NOVEMBER 14, 2024 – Lately, I’ve been so focused on serious, heart-wrenching matters in my own little sphere, I’ve had little time or desire to focus much on the larger world. When I do raise my head for a wider view, however, I find perverse relief in a painful diversion: The Appointments.
They are straight out of a TV cartoon, a comic book series, a dystopian novel about the decline of a super-power. Most people with whom I associate are gobsmacked by what’s happening. If I’m distressed by The Appointments, I’m hardly “gobsmacked.” The salient feature of Trumpism is that nothing about it or its founder ought to surprise us. Just as someone I know said in the aftermath of 9-11, “We shouldn’t be surprised by anything anymore,” we today shouldn’t be dazed by any of Trump’s actions.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t oppose or resist them. Quite the opposite. To keep the whole Experiment from blowing up, we who are distressed and those who are “gobsmacked,” have a civic duty to stay at our posts inside the laboratory of American democracy.
Except . . . what on earth is Trump’s game, exactly? Does he even have a game? By all appearances, his goal is merely to increase and wield raw power, not for making the world a better place but exclusively for his corrupt personal aggrandizement. Trump knew that his return ticket to the apex of celebrity and power for the sole sake of power was to motivate and manipulate the fears, greed, myopia, and ignorance of enough people to put him in the White House again.
Many of the people who voted for him assumed (desired?) that his first step would be to address the raw meat issues such as inflation and “criminal gangs” among illegal migrants. These were the matters that had absolved 73 million people from having to consider character, judgment, decency, management competence, temperament and proven leadership skills as qualifications for high office.
Trump’s detractors, meanwhile, feared that high on his “out of the gate” moves would be retribution against his political opponents. This fear was well-grounded, given Trump’s express fixation on the “enemy from within” and his wilting public excoriations of anyone who didn’t display unbroken fealty to him.
As the world turns, however, it seems that Trump has a different order of priority. His dominant aim with The Appointments is to disabuse Republican senators of the idea they can exercise independent action without paying a price too high for such luxury and latitude. With the “Awful Four,” especially, he’s put those senators in a corner. They either accede to his commands, no matter how outrageous or harebrained, or the senators run the risk of being neutered and ostracized. That, I think, is where Trump is headed. If he can compel even the most reluctant senators to toe the line on approval (or recess appointments) of the likes of the “Awful Four,” he’ll have increased his executive power 10-fold over the “Most Exclusive Club in the World,” as the United States Senate used to be called. From that position of dominance, Trump’s path to full-on autocracy will be short and straight.
Given how little most people understand about how government works; how the economy functions; how troubles in one corner of the country—or globe—are intertwined with ostensibly unrelated issues elsewhere, many Americans will be surprised and confused by the direction Trump is taking the nation . . . and the world. But none of us should be surprised when the 250-year-old ship of state runs aground.
What a wonderful diversion, all of this! Now refreshed I can return to other worries.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
