Shooting on 5th Avenue

In his inaugural address to the nation, the newly-minted president of the United States said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” No, wait. He didn’t say that in his inaugural address. He said it a year ago in a campaign speech in Sioux City, Iowa.

But he might as well have. Nothing more accurately captures the contempt Trump has for his supporters – their gullibility, their unreasoning adoration of him, their willingness to accept words from his mouth that range from the inaccurate to the untrue to the utterly fantastical, than that sentence.

Except for possibly this one, which was in the inaugural address: Washington. he said, has “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.” In fact, as the New York Times pointed out in an editorial entitled What Trump doesn’t get About America, the United States leads the world in military spending, allocating more than the next seven nations combined, including China and Russia. Current spending, in fact, is far higher than it was before the 9/11 attacks.” But the idea that the U.S. military is in disarray and needs to be rescued by him, though not true, plays better with his audience.

Or this, in which he used the quickly-becoming-immortalized phrase “American carnage” to perpetuate his characterization – always a crowd-pleaser at his rallies -- of U.S. cities as crime-ridden hellholes aching to be pulled back from the brink by him. In fact, crime is far lower than in past decades. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. But his followers believe otherwise because he tells them to and they want to. Of course crime is a problem. It’s always a problem. And now, more than ever, it’s related to the easy availability of guns which he and his folks are so fond of. But Trump’s depiction of U.S. cities as being on the verge of incineration and collapse because of crime is just theater.

Or this, always a reliable entry in the Republican hit parade: that government spending is all about taking money away from the decent and hard-working and handing it over to the lazy and stupid. And so, in his address, he pandered to this mythology by identifying as a top priority his intention to “get our people off welfare and back to work.” This is exactly what his people want to hear – that their hard-earned dollars are being taken away from them by “big government” and handed over to losers, and that’s why they’re not as prosperous as they would otherwise be. 

What they don’t want to hear, and what it’s therefore not in Trump’s interest to tell them, is that “welfare” is and always has been a miniscule part of government expenditures. “The number of people receiving federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits fell by more than 70 percent, to 1.2 million, between 1996 and 2016,” the Times editorial said. “As Mr. Trump spoke about the disappearance of jobs…the unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent in 2009, the height of the recession, to less than 5 percent.” So getting people off welfare and back to work, though generally a laudable idea, is not a major priority because it’s not a major problem. But saying otherwise, in the certainty that his true believers will unquestioningly accept everything he says, is what works best for Mr. Trump.

Same with his “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” another fan favorite because they believe what he has told them – that thieving foreigners have stolen away our manufacturing jobs and that he intends to put a stop to that right now. What he doesn’t tell them, because it wouldn’t help him to do so and because they don’t want to hear it, is that he can’t put a stop to the real culprit in the loss of manufacturing jobs, automation. Nor does he mention the millions of American jobs that are dependent on commercial interaction with all these villainous countries.

The big question with regard to this speech is…why. It was, as many people have observed, much more like a campaign speech than an inaugural address. Our 5th Avenue shooter was still firing away even though there was no longer any reason to do so. Why waste time and energy, and political capital, in another sermon to the converted when he could have used it to bring at least a few members of the unconverted into the fold? Flyover’s opinion: Donald Trump’s run for the presidency was never about serving the people, improving their lot, striving for a more perfect union, or persuading people to embrace a vision of how things ought to be. This was Donald’s Excellent Adventure – his fun and exciting new career. It was another source of food for his insatiable ego, and the feeding required an endless supply of narratives, invented if necessary, for him to be the hero of, an endless supply of dragons of which he will be the slayer. Those narratives, and the ego gratification that goes with getting people to believe them, are the fun of it for him, and that’s why he pounded away at them again. He doesn’t give a hoot about converting the unconverted. He just wants to hear, again and again, the roar of the crowd  And so he tells that crowd whatever will make the roaring happen. knowing they will believe whatever he says. 

If he thinks so little of his followers, imagine what he thinks about the rest of us.