When is enough enough? Lies and damned lies. Moving forward!
So far, the Trump lies have been backfiring like a car badly needing a tune-up on the way to the junkyard. The truth cannot be ignored, when your family members and fellow parishioners are dying of Covid, the drought is drying up your crops, fires are burning down your neighbor’s house. Meanwhile Trump is working on his golf game and watching the TV in palatial surroundings while some of his most violent, devoted followers may face stiff prison terms.
He claimed Covid 19 was a gigantic Democratic hoax, nothing worse than a minor flu, which would soon go away. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/10/trump-covid-denial/616946/ It has so far killed over 600,000 Americans and has reduced our nation’s life expectancies quite dramatically, by three full years among Hispanics and African Americans (many of them essential workers and their extended family members) and wrecked the economy. He made the necessary responses to a public health emergency into a partisan political contest instead. As a result, his followers have not been vaxxing or masking or social distancing. Now they are re-spreading the disease; they are getting sick, and they are being hospitalized and they are dying. Trump, his wife and young son all got Covid while they were in the White House; Trump was severely ill; then they all quietly got vaccinated in January. For some reason, he has persistently failed to message his followers to go get their “Trump” shots and to use his own experience and hospitalization as a story to highlight the importance of vaccination, instead limiting himself to a few short, anodyne statements. Imagine what could have been if he devoted his rallies to calling for vaccinations and praising their effectiveness instead of recounting his many grievances with his electoral defeat. Opposition to the vaccine is now hard grained among too many Republicans, where almost half say they will refuse the vaccines, and Republican political leaders contradict Trump at their political peril.
He has steadily claimed climate change was a hoax. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/climate-change/us-elections-2020-a-history-of-trump-s-climate-change-denial-74075 Yet the heat waves, fires and droughts are burning up the West, killing people and wildlife, damaging farmer’s crops and threatening the world’s food supplies. Europeans and Chinese are drowning in unprecedented deluges. These are not the kind of events that Trump’s farm belt supporters can ignore in quite the same way that the airconditioned denizens of his Palm Beach country club can do.
He claimed he won the last Presidential election in a landslide. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/07/donald-trump/trump-clings-fantasy-landslide-victory-egging-supp/ An echo chamber among right-wing media, a coterie of venal lawyers and specific politicians amplified his lies. He called his followers to assemble and to pressure Congress to prevent the electoral certification of Joe Biden as the nation’s next President; at his urging, they attacked the US Capitol to overthrow his electoral defeat, and more people died, and many of the Capitol Police were badly injured. Five hundred and eighty-seven of his followers have been charged so far. https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-arrests-charges-names-2021-1, but prosecutors have not yet reached the higher ups of the conspiracy to overthrow the electoral results and threaten our Constitution. Trump has spent the last 7 months with his family and acolytes at his golf clubs in Palm Beach and New Jersey. Now he claims January 6 was a loving peaceful protest. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/11/trump-jan-6-insurrection-these-were-great-people-499165 “Who do you believe me or your lying eyes?” Senate Republicans refused to approve an independent, bi-partisan Commission to investigate the events of January 6, and House Minority Leader McCarthy is stuck like gorilla glue to those members in his ranks most determined to derail the Congressional investigation.
As we move forward, we need to somehow distance people’s political adherence to Trumpism from their willingness to get the lifesaving vaccines. Some Republican politicos and some in the Fox news orbit are trying to make that switch – a delicate dance. Others are still buried deep in their own conspiracy havens and are immune to the real world of filled Covid wards, morgues and cemeteries. Biden, I think, is making the right choice to ignore Trump and rebuild the nation’s health and regrow the economy and restore people’s shattered faith in their own government. Biden, however, is not yet the trusted messenger to overcome vaccine hesitancy and Covid denialism among the Trumpists. It will require instead local doctors, local nurses, local pharmacists, local preachers and local community leaders with long-standing reputations in their communities to step forward with persistent persuasion until the job is done. Employers and entertainment venues will need to require vaccinations or a clean Covid test. Universities are already starting to do so, as is NYC and the State of California. Hospitals and doctors and nurses have begun to call for some version of vaccine passports, starting with the health facilities themselves.
Trump did not create this reckoning we face in the US; he was the fatally flawed messenger for a segment of the population that was alienated and fearful of change, but he has exacerbated it, grown it, emboldened it and given it an ever-stronger racial animus filled with virulent hatreds. Recent survey data indicate that 40 to 50% of all Republicans are now willing to resort to political violence to achieve their ends. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/aei-poll-40-percent-republicans-conservatives-political-violence.html And too many state GOP legislators are proving ever more willing to ignore and suppress the democratic will of the voting populace when it is at odds with their own agendas. The Republican Party cannot endure as a credible governing party if it continues to embrace Trump’s lies and the nascent totalitarianism that is metastasizing within its ranks. And the vitality of our democracy itself may well be at stake over the next several election cycles.
I remain optimistic that we survive the tumult ahead. I’m convinced that a strong majority of Americans were repelled by Trump and Trumpism and will continue to reject him and it. I’m hopeful that state GOP governors like Baker and Scott and Hogan will lead their party back to sanity or, if need be, create a new party for those Republicans similarly repelled by the right-wing extremists taking over the GOP. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinsinger have been showing real courage in standing up to the GOP’s Congressional leadership. We do need a viable two party system to debate and decide the great challenges facing our nation and the world. We cannot succeed when one of those great parties has been taken over by the likes of Donald Trump and his minions and the House and Senate Republicans are too terrified to cross him or speak the inconvenient truths that he cannot bear for the nation to hear.
Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 7/26/21