“Until more Democrats get off their keisters to protect America, I have a sample statement for them.”
At some point during the Trump presidency, we’re going to have to stop acting like those calling for impeachment are “fringe.” Elizabeth Warren, though not the first high-profile Democrat to explicitly say so, recently came out swinging, saying:
“To ignore a president’s repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation into his own disloyal behavior would inflict great and lasting damage on this country, and it would suggest that both the current and future Presidents would be free to abuse their power in similar ways.”
The worst part about the impeachment conversation is that it took this long. Between his own cabinet talking about using the 25 Amendment to remove him from office, rumblings about a 2020 Republican primary, and the president’s incalculably long list of crimes not seen since Nixon, Democrats are still playing it safe.
Warren breaking the dam has had some impact, and other presidential hopefuls are likely to follow suit, as in the case of Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. But until enough of them get off their keisters and do something to protect the American people, I have a sample statement for them.
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“It’s not that a $100 billion arms deal doesn’t represent a tangible benefit to the country — it’s about whether or not we defend our highest values, even when it’s difficult.”
“Do you think that Donald Trump has friends? Like, friends friends?” I sat down with a good friend to unpack this. We counted:
But no friends. Maybe, I suggest, a man with the ego to say, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do” might be hard to be around, because he doesn’t care about anything but himself.
My friend gives me a crucial distinction. “No, Tim,” he says. “He doesn’t care about anything more than himself.”
***
When looking at the state of the world, it’s easy to think that no one cares. I’ve thought it, too, but it’s not exactly how things work. While watching the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, what became clear to me wasn’t so much what the GOP senators (and Joe Manchin) who eventually voted yes for Kavanaugh valued, but what they valued more.
They came to the hearing prepared for the criticism that they don’t listen to survivors of sexual assault, that they don’t hear the concerns of women, and that they don’t really care. So instead, they pivoted.
No one — not one single senator — directly refuted Ford’s story. Not a single one said explicitly that they didn’t believe her. Even Lindsay Graham (of angry, tortured, Kate McKinnon fame) said that he believed Ford, he just thinks she’s got a couple facts mixed up.
This accomplished two things—one of them, I believe, on purpose. The first was that it gave the right a little room to breathe (because many female voters on the right felt wary of the Kavanaugh situation as well.) It gave Senators like Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse enough cover to say, “Welp, she came with a claim, we looked into it, and it didn’t check out.”
The second thing that it inadvertently did was reveal a level of raw brutality to the politics at play. Remember, no one said they didn’t believe her. The question at hand, rather than being “Do these GOP senators care about sexual assault?” was actually, “Do they care about it more than they care about Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed?”
The answer, we saw, was no.
The Wages of Belief
Comedian Tim Minchin tells a humorous story about man who was going to rent him a piano. In his acts, Minchin vigorously defends atheism and mocks religion. The piano owner, being a religious man, didn’t want to rent it to him to do that kind of act.
“In his words, ‘not for a million dollars ha ha.’ … I did want to offer him a million bucks … So I respected him, but I did want to test his resolve by actually saying, “Oh, ok, a million dollars? Alright,” and see if he still said ‘ha ha ha’ or whether he said, “Oh, alright, my love in Christ doesn’t matter so much.”
The only way to know the true merit of any belief is to have it tested. And your decision ultimately will not mean that you care about one thing and don’t care about the other, but that you care about one thing more than you care about the other.
The Scales of Injustice
Now we have the issue of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who there is sufficient evidence was murdered by Saudi Arabia at their consulate in Istanbul.
“You’ve got one journalist — who knows? Was it an interrogation? Was he assassinated? Were there rogue elements? Who did it? … You’ve got $100 billion worth of arms sales … we cannot alienate our biggest player in the Middle East.” — Pat Robertson, Christian Pastor
The place we’re at in the world right now is a perilous journey through the extreme. And the true problem of a world full of monsters is that we expect them to be monsters all the time. Like I did, we want to believe that these monstrous men are lonely, friendless pariahs, cut off from society. And even the true emotion that we see isn’t true — they’re just faking.
We want to look at Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump and not see the possibly genuine connections they have with other people. We don’t want to acknowledge that the laughs and smiles are real, because we’re convinced that a monster has to be a monster all the time.
But they don’t. They look like other things. They look like a man who lectures Democrats and the media on civility a day after someone sent actual bombs to Democrats and the media, and then perhaps shares genuine affection with his family.
The question is what we value more. It’s not that a $100 billion arms deal doesn’t represent a tangible benefit to the country — it’s about whether or not we defend our highest values, even when it’s difficult. Do we care about human life more than money?
In an article entitled, “The Weightier Matters of the Law,” I argue this exact thing:
The phrase “the weightier matters of the law” implies that Jesus believes there areweightier matters of the law, as in, “things that are more important than other things.”
One can only wonder how thousands of desperate families fleeing civil war (incalculable risk to others) would fare against such excuses as, “national security” (almost infinitesimal risk to ourselves) on Jesus’ scales. Which might qualify as a “weightier matter” to someone who began their life as a refugee? (Matthew 2)
One criticism of Bernie Sanders and the many progressives and Democrats that followed him was that they have big ideas, but can’t pay for their proposals. But the Republican method of “Bring us a perfect, fully fleshed-out, framework for every aspect of this proposed change and guarantee its future success before we even think about pretending to think about changing it” isn’t working, either.
How transformative of a world we could have if, instead of Republicans pretending we don’t have the money, and Democrats pretending having the money doesn’t matter, we said, very plainly and clearly,
“Yes, this measure will raise taxes, it will cost more, and it might be difficult to fit in the budget, but dammit, we’re going to try, because the value of our children’s education is higher than the value of money.”
OR
“The value of our children’s lives is more important than the difficulties of gun legislation.”
OR
“We respect the suffering of other people, therefore we must work together on a humane path to immigration. We care more about our neighbor’s safety than we fear them.”
OR
“The value of human life is more important to us than $100 billion dollars.”
We’re not arguing about whether we value Jamal Khashoggi’s life, or believe Ford’s assault, or care about children’s safety in school — we’re arguing about exactly how much those things are worth.
If someone didn’t care about Khashoggi’s life, that would be less barbaric. The far more brutal thing is to actually hold human life as a value, but determine that it must give way to money if the number is high enough.
***
I don’t know if Donald Trump has people he genuinely cares about. But it doesn’t actually matter. It doesn’t matter if Melania or Ivanka “secretly” feels at odds with his actions, as some suggest. It doesn’t matter if the smiles or laughs are real and the love is true. Because despite what we feel, we all choose who we would like to be.
Trump and all the Republicans that enable him, have already shown us what they value more. And it’s not bodily autonomy. It’s not safety. It’s not human life.
All of them, above all else — Trump included — value him.
***
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In the face of the mind-numbing idiocy of the Trump presidency, it’s easy to zero in on the president’s stupidity. Here’s why we shouldn’t.
In 1984, a 37-year-old Donald Trump wanted to evict tenants of 100 Central Park South, a 15-story apartment house in New York City. The courts didn’t approve of his methods, throwing out cases left and right they denounced as specious. So young Donald had an idea.
“Also, he proposed putting some of the city’s homeless people into the dozen or so apartments he has already emptied in the building,” details a New York Times report at the time. “The city smelled a scheme to use the derelicts to scare out the rest of the tenants, so it correctly declined the offer.”
Plainly put, the president is evil. Anyone who asks themselves what the most disgusting thing they can think of is, answers “homeless people,” and subsequently uses them to “scare off” tenants is not a good person. Given that the president is now 72 years old, he has been “not a good person” for a very long time. However, a different argument has been creeping up.
It’s in Michael Wolff’s exposé that claims White House staffers and advisors to the president speak daily about the 25th Amendment to the Constitution (the one that says his cabinet can remove him from office.) It’s in assertions (like from an anonymous New York Times op-ed) that he’s unfit to lead. It’s in celebration of gaffes like him drinking water strangely, rambling incoherent nonsense mid-sentence at rallies, or staring directly into the sun during a solar eclipse. This argument is in memorable moments like him calling himself a “very stable genius,” or saying that he consults himself on foreign policy because he has “a very good brain, and [has] said a lot of things.”
The argument is that President Trump is stupid.
***
Donald Trump stares at a solar eclipse without ocular protection. (Aug. 2017)
On its face, it seems hard to argue with. However, it’s an issue of style over substance.
President Trump, despite practicing and proudly embracing a style at odds with a large amount of Republicans (remember, many Republicans before and now say that they don’t care for his tweeting), is in lockstep with them on substance. Republicans are receptive to his views on race relations, patriotism, class, wealth, history, and more. They agree that NFL players are snobby millionaires who need to shut up and do as they’re told. They agree that the people of Puerto Rico just want “everything to be done for them.” They agree that “very fine people” were on both sides of the conflict in Charlottesville, in which one side was neo-Nazis who killed a woman.
In this conception of the world, the Civil Rights Movement was a failed enterprise, and we should return America to its rightful former state. In this view, feminism upending existing power structures was a bad thing. Minority groups have more rights than white people now, and the true crime of modern society is either political correctness or white genocide.
President Trump knows this. The story of the apartment building 37 years ago shows that he’s well adept at weaponizing the grievances of one group over another, either to propel himself further or because he legitimately agrees with neo-Nazis. There is no longer a meaningful distinction between the two. A man willing to traffic on other people’s pain is no man at all.
Saying that Donald Trump is stupid gives him a pass. Taking his actions from the tangible realm of “evil action” to the more ethereal one of “intelligence” is a disservice to his agency, and the Americans that suffer every day as a cause of it.
To be clear, he is both stunningly vile and deeply incurious. You can be both, but my contention is that he cultivates this air for a reason.How can anyone argue he could be complicit in collusion with Russia if he apparently lacks the attention span necessary for an intelligence briefing? How can anyone question provoking Kim Jong Un via Twitter if “he’s new at this,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan argues? Can’t we imagine a world in which Donald Trump can’t be truly culpable for his crimes because everyone instinctively believes that he’s too dumb to know what’s going on?
None of Trump’s actions are indicative of ignorance, anyway. They are, however, indicative of cruelty. Calling Colin Kaepernick a “son of a bitch” for kneeling during the national anthem, coddling neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, denying that 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico (a loss of human life equivalent in scale to 9/11), refusing to lower the White House flag to half-staff for a deceased senator, calling Stormy Daniels “horseface” on Twitter, mocking Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (an alleged sexual assault survivor of now Justice Brett Kavanaugh), and most recently, covering for Saudi Arabia after they were credibly accused of using a bonesaw to dismember dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi — these are not the actions of a simple, uneducated dummy, but of a deeply cruel man.
Trump mocks Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a rally. (Oct 2.)
In a recent Atlantic article entitled, “The Cruelty Is The Point,” staff writer Adam Serwer delivers his diagnosis on the cruelty of Trump and his base:
“It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
We’ve already seen this argument from members of the United States Congress, to ensure that the president feels less than the full weight of the choices he makes. We don’t need to be repeating them. Just get used to it: Trump is a septuagenarian who understands what he does. And on the rare off chance that he doesn’t, ignorance of the law is not a defense from it that anyone else can use, so why should he be able to?
Donald Trump ran on a campaign of taking full advantage of his ignorance to protect himself, and Republicans in Congress are willing to do the same for him. I’m not. He may be unintelligent, but he knows exactly what he’s doing, and prizing the latter over the former equips us to hold him to account for it.
In the face of the mind-numbing, cynical, insidious, weaponized, should-be-illegal idiocy of the Trump presidency, it’s easy to zero in on the president’s stupidity. However, I can live with a dumb president. But perhaps more importantly, he is not a good person, and he never has been.
Now That We're Here 