Donald Trump’s presidency has accomplished something remarkable: It has battered away our capacity to be shocked. His behavior is so consistently outrageous, shattering norms and continually aspiring to new lows, that it becomes difficult to muster the appropriate level of revulsion for each new affront.
Still, one moment from August—during the same week that Trump confirmed his interest in buying Greenland; shut down access to green cards for immigrants who might at some point require government assistance; approvingly shared a Fox News host’s tweet about a criminologist who claims “there is no evidence that we are in the midst of an epidemic of mass shootings”; and declared that Americans have “no choice” but to vote for him in 2020, because otherwise the stock market will collapse and their 401(k)s will be wiped out—merits special attention.
After having earlier opined that four members of Congress, all women of color, ought to “go back” to the countries from which they came (three of them were born in the United States; the fourth is a naturalized citizen), Trump upped the ante, successfully urging Israel to deny admission to two of them—Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, both Muslim—claiming without evidence that they “hate Israel & all Jewish people.”
Tlaib had been planning to visit her elderly grandmother in the West Bank, but refused to agree to the condition that she pledge to not express support during her stay for boycotting Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
It is time to insist on this President’s immediate and unceremonial removal from office by all nonviolent means necessary.
“Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me,” Tlaib tweeted of her grandmother, who is Palestinian. She said a visit “under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in—fighting against racism, oppression & injustice.”
That prompted the Insulter-in-Chief to tweet: “The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!”
Let us pause for a moment to reflect on the mentality behind such a statement. The breathtaking meanness of it. The small-mindedness. The lack of basic human decency. What more evidence could anyone need that the current President of the United States is a despicable person?
Tlaib’s grandmother got in her own dig, in an interview with Reuters: “Trump tells me I should be happy Rashida is not coming. May God ruin him.
But the real rebuke must come not from above, if that is where God resides, but from within the United States. It is time to insist on this President’s immediate and unceremonial removal from office by all nonviolent means necessary.
We are now facing the precise situation envisioned by the Founders in the Declaration of Independence, when they affirmed “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” a government that has committed “a long train of abuses and usurpations” revealing “a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.”
Having endured this long train of abuses and usurpations, those of us who call ourselves progressives must do everything we can to overthrow the current government.
We are, unlike the President, not delusional. We know that, practically speaking, the most likely instrument for overthrowing Trump will be the 2020 election. But even here, we need to be vigilant and even militant, given the strong possibility that, if Trump loses, he will claim fraud and refuse to relinquish power. We must do everything possible to ensure a free and fair election—combating voter suppression and outside interference—and then be prepared to fight if Trump takes his fondness for dictators to its logical conclusion.
But we shouldn’t have to wait until 2021 to “throw off” our present government, as the Declaration of Independence puts it. Calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office is fully congruent with the conditions set forth by the Founders. It behooves us to try, with all of our collective might.
Without a doubt, Congress already has all the evidence it needs to impeach Trump. He has criminally obstructed justice, as the Mueller report documented. He’s also broken the rules against presidential profiteering, cheated on his taxes, abused his pardon power, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of news outlets he doesn’t like, separated migrant children from their parents and locked them in cages, forced public officials to produce false weather reports to match his misstatements, and pressured a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political rival.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
While momentum toward conducting an impeachment inquiry continues to build, many Democrats are still wistfully raising a wet finger to the wind and worrying that such a bold move might be politically risky. As with so much else, this is not an issue on which we can expect the Democrats to lead—but maybe they can be compelled to follow. Progressives should put pressure on incumbent members of Congress for whom the I-word is a bridge too far.
Meanwhile, let’s turn up the heat on Trump—in the courts, in the media, and in the streets.
Looks like that first base is covered. The list of lawsuits against Trump on Wikipedia contains dozens of entries and is nowhere near complete. A single group, the Center for Biological Diversity, has filed more than 150 lawsuits against Trump since he became President. But the amount of progress attainable through the courts will always be constrained by the hardcore right-wingers who now dominate the U.S. Extreme—er, Supreme—Court.
The media, meanwhile, have done a commendable job exposing Trump’s lawlessness and corruption. They’ve helped force out dozens of the crooked swamp-dwellers that make up the Trump Administration. They’ve catalogued his constant lies, which now number more than 12,000. They have worn his put-downs (“the enemy of the people”) as a badge of honor. But the mainstream press, unlike The Progressive, will always be joined at the hip to a political and economic system that can never acknowledge its deepest faults.
And then there’s the streets. Trump’s tenure in office began with the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, the largest one-day demonstration in U.S. history. It has continued with major protests in support of sensible gun laws, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and a global action to address climate change.
We need to keep it up, and escalate, while at the same time reaffirming our commitment to nonviolence. (The whole point of some white nationalist events, like the recent Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, is to provoke counterdemonstrators into violence to make them look bad. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.) We must seize every opportunity to express displeasure with this President.
That’s why it felt a bit deflating to learn that only about 200 people—bless them, one and all—turned out to protest Trump’s photo op in Dayton, Ohio, following the mass shooting there that claimed ten lives and left seventeen people wounded. Trump also made an empathy-free visit to El Paso, where he stood next to Melania, flashing a thumbs-up sign, as she held an infant orphaned by the massacre there. Hundreds of protesters turned out for that visit.
Shouldn’t it have been thousands? In fact, shouldn’t the President be unable to visit any American city without drawing more foes than fans?
Like it or not, our reality TV President has struck a chord with a broad swath of the American public. His supporters adore him, because, well, they just do. His approval ratings have, over time, been historically low, at about 40 percent, but, given the enormity of his unfitness, are amazingly high. The King of England had supporters in the colonies, too.
It’s easy to dislike people who like Trump. Certainly, there are deep pits of malevolence and hypocrisy in the psyches of some Trump enthusiasts, particularly evangelical Christians. But the vast majority of Trump’s supporters are much better people than he is, not that this is an especially high bar. They are drawn to him for the spectacle, and out of disgust with politics as usual. They justifiably feel overlooked by the political system and buy into Trump’s claim to be on their side.
The President, however, has done little for the vast majority of his supporters except hold out false hope. The economy has done well by some metrics—low unemployment, a rising stock market, skyrocketing CEO pay—although this has mostly not trickled down to the average person. Now there are signs that we may be headed into a recession, or worse. Already Trump is scoping out whom to blame should this happen. (Hint: It won’t be him.)
Trump’s mishandling of the economy is a ticking time bomb ready to explode. The fact that the economy hasn’t yet tanked—at least not as of press time—owes more than anything to his having inherited a strong economy from President Barack Obama. But now, those 401(k) plans are in jeopardy—due to Trump’s foolish tariffs, pointless antagonism of longtime economic allies, and reckless tax breaks for the rich that are pushing the deficit Republicans are always so concerned about when Democrats are in office past the $1 trillion mark. People stand to lose a lot of money once the Emperor’s nakedness is acknowledged, as it will be, sooner or later.
So why not take steps to isolate ourselves from the crash even he predicts will happen? Perhaps Americans with 401(k)s should think seriously about divesting from the stock market. Get out now, before the crash the President is working to bring about occurs. Then you can support with all your might, and all your money, the overthrow of the Trump government.