Ever since America, or at least as many Americans as it takes to determine the fate of the world under our flawless electoral system, ate the big one and decided that Queens-based self-publicist/casino swindler Donald Trump should be President, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about how he’s the worst person ever to occupy the White House. This is nonsense, of course; while there’s still plenty of time for Trump and his gaggle of half-witted frauds to plunge the world into ecological holocaust, many respected residents of the Oval Office have engaged in genocidal warfare, owned human beings that they used for unpaid labor, and stripped other nations of their wealth and population in pursuit of some economic self-enrichment or other. Trump isn’t even particularly awful by the standards of post-war Republican presidents.
What spurs most of this tortured breast-beating is Trump’s blatant unfitness for any kind of public role involving responsibility, decorum, or civility, not his lack of basic human decency. He is a crass, bumbling moron who does not care to play the game of pretending that he has any respect for the history or the politesse of his position; he also does not bother to lie in a convincing fashion, instead telling obvious falsehoods to a press corps that is used to being fed false information in a more respectable fashion. But while he very well might be the stupidest person to ever serve as President, and while he is definitely the person who cares least about acting like we think a President is supposed to act, even here he is not without precedent. He was very much set up for his role by one of the most beloved leaders in American history: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Like Trump, Reagan was a dim-witted oaf who coasted to fame on the strength of his populist charisma, and who was largely known to the American public by virtue of his work in the entertainment industry. He, too, was a man of simple wisdom who had no real ideology — they both switched parties as they saw fit and were never part of any political establishment — and his devotees believed in him not because they believed a single thing he said, but because he said them in a way that they found sincere and convincing. They were both far past their prime (Trump surpasses Reagan as the oldest president in history) and they both surrounded themselves not with party operators, but with old cronies, crooks, opportunists, and hustlers who saw government as a means to fatten their wallets off the public tit. They both saw themselves forced to shed cabinet member after cabinet member who overstepped the levels of graft considered acceptable by the general public, and they both had a relationship to actuality that could be called distant at best and antagonistic at worst. My point is: whatever the sputtering outraged pundits tell you, we’ve been here before.
For example.
- Reagan’s campaign conspired, during the 1980 presidential debate, to steal then-President Jimmy Carter’s briefing book so they’d know ahead of time what tactics he planned on using. (Reagan’s chief henchman in this endeavor was bow-tied nerd George Will.) When Reagan met with Carter to plan his transition to the White House, he refused to ask any questions or take any notes, and compounded his previous chicanery by just flat-out asking Carter to turn over his presentation.
- Reagan claimed, repeatedly, throughout his presidency that there is no word in the Russian language for the word ‘freedom’.
- Practically his first act in office was to negotiate the release of American hostages held for over a year in Iran. While he presented this as the result of his tough-on-terrorism stance, in fact, it was due to negotiations his party had secretly made with those terrorists in an attempt to prevent Carter’s re-election. Later, he would take the proceeds of his dealings with terrorists and funnel them to other terrorists, resulting in the worst scandal of his administration; he strenuously denied — or, to put it another way, lied about — this throughout his presidency.
- Another of Reagan’s favorite bits, especially during the frequent periods of high unemployment during his years in office, was to hold press conferences in which he would publicly question how people could be out of work when there were so many want ads in the paper. Sometimes he would amplify this bit by holding up an actual newspaper.
- Reagan oversaw SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as the “Star Wars” program because it was entirely fictional. This defense technology, which cost almost $200 billion, was meant to be a system of orbiting satellites that would use lasers to shoot Soviet missiles out of the sky before they could detonate over American soil. If you’re wondering why we are not being protected by this wonderful system even today, it’s because it doesn’t work, it never worked, and his administration knew it wouldn’t work, but they spent nearly half a trillion dollars in 2018 dollars on it anyway as a payoff to their friends in the defense industry.
- Speaking of nuclear weapons, at a time when many Americans were terrified of the real possibility of an atomic holocaust (in no small part due to the President’s belligerent attitude towards the Soviets), Reagan loved to make hilarious jokes about it in public, like one in 1984 when he told the gathered press corps that he had “outlawed Russia” and would “begin bombing in five minutes”. (Another favorite Reagan joke was about killing Muammar Gaddafi by giving him AIDS, because he was a homo. Get it?) In addition to this rib-tickler about global genocide, he insisted later in his presidency that nuclear missiles launched from submarines could be recalled — that is, stopped in mid-air and reeled back into their ballistic tubes like watching a movie in reverse — if they were triggered by accident.
- Reagan despised the press and antagonized them at every opportunity. (When he told his boffo bombing-Russia joke, he blamed the trouble it got him in on the press for reporting it and not himself for saying it.) The modern gutlessness of the press corps can be directly traced to his administration’s habit of denying White House access to any reporter who didn’t ask the President softball questions. At one point, early in his first term, his contempt for the press reached its zenith: he chose who would get to ask him questions by having pick jellybeans out of a jar.
Truly a golden age of respect for the dignity of office. Something to remember, anyway.
FUCK RONALD REAGAN
“Ronald Reagan represents all of the worst elements of the American political experience of the last 50 years. All of them. He was, and always will be, nothing but a steaming hot pile of filthy hyena puke.
Intellectually, Reagan gave chimpy a run for his money. He was vacuous. He was shallow. He was incurious. He was a puppet and a door stop for a group of sick ideologues who really ran the country. He was a shitty actor and foolish tool.
Ideologically, he was a hater and an imperialist and far-right loony-tune. He hated the poor. He hated gays. He hated leftists. He hated communists – and he was pretty sure you were one if you disagreed with him. He hated and he hated and he hated. Just ask his own kids. He hated them and himself and his ex-wife. Ronald Reagan was a twisted unrepentant closed-minded shit-bag hate monger. And that’s just for starters.
The foreign policy of Ronald Reagan did more to impoverish and kill the poor and helpless humans of the world than any world leader before or since – with the possible exception of our current chimpking. Reagan just didn’t give a shit. He was going to defeat communism (which was already falling of it’s own weight) and he didn’t care how many children were burned alive or how many people starved to death on the way. Let em die. Reagan was a fucking asshole.
On Reagan’s watch the military budget of the U.S. grew to the proportions of a heaping pile of 10,000 week-old dead and bloated Blue Whales. And it stunk just as bad. The practice of rewarding incompetent cronies with gigantic useless contracts for unneeded military hardware was elevated to art form under Reagan. Reagan’s legendary megalomania, hubris and abject ignorance led him to believe the tales of any crackpot who managed to slither past the goons who comprised his inner circle. Star-wars missiles, atomic shields, space-age death rays. You name it – that dumb piece of shit would fall for it – and blow billions of your tax dollars on it.
And on the domestic front – holy shit the domestic front. Ronald Reagan was a force for the rampaging evil of anti-human destructiveness. He never met a social program he didn’t scorn. He never met an American in need he didn’t shit directly upon. His response to the AIDS epidemic is one of the most sickening cold-blooded expressions of pure murderous political evil in the history of the earth. Genghis Khan could only dream of such depravity and indifference to human suffering. There is so much more, but, hell, if you don’t already know about this shit, then go read a fucking book or two.
Then there was Iran-Contra – the infamous orgy of unfettered criminality at the heart of the Reagan legacy. Again, look it up. Rogues, liars, crooks, murderers and ignorant heartless scum surrounded Reagan at all times. Alli Babba would’ve been shamed. But Ronald Reagan was shameless.
Oh, did I mention The War on Drugs and it’s ballooning of the prison/criminal industrial complex and the rise of brainless goon-like authoritarianism? Or the destruction of the modern labor movement including the cowardly firing of the Air Traffic Controllers? Or the beginnings of the current trend of packing the Judiciary with corrupt freakish pseudo-fascist stoolies? Or the repugnant rapes of Lebanon and Grenada? Or the dim-witted goofball junk science that came to known as “Reaganomics?” Or grant rigging at the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Or James Watt and the whole-hearted attempt to destroy the earth and all it’s inhabitants at the expense of greed mongers and corporate whores? Or the largest white collar theft in the history of planet Earth – the Savings and Loan Bailout? And on and on and on and on.
I really don’t have time for this shit. So let me conclude,
Ronald Reagan will forever be remembered as one of the most idiotic, vile, worthless leaders of any any nation in any era. He presently occupies a special place in Hell beside Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. And I promise you, they all think he’s an idiot too. Fuck Ronald Reagan. And then fuck him again.”
(Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan is a short work by dystopian English author J.G. Ballard, first published as a pamphlet by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton. It was later collected in The Atrocity Exhibition.)
Both suffered from dementia, but Reagan took direction well from the more conventional R handlers who eventually got him under control. The only obviously, literally demented thing he did was the confident statement very early on that of course you could recall ICBMs after they were launched. They must have had a talk with him after that, and did a better job of protecting him from making off-the-cuff statements, because there were no repeat episodes, well, at least none the press reported.
Trump does not take direction well at all. The saving grace towards pretending he was normal during the first two years was that he is also not at all interested in public policy or politics. He was content to sit in his little corner and tell himself and the world he was making important presidential decisions, leaving the minimal decisions his party did make to achieve its limited goals to the conventional politicians in the R Congressional leadership. Those people just had to agree with him about the stability of his genius and he would let them do as much or as little as they wanted. Now that he has to deal with House Ds who won’t play along with the fantasy, he has had to step up to making real decisions on his own. Legislative chicken is as complex a game as he can understand at this point, so chicken it shall be.
The person that dementia creates is built on the foundation of the patient’s whole life up to that point. Reagan was apparently a reasonably polite and deferential person, basically passive in his approach to life, and he had decades of experience as an actor. He fell easily into taking direction well and reading his lines as written by his non-demented handlers. Trump, in contrast, has apparently been a professional asshole his entire life, someone who needs to be large and in charge. He does not take direction well. He has to win, he has to dominate, and since the only game he’s still capable of understanding is chicken, he will have to win at that game, force the Ds to submit, so that he can humiliate and dominate.
And if he wins because the Ds cave on Wall, he will have to go back to this game again and again. It doesn’t end until and unless the conventional politicians remove him from office. He’s not going to make it to 2020 on the current trajectory.