I was wrong.
I thought certainly Mueller would release his report last week, and did mention it could come as late as this week. I suppose that is still possible. What I didn’t know is whether or not Mueller’s report might even be relevant now. We have confirmation from deep and high in the White House, the president of the United States is unfit to lead, and is being actively thwarted by members of his own staff. Additionally, excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book cite several relevant incidents in which the president’s own staff circumvented his authority to take a decision out of his hands.
We are told to be grateful for the favor.
I am not.
This is not supposed to be the way it works. Our constitution is magnificently set up to handle just such a scenario, through the 25th Amendment. We are told that the 25th Amendment has been discussed inside the White House, among members of the cabinet. They determined it could not be invoked because it would precipitate a constitutional crises. Damn right it would. It would precipitate a crises which leads to the exercise of proper constitutional authority.
Instead, we are told to be thankful that a handful of conservatives within the White House have exercised a coup.
What else does one call it when the machinery of a democratic government is grabbed forcefully by people whom no one elected? At the very least, we have election results – though highly suspect – that Donald Trump was constitutionally elected by the people to hold that office, and in that respect Donald Trump is the only one authorized to exercise such powers, for now. But, without the imprimatur of constitutionality given by actual voters, the powers that be within the White House are now publicly telling us that “they” run the country, at least to the extent they can.
It has happened before, as noted in Slate, today, in an article by Jamelle Bouie. Both the Wilson administration (incapacitated by a stroke, Wilson’s wife took over effective control of the White House for the last 18 months) and Nixon administration went through periods in which it was an open secret that the president was not in control. But, Wilson’s stroke occurred prior to the passage of the 25th Amendment, and Nixon’s decompression came at the very end, with only weeks remaining in his presidency. This is different.
Trump is far from transparent, and yet with reported work and inside accounts, we have a remarkably full picture of the “breakdown” in and around the president. And if anything described by Wolff, Manigault, or Woodward is true, then the United States is currently in the midst of an acute political crisis, beset with a functionally incapacitated president and a government branch run on an ad hoc basis.
Fundamentally incapacitated president.
Say that over and over in your brain, and think about the ramifications. Think about the remarkable “oversight” provided by the Republicans during the Obama administration, the hunt for any illegality, Benghazi, the IRS, Fast and Furious, anything that could scandalize the presidency was an outrage, something requiring the oversight of the usual suspects in the House. Yet, today, here we sit, the morning after a senior administration official, not a Democrat, not a life-long public servant, member of the “Deep State,” but a Republican who loves tax cuts, the military and de-regulation, a senior official that Trump appointed, has told the world that the president is unfit to carry out the office.
And the Republican congress?
Well, nothing so far. It is business as usual in the Senate, with Republicans trying to shepard Kavanaugh through the nomination process. I haven’t heard of any emergency sessions called in either House, you?
More than the public nature of President Trump’s deterioration, it’s the inaction and complicity of the majority party that truly differentiates the present situation from those of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon. Like them, Trump has a cadre of aides and advisers essentially acting in his stead as president, working around him and circumventing his worst impulses. But unlike those presidents, Trump is also insulated by a political movement that ranks pursuit of its ideological goals above all else, including the integrity of the presidency.
This is the “party over country” problem raising its ugly head, the result of forty years of increasing tribalism on both sides, but particularly a suspension of belief on the right that any “leftist” or Democrat should have a “say” in how the government runs. It is an ethos that seems to effect even the reasonable Republicans, Flake, Sasse, Corker, and – may God rest his soul, the late John McCain aided and abetted this behavior. It now threatens to take the entire country under, as many of us have long known it would.
Our founding fathers, particularly Hamilton, who wrote about this very possibility in Federalist 65, (still the best political blog out there, the guy would be a sensation nowadays) where he stated it would fall upon the Senate to be “removed enough” from the day to day politics and self-interest, such that the preservation of the nation itself would win out in any immediate emergency where a party might suffer, and thus they entrusted the ultimate question in impeachment to the Senate. Up until twenty to thirty years ago, they might well have been correct in that assumption.
But, without a foreign enemy with which to bind us together as Americans, one that we all must fight, we seem unable to hold up such essential responsibilities to the next generation.
Trapped in an unprecedented situation of a crisis that’s broadly known but presently unresolvable, we’re experiencing the extent to which Hamilton was simply too optimistic. The ability to deal with wrongdoing and complete dysfunction in the executive branch is, as he feared, entirely “regulated … by the comparative strength of the parties.” And one of those parties is unconcerned with the potential consequences of a dysfunctional White House and a seemingly unhinged president. Donald Trump cannot do his job, and as long as the Republican Party holds power in Washington, there’s nothing to be done about i
Too optimistic, or simply not cynical enough to ever imagine a world in which one nation is so huge, so rich, that one party believes it to be “okay” to allow a period with such instability to pass on its watch, because enough “right” is happening within their party’s needs. If Trump were to lose his popularity with his base, or if something else fundamentally alters the equation, to the point where the conservatives who write the checks, the Adelsons, Mercers, Kochs, etcetera are not getting what they want anymore, well, at that point, it is …once again party over country, and Trump will be removed.
Until then, the crises continues on faith, faith alone, that the United States we have today will be the United States we want a year from now, three years from now, thirty. Faith alone.
It is not supposed to work that way.
As you think about the “faith” put into the system, into the coup-cabal as they might as well be called, I will state for about the tenth time on this blog alone, because I haven’t seen it written anywhere else, true as it may be. There is no “rule” that the United States must thrive as the world leader in democracy, freedom, preservation of Jeffersonian ideals, there is no magic to our geography or place in time, no “spirit” that runs through those beautiful buildings, that assures the presumed American exceptionalism. It will not continue by accident, or by decree, the mechanism will not run itself.
As John McCain made clear in his funeral, it takes a belief in the American people, and action by the American people, dedicated to preserving what they have inherited.
I am not seeing it. I do not think that the coup functioning inside the White House has done the nation a favor. Indeed, I think it brings us closer to our downfall. Does anyone else notice?
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