Disgrace

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.