We've Seen all this Before

In William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972, the author recounts how Hoover downplayed the Great Depression, and it sounded eerily like how Trump has downplayed the pandemic. Hoover looked on the depression as a public relations problem, and he treated it as a psychological phenomenon. Like Trump, he pretended the problem did not exist.

Specific statements made by Hoover sound just like Trump. In December of 1929, he declared that "conditions are fundamentally sound". Three months later he said that the worst would be over in 60 days. In May he said the economy would be back to normal by fall. In June he denied a request for a public works project, saying "The depression is over".

When men appeared on the streets selling apples, Hoover said that "Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples". When he was roundly criticized for this, he called his critics "unpatriotic". At one point he denied that people were starving, a demonstrably false statement which was promptly refuted by numerous journalistic reports.

Hoover's treatment of the bonus marchers which occupied Washington, D.C. in 1932 was especially despicable. He sent in the military to brutally drive them out of the city. Trump also wanted to use the military to combat the protesters in Portland and other cities, but he was unable to accomplish this, sending instead federal agents rather than troops.

And then there is the Joe McCarthy era. McCarthy's evil during his reign of terror far surpasses anything Trump has done. His lies destroyed many careers, and ruined many lives. People were blacklisted merely for being suspected of once being friends with a Communist sympathizer. How flimsy is that! And McCarthy had a 50% popularity, more than Trump has ever had.

The Douglas MacArthur sage is also informative. When Truman fired him, MacArthur had a 69% approval rating, compared to only 29% for Truman. Upon his return to the U.S., he gave a 34-minute address to a joint session of Congress, which was interrupted by applause 30 times. He was chosen to deliver the keynote address at the 1952 Republican convention.

But what is instructive is how fast MacArthur's star faded. Within ten days after his dismissal, his approval rating had already started to fall. He gave many political speeches to various state legislatures, but his hopes that the 1952 Republican Convention would turn to him for the nomination did not come to fruition, and after that little was heard from him. MacArthur had shown by his speeches that he was more interested in pursuing his private vendetta against Truman than in offering pertinent commentary on the issues of the day, and people grew tired of that. He lived out his last 12 years as a virtual recluse, holed up in the penthouse suite of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in NYC.

I was struck by a stat showing that by the end of November internet searches for "Donald Trump" had dropped to 1/8 of what they had been at the start of the month. His star is fading, and I expect (and hope) that once he leaves office he will fade just as fast as MacArthur and McCarthy did.