Will Trump’s Presidency Ever End?
America
is in terrible danger.
By Frank Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 25, 2020
Toward the beginning of a wise and
beautifully stated essay about American partisanship and the response to
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the lawyer and political commentator David
French wrote, “I have never
in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the
American political class.”
I don’t think the shudder was confined
to the political class. And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just
as deep.
That was when Trump
supporters descended on a polling location in Fairfax, Va., and sought to
disrupt early voting there by forming a line that voters had to circumvent and
chanting, “Four more years!”
This was no rogue group. This was no random occurrence. This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.
Republicans are planning to have tens
of thousands of volunteers fan out to voting places in key states, ostensibly
to guard against fraud but effectively to create a climate of menace. Trump has
not just blessed but encouraged this. On Fox News last month, he bragged to
Sean Hannity about all the “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor
the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be
poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and
robbing they do.”
Color me alarmist, but that sounds like
an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it
by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person,
which is of course blatantly against the law.
Is a fair fight still imaginable in
America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing
segment of the population, no. That’s the toxic wellspring of the dread that
French mentioned. That’s the moral of the madness in Virginia.
Right on cue, we commenced a fight over
Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with
Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy potentially answered by court
packing, among other acts of vengeance, if Democrats win the presidency and the
Senate.
That’s a big if, because we’re also
hurtling toward an Election Day that may decide exactly nothing — and I don’t
mean that night. I mean for months. I mean forever.
Talk about a shudder:
On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power
in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he
wouldn’t. He prattled anew about mail-in ballots and voter fraud and, perhaps
alluding to all of the election-related lawsuits that his minions have filed,
said: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”
We’re in terrible danger. Make no
mistake. This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being
ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded,
because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those
trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground.
The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.
The week since Ginsburg’s death has
been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial
clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party, would realize
that to endorse McConnell’s abandonment of his own supposed principle
about election-year Supreme Court appointments would be a straw too many, a
stressor too much and a guarantee of endless, boundless recrimination and
retribution. At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”
Hah. Only two
Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell,
and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged
wording. All the others fell into line.
I don’t blame it on a lack of courage.
I attribute it to something worse. Most politicians — and maybe most Americans
— now look across the political divide and see a band of crooks who will pick
your pocket if you’re meek and dumb enough not to pick theirs first. The person
who leaves his or her wallet out in the open, as a gesture of good will, can’t
complain when he or she winds up broke.
“It’s the Wild West,”
said a Republican strategist who is no fan of Trump’s but was using that
metaphor to defend McConnell to me. I
had reached out to the strategist to vent my disgust.
“It’s all about situational power
dynamics,” he continued. “If the situation were reversed, the Dems would be
doing the same thing.” He argued that Chuck Schumer and McConnell “play the
same game. McConnell just plays it a little better.”
So the lesson for Democrats should be
to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon
as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give
Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto
Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate.
Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list.
I wouldn’t begrudge the Democrats any
of it. The way I’m feeling right now, I’d cheer them on. But Republicans reach
back to Harry Reid’s actions when he was the Democratic majority leader of the
Senate to justify their wickedness now. Democrats will cite that wickedness to
justify the shattering of precedents in the future. Ugliness begets ugliness
until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?
And who the hell are
we anymore? The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought
pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths
related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far,
on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?
On Wednesday The Atlantic rushed its
November cover story onto
the web with an explanatory, almost apocalyptic note by its editor in chief,
Jeffrey Goldberg, that some journalism is too important to wait. The article is
about the very real chance — essentially confirmed hours later by Trump’s
“continuation” comment — that he might contest the election in a manner that
keeps him in power regardless of what Americans really want.
“The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless
incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a
resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing
down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,” the article’s author, Barton
Gellman, a Pulitzer winner, wrote. “The mechanisms of decision are at
meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure
are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would
leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against
that calamity.”
Just a few days before those words
screeched across the internet, The New Yorker published a
similar, equally chilling opus by one of its star writers, Jeffrey Toobin, who
explained how this election might well degenerate into violence, as Democratic
poll watchers clash with Republican poll watchers, and into chaos, as
accusations of foul play delay the certification of state vote counts.
Several hours after Gellman’s article appeared, Slate published one by Richard Hasen, a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”
Sometimes an overlap
of alarms like that reflects groupthink. Sometimes it signals hysteria. This
isn’t either of those times.
“The republic is in greater
self-generated danger than at any time since the 1870s,” Richard Primus, a
professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me, saying that
Trump values nothing more than his own power and will do anything that he can
get away with.
I spoke with Primus, fittingly enough,
as he drove home to Michigan from Washington, where he was paying tribute to
Ginsburg, for whom he was a clerk two decades ago.
“If you had told Barack Obama or George
W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be
permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic —
I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the
survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”
What gave Primus that idea? Was it when
federal officers used tear gas on protesters to clear a path for a presidential
photo op? Was it when Trump floated the idea of postponing the election, just
one of his many efforts to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own system
of government?
Or was it when he had his name lit up in fireworks above the White House as the climax of his party’s convention? Was it on Monday, when his attorney general, Bill Barr, threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that the president considers “anarchist”? That gem fit snugly with Trump’s talk of blue America as a blight on red America, his claim that the pandemic would be peachy if he could just lop off that rotten fruit.
The deadly
confrontations recently in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., following months
of mass protests against racial injustice, speak to how profoundly estranged
from their government a significant percentage of Americans feel. These
Americans have lost or are losing faith that the system can treat them fairly.
“Tribal,” “identity politics,” “fake
news” and “hoax” are now mainstays of our vocabulary, indicative of a world
where facts and truth are suddenly relative. Yours may contradict mine, eroding
any common ground and preventing any consensus. Yes, there were conspiracy theories
and there was viciously ugly feuding before — there were duels! — but there
were no Facebook or Twitter to accelerate the sorting of people into
ideological cliques and to pour accelerant on the fires of their suspicion and
resentment.
Those fires are burning hot, with dire
implications for what happens after Nov. 3. Sizable camps of people in both
parties don’t see any way that the other could win honestly and won’t regard
the ensuing government as legitimate. Trump has essentially commanded his followers
to take that view.
And he’s foreshadowing legal
shenanigans by his team that would leave many Democratic voters feeling robbed.
Try this on for size: Litigation to determine the next president winds up with
the Supreme Court, where three Trump-appointed justices are part of a majority
decision in his favor. It’s possible.
“Things that seemed off-the-wall are
now on-the-wall,” Hasen told me. Last February he released a book, “Election
Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy,” the
title of which now reads, if anything, as understated.
What’s the far side of a meltdown?
America the puddle? While we await the answer, we get a nasty showdown over
that third Trump justice. Trump will nominate someone likely to horrify
Democrats and start another culture war: anything to distract voters from his
damnable failure to address the pandemic.
Rush Limbaugh — you know, the statesman
whom Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year —
has urged McConnell not even to bother with a confirmation hearing for the
nominee in the Judiciary Committee and to go straight to a floor vote. Due
diligence and vetting are so 2018.
Some Democrats have suggested boycotting the hearing in protest and in recognition of the (usually) predetermined outcomes of these grandstanding sessions. Some floated the impeachment of Barr (who deserves it) to gum up the timetable.
You know who has most
noticeably and commendably tried to turn down the temperature? Biden. That’s of
course its own political calculation, but it’s consistent with his comportment
during his entire presidential campaign, one that has steered clear of
extremism, exalted comity and recognized that a country can’t wash itself clean
with more muck.
He’s our best bid for salvation, which
goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our
peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of
it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden
takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish
Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.
There is another school of
thought: Maybe we need some sort of creative destruction to get to a place of
healing and progress. Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back
up.
But what if there’s
bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.
