Siding with the Evil Empire
It’s pointless, at this late hour, to complain that Donald Trump isn’t a conservative. It ceased being a useful criticism sometime in mid-2016, when Republican primary voters — the sort of people to whom the label of “conservative” was supposed to matter — were busy proving that they didn’t care that Trump isn’t a conservative, because they, it turns out, aren’t actually conservative themselves. Sure, they may have talked a good game during the Clinton years, and the Bush years, certainly the Obama years, but when the opportunity arose to actually express a meaningful conservatism, most of them went crank populist instead.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump is still capable of shocking [at least to me] by how un-conservative, and even anti-conservative, he can be. One of the main tenets of modern conservatism is opposition to Russian expansion. It started as opposition to Soviet — and therefore communist — expansion following WWII, because conservatives rightly recognized that Soviet communism was a pernicious ideology that inflicted human suffering on a wide swath of the global population. And so containing the Soviet Union, and indeed defeating it, became one of the main animating forces of conservatism in the second half of the 20th century.
Well, Donald Trump doesn’t care about that sort of thing. I’ve never been one to indulge in the fantasy that Trump is so weirdly deferential to Russia and Putin because Putin has some incriminating blackmail material that he is perpetually lording over Trump. Don’t misunderstand — I wish that were true, because that seems better to me than what I think is the truth: that Donald Trump just genuinely believes this shit. He doesn’t care that Russia, under Putin’s iron-fisted leadership, has revived its expansionist aims, and is currently — as in today, right now — engaging in all manner of war crimes, to include torture, rape, intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure, and kidnapping and indoctrination of children.
That used to be the sort of thing an American president would oppose by default, but due to his various psychological pathologies, the current American president isn’t especially bothered by them. In fact, Donald Trump is apparently more put off by what he views as a personal slight from the Ukrainian president — who he will never forgive for getting him impeached the first time — than he is by honest-to-God Russian war crimes. And so he’s gone full Soviet. Never go full Soviet.
Earlier this week, representatives for the United States and Russia met in Saudi Arabia to begin negotiations to “end” the war in Ukraine, which conspicuously left out, y’know, Ukraine from those negotiations. When asked about that strategy, a petulant Trump spat back “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it.”
Ukraine shouldn’t have been dressed like that, y’see. It’s their fault half a million of their citizens have been killed. That countless women have been raped, that countless civilians have been tortured as a means of conquest.
The next day, Trump doubled down on this sentiment with a bizarre rant on his social media site:
That, of course, is at various points embarrassingly dumb and also plainly untrue. For one thing, you know Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn’t a dictator because, if he were, Trump would be praising him. [The man has a type, y’know?] But all that stuff about the United States getting nothing back from it’s aid to Ukraine, or that half of it is missing, or that Zelenskyy is low in approval polls or played Biden like a fiddle, is all fever swamp nonsense. And, not for nothin’, if Trump thinks “a big, beautiful ocean” is enough of a deterrent for war with Russia, he’s more ignorant than we thought.
In what should be shameful to Americans, American representatives [presumably at the president’s direction] are already giving away the store to the Russians — considering lifting sanctions, allowing Russia keep annexed territory, foreclosing on Ukrainian membership in NATO and the EU, allowing Russia back into the G8, even removing US military personnel from Eastern Europe — in exchange for nothing. The United States wouldn’t even sign on to a G7 statement this week that referred to Russia as the aggressor in the war in Ukraine. This is not mere neutrality in the conflict, which would be bad enough. This amounts to taking Russia’s side.
This is supposed to be America 101 type stuff: Americans are the good guys. We’re supposed to stand on the side of freedom, on the side of the innocent people attacked, unprovoked, by its fascist expansionist neighbor — who just happens to be our historical geopolitical foe. But Donald Trump fails this basic test of Americanism because his instincts are not recognizably American.
I understand that the issue of Donald Trump’s character is a prissy concern for limp-wristed nerds like me who “don’t know what time it is,” but I still find it objectionable that Donald Trump is an unrepentant, remorseless asshole. He is wicked, in the biblical sense, and now he is making it official American policy to side with wickedness. And maybe some will go along with it — Trumpism has so thoroughly warped and rotted the consciences of many of his supporters such that perhaps they’ll be able to convince themselves that “Russia is good, actually” — some people just enjoy the taste of boots, I guess. But I have to imagine, if there’s any remaining pride in America as a force for good in the world, most Americans aren’t going to take kindly to being told we have to side with what Ronald Reagan accurately described as the Evil Empire.
Granted, these last nine years — and the last few months especially — have been educational in the sense that I was grossly mistaken as to what the American people are willing to accept from their elected leaders. So it’s entirely possible, I suppose, that most Americans will be fine with codifying Russia’s war crimes and subjecting Ukraine to further suffering because maybe they deserve it. But until such time that becomes apparent, I’m going to hold on to the idea that Americans still have the capacity to support freedom and oppose aggression, particularly Russian aggression — and I’m going to hold onto it like the proverbial Irishman holding on to a single blade of grass to keep from falling off of the earth.
Say, does the Star Spangled Banner still wave?
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
So said Thomas Paine in his pamphlet “The American Crisis.” Written in the winter of 1776, when the Revolutionary War was, uh, not off to a great start.
I was reminded of this recently while lamenting the…recent unpleasantness…with a friend of mine. I was noting some similarities in recent elections — e.g., 2008 was similar to 2016 in the sense that it could be written off as a fluke borne out of unusual circumstances, but it was 2012 and 2024 that really broke people’s brains because we had to confront the fact that it wasn’t actually a fluke borne out of unusual circumstances, it was the genuine will of the American people. [Also, not for nothin’, but quite a lot of the same people who had their brains broken in 2012 went certifiably insane in 2020, and their condition has not improved.] My friend agreed there might be something to that — 2016 was painful, sure, but it was 2024 that robbed her of her faith in the country. And that sort of formulation makes me itchy because…we live in the country, don’t we? Have we lost faith in ourselves?
It can be difficult to maintain perspective, because as I always say, in any self-respecting country, a demagogue like Donald Trump would receive zero votes. So for him to have won the popular vote for the first time on his third try [and after everything], it was certainly disorienting. But it was not a convincing victory — Trump won by a smaller popular vote margin in 2024 [1.5%] than Hillary Clinton did against Trump in 2016 [2.1%]. I don’t recall anyone claiming that Hillary Clinton was a force to be reckoned with in national politics. And just as a matter of ratios, for every 31 Trump voters in this country, there are 30 Kamala Harris voters.
Patriotism is a tricky subject, particularly when the country is led by a wicked, remorseless asshole [to borrow a phrase, from myself]. Donald Trump is no patriot himself; he is the lowest sort of nationalist — an American chauvinist of the sort who believes that the country is only “great” when he’s running it. And when he’s not running it, he despises it with a fervor that even the most rabid Code Pink Jacobins would find excessive. Patriotism certainly isn’t unconditional — as G.K. Chesterton noted: “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” Nor is it based on our opinion toward whoever the current president may be, or even the people of the electorate who chose him.
I’ve always been partial to the belief, perhaps put most poetically by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter — […] It was a willingness of the heart.”
I’ve always been proud that America — that becoming American — is so accessible. We don’t do that blood-and-soil bullshit [at least we’re not supposed to] that’s ruined Europe multiple times across its long and bloody history. A good friend of mine from college lives in Europe, specifically Germany. He’s lived there more than a decade, he pays taxes there, his children are German, etc. But no matter how long he lives there, he’s not going to be considered German, or European, in any meaningful sense. That’s just not how they do things over there. Meanwhile, literally anyone can become American inside of 10 minutes with the right attitude — “a willingness of the heart.”
Donald Trump, I suspect, thinks that’s bullshit. I know a good many of his supporters do, even if they didn’t used to. But they’re bad Americans. I know we’re not supposed to impugn the patriotism of others — there was a time when that was possibly the most offensive insult you could levy on someone — but I think we’re past that. Donald Trump’s vision of and for America is at odds with what America is supposed to be — the American idea. If being American requires a certain “willingness of the heart,” and these people have, biblically speaking, “hearts too hardened” for such willingness, how could they possibly meet the definition?
Over the last several weeks, I’ve heard more people than usual, and many people who should know better, saying things like they’re “ashamed” of America. I say nuts to that. America is still rad. Is it embarrassing that our representative on the world stage right now is a wicked, remorseless asshole [there’s that phrase again]? Sure. Is it embarrassing that roughly half of the electorate chose this of their own free will? Sure. But they are failing America; America is not failing.
That’s why I have a difficult time, I think, “losing faith” in America. Even if 49.8% of its electorate [to varying degrees, sure] is failing to live up to the ideals of America, that is not an indication that such ideals do not exist. Such ideals exist regardless of how many of our countrymen, including the president, fail to meet them.
There’s no Sunshine Patriots here. It might be raining like hell, but someone has to keep that flag planted.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Greek Mythology
Clue: As one of his 12 labors, Hercules had to catch a gold-horned stag that was sacred to this goddess of the hunt.
Artemis
Today’s clue:
Category: Human anatomy
Clue: Named for their shape, the two types of light-sensitive cells in the eye’s retina are known as these.
Dispatches from the Homefront
Three-quarters of my family has been laid low this week from a surprise appearance by Influenza A. Personally, it’s the sickest I’ve been in years, since the time one of the kids brought home a stomach bug that kept me horizontal for 24 straight hours. Our normally energetic five year old was zombified for three days, and even my wife — whose decades as an elementary school teacher I believe has strengthened her immune system to that of a Civil War field doctor — had to take a day off work. That’s how you know it’s serious business. Meanwhile, the three year old has apparently managed to dodge these microscopic invaders, despite a complete inability to keep her filthy hands out of her nose and mouth.