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Trump Exceptionalism Will Kill Every Last One Of Your Brain Cells | Current Affairs:
memecucker:
“I can’t believe in the history of the White House any president has ever spoken the words that I heard our president speak yesterday.” That was Senator Dick Durbin’s reaction to Donald Trump’s instantly infamous “shithole countries” remark. But what I can’t believe is that a United States Senator (and grown man) could think Donald Trump was the first foul-mouthed racist to inhabit the Oval Office. We have LBJ on tape saying the n-word, after all, and there was almost no ethnic group that Richard Nixon didn’t make a bigoted comment about at one point or another. (His White House tapes contain remarks about “Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans.”)
We can dismiss Durbin’s remark as a bit of rhetoric, of course. He didn’t mean it literally, but was expressing the degree to which Trump’s disgusting prejudices depart from the expected standard of “presidential” conduct. (Even if the actual standard of presidential conduct has often been roughly on this level.) But many Democrats do actually believe, implicitly or explicitly, in a form of “Trump Exceptionalism,” which holds that Donald Trump is an entirely aberrant departure from previous presidents, whose conduct is of an unprecedented level of awfulness.
In narrating Trump’s presidency as totally different from what came before, though, they often end up exaggerating the extent to which Trump’s actions are actually unprecedented (or “unpresidented”). That’s a concerning tendency because it lead to the forgetting of history, but also because it ends up exonerating prior presidents for inexcusable acts. Exhibit A here is the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, who is responsible for an inconceivable amount of death and carnage, but who is increasingly seen as dignified and statesmanlike when compared to Donald Trump. Bush himself encourages that view by occasionally issuing denunciations of Trump’s less defensible outbursts. The more Trump is depicted as an aberrant departure from a sound and principled norm, the better Bush seems. The irony here is that so far, measured on Number Of Illegal Wars That Killed Half A Million Innocent People, Bush is far worse than Trump. And though Trump’s immigration policies are uniquely cruel, much of the rest of Trump’s agenda is simply orthodox Republican politics. Massive tax cuts for corporations, gutting consumer protection, eliminating ObamaCare: I struggle to think of any of Trump’s policies that put him outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.
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Trump Exceptionalism Will Kill Every Last One Of Your Brain Cells | Current Affairs:
memecucker:
“I can’t believe in the history of the White House any president has ever spoken the words that I heard our president speak yesterday.” That was Senator Dick Durbin’s reaction to Donald Trump’s instantly infamous “shithole countries” remark. But what I can’t believe is that a United States Senator (and grown man) could think Donald Trump was the first foul-mouthed racist to inhabit the Oval Office. We have LBJ on tape saying the n-word, after all, and there was almost no ethnic group that Richard Nixon didn’t make a bigoted comment about at one point or another. (His White House tapes contain remarks about “Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans.”)
We can dismiss Durbin’s remark as a bit of rhetoric, of course. He didn’t mean it literally, but was expressing the degree to which Trump’s disgusting prejudices depart from the expected standard of “presidential” conduct. (Even if the actual standard of presidential conduct has often been roughly on this level.) But many Democrats do actually believe, implicitly or explicitly, in a form of “Trump Exceptionalism,” which holds that Donald Trump is an entirely aberrant departure from previous presidents, whose conduct is of an unprecedented level of awfulness.
In narrating Trump’s presidency as totally different from what came before, though, they often end up exaggerating the extent to which Trump’s actions are actually unprecedented (or “unpresidented”). That’s a concerning tendency because it lead to the forgetting of history, but also because it ends up exonerating prior presidents for inexcusable acts. Exhibit A here is the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, who is responsible for an inconceivable amount of death and carnage, but who is increasingly seen as dignified and statesmanlike when compared to Donald Trump. Bush himself encourages that view by occasionally issuing denunciations of Trump’s less defensible outbursts. The more Trump is depicted as an aberrant departure from a sound and principled norm, the better Bush seems. The irony here is that so far, measured on Number Of Illegal Wars That Killed Half A Million Innocent People, Bush is far worse than Trump. And though Trump’s immigration policies are uniquely cruel, much of the rest of Trump’s agenda is simply orthodox Republican politics. Massive tax cuts for corporations, gutting consumer protection, eliminating ObamaCare: I struggle to think of any of Trump’s policies that put him outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.
(Your picture was not posted)
