Summits of Stupidity

If there is one thing our president likes better than having his feet kissed by craven underlings, it is cozying up to murderous foreign dictators, whom he loves with a bully’s instinctive admiration for brutality in any form. After all, Trump’s attempt to lynch the Central Park Five never got anywhere. Kim Jong-Un actually has his rivals blown apart with anti-aircraft guns, while Putin murders his  – on British soil! — with  radioactive waste and nerve agents. Ya gotta admire that kind of thing. Strength, you know.

This month’s farcical summit in Singapore ended in an astonishing unilateral surrender on our part, when without prompting or prologue, much less any quid pro quo, Trump canceled the joint military exercises that have been a keystone of our defense of South Korea since 1953. Then he swaggered back across the Pacific, boasting that he had somehow ended the nuclear threat from North Korea. News flash: the North is frantically back at work upgrading research facilities, and the weapons program is back on, full speed. 

So now, having been aced and skunked by the Tubby Terrorist of Pyongyang, ye Orange One has scheduled a sequel with our real president, the Shirtless Spy of Moscow. It was inevitable that Trump would sooner or later kneel at the feet of his patron, and now is the time. Any high school kid can see exactly where this next summit will end: with complete normalization of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and bloody subversion of Ukraine. A real blockbuster of a surrender, one that makes Munich look like the Defense of Bastogne. It will establish the principle that henceforth, in international relations, “strength” entitles you to do what you want.

At least twice before, the world has been through periods when that principle governed. Each such era ended in a world war.

Like Germans who survived Hitler, Americans of this period will one day face an excruciating question: “What did you do during the madness, Mommy and Daddy?” I can imagine many worse answers than this one: “I voted once for that con artist. Then I woke up and did everything I could to resist.” 

My List

Trump, in his malignant infuriating way, is clearly a PR genius. His messaging strategy has perfectly followed and vindicated Goebbels’ famous formula: “Make the lie big. Keep it simple. Keep repeating it, and eventually they will believe it.”

So to this point, his Big Lies are winning the day against the complicated, careful truths we Progressives are mostly trying to tell. It occurs to me that we need to restrain our love of nuance and work more on distilling our worldview into a few Big Truths that we repeat as doggedly as the other side does its slogans. Here goes my attempt at putting together a list. Of course I had to resist might and main the urge to elaborate on each assertion, and am no doubt still too wordy and iffy for prime time in most cases: a telling weakness.

1.    Trump is the worst president in history. 

2.    And the worst human being ever to have held that office. The most dishonest, the most self-centered, the most devoid of ordinary human scruple and emotion.  

3.    Trump and his minions are using their government positions to loot the country.

4.    Promising and pretending to “make America great again,” Trump has in fact done colossal damage to our standing in the world. So far the damage is largely obscured in an ongoing tempest of lies, but its full dimensions will emerge soon and last for a long, long time. 

5.    The recent summit with North Korea was a shameful surrender, preposterously disguised as some kind of diplomatic breakthrough. 

6.    The much-ballyhooed economy owes its vitality mainly to long-term, worldwide trends, and especially to actions of the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration in 2008-2009. Trump deserves as much credit for it as a rooster does for making the sun rise. 

7.    Trump has begun a trade war whose effects will be felt most by those who supported him most. 

8.    Though little attended to, Trump’s stance on the #MeToo movement is clear. He supports the Harvey Weinsteins. 

9.    Trump’s assault on democratic institutions — the press, the courts, law enforcement — is an assault on the liberty of all of us, no matter how we pretend otherwise. When he says he wants Americans to act like North Koreans — like miserable, terrified slaves — he really means it.  

10.   This administration tortures children. Just foreign children, so far, but that can change. 

11.    No one has yet explained how Trump emerged from his bankruptcies of the nineties and aughts. The most likely hypothesis is: with Russian dirty money, establishing the warm working relationship that later brought him the presidency. 

12.    Those who voted for Trump made a calculated decision to “believe” what they knew very well to be lies, because they thought their interests would be served. The onus is now on them to prove their honesty, their common sense, and perhaps their humanity. 

13.    But there is an onus on liberals, too: to get real about the costs of globalism, population flows, economic progress, cultural change, national defense, nuclear proliferation, and yes, rights reform and political correctness. To field candidates who will speak fearlessly about the how of reform as well as the what, with particular attention to the price tags of good policies. To dial back just a bit the moralism and shaming and non-negotiable demands.