Trump sadism is certainly a central tenet of his character, but fortunately so is his lack of interest in doing hard work. Trump's primary capability is his antenna that is attuned to several particular American grievances - racism, nativism, sexism and a deep strain of antigovernmental paranoia. For Trump the first three are inimical to his personality and, in him, the last is an expression of his unwillingness to follow any rules that might constrain his giant ego.
Destroying the actual means of representative governance in the United States has been the central core of the Republican Party since the American people put a brain dead, washed up Hollywood actor into the White House. The party saw in Trump a new model out of the Reagan mold - someone more interested in acting as President than doing the work of leadership. Instead, they got a man whose only governing efforts would be directed at completely breaking the government. Yes, they got massive tax cuts for the rich, but they also got massive public corruption and ultimately they got a president who reveled in the routine public humiliation of his own political supporters.
It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.
He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.
Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.
This right-wing anarchism extended, of course, to global governance: the trashing of international agreements, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, sucking up to the leaders of mafia states, and open contempt for female leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May.
With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.
Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers.
Trump's twisted genius is his ability to tap into the darkness in the American character. Republicans had been nibbling at the edges of this darkness for decades, but with Trump they got someone willing to eat the whole meal at one sitting.
...Trumpism, to the extent that phrase isn’t an oxymoron, is simply an extension of the ideological core of Reaganism. What Trump adds to the mix is an open embrace and celebration of autocracy, which is a significant step beyond what movement conservatism was forty or even twenty years ago.
But the hatred of government, presented as the embrace of “freedom” — that’s just movement conservatism in its purest form.
There’s a certain sort of American who thinks of “freedom” in the way a poorly socialized dull-normal 15-year-old boy does: Freedom means I have the freedom to choose not to wear a mask during a global pandemic, but it most certainly does not mean that a private business can choose to refuse me entrance onto its premises if I won’t wear a mask. Because that would interfere with my freedom...
Trump’s nearly sole talent is that he has a feral instinct for tapping into the endlessly rich vein of intellectual and emotional stuntedness that is the American worship of “freedom” in this sense. That 74 million plus people would vote to retain an openly autocratic crook in the presidency in large part because they believed he was going to protect this kind of freedom is an indictment of an entire culture, if not a whole species.
Republicans have shown that they are more than willing to embrace a would be dictator if it means they get to stay in power under that dictator's rule. Finding out that Trump was unfit to lead our nation isn't a surprise. Finding out that the Republican Party has become a willing accomplice in the destruction of our Constitutional Republic, that is the most painful lesson of the Trump four year reign.
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