THERE WAS AN ERA IN WHICH THE COUNTRY SEEMED CAPABLE OF DISTINGUISHING its policy battles from its cultural clashes; a time when not every newsworthy development, political or otherwise, was filtered through our preexisting worldviews; a recognition that people were defined far more by their personhood than by their party affiliation.
The appetite for this climate remained, as evidenced by the gusher of warm-and-fuzzy responses to the unlikely friendship struck up by George W. Bush and Michelle Obama.
But those days when the default was not to distrust peoples’ motives—when the notion of self-selecting into tribes that lived in the same places, shopped at the same stores, and watched the same news shows would have been preposterous—those days were gone.
More enduring than Trump’s appointment of judges, or his signing of a tax law, or his deregulating of the energy industry, would be his endorsement of America’s worst instincts. The levees were leaky long before he descended his gilded escalator, and certainly other bad actors contributed to the breakage. Yet it was Trump who used his office to flood the national consciousness with fear and contempt, with suspicion and resentment, with ad hominem insults and zero-sum arguments. In so doing, he not only enslaved one half of the country to his callousness, but successfully bade escalation from the other half, plunging all of America and its posterity deeper toward perdition.
Hollywood, naturally, couldn’t help but overplay its hand. Its leading men and women lectured on matters of morality while enabling the vilest of predators in their own industry. Comedian Kathy Griffin, the cohost of CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage, posted an image of herself holding the fake, bloodied, decapitated head of Trump. Actor Johnny Depp asked aloud of one audience, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” At award shows and galas and film festivals, the pilots of pop culture took turns savaging the president—and, his supporters felt, themselves by extension—in ways that further exacerbated the country’s circular firing squad.
Americans were so cantankerously immersing themselves in extraneous debates that the line between reality and parody began to blur. One such dispute broke out over the toxic masculinity addressed, and possibly exaggerated, in an ad from Gillette, the iconic shaving company. (To the future archeologists picking through the ruins of our society, yes, this actually happened.) Inverting the company’s traditional slogan from “The best a man can get” to “The best a man can be,” the razor empire earned tens of millions of views and sparked a social media cacophony with a spot calling on the male species to evolve. No more bullying. No more whistling at women. No more laughing at sexual humor. And no more . . . boys wrestling with each other in the backyard?
The American fireworks of social indignation were loud and lucent but short-lived, never allowing the aggrieved masses to linger on any given outrage. Sure enough, quicker than you could dial the Dollar Shave Club, a fresh controversy was engulfing the country. It had the three ingredients of a kiss-your-fingertips cultural casserole: race, testosterone, and Make America Great Again hats.
On the evening of Friday, January 18, video emerged online of a strange confrontation from earlier that day. On the site of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, a group of white teenagers, many of them clad in the president’s iconic red baseball caps, encircled an old Native American man. His name was Nathan Phillips. As he sang and beat his drum, the kids whooped and chanted and danced. The video focused on one of them: Sixteen-year-old Nick Sandmann stood across from Phillips, their eyes locked on one another, Sandmann wearing a mysterious smirk.
Not long after, a second video swept through social media, this one of Phillips describing the events thereafter. “As I was singing, I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall! Build that wall!’” the Native elder said on camera, his voice choked with emotion. “This is indigenous land. We’re not supposed to have walls here.”
Judgments of the junior Klansmen were expeditious. By the next morning, America was ablaze. Not since Charlottesville, it seemed, had a story amassed so much attention in so little time. Click-hungry news outlets blasted out reports of the persecution, stressing how Phillips, a Native American and a Vietnam veteran, had been accosted by a gang of MAGA-clad teens, while a chorus of celebrities, journalists, politicians, and combinations thereof delivered their damning verdicts.
CNN’s chyron called attention to the “Heartbreaking Viral Video,” while the New York Times published a story headlined, “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March.”
The only problem: Nathan Phillips was lying. Nowhere in the hours of footage reviewed by hundreds of journalists could any of the teens be heard saying, “Build that wall!” And it turned out, he was not a Vietnam veteran, a fact that punctured his other principal claim to sympathy.
As more reporters actually did their job, it became obvious that the Covington Catholic kids had gotten screwed. Video clearly showed that, contrary to being racially charged predators, they were the ones preyed upon. The incident had begun with a confrontation between two other groups: Native American activists and members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, an extremist sect and known hate group. As the Covington students looked on, one of the Black Hebrew leaders started calling them “dirty-ass crackers” and threatening to “stick my foot in your little ass.” The provocation escalated, all of it one-sided: Black Hebrew members hurled vile insults at the teenagers, calling them “incest babies” and “future school shooters,” while mocking the pope (“faggot child-molester!”) and Trump (“Your president is a homosexual!”)
Granted permission by their chaperones to perform school-spirit chants in the face of the spewing hatred, the lads partook in some synchronized hooting. It was at this point that Phillips, trailed by his fellow indigenous activists, entered the fray, marching toward the students and pounding on his drum. When he came toe to toe with Sandmann, the sixteen-year-old did not move but merely stared straight ahead, wearing the smirk seen ’round the internet. Maybe he meant to intimidate Phillips; perhaps he was just paralyzed by the strangeness of the moment. Either way, the teenager showed zero sign of outward aggression. None of these facts mattered. Most of the do-gooders who impugned Covington Catholic and its students offered no apology. The fire-and-brimstone tweets would remain active, a testament to America’s unapologetic rush to judgment circa 2019.
It was all so uniquely Trumpian, a supposed atrocity so perfectly suited to the politics of his reign, that the serendipity went largely overlooked.
The president’s ascent had been invited by the right’s unresponsiveness to outrage; his ability to get away with political murder owed to the left’s gratuitous cries of wolf. Now, nearly one month into a government shutdown, America spent the weekend of January 18, 19, and 20 fixated on faux prejudice by some teenagers while the president of the United States was peddling the real thing.
THAT FRIDAY MORNING, HOURS BEFORE THE COVINGTON CATHOLICS came across the Black Hebrews, Trump fired off a tweet: “Border rancher: ‘We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal.’” Linking to a story from the Washington Examiner, the president annotated his tweet thusly: “People coming across the Southern Border from many countries, some of which would be a big surprise.”