“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham County Jail
In the wake of Trump cronies Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort getting convicted on tax charges, Donald Trump’s issues continue to escalate. Veteran journalist Bob Woodward released excerpts from his upcoming book on the Trump Administration, Fear: Trump in the White House, that only served to confirm that various named officials loathe Trump, including Chief of Staff John Kelly, who Woodward quotes as saying “we’re in Crazytown… this is the worst job I’ve ever had.” And Kelly was in combat. But then in combat, the people shooting you are usually to your front.
Somehow even this news didn’t get the same attention as the now-famous September 5 piece in The New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, where the Times Op-Ed staff stated first that the author was “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. ” (This incidentally rules out Mike Pence, because Vice President is an elected position.) While stressing their conservative bona fides, the author states “the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic” and “the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” Of course the surprise is that anyone is surprised that the quadruple-bankrupt Jersey casino boss and comic relief on The Apprentice is not entirely truthful or ethical. And yet this maneuver raised more hackles than Woodward’s attributed accounts. The piece has of course been pored over by numerous people already. One of the common themes – especially among Trump defenders – is that such insubordination and subversion of policy is an attempt to thwart democracy. Well, first, there’s the practical question of whether Trump has a policy in any given area. But there’s also the point that the only reason Trump is even president is because America is NOT a majoritarian democracy, but a federal republic. Even in that context, voters – or the Electors of their states – chose Donald Trump, not John Kelly or one of the people he hired. But that point just returns the question to where it belongs.
The anonymous Times author tells the readers: “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t. The result is a two-track presidency.” But by the author’s own admission, this “two-track presidency” is attempting to enforce sanctions on Russia that Congress demanded and Trump will barely even acknowledge. The author doesn’t even bring up Trump’s violations of human rights on the border, including test run cases to see if the government can take the rights of non-citizens in order to remove them from the rest of us. Assuming that there are adults in the room – which is really debatable – what’s the point of having responsible adults in the room if they can be pushed around by a bratty child? The problem is not the people Trump hired. The problem is that the guy who was elected is NOT a responsible adult.
But still, this sort of thing hurts Trump where he lives, because this account on top of the Woodward expose simply confirms that Trump is not at war with an establishment “deep state” but rather his own people, who may not know much but are either ethical enough to balk at some things or pragmatic enough to realize that their boy is threatening the gravy train.
At various points, liberals have warned that the Administration and its sympathizers are engaging in “gaslighting,” pushing a secret agenda in such a way that they can deny doing so and make their opponents look delusional. Like, how supposedly there’s a white-supremacist plot to use the “OK” gesture as a secret gang sign so that when one of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s former employees flashed it at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, we had to have a serious debate as to whether using the OK sign makes you a racist. But I’ve stated for quite some time that when Donald Trump believes his own hype, lies even when he doesn’t have to (or when it would backfire on him) and doesn’t want facts about him to come out, he ultimately doesn’t believe in objective reality and prefers the notion that changing the consensus means you can change the facts. In other words, he is far more vulnerable to gaslighting than even liberals, who for all their post-modernism, still have the ingrained assumption that outside reality is a thing that exists.
Especially, if Woodward’s account is true, former Economic Advisor Gary Cohn saw an order on Trump’s desk to withdraw from an important trade agreement with South Korea and countered it by simply taking the document off his desk, which indicates not only that Trump is disconnected with reality, he may have no sense of object permanence.
Prior to the release of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump might not have been aware that he was held in such low esteem by his own people, because Trump’s picture is in the dictionary next to “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” But now he knows. And the gaslighting is, he knows but he can’t say exactly WHO said these mean things about him. It could be anybody on his staff. Maybe ALL of them.
But that gets to a question that a lot of commentators have pondered: If the only thing that allows sanity to prevail at court is that the Emperor doesn’t know that his worst impulses are being thwarted, what is the point of letting him know it? It could be that given what we already know about the knife-fighting atmosphere inside the White House, that this piece was actually written by one of the true believers who wanted to raise Trump’s ire for the purpose of getting him to purge anybody who wasn’t sufficiently devoted to goodthink. Which would be the tactic of a truly spiteful, conniving, needledicked bugfucker. In other words, Stephen Miller.
Or, it could be that after Senator Bob Corker’s comment about all the Republicans looking at Trump’s unfitness and quailing, “we don’t want to confront him, we don’t wanna poke the bear!” Anonymous decided, “poke the fucking bear, already.” If Trump really is that unfit, and sensible people can only do so much to conceal that – especially since they can’t conceal Trump’s behavior with other heads of government – then the only way out is through.
Last week I was on Facebook, where someone had posted the line, “I hope there’s never a president who makes us look at Trump the way Trump is making us look at George W. Bush.” Which caused me to bring up my axiom, “every new president somehow lowers the bar.” And some asked how I could apply that to Barack Obama, who was generally a good guy. The point I made was: “The reason I include Obama is because of what he didn’t do. By not prosecuting Bush-Cheney officials for war crimes and not prosecuting the Wall Street culprits of the Great Recession, Obama allowed their bad behavior to stand as precedent. And that lowers the bar. All the liberals who (correctly) condemn Trumpublicans for degrading civic norms need to consider that the other party didn’t enforce them either. ” And one of my liberal Facebook friends went, “Oh brother. Obama was supposed to prosecute for war crimes etc.? Bullshit. The Repugnants would have loved that shit show. Really? How would Obama pull that off? Democrats are not the ‘Benghazi the shit out of it party’. Regardless of war crimes then the reality of trying to prosecute. Did you forget this is the same nation with a monkey in charge? And then you think a black president, Democrat no less can prosecute the previous administration for war crimes? Did you forget this (is) the US of A? “
In the immortal words of Yoda, “that is why you fail.”
I like Obama, but overall, he was kind of passive. In fact, I could argue – and have – that the refusal of Obama and other Democrats to confront the Republican subversion of norms was a huge part of how those norms deteriorated even before Trump. If anything, the rise of Trump should make it clear that there is a recipe for success in bucking the establishment process and not being politically correct. You’re not supposed to bash Mexicans. You’re not supposed to mock disabled people on stage. You’re not supposed to bring up pussies or bleeding. But he did, and he won. Now imagine if such a power was used for Good instead of Evil.
This leads me to something else that happened this week. During the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Republicans only released most of their data on Kavanaugh the day before the start of hearings, so that Democrats wouldn’t have time to go over it. Not only that, the Trump Administration, in an unprecedented step, used “presidential privilege” to withhold access to documents from Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush Administration. Such documents that the Senate has access to were marked “committee confidential” even though the Senate Judiciary Committee was in open session. Well, Senator Cory Booker (D.-New Jersey) decided that rather than having the committee-confidential documents from the Bush era withheld from discussion, he would release them to the public through his office, even though Senator John Cornyn (R.-Texas) reminded him that penalties for violating Senate committee confidentiality included possible expulsion from the Senate. Senator Booker did it anyway.
Cory Booker is everybody who’s ever had to put up with the stifling correctness on a leftist (OR right-wing) Internet forum and its pissy, control-freak moderators and who eventually tells them, “Go ahead and BAN me, motherfucker.”
The difference is, it actually worked, because while Booker might still get censured, kicking him out of the Senate would just force a special election – in Democrat-friendly New Jersey – in which his ouster would necessarily be a central issue. In other words, Booker raised a bluff that he knew the Republicans couldn’t call.
We need more people like him, frankly.
Otherwise the “sane” party of Democrats are just the flip side of “sane” Republicans who enable erosions of the rule of law and the most pungent perversions of justice because they’re more scared of disruptions to regular order. There is no point in playing by the rules when the Republicans threw the rules out years ago. This is exactly why things got to this state: Because everyone in Washington is a fucking marshmallow who goes along to get along.
Anyone who wonders why I’m a “third” party voter, this is a big part of it. Because you “responsible adults in the room” let us all down, and now the republic is endangered because of it.