The enabling not only continues, it acceleratesby digby
I know the following is by David Frum and he has much to answer for for his part in laying the groundwork for this political crisis. (I mean… ) But I’m willing to set that aside for the moment and take it up with him when the emergency has passed.
Meanwhile, he’s right about this:
It may not be the newsiest—arguably it is the least newsy—but the most important moment in Wolff’s book are words attributed at second or third-hand to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time of Donald Trump’s election. “He will sign anything we put in front of him.”
Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.
Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.
The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.
Before the Saturday morning tweets, what should have been the biggest story of the week was Trump’s success at mobilizing the Senate and the FBI to deploy criminal prosecution as a weapon against Trump critics. The Senate Judiciary committee—the Senate Judiciary Committee! The committee that oversees the proper enforcement of the law!—formally filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier about Trump’s Russia connections. The referral was signed by the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, without even notice to Democrats on the committee, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said; a startling abuse of majority status and a sharp departure from the norms of the Senate, especially a 51-49 Senate.
The Department of Justice can ignore such a referral. It’s ominous, however, that on the very same day, the FBI obeyed Trump’s repeated demands and reopened a long-closed criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The FBI has come under relentless abuse from Trump, who complains about its refusal to do his will. Is it now yielding?
We also learned this week from The New York Times that aides to the Attorney General sought damaging information on Capitol Hill about FBI director Comey, indicating close cooperation between the White House and Main Justice to exert political control over the country’s chief law enforcement agency.
Michael Wolff has drawn the most indelible picture yet of Donald Trump, the man. But the important thing about Trump is not the man; it’s the system of power surrounding the man.
In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.
What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.
This is a problem equal to the problem of Trump himself. I had thought that maybe there were some Republicans who actually cared about the nation or at least cared about the integrity of the constitution and the congress. There are not. A handful have said something but they voted with him and continue to help him expand his power by delivering that tax cut victory which, by the way, any of them could have stopped simply by saying that it raised the debt too much.
They didn’t have to do it. They really didn’t. They are all complicit.
It’s true that the Republican party has been complicit for years in creating a political environment that allowed an ignorant madman to become president. But they could redeem themselves in this moment and they are not doing it.
That scares me just as much as Trump. In order to enact their agenda the Republican party is enabling Trump’s authoritarian instincts. And that goes beyond the racism and xenophobia on which he ran. For most of them, that’s a very natural thing to do since they’ve always shared them. But I thought there might be a few elected officials whose paeans to freedom and the constitution were based upon some underlying principles. And I guess I assumed that a handful would be a tiny bit concerned about Russia interfering in the election and possibly compromising the president — even if he was a Republican.
It’s clear that every last one of them were full of shit.
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