The Human Smelter

Trump—gelded by his parents, he never grew to understand manhood.  He thwarted his own remarkable political instincts and brutal cunning because he had no self-control.  He unerringly chose the worst personal and political advisors.  He handed his enemies everything they needed, beyond everything they stole.

But he did us a remarkable and terrible service.  He’s the human smelter that crushed everyone’s superficial personas and rendered them down to their true natures in their reactions to his Presidency.  Many of his own actions are unworthy of any grownup but those who loathed him only because he wasn’t supposed to win—their shameful dishonesty, all of them self-prostituting to stay on the good sides of other bad people, to dance for the purulent pipers who want us to think they play superior music—they managed to sunder themselves from reality and be proud of it.

Trump really broke people.  Like, permanently broke them.

(Simulation Commander Screaming into the Void | SimulationCommander | Substack, in a recent comments thread)

There’s no one left, of anyone I ever admired in the political or journalistic sphere, who hasn’t shown himself willing to lie on demand or willfully refuse to recognize or acknowledge plain facts or to maintain the civil conventions that allow us to function in society when we can’t always choose our company, and to slander anyone even tangentially associated with him or imputed to be.

The hell with them, mostly.  But two made me sad.

Jimmy Carter had been the only President of my lifetime I admired.  And then he went and declared himself an adherent of the Church of the Russian Collusion too.  This has learned me, for whatever remains of my time on this mortal coil, to never have any faith for any reason in any politician ever again; they will even trash a lifetime of apparent decency to remain in the hallowed tribe.

But one person shocked me and I feel the sting of it, that I’d been so fooled in my estimation.  Eugene Robinson, columnist at the Washington Post and someone I’d seen on Meet the Press and other cable news shows for two decades, had always seemed a nice—even a sweet—man and a thoughtful journalist. 

And it must’ve been during one of the last few times I watched MSNBC that he, too, finally came out, snarling about white people.

I don’t remember now exactly what in particular the conversation had been about and what exactly he’d said.

But Trump broke him too. 

We all have our dislikes and our biases and for many of us it’s not prejudices but postjudices, things have happened to us in real life that formed our responses ever after, and not unreasonable but maybe sometimes extended too far into the general rather than appropriately blaming the specific.  We learn to get along in the world by keeping these to ourselves; sharing them within our trusted circle where we needn’t be correct about anything.  We’ve the right to be human.

But these people Trump broke, they took permission to stop pretending anywhere at all, to say right on national TV what they never in their right minds would have allowed to besmirch their professional reputations, to revel in the mudstinking joy of permissible hatred.

And I’m glad Trump made it happen.  I’ve been fooled a lot in my time.  Going forward though, it’s like The Who said.