One very noticeable thing about Washington DC is the ubiquity of memorable quotations. The grand marble monuments to Lincoln and Jefferson are formal to the point of pomposity, but are made meaningful by the words carved on the walls. The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, authored by Jefferson and placed in his memorial; the text of Lincoln’s second inaugural speech and the Gettysburg Address grace his monument; and down the steps from there, on the spot where the words were uttered by Martin Luther King, is carved “I have a dream”.
This entire infrastructure of historical memorial in the United States is designed to create a pleasing narrative of progress, of a republic being gently perfected over time, so that the ending of slavery or civil rights reforms can be absorbed into a national mythos as if they had always been intended, rather than resisted and fought for.
One reason why this act of self-deception is possible is the existence of words: the words in the independence declaration, the constitution and the Bill of Rights. These documents testify to a belief in the perfectibility of political institutions, and a reverence for eloquence. They contained at least the promise of human progress.
The point is that all of this seems absurd in the age of Donald Trump. It is for now impossible to sustain a naive, Frank Capra-like belief in inevitable progress, or a belief in very much at all.
Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy is a polemic take rather than a work of balanced reportage – and that is part of the point. For even to attempt to report on or analyse Trump as if he were a conventional president is make a category error. Reporters or news organisations attempting to give the US president a fair wind by not calling his incessant lies lies are not being balanced – they are contributing to further imbalance by allowing the failed property developer to further disorient the public without proper checks. And of course Trump won’t be grateful for their attempts at impartiality: he wants adulation, not balance.
Trump’s vulgarity and incuriosity make a mockery of the grand mythos of the US, its monuments to its own progress and the eloquence of its leaders. His politics are not just regressive, they are degenerate. He has, as Gessen correctly points out, no concept of the US as a constitutional republic under law, and certainly no concept that his primary role as president is to defend the constitution.
It is arguable, and some psychologists have suggested – though we should be wary of long-distance diagnoses – that Trump has only a minimal concept of the needs or feelings of other human beings beyond their capacity to serve him.
The historical novelist Thomas Mallon, who has written books about several presidents, has said he will never write about Trump because “there is no inner life. There’s no moral complexity, no ability to feel any guilt or any ambivalence”. This book seems to advance that premise.
When Trump was running for election, the apparent lack of multidimensionality made him grotesquely cartoonish, but also riveting. He is entirely without depth other than in relation to his need for approval, a yearning which is bottomless. Ascribing conventionally nuanced personal motivations or political calculations to his is not just pointless, it is counterproductive. It aids the cause, according to Gessen, of normalisation.
Gessen highlights the fawning reviews Trump received for his first address to a joint session of Congress, in February 2017. Mainstream reporters and commentators clamoured to describe a scripted address that hewed slightly closer to White House conventionality than Trump’s usual demented rants as evidence that he would be a recognisably conventional president after all. It was “the moment Trump became president”, gushed one broadcaster, sycophantically and inaccurately.
Trump had become president when he was inaugurated, the same as every other commander-in-chief, but simply had an entirely different concept of what being president meant. And, as this book lists doggedly, he has mostly succeeded at asserting his own version of the role – which is that it is a tool for indulging his bottomless need for approval and power over others.
Gessen’s book is mostly polemical, and mostly not new. Nevertheless, the writer’s tone of outrage has value. It is an inventory of awfulness we already knew about, but stopped counting. The corollary of Trump’s cartoonishness and the sheer, unredeemed squalor and corruption of his administration is that it is easy, even tempting, to tune it all out.
The initial sense of grotesque comedy at his campaign has faded, and so has the shock factor of each new depth he plumbs. The travel ban on Muslim countries; the Twitter threats against North Korea; the unrecorded meetings with Vladimir Putin. Each, in their moment, shocking almost beyond conception but first gotten away with, and then reduced in seriousness because of the obliterating scale of everything else.
The Putin connection is an important part of this book, but not in the way one might assume. Large parts of Trump’s opposition banked on the investigations of Robert Mueller to act as the president’s nemesis, and as their deliverance from the nightmare of his presidency. But it did not, because Mueller could not report incontrovertible proof of an agreed plot between Trump’s team and Russia. In a sense, he found worse; he found – or at least described – a Trump organisation which was both chaotic and structurally corrupt, and in no way separate from the administration of government after Trump’s election as president.
This is one of the similarities between Trump and Putin, similarities which Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who has written about living in both men’s autocracies, understands more than most. American exceptionalism has allowed some to believe that the strength of institutions, or the eloquent words engraved in marble on Washington’s monuments, will save their republic. They haven’t yet. The US is in many demonstrable ways already an autocracy.
Thankfully for Americans, and those of us who care about their country, Trump is a less effective autocrat than Putin. And unlike Putin, he can be removed this November. If he is, rebuilding the mythos of the republic will take an awful lot of work. If he isn't, and manages to stay in office, we can only imagine how the horrible and inevitable Trump monument in Washington might look.
Matthew O'Toole is an SDLP politician and MLA for Belfast South.
