The Necessary, Honorable Thing

Defeat Trump

“To warn against, prepare for, and persevere until.”

Art, culture, information, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people.

*Samizdat, a Russian term dating from about 1966, means “self-published” and refers to the underground publication and circulation of banned, unauthorized, and dissident articles or books, often by hand and passed from reader to reader. Samizdat publication occurred across the Soviet Bloc. Its manual reproduction was necessitated by government control over the registration and permissions to access both typewriters and printing devices. Samizdat smuggled out of the country to lands supporting a free press became known as tamizdat.

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I first published the following essay on Medium, on March 23, 2016. Nine months had passed since Trump announced his presidential candidacy, nine months that offered a surfeit of evidence as to his character. One hadn’t needed those nine months to judge his character, however. There had been, for instance, his earlier, dishonest and wicked, xenophobic campaign of racist delegitimization over Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Before that, the sum of Trump’s career, melding big-money business promotion and the culture of media personality — a subject I reference below, and which had for decades been accommodated by political leaders from mayors to former presidents and candidates — also revealed the man for what so many overlooked him to be.

Though it was still ten months before Trump would wield government power, all I say of him in the essay was borne out to be true. I claim no special acumen in those insights. Millions – tens of millions — saw what I saw. I claim, rather, the very opposite — the inexcusable failure of the tens of millions who did not see it or saw it and didn’t care, who excused it out of political fear or expediency or, “God forbid,” higher religious purpose, in order to see appointed to the Supreme Court, for instance, “conservative” judges who would overturn a woman’s right to reproductive freedom, to control over her own body.

I republished the essay in the very first weeks of Homo Vitruvius, in early May 2023, when the Substack had precious few readers. I changed then the original title, eliminating its subtitle: “Denounce Trump.” That was the imagined necessary and honorable thing. Many did denounce him. Many, as we know, did not. By 2023, post a Trump presidency, denouncement didn’t seem precisely the issue anymore. In the fall of that year, I republished on Homo Vitruvius several more essays I had previously written on the Trump phenomenon. I knew then that I would republish them all one more time in the lead up to this November’s presidential election. Only in the past week did I conceive those republications as the start of a greater endeavor that I now call American Samizdat.

This time around, with this essay, I was once again tempted toward what I resisted doing, changing the title a little. I have to say that in 2024, fully nine years into the American political age of Trump, to speak of “honor” in seeking to rouse further and greater resistance to him, and what is now an atrocious political movement built around him, strikes me as sorrowfully, even tragically quaint, perhaps in just the manner as honor was examined in Michael Powel and Emeric Pressburger’s classic film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It isn’t that the virtue that is honor isn’t genuine — this whole endeavor arises from confidence in it as just so. Indeed, many people have acted with it over the past near decade. But many have not, and it is, rather, that for those who acted dishonorably, and for those who have failed daily to recognize the very profile of honor even as it lies sprawled a dead corpse along the side of the road, to invoke honor at this point as a motivator to particular actions seems, shall we say, pointless. Still, opposition to Trump and all he represents — a uniquely American brand of populist demagoguery and authoritarianism — begins in basic human decency as people and honor as patriotic citizens of a democratic nation of laws. I retain the title to honor that origin.

Following the essay below, I published against Trump several more times, in different periodicals, often with editorial timorousness at how strongly I made the case against him. One highly lauded “moderate” online publication, Quillette, was set to publish a substantial essay of mine, soon to appear on American Samizdat, when its founder and editor-in-chief apologetically but abruptly, without discussion, rescinded acceptance of it for fear of what she considered its “inflammatory” nature. Trump’s inflammatory nature reached a height on January 6, 2021, and now we face, with his potential victory in November, the certain end of the American democratic republic.

Photo by Liam Simpson on Unsplash

A final introductory note before I turn the podium over to my past self. I have argued for seven years that opposition to Trump should be founded in human decency, not left-right policy difference. Many in my general vicinity on the left did not agree with me on that point, or, certainly, practice its discipline. Accordingly, they have not always been gracious or welcoming to the so-called “Never-Trumper” who joined in the opposition from the right. For many on the left, past transgressions, as they were fairly or unfairly perceived, could not be forgiven. The urge to spank proved irresistible. It is the writer and humanist in me, however, who finds Republicans turned Never Trumper the most compelling people of all who play roles in this drama. It has been relatively easy for a liberal to stand against Trump. Nothing was asked of liberals but to remain what they were. But a Republican-conservative who forthrightly turned against Trump and the GOP, especially among the activist, political class, is the best exemplar of what this essay and this introduction attempts to call forth from people — the decisive courage of conscience, even by rejecting former commitments, in the painful recognition of one’s errors. In some cases, the moment has entailed a more liberal turn in thought. More often, I think, it required — in the greater national culture and a narrower political culture that work against it — the freshly developed capacity to distinguish and separate deeper human virtues from temporally-bounded political ideology. We now know, despairingly, that many millions among us have proven incapable of it.

The Necessary, Honorable Thing: Denounce Trump

Il Duce: (The Leader)

Only a few true moments of conscience present themselves in a lifetime. For relatively safe and comfortable Americans of the post-World War II era — a place and period of human history unparalleled in its general security and complacency — those moments are even fewer. So unfamiliar are these crucibles of conscience in actual experience that even many among the learned are blurred in their vision, dulled to the understanding of what rises before them. Though their fates may be poised before an unalterable destination and a lifetime of nostalgia for the world they lost, they do not act. But they must act. For just such a moment of conscience is now.

Donald Trump, like all demagogues, is a barbarian. Bespoke to pass for civilized in the cultivated appointments of commerce and power, he is a brute in a suit. It is a truism among the unblind that he is a narcissist, an Ego on legs sublimating primal urges to the contest of domination. He has not the least understanding of American history or of the American ideal — both of which he defiles with almost every utterance — but would not value them if he did. For every person who ever confused the exceptional idea of America with some reality of an Exceptional America, Donald Trump is the horrific lie behind the ripped open curtain to which that delusion is put.

As a person, he is an offense to decency who will demean and destroy both the high and the low, the weak and the strong, the guilty and the innocent in order to aggrandize his lust for superiority. Upon the culture and the body politic, he is a blot, a blight, a blob: decent people should refuse his presence for fear of the accreting ooze spreading at their feet. Those analysts among the opining class who confuse and characterize his crude offense and bald bigotry pronounced in a New York accent with candor — said often of a man who can barely articulate a truth not shadowed by a lie, and who rises to glory as the P.T. Barnum of bullshit* — should be locked away from keyboard and microphone for the danger to the republic they amplify.

As a man in pursuit of political power, he is the apotheosis of ignorance over the cheap mammon of notoriety. He knows nothing of the issues he addresses, cares nothing for the people whose passions he exhorts — whom he would cheat by a scheme the moment after professing his love from the podium — and he believes in nothing that he says but the declarations of his own greatness. The foremost authoritarians of the twentieth century themselves actually believed in something — in some perverse conception of the people or the state. Donald Trump is the debasement of even demagoguery itself, for he scorns the very demos in demagogue, which is nothing but a mark to be played.

Short of the snuff film legalized, the return of public executions, or the restoration of the Battle Royal, Donald Trump is the final degradation of exhibitionist, reality-entertainment, gawker American culture. Politically, he is the greatest threat to the Republic since the Civil War. He is an event horizon beyond which, even eventually defeated and overcome, the nation would never be the same again. In some respects, for what Trump has revealed of many, that is true already.

What has Trump revealed?

That the American people, no different from any other people — which the nation’s founders well knew, but their most pious inheritors forgot, in unseemly self-congratulation for an achievement not their own — are subject to the same ugly and shameful passions and animating angers as any other people; and which their better educated but equally foolish observers will excuse as the passionate expression of democracy.

That despite the cant of American patriotism, American political partisanship is superior by far for many than love of country; that there is, for many, no true idea of America separable from a conservative or liberal America.

That the American news media, at their now far too common worst — ever and fatally uncomprehending of the distinction between objectivity and neutrality, and of the inherent mission of journalism to seek and serve the truth, and thus reveal and judge the lie — are stenographers of disaster and ticket takers at a Roman Circus they sponsor.

The advent of Donald Trump on the political scene is a rend in the fabric of American republican history, a maelstrom in the moral climate of the nation’s present. As did many millions of Europeans after the Second World War, and Americans after McCarthyism, we will reckon with the roles we played at the time of his rise for generations to come, as well we should. For now, the task is to ensure that the reckoning comes sooner and less seriously than if it comes later.

Every Republican who would be called a patriot should work to ensure that Donald Trump does not become the candidate for President of the Republican Party. If he does, Republicans of conscience must leave the party and form a new party, of conservative principle, of human decency, and of commitment to America’s founding ideals, and run a candidate against Trump.

News media must cease to treat Trump as another candidate, end their acquiescence to, and normalization of, his conduct, and report on him not as a mere variant candidate for president, but as a phenomenon of American political history deserving of historical analysis and judgment.

Too many have waited too long. The time has come. This is the moment.

Denounce Trump.

“No one man can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

Edward R. Murrow

AJA

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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

SAMIZDAT.

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