Now That He's Headed For The White House, Do You Hope Trump Is Successful?
I was in my 20s when I settled in Amsterdam. One of my closest friends was a young painter, Evelyne Pommier. Her father was French and her mother, Hilda Van Norden, was Dutch. They lived in Paris and I was the only one of any of our friends who had a car so we used to sometimes drive to Paris to visit them. I became friendly with her mother, also a painter. Eventually, still in her 20s, Evelyne died in India. That drew Hilda and I closer together and we stayed in touch over the years and decades and whenever I was in Paris I made time to meet her. I’ve told the story here before that when she was a teenager, she and her brothers blew up a Nazi train and that ’til her dying day, a few years ago, she was recognized as a hero in Holland and awarded a lifetime pension. Also my hero. I was lucky in the hero-realm; I became close with Julian Bond and, later, with Harvey Milk, Norman Lear
Last week, Rebecca Solnit wrote that “The historian Hannah Arendt wrote (back in that era when ‘men’ meant all of us): ‘What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.’ By reaching out and creating the conditions for mutual support and encouragement, you become a source of strength to others. When the election outcome became clear to me late Tuesday night, I wrote: ‘Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the 10 trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.’ There’s a false dichotomy between the popular business of self-care and being engaged and caring for other things; doing the latter can bring you into community with people who are good for you, can help you find that dignity Gerard spoke of, can strengthen and encourage you— and even make you hopeful, because to be around the best versions of human nature does that for you. There will be heroes in the crises to come; look for them. Maybe you’ll be one... The study of heroes is one way to ground yourself in memory. The US is an uneasy cobbling together of different constituencies by race, class, gender and culture, and those who have been subordinated have exemplified heroic resistance all along, have given us Geronimo and Frederick Douglass, Ady Barkan and Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde and Grace Lee Boggs. This country has been rich in oppression, which might be why it has also been rich in heroes.”
Solnit noted that “Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness, open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity, inclusiveness. ‘Fight on’ might sound like a lot now, but maybe you can at least not quit, even if you need to take time off, which is not the same thing as checking out. In stillness and quiet comes the recharging of self and strength, just as in sleep the body rebuilds itself. ‘Back to work— and notably bucking up the younger people I know with reminders that dignity lies in a refusal to be complicit and that despair ultimately is a form of complicity,’ the LGBTQ public historian Gerard Koskovich wrote in a note to me… After the first Trump election Timothy Snyder’s first mandate for facing the coming trouble was: ‘Do not obey prematurely. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.’ I’ve half-joked ever since that we shouldn’t obey maturely, either. There will be all too many opportunities for direct resistance, not least offering solidarity and sanctuary to those most under attack, including those who are immigrants, need reproductive rights, are transgender, or have boldly spoken up.”
On then sunnier side of the street, Jonathan Bernstein looked at how Trump is already starting to go off the rails. “If anyone believed the nonsense about Donald Trump’s second term shifting away from chaos and towards ruthless efficiency,” he wrote, “his initial personnel rollout is putting that to rest. We’re going to have four more years of chaos and inept presidenting... Trump has already selected two sitting Members of the House (Stefanik and National Security Advisor designate Michael Waltz) for his administration despite the ongoing vote-counting still leaving the size of what appears to be a tiny Republican House majority up for grabs
Trump, he wrote, “doesn’t know how to manage anything or how to delegate. It worked out poorly in his first term. Presidents, after all, can give all the orders they want, but even if it works— which it generally doesn’t— there’s far more going on than what a president can actually pay attention to. Even a well-briefed, hard-working president. If no one does triage, choosing carefully which things to bring to the president and which to handle at a lower level, there will be chaos. And if no one monitors what’s happening at all the executive branch departments and agencies? Once again, chaos. Sure, Trumpists put in place might be eager to carry out what the president wants… but they may also have their own creative, or self-serving, or just wacky interpretations of what Trump may want about this or that issue that the president hasn’t actually spent a minute of his life thinking about (and while Trump is an extreme case, no president is expert or even has vague opinions about many of the things that government does; there are just too many of them). Or they may only have pretended to be Trumpists, and really be out after their own interests (including self-interest) in mind. One of the whole points of having a large, organized, disciplined White House staff is to fight for the president’s agenda in all of those departments and agencies— and to solve problems before they harm the president. Presidents simply can’t do it themselves.”
Indeed, what Trump perceived as organized Deep State hostility to him was in most cases nothing more than his own inept management, which started with failing to empower the White House Chief of Staff the way that Ike and other effective presidents had done.
The first Trump term worked best during the early months of John Kelly’s tenure as Chief of Staff, when he seems to have tried hard to professionalize things. Unfortunately, he was ultimately no match for Trump’s ineptitude, and he spent the last several months of his nearly two-year attempt at the job in what seemed to be a sort of defeated stupor, perhaps just trying to prevent anything too disastrous from happening.
At best, Trump can hope that [Susie] Wiles will sometimes prevent him from acting on his worst impulses. But it’s hard to see anything in her record to suggest she’ll be able to fight off his style and her inexperience to really establish a professional White House. Not that I would have expected Trump to hire anyone actually ready to do that job. He no doubt thinks of his first term as one where he did everything correctly only to be undermined by disloyal enemies scheming against him, and all he has to do is eliminate all his enemies and replace them with loyal allies to have everything work perfectly.
If so, he has no idea what the job entails. And so: Welcome back chaos. Dangerous, destructive chaos.
As for the question in the subtitle… it needs to be framed properly so that we know exactly what “successful” means in this instance. Who would his success benefit and who would it harm? Obviously, the moral position is not to hope for success if it simply means Trump implementing his agenda, which threatens marginalized communities, democracy, and social justice. “Success” for the next few years is likely to make sure Trump faces fierce resistance, accountability and failing— as painfully as possible— to enact policies that exacerbate suffering, inequality and ecological destruction. Moral consistency demands opposing actions we know are destructive, even if he’s sitting in the Oval Office. My moral responsibility is to fight against policies that promote suffering and inequality. Again, true success would be Trump failing to implement his harmful agenda and, instead, facing the kind of organized resistance that prevents future abuses of power. Can we all agree?