I would like to be working right now, at 4:41 Thursday afternoon on the 30th of January in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Five. I was working on the plan for a course for next semester earlier, I have essays for a collection to edit, I have some prep to finish for tomorrow’s seminar–but I watched this and now I just can not.
I’ve spent the last two days (doing my job and) watching RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard lie, misrepresent, and conspiracy-theorize their way through their confirmation hearings. It’s really hard to watch. Watching eight minutes of this video was somehow much worse. This was watching the country be destroyed in real time.
The great thing about millions of your fellow citizens electing a bullshitter who’s also filled with hate and completely lacking shame is that it brings you moments like the one I just watched, in which the chief executive of a nation of what, 330-something million people clumsily tries to blame a still-fresh, un-investigated, bodies-still-in-the-water air disaster on either the federal government and/or an airline hiring someone not white and male without even the thought of providing a shred of evidence of anything, really.
Before I watched this, I was in a Zoom meeting where colleagues across the country worried that students at their schools are scared to leave their dorm rooms to go to class because the Bigot in Chief has turned ICE into his own private deportation police, and then I had the privilege of watching him affix his comically narcissistic signature to an “executive order” ordering his transportation secretary (a former star of The Real World: Boston, of course) to stop hiring anyone but white men. He referred repeatedly to the importance of having people in these jobs with “large brains,” “the most competent people,” not “people there for any other reason.” Then questions from the press gave him the opportunity to speak ignorantly and hatefully about tariffs against Canada and Mexico, about putting deportees in Guantanamo Bay (“there are countries that won’t take back their criminals that they sent in to us”) and about his attempts to persuade Jordan to take displaced Palestinians (“They’re gonna do it, okay–we do a lot for them and they’re gonna do it”). Another question gave him the opportunity to show that he couldn’t remember the date by which he said federal workers had to be back in the office or be fired (“if they’re not going to come into the office and report as per the date that you know what it is, everybody knows what the date is, it’s been very well documented”).
He’s got one of the most important jobs in the world. He is not the most competent. He is not in possession of “the best brain.” He is an ignorant, uncurious bigot. His remarks demonstrate that he has no idea what he is talking about and has no interest in having one. The best part: when asked if he’d spoken to families of crash victims, he said, “I don’t want to uh comment on that” (so, okay, that’s a no) and when pressed about going down to the site, he said, “I have a plan to visit, not the site, because uh what is, you tell me, what’s the site, the water, are we going to go swimming.”
Are we going to go swimming.
This country is rich with people who serve others, who believe in and devote themselves to work that helps keep people safe or healthy, that teaches them, feeds them, aids them in organizing their communities, their towns, their lives, and who don’t enrich themselves doing it. A man who can make a joke like this, if that’s what it was, or can this heartlessly dismiss the notion of visiting the spot where the planes went down, five miles from his home and office, is not a man who has it in him to perform public service. He doesn’t believe in it and he would never devote himself to it. I am sure he thinks that real public service, like serving in the military, is for suckers. We know this. We know who he is. But sometimes seeing a concrete example of it like today’s can still bring you up short. He’s not there for us. Any of us. And sometimes it seems worth it to just say it out loud. And then get back to work.
Samuel Cohen 