Topic: Fifty Shades of Orange
Writter: Michelle Goldberg
Publish Date: 22 December 2017Writter: Michelle Goldberg
Published on : The New york times
Fifty Shades of Orange
At a televised cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Donald Trump, as is his custom, called on his appointees to publicly praise him. In a performance that would have embarrassed the most obsequious lackey of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Vice President Mike Pence delivered an encomium to his boss, who sat across the table with arms folded over his chest, absorbing abasement as his due.
“I want to thank you, Mr. President,” Pence said. “I want to thank you for speaking on behalf of and fighting every day for the forgotten men and women of America. Because of your determination, because of your leadership, the forgotten men and women of America are forgotten no more. And we are making America great again.” The president thanked him for his kind words, and Pence replied, “Thank you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”
It was a neat summation of where the Republican Party is at the end of the first year of Trump. There’s been a synthesis, in which Trump and establishment Republicans adopt one another’s worst qualities. Trump, who campaigned as a putative economic populist — even calling for higher taxes on the rich — will soon sign into law the tax plan of the House speaker Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randian dreams. The majority of elected Republicans, in turn, are assuming a posture of slavish submission to Trump, worshiping their dear leader and collaborating in the maintenance of his alternative reality.
Some of this might be strategic; everyone knows Trump is susceptible to flattery. But in many cases — certainly with Pence — it seems sincere. In a recent Atlantic profile of the vice president, McKay Coppins wrote that Pence’s faith mandates obedience to temporal as well as heavenly authority. When he accepted the vice-presidential nomination, Coppins wrote, “he believed he was committing to humbly submit to the will of Donald Trump.” From a secular perspective, Pence, like many other Republicans, appears to be a person inclined to authoritarianism.
Erich Fromm, a German-Jewish psychoanalyst who fled Nazism, described authoritarian personalities as simultaneously craving power and submission. “The authoritarian character loves those conditions that limit human freedom; he loves being submitted to fate,” he wrote. Fate, in his formulation, can be the laws of the market, the will of God, or the whims of a leader. According to Fromm, authoritarians might make a show of valuing freedom and independence — watchwords of the American right — but long to be ruled by a stronger force.
Viewed this way, it’s not surprising that religious conservatives have been among Trump’s most ardent fans. Certainly, it’s understandable that people on the right would try to get what they can out of this president. But the relationship between Trump and many Republicans increasingly looks less like a marriage of convenience than a sadomasochistic affair.
Even as Trump’s poll numbers fall, most Republicans in Congress only cling to him more tightly. At a White House celebration on Wednesday, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, spoke of his “love” for the president, who he described as “one heck of a leader.” He added, “We’re going to keep fighting and we’re going to make this the greatest presidency that we’ve seen not only in generations, but maybe ever.” Either Hatch really believes this, or he believes in the utility of unabashed sycophancy. Neither possibility suggests he will be an ally in preserving democracy.
The mounting authoritarianism of the Republican Party under Trump is particularly blatant when it comes to the Russia investigation. It’s not just that Republicans are covering for the president, or are acting as if electoral collusion with Russia, a country most Republicans used to regard as an enemy, was no big deal. Several members of Congress, as well as platoons of pundits, are also participating in the ludicrous fiction that there was a pro-Hillary Clinton conspiracy afoot in the F.B.I., an entity led by a succession of Republicans and described by one agent during the election as “Trumpland.”
It is true, of course, that Peter Strzok, a senior F.B.I. counterintelligence agent, was removed from Robert Mueller’s investigation this summer because he’d texted a colleague, with whom he was having an affair, about his horror of a Trump presidency. For the sake of appearances, it’s a good thing that Strzok was reassigned. But what’s gotten lost amid Republican shrieking is that this incident reflects at least as poorly on Trump as on the agent. Strzok, after all, was privy to the investigation of Trump’s Russia connections before almost anyone else, and as Del Quentin Wilber of The Wall Street Journal wrote on Twitter, he was “flabbergasted” by what he saw. His texts directly contradict Trump’s claim that the Russia investigation is “fake news” cooked up by bitter Democrats to explain their loss.
If Republicans were as loyal to the country as they are to the president, they’d want to know exactly what had Strzok so alarmed. Instead, according to Politico, Devin Nunes, Republican of California and leader of the House Intelligence Committee, is running a secret inquiry into anti-Trump bias at the F.B.I. and Department of Justice. The goal, Politico reports, “is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement.”
It is, as they say, not normal for erstwhile law-and-order Republicans to attack the F.B.I. for being overzealous in its pursuit of Russian subversion. Nunes’s inquiry appears similar to Trump’s voter fraud commission, invented to substantiate right-wing fantasies about Democratic vote rigging. The point, in both cases, is to flesh out a lie rather than find the truth. Hannah Arendt once wrote of this sort of policy-as-disinformation: “Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda.”
For the past year, a lot of us have assumed that Republicans are putting up with Trump out of fear of their base or lust for tax cuts. We’ve imagined that beneath our mutual partisan loathing lies some remaining shared commitment to liberal democracy. Maybe that’s true, and Republicans will display new independence once tax reform is signed, particularly if support for the president keeps dwindling.
But there’s another possibility, which is that a critical mass of Republicans like being in thrall to a man who seems strong enough to will his own reality, and bold enough to voice their atavistic hatreds. Maybe Trump is changing Republicans, or maybe he’s just giving men like Pence permission to be who they already were.
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