Donald Trump is in the habit of accusing his enemies of pretty much anything, even eating dogs and cats, in order to draw attention away from his scam. In response, liberals and Democrats have developed a habit of their own. Don’t get distracted, they usually tell us. He’s just playing politics: Keep your eyes peeled on what’s really going on.
However, I think it’s worth it to focus on the accusations themselves. For one thing, they are evidence for drawing conclusions about him. For another, we are setting ourselves up for failure by ignoring them. We take the high road. Trump takes the low road. Guess who wins?
Consider the “hurricane of fire” that’s ravaging Los Angeles County.
Since Tuesday, at least five wildfires have blown through the region on wind gusts of up to nearly 100 miles an hour. California is exceptionally dry right now. There’s hardly been any rainfall during this rainy season. As of this writing, five people have died. About 180,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. Around 50 square miles and more than 1,000 structures have burned down. The inferno, which hasn’t been contained, is already being called the worst in the city’s history.
There’s so much fire the hydrants ran dry.
In response, President Joe Biden has greenlit disaster declarations that open up federal agencies, resources and money for recovery. FEMA will cover the cost of the state’s firefighting. The US Forest Service will dispatch air tankers and helicopters to help local first-responders. Ten Navy helicopters will follow suit. Meanwhile, the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, deployed the California National Guard.
Instead of cheering this life-saving all-hands-on-deck response, the president-elect took to social media to blame Newsom and Biden. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA,” he wrote. “THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!”
And: “Gavin Newscum [sic] and his Los Angeles crew have contained exactly ZERO percent of the fire. It is burning at levels that even surpass last night. This is not Government. I can’t wait till January 20th!”
Moreover, he wrote: “The fires in Los Angeles may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country. In many circles, they’re doubting whether insurance companies will even have enough money to pay for this catastrophe. Let this serve, and be emblematic, of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum [sic] Duo. January 20th cannot come fast enough!”
Some are getting hung up on the details. For instance, the hydrants did in fact run dry, but not because of mismanagement on the part of local government, as Trump implies, but because we’re talking about a “hurricane of fire” here, and because pipes and pumps may be broken or damaged, and because homeowners tried to protect their homes.
The details of the accusation, however, don’t matter as much as the larger accusation itself. That’s the way Trump sees it. Unfortunately, his Democratic enemies do not. From their perspective, which is to say, from the liberal perspective, if the details are not true, as virtually everything Trump says isn’t true, they’re not worth responding to.
The Newsom administration is representative in this regard. In reference to yet another one of Trump’s accusations, it said: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration — that is pure fiction. The governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
From the liberal perspective, the accusations – playing politics – are Trump’s way of distracting us, in this case, from a good-faith effort to contain a historic fire. Elsewhere, liberals might say, Trump is trying to cover up for his own shortcomings. For instance, he’s already backing away from his promise to lower the price of groceries and impose across-the-board tariffs. Accusing his enemies of something, anything, prevents the American people from awareness of his shuck and jive.
But the thing about accusations, especially when they come from an incoming president with the backing of a rightwing media apparatus that is global in scale, is this: They may not be true, but they quickly become “true” with enough time, effort, repetition and ruthlessness.
So it’s not enough to say that the accusations distract us from what’s really going on, because the accusations themselves can very rapidly become what’s really, really going on, so that Trump’s enemies are not only dealing with whatever crisis they are facing, in this case a “hurricane of fire,” but also a deeply warped perception by the public of that crisis. In the end, Trump’s enemies might actually succeed in resolving the crisis, but receive no credit for having done so, because Trump has made it impossible for the public to believe they could.
This is a trap for liberals and Democrats, but one that’s partly of their own making. It’s rooted in the liberal view of honorable public action amid natural or man-made disasters. It presumes a causal relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. Solve the problem and the people will reward you. Fail and they will punish you. The key to success, according to this view, is not playing politics.
Playing politics, however, is the way out of that trap.
I don’t mean leveling accusations on the scale of “they’re eating the dogs,” but I do mean leveling accusations that can compete with Trump’s for the public’s attention. In the case of California's “hurricane of fire,” I would suggest that Gavin Newsom’s office take its response to Trump to a grander stage of confrontation. Not only is the governor trying to overcome disaster, he’s trying to overcome sabotage.
This is a small example of what I hope is a larger attitude-adjustment. Liberals and Democrats tend to believe the best response to “the politics of division,” as some call it, is a kind of politics that sets politics aside “for the good of the people.” That didn’t work for Joe Biden. If nothing else, setting aside politics risks giving Trump greater opportunities to steal Democratic success, as he is about to steal Joe Biden’s success, while blaming liberals for everything that goes wrong.
The answer to evil politics is not no politics. It’s good politics. And one way of achieving parity is meeting every evil accusation with an equal, opposite and good accusation. Trump is a menace to society. His accusations are not a distraction from the truth. They are the truth.
If liberals and Democrats do not learn this lesson, I fear the worst.
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