Monday, January 20, 2020

The Impeachment Saga: Trump’s Putinesque ‘Misdirection, Disorder, and Political Stagecraft’


“Once this quagmire—in which truth and lies are knotted up and nothing is incontrovertible—is established, the final aim comes into view….As the Kremlin has long known, once you've successfully swamped truth, you're no longer accountable for your actions. Mounting evidence  from the administration's first month or so in office suggests that this is the Trump team's goal: to produce a state of disorder between themselves, the media, and the public, so that it becomes all but impossible for Trump and his team to be held accountable for conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power. It’s how Moscow has entrenched a super-rich oligarchy and a thinly veiled authoritarian regime: by hiding behind its splashy dramaturgia [Russian for “theater craft”]. Trump is quickly learning his own variation on this theme. ‘There is a sense that he will purposefully move the conversation onto colorful bullshit, away from the really serious stuff,’ [former Russian TV producer Peter] Pomerantsev says. The Kremlin has provided him with a blueprint for ruling with impunity by way of misdirection, disorder, and political stagecraft.”—Mike Mariani, “In Trump’s America,” Vanity Fair, April 2017 

A few weekends ago, while channel-surfing, I came across a C-Span talk to a Temple University class given by Geoff Shepard, who 45 years ago served as principal deputy to President Richard Nixon’s lead defense lawyer. Shepard was speaking about alleged judicial and prosecutorial abuses in the case that brought the President down, or what he insisted on calling The Real Watergate Scandal in a book by that name.

Poor Tricky Dick. I imagine he would be kicking himself that when he needed it, he didn’t have a cybersphere where anything goes and a Fox News happy to offer guest appearances to die-hard apologists who wrench facts out of context and manufacture political conspiracies out of whole cloth.

Most of all, Nixon—who made his career as an unrelenting commie-hater—would be stunned that a later Republican occupant of his office would not only solicit, on national television, aid from a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB and take that spy-turned-dictator’s word over his own intelligence agencies, but would then, as Mike Mariani noted above, copy that foreign thug’s playbook to power. 

Such is the state of America, even with the battle on Capitol Hill joined now, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally moving the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump to the Senate after a delay of several weeks, and—in a scene with multiple levels of irony—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts swearing the Senate to impartiality—something that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, has previously gloated he would not do. 

This weekend, a friend told me that, even as the third President in our lifetime undergoes impeachment, the U.S. should emerge as intact as it always has. I’m afraid I can’t be that confident. 

The Russian-style regime viruses pointed out above by Mike Mariani—"conflicts of interest, shady relationships, and abuses of power”—have been normalized here now, too, starting with Trump's own family and radiating out to businessmen who enjoyed his favor as Cabinet members or in their own industries. 

And the means of accountability that Americans have long employed to keep wayward Presidents in check—independent investigators, the press, the opposition party, and even formerly independent Congressmen in his own party—have found themselves slipping on what Mariani has correctly identified as “misdirection, disorder, and political stagecraft.”

No Matter What the Outcome, A Capricious, Transgressive President Has Been Marked

It may be a foregone conclusion that the President will escape conviction in the Senate, as Bill Clinton did two decades ago and as Nixon almost certainly would not have in 1974. Yet, no matter what else happens now, Trump has been marked as a transgressive President whose conduct has been judged even by subordinates as legally perilous to him and themselves. (Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney fled the room during crucial meetings on the Ukraine involving Trump and the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.)

The enormity of what is happening to him has managed to penetrate even the skull of this Oval Office occupant with precious little knowledge of history. His consequent default to whining—full Trump Baby mode—has been lightning-fast, and all the more horrible to watch. (Trump’s cry that he has not been given due process, for instance, is laughable, starting with the fact that he forbade any documents or witnesses that might have exonerated him before the House Intelligence Committee.)

It is never a cause for celebration when a President is impeached, because it is not only the ultimate weapon allowed by the Constitution against a President, but the only possible one sanctioned when assassination is considered too awful and rotation in office insufficient to prevent further ills. It is a tragedy when an intelligent politician's deep character flaws make him vulnerable to this instrument, whether it be Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. 

But Trump was never an attentive if deeply imperfect student of government, as those Presidents were. Neither has he ever been capable of summoning a lonely courage in his best moments before the public, as Andrew Johnson did as the only Southern senator to remain loyal to the Union. Nor can Trump even be considered a conventionally tragic figure, as he has never demonstrated the slightest capacity for the self-examination undertaken by such dramatic figures after their fatal mistakes.

For anyone still inclined to see tragedy in the President’s case, it is that Trump never learned to channel properly his near-boundless energy. He could have steered the ship of state firmly but decisively forward. Instead, he nearly capsized it with mad caprice. 

Understand this: as the White House, early in this new year, escalated tensions with Iran, most Congressional Republicans had to be privately asking themselves what they had let themselves in for by never curbing the President’s penchant for metastatic mendacity. 

We should not imagine that the lack of an all-out shooting war to date means an already fragile Middle East has not been further destabilized. It’s a shorter walk than the GOP should imagine from campaign falsehoods to flimsy excuses about whether or not Iran presented an imminent threat.

Lawmakers’ tolerance for the never-ending tide of lies from the White House has worn perilously thin, as seen in Sen. Mike Lee’s outburst after listening to an "insulting and demeaning" briefing by administration officials offering no plausible, even coherent rationale for the assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani. 

No matter how audible their sighs of relief over the lack of American bloodshed after that strike, Republicans on Capitol Hill had to wonder if the inevitable had merely been postponed. With the credibility of America’s commander-in-chief suspect from the get-go, what exists to tamp down protest at home and street rage abroad?

Republicans were so busy going into a fetal position in the first few hours after Trump’s saber-rattling that they weren’t repeating with their accustomed shameless gusto their argument that it is the American people through the next election who should decide his fate. (If impeachment is a coup, as Trump has insisted ad infinitum, what do you call the attempt to remove from office Bill Clinton, who won more terms by wider margins than Trump as the popular and Electoral College victor both times?)

Trump Has Left No Alternative to Impeachment

The GOP could say what they wanted about their opponents, but really, what alternative did Trump leave Pelosi and the House Democrats? 

*If they did nothing after knowing the facts of the Ukraine scandal, Trump could reasonably claim that they saw nothing wrong when he tries something worse the next time (and there WILL be a next time—he is STILL sending Rudy Giuliani over there to find dirt on Biden, and, in the most recent budget negotiation, STILL held up military aid to Ukraine). 

*If Congress censured him, he would move to rescind it (as Andrew Jackson did in the 1830s, before he left office) or laugh it off as a slap on the wrist (more likely). 

Trump brought the tsunami of his current troubles on himself because he can never leave well enough alone: enough women, enough money, enough power, enough adulation.  He could not abide being a laughingstock for exhibiting Presidential ambitions, so he had to find some way, any way, to get it done. He could not tolerate Americans watching the storming of a U.S. embassy in Iraq and wonder if this was so much better than the Benghazi affair under President Obama.

Without realizing it, Trump had revealed that he is exactly what he scorns so often in others: weak. With no other alternative, he has sought, ever more frantically, to capitalize on the chaos that has resulted from this emotional incapacity.

Baseball fans throughout the country have been convulsed by the cheating scandal involving the Houston Astros. The team’s victory in the fall 2017 campaign has been tainted, many believe.

Yet the stakes in the 2016 Presidential campaign were far more consequential, and nearly half the country not only shrugs off credible reports that Russia aided Trump but equally urgent testimony by intelligence officials that this is occurring again. Where is the outrage comparable to what we are seeing in the baseball world?

Trump’s Farrago of Irrelevancies, Insults, Half-Truths and Brazen Falsehoods

The Ukraine affair itself was only the most recent attempt to distract voters from the lingering stench from the more than 100 contacts made between Russia and 18 people (including the candidate himself) from the Trump campaign, according to the Mueller report.

From virtually the moment Trump was inaugurated, he sought to defuse a series of revelations that could have destroyed his Presidency before it had barely begun, with threats against all the players who could bring him and his henchmen down:

*The investigators: The ostensible cause of the removal of Acting Attorney-General Sally Yates was her refusal to defend his travel ban. But her firing also got out of the way someone who had warned him that then-National Security Adviser Mike Flynn could be "blackmailed by the Russians," because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his "problematic" conduct. The FBI has endured even worse, as Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were not even fired by Trump but subject to investigations themselves. While Comey has been investigated for his leak of a Russian-related document, former Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has so far escaped similar recrimination from his old boss for leaking private text messages critical of Trump by FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The latter leak enabled the President to ridicule the latter pair for their affair—and to serve notice on others who dared to step out of line that their vulnerabilities would be similarly exposed to public shaming. Ask yourself: After being around for 40 years, why is it only now that FISA warrants have been called into question as a tool of prosecutors? Even Robert Mueller, a registered Republican who served in the (Republican) George W. Bush administration, was not spared, as Trump ludicrously claimed that a dispute over a country-club fee in a Trump property biased him against the President. After all that, Trump still felt the need to make Attorney-General William Barr—the most dangerous administration confederate in his assault on the Constitution—authorize the Inspector General Michael Horowitz and John Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, to poke around in the original allegations that helped surface Trump’s misdeeds.

*The opposition: Trump has continually sought to blunt the effectiveness of the Democratic Party as a means of restraining him. Incensed by Hillary Clinton’s post-election criticisms, he authorized two investigations—into her use of a private server and possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State—that turned up nothing. Biden has seen his credibility called into question through the Ukraine affair. Rivals and critics of the President have been served notice: if they don’t keep quiet, they will have to endure some combination of loss of votes, Twitter-induced hatred, or mounting legal bills.

*The media: Everyone from reporters up to and including publishers have been subject to a campaign of vitriol and Presidential retaliation far surpassing any prior administration’s. One media claim after another about Trump’s actions on Russia and the Ukraine have been denounced as “fake news,” then proven by documentary or eyewitness testimony, then dismissed with the equivalent of “who cares?” shrugs. Repeatedly, he has used the totalitarian trope that the press are “enemies of the people.” In a particularly egregious retaliation against a prominent press critic, Amazon has charged him with exerting “improper pressure” to block a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon because of negative coverage by the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon head Jeff Bezos.

*The Senate: Six-year terms had long enabled the Senate to act in effect as a “coolant” to a House of Representatives subject to elections every two years. Powerful committee chairs especially had to be placated, even by Presidents of the same party who had enjoyed landslide victories like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But GOP Senators today are running scared that a storm of Trump Twitter tirades will lead to them being “primaried” out of office. Thus, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two fierce (and, in retrospect, far-seeing) critics of Trump in the race for President have fallen meekly in line. No surprise, then, that Republicans are trying to distract the focus of the Senate trial, periodically threatening to subpoena the targets of Trump’s dirty tricks, Joe and Hunter Biden, rather than the aides who could confirm or deny the President’s account. To an effect never before seen in a body that traditionally valued its independence, they have become, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc., as they obfuscate the overwhelming conclusion of witness testimony and the President’s own transcript of his July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: i.e., that Trump personally shook down a foreign leader for dirt to use against the leading candidate to defeat him in the next election.

The Ukraine Affair—Geopolitical Three-Card Monte

Those with long memories will recall that dirty tricks against the presumptive nominee of the opposing party represented the same strategy that Richard Nixon used in his 1972 reelection against Sen. Edmund Muskie. As ugly as that was, it was still less dangerous than Trump’s Ukrainian three-card monte—a geopolitical sleight-of-hand that:

* diverts attention from his Russian machinations; 

* bolsters his reelection prospects;

* ensures he is less likely to be prosecuted following an electoral defeat; 

* continues the cozy arrangement by which the family business in which he retains an ownership interest still reaps benefits from foreign governments; and

* imperils a small, relatively young nation threatened by a larger, neighboring authoritarian power (shades of 1938 Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany).

Sticking to the Misdirection Script, Even as He is Brought to Account

Are you really surprised that Trump continues to bellyache and abuse even as the impeachment trial limps to its foreseeable conclusion? Consider how he:

*fired off a rambling—and, of course, fallacious—six-page letter to Nancy Pelosi, denouncing her for trying to impeach him while also insisting she wouldn’t dare (WRONG!);

*bizarrely tweeted that Pelosi’s “teeth were falling out” at a recent public appearance (leading many to wonder if the President’s frequent mispronunciations resulted from his own dental difficulties); 

*retweeted (with no evidence, naturally) a suggestion by former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer that Pelosi’s delay in moving impeachment to the Senate resulted from the Democratic establishment’s desire to hurt Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who must attend the impeachment trial instead of visiting Iowa in the crucial final week before its caucus; and

*suggested at rallies that the late Rep. John Dingell and LBJ were currently in hell.

The intent was the same as it's always been for him: to get the media he says he despises (but cannot do without) to run off to tut-tut or correct his latest outrage, even as they shift the public's attention from his real misconduct.

In the 2016 election, before they began to cower at the rampaging menace in their midst, many Establishment Republicans questioned whether Trump was adhering to conservative doctrine. I, for one, am here to say that Trump runs a grave risk of being liberal, if we use Tom Wolfe’s winking definition of that term in regard to his once-smug "Master of the Universe" Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities: “A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.”  

Only that can account for Trump's suddenly tender concerns about violation of rights (his!) and “McCarthyism.” Those concerns are only marginally less laughable than his contention that in the Ukraine affair, he’s acted as an international corruption fighter. (If you believe that, then you probably bought O.J. Simpson’s claim  that he would spend the rest of his post-acquittal life seeking the real killers of his ex-wife.)

Throughout his life, nobody has ever called Donald Trump to account. Now that he has been, let's be clear why this came to pass: not because he is a bullying wretch, not because his opponents disagree with his policies, but because he broke the law and flagrantly abused the Constitution he swore an oath to uphold. 

In the number and variety of his offenses in a still-limited amount of time--profiting from his office through shameless violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, open solicitation of three foreign governments' (Russia, Ukraine, and--lest we forget!--China) intervention of U.S. elections, obstruction of justice, such blatant coddling of an authoritarian that he could credibly be charged with treason were we at war, discrediting the intelligence and criminal-justice agencies charged with keeping us safe, and rampant abuse of power--no other President has deserved impeachment more

Indeed, if Trump's actions do not violate the Constitution (as egregiously obnoxious impeachment defense team member Alan Dershowitz insists, against all evidence), then it is impossible to conceive what the Framers might have had in mind with this clause.

Now is not the time for his critics to bewail his misconduct. Action is called for--loud enough so it can even be heard and heeded by Senate Republicans who right now have as much backbone as a chocolate eclair.

But, no matter what else happens from now on, Trump can’t say he hasn’t been warned about the consequences of his misconduct—and we, the American people, can’t claim, like Germans after WWII, that we didn’t know what was going on when a leader convinced his nation to follow him down a reckless, lawless path.

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