What we need in this country right now is a slow news day. Headlines limited to the latest Kardashian pregnancy, or Felicity Huffman’s community service, would be welcomed comfort food for our overtaxed brains. Small chance of that happening anytime soon. Instead, we are bombarded with almost hourly reports of a perpetual presidential implosion, stories of such spectacular incredulity that there is barely time to unpack them before another one breaks.
The Trump presidency is looking very much like the grand finale of a fireworks display, those closing moments in which the pyrotechnician tosses up one spectacular explosion after another. We were bug eyed when the president linked Ukraine’s security to that country’s ability to help Trump’s reelection campaign. Then, poof – before the shock wore off, before we could so much as exhale, the next one exploded. Our president, rejecting unanimous pleas of his military and intelligence advisors, pulled our troops out of Syria, abandoning the Kurds who led our battle against ISIS.
While we tried to absorb the catastrophic results of that move, along came another poof. State Department officials said Trump’s political shenanigans in Ukraine went down only after career diplomats were pulled back so that the president’s private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, could call the shots. Then another poof: Four of Giuliani’s associates on the Ukrainian caper were indicted on charges of conspiring to circumvent federal laws against foreign influence. While pondering the mug shots and bios of the first two arrests – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – yup, another poof. Giuliani himself was reported to be under criminal investigation.
On one level, all this news seems overwhelmingly cumulative and confusing. Who has the time to do endless Google searches on Lev, Igor, the Kurds and Ukraine? Yet, there is a very simple common denominator. Donald Trump is so singularly focused on himself and his interests – petty and large – that he has forsaken everything else. Absolutely nothing outside of himself matters, not the Constitution or the laws of the land, not truth or integrity, and certainly not the welfare of the American people. To him, this presidency has always been about one thing and one thing only: the needs of Donald J. Trump.
We’ve known since January 20, 2017 that the solipsism of our 45th president would dictate his every action, tweet and utterance. Hours after promising to “faithfully execute” his office, the Donald concocted a lie about how his inauguration crowd was the largest in American history. That very same day, he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission launching his reelection campaign. From that day forward, the very essence of his first term was about winning a second term. For the 44 men who preceeded him, winning the presidency meant an opportunity to make a difference in the world. For Trump, winning was all that mattered, an end unto itself, validation for a dangerously insecure man.
Unfortunately, the articles of impeachment are likely to be narrowly constructed, directed at the president’s attempt to obtain campaign assistance from foreign countries and then obstructing the House’s investigation into the matter. As odious as those actions were, the circumscribed prosecution is reminiscent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. The fact of the matter is that every single dark moment of this presidency, every injury he has inflicted, has come about through a single course of conduct, namely Trump’s consistent propensity to promote himself, with reckless disregard for the harm inflicted on others.
Republican leaders in Congress were incredulous over Trump’s cut-and-run in Syria, calling it a foreign policy disaster that will haunt the United States for years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the president’s chief enablers, called it a “grave mistake” and a “strategic nightmare”. Yet, until and unless the Republican base decides to give up the ghost on this president, the party’s leadership will continue to view him privately as their worst albatross while publicly opposing impeachment.
They choose, charitably, to view the Syrian disaster as a foreign policy disagreement. It is anything but. Donald Trump doesn’t have a foreign policy. All he has is a Donald policy. He does whatever he thinks is best for himself, with utterly no regard for the consequences. He leveraged Ukraine’s security on digging up dirt on the Democrats because the 2020 election is an existential crisis for him. The strategic nightmare in Syria was a product of the same Donald-centric dynamic. He wants to campaign on bringing the troops home. Because that’s all that mattered to him, he pulled the plug without a single strategic thought about the consequences of such sudden action.
Sadly, we would need at least another 20 Vietnam Walls to list all of the victims of Trump’s it’s-all-about-me approach to governing. For example, he instituted a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military and has asked the Supreme Court to strike down employment discrimination protection for the entire LGBTQ community, both moves aimed at garnering affection from evangelical Christians and the homophobic portion of his base.
To keep the love coming from that base, Trump has:
REDUCED or eliminated food stamp assistance for millions of poor families.
ENDANGERED the economic security of American farmers through his trade wars.
ELIMINATED teen pregnancy programs that provided access to contraception and education.
REFUSED, as part of his anti-regulation political pitch, to ban a pesticide linked to birth defects in children of farm workers.
SEPARATED migrant children from their parents to show how tough he is on immigration.
PROMOTED racism and xenophobia by appealing to forces that fear the loss of white privilege.
The list, of course, goes on and on. In each instance, the force at work here is not the president’s ideology. He has none. It’s all about feeding his base, positioning himself for his next tweet or rally or election. It’s all about making himself a winner, a legend in his own mind.
That’s why we need a more expansive view of impeachment. It’s about so much more than trying to get other countries to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. It’s about a president who, despite his sloganeering, has never once put America first. It’s about a president clinging so obsessively to a pathological power of self-absorption that nobody outside of himself is safe.
Most importantly, it’s about a president who, for the first time in our country’s history, represents the biggest threat to America’s democracy.