Sam Smith - I’ve been covering news for over six decades and have never seen any national official as corrupt, irrational, and indifferent to others than our current president. Even outside of virtue issues, I find myself wondering how anyone in power could be so indifferent to the number of Americans who don’t like what he’s up to. Most of the politicians I’ve seen have at least tried to calm criticism and avoid corruption issues. Trump just seems indifferent to what others think.
Clearly there’s a lot of work here for psychiatrists, but something we all should be considering is how so many Americans accept such a leader. In other words, it’s not just a matter of Trump’s mind but our collective minds.
My best guess is that we are now paying the price for our cultural changes in our past few decades – my bet would be starting in the 1980s. Before then our cultural and political story was comfortably filled with progress. I think that it really started with Franklin Roosevelt and ended with Ronald Reagan.
Meanwhile business schools, corporations, public relations and advertising were getting much more power in American society as the alternative cultures of cooperation, fairness, and equality were being downgraded. The 1960s was the last great decade of American progress.
Yet despite the discouraging national changes, decency and democracy has survived in many American communities.
For example, I lived and was active for decades in a local Washington DC that not only was progressive in its politics but sensible in its ethnic relations, at one point being about 70% black. I can’t recall a serious ethnic problem that this white guy personally faced in those days. And whites and blacks joined to fight plans for new freeways, DC Transit fare increases and support DC statehood. The rest of the country, however, paid no attention to the DC story and we find ourselves moving backwards on the ethnic issue thanks to folks like Trump.
Back in 2009 my wife and I moved to a small town in Maine where I had summered as a youth. I can not point to a single citizen I’ve run into who has talked or acted in the manner of Trump. It recently occurred to me that one reason for this was that at the local level there were few problems you could talk your way out of. I had learned this from sailing and farming, which would help me in my time in Washington where not just Trump but thousands of others thought you handle any problem with the best deluding words.
In short, Donald Trump is only one example of what has happened in recent time - a cruel beneficiary of a country that has moved away from reality to rampant verbal illusions. Even getting rid of Trump will not solve this problem, useful as it may be. We must face up to the fact that we have created a land where exaggeration, mistruths, and flagrant lying get such high approval.
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