The desire to put Trump behind us as January 20th draws closer is approaching something tangible. Already there are multiple retrospectives about his presidency, the impact he had on America, questioning whether we can knit back together what he so clumsily sundered.
To be honest, I'm not really interested in many of them. After five years, I don' trust anyone who still thinks that Trump is something that happened to America and isn't a representation of what America is.
Let's focus on what many called the most insidious aspect of Trump's presidency- his lies. Surely, there are presidents or people who could match his pace. It seemed like everyday Trump would overwhelm the news cycle with at least six impossible lies before breakfast then move on to entirely new, even contradictory lies in the afternoon. The media never got a handle on this, always seemingly caught flat-footed by the pace and flexibility of Trump's mendacity. They never quite caught on to the fact that Trump wasn't lying to advance anything grander beside making himself look good. Reporter's, pundits, every one kept waiting for the usual script of "Politician lies to support their agenda, gets caught, acts contrite, then moves on to new tactic to accomplish the same," to assert itself, never quite wising up to the fact that the more his lies were exposed, the greater the existential panic in Trump's mind grew, necessitating an even grander lie to square that dissonant circle.
Trump's biggest weakness is that he doesn't know how to play off a loss. He has to be the winner, has to be the best, in everything all the time, no matter what. That pathetic desperation is what did him in more than anything else right from the start. Instead of playing off the fact that his inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's by saying that these were the true patriots, real Americans who fulfilled the promise of the founders, citizens who walked the narrow way of freedom, their smaller number a testament that they were swayed onto the easier, wider path of multiculturalism. Sure, fascist overtones are positively dripping from those sentiments, but that never stopped Trump before. Point is, he could've played up the near religious devotion into even higher pathological levels of worship past what they his supporters are already giving him and encased himself in near unassailable political positioning but, instead, chose to use an overhead shot of Obama's inauguration crowd that took five seconds of reverse image searching to confirm. Instead of spending his first week in office basking in the glow of his victory, he was embarrassing himself by pretending he didn't steal the accolades of the Black president who made him feel so inferior.
One of the biggest questions surrounding Trump's supporters is "How could they accept all the lies?" For one, they've been conditioned to by decades of Fox News and radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who built their entire industry over lying to their audience. For another, everything else about their lives has been built on lies in some way, what makes the presidency so different?
Consider, Purdue Pharma actively paid doctors and generated studies to lie about the addiction risks of Oxycontin. The company even plead guilty in court to this in 2019. But it's going bankrupt, none of the executives are going to jail and the Sackler family already set up another pharmaceutical company to keep peddling their wonder drug. Meanwhile, all the addicts they created are now dying in record numbers shooting up heroin.
You can do this all day, too. Exxon-Mobile knew that the fossil fuel industry was creating a climate crisis then spent decades setting up a network of think tanks and public intellectuals whose sole purpose was to lie about and obscure this fact. Goldman Sachs would bundle mortgages they knew would fail into complex derivative packages, lie about their worth to investors, then turn around and bet against those very same bundles, waiting to cash in on their inevitable failure. Let's not forget the efforts from the tobacco industry do deny their products link to cancer and emphysema, or the lead industry lying about the toxicity of their product. Oh, right, the Radium Girls- women who got cancer after being told to put their radium-infused paint in their mouths to "point" their brushes- also deserve a special mention.
And oh do things just go on. The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor lied about their evidence to obtain a search warrant, police lie so much on the stand in trial that defense attorney's invented the term testilying as shorthand, not to mention the staggering amount of overturned death penalty cases were police and prosecutors lied through their teeth about the defendant's guilt.The military lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War, Nixon lied about sabotaging peace talks for the same war so he could become president, Regan lied about the Iran-Contra and the CIA's facilitating the crack epidemic. We lied about torturing people, WMD's, NSA surveillance, lead in water pipes, COINTELPRO, among so many others.
Point is, we can't complain about Trump being a liar when our entire society is built around the manufacture and maintenance of lies.
Is it really surprising then, living a country where they're surrounded by lies on all sides, that Trump's faithful would throw themselves so fervently behind someone who lied about everything he spoke about? The only thing you could call out Trump for on his mendacious personality is how pathetic his lies are. But that he lies constantly, about everything, and kills people because of it? Nah man, that's American as baseball.
"Can you believe that Trump is pardoning his cronies, his co-conspirators?!?!?!?" Yes, yes I can. If #MeToo, pedophile priests, or any of the rape scandals in the military have taught us anything, it's that powerful people stay that way because the connections and organizations they belong to actively cover up their crimes. Plus, this unprecedented abuse of power already happened when Elder Bush pardoned everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair so they wouldn't turn states evidence against him and send him to prison.
If truth is supposed to mean anything, then we have to tell the truth to ourselves about who we are. We need to admit that the conditions we find ourselves in now are the same that we've been in. The only difference is that the reality has become too intolerable for the lies to paper over anymore. Which, is good, it's the kick we needed to confront the lies that we've become too complacent with. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that these are sudden developments that sprang out of extraordinary circumstances that just require us to right the ship and we'll be back on course.
No.
We are what we are because this is what we've chosen to become. We have to accept the responsibility of that. If we don't, we'll never come to terms with the fact that we allowed ourselves to get duped into believing that this brutal system was freedom. And if we never realize that if we have the power to accept it, then we won't see that we have the power to reject it, too.
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