It should be clear by now to all that President Donald
Trump’s original reaction to the violence in Charlottesville was his his true feeling about the
perpetrators of violence and what they stand for. And his performance at the hastily arranged
press conference at the White House on Monday, August 14th, where he
recited with barely disguised discomfort, if not disdain, the script that had
been shoved before him by his staff, acting as our surrogates, calling out
“white supremacy”, “KKK”, “neo-Nazis”, and “racism is evil”, happened only
because the rest of us insisted that he must and in exactly those terms call
out those crucial members of his base.
And now with his Arizona rally where he insisted that his initial
reaction was right, it is time to ask why we demanded that he did what he did
at that press conference. For, at that
conference, he was literally responding to our insistence that he lie to us.
Why do we ask to be lied to? Why do we insist on hollow rituals when all
they do is further reinforce our cynicism about our institutions and our public
life and diminish the dignity we attach to the highest office in our land: the
presidency?
If anyone seriously thought that Donald Trump believed
any of what he had said at that Monday press conference, subsequent
pronouncements from him have clearly demonstrated otherwise. I did not.
I would like to think that I was not alone. It had taken him two days of badgering by
almost everyone after his initial response to the violence in Charlottesville,
the unwarranted death of Heather Heyer, and the maiming of eighteen others, to
consider blaming those who were directly responsible for that tragedy. If his statement had come from a rethinking
of his initial position, he ought to have admitted making a mistake and
apologizing for getting it wrong the first time. Nothing of the sort happened. This is why I am convinced that his was a
crass response to pressure from, ironically, “many sides”.
If I am right, it is fair to say that in making his
statement, the president lied. That the
president lied is not what is important on this occasion. It is that he responded to our goading him to
lie to us.
Nothing in this president’s short political career and
his life prior to it tells us that he is anything but a well-rounded bigot:
against blacks and Hispanics; against women; against Muslims; and against
Jews. He ran on an openly bigoted platform
and nothing he has said or done since taking office suggests that he has had
any change of heart. On the contrary,
his silence on the mosque bombing in Minnesota and his failure to reference
Heather Heyer in his first response to Charlottesville merely emphasize his
commitments. Finally, when you have one
of the official leaders of the alt-right movement, Steve Bannon, as a principal
counselor to the president, we should not pretend that the presidency has not
been shrunk to fit the moral size of this president.
As a people, we are alarmed that the presidency is
becoming one with its present, temporary occupant. It is why that even when we are not sure that
the president himself believes it, we insist that the presidency itself step up
and demonstrate moral leadership. In
other words, we acknowledge the moral cretinism of Donald Trump but we do not
want the presidency to become synonymous with the moral cretin who holds the
office momentarily.
Still, as much as I sympathize with the desire to keep
the office separate from its momentary holder, it may already be too late to
save the American presidency.
For eight years while Barack Obama held the office,
the Republican Party, its foot soldiers in the Tea Party movement, and the same
right-wing bigots under attack now in the aftermath of Charlottesville all thought
absolutely nothing of rubbishing the presidency because of their intense hatred
of its then officeholder. They then
entrusted the office to a clearly unfit holder, Donald Trump. Why do we think that a small mind would not
remake the office to fit him?
When we demanded that the presidency disown part of
the president’s constituency, we essentially asked our president to abandon
some of his cherished supporters and distance himself from his own
preferences. Yes, he obliged us, but
then he had to do so by lying to us.
Instead of asking to be lied to, we would have been
better served to let the president own his bigotry while we seek ways of
separating his kind from ever occupying the presidency again. We have ample time to do that. Let us get to work.
