Vote like your life depends on it

I said four years ago that the main task of a political party is to do the work of identifying capable candidates for office who fit its creed. That way supporters can vote the straight ticket, without having to vet each one themselves. A political party that chooses incompetent candidates deserves to lose other races as well. The party that chose Donald Trump then deserved to lose; choosing him again means they deserve to be destroyed.

I said in 2016 that the best we could probably hope for from Trump was a standard Republican administration. I expected that the party would be able to do the work of selecting competent officials and the sheer inertia of a functioning government would mostly keep him in line and keep things working. And I wondered if he might surprise us by doing something well. Mind you, I used the phrase "once he gets into office and confronts the realities" and that really does show a complete misunderstanding of the way his mind works.

In some ways Trump has been better than I feared, but mostly because of incompetence. He proved unable to remove Obamacare even with Republican majorities in both houses. Largely because he was unable to even pretend to have anything better to offer, and there was enough public pressure on the margins to get Republican senators to block it (or alternatively, because the GOP knew it would be a disaster and allowed blocking votes from those with the most to gain from them). After four years, and all the sabotage he's committed on it, the court case is still in progress.

He has not started any major wars. He courted disaster in North Korea, and tried very hard to start a war with Iran, but was not nearly as organized as Bush was with Iraq. To be fair I think it is Republicans who want an Iran war; Trump just wants to pose with military hardware. I wondered if he would be able to get somewhere with North Korea because he's a bully and might understand how to get inside Kim Jong Un's head, but he was too lazy to do any work himself and the North Koreans saw him coming a mile off.

Mostly he has followed a standard Republican line - tax cuts for the rich, service cuts for the poor, regulation cuts for big business, and nothing that might result in action on climate change. All layered over with unconcealed racism and divisiveness. Saying the quiet part out loud, as it is described; being open about what the GOP usually only hints at.

What surprised me the most was the decay he has been able to inflict on the US system of government. Where his appointments are not outright corrupt they are incompetent, because sooner or later a competent official will tell him something he doesn't want to hear. Even the weather bureau! I really thought it would take longer for him to do so much damage, and I don't know what would be left after another four years.

And then there is the pandemic. Tailor made for Trump. He could have brought in travel bans, called out the army, commandeered big corporations, blamed foreigners and "those dirty people". But he was just purely incapable of listening to advice and he botched it all and is still botching it. He is still mocking the wearing of masks! Just by standing aside and letting people get on with it the US response would have been so much better, and the polling numbers for people like Cuomo show that he could have been sailing to re-election if he had done even a workmanlike job.

And this is what really scares me. After all of this incompetence, he still has a viable chance at another term. He has a huge supporter base that won't hear a word against him, and a large number of states that will vote clear majorities for him in November. Never mind the vote suppression, a president as historically bad as Trump should be trailing by double digits in solid red states.

There's a limit to how much damage Trump can do in four more years because he doesn't really care about any of this and he is now quite old. He doesn't have a goal in mind apart from making money and he won't last long. But he is showing the way for the next Trump. The competent one, who believes in ethnic nationalism or a proper theocracy. Who chooses good officials and almost always listens to them. Who uses a dog whistle instead of a foghorn. Who lies by design instead of by reflex. The one with a plan.

And that is why Trump needs to lose badly this time. He needs to lose so badly that he takes a lot of Republicans with him. America needs him to be a cautionary tale, that parties shy away from emulating. Politicians need to flinch if they find themselves compared with him.

Vote. Vote like your future depends on it.

Update, since 2020 is so hard to keep up with: The worst case is if Trump has a really mild dose of Covid-19 and shakes it off quickly; we would soon find out if there was anything else he could do to sabotage the response. Simply dying would potentially take the edge off whatever electoral defeat he suffers. But a serious case that puts him in the ICU that could cause a lot of his supporters to start taking it seriously, and that could save thousands of lives. Another way he can serve this country as a cautionary tale.

Competence matters

I expected a Trump administration to kill a lot of people, but I thought it would be by repealing the Affordable Care Act and putting a fig-leaf (or even nothing) in its place. Or perhaps starting the war with Iran that the Republicans have been wanting all this time. I still think the person who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize is whoever convinced Trump that Obama intended to go to war with North Korea, thereby guaranteeing that Trump would avoid doing that if it was at all possible. The Republicans have done a lot of damage to the Affordable Care Act and are trying to do more; but they couldn't summon the nerve to actually just throw it out. Trump seemed to be trying to get a war with Iran (maybe just in time for November?).

And then... this happened. A pandemic seems tailor made for Trump. A noted germophobe, and someone who would just love closing borders. If he'd acted sooner and done things that would have fit right into his agenda, he would now be looking like a genius. He had the information in time; US intelligence gave warnings long before a lockdown would have worked.

I underestimated the degree to which the Trump administration has destroyed the capacity of the US government to wield expertise and get things done. My hope was that Trump would spend his term playing golf and bloviating about how wonderful things were. But his combination of ignorance and pride means anybody competent who works for him must talk nonsense or get fired. And it turns out that a competent government is important.

I have been thinking a lot about this quote from George Orwell's essay "In Front Of Your Nose":

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Trump has bumped into reality, and the United States is paying the price. In six months we get the chance to express our disapproval, and we need to take it.