The President-Elect Through an Alamogordo Glass Darkly
For
now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known. Corinthians 13:12
Long before Donald Trump became a presidential
candidate he was a well-known public figure with a reputation for grandiosity
and insensitivity to people affected negatively by his real estate projects, casinos
and entertainment franchises. In the year 2000, The Simpsons set a story in the future that showed Donald Trump as
president. It was a joke because no one believed then he had the temperament,
the knowledge or skills for high political office. In those long ago days,
before the recent US election campaign, one could feel fairly certain about
what sort of person Donald Trump was. The problem now is that the anti-Trump
outrage has reached such a fevered pitch that all reporting about him has
become unreliable because it is motivated by political agendas. Everything he
says or does is being interpreted in the most negative light possible.
Contrary to the modern ethic that
always seeks to eliminate bullying and discrimination, Trump’s mental and
physical attributes are always fair game for ridicule. One example is the
constant ridicule of the way he speaks. His inarticulateness is said to be a
sign of his inferior thought processes, but no one speaks this way about a
teenager with a language impairment. We are told all the time that such people are
otherwise intelligent and capable of many great things.
Another example distortion became
apparent when it turned out that video of him “mocking a disabled man” was
edited to make him look bad. The gestures in question were actually part of
Trump’s idiosyncratic hand gestures which themselves have been mocked
endlessly.
Perhaps the most absurd criticism
came from a column in Salon in which the writer said Trump could not be trusted
because he doesn’t drink and has never used illegal drugs, and somehow this is
worse than the fact that he once described a sexual fantasy about intimate
touching of a consenting partner. And it is Hollywood celebrities who are
shocked by this—a town that has made fortunes by telling stories about its own
debauchery! In this upside-down moral universe, we are supposed to believe that
American priests have never heard anything worse in confession.
In spite of all the shady things
everyone learned about Trump during the election campaign, sixty-million people
were ready to forgive, perhaps because like any sensible priest, they could see
he was just a regular sinner like everyone else, and certainly not much
different than hundreds of other politicians.
The poet Phil Rockstroh has been
describing in an inimitable style the way traditional politics has been upended
and refracted in a mirror funhouse where the formerly relatively sober and wise
leadership class is now wandering the political landscape dazed and confused,
sinking to the level of travesty they attribute to their opponent:
Democrats, you have
managed to beat rightist wingnuts in the race to Crazytown. Liberals, your
lunacy involving Trump being Putin’s Manchurian Candidate, thus the election
results should be voided, is right up there, loony-muffin-wise, with Republican’s
fixation on Obama’s Birth Certificate. Democrats, do you remember the
blunderbuss of snark you aimed at the ambulatory head wounds known as Birthers?
Have you gone bughouse crazy? Seriously, where is there a scintilla of evidence
to support your claim that Vlad The Election Impaler denied Empress-In-Waiting
Hillary her birthright to the US presidency? For your own sakes, get a grip on yourselves.
In the interest of retaining a shred of dignity, proffer some evidence or
shuffle in the direction of the consulting room of a qualified psychological
professional.
The most serious example of
motivated reasoning toward Trump has been on display in the many articles expressing
fear about what Trump might do once he gets command of a nuclear arsenal. The
Internet is suddenly full of images of Trump’s scowling face with a mushroom
cloud in the background. In an ironic way, it is good that Trump was elected
because it has brought much-needed attention to a problem that the public
ignored previously. In fact, there is a long list of travesties that people of
good conscience should have been protesting during the Obama presidency, but
they were ignored when the elegant speechifier in chief was in power. Now it
looks like they are going to protest and Trump will be the patsy taking the
blame for all that is wrong with the country.
The risk of an intentional or
accidental nuclear war has existed since the 1950s, and the decision to launch,
for any arbitrary reason, has always been left in the hands of a single
individual—and America has always prided itself on being a land where anyone
could become president. When all is considered, there is no reason to believe
the risk increased when Trump was elected since it was Hillary Clinton who
wanted to risk having a conflict with Russia over Syrian skies, and Trump who
wanted a new detente.
An article in Mother Jones expressing panic about Trump with his “finger on the
button” illustrates how much his critics are straining themselves to portray
everything he has ever said in the worst light possible. In Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is
Inevitable? the author, David Corn, finds that, based on comments he made
between 1990 and 2004, Trump has a dangerously fatalistic view about the
inevitability of nuclear Armageddon.[1] Mr. Corn is to be commended for
finding several quotes from long ago that give us insight into Trump’s thinking
about nuclear weapons, but his interpretation and conclusions don’t stand up. Seen
without bias, Trump’s thoughts about nuclear weapons are no different from
those of millions of people who have worried about nuclear war and fought to
have nuclear weapons eliminated. If we didn’t know whose words these are, we
might notice that the speaker doesn’t talk like someone who has a PhD in the
history of the nuclear age, but we would also note that his thoughts are
similar to those of millions of people who have contemplated the implications
of a world stocked with thousands of nuclear weapons:
1990:
I’ve
always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in
my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest
problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s
a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until
they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all
stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows
how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.
It’s
like thinking the Titanic can’t sink. Too many countries have nuclear weapons;
nobody knows where they’re all pointed, what button it takes to launch them.
The
bomb Harry Truman dropped on Hiroshima was a toy next to today’s. We have
thousands of weapons pointed at us and nobody even knows if they’re going to go
in the right direction. They’ve never really been tested. These jerks in charge
don’t know how to paint a wall, and we’re relying on them to shoot nuclear
missiles to Moscow. What happens if they don’t go there? What happens if our
computer systems aren’t working? Nobody knows if this equipment works, and I’ve
seen numerous reports lately stating that the probability is they don’t work.
It’s a total mess.
1995:
If
Hitler had the bomb, you don’t think he would have used it? ... I mean, you
have people that are sick and they are now having nuclear arsenals, and I think
it’s one of the greatest problems of the world… So it’s always tough to say—I
mean I like to project for the future but really live very much for the
present. And I like to learn from the past, but it’s very, very fragile, life
is so fragile.
2000:
My
uncle John Trump was an MIT professor and a brilliant man. He had a clear and
compelling view of the future, including a strong belief that one day the
United States might be subjected to a terrorist strike that would turn
Manhattan into Hiroshima II. I always respected Uncle John, but sometimes found
myself wondering if maybe he wasn’t exaggerating just a bit. Today we know that
John Trump knew exactly what he was talking about. So what are we doing about
this threat? Are we getting tough with people who would wipe us out in a
second? Hell no.
2004:
I
don’t think any building will be here—and unless we have some very smart people
ruling it, the world will not be the same place in a hundred years. The weapons
are too powerful, too strong. Access to the weapons is getting too easy, so I
think the landscape we’re looking at will not be the same unless we get smart
people in office quickly.
I
had an uncle who was a great professor and a brilliant man—Dr. John Trump, a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His whole life was
devoted to the study and eradication of cancer, and sadly, he died of cancer.
But he was a brilliant scientist, and he would tell me weapons are getting so
powerful today that humanity is in tremendous trouble. This was 25 years ago,
but he was right. The world is rocky, and some terrible things are going to
happen. That’s why I lead the life I do. I enjoy it. I know life is fragile,
and if the world looks like this a hundred years from now, we’ll either be very
lucky or have found unbelievably good leaders somewhere down the line.
Conclusion
of the editorial
The writer concludes from these
comments that Trump expresses a terrifying fatalism about nuclear warfare being
unavoidable. He does concede, however, that Trump has at least thought about
this problem over his lifetime and made nuclear policy a priority, and that he
obviously considers himself to be one of the smart people with a “very good
brain” who could solve the problem. Yet Trump’s concern with the issue counts
for nothing in the final conclusion:
Trump’s campaign comments about nuclear weapons and the
possibility of using them have not been reassuring. His previous remarks
suggesting he believed nuclear war was all but inescapable are the stuff of
nightmares.
People of a certain age may remember
that similar things were said about Ronald Reagan in 1980 as his political
opponents feared that his literal belief in scripture would self-fulfill and
hasten the arrival of Armageddon. It turned out that he was devoted, in his own
roundabout, reckless way, to a world free of nuclear weapons, and he ended up
making progress in that regard when he had a Soviet counterpart who was more
than equally committed to the goal.
We must also remember that much of
this outrage, and even awareness of nuclear issues, has been absent in the
years since G.W. Bush abrogated the ABM treaty in 2001, thus eliminating Russia’s
trust and interest in continuing nuclear arms reduction talks. The issue has
essentially been off the table as far as China and Russia are concerned because
they have no interest in living in a nuclear-free world in which America has a
vast supremacy in conventional weaponry. But that’s another issue Americans don’t
want to face.
The outraged voices were also silent
when Obama approved the trillion-dollar upgrade of the nuclear arsenal, a
decision that is now being unfairly attributed to Trump just because he wrote a
tweet supporting the continuation of the policy. As we must ask about Meryl Streep’s
speech at the Golden Globe Awards, where was the outrage and concern before
your bogey-man rose to power? And would there have been any outrage if Hillary
Clinton had won and continued the hawkish foreign policy, erosion of civil
liberties and neoliberal policies that worsen economic inequality?
This question brings us back to the
quote from the Bible embedded in the title of this essay. The glass could be
both glass and mirror. It suggests that we do not have a perfect understanding
of ourselves, of others, or of the world we observe, but by the act of looking humbly
at the reflection we should strive and hope to see clearly. In straining to see
evil in everything Trump does, the liberal elites have darkened the glass
further. They have decided to not look inward nor to look for any humanity in
the object of their revulsion.
The artists of the entertainment
world should recall some insights from long ago. Neil Young knew that “even
Richard Nixon has got soul,” and we might recast Sting’s lyric from 1985 as “I
hope the Donald loves his children too.” One hopes that Sting was being ironic
when he sang, “I hope the Russians love their children too,” but it’s hard to
tell. It was a sign of the idiocy of the Cold War that people had to seriously
wonder about this question. Russians? Love their children? Is it possible? Of
course they loved their children as much as anyone, while they also matched the
rest of the world in the irrationality of risking nuclear annihilation to protect
them.
Just as Cold War paranoia looked at
Russians then and now, Trump’s critics refuse to credit him with having any
humanity. Liberals who would argue for prison reform and rehabilitation of the
worst criminals fail to see that Trump, in spite of his character flaws, seems
to have friends and family that he loves, and that is something that they could
build on. Of course Trump loves his children and has no desire to see their
world destroyed. If he has said anything crazy about nuclear weapons, it is
only a reflection of ourselves and the situation we are all in with nuclear
weapons. Everyone who has ever contemplated the fate of a nuclearized world has
had dark thoughts about the final outcome. The Noble laureate Bob Dylan (would
you trust the genius American poet with his finger on the button?) declared, at
the height of his fame for anti-war songs that Hard Rain was about “some sort of end that’s just gotta happen.”[2] And just as Trump wanted to enjoy
life to the fullest during the threat of nuclear war, so did Jim Morrison when
he told rapturous fans in American Night, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen,
man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shit house goes up in flames.”
This thought has been in a lot of people’s heads since the bombs were dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Any generous interpretation of Trump’s
thoughts about nuclear weapons would show that there is nothing unusual in what
he said as an ordinary citizen, long before he ever thought he would have the
responsibilities of the presidency.
As most of the American political
and entertainment elite fell into line with a boycott of the Trump
inauguration, Jimmy Carter, the most liberal of former US presidents, was one
of the few who declared early that he would attend.
Notes
[1] David Corn, “Does
Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable?“ Mother Jones, December 8, 2016
[2] Jonathan Cott (Editor), Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (New
York: Wenner Books, 2006), 7-9.
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