RUTHFULLY YOURS

I always found the literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) distinctly curate’s-eggish. You ask, “How is your egg this morning, curate?” “Good in parts,” comes the reply. But Bloom made one observation that stuck with me. Lots of literature, Bloom wrote somewhere, deals with the phenomenon of falling in love. But equally poignant is the story of falling out of love.

Bloom was thinking primarily of personal romance. However, the emotional dialectic he limned works itself out on the larger stage of political life as well. There is a certain mystery about both sides of the process. The public’s enthusiasms are as fickle as they are extravagant. What explains the infatuation with figures like Barack Obama? In retrospect, it is possible to offer more or less plausible explanations. Obama’s race, his smooth, non-confrontational manner, and his ability to dress up radical policy proposals in an emollient jelly of seeming common sense all help explain his political success.

Obama has occupied an enviable place in the magic circle of celebrity since his first election in 2008. It persisted through Donald Trump’s first term and for most of Joe Biden’s. There were signs that Obama’s star was fading during the later stages of Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign. Trump’s resounding victory on November 5 crystallized the eclipse. Speaking at a “Democracy Forum” last week, Obama attempted to wheel out his old standby: that Republicans were in the habit of “weaponizing” the DOJ and other institutions in order to steal elections and cement their hold on political power. “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power,” he said, “ either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

There was a time when Obama might have gotten away with such antics. Not anymore. His blatant act of projection was instantly called out and ridiculed. Quoting the remark, Miranda Divine spoke for the Zeitgeist when she observed that “It’s over for Obama. The spell is broken. Donald Trump vanquished him, Biden, Harris, the Bushes, and the Cheneys. All of them, with a spring in his step.” The commentator John Gibson offered a pithier précis of Obama’s comment: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did, and they must be stopped.”

Remember when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize not for anything he did but merely for existing? (And for not being George W. Bush.) Those days are long gone. The age has fallen out of love with Obama and all that he embodies: the woke racialism, the imputation of white guilt, the suspicion of the free market and American power, the active “suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

What spoiled the romance? In one word, Trump. His victory ended the Obama playlist and queued another featuring the MAGA classics.

A longer version involves the mournful alchemy of projection.

Psychologists define “projection” as the attribution to others of attitudes or behaviors that belong to oneself.

A bully blames his victims for being overbearing and peremptory.

A swindler accuses an innocent mark or rival of engaging in the same dishonest behavior he himself is practicing.

Here’s a real-life example: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

That’s a tweet from Hillary Clinton, dated Oct. 31, 2016.

In the lexicon of psychopathology, I suppose that “projection” is generally held to be un- or only semi-conscious. In the realm of criminality, of which our politics, alas, has become a subset, the behavior seems to be deliberate, if also angrily defiant.

Item: What do you mean by wipe a computer server? “Like with a cloth or something?”

Earlier this year saw John Bolton, Trump’s terminally disgruntled former National Security Advisor, performing his own version of the Obama shimmy.

“There are,” he wrote, “clear dangers to a second term for Donald Trump.”

Like what, John?

“For one, he has made it known he will seek retribution against his political enemies using agencies like the Justice Department. It’s certain Trump has plans to repeatedly cross lines that will cause conflict, often constitutional conflict.”

Imagine a president of the United States weaponizing “agencies like the Justice Department” to harass his political opponents! Whoever heard of such a thing?

Well, there are the 1,200 or so people who have been targeted by the DOJ for hanging around the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

And, believe it or not, the DOJ is scurrying to put as many people behind bars before Trump takes office on January 20 and calls a halt to this malevolent charade.

As I noted above, if you’re a psychologist, most examples of projection are un- or semi-conscious.

In the realm of politics, which means in the realm of political warfare, there’s also a large current of obvious mendacity at work.

One of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue, in the 2024 presidential election is the southern border, by which I mean the lack of a southern border.

In the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, it was the No. 1 concern.

And, of course, for the poor states abutting the line that technically divides the United States from Mexico, concern about the flood of illegal immigrants coming is a white-hot existential concern.

Who is to blame for this situation?

According to President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump is.

When someone explained to the president that people didn’t like the fact that millions of noncitizens were being welcomed with open arms and were, moreover, being showered with all sorts of goodies paid for by U.S. taxpayers, Biden suddenly said, yes, the open border is a problem, but “the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump.”

The numbers don’t exactly support the president’s claim.

In 2023, there were 2,476,000 illegal border crossing encounters; in 2022, there were 2,379,000; in 2021, there were 1,735,000. In 2020, the last year of Donald Trump’s administration, there were 400,000.

If you think those numbers are a problem for the Biden administration, you underestimate the extent to which the public can be acclimatized to lies.

As another important person noted, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

There was a caveat to this declaration, however.

Success depends not only on the size of the lie or the frequency with which it is repeated. In the realm of mendacity, repetition, to succeed, also requires repression.

“The lie can be maintained,” that astute rhetor observed, “only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie.”

How long will the United States coast be free from the “political, economic, and/or military consequences” of the untrammeled illegal immigration it has been subject to?

The jury is out on the timetable. But there’s an increasing consensus about the dismal long-term effects.

The people have awakened to that reality, to the fact that millions of illegal immigrants translate into millions of new leeches on the economy, millions of people set to displace American workers for scarce jobs.

That same authority I have been quoting, one J. Goebbels (1897–1945), understood with penetrating clarity what had to happen if the lie was to prevail.

“It thus becomes vitally important,” he wrote, “for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

The Gospel of St. John assures us, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

It’s a syllogism-like process that assumes a conditional if–then statement.

If you know the truth, then the truth will set you free.

Our masters in Washington know this.

Hence their adoption of the apparatus of repression, just as that other Joe said they should do.

Donald Trump and his team are set to dismantle that apparatus. The public understands this, which is a major reason the romance with Obama and everything he represents has faltered.