The Baffler -- David Roth: The President of Blank Sucking Nullity From a-hole to b-hole, Trump explained

On August 12, Trump and the world witnessed armed white supremacists in the streets and an attempted mass murder by an ISIS-preferred method. Over the course of three working days, he figured out a way to get firmly and even defiantly on the wrong side of it all. In a pair of transparently strained attempts at being Presidential, Trump struggled to muster a condemnation of literal fascism on the literal march; he identified the presence of “very fine people” on both the fascist and anti-fascist sides of what is honestly not a working binary, and he reserved the phrase “truly bad people” for the news media, which had been so unfair, so unfair, in their response. By Tuesday, the issue was once again the media’s selective and slanted and dishonest treatment of him. By Thursday morning, Trump was tweeting mournfully about the tragedy of Confederate monuments being removed from public parks. He finally sounded like himself again.
Among the segment of the population that’s put off by things like a president refusing to forcefully condemn Nazi rioters, this has raised some uncomfortable questions about Trump’s beliefs. Does he really share any or many of the beliefs with the racists and nationalists and racist-nationalists who made his campaign their cause, or is this a political calculation against criticizing a small but important part of his base? Was his decision to defend statues of famous slave masters a reflection of his perspective on history, or maybe a darkly strategic reading of the national political mood? Did he not know that what he said was historically incoherent and obviously wrong? It’s right to wonder, but we should be past asking these questions about this man at this point. The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him. Start with this, and you already know a lot. Start with this, and you already know that there are no real answers to any of these questions.
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.
There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.
Trump now “executes” by way of the The Junior Soprano Method. When he senses that his staff is trying to get him to do one thing, Trump defiantly does the opposite; otherwise he bathes in the commodified reactionary grievance of partisan media, looking for stories about himself. It takes days for his oafish and overmatched handlers to coax him into even a coded and qualified criticism of neo-Nazis, and an instant for him to willfully undo it. Of course he brings more vigor to the latter than the former; he doesn’t really understand why he had to do the first thing, but he innately and deeply understands why he did the second. The first is invariably about someone else—some woman, there was a car accident, like during or maybe after that thing—and therefore, as an asshole, he does not and cannot really care about it. The second is about him and therefore, as an asshole, he really, really does.
To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States. What his intransigent admirers like most about him—the thing they aspire to, in their online cosplay sessions and their desperately thirsty performances for a media they loathe and to which they are so helplessly addicted—is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is rich or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole, and so authentically unconcerned. The howling and unreflective void at his core will keep him lonely and stupid until the moment a sufficient number of his vital organs finally resign in disgrace, but it liberates him to devote every bit of his being to his pursuit of himself. Actual hate and actual love, as other people feel them, are too complicated to fit into this world. In their place, for Trump and for the people who see in him a way of being that they are too busy or burdened or humane to pursue, are the versions that exist in a lower orbit, around the self. Instead of hate, there is simple resentment—abject and valueless and recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite.
This is what an asshole is, and lord knows Trump is not the only one in his business, or our culture, who insistently bends every incident or issue back towards his sour and jealous self. Some of the people who do this even care at some level about the broader world, but because they are assholes believe that the solution to that world’s problems lies in paying more attention to one particular asshole and his or her ideas. Trump is not one of those people. The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation. What other people might want, or indeed the fact that they could want at all, is crowded out of the picture by the corroded and corrosive bulk of his horrible self.
There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own. Is Trump a racist? Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all. Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit? Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite. Does he even know about . . . Let me stop you there. The answer is no.

The answer is always no, and it will always be no because he does not care. Every lie, every evasion, every massive and blithely issued shock to the conscience Trump authors will only ever be about him. He will never be embarrassed by any of these things, because he cannot understand anyone’s response to them except as it relates to him. Slavery? That’s another thing that his very dishonest enemies want to blame him for. Racism? He’s been accused of it, and honestly it’s so ridiculous, so ridiculous. History? He’s in the business of making it, baby. Violence? Not his fault. People protesting? He doesn’t know them.
This is the horror at the hole of every asshole, and it is why Trump will never get better as a president or a person: it will always and only be about him. History matters only insofar as it brought him to this moment; the roaring and endless present in which he lives matters because it is where he is now; the future is the place in which he will do it all again. Trump’s world ends with him, and a discourse or a politics that is locked into scrutinizing or obsessively #resisting or otherwise chasing him will invariably end up as arid and abstracted and curdled as he is. More to the point, it’s a dead end. The shame an animal feels is secret to us.

Alex Massie: Trump’s presidency will stain America for years to come

Aug. 15
The Spectator

It is amazing what a crowd – or a basket – of deplorables can do. Sometimes they can even strip away cant and reveal the truth. Such has been the case since a few hundred neo-Nazis and assorted other white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the weekend. They were protesting the planned removal of a statue honouring General Robert E. Lee, a statue typical of the American south’s longstanding emotional sympathy for the Confederacy. The Confederates might have been wrong, but they were romantic and, besides, they were our kind of wrong. Of course they should still be honoured by statues that serve as consolation prizes or participation trophies. America’s original sin endures, you know. 

And it lives in the White House too. Previous presidents have been, if we are coy about these matters, complicated creatures. But Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, to name but two of these complicated creatures, were politicians of substance; men who viewed the presidency as a means to an end, as a way of getting things done. A vehicle for improving the republic. The current incumbent, Donald J Trump, is a much simpler kind of bigot. 

There is no need to be coy about this. If it is unfair to suggest that the 63 million people who voted for Trump are all bigots and racists we may still insist upon the truth that they voted for a man who is. This has always been apparent, from the time when the Trumps were discriminating against black tenants in New York City to the time when candidate Trump was railing against Mexicans and Americans of hispanic heritage during the campaign. 

And it was made obvious, too, by the people he chose to staff his White House. The Steves, Bannon and Miller, and the likes of Seb Gorka are unapologetic white nationalists. And why, for shame, should they apologise for being so when they serve a president who is plainly cut from the same cloth? The Breitbarting of the White House has been a shameful thing to witness. Never before, or at least not in living memory, has the American presidency been so degraded. 

It is no exaggeration to say that Trump is the most ignorant president any of us can recall; ignorant, that is, of everything except his own genius. No American president has known less about American history; none has shown so little appreciation of the work done by his predecessors, nor of his own duty as a custodian of the republic’s virtues or guarantor of the better angels of its nature. Trump is ignorant of everything except himself and sometimes you suspect his knowledge of his specialist subject it itself more limited than you might think possible. 

But why should Trump be expected to take sides in a street brawl between white supremacists and counter-demonstrators? I mean, one of these groups was made up of his people and the other was not. So you can see the difficulty. Even now, shitty takes will be being prepared arguing that it’s somehow liberalism’s fault; that the decent bear responsibility for the indecent. Well, in a word, no. 

Again, not everyone who voted for Trump is a bigot but it is obvious that he performed well in the bigot community. David Duke, like the other goons marching in Charlottesville, had no doubt that Trump was his president in ways Barack Obama could never be. And again, Trump’s staffing of the White House has given Duke and his ilk every reason to believe that the president is broadly sympatico with the aims and values of white nationalism. At no point, certainly, has Trump disabused this constituency of any of this. A man must accept support from wherever he can get it, after all. 

It all represents the shaming of the United States and I think we may now suggest, quietly, that it’s not just a question of economic insecurity. These people wanted to take their country back. To the 1950s, if possible. And in their president they see a kindred soul and, while guilt by association is not always a pleasing or profitable suggestion, in this instance if the hood fits, well, it fits. 

As David Frum, a Republican whose ‘Never Trump’ bona fides need no further substantiation, observed, the president “is always an effective communicator, but rarely has he more clearly communicated who and what he is than he did today”. Quite. It would be sad if it weren’t all so shameful. And embarrassing. 

Meanwhile, I suppose a measure of pity is warranted for those people in this country still clinging to the notion this is a president who is “good for Britain”. Admittedly, that pity should be laced with scorn but there you have it. Even if Trump could plausibly be thought a Good Thing for the United Kingdom, there is something miserable about kowtowing and abasing ourselves before a man so thoroughly unqualified in every way for the office he now holds. Trump’s idea of a deal is glory for him and humiliation for you. And, besides, no-one serious can possibly trust anything he says. 

All of which is to observe that if ever there was cause for allowing Trump the benefit of the doubt, for giving him time to acclimatise to and then grow in office, that time is surely over. He is who he is and that, frankly, has been obvious from the start. If you chose to ignore this – as, to their shame, millions of Americans and too many Britons did – then you were only fooling yourselves. 

Realpolitik demands we accept disagreeable reality but even if we accept it a certain measure of self-esteem and dignity demands we recognise the truth for what it is. Nothing good can come from deluding ourselves or maintaining the fiction that what is plainly appalling is in some odd fashion actually welcome. So it is with Trump and this country’s dealings with his administration. 

If we have it bad, however, we might also spare a thought for Congressional Republicans and, indeed, millions of Trump’s voters. The possibility of redemption is still there for them, but only if they too are prepared to look reality – and truth – squarely in the face. The longer they kid themselves, the longer they maintain the lie that all of this is acceptable or somehow just within the bounds of what is normal, the more they abase and shame and soil themselves. Because it is none of these things and the more fully you recognise this the more thoroughly you begin to understand that it is likely, all of it, to get very much worse before it gets better. 

The sadness is oppressive and so too is the shame and the embarrassment one feels for a great country that has never, at least not in my lifetime, been led by a president whose worldview and every instinct refutes and repudiates the very values he is supposed to embody and uphold. 

It is what it is, I suppose, and that realisation might be the saddest of all. It has only been 200 days, albeit 200 days that feel like years. Shame. Pity. Scorn. Embarrassment. These are the leitmotifs of the Trump years. And they will stain the great American republic for years yet.