trump legacy

The Legacy of President Donald Trump He was America's tour guide on its loudest, most exhausting, and longest-ever journey in a circle. Matt Taibbi Dec 23, 2020 727 880 Reports say Donald Trump has lost it. Unable to face the reality that he will no longer be president soon, stung by public repudiations from the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Bill Barr, and other erstwhile pals, he is said to be canceling appearances left and right, retreating to a lonely schedule of golf and manic conspiracy theorizing on Twitter. He posted 550 times in just a few weeks of November, with three-fourths of that content, the New York Times for some reason calculated, made up of rants about a stolen election. Unlike past presidents, who with the exception of Dick Nixon were all feted on the way out no matter what crooked or blood-soaked record they left behind, Trump is being ridden out on a rail. He exits politics as he entered it, as a human punchline, a ball of catnip to the commentariat, which gets to snicker now about his thinning schedule and “tiny desk” (the updated version of all those jokes about short fingers that drove him so crazy once). There is delight as “former close associates, longtime Trump observers, and mental health experts” whisper into the op-ed pages the cold final judgment that, as Politico put it, “Trump is a loser.” Which is fine — victori sunt spoila and all that — but it’s already safe to say the Trump years will be remembered as a brutal black comedy that made winners and losers alike look very, very bad. It was supposed to be a historic, norms-smashing catastrophe, but the reality is that almost nothing actually happened during the Trump years, except for a very long, exhausting story. The major in-between change was a total loss of our collective grip on reality, beginning with the fact that most of the country thinks we just went to hell and back a thousand times, instead of making just one noisy trip in a circle, arriving just where we might have four years ago, if Joe Biden had run instead of Hillary Clinton. The tiniest conceivable step, but oh so much grief and self-deception to get there! They’ll deny it, but huge portions of the snickering chatterati rooted for Trump at first. When he jumped in the 2016 race, cultural icons laughed, big-money Democrats cheered, and rubbernecking cosmopolitan media audiences clicked and tuned in by the millions. Except for the more favored Republican primary opponents who learned early on to look on Trump with genuine alarm, like a social disease persisting beyond the usual course of medication, most of upscale America thought the Trump Show was a hoot. It was a happy event when he called into Morning Joe, like the old scripted radio bits where Rob Bartlett would call into Imus in the Morning as Bill Clinton or Don Corleone or Manuel Noriega, except here the voice pumping in one-liners over the phone to the guffawing straight-man cast was the real Donald Trump. Mika, Joe, and Willie yukked it up about Donald’s Latino friend who’d sorta learned English (“I wouldn’t say it’s Ernest Hemingway we’re dealing with,” Trump cracked) about the realness of Donald’s hair (“I tugged it once,” agreed Mika) and about how “it meant the world” to Lawrence O’Donnell when Trump was one of the first to reach out to him after he got his show back (“I like him,” O’Donnell said). The Hillary Clinton campaign was even more enthralled. Bill Clinton, after all, had an encouraging chat with Trump just weeks before he entered the 2016 race, telling Trump he “was striking a chord with frustrated conservatives and was a rising force on the right,” as the Washington Post explained. The Clintons were preparing to run against Jeb Bush, who scared them because he had cash and an economic message that reportedly polled well with minority voters. The infamous Wikileaks-leaked memo about pied piper candidates showed the Clinton campaign was anxious to “elevate” Trump during the 2016 primary season, feeling they could use his lunatic act to defame the GOP against the inevitably more moderate “real” candidate down the line. When it started to look like Trump had a shot at winning the Republican nomination, the Clinton campaign was so tickled it kept its mouth shut, so as not to jinx the situation. As Politico later reported: Guidance was to hold fire on Trump during the primary and resist the urge to distribute any of the opposition research the Democrats were scrambling to amass against him. That hoarding plan remained in place deep into 2016 as some senior aides stayed convinced that a race against Trump would be a dream… Democrats understood that Trump was an effective chaos agent, an iconoclastic shit-hurler who could bust apart the candidacies of people like Bush and Marco Rubio. They didn’t realize Trump was only just beginning an unprecedented assault on institutional America that would sweep them up as well, and that his greatest asset would be the consistent inability of upper-class America to take him seriously. When Trump entered politics, his reputation in places where the most influential people live — the Upper East Side, Georgetown and Northern Virginia, in the wealthy tech-fattened cities of the West Coast — was that of a class A buffoon and small-time huckster. He wasn’t rich in the same way as people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Mike Bloomberg. He was like one of those billionaires in the same way Madonna was “like” a virgin. Try to imagine Jeff Bezos juggling bridge loans while using his name to hustle steaks or ties or Jacquard throw blankets, and you’ll get an idea of how desperate and gauche Trump seemed to people with real money. He was the kind of character educated people found infinitely mockable: an egotist and gluttonous devourer of inherited cash who made it all the way through the grad programs of the country’s finest schools unblemished by insight, reflection, or idealism. Impressively, he seemed even more immune to America’s civilizing institutions than George W. Bush. Trump was tacky, had absurd hair, and his interests seemed limited to money and fake boobs. If wealthy America is a family, Trump was its Fredo, an embarrassing loudmouth who in his younger days reportedly couldn’t focus on work because he was having sex with “two and three women” at the same time. Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter earned his post as the official stenographer of the American upper classes on the strength of his work at Spy lampooning twits like the “short-fingered vulgarian.” Trump was the ideal Spy target: book-dumb, shallow, and thin-skinned. Picking on him was a way for the smart set to congratulate itself on its superior refinement. In 2011, when Barack Obama responded to Trump’s preposterous birther campaign by savaging him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, noting that questions like whether to fire Meat Loaf or Gary Busey on Celebrity Apprentice are “the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night,” the crowd howled in delight. Obama was a checklist of everything Trump wasn’t: trim, handsome, elegant, brilliant, a civil rights hero, a perfect exemplar of upper-class attitudes and decorum, and incidentally, an actual sex symbol whose (one) wife years later would still gush over his “swag.” (Testimonials from the women in Trump’s life tend to run more along the lines of Stormy Daniels blurting out, “I had sex with that… Eech”). Obama won every conceivable plaudit from high society, including a Grammy, Time’s Person of the Year, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. Trump meanwhile was a two-time nominee for a Reality Programming Emmy who lost both times, and would at one point come close — the city council vote was 3-2 — to having to return the key to the city of Doral, Florida. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner trailing only the Oscars and maybe Davos as the ultimate gathering place for America’s beautiful people, Obama’s brutal 2011 routine (delivered with unsurprisingly perfect comic timing, as TV cameras cut back and forth to shots of an unamused Trump in profile), was the tuxedo class equivalent of a tarring and feathering. When NBC finally ditched The Apprentice in 2015, it was the culmination of decades of rejection of Trump by polite society (to be fair, most of it probably deserved). This positioned him to commence what would become one of America’s all-time revenge tours. The mockery Trump earned gave him something in common with huge portions of the rest of America, which also felt it was being laughed at by one-percenters. It took Trump a while to grasp this. When he took his first halting steps toward the presidency in 1999, flirting with the nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform Party and touting himself as a guy who was “pretty liberal on social issues,” he was clearly still trying to win the approval of members of his own social class. He went to the left of Clinton in stumping for gay soldiers in the military, said he wanted the “great lady” Oprah Winfrey as a running mate, and ended up ditching the party when it included “a Klansman, [David] Duke, a neo-Nazi, [Pat] Buchanan… not company I wish to keep.” The 1999 Trump tried to sound statesmanlike, but it got him nowhere with the society crowd whose acceptance he craved. Jesse Ventura was taken more seriously. By 2016 he realized all the mockery he’d absorbed worked in his favor. Trump is no intellectual, but he does have a knack for sniffing out the real bottom lines of business deals, and his campaign started picking up steam once he started to talk about how American politics for most people was basically a defective/fraudulent product, sold by the same people who’d laughed at him at the Correspondents’ Ball. He knew something about selling crappy products to mass audiences and began spilling the political trade secrets of the monied class in his speeches. His emergence as a populist hero nonetheless delighted his old society enemies, who were unconcerned enough to egg him on out of sheer bemusement. Even Carter reiterated in 2016 that Trump’s fingers still looked “abnormally stubby.” Trump began his vengeance campaign with the easiest targets, Republicans. He asked a simple question during the 2016 primary: why was one of the two most powerful political parties in the country content to put its fate in the hands of a clear sub-mediocrity like Jeb Bush? Trump pantsed Jeb and the rest as phony “leaders” who had no will of their own and whose real job was to be puppets of other interests who didn’t have to guts to show themselves. He then deployed the same strategy against Hillary Clinton, who walked into his trap by openly courting Bush’s donors and refusing to repudiate the Wall Street titans backing her. Trump at best was a deeply flawed human being, and maybe a level or two down from that — I think particularly of the story from Ivana Trump about Trump ripping out a clump of her hair and allegedly forcing himself on her as punishment for recommending the wrong scalp reduction surgeon — but he was the only politician who bothered to prioritize talking directly to voters. Democrats like Clinton were obsessed with the transactional model of politics, which dictated that winning was mainly a matter of securing the right backers, the right endorsements, and the right message, written by the right consultants. The way they did politics scarcely involved input from people outside K Street. They were the political version of movie producers more interested in Oscars and invitations to Cannes than box office, in competition with someone in touch enough with America’s lowest common denominator to create The Apprentice. It shone through that Trump actually liked interacting with his voters (“I love the poorly educated!”) in ways no Democrat since Bill Clinton had thought necessary or desirable. Trump did campaign on a platform designed to play to xenophobia and racism, and the motivation for his run, the part that wasn’t a craven PR stunt designed to revive his flagging entertainment career, came from the same general place that inspires people to leave pipe bombs and set forest fires: he felt personally slighted and wanted to spread the hurt. He more or less completely destroyed the old Republican Party in 2016, while the damage he did to Democrats was lasting in a different way. He forced them to abandon their pretensions to kumbaya liberalism and announce themselves as the elitist authoritarians they’d always been. Trump deserved the fragging he got from Obama in 2011. The birther campaign that inspired it was one of the lower stunts he ever pulled, though one could argue inducing people to take out loans to buy ripoff diplomas or welching on bills to workers is worse than anything you can do to a sitting president. Still, even the sainted Obama had weaknesses. Who could argue it wasn’t ridiculous to give the Nobel Peace Prize to a guy who held weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings to decide whom to assassinate, bragged to aides he was “really good at killing people,” and was creepily believable when he threatened to wipe out the Jonas Brothers with Predator Drones? It was no less ridiculous when President Trump years later began insisting that he should get a Nobel Prize, too, “if they give it out fairly, which they don’t.” But he was probably right when he said he deserved the award at least as much as Obama, who was conducting bombings in seven different countries by 2016 and, as Trump correctly noted, “had no idea why he got it” when he won. While he isn’t really rich, Trump had enough money to significantly finance his first run for president, which underscored the ugly truth that politicians running against him were technically even smaller-time swindlers than he was, and therefore also more pathetic. After all, Clintons and Bushes (and Obamas, and Bidens) had to whore themselves for donor checks to run, and pay for political ads, while he, Trump, got the press to spread his message for free. Trump described the presidency as a door prize passed back and forth between competing clans of wealthy interests, who in turn delegated it to a jumped-up servant class of political prostitutes, the sort of people whose attendance at a wedding anyone, Trump included, could buy for a few thousand bucks. Most of these front men and women — Clintons, Bushes, whatever — were hustlers just like Trump, people who’d suck the paint off a doorknob for a dollar, or pass NAFTA for two. Trump’s pitch was, would you rather vote for an unrepentant pig like me, or someone who goes to Oxford to learn how to make selling you out to Johnson & Johnson or Lloyd Blankfein sound like it’s your idea? If you thought in these terms, the vulgarity gap suddenly didn’t look so pronounced. Once Trump was elected, competing narratives developed. One involved the real President Trump, a dedicated incompetent whose skill at accomplishing almost nothing of substance across four years ought rightly to earn him a place alongside great presidential non-doers like Gerald Ford, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. The other narrative described a figure of surpassing importance and unique historical evil, an American Hitler. Trump can’t have been both, but somehow is, supposedly. What gives? Go through any media list of Trump’s worst in-office offenses, and most of the stuff you’ll find is head-scratchingly small-time — for Hitler. Hatch Act violations? Kellyanne Conway using her social media account to hype “Make America Great Again”? Leaving 10 IG offices vacant and firing two others who were investigating his staffers? Violations of the emoluments clause? That last one always cracks me up. Yes, Trump and his spawn seem to have worked tirelessly to pad the bottom lines of Trump businesses, including the use of the Trump Tower as a headquarters for the RNC, the hosting of a G-7 Summit at a Trump Doral Miami golf resort, having lobbyists from companies like T-Mobile stay at his hotels, etc., etc. This was the one use of White House authority the Trump administration seems to have entered into with real gusto, as there were reportedly more than two thousand visits by government officials to Trump properties. This was predictable given the vast record of sleazy profiteering in his litigation history, but also should have been as much a relief as an outrage to Trump critics. If Trump couldn’t figure out a better way to monetize the presidency than shuttling G-7 leaders to eat $17 shrimp salads at his shitty golf courses, it probably meant he didn’t grasp the more terrifying conceptual possibilities for corruption in the presidential machinery. Behaviorally, Trump was an embarrassment, talking about “shithole countries,” suggesting minority congresswomen “go back” to the “most corrupt and inept” countries from whence they came (three of the four were American-born), and saying things like “Why do we need more Haitians?” As an example-setter and inciter of bad behavior, Trump probably has no presidential equal, but this is America and we grade on a pretty serious scale, when it comes to Executive Branch iniquity. Where’s his secret bombing of Cambodia? Which country did he drench in disfiguring Agent Orange? How many wars did he start under false pretenses? Where’s his Teapot Dome, his Palmer Raids, or, for that matter, his $39 billion war support contract for KBR/Halliburton? Imagine if George W. Bush the Simple had actually run his White House, instead of a more organized psychopath like Dick Cheney, and you get a decent picture of Trump’s real legacy. On every level, Bush’s presidency — which launched two bloody wars and built vast programs of secret surveillance and extralegal detention that will outlive all of Trump’s fiercest critics — was more destructive than that of Trump. Yet, Bush hangs with Ellen DeGeneres and is celebrated for receiving a “moving” embrace from Michelle Obama, while Trump is uniformly shunned as an irredeemable monster. This is because the Trump legend constructed by antagonists, which was as much about culture as it was about politics, was always destined to have more historical import than the Trump reality. The paradox of this period is that the legend was often more ridiculously false than Trump’s own lies. Trump arrived just as his old boss at NBC, Jeff Zucker, came to CNN. Zucker wanted to “broaden the definition of news” and right away began pushing the network to reality-style coverage blowouts of things like drifting cruise ships and the disappearing Malaysian airliner. Don Lemon even sank to interviewing a “celebrity llama” in the months before Trump announced. Zucker immediately understood that Trump could be a permanent solution to programming problems. “I’ve always been interested in the news, but I’ve always been interested in what’s popular,” Zucker told the Times. “I’ve always had a little bit of a populist take… Which I know is interesting when you talk about Donald Trump.” Just as Trump learned the value in being attacked by the kind of snobs who attend the Correspondents’ Ball, CNN learned there was huge value in being attacked by Trump, whose constant complaints and tweets gave the network plenty of its own “earned media.” This led CNN to ditch what Zucker described as the “utility” profile the network enjoyed prior to his arrival, and embrace being “characters in a drama.” This decision, mimicked in one form or another by nearly every mainstream news organization in the Trump years (usually citing motivations less honestly expressed than those of openly ratings-obsessed Zucker), produced the first important part of Trump’s legacy, the permanent alteration of the news landscape. News changed from something often dull and neutral in tone to a charged narrative show, in which the drama of each day’s events built toward the next, in the manner of episodic TV. This format depended upon static sets of villains and heroes, whose virtues and vices had to be operatic in scope to justify the daily coverage barrage. The truest things about Trump were his smallness of character and the accidental nature of his success, but the instant he was elected he was sold to us as the grandest of villains: leader of a coming fascist revolution, a super-spy for the Russians, the head of a white supremacist conspiracy. For four years, Trump was ludicrously portrayed as not merely a diabolical traitor, but a revolutionary planning the imminent overthrow of democracy. Trump-Putin-Boris Johnson was the new Axis of Evil, and Trump’s every move was imbued with significance far beyond grubby reality, to the point where educated people in 2018 marched to protect the job of Jeff Sessions, in the belief that his firing was the first lit match in the American Reichstag. “We aren’t alarmed enough about Jeff Sessions’s Firing,” is how Vox put it (we actually didn’t really need to be alarmed at all, about this or a hundred other things). Every other week, some poor Atlas propping up the weight of civilization had to be physically protected from Trump’s imminent assault: Christopher Steele, Jim Comey, the Ukraine whistleblower, the anonymous #Resistance author bravely penning a New York Times editorial, Stephan Halper, Marie Yovanovich, the “exfiltrated spy,” and countless other facers-of-danger, a suspiciously high number of whom ended up scoring sweet book deals. “Democracy itself” was reported to be hanging by a thread so many times in the last four years that it would take a massive effort to count the instances (I should know, I’ve been working on the list for months), and while the Trump administration did many questionable things, Trump himself somehow never followed through on rumored plans to upend the Mueller probe or cancel elections or start nuclear war, or any of a thousand other Dr. No-style schemes to destroy the world. Trump’s best defense to the most serious accusations was that he was just a shnook developer who was overmatched in Washington and wouldn’t have known how to commit half the crimes attributed to him. But his delusions of being a political superhero, a cross of Lincoln, Churchill, and Reagan (he gracefully conceded Jesus was a little more famous), led him to subconsciously endorse the false legend of colossal importance. On some level, he preferred being Hitler to conceding the old insult of a “short-fingered” nobody, helping power the symbiotic news mania. He played up his reputation as a threat to the established order, when he demonstrated repeatedly that he didn’t really know how to be that. He flirted with moves that would have left a mark, like pulling out of Afghanistan or pardoning Ed Snowden, but his most significant acts were nearly all designed to curry favor with the political class whose approval he still craved, like his massive 2017 tax cut, his record military spending hike, and especially his epic commitment of government support for the financial markets at the start of the pandemic, whose clear policy ancestor was the Bush/Obama bailout of 2008-2009. Democrats should not only give eternal thanks for Trump’s ignorance (in the form of quotes like the one about combatting Covid using disinfectant “by injection or almost a cleaning”) his uncouth manner (his “I hope you can let this go” aside to James Comey about Michael Flynn is probably how he dealt with a hundred gaming and workplace inspectors in places like Atlantic City), and his almost total lack of traditional political savvy. Down the stretch in 2020 he often insulted huge potential support blocs, from the elderly to the supporters of “Crazy Bernie.” This year, he abandoned his own successful 2016 outsider strategy, cloaking himself in the garb of a traditional Republican by painting Biden and Harris as radical leftists, instead of proxies for Wall Street. This was done seemingly in service of a delusion that he, Trump, was now the defender of the establishment. Of course, the actual establishment rewarded him by massively shifting its third-quarter donations to Biden and Harris. Down to the bitter end, Trump was crippled by his desire to be taken seriously by the representatives of the political “swamp” he’d denounced, the John Boltons and Gary Cohns and H.R. McMasters, who all predictably stabbed him in the face at the first opportunity. This was another reason Revolutionary Trump was always absurd. Not only does he not have enough friends to pull it off — he’d have trouble enlisting enough conspirators to hold down the White House State Dining Room, let alone the Pentagon or the Capitol Police — but the legend conflicts too strongly with his proven desire for acceptance. He may like visiting the poorly educated, but he doesn’t want to be banished to go live with them. As for his current “coup,” as it is being called by nearly everyone in media: It’s an odd sort of coup when the chief plotter has already agreed to surrender power on schedule. “Certainly I will, and you know that,” Trump said, when asked if he would leave the White House on January 20th. My faith in Trump’s sanity is not so absolute that I can’t see him forcing the Secret Service to drag him out by his underpants on that day, but there’s a difference between throwing a media tantrum (Trump is adept at this) and successfully overthrowing the government. The Trump presidency will be over soon, and though there will doubtless be drama in between, his leaving with a whimper will mark the last in a staggering list of Trump-related false alarms. There was always so much less than met the eye with this story, a simple tale of an arrogant ruling class that first got a deserved comeuppance in the form of maybe the least deserving challenger imaginable. It then spent four years pretending it was beaten by a demonic supervillain instead of an ad-libbing, flatulent salesman with a fourth-grade reading level. The propaganda we had to endure to cover up the embarrassing real story had the unfortunate effect of furthering distrust in both media and government, and therefore (of course) swelling Trump’s numbers. This was yet another of the symbiotic idiocy cycles that have come to so characterize American politics in the Trump age. No one will admit it, but Trump was and is a quintessentially American type, and his rise to the presidency, one of the all-time American stories. It was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County meets Duck Soup meets Scarface, a tall tale saga of how anyone determined enough, and full enough of resentment, greed, and unearned confidence, can make it all the way to the top in this country, armed with nothing but the pure power of bullshit. Would we really want things any other way? All of this may have been a miserable confluence of events, but the core truth of the Trump story is that in democracy, we have to accept that anything can happen, even this. It’s part of the deal. More than that, it’s over. Let’s hope we never have to find out that the only thing worse than the circus we just went through is an alternative, where it’s impossible. 727 880 ← PreviousNext → Write a comment… CommentorinchiefDec 23, 2020 So I was several paragraphs in waiting for the obligatory clarification from Matt along the lines of “of course, these are not my opinions on Trump, but those of the elitist snobs I have pilloried in my work” but I if it exists, I couldn’t wait that long. I couldn’t get past this gem: “Obama was a checklist of everything Trump wasn’t: trim, handsome, elegant, brilliant, a civil rights hero, a perfect exemplar of upper-class attitudes and decorum, and incidentally, an actual sex symbol whose (one) wife years later would still gush over his “swag.” I don’t know if Matt looks up to or is sucking up to the people that think this way but I can assure you the large majority in this country think these comments are a joke. I can’t take it seriously. 43Reply 199 replies by Matt Taibbi and others Tom WorsterDec 23, 2020 At the end of and after Obama's 2nd term, Matt would defend Obama against critics from the left. That changed this year when Obama came out for Biden. Matt seemed to start to accept that he'd fallen for Obama's con and that he had always been a tool of the ruling elite. That's a bitter lesson. It takes time to process and reorganize one's stories. Matt's working these things out in these pieces and it makes sense that his anger is mostly directed to the educated liberals since he is one. My critique of this article is that it lets Trump off for some serious damage that he's certainly responsible for that will at best take time to undo and/or may never be undone. 5Reply 12 replies by Matt Taibbi and others 878 more comments… © 2021 Matt Taibbi. See privacy, terms and information collection notice Publish on Substack