I have brought up a few children – although most of that job
was superbly done by my wife of 50 years – and I can vividly recall the times
that I told them, in answer to their question why they had to do something, or
do something a certain way, or not to do something, ‘because I say so’. I knew
then, as I do now, that that was a cop out. An abuse of parental authority. Cutting
off further discussion by using those words meant that I was either too lazy to
give them a real answer or that I was deliberately hiding the truth from them.
I think about this often, as and when I hear our President making
blatantly untrue statements of which we are being served daily examples. The
Washington Post reported that as of February 17, 2019 President Trump had made
8,718 false or misleading claims in his first 759 days in office. That is an
average of 11 per day!
PolitiFact, owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for
Media Studies, keeps a scorecard on Trump statements and reports that only an
astonishingly low percentage (15%) of his statements are judged to be ‘true’ or
‘mostly true’. That means that 85% of the statements coming from our President
are judged to be either ‘half true’, ‘mostly false’, ‘false’ or ‘pants on
fire’.
I have never known anybody in the public domain to be
willing to make verifiably untrue statements so easily, repeatedly and
emphatically as our President. It does not seem to faze him that the press
jumps all over these statements the moment he makes them; in fact, he seems to
relish that as an opportunity to accuse the media of disseminating fake news
and being biased against him. We have just seen that spectacle when he, completely
unprovoked and in a White House appearance with the NATO Secretary General, made
up that his father was born in Germany (in his book ‘the Art of the Deal’ he
claimed his Swedish ancestry). It falls in the category of trying to rewrite
history to conform to his own world view, aspirations or vanity. The most
egregious examples of this flaunting or bending of the truth are in his
pronouncements about his ‘landslide election victory’, the size of the crowd
attending his inauguration, the ‘massive election fraud’, trade wars being easy
to win, a ‘crisis’ at our Southern border, Obama’s religion and birthplace, his
support from among women, wind turbines
causing cancer, US Steel building six new plants in the US, his denial of
original positions he took on entering the Iraq war and women’s right to
choose, his ownership in the Trump Winery, falsely claiming it to be the
largest winery on the East Coast. And the beat goes on…….
It is a common feature of authoritarian rule that, over time,
a narrative gets created that bears no resemblance to the objective truth, but
only serves to establish and perpetuate the myth of good judgment, foresight
and statesmanship of the ruler. The next step then is to have a good part of
the population jump on board and subscribe to the alternate reality. This is
what happened with Mao Zedong in China, with Stalin in the Soviet Union, With
Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and the Kim dynasty in North Korea. It
does not succeed without an almost religious, fanatical, belief in the word of
the ruler.
And that is where the threat to our democracy is embedded. The
US nation has become so divided, fed information by media that conform to one
or the other side of a polarized world view, that it has become way too
gullible in accepting the gospel spread by the TV and Cable evangelists of the
new political dogma. On the right side and the left side. It is disturbing that
in my lifetime the political center has seemingly evaporated. You remember talk
of the ‘silent majority’ in the seventies and eighties? If there still is such
a thing, it has not shown up at the polls or even in the media.
In the 2016 Presidential elections, many of us saw the
Hillary – Donald contest as a choice between the lesser of two evils. Although
it is still early in the run up to the 2020 election, chances are that the
voters will be confronted with a similar choice again in the next race to the
White House. In the GOP only Bill Weld has emerged as a primary contender for
Trump. Not a credible contest. And Independents seem to be reluctant to put
their substantial clout behind Howard Schultz. The likely scenario is a choice
between Trump or a far left of center Democrat like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth
Warren or Kamala Harris. I simply refuse to believe that the American voting
public will go the (democratic) socialist left-wing route and rate the chance
high that the Democrats will hand Trump a second term by nominating an
unelectable contender from among their ranks.
If that scenario plays out, and the GOP does not get
repudiated at the Congressional and State House elections, Katy bar the door: Trump
and a slavishly submissive GOP will have four years to rule by executive power,
stack the judiciary further with originalist conservatives and have a free hand
to feed the American public its warped version of the truth, misrepresenting
what is truly happening (or should happen) in America and the world at large.
Then, if we have the audacity to ask why we should go along with misguided and
dangerous tactics and policies, we will be told: ‘because I say so’. How many
of us will then step in line, or fall silent, shrug our shoulders and go along?
So far, our institutions are holding. The judiciary,
prompted by interest groups and civic organizations like ProPublica and the
ACLU, scrutinizes every step of the Trump administration and pushes back everywhere
it finds unconstitutionality or abuse of executive power. And, since the
Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives in 2018, Congress is
taking its oversight responsibility seriously. But that is a tenuous,
momentary, condition that hangs in the balance because of an opposition in one
of the halls of power in Washington that can be erased in the next election.
The last person we should accept the words ‘because I say
so’ from is Donald Trump, who is proven to be a pathological creator of his
own, alternate, truth to suit his personal interests, views and ambitions.
