Trump Doesn't Believe He Has a Country to Defend, Just Himself

“You don’t call the FBI.”

This was the answer given by the president of the United States to an interview question as to what a presidential candidate should do when offered derogatory intelligence on a rival politician by agents of a foreign power.  When ABC’s George Stephanapoulos remarked that the FBI director says that calling the FBI is exactly what should happen, Trump removed all ambiguity as to his position, replying, “The FBI Director is wrong.”

This is an interview that everyone needs to read.  After literally years of the president denying any collusion between his 2016 and Russia, in his remarks to Stephanapoulos he essentially said that he believes the activity he denies engaging in is actually legal and right, and something he would do.  In one fell swoop, the president demolished any plausibility to his years-long defense, and this alone makes his recent words remarkable.

But more than that, what he said hits at multiple pillars of morality and patriotism simultaneously.  This is the actual president of the United States, in unadorned language, saying that there’s no difference between opposition research and a hostile foreign power seeking to influence an election for its own purposes; that the Democrats are such a threat to the country that collusion with foreign spies is nothing in comparison; that there is no right and wrong, only a world divided between the powerful and the fucked-over; that it’s okay to betray your country if it helps you gain power.

This real-life nightmare scenario encompasses not only the president’s disqualifying sentiments, but the lack of outrage from the great majority of his party at what he has said.  More than this, it encompasses a Democratic Party that, for reasons increasingly obscure, has consistently failed to attack the president for what he essentially is: a traitor who, as brutally summarized by David Corn at Mother Jones, encouraged election attacks by Russia, aided and abetted those attacks by denying their existence and failing to mobilize an adequate response or defense once he was elected president, and who now has invited wide-scale foreign meddling in the 2020 elections.  As I’ve noted before, if the shoe were on the other foot, and a Democratic president had acted in this way, the Republicans would have been calling him a traitor from day 1, and for once their otherwise incendiary and over-the-top language would have been totally appropriate.

It’s not surprising today to see the president half-backtracking from his remarks, given the criticism they’ve received in the last few days, except there’s no reason to thinking he isn’t lying now. And although he now claims that of course he would notify the FBI should be notified if a hostile country were giving him dirt on a rival, he’d still look at the dirt. The idea that politicians should have a loyalty higher than to doing what it takes to win obviously eludes the man, even when he’s given the chance for a do-over. The president loves to talk about how you can’t have a country without borders, but equally true is that you can’t have a country when the president is willing to give foreign spies the keys to the White House.

Laughing the President Off the Stage

David Roth has commemorated Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom by taking a stab at what the president really wants — and in his latest column, discerns that Trump’s highest aspiration may be to simply exist among the highest echelons of society, whether royals or the hyper-rich, in a sort of ostentatious and cloistered warm bath of mutual acceptance.  Roth’s take is casually adorned with eviscerating observations of the president’s embrace of gaudy adornment and the clear evidence that some status akin to the queen of England is his de facto dream role.

In verbally manhandling our doughy commander-in-chief, and paring away to get at what faint if twisted light might still flicker in the place where other people have a soul, Roth reminds us of the disorienting doubleness of this strange man: on the one hand, absurdly laughable, and on the other, a deeply dangerous authoritarian figure.  Can both be true?  Apparently, yes — but we would do well to remember what an effective weapon ridicule and ritual dismemberment of a foolish king can be.  Whatever serves to expose the emptiness of this man, and the hollowness of his claims to authority, but without granting him the benefit of a perceived harmlessness, is well worth exploring.  Many of us underestimated Trump in 2016, but more and more I wonder if this has led us to overestimate him today. 

Plum Line Blog Post Nails Down Dissonance on Infrastructure "Debate"

At The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, Paul Waldman makes a powerful case about why no infrastructure bill has yet emerged from the Trump presidency: a point that I think is essential to understanding the current state of American politics.  He starts with a critique of the Post’s own reporting on the subject — specifically, a recent article on the current prospects for an infrastructure bill getting passed by Congress and signed by the president.  Remarking on the article’s references to “partisan impasse” and “the capital’s infamous gridlock” as explanations for why no progress has been made, Waldman cuts to the chase and reminds us that the lack of movement on an infrastructure bill is rooted in deep and largely irreconcilable differences between the Democrats and Republicans both on this specific issue and in “the larger question of legislating and governing.”  His is a point too often obscured in daily politics coverage: Republican goals for governance are limited, and indeed regressive: most of their agenda concerns restricting both the role of government and the rights of Americans.  Meanwhile, the Democrats, as Republicans would agree, largely support an activist government that wants to increase social benefits like health care and education.

It may seem like Waldman is making a partisan point, but this is really just an indisputable statement of fact.  One reason it’s so obscured, though, is that political coverage continues to identify bipartisan cooperation as the highest form of political achievement; another, as Waldman points out, is that politicians themselves continue to say that Washington gridlock is the problem, which will be fixed if you just election Politician A to go to the capital so that he or she can break the infernal logjam.  It is not too much to say that President Trump himself made this argument during the 2016 campaign, every time he identified a problem that he alone would be able to solve.

On infrastructure specifically, Waldman points to a major distinction between Democrats and Republicans: “In simple terms, Democrats want to build infrastructure by building infrastructure, while Republicans want to mostly provide tax incentives to private corporations so they’ll build infrastructure from which those private entities can profit.”  Lest you think this is exaggeration, I’d invite you to read in its entirety the Post article that sparked Waldman’s critique.  While its “pox on both your houses” framing is flawed in the ways that Waldman pinpoints, the article in fact provides plenty of evidence to support his points about the Republican reluctance to fund things like bridges and broadband internet that help a modern nation go round.  His underlying premise is that any pretensions that Trump has a governing philosophy meaningfully distinct from the Republican Party is more or less bunk, and hoo-boy, does the Post article show this.

First, the piece gathers some amazing commentary from Republican anti-tax powerhouse Grover Norquist.  The mere presence of Norquist alone in the infrastructure debate is pretty decisive support for Waldman’s argument that the GOP is opposed to an affirmative role of government, seeing as Norquist is perhaps most famous for his line about wanting to shrink government down enough so that it can be drowned in a bathtub (an analogy whose violence and sadism are increasingly revealed to be among the proto-fascist antecedents to the Trump-led authoritarianism currently struggling to be born).  But Norquist’s comments about why Trump would be right not to work with the Democrats on infrastructure highlight how nearly impossible cooperation between the two parties really is.  Norquist accuses the Democrats of trying to “trick” the president into a tax increase proposal to fund the new spending, so that they could then use the tax hike as a cudgel to beat Trump and the GOP in 2020. In inimitable Norquistian hyperbole, he refers to this theoretical tax increase as “‘fingerprints on the murder weapon’ that would be used to convict Republicans in the next election” — for this GOP heavyweight, politics is apparently not war by other means, but a series of baroque murders for which one continually seeks to evade justice.

Particularly telling is the way that Trump, while having represented himself as someone who would be particularly effective on the infrastructure front, has basically retreated to the sanctity if not safety of the GOP’s anti-tax hilltop; the Post article notes that Trump echoed Norquist’s views in a Fox News interview, saying, “What they want me to do is say, ‘Well, what we’ll do is raise taxes, and we’ll do this and this and this,’ and then they’ll have a news conference, ‘See, Trump wants to raise taxes.’”

Of course, the Trump-GOP spin into authoritarianism and unapologetic governance on behalf of America’s uppermost classes involves far worse sins than hypocrisy and incompetence in keeping our bridges from falling down (though people being killed through entirely preventable infrastructure failures is pretty reprehensible).  But infrastructure is an interesting issue because it goes to the heart of the fundamental incompetence of the party’s governing philosophy, such as it is.  After all, how on earth is the American economy supposed to function without spending money on things like highways?  As Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, puts it: “We have to talk about real revenues, which means some form of taxation in some way. You can’t do it with fairy dust.”

Yet fairy dust is apparently not just what the GOP seems to believe in, but has actually chosen to snort into its virtual gaping nostrils, inducing a pseudo-psychedelic trip for them and a waking nightmare for the rest of us.  It’s as if they’ve embraced an imaginary capitalism, in which makers and innovators wave a wand and make jobs and growth happen, and that all the things that support a modern economy — not just infrastructure, but an educated workforce and a stable financial sector — just magically exist and have no need for further upkeep or improvement.  I’m tempted to say it’s a strangely childlike or naive view, but the truth is that it’s more truly an embrace of a full-on cannibal capitalism, that sees nothing beyond the gains of the present moment, the future be damned (witness the party’s indifference to climate change for the ultimate example).  

So the Waldman piece is spot-on about a basic point of American politics that keeps getting lost — that on basic ideas of why government exists, the two parties are as far apart as can be — but to be honest, the reason it truly grabbed my attention is because it helped clarify for me the media’s continuous lack of appropriate context for covering both the Trump presidency and current American politics more broadly.  The Post article in question falls down in a major way by framing the infrastructure stalemate as simply another example of quarrelsome politicos failing to reach an achievable consensus (even as it provides ample evidence of why this consensus is hardly achievable); but taking another step back, you can see that it also sidesteps at least three equally crucial frames: 1) the overall chaos and incompetence of the Trump presidency; 2) the great degree to which the president’s energy has been taken up by evading responsibility for his bad deeds in the 2016 election; and 3) the president’s obsessive focus on immigration and border security as the pre-eminent issue both for the U.S. economy and for his re-election in 2020.

The inadequate contextualization of news coverage appropriate to the moment finds its analogue in the dilemma facing the Democrats in how to deal with Trump: fight him tooth and nail, up to and including impeachment, or work with him?  The infrastructure dialogue between the Democratic leadership and the president brings these two threads together, as the most recent outcome was the president’s declaration that infrastructure legislation would not move forward unless the Democrats swore off further investigations of his administration.  In this case, of course, the philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats would seem to be secondary to the larger political conflict between Trump and the Democrats; but it’s important to note that Trump’s ultimatum only seems reasonable if you choose to pretend that absent the Trump administration’s various illicit activities, the two parties might find common ground.  Ignoring this fact makes Trump seem somewhat reasonable — he just wants to get to the people’s business, if those darned Dems would let him! — but in fact Trump’s embrace of Republican orthodoxy on taxes and spending is already putting agreement far out of reach.

The sheer number of disconnects — between the GOP and the Democrats on basic ideas of why government exists; in the enduring propensity of politicians from both parties to proclaim an undying faith in the bipartisan ideal; in the unwillingness or inability of the media to adequately report these partisan differences; between Trump’s increasingly lawless presidency and the idea that politics as usual can still proceed; in the Democrats’ inability to decide on whether they still want to work with Trump or to impeach him — combine to create a daily atmosphere of dissonance and frequent incomprehensibility that largely serves to hide the radicalism of the GOP and excuse the inadequate Democratic response to our era of political crisis.  Add in the matter of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, and the president’s subsequent obstruction of justice, and you get a fuller sense still of why many people wish to believe that it is all still politics as usual, and why this denial is increasingly part of our collective political problem.

As Trade War Escalates, Have We Lost Track of How Weak Trump's Hand Really Is?

I wonder if we are so used to President Trump driving the headlines and political discussion in this country that we’re all collectively a little blind to the possible self-destructive potential of his escalating trade wars with nations around the world?  There are some good summaries of the trade situation out this weekend, including at both The New York Times and here and here at The Washington Post.  Two things jump out at me: the degree to which other nations’ domestic politics may lead them to defy Trump in ways that he isn’t anticipating, and to which the president is betting that the U.S. economy will better handle any damage compared to its trading partners.  Wielding the blunt instrument of tariffs, as one analyst refers to them, he seems to increasingly be under the spell of his own ability to maintain the initiative. (The linkage he has now established between increased tariffs on Mexico and that country reducing immigration into the U.S. seems a serious transformation of a complicated trade war into something much more complex and intractable, and around which the president may have far less control than he imagines).

But with all the Trump-centric coverage, I doubt that our media has sufficiently covered what other leaders and other populations are willing to do to avoid being steamrolled by the U.S. in these trade disputes; that is, whether we’re too used to seeing everything from Trump’s perspective, and aren’t as aware as we should be of other countries’ agency in these matters.  Likewise, what’s being reported about the harm to corporate supply chains due to various tariffs raises the question of whether Trump doesn’t understand the full implications of his moves for the health of an American economy in which many sectors have built themselves around the assumption of free trade agreements such as NAFTA.

The growing possibility that the reputational damage Trump is doing to the U.S., via ham-handed tactics that treat long-time allies as untrustworthy adversaries (hello, Mexico and the E.U.), and untrustworthy adversaries as long-time allies (hello, North Korea), is also deeply worrisome.  As a law professor observer notes in this Washington Post article, “One of Trump’s major failings is that he only has a hammer.  He has no capacity of looking at the long term and recognizing that the vast majority of our interactions in life are repeat interactions.  I joke with my students that if you treat negotiations as a one-shot deal, it will be. No one will ever want to deal with you again.”  What felt like a theoretical threat a year ago — that Trump might permanently affect the U.S.’s ability to maintain long-term trading and political arrangements with allies and partners — is starting to feel a lot more real.  

It’s particularly horrifying to contemplate that Trump’s willingness to not only maintain but escalate such a self-defeating approach is rooted, above all else, in his determination that this is how he will secure himself victory in 2020.  It is clear he believes that a display of toughness, that he is fighting for his supporters, is key to winning the next presidential election.  Long-term damage to the U.S. economy or interests does not matter; Trump is all.  It is tempting to hope that this self-obsession may yet backfire, that, as I noted earlier, he’s overplaying his hand and underestimating the resolve of U.S. trading partners.  As veteran U.S. diplomat Christopher R. Hill remarks in the Post article, “I know that Trump considers the 2020 campaign as a triumphant march to the inevitable [reelection], but that’s not the way the rest of the world is looking at it.  You’re already seeing the Chinese holding back and saying, ‘We’ll see what will happen over the next 18 months to see if he’s still around and then maybe we’ll do something.’ To some extent, Trump does not have the self-awareness to understand that people are looking at the window closing on him.” Put another way: what interest do other world leaders really have in accommodating Trump when defying him may help doom his re-election chances in 2020?

Assault on U.S. Spy Agencies Should Leave Us All Shaken, Not Stirred

As I discussed a couple days ago, the president’s authorization for Attorney General William Barr to declassify intelligence information behind the government investigation of the Trump-Russia nexus should be cause for foreboding and anger in us all.  Not only is this a clear and dangerous case of the president seeking to exact revenge against his political enemies — a category of Americans identical with those who have sought to protect the United States against an attack by a foreign adversary and complicity in that attack by members of the Trump campaign and administration — but it has also opened up the prospect of the president doing real and lasting damage to America’s ability to protect its secrets and gather intelligence against others.  Barr’s exercise threatens to expose intelligence sources, sabotage work with allies, and benefit malicious foreign leaders like Vladimir Putin by exposing U.S. assets and methods in their countries.

But even as opponents of this deranged president have strong and manifold reasons to denounce his latest effort to undermine the U.S. government in order to aggrandize his power, it feels particularly important to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions of defending the U.S. intelligence community against Trump’s latest machinations.  There is ample history of the CIA using an alleged need for secrecy as a cover for corrupt practices.  Moreover, in terms of its bureaucratic power, separate and apart from its mission, a recent New York Times article correctly notes that, “Traditionally, the C.I.A. has been effective at intramural governmental fights, in large measure because its power comes from its information and its closely guarded secrets.”  So there is healthy reason to be clear-eyed about intelligence community motivations and agenda in its pushback against this move by Trump, without excusing the president’s corrupt motivations.

Not unrelatedly, and captured in the quote above, we are already seeing Barr’s mission being framed as a bureaucratic power struggle with the intelligence agencies.  This is made all the easier because of the CIA, FBI, and other security agencies’ broad insulation from public scrutiny and accountability.  It is not that the bureaucratic struggle angle is not useful or important, but that it threatens to obscure the larger assault Barr has embarked on: he isn’t just undermining particular agencies, but the security needs of the American people, as served by these agencies.  This is not simply a battle between a corrupt president and a powerful intelligence establishment, but a struggle over the defense of the United States, both in terms of gathering intelligence around the world and protecting ourselves from other countries’ ability to do the same.  Interestingly, it’s security professionals themselves who have been hammering this point the hardest in recent days; whether it’s a strategy to gain public sympathy, heartfelt, or a mix of both, they remind us that we’re talking about putting America’s ability to defend itself in danger so that the president can punish his enemies and build his power.

It remains remarkable to me that the Democratic Party has failed to push a line of attack against Trump and the GOP that calls into question the motivation of a party that seeks to demonize as treasonous security agencies that, however imperfect, perform functions vital to our collective safety.  Trump’s aim is clear — to neuter and politicize entities like the FBI and CIA that need to remain nonpartisan both for the sake of our democracy, and so that they do their assigned jobs as free of political influence as possible.  Trump’s nefarious ties to Russian attacks on the 2016 elections would not nearly be as well known to the U.S. had intelligence agencies failed to do their work and examine the suspicious ties and activities in the first place.  This hardly puts the intelligence community beyond reproach, but it should remind Democrats and others that defense of American intelligence and counter-intelligence is patriotic, even as Trump’s attacks make future reform of these agencies necessary in order to preserve both their independence in conjunction with far greater public accountability.  In a democracy, intelligence agencies and the world of spies must always be treated with healthy suspicion, as they stand in unresolvable tension with the openness and information flow of a free society.  But what we’re seeing Trump do right now is abuse their cloistered status, and push them in a direction clearly not compatible with our democracy.

Honor the Troops By Stopping the Endless Wars

There are many ways to honor the sacrifices of the U.S. military this Memorial Day, but I recommend adding to your remembrances some reading about the ways the Pentagon and politicians promote a shallow and cynical exploitation of American service members in order to evade greater public scrutiny of the endless wars in which their sacrifices are currently made.  For starters, I’d recommend this no-punches-pulled piece by Boston College communications professor Michael Serazio, titled “How Empty Displays of Sports Patriotism Allow Americans to Forget the Troops.”  I had not previously been aware that Major League Baseball teams have been wearing camouflage uniforms on Memorial Day to honor the troops, as if catching a baseball were akin to catching a grenade (news flash: it’s not).  Wearing a military-type uniform to honor service members strikes me as a surreal joke, not a sober homage; as Serazio puts it, it “cheapen[s] the commitment of [service members] to mere performance and play, when their occupation is anything but.”  He also notes that the Pentagon’s insinuation of military themes into major league sports serves to “channel our patriotic fervor into contests with unambiguous outcomes and no untimely casualties” — a maneuver, not incidentally, that ascribes closure and meaning to military service that is belied by a series of catastrophic foreign policy decisions by our political leaders.

Successive presidential administration have learned that fetishization of military members’ sacrifice and suffering is the surest way to avoid scrutiny of the dishonorable and murderous wars they’ve been ordered to engage in, and to avoid the incendiary reality that the flip side of American casualties are vast numbers of foreign dead, including almost too many civilians to count.  The truest way to honor the troops is to be damned sure they are never asked to risk life and limb in a war unless that war is absolutely necessary, and to insist that Congress has the cajones to actually pass a declaration of war when one is deemed necessary.  Otherwise, the result is what we see now: an endless sprawl of forever wars, in places most Americans can’t be bothered to find on a map.

Is Not Even the Very Holy Border Wall Sacred from the President's Corruption? (Short Answer: No)

The news last week that President Trump has pressed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to, in the words of The Washington Post,  “award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News,” would be an enormous scandal for any other administration; that it already seems to have disappeared in the tsunami of daily ethics violations and assault on American democracy is no surprise.

Yet the fact that the president would apparently push the U.S. government to violate contracting rules in connection with his preeminent issue — building a wall across the southern border — is deeply revealing of both his autocratic notions of the presidency and of how the American economy operates.  These notions are important not only because they go to the heart of this administration’s fundamental mindset and motivations, but also because they reflect the mindset of millions of supporters who remain loyal to the president despite what the rest of us see as his flagrant unfitness for office.

In this instance, the president’s willingness to put pressure on military officials seems rooted, at least partly, in a personal belief that the wall product of the company in question, Fisher Industries, can be installed quickly and cheaply.  In other words, he sees circumvention of contracting procedures in favor of Fisher’s product as a personalized solution to a personal crisis —how to build a border wall, or great chunks of it, prior to the 2020 election.  From this perspective, Fisher’s barrier product must seem like a no-brainer to Trump (the Corps of Engineers has indicated to the president that it’s cheaper because it doesn’t meet the standards set by the Corps, but when has a shoddy product ever put off the president?).

(It is also worth noting, as another indicator of the impropriety of the president’s advocacy for Fisher Industries, that Fisher Industries is suing the federal government over its border wall procurement process.  And so the president’s corruption expands, to include support for a company that has set itself in legal opposition to the government of which he’s the executive.)

But what would strike many Americans as the president’s corrupt involvement in a process properly left to  a competitive bidding process likely strikes many of his supporters as the president simply doing what he needs to get the job done.  In this, Trump’s actions are those of an autocrat, a form of un-democratic governance his supporters have come to endorse.  Specifically, it’s worth noting how Trump’s judgment is placed over governmental processes intended to both save taxpayer money and ensure they get what they’re paying for.  This mentality is echoed in complaints by Fisher’s president that “bureaucracy” is interfering with construction of the barrier, and likewise in comments by North Dakota Senator Cramer (a recipient of major donations from North Dakota-based Fisher) that Trump was elected to get through Washington’s bureaucracy.  But these businesses and politicians see this corrupt government with clear eyes — in claiming to be in revolt against an unresponsive bureaucracy, they instead grasp a golden opportunity to exploit personal connections and a corrupt president to make major moolah.

This corruption should be repellent to most Americans; the fact that it is not so to his supporters speaks to both their cynicism about how government has always worked, but also, I think, about how the economy itself operates.  Forget about the free market; forget about competition; what is important is to get on your side someone who understands the importance of personal connections, and who will shovel the work and money your way.  The irony, of course, is that this solution only reinforces the problem it purports to resolve; it’s based on a naive belief that a corrupt president would ever actually be on their side, and not more interested in lining his own pockets and the pockets of those willing to serve his purposes.  Not that there are any ethical companies lining up to build the border wall; but are his supporters really served by an economy where those who are awarded such work are those who could afford to make the biggest donations to politicians?  Ordinary citizens may think the president has their back economically, but this personal intervention on wall construction illuminates the devil’s bargain they have made: having lost their faith in the American economy, Trump turns around and simply continues playing the same rigged game that has led to their cynicism, only supercharged with the power of the presidency and with an additional self-serving purity.  When you bet on the corrupt and self-serving to save you, disappointment will be your inevitable lot.

Finally, it’s worth noting, as I feel I’m doing constantly these days, the lackluster framing this otherwise well-reported Post story provides for the corruption it details. “Trump’s personal intervention risks the perception of improper influence on decades-old procurement rules that require government agencies to seek competitive bids, free of political interference,” the author writes, in hideous understatement. The president’s actions as described in the piece already constitute improper influence, whether or not they were successful; the Post’s mischaracterization of its own story is truly bizarre.

President Moves Forward on Weaponizing Intelligence Apparatus Against Political Enemies

The news today that President Trump has given Attorney General William Barr enhanced powers  to investigate those who investigated ties between his presidential campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election should, at a minimum, end any discussion as to whether impeachment against this president is warranted.  In using the tools of law enforcement to hunt down those who worked to defend the United States against a very real assault by Russia and examine very real links between that assault and Trump campaign officials, the president has placed revenge and personal power over any notions of patriotism, national security, or the constitutional order.  Particularly chilling is the certainty that a normal investigation, while uncalled for, would doubtless conclude that, contrary to the paranoid and self-serving propaganda of the president and his allies, there is no deep state involving hundreds of people who conspired with a corrupt Obama administration to take down the coming savior prophet presidency of Donald J. Trump.

We can be assured, though, that this will be no normal investigation, but one intended to reach the fake conclusions it start with.  As a former CIA chief of staff tells The New York Times in reference to the president’s order to intelligence agencies to declassify information to assist the investigation, “It’s dangerous because the power to declassify is also the power to selectively declassify, and selective declassification is one of the ways the Trump White House can spin a narrative about the origins of the Russia investigation to their point of view.”  And this is in addition to the more basic problem of undermining intelligence work by possibly exposing sources and methods of U.S. intelligence.  You don’t have to be an unswerving supporter of the CIA and FBI to be appalled that a president would endanger American security for the sake of his job security.

Remember — President Trump has already proclaimed that those involved in the Russia investigation are guilty of treason.  This investigation is intended to prove the president’s slander.  In this respect, its basis in the world of intelligence is a perfect cover, as the president’s political enemies can be targeted not only by selective declassification of intelligence, but also by allusions to made-up intelligence that they will say must remain classified.

It is still an open question as to whether an impeachment inquiry would have any chance of weakening or removing the president, or would further strengthen his hand; at this point, I’m inclined to agree with those who argue that the brokenness of the impeachment route is another sign of our broken political system.  At a minimum, Democrats need to raise holy hell about this, targeting not only the president but all those Republican politicians who give him their vocal or tacit assent. But there is no question that the president has crossed yet another red line in super-charging his vendetta against his political enemies by enlisting the powers of the intelligence community against them, even at the expense of creating actual national security dangers.  The president is signaling more strongly than ever that there are no lines he won’t cross to protect himself.  He would destroy this country to save himself.

Reading the Congressional Tea Leaves on Impeachment

Line of the day: “While Pelosi and her allies have been figuring out the best way to turn up the temperature, the president and his allies—flouting laws and resisting subpoenas at every turn—have been burning down the house.”

But this whole piece by Alex Shephard is a good rundown on the state of play of the impeachment debate among congressional Democrats. It’s been my sense that at some point, the Democrats would not so much have to make a choice about impeachment as have it forced upon them by a reckless and autocratic president whose only path to avoiding jail time or removal from office is to destroy our country. That point seems to be arriving. I also note for reference the tension Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to be struggling with between pushing forward a Democratic agenda and fearing the public will see Democrats as overly preoccupied with impeachment. Shephard has some good critiques of this, and I hope to offer a few more soon.

Rich People Using Loopholes to Avoid Paying Taxes? I Think We Can Trust Elizabeth Warren to Come Up With a Plan for That!

This is something that we’ve already heard a lot about, and will continue to hear more about - that the social programs proposed by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other Democratic candidates for president will cost more money than the country can possibly afford.  It seems to me that this article today in The Washington Post, titled “Warren’s ambitious agenda relies on a massive wealth tax that the rich may evade,” is pretty typical of the mainstream coverage of this issue, for good and for ill.

The article’s framework is one of the most venerable in political reporting: is a candidate over-promising to her voters?  After noting some of Warren’s pre-eminent budget proposals — free public college, universal child care, and student debt cancellation — and how she plans to pay for them via taxes on the rich, the article identifies two possibly mistaken assumptions in the senator’s logic: “First, that the country’s wealthiest taxpayers won’t find ways to evade the targeted tax hike she proposes; and second, that new entitlement programs won’t result in ballooning costs that plunge the federal government deeper into debt.”

These are reasonable questions to raise, and I think even Warren partisans know that they need to address them.  But on both points, the article feels blinkered, perhaps inevitably, by received wisdom and a lack of appropriate context.  It is a given that the wealthy will attempt to pay as little in taxes as possible, and that they will pull out the stops to minimize payments of the sizable wealth tax Warren is contemplating.  But while the article notes the success rich people have had both in the U.S. and abroad in evading such taxes, it crucially ignores a few things.  Passage of such tax policies would be both the product of, and a further catalyst for, a re-calibrated public understanding that the rich need to start paying their fair share.  It seems highly likely that this would mean both heightened public awareness of tax avoidance by the rich, and a redoubled effort to head off loopholes and other such tactics.

It also seems more than reasonable that Warren, and other Democratic candidate with similar plans, recognize that their proposals are meaningless without effective tax collection.  The wealthy are not currently aggressively minimizing their taxes simply because they can afford great lawyers and accountants (though that’s a contributor), but because our current tax laws enable this, in combination with tax evasion enabled by an Internal Revenue Service that has been gradually gutted by anti-tax Republicans over the last 20 years.  Criticism of the uselessness of taxes on the rich based on the rich’s lawlessness seems less a valid critique of such taxation, and much more an urgent wake-up call to bring the scofflaw wealthy to heel.  It’s remarkable that such a middle-of-the-road article can note law-breaking in the highest echelons of society as simply an immutable fact of life, and not the rotten result of particular political conditions that might be changed.   

The article’s second major critique — that Warren’s new social programs may involve far greater costs that will “plunge the federal government deeper into debt” — is another valid and important criticism that nonetheless is based on assumptions worth examining.  First, that increased social spending might entail deficit spending is tightly tied to the first critique that her proposed taxes on the wealthy will be insufficient; again, it seems within the realm of possibility that a political consensus that allowed such social programs to pass would also include a determination to close off tax loopholes for the rich as much as possible.

Second, does it even make sense to talk about the federal government’s deepening debt anymore without noting that the Republican Party has been explicit about its goal over the last two-plus decades of choking off social spending by cutting taxes and exploding the debt?  Or to state that debt is a problem when none of the dire consequences forever predicted ever seem to come to pass?  As many have observed, debt only ever seems to become a crisis when it can be attributed to social spending that helps broads swathes of Americans. The underlying false assumption that debt is always a bad thing also ignores what is actually a crucial premise of all this proposed spending by Warren: that it will actually help economic growth over the long haul, aiding millions to climb into or grow more secure in the middle class, and raising the overall tax base, to boot.

Finally, the article notes criticisms by some economists that higher taxes might lead to less saving and investment by the wealthy; but this only reinforces the point that an economy in which the wealthy are such outsized drivers of our economy is an economy badly out of joint.   This ties into another unexamined premise that is found not only in this article but in writing about taxation more generally: the idea that taxed money is simply taken out of the economy.  This, however, is not true.  Apart from money that goes to debt service, government spends the money it collects through taxes, so that it is not taken out of the economy but in fact put into it.  You can certainly make the case that government does not invest money as productively as private investors, but this is not an argument proponents of greater social spending should shy away from.  In fact, how you define what is productive — is it simply growing the GNP, or growing the GNP at the same time that you enhance people’s educations and health in ways that promote both long-term, sustainable growth and a happy citizenry — should be at the heart of debates about the economy and the budget.

To Fight the GOP's Turn to Authoritarianism, Democrats Need to Talk About It

At the risk of turning The Hot Screen into a Jamelle Bouie fan club - if you’re not reading this New York Times columnist on a regular basis, you’re seriously depriving yourself of one of the sharpest political analysts of these upside-down times.  In Monday’s piece, he makes a point — and gives it resonant historical context — that has been haunting the edges of my consciousness for months now: in confronting Trump, his opponents would be wise to maintain the initiative against him.  This is much more than some Art of War-type banality, as it invokes not only Trump’s unprecedented ability to shape media coverage of him and his administration, but also that unspoken thing that holds back some of his opponents without the notion ever being fully articulated: overestimation of the president’s strength. 

The president and the GOP intend to use all the powers at their disposal to continue pushing forward policies supported by a minority of the public, such as draconian immigration crackdowns, a gutting of regulatory protections of workers and the environment, and now, apparently, war with Iran.  They also intend to use these powers to delegitimize and even criminalize the Democratic Party, whether through increased voter suppression measures, tacit encouragement of foreign involvement in the 2020 elections to spread disinformation and distrust, and criminal investigations of Democratic politicians (if you think this is going to stop with the Democratic presidential candidates, you are surely dreaming). Democratic opposition on the first front has been fierce, but has been limited by the party only holding the House.  On the second, the Democratic Party has been less organized in its resistance.

Trump and the Republicans also maintain a certain initiative by acting in ways that are outside the bounds of what has historically been acceptable behavior, both morally (I am thinking here of the cruelty toward undocumented immigrants, such as family separations and children held in inhuman conditions) and in terms of American democracy (the president pressuring a foreign power, Ukraine, to dig up dirt on Joe Biden’s son): activities to which our political system might be said to lack adequate responses, since they’re both outside the framework of known politics and essentially defy both the rule of law and common adherence to humane norms on which our politics depend.

If I’m sounding unexpectedly sympathetic to the opposition’s plight, I suppose that is how I’m feeling right now.  When one party is trying to break our democracy, there is no ready playbook for how to fight back.  But in moving toward a response, a couple points are becoming clearer.  The first is that the Democrats are only hamstringing themselves if they fail to see this moment for what it is: an existential fight to the finish with a GOP that has gradually transformed into an authoritarian, anti-democratic party.  Part of the reason I say this is because this is how the GOP itself already sees the situation.  This is a party that for literally decades has seeded the judiciary with a cadre of Federalist Society attorneys and their ilk, who importantly for our fraught moment seem to worship the centralization of all power in the hands of the president (unless he’s a Democrat, in which case the president is always grossly abusing his powers of office); that for years has fought to change the rules of voting in states across the country so that Democrats can no longer win power by winning the majority of votes, and must work harder than ever to even win a majority of votes in the face of voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics; and has happily existed in a symbiotic relationship with Fox News, a partisan broadcaster devoted to spreading fear, hate, and racism to its all-too-credulous viewers.

From this perspective, the debate (such as it is) over the wisdom of impeachment is both totally appropriate and also wildly missing the point.  Impeachment is a specific tool, to bring the power of the legislature to bear on a lawless executive, but in its apparent inadequacy to our present circumstances, it can also be seen as the founders’ tip of the hat to the idea that democracy will come under threat, sooner or later, from perennial human urges to unfettered power.  In the face of a concerted, decades-long effort to roll back American democracy, impeachment of the president seems a puny tool; potentially resonant under the right circumstances, with symbolic heft, but inadequate to win the larger fight against an anti-democratic movement that goes far beyond the current president.  

So recognizing the stakes is requisite to formulating a response.  But after that point, the Democrats and other opponents of this right-wing movement face difficult, even paradoxical questions: How do you employ the law in a struggle against those who no longer adhere fully to the rule of law?  How do you fight against an opponent who fundamentally believes you have no legitimate claim to hold power?  These are enormous questions with no ready answers, but to ignore them and not at least attempt to answer them is to court disaster and defeat.

One point, though, is clear: democracy is far less likely to prevail if its defenders fail to call out and name the anti-democratic aims of its opponents.  This includes describing for the broader public how seemingly disparate pieces of legislation and executive policy together add up to a broad roll-back of American democracy.  And this point is why shivers went down my spine when Joe Biden declared last week that President Trump is an anomaly compared to the rest of the Republican Party.  While there are strong arguments to be made that it’s good politics to reassure Americans that there is a great middle ground where the country can find consensus and move forward, it is a far different matter to provide the GOP with bipartisan cover for its slide to the authoritarian right.  This crisis is not just about Trump, and it is something of a comforting fairy tale to keep saying that he’s a unique problem we’re facing.  This president would be nothing without the way he’s fused his governance with a pre-existing set of Republican policies and attitudes.

Which brings us back to the points made by Jamelle Bouie that I started off with: taking back the initiative and refusing to overestimate the president’s hand. From collaboration with the Russians to refusal to hand over the president’s tax returns, Trump and the GOP are on the wrong side of the law and of public opinion in a hundred different ways. Democrats should be making the case every day that the president’s lawlessness and the GOP’s complicity undermine the rule of law, but also are interfering with the ability to move forward with laws and policies that actually help Americans. The president has nothing to offer but more of the same: more hatred, more scapegoating, more destruction of our democracy. Make the GOP own their authoritarianism, their defiance of majority rule. Never, under any circumstances, act as if their behavior is acceptable.

It's Not too Late to Make Immigration Stance a Liability for Trump and the GOP

One of the most urgent questions of this dangerous era is how we have so seemingly quickly arrived at the precipice of authoritarianism, the guardrails and traditions of American democracy trashed and abandoned in the space of a mere couple of years.  A good part of the answer will lie in the gradual transformation of the Republican Party into a proto-authoritarian party over the past decades, in no small part driven by whatever anti-democratic measures were necessary to suppress minority voters, distract white voters from the inequality and corporate exploitation destroying the American dream, and enact the misogynistic and homophobic dreams of people who dared to claim, against all rational and moral evidence, that they acted in god’s name.

But the flip side to our crisis is that too many Democratic politicians, as well as millions upon millions of American voters, still don’t recognize the scope of the challenge, don’t understand that this is about much more than Donald Trump, who has brought to the fore ideas that have been latent in Republican politics, but which were bound to break out sooner or later given white panic over demographic change, growing economic inequality that inevitably heightens everyone’s status anxiety, and the inexorable growth of the executive power under presidents of both parties.  Every day, I am feeling more and more that all the emphasis on Donald Trump’s role in our crisis is leading us astray, as it distracts from the equally pernicious role of a GOP that enables his worst impulses, and whose regressive social and economic agenda he has been happy to embrace as his own.

Part and parcel of this failure to fully recognize the direction the GOP has been pushing our politics is an abysmal failure on the part of Democrats to offer a robust countervailing vision of a more democratic, egalitarian, and inclusive America. The good news is that our time of crisis has sparked such a reckoning among Democrats; probably the key question for their large field of presidential candidates is how much fundamental change will need to be part of defeating Donald Trump in 2020.  A related piece of good news is that Democrats seem to recognize the importance of hashing out this question.  I feel like a good rule of thumb is that Democrats are generally on the right track the more their discussions of the future aren’t simply about countering the president, but about outflanking and obscuring his dour and regressive agenda.

Yet on a central issue, Democratic failure to define the terms of debate continues to offer the president a path to mayhem, division, and long-term damage to both the American soul and American economy.  Exploiting racial and economic fears by demonizing and abusing Latin American immigrants is his premier strategy, but this has only been possible due to Democrats’ politically unwise choice to continue fighting more or less within the terms of debate Trump has laid out.  Immigration is central to Trump’s political vision, but it’s also critical to America’s identity, economy, and future; it’s far past time for Democrats to hammer home Trump’s vulnerabilities on this front, and to stop playing defense.

In a recent piece, Matthew Yglesias of Vox describes in clear, logical fashion the various ways in which immigration has been a net good for the American economy, building our country into the powerhouse it is today in ways that are rarely reflected on.  It is hard to come away from his article and not conclude that opponents of immigration simply have no idea how economic growth comes about, and that they have relied on bad-faith and just plain wrong arguments to accuse immigrants of taking more than they give to the country.

And a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll suggests that Americans are deeply receptive to the truth about immigration.  Even as the Democrats have inexplicably allowed Donald Trump to retain the initiative on this issue, it turns out that the president’s immigration policies are quite unpopular with middle of the road voters.   Post columnist Greg Sargent reminds us that the president’s effort to make the 2018 midterms about invading immigrant caravans did nothing to preserve the GOP’s house majority (though others have argued that it may have helped them preserve seats in the Senate).  I’ve said before that I think Trump has played a meta-game with immigration, in that his abuses against Latin American migrants force the Democrats to spend time defending non-voters, playing into Trump’s goal of making them seem more supportive of non-Americans than citizens.  But these poll results suggest the opposite may also be true - a lot of voters are on to Trump’s con game, in which he’d rather talk about hurting immigrants than helping Americans.  Not everyone, it seems, thinks immiserated refugees are either a safety threat or an employment challenge; and this is without the Democrats offering a full-bore challenge to the president’s false premises.

Americans know hate-mongering when they see it.  Some revel in it, and are with the president; but most are appalled by it.  The more Democrats can take the wind out of the sails of Trump’s claims that immigrants are stealing jobs, or wreaking havoc, the more he’ll be reduced to anti-immigrant appeals based purely on racism and hate, which most Americans will be able to judge and condemn on their own.

Citing Possibility of 2020 Trump Coup, Pelosi Prescribes Unnecessary Electoral Bar for Democrats

This weekend’s New York Times interview of Nancy Pelosi contains the jaw-dropping news that the House Speaker is worried Donald Trump will refuse to recognize any 2020 Democratic presidential win short of a decisive margin of victory.  She uses this menacing and all-too-believable threat to back her argument that the Democrats’ chance of such a victory will be to “own the center left, own the mainstream,” rather than to push more fundamental reforms backed by some of the party’s presidential candidates.

Pelosi’s concern that Trump isn’t going to leave office unless defeated by a big enough margin raises troubling questions.  If Pelosi’s assessment of the man is correct, then there is likely no margin of victory he would accept as legitimate.  Indeed, a larger victory could conceivably lead the president to accelerate arguments that the vote was rigged or that millions voted illegally, because otherwise how could the loser Democrats have won so big?  This isn’t crazy speculation: this is exactly what he did in 2016 to explain away his massive popular vote loss.

Pelosi’s argument also signals to Trump that he has veto power on what might constitute a Democratic victory.  Will his majesty find a 2% victory margin by the Democratic candidate insufficient?  Will 3% do?  I understand Pelosi’s message that he must be repudiated thoroughly and unambiguously, and agree with it, but to say that an overwhelming victory is necessary in order to secure Trump’s assent to yield power is a step too far.  The Democrats need to win under the current rules; they cannot assent to new rules imposed by an authoritarian-minded president, and must call such a possibility what it is: a coup by a tyrant that the great majority of the American people would reject.

(The NYT piece notes that Pelosi was worried about such a delegitimization effort had the Democrats not won a resounding victory in the 2018 Congressional elections. It’s worth noting that the Democrats indeed had to win a tremendous margin in the popular vote in order to take back the House with the size victory they did; via gerrymandering and voter suppression, Republicans have already enacted the new set of rules for Democratic victory that she fears Trump will impose via Twitter incitement.)

Pelosi’s remarks also elide the counterpart issue to any worries about Trump’s refusal to leave office: what the Republican Party would do in such a situation.  But her concern about a Trump refusal scenario necessarily involves broader GOP backing of such an anti-democratic move; otherwise, Trump’s theoretical refusal to leave office could simply be laughed off, with the man bodily carted out of the Oval Office and remanded to the swank, sleazy halls of Trump Tower.

Speaker Pelosi’s diagnosis of the need for an overwhelming Democratic victory in 2020 leads her to prescribe an electoral strategy that appeals to moderate voters; “Own the center left, own the mainstream,” she says in the NYT interview.  Pelosi has previously made clear her interest in protecting newly-elected representatives from swing and more middle-of-the-road districts, and her strategy is of a piece with that — essentially, repeat the successful strategies of 2018 in the 2020 race.  Yet the specter of the Democrats appearing to be the party of the status quo, against Donald Trump’s resonant message that he will tear that status quo down — if only to move the country backwards — leaves me with a queasy feeling.  In the 2018 election, candidates could fit their pitches to individual districts; in 2020, the Democratic presidential candidate won’t be able to hedge his or her stands in such a way.  

Nancy Pelosi and other long-time leaders of the Democratic Party have yet to fully grasp the reality of our situation: that with one party having abandoned its adherence to democracy, the only way forward is for the Democrats not simply to beat Trump, but to discredit and delegitimize the contemporary GOP.  Not work with it, and find middle ground; but to name it for the authoritarian, white-supremacist coddling, inequality-embracing monster it has become.  This will necessarily involve re-setting the terms of debate decisively in favor of democracy and equality.   The GOP has basically embraced the terms of absolute destruction, with their complicity with Trump’s obstruction of the Mueller report and apparent determination to back Trump’s use of the Justice Department to go after his political opponents.  The Democrats cannot reciprocate by calling their opponents criminals, and threatening to prosecute them, but they also cannot hold back from condemning the GOP’s breaking of faith with the Constitution and American democracy. This is the high road, and it’s the right political road.

In this sense, Pelosi’s prescription is correct, but for broader reasons than she gives: the Democrats need a large margin of victory in 2020 not in order to placate Trump, but to repudiate the entire rotten project of the GOP.  In this sense, Pelosi’s note of defensiveness and caution again strikes me as the wrong one.  Against Trump and the GOP’s dour vision of an America closed to immigrants, beholden to the wealthy, and inciting hatred against everyone from journalists to Muslims, the Democrats can’t hesitate to talk not only about everyday issues like health care and a living wage, but the larger vision of America such policies enable.

I suspect Pelosi’s contradictory comments are her way of threading the needle of this upset and upsetting political epoch.  Acknowledging Trump’s likely willingness to contest presidential election results lets the left wing of the party know she understands their concerns; her strategy for dealing with this pins the party’s hopes on the politics-as-usual-but-on-steroids that won the Democrats the House in 2020, reflecting a belief that Americans as a whole are not yet in the mood for massive progressive change but need to be casting votes for something positive, not simply against Trump.  But with a possible presidential candidate like Biden, who is enacting a variation of Pelosi’s strategy in his appeal to middle-of-the-road voters and refusal to condemn the GOP for Trump’s sins, would the Democrats be able to convince enough Americans that moving past Trump is enough to earn their votes?

For an Opponent of Undocumented Immigration, Trump Sure Hires a Lot of Undocumented Immigrants

Donald Trump and his allies have turned the full force of the right-wing propaganda machine to protecting the president from the Mueller report’s documentation of obstruction of justice and complicity with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.  In the face of this, with Democrats already hamstrung by their own too-slow grappling with the unprecedented treachery and lawlessness of this White House, it can sometimes seem like Trump’s future hinges on this single, albeit deeply important, issue.

But as Tuesday’s reporting from The Washington Post reminds us, taking down this president won’t just be about Trump’s willingness to accept help from a dangerous foreign adversary, but also about attacking the president on multiple fronts: in this case, undermining the president’s war on undocumented immigrants.  As yet another story about the president’s use of undocumented labor, including alleged wage theft and lack of overtime pay, at yet another of his golf clubs makes clear, Donald Trump loved undocumented workers until he started running for president. 

What makes this a vulnerability for Trump, and not just another part of his past he can just shuck off, is that it’s contiguous with a broader vulnerability for the GOP at large.  Trump has brought the Republican Party’s strategy to new heights of bullshit: convince the rank and file that undocumented immigrants are the cause of all bad things in their lives, from losing a job to being threatened by violence, while actually doing nothing that would either substantially slow immigration northward (such as greatly increased economic aid to countries like El Salvador and Guatemala) or punish U.S. employers who hire such workers.  Yet too many businesses continue to rely on the cheap labor of undocumented immigrants for expelling existing immigrants or truly barring further immigration to ever be acceptable to major business sectors/Republican supporters.  Meanwhile, businesses like Trump’s simply continue to hire undocumented workers, who bear the lion’s share of the legal risk of such employment.  A grotesque, quasi-mathematical truth emerges: undocumented immigrants are increasingly desirable as the compensation a businessman like Trump needs to pay them approaches zero.

I don’t doubt that most Trump supporters will dismiss stories like those reported by the Post as fake news, or simply as evidence that Trump changed his priorities once he became president.  But as with many of the obvious faults and failures of Trump’s personality and policies, talking about such issues can peel away at least some voters from his coalition; can help sow doubts that the man really is on their side.  And immigration is Trump’s defining issue, the way that he’s made himself appear strong and managed to inject white supremacist thinking into the political mainstream in the name of defending national sovereignty.  Anything that can be done to mess with perceptions of his authenticity on this front is well worth exploring and exploiting.

Can Impeachment Put the Entire GOP On Trial?

A disquieting paradox may be at the heart of Democratic reluctance to pursue impeachment inquiries against President Trump in the wake of the Mueller Report: to concentrate the party’s efforts on an effort that has nothing directly to do with improving the lives of Americans risks adding renewed energy to the currents of discontent that helped Trump win the White House in the first place.  This seems to underly the frequently-heard position that the Democrats should seek to repeat their 2018 strategy in taking on Trump in 2020, with an emphasis on down-to-earth issues like health care.  An analysis yesterday from The Washington Post surveys this perspective pretty thoroughly, and it is perhaps best summed up by an advisor to Kirsten Gillibrand’s remark that, “If in a year I am talking about the Mueller report, I am losing.  Because the election is going to be about the economy.”

Democrats have inevitably been placed in a fraught position by the corrupt and authoritarian Donald Trump, and by the GOP that enables him.  To an alarming degree, politics is no longer the realm that most Democratic politicians are accustomed to thinking of it, where the long, slow slide of the Republican Party into a proto-authoritarian entity could be excused as hard-ball politics or simply a change in quantity not quality, and where Democrats could persuade themselves they were competing on the basis of ideas within a common framework of accepting democratic governance.  But Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, and what we have learned to date, up to and including the Mueller report, of both the president’s efforts to deny that interference and to obstruct its investigation, have helped demolish any lingering faith that we are still practicing politics as usual.

As much as many Democrats would like to make the 2020 election about the economy and health care, seeing that as fertile ground for defeating Donald Trump, and as strategically reasonable as it is to move the terms of the election onto ground that they see as highly favorable to the Democrats, the nature of the acts documented in the Mueller report are not simply the type that can be de-prioritized or set aside.  Cover-up of a foreign attack against American democracy, and a willingness to accept that help, is treachery against every American, regardless of who they voted for.  And for the Democratic Party, the issue is existential: Trump’s willingness to countenance Russian help, and then to seek to cover it up, was a direct attack on the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.

The Trump administration and its allies aren’t going full-bore to discredit and propagandize against the Mueller report because they actually think it’s bullshit.  They’re doing this because they’re fully aware of the mortal threat it poses to this presidency, a threat that the opposition is curiously slow to grasp.  And this may get to the heart of what ails the Democrats.  Too many in their leadership don’t realize that we’re in the late stages of a breakdown that’s been a long time coming, but that’s finally upon us.  It is not just that the Republican Party has gone all in with defending a president who has committed indefensible acts, not only in terms of accepting Russian election interference, but in excusing his inexcusable incompetence on so many other fronts, from the drowning of Puerto Rico to the separation of families and the caging of immigrant children.  It’s also that the GOP has for many years laid the groundwork for this escalation of authoritarianism on the right, with state-level voter ID laws, gerrymandering, and other voter suppression efforts allowing the GOP to win majorities despite its dwindling numbers nationwide, and its transformation into the party of white people, if not full-on white nationalism.  We can’t forget this: in the face of such a tilted electoral playing field, were it not for the massive organizing and outrage that swept the country last year, the Democrats never would have had a prayer of re-taking the House and being able to provide even a modest check on this craptastic regime.

And this misunderstanding of the current crisis has, at least in part, led Democrats to misunderstand the role of impeachment in illuminating the convergence of Trump and the Republican Party.  As Brian Beutler argues at Crooked.com, even as Democrats argue that a Republican-majority Senate makes an impeachment effort futile, they ignore the fact that both the inquiry and the Senate trial would put Republican congresspeople and senators on the public record, both in terms of their complicity with this presidency and in choosing to vote in his defense.  By underestimating the possibilities of even an unsuccessful impeachment, the Democrats are missing an opportunity to permanently brand the GOP the party of Trump, and vice versa, as a prelude to 2020.

In arguing that the 2020 election will be the proper means by which to attempt to eject Trump from office, the Democrats are putting their faith in an electoral process that Trump, as shown by the Mueller report, has no qualms about corrupting.  As others have pointed out, the Democrats on the one hand would have us believe Trump is an unfit president, but on the other undermine their argument by saying that we just have to live with him until 2020 - and if the president “wins” again, by the corrupt means that the Democrats had decided weren’t worth impeachment, well, that’s just how it goes.

Perhaps the short version of my argument is this: the Democrats may think that politics as usual will save them, and the country, but we have plenty of evidence that Trump will not be playing politics as usual through 2020.  Even as the Democrats dither on impeachment, Trump and some in the GOP have indicated their intent to seek revenge against the Democrats for having supported investigating the president in the first place.  Even without impeachment going forward, in other words, the president has no qualms about turning the tables, and seeking to unleash the power of the state against his political enemies.  Here are a couple questions that I’d love for the Democratic leadership answer:

 What will be the Democratic response when the president seeks to criminalize and remove from office Democratic lawmakers?

What will be the Democratic response when malign foreign actors attack the 2020 election in support of Trump, and Trump accepts this assistance, when the Democrats have established that such complicity by the president does not constitute an impeachable offense?  

What will be the Democratic response when the president points to the lack of an impeachment inquiry as proof that he is doing nothing wrong in accepting the help of foreign powers in a presidential election?

Doing the right thing in no way means being politically unsavvy about how you do it.  Democrats must draw as clear a line as possible between any impeachment inquiry and the ability of government to serve the public’s needs, including specific policies.  Any impeachment effort must be accompanied by the Democrats doubling down on a progressive, transformative agenda making clear to the public what legislation they will pass once they have control of the Senate and presidency. Impeachment, somewhat paradoxically, can’t just be about impeachment.