Shortly after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency I
decided to watch again President Barack Obama’s talk at the funeral for the men and women of the Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Grace Church in Charleston, Christians murdered by the
white supremacist Dylan Roof. I urge you to call it up, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003767801/obama-delivers-eulogy-in-charleston.html,and
ask even those who despise Obama to watch with an open mind and heart. I
occasionally disagreed with him, and at times I thought he might not be up to
the job, but in that moment Obama displayed his fundamental humanity and the
power of his leadership in grief, and ultimate consolation. Amazing grace,
indeed. I think it was the best eulogy spoken in the US since the doomed Robert
Kennedy’s brief 1968 Indianapolis speech upon learning of Martin Luther King’s
death. Somehow in that moment Kennedy found these words: “My favorite poet was
Aeschylus. He wrote, `In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.’”
At that time I tried to imagine President Trump speaking
after some inevitable, horrible tragedy. I couldn’t, and that led me to
understand just how much we had lost with Obama’s passing from the scene and
the elevation of this terrifying, self-absorbed demagogue to the
presidency. And now this disgrace. The
London attacks were greeted by a Trump “tweetstorm”: repeated mischaracterizations
of the words of the mayor of London, a Fox and Friends-worthy assertion that
gun control is ineffective since the attackers used vehicles and knives (a
tweet followed in a day by the shooting of five in Orlando by a disgruntled
worker), an attack on “political correctness,” and a revival of the language of
banning immigration from countries chosen by the president. He disgraced
himself, his office, and all of us with this ridiculous, ill-considered rant.
It’s now clear what Trump will do when the next terror
attack occurs in the United States. He will feed the fear. He will attempt to leverage the panic into
arguments for his agenda and power for himself. Any attack will lead him to
argue that he was right and the critics were wrong, and any outcome will serve
his narrative—the absence of attacks will be evidence of his effectiveness, any
occurrence will be used to attack those with different views.
