I watched about three minutes of Monday night's "debate" between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, then flipped away confident that I'd gotten the gist of the performances; news from every source Tuesday morning confirmed the accuracy of my conclusion. But thinking about it on the long drive across country on the Interstate got me to wondering, not for the first time, about Trump's supporters. They make up about a third of the electorate; they are all adult enough to vote, and drive, and have at least an average education, and presumably they are largely able to function to some degree in the real world. I know a couple of these people pretty well myself, and I know that they, at least, tick all those boxes. How, then, can anyone still support this man, after three and a half years of lies and failure? (I even read an entire book, Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild, hoping for some insight on the question.)
I've had conversations, in person with one and by email with another, and both of the Trumpistas that I know stick resolutely to their support for him. They have no articulable basis for it, beyond "I like what he's done" -- though they can't really say what that is. When I look at Trump's accomplishments, other than the lies and the cover-up of those lies and the denial of reality and the readiness to brand any uncomfortable fact "fake news", I see next to nothing.
I see a very, very bad tax law change, which redounds to the disadvantage of most people, including both my Trumper friends. I see the missile attack on a Syrian air base in response to that nation's use of chemical weapons (at least Trump did something, even if halfheartedly; Obama, despite his "red line" warning, did nothing). I see the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court (Gorsuch is a knowledgeable and, I think, reasonably mainstream judicial thinker, with respect for principles and traditions, though I wouldn't say I necessarily agree with his outlook). I see the Kavanaugh appointment; however questionable the man's behaviour may have been when he was in college and drunk, I think, after a certain amount of time, it's just too late to hold that against him. (Plus, I think there's a certain amount of unfairness in using the mores of the 2010s to judge the behaviour of a 20-year-old living with the mores of the 1980s; it's kind of like condemning the founding fathers, now, because things they did that were commonplace in the 1780s are considered reprehensible in the 21st Century.) It's too early to form an opinion of Kavanaugh's respect for the rule of law and the traditions of American jurisprudence, and to be honest I'm not all that optimistic about him as a justice; but I'm prepared to be persuaded one way or the other. So let's give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say that the Kavanaugh appointment can be chalked up on the Accomplishment side of the ledger.
And that's about it. One of my Trumper friends said he liked Trump's stand on immigration. (That was the only particular he could articulate.) I have no opinion about it, one way or the other: I don't consider immigration a big deal, though I understand why people in the formerly lily-white midwest, and in the historically black-and-white south might be frightened out of their minds (as they seem to be, from here) by all the taquerÃas suddenly sprouting up in their quaint little farming communities. It can be scary to be suddenly confronted with a noticeable number of people who talk with a different accent and eat strange foods, I suppose, if all you've ever known for generations is steak and corn and coleslaw at the church social.
But one of my Trumper friends lives in San Antonio, a city that has had a very, very large population of people whose roots are in Mexico and Central America. (At one time, I calculated that my wife and I were the only "anglos" on our street, but I think now that I had forgotten about the elderly couple who lived across the street and a couple of doors down. One of them, at least was anglo -- a term that, around here, just means "not hispanic".) Most of them are from families that were long-settled here when Travis drew a line in the sand. Some of the more recent arrivals speak with that accent that we call "Mexican" because Mexicans are by far the largest part of the group; or speak only Spanish. Either way, they get by; their children -- whether "dreamers" or native-born citizens -- are indistinguishable from the rest of the population. They are as American as my friend or me, and here in South Texas, they are no kind of "threat" to our way of life. Hell, they have influenced and defined our way of life, mostly for the better, as much as any ethnic group. (The other large ethnic groups here are German and Polish, who are distinguishable only by their family names; a fair number of Blacks, whether descended from slaves or more recent arrivals, who seem to me to be about as integrated into the fabric of the city as everyone else, unless they hold themselves apart (as some people are wont to do); growing populations of East- and South-Asian people, groups just now getting large enough to start moving out from the concentrated enclaves that immigrant groups seem always to start with; and smaller numbers of Arabic and Caribbean people, who are mainly recent-enough arrivals to still stand out for their accents and their overly-polite uncertainty about How We Do Things Here. They'll get over that, presumably, and their kids will be mostly indistinguishable when their time comes.) My friend has no cause to be so agitated about immigration here: all these people, where ever they came from way back when or last year, they're here now, and they're part of us. (The other friend lives in South Louisiana, where there are blacks and whites, and the whites are either Cajun or otherwise. I can see where he might have a knee-jerk reaction to novel ethnic changes.)
So I can see how people in places where large-ish new concentrations of immigrants from non-European places can be disconcerting; but I see it as a temporary issue, one of perception and unfamiliarity rather than any kind of real undermining of American values. I can respect my friends' discomfort with immigration without agreeing with it. What I can't respect is Trump's shameless playing up to that prejudice, and his unconstitutional diversion of funds appropriated for other purposes to his boondoggle border fence. (I know, he likes to call it a wall, but it's not a wall, it's a fence, and not a very effective one at that.) And let's not even talk about the cost of this project.
And then there's Trump's "muslim ban," the exclusion of immigrants from a bunch of what he considers "shithole countries". This policy amounts to nothing more than a tawdry bit of window dressing on our side of the question, much like the old exclusions of East Asians that provoked our first immigration policies many decades ago. Those policies at least had the questionable virtue of being in line with general attitudes, back when the American melting pot was as ethnically homogenous as fondue (except for the black folk, but they didn't count back then, did they?).
So I would say that Trump's actions on immigration are a failure; though I will give partial credit for the ending of "temporary protected status" for some groups. The formalist in me thinks that, if we're going to allow people to come to the US on a temporary basis because of humanitarian concerns, that protection shouldn't last a lifetime. If those people who came here 30 years ago want to stay on, let them apply for green cards or citizenship, or go back home. (I admit to not knowing what's involved in applying for either green cards or citizenship, but when you get right down to it, it doesn't matter. They were allowed in temporarily, and then they should leave just like a guest who comes for a visit.)
His trade policies are a failure, too. His trade war with China has produced nothing but bills for American taxpayers. His modifications to NAFTA have produced nothing but hot air and semantics.
Trump's murky dealings with Russia have produced nothing for the US as a nation, though it sure seems to be doing something for Trump, personally. Who knows what.
Trump's threats to abandon NATO have caused unrest among our best friends in the world, and have produced only a grudging increase in defense spending by some of those friends, and a whole lot of ill will. I won't deny the propriety of his insistence that they live up to their commitment to spend two per cent of their GDP on defense, but I sure think that result could easily have been accomplished without all the fuss and bother that his hack-handed methods produced. Partial credit, then.
He gets no credit for his handling of the ongoing morass in Afghanistan. I know my own views on how to handle that situation; he has, apparently, none of his own. Another failure.
He promised to "drain the swamp," an idea he got from Mussolini. (Trump probably doesn't know who Mussolini was, but somebody he talked to during the campaign must have once read about Mussolini's promises to drain actual swamps.) Look at the people he's brought into government -- the "best people, the very best", according to him. They are quacks and dilletantes, self-serving hacks and antisocial zealots. The decent ones, though few in number, were mainly in and out in a few months, hired and fired more or less on a whim. Many of them were outright criminals. Trump's vaunted judgment of people -- vaunted, that is, by him -- gets a failing grade from me. I believe he could have picked better people at random from a list provided by the DMV of any state.
Somebody (Steve Bannon, I bet) convinced Trump early on that Iran was getting away with something because of the 6-nation agreement they entered into. So Trump pulled the US out. Okay, he's in charge, he gets to make that decision, even though everyone else involved thought there was no problem with it. But then he tries to use the agreement's enforcement mechanism to re-impose sanctions against Iran. Hey, fool: you aren't a party to the agreement anyore, you can't invoke its remedies any more than, say, Cambodia or Bhutan can. Amateurish move.
North Korea makes wild threats against the US and its ally, Japan. Trump conducts his personal diplomacy, promising either a non-nuclear Korea or war. Which do we have now? Kim ran circles around our dealmaker-in-chief.
The economy was doing alright until the pandemic hit. He gets a little credit for letting Obama's methods of promoting recovery from Bush's recession play out. But take back some of that credit because of Trump's self-serving lies about what he's done. He campaigned on the promise of 3% growth; he's failed to attain that, and in fact the economic recovery, the long, slow economic recovery from Bush's recession a decade ago is less impressive under Trump's aegis than what Obama accomplished in the latter part of his administration.
And then there's the handling of the pandemic. Trump didn't create the virus, of course, but he saw it coming and did nothing to prevent disaster. It was a conscious choice, to eschew national health-protection policies in favour of a "states' rights" checkerboard of more or less effective responses. It was a conscious choice to not stockpile the equipment that would be needed -- a choice determined by Scrooge-like attention to cost and not much else. When he flipped on that decision, it was a conscious (and un-American) choice to prefer giving aid to "red" states over "blue" states. It was a conscious choice to disparage the opinions of those people who should -- and do -- know best how to prevent the wide spread of disease. It was a conscious choice to press for relaxation of protective measures despite the advice of people who understand disease. It was a conscious choice to muddle the population's understanding with talk of medicine-show cures, to politicize basic protective measures like masking-up; to question with no factual basis the epidemiology; to broadcast claims, based on ignorance and hopeful assumptions, that kids don't get sick, that warm weather will solve the problem, that it's safe to go back to school and back to work and back to normal. And it was a conscious choice to do all of this just in the hope that miracles would occur and he would look good when the election came around. Trump's handling of the pandemic is a total and most abject failure, epitomising the most repulsive consequences of his unfortunate personality: arrogance, self-importance, lack of empathy, ignorance, willful stupidity, incompetence, laziness and poor judgment.
When you add up Trump's accomplishments and failures, they don't add up to much. When you then take into account his sleaziness, his inability to focus, his loucheness, his incompetence at administration, his frauds, his lies, his nepotism, his disrespect for -- well, everyone, his inappropriate and autocratic insistence on loyalty to himself instead of to the Constitution .... I mean, the man even cheats at golf.
Trump famously said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it; his supporters wouldn't care. Based on the unwavering support of that third of the population who seem to think the man walks on water, despite everything he is and everything he's done or not done, I'd go even further. If Donald Trump hosted snuff porn films on television, his supporters would first call it fake news, then they would blame the victims' parents for not having raised them better, and then they would say, Hey, Trump's just trying to make a buck; What's wrong with that?
The cars weren't pristine restorations set behind velvet ropes. They were cars in every condition, crammed into the available space. It was OK with him if I opened hoods and doors now and then, and I couldn't resist playing with the fuel-filler cover on the old Cadillac Fleetwood -- you know, the kind hidden in the taillight. There were lots of Cadillacs and Lincolns, including less-often-seen models from the '50s; there was a '64 T-Bird convertible hardtop (my mother's dream car); a '28 Rolls, and '37 Cord, a '29 Auburn, a couple of Packards, some Nashes, big Chryslers, a '64 Imperial convertible and the gigantic GM cars from the '70s.
