Controversy swirls, have you noticed? It does, a lot, about the FBI, about immigration, about North Korea, about everything! The world goes round, and controversy goes around. Yeah, a whole lot of controversy these days.
It would be nice if we could step back and get some perspective, a balanced view, as it were, one that rejected all the noise and tumult we’re receiving from extremists on both sides.
It would be nice, but it would be inaccurate. Sure, Donald Trump, Jr. did not commit “treason” by taking a meeting with some Russian operatives who said they had some Kremlin dirt on Hillary Clinton. That is so not treason! And some of those FBI guys totally are Democrats! And we are, after all, all Americans, just like Trump said in his State of the Union address, during which he did not once spray spittle on anyone! I mean, for Trump, he was normal, way normal! And some of those Democrats acted like little kids, like Trump’s childishness is rubbing off on them, you know! That’s the part I don’t like!
I’m writing this off the top of my head because I’m too sour to engage in specifics, and I don’t want to chase down and laboriously refute a dozen postings around the web that illustrate all the various hues of the basic “let’s all just simmer down” meme that the Republican war on the FBI is provoking across too much of America. It’s true that government powers of surveillance are far too broad; it’s true that left-wing claims that Russian influence “stole” the election are nonsense and pathetic sour grapes; it’s true that the left-wing academic war on due process is atrocious, and the embrace of “righteous violence” is even worse; it’s true that in the Democratic primaries Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders each pushed the other to the left on their issues, so that the party on the whole has become far more doctrinaire than it was a couple of years ago; it’s true that Trump has done a lot of things that Jeb Bush would have done if he had been elected president. All of things are true.
But what is also true is that Donald Trump’s complete disdain for due process has swallowed up the entire Republican Party. The Republican Party is now the party of tribalism. The Republican Party is right now claiming the right to decide who the FBI cannot investigate. Soon they will be deciding who the FBI must investigate.
The few “conscience Republicans” are displaying their conscience not by resisting Trump but by resigning. Jeff Flake, John McCain, and Susan Collins could have voted, not in good conscience but rather in perfect conscience, against the Republican tax reform “package” on the grounds that it was put together in complete defiance of congressional procedure and particularly in defiance of Senate procedure. This would have been a significant blow to the Trump administration, perhaps the only way in which a significant blow could be delivered. They froze like deer in the headlights, cowards in their souls. They could talk, a little, in generalities. But to do, that was beyond them.
The same was true, both before and after Trump’s election, by the “great men (and women)” of the party—President Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, any of a dozen governors. They would wait for the right moment, or rather wait until the right moment had passed, and then surrender to what their cowardice had made inevitable.
I don’t know what Trump will bring. Perhaps an accidental disaster, one that somehow won’t do any damage but rid us of him—swooping him away like a benign tornado—will happen. But I wouldn’t count on it. It’s “comforting”—a little—to notice that America’s plight is not that different from other countries—the backlash against globalism is putting enormous strains on governments around the globe, except perhaps in Russia and China, which had already adopted authoritarian nationalism. Comforting, but not much. Trump is an entirely unique figure in American history, a president who is proudly and entirely corrupt. Every day he is in office, the country grows worse.
