The G-7 Meeting Was Charlottesville for America's Relations With the World

So now we're all supposed to hate Canada, too?  Because Canadians invaded us in the War of 1812 and burned down Trump's house?  And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed the crime of making President Trump look weak before the summit with Kim Jong-Un?  These could easily be plot points from a 1980's Canadian comedy starring John Candy and Rick Moranis, yet the American public is asked to accept them as just another day in the life of the Trump administration.   

But the president's moronic attempts to demonize our neighbor to the north are only one facet of the wrecking ball he has taken to American allies and alliances at the G-7 meeting this weekend.

However you might feel about trade imbalances and the practices of our economic partners, the idea that the remedy is to blow up trading rules that the United States itself helped put in place, in favor of a destabilized and unpredictable situation that literally risks the health of the world economy, is simply madness.  But this is only part of what's happening, because these economic attacks on our friends are intertwined with deeply unsettling political maneuvers to separate the United States from long-time allies.  And as so many times before during this demented presidency, this political distancing reflects the malign gravitational pull of Russia on Donald Trump, as his criticisms of allies at the G-7 meeting were combined with a demand to admit Russia back to the group.  The reason Russian is no longer welcome to these meetings, of course, is that it annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine, acts of barbarism and warmongering that the president would now have us believe were actually caused by Barack Obama — a slander against our previous president that is both deeply un-American and deeply stupid.  No one but Vladimir Putin made Russia do such things.

As many have been pointing out, Donald Trump's blows against our alliances, in the face of decades of bipartisan consensus over U.S. foreign policy, are serving Russia's agenda to an unmistakable extent.  The context for understanding the true horror of this is Russia's interference in the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.  Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall made the case Friday that, whether or not we have all the pieces of what arrangements were made or pressures brought to bear on the president, his actions are identical to those of a person who is compromised by Vladimir Putin and acting in the Russian leader's interests, at the expense of the United States.  I strongly encourage everyone to read the piece: it neatly recaps the awful consonance between Russian goals and Trump's behavior, and captures where we are in terms of accepting this baseline reality.

But if Trump's behavior towards Justin Trudeau is out of a 1980's political satire penned by Gary Trudeau, the overwhelming evidence that he's a puppet of the Kremlin is the stuff of Cold War spy fiction, not to mention the ravings of right wingers claiming the same of presidents from Truman to Carter.  So our situation, far from being unimaginable, has already been highly imagined — but still it has the uncanny feel of something beyond the bounds of reality come to actual life.  We are in uncharted waters, but it is imperative that Americans understand that this is in fact our reality, much like we had to accept the reality that the Twin Towers had been knocked down by terrorists in an act that so many of us felt was like something out of a Hollywood action film.

The larger story, of course, is not only that Donald Trump appears to be serving the Kremlin's interests, but is attempting to subvert and destroy our government in order to protect himself from the consequences of his treasonous behavior.  He calls the investigation of collusion between his campaign and the Russians a witch hunt, despite the multiple indictments and guilty pleas secured by Robert Mueller.

I understand the reluctance of many Democrats to highlight the fact of Donald Trump's collusion with and ongoing alignment with Russian interests; they have made an assessment, one backed up by polling data, that Americans want their leaders to focus on issues that affect their daily lives.  In a deeply ironic twist, the fact that the president may be subordinating U.S. interests to Russian ones is considered too big and abstract for Americans to handle.  But the reality, outside of public perception, is that this situation is an existential threat to the United States — both at a purely national security level, and also within the framework that these Democratic politicians claim to be concerned about, on questions of whether the president can be trusted to do the right things for the economy and other domestic issues.   

I can't recall where I read it, but one commentator made the point recently that part of the Democratic reluctance to fully articulate the known extent of Donald Trump's perfidy is that it would then require them to take action, and that they are both uncertain as to what actions to take and as to whether they have the political clout to accomplish anything.  This feels spot on, and goes back to something I discussed in an earlier post — that Democrats are in a bind due to confusing what they need to do as patriotic Americans versus what they need to do to gain political advantage.  It is not that these two things aren't in a necessary and legitimate tension — after all, for nearly all issues, politicians advance the goals of their party by acting in ways that also increase their political power, i.e. campaigning on ideas and legislation that they think enough voters support to vote them into office so that they can then implement these ideas and legislation.

But for Democrats to continue to behave as if this president is not likely under the sway of a foreign power's influence is to risk complicity in his offenses against our nation, and to fail our historical moment with potentially catastrophic consequences.  This is especially true when nearly all GOP congressmen and senators are happy to run interference for this presidency, even if it means participating in the destruction of our democracy.  The clincher for me is that, far from ginning up a fake "witch hunt," as the president would have it, Democrats could easily make the case that they are responding to the daily ways in which Donald Trump himself draws attention to his complicity in a frightening and unacceptable attack on the United States.  It is Donald Trump who inexplicably calls our allies enemies, and our enemies friends; it is Donald Trump who lies, day and night, through Twitter and spoken rant, about not only the facts of Russian collusion with his campaign, but about there having been no Russian interference at all in the election.  It is almost as if, hamstrung by a guilty conscience and a deep impulsiveness, Trump is driven to such self-destructive obsessions.

And to bring it back to Democratic concerns that voters want them to fight for pocketbook issues rather than hard-to-follow national security concerns — the Democrats should make the framing argument that Donald Trump's collusion can be seen on a continuum with a fake populist economic agenda that is actually enriching the wealthy and ignoring Americans who labor for a living.  He has scammed us all to benefit himself and his ilk, a fact evidenced by everything from the soak-the-rich-with-refunds tax bill, to attempts to take health insurance away from ordinary Americans, to inciting a trade war that will hit Americans in the pocketbook.  Any Democrat intimidated by Trump’s faux populist appeals is blind to his fakery, and is not arguing nearly hard enough for the very real reforms required for the U.S. economy and political system.  To relate this to the events of this weekend: Donald Trump's constant attacks on our trading partners, and on immigrants, is how he does an end run around talking in more substantive ways about our economic problems — problems which have far less to do with being taken advantage of by these partners, and far more to do with an economic arrangement in our country that disproportionately rewards the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. 

Revised Puerto Rico Death Toll Should Put an Incompetent Presidency on Public Trial

Even before the New England Journal of Medicine published a study estimating a death toll on Puerto Rico shockingly higher than the official count, the fact that Donald Trump’s mishandling of the response to Hurricane Maria hasn’t been a bigger scandal, with a larger impact on his standing, has been a troubling real-world exhibit in this horror show of a presidency.  This administration’s efforts to downplay the crisis from the get-go — a power grid in tatters, water supplies disrupted, medicine in short supply — even when faced with widespread reporting to the contrary may still be our most terrifying example to date of what happens when a presidency dedicated to propaganda and manipulation of reality meets an actual, undeniable emergency.

There is also a case to be made that media coverage of the disaster did not match the challenge.  The fact that Puerto Rico is not a state also muddied the public’s understanding of the situation, despite pretty effective efforts by politicians, activists, and victims to remind us all that Puerto Ricans are actually American citizens.  (Much more can be said about this — but the idea that some Americans live in political entities that are not states, and so lack the political influence that comes with that status, is a totally undemocratic absurdity — and it is no coincidence that in the case of Puerto Rico, this situation is the toxic aftermath of the Spanish-American War and un-American ambitions of empire.)

You’d have to be willfully blind to think that the president’s animus towards Hispanics, and the fact that Puerto Rico’s political power is so limited, didn’t play a part in the White House’s neglect of the island.  This is horrifying to contemplate: but the ultimate basis of the horror is the same whether or not you accept this particular indictment, since no matter the motivations, many preventable American deaths likely occurred due to incompetence at the highest levels of our government.  The question now is whether our political system will hold the president to account for this.  

The larger backdrop, of course, is a White House beset by scandal and worse, from an EPA administrator who rips off taxpayers and enables climate change denialism, to a president who appears beholden to Russian interests in what is likely the most far-reaching and earth-shattering political scandal in American history.  Throw in his evident antipathy for democracy in America, and it is no longer surprising that any particularly horrid scandal might not find the purchase it deserves in our public discourse.  But the Puerto Rico disaster is singular at this point, in that we are now learning that it involved a massively underreported death toll that brings the president’s incompetence into blinding view, and challenges the conscience and empathy of every American to stick up for our fellow citizens when our government has failed them.  There is nothing conservative in downplaying the deaths of American citizens, and there is nothing liberal in downplaying such a story because it might not have the traction of other lines of attack against the president.  In a way analogous to the Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion, what happened in Puerto Rico goes to the heart of whether we are a country with a basic sense of patriotism and shared humanity, or merely a collection of tribes and power centers battling it out to sit on some metaphorical Iron Throne.

Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans is a clear parallel to the plight of Puerto Rico; in both, racism and incompetence by those trusted to lead resulted directly in an unforgivable loss of life.  But as with Katrina, I trust that Americans will eventually absorb the full tragedy of what transpired in Puerto Rico, and understand that what happened to Americans there could happen to Americans on the mainland as well.  Opponents of this presidency need to remind fellow citizens of President Trump’s repeated displays of incompetence and indifference, from downplaying the number of deaths to claiming credit for saving the island, as when he tweeted, “Nobody could have done what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!” — self-puffery based on a mendacious and sociopathic assessment of the reality of the island’s plight.  And we will need campaign ads in 2018 and beyond that show the president tossing paper towels to Puerto Ricans in his personal “let them eat Highly Absorbent Bounty” moment that captures both the insufficiency of the government response and the president's personal responsibility for this failure.   

Democrats Need to Fight Sadism Against Immigrants on Their Terms, Not the President's

In case you missed it, President Trump is now blaming the Democrats for his own policy of inhumane and sadistic separation of immigrant children from their parents, despite the fact that these actions are being done at the direction of the president himself and carried out by the executive branch of government that he controls.  I’m certain that he and his advisors are casting this nonsensical blame to sow confusion among the public, as well as to provide a moral lifeline to those of his supporters troubled by behavior more associated with totalitarian regimes than a healthy democracy.  This way, they can have it all — witnessing the cruel and satisfying spectacle of inflicting emotional pain and suffering on immigrants, while also telling themselves that this cruelty is actually the fault of the Democrats.  

The White House has made it clear since the early days of its anti-immigration moves, including the ban on people from majority-Muslim countries, that a central policy benefit has been forcing Democrats and liberals to take a stand that makes it seem as if they care more about non-Americans than actual citizens.  This is a canny and malicious way to stir up Trump's base, but I question whether the public at large is so easily duped.  However, I do see in these latest outrages the danger of still more distraction from the far greater menace to our country — the overwhelming evidence that the president is beholden to Russian interests, that members of the campaign and likely the president himself have committed what a reasonable person would call treason, and that this presidency is engaged in a level of self-enrichment and corruption potentially unparalleled in our history.  The Trump administration’s vigorous exercise of presidential powers means that the opposition is forever scrambling in reaction to its moves, including on the immigration front.

The most basic adherence to liberal principles means that the sadism at the border must be opposed — defense of the defenseless and of human rights is non-negotiable — but this opposition needs to be fit into a larger movement to counter Trump and the broader authoritarian, racist movement he’s given voice and shape to.  The key dynamic of this present confrontation that we need to keep in mind is that Donald Trump finds himself able to inflict suffering on a population of people in a way that demonstrates his power and fidelity to the principles he campaigned on, while also demonstrating the powerlessness of his opponents.  This powerlessness is only emphasized by Democratic politicians who call on Trump to stop these practices.  For Trump, their impotent cries are the point of this moment; they demonstrate his absolute strength and their utter powerlessness.

The majority of the American people find this treatment of children and parents an affront to basic human, let alone American, values.  Trump is doing it because it pleases him and his base; yet he has now chosen to play the situation like the separation policy is actually the fault of the liberals themselves.  The opposition can throw this back at Trump — not only is he implementing an un-American policy, he doesn’t seem to have the cajones to own up to being responsible for it.  Somewhat counter-intuitively, because it involves an admission of their own limited leverage, Democrats should be emphasizing Trump’s absolute ownership of this issue and of his own sadism, and ask what punishing the most vulnerable people on the continent has to do with making America great again.  In exaggerating the threat posed by women and children, Trump paints a picture of an America that is weak beyond comprehension, ever a Central American family unit away from giving up the ghost and turning into some sort of burrito-Mariachi band hellscape.  The cruelty suggests cowardice, and both the cruelty and cowardice reveal a president, and a party, that would rather attack impoverished immigrants than, say, confront the monopolies and oversized banks that are sucking the life out of our economy.  

The most important step to redressing this nightmare is to beat the GOP in the upcoming elections, and eject Donald Trump from office.  Then we will have the means to pursue justice against Trump and his minions at ICE, who are clearly following orders that no decent American would ever follow.

Economic Malaise Runs Wild as Major Corporations Deny Even a Minimal Responsibility to the Common Good

The United Way has been surveying economic distress in America, and last week issued a report that indicates 43% of U.S. households have incomes that don’t provide enough to cover the basics of existence.  These results provide still more evidence, as if more were needed, of this country's crisis levels of financial insecurity.  Such results should shame and shake us all, and the fact that they don’t speaks to a parallel crisis of denialism and class insularity that cries out for resolution.  They’re also a shocking gauge of the daily indignities and stresses behind more abstract talk of economic inequality, and another window into understanding that the pervasive media and political message that we have the best possible economy in all of human existence is utter bunk.  A healthy economy would bring security to all our citizens; a healthy economy would not perpetuate hardship for nearly half its population.  

The situation is all the more disturbing when you look at the unemployment rate, which has now hit 3.9% — the lowest since 2000.  That so low a rate can co-exist with such deep malaise for nearly half of American households is more unpleasant evidence that employment and economic security have become seriously decoupled.  

There are two basic responses to this situation.  You can react with compassion, outrage, and a sense of fraternity rooted in patriotism and our common humanity that so many of our fellow Americans are getting fucked over.  Or you can look away, feel relief that at least you’re better off than those people you just read about, and blame an enormous chunk of Americans for their own plight.

The CNN article about the United Way study links to a piece about a recent tax battle in Seattle that encapsulates much of the horror of this perceptual divide.  The city passed a tax increase on companies that earn $20 million or more annually — about 3% of all businesses.  The money generated will specifically go to construction of affordable housing and emergency services for the homeless.  Yet CNN describes the tax as “controversial,” apparently because big businesses, including Amazon, don’t want to pay more taxes, and managed to tap into the big conservative lie that taxes will always kill jobs and so are never acceptable.  A case could be made, though, that a more controversial position would be a gargantuan, job-killing company such as Amazon attempting to make the case that it should not pay a small tax to help serve the neediest Americans, including some who have been directly affected by Amazon’s role in increasing the cost of living in Seattle.

Likewise, “controversial” could be applied to Amazon’s implicit threat to Seattle that such a tax might cause Amazon to reconsider continued investments in the city.  We are so used to businesses responding to the exercise of democratic power with bullying and feudal disdain that we miss how immoral and self-serving such behavior is.  Amazon, and the more than a hundred other businesses that joined it in opposition, could have seen the tax as a way for them to be part of the solution to American equality, and to ally themselves with those screwed over by the contemporary economy.  Instead, they argued for more screwing, with extra fucking on the side for good measure.

It is not socialism or some sort of revolution to pay a tiny fraction of your income so that people don’t die on the streets or don’t have to worry so much about paying rent; it is simply a minimal moral obligation to your fellow citizens.  Too many businesses, particularly oligopolies like Amazon, have come to see citizens as marks and dupes, rather than the people who are actually to be served by corporations and the larger economy.   The ability of companies to bully our elective representatives would be finished overnight if Americans got back in touch with their basic sense of dignity, solidarity, and Democratic spirit, and condemned such bullying as outside the bounds of acceptable corporate behavior.

But for the present, the difficulties Seattle had in passing the most minimal and reasonable legislation to address economic insecurity is a window into how we've arrived at a situation where nearly half of American households are in the same leaky economic boat.  Amazon and other corporations have two messages to Americans: If you can afford to spend money, just shut up and shop.  And if you can’t afford to shop, just shut up.

GOP’s Subversion of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Looks More Short-Sighted by the Day

Don’t get me wrong: the Trump Administration’s efforts to debilitate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with the connivance of the Republican Congress, are deeply upsetting for a whole spectrum of reasons.  Coming so soon after the 2008 financial crisis and so early in the existence of the CFPB, they suggest a boldness to the financial sector and its apologists; the GOP seems to be betting on a public amnesia about why such an agency is needed.  This subversion is unsettling as well due to the fact that Democratic supporters of the CFPB are totally shut out from the levers of national power and so unable to do anything directly to stop the damage.   Most disturbing, though, is the prospect of millions of Americans losing a vital line of defense between their efforts to make better lives for themselves and those who would seek to exploit and rip off the citizenry, on fronts ranging from college and payday loans to mortgages and banking fees.  It’s also important to acknowledge the long-term harm being done to the agency, as committed public service agents understandably choose to depart from an agency no longer permitted to perform its mandated work on behalf of the public.  Here's how The New York Times summarizes the rollback:

Since taking over in November, [interim director Mick Mulvaney] has halted all new investigations, frozen hiring, stopped data collection and proposed cutting off public access to a database of consumer complaints.  He dropped most cases against payday lenders — a primary focus of the consumer bureau — and also proposed scrapping a new rule that would have heightened scrutiny of an industry accused of trapping vulnerable customers in a cycle of debt.  And he has tried hard to persuade Congress to take away funding authority for the bureau from the Federal Reserve — so that Congress can cut it.

On top of this, Mulvaney just this past week directed the CFPB to move the student loan division into the consumer information unit, which appears to have the objective of scrapping the bureau’s efforts to actively protect recipients of student loans.  Taken together, these moves are changing the CFPB from a watchdog to an ineffectual role not recognizable in the legislation that created it.  The sabotage — which has been telegraphed unambiguously by the Trump administration — is well underway.

But though the immediate damage to citizens is real and growing, this is not a moment for despair, or clucking over the depravity of Republicans, but rather a time to leverage their ill-advised and anti-consumer moves into a moral truncheon with which to politically bludgeon the GOP in the 2018 elections and beyond.  Their short-lived gains are our long-term opportunity; Mick Mulvaney would be well-advised to refresh his understanding of the term “Pyrrhic victory.”

The overeager effort to hobble the CFPB in itself constitutes an obvious betrayal and subversion of the bureau’s legislated mission to protect American consumers against unethical behavior by financial entities.  Moves to undermine the bureau repudiate the public good in favor of the powerful in ways that most people can easily grasp.  Does the average American really think the problem with our country is that ordinary people have too much power and giant banks have too little?  Republican complaints of the CFPB's allegedly aggressive moves against financial firms are easily fact-checked, and can be weighed against the abuses financial entities have committed against literally thousands upon thousands of Americans.  For whatever mix of hubris and ideological blinders, Mulvaney and his ilk see no need to hide what they’re doing.  They appear think that power lets you do whatever you want, without consequences.  This blindness has left proponents of the CFPB with no shortage of egregious actions to bring to sympathetic public attention.

In a broader sense, one can see how the CFPB is so threatening to the GOP because it’s an unambiguous example of the government serving the public good.  The New York Times notes that the CFPB is “an Obama-era watchdog agency vilified by Republicans since its inception as an example of government overreach.”  Yet the GOP sees “government overreach” in literally any attempt by the American people to use democratic processes to pass laws to serve the public good.  This position has little or nothing in common with a democratic party, and more with one whose sole constituency is corporate interests.  In this sense, attacks on the CFPB may serve a short-term goal of helping the GOP's true constituents, and a strategic goal of undermining a vision of a pro-citizen government, but these efforts are so transparently self-serving that a canny opposition would do well to turn them back against the GOP as more proof of where the party’s true loyalties lie.

Gleeful destruction of an agency explicitly created to help ordinary Americans exposes the GOP’s highest priorities.  Remember — Mick Mulvaney is not really a “longtime critic” of the CFPB, as The New York Times describes him, at least not in the sense of someone who offers a useful critique.  Mulvaney and the GOP are fundamentally, irretrievably opposed to the very existence of the CFPB.  There is no nuance to their favoring the powerful over the vulnerable.  In opposing the CFPB so vigorously, the GOP has hacked away at its ability to occupy any middle ground; instead, it reinforces opponents’ ability to describe them (accurately) as an extremist party.  

The myriad attempts to undermine the CFPB collectively manage to affect millions of Americans across the political spectrum, in ways that, again, may allow the GOP to serve its donors in the short term, but which pose the possibility of real long-term damage to the party's capacity to claim to serve the public interest.  Mulvaney’s efforts to undo student loan protection efforts may be the poster child for this flaw in their master plan.  Deciding to essentially stick it to a voting populace in the formative years of its political identity in a way that leaves no doubt as to which party hates students seems awfully dismissive of the millions of votes this group will be casting, not just in 2018, but in literally elections for the next half century.  Making the case that lenders shouldn’t be able to rip off and exploit people pursuing the American dream of receiving a college degree is easy; defending such practices is foolhardy, bordering on political malpractice — unless, of course, the campaign donations you receive from lenders is more important than protecting the students you’re elected to serve.  But America is the land of freedom, after all, and I suppose members of the GOP are free to make self-defeating and morally indefensible choices all they want.

It’s fair to take a little comfort in viewing the current situation as a successful stress test of the CFPB and its very reason for being.  Over its seven years of existence, we have already seen that the bureau works to serve the public interest.  The concerted effort to undo it provides yet more evidence for why we really need it.  The GOP is in the unenviable position not of stopping a piece of legislation with theoretical dangers, but of trying to make the case, against all evidence, against an agency that has already accomplished the public good it was designed to.  A bureau with this many of the right enemies is obviously doing its job.  It shows what a threat the CFPB is to financial corruption and the desire of powerful interests to exploit Americans for financial gain.

The Times notes that “Mr. Mulvaney’s approach is finding favor with the person who may matter the most: the president.  Mr. Trump, several administration aides said, is delighted at the idea of Ms. Warren watching an institution she spent years building being undermined from within — and eager to see Mr. Mulvaney continue waging a battle to reduce federal regulations through the Office of Management and Budget.”   So Mulvaney’s efforts to hobble the CFPB are tied up with Donald Trump’s personal animus toward Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who initially conceived of the such a bureau and was heavily involved with its creation. However, the president’s adherence to a politics of personalities and revenge swaddles him from grasping the full repercussions here - he may think he’s screwing over Elizabeth Warren, but he seems genuinely ignorant of the additional fact that he’s also screwing over the millions of Americans protected by the CFPB - millions and millions of registered voters, to borrow a phrase from the original Ghostbusters.  

So it's a little ironic that Mulvaney himself provides plenty of opportunity for Democrats to personalize the battle over the CFPB.  Apparently pushed to the margins in debates around the federal budget — which his actual full-time job as OMB director would normally focus on — he seems to be using his interim appointment to the CFPB to let out some aggression and go a bit hog wild.  Unfortunately for his cause, his pretensions to be defending big business against rampaging consumers on some sort of intellectual principle has been undermined by his recent declaration that, as a congressman, he only met with lobbyists who had donated money to him.  He has tried to mitigate these remarks by pointing out that he always met with constituents, whether or not they had given him money, but this only seems to reinforce the awful impression of ethical looseness.

Additinally, Mulvaney has lied to Congress about his contacts with payday lenders, falsely telling Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio that his only such contacts were in the ordinary course of business, when in fact such interaction occurred on at least one other occasion.  Given the plethora of scandals embroiling such Trump administration luminaries as Scott “If It Appears to be Unethical, Just Do It!” Pruitt and departed folks like Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, it’s seems worth inquiring what shenanigans Mulvaney has gotten up to in his efforts to curry favor with financial entities.  Mulvaney may currently be the form of the CFPB’s destruction, but his upside-down logic (banks are oppressed!) and dubious personal history threaten to turn him instead into one more good argument for why we need the CFPB in the first place.

Um, What About the Trade War?

Donald Trump can't really be this stupid. . . can he?  Or did someone hack his Twitter account?  Either way, this is a flabbergasting tweet:

President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!

MCGA!

Advocates of Impeachment Need to Combine High-Minded Appeals with Honest Partisanship

I’ve been catching up on some of my favorite political columnists this week, and among other things have been reminded why Brian Beutler is on my essential reading list for comprehending our extreme times.  In "Don't Absolve Trump of His Impeachable Offenses," he picks apart the contradictions and assumptions in both parties’ views of impeaching President Trump.  Citing how the GOP is talking up an impeachment threat should Democrats win back Congress, he points out how this approach is abetted by the Democrats’ “muddled” positions on this question.  Beutler argues that Democrats who say impeachment talk is premature absent a firm case emerging out of the Mueller investigation ignore the way Trump’s continued ties to his business make him unfit to be president, for a variety of reasons ranging from his susceptibility to blackmail to his use of government for personal financial benefit; that is, grounds for impeachment don’t rest on Russian collusion alone.  He continues:

But even in absence of a Russia scandal, Trump’s business empire (to say nothing of his autocratic tendencies and incompetent management) would be a burning crisis. Democrats wouldn’t be “normalizing” the abuse of the impeachment power by deploying it against Trump. Their refusal to acknowledge Trump’s basic incompatibility with high office is instead normalizing the idea that corrupt businessmen can use the presidency to enrich themselves at the expense of the public [. . .]

The fact that impeachment may not be practicable [. . .] has no bearing on the normative question of whether Trump deserves to be impeached, or on whether Democrats and liberals should try to persuade people that he does. The answer to those questions is obvious.

The way Beutler turns the question of normalizing impeachment around to the question of normalizing Trump’s corruption is an extremely helpful way to both think about impeachment and why it’s a reasonable measure for discussion.  Being explicit about the high costs of the Trump presidency to our system of governance rightly puts the spotlight on those real harms occurring on a daily basis, and contextualizes talk of what would otherwise seem an extreme remedy.  Beutler’s separation of the practicability of impeachment from the question of whether there are actually grounds likewise helps us see our situation more clearly.

Beutler goes on to write: 

It is completely reasonable for Democrats to weigh the political costs of acknowledging or dwelling on Trump’s obvious unfitness for office. But it’s also a mistake in both the near and long term to pretend the obvious doesn’t exist.   It’s a dangerous thing—for people and for the institutions that make the country governable—that Trump is president. The fact that he won’t divest himself from his businesses, won’t stop mingling his public duties and his financial interests, and also won’t say whom he owes money to, or who could otherwise ruin him financially, is an affront to all citizens, and a national security emergency.  [. . .]

Those who are scared that any impeachment buzz in the air will hurt Democrats politically ought to say so, but without absolving Trump of all the impeachable depravities he’s engaged in before our eyes.

For me, this final paragraph catalyzed an insight that hovers over the whole article: impeachment is a conundrum for Democrats in part because it requires them to argue they are acting in the national interest — to confront a “national emergency,” in Beutler’s phrasing — while inevitably also acting in a partisan manner, in that impeachment means acting against a president from the opposite party.  This is a contradiction that the GOP exploits when it points to the impeachment threat as a reason to vote for Republicans — that the Democrats want to remove Trump because he’s their political nemesis, not because he’s committed impeachable acts.  (Though, as Beutler points out, this puts Republicans in the unenviable position of defending his actual impeachable behavior — a difficult situation somewhat analogous to the danger to the Democrats of not opposing Trump sufficiently.)

Putting aside the impeachment question for a moment, this same tension underlies the broader debate over the political cost to Democrats of putting opposition to Trump and a focus on his malfeasance at the center of the party’s agenda: they may claim to be acting in the national interest, and may objectively speaking actually be acting in the national interest through opposition to the president, but this does not mean that the broader public supports such a focus — as opposed to, for instance, the Democrats downplaying opposition to the president and fighting for a concrete, positive vision of their own.

Under normal circumstances, opposing the other party and advocating your own positions are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re the regular substance of politics.  The reason there is a question, and anxiety, about the Democrats defining themselves primarily by their opposition to Trump isn’t necessarily due to flaws in the party, but because for so many Democrats, Trump merits implacable and virulent opposition.  The question of impeachment is the logical extension of a conclusion that he’s done and said things that merit removal from office.  

So I see a second tension here: the existence of a president who deserves impeachment also means that the opposition party must to some greater or lesser extent necessarily subordinate its identity and partisan goals to this one overriding objective.  You could say that the seriousness of the situation requires that the balance between advocacy and opposition requires a shift in favor of opposition.  But going back to the first tension I identified, though, this puts the Democrats in a bind, since our two-party system means that impeachment will inevitably assume a partisan cast, even as the Democrats could persuasively argue that they’re serving a broader national interest.  The largely single-minded mode a party seeking impeachment must embrace will perversely make them seem even more partisan in their motivations.

The basic danger and fear — which I think is pretty broadly clear to anyone involved in Democratic politics, wherever they come down on how to proceed — is that Democrats will be identified with an oppositional stance simply for partisanship’s sake rather than a party fighting for a concrete agenda that will help Americans, and in doing so will sink their chances of either stopping Trump or accomplishing any of their positive party goals.  But I would argue that if Donald Trump truly merits full and unremitting opposition, up to and including impeachment — and I believe he does — then Democrats need to fully acknowledge and navigate the inevitable tensions I’ve identified.

If there is an ineluctable partisan dimension to such opposition in a two-party system, then Democrats are either going to need to figure out how to minimize this perception of partisanship, or how to explain it in a way that upends easy dismissal of their actions as simply “partisan.”  Likewise, if there is an inevitable danger in Democrats subordinating their positive party goals to the emergency of removing a president from office, Democrats need to figure out how to minimize the risks on this front as well.

In our highly-polarized political environment, these are incredibly difficult tensions to navigate.  In fact, a signature danger of our time is that a president clearly unfit to serve is protected both by a seemingly unshakeable base of support, and by an overall atmosphere in which arguing for a larger national interest is seen by many as suspect.  Yet, just as Beutler points out that failure to pursue impeachment equates to essentially normalizing impeachable presidential behavior, one could argue that Democrats’ failure to fully oppose Donald Trump’s impeachable behavior, rather than insulating them from unpredictable political downsides, actually carries its own toxic downside for Democrats: of normalizing not just a president, but a form of politics, deeply inimical to their core beliefs and goals.  

Beutler argues that Trump’s failure to separate himself from his business is grounds for impeachment; but I would argue that beyond this, Donald Trump has engaged in an array of behaviors and actions that, while no single one might merit impeachment, together constitute a self-inflicted indictment of the man’s unfitness for office.  From calling a free press “the enemy of the people,” to a restriction on immigration that quite clearly singled out Muslims, to his coddling of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, to his failure to protect the United States from future Russian election interference, to his accusations that the Justice Department and FBI are broken and not to be trusted, to his lies that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton and that we can’t trust our own elections, Trump has proved himself to be an illiberal autocrat fundamentally opposed to American democracy. 

The question of whether Democrats should seek Donald Trump’s removal from office only has one answer.  The question, then, is how to navigate the treacherous terrain of seeking this goal.  Somewhat paradoxically, the depth and depravity of Donald Trump’s offenses against American democracy, and his attempts to stoke, not allay, partisan divisions, arguably have opened a path forward for a stance of full opposition by the Democrats.  In a two-party system, impeachment will inevitably assume some degree of partisan cast.  However, because Donald Trump’s offenses go to heart of our democratic system, the Democrats have a clear opportunity to make the case that their partisan identity is inextricably linked to their commitment to basic American democratic values.  In fact, I’d argue that it’s become both a necessity for Democrats to double-down on this commitment, and to insist on it as a key part of what the party stands for.  These are basic values that most Americas agree with: The rule of law.  One person, one vote.  No special treatment for the wealthy.  No person is above the law.  There is no basic tenet of American democracy that Donald Trump has not run afoul of; in this, there is a path forward for Democrats to neutralize inevitable accusations of partisanship in their fight to end this presidency.

As to the question of the price Democrats will pay for emphasizing opposition over engagement: it seems to me that here, too, the path forward is to embrace partisanship in a creative and canny fashion.  They should keep making make the case that they are serving the national interest; but also assert that Democrats don’t simply oppose Donald Trump, but advocate for an entirely different way of doing things, in terms of both democratic process and legislative substance.  They should embrace a traditional American way of politics that actually believes in democracy and equality, while also reminding voters of what legislation they would work to pass.  This will energize Democrats who want more than just opposition to Trump, and inspire other voters who want the country to move forward.  Democrats must paint Trump and the GOP as anti-democratic forces standing in the way of progress that the majority wants to see, and must emphasize and describe as much as possible what they will aim to get done once Trump is removed from office and the GOP is defeated.  The agenda necessarily will include both measures to strengthen our democracy — both in terms of voter registration, anti-gerrymandering measures and the like, as well as strengthened defenses against hacking — but also promises to pass items like real infrastructure legislation, immigration reform, and a tax bill that moves some of the obscene cuts to the top 1% into the pockets of middle- and working-class Americans.  In other words, Democrats need to both defend democracy on principle, and demonstrate, through a concrete agenda, how democratic action delivers concrete benefits to the American people that in turn strengthen the public good.

This strategy is key in light of another factor we need to consider when talking about opposing Trump: the GOP’s decision to protect the president from his malfeasance, in the name of short-term party gains like the recently-passed tax bill.  The broader picture is that it’s not just Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole, that has increasingly turned to an anti-democratic agenda, from voting restrictions, to tax cuts that primarily benefit the richest among us, to gerrymandering that strikes at the heart of representative democracy.  Any strategy for opposing Donald Trump needs to implicitly or explicitly involve an indictment of the GOP as a whole; to treat Trump as an isolated issue would be to treat the symptom but not the disease.  Democrats needs to push for common-sense laws in defense of basic democratic processes that the GOP will not support, in order both to protect our form of government and to help expose the authoritarian direction of the Republican Party.

One obvious rejoinder is that while this approach might win Democrats enough votes to take the House and impeach Donald Trump, it’s impossible to win enough Senate seats in 2018 to convict and remove the president from office; in fact, this “partisanship-forward” approach, to coin a phrase, would likely mean Republican senators would be more opposed than ever to removing a president from their own party.  True enough; but I would reply that there seems to be no possible scenario in which most Republican senators would vote to remove the president.  But impeaching the president, and forcing GOP members of the House to defend him, would set Democrats up for significant victories in 2020, both in the presidential election and in Senate races in which many Republicans would be forced to defend their votes to retain a corrupt president, who at that point would be up for re-election and exerting a serious drag on GOP prospects.

A couple final thoughts on impeachment and its discontents.  First, I think Democrats would do well to recognize that in times that feel so fraught and destabilized, talk of impeachment can feel like part of the problem, rather than part of its solution.  If they’re going to pursue impeachment, they need to be sure to frame it as the constitutional remedy for a situation like we now face.  Second, we need to remember that the discussion around impeachment is a process, and that the primary ingredient is making the case regarding Donald Trump’s unfitness for office.  At a minimum, such an argument will strengthen Democrats’ prospects in the mid-term elections and in 2020 —  particularly if it is combined with a broader indictment of the GOP for its authoritarian inclinations and the Democrats' assertion of themselves as the party that defends both the constitutional order and the American Dream.

Wolf Wreaks Mayhem in the Lion’s Den

Michelle Wolf’s routine at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last weekend was comedically vicious and unsparing.   Eviscerating White House officials, up to and including the president, in the face of an audience that grew increasingly restive, she riffed off of the hypocrisy and madness of America’s political leadership and Trump-enabling media.  With jokes that took as a given Donald Trump’s serial assaults on women and the daily dispensing of lies from the White House, Wolf shocked the audience because she didn’t care to soften the full horror of our political moment, while those who had invited her obviously expected her to play by a more jovial and forgiving set of rules.  That powerful people don’t want their misdeeds to be exposed is one the eternal cliches of our world; to see Wolf make this audience squirm was to see such exposure in action.

The absurdity of asking a comedian to do a political roast, and then to be offended when that comedian hits too close to home, should be plain to all.  The criticism that Wolf wasn’t funny is silly; her jokes may not have been laugh-out-loud funny, but they were humorous in a sharper, cerebral manner.  The truth is, she’s being criticized for attacking the powerful — both the Trump administration and any media figures who think it’s acceptable to cavort with those they cover — in an utterly disrespectful and insulting way.  In implicitly asserting the indefensibility of this president and any who cover for him, Wolf reminded us that the powerful depend on their lessers’ willingness to respect their power; in showing no respect, but rather flashes of anger and righteousness, Wolf committed the ultimate sin of reminding them that they may not be as powerful as they believe.  To accomplish this with words and wit, Wolf conducted a lightning incursion of accountability and egalitarian spirit into a lion’s den of elitist self-congratulation.

Wolf is being criticized for being inappropriate; but the whole of her routine does not even begin to match the moral obscenity, cruelty, and ignorance of Donald Trump last week, when he said of the Paralympics that, “it’s a little tough to watch too much, but I watched as much as I could.”  This is what truly vicious and inappropriate language sounds like: words uttered by the most powerful man in the world about a group of people who live with challenges most of us will never have to deal with, in a way that makes them sounds like freaks who can only be tolerated for short periods of time.  Critics of Wolf are catastrophically wrong: Donald Trump and his defenders deserve every bit of truth-telling that our fellow citizens can throw at them.

Following Withdrawal of V.A. Nominee, Trump Exacerbates Self-Inflicted Political Wound

My first impulse was to write “Not surprisingly, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson has withdrawn from consideration as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs” — but that’s not really accurate, as I’m not sure what’s surprising or not these days.  After all, would I have been surprised if he were still the nominee?  The president did seem to be doubling down on his pick just a couple days ago.  Also, you need look no further than Scott Pruitt to see a man surviving toxic levels of corruption allegations.

Still, there are some obvious reasons why Jackson wouldn't object to being out of the spotlight.  The allegations of careless dispensing of medications and drunkenness on duty undermined not only his case for acting as VA head, but his ability to perform his current job as physician to the president.

This is why you just have to smile when you see reports of Donald Trump trying to turn Jackson’s failed nomination into a cudgel against Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana, who as ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee played a prominent role in publicizing the allegations against Jackson.  The president has actually called for Tester's resignation, and talks as if the senator had promoted baseless slurs against the good doctor, when in fact the larger storyline is that Tester helped protect the VA from a potentially comically unqualified leader at a time when the department cries out for competent leadership.  It's also noteworthy that Trump suggested he has secret information that would end Tester's career — a creepy insinuation that reminds us both of Donald Trump's willingness to abuse the power of his office, and of his long-practiced tactic of throwing accusations back at accusers.  

It’s hardly shocking that Trump would lash out at Tester rather than admit to his own catastrophic choice, but it also means that the national conversation is likelier to turn to whether Jackson should remain in his current position.  More damningly for the president, it also provides a opportunity for Democrats, including Tester, to make the case that Donald Trump has failed America’s veterans by nominating such an unfit nominee; in fact, you could make the case that it shows that Donald Trump cares more about his underlings’ loyalty to himself than whether they can ensure adequate health services are provided to literally millions of American veterans.  I'm not so sure the president has thought through the full consequences of pursuing this vendetta against Tester; I’m somewhat more sure that Jon Tester isn’t losing any sleep over it.

V.A. Nominee Is Sunk If Allegations of Wanton Pill-Dispensing, Occasional Drunkeness Are True

“Mr. Tester said that there was no evidence before the committee that Dr. Jackson had shown up drunk to the White House.” - The New York Times, April 24, 2018

One can’t help idly wondering if the president’s defense of Dr. Ronny Jackson in the face of credible allegations around his sobriety and prescription ethics isn’t tied to Jackson’s previous endorsement of the president’s miraculous state of health.  If it turns out he’s a wild card, then that’s sure to raise questions about the president’s exam earlier in the year.

This nomination is also a perfect study of the collision between standard GOP contempt for government and competence, and a department with a life-and-death, moral obligation to provide health services to American veterans.  Trump’s preference for personal loyalty and connections over experience has supercharged this collision in the manner of one of those miles-long supercolliders tucked beneath the Swiss Alps.  Trump fumbles; Americans suffer.

Atlantic Writer Makes Case That GOP Pressure on FBI Set Context for Bad Decisions by James Comey

Adam Serwer’s analysis of James Comey’s role in the 2016 election zeroes in on some of the former FBI director’s major flaws and contradictions, arguing that Comey clearly broke FBI protocol by his actions, appears not to fully recognize his mistakes, and ultimately chose his own peculiar sense of personal honor over the duties of his office.  But Serwer makes another point that needs broader airing: Comey’s decision-making process in relation to the Clinton and Trump investigations, at least in terms of his public disclosures around these, was arguably structured by the atmosphere of intimidation and criticism in which the GOP had forced the FBI to operate during the previous years.  As Serwer says:

The FBI is petrified of criticism from its conservative detractors, and is relatively indifferent to its liberal critics.  Comey may have known that the Republican outrage over not disclosing the reopened Clinton investigation would dwarf whatever frustration Democrats might express at the opposite course of action, had he kept it under wraps as Justice Department guidelines obligated him to do.  Indeed, despite the role Comey’s decision played in helping Trump win the White House, Republicans have spent the Trump administration demanding political purges of the FBI and prosecutions of the president’s critics and rivals.  While Republicans bear the responsibility for attempting to politicize federal law enforcement, the Democrats’ feeble acquiescence to this dynamic has only enabled them.

A Republican effort to game the FBI during the Obama years paid off big time when it counted, and the anti-democratic tendencies inherent in this attitude have now blossomed into full, sickening bloom, as the GOP presses the boundaries around using the FBI as a tool for political revenge.  But Serwer’s line about Democratic acquiescence to this process is crucial to understanding the situation we’re in.  For years, Republicans have been playing by a different set of rules than the Democrats: rules that prioritize power over democracy.   In failing to adequately challenge this pressure, the Democrats have crippled their own ability to win elections and exert power in government, but have also failed to defend our political system.  This seems less the result of incompetence or strategy, although the Democrats have done poorly on both fronts, and more of a basic failure to understand the fundamentally anti-democratic direction of the modern GOP.

But as I’ve repeatedly argued, there’s no mistaking the Republican tilt toward authoritarianism now.  Among other things, returning balance to the system will require a full reversal of the Trump-era politicization of the Justice Department.  Our current situation is perilous, but Democrats should fight for a system of impartial justice that most Americans agree with; it’s their responsibility to highlight this issue and argue for its central importance to our democracy.

The GOP is assaulting our national institutions and democratic norms on many fronts, but subverting the Justice Department to political ends may be their single most dangerous maneuver.  When issues of crime and punishment depend on who holds political power, then we're well on our way to an authoritarian nightmare replete with intimidation and violence.

Obviously, our situation will be much more dangerous should the Democrats fail to recognize the stakes and the primacy of restoring traditional boundaries between politics and law enforcement.  One danger is that some Democrats might be tempted to use such tactics should they return to power: to embark on a cycle of revenge using the toolbox the GOP has engineered.  Needless to say, this would be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it.  Such dark possibilities are yet another reason why Democrats need to be absolutely clear right now about resisting this move towards politicized law enforcement, and about their plans to return the FBI and Justice Department to a position of impartiality and trust.

Has Oregon’s Republican Secretary of State Caught the Pruitt Flu?

So apparently our Oregon Secretary of State, Republican Dennis Richardson, asked that he be provided with a security detail, unlike all other Oregon secretaries of state before him.  Richardson’s staff claimed that the secretary of state faced security threats due to “heightened partisan tensions across the country,” in the wording of The Oregonian, though they could not point to any specific threats.  If this sort of outside-the-box request by a Republican politician rings a bell, it’s because EPA head Scott Pruitt has at the federal level earned headlines due to the millions of dollars he’s blown through on his own unprecedentedly elaborate security protection.  

So is this a thing now, Republican politicians claiming they need security to be protected from non-existent threats?  Apart from the authoritarian connotations of even lesser-known bureaucrats requiring their own personal firepower, it’s worth noting the way such actions bizarrely slur Democrats as threatening physical harm against them.  After all, only one of America’s two major parties is headed by a president who has regularly prescribed violence as a suitable prescription for immigrants, reporters, families of terrorists, and other apparent enemies of the state.  Only one party has a president who found himself unable to call out Nazi thugs who killed a woman in Charlottesville.  Only one party seems untroubled by the mainstreaming of physical threats into our political discourse.

Here in Oregon, Richardson has withdrawn his request for security (and a driver), citing his concern that future holders of his office might abuse these services — a consideration that was obviously true at the time he initially made these requests.  I am left to conclude that he’s changed his mind due to the shitty reception his proposal received, though one suspects he considers himself ahead of the game among right-wing voters by having managed to suggest that the left in America has turned violent toward politicians it opposes.  Heck of a way to build that base, Dennis.

Frightening Times, But Not a Time to Be Frightened

Frank Bruni provides an effective rundown of President Trump's extreme and worrisome response to news that the FBI had raided the premises of Michael Cohen, his long-time consigliere, and I'd recommend it for some more color around events I referenced in my previous post.  But while Bruni's conclusion that we should be "frightened" of what the president might do next is superficially reasonable, it's actually a point of view that suggests that both elected officials and the public at large are powerless to counteract our increasingly deranged president — and this, my friends, is actually part of the pickle we're in.  It speaks to an underlying dynamic, charted by cannier observers than myself, in which the nation seems to exist in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump; he acts, and we react.  But while there's admittedly plenty of evidence that we're stuck in a psychological showdown, it's also true that there are no literal constraints on either our legislators or the public at large to express their will, and exert their own powers, against the depredations of this president.

I agree that Trump is frightening, and that this is a frightening moment; but I, for one, really don't feel like being frightened, definitely not by a reality TV star who became famous for firing people, and who plenty of evidence shows colluded with a hostile foreign power to gain the presidency of the United States.  Frankly, I'd rather dwell on other feelings I'm experiencing on a daily basis, like anger, and righteousness, and solidarity with the millions of other people in this country who appear to feel more or less exactly like I do.

The founding fathers were hyper-aware of all the things that might go wrong with a political system, both in general and with the one they were creating.  Prevention of a despotic executive was a primary concern in the design of the U.S. Constitution; hence the separation of powers, and the mechanism of impeachment in a worst-case scenario.  What we're encountering with Donald Trump would hardly strike them as something unusual; in fact, they'd probably be surprised we hadn't had to deal with such a figure until now.

This is no time for naivete.  People like Donald Trump are part of the reason we have a government in the form that we do; and we can't just run around like headless chickens bemoaning the falling sky, when the very design of our country signals to us that the sky would inevitably fall at some point, you silly chickens!  It stinks that one of our two parties (cough-cough!  the GOP!) has embraced increasingly anti-democratic tactics and provided cover for Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies.  But let's face it — sooner or later, some asshole was going to come along and try to be king, or, OK, the BIGGEST STAR IN THE HISTORY OF PRESIDENTIAL TELEVISION EVER.

Mueller Investigation and FBI Raids On Cohen Are America Defending Itself Against Trump

Yesterday, FBI agents served search warrants at the office and home of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s long-time fixer-attorney and confidant.  Although the crimes under investigation are apparently unrelated to the Russia-collusion investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump’s initial response was to essentially reiterate the existence of a vast and implacable conspiracy out to get him and to revisit his recent attacks on the Mueller team.  In the past 24 hours, fed by reports out of the White House as to the president’s rageholic-brooding state of mind, there’s been plenty of speculation that a presidential move against Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could be imminent.  Such an action would constitute a full descent into the brewing constitutional crisis that is, at its base, about the president’s likely criminality and his use of the tools of his office to obstruct an investigation into himself.

Since the early weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has been the position of The Hot Screen that Donald Trump must either be impeached or forced to resign.  This never felt like going out on a limb, as this stance was based on more than a year’s worth of observing Donald Trump’s anti-democratic, racist, and misogynist rhetoric as he campaigned across the U.S.  There were no surprises once he won the election; he immediately set to work undermining the credibility of our electoral system, claiming without a shred of evidence that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote.  This is a claim that he has maintained to the present day; in fact, he renewed this line of slander against American democracy just this past week.  I highlight this particular line of attack because of its intersection with yet another ground for the need to remove the president from office: his campaign’s collusion with a Russian effort to undermine and throw the election to Trump, which had at its core an identical purpose as the president’s claims that our electoral system cannot be trusted: to undermine popular faith in U.S. democracy.

I could go on, but I offer this brief retrospective for now to demonstrate the consistency of this site’s position regarding the president’s unfitness for office, to point out that the events of the last year have only provided mounting evidence of his unfitness, and to argue that the pass we have reached — at the precipice of a constitutional crisis, where he would rather decimate the rule of law than face the consequences of his own unfitness — has always been a foregone conclusion with Donald Trump.  It was just a matter of time.

I remain dazed by the fact that, with Trump, the truth is so often right on the surface, even when he tries to bury it in lies or dissimulation.  The one central question has always been whether citizens choose to accept or deny the hideous reality of this man.  In this, he’s been a Rorschach test for the American character: do you see a con man, or do you see a leader?

The plain fact is that the president talks like a cornered criminal.  Virtually every sentence out of his mouth suggests he has something to hide, and testifies to how personal interest comes above all else.  To listen to his initial remarks yesterday following the Cohen raids is to hear a man who would rather burn down the rule of law than to answer for his crimes.  He is either delusionally paranoid, or willing to cold-bloodedly and knowingly peddle conspiratorial theories that suggest only Donald Trump stands between a Deep State takeover and American liberty.  I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the latter, but who knows if there isn’t some small amount of the former mixed in?  His self-interest is transparent; if the stakes weren’t so high, it would even be laughable.

But unfortunately, the stakes are as high as you can imagine.  My sense has been that, after so much build-up, and events hobbling along, the true crisis will be swift and disorienting: disorienting because it’s been so long coming and is suddenly here, and because in one blow we will have gone from a world in which we still have some assurance that our laws will protect us to another framework entirely, in which that assurance seems radically in doubt.

By instinct or advice (or, less likely, by thorough consideration), the president is attacking institutions vital to our democracy to aggrandize his own power, in line with a playbook followed by autocrats in other countries.  He maligns the free press; he attacks law enforcement; he claims our elections are flawed.  Truth, justice, and democracy — all are in his crosshairs.  But his plan, such as it is, is rough and not well thought through.  Certainly in the case of the Mueller investigation, his strategy has been reactive, which is not really a strategy at all; he makes decisions that increase his problems unless he then does something else that seems to make things all right for him but actually increases his jeopardy even more.

So we’ve been pushed to the edge of crisis; but of course it’s much more complicated than just Trump making bad decisions.  One other huge piece of the puzzle is that the Republican Party has by and large made itself complicit in his offenses against American democracy.  In the days ahead, we will find out which GOP politicians are fully committed to Trump’s willingness to take a wrecking ball to democracy, and which ones will understand that this is a bell that can’t be unrung; that once the GOP goes full authoritarian, there’s no going back.  They will either need to succeed in making sure we never have free and fair elections in this country again, or face such electoral oblivion that it will not be an exaggeration that a Republican will not be able to be elected dogcatcher in most of the U.S.

We’re also going to find out who the true leaders in the Democratic Party are: who can handle the biggest domestic crisis our country has faced at least since Watergate, and more probably since the Civil War.  We will see who thinks that we can return to politics as usual after this, and who understands that this is a time to renew American democracy, such as by passing legislation that eliminates attempts to disenfranchise Americans and puts an end to partisan gerrymandering by either party.

The biggest question, though, is what most of us are about to find out about ourselves, and about our fellow citizens.  Without a sudden and unlikely change of heart by Republican legislators, the final check against Donald Trump will have to be public resistance.  There are widespread calls for mass demonstrations in the event of Mueller’s firing, and those are sure to be part of the necessary response.  But we need to be prepared to keep the demonstrations going for a sustained period of time, and to consider actions like nation-wide strikes to keep the pressure on the political system to remove Donald Trump via impeachment or through forced resignation.  We need to be prepared to collectively and creatively figure out mass, peaceful solutions to save our country.  We've seen signs of how much collective power we have, from the amazing Women's Marches putting Trump's inauguration turnout to shame to a small band of Florida high schoolers reframing the gun control debate almost overnight.  It heartens me to think that literally every person who attended the Women's Marches, and every one of those high schoolers, has better ideas about how to make America great than our current president.

Right now, there's a lot of talk about Trump's rage, about how everyone's worried about what he does next.  This is hardly the first time that the national narrative has been framed around Trump as the sole terrifying actor who drives the national narrative and forces everyone to respond to his actions.  I suggest an alternative read: that for many months, the American people, embodied by the Mueller investigation, have in fact been bearing down on Donald Trump, causing him to react in an increasingly desperate manner.  I suspect we are at a pivot point when not only Trump, but the national consensus as well, turns to an awareness that it is the American people who make the decisions about where this nation goes, not a failed reality TV star who colluded and sleazed his way into the White House. 

Torture Advocates at CIA and State Department Suggest an Even Darker Direction for Trump Administration

Andrew Sullivan’s writing is marked by a tendency to draw extreme conclusions from sharp and insightful observations about real-world phenomena.  One of his dispatches this week is a case in point of how this can go wrong, as he matches a fine analysis of the right’s tendency towards authoritarianism — a proven fact in the age of Trump — with an alleged tendency of the left to an equivalent zealotry.  By my reckoning, there’s a world of difference between the mainstreaming of proto-fascism into the Republican Party — which controls all three branches of the federal government — and, say, people on the left defending the rights of transgender people to full equality, or even at a more adventurous extreme asserting that there’s no fundamental difference between the sexes.  Sullivan seems to have convinced himself that progressives have been driven to extreme positions by the rise of Trump; but my own observation is that progressives are by and large fighting for basic American values like equality and freedom from fear.  Liberals as a whole aren’t fighting to defeat Trump so they can turn around and force their fellow citizens in red states to all bake cakes for gay weddings and dress their toddlers in gender-neutral colors; they’re collectively fighting to defend basic rights across a broad spectrum of areas, from voting rights to protecting the environment.  Sullivan tends to ascribe an intellectual uniformity and extremism to a group far more diverse and conflicted in its specific goals, out of a desire to find some nonexistent parity with conservatism.

This said, there are also times when Sullivan’s identification of the deeper consequences of certain topics is spot on and deeply heartening.  His essay this week on the many, many acts of torture committed by the CIA, and enabled by Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s pick to head the agency, is Sullivan at his best.  After describing the abuse of prisoners in graphic and affecting detail, fully establishing that there can be no doubt that these were acts of torture, he ends with arguments that not enough people make, but which are essential to understanding the heinous crimes committed in our name and the evil of a president nominating Haspel as CIA head: 

It would amount to a full-on endorsement of torture by the United States, and a signal to the entire world that it can be justified. This is a profound threat to human rights globally and to the long tradition of American warfare, initiated by George Washington no less, in which the use of torture has always been regarded as exactly the kind of barbarism America was founded to overcome. It would be the final nail in the coffin that used to be the West.

Maybe in the era of Trump, that coffin is already covered in dirt. But if senators want to retain any semblance of the notion of American decency, if they are to honor the countless men and women in the CIA and military who for decades have resisted the impulse to torture, if they are to respect those who fought the torture-states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and if they also want to remember those Americans, like John McCain, who were once subject to exactly the kind of torture Haspel authorized, they will vote down the nomination. If this line of defense falls, we are truly lost in a vortex of self- perpetuating evil. We will have abolished something deep and essential in the soul of America.

Overturning a basic tenet of human rights that the United States honored for literally its entire history, at least until the evils of the Bush administration, should chill every thinking American.  To institutionalize this evil exception by appointing one of its prime enablers as head of our premier intelligence agency would be to bring it out from the shadows into avowed U.S. policy.  As Sullivan suggests, this betrayal would mark a turning point in the history of the entire Western world, trading democratic progress for a turn to barbarism.  Worth adding to Sullivan’s indictment is the fact that this is happening not in the midst of a crisis or its aftermath, as was the case with 9/11; contemplating a defense of torture now is as cold-blooded and calculated a choice as can be imagined — torture for its own sake, torture as a principle of governance in a time of relative peace.

One of the most powerful weapons in democracy’s arsenal is the delegitimization of torture.  Torture is the cornerstone of anti-democratic control — the capacity to inflict violence on a helpless human being.  It is the most extreme form of violent repression; it isn’t the state defending itself against armed resistance, however morally wrong that might be, but against someone who is already a prisoner of the state.  If you can torture, all other forms of lesser force are also allowed; and the ability of a government to use force against its own citizens is always an enemy of democracy.  If people can organize and meet without fear of physical harm, then fighting for and defending democracy is so much more possible than otherwise, because then numbers and moral suasion are that much more powerful.  This is why I still have so much hope for our country: so long as we can organize and act democratically, we can defeat Trump and move ourselves forward.

So if the United States truly believes that democracy is a universal value, then in the most self-interested sense, we gain nothing from engaging in a practice that allows authoritarian regimes the cover they need to commit torture against their own people.  American advocates of torture, in fact, stand revealed as enemies of democracy; not only democracy abroad, but at home, as well, because how long will it be before the mentality of abuse of helpless prisoners begins to seep back into domestic politics?

If you have not done so already, please take a few minutes to call your U.S. senators’ offices, and urge them to vote against both Haspel and fellow torture advocate Mike Pompeo as secretary of state.  An outpouring of public outrage can make a difference.