The Last Thing We Need Is To “Go Back To Normal”
After four years of having a xenophobic reality TV host in the White House, the desire to just “go back to normal” is understandable. But a return to normalcy would be disastrous, shoring up the plutocratic status quo that gave us Trump in the first place.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton embrace on the third day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center on July 27, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
In Stephen King’s novel It, Pennywise the Dancing Clown lures children into the sewer with balloons and promises of fun. That might not be the most subtle analogy for the Trump era, but it’s one that’s occurred to me about a hundred times in the last few years. Trump was a reality TV host with a penchant for getting into entertaining feuds. He plowed through the Republican field in 2016 by acting like an insult comic and by playing to both ugly prejudices and legitimate economic fears.
As president, he hasn’t literally eviscerated anyone like Pennywise, but he has separated families at the border, fulfilled his campaign pledge to deal with foreign enemies by “bomb[ing] the shit out of them,” and mismanaged the COVID-19 crisis so horrifically that one study projects that we’ll reach half a million deaths by the end of February. And he’s acted like a clown while he’s done it all.
The Pennywise Presidency
Other presidents have committed worse crimes (though, the COVID-19 disaster is certainly up there). But most of them strained, however unconvincingly, to present themselves as reasonable and compassionate people. Bill Clinton might have declared that the era of big government is over and championed “welfare reform,” but at least he reassured us that he felt our pain. George W. Bush cluster-bombed and invaded multiple countries and surveilled and detained Muslims in America, but he held White House iftar dinners and talked about the importance of religious tolerance and his admiration for Islam as a religion.
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