What if we’re asking the wrong question?
by Tom Sullivan
“Our constitutional system never contemplated a President like Donald Trump,” Jeffrey Toobin advises in his latest column for The New Yorker. The Framers anticipated some friction between the three branches of government, but not a mutant like Donald Trump who, abetted by cult-like followers, single-handedly initiates a total blockade of the legislative branch.
Though there may be a raft of them, these are not singular fights, Toobin insists, but “an open campaign of total defiance against another branch of government.” The legal system was not designed to address this kind of a coordinated wave attack. “The law has no clear mechanism for adjudicating these claims together—but they belong together,” Toobin explains.
To hell with the unitary executive theory. In the name of America, the sitting president and his followers now upset its very meaning in ways as potentially impactful as the Civil War. Grover Norquist famously wanted to roll back the 20th century and restore the McKinley administration. Trump is bent on restoring monarchical rule that ended on these shores with the Treaty of Paris. His red-hatted faux-patriots are just fine with that.
“If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… just so long as I’m the dictator. Heh-heh,” chuckled George W. Bush.
Maybe that’s the idea. It’s the way Trump has lived his gold-plated-penthouse life.
Last summer I wrote how in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a mutant with telepathic powers upset a broad plan to guide the galaxy through a thousand years of chaos and decline to a new period of order. But the plan could not anticipate the Mule, a single individual with the ability to “change the emotions of others … to first instill fear in the inhabitants of his conquered planets, then to make his enemies devoutly loyal to him.”
Our Constitution did not anticipate such a turn of events either, Toobin offers. “The only likely remedy, therefore, will lie with the voters, next year.”
Famous last words.
To date, the media seems not to have learned from 2016 and two years of Trump. Having behaved unethically and immorally without being held to account, Trump has become even more dismissive of constraints on his behavior. His personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, announced he would travel to Ukraine and ask a foreign government to examine the origins of the Mueller investigation as well as former Vice President Joe Biden’s son’s business dealings there. Bait taken, headlines secured, and foreign seeds planted, Giuliani announced he has cancelled the trip. The press delivered Trump’s message for him.
Well he doesn't need to go now does he?
He already said, "Ukraine, if you're listening …" https://t.co/ttr25gRf7Z— digby (@digby56) May 11, 2019
For their part, Democrats seem slowly to be finding their footing. Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley sees signs they are threading the needle between doing what the Constitution demands in sanctioning Trump and pursuing what voters want:
The message Democrats are now sending is: We don’t want to have to take our eye off Everyday Issues That Matter to the American People to talk about impeachment, but we will “check” the president’s corrupt behavior if we have to, for the good of the country. Yes, the Democrats are now presenting themselves as the aging lawman getting called out of his armchair to save the town. And it’s not a terrible plan!
Polls show movement towards support for impeachment or at least towards “keeping Trump in check.”
In the end, The Foundation found a way to render the Mule harmless without killing him. With America’s genius for improvisation, it may still do the same to Trump. But like spinning the wheel on the Titanic, this ship takes a painfully long time to respond. Still, we may yet avoid sinking. But it is not just wit and invention that’s needed now from real patriots, but courage, determination and, most of all, persistence. Lady Liberty may yet have a few tricks up her toga.
With that hopeful thought in mind, it strikes me perhaps Democratic voters looking to 2020 might be focused on the wrong question. By next year the question may no longer be, “Who can beat Trump?” but “Who can beat [fill in the blank]?”