Yesterday, FBI agents served search warrants at the office and home of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s long-time fixer-attorney and confidant. Although the crimes under investigation are apparently unrelated to the Russia-collusion investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump’s initial response was to essentially reiterate the existence of a vast and implacable conspiracy out to get him and to revisit his recent attacks on the Mueller team. In the past 24 hours, fed by reports out of the White House as to the president’s rageholic-brooding state of mind, there’s been plenty of speculation that a presidential move against Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein could be imminent. Such an action would constitute a full descent into the brewing constitutional crisis that is, at its base, about the president’s likely criminality and his use of the tools of his office to obstruct an investigation into himself.
Since the early weeks of Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has been the position of The Hot Screen that Donald Trump must either be impeached or forced to resign. This never felt like going out on a limb, as this stance was based on more than a year’s worth of observing Donald Trump’s anti-democratic, racist, and misogynist rhetoric as he campaigned across the U.S. There were no surprises once he won the election; he immediately set to work undermining the credibility of our electoral system, claiming without a shred of evidence that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote. This is a claim that he has maintained to the present day; in fact, he renewed this line of slander against American democracy just this past week. I highlight this particular line of attack because of its intersection with yet another ground for the need to remove the president from office: his campaign’s collusion with a Russian effort to undermine and throw the election to Trump, which had at its core an identical purpose as the president’s claims that our electoral system cannot be trusted: to undermine popular faith in U.S. democracy.
I could go on, but I offer this brief retrospective for now to demonstrate the consistency of this site’s position regarding the president’s unfitness for office, to point out that the events of the last year have only provided mounting evidence of his unfitness, and to argue that the pass we have reached — at the precipice of a constitutional crisis, where he would rather decimate the rule of law than face the consequences of his own unfitness — has always been a foregone conclusion with Donald Trump. It was just a matter of time.
I remain dazed by the fact that, with Trump, the truth is so often right on the surface, even when he tries to bury it in lies or dissimulation. The one central question has always been whether citizens choose to accept or deny the hideous reality of this man. In this, he’s been a Rorschach test for the American character: do you see a con man, or do you see a leader?
The plain fact is that the president talks like a cornered criminal. Virtually every sentence out of his mouth suggests he has something to hide, and testifies to how personal interest comes above all else. To listen to his initial remarks yesterday following the Cohen raids is to hear a man who would rather burn down the rule of law than to answer for his crimes. He is either delusionally paranoid, or willing to cold-bloodedly and knowingly peddle conspiratorial theories that suggest only Donald Trump stands between a Deep State takeover and American liberty. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the latter, but who knows if there isn’t some small amount of the former mixed in? His self-interest is transparent; if the stakes weren’t so high, it would even be laughable.
But unfortunately, the stakes are as high as you can imagine. My sense has been that, after so much build-up, and events hobbling along, the true crisis will be swift and disorienting: disorienting because it’s been so long coming and is suddenly here, and because in one blow we will have gone from a world in which we still have some assurance that our laws will protect us to another framework entirely, in which that assurance seems radically in doubt.
By instinct or advice (or, less likely, by thorough consideration), the president is attacking institutions vital to our democracy to aggrandize his own power, in line with a playbook followed by autocrats in other countries. He maligns the free press; he attacks law enforcement; he claims our elections are flawed. Truth, justice, and democracy — all are in his crosshairs. But his plan, such as it is, is rough and not well thought through. Certainly in the case of the Mueller investigation, his strategy has been reactive, which is not really a strategy at all; he makes decisions that increase his problems unless he then does something else that seems to make things all right for him but actually increases his jeopardy even more.
So we’ve been pushed to the edge of crisis; but of course it’s much more complicated than just Trump making bad decisions. One other huge piece of the puzzle is that the Republican Party has by and large made itself complicit in his offenses against American democracy. In the days ahead, we will find out which GOP politicians are fully committed to Trump’s willingness to take a wrecking ball to democracy, and which ones will understand that this is a bell that can’t be unrung; that once the GOP goes full authoritarian, there’s no going back. They will either need to succeed in making sure we never have free and fair elections in this country again, or face such electoral oblivion that it will not be an exaggeration that a Republican will not be able to be elected dogcatcher in most of the U.S.
We’re also going to find out who the true leaders in the Democratic Party are: who can handle the biggest domestic crisis our country has faced at least since Watergate, and more probably since the Civil War. We will see who thinks that we can return to politics as usual after this, and who understands that this is a time to renew American democracy, such as by passing legislation that eliminates attempts to disenfranchise Americans and puts an end to partisan gerrymandering by either party.
The biggest question, though, is what most of us are about to find out about ourselves, and about our fellow citizens. Without a sudden and unlikely change of heart by Republican legislators, the final check against Donald Trump will have to be public resistance. There are widespread calls for mass demonstrations in the event of Mueller’s firing, and those are sure to be part of the necessary response. But we need to be prepared to keep the demonstrations going for a sustained period of time, and to consider actions like nation-wide strikes to keep the pressure on the political system to remove Donald Trump via impeachment or through forced resignation. We need to be prepared to collectively and creatively figure out mass, peaceful solutions to save our country. We've seen signs of how much collective power we have, from the amazing Women's Marches putting Trump's inauguration turnout to shame to a small band of Florida high schoolers reframing the gun control debate almost overnight. It heartens me to think that literally every person who attended the Women's Marches, and every one of those high schoolers, has better ideas about how to make America great than our current president.
Right now, there's a lot of talk about Trump's rage, about how everyone's worried about what he does next. This is hardly the first time that the national narrative has been framed around Trump as the sole terrifying actor who drives the national narrative and forces everyone to respond to his actions. I suggest an alternative read: that for many months, the American people, embodied by the Mueller investigation, have in fact been bearing down on Donald Trump, causing him to react in an increasingly desperate manner. I suspect we are at a pivot point when not only Trump, but the national consensus as well, turns to an awareness that it is the American people who make the decisions about where this nation goes, not a failed reality TV star who colluded and sleazed his way into the White House.
