After Trump

I subtitled 7 Days in Ohio, my 2016 book type thingy about the surreal week I spent covering both the Republican National Convention and the Gathering of the Juggalos Trump, The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Summer Everything Went Insane because I delusionally imagined that I was witnessing a crazy anomaly in the history of American politics. 

I was sadly and unfortunately convinced that there was absolutely no chance whatsoever that Trump would be elected president and that in the future when we looked back at the 2016 presidential race it would be remembered as an annum where we suffered a culture-wide madness that led us to believe that Donald fucking Trump, that cheesy, deplorable goon from reality television, was somehow qualified to lead the free world as the President of the United States. 

I was convinced that we would be violently cured of this tragic misconception well before we made the unfathomably vast mistake of electing Trump president. I was wrong. Holy fuck was I ever wrong. 

I would like to believe that Donald Trump’s election was a fluke that does not reflect the character, will or desires of the American people but I’m not sure that I can. 

I spend an awful lot of time these days trying to imagine what the present will look like once it has safely become the past. What will the Trump years look like to our children and grandchildren’s generation? Will they be remembered as an enduring humiliation, a nadir the nation was lucky to recover from or will they be seen as a new beginning, the birth of a genuinely radical Alt-Right movement deeply rooted in racism, Islamophobia, transphobia and the deification of Trump as something approaching a rebel-God? 

We’ve gotten a glimpse of how society will treat Trump’s people in the many, many members of Trump’s cabinet who were either fired, or resigned. With the exception of true believers like Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, most of the “best people” Trump hired to work for him have turned on their old boss with varying degrees of intensity and viciousness.

I’d love to think that working for Trump will be seen as a mark of shame going forward, the same way collaborating with the Nazis or enthusiastically participating in the Hollywood Blacklist was rightfully seen as a sign of low moral character. But I just don’t see that happening. 

Sean Spicer is an interesting example in that he has remained a spineless sycophant even after leaving the Trump administration. Some folks were disappointed, if not downright aghast that he was able to leverage a high-profile position lying to the American people and gas-lighting the press into a spot on Dancing With the Stars and one of the rare memoirs of life in Trump’s White House that did not depict the president as a serious threat to American democracy. 

If Trump goes down, and is impeached, resigns or gets demolished in the 2020 election the members of his cabinet will be able to save face by positing themselves as pragmatists working behind the scenes to save us from their boss. 

But I don’t think that’s going to happen. My fear is that not only will Trump get re-elected, but that he will be the patriarch of a political dynasty. A terrible, terrible political dynasty. You think Trump is bad? Just wait until Jr’s administration. 

Trump and his minions will not be held accountable for Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia and poisonous misogyny because you cannot get away with saying and doing egregiously, unforgivably hateful, horrible things for a period of years, as Trump has, without permanently and dramatically changing the criteria for what is considered socially acceptable.

I wish that Trump was a once in a lifetime aberration and that we will return to a place of sanity sometime soon but I fear deep down that he and his awful, paranoid worldview and egomaniacal brand of narcissism-fueled leadership represents the new normal. 

And brother, that ain’t good. It’s not good at all.  

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