With the movie Vice up for several Academy Awards and a trumped up “state of emergency,” it is time to compare the Trump and Cheney/Bush presidencies. What comes to mind is chaos vs. control. No, not KAOS vs. CONTROL as in the brilliant sixties spy send-up Get Smart. We’re talking Chaos and Control: the universal forces. While both Trump and Cheney may be power mad rightwing leaders creating change, Trump is chaos. Vice President Dick Cheney, whom the movie Vice portrays as (and many believe to have been) the true leader of the Bush presidency, is control. I have an emerging hope that, despite appearances chaos may be more beneficial to the democracy than control.
For one thing chaos = disruption, which we now value. We live in a time where Amazon, Uber and other highly successful companies celebrate their “disruption” of business as usual. Trump is the disruptive presidency. Could he be the chaos we need to disrupt the system of complacency, ignorance and lack of engagement? Surely the flaunting of separation of powers by declaring a fake state of emergency on the heels of a government shutdown is a major piece of that. You didn’t know the importance of separation of powers? Watch the president take your tax dollars away from something you value and use it to build a wall; didn’t know you needed the feds? Try getting food stamps, visiting a national park, getting your tax return, seeing a doctor, flying on a plane, during a government shutdown.
Let’s look at it more closely. Dick Cheney, the movie Vice reminds and educates us, systematically, methodically and quietly seized power in the Bush White House from the famously powerless position of the Vice Presidency. Cheney recruited and cultivated the theory of “unitary executive power:” a way to vastly expand the power of the executive beyond that of the other previously “co-equal” branches of government, legislative and judiciary. When Al-Qaeda attacked on 9/11, Cheney created, from that crisis, opportunity (as the overworked Chinese maxim recommends). Convincing Secretary of State Colin Powell to dissemble before the world about “weapons of mass destruction,” the Bush-Cheney team was able to justify the invasion of Iraq (instead of Afghanistan, which would have been the obvious choice), allowing their big oil buddies to get their greedy hands on long-desired petroleum fields.
Moreover, it seems that Cheney accomplished all this all fairly secretly, largely out of the public eye. The consequences of Cheney’s campaign for control were devastating. While US military casualties were low as wars go, it is estimated that Desert Storm killed close to 500,000 people in Iraq, including a high proportion of women and children. Nearly 100,000 Afghani people were killed. In the name of defeating “terror,” the Patriot Act was created to justify secret extra judicial procedures, indefinite detaining and torture of prisoners, as well as legalizing broad domestic surveillance of Americans.
Compared to now, no one noticed. Yes, the Bush-Cheney team was mocked, reviled and despised by Democrats and much of the world (how did the old joke about Cheney’s arrhythmia go? W was just a heartbeat away from the presidency?). There were, of course, protests. But it wasn’t like it is now: a fraction of the population noticed; a fraction cared; a fraction could tell you what was happening. Proof of this is provided by the re-election of Bush-Cheney.
Enter the chaos of the Trump presidency. Although posturing as another rightwing power mad leader, Trump gives no evidence of discipline, control, theories or system. “I have a gut,” he brags. “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” (The Art of the Deal).
I’m sure Dick Cheney, alive and well with someone else’s heart in his chest, sees that all this chaos could be put to good use for the rightwing. After all, Trump’s tweets, bleeps and blunders as well as the Mueller investigation are all a tremendous distraction. Any reasonable Control could use it as a slight of hand to shove through all the pieces of the conservative agenda that were still missing. And in some respects, this is occurring. Trump’s surviving appointees are doing their best to dismantle the Clean Air Act, protections for endangered species, civil rights protections, etc. And then there’s Brett Kavanaugh (although him we noticed).
But there’s also this: we are not at war. And, as the midterm congressional election demonstrated, many more people are paying attention.
There’s a spiritual element I haven’t spoken to that I want to unpack: as a human race at least in the west, we’ve been taught to fear chaos and change and to court control. But in the body, it is said that all diseases are control and cures are chaos. Cancer is, while it disrupts our lives, very systematic in how it builds and grows. And all our medical “cures” for cancer (basically cutting (surgery) burning (radiation) and poisoning (chemo) are chaotic. They are designed to disrupt the system of cancer and to make it break down and cease to grow and build on itself.
Prior to this presidency, we’ve been aware of a cancer growing in our body politic: that cancer is complacency, ignorance and lack of engagement. Cheney and his ilk exploited that cancer, encouraged it and grew it. Witness the elimination of the fairness doctrine which allowed Fox News to rise.