from A Hundred Days of Trump by David
Remnick:
“…[Trump’s]
presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with
global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health,
constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science,
public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite… Impulsive,
egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has… set fire to the integrity of his office…
“Trump
flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he
has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. His
bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United
States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the world’s
autocrats…
“Trump
appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks
out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at
times, it seems, unhinged… The urge to normalize Trump’s adolescent outbursts,
his flagrant incompetence and dishonesty—to wish it all away, if only for a
news cycle or two—is connected to the fear of what fresh hell might come next.
Every day brings another outrage or embarrassment…
“In
1814, John Adams evoked the Aristotelian notion that democracy will inevitably
lapse into anarchy. ‘Remember, democracy never lasts long,’ he wrote to John
Taylor, a former U.S. senator from Virginia, in 1814. ‘It soon wastes,
exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit
suicide.’ As President, Donald Trump, with his nativist and purely
transactional view of politics, threatens to be democracy’s most reckless
caretaker, and a fulfillment of Adams’s dark prophecy…
“[O]pposition
to Trump also has to give deeper thought to why a demagogue with such modest
and eccentric experience could speak with such immediacy to tens of millions of
voters anxious about their lives and their prospects, while the Democratic
nominee could not. The intellectual and political task ahead is at once to
resist the ugliest manifestations of the new right-wing populism—the fears it
plays on, the divisions it engenders—and to confront the consequences of
globalism, technology, and cultural change. Politicians and citizens who intend
to defeat the forces of reaction, of Trumpism, need to confront questions of
jobs lost to automation and offshoring head on. Unemployment is at five per
cent, but that does not provide an accurate picture of an endangered middle and
working class…
“The
clownish veneer of Trumpism conceals its true danger. Trump’s way of lying is
not a joke; it is a strategy, a way of clouding our capacity to think, to live
in a realm of truth. It is said that each epoch dreams the one to follow. The
task now is not merely to recognize this Presidency for the emergency it is,
and to resist its assault on the principles of reality and the values of
liberal democracy, but to devise a future, to debate, to hear one another, to
organize, to preserve and revive precious things” (A Hundred Days of Trump by David Remnick).
from Trump has a dangerous liability
by George F. Will:
“It is urgent for Americans to
think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This
seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the
result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and
married to stratospheric self-confidence…
“What is most alarming (and
mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not
that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge
about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t
that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not
know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it
is to know something…
“It is, however, too late to
rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense ‘not
only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’ His fathomless lack of
interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave
him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to
a disorderly mind.
“Americans have placed vast
military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that
is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks
and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by
insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational
fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him
uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict” (Trump Has a Dangerous Disability by George
F. Will).
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