Here Are Twenty Other Disturbing, Awful Things That Trump Has Said This Month, and It's Not Over Yet

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/here-are-twenty-other-disturbing-awful-things-that-trump-has-said-this-month-and-its-not-over-yet

Letter from Trump’s Washington
Here Are Twenty Other Disturbing, Awful Things That Trump Has Said This Month, and It’s Not Over Yet
Sadly, the President’s refusal to promise a “peaceful” transfer of power is just another outrage in a September full of them.
By Susan B. Glasser
September 24, 2020


We already knew that this fall’s campaign, with Donald Trump fighting for his political survival, would be crazy, overwhelming, and exhausting. But, no matter how much we’ve come to expect the worst, it’s still a shock when it happens. At least it should be. On Wednesday, Trump was asked what should have been a simple question: “Do you commit to a peaceful transfer of power?” There is only one answer to this question in America. The answer is yes. But not for Trump. “Well, we’re gonna have to see what happens,” he responded. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster.” Further pressed, he added, “We’ll want to have—get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very—we’ll have a very peaceful . . . There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

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This September seems to be the ultimate test of whether we really, truly, finally have run out of outrage. Reading back through this list, it’s hard to conclude anything else. When Ginsburg died, it took less than a day for Trump to announce that he would try to replace her before the election. I was not surprised in the least bit. When Trump—after complaining for months about a “rigged” election, just because he is behind in the polls—said on Wednesday that he would not agree in advance to a nonviolent transfer of power, his words were abhorrent but not at all revelatory.

At a press conference on Tuesday, the day the U.S. officially passed two hundred thousand deaths from the pandemic, Trump was asked why he had not said anything about the grim milestone. He listened to the reporter’s question, then turned away. “Uh, anybody else?” he asked. Because of all the horrors and lies that preceded it, and all that are sure to follow, the President’s callous disregard was not a major story but just another viral video in a news cycle full of them. Trump has succeeded in conditioning us to believe that the week’s news, while awful, is less so because the awfulness is so consistent. Awful is the new Trumpian normal, which is pretty amazing when you consider that the old Trump-era normal was already pretty bad. He has rendered us collectively incapable of outrage, just when we need it most. If we can’t be appalled at the President’s indifference toward two hundred thousand dead Americans, then there is nothing left that can horrify us. After all, the COVID-19 death toll so far is the biggest mass-casualty event in American history aside from the Civil War, the Second World War, and the 1918 flu pandemic.

Throughout the past four years, I felt that it was important to maintain the ability to be shocked or surprised or at least deeply concerned when Trump violated this or that previously uncrossable line, when he shredded a law or a norm observed by previous Presidents of both parties—even if it was utterly predictable and consistent with what we already knew of him. That was the exercise: to try to understand how and in what ways Trump represents a sharp break with the American past—or whether he is simply the latest example of a partisan leader who is willing to use whatever means, no matter how unscrupulous, to win. I started out, in other words, hoping and striving for clarity.

This is 2020, however, and the election is little more than five weeks away, and the list has grown too long: Trump has diverged so far from any of our past Presidents in his conduct, in what he says and does, in exposing the public to consequences that are reckless and even deadly. We are fully exhausted and fully on notice. I have depleted my reserves of shock and awe. I fear there is no more outrage left to summon. But I have not changed my view in one vital respect: We have to keep writing it down. Every last word of it.