Pity the poor novelist. The Trump presidency is depriving thriller writers of great original material. We will all be writing roman à clefs — true stories with altered names. Who needs to invent political thrillers when the newspaper delivers the best plots in years?
Plot 1: A well-regarded journalist, a lion amongst his colleagues, drops a tell-all book about a highly controversial president chock-full of mostly anonymous sources dishing on their deeply flawed commander in chief. But that blockbuster is upstaged when a serving member of the President’s team pens an anonymous op-ed (in the newspaper the president most hates) revealing there is a “resistance” inside his White House that is preventing the president from destroying the nation from within. The anonymous writer reveals they are running the country, not the president.
Plot 2: A soft coup. A rich, over-privileged, under-educated erratic egomaniac decides to run for president of the most powerful nation on Earth. He destroys his political opponents by deploying middle-school rhetoric, and — with the aid of his nation’s most ardent enemy — gets himself elected by losing the popular vote. The now-president is so seemingly deranged by vanity his most senior advisers and cabinet appointments immediately plot to keep him from actually running the country so that he does not ruin it.
Plot 3: The most powerful nation on Earth elects a president who is so intellectually slothful, so clueless as to how his own government works, that his closest aides control him by simply removing certain files from his desk. The president doesn’t notice this until one of his political enemies publishes a book informing him of it, but he only finds that out by watching TV.
OK, so #3 has a splash of Monty Python.
Yet none of those plots are as riveting, nor as plausible, as the last two days’ news cycle. The revelations comings from Bob Woodward’s “Fear” were utterly overshadowed by the anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times by a “senior” administration official. The former we’ve seen two of before and I am blasé about them. The latter is so unprecedented it has finally pushed us through the Looking Glass.
A serving appointee who claims to support Trump’s “agenda” reveals that there is a resistance of seemingly dozens of officials inside Trump’s own administration who have clandestinely set-up a “two-track” presidency where Trump gets to temper tantrum, while they actually run the country, leading the great ox by the nose and cleaning up after him.
Some of Trump’s supporters immediately called the publication of both these exposes — claiming they were coordinated — a “soft coup.” But if anything, the op-ed clearly shows a soft coup has already happened.
Strangely, for a lifelong lefty, I find it … comforting. Whoever would’ve thought such a thing would be executed by conservatives in order to save the republic from one of their own? If a coup had ever occurred in the country, I’d always assumed it would be against a genuine socialist with designs to wind down Wall Street and sunset the American empire. This seems more the soft coup of lowered expectations. The threat is not political or economic; it is moral, intellectual, psychological.
We are supposed to be so divided, so unable to agree on the simplest terms, that civil war is upon us. And yet, those deepest in the “enemy camp” are undermining the commander most desperate to fire the first shot. They deliberately dilute or deflect his worst impulses to “preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
Look at that phrasing! The writer could have said “until the end of his two terms” or even “his term in office.” By using “until he is out of office” the writer reveals their low expectations for Trump to even finish the first term.
But we can only take so much heart from this. Like all else, the ultimate answer lies in an electoral strategy to defeat Trump, the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus in the mid-terms and 2020. What is most revealing is that such a screed as the Times published could only be written by an appointed official who risks only firing and then a parade as he or she goes into private life.
No one holding elected office would dare publish such a rebuke — it would cost them their career and standing in the Republican world.
And that ultimately is the crux. Trump is completely unfit for office and is president only by the grace of the ancient, useless Electoral College. This is a one-off, as we will never elect such an “amoral” ignoramus again. The only saving grace of Trump is that he is one of a kind. Even the GOP will not elect a watered down imitator.
Had Ted Cruz, say, won in 2016, we would have many of the same policies, though not the dangerous derangement of Trump’s egomania. But Cruz, lest we forget, campaigned to have police target Muslim neighborhoods, for example. We cannot count on the GOP to ease up on their extremism.
So, the single issue remains: Once the Monster is gone, Dr. Frankenstein will continue his immoral social experiments trying to catch lightning to fry our social contract. We can count on the GOP to learn only one lesson from the evil of their mad science: Don’t let the monster go in front of the cameras.
It is not the Monster we need to fear. It is the Mad Scientist(s).
Joe Gannon, author and teacher, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazette.net.