Fibonacci Blue
Protest against Donald Trump, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 19, 2016.
When news broke that Donald Trump had decided to hold the 2020 G7 summit at one of his Florida resorts, meaning payments from foreign visitors would go to his private benefit, even some Republicans long accustomed to the President’s casual lawlessness reacted with alarm, ultimately forcing him into a rare retreat. But U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, thought Trump’s plan was praiseworthy.
“It may seem careless politically,” he allowed, “but on the other hand, there’s tremendous integrity in his boldness and his transparency.”
Wow. That’s taking brown-nosing to a whole new level. If Trump followed through on his musings about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, Cramer would no doubt laud him for not trying to hide his murderous instincts, as a common criminal might. (One of Trump’s personal lawyers actually argued in court that the President could not be arrested or even investigated should he in fact commit a Fifth Avenue murder.)
Similiarly, when Trump likened the impeachment proceedings against him to “a lynching,” much of the nation was taken aback. Could he really be so callous and ignorant as to use such an analogy, given the horrific role of lynching in our nation’s past?
Not only could but should, opined U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “This is a lynching, in every sense,” Graham asserted. “This is un-American.” He said lynching involves people “who are out to get somebody for no good reason” and who take “the law in their own hands.”
Actually, lynching involves extra-judicial mob killing—often involving hanging people by their necks until they die—which between 1882 and 1968 happened at least 4,743 times, mostly to people of African descent. But Graham, who once correctly identified Trump as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” has become a shameless, groveling apologist for the President, like much of his party.
Republicans keep lowering the bar for Trump and he keeps crashing into it, splintering it to shreds.
That’s one of the truly tragic things about Donald Trump—how he diminishes the people around him, by bringing them down to his tawdry level. Some Republicans, including Senators Cramer and Graham, will likely never rise from the muck, although Graham did briefly rouse from his moral coma to dissent from Trump’s sudden and reckless decision to invite slaughter on the Kurds in Syria, to the delight of the despots the President kowtows to in Turkey and Russia.
Congressional Republicans keep lowering the bar for Trump, in terms of what constitutes acceptable presidential conduct, and he keeps crashing into it, splintering it to shreds.
George Will, the conservative pundit, laments in a recent column that “aside from some rhetorical bleats, Republicans are acquiescing” as Trump makes public display of his “gross and comprehensive incompetence.” He argues that if Trump continues to get away with insisting that “the Constitution’s impeachment provisions are unconstitutional,” the instrument of impeachment will be rendered useless as a check on all future Presidents.
There may also be a political price to pay, as Will notes in issuing a warning that to Democrats surely sounds like a dream: “If Congressional Republicans continue their genuflections at Trump’s altar, the appropriate 2020 outcome will be a Republican thrashing so severe—losing the House, the Senate, and the electoral votes of, say, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and even Texas—that even this party of slow-learning careerists might notice the hazards of tethering their careers to a downward-spiraling scofflaw.”
That conservatives like Will are at the forefront of opposition to Trump creates opportunities for alliances that were once unthinkable. MSNBC commentator Charlie Sykes, a conservative from Wisconsin, says in an interview for this editorial that Trump’s unfitness has the potential to unite the citizenry.
“I would like to think there’s a coalition of the decent out there who are just horrified by watching Donald Trump, by watching what he’s doing, but also what he’s doing to us,” Sykes says. “I would love to see the emergence of a coalition that would set aside ideological differences, at least temporarily, to deal with the current emergency.”
Sykes, a longtime Wisconsin radio talk show host, is now editor-at-large of The Bulwark, a conservative website “dedicated to preserving America’s democratic norms, values, and institutions.” He believes Trump “poses an existential threat to a lot of the democratic norms that we have right now, and I do think those cross party and ideological lines.”
To this end, Sykes argues, “progressives ought to be willing to make common cause with Republicans and conservatives who are willing to break with Trump. That’s not a surrender of principle. It doesn’t mean that we don’t disagree about things, but it means that at this particular moment in time, it’s more important to be allies than to dwell on what we disagree about. We can go back to debating the tax rates later, but if we want to get past this moment in history, there’s going to have to be this alliance that recognizes the unique emergency that the country faces.”
It’s an intriguing possibility. While Trump’s impeachment now appears certain, it will result in his removal from office only if twenty Republican Senators join Democrats in voting for it. This is unlikely, given the devotion that most Republicans have shown thus far, but it’s not impossible.
The impeachment inquiry has churned up massive new evidence of Trump’s shocking and illegal conduct, as career civil servants reveal the extent to which he has sought to use the power of the presidency to his personal political advantage.
William Taylor, acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, described how Trump explicitly tied the release of Congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine’s willingness to dig up dirt on his political rivals—precisely the quid pro quo that Trump has insisted did not occur. Others followed, sometimes defying White House orders not to testify, at great risk to themselves and their careers. Meanwhile, the President’s allies, to their eternal discredit, have rushed to provide cover for the President, with Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, demanding that the whistleblower who got the ball rolling be exposed and punished.
As Sykes frames it, the question for Republicans is how much more pure humiliation they are willing to take.
“What Republicans right now have to be asking is: Do they really want to support five more years of this? We’re talking about five more years of Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief. Five more years of defending and enabling Donald Trump, particularly as he becomes more and more untethered, more and more unhinged, more and more contemptuous of the truth and of the law.”
There can be little doubt that Republicans are driven largely by political self-interest, as are many Democrats. But that means some of them might still be persuaded to abandon Trump. Sykes, while “immensely disappointed at the degree to which [Republicans] have rationalized and enabled Donald Trump,” has not given up hope that they will turn against him. If a few Republicans do so, a few more will likely follow.
And progressives can be a part of this, as long as they can get beyond blaming their fellow citizens for having the bad judgment to support Trump and instead encourage them to honestly ask: “Do you really want to be part of this anymore?”
The answer, for a broad and growing swath of the American public, is no.
No, we do not want a President who constantly embarrasses us on the global stage.
No, we do not want a foul-mouthed bigot to be America’s face to the world.
No, we are not OK with separating children from their families and locking them in cages.
No, we don’t want a President who doesn’t know the name of his own Defense Secretary, refers to members of his party as “Rupublicans,” and thinks Colorado is on the Mexican border.
No, we will not normalize Donald Trump, his ignorance, his crudeness, his impulsiveness, his meanness of spirit, his contempt for the very notion of Constitutional checks and balances, his open corruption and gross incompetence.
Yet Republican politicians will never abandon Trump as long as they perceive that this will cost them politically. As of midautumn, nine in ten Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents opposed impeachment. But that may change.
To secure the deserved ouster of this President, we need to win over a critical mass of ordinary Trump supporters. That may happen just from the open Congressional debate over impeachment and the weight of daily mounting evidence as to the President’s criminality.
To date, the President’s every response to the possibility of impeachment underscores its necessity. He has set out to obstruct the process, even ordering public officials to refuse to testify about his misbehavior. It is getting clearer that anyone who stands with him stands in opposition to the rule of law.
In the end, there will be some Republicans who will support impeachment—perhaps not enough to oust Trump from office but enough to more plausibly put the lie to the notion that the push for impeachment is a Democratic plot. There will be more defections of principled conservatives and constituencies that realize, however belatedly, that Trump has been conning them. And the majority of Americans who oppose this President will continue to grow.
What a delightful irony it would be if, in the end, this most determinedly divisive of Presidents ended up bringing the people of this country together.