Donald Trump's Uncivil War of Words

FAKE NEWS! Oh wait, I get confused sometimes.

Donald Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to the once promising political career of Jeb “Please Clap” Bush. Trump’s mockery made the one-time front-runner a political laughingstock. Jeb impressed Oliver Stone so much that he made a goddamn movie about how much George W. Bush, a two time President of the United States, envied his gold god of a brother in W yet Trump made quick work of him and his presidential ambitions. 

Trump is similarly the worst thing that ever happened to the reputation and television career of Billy Bush. Trump and Billy Bush’s legendary “locker room talk” about how women let you “grab ‘em by the pussy” if you’re a star led to Billy Bush getting fired as the co-host of The Today Show but somehow did not lead to Trump either dropping out of the presidential race or losing the election to the infinitely better qualified Hillary Clinton. 

Trump did terrible things to the careers of Jeb and Billy Bush but his nightmare of a presidency is probably the greatest thing that has happened to the reputation and legacy of at least one Bush in ex-president George W. 

When Bush left office in 2008, replaced by a dashing young man named Barack Obama who personified hope and change, it sure felt like the world was exhausted with him. A Republican party that never stopped glorifying and deifying Ronald Reagan lazily decided to leave W. In the dustbin of history alongside his father, as a buffoonish war-monger without much to offer the party going forward. 

Bush’s public rehabilitation began during Obama’s tenure. The public is quick to forgive and forget, as long as you’re a wealthy straight white man with a nice smile and an agreeable personality. We forgot and forgave W’s sins as he settled into a comfy dotage as a nice grandpa type who painted and left the divisive business of politics to less gentle souls. 

But Trump wasn’t truly rehabilitated until a Republican president came along whose personality is so abrasive and nakedly hateful that it can’t help but make W look like the uniter, healer and compassionate conservative he always professed to be. 

One of the things I like about Bush in hindsight is the way he wasn’t constantly accusing people who disagreed with him personally or politically of being both evil and deeply disturbed in a criminally insane kind of way. He disagreed with Democrats and much of the press, but not to the point where he felt they should be imprisoned and/or shunned from polite society and made pariahs. 

You might say that that’s literally the least a reasonable leader would do. You would be right. It’s also substantially more than Trump has ever managed. In Trump’s paranoid, intentionally divisive worldview the differences between his supporters and his critics aren’t a matter of conflicting opinions on how society and the government should be structured: it’s a total war between patriots who love the country and want it to thrive and spread democracy, and consequently support him blindly and unconditionally, and sick, evil people so poisoned with hatred of him, and by extension, the United States, that they’ll resort to anything in their depraved attempt to destroy him. 

A good example of this frothing at the mouth paranoia and fear-mongering can be found in a Tweet published on May 31st, months into the pandemic and deep into the protests inspired by the brutal murder of George Floyd that seethed, “The Lamestream Media is doing everything within their power to foment hatred and anarchy. As long as everybody understands what they are doing, that they are FAKE NEWS and truly bad people with a sick agenda, we can easily work through them to GREATNESS.” 

In the space of 280 characters, Trump once again deploys the phrase “Lamestream Media” in a manner that suggests it makes the press look bad instead of reflecting terribly on himself and particularly his sense of humor, accuses the media of being hate-mongers and anarchists, recycles the phrase FAKE NEWS (all caps of course) and accuses the media of being “truly bad people” with a “sick agenda.” 

It’s not too big a leap to go from Trump’s oft-repeated assertion that the press and the entire Democratic Party are legitimately sick in the head, consumed with an amoral agenda, evil and single-mindedly obsessed with destroying him to Q’s conception of Democrats as truly sick and bad and immersed in a secret nightmare world of Satanism, ritualistic child sex abuse and sex trafficking. Trump never stops planting seeds of hate and paranoia in his followers’ fertile minds and imaginations that bloom into real-life ugliness and occasionally violence.

Trump doesn’t just seek to attack or hurt the enormous swath of humanity he considers his enemies: he seeks to dehumanize them as well, to depict them as something less than human. After all, a leader is obligated to treat human beings with a certain amount of respect and dignity. But if someone is “truly bad” with a “sick agenda” then all bets are off. You can gas people like that. You can turn hoses and attack dogs on them. If you think they’re sick and destructive and “truly bad” then you can do anything to them without shame or guilt. 

Adults don’t describe huge, heterogenous groups of people as “bad” or “truly bad” or “sick” because they know those terms are devoid of nuance and complexity; those are the words and ideas of tinpot dictators and fascists, not people who champion a political system built around leaders from different parties finding common ground to move the country forward. 

Only children divide the world into good and bad. Trump has the mind of a child so he loves to describe his enemies as not just misguided but bad, or “truly bad”, and “sick.” Take a Tweet from October 17th of last year when he observed of the speaker of the house, “Nancy Pelosi needs help fast! There is either something wrong with her “upstairs”, or she just plain doesn’t like our great Country. She had a total meltdown in the White House today. It was very sad to watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick person!” 

Trump is flexible enough to leave it up to his Twitter followers to determine whether his enemies do unconscionably evil, illegal things because they’re sick (warped in the head with hatred and envy) or bad (evil).

In 2017, for example, he tweeted “How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy.”

The rest of the world might look at Obama as a figure of dignity and self-respect, a real class act but in Trump’s mind he’s bad or sick, and that’s why he engaged in the worst scandal/controversy/crime in American political history. 

It’s exhausting hating so many people so fiercely for such stupid, petty, self-obsessed reasons. That’s why Trump is uniquely unqualified to bring our nation together during a time of historic unrest, despair and righteous outrage because his whole ethos is to spread hate and fear and divide. 

Trump’s war of words is eternally, incontrovertibly uncivil. We desperately need someone to speak wise words of healing and reconciliation. Too bad we have someone who only knows how to lash out and harm, who sees the world as full of enemies to be defeated and destroyed instead of potential allies to help save us from ourselves and a world spiraling ever closer to madness. 

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