Lyle Lanley strolled onto The Simpsons in 1993 and took the town for a ride. Literally. Springfield came into possession of a cool $3 million courtesy of a fine imposed on Mr. Burns (the town’s evil, less-sexy J.R. Ewing for the non-initiate, and I’m assuming that if you don’t know who Mr. Burns is then J.R. Ewing IS an appropriately hip comparison) by the EPA for improper storage of industrial (read: nuclear) waste. At a town meeting, Marge Simpson made an impassioned call to repair the decrepit infrastructure, but wandering salesman Lanley, played by the late Phil Hartman and based loosely on The Music Man, convinced the townsfolk that what they really need is a “genuine bona-fide electrified six-car monorail.”
The metaphor needs some work, I know. For starters, it’s not comprehensive enough. If Lanley wore a shirt that said FRAUD across it in big letters and the town still bought that monorail from him, bought several, in fact, we’d be in pretty familiar territory. The episode, Marge vs. the Monorail, or 4×12 in production-speak, was written by Conan O’Brien and directed by the guy that directed Wreck-It-Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet (and over a dozen other episodes of The Simpsons, as well as co-directing the pilot of Futurama, and directing that episode of Drawn Together where Foxxy Love teaches Wooldoor Sockbat to masturbate). It is largely considered one of the best episodes of The Simpsons, and if you haven’t seen it, here’s what happens in a nutshell: the slick Lanley convinces the town they need a monorail more than they need repairs to their shitty infrastructure, inept Homer is made train conductor, and Lanley quickly leaves town with his money before the maiden voyage so he’s not held accountable when the poorly-constructed monorail crashes and burns.
I hope it’s obvious that I’m talking about the election of Donald Trump and the persistence of his supporters.
Trump’s 2016 victory left a lot of us with burning questions we never thought we’d have to ask. What does it take to get people to install a wholly and woefully incompetent leader over our government? What urgency is prerequisite to deciding that basic human decency isn’t necessary in American leadership? Right off the bat I’m scanning the room: if you agree with me then I’m preaching to the choir; if you don’t, nothing I can say will change your mind. As the adage goes: if logic didn’t bring you here, it certainly won’t get you out.
The GOP has a history of electing unqualified fools (or failing to elect qualified ones), at least over the past forty years (roughly my lifetime). Ronald Reagan was a Hollywood actor. George W. Bush couldn’t get in to University of Texas Law School. Bush Sr., at least, WAS qualified: Texas congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, RNC Chair, ambassador to China, head of the CIA, and Vice President. Perhaps too qualified, as he lost re-election in 1992. In fact, George Herbert Walker Bush’s unpopularity even among Republicans is a window into the soul of the GOP. The cover of the October 1987 edition of Newsweek called Bush a wimp. Bush, a WWII veteran that enlisted after Pearl Harbor and became the US Navy’s youngest pilot when he received his naval commission in June 1943 mere days before his 19th birthday. Bush, who was shot down by the Japanese after a successful bombing attack on Japanese installations at Chi Chi Jima and bailed out of his craft into the water, where he waited four hours for rescue. This is the man the GOP deemed too wimpy to re-elect. A Yale man, fraternity president for Delta Kappa Epsilon, captain of the Yale baseball team, winner of numerous athletic awards, and Phi Beta Kappa graduate. As he ran to succeed Reagan the phrase every woman’s first husband was making the rounds. His remarkably genuine brand of humility was incompatible with the Republican need for ostentatious showmanship of the like provided in abundance by the great communicator, or Bush’s smart-aleck cowboy persona, or carnival barker Trump. The GOP don’t want statesmen, they want showmen. The successful elections of Reagan, W, and Trump, and the unsuccessful re-election of George Herbert Walker Bush, is the greatest indictment of the GOP’s soul: slickness, not substance. One might even venture to suggest that conman charisma is a prerequisite to winning the White House as a Republican.
Donald Trump is quite the showman. In the eighties he acquired the Taj Mahal casino in Las Vegas, which was financed by over $600 million in junk bond trading and cost over one billion dollars when it was opened, and within a year it was bankrupt. In fact, Trump’s hotels and casinos endured several bankruptcy filings between the bankruptcy of the Taj Mahal and Barack Obama’s first term as president. By the 1990s, only Deutsche Bank would lend to Trump, who now owed a combined $4 billion to 70 different banks, and major lenders were quickly limiting their exposure to the sinking real estate market. Accusations of sexual assault and misconduct against Trump go back as far as the seventies. His divorce from Ivana Trump, and affair and subsequent marriage to actress Marla Maples, was highly-publicized at the time, as was their divorce and his subsequent marriage to nude model Melania Trump. In the early 2000s, he began hosting a reality show, The Apprentice.
It’s not all failed casinos and torrid love affairs, however. Let’s not count out his conman charisma and otherwise all-around corrupt behaviors. He and father Fred were sued in 1973 by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to black people. He was accused of tenant intimidation. He has alleged ties to mafia figures, though the ubiquity of organized crime in the concrete business of 1980s New York City mitigates this somewhat. In 1991, Trump and others were found guilty by a federal judge of “conspiring to avoid paying union pension and welfare contributions for the workers.” He’s been fined multiple times for violating state casino laws in both New Jersey and New York, and he was fined by the Federal Trade Commission in 1987 for failing to disclose stock purchases above minimum disclosure levels. In 2018, Trump settled a series of lawsuits against his eponymous “university” for $25 million, though the matter was rife with scandal: the name of the business was changed because the school violated New York law by operating without an educational license; students were encouraged to max out their credit cards to pay tuition; and many of the faculty were woefully unqualified, from lacking college degrees to holding jobs as travel agents and motivational speakers and, in at least one case, being a convicted felon. Trump’s most recent infraction, which was settled in December 2019 when he was court-ordered to pay a $2 million fine for misusing the funds of his namesake charity foundation, saw him divvying out a cool reparative $250,000 to eight charities, including Army Emergency Relief and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The foundation was dissolved by mandate and three of his children were required to attend mandatory training on how to manage a charity.
I could go on and on. It is hard to keep track of the constantly unfolding Trump scandals. But the one important fact that I want to draw attention to is that in spite of the shockingly incomplete list of frauds, foibles, and transgressions listed above, over 80% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, the most supportive of those evangelicals are regular church-goers, and more than three years into his presidency there has been almost no erosion of that support. Who can think of a sharper contrast than the lifestyle and career of Donald Trump against the love, grace, and charity of Christian theology? Are these gullible victims of a conman or hypocrites come to light? I can’t explain the phenomenon, content as I am to marvel at it, but I think the answer is an easy one: a little bit of both.
According to Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, Baptist minister, and personal friend of the late Harper Lee, the election of Donald Trump “laid out graphically what is in essence the loss of Christian America,” or what he goes on to call a “late-stage Christian afterglow.” The point he makes is striking: evangelicals have turned to their own form of secular humanism to fight against, well, secular humanism. Eschewing the traditional morality of the Religious Right, the voting evangelicals see no conflict in a type of politics that wants nothing do with the antiquated notions that one should love one another as I have loved you (John 13:34), or that the meek shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5), or that you shall know them by their fruit (Matthew 7:20). “There are few greater proponents of social welfare in human history than Jesus Christ,” writes Caroline Builta for the campus newspaper at the University of Alabama. “The Bible teaches compassion for and servitude toward the impoverished, and yet, there is no bigger proponent of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps than the Republican party.” Today, the party is known for its staunch opposition to gay rights, abortion, and gun control, but little else of modern conservatism speaks to any genuine vision of religiosity. Indeed, there was a time when the Southern Baptist Convention saw the Roe v. Wade decision as an advancement of “religious liberty, human equality and justice.” Just over five years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention put out a condemnation of casinos and lotteries, an industry Trump profited on for years. This had, one surmises, no impact on how its members voted in November 2016. In fact, the deeper one delves into this rabbit hole, the more obvious it becomes that the modern defining feature of American Christianity is a repeated failure to put their money where their mouth is. Evangelicals mostly target sins they do not want to commit (homosexuality) or simply cannot (abortion, for men). They have no interest in condemning or outlawing the temptations they frequently enjoy. It’s the Bible Belt that consumes the most porn according to studies in 2014 and 2017. Evangelical protestants are more likely to be divorced than any other Christian denomination or non-christian faith, including agnostics and atheists. Jesus condemns divorce in four different places in the bible. “Does divorce bother evangelicals?” Pastor Flynt asks. “No, absolutely not. Does adultery bother evangelicals? No, not really, because if so they wouldn’t have voted for Donald Trump. So what bothers them? Abortion and same-sex marriage. Beyond that, there’s no longer an agenda.” As evangelicals seem intent on turning a blind eye to their own faults while railing against others, and considering their propensity toward failed marriages and porn addiction, perhaps it makes perfect sense that they would vote for Donald Trump though, perhaps, it’s obvious that rational thought is not the topic of today’s sermon, bless and keep you.
When Lyle Lanley went on a monorail PR tour at Springfield Elementary, Lisa Simpson, the show’s skeptic-in-residence, rightly asks why anyone would build “a mass transit system in a small town with a centralized population.” It was an excellent question, but not even Lisa Simpson is immune to a little intellectual flattery. He swoons, she giggles, and everyone moves on. I wish it were this simple in the age of Trump. We are living in a world where The History Channel hosts a program called Ancient Aliens and The Learning Channel documents the life and times of Honey Boo Boo. We are not the moral and intellectual bastion that we like to think we are. And so, Trump is not just a conman, but an obvious one. THAT is the bee’s sting. Nuance is not a requirement for gulling the American people. It takes blatant stupidity or willful ignorance to confuse a moral defender of the American family for a serial adulterer whose comments about his own daughter should have ended his candidacy right off the bat, or to mistake a paragon of business success with a man that lost $1.10 billion across a ten-year span. And yet, here we are. His election stemmed from a combination of racial tensions, the disillusionment of the rust belt and the midwest, the perpetual disbelief that government can’t do anything right, and the so-called Jesse Ventura effect, which Michael Moore discusses in his prophetic article that warned Democrats that Trump would assuredly win the presidency in 2016.
Trump’s political success has been, at least ostensibly, based on lies and misinformation. It began with the birther movement. He didn’t start the rumors about Barack Obama’s putative place of birth, but he promoted the conspiracy theories even after Obama authorized the release of his long-form birth certificate. This tactic prefaced the ethos of his irrational candidate platform, which was, essentially, to take the country back from Obama. This is where it gets weird.
It is atypical to run for president on a series of campaign promises that mirror successes that are already occurring under the incumbent, but this is precisely what Donald Trump did. He riled his base against Mexico and illegal immigration while Obama held the record on most non-citizen removals in US history, more than Bush and Clinton combined, garnering him the derisive nickname deporter-in-chief. Trump promised a strong economy, even as the unemployment rate dropped below 5%, which is considered full employment, and Obama’s last full month in office marked the 75th month of consecutive job growth–the best on record to date. According to Forbes, the Dow “reached new highs the remaining two years while [Obama] was in office and another one in his last month.” And, to touch on a cultural issue, in spite of vitriolic rhetoric from Trump supporters that Obama has been race-obsessed, our 44th president “talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961,” according to a University of Pennsylvania political scientist that “examined the Public Papers of the Presidents, a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—proclamations, news-conference remarks, [and] executive orders.” By contrast, Trump was endorsed by the infamous David Duke, a convicted felon, holocaust denier, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. One begins to feel that the details of the presidency when Trump was running mattered far less to Republican voters than who actually inhabited the role on stage. Looking back at the previous three years, it seems clear that Republican voters wanted the successes Obama gave them, but what they really wanted was someone they felt comfortable attributing those successes to. Gullible, or hypocritical?
Lyle Lanley is back in town. When he showed up the first time he’d only been to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook. Now he’s been all over America and he’s back in your town and, guess what? He’s got another monorail to sell. It shouldn’t be too hard: a new Gallup poll gives Trump his first net positive approval rating since January 2017. Before we double down and buy another gallon of snake oil, how well has the first batch fared?
By any reasonable, objective standard, Trump’s presidency has been, to paraphrase his predecessor, “a shit show.” If the GOP could easily ignore the successes of an opponent president that presides over record job growth and the killing of Osama bin Laden, they have been just as adept at ignoring the raging clusterfuck that has been the Trump administration. And it’s at this point that I have to frustratingly concede that there is no way to reasonably list every at-hand example of ineptitude and malice; there’s simply too many, so we will have to limit ourselves to Donald Trump’s greatest hits.
He ignored the Russian interference in the 2016 election (interference which was confirmed by Robert Mueller’s report), and does not appear concerned that it is happening again with both his re-election campaign and the campaign of Bernie Sanders, going so far as reprimanding his intelligence staff for failing to conceal reports of interference from the House Intelligence Committee.
He surrounded himself by criminals, contradicting his campaign cry to “drain the swamp” of Washington D.C. Several of his campaign officials, including his campaign chairman, have been indicted for varying crimes. His personal attorney and his former National Security Advisor have been indicted and convicted. The Mueller probe resulted in 34 individual indictments (and 3 Russian business indictments).
He has put important agencies in the hands of woeful incompetents. The Dept of Education is headed by an individual that is happy to divert federal funds away from public schools and lauded Trump for cutting education funding. The Dept of Energy was given over to Rick Perry, who publicly called for its abolition, later admitting he had no idea that the department is responsible for the design, maintenance, and testing of our country’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Perry’s predecessor was an actual nuclear scientist; by contrast, Perry majored Animal Science at Texas A&M. Trump’s head of the EPA previously sued the agency (multiple times) and eventually resigned amid a flurry of ethics violations. His labor secretary has criticized rules that are designed to protect workers and his HUD secretary has criticized policies intended to fight segregation in housing. Michael Lewis has written a whole book on the Trump Administration’s failure to provide proper project management within the executive bureaucracy, the book’s eponymous “fifth risk.”
Trump withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal, increasing tensions between Washington and Tehran. Iran has since withdrawn from its agreement to limit uranium enrichment, reduce its stockpile of uranium, and curb research and development. Any even-keel diplomacy gained under Obama is, for the moment, irreparable.
Trump started a trade war that has cost America’s farmer a lot. So much, in fact, that we’ve given them $28 billion in aid over two years to make up the losses, the highest level of farm subsidies in 14 years. Dairy exports to China have decreased 50%. China slapped tariffs on soybeans and has virtually stopped buying American soybeans, opening the way for South American competition and affecting some 75,000 farmers in Illinois (our country’s number one soybean producer).
Trump has added more to our national debt than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush combined. Our deficit, which Trump promised to eliminate within eight years, has increased by 68%. A recession is due in 2021 according to economists, and though it will be Trump’s fault, if he loses the election in November it will undoubtedly be blamed on Democrats.
Most recently, Trump has put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus outbreak response, even though Pence dealt inadequately with one of the worst HIV outbreaks in Indiana state history when he served as governor, and has written unequivocally that “[cigarette] smoking doesn’t kill.” His record with public health crises is such that one epidemiologist compared Trump’s appointment of Pence to “putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.” Not only is Pence’s appointment inadequate, the Trump Administration has cut a number of disease security programs that would have helped contain the virus, including an 80% cut to the CDC’s global disease outbreak program.
And, as I’ve said before, we could go on and on. There’s plenty I’ve not touched on because, well, it’s so goddamned exhausting to rehash all of the nonsense. The problems with Trump have been predictable and avoidable. There’s no other way to put it. Yet, Trump’s support among Republicans has never been higher. Gullible, or hypocrites?
In their book Democracy for Realists, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels offer disturbing insight into voting behavior: “Voters don’t have anything like coherent preferences. Most people pay little attention to politics; when they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for contradictory reasons.” They dismiss the notion that most of us hold dear, which is that citizens vote for whichever leader will carry out their preferences for how government ought to function. This isn’t how voters operate. Rather, the voters “make political decisions on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not an honest examination of reality.”
Americans are not particularly informed about their government, with a disturbingly high number unfamiliar with the branches of government or the provisions in the First Amendment. A PEW research poll showed that only 19% of those polled could identify the Prime Minister of Britain, 28% could name the Chief Justice (fyi: Roberts succeeded Rehnquist in 2005), and only 34% were aware that the TARP legislation was enacted by Bush, not Obama.
So, if you don’t know what the government does, and you are not particularly convinced that the government does anything worth doing in the first place, why would you be scared to put a megalomaniac in charge of it?
The horrifying reality is that applying rationale to a decision as important as who should be president is a pointless endeavor. We have long theorized that voters reward incumbents for a good economy and vote them out when things are going poorly (the so-called economic voting theory). If this is the case, why wasn’t Clinton elected as candidate of the incumbent party? Well, two reasons: the first is that income inequality has not gotten better (it’s gotten worse), though this fails to satisfy the premise of gullibility or stupidity in the American electorate as any vote for a crass bankruptcy-prone billionaire as the savior of the little people is short-sighted at best. The second reason is that Americans see politics like a football game. They just want their team to win, consequences be damned. We all have friends and families that root for teams that constantly lose. That’s the American voter for you: we care more about who gets to spend the money than we do about how that money is spent. Maybe Marge Simpson’s plan to fix Springfield’s roads is solid, but unfortunately she’s not part of the team–Lyle Lanley, on the other hand, is wearing red. That’s all that really matters in the end, right?
So: now what? Resign to the fact that we are surrounded by one of two camps (at best): the very stupid, or the very gullible? Ugh, I’m not optimistic. But hey, I’ll give you something to think about if you’re feeling down about all of this (as you should be).
First off, it’s the older generation that is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the younger generations (millennials and Gen Z) from taking over. What happens to older generations? They die off. We won’t always have to listen to out-of-touch seventy-year-olds intent on ignoring stagnant wages and the spike in mass shootings, and railing against those of us who see the problems and speak up about them. The people that qualified which water fountain black people were allowed to drink from won’t be around much longer to call the rest of us snowflakes, while they lament gay marriage over china cups of Folger’s coffee. Joe Biden, who fought for school segregation, and Michael Bloomberg, who has been fighting sexual harassment allegations for years, are unlikely to be around for the elections of 2024 and 2028. So there’s that, at least.
Second, our country is becoming less religious. I find Trump’s overwhelming support by evangelicals to be particularly satisfying. They have ceded the moral high ground, and quite publicly, too. I can now stare blankly when another invokes their Christian belief system as justification for opposing some perceived immorality. “I’m sorry,” I might say, “am I supposed to equate Christianity with morals?” I apologize and explain that I hadn’t been aware that corruption was anathema to the Christian belief system. “I just didn’t realize,” I say, with a friendly chuckle, “but that’s good to know. I always thought you would know them by their fruit.”
And lastly, we’re going to have to support politicians that can save us from ourselves. Our stupidity, our gullibility? It’s the human condition. But we can curtail it. We really can.
We need media laws that prevent falsehoods from being portrayed as news, like the FCC fairness doctrine that was revoked in the eighties. Schools are already tackling so-called “fake news” in how they instruct our children, and senior citizens are being taught to handle disinformation, too.
We need term limits on legislators to minimize hyper-partisanship. Read about the pros and cons here. While you’re at it, learn the difference between being partisan and being hyper-partisan. Check out these two articles on the subject here and here.
We need to overturn Citizens United v. FEC so that wealth and corruption don’t dominate our elections, providing disproportionate voices from the rich over everyone else.
We need to pass a law in the Senate that requires a supermajority to confirm SCOTUS nominees that aren’t approved by the American Bar Association.
We need further restrictions on lobbying activities, and a lifetime ban on lobbying for any elected legislator.
We need comprehensive and enforceable laws that target nepotism and improper emoluments with regard to all elected officials.
And, most importantly, we need an educational system that teaches our students to understand how to look past their own biases when they make political decisions. We need students that study philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, and statistics before they reach college age and their biases of the world begin to set. Until we all learn to look inwardly, we will continue to fall victim to our own gullibility and ignorance.
Now, here’s Conan O’Brien performing his legendary monorail song at the 2014 Hollywood Bowl. Cheers!
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