Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  The pattern of leaks in October is clear.310 Putin does not simply imagine Trump in the White House—he is trying to put him there. Never before has a foreign leader invaded our electoral process for his own ends. Only Vladimir Putin, and only to help Donald Trump.

  It is easy to imagine why—it is easy to manipulate an ignorant narcissist. So beguiled is Trump by Putin that he excuses Russia’s involvement in war crimes that have horrified the world. Only Trump could claim that the mass slaughter by Russia and the Assad regime of the Syrian opposition—as well as of relief workers and innocent men, women, and children—is, contrary to fact, directed against ISIS.

  But then Trump comprehends nothing about ISIS, Iraq, Syria, the Middle East, or any of the geopolitical dangers a president must navigate. Of these, the most dangerous of all is the threat of nuclear war.

  So imagine that only the judgment and stability of President Trump stands between us and a nuclear holocaust.

  That sentence is not framed to frighten—it states what is true for every American president. Under the Constitution, the president is the commander-in-chief of our military. His orders are final and, in our time, presidents have used this power to launch strikes and start wars. There is nothing in the nuclear chain of command that would stay a presidential order to use nuclear weapons. We depend on a president’s wisdom and restraint, for that is all we have.

  In this arena, as in so many others, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not the same. Far from making no difference, which one we choose to be president will make every difference.

  Donald Trump is unstable, unbalanced, and devoid of prudence, empathy, or concern for anything but his needs of the moment. He lacks the basic attributes of a normal human being—let alone a president.

  Hillary Clinton has those attributes, and many others. To compare her with Donald Trump is not simply false equivalency—it is willful blindness. But let us assume for the moment that Hillary Clinton is not the flawed but able leader reason shows her to be, but the venal caricature painted by her most hysterical political enemies.

  I am reminded of the race for governor of Louisiana in 1991. The Democrat was Edwin Edwards, as personally corrupt as they come. But the Republican was a vicious demagogue, racist, and anti-Semite. A man named David Duke.

  As governor, Duke would not have been a threat to the country, or the planet. But he was a threat to the reserves of decency in the state of Louisiana, and the only electable alternative was Edwards. So Duke’s opponents crafted a bumper sticker. It read: VOTE FOR THE CROOK—IT’S IMPORTANT.

  This was not a joke, nor was it flippant. It was a profoundly moral statement—a rejection of false parallels, social irresponsibility, and self-pity that one’s choices were disappointing. It was an adult acknowledgment that those choices were very different, with different consequences, and that only one made sense. It asked voters to imagine, and to choose, the best alternative at hand—and to imagine the price of inaction.

  In 1991, voting for Edwin Edwards was the only way to keep David Duke from becoming governor. The voters of Louisiana did so. In 2016, Americans face a far more consequential choice: the only way to keep Donald Trump from the White House is to vote for—and elect—Hillary Clinton. There is no doubt that Trump’s supporters will turn out for him on November 8, no matter what more we discover. So the rest of us must consider the consequences of how—or whether—we choose to vote.

  Imagine President Trump.

  Making America Hate Again

  Trump’s War on Civil Society

  OCTOBER 25, 2016

  Has it been only five paranoid, divisive, dishonest, self-pitying, conspiracy-filled, societally degrading days of Donald Trump since Wednesday night’s debate? Hard to believe. For Trump has made the last two weeks feel like an excruciating journey to a country we should never be.

  The comprehensive damage he has inflicted on our national spirit is unprecedented in a presidential candidate. As sordid as it is, his behavior toward women is but a symptom of his pervasive contempt for the traditions of decency and civility that bind us together as Americans. Still, it is well to start there, for his disdain for women epitomizes his disdain for everyone and everything but Donald Trump himself.

  Despite his mendacious whining, through videotape and interviews Trump painted his own self-portrait as an emotionally stunted serial groper who forced himself on women, intruded on naked beauty contestants, and saw attractive females as prey. As of this writing, eleven women have now come forward to allege that Trump is precisely the tongue-thrusting, genital-grabbing Peeping Tom he boasted of being.

  Their accounts are detailed, credible, and, in several cases, conform to what they told friends at the time. Trump’s response is pathological: everyone involved is a liar—not only all eleven women but Trump himself. This is worse than unbelievable, though it is surely that. Our would-be president is claiming that, when describing himself as a sexual predator, he was lying to enhance his image.311

  Equally demented, he has threatened the women with lawsuits and intimated at rallies that two of his accusers are too plain for his predation. Of one, he said, “She would not be my first choice, that I can tell you”; after calling the other a “liar,” he added, “Check out her Facebook, you’ll understand.” To this he added a sexist jibe at Hillary Clinton: “And when she walked in front of me [at the second presidential debate], believe me, I wasn’t impressed.”

  Finally, having humiliated his wife, he pushed her in front of the cameras to recite his storyline: his boasts were false; his victims are lying; the media is “so dishonest and so mean.” A phrase better used to describe her husband.

  Another woman, Michelle Obama, spoke for countless others. Trump’s self-description, she said, “has shaken me to my core . . . It’s like the sick, sinking feeling you get when you’re walking down the street minding your own business and some guy yells out vulgar words about your body, or when you see that guy at work that stands a little too close, stares a little too long so you feel uncomfortable in your own skin.”

  Her candor and eloquence reminded us of how unthinkable it would be to replace the Obamas with the Trumps. And, perhaps, made it a little easier for women to cope with, and speak of, their experiences with men like Donald Trump.

  But our national experience with Trump is hardly over, and it is coming at a very high price. Unhinged by adversity—a disqualifier in itself—he is turning the death throes of his campaign into a scorched earth attack on our civil society.

  Instead of reaching out for voters, he is rallying his base with lies, vitriol, and paranoia. In Trump’s account he, and they, are victims—of the government, the media, minorities, a crooked electoral system, a corrupt international conspiracy to advance Clinton, an American elite that views his followers with contempt, any woman who accuses him of sexual assault, and every American who does not see the world as they do. All critics of Trump are lying to them; they can believe no one but Trump. He is no longer advancing an argument; he is shredding our social fabric.

  Every fusillade of lies is like a Rorschach test, meant to separate his true believers from the rest of us. The New York Times—having reported on his accusers—is a cog in the conspiracy to elect Clinton run by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. In Trump’s telling, this evil cabal will stop at nothing:

  Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed. They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and your family, they will seek to destroy everything about you, including reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that, they will do whatever is necessary. The Clintons are criminals, remember that. They’re criminals.

  The vapor trail of his incitements is like a field guide to mass insanity: Hillary Clinton should take a drug test before the final debate. Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich those global financ
ial powers . . .”—a gamy resurrection of anti-Semitic tropes. His accusers have made up stories fed them by the conspirators. The conspiracy presumably includes the CIA: despite the fact that intelligence professionals briefed him on Russian hacking, Trump says, “Maybe there is no hacking.”

  But there is no lie so misshapen that Trump will not utter it. The most corrosive of these is his attack on our electoral process.

  In-person voting fraud is so rare as to be statistically nonexistent. Numerous studies have shown this. As the Washington Post reports: “One of the most comprehensive investigations into voter impersonation found only thirty-one possibly fraudulent ballots out of over 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014.”

  Despite this, Trump and his campaign inflame his followers by repeating a series of enormous lies.

  Trump asserts: “Of course there is large-scale voter fraud happening on or before Election Day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on?” His campaign claims without evidence that there are “recent voting irregularities across the country from Pennsylvania to Colorado and an increase in unlawful voting by illegal immigrants.” Trump again, throwing in a dollop of racism: “I hear too many stories about Pennsylvania. Certain areas. We can’t lose an election because you know what I’m talking about. So . . . go check out areas.”

  More Trump: “People that have died ten years ago are still voting. Illegal immigrants are voting. So many cities are corrupt, and voter fraud is very, very common.” Newt Gingrich: “To suggest that . . . you don’t have theft in Philadelphia is to deny reality.” Trump yet again: “It’s one big fix. This whole election is being rigged.” All this in the service of his insinuation that hordes of minority voters will commit election fraud.

  Thus he focuses his fictions on cities with substantial African-American populations. One day before the debate, he proclaimed: “Voter fraud is all too common, and then they criticize us for saying that. But take a look at Philadelphia, what’s been going on, take a look at Chicago, take a look at St. Louis. Take a look at some of these cities, where you see things happening that are horrendous.”

  This is grotesque. The Pulitzer Prize–winning fact-check site PolitiFact rates Trump’s lying as “Pants on Fire”: “More people are struck by lightning or attacked by sharks than are accused of voter fraud.” Ohio’s Secretary of State, a Trump supporter, says flatly: “Any time your comments draw into question the legitimacy of the elections process, they cross the line. Particularly if you can’t back it up with evidence.”

  Trump does not even try. But his naked lies have made his followers believe that voter fraud is rampant—just like, polls show, a majority of Republicans. When Trump loses, millions of Americans will believe that he was cheated out of victory. This is exactly what he intends: to delegitimize Hillary Clinton as president—as he once tried to do, through the birther movement, to Barack Obama. But this time not before, quite possibly, inciting race-based intimidation or even violence at the polls.

  So where was the leadership of the Republican Party? In hiding, mostly. They no doubt fear Trump and his legions, to whom he described Paul Ryan as “weak and ineffective.” So Ryan confined himself to a tepid statement expressing confidence in our electoral process; Mitch McConnell said nothing. So much for leadership—or integrity.

  But then Trump was piggy-backing on shabby falsehoods that the GOP concocted long ago. For it is Republicans, not minorities, who have tried to rig the vote—by excluding minorities. How? By advancing bogus claims of voter fraud to justify voter ID laws calculated, as a Court of Appeals recently held, to target “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Trump is not an aberration; he is the GOP’s hideous offspring, turned back against them at the head of a peasant army of rebellious Republicans.

  By and large, the party’s erstwhile leaders are a pitiful sight. Willfully ignoring Trump’s character, they imagined that he could be tamed. Now they cower in the face of his excesses. The most recent, most pathetic, examples were the officeholders who abandoned Trump over his abuse of women, only to crawl back on board when the base howled in protest. Like the evangelical eunuch Mike Pence, they dare not speak for decency, or even for themselves.

  Barack Obama got this precisely right: Republicans are now caught in the “swamp of crazy that has been sold over and over and over and over again”; Trump is the nominee you get when your appeal is “based on lies, based on hoaxes.” He should know. Some of their lies and hoaxes—including Trump’s—were directed at America’s first black president.

  Now they are his vehicle for degrading our national life. In the Washington Post, Michael Gerson described his party’s nominee and where he is taking us. Trump is “frighteningly unstable under pressure.” He is “easily baited—hyperbolic and vengeful.” His advisers are “feeding his manias.” He is “completely unmoored from restraining influences, and would be as president.”

  He is the champion of “crackpot conservatism—an alt-right rage against a vast, scheming establishment that includes the liberal media, global financiers, and a growing list of women making accusations of sexual assault.” He “has no commitment to the American political system.” He “is perfectly willing to delegitimize democratic institutions as a campaign tactic, squandering a civil inheritance he does not value.” His “descent into ideological psychosis has tainted the reputation of all who were foolish enough to associate with him.”

  What else did the GOP expect from an obvious bully, narcissist, ignoramus, liar, and cheat, a man for whom nothing—and no one—exists but himself? It created the fever swamp in which he has thrived. Now, day by day, he is degrading our political life and, by his example, our society. In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he has made America “define deviancy down” to accommodate his worst instincts—and nourish ours.

  So Wednesday’s debate, moderated by the estimable Chris Wallace, represented a final reckoning. For Trump, it was one more chance to call Clinton sickly, incompetent, and corrupt in front of a massive audience. But in return Trump would have to respond in real time to hard questions about real issues. In short, this debate was sanity’s last shot.

  Thanks to Wallace, sanity prevailed—until, thanks to Trump, it didn’t.

  For a good while, Wallace’s skillful questioning produced the miraculous, a debate involving Donald Trump that seemed almost normal. Issues materialized from nowhere: the Court, nuclear weapons, taxes, the economy, Syria, ISIS. While woefully uninformed, for a time Trump hit his right-wing talking points like a kid reciting from memory. One could not help but think that his mom, Kellyanne Conway, was beaming with pride.

  Still, there was no missing the adult in the room. On issue upon issue Clinton was confident, crisp, and comprehensive—a president in waiting. At times, she dodged uncomfortable subjects like emails and her position on free trade. Nonetheless, with respect to substance, she was clearly winning on points, the predictable outcome of a cage match between a policy wonk and an incurious dunce.

  But Clinton was not content. Like the heroine of a political revenge movie she turned on her thuggish tormentor, sticking sardonic sound bites like darts into his very thin skin, served with extra relish.

  When she was helping black kids in the South get better schooling, she reminded him, the government was suing Trump for racial discrimination. When he was building Trump Tower, this enemy of illegal aliens exploited undocumented workers. When he built his signature hotel in Las Vegas, this proponent of a trade war with China used Chinese steel. This wall-building enemy of NAFTA and exporting jobs shipped jobs to Mexico. This master of the universe constantly whines that everything—even the Emmy Awards—is rigged against him.

  When Clinton was involved in taking out bin Laden, Trump was hosting Celebrity Apprentice. When the Clinton Foundation was combating AIDS, the Trump Foundation “took money from other people and bought a six-foot portrait of Donald”—a dart to which Clinton added, “I mean, who does that?” Under Clinton’s plan to fortify Soc
ial Security, “my payroll contribution will go up, as will Donald’s—assuming he can’t figure out how to get out of it.”

  At this, the erstwhile Übermensch—the very same guy who called her criminal, incompetent, corrupt, and a liar; the same guy who brought several women to the prior debate to highlight her husband’s indiscretions—snapped “such a nasty woman.” Given that she had previously catalogued his alleged serial abuse of women, this rejoinder was, to put it mildly, ill-considered.

  Trump had already elicited gasps from the audience by claiming: “Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody.” One could only share their amazement: by then he had labeled nine women’s detailed accounts of sexual predation as lies “probably started by [Clinton] and her sleazy campaign”; denied the slighting comments about two of them immortalized on tape; asserted—falsely—that the women’s accusations had been debunked; and claimed—incredibly—not to know anyone on a list of accusers that included women he had previously admitted knowing.

  But given ninety minutes Trump can lie a lot. He lied about suggesting that Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia should have nuclear weapons. He claimed that the United States was inundated with ISIS operatives from Syria. He falsely asserted that “Hillary Clinton wants to double your taxes.” Despite having been briefed by our intelligence agencies, he denied knowing about the Russian hacking of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

  So far, so squalid—the numbing new normal to which Trump has reduced us. By this time, I was developing a certain fascination with the split screen. I have a novelist’s sensibility, I’ll admit. But the close-up of Trump struck me as a merciless psychic x-ray. With every look of anger and contempt, every moment of thin-lipped, squint-eyed fury, I imagined his gargoyle soul becoming graven on his face.