In an alternate universe closely resembling our own, Unnamed Democrat is a member of Congress from a purple state. This is the speech he hypothetically gave to the Springfield Democratic Club on January 12.
Thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for – I hope – staying until the end of my remarks.
I'm here primarily to address the question, “what is the right attitude for us Democrats to strike towards President Donald Trump?” And my answer is inspired, if that's the right word, by a phrase Trump used in his press conference yesterday to characterize a news organization which dared to commit journalism against him. I think we should say of Donald Trump: “You are a Fake President.”
We all know there is, or used to be, a long tradition of a “honeymoon period” in which the opposition tries its best to be deferential to the new president, to compromise, to show the nation that it accepts the new president as the legitimate representative of the people, the legitimate occupant of our most important office. This of course is a tradition which the Republican Party has not so much ignored as set on fire, in ways I think we're all familiar enough with not to need our memories refreshed now. Still, it might be worth resurrecting this tradition under the right circumstances. If, for example, the new president elect, no matter how much we disagreed with his principles, actually had principles; if he was a man who had demonstrated his sincerity in seeking the best course for the nation, and his good faith in recognizing the part that a loyal opposition had to play in finding that course; then I would be willing to enter, maybe not a honeymoon, but at least a trial cohabitation period.
But such is not the case. We are dealing instead with a president-elect who is entirely unprincipled, whose obvious motivation has always been and continues to be not the good of the country but the filling of his own bank account and the satisfaction of his own massive ego, and whose political practice has always been to tell ugly lies and issue witless insults against anybody whom Trump imagines to pose some threat either to that bank account or to that ego.
Now I know it wasn't politically correct to say all that, but... [LAUGHTER]. More seriously, I know that these are not the sorts of things public officials are supposed to say about Presidents, even if they are true. We are not supposed to say them both because we are supposed to have respect for the office, if not the man, and because saying them is thought to threaten . . . something or other. Bipartisan comity, or something like that. To take these points in reverse order, first it should be obvious to anybody who has been paying any attention at all for the last quarter of a century or so that “bipartisan comity” is by now nothing but a sucker's game, that when Republicans imply or state that the Democratic president is a foreign usurper, and that Democratic foreign policy seeks the downfall of America and the death of our soldiers, they are just Raising Legitimate Issues; but that when a Democrat says that Donald Trump is a greedy charlatan, that is a shocking violation of the fabric of civil society. Let us be clear that we are not going to feel bound in the slightest by the “rules” of that silly game.
Now, as for the more significant objection, that of “respect for the office”: it makes sense to respect the office of the Presidency, if that means acknowledging that the office makes tremendous demands on any of its occupants who seek to meet its often-frightening challenges, and that those who dedicate themselves to the work required to do this therefore do deserve our respect. But what of those who have no intention of dedicating themselves? What of those who show no sign of making the slightest effort to cure their colossal ignorance, who show nothing but dismissive apathy about issues which literally might mean life or death to the people they supposedly represent and serve? What of those whose response to questions about what happens when the Affordable Care Act is repealed is, “Don't worry, we'll have something terrific, everybody will be happy.”
I simply cannot conceive of how anybody who had who had given even the slightest thought to the difficult issues raised by our system of health care, who had even the slightest interest in the fate of those who desperately need health insurance, could talk like this. Try to imagine it. Try to imagine someone who had actually thought for ten seconds about these issues, who actually felt any degree of empathy towards those whom the ACA was designed to protect, and which the ACA has succeeded beyond expectations in protecting... try to imagine such a person having nothing to say about the proposed abolition of the ACA except “we'll have something terrific, everybody will be happy.”
Ladies and gentlemen, precisely to the degree that we respect the office of president, we must feel disgust and contempt for anybody who seeks that office while having no intention of meeting its requirements. A “president” who will not meet the requirements of the office of president is nothing but a Fake President.
And it isn't just by the standards I just spoke of that Donald Trump will be a Fake President; the standards implicit in his own declarations, and his own actions, unmistakably show this as well. Consider his reaction to the re-election of President Obama in 2012. When Trump, in his ignorance of how election results are reported, falsely concluded that Mitt Romney had won the popular vote, he Tweeted in outrage that this was unjust, that “the loser won.” There were a few references to this after the 2016 election, when it became clear that Trump had lost the popular vote himself – that is, that he was “the loser” by his own standards. But this was generally treated just as one of those amusing double-standards which pop up all the time in politics. It was much more serious than that, and we really have not given this the attention it deserves. It's not just that Trump pretended that only the popular vote made a president legitimate when he thought the Republican had won the popular vote, then changed his mind when the Democrat won the popular vote. Much more crucially, it's the fact that Trump explicitly said that when such a “loser” won the electoral college, this was an outrage which demanded an uprising to overturn the results.
Just think of this for a moment: Donald Trump said “we can’t let this happen,” that “we should march on Washington and stop” this “great and disgusting injustice”; that is, he called for sedition to prevent Obama from taking office. If Trump was right in claiming that the loser of the popular vote was so illegitimate that he needed to be forcibly removed before he took office, or else — in his words — “we are not a democracy,” then – obviously – Trump is so illegitimate that he should not be allowed to take office. If Trump was wrong about this, but sincere, then the only honest course he could possibly take would be to renounce office voluntarily, to refuse to subject the nation to an illegitimate presidency, a Fake Presidency. And even if Trump was just trolling, being seditious for his own amusement, how can somebody who treats the basic principle of elections governed by law with such casual contempt possibly be the legitimate president of a government founded on that principle?
The bottom line is that Trump publicly called for the overthrow of the government which had been put in office by the means explicitly called for by the United States Constitution, a document Trump is now about to swear he will protect and defend. How can he possibly take that oath in good faith? And how can anybody who cannot legitimately take the oath of office be a legitimate president? Such a man can only be a Fake President.
Finally, I come to the matter which has been most in the news recently, the reports that – to put it bluntly – Trump was essentially put in office through the influence of a foreign government, and could be pressured to put that foreign government's interests ahead of those of the United States. This would obviously make Trump a Fake President to a degree never before seen or even imagined in U.S. history. But should I include this in my analysis? Should I try to make this another demonstration of Trump's fakeness, when the reports have not been proven? Well, if we are adopting the standards of judicial objectivity, obviously not. But if we only hold ourselves to the standards of Donald Trump? Hell, yes!
Right-wing propagandists have spent eight years accusing the Obama administration of operating on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood or of ISIS on no basis at all. And Donald Trump has explicitly embraced these propagandists by name, has praised them and appeared on their shows, as they declared on no basis at all that Obama and Secretary Clinton were planning to import hundreds of millions of Muslim terrorists into the U.S. to rise up at their signal and slaughter the Christians. This is not an exaggeration; they really, actually say exactly that on their demented radio shows, and Trump really, actually said that he was indebted to them for their insights. Very obviously, then, if we were to adopt the kind of thinking explicitly endorsed by Donald Trump, we would say that a presidential candidate who has been reported to be indebted to hostile foreigners, and whose response was to retaliate against the intelligence agencies which were the sources of those reports, by cutting their numbers and their budget, was not only to be suspected of illegitimacy, he was an obvious, undoubted, undeniable, conscious, purposeful traitor to the United States.
I will not go that far. I will only say that such a man is obviously nothing but a Fake President. That does not mean we are going to ignore the laws he signs, because they come from an illegitimate source; that's not how America works. It does mean that we will not give this fraud any undeserved respect, that we will not pretend to believe that he means what he says or that he knows what he is talking about, that we will not stop bringing to the nation's attention how much damage he is doing in his lazy ignorance and his complete indifference to the principles of democracy and the well-being of everybody outside his circle of sycophants. And if we do that well enough, we can look forward with confidence to the repudiation and expulsion from office of this fraud, and an end to the Republican Congress which will be writing the unconscionable legislation which he'll be signing.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your time and attention.