[…]
Trump’s reëlection, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no longer be ascribed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least mysterious public figure alive; he has been announcing his every disquieting tendency, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or detractor, who does not acknowledge, at least to some degree, his cynicism and divisiveness, his disrespect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American soldiers are “suckers.” Many of his former closest advisers—Vice-President Mike Pence; his chief of staff John Kelly; Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—have described him as unfit, unstable, and, in the case of Kelly and Milley, a fascist. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump went out of his way to dismiss his consultants’ blandishments to moderate his tone. Instead, he pretended to fellate a microphone and threatened to direct the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself, as if to say, “Forget the scripted stuff on the teleprompter. Listen to me when I go off-the-cuff. The conspiracy theories. The fury. The vengeance. The race-baiting. The embrace of Putin and Orbán and Xi. The wild stories. This is me, the real me. I’m a genius. I’m weaving!”
[…]
An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would signal an abnegation of one of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion that American democracy is a sham—that there is no democracy. All that matters is power and self-interest. The rest is sanctimony and hypocrisy. Putin reminds us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; it can turn out to be an episode.
One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here.
It’s too abstract. The virus has a life of its own. Blaming Trump for those deaths is kind of like blaming Biden for hurricane that hit North Carolina.
Yeah, Trump could’ve implemented policies that he didn’t that the experts have told us could’ve saved lives. However, that’s all hypothetical savings.
That’s very different than “Trump deported my friend” or “Trump’s FDA let heavy metals into my Little Debbie’s” or “Trump’s economic policy resulted in me losing my home because I couldn’t afford to live.”
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Trump dismantled the team in China that monitored the exact market where the virus originated from. He then ignored the handbook for combating the pandemic that the Obama administration had created for precisely this kind of virus, deliberately stalled the federal response, because he erroneously believed that the virus would kill more Democrats than Republicans, knowingly spread lies about masks and vaccines and on top of all of that, enriched himself and his cronies when he did finally respond. Crucially however, the world is organized in such a way that without an adult at the helm in the US, the global response to the virus was disjointed and disorganized, since so many systems depend on a competent American government in charge.
