So, Donald Trump is gone. At least, he's not President any more. True to form, he didn't go quietly, and he keeps hinting he'll be back in 2024. He could be in jail by then, or at least convicted of one of the many crimes for which he is currently being investigated. But since he's so far been a Teflon man, I wouldn't like to count on it.
Trump has raised untruthfulness to a pitch you would only ever expect to see in a totalitarian regime with a State-controlled media. His daily storm of tweets, not to mention his speeches and press conferences, involved a steady stream of lies. These are not a secret because the US has a free press which employs fact checkers. The Washington Post has been keeping a tally and in October 2020 it passed 30,000 untrue statements for the four years of his presidency, an average of over 50 per day. In one single day, on 11 August 2020, he made 189 untrue statements.
Some of these are trivial and silly, but some are serious. His claims about the progress of the current pandemic, and the policies that have flowed from it, cost hundreds of thousands of lives. His lies about his opponents and critics are often plainly defamatory. His lies about climate change could cost us the earth. His lies about electoral fraud in the Presidential poll, which began well before the election and have not yet stopped, led to the undermining of democratic process and the violent invasion of the Capitol. He even doubled down by lying about who committed the invasion. There is no plausible deniability in his lies - he lies openly, repeatedly and with impunity.
Yet far from these lies seeing supporters abandon him, they seem to have bound them closer to him. A substantial number of Republican law-makers took his lies about electoral fraud to the floor of the House, stretching out the debate on what should have been a formality for long enough to allow the rioters to invade and send them all scurrying for cover. Even after that debacle all but half a dozen of the Republicans in the US Senate voted against his impeachment. This is clearly a problem that goes beyond one bad apple.
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Nothing showed this more clearly than Trump's return to the spotlight at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a gathering of the right-wing of the Republican Party. In the midst of the usual torrent of lies about immigration, the stolen election and various other pieces of the usual script he hinted at another run for President to loud cheers. The woman in the cowboy hat (seen at about the three minute mark in this ABC report) summed it up best.
"I'm honestly enjoying being around so many American patriots who are pro-God, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Trump."
It's fascinating to think that the 'American patriots' are the people most determined to tear down the US electoral system but I was more intrigued by her manifesto. It rolls off the tongue so easily that you are lulled into thinking, 'OK, that's what they stand for'. It seems obvious. But let's stop and take a closer look.
One way to think about this is as a series of four propositions.
You might view this as a list from which you can choose. Maybe you might be pro-God, pro-life and pro-gun but think someone else would serve the nation better than Trump. Maybe Mike Pence - he is pro-God, pro life and pro-gun, he seems a bit more honest than Trump and as far as we know he has never had to pay off a porn star. Maybe you might be pro-God, pro-gun and pro-Trump but be undecided on the morality of abortion.
However, the devotees at CPAC have made it quite clear that this is not how they see it. It's all or nothing, as Mike Pence found out when he dared to buck the Trump line and allow the election results to be certified. For our friend in the cowboy hat and the devotees at CPAC, the four are inextricably linked.
This is a complete tribal pact you must sign in blood, and this is what creates the problem for Trump's Republican acolytes. If you stop to think for any length of time you can see that the four propositions can't co-exist as a package and leave you with any sense of integrity. This is illustrated in my third version of the diagram.
Being pro-God and pro-life are certainly compatible. After all, God is the author of life and his followers will cherish it. It's also not hard to be pro-Trump and pro-gun. Trump has varied in his attitude to gun laws over his life but as President he consistently opposed any tightening of gun laws, suggesting that the best response to school shootings was armed guards. However, the other relations are rather more problematic.
For a start, it is hard to sustain being both pro-life and pro-gun, since guns are purposely designed for killing things, including people. The fierce resistance to any sort of gun control in the wake of the frequent mass shootings (many involving children) which are a feature of US life is just baffling. One has to conclude, as many have, that these people are not really pro-life, they are just pro-birth. Once the children have been launched into the wide cruel world they just have to take their chances.
It is similar with the relationship between being pro-God and Pro-Trump. We have seen various right-wing Christian figures like Franklin Graham and Eric Metaxas proclaiming that Trump is God's chosen one and that it is a Christian duty to vote for him. Yet it is hard to picture the Christian God and Trump getting on. God is the author of truth, but Trump has publicly lied over 30,000 times. God is a fan of chastity and financial honesty, but Trump is a serial philanderer and has fought tooth and nail to keep his tax records from the public eye. He is not even repentant about these obvious faults, telling journalists he can't think of anything he needs to repent of.
God's Chosen, the man who has no need to repent. Does this remind you of anyone? Trump is not a Christian ally, he is a competitor, a rival Christ who seeks the role of national savior in God's name. You can't have both, you have to choose which one you will worship.
This little tetrad is just one example of the kind of cognitive dissonance involved in being a Trump Republican. One has to simultaneously maintain that one is pro-life and that it is OK to separate refugee children from their families and facilitate the free distribution of high-powered firearms. One has to simultaneously hold the view that Jesus is God's chosen one, and that Trump is. One has to square support for 'law and order' with a violent invasion of the seat of government. And this is without the sea of bizarre conspiracy theories in which Trump's hard-core supporters swim.
If you have ever had the misfortune of attempting to debate a Trump supporter you will have noticed how quickly they switch from discussion to personal abuse. I believe this is because for them, reasoned discussion is literally impossible. The only way to maintain the illusion is to shout louder in order to drown out thought.
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When I got my Trump toilet brush for Christmas I posted a picture of it online and asked for suggestions as to what to do with it. One of my Trump-supporting relatives took offence, and provided me with a list of Trump's achievements as President. These included upholding religious freedom, standing up to China, bringing peace to the Middle East and opposing abortion. Short though this list is for four years of Presidency, it is worth examining.
Religious Freedom
It appears to have escaped the attention of most Trump supporters that religious freedom is protected in the US constitution. The First Amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Religious freedom is not under threat in the US. Every now and then the courts have made rulings which ensure that people who are not fundamentalist Christians can also exercise their First Amendment rights, for instance to get married, buy cake or otherwise live the lives they choose even if these offend fundamentalist sensibilities. But this is not a curtailment of religious freedom, it is upholding the prohibition on establishing a religion.
Standing Up To China
The Trump administration started a trade war with China, based on the notion that the US was getting a raw deal out of the exchanges. This notion may be correct, I don't know. I don't understand much about trade policy. From what I can see the main result so far has been to cut off the Chinese market to various US exporters who are now on the hunt for new markets. Australia, always a willing participant in America's international disputes, has found itself caught up in the war.
At the same time, we have found ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic caused by a virus that originated in China. This too has become part of the war. Trump and his supporters have claimed all sorts of unlikely things about the virus's origin. Meanwhile, the Chinese government has obstructed a WHO team investigating the origins. This means that we have lots of speculation but few facts about where it came from.
Since I am old enough to have been around during the Cold War, this all looks very familiar. Two global superpowers face off across a divide that is partly ideological but mostly to do with power and domination. Truth, the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. So sure, Trump is standing up to China. China is standing up to Trump in return. Who will win? If we are lucky, everyone, if things go as they usually do, no-one.
Peace in the Middle East
Trump's other supposed foreign policy triumph is to achieve peace in the Middle East. If you are following Middle Eastern news, and more so if you are living there, this might come as a surprise to you. A brutal war is underway in Yemen, with mass civilian casualties, facilitated by US ally Saudi Arabia using US-made weapons. Civil war continues in Libya with no end in sight. Islamic State has been defeated in Syria, mostly through the efforts of the Assad regime backed by Russia and of local Kurdish militias who the US promptly abandoned. Now the Assad regime is firmly in control of a decimated Syria. Is this a good thing?
But this is not what my relative means. What he is referring to is the 'normalisation agreements' signed between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, assisted by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. These agreements are not nothing. They make Israel more secure, giving it more allies in the region. This is good if you are pro-Israel, which most Trump supporters are, but not so great if you are Palestinian. Does this equate to peace? It depends what happens next. What it does is clarify the lines of conflict in the Middle East, and these look remarkably old school. On the one side, we have the Saudi bloc aligned with the US, with Israel now inside the camp. On the other we have the Iranian bloc which includes Syria and Iraq, backed by Russia. It's like the Cold War all over again, complete with proxy wars in Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya and of course Afghanistan. It's tense and complicated. Is it peaceful? Not particularly.
Opposing Abortion
Lastly, back to the US domestic scene and the issue which has bound conservative Christians to the Republican Party through thick and thin for the past few decades. Trump has been hailed as the most anti-abortion President in history. I have often asked his supporters what Trump has actually done to reduce abortion rates and his supporters struggle to answer. I had to google it for myself and the results were meagre.
Trump has grandstanded a lot on abortion, speaking at Right to Life events and touting his opposition to abortion. Talk is cheap.
Secondly, he has appointed three 'conservative' judges to the Supreme Court who have previously indicated their disagreement with the precedent set in 'Roe vs Wade', the Supreme Court case which protects the right to abortion in the US. These judges in a now conservative-dominated court have yet to hear an abortion-related case and there is no guarantee they ever will, nor how they will rule when an actual case comes before them with real live evidence.
Has any of this resulted in fewer abortions? I'm glad you asked. The Centres for Disease Control collect abortion data from around the US and it tells an interesting story. In 2009, the year Barack Obama was sworn in as US President, there were 784,507 abortions. This number fell every year of the Obama presidency, reaching 623,471 in 2016. There is a lag in reporting so we only have data up until 2018, the first two years of Trump. In the first of these it fell again, to 612,719, before rising to 619,591 in 2018*. Other estimates differ on the raw numbers (for instance, this one from the Guttmacher Institute has higher absolute numbers) but agree on the trend. One swallow doesn't make a summer, but on the evidence so far Trump succeeded in breaking a trend which stretched through the whole Obama presidency, overseeing the first increase in the number of abortions in at least a decade. One wonders, based on this performance, why Barack Obama was not hailed as the most anti-abortion President ever. But perhaps this is gilding the lily. Abortion rates have been falling in the US since the 1980's.
What explains this decline? The Guttmacher Institute puts it down mostly to a reduction in unwanted pregnancies. And here we get to the heart of the question - are you actually pro-life, or is it just a posture? Public health experts tell us the most effective way to reduce abortion is to give women and girls better control over their reproductive health - to teach them about birth control, give them access to health services and contraceptives, and protect them from rape. But Trump and his supporters oppose these measures. What are the chances of reducing abortion when you oppose the measures that work, while talking big but doing little on measures that don't?
This reinforces my understanding above. Being 'pro-life' is not so much a policy goal for the CPAC crowd, it is a badge they wear. It matters little whether actual babies are born or not, nor what kind of life they have after birth. What matters is that you say, loudly and with feeling, that you hate abortion.
(* Quick update as at August 2022 - we now have 2019 data as well and abortions rose in that year again, to 629,898. The number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 also increased during Trump's term, from 11.2 in 2017 to 11.3 in 2018 and 11.4 in 2019, while the ratio of abortions to live births went up from 185 for every 1,000 births in 2017 to 189 in 2018 and 195 in 2019. So no, sadly the 2018 number does not seem to be a blip.)
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Of course there are certain things Trump's supporters just don't mention. Top of the list is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump's disastrous mishandling of this pandemic, along with that of his State counterparts, has led to the deaths of half a million people and counting. Then there's climate change, which Trump and his supporters persistently deny despite the evidence of actual changes to the climate across all four seasons. Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Accords has set US and global efforts to cut emissions back at a time when they need to leap decisively forward.
Alongside this, there is the blatant criminality of his team and his circle of advisers. He labels every investigation into him a 'witch hunt'. Yet the Mueller probe, the 'biggest witch hunt in American history', resulted in eight Trump aides being convicted of offences. No doubt you need a big witch hunt when there are lots of actual witches. Other Trump aides have been indicted for other things. Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon was charged with embezzling funds from a charity he set up to help fund Trump's wall along the Mexican border. Ivanka Trump is being investigated for her role in a charity set up to fund Trump's presidential inauguration which engaged in financial shenanigans like paying $1m to hire a ballroom at Trump Hotel for the night. Many of these people were pardoned by Trump in the final weeks of his presidency - but not those who testified against him as part of plea deals.
There could have been more, but Trump refused to allow White House officials to appear before various Congressional inquiries which effectively shielded them - and him - from further scrutiny. After sacking both FBI chief James Comey and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions for refusing to interfere with Mueller's probe, Sessions' replacement William Barr ran interference at its close. To this day the full report has been neither released nor tendered to Congress. And all of this is before we get to Trump's own desperate attempts to overturn the results of November's Presidential Election, which included personally ringing State officials to ask them to find him some extra votes.
Nonetheless after all this misgovernment, compulsive lying and criminality one solid fact remains. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Trump in the 2020 election. This is seven million fewer than voted for Joe Biden but still more than had voted for any other Presidential candidate in US history. These votes were not fraudulent, they really happened. This is 74 million people who either believed his lies, or didn't care as long as they got what they wanted. This, ultimately, is the damage that has been done to American democracy. Trump didn't do it alone. The Tea Party movement, The Heartland and Cato Institutes, key fundamentalist leaders, Fox News, Breitbart, Q-Anon and an army of Russian troll bots all played their part. It is a long walk back from here. Good luck, America.
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