With Trump’s Sunday tweetstorm announcing that he believed Putin’s denial and the revelation by The New York Times that Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner met with Kremlin connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in the hope of obtaining damaging information on Hilary Clinton, we have arrived at that depressing place that Sarah Kendzior and Timothy Snyder presaged in November. When confronted with the imminent publication of details about this meeting by The Times, Donald Jr seemed to express disappointment that Veselnitskya failed to deliver the goods and instead pressed him on the Magnitsky Law, which imposes sanctions on Russian individuals responsible for human rights abuses.
We can only guess that Donald Jr. thinks that the failure to actually obtain damaging information is exculpatory. If this were a movie, Trump, “pere et fils” would have been tripped up by their combination of sloppiness and unrelenting stupidity. But as those who have studied autocrats have warned us, brazenness is the point. It is one of the ways that despots flex their power. By their actions, they say to the populace, “We know that we are breaking laws, exploding norms, gleefully rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies…and there is NOTHING that you can do to stop us.”
Fortunately, in the United States, that is not technically true. We have a system of Constitutional checks and balances expressly designed by our flawed but brilliant founders to protect the people from abuses of power. All lawyers, though, know the difference between de facto and de jure. Checks and balances are meaningless if not used. We should demand that Lindsay Graham, John McCain and Marco Rubio do more than tweet acid-tongued quips that look good in print. The truth is that we have a Republican Congress full of unindicted co-conspirators who are too drunk with power to do anything to stop Trump as long as he has a working right hand to sign their agenda into law. They are heedless of the damage being done to America’s standing in the world, or to our democratic norms here at home.
If we are being honest, we know that the price of our “greatness” has been genocide and enslavement. At the same time, we can legitimately lay claim to greatness because our Constitution and our laws spoke of freedom and equality in neutral terms and provided the framework through which those of us who were marginalized and despised could attain a greater measure of both. The United States has always been a divided soul. The persistence of institutional racism and the ubiquity of Confederate monuments and symbols have long been evidence that for a significant number of Americans, their concept of freedom requires others who are less free. Constitutional originalists express the same idea in more elegant language. The reality is that we fought our bloodiest war and spent another 100 years fighting to throw off the yoke of state sponsored segregation to prove those with a race and gender limited idea of freedom wrong. The question is, whose vision of America will prevail?