The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump killed the Republican Party with racism and the rest of us with coronavirus by S.V. Dáte

The following is excerpted from “The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism and the Rest of Us with Coronavirus,” by S.V. Dáte.

"...A pandemic never occurred to them. The idea that Donald Trump would ever be required to sit still, pay attention and make rational decisions that would determine whether hundreds of thousands of Americans would live or die not once crossed the minds of those who put him into the Oval Office.

"Oh, they all had their various reasons for wanting him there. For white evangelical Christians, he had explicitly promised to appoint the federal judges they had so longed for to turn back the nation’s cultural clock. For Mitch McConnell, a Trump win — as unlikely as it seemed — was the only real path to making sure Republicans retained control of the Senate and he himself remained majority leader. And for Vladimir Putin, having Trump in the White House — as unlikely as it seemed — would be a dream come true, an opportunity to wreak havoc on his longtime adversary and weaken its historic alliance with Western Europe.

"Russia’s dictator, of course, was not remotely interested in what Trump’s ascension might mean for Americans in the event of an actual calamity. If they were dumb enough to vote for him, well, they deserved whatever they got. In any event, it was not his problem.

"As for Trump’s American supporters, perhaps so much time had passed since Sept. 11, 2001, that the idea of a genuine national emergency was but a faded memory. Perhaps the quiet competence that President Barack Obama’s team had employed with the 2009 flu pandemic and later with the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak had diminished the perceived threat that a simple virus could present.

"For whatever reason, even as they watched the noise and chaos and nonsense generated by candidate Trump for a full year and a half, the consequences of a real crisis requiring real leadership actually happening on the watch of a President Trump had never really dawned on them.

"True, there existed then — and continues to exist today — a significant cadre of Republican voters who genuinely believed that the Trump they watched on 'The Apprentice' was the real Donald Trump. That he was a real billionaire, based on his own efforts and smarts. That he was capable of making rational, quality decisions based on the facts presented to him.

"That excuse, though, does not work for those Republicans from McConnell on down to the congressional candidates who had occasion to speak with Trump in person. As one top Republican National Committee member told me after his first face-to-face encounter with Trump two months before the 2016 election: 'OK. Our guy is insane.'

"His was not a minority view, by the way. Trump’s incoherence, his temper, his impulsiveness, his breathtaking ignorance — all of it was well-known among the top tiers of the Republican machinery. But for them, it was simply a challenge to overcome, another hurdle that fate had placed between them and their holy grail of judges and tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. 

"Not once did I ever hear any concern that just maybe they were working to install a useful idiot who truly was an idiot, with absolutely zero leadership qualities one ordinarily looks for in someone aspiring to become the chief executive of the world’s remaining superpower.

"It was an abject failure of the Republican Party’s responsibility to the country. In our two-party system, both have a duty to weed out candidates who fail the threshold test of commander-in-chief and, related, emergency-manager-in-chief. Through the summer and fall of 2015 and then the early nominating contests of 2016, it was clear as day that Trump was not credible in those roles, and yet neither the remaining candidates nor the party leadership made a serious effort to ensure his defeat.

"True, there were some who voiced warnings. Jeb Bush called Trump a 'chaos candidate' who would bring us a 'chaos presidency.' But there was also Ted Cruz, who literally praised Trump for the better part of a year, refusing to criticize him in the hopes of one day inheriting his voters. By the time Cruz did unload on him, it was seen as sour grapes. Such was the cynicism and game-playing that put us where we are.

"Republicans will pay a price for that negligence. This already became apparent in the off-year elections, with Democrats winning back the House in 2018 and scoring wins in such unlikely races as a special election for an Alabama Senate seat in 2017 and the Kentucky governorship in 2019. 

"Whether Republicans suffer a complete presidential year wipe out in the autumn of 2020 or four years later is debatable, but that it will happen is not. Trump is betting not just his own future, but that of the party he hijacked on the dwindling demographic of angry white men without college degrees, disproportionately in the South. This is not a winning bet.

"Separate from the Republican Party’s failure to safeguard the country, though, is the failure of ordinary Americans. Trump did not elect himself. And while he had the direct help of Russia and the unintended help of the FBI director, it was, in the end, actual Americans who cast their ballots for him.

"In a representative democracy, the buck ultimately stops with the voters. So, yes, the president failed us miserably in his handling of the pandemic. From pretending he had stopped the virus from entering the country to claiming it wasn’t so bad to wishing that it would just go away to nonsensically hyping an unproven treatment to discouraging the use of masks to eventually just getting bored with it and moving on, the president could not have handled this more poorly had he been actively trying to fail us.

"This is on him — the many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of serious illnesses that might not have happened with a competent response. The 189,000+ deaths, at least, that could have been avoided. But it’s also on us.

"When the coronavirus reckoning is complete, when all the numbers are eventually tallied, here’s one more that should be included: the 62,984,828 who enabled it to happen back on Nov. 8, 2016…

"It’s easy now as the pandemic drags on and the American death toll climbs toward 200,000 to put all the blame on Trump. He did, after all, make bad decision after bad decision in the crucial early weeks of the outbreak, from ignoring intelligence community warnings to downplaying the threat to avoiding taking steps that would anger China’s dictator and endanger the all-important trade agreement he believed he needed in order to win a second term. He even called concerns about the pandemic “a hoax” at one of his campaign rallies, sending a signal to his voting base that public health officials have had an impossible time countering ever since.

"That mishandling of the disease, in turn, wrecked the strong economy that for three years Trump had been claiming as his own. In truth, he had inherited it from Obama, with employment and gross domestic product numbers largely similar to those under his predecessor’s second term. The resulting crisis is rivaling the Great Depression in job losses. With a competent response to the pandemic, much of the related economic catastrophe might have been avoided, as well…

"Trump’s handling of the pandemic, also, was entirely predictable. For starters, he only occasionally takes intelligence briefings. Both George W. Bush and Obama began their days with one. Trump spends the first several hours of his day watching television and tweeting about what he has just seen. In 2020, he has been taking between just one and two briefings each week.

"Meaning that when the experts were trying to tell him that something bad was happening in China and that we needed to prepare, Trump could not be bothered to listen. His top health officials were getting alarming news over the New Year’s holiday about a pneumonia-like outbreak in Wuhan. Trump was golfing. When his health and human services secretary finally got him on the phone nearly three weeks later to talk about the virus, Trump yelled at him instead about a backlash to vaping regulations that was going to hurt Trump with vapers.

"Indeed, Trump’s singular focus was then, and remains today, his own reelection. Nothing else matters, and that is now why well over a hundred thousand people in America killed by the coronavirus would still be alive if just about any other adult human being had been president instead of Trump…

"After seeming to take the threat seriously for a couple of weeks in the second half of March, Trump quickly grew bored of it and began demanding that states 'reopen' their economies so he could go back to the campaign strategy that he had been planning: that is, taking credit for the economy Obama had left him. Numerous times, Trump repeated in remarks what he had tweeted on March 22, in all capitals: 'WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.'

"Indeed, just reading back through his various statements through the course of the pandemic is an exercise in shock and awe. 'The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.' 'This is a flu. This is like a flu.' 'I think that we’re doing a great job.' 'It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.' 'Just stay calm. It will go away.' 'Slow the testing down, please.' And, of course, the statement that could easily wind up the epitaph of his presidency: 'I don’t take responsibility at all.'

"If evil scientists had conspired to concoct a worse president for our country in a time of crisis, they would have been hard-pressed to outdo Trump. His ignorance, mendacity and stubbornness are a toxic mix in the best of times. Many of the adults in both parties assumed that eventually, when it was finally over, his most egregious messes in the area of trade policy, the NATO alliance, climate change and the environment could, with some work, be cleaned up.

"The same cannot be said for all the Americans who will have died unnecessarily because one of the worst human beings in public life — a man who has shown time and time again that his lack of humanity is matched only by his open corruption — happened to become our president… 

"He is now, and for decades has been, a middle school bully with the impulse control of a toddler. The only thing Donald J. Trump cared about before he took office was Donald J. Trump. That has not changed in these three and a half years…

"Sixty-three million Americans, and the quirks of the Electoral College, put into the most powerful office in the world a truly despicable person. Trump does not treat people well. He would cheat you as soon as look at you. He is spiteful and mean while also venal and ignorant. And none of this was hidden from view. Not a single bit of it. Yet people voted for him anyway. That says a lot about us. None of it good...

"Despite this, the fact remains that breaking things is easier than fixing them, as Trump has repeatedly demonstrated. With a 30% plurality of the populace interested in maintaining its cultural supremacy solidly behind him and a large enough slice of the Republican establishment willing to accept a Faustian bargain for the sake of its own agenda, he has gotten away with it. We can already see what this has done to our country after three and a half years. What happens if that three and a half becomes eight?"

-S.V. Date

 For the entire article about the book, click here. It’s worth your time.