It’s Always 1984 in the White House

The unsettling thing about the current Administration is that we have never encountered anything like it before. That’s apart from discovering a language to describe it. We all know the pattern of disordered self-centeredness, Trump’s need to place himself in the bull’s-eye of conversation. Generals aren’t generals; they are “my generals.” A course of action may be outlandish or repellant, but “if I wanted to do it, I certainly could.”

But what about when it devolves to outright crazy? In the run-up to Christmas, Trump took phone calls from kids who wanted to know when Santa would arrive. It’s a nostalgic little piece of stunt-work by NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The kids call in and the President tells them whether Santa’s sleigh has been sighted over New Jersey. I don’t like the idea of the American president serving as the intermediary for Higher Beings, but I acknowledge that it’s been this way for a while. I should also rejoice that NORAD still exists.

But this President couldn’t leave the matter there. He had to editorialize about “clean, beautiful coal,” and to claim, fraudulently, that he had won Pennsylvania. All of this in calls from eight-year-old children who had nothing on their minds except cookies and milk for Santa. Where is the language to describe such behavior? What’s the right chapter in the DSM? We need a new term, like “coked-up narcissism.”

The same with his inclination toward declarative wrongdoing, an Orwellian habit of saying that bad is good. I think I just made up that term, but it’s an effort to capture Trump’s pathological habit of doing bad things as if they were not despicable. Take the recent grift of crypto-profiteering. It is clearly wrong for the president of the country to profit from a business which he participates in regulating. It’s even worse to pardon a convicted crypto criminal who confesses his guilt but promises to enrich him.

But that is precisely what happened as summer turned to fall. You may not have followed the case of Changpeng Zhao, but I think I can save you part of the effort. Zhao turned his crypto business into a laundromat for money, allowing for nefarious doings at a high level of criminality. The Biden Administration sent him to jail and then settled the affair with an enormous fine.

But on his accession to the throne, Trump promptly pardoned Zhao and entered into a sleazy payback partnership. At the same time, he had his water-carrier, Carolyn Leavitt, tell us that Biden’s enforcement efforts were excessively harsh, and that the president was merely righting a wrong.

You’re left outraged and astonished, but then turned inside out. If he just did a bad thing as if it were a good thing, it must be that he hasn’t flouted the constraints. The truth is that he has, but the plainness of the behavior, enacted publicly on a national stage, accustoms us to the thought that he may be within his rights. I’m going to call that “declarative wrongdoing.”

Will naming it change anything for us or our children? I may be outraged, but I’m not a fool. None of this will stop until Trump is defeated at the polls. His conduct is not a simple matter of politics, but the functioning of a deeply contaminated psyche, the perverse compulsion of a corrupted soul. But we still have to find the language to describe it, if only to keep ourselves sane in the process. Orwell reminded us that bad isn’t good. Bad is bad, and we have to keep saying so.