Is the President the Face of a Nation or Its National Identity?
There’s a bold difference between leadership and representation
This is another piece I wrote leading up to the election, but the point is every bit as relevant today.
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In about eighth grade I began to wonder whether Barack Obama was the leader who actually represented the face of our country. He was the president that both of my parents had voted for. And even while still half of a decade shy of walking into my first voting booth, I cheered beside them when he emerged victorious over John McCain in the 2008 election.
Obama wasn’t the perfect president, but he was charismatic and compassionate and capable and empathetic. He was thoughtful and measured and diplomatic and educated. He was a million and one things that my country was not.
He was an effective leader, but he wasn’t the leader of our consumerist, fast food-eating, Keeping Up With the Kardashians-watching, presidential debate-gamifying country.
Throughout Obama’s time in office, the clearer it became to me that he didn’t represent the America that I knew. By the time he was reelected, I was no less eager to see him defeat Romney and Ryan than I had been four years prior in his race against McCain and Palin, but I’d grown solidified by then in the idea that leadership and representation meant two separate things. There was the leader and there was the country.
Obama was a kind and conscientious president to have in power and even his opponents could frequently discern that he cared, as reticent as they may have been to acknowledge it. When school shootings took place, he toed the line between leader and parent.
Likely no moment from Barack Obama’s presidency stands out more to me than his response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The day it happened, our teacher stopped her lesson mid-class so that we could hear Obama address the horrible massacre that had just taken place. She projected his presidential briefing across the white board and we watched the president fight tears as he tried his best to muster pragmatism. Some of us were so numb to this horrible sort of update that our eyes glazed over. For others among us, the dams broke open.
We watched our president lay out a path forward for our country — a path that our politicians never heeded. By then, I knew that Obama was the sort of president I wanted to have for my nation. But I’d also begun to wonder how a country that could incur school shootings with such a grating regularity could elect such a sensible leader. I had trouble reconciling the two realities.
I had trouble believing that this country festering with “Tea-Bag” patriots — and that elected two George Bush’s and seriously ruminated over a vice president like Palin — could be so fortunate. It felt like an opportunity greater than what we deserved.
Donald Trump is a danger. But he’s a danger who better embodies our ills. He’s self-centered, materialistic, and brash. He’s gluttonous, apathetic, and impulsive. And he represents that part of us that would rather watch the game than learn about policy. He’s a stand-in for those of us who struggle to name as many constitutional amendments as they can The Simpsons characters. He’s that part of America that can’t be bothered to dig into the issues that ail us.
There’s nothing admirable about our national identity that Trump embodies, but he embodies part of us all the same.
Every time I go somewhere new, I see a country full of people grappling with the issues at hand at such a surface level that it scares me. It scares me how much of our population is so woefully disengaged from the issues that affect each of us that they would consider a vote against democracy itself. And in those people, I can’t help but see the country for which Trump wasn’t an aberration, but a foregone conclusion. The shameful culmination of centuries worth of degradation and the slow, systematic de-prioritization of knowledge and reason. The end result prophetically detailed in Idiocracy.
Trump’s continued viability as a candidate stands as a barometer of what our country has become. If he didn’t represent us — at least to a degree greater than many of us would like to admit — then he wouldn’t have a chance in this election to begin with. To much of the world, it’s an astonishing truth that an insurrection inciting felon could run for such a high office while comparable criminals within the very same country lack the right to vote at all. But that ugly truth illustrates where we stand. It brings our bizarre legal double standards into light and reveals the lows that a hundred million people are willing to entertain.
Trumpism may be no more than a cult of personality, but that such cults are possible in this country is an issue that runs far deeper than Trump. Trump’s Republican party may die with him, but we’ll still live in a country that’s so gloatingly uneducated that Trumps are possible. We’ll still live in a nation where it’s easy for bitter, vengeful charlatans to recite the same lies over and over and over until they’re believed and repeated by masses.
Before Trump’s rise to power, the groundwork for such a leader to thrive here had already been laid. We’re the country that tweets, watches Tiger King’s and Jersey Shore’s, and idolizes celebrities. To weaponize social media in the interest of attaining higher office was an end result so obvious that it was only a matter of time before some demagogue within the country attempted it.
For much of my life there had been a disconnect between our discourse and the leaders we elected. With few exceptions, there was a degree of dignity to the offices that these leaders held. They spoke with a political jargon that so often soared above the heads of the average American. And in Trump, many see a man more relatable.
In Trump’s inability to command vocabulary and policy in the same way as every one of his predecessors, many see a friend. In his Tweets that are so simple anyone could understand them, many mistake simplicity and approachability for transparency. They believe that a man willing to freely broadcast his mind to Twitter is above the deceptions that have riddled his campaigns for president, debate performances, and brief tenure in the nation’s highest office.
But even while there are aspects of Trump that people can find relatable, there’s no need for our national identity to remain defined by our vices. We’re capable of electing leaders who represent our better halves. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris each have their drawbacks. Some of them are notable. There have been times in their careers where they’ve reversed on issues. And there have been very real causes to review their records and question their decisions.
But throughout so much of our history, we’ve managed to elect leaders who’ve presented paths forward for our country. Sometimes the visions between our leaders have varied wildly. But never have they been colored by the fire and brimstone lunacy that we know we can reliably expect from Donald Trump. In the Republican and Democratic leaders of the past, there was a recurrent thread of idealism. There were periods when that thread thinned. Yet never has that thread been at such existential risk of snapping in two as it has been since Donald Trump entered into our politics.
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You have said the painful truth, and very eloquently.