The Republicans have a big problem ahead trying to decide whether to rebuild or to split formally and go separate ways, and if the latter then their waning overall support becomes even more of a challenge to ability to win elections at the federal level.
Our biggest problem as a country though is going to be learning to trust each other again and probably regardless of political party. We've all been schooled for four years not to believe much of anything and to look to Trump's twitter line or media reaction to it even to figure out what "matters" today. Trust is not in the picture. We've been told not to trust each other. What matters is getting a grip on the day before it slides away into what not to believe tomorrow.
I just connected with Bret Stephens' 12/14 piece in the opinion pages of the NYT, talking about corrosion of social trust and referencing
a WaPo essay on trust by the now very aged George Shultz, a former Secretary of State asserting that "trust is the coin of the realm."
The Stephens piece is at
A little part of it in everyone.
www.nytimes.com
Trump’s presidency is hardly the sole cause of America’s declining trust in our institutions, which has been
going on for a long time. In some ways, his was the culmination of that decline.
But it’s hard to think of any person in my lifetime who so perfectly epitomizes the politics of distrust, or one who so aggressively promotes it. Trump has taught his opponents not to believe a word he says, his followers not to believe a word anyone else says, and much of the rest of the country to believe nobody and nothing at all.
He has detonated a bomb under the
epistemological foundations of a civilization that is increasingly unable to distinguish between facts and falsehoods, evidence and fantasy. He has instructed tens of millions of people to accept the commandment,
That which you can get away with, is true.
The link to the Time piece by Stephens that he provided in the above quote is from 2017, when as a former colleague of the late Danny Pearl at the WSJ he was asked to deliver that year's Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, from which the following quotes are taken:
If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.
One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.
Heh, yeah and it never happened, did it.
Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.
Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.
Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.
If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.
Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential?
That right there is a concern of mine. We've just spent four years watching a shameless liar entertain us. The press has realized we
have found it all pretty entertaining
(outrage itself became entertainment... if you don't think so then you haven't yet caught yourself lately sighing and leaving some serious piece of journalism about policy in the Biden administration for "some other time" because Trump clickbait is more energizing)
even if we've come to trust mainstream media outlets less just for having got themselves and us sucked into Trump's narcissistic focus on him and his every twitch.
If we have continued to find Trump himself not trustworthy, just constantly being drawn to his every utterance by the press has made us question their worth too, which of course has been exactly what Trump has hoped for. Now he is leaving government and we are stuck along with the press trying to regain our footing with respect to trust of each other, and us at least of the Fourth Estate as well. Trump may well still be out there with this or that shiny object going forward, trying to lure the press and us into staying entertained by his ability to divide us and generate outrage. And the Republicans will be watching to see how he does in order to figure out what to do about the fraying bonds within their own party.
The rest of us shouldn't think we don't have a lot of trust issues on the left in the meantime.
As for the press? I think they're all quaking in their boots. The reality show from this White House underwrote their bottom lines for four years, in a time of tremendous pressure from the internet and during ongoing consolidation of commerically viable journalistic endeavors. Sobering up and trying to get the American population to come along to rehab now is going to be a challenge.
) is stark, the difference between a empathetic, respectable, caring leader, and a raving, teeth nashing, user-loser conman and psychopath, a spewer of poison and lies with every breath.
