Donald Trump offered every adult American a bribe Wednesday night. If the Republicans keep the House and Senate during the midterm elections, Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” He proudly shouted this from the Dallas podium during the sparsely attended Republican midterm convention.
After Trump made this startling announcement, a Texas Republican I know texted me to say, “Tonight the United States of America is Dead. It is now the United Kingdom of Trump.”
I think he was proud of that.
Since the Hatch Act — which bars executive-branch employees from political activity — doesn’t apply to the president, and since the Supreme Court has ruled him immune for any actions he takes as president, nothing will happen to Trump for what ought to be a blatantly illegal action. I can only hope the American people recognize this for what it is, although many — including more than a few reporters — definitely won’t.
Earlier in the week, a wave of nostalgia washed over me as I walked away from the north gate press entrance to the White House before Trump left for his standup gig in Dallas.
Though I’ve been coming and going at the White House since the Reagan administration, it finally dawned on me how different things are today — and how many younger reporters have no idea how much we have lost.
The first time I saw the White House I was just a wee lad riding in a car with my father, who was acting as a tour guide as he drove the family through D.C. traffic in our powder-blue Pontiac station wagon. Dad was a bit of a history buff and I was on my first big trip away from home.
Previous to that excursion, the biggest trip I can remember making was driving 90 miles from Louisville to watch the Cincinnati Reds play at Crosley Field. I’m told I also traveled to New York when I was an infant, but I don’t remember that — nor the stain on a family friend’s sofa of a family friend for which my micturition and leaky diaper were reportedly responsible.
After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994, the government closed Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to vehicle traffic. I thought that change would be only temporary. I was wrong.
As Dad drove past the White House that bright sunny day in the summer of 1969, I had a funny feeling. The president was always in the news. The White House and the people who lived and worked there were larger than life. Then, suddenly, they were not. I waved as we drove by. There was the home and office of the man who ran the country. He worked from home, like my dad, an insurance salesman, did. The leader of the free world wasn’t all that different from us. He was just another guy living on a busy city street. My dad had just driven by his house.
It was what made America great, my dad said. “Anybody can be president. “They’re no different from anyone else. They’re just public servants.”
After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994, the government closed Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicle traffic. While that was good for pedestrians, it cut off the White House and symbolically severed it from public access — you could no longer drive by and wave. I thought that change would be only temporary. I was wrong.
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More than half the people alive in this country never had the opportunity I did, of simply driving past the White House. Over the years, public access to what was once deemed the “People’s House” has become increasingly limited. John Quincy Adams used to walk from the White House down to the Potomac and go swimming — often in the nude. Andrew Jackson once threw a party at the White House, and 10,000 Washington residents showed up to help themselves to whatever they could carve from a 1,000-pound block of cheddar cheese. The place supposedly smelled of cheddar for weeks afterward.
Public access changed again after 9/11. Security concerns dictated some of these changes, but it certainly doesn’t explain all of them — especially not those recently made by Trump in his never-ending quest to turn the People’s House into the Palace on the Potomac.
That’s how I felt Tuesday. Government cars were parked on the former thoroughfare of Pennsylvania Avenue. Banks of cameras and microphones. Lafayette Park was closed. There were fences everywhere. I tried to take a picture of the north face of the White House, as I’ve done dozens of times before. I was shooed away by uniformed Secret Service agents. The area, I was told, is “off limits.” Today I can’t even take a picture of the place I waved at from the back seat of my dad’s car.
Not too long ago Lafayette Park was alive with families, protesters, romantic couples, singers, mimes (shudder) and others. Now it’s “under renovation,” closed up and empty. It will soon get the same 13-foot-tall fence the White House got during the first Trump administration.
Now the separation is essentially complete. We have severed the White House from the public. It is fenced in and gilded, with literal gold. The president is now an elected king who openly offers to pay voters for their support. He conducts tours of the White House helipad while promoting a fertilizer brand on national television. He demands that we stop doing business with certain companies from Canada, decrying “communism” while acting like an old-school Soviet leader.
There are reporters covering politics these days who find all this normal because they’ve never seen anything else. The lack of transparency, the minimal communication and the demand for fealty is all that younger reporters know — and those with experience who know better are slowly squeezed out. Soon, within the next year or so, no one will be left reporting from the White House who actually knows how a free press is supposed to act.
There are reporters covering politics these days who find all this normal because they’ve never seen anything else. Within the next year or so, no one will be left reporting from the White House who actually knows how a free press is supposed to act.
If our current media knew that, we might question Trump’s dangerous and delusional rants about his actions on 9/11. His latest invented yarn of personal heroism places him in the dust of Ground Zero, putting his life on the line trying to save people before two firemen pulled him from the rubble and carried him to safety. Each telling of the story gets more dramatic. Soon he’ll tell us he carried dozens of people on his own back while personally defeating the terrorists. Or, more likely, he’ll just post an AI meme declaring it so.
My aching nostalgia isn’t limited to how the White House used to operate. I’m also nostalgic for politicians who acknowledged facts and reality.
Some say it was the 9/11 attacks that irrevocably changed America. But I don’t think the acts of terrorism did us in. It was our response to those acts. We’re less innocent, but we’ve become more brittle and more fearful. The hatred of Muslims in this country began after the Twin Towers fell, and has become so noxious today that people want to condemn the mayor of New York for wanting to attend the 9/11 commemoration. As an aside, I do like how Zohran Mamdani released documents showing that the administration of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani downplayed or withheld internal warnings about post-9/11 air quality, while publicly assuring residents and workers that the area was safe. Giuliani has been leading the charge to keep Mamdani from the commemoration.
The roots of hatred run deep in our country, and always lurk just beneath the surface. Black people didn’t earn their freedom until the United States had existed for almost 90 years. Women couldn’t vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Prejudice and racism were ingrained in the system until the Civil Rights Act became law in 1964.
That said, our social progress has been stymied since 9/11 as fear dominates every national action. Osama bin Laden knew he couldn’t defeat the U.S. outright. He wanted to turn us against each other. As we mourn the dead from 9/11 on the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack to ever take place on American soil, we have to consider if he succeeded.
Trump learned from that event. He learned to use our fear against us.
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In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. said that even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, he still worried about America. “It’s sick with racism still. A nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal. We’re still arguing that color of his skin determines the quality of his character.”
We can say the same today, and worse.
On the day I rode with my dad past the White House for the first time, about 10 percent of all Americans lived below the poverty level. Today one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the 10 percent who live in “poverty,” a term that’s now as questionable as anything Trump claims.
Poverty in the “richest” nation on the planet is defined at an annual income of $32,000 for a family of four, and $16,000 for a single person. The average rent and grocery bill is higher than that. If you can’t afford a car, gas, lights, water, healthcare, childcare, clothes, education, entertainment and you have no savings, you’re still considered as living above the poverty level.
In the cheapest states the annual cost of living for a family of four — without counting savings or entertainment — is estimated at slightly more than $100,000. It’s above $300,000 in the most expensive parts of the country. Now you know why Trump believes that the average American voter will eagerly accept his $5,000 bribe.
While we in the United States have never lived up to our ideals, we’ve always embraced the idea of progress. We wanted to get better. Often, we have tried.
But not anymore. Not now. With Donald Trump in the White House, we have abandoned any pretense of brotherhood and inclusion. We embrace greed, bribery, lies and bullying. We embrace racism and ignorance. Trump isn’t the problem; we are. If we didn’t buy it, he couldn’t sell it.
So my nostalgia isn’t just for what the White House used to be, or what politicians used to be. It’s for what this country used to represent, what we strived to be. The White House is and was a symbol of who we are.
Today it is a symbol of a people who still seem poisoned and embittered by an attack that happened a quarter of a century ago. It is a cold and lonely palace stripped of its humanity and its beauty; a gilded cage inhabited by a delusional lunatic who doesn’t understand why a government of, by and for the people is an important idea.
As we commemorate those who died on 9/11, we should rededicate ourselves to the ideals upon which this country was based, face the future united and throw off the chains of oppression that have led an elected public servant to think he can offer us a bribe to keep him in power.
This is supposed to be the United States of America, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. It can never be the United Kingdom of Trump.
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