Nixon/trump

I recall, although not very well, the presidential election of 1972, when Nixon, despite having been implicated in Watergate, was the clear winner over George McGovern. Less than two years after the vote, he removed himself from office after it became clear he was going to be made to leave.

Donald trump doesn't even have the few blessings of Nixon's first administration. In his first year of office, Nixon oversaw passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency; he instigated the peaceful desegregation of southern schools, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and ended the draft. He was the first US president to visit the People's Republic of China. 

Nixon was a popular president, and I admit, as a 12 year old proto-conservative in 1972, I made sure my parents were voting for him. But as the country improved socially over the decades, I also improved, seeing Nixon and what he represented for what it was: Greed. For money, for power, I'm too small a person to see high enough to work that out. But it was to our everlasting pride as a nation that, when it came to punishing a criminal executive, we did so. 

Which is why so much of why the return of trump and his rethuglican party to power hurts. We had achieved so much--abortion safety, protections for voters and the marginalized among us, more consistent employment--and in the years of his reign and after, saw so much of them eroded. There was more work to do, of course, harder work. But does anyone think a trump administration will prioritize anything but the dismantling of what remains?

What did we trade marginal improvement for? What did trump do in his four years that suggest he has any clue, beyond thoughts of vengeance against his enemies, what he wants to accomplish? Is this why he received slightly better than 50% of the vote, so his followers can watch the spectacle he promises to make of the political landscape? Are they hoping that somehow watching their behemoth battle whatever false enemies he has trumped up will somehow benefit them? That promises to be at best a pyrrhic victory for rethuglican voters, because in any fight between King Kong and Godzilla the losers are always the people who are on the same island. 

An Essay You Should Read

 

This is a good, hard look at what our immediate future can look like if we can look beyond our own fears and trepidations and stay in touch with the people we trust, not just to bitch but to bitch and work toward solutions. Don't allow yourself to be isolated, that's the way these motherfuckers get their way. Love each other and stay safe. 

Take courage friends.
The way is often hard, the path is never clear,
and the stakes are very high.
Take courage.
For deep down, there is another truth:
you are not alone.

Wayne B. Arnason

Subversion

As a teacher in the early 21st century, when things started getting hot politically, I often argued with my students that the law demanded things be done certain ways. That, although republican operatives subverted the protections of the legal system by disrupting the Bush-Gore count, the Supreme Court ultimately held sway. And while I didn't agree with its decision, it had the final say, and adhering to its findings is what separates the US from, say, the Sudan.

But I didn't expect, and I doubt few did, that fealty to the law could ultimately be used as a cudgel. When he began his campaign, most of us were aware trump paid only lip service to the law and assumed that would undo him. When he assumed office, most of us were aware he could not hold to the strictures of what the law about what he could and couldn't do, and assumed that would undo him.

What we didn't expect, and what Dahlia Lithwick in this excellent commentary only hints at, is the number of people not only willing to look the other way when trump insists others abide by the laws he ignores, but who actively enable his flouting of those laws, who accept his unspoken credo that the law is for suckers. This period of our republic will ultimately be used as an example of how desperate things become when the system operates as if the rules are only used on the public, not for them.



JURISPRUDENCE
The Law Is for Suckers
Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal proves that they let you do it.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

FEB 05, 20206:21 PM

“The law is for suckers.” That has been the credo of Donald Trump throughout his personal and business life. James Zirin, in his superb book, Plaintiff in Chief, chronicles the 3,500 lawsuits to which Trump has been a party, a pattern of scorched-earth attacks that include deliberate “delay, counterattack, obstruction, deflection, confusion, threats of ruin, and blanket assertion of attorney/client privilege to avoid accountability.” These were tricks he learned from the notorious Roy Cohn, and they were largely successful in helping him evade legal accountability throughout his business career.

They were, it turns out, the same tricks Trump brought to the campaign trail and later to the White House. It was all, writes Zirin, a dangerous new approach for a president:

Trump is very different. His instinctive litigiousness; his abuse of the legal process to obtain leverage, not justice; his mean-spirited statements and conduct; his overblown damage claims; his many lies, exaggerations and prevarications; his willingness to sue, trash, or discard even those who did him a good turn along the way are abnormal by any standard.

It is a paradox that the most litigious country in the world—a country whose founding documents were largely drafted by lawyers, and whose constitutional true north has long been the constraints afforded by the law—elected a man who has spent the bulk of his life creating a two-tiered system, in which some men are bound by law and others float away from it. We knew long before he was elected that Donald Trump would not be bound by the rule of law, or by the norms of a system dependent on checks and balances. He told us as much. During the campaign he floated the prospect of torturing the families of enemies, and rewriting libel laws, and banning travelers to the United States based on their religion. Sure, it maybe sounded like hyperbole, and it maybe sounded like campaign-speak, and even as some of those efforts were effectuated, including the Muslim ban and family separations, and even as the norms about nepotism and self-dealing and disclosure were brushed away, it still seemed as if a country founded on law would locate some guardrails.

It hasn’t. Just as Zirin promised us, Trump has deployed all of his Roy Cohn strategies to show us that the law is for suckers, and that for great men it serves as a nuisance at most, something to be gotten out of with a squadron of well-paid lawyers, by terrorizing opposing parties and witnesses, by lying fluently and repeatedly, and by declaring victory even when you lost. It should not surprise a soul that he would have brought those tactics to bear as a candidate, as president, and as the subject of an impeachment inquiry. The legal arguments he has deployed throughout this process—that he should have “absolute immunity” from investigation; that he could not be removed from office for crimes; and that he could only be impeached for literal crimes, not high crimes and misdemeanors as the Framers intended—were vintage Roy Cohn. As was the argument, as proffered by Alan Dershowitz, that if the president believed his election interference was in the best interest of the republic, it was both not illegal and also not an impeachable offense. The fact that the Senate and the Justice Department helped him evade accountability, or that White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Dershowitz and Ken Starr served as Roy Cohn mini-me’s, should surprise nobody. Nor should the fact that the “trial” was not a trial and the jurors were not jurors or that a nontrivial number of the jurors voted to acquit him while still acknowledging that what he did was the thing he continues to deny having done.

Nobody should be surprised that in the wake of 3,500 lawsuits, Trump will conclude that he is indeed above the law, that the legal regime exists only for suckers, and also that he can repurpose the machinery of law to investigate, harass, and punish the whistleblowers and the witnesses and those who sought to constrain him. At which point the law won’t just be the thing that applies only to losers and suckers, but also the thing that can be used to put down those who sought justice in the first place. And nobody should be surprised that having invited foreign election interference and having been acquitted for doing so, this president will use the formidable power of his Justice Department to manipulate the 2020 election, and to call into question the results of that election in the courts.

We can debate the wisdom of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and the ticktock of the impeachment investigation and trial—whether it should have been broader, or gone longer, or relied upon court rulings that never came. But we can hopefully agree that what they attempted to do was use both legal processes and legal arguments to show that when a president abuses the power of his office and denies accountability, it should matter. They were trying to prove that the law isn’t just there to punish asylum-seekers trapped in Mexico or black men in prisons, but that it should apply to everyone, even the wealthy, and even the people who believe it doesn’t apply to them because it never has in the past. Donald Trump staked a decadeslong business career on the bet that if you’re rich, famous, brazen, and unrepentant, the law will let you do it. He staked his presidency on the same. Republicans who deplore the death of “unity” today should remember that this was once a nation unified around at least the hope that the law was for everyone, and that going forward, it will be divided around the certainty that some people don’t answer to the courts or the Constitution. Their president will answer to nobody. All of us now answer to him.

Laugh in his face

When I was in my late teens or early 20s, I wrote a bad short story. This isn't anything in itself. At that age and at that point in our lives, most of us write bad stories of one kind or another. And my story wouldn't have risen to the "so bad it's interesting" level; it was simply an overwrought story full of its own importance and cleverness, and to be honest the only thing I remember of it is that it was part of an attempt I was making then to have all my stories interconnect by showing the different sides of the same characters (for instance, by having one character, an attempted rapist in one story, die in Vietnam saving a wounded soldier in another story), and as an indication of its poverty, I don't even remember the title.

But I do remember its denouement. The story was about elementary students whose teacher opts not to have a Christmas tree in their classroom, leading one child's father to confront the teacher in the parking lot after school in front of the kids. The father, who I modeled after a short, scared, violent man I knew in real life, punches the teacher in the face, knocking hm into the snow, and then drops into a defensive stance. The teacher, straightening up, instead of fighting him the way the kids hope for, laughs loudly at the father, collects his things, and walks to his car, still laughing. This might sound better and more nuanced than it was, and my story suffers from the teacher having to explain to the narrator why he did that.

But my point, that people who mete out violence deserve the deflation of a loud laugh and the unwillingness to take them seriously, is a good one. I don't remember where I got that but it's a good point: Try putting yourself above others by one means or another, and try to keep yourself there by violent reaction, and you need to be brought back to reality by a hearty belly laugh at your expense.

Not with you, but at you.

This is what I think we need in this age of trump, a solid laugh at what he and his supporters say about themselves and about him. To be sure, what they are doing and attempting to do, by taking on for themselves the responsibility of turning back the clock to a time when old rich white men make the rules everyone but them play by, is not a laughing matter. It hurts people in reality, sometimes killing them, and often the most vulnerable. That's what they count on to keep ourselves in line, that they are too serious and frightening in what they can do to us. How much more crushing to their sense of self to be reminded that we know they're afraid. They deserve no solace or pity.

Laugh in their faces.

Your uncle forwards a message that climate change as we're experiencing it is natural. Return it with a laugh. Someone you're having a debate with says trump is doing well for the economy. Laugh in his face. I'm not talking about a titter or a chuckle. I'm talking about a full, inarticulate, unstoppable belly laugh. As if what they are asserting is so obviously on the face of it ridiculous that the only rational response is to laugh at it, because it must be a joke. And make no mistake because trump and his assertions are a joke.

Would this have made a difference, had we treated trump as the empty suit he is at the start of his campaign as a self-referencing buffoon? Some would argue that we did exactly that, and further that it was our inability to take him and his ideas as a serious threat that led us to where we are. That may be the case. Perhaps our having done so worked in his favor, giving him and his followers the impulse to show us up for not having taken him and them seriously. I don't know. But I do know that they're expecting us now to take them seriously, and it's time to point out to them, no matter what harm they may try to do us, that we do not.

We Will Not Be Silent

I've waited a week to make this post, partly out of inertia and partly out of a desire to get the message right. I am fiercely partisan, there's no getting around it. I believe strongly in the work of progressives and the liberal impulse. Christianity's most meaningful words for me are "What you do to the least of these you do to me." 

I am furious at the outcome of the presidential election. In that, I join a lot of people. I'm among the first to argue that doesn't make us right. There is a reason we don't accept majority rules in our system.

I am furious, but not at a Hillary Clinton loss. I'm not furious at a Republican win. And I'm not furious with Donald Trump. I'm furious that in the Twenty-First Century, Donald Trump ran on a platform of bigotry, misogyny, and anti-immigrant sentiment culminating in a fantasy about a literal wall between two nations (have we learned nothing from East and West Berlin?), and won.

I am furious with the people responsible for this. I am furious with Donald Trump voters and sympathizers.

I am furious that Donald Trump earned enough votes to make him the candidate in the first place. I am furious that what most of us experienced as a vanity campaign, all about him, never about the rest of us, was capable of lying about the career of a veteran politician and winning on that strength. I am furious someone endorsed by numerous white supremacy and anti-Semitic organizations, not a single one of which he disavowed, managed in 2016 to win. I am furious that in contemporary America there are a number of people who have both a genuine and deserved fear of the aftermath of a Donald Trump victory. I am furious that Donald Trump could accuse Latino/as of multiple falsities and yet garnered nearly 30% of their votes. I am furious that many politicians in the Republican Party took the drastic, courageous, and necessary step of publicaly disavowing their candidate and his views, and yet 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for him (and let us not forget the several, like Paul Ryan, Bob Dole, and Ted Cruz, who regaled the public with how poor was the reflection he gave the party, only to cynically pull the lever for him). I am furious that a person who is on record as having little but disdain for women was voted for by nearly half of them. I am furious that for the first time in modern American political history, a candidate threatened to jail his opponent if he won.

Donald Trump may, in time, come to surprise us. Once faced with the enormities of office and the necessity of compromising in order to acheive anything (as he has already learned how, despite his elevation because he is not a career politician, he simply cannot do the simplest things without them), he may become less divisive, less self-satisfied, less inflammatory. He will also then become less liked by his followers, which is always what happens to a president after an election, but seems especially likely in Trump's case. I doubt it, but it is possible.

I don't care. Donald Trump won and he won with the votes of people who, at the very least, did not give a damn how what he said and did could affect their neighbors. That will never, ever sit right with me, and it never should.