Ten years ago this Monday, on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump entered American politics by descending on a golden escalator into the lobby of the monument to his greed and bad taste that he build on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
Because so few New Yorkers wanted to have anything to do with a man who had spent his career establishing himself as the city’s most embarrassing resident, the crowd that cheered on the spectacle had to be augmented with paid actors portraying people who actually liked Trump.
In a similar role was his vapid wife Melania, a slender study in stylish odiousness, who made her fortune wanly pretending she wouldn’t rather be anywhere else with anyone else. (Or, as Led Zeppelin put it, “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.”)
Although that afternoon, Trump stopped temporarily to make the announcement he was running for president, he has ever since dragged the country down with him on a never-ending escalator ride to depths of a national hell unlike any we have experienced before.
And we are still descending with no end in sight.
Trump’s career until that point and his remarks that day, provided all the evidence we needed of his unfitness for the presidency. He was a bully, a thug, a conman who failed in business after business but always seemed to do better for himself than did his partners or employees. He was a racist, a misogynist, and one of America’s most high-profile cretins. He seemed to be living proof that it was possible to get rich—or at least stay rich—in America by combining ignorance, greed, vulgarity and an insatiably appetite to turn the spotlight on himself.
Living in New York City at the time and having watched from afar his career such as it was, my first reaction was that no one could take him seriously as a presidential candidate and my second was that if enough people did we would be in deep, deep trouble.
When he ultimately became the nominee of the Republican Party, I broke tradition at the magazine I was editing at the time, Foreign Policy, and we published an editorial which said that given the possibility of his election that he was the greatest threat America faced at that moment.
We were right. But we understated the risks.
Trump’s first term in office saw him impeached twice and only through the applied cynical and deeply irresponsible partisanship of the Republican Party avoid being removed from office. He coddled our enemies, insulted our allies, grew our national debt and mismanaged the national health crisis we faced during the COVID pandemic in ways that experts conclude may have been responsible for the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Then, in the wake of an election defeat about which he lied, he incited an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was the most heinous act of betrayal by a U.S. public official since former Secretary of War, Senator Jefferson Davis, assumed the presidency of the Confederacy in 1861—although let it be said in Davis’ defense that his betrayal was probably less cynical and more grounded in principle, albeit corrupt ones, than was Trump’s which was purely selfish.
Trump was subsequently accused of multiple crimes that occurred prior to and during his time in office, lost multiple decisions and was ultimately convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud. His legal fate would have been worse had he not been saved by the most corrupt Supreme Court in U.S. history which rendered a series of decisions that derailed several prosecutions against him.
Subsequently, that court proffered powers onto him that, should he be reelected, would essentially place him above the law.
When he narrowly won reelection he seized the license he had been given and launched an assault on our institutions, values and laws unlike any we have seen in our history. He has in just months, gutted critical government institutions, participated in the most egregious open corruption America has ever seen, serially violated the law, diminished our international standing, put the people of the United States at greater risk of terrorist attack, pandemic, and natural disaster while also weakening virtually every national security institution upon which this country has depended since the end of the Second World War.
And he is just getting started. The descent is growing steeper and more rapid daily.
This past week, has in many ways been another landmark in Trump’s effort to drag the country down to his level, remake it in his own twisted image.
The menace posed by Trump and his MAGA supporters has become clearer than ever, seemingly growing not just with each passing day but with each passing hour. Danger is in the air as never before. The president and his supporters have begun to embrace violence in ways previously unimaginable in U.S. history.
He sent the military into Los Angeles. He did it without regard for the Constitution or the law. He claimed he did it in response to an invasion and insurrection. But there were no hints of either. Those were just words being used so he could claim emergency powers that would let him impose his will on the American people at the end of the barrel of a gun. The man who incited a melee that resulted in widespread deaths and injury on January 6, was ratcheting up the role violence would play in his plans.
He stood before troops at Fort Bragg and used them as political props, again seeking to associate the power of the military with his own plans to remake America into an authoritarian state. He screened out those who might not support him. He egged on the crowd to applaud his divisive rhetoric. He sold his merch. He debased the Army even as he ostensibly was honoring it. Again, he was embracing force, suggesting that violence was one of the options he and his supporters had to advance their goals.
His Department of Homeland Security and its ICE shock troops had been the original perpetrators of the disruptions in Los Angeles. Their mastermind, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, threatened those who did not bend to Trump’s will. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem did the same and then stood by as a serving United States senator, after identifying himself publicly, was manhandled, thrown to the floor and handcuffed for having the temerity to ask her a question at a press conference.
Meanwhile, the heavy-handed muscle of the Trump anti-immigrant, anti-due process gang (the most dangerous gang in America by far, it makes MS-13 look like the Daughters of the American Revolution in terms of the relative threats they pose), Tom Homan, announced plans to expand their reign of terror to new cities nationwide, all communities that voted Democratic.
The response of the MAGA Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to the mistreatment of Padilla was to call for Padilla’s censure. Noem’s message in Los Angeles was even more disturbing, she said she and the military were in that city and California to “liberate” them from their duly elected leaders.
Also this week, following the brutalization of Padilla and presidential threats against the Governor of California, a member of Congress was indicted for fulfilling her responsibilities and investigated an ICE detention facility in New Jersey. It was only the latest in a series of overt threats and the on-going harassment of opposition political leaders. Political violence directed against Democratic office holders took place in Minnesota and the White House response was muted even as MAGA mouthpieces on social media sought to blame the attacks on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz because a suspect in the case was once appointed to a job by him.
Then came the military parade on the president’s birthday to honor not the army, but him. In a grim irony, troops in Revolutionary War uniforms were among those who marched by in formation to honor a would-be king, a man who sought to undo everything that the American military—the ones he called “suckers” and “losers”—had fought, sacrificed and died for.
That’s just this week. But it was a week in which some of the most ominous foreshadowings of Trump’s escalator ride into infamy became our dark reality. It has been a frightful, frightening downward journey. But there have also been hopeful signs.
On Saturday a million people turned out in 2000 cities across America to assert again that this is no country for kings. And that in turn may remind us as we consider the direction which wish to go after ten years of Trump on our national political stage of another lyric from Stairway to Heaven.
“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.”
The post Opinion: Trump Has Us On His Golden Escalator to Hell—But There is a Way Off appeared first on The Daily Beast.
