"I know a guy"

“I know a guy”
By David Benjamin

“After 2½ years we’ve seen enough. Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.”
— Orlando Sentinel

PARIS — The mass psyche of the Trump cult is a matter of undying mystery, not just for me but for the majority — now around 55 percent — of Americans who keep asking one another, “My God! What’s wrong with those people?”

I feel blessed to know — even like and respect — some of “those people.” Recently, I corresponded with a Trump convert, a high- school acquaintance whom I’ll call — to protect the innocent — Cyril.

Cautiously, Cyril admits Republican sympathies. This confession implies his membership in a political subspecies I’ve always called “closet Republicans.”

These folks are nice. They’re educated, affluent, inevitably white and socially nimble. They have friends and colleagues of various ideologies. They’d hate to offend any friend or colleague who might or might not be — they don’t dare ask so they’re not sure — Republican. So, they dodge political talk almost religiously. One of them would never say, “I vote Republican all the time.” But they do. If pressed, they’ll admit a slight GOP bias. They’d prefer to say, however, that they’re “independent,” a term which, if it were food, would be cottage cheese.

Cyril hinted his “independence” by claiming that he might have voted for Joe Biden if Biden had been on the ballot in 2016. This is doubtful for two reasons. First, in another paragraph, he refers to Hillary Clinton as “evil.” An evocation of evil by a rank-and-file American voter poses a polarity so profound as to be immutable. Second, Cyril’s Hillaryphobia is an echo and a triumph of the Fox News bullhorn. No mass medium before Fox News has ever committed itself as systematically to demonizing select politicians — and of politics as a calling.

This isn’t exactly a weird perspective. Americans have always healthily mistrusted our political class. Traditionally, our politics are rife with bigotry and buncombe. But a broad and accepted belief that a mere self-serving politician can be deemed actually evil— without palpable supporting evidence — is recent and disturbing. The fact that a citizen as amiable and moderate as Cyril can hold such a view is chilling. After all his outrages, for instance, I cannot bring myself to call Donald Trump evil. To do so would imply that the scarecrow has a brain.

How did this happen to Cyril?

My thesis: Fox News has spent 28 years tirelessly depicting a teenage Goldwater Republican from Park Ridge, Illinois as a reincarnated Bitch of Buchenwald. This propaganda seeps into people who never watch Fox, because CBS, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and online news aggregators slavishly mimic Fox News on the story of the day. Anyone touched by “Trump TV” is morally altered.

For instance, in response to my remark that Trump is guilty of chronically cheating on his various wives (specifically betraying current mate Melania by sequentially boinking centerfold Karen McDougal and porn actress Stormy Daniels), Cyril said my dudgeon is misdirected. I should rage not against Trump, a mere copycat philanderer, but against Bill Clinton, who cheated on Hillary before Trump cheated on Ivana, Marla and Melania while referring to his daughter Ivanka on a national radio broadcast as a “piece of ass” and bragging on a national TV broadcast that he enjoys the practice of unsolicited “pussy grabbing.”

I can only grope for logic here. Bill definitely cheated on his only wife and likely made unsought advances on any number of women. But somehow, by way of Fox News and conservative consensus, Bill’s fleshly sins have become Hillary’s Satanic tattoo. While Bill was merely horny, Hillary — who enabled him by not preventing him from doing what she didn’t know he was doing until afterward — was “evil.” On the contrary, there’s no one on Fox News, in the GOP, or among Trump cultists who has ever called Ivana, Marla or Melania “evil” for allowing him (as if they could stop him) to hump every floozy who ever cocked a hip in his direction.

The illogical logic that emerges is that Bill did it and that was wrong. Now, it’s okay that Trump did it and keeps doing it, ’cause Bill did it first! It was only wrong, apparently, the first time. Or, as Peter Wehner wrote recently in the New York Times, “Many of those who during the Bill Clinton presidency insisted character and personal integrity were essential qualities in political leaders have in the Trump era decided such matters are utterly unimportant.”

An explanation for this sort of moral duplicity is team spirit — absolute belief in party over both country and conscience. I understand this impulse because I love the Green Bay Packers. I would stay true even if — to pose a wild instance — a Packer had to pay a $25 million fraud settlement to hundreds of people cheated by a phony college called, say, Aaron Rodgers University.

My favorite passage is where Cyril turns several anecdotes into a global Trump endorsement that validates his personal faith. Cyril’s career has taken him often overseas, especially to the Middle East. He discovered there a popular affection for Trump, particularly among Egyptians, Afghans and a Christian minority who disdained Trump’s predecessor as “weak and spineless.” Cyril cites the testimony of “a highly educated, highly placed and highly influential Saudi prince.” Quoth Cyril: “He validated what my Egyptian friend said about the noticeable lack of leadership during the Obama era, and that the climate is much better now.”

Notwithstanding the sincerity of the pro-Trump witnesses Cyril found in various Sunni strongholds and murderous autocracies, I found myself peeking at a slightly bigger picture. I understand that the Christian minority in the Middle East, for example, feels hemmed-in, fearful and queasy. But they’ve been feeling that way since the 6th century or so. One is tempted to brace a Christian living precariously among the glowering Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, and ask, “Jesus, fella! Why the hell do you stay here?”

Seriously, though, Cyril might have gotten a different picture of the region if he’d had contact with a few Shiites, a Persian or two, a Palestinian family, some Kurds, a few lonesome Sufis, a village in Yemen, a starving baby in Sana, the government of Qatar, maybe a Syrian or two.

I mean, does Trump even know the difference between Shia and Sunni?

There’s a scene in Ocean’s Eleven, just after Danny’s team has emptied Terry Benedict’s impregnable vault. Benedict (Andy Garcia) suspects that Danny (George Clooney) might know who done it. Danny offers a deal for what he knows about the heist. Benedict agrees. Danny says, “I know a guy. We were in the joint together. Anybody pulls a job in the western United States, he knows about it. You give me 72 hours…”

There follows a long pause. Benedict fixes Ocean with one of the coldest stares in cinema history. His voice dripping with contempt, he says, “You know a guy.” Then, he flings Danny into the waiting arms of the police.

In this scene, Andy Garcia passes judgment for all time on the value of anecdotal evidence. I’ve been talking to people lately from England, France, Belgium, Venezuela, India, Ireland, Canada and a bunch of other countries who, today, feel toward America the way Terry Benedict feels about Danny Ocean’s “guy.” They see Trump as a dangerous clown, projecting counterfeit strength through tweets and betraying genuine cowardice through cruelties against children. All their lives, they looked up to America. Now, they look away.

But I don’t write about these people. I certainly don’t treat them as authorities. They’re just guys I know.