If you squint your eyes just right, and try very hard to look beyond and beneath the wreckage of our national politics, it’s possible to find signs of hope, of a new dawn ready to rise out of the ashes of our Trumpian despair. Really. Well, sort of. Anyway, I wanted my first blog post of 2020 to focus on the hopeful, on a vision of transcendence and progressive change. I had 16 pages of notes and was all set to make the case for optimism. Then our president ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, and the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of the war drums quickly drowned out all aspirations of hope and change.
Happy New Year, same as the old year. Only worse. And we thought 2019 got off to a bad start when Trump shut most of the government down. We should be so lucky to have a shutdown right now. It might have prevented Friday’s drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.
Instead, we woke up on the third day of this new year to a cascade of depressing news. Yes, Suleimani orchestrated the deaths of hundreds or thousands (the Prevaricator in Chief says millions) of American and Iraqi troops and citizens. He was also revered as almost a cult figure by Iran’s leaders and allies. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised “forceful revenge”.
As a result, our country went into to full-scale war prep. The State Department warned all U.S. citizens to leave Iraq immediately. Thousands of American troops are on their way to the Middle East. U.S. businesses and government agencies were told to prepare for Iranian cyber attacks. “World War III” trended on Twitter. The Selective Service’s website crashed after being inundated by young men worrying about getting drafted into battle.
Trump, meanwhile, took a hero’s bow at a Miami campaign rally, boasting about Suleimani’s execution-by-drone. “He was planning a very major attack,” said the president, “and we got him!” The crowd roared, and Trump took it to the next level with a single declarative sentence: “God is on our side.”
If all this had gone down at any other time in our history, the prudent and rational course for us would have been to take a deep breath and engage in watchful waiting as events unfolded. As unseemly as an assassination of another country’s leader might appear, we would also be mindful of how much we don’t know about the underlying facts of the kill order. The president, after all, is surrounded by military and intelligence experts who carefully weigh all available facts before advising the commander in chief. If they all thought killing one high ranking Iranian leader would save many American lives, that would warrant a green light in many moral paradigms.
Sadly, this is not any other time in history. This is now. This is Donald J. Trump. His narrative about killing the bad guy in order to save American lives can only be viewed through the lens of a pathological liar, one who, according to the Washington Post’s fact checker, made 15,413 false or misleading statements during his first 1,055 days in office. He has also demonstrated a propensity to ignore the advice of the experts who surround him, bragging about how, due to the power of his instinct, he knows more than any general.
Then comes Trump’s single most important behavioral characteristic, at least in terms of predicting the choice he will make in any given situation. He will, without fail, follow the impulse to do whatever he thinks at the time will make him look the strongest and the winningest to his adoring MAGA base. As a piece of leverage, last year’s government shutdown was a dismal failure for the administration. Trump’s base, however, showered him with adoration for messing up a government they disdain in order to build a wall to keep brown people from “invading” America. The same please-the-base decision making was responsible for putting children in cages, the transgender military ban and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty, to name but a few.
The dynamic also explains why Trump rejected the advice of military experts last fall and announced a sudden withdrawal of troops from Syria, leaving our Kurdish allies to fend for themselves. The president hit the campaign rally circuit in October with boasts of “No more endless wars. I’m bringing them all home.” He basked in the dopamine of cheering crowd approval.
Not even three months later, the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops into the middle east, gearing up for an Iranian retaliatory strike in response to Suleimani’s killing. Most authorities on the middle east say we are closer to a full-blown war in that region than at any time in the past several decades. Some say we are already at war, that the drone strike on Suleimani was an act of war.
How is it that the same president who took bows before a cheering crowd for ending wars is now getting the same reaction for starting one? Chalk it up to the magic of a freeze frame presidency. This guy doesn’t do strategy, only tactics in the moment. And whatever that moment portends is all that counts. Shortly after Suleimani was killed, Trump triumphantly announced that he had “ended a war”, even while thousands of American troops were on their way to the middle east in preparation for Iran’s retaliatory strike. In Trump Time, that neither counted nor mattered.
What makes this horrendous situation even worse is the current political atmosphere in which congressional Republicans have abandoned all moral calculus in order to march in lockstep with a president they know is, at best, unhinged, out of fear that Trump will disparage them on Twitter. These GOP leaders have spent the past few months insisting that there is nothing wrong with a president asking foreign countries to interfere in our elections, a revolting abandonment of long-held norms and values. Add to that now, the party’s acquiescence with the assassination of another country’s leader.
This rapid and deep abdication of the moral underpinnings of our democracy will one day be laid bare in our history books. The days we are now struggling through will be correctly portrayed as a major stain on what has been known as the “American Experiment”. The only control we have over the content of those pages will be the length of that stain, and how we go about removing it and taking our country back.