The Wanna-Be American King

The concept of accountability has gone missing in Washington DC.

Donald Trump was never going to be held accountable.  He's probably never been held accountable in his entire life.  Certainly not since being sworn in as president.  The day after Robert Mueller testified in Congress about his involvement with the Russian government in the 2016 election (in which he only escaped being indicted due to DoJ guidelines), Trump was putting pressure on the Ukrainian government to uncover (or fabricate) "dirt" on the man who he assumed would be his opponent in the 2020 election.  Where a normal person might choose to lay low after such a close call, Trump decided to double down on his corrupt behavior.  He never made a secret of it.  Hell, he openly talked about it in televised interviews.  None of Trump's aides, advisors, or cabinet officials have been able to restrain his worst impulses except around the edges.

And Congress? The co-equal branch of government specifically designed in many ways to act as a check on the Executive branch? The House of Representatives took its responsibility seriously and impeached the president. But the Senate is refusing to do its job.  It ignored the evidence, refused to hear witness testimony, and will very likely acquit Trump in a speedy sham trial a few days from now.  The Senate didn't just fail to hold Trump accountable, it - specifically Senate Republicans - flat-out refused to do so.

So Trump will face zero punishment for attempting to interfere with the 2020 presidential election.  Sure, he's been impeached, and that will be a stain on his legacy forever.  But as far as him suffering any immediate consequences that will prevent him from trying to rig it in his favor?

Zip. Zero. Nada.

Of course, there's the 2020 election itself.  Vote him out of office, right? That is, vote him out of office through the election he's actively trying to cheat in? Sure, piece of cake.

Now, I'm not telling anyone to give up in despair and not vote.  For god's sake, VOTE.  Because this election is probably the most important one in your lifetime.  But don't expect it the Trump campaign to play fair.  Don't be surprised by the traditional Republican tactics like voter suppression, selective voter ID measures, and limited polling sites in Dem-leaning districts.  Don't be surprised if Trump pulls out all the stops - like, say, deploying ICE to polling sites for the purpose of intimidating voters to stay home.  Or worse.

Additionally, Trump will probably do a whole bunch of idiotic, amoral, and illegal stuff between now and November.  And if the past has taught us anything, it's that Trump's antics will push his previous fiasco out of the public consciousness.  It's a well-established pattern at this point: Trump generates a controversy, it dominates the news cycle for a couple days, and is promptly forgotten once Trump makes another bonehead mistake.

Here's an example: have you heard anyone mention Trump's drone assassination of the Iranian general in the last 2-3 days? Trump nearly blundered the United States into a war, and hardly anyone is talking about it now.

Acquitting Trump will be giving him a green light to do whatever he wants, without consequences.  And given some of the things Trump has shown himself to be okay with doing (roughing up protestors, declaring martial law, curtailing the First Amendment, jailing his political opponents) make me extremely nervous.

I'm not saying it's certain that any of these things will happen.  But the chances that they do are a lot further away from zero than they should be.

So. . .thanks, Senate Republicans.

Speaking of that pack of worthless, unprincipled weasels - guess who else won't be held accountable?

Yeah, yeah, I know there's a lot of pent-up anger at the Senate over the impeachment trial's likely outcome.  There sure was after the Senate voted to not allow witnesses, therefore paving the way for the acquittal.  But will that translate to meaningful results at the ballot box? I'm not so sure.  First, there was a lot of anger in the 2018 midterms, too; but despite Democrats making significant gains (the much-hyped "blue wave"), Republicans managed to pick up two seats in the Senate.  They're probably counting on maintaining, if not increasing, their lead in the Senate.

Because despite all the angry phone calls and emails, and the op-eds rightly calling them cowards and worse, they have pollsters who have gauged the public's sentiment and know how their constituents feel.  They've known for a while, which is why they voted the way they did.  So aside from a few vulnerable Senators, they're not sweating reelection.  And if they do unexpectedly lose, they're not worried.  They can find a pundit gig, or a position on a consulting firm, or even just retire.  And in eight or twelve years, "Republican" won't be a dirty word anymore and they can reemerge from the political wilderness.  And Republicans have some experience being the minority party.  If Democrats do retake the Senate, they'll just go into opposition mode and make it incredibly difficult for the Senate (and the White House, if a Democrat gets elected) to do its job.

No, the only thing they're worried about is being excluded from the Big Club, and that only happens if they defy Trump.  Mitt Romney and John Bolton are quickly becoming cautionary tales.

So, to sum up, we've got a president who's unaccountable because his subordinates can't keep him in check, and the Senate simply won't; and fifty-three Senators who are unaccountable because they know the worst outcome for them is the unlikely chance that they don't get reelected.

Where does that leave the country going forward? Well, if Trump loses in 2020 (and that's a big "if" for multiple reasons), expect Republicans to "suddenly" rediscover all the principles and ideals they've been uniformly ignoring since January 2017.  And that creates a dilemma.

A Democrat president (and/or Senate) acting the way Trump has done will further erode the concept of presidential accountability and co-equal branches of government, so the right thing to do would be to heed those calls for accountability.  However, to anyone who remembers Republican behavior throughout the Obama administration knows that Republicans aren't making good faith arguments.  They only care about accountability to the extent they can use it to weaken Democrats and get themselves back into power. Consequently, there's a strong, justifiable argument for telling Republicans to sit down and shut up.  Additionally, if Republicans obstruct simply for the sole purpose of denying Democrats a legislative victory (it was Mitch McConnell's entire strategy from 2010 - 2016), a Democratic president may have to act unilaterally just to keep the government functioning.  It's happened before.

Thus, the Democrats' (and America's) predicament.

Of course, this all depends on the election's outcome.  If Trump gets reelected, it could very well mean the end of Constitutional democracy in America.  And that's not a dramatic exaggeration.  He's already been sent a message that he won't be held accountable no matter what he does.

How far do you think he'll run with that if he gets another four years?

Choose wisely this November.  Because a president that's not accountable to anyone is a king.

The Emperor Has No Clothes - and We've All Known for a While

So . . . The Op-Ed.

The latest act in the Trump Administration's 3-ring circus took place a few days ago, when the New York Times published an op-ed by an alleged "senior official in the Trump administration" which basically confirmed what everyone already knows: Trump's presidency is a absolute fiasco and Trump himself is thoroughly unfit to govern. The op-ed lays out a laundry list of flaws, portraying the president as inconsistent, prone to fits of pique, impulsive, lacking any intellectual curiosity . . . things that were abundantly clear to anyone who was paying attention during the presidential campaign. So, none of Trump's character defects are really a shocking revelation.

Seriously, if they weren't obvious to you, you are a very poor judge of character.

What I found interesting, and maybe a tiny amount irksome, was that the op-ed writer claims to be one of many administration officials actively seeking to thwart Trump's most disastrous policy ideas. The op-ed doesn't mention any specific incidents, but Bob Woodward's book corroborates much of it while also providing specific details. Including (assuming the story is true) removing official papers from the president's desk to prevent him from signing them into policy.

For sure, every president butts heads with his cabinet members, advisors, or other senior officials. It would be naive to think otherwise. In a similar vein, there's often a disconnect between what the president wants and the career bureaucrats charged with making it happen.  Maybe the intent gets lost in communication. (Remember that "telephone" game?) Maybe an agency's office in a rural area doesn't have the resources to adequately implement the directive the way the president envisioned.  Maybe the president's idea is unworkable or runs into conflict with existing policies.  The US government is a big, sprawling bureaucracy, and problems are bound to arise in the process of translating the president's general directives into specific legal or regulatory policy.

There's a difference between problems that typically arise in a presidential principal-agent relationship, and what's going on in the Trump administration.  As much as I'd probably cheer if I knew just what ill-conceived policy ideas Trump's senior officials have derailed, I'm just a bit displeased about how they went about doing it.

And before you think I'm heading there - no.  NO. This is NOT a coup. Here's a good explanation on why it isn't.  Basically, it comes down to the fact that these officials still agree with a large portion of Trump's agenda, and want to keep him in power to see that agenda through. So let's nip that idea in the bud.

But just because it's not a coup doesn't make it okay, though.  Neither does the fact that they're containing one of the worst presidents this country's ever had.  These senior officials, even if they're doing what's right for the country, are still usurping part of the president's authority.  Authority they were never meant to have.  They may have been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but they never ran for election.  Nobody voted them into office.  Nobody knows what positions they have on certain issues - which might tell us what criteria they're using to grade proposed policies.  So what metrics are they using to decide what policies are too awful to be made official? This administration is okay with breaking up families and keeping kids in cages, so it's clearly okay with a lot.  If that policy was approved, how bad must the ones we're not seeing be?

And if Trump is so bad at being president, why don't these officials use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office? Because he's still politically useful.  Here's the best take I've read about the anonymous op-ed so far.  It makes quite a bit of sense, and I happen to agree with almost all of it.

I've said several times that Trump is the predictable outcome of roughly twenty-five years of the GOP's poisoning of American political discourse: science-deniers like Rick Scott and Jim Inhofe, bumbling idiots like Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Michele Bachmann, and opportunistic partisan obstructionists like Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan.  They all created this monster and now it's rampaging across the countryside.  Only they can't put it down, because now they need it.  Trump demolished fifteen other GOP primary candidates, some of them experienced and capable politicians.  Which means that he is what the GOP base wanted.  Trump redefined what's considered acceptable political conduct, he inspired others like Jim Jordan and Roy Moore to adopt his methods, and now the GOP needs to fall in line behind him if they want to keep winning elections.

Trump is unfit for office, we all knew that.  And in the process of displaying his absolute unfitness, he's removed the last shred of doubt that the GOP is a morally bankrupt political party, equally unfit to govern, and also that the entire right-wing media establishment is a farcical propaganda-peddling machine.  And since the party's leaders are unwilling or unable to develop some political courage and begin the process of  removing Trump from office, the country will continue to watch a reckless, incompetent president crash from one fiasco to the next.

The 3-ring circus continues.

The Turning Point

Some day, maybe a few decades from now, I think the history textbooks will refer to the events of the past week as the "before and after" moment in the Trump presidency.  The moment when he hit rock bottom, and showed the entire world just how wildly unqualified he is at being president.  What makes this different from before? That's a fair question.  It's not like Trump's incompetence hasn't been on display before: at the United Nations, meeting European heads of state, mishandling the North Korean nuclear situation.  The difference is that now, we're seeing the consequences of that incompetence in tangible, horrific terms - pictures of devastation and stories of suffering coming in from Puerto Rico.  Before Puerto Rico, the consequences of Trump's incompetence could only be measured in harsh rhetoric and cooled relationships.  Trump certainly antagonized heads of state, among others, but nobody died.  He raised tensions with North Korea, but still, nobody died.  That's the difference here.  Trump's screw-ups up until now carried consequences, but not dire ones.  Before Puerto Rico, his incompetence didn't matter the way it does now. 

A US territory was leveled by a natural disaster, and Trump's reaction has been marked by callous indifference, zero sense of urgency, and political grandstanding.  A president who is more concerned about San Juan's mayor hurting his little feelings, who takes days to waive a law in order to speed up deliveries of aid, who lectures residents with a "pull yourself up" sanctimonious attitude, is unfit to lead.  Trump's unfitness has been obvious since Day 1, but this is arguably its worst manifestation.  This is his "Nero fiddled" moment. 

Donald Trump has crossed over from a loudmouthed buffoon to a dangerously incompetent president.  He has Americans' blood on his hands now.  The GOP Congressmen who shield him are complicit, and their constituents need to exert pressure on them to stand up to Trump.  The citizens who support Trump after what we just witnessed need to walk back their support, or otherwise be called out and shunned.  Personally, I don't want to associate with those people anymore.  It's not political theater anymore.  Those people and Congressmen are enabling someone who will do grave damage the longer he remains in office.  Trump is not a harmless nuisance any longer, and it's time to start considering the need to impeach him.