There certainly are a lot of jobs to be done, these days in America, as we struggle to salvage our profoundly afflicted political realm. One of those jobs is to make some changes in the ways we see, understand, and talk about the various aspects of the darkness of the force that’s arisen on the right and has now taken the grotesque form of Donald Trump wielding the powers of the American presidency.
Good people often talk in inapt ways about WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST. The piece I wrote here yesterday — “Barr Believes in a ‘Theory’ of Executive Power? I Don’t Believe it for a Second” — addressed one of those inapt ways: we’re not dealing with a political philosophy, I argued, we’re dealing with a basically sociopathic guy who pretends to have principles but is really just about the quest for power.
I wrote that piece because of my frustration at hearing a lot of good and intelligent people talking about Barr in ways that confer an undeserved degree of respect on his pronouncements and miss the truly dark nature of what’s going on.
In a similar way, I get impatient with all those good and intelligent people who make frequent pronouncements about Donald Trump that miss (what I think is) the heart of the matter. They talk about how Trump doesn’t understand this and that he doesn’t know that— with “this” and “that” being things like “the way our government is supposed to work,” or “what’s in the Constitution,” or that a particular course of action is “illegal.”
Admittedly, I don’t feel certain just what Trump understands and knows. I haven’t forgotten that people who have worked with him have called him a “f---ing moron,” and an “idiot.” And I’m aware that “Warning,” the new book from Anonymous, describes how his staff had to learn that briefings of the President had to be boiled down to one simple point.
But Trump also shows some forms of intelligence on a regular basis. What he’s accomplished in becoming President and then in surviving this long while constantly committing obvious impeachable offenses is really quite astonishing. The ways in which he keeps a substantial portion of the American electorate devoted to him shows some kind of diabolical understanding at a deep level.
And I just cannot imagine that after all the hullabaloo over Trump’s collusion with the Russians who helped him win the 2016 election, Trump doesn’t understand and know full well — this time! — that such help is against the law. He cannot be so stupid of ignorant that he didn’t know he was transgressing when he talked with George Stephanopolis on camera about how he’d welcome oppo from a foreign source; nor do I imagine that Trump didn’t know he was committing a crime when he leaned on Ukraine to provide him with an announcement of investigations with which to smear Biden (so he could beat Biden in 2020 as he’d defeated the “Lock Her Up!” victim of Trump’s similarly bogus smearing of his 2016 opponent).
Nor does his conduct in the “obstruction of justice” regarding the Mueller investigation — in which he turned to Don McGahn and then to Corey Lewandowski for some machinations to disarm the investigation into his previous crimes — suggest that the problem was a lack of understanding. As with Ukraine-gate, so also with his obstructions, Trump seemed to understand something about the need to do things covertly.
“Consciousness of guilt” is abundantly displayed by Trump over the course of his presidency.
But regardless of how much Trump understands, I think it is a mistake to talk about Trump’s conduct in terms of some supposed ignorance. Ignorance sounds like something that could be remedied: a bit of education, some cogent explanations, and the ignorance is dissipated, and the lawless President could presumably start conforming his behavior to the requirements of “the rule of law” and the constitutional order.
No, the problem isn’t ignorance or a failure to grasp what is required of him. The problem rather is that Trump doesn’t care a whit about law or Constitution or norms or any other way we as a civilization have drawn a boundary between right and wrong, between the unacceptable and the unacceptable.
The problem is that we have a President who is a sociopath, and who cares only about himself — not the “big stuff” like the Ukrainians war against the Russian, but only the “big stuff” that serves him, like winning re-election — and who therefore doesn’t give a s**t about anything else, including the American system of government to which he is continually acting as a wrecking ball.