The inauguration of us

Trump isn't who we are, we used to tell ourselves. But he is. Can we change?

It has always been tempting to think of Donald Trump as an infection. A rare bacterial strain that emerged out of nowhere (or Queens) and began to sicken the American body politic. To turn us meaner and nastier, to corrupt our institutions, to rig our systems, to divide us, to inflame our hatreds, to delude us, to engross us with lies, to make enemies of friends, to neglect, to grift, to leech a nation for profit.

The alien-invader thesis could be soothing when so little else was. He was a gift from Russia, a Manchurian candidate, a plant, a puppet dangled by shadowy possessors of kompromat. Or: He was not a real Republican. He was a thrice-married, pro-choice New York Democrat who had infected the Republican Party and colonized it. “This is not who we are,” you used to hear. People really seemed to believe that for a while.

If you subscribed to the bacterial delusion, you were constantly on the hunt for antibiotics. Maybe Bob Mueller was it. Maybe Merrick Garland was it. Maybe Jack Smith was it. Maybe this trial and this judge; maybe that one. Maybe this report. Yes, yes, this — this would be the end of him.

But everything kept not being the end of him. Every antibiotic took its best shot. Nothing did it. Not the courts, not the Department of Justice, not special reports, not impeachment trials. Trump was the most resistant strain in history.

The truth that was harder to accept was staring at us all along: This man was not alien to us, a foreign invader. He was us, or at least a part of us. This wasn’t a bacterial infection. It was an autoimmune condition, parts of who we are flaring heatedly against other parts of who we are; a vicious battle within our own hearts; not a sectional conflict but an intracellular fight.

Today, as the second inauguration of Donald Trump takes place, it is a chance to cast off the alien-invader delusion once and for all, and to recognize Trump and Trumpism for what they are: an outgrowth of our own innermost tendencies. Doing so might finally free us to face certain parts of the American being and transform them.

After all, was it really so hard to explain why this peddler of outrage rose in a country where outrage had become how you make ideas move, how you sell things, how you get attention, how you make money, how you make the algorithm choose you?

Is this vulgar peddler of coins and sneakers and steaks and educations and Bibles so, yes, outrageous to us that we cannot see that this, too, is us — a country of get-rich-quick schemes and big-smiling salesmen, of trusted media voices who sell gold and supplements on the side, a country where now you must have a personal brand to be a painter, a writer, even a professor or a schoolteacher crowdfunding for pencils, where religious leaders are multimillionaires, where former presidents build corporate empires, where you cannot get news of public affairs without being sold to?

Is Trump’s famously short attention span all that alien to our scrolling, swiping ones?

Is his success as a self-styled billionaire savior, uniquely capable of fixing it, because he milked the system he now heads, because he broke the rules he now proposes to reform — is this profoundly American figure not an emanation of our own strange relationship with the rich superhero? A relationship you don’t find in many other places. A tendency to put these people on magazine covers, to treat them as social visionaries, to take their money for good causes and sell them reputational detergent, to think that they are in possession of special brains that know how to run society?

Is this man who has been so deeply moulded by the activity of Not Reading all that alien from a country that reads less and less?

Is the allure of the 24/7 show this once-banished, now-returned, riveting felon puts on so inexplicable in a country whose preferred forms of entertainment are conflict-saturated fictions called “reality TV” and crime procedurals and superhero reboots?

Is Trump’s stoking of tribalism unconnected to the filter bubbles and civic fatalism and contempt we let creep into our hearts?

Is his insecure masculinity not the insecure masculinity that has been allowed to fester in millions of Americans? Left to fester in part because of a belief that to help those who once enjoyed certain privileges is to compound the old oppressions.

Is Trump’s certitude not the certitude we have let attack our own curiosity? Is his knowing before thinking not familiar? Is his being a person only of answers, never of questions — do you not recognize this at all?

Is his consequentialist view of truth — that the only truths worth hearing are those that benefit him — not also ours? Whether about an aging president or a war in Gaza, how interested, how open, are we to truths unhelpful to our causes and our teams?

I would never in a million years argue that today, at high noon, we are getting what we deserve. No one deserves all that may be coming. But America is getting a playback of what we have allowed ourselves to become.

I don’t write all this to depress you. On the contrary. The alien-invader thesis, the bacteria delusion, the antibiotic dream — these were attempts at comfort that ended up being depressants. Because we kept thinking this not-us force could be expelled and then we would snap back to being ourselves. Every time we didn’t snap back, it was gutting. Lucy and the football. No one coming to save us. We are on our own.

I favor the autoimmune idea partly because I think it’s true, and partly because it gives us something to work toward. If you liberate yourself from the story that Trump is so ornately, gildedly singular, you open doors to what can actually be done.

To understand him in autoimmune terms is to understand that parts of us, now as before, are up against other parts of us. This is the real contest. The electoral contest is downstream from the intracellular. You are not entitled to leaders better than you.

What is also true, and we forget, is that these deep habits in us that appear, too, in Trump are up against other deep tendencies.

We are the country of four centuries of white domination and slavery morphing into segregation morphing into mass incarceration, but we are also the country of the civil rights movement that inspired the world and the country with perhaps the world’s most generous view of the possibility of becoming American, becoming one of us. We are a country of deep racism, and we are a country of a kind rare in the world — a country made of all the other countries, bonded by creed, not blood and soil.

Today, after all, is both Donald Trump’s re-inauguration day and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday. We are both.

We are the country of book bans, and we are the country that has published many of the books that have driven much of the world’s conversation for many decades.

We are a country in the grips of a backlash, and we are a country that has in recent decades changed more in the status of millions of people who once lived on the margins of society than our forebears in many previous centuries combined.

So, yes, today, painfully, we are witnessing the inauguration of us. It is not the triumph of some Americans over other Americans so much as the triumph of the small-hearted tendency in American life over the generous one, the cruel impulse over the humane one, the vengeful drive over the magnanimous one, the safety of the smaller “we” over the dream of the bigger one.

And, again and again in history, the generous tendency, the humane impulse, the magnanimous drive, the bigger “we” has ailed and then returned stronger than ever.

Will it again? I trust in my bones it will. But its revival will not be a function of the clock. Time may heal wounds, but it doesn’t on its own resolve the battle for your soul.

What begins today isn’t who we are, and it is. What should give us some hope is that who we are is still a matter of our choosing.

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Photo: Getty/Saul Loeb