Trump has an odd talent for forcing everyone who supports him to make a Faustian bargain.
Take the case of Sens. David Perdue and Tom Cotton. They lied on national television Sunday, saying that Trump didn’t say “shithole countries.” This was to counter Sen. Dick Durbin confirming that Trump said “shithole countries” in the senators’ meeting with Trump on immigration. Perdue and Cotton were, not surprisingly, obfuscating. They told White House privately that they believed they heard “shithouse” -- a distinction without difference.
Imagine the thought process one must go through to deliberately mislead a nation thanks to the difference between shithole and shithouse. You wouldn’t tolerate that nonsense from a six-year-old. Certainly, black congressmen aren't missing the point:
“The words don’t matter,” Mr. Richmond (D-La.) said. “The words just cement his sentiment that the people in those countries are less worthy, and he would like people from different countries. He chose the black countries to say he didn’t want those people and one of the whitest countries to say he did want them. I think that’s telling.”
Asked if he saw any difference between the two words, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the chamber, was equally dismissive: “No,” he said.
Trump’s mendacity is well known. What is more telling at this point is what is revealed about Perdue and Cotton. To wit: they are moral weaklings. They've now shown they will lie at the slightest convenience. They will cover for the sort of racism that is far more consequential the “locker room talk” it’s written off as because lowbrow banter rarely comes with the stakes of 800,000 people having their lives turned upside down.
Trump has been cruel and racist for a long time. (I find his bit part in the case of now-exonerated Central Park Five particularly nasty and telling.) What changed is we can now confirm that Perdue and Cotton are much the same way. To paraphrase football coach Denny Green, they are who we thought they were.
They aren’t the only ones. Paul Manafort, Anthony Scaramucci, Kellyanne Conway, and Sean Hannity are just a few of the many who made ridiculous statements, lied, and, in some cases, committed crimes because of Trump. They who didn’t merely sacrifice their dignity on Trump’s behalf -- they’ve shown they never had any in the first place.
The lesson of Faust is not just that making a deal with the devil costs you your soul. It's also that the pursuit is poison in itself.
Note to Cotton, Perdue, and their ilk: the kicker of every Faustian bargain is the devil never delivers what he promised.
2 comments:
Well said! Could the same logic be extrapolated? In my opinion, one could make a solid case that every Trump supporter makes a faustian bargain every day they continue to support him. People in the top 1% who benefit the most from the tax bill support him, glad to get a kickback and then conveniently justify away all other facts and abhorrent behavior. Single-issue voters, (anti-abortion etc) do a "deal" in their mind; anything is worth getting some movement on their issue. To be fair, I guess this kind of bargain is made in the mind of every voter since the beginning of democracy since each candidate has flaws... it just seems so extreme today with Trump that supporting him at this point seems morally wrong- devil indeed. There's got to be some line for each voter where the costs outway the benefits. So far, it has been a race to the bottom to find that line... a line which gets tested every day.
You've got a good point. I've got a lot of empathy for sincerely-held viewpoints that I disagree with (e.g. anti-abortion) and all of us voters are trying to squeeze infinitely complex views into a binary choice. I don't have a great solution for this. People call for viable third parties and the like but I'm not convinced going from two choices to three or four is going to solve our underlying problem. Instead, I think a deeper conversation about the values underlying the policies we pursue would move us in the right direction. I look forward to seeing that represented on cable news much as I look forward eating all of the donuts I want with no sugar hangover.
In the interim, we have to make do with making all sorts of moral compromise on flawed politician. That said, I think Trump pushes the envelope on the line between flawed politician and sociopath.
Post a Comment