VIBERT: One year later and America’s a fool’s paradise
JIM VIBERT SaltWire Network
Published January 19, 2018 - 7:47pm
Happy anniversary.
It may seem like a decade has dragged by, or feel like it was just yesterday, but a year ago today Donald Trump placed his hand on the Bible, took the oath of office and delivered an inaugural address that former president George W. Bush reportedly walked away from saying, “That was some weird shit.”
President Trump has revealed in word and deed what he was talking about when he promised to make America great again. Trump’s nostalgic dream seems to reflect American greatness circa 1952, when he was a lad of five enjoying the carefree benefits of affluent family life in an all-white Queens, New York neighbourhood.
America was at war on the Korean peninsula, Jim Crow governed the Old South, and everywhere across the land the supremacy of white males was uncontested. America was enjoying a post-war economic boom that made it easy for folks who looked like Donald’s father, Fred Trump, to get ahead.
Making America afraid again
The mightiest nation on Earth recognized its threat was communism, the Soviet block occupied the broken eastern states of Europe, and Russia had the bomb. America needed bigger bombs and more of them, so the nuclear arms race was off and running.
American immigration was controlled by a strict quota system that favoured Western and northern European nations, but an influx of illegal “aliens” from Mexico caught enough attention to warrant “Operation Wetback,” which sent thousands of illegals home to Mexico.
A rock-solid base of between three and four in 10 Americans is fully invested in Trump’s fantasy. That number serves as the best available indictment of broken American schools, the obstinance of fear-based racism, and proof that the most destructive and unintended consequence of the “democratization of knowledge” is the perversion of reality.
Trump himself is the pervert-in-chief, but then Americans knew that, or should have, when they elected him. Yet it seems the distance between Trump and the truth has widened in office, despite his easy access to the best sources of solid information on the globe.
He obviously still browses fringe and alt-right websites, because that’s where he found faked videos that purported to show acts of violence committed by Muslims, which he shared on his infamous Twitter feed. He has never acknowledged his error.
He accused his predecessor, Barak Obama, of wiretapping his Trump Tower headquarters after he found that lie circulating on the conspiratorial websites and talk radio, the epicentre of white “Christian” paranoia. Again, the allegation was unsubstantiated because there is simply no evidence, anywhere, that it took place.
Liar-in-Chief
Trump’s narcissism is cloying until his need for approbation sends him rushing back into the embracing arms of the worst elements of the American national character, when it becomes menacing. A chronic charlatan in the Oval Office is disturbing, but when his hoax draws action he becomes a real and present danger. Control of the most potent military force in history, vested in a world view that is at odds with reality but firmly entrenched in his own instinctive bias, puts humanity in jeopardy.
From the day he took the oath and his White House claimed the event was witnessed by the largest audience ever, a demonstrably false assertion, America has been experiencing an alternative existence — living in a fool’s paradise.
The biggest fools are those Americans who elected him despite his obvious flaws, because they thought he was a plain-talking anti-politician who would get things done.
Trump isn’t the anti-political president. He is a caricature who draws together the most obnoxious elements of the voters’ worst concept of a politician.
He’s a braggart, a liar, self-absorbed and self-serving. His motive for doing what he does is to attract adulation, and it makes no difference to him whether that requires benevolence or malevolence.
The 45th president of the United States is the worst electoral mistake to date in a nation that has made plenty. America has survived its share of felons and phoneys partly because, as Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all the time.
While that’s still true, Trump only needs to dodge the law and then fool 10-12 per cent of the American electorate, add them to his unshakable base, and he will remain in office for another seven years. One way or another, reality will be permanently perverted by then.