By Aerosol

Ponder for a moment the strange affair of Tulsi Gabbard and what it says about Trump. That a sickness infects those Trump gathers round him is obvious – the excesses, errors and horrors that daily emanate from Trump’s White House is proof enough – but the catastrophic mistake of the Iran attack suggests something even worse. For on Twitter/X this week Tulsi Gabbard has posted a defence of Trump’s warmaking, citing the lie that he was ‘overwhelmingly elected’ by the American people (47% of votes cast is not ‘overwhelming’) and that it is up to him to decide what will ‘protect’ America (America and the world need protection from Trump, not the other way round). Up to him? No; up to the three branches and ultimately the people.

This is the same Tulsi Gabbard , former Democrat representative, who in 2018 was co-sponsor of the No More Presidential Wars Act seeking to ensure that there must be ‘congressional authorisation’ for military action, who described Trump’s authorisation of the assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 as ‘illegal and unconstitutional’, and who said that going to war against Iran would be ‘so costly and devastating’ that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would ‘look like a picnic’ in comparison. Right on all counts.

Yet here she is defending the indefensible ninety degrees opposite to what she formerly said and did. What has broken her neck and twisted her head round so that she looks in the same direction as her heels?

And what of the vaunted Susie Wiles, said to be a cool head who has a restraining influence on Trump? It might be that her presence as his White House Chief of Staff indeed restrains him somewhat, from e.g. nuking Tehran (but don’t hold your breath), so God knows what he might otherwise be doing. But in fact it doesn’t look like it; after all, one insistently sensible voice in the Oval Office might have prevented the dreadful mistake of the Iran attack, which is dragging the world into a long-term costly mire at best, and at worst into full-scale cataclysm. No doubt it is hard work restraining an uninformed, thoughtless, immature, prejudiced, gimme-now manbaby, the more so that almost all the people he has grouped round him are cut from the same cloth. But just a couple of brain cells, and enough will-power to keep breathing in and out, might have counselled against throwing a match into a tank of gasoline. Literally, as it happens.

On the other hand, a survey of the Wiles record suggests something different. Her journey from bankruptcy to tobacco industry lobbyist to successfully managing a GOP candidate’s campaign by distancing the candidate from Trump, add up to something less than the image – something more opportunistic and unprincipled, rather as Tulsi Gabbard has turned out to be, and as J. D. Vance so manifestly is – he who once called Trump ‘Hitler’ and aspersed him roundly, but now his (much marginalised and unhappy) VP, and publicly defending a war he is said privately to disagree with.

It is as if the people who get within inhaling distance of Trump’s miasma catch an infection from the diseased, rotting entity that he is – as if his malignancy is carried on an aerosol of his exhalations and efflations – as if the corruption of his presence spreads like vines and roots into the pores, ears, eye-sockets of those in his ambit, crawling over their brains and zombifying them. For how can anyone with an ounce of self-respect be so craven, so dishonest, so lacking in integrity, so shameless, so hypocritical, as the Gabbards and Vances in their utter reversals, submitting to service under this monstrous individual? It makes one gasp to think of it.

Trump has ended the world as we knew it, and might be ending the world tout court, so it could be fruitless to point out that the normalisations he has introduced and achieved – of blatant and persistent public lying, abuse of opponents and enemies, conducting foreign policy by assassination (aka murder), kidnapping, financial extortion, bullying and threats, unprovoked bombings – are the diametric opposite of what the better part of humankind has been hoping to achieve, given that discreet and more muted versions of these nostrums have too long been par for the course – yet, in their discretion and mutedness, thereby themselves acknowledging their moral undesirability. Trump just brutishly does them. Doubtless his epigones think he is accordingly more ‘honest’ about realpolitik than others have been. But this ‘honesty’ is an embrace of the idea that the world cannot be better, is a nasty Hobbesian wilderness where the only recourse is to be nastier than others, a perpetual fist-fight in which only Might matters because only might has the privilege of being right.

And this is to fail to recognise the fact, for fact it is, that there has been progress, slow and halting albeit, towards better things and better ways. This ahistorical Trumpian ignorance and crashing-about is what is tearing down the long, long endeavours to achieve them. It is vandalism. It stinks. And all those who are enabling it around Trump stink as retchingly as Trump himself.

Although it generally seems that Trump’s own odour prevents him from smelling the coffee, a waft of its aroma might be coming his way: having destabilised alliances, abused allies, torn holes in the fabric of relationships that has kept the world from all-out disaster until he came along, he is finding that former friends are more former than friends now, thanks to his own crassness. Like the toddler whose invitation to play football with him is rejected by those he has bullied, he says that he doesn’t want to play with them anyway and doesn’t need them (‘so there!’) – which is proving to be a much harsher lesson to him than them. Alas, as the US situation in the Gulf grows more desperate, and the world economy teeters on energy cost hikes caused by this stupid act, Trump might do something even more wreckless than he has already done: that ‘nuke Tehran’ option might not be off the table for him. Little seems to be off the table for him.

If there is any life after Trump, the US – to repeat yet again – has to reform its institutions to ensure that the Frederick Douglass principle applies: ‘We should have our government so formed that even in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe’.

By the way, I am fully conscious of being as abusive and intemperate towards Trump and his gang as they are towards their perceived opponents and enemies. It would be pleasing, and (if you’ll allow me to say so) somewhat more in character, to employ a more detached and moderate tone, a more constructive attitude, and a less florid descriptive vocabulary. But on analogy with the observation that ‘It is an excellent thing to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out’, there really are red lines that, once crossed, do not admit of courtesies. Trump and the rest of his brass-necked band have crossed them long ago, and do not deserve respectful treatment – not one bit: the very opposite. They deserve to get as good as they give. Aristotle said that it is justified ‘to be angry with the right person, in the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose’; these intemperances are Aristotelian, and I don’t apologise for them. Unlike Trumpians, most of us are able to detach the sympathy we feel for anyone undergoing treatment for an illness, as Susie Wiles is currently doing, from the temptation to excuse that person’s turpitudes and failures in office not connected with that illness. Accordingly I sincerely hope she gets better – both physically and in her political conscience.