Jackie Calmes
God help us.
I can’t do better than those words, uttered last year by Donald Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, when he dolefully contemplated Trump returning to power.
This is not going to be a standard day-after reflection on how the election is over, the voters have spoken and now we can look forward to the next president’s leadership of our nation and hope for the best. That’s what I felt eight years ago, after Trump had upset another Democrat who would have been the first female president.
In 2016, having covered presidents of both parties as they came and went, I naively believed that even the narcissist Trump would be humbled by the august power and responsibility of being the leader of the free world. That he would grow in the job.
He wasn’t, and he didn’t. We know that now — after his tens of thousands of lies in office, the near-daily chaos, his deadly botched response to the pandemic, undermining of Americans’ faith in elections, flirtations with autocrats, unprecedented refusal to accept loss and peacefully transfer power in 2020, and his absconding with the nation’s top secrets.
In 2017, it was possible to believe that Trump, the purported deal-maker, meant it when he said he wanted to compromise with Congress on both gun control and immigration. He did neither, vexing Democrats and Republicans alike by his deal-breaking. Not only that, Trump ever after demagogued immigration — right back to the White House, it seems.
And now, if he’s true to his dystopic words on the campaign trail about murderous migrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” we can look forward to “bloody” deportations of millions of people, starting on day one. Which, if carried out, would doom Trump’s other big promise: to further grow the economy. Nonpartisan economic analyses suggest mass deportations of workers — because that’s what the undocumented residents are: tax-paying workers — would hit the economy harder than the last decade’s financial collapse.
Many years ago, a well-known Republican strategist first schooled me in the political truism that although Americans profess to want our candidates to embody hope and comity, fear and anger are by far the stronger vote-motivators. Trump never needed to be schooled. His superpower is his innate grasp of the power of fear and anger to build an aggrieved following, what he called in his victory declaration early Wednesday “the greatest political movement of all time.”
The now-vanquished Kamala Harris said at her final, hopeful rally in Philadelphia on Monday night: “We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that.”
No, sadly, we aren’t.
Harris envisioned a United States “where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor.” Trump, who began his campaign last year vowing “retribution,” couldn’t get through his 10-minute victory lap early Wednesday morning without referring to “the enemy camp.” He was talking about the TV networks, but for weeks in his closing campaign arguments he’d expansively — and ominously — defined an “enemy within” that included Democrats, journalists, his Republican critics and former advisors-turned-Cassandras, a la Kelly.
Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.
