Of malice and MAGA

Trump aims to make America mean again

I picked up East of Eden with enthusiasm. True, I was reading it because it was next in my book club’s lineup. But I had read John Steinbeck before – The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men – and enjoyed him.

I’m not enjoying East of Eden very much. Steinbeck’s descriptive prose of California’s Salinas Valley is, as always, lush and inviting. But the human world he depicts, of farmers and ranchers trying to make a life at the turn of the last century, is mostly harsh, unforgiving, and brutal. Men attack others with fists, feet, farm tools, rocks, anything at hand. They act from a variety of motives, some understandable, some far less so. One character commits a long series of predatory acts that leave a trail of human wreckage in her wake. Those incapable of such violence, either physical or psychological, are depicted as naïve and vulnerable, easy prey for the human carnivores.

Steinbeck’s intent was at least partially allegorical – to paint a portrait of a primordial world where there are no constraints on human behavior, no matter how malevolent or cruel.

But allegory or not, I find it painful to read today, because this is the world that Donald Trump and his accomplices are trying to recreate.

More than six years ago, journalist Adam Serwer presciently identified the purpose, the unifying principle, of Trump’s behavior: “The cruelty is the point.” Trump’s intent was to communicate an unmistakable message. “Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.”

That was less than halfway through Trump’s first presidential term. Now, just two months and change into his second, we are seeing the same MO at work, but on a much more expansive scale.

Some of this is expressed in shockingly vivid ways – and the shock value is clearly intentional. Immigration officers dressed in black with faces concealed seize, handcuff and frog-march away a student on a public sidewalk. Her sin was to co-author an editorial in her college newspaper criticizing her university’s position on Gaza. A cabinet officer travels at taxpayer expense to El Salvador to record a propaganda video, standing in front of a jail cell packed with deported prisoners. The purpose of these actions is to terrorize immigrants, legal and otherwise, but also to send a message to the rest of us: Step out of line, and this could happen to you.

Other moves are made in the shadows, but are no less cruel and no less purposeful. Government agencies that provide service and support for millions of people are gutted by personnel and funding cuts, or shut down altogether. Academic institutions are threatened with huge reductions in federal funding, forcing them into a lose-lose choice of either betraying their foundational principles or suffering the loss of vital programs. Law firms that displease Trump are targeted with potentially crippling sanctions unless they bow to his wishes, a maneuver intended to make it far more difficult for Trump’s many victims to find effective legal representation.

This is a world that brings to mind Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of life in a state of nature, before the imposition of society and government: “nasty, brutish, and short.” Trump’s aim is to degrade or destroy the mediating institutions of government, society and culture that have evolved over decades and centuries to protect the many from the few, the vulnerable from the powerful, the prey from the predators.

One of those institutions is religion, to the extent that it tries to provide a guide for ethical conduct. Steinbeck, although said by biographers to be an agnostic, imbued East of Eden with strong biblical themes, especially the choice between good and evil and the idea that each of us is free to make this choice. The harsh brutality that he depicts in the novel serves a purpose, as a literary device that illuminates the literal and figurative terrain on which each character chooses their path. Some take the road of evil for no discernible reason, presumably because of some inherent flaw, and suffer no remorse. Others commit abhorrent acts because of wrongs done to them in the past, real or perceived, and live to endure guilt and torment.

Trump professes to be a believer. He enjoys devoted support from many evangelical Christians. He has even claimed that he survived an assassination attempt because of divine intervention. If there is any religious core to his policies and actions, it eludes my understanding. He prefers an amoral world devoid of norms and standards because it is precisely this kind of world that enables him, by allowing him to freely indulge his capacious appetites for power and domination.

That is the world we are all condemned to live in, if Trump has his way. And it is no Eden.

Further reading:

Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” The Atlantic, Oct. 3, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/