Brian Beutler at the New Republic notes signs of a sea change in recent coverage of Donald Trump: a growing consensus that Trump is trimming the sails of his rightward tendencies, and moving to some sort of centrist politics. As Beutler effectively outlines, though, Trump’s retreat or rebuff on radical policies like the ban on Muslim immigrants or his previous statement that NATO is obsolete, need to be measured against the problematic centrism that he’s now said to occupy.
Beutler writes “It is strange, for instance, to describe the combined law enforcement policy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, economic policy of adviser Gary Cohn, and foreign policy of Trump’s Twitter feed and the military generals in his good graces as ‘centrism.’ Trump has instead taken the three-pronged fusionism of standard movement conservatism—pro-corporate economic policy, religious right-wing social policy, and hawkish foreign policy—and stripped away any pretense of concern for racial equality and inclusiveness. Describing that kind of platform as “centrist” is both inaccurate and a gift to reactionary forces in society.”
It isn’t surprising that mainstream commentators would want to believe that the crisis has abated and that our institutions have tamed Donald Trump; after all, this would suggest that there’s nothing fundamentally flawed about our politics and economy. But the election of Donald Trump is a wake-up call to all of us that our country is at a profound crossroads. We face an environmental crisis of literally civilization-threatening intensity; levels of economic despair and inequality that have helped bring to power a would-be authoritarian leader in the person of our current president; ongoing and escalating U.S. military action that is far too close in appearance to a war on Islam to ever be successful; and unaddressed structural racism that has millions of African-American citizens fearful that a routine traffic stop might turn into a death sentence. And yet, we’ve elected to power a president, and a Congress, that will not address these issues in any meaningful way, because they don’t actually think they’re problems, and who are, in fact, committed to perpetuating them.
Apart from the fact that the president has no real plans or intentions to address the most fundamental challenges we face, his moral and mental incompetence mean that we confront a whole separate set of dangers no matter what particular policies he is or isn’t working to implement. There’s an ongoing investigation into the Russian role in the last election and possible collusion between that nation’s intelligence apparatus and the Trump campaign. Donald Trump and his family apparently intend to use the presidency as a path to personal enrichment, legal or customary conflict of interest rules be damned. The president appears to be embracing reckless belligerence in place of "mainstream" foreign policy that is itself already thoroughly militarized.
And the president has already demonstrated a propensity to abuse the power of his office in frightening ways. Among other offenses, he slandered President Obama with talk of impeachable wiretapping, then instructed intelligence agencies to find evidence to fit his baseless accusations. He has also used his bully pulpit to literally bully individual citizens, a grotesque and frightening mutation of this twitter-loving chief executive. This is to say nothing of the collection of incompetents, fools, and ideologues who have unfortunately been granted the privilege of serving as members of his cabinet, and who are already showing plenty of evidence of serving private avarice, not the public good.
Let’s not be lulled into thinking that the worst is somehow behind us. We can’t let ourselves lose four years not addressing head-on the existential issues of our time. And we can’t stop working to constrain, block, and ultimately eject from office this joke of a president that the GOP has seen fit to inflict on a country that deserves, and needs, so much better.
