Someone asked the other day what people could possibly mean when they refer to the good things Donald Trump has done for the country.
I cited for a quick example the front page of this newspaper that morning and the lead headline: "Trump inks executive orders [and] tackles payroll tax and jobless aid."
Many see that for what it is. Trump is making a political grandstand play to serve the re-election validation his megalomania requires. He is asserting powers he may not have, and should not have, and doing so dangerously considering that he is presuming autocratically to suspend the payroll tax that goes to Social Security and Medicare.
The manna could stay with employers rather than go to employees. And, unless paid back, it will inflict new and unnecessary stress on the programs on which our seniors rely.
But to those who think in broader superficial terms about the decline of our functioning government due to partisan nonsense as usual in the near-worthless Congress, and who see Trump as the best antidote available, the message of that headline is worth a point or two to Trump.
And that is to be added to the point or two he gets from new gun-owner fright arising from the New York attorney general's initiative to dissolve the National Rifle Association.
Pretty soon Joe Biden's big lead is smaller and momentum may be switching a little.
Trump is entirely a creation of our dysfunction and resentment. There is plenty of blame to go around for that, but it must start and largely remain with money-driven and consultant-directed hyperpartisanship in Congress.
They can hardly attempt anything important there unless they attach vexing unrelated issues into an omnibus bill giving everyone something to boast or whine about--and to accuse the other side of for attack-ad convenience come re-election time.
Loath though I be to say even a mildly approving word for our usually dismal Arkansas General Assembly, it remains functionally possible there for a single issue to be limited to a single bill for single consideration and a single vote and passed or rejected on that basis.
In the big time in D.C., Democrats and Republicans broke down last week on a second round of stimulus--allowing Trump to assume the despotic savior role--because, in one thick measure, they were arguing, among other things, about continuing vital unemployment benefits and the extent of additional money for state governments and whether the Trump administration is trying to strangle the U.S. Postal Service to impair voting by mail in November, which he thinks would ill-serve his megalomania.
All are deeply important issues. But they don't go together. People unemployed in a pandemic should not be denied benefits because Democrats are bothered that Trump seems to be trying to shut down the post office.
But these measures are put together by mutual partisan scheming so that each partisan side can come home and accuse the other of opposing help for the unemployed.
Trump gets to stride in and bellow that he's saving the day. As the essence of his political rise in the first place, such a pronouncement, though dubious, is the essence of what might sustain him even as most Americans now understand that he is a behavioral disgrace.
So is Congress, some of them will say, and be right.
Here's how things could work in a functioning and sane America: Republicans could argue for $400 on pandemic unemployment relief and Democrats could argue for $600, and they could split the difference at $500 and put that alone in a single measure and pass the damned thing--to help people, you know?
Then they could take up a single bill on new state assistance, and split that difference.
And then they could take up a post office bill and have that issue break down, of course, because that's about Trump's ego, which Republicans unrelentingly serve and Democrats unrelentingly resent.
With pragmatic functionality on two of three issues, the country would have a flow of stimulus and unemployment dollars and less need for a faux hero like Trump.
What can we do to change this dire state? We can only demand more, believe less of what we hear, and vote smarter.
The other solution, which is to install a European-style parliamentary system with multiple parties forced to form governing coalitions ... well, there are a lot of moving parts to rewriting our Constitution that much.
It would be a lot to ask of a society that can't even wear masks in a pandemic.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.