Several months ago it became clear that Trumpism is a corrosive force that corrupts everyone in Donald Trump’s orbit. What makes Trumpism corrupting is that it is not possible to pick and choose from the Trump buffet. You cannot endorse the border fence, hope for a good Supreme Court appointment, and call it a day. Signing on with Trumpism means being forced to defend every utterance to pass the man’s lips. Witness what happened last week.
Trump declared that a federal judge born in Indiana is a “Mexican” who therefore couldn’t fairly adjudicate the civil case in which Trump is being sued for fraud stemming from “Trump University.” This charge—that someone’s race or ethnicity precludes the possibility of their being able to perform a job competently—is, as Sen. Ben Sasse said, the literal definition of racism.
Seeing this merde sandwich sliding toward them on the buffet, many of the Republicans who have formally endorsed Trump tried to pass. The collective objections from people such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio could be fairly paraphrased as, Well, yes, he may be a racist. But he’s our racist.
That wasn’t good enough for Trump, who doubled down. His campaign had initially circulated a memo to its surrogates that instructed them to avoid commenting on the fraud lawsuit. But then Trump himself held a conference call with high-level supporters and surrogates in which he told them to “Take that order and throw it the hell out.” And then Trump gave his own marching orders: “The people asking the questions—those are the racists,” he said. “I would go at ’em.”
Much like O. J. Simpson vowing to go after the real killers, Trump and his surrogates now contend that it is people like Paul Ryan who are the real racists. This contention is absurd and laughable, but also instructive. It further reveals the nature of Trumpism.
Donald Trump is, at this point, only an aspirational authoritarian. But Trumpism is already an authoritarian system, demanding unthinking loyalty and enthusiasm and disregard for the truth. Remember back half a dozen scandals or so, when it was revealed that Donald Trump used to call reporters and praise himself while pretending to be Donald Trump’s publicist? As Ben Domenech wrote, “This is a thing that happened and that Donald Trump admitted happened, both in a court of law and in the press, in 1990 and in 1991.”
But when the story resurfaced, Trump changed his mind and insisted not only that this thing had never happened, but that he had never previously admitted to it, either. So it was a lie, squared. And then Trump sent out Paul Manafort to dutifully insist on national television that if Trump now says he never pretended to be his own publicist, then Manafort believes him.
What’s important here isn’t the lie, but the fact that Trump knows he’s lying, and that Manafort knows he’s lying, and that they both know that you know they’re lying, too. And that they don’t care, because they believe that they hold the authority to make you acquiesce to their version of reality. In Trumpism, lying is an exercise of power. We have seen this before.
In 1978 Václav Havel wrote a famous essay titled “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel considered the case of a greengrocer in the Eastern bloc who puts a sign in his shop window proclaiming “Workers of the world, unite!” Here’s Havel:
Havel’s description of why the greengrocer puts up the sign is eerily analogous to why so many elected Republicans have endorsed Trump. As is Havel’s imagining of what happens if the shopkeeper breaks with the system:
All of which hits remarkably close to home for those conservatives who have criticized Trump and refused to get with the program. But the parallels continue. Havel, again:
Which is exactly right. Neither Paul Manafort nor Chris Christie nor any of the other political professionals who have rallied to Trump hold anything like an inner conviction about his merits. They do what he asks because they are being paid, or because they hope for a career-saving political appointment, or because it gets them into the regular rotation on cable.
And as for the rest of Trump’s nominal supporters—the Marco Rubios and Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans of the world—they do it because they are part of the panorama and because it is how things have always been done.
Yet as Havel knew, an act of rebellion from even one greengrocer can be powerfully destabilizing. He can “upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together” and demonstrate “that living a lie is living a lie.” Because “as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness.”
This, then, is how you fight Trumpism. You refuse to put the sign in the grocery store window, as honorable Republicans such as Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, and Lindsey Graham have done. Or you take the sign down, as Mark Kirk did when he rescinded his endorsement of Trump. It would be good if Susan Collins, Ron Johnson, Kelly Ayotte, and other elected Republicans were to join their company.
It may be too late to save the GOP’s 2016 prospects. It is not too late to salvage the party’s honor. Trumpism corrupts; but as Václav Havel understood, it is never too late to shrug off the yoke of corruption.
