The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump
“Vice is a monster
of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet
Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the
day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet
seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then
embrace.” The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken
for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the
ascent of Donald Trump.
First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained
grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly
over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after
all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not
so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on
the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the
dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are
mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which
Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.
Now
for the embrace. One by one, people who had not merely resisted him
before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were
determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a
pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and
magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating
with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling
to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control
him.’
No, you can’t. One can argue
about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a
grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom
Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal
constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in
fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his
enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in
his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of
noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to
destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and
transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American
values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power,
through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning
the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or
threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have
the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of
thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and
discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more
limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as
large as they can.
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