Trump and The Age of Ignorance
We were gathered around the firepit outside the hotel room of a certain lawyer, prominent in libertarian circles, when someone said to me, “I’ve noticed from your writing that you are not a Trump fan, unlike other libertarians in our circle.” Ah ha. Someone noticed. The gala, celebrating the Mises Institute’s 40th anniversary, was over. My companions, two I knew, two I just met, retired to talk about more freedom stuff at its high points, foolishness at its worst.
My explanation centered on Mr. Trump’s first payment default of a $10 million loan from Security Pacific Bank, a firm I worked for until it was purchased on the brink of failure by Bank of America. Trump’s default was a rumor at the bank, but confirmed in SP CEO Robert Smith’s book Dead Bank Walking. I explained that the default was reflective of Trump’s poor character.
My questioner, another prominent libertarian attorney, replied with words to the effect,”Trump showed no respect for the government strictures and laws we all hate. He was good because he showed no respect for the government.” While I put up no argument at the time, Trump’s disrespect reflected no libertarian principles, but only 300 pounds (okay 239 according to the White House physician) of walking, talking personal character defects.
The same disrespect coming from Ron Paul, who we’d just heard speak would have been different. I did mention that the fanboy worship of Trump by some libertarians was something I couldn’t understand. The idea that Trump is smart is also an idea that leaves me nonplussed.
“The election of a serially bankrupt, functionally illiterate reality TV host was the logical consequence of the five decades preceding it,” which Andy Borowitz in his book Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber refers to as “the Age of Ignorance.”
“What happens when you combine ignorance with performance talent? A president who tells the country to inject bleach,” writes Borowitz. Thankfully, I don’t have to endure constant patter from friends anymore about how Trump is playing 3d or 4d chess. Yet the ex-president, as Borowitz explains offered so many mutilations of the English language we “could fill a non-word-a-day calendar,” excluding “covfefe.”
Borowitz offers an H.L. Mencken quote about Warren G. Harding’s dimness. Yet, I believe H.L. Menken had Trump in mind when he wrote, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Of course, I never thought Trump would win the presidency. As Mark Leibovitch writes in Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission, “I never thought his campaign would amount to much beyond a whoopee cushion detonated in our polite Kabuki theater.” I was wrong along with Leibovitch.
He describes Trump as “a hyperactive brute whose interest in policy was no match for his ever-present TV clicker.”
Most of Leibovitch’s book is about the goings on at Trump’s Washington hotel, described by Zack Everson as “a towering granite symbol of Trump’s takeover of official Washington–and of his unprecedented for-profit presidency.”
At one Trump drop-by at the hotel, “He was trailed by a chant of Trump, Trump, Trump from the lobby patrons and an entourage of bootlickers that included [Rudy] Giuliani, [Lindsey] Graham, the former congressman Mark Meadows, and the tight-suited Secret Service detail.”
Appropriately, Leibovitch describes Trump as, “at heart, a hospitality guy whose default mode tended toward the solicitous shtick of a manager or maitre d’.”
Trump wants everyone to like him. That’s what he cares about: certainly not ideology. And, as Al Franken told Leibovitch, “celebrity trumps ideology.” Leibovitch provides the best explanation of Trumpism, “His imbecillic authoritarianism felt much more like dark comedy than real possibility.”
Trump convinced us we were all dirty, but that he was better at it, “proving how smart and savvy he was. Only losers get hung up on the unspoken rules of the capital. Bless their hearts,” writes Leibovitch.
The people around Trump were also Leibovitch’s focus. For instance, “[Mike] Pompeo was a particular kind of Eddie Haskell figure among the Alpha Lapdogs, dutiful in sucking up to Trump and prodigious in trashing him behind his back, per several White House and Hill sources.”
So no, I was never a Trump fan and still can’t understand how any libertarian can be. In the Cognitive Reflection Task, Libertarians score higher on intelligence tests than either liberals or conservatives, yet many fell for the Donald. One would think libertarians would value intelligence. But no. In terms of corruption and law breaking, as Borowitz writes, “it’s hard to get too worked up over Teapot Dome once you’ve seen a president urge a mob wearing fur pelts and face paint to storm the Capitol.”
It’s hard to imagine another four years. But, I couldn’t conceive of it the first time.
