I know, I promised to refrain from posting anything about Donald Trump. After all, what can be said that hasn't already about the lying, malignant narcissist? Besides, the last thing he needs is more attention. The following commentary by NY Times columnist Roger Cohen, however, has moved me to make an exception. In a few short, revealing words, Cohen paints a spot-on picture of Trump the man. It got my blood boiling.
Several less than perfect persons have occupied the White House. Ours is an imperfect system; a few bad apples are inevitable. But I will venture to say that the American presidency has never been so dishonored as it has been by Donald Trump. It's not just that the self-absorbed dirtbag is an embarrassment to everything America is supposed to stand for, after all we've been led by a number of presidents who have strayed from our ideals, but it's hard to reach back in history and find a president whose deceit and downright evilness has caused so much damage to our values, our democracy, and to so much of humanity, at home and abroad. We've endured evildoer presidents in the past (Nixon comes to mind), and have managed to transcend the damage, but I'm sorry to say I'm not sure we will ever recover from the Trump presidency, especially if he wins reelection, which is shockingly possible, if not likely.
I know Americans are a resilient people, we've overcome many hardships and adversities, and risen to great challenges. I'm encouraged by the empowerment of women, young people, and progressive energies alive at the grassroots, but I'm not sure this will be enough to overcome the Trump effect. (Apologies for my cynicism; I hope you have not become similarly afflicted.) Donald Trump is a product of a white nationalist, fact-adverse populism that has been brewing for decades. It is now deeply entrenched in our political institutions and a large segment of our national culture. This means progressive-thinking people need to overcome not just the man, but the roots that produced, and continue to sustain, his ignominious rule, a Herculean task, indeed.
If you value humanity, I trust the following Cohen commentary will summon raw emotions similar to mine. If you're a Trump supporter, or one of his shameless Republican congressional lapdogs, I suspect you'll see nothing wrong with the president's frank indifference to Nadia Murad's story-- or, for that matter, to his general lack of empathy for human suffering. Hell, you might even celebrate it. Such is as it is in the Trump's world.
I hope the Cohen post inspires a dialogue, and hopefully a personal response.
Ronald T. Fox
Trump’s Inhumanity Before a Victim of Rape
In his boundless self-absorption, this president is capable of anything.
By Roger Cohen
July 26, 2019
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator from New York, famously observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Today, everyone is entitled to his own facts, or their own facts, since even grammar has changed. The message from the Trump White House, and from Boris Johnson’s rise to prime minister in Britain, is that facts don’t matter. The bald-faced lie is perfectly acceptable, so long as it keeps you at the center of what passes today for attention. The important thing is to feed the machine. Shock is the best fodder. Social media dies without outrage.
In the mid-1930s, a few years before World War II, Robert Musil, the author of “The Man Without Qualities” wrote, “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” The political culture of both the United States and Britain is sick. It is unserious, crooked and lethal. There is no honest way to dissociate the rise of Trump and Johnson from the societies that produced them.
The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. Johnson does a grotesque Churchill number. Nobody cares. The wolves have it; the sheep, transfixed, shrug.
Indignation is finite. Power, the Italians say, wears out those who do not have it. That’s Trump’s credo. I confess to moments when anger refuses to be summoned by the latest Trump outrage, since, anyway, nobody can remember Friday what was so unconscionable Monday.
Still, I cannot forget Trump’s recent treatment of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who won the Nobel Prize last year for her campaign to end mass rape in war. The Islamic State, or ISIS, forced Murad into sexual slavery when it overran Yazidi villages in northern Iraq in 2014. Murad lost her mother and six brothers, slaughtered by ISIS.
She now lives in Germany, and has been unable to return home, a point she made in her July 17 White House meeting with Trump. “We cannot go back if we cannot protect our dignity, our family,” she said.
Allow me to render the scene in the present tense. Trump sits there at his desk, an uncomprehending, unsympathetic, uninterested cardboard dummy. He looks straight ahead for much of the time, not at her, his chin jutting in his best effort at a Mussolini pose. He cannot heave his bulk from the chair for this brave young woman. He cannot look at her.
Every now and again, in a disdainful manner, he swivels his head toward her and other survivors of religious persecution. When Murad says, “They killed my mom, my six brothers,” Trump responds: “Where are they now?”
Where are they now???
“They are in the mass graves in Sinjar,” Murad says. She is poised and courageous throughout in her effort to communicate her story in the face of Trump’s complete, blank indifference.
Why this extraordinary attitude from Trump? Well, at a guess, Murad is a woman, and she is brown, and he is incapable of empathy, and the Trump administration recently watered down a United Nations Security Council resolution on protecting victims of sexual violence in conflict.
At the mention of Sinjar, Trump’s unbelievable response is, “I know the area very well, you’re talking about. It’s tough.”
Let’s play how-well-does-President-Trump-know-Sinjar? It’s a wildly implausible game.
Toward the end of the exchange, Trump asks Murad about her Nobel Prize. “That’s incredible,” he says. “They gave it to you for what reason?”
“For what reason?” Murad asks, suppressing with difficulty her incredulity that nobody has briefed the president. Nobody can brief this president. It’s pointless. He knows everything. “I made it clear to everyone that ISIS raped thousands of Yazidi women,” she says.
“Oh really?” says Trump. “Is that right?”
Yes, that’s right. One reason this exchange marked me is that I found myself in 2015 in a Yazidi refugee camp in southeastern Turkey interviewing a survivor named Anter Halef. In a corner sat his 16-year-old daughter, Feryal. She sobbed uncontrollably. I had seldom seen such grief etched on a young face. Life had been ripped from her before she began to live. There was no road back for her. Her eyes were empty vessels left so by rape.
I have watched the Murad-Trump exchange several times. It is scary. This president is inhuman. Something is missing. In his boundless self-absorption, he is capable of anything.
I am grateful to Brian Stelter of CNN for recalling this month the words of Edward R. Murrow in 1954 in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attempt to provoke public frenzy at supposed Communist infiltration of American life. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” Murrow says.
Of McCarthy, Murrow observes: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”
And then: “Good night and good luck.”
Roger Cohen has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. His columns appear Wednesday and Saturday. He joined The Times in 1990, and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. @NYTimesCohen
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I am glad that you sent this latest Phronesis out to all of us to read. While it is easy to ignore that daily trash that comes out of
ReplyDeleteTrump's mouth, the issue of Nadia Murad's story is something that needs to be addressed. I too watched in horror as The Donald
sat there on his "toilet seat" not willing to listen or look at this poor woman. His body language continues to show that he is an
uncaring racist and a despicable human being. I only wish that there was something that we could do to convince his core supporters, the Republicans in Congress and his own family that this man does not deserve to be the President of the United States.
I strongly agree, as do a majority of Americans. Unfortunately majority sentiment doesn't always square with the Electoral College. Trump could lose the 2020 election by five million votes and still get reelected. This is an embarrassing representation of the meaning of democracy, especially coming from a country that considers itself exceptional.
DeleteTrump can't help it! Empathy is not in his DNA. Just this week ... again ... "across from Trump" sat more faces of suffering following the mass shootings across this country. Tragedies that obviously suggest a roll for a "healer-in-chief." Trump bellied-up to the microphone and did you notice? He read the entire speech from a teleprompter.
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, that is not Trump. For how long now have the American people been put on notice that Trump is "different." He goes off-script! The "story" ... the real Trump ... is always in what he says beyond what was written. The real Trump is to be found in tweets; capable at best of conveying policy sound bites. But more often used to deny facts, tell big lies and repeat ad nauseam, name call, rewrite history, and/or embrace (never directly) and repeat racist, sexist and elitist narratives, usually in the name of America.
On the other hand, this pure Trump. When he (and his sycophant army) need to front a sense of "We the People" he tends (not always successfully) "keep to a script." What else can he do? A sense of "We the People" is simply not in his DNA. He has to read someone else's words when circumstances suggest empathy is appropriate.
But have no fear it won't take long for the real Trump to reappear. In the mean-time Tucker Carlson has taken point on framing a truly Trumpian response to current events. White supremacy is a myth! By extension then, even raising a question or concern regarding hate-motivations and their connection to Trump's unscripted-self becomes "evidence" of a continuing "liberal" conspiracy. Eventually his narrative will vilify the usual suspects: Obama, Hillary, immigrants, liberals, and the media ... blah, blah, blah! The same rhetorical strategy played out over and over and over!
The meaning of "democracy" is indeed at stake. A focus on Trump-the-person however does no more than identify what "We" don't want. The problem is what we do want! Our focus must be fact-based and zeroed in on actually solving problems not preoccupied with who gets to author and take credit for policy the effects of which are discounted by electoral calculations, especially regarding campaign fund raising.
The Electoral College is an institutional hurdle, no doubt, as will be the range of Trump chosen hacks on the federal bench, particularly the Supreme Court. Super majorities will be necessary! A daunting task indeed. But I point out that in 2016 the 138 million who did vote for president represented only 58.1% of those eligible. The potential is still there to reassert progressive policy. But I fear that unless media refocuses on policy and refuses to give up on facts (especially the tendency to mute critical responses to his outrageous "Fake News" claims) for the sake of some kind of "neutrality." We all must demand change. We all must act to make that happen!