SEPTEMBER 2020 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

With revelations about his disregarding the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus, pressuring the CDC to release updates that fit his administration’s “all-is-well” virus narrative, heavy indebtedness and failure to pay taxes, and his horrific behavior at the first presidential debate, among other things, the September news cycle was, not surprisingly, dominated by President Trump. This forces me to include some Trump selections among the September IGGY nominations.

1. Michael Caputo, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Since he was installed at the 80,000-employee department last April by the White House, Mr. Caputo, a media-savvy former Trump campaign aide, has worked aggressively to control the media strategy on pandemic issues. But over the weekend, he was engulfed in two major controversies of his own making.

First Politico, then The New York Times and other media outlets, published accounts of how Mr. Caputo and a top aide, Paul Alexander, had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light. The C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports had previously been so thoroughly shielded from political interference that political appointees only saw them just before they were published.

Then on Monday, The Times reported that a Facebook presentation by Mr. Caputo the previous night was filled with bizarre and incendiary comments. He had attacked C.D.C. scientists as anti-Trumpers who had formed a “resistance unit,” engaged in “rotten science” and “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants” except for coffee shop meetings to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.” He urged his gun-owning followers to buy ammunition because “it’s going to be hard to get” and warned that left-wing hit squads across the nation were training for violent attacks. He also referred to physical health concerns and said his mental health “had definitely failed.”

To a certain extent, Mr. Caputo’s comments were simply an amplified version of remarks that the president himself has made. Both men have singled out government scientists and health officials as disloyal, suggested that the election will not be fairly decided, and insinuated that left-wing groups are secretly plotting to incite violence across the United States. But Mr. Caputo’s attacks were more direct, and they came from one of the officials most responsible for shaping communications around the coronavirus.

Caputo’s 26-minute broadside on Facebook against scientists, the news media and Democrats was also another example of a senior administration official stoking public anxiety about the election and conspiracy theories about the “deep state” — the label Mr. Trump often attaches to the federal Civil Service bureaucracy.

Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

Why would Caputo make such outrageous claims? Not because he is a health expert, heaven forbid (he has no background in health care), or an astute visionary. No, it’s because he’d Trump’s kind of guy: a diehard loyalist equipped with a deep antipathy and suspicion of scientific expertise who knows how to toe a political line favorable to the Trumpster.

Will these inflammatory words get Caputo fired? Of course not; he’s a Trump man. Why would the president, who on his visit to the fire-ravaged West challenged the established science of climate change, declaring “It will start getting cooler…. Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually,” fire a chip off his ol’ bloc?

2. David Clark, Former Sheriff from Milwaukee. Clarke, a Trump-supporting former sheriff from Milwaukee best known for running a jail ripe with abuse, where four inmates, including a baby, died, is again swirling in controversy. Clarke was a key Trump advocate in 2016, later getting hired on for a cushy senior advisor gig at America First Action, a pro-Trump Super PAC where many of the Trump administration and Fox News castaways like Don Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, have landed high-paying jobs.

Clarke was fired from America First Action not long after Fox News banned him because of his increasingly outrageous rhetoric. Twitter once temporarily suspended Clarke after he advocated violence toward liberals.

And now Clarke is again proving how unfit he ever was for the job of sheriff or political adviser. Clarke was guest-hosting The Mark Belling Show, a Milwaukee-based radio show on WISN, when he essentially advocated the premeditated murder of protesters, telling listeners to “make a plan.” Thanks to Media Matters for the audio and transcript.

DAVID CLARKE (GUEST HOST): The question is when is government going to do something? Inaction is not a plan. You know what happens with inaction? People take the law into their own hands. Government is leaving them no choice. No choice. I don’t advocate for some of the stuff that’s starting to happen, but I am certainly done -- I am through with condemning it. I’m done with that.

I’m just telling people, “Hey, you’re on your own." Think about it, have a plan. Act reasonably. You have to act reasonably. Then you’re going to have to articulate what you did afterwards. But you can’t have government officials and law enforcement executives telling people, “Do not take the law into your own hands." Well, you’re forcing them to!

Clarke went even further:

DAVID CLARKE (GUEST HOST): The majority of these gun purchases are first-time gun owners. And when we leave this up to the individual, it’s not going to end real pretty. But I don’t blame them. Have a plan, think it through, be able to articulate it, and be reasonable. It’s all the law requires. You have the right to defend yourself, you don’t need permission from the police or a sheriff.

Just make a plan … to murder. In other words, premeditated murder. Clarke once likened the Black Lives Matter movement to the KKK. Is it any wonder he was too extreme for even the Trump administration and Fox News?

3. President Trump. Always seeking a new low, Donald Trump compared the police shooting of Jacob Blake to a missed golf putt in his interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. Kenosha, Wisconsin, police shot Blake seven times in the back at close range as he tried to get into his car. To Trump, this shows that police “can do 10,000 great acts, which is what they do, and one bad apple―or a choker,” he said. “Y’know a choker. They choke.” And Donald Trump has one context for choking.

“Shooting the guy, shooting the guy in the back many times, I mean, couldn’t you have done something different? Couldn’t you have wrestled him? You know, I mean, in the meantime, he might’ve been going for a weapon and, you know, there’s a whole big thing there. But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt.”

Yes, shooting a man repeatedly and missing an easy putt are, in Trump’s mind, similar levels of error.

Ingraham tried to bail Trump out of the giant mistake she saw him making. “You’re not comparing it to golf. Of course, that’s what the media will say.” (The media will say it because that’s what was happening.)

Trump would not be deterred, though. “I’m saying people choke.”

“They panic,” Ingraham tried to redirect him.

“People choke. And people are bad people. You have both. You have bad people and you have—they choke! You could be a police officer for 15 years and all of a sudden you’re confronted. You’ve got a quarter of a second to make a decision. If you don’t make a decision and you’re wrong, you’re dead. People choke under those circumstances and they make a bad decision.”

What’s particularly sick here is that it’s kind of a surprise Trump would acknowledge this shooting as a problem at all. He’s downplaying it in a truly disgusting way, but he’s not vilifying Blake for the crime of being shot because he’s Black. He can acknowledge the possibility that maybe the police should have tried something other than shooting a man repeatedly in the back. In the same way he regrets when someone misses a putt they should have made.

Choking at golf, though. Leave a man paralyzed or miss a three-foot putt, you know, same thing. And that’s the other thing—Ingraham tried to save Trump from this by distracting him with blaming the media, but he was determined. He had an analogy and he had to get it out there. It’s one more in a string of interviews showing how totally out of it Trump is, and it’s terrifying how much power he wields.

4. More President Trump. According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials in the Trump administration, Donald Trump’s behavior in private is … exactly what you might expect, as reported by Greg Miller of The Washington Post.

In unguarded moments with senior aides, President Trump has maintained that Black Americans have mainly themselves to blame in their struggle for equality, hindered more by lack of initiative than societal impediments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

After phone calls with Jewish lawmakers, Trump has muttered that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together” in an ethnic allegiance that exceeds other loyalties, officials said.

Trump’s private musings about Hispanics match the vitriol he has displayed in public, and his antipathy to Africa is so ingrained that when first lady Melania Trump planned a 2018 trip to that continent he railed that he “could never understand why she would want to go there.

As Miller’s article points out, Trump isn’t the first racist president we’ve ever had. He is, however, the first incumbent president in living memory who has explicitly made racism the cornerstone of not only his tenure in office but his reelection campaign, as well. 

You might ask if Trump’s outspoken racism is just posturing, aimed at his lily-white base. Maybe his call on the extreme far-right, white nationalist group Proud Boys to “stand back and standby” was just rhetoric to solidify his tough on crime credentials.

Well, you can dispel such a justification. As detailed by Ibram X. Kendi, writing this month in The Atlantic, racism has been the guidepost of nearly all of Trump’s domestic policies from day one, with a constant and obvious goal of eliminating all of the achievements of the nation’s first Black president. As Kendi describes it, “he would make it seem as if a Black man had never been president, erasing him from history by repealing and replacing his signature accomplishments, from the Affordable Care Act to DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.”

And although Trump has not succeeded (thus far) in completely undoing the work of President Obama, it isn’t for lack of trying. He has significantly undermined many of his predecessor’s accomplishments through deliberate sabotage, stealthy rollbacks, or willful neglect. But it was never enough for Trump to simply repudiate Barack Obama.

His end goal is much more comprehensive and mirrors that of the GOP as a whole—to protect and preserve a social hierarchy where whites are always at the top. Through his words and behavior he brought unabashed racism into the mainstream for millions of Americans, the same ones who attend his rallies and wear little red hats, the same ones who cheered as he demonized immigrants during his campaign rallies in 2016. As Kendi sardonically observes, we should all be thankful for what he has forced us to recognize about this country and its high-minded pretensions of equality.

Black Americans—indeed, all Americans—should in one respect be thankful to him. He has held up a mirror to American society, and it has reflected back a grotesque image that many people had until now refused to see: an image not just of the racism still coursing through the country, but also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.

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And the winner is . . .

As a certified Ignominious person whose outrageous behavior, lying, and racist, misogynistic and xenophobic rhetoric are self-defining, and not momentary absurd displays, Donald Trump is no longer eligible for a monthly Ignominious Absurdity award. This said, and since Caputo later apologized for his incendiary comments, I have chosen former Sheriff David Clarke as the September IGGY award winner.