Trump Is A Republican; Republicans Are Trump
Earlier this week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “Like many other women + working people, I occasionally suffer from impostor syndrome: those small moments, especially on hard days, where you wonder if the haters are right”. Well, thankfully, I don’t have to worry about haters because I am not even a blip on the radar of the political social media environment. But sometimes I do begin to doubt that what I see with my own eyes isn’t what everyone else believes is real. And, yes, I know I probably use some over-the-top language familiar to polemicists, but purely in outrage over the constant erosion of the norms and structures of our democracy, mainly perpetrated by the Republican party, since well before the 2016 election. And then I wonder if I’m just the cranky and old liberal version of the proverbial Fox News-addled, drunken uncle who ruins the holidays, which I very well may be.
The trail of democratic destruction may be well known in its details but less understand as part of a whole. Bush v. Gore, extreme partisan gerrymandering, mid-decade gerrymandering, voter suppression, authorizing illegal torture and spying on US citizens, the politicization of foreign policy by inviting foreign powers to intervene in our domestic politics (which includes Netanyahu’s address to Congress as well as Trump’s abuses), the destruction of norms in confirming lower federal court nominees, the refusal to allow a Democratic president to appoint Supreme Court justices, the refusal to defend the country from a broad attack on our electoral process, obstructing an investigation into that attack, abrogating the power of the purse to the executive, the abuse of the concept of national security which is now being extended into the economic sphere, the separation of families and the caging, imprisonment, and abuse of innocent children, and the destruction of the independence of law enforcement, all these and more were done with the support and willing acquiescence of the Republican party. Trump is not sui generis. There is a reason he ran as a Republican. He is the culmination of decades of Republican politics.
AOC’s moment of doubt was cleared up quickly when Utah Senator Mike Lee made his puerile presentation in opposition to the Green New Deal. My moment was dispelled when I read the normally sober and conservative (not in the political sense) Peter Baker’s analysis of the ramifications of the Barr letter which stated, “After Watergate, it was unthinkable that a president would fire an F.B.I. director who was investigating him or his associates. Or force out an attorney general for failing to protect him from an investigation. Or dangle pardons before potential witnesses against him. But the end of the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made clear that President Trump had successfully thrown out the unwritten rules that had bound other chief executives in the 45 years since President Richard M. Nixon resigned under fire, effectively expanding presidential power in a dramatic way. Mr. Mueller’s decision to not take a position on whether Mr. Trump’s many norm-shattering interventions in the law enforcement system constituted obstruction of justice means that future occupants of the White House will feel entitled to take similar actions. More than perhaps any other outcome of the Mueller investigation, this may become its most enduring legacy”.
Indeed. And William Barr further illustrated the death of the independence of the Department of Justice when he apparently bent to Trump’s will, abandoned the long-standing obligation of the DOJ to defend existing law, and announced it will be supporting an almost farcical challenge to the constitutionality of the ACA.
As Baker writes, Trump may have thrown out the rules of the last 45 years and expanded presidential power in a way that only increases the likelihood of further corruption and abuse of power. But he was only able to do that with the acquiescence and support of the Republicans in Congress. And it was all of them, every single one. It would have only taken less than a handful of them to stop this. They did not.
Many of us felt more pangs of doubt when AG Barr announced that Mueller had decided not to pursue a conspiracy charge regarding the actions of the Trump campaign and Trump associates during the 2016 campaign. It seemed to fly in the face of all the evidence that Mueller had already presented. But that summary was used as a cudgel of “exoneration” and Republicans, not just Trump, demanded that those who theorized that collusion occurred must pay penance. That included the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee who demanded that chairman Adam Schiff step down. Thankfully Schiff responded forcefully and dispelled those doubts in what for him was a rant that will live across history (h/t to David Michigan at DKos for the transcript).
Said Schiff, “My colleagues might think it’s okay that the Russians offered dirt on the Democratic candidate for president as part of what’s described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign. You might think that’s okay. My colleagues might think it’s okay that when that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, that the president’s son did not call the FBI, he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help — no, instead that son said he would ‘love’ the help with the Russians. You might think it was okay that he took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience running campaigns, also took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that the president’s son-in-law also took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that they concealed it from the public. You might think it’s okay that their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better. You might think it’s okay. I don’t.
You might think it’s okay that, when it was discovered a year later that they had lied about that meeting and said it was about adoptions, you might think it’s okay that the president is reported to have helped dictate that lie. You might think it’s okay. I don’t. You might think it’s okay that the campaign chairman of a presidential campaign would offer information about that campaign to a Russian oligarch in exchange for money or debt forgiveness. You might think that’s okay. I don’t. You might think it’s okay that that campaign chairman offered polling data, campaign polling data, to someone linked to Russian intelligence. I don’t think that’s okay. You might think it’s okay if that the president himself called on Russia to hack his opponent’s emails, if they were listening. You might think it’s okay that, later that day, the Russians in fact attempted to hack a server affiliated with that campaign. I don’t think that’s okay.
You might think that it’s okay that the president’s son-in-law sought to establish a secret back-channel of communication with Russians through a Russian diplomatic facility. I don’t think that’s okay. You might think it’s okay that an associate of the president made direct contact with the GRU through Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, that is considered a hostile intelligence agency. You might think it’s okay that a senior campaign official was instructed to reach that associate and find out what that hostile intelligence agency had to say, in terms of dirt on his opponent. You might think it’s okay that the national security adviser-designate secretly conferred with a Russian ambassador about undermining U.S. sanctions, and you might think it’s okay he lied about it to the FBI.
You might say that’s all okay. You might say that’s just what you need to do to win. But I don’t think it’s okay. I think it’s immoral, I think it’s unethical, I think it’s unpatriotic and, yes, I think it’s corrupt, and evidence of collusion. Now, I have always said that whether this amounts to proof of conspiracy was another matter. Whether the special counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt the proof of that crime was up to the special counsel and that I would accept his decision, and I do. He is a good an honorable man and he is a good prosecutor. But I do not think that conduct, criminal or not, is okay. And the day we do think that’s okay is the day we will look back and say, that is the day America lost its way.
And I’ll tell you one more thing that is apropos of the hearing today. I don’t think it’s okay that during a presidential campaign Mr. Trump sought the Kremlin’s help to consummate a real estate deal in Moscow that would make him a fortune. According to the special counsel, hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t think it’s okay that he concealed it from the public. don’t think it’s okay he advocated a new and more favorable policy towards the Russians, even as he was seeking the Russian’s help, the Kremlin’s help, to make money. I don’t think it’s okay that his attorney lied to our committee. There is a different word for that than collusion and it’s called compromise. And that’s the subject of our hearing today”.
Schiff was not only speaking to the American people but also directly addressing his Republican colleagues. What happened in 2016 was immoral, unethical, unpatriotic, corrupt, and evidence of collusion. That all that does not amount to a crime says more about prosecutorial timidity and the weakness of the laws against white collar crime than it does about supposed “exoneration”. And, sadly, Republicans are OK with all that immoral, unethical, unpatriotic, and corrupt behavior simply because they won. They aided and abetted it every step of the way and continue to do so. And, because of that, because of them, America has lost its way.
The destruction will continue even after Trump has gone. And, assuming our democracy does not totally collapse, hardly an assured assumption, it will only stop when another round of good government, Watergate-style reforms are passed to encode into law some of the norms that Republicans have broken. In order to get there, however, it will require the current incarnation of the Republican party to disappear. That began in 2018 and it must continue in 2020 and beyond.