On August 23, 2011, I was one of hundreds of consultants and bureaucrats sweating through my suit at midday on the national mall in Washington, DC. Milling about in our evacuation points and surrounded by curious tourists willing to brave the sauna that is our capitol in late Summer, most of us were scared. Minutes ago we were packed into our various conference rooms and cubicles, going about our latest very important discussion concerning our latest very important deliverable we would forget in a month’s time. I remember looking back into a room I had just left to see the conference table I had just used rise and fall like a raft passing over a swell in the surf. Did I just imagine that, or have a dizzy spell from too much coffee? No on both counts. As if in answer to my question, the dusty fire alarms of our aging federal building blared, and down the steps we went, many of us in a panic.
Nobody believed what we had felt came from a natural source. Many of us were heads-down on our phones, flailing for information we could use about what was really happening. Were we under attack? Was part of the plan luring evacuees from nearby buildings into a concentrated area in the open – one of great American significance? It was 2011 and we’d had nearly a decade to learn that anything was possible. One of our junior analysts, a young woman who was both a talented H1B contractor and a person of tiny stature, began to cry from the anxiety of it.
Our first evidence that there had been an earthquake and not a terrorist attack was not from the internet, but from a helicopter. Carefully approaching the Washington monument, it began flying a lazy, corkscrew pattern around the obelisk. We started to understand that they had begun a hasty inspection to identify if any severe cracks had formed, which likely meant we had just experienced a minor version of what Californians endure all of the time. Our west coast colleagues had no shortage of fun at our expense in the next few hours, gleefully posting pictures of overturned coffee mugs and lawn furniture, tagging them “scenes from the devastation of the D.C. Earthquake.”
I am not writing this today of all days out of a sudden need to reminisce. Part of the lingering effects of spending a lot of your parents’ money (and your own credit rating) on an English degree, followed by two years of teaching high school, is a chronic tendency towards identifying symbolism and irony and making odd connections between disparate events – sometimes when they aren’t even valid comparisons. I’m fairly certain this one, however, is close to the mark when it comes to where we find ourselves.
For the better part of the past year, Donald Trump has been nothing short of a series of escalating tremors felt in America’s political landscape. Even before standing with the other candidates at the Reagan library for the first GOP debate he has confounded the establishment. I’ve become almost – almost – numb to his seeming invulnerability to blows that would have annihilated his predecessors and primary opponents. Mock the disabled? If Jeb Bush had done it – take a seat. Multiple, gleefully confessed affairs? Enjoy your parting gifts, Ted Cruz. Scores of lawsuits from jilted or shorted partners? Time to be a regular on the Sunday shows, Marco Rubio.
Yet in spite of the hyperbole, the vulgarity, the reference to anatomy – he vanquished them all. I see many reasons for this. The first is the willful fascination of a mainstream media driven by the relentless news cycle and need for revenue, found only by creating excitement at the expense of fact. As we are also learning through WikiLeaks and the “Podesta emails,” there may have also been more nefarious forces at work. The second is our celebrity-obsessed culture. Who hasn’t seen Trump on television striding confidently in slow-motion from his private plane during the opening sequence of “The Apprentice?” I think I’m safe in betting a month’s salary that it’s significantly higher than those who have ever viewed a congressional hearing on C-Span. Also vital to mention here is the utter incompetence of the GOP as a functioning organization. For years, they’ve been called the “stupid party” – not for its members, but for its direction or lack thereof. This year they earned every last syllable of the insult.
But lastly, and most importantly, is this: Trump saw the ways in which we as Americans are truly, deeply divided – and sought to exploit it. Mixed into his sizzle was just enough Trump steak. Our immigration system is broken. Over the past quarter-century of its vigorous implementation, free trade has devastated traditional industry while enriching the highly educated of our bi-coastal elite. The subsequent economic vacuum was filled in disadvantaged cities such as my Baltimore with drugs, crime and the misguided policies of corrupt politics. In foreign policy, our nation has witnessed a resurgent Russia dictating the terms of engagement in a brutal civil war in Syria that has become a humanitarian catastrophe and a global shame. Power vacuums left from our Iraqi withdrawal and botched Libyan intervention helped facilitate the rise of ISIS.
Trump spent months bloviating on all of these topics. Above all of the noise were his battle cries of "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" and “THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED!” Yes, to both. But lying below the obvious cracks are even deeper fissures which have earned almost no attention when attention has been most needed. Our progressive programs and foreign adventures have combined to create a national debt soaring over the twenty trillion-dollar mark – six figures owed by each and every man, woman and child. Despite the statistical sleight-of-hand performed monthly by the Department of Labor, our workforce participation rate – the percentage of American adults of working age actually working – is at its lowest level in forty years. The growth of complexity in federal regulations has been staggering. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) in 1960 stood at 22,877 pages. By the end of 2013 the CFR had exploded to 175,496 pages. The US tax code alone is over 70,000 pages long. And as Trump has so clumsily reminded us, it’s full of loopholes.
Does the Trump/Pence ticket even have concrete plans for implementing their agenda to which America can refer? I spent an hour or so perusing the position papers on the campaign website. My best answer to the question is: sort of, if you consider documentation about as deep as marketing collateral “plans.” Some of it scratches many of my Libertarian itches: simplify taxes, pause regulatory growth, roll back the overreach of the EPA, among others. But the details never get below the bullet point level. Absent more information, everything his campaign site (or Clinton’s campaign site, for that matter) promises to change in our country evaporates with a single question: how?
Attempts at reform (or at least simplification) in our current environment yield little to no result. Decades of rampant Gerrymandering have placed an emphasis on more ideologically “pure” candidates within each party’s primaries, creating a polarized representative branch that vapor-locks upon any attempt at serious legislation. Those lucky, skilled or wealthy enough to navigate the brutal path through a congressional election find an environment best described as a state of permanent campaigning. Current and former representatives tell stories of being led by party members to rows of cubicle phone banks, saddled with the expectation of raising $10,000 per day to be considered competitive in a re-election. This leaves little room for serious legislating or – even worse – connecting with constituents.
This is the type of conversation I wanted, hoped, needed the election of 2016 to provide. We got Trump instead. And like an American Icarus, the longer he remained aloft and ignored the dangers of hubris, the more the sunlight melted the wax in his wings.
He had to know this was coming, didn’t he? Spend most of your adult life as a celebrity and it becomes nearly impossible to hide the worst parts of yourself, especially in our time of pocket-sized devices that hold more information than the best personal computer of 1980. And so in predictable fashion, the recordings and accusations began to drop. The vulgarity. The infidelity. The misogyny. The pettiness. The inference of sexual assault. Most of all, the hubris. After all, when you’re a celebrity they’ll let you do anything, right?
Maybe Trump failed to recognize that the world had changed too much to hide these revelations. Considering his demonstration of media savvy, I doubt it. I think he knew and didn’t care. Worse still, I believe that he considered it a perverse opportunity. The Clintons have their own sordid history. Subject him to a referendum on his character, and he will subject Hillary Clinton to the very same thing. Which is, of course, exactly what he did in the second presidential debate.
Except there’s a difference. We suspect – hell, we know – that Hillary is guilty of corruption, destruction of evidence, character assassination – yet somehow, amazingly, she has become the lesser of two evils in this election. A media manipulator should understand that perception is reality in 2016 America, and the simple truth is that while she is rightly perceived as a potentially terrible President, it is also true that he presents an image that cannot be reconciled with occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She has leveraged a system to enrich herself and harm her enemies. You just inflict the harm yourself, Donald. The country barely tolerates the first, but is terrified and disgusted by the second. You lose.
She will be more of the same, insulated by a system that protects and perpetuates more of the same. For Trump, the fall will be long, loud, and obscene. In his collapse is where I believe we find the greatest divide among us.
To illustrate: two stories from my own life. Sunday mornings in the Fall mean double-header baseball games in my over-30 league. My team is a group of decent, hard-working guys, many of whom work in what might be called blue-collar professions – good jobs, important jobs, but also the kind of jobs that have grown less commonplace. Between innings and waiting on the bench for your turn at bat often affords chances to talk. Since I’m a political junkie and was still hearing the Access Hollywood "bombshell" recording echo in my ears, I asked the biggest questions on my mind: what did you think? Will you be watching tonight? This began a series of loud, angry complaints about Trump – specifically, how Trump was being treated. One team member: “it is just locker room talk!” Another: “You know the media’s just hiding worse about her.”
Another story. Since the release of Trump’s conversation with Billy Bush, my wife has engaged in furious arguments over Facebook, which has been quite the battlefield in this election. A full disclosure about these conversations is in order. Both my wife and I are relatives to someone who was sexually assaulted. Eerily enough, the manner in which she was assaulted was almost exactly what Trump described. While neither of us were Trump supporters before, you can guess my wife’s reaction to these recordings, as well as mine. Her true heat and fury, however, has been aimed at the women in her social network defending Trump. At one point Sunday evening prior to the debate, my wife screamed at her laptop, yelling “HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY CALL HIM AN AGENT OF GOD!?” No, I said. No one said that.
Sure enough, they did. And it took me all of thirty seconds of searching in Twitter before I found this example:
And this one:
And this one:
So here we are. In the face of a republic straining under the weight of its own complexity, cost and divergent culture, a significant number of the American people are willing – eager, even – to overlook an obvious sociopath’s flaws in the name of change. They will forgive his lack of character, lack of humility, even his lack of competence – because he can be the one to finally throw all of the bums out. Michael Moore, a man with whom I have now agreed only once, put it this way: “Donald Trump is a Molotov cocktail that forty percent of the American people want to throw at Washington.”
Trump will fail. Too many Americans see too much danger in it. But we cannot forget it. Viewed in the correct context, in his own ugly, narcissistic, incoherent manner Donald Trump has performed a service for this country. In deference to Mr. Moore’s analogy, I like my metaphor better. Donald Trump has been a political and cultural earthquake. In shocking the system, he has illuminated dozens of fault lines and fractures inside our version of what Barbara Tuchman in discussing nineteenth-century Europe called “The Proud Tower.”
To our likely next President, Hillary Clinton, I can only say this: don’t ignore the tremors. Make your first priority – before any specific policy agenda to add to your own personal legacy – beginning the hard and sometimes mundane work of inspection, reconciliation, repair. Want to help provide small business relief? Don't simply pepper your speeches with references to it. Fill your White House appointment book with small business owners. Sit in a room with them and take notes. Fix Obamacare? Learn its effects on real people, both for better and worse. Listen and listen. Then listen some more. Then act collaboratively with Congress. I don't think you would expect this to be easy or pleasant, but pens and phones are shortcuts that close one structural flaw at the expense of creating another. You’ve been around long enough to know that. Don’t repeat mistakes out of mere precedent and opportunity.
To our media, a word of caution: most of you are in desperate need of a dose of circumspection. If you honestly believe America does not realize that your thumb is on the scale for one party or another, you have spent an unhealthy amount of time moving in circles of like-minded people. I know this doesn't happen through statements made that are actually false; it's far subtler. Too many outlets maintain a narrative, either leftward or rightward, by acting as gatekeepers controlling what facts are provided the most exposure. Much of this is justified by the notion that others show more data from an opposing viewpoint, so rationalizing a response in kind is an easy leap. Get out of your ideological comfort zones. Remember that picture of being a Journalist you carried into college? Be that Journalist. You're running out of time. Among the major institutions of American society, newspapers and television news are among the least trusted according to polling data, right ahead of - you guessed it - big business and Congress.
Finally, to all of us: Voltaire wrote that "history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes going up." Most of Europe has been clad in silk for some time, thanks to its welfare state - and its sun is setting. Whole swaths of Asia have strapped on their wooden shoes and are climbing. And far too much of the Middle East simply want all of us gone. Our uniquely American gifts of freedom and self-renewal bless us with an ability rare in mankind - the power of choice. Let's not give in to cynicism, or content ourselves with entertaining distractions. Between the lowest levels of American life - families - and the highest levels of our government, there are middle layers that have weakened over time. We can fix that. We can start ventures, volunteer time, join political groups. And in paying attention to our government, we can follow Sharyl Attkisson's closing words from Stonewalled: "Do your own research. Consult those you trust. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself."
I doubt much of this will happen - though I do have far more faith in ordinary Americans than our leaders or those who report (or decide not to report) on how they exercise their power. But I fear that all of this needs to begin, right now, to halt our decline. America needs to recognize what has happened: the election of 2016 has shaken every one of our foundations. Find the cracks. Start the long road to fixing them. Because if we plow ahead in the name of progress – building atop our damaged foundations – I am afraid that our proud tower is coming down.
