On the day after the election in November, I published a post called “Republic of morons” here; after some due consideration, I removed it, feeling that perhaps it was a bit too harsh on any of those who might have voted for Donald J. Trump, a few of whom I know (and if you’re reading this, you know who you are too). After the events of the past few days, I regret its removal. Since Monday, the President of the United States has:
- Destroyed the hopes of men, women, and children seeking asylum from war-torn, poverty-ridden, and (other) criminal governments
- To quote the New York Times, issued an executive order that “effectively defines transgender Americans out of existence”
- Mocked a bishop of the Episcopal Church who urged him to compassion for others
- Removed the Spanish-language Web site for the executive branch
- Cheerfully opened the corridors of power and influence to a bunch of bullet-headed tech bros
- Pardoned those who cheerfully and violently attacked police and security agents attempting to protect the nation’s legislative branch and its members
- Bowed out of both the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the World Health Organization
At the National Cathedral services yesterday, Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, looked Trump straight in the eye and said, “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.” She went on to say, “The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”
After midnight last night, Trump posted his response on Truth Social:
The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology! t
And, according to NPR, “After the service on Tuesday, Republican U.S. Representative Mike Collins from Georgia posted a video clip on X of Budde’s sermon along with the text, ‘The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.'”
Trump was elected on a platform of fear, bigotry, and greed, and this is the platform that apparently appealed to 77,303,568 voters in November. Whether or not they admit it, the voters are to blame.
I repost that original November entry below — noting that Jonathan Swift was an Anglican clergyman as well. I’m still not sure about how I plan to spend the next four years, but I think it’s obligatory on all of us to stand against it.
Jonathan Swift was right.
On CNN the handwringing began several hours ago, and it’s likely to go on for days and days. I dread the mawkish elegies for democracy I am expecting from the Atlantic, Timothy Snyder, and Anne Applebaum. And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is getting into the act with an (understandably) craven congratulatory message on x.com.
This is not to say that the Atlantic, Snyder, and Applebaum will be wrong, or that Zelenskyy isn’t playing as careful a game as he can. But in all this handwringing, the emphasis has been on how the Democrats and the Harris campaign blew it this time. Unfortunately we now have proof that all those Hallmark-card Benetton-ad sentiments about the American voter were based on a profound misunderstanding of the ability for that voter to practice even a modicum of critical thinking, and how narrowly that voter sees their self-interest, whether it’s the price of eggs or religious and cultural belief. Never mind, really, that Trump wound up over and over again in bankruptcy court, even losing money on a gambling casino, or that he regularly sat down for dinner with anti-Semites and racists. Never mind the grotesque misogyny, the careless personal smears, the crude jokes, the daily chaos of his first term, the disparagement of scientific fact, the deep-rooted xenophobia, the shameless pandering, the felony convictions, the sexual assaults, the religious hypocrisy, the philistinism, the breathtaking greed and corruption, the threats of retribution, the incitements to violence — the constant regurgitation of every possible stupidity of which the human mind is capable.
Last night, he won, fair and square. And I know people who voted for him. God bless America.
No, it wasn’t the fault of the Democrats or Kamala Harris. It was the fault of the American voter; this is what they want. The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will now become a quaint and very expensive museum rather than a celebration of the democratic spirit in America.
So what to do next? I had been hoping to spend the next four years of my sixth decade bereft of the constant stomach-churning irresponsibility and unpredictability, the constant insults to the human spirit, of Trump’s first term, but those who voted for Trump have decided to deny me that. I blame them for that the most (though perhaps this is only proof that I can be as selfish as they are).
Oh, well. I can still turn to the elegance of Vienna and the German language, as well as the charms of Philadelphia. My family continues to give me the greatest pleasures, outstripping even those of Vienna and Philadelphia. There is good wine to drink, good music to listen to, good writing to read. There’s also my dwindling ability to do what I can to promote kindness, peace, and decency (though I seem to be in the minority here, based on the election results).
And laughter, they say, is the best medicine. I can continue to turn to the great American satire of Mark Twain (“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,” he wrote — wishful thinking, but I’ll take what I can get) and H.L. Mencken, to whom perhaps I should have been listening more closely. I doubted their misanthropy and mistrust of the American citizen; clearly, I was wrong.
And there is also Jonathan Swift, with whom I shall sign off today. In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels, the adventurer finds himself at the court of the Brobdingnagian king. “He desired I would give him as exact an account of the government of England as I possibly could; because, as fond as princes commonly are of their own customs (for so he conjectured of other monarchs, by my former discourses), he should be glad to hear of anything that might deserve imitation,” Gulliver (yclept Grildig in this country) explains. Gulliver describes the government of England to the Brobdingnagian king at considerable length. And, although England is a constitutional monarchy and the United States a representative democracy, I think the king’s response remains valid. Quoth Gulliver:
[The king] was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Or, as P.J. O’Rourke once put it, in much the same spirit, “Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.”