The Chris Moeller Archives

The president-elect

Protest is a beautiful thing. Not only should Americans be taking to the streets to show their displeasure with this election, as they are, I can’t think of a better way to usher in any new presidency. Remind ‘em who’s in charge, you know? Resistance is deeply underappreciated. Civility, overrated. Bipartisanship in general is overrated, especially in these United States of America, where, particularly in respect to foreign policy and past and current military engagements, we’ve endured more bipartisanship than we could handle. My only lament when watching the streets erupt in aspirational anger in Portland and Oakland and Miami and Des Moines and all over really is the annoying assurance I have that the same people would not be in the streets doing the same thing if the lady had won.

Yes, the people have spoken in an election that was just about as fair, and certainly as open (despite their best defensive efforts), as we ever get. The people made their decision, and then something called the Electoral College completely reversed the outcome, but hey, accidents happen. If you're only against it when it works against you, you look like a sore loser. The Electoral College and our foundation in monarchy aren't getting uprooted so long as the royal twits of Britain still grace the cover of People Magazine each week. King George casts a long-ass shadow. Joyously, however, voting is far from the only method of political speech available to the citizens of this nation, and now the method of speech changes. Out of the voting booth, into the fire. It’s a privilege possessed by the “haves,” and not the “have nots,” to return to a normalcy of disengagement after the shit show of one of our modern American elections comes to an end. When you attempt to silence the voices of the oppressed, those voices must only get louder. It’s our job to demand from our elected officials that they now lift us to our better selves-- to remind them that every one of their public actions affects living, breathing humans. Some property may become damaged during protests. It's unavoidable. Who cares? It’s only property. We have a power-- and a responsibility-- that comes with living in the home of the most powerful military and paramilitary domestic police force in the world to demand that it operate at all times in respect to universal human rights and human dignity. Our elected officials may be our chosen leaders, but they are always, also, lest they forget, our employees.

That being said, the street theater angle with Trump is not the only one we can take. Maybe that particular shoe doesn’t fit your foot. I know people are freaked with worry that he’s out to get the gays, the Hispanics, the Muslims, the women that he’s not attracted to, the women that he is attracted to. The early evidence of the threat he poses is in his choice of transition and cabinet officials. With Trump, though, it seems to me that it’s all about flattery and sucking up to him. He wasn’t going to choose middle-of-the-road, establishment Republicans to aid in the White House transition because there are none of them, among his public supporters, from which to choose. I promise you that the young, deeply egocentric Donnie Trump that walked upon the hard streets of Queens, imagining he would one day be the United States president, didn’t envision that his future administration would be populated by the likes of Bible-thumping rural types like Mike Pence and Ben Carson, but you dance with them that brung you. Up until about five years ago, the man’s cultural and socioeconomic outlook was more in line with, say, Bill and Hillary Clinton and other Manhattan Republicans.

The Donald, as one of his exes famously called him-- almost a lifetime ago, is constantly acting. He is hyper-aware that he is always being observed, and he is relentlessly reward-seeking. His possibly-unmatched pursuit of fame and wealth is, itself, a manifestation of his need for social approval. He feeds off puffery, which is why liberals might want to consider taking this tack. Trump liked Pence and Carson because they liked him. Let’s be more savvy than we've been so far. If you insult the man personally, and his acolytes, as liberals continue to do, then he will steel himself to move further away from them, towards those that validate his actions. That’s the way it is with such a man of weighty ego and little principle. Alec Baldwin portrays him on television in an unflattering way, Trump responds with an early morning tweet along the lines of Alec Baldwin has no talent. Saturday Night Live hasn’t been funny for years. Even though he guest-hosted the show only six months earlier. But Tom Brady implies an endorsement of his campaign in the New England Patriots locker room, and Trump’s response to the half-withdrawn celebrity affirmation is something like, He’s a great talent. He’s a winner. I like winners. He’s fantastic.

Let's not assume there's more ideology there than just a tendency to rise to the bait of insults. He is, to a degree, a blank slate, and right now, the only people feeding his ego are those that favor angry white reactionary authoritarians. I’ve stopped believing that Candidate Trump was playing his cards close to the vest all this time, trying to conceal from us how much of his right-wing, nationalist pandering was of him and how much was for the benefit of his audience. Instead, I now believe he’s not even sure of it himself. As he reaches the White House, and I think he’s quite surprised he did it, he’s going to pursue the policies that he believes will make him beloved.

Many look at Trump and focus on the man he wants you to see, a man who takes great pains to convey that he could care less about what people say and think about him. He’s seemingly too gruff to care who he has just offended. But taking a closer look, those same people would certainly acknowledge how thin-skinned the man is-- extraordinarily so. He takes deep offense at the smallest of personal slights. He has a strange fear of impurities of any kind. He’s a germophobe obsessed with other people’s bodily fluids. When Hillary Clinton has to pause during a debate for a bathroom break, he thinks it's "gross." It all has to be a product of his relationship with his father. Little has been written about it, other than the fact that, by Donald’s admission, Trump the elder once gave his son a “small” loan of a million dollars, but there’s no way that a man of Fred Trump’s time and place and public reputation was anything remotely resembling an attentive, loving father. By all historical accounts, including Donald’s, he was married to his work. At a young age, he sent Donald off to a military school. Maybe it was impossible for anybody to give this young man as much validation as he required, and it certainly wouldn't be a man Woody Guthrie implied was a racist, but the point is there. Speaking at his father’s funeral in 1999, Donald said that the man’s greatest accomplishment in life had been raising him, his gifted and successful son, which when you think about it, is really a dig, when the speaker's stated belief is that the dead man’s focus was always on his work rather than on his family.

Narcissism is born of an absence of childhood mirroring. We should be used to this by now. Trump will become at least the fourth president we’ve had in a row with major daddy issues: two Republicans, Trump and G.W. Bush, were raised by cold men difficult to please (Dubya would go so far as to start a war as president in an attempt to avenge his father), and the Democrats, Obama and Clinton, were each raised not by their fathers at all, but by single mothers.

I heard somebody say once that conservatives look upon the United States as a child looks upon his or her parent-- with reverence and an uncritical eye. The flag-waving patriotism they’re known for is an indicative trait. Scientific research shows that conservatives are more fearful of events outside their sphere of experience than are their liberal counterparts. Liberals, by contrast, look at the nation as the parent looks upon the child-- imperfect and in need of constant guidance. Despite a recent uptick in liberals’ collective tendency to engage in some “dear leader” politics of their own, I consider this analogy to be generally true. Trump was never a perfect match for a group of socially-conservative voters, what with his womanizing, his manners, and his waffling on abortion rights and gay marriage, but in matters of national security, he ideally fit their collective psychic need for a Biblical-style savior to protect them from our dangerous and fallen world. Trump, in return for their support, receives the satisfaction of getting to play the savior he’s always imagined he could be.

Presidents, to our eternal good fortune, cannot afford to invest too heavily in any one particular relationship as navigation through the ("swamp") waters of Washington is so notoriously difficult. Trump is going to need more friends than the ones he’s got right now, and liberals are just as capable as conservatives of providing the vulnerable blowhard with the external gratification he’s been so continuously and desperately seeking since his earliest days on planet Earth

Let’s try to make the most of our vast experience with these personality types. We need to apply the same rule to Trump that Dr. Cornel West applied to President Obama’s presidency-- because it’s really a universal concept in democratic citizenship: We criticize, but we don’t demonize. We protest, but we engage with our protest. We make our demands. We make him relentlessly aware of what we stand for and what we stand against, but we be not afraid to tell him so when we find common ground. For me, personally, that common ground includes his appealing promises to repeal neo-liberal trade deals, to discontinue our military support for the Syrian rebels, and to normalize ties with Russia. Trump fights to win. He says he loves the fight when it comes to negotiation. So give him one. That will be a challenge unaccustomed to for most Democrats. We can’t always be sure he knows what he’s fighting for, and for sure, a lot more than often we won't agree with the choices he'll make. Because of his anger issues and his off-the-charts narcissism, his is a particularly combustible presidency. At stake is not a company with his name on it, as he’s used to, but a country with our name on it. He needs us-- whether he's aware of that yet or not. He’s an elected representative of our democratic government, and that makes him akin to that child who is testing parents' boundaries. Despite the way he often, like a child, lashes out at us in anger, he's really just a man that's short on love. Give it to him tough. The alternative is getting squashed.

posted by CM @ 6:55 PM