If we’ve learned one thing from the past three years, it’s that letting Donald Trump get away with even the most outrageous acts doesn’t make him self-impeach, it makes him stronger. When the Democrats stand by without the appropriate level of criticism or calls to action, passivity becomes validation of his authoritarian and inept ways, a signal to the American people that his behavior is not so outrageous that we need to try to do anything to stop him.
Sitting back now and simply watching Donald Trump’s murderous incompetence, twinned with likely malevolent intent, in not acting with anything resembling reasonable speed to the sickening of blue states like New York and California sends seismic shock waves almost too great to measure across American society – a message that no matter how heinous his actions, there is simply no point in trying to do anything about the president’s unfitness for office. Certainly Democratic politicians as of today exhibit little interest in expressing the adequate outrage and leveling the appropriate charges – that the president is a monster, surrounded by a gang of accomplices, all of whom are guilty of a level of negligence that should result in their being banned from public office and polite society for the rest of their days.
And to ignore the president’s established ability, via the perversities of the contemporary media ecosystem, to manipulate reality and shift blame away from himself, in favor of the idea that the truth will simply become known to Americans and that they will judge for themselves what a terrible man he is, at this point amounts to politically suicidal malpractice. The Democrats seem to be reading the polls showing a plurality of Americans support the president’s handling of the pandemic, and concluding that they had best not challenge him because of his apparent political strength, when in fact the opposite is far more likely to be true, and is morally required – that they do everything they can to communicate to the American people that the president’s disinformation campaign against even the existence of the virus, as well as his deranged and incompetent handling of the federal response, are unprecedented failures by an American president to do his duty and serve this country above his personal interests.
Instead, day by day, despite hopeful media narratives to the contrary, Donald Trump simply and predictably gets worse and worse. He threatens to undo the strict social distancing measures that his own months of inaction have made necessary. He suggests that state governors need to provide him with some benefit if they expect to receive medical supplies. He incites hatred against Chinese and Latinos by rhetoric that suggests they bear particular malicious responsibility for the spread of the coronavirus. He questions requests for ventilators from medical professionals.
We all have to fight starting far more viciously and savagely than we have until now. It’s not often that you can say so, but we are in an actual life and death struggle. We are very far from politics as usual. People are dying because of the choices made by the monsters of the GOP. We simply can’t wait until the next election; outright opposition needs to begin now, with the minimal goal of exposing and framing their inhuman behavior, and a maximal goal of changing that behavior. The most basic thing we can start doing is describing the actions of the president and his party with brutal specificity and moral accuracy.
This opposition will be most powerful if Democrats and others are pushing an actual coherent vision as what we should be working towards in place of this death march treadmill the GOP and friends are so eager to push us all back onto. We have no choice but to make this into a turning point toward great equality, social solidarity, and economic justice. The political field is wide open for this sort of uniting, common-sense argument for where we desperately need to go as a society. And it clearly starts with ensuring a medically-driven, fact-based fight against the coronavirus.
But if you want these ideas to be taken seriously, you need to deal with the party standing in the way – beating down the GOP goes hand in hand with moving any sort of positive vision for the future forward (as Jared Sexton vividly describes here, the GOP simply doesn’t think about the future anymore, only a present that they can exploit and plunder). The Republicans and their goblin king are supremely dangerous, but particularly right now, they’re glass-jawed in their complicity in the mass suffering and economic distress now surging over our country. Their race hatred and white nationalism had them obsessed with pretend enemies when all we really needed was basic epidemiological competence at the federal level. Start hitting them and don’t stop, not until a Republican can’t get elected dog-catcher in this country. Look at the fuss they’re making at one of the first ads that pin the coronavirus squarely on the president – already warning that networks might lose their license for telling the truth. The truth makes them whimper, and their response is to grab for a tinpot dictator’s playbook. Political annihilation is what they deserve and what we need.