Adam Gopnik on Donald Trump

Just in case you were wondering what you need to believe about Donald Trump to retain your place among New York’s liberal intelligentsia, Adam Gopnik, surely a capable writer, has written a screed to end all screeds explaining the correct belief about Trump. 

It is, Trump is a villain, worthy of constant opprobrium and raw unadulterated hatred.

New York’s liberal intelligentsia is ferociously independent. It rejects all orthodoxy, and yet, it has simply embraced its own orthodoxy, the kind you read in the New Yorker and the kind that is peddled by Adam Gopnik. If you deviate from the party line about Trump you will learn the extent of the ferocity.

As it happens, the word “villain” seems more suited to literary fables than to political philosophy or even cultural analysis. After all, Shakespeare used the word prominently in Hamlet:

O villain, villain, smiling damned villain….

That one may smile and be a villain.

Gopnik is obviously biased. He does not really consider what Trump may or may not have accomplished in his presidency. He considers Kamala Harris to be an everyday workaday politician. 

Anyone who has wiped the glaze from his eyes would have recognized that Harris, a woman of no singular achievements has risen to the top by sleeping with powerful men. 

As Harris herself asserted clearly, in her Fox News interview with Bret Baier, she is not responsible for anything that has happened over the past three and a half years. She cannot even accept that she was part of the administration that brought it all upon us.

Whereas Gopnik rails against Trump for failing to take responsibility, he fails to notice that Kamala Harris cannot accept that she was in charge of, for example, the border. Someone who cannot take responsibility has no character. The suit fits Kamala; Gopnik ignores it.

Our border czar, such as she was supposed to be, had presided over a flood of migrants into the country. Parts of the nation are overwhelmed by migrants and Gopnik thinks that those who are opposed to the invasion are mere xenophobics. As though the rising crime rates and the ruinous introduction of unqualified and incompetent students into public schools is something we should embrace. 

Gopnik rants that Trump might very well negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, but he fails conspicuously to notice that this Biden foreign policy debacle has cost nearly a million Ukrainian lives. 

Similarly, and quite naturally, Gopnik does not bother to mention the catastrophe that has befallen the Middle East since the Biden team set out to appease the mullahs in Iran. He does not grant Trump any credit for the Abraham Accords, though apparently, he does not blame the Biden administration for the events of October 7.

Speaking of Ukraine, how much better would it have been if the Biden administration, led by Kamala herself at the Munich Security Conference that preceded the invasion, had found a more diplomatic way to solve the problem. After all, Noam Chomsky, of all people, agrees with Donald Trump on this score.

Had Gopnik offered us a balanced approach to the Trump record-- because there is a governance record-- his arguments would have some credibility. As is, his rank bias discredits whatever he has to say, even when he lights on an interesting point.

Apparently, the American right believes that the culture is rigged against them. Surely, Gopnik has a point here. The academy, the educational system, the media and social media-- all tend left. With some recent and conspicuous exceptions-- think Elon Musk-- the culture at large is not balanced. It is biased against the right.

Somehow or other people who do not think like Gopnik believe that the country has been having problems. Surely, they are suffering from misinformation:

We may be standing on the edge of an abyss, and yet nothing is wrong, in the expected way of countries on the brink of apocalypse. The country is not convulsed with riots, hyperinflation, or mass immiseration. What we have is a sort of phony war—a drôle de guerre, a sitzkrieg—with the vehemence of conflict mainly confined to what we might call the cultural space.

The world is suffering wars; Eastern Europe has suffered nearly a million dead; the Middle East is falling apart; the country has been overrun by migrants, most of them here illegally; inflation has eaten up most of the wage gains; the economy is in some serious trouble. One might say that statistically we have never had it so good. If so, how does it happen that so much of the country thinks that we are a nation in decline, headed in the wrong direction.

And, of course, rather than worry about the gross incompetence of Biden and Harris, Gopnik resorts to defamation and slander. He calls Trump a cancer, a vile human being, a “spectacularly malignant political actor.” You will imagine that it would have sufficed to call Trump malignant. Gopnik had to make it into a spectacle.

As though that is not enough, he adds that “Trump’s madness rose to a peak of raging lunacy.”

Gopnik has become a model of rhetorical incontinence. Surely, such vile drool encourages certain deranged individuals to try to assassinate the former president. If that is true, how could they not. 

If he had had a tad more imagination, he would have recognized a point that I made some time ago. For certain true believers on the left, Trump is the Antichrist, the sum of all evils. Once they destroy him they will see the Heavenly City descend on the planet.

You might imagine that Trump incited a violent insurrection on January 6. The point is debatable. But, Gopnik ignores the violent insurrection that was mounted by Trump’s enemies during the Spring and Summer of 2020. It was encouraged by one Kamala Harris.

The notion that Trump is going to expel countless helpless immigrants is yet another absurdity. People who do not belong here, people who broke the law to come here, have no real business being here. Gopnik’s empathy is largely misplaced:

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants.

But, then, Gopnik wants to save Ukraine from Trump’s wish to “abandon” it to Putin. Now that the bodies of dead Ukrainians pile up in Eastern Europe, the only real concern is that perhaps Trump would prefer to make a deal, to stop the carnage:

Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. 

An administration whose manifest weakness has produced chaos and war around the world is pretending to be tough. It is a pathetic charade.

What really hurts Gopnik’s feelings is this. When he tries to give Trump the benefit of the doubt-- why would you bother to give an evil villain the benefit of the doubt?-- the Donald tells another whopper, another lie:

Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power. 

As it happens, if Kamala obfuscates her views and if she pretends no longer to believe what she has always said she believes, Gopnik considers that she is just a normal politician.

Republicans never receive such grace. Recall that George W. Bush was called a lying liar over and over again. And that Trump, even if he merely misspeaks is denounced as a perfidious prevaricator. 

Again, as though it needs repeating, the Gopnik indictment of Trump the Antichrist is not merely an exercise in political eschatology. It is designed to create a narrative, one you can believe in, one that you must believe in, if you want to break bread with the likes of Adam Gopnik.

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