Stop feeding the orange ego

Matt Taibbi had an insightful essay last week, “The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over.” The title is unremarkable, but the brilliant subhead—“Is America sure it's ready to give up its addiction to crazy?”—nailed something that has been bothering me. Taibbi’s thesis is that those of us appalled by Trump can’t stop handing him our attention:

His schtick is to provoke rivals to the point where they drop what they’re doing and spend their time screaming at him, which from the jump validates the primary tenet of his worldview, i.e. that everything is about him. Political opponents seem incapable of not handing him free advertising. They say his name on TV thousands of times a day, put his name on bumper stickers to be paraded before new demographics (e.g. “BERNIE BEATS TRUMP”), and then keep talking about him even off duty, at office parties, family dinners, kids’ sports events, everywhere, which sooner or later gets people wondering: who’s more annoying, the blowhard, or the people who can’t stop talking about the blowhard?

Biden’s candidacy is the ne plus ultra of this approach because Biden represents nothing so much as the not-Trump. If there were such a thing as a Biden rally today, who would take the trouble to go? What would motivate you? Would you say to yourself, “I can’t wait to go out and not see Donald Trump!” Biden has explicitly promised NOT to provide Medicare for All, NOT to alleviate student debt, NOT to reverse the crazily skewed income distribution aggravated by both parties over the last 40 years. Can anyone name an attractive policy innovation that the Biden campaign represents? Being nice while in office? 

The only thing Biden & Co. seem positively committed to is jacking up tensions with Russia and China even further. Maybe he should call a war mobilization rally—except that not even active-duty military personnel would attend it. 

The obsessive revulsion over Trump by the antis goes a long way toward explaining the eerie hold he exercises over his cult followers. Every furious anti-Trump meme confirms their deep resentment of the people their side designates as the enemy—liberals, non-white people, immigrants, transgender bathroom users, etc. As a result the actual policies Trump promotes, which harm his own followers along with everyone else, are shunted into near oblivion. When I read Facebook exchanges among Trump-lovers, a huge portion is dedicated to putting a rhetorical thumb in the faces of his alleged enemies. The two sides reflect and energize each other. 

Our politics is thus reduced to a theological dispute such as those that stir rival Hasidic communes or the weird tragicomedy of the wars of the Nestorian heresy when opposing 5th-century Christians drew their battle axes over whether Jesus embodied both human and divine natures in his holy person or just one or other of the two. This seems hardly a pressing issue in retrospect, but Europe was plagued with religious wars for decades over less. Soccer rivalries and Superbowl madness belong to the same category of furiously mindless opposing dualities that thrive on elegant fictions, the fiction in this case being that our underlying interests as human beings are in violent contradiction. They aren’t—unless you’re Jeff Bezos. 

This fight over gauzy nothingness masks the even more telling weakness in the tribe vs. tribe election that approaches: the Democrats’ critique of Trump’s reign ignores the vast panorama of his multiple assaults on the public welfare in favor of silliness, irrelevancy, and arcane insider baseball. Take the impeachment proceedings that were supposed to end the Trumpian nightmare—it was such a robust failure that no one even dared to mention it at the Democratic National Convention. (Nor did the Republicans breathe a word about the hated “Obamacare” act they pretend to reverse.) 

Or consider the nearly three years of breathless tail-chasing over Russiagate in which evil Vlad the Enabler allegedly undermined Hillary Clinton’s genius presidential campaign. “QAnon for Liberals,” is the fairest subtitle this exercise in mass hypnosis merits as the Mueller investigation to this day has not unearthed evidence of such attempted interference. But respectable mainstream publications continue to flog it anyway while pointing the finger at the yahoos and dupes who swallow conspiratorial ravings from Rush Limbaugh. 

These lame-ass fantasies are preferred by the Democrat mainstream over pounding away at Trump on, for example, tax giveaways to the Scrooge McDuckian plutocracy, the destruction of environmental protections that will result in more cancer for your grandchildren, his grotesque and blatant family corruption, the GOP’s blithe indifference to climate destruction, and on and on. Democrats can’t touch Trump on these issues because they are deeply complicit with them and beholden to the same economic interests that benefit from Trump’s betrayal of the commonweal. 

 As the November race tightens, and Biden’s free ride comes to an end, his handlers better shift gears and decide that it’s time to stop energizing Trump’s base with attacks narrowed to his disagreeable person and start offering a vision of something new. Maybe we can break the addiction by admitting we are powerless over what an asshole Donald Trump is, which as any veteran of recovery can tell you, keeps the focus on him—and with it, the control.