America has overdosed on Trump
Also: the cruel cost of Trump's child-separation policy, and an unfair comparison from The Bulwark's Charlie Sykes.
The other day, my son told me his dream job is to be a chocolate taster, where you get to eat chocolate all day, every day. I responded that after a couple of days, he’d never want to eat, smell or even see a piece of chocolate ever again.
In 2016, Americans decided that they wanted political junk food. Well, a plurality of Americans. Actually not even that, but enough Americans to put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
After four years of endless drama, it looks like American voters have thoroughly had enough. Joe Biden’s town hall event last week beat Trump in the ratings - despite the latter appearing on three channels, instead of just one - and now it looks like Biden is eating into Trump’s social media advantage.
Politico’s Tim Alberta thinks Trump fatigue has set in:
As I wrote last week in a dispatch from Arizona, sometimes you hear a voter say something “so basic, so one-dimensional, that you’re inclined to dismiss it until you hear it for the thousandth time.” That’s the story of this election: All across America, in conversations with voters about their choices this November, I’ve been hearing the same thing over and over again: “I don’t like Trump.” (Sometimes there’s a slight variation: “I’m so tired of this guy,” “I can’t handle another four years of this,” etc. The remarkable thing? Many of these conversations never even turn to Biden; in Phoenix, several people who had just voted for the Democratic nominee did not so much as mention his name in explaining their preference for president.
Generations of pollsters and journalists have fixated on the question of which candidate voters would rather have a beer with—a window into how personality translates into political success. Here’s the thing: Americans have been having a beer with Trump for the past four years—every morning, every afternoon, every evening. He has made himself more accessible than any president in history, using the White House as a performance stage and Twitter as a real-time diary for all to read. Like the drunk at the bar, he won’t shut up.
Whatever appeal his unfiltered thoughts once held has now worn off. Americans are tired of having beers with Trump. His own supporters are tired of having beers with Trump. In hundreds of interviews this year with MAGA loyalists, I have noted only a handful in which the person did not, unsolicited, point to the president’s behavior as exhausting and inappropriate. Strip away all the policy fights, all the administrative action (or inaction), all the culture war politics, and the decision for many people comes down to a basic conclusion: They just do not approve of the president as a human being.
Trump has a cult following that will drink whatever Flavor-Aid he tells them to, but most of the electorate is reaching for the Pepto-Bismol. Of course, I could be wrong, and a feud with 60 Minutes could be exactly what takes voters’ minds off a pandemic and looming economic crisis.
Related: George Will writes that “Trump will end his presidency as he began it: Whining.”
As the Donald Trump parenthesis in the republic’s history closes, he is opening the sluices on his reservoir of invectives and self-pity. A practitioner of crybaby conservatism — no one, he thinks, has suffered so much since Job lost his camels and acquired boils — and ever a weakling, Trump will end his presidency as he began it: whining.
His first day cloaked in presidential dignity he spent disputing photographic proof that his inauguration crowd was substantially smaller than his immediate predecessor’s. Trump’s day of complaining continued at the CIA headquarters, at the wall commemorating those who died serving the agency. His presidency that began with a wallow in self-pity probably will end in ignominy when he slinks away pouting, trailing clouds of recriminations, without a trace of John McCain’s graciousness on election night 2008:
“Sen. [Barack] Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother did not live to see this day — though our faith assures us she is at rest in the presence of her Creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise. . . . And my heart is filled with nothing but gratitude . . . to the American people for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Sen. Obama and my old friend, Sen. Joe Biden, should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.”
Just 12 years separate the nation from this tradition of political competition bounded by banisters of good manners. Subsequently, the Republican Party has eagerly surrendered its self-respect. And having hitched its wagon to a plummeting cinder, the party is about to have a rendezvous with a surly electorate wielding a truncheon. The party picked a bad year to invite a mugging, a year ending in zero: Approximately 80 percent of state legislative seats will be filled this year, and next year the occupants, many of them Democrats wafted into office by a wave election, will redraw congressional districts based on the 2020 Census.
After Democrats controlled the House for 40 years (1954-1994), control of it changed under four presidents (Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Obama in 2010, Trump in 2018). Trump’s legacy might include a decade of Democratic control of the House.
Of course, Americans who are just tired of the constant Trump drama, and embarrassed by this man representing them on the world stage, are the lucky ones. For others, his Presidency has been devastating at the personal level.
NBC reports that many parents from Mexico and Latin America who entered the country illegally with their children were sent back to their home countries while their kids remain in foster care or with relatives. And thanks in no small part to the pandemic, hundreds of them remain unaccounted for:
Lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify migrant families who were separated by the Trump administration say that they have yet to track down the parents of 545 children and that about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children, according to a filing Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union.
[…]
The ACLU and other organizations that are part of a court-appointed "steering committee" learned that more than 1,000 families were separated in 2017 based on data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. Of those, the committee has been able to contact the parents of more than 550 children and believes about 25 of them may have a chance to come back to the U.S. for reunification.
Gelernt said some of the families that have been contacted have elected to keep their children in the U.S. with family members or sponsors "due to fear of what will happen to their child if they return" to their home countries.
The group Justice in Motion is physically searching for the separated parents in Mexico and Central America. "While we have already located many deported parents, there are hundreds more who we are still trying to reach," the group said in a statement. "It's an arduous and time-consuming process on a good day. During the pandemic, our team of human rights defenders is taking special measures to protect their own security and safety, as well as that of the parents and their communities."
I don’t like the direction the ACLU has taken away from defending freedom of expression, but God Bless them for taking on this important work. And may God forgive officials who allowed this to happen.
I must take issue with Charlie Sykes over this comparison he made to HuffPost:
Post-Aloha From Hawaii Elvis is a legendary cautionary tale about prescription drug abuse, but right up until the end, The King still had lucid intervals when he was capable of strong performances. Late Elvis was kind of like what Todd in the Shadows said about Lauryn Hill - buying a ticket to one of his concerts was like playing the lottery, where you’d most likely see a train wreck but if you were lucky you’d get an incredible show.
And “Way Down,” his very last single released during his lifetime, deserves to be remembered as a classic.
So, yeah, that’s completely unfair, Mr. Sykes. Don’t trash the memory of The King by comparing him to the President.
I knew you had to be up to something with the mention of an unfair comparison by *Sykes*, of all possibilities :D ... (I really enjoy reading the Bulwark - it always pays to follow up the references in your posts and I have found a lot of worthwhile sources that way, the Bulwark being one that gets read even on my craziest busy days).
Candy fatigue has indeed set in. All but the diehards (who one feels would even drink poisoned Kool-Aid with Trump rather than see him for what he truly is) are yearning for sanity and substance. McCain had substance. Biden has it, although it would be nice to see it revealed more often - yet compared to the maniac next door, he’s probably smart to maintain a lower profile.
These are people who are capable of facing adversity as an opportunity for personal growth, even and especially when it hurts. A person’s reaction to basic human situations - being deeply hurt, unconditionally loved and admired, etc. - is always very telling. The truly good ones respond with humanity and humbleness, recognizing and building on the gifts they are given.