Trump: The Tyrant who Shattered the American Ideal
An opinion-analysis on how Donald Trump shoved the American standard off a 58-story skyscraper.
How did we get here? What happens next?
The American Ideal was more than just a standard. Certainly more than just a dream. It was a belief, a confidence, in the land, the nation, the people and the opportunities that spanned many subcultures, demographics, and groups both in the United States and around the world. Even in all its failures, it was to stand for aspiration.
Arguably akin to failure, nary a day in which the common Republican or Democrat public servant finds themselves following a code of ethics religiously, but there has traditionally been an equitable understanding.
The understanding is simple: “scandals are bad because being bad looks evil, and evil politicians are not what America is about.”
This understanding exists because politicians, regardless of ideology, seek to shelter under and hold precious the American Ideal: within it, the simple idea that America is a land of equal law and opportunity, and that as such, we are the good guys.
Any common partisan may believe strongly that the opposing side, or even the base or extremes of their own party, are guilty of ignoring the civil standard needed to uphold the Ideal. Not often would they technically be wrong. However still, the common view (call it an illusion or a hope) of this standard exists as common history of both parties.
For a larger part, it was to be exercised on its public servants internally and autonomously. Naturally.
A public servant’s main priority will always be to appease their base, but even the servant understands that if they cannot, at the very minimum, sell their heinous actions or inaction as good, then they are truly destined to lose office or fall from grace. Even Richard Nixon had his limits, and as much as he degraded the American system, he too still had personal beliefs in the American Ideal.
Democrats are in no way guilt-free of significant scandals.
Lest it be forgotten that indeed no neo-liberal Democrat has dared to repair this downward arc of degradation.
Yet, it sadly only takes only an objective record of modern history to make one acknowledge that this downward arc of degradation in American politics is accelerated primarily from one party, at least at the federal level.
The process began shortly after the Eisenhower presidency and we can look at more modern history to find how politics had changed for the two parties. On one end, the Clintons had helped convert their party’s internal mechanisms from a big tent ethos to a larger emphasis on the covert practice of unabashed corporatism. Perhaps this was to fill a vacuum left by the slow but steady death of reasonable Republicans.
It stands to reason, that to paraphrase pundit Kyle Kulinski, there are two political movements now: Republicans and Diet Republicans.
Likewise, on the other end, the Bush II presidency was objectively and undoubtedly one of the darkest presidencies the nation had seen in multiple ways. We saw in those days that a far-right American administration was capable of multiple illicit and often heinous acts, and would actively attempt to get away with them.
At the time, many thought the Bush II era would be forever known for its scandals, yet there was still some semblance of an understanding. If a scandal occurs, a politician needs to attempt to fix their image in the public light, or they’ll lose even their own supporters.
There did not to be more of a reason than the logical acceptance of an American democratic reality, and the subsequent need for a common good. One cannot afford to lose the approval of a significant minority that is known as the majority of American voters.
It is in the incentive of a politician to be appreciated.
Bush II was a cheat, his vice president most certainly a war criminal, but they still tried to sell us (and the world) the idea of a somewhat honorable presidency. While Cheney made sure to remind us that the writing was on the wall for the Republicans, America had still not shattered the Ideal, at least not fully.
Those who had no significant vested interest in the American Ideal, mainly foreign viewers of our actions, may have truly lost faith. American exceptionalism now looked pretentious and unfounded.
But while Cheney and Bush effectively tarnished us with the frequency of scandals, not many Americans would publicly describe the American Ideal as dead at this stage. After all, these scandals wrought significant unpopularity and internal consternation to the administration, and were followed by a relatively respectful and stable eight years under Obama.
In the Trumpian era, the civil standard of public service is flipped 180 degrees, thrown out completely, and the American Ideal is executed, publicly and unabashedly. There isn’t even an honest attempt to sell those who don’t already believe.
Donald Trump does not seek to be beloved or accepted by anyone who isn’t part of his cult. It didn’t take Kelly Anne Conway denying objective reality early into the presidency to let us know that, but it sure didn’t help either.
Even as Joe Biden says frankly cute platitudes, he too knows that no amount of political whispers on the sweet dreams of unity and apple pie could ever hope to singularly recover an opposing political party from its ethical nosedive. This same nosedive had resulted in the party publicly giving up on the American masses.
Spoon-fed propaganda and blatant misinformation, better known by non-journalists as ‘straight-up lying’, is spewed out by the administration on a daily basis like bile from a sewer. They know that anyone who isn’t clearly faithful to the presidency can tell 210,000 plus American lives are lost and the president is completely tone-deaf.
The Republican Party had long ago committed a ritual suicide under Trump, and in its stead it birthed a cult of personality. This was a cult whose religious dedication to their leader meant constantly, and often unabashedly, contradicting themselves and their own proclaimed morals and code of conduct to follow him. The few that jumped ship, are all horrified by this reality.
If Nixon was too much for the Republican Party to bear, the fact that Trump is their nominee for the 2020 election should convince any objective viewer of history that the Party had died. The arc had completed its descent.
This death of the conservative politic and consequent rebirth into a quasi-religious fascistic cult of personality, was headed by Trump himself. It was carried out faithfully by a supreme majority of the Party.
Those who weren’t believers, became supporters.
Those who dared not to, were simply no longer Republicans.
Trump: a former TV star, self-admitted sexual assaulter and adulterer, and unsuccessful businessman. He knew his strengths lay in the limelight. Throughout his life, he believed his brand and following to be the most important thing about him.
Deep down, all he ever wanted through any variation of character he played, however chaotic, was to be loved and admired by a devout congregation. He did not mind creating chaos, as long as his believers still approved. He could handle having an opposition, as long as his side stuck by him; at least for long enough. This belief existed in every venture, whether it be mail-order steaks, reality television, or the American presidency.
Trump knew, just like a professional wrestling show he once participated in, there are typically two sides: good and evil. But what Trump also knew, was the whole thing was fake. Reality was what they carved out for themselves. With his campaign announcement riding down an escalator, he knew he had the chance to once again carve a new reality into the back of America.
Trump had plenty of reason to execute on this plan. The credible culmination of years of blatant tax evasion and criminal acts, and what better place to hide from the authorities than the Oval Office itself?
Presidential immunity wrought by the unitary executive is powerful, but perhaps he even believed that he would be beloved so much that he wouldn’t even face criminal prosecution post-presidency.
Evil is bad and its character is supposed to do bad things. Regardless of this fact, evil is undeniably effective, ruthless, and seemingly all-powerful. Evil has the ability to possess others and bring them under evil’s watchful command.
Lastly, evil has no regulator, for evil lives in its own twisted reality. Trump knows these fatal parameters, and they fit him for his personal goals just as evil fits any cult leader.
We can claim to know politics and ideologies. We can disagree day and night, but evil is supposedly objective in human history, even if it transcends both sides.
The only way you can deny true evil, is by denying true reality.
Trump knew this and he needed it to succeed. He also knew that reality is what you make it. He knew that his 1984-esque obfuscation of reality had led a key role in the majority of his business ventures, if not at the pitch, then by the bitter end.
It wasn’t hard for Trump to understand that if you try hard enough with people dumb enough, you can make them believe anything, at least for a while. This philosophy is why Trump is known in New York City as a con-man.
Why, it’s no secret why Trump publicly adores fascistic dictators; because to believe in fascist rule is to live in a lie. Like Kim Jong-Un, like Putin, like Orban: every fascistic illiberal leader needs a lie to feed their loyal base.
However, even if Trump succeeded in creating this false image of himself, there remains one singular consistency. Despite being beloved and adored by his cult, he knows behind his illusion he resembles a dark nightmare: painful, racist, violent. He enveloped himself as the antithesis of the American Ideal: A politician to whom evil is good, and the traditional standard of good, the American civil standard, is evil.
Trump exists off of chaos and scandals. As a result, in his latest con he accepts his role in what history knows as a political tyrant.
Perhaps he revels in this, contrary to popular belief, there have been good tyrants. Tyrants can be bringers of change through a death and rebirth of not just an era, but an age.
Such childish assumptions are natural for Trump. But what he failed to grasp is that not all tyrants are good, not all death is warranted, and not all rebirth is into something better.
Trump had aimed his sights on the American civil standard for personal benefit; because it had fit his character. His character accepted the typical idealistic Republican religiosity around Americanism, while simultaneously being the most un-American president, ever.
To him, he did not destroy the Ideal, he envisioned and recreated it. To Republicans who swallowed his pill, like Mitch McConnell, the reward for this grave sin against America was the advancement of several conservative policies and a rather excessively thick packing of the federal court system.
Whether or not we objectively accept that the Ideal has always been a quasi-illusion and that our own place in history may be darker than we want to believe, the dream still existed in the past to show us the blueprint to a more equitable and prosperous future.
Undoubtedly, it was through the thirteen shining stars of a promise land, of the Ideal, that our founding fathers wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is what united the thirteen colonies with differing nationalities, industries and backgrounds.
Growth would not come easy, but the framework lay loose enough to allow for needed change. While America regressed and progressed and progressed and regressed, one thing was for certain: the same American Ideal that birthed our founding documents would not allow the cog to slip too far.
America was set in evil ways, but it was to become less evil over time. Under Lincoln, merely fearing of being too brazen, meant simply maintaining slavery. But even maintenance was unacceptable to the South at that point.
There had been too many years of their evil held under relative stagnation, and Lincoln was the last straw.
Humans are imperfect, and even more stubborn in recognizing when they’ve made mistakes. The American-brand of civil society is a bold attempt at social evolution. Civil war broke out because the nation needed an answer about what being human meant, in more ways than one.
When the Union won and Reconstruction began, the pendulum swung hard in the direction of the American Ideal, and subsequently the raising of our civil standard. When reconstruction failed and Jim Crow was born, we were reminded how slow social progress would be for our nation, even post-war.
I know not of the future of the American Ideal and the American civil standard. I know that the illusions, or hopes, that both portray have been shattered.
They might have been shattered to many when we went to war with drugs or the Middle East. To some, it may have been when we interfered in Latin America or Vietnam. To others, it had been shattered the minute they were faced with the cruel harshness of what it means to be a minority in this country.
But to many Americans, the belief in the Ideal still existed, even if it wasn’t yet reality.
Trump came to show us that the Ideal meant nothing, at least to him and to his believers. He showed us that a significant minority of this country would forget the Ideal. He showed us that a significant minority could either accept or worship a political nightmare that had gripped the country. He showed us that a significant minority could publicly be faithful in belief that it was all for the Republic’s betterment.
Yet, and regardless of these cultist beliefs, his believers simply don’t number large enough to continue the era in a democratic environment. Trump will be voted out of office.
It will take all of us, uniting in our voices of popular discontent with his un-Americanism, but attempted Trumpian fraudulence aside, it will be a resounding popular vote for Biden through the process of every conscientious American’s vote.
It will not, however, recover the American Ideal.
You will not see Republicans suddenly fall in love with Biden, and everyone come together to negotiate for a better future. This will be no FDR administration.
The Republican party will assume the same stance it did under Obama, a stance first formally adopted by Newt Gingrich. Any bipartisan compromise in Congress will simply be compromise on exactly how far right a bill will be.
As far as the immediate future, no one can truly know how Trump will react. We know his character and we know the role he plays with his believers. His character is publicly suggesting a coup.
Will he break character and fade into the darker annals of history, or will he truly try to hold onto power?
Even Biden knows deep down that there exists a plausible reality in which Trump’s fear of criminal prosecution is so high that he may commit to acting out his role in-full. The cost of which may be grave.
I can’t guarantee or estimate the response if he does. I know that the upper echelons of U.S. government, both in the military and still yet in the courts, would not stand for a flagrant defiance of the Constitution. A significant number of U.S. states would not stand for it either.
This is perhaps the only facet of the deep state conspiracy Trump spouts that rings true. Despite relative public obedience to the president, many public servants in government still believe in the supremacy of their constitutional oaths and in their love of country, and are prepared to stand against a coup.
Regardless of how we progress (or regress) post-Trump, we will never be the same. Politics will never be the same. The damage created to the United States and the American Ideal is socioeconomically and politically long-lasting and scarring.
There exists only one aspect of control to counter Trump’s actions against the American Ideal and against our standard. One piece of the puzzle exists regardless of how deep the wounds of a torn America are, and that function of the equation can only rest in the hands of the American people.
Indeed, we must believe in the power of the people.
As humans above all else, we alone must find the ultimate autonomy to a changed destiny: we can choose to let the wounds of our nation fester, or we can tend to them. The decisions we make will not magically piece back the broken pieces of a shattered American Ideal, but it may just save the Republic.
For which the Republic stands, is a subject we can always choose to better.
