22. What About Impeachment?

My last posting maintained that it would be very wrong to assassinate President Trump, and I’d like to take that train of thought a step further here.  Only a seriously delusional person would make a real effort to waste the Don, but there’s a tendency on the left to want to make the same mistake in a less gory fashion.  Trump’s detractors don’t by and large want to kill him, but many do want to impeach him and remove him from power that way.  That’s wrong, too; let me explain why.

I’ll boil it down:  Trump isn’t the problem.  He’s a symptom.  He’s an example of the sort of thing that’s going to keep happening for as long as America is in the current funk.  Removing him personally from the scene won’t make any real difference.  He’s a sideshow, a distraction from what should be our true concern.

I will, however, admit this – Trump may not be the problem, but he certainly is a problem.  That is, he has certain important flaws that make him significantly worse than your generic bad President.  Everyone probably will have their own list of those.  Mine isn’t too long – just two items.  But they aren’t trivial.

First, he’s a flaming incompetent.  He hasn’t the foggiest notion of what it takes to be a responsible national leader, and he isn’t interested in learning.  At any moment, he could bring the whole world crashing down out of sheer ignorance and recklessness.  This danger transcends ideology.  It alarms Mitch McConnell as much as it does the rest of us, maybe even more – when Trump stumbles, the GOP takes a fall.

Second, he’s a fraud.  He claims to be a nationalist, which really bugs me, since I regard myself as one.  In fact, Trump is a charter member of the global financial elite he railed against during the campaign.  His stance as President is basically the standard Republican amalgam of (1) “trickle-down” economics, (2) Christian religiosity, and (3) white racial ressentiment – none of this having anything to do with genuine nationalism, which entails treating the whole American people as a community vis-à-vis the rest of the world.  I’ve made this point previously.

So, I’d shed no tears for the Don if, through some legal means, he was obliged to exit the White House at an early date.  Yet neither would I feel that a decisive battle had been won.  The reason should be obvious from what I just said.  Trump has a uniquely terrible Presidential style, to be sure.  But his administration’s policies would continue under any Republican Chief Executive.

Economics is the key consideration.

Capitalism has many virtues, but it’ll naturally tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, unless the government redistributes wealth through the appropriate taxing and spending programs.  In 1980, before Ronald Reagan was elected President, the income tax rate for the highest bracket was 70%, and the wealthiest one percent of Americans owned about 20% of the property.  The Gipper cut taxes on the rich in half and then some, and although it’s varied in the years since, it’s never been higher than it is right now – 39.6%.  And the wealthiest one percent now owns more than a third of the country.  In other words, far from equalizing things, the “trickle-down” Republican approach has evidently fostered the tendency towards oligarchy that’s the most serious problem facing our society today.

Trump’s tax plan is pure Reaganomics, and consequently a big step in the wrong direction.  Yet the GOP has been going that way for decades.

The same is true in other policy areas.  Any Republican President will gesture to the Christian right by nominating federal judges poised to chip away at abortion rights.  These same judges will be sure to strike down, on alleged “free speech” grounds, any efforts to curb the oligarchy’s ability to buy elections.  More or less covert racial appeals have been a staple of Republican politics since the time of Nixon’s Southern strategy.  George H. W. Bush might be one of the most gentlemanly figures in American politics, but he ran those Willie Horton ads.  Republican state legislatures around the country are depriving Blacks of their voting rights based on spurious claims of fraud.  And the GOP has been in climate change denial for many years.

Trump didn’t invent any of that.  In fact, insofar as he’s ever deviated from GOP orthodoxy, he’s been better – in my opinion, anyway.  Thus, as a candidate, he came out against, and basically sank, the TPP – the same position Bernie Sanders took.  The rise of American oligarchy and globalization are closely connected phenomena, and economic nationalism would indeed be a way to combat both.  Unfortunately, I’d expect Trump’s plutocratic interests will override anything beyond a rhetorical nationalism on his part, but any other Republican would likely be worse.

If you’re worried about Russia, remember that Paul Manafort was a Republican operative (and on a Putin ally’s payroll) before he ever met the Don.

I’ve made my point.  Trump may be blundersome and offensive, but he isn’t the problem.  If he were out of the picture, he’d be replaced by someone else, backed by the same constellation of interests, dedicated to promoting the same policies – and probably doing it more smoothly and effectively.

Things could be worse, believe it or not.

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