No laughing matter

Yesterday we witnessed the hideous tableau of Trump’s first full cabinet meeting.  Five months into his tenure, Trump invited television cameras to capture the revolting spectacle of sycophancy on display.  Although the sight of everyone from Rex Tillerson to Reince Preibus debasing themselves to flatter this manifestly unqualified buffoon was seen as comedy, it was anything but.

As cognitive linguist and Berkeley professor George Lakoff has repeatedly pointed out, he who sets the frame controls the narrative and Trump is a master at framing.  By his tweets and photo ops, Trump has been able to dictate the day’s coverage and distract us from the momentous policy decisions being made.  While we were busy laughing at embarrassing obsequiousness, Trump was using the press as a megaphone to amplify his lies.  Low information voters will take the repeated untrue statements from that Cabinet meeting at face value, not bothering to read the fact checks in print media.  The press has to stop allowing itself to be used this way and call out the lies in real time.

While we were busy chuckling at Chuck  Schumer’s parody, we overlooked Trump surrogates, Newt Gingrich and Newsmax editor, Chris Ruddy, floating the idea that Trump was considering firing Special Counsel, Robert Mueller III.  Taken together, these two developments should be a bright, flashing red alarm signal that Trump is eager to join the ranks of Putin, Erdogan and El-Sisi as an authoritarian despot with the power to muzzle the free press and quash independent investigations into his wrongdoing.  This is no laughing matter.

Sadly, it is a vain hope that Congress will exercise  its Constitutional authority as a check on Trump’s excesses.  Republicans are too busy salivating at their own unchecked power.  MItch McConnell, evil incarnate, is guiding 13 men to write a  healthcare bill in secret that will repeal Obamacare and strip insurance from 24 million people.   The Senate Republicans aim to pass the bill without public hearings and without even disclosing its contents to their Democratic colleagues.

Comity is dead, and Congressional Democrats have to stop pretending otherwise. Republicans are clearly committed to gaining and maintaining absolute power to inflict pain on every American who might be tempted to vote for a Democrat.  They have shown again and again that they will obstruct, gerrymander, suppress the vote and lie in order to do so.  In light of that, any pretense that Republicans are guided by law, ethics or basic human decency is out the window.  Faced with this, our only hope is for Congressional Democrats to throw every procedural and political roadblock imaginable in the Republicans’ path.  The time for timorousness is over.  It is time we recognized that Congressional Republicans are a cabal of rapacious jackals feeding off of the carcass of our democracy.  That is nothing to laugh about.