They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech. [*]
The shrug from Mitch McConnell, the twisted explanation of Paul Ryan, who said Trump is a racist and a xenophobe, but he’s ours — party before country. As well, the duck-and-hide Republicans, so quick to whip out their pocket copy of the Constitution, now nowhere to be seen when the foundation of that same document is under assault by the man carrying their banner.
They will remember, in classrooms and seminars, those who wrote Trump off as entertainment, a freak show and ratings spike, before he tried to muzzle a free press, and came for you — using a page from another tyrant, Vladimir Putin, admired by the homegrown monster.
As well, they will call out the enablers. In the run-up to the presidential primary season, few candidates received more favorable press coverage than Donald Trump, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School found. The watchdogs were in on the ride. Sure, he’s a know-nothing and fraud, incapable of processing information or getting through a day without a half-dozen lies — but it’s just a role. Get a load of Ted Cruz’s wife! Heidi Klum is no longer a 10! And when he talks like a fascist, when he uses the America First slogan adopted by Nazi sympathizers in this country in the 1930s, it’s all for play, you see. He is historically illiterate, so the rest of us must be as well.Echoing that, Bob Garfield reminds us that, even though Rump may be headed for an epic defeat, we've already lost something as a nation:
Let’s start with the inconvenient fact that 13,300,472 Americans cast their primary votes for Donald Trump. Notwithstanding his recent popularity plunge, if polls are correct and the election were held today he’d still collect 40 percent of the vote. Which is in the neighborhood of 50 million.
Fifty million — pulling the lever for a pathological liar, peddler of vile racist, misogynist, xenophobic ravings and sneering trampler of our most fundamental American values. Not to mention the Constitution, with which he seems unfamiliar. Not to mention a personality I’d call infantile, if I weren’t afraid of insulting infants. And tiles.
Fifty million Americans are for that. If you took those voters and laid them end to end around the circumference of Mars, you’d get no argument from me. Because to support Trump is to spit on the American flag and all it stands for.*Speaking of Ken Burns, here's a longer excerpt from his June 12 commencement speech at Stanford University (the full text is here), wherein he lays into Rump as only a historian can:
As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again – all happening at once. We know from our history books that these are the diseases of ancient and now fallen empires. The sense of commonwealth, of shared sacrifice, of trust, so much a part of American life, is eroding fast, spurred along and amplified by an amoral Internet that permits a lie to circle the globe three times before the truth can get started.
We no longer have the luxury of neutrality or “balance,” or even of bemused disdain. Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not. Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history. Do not be deceived by his momentary “good behavior.” It is only a spoiled, misbehaving child hoping somehow to still have dessert.Ah, yes, the media.
The rise of Rump is the inevitable culmination of years of Republican lies, obstruction, bigotry, know nothing-ism, and general pandering to the fears and worst instincts of people. It's now been exposed for all whose eyes are wide open to see, and America is the poorer for it, regardless of the outcome of the election.
