What Are Democrats Waiting For Before They Campaign Against Trump?
Democrats need to begin campaigning on President Donald Trump. Every day. He is unacceptably corrupt, and his team of swamp rats makes Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal seem like a paragon of integrity and honest governance. Not only corrupt, Mr. Trump is presiding over the most aggressively dumb presidency in American history while crawling inch by inch down the exact same path of obstruction of justice and inevitable impeachment as Richard Nixon. Trump & Co. are too stupid to realize how entrapped they are in Mueller’s net.
Mueller’s indictments, guilty pleas, and cooperative deals speak for themselves that Trump and his accomplices must no longer be allowed to govern the United States. Right out of the campaign gate, Trump hired obvious, wannabe foreign agents like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, and obvious, known foreign-agents like Michael Flynn and Rick Gates for a campaign headed by Paul Manafort, a man who spent decades advising and laundering funds for superfluous tyrants, most famously for pro-Russian Ukrainian puppets.
Meanwhile, Trump’s latest “spy” conspiracy theory is predicated on the apparent delusion that such colorful and seemingly inappropriate campaign hires would not be suspicious to the FBI or US security agencies. Paul Manafort, who currently owes substantial debts to his Russian puppet party in Ukraine, publicly agreed to work for Trump for free before pro-Russian campaign planks suspiciously appeared in the GOP’s platform renouncing Republican support for anti-Russian Ukrainian groups. No wonder Trump’s gang of democratic misfits inspired an intelligence operation into their suspicious connections to Russia.
There’s also the peculiarity that Mr. Trump—who spent a year and a half literally yelling at campaign stops and debate stages that Hillary Clinton carelessly mishandled classified information and put American national security at risk—has refused to be burdened by basic security features on the cell phone he uses to tweet and call foreign leaders. Trump is also stupid enough to allow known Russian spies into the Oval Office, leak classified information to Russians, and is too militantly ignorant to comprehend the importance of reading the information that the intelligence community painstakingly collects for him in his national security briefings. He requested they get condensed into a single page, and still doesn’t read them unless his name is inserted into every paragraph. Donald Trump’s mental competency is that of a failing elementary school student with ADHD, and he has proved himself mentally unequipped to continue serving as President.
Even more critical, Mr. Trump has done virtually nothing to protect future elections against foreign meddling because he’s such a snowflake he can’t bring himself to imagine a world where his election win might have been bullshit. Unsurprisingly for those who have been paying attention, it’s becoming more and more clear that his presidential victory was directly related to that meddling, and the Russian government’s success at infiltrating the right-wing media world with divisive propaganda campaigns has been effective in agitating America’s culture wars in beneficial ways for Trump’s über-divisive politics.
Abroad, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has so far consisted of a real-life test of how many Constitutional emoluments clause violations one American politician can possibly rack up, outright nepotism of his equally unqualified and intellectually limited family members, and, of course, drowning in a expanding swamp of personal financial enrichment and debasement of every cabinet department in the executive branch. Trump’s self-interest in his dealings and policies regarding Russia, Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, among others, could now fill a book. This was painfully obvious recently when Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump mysteriously tweeted that he was going to spend his time helping protect Chinese jobs within a telecom company that US intelligence agencies have warned pose a national security risk, because Trump would personally benefit from a $500 million Trump Organization-linked deal with China in Indonesia. Reread that sentence if you have to… we’re talking half a billion dollars…. This is literally third-world dictator corruption, America.
Within his own conservative political umbrella, Trump—the Washington outsider who promised to clean up D.C., break the mold, and not govern beholden to any special interest money—has been neutered by the usual suspects of right-wing partisanship: the National Rifle Association, the fundamentalist Christian Right, the Israel lobby, and the regular host of giant corporations who have learned the secret to Trump’s heart is, simply, money laundered to him through his hotels, golf clubs, and Michael Cohen.
Trump’s accomplishments, meanwhile, are skim, and his best successes have been in needlessly suffocating a plethora of valuable Obama-era policies with executive orders out of egotistical spite and what can only be inferred as racial animosity, while his hyper-partisan GOP-controlled Congress ferments in self-destruction and legislative uselessness, failing to pass hallmark proposals into law—such as Obamacare’s repeal.
Trump’s other notable efforts include numerous “Infrastructure Weeks” that turned into nothing because his administration never does its homework outlining policies, and his staff is too overwhelmed with ceaseless backstabbing, daily public relations emergencies, and spigotous leaks to the media in consequence of his chosen management style, which above all else gluttonies for total, personal war and pyrrhic victory. His carousel of a staff suffers daily injuries and almost weekly humiliating firing dramas because no one’s job is safe when the buck stops anywhere but the Oval Office’s desk.
Individually, Trump has a thin-skinned, narcissistic delusion that he might be the greatest person to ever live, and that if anyone disagrees or tries to impede his impulsions they must be literal enemies to be destroyed. America: sociopaths are not the right type of person to elect as President of the United States. We’re a democracy after all, and our government is proudly constitutionally public. A fake billionaire who at seventy-two acts like a six-year-old, Trump is a modern Athenian tyrant deserving of exile, not political promotion. He has pandered to domestic resentments to exploit his own supporters, he dehumanizes his political opposition, and he hints at violence aimed at journalists who document his lack of cognitive coherence. He linguistically exaggerates, quite literally, everything. He tells demonstrably absurd lies. His supporters in the media assure us the secret to understanding Trump is to not believe what he says in speeches or on Twitter, which is brain-meltingly stupid. His behavior is juvenile at best and fascist at worst, and in fact, the bar is so low in terms of his accomplishments that his backers have demanded he win a Nobel Peace Prize merely for calling Kim Jong-un “Little Rocket Man” on Twitter and impulsively agreeing to a peace meeting which was promptly canceled because, again, the Trump Administration never does its homework. Meanwhile, his presidency is swirling down the drain of impeachable obstruction of justice, and his advisers are swimming circles inside Robert Mueller’s collusion barrel. Donald Trump, for all of these reasons, must stop being president.
Although President Trump craves so desperately to see his years in office remembered like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, the Trump administration’s historical legacy will be considered important only in regards to its institutional crisis-testing of America’s government and society, and its unprecedented debasement of American culture, tradition, and history.
Yet Democrats are quietly and politely waiting for Mueller’s investigation to end and bring about its seemingly inevitable indictment and/or impeachment of the President. But suppose Trump gets off on a technicality? Perhaps the GOP does nothing to hold Trump accountable for his administration’s crimes out of fear that their political base will turn on them? What if Trump tries to lead a fascist coup against the American rule of law and ends the investigation by threatening the prosecutors’ and judges’ lives? It’s a possibility. Trump regularly admires the world’s dictators in public.
Yet Trump’s approval ratings are rising because he claims credit for Obama’s economy, and Democrats are losing inches in the tug-of-war of public perception going into a midterm election. Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi ought to keep responsibly cool, but why aren’t other Democratic politicians and media personalities daily calling bullshit on Trump in viral videos online or cable news appearances? Where are liberal bulldogs going on every mass media platform available and calling Trump’s ideas, speeches, and policies un-American with the colorful language Trump’s assault on reality deserve? Where is the righteous fury? Trump is literally calling for his Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute the investigators examining his crimes and abuses with a hypocritical witch hunt. Republicans, in contrast, are running their 2018 mid-term elections against the made-up crimes of Hillary Clinton. So why are Democrats tiptoeing around real crimes, and the most blatant and heinous crimes in American history? Do Democrats want to lose another winnable election? By being so timid, Democrats are erecting dikes in the way of their own blue wave.
The Left needs to stop being nice. Resisting the Trump Administration is not a battle of politics, it is a battle between objective right and wrong, facts and lies, and flagrant violations of both the Constitution’s spirit and letter. There was a time not long ago when dozens of Republicans went on every news show they possibly could to call Obama a tyrant for simply wanting to give poor people slightly subsidized health care, a terrorist sympathizer for doing a fist bump with his wife, and un-American because he ordered Dijon mustard on a sandwich.
Democrats need to get in the game, down in the gutter, and dirty.
(Picture courtesy of Gage Skidmore.)
