COMMENT by BILL LUEDERS
THE DAMAGE DONE, THE JOB AHEAD
T
he damage done by Donald Trump will not end with his presidency. It will take years, perhaps generations, to flush out the toxins he has injected into the body politic. No, the soon-to-be-ex-President did not invent racism, xenophobia, demagoguery, or disdain for truth. But he elevated these in the national consciousness, to a level his followers will seek to sustain—if for no other reason than to affirm Trump’s perverse legacy. Trump has used racism as a tool to gain political advantage. He responded to police brutality by egging it on. He not only denied the existential threat of climate change but seemed intent on making it worse. He handled the COVID-19 pandemic by mocking mask-wearing, rebuffing experts, and hosting superspreader rallies estimated to have infected more than 30,000 people, killing more than 700 of them. His response to losing an election has been to proclaim it illegitimate, as he vowed to do if the result displeased him. Trump did not lose the election because a cabal of his enemies committed massive electoral theft. He lost because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris received the most votes and won the Electoral College. Sheesh. Yes, it’s dispiriting to see how close Trump came, drawing more than seventy million votes. Some 80 percent of the nation’s substantial white evangelical population support this known adulterer, serial sexual predator, and foul-mouthed faux-Christian. The President has disparaged broad swaths of the public—people who serve in the military, Gold Star families, immigrants, people with disabilities, Muslims, and the media. He called Harris, now the nation’s Vice President-elect, a “monster.” He has fired those who refuse to abide by his delusions—including, just after the election, Defense Secretary Mark Esper—and used his office to punish his enemies and enrich himself and his grifter family. Trump accused the doctors and nurses working heroically to save COVID-19 patients of fabricating death counts for money. He shunted aside experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci and centered his response to the pandemic on the advice of Scott Atlas, a crackpot Fox News squawker who thinks everyone in the country should contract the virus. He riled maskless acolytes into chants of “Fire Fauci!” His former adviser Steve Bannon called for the severed heads of Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be hoisted on pikes outside the White House—a threat Bannon’s 6 | DECEMBER 2020 / JANUARY 2021
own lawyer took seriously enough to drop him as a client. (Bannon is currently facing felony charges for stealing from the President’s supporters.) Perhaps worst of all, Trump has impugned the nation’s poll workers, ballot counters, and election supervisors—people who risked their health to dutifully record the votes of their fellow citizens—as being part of a grand conspiracy to deny him a second term. It is an accusation as despicable as Trump himself. And while it is likely that the absence of evidence will doom Trump’s chances of subverting the elec-
There is no reason to believe that Biden can unite the country around a common agenda. He will be met with opposition and obstruction at every turn. tion result, there is no reason to be optimistic that the Republican Party will become less cultish and corrupt. Its members have continually enabled and encouraged Trump. They stole two Supreme Court seats. They suppressed votes and used redistricting as a weapon. They will make sure that Biden is met with opposition and obstruction at every turn, no matter who “controls” the Senate after the two Georgia runoff elections on January 5. Expect Trump to keep lying from the sidelines, and for his followers to stand by him. The most un-American President in American history will not put the country or anything else above his own raging narcissism. What author Thomas Frank has called “the crassest, vainest, stupidest, most dysfunctional leadership this country has ever suffered” cannot be wiped away with a sufficient number of Electoral College votes.
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et none of this means that Biden cannot achieve some successes or that the cause of building a more progressive nation cannot be advanced. It will be hard, but it can be done. Biden will always be a centrist, not a firebrand. While that’s a welcome change from Trump in terms of temperament, what the nation needs now is bold and forceful leadership. Biden likely will take decisive steps to reverse Trump’s actions that have harmed the environment and undermined the country’s national security. He can rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, revive the nuclear deal with Iran, restore the nation’s
Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.
