For years Trump has been playing a winner, while he loses in nearly every arena he enters. He did win a close election in 2016. That made us all losers.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

October 20, 2020

We Are Not Just In Trouble, We Are In Danger

 

 

The Michigan militia plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her “on trial” or just shoot her may seem like far-fetched lunacy by a few whackos nipped in the bud by alert FBI agents. But I think it’s a warning about the physical dangers faced by Americans as we approach the election.

The willingness of many Michigan right-wingers to threaten elected officials with guns was on display in April and May, when protesters armed with assault rifles entered the State Capitol. During the second demonstration, signs compared Whitmer to Hitler and others read “Tyrants Get the Rope”. Before the third demonstration on May 14, private Facebook groups threatened violence against Whitmer and other lawmakers.

The existence of armed right-wing anti-government extremists willing to kill is nothing new, at least since Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, murdering 168 people. The Department of Homeland Security, a bastion of Trump appointees, believes that “white supremacist extremists ... will pose the most persistent and lethal threat” to our national security.

But these isolated groups are not working alone any more. They are being encouraged by FOX News and by the President. Kyle Rittenhouse illegally acquired an assault rifle, traveled from Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and murdered two people during a demonstration about the police killing of Jacob Blake. He has been charged with homicide. Yet FOX News hosts Tucker Carlson said Rittenhouse was maintaining “order when no one else would”, and Jeanine Pirro said he was “innocent”, an “all-American” being demonized.

Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” on April 17, and less than two weeks later, armed protesters appeared at the State Capitol. He called the protesters “very good people” the day after that incident, reminiscent of his comments about white supremacists in Charlottesville. He supported Rittenhouse, saying “he probably would have been killed” if he had not defended himself, and refused to condemn vigilantes. He famously refused to condemn white supremacists during his debate with Joe Biden.

In the background, in no longer dark corners of the internet, QAnon worshipers encourage each other to believe that Democrats are baby-eating monsters. In August, Trump offered them high praise: “I’ve heard these are people that love our country”, and congratulated himself on their belief that he is central to saving America from cannibals. Then he called Kamala Harris a “monster”, far beyond a bad or incompetent politician, but exactly the Halloween caricature that QAnon claims.

The President tells us at every chance that these Democratic monsters are actively trying to steal the election, because only their traitorous plotting could prevent him from winning the election.

August 17 in Wisconsin: “The only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged”.

August 19 in Washington: Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany would not give an answer to this question, asked by two different reporters: “Does the President believe there is any circumstance under which he could lose the election fairly?”

August 24 at the Republican National Convention: “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

September 12 in Nevada: “The Democrats are trying to rig this election, because it’s the only way they’re going to win.”

September 15 on “Fox and Friends” about Nevada voting and Governor Steve Sisolak: “I’m winning that state easily, but the one thing we can’t beat, if they cheat on the ballots. Now he will cheat on the ballots, I have no doubt about it.”

September 29 at the Cleveland debate: “He will destroy this country.”

Not just Trump, but the Republican Party in its most official and public role at their national convention. The opening speaker, Charlie Kirk, said that Democrats “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear.”

The gun-waving McKloskeys: “Your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”

Kimberly Guilfoyle: Democrats “want to destroy America”.

Donald Trump, Jr.: The election is a choice between “church, work and school” against “rioting, looting and vandalism.

Despite months of polling results and nearly constant reports in the media about those results, Republicans are convinced that Trump will win the election. The Gallup survey in the middle of September showed that 44% of Republicans said Trump would definitely win, and 46% said he would probably win, leaving only 10% who believe the polls that show Biden with a sizable lead.

How could that be? Kevin Williamson in the National Review blames a variety of conservative media figures who have been predicting a Trump landslide, which he labels “the bull peddled by the entertainment wing of the conservative movement”. These Trump entertainers are setting up their fans for supreme disappointment.

We have had dirty presidential politics since our founding. But never has a President openly and repeatedly encouraged supporters to take up arms against his deplorable enemies. These enemies are trying to “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God.” They would destroy America and eat babies, in the event they steal the election. The only evidence anyone needs before attacking these inhuman monsters: if Trump loses, which Nate Silver estimates is by far the most likely outcome.

Now what could be more understandable than a brave American who loves his country, listens carefully to FOX News and talk radio, and believes what the President says, deciding to load his gun to defend America. That would be stupid, illegal, traitorous, perhaps insane. But every day more likely.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

October 13, 2020

My Wish for Trump

 

 

Trump has COVID. What do I wish for him?

That question provokes a variety of verbal contortions. Official Democrats wish him and Melania well. A conservative, Ross Douthat, plays defense, blowing up a bit of evidence into an assumption that any other President would have made the same early mistakes. More liberal Nicholas Kristof wants to abstain from offense, saying the main thing to do now is to avoid snark. David Barash at Daily Kos is refreshingly brutal. He won’t wish Trump well, and he’s right in everything he says. I’m sure there will be many more efforts to publicly acknowledge the emotional, moral, and political battle between our better and worse angels.

We have been schooled to believe we should always wish the best to everyone, even to the epitome of hate-your-opponents. When Hillary had the flu, Trump mocked her. Our President in a time of plague is the greatest source of public misinformation about it, says Cornell University researchers, after studying 38 million articles about the pandemic. If anyone deserved to get coronavirus, it’s Donald Trump. But let’s still play nice.

I won’t play nice, but I don’t want Trump to die, or even become deathly ill. That would not just be bad for him, but bad for my wishes for our national future. I want Trump to get well, to live many years beyond the end of his Presidency.

The last thing we need is for the Republicans to be able to validate his pose as the ultimate victim, so they can transform Trump into a martyr, even if it is to his own stupidity.

I am gleeful at the prospect of dozens of tell-some books by those who were present for Trump’s outrageous behavior, who heard what he said. Publishers will dangle millions of dollars in front of people who have thus far demonstrated little spine or conscience. Some of what they say will stick to his image like obscene Post-Its.

I look forward to countless court cases around Trump, a later life of defending himself for his whole life thus far. Eventually the accumulation of evidence and judgments will prove to any reasonable person that he was and is a crook, a fraud, a failure in everything but inherited privilege. I recognize how many unreasonable people there are in America, who could never be convinced of any truth about the object of their idolatry. Their fantasies will disappear into the dustbin of history, then reappear in some other guise as another generation of deluded souls gets taken in by the latest con. But some of the Americans who were duped by the greatest con man of our lives will eventually realize that they had no idea what was really going on. The history books will paint a damning portrait of Trump.

I look forward to the Republican Party explaining how it became Trump’s slave and where it is going now. The Never Again Trumpers still have a lot of squirming to do about their role in creating such low-hanging fruit for their most dangerous adherents. We all need to confront our participation in systemic racism, but most of all the systematically racist Republican Party. That could bring us a little closer to a just society.

That could only happen if the ultimately privileged Mr. Trump has some mild case of this flu, and recovers quickly enough to continue his reign of terror on the country of his birth for just a few more months. Then I look forward to the crash.

I want Trump to get better, but I don’t wish him well.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

October 6, 2020