Category: Democracy

DEMOCRATS’ INTERNAL DISSENSION BEATS THE ONE-MAN PARTY OF TRUMP

These times are not easy for any of us, but moderates from both parties seem to be experiencing their own special version of hell right now. On the one hand, they see Donald Trump plunging ever deeper into the hateful abyss of bigotry and division. And then they watch a horde of Democratic presidential candidates play to the party’s leftward flank, leaving them between an orange rock and a very hard place for them to go. 

“I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump,” wrote New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks.“So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?”  

Former Republican operative Rick Wilson begged Democrats, the party he is rooting for in 2020, not to “(rush) to the left with reckless abandon.” 

Mona Charen, a conservative author who worked in the Reagan White House, is disgusted with Trump but worried that Democrats will nominate some starry-eyed socialistic liberal unacceptable to “Republican refugees like me.”

This Never Trumper angst is shared with such prominent centrist Democrats as Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, as well as many of those seeking their party’s presidential nomination.  One of them, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper blasted his more liberal counterparts – Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – during last Tuesday’s debate.  Referring to their health care proposals and support for the Green New Deal, Hickenlooper said, “. . . you might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”  

With a summer-and-a-half to go before we know the precise parameters of the 2020 presidential campaign, it’s easy to get lost in the noxious electability weeds of specious political prognostication.   We really need to chill, take some deep breaths, and remember that just four years ago we all saw Donald Trump as the most unelectable candidate in either party. The optics of a single moment do not portend a future outcome, particularly in a process as fluid as a lengthy presidential campaign.  

For those of us longing for an end to our Trumpian nightmare, this process will be filled with excruciating anxiety.  Yet, it has to play out. What remains of our democracy depends on it.  We are, after all, left with only one functioning political party.  Trump commandeered  the GOP and drained every last drop of process and policy out of it.  What was once the party of austerity, free trade and limited government is now the party of Trump, a nihilist cabal singularly committed to the insatiable ego needs of a lying, racist megalomaniac.   

When it comes to the basic building blocks of our political system, the Democratic Party has the only tent in the game.  And it has to be big enough to house everyone, from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, to the Bronx’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, the dialogue inside that tent will be acrimonious and contentious as we argue over whether to go with big, bold structural change or with steady incrementalism geared toward repairing the damage that Trump wrought. Yet, despite all the chaos churned out by this agonizingly protracted nominating process – or maybe because of it – the Democrats are giving voice to what it means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  The other party has muted the people’s voice in order that Donald Trump alone can rule this country.  

A year from now, the single most important issue of the 2020 election will be whether to take four more years of Trumpian disarray and dysfunction, or go with a candidate who will neither embarrass America nor tarnish its soul.  Sure, issues like health care, immigration, climate change, income inequality and foreign policy are vitally important. The only election prediction I will make is that, come November 3 of next year, the nuances of those policy matters will take a back seat to a referendum on the most excruciatingly toxic presidency this country has ever seen.

However, now is not the time to narrow the debate to a Trump versus Not-Trump dichotomy.  There are two dozen Democratic candidates, each with their own vision for a better America. We watched them battle it out over their ideas and resumes last week.  It wasn’t always pretty or elegant, but it was an extremely important part of the process.  Those candidates – at least most of them – are works in progress on the presidential stage.  And so are their ideas.  

In a normal campaign, there may be cause for alarm when primary candidates tilt too far to the left or right, since most general election voters lean toward the middle. But there is nothing normal about the 2020 election.  The only discussion on the nitty gritty of policy matters is taking place in the Democrats’ tent.  As they joust over Medicare for All versus a modified Affordable Care Act with a public option, Donald Trump has no healthcare plan and never did.  As the Democrats argue among themselves over approaches to immigration reform, Donald Trump has no plan other than his wall and putting children in cages.  The Democratic candidates have ideas – big and small – for wealth redistribution. And here, so does Donald Trump, but it is in the opposite direction: through tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor.

Centrists should lose no sleep over fear of creeping socialism, particularly given the composition of Congress and an abundance of gerrymandered conservative districts. To put this red scare in perspective, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, Congress’ two Democratic Socialists, have authored a bill that would cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent, hardly a stake through the heart of the bourgeoisie. 

The bottom line in this August of 2019 is that Democrats have just begun their process of nominee and issue development. A robust conversation over matters affecting our lives and our country’s future is essential to our democracy and to mobilizing the electorate.  Even a raucous, contentious debate stands in poignant contrast to the status quo, a government of Trump, by Trump and for Trump.  

THE BATTLE AT HALFTIME: THE RULE OF LAW vs THE RULE OF TRUMP

I once made the case in this space that Donald Trump’s disregard for truth and the rule of law was unlikely to push the country into an authoritarian abyss. My prophecy then was that career civil servants, steeped in democratic traditions, values and rules would serve as a strong buffer against the aspirational ravages of Trumpism. Now I am not so sure.

As this maniacal presidential term approaches halftime, the carnage from Trump’s brutal assault on our democracy seems to be steadily growing, almost exponentially. As a quick thought experiment, think back to any presidency in the past 30 years, Republican or Democrat. Could you have imagined then a president who:

CALLED for the prosecution of his political opponents.

OBSTRUCTED an investigation into foreign interference with our elections.

DEFENDED a Saudi leader who the CIA says ordered the murder of a Washington journalist.

THREATENED judges who ruled against him.

And now comes this unseemly B-movie plot in which Trump’s former campaign manager and convicted felon feigns a cooperative stance with the special prosecutor in order to channel investigative intelligence to the president in exchange for a pardon.

I’m not saying it’s time to start whistling that old Barry McGuire ditty about the “Eve of Destruction”. Not yet anyway. Still, this president has clearly intensified his attack on our democracy and the rule of law. He has also become more adept at finding lieutenants who will aid and abet that mission.

The New York Times reported that Trump ordered the prosecution of Hillary Clinton and James Comey, despite the absence of any evidentiary predicate. According to that reporting, then White House counsel Don McGahn told him that a president can’t order criminal prosecution of his enemies and, if he recommended doing so, it could get him impeached. So Trump backed off, just as he did a year ago when he was hell bent on firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller and McGahn threated to quit.

Eventually, Trump tired of being reined in by his legal advisor and McGahn resigned. His replacement, Pat Cipollone is said by former U.S. attorney Harry Litman to have more “moral malleability” than his successor, just what this president is looking for. That’s how Matt Whitaker, an outré lawyer with an underwhelming legal career, became acting attorney general. Not only has the new AG been openly critical of Mueller’s investigation, he has also made music for Trump’s ears by declaring the judiciary to be the “inferior branch” of government.

And we thought Jeff Sessions was in the running for Worst Attorney General Ever. The divide here is not about conservative versus liberal. It’s about respecting the rule of law versus the opposite, namely letting Trump be Trump. Both Sessions and McGahn are right-of-center purists. They are also imbued with the culture, traditions and rules of our democracy, putting them both on an unavoidable collision course with this White House. Trump saw Sessions and McGahn as his guys and expected them to do his bidding, to protect him at all costs. They saw themselves as “officers of the court”, with a sworn fealty to the legal process.

Remarkably, our system of government has held up over the years not because of the brilliance of our laws or the unique architecture of our constitution. Instead, our success has come from a source far more nebulous, one rarely mentioned in civics textbooks, namely our deeply held norms and customs that place the rule of law above the command of any one ruler. As Harry Litman, the former U.S. attorney, noted in the New York Times, Russia has “legal protections no less extensive and high-minded than ours”, but they don’t stop Vladimir Putin from locking up his political opponents.

In other words, our system works because we believe in the rule of law and accept it as our way of life. We went weeks without knowing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, as armies of lawyers for both sides litigated their way from Florida state courts to the U.S. Supreme court, where, on a 5-4 vote, the justices, in effect, handed the presidency to George W. Bush. His opponent, Al Gore, quickly conceded. The law itself was not responsible for that peaceful transition of power, rather it was a national consensus and commitment to follow the rule of law.

That consensus and commitment to our democratic traditions has never been so volatile. Pew Research Center studies show that 61 percent of those polled say they distrust the basic framework of government and want to see it fundamentally restructured. That ripens the conditions for demagogic rule. Therein lies the inherent power of Donald J. Trump. It makes it possible for him to repeatedly lie without consequences. It lets him dismiss fact-based research of government agencies. It lets him verbally attack judges who rule against him. And, with the “moral malleability” of newly appointed legal advisors, it may well let him use the Justice Department to lay waste to his political adversaries.

Question: faced with a 2000 Gore-like situation, what would Trump do? Right. And that is just how fragile our system is right now.

TRUMP OUTSHINES RUSSIAN TROLLS AT DECEIVING AND DIVIDING

Russia’s byzantine efforts to infect American politics with chronic misinformation and rampant discord may be about to end. And we have none other than Donald J. Trump to thank. With a president so deeply skilled at dividing people and turning truth on its head, there is no need to subcontract that work to the Russians. Who needs an elaborate Russian troll farm to crank out social media posts about the evil of black protesters and invading brown immigrants, when Trump can do it himself with the flick of his Twitter finger or the roar of his bully pulpit?

Remember those 13 Russians charged with clandestinely promoting Trump’s 2016 candidacy? They were accused of stirring the social media pot with totally fabricated posts touching on racist and xenophobic fears. The February indictment says their goal was to “sow discord in the U.S. political system. . .through information warfare (designed) to spread distrust towards the other candidates and the political system in general.” Well, the Donald has shown he can do all of that on his own. He was an excellent student of his Russian mentors, so much so that he no longer needs foreign aid.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written extensively about how the Russians pioneered the whole concept of “fake news” in the 1990s and 2000s. In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s post-Cold War strategy was to make up for the regime’s lack of economic and technological power by flooding the Internet and television with misinformation and demonizing the institutions charged with uncovering facts, “and then exploit the confusion that results.” Wrote Snyder: “They cultivate enough chaos so people become cynical about public life and, eventually, about truth itself.” Then, in the 2010s, Snyder notes, Putin took that successful formula on the road in an effort to destabilize Western democracies. Low and behold, there was Donald Trump, ascending the golden escalator to launch a presidential campaign based on division and fabrication. It was a marriage made in Moscow.

One of the many examples of Russian skullduggery cited by the Mueller investigation involved an authentic photo of a Latino woman and her child holding a sign that said, “No Human Being is Illegal”. According to the indictment, the Russians digitally altered the sign to read, “GIVE ME MORE FREE SHIT” and plastered it on social media. Flash forward to the recent release by the White House of a doctored video that made it falsely appear that CNN’s Jim Acosta had aggressively grabbed the arm of a press aide. No need for foreign subterfuge when you can do it yourself.

In that same Russian indictment, a Kremlin operative was accused of circulating a fake news item under the heading of, “Hillary Clinton has Already Committed Voter Fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.” As Snyder noted, the heart of the Russian game plan is not about ideology, it’s about getting people to accept that “there’s no reason to believe in anything. There is no truth. Your institutions are bogus.” But you hardly need a Russian troll farm to sow those seeds, when the president of the United States accuses the Democrats of voter fraud in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, the second he realizes his candidates might not win.

Most of the fabricated posts cited in the Russian indictment involved race, immigration and religion, obviously visceral hot-button issues that trigger deep divisions. They contained outrageous lies and threats about Black Lives Matter taking over major cities, Muslim terrorists hiding behind burkas and illegal immigrants destroying American communities. In other words, pretty much the same game plan Trump trotted out for the midterms. The only difference is that presidential pronouncements enjoy a wider circulation and carry more weight than Facebook posts. Based on Trump’s campaign rally speeches and his Twitter feed, Americans were alerted daily to the presidential fiction of a pending invasion of killer immigrants and middle east terrorists approaching the U.S. border. He totally outdid his Russian counterparts on this one by ordering the military to protect us from the fabricated attack.

For a president who celebrated his inauguration by lying about the size of the crowd, it’s hardly news that Donald Trump enjoys a perverse relationship with the truth. But he’s really outdone himself lately. He told one campaign rally that Democrats will give illegal immigrants free cars just for sneaking into the country. At another one, he berated Democrats for ignoring the health needs of veterans and boasted about how he got Congress to pass a bill allowing vets to use their own doctors if the VA wait time was too long. Only problem was that the bill he was talking about was passed in 2014 and signed by Obama. On the night that Democrats won a majority in the House, flipped seven governorships and eight state legislative chambers, Trump called the results “close to complete victory”. When his latest choice for attorney general drew fire, Trump absurdly insisted that he doesn’t even know the guy.

This behavior would be amusing if it came from a crazy oddball uncle, something to chuckle about on the way home from family gatherings. But this crazy uncle is our president, and he is using the Russian playbook to, as Snyder, the historian, calls it, “create chaos from inside” by making a mockery of truth and denigrating the instruments of democracy. For the Russians, such an outcome weakens their main adversary. For Trump, it’s just a way to get through another day. For the rest of us, it’s another reason to keep searching for an exit from this nightmare. Without truth, without faith in our democratic institutions, America’s greatness is as phony as Trump’s invasion from Central America.

SAVING OUR DEMOCRACY THROUGH TRUMP OBSESSION

In case you haven’t noticed, we are obsessed with Donald Trump. He gets far more news coverage than any of his predecessors. We incessantly talk, tweet, post and blog about him. Late night and early morning talk shows digest the Donald’s every move. Four films at this year’s Sundance Festival were about Trump. Psychotherapists are treating patients for “Trump Anxiety Disorder”. Drained by the antics of our 45th president, people are unplugging from social media just to clear their heads.

So, in the vernacular of Brokeback Mountain, why can’t we quit him? What sense does it make to fixate on someone we know will fill our hearts with angst, agony and anger? Why not go on a lean Trump diet of a morsel or two every now and then?

The answer is that Donald J. Trump poses a lethal threat to the core principles of our 242-year-old democracy. Ignoring the elephant in the room doesn’t mean he’s not there. We have every reason to be anxious and angry. Yet, our deliverance from this morass will come from continued vigilance, not escapist denial. And come it must, for our very way of life is at stake.

If you think that last sentence was mere hyperbole, then consider what this president said Monday night in response to a warrant authorizing the search of his attorney’s office: “It’s an attack on our country . . . ; it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” Of course, “what we all stand for” is a nation of laws. The search warrant was sought through those very laws, by top U.S. Justice Department officials appointed by Trump. It was also authorized by a federal judge, representing a separate branch of government. It was as American as apple pie. Yet the president of the United States saw the search as treason simply because it might have adverse consequences for him. Only in an autocracy ruled by a strongman tyrant would that premise make sense.

Therein lies the problem. Trump approaches the presidency as if our constitutional democracy doesn’t exist. He may think he has a bigger nuclear button than his North Korean counterpart, but what the Donald really wants is Kim Jong-il’s title: Supreme Leader. Trump is perpetually mystified and profoundly frustrated with the parliamentary ways of Congress. And he has no time whatsoever for the annoying intrusion of a judiciary he can’t control. As he has said so many times, “I alone” can fix the country’s problems. If only he could find a way to rule the kingdom by himself.

And that is precisely why it is so important for us not to turn our backs on this presidency. Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote a book called How Democracies Die. They cited four markers, all of which have Trump written all over them: They are:

1. Rejecting or showing weak commitment to democratic rule.
2. Denying the legitimacy of political opponents.
3. Encouraging or tolerating violence.
4. A readiness to stifle or limit civil liberties of opponents, including media.

Hanna Arendt, a noted political philosopher of the Twentieth Century, wrote about the characteristics of totalitarianism more than 80 years ago. The ideal subject for totalitarian rule, Arendt wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” According to the Washington Post fact checker, Trump made more than 2,000 false or misleading statements during his first 355 days in office. He has relentlessly gone after the news media, insisting that everything they publish or broadcast is “fake news.” Polls show that a substantial portion of his base believes him.

If Donald Trump ruled this country in the authoritarian style he craves, there would be a total Muslim ban, a complete rollback of LGBTQ rights, a wall around Mexico, eviction from the country of 800,000 young immigrants brought here as children, deportation of millions more, all without due process. To one extent or another, those objectives have either been scaled back or blocked by the courts, or by the actions or inactions of Congress. So far, our democracy is holding, even against the will of a man determined to undermine it.

Yes, the news media has covered Trump more extensively than any other president. And, yes, most of the coverage has been negative. But it’s negative in the same sense that a story about a devastating hurricane is negative. By definition, news is an aberration, something unexpected or contrary to custom and tradition. When Trump, on almost a daily basis, issues statements that are patently false, that’s news. When the president calls impoverished African countries “shitholes”, that’s news. When he says one thing and then does the complete opposite, that’s news. When he repeatedly demeans and insults other governmental leaders, including members of his own cabinet, that’s news.

At this very moment, according to news reports, we are on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Trump wants to fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials in an attempt to shut down the Russian election interference investigation. So far, his own advisors and other Republican leaders have held him back. But, as we know, Trump doesn’t take kindly to advice that runs contrary to his impulse.

Clearly, our democracy is facing more peril than it has in at least 50 years. Now is the time for more Trump news, not less. Now is the time, for us to tune in, not out. A recent poll showed that one in five Americans have participated in protests against Trump. That’s just the vigilance we need to protect our democracy. After all, that is really, in the president’s words, “what we all stand for”.