Why we might just want to keep
him in office, as fatally damaged goods.
By Doug
Henwood
How much longer can this go
on? As I write this, PredictIt
gives 71/29 odds that Trump will last the year, but it’s mighty tempting to buy
the “no”—especially after the revelation that he asked Comey to shut down the
Flynn investigation. (Disclosure alert: I bought 100 shares of “no” at
$0.28.)
What is the endgame of the
people, mostly Democrats, pounding the drums most heavily? Do they want to
impeach Trump, which seems a long shot given Republican control of Congress? Do
they want to bruise his weak ego so badly that he resigns? Clearly the job is much
harder than he ever imagined—and, by the way, what reasonably sentient person
over the age of 8 ever thought the presidency wasn’t grindingly hard? But he
also wants adulation, not the relentless volleys of shit he’s gotten. It’s not
impossible to imagine him just walking offstage, especially if his legal
situation gets seriously dicey.
What then? President Pence? If
Pence were president, the entire Republican dream agenda would sail
through Congress in like three weeks. Pence spent a dozen years in Congress (Tea
Party branch) and four years as governor of Indiana; he’s an appalling figure
but he knows how things work. He might not be able to overcome his party’s
internal divisions, but he probably could do a better job than Trump, and every
day would not be a circus as it is now.
Pence is a horror—fiscal
sadist, misogynist, homophobe,
lover of the carceral state. He’s repeatedly described himself as “a
Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” though given
today’s modern GOP, it’s not clear there’s much of a difference among these
features. (He should have said he’s a reactionary Christian; there are plenty
of other kinds.) He’s a creationist who rejects climate change, thinks
stem cell research is “obsolete,” and once actually said that “smoking
doesn’t kill.” His anti-abortion law was the most extreme
in the country. His cuts to Planned Parenthood led to a rural HIV epidemic.
Like Sessions, Pence is a maximalist
on drugs, including weed. He’s hot to privatize
Social Security. He likened
the Supreme Court’s upholding of Obamacare to 9/11.
Should Trump get pushed out,
the orchestrated campaign of healing would be painful. It’s not
far-fetched to imagine leading Democrats channeling Gerald Ford’s “our
long national nightmare is over.” There would be something of what Wall Street
calls a “relief rally” on the transition, and it would perversely grease the
way for Pence to make the U.S. more like the Indiana he left behind. We
should be fighting to keep him in office, as fatally damaged goods.
Several things seem to be
driving this campaign to squeeze Trump out, aside from the obvious
fact he’s an unstable ignoramus. Dems still can’t get over the fact that they
lost to the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling, but instead of
blaming their own terrible candidate (the second-most unpopular candidate in
the history of polling) and the slavers’ legacy, the Electoral College, they
want to blame Russia. (Time was they blamed Comey too—remember when Paul
Krugman said
that “Comey and Putin installed a crazy, vindictive can’t-handle-the-truth
person in the White House”? But he’s since been rehabilitated.)
But that’s not all: a large
part of the political class (Hillary prominent among them, along with John
McCain), the security establishment, and their contract-hungry patrons in the
military–industrial complex all want desperately to make Russia the enemy,
and are reviving zombie tropes from the Cold War to promote their cause. Trump
may well have friends in the Russian mob, but his resistance to elite hostility
towards the country is one of the few non-awful things about him.
It’s been stunning to watch
liberals cheering on the security state’s war-by-leak against Trump. He’s
odious, but he is the legally elected president—under an absurd electoral
system, but that’s the one we’ve got. (Makes you wonder what they would have
done to Sanders, if by some unimaginable fluke he’d won.) And yet we’ve seen
months of praise for the CIA and the FBI as the magic bullets who could deliver
us from the short-fingered vulgarian.
The defenses of the CIA began
with Trump’s disparaging remarks about the Agency before taking office, which
were taken as near-blasphemous. For an amateur like Trump, such attacks
were extremely risky. In early January, Chuck Schumer presciently warned (on
the Maddow Show, of course): “Let me tell you: You take on the
intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at
you.” You’d almost think that he knew what would come next: an endless series
of leaks portraying Trump as Putin’s towel boy and, as an extra-special bonus,
a pervert (the piss tape)—all applauded by liberals, with little regard for the
CIA’s 70-year history of lying, assassination, and coups.
Then came the Comey firing,
and suddenly the FBI was a noble organization as well. It’s far from that, and
has always been. As Mark Ames reports in his little history
of the Bureau, it has no legal charter; Congress didn’t want to authorize a
secret police so Teddy Roosevelt created it by executive fiat. Much of the
Bureau’s history was been about persecuting communists—and gay people—and
smearing its enemies. It spent the 1960s and early 1970s trying to ruin Martin
Luther King, the Black Panthers, and and the New Left. In other words, it’s
been political from the very first, and all these current worries about
“politicizing” the FBI are Grade A bullshit.
Which brings us back to the
endgame issue. Democrats look to be extending the strategy of their failed 2016
campaign by being the not-Trump and nothing more—it’s all they’ve got. They are
making no visible effort to come up with an appealing agenda as an alternative
to the deeply unpopular one the GOP has on offer. In fact, they’re annoyed
at Bernie Sanders for trying to get the party to talk about policy, which is
somehow seen as an act of narcissism in the Beltway worldview:
But the senator, who’ll be 79
the next time the New Hampshire primary rolls around, is continuing to put
himself at the center of the conversation. He’s introduced a Medicare-for-all
bill this week that he hopes will force others to sign on.
Imagine that! Pushing a bill
to expand health insurance coverage at a moment when Republicans are trying to
take it away. The ego of that man.
The party’s strategy
can’t be counted a success on conventional measures; Gallup reports
that the Dems have lost 5 approval points since November, leaving the two
parties with near-identical approval ratings (D: 40%, R: 39%).
During the early days of the
Trump administration, it seemed like a serious left opposition might take form.
That‘s a hazy memory now that so many liberals and even leftists are taking
dictation from the security state and throwing around words like “treason.” We
can do better than this, can’t we?
© 2017 Doug Henwood
Doug Henwood edits the Left Business Observer, a
newsletter he founded in 1986, He also hosts Behind the News, a weekly radio
show covering economics and politics on KPFA,
Berkeley, that is rebroadcast on several other stations across the U.S.,
and has a worldwide audience via its Internet archive. His book Wall
Street is now available for free download here.
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