Photograph Source: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States – CC BY 2.0
“This was about staying out of prison.”
– Haberman and Swan (Regime Change) as to why Trump ran in 2024
Whether we impeach or imprison (or both) Donald J. Trump would be a first step if we are to return to a struggling path of an electoral, Constitutional, democratic order we recognized on this 250th July 4th.
Trump’s presidencies have taken us to a place where trust in our elections, a bedrock necessity, a peaceful transfer of power, respect for a Constitutional due process and judicial verdicts rendered, respect for First Amendment freedom of the press rights, and observance of the co-equal powers of executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are mockingly ignored and violated at will.
Trump’s struggle is to get those who would get him before they get him. And meanwhile line his own pockets. The boldness in him that some admire goes no deeper than this. He has been on trial and been found guilty by unanimous jury of 34 felony counts. This had all led to a second go at turning the country and the world upside down.
He’s taken us down the rabbit hole where half of us can’t distinguish bullshit and lies from verifiable assertions and the other half remain stunned or apoplectic. The man’s presence is absolutely confounding in a Mephistophelian way.
Also confounding is the historical path to where we are now. I mean the struggle to American Exceptionalism. Were we struggling close to coming apart before Trump or after? Trump sold a story of American carnage that only he could remedy. There was carnage. By 2016, the top 1% had as much wealth as the bottom 90%. That Trump would readjust that carnage to the greater immiseration of the 90% not enough voters foresaw. Stunned or already at the Kool-Aid.
In Gore Vidal’s view, the United States of Amnesia has been more of a militarized republic than a 5thCentury BCE Athenian “rule by the people.” The country has been protectively amnesiac regarding the extermination of an indigenous population, 89 years of Black African slavery up until the 1865 13thAmendment, the annihilation of Japanese civilian populations with atomic bombs in August 1945, and 144 years after the declaration “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” the 19th Amendment extended the right to vote to women. 144 years.
It seems that such total amnesia has given way to what you would call a “So What?” response. It’s as if a callus has been formed on the American Mass Psyche. Perhaps this is what happens when an individual or a country is bombarded constantly with words and images that punish an image, like Exceptional, we try to hold on to. Nevertheless, this “So What?” defense is tragic because unless we are able to fully feel and recognize what is true, though terrifying and humiliating, we cannot repair and improve. An overwhelming number of Americans need to conclude that Trump deserves – impeachment followed by imprisonment — if this government and its citizens are to escape absolute farce post-Trump.
We’re all very soon going to get on the “Get Trump” bandwagon/funeral procession, or, off his sinking ship, and at the same time hopefully recognize that unless all his violations face justice and not allowed to slide into Amnesia or “So What? or “More Than I Can Deal With,” our very much on-going 250 year old struggle is going to be troubled as it never has before with challenges and damages to basic principles left unanswered.
That events can be sent to the oblivion of the River Lethe in our American Mass psyche is a real thing. But whether the Trump assault can be so evaporated without the country still feeling, like an amputated limb, the aftermath of this assault is, to my mind, not possible. His devastation is of an order different than this country has struggled with before. He’s attacked with reckless impunity the grounds upon which we can decisively squash the flood of troglodyte “posts” that fill the mosh pit of social media.
Gore Vidal called the U.S. “a militarized Republic” which, if reliable to some extent, and I think it is, then Trump is the first leader who has played the country as just that. Positioned at the top of a military/economic powerhouse, Trump dealt as such both domestically and internationally. Manipulating investment returns manipulates the flow of that money into political campaigns. Internationally, the wealth supporting winning military ventures replaces protocols of diplomacy with Mafia-like offers that can’t be refused. Don Corleone extorted competitors because Luca Brasi was his enforcer. Trump sees U.S. military might as his enforcer and the Justice Department at home as the same.
While we could feel that previous presidencies have not negotiated as a militarized Republic, when you look closely through that lens, or listen to international views, Neo-Con regime of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle/Bremer/Feith et al seized the 9/11 moment to get away with being a militarized Republic. Military/Economic power could position in an advantageous way then and in a future relation to China’s own rising power. This was the window quickly closing of fixing a new American order. It was LBJ who also knew how to act on behalf of a militarized Republic: “America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea… If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they just might get whacked good.” Not Cyprus but Viet-nam got “whacked good” based on the Gulf of Tonkin lies, equal in devastating outcome to the WMD lies.
In short, Vidal had history to prove his point but Trump’s push internationally is being played on a different board. Listen: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Message to us: Try to stop me. Trump has been successful in taking all he can get away with; a con man/grifter/extortionist, he will cut and run, as he is now doing with a war in Iran he began for no profit to himself — revealed thus far — but completely out of a demented hubris. Jared Kushner, who picks up slaughtered parts like a jackal in Trump’s wake may be too busy evicting Palestinians to make a Spa of a war torn Iran. The real estate investor’s eye is on Cuba but the country has to be war torn first.
And so, it’s not just the crippling of the U.S.’s always shaky Constitutional order compliments of Trump but a full scale exposure through Trump of the U.S’s strong arm international affairs that need to be answered. The erratic tactics of Trump do not keep China at bay nor they reassure the EU that such tactics will support them and not Russia or China or North Korea. It is only because American focus on anything is always on the individual that we underestimate the macro level of damage that we face and the consequences of not insisting that a price must be paid.
I believe since Reagan planned a multi-layer missile defense system, the international community realized the U.S. would use its economic power in the service of its military power and international peace pacts be damned. All that was wanted was an American president who would without shame or hesitation slap aside honorable peaceful diplomacy, making it clear that filling the craw of this beast was the healthy thing to do.
Perhaps everyone but Americans were surprised that someone like Trump hadn’t come along before, although everyone has been surprised at the sheer impossibility of such an existence. I would argue that in a country that values getting rich as a personal and societal summum bonum and has only laughable deterrents to this predation of the weak and poor, the unscrupulous would be every other face in a crowd.
If this is true, it would give us an answer to the hot question: Why do Republicans and Cabinet members not say no to Trump, challenge his lies, and stand up against his mania? Answer: They are so very like him, only differing in that he is the president and they are not. He lets them stick their beak in the money pot to be had in return for their loyalty. As Putin’s moguls keep him safe, Trump’s moguls keep him from impeachment and imprisonment. Only when his grift and extortion threaten returns on investment will his moguls run from him. But like the crow who won’t leave the carrion feast in the middle of the road until the last second, this Trump gang will do the same. Tsar Paul I of Russia’s fate may be what awaits Trump.
“I’ll pardon everyone who has come within 200 ft. of the Oval Office,” Trump has told this accessories to crime lot who are nervous about a real retribution conducted by an unchained Congress and Department of Justice, nervous about a time when reason will regain its hold on the country.
No need for armchair diagnosis of these criminal accessories as sociopathic or innately predatory. They are home grown American soil products. Trump’s uniqueness lies in extended public exposure. As president his corrupted soul is on a 24/7 display, which he enjoys because fame, or notoriety, simply goes along with being rich. Securities and insider trader fraudsters avoid such exposure for obvious reasons. Trump doesn’t forego parading his crimes in the limelight because his own megalomania and now the Supreme Court has made him invulnerable. Never before has the American Confidence Man, whom Melville saw as endemic, been in such full display or has so much latent mental illness been given so much time to blossom before our eyes on a presidential stage.
It may not be possible to bring to a hard core 35% Trump loyalists an acceptance of empirical and rational methods of establishing objective, verifiable facts and evidence, but all the mindboggling stupidities laid on us require that an effort be made. Amnesia will not set in here. Crimes alleged and pursued without evidence must be brought into the court of reason and answered.
Every department and agency Trump has contaminated must, like the Augean tables, be mucked out and his appointed clowns judged. The destruction to all the agencies listed in the U.S. Government Manual made by Musk and his Nerd Army need to be re-established. An un-elected trillionaire batshit crazy should never again be allowed to take a chain saw to our government. The ways in which mind boggling stupidities swarm on social media cannot be primary in how we know, anything, including politics. That recuperation begins in the 3rd grade, not with STEM, but reading comprehension.
Redemption here is hard to imagine but it surely begins with Trump in jail, preceded by impeachment.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joseph Natoli.