The overriding issue America faces today is not whether Trump will be reelected in 2020, or Roe v Wade, or immigration and the wall, or the trade war with China, or war with Iran, or North Korean de-nuclearization – it is the survival of American democracy. The cascade of alarming events every day overwhelms the news and obscures the fact that our democratic system of government is not only under attack, but that the attacker of it – Donald J Trump – is on the verge of winning. In fact, the cascade is part of his strategy of distraction, including that every day, just when we feel it can’t get any worse, it gets worse.
Trump’s recent re-tweet of a video of Nancy Pelosi, that had been slowed down and edited to make her appear drunk and inarticulate, is an example of how this strategy is working. In normal times a US President attacking the Speaker of the House in this way would have been so unthinkable that it would have been a weeks-long scandal and would have prompted calls for his removal from office – but it has already faded into the background as Trump has since accused the head of the FBI of treason, started a vendetta to uncover an attempted coup of his presidency (and, in the process de-classified some of the most sensitive information held by our intelligence agencies), verbally attacked Joe Biden, while in Japan and insulted his Japanese host by minimizing Kim Jong-un’s launching rockets that could reach Japan, but not he US.
Author Fran Liebowitz recently described the feeling, that she and so many of us have, as being “plagued” by what is happening under Trump’s presidency … that it is like having a chronic illness that you try to ignore. The problem is that it is something we ignore at our peril, because the future is at stake. America is in a battle between two different worlds – the World of Fox and the World of Facts – and if the World of Fox wins our democracy is doomed.
In the World of Fox, the Mueller Report exonerated Trump of both obstruction and collusion, the FBI committed treason by spying on the Trump campaign, the Clinton campaign was complicit in the treason, Hillary leaked classified information from her private email server and, of course, the democrats, aided by the deep state, tried to conduct a coup to remove Trump from office – and want a do-over of the Mueller investigation, because the first try failed. This is what Trump’s base believes, because they get their News from Fox, which is integral to Trump’s publicity machine, as well as from Trump-influenced social media and right-wing Sinclair-owned broadcast stations.
Now, to better understand the current situation and how Trump might be stopped, let’s look at the World of Facts
In the World of Facts, the good news is that Trump’s base is around 42% of the electorate. It has been at that level consistently for over a year and is confirmed by recent polls that compare his chances of being re-elected against his possible democratic opponents. While the poll results show Trump losing by varying amounts, depending who he runs against, his number is consistently around 41%. Also, in the 2018 mid-term elections, democrats running for the House received nine million more votes than their republican opponents. Thus, because everything he does seems geared to appealing to his base, which reinforces the plague felt by the 54% who favor anyone but Trump, it is difficult to see how he could be reelected. That is if we assume that the 2020 election will be conducted on a level playing field. – and there’s the rub. Unless Trump’s ability to break any law he doesn’t like is stopped in its tracks, now that he has successfully installed his stooge William Barr as attorney general and two new allies on the Supreme Court – and recently joked on the phone with his friend Vladimir Putin about Russian election interference, rather than trying to stop it – who knows what he will be able to do to tilt the playing field.
The Mueller Report found multiple cases of Trump committing obstruction of justice, which has been confirmed in a letter signed by over eight hundred former prosecutors. In the report, Mueller stated “The Office of Legal Council has issued an opinion finding that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions …… The conclusion that congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.” Attorney General Barr, however, did not leave it to congress and decided on his own that there was no obstruction. He also denied that Mueller had intended it to be decided by congress.
Mueller also found much evidence of interaction between Russia and the Trump campaign, but decided that it was not indictable because, as the report states, the legal definition of conspiracy would have required “an agreement – tacit or express – between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference. That requires more than the two parties taking actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests“. The report also says “A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean that there was no evidence of those facts.” In fact, the report contains many instances of the Trump team and the Russians taking actions that were “informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or interests”, These do seem to amount to collusion, which is not a legal term, if not conspiracy, which is. They include such things as efforts to coordinate the timing of Wiki Leak’s release of the information that the Russians hacked from the Democratic National Committee.
The Mueller Report (even with redactions which clearly cover up some of the most egregious material) is probably the most sordid document I have ever read. Opening it to almost any page reveals tales of lies, contradictions, devious acts, attacks by Russia on our democracy, infiltration of our electoral system, hacking of our institutions … things that would have been unthinkable pre-Trump. But AG William Barr, living in the World of Fox, distorted his early summary of it as a complete exoneration of Trump.
One example: in Gerry Meandering on March 27th I noted that Barr quoted, as evidence that Trump had not conspired with the Russians, a partial sentence from the report – and questioned whether the rest of the sentence would show that Barr had included only the favorable stuff. Now a reading of the whole sentence reveals that that is exactly what he did. Here is the full sentence, with the part Barr omitted underlined: “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Because he sits at the pinnacle of our justice system, Barr is in position to enable his client Trump to ignore the law, knowing that many of the results of Trump’s actions – such as ordering his people to ignore subpoenas, refusing to respond to any requests or demands from congress for documents, banning anyone ever associated with him from appearing before congressional committees and refusing to do any business with democrats until they stop investigating him – will either end up in his lap – or in the Supreme Court.
In a May 1st interview Hillary Clinton characterized the threat to American democracy, posed by Barr’s fealty to Trump, as “setting America on the road to tyranny” She said “The positions being taken and advocated by Barr (e,g,: that the president can fire any prosecutor investigating him if he thinks the accusations are false) were unlike anything that I’ve ever heard of, that were ever accepted with any level of seriousness before.” Also, in a May 19th New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg wrote: “As we watch Donald Trump remake this country in ways that once seemed unimaginable, ….. there’s been renewed interest in Watergate. Yet …. the past can prove inadequate to understanding the depredations of the present.” These comments capture the unprecedented situation we now face. Nixon was a crook and did very bad things. George W Bush got us into a war that has had disastrous effects and that we are still fighting seventeen years later, but neither of them were a threat to democracy, because they both understood, respected and abided by our Democratic system of government. American democracy is now in serious jeopardy because Trump does none of those things.
Of course it is quite possible that, even with his seeming control over the justice system – with a compliant Supreme Court and a hand-picked attorney general – plus a Mitch McConnell-controlled Senate -Trump may go too far overboard. In recent days he has appeared to be moving in that direction, including using such flimsy arguments to prevent his financial information from being released, that the lawsuits have been virtually laughed out of court. In fact the acclaimed Harvard Law professor Lawrence Tribe predicted that, if they reached the Supreme Court, they would be unanimously overturned.
And, of course, there are many other things that might save the day. Nancy Pelosi and the House committees that are conducting investigations have only just begun to flex their muscles. In addition to filing subpoenas, holding people in contempt or starting an impeachment investigation, they also have a tool called “inherent contempt”, which gives congress the power to arrest, imprison or fine those who are in contempt of congress. The Mueller Report also discloses that there are sixteen pending cases against Trump and his associates in the Southern District of New York and other jurisdictions.Any of these could seriously impact Trump’s presidency.
But if none of that happens – and if Trump’s two Supreme Court appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, combine with the other right wing justices and find some basis to uphold Trump’s ability to be seemingly above the law – and if the Mitch McConnell dominated senate continues to put politics above country and blindly support Trump – this would effectively give him control of all three branches of government, eliminating the checks and balances that are intrinsic to American democracy and starting America down the road to tyranny.
This brings us to the man pictured above, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Glover Roberts Jr, was appointed by President George W. Bush. He has long been considered a solid member of the five person right-wing faction on the court. But he is also known to have a strong concern for the growing negative reputation of the court as an overtly politicized body. At times he has cast unexpected votes to counter that reputation, The recent arrival of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh has now thrust him into the court’s ideological center, a spot that had long belonged to recently retired Justice Anthony Kennedy. Last November, after Trump called a judge who had ruled against him “an Obama judge”, Roberts broke his usual silence outside the court, by releasing the following statement “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Why is this important? Because, if all else fails, there is reason to hope that John G. Roberts will exercise his reverence for the integrity of the law, the Supreme Court and the United States of America, and cast his vote with the four liberal judges on the court, choosing the road to democracy over the road to tyranny – and will thus become the savior of American democracy.
Gerry Meandering 