The Great Performance of Our Failing President
Last edited Sat Jun 10, 2017, 05:51 PM - Edit history (1)
*It’s true that President Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any modern president at this point in a first term, which has hamstrung his ability to pass any major legislation. But he has triumphantly succeeded in turning politics into spectacle, transforming the complicated process of government into something more like made-for-TV drama. A lot of his supporters care more about the fight than the results, and the sense that the whole production is faked only adds to their enjoyment. As a political historian who writes mainly about the Republican Party, I’ve often puzzled over why far-right groups during the 1950s and ’60s had such an appetite for obvious falsehoods. Robert Welch Jr., a founder of the John Birch Society, famously maintained that President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Other extremist groups charged that a committee of University of Chicago eggheads was rewriting the Constitution to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property, and that the United Nations was training barefoot African cannibals in Georgia for an armed takeover of the United States. Did the people who read those made-up stories actually believe them?
In the 1960s, Republican Party officials and conservative leaders like William F. Buckley Jr. were able to marginalize the John Birch Society and related groups. Today, it’s the conservative establishment that has been marginalized by right-wing media and President Trump’s populist movement. Birch-style fake news stories once circulated only among small audiences. Today, thanks to the internet, they reach millions of Americans who make up a big chunk of the Republican Party’s base. I have quite a few friends who are avid consumers of Trump-supporting alt-right “news” websites, but I have yet to find one who actually believes in the wilder fantasies they purvey. . .
Many Trump supporters engage nonetheless in a willing suspension of disbelief when they partake of right-wing media. They enjoy the ridiculous exaggerations and outright lies for the outrage they provoke in Democrats, liberals, intellectuals and pompous commentators of all political stripes.
Populist conservatives also appreciate fake news for conveying what they see as underlying symbolic truths. . .
One of the lessons future historians may draw from the Trump presidency is that populism and partisanship shouldn’t mix. President Trump won the election in large part because he was one of the few candidates from either party to address terrible problems in the left-behind parts of the country, including the drug epidemic, declining labor force participation rates and the rising cost of health care. But when he arrived in the White House, he merely added his own brand of insult to the usual Washington partisanship. He didn’t begin to do the work that would have been required to assemble a bipartisan coalition around a genuine populist agenda. Instead, he agreed to make Paul Ryan’s draconian repeal of Obamacare his top priority. That provoked Democrats in Congress to be just as obstructionist and hostile as Republicans were under President Obama.
Toxic polarization means that Congress is unlikely to pass any significant legislation on infrastructure and tax reform that once might have attracted cross-aisle support. . .
Mr. Trump cast himself during the election as the sole candidate able to break through Washington gridlock and get things done. Will his failure as a problem solver cause his supporters to abandon him? I doubt it. Scratch a Trump supporter, and you’re likely to find someone deeply pessimistic about America and its future. Few believe that he will be able to bring back the good times.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/opinion/great-performance-of-donald-trump-our-failing-president.html?
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