During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.
At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.
I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.
“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
crake on September 9th, 2019 at 11:55 UTC »
Trump is a massive problem, but the real problem in the US is that there is no Congress.
There is a functioning House of Representatives, but the powers of Congress can only be exercised if there is both a functioning House and a functioning Senate.
The US Senate is completely broken, and for all intents and purposes does not even exist anymore as any type of functioning body. No legislation can be written there, no bills can pass through there, no nominees for high office can be vetted or denied appointment because the Senate now serves as an institution that selects a Majority Leader to act as a shadow president, nothing more. The Senate shadow president has an absolute veto over any and all legislation, much more powerful than the actual President’s veto because it cannot be overridden.
The parties completely control the Senate, and the individual Senators are mere proxies for their party, which is why they are not swayed by any rational argument and are content to be a mere rubber stamp (if their party is president) or an impenetrable roadblock (if the other party is president). Foreign governments have enormous influence over the GOP, yet the GOPs power in the Senate stems from a structural advantage that can never be overcome because it flows from a handful of empty rural states that have permanently Republican voting populations that will not ever change (or may take 50+ years to change). There is this a permanent “balance” in the Senate divided roughly equally between GOP and Democrats when counted by number of states, but is entirely unbalanced when looked at by population represented, because the two Democrats representing California alone represent more constituents than a dozen GOP Senators from the Midwest and mountain states. The Senate has become a House of Lords filled with party functionaries from empty burroughs, and it is almost impossible to constitutionally fix.
Without a Senate, the Congress is powerless. The House can only pass non-binding resolutions and pursue endless investigations, which is better than no action, but is not a check on a lawless president like Trump.
Trump is able to assume the powers of Congress, such as proclaiming the unilateral authority to impose duties and taxes on any foreign imports at any time of his choosing, for example, because there is no Congress to check him. Even as I write this, he is impounding funds appropriated by Congress for one purpose, and redirecting those funds to a border wall that Congress refused to authorize and pay for. This is extraordinary, and has never happened in US history. It is only possible because there is no functioning Senate.
The lack of a Congress is infinitely more troubling than one rogue President. Trump can do a lot of damage, but the lack of a Congress means that the people have effectively no voice in governing, save for a crapshoot vote for Presidential “dictator” every 4 years, presuming that a future president (or Trump) doesn’t simply eliminate elections altogether, an action that wouldn’t be contested by the current “Congress.” And even the legitimacy of presidential elections is suspect given the current situation where millions more vote for the losing candidate, but the structural advantages of rural voters as institutionalized by the electoral college mean that presidents are elected without winning the popular vote.
All of this is to say that the US democratic experiment is nearing its end. The Congress functioned for 200+ years because the Senate was an institution guided by apolitical norms present from the founding, and individual senators were statesmen rather than party functionaries. That system is dead now; the influence of big money is so strong now that the statesmen have died or retired, and the parties now completely control the Senate.
Eventually, people will wake up and be angry about it. That may happen when the economy crashes or when there is another foreign attack on US elections and no repercussions because the Congress cannot act. If the economy turns sour and the people are stuck with a president and Senate selected by Moscow, the entire government could come crashing down in revolution, the stakes are really that high.
*edited for typos
AnnabananaIL on September 9th, 2019 at 11:47 UTC »
What galls me is the way Republicans continue to look the other way despite his bullshit.
Yesterday I watched a Republican senator on a national news show think very carefully before answering a question about separating himself from Trump. In 2 seconds you could see him doing the math and refusing to incur the wrath of T-rump supporters on national television.
They have no courage or moral fiber; all they care about is remaining in power. The ends justify the means. So when do the means become so unpalatable they disavow him? To me it looks like never.
ubix on September 9th, 2019 at 11:11 UTC »
We need to start talking about this in context: Republicans’ poor judgment resulted in electing a mentally unstable, corrupt narcissist to the highest position in government.