GOP Desperate to Put Lipstick on Trump's Racist Porker of a 2020 Campaign Strategy

This weekend’s analysis by The Washington Post of the Trump re-election campaign’s decision to make explicitly racist appeals to his base offers a wealth of insight into the GOP’s rationalization of his full-on white nationalist strategy for 2020 — a strategy that will inevitably bear heavily on the electoral fortunes of the party as a whole. The gist of the article is that the Trump campaign, having looked at the polls measuring the public reaction to the president’s racist attacks on four Democratic representatives of color more than a week ago, has decided that more of the same is the recipe for re-election.  However, to defend against accusations of overt racism, the Post notes how some Republicans have asserted that his “attacks were based in ideology rather than race,” and goes on to state:

But Trump’s advisers had concluded after the previous tweets that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020.

This has prompted them to find ways to fuse Trump’s nativist rhetoric with a love-it-or-leave-it appeal to patriotism ahead of the 2020 election, while seeking to avoid the overtly racist language the president used in his tweets about the four congresswomen.

I don’t see any way to understand the Trump campaign’s preferred strategy as anything but plausibly deniable racism.  If the president concentrates his attacks on minority and immigrant lawmakers, and then Republicans say that it’s only about their “ideology,” only the most naive voters (and reporters) would not see this for what it is: claiming that disagreement on policy is meant to provide cover for a racist appeal to white voters. And the clincher is this: since the president has already made clear that everything is for him about race, there is no reason for any American to credit all-too-transparent efforts to re-brand his racism as something more palatable.

Again and again throughout the article, the claims by GOP politicians and strategists that the president is not doing what he clearly is — running for re-election based on appeals to racism and white supremacism — are illogical or even outright laughable.  It notes that “Republican officials say Trump is harnessing the anger of those who continue to feel left behind despite the strong economy, and steering their fury toward members of Congress he has accused of bad-mouthing the country and embracing socialist policies.”  This explanation reveals far more than those GOP officials realize: they admit that the wonderful Trump economy is anything but wonderful, and correctly identify the president’s strategy of distracting his base from his economic failures by supercharging their racial resentments against groups who have no responsibility for their economic malaise.  Their explanation also oddly leaves out those Trump supporters who are doing well in the economy and who nonetheless are fired up by Trump’s incitements to open racism. 

Equally feeble are the efforts by Trump campaign and other Republican officials to claim that Trump supporters are “too quickly branded as bigots,” and that it’s the Democrats who are trying to “create conditions where if you are a certain gender or a certain race all criticism is considered racist or sexist,” as noted by Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh.  And Bryan Lanza, a 2016 Trump campaign advisor, tells the Post that “Usually, when they are faced with charges of racism, Republicans hide a little bit.  And the president’s not hiding.  And I think that that’s what the Republican voters like about him.”  Of course, the reason the president is facing charges of racism is because he’s made racist statements and implemented racist policies.  Lanza may be trying to make the opposite point, but he ends up giving the game away: Trump doesn’t hide his racism, and his supporters like it.  It’s a secondary matter that they admire that Trump stands by his racist statements and always denies that they’re racist.

Yet though it may be secondary to their receptivity to racist appeals, the widespread belief among many prejudiced white voters that they are not actually racist, and that it’s insulting to call them racist, is a very real and potent psychological phenomenon.  Studies have shown that explicit condemnations and call-outs of prejudice can have the effect of making people double-down on their racism, and clearly Trump and the GOP are now happy to weaponize this phenomenon, too, into a sinister campaign (Molotov) cocktail.  The president runs a racist re-election campaign, which thrills his base; the loyalty of the base is further super-charged when the necessary condemnations of Trump’s racism and of his followers are felt by his base to be unmerited and illegitimate.  So the racist method is not without its madness, and this is why the GOP wants to have things both ways, as it has for decades now — it wants to make racist appeals that are also deniable.  Trump is all on board with the racist appeals, but whether through indiscipline or conscious determination (or a combination of the two) doesn’t really care if the racism is deniable in a traditional sense.  To Trump, a racist statement can be rendered deniable simply because he denies that he is racist.

What keeps getting lost, not just in this one Washington Post article, but across much of the reporting on the Trump presidency and the 2020 campaign, is that the idea of a “racist campaign strategy,” while inherently evil in and of itself, simply can’t be separated from the fact that the Trump presidency is every single day moving forward a white supremacist agenda in actual real life.  Indeed, the same can even be said of the racist campaign strategy, where the president’s incitements of hatred against African-Americans, Latinx citizens and immigrants, and other groups are not just words that energize his base, but have consequences for millions of Americans who are made to feel less welcome in their own country, and who are rendered less safe as the president’s words inevitably give at least tacit encouragement to those who will follow their racist inclinations with action, up to and including terrorizing violence against their fellow human beings who happen to have a different skin color.

It’s also of note that the article chronicles how Republican politicos are avidly trying to convince themselves that this openly racist re-election strategy will not alienate more voters than it gains them.  And so they point to supportive polls, and make the argument, that moderate voters will look past the racism because they oppose the Democrats’ legislative agenda.  One detects a whiff of wishful thinking in some of the comments captured in the article, but the question of whether or not open racism backfires is the proverbial million dollar one.  (In this regard, it’s worth noting that some Republicans appear to have given up hope of winning the popular vote, and see a path to an Electoral College victory via this immoral white supremacist appeal.)  But it is surely the responsibility of Democrats, both as matters of electoral and patriotic necessity, to work to ensure that the Trump-GOP racist playbook fails.  They must confront and call out this white nationalism head-on, even when the GOP tries to hide it behind claims of arguing about “ideology” rather than race. Likewise, Democrats must be sure to map out how it is in Trump’s interests to appeal to the worst parts of human nature and our shortcomings as a nation in order to hide his own failings as president.  It is not essential or anyway realistic to expect to win over the mass of Trump backers; but peeling away even a few may make the difference in this next election.

Finally, the Post notes that “Democrats are banking on the idea that even if Trump’s language excites his base, it is likely to offend a diverse coalition of voters who will turn out to defeat him,” which one hopes will be the case.  But even as they talk a good game about still winning over moderate voters, Republican awareness of the backlash they are provoking provides deep incentives for them to mess with the mechanics of the 2020 election, whether through voter suppression or tacit support for ongoing Russian efforts to tamper with election systems and inject propaganda into the U.S. mediasphere.  Another way of putting it: Trump’s morally corrupt racist appeal makes other forms of corruption necessary in order to seal the deal of an election that must be won by a minority of voters.  

Why Aren't Republicans As Incensed by White Supremacist Terrorism as They Are By Antifa Street Fights?

A proposed nonbinding resolution by Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy to designate antifascist activists, also know as antifa, as “domestic terrorists” is an unsurprising but deeply worrisome escalation of the GOP’s steady embrace of white nationalism and its inevitable efforts to suppress domestic dissent.  This escalation has now extended to an effort to obscure the violence of right-wing extremists.

Portlanders like myself are more familiar with antifa than most Americans, as they have a relatively large presence in our city, pretty much in direct relation to the fact that Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are the unfortunate repository of a variety of right-wing hate groups and white-supremacist organizations.  The city has been the site of various fairly large-scale altercations between antifa and these right-wing extremists, involving both violence and injuries (including to bystanders harmed by the police response).  My personal commitment to non-violent protest means that I find myself in full opposition to antifa tactics, even as I have no quarrel with their identification of right-wing extremism as a force that must be countered and rolled back at every opportunity.  But at this point, it appears that, in Portland at least, antifa efforts are having the opposite of the effect they intend, their tactics muddying public perceptions of the clear and present danger of right-wing extremism; their actions mean that the politically delegitimizing taint of violence is not associated solely with right-wing freaks, and they create a sense of equivalence between the two sides so that right-wing extremism is not seen as sharply as the unique threat that it is.

Yet, having said this, there is simply no real comparison between right-wing extremists and the efforts of antifa.  In an era of rising far-right violence that has claimed literally hundreds of lives over the past decade, antifa activists have been responsible for exactly zero deaths.  That’s right — none at all.  And while their violence and resulting injuries should not be excused or ignored, antifa simply lacks the organizational coherence, aims, or tactics that would argue for a domestic terrorism label for the movement.  There is no antifa entity or hierarchy to be targeted; in a similar vein, its aims simply do no match the standard conceptions of terrorism. For instance, the Patriot Act indicates that “a group commits domestic terrorism by committing crimes dangerous to human life that seem meant to intimidate the public, influence government policy by coercion or affect the government’s conduct by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”  Antifa street brawling does not meet these ideas of “mass destruction,” “assassination,” or “kidnapping.”  In a broader sense, domestic terrorism is an attack on a free and open society, by using violence to remove the sense of personal safety necessary to conduct public and private life: again, this description does not fit antifa, which directs its efforts at a specific group of far-right agitators and ideologues.

On the other hand, right-wing extremism, in its various violent manifestations, fully meets these standards for defining domestic terrorism.  The targeting of Americans for the color of their skin, for their gender, or for their religion aims to make vast swathes of the American population feel under threat, and reflect agendas that seek to fundamentally degrade the lives of literally millions of people.

Give these facts, alongside the statistics I cited above that leave no doubt that the preeminent and ongoing terror threat facing Americans today comes not from the far-left, or anarchists, or jihadists, but from far-right extremists, it might seem puzzling that the Republican Party has decided this is a fine time to direct law enforcement’s attention against a movement that identifies itself primarily by its opposition to. . . far-right extremists.

Even if there were no rising threat of white supremacist and right-wing extremism that cries out for far more massive and coordinated law enforcement and political attention than exists at present, it would still be a massive overreach and waste of resources for the government to deem antifa as domestic terrorists.  The most benign explanation for GOP interest in such a move is to play to its Fox News-addled base, for whom the network has painted antifa as a dire threat to the republic.  But I think we are well past benign explanations for the Republican Party’s actions regarding the politicization of terrorism and of protestors deemed left-wing.  A more persuasive motivation for this Senate maneuver is to attempt to associate progressives and liberals with antifa, which is much more destructive an effort if antifa can be called, with federal imprimatur, a terrorist organization.  It is also quite believable that such a “domestic terrorist” designation, based on such a loosely defined group, could be used for even more corrupt purposes; in the worst scenario, it would be a tool to suppress any sort of demonstrations against right-wing extremism, a possible misuse that’s been raised by the Anti-Defamation League in response to the proposed Senate resolution.

We also can’t look away from how the GOP has been conquered by white nationalism, a racist ideology which inevitably sanctions state violence against minorities and others, and so is contiguous with non-governmental violence against these same groups.  A guiding strategy that puts the interests of white Americans above all others is racist, and racism is always an invitation to dehumanization of and violence against those excluded as not full citizens, not to mention those who aren’t citizens at all.  And when the president of the United States feels comfortable using racist language to argue that brown-skinned U.S. representatives don’t belong in this country, and incites hatred against whole populations, many extremists will take this as tacit encouragement for their individual and collective acts of violence against these same groups.  From this perspective, then, there might be a tacit understanding that the GOP needs to downplay the expressions of violence by extremists who differ from many Republicans in degree but not in kind.  How better to blur the stakes than to demonize a group that opposes right-wing extremists?

It is also not convincing that Republicans would point to the apparent antifa assault on conservative journalist Andy Ngo in Portland last month as an example of the left-wing threat.  President Trump has now called journalists “the enemy of the people” countless times, his campaigns and rallies are well known for the mass hatred and threats directed toward the reporters who cover them, and the largest mass killing of journalists since 9/11 occurred at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland in June of last year.  It strains credulity that after remaining silent in the face of such totalitarian and inciting language from the president, the GOP is suddenly concerned with protecting the safety of our free press.  

The real story behind these shenanigans by Cruz and Cassidy is a conspicuous conservative blind spot when it comes to the far greater threat from right-wing violence, a blindness that one begins to suspect is willful when they instead choose to demonize those people explicitly dedicated to stopping white-supremacists and other far-right malefactors.  But politicians like Ted Cruz and the brain trust (such as it is) at Fox News aren’t so naive; they’re aware that they’re putting the thumb on the scales in favor of right-wing extremists by hyping an alleged public threat that, in a real two-fer, happens to be a movement opposed to the right-wing extremists they can’t bring themselves to prioritize as public enemy number one.

Historical Perspective from Atlantic Writer Lays Bare the Stakes of President’s Racist Attacks on Congresswomen

As I never tire of saying, if you aren’t reading Adam Serwer’s political dispatches at The Atlantic these days, you’re unnecessarily denying yourself essential grounding for understanding the age of Trump.  His column in the wake of the president’s “go back to your own countries” tweet minces no words in identifying the fundamental import of Trump’s words: “He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American.”  Serwer continues:

This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact. If these women could all trace their family line back to 1776, it would not make them more American than Trump, a descendant of German immigrants whose ancestors arrived relatively recently, because he is white and they are not.

Particularly compelling is that Serwer demonstrates how such beliefs, and their conflict with American ideals, run clear back to the founding of the U.S.; in this, he reminds us, as well we need, that Trump is hardly an anomalous figure, but rather channels some of the oldest and foulest strains of American politics, with this basic denigration of non-white citizenship reflected in a variety of Trump administration policies, from ending DACA to the reign of sadism on the southern border.  As Serwer writes:

We can see a battle over the fundamental nature of American citizenship that has been waged since the founding. Was America founded as a fundamentally white and Christian country? Or as a land of opportunity, where anyone of any background could come, thrive, and contribute? Neither faction is truly wrong, and neither is truly right, and neither has ever won anything resembling a permanent victory—and perhaps neither ever will.

Serwer is clearly on the side of America as a land of opportunity, and ends by endorsing a more inclusive strain of American nationalism, articulated by figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.  But that last line above about neither faction being truly right or wrong, and that it’s possible neither may win out permanently — which one might read to be despairing or cynical — actually drives home the fact that what we are living through now is a work in progress; a dialectic between long-established tensions in the American project; and that things are far from settled, both for good and for bad.

In the face of the president’s essential declaration that he intends to make the incitement of white racist hatred and white nationalism the cornerstone of his 2020 campaign, I’d argue that articles like Serwer’s are a big part of the way that we can defeat this bigotry.  I wrote last week about the urgent need to provide context for the actions of the president and the GOP, and Serwer’s piece is perhaps a textbook case for how to embody this.  Trump’s behavior is fit into the larger American story; he may be a uniquely horrid person, but what he articulates did not come out of nowhere.  In fact, understanding this history helps us get a clearer understanding of what Trump is doing now.

This also means that when Serwer says that we are experiencing something new in the country, we should sit up and take notice.  In his most recent column, addressing the North Carolina rally at which Trump supporters chanted “Send her back” in reference to Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, Serwer asserts that “America has not been here before”:

[W]e have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.

[. . .] To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose [. . .] To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American.

Serwer’s most recent piece explains the stakes of this latest dark twist in our American story; and it ends with an indictment of Democratic fumbling and fecklessness in the face of this Trumpist assault that’s both chilling (for its no-holds-barred truth-telling) and necessary (because the Democrats must be roused to action if we are to avoid slipping into a white nationalist hellscape).  Among other things, he zeroes in on the increasing craziness of the party holding back from direct confrontation with Trump’s white nationalism based on the dubious premise of winning over working-class white votes, which I think is going to emerge as perhaps the central tension of Democratic strategizing and the presidential primary contest in the coming months.

Democrats Need to Be Ready for President's Inevitable Escalation of Racist Language and Goals

The Washington Post’s reporting this weekend blows a hole in any arguments that Donald Trump was displaying a strategic political genius by his racist tweets about four Democratic congresswomen last week.  The president may not get it, but panicked reactions and comments from Republican insiders interviewed for the story show that many in the GOP understand the peril in which he’s put the party.  Of course, as many have long argued, the whole GOP is compromised by a racist mindset, but it has taken Trump to catalyze the party’s de facto embrace of white nationalism.  It may be darkly pleasurable to see these politicos now panicking about Trump going too far with his displays of outright racism, but this doesn’t mean things are better than they look.

The fact remains that, faced with hate-inciting, white supremacist language, nearly every elected GOP official at the federal level chose to publicly demure on whether the president had done anything wrong.  And the unease communicated privately to Donald Trump or to Post reporters seems to have been mostly about the possible harm to everyone’s electoral chances, not over the moral repugnance of his words.  But none of this is surprising, and neither is the fact that the president is choosing to run in 2020 on a supercharged version of his 2016 campaign of racism and white resentment.

The huge wild card, then, is what the Democrats will do about it; as I’ve already discussed, the president’s white nationalism cannot be ignored, but must be confronted outright and discredited.  Some grounds for optimism is that some Democrats are fighting for just this.  Count me as on the same page as pollster Cornell Belcher, who told The New York Times that, “Just as much time and resources as the nominee spends on targeting and messaging around health care and wages and climate change, they should spend an equal amount of resources around an alternative racial vision for the country.  This isn’t a goddamn distraction.”  It’s also hard to disagree with Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of Center for Popular Democracy, who told the Times, “You have to be able to speak powerfully about our willingness to belong together.  Don’t just condemn the racism and the language but use it as an opportunity to argue for a vision of the country in which we can all be included.”

What to articulate as a countervailing argument to white nationalism is obviously a huge topic, and I’ll return to it in future posts.  The point for now is that the last week has clarified that the Democrats absolutely cannot run from this fight.  

The Post article I noted at the start also indirectly highlights how much long-term damage the president is willing to inflict on the Republican Party for the sake of his own short-term prospects.  There’s not a GOP politician alive who’s always know that you might be able to rev up the vote with full-on expressions of white supremacism — but they also largely knew that this would ultimately prove a losing strategy, making overt what was best left to dog-whistle politics, and running the risk of energizing an anti-racist opposition.  They are now about to learn whether their cynical caution was warranted.  Again, though, there is good reason to believe that, despite the GOP complicity in Trump’s rule, and the widespread Republican embrace of racist laws involving gerrymandering and voter suppression, Trump may be pushing the GOP to a place it will not survive once the president is out of office.

Then there is the question of all those Trump rally attendees in North Carolina who took up the “Send her back” chant after Trump lied and incited his audience against Representative Ilhan Omar.  As canny observers are pointing out, by taking up the chant, his audience indicated that it understood the racist intent behind Trump’s original tweets and follow-up commentary.  In this, we see the very real possibility of the president unleashing hateful forces that defy any attempts to whitewash or contain them.  I can imagine Democrats running campaign ads of Trump rallies — the racist rants, the solid sea of white, the pleased president accepting his role as a tribune of racial hatred — and simply asking voters whether that’s the sort of America they want for themselves and their children.

This is a simplified and idealistic take, of course, but the way that Trump may be running up against baseline decency is also highlighted by how “Go back to where you came from” is explicitly cited by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as “an example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin,” as noted by Adam Serwer at The Atlantic.   Beyond this, the president’s displays of racial antagonism and contempt would get him fired from many a private company.  As much as Trump might be saying what millions of white Americans are supposedly thinking, there are millions more white Americans who have worked for years in diverse environments where racial prejudice has been defused, not amplified, by quotidian contact with people of different ethnicities and countries of origin.

These observations point to a final thought: that responsibility for resolving the current crisis of a president willing to play groups of Americans against each other falls squarely on the Democrats and other opponents of the GOP.  As Donald Trump encourages his followers towards the blindness of hatred as an expression of authentic feeling, it is up to the rest of use to dissect, defuse, and dissolve these misdirected energies as much as possible, both for the sake of defeating this movement at the ballot box and for the sake of living peaceably with our fellow Americans.  

Defeating White Supremacism Is Non-Negotiable

This post by Greg Sargent makes me think that I’m not crazy when I say that Trump’s escalation into explicit racial incitement is dangerous in great part not simply in itself, but if it is met with insufficient pushback from the Democrats and others.  Sargent helped clarify something that has been staring a lot of us in the face: that this is not a matter where there can be compromise or mutual understanding.  There is no middle ground.  The president and his party are simply and catastrophically in the wrong, and to speak of it as a normal political disagreement fails the public. What we face is not simply the president saying racist things and proving himself a racist for anyone who might have doubted it; it is that the president has made clear that he will rely on the incitement of racial hatred to push for a vision of America that is rooted in white supremacism and the dehumanization of non-whites.

This is why the great danger right now is that this white supremacist language and approach to governance will somehow be normalized, through repetition and acquiescence; that what should lie outside the bounds of acceptability in a democratic society makes its way in — because an ideology based on hate and inequality can never be squared with democracy, but only destroy it. And as Sargent points out elsewhere, the president’s insistence that his remarks and tweets about the Democratic congresswomen aren’t racist is in itself a huge deal; Trump wants people to believe that racism is actually acceptable in politicians, by engaging in it while simultaneously disclaiming racist intent.  The effect is to mainstream racism.

So it is a little bit like being caught in a Black Mirror episode to read that some moderate Democrats believe that the last several days have actually been an enormous win for Donald Trump, and that “the party was playing into his hands by spending so much time condemning his remarks.”  Sargent’s response is spot on: addressing these moderate Democrats, he writes, “No matter how purple your district is, if you can’t explain to swing voters why Trump’s racist and white-nationalist displays and provocations are unacceptable in terms that they’ll understand — if this isn’t a fight you want to have — then you should ask yourself what the heck you’re doing there in the first place.”

But I think you can go a step further and say that this is a challenge, but also an opportunity, for the Democratic party as a whole.  The president has now placed not only himself, but the entirety of the acquiescent GOP, on a collision course with the past 200-plus years of slow, painful, and sometimes circuitous progress towards racial justice in this country.  Like many unscrupulous and immoral politicians before him, he has discovered that hate sells.  But there is nothing defensible about white supremacism, about inciting hatred against immigrants, against telling black Americans to go back to Africa.  This is bottom-of-the-barrel, white trash language, the language of demagogues and cowards, in service of an evil and anti-democratic vision.  We are way past claims of cultural anxiety or economic insecurity, at a point where basic empathy and perceptions of common humanity have been left behind in favor of hatred and tribalism.  

So what many perceive as Trump’s greatest weapon is also his greatest weakness; but it takes conscious and concerted effort to make sure his embrace of hate does him in.  To speak optimistically, it beggars the imagination to think that the Democratic Party might not be able to articulate a countervailing, persuasive vision of what this country really stands for.  In fact, plenty of Democrats and others have already been doing this.  And the Democrats need to grasp the opportunity of this moment, the chance to break not simply Trump but the entire GOP on the anvil of white supremacy.

As frightening as this time in our history is, we can’t lose sight of the fact that Trump and the GOP are acting out of weakness, not strength. They are embarked on a high-risk strategy that can only work if they are allowed to dissemble about their racist and anti-democratic ends, and if the majority allows itself to be cowed by the displays of hate — hate that has at its root fear, cowardice, and ignorance.

All Tweets Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others

I want to return to the president’s racist tweets against four Democratic members of Congress this past weekend, because they bring together all the foulness and challenges of addressing this unfit president in one combustible and super-saturated package.  Let’s start with the discussion of whether this is just another example of Donald Trump inciting outrage in order to distract and confound his opposition.  I’m all for keeping our eyes on the prize, and not getting sucked into every controversial or despicable pronouncement from this president, who after all has showed a canny ability to steer political coverage and discussion through his abuse of the presidential megaphone, now amplified by the dubious miracle of Twitter.  This is why I’ve argued repeatedly that, given the relative ease with which the president has been able to maintain the initiative, it’s crucial that the opposition set forth a coherent and damning explanatory framework for the president’s actions and pronouncements; this framework should hamper his ability to change the subject, instead providing a narrative into which each new offense can be seen as pieces of a united and despicable whole, and thus turn the president’s efforts against him.

The president seeks to outrage, and does so in a myriad of darkly creative ways, but it’s the reasons for what makes us feel outraged that we ought always return to.  But I’ve argued since the start of this presidency that no further evidence was needed to prove his unfitness for office; that his words and actions during the 2016 campaign disqualified him from being president.  It was clear then that he was a treasonous, anti-democratic, white supremacist authoritarian-in-waiting, and not a day has gone by since his inauguration that he didn’t re-prove the truth of this case.  Put another way: from the start, the actual reasons for the outrage he provoked were sufficient to justify implacable commitment to his removal from office.  In a sense, all other offenses he committed after his inauguration were only icing on a gay-fearing-baker’s artisanal wedding cake.

My ideal political stance, then, is one that acknowledges but doesn’t treat in isolation Trump’s various offenses.  As I said, what is required is that the basic premises of his unfitness for office be established, and each new offense entered as a piece of evidence in the tally of established broader reasons for why he should be forced from office.  But the key is this: I’m not just talking about congresspeople literally noting these offenses in preliminary articles of impeachment (although, yes, that’s part of it), but about something larger.  I’m talking about opponents of Trump putting together a public argument with which to convince as many fellow citizens as possible of the urgent need for action, with the end being removal of the president via impeachment or resignation.  Failing this, this strategy aims at ensuring the president is defeated in the 2020 election.  And beyond this, I want to be clear: the ultimate response to Trump is to organize politically, in order to win future elections and oppose his policies, be it the abuse of migrants or the ongoing offenses against our environment.

This is part of the reason I’ve sometimes included “ruthless” in my list of necessary qualities for addressing Trump and the authoritarian GOP: we must ever be aware that the point is not simply to call out presidential misdeeds, but to do so in a way that persuades fellow Americans into opposition, and that shifts some number of these Americans into political organizing, whether it’s voter registration, putting pressure on their elected officials, or working on political campaigns.  And this is most effectively done if we can point to how each individual offense is part of an identifiable and political strategy and agenda.  The president is going to keep doing what he’s done, because he thinks it works: it certainly jazzes his base, and he may be right, up to a point, about how it jars and overwhelms the opposition.

But it simply makes no sense to me to conclude that when a president self-indicts on a daily basis, his opponents cannot find a way to turn his own high-risk strategy against him.  I’ve been trying to summarize my take on such a strategy, which at its core involves describing and contextualizing the behavior of Trump and the GOP.

As I wrote a couple days ago, what is so striking about the president’s “black/brown people should go back to their home countries” tweets and remarks is that this is a clear case where the tweets are not a distraction from something worse.  After all, these remarks, and the GOP’s mass silence in their aftermath, further establish that the president and his party are agreed on a white supremacist vision for the United States.  So of course they should inspire outrage — but the real story, the thing we should be talking about and persuading our friends and neighbors of, is that we have a president and a ruling party that see white supremacism not only as a legitimate basis for organizing politics and society, but as at the center of their political agenda and strategy.  

This is also why discussions of whether or not these tweets “prove” that Donald Trump is a racist are understandable but also off the mark.  On the one hand, for the president to put forth such clearly racist sentiments will hopefully turn some number of people against the president.  But on the other, the point is not that Trump is personally racist, but that he embraces and seeks to implement a white nationalist vision of the United States.  His words might sound like the classic “racist uncle” yelling at people of color from the porch of some Gray Gardens-style manse, but coming from the president they are something else entirely.  Not only do they render him untrustworthy to execute the law of the land in a race-blind, equitable fashion, but they are of a piece with what we already know: that the GOP and Trump see their surest path to political victory through inciting the fears and hatreds of their white base, and to promote whites’ political position and status in society at the expense of everyone else.  This is to say nothing of the supercharging of daily racism and violence against non-whites in our country that the president’s endorsement of overt racism will lead to.

I think this is a case where some Democratic politicians are using the seemingly wise theory that you can’t jump at every Trumpian provocation as a way to avoid this damning conclusion in response to Trump’s “back to Africa” remarks; for to publicly indict the GOP and Trump as white supremacist in ideology is to at some level to risk all strategies that seek to win the White House by courting persuadable white voters who broke for Trump in 2016, who they fear will side with Trump if the 2020 election focuses primarily on race.

I also think that any spin on Trump’s recent tweets that stresses their intention to outrage his opposition dangerously misses or understates what is clearly a key part of their intent: to incite Trump’s backers, and to peel away some number of undecided white voters into the Trump camp.  The GOP can of course pretend that they’re actually talking about protecting the borders, or protecting the U.S. from “communists” like the congresswomen targeted by the president, but Trump keeps giving the game away: it’s about inflaming racial hatred against non-whites.  And when Trump makes explicit a white nationalist agenda that by its very nature will require suppression of non-white votes, that promotes the primordial American sin of racism, and that views non-whites as not real citizens, it’s not just another campaign strategy, one among many: it’s a full frontal assault on what this country is about, channeling the most hateful and discredited of traditions.

In such a situation, to argue that the Democrats are somehow falling into Trump’s trap by “allowing” the president to make the election about white supremacism instead of health care or the economy completely misreads the stakes and downplays the need to explicitly refute this cancerous ideology.  The president is going to incite “white grievance and anti-immigrant nativism” in 2020, as this Washington Post article notes, no matter what the Democrats do; he thinks this is what won him the 2016 election, and it’s what he believes in.  This is a moral reckoning that the opposition can’t avoid, as it goes to the heart of what sort of country we are.  But beyond this, it also goes to whether we’re actually a democracy: for a white nationalist appeal isn’t going to win the White House or Congress without anti-democratic measures to suppress and gerrymander the vote.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats should avoid talking about the economy, the environment, health care, or education; after all, these are areas in which the president is failing everyone, including his supporters.  But the best defense against his white nationalist pathology is to shine a light on it; to explicate the meaning of the president’s racist words to ensure that no informed citizen can be ignorant of their immoral content; and to contend that you can have white nationalism, or American democracy, but not both.

White Supremacism Renders Trump Unfit for Office

Given President Trump’s determination is to leave no doubt that he considers himself to be the white-supremacist-in-chief, it’s worth remarking anew, in the face of his racist tweets today targeting four U.S. representatives, how grotesque an error Democrats have made in not making his animating racism and white supremacist project the focal point of the party’s opposition to his misrule.

The task before the Democrats has always been crucial and inescapable, but in no way complicated or even overly difficult.  This is a president who, from the start, has bared his racism for all the world to see, a racism that has in turn informed and lent consistency to all he seeks to do while he occupies the Oval Office: restrict the political power of non-white Americans; shape the economy so that it benefits those who are already rich and predominantly white, while distracting his supporters as he picks their pockets; enact mass cruelty and human rights crimes against brown-skinned immigrants at the southern border.  The principle of opposition isn’t hard to articulate: a man such as this president, who views whites as the natural top tier of American society, and who views non-whites as neither full citizens nor, to be blunt, fully human, lacks the moral authority to be president.

There are other explanatory frameworks through which to view this presidency - misogynistic, plutocratic, kleptocratic - but the white supremacist aspects are dominant, and bleed into the other dark tendencies of this White House.  The promotion of racism serves to distract Trump’s base from the many ways in which the president serves them badly, whether through tax cuts that benefit only the richest among them, disabling climate agreements that would keep the planet from spiraling into uninhabitability, or foreign policy blunders that raise the probability of wars both costly and catastrophic. 

The white supremacist narrative also has the benefit of being affirmed on a near-daily basis by the president himself.

Let me put it another way: the president wants everyone, both this base and his opponents, to know that he’s a racist.  This may enthuse many of his supporters, but it also carries great danger for him, as it serves to create a cap in the number of people who will ever support him.  However, what the president is betting on, in part, is that this cap can, somewhat paradoxically, be lifted as a direct result of his explicit racism.  Part of a president’s traditional power is that of persuasion; together with the authority of his office, he can change what many people consider to be acceptable to think, feel, and express.

This means that Trump’s blatant racism is inevitably a test for the Democrats: if they fail to counter it with sufficient force, they will lend his vile ideology a sort of tacit acceptance, when what they need to be doing is making it clear such white supremacism is unacceptable in a civilized society such as ours.  The Democrats have, until now, been failing this test, by not identifying the president’s racism as sufficient grounds for implacable opposition to him.  The good news, if you can call it that, is that the president has constantly offered them a second chance to make up for this error.  His tweets this weekend are such a second chance.  I think it’s an error to say that these tweets are a distraction: they are, in fact, very much the thing itself, the basic statement of Donald’s Trump argument for why people should support him, and what sort of governing we can expect for the rest of his first term or, god forbid, another four years beyond that.

So make the president double-down on his remarks (he will never apologize for them).  Make the whole GOP defend the indefensible.  Let them all go on the record saying that only white-skinned Americans are actually Americans, or refuse to answer the question, or break with the president.

It is a secondary issue, but not too much so, that the president’s tweets today might be held up by some as a shining example of how he maintains the initiative in our political discourse, by shaping the conversation through the power of the presidential tweet. A better way of viewing what has happened is to observe how Trump has once again acted consistently with his prior actions and all that we know of his despicable character. There is no worse thing that the president is distracting us from than his white supremacism; if he thinks he is, then he’s mistaken. And if he thinks that this is a winning subject for a summer weekend, then it is largely proof that the moral rot that drives his racism has also led him to an overly cynical view of the American public. We all owe it to each other to call the president’s racism by its true name, and to re-affirm that the only acceptable way forward for this president is resignation or removal from office. A president who doesn’t accept that nearly half the citizenry is even American defiles the Oval Office and has proven himself unfit to govern, or to be trusted with equitably executing the laws of the land.

Concentration Camp Debate Suggests How to Defeat Right-Wing Propaganda

I’m not surprised that Jack Holmes’ article on applying the terminology of concentration camps to the Trump administration’s migrant border facilities has reached something of a critical mass as a public discussion point.  It’s  been retweeted and commented on by Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, which in turn provoked a predictable and telling response from Republican Congressperson Liz Cheney; a few weeks on, it remains part of the fabric of discussions about the border crisis.

Holmes spoke with scholars of concentration camps about the detention of migrants who’ve crossed the southern border, and both he and these experts make the case that concentration camps are exactly what the U.S. is running.  But as fascinating, provocative, and horrifying as the article’s argument is in and of itself, it should also provoke a reckoning with basic questions of language and politics that are central to our Trumpian moment.  Many people of good conscience and deep opposition to the Trump administration will likely hear the term “concentration camp” applied to what are commonly called migrant shelters or detainment facilities, and think that this is going too far.  After all, Dachau was a concentration camp, and the U.S. government is not working immigrants to death or gassing them.  The language may seem to them incendiary, and the more philosophically-minded might make the case that such overstatement of the case actually gives the Trump administration more latitude for further cruelties against detainees.  In fact, this is a rough account of my own thought process when I saw the article’s headline —and I don’t think I’m alone.

But reading the article changed my mind.  It did so by providing context for what the United States is doing by comparing it to the actions of other countries, by detailing the conditions and treatment of migrants within the camps, and by laying out definitions of what concentration camps are by those who study them.  Here’s a powerful sample:

“Not every concentration camp is a death camp — in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning.  Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions [. . .] systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies—as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War—as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”

That first line chills me every time I read it, and for good reason: it hits on the way that I think most of us too naively believe evil always shows up in full, recognizable form, and how instead a complex interaction of factors — individual malfeasance, bureaucratic inertia, indifference, and a failure of the public imagination — can build into catastrophes that no moral person would hesitate to condemn.  The article goes on to make two key points: one, that the U.S. detention system fits under commonly understood definitions of concentration camps; and two, that there is every reason to worry that conditions will deteriorate beyond even this early point of immoral treatment of the detainees, with or without deliberate choices by the Trump administration to make things worse.

I don’t think any Democratic politician can walk away from the article and in good faith not refer to the facilities as concentration camps, as both a matter of accuracy and of ending them.  But at the same time, such powerful language will be most effective as a weapon in the fight to end these detention practices if it’s accompanied by some version of the context the article provides.  Otherwise, what could be deeply effective in changing the debate might contribute to the same propagandized language environment that benefits the president; of which, in fact, he is a master.

Donald Trump would seem to do the opposite of what I’m advising: indeed, the Trump years have been an object lesson in the power of language to shape people’s perceptions of reality, and more specifically, in the way that language can be used to pervert perceptions of reality.  At the most extreme, he empowers himself by calling things what they are NOT, and asking people to share his vision.  Migrants are vermin; Mexicans are rapists; immigration is invasion.  More broadly, he uses language not to accurately describe reality, but to arouse various emotions — anger, fear, envy — to gain political support.  He incites, he manipulates, he deceives.

But here’s one point that I’m trying to work through: obviously, I’m not saying Democrats should use the term “concentration camp” simply because it’s the most accurate term for the migrant facilities, but also because of its tremendous emotional connotations — its power to shock the conscience, change minds, and provoke political change.  In fact, I would not be surprised if relatively few Democratic politicians follow Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s lead in employing this term in the immediate future, because of the perceived risks I mentioned above: fear of overstating the case in ways that provoke a backlash from otherwise persuadable voters, and that provide cover for further depredations by a Trump administration willing to point to full-on death camps as the only yardstick by which to measure its depraved actions.

While these aren’t unreasonable fears, they are symptomatic of larger difficulties around language and its relation to meaning that continue to dog the opposition.  In politics, if you cannot bring yourself to call a thing what it is, or lack a word for that thing, then you are inevitably hobbled.  On top of this, I think Democrats are rightly cautious to mimic the propagandistic language of Donald Trump.  This is partly tied to their general approach to governance; unlike Trump, they are not working to stir up enmity against whole groups of people based on race, nationality, or religion, and so in basic ways have no need for such language.  Put another way: the president largely plays to negative emotions that are, generally speaking, not applicable to Democratic politics, which are on the one hand generally more policy-driven, and on the other, rooted in coalition politics that can’t really be reconciled with the us-versus-them mentality behind much of the president’s hateful and provocative language.  It is true that many Democrats feel anger and even hatred toward Trump, as well as at the voters who elected him and continue to approve of him in polls — but this animus at Trump voters isn’t supercharged by the same racialized and primal sentiment Trump would have his supporters direct towards the Democrats.  At a pragmatic, electoral level, Democrats have not been willing to write off whole swathes of the electorate as Trump has (the president clearly sees a possible path to re-election that, as in 2016, does not require him to win the popular vote).  At a moral level, Democrats don’t see hate as a legitimate basis for political appeals.

In the matter of the camps (and this is a conundrum that can be applied more broadly to the overall challenge of the Trump administration), the Democrats face two dangers: either understating or overstating their case.  It will not surprise you when I say that, on the subject of migrant detention, understating the case is a political and moral failure for the Democrats, and a political win for the president.  But how to avoid overstating the case?

The article I started off discussing offers some major clues.  First, historical context is vital.  The widespread phenomenon of concentration camps over the past century is deeply chilling, yet the silver lining (if we might call it that) is that there is a measurable baseline against which the U.S. camps can be measured.  Put very basically: calling these sites “concentration camps” is more persuasive when the term isn’t just thrown out to provoke, but also to educate and illuminate.  Particularly striking for me is how learning that concentration camps can encompass, but are not exclusively, death camps, in no way makes this terminology less politically and morally useful than thinking that only death camps qualify as concentration camps.  Instead, the term captures a continuum of degradation, abuse, and potential horror rooted in real-world examples that can help focus shame and condemnation on current American practices.  To make the obvious point: a camp doesn’t have to be Auschwitz to be horrific and unacceptable.  For me, the larger matter in this moment is the way U.S. camps are undergirded by a basic disregard for human rights, a de facto strategy of dehumanization, and a legitimization via racism shared by past concentration camps.  It doesn’t matter if these aren’t Nazi camps; what they’re intended to do is still evil, un-American, and unconscionable.  No patriotic American would want to see their country defiled by such practices.

The use of incendiary language that twists basic facts and truths about the world is how the president propagates a myth about America and his place in it.  As in his attempts to re-brand the 4th of July as a celebration of Donald Trump and how he saved America, his methods depend on excluding history, reality, and truth, except to the extent those things can be filtered through a distorting Trumpian prism that twists them into barely-recognizable forms.  And so, on the immigration front, he dismisses vast swathes of individuated humanity as faceless, predatory hordes coming to take America’s wealth.  There is no Latin America, with its various countries, their stories, and their individual and collective past relationships with the United States.  There is also no acknowledgment of the billions upon billions of dollars of wealth contributed to our country by prior and current Latino migrants, documented or not, as they worked our fields and built our houses and cooked in our restaurants.  Instead, below the Rio Grande is simply an amorphous blob of geography and humanity, who all mysteriously speak Mexican even though they’re not all from Mexico but who knows what other countries might be down there?  The world south of the border is a punching bag, not a place, and all the humanity there faceless if not outright symbolic.  As a danger that transcends history, any measures, not matter how cruel, are justified.

And so facts, historical context, and accurate language are how we break the myth-making.  Just as the president is advantaged to the extent he is allowed to talk about migrants as if they are not individual human beings, and about Latin America as if it’s not an actual place, he’s also the beneficiary of the opposition’s failure to use the right words to describe his administration’s treatment of immigrants.  If there is a case to be made that the Trump administration is running concentration camps, then Democrats need to make that case.  The Democrats must do everything they can to rob immigration of the symbolic power Donald Trump has invested in it as the premier threat to the United States, both in order to defeat the infliction of cruelty, and to deny him the ability to blame all America’s ills on immigration.

Allowing immigration to dominate the political discussion will always be a net loss for Democrats, because the meta-message telegraphed to the electorate, rightly or wrongly, is that Democrats care more about protecting immigrants than working for American citizens.  The president, even if he is lying and deeply misguided about his approach, is at least able to consistently articulate that he is inflicting pain on migrants in order to protect the United States. The Democrats’ case, in contrast, is that they are protecting migrants in order to actually protect the migrants, and secondarily in order to prevent the United States from inflicting on itself a moral and humanitarian catastrophe.  The Democrats have an ethical imperative to do so; but they also need to figure out a way to simultaneously inflict maximum pain on the president, that holds his inhumanity to account.

They cannot stop the president from talking about immigration, but surely one way to neutralize him is to make sure the full story of immigration is being discussed: that it is an integral part of America’s history, and that the migration from south of the border has long been part of our development, and is not a terrifying new thing, but a situation to be managed without cruelty or terror.  They can also make sure to highlight ties between the president’s white nationalist agenda and his war on brown people at the border.  And fighting big lies doesn’t just require dramatic truths — the opposition shouldn’t afraid to appeal to pragmatism as well, and to make the case for how immigration helps us economically. We are already seeing how the president’s powerful lies are leading to measurable, real-world atrocities — countering them grows more urgent by the day.

Working Out Trump's Fireworks

In his planned colonization of the Washington, D.C. 4th of July celebrations, President Trump has inadvertently recharged a welter of questions about this dark age and his role in it.  Is he a dictator in waiting, or simply a draft-dodging pudding-for-brains who likes big tanks because they remind him of a long-lost toy truck, a la Kane’s Rosebud?  Is he merely ridiculous, or a mortal threat to the republic?  Is he self-defeating, or growing his power with every norm he knocks over?  Is he a solitary threat, or inseparable from a complicit and equally illiberal GOP?  Is the key to defeating him ignoring him, or engaging with every last provocation?  Will public opinion ever reach a decisive turning point against him, or are we stuck in a Western Front-style stalemate in which every new fact and circumstance reinforces pre-existing convictions all around?

Until the past few days, this last pair of questions had been my framework for viewing Trump’s decision to stake a beachhead at the Lincoln Memorial from which to convert the nation’s birthday into a campaign rally.  This felt so obviously self-serving, such an obvious distortion of the holiday, that it didn’t seem so much different from Trump dressing up as Santa Claus come Christmas and inviting Christians everywhere to worship him as the second coming of you-know-who.  You’d either see it for the travesty it is, or you wouldn’t.

In this, I was clearly also falling on one side of another of the set of questions I started with, opting to ignore rather than engage this specific violation.  I don’t live in D.C.; I want to enjoy my holiday on my own terms; I don’t want to think about Trump on the 4th. But a piece yesterday at the Plum Line blog, which I’ve been praising to the skies lately, has helped bring me fresh perspective, not only on why we should pay attention to the 4th of July shenanigans, but on how we need to talk about Trump if we want to stop him.

Plum Line writer Greg Sargent begins by describing how the president’s actions match those studied and documented by scholars of authoritarianism.  This early paragraph contains the mini-thesis of the piece:

The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions — false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.

Sargent goes on to describe how Trump’s application of this authoritarian principle has led him to try to make images of resurgent military might his own, as a token of how he’s delivered on his promise to make America great again; in doing so, he seeks to cover himself with borrowed glory while turning a unifying public celebration into a divisive personal rally that seeks to meld leader and state.

It is a fascinating and I think accurate read, but I want to share the larger revelation that it gave me: that time and again, the outrageous actions that Trump and the GOP take are not only reported and discussed without adequate context by the news media, but also by the president’s opponents.  That is, the truly overwhelming number of assaults on American democracy are too often viewed in piecemeal fashion.  In the first place, the president’s critics fail to connect them to each other.  In the second, though, his offenses are simply not often enough discussed in the context of the authoritarian impulse that is their common thread.

Now, I realize how this might seem to contradict the reality of much coverage of Trump.  It’s not just Sargent who gets it, after all — a LOT of people have been ringing the alarm about the anti-democratic GOP and Trump’s disregard for the constitutional order.  But what I’m realizing with this Independence Day grotesquerie is that the need for context isn’t just important — it’s essential, because of the very nature of authoritarianism, which seeks to impress a sense of its own power on every aspect of society and every member of it, and whose advance is conducted by a multi-pronged strategy that overwhelms a democratic society, in part by preventing that society from comprehending the totality of the attack. 

Rather than being a silly distraction from worse offenses, it now strikes me that Trump’s 4th of July plans are both an escalation and a desperate warning of how dangerous this moment is, and how important it is to respond in rhetorical force to his attacks on genuinely unifying traditions and our shared history.  By providing essential context for how Trump is acting like other authoritarian nationalist leaders in the past (and in the present, too), Sargent is able to make us all reconsider the true and scary import of what the president is attempting to carry off.  Talking about how Trump’s actions fit into familiar patterns of authoritarianism raises awareness of behaviors and ideas that in isolation seem merely worrisome, but collectively present a clear and present danger to the republic. 

But the specifics of the authoritarian self-mythologizing that Sargent describes also suggest a pair of complementary reason for why this context is essential.  As the authoritarian leader tries to tell a false story about himself and his role as the savior of the country, this totalizing effort to retell history and rebrand the present require a strong countering effort to remember our actual history and what constitutes true patriotism.  The authoritarian has the advantage of pressing a unified story that flatters him and his followers; meanwhile, those who oppose him will inevitably possess competing and often contradictory notions of the country’s past and present, which is rightly the nature of a democracy.  Rather than mirror the authoritarian in like fashion, the better option is to call out his lies and insist on the complex reality of our democracy, which of course involves not just warts and horrors, but a real-world magnificence, not least that it is a project in which all of us — not just the president and his adherents — can have a voice.

But something else came to mind as I wondered about my own initial resistance to paying closer attention to the president’s 4th of July plans.  This is pretty speculative, but I’m wondering if part of my reluctance was due to an unconscious recognition of the power of what Trump was attempting to pull off; that some part of me knew that if I paid attention to his spectacle, I might actually be. . . impressed.  This made me think of an extreme example: even if you hated Trump, there would be something awe-inspiring and intimidating if he were to marshall, say, a thousand tanks to the nation’s capital and draw all our attention to the unprecedented display he had created.  Obviously, Trump is only putting on a fraction of such a scene, but aiming to overwhelm is the intent.  As Sargent puts it, “what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts.  The naked audacity of the usurpation is itself the point.”

But I would add that this event “larger than the sum of its parts” is larger, partially, because the effect it achieves goes beyond rational thought.  We are meant to be wowed, intimidated, overcome.  This isn’t a merely incidental authoritarian tactic; it is key for anyone wishing to subvert the mutual respect and equality that are democracy’s ideal.  Trump is not trying to provoke awe at how great our country is: he is attempting to identify himself with our country, through an identification with its military might, literally at the expense of every other American for whom the 4th is intended to be a celebration.

This is only more reason that explicitly identifying the president’s authoritarian project is so important — to combat its unconscious power and appeal to many people.  This unconscious power is akin to, but not the same as, the general idea of normalization that has been much discussed in the Trump years: generally speaking, the way that outrageous behavior comes to seem acceptable or normal through repetition and because it is being carried out by the most powerful elected official in the country.  There is a reason that someone like Trump deploys spectacle and seeks to identify himself with the state: because these symbolic moves affect people’s perceptions in ways that bypass rational thought.  You might hate him; but the authoritarian makes you feel relatively powerless to do anything to change things. He has agency; you do not.

This unconscious angle got me thinking about the role of mockery in undercutting the pretensions of Donald Trump and other would-be authoritarians.  We can defend ourselves by making ourselves more aware of what’s going on — in this case, picking apart what the 4th of July spectacle is intended to do can help drain it of its overwhelming power.   But when it still happens, we have only partially protected ourselves; the “naked audacity of the usurpation,” as Sargent puts it, is inevitably a blow against the body politic.  Here is where I think there is an incredibly powerful role for satire — but satire that doesn’t start simply with the premise that the president is a pathetic powerless man, but rather that acknowledges the real danger he presents as part of the reason for tearing him down.  In other words, we make fun as a way of taking seriously, as opposed to making fun because we don’t take him seriously.

Channeling Travis Bickle, Trump's Comments On Homelessness Implicate a Nation

It should surprise no one that Monday night, in an interview in the safe space of Fox News, Donald Trump turned his attention to the plight of the homeless, and it is not too much of a plot spoiler to say that his views lacked any vestige of fellow feeling or empathy..  After all, there really is no group of vulnerable people in America whom the president does not despise, be they immigrants, the disabled, or African-Americans.  So when the Washington Post writes that the president indicated he wants to address “the crisis of people on the streets,” in the paper’s phrasing, the phrasing leaves ambiguous what it should not: since the crisis the president actually identifies is the terrible offense that people living on the streets give to passers-by, as opposed to the urgent moral need to relieve their suffering; the plight of the homeless turns out to be the plight of everyone but the homeless. From police “getting sick just by walking the beat,” to office workers forced to “walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago,” to world leaders visiting the United States who “can’t be looking at that,” Donald Trump is appalled by the pain inflicted on the non-homeless. He speaks almost as if it were an aesthetic issue for him, a matter of city surfaces that just need the filth scrubbed away.  

For Trump, there is no context, no interest in why a person might end up on the streets, and no apprehension of any humanity behind the eyesore.  His ideas for how to resolve matters are both all-encompassing and ominous.  “We have to take the people.  And we have to do something [. . .] They can’t be looking at scenes like you see in Los Angeles and San Francisco . . . So we’re looking at it very seriously. We may intercede. We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up.”

But as concerning as the president’s language is, and how revealing it is of Trump’s essential brokenness — he doesn’t even bother to fake the empathy he’s incapable of feeling — it wouldn’t be half as ominous if it weren’t a close cousin to the attitude regularly displayed by countless business associations and government officials, who talk about homelessness less as a humanitarian crisis and more as a problem that hurts profits and threatens tourism.  And it is also not many more steps removed from the postures of disregard and borderline cruelty that I often hear from otherwise normal, indeed liberal people here in Portland, too many of whom see our municipal and collective failures to end homelessness as convincing evidence that the homeless themselves must be to blame, with all the destructive and dehumanizing consequences of that conclusion.

In these respects, then, we should be worried not simply about the president’s personal attitudes, but in the way that what comes across as more or less outright sociopathy is shared, if in varying degrees, by millions of other Americans.  That the president has cycled to this issue, however incidentally and temporarily, adds new evidence to a sense that the U.S. has catastrophically failed to gauge the degrading impact of the homeless crisis, not just on its victims, but on our common morality and democracy.  We have all woven into the fabric of American society a weave that also, paradoxically, lies outside it, serving as a constant reminder of how hideously low it is possible to fall in this country, while providing the most financially strapped reassurance that at least their plight isn’t as bad as it could get.  In tolerating the intolerable, and by convincing ourselves of the limits of our individual responsibility, of how far society’s protections extend, and of government’s allowed scope of action in preserving the civil and human rights of all Americans, the spectacle of homelessness has proved fine training to prepare us for the likes of Donald Trump.  So perhaps when the president’s remarks, chilling and oddly abstract, catch our attention, and invite condemnation, we would do well to follow them to their collective source.

In Seeking to Reassure the Ultra-Wealthy, Joe Biden Disquiets the Rest of Us

I realize the comments Joe Biden made at a Wall Street fundraiser a week and a half ago are the very definition of yesterday’s news, but their unsettling nature, and the insights they provide into the presidential candidate’s thinking at a point early in the race before he’s had a chance to react to criticisms and potentially change course, are worth a little more time.  Paul Waldman at The Plum Line (which, with Waldman and Greg Sargent tag-teaming the site, has been absolutely on fire lately) does a whiz-bang job of explicating Biden’s remarks and what they say about the former vice president’s political philosophy; re-reading Walden’s post today, I’m still almost shocked by how sharp (though necessary) a scalpel he’s taken to what Biden said.

Biden’s remarks about working with segregationist senators have received the severest working over by Waldman and others, but I agree with Waldman that what Biden said about economic inequality and how the rich have nothing to fear from a Biden administration is also “startling.” First, here’s what Biden said that got people talking:

You know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. Because when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. [...] It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the other, the other. You’re not the other. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down.

Biden’s comments that “nothing would fundamentally change” have been criticized the most, as a sign that he doesn’t believe the American economy needs any significant rejiggering in terms of a remedy for inequality or the distribution of economic power.  They also remind me of President Obama’s remarks during his first administration, when he told a group of bankers that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks.  I think the same accommodating spirit is at play in Biden’s remarks: the people are mad at you, but if you trust me, I’ll find a middle way where both sides can win.  In both Obama’s and Biden’s cases, the message is similar; as Waldman puts it, it’s that we have to take economic action not because it’s the right thing to do, “but because if we don’t, the masses will rise up in anger and you never know what might happen then.”  Along with his attempts to flatter (“rich people are just as patriotic as poor people”) and cajole (“you all know in your gut what has to be done”), it sounds like Biden is telling his wealthy listeners that they are reasonable people who are smart enough to let him help them protect their basic place at the top of the American pyramid.

It’s not just that Waldman’s correct when he points out that the GOP and corporate interests have shown no indication of wanting to accommodate workers’ interests, dooming Biden’s approach to failure, or that Biden’s interest in having good relations with billionaires means he lacks interest in changing the status quo, although I think these are the basic problems with Biden’s remarks.  There are actually multiple instances in just this one paragraph of Biden’s speech where his patented earnestness obscures further dubious assumptions and flawed conclusions.

Flattering rich people that they are “just as patriotic as poor people” is, by itself, gratuitous and ingratiating, yet the following line reveals why they’re patriotic, as Biden continues, “we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.”  The rich are patriotic because they’re rich;  what is left unsaid, but implied, is that being rich is patriotic because they help provide jobs and make the economy run.  In other words, Biden sails awfully close to the Romney-Ryan “makers and takers” rhetoric which Democrats have opposed, and opens Biden up to various ripostes: Is it really the fate of the majority to view the rich with gratitude at their job-creating beneficence, and to forever downplay the fact that there is no economy without the great numbers of people who work hard, innovate business in a million creative ways, and yet never receive fair compensation for their labors? 

Biden’s comment that “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change” has rightly been criticized as a sign that he won’t push for fundamental change in the economy, as his words seem meant to reassure his rich and powerful listeners that they have nothing to fear from a Biden presidency, such as not being taxed into the poorhouse (or even into having less yachts).  But it’s worth calling out how dependent on audience his remarks are, since the hope of the great majority of Americans is indeed that their “standard of living” will indeed change — for the better.  The lived reality of most Americans is a stagnant or declining standard of living, which is a big fucking deal, to use a Biden-ism, and his concern to reassure those with an enviable standard of living is disheartening.  

After his disquieting standard of living comment, though, Biden said something’s that received less attention: “Because when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution [. . .] It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the other, the other.  You’re not the other.  I need you very badly.  I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down.”  Something quite odd is going on here, and it’s of a piece with Biden’s preceding mumble-jumble rhetoric that uses ambiguity to allow its listeners to draw flattering conclusions.  Refering to “demagogues” who blame “the other” for the country’s problems, Biden reassures his audience of worthies that they are in fact not this despised other.  These comments are bizarre for at least two reasons.  First, it’s quite possible to interpret Biden as saying that fellow Democratic candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are “demagogues” who vilify the wealthy for the nation’s problems; this would be supported by his preceding remarks reassuring his wealthy audience that they are patriots who contribute to the U.S.  Second, because “othering” is the undisguised strategy of Donald Trump and the right-wing GOP, which identifies immigrants, racial minorities, and women as to blame for America’s ill and undeserving of a range of rights.  However, to draw any equivalence between the left’s condemnations of an upper class that has siphoned off so much of the country’s wealth to itself, and the right’s attempts to criminalize, brutalize, and denigrate various groups of immigrants and Americans, is grotesque.  The number of Americans who are calling for interning the rich in concentration camps is passingly small, while millions support the president’s catastrophic and abusive treatment of immigrants.

I’m sure that, if confronted with this reading of his remarks, Biden would vociferously deny that he was drawing such an equivalence, just as he argued that his remarks about working with segregationists were in no way an endorsement of those men’s racist ideology.  Yet I don’t see how you can read Biden’s words as a whole and not conclude that he’s basically telling rich people that he wants to be president in order to protect them against ravening masses who seek to take their wealth and send them to the guillotine.  That he made these remarks at an event in which he aimed to get as much money as possible from the wealthy attendees is no excuse, and in fact heightens the sense that he’s missing the truth of our historical moment: do we really need another president who thinks he needs to fight for the rights of millionaires and billionaires?  Those guys have plenty of power on their side, lobbyists and lawyers and bought politicians.  It seems to me that Americans need a president who’s on their side.  Indeed, as I argued recently, the idea of fighting for left-behind Americans is a big part of Trump’s appeal, even as his actions undercut any truth to it.  For the Democrats to oppose him by nominating someone who’s literally telling the rich he’s going to fight for them would be totally mad.

Wild Wild Oregon GOP

It’s been a week of mixed feelings for many of us Oregonians.  On the one hand, it’s nice to be garnering some national witness to the freakshow antics and anti-science beliefs of the state’s Republican Party, as all 11 GOP members of the Oregon Senate have gone into hiding in order to prevent a quorum in that body, with the aim of stopping a Democratic-backed cap and trade bill meant to combat climate change.  Democratic Governor Kate Brown quickly ordered the state police to track down the absconding senators and bring them back to Salem, at which point the story took a less comical and decidedly darker turn, in the way that things tend to do in the age of Trump and a radicalized GOP.

In a comment directed at the state police, Republican Senator Brian Boquist told a reporter that they should “[s]end bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon.”  In other words, an Oregon senator warned that he was willing to kill his way out of a quorum.  Perhaps Boquist was emboldened by the offers made by various right-wing extremist groups to shelter and protect the Republican senators, even as the senators turned those offers down.  The shivers of violence were only heightened when the state police advised the senate leadership to cancel a session planned for last Saturday, on account of unspecified right-wing actions at the state capitol; a Democratic senator confirmed that the police had provided notice that the senators and others planning to be at the capitol were in physical danger.

But it gets worse.  The state GOP issued a statement accusing the Democrats of canceling the Saturday session “out of a fear that Republican voters might show up.”  That is, with the state government — not a Democratic state government, or a Republican state government, but the Oregon state government representing all of us — threatened by right-wing extremists, the state GOP chose to lie about the threat posed, turn it into a political hit against the Democrats, and (most damningly) provide rhetorical cover fire for the gunmen behind the threats.  The state Republican Party subsequently tweeted photos of a rally at the capital from weeks ago, indicating that the unarmed protestors were the militia the Democrats feared — once again making threats of right-wing violence into a joke, and spreading lies about a non-existent, peaceful rally supposedly going on that day.

Today, it’s been reported that the Senate’s president, Peter Courtney, doesn’t have sufficient Democratic votes to pass the climate bill, even as politicians of both parties look at the potential of no bills of any stripe being passed should the runaway Republicans not return by the end of the session.  It’s a twist whose meaning will depend on the results of further reporting.  Did the Republican walkout give wavering Democrats cold feet, or cover to change their votes?

Regardless, state Democrats can’t let the GOP sweep under the rug the remarkably anti-democratic events of the last few days.  Senator Boquist should be asked to resign, due to his threats of violence, and the state Republican Party must be held to account for its willingness to play politics with threats posed by right-wing extremists.  Early signs are ambiguous: Governor Brown has called the Republican tactics “not just unacceptable, but dangerous,” and asked “Are they against climate change legislation or are they against democracy?”  It sounds to me like she’s condemning the walk-out, which is indeed an anti-democratic power play by the GOP which, if it continues, could bring the state government to a destructive standstill.  However, the lack of specific condemnation of the GOP’s willingness to cover for violent extremists seems like a regrettable omission.

To combat those who are infatuated with violence and a sense of their own victimhood, there’s a reasonable temptation to downplay their provocations and not give more oxygen to their anti-state threats.  Yet I worry that the right-wingers who inserted themselves into this story will take comfort in the notion that it was their armed militancy that defeated the climate bill; if so, any sign of Democratic responsiveness to such tactics is deeply dangerous, both to our democracy and the possibility of Oregon ever passing progressive legislation again.  I think I’ve made clear in various posts over the years that threats of violence are disqualifying for politicians and parties in a democratic system.  Violence, is, in fact, democracy’s antithesis.  It is the end of reason and debate, and the beginning of rule by the gun and by the powerful.

It is also worrisome to think that the extremists who rushed to give shelter and more to the Republican senators, backed by the barrel of a gun, were emboldened by the right-wing occupation of federal lands at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016: a standoff in which one of the extremists was shot and killed by law enforcement, but whose perpetrators otherwise got off scot-free due to a bungled federal prosecution of their crimes.  Any threats against law enforcement during this current situation need to be taken seriously and appropriately.

I’m hoping this series of events will be a wake-up call to anyone in Oregon who thinks that the sickness of Trumpism hasn’t reached us, too.  After years of the Democrats winning elections and control of the state government without the gerrymandering and voter suppression that have become standard fare in Republican-dominated states, the state GOP has decided to wreck the state government rather than actually try to become a party that appeals to more voters.  It is sad and lazy, and it’s a sign that Democrats need to figure out ways to keep peeling away voters who still side with the Republicans.  In the case of the climate bill, it seems as if the Democrats have not made a sufficient case that poor and rural residents will be protected from higher fuel prices, which are more than reasonable concerns.  Oregon has a perennial problem with asking fat cat companies like Intel and Nike to pay their fair share into the common good, and the idea that this reluctance causes the party to push legislation less generous than otherwise towards less affluent residents is not a question the party leadership likes to ponder overmuch.  

Will Biden Help Make Case That the (Presidential) Future Is Female?

This might strike you as a report from the Totally Obvious desk: but I’m wondering if the upcoming Democratic debates aren’t going to seriously take away some of Joe Biden’s current momentum, and result in it moving to the female candidates in the presidential primaries, particularly to Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.  On the one hand, I suspect that whether or not Biden’s touchy-ness with females continues to receive coverage, or whether stories like his repeated injunction that parents to build fences around their houses to protect their teenage girls reach and offend more people, his attitude toward his female rivals will include elements of condescension and dismissal that will be illuminating for all voters, but particularly women.  I think this will be doubly illuminating because the female candidates know that they must prove to voters that they’ll be able to handle Donald Trump; in this sense, Biden may serve as something of a stalking horse for the female candidates to show any voters worried about Hillary 2.0 that their fears are misplaced.  The road to a female Democratic presidential candidate is going to go through Joe Biden, not simply as a fellow candidate to defeat, but as someone who I think is inevitably going to take a stance, however subtle or overt, that it’s going to take a man to defeat Donald Trump.

Farhad Manjoo, who started as more of a tech writer but whose increasing forays into politics have been deeply insightful and provocative, wrote a piece last month that makes what I’d call a strong “male case” for the necessity for electing a woman president (I say “male case” because countless women have been writing about this issue for decades).  It resonated with me because I think it captures something of the humility, exhaustion, and assessment of the historical turning point that I’ve been feeling towards gender equality and what seems to have been a great leap backwards for humankind with the election of Donald Trump.  The incessant electability arguments and example of the popular-vote-winning Hillary Clinton as reasons that we must once again defer a female president to the hazy future are, as Manjoo argues, just giving in to and empowering an idiot patriarchy that’s defiled the brains of both sexes for far, far too long; we assume enough people feel like a woman shouldn’t be president, so we individually give up hope, too.  

Of course, it doesn’t help that our first female candidate was denied the White House by such a horrid misogynist.  Anyone who expected to witness the shattering of that great glass ceiling in the sky in November 2016 ended up getting more or less the diametric opposite of what they wanted; cognitive dissonance, and an impulse toward playing it safe, was bound to ensue.  But should either men or women look at the results of the 2016 election and decide that it’s time for women to back off?  Or reach this conclusion after the 2018 elections, which brought record numbers of women to Congress?  It makes as much sense to see so tantalizingly close a Clinton victory as inspiration for redoubled efforts, and to view the clear centrality of gender politics to the current energy in the Democratic Party as further evidence for drawing the opposite conclusion: that the story of America points to Trump’s reign being the reversible last-stand of a morally, spiritually, and politically bankrupt belief that men have a more or less divine right to lead.

The Dialectic of Warren and Trump: A Speculation

In crucial ways, Senator Elizabeth Warren is the anti-Trump.  Where the president has acted to aggrandize power in the demagogic figure of himself, Warren’s presidential platform includes various democratizing measures — not just for the political system, but for our economy as well.  Where the president wields tariffs like an all-purpose instrument of statecraft and calls a tax cut an economic strategy, Warren has developed multiple highly-detailed plans for economic growth.  Where the president mocks and undermines women, Warren’s election would radicalize our collective perceptions of female power in American society.  I could go on.

In other ways, though, some of Warren’s contrast with Trump has been worrisome.  Her decision to effectively give in to the president’s attacks on her claims of Native American heritage, by undergoing and releasing the results of DNA testing, seemed to be a strategic error, an attempt to sate a bully whose temperament is to never be satisfied with whatever humiliation he manages to inflict on his opponents — witness Trump’s continued hedging on whether or not President Obama was a U.S. citizen after Obama made the decision to release his long-form birth certificate.  If their positions were somehow reversed, Trump never would have given ground on this issue like Warren did.  The Massachusetts senator seemed to get outplayed in her attempt to take away the oxygen Trump was using to play his abusive and racist game.

But it is looking more and more as if the ancestry imbroglio, while unfortunate, was a deviation from Warren’s otherwise pugnacious approach both to Trump and to campaigning for president.  In fact, there is one particular Trump-like quality that she seems to embody — her declaration that she’s fighting on behalf of Americans against those forces arrayed against the American dream.  Like Trump, Warren has defined an us-versus-them picture of the world, though with decisive differences: hers is based in the realities of economic, racial, and gender inequality, rather than in the racist hysteria of white Americans facing a vengeful wave of brown-skinned interlopers who steal our jobs at home and abroad.  And her remedy is a universe away from scapegoating immigrants, giving aid and comfort to white nationalism, and turning the White House into a nest of cronyism and corruption.  Instead, it’s a promise to take down un-democratic power arrangements throughout our society, from self-serving bankers to boardrooms that shut out workers’ voices; to propose efforts to end corruption in government and protect our voting process; and to focus on actual measures to grow our economy and battle the inequality that’s turning this country into something out of dystopian sci-fi film.

Trump’s relative success, if nothing else, shows that the U.S. is primed for a more bully-pulpit presidency.  Somewhat unexpectedly, it was reading Joe Biden’s comments a week or two ago about America easily being able to out-compete China that really crystalized this for me.  In his casual dismissal of the idea that Americans might actually feel threatened by free trade arrangements that have at least in part contributed to massive losses of manufacturing jobs in great swathes of the country, Biden seemed to be ignoring key lessons of 2016 and before.  One of those lessons is that those whose livelihoods are threatened by tectonic changes in our economy, whether through foreign competition or automation or the destruction of unions, don’t want to be told that they just need to change their attitudes.  Whatever the particular combination of reasons for American deindustrialization, it’s a phenomenon that has helped mass produce voters willing to give Trump’s combination of fake economic populism and authoritarian race baiting a whirl.

Trump gets that Americans are in no mood to blame themselves for their problems: he told us that he was going to stick it to the Mexicans and the Chinese, and boy is he doing that, even if he’s also sticking it to himself, like a punch drunk boxer socking himself in the face half the time.  Warren understands the basic political reality that a president needs to be sympathetic to voters’ struggles, which is arguably always true but is doubly so in these anxious times, when Americans have a hunger to get to the root causes of why they feel economically insecure even in a relatively roaring economy like we have at present.  What the president has done is to legitimize the idea of making this quest for root causes and comprehensive solutions into an existential battle between success and ruination.  Trump has identified not only other countries, but also non-white citizens and of course immigrants, as the enemies of (white) American prosperity, while essentially running a government that is seeking to siphon, through tax laws and corruption of federal regulatory powers, as much wealth as possible to the richest Americans.  It is a contradictory mess that is authoritarian, racist, and plutocratic in comic book dimensions, but no less pernicious for its contradictions and self-sabotaging dynamics.  So it is not only that Donald Trump has legitimized the idea of the president dividing up the country and fighting for his side, but that he’s done so based on a worldview that is so fundamentally wrong (and self-serving) that it calls out for just the reality-based, democratic, and truly populist response that we are seeing from Warren.

I really can’t overstate the importance of how so much of Warren’s analysis and proposals is based in actual reality, rather than the fever dreams of white nationalists and overemphasis on easy or misleading solutions (see Trump’s endless trade wars).  As Farhad Manjoo observes in a recent column, Warren has taken a risk that most politicians avoid by getting so specific so early on; as he puts it, “she risks turning off key constituencies, alienating donors and muddying the gauzy visionary branding that is the fuel for so much early horse-race coverage.”  Yet, as he notes, this specificity has helped drive the debate among Democrats, and he also suggests that the flip side of being so forthcoming is that Warren can absorb criticism; that is, hers is an agenda that’s responsive to empirical testing, and thus, correction.  This couldn’t be farther from the Trump/GOP vision of an America that’s as much myth as anything else, where a vision of white hegemony as it existed in the 1950’s and where American workers are somehow prosperous even as the rich are allowed to take more and more of the nation’s wealth cannot really be reconciled with or refined by the real world. (Manjoo also notes the hopefulness of the fertile and wide-ranging discussion of democracy, the economy, and beyond among Democrats, despite the obvious temptation to just focus on Trump’s terribleness — another argument that Warren and other status quo-questioning Democrats are just what the political moment requires, and further evidenced by the fact that people are so obviously hungry for this broader discussion).

In a similar vein, we can see how Warren’s self-presentation, via a plethora of detailed plans (as well as a seemingly inexhaustible willingness to explain complicated policy matters in ways that non-experts can understand), might in itself constitute a vision — not just as the articulation of a perspective that sees the powerful pitted against the democratic many, but in a meta sense, in that politics is something that we need to talk about and make conscious, and that ultimately must be testable by facts and common agreement.  In his survey of why Warren has been rising in the polls lately, Paul Waldman suggests as much when he writes that, “what’s in her plans may matter less for the support she gets than for the idea that she’s the candidate who has plans for everything. It means she’s serious, substantive, prepared and ambitious about change. Not coincidentally, these are all things President Trump is not.”  As I hinted at earlier, the more philosophically-inclined might see something of a dialectic between Trump and Warren, the president being the white nationalist yang to the senator’s democratic, patriotic yin.

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

“You don’t call the FBI.”

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

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

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

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

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