American Nero

If the Shoe Fits

Though dictator Ferdinand Marcos was deposed in the Philippines back in 1986, to this day many foreigners know him best for the 3,000 pairs of shoes accumulated by his insatiable clotheshorse of a wife, Imelda. Her collection was so bizarre, her greed so brazen, that it still astounds.

Imelda Marcos’s footwear symbolized so much about a duo that stole $10 billion from their country’s coffers: their corruption, arrogance, human rights abuses and indifference to the poverty and suffering of their fellow Filipinos. To top it all off, many of those ripped off by the rapacious couple remain loyal to their memory and family to this day.

Higher and Higher

Donald Trump also astounds, to put the point politely, and also retains support from folks he’s cheated. But the Marcoses can’t compare with him in one cruel, crucial way.

It’s true that their plunder dwarfs that of our Grifter-in-Chief as he pulls off one last scam, fleecing his supporters of $170 million in donations. The funds will supposedly help him fight to overturn a supposedly stolen election. In fact, they’ll mostly line his pockets.

And of course, his refusal to accept defeat is doing lasting harm to our democracy.

But in terms of immediate impact, he’s committing a far larger transgression before our very eyes, one which leaves even the Marcoses in the dust: While he lies and cries about alleged electoral fraud, he does nothing about a pandemic that just set a record high for daily deaths and hospitalizations here, with worse yet to come. At this rate, Covid could easily claim more than 100,000 additional lives before he leaves office.

Lower and Lower

Vaccines are on the way, thanks in part to Project Warp Speed. But in the meantime, our hospitals and health workers are stretched beyond their limits.  

And Trump? He plays golf. He tweets. He rants. He raves. He watches TV. He spouts “The most petulant 46 minutes in American history.”

But he does nothing to lead, to educate, to inspire, to mobilize, to organize, to prepare, to coordinate or to fund vital mitigating measures even as we set records for Covid fatalities. And he blocks a smooth transition that could help Joe Biden’s team hit the ground running in battling the virus.

He once again shows that there’s indeed no low to which he won’t go.

So much has already been written about all the ills that Trump has normalized, all the norms he’s shattered, all the institutions he’s undermined. But his current focus on golf and grift while so many perish rivals the worst misdeeds of his reign.

There’s understandably substantial media coverage about what Trump is doing to try to undo the election. Yet we see precious little about what he isn’t doing as a once-in-a-century crisis calls for him to do his job.

Oh, there are occasional articles, such as this piece likening his inaction on the pandemic to negligent homicide. We also learn of travesties such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mimicking his boss by holding potential superspreader gatherings.

But by and large, we endure Trump’s dereliction of duty without comment. I guess we suspect that any action he’d take could do more harm than good. Or we prefer to contemplate other problems. Or we want to focus on more positive developments. Or we’re just burned out on his depravity.

When the final list of this sociopath’s sins is compiled, the failure that should be near the top is that he focused solely on one last scam when more and more people were dying each day.

Establishing the Truth, and a Final Truth

In a more constructive vein, I wonder whether there needs to be some formal accounting of the damage this deranged man did to this nation and beyond our borders.

After apartheid rule gave way to democracy in South Africa in the early 1990s, an official Commission of Truth and Reconciliation documented the human rights violations and other abuses that had taken place under the racist regime. It’s a model that’s been used in many places. Perhaps we need a variation on that theme.

A formal accounting here might focus more on truth than reconciliation, given Trump’s rabid base. But it could at least complement and validate the array of critical articles and books we’ll see in the years to come.

Even as I write this, though, I confess to ambivalence about any initiative that would help keep Trump in the public eye. I want a full-fledged record of what he’s wrought. But might a better approach be to deny him attention that would help him fan his hateful flames?

Regardless, this reality remains: Right here, right now, our very own Nero fiddles while Americans die.