Since he was given the green
light by all but one Republican senator to ignore any moral or ethical
constraints—let alone constraints period—in his abuse of presidential power
that Attorney General William Barr continues (despite his highly not credible
defensive posturing) to aid and abet, Trump for the moment seems unstoppable. Freed
from the cobwebs of past “understandings” of the limits of presidential power
in the wake of Watergate by presidents who did not want to “test’ just what
those limits were, Trump’s personal
prejudices and lack of consideration for anyone but himself is the order of the
day. Even his recent rash of presidential pardons and commutations have to be
seen in the context of his personal interest; whether it is tax fraud,
influence-buying, illegal campaign contributions, lying to investigators—or in
the case of Joe Arpaio, contempt for court orders barring racist activities—all
those things Trump is guilty of in one way or the other, and it is way for him
to justify to himself that he has done nothing “wrong.”
This man has clearly got to go;
if Trump is elected to a second term, there is no going back to a time where a
president was forced to contain his basest instincts because he feared for how
history would define him. As bad as Ronald Reagan may have been seen to many,
he on occasion sought bi-partisan support for many of his pet projects, and his
immigration reform law was the last such act to pass. When Reagan “discovered”
the Iran-Contra scandal just before it hit the presses, he went on national
television and announced that he was directing the Justice Department to
investigate the rogue operation. What Trump is doing is to lay waste to any
moral or ethical stop signs—he is running through them like a freight train off
the rails. Perhaps subsequent presidents will be more cautious, but only in
relative terms, because they can point out the hypocrisy of Republicans in
allowing this to happen. If Trump is elected to a second term, that can only
mean that a large segment of the American electorate—the white nationalist and
nativist segment—does not have any moral or ethical sense as long as others are
doing the suffering, and the other side will be right in claiming that
something “radical” must be done to right the country’s moral and ethical ship.
In order to “right’ the ship, we can’t
have a “moderate” who will simply work not to offend people who deserve to be
offended for all the harm they have caused by supporting Trump like so many
lemmings mindlessly following their Fuhrer to the cliff. We have the Democratic
establishment wetting their pants over the prospect of Bernie Sanders being the
nominee, yet what this country needs is not someone who doesn’t wish to “offend,”
but someone who gives the country a black and white contrast for the country’s
very soul, which has clearly been lost at sea under the Trump
administration. During the early days of
the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover continued to act on behalf of the wealthy
and corporate interests that put him in power, whose unsound policies inflated
stock prices well beyond what could be sustained, and when the bubble burst,
everyone—including ordinary people who believed the lies they were told—lost not
just their savings but their jobs; at its peak, unemployment was at 25 percent,
and working people lucky enough to have jobs didn’t make much. But Hoover did
almost nothing to relieve the economic distress, believing that everything
would eventually “right” itself if the “market” was left to its own devices.
Save for those who lost their shirts in the stock market crash, those who were
still very rich were not to be annoyed by such things as higher taxes to pay
for social safety net programs.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt
became the Democratic nominee, his proposals to relieve the economic suffering
were attacked as “socialist,” but most voters—and a few Republicans who saw
that the short-sightedness of the Hoover administration was disastrous for
their party—saw through the rhetoric and saw this wasn’t about “ideology,” this
was about doing something, anything, to correct the do-nothing policies of the
Hoover administration and against the interests of those he was protecting.
During the pre-war years of his presidency, FDR was continuously attacked by
the right as a “communist” and a “socialist,” although he himself never used
the term, insisting that “ideology” had nothing to do with what was needed to
set the country right. But the New Deal programs that he instituted, and Social
Security in particular, were “radical” for the time, as were the high marginal
tax rates enforced on wealthiest people; those were times when the government
became “socialist’ in all but name, and most people at the time thought it was
the right thing to do. The fact that Democrats enjoyed huge majorities for a
time in both houses of Congress proved that attacks like accusations of “socialism” and “communist” used by those
opposed to the New Deal meant nothing to people who just wanted something done differently—and
“radically” if necessary.
Today, it isn’t an economic
crisis that the country faces, but a moral one. Trump’s record speaks for
itself, as does it’s inhumanity and indecency. We have been hearing too often
that in order to beat Trump, we need a candidate who will “appeal” to as wide a
base as possible. But what does that mean? Hillary Clinton chose to “appeal” to
a wide base, and she lost. Maybe voters want a candidate who is the exact
opposite of Trump, because a “moderate” candidate only promises to take the
country back to a “status quo” that only temporarily stays the inevitable drift
back in the wrong direction, because it implies that nobody wants to take a real stand for what
is moral and ethical. Accusations that a candidate is a “socialist”—even one
who openly describes himself as such—ignores the fact that many voters, having
now seen what evil looks like as a national policy, would be “curious” or even
desperate to see what the alternative looks like. Post-election polls in 2016 showed
that voters were in fact ready to support Sanders over Trump, and there is no
reason not to believe this is still the case.
Voters are not as stupid as media
pundits think they are; presidential candidates promise a lot of things that
they cannot actually fulfil, but what matters is the intent to do something. We
have seen Trump use his executive authority to overturn every Obama-era actions
he can find, merely out of petty personal vindictiveness. We need a president
who will overturn Trump-era actions, not for petty personal reasons, but
because it is the morally right thing to do. And we need a candidate and
president who has the courage to do all of that, and more.
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