When I was a boy, I often heard my mother quote an old adage: Many a
true word has been spoken in jest.
I hated it when she said it because it usually was aimed at me whenever
I said something cruel, unkind, unjust or self-serving and then, when she
called me on it, would claim I was “just kidding.” When I did this, like I say,
I was just a boy. It’s a puerile and only very thinly veiled ploy that is
wholly unsophisticated and simply doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.
And yet, the 45th president of the United States makes use of
this childish device on a not infrequent basis. One of the first times we heard
it was when the infamous Access Hollywood tape became public. You’ll recall
that on that tape, among other totally inappropriate and sexist things that
Donald Trump said, he bragged that he could “grab women by the pussy” and they
wouldn’t do anything to stop him because he was a star. He would later say that it was “just locker
room talk”—a variation of the “just kidding” argument—as if that justified it
or rendered him any less repulsive for saying it.
The Access Hollywood tape is now part of a long list of offensive or potentially dangerous things
this president has said and later tried to justify by arguing (or having one of
his surrogates argue) that he was just joking.
At the height of his campaign to win the presidency over former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, Trump publicly and famously said, “I will tell you
this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000
(Clinton) emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded
mightily by our press.” He thus not only openly encouraged Russia to interfere
in the 2016 elections, but also tacitly admitted that he believed reports of
Russian operatives hacking sensitive US communications.
However, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating
Russian interference in US affairs, sent a written question to the US president’s
attorneys regarding this campaign statement, Team Trump responded that the
president (then candidate) had made the
statement “in jest and sarcastically, as was apparent to any objective
observer.”
Be that as it may, Mueller’s probe showed that it was no more than five
hours after Trump’s 2016 statement before Russian agents were already actively engaged
in hacking Hillary Clinton’s server and eventually the communications of the Democratic
National Committee. Furthermore, although the Mueller Report fell short of
establishing evidence of an actual conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin, it
did indeed establish that there were multiple lines of communication between
Russia and Team Trump.
When, later in the 2016 campaign, thousands of emails hacked from the DNC
and from Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta were published in a public
information dump orchestrated by publishing transgressor Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks
and picked up by the mainstream media, Trump crowed at a public rally, “I love Wikileaks!” Clearly, Trump and
Assange shared inimical feelings toward Hillary, Trump because of the election campaign
in which he was constantly insisting that she should be “locked up”, and
Assange dating back to Hillary’s stint as secretary of state, when the Obama
administration sought to bring charges against the Wikileaks founder for his
role in the publication, among other things, of incidents of wrongdoing by US
troops that were being kept secret by the military.
After his “I love Wikileaks” cheer, Trump would go on to praise the
organization dozens more times, for as long as it was undermining his rival’s
campaign. When Assange was arrested in London, however, after holing up for
seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in order to elude arrest warrants in
Britain, Sweden and the US, the president’s chief spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee
Sanders told Chris Wallace of Fox News that the president “clearly...was making
a joke” regarding Wikileaks during the
2016 campaign. Trump, for his part, seems to be suffering from “Wikiamnesia”,
since when asked by reporters what he thought of Assange and Wikileaks now, after
the rogue publisher’s arrest, he said, “I know nothing about WikiLeaks.”
Sarah Sanders once again pulled a joker from the deck after Trump asked,
“Can we call it Treason?” when Democrats in Congress failed to applaud his
State of the Union address. Democrats said accusing opponents of treason for
not praising the executive seemed a lot like fascism, to which Sanders claimed
that the president “was clearly joking.”
And then there was the time Trump claimed to have been joking when he
suggested to a gathering of law enforcement officers that they should “not be
too nice” to the suspects they arrested. And the time that he said former
President Barack Obama was “literally the founder of ISIS.” After that
outlandish claim, Trump tweeted of those who were appalled by such a suggestion,
“They don’t get the irony.”
The list goes on, but the latest presidential “joke” is, perhaps, his
most narcissistic and authoritarian-minded yet. This is his controversial two
bonus-years “joke”.
But first, he had a laugh at the expense of the Mueller investigation on
the telephone with Vladimir Putin, the very Russian head of state whose
espionage agents carried out a disinformation campaign that sought to skew the
2016 US general election in favor of Trump. The hour-long phone call between
the two leaders was a thumb in the eye to everyone who finds Russia’s
interference in US domestic affairs completely unacceptable. It came just two
weeks after the release of the Mueller Report on the special counsel’s
investigation into Russian meddling, which corroborated that this had indeed taken
place. Despite denying any Russian state interference in US affairs, Putin had
admitted that he was “rooting” for Trump to win.
Well, that interference was never discussed in the US president’s latest
talk with Putin—an anti-democratic strongman for whom Trump has continuously
expressed admiration since his 2016 presidential campaign. Rather, Trump
encouraged Putin to reset their good personal relations now that “the Russia
hoax” was over. The president told reporters that Putin had “actually sort of
smiled when he said something to the effect that it (the Mueller investigation)
started off as a mountain and ended up being a mouse. But he knew that because
he knew there was no collusion whatsoever.”
When critics pointed out that the communication with Putin had been a
phone call rather than a video conference, so Trump’s assertion that Putin had
smiled seemed rather like wishful thinking, the White House rushed to clarify
that the president had misspoken and meant to say that Putin had “laughed, chuckled.”
Surely, neither version made any difference to Americans who find
rampant Russian anti-American cyber-espionage no laughing matter. And
considering the grave contents of the Mueller investigation report, a critical
mass of Americans find the president’s quasi-carnal relations with the Russian
autocrat baffling and disturbing to say the least.
But back to the “two-year bonus round”. Last weekend, lawyer, Liberty University
president and Trump-Evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr. took to Twitter to compliment
Trump on his “no collusion, no obstruction” status following release of the
Mueller Report. Falwell bought into Trump’s own theory that the Mueller
investigation had been an attempted coup orchestrated by Democrats. The Liberty
University president tweeted, “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st
term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.”
Far from explaining to Falwell that, in case he hadn’t noticed, the US
was a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and that presidents only
served on behalf of the people and only for the terms mandated by law, Trump re-tweeted
Falwell’s seditious suggestion and added: “Despite the tremendous success that
I have had as President, including perhaps the greatest ECONOMY and most
successful first two years of any President in history, they have stollen [sic]
two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be
able to get back.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and researcher who
specializes in the traits of authoritarian rulers, in response to a query from The New York Times, said, “Everything
that he (Trump) says is a trial balloon—even his, quote, ‘jokes’ are trial balloons.”
According to Professor Ben-Ghiat, “If you look at what he jokes about, it’s
always things like this. It’s the extension of his rights, it’s the
infringement of liberties.” She added that, “Authoritarians are continually
testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with, and everything he
does is a challenge to Democrats to mount some response against him.”
The Falwell and Trump tweets underscored fears expressed by Speaker of
the House Nancy Pelosi about the possibility of Trump’s refusing to accept the
outcome of the 2020 election if his Democratic rival wins. She suggested that
if Democrats were to win, they needed to “win big” in order to protect the
country from the kind of divisiveness that any refusal by Trump to accept an
orderly transfer of power could cause.
Alarm and condemnation expressed in the media and in opposition circles
regarding the portent of Trump’s tweeted enthusiasm for Jerry Falwell Jr.’s
anti-democratic and unconstitutional suggestion was so swift and so strong that
the White House felt called upon to issue a denial. Officials said the
president was “just joking” when he talked about being owed an extra two years
over and above his four-year term.
It is noteworthy that the president’s latest “joke” comes at the dawning
of a constitutional crisis, in which the Executive Branch is actively rejecting
legislative oversight and seeking to rule the country as an autocracy that
answers to no one for its actions. In my many years as an expatriate and
newsman, I’ve had the fortunate professional experience and the dubious
personal distinction of living under and next door to a rather wide variety of
populist authoritarians and hardcore dictators. It’s an experience that, until
now, not a lot of Americans have had, so for many it’s hard to see the signs of
what could be coming or even of what’s happening right now. On the one hand,
there is Trump’s base, made up of people who seem to have no use for democracy
and who are perfectly happy to be ruled by an autocrat. On the other is the
majority of Americans, who simply can’t bring themselves to believe that
anything as intrinsically alien as authoritarianism could ever happen in the
United States.
Friends, all I can say is, “Wake up!” It can, and it is.
