Rage! President Trump and the 2020 Election

“Ululations of orchestrated hysteria went up from the nation’s media,” wrote Gerard Baker, columnist at the Wall Street Journal, decrying the reactions of the mainstream media to Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016. “It was 1933 again. Late Weimar America would succumb to an authoritarian with a distinctive haircut and a penchant for intolerant rhetoric.”[1]  

Fast-forward to September 2020: Former Vice-President Biden, in a television interview, described President Trump as “sort of like” Nazi Germany’s Goebbels, the head of Hitler’s propaganda machine – or, in the first presidential debate, as “the man is a clown…a liar.” Biden again: Trump is “more like Castro than Churchill.”[2]  

When the President was briefly hospitalized for Corona, three major newspapers immediately assigned senior reporters to update the President’s obituary text. When, a couple of days later, he returned to the White House, the reporter for MSNBC described his saluting from the back portico of the White House as a “Mussolini moment,” after the World War II Italian Fascist leader.[3]

Rage, hatred, loathing: Those words sum up the tenor of discourse and behavior, not just in the U.S. but, it seems, in much of today’s world. While not new, those animating sentiments seem to have reached new heights with the appearance of Donald Trump on the national scene.

The invectives, the vitriol – one could say the demonization – are in reality a systematic attempt to delegitimize President Trump and to deny his very humanity. They have been a constant, uninterrupted stream since even before his inauguration. In both Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ debates, their constant smirking and sneering, their condescending expressions, their intentional staring squarely at the camera to show their contempt for the President by addressing themselves to voters over the head of their opponent seemed coordinated. They are part of the consistent attempt to simply dismiss Trump. The years-long Mueller investigation, the effort to impeach the President, the many investigations into every aspect of his life, his family, his friends, and his associates have all been part of the steady drumbeat.

*  *  *

It is as clear as daylight that Trump has an irritating side to his personality. That, however, accounts for but a tiny fraction of the strong emotional reaction to him. The major source lies elsewhere, and much deeper. Some of it can be ascribed to the current atmosphere, some goes back several decades. An important component comes from what the President has done – and is doing – and from the major forces he has in the process challenged.

Noteworthy also is that the strong reaction to Donald Trump came initially from across the spectrum – not just from the Left. Some conservatives, in their irritation, even bolted from the Republican Party, and the term “Never-Trumpers” came into being. Over time, however, the “resistance” to President Trump has come mainly from the Left and even more so from the extreme Left. The Democratic Party has in effect been commandeered by that extreme Left, with the nominal Party leaders either co-opting the extremist positions or keeping quiet about any possible disagreement.

The more immediate sources of opposition to Trump – of the attempt, really, to remove the elected President – are only superficially connected to what are often called the President’s “character flaws.” There can be no argument that the President has been prolific in his repeated, and often sharp, criticisms of those who disagree with him. His insults, his unending tweets on every conceivable topic, are legend.

One commentator once mused that the President was able to “play” his opponents in the press by sending them scurrying to fact-check or otherwise attack him while in the meantime the President was proceeding toward the fulfillment of his objectives. This is definitely not what people were used to, especially from persons in prominent positions. This sort of thing, in other words, is “not presidential.” On that, too, there is no argument.

It also is beside the point. Donald Trump represents a truly unique phenomenon. In one sense, he reflects the American society from which he comes – a noxious, often vulgar, irreverent, polarized, intolerant, relativist environment – from which civil discourse has disappeared. His caustic approach is in many ways nothing more than an echo of his context. And if he were not so “tough,” it is doubtful he could have persisted as he has toward his objectives.

At the same time, Trump represents a major catalyst for momentous change: something radically new. He is the first president (certainly in a very long time, if not the first altogether) who has made promises and actually kept them (when not stopped by his opposition). And, practically unheard of until now, he has undertaken to “drain the swamp,” meaning that he has taken on the permanent bureaucracy, those thousands of anonymous government officials who create and administer the myriad regulations that affect our lives yet are not answerable to the electorate.

Those objectives were guaranteed, in and of themselves, to generate enormous opposition. Trump has challenged the “accepted way of doing things.” The “establishment,” ensconced in its routine of “business as usual,” was suddenly confronted by someone who immediately set about to change things.

But more than that, while the President’s jarring style and the powerful individuals and forces he has disrupted are one major component behind the effort to remove him, the second one is the larger socio-political environment – our society in turmoil. It is this second component that we need to understand in order to grasp the significance of the first.

*  *  *

We are living through a period seen by the extreme Left and anarchist elements spearheading the opposition to Trump as pre-revolutionary, or even revolutionary. A number of figures in that political segment actually say openly that they are seeking to essentially change the American system, and their explicit attacks on the U.S. Constitution testify to that.

The recent massive, ongoing, and often violent “protests” are one indication of this. Groups such Antifa and Black Lives Matter have openly engaged in violence, with the leadership in “liberal” cities standing aside and either encouraging lawlessness or standing by destruction of property and murder, at times even voting to “defund” or reduce law enforcement budgets (as in New York City or Portland, Oregon). The mayors in Washington D.C. and New York City actively supported them: the D.C. mayor by having a major avenue painted with the name Black Lives Matter, and Mayor De Blasio, in a childish outburst, ordering the same on the street in front of Trump Tower.

Who could have imagined mobs running amok in major cities? Who could have dreamt of downtown New York City’s elegant areas being vandalized and boarded up after violent rampages, and the spreading and continuing violence and destruction of property month after month? Who could have believed that movements supposedly fighting for justice and the welfare of underprivileged groups would wantonly destroy the very neighborhoods and livelihoods of the people they supposedly want to help?

The widespread toppling of statues, including those of Christopher Columbus – and now even President Lincoln – have little to do with racism. This particular aspect of the overall Leftist strategy fits neatly into the longer-term campaign to subvert and destroy the underlying moral consensus of the nation. One of the key objectives is to have a society no longer proud of its identity because that identity will have been obliterated. The physical destruction of key symbols of nationhood goes along with the hollowing out of the fundamental consensus and basic values that make up national identity and pride. Together, they generate, almost inevitably, a passive, rudderless society willing to submit to its radical transformation into something unknown, a society more ripe and ready for a determined, organized attempt to topple the existing system and impose a new authoritarian or even totalitarian regime.

*  *  *

The extent to which these objectives of the Left have been achieved is not hard to see. The extreme Left so dominates the overall discourse that people have become afraid to voice their opinions. People are being fired from their jobs for voicing their views, their accusers brazenly saying they feel physically “threatened” by such views. The recent hearings for the confirmation of Judge Barrett to the Supreme Court even featured a sharp attack on the nominee for saying that she did not discriminate on the basis of sexual “preference.” This was deemed offensive by the Democrats, who mandate the word “orientation.” Within half an hour following the exchange, the Merriam-Webster dictionary announced it was changing its definition of the word “preference,” adding that the use of the term in relation to the LGBT issues was “offensive.”[4]

How far this “newspeak” (a la the novel 1984) has spread is further exemplified by the attacks on the Supreme Court nominee and her family for their earlier adoption of two black children they rescued from orphanages in Haiti, one of whom in the aftermath of the earthquake there.

Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor saw dark motives in the adoption: “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children....They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people…while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.” Another, Ruth Be-Ghiat, a New York University historian and CNN political commentator, wondered whether the two children in question “weren’t adopted so much as kidnapped….Many authoritarians seized children of color for adoption by White Christians,” she wrote. “Pinochet’s regime did this with indigenous kids, and Nazis took Aryan-looking Poles for German families. Trump takes migrant kids for adoption by Evangelicals.”[5] While these extreme views are nothing new, the prominence they have gained is.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter have consistently censored conservative news stories, most recently one about Biden family corruption. And the decision by Amazon not to stream a documentary by the noted African-American scholar Shelby Steele and directed by his son Eli, “What Killed Michael Brown?”, is another powerful illustration of the Left’s dominance and dictation of what the public is allowed to see. In refusing to air the film, Amazon in effect prevents a wider audience from hearing the voices in the black community that dissent strongly from the victimhood ideology.[6]

The firing of its opinion page editor by the New York Times this past summer, following complaints by its reporters, is yet another illustration of the systematic silencing of anything deviating from the Left’s story line. The objection was that the editor in question had allowed the publication of a conservative viewpoint. The charge was not simply a complaint about a difference of opinion; these reporters saw the offending piece as a direct physical threat! What was for a while largely restricted to university campuses has spilled over into the wider public arena: Language, whether spoken or written, is now “violence.” And that is meant to choke off all criticism and to prevent the airing of anything but the officially promulgated “party” line.

The common use of comparisons of opponents to Nazis, Fascists, and various other mass murderers reflects an obscene cheapening and belittling of the horrors of the Holocaust and,

unfortunately, also underscores what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” It is symptomatic of a language of insults, disparaging epithets, and a hatred and rage underlying almost all human interaction.

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It is within this raging anger and intolerance that the President is operating. That anger is so overwhelming that it has largely blocked the ability to reason. The incessant disparaging stream of attacks on anything Donald Trump says or does produces a knee-jerk, almost automatic opposition.

The predilection of the public and of the media for paying attention to what is said not what is done has helped confuse people. People have consistently focused on what politicians say, not on what they do. A pervasive cynicism holds that politicians make but don’t keep promises, that anyway “they are all the same” and “nothing really changes.” People, it would seem, like to hear pleasant things. The more grandiose, the more unrealistic the promise, the more appealing it seems to be. Universal health care, free education, zero emissions, only renewable energy –  in other words, socialism under other labels – all these resonate strongly with an electorate in turmoil.

When one looks at what President Trump has actually done, a different picture emerges. If we were to go by how much attention has been given to his actions by the mainstream media or, in general, anywhere, one could be forgiven for thinking that not so much has been achieved. Yet, what the President has managed to accomplish – both domestically and in the foreign realm – is enormous and of historic significance. We will focus here on the Middle East and particularly on the Israel-Arab interaction. The reason for this is that, however important Israel and the Middle East might be, the President’s actions here go far beyond this. His approach illustrates better than anything the President’s foresight and courage, his willingness to challenge accepted so-called “conventional wisdom” – and succeed!

The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 (became Public Law No: 104-45) had recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and mandated that the U.S. embassy be moved there “no later than May 31, 1999.” (Israel is the only country in the world in which others claim to dictate where its capital can be.) Non-implementation of the law required yearly wavers by the president on grounds of national security. The conventional wisdom of the professionals in the State Department was always that moving the embassy would result in “blood in the Arab street” and serious damage to American interests.

President Trump recognized Jerusalem and moved the embassy. The Arab world was quiet. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Nothing happened. He has now succeeded in bringing about peace treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with others lining up to follow suit. The equation in the Middle East has been transformed.

The fact that Iran is the common enemy is an element in the equation, but here, as well, it is the President’s courageous leadership and his approach of withdrawing from direct intervention in that area that has played an important role.

The various Sunni Arab regimes noted Washington’s unwillingness to continue an active engagement involving U.S. military forces, and saw that Israel was the only local/regional power that could – with continuing strong American backing – ensure a more stable and defensible region. They came to recognize that their unwavering support for counterproductive Palestinian positions was costing them a lot and bringing no benefits. They saw that, with normalization of ties with Israel, economic and other cooperation and interaction would bring enormous benefits.

Have the “experts,” all those who for years argued against such moves as the President has undertaken, acknowledged that they were wrong? Has the President received any praise for his courage and achievement? At best, there has been silence, and some muted complaints that the Palestinians have been “abandoned.”

*  *  *

Strong opposition to the President has come from many corners of the bureaucracy. Mr. Trump’s announced intention to “drain the swamp,” an allusion to the permanent bureaucracy of professional civil servants, noted above, generated a predictable active opposition from those quarters. It has been most visible perhaps in the Justice Department. The evidence now emerging from newly declassified documents shows an FBI deeply immersed in open bias, false FISA applications, and internal emails spelling out its determination to remove Trump. This “fishing expedition” of an investigation was paraded before a Democrat-controlled House eager to impeach the President and was prominently displayed in the media, tying up normal governance and hampering the President by sowing doubt and mistrust as well as outright falsehoods.

U.S. withdrawal from places such as Syria has been criticized, with some justification. Particularly disturbing has been the seeming abandonment of the Kurds and the President’s reluctance to confront Turkey’s Erdogan for his aggressive behavior, not just in and around Syria, but also Turkish aggressiveness toward Greece, its support of Hamas, etc. On the other hand, in allowing other countries, such as Russia and Turkey, to becoming more involved, even militarily, Trump is in effect allowing them to become bogged down, often in conflict with one another, in hopeless adventures that will only further weaken these states internally – something they can ill afford.

In criticizing the President’s lack of more forceful action, it would be wise to remember that the current domestic polarization has limited Washington’s freedom of action and encouraged America’s opponents and enemies to probe, to undertake actions they would never have dared to undertake had they believed that the President had more domestic backing. Sun Tzu, the well-known ancient Chinese strategist and, more recently, Clausewitz, the general and military theorist in the time of Frederick the Great and Napoleon, had already warned that, in a state divided domestically, the strategic center – the best target of opportunity for its enemies – would be its capital. These consummate strategists understood that under such conditions of domestic weakness, the state becomes an attractive target for its enemies.

Perhaps the best summary of President Trump’s presidency thus far is that provided by Daniel Pipes, a top Middle East expert, in a Newsweek piece this past summer:

His [Trump’s] policies in the areas of education, taxes, deregulation, and the environment have been bolder than Ronald Reagan’s. His judicial appointments are the best of the past century….His unprecedented assault on the administrative state proceeds apace, ignoring predictable howls from the Washington establishment. Even his foreign policy has been conservative: demanding that allies contribute their fair share, confronting China and Iran, and singularly supporting Israel. Ironically, as David Harsanyi notes, a potential character flaw actually works to our advantage: “Trump’s obstinacy seems to have made him less susceptible to the pressures that traditionally induce GOP presidents to capitulate.”[7]

Highly relevant to Mr. Pipes’ assessment is the fact that in this very piece he stresses how strong of an “anti-Trumpist” he was. He relates that his opposition was so strong that he actually was one of those who left the Republican Party on account of Donald Trump’s nomination and then election.

A key question for all of us is: Will people have the courage to look beyond the President’s character flaws as Daniel Pipes has done? Will voters be willing to disregard what Donald Trump says and re-examine what he has actually done? Will we, with a sober look at his record of promise-fulfillment, now take more seriously the promises he makes for a second term?

Or have the rage and the hatred, now so prevalent, so omnipresent, become so dominant as to thoroughly choke our ability – and willingness – to take the proverbial “deep breath” and rethink those viscerally negative assessments of his presidency?

If the answer to that last question is yes, then it is worth remembering that such an autopilot fury may well – through the democratic process itself – usher the disappearance of that democracy.

Dr. Krakowski is President and CEO of EDK Consulting. He is a former aide to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense and former professor of International Relations and Law. He has advised the U.S. Undersecretary and the Deputy Secretary of Defense on strategy for the War on Terror. Dr. Krakowski has contributed chapters in books and written extensively in periodicals.  He has been a frequent guest on national radio and television programs. He holds a PhD and MPhil from Columbia University in New York, and an MA from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C.