I know I’m not alone in having a hard time adjusting to our new surreality. This can’t really be happening, can it?
Every night getting ready for bed, I find myself having to fight thoughts about the coming regime change — to keep them from playing in an endless loop and making sanity, not to mention sleep, impossible. (Pushing them aside with analyses of the plots of whatever mind-numbing TV I’ve intentionally subjected myself to seems to do the trick. I have some very insightful thoughts on the narrative inconsistencies in Timeless, if you’re interested.)
During the hours I’m supposed to be awake, I struggle with the whole “what the hell do we do now” issue. Here’s your opportunity to share my struggle.
What’s the emperor wearing today?
Maybe we’re living in a fractured fairy tale: The Trumperor’s New Clothes. Much as I like the analogy, it’s not quite right. First off, his clothes are made of gold-plated bile and invective, plain as day for all to see.
And clearly not everyone is going along with his charade; lots of people are saying that his thin skin is showing. But the people who loved him before and love him now do so because he’s not wearing ordinary clothes. He’s his own man! And if it pisses off liberal elites and upsets their norms, all the better. And right now, those are the only people that matter.
How are the villagers responding?
The news media? Well, collectively they would prefer not to look stupid, and many outlets would be happy to curry favor and avoid unpleasantness. But the main problem is even bigger: they don’t know how to play this new emperor’s game. Like most of the rest of us, they’ve never seen one like this before.
Carefully calculated or the result of idiot savant syndrome, Trump is playing a different game: Calvinball on Constitution Avenue. There’s a lot of work to be done by the responsible press (surprise: it’s not the only kind!) to study up on similar manipulative charlatans and learn the new rules — or at least unlearn some old ones. The alternative is, in true Calvinball fashion, playing Charlie Brown to Lucy and her football for the next four years.
Another problem isn’t really new: our news media (and our political institutions and our society in general) have always been more comfortable with, and more structurally set up for, “just the fact, ma’am” style story framing. Hence the overreliance on “he said, she said” coverage.
And when I say not new, I really mean: here’s my chance to dig up one of my favorite old Doonesbury strips!
(For you yungins, the impeachment being contemplated was that of Richard M. Nixon.)
We’re seeing it play out right now in the nomination of Mick Mulvaney to be White House budget director. Who? Right. There are so many other egregious nominees that he’s kind of a deplorable backbencher. But he became mainstream-news-worthy because “he had failed to pay more than $15,000 in taxes for a household employee in the early 2000s.” Not because of concerns about Trump’s spending priorities. Not because of completely implausible budget projections. Not because the numbers just don’t add up.
Because of an easily quantifiable, all-too-common misdemeanor.
Don’t get me wrong — I’ll take it if it helps to throw some sand in the gears. (And I can hear the invocations of Al Capone and tax evasion, thank you very much.) The point is that a reprehensible but low-level unlawful matter, whether it’s a distraction or not, is easy to get your hands around. Budget analysis and parsing out the real-world implications of policy proposals is complicated and time-consuming and requires journalistic judgment. And many outposts of the press have no time or stomach for that anymore.
But wait, it gets worse.
How about them Burghers?
I’m seeing a more troubling trend along the parade route: the willingness of business leaders to be puppets in the ongoing Punch & Jobby show playing out on Twitter.
It’s infuriating to see Trump taking credit for heroically saving or magically creating jobs when those claims are, what’s the word? Straight-up lies? (And I haven’t seen any tweets about Lowe’s yet.) But the sad! truth is that there’s no business interest in opposing him at the moment. Let me turn the mic over to Paul Krugman:
Bear in mind that corporations have every incentive to go along with the spin. Suppose that you’re a C.E.O. who wants to curry favor with the new administration. One thing you can do, of course, is steer business to Trump hotels and other businesses. But another thing you can do is help generate Trump-friendly headlines.
Keeping a few hundred jobs in America for a couple of years is a pretty cheap form of campaign contribution; pretending that the administration persuaded you to add some jobs you actually would have added anyway is even cheaper.
Right. Of course (to bring my two streams of thought together),
... none of this would work without the complicity of the news media. And I’m not talking about “fake news,” as big a problem as that is becoming; I’m talking about respectable, mainstream news coverage.
Slate has started a series that will explore the veracity of Trumps job claims: Deal or Faux Deal? But it’s going to be a steep hill to climb to cut through the bullshit and puffery. And what may initially be PR wins will soon have — are already having — significant policy implications.
So there’s no fairy-tale ending?
Well, at this point I think the moral is: just give up. Wait, strike that. Here are a couple of rays of sunshine:
Trump is remarkably unpopular. Not just his-ratings-are-lower-than-other-incoming-presidents unpopular (though they are, by a lot); but actually, truly well underwater in the favorability department — the only president-elect with that dubious distinction going back to 1953, according to Gallop. (I don’t know if their records go back any further.) Even his numbers among Republicans, while high, are not in the normal North Korean-like 90%+ range.
Which means that he’s doing a great job wearing out his welcome before he’s even walked through the White House door. “[T]he unprecedented concern about Trump in polling since the election also signals he may be miscalculating how much turmoil most Americans will tolerate from a president.”
Now for some tough love: no fairy-tale ending? Boo-fucking-hoo.
For starters: If you’re still, like me, at least occasionally falling into oh shit oh shit oh shit mode, get over it:
I think there’s still a bit of a “somebody do something” mentality, in which the hand-wringers are somewhat passively hoping someone else will solve this problem.
Thing is: There is no someone else. No one is coming to save us from Trump and his merry band of egregious nincompoops. If there is saving to be done, it comes from us, or not at all. Be the “someone else” you want to see in this world. Because otherwise you’re leaving it to the horde of racists and bigots following in Trump’s wake. And that’s not acceptable.
At the very least, if you can’t get out of oh shit oh shit oh shit mode, then make goddamn sure you’re not making things harder for the people who are stepping up. I think it’s time to realize that we’re in a “perfect is the enemy of good” situation.
And this is mostly directed at the press, but good advice for all: Don’t be a crybaby:
I've been surprised at the extent to which right-thinking people are all but threatening themselves with what Trump might do to, collapsing into their own sense of powerlessness. Maybe he'll jail his opponents! Maybe he'll call off the 2018 election! Here it is worth remembering things we learned from the campaign. Trump's one true gift is his ability to get his critics to surrender up their own dignity somehow of their own free will.... Trump is a punk and a bully. People who don't surrender up their dignity to him unhinge him.
What about happily ever after?
Slow down, we’ve got a long way to go. And a lot of hard work to do.
First: Don’t be normal. I’ve mentioned before the need to (and the struggle to) avoid normalizing Trumpian behavior. With so much of it flying around, it’s easy to lose track, and easy to lose sight of just how out of bounds so much of it is. Here’s one handy cheat sheet. Start one of your own!
Second: Control the conversation. We choose whether Trump is legitimate. At this point it’s not about counting electoral votes, it’s about whether Trump’s agenda, such as it is, will be enacted. In a literal sense, no, we can’t stop the House and Senate from following Trump off a cliff. But we do have the ability to make Republicans feel the heat. To make big business uncomfortable cozying up to the administration. To choose the issues to rally around.
It can’t be done? It’s being done.
People across the country are organizing and making themselves heard on healthcare, and the strategy to support and further those efforts is being debated and honed. This is making Republican congresspeople run scared and Republican governors tap the brakes.
And it’s gotten a major business lobbying organization joining the pushback against Obamacare repeal. Sure, it’s in the interest of the American Hospital Association to say that — which is exactly the point. We have it in our power to make it in the interest of big businesses to oppose the plans coming out of Congress and the White House.
It can’t be done? It’s being done.
In North Carolina, the pushback against HB2 has led to conventions being cancelled, corporate expansions being withdrawn, major sporting events being pulled, and widespread condemnation from business lobbying groups and individual businesses of all sizes (including IBM). All because they didn’t want to be associated with anti-LGBTQ bigotry. Maybe it was prompted by moral concerns, or more basic issues of equity and civil rights. Or maybe it was a pure bottom-line decision: loss of income, deteriorating image, alienated customers. Whatever the reason, opposition to HB2 worked by making it untenable for the business community to sit on the sidelines.
It’s not a magic bullet; we got rid of the governor who signed the bill, but HB2 is still on the books. Because, yeah, there are people and organizations pushing back against us from the other side.
We’re not going to win them all. Not even if all of us go all out all the time for the next four years. And none of us can do that. We each can’t do everything. But we can tag team this thing, protesting and fighting when we have the strength and will, knowing that there will be someone else to pick up the slack when it’s time to refresh and regroup.
Knowing that there are going to be a hundred different ways to get engaged, dozens of policies and problems to focus on, countless opportunities to get creative.
Knowing that we’re not all going to agree on issues or tactics or strategies and that’s okay. On our way to the next election, we’ve got hearts and minds to change, and it’s going to take a lot of different methods to change them.
Trump is many things. But the most important to remember is this: he is weak. He is a coward who doesn’t like to be challenged. So let’s challenge him. And he’s a politician whose support is already sinking. So let’s throw him an anchor.
We can’t yet win in Congress, but we can win in the court of public opinion, as long as we don’t let ourselves get distracted, or try to play by his rules. We can make life difficult for those who are trying to destroy our government from the inside. We can make it harder on businesses to stay silent as the Trumperor passes by. We can become the people who matter.