Donald Trump is not, at this writing, conceding the election. He’s demanding that Joe Biden prove he got eighty million votes, and is refusing to accept the election as evidence. He is demanding that millions of voters be exposed as cheats or dead people. He is demanding that election officials resign. He’s challenging legitimate votes with baseless lawsuits that are thrown out as soon as they hit a courtroom. He has fired the federal official—his own appointee—in charge of keeping elections fair and honest.
Maybe he believes he lives in a country where a heretofore unknown street gang—the Deep State Democrats—has suddenly shown itself to be organized and committed and corrupt enough to destroy this country’s democratic institutions.
That is some organization. That is some commitment. That is some corruption. I don’t believe any of it. Having been a Democrat long enough to know that they are unorganized, self-destructive, and attract more than their fair share of boy-scout types, I’m pretty sure the Democrats couldn’t steal a middle-school student council election.
If there’s a deep state, it exists in the laws, customs, and behavior of our nation’s civil servants, who collect taxes, enforce zoning laws, run prosecutor’s offices, and attempt to control pandemics. They’re rule makers and rule enforcers. They often enough find a perverse joy in being obeyed to the letter, but they do keep the country running day to day. They are averse to making policy, and instead focus on making sure their own little bailiwick is a tidy and rigid place where it doesn’t matter who’s president. If a political appointee tries to change their agency from above, they will ignore, sabotage, or contravene orders. They are a force for inertia. Deep inertia.
I believe Donald Trump and his followers thought they had this election fixed. The right people were in place to manipulate votes, and enough doubt could be cast on mail-in ballots that they would be thrown out by friendly judges. Secretaries of state were in position to invalidate the votes of entire regions. Election officials had been bought, not with cash but with a wink and a nod that promised increasing power and higher positions in Republican politics as long as they did what was expected of them.
The outrage expressed by Trump, his base, and his supremely cynical enablers comes from having the kind of organization and commitment and corruption they accuse the Democrats of, but still coming up short. When the votes went for Biden, it must have looked to them like the Democrats had done everything they had done, but better. The alternative was to think that all their planning, all their fervor and sneakiness, all their elaborate propaganda, all their vote suppression and map sessions, all their last-minute phone calls to state legislators—all of these, they would have had to realize, weren’t good enough. It was less painful to suppose the Democrats had out-cheated them.
Is it hard to understand why Trump thinks Joe Biden is part of an organization that requires absolute loyalty, absolute secrecy, and absolute dishonesty?
Is it possible to think that Trump’s inside knowledge about how bad, perverse, and ugly human beings can be comes only from his outside?
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Let’s not go there yet. Instead, let me remember a bunch of people who weren’t bad, perverse, and ugly. They were all eighteen years old, and in my first-year writing classes at the College of Idaho.
A thought experiment I asked them to perform was to imagine our classroom as the center point of a sphere with a radius of a million miles. “Look how tiny this room is in relation to the size of that sphere,” I told them. “Extend the radius out to Mars and Venus and Mercury, and we’d be that much smaller. If the sphere were to include Pluto, it would be so much bigger than we are that for all practical purposes, this classroom wouldn’t exist. We’d be a misplaced zero in a vast computer program, a raindrop in a hurricane, a dollar in the federal deficit.”
Then I asked them, “In this scheme of things, where is the center of the universe?” Silence.
“Include the galaxy,” I said. “Include the Local Group, the clumps and threads that connect the Local Group to other galaxies. Extend the radius of our sphere all the way to the furthest quasar our radio telescopes can detect. Where is its center, still?”
Lots of frowns. A hand up, finally. “Here?”
“Bingo,” I said. “Right here. But there are twenty-five people in this room. Not all of us can be the center of the universe. Which one of us is?”
Another hand up. “The professor?”
Big smile from me. “Six weeks into college, and you’re finally learning something.”
Then I spoiled it all. “When you start with your own point of view, of course you’re going to be the center of things. But you’re not. And no one in the universe is going to care where you think its center is anyway, especially if it’s a sentient dung beetle a billion light years away with its own point of view.”
A voice from the back of the room: “I thought this was a writing class.”
It was an exercise in right-sizing. If I could get them to see how small they were in relation to the universe, and how impossibly far they were from its center if it had one, I might be able to teach them to look around and write down what they saw, simply, honestly, and with humility. I might be able to convince them that other people had their points of view, too, ones different from their own and worth thinking about. I might be able to convince them that a human touch, a helping hand, a declaration of friendship or love or respect can turn indifference into something better.
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One of the things that college students get for their tuition money is an understanding that the world is far less black-and-white than they thought it was in high school. That’s why—I’m sorry to put it this way—people who have graduated from college vote far less frequently for demagogues than people who haven’t. They’ve been taught critical thinking, which means they have learned to recognize, time and time again, that reality is full of paradoxes and contradictions. Trump offers a simple world to live in, one where the Chinese are bad, immigrants are bad, NATO is ripping us off, liberals exist to be owned, the two types of people are winners and losers, and if you vote for him, you’re a winner.
The world the educated live in is a lot more complicated, its issues far more gray than black and white, its joys more of the cerebral cortex than of the limbic system. Those people getting their diplomas have, for four years, endured writing professors telling them to live, if they can, in a messy human world, one full of loose ends and frayed edges and dubious victories, one constantly demanding repair and forgiveness and, most of all, the hard work of seeing clearly.
“Sure you can be famous,” I told my students. “In a few short years, you could be playing center field for the Yankees, filibustering in the U.S. Senate, arguing before the Supreme Court, doing brain surgery, accepting a Pulitzer, or running your own start-up life-extension company. Maybe all at once. But there are better and more human-scale venues to excel in, better and more humane people to be.”
I don’t know that I ended anyone’s superhero dreams with these words. If I did, I hope that their lives were kinder and gentler for it.
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Once you decide you’re the center of the universe, you can eliminate the evidence that you’re not, simply by shrinking the universe to fit the limits of your perception. I joked with my students about being the center of the universe, but I had colleagues who took their universes and their places in them far more seriously. It was an occupational hazard, one that resulted in some seriously tiny universes.
When you know more about your one thing than anybody else in your faculty meeting, you start seeing the world, including your colleagues, through the lens of your specialty. Fellow faculty appear as insects if you’re an entomologist, delicate crystals if you teach geology, dubious business plans if you’re in the Economics Department. If I walked into a faculty meeting after teaching a playwriting workshop, I could see flawed scripts taking their seats beside me. I could see happy endings or tragic ones, plot twists, flat spots in the action, full-length plays that had all the substance of one-acts.
Such distortions are harmless, mostly, unless you decide that they’re real instead of artifacts of your perception. Make that sad decision and you’ll be stuck in character for a too-long run, with stupid lines and audiences loudly unwrapping the cellophane from hard candies, and you’ll never again be the person you were before you passed the audition.
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When you look at Donald Trump as a victim of this process, it’s obvious that he wasn’t in one of my writing classes, at least the ones that focused on the pitfalls of unselfconscious points of view. These days he sees himself as occupying a bigger sphere than most people, and he’s very much in the middle of it. He’s found a lot of people willing to go along with that perception. The ones who won’t are his enemies. The ones who will are his friends. Friends or enemies, they’re all bit players and extras in his drama.
(If only that last rewrite hadn’t added that subplot of the pandemic. It didn’t add any lines for him, and he had to ad-lib, which he’s not good at. Eventually, he just pretended that part of the script wasn’t there, and that he could move the play forward on character alone. That’s a big mistake if you’re Donald Trump.)
Pandemic or not, Donald Trump’s superhero dreams stayed intact until he lost the election. That loss threatens more than just his dreams. The character he’s playing has gotten bigger and louder to compensate for the disappearance of the human being he once was. He cannot let the final curtain come down without his role vanishing, and when it does, there’s not going to be much left but an empty costume in the prop manager’s laundry hamper, and orange greasepaint-stained tissues in the greenroom wastebasket. If he insists that the play have an extra act, he’s going to keep lots of people up beyond their bedtime. More and more they’re just going to want to get their coats and go home.
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Toward the end of those long-ago writing classes, I would begin to read student essays that were full of researched facts rather than opinions. They sometimes contained self-deprecatory humor, which always earned them a higher grade. (Self-deprecatory humor is one of the ways you can bring a hifalutin discussion back down to human scale.)
Also, instead of grand pronouncements on global communist conspiracies or illegal immigrants or the violent subtexts of Barbie Dolls, I got heartfelt meditations on what it felt like to be the first in the family to go to college, or on the effects of a sister’s corrective cosmetic surgery, or on the difficult relationships between two cousins, one a citizen and one with no possibility of citizenship. Students stopped playing it safe. They started sharing their joys and tragedies, and when I read their writing, I started seeing them as human beings. It made it hard to judge them, which was a problem when a big part of my job was to give them grades, but it made it easy to love working with them.
At the end of the semester, they were no longer stuck at the center of their respective universes. They were far more free to roam the one we all shared.
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It takes years of practice if you’re going to write to human scale, and years more if you’re going to live to human scale. That’s what I would have told Donald Trump if he had ever signed up for one of my writing classes. I don’t think he would have paid much attention to me.
Even if, by a miracle, I could have shown up at his military academy as his new composition teacher, I don’t think I would have been able to get through to him. He had already mistaken the shadow he cast for himself, and he liked that vast darkness for its size and its effect on others. If I had told him that being human is a kind of Goldilocks endeavor—not too big, not too small—he wouldn’t have believed me.
“Being human is for losers,” he would have said.