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| Lincoln’s Inaugural Address.“We are not enemies, but friends” |
Opinion
Donald Trump Is Our National Catastrophe
With malice toward all; with charity for none.
By Bret
Stephens
Opinion
Columnist
June 5,
2020
This spring
I taught a seminar (via Zoom, of course) at the University of Chicago on the
art of political persuasion. We read Lincoln, Pericles, King, Orwell, Havel and
Churchill, among other great practitioners of the art. We ended with a study of
Donald Trump’s tweets, as part of a class on demagogy.
If the
closing subject was depressing, at least the timing was appropriate.
We are in
the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe. The catastrophe is not the
pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops, or looted cities, or
racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s unprecedented is that
never before have we been led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
With malice
toward all; with charity for none: eight words that encapsulate everything this
president is, does and stands for.
What does
one learn when reading great political speeches and writings? That well-chosen
words are the way by which past deeds acquire meaning and future deeds acquire
purpose. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” are
the only false notes in the Gettysburg Address. The Battle of Gettysburg is
etched in national memory less for its military significance than because
Lincoln reinvented the goals of the Civil War in that speech — and, in doing
so, reimagined the possibilities of America.
Political
writing doesn’t just provide meaning and purpose. It also offers determination,
hope and instruction.
In “The
Power of the Powerless,” written at one of the grimmer moments of Communist
tyranny, Václav Havel laid out why the system was so much weaker, and the
individual so much stronger, than either side knew. In his “Fight on the
beaches” speech after Dunkirk, Winston Churchill told Britons of “a victory
inside this deliverance” — a reason, however remote, for resolve and optimism.
In “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr., explained why
patience was no answer to injustice: “When you have seen hate-filled policemen
curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with
impunity … then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
In a word,
great political writing aims to elevate. What, by contrast, does one learn by
studying Trump’s utterances?
The purpose
of Trump’s presidency is to debase, first by debasing the currency of speech.
It’s why he refuses to hire reasonably competent speechwriters to craft
reasonably competent speeches. It’s why his communication team has been filled
by people like Dan Scavino and Stephanie Grisham and Sarah Sanders.
And it’s
why Twitter is his preferred medium of communication. It is speech designed for
provocations and put-downs; for making supporters feel smug; for making
opponents seethe; for reducing national discourse to the level of grunts and
counter-grunts.
That’s a
level that suits Trump because it’s the level at which he excels. Anyone who
studies Trump’s tweets carefully must come away impressed by the way he has
mastered the demagogic arts. He doesn’t lead his base, as most politicians do.
He personifies it. He speaks to his followers as if he were them. He cultivates
their resentments, demonizes their opponents, validates their hatreds. He
glorifies himself so they may bask in the reflection.
Whatever
this has achieved for him, or them, it’s a calamity for us. At a moment when
disease has left more than 100,000 American families bereft, we have a
president incapable of expressing the nation’s heartbreak. At a moment of the
most bitter racial grief since the 1960s, we have a president who has
bankrupted the moral capital of the office he holds.
And at a
moment when many Americans, particularly conservatives, are aghast at the
outbursts of looting and rioting that have come in the wake of peaceful
protests, we have a president who wants to replace rule of law with rule by the
gun. If Trump now faces a revolt by the Pentagon’s civilian and military
leadership (both current and former) against his desire to deploy active-duty
troops in American cities, it’s because his words continue to drain whatever is
left of his credibility as commander in chief.
I write
this as someone who doesn’t lay every national problem at Trump’s feet and
tries to give him credit when I think it’s due.
Trump is no
more responsible for the policing in Minneapolis than Barack Obama was
responsible for policing in Ferguson. I doubt the pandemic would have been
handled much better by a Hillary Clinton administration, especially considering
the catastrophic errors of judgment by people like Bill de Blasio and Andrew
Cuomo. And our economic woes are largely the result of a lockdown strategy most
avidly embraced by the president’s critics.
But the
point here isn’t that Trump is responsible for the nation’s wounds. It’s that
he is the reason some of those wounds have festered and why none of them can
heal, at least for as long as he remains in office. Until we have a president
who can say, as Lincoln did in his first inaugural, “We are not enemies, but
friends” — and be believed in the bargain — our national agony will only grow
worse.
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