When it gives way, it could cause a political tsunami with the power to rearrange the two party system, an arrangement the Founders never intended in the first place. The repeated warnings in the Federalist Papers about “factions” included how they would arise by economic inequality or by geographical loyalties or even by what we have come to call “personality cults” — a phrase unknown to Madison or Hamilton but a reality in the times of monarchy from which the Constitution was intended to launch the experimental republic.
An experiment of 243 years is an eye blink easy to miss on the grand canvas of history Donald John Trump has never studied. Trump seldom stews over how to square Chairman Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” with Talleyrand’s famous advice to Napoleon that
You can do anything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them.
It takes very little encouragement for Mr. Trump to go off on a rant about his status as commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world. That’s a conclusion that requires a comparison between war elephants and tactical nukes with an adjustment for the respective times. This is a comparison Mr. Trump is not equipped to make.
Trump’s ignorance of history is a much lesser issue than Trump’s disdain for history. The president of the United States is in a position to order up a briefing book connecting any issue to its historical context. In our times, most candidates for POTUS have some post-graduate education. Mr. Trump has no graduate record and what he’s told us about his undergraduate record is a transparent lie. While he has his school records locked down, the point of the Dean’s List and conferring a degree with honors is public celebration of academic excellence.
His name does not appear where it would have to appear if Trump were truthful about his school record.
A POTUS who chooses direct negotiations with North Korea needs, at minimum, an overview of events on the Korean Peninsula from Kim Il Sung to the present.
To understand Vladimir Putin, it would be good to remember George Kennan’s idea of “containment” and how it played out in academia and in U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The POTUS could order a white paper and have it within a week, assuming there is nothing on the shelf to be dusted off and presented tout suite.
Korea and Russia and countless other decision points are outward looking uses of history, but at this time President Donald John Trump faces an inward looking issue about the nature of the experiment that some of us believe is how to govern a republic by democratic means — power from the bottom rather than from the top.
Mr. Trump exhibits no concern for his historical legacy.
It’s interesting to compare our executive problem child to a similar person in the U.K. with weird hair and a weird relationship with the truth. England (note to Trump: England is not the U.K.) had no written constitution, so the constitutional monarchy is a creature of customs and norms that emerged organically as power shifted from the monarchy to the parliament.
The two primary differences in the U.K. are parliamentary democracy as a means to remove a government and the lack of a written constitution. Both the U.K. and the U.S. are governed by bulls who carry around their own china shops and wreak havoc on customs and norms and the comity among the players that enables the kind of governing that we come to regard as “normal.” That normalcy contrasts with kleptocracies and serial coups d’état to demonstrate our superiority.
Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are serial philanderers who have not bothered to hide their sexual adventures and on occasion brag about them. I am not informed if Prime Minister Johnson has discussed the size of his johnson on television, but if he has I’m pretty sure President Trump was first in 2016, when he trumpeted his endowment in a reply to Sen. Marco Rubio’s jibe about his “small hands.”
Both politicians have been blessed with an electorate that does not much care who is sharing their candidate’s bed. Trump went to the trouble of paying off two ladies to save their stories until after the election, but it’s pretty clear his caution was excessive. The story that did come out was both on tape and much worse. The ladies paid to keep quiet were consenting adults, while the tape has the candidate bragging about how he gets away with grabbing women he does not know by the crotch — a textbook sexual assault that did not even put off the evangelical Christians who made up part of his electoral base.
Johnson has now stepped over the line that was not violated by his very public affair with a young ex-model, Jennifer Arcuri, while living with a different lady. The accusations that are starting to stick are not about sex. The claim is that, when he was Mayor of London, Johnson engineered a government grant worth over 100,000 pounds for Ms. Arcuri’s start up business and arranged for her to join him on several publicly funded trade missions. The money Johnson spent was supposed to encourage British small businesses; Arcuri is American.
The sum involved would be north of $123,000 at the current exchange rate, but both the pound and the dollar have taken some wild rides influenced by antics of Johnson and Trump as heads of government. Trump, in particular, appeared to be amused when he learned he could move the major market indices with tweets. It took a bit more effort to move the world’s reserve currency, including public insult to the Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank Trump appointed.
All of this tabloid material makes the hard news strike even harder. The British Supreme Court has held that Boris Johnson’s attempt to suspend Parliament until after the drop dead date for Brexit was unlawful. Therefore, Parliament is still in session and may reconvene and try to stop the “hard Brexit,” withdrawing without a negotiated settlement of the U.K.’s obligations.
Days later, the most powerful woman in the U.S., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a solemn statement for the television cameras announcing that the de facto impeachment inquiry has been formalized in light of Trump’s admission that he tried to get actions from a foreign head of government to affect the 2020 U.S. elections. The various committees currently investigating Trump are to report to the Judiciary Committee, which will report out articles of impeachment for a floor vote — or not. When Trump claims to have taken action that borders on treason, he might have been off on one of his periodic brags.
This is hard to understand. Trump has spent almost three years denying that he colluded with Russia to affect the 2016 elections. But before the ink is dry on the Mueller Report, he announces that he has been colluding with Ukraine to affect the 2020 elections. Can this be real?
Pelosi has been firm in opposing having a vote on articles of impeachment going into an election year. Trump’s public admissions shook loose enough votes to force Pelosi’s hand. The tension in her voice and the look on her face told the story.
It is not clear to me that Trump knew he was playing fast and loose with impeachment or that he had done anything that could not be repaired with a phone call to “Nancy.”
The senate has been Trump’s political firewall. If one article of impeachment alleged shooting someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, the senate would never vote to convict, claimed the wags who won’t let Trump forget his remarks about the political loyalty of his base. It might have gotten his attention when the senate passed a unanimous demand that the appropriate congressional committees get a whistleblower’s statement about the Ukraine matter. The White House had been stonewalling that request along with all other document requests.
Today, September 25, the White House released a transcript of the conversation between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The Trumpian lies in the transcript could be chalked up to ignorance.
He claims the U.S. has been Ukraine’s biggest supporter. That’s not so — Europe has given more.
He claims Ukraine has done nothing for us. Perhaps Trump does not consider giving up nuclear weapons at U.S. urging “for us.” Our public policy has been to oppose nuclear proliferation since WWII, but Trump has spoken as if that policy did not exist.
In the transcript released by the White House, Trump ties further arms sales to “doing us a favor.” That favor is an investigation of the Bidens. This jibes with what Rudy Giuliani has said about his mission to Ukraine.
I was working in a newsroom as Watergate unraveled and I have two recollections that might be pertinent. One is that every time the White House released material, they left out the worst stuff. The other is that when the dam broke, we went from dry to neck deep overnight.
Mr. Trump’s dam is leaking in several places.
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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