One of the obvious conundrums of the Donald Trump presidency is the disparity in media presence between him and his opponents (not to mention between him and everyone else). The president’s pronouncements and actions dominate the public sphere like no politician before him. He can move the national dialogue with a single tweet, a technology that in itself has given him a communications agility we haven’t seen in the White House before.
It’s fair to say that this media dominance has contributed mightily to a deeply troubling sense among the many, many people who disapprove of his presidency that the man seems simply unstoppable. This perception is amplified by the sheer volume of bad, horrifying, and/or batshit crazy ideas that continue to slither out of the White House on a daily basis. An unspoken but broadly-shared hope that both the quantity and (lack of) quality of the presidency would lead to a rupture in his support has not been rewarded; instead, the president’s sheer persistence is in itself deeply disturbing.
Maybe I’m overstating things; maybe I’m discounting the slow slide in his poll numbers, the inevitable toll of his legislative failures on public opinion. But there are two undeniable, pernicious effects of his media dominance. The first is that the unprecedented onslaught of political sludge has inevitably weakened our ability to tell the merely godawful from the more life and death stuff. The second is that it’s encouraged a sense that we are witnessing an unstoppable political force, when what we’re actually witnessing is an unstoppable spectacle.
At this point, Donald Trump’s incompetent and terrifying handling of North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, his own apparently uninformed and deranged thoughts on nuclear weapons and war, and what we are increasingly learning about his own staff’s fears about his competence, are facts that we need to collectively identify, prioritize, consider, and act on. More than any other existential challenge of this presidency — the efforts of the Russian government to aid in his election, the possible collusion of the Trump campaign with these efforts, the president’s determination to undermine health care for millions of Americans, his insane denial of climate change and destruction of policies to combat it, his aid and comfort to right-wing extremists across the nation — the fact that a man with the self-control of a toddler and the accumulated rage of a narcissistic 71-year-old is to all appearances driving us to a nuclear confrontation with North Korea needs to be THE subject we are talking about. It is a conversation that Donald Trump simply cannot be allowed to dominate.
In the past few days, you might say that the worst fears about Trump’s mental and emotional competence are being proven well-founded. Tennessee Senator Bob Corker has gone on the record to say that not only himself, but virtually all other Republican senators, have serious concerns about the president’s "volatility." Notably, he asserted that the White House staff is in a continuous hustle to keep the president’s worst impulses in check, and that he fears that the president may be setting the country on a path to World War III. There has been a report about Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis discussing what to do if the president were to suddenly try to launch a nuclear attack, as well as Kelly’s general efforts to “physically sequester” the president, apparently as part of his initiative to bring discipline to the White House. But as The Atlantic’s David Frum argues, there are huge risks, including to democratic principles, in relying on advisors and generals to provide constraints on a president in the absence of Congress playing its proper role. We’ve also learned that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s remark that Donald Trump is a “fucking moron” was prompted by the president’s frightening and ignorant inquiries about increasing the U.S. nuclear arsenal by almost ten times its current size (questions that the president has subsequently denied asking). This is to say nothing of the man’s daily demonstrated lack of empathy or sense of shared humanity.
The true lunacy of our situation is not Donald Trump. It’s that way too many Americans are watching his reality-show presidency as if it were really a reality show; as if his demented actions aren’t already having consequences for their fellow Americans, from his incompetence in marshaling a response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, to this week’s moves to unilaterally gut Obamacare; as if the terrifying nuclear possibilities gathered around him couldn’t become reality; as if they can’t do anything to change things.
There are no easy solutions here. If there were, people would have already acted on them, and we wouldn’t be at such a perilous place. The existence of nuclear weapons, and our collective failure to abolish them, are problems that pre-date Donald Trump’s presidency. We have never fully reckoned with this genocidal power at the country’s disposal, or how it is impossible to reconcile with either democracy or any ethical way of thinking. After all, the notion that the president could theoretically wipe out another country, or even all life on earth, is a power so far beyond constitutional checks and balances as to make the Constitution null and void. We have been seeing the consequences of this for the past half century and more, as the rise of the imperial presidency has been abetted by the chief executive's control of this absolute power.
But at least the idea that a nuclear war might be caused by a deranged political leader has haunted our conscious, collective imagination from the beginning of the nuclear age, and indeed is a key part of the U.S.’s argument for why North Korea should not be allowed to have nukes. We cannot claim this is a possibility we have never imagined.
It’s predictable to the point of cliche that Donald Trump might use war to distract the country from his flailing presidency. We have seen this script before. George Bush rode 9/11 to re-election, in part by means of wars in two countries from which the U.S. to this day is unable to extract itself. As Trump continues to fail as president, his incentives to reset the political board by means of radical action will only grow stronger. And he has the power, doesn’t he? Isn’t it up to the president to defend the country by whatever means necessary? Yes, the rationalizations are there for the taking, as they've been for other presidents before him.
It’s time for the American public and its elected representatives to lay down a bright line against presidential war-making. Democrats Senator Ed Markey and Representative Ted Lieu introduced a bill back in September 2016 to constrain the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war from Congress, and this legislation should be passed. But Congress also needs to make it clear to the president that any military action against North Korea would require a declaration of war. After all, even conventional military action against a nuclear power means it can escalate to all-out nuclear war, and the Markey-Lieu legislation would be insufficient in that scenario. And in turn, the American people need to make it clear to Congress that they expect their elected officials to put the brakes on presidential belligerence. This is a situation we must all turn our attention to, sooner rather than later.
