Unlike some scribes who look back in time in order to explain the current political climate, I demur. The era surrounding Donald Trump and his rise may not have a historical precedent. Trump, the political phenomenon, may not have an antecedent. He may be a one-off.
Recent theories draw parallels to events in our nation’s past. MSNBC host, and former congressional aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Lawrence O’Donnell’s Playing with Fire traces our current political and cultural state to the era beginning with the tumultuous summer of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon. This is the summer following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy which saw riots in most major American cities and the disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Another theory suggests that the alledged crimes of the Trump campaign and its resultant administration parallel more specifically the Watergate era crimes of the Nixon Administration. Much has been made of the similarities of having a Special Prosecutor named to investigate the activities of the president and his associates. Trump’s actions, and those of Richard Nixon, both suggest presidential complicity and the abuse of power inherent in trying to halt or contain the investigation.
Finally, there are those that take the connection back further with an arc that began with the civil rights movement and the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the landmark Supreme Court ruling which reversed the “separate but equal” discriminatory practices legalized by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1899. Brown led to an awakening and a movement that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed by the Voting Rights Act a year later. Popular sentiment identifies this moment as the one that changed the political destiny of the south, driving the Dixiecrats to the Republican Party. After signing the Voting Rights Act into law, LBJ famously predicted, “It is an important gain, but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” What is lost in this rendition is that, while the Democrats lost the “solid South”, both bills passed with enormous support from both parties. It was Southern and border legislators who sustained a 75 day filibuster before the Civil Rights bill passed in the Senate by a 73-27 vote margin after passing the House 290-130. Trump’s “movement” is hardly as popular even in his own ranks. Their leader was Robert Byrd, a tenured Democrat who later became the President pro tempore of the Senate and who in his early years was an avowed Klan member. Back then, the bipartisan minority masked their bigotry with calls for the protection of states’ rights and “civil liberties,” which were somehow conflated with individual and civil rights.
While these are interesting and cogent arguments for explaining Trumpism’s contextual ties to our past, they all ignore the singularity of its lack of coherence. In each of the other examples being cited, there is a tie to a seminal event. The Civil Rights movement followed years of recrimination and intolerance interrupted by World War II. The war is credited by many as being a catalyst for racial tolerance. In the South, “the times they are a’changin” was a bitter pill to swallow even as the rest of the country was convinced of the inevitability of fulfilling the promise of the Founders’ that all men were equal under the law—and all women as well. To the solid South, which was hijacked into the GOP by a crafty and unprincipled Richard Nixon, the Civil War would remain their seminal event. The “party of Lincoln” was recrafted into a morass of lost and privileged causes attenuated by religious intolerance, misogyny, and racial hatred.
Unless we are willing to pretend that the election of the first black president in 2008 was not a seminal event, the circumstances leading to Donald Trump’s election had much more recent lineage. We needn’t reach back in time to find reasons for the rise of a sorely unfit leader. Faced with Obama being followed by the first woman president, Trumpism rose from the backlash of bigotry and hate that fueled previous dalliances. At their root is the fear that the thing which they hate will overcome them. As the White Supremacists chanted in Charlottesville this fall, their grievance was their fear being replaced—of being forced to share the bounty of what they believe to be the result of their doing. Trump is not of the same stripe. As hateful as the “base” supporting him are, Trump is not their philosophical fellow traveler. He has other devils driving him.
Donald Trump is weak, both in his leadership skills and his reasoning. He wears his own insecurities on his sleeve, he demonstrates his own cognitive deficiencies in his tweets. He is his own singularity—a seminal event of massive proportions all on his own. What differentiates Trump from the events of the past, however, is his weakness for treason. There is no American historical equivalent for what he is being accused of---no modern comparative outside the Nazi quislings who were traitors to their countrymen in the face of fascism. Trump is the quisling of our era. His submission to Russia and Putin, his attraction for despots like Turkey’s Erdogan and the Philippine’s murderous Rodrigo Duterte are impossible to reconcile with any known American national interest. The opposite is blaringly apparent. Trump is our first leader who is a traitor. Even the bigots and racists and white supremacists of today and the past would consider themselves as patriots. Misguided as they were and are, they are American outliers. Donald Trump is not of their ilk. He long ago sold his soul for power and money. Our national interests are only the latest in a long line of “product” branded and sold to fill his coffers. His depravity isn’t fueled by simple fear or hate, he has no worries about being replaced or set aside—these are human emotions that, while despicable, are transparent. He has demonstrated clearly to whom he owes loyalty—to his family, the Trump Organization, and Russia. There is no other explanation for his actions. He is alone in his infamy. He is alone in his treachery. He is in all respects a singularity.