Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  Imagine, then, the sense of caution, the gift for observation, the feeling of solitude, the awesome self-reliance the young Barack Obama would need to navigate the world. Imagine the stunning realization that, in ways few could understand, he was a person unto himself. Imagine the sensitivity to difference through which he learned to deal with differences.

  Then, perhaps, we begin to imagine the man we came to know. The truly extraordinary understanding he brought to speaking on race when that necessity was thrust on him by Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The experience of becoming a human Rorschach test who, simply by aspiring to leadership, symbolized our psychic response to race—for most of us, of racial progress; for a fearful minority, of displacement within a society that threatens them.

  Imagine, too, the awesome forbearance it took to remain stoic in the face of the racist birtherism stoked by Donald Trump. Or the criticism of African Americans who believed that he should speak first and foremost as a black man. Or the racist rudeness of a white southern congressman shouting “liar” at a black American president. Or the ceaseless Republican obstruction underwritten by racial animus. Or political enemies trying to convert his own wife to that racist stereotype—angry black woman—fueled by their own subliminal guilt and unease.

  Imagine, further, the burden of knowing that, though you personified the best of America to the world, millions of your fellow Americans hated you because of your race.

  Imagine all that, and wonder at the extraordinary grace Barack Obama brought to the ceaseless task of both leading and representing us. Feel gratitude, as well, for a man who gave us an administration that was high in ethics, and a family so consistently admirable in leading such a uniquely unnatural existence.

  But we have been lately reminded, yet again, that for any president—but particularly this one—race is a minefield, all the worse because of the ongoing trials of black Americans, to whose experience too many whites are oblivious, and who look to Obama to express their frustration and pain.

  The tragedies in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas captured his dilemma. Blacks asserted that he had been too slow to condemn police shootings of other blacks; irrational and angry whites held him responsible for deaths in Dallas simply because he expressed concern about the deaths in Baton Rouge and St. Paul; the despicable Trump accused him of dividing the country. As a fatalist, he must surely have anticipated this, just as, surely, it must have taken a toll.

  And yet throughout his term, as he did again in Dallas, he has comported himself with admirable balance, speaking for all Americans without retreating from his identity as a black man, whether stating the stark and simple truth that Trayvon Martin could have been his son, to leading the mourners in Charleston by singing “Amazing Grace.”

  Graceful, indeed—and hard.

  So imagine how Barack Obama must feel about Donald Trump.

  Some of those feelings are surely personal—and wholly justified. Trump is the odious gasbag who tried to humiliate our first black president by feeding the racism, nativism, and xenophobia of the bogus birther movement. The moral cipher who, simply to get attention, assaulted Obama with groundless lies. The opportunist who ultimately compelled our president to release his birth certificate to quell the fevered suggestion that he was not, somehow, legitimate.

  Thus it was pleasing to watch Obama dispatch Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, turning the man’s bloviations to sport for our national amusement. But his disdain for Trump is far more than personal, for the bilious billionaire is the antithesis of everything that Obama wants America and its president to be.

  Obama prizes reasoned dialogue; Trump is an ignorant demagogue. Obama strives to make judicious judgments; Trump’s sputterings are mindless to the point of danger. Obama speaks to inclusiveness and generosity; Trump to suspicion and divisiveness. Obama is a man of dignity; Trump a narcissistic buffoon who would degrade our public life.

  Obama is ever conscious of his responsibilities; Trump feels no responsibility to anyone or anything but his own all-consuming ego. Obama is the president who made the brave and risky decision to go after Osama bin Laden; Trump is the draft dodger who questions his loyalty and spine.

  And here’s the core of it. Obama has surmounted the toils and trials of race, and asked us to do the same. Trump is a practicing racist.

  Trump’s offenses against decency are legion. He targets blacks with racist dog whistles; Mexicans with demeaning stereotypes; American Muslims with insinuations that they are, collectively, a fifth column for terrorists. And, in doing so, he tears at the fabric of that which is most precious, and often most fragile, in our society.

  Every fiber of Barack Obama must want to banish Donald Trump from public life. And, at last, his opportunity is at hand.

  We have already seen the preview. In the wake of the slaughter in Orlando, Trump shamed himself by spewing self-congratulations combined with demagoguery, lies, and practical and moral idiocy—scapegoating Syrian refugees and every Muslim abroad; suggesting that American Muslims at large were complicit in terror; labeling Obama’s careful effort to distinguish between terrorists and all Muslims as weak; and, perhaps most loathsome, questioning the president’s loyalty.

  With palpable contempt, Obama eviscerated all this. He then reminded us that “we don’t have religious tests here” and that “we’ve seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens, and that has been a shameful part of our history.” And, by doing so, he reminded us of the ways in which Donald Trump would not only undermine our security, but our values.

  But that response was the grim duty of a president faced with tragedy. At the Democratic convention, we got a glimpse of how Obama will eviscerate Trump—for the emptiness of the man, and the stunted prism through which he views America. And after Trump demeaned the Khan family, Obama used the moral authority of his office to challenge Trump’s fitness to hold it.

  Come the fall, Barack Obama will be free to mount an argument in his own time and way, giving everything he has to make sure that the next president embraces, not destroys, the values he has brought to the office. And, by doing this, he will exact his well-earned reprisal on Donald Trump, dispatching him from public life with the back of his hand.269

  Perhaps that is the best part. Barack Obama’s ultimate revenge is not simply that he will do that, but how—with a grace and elegance beyond the power of a man like Trump to summon, or even imagine.

  Sublime.

  The Fateful August of Donald J. Trump

  AUGUST 30, 2016

  In the month since the conventions, the jittery surface of the twenty-four-hour news cycle has been roiled by crosscurrents, its avatars trumpeting each new event as more dramatic than the last. But beneath there is a sickly stillness of a candidacy mired in the swampland of Donald Trump’s own mind, creating a numbing ennui seeping through the electorate like encephalitis in slow motion. Too many Americans have realized who he is.270

  The contrast between the dystopia of Cleveland—four midnights in America—and the competence of Philadelphia left him trailing. But something worse had happened to Trump himself: instead of provoking excitement, he was inducing fear and stupefaction.

  True, his lies come so quickly that none has meaning in itself. But the larger meaning comes through—Trump’s every statement has no meaning but Trump himself. To call him a liar is to assume deliberation in a man who cares nothing about the words he speaks beyond whether they serve him in the moment. Such people are not merely frightening—they are exhausting.

  With ten weeks to go, he seems no more thoughtful or capable than he did during the primaries, when all he had to do was inflame a plurality of inflammable Republicans. The only difference is that, fearful of defeat, he reads more often from a teleprompter, proving nothing but that he has the basic literacy to recite the simplistic sentences others write for him. He may have changed his management team, but he cannot change himself.

  The larger audience of the general electorate is on to th
is, and it worries them. They sense that the real man—the only man Trump values—resides in his spontaneous utterances. And those betray the stunted soul who lives within Trump 3.0.

  That is why his attack on the Khan family—a far more egregious and persistent lapse than Mitt Romney’s 47 percent moment—lingers in the mind. His stunning lack of empathy, particularly for Mrs. Khan, was bad enough. Add lack of judgment—a normal man would not disparage the parents of a dead American soldier. And, even worse, throw in his whiny claim that he was “viciously attacked.”

  He kept after this for four days, asserting on his own behalf that his pursuit of billions “involved a lot of sacrifices”—though not, perhaps, quite as wounding as losing a son or, even more precious, his own life. But we swiftly learned that Trump was never at risk of this, having secured a medical deferment during Vietnam—a safe harbor he falsely attributed to a high lottery number. Another man might have maintained a graceful silence.

  But then another man would not try to recover his footing by accepting a Purple Heart from a veteran, then braying that this was a “much easier” way of acquiring one than actually getting wounded in the service of his country.

  As with all the months before, August was replete with such defining moments. The difference is that more Americans are watching Trump more closely. And what they see disqualifies him—not just as a leader, but as a man.

  Instead of reaching out to Republican officeholders worried about his candidacy, he disparaged them. But this was as nothing to the several days he spent insisting that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the “founders” of ISIS, praising himself as a “truth teller” before retreating, under pressure, to the claim that he was merely being “sarcastic.” Whatever he was being, it was not presidential.

  Asked about sexual harassment, he opined that should his own daughter be victimized, “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company . . .” Startling—until one remembered that Trump defended Roger Ailes against charges of serial harassment worthy of Bill Cosby, questioning the motives of some of Ailes’s accusers.271

  But this is standard fare, for Trump’s search for the bottom is bottomless. Having begun the month by attacking the Khans, he ended it by exploiting the separation of Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, from the troubled Anthony Weiner—suggesting that Weiner had access to classified information from the State Department. His grounds? There are none. For Trump, gratuitous cruelty to others is just another opportunity to get the attention he craves.272

  This ugly verbal incontinence has a way of turning sinister. Hence his suggestion that “the Second Amendment people” could find a way to prevent Hillary Clinton from appointing judges they don’t like—a casual recycling of the violent right-wing trope that “Second Amendment remedies” may be needed to address some imaginary federal overreach.

  Thus, too, the rancid undertone of his commentary on race, religion, or ethnicity.

  Speaking in Maine, he offended locals of all races by groundlessly portraying peaceful Somali immigrants to the area as sources of crime and potential terrorism. Even his purported outreach to African Americans—delivered to a crowd of white folks in an obvious effort to mollify white suburbanites—was riddled with condescension and inaccuracy and suffused with racial stereotyping: “You live in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

  One can start with any hope of a responsible dialogue about race. Trump’s “alt-right” view of African Americans—so effectively skewered by Hillary Clinton—decamps from reality. By any historic measure our cities are safer. Despite the stubborn scourge of our racial history, more black Americans are doing better, and few recognize their communities—however grave their difficulties—in the bleak “war zones” that Trump describes. To be sure, the devastating portrait he paints is about something real: not the lives of black people, but about how Donald Trump has always seen black people.

  To the extent that he sees them at all. Over the weekend, the cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade was randomly killed in Chicago by gunfire while walking her baby. Trump responded with a particularly odious tweet: “Just what I have been saying. African Americans will VOTE TRUMP”—neatly exemplifying his insensitivity to personal tragedy and to black Americans as a whole.

  Among increasing numbers of Americans, the overall effect is boredom and fatigue—akin to listening to a cretinous uncle, deep in his cups as he spoils Thanksgiving dinner, spouting ignorant racial theories made even more dispiriting by the certainty that he shares them with his friends. All that jolts one out of stultitude is that Trump wants his friends to make him president.

  Equally noxious is his appeal to racism as a means of delegitimizing the general election in advance. “I’m telling you,” Trump forecasts, “November 8 we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged.” On this pretext Trump is proposing voter suppression vigilante-style: encouraging squads of supporters to show up at polling places to identify suspect voters. One need not be a cynic to appreciate that the means of identification will involve pigmentation.

  But just as corrosive is Trump’s cynical effort to excuse defeat by eroding confidence in our electoral process because “the other” has stolen the election. The residue could transcend the birther movement in its damage to our societal glue—the feverish belief among a subset of Americans that Hillary Clinton is not a legitimate president.273

  A particularly disturbing compound of lies, stupidity, self-delusion, and self-interest fuels Trump’s vacuous commentary on Vladimir Putin. Start with the foundational falsehood: Trump’s stunning claim in 2014 that, “I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer.” Or his assertion in a November 2015 GOP debate that, “I got to know [Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes.”

  Six-year-olds are allowed to conjure imaginary friends. But not presidential candidates. It is beyond dispute—as Trump has now been forced to admit—that he and Putin have never met or even spoken. Even more bizarre is that Trump seems to imagine that the rest of us share his incapacity to separate fiction from reality—and thus that no one would notice, for example, that 60 Minutes taped its interviews with Trump in New York and Putin in Moscow.

  But his obsession with Putin transcends the merely fantastical, raising serious questions about our national security. He publicly encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. And, quite clearly, he is the intended beneficiary of hacking against the Democratic National Committee performed, experts believe, by Russian intelligence, resulting in emails siphoned through WikiLeaks to damage Clinton’s campaign. One must wonder why Putin takes such an apparent interest in making Trump our commander in chief.

  Could it be, just maybe, that this serves Putin’s interests?

  Trump’s ignorance surely does. Questioned by George Stephanopoulos as to why the GOP platform softened its stance on defending the Ukraine against Russian aggression, Trump said of Putin, “He’s not going into Ukraine, okay, just so you understand.”

  Astonished, Stephanopoulos rejoined, “Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?,” compelling a clearly mystified Trump to fudge with, “Okay, well, he’s there in a certain way . . .” That certain way, as any Ukrainian could tell him, includes the annexation of Crimea and insinuation of Russian troops and military hardware into that part of the country that remains.

  But not to worry, Trump said—“From what I’ve heard [the Crimeans] would rather be with Russia than where they were.” The origins of this insight went unmentioned, though one possible source is his erstwhile campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who has raked in millions advising a pro-Russian autocrat who was formerly president of the Ukraine. Elsewhere, to Putin’s larger benefit, Trump has declared NATO to be “obsolete,” and questioned the principle that an attack on one member state is an attack on all.

  In
deed, Trump’s partiality for Putin partakes of callousness—and not just toward Russia’s external victims. He described Putin to Joe Scarborough as a “leader, unlike what we have in this country,” fusing fondness for his imaginary friend Vladimir with an unseemly taste for authoritarianism. When Scarborough countered that Putin “kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Trump blithely responded, “Well, I think our country does a lot of killing also, Joe.”

  Of journalists? Such moral and intellectual vacancy is a boon to cold-blooded men like Vladimir Putin.

  But perhaps, by pandering to Putin, Donald Trump is also looking out for himself. I have it on good authority that Trump can no longer get financing from American banks. There is no doubt that, under Putin’s auspices, he could do much better in Russia—if he has not done so already. Which may be one reason, among many, to conceal his tax returns.

  Whatever the case, highly placed Russian officials have openly welcomed the prospect of a President Trump. No mystery here—if anyone knows how to exploit ignorance and egotism, it is surely Vladimir Putin. Which is why Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, has characterized Trump as an unwitting agent of Russia.

  Given the cacophony surrounding Trump, his affinity for Putin has stolen but imperfectly into the national consciousness. Still, it is already seeding doubt. And August is the month when more Americans became fearful of Trump as commander in chief.

  Nowhere is presidential latitude broader, and the risks greater, than in the conduct of foreign policy and the exercise of military power. The opportunities to take ill-advised and unilateral actions are legion—abandoning allies, scrapping treaties and trade deals, arbitrarily barring all immigration from friendly European countries, and, of course, lighting the powder keg of the Middle East. The latter threat, at least, is something that Americans get. But nothing focuses our collective mind like the specter of nuclear war.