Going There with Donald Trump [View all]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

How the hell do I know what I find incredible?” a bemused philosopher asks in Tom Stoppard’s play “Jumpers.” “Credibility is an expanding field … and sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.” This is a now familiar emotion, a recognizable expansion. The unimaginable happens—Donald Trump, fool, oaf, and sociopathic liar, becomes the nominee of a major American political party—and within minutes what ought to be a shock beyond understanding becomes an event to savor, accept, and analyze. The desperate efforts to normalize the aberrant begin: he’s actually a Rockefeller Republican with orange hair; he wasn’t humiliated by President Obama’s mockery at that dinner in 2011 but responded as a lovable, gregarious good guy; even his birtherism wasn’t the vile racist sewage anyone could see it to be—he was genuinely unsure about where exactly it was the President was born. Trump tells one wild ranting lie after another on Sunday-morning television—we are the most heavily taxed nation in the world; he always opposed the Iraq war—and Chuck Todd can’t do much more than nod and say “Gotcha!”


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Hitler’s enablers in 1933—yes, we should go there, instantly and often, not to blacken our political opponents but as a reminder that evil happens insidiously, and most often with people on the same side telling each other, Well, he’s not so bad, not as bad as they are. We can control him. (Or, on the opposite side, I’d rather have a radical who will make the establishment miserable than a moderate who will make people think it can all be worked out.) Trump is not Hitler. (Though replace “Muslim” with “Jew” in many of Trump’s diktats and you will feel a little less complacent.) But the worst sometimes happens. If people of good will fail to act, and soon, it can happen here.

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