Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times and a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Writing on his own blog recently, Krugman warns that America is rapidly turning into a kleptocracy that he calls “Trumpistan.” Life in Trumpistan is characterized by incidents where the president can demand loyalty from law enforcement officials on the one hand and have journalists arrested at will on the other. Injustice and obstruction of justice are routine and the Republicans don’t care. Here are some incidents which Krugman finds sobering. [Blog quoted in its entirety due to brevity.]
Item: Trump demanded loyalty — not to his office, but to the person of the president — from James Comey.
Item: Trump admitted on live TV that he fired Comey to stop the ongoing investigation into Russia’s connections with his campaign.
Item: a woman was arrested for laughing at a Trump administration official.
Item: Another Trump official has commended police for arresting a reporter who shouted questions at him.
Item: Republicans in Congress show absolutely no inclination to do anything about any of this.
So, has America already become an authoritarian regime where law enforcement serves the supreme leader, not the Constitution, where questioning or even ridiculing the regime’s officials has become a crime, and in which the legislature is just a rubber-stamping operation?
We don’t know the answer yet; we’ll have to see how things unfold in the next few weeks. But future historians may well record that American democracy died in May 2017.
The Atlantic‘s James Fallows, one of the reporters who covered Watergate 40 years ago, addressed some of the same issues as Paul Krugman.
So I’ve been thinking about comparisons between Watergate and the tangled, fast-changing Comey-Russia-Flynn-Trump affair. As with anything involving Donald Trump, we have no idea where this will lead, what is “true,” and when the next bombshell will go off.
But based simply on what is known so far, this scandal looks worse than Watergate. Worse for and about the president. Worse for the overall national interest. Worse in what it suggests about the American democratic system’s ability to defend itself.
At some point in the coverage of every scandal you’ll hear the chestnut, “It’s always the cover-up, never the crime.” This refers of course to the historical reality that scandal-bound figures make more problems by denying or lying about their misdeeds than they would if they had come clean from the start.
This saying first became really popular in the Watergate era—which is significant for what it suggests about the gravity of the underlying crime in that case. Richard Nixon’s beleaguered press secretary Ron Ziegler, a Sean Spicer-like figure of that era, oversold the point when he dismissed the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters as a “third-rate burglary.” But the worst version of what Nixon and his allies were attempting to do—namely, to find incriminating or embarrassing information about political adversaries ranging from the Democratic party chairman Lawrence O’Brien to Pentagon Papers-whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg—was not as bad as what came afterwards. Those later efforts included efforts to derail investigations by the FBI, the police, various grand juries and congressional committees, which collectively amounted to obstruction of justice.
And what is alleged this time? Nothing less than attacks by an authoritarian foreign government on the fundamentals of American democracy, by interfering with an election—and doing so as part of a sustained effort that included parallel interference in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
At worst, such efforts might actually have changed the election results. At least, they were meant to destroy trust in democracy. Not much of this is fully understood or proven, but the potential stakes are incomparably greater than what happened during Watergate, crime and cover-up alike.
And Fallows, like Krugman, is disillusioned with today’s GOP, defining them as craven and doing far less than the Republican senators and congresspeople of the Watergate Era did.
On the merits, this era’s Republican president has done far more to justify investigation than Richard Nixon did. Yet this era’s Republican senators and congressmen have, cravenly, done far less. A few have grumbled about “concerns” and so on, but they have stuck with Trump where it counts, in votes, and since Comey’s firing they have been stunning in their silence.
Today’s party lineup in the Senate is of course 52-48, in favor of the Republicans. Thus a total of three Republican senators have it within their power to change history, by insisting on an honest, independent investigation of what the Russians have been up do and how the mechanics of American democracy can best defend themselves. (To spell it out, three Republicans could join the 48 Democrats and Independents already calling for investigations, and constitute a Senate majority to empower a genuinely independent inquiry.) So far they have fallen in line with their party’s leader, Mitch McConnell, who will be known in history for favoring party above all else.
I hope some of their choices, soon, allow them to be remembered as positively as are the GOP’s defenders of constitutional process from the Watergate days. But as of this moment, the challenge to the American system seems more extreme than in that era, and the protective resources weaker.
There can be little question among thinking people that America is closer to being a totalitarian regime than ever before in its history, including the Watergate Era. And maybe May, 2017 will go down in history as the date democracy died. Or maybe May, 2017 will be recorded as the turning point in the infancy of the Trump administration, the time when The People stood up and said, “Enough.” If not us, then who? And if not now, then when? If there was ever a time to call our senators and congresspeople, and write our local newspaper editors and media outlets, this is it. We must resist.