It was a speech for the ages, urgent and eloquent.
“We are gathered in the cause of liberty,” the speaker said. “This is a unique moment. The great democracies face new and serious threats, yet seem to be losing confidence in their own calling and competence. . . . The health of the democratic spirit itself is at issue.”
As the speech progressed, there was no doubt that its target, though unnamed, was America’s forty-fifth President, Donald Trump.
“We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty,” the speaker lamented. He condemned the “nationalism distorted into nativism” that has led Americans to forget “the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America.” He warned of the threat to American democracy posed by Russian meddling in our elections by spreading divisive messages, and the danger to civic values caused by “bullying and prejudice in our public life.” He added, optimistically, “Self-correction is the secret strength of freedom.”
The speech, delivered October 19 in New York City, was by George W. Bush, until now arguably the worst President in at least modern U.S. history. It was one of a spate of jaw-dropping rebukes directed at Trump by members of his own party.
Senator John McCain of Arizona issued a dire warning about “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.” Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee called Trump an “utterly untruthful President” engaged in “the debasing of our nation.” Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona topped them all, blasting Trump from the floor of the Senate for his “reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior” and his “flagrant disregard for truth and decency.”
“None of this is normal,” Flake asserted.
None of it is. Donald Trump presents an existential danger to American democracy and institutions, from the courts to the press to the rule of law. That does not overstate the case.
On the world stage, Trump, in his recklessness and incompetence, constitutes the single greatest threat to U.S. national security. His response to the acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear program under Kim Jong-Un has consisted of juvenile name-calling, coupled with deliberate efforts to undermine diplomatic solutions.
In Iran, he ignored the counsel of his own national security advisers in taking steps to scuttle a nuclear nonproliferation pact that everyone agrees is working as intended. The move has alienated U.S. allies and been a boon to hardliners in Iran. “He unraveled eight years of Obama’s efforts to show that the U.S. government supports the Iranian nation and only opposes the Islamic Republic,” one expert told Time magazine. “Now Iranians feel that the [Revolutionary Guards] are the real guardian of their nation.”
If it feels at times as though Trump is trying to start a war, perhaps that’s because he is. External enemies, preferably ones even scarier than Hillary Clinton, represent his best chance to consolidate his hold on power, given his historic unpopularity. Creating disorder and chaos is central to his governing philosophy.
Trump has taken a wrecking ball to Obama Administration protections for immigrants brought to the United States as children, and for transgender students and military personnel. His administration has stripped workers and consumers of the right to take collective action against unscrupulous companies. He’s done everything in his power to destroy the Affordable Care Act, leaving millions of people uninsured and at the mercy of health-care profiteers.
In domestic as well as foreign affairs, we are now governed by what Thomas Friedman has dubbed the Trump Doctrine: “Obama built it. I broke it. You fix it.”
Absolutely nothing that Trump says can be believed. No norms are followed, no boundaries respected. He has no interest in effective leadership.
Take Trump’s response to the opioid crisis. After promising to declare the epidemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans since the year 2000 a national emergency, which would have opened up access to a $23 billion federal fund, he changed his mind. Instead, he announced a national public health emergency, involving a different pot of money, containing $57,000.
Worse was Trump’s display of ignorance about the causes of the crisis, when he said the best way to avoid problems with opioids is “don’t start.” As The New Yorker recently reported in painstaking detail, this was a deliberately created crisis, with companies like Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, launching an all-out marketing campaign to play down the dangers of addiction and drive up sales. Drug companies made billions of dollars knowingly addicting millions of people and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. People became addicted by listening to their doctors’ advice.
But Trump is, let’s face it, much worse than the sum of his failures. That’s why his Republican critics rail not against his policies but his persona. As Flake put it, “Character counts. Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly or debased appetites in us.”
Trump is unprincipled, undisciplined, unconcerned about precedent or propriety. He has surrounded himself with people inclined toward criminality, as the Mueller probe is starting to reveal. His appointees spew vulgarities and misuse government resources. His coarseness and dishonesty are contagious.
Consider John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, a man once lauded for his integrity. When Trump got into a fight with a grieving Gold Star widow over his inability to fake empathy for her loss, Kelly was tapped to defend him. He accused a black female member of Congress of making specific self-serving remarks at a public event and refused to apologize when video proved him wrong. His reputation demolished, Kelly went on to proclaim Confederate General Robert E. Lee an “honorable man.” That’s an amazing thing to say about a racist slave-owner who committed treason and caused many thousands of deaths. But perhaps, compared to Kelly, he was.
This is where Donald Trump has brought us, and why he must be opposed—not just by progressives but by everyone who cares about basic shared values, such as facts matter and Presidents shouldn’t behave in ways we wouldn’t accept from our children. What is happening in our nation now demands an overwhelming collective response. Resisting and defeating Trump has become a national imperative. Even George W. can see it.
And Now, a Word About Antifa . . .
There is no dispute that Trump has unleashed dark forces within American politics. Some of those forces are, as we’ve seen, violent. And that has prompted some people, particularly those who identify as anti-fascists, or what has become known as antifa, to respond in kind. It’s a bad idea.
As the article by Erik Gunn elsewhere in this issue mentions, many members of extremist groups want nothing more than to rumble. It inflates their sense of importance and reinforces their bigotry.
During a recent appearance in Madison, Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, noted that most social movements have historically employed a range of strategies, including the strategic use of violence against property and people. (“Resistance,” he said, “is more of a mosaic.”) Shouting down speakers of messages deemed too pernicious has been part of anti-fascist opposition for decades.
The problem is that applying such tactics to the present situation is not necessary and, in fact, certain to backfire. Consider the antifa protester in Seattle this summer, producing a dream clip for the right. “We fight fucking Nazis. We punch them, we hurt them, we prevent them from having a platform,” the woman shouted, turning her wrath on progressives who have a problem with punching people in the face: “You failed us. All of you who stood by when we were like, ‘Please, please follow us. The Nazis are that way!’ Fuck your fucking Constitution, fuck your liberal Bernie bullshit. We are here to fight Nazis.”
Other supporters of antifa have been less crass but just as wrong in rationalizing the use of violence to achieve political goals. Consider these words from author Malcolm Harris, in his essay “Why the Media Refuses to Understand Antifa”: “When antifa wins, there’s little fighting, and participants move on to other things, like disaster relief; when the fascists win, there are death camps.”
Really? That is the choice we are facing? Shutting down offensive speech or death camps? Harris goes on to name the opposition as “the free-speech side.” He’s right. And that’s the side The Progressive has always been on.
Erwin Knoll, this magazine’s former longtime editor, fled his native Austria as a child to escape the Nazis and lost family members in actual death camps. And yet there was never a more forceful and uncompromising proponent of free speech and nonviolence than Erwin. That is the legacy and charge of this magazine.
Bill Lueders is managing editor of The Progressive.
Lukas Keapproth