Shame on Obama

Donald Trump is a vile excrescence

Before retiring last evening (I live in the UK, which is at least five hours ahead of the USA), I saw something even more upsetting than the news that the Pacific Palisades-adjacent house, the 1963 purchase of which was parents’ proudest achievement, was about to go up in flames. It was a photograph of Barack Obama chuckling delightedly at something his successor as president had said to him at President Carter’s funeral.

The photo was upsetting itself in its own right. On the night Barack Obama was first elected to the presidency, in 2008, I literally danced in the street (there were few cars on Wolcott Avenue in Beacon, New York, at that moment). And here he was seeming to revel in the company of a fascist rapist. But it was the caption someone had superimposed that upset me most, because it seemed a reasonable question. “If you think there’s much difference between them, you’re a fool”.

For years, Obama had taken the high road as Trump, in his imbecilic way, denigrated him about everything under the sun. Then, during the 2016 election, he’d begun hitting back. ““He’s still worried about his inauguration crowd being smaller than mine,” he said a few months into the horror of the first Trump presidency. “Does he have nothing better to worry about? Did no one come to his birthday party as a kid?”

Four years later, he asserted — quite accurately, I thought — that Trump hadn’t grown into the job of president because he didn’t have the brain power to see it as distinct from a TV “reality” show. He want on to obsesrve that some of the consequences of Trump’s presidency, during which Trump had seemed more intent on subverting everything Obama had accomplished as president, were “170,000 Americans killed by the coronavirus pandemic, millions of jobs lost while the rich get richer, our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before”.

And here he is at the Jimmy Carter funeral grinning with apparent delight at something Trump said. Are we to believe that Trump’s sense of humor, the earlier highest attainment of which was a succession of derogatory, infantile nicknames for political and other opponents, had suddenly sharpened? Or was the guy I’d so admired years before doing what Hilary Clinton, with the war criminal Henry Kissinger, and Michelle Obama, with the war criminal George W. Bush, had done before him — kissing up to a monster to demonstrate…what? Their generosity of spirit? Their award-worthy good sportsmanship?

My song In This Moment of Monsters.

Donald Trump is a horror story, a fecal stain on American history, a vile excrescence. He should be a pariah, as GWB and Dick Cheney should be, as Kissinger should have been. When the Mitch McConnell lookalike husband of Nebraska senator Deb Fischer declined to shake hands with Kamala Harris at the swearing-in of the new Congress last week, it was petty and disgraceful, because, if you don’t count her failure to do much more to end the horror in Gaza, Harris’s major crimes consisted of holding political views (to whatever extent she may be perceived as doing so) presumably anathema to Mr. Fischer’s. The crimes of Trump, that prolific terrifier of the vulnerable, that tireless enabler of xenophobe, include rape and treason.

For Obama, or anyone else at the funeral, to decline to shake Trump’s hand would have been noble and brave. Trump should be given the cold shoulder, spat on rather than schmoozed. At the very least, he should be ignored.

As I’ve been shouting into the wind for a couple of weeks now [please see below], what exactly is the point of playing by rules another openly disdains, or even mocks? Where was Donald Trump the day Joe Biden was inaugurated?

An even more ghastly interpretation of Obama’s behavior now occurs to me. What if he, possibly fearing legal persecution from Trump’s Department of Injustice, is trying to mollify the vile excrescence by feigning amusement at his jokes? What if, in other words, his courage and integrity are those of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos?

Shame on you, Obama.