In September 2001, two days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson explained why God had allowed such an outrage in America. Their televised conversation became instantly notorious. “What we saw on Tuesday,” said Falwell, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.” He then listed some of the reasons why God might permit further carnage: “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle … all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say ‘You helped this happen.’”
It has become increasingly difficult to avoid such lunatic thinking in the age of Trump. His madcap presidency has unearthed and empowered a deep vein of martyrology within the GOP. In fact one could argue that his instinct for what the base really wants has always been Trump’s most valuable political asset. Unlike the establishment Republicans whom he has effortlessly sidelined, Trump has been always willing to say the quiet part of conspiracy theories out loud. From his early years pushing Birtherism (the idea that Obama was not American) to frequent rants about ‘deep state’ actors who are trying to scuttle his presidency, Trump has completely disinhibited his base. Now, encouraged by increasingly surreal right wing media, many of them sincerely believe the pandemic has been used as a political weapon to humiliate their heroic leader.
The president has fed this lunacy at every turn. His latest concoction – “Obamagate” – is a return to the 2016 playbook in which Trump casts himself as an outsider and victim. Projecting the mafia-like behaviour which has characterized his presidency throughout, Trump alleges that his political rivals used intelligence agencies to advance a political vendetta. That, of course, is exactly what he is trying to do. And yet, unblushingly, despite having just argued in his impeachment trial that the president is effectively above the law, Trump now asks that Obama be held accountable for lawbreaking. This self-serving hairball of deep-state conspiracies and other mad conjectures is peak Trump.
Thirty years ago Joan Didion noticed a paranoid strain in American conservatism. In the mid-90s, for instance, the opening page of a popular book on “Compassionate Conservatism” warned that it “will face dug-in opposition … have to cross a river of suspicion concerning the role of religion … to get past numerous ideological machine-gun nests.” President George W. Bush and his Machiavellian strategist Karl Rove also noticed this tendency and used it pander to the fundamentalist Christian base.
In the Bush years a series of “Left Behind” novels sold more than 50 million copies in the American heartland. They followed the struggles of a few faithful resistors to the Antichrist – a character who, Didion wryly noted, seemed to act much like the head of the UN – as he tried to subjugate America. The struggle was understood as a prelude to the End Times and the Rapture. The credulousness enabled by such nonsense was a helpful distraction from the Bush administration’s disastrous mistakes in the Middle East, and from many domestic failures. Similarly fevered thinking would animate the Tea Party movement and then the Make America Great Again cult which has doubled down on its leader as he crosses rivers of suspicion and draws fire from the gun-nests of the “radical left.”
Fortunately, Trump’s latest distractions have not overshadowed genuine scandals about his failures. In a recent whistle-blower complaint, Rick Bright, former head of the federal agency which develops vaccines, set out detailed evidence of the government’s repeated lapses in the face of dire warnings about the virus. “Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined,” Bright said, “2020 will be the darkest winter in modern history.” It is a chilling reminder that while the American president indulges in conspiracy-laced shadowplay with imagined enemies, thousands of lives are being lost because of his incompetence.
