Trump's not the one to lose sleep over

David Sherman

It’s not Trump, stupid! It’s the country. The president is only the U.S. clown in chief, face appropriately painted. The deadly car crash that is our neighbour to the south is beyond our fixing. It’s eating away at our psyche like metastatic cancer.

We’re innocents caught in a cross-fire, physically and mentally under assault.

As former Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff wrote, “What kind of national independence is possible for a country that shares an undefended border with the incorrigibly violent, expansionist and yet irresistibly attractive monster state to the south?” Mr. Trump, he said, is raising the same question in brutal, existential terms. Yes, Trump is stupid and ignorant. Others have been more blunt.

 “You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump,” author Fran Lebowitz said. “You just don’t.”

Former chief of staff John Kelly once called him an “idiot.” Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called him a “moron,” which was amended as a “fucking moron.”

Or, perhaps as Dylan sang decades ago, “But it ain't him to blame, He's only a pawn in their game.”

He's the front man for a cabal of the wealthy, unscrupulous and unconscionable, the government Americans voted for, the government they deserve.

MAGA proved again the “greatest democracy” in the world is but a delusion, a marketing campaign, selling itself like Marlboro Man pitching cigarettes as cancer awaited.

It’s a military force now with a new brand name, the Department of War, ready for when extortionate tariffs and threats don’t have them dropping their shorts. Or when people with conscience and spine object and detention centre beds are empty.

Barack Obama’s election was heralded by eyes blinded by the myth of the stars spangling. Wags wrote it was the end of racism. Perhaps they had been celebrating excessively.

Obama unwittingly seduced the swamp creatures out of the dark waters of festering hate. The man drank espresso, ate Dijon mustard, once wore a light-coloured suit, fodder for Fox intent on proving he was too damn uppity. Worse, he tried to make life better for some.

Obama and his partner, Michelle, unleashed the forces of Jim Crow by demonstrating American democracy might work, the majority could be heard, the best man could win. God help them! A Black man could win. This was unthinkable. Luckily, he was quickly emasculated by losing the House in his first midterms and the Senate the next. They wouldn’t let him name a judge, suddenly constitutional precedents were written in pencil and easily erased.

Jim Crow was out of hiding, working in government with more to come.

As former editor of Harper’s, Lewis Lapham wrote, the U.S. system of government is designed to be ineffective, a beautifully built automobile, heavy on paint and chrome. Unfortunately, its tires are flat, built on assembly lines where the working man was treated as a cog in a wheel, his or her heart and soul irrelevant. And if his wages were enough to enjoy life, these were a dozen countries where wages were insignificant and profits exorbitant. Good paying jobs were outsourced. This was sold as a good thing for all.

Democracy was an illusion in a nation where the federal government condoned, created and instigated lynchings, Separate but Equal, Ku Klux Klan, Minute Men, McCarthy and HUAC, dogs and fire hoses, Richard Nixon, Watergate and the Rat Fuckers. A federal law against lynching only passed in 2022. Previous attempts failed to get the needed votes. In the land of the free, freedom extended to the right to lynch.

The party of Lincoln is the party of poverty wages, profit prisons, entrenched ignorance, calculated disenfranchisement of people of colour. The great state of Florida made it illegal to eat, drink or piss while you baked in the sun for as long as eight hours to vote. But that was only if you were a person of colour or deemed likely to vote Democrat. Republican voting times in gated communities with lawns decorated with signs touting, “Armed Response” were quicker. And washrooms legal.

Trump had nothing to do with the fact good schools and knowledge and career connections are reserved for the ruling class, the generations whose money made more money. He just took advantage of it.

This great myth of the world’s greatest democracy, mother’s milk to those most determined to make it anything but, was pumped into the air like exhaust from cars that flooded the nation.

In the world’s greatest democracy, the inability to earn enough to eat and have a roof over your head was a systemic, though ignorant, attempt at keeping the wealthy wealthy and the poor hungry and desperate.

Henry Ford, the great anti-Semitic industrialist who turned men into machines, understood decent salaries meant the human machines who built his machines should afford to buy them and goose his profits. Despite his repugnance, Black and white men gave their life to Ford and could earn enough to live on and perhaps buy a home. And it helped create a massive migration of Black men from racist southern states north to Michigan and beyond.

Minimum wages in many southern states remain frozen at $7.50, assuring a hungry, brow-beaten, uneducated population that can be manipulated, exploited and starved into submission, susceptible to the reality-star hypocrite.

Even a loud-mouthed rapist and tax cheat, serial liar and business failure could be their saviour. Democrats and progressives and people with a heart and mind, watched and tuned out to watch Netflix.

Health care insurance can cost as much as $18,000 for a family of four if not subsidized by an employer. Tens of thousands die for lack of health care. If anyone’s kicking up a fuss, we don’t see the dust.

Somehow “the beauty of our weapons” made up for the rancid reality of people surviving on corn starch or canned pet food or not surviving at all. Assembling the world’s most powerful military could excuse the shoddy schools, starvation wages, racism, cruelty. The world’s most powerful economy could segregate wealth and convince its citizens it was as it should be. Greed benefited everyone.

Just as the bulk of news media and citizens fell into line chasing imaginary weapons of mass destruction, most have fallen into the bounty of the very few crushing the very many. Homelessness is an eyesore, hunger the problem of food banks. It is the American way. And has nothing to do with Trump.

The myth of America can endure if only we ignore history and focus on Trump and his henchmen – Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Chris LaCivita, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Kellyanne Conway, etc., etc., etc. The reality TV star and his wealth of hucksters are just one in a line of fascists and racists dating back to American hero, Andrew Jackson, celebrated with his visage stamped on every U.S. 20-dollar bill. Renown for owning and brutally treating 600 slaves and his genocide of American aboriginals, he is canonized as a great American.

The truth is Trump is too stupid to accomplish anything. His business record is testimony. His ethos of “lie and deny” is legendary. His pedophilia is ignored. “Boys will be boys, ha ha ha.”

He is what Americans want, what they elected, who many worship and wingnuts believe was sent by Jesus. Some think he is Jesus.

It is an exaggeration, but not extreme, to compare Americans who say they didn’t vote for him or denigrate him today to the fabled “Good German.”

Americans went along with education and health care a preserve for the wealthy, starvation or the more polite “poverty wages” for the uneducated, the segregation of the country that continues today, the mass incarceration aimed at keeping Black people behind bars as long as possible.

“Money, guns and lawyers” is their anthem.

There was no room for common sense in a country built on the backs of slaves, motoring along on the sweat of people forced to work three jobs to pay the rent – maybe.

Trump is the puppet Americans want.

How did the well-read, well-educated, well-financed fall under the spell of an ignorant felon? Complacency and greed. Taking from the poor to give to the rich, either through taxes or sweat is an American tradition going back to the revered “Founding Fathers.” Like Aristotle, they wrote of democracy while slaves cooked their meals and warmed their beds.

The great irony, as Neil Gabler writes in An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Jewish immigrants in the film business drifted to Hollywood, in part to escape Thomas Edison’s stranglehold on filmmaking in the East, but also for film-friendly climate. But Carl Laemmle (Universal), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), William Fox (20th Century Fox), Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Harry Cohn (Columbia) and the Warner Brothers (Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack, of the company that wore their name, had fled anti-Semitism, pogroms and poverty in Eastern Europe. Their films depicted a Nirvana, an America they wanted to believe existed. Films were a cheap escape from reality, drudgery of daily working life and the tenements of big-city life in the North. An antidote to their struggles of the past.

The United States of Virtue was unwittingly marketed by the movie industry, its founders and producers often immigrants themselves, determined to paint a picture of America as Eden. Pure escapism, pure fantasy, but it fed the nightmare and the dream. Followers of freedom could flee evil lands to find a great nation, sculpted to meets man’s lofty ambitions of democracy, streets of gold and beautiful women. And justice. In the movies, good guys won.

The films served the propaganda well. It ignored the reality of centuries built on slavery, cheap labour, bad education, a country for the privileged and the white. And it stoked the love affair with guns. The big screens were awash with lives of luxury or heroes with guns, slaughtering Natives, shooting bad guys. Money was never mentioned. Black women were all Aunt Jemima. And, if you hustled, anything was possible. If you fail, if you fall ill, it’s your fault. Somehow the myth of the movies permeated American life and even the world’s. America was a wonder, the greatest democracy in the world. And, to prove it, they could bomb you into yesterday. Trump is an empty, albeit venomous, suit. But he’s one of a long line of them, backed by a couple of hundred million people who voted for him or sat back and watched their widescreens and let it happen. He’s not a cause. Just a result.