Tag: gop

Professional Victims

Donald Trump wants you to know he is a victim. He also wants you to know that he is really, really rich; that he alone can fix it; that he has a very good brain. But above all he wants you to know that he is a victim, and that never in the history of the world been anyone more victimized. That is especially true now that he is — officially — what he most dreads being: not a victim, but a Loser.

True victims don’t bruit their victimhood about, don’t claim it as an excuse or use it as a lever: Job, for all his suffering, cursed only himself and the day he was born — never his tormentor; Christ accepted his fate, too, telling Pilate, in essence, “Do what you have to do.” Self-proclaimed victim status is a scam; Trump has been running this con in New York for at least forty years, where city regulations make it impossible — so he says — for any developer to make money. Never mind that successful developers profit hand over fist in Gotham: Trump is a victim! He has somehow thrived in spite of the regulations but that doesn’t mean anything. He’s a victim! The New York Attorney General investigates him for fraud (Trump University): he’s a victim! He purchased 400 acres of useless land in Westchester and Putnam counties for $2.75 million; when he could find no developer willing to build on it, he gave it to the State of New York and claimed a tax deduction — of $26 million. (Regarding this he’ll probably tell you he’s a genius.) His fake foundation is ordered dissolved for more fraud and self-dealing. He’s a victim! By a fluke of history he now occupies the Oval Office, where he presides over the smoking wreckage of our national government. He held the match and the Republican senate steadied his hand while he set the torch to all the guardrails of our democracy, while he tore children from their parents and put them in cages, while he teargassed peaceful demonstrators. But he is, absolutely, a victim. The rest of us? Suckers and losers.

One is tempted to marvel at the pathology of it. The mind of a sociopath is as fascinating as a high-speed train wreck: We can’t avert our gaze even as it lays waste to everything in its path. We should instead spend a few minutes analyzing how we got here — and then planning the long climb out, the years-long rebuilding of our national government, our national institutions, and our national pride.

Trump, after all, isn’t the only professional victim: the national GOP has been playing the victim card, too, and quite successfully. People of faith are victims of laws that apply equally to everyone; businesses are victims of workplace safety mandates, of environmental regulations, of antitrust laws, of minimum wage rules; people of great wealth are victims of estate taxes. Republicans are victims, of anyone who dares harbor a different vision of America.

That is not democracy, it is theocracy; and of a most twisted and degenerate sort.

Intellectual (Dis)Honesty

Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump don’t want to defund the police. A sloppy slogan — which Carlson, at least, knows doesn’t mean what he says it means — has become a rallying point for the collapsing conservative movement and Trumpism. “Defund the police” doesn’t mean — as, again, Carlson is surely aware and which Trump might or might not be — abolish the police, dismantle the police, disband the police, dismiss the police, or even replace the police.

What it does mean is simply this: we ask the police to do too much, and it’s long past time we cut back on their mission to allow them to focus on the things only a well-trained professional police force can do. It’s time to stop asking them to be social workers, truant officers, mental health professionals, suicide prevention counsellors, poison control specialists, drug treatment counsellors, election monitors, and the thousand-and-one sundry other things we throw money at the police to do because, well, it’s just easier than hiring people who actually trained for this or want to do that.

The truth is, the police are failing right now: they fail because of mission creep. “Protect and serve” was never meant to mean, “Protect our bloated budgets and we will serve your political interests.” The answer, it seems (to listen to the Tucker Carlsons and Sean Hannitys of the world), is to repair and reform the police, presumably by throwing more money at them.

These are the same people, mind, who believe that failing public schools should be defunded — by which they mean, disbanded and shut down. Take the education budget and shovel it towards the private sector where it won’t so much educate children as enrich the well-connected, in much the same way the law-enforcement dollars spent on tanks and riot gear don’t keep the peace so much they as effect an enormous transfer of wealth out of the public coffers.

It has long been an article of faith in conservative circles that competition is a sort of magic bullet that will solve every problem. Schools not doing the job? Take away their money and inject some competition into the system, and may the best school win! Health insurance not covering your expenses? Competition is here to save you! Just read the fine print from every carrier and make an informed decision!

Public schools fail for the same reason policing fails: the ever-expanding mandate makes it impossible to focus on the core mission. If we want everyone to have a future in this country — black children, white children, special-needs children, gifted children, everybody’s children — we might take a few minutes to consider why the answer for one failing institution is to withhold funding; and for the other, to continue to throw money at the problem.

It’s past time for the proponents of charter schools and school vouchers, and the defenders of shockingly abusive police practices — so often the same people — to be honest about their agendas. The results of your intellectual dishonesty are always, always deadly.