As the President Trump Show plays out daily on cable news, popular reactions — both the rants of his critics and the railings of his followers — suggest a common human tendency: We are trying to fit new circumstances into familiar vessels so we can pretend that we are not in uncharted seas.
We are all of us trying to deal with the current administration simply as one more manifestation of ideological division: Those who don’t support the Trump agenda are screaming liberals; those who do are conservative nut cases. This debate feels familiar and comfortable for all concerned. It’s water we have sailed with every presidential administration for time out of mind. We pretend that dissension over the Trump administration’s antics, gaffes and oddities has the same basis as dissension in national politics has always had: right versus left. Simple.
But we are simply wrong. The current administration fits no mold; it is unlike any we have had before.
Donald Trump is not a reincarnation of Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt or any other occupant of the Oval Office from years past. Neither is he a liberal or conservative statesman. He is an opportunist who has mastered the art of deflection, denial and off-balance sleight-of-hand dishonesty, and has sold them to a huge cross-section of our citizenry as healthy, make-us-great-again iconoclasm. No president before him has managed to fool this many of the people this much of the time with this tawdry a display of leadership.
It has nothing to do with his ideology, if indeed he has any. It’s about an overarching sense of cynicism in his entire approach to the American presidency, an air of opportunism and wink-and-nod profiteering. Buried beneath (and not very far beneath) the surface of any presidential action seems to be a single consideration: What will most benefit Donald, his cronies and his personal interests? The president has, in short, co-opted the White House as a business asset. If there is anything left in 21st-century America to inspire commonality, it should be universal condemnation of such chutzpah and arrogance by the person holding the office once thought to embody leadership of the free world.
But it’s not happening. The very unprecedented, surreal nature of the situation has America ignoring the real crisis and clutching for the old red-versus-blue model. Supporters of the administration twist and stretch like acrobats to justify Trump in his doings, and opponents chase off after every instance of incompetence or malfeasance, real or imagined. This is how the script plays out, we seem to say. This is politics in Washington, as it has always been. And so the president has both Republican-dominated houses of Congress in enthralled lockstep behind his every agenda item, however harebrained or counterproductive, because GOP control of the federal government is worth any price, including the national welfare.
And the left, rather than picking its battles and rifle-shooting the actual issues, pours time, energy and rhetoric into whatever juicy item on the daily news cycle will generate the most “buzz.” It’s all geared to short-term tactical gain, all about one-upping the other side. And while we batter and quarrel in the familiar arenas of politics past, a snake oil salesman is fleecing the country — unsustainable corporate tax cuts, torching of international bridges, industry-friendly environmental rollbacks and dismantling of social programs — and no one is really minding the store.
Vince Rampton is a practicing attorney at Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough in Salt Lake City.