Quarantine Trump, Part II

Reporting from The Washington Post adds more details to the story of the White House’s botched response to the coronavirus threat to date.  I described a couple days ago how Donald Trump’s concern with re-election has been the prism through which he views this crisis, distorting his priorities and contributing to his propagation of disinformation about the challenge we collectively face.  The Post article provides more details on this obsession, but also crucially details the basic incompetence that has plagued his and his team’s response.

The decision to name Vice President Mike Pence as coordinator of the coronavirus response effort also looks worse the more we learn about it.  The Post notes that, unlike previous administrations, Trump declined to name a “czar” to handle this health emergency, and goes on to report, “The president decided against that option after worrying that bringing in a person from outside the administration might be seen as a failure — and wondering whether such a person would be loyal to him, according to those familiar with the debate.”  Though at this late stage of his presidency it’s no surprise that the president would worry more about perceptions of his own failure and requirements of loyalty from subordinates, in this emergency context such tendencies come across as simply deranged.  Moreover, even some of Pence advisers wondered “whether having Pence in charge was a good idea, given the the messy situation and a lack of experience in his office on the topic.”  

The article also reports that some Republican senators have been criticizing the administration response and lack of preparedness; yet some of these same senators were in office while the administration made the cutbacks to the U.S. pandemic response infrastructure that are now plaguing current efforts.  Where was the GOP when it had a chance to help prevent these foolish decisions?  While from a political perspective it’s tentatively encouraging to see them willing to criticize Trump, we can’t ignore their hypocrisy and cynicism in speaking out now rather than years ago. 

The piece also offers a good summation of the president’s various misstatements and lies about the spread and threat of the virus, though they are scattered throughout the article, which has the effect of downplaying the consistency of his efforts to dissemble about the threat facing the United States.  Most jaw-dropping to me is his statement Thursday that, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”  This may be the clearest evidence yet that the president, faced with an implacable reality, would rather convince himself and others of fantasy scenarios in which all will be right with the world, rather than confront necessary challenges head-on.

Writing at the New Republic, Ryu Spaeth zeroes in on what may be behind this possible self-delusion on the part of the president. He says that beyond the basic fact of Trump’s instinct to spread disinformation, there has been “a strong whiff of wish fulfillment in all [his] strenuous assertions” about the threat of the coronavirus, and that “his response also reveals a deep unease, a recognition on Trump’s part, through the apocalyptic swirl of his own paranoia, that the coronavirus represents a very real threat to his presidency.”  Spaeth correctly notes the threat Trump sees in an economic downturn driven by the coronavirus; the reference to Trump’s tone of “wish fulfillment” gets at the fact that at a basic, undeniable level, Trump understands reality quite well.  Indeed, the more threatening that reality is, the more incentive he has both to delude himself and to convince the rest of us of his own delusions.   I think that he realizes his own unfitness for the presidency, and is panicked by his growing peril, which raises the possibility of further flailing missteps and doubling down on what has been operating model for three years — relying on disinformation and propaganda to hide his shortcomings.

In the face of the threat of the virus and the president’s well-established incompetence, criticism of the president is well-warranted and necessary, as our best chance to hold him accountable and force as much of a course correction as possible.  Of course, to the president and his defenders, there is no distinction possible between attempts to hold him accountable for doing the job he was elected to do, and fantastical theories of a vast media-liberal-deep state conspiracy to destroy his presidency by any means necessary.  The idea that any criticism of Trump is always and ever unmerited may have begun as an authoritarian political strategy, but at this stage, when it blinds him and his defenders to the political risks of downplaying a threat that cannot ultimately be covered up by lies and propaganda, it has evolved into something indistinguishable from paranoia.

Afghani-gone?

It is not getting nearly as much attention as it should in the midst of the coronavirus threat, stock market crashings, and the escalating Democratic presidential primary — but news this weekend that the United States has signed a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan within 14 months is remarkable.  The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has been a vast and ultimately indefensible catastrophe, second only to the invasion of Iraq in its folly and infliction of suffering and death on literally millions of people.  As tragic as the deaths of more than 3,500 U.S. and coalition troops have been, this tragedy has been multiplied many times more among Afghan soldiers, civilians, and insurgents.  Then there is the $2 trillion cost of the war, over decades during which the American people were told, by politicians of both parties, that this country could not afford health care for more people, could not provide more assistance with college tuition, could not solve our homeless crisis.

And yet we are now at a point where we could have been nearly two decades ago — signing a deal with the Taliban, whose good faith still cannot be trusted.  Apart from the withdrawal of troops, the deal lays out a framework for the Taliban and Afghan government to negotiate during the withdrawal period; as The Washington Post notes, the “agenda for the talks is massive, including a comprehensive cease-fire, the role of the Taliban in a future government, and rights for women and civil society.”  It is still possible the deal will fall apart; Secretary of Defense Mark Esper stated that the “United States will not hesitate to nullify the agreement” if the Taliban does not maintain its commitments.  Indeed, critics are already noting that the Taliban will never adhere to its commitments during this negotiation period, and will eventually take over the country again once the United States leaves.  And yet, absent a  World War II-style mobilization to occupy Afghanistan that we never undertook and will never undertake, this was always the inevitable endpoint: a crappy deal that to a great degree would yield Afghanistan’s destiny largely back to its warring factions.

It is too soon for definitive answers as to why the U.S. is withdrawing now, but it seems that President Trump’s willingness to do so is the primary driver.  And since Trump is president, there is no outcry of treason from the right that would have met a Democrat’s decision to do the same — vaguely akin to staunch anti-communist Richard Nixon having the credibility to launch direct relations with China.  We have yet to learn the tenor of the advice that Trump has been receiving from the military and his advisors, and to what extent this decision has broader institutional support.

The New York Times writes that, “The Trump administration has framed the deal as the long-awaited promise made to war-weary Americans, for whom the Afghan war has defined a generation of loss and trauma but has yielded no victory.”  But are Americans really war-weary?  The Times, and indeed President Trump, suggest they are ready for our Afghanistan involvement to end, but is this really the case?  To the contrary, this war has been conducted increasingly far from the consciousness or concern of most Americans. Yet this lack of caring has been going on arguably since the first few years of the conflict, as Iraq and its aftermath occupied the national dialogue.  And the notion that this war “has defined a generation of loss and trauma” badly misstates the impact it’s had on the United States.  An extremely narrow segment of the population has served in Afghanistan, to the point that many Americans don’t know anyone who has actually been deployed there, let alone killed or wounded.  Yes, there has been much loss and trauma, but it has been largely invisible to the great majority of Americans, and experienced by a small subset of our population and their families.

Most startling of all is that major news sources are reporting on this withdrawal plan and the history of the Afghanistan War this weekend without noting that it has for most of its duration constituted a fraud perpetrated on the American people.  A few months ago, The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers reporting project laid out the serial incompetence, lack of credible strategy, and self-delusion that have constituted the American experience in Afghanistan.  Most damningly, the Afghanistan Papers also laid out the great degree to which the government, including administration officials of both parties and the military, consistently lied to the American people about how badly and how fruitlessly our efforts were going, and suppressed vital knowledge that the conflict was fundamentally un-winnable.  Afghanistan has been a terrible war; but it has also been a scandal and cover-up of historic proportions, for which the American and Afghan people have paid the price.  For the United States, this incompetence abetted by mendacity has denied the American people the ability to make informed decisions about the United States’ war in Afghanistan. In this sense, the war has been a tragedy of democracy as well as of human life.

Instead, the U.S. continued fighting, not simply out of bureaucratic inertia, or the stated goal to prevent another 9/11, but as an insurance policy to protect the current administration, whether George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, from political damage should another large terrorist attack occur on U.S. soil.  In this sense, American soldiers have figured as sacrificial figures, the spilling of their blood required to show that we were “doing something,” even if that something no longer had any rational relationship to decreasing the threat of terrorism against the United States.  The Afghan people have similarly been sacrificed for U.S. politics, though invisibly.

Quarantine Trump

If there is any justice in this world, February 28 will remembered as the day the Trump presidency ended.  Staring down the prospect of a pandemic that has already killed thousands around the world and brought the Chinese economy to a standstill, Donald Trump declared at a rally Friday night that the coronavirus is a “hoax”; at a news conference today, he said that he had actually been referring to what the Democrats are saying about the virus, which is a distinction without a difference. Against a deadly reality that requires a concerted and rapid federal response, our president put forth a grotesque and self-serving lie about the danger this disease poses, transforming a real-world emergency into a conspiracy to deny him re-election.  In doing so, he endangers us all, no matter your party affiliation, gender, race, or citizenship status, and confirms his basic unfitness to hold office. His dereliction of duty will haunt him going forward, and into the 2020 election.

Fearing the effects of the coronavirus on his re-election first and foremost, the president is clearly obsessed with the economic downside rather than the human cost of the disease.  This is not subtext with him; it is what he unmistakably communicates with every tweet and every appearance.  Earlier this week he was denying that the virus would have much impact in the U.S., and told us that the stock market looked pretty good to him.  Now, just a few days later, he’s reached the absurd endpoint of his regime of propaganda, attempting to persuade the American people that the virus is nothing to worry about.  

Just a few hours ago, he continued along in this vein, speaking about the first American death from the coronavirus.  He told reporters that, “healthy individuals should be able to fully recover [. . .] So healthy people, if you’re healthy, you will probably go through a process, and you’ll be fine.”  The president can’t even bring himself to say people will get sick, only that they will “go through a process,” as if we are all automatons to him; nor does it seem to occur to him how worrying his words might be to someone who is not healthy, including those suffering from illness or seniors, who together number in the tens of millions in the U.S. alone.  But he cannot acknowledge that many millions are at risk because he fears for his re-election — and apart from, this, of course, he is fundamentally incompetent and completely unmanned by the current crisis.

His insane ideas are being echoed by other members of the administration, who amplify the cuckoo message in an attempt to make state propaganda overwhelm necessary facts.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to say if the virus was a hoax, while White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney simply opined that Americans should ignore news about it.  Meanwhile, outside the White House, right-wing commentators are spreading the fiction that it is a story concocted to bring down the president.

By elevating his election concerns to the highest priority and attempting to hold back the tide of reality, Donald Trump and his henchmen are all but ensuring that Americans will die from his recklessness.  There is certainly a federal effort underway that takes the reality of the virus as a given, but the president’s contradictory words disarm Americans who need to take this virus seriously.  Beyond this, his appointment of Vice President Mike Pence to head up the effort is evidence that he does not take this fight seriously, given the Vice President’s horrible record with mishandling an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was governor.  And the federal effort is left scrambling and playing catch-up due to the defunding of the CDC and pandemic response teams that the Trump administration has pushed over the last few years.

In one awful swoop, this disease is rendering defunct the president’s America First attitude and the GOP’s decades-long war against national healthcare.  Though the president may try to blame Democrats for open borders that have somehow allowed the (hoax) virus to enter the country, the reality is that migration has nothing to do with this pandemic.  If anything (and leaving aside the Chinese government’s authoritarian incompetence), it’s the basic interconnectedness of our world that is helping it spread, including tourism and international businesses.  Rather than being an argument for closing ourselves off from the world, something like the coronavirus is more evidence that in the contemporary world, international cooperation is the order of the day if we are to beat back threats like pandemics and climate chaos.  

Our fundamental interconnectedness within our borders is also why the coronavirus may well blow up the GOP’s decades-long war against health care for all.  Over the past few days in particular, I’ve read many people who note that our lack of guaranteed health care becomes a mortal threat when a disease like the coronavirus threatens.  I’ve seen the U.S. described as almost a hothouse for a pandemic, as millions will put off going to the doctor, while millions more who lack sufficient sick leave will go to work when they should remain at home, and in this way ensure the virus’ spread.  

At this point, we are wholly reliant on the people surrounding Trump and the federal bureaucracy to steer us away from disaster. Unfortunately, at this late stage, Trump has culled all but half-wits, sycophants, and white supremacists from his inner circle, which means that we will need to place our faith in the competence of officials like those at the Centers for Disease Control to make the right decisions going forward. This situation will also place added responsibility on state officials to compensate for the lack of leadership at the top of the governmental hierarchy. And whatever pressure our members of Congress can place on this presidency, be it through oversight or publicizing its shortcomings, will be badly needed in the days ahead.

At the local level, we’re going to need to double down on our care for each other and help each other stay informed and safe. This will include a rigorous and sustained pushback against the lies emanating from this White House about the coronavirus and the unforgivable effort to lull Americans into complacency on behalf of Trump’s re-election campaign. This means not passing on the president’s lies, but it also means not passing on false information about the spread of the coronavirus that foments panic rather than building understanding. Don’t forward on or post stories reflexively; check sources, and use your common sense.

Will Trump Echo China's Inept Authoritarian Response to Coronavirus?

As the scope of the coronavirus threat has begun to impress itself on the American public this past week, and the impulse to look inward and protect ourselves, at the national, state, and personal levels, becomes stronger, we need to reserve some energy and effort to understanding how this pandemic in the making came to be.  In particular, the fact that it’s emerged from China, one of the most authoritarian and anti-democratic countries on earth, seems to cry out for deep examination.  The country has been recalcitrant in its sharing of information about the virus with other nations; from this perspective, the country’s authoritarian style has hampered the efforts of the global community to control the spread of the coronavirus, and so itself effectively contributes to the threat to other nations.

Likewise, it has seemed highly probable to me that the country’s totalitarian governance has a direct relationship to its internal mishandling of the outbreak — but this has been more of an intuition than a well-developed theory.  The basic lack of accountability to its people gives the Chinese government an incentive not to act competently, but this is certainly balanced by the government’s need not to lose the confidence of its population and provoke unrest or even threats to the Communist Party’s hold on power.  At the same time, I could see the obvious counter-argument that its broad control over the population meant it might conceivably be more effective than democratic nations in locking down the virus; after all, so easily being able to effectively declare quarantines for vast swathes of the population could be seen as an advantage when dealing with a contagious disease.  And wouldn’t its vast surveillance apparatus aid it in detecting and controlling an epidemic?

But as professor and technology writer Zeynep Tufekci discusses at The Atlantic, the idea that authoritarian leaders might have trouble understanding what’s going on in their own countries is actually a well-documented phenomenon.  From China’s own modern history, she describes how the famines that began in the 1950’s could be traced to Chairman Mao Zedong receiving wildly inflated information about food production from subordinates “afraid of reporting bad news and because they wanted to please their superiors.”  However, China’s leadership learned from such tendencies, and in more recent times has used “big-data analytics in a digital public sphere” to monitor public sentiments and monitor events.  The government has used this to respond to real issues (such as incidences of corruption) in a way that allows it to appear accountable to the Chinese people without the democratic mechanisms that normally make accountability possible.

But under Xi Jinping, surveillance has been heightened ever more through social media and monitoring apps, and the country now also has an extensive system of cameras that interface with facial-recognition software.  The logical effect is to make people more cautious about the information they share, which confounds the government’s ability to rely on its monitoring of them to manage social unrest.

When the virus began to appear, it also seems likely, based on Tufekci’s description of events, that local authorities had incentives to downplay the ominous news, and in so doing enabled its spread.  She points to Xi’s slow response to the outbreak as evidence, writing:

It’s hard to imagine that a leader of Xi’s experience would be so lax as to let the disease spread freely for almost two months, only to turn around and shut the whole country down practically overnight [. . .] If people are too afraid to talk, and if punishing people for “rumors” becomes the norm, a doctor punished for spreading news of a disease in one province becomes just another day, rather than an indication of impending crisis.

Tufekci notes that it’s difficult to know with certainty how events have played out in China, but the dynamics she outlines are persuasive.  The coming months should involve a continued close look at how Chinese authoritarianism has led to a direct threat to the health and livelihood of the rest of the global community.

Even without definitive conclusions, it’s not too soon to see China as a warning sign, as our own authoritarian president shows every sign of fumbling the U.S. response to the coronavirus, threatening to add a deadly new dimension to his reign of incompetence.  Many observers were rightly horrified by his press conference yesterday; coming on the heels of bountiful evidence that he is less worried about Americans dying than about the stock market drying up and costing him re-election, his appearance provided further evidence that he’s not up to the task of protecting the United States, either mentally or morally.  

And just as the Chinese effort seems undermined by the unwillingness of those lower in the state hierarchy to pass bad news on to their superiors, the president has spent the last three years replacing competence with loyalty in the U.S. government, prizing denial and disinformation over facts.  It seems well within the realm of possibility that he has now surrounded himself sufficiently with an apparatus of personnel and information-gathering that ensures he will only hear what he wants to as he deals with the first true crisis of his presidency.

It also seems quite possible that he will resort to authoritarian solutions to the challenge, both out of personal inclination and because the intelligence and prior planning needed to deal with this crisis are wholly beyond the man.  At a minimum, he will surely use this “viral invasion” to double down on his lies that America needs to cut itself off from the world, when the real lesson is that his idea of defending America’s borders, through physical walls, destroying alliances, and cruelty to immigrants (including crowding them into camps where they are more vulnerable to communicable diseases) bears no relationship to what protecting the United States actually looks like.  As many have noted, a global pandemic can only be addressed by global cooperation; in the face of this, the radical nationalism that the president advocates begins to appear even more cut off from reality, even outright delusional, and promoting American weakness, not strength.

Boo to Bloomberg

As he’s moved up the polls and made his first debate appearances, I’ve been catching up on my Michael Bloomberg reading.  I’ve been deeply skeptical from the get-go at the spectacle of a billionaire trying to buy the Democratic presidential nomination, and getting better acquainted with the details of his past and candidacy has only highlighted how obscene and dangerous his nomination would be.  The Washington Post has an in-depth report on the long history of sexual harassment of women at the business he founded, while his derogatory remarks about trans people and minorities have been widely reported.  Then there’s his stop and frisk policy as New York City mayor, the very archetype of a racist approach to policing.

If you’re wondering how Bloomberg came to anoint himself the savior of the Democratic Party and not get laughed off the virtual public square, I highly recommend this New York Times deep-dive on the power and influence he’s developed in politics through careful deployment of money in exchange for tacit loyalty from politicians and others throughout the country.  This has left him with a great deal of credibility in the eyes of many who have received his largesse or agree with the good works it has done.

The most trenchant arguments against his candidacy, though, center on his billionaire status and authoritarian instincts.  David Dayen’s take at The American Prospect hits both these points; the following is a powerful summation of what he says it would mean for Democrats to nominate Bloomberg to challenge Donald Trump:

I think it’s a tragic mistake. A plutocrat-on-plutocrat election will just further subvert our already fragile democracy. It will show that nothing matters in a democracy if you have enough money. It will take every comment that Democrats said about the GOP being seduced by Trump and boomerang it back in their faces. It is an act of pure desperation that will alienate giant swathes of the country and put a For Sale sign on democracy, perhaps permanently.

Similarly, Greg Sargent hones in on the contest between Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders to explore the specific damage the former’s vast financial resources can inflict on American democracy.  He notes how millions of people have given average donations of $18 to the Sanders campaign, allowing him to run entirely on people power, and asks:

What message will it send if Democrats allow this new model to be snuffed out under an avalanche of one billionaire’s spending from his plutocratic fortune?  What message will this send to the millions of people who have scraped to do their part against Trump by donating small sums not just to Sanders but also to the other Democrats?

Framing the fight against Bloomberg’s intrusion into the race as not just Bloomberg versus a particular candidate, but effectively against the collective voice of all the supporters of a candidate, helps clarify the stakes.  Bloomberg appeals to many Democrats as a deep-pocketed savior, problematically viewing him as “our Trump.”  Yet the idea that Americans need another plutocrat to defend them represents a debased rather than realistic vision of both the Democratic Party and American democracy.  In a very real sense, the oligarchy and concentration of wealth that so many Democrats identify as a mortal threat to this country are coming directly for the Democratic Party itself in the form of Michael Bloomberg, a man ready to resolve the party’s long-running struggle between working people and the wealthy in favor of the latter.

The challenge Bloomberg presents can be posed as a question of faith — the faith that Americans have in each other, their collective voice, and their capacity to forge their own future.  Do we believe we can defend ourselves, or have we given up hope?  Do we believe that the nation can be transformed into a land of equals, or do we believe it’s time to accept that the public square and economy have been taken over by the wealthiest among us? Do we trust each other to move the country into a future that will benefit all?

President's Lies About Russian 2020 Election Interference Require Full-on Debunking by Democrats

The cascade of offenses against our democracy and our collective security can feel overwhelming, but the stories last week about Russian efforts to double down on their efforts in 2016 and interfere in the 2020 election should be getting every American’s attention.  This is not simply because our leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, have a responsibility to put a stop to this attack, but because the president is already lying about the Russian offensive, just as he did in the wake of Russia’s 2016 sabotage.

It has gone on for so long that it can be hard to see the situation with fresh eyes, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying.  When the U.S. intelligence community warns that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to support him, and Donald Trump denies this, everyone who believes in our right to choose the leaders we want should understand that the president is simply lying.  He has no sources of information apart from our national intelligence agencies.  If he did, he would make them known, to strengthen his case, but he does not.  Beyond this, the president’s indifference to Russian interference, even for the moment granting him his belief that it’s not actually for his benefit, in itself is a failure to protect the U.S. from a foreign attack.

The New York Times reports that the president was angered by the fact that Democrats were briefed on the intelligence community’s assessment of the interference intended to benefit him, but you will search in vain for reports of his similar anger at the Russians for attempting to undermine U.S. elections in the first place.  The president apparently is upset that the Democrats have been told this information because he worries they will use it against him for partisan advantage.  This again betrays the president’s complete lack of understanding of what it means to actually be an American president, not just a Republican one.  An American president would find Russian support of his presidency obscene and in need of rebuffing; this president, though, prefers to simply persuade the American people that no such support exists, and to do nothing about receiving its benefits. In furtherance of this strategy, he has already dismissed the acting director of intelligence he holds responsible for publicizing Russia’s support of his campaign, and has replaced him with a lackey who has apparently been charged with defending the president’s political interests over U.S. national security: a disturbing turn toward converting the U.S. intelligence apparatus into a partisan weapon.

Not only has the president lied about what he knows regarding Russia’s ongoing campaign to re-elect him, he claims that Russia actually wants Bernie Sanders to be president.  Yet it has also been reported that the Russians are interfering in the Democratic primary and appear to support the Sanders’ candidacy: information which Donald Trump has clearly been briefed on.  This Democratic Party effort may indeed be part of Russia’s attempt to undermine our faith in our electoral system more generally, but it is clearly not at odds with Russia’s effort to re-elect Trump, as they would not be alone in viewing Sanders as a weak candidate against him.  But rather than act to foil and deter Russia’s interference in our elections, including the Democratic primary, Trump is already using the sabotage campaign to his personal advantage: he tells us it is indeed ongoing, takes no responsibility to stop it, and uses it as a partisan weapon to slander Sanders.  I don’t see how you can look at these facts and not conclude that the president is effectively colluding with the Russian scheme against our election on his behalf, by choosing to distort the ends of the Russian interference in the Democratic primary rather than call it out as a hostile act against the United States that he has a responsibility to stop.  In a similar vein, his denial of the Russian efforts on his behalf — again, based on absolutely no evidence — mean that he is effectively colluding with their effort on behalf of him.  

The true horror and absurdity of this moment come into full focus when we recall the events of the past four years, with which this latest information provides a dark continuity.  The president is doing the same thing he did in the 2016 election and its aftermath, when he reaped the benefits of Russian electoral interference while denying that such interference existed (and this is setting aside the extensive evidence of explicit collusion between his campaign and the Russian government).  And since that election, we’ve witnessed a president curiously obsequious to Vladimir Putin, mysteriously subordinating vital aspects of American foreign policy to Russian interests.

As in the past, the president lies about Russia’s role with support from the broader GOP.  Tellingly, the evidence Republican officials cite of Trump’s allegedly tough stance against Moscow is laughable, only serving to disprove their point.  Defending Trump, Representative Chris Stewart spoke of how the president has strengthened NATO and supplied anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.  For anyone to believe that Trump has been strengthening NATO, and not trying to tear it down since the day he took office, is too absurd to contemplate.  And as for his commitment to defending Ukraine?  I seem to recall an impeachment about how he tried to extort that country, withholding vital military aid even while Ukrainian soldiers were dying in their conflict with Russia and Russia-backed separatists.  

So as Republican elected officials sign on to Trump’s lies about Russia’s role, the fact that the president is now purging the intelligence community to ensure that further information about Russia’s activities on his behalf is not made public or known to Democrats is not simply chilling, but a fact that in itself needs to be called to account beyond the fact of Russia’s attack on our elections.  In doing so, the president is seeking to formalize his own lies about Russia’s role, again abetting that attack rather than defending America against it.

At this point, the House Democrats’ game plan for running the 2020 election by highlighting health care, jobs, and corruption seems to have run into the wood chipper of the hard facts of the president’s betrayal of this country.  When America is attacked, the president’s job as commander in chief is to defend it, not to give the attackers a pass because he thinks they’re on his side.  For the Democrats to ignore the overriding primacy of protecting our elections is to exist in a sort of fantasyland.  A foreign campaign to rig the 2020 election, supported by the president, is not something that they can simply ignore, as if ignoring it will somehow make it go away or allow them to set the agenda of the 2020 election.  They act as if they can’t do anything about it, yet Trump clearly fears exposure — that’s why he keeps lying about what Russia is doing, even as he seeks to benefit from it.

This isn’t to say that the Democrats can’t or shouldn’t also advocate for their positive agenda.  Indeed, it’s crazy to me how they don’t see how the president’s profound abdication of duty on this central issue — defending our elections — completely dovetails with the issues they say they want to run on.  If the president can’t be trusted to defend our elections, how can he be trusted to defend people’s health care or jobs?  And isn’t enabling and embracing a foreign attack based on his selfish personal interest the ultimate example of corruption?

Indeed, we are at our current perilous point in part because the Democrats have held back in two major respects.  First, they have refrained from the necessary demonization and denunciations of Russia that Putin’s offenses demand.  Election sabotage is not something we just have to get used to; it’s something we have to put an end to.  Crush Russian with economic sanctions; arm their enemies; arrest any Russians involved with the election tampering who make the mistake of leaving Russian territory.  And last but not least, enact a long-term strategy that undermines Putin’s authoritarian state and gives the Russian people a shot at life in a democracy.

Given that the Russians are meddling in the Democratic primaries on Bernie Sanders’ behalf, the Democrats also have no political choice but to emphasize that they view Russia as engaged in an attack on the U.S. that must be repelled and defeated.  Otherwise, we will surely see Donald Trump flip the script, and accuse Bernie of being the one who is colluding with the Russians, while asserting that he’s the true defender of America (in fact, in the few hours since I started writing this article, I now see that Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, is also using the reports of Russia’s interference on Bernie Sanders’ behalf as demonstrating Sanders’ sympathy for Russia, leading me to believe we’ll be seeing much more of this tactic. In light of this, Sanders would be well advised to take the advice of former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, who writes today that “If Bernie is the nominee, he needs to DEMAND, vocally and repeatedly, that the IC thoroughly investigate all Russian efforts to boost his campaign, provide him with regular updates, and for Trump to immediately take steps to ensure election security.” Rangappa argues that this is the right thing to do, forms a sharp contrast with the president’s behavior, and is a prophylactic against the slurs that will come from the Trump campaign).  Similarly, I don’t see how any Democratic presidential candidate can be considered credible without a concrete plan to end Russian election interference once and for all.  This simply can’t be permitted to go on.  It may not be war in the classic sense of a violent conflict, but the use of sophisticated misinformation efforts to hack our democracy is nonetheless an attack on our political system and our society.

Second, despite having impeached Trump for abuse of power, Democrats have shied away from the assertion that is staring us in the face: that this president has actively betrayed the United States by making himself party to an attack by a hostile foreign power.  I understand the impulse to avoid Trump-like incendiary language and a general desire to avoid exacerbating the incivility that he has fueled; yet our inability to call something by its right name can be crippling, and that increasingly feels like the case regarding Trump’s unwillingness to defend the United States against foreign attack.

Re-Establishing Rule of Law Will Require Maximum Transparency From Democrats

As we look forward to months of a hard-fought Democratic primary campaign accompanied by escalating authoritarianism from the president and his compromised party — including, crucially, attempts by Trump and his lackeys to undermine both the Democratic primary and subvert the 2020 election — it might feel premature to talk too much about what stance Democrats should take towards the legacy of corruption, crime, and treason they would inherit should they win back the White House.  But this question is far more than an abstract intellectual exercise, since how Democrats answer it will shape the nature of the campaign and their prospects for victory.  Beyond this, it will give form to an equally crucial struggle: how to govern in a way that rebuilds our collective faith in democracy while also working to disrupt, degrade, and destroy the Trumpist movement that has brought us so close to the brink of an American-style authoritarianism.

Trump’s post-acquittal behavior has demonstrated the centrality of undermining the impartial administration of justice to his authoritarian aims.  Since the Senate vote, the president’s highest priority has been to seek to punish those whom he considers his enemies; he has fired witnesses who responded to subpoenas (Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, sad-sack EU Ambassador Sondland), called for investigations of opponents, and supercharged efforts to protects his allies from ongoing legal actions (Roger Stone, Michael Flynn).  Punishing enemies and protecting friends by abusing the law is deeply corrupt, as it turns the law into a tool of partisan power rather than an instrument of justice.  For a strongman-type like Trump, though, using the law in this manner is simply common sense — if you can do this to your advantage and no one can stop you, it’s irresistible to try to exact vengeance and consolidate power.

Turning the Department of Justice into an enforcer of presidential vendettas and mercies will inevitably corrode any broad public sense that the legal system can be trusted.  If government officials can drum up false charges against some of the most powerful people in America, then how would we ever know whether lesser cases didn’t involve similar corruption or bias?  Why wouldn’t U.S. attorneys around the nation learn the lesson that to get ahead, the path lies in targeting local Democratic politicians on false charges, and deciding not to pursue allegations against Republican allies of the president?

So Trump’s attempts to make the Department of Justice into a partisan weapon are the tip of the spear in destroying the rule of law in our country.  But it’s not just in terms of directly subverting the administration of justice, via self-serving decisions to investigate or prosecute; it also destroys the rule of law by undermining public faith that it can ever trust its government to administer justice fairly and impartially more generally.  In a corrosive and depressing fashion, the logical conclusion most people would reach after a sustained period of such abuses is one sadly identical to that of the president: that the law is merely a tool that the powerful use to abuse their enemies and the less powerful.

Meanwhile, alongside this politicized attempt to hollow out the idea of who is guilty and who is innocent, there are countless pieces of evidence that the president and his cabinet have engaged in all manner of corrupt, illegal behavior, from the president’s endless grifting of taxpayers to the more mundane money-making of lesser lights like Rick Perry and Elaine Chao.  This behavior of course intersects with the president’s efforts to corrupt justice in a crucial way, in that he and his cronies are able to break the law in plain sight without fear of a politicized Justice Department taking any legal action.

All the major Democratic presidential candidates appear committed to following the rule of law should they be elected; we would expect them not to use the Justice Department as a political weapon and to respect the idea that the law applies to all equally, and to preside over administrations that aim to act in a non-criminal manner.  Yet a commitment to follow the rule of law is not the same as the need to restore the rule of law following the corruptions of the Trump administration.  A strong case can be made that it will in fact not be possible to follow the rule of law without a proper accounting and undoing of the damage the Trump administration has inflicted on it.  For example, if the Trump administration has corruptly instigated or subverted investigations, a Democratic administration could not simply pick up the threads and continue as before, since this would mean becoming complicit in and sustaining the very corruption they had pledged to end.  Likewise, allowing Trump and his minions to evade consequences for their rampant criminality would perpetuate the current administration’s contempt for the law.  Allowing crimes to go unpunished means that they would be repeated; for Republicans, and even Democrats, would have learned the lesson that any presidential crimes are permitted, since they will always be forgiven in the name of moving on.

Given all this, you will not be surprised when I say that it’s essential that a Democratic president act decisively both to clean up the Department of Justice and ensure that Trump administration crimes face proper scrutiny and punishment.  You may be surprised, though, when I also say that in practice this will likely be much, much harder than it sounds in theory.

As a real-world reference, let’s start with the criticism Senator Elizabeth Warren has received in the last week for reiterating, in the context of Bill Barr’s interference in Justice Department investigations and sentencing decisions, that as president she would “propose an independent DOJ task force to investigate crimes by Trump administration officials.”  Warren made this point in the course of identifying the president’s abuse of Justice Department investigations as an authoritarian threat that needs to be rolled back not just in the next administration, but in the here and now, via congressional action.  The general critique of her position is that this sort of task force would resume the same illicit practices as the Trump administration, using the Department of Justice to wage war on partisan enemies.

Lawfare’s Susan Hennessy tweeted a brief but nuanced critique of Warren’s proposal, writing that “Presidential candidates should NOT be pledging to investigate Trump, or any political opponent or any other specific person, if elected. We need to restore norms of DOJ independence. This erodes them further.”  Hennessy also, importantly, notes that it is acceptable for Warren to call on Congress to investigate Trump, suggesting that Democrats in Congress would be fine to do so in a Warren presidency as well; her concern is with abuse of the administration of justice by the executive branch.  While agreeing with Warren’s anti-corruption focus in general, she sees Warren’s pledge of a specific investigation as a red flag, and suggests (in the funhouse way of Twitter, in response to a question from NPR’s “Wait Wait. . .  Don’t Tell Me” Host Peter Sagal) an alternate approach for Warren to take:

I think the right answer is "I will appoint a qualified Attorney General who upholds the rule of law and the impartial administration of justice. I will trust his or her judgment regarding appropriate investigative and prosecutorial decisions.  As president I would set enforcement priorities, including addressing political corruption and white collar crime.  That said, it is inappropriate for any candidate to comment on individual investigations and shameful President Trump doesn't share this core commitment."

I agree 100% with Hennessy’s wish to avoid a politicized justice process, and have come around to thinking that her critique of Warren’s task force idea is warranted; yet the practical and political reality is that a Democratic president would play a decisive role in what approach to take to the Trump’s administration’s criminality, no matter the distance the new president tries to establish.  If a president set political corruption as a priority, and the AG proceeded to undo Trump’s corrupt practices, would there be any doubt that this is what the president also wanted?  Similarly, if a new president set political corruption as a priority, and the Justice Department proceeded to indict members of the Trump administration for their crimes, there would unavoidably be a sense that the president had set this course by his or her prioritization of political corruption.

Of course, I’m being a bit loose with my language when I say “there will inevitably be a sense” of this politicization.  Who, after all, will be doing this sensing?  On the one hand, millions of Americans who despise Trump would cheer such cleaning of house, inevitably seeing it as a sort of payback against Trump, no matter how justified the investigations or charges.  Simultaneously, Republicans would waste no time claiming that any investigations or charges against Trump officials were politically motivated — after all, why not make lemonades out of lemons and argue that Democrats are now no better than Trump?

Re-establishing a government that enforces the law impartially in the name of justice for all Americans may be the single greatest challenge for a new administration.  This encompasses everything from protecting our elections from foreign interference to making sure the president doesn’t use DOJ investigations to kneecap political rivals.  But just as the option of simply turning the page on Trump administration lawlessness means to condone and perpetuate it, what might seem like the righteous option of righting Trump’s perversion of the law and punishing his criminality carries inevitable risks of appearing as corrupt as he was, even if this fictional bias is cheered by partisan Democrats and hypocritically hyped by the GOP.

In other words, even as the Democrats need to do the right thing for the country and undo Trump administration corruption, this very corruption has created a presumption of biased or politically motivated behavior that a Democratic president will not be able to entirely evade.  There is no getting around the fact that widespread criminality on the part of Trump, supported by the congressional GOP, means that the Democrats face a fairly treacherous path forward.  Indeed, I’ve come to believe that there is no good path forward, only less bad ones.  Many Republicans and others will inevitably view a Democratic commitment to the rule of law as a naked partisan play, their capacity to believe the words of the other party undermined by how thoroughly Donald Trump has poisoned our collective assumptions about the motives of a president, and the vast capacity for abuse of power he has displayed.  The irony is depressing: when following the rule of law leads to indictments of criminal members of the Trump administration, the Republicans will attempt to cast this very adherence to justice as corruption, even when they know better.  Cleaning up corruption will itself be accused of being corrupt.

In light of this compromised terrain, it seems that in addition to foregrounding an unswerving commitment to the rule of law, the Democratic presidential candidate should publicly articulate the contradictions and dangers involved in cleaning up the mess Trump leaves behind, as a way of defusing some of the inevitable gaslighting by the GOP, and of signaling to Democrats that the order of the day is justice, not payback.  He or she should clearly state why it’s important to undo the corruption and punish the criminality of the Trump administration, but also clearly acknowledge the dangers of this situation, and pledge a commitment to non-partisan justice.  Even if this doesn’t stop Republican officials from bad faith accusations of bias, such transparency will help the public reach their own conclusions.

At the same time, both the new president and Democrats in Congress would do well to pair investigations and charges against members of the Trump administration with new laws that would help prevent such corruption in the future, such as around increased transparency on the part of the White House and cabinet members.  Legislation that requires greater openness by the new administration would demonstrate that the Democrats are serious about preventing a recurrence of the abuses of the Trump administration, even if it constrains their own power.  In other words, rhetoric and action must work toward a corruption-free future, which will help defuse accusations that everything is just a matter of partisan payback. Faced with the wreckage of the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, Democrats need to do everything they can to undo the damage without being contaminated by it.

Sympathy for the Devils

To paraphrase convicted Illinois ex-governor Rod Blagojevich: Today’s pardon travesty is fucking golden — for anyone who wants to beat Trump in 2020.  It would be difficult for the president’s most dedicated enemies to come up with a more damning sleazeball two-fer than Blagojevich and Michael Milken, the junk bond king who stuck a shiv in the American financial system back in the 1980’s.  These guys are cartoon-level bad guys whose offenses are easily understood by the public and constituted direct assaults on key aspects of American society.  In attempting to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder when it became vacant following Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, Blagojevich defiled his office and put himself at odds with the interest of all Americans, of all parties, when he essentially worked to cheat Illinois’ citizens of fair representation and befoul the Senate with a criminal who paid his way to be there.  And Milken, who was convicted in 1990 on counts including securities and mail fraud, is an infamous avatar of financial abuses and 80’s greed, a man who holds the rare honor of symbolizing in the public mind the corruption of an entire decade.

Today’s other pardons are likewise shitty affairs, and again share the common thread of having been recommended to the president by a motley crew of Fox television personalities, celebrities, and acquaintances.  There’s Bernie Kerik, the former chief of the New York Police Department, who was convicted of tax fraud; Edward DeBartolo, Jr., convicted in connection with a corruption case against a Louisiana governor; and David Safavian, convicted in connection with the Jack Abramoff scandal.  For kicks, Trump also pardoned Angela Stanton, described by the Washington Post as “an author who served a six-month home sentence for her role in a stolen vehicle ring.” Hey, what’s a little grand theft auto among friends?

And so our president, by taking pity on an absurd and undeserving roster of criminals, infamous and anonymous alike, has managed to shine a spotlight on his own unrepentant criminality.  Beyond the sheer fact of his sympathy for the devils among us and disregard for the Justice Department’s long official list of people who might credibly deserve pardons and commutations, Trump clearly has a fondness for pardoning crimes of which he and his current administration are surely guilty.  Does he see a kindred soul in the foul-mouthed Rod Blagojevich, a man so stupid and crass that he thought he could get away with actually selling a Senate seat? Why, I believe he does!  Do Bernie Kerik’s travails for the crime of tax fraud strike a sympathetic chord in the president’s otherwise-unmusical heart?  Again, yes!  And the Washington Post doesn’t pull any punches in suggesting the president may be establishing the basis for further pardons closer to home, noting that, “The pardons and commutations focus on the type of corruption and lying charges his associates were convicted of as part of the Russia investigation, once again raising the question of whether he will pardon former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime adviser and friend Roger Stone.” There is no thought of other people, always only himself and how to evade responsibility.

The president’s mumble-mouthed defense of these pardons, and the parallel nonsense spouted by those who advocated for them, demonstrate that all are simply getting away with what they can without feeling any need to justify themselves beyond abusing the prerogatives of power and access.  When Trump told reporters in reference to Blagojevich, “That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence, in my opinion,” you can’t miss the sheer empty nonsense of the pronouncement (though the armchair psychoanalyst can’t help hesitating over that word “powerful,” and reading into it the president’s own primordial fear of a similar punishment that awaits him should justice actually win the day).  Likewise, it’s hard not to laugh out loud at a Trump supplicant’s explanation for why he lobbied to pardon Blagojevich: “It was just so glaring that it was a political case.” Yes, indeed. Blagojevich’s attempt to defraud the American people of a Senate seat was indeed undeniably political. 

If Donald Trump’s latest round of pardons for undeserving criminals doesn’t cheer Democrats and others who want the president defeated in 2020, I really don’t know what will.  With a few grandiose strokes of a pen, he has self-identified as the best friend the criminal element could ever want.  His pardons are exactly those that a criminal himself would make — mercy for the unrepentant and well-connected, and pitiless disregard for the wrongly convicted and the truly deserving.  The president may be acting more lawlessly by the day, but when his overreaching is so reckless, so easily grasped by ordinary Americans, it becomes another weapon in the arsenal that will defeat him and the GOP come November.

The Democrats' Post-Impeachment Strategy Is a Fiasco in the Making

The best single analysis of the post-impeachment state of political play I’ve seen so far is Brian Beutler’s over at Crooked.com.  There are three big points I want to flag.  First, Beutler describes how the president’s post-acquittal actions have centered on enhancing Donald Trump’s ability to screw with the 2020 elections, via giving Attorney General William Barr sign-off on investigations of presidential candidates, creating a channel for Rudy Giuiliani to funnel dirt and propaganda to the AG, and Barr taking the reins of all legal matters relating to the president.  The second is that Trump’s campaign strategy for 2020, in addition to using a corrupted Justice Department to slander Democratic presidential candidates, is to demoralize his opposition as much as to energize his base; this includes a “multibillion dollar propaganda machine” documented in The Atlantic.  And third, he sketches out how Democratic politicians can energize voters by the basic act of fighting back and defying Donald Trump as he pursues his reign of lawlessness.

Beutler captures major dimensions of America’s deepening political crisis, but I’ve been mulling over a further aspect that makes it so much worse: the apparent inability of much of the Democratic Party to recognize the crisis for what it is.  While impeachment was still ongoing, I was struck by how so many Democratic politicians basically fetishized impeachment as the sole means to fight back against the president.  This was despite the fact that pretty much every single one of them knew that impeachment would not end up removing the president, and would likelier than not unleash further depredations.

Well, unleashed he is: and the fact that congressional Democrats clearly had no plan in place to counter his rapid moves towards greater authoritarian control over the government — whether it was his rapid firing of officials who had responded to subpoenas issued by Congress or his Attorney General’s moves to turn the DOJ into a tool of partisan retribution — may be the greatest strategic blunder yet from a party that has made many of them during the course of this frightening administration.

I am not saying that the Democrats could have stopped these moves; they likely could have not.  But there is a world of difference between the world of holy hell they should have raised, and simply covering their eyes at Trump’s moves. Instead, in the week and a half since the acquittal vote, by backing down from further confrontation, they’ve allowed the president to frame impeachment as a Democratic failure and a presidential victory.

Today, my last vestiges of hope that I was missing something, and that House Democrats were actually preparing to unleash a wave of subpoenas and new investigations against this White House, were dashed away by news that the new plan is indeed to retreat from confrontation with this president.  Amazingly, they have decided not to subpoena former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is widely believed to possess information that baldly contradicts the president’s cover story about his Ukraine extortion plot.  Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership have decided that the way to beat Trump and the GOP in 2020 is to focus on jobs, corruption in Washington, and health care:

[J]ust as they did before the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats appear to have decided that focusing on Mr. Trump’s near-daily stream of norm-shattering words and deeds only elevates him, while alienating the swing voters they need to maintain their hold on the House and have a chance at winning the Senate.

Given that the House has already taken the most powerful step a Congress can take to hold a chief executive accountable — impeachment — Democrats reason that there is little more they can do. Some say Mr. Trump brings enough attention to his conduct all on his own.

I happily concede that there is more than one possible way to wage the 2020 campaign, and that the 2018 template shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.  But in 2018, it was clear as day that the Blue Wave was driven by huge amounts of revulsion against this unfit president as much as by the appeal of Democratic health and jobs plans. The idea that the president’s unfitness for office should not be a central part of an argument for why citizens should vote to remove him simply makes no sense - particularly when the new strategy means avoiding the very tactics, like aggressive, escalated investigations, that can bring that unfitness into the clearest view possible.

Particularly unnerving is the inclusion of cleaning up corruption in Washington as one of the three pillars of the Democrats’ “For the People” agenda.  What more pressing corruption does the nation face than the destruction of the rule of law by the president?  When the poster child for corruption is in the White House, it makes no sense not to make him central to the Democrats’ case.

But another enormous fallacy is hiding in plain view.  House and Senate Democrats would have us believe that their highest priority is to be re-elected in order to stop Trump, but this isn’t actually true.  The way to stop Trump is to elect a Democratic president in 2020.  In the face of Trump’s openly-conducted effort to subvert the 2020 election, the constitutional responsibility and political priority of House Democrats in particular are identical: to investigate, publicize, and work to stop the president’s lawlessness.  Claiming that election in 2020 is their highest priority is an abdication of their oaths of office, and speaks to an unresolved divergence over how Democrats might best win the presidency versus win control of Congress.

In Beutler’s analysis, he draws a straight line from the demoralization many Democrats are feeling to the need for Democratic politicians to fight Trump as a way of keeping spirits up.  After all, if Democratic politicians can’t be bothered to fight Trump, what sort of message does this send to the Democratic base, or undecided voters?  If elected Democrats act like directing the Attorney General against the president’s enemies isn’t worth making a big fuss about, this telegraphs not only to their own party faithful but to potential converts to the anti-Trump cause that what the president is doing is normal.  The president is not in fact self-indicting or bringing sufficient attention all on his own: the Democrats also need to bring all the attention and investigatory powers they can to exposing the details and extent of his authoritarian behavior.

The Democrats’ screwball decision to volte-face and pretend impeachment never happened also retroactively casts impeachment in an unflattering and futile light.  If the claim was that Trump needed to be removed from office because he was a mortal threat to the republic, then what to make of the fact that they are no longer pressing that claim?  Were they wrong?  Is he no longer such a threat?  Of course not — so why act in a way that undercuts their previous willingness to decisively confront this president?

This willingness to allow the president to essentially control the narrative of what impeachment means also throws into doubt the idea that the Democrats’ real plan was to put Republican senators on the record for their support of the president’s unconstitutional behavior.  Why are they acting like impeachment didn’t achieve what they wanted when they knew in the first place it wouldn’t remove him, and that it did in fact taint 52 GOP senators with an indefensible vote?  If it was bad for GOP senators to vote to acquit him, then why would it be bad to force them to continue to defend behavior that is arguably worse than what he was impeached for?  Why take off the spotlight when the GOP is arguably on the ropes in terms of the damage being done to the party via its unstinting support for this unfit president?

The president plotted, and continues to plot, to rig the 2020 election.  This is a mortal offense against our democracy, and throws into doubt the ability of Americans to vote him out of office in the coming election.  In light of this, the highest priority of Democrats should be to document and highlight his war on American democracy, and to show the American people that no issue is more important.  Health care, corruption, jobs: these are all meaningless if we can’t trust in a free and fair election in November.

First, Immigrants Were the Enemy. Now, U.S. Cities and States Are.

The Trump administration plans to deploy a hundred members of the Border Patrol’s BORTAC tactical teams to assist ICE agents with arrests of undocumented immigrants in the United States, including in sanctuary cities.  Officials say these personnel are being deployed to make up for challenges ICE faces due to the lack of cooperation of sanctuary cities, but the New York Times notes that “immigration agents in cities are enforcing civil infractions rather than criminal ones. They are not allowed to forcibly enter properties in order to make arrests, and the presence of BORTAC agents, while helpful in boosting the number of agents on the ground, may prove most useful for the visual message it sends.”

It would be naive at this point to think this “visual message” is not only meant to intimidate immigrants, but the cities and their citizens who oppose the Trump administration’s criminalization and dehumanization of the undocumented.  Last week, we learned that the administration is banning New Yorkers from an expedited re-entry program when returning to the country from abroad; officials made clear that this move was in retaliation for New York’s approval of driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, as well as for the state’s refusal to allow Homeland Security access to its DMV database.  In the quest to turn immigrants into a hated other, the Trump administrations is now embarked on a strategy to punish our own citizens and states for opposing its crackpot crackdown.  First, immigrants were the enemy; now, our fellow Americans apparently are.

This is alarming, authoritarian behavior, but it also reflects the self-defeating agenda of the right-wingers in the White House.  The sight of heavily armed law enforcement rolling up on immigrant communities might thrill his die-hard base, but most Americans will see instead the disparity between the body armor and the unarmed civilians in their path.  It’s a stupid person’s idea of strength, in the same way that Donald Trump has been described as a stupid person’s ideas of a smart person.

As Donald Trump engages in an escalating pattern of outright criminality in the wake of Republican senators’ abdication of their impeachment duties, it’s important to his survival that he divert attention away from the White House’s crime spree.  An escalated campaign against immigrants creates the false impression of crisis and escalation caused by undocumented immigrants, when in fact this newest outrage in the anti-immigrant war is ultimately a sign of the president’s fundamental weakness: that he is a man who must prey on the weak to make himself feel strong, and to distract others from his essential inadequacy to the task of being president.  In this, he is both dangerous and deeply pathetic.

Virginia Democrats Foolishly Punt on Strengthening State's Unions

Last year, Democrats took control of the legislative and executive branches in Virginia for the first time in a generation, bringing to fruition an electoral re-alignment many years in the making.  Yet despite its political power, the Democratic leadership has decided to retreat from a legislative initiative to repeal the state’s right-to-work law, which means that union employees will continue being able to join unions without paying dues — a long-standing anti-labor strategy to starve unions of funding.

As Eric Levitz writes at the Intelligencer, this decision was based on a surely-unscientific and biased survey of CEO’s in the state who pointed to a likely loss of jobs to right-to-work states, while failing to weigh the potential economic benefits of higher-paid workers who could afford more goods and services.

While this particular story involves a single state — one with its own particularly strong anti-labor history — there are warning signs for the Democratic Party at large when Virginia Democrats fail to acknowledge the importance of strengthening the labor movement.  The GOP has long seen smashing unions as key to gaining and maintaining power, despite the fact that many of the working-class voters it purports to represent have been well-served by organized labor.  Of course, Democrats across the nation have enacted their own betrayals of the labor movement over the years, including President Obama’s difficult-to-understand unwillingness to back a card-check bill early in his administration — a simple change in law that could have helped jump-start organizing by working people as the economy struggled out of a recession caused by some of the richest and most powerful economic interests in America.

What’s particularly galling to me, though, isn’t the economic stupidity of not doing everything possible to boost working people at a time of obscene inequality and stagnant wages, when strengthening the earning power of the working class would both help them and the economy at large.  It’s the fact that Democrats, even moderate, labor-skeptical types in Virginia, would still refuse to understand that the failure to court, strengthen, and support unions has helped ready us for the ongoing Trump disaster and what increasingly feels like a life-and-death struggle to stop authoritarianism from taking root in the United States.  The current president can court the support of working-class Americans in part because so many of these workers see no other power in the nation willing to fight for them.  Without a union, or a concept of labor power, they feel atomized and powerless; rather than joining together to make change, they’ve been convinced that the only way to change things is by putting a strongman in charge to bring order to what feels like a chaotic and unfair economy. 

A country with a strong labor union would be far less vulnerable to the false promises and authoritarian pretensions of a leader like Donald Trump.  Workers would see themselves as powerful, rather than in need of a crooked real estate developer to save them.  When Democrats fail to fully support working people’s economic aspirations, they self-destructively help create the conditions of their own political doom, alienating those who should be allies and degrading those allies’ ability to act as bulwarks of democracy.

Instead, we see Democrats like those in Virginia choosing the interests of CEOs over blue-collar workers.  This chillingly echoes a phenomenon that I fear we will see more of as the 2020 election ramps up — corporate America determining that it would rather accept authoritarian rule so long as it guaranties low taxes and docile labor, rather than democracy and the specter of a pro-labor Democratic president who doesn’t value money higher than human lives and happiness.  It is disheartening to see that some Virginia Democrats can’t see the larger stakes here, and would rather enable local businessmen to squeeze working people, even if the political cost is to weaken the movement to turn back the authoritarian GOP.

Crisis and Opportunity in the Post-Acquittal Political Universe

Greg Sargent has an excellent run-down of what the Democrats should specifically do to reign in Trump’s post-impeachment efforts to rig the 2020 election.  As he notes, the plot to smear Joe Biden “is still in operation today. Republicans have been running ads in Iowa that echo the fabricated narratives of Biden corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani has been meeting with former Ukrainian officials to further validate that narrative.”  He also points out that though impeachment has failed to remove the president, it has produced copious damning evidence and further avenues of inquiry regarding the president’s corrupt behavior.

This gets to a point that I’ve tried to hammer home over the past couple months: no one should confuse the impeachment effort with the larger, overriding goal of exposing and ejecting from power this president and his allies in the Republican Party.  Everyone knew that impeachment was highly unlikely to end with the president’s removal; but as I wrote a few days ago, the end of the impeachment process in no way ends our collective need to counter the malevolently anti-democratic agenda of this presidency.  In this unsettled time between acquittal and whatever new phase we’re about to enter, the Democrats would be foolish to cede the initiative to the president.  In the face of Trump trumpeting his acquittal, the Democrats need to signal that the president remains as much a danger today as he did the day before the Senate vote.  The message should be that far from being cleared, the president’s corruption now extends to the vast bulk of the Republican Party, which has become a willing accomplice to his authoritarian goals.

In this, the Democrats perversely have both the GOP and Trump on their side.  In chilling plain view, not only does the president continue to pursue his original scheme to smear Joe Biden, but the GOP is taking an active role in helping the plot along: just yesterday, we learned that two GOP senators had obtained Treasury department records of Hunter Biden’s financial information.  That they no longer see a need to hide their illicit efforts to defame political opponents is chilling, but this offers the Democrats the chance to draw a stark distinction between themselves as defenders of American democracy and the GOP’s descent into banana republic shenanigans.  

Acquittal has emboldened Trump and the GOP to escalate their movement toward anti-democratic rule, but in this they reveal their own confusion about the meaning of the impeachment process.  They are pretending that acquittal means the president is innocent of the charges against him, but the actual meaning of acquittal was to establish that Trumpian corruption now extends through the bloodstream of the GOP as a whole.  The facts remain what they were before, and new efforts to twist our government into Trump’s re-election machine reinforce what we already knew and provide fresh evidence of their unfitness to govern.  They are betting everything on enough Americans being OK with unbridled corruption and authoritarianism; in response, the Democrats must double down on our democracy, on the rule of law, on free and fair elections.

The danger of this moment is great; but just as we shouldn’t underestimate its true dimensions, we also shouldn’t underestimate the simultaneously growing vulnerability of Trump and the GOP.  Every step further they take to dismantle our democracy is one more sign of contempt for our shared American project.  The fact that many or even most in the GOP are taking Trump’s lead out of fear rather than out of any fully-articulated ideological agreement signals their cowardice, but also the underlying ad-hoc nature of this authoritarian slide.  In a substantial way, Team GOP has turned to outright opposition to our democratic norms because they know they can no longer win any other way, given this country’s demographic and ideological changes in combination with the party’s refusal to shift with the tides of history and justice.  This makes them losers on a vast, even cosmic scale; all who oppose them should cheer themselves with this fact, and spare no effort in hammering home the cowardice and weakness of a party that has given up on persuasion, debate, and majority rule.  As much as it’s trampling the constitution and engaging in corrupt activity, the GOP is also to a great degree trying to bluster and bluff its way to permanent power.

Impeachment Charade Will Help End the GOP

During the impeachment process, Democrats have at times invoked the permanent and devastating damage to the constitutional order that would result should the Senate fail to remove Donald Trump from office.  Aimed more at the broader public, as a way to convey the seriousness of the president’s offenses, than at essentially unpersuadable Republican senators, this line of argument — sorrowful, elegaic, even despairing — points up the contradiction between the depth of Trump’s crimes and the near-inevitable failure of impeachment to end his reign.

While it is true that long-term damage could well result from the precedents that Trump is setting, both in terms of his own room for maneuver and the ability of future presidents to act in similarly corrupt fashion, impeachment was an important tool for stopping him — but not the only tool.  And acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate doesn’t mean that his crimes aren’t as grave as they’ve ever been, only that the Republican Party has now made itself party to those crimes.  And just because impeachment has failed to remove him does not mean that the Democrats are to any degree discharged of their duty — political, moral, and constitutional — to fight tooth and nail to continue to expose this president’s corrupt behavior, particularly his attempts to rig the 2020 election in his favor, and to put a stop to it.  

Yes, it is undeniably sad, even tragic, that our constitutional order has failed to remove a corrupt president when backed by the lockstep support of his party in the Senate — but it is also enraging and completely unacceptable.  Donald Trump tried to use the power of the presidency to blackmail a foreign country into interfering into the 2020 election against a likely opponent, Joe Biden, and the Republican Party has determined that this is reasonable behavior for a president.  In doing so, GOP congressmen and senators have nearly universally shown the public their unfitness to hold office in our democracy.  There is no line they will not cross after this: not the president, and not his supporters in Congress.  Already, senators are talking of investigating the original whistleblower after the impeachment trial ends, and of impeaching Joe Biden for his fictional Ukraine offenses if he is ever elected president.  These are not the policies of an American political party, but of authoritarian regimes like those that exist in countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

Canny observers have made the case that the Democrats’ impeachment effort ultimately meant to put Senate Republicans on trial as much as, or more than, the president; was intended to show that they will excuse any act by Donald Trump, no matter how heinous or treasonous, and in the process set up more vulnerable members for electoral retribution in 2020.  I desperately hope that this was part of their game plan all along, because it would indicate a greater awareness of the danger our country faces than the Democratic leadership sometimes shows.

At this point, alongside continued efforts to expose and stop as much of the president’s wrongdoing as possible, Democrats should build on what impeachment has revealed about the corruption of both Trump and the GOP, and make the case to voters that the Republican Party of today bears only a superficial resemblance to the Republican Party the GOP would have us believe it to be.  Under the catalyst of Donald Trump’s morally empty leadership, the party has fully transformed into a vehicle of electoral corruption, treachery, and white nationalism that has no rightful place in American politics.  Fortunately for the Democrats, the manner in which the GOP has turned back the impeachment effort only amplifies the case that the president and his party are a menace to the nation: polls consistently show that large majorities of Americans thought there should be witnesses and evidence at the Senate trial, and most American are savvy enough to know what it means when one side think witnesses won’t do its case any good.

The congressional GOP’s wholesale fusion with the agenda of the president makes the party deeply vulnerable to further revelations of presidential wrongdoing, but we shouldn’t skip over the fundamentally chilling fact of such unwavering mass support.  As Josh Marshall reminds us in a recent effort to unpack how Trump’s dominance has come about, the fact that the whole party has more or less fallen in line with him has helped tremendously to normalize Trump’s extremism; indeed, as Marshall points out, when an entire party embraces a group of extreme positions, there are logical problems with calling them outside the mainstream (even if they objectively are).  

In a quite frightening way, this turn to authoritarianism has happened so quickly that it’s simultaneously deeply uncanny but also superficially banal.  Yet the Democrats cannot give an inch in this confrontation.  They cannot agree to any move that sets this country further towards authoritarian rule, and they must accept the reality that the GOP cannot be compromised with, only defeated and discredited.  Among other things, they need to start calling Trump-GOP authoritarianism out by name.  Its manifestations include not only attempts to rig the 2020 election, but wider efforts to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and otherwise prevent majorities from electing the representatives of their choice.  It seems undeniable that the GOP has come to the realization that it can no longer win the majority of voters anymore, and that this has led it to the logical but deeply immoral conclusion that democracy itself has become its enemy.  After all, the Republicans have lost the popular vote 5 times out of the last 6 presidential elections, and won less votes than Democrats for Senators in the last 3 elections.  It took a massive turnout in 2018, plus widespread revulsion at the Trumpian GOP, for the Democrats to re-take the House in the face of massive gerrymandering and voter suppression (even as they failed to re-take the Senate despite Democratic Senate candidates overall receiving more votes).

In other words, there is a perverse but extremely real reason why the GOP has finalized its turn to the hard right — and Democrats need to be talking about this as well.  This awful turn in our history did not come out of nowhere, and it is based on undemocratic conclusions on the part of the GOP that need to be exposed and discredited.  So while we can’t completely dismiss the sorrow of this moment, when the GOP has greenlighted and indeed made itself complicit in the president’s efforts to scam his way to re-election, we can’t confuse defeat of impeachment with defeat of American democracy. That fight is just getting started, and at the very least, millions of Americans now have a far clearer idea of the danger we face, and that defeat is not an option.

Will Trump's Hate Rallies Help Doom His Re-Election Effort?

Since even before his election, the idea that the media might normalize Donald Trump’s language and ideas has vexed many an observer.  On the one hand, the extensive and unfiltered coverage of his candidacy by CNN and other outlets mainlined literally hundreds of hours of illiberal, racist, and misogynistic discourse into the body politic; this raised the possibility that a sort of politics previously considered outside the mainstream might either numb the nation into submission, or grant fringe ideas a legitimacy through repetition by this major presidential candidate.  Both of those threats have to some extent come to pass.  Three years into his presidency, I suspect that very few opponents of Trump haven’t built up internal filters to prevent being constantly outraged by the president’s vileness; and he was elected in great part by stoking the resentment and racism of millions of Americans who responded to his nativist, white nationalist message.

But the other great normalization threat has also come to pass: the media, whether overwhelmed or looking to avoid criticism that accurate descriptions of the president are the same as anti-Trump sentiments, has repeatedly attempted to depict Trump as less offensive than he is, whether by outright omission of damning details, or by analyses and opinion pieces that impute sophisticated reasoning where there are only brute, self-serving instinct and authoritarian stratagems.

Vox’s Aaron Rupar re-visited this latter issue last week — first covering in its gory detail a Trump rally in Milwaukee, and then re-visiting the issue of de facto press suppression of the president’s extremism in light of a National Public Radio report of the same rally that essentially re-wrote its offensiveness and weirdness out of the story.  Rupar witnessed a rally in which Trump not only obsessed about lightbulbs and improperly-flushing toilets, but also praised war crimes, talked about locking up Hilary Clinton, and spoke of a former president possibly being in hell.  The NPR report of the same event, though, communicated the speech of a merely plucky president, one who “snapped back at Democrats for bringing impeachment proceedings” and was “taking on Democrats on their own territory.”  Absent from the NPR report were the details by which an ordinary American might conclude that the president was engaging in authoritarian rhetoric unfit for a democracy, or that he might even be a few cards short of a full deck.

In terms of simply ensuring that the American people are receiving accurate information about their leader, this NPR story is quite unnerving.  And though NPR in other instances has done a far better job of accurately reporting on the president’s remarks — a point NPR’s defenders were quick to make following Rupar’s critique — it is obvious that many other outlets have engaged in similar whitewashing, all feeding an inaccurate view of this president that works out in his favor.

Over at The Plum Line blog, though, Greg Sargent brings up a possibly even more disturbing point about the media impulse to soften reporting on the president for fear that accurate reporting will invite accusations of anti-Trump bias.  He observes that Trump has settled on a re-election strategy in which he will seek to “electrify” his base voters via the illiberal playbook on display in Milwaukee:

These rally performances are all about achieving that electrification. The need to do this is why he paints the opposition as illegitimate, works to deceive those parts of the country into believing his impeachment is an effort to overturn their electoral will, rages at Rep. Adam B. Schiff and his “pencil neck,” slimes urban districts as being infested with rodents.”

But Sargent sees a downside to Trump’s approach: the possibility that it might lose him more votes than it gains him:

One key question is whether Trump can supercharge those parts of the country with such tactics without activating a backlash — among young and nonwhite voters, and among the sort of suburban and educated whites who remain alienated by Trump — that overwhelms the numbers in even hyper-energized Trump country. This plainly worries Trump’s advisers, who know the base might not be enough.

And this is where the issue brought up by Rupar becomes extremely relevant, because it raises the possibility that Trump may be able to rally his base via fascistic language and spectacle while the larger public doesn’t realize this is even going on, as Sargent writes:

Press coverage that sanitizes away the wretched, hateful sides of Trump’s performances could help his appearances carry forward Trump’s mission of electrifying the base, under the radar, without clearly conveying to all those other voters — those who may not be tuning in as attentively to the 24/7 manure show that is this presidency — the truly depraved nature of what he’s dumping in their backyards.

He ends by noting that it’s not clear how widespread this disparity between coverage and full Trumpian horror show might be, but I think Sargent actually sells his excellent point a bit short.  I agree that Trump’s effort to rally his base will be paramount in the upcoming election, and that this will create a huge backlash from Americans repelled by the increasingly extreme language and positions he will deploy to get them angry and motivated to vote.  This backlash is already in great evidence all around us, from the Democratic wave that took back the House in 2018 to the huge energy apparent in the Democratic presidential primaries.  

Sargent speaks from the perspective of a journalist and media critic, but it’s important to note that the Democrats can play a major role in remedying deficiencies in coverage that might otherwise allow Trump’s authoritarian rallies to go unremarked.  We can assume that his rallies will only become more extreme and unhinged as election season gets fully under way, and that they will veer increasingly in the direction of the darkest examples we’ve seen so far, such as his imprecations of hate against Muslim members of Congress and the incitement of “Send them back” chants among the faithful.  This is a president who can no longer credibly pretend in any way to represent moderate or middle-of-the-road strands of American politics; there is no erasing the trail of racism, white nationalism, and cruelty that he has left in his wake.

For Trump, there is only forward: forward ever deeper into the cult of personality, into the lure of authoritarianism, into the realm of unbridled white power.  Of course the Democrats need to show a constructive, positive vision for the future, but they also need to render crystal-clear the vileness at the center of Trump’s approach to politics.  Turn his hate rallies into 30-second TV spots, show voters the repulsive hatred that twists the faces of his admirers, that poisons the hearts of the children brought along to these sordid gatherings, that shows attendees as members of a political death cult and not a movement fit for a democracy.

The Fight Against Trumpism Won't End With the 2020 Election

As I’ve discussed before, it’s possible for the Democrats to beat Donald Trump the wrong way in 2020.  What do I mean by the “wrong way”?  I am thinking in particular of a victory based on a political strategy, both electoral and legislative, of trying to go back to some “normal” pre-Trump time that never existed, and that fails to address the root causes that have led to the rise of Trumpism to begin with, particularly massive inequality, systematic racism, and anti-democratic aspects of American government and politics.  Such a pyrrhic victory would also involve the Democrats failing to make clear that their larger objection is not to Trump but to Trumpism, the authoritarian and white nationalist mindset that now has nearly the entire GOP in its grip.

The form of a healthy Democratic critique, and a positive alternative vision for the United States, can certainly take a range of forms — forms that we see being debated right now by the Democratic candidates for president.  Even as centrist a figure as Joe Biden is talking about fairly substantial progressive programs that would represent a move left from the Obama administration.

But as crucial as a vision for the future is for pulling ourselves clear of the cesspool of Trumpism, the Democrats would be foolish and self-defeating if they failed to offer a sustained critique and investigation of what this country has gone through during the Trump administration.  It’s been a time of massive disinformation from the heights of government; of betrayal of the people’s interest in favor of unfriendly or hostile foreign governments; of human rights abuses that have done great harm to thousands of immigrant families and individuals; of a presidency run like a crime family as Donald Trump sought to kneecap political rivals and subvert the 2020 election; of a sustained anti-democratic assault on facts and the very idea of truth.

We can allow none of this abominable history to be swept under the rug, or to let either the Trump administration or the GOP at large off the hook for their assault on American democracy.  We cannot move on, or work effectively to prevent a recurrence of these nightmarish years, without a full accounting and airing of what has happened.

It seems to me that there should be two major thrusts.  The first should target the crime and corruption of the Trump administration.  I had initially been thinking that this would primarily be done via open-ended congressional investigations, but in the last several days, Elizabeth Warren has announced plans to involve the executive branch in exposing Trump administration corruption.  According to the Boston Globe, Warren would direct “the Justice Department to appoint an independent task force to investigate corruption that took place during the Trump administration,” which would  “investigate Trump administration officials for potential violations of federal bribery and insider trading laws.” The Globe also reports that Warren says she “won’t hesitate to use her for-cause removal authority for heads of independent agencies who neglect their duties or engage in malfeasance while in office.”

This is exactly the sort of aggressive action against the Trump administration that Democrats should embrace.  They must not falter in the face of accusations that they are seeking payback or doing something unprecedented.  What is actually unprecedented is the corruption of this administration, its utter contempt for the safety and welfare of the American people, its lack of even the haziest notion of serving the public good rather than the private interest of the president and his henchmen.  This is a case where principle and political interest align for the Democrats.  

Investigations of the Trump administration’s malfeasance will undoubtedly produce a stream of revelations and evidence that will easily counter accusations that Democrats are seeking payback.  Indeed, likely cries of foul by defenders of Trump would only highlight the extent of their corruption, easily folding into a narrative that the Trump administration considered itself above the law.   The Democratic Party should use a dedication to rooting out corruption as proof of its fundamental difference from the GOP: that it believes in the rule of law, in facts, in truth, in the public interest.  The Democrats should not be afraid of being accused of playing politics, when those accusations are rooted in the basic fact that the Democrats are acting in the public interest and as a scourge to Trump administration corruption.

But beyond the need for sustained investigations that steadily expose and discredit the Trump administration and its allies, Democrats need to engage in a broader political and cultural investigation, of how our country got to this point where we teeter on the edge of being ruled by authoritarian ethno-nationalists, as if were were Turkey or Hungary and not the greatest democracy in the world.  Something has gone terribly wrong, and a public airing and discussion is badly needed.  Let both parties bring in experts and witnesses.  In the full light of day, let the Republicans make the public case for why gerrymandering is good and immigration is bad, why voter suppression is permissible, why the president should have the powers of a king, and why massive inequality in wealth is simply evidence of god’s will.  Let’s hear from people who are convinced their jobs have been stolen by immigrants and who see their status and power in American society diminishing.

But let’s also hear from African-Americans who can speak of their frustration and anger at continuing to face discrimination and state violence 150 years after slavery ended; from immigrants who help the economy hum along; from middle-class Americans in liberal cities who help build their communities and are married to immigrants and have gay children; from women whose career prospects have been derailed by sexism in the workplace; from small business owners hobbled by oligopolies like Amazon. We need to use politics to work through our differences — but not just via the conflict of elections, but by bringing the full mechanisms of governance to bear, in the form of hearings that facilitate discussion, promote facts over fear, and undermine right-wing tendencies toward dehumanization, propaganda, racism, and destructive nationalism that have been turning our politics into a zero-sum, undemocratic horror show.