August 8, 2017
On a daily basis, we see mounting evidence that, not only is Trump intellectually and temperamentally unfit to be president, not only is he zealously pursuing policies to reverse the societal progress this country has made towards equality in the last seventy years, but that his continued tenure as president risks our permanent transformation from a deeply flawed representative democracy to a tin pot autocracy ruled by a vulgar, vengeful, pathologically insecure bigot.
The Washington Post’s story yesterday about how the Trump Hotel in D.C. has become a hub for conservative and international influence peddling reads like a scene from a dinner theater version of “Casablanca.” The Post described a lobby bar peopled by the boldface names in Trumpworld, like Lewandowski, Spicer and Giuliani, with a calendar full of events sponsored by organizations and groups seeking to curry favor with Trump. In a nod to compliance with the emoluments clause, the hotel says it maintains a separate ledger of payments from foreign nationals, but no one has verified the existence of such a ledger or has knowledge of the amount that foreign interests have paid to the hotel since Trump’s inauguration in January. The most shocking example of influence peddling that The Post reported was that the Saudi government paid the six figure hotel bill of a veterans’ group that came to Washington to lobby against a bill that would have allowed the families of the victims of 9/11 to sue the Saudi government!
Trump meanwhile, is busily tweeting sycophancy, insults and classified information from his Bedminster hideaway. Over the weekend he retweeted praise from a purported Black woman supporter named “Nicole Mincey,” who turned out to be either a Russian bot or a scammer selling MAGA merchandise. Yesterday, Trump unleashed a bewildering tweetstorm against stolid Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, excoriating him for an ancient incident in which he exaggerated his service record. Clearly, the decidedly unflashy Blumenthal has gotten under Trump’s skin with his insistence on pursuing the Russian investigation wherever it leads and his willingness to eschew equivocation and raise the prospect of impeachment.
While the press focuses on Trump’s idiotic tweets and his naked avarice, momentous and dangerous events are ignored. The press has barely mentioned Trump’s failure to condemn the terroristic bombing of the Dar Al Farooq Mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota. Trump has spent no time developing a strategy to deal with North Korea’s threats to retaliate against the U.N. sanction vote (other than to tweet classified information in statements which conflict with those of his U.N. Ambassador, Nikki Haley). Today, his Justice Department, led by serial perjurer and committed racist, Jeff Sessions, reversed course in a major voting rights case and backed Ohio’s massive “use it or lose it” purge of infrequent voters.
The fact is that, although the particulars of Trump’s unique danger to our body politic may differ from day to day, the fundamental aspects have not changed – corruption and greed on an epic scale, policy animated by pernicious hatred of anyone who is not a straight, white Christian man, led by an impetuous, petulant bully. The danger we are in cannot be overstated. We cannot afford to equivocate, sit on the sidelines or get caught up in intra-party squabbles between the center left and far left. It will take each of us using everything we’ve got to defeat the menace that Trump, Pence and their enablers constitute to our liberty, safety and security. It may be August, but playtime is over.