His column for today’s New York Times is subtitled “President Trump’s free rein from political norms puts the United States at risk.”
Blow has a number of brief and to the point statements about our current political situation throughout his piece, after beginning with this direct paragraph:
We watch daily as the constitutional and conventional fabric of this country is clawed at and unraveled by Donald Trump, while those with any power to prevent or punish his actions are suspended in a state of listlessness, making political calculations rather than performing constitutional duty.
He immediately follows that with this pointed sentence:
We are drifting dangerously close to an imperial presidency that exists above and outside the rules we thought were designed to prevent such an occurrence.
Blow quotes from the Mueller report and also from the recent letters signed as of now by more than 800 former Federal prosecutors.
He then states bluntly that the only course of action left is impeachment, but notes that the Republicans have written off any rebuke of Trump
because they know that Trump now has a stranglehold on the Republican Party and therefore their base of power.
We might stop here because absent some Republican support in the Senate removal of the President, which requires 67 votes in a body currently controlled by Mitch McConnell and the GOP, is simply not going to happen.
Or, as he puts it in another one-liner
Republicans have declared Trump their king and bowed to his maleficent majesty.
Note the clever and almost easy to miss replacement of the normal modifier of majesty, “magnificent,” with the absolutely cutting adjective “maleficent.”
After describing the Congressional Democrats (in general) as “scared witless,” Blow takes on those who seem to want to follow the precedent from Watergate by slowly building a persuasive case that in the 1970s we did not have cable, the internet, and social media (all of which, I might note, contribute to our current 24 hour news cycle). The response from Trump and his allies has bee “wholesale obstruction” with a refusal to respond to subpoenas, with constant criticism of Democratic attempts at oversight. Here we have to wonder whether the Courts, especially at the Appellate level, having had the many openings that McConnell had blocked Obama from filling that are now being packed with right-wing idealogues, will in any way rein this in, even before it would get to a Supreme Court that has one Justice, Gorsuch, who is there only because McConnell illegitimately blocked Obama from replacing Scalia with Garland, and of course now Kavanaugh replacing Kennedy. Blow quotes Kerry W. Kirchner, former House general counsel for the last Republican majority, as saying that if the courts sign off on what Trump and company are doing we will have an imperial presidency, one that is largely unchecked.
Blow is critical of House Democrats, ridiculing the notable caution of Speaker Pelosi with the comment that in a war in which they are already finding themselves in which Trump’s base is solid,
Democrats are bringing their letter openers to a gunfight.
As to Friday’s letter from Rep. Nadler, Chair of House Judiciary, which includes the idea of attempting to reach a compromise with AG Barr on release of the Mueller report, Blow is equally scathing, writing
Compromise isn’t in this administration’s DNA; annihilation is.
Let’s be clear. If one looks at Trump’s history in business, he has since he first turned to Roy Cohn followed a scorch earth policy, at least rhetorically, until he no longer could get away with it. Then he would either change the subject or lie about what happened by getting out in front and declaring his loss as some kind of victory. Yes he has been beaten in the past in the Courts and in getting fined for his abuses, but somehow NONE of that seems to get through to those in his base, perhaps in part because the media has been complicit in playing the “game” by his rules. Now he has a Republican Senate full of those who after being scathing about him during the primary are among his biggest cheerleaders, two of whom, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, were among his primary opponents. He has at this point the worst cabinet in history — he might have had even before Mattis resigned. With the churn in his cabinet and keeping many position filled by Acting Secretaries (and for a while an Acting AG), he removes the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, even though his instability and dishonesty and ongoing obstruction — to list just three possible examples — demonstrate his manifest inability to uphold his oath and fulfill the duties of the office he currently occupies.
And even were all the Democrats in agreement to try to force him to abide by the constitutional right and duty of the House to perform appropriate oversite, absent a court system willing to expedite the hearing processes Trump clearly can run out much of the clock well into next year, at which point Democrats would likely be unwilling to make the election entirely about impeachment, so that would become moot.
And unsaid by Blow is this: even if Trump were to lose in the Courts, would he abide by their decisions? After all,remember the portrait of a predecessor he now has in the Oval is of Andrew Jackson, who after the Supreme Court had ruled against his position in the Indian Removal case (Worcester v Georgia) is purported to have said “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Nixon accepted the 8-0 ruling against him and turned over the tapes. People already wonder if Trump would leave office even after losing election, or whether he would try in some fashion to stay in office. His current Chair of the Joint Chiefs would not support the use of the military to protect the President, but his term is coming to an end, and it is more than conceivable that Trump will start seeing the upper ranks of the military with those who will commit to fealty to him, as he attempted to do with Comey, as he clearly seems to have from Barr, and as he may well have from some of the more recent judicial picks.
This might also apply to the House using inherent contempt and attempting to arrest key figures. Remember, the Trump family is protected by Secret Service. Are we going to have a confrontation between that law enforcement organization and the Capitol Police or the Sergeant at Arms, or in the case of a Supreme Court ruling against Trump the Marshall of that tribunal?
I am not saying any of this WOULD happen, merely that it could.
Which is why I think we have to take seriously the final words in Blow’s column, which are these:
Trump may well become the first American king, lawless and unaccountable, by default, by an overall political paralysis.
We may not be there yet, but it is far too easy to the see that the road down which we now travel could easily arrive at that destination.