Some Thoughts on Obama v. Trump

One of the narratives that time may have diluted a bit regarding Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was the sense that he represented a significant step towards the fulfillment of a promise that so many of us thought to be merely fancifal, the promise that any American child could grow up to be president. It was more than the color of his skin. It was also his unlikely rise. A child of no great means raised by grandparents and a single mother. A young man who rose from community organizer to author to senator to occupier of the highest office in the land. A president who conducted himself with dignity and grace while in office. It is a uniquely American story that spoke, and continues to speak, to our better angels.

The downside of Obama’s success was that he made the job look, if not exactly easy, than at least more manageable than we might have otherwise assumed after witnessing the torturous (pun intended) W. years, and the sordid presidency of Bill Clinton. Obama displayed competence and cool; even when things were tough Obama looked like he was having fun. When Stevie Wonder hangs out at your house, of course it looks like fun.

Better days.

Maybe it was his ease that made people so mad. Maybe it was his trim figure and the slight strut in his step on the walk across the White House lawn to Marine One. Maybe it was the adoring wife and the sparkly kids. Maybe people resented that everything seemed to come to Barack Obama without struggle. Maybe they looked at their own lives and compared themselves to him, and rather than find inspiration they found resentment. Whatever the reasons, they hated him.

From the beginning, they questioned his patriotism, religion, even his nationality. Once elected, they came out of the woodwork to hate him, calling themselves “The Tea Party,” to oppose his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Healthcare Act. Millions and millions of Americans hated Barack Obama for reasons they could never quite articulate. Or, rather, they could but chose not to in polite company.  

So when the 2016 election rolled around and these people were looking for their own champion, perhaps it’s no wonder that they chose somebody so different from the man they wanted to replace, and whose legacy they wanted to destroy. They chose brash over reserved, they chose obnoxious over adroit, garishness over grace. They chose nastiness. They chose pettiness. They chose an unlikely avatar to represent themselves, a man who seemed to represent everything they claimed to hate. But they loved him because his enemies were their own. In choosing Donald Trump, though, it’s also important to remember that they turned their backs on the two most important prerequisites for the office: competence and character.

Trump’s personal and professional failings were well-known by November of 2016. His business failings, his corruption, his deep insecurities and spectacular narcissism. We knew his casual misogyny and racism. We knew his penchant for victimhood. The bullying. The careless violent rhetoric. We knew his endless capacity for bullshit. And we elected him president because enough Americans decided that they wanted a man like that to represent them instead of a serious-minded and accomplished woman who foretold exactly what to expect if the nation should put Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump’s crushing loss in 2020 against another decent and sober (and white ) man has brought us to this place in time, when a former president has been indicted four separate times for a total of 96 criminal charges. This, after an additional civil trial has already found him liable for sexual assault. The latest charges, filed last night, outline a broad criminal conspiracy to overturn the election. The charges ensnare eighteen other defendants, including his Chief of Staff and prominent members of the ramshackle legal team he assembled in the months after losing . Rick Wilson’s famous maxim “Everything Trump touches dies” has never felt more apt.

Unsurprisingly, the indictments have only bound his most ardent supporters more closely to Trump. “They are trying to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom,” he said. He never elaborates which freedoms of yours “they” are trying to take away, but suffice to say it has something to do with library books and the drag queens and a whitewashed teaching of American history. Or maybe it has something to do with Muslims or Mexicans or the Barbie movie. None of it is clear, but his support among the Republican faithful has yet to waver.

Trump’s indictments only solidify their alienation from the nation they claim to love, but whose institutions they neither trust nor respect. They have vowed to clean house, to do away with the FBI, the Department of Education, the IRS, the Department of Energy, etc. etc. etc. Ron DeSantis has promised to “start slitting throats on Day One” if elected. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a close Trump ally, said a couple days ago that “only through force do we make change in a corrupt town like Washington DC.” Republican leadership remains silent and complicit. They are afraid to say anything, lest the same mob that threatened to hang Trump’s vice president turn their attention on them. “If we nominate Trump, we’ll get destroyed,” the former Trump critic and current Trump lickspittle Senator Lindsey Graham once wrote, “And we’ll deserve it.” If anything, Graham may have understated the case. Although he was talking about the Republican Party, it is now the nation that is in danger of being destroyed.

But it is towards Obama that my thoughts turn today because it is Obama that set the stage for all of this. It is Obama who had the gall to demonstrate American (Black) excellence and, in doing so, re-awakened a deep and primordial American rage. The rage found a voice and his voice became their voice. When Trump says that he is being indicted “for you,” I believe it. I also believe that, in effect, his criminality is theirs. For electing him. For supporting him. For allowing him to hijack decency. For ignoring his meetings with white nationalists and embracing QAnon. For holding their noses at his odiousness, or worse, for wafting it back in the general direction of their neighbors with their “Fuck Your Feelings” t-shirts and gleeful chants of “Lock her up.” His criminality is legal, theirs moral.

No political party has a monopoly on ethics. Democrats have plenty of their own scum to skim. But this party, Trump’s Republican Party, has done away with the question of character altogether. They have spun vice into virtue. Time and again, in these waning days of Trump, we see bullies and blowhards and petty dictators celebrated and cheered. The only sin is not kowtowing to Trump. It is in him that we see the worst of our American character pried open and given air. The rest of us have been forced to breathe its stench for too long, all the worse because we remember what it felt like to be proud of the man sitting in the Oval Office for eight years. This Republican Party has turned the American character on its head, and the fact that their leader remains a serious contender for the presidency after all that he has put this nation through is the ultimate indictment, and it falls on us all.