It seems that we have a pendulum problem in America, and the problem may be intractable. Every policy of the current administration is a “through-the-looking-glass” reaction to some other policy of some other president.
Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty; Donald Trump has declared war on the impoverished themselves, made more numerous now by his destructive economic policies. LBJ brought us the Voting Rights Act; Trump brought us targeted voter suppression, gerrymanders, and redistricting so that no matter how hideous his policies and their outcomes, his party will never lose an election again.
Ronald Regan extolled the value of immigrants; Trump sends immigrants to third-world concentration camps after being arrested and abused by his masked, paramilitary goons. Nixon’s Supreme Court decided that women were entitled to reproductive autonomy; Trump’s Supreme Court decided that women are human incubators with no right to self-governance, including the right to receive emergency care for the life-threatening complications that are killing them in hospital parking lots.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought us Social Security; Trump could not care less about social safety net programs and is eviscerating them even as we speak. The only “social” anything he cares about is his own “Truth Social,” which of course is just one large screening room for his narcissism, his lies, his vitriol, and his projections.
There are clear differences between Trump’s perspective and that of almost every other individual who has held his office in the past. What others have built, one man tears asunder, and you might consider the recent demolition of the East Wing of the White House as a perfect example of his destructive impulses. President Eisenhower, a war hero, built the East Wing of the White House following World War II; President Bone Spurs, a draft dodger, demolished it to make way for his self-aggrandizing ballroom.
Dwight Eisenhower also presided over the first distribution of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. In an alternate universe, Trump has appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to discredit and withhold the vaccine that has, for more than 70 years, prevented the disability and death of millions of children and adults worldwide.
Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House Rose Garden? Gone, to make way for Trump’s concrete-paved patio that has all the grace and elegance of a parking lot. Michele Obama’s vegetable garden? Also gone. Wife Melania got rid of that, perhaps because Donald Trump cannot countenance the sight of healthy food. One wonders if Melania attempted to pacify him by planting a grove of Big Macs in its place.
Is that a flowering Filet-O-Fish in a decorative planter on the patio?
The previously sedate, tastefully appointed, and historically preserved rooms of the White House have blossomed now into blindingly gold-leafed atrocities, proving the age-old adage that there is no correlation between money and taste. Donald Trump is such a taste-deficient nouveau riche that he has confused excess with elegance. Or maybe not. Maybe he knows the difference and simply prefers the former. The Lincoln Bathroom—by all accounts a perfectly fine bathroom—has now erupted into a gold and marble palace for poopery, fit for a tsar.
Theodore Roosevelt created our national parks to preserve the pristine beauty of our vanishing American wilderness. Trump intends to log them and frack them, and while he is at it, he plans to have his leering face carved into Mount Rushmore as an indelible tribute to his vanity. He has already managed to rebrand the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” in his zeal to achieve the primacy of completely unearned top billing.
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy all worked to establish a rules-based international order both during and after World War II, including the establishment of the United Nations and NATO, and their efforts resulted in a remarkable age of comity between the sovereign nations of the Western world. Donald Trump has now violated those principles, abandoned our allies, killed more than 100 fishermen in the Caribbean, and invaded Venezuela, kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and his wife, taken over the country, and will presumably install a Trump-friendly puppet to help him loot the country’s oil reserves.
It seems that Donald Trump and his cabinet intend to politically and economically destabilize the entire Western Hemisphere by the end of his second term. He and his minions provide continual evidence that they are little more than domestic and international terrorists.
The examples of President Pendulum’s destructive tendencies are virtually endless. So numerous are they, in fact, that I have stopped trying to digest every fresh assault on our republic. The destruction is so fast, so furious, that it is nearly impossible to keep up.
In days gone by, no matter how horrifying the political moment, we could count on the pendulum to swing, eventually, in the other direction, but we no longer live in an orderly world. The sublime has given way to the ridiculous, the lunatics are running the asylum, and nobody seems willing or able to stop them. One year in, they have taken a jackhammer to the Constitution and the rule of law as the rest of us scream from the sidelines, terrified.
We are about to begin the second year of what promises to be a four-year debacle. While many of us hope that the pendulum can be reset, we might find that there is so much sand in the gears, so much damage, that it is now beyond repair. As committed as we are to restoring the natural balance of our constitutional republic, the possibility exists that the grandfather clock of American democracy has finally given up the ghost and time will be now be frozen, forever, at quarter past Trump.
