Donald Trump appears full of the holiday spirit in Florida, celebrating that people can finally say “Merry Christmas” again, among other things. What might 2018 bring for him and the country?

When President Trump arrived at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Christmas Eve, he greeted club members and guests by telling them “you all got a lot richer” as a result of his tax plan, which had just become his first major legislative success. Paul Krugman, in his analysis of the measure, wrote in the New York Times that “Republican Tax-Cut Santa… doesn’t care whether you’re naughty or nice. In fact, he’ll actually reward you if you’re naughty in the right ways.”

While it’s unclear how much Trump will personally benefit from the $1.5 trillion tax plan – which he has called a “gift for hard-working Americans” – it’s also precisely uncertain how much the now more than 100 days the President will have spent at properties he owns since his inauguration will end up costing the taxpayer.

As his first year in office comes to an end, his tweet on Christmas Eve gave an indication of what he’s celebrating this holiday season (we’ll come back to the “fake news” part later, don’t worry…).

 Vanity Fair reported that the President “can’t believe there wasn’t a parade in his honour” after the tax measure passed. And in spite of that legislative victory, Trump ended the year pretty much as he began it; concerning himself with image and appearance, while inevitably sowing division and convincing Americans to believe either the best or the worst about themselves. Rarely has there been a more polarizing political figure, and rarely has there been a more convulsive year in American politics. As CNN put it in their review: “Whether you think it was a total dumpster fire or the beginning of a great new America, it’s hard to remember what exactly we all survived in this first year.”

As a small memory-jogger, try The Guardian’s end of year Trump quiz.

In a more serious look back, though, the paper’s Jonathan Freedland wrote that while we were all distracted by the unprecedented noise, Trump “is changing America for decades to come” whether that’s through policies on net neutrality or appointments to the federal judiciary. Freedland writes:

Just watch the excruciating Senate grilling of one nominee for the bench as he was asked basic undergraduate questions of law, and could not answer any of them. Needless to say, 91% of Trump’s nominees are white and 81% are male, re-stacking the judiciary with white men at a rate unseen for 30 years, reversing decades of steady progress towards a bench that resembles the society it judges.

Trump knows what he’s doing, hailing this shift as an “untold story” that “has consequences 40 years out”. He’s right about that. Judges are appointed for life. A judiciary made in Trump’s image will live on long after he’s gone.

That’s truer still of his record on the environment, which seems to have no purpose beyond vandalism, erosion of the Obama legacy and the enrichment of his corporate pals… Name a good rule, and the Trump administration has shredded it… His withdrawal from the Paris accords on climate change made the news, but every day Trump is doing what he can to make the planet uglier and sicker.

Add to that increased tensions over potential international incidents sparked by an errant or ill-tempered tweet, along with concerns among the intelligence and diplomatic communities about lasting damage to America’s standing and influence in the world as an ‘America First’ approach takes hold (incidentally, the US ambassadorship to Dublin has been empty since Kevin O’Malley left the post in January) and there is certainly little doubt that Trump’s first year in office has often been chaotic. Writing in Foreign Policy, Max Boot says that while the President has done more – and less – damage than feared, America will survive, “but it won’t ever be the same.”

 Neal Gabler, meanwhile, writes that for America itself, the “political cancer” is metastasizing:

That fissure opened because the country was formed over conflicting concepts of freedom and equality. We like to think of ourselves as champions of equality: a tolerant, charitable, compassionate egalitarian people, showing one another respect and decency, and sometimes we are. This is, I believe, the very foundation of American liberalism. But we also like to think of ourselves as free from constraints, independent and self-sufficient, less concerned with compassion than with what we regard as personal justice. This, I believe, is the foundation of American conservatism.

Throughout our history, these two forces have continually vied with one another and at best tempered one another. The country operates in a kind of equilibrium between community and individualism, between sacrifice and self-interestedness. Trump has upset that equilibrium. By foreswearing equality entirely, he turned us from a community into, as many observers are now saying, a group of tribes, each focused only on its own prerogatives. Trump turned us against one another. He created a new, cold civil war between an expiring America where freedom was paramount and an ascending one where equality was paramount. He arrested history.

On Friday night, historian Jon Meacham told MSNBC that at a fundamental level what had been lost by the Trump Presidency was an “instinctive reverence for what happens at the center of power.” In the same segment, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan argued that modern America has lived through a “leveling of standards” in entertainment, news and culture. “I don’t think Donald Trump brought this about, but is a reflection of it.” Calling him “bombastic” and “grudge-holding” as a president, he nevertheless has had “some real achievements, but it has come at a cost,” she said.

And, certainly, the view of some conservatives, primarily taking joy in their opponents’ discomfort, continues to be that Trump is being successful simply by his very continued existence.

 

A new truth

A wholly new characteristic about this political year and coverage of it has been the way in which the President’s exaggerations, misleading statements or outright falsehoods have been reported, and the limited real-world consequence flowing from them.

Politifact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ was Trump’s claim that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 election, simply because he has repeated it so often. (In another ‘award’, the President’s feud with the NFL was named the top sports story of the year by the Associated Press). Meanwhile, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have been chronicling the “false or misleading” claims – the Post says they number 1,628 in the first 298 days, while the Times provides links to rebut the false statements.

But ultimately we have to ask what function such reporting serves, if there is no holding to account, no apparent notion that such deception is wrong; rather, that is facilitates the creation of a world where we can believe whatever we like, and if it’s factually inaccurate, that’s someone else’s fault.

On Christmas Eve morning, the President’s Twitter followers woke up to this:

Reviving a familiar theme of blaming the media for record low approval levels an idea frequently reinforced this year from the podium of the press briefing room in some bizarre exchanges between journalists and whoever happened to be the voice of the White House.

It’s no surprise that as the frames of reference have changed, so journalists’ own approach to their work has shifted – the Post’s Margaret Sullivan writes how she now uses the expression “reality-based press” rather than “mainstream media” since the idea of what has become “mainstream” and what that means for different audiences is in flux.

So, as Politico reports, we should probably expect Trump’s most important media outlet, Fox News, to further respond to challenges from Breitbart in hardening its support for the President through its appeal to his base.

 

The old and new years

In perhaps a fitting end to the year, there were three relatively small and, on their face, what may have seemed petty aspects of the new administration, but yet which reveal much about the mindset behind it:

  • Firstly, there was a dispute over whether or not the Centers for Disease Control had been ordered to stop using certain words;
  • Secondly, the administration revealed the redesign to the Presidential Coin, a memento the Commander-in-Chief often hands out to service personnel. As Slate reported, Trump’s coin is “just as tacky and egotistical as you’d expect.”;
  • Thirdly, the White House took down “We The People”, the public petitions section of its web site, “for maintenance” without responding to a single one. So it looks like the current incumbent’s admiration for Andrew Jackson doesn’t extend to the present incarnation of accountability through the ‘big block of cheese day’.

The official statement says the site will be back in the new year, but like everything else surrounding this administration, we’ll just have to wait and see. So what can we expect in the months to come? Are there signs that anything might change significantly in the new year?

The most significant thing in the political calendar will be the November midterm elections, with every seat in the House being contested, along with 33 Senate seats, including some where up and coming Democrat stars can gain some exposure – like Beto O’Rourke who is set to challenge Ted Cruz in Texas.

Conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin writes that the midterms could “end the nightmare of Trump”.

It is slowly dawning on Republicans and the right-wing media echo chamber that President Trump’s assault on democratic norms and the rule of law, his betrayal of his own populist campaign themes (with tax cuts for the rich and Medicaid spending cuts, for example), his misogynist and xenophobic rhetoric, his mean-spirited vendetta against hardworking immigrants and his dangerous, erratic behavior on the world stage have ignited a backlash that could deliver in 2018 House and Senate majorities to Democrats, who barely had a political pulse a year ago. Trump’s inability to distinguish his grandiose fantasies from reality will also give the midterms an urgency rarely seen in a non-presidential election.

After some early setbacks in the special elections to replace Trump cabinet appointees, Democrats appear to have the wind at their back in the aftermath of the unique election in Alabama. And while you can expect more measures and pronouncements designed to agitate and stoke the seemingly resilient base, the Republicans are also likely to make midterms a referendum on the media.

You can probably also expect, as the midterms approach, more political infighting – particularly between the McConnell and Bannon factions of the GOP, even while those closest to Trump appear to be closing ranks. John Cassidy at the New Yorker writes that the recent “groveling” by members of Trump’s cabinet is “an alarm call for 2018.”

Of course, hanging over it all, and tying it all together, is the Russia investigation and, much as the White House wants to think Robert Mueller’s work might be winding up any time soon, the quiet deliberation of the Special Counsel as his probe intensifies has undoubtedly unnerved the administration.

Just as the President has successfully undermined the credibility and reputation of the free press, he has been doing the same with the FBI and – by implication – the rule of law; muddying the waters with allegations and insinuations about the impartiality of senior officials, while there have been a slew of rumours that Trump may be preparing to stage a Nixonian “Saturday Night Massacre” by attempting to remove Mueller.

All of this emphasizes – as if any emphasis were necessary – the sheer unpredictability of what might happen next in this ever-enlarging legal spider’s web.

The President will be at Mar-a-Lago until the new year begins. What sort of year that turns out to be, or where the country might stand this time next year, is, honestly, anyone’s guess. If anything’s likely, though, we should probably expect more attempts at distraction and dog whistling via the President’s favorite means of communication.

So it was all the more special when the President and First Lady turned up for a church service on Christmas Day to hear the rector’s homily focus on “the power of words.” With Trump – who received a standing ovation from worshippers as he arrived – seated in the third row, Rev James Harlan told the congregation:

We know the power of speech, of words.

Nelson Mandela the great champion of racial equality in South Africa, who was imprisoned for almost three decades for standing up to a government that was repressing and racist and all of that. Nelson Mandela knew the power of words. He said: “It is never my custom to use words lightly. If 27 years in prison have done anything to us it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.

Words matter. The book of Proverbs talks often about the power of words. Proverbs 18, for example says death and life are in the power of the tongue. Words can build up or tear down. Words can speak truth or obfuscate truth. Words convey information, emotion, motivation.

Your words and mine too often give voice to and empower the darkness that sometimes seems to loom so large. Your words and mine can have as much destructive and divisive potential as creative and healing potential. But God’s Word, made flesh in Jesus, whose incarnation we celebrate on this holy night, that word is perfect and pure light.

Finally, although the gift-giving season might be over for another year – to the likely relief of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin – there’s still time to get your hands on the apparently completely genuine ‘Trumpy Bear.” In a world where it’s getting ever-harder to distinguish parody from reality, it’s more important than ever that we try to hold onto a sense of humor; and continue to believe that, distant as it might seem, a return to some sense of political normality might be possible.

Best wishes for 2018.

Also published on Medium.