I’m tempted to call Donald Trump – the future president of these United States – a Luddite. But that really wouldn’t be fair to Luddites.
After all, the popular view of the Luddites – that the 18th-century English hand weavers who adopted that name were people who didn’t understand and feared modern machinery and thus are a good symbol of contemporary ignoramuses – is completely wrong. The Luddites, in fact, understood modern technology only too well. And they knew that the wondrous new weaving machines they industriously smashed would put them out of business.
Trump, though, seems not to understand technology at all. At least not computers, as he vividly demonstrated while enjoying the holidays at Mar-a-Lago, his exclusive Florida private club.
First, he popped outside an ornate door with his good friend, erstwhile boxing promoter and convicted violent felon Don King (who was wearing multiple gold chains and, inexplicably, brandishing a large American flag). Trump apparently had a sudden need to share his feelings on computers with waiting reporters.
“I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it so nobody knows exactly what’s going on. . . . We have speed. We have a lot of other things. But I’m not sure you have the kind of security that you need.”
After we’d all had a few days to ponder those words – “nobody knows exactly what’s going on” pretty much does sum up our current situation – the president-to-be interrupted his New Year’s Eve celebration (a literal pay-to-play experience, with tickets to the lavish affair beginning at $575) to expound further on his view of life in the age of computers and speed and international spying.
Trump has expressed extreme doubt about the conclusion of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies – perhaps the biggest and best intelligence operation in the world – that Russia under Vladimir Putin’s direction hacked into American political operations and disseminated stolen information to influence the last election.
We should note that over the years the incoming president has shown an unnerving fascination with and even affection for the Russian despot, praising him as “tough” and a “strong leader.” Never mind that Putin is, as John McCain said in December, “a thug and a murderer and a killer and a KGB agent.”
And now our next president – for whom these same intelligence services will work in a few weeks – is denigrating them, fearing that Russia’s interference in our elections tarnishes Trump’s own victory. Well, yes, it does. But it does not mean he didn’t win. He did. He will be president. And he should stop being so thin-skinned and insecure. Insecurity is a scary quality in a man with the nation’s nuclear codes.
And for pete’s sake, why is he citing Julian Assange of WikiLeaks – which circulated the stolen files – as a credible alternative to the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus? Assange is an Australian expatriate who’s been holed up since 2012 in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid being extradited to Sweden for questioning about an alleged sexual assault, and Assange has made it plain for years that he views the United States as pure evil. He especially loathes Hillary Clinton – as does Vladimir Putin – Assange for her calling him a criminal who should face charges and Putin for her labeling his election rigged (which of course it was).
Republicans have been foaming-at-the-mouth angry about Assange and WikiLeaks for years. Trump himself suggested in a 2010 interview that Assange deserved the death penalty for his leaks! Now, apparently, he views him as an ally, and a lot of weak-kneed Republicans are afraid to disagree.
Consider all this background as we continue to contemplate Trump in Mar-a-Lago.
“I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove, so it could be somebody else,” he said. “I know things that other people don’t know,” he cryptically added. And he cautioned us all:
“You know, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by courier, the old-fashioned way. Because I’ll tell you what: No computer is safe. I don’t care what they say.”
He didn’t mandate writing it out with quill pens on parchment, but we sure got the drift. Along with images of the streets of Washington filled with armies of messengers cycling frenetically from the White House to Foggy Bottom to the Pentagon and Langley and back, along with platoons of topcoat-clad diplomats flocking to airports with attache cases discreetly chained to their wrists, a la some John Le Carre thriller.
DJT seems an old-fashioned kind of guy who maybe has seen too many movies. He’s fond of beautiful women – preferably young, buxom and not given to having opinions – and the values of the 1950s. He evokes the sanitized orderliness of Father Knows Best America as ideal and promises to return men to the coal mines and steel plants to earn their livings.
Trump grew up in the leafy tranquility of the New York City borough of Queens, far from mines and mills. I grew up under the sooty skies of Cleveland, when most men who worked in the steel mills – which were in fact like unholy infernos – did it so their children would have a better life and not work in those same mills. I suspect coal miners felt much the same.
Of course, Trump knows better than I – better than anyone, really – because, as he said last year, “I have a very good brain.”
In that case, he was being questioned about what experts he relied on for foreign policy advice. Well, he responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. . . . I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people. . . . But my primary consultant is myself, and I have a very good instinct for this stuff.”
But it’s not just foreign policy he’s mastered. He made it plain during the campaign that our new leader with the good brain knows more than just about everyone else about everything. The future commander in chief loudly proclaimed, for example, that he knows “more than the generals” about warfare. (Perhaps it was his grueling stint in a private military-style New York high school.)
He knows more about climate than climate scientists, more about trade, more about the economy, more about our national medical care system, more about every subject known to mortal man. Including, improbably, about computers, apparently because his 10-year-old son, Barron, “is so good with these computers, it’s unbelievable.” I expect Trump’s next move will be to put Barron in charge of the nation’s computer systems.
After all, despite promising working stiffs he’d “drain the swamp” in D.C., he’s now assembling a Cabinet composed mainly of influential billionaires (most of them elderly), generals (now he seems to like them), has-been politicians and right-wing ideologues from the fringes of the once Grand Old Party whose qualifications seem to be either a) that they know nothing about the department they’re being asked to run or b) that they hate said department. In some cases, both a) and b) apply.
It’s tempting to treat Trump as a joke, an inept and astonishingly ignorant blowhard with non-existent impulse control and an incredible ability to hold a grudge who was the beneficiary of a dramatically screwy election. And he is that. He’s also an appallingly ignorant 70-year-old man who not only doesn’t know much but doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, which is truly dangerous.
And he’s about to become the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, the person with ability to send young Americans to their deaths in foreign lands. His every word and gesture will be endlessly analyzed by the rest of the world. Not only democratically elected leaders but despots and tyrants – some with nuclear capability – will look to him and to his reckless tweets for their cues. His appointees will control the future fortune of the most humble of citizens. They will make decisions affecting who lives and who dies, literally.
It’s going to be a sad and scary four years.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)