Trump as disease
by Tom Sullivan
Mental health experts have eschewed diagnosing the acting president from afar. Donald Trump biographer David Kay Johnston is not a health care professional. He has no such qualms. On Monday night's "Hardball," Johnston declared to host Chris Matthews, “We have a mentally ill person in the White House, someone who is deranged ... He is deeply mentally ill."
Europeans dislike Trump but experience less outrage, Johnston explained, because "they’ve had centuries of mad kings and crazy warlords and other rulers who were nuts."
Perhaps it is time to consider that Trump's particular form of madness is contagious.
In the wake of presidential outbursts against Democratic women of color in Congress, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina acted as Trump's wingman. Graham piled on, declaring the four women of The Squad, “a bunch of communists.” Graham railed, “They hate Israel, they hate our own country. They’re calling the guards along our border, Border Patrol agents concentration camp guards. They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They’re anti-Semitic. They’re anti-America.”
Graham, who once described Trump as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” is now all-in on Trumpism. On "The View" Monday, Meghan McCain observed that Graham, a man she once saw as an uncle, is no longer the same person:
“The problem is you’re making this about race,” she exclaimed. “You’re making this about racism. You’re making this about what’s truly American, and it’s all these old racist dog whistles that have plagued this country for so long, and for me as the conservative representative on this show, I was so upset coming back yesterday.”Whatever is happening with him, McCain said, Graham "is not the person I used to know.”
The contagion is not isolated to Graham nor to Trump's border guards. He has gleefully thrown fuel on hot coals to earn himself TV face time, distract attention as he's so skilled at doing, and to remind the base he needs for 2020 theirs is still a white man's country.Read what American neo-nazi Andrew Anglin, who runs the racist Daily Stormer, says about #Trump attacks on four women in Congress: pic.twitter.com/BebwBNCNVy
— David Cay Johnston (@DavidCayJ) July 16, 2019
It is important to say that none of this is new to American life. Americans as early as the founding generation believed whiteness was a prerequisite for the exercise of republican virtue. Before the Civil War, there was a decades-long movement to send free and freed blacks back to Africa based on the theory that black people were unfit for and incompatible with democratic life. America’s most restrictive immigration laws were rooted in the idea this was, as the popular 19th-century phrase had it, a “white man’s country,” inherently threatened by the presence of nonwhites and non-Anglo-Saxons, not to mention women.Trumpism is a form of mass hysteria rooted in historic racial animosity. More game show host than "reality" TV star, the acting president simply used his celebrity to make racism acceptable again in impolite company. One can imagine him looking out from his wing chair, wagging his finger, and announcing, "You're lynched."
Trump, in other words, isn’t an innovator. His theory of citizenship is an old one, brought back from the margins of American politics and expressed in his crude, demagogic style. And it has found a comfortable place in a Republican Party that elevates its narrow, shrinking base as the only authentic America and would rather restrict the electorate than persuade new voters.