Donald Trump’s Uncle Joe Moment

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty)

IT WAS ALREADY ONE of the most clownish (if sinister) moments in the Trump administration—the Department of Justice actually brought criminal charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for sabotaging the president’s big, beautiful, reflecting pool. It then dropped them for legal reasons that amounted to: We screwed up.

But now we learn that Trump can’t let it go. The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is pressuring the DOJ to revisit the case. Wonder if Todd Blanche will “talk the president out of” it. (Just kidding.)

This is Trump’s America. Hearn was cycling around the D.C. monuments and stopped to examine the very-much-in-the-news green swamp. The next thing he knew, he was being charged with felony vandalism. Just pause there for a second. This is police-state stuff. Don’t let the fact that it was a false accusation about a fake offense regarding a trivial matter distract you. On one level, it seems cartoonish, but Hearn and three others were charged with real crimes (three misdemeanors and one felony). They had to get lawyers. One lost his job after his arrest and was forced to move out of his home. All of this because the Dim Leader was embarrassed when his pet project went wrong.

Hearn reached his hand into the water, according to Trump’s post, and transformed Trump’s expensively renovated “American flag blue” pool into a green, slimy mess with pieces of lining floating to the surface. That’s some hand. Or did he sneak in under cover of darkness with a huge knife and make a 300-yard gash on the bottom of the pool? Trump didn’t say. He was in tantrum mode and remains there.

Vandals! They are making me look ridiculous. They must pay.

Every day that passes brings Trump closer to the Captain Queeg of The Caine Mutiny. Queeg ran over his own tow cable, had a nervous tic that involved ball bearings, and was obsessed with his stash of strawberries, but he was at least able to command a ship, which is more than can be said of the president.

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THERE ARE DARKER PARALLELS, TOO. Failing leaders often seek scapegoats. Idi Amin blamed Asian immigrants for his nation’s woes. The Ottomans blamed the Armenians for their poor showing in World War I. The focus on vandals, though, suggests no one more than Josef Stalin, who invented a whole category of crime, “wrecking,” to deflect blame for his idiotic economic catastrophes. Trump is no Stalin—he’s not as smart, for one thing. But he would surely have no moral qualms about Stalin if the old monster were around today. Trump would probably describe him as a “tough guy” who gets results. No trouble about trials, just execute suspected criminals. Trump has praised China and the Philippines for precisely this, and in the Caribbean is carrying out that vicious policy on suspected drug smugglers (or anyone in a boat). Trump would have admired Stalin’s “strength.”

Just as Trump’s own incompetence caused the reflecting pool renovation to fail, Stalin’s own policies—forced collectivization of agriculture, hyper-rapid industrialization, and rigid five-year plans—caused whole industries and sectors to fail. Scapegoats were required. Thus began the “wrecking” trials. Were mines having explosions? Arrest the engineers! Were there high rates of industrial accidents? Arrest the “saboteurs”! It began in the Donbas region of what is now Ukraine, where Stalin’s henchmen arrested fifty-three mine engineers and managers and charged them with conspiring with the exiled and expropriated former owners to wreck the Soviet economy. Nikolai Krylenko, the prosecutor, accused them of “spoiling machinery, undermining the revolution’s fuel supplies, inveigling the Soviet government into wasteful expenditures; preparations to destroy the coal industry as soon as war or intervention started.” Seven got the death penalty. They were the first of hundreds of thousands (millions more would perish for other political crimes in the Gulag). Stalin used the trials to redirect public anger about hunger and shortages, but also to undermine and eventually eliminate his political rivals.

And while we’re on the subject of Stalin, there’s another aspect of late Trumpism that resembles the Communist dystopia—the anti-science mania. Trump just issued an executive order on childhood vaccines that rivals Stalin’s embrace of Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko was an agronomist who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of his own theories—which happened to fit better into the Communist Party’s concept of how the world works. He argued that acquired characteristics (like resistance to cold) could be inherited. If that were true, agricultural yields could be doubled or tripled or quadrupled in just a year or two. Lysenko framed his theories in Communist jargon, denouncing Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois.” He denounced American scientists who relied on fruit flies for research (due to their extremely short lifespans) as “fly lovers and people haters.”

Stalin, and later Mao, swallowed this lie whole and imposed it upon hundreds of millions of Russians and Chinese. Anyone can make a mistake, right? Except this politicization of science led to the worst famines in the twentieth century, condemning tens of millions to slow starvation.

Trump’s attacks on vaccines are very much in the same spirit, utterly divorced from reality and capable of causing great suffering (though not on the scale of Russian and Chinese famines).

We don’t yet know how many more Americans will face the loss of their liberty due to the perversion of the Justice Department under Todd Blanche. We do not know how many children will die of completely avoidable diseases due to the state-imposed quackery of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump. But we do know that as Trump prepares to denounce the Democrats as Communists in the leadup to November, few resemble them as much as he.