Chuck’s Reviews > A Promised Land > Status Update

Ws that unity of effort, that common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? …We could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how much work I had left to do.

The day after…my daily batch of 10 constituent letters contained [one] from a young woman…who’d been four years old at the time of the attacks…her dad had been in one of the Twin Towers when it fell and had called to speak to her before it collapsed… Although nothing could change the fact of his absence, she wanted me and [everyone involved]…to know how much it meant that America hadn’t forgotten him.

[Trump] was a spectacle, and in the USA in 2011, that was a form of power. Trump trafficked in a currency that, however shallow, seemed to gain more purchase with each passing day… far from being ostracized for the conspiracies he’d peddled, he in fact had never been bigger.

As the students and their parents cheered, many of them waving American flags…I thought about the country I’d just described to them- a hopeful, generous, courageous America, an American that was open to everyone… For their sake more than mine, I badly wanted it to be true.

I was once again reminded that so much of what really mattered in government came down to the daily, unheralded acts of people who weren’t seeking attention but simply knew what they were doing and did it with pride.

Trump understood instinctively what moved the conservative base most, and be offered it up in an unadulterated form… I knew that the passions he was tapping, the dark, alternative vision he was promoting and legitimizing, we’re something I’d likely be contending with for the remainder of my presidency.

[Trump] had figured out that whatever guardrails had once defined the boundaries of acceptable political discourse has long since been knocked down. In that sense there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They too understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true. The only difference… was Trumps lack of inhibition.

More and more, I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin…had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center- an emotional, almost visceral reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.

Some of the same Republicans who had demanded that I intervene in Libya had decided that they were now against it… [they] seemed unembarrassed by the inconsistency. Effectively, they were putting me on notice that even issues of war and peace, life and death, were now part of a grim, unrelenting partisan game.

My time had been absorbed by just trying to keep the circumstances of the poor…from worsening: making sure a global recession didn’t drastically drive up heir ranks or eliminate whatever slipper foothold they might have in the labor market; trying to head off a change in climate… or in the case of Libya, trying to prevent a madman’s army from gunning people down in the streets.