Dirty Hands

In all the outrage over Trump’s behavior, what gets lost is far more significant. Yes, yes, Trump is a crass, boorish schmuck (and likely sexual predator). I get that. But, in substance, his administration isn’t all that different from what came before. There’s overwhelming continuity between his policies and Obama’s and, before him, Dubya’s.

Trump is continuing (and escalating) the bombing of Syria. He’s carrying on the Obama Administration’s military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia (among others) and their support for the Saudis’ war against Yemen. He has maintained Obama and Dubya’s refusal to hold Wall Street accountable for its titanic acts of fraud and malfeasance. Most important of all, despite his many campaign promises to the contrary, he has preserved his predecessors’ slavish devotion to Big Business at the expense of everyone else.

So what’s the big deal? Sure, Trump gets mixed up with unsavory characters like Roy Cohn and Billy Bush. He didn’t even bother to make sure that mic on the bus was turned off before he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.” His personal failings are legion and obvious. They’re not well-hidden like JFK’s infidelities, Reagan’s senility or Nixon’s paranoia.

But what does that have to do with the fate of the Free World? In a word, nothing. The discovery of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky didn’t inspire millions more American men to cheat on their wives, nor did it lead to death and destruction (or at least nothing out of the ordinary). Trump’s personal history of sexual assault isn’t likely to trigger an increase in sexual harassment across the country. But, given the way many people react to Trump, that’s what they seem to believe.

The truth is America’s Business-As-Usual is the real problem. For all the panic over “normalizing” Trump, we forget that our national atrocities were normalized a long time ago. From the genocide of Native Americans to slavery and Jim Crow to the death of over a million people in Iraq alone, the U.S.’s criminal record is long and bloody. Our problems are much older, much more serious and run much deeper than Trump.

So why all the hand-wringing over 45? The difference between Trump and his predecessors is not that he’s a con man and a criminal. He’s a freaking politician, for god’s sake! It’s not like he was running against choirboys and -girls. The difference is Trump is a bad con man and a blatant criminal. He’s not an effective liar. His act is transparent. He offends our sense of propriety because he lacks the subtlety to give a convincing performance. At least Hillary would’ve put some effort into sounding empathetic. Maybe she even feels empathy for her victims, but she still would’ve bombed that airbase in Syria.

Trump has shown us as we truly are: an ugly, violent, rapacious empire. To trot out a tired cliché, Trump isn’t the president we want; he’s the president we deserve. An old, fat, ignorant, belligerent, bigoted, paranoid, entitled, rich, White man who was born into obscene privilege is the perfect symbol of today’s America. He’s got everything, yet he insists that he needs more money and more protection.

We prefer politicians who flatter our vanity. That’s why Obama was the perfect president for our age. He’s a handsome, charismatic, articulate orator whose very appearance (as a Black Person in the White House) confirmed our most deeply-cherished hopes about the continuing viability of the American Dream. We’d rather think of ourselves as the inheritors of MLK’s legacy, glorified by the honeyed words of Obama, borne aloft by his soaring oratory, carried to the Promised Land on rhetorical wings of poetry.

We aren’t people who use smartphones made in Chinese factories so terrible the workers routinely attempt suicide. We aren’t the people whose clothes are made in sweatshops, whose gizmos are made of rare earth minerals mined overseas, poisoning the workers and the surrounding communities with toxic runoff.

We elected a Black man president and nominated a woman for the same job! We didn’t just stand idly by as that Black president deported 3 million people, protected Wall Street from criminal prosecution and continued the wars of his predecessor. We didn’t conveniently ignore that woman’s enthusiasm for “humanitarian” intervention, her lucrative speaking tour of the country’s biggest financial corporations or her careless disregard for national security.

Do you think the Middle Easterners killed by Obama cared that he’s a “woke” African-American who isn’t racist, sexist or Islamophobic? Do you think they passed from this life to the next in peace, content in the knowledge that they had been executed by a sensitive, highly intelligent president? Surely, they must have, for Obama used only the most culturally-sensitive missiles on his drones, the I-Feel-Your-Pain 5000, left over from the Clinton Administration. I’m sure he was kind enough to write their names in Arabic (or Farsi or Somali or…) when he filled out his Kill List.

We all long for the Good Ol’ Days, when our leaders were far more discreet about our mass murders, so we didn’t have to think about ‘em so much. They killed people with class. They didn’t brag about it. They were very dignified. Now we have this ogre who must parade our dirty laundry around like a trophy. He’s made it very difficult to get anything done.

Did Obama ever crow over some drone strike? Certainly not! He understood the importance of maintaining a low profile for that sort of thing. No one likes to think about it, but it must be done if we’re to continue making the world safe for Democracy. It takes a real professional to handle these things with the delicacy and discretion they demand.

Trump is castigated for committing the Elite’s ultimate sin: He’s gotten his hands dirty. In order to be truly presidential, you must have others do your dirty work. Ideally, it would be a nice, clean, surgical drone strike: no muss, no fuss. Only a vulgar oaf would try to draw attention to that unpleasant business.

His personal crimes pale in comparison to any president’s professional crimes. But those crimes have the imprimatur of the state. Those are patriotic crimes done in the name of the Flag, Mom and Apple Pie. Therefore, they’re not crimes.

It’s ironic that the Elite should most loathe Trump, our shallowest president, for it was their shallowness that paved his way. They only wanted to put a happy Black face (and then a woman’s face) on the status quo. They have no interest in fundamental change. They just don’t want to be reminded of the blood on their hands – and ours.