To nobody’s surprise, Donald Trump’s first shot at presiding over an extended Independence Day celebration has been singularly unique. Other presidents have used the occasion to wax eloquent about American exceptionalism, the dignity of freedom and the inherent goodness of democracy. The Donald dispensed with such trivialities in order to address one of the core issues of our times: Mika’s bleeding facelift.
It’s been a bombs-bursting-in-hot-air kind of holiday weekend. One minute, Trump was calling MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claiming she was once “bleeding badly from a facelift”. Then he took on her co-host and fiancé, Joe Scarborough, tagging him with the moniker “Psycho Joe,” and alleging that he once begged the president to have a National Enquirer story on the couple’s then-unannounced romance killed. As the weekend progressed, he sent out a doctored video that purported to show himself assaulting a CNN broadcaster. Then he went before a faith rally at the Kennedy Center to assert his superiority over the reporters who cover him. Falling far short of John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .”, Trump offered this prosaic little ditty about the news media: “I’m President and they’re not.”
Politicians of every stripe weighed in quickly. Even Republicans were critical of the president’s unpresidential behavior. House Speaker Paul Ryan, specifically addressing Trump’s comments about the MSNBC hosts, said, “Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment.” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse had this message for the president: “Please just stop. This isn’t normal and it’s beneath the dignity of your office.” His colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham offered this: “Mr. President, your tweet was beneath the office and represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America.”
Anyone who has ever dealt with a deeply troubled family member – an abuser, addict or even someone traveling through the pain of dementia – will recognize what we are going through right now in our broader American family. Normalcy is constantly changing, expanding to include behaviors once thought abhorrent or unimaginable. Over time, they become routine through the process of repetition and escalation. It’s exhausting to constantly react to bizarre, out-of-control behavior. You do it in the beginning, but it gradually becomes more common; not more acceptable, just more known and, to some extent, anticipated. Yet, every so often, no matter how accustomed we’ve grown to this devolving normalcy, a new version of the grievous conduct presents itself, nudging us, once again, to ask, “What on earth has our life come to, and what can we do about it?”
Our reaction to the president’s holiday weekend binge of verbal abuse and indecency is not a result of rational, linear processing. It’s not that he hit a new low; he has said and done much worse. But every once in a while in this deeply abnormal environment we find ourselves in, Trump’s maniacal behavior strikes a new responsive chord, reminding us that we can never, under any circumstance, accept this conduct as normal. No matter how used to it we have become. And that’s a good thing, because it lifts us out of the numbness that repetitive acts of abject abnormality tend to create.
One of the more telling moments in this latest episode came when Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked by reporters for a reaction to the Mika/Morning Joe flap. Now, contemplate this situation. White House spokespeople over the years have been forced to account for a lot of presidential behavior, from Watergate to Iran-Contra, from Monica Lewinsky to the Iraq War. Now comes a question never before proffered to a president’s press rep: deeply personal and hurtful remarks about two television personalities shared with 33 million Twitter followers. Here is how Sanders responded: “The American people elected a fighter. They knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump.”
It may have been the most straightforward, honest response ever issued by the Trump press office. Buyer beware, indeed. We knew Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, just because he could. We knew he was mean, that he delighted in calling women “fat pigs”, and body shaming Miss Universe contestants. We knew he encouraged violence at his campaign rallies. We knew he said vile, hateful things about blacks, Mexicans, Muslims and anybody who got in his way. Shame on us for electing him.
But think about this for a minute. When the person in charge of promoting the president’s image, of presenting him in the best possible light, reaches for the you-knew-what-you-were-getting into-when-you-voted-for-him defense, rock bottom is not too far away. It’s a creepy guy line from way back. Ask any marriage counselor or family court judge. As a reporter in the 1970s, I covered the opening of a new shelter for battered women. There was a sign on the wall that told this story: “A snake was hit by a car. A woman picks him up, feeds him, and gets him to a full state of health. But then he bites her, injecting her with his deadly poison. On her death bed, she asked, ‘After all I did why me?’ The snake responds, ‘You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.’”
The fact that we allowed this snake to be elected and inaugurated as our president, will not take away the venomous sting he is inflicting on the psyche and soul of this nation. And it won’t take away his culpability. In an act of patriotism for the country we love, we must be vigilant for every rattle and snakebite to come. As disheartening and unsettling as that may be, it is an opportunity to strengthen the resistance and to remind people that meanness, cruelty, obstinance and solipsism are not building blocks for America’s greatness.