Tendentious Economic Arguments for GOP Immigration Bill Give Cover to Its Race-based Appeal

Even if you could set aside for a moment the racist implications of the new immigration bill proposed by a pair of Republican senators and backed by President Trump, their economic arguments for why we need this legislation are hardly airtight.  At first blush the idea that unskilled immigrants take away jobs from working-class Americans makes a sort of intuitive sense, but of course there are studies that say this isn’t the case; that, instead, immigrants fill the sort of jobs, such as in agriculture and the restaurant industry, that many American workers are not inclined to want.  There’s also a larger economic point ignored by the bill’s proponents, which is that immigrants compose almost half of this country’s population growth, and so have obviously provided much of the needed labor over the past many years.  Less workers would also slow the growth of the U.S. economy, which as this CNBC article indicates would run smack dab contrary to Donald Trump’s promises to grow the economy by leaps and bounds.

With its restrictions on immigrants who are allowed into the country on grounds of family connections, the bill would greatly increase the percentage of overall immigrants allowed in due to their job skills (though as the New York Times notes, the raw numbers of such immigrants would not substantially change under the bill).  The emphasis on bringing in better-educated workers who might threaten the jobs not of the working class, but of middle class and upper earners, makes it worth considering whether one aspect of this bill is that it reverses the class war that Trump suggests has been waged against lower-income Americans: with the avowed purpose of protecting the working class, it seems to look the other way when it comes to competition from immigrants for higher-end jobs.  But, again, there are serious reasons to question the premise that immigrants generally “take away” jobs in the first place.  As a side note, the bill includes a preference for people with "entrepreneurial" skills, but not those with skills at promoting democracy or engaging in human rights activism; this is another sign of the rot of the thing — could Republicans not offer a leg up to immigrants who might benefit our country in ways other than purely economic ones?

Look at me, though, arguing as if this whole thing was about logic and reason!  As is often the case with this presidency, the most important part of the appeal here is emotional — primal, even: an appeal to not-always-stated-aloud arguments about what REAL Americans look like and how REAL Americans should get first dibs on jobs.  So the main stated reason for the whole bill is that newcomers are taking away American jobs, and that this has to stop; this was a huge plank in Trump’s appeal to voters last year, and it’s not surprising he’s pushing it now as a way to rev up his base in this time of increasing White House disarray and incompetence.  But the bill’s a real two-fer, though, because even if White House adviser Stephen Miller pushed back against the idea at a briefing this week, the legislation would also have the effect of bleaching the shit out of the skin color of the immigrant flow coming into the United States; this would be the by-product of cutting back family-based immigration, not to mention of giving preference to English speakers.

Miller’s involvement is one of various tells that the racial angle is a major driver of this “reform”; formerly an advisor to Jeff Sessions, he apparently shares the senator’s worldview of a United States beset and deeply threatened by the arrival and propagation of brown-skinned hordes.  The idea that newcomers are taking the jobs of Americans is bad enough; but this is inseparable from the fears and resentments of Trump’s white base that these takers are not like them at all, whether because of the color of their skin, their foreign cultures, or their non-Christian religions.  The GOP backers of this bill have half-hidden an emotional appeal inside an economic nationalist one.

The bill roll-out was also a priceless introduction for many people to the arrogant and benighted Mr. Miller.  You need look no further than his giving voice to a right-wing re-interpretation of the meaning of the Statue of Liberty at this week's briefing, and his condescending efforts to explain it to the White House reporters, to grasp the shallowness of this silly man.  The Trumpers' America First shit may or may not play well with the base, but it should shock the conscience of the nation at large.

We Don't Need Experts To Diagnose the President's State of Mind

The Hot Screen was startled to see news last week that the American Psychoanalytic Association had rescinded its rule about members offering psychological diagnoses of public figures they hadn’t examined.  This restriction is known as the Goldwater Rule, so named as it was implemented after former senator and Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater successfully sued the organization in the 1960’s following a survey of members that had half of them calling Goldwater psychologically unfit to serve as president.  But follow-up stories are reporting that this restriction actually remains in place for the American Psychoanalytic Association, though psychiatrists have been and still are allowed to offer more general opinions on a politician’s mental health.  Meanwhile, the American Psychiatric Association still retains a stricter adherence to the Goldwater Rule for its members.

The context for this story was of course Donald Trump, and the wish of some mental health professionals to opine on his mental and emotional state — so why am I feeling relief that psychiatrists can’t diagnose the president?  For starters, such a diagnosis would be unethical, based on something looser than the usual diagnostic procedures of the profession, and so ultimately not a real diagnosis at all.  In unleashing its medical-professional firepower on Trump and other politicians, the psychiatry profession would simultaneously be loosening its claims to actually be a profession whose opinions are worth listening to in the first place. 

Offering authoritative opinions on the psychological health of politicians would also weaponize for partisan purposes the tools of a medical profession officially dedicated to healing, not hurting; after all, “do no harm” is the motto of doctors everywhere.  What would be the limits?  It is not hard to imagine a situation in which politicians began to solicit the opinions of psychiatrists in order to “objectively” deny electoral legitimacy to their opponents.  And what conditions could be disqualifying?  That someone has “attachment issues”?  That someone seems to have obsessive-compulsive disorder?  How about obsessive-compulsive syndrome? Or what if someone was "diagnosed" as a sociopath?

In the case of our current president, it would be misguided to channel opposition to Donald Trump into a psychological bill of particulars as to his unfitness for office.  One of the things that’s deeply striking to me (though not just me!) is how the president channels the anger and resentment of so many Americans; how he gives voice and legitimacy (by dint of being a public figure willing to say such things) to the darkest and most dangerous currents of the American character.  Clearly there is a story to be told by future biographers of how the president’s psychology intersects with not just mass psychology but such profound currents of American history.  Impulses to pathologize Donald Trump’s individual character have the side effect of downplaying the profound ways he embodies pathologies of the American character; he becomes something of a scapegoat, and the secret desire to put all of America’s sins on Donald Trump’s head (or inside his head, to throw in a psychology pun!) is itself a psychological impulse worth taking a closer look at.

Donald Trump is a powerful example of how redundant it would be to introduce faux-authoritative opinions into evaluating his fitness for office.  Whatever ails Donald Trump’s mind and emotions is not subtle, and though much surely lies below the surface, what is visible is more than enough for an average citizen to make the sort of judgments as to mental state and character that we all make constantly, day in and day out, as human beings interacting with other human beings.  For instance, we don’t need a professional to tell us that Donald Trump has rage issues: these are as plain as day for anyone willing to see them, based on countless tweets, speeches, and news stories.  These are characteristics that a child can see.  I personally think Donald Trump is a deeply damaged individual, but I also think this is something that every citizen can figure out for themselves.  

I think the much more important question than whether Donald Trump suffers from some sort of disqualifying psychological condition is why so many people continue to support him, not simply in the face of the psychological evidence, but in the face of his actual actions.  I guess this is a fancy of way of saying that for anyone who opposes Trump and supports a truly progressive vision for the United States, the basic question is why so many people would support a man, and policies, that are alternately economically regressive, anti-democratic, racist, and religiously chauvinist.  We can criticize Donald Trump for his lack of empathy; but we would also do well to cultivate our own, regarding our fellow citizens across the political divide.  A democracy should not be simply about closed minds, righteousness, and red versus blue; it should also be about mutual understanding, persuasion, and finding common ground.  Politicians like Donald Trump divide us against each other, make us believe our divides are unbridgeable.  Psychological understanding, it turns out, is an important part of renewing our political life — not when used as a weapon, but as a tool for crossing the inevitable divides between one citizen and another.

Crimes and Punishments

Many are rightly criticizing the president’s recent remarks that police should rough up suspects under arrest, but as often is the case with his words and actions, there is really no sufficient response to this recent speech, short of seeking his removal from office.  In one fell swoop, Donald Trump has put the bully pulpit of the presidency on the side of vigilantism and racist policing, trashed the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and suggested that infliction of physical pain is now an appropriate punishment for simply suspected law-breaking.  In doing so, he has offered yet more evidence that he’s unqualified for the presidency and unfit to hold office.

Encouraging violence against suspects is a recipe for disaster, not only for the well-being of the arrested, but for our legal system more generally.  How many convictions might ultimately be thrown out if police took the president’s advice to its logical conclusion and began beating confessions out of suspects?  Is anyone willing to argue that this is NOT the logical conclusion of his remarks?  That you are guilty upon arrest, and deserve treatment that in other countries we would freely describe as torture?  This is to say nothing about the way his words will inevitably poison relations between those communities already overpoliced and underprotected by misguided if not outright racist policies that routinely deny poorer Americans their civil rights, including protection from unreasonable search and seizure.  

Trump’s words are meant to shock law-abiding citizens, and to give succor and inspiration to his die-hard supporters who confuse state violence against the accused with getting tough on crime.  But rather than being the words of a lunatic, as some would argue, Donald Trump’s remarks are all too red, white, and blue, though out of a dark tradition that encompasses the horrors of Jim Crow and grotesquely disparate sentencing for blacks and whites.

And as Trump is the leader of the GOP, these words must also be taken as positions held by that party, unless and until they’re widely repudiated by elected Republican officials.  Enough of acting like Trump is some sort of outlier.  He’s the logical conclusion of Republican attitudes, the racist, authoritarian underbelly that’s been hiding in plain view all along.  Make the party choose — defend the president, or break with him.

For anyone opposed to Trump, I would also advise that, after processing the inevitable outrage over his remarks, it’s important to remember that Trump wants to disorient and divide our country, to force us into a reactive posture, and that we should seek to deny him this outcome.  I continue to believe that implacable, cold-blooded strategizing is a proper response to what we face; this includes both outright opposition to this president, but also a clear and vocal articulation of the country that WE want to see.

Donald Trump has far more to fear from an alert, organized, energized citizenry than we have to fear from him.  It’s also clearer than ever to me that we need to make a political example of this president so that our country never has to endure such a would-be tyrant who would shred the Constitution, turn citizens against each other, and profit off his high office.  It may not always feel like it, but Donald Trump is politically on our turf, not his own.  He's not a candidate anymore, flying home every night to Trump Tower.  He's the president, and living in democracy's house, both literally and metaphorically.  Trump may be trying to break the norms of our system, but it's hard for me to believe that millions of patriotic Americans can't turn this around and figure out effective strategies for breaking Trump, not to mention the complicit party that enables his rancid presidency.

Is Donald Trump Just Twenty Years of Republican Norm-Breaking on Steroids?

Like a lot of other folks, Jamelle Bouie at Slate has come to the conclusion that the main institutional hope for putting the brakes on Donald Trump’s slide into lawlessness is for the Republican Party to finally lay down some lines the president must not cross without risking the loss of GOP support and/or impeachment; as loyal readers may recall, The Hot Screen just this weekend tried to argue for the urgency of the Democrats forcing Republicans to do just this.  But Bouie also very neatly lays out how fellow Republicans have benefitted from the Trump presidency and how their actions up to now are hardly reassuring.  What really got my attention, though, is how Bouie sharply sketches out the ways in which Trump fits a pattern of Republican disregard for political norms that stretches back at least to 1994, writing:

If we are facing a kind of constitutional crisis, where an ultrapolarized, hyperpartisan Republican Party is short-circuiting the mechanisms for accountability, what we’re seeing may be the acute manifestation of trends that stretch back to the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 and the advent of a no-compromise form of political warfare that disdained norms, attacked institutions, and cultivated white racial and cultural resentment.

Bouie notes the GOP’s blocking of Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court and debt ceiling showdowns as examples of such extremism during the Obama administration.  Recently, the Hot Screen has been fired up about pointing up the GOP’s complicity with Trump’s rule-breaking: but I think Bouie is onto something absolutely critical when he suggests, without quite saying directly, that Donald Trump might be seen as merely continuing anti-democratic methods that the GOP has been engineering for at least the past 20 years, though on Trump Tower-sized steroids.  This includes not only direct GOP assaults on democracy itself, through activities like gerrymandering and voter suppression, but also of course on our institutional norms.  Anti-government beliefs, it turns out, end up being anti-democratic when the government you’re so opposed to is a democracy.

It seems incredibly important that the story of the GOP’s transformation into an anti-democratic wrecking ball needs to be told in a way that's accessible to as many people as possible, especially those who don't normally follow politics in depth; in its absence, we’re left without major context for how Trump came to be, and why his presidency endures despite an unfitness for office that’s clear to at least half the voting population.

I wonder if we are facing the dangerous convergence of a Republican party rife with anti-democratic tendencies in the name of serving the interests of the rich and powerful, and a GOP base with increasingly anti-democratic tendencies because they believe democracy itself has failed them.  For the GOP, Donald Trump could begin to seem like the solution to the fact that they're likely never to win the popular vote again for the presidency — a leader willing to do the national-scale dirty work of knocking millions of "illegal" voters off the rolls to tip future elections in the GOP's favor.  For the GOP base, someone like Donald Trump has obviously already begun to seem like the solution to their problems — a strong man who serves the interests of them alone, not the nation as a whole.

Trump Courts Constitutional Crisis in His Desperation to Stop Russia Investigation

So now Donald Trump has signaled that he’s prepared to fire Robert Mueller if the former FBI director’s investigation of Russian election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign strays beyond whatever bounds Trump says are proper — in other words, he’s prepared to fire Mueller if Mueller continues to do his job.  The president’s remarks to this effect came in the midst of a frequently mind-boggling and never-reassuring interview by The New York Times last week: an interview filled with enough deeply shocking statements that the basic fact of the president’s rambling, self-centered focus throughout the interview hasn’t gotten as much coverage as it should.  This man was elected to serve the interests of the American people, and when given a golden opportunity to talk about how he’s doing so, he doesn’t even pretend to fake an interest, instead issuing threats against Mueller, signaling his loss of confidence in former buddy Jeff Sessions, and bashing Barack Obama and James Comey.

As some of the political writers we follow closely note here and here, we’ve now arrived at an unmistakeable point of political crisis.  As Talking Points Memo hammers home, in ruling out quite valid lines of inquiry, most importantly into his family’s finances, Donald Trump has essentially said he won’t permit any investigation into possible collusion with Russia.  And the NYT interview was closely followed by news of how the Trump camp has essentially declared war on the Mueller investigation.

Finally, we also learned in the last few days that Trump has asked advisors about the scope of the president’s power to pardon — including his power to pardon himself.  This news has been surrounded with disclaimers about the president not having any actual concrete interest in the pardon path — but it seems foolhardy to believe this.  Yesterday, as if on ominous cue, the president, unprompted, has visited the pardon issue, tweeting that, “While all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.”  (And in an ironic twist stranger than fiction, Trump made this tweet the same day he attended the commissioning of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford, a ship named after the former president who also happens to be the most controversial issuer of a pardon in U.S. history.) 

Together with the fact that Trump considers the Mueller investigation illegitimate, news of interest in the pardon power suggests that the president is prepared to push the presidency well past a point compatible with either the rule of law or democratic governance, to a point of unfettered lawlessness.  How else to describe it when the president suggests that he has the power to pardon any crime he or anyone else has committed, and asserts the ability to limit any investigation as he sees fit?  To put the situation in the stark, concrete terms we need to understand in order to figure out how to respond: There are strong suspicions that the Trump campaign colluded with already-established Russian meddling in the 2016 election.  Over the past weeks, we have received increasing evidence that this collusion is real.  The president has now signaled he is willing to abuse his powers to stop that investigation.

The president is acting exactly like someone who has something to hide; is acting, in fact, exactly as someone so unprincipled as to have colluded with a foreign power to win the presidency would act, up to attacking our system of government itself and moving it out of the realm of democracy into something authoritarian and vile. 

Where will we be if, tomorrow, Donald Trump fires Mueller and pardons himself and everyone in his administration for any crimes related to the 2016 election?  This would be a clear statement that the law does not apply to the president, an abuse of the pardon power that transforms the president into the equivalent of a king.  It is grotesque enough that collusion and possible treason would be excused.  But this would only be the beginning of a reign of lawlessness — because if you can use the pardon power on the most serious of issues, why not on other ones?  And why not all the time?  After all, the Constitution doesn’t say there are limits to how often the president can pardon.  The logic quickly leads to a situation of authoritarianism, with an effective dictator who by definition cannot break the law — who can, by extension, do anything he wants.

This turn of events wouldn’t feel so ominous if the majority Republicans had so far indicated any commitment to constrain the president’s norm-breaking, from his attacks on the press to his attempts to delegitimize the Russian-related investigations.  But Republicans, particularly the House and Senate leadership, have been the president’s enablers for the past six months.  They have chosen to make a deal with the devil in order to push conservative legislation like Obamacare repeal and tax cuts for the rich.  As I’ve detailed here, they’ve already made themselves complicit with Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies.

So as a first order of business, it’s time to turn up the pressure on those who could persuade the president that there is a point beyond which his political party will not allow him to go.  Democrats need to demand that GOP senators and congresspeople make it clear that the president’s firing of Mueller or use of the pardon to excuse possible crimes committed by him or his campaign will mean the loss of the party’s support, and impeachment for the president.  If the GOP fails to do this — and such failure is likely, but calling them out will establish their positions for all to see — Democrats need to make it clear to the public at large that the GOP is at risk of becoming an accessory to something that we haven’t yet had to face as a nation — a president whose actions threaten to take us into a realm of full-bore authoritarianism.

More than this — the public needs to make its voice heard, starting now.  Jeet Heer at New Republic is right on when he says that the public needs to signal immediately, including by means of mass demonstrations, that the American people won’t countenance the lurch into authoritarianism that either a firing of the special counsel or issuance of pardons would represent.  Michelle Goldberg reports on current organizing for mass responses should the firing occur, which is good news, but this seems not proactive enough.  Too many norms have already been broken, from the Muslim ban to Trump’s ongoing actions to subvert voting rights based on lies that there were millions of illegal ballots cast in 2016; we need to start getting ahead of the curve.

Just the possibility that the president is considering the pardon should be warning enough — six months after his inauguration, he’s already started thinking about turning what has traditionally been a limited power meant to soften the edges of the judicial system into the keystone of uninhibited rule.  What sort of person even thinks about this?  Not one fit to be president.  It’s time to take the initiative back from Trump.  Months ago, I had wondered whether he would ever start thinking about using pardons to weasel out of the Russia investigation, and I immediately thought this was a histrionic and absurd idea for me to have.  Now, it’s as clear as day that the most extreme anti-democratic possibilities can become reality when the president is Donald Trump.  

This has never really been an matter of whether the Russians made a difference in Trump winning, which because of its essential unknowability is sort of a non-issue.  The real concern was whether his camp colluded with the Russian in the effort.  Such a collusion would be so far beyond the pale of what is acceptable in our country that it is fair to say that it is now a major fault line of what sort of citizen you are: one with a basic patriotism and belief in our democracy and political union, or one who believes in power over patriotism, power over democracy, power over the rule of law.  And it is serious enough a possibility that it raises the question of what might still be occurring in the way of distorted policy, payoffs, and other sordid arrangements with the Russians.

But now we are past even that deeply-destabilizing point, with the president’s apparent desperation to cover up any investigation into that collusion — not to mention prevent any exposure of his financial history — leading him to essentially declare war on our democracy itself.  He’s already fired the FBI director, and said on national TV he did so because he didn’t like the Russia investigation.  That firing in itself was a shocking event.  Now, as evidence increasingly mounts of bad deeds committed by Team Trump in the 2016 election, his desperation to cover up the crime is increasing accordingly.  Unfortunately for us, the only ways left to him to cover up are direct attacks on the rule of law in our country.  Unfortunately for Trump, I’m pretty sure that most Americans won’t accept this.

The Democrats Underplay the Russian Collusion Story at Their Peril

As we’ve noted off and on, Andrew O’Hehir over at Salon has been going big on the meaning of Donald Trump to our democracy.  As far as we’re concerned, everything he’s written since the election (and before, for that matter) is well worth reading for anyone interested in a perspective that assimilates history, philosophy, and pop culture into keen perspectives on our ongoing political and cultural meltdown.  He’s been diving into a trio of recurrent and interrelated themes — 1) whether Trump’s election is a fluke or telling sign of a democracy and culture in crisis mode, 2) the battle for the soul of the Democratic party in the wake of the 2016 election, and 3) how the question of Russian meddling into the past election relates to these first two subjects.  In his own words, here's a good summary of what he's been about:

“[T]he fundamental divide when it comes to understanding the rise of Donald Trump and the outcome of the 2016 election is about political worldview or even epistemology, meaning how we decide what is most important. Is President Donald Trump a fluke, created by Jim Comey and the Russians and a weird eruption of racial and sexual bigotry among a subset of white Americans? Or is he a symptom of a deeper long-term disorder, a phenomenon that was overdetermined by multiple factors and in some sense a product of America’s historical karma?

Beyond those questions, of course, lie the unquenchable questions that threaten to devour the electoral coalition of the American center and left: What is the path forward for the so-called resistance? Is the Democratic Party, which believed it represented a clear and growing American majority and was about to elect our first female president, in need of a major ideological overhaul or just some tweaks to the messaging? Does the road back to power for progressives (another term of art) require a strategic alliance with Wall Street finance and corporate capitalism — or something closer to open conflict with those forces?” 

Lately, O'Hehir's been particularly focused on the idea that the overall concept of Russian interference in the election has become a “proxy” war between the Clintonite and Bernie-ite wings of the Democratic party.  As he broadly describes it, in this conflict, the former group wants to emphasize the Russian factor as the reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss, as a key part of making the case that her centrist policies were sound and sufficient for victory, which would have been hers were it not for Putin’s interference.  Meanwhile, the more progressive wing of the party sees the Russia story as perhaps secondary, and as a distraction from more important issues like economic inequality.  

In this weekend’s column, O’Hehir provides more clarity on this intra-party conflict, in part because it contains an interview with author and activist Norman Solomon, who is on the skeptical end of the spectrum of perspectives on the Russia scandal.  Solomon sees the emphasis on Russia as a way for Clinton centrists to “[retain] control of the party and [beat] back the Bernie insurgency,” and states that “Blaming Russia is a way of not blaming the corporate elites of the Democratic establishment.”  Solomon also points to reports in the recently published book Shattered that shortly after the election, “top operatives” of the Clinton campaign “decided to blame Russia for Clinton’s loss.” 

The idea that Team Clinton and Democratic centrists have a heavy interest in casting Russian interference as the primary reason for their defeat is deeply persuasive.  It’s also understandable that the progressive wing of the Democrats would not want to get rolled by this argument and have it used to discredit a move towards a more populist party.  But it seems to me at this point, with the revelations of Donald Jr.’s emails coming on the heels of various other implicating reports, that the most important part of the Russia story is the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians, and that getting to the bottom of this possible collusion should rightly be at the top of all Democrats’ agenda.  At the most basic level, we are faced with the most monstrous of possibilities — that a presidential campaign betrayed its loyalty to country for partisan gain, and has subsequently abused the power of the presidency to cover up that betrayal.  The urgency of keeping up this focus is emphasized by the stakes involved — they might even be said to be beyond politics.  In the short term, sure, this focus might redound to the benefit of Clinton-type Democrats — but who cares when the issues are so grave?  Besides, settling the question of collusion is NOT the same as saying that the Russian factor is why Clinton lost.  

Ultimately, anyone who believes in getting to the roots of economic inequality, racism, misogyny, and other basic issues needs to be able to argue for the primacy of those issues while defending the country’s basic security.  But of course, politicians and party can indeed do more than one thing at a time.  Indeed, at this very moment, the Republicans as a whole have presented another huge challenge, this one domestic, against which the Democrats need to push with all their might — the repeal of the ACA and its replacement with a grotesque new bill that would throw upwards of 20 million American off their health care plans.  Though this would seem on its surface to be a much different issue than collusion with Russia, the basics are in fact deeply similar — the GOP is a party that can’t be trusted to serve the interests of the American people.  It can be stated that simply.  And on both issues, the Democrats need to fight for the public interest.

Don Jr. Revelations Up the Stakes for Associating Entire GOP With Russia Mess

With the waterfall of disclosures this past week around Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer with the premise of the Russian government providing support to his father’s campaign, the idea that the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 election became much more concrete for a lot of people.  And with these developments, it has become more important than ever, both politically for the Democrats and as a matter of defending the most basic notions of national security, to highlight how the Republican Party has been a crucial enabler of the president’s efforts to evade accountability on Russia’s role in the past election.

To this point, Jeet Heer at the New Republic considers the evidence of Republican Russia-related obstructionism.  The list is damning, from Mitch McConnell’s now-notorious resistance to a bipartisan statement at the behest of President Obama about Russian interference during the 2016 campaign, to the unethical antics of Representative Kevin Nunes, to various Republicans’ disparagement of fired FBI Director James Comey.  Heer suggests a possible conundrum for Democrats, between hoping that they can work with Republicans to impeach the president, and holding the Republicans to account for their complicity in protecting Trump, but at the expense of losing the cooperation necessary to bring the president to heel.  Heer comes down on the side of hitting the Republicans on the issue, citing the foolhardiness of Democrats waiting for the G.O.P. to do the right thing.

In a similar vein, Brian Beutler points out that the Donald Jr.-Russian attorney meeting raises a bunch of uncomfortable questions for the president’s enablers.  “Trump and his advisers didn’t just lie to the public, but to his partisan allies as well,” writes Beutler.  “The most charitable read of the GOP leadership’s behavior is that they believed Trump’s lies and proceeded accordingly. Now that they know they were misled, we need to know what they intend to do about it.”  He also states:

“As we now know, McConnell ran interference for Trump to stop President Barack Obama from warning the country about a Russian subversion campaign that Trump not only knew to exist, but with which he actively collaborated. . . That abdication carried a rotten stench even before we knew how solicitous the Trump campaign was of Russian meddling. But now we know that the proof McConnell supposedly needed was sitting idly in multiple inboxes at Trump campaign headquarters. Until Tuesday, he and other Republicans could escape scrutiny for their conduct by hiding behind the sensitivity of the deliberations. Now the best they can say for their behavior is that they unwittingly abetted Trump’s collusion with the Russian government because they fell for his lies. The alternative is that they made a conscious decision to allow Russian subversion of the election to continue unimpeded. The country deserves to know where the truth resides.” 

The press needs to ask these questions, but just as importantly, so do the Democrats.  As a political matter, they need to exploit the divisions that the Trumpsters’ dissembling have caused with his defenders — these Republicans have to be forced to choose between continuing to defend the president, and so further implicate themselves with his bad behavior, or force a rift that will weaken both the president and the GOP as a whole.

At this stage of the game, it seems to me that there’s no political downside to the Democrats going after the Republicans on their enabling of Donald Trump.  I say this in light of the existential seriousness of the issues at play, and the escalating evidence that where collusion is concerned, smoke means fire.  At the barest minimum, even if there was no collusion, Donald Trump quite arguably obstructed justice by firing FBI Director James Comey to derail the investigation, even if it was only to protect his political agenda from distractions.  At a bare minimum, that is, the Russia factor has caused Donald Trump to abuse the power of his office.

Of course, possible collusion with Russia is only the most heinous among a group of other actions Donald Trump has engaged in that reveal him as unfit for the presidency.  As just one example, the speciousness of his claims that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election and subsequent creation of a task force to “investigate” this wholly fictitious issue cannot be overstated.  As much as the Russian meddling, this is a direct assault on both the reality of what happened in 2016 — Donald Trump’s popular vote loss by millions of votes — and on the integrity of our elections going forward, a clear prelude to mass voter suppression.  As Charles Blow puts it in a column this week that discusses the Don Jr. meeting and beyond, Donald Trump has declared war on our country — on its Constitution, its values, and its culture.  

So the Democrats shouldn’t only be hitting Donald Trump on the Russia issue.  Rather, it’s the worst of an impeachment-level group of sins that needs to be foregrounded in the nation’s political discussion.  But it is of a piece with the others: it’s the president abusing his power to serve his own interests over those of the American people.  Trump’s Russia ties are politically radioactive in a singular way; but even if it turns out there’s been no actual collusion, Democrats need to exact a price for the utter amorality of his and his campaign’s actions, even as they continue to hit him on these other issues.

But as a political matter, and as a basic recognition of how we got to this point, hitting Trump on his bad actions up to and including collusion with a hostile foreign power needs to always be coupled with the idea that Trump’s baggage is getting in the way of dealing with our country’s REAL challenges, and with the Democrats talking about what they’re going to do to fight inequality, create jobs, ensure free trade works for everyone, and saving our planet.  

It does seem that the Democrats are inevitably in a bind not of their own making.  Because of the utter seriousness of the threat Trump presents to our country, including possible collusion with a foreign power, they are essentially in a position of being naysayers. That is, there’s not a lot of room to maneuver here; outright opposition to him is called for.  But no one says this can’t be linked to always putting forward what they’d be doing differently — all the good things that Trump’s incompetence is preventing.  They can’t let Trump frame this as a fight between himself as the defender of ordinary Americans and an elite conspiracy out to get him. 

The President's Western Civilization Speech Draws on White Nationalist Traditions

Over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie has braved the hyperbole of Donald Trump’s speech in Poland last week to suss out what exactly the president is talking about when he says that “Western civilization” is under tremendous threat from outside forces.  He points out that while past presidents talked of “‘the West’ in ideological terms – world of free elections and free markets,” Team Trump has foregrounded culture, religion, and most tellingly, race.  And its emphasis on Western civilization being a matter of blood lines, and not, say, a pinnacle of democracy and human rights, Bouie shows how Trump's language “fit[s] comfortably into a long history of white nationalist rhetoric.”  The president, it seems, has taken his bullshit racism global.

In one sense, it’s ludicrous to listen to Donald Trump try to engage with big ideas about the nature of our “civilization,” not when his ignorance of history, let alone the present, is obvious to all.  But of course what we encounter when we read or hear the words of his speech is not an accurate, considered summation of the state of the world, but an expression of the retrograde tribalism and anti-democratic spirit afoot in the West, and elsewhere, that Donald Trump has harnessed and amplified.  The president may claim that our threats come from outside, but the greatest challenges of our day come from within, whether you consider economic inequality, a degraded environment quickly approaching a crisis point, a political system engulfed by money and increasingly unresponsive to the needs of the common citizen, or festering racism and misogyny.  Donald Trump hasn’t diagnosed our peril; he IS our peril, along with a mindset that encourages us to hate and blame others instead of facing down our own afflictions.

Are Democrats Set to Cement Their Hold on Virginia?

Last week, we briefly touched on the Virginia gubernatorial race for what it showed of the continuing derangement in the Republican Party — a Trumpish candidate nearly won that party’s nomination for governor — but this article at New Republic examines how the race also showed positive news for both the Democratic Party and advocates of moving that party in a more egalitarian direction.

The far-right Republican candidate in the race, Corey Stewart, managed to push his erstwhile centrist Ed Gillespie rightward in the race, so that by the end Gillespie was echoing some of his opponent’s defense of Confederate monuments.  However, the article makes the case that in the Democratic primary, an opposite tendency occurred, with former representative Tom Periello pushing winner Lt. Governor Ralph Northam both leftwards and into front-and-center opposition to President Trump.  

The Hot Screen believes that the fight to return the Democratic party to its pro-working and middle class roots won’t be settled quickly or by any single, decisive victory.  We also don’t think that we should underestimate the staying power of more establishment politicians.  The article notes how Periello took the lead in nationalizing the campaign, for instance by making a critique of Donald Trump a major part of his platform, and talking about issues such as the minimum wage, college tuition, and corporate money in politics; yet these appeals couldn’t overcome Northam’s long-standing relations with various political interests in the state.  As in Jon Ossoff’s run in Georgia, our instinct says that nationalizing a race is a double-edged sword; you may activate some voters for hitting on supercharged issues like opposition to Trump, but you may alienate others who are interested in someone who really knows what is going on at the state level.  Of course, these two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and indeed it seems that part of Northam’s success was in co-opting Periello’s nationalizing of the race with his own long-standing political history in the state.

So while Stewart pushed Gillespie toward taking positions that will likely harm him in the general election, it seems Periello may have pushed Northam in a direction that will help him.  And at the level of partisan enthusiasm, Northam also seems well-positioned for the general election: the article notes that “[he] received nearly as many votes as were cast in the entire Republican primary, suggesting that Democrats have close to a two-to-one advantage with energized voters heading into the general election.”  

A Heroic Attempt at a Fourth of July Break From Politics Gets Political

My first thought was to highlight this tale of plans for extraterrestrial communication as a holiday breather from business as usual — a little cosmic perspective for us all beyond the usual valiant grappling with American politics.  But alas, as we read the article in its entirety, we realized, with touches of both awe and dread, that talking to life on other planets is arguably a deeply political question, despite the fact that to date, scientists and science fiction writers have had the run of the debate.  At the risk of being all Trump all the time, we could speculate that in an age of such strong political conflict, it shouldn't be surprising that our fears of the other would be reflected in theoretical debates about the wisdom of making our presence known to other civilizations in the universe.

So what am I on about?  Well, it turns out that there’s a project underway, called Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (METI), that aims to begin transmitting messages of mankind’s presence to relatively nearby stars.  But the idea has provoked controversy and opposition from those who warn of the risks of drawing the attention of possible other civilizations, even if they’re many light years away; they argue that we inevitably run the risk of contacting a hostile civilization, and point to the likelihood if we contact anyone, they’re likely to be far more technologically advanced that ourselves.  These opponents have to point no further than Cortes’ arrival in Mexico to make their point of how badly the meeting of a more technologically advanced civilization with a less advanced one can go.

The article delves into fascinating discussions of the likely nature of other civilizations, and what we can infer based on the data we have so far.  The two glaring data points are the increasing number of possibly life-supporting planets that astronomers have begun detecting over the last decade, and the fact that we ourselves have yet to detect any evidence of advanced life on other planets.  The first issue is more concretely embedded in the Drake Equation, which is an attempt to calculate the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.  As you might suppose, the equation mostly consists of highly speculative variables, such as how often life evolves on planets, how often such life leads to intelligent life, and how long such civilizations endure. 

The article turns as well to heretofore neglected question of who exactly on Earth should be able to make a decision on extraterrestrial communication that could potentially lead to the extinction of our species.  It is hard not to see a certain arrogance in a small group of scientists and richie-riches like Elon Musk making this decision all on their lonesome, even if it’s based on scientific curiosity and a fundamental optimism about the nature of advanced life.  It doesn’t seem like a bad idea for more people to start contemplating these mind-blowing ideas of civilizational contact and thinking of ourselves as a single species that needs to exercise caution in the face of a vast and unknown universe. 

Apart from the ethical questions it raises, this piece is also a great examination of human ingenuity and creativity in terms of communication and attempts to grapple with ideas that tease the limits of our knowledge and perhaps comprehension.  The most intriguing read I've had for a while.

The President's Disgusting Tweets Are Providing a Valuable Public Service

Over at Slate, Michelle Goldberg notes that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, Donald Trump HAS exercised discipline on at least one front since taking office — restraining his personal statements of hatred and disparagement against women.  This quiescent phase has of course now come to a revolting and troubling end, as the president unleashed tweets this past week against MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski that revisited familiar Trumpian flash points around the subject of females.  Far more than delivering insults to his unfortunate target, Trump has subjected all of us anew to unsettling insights into his psychology and temperamental unfitness for office.

Apparently offended by Brzezinski’s on-air critiques of his presidency, Trump chose not to refute, or engage, or persuade, but to attack this commentator as unintelligent, crazy, and “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”  In Trump’s mind, women who challenge him aren’t just a priori dumb and crazy; they’re also physically disgusting, a point he drives home with blood references that are impossible not to associate with menstruation (and that harken back to his previous attack on Megyn Kelley having “blood coming out of her whatever").  Indeed, Goldberg notes that Trump “instinctively projects his own revulsion toward menstruation onto women who threaten him.”  (And Donald Trump's references to women's bleeding becomes even more psychologically telling when you consider that Brzezinski and co-host (and fiance) Joe Scarborough have offered evidence that Brzezinski did not indeed have a face lift.)

Josh Marshall takes this analysis a step further, tying Trump’s blood references to Trump’s overall psychology of dominance and submission, wherein blood is a symbol of a humiliation that Trump must always work to inflict on others, and never suffer himself:  “Whether it is the ‘disgusting-ness’ of the intimate acts of women’s bodies — menstruation, a woman urinating — or this more general shame and humiliation of being seen bleeding or injured it comes back to the same thing: Trump’s focus on humiliation, the shame of being among the dominated as opposed to those doing the dominating. For Trump, the entire economy of human relations is reduced to this dichotomy. It is a snapshot of the brutal and abusive whirlwind the whole country is caught up in.”

It is, to put it mildly, less than optimal to have as president a bad hombre with such uncontrollable and unexamined impulses that they lead him to attempt to bully and humiliate others; but The Hot Screen thinks Goldberg is on to something when she asserts that it is ultimately in the interests of the country for Trump to keep showing us who he really is: “If there is the barest sliver of consolation, it’s that Trump appears almost as miserable and anxiety-ridden as we are. He’s losing the tiny bit of control he had. It’s better for Trump to show us all who he really is than to let his lackeys pretend he’s remotely worthy of his office. Every time he tweets, he reveals his presidency as a disgusting farce. Let’s hope he keeps doing it.”

Trump’s grotesque remarks demean the presidency and our country’s political dialogue, but they also do us the service of diminishing Trump’s personal standing and power with the public and in Washington.  When even Republicans say he needs to stop, this is a glaring clue that the opposition shouldn’t mind too much if they keep on going.  It’s always better for a vile person to show their true colors for all the world to see than to hide behind niceties and false conscientiousness.  We also need to remember that Trump’s anti-women words are paralleled by real-world actions that do great harm to females; Goldberg notes his expansion of the global gag rule, undermining of federal family planning programs, and erosion of enforcing laws against gender discrimination in education.  If his tweets help to remind us that he’s already implemented his own substantive war on women, and rouse more people to resistance, so much the better.

CNN Continues to Peddle Misleading Storyline of Sour "Relationship" Between Trump and Obama

A few weeks ago, CNN posted a story that desperately and mistakenly tried to create the impression that Donald Trump and Barack Obama share roughly equal blame for their poor relationship.  As we tried to show in this article, the idea that Barack Obama has anything resembling the culpability of Donald Trump in damaging relations between the two men is an utter joke.  A fair reading of the facts demonstrates that Trump has been the instigator of bad feelings between the two, beginning with Trump’s accusations years ago that President Obama lacked a birth certificate and wasn’t an American citizen.

Now CNN is out with a new article on the same theme, revisiting many of the original piece's false assumptions.  Perhaps it’s just the passage of time, but the offensiveness of the bizarre attempt at balance is even more striking to The Hot Screen this time around, and we’ve got a few ideas why.

As in the first article, this fresh CNN piece speaks in terms of a two-way fight between the former and current president, terming it “the nastiest public dispute in modern presidential history.”  Though it does acknowledge that “the acrimony is largely one-sided” — a point well supported by the evidence it presents - the article’s frame of a “dispute” or a bad “relationship” is a misleading perspective on the facts.  Of course it is true the two men don’t get along.  But the far bigger story is that Donald Trump, as president, has at this point accused his predecessor of various crimes, including illegal spying (in the form of alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign), collusion with the Russians, and obstruction of justice (these latter two via a tweet just this week).  To say they are in a "dispute" at this point is like writing about a robbery exclusively in terms of the ensuing “really bad relationship” between the victim and assailant — talk about burying the lead!  

Saying that Trump and Obama have a bad relationship suggests a parity between the men, but the fact that one man is the current president and is using his power and prestige to accuse his predecessor of crimes is hugely relevant to describing what is going on here — what is, in fact, the far more important news.  This fact makes a world of difference in terms of their power differential, and more importantly, the implications of one's animosity toward the other.  To speak of a sort of tit-for-tat between the two men serves to obscure the shocking and vitally important fact that, for the first time in modern memory, a president is seeking without evidence to criminalize his predecessor.

As we've stated before, we believe that if and when articles of impeachment are drawn up against President Trump, they need to include his dangerous slander against Barack Obama, for the inciting effects it has on his supporters and the potential destabilization it carries for the peaceful transfer of power in our country.  We can't allow Trump to normalize the idea that a new president can use the power of his office to falsely accuse his predecessor of criminal behavior: this is the gateway to a state of affairs where the justice system is used as a political weapon, as it is in many an authoritarian regime and banana republic.

Signs of Hope and Caution in Democrats' Georgia Special Election Loss

This past Tuesday, the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district came to a disappointing conclusion, with Republican Karen Handel beating Democrat John Ossoff by 52% to 48% of the vote.  It was the most expensive House race in U.S. history, with a total of $60 million spent between the two parties.  Republicans have held the seat for decades, but when Donald Trump chose Representative Tom Price as his secretary of Health and Human Services, the Democrats saw an opportunity in this district where Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton by just the barest of margins.  Ossoff won 48% of the vote in the first round, missing the 50% threshold needed to win outright, and leading to a runoff against Handel.  

This article gives a taste of some of the intra-party recriminations that have followed Ossoff’s loss; but it seems to The Hot Screen that the notion that Ossoff’s loss proves the Democrats are permanent losers is to put too heavy a burden of symbolism on a single race.  Yes, a loss is a loss; but we still have the remarkable fact that a Democrat nearly took a deep red Republican seat.

First, this seems to provide some pretty solid evidence that Donald Trump is creating a serious drag on the Republican Party; again, yes, close is not the same as winning, except it can still be quite meaningful.  In this case, it would seem incredible not to attribute the swing in the direction of a Democratic candidate to the unpopularity of Trump among so many Democrats and moderates.  And though Democrats did spend a tremendous amount of money in this race, so did the Republicans, which to our mind would seem to mean this election was something of a wash in terms of advertising.

We should also not ignore the fact that Ossoff had at least medium-sized baggage that could not have helped in such a media-blitzed race as this.  He wasn’t a resident of the district he sought to represent, and it seems probable that all the outsider money pouring in only accentuated perceptions that he was a sort of carpetbagger.  We would feel much more worried about Democrats' future prospects if he had been an amazing candidate.  We also can’t help feeling that many Democrats have a misperception that having spent so much money, they had earned a victory — that, needless to say, is not the way the world works, and also seems to misunderstand what money can and should do in an election, at least if you’re from a progressive movement that holds as one of its fundamental beliefs the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Ossoff ran as a moderate Democrat; as Robert Borosage writes at The Nation, “He presented himself as a centrist, speaking boldly against government waste and federal deficits, and talking, as his opponent put it, ‘like a Republican.’ He championed civility and decried partisan division. He explicitly opposed Medicare for All and tax hikes on the rich.  He wouldn’t even commit to voting for Nancy Pelosi as the leader of his party. He chose not to make the election a referendum on Trump.”  Andrew O’Hehir more provocatively savages Ossoff as a candidate, though we don’t agree with his dark conclusions about what this means for the future of the Democratic Party (our post is in fact partly a response to some of the points O’Hehir makes, and we invite folks to check out for themselves whether his points have more validity than we believe).

So yes, Ossoff’s loss suggests that the moderate-center Democratic playbook may not be sufficient to appeal to disgruntled voters, including moderate Republicans — but to say this automatically means it’s time to put on our dancing shoes and boogie over the Democratic Party’s grave is silly.  The Hot Screen is all in for an unabashedly populist Democratic party that puts the fight against economic inequality front and center; but it's also possible that a candidate who fielded such views would not have fared as well as Ossoff in what is, after all, a district that is doing well economically overall, and that has been, it bears repeating, in Republican hands for many years.  Indeed, as milquetoast as he may have been, and as much as we want to see Democrats pushing left, Ossoff's platform doesn't seem to have been nuts given his particular context.

But because he did indeed lose on positions that were more Clinton than Sanders, and even though it was close, I don't see how this loss doesn't strengthen the hand of those who are arguing for a more populist direction for the Democrats overall (and we recommend the Borosage article for its overall argument that favors this point of view).  Again, though, this raises the important point that this was just one race, in one specific district; Ossoff's loss is suggestive, but does not provide clear and decisive evidence for any particular viewpoint.  In our opinion, the case that Democrats need to generally embrace an egalitarian populism is overwhelming, and we see nothing in this race that refutes this.  

Significantly, the outcome in Georgia corroborates results in other special elections to fill the seats of representatives who have joined the Trump administration.  In the race to replace then representative, now CIA director Mike Pompeo, the Democratic candidate lost by a far smaller margin in Kansas' 4th Congressional District than in previous elections, despite very limited Democratic resources put into the race.  Even more intriguingly to The Hot Screen, on the same day that Ossoff was edged out, a Democrat managed to come even closer to taking South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, losing 48% to 51% — and this in a district Donald Trump won by more than 18 points, and where the Republican incumbent had won re-election in 2016 by a 20-point margin.

It sucks rotten eggs that the Democrats were not able to win these special elections; but then again, as Talking Points Memo notes, Donald Trump picked representatives for posts in his administration who were not coincidentally from strongly Republican districts.  That the Democrats were not able to pick amazing candidates on relatively short notice, or didn't spend more money in races where it might have made a big difference (in the Kansas and South Carolina races), are hardly signs of a doomed party.

But there is one great cautionary lesson to draw from the Georgia results.  Despite the very real energization of Democratic voters in opposition to Trump, the feral and proto-authoritarian pro-Trump movement remains very much alive, and perhaps equally energized by Trump’s victory and his determined unsettling of the American political order.  You need look no further than Virginia, where a couple weeks ago both parties held their gubernatorial primaries, and where a Trumpian figure named Corey Stewart just barely lost to establishment Republican Ed Gillespie.  Among other things, Stewart riled up supporters by defending monuments to the Confederacy, memorably tweeting that “Politicians who are for destroying the statues, monuments and other artifacts of history are just like ISIS” (to which we have to respond: "Sort of like," sure, we could see that — but “just like”?  We Yankees cry foul, Mr. Stewart, oh, we do cry foul!).  In their enthusiasm for the sordid Dixie dog-whistling of this vile candidate, Virginia Republicans uttered a primal scream all too reminiscent of the nationwide one we all heard back in November.

Is Firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller the President's Inevitable Next Step?

The single biggest piece of political news this past week was the revelation, broken by The Washington Post, that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating President Trump for possible obstruction of justice.  In the first place, this a victory for our basic sense of a shared reality.  Donald Trump, after all, did tell an interviewer on national TV that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation; everyone witnessed (or can witness, through the glories of YouTube) his statement, unlike, say, Comey’s allegations that the president asked him to call off the probe against General Michael Flynn.  The way that Trump’s corruption is often in plain view is one of the most disorienting things about our current political crisis — and it’s a relief that a formal response is taking shape under the aegis of Mueller’s investigation.

But we here at The Hot Screen share a belief with many others that the president will not allow the wheels of justice to spin to their proper conclusion.  Stopping the investigation into Russian election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign was important enough to Donald Trump to take the political risk of firing James Comey (although there is evidence that he did not see the move as overly risky, for instance thinking that Democratic animus towards Comey would give him some cover).  In light of the second-most important political news of the week — that Mueller’s investigation is exploring lines of inquiry that are likely to spell serious trouble for Trump allies — the president has more reason than ever to quash the Russia investigation.  

Already, Trump is attacking Mueller (as is the right-wing media) with a clear interest in discrediting whatever results the investigation might bring.  These attacks by Trump seem to be another variant of obstruction of justice — what else do you call it when a president seeks to preemptively undermine the results of an investigation against himself?  But beyond these initial attacks on Mueller, Trump has already shown with the Comey firing that he’s willing to break political norms in order to protect himself, even if it means creating severe problems for himself down the road.

But here’s the thing — as a general principle, Donald Trump’s entire candidacy and presidency, apart from the Russia angle, have been one relentless breaking of political norms, from calling for Hilary Clinton to be jailed, to inciting violence against protestors at campaign rallies, to attempting to implement a ban against Muslims from entering the country.  The heightened stakes around the Russia investigation are due to the fact that we are no longer just talking about questions of political culture, but about whether, to use the dramatic, familiar phrasing, the president is above the law.   

Based on what we’ve been reading, there would be nothing outright illegal about Donald Trump ordering Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to fire Robert Mueller.  But first and foremost, as Josh Marshall points out, firing Mueller would mean unequivocally that Trump “will not allow any investigation of Russia and his campaign to go forward.”  Calling this obstruction of justice would be to hide the gravity of such a move: firing the special counsel would be tantamount to the president asserting he is above the law, since he would have stopped an investigation of himself.  And as Marshall concludes, the logical next step under our system of government would be for Congress to look into impeaching and convicting Donald Trump.  Marshall doesn’t say it explicitly, but it’s clear that the reason Congress should at such a point take the step of impeachment is that our system of government clearly can’t exist as intended if one branch of government can operate beyond the law, or, in plainer words, can do whatever the hell it wants in the manner of any tinpot dictatorship.

Here’s the reality of the situation, though: given the choice between Robert Mueller having enough time to identify specific laws that Trump and his team may have broken, and having the current Republican Congress decide whether to impeach the president for effectively declaring himself above the law as a general principle, it seems naive in the extreme to think that Donald Trump’s decision here is not foreordained.  Republican members of the House will not turn on a president who still enjoys high approval ratings from Republican voters; they will neither consider nor vote on impeachment.  Indeed, this basic fact — that we seem on the precipice of requiring impeachment of the president, without any prospect of this happening — seems to be quickly looming as the most basic point of our political crisis, and is a point explored in various detail both in Marshall's piece and in this latest post by Andrew Sullivan.  There is no doubt in our minds that, as with everything else the president has done to date, fellow Republicans would seek to defend and exculpate the president from his anti-democratic actions, once again defining presidential deviance down.  And if Donald Trump is able to stop the Russia investigation, then he will likely feel totally unshackled, as he will have, by design or side effect, established the essential lawlessness of his administration.

So it is probably the understatement of the year to say that the Democrats need to start playing offense, and be ready for Trump’s next move.  This is not politics as usual.  This is not a matter of waiting for the president and the Republicans to overreach, and then reaping the benefits of a backlash in the next election.  They need to be actively laying the groundwork for Trump’s removal, based on the mounting evidence of his unfitness for office, and to be making the case that the Republican Party as a whole is implicated in this unfitness by dint of their unwavering support for the president.  Along these lines, we strongly encourage everyone to read this piece by Brian Beutler, which makes the case that the Democrats must make it clear immediately that they would consider the firing of Robert Mueller to be an impeachable offense.

The Democrats need to define without ambiguity what the stakes are, both on the broader level of the rule of law versus a de facto authoritarian presidency, and on the practical, visible effects, such as a presidency unwilling to respond to Russian hacking of the past election.  Even if there is close to zero likelihood Republicans will explore the possibility of impeachment, the Democrats must keep in full view of the public a reality-based, democratic, pro-rule of law narrative that counters the derangements of the Oval Office and the president’s Republican enablers.  They cannot simply wait for the Republicans to overreach; they need to be telling a compelling, accurate story of how the Republicans are overreaching and why Americans need to oppose this.  

In a conflict between lawlessness and the rule of law, The Hot Screen patriotically believes and fervently hopes that the latter will prevail in the U.S., given the strength and continuity of our traditions.  But clearly something has gone terribly wrong for the U.S. to have elected a president as unqualified and authoritarian as Donald Trump in the first place.  One of the twists to this convoluted situation is that, to protect the rule of law, the opposition cannot look to the law alone, not when any lawbreaking by the president must be dealt with by an aiding and abetting Congress.  Instead, this is ultimately a political battle — one that has at its forefront the basics of government accountability, competence and lawfulness, but is a political battle nonetheless — over what sort of country we want this to be.

This struggle is being conducted in a political environment that has been severely disrupted by Donald Trump’s media savvy and blatant untruthfulness.  But it is also being conducted over some very basic, easy-to-grasp issues that we believe will play out in increasingly destructive ways for the president and his party, if the opposition works to keep them front and center in the public dialogue.  After all, the investigation that is at the heart of our current state of affairs concerns another country — Russia, no less! — attempting to subvert our electoral process in favor of a particular candidate.  Donald Trump has made a decision that this is not a matter that needs to be looked into.  A majority of American disagree with this assessment.

In staking his presidency on an issue that appears so black and white to so many Americans, Donald Trump has given the opposition incredibly solid grounds for making its case.  He has created a space for Americans to remember and renew a fundamental, inspiring, and uniting patriotism based on the basic fact that we’re the greatest democracy on earth and will not countenance anyone fucking with it.  To our minds, there is a clear line between Republican indifference to assessing Russian interference in our democratic processes and Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters through bogus voter ID laws and other such measures.  At the base of both is a fundamental opposition to the democratic spirit of our country, and the case of Russia makes it clear how this can easily be defined as an essential un-Americanness, a lack of the most basic patriotism.

Donald Trump’s Efforts to Undermine NATO Continue

As we noted recently, Donald Trump’s assault on our country’s alliances and allies is one of the most hidden-in-plain-view impending disasters of this presidency.  This issue got renewed attention when, during his visit to NATO headquarters last month, he dropped language from his speech that would have re-affirmed the U.S.’ commitment to defend its NATO allies.  President Trump finally re-iterated this commitment last week, but as Talking Points Memo points out, he also included remarks that seem to be laying the groundwork for further disparagement and attacks on the organization; as TPM puts it, he seems to be continually moving the goalposts in a way that NATO members will not be able to meet and that seem intended to sow conflict with the organization.  The idea of the United States working to break apart an alliance that is ultimately very much in our interests is deeply unsettling, and should be used by the opposition both to pummel Trump and a Republican Party that seems no longer to believe that the U.S. should find common cause with other democracies.