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The Art of the Trumpaclysm
How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself
By Tom Engelhardt
It's been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it's been! It's driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack for "breaking news" or audiences. It's a smash in both the Hollywood and car accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which we've simply never experienced. Think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and the cameras rolled. It's proved, in every way, to be a giant leak. A faucet. A spigot. An absolute flood of non-news, quarter-news, half-news, crazed news, fake news, and over-the-top actual news.
And you know exactly what -- and whom -- I'm talking about. No need to explain. I mean, you tell me: What doesn't it have? Its lead actor is the closest we've come in our nation's capital to an action figure. Think of him as the Mar-a-Lego version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a president who, as he told us at a news conference recently, is "the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life" and the "least racist person" as well. As report after report indicates, he attacks, lashes out, mocks, tweets, pummels, charges, and complains, showering calumny on others even as he praises his achievements without surcease. Think of him as the towering inferno of twenty-first-century American politics or a modern Godzilla eternally emerging from New York harbor.
As for his supporting cast? Islamophobes, Iranophobes, white nationalists; bevies of billionaires and multimillionaires; a resurgent stock market gone wild; the complete fossil fuel industry and every crackpot climate change "skeptic" in town; a press spokesman immortalized by Saturday Night Live whose afternoon briefings are already beating the soap opera General Hospital in the ratings; a White House counselor whose expertise is in "alternative facts"; a national security adviser who (with a tenure of 24 days) seemed to sum up the concept of "insecurity"; a White House chief of staff and liaison with the Republicans in Congress who's already being sized up for extinction, as well as a couple of appointees who were "dismissed" or even frog-marched out of their offices and jobs for having criticized The Donald and not fessed up... honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up, or rather only Trump himself can do so. And by the way, just so you know, based on the last weeks of "news" I could keep this paragraph going more or less forever without even breaking into a sweat.
Among so many subjects I haven't even mentioned, including Melania and former wife Ivana -- is it even possible that she could become the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic? -- there are, of course, the Trump kids and their businesses and the instantly broken promises on (such an old-fashioned phrase) their conflicts of interest and the conflicts about those conflicts and the presidential tweets, threats, and bluster that have gone with them, not to speak of the issue of for-pay access to the new president. And how about Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner (another walking conflict of you-know-what), who reputedly had a role in the appointment of the new ambassador to Israel, a New York bankruptcy lawyer known for raising millions of dollars to fund a West Bank Jewish settlement and for calling supporters of the liberal Jewish group J Street "far worse than kapos" (Jews who aided the Nazis in their concentration camps). Kushner has now been ordained America's ultimate peacemaker in the Middle East. And don't forget that sons Donald and Eric are already saving memorabilia for the future Trump presidential library, a concept that should take your breath away. (Just imagine a library with those giant golden letters over its entrance to honor a man who proudly doesn't read books and, as with presidential executive orders and possibly even volumes he's "written," signs off on things he's barely bothered to check out.)
And speaking of Rome (remember Nero fiddling?), have you noticed that these days all news roads lead back to... well, Donald Trump? Take my word for it: nothing happens in our world any longer that doesn't relate to him and his people (or, by definition, it simply didn't happen). Since he rode that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, his greatest skill has, without any doubt, been his ability to suck up all the media air in any room, whether that "room" is the Oval Office, Washington, or the world at large. He speaks at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, amid angry outbursts on leaks from the intelligence community and attacks on "the dishonest media" for essentially firing his national security adviser, he suddenly turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian issue and says, "So, I'm looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I'm very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians -- if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best." And the world as we've known it in the Middle East is suddenly turned upside down and inside out.
Generalizing
In its way, even 20 months after it began, it's all still so remarkable and new, and if it isn't like being in the path of a tornado, you tell me what it's like. So no one should be surprised at just how difficult it is to step outside the storm of this never-ending moment, to find some -- any -- vantage point offering the slightest perspective on the Trumpaclysm that's hit our world.
Still, odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trump's presidency came from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.
Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history. He's unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics, and governance. In that sense, to generalize (if you'll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we've been living in for some years now, even if we'd prefer to pretend otherwise.
After all, it's clearly a government of, by, and evidently for the billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where we've been heading for the last decade and a half anyway. Let's start with those generals. In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature of our American world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the most confidence among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big business, and Congress (in that descending order).
Support for that military in the form of staggering sums of taxpayer dollars (which are about to soar yet again) is one of the few things congressional Democrats and Republicans can still agree on. The military-industrial complex rides ever higher (despite Trumpian tweets about the price of F-35s); police across the country have been armed like so many military forces, while the technology of war on America's distant battlefields -- from Stingrays to MRAPs to military surveillance drones -- has come home big time, and we've been SWATified.
This country has, in other words, been militarized in all sorts of ways, both obvious and less so, in a fashion that Americans once might not have imagined possible. In the process, declaring and making war has increasingly become -- the Constitution be damned -- the sole preoccupation of the White House without significant reference to Congress. Meanwhile, thanks to the drone assassination program run directly out of the Oval Office, the president, in these years, has become an assassin-in-chief as well as commander-in-chief.
Under the circumstances, no one should have been surprised when Donald Trump turned to the very generals he criticized in the election campaign, men who fought 15 years of losing wars that they bitterly feel should have been won. In his government, they have, of course, now taken over -- a historic first -- what had largely been the civilian posts of secretary of defense, secretary of homeland security, national security adviser, and National Security Council chief of staff. Think of it as a junta light and little more than the next logical step in the further militarization of this country.
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