The Weekly Screed (#903)

“… Much more beautiful, 

much more beautiful…” 

By David Benjamin

“I always hear ‘the elite, the elite.’… I have a better education than them, I’m smarter than them, I went to the best schools, they didn’t… Much more beautiful house, much more beautiful apartment, much more beautiful everything. And I’m president and they’re not, right?”

                                                                        — Chuckles

MADISON, Wis. — In his novels, Sinclair Lewis created a set of characters—credible though preposterous, weak yet ambitious, and sadly comic—who evoked the power of the American psyche for both self-invention and self-delusion—among them George Babbitt, Elmer Gantry and Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip.

Lewis’s hasty, flawed and prophetic 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, drew critics’ comparisons at the time between the story’s pernicious demagogue, Buzz Windrip, and a couple of real tyrants, in Baton Rouge and Berlin. Nowadays, the parallels are back and Sinclair Lewis is prescient all over again. There’s a new President Buzz, but this time he’s not fiction.

One thumbnail describes Buzz Windrip’s stump style as “fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism.” In the novel, Buzz promises to make America great again.

I first read It Can’t Happen Here when I was in high school. Since then, I’ve circled back frequently to Buzz Windrip, because he represents the living, breathing consequence of power without conscience. I knew already, at sixteen, that all politics is the pursuit of power, although often mitigated by the orator’s obligatory genuflection to “public service.” Reading Lewis, we gain little insight into the mind of Buzz Windrip, because he is more a maguffin than a character.

On the other hand, the probing of Donald Trump’s psychology is a sort of national pastime. He displays one of the most naked ids in the history of our politics. He boasts and preens, he struts and frets, he lies and sneers, he grovels for applause. More than any elected leader in our lives, Trump is openly devoted to power without plan or purpose, solely for its own sake. He wants it because he likes it, and we like him him because he wants it. There seems in Trump no artifice because he is entirely, brazenly, unreflectively artificial.

Although inadvertently, Trump has marshaled more raw power than any president since Lyndon Johnson commanded the Oval Office with Democratic majorities in Congress and a friendly Supreme Court under Earl Warren. LBJ squandered that moment by clinging to an ill-begotten war that became for him more a test of his manhood than a Cold War stronghold.

Trump’s unprecedented potential for Buzzocracy stands on three pillars. The first is the “loyalty” of a political party—Republicans—to which he has tenuously “belonged” for fewer than five years and to which he evinces no believable loyalty. He controls rank-and-file GOP voters through a tribal ferocity that winks indulgently at his every outrage. Where once America had “yellow-dog Democrats,” we now have “murder-on-5th-Avenue” Republicans.

The fierce tribalism among Republicans has spawned a cult of personality that depicts Trump as messiah to a “common man” whom he—ironically—is loath to actually touch.

“Cult” is the operative term. Trump—who seems naked and puny without a pulpit to pound—has captured the fervor of America’s apocalyptic underbelly, preaching with a ragged flamboyance that would make Elmer Gantry grind his teeth with envy. Most of us know someone, enchanted by his smirking mendacity, by his biz-whiz “Apprentice” persona and by the fevered propaganda of Trump’s own private State TV network, who believes Trump was literally anointed by God and sent down to walk among us and save white Christian America from an invasion of infidels and to cleanse the Oval Office of the dark and greasy Muslim residue left behind by a Kenyan usurper.

The urge to worship—blind, emotional, impenetrable—is a primordial hunger. It infects American politics more than we like to admit. Trump, its unlikeliest beneficiary, plays it better than any of his forebears, dating at least as far back as William Jennings Bryan.

  

The belief among Trump’s so-called “base” that he is our savior doesn’t infect the GOP’s leadership. Most career Republicans didn’t welcome Trump and—if he dropped dead—would struggle to keep from singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and doing the Varsity Drag around his casket. Trump controls these hardboiled pols—Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell foremost among them—by terror.

Trump’s true believers will never be numerous enough to command a majority in either party or in the nation. But they are sufficiently abundant—not to mention strident, violent and fervent—to swing any GOP primary where Trump sends them. Combine this scorched-earth faction with the votes of a Republican electorate who would vote almost unanimously for a spavined nag with big red “R” painted on its ass, and you can swing a national election. Trump has proven this frightening proposition once already.

The terror he instilled with that November 2016 surprise is the high-beams in the eyes of Republican leaders. He will say, “Eat this.” They will say, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”

Speaking of McConnell, he is the bricklayer who erected the third pillar in Trump’s tower of power. When he deep-froze the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and refused to even hold a hearing on Barack Obama’s choice, McConnell trashed an eon of U.S. Senate protocol and cemented the politicization of the Court.

Co-opting the third branch of government is a strategy tried at times by both major parties. It always failed, until McConnell. By empirical measure, McConnell has given the nation the least impartial Supreme Court since Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. More important, this is a Court that’s not just susceptible—it’s downright eager—to cede control of every branch and function of U.S. democracy to a “unitary executive.”

When Donald Trump declared that the absence of a “beautiful wall” between the United States and Mexico was a “national emergency,” then launched a sing-song soliloquy about this travesty’s trip through the federal judiciary, he was as prophetic as was Sinclair Lewis when he wrote It Can’t Happen Here. Trump admitted that there remain enough un-bought non-McConnell judges left in the system to temporarily thwart his desire to fiddle the budget, the border and the other two branches. But Trump knows that, “we will end up in the Supreme Court… and win.” This cocksureness— that Trump has a lickspittle majority of the once-Supreme Court tucked in his trousers—is Mitch’s gift, meant for a Republican president but bestowed instead on an amoral real-estate grifter with the impulse control of a high-school freshman.

We have a president who loves no one and believes in nothing beyond money and power. We, his willing countrymen and future subjects, have granted him all the power on earth.

Perhaps dreading this moment 230 years ago, another American prophet, Benjamin Franklin, called us “a republic, if you can keep it.”