Déjà vu all over again

Though he surely does not know it, Donald Trump’s U.S. approval rating today is the same as the U.S. approval rating of the Vietnam war after the Tet offensive of 1968 — around 35%.The Tet offensive, for those too young to remember, was the first nationwide offensive the National Liberation Front carried out against U.S. forces and our South Vietnamese clients. (Viet Cong is a pejorative term in Vietnamese; they are objectively known as the NLF.)During the monthlong assaults, the United States suffered at least 9,000 dead, 35,000 wounded and 1,500 missing in action. Vietnamese civilian losses were far greater, though the true number is impossible to know, as the U.S. “Mission” counted any dead Vietnamese as a Viet Cong.After the long offensive, which created at least 630,000 refugees, U.S. policymakers called it a victory.(Hard to believe? See Frances FitzGerald’s 1972 history, “Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.” Still the best overall history of that U.S. war, she delivered the manuscript in 1971 and it won a Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Award and a National Book Award in 1972. And even in 1971, four years before the was officially ended, FitzGerald foresaw the U.S. defeat, the terrible toll it took, and the loss of U.S. “face” around the world.)Key to the U.S. defeat was that U.S. policymakers, by and large, knew nothing of Vietnamese history and the Vietnamese people. And to the extent that they were offered a chance to know, they didn’t want to.For instance, after the Tet offensive, in a six-month period in 1968-69, the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division reported 11,000 enemy killed and 700 weapons captured. Asked how he knew that 10,300 unarmed people were communists, a U.S. officer said, “They’re dead, aren’t they?”The reason the United States lost faith in presidents Johnson and Nixon, and the war itself, is the same reason Americans have lost faith in Donald Trump: dishonesty, corruption, incompetence, swagger disconnected from ability, and isolation of political leaders from the population at large.Here’s a quick quiz: Which issues are more important to Americans:A White House ballroomThe price of beef“victory” in the Strait of Hormuzthe cost of housingcreeping socialism (we don’t count Social Security, Medicare and Medi-Cal as socialism)how to find a good jobpreserving Yosemite National Parkslicing off a bit of it for a wealthy developerConsider the Phoenix program, a precursor to Trump’s ICE raids. The CIA-led program set a quota of 20,000 NLF members to be “neutralized” in 1969. Sure enough, the GVN reported 19,534 NLF agents “neutralized” that year. At least one-third of them were simply murdered, though the law permitted only their arrest and detention. There are no accurate reports on what happened to the others, though torture was common.We claimed the Phoenix assassinations targeted only “hardcore” NLF cadres, just as Trump set a quota of so many thousand ICE arrests per month, to be directed at “the worst of the worst,” though the great majority had no criminal charges pending against them.And just as anti-war protests led to the killing of four unarmed students at Kent State, with nine others wounded, in 1970, and even more protests, the killings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Texas, Virginia, Maine and elsewhere added fuel to anti-ICE protests nationwide.Also parallel is the falsification of history, both of the past and as it unfolds. Trump, for example, has ordered the deletion of nearly 400 U.S. databases, many of them involving health, education and the environment.FitzGerald wrote: “The circle of self-interest created a circle of self-deception that began and ended in the office of the President of the United States.” A corollary was a fiery resentment against anyone who dared to break that charmed circle. And for all his lies and false claims, Trump is surely the most resentful man in the United States.So we end up where we began, with ignorance calling the shots, and resentment loading the weapons.Frances FitzGerald, now 85 years old, surely did not write “Fire in the Lake” 55 years ago in response to a coddled, libertine draft dodger, but the parallels between our national destructive blindness in Vietnam and Trump’s war against his own country are obvious.I could go on, but let me close with a trick we’ve tried before: “In 1965 Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested that the United States government simply announce that it had won the war and then withdraw its troops from Vietnam.”Trump has already done that, at least 12 times, in his idiotic war against Iran, beginning on Day 3. Or was it Day 2?Worst of all, perhaps, is the complacency with which the United States has accepted Trump’s war against his own people, relentlessly pitting one half of our nation against the other half, both halves fictional, kept half alive only by his prodding resentment.Have we really reached the point at which Lt. William Calley, leader of 1st Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division, said after his troops massacred more than 300 people at My Lai village in 1968: “It was no big deal.”Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads