| Tyrone Slothrop |
05-19-2017 11:41 AM |
Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
I don't always like Andrew Sullivan, but I think I am 100% with him on this:
Quote:
How does this end?
I left D.C. Wednesday for a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, for a talk. The previous night I’d watched slack-jawed as the latest Trump saga unfolded on cable news, switching back from Fox to MSNBC and CNN. As has happened so often in the last few months, it was becoming a blur. What did we now know? The president had kept Mike Flynn on staff many days after learning he was a security risk. Trump had asked FBI Director Comey to give him his personal loyalty, then fired him because he was frustrated that the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government was continuing. Trump then lied repeatedly about this — and sent senior staffers out there to lie as well. He threatened the FBI director with alleged “tapes” of their conversations. We also discovered that Trump had carelessly betrayed a critical ISIS source while bragging to foreign minister Lavrov and Russian ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office. We were entering, it seemed to me, the Caligula phase of the collapse of the American republic. Pretty soon Trump would be announcing that the new FBI director would be a horse.
And then, on the little shuttle bus on the tarmac to the plane at Reagan National, I found myself sitting next to a recently retired pilot, who struck up a very pleasant conversation. He told me about a recent career change, retirement, his family, and his new neighbors who had left England to escape “the Muslims.” Okay, I thought. No need to make a scene. Just listen for a while. At one point, I gingerly indicated that I didn’t exactly share the views of his neighbors. “Oh I understand,” he said. “My wife is always telling me never to talk about religion or politics with strangers, but I can’t help myself.” No problem, I told him. I do it all the time too. Then he leaned in, pushed his wire eyeglasses up his nose, and looked straight into my eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “This president will be the greatest president we have ever had in our entire history.”
Once in Mississippi, I did my daily scanning of the conservative media. The alternative story was now well-established. Trump had fired Comey because he had a right to (just like he had an “absolute” right to tell Moscow top-secret intel), and because Comey was incompetent and had screwed up the Clinton-email case. The intel gaffe was just a slip-up that wouldn’t matter much at all. There was no evidence of any connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — and so the investigation was hooey anyway. Comey’s memo couldn’t be talked about without the full context — so lets just wait and see. Comey was just interested in revenge anyway. The mainstream media and the “deep state” were busy trying to undermine a president who was accomplishing more than any president this early into his term.
These are, it seems to me, the two unstoppable narratives grinding our politics to a halt. The status quo in Washington — an unhinged, unfit, mentally disturbed narcissist as POTUS fast losing any faint credibility with even his own staffers — is utterly unsustainable. In a serious crisis, more than half the country won’t believe a word the president says. The White House is barely functioning; legislation is completely stalled; next week’s trip abroad will have everyone watching from behind a couch; the FBI and CIA are reeling; there’s almost no one in the State Department; no presidential due diligence is applied to military actions; the president only reads memos when his name is mentioned in them; a not-too-smart and apparently mute 35-year-old son-in-law is supposed to solve every problem in the country and world; and the press secretary is hiding in the bushes. No one has any confidence that the president couldn’t throw us into a war or a constitutional crisis at a moment’s notice. Nothing this scary has happened in my lifetime.
And yet around 35 percent of the country still somehow views every single catastrophe Trump perpetrates on America and the world as either a roaring triumph or a huge middle finger to the elites, and therefore fine. For them, everything is sustainable. When Republicans can shrug off giving top-secret Israeli intelligence to the Russians, there is nothing they cannot shrug off. We are not talking about support for various policies here. We are talking about the kind of following a cult leader has. In poll after poll, around 80 percent of Republicans still approve of the job Trump is doing. Still. That’s why the GOP leadership, even as their agenda evaporates, are leery of taking Trump on. His hold on their own voters is tighter than theirs is. It’s tighter than Nixon’s because Trump has built a reactionary movement from the ground up and taken over an entire party. He can communicate with them in ways no other Republican can. And there is no way on earth he is ever going to go quietly, if he agrees to go at all.
That’s why I have a hard time figuring out how this ends, even though it must end. Even if the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation hits some pay dirt, I can see Trump surviving if he cannot be proven to be directly implicated. He’s already setting up the case: He’s being subjected to an historically unprecedented witch hunt, remember? And there’s no institution or person he won’t blame or destroy in his bid to save himself. Just ask his former creditors. If he’s up against the wall, he will treat the Constitution the way he treated his banks. Or say the Dems manage to regain the House next year, and hold impeachment hearings. Wouldn’t that simply galvanize support for Trump as he fights back against the “deep state,” the “swamp,” the GOP, and what Hannity calls the propaganda media circus — and render 66 votes in the Senate to convict him a pipe dream? Part of me wonders if he’d quit even if he’s beaten in the next presidential election? Isn’t it always rigged when he loses?
In some ways, I think the best analogy for Trump is O.J. Simpson. Even if we all know he’s guilty as sin, even if his own supporters see the flimflam behind the claptrap, even if the evidence is staring us in the face, he’ll never lose his core support. For 35 percent of the country, he’ll never be guiltier than the system he’s challenging. The best we can hope for is a Democratic House in 2018 and a grinding, grueling attempt to minimize the already enormous harm Trump has done in the meantime. We can pursue that outcome while hoping our cold civil war doesn’t get hot — because this is beginning to feel like the 1850s.
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