Month: December 2020

AMERICA’S BROKEBACK CRY TO TRUMP: HOW DO WE QUIT YOU?

As Donald Trump’s four-year spree of crimes against democracy comes to a close, thought leaders in Democratic and legal circles are trying to figure out what to do with their nemesis. The options run the gamut, from ghosting him into existential oblivion, to a massive judicial inquiry approaching the breadth and depth of the Nuremberg trials. 

Clearly, the ghosting route has immense psychic appeal. As in any bad breakup, vaporizing the object of your disaffection into pure mental nothingness cleanses the mind and soul in preparation for new, and hopefully better, experiences. Alas, the stunt is hard to pull off with a mere mortal, let alone with the Svengali of Narcissus, and the 88 million Twitter followers at his fingertips. 

That narrows the choice to an assortment of investigatory and prosecutorial approaches.  Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell of California proposed a “Presidential Crimes Commission,” a panel of independent prosecutors empowered to investigate any and all of Trump’s legally dubious actions during his presidency.  

Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and George Washington University lecturer, suggested an even broader study by a bipartisan “Trump Crimes Commission” with congressionally selected members and staff from all three branches of government. That body, Kirschner explained in one news account, would investigate everything Trump did to thwart democracy, obstruct justice, and abuse power. He called it a “uniquely American response to our uniquely American atrocity.”

There has been strong support for this type of all-encompassing, spare-no-effort approach to dissecting the misdeeds, missteps and criminal activity of the Trump years.  The rationale was captured quite succinctly in a Financial Times’s interview of former Obama White House lawyer Ian Bassin. “By not confronting wrongdoing, we deprive Americans of an accurate, shared understanding of what happened,” Bassin told the newspaper. 

From a factual standpoint, it’s hard to argue with any of this.  Like a mad bull in a china shop, Donald Trump ran roughshod over every fiber of our democracy. There wasn’t a law, rule, norm, or principle that he didn’t trash if it stood in the way of his self-interest. 

Yet, the last thing this country needs right now is another four-year spotlight on Trump and the nefarious machinations of his presidency.  This is a guy who craves attention like a vampire covets blood. He just held up a COVID relief bill his own administration helped negotiate, and drew substantial bipartisan rancor, all because it gave him a few days of attention.  

Protracted investigations of every nuanced twist and turn, from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the impeachment trial, would give Trump a daily platform from which to rant and rave about the “witch hunts of the radical left Democrats who stole the election.”  

Yes, the president tried but failed to have Mueller fired. Yes, he tweeted disparaging comments about an impeachment witness during her testimony. It’s hard to see how trying to squeeze felony indictments out of such inane and moronic behavior advances the cause of American democracy. 

No U.S. president has ever been convicted of a crime for actions taken in office. That’s a precedent that can and should be broken for good cause, but a defamatory tweet or the ordered discharge that never happened hardly rise to that level. Sadly, criminal trials for obstruction of justice and witness tampering will bring us no closer to a consensus on what our democracy should look like. 

Unfortunately, our current political environment is not one where it is remotely possible to assemble what Ian Bassin, the former White House lawyer, calls a “shared understanding” of Trump’s wrongdoing.  We can’t even reach a “shared understanding” of who won the election.  More than 70 million people voted for Trump, and two-thirds of them believe their guy when he says he won in a landslide, an evidence-free belief constructed out of pure whim and fancy.

There are far more important issues than Donald Trump facing this country.  The pandemic continues to rage. As it does, the poor and much of the middle class face economic devastation. There is a growing crisis of racial injustice. We are fast approaching the point of no return on climate change. Nearly 29 million people are without health insurance. With narrow partisan divides in the House and Senate, President-elect Joe Biden faces enormous challenges on those and other issues.  Add a prolonged high-profile Trump investigation to that mix, and odds of success dramatically diminish on everything else.

On a deeply visceral level, the image of Trump, clad in an orange jumpsuit, looking frightened and forlorn in his prison cell, is therapeutic enchantment for roughly half the country. If he lands there as a result of relitigating the Russian investigation or the impeachment inquiry, the other half of the country (or at least his base) will see him as a martyred political prisoner.

This is not to say that we should simply ignore the 45th president and the damage he did to our democracy. There is a lot of repair and reparation work to be done, but we don’t need a grand inquisition to do it. If new information related to criminal acts by Trump or his allies surfaces, it should be processed through normal channels in the Justice Department, thoroughly investigated and indictments sought if appropriate.

Trump himself has given us a detailed list of what needs to be fixed. When it comes to blowing up democratic norms, he was an open book. He hid his tax returns. He personally profited from official government business directed to his hotels. He ignored congressional subpoenas. He protected his interests by firing employees who got in his way. He used pardons to protect campaign allies convicted of crimes. The list goes on and on. House Democrats have already started drafting legislation that would close many of the loopholes Trump was able to crawl through.

Finally, the smoothest and most pragmatic route to fulfilling the lock-him-up fantasy, is through the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. His ongoing investigation involves Trump’s business and financial interests and could well result in indictments on multiple charges.  Such crimes are not only pardon-proof, they avoid the optics of political retribution.  Tax evaders and financial cheats don’t garner much sympathy.

Any way you cut it, Donald Trump will remain in our heads and in our news feeds for some time.  Still, the goal should be to diminish the focus on him so we can, at long last, deal with the momentous problems facing our country.

THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW YEAR: TURNING DESPAIR INTO HOPE

The single unifying principle in this year of discombobulation is an intense desire to see the end of 2020. Consensus evades us on everything else; like who won the election, the value of social distancing, the amount of viral load in droplets of Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye.  But when it comes to seeing the backside of 2020, we are truly one nation, indivisible. The masked and unmasked masses – in states red and blue – are more than ready to adjourn this year from hell. 

England’s 19th Century poet laureate Alfred Tennyson prophetically captured our antipathy  for this abysmal year:  “Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier’.”  

But, as we approach the threshold of 2021, is there hope?

It’s hard to imagine a more relevant question right now.  This year kicked us in the head. A deadly pandemic took our oxygen away, literally and metaphorically. Many hospitals remain filled to capacity, giving a new and cruel meaning to the seasonal refrain of “no room in the inn.”  Despite the most important election in our lifetime, the nation remains toxically divided. Hatred and blinding rage flow from the middle fingers of both sides, poisoning families, friendships and neighborhoods. 

Is hope still alive?

The early Greek thinkers took a dim view of hope. They saw it as wishful thinking and an impediment to building knowledge-based strategies. That concept evolved quite profoundly over the centuries. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian theologians elevated hope to the status of an “irascible passion” for good, one that counteracts our immediate and baser impulses.  To Aquinas, hope is the opposite of despair.  With despair, he wrote, we “withdraw” from the source of our concern, while hope pushes us to “approach” that source and endeavor to make it better.

I thought about this hope/despair continuum recently after viewing an email exchange between two people who pride themselves on their radical left political credentials.  One of them expressed relief that Trump is on his way out, but then went on to wax prolifically on what he sees as the evils of a Biden-Harris administration.  Biden, he said, has been on “the wrong side of every issue in his 47 years in government,” and is filling his cabinet with the “same old warmongering corporatist, neo-cons who have eroded the poor and middle class throughout the Obama era.” 

On the other side of this email dialectic, was a guy in his early 70s who cut his Bolshevik teeth as a Vietnam War resistor, Black Panthers’ supporter, and an American Indian Movement activist, not to mention extensive involvement in various underground guerilla action groups that aren’t listed here, just in case the statute of limitations has not run out. 

Without challenging a word in the anti-Biden elocution, this aging radical emphasized the enormous value of removing Trump from the White House, all in a strategic hopefulness that would have pleased Aquinas.  “My approach,” he wrote, “ is to fuel my own optimism for the sake of my own health and happiness . . . I give Harris and Biden blanket forgiveness for all their past evils (because) I feel more optimistic and peaceful that way.”  He hopes for good governance from the new administration, but will be ready to “write letters and sign petitions” if they go astray.

Two people with shared political beliefs, principles and values, yet one is filled with despair and the other with hope.  The takeaway from this anecdotal exchange is that the difference between these two extremes is a choice we, alone, control.  We can give up hope and cast the entirety of our focus on the darkness of our despair.  We can also choose to turn away from that darkness, and forge our way into a new day with the light that hope brings. 

Playwright Tony Kushner takes this hope/despair dichotomy to a whole different level.  His Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Angels in America, focused on an era as bleak as the one we are now in, the AIDS crisis during the Reagan Administration.  The play is filled with the ravages of horrifically painful deaths, rampant homophobia, and the utter lack of empathy and action from political leaders.  Yet, the piece ends with an uplifting, hopeful speech.  Asked about that closing scene, Kushner insisted that hope is more than a mere choice.  “It is an ethical obligation to look for hope;” he said, “it is an ethical obligation not to despair.”

Sometimes the facts overwhelmingly support despair.  Think of the enslavement, the lynching, the brutal persecution of Black people. Think of the total subjugation of women in every aspect of their lives, denied the right to vote, to own property, to make decisions.  Think of the horrors faced by LGBTQ people, jailed for loving the wrong person, murdered for being different.  They all had every right to choose despair. It was a deeply rational choice.  Yet the leaders of those movements opted for hope, even while the destination seemed unimaginable. To be sure, those struggles continue, but the enormity of their progress was driven by hope.  

So, yes: there is hope as we cross into a new year. There is hope, not because of a change of calendars or circumstances. There is hope because we can choose it, because it brings us far more peace and health than despair. There is hope because we have an ethical obligation to do what we can to make this a better world. 

This holiday season seems an especially apt time to choose hope.  Our various faiths and traditions all involve symbols of light bringing us hope out of the darkness of despair. The winter solstice celebrates the return of the light and hope of the sun following the longest night of darkness.  Christians decorate Christmas with all manner of lights, signifying that bright and hopeful star that announced the birth of Jesus. Hanukkah is an eight-day “festival of lights” commemorating the power of hope over the forces of darkness. Kwanzaa is celebrated over seven days, with families lighting one of seven candles on the Kinara (candleholder) every night. Each candle represents a basic principle reflective of African culture and the hope it brings to every family. 

So ignore your apocalyptic social media feed for a few days, light a candle, lean back and let hope triumph over despair. As Leonard Cohen taught us, the darkness isn’t forever: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”