“Sure I would, if I ever found one worth voting for.” — James Middleton Cox, media mogul, Yellow Dog Democrat, 1920 Democratic presidential candidate, when asked if he’d ever vote for a Republican.
The impeachment of the president has been criticized, even by fairly reasonable observers, because there was never a real chance to convict and evict Donald Trump and put his dismal chapter in America’s political history behind us. They argue that the futility of the Senate trial may only strengthen Trump’s hand in the November election, perhaps provoke even worse behavior if he believes he’s invulnerable. I think that’s a shortsighted view. This impeachment, long overdue and executed in good faith as far as I can see, has already accomplished several things that could prove critical as our political system is tested as it has seldom been tested before.
There is no evidence that Donald Trump was ever capable of embarrassment. But the pressure of an impeachment trial has smoked him out in a sense, erasing any last traces of restraint or common sense in the mad public utterances he posts on Twitter. Short of four-letter words and direct physical threats, it’s hard to imagine a wilder, crazier outburst than last weekend’s “tweet” from the White House, as quoted by the New York Times:
“Our case against lyin’ cheatin’ liddle Adam Shifty Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democratic Party, starts today at 10:00 AM.”
Unquote. Is that a president of the United States speaking to us, a man who occupies an office graced by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln? Or a semi-psychotic eight-year-old screaming “I know you are but what am I” at some kid on the playground who called him a sissy? Could any satirical sketch on Saturday Night Live approach the unfathomable imbecility of this tweet? Trump is destroying satire. There’s no allowable range of reactions to his latest words. No sane person can read them and sustain the illusion that the president is sane, too. Or that he’s a functioning adult, far less an individual you would trust with any public office, or any sharp object. If you find Trump’s words amusing or inspiring, you are no less arrested in pre-adolescence than the idiot who posted them. You are a very sick, very twisted little boy or girl.
The columnist Michelle Goldberg was one of the first to note the most spectacular thing about Trump’s mental illness, which is his infinite capacity for what psychiatrists call projection — he invariably, relentlessly accuses his enemies of the things of which he himself is most guilty. “Dumb as a rock” is one of his favorite epithets, this man history will remember — judged by his own words — as the least intelligent, most profoundly ignorant man who ever occupied the White House. “Lyin’” “Cheatin’” and “Crooked,” his nicknames for rivals ranging from Rep. Adam Schiff and Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz, are the favorite insults of the man who trails a score of scandals, has been impeached for cheating and has been caught in more than 15,000 lies since he took office.
He also loves to mock his antagonists’ bodies and personal appearance, this bloated figure who drapes himself in yards of expensive blue suiting and still looks like a schoolbus covered with a rain tarp. He calls women homely, and is photographed every day with facial expressions so grotesque that great cartoonists labor to reproduce them. Not to mention his hair. (He also mocks rivals for their inferior stature, as in “Mini-Mike Bloomberg” and “Liddle Adam Schiff,” height being his sole claim to superiority. Remember Elvis singing “Big Boss Man”——“you ain’t so big, you’re just tall that’s all.”)
This level of projection reaches way beyond hypocrisy, into the realm of the true psychopaths. A man I knew once had a mental breakdown and decided that I and several of his friends and neighbors had become his enemies. But when he went public with his paranoia he accused us of doing things we’d never dreamed of, that puzzled us even more than they insulted us. It took us a while to figure out that these were all things he had been doing himself. Psychosis can create a kind of funhouse mirror where your ugliest selves are distorted into images of other people.
Trump’s latest tweet (how I hate to write that silly word) simply closes his case, for any citizen worth engaging in conversation. If anyone should suggest that you’re being too hard on the president, offer no reply and point silently to the astonishing paragraph I’ve quoted above. Its author is a dumb, mean thug without scruple or principle, reduced by dementia to an even lower rung of raving sub-humanity. And that’s being kind.
The partisan heat he brings to this rabid denunciation of his impeachers, a harbinger of the red-baiting rhetoric Democrats will face in this election year, points up a second useful, constructive lesson we’re learning from Trump’s impeachment. We’ve gained clarity. We can no longer fool ourselves about the state of American politics, no longer pretend that most of the people in leadership positions are well-meaning, civilized adults who merely hold different opinions, who may disagree but will eventually work it out. Though no shots have yet been fired — at least not in the halls of Congress — we’re now witnessing a civil war between two armies, two opposing parties committed to destroying each other.
This is never more clear than in the current performance of our Senate, which used to be admired for civility and collegiality. Last week, the media were speculating whether any of the Republican senators would have the courage and integrity to break ranks with Trump and try his impeachment in earnest. One of the key senators in these news stories was Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who shares an old friend with me, a writer who was one of his classmates at Vanderbilt. Through this friend I’ve met Alexander on a couple of occasions, and I came away with positive impressions. He’s smart, he’s no grim ideologue, he’s a former college president who plays a mean piano. I have no doubt that Lamar Alexander sees Donald Trump as clearly as I do, and knows that he’s as guilty as sin and as toxic as the coronavirus. He knows Trump is nuts.
When I asked myself whether Sen. Alexander might be one Republican rebel, voting to call witnesses and putting his country ahead of his party and its president, my correct guess was “no way.” No way, even though he’s retiring this year and has nothing more to fear from Trump’s dreaded “base” of angry voters. Why not, Lamar? It’s about the difference between party affiliation a few years ago — the comfort of colleagues who shared your values, a reliable fundraising network — and party affiliation today, which mandates the unquestioning loyalty of a soldier in an army at war. I wanted to be wrong about Alexander. But he has a personal relationship with Mitch McConnell, who would have tried to punish his desertion as an act of high treason. Grilled about Trump’s Ukraine caper on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Alexander conceded “I think it was wrong…Improper, crossing the line…” — and then cast his vote with Mitch’s moral midgets. America will not find the heroes it needs among low-key red-state legislators like Lamar.
This was the state of things, on impeachment watch 2020 — waiting to see if two or three Republican senators would risk showing any deeper concern for the Constitution, the Republic, the planet, or the future under the assault of the deranged goblin who swallowed their party. Democrats are becoming, by sheer default, the champions of truth, justice and the American way. Serious questions and misgivings about the dozen men and women who are vying to replace Donald Trump could fill the next six pages. But electing one of them in November is the last faint hope of a system so rotten with money and influence-peddling that it threatens to implode. Reading that billionaire candidate Michael Bloomberg has already spent $88 million on a single ad campaign sickens me almost as much as reading Trump’s latest tweet.
We are losing control, and the phenomenon the media describe as “polarization” is so advanced and so tribal, in the minds of most voters, that any hint of nonpartisan neutrality is met with disbelief. I had a drink recently with Jared Yates Sexton, whose reporting on the 2016 election, in his book “The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore,” won praise for its revealing portraits of Trump loyalists. Sexton told me that belligerent Trump voters would seem baffled when the author told them that he had little affection for the Democrats, either. In this America of the armed camps, everyone is supposed to belong to Tribe Red or Tribe Blue.
I’ve never been shy about my distaste for the liberal thought police, or the leftwing purists who disdained Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But just how frightening, how downright loony are some of the blood-Red Republicans who follow in the wide wake of King Donald? Pay attention. Televangelist Paula White, Trump’s recently appointed liaison to the nation’s compliant evangelicals, delivered a sermon in Florida in January that included this much-re-tweeted outburst: “In the name of Jesus, we command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now. We declare that anything that’s been conceived in satanic wombs, that it’ll miscarry. It will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction, any plan of harm.”
Who was known as “The Father of Lies” before Donald Trump laid permanent claim to the title? The president refers to the unhinged Ms. White, an apostle of the “prosperity gospel,” as his personal pastor. But “satanic pregnancies” seem like mild fantasy compared with a recent speech by another pro-Trump evangelist, Rick Wiles of TruNews, a far-Right website the White House awarded full press credentials for the World Economic Forum in Davos. Listen to this gentle man of God, reacting to the president’s impeachment: “That’s the way Jews work. They are deceivers. They plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda. This ’Impeach Trump’ movement is a Jew coup, and the American people better wake up to it really fast.” Wiles also warned his parishioners, “when Jews take over a country, they kill millions of Christians.”
Words fail me, of course. TruNews has its press credentials, while Michele Kelemen of NPR had hers suspended had her credentials suspended because her colleague insulted Mike Pompeo. Those of us who were raised in actual Christian families, who were taught that the Hebrew prophet Jesus Christ was all about love, are always stunned to rediscover that creatures like White and Wiles still live and thrive in “Christian” America. And to acknowledge that they and their sad benighted congregants have never felt more welcome in the halls of power.
These truths are self-evident, that while not all Republicans are bad people, in 2020 nearly all bad people are Republicans. (I’ve written that before.) And nearly all stupid people, too. As much as a mandate of any kind goes against my grain, I’m obliged to vote for any Democrat who opposes them. The Republicans went fishing for votes in all the filthiest places; now they own those voters, all the anti-Semites and assault-rifle yahoos, the white-power militias and merchants of hate. Grown craven, cruel and reckless, this is a party that matches and richly deserves its president. But our national dilemma stretches far beyond the neo-fascist rebranding of a major political party.
Trump and his minions, defying the Constitution and stumbling and fumbling across the world stage like a parade of inebriates, are on the verge of voiding our social contract. This contract, the focus of much philosophizing through the ages, is the basic agreement — in any nation other than an absolute monarchy or dictatorship — between the government and the governed. “The consent of the governed” is what King George and his Parliament had lost when the American colonies staged their revolution in 1776. In a democracy we agree to pay taxes, obey laws, and serve in the armed forces when called upon, and in return we receive the physical protection of the state, as well as the various services and benefits it provides. This is the contract, the essential deal that creates nation-states, that forged “civilization” out of the scattered wild tribes of the human race.
What happens when the majority of the citizens governed — and in this case I think it might be at least a simple majority — loses all confidence in a government that a faltering system has legitimately installed? Giving your consent and linking your fate to a government controlled by Donald Trump is like boarding a plane with a blind pilot, or a bus with a blind driver and no brakes. These very real threats of war with Iran, triggered by a president’s reckless decision — would you risk your cat or your parakeet, far less your son or daughter or your own precious body, in a war instigated by a raving lunatic without a trace of military or diplomatic experience? Or one who has virtually declared war on the environment?
I wouldn’t, and I think I can name a lot of people who would join me in my resistance. Which means we feel that the social contract has been violated by this lawless man, and no longer binds us. Patriotism doesn’t oblige us to obey Donald Trump. In fact, it pushes us the other way, toward conscientious objection and rebellion if need be. If that sounds too radical to your ear, go back up the page and read that damned tweet again. That ought to seal it. If you would pay your taxes or risk your life to sustain an enterprise directed by the man who wrote that, you’re at least as crazy as he is. If there are enough of you crazies out there to reelect him, I’m probably going to wind up in jail. But I’ll serve my time in real good company.
Hal Crowther’s latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. His essays were awarded Pushcart Prizes in 2014, 2018 and 2019. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2020
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