What Will Donald Trump Be Remembered For? The World According to The Don(ald)

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

06 September 18

The other day, out of the blue, I got an email from the remarkable Bill Moyers about a new book I’ve been urging TomDispatch readers to get their hands on. Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, published by Dispatch Books, shouldn’t be missed. But instead of listening to me, since I’m obviously an interested party, consider what Moyers has to say: “I read Every Body Has a Story over the past few summer weeks -- sitting on a bench in Central Park -- and was engulfed in memories of what happened to ordinary Americans 10 years ago when Lehman Brothers folded, the market crashed, recession drilled deep into the marrow of the country, and tens of millions of lives were thrown into turmoil from which many have yet to recover (a factor in Trump’s election). I was on PBS then with my weekly series and caught some of the drama and trauma. Beverly Gologorsky has made real the experience of falling... falling... and landing, like those Thai kids trapped at the bottom of the drop. I grew up with people like that who had been felled by the Great Depression and I kept seeing some of them in the characters in her story. I've also been working on a series about what happened to the families of farmers and workers during the first Gilded Age and, while reading this book, couldn’t get them out of my head. All I'm saying is that Every Body Has a Story may be fiction, but I've not seen more reality in a novel in a long, long time.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

What Will Donald Trump Be Remembered For?
The World According to The Don(ald)

know you won’t believe me. Not now, not when everything Donald Trump does -- any tweet, any insult at any rally -- is the news of the day, any day.  But he won’t be remembered for any of the things now in our headlines. No human being, it’s true, has ever been covered the way he has, so what an overwhelming record there should be. News about him and his associates fills front pages daily in a way that only something like a presidential assassination once did and he has the talking heads of cable TV yakking about him as no one has ever talked about anyone. And don’t even get me started on social media and The Donald.

In a sense, like it or not, we are all now his apprentices and his transformational powers are little short of magical. Simply by revoking the security clearance of John Brennan -- who even knew that America’s deep-staters could keep such clearances long after they left government -- he managed to make the former Obama counterterrorism czar and CIA head, a once-upon-a-time “enhanced interrogation techniques” advocate and drone-meister, into a liberal hero; by attacking former FBI head James Comey, he turned the first national security state official ever to intervene in and alter an American presidential election (and not in Hillary Clinton’s favor either) into a bestselling, well-reviewed, much-lauded author; by his dismissive taunts and enmity in life and death, he helped ensure that Senator John McCain would have a New York Times obituary of such laudatory length that, in the past, it might only have been appropriate for someone who had actually won the presidency; with his charges and passing insults, he even proved capable -- miracle of all miracles -- of turning Attorney General Jeff Sessions into a warrior for justice.

Donald Trump is, in the most bizarre sense possible, a transformational figure, not to speak of the man who makes the “fake news” fake, or at least grotesquely overblown and over-focused. He has the uncanny ability to draw every camera in the house, all attention, blocking out everything but himself. Still, omnipresent as he is -- or He is -- take my word for it, he won’t be remembered for any of this. It will all go down the media drain with him one of these days. Don’t be fooled by newspapers or the Internet. They are not history. They are anything but what will someday be remembered.

Still, don’t for a second imagine that Donald Trump won’t be remembered. He will -- into the distant future in a way that no other American president is likely to be.

A Forgettable Presidency

Let me tell you first, though, what he won’t be remembered for.

He won’t be remembered for entering the presidential race on an escalator to Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World”; or for those “Mexican rapists” he denounced; or for that “big, fat, beautiful” wall he was promoting; or for how he dealt with “lyin’ Ted,” “low-energy Jeb,” and Carly (“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”) Fiorina, or the “highly overrated” Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle ("You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"). He won’t be remembered for that pussy-grabbing video that didn’t determine the 2016 election; or for the size of his hands; or even for those chants, still in vogue, of “lock her up.” He won’t be remembered for his bromance with Vladimir Putin; or his bitter complaints about a rigged election, rigged debates, a rigged moderator, and a rigged microphone (before, of course, he won). He won’t be remembered for his “stormy” relationship with a porn star; or even the hush money he paid her and another woman he had an affair with to keep their mouths shut during election season and thereafter, or his three wives; or the book of Hitler’s speeches once by his bedside; or the five casinos that, as a great “businessman,” he took into bankruptcy; or the undocumented workers he hired at next to no pay; or all the people he stiffed; or the students he took to the cleaners at Trump “University”; or the private airplane with 24-carat gold-plated bathroom fixtures he flew in; or those giant gold letters he’s branded onto property after property globally; or the way he promoted his own children and in-laws and their businesses in the White House; or the hotel that he built in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue and, once he entered the Oval Office, turned into a hub of corruption.

He won’t be remembered for the record crew of people who took positions in his administration only to find themselves, within a year or so (or even days), fleeing the premises or out on their noses, including Anthony Scaramucci (6 days), Michael Flynn (25 days), Mike Dubke (74 days), Sean Spicer (183 days), Reince Priebus (190 days), Sebastian Gorka (208 days), Steve Bannon (211 days), Tom Price (232 days), Dina Powell (358 days), Omarosa Manigault Newman (365 days), Rob Porter (384 days), Hope Hicks (405 days), Rex Tillerson (406 days), David Shulkin (408 days), Gary Cohn (411 days), H.R. McMaster (413 days), John McEntee (417 days), and Scott Pruitt (504 days). And White House Counsel Don McGahn was only recently tweeted out of office, too, with others to follow.

He won’t be remembered for the way more of his associates and hangers-on found themselves in the grips of the legal system in less time than any other president in history, including Paul Manafort (convicted of tax fraud), Michael Cohen (pled guilty to tax evasion), Rick Gates (pled guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators), Alex van der Zwaan (pled guilty to lying to investigators), Michael Flynn (pled guilty to lying to the FBI), and George Papadopoulos (ditto). With plenty more, it seems, to come. Nor will he be remembered for the number of close associates who turned on him -- from his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who once swore to take a bullet for him, only to testify against him; to the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, who had long buried salacious material about him, only to accept an immunity deal from federal prosecutors to blab about him; to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who did the same. Nor will The Don(ald) be remembered for his mafia-style language and focus (“RAT,” “loyalty,” and “flipping”), his familiar references to a mob boss, the way he clings to his personal version of omertà, the Mafia code of silence, or for being “a president at war with the law.”

He won’t be remembered for campaigning against the Washington “swamp” and, on arrival in the White House, creating an administration that would prove to be an instant swamp of personal corruption -- from EPA head Scott Pruitt’s $43,000 soundproof office phone booth, the millions of taxpayer dollars he racked up for a 20-person, full-time security detail, and the more than $105,000 he spent on first-class air travel (and $58,000 more on charter and military planes) in his first year in office; to the near-million dollars of taxpayer money Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price poured into flights on private charter planes and military jets; to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s $12,000 charter plane ride on an oil executive’s private plane, his nifty $53,000 worth of helicopter rides on the public dole, and his $139,000 office “door”; to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 office dining set. And that’s just to start down such a list (without even including the president and his family).

Nor will he be remembered for the sinkhole and stink hole of environmental pollution he and his crew are creating for the rest of us, nor for the estimated up to 1,400 extra premature deaths annually and “up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days,” thanks to his administration’s easing of federal pollution regulations on coal-burning power plants. Nor for “greatly increased levels of air pollutants like mercury, benzene and nitrogen oxides,” thanks to its push to relax air pollution rules of many sorts. Nor for the suppression of news about pollution science. Nor for drastic cuts to the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, lest it protect us against anything at all that corporate America wants to do. Nor for the opening of America’s waterways to far greater dumping of waste and pollutants, including mining waste. And that, again, is just to start down a list.

By the time he’s done, the swampiness of Washington and the nation will undoubtedly be beyond calculation, but that is not what history will remember him for. Nor, in the country that may already have outpaced the inequality levels of the Gilded Age, will it remember him for the way in which he and his Republican colleagues, thanks to their tax “reform” bill, have ensured that inequality will only soar in a country in which just three men -- Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos -- already have as much wealth as the bottom half of American society (160 million people). Nor will it remember the way Donald Trump reinforced racism and a growing tide of white supremacy (just the prerequisites needed for establishing a “populist” version of authoritarianism in the U.S.), including the “birtherism” by which he rose as a politician, his “evenhanded” remarks after Charlottesville (“very fine people, on both sides”), his implicit racial slurs, his obsession with black football players who take a knee in protest, his tweeting of a white supremacist conspiracy theory about South Africa -- for which former Klan leader David Duke tweeted his thanks -- and the rest of a now familiar litany.

Nor will the man who claimed in campaign 2016 that he could “win” better than the U.S. military high command (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do...”) when it came to America’s wars or get us out of them be remembered for having done neither. Nor for his urge to pour yet more tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and the national security state (even as he regularly blasts its officials).

And keep in mind that this is just to graze the surface of the Trump presidency -- and while all of it matters (or at least obsesses us now) and some of it will matter greatly for a long time to come, it’s not what history will remember Donald Trump for.

A Crime Against Humanity

On that score, the record is clear, in part because we are already beginning to live the very future that will remember Donald Trump in only one way. It’s a future that, at its core, has animated his presidency from its first days. Whatever else he thinks, says, tweets, or does, President Trump and his administration have been remarkably focused not just on denying that humanity faces a potential future of environmental ruin -- as in the term “climate-change denial” so regularly attached to a startling list of people in his administration -- but on aiding and abetting the disaster to come.

As everyone knows, Donald Trump is taking the world’s historic number one (and presently number two) emitter of greenhouse gases out of the Paris climate agreement. He is also, not to put the matter too subtly, a fossil-fuel nut, nostalgic perhaps for the polluted but energized American world of his 1950s childhood. From his first moments in office, he was prepared to turn his administration’s future energy policy into what Michael Klare has called, “a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies.” He has been obsessed with ensuring that the U.S. dominate the global oil market (think: Saudi America), saving the dying coal-mining business in this country, building yet more pipelines, rolling back Obama-era fossil fuel economy standards for autos and other vehicles, and letting the big energy companies drill just about anywhere from previously out-of-bounds waters off America’s coasts to Alaska’s protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In other words, every act of his related to energy reveals the leader of the planet’s “last superpower” as a climate-change enabler of a sort that once would only have been the fantasy of some energy company CEO.

This makes him and his administration criminals of a historic sort. After all, he and his cronies are aiming at what can only be thought of as terracide, the destruction of the environment of the planet that has sustained us for thousands of years. That would be a literal crime against humanity so vast that it has, until this moment, gone unnamed and, until relatively recently, almost unimagined.

In the wake of this summer, climate-change denial, however ascendant in Washington, is an obvious joke. You no longer have to be a scientist studying the subject or even particularly well informed to grasp that. As New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta put it recently, in covering the heat waves that have engulfed the planet, “For many scientists, this is the year they started living climate change rather than just studying it.” The rest of us are now living it as well.

The math is no longer even complicated. As Sengupta points out, 2018 is shaping up to be the fourth warmest year on record. The other three? 2015, 2016, and 2017. In fact, of the 18 warmest years on record, 17 took place in guess which century? For the lower 48 states, this was, May to July, the hottest summer ever; Japan had an “unprecedented” heat wave; Europe broiled; Sweden’s tallest mountain ceased to be so as its glacial peak melted; numerous fires broke out within the European part of the Arctic Circle; scientists were spooked by the fact that the oldest, strongest ice in Arctic waters started to break up; California, along with much of western North America burned amid air so polluted that warnings were regularly issued in a fire season that threatened never to end. The temperature set records at over 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 straight days in Oslo, Norway; over 91 degrees for 16 straight days in Hong Kong; 122 degrees in Nawabsha, Pakistan; and 124 degrees in Ouargla, Algeria. Ocean waters were experiencing record warmth, too.

And again, that’s just to start down a far longer list and but a taste of what the future, according to The Don(ald), has in store for us. Imagine, for instance, what the intensification of all this means: a California that never stops burning; coastal cities swamped by rising seas; significant parts of the North China plain (where millions of people live) made potentially uninhabitable thanks to devastating heat waves; tens of millions of human beings turned into the very people Donald Trump hates most: migrants and refugees. This is the world that our president is preparing for our grandchildren and their children and grandchildren.

So tell me that he won’t be remembered for his absolute, if ignorant, dedication to the taking down of civilization.

In other words, the one thing Donald Trump will be remembered for -- and what a thing it will be! -- is his desire to put us all on an escalator to hell; to, that is, a future of fire and fury. It could make him and the executives of the largest energy companies the greatest criminals in history. If the emissions of greenhouse gases aren’t significantly cut back and then halted in a reasonable period of time, the crime he is now aiding and abetting with such enthusiasm is the only one, other than a nuclear war, that could end history as we know it, which might mean that Donald Trump won’t be remembered at all. And if that isn’t big league, what is?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands.

On a Sinking Island, Climate Science Takes a Back Seat to the Bible

By David J. Unger, Grist

06 September 18

he good thing about science,” Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, “is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Your stance on gravity is irrelevant. Either way, if you step off a cliff, you will most certainly fall. Likewise your stance on climate change. If you live on an island in the middle of 18 trillion gallons of warming, expanding water, you’re eventually going to sink no matter what you believe.

Tiny, waterlogged Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia in Chesapeake Bay, is full of people of faith. They believe in God. Climate science, not so much. In recent years, they’ve garnered some media attention for the paradox of largely rejecting sea-level rise while simultaneously suffering its wrath. Earl Swift, an author of six previous books and a former correspondent for The Virginian-Pilot, immersed himself for the better part of two years with the 481 inhabitants of Tangier. His new book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, is part regional history, part crabber ride-along, part disaster narrative in slow motion.

At its best, Chesapeake Requiem is a meditation on belief and disbelief in an America shouting about fake news. Swift is unflinching about the catastrophe on the ground, but careful not to belittle the beliefs of those at the heart of the calamity. He works hard to move beyond fly-by descriptors like “quaint” or “lost in time,” which mainlanders often use to describe the isolated crabbing community. Instead, he penetrates a human community facing an existential threat in ways few of us can understand. They may not believe in a major factor of their own demise, but that doesn’t render their extinction any less real.

“We’ve actually got people sitting around debating whether these people are worth saving. How is that OK?” one islander tells Swift. “I don’t care if you want to call it erosion or sea-level rise or Aunt Sadie’s butt-boil. It doesn’t matter what’s causing it. The point is that this disaster is happening, and these people need help.”

Tangier’s situation is indeed dire. As if sea-level rise weren’t enough, the island has also long lost ground to erosion, and the entire region is sinking. Some 21,000 years ago, the Laurentide ice sheet stretched across the middle of the continent, its tremendous weight pushing down the earth below, while the ground around it curled upward. Now that the ice is gone, the land that seesawed up — including coastal Virginia — is seesawing back down. Scientists call it “glacial isostatic adjustment,” but to put it bluntly, the ground is falling while the water is rising.

Tangier, which Swift describes looking like “a board-flat green wafer just above the water,” will be uninhabitable by 2063, according to a 2015 study in Scientific Reports. The study’s lead author admits to Swift that the estimate was conservative. These days he puts the number of Tangier’s remaining years “probably closer to 25.”

“[I]f no action is taken, the citizens of Tangier may become among the first climate change refugees in the continental U.S.A.,” the 2015 report concluded.

This is not for a lack of proposals to save Tangier or at least delay its demise. The book charts decades of plans for jetties and seawalls — all scuttled by a lack of funding, calls for yet more studies, congressional distraction, or all of the above. Meanwhile, Congress has approved $1.4 billion to rebuild wetlands for nesting birds on a sinking island just 60 miles north of Tangier. The human population of that island is zero. Is it any wonder that these people are cynical about their own government?

Swift spends much of the book emptying crab pots with James Wyatt Eskridge, known simply as Ooker. Like many on the island, Ooker was born there, and his family has called it home since George Washington led the Continental Army in the Battle of Monmouth. In addition to his 50-plus years crabbing, Ooker has been Tangier’s mayor for the past eight. That makes him the go-to face of the island whenever CNN, The New Yorker, the BBC or any number of news outlets decide to mine the island for click-worthy quirks and contradictions.

Swift recounts a time Ooker appeared in a CNN town hall on climate change featuring the climate activist Al Gore. In a memorable exchange, Ooker asks Gore why — if the seas are indeed rising — he hasn’t he seen it in all his decades of working the Chesapeake Bay. “Our island is disappearing, but it’s because of erosion and not sea-level rise,” he tells the former vice president.

Rather than explain the individual imperceptibility of sea-level variations across decades, Gore instead answers with a parable. A man trapped in a flood rejects the help of passersby, insisting instead that “the Lord will provide.” When the man eventually dies and ascends to Heaven, he asks God why he didn’t provide, to which God insists that he did — in the form of the passersby offering their help.

It’s a powerful illustration of science and religion talking past one another — each side missing the other side’s relevance and meaning. The islanders felt that Ooker “won” the argument and that Gore had mocked their faith. (On Ooker’s crabbing shanty hangs an Ichthys — Jesus fish — and the words “WE BELIEVE.”) Swift offers readers a more nuanced take on the back and forth:

“The Lord has provided the islanders with minds for recognizing the danger that faces them. That might be the sum of what the Lord plans to provide them with, this time around. Denying that the danger exists — or expecting a miracle to chase it away — might not be what the Lord has in mind.”

There’s a difference between being saved and being saved, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Swift’s insight into the Ooker-Gore exchange is built on years of listening to both the science and the Sunday sermons at Tangier’s Swain Memorial. Swift, himself admittedly “no follower of organized religion,” employs his own imaginative faculties to behold the wicked problem of climate change in a way that Ooker might actually respect. (At least I hope so; it’s unclear if the writer shared his analysis of Gore’s parable with the crabber.) The coming decades will demand boatloads of that kind of empathy as more and more places like Tangier lose their battles to the sea.

At times, Chesapeake Requiem strays too far into tangents that distract from its important points. Swift isn’t the only writer to depict Tangier as a bellwether for how we handle climate refugees, and more hurried readers can get the gist elsewhere. Nevertheless, the book is a rich contribution to the growing genre of climate-science narrative nonfiction. Not just because Swift documents a culturally significant piece of America that will likely soon disappear, but also because he is trying to make sense of climate-change doubt in those with the greatest incentive to believe.

“We are here until he [God] says otherwise,” one islander tells Swift. At this point, even the science seems to agree that only a miracle could save Tangier.