TRUMP WAS ALWAYS THE HORROR HE IS –

How Did Trump Happen?

When I wrote the essay below & it was posted on Substack – I actually believed, as I wrote, that Trump might be an avatar of the similarly mad but once-in a-blue-moon capable of righteousness-- North Dakota Governor Langer, who saved my grandparents’ farm from foreclosure and paused the federal government and the banks from their destruction of a state agricultural economy.

I was wrong. Trump, though he is certainly crazy, has never been righteous or felt an ounce of compassion. There was never a tryst with “Lincoln’s better angels” on his calendar. Now the very notion seems laughable.

To read this earlier essay is to comprehend that Governor Langer, who had nearly as many flaws as Trump – as well as mirroring his extremism and criminality – had a human heart, had a brain, and courage – like the petitions of the original Wizard of Oz entourage.

Trump lacks brain power and compassion and he is a coward.

Now that he, like Langer, is back for a second term – this time Trump is without reasonable advisors keeping him in check – his unadulteratedly evil character has shown up, back like a giant poltergeist.

As bad as “Wild Bill” Langer was, he would never have moved aggressively against women’s rights, immigrant rights, the environment, universities and law firms -- the Constitution and our democracy. Trump is attempting to control the arts, the media and freedom of speech at every level.

And the Republicans (and his lunatic Cabinet and the stacked-sick Supreme Court) are all falling into line, kissing his bone spurs.

Read this former post again and weep.

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My mother watched her father drop the reins of the horses he’d just unharnessed under a sky dark with swirling clouds of dust. The horses galloped off as he trudged heavily toward a car that had just parked on the property. It was 1932, where a once-rich family farm now struggled to keep acres of dying crops from blowing away in drought winds – near the little town of Wyndmere, North Dakota.

Later my mother and her siblings overheard their father speaking in low tones to his wife, describing the driver of the car as a foreclosure agent from the Federal Land Bank. “We’re going to lose the farm”, he said. At midnight, my mother paused alone outside the bedroom where her mother sat, lips moving silently as she fingered her rosary beads, her head bowed, praying for a miracle.

The miracle came. The next day, the governor of North Dakota, William Langer, enacted a law protecting farmers from future foreclosures, along with an increase in the price of wheat. Dakota family farms were made safe from government eviction by his decree.

This story remains cinematic in my memory: the lowering sky, the blowing dust, the horses rearing up then galloping away, the Federal threat waiting in the car and my grandmother praying.

This family memory has also become a half-open window into the history of two states, North Dakota and Minnesota, as irresistible to me as viewing my parents’ marriage as a working cliché of incompatibility – she a lifelong Democrat and he a Republican from birth. They argued politics (and everything else) yet their marriage lasted over sixty years.

Yet comparisons go a bit beyond the wedded bickering of my parents or North Dakota and Minnesota in the Depression era – it reveals to me how Trump got re-elected in 2024.

After my mother and father met at a state college in Wahpeton, North Dakota they married, then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1940’s, where I was born later but grew up hearing the stories of their separate politics, how they cancelled each other out at the voting booth.

In my mother’s memoir of growing up in the Red River Valley, there was no mention that “Governor Langer”, savior of the family farm, was a Republican. Her parents came from immigrant stock – my mother’s people were from Czechoslovakia, progressive, Catholic, fiercely compassionate, Democrat.

My father’s mother was Norwegian and a conservative Republican, a gifted teacher with an advanced degree, a strict disciplinarian, a stolid Lutheran, suspicious of the welfare state, while his father was a scholar and failed entrepreneur, charming, a drinker, also Republican.

Characteristics of partisan politics end up passed along like proclivities from the gene pool – thus the biography of William (“Wild Bill”) Langer ends up sounding uncannily (almost biologically) like the con artist/politician Trump.

Langer was a Republican who could “talk Democrat” – when he needed to – thriving on embodying contradiction. He was governor of North Dakota, a libertarian state, opposed to all government interference. Its neighboring state, Minnesota, was progressive, its Democratic party officially known as the DFL, Democrat Farm Labor party, the heart of the prairie: farmers, laborers, teachers, activists.

Langer, as a Republican in a farming state knew his constituency and defended the farmer - along with the small business owner - against big banks, Wall Street and corruption in the nation’s capital.

But he knew his other constituents well. He spoke to their extreme isolationism, their hatred of all foreign wars, their rage against the United Nations and “Bolshevism”. His German and Scandinavian voters remembered the First World War with bitterness and distrusted America’s allies. His supporters championed non-interventionism, even U.S. involvement in World War II. Immigrants themselves, they feared immigration.

Langer ended up embroiled in scandal after scandal, including money-making schemes while in office - plus conspiracy to defraud the federal government. He stood trial and was convicted, a convicted felon.

Yet he was governor of North Dakota twice – his first term from 1933-34, ended up with his removal from office, charged with corruption. Despite this criminal history, he was re-elected governor from 1937 to 1939. He was enormously popular – progressive Democrats joined Republicans in re-electing him.

He identified himself as a Zionist supporter of Israel, yet later in his career as U.S. senator, lobbied on behalf of a reprieve for a top Nazi official, involved in the mass murder of Jews in Estonia.

My mother died at 99 in 2015, believing that Hillary would win the upcoming election. I didn’t know about Langer’s party affiliation when I arranged publication of her memoir at that time.

But did she know? She must have known who “Wild Bill” was?

I recognize now that the question is not solely about family history but what the appearance of political anomalies like Langer (and Trump) represent historically. These are men who operate outside their party’s norms and traditional platforms, rocking a populist disruptive version of governance based on the “savior” cliché -- the cult of personality.

I will never vote Republican but I keep thinking about this governor who answered my grandmother’s prayers.

My mother loved poetry and learned to recite pages of poetry and oratory like the Gettysburg address “by heart” in Elocution class. There was nothing elitist about poetry at that time. There were no graduate programs in Creative Writing. Ordinary people memorized great poems and quoted them in line at the post office (“They also serve, who only stand and wait”) I became a poet because I still hear my mother’s voice chiming “The world is too much with us.”

My father’s voice, however, was hard and unrelenting as he spoke out against the welfare state and “the public trough”, backgrounded by his own significant success in real estate. Growing up, I fought bitterly with him and the Republicanism that I believed had closed his mind.

My mother retained her belief in mercy mitigating justice and never forgot her mother handing out bread to hungry transients who came to the farm’s kitchen door during the Depression. And she never forgot Governor Langer – who crossed party lines and rescued farmers from transience.

What rough beast comes round (like poetic justice) to serve those waiting to be heard? “They also serve who only stand and wait”– but also worship the leader who does not stand quiet but speaks out for them?

“O Captain my Captain” – drew national tears as Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln - a great and noble Republican when the Democrats were the bad guys.

The parties have switched around, so who was Langer? And who is Trump? Lawless opportunists who manipulate an angry constituency and its sense of survival, or hucksters taking advantage of a political party in chaos?

Or politicians celebrating an occasional tryst with Lincoln’s “better angels” – moments of grace that look like a slate of answered prayers?

If an entire state or nation seems irrational in voting for one of these anomalies, it has less to do with the wild card who ends up elected and more to do with the manipulatable belief in political parties – as if being a Democrat or Republican could address the confusions of individual life. Or the spirit that animates our life’s choices, which we might call hope or change, but which really is that part of ourselves that is living contradiction.

We trust those who seem to care about us when we need it most. This guides us in love and marriage, as well as politics. We “stand and wait” but whom do we serve when we elect a reflection of our own confusion to serve us?

It is up to these parties to continually reform themselves to answer these questions – not with mindless rhetoric but with a thoughtful look at the “art of the possible.”

If all that is “possible” is the worst we can imagine for ourselves, there will be more Langers, more Trumps. The difference between the arbitrariness of the libertarian and the progressive has to do with how we see ourselves. And who we think can “save” us from ourselves? That’s the prayer that needs answering.

- Carol Muske-Dukes