Even the most optimistic person on the left could not have imagined on January 20 how quickly Donald Trump would spark so many serious mentions of “impeachment.” But, then, the four-month interval of surreality we’ve just endured is unlike anything before in American politics at the top.
What will be seen every day now after the latest developments is the steady sagging of support for Trump among conservatives. It’s reckless to predict such things, but the point when sagging turns into breaking can’t be far away unless Trump manages to turn things around. And that would require Trump to stop being Trump.
A whole lot of prominent conservatives didn’t want this guy elected in the first place. And it’s only 18 months until the mid-terms. And some of them who haven’t completely lost their moral compass know in their heart-of-hearts what they would be doing right now if Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders) was president and being accused with good evidence of doing what we know The Donald has done, much less what he is suspected of. Shackles and orange jumpsuits by lunchtime.
Plenty of liberals are excerpted in today’s APR, but it’s worth first noting a few words from Bret Stephens, the climate science-denier The New York Times recently hired to be a regular conservative voice on its Op-Ed pages. Stephens was never in Trump’s camp. In fact, he said just a year ago that he wanted Trump beaten so badly in the general election that Republican voters “learn their lesson.” So it’s no news that Stephens’ Thursday column states:
No staff shake-up would have prevented any of this from happening. It would have descended on a hapless White House staff like a superheated pyroclastic flow from a presidential Pinatubo. And it will continue to descend, week after grim week, until Trump leaves or is forced from office.
That is the Trump reality. A man with a deformed personality and a defective intellect runs a dysfunctional administration — a fact finally visible even to its most ardent admirers. Who could have seen that one coming? Who knew that character might be destiny?
Let me predict one more thing. Unless Trump stops being Trump, over the next few weeks, ever more conservatives are going to accept the reality of Stephens’ conclusion, even if they don’t express themselves quite so colorfully.
Onward to what the non-conservatives have to say.
Chauncey DeVega at Salon writes—Is the end of Donald Trump’s presidency drawing nearer? Either way he will have done great harm to America:
Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s presidency is not a professional wrestling narrative or a dystopian movie. It is real life. This bizarre political horror movie will not end when the lights come on.
Once Trump’s time in office is over — however it may end, and however soon — the American people will not have crawled through miles of human waste and then washed themselves with a bar of soap before escaping to freedom, like Tim Robbins’ character in “The Shawshank Redemption.” A reckoning remains upon us. By calling forth the submerged specters of fascism and authoritarianism to win a presidential election, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have irreparably harmed American democracy in ways that cannot be easily foreseen. As such, the American people must be prepared for the fact this crisis will not be fully rectified by removing one man from office, or electing one political party in place of the other.
Instead, the United States needs a domestic Marshall Plan where the country’s broken schools are fixed; extremes of wealth and income inequality are reduced; money is no longer considered “free speech”; media concentration and monopolies are ended; the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated; the Republican Party’s voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics are deemed illegal by the courts and voters; civic literacy is nurtured; and the loneliness, collective bewilderment and white racism that carried Trump to the White House are remedied.
Alex Shepard at The New Republic writes—Joe Lieberman is back to irritate Democrats:
Is Trump serious? Lieberman as FBI director would be the culmination of a long journey, from Al Gore’s running mate to John McCain’s roadie to public option–killer to least-entertaining troll in politics. (The New Republic endorsed Lieberman for president in 2004, which isn’t relevant to this story, but is always worth pointing out.)
It is more than likely that Trump isn’t serious and that this is a troll—not as good a troll as considering Merrick Garland for the post, but a good troll nevertheless. It will give the administration “bipartisan” cover, especially if Trump ends up picking Keating, a Republican politician.
If Trump and Lieberman are serious, it would be a huge problem because Lieberman’s law firm represents Trump—and Trump has paid the firm millions. Yes, that would just be the latest conflict of interest in an administration full of them, but even the Trump administration probably realizes that Lieberman is not worth the price of admission.
Any liberal who doesn’t know anything else about Joe Lieberman ought to be soured on him just by seeing that he is accepting a Donald Trump interview for a high post. For those of us who are sadly familiar with him, it’s no surprise. The surprise is that Joe Arpaio isn’t on the short list.
Dylan Scott and Tara Golshan at Vox write—A scandal-plagued White House is unraveling Republican unity in Congress:
Every stunning decision, discomfiting revelation, and inexplicable comment from President Donald Trump is leaving congressional Republicans increasingly anxious, bewildered, and fuming.
After the turbulent 2016 campaign, most Republicans were willing at the start of the year to set aside any uneasiness about the uncensored celebrity president to pursue their goals of repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, and disassembling the regulatory state. They made excuses for or tried to ignore the scandal-ridden administration as long as it meant a unified Republican government could legislate.
But the past eight days — when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and shared classified intelligence with Russian officials, followed by a stunning New York Times report that Trump, before firing Comey, pressed him to end a federal investigation — have backed Republicans into a corner.
There is no longer a unified Republican government in Washington.
Thomas Edsall at The New York Times writes—Why Republicans Are Always Looking Over Their Shoulders:
The sudden appointment of Robert S. Mueller as a special counsel for the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia highlights a key question: Which choice poses the greater risk for Republicans in Congress, to support a potential impeachment or to close ranks behind the president? To defy Trump or to support him? To provoke anger among the legions of Trump loyalists back home or to run the risk of turning the 2018 midterms into a Democratic wave election?
In his classic 1974 study, “Congress: The Electoral Connection,” David Mayhew, a political scientist at Yale, based his analysis on a simple but profoundly illuminating premise: that members of the House and Senate are “single-minded seekers of re-election.”
For that reason, for congressmen trying to titrate their response to the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation as it unfolds, the most important development on the Republican side of the aisle is the rise in recent years of primary challenges from the right.
Heeeeeeeeere’s Keith:
Jonathan Freedlund at The Guardian writes—Could Trump go the way of Nixon? The Watergate parallels are uncanny:
Day by day, hour by hour, the pieces are falling into place – together assembling a picture that looks eerily like Watergate. Then, as now, the whole affair originated in a break-in at Democratic HQ: a real one in 1972, a virtual one in 2016, in the form of the hacking of email accounts belonging to campaign staff. Then, as now, the real trouble centred not on the crime itself but rather on the attempt to cover it up – and to thwart those investigators looking into it.
In both cases, an apparent tipping point was a presidential firing of a lead investigator. For Nixon, it was the despatch of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. For Trump, it was last week’s sudden sacking of Comey himself.
And each time, the media has played a crucial role. The dogged investigative work of the Washington Post in exposing Nixon made legends of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Today the Post is once again tormenting a Republican president with its revelations, joined in fierce competition with the New York Times. [...]
Leaks infuriated Nixon just as they enrage Trump. Key players in the Watergate saga were the White House group known as “the plumbers”, tasked with plugging the maddening series of leaks. Similarly, Comey’s memo shows Trump asking the FBI director to do something about the flow of unauthorised information from his fledgling White House – and, indeed, even suggesting that reporters who use such information should be jailed.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Trump has caused a catastrophe. Let’s end it quickly:
There is really only one issue in American politics at this moment: Will we accelerate our way to the end of the Trump story, or will our government remain mired in scandal, misdirection and paralysis for many more months — or even years?
There is a large irony in the politics behind this question. The Democrats’ narrow interest lies in having President Trump hang around as close to the 2018 midterm elections as possible. Yet they are urging steps that could get this resolved sooner rather than later. Republicans would likely be better off if Trump were pushed off the stage. Yet up to now, they have been dragging their feet. [...]
Nothing could be worse than slow-walking the Trump inquiries. The evidence is already overwhelming that he is temperamentally and intellectually incapable of doing the job he holds. He is indifferent to acquiring the knowledge the presidency demands and apparently of the belief that he can improvise hour to hour. He will violate norms whenever it suits him and cross ethical lines whenever he feels like it.
He also lies a lot, and has been perfectly happy to burn the credibility of anyone who works for him.
Ross Barkan at The Guardian writes—The liberal punditocracy thinks Donald Trump is toast. Not so fast:
[T]he rightwing media’s reaction to Trump’s latest imbroglios should be a comedown for every Democrat and liberal member of the punditocracy who is convinced that his days as president are numbered. What they always seem to forget is that a large chunk of the people who elected Trump still want him around. Just as importantly, the media they consume hasn’t given up on him. With no consensus reality uniting all Americans, news consumption becomes tribal: you remain in the fiefdoms you trust and shut everyone else out.
The Watergate scandal felled Nixon because, in part, his own party turned on him. House Republicans, giddy about their newfound majority, pressed the case against Clinton. No president in American history has been impeached when his own party controlled Congress, but we’ve at least learned from 2016 that few people should take comfort in any kind of precedent.
Will Republicans desert the president? More importantly, will the media they read and watch to form the only reality they know suddenly decide Trump is totally unfit to lead?
Alexandra Petri at The Washington Post writes—The president is not a child. He’s something worse:
We were wrong, it turns out. Anyone cannot be president. Anyone can be elected president (any man, that is), but not anyone can be president. [...]
Merely watching this, you are now 600 years old. (Have you written this before? Hundreds of years have passed since Tuesday. You have no memory of the Time Before.) It is as though all of your involuntary muscle functions now require conscious effort. Everything you assumed would take care of itself so that you could go about your life now requires you to watch it and hold your breath. You are holding your breath all the time. [...]
It is the vague worry I feel in the back of my mind all the time about the Yellowstone Caldera, but it is running the country. [...]
He’s a human Failure to Read the User’s Manual.
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—Trump Has Really Screwed Himself This Time:
For a White House as undisciplined as this one, the tape stonewalling scans less as a political position than a legal one. White House counsel Don McGahn, or someone else who understands the potential gravity of the situation, may well have told everyone to keep their mouths shut. If the White House were to acknowledge that there are no tapes, Trump would be caught in a very troubling fabrication to intimidate a witness, but if the White House confirms that tapes exist, Trump would face the legal obligation to preserve them and perhaps even surrender them to Congress.
We know to a near certainty that the White House will come under immense pressure to come clean. If Comey testifies publicly before the Senate, it is likely he will confirm under oath that Trump sought his personal loyalty, thus resolving the mystery of the White House tapes one way or another. Trump might dispute Comey’s claims, but if he doesn’t release any tapes to prove his case, it would suggest either that the tapes don’t exist or that they vindicate Comey. The question at the heart of the tape scandal would tighten from “Do the tapes exist?” to “Did the president lie about the existence of the tapes, or about their content?” That’s a question people working in the White House will feel much more pressure to address than the one they face today.
It strikes me as overwhelmingly likely that the truth lies in one of these two scenarios. But even if Trump has recordings of his conversations with Comey, and they vindicate Trump—as he coyly suggests in his tweet—it is small solace because he will have recorded himself using his power to fire Comey as leverage to discourage an FBI investigation. That is, he will have gathered evidence against himself, documenting his attempt to obstruct justice.
Henry A. Giroux at Truthout writes—Dancing With the Devil: Trump's Politics of Fascist Collaboration:
Certainly, Trump is not Hitler, and the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic. But it would be irresponsible to consider Trump to be a either a clown or aberration given his hold on power and the ideologues who support him. What appears indisputable is that Trump's election is part of a sustained effort over the last 40 years on the part of the financial elite to undermine the democratic ethos and highjack the institutions that support it. Consequently, in the midst of the rising tyranny of totalitarian politics, democracy is on life support and its fate appears more uncertain than ever. Such an acknowledgment should make clear that the curse of totalitarianism is not a historical relic and that it is crucial that we learn something about the current political moment by examining how the spread of authoritarianism has become the crisis of our times, albeit in a form suited to the American context.
History, once again, offers us a framework in which a global constellation of authoritarian economic, social and political forces are coming together that speak to tensions and contradictions animating everyday lives that transcend national boundaries for which there is not yet a comprehensive, coherent and critical language. What has emerged is a climate of precarity, fear, angst, paranoia and incendiary passion. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt, it would be wise to resurrect one of the key questions that emerges from her work on totalitarianism, which is whether the events of our time are leading to totalitarian rule.
Whether or not Trump is a fascist in the exact manner of earlier totalitarian leaders somewhat misses the point, because it suggests that fascism is a historically fixed doctrine rather than an ideology that mutates and expresses itself in different forms around a number of commonalities. There is no exact blueprint for fascism, though echoes of its past haunt contemporary politics.
Russell Berman at The Atlantic writes—The Pentagon Is Almost Ready for Its Close-Up:
The Pentagon will spend the next several months gearing up for a mission so complicated that many officials doubt it can be pulled off, an undertaking so immense that the military hasn’t once dared to try it before.
No, this isn’t a story about deploying a fancy new weapon, or unveiling a new aircraft, or launching a military operation of any kind: The Department of Defense is preparing for its first-ever audit.
That the nation’s most sprawling and expensive bureaucracy—and the world’s largest employer—has yet to undergo a formal, legally mandated review of its finances is a source of embarrassment among budget watchdogs, and it has become a preoccupation for members of Congress intent on demonstrating their fiscal prudence even as they appropriate more than $600 billion annually to the Pentagon. “Like Waiting for Godot,” one Democratic senator, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, quipped about the absent audit at a recent hearing. The lack of formal accountability has left unanswered basic questions about how the military spends taxpayer money, like the precise number of employees and contractors its various branches have hired. Cost overruns have become legendary, none more so than the F-35 fighter-jet program that has drawn the ire of President Trump. And partial reports suggest that the department has misspent or not accounted for anywhere from hundreds of billions to several trillion dollars.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Trump and Republicans Are On a Collision Course:
It is important to keep in mind that whether we’re discussing habitual lying, possible collusion with the Russians, obstruction of justice or the leaking of classified information to a known adversary, all of these issues are self-inflicted wounds from Trump himself. As investigations over these matters progress, is there any reason to believe that there will be no additional items to add to the list?
Even those who chide the media for assuming that Trump will pivot or somehow become “presidential” often fail to acknowledge that his behavior will continue to produce these kinds of scandals, if not increase in severity. While I am often loath to make predictions, this one isn’t a stretch…that reality is almost certainly on a collision course with Republican tribalism.
Why am I so sure of that? It is because of what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes as wells as from things I’ve read by people who have a deep knowledge of Trump, like the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz. He recently expanded on what he told Jane Mayer about his understanding of the president almost a year ago. Schwartz described what Trump learned from his father, and then talked about his “survival mode.”
To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear or you succumbed to it — as he thought his older brother had. This narrow, defensive worldview took hold at a very early age, and it never evolved. “When I look at myself today and I look at myself in the first grade,” he told a recent biographer, “I’m basically the same.” His development essentially ended in early childhood.
Eric Levitz at New York Magazine’s “Daily Intelligencer” writes—Republicans Should Offer Trump a Golden Parachute:
Donald Trump has outlived his usefulness to the Republican Party. The reality star’s shameless improvisations may have propelled the GOP to power, but now they threaten to paralyze the capital it conquered. [...]
Your average elected Republican never liked Trump to begin with. Now “it would be tough to overstate how angry, confused and fed up Republicans are with President Donald Trump,” Politico reports. And that disoriented rage is allowing some in Paul Ryan’s caucus to whisper about impeachment. [...]
But what if they persuaded Trump to accept early retirement? After all, Trump seems to be as disappointed with the realities of his presidency as anyone in Congress. [...]
Everyone would be better off if the president stepped down to spend more time with Fox News and his Twitter account. Trump could spend his golden years doing the things he loves most; the Republicans wouldn’t have to run away from (and/or or flip off) reporters at the end of each day; and the rest of us could savor our more favorable odds of not dying in a nuclear holocaust.
Jeff Alson at In These Times writes—The Impeachment Trap: Be Careful What You Wish For Trump is odious, but impeachment is dangerous—both for the Democrats and the progressive movement:
[O]utrage aside, we must keep one thing in mind: how progressives and Democrats approach impeachment could shape our democracy and the domestic political landscape for a generation. We must focus on what is best for the American people, not on what is worst for our so-called president. I believe it would be a major strategic blunder for the Democratic Party to fall for what I call the Impeachment Trap—the powerful temptation to lead the charge for impeachment without considering the strategic implications.
Since neither impeachment in the House of Representatives nor conviction in the Senate are possible without Republican votes, it is a waste of time and energy for Democrats to promote impeachment in the absence of any Republican support. I am most concerned about the scenario where one or more leading Republicans come on board and entice Democrats to lead a successful impeachment.
The simple majority necessary to impeach in the House of Representatives, as well as the two-thirds majority that is required to convict in the Senate, can be achieved with the support of most or all Democrats and a minority of Republicans. Unfortunately, this scenario would offer enormous political benefits to the Republicans.