Obsession With Trump Blinds Us to His Partners in White Supremacist Crime

Most of us, even the best-intentioned, are to some degree undermined by a key logical fallacy of our times: that Donald Trump is the sole actor in our national nightmare, that he alone is subverting the constitution and betraying the national interest, that he alone is to blame for where we are.  I count myself among the guilty; it’s hard not to think this way to at least some extent, given the president’s unique mixture of malice, bravado, sociopathy, and sheer improbability.  And after all, he IS the president.

But I think at this late stage of his catastrophic term in office, this emphasis on the man over the larger movement he seems to have coalesced and accelerated is not at all helpful.  It is blinding us to the full danger of the moment, allowing his weaknesses to hide the clear strength, both in numbers and in frenetic, hateful energy, of a white nationalist, authoritarian movement that is asserting power and gaining strength via his presidency.

The most obvious way to think of this is that the president is hardly coming up with the full range of his crackpot policy ideas and strategies of hate and division all by his lonesome.  He’s surely got an instinct for demonizing the vulnerable and stoking the prejudices of his base, but he’s been aided by advisors who, using their own ideology and experience, have worked to bring into reality what the nation is experiencing as Trumpism.

White nationalism is at the center of Trump’s governing strategy and substance, and no one appears to have been more important to helping him articulate it than Stephen Miller, the former aide to Senator Jeff Sessions who became the architect of this president’s unforgivable immigration policy: a policy that looked back to the America’s darkest days of immigration restrictions for inspiration, and sees no act too cruel so long as it’s perpetrated on those lacking the virtue of white skin.  There’s already been ample documentation of Miller’s white nationalist links; but as this Rolling Stone article makes clear, Miller in turn is acting in concert with fellow travelers of anti-immigrant, white nationalist sentiment within the U.S. government.  These include an ICE employee who used to belong to an anti-immigration center considered to be a hate group, another former employee of a second anti-immigration group, and a former writer at the right-wing Breitbart site.  

Every day that Stephen Miller, with his extensive ties and alignment with the vilest strains of white nationalism, continues to work in this administration is a deep offense against our nation and against our common humanity.  But the fact that Miller has a network of like-minded individuals working with him to create a fundamentally racist and nativist immigration policy should light a fire under anyone who doesn’t already feel a sense of outrage at what we’re facing.  We have far more than a Trump problem.  Adherents of a revanchist movement that sees non-white immigrants not only as unworthy, but as less than human, criminal, and disposable are now literally helping make decisions on the very issues they should be kept a million miles away from.  They seek to reconfigure the demographics of the United States for potentially decades upon decades into the future, based on a toxic stew of racism, lies, hate, cultural slander, and a love of cruelty.

Seldom have the white supremacists been so upfront about their sick visions for America, and so empowered to make them a reality.  It’s not just Trump who needs rooting out; the whole white nationalist gang has to be rousted from the government jobs they never should have held to begin with.

Manipulation of Public Is a Defining Feature of Iran Conflict

As the American people have been spun up and down the War-with-Iran roller-coaster — first beset by dread and then relief as the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani seems not to have led to a descent into full-scale war, at least not yet — we may be forgiven for not realizing that mass manipulation of public sentiment has been the major unexamined story of the last week.  To begin with, the Trump administration has pretty clearly lied to the American people about the purpose of the assassination, claiming it was carried out to forestall “imminent” attacks that officials are unwilling and unable to provide evidence for.  Rather, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias writes, “the administration instead simply made a calculated decision to escalate American pushback on Iran as part of a larger series of back-and-forth actions that began with the US pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.”  Yglesias points to the influence of administration members and others who want war with Iran, and who see provoking Iran into a cycle of escalation as a way of producing the desired outcome: by lying to Americans about the real purpose of our attacks on Iran, and provoking Iranian responses to American attacks, the Trump administration is relying on basic dynamics of public opinion to help make its case for war. 

In other words, the Trump administration is arguably not only trying to foment a war with Iran, but to prevent the American people from realizing this is what they’re doing.  And in keeping vital information from us, they’re also telling us that we don’t really have a role to play in deciding whether to go to war. 

Now, it’s within the realm of possibility that President Trump doesn’t want a full-blown conflict with Iran.  After all, as this New York Times overview of the last week describes, the administration was careful to communicate to Iran the desire to avoid further escalation following the assassination, and did not seize on Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks against U.S. air bases in Iraq as an excuse for further violence.  But even if the killing of General Soleimani was intended as a reasonable response to earlier Iranian provocations, such as the violent protests at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, this still opens up the possibility of an unstoppable cycle of violence, despite this actually being the U.S.’ intent.  And so in even this more benign reading of events, we are being told that events that might easily lead to war are somehow not a matter to be decided by the American people through their representatives in Congress.  This is clearly neither in the public interest nor in the spirit of the American constitution, which reserves to Congress the decision to declare war.

A second glaring manipulation of the past week is the president’s clear intent to use action against Iran to boost his political position.  It strains credulity to think that throwing sand in the gears of the impeachment effort was not a consideration in his decision-making; certainly, this is an angle that congressional Republicans have not been afraid to play up, as they hammered Democrats for making the president look weak by pursuing impeachment during a national security crisis.  And we are beginning to see firmer evidence that impeachment was a factor in the president’s decision-making; for example, the Times piece states that Trump “told some associates that he wanted to preserve the support of Republican hawks in the Senate in the coming impeachment trial, naming Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas as an example.”  Given the lies already exposed about the administration’s intentions toward Iran, Democrats need to uncover any evidence that the president is using war to nullify the impeachment effort.  If there’s sufficient evidence, this should be added to the articles of impeachment.

A third thread of the manipulation narrative is the Republicans’ alacrity in using the Iran conflict as a cudgel for accusing the Democrats of being unpatriotic, and worse.  In other words, an event seemingly calling for national unity was seized on by the GOP as an opportunity to divide America into patriots and traitors.  As some pundits have already noted, Democrats were quick to push back against these attacks.  But what’s remarkable is the way that the GOP slipped so quickly into a familiar pattern of attempting to leverage national security issues into a way to smear Democrats with preposterous claims.  

And this leads me to the fourth facet of this week’s manipulations: the media’s default coverage of national security and international events as a realm far more divorced from domestic politics than it actually is.  This is perhaps less of an overt manipulation than those I’ve already described, but it’s a framing that nonetheless ends up promoting something untrue: making the public believe that the government is acting in its interests at least to some degree because the actions are taking place abroad.  In other words, more than in the domestic arena, President Trump’s actions are given the benefit of the doubt as being in the national rather than his personal interests.  In this sense, Trump is exploiting the wide latitude for action overseas exploited by presidents over the past 70-plus years, and increasingly since 9/11.

But just as George W. Bush saw the Iraq invasion as a way to assure his re-election — it was, after all, clearly a war of choice — we can also see how President Obama’s initial escalation of a pointless war in Afghanistan was driven by a need to appear tough to domestic critics (if you have not already, please check the staggering Washington Post Afghanistan Papers series on the lies both the Bush and Obama administrations relied on to maintain a U.S. presence in that country).  So even as the wars following 9/11 should have shattered the idea that foreign policy is somehow a realm where the president should be accorded wide latitude in his or her decision-making, the media has broadly covered it as an ethereal realm where the president’s actions are by default thought to be selfless and pure.  Given all we know of Donald Trump’s subordination of American interests to those of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other foreign governments in other areas, to give him any benefit of the doubt signals that the lessons of both the past few decades and the past three years are being ignored in favor of a fictitious selflessness on the part of the president when it comes to matters of war and peace.  This is extremely dangerous for our country, and in no way serves the public interest.

Indeed, the overarching offense that ties together the various manipulations I’ve been describing may be the president’s exploitation of Americans’ good faith belief that the president will act in their interest. That is, manipulation is only possible because many Americans still behave in a rational, patriotic way; despite so many experiences to the contrary, it still seems outlandish that a president would abuse powers of life and death, war and peace, for the wrong reasons. Whether it’s the president lying to the public about the reasons for conflict with Iran, the GOP’s contention that Democrats are standing in the way of the national defense, or the media’s inclination to suggest a hard divide between domestic politics and foreign affairs, such efforts are premised on the basic credulity of the American people regarding the ethical behavior of their government. One of the tragedies of our moment is that so many Americans continue to extend such faith, even when we’ve had so much evidence that our leaders will be ruthless in taking advantage of it; but as I’ve tried to describe above, it’s clear that the efforts to confuse and manipulate us are pervasive.

Australia's Catastrophic Fires Are Burning Away Lies of Climate Change Deniers

As we read and watch coverage of the apocalyptic fires across Australia — for a sense of scale, they have already burned an area nearly the size of West Virginia; at least 25 people are dead; and 500 million animals are thought to have died — a decisive political lesson is emerging from the response of that country’s prime minister and other political leaders.  Australian novelist Richard Flanagan describes how “since 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries.”  Yet in the face of fires that are unquestionably accelerated by man-made changes to the climate, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has declared that now is not the time to talk about climate change.  Meanwhile, Flanagan writes, “While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports.”

In short, dealt a catastrophic blow by fires supercharged in part by Australia’s extractive energy industry, much of that country’s political class has decided to double down on apocalypse.

As Masha Gessen writes in a fascinating analysis of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the way she is Donald Trump’s opposite in every way imaginable, this basic clash between realities playing out in Australia is at the heart of the climate fight worldwide: you either believe there is a moral obligation to save the world, or you believe the world, and life in general, are something to be exploited and thrown away in a nihilistic belief that nothing matters beyond the here and now.  What the horrific situation in Australia makes clear (where “horrific” encompasses both the environmental catastrophe and the failure of its leaders to acknowledge it) is that there’s ultimately no compromise possible around climate change.  Either you are for environmental apocalypse, or you are against it.  In continuing their denialism and addiction to a fossil fuel future, much of Australia’s leadership has made this choice as clear as can be.

So reality swamps the lies of the denialists and the do-nothings, at least in Australia — but does that mean that reality will actually win out?  Flanagan sees echoes of the past that suggest that the side of denial and death holds the losing hand at this point:

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.

[. . .] As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?

Not just in Australia, but around the world, I am hoping that we will see this dynamic begin to play out more and more.  This is not a political debate with any sort of moral ambiguity.  One side is 100% wrong, only it continues to lie and distort and appeal to the worst, most selfish aspects of our individual natures.  As with the model of the Soviet Union, the limitless incompetence and irrelevance of politicians and parties around the world who refuse to meet the challenge of climate chaos should cause them to lose their public legitimacy sooner rather than later.

But there are no rules of history, no assurances that these fools will in fact be turned out of power anytime soon.  It’s up to all of us to make this happen. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about David Wallace-Wells’ warning that climate change might cause populations around the world to turn their sympathies inward, to their own nations and neighbors. This would be self-defeating, as we need global, coordinated action and empathy to resolve global warming before its damage becomes still-more horrendous. Wallace-Wells worries that coverage and reactions to Australia’s fires so far might signal such indifference, but clearly this story is still unfolding, and the possibility of conveying it to the world is still very much possible. Americans need to make known their sympathy to the Australian people, and outrage toward the Australian government. And when the government of a close ally like Australia so seriously betrays the interests of its citizens, the U.S. should use its diplomatic clout to pressure that government to do the right thing. As much as anything, Australia’s crisis is a reminder that the United States needs to get its own house in order, and to elect a Congress and a president who give fighting climate change the highest priority.

Defense of Democracy and Planet Will Be Inseparable In New Decade

Does anyone else feel like the dawn of a new decade caught them unawares?  Until a couple weeks ago, I thought of 2020 as just the plodding follow-on to 2019, which had shared the same incremental relationship to 2018, and so on.  Personally, I blame the millennium — after a once-every-thousand-years roll-over, how can a simple new decade ever compete?  Throw in the fact that we’ve spent the last 20 years not even well settled on what to call where we are. The “oughts” never felt natural (sort of British and controlling all at once); meanwhile, the “teens” never fully won their fight with the “2010s,” the two diluting each other’s potential dominance in a way reminiscent of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren splitting the progressive vote in the Democratic presidential primary.

So here we are in the 20’s, at least back in the land of certain naming conventions, but not sure yet if they will roar or whimper.  What we can be sure of, though, is that we’ve got a great if artificial turning point for looking back at the last ten years and thinking about the themes that emerge.  The two enormous ones I’ve been thinking about aren’t just in the past, though, but will continue to dominate our not-really-new age for years to come.

The first is climate change, which at last is hammering its way into mass consciousness as the existential threat that it’s been all along; according to this Washington Post article, “76 percent of American adults view the issue as a ‘major problem’ or a ‘crisis.’”  This Post story can stand in for the many other recent ones that identify the last ten years as a “lost decade” in the fight against climate change.  While the average global temperature and concentration of carbon in the atmosphere both continue to rise, the 2010s were an era when countries around the world went through the motions of making climate change agreements and then failing to abide by them.  In 2010, the United Nations estimated the world would need to decrease emissions by around 3% annually; having failed to do so, the present estimate is that we need to cut emissions by 7.6% each year to stabilize temperatures.  The disastrous consequences of these failures are mounting, from great swathes of Australia ablaze and dangerous to human health, to acidifying oceans and unprecedentedly monstrous storms.

And this is after temperatures have risen just a single degree Celsius due to the burning of fossil fuels.  On our current trajectory, we’ll hit a 3.2-degree rise by the end of the century.  Scientists have identified 1.5 degrees as a crucial point, and describe a 2-degree rise as something that would be disastrous for many parts of the world.  What many people are just starting to grasp is that many parts of the world are already experiencing this extreme change; a Washington Post analysis “found roughly 10 percent of the globe has surpassed 2 degrees of warming since the preindustrial era.”

At the same time, we’re also getting into the realm of tipping points and feedback loops.  For example, the melting of Arctic ice means that there’s less of it to reflect sunlight, so that the water simply absorbs the heat instead, feeding the melt-off, while elsewhere in the far north the melting of permafrost releases methane into the atmosphere that likewise feeds the cycle.  Similarly, we’ve recently heard about how enough of the Amazon rainforest has been compromised that self-perpetuating desertification may take hold in vast areas of it.  Even as scientists offer some faint reassurance that even the worst scenarios don’t necessarily mean the end of all human life on the planet, it is becoming as clear as anything that there are all sorts of catastrophes short of a full-on apocalypse that many millions of people are increasingly being forced to endure.

The second overriding issue I’ve been thinking about is the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism around the world and in the United States.  From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Narendra Modi in India, from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Vladimir Putin in Russia, it’s undeniable that a rollback of democracy is well underway.  The reasons for this are complex and manifold, and to a great extent relate to the history and politics of individual countries.  Yet this is also a global phenomenon with some common roots, perhaps none more important than increasing economic inequality worldwide and the avenues this opens up to the manipulation of mass resentments and the incitement of blame and hatred against those labeled as being outside the nation.

Looking back over the last 10 years and more, we can see how in the U.S. the Republican Party has embodied the American strain of this global virus, ending with a full-blown case of authoritarian fever in the form of Donald Trump.  As I’ve tried to describe over many, many posts, GOP initiatives like its redistricting schemes after the 2010 census and its embrace of voter suppression as a key electoral strategy are anti-democratic maneuvers that secured the way for the full-blown authoritarian tendencies of our current president and the zombie GOP that worships him like a god.  I highly recommend this piece by David Daley, who literally wrote the book on the Republicans’ REDMAP (for Redistricting Majority Project) plan to secure majorities in state houses and Congress even in the face of popular vote losses.  Daley describes how manipulation of redistricting in favor of Republicans acts as a sort of gateway drug to increasingly authoritarian tactics:

Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were “surgically” crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. And after the U.S. Supreme Court undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came a flood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.

And then, of course, along came Donald Trump, who not only embodied a whole host of authoritarian attitudes that were latent in the GOP all along — the longing for a strong man, the overly-zealous deference to authority — but the racist and white nationalist elements to which the authoritarian impulse in America is inextricably tied.  After all, a central point of all these anti-democratic attitudes is to make sure that white Americans continue to hold power in the country, and that non-whites are denied their fair say in its destiny (at The Nation, Joan Walsh has a fantastic run-down of the way the GOP has transformed into a white nationalist party in plain view of us all, benefitting from denialism in both the media and in a Democratic Party that it still coming to grips with its rival party’s squalid transformation).

This is also as good a time as any to remind everyone of the startling fact that the Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1992 — a piece of information so startling that I did a literal double-take when I came across it again the other day, and a crucial data point for understanding the GOP’s desire for undemocratic mechanisms to maintain its grip on power.

Both of these crises — that of the environment, and of democracy — have extensive parallels.  Denial and disinformation are key to how bad things have gotten, whether it’s oil companies engaging in campaigns to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change, or the use of propaganda by authoritarian leaders to maintain power.  And both are rooted in the needs of the few overpowering those of the many; our planet is being wrecked to make a smaller and smaller number of people extremely rich, while authoritarian government ultimately serves only those at the apex of power.

But I think one of the big themes of the coming decade will be our collective realization of how these two issues are in fact interlinked to the point that neither can be resolved separately from the other.  Authoritarian rule stands in the way of the profound economic and political shifts countries must make in order to head off still more obscene and unacceptable damage to our planet.  It is no coincidence that here in the U.S., the GOP both increasingly opposes democracy and denies the reality of climate change.  As political scholars have noted, the authoritarian-nationalist mentality is one of exploitation and degradation, with no real belief in a better future, looking instead nostalgically toward a mythologized, glorious past.  The idea of needing to live in harmony with nature is a challenge both to the limits of the leader’s power and to the centrality of a nationalist message.

Conversely, some climate experts are warning of pernicious social and political feedback loops that might develop in response to the increasing devastation of global warming.  Vox writer David Roberts describes this line of thinking:

As climate damages mount and countries begin dealing with more heatwaves, floods, and storms, continued investment in sustainable alternatives will become more difficult. Adaptation spending will rise relative to mitigation spending.

Climate change will primarily manifest as a series of traumas, and as a general matter, stress and trauma cause people to draw their circles of concern inward. Yet addressing climate change requires a circle of concern that encompasses all of humanity. It requires international cooperation. And the escalating damages of climate change are likely to make the very cooperation necessary to fight it more difficult. Local concerns and fears will come to dominate.

In other words, climate chaos could very well accelerate the forces of nationalism and urges for strongman leadership that are the diametric opposite of what’s needed to actually stop climate change.  Chillingly, David Wallace-Wells sees the global response to the catastrophic Australian fires over the last few months as an early sign of how climate change might inspire “system of disinterest defined [. . .] by ever smaller circles of empathy.”  

These possibilities of global political and climate doom are frightening and depressing almost beyond comprehension — but understanding the profound linkages on these two fronts is ultimately clarifying, even electrifying.  For anyone who believes in democracy and a healthy planet, there is no way forward but by defending and advancing both.  There is no environmentalism without democracy, and there is no democracy without environmentalism.  

Straight Out of Dickens

We’ve discussed a few times in the past couple months the ominous and politicized plans emerging out of the Trump White House to “crack down” on homelessness in order to embarrass the president’s political enemies and rid American cities of the aesthetic blight of those who lack basic shelter.  The bad news has continued, as a couple weeks ago the president chose Robert Marbut as executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.  Marbut has consulted with many American cities on how to address homelessness, and his views are both controversial and at odds with the consensus that has emerged over the past couple decades on the best approaches to this crisis.  During that time, a broad agreement emerged among those who concern themselves with this crisis that, perhaps not surprisingly, finding housing for those who lack this basic human right should be integral to the cause.  As NPR describes it, this “Housing First” approach means that “you need to get people into housing before you can effectively solve the other problems that they may be having.”

Disappointingly, Marbut is not on board with this consensus position, and embraces more of what some might call a tough love, and what others might call a sadistic, approach to helping Americans in need.  His preference is for services over shelter, and for an approach that sounds a lot like criminalizing homelessness.  For instance, the Tampa Bay Times reports that for Clearwater, Florida, he recommended “preventing the homeless from lying down on sidewalks, banning bathing in fountains and sleeping in public places, expanding rules about panhandling and 'hoarding' in backpacks or shopping carts, and expanding police arrest authority for what are now minor offenses that now just result in a ticket.”

And a letter co-signed by 75 members of Congress who object to his appointment describes some of Marbut’s other efforts:

In one [. . .] campus that he created in St. Petersburg, people experiencing homelessness were made to first sleep on mats in a courtyard outside the facility; only with “good behavior” could people make their way indoors to the air conditioning and, after further proving their worthiness, bunk beds.

Marbut also takes issue with feeding homeless people on the street, we can only assume for fear of encouraging their dependence on food. 

Homelessness is an issue that has vexed politicians of both parties and the efforts of many, many compassionate and dedicated individuals, including some who have made it their life’s work to help people in such dire need, and there has been no silver bullet to this crisis.  But as I’ve said before, particularly frustrating is that American failures on homelessness are hardly the sole fault of Donald Trump or the Republican Party.  Disappointingly, plenty of Democratic politicians have enacted policies criminalizing the homeless in cities across the United States.

Yet it is undeniable that since 2010, and particularly since the Obama administration’s implementation of Opening Doors, described as “the nation’s first strategic plan to solve homelessness,” the number of people in the United States without shelter has decreased significantly. 

Rather than building on progress that’s been made, Donald Trump appears set to reverse the gains made in sheltering vulnerable Americans, both out of ignorance of the best practices developed over time, and out of an overriding need to politicize this issue to attack his political enemies.  Since Christmas, the president has resumed his Twitter obsession with homeless people in California and New York, and accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of shirking their responsibilities on this front.  As Aaron Rupar at Vox points out, though, Trump tellingly continues to hold his fire on GOP politicians in Florida, the state with the third-largest unsheltered population.  It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the president has no problem making the homeless crisis worse, in order to increase the size of the cudgel he thinks he can wield against Democrats.  After all, among his comments about this issue, you will search in vain for even a glimmer of acknowledgment that most of the unhoused are fellow Americans, and all of them fellow human beings, deserving of both compassion and respect.

Moving steadily to eliminate homelessness means providing homes and adequate services to this population, not sweeping them into holding camps and making them jump through hoops to earn a bed to sleep in.  Revulsion at Trump’s plans on this issue should go far beyond turning it into a political liability for the president.  This is a crisis for our entire society and any claims we have to a common morality.  There are many elements of our status quo that will shock the conscience of those Americans who come after us, but surely our tolerance and mass indifference to those without shelter will be near the top of the list.  That we have struggled so long to form a national consensus that people without housing should unconditionally be provided this basic human right is a sign of our society’s moral shortcomings, not the shortcomings of those without housing.  Prolonging a humane resolution of this crisis due to a collective reluctance to commit adequate resources is doubtless a component of our inability to address the pressing needs of those in less perilous but still abominable circumstances, from students crushed by college debt to Americans imperiled by a lack of health insurance.  When we establish no clear floor to how far we will allow anyone to fall in our society, we are all left floundering for less basic but still vital needs.  Promoting false solutions to homelessness assaults our common dreams far beyond the crisis of Americans living on the street. 

Embrace of War Criminals Is a Back-Door Assault on Rule of Law in America

As with many of his other offenses against the United States, Donald Trump’s interventions in the case against Navy SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher have been rendered even more indefensible by the passage of time.  Gallagher was accused by fellow SEALs of executing a wounded prisoner and killing unarmed civilians, but ended up being convicted on only a charge of posing with the body of the dead prisoner he had been accused of killing.  But when the Navy moved to demote Gallagher and to remove him from the SEALs, the president intervened on his behalf, based on the general argument that there is nothing that American service members can do that is beyond the pale.

Unfortunately for the president, The New York Times has published a disturbing article based on video interviews of the SEALs in Gallagher’s unit conducted as part of the investigation, as well as text messages unit members sent each other regarding their commander and the actions he was accused of.  While he was acquitted of the crimes of murder, multiple members of his unit describe in vivid and corroborating detail Gallagher’s multiple killings of civilians, the murder of a prisoner, and a general unit-wide sense that he was a psychopath who endangered his own men.  It is difficult to read this account and not conclude that the prosecution of Gallagher was badly botched and resulted in a travesty of justice.

But it’s the larger picture that deserves far more public attention that it’s getting.  Before his intervention into Gallagher’s case, the president had already pardoned two convicted war criminals, men who were found guilty of killing civilians.  As many people have already noted, through these actions and his own explanations for his actions, the president is making an embrace of American war criminals central to his political identity.  He has even made it clear that he intends to campaign with them in 2020.

The single best discussion of why this is happening and why it’s important may be Adam Serwer’s “The War-Crimes President” in The Atlantic.  Serwer contends that Trump’s actions are “a rational extension of Trumpist nationalism, which recognizes no moral, legal, or institutional restraints on the president worth upholding, and which sees violence against outsiders as a redemptive expression of national loyalty.”  Serwer writes:

It would be a mistake [. . .] to view Trump’s pardons as stemming from a deep reverence for the military or an understanding of the difficulties faced by service members. Rather, he views these crimes as acts of nationalist solidarity against Muslims, against whom crimes are not simply acceptable but praiseworthy. Trumpists are capable of recognizing the evils of excessive state power — but only when it is directed at those they see as like themselves. When it is directed at those they hate and fear, such excesses are not crimes but virtues.

The crimes of which these service members are accused were committed against people the president does not consider fully human. It would not do to punish Americans for killing people whose lives, in the eyes of the president and many of his supporters, do not matter.

Serwer sees Trump’s broader end as an attempt to divide America into those who are loyal to such an America-first and Trump-first ideology, and those who are not.  After all, objecting to his pardons of war criminals means to implicitly take the side of the rights of those non-Americans against whom they committed their crimes.  Doing so shows “disloyalty and weakness,” while denying the existence of foreigners’ humanity display “patriotism and strength.”  Stoking such division through an embrace of war criminals is paralleled by Trump’s demonization of Muslims, Mexicans, and African-Americans; in all these cases, Trump would split the country into the camp of the loyalists and the camp that is, or defends, the supposed outsiders.

So there’s a deep and pernicious political strategy at play in these pardons, but the equally sinister attack on the very idea of war crimes needs to be called out as well.  Jeet Heer observes that though there’s been a lot of legitimate and necessary criticism of Donald Trump interfering in the military chain of command, with all the deleterious effects that will have on the military’s effectiveness, the larger problem with his pardons is that they’re “part of a larger push to normalize war crimes.”  The fundamental immorality of war crimes should be plain to see for all civilized people, but beyond this are the pernicious, practical downsides.  As Waitman Wade Beorn writes, “The effects of a malfunctioning moral compass extend past our borders. Allies and host nations will be more hesitant to work with the United States if they cannot count on us to effectively punish those who cross ethical boundaries. This can imperil our troops overseas and threaten our strategic safety.”  In other words, if the United States ignores the laws of war, it is likelier that American soldiers and civilians will pay the price for this down the road, and that American power will suffer.

As Beorn pithily puts it, “Trump is now breaking the moral backbone that prevents war crimes, demolishing America’s military institutions and replacing them with his own cult of personality and bankrupt values system.”  Trump has sent a message that not only are war crimes acceptable, but that anyone who reports those crimes now risks harm to their career.  The president has thus assured that our military is now at war with itself, between those who see themselves subject to the unequivocal pro-war crimes message of an unfit commander in chief, and those who rightly view themselves as bound to the rule of law. Such a division can only have a profoundly destructive impact on the effectiveness and order of the U.S. military.

But of course it is not simply the rule of law in the armed forces that is under assault by the president’s endorsement of war criminals, but the rule of law in the United States more generally.  In American war-fighting, the president has essentially found a weak link or back door in Americans’ attitude toward the rule of law and its premise that the law applies to all equally.  It is far easier to argue that foreigners, even civilians, deserve no protection under U.S. law so long as the U.S. is fighting a war, than to argue that certain segments of the U.S. population are simply not as American as the rest of us.  But as Serwer describes, both are part of the same us-versus-them mentality, the division of the world into Trump loyalists and Trump enemies.  By seizing on a realm where the idea of the law seems to be at its weakest, the president clearly sees a way to normalize not just war crimes but the substitution of his personal will for the rule of law more generally, based on the general Nixonian principle that if the president says it’s right and legal, it is.

In this, Trump is aided by the generalized and unexamined American worship of the U.S. military as a paragon of virtue and selflessness .  Service members do exemplify admirable traits of public service and duty, but Americans have generally taken this admiration to mystical and dangerous levels.  Our collective guilt over their sacrifice in two wars now generally understood to be pointless and counter-productive is immense, and so our ability or willingness to view the armed forces with clear eyes has been deeply compromised in favor of a sentimentalized idea of military service.  Ironically, the first president to fully criticize these wars has not hesitated to take advantage of the public trust held by the military for his own ends: in this case, to declare that members of the military are incapable of committing war crimes.  In doing so, he uses the unimpeachability of service members to aggrandize his own ability to declare what is right and wrong, and who deserves to live and who deserves to die. 

It is also no coincidence that the president is undermining the rule of law via the one public institution in America that, beyond the hero worship that has entered our culture, is the least democratic.  As a hierarchical organization based not only on a strict chain of command but an institutional class system of officers and enlisted men, the military in fact functions in ways that are utterly anathema to our democratic ideals and system of government.  This has always been a deeply worrisome element of Americans’ increasingly broad and unquestioning admiration for the military.  The perniciousness of this contradiction — mass admiration for an undemocratic institution — was brought home to me by The New York Times describing the code of silence among Navy SEALs that generally keeps them from speaking out about wrongdoing in their ranks.  An institution that excludes the rule of law as a bedrock principle should be viewed with deep skepticism by a democratic, law-abiding people.  In this case, there are two instructive lessons.  First, the basic despotism and hierarchy of the military meant that a squad leader could commit war crimes without his unit being able to stop him (even when members went around him and up the chain of command to warn of their chief’s behavior, they were told to remain quiet).  Second, it required unit members to act against the code of silence in order to do the right thing and behave as American citizens.  The idea that it’s OK for commando-type units to have their own code was a small chink in our collective adherence to the rule of law that an authoritarian-minded president like Donald Trump has not hesitated to exploit.

At this point, we need to be talking about how the president is seeking to undo the rule of law in the country, which is of course happening across a broad spectrum beyond just these war crimes pardons.  But in their extremity, it’s absolutely necessary to defend the rule of law around war crimes, precisely because they involve value and emotions that Trump obviously sees as advantageous to himself.  “Kill our enemies and let god sort it out,” he is essentially saying, and we can’t ignore the appeal of righteous retribution and unfettered American power, or the way he employs such primal emotions to split the country apart.

So how do we roll back this assault on the rule of law?  Talking about it and exposing the president’s strategy is necessary, but we also need to go on the offensive. Adam Serwer get at the perversity of how Trump’s lawlessness is playing it out in the military, but also offers a clue as to how to fight back: 

Although Trump insists that he is honoring the U.S. military, in fact the pardons render the law-abiding majority of American service members disloyal for following rules that others were loyal enough to break. Under this twisted moral framework, it is the service members who turned in and testified against their comrades for violating the laws of war who showed insufficient patriotism.

Even as Trump seeks to elevate those who follow his malevolent view of America’s and his own power, the vast majority of service members and Americans in general see the evil in acts like killing civilians and prisoners.  In particular, members of the military need to speak, against a corrupt commander in chief and in support of the laws of war, and by extension, the rule of law more generally.  But the rest of us also need to be talking about how the president has placed members of the military in which they either act as Americans or as Trump loyalists, a choice that is simply inexcusable. It is powerfully in our favor that Trump’s embrace of war crimes ends up making law-abiding service members into criminals and criminal service members into loyal heroes. Needless to say, there are far, far more service members who do the right thing, and by sticking up for their cause, we also stick up for the broader cause of the rule of law.

And as Jeet Heer emphasizes, we need to make sure that this is not treated as a matter of Trump violating the military’s procedures, but as the more fundamental embrace of criminality that it is.  The fact that members of the military are now being asked to choose sides by the president — either him or the constitution — is a depraved and unforgivable demand — but one which members of the public can easily understand as fundamentally un-American.

The Democrats, and the Democratic candidates for the presidency in particular, need to engage Trump directly on his corruption of the military, both for its pernicious effect on the armed forces and on the rule of law more generally. They need to recognize and exploit the fact that Trump’s position on war crimes is a profound vulnerability to the president, even as it poses a profound threat to the rule of law; his is a high-stakes gambit for which he must be made to pay a deep cost. Beyond this, the idea that Trump may be working to bend the military to his undemocratic and authoritarian system of values is a direct threat to civilian control of the military and to American democracy itself. At the same time, making the case that Trump’s embrace of war criminals debases the vast majority of law-abiding service members can play a role in fracturing his electoral coalition and his deranged authoritarian, white nationalist movement. In the face of the president’s efforts to divide our country into loyalists and enemies, it is fair game for Democrats to make plain the choice between being pro-military and pro-Trump. The first modern American president to openly embrace war crimes must also be the last.

Unpacking the President's Lies About the Environment, Part II

A few days ago, I talked about how the lies behind President Trump’s anti-environmental screeds can be used against him.  One big point that I didn’t make is that it’s a mistake to over-emphasize what seems to be Trump’s sheer craziness (“wind turbines cause cancer”) rather than focus on the more substantive message of his comments.  Though there’s plenty that he says about environmental issues that might be added to the already-overwhelming case that the prez is off his rocker, Donald Trump is also communicating a powerful right-wing worldview that he shares with much of the GOP.  When he tells us that the government has no right to tell people what sort of lightbulbs to use, even when such energy- and cost-saving policies are the result of the implementation of laws passed by Congress and signed by a previous president, he is basically making an argument that the government acts illegitimately when it acts democratically.  This might sound absurd, since we all agree, at least at some level, that we live in a democracy, but it is of a piece with long-standing right-wing arguments that seek to label majority rule under a democracy as some sort of Soviet-style “collectivism.”  This is the strain of conservative thought that identifies any government action it opposes, even when authorized by a democratically-elected government, as trampling on individual rights and free choice.

The flip side of this mentality is a belief that Americans really should not be trying to act collectively to solve common problems via our government.  We are effectively instructed to be uncomfortable, if not outright rebellious, towards banding together for the common good.  Instead, whatever we decide in our daily individual lives, via choices as consumers, is the main way our democracy should function.  Dollars spent, not votes, reveal the will of the people.  Collective action via politics for common ends is seen as dangerous and un-American.

But in the case of the environment, this proscription against collective action is supercharged by another powerful idea that is hardly Trump’s alone, but that’s elemental to his anti-environmentalism: the idea that there are no limits to what we can extract from and inflict on the planet.  This really is at the root of the idea that we don’t need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, don’t need renewable energy, don’t need to change anything at all in how our economy runs or how we live our lives.  It is a denial of reality, sure, but it’s an intoxicating denial, and anyone who wants to beat Trump and the Grand Old Party of environmental apocalypse needs to counter this position.  For instance, you can see how a strategy like the Green New Deal tries to turn this crisis into opportunity, showing how the economy and our wealth can actually grow by transitioning to a carbon-neutral world.  But much more thought and perspectives are needed to push back and replace this powerful strain in American thought that we don’t need to ever consider our relationship to the natural world.  Just because Trump sounds stupid when he talks about low-flow toilets being a pain in the ass shouldn’t blind us to the powerful tropes of dominance of nature that have been with us for centuries, and that he channels in his rants.

You can also see how this idea of no limits has perverse connections with the conservative notion that collective action is illegitimate and unwise.  Since we are all just individuals with minimal individual impacts on the planet, how on earth could the planet be impacted by what each of us does?  And since this is the case, collective action directed at a phantom problem is rendered even more suspect and unwise.

Absurd Lies About Environmental Protection and the Economy Will Come Back to Haunt the President

Following President Trump’s most recent attack on wind turbines as a source of clean and renewable energy, The Washington Post is out with an article that frames his comments as part of a campaign strategy for 2020.  The Post notes that the president has also “zeroed in on consumer issues such as energy-efficient appliances, carbon-reducing fuel standards and plastic straw bans” in an effort to contrast himself with the environmental policies of the Democrats. Mission accomplished, I would say!  The article makes much of the president’s personal feelings on these issues, but the larger unifying factor is Trump’s use of hot-button issues to distract from the overwhelming and existential climate crisis that’s upon us.  In this, the president is hardly acting only out of his own impulses, but advancing the interests of the oil and gas industries that have done so much to bring us to this awful point.  He’s also obviously got his eye on stirring up a cultural clash between his base and the know-it-all liberals who don’t want Americans to use sippy straws or incandescent lightbulbs.

It is never anything but sickening to hear the most powerful man on the planet claim that climate change is not real, but as with his attacks on Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump is providing his opponents with powerful weapons that we can all use to bring this sordid presidency to an end in 2020.  It’s not just that his remarks on such important topics are so deeply bizarre, misleading, and contradictory that, for example, the Post felt compelled to run a whole separate article on his latest wind power comments just to explain why the president isn’t as crazy as he sounds.  Beyond this, Donald Trump’s anti-environment policies are built on a structure of interlocking and self-defeating lies that obscure a basic fact: his policies rip off, poison, and risk the planetary future of all Americans, his base and his opponents alike.

Take the White House’s reversal of an Obama-era policy to ban incandescent and halogen bulbs, to have been effective January 1, 2020.  The Trump administration presents this as an economic victory for Americans, except that it’s not.  The more energy-efficient bulbs might be more expensive up-front, but they would save the United States $14 billion in energy costs every year, along with eliminating 38 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.  At the most basic level, Trump expects that most Americans don’t understand basic economics — that sometimes you need to pay more upfront to save money long-term.  Instead, this common-sense idea is ignored in favor of a MAGA narrative in which a tyrannical government tries to micro-manage the bulb choices of Americans.

The same dynamic plays out in the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back auto emissions standards.  It doesn’t take a math whiz to realize that Americans won’t benefit by paying more for gas to run their cars and trucks every years, even putting aside the broad environmental benefits.  But why put aside the environmental benefits? - less exhaust in the air wouldn’t just help fight climate change, it would also help local air quality. This is to say nothing of how gas-guzzling American cars will be shunned by buyers abroad, as American manufacturers see market share taken away by environmentally-savvier competitors.

Things get weirder, but arguably even dicier for the president, as his critiques get narrower and more obscure.  He’s been on a tear against low-flush toilets and water-efficient dishwashers, which as most people know are elements of a vicious plot to deny god fearing-Americans the grace of cleanliness.  Indeed, according to the Post, Trump “has specifically asked for the chance to weigh in on a change to dishwasher standards that will be finalized next year.”  Yet by the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimates, “the typical American family can save $380 in annual water costs and save more than 17 gallons of water each day by buying appliances that meet” upcoming energy standards. Why does Trump want us to waste an extra $400 year on literal waste?

Particularly frustrating, but also an area of great vulnerability for the president, is the enormous lie that rollbacks on environmental protections do no harm to the environment.  According to White House spokesman Judd Deere, “While eliminating harmful and unnecessary regulations, this President has unleashed the American economy, provided greater regulatory certainty, achieved energy independence, and continued to safeguard the water supply and improve air quality.”  The assertions that the president is either keeping water safe or improving air quality are demonstrably untrue.  According to an analysis at CNBC, just a handful of Trump administration regulatory rollbacks are set to poison communities around the U.S. and accelerate global warming.  From refusing to hold oil and gas producers responsible for methane emissions, to allowing industry and farmers to poison drinking water without consequence, to helping coal plants keep on chugging, Trump policies are set to degrade our environment and our health.  It is one thing to make the case that environmental regulations hurt the economy — an argument, of course, that dismisses the right of all Americans to clean air and water — and quite another to simply lie about the inevitable results of your policies.  

Donald Trump can try to pretend that all government action on the environment is a form of tyranny, but when he opposes policies that combat climate change while also saving Americans money, the lies start to come apart.  Throw on an extra helping of self-serving mendacity about how more pollution means the environment is cleaner, and you’ve got a combustible mix of stupidity and lies waiting for his opponents to light it up and toss it back to him like a renewable energy Molotov cocktail.  

New Information About Funding of Ukraine Plot Strengthens Case for Open-Ended Impeachment Inquiry

There is blockbuster news out about Rudy Guiliani that, among other things, points up the folly of the Democrats’ rush to finish up the impeachment of Donald Trump while damning facts continue to emerge. We have now learned that Lev Parnas, an associate of Guiliani who assisted in the campaign to conscript Ukraine in a scheme to slander Joe Biden, received $1 million in funds from a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. As Jonathan Chait summarizes the import of the this information, “Trump’s Ukraine plot appears to have been financed by Russia.”

Of course, this news is only politically harmful to Donald Trump if the Democrats choose to place it in the larger story they have been telling of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office. It seems incredible to me that Russian funding of the president’s scheme wouldn’t be promoted to the forefront of their allegations against him.

When It's a Good Thing to See the Trees for the Forest

Two recent articles from major media organizations demonstrate that we are not near to exhausting creative and proactive ways of making the threats of climate change feel concrete and understandable to the ordinary citizen.  They come at the issue from opposite sides of the spectrum, but together suggest how technology and education can help shift our perspective on local and global environmental threats.

Vox has published an overview of three tree species — the Brazil nut tree in the Amazon region, the stilt mangrove in Indonesia, and the African teak tree in West Africa — that play vital roles in keeping their ecosystems healthy and climate chaos at bay.  Scrolling visuals provide a bird’s eye view of these trees and the surrounding forests; clean, concise descriptions discuss how they help protect the environment.  It’s an unexpectedly intimate perspective on forests, giving us a fresh look at these trees and the scientists who study them.  It also does something that we could use a lot more of: remind us that there are people around the world who are as concerned about climate change as many Americans are, and that we are all part of a global movement that summons forth our common humanity and interests.  And though it is easy to be haunted by what we are losing around the world, the Vox piece reminds us that there’s still much of nature left to save; it brings a powerful sense of our larger, shared world to our computer and smart phone screens.

From The New York Times comes a bleaker but also effective use of technology to communicate what might otherwise seem abstract.  An exposé of methane leaks from oil and gas facilities in west Texas uses infrared video to show plumes of this greenhouse gas escaping into the air, alongside normal-spectrum shots in which the gas is completely invisible.  It’s like getting a peak into a hidden, toxic reality that lives alongside our own.  The fact that this gas ends up in the atmosphere, where it can be up to 80 times as effective as carbon dioxide in trapping heat, means that these haunting, sci-fi images document harms to us all, not just to workers at the facilities or residents in the immediate area.  They also convey the degree to which those who benefit from the pollutants that drive climate change rely on the unseen nature of the threat to obscure the price they inflict on the rest of us.  The Times piece gives us eyes to see what’s been in front of us all along.

These articles are a good reminder that there’s no silver bullet to informing and inspiring the public to take action on climate chaos.  Multiple and fresh perspectives are called for as we stand at the dividing line between action and despair.

Public Right to Know Should Supercharge Impeachment Inquiry

In his latest column at Crooked.com, Brian Beutler makes a couple points that nicely supplement the overall argument I made yesterday as to why an extended and broad impeachment inquiry makes the most sense for Democrats and the good of the country.  Beutler has been arguing strenuously for a broader impeachment effort, but this piece acknowledges the current state of play by suggesting a lemonade-out-of-lemons compromise: let the Democrats move forward the Ukraine-related articles of impeachment, since these involve the existential matter of the 2020 election and thus an overriding emergency, but keep open other avenues of the impeachment inquiry, with more articles to follow.  

But there’s a specific point he makes that I think strengthens what I was trying to say yesterday: if the ultimate goal of impeachment includes an effort to make the GOP pay a price for their refusal to take their constitutional responsibilities seriously regarding the president’s bad acts, then the least Democrats can do is make them vote multiple times for multiple articles of impeachment.  In this way, Beutler says, the Democrats could make it that much harder for the GOP to assert meaningful distance between any of Trump’s impeachable, corrupt acts and the party’s complicity in covering those up.

Beutler makes a second observation that also provides a great summation of why he thinks the impeachment inquiry should keep going:

Closing the inquiry with the passage of narrow articles of impeachment will be the end of the line for most if not all efforts to expose the full breadth of Trump’s abuses of power. Information the public is entitled to ahead of the 2020 election will remain indefinitely hidden. By contrast, the threat of a second Senate trial pertaining to Trump’s obstruction of Congress, his self-enrichment, his seizure of federal dollars for personal gain, his financial crimes, or for still-concealed aspects of his corrupt foreign policy would preserve the House’s lone means of obtaining new information and commanding the public’s attention to Trump’s misconduct. It might also give Republican senators pause about their intention to acquit Trump of the Ukraine shakedown in January. That vote will be relatively easy for them if they’re confident further evidence will never come to light, harder if they’ll live in a constant state of worry about what shoes are left to drop.

The prospect of making GOP senators “live in a constant state of worry” about oncoming revelations can also be described as the Democrats maintaining the initiative by rightly continuing to uncover the president’s corrupt and impeachable acts.  But Beutler’s point about the investigation making public all sorts of information that voters are entitled to have particularly caught my imagination.  Separate and apart from Trump’s corrupt acts, the public’s basic right to know what its government is doing, and why, might still emerge as one of the overarching lessons of the Trump administration.  In terms of impeachment, it’s an idea that, if wielded by the Democrats, can help refute aspersions that theirs is simply a “partisan” inquiry rather than a necessary defense of our constitutional order.

For example, whether or not you agree that he should be removed from office, it’s indefensible for President Trump to take the position that no close advisors who had dealings with him on the Ukraine plot will be allowed to testify.  The availability of information necessary to appraise the actions of our leaders is separate from whether or not Trump should be removed from office, and is a bedrock requirement of any democracy.  Beutler suggests that we need information about the president’s possible abuses to make an informed decision in 2020; the reverse of this, that without it we are actively being kept in a uninformed state, is another non-partisan point that strengthens the impeachment effort, but that also stands quite powerfully on its own merits.  If the president is innocent, why won’t he let the people who can prove it testify?  This question answers itself, but carries a democratic power separate from its foregone conclusion.  The president’s advisors ultimately serve the public, not him, and we cannot make informed decisions about our government without adequate information.  This is hardly a partisan position.

In Defending Trump, GOP Is Now Party to Plot to Rig 2020 Election

Reading the two articles of impeachment, as damning and grounded in fact as they are, it’s impossible for me to not feel the howling absence of the many other articles that could and should have been drawn up alongside this pair.  The power of these existing articles is partly responsible for igniting the imagination: solidly written and sobering, I can only speculate on what the impact would have been if there had been a whole stack of them, pages and pages of irrefutable indictment.

If impeachment has a vanishingly small chance of turning into a conviction in the Senate, it makes no sense that the Democrats have chosen not to broaden and diversify their case for why the president is unfit for office.  Even as they attempt to demonstrate a pattern of presidential misconduct within the Ukraine scandal, they are passing up an opportunity to paint a far more extensive and darker picture of the president’s pattern of corruption and catastrophic incompetence, from excusing the Russian attack on the 2016 elections and undermining efforts at defense against future foreign subversion, to profiting off the presidency and very likely bending numerous areas of foreign and domestic policy to profit the Trump family at the expense of the national interest.

Far more than the two Ukraine-related articles alone, a broader indictment would help push forward the two defenses of the constitutional order that Democrats can achieve via impeachment: galvanizing the public into opposition to Trump, and demonstrating to the public the GOP’s complicity, by defending Trump, in attempting to transform the United States from a democracy into an authoritarian regime: because authoritarianism is what we will have if the president, supported by his party, can use the power of the U.S. government to make sure Americans don’t have a free and fair choice in deciding whether to re-elect him.

I think most of us have been led astray by a basic misconception encouraged both by Donald Trump’s singular ugliness and more recently by the Democrats’ decision to pursue impeachment against him: that the president is the main source of our democratic crisis, and that removing or neutralizing him politically will resolve it.  The United States does of course face a crisis due to a corrupt and authoritarian-minded president, but it is a subsidiary of a larger crisis: that the GOP as a whole has long laid the groundwork for, and now under Trump has openly embraced, via lockstep support of every malevolent presidential action, the goal of enacting some form of authoritarianism in the United States.  Impeachment, for all my criticisms for how the Democrats are running it, has at least achieved this much: it has demonstrated that the GOP no longer functions like a democratic party in a democratic society.  It is in no conceivable way democratic for every member of a party to parrot discredited and false lines about the president’s behavior, or lies about the Democrats, and to claim that what the president said and did he did not actually do and say.  (That key defenses and lies have their origins in Russian disinformation campaigns meant to support the president and undermine the Democrats is shocking, and indeed unforgivable, given that Republicans cannot legitimately pretend they don’t know of their Russian origins.)

So the United States doesn’t have a Donald Trump problem so much as a Republican Party problem.  And this GOP problem can be summarized thusly: under Donald Trump, the Republican Party has seen the promised land, and it is authoritarianism.  I don’t believe this is the result of some vast conspiracy or long-term plan — in fact, I’m not sure the GOP would have gotten to this point without Donald Trump’s uniquely malevolent skill set and lack of scruples.  But you can’t understand where we are with Donald Trump — a president who has essentially declared his right to rig the 2020 election in his favor — without seeing that he’s only doing on a larger scale what the GOP has been doing for years now: manipulating elections across the country, via voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ensure that they win contests they should rightly lose, and to ensure that those who prefer Democrats are denied free and fair elections.  Even before Donald Trump, the GOP had been gradually backing into authoritarianism for many years.  Authoritarianism was not a conscious end goal, but the logical outcome of the sorts of policies required in order to keep winning elections based on a shrinking base of white voters and preventing majority rule from harshing the party’s mellow as it aimed to serve the interests of wealthy corporate donors.  It took Donald Trump to make explicit all the less vocalized strands of Republicanism beyond the cardinal sin of subverting our elections — the racism, the worship of military might, the misogyny, the view that the earth is merely meant to be exploited for material gain — but nothing he has done is really different from what was latent in the GOP all along.

I understand that the argument I’m making may sound extreme, or difficult to stomach.  If this is the case, I would urge you to go through the exercise of reviewing current events from the GOP’s perspective.  Imagine that you have seen the writing on the wall for years: that demographic changes plus an ideological commitment to promoting the interests of the wealthy over those of the majority mean that you are likely to no longer win the House of Representatives in coming years, or the presidency (absent an electoral college win alongside a popular vote loss).  This has already encouraged you to engage in various, escalating schemes to maximize your vote share by rigging elections against Democrats at the state level.  Now imagine that an unlikely presidential candidate captures the enthusiastic backing of your base, wins the presidency with the help of Russia, and schemes a path to victory by an outright attack, enabled by the power of the presidency, on the 2020 contest in order to secure his re-election.

As a Republican, you’ve already grown accustomed to the idea that elections are not meant to be free and fair, but are something to be manipulated and managed.  From your perspective, President Trump’s effort to enlist Ukraine in a scheme to thrown the 2020 election in his favor might be bigger and badder, but it’s not really different in kind from what the party has been doing for decades.  Also, you realize that given the nearly infinite number of crimes you are pretty sure Donald Trump has committed during his first three years in office, the GOP is basically screwed if the Democrats win the White House in 2020, or actually ever again.  After all, even if the Democrats choose not to weaponize presidential power in the manner of Donald Trump, even a more restrained approach in which the new Democratic president works with a Democratic congress to provide an accounting of Trump’s crimes will be an albatross around the GOP’s neck for a good long time to come.

From this perspective, based on calculations of power and the force of precedent, why wouldn’t the GOP go all in on a scheme that would essentially undo American democracy, potentially indefinitely?

Now, I’m playing somewhat loose with the term “authoritarianism,” which is the subject of reams of scholarship and debate and real-world studies.  Although a good case can be made that various other authoritarian elements are present in the Trump-GOP — as I noted above, from the worship of military might and misogyny to the identification of certain populations as inferior or un-American — that’s not the case I’m trying to make right now (though I’m using authoritarian in part because it does indeed wrap in those important elements.  And I will note for the record here that one of the complicating factors in being able to comprehend and thus address the threat posed by the Trumpist GOP is our lack of terms to describe what we’re experiencing, and the fact that often those terms, even when accurate (such as “authoritarianism”) nonetheless sound academic, alien, and/or insufficient. This is a big problem).  Rather, for the purpose of the point I’m trying to make about how we should think about the issues swirling around impeachment, I’m using “authoritarian” as a super-charged way of saying “anti-democratic,” because I think it gets at the immediate and pre-eminent threat posed by Trump and the GOP: Trump by his actions around Ukraine, and GOP representatives and senators by their complicit defense, are trying to deny all Americans free and fair elections in 2020.  There are obviously many anti-democratic behaviors possible, but the single greatest one is preventing Americans from choosing their president. 

Yet the Democrats, or at least the Democratic leadership calling the shots on impeachment, continues to proceed as if it is the president alone who threatens our democracy with an authoritarian nightmare.  This is simply not true: it was not true when the GOP covered for the president’s lesser yet also impeachable offenses prior to the Ukraine scandal, and it is certainly not true now, when the Senate and House GOP have become largely indistinguishable from the Trump White House in their defense of his actions, pursuing the dual, mutually contradictory tracks of arguing that the president did not do what he clearly did, and that it was 100% OK that he did it.

So we don’t face a problem of a rogue president: we face the problem of one political party desiring to bring about an end to American democracy.

The failure of Democrats to face up to or grapple with this fact has, I think, led to what I previously referred to as a fetishization of the impeachment process, in which impeachment is more or less acknowledged as doomed to stop short of removing Trump, but is nonetheless played up as a terrible, cleansing power that must be done out of a heavy heart and sense of duty, with the ultimate but never overtly stated goal of damaging the president’s re-election chances.  But if you admit that the problem is not a rogue president but what amounts to a scheme by both the president and the congressional GOP to steal the 2020 election (another unexamined angle: the GOP as a whole, not simply Trump, stands to gain from any disinformation campaign against the Democratic presidential nominee), then impeachment as currently constituted neither addresses the larger issue of GOP perfidy nor the fact that it will not prevent the catastrophic subversion of the 2020 election. In effect, impeachment becomes an excuse for an actual strategy to defend American democracy.

Lest you think I’m overstating the threat posed by either the Trumpist GOP in combination with the Democrats’ cognitive blocks to comprehending it, please take some time to read this startling and enraging Politico piece from a few days ago.  This early paragraph gives you a taste of the self-defeating mindset that seems to have taken hold of some congressional Democrats:

Democrats say [. . .] the need to remove Trump from office is so urgent precisely because he's certain to continue threatening the integrity of the 2020 election and stonewalling Congress' ability to prevent it.

Yet Democrats are only just beginning to confront the paradox that their imminent impeachment vote creates: What happens when a remorseless president commits the same behavior that got him impeached in the first place — only this time after the House has already deployed the most potent weapon in its arsenal?

“I have not allowed myself to entertain that sequence of hypotheticals,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a constitutional lawyer. “If he’s just impeached and not removed, we will definitely have to continue to deal with a lawless and ungovernable president.”

Representative Raskin is a smart guy, but the quote above is one of the most discouraging statements I have heard from a politician in my lifetime.  It’s clear that Donald Trump will not be removed by the Senate, and fully intends to continue his impeachable behavior, yet Raskin has not allowed himself “to entertain that sequence of hypotheticals”?  Raskin is hardly an incompetent; rather, he appears to be a victim of impeachment fetishization, that mechanistic worldview in which the Democrats have no choice but to roll out the mighty impeachment cannon, fire it at the president, sit helplessly by while Senate Republicans acquit him, and then run around stunned by the sublime terror of what they’ve inflicted on the nation while the president continues to crime.

Other Democrats quoted in Politico amplify Raskin’s cluelessness.  “‘Should we stop stopping speeders if they still speed?’ wondered Val Demings (D-Fla.), a member of the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. ‘When we vote, we will have done our job.  Then the Senate needs to take these matters seriously and take action.’”

“When we vote, we will have done our job.”  This is a statement that is simply not true, not when you know in advance that the Senate will in fact not “take action.”  But Demings’ quote helps us get to the basic point I want to hammer home: the duty of Democrats, both in the House and Senate, is not to impeach Trump, but to identify the authoritarian menace posed by the GOP and Trump together, and to destroy it.  The Democrats’ job is only done when they have used all means at their disposal to expose and derail this threat.

And here we get to the second cognitive failure of congressional Democrats.  Not only do they refuse, at least publicly, do identify the GOP as a whole as a threat to the constitutional order, but they refuse to treat the GOP as the illegitimate actor it has become.  In defending Trump over the Ukraine scandal, the GOP has indicated, without room for misunderstanding, that it does not believe the U.S. should have free and fair elections, full stop.  This isn’t just some minor point to ding the GOP about: this is an existential threat to the United States and to our way of life, not to mention to the Democrats’ continued viability as a vehicle for Americans’ defense of the republic.

In short, Democrats need to stop acting as if democracy in America is a pre-ordained tragedy in which they are fated to play their heroic yet doomed role via an unsuccessful impeachment effort against the president, and start using the impeachment effort to identify the twin GOP-Trump threat for the unprecedented anti-democratic movement that it is.   Anything else is dereliction of democratic duty.

Another quote in the Politico article neatly encapsulates the flaws in current Democratic thinking around impeachment:

The only way we’re going to stop [Trump] from continuing this is to convict him in the Senate and remove him from office,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), a member of House leadership.

“If this president is not held accountable and my Republican colleagues in the Senate don’t honor their oath of office and convict him based on overwhelming evidence,” said Cicilline, “we will no longer have a democracy.”

So, in other words, we will 100% for sure very soon not have a democracy, since Cicilline knows full well that Republicans in the Senate will indeed fail to hold the president accountable.  Yet, according to Cicilline, GOP senators are the only ones who can stop Trump from continuing his behavior.  Cicilline may be a member of the House leadership, but these are not the words of a leader.  While it may be fine for an anonymous blogger like myself to warn semi-hysterically of the end of American democracy, it is the responsibility of elected Democrats to actually prevent such an outcome, not attest to its inevitability.   I do not see how Cicilline’s statement is substantially any different from Democrats literally throwing up their hands and telling Americans that our democracy is dead, and that they can think of no further defense of 200-plus years of an American experiment that to date has successfully defended itself against the Civil War, the Great Depression, Adolph Hitler, the nuclear abyss of the Cold War, and the mass death of 9/11. A reality TV show host and a party full of conservative hacks were apparently too much for us to handle.

The Democrats must waste no opportunity to describe the terms of this fight in unambiguous terms, hammering home a simple and true message: Trump has attempted and continues to attempt, and the GOP continues to assist, a scheme to rig the 2020 election in the president’s and the GOP’s behavior.  Allow no daylight to exist between party and president, because effectively none does.  Subverting a national election is no different than canceling it, and in fact is arguably worse, because it gives the American people the illusion of democracy while withholding the reality.  Neither Trump nor the GOP deserves to politically survive such a crime against the American people.  Certainly there is no need to pretend that either supports our democracy, or any longer follows an oath to defend the U.S. constitution.

This means using impeachment and continued investigations to make clear that the GOP and Trump are inextricably involved in the grand crime against our democracy of attempting to rig the 2020 election, as well as the various lesser but still impeachable corruptions of the Trump administration.  Democrats must also make sure that there will be no backing down in this fight, no chance that they will ever accept the possibility, in Cicilline’s defeatist words, that we “no longer have a democracy.”  Democracy is the ideal and the weapon with which the Democrats and all other opponents of Trump-GOP authoritarianism will degrade, delegitimize, and defeat the authoritarian monstrosity of the Trumpist GOP, even in the awful circumstance that Trump manages to cheat his way to re-election in 2020. Instead of bemoaning the imminent death of democracy, the Democrats must own and communicate their intention to implacably defend and advance the constitutional order, without compromise, until the boundaries of our democracy are again re-asserted.

Apart from the justness of the cause, the Democratic leadership also needs to recognize that even if elected Democrats are not looking ahead to what comes after impeachment, rank and file Democrats certainly are, and are not reassured by what they see.  It is already deeply discouraging to read on a near-daily basis the myriad routes to victory the president can follow in 2020 by losing the popular vote but still winning the electoral college; when we face the prospect of Wisconsin being the boss of us all, it is hard not to feel physically queasy (however much we might love Wisconsin!) at the prospect of a third popular vote victory in 20 years snatched away by an outdated, slavery-abetting institution.  That such an outcome is now inextricably intertwined with the president’s plan to game the 2020 election via foreign interference requires Democratic leadership do double down on, well, leadership.  Democrats can’t expect citizens to keep fighting if Democratic officials keep insisting to us that the fate of democracy is in the hands of Senate Republicans (who most of us know will be putting party over country in the trial of Donald J. Trump) and that it’s game over once that foreordained conclusion is reached.

This is a politics of bright lines and absolutes that many Democrats are unfamiliar with, yet one they must quickly embrace.  If GOP senators plan to betray their oath of office and not fully consider the charges against the president, then Democrats need to keep the impeachment process going in ways that do maximum damage to the president and the Republican Party.  The GOP has made itself complicit in a scheme to subvert the 2020 election, and the Democrats must hammer this home at every opportunity.

The flip side to the GOP’s descent into full-time lies and propaganda in defense of the president is that the party has made itself deeply, collectively vulnerable to a democratic backlash and revival.  If we can stop Trump in 2020, if we can take back the presidency and at least keep the House, then Democrats will have the opportunity to spend the coming years not only beginning to make the economic and electoral reforms that defuse the forces of inequality and hate that are giving strength to the authoritarian GOP, but will be able to continue to expose the perfidy of this presidency and his defenders by ongoing investigations that publicize what foul deeds have been done in the name of the American people. 

Trump's Despicable Tweet About Greta Thunberg Will Help End His Presidency

In recognition of the tremendous impact that Greta Thunberg has had on accelerating a necessary global uprising to take on climate change — in her case, by directly inspiring climate action by millions of youth, not to mention millions of others of slightly older generations — Time magazine has named her its Person of the Year for 2019. Despite knowing better, I did not brace myself for President Trump’s inevitable tweet in response, and so felt unfiltered a surge of hatred towards him that is a great part of the tweet’s purpose.

Because this particular tweet is so vile — insulting a child with the power of the presidential megaphone, with all the grotesque power disparity and smashing of basic human decency that conveys — and so clearly designed to provoke a backlash, it can provide a lesson in how Trumpism works, and how we can work to destroy him and the authoritarian GOP movement he heads up. First, the sense of outrage that I and millions of people are feeling is the flip side to the tweet’s other main emotional purpose, which is to provoke from his base feelings of hatred toward Thunberg and feelings of solidarity and approval toward the president. The overall point and effect is to break the country into two irreconcilable camps: those the president considers to be his enemies, and those who are loyal and sympathetic to the president. This is the great dynamic of this presidency, and of his authoritarian impulses: to split the country into aggrieved, loyal supporters and everyone else, in the hope that his enraged base will be enough to secure his power, all the while distracting everyone from a more direct consideration of the actual issues before us and disseminating falsehoods that make actual debate difficult if not impossible. This is his one big play. It’s all he’s got: divide, distract, and dissemble.

From this perspective, we would do well to take a step back and stay in touch with a basic truth: this is a strategy rooted in the president’s weakness, not strength. He has no faith in being able to persuade, only manipulate and lie; and he lacks the support of a majority in this country. This is not to say his strategy cannot be frighteningly effective; to fight back effectively, we need to recognize its basic precariousness and origins in weakness. In this particular case, his weakness is highlighted by the fact that he has brought to bear the power of the presidency against a 16-year-old girl, which reveals that the weakness is not simply one of power but of basic morality.

It is always important to be conscious of these dynamics behind Trump’s tweets and other like pronouncements, in order to decline his invitation to tear our country in two, avoid being consumed by hate, keep our eye on the substantive issues of our time, and always remember the fundamental weakness that makes this absurd figure eminently beatable in 2020.

But seeing through the manipulation and inevitable outrage also allows us to understand that this is no ordinary tweet, but represents what can only be described as a clash of realities that Donald Trump is, perversely enough, right to be scared of. Whether he fully realizes it or not, Thunberg, and the mass mobilization on climate action she is helping to catalyze, is exactly the sort of grassroots, radical movement that Trump should fear, because these movements will scour plutocrats and autocrats like Trump out of power and into the proverbial dustbin of history. The fight against climate chaos is quickly emerging as the dominant struggle of our time, bound up with the global crisis of economic inequality, and it has the virtue of being both irreducibly real and undeniably an existential threat to human life as we know it.

In a terrific and terrifying column out this week, Paul Krugman writes of how climate denialism “was in many ways the crucible of Trumpism [. . .] Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the ‘deep state,’ they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.” Ironically but fittingly for Trump and the GOP, climate chaos is now a major reason why both will be pummeled into political oblivion, as their lies can no longer stand up to the horrifying evidence of climate disruption around the world. Substantial numbers of GOP voters, particularly among the young, now view climate change as real and as a threat. The crisis that the GOP helped bring to fruition is a wedge that can crack apart Trump’s base.

In other words, Trump’s tweet is a trifle in the face of the forces that Thunberg is helping to unleash. In fact, we can see that in fact Trump’s tweet is a weapon to be added to our collective arsenal. Whether the cruelty and stupidity of it can persuade 10 voters or 10,000 to vote against the president is entirely up to how boldly we, collectively, are able to wield it.

Oregonian Editorial Board Rips Into Sondland's Sexual Harassment Defense

It’s gratifying and also a bit of a relief to see that The Oregonian’s editorial board has written an op-ed excoriating Gordon Sondland’s response to the three women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.  Gratifying, because this is what Sondland deserves; and a relief, because I’d been wondering how much the generally establishment-oriented editorial board would respond to these allegations against our local businessman-turned-international-man-of-intrigue-and-Trump-co-conspirator.  The writers zero in on the “shallow and outlandish defense mounted by Sondland,” who they say is “trying to prove his innocence through a weird combination of conspiracy theory, smear campaign and victim-blaming clichés.”

Particularly welcome and on point is their refutation of Sondland’s argument that the women’s long delay in making their accusations somehow discredits them; as the board writes, “One of the most profound changes wrought by the #MeToo movement is that the public is finally understanding why victims keep quiet [. . .] New articles have detailed how perpetrators have used threats and retaliation to intimidate victims, making the prospect of going public not worth the hit to victims’ reputations or careers.”  As the three women’s stories involved accounts not only of sexual harassment but of subsequent retaliation by Sondland against their careers or business interests, it is easy to see how well-grounded fears of further retaliation would have inhibited making public their stories.  The Oregonian concludes by writing, “[A] defense built on insinuation, threat and old-timey notions of how women should behave doesn’t stand a chance.”  Let’s hope so.

Impeach It Like You Mean It, Part III

I think we all need to pay closer attention to the cognitive dissonance between the Democrats’ unveiling of articles of impeachment against the president on the same day that they’ve come to an agreement on the revised North American trade deal, or USMCA.  As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer writes, Democrats are “handing Trump a victory on his major domestic policy priority,” which both suggests that the impeachment is just so much “meaningless partisan theater” while also demonstrating that the president fights hard for American workers and is a great dealmaker.  It’s true that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has talked up the importance of getting this USMCA legislation passed as a way to protect more vulnerable Democratic House members — it’s an accomplishment they can bring back to voters to show they’re working for them — but I find Serwer’s points impossible to dismiss.  Whatever the merits of bolstering Democratic House moderates, to do so in a way that validates the political goals and electoral chances of the very president the Democrats assert is a threat to the republic makes little sense.  Indeed, as Serwer suggests, the only way it DOES make sense is if the Democrats don’t actually mean what they say about the threat the president poses to our constitutional order.

This is the third piece I’ve written under the “Impeach It Like You Mean It” moniker, and the ominous juxtaposition of the USMCA announcement with the release of just two, narrowly-focused articles of impeachment makes me think that the Democrats are not actually impeaching like they mean it.  Will Stancil, who’s also been sounding the alarm about the craziness of the Democrats’ support of a USMCA deal with Trump, notes that the Democrats are trying to reconcile two impulses that simply can’t be reconciled: “their irresistible desire to look sober and bipartisan by always compromising” and “the absolute objective unacceptability of Trump.”  Even if you grant the House leadership more pragmatic and tactical reasons for wanting to make a deal with Trump (i.e., to protect some House members in the 2020 election), I think Stancil gets the basic conundrum right, and it points to a basic fact that’s been nagging at me: even as the Democrats are pursuing impeachment against President Trump, they’re not actually behaving as though what they accuse him of is true.

The Democrats are right to impeach Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election in order to ensure his own re-election, but they’ve known all along that there was close to a zero percent chance that the Republicans in the Senate would ever vote in sufficient numbers to remove Trump from office.  It seems that the point of impeachment, then, is some combination of publicizing a damning case against the president that also forces the GOP as a whole to go on record as supporting his corrupt purposes, even as it results in his ultimate acquittal in the Senate; this would seem to be the reasoning behind keeping the impeachment process short and narrowly-focused.  But here’s the thing: while this strategy might work around the margins in terms of persuading some voters to oppose the president and GOP in 2020, it does nothing to actually stop the president from continuing his attempts to subvert the 2020 election: attempts that are in fact ongoing, from Rudy Giuiliani’s latest trip to Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens, to the president and the GOP continuing to propagate lies about how Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on Democrats’ behalf (which has the goal of both undermining Democrats and providing cover for the president’s ongoing subversion efforts).

It’s hard to avoid the sense that congressional Democrats have in a sense fetishized impeachment as the central way to resist Trump, as a ritual they are beholden to enact, and which will have mysterious yet unarticulated powers to stop the president’s bad behavior even if he isn’t removed from office.  But, to borrow a line from Fiona Hill, that is in fact a fictional narrative.  By embracing a method to stop the president that’s doomed to fail to stop him — because of foreordained outcome in the Senate — they’ve effectively signaled that they believe they actually have no way to stop the president.  The feeble power of this unfortunate message has already reached Donald Trump, who has continued to engage in and even escalate a range of activity that shows he considers himself above the law, from the blanket, unprecedented refusal for the White House to participate in the impeachment proceedings, to continued calls for foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 elections.  We have every reason to believe that these efforts will only escalate following an acquittal in the Senate, which both Trump and the GOP at large are likely to pass off as an endorsement of his authoritarian efforts to attack the 2020 vote.

Given these harsh realities, for the Democrats to treat impeachment as a “solemn” (in the words of Nancy Pelosi) duty that’s grave and sober and serious that must be done quickly and efficiently because it’s so damned solemn and serious begins to feel like a whole lot of mumbo jumbo; like going through the motions; like the “partisan theater” Adam Serwer described.  This president is corrupt to his core: from using the presidency for personal profit, to aligning with foreign powers to destroy his domestic opponents, he’s a walking, talking example of why the impeachment power was included in the U.S. constitution.  But in crucial ways, the Democrats’ move towards an impeachment bound to fail is proving a distraction from the actual reason impeachment is in the congressional toolbox - because, given human nature, it was inevitable that sooner or later we would have a president who wanted to be a king, and that Americans would have to figure out a way to stop him.

With removal off the table, refusing to engage in a prolonged impeachment inquiry that would expose the vast extent of the president’s criminality to the full light of day, in an effort to move public opinion firmly against the president — which will be one of the key ways that we are able to beat back the authoritarian project of this president and the Republican Party — feels very much like the Democrats lack the courage of their convictions.  Likewise, with extensive proof that the president intends to deny the United States a free and fair election in 2020, with the very possible outcome that he would be re-elected and the United States effectively reduced to the status of a banana republic, what possible reason is there to treat the president with anything but unremitting contempt and hostility?  Why are the Democrats so insistent on talking about how solemn a process this is, when outrage and indeed rage should be the order of the day?

Another way to frame what I’m getting at: what happens in January or February 2020, after Senate Republicans have used the impeachment trial not only to acquit Donald Trump but to disseminate false stories of how it’s been the Democrats and Ukrainians all along who’ve been attempting to undermine U.S. elections?  And Donald Trump continues, whether openly or secretly, to do all he can to ensure victory in 2020, from launching investigations of whoever the Democratic presidential nominee is, to inviting election interference from abroad?  What is the Democrats’ plan to protect America against Trump-GOP authoritarianism then, once the impeachment bolt has been shot and missed its target? Will the Democrats simply throw up their hands and say they’ve done all they can, or will they finally start acting like American democracy is on the line?