How Trumpism Changed America

I borrow most of the title from an excellent essay by Clare Malone for fivethirtyeight.com the day that Pennsylvania was called for Biden.   There is now an embodiment for the sentiment that has lingered for long, surged, then congealed, lifting Donald Trump to an improbable Presidency riding a wave of festering froth.  As for so much else he rode, on his route to his current beached state, he gets to brand it. 

I leave it to the semioticians and neuropsychiatrists to explain how one translates his boffo B.S. into something resonating favorably in adult voters' brains.  It does appear now, though, that there is a permanent policy focus to the narcissistic bombast that Dikhead45 foisted upon us.  The January 6 Trump Riot crystallized it. 

I would synthesize Trumpism's real-world manifestation as opposition to the continued functioning of almost all the US Federal Government. Defense, Homeland Security--they get the maximum, but that's pretty much it.  Maybe FEMA, because God.   As for the rest of them, the approach was to sap their energy with bad appointees and dire directives contrary to their mission, whatever it is.  The sad result is that the dysfunction of the Federal departments starved for proper leadership only increases, while even those favored face the curse of being requested to behave improperly to suit their commander's impure impulses. And so the murmurs of disunion, internally and abroad, are not dispelled, as they should be when an evil smell is suppressed.  For it lingers on. 

The Trump Administration's Active Self-Sabotage 

Commerce (Wilbur!) and how he tried to corrupt our Census!  

H.U.D.  - He appointed Ben Carson, who barely knew what the department did, even after four years of doing it. 

D.O.E. - He appointed Rick Perry, who once promised on national TV that he would have eliminated the department's existence if he had been elected.  And if he could remember. 

State - He ruined the department in so many ways, particularly by providing obstacles to its ordinary functions, but also by the ludicrous foreign policies he ordered up.  Finding suitable stooges to execute his bizarre, immoral impulses was a challenge, and he couldn't completely do without international relations--though he preferred it to be done through his zealot loyalist trade guy.  So, he let the rest of it atrophy, putting pompous Pompeo to be the mouthpiece of whatever, with only those of infinite patience able to endure just those four years.                                   

He even tried to obstruct the functioning of the Post Office!    DeJoy, for Ben Franklin's sake!  

His damage was not limited to his executive mismanagement, though his use of his directly authorized powers to corrupt were extensive.  He did what he could, and it was a lot, to further the corrupting politicization of Federal court appointments, which will endure. He attacked, and continues to attack, the functioning of our election systems--criticism surely justified, though not for the reasons, if any, he ever cited--even though his Federal executive has little to no control over them. 

As far as Congressional relations with the White House were concerned, he seemed happy with stasis and stalemate, once he had extracted the tax cuts (less fuel for the Federal government) that he sought.  He was OK with the McConnell debt limit default threat strategy, basically a tactic to deny the government the ability to pay its bills.

--Written Sept. 8, 2021.  

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