Former President Donald Trump’s enablers are a recurring nightmare. Just when we begin to forget them, they reappear as if deliberately to taunt us and haunt us.
My book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, was about followers, specifically Trump’s. Those at a greater remove, including his base. And those up close and personal who were the president’s enablers, who on a regular basis facilitated and sometimes even exacerbated his bad behavior. They consisted of rather a large cast of characters, including some well-known names such as Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president; Lindsey Graham, long term Republican senator and short-term Trump toady; Jared Kushner, Trump’s serf and son-in-law; and Mark Meadows, Trump chief of staff and fixer in chief.
They also included members of the media, most regularly and visibly at Fox News. And, since I was writing about the year that was the worst of the pandemic, they also included some who worked at the C.D.C., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is this twofer, some of whom were well intentioned but all of whom were enablers, who reappeared this week to remind us of how complicit in Trump’s wrongdoing were so many who could so easily have done otherwise.
We now know that at Fox were two different scenarios, one private, one public. Because Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox for defamation, information came out that made clear that some of the network’s biggest stars and highest paid executives did not for one moment believe Trump’s claim that he had won the 2020 presidential election. Did they however go public with what they knew to be true? They did not. Instead, they pandered to the president as they pandered to his crowd, their viewers who they did not want at all costs to alienate.
This week it also came out that some C.D.C. scientists were in despair as the agency squelched their Covid-related alerts and research. “All of us knew tens of thousands were going to die, and we were helpless to stop it,” testified one. Said another, “I’m [still] angry about this every day.” As the New York Times reported it, these scientists were not alone. Many at the agency reported their sense of frustration and powerlessness had led them to seek therapy or to turn to medication to “cope with their frustration and disillusionment.”
Because we do not teach or even discuss how to follow wisely and well, we foster a culture of silence in situations such as these, in situations in which a bad leader has a stranglehold. If groupthink prevailed at Fox, at the C.D.C. was the widespread sense that no one had the power or maybe even the right to speak up and speak out.
By failing to educate our young people that there are times when they ought to take a stand, and when they ought to speak truth to power, we are failing ourselves.