With the right wing’s escalating attempts to pre-emptively smear and outright obstruct special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump-Russia collusion — lately, most notably and tragi-comically by debunked claims of a “secret society” within the Justice Department fomenting a coup against the president — it’s now clear that conservatives will literally seize on any tool at hand to defend the president, no matter the collateral damage to our democracy. The sheer number of bad faith actions to undermine a lawful investigative process is not only staggering in itself; it has also reached a point where no objective observer can deny that a quantitative change has occurred in the GOP’s collective attitude toward the rule of law. It seems unlikely that the party, let alone the conservative propaganda machine, will accept the results of Mueller’s investigation if it implicates the president in any sort of wrongdoing. It is not simply the “anything goes” effort that catches your attention, but the intent behind it — to defend a president for the sake of the Republican Party’s hold on power, no matter what illegal or unethical actions Donald Trump may have taken.
In the past few days, with the news of the special counsel’s interview of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and as many as 20 other White House Staff, along with The New York Times story that Donald Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller back in June, the president’s attempts to obstruct the investigation into his possible wrongdoing — which, always remember, is ALSO an investigation into the already-established Russian interference in the 2016 election — have become undeniable.
It’s difficult to imagine a more extreme scenario on which the GOP could have chosen to make a stand. We already know that collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government occurred; apart from establishing the extent of the collusion, the other main question at this point is whether Trump was aware of or involved in this effort himself. Multiple people have already been indicted by, or chosen to cooperate with, the special counsel's investigation. But in undermining and stymying an investigation that goes to the legitimacy of our electoral process, and so involves the possibility of literal crimes against our democracy — an investigation that would not only punish malefactors, but also help prevent such interference in the future — the Republican leadership is choosing party over country in the starkest possible terms. I don’t think I’m the first person to feel like he or she lacks the words to express how outrageous, frightening, and un-American it is to see one of our two major political parties essentially giving cover to an assault on our country.
Part of what has me so unsettled right now is the disparity in the forces, in terms of energy and enthusiasm, set against each other. On one side, the Republicans have literally mobilized their entire party, plus the enormous right-wing propaganda apparatus, to undermine the special counsel’s investigation. They insist unequivocally, against all evidence to the contrary, that there was no collusion, and that all is a plot to destroy the president (more on this shortly). And as I already noted, they are doing so in a way that essentially refutes the rule of law in the country. On the other side, the Democrats are, to put the best possible spin on it, scrupulously adhering to the rule of law, by deferring to and defending the Mueller investigation, and by doing what they can in Congress to make sure that the legislature’s investigations, though headed by Republicans, continue along. It is an uneven clash, in that one side says their man is not only absolutely innocent, but that there is moreover a plot by real bad actors to malign his innocence. On the other hand, the Democrats are essentially behaving as if the jury is still out on President Trump’s guilt or innocence.
But to describe the disparity like this only gets us partway to the full, horrid situation. Because it turns out that the way Republicans are working to undermine a federal investigation being conducted on behalf of the American people involves propagating a sprawling counter-narrative of conspiracy, treason, and paranoia that, believed by tens of millions of Americans, tears apart the common understanding that Americans need if we’re to actually be a country. A Deep State seeks to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, complete with secret societies and secret handshakes, and it was the Clinton campaign that conspired with the Russians.
As Jeet Heer discusses, such paranoid views, for much of American history associated only with the fringes of the political spectrum, are now embraced by the Oval Office and much of the conservative mainstream. But though Donald Trump himself may be a paranoid personality (like his increasingly obvious antecedent, Richard M. Nixon), this top-down conspiracy theorizing is less the fevered work of people who feel powerless trying to piece together the obscure machinations of power, and much more the machinations of the powerful trying to obscure the wrongdoing of those with whom they share power. In other words, it’s paranoia with a purpose, ad-hoc conspiracy theorizing that in itself constitutes a sort of conspiracy — an unacknowledged effort to spread lies to protect the guilty. Politicos and operatives deploy conspiracy theories knowing full well that the tales they are telling are, in fact, lies.
This conspiracy-mongering is doing immeasurable damage to our politics and society because it’s being communicated to, and believed by, tens of millions of credulous Americans across the country. The irony of the term “fake news” as a slander against the free press has never been greater, as an enormous chunk of the U.S. population takes as truth the most insane theories that exclude or excuse the bad acts of Trump and his ilk, and place the actual criminality (with interest!) on the president’s political opponents, and — arguably more chillingly — on the governmental agencies that administer the rule of law.
Opponents of Trump and other believers in a democratic United States make a serious error if we confuse our current situation with where we were a year or even six months ago. Though the rule of law has held thus far, the escalating flow of authoritarian propaganda from the president and his apologists has corroded the democratic understandings of literally tens of millions of our fellow Americans. While many of us have watched with growing anxiety as the president has provided daily evidence of his unfitness and animosity towards American democracy (depressingly hitting sequential new lows with the regularity of a Metamusil addict), millions of citizens have lived an opposite, if also fraught, reality. From their perspective, the last year has hardened their sense that powerful agents are out to get them, and that these same agents are out to get the president as well. Just as we’ve been growing angrier, so have they. They have seen a president not abusing the powers of his office, but doing what he needs to in order to defend himself against implacable and nefarious foes. We see a president more fully embracing an authoritarian view of his office; they see a heroic strong man acting righteously and never backing down, an infallible figure admirable in his refusal to brook limits to his power. They see the dictatorial figure they’ve been longing for but never fully realized they wanted, at least not until he edged his way into the Oval Office.
What we fail to recognize at our collective peril is that while we’ve been playing by the rules of the democratic game, the right has been working to change the game into something a lot less synched up with truth and reality, and a lot more recognizable as the sort of system you see under authoritarian governments, where there is no truth but what your leaders tell you. The attacks on the Justice Department and FBI, the idea that seditious elements of those organizations need to be purged, are a warning sign that we have crossed into extremely dangerous territory. More precisely — such widespread and coordinated attacks are the dangerous territory.
We can only do democratic battle while we still have a democracy. If the GOP is able to subvert federal law enforcement, the courts, perhaps the military — what then? Literally anything goes at that point. If the president could quash an investigation into whether the Russians attacked our elections, then there is really nothing he could not do. This is part of what feels so uncanny about our crisis. In apparently defending the president on a narrow though incredibly important point — whether or not he is implicated in collusion and obstruction of justice — the president and his party are making moves that take our government in a direction of unfettered power on all fronts, not simply in terms of being able to defend the president against what are, again, important but relatively narrow charges. From one angle, this makes sense — after all, their ultimate, if mostly unvoiced, argument is that the president can’t have done anything illegal because he is by definition above the law; this notion lends itself in turn to a limitless and unconstitutional idea of the presidency that can't be squared with an executive that exists in tension with the other branches of government.
But one increasingly has the sense that the stakes are so high for the right because this sort of authoritarian government isn’t just a necessity in fighting off the potentially annihilating suspicions around Trump, but because it’s an end in itself. As we’ve discussed before, from voter suppression to gerrymandering to delaying elections, the GOP has increasingly turned to anti-democratic tactics to hold power. Now that much of the GOP has gone all in on the Trumpian white nationalist vision of America, in which America’s move towards a minority majority is seen as an existential threat to the proper nature of the nation, an opposition to democracy is necessarily embedded in the Republican Party. After all, if white Americans will no longer be a majority in the near future, yet are considered the only legitimate Americans, then all manner of anti-majoritarian tomfoolery comes to seem justified.
People have spoken of Robert Mueller’s potential firing as a red line that Trump cannot cross. I agree — but without specific plans and consequences in mind that would take the fight to Trump, such drawing of lines is meaningless. In fact, one could argue that Trump's direction that his White House counsel fire Mueller did cross this red line, even if the order was not carried out. The GOP seems to understand this point, and so in the last few days we’ve seen attempts to muddle what happened, from arguments that Trump was simply talking out loud, to the idea that this news actually reinforces the integrity of our system since it shows that Trump wasn’t actually able to fire Mueller. But the lack of a firm response by the Democratic party, and frankly by civil society more generally, may also have sent a dangerous signal to Donald Trump that nothing will actually happen when he actually goes through with firing Mueller (and yes, I am still betting that firing is a question of when and not if).
In a sense, Trump’s failed effort to fire Mueller, while bad for the president in the eyes of some segment of the public and damning in terms of the obstruction of justice investigation, demonstrates that things are worse than we realized. Again, if the president can literally fire anyone who threatens him, then what is to stop him from using the same scorched earth tactics in all areas of governance? If it pleases the base, why not have the Justice Department investigate, prosecute, and jail Hillary Clinton? If there is no opposition to stop him, then why should he stop?
The Democratic Party can no longer pretend the country is not in a political crisis. No regular business, whether on immigration or the budget, should be conducted until the Republicans are forced to provide a definitive yes or no on a law to protect the special counsel against firing. If the GOP responds in the negative, then the highest order of business would be to put together a strategy to win the constitutional crisis that would result from such a firing. And the opposition needs to make it absolutely clear that the GOP is complicit in the point we’ve reached, that in defending a corrupt president, Republicans have allowed that corruption to eat into their moral legitimacy, and to destroy any pretense they’ve had to be a legitimate American party.
Too many Democratic politicians think that this is more or less still politics as usual. It’s not. The Republican Party would rather burn down our democracy than lose its grip on power. The GOP is attempting to change the rules away from democracy and into something dark and unaccountable. The Democrats need to change the rules as well, but in a democratic direction, to fully discredit their authoritarian opponents. The only language the right will ultimately understand is an electoral show of force — non-violent, democratic, and overwhelming. In 2018, in 2020, and beyond, we need to hit American politics with a democratic shockwave that brings in a progressive, democratic vision that imposes accountability on those who have abused their power. We need to be very clear that there can be no forgiveness for what these dark and power-mad men have threatened us with. And we all need to reckon long and hard with how we got to this point, in order to make sure we never come this close to disaster again in our lifetimes.
This may be why I found the recent “Oprah 2020” bubble so distasteful. Against an unqualified moral reprobate who took advantage of a multi-faceted decay in our democracy, the Democrats would run a contrary charismatic figure. But by placing so much hope in a single person, these people signaled that they don’t grasp the nature of our crisis, where a worship of celebrity and showmanship has helped corrupt the political process. A savior figure from the left shares something of the lazy authoritarianism that the right has embraced: it suggests that ordinary people cannot save themselves, and that they need a star to save them. This line of thought is deeply undemocratic, and weakens our collective power by implying that we are all insufficient to bring about change in society. It is a debilitating fairy tale that we tell ourselves because we are all a little scared right now, and feeling powerless.
