TRUMP'S LASTING LEGACY -- THE INDECISION TRAP

Sometime this week I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris for President.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

Long after this election is over, history will write its epitaph.  And no matter what the actual outcome is next week, history will not be kind to Donald Trump or those who supported him.  

If Trump wins, he will govern as he has promised.  

Perhaps his only positive quality is his utter transparency. 

He does not disguise any of the ugliness. 

And the government he will lead will be ugly.  

The economy will crater under the burden of inflationary tariffs and trade wars. Human rights -- indeed, simple decency -- will be discarded as 11 million immigrants, many of them innocent children, are seized, jailed and thrown out.  Constitutional norms will collapse as he creates a Department of Justice that takes political opponents off the field and rubber stamps his every lunatic move. America's alliance of democracy will collapse as he sacrifices Ukraine to Putin and the depravity of Russian rape and pillage. 

The courts will throw up their hands in frustration.  

If they disagree with him, he will ignore their decrees, certain that no consequence will follow. He has been  freed from the rule of law by the permission slip John Roberts created when six conservatives on the Supreme Court voted to give presidents immunity for the crimes they commit on duty and by the lemming-like refusal of remaining Republican office holders to ever impeach and convict him no matter how high his crime or misdemeanor.

But what if Trump loses.

How will history treat him then?

The answer is . . .

No better.

Trump has become worse, much worse, over time. 

What started out as puerile schoolyard bullying in a 2016 campaign no one took seriously has become, in the chilling words of Yale author (How Fascism Works) and professor Jason Stanley, "textbook Mein Kampf."  Political opponents are no longer "Crazy Nancy" or "Shifty Schiff".  They are the Hitlerian "enemy within". His attempted coup on January 6, 2021 proved that his love affair with lying, and with himself, is not merely rhetorical. 

He is serious. 

Deadly so.

But too many cannot or will not see this.

These days, even some who used to see, like the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, have put on blinders.

Why?

I think Hannah Arendt knew the answer.

In a 1974 interview with the French jurist and scholar Roger Errera, Arendt said "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."

"This is because lies," she continued, "by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie . . . but . . . a great number of lies".

Unique among politicians in contemporary America, Donald Trump has done more than any other individual to convince the American citizenry that "everybody always lies". 

His own lies are constant and over time have become voluminous. And because he insists upon and enforces blind loyalty, his lies have metastasized. Though often but not always repeated verbatim, his followers never reject his lies. Instead, and as Arendt foretold, they rewrite them. 

Trump's lie that he won the 2020 election becomes JD Vance's lie that he and Trump were merely pointing out "problems" . . .

Or Trump's refusal for three hours to call off the January 6 carnage at the Capitol becomes Vance's  lie that he merely advocated peaceful protest . . .

Or Trump's departure on January 20 becomes Vance's lie that the transfer was "peaceful" and January 6 is beside the point.

Nor does Trump limit his serial prevarications to the 2020 election and subsequent attempted coup.  

As President, he lied about COVID, pretending early on that it would end with warm weather and later that it might be cured with bleach.  Tens of thousands died as a consequence. Throughout the current campaign, he has lied about abortion, claiming the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade was approved by all. It was not. 

He also lies in claiming the decision jeopardizes no one. 

Three women have died in anti-abortion fetal heartbeat states because they could not get the medical care needed to treat their miscarriages or other complications. Given the lag time in undertaking and then reporting on reviews of pregnancy-related maternal deaths subsequent to Roe's reversal, "there are," as Pro Publica reports, "almost certainly more."

"The result," Arendt explained in her 1967 essay Truth and Politics, "is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end -- is being destroyed."

This is fatal to  democracy. 

Because . . .

It is fatal to judgment.

To our ability to think.

"A people that no longer can believe anything," Arendt concluded in her interview with Errera, "cannot make up its own mind.  It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

This is where we are with Trump.

And it is where we will be even if he loses next week.

Over the course of the last four years, I have always been amazed that there were any people undecided on Trump.  I thought his acts so clear and so reprehensible that no one could really avoid not only a decision but also one that unhesitatingly rejected him. The man is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, business fraud and charlatan. As demonstrated most recently at last Sunday's rally at Madison Square Garden, his campaign is a foul-mouthed verbal sewer of racism and denigration never before witnessed in American politics.  His fascism is his worst but by no means only disqualifying trait.

How could anyone be undecided?

Now I know.

It's not that people are undecided.

It's that Trump has undermined, and for some even killed . . .

Their ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Or what is true from what is false

Their ability . . .

To evaluate.

To judge.

To think.

Decisions are different from reactions. Reactions are reflexive, automatic.  Decisions at least at some level are considered. If, as Arendt lamented in the face of a culture of lies, we lose "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end", decisions become impossible and all manner of reflexive reaction takes over. There are no facts. And therefore no gatekeepers, no experts, no standards. 

Everything can be excused because nothing is true. 

And because there are no standards, opponents can be falsely or at the very least hypocritically judged . . .

Or disgustingly dismissed . . .

Or even jailed. 

All of which, in the current campaign, has been done to or threatened against Kamala Harris . . .

And Liz Cheney . . .

And Generals Milley and Kelly.

Kamala Harris is a normal politician with more or less standard Democratic party positions on the issues.  As Biden's Vice President she participated in an administration that led us through COVID, rescued us from economic catastrophe, created jobs, tamed inflation, renewed NATO, helped preserve the post-World War II rules-based order and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. In any other time, with an economy the envy of the world, this would be a record that would seal victory at the polls. In any other time, with the threat to women's rights at an all-time high, the margin would not be close.

But we do not live in any other time.

We live in Trump time.

The time of lies and Hannah Arendt's worst nightmare.

An era where, as the internet meme puts it, "he gets to be lawless and she must be flawless."

It's not that people are undecided. 

It's that they can no longer decide. 

I'm voting for Kamala.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

If you can't decide, do it for them anyway.

History may not treat you kindly.

But they certainly will.