With the presidential primaries rounding into the home stretch and anti-establishment candidates making such strong showings, anti-Trump opinions are becoming ever more unhinged. Let me be clear; I don’t like Donald Trump; for many reasons, I wouldn’t vote for him on a bet. But the hysteria of the political commentariat about the man is rising to a shriek. Opposition to Trump is fine. Debasing public debate with wild, unsupportable charges is not.
But in this article by Adam Gopnik, more than simply intemperate charges and delusions of apocalypse are at work (The New Yorker, 5/20/16). No, those things only demonstrate more clearly the panic of a political elite that feels its fingers slipping from the levers of power.
Much of the objection to Trump rightly (in my opinion) focusses on his shoot-from-the-hip style, fevered language and extreme, ill-thought-out ideas. That makes Gopnik’s piece all the more remarkable for doing exactly the same thing. But his screed is actually less considered and more offensive than anything Trump has said. Crazily, Gopnik compares Trump to Adolf Hitler and then fails to find any distinction between the two. Even the devalued coin of Internet commentary does better than that. There, the value of a piece is considered to be in inverse relationship to the readiness of the author to compare his/her opponents to Hitler. Truly, Gopnik’s article is that bad.
But first, let’s address its meagre content. His main points are two: (1) Donald Trump hates American values, is anti-democratic and, if elected, will become a dictator who just may destroy American values; (2) there’s nothing anyone can do about (1).
Here are a few quotations from Gopnik’s piece in which he actually out-Trumps Trump:
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over…
The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power…
He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was.
Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’
No, you can’t…
One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke… but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States…
Let’s deal with (2) first – Trump as irresistible force. As Gopnik sees Trump, whatever Trump wants, Trump gets. In that belief, just like his over-the-top tone, Gopnik precisely echoes The Donald himself. No one is as impressed by Trump as Trump himself, but Gopnik gives it a good try. In the movies, Evil verges on the all-powerful, and so is Trump to Gopnik. He suggests the man is a “monster,” and then presents him as unstoppable (“’We can control him.’ No, you can’t.”)
Here’s some news: power in the U.S. is divided among three branches of government. Every president enters the Oval Office with grand ideas about what he can accomplish only to learn that Congress and the courts have a say (administrative agencies too). Indeed, it is precisely that rein on presidential power that has so thwarted President Obama. The Republican controlled Congress has blocked most of his initiatives and there’s been precious little he can do about it.
The same would be true of Trump, except far more so. Most presidents come to power with at least the backing of their own party, but not Trump. His party actively dislikes him and his stated policies many of which are notoriously anti-GOP. He’ll have to negotiate not only with the Democratic leadership in Congress, but hostile Republicans as well. So yes, Mr. Gopnik, that constitutional arrangement of powers about which you enthuse, will “control” a President Trump as well as it has every president before him. Probably better.
Now to (1) above, in which Gopnik presents Trump as, not just a bad candidate, but a danger to the country. He makes a hash of it. The shrillness of his condemnation isn’t matched by facts to support it.
Hitler? Really? Frankly, if Gopnik can’t see the difference between Hitler and Trump, he’s disqualified from ever commenting again in any respected forum. Drawing the comparison requires him to show that the United States of today is indistinguishable from post-WWI Germany under the Weimar Republic. Wisely, he doesn’t even try. And where are Trump’s armies of Brown Shirts? I suppose we’re to believe that a random punch-up at a Trump rally is our version of Kristallnacht. The Internet is right; comparing one’s opponent to Hitler is a sure sign of weak arguments sought to be obscured by absurd hyperbole.
He announces his enmity to America… in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants.
But the use of torture and the killing of noncombatants weren’t invented by Trump, or didn’t Gopnik read the newspapers during the George W. Bush Administration? Was Bush Hitler too? Whatever Trump believes about torture and noncombatant death, it’s not an attack on America, it’s just bad policy. More to the point, international law prohibits both. Trump’s a blowhard, but that doesn’t mean he’d actually issue an order to violate those laws or that his subordinates would obey it if he did.
[His enmity to America] is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies…
Richard Nixon did more than just threaten his political enemies and yet somehow America and our system of government survived. Plus, that same system brought Nixon down in disgrace. You’d think Gopnik would know.
[Authoritarians] do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
Actually, every president makes his “power as large as [he] can.” Indeed, it’s one of the GOP’s main gripes about President Obama – that classic constitutionalist – that he enlarges his power at their expense. But again, what Gopnik calls the “American experiment” has survived.
Amazingly, Gopnik rejects out of hand the notion that the power of a President Trump would be circumscribed by both the system designed for that very purpose and the majority of the political class that despises him. He offers no support for such a claim, apparently believing that naked assertions equal sound argument. According to him, next January is the end of America as we know it.
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal.
It comes as no surprise that the man who can’t tell the difference between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump also can’t tell the difference between the United States of 2016 and Russia 99 years ago, but the rest of us can. Not one of the countries Gopnik mentions had any history of constitutional democracy, nor the limitations on sovereign power that go along with it. But we have. The idea that a Trump presidency would constitute “a wound to hope and order that will never fully heal” is contradicted by essentially all of American history. For Gopnik’s information, in 1860, the country split apart and then fought the bloodiest war in its history to reunite it. But according to him, a Trump presidency would be worse than that. Gopnik’s rhetoric is irresponsible (and frankly silly), easily surpassing any of Trump’s words.
Gopnik calls Trump “anti-democratic,” a strange charge to level at a man who’s about to be elected by popular vote as his party’s presidential nominee. How much more democratic can he be? But ‘anti-democratic’ is an interesting term, one I’ll deal with more in my next piece.
Again, I hold no brief for Donald Trump. As president, he’d likely be an embarrassment, possibly even more of one than other recent presidents. But Mr. Gopnik, he wouldn’t be King Donald. Take a pill and relax; let others of us do the thinking.
