Ed Wexler, PoliticalCartoons.com, CagleCartoons.com
Did you know over 100 newspapers called for Bill Clinton’s resignation in 1998 and 1999?
And for what?
A blowjob Lying about a blowjob.
He didn’t resign of course, but that didn’t mean the eight year jihad culminating with impeachment had no rewards for Republicans. Because of the Lewinsky matter, Gore’s 2000 campaign left the still popular and powerful Clinton out of his campaign, and chose the lackluster Joe Lieberman for Veep as a supposed “antidote” for Clinton’s sins.*
I think Bill Clinton could have gathered a lot more than 538 votes in Florida in 2000.
Twenty years later, Trump makes Clinton’s offense seem like a minor parking violation. Yet I know of only one newspaper with the guts to call for him to resign — the Portland (ME) Press Herald on June 5 of this year, just before he visited the state.
Even before the Coronavirus and hundreds of thousands of deaths, even before the Ukraine election crimes, there were a flood of reasons to demand resignation. A very short list:
- Payoffs to a porn star and Playboy model
- Concealing his Trump Tower deal during the election
- Multiple emoluments violations (including most recently, attempted bribery for the British Open)
- Siding with Putin over Russian election interference
- Multiiple obstruction of justice counts in the Mueller Report
Left media called for it. A year ago, Eric Boehlert wrote What will it finally take for newspapers to demand Trump resign—the way they did Bill Clinton? Bethesda 1971 also called for it a year ago, in He is unfit. He should resign.
And now, there is an “open and shut case” (as Kamala Harris said),
Just look where they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than 165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the chance to say goodbye. It didn’t have to be this way.
Harris’s words are backed up by William Saletan’s thoroughly documented Slate Article: How Trump Killed Thousands of Americans, concluding “For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.”
And that’s the point of demanding resignation now. This is different from Trump’s misdeeds up to 2020, which were criminal and impeachable, but not yet catastrophic. Trump’s pandemic response is a complete and utter cataclysmic failure. While from 2017-2019, Trump posed a daily threat of horrible consequences, and consequences were horrible for some, like children in cages, now it’s no longer just a threat. It is daily reality for five million who contracted Covid-19, for the families of 166,000 who died, for the tens of millions of unemployed, for the constant fear and anxiety of hundreds of millions. And now he compounds it by trying to force school openings and destroy the post office.
Needless to say, this is not normal. Someone with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands should not stay in power one more minute. But you would not know that from watching and reading media, where hardly anyone calls for his resignation. As I write, he is holding up Corona Virus aid to defund the Post Office.
And for what?** His own re-election.
This is a combination of depraved indifference to human life, and intentionally causing loss of human life by cutting off aid — i.e., homicide. Reporting or editorializing about him without calling for his resignation is media malpractice. It is normalizing a sociopath who doesn’t care hundreds of thousands have died, and has no problem pushing policies that will kill hundreds of thousands more.
He will not resign. But neither did Bill Clinton, and the calls for his resignation helped usher in George W. Bush and all the carnage that followed. A cascade of resignation calls now will have an electoral effect.
The media normalized Trump in the 2016 campaign by treating him as an amusing novelty act and demonizing his opponent, but bad as that was, this is so much worse. As I wrote on April 1, when the death toll was “only” 940, The Emperor's nakedness has turned deadly. Where are the mass calls for resignation?
Unlike Fox and its viewers, the rest of the media see the nakedness, but feel compelled to present him to their audience as clothed — in normality, in both siderism, in blue collar diner-ism, in endless empty podiums, in a “changed tone,” in “clouds lifted,” in empty military ventures, in representation of charlatans on TV panels, and in many other subtle and blatant guises.
There have been many instances of courage lately: Alexander Vindman, Fiona Hill, tens of thousands of health care and essential workers.
It’s time for newspapers, media and all public figures to summon up just a fraction of that.
If they don’t, they’re complicit.
Let there be a chorus of calls for resignation.
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*Irony watch: Just after election day, Lieberman essentially surrendered to W Bush by saying late mailed military ballots should be counted.
**Marge Gunderson in Fargo:
“So, that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money? There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it.”
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