Baited
BAITED
By Deborah Long
We are baited daily with a series of seemingly limitless diversions, gimmicks intended to obfuscate the meaning of the Trump Administration. It confounds our ability to take a 30,000 ft. view of this historic Republican shift away from the values that defined America at its founding, and toward a species of politics that we, as a nation, have only fought against in the past. Today’s red herring led to endless discussion concerning the comically corrupt, Scott Pruitt – a man so hopelessly venal that he symbolically stands astride Donald Trump’s cabinet as The Colossus of Kakistocracy.
Today, Trump’s mastery of the news cycle entertained his base by dangling Pruitt over the precipice like The Fool in the court of Henry II. There's nothing like a good hanging to please the masses. And predictably, incisive punditry and journalism spanned the gamut of analysis from A to B: why was Pruitt fired? – did he lose favor with Trump? - was it because of the polling numbers? Prattling fatuity.
Surely at this point, we would be tired of winning if the contest was to define and give examples of what the opposite of good government looks like. I wish I could say that this reminds me of 1968. But it doesn’t. In fact, I wonder if we can still summon up the courage to define what good government actually is.
We need to understand Trump's manifesto far better than we do. And we need to recognize that the GOP now exists to check off its own plutocratic grocery list: a dangerously divided society, both socially and economically, that cleaves to the Hobbesian description of human nature, unbounded by the constraints of coherent government. A country where lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" unless you're a rich white male. These ideas are the way plutocrats plunder third world countries.
It is concerning that during the daily drivel of Sarah Sanders’s lying, Michael Cohen’s farcical efforts to rehabilitate his image as that of a family man, and Paul Manafort’s efforts to just throw the hook – nobody seems particularly interested in asking, “What’s up with this Putin summit?” Is this meeting the thread that leads us out of the reality TV labyrinth we’ve been lost in for over two years? A con like no other - and with no note takers allowed? Could this purported summit really represent the beginning of the second act of Trump’s meta-narrative that’s been hiding in plain sight since before the inauguration? Could a story of the Trump Administration even be written without this major overarching theme of treason?
What is Donald Trump delivering to Vladimir Putin next week that might be worth risking possible imprisonment? What, in fact, does it cost to get the help of the Russian government in swinging a US presidential election? What percent of Rosneft makes taking these risks worth it? And since we’re asking, what was the GOP attempt at the lessening of sanctions against Russia in payment for? What is our virtual withdrawal from Syria in payment for? And a curious nation needs to ask, what could the US withdrawal from NATO buy with Mr. Putin?
These questions are the urgent ones we need to be asking. I fear that in this byzantine 2 years of normalizing hate, greed, and almost comic levels of corruption…. we simply fall into line and hallucinate that the Republican Party is legitimate, that it has ideas that are worthy of being heard, that our government isn’t being sold to the highest bidder, …that what is hiding in plain sight could not possibly be happening.
