You pays your money and you
takes your pick.
Thursday’s New York Times: ‘Trump Vows “Warlike
Posture” if Democrats Investigate Him.’
Likewise The Guardian: ‘Trump issues threat of warlike response after Democrat
gains.’
The Financial Times, on the other hand: ‘Trump urges bipartisan
approach as Democrats take control of the House.’
So which was true, and which
was Fake News? Both, of course, were true, because Trump said both. And it’s
another reason why we should surely now know better than to take seriously
anything he says.
Much better to concentrate on
what he actually does rather than on his Rant of the Day. And by far the most
important thing he did on Wednesday was fire his attorney-general, Jeff
Sessions, who has enraged him for months by failing to halt the Mueller inquiry
into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia in the period leading up to the
2016 presidential election.
Was the decision to get rid of
Sessions designed to shut down, or at the very least hobble, the inquiry? What
do you think?
What’s more, within hours of
Trump’s chaotic, nasty press conference, with the president at his snarling
worst, the White House suspended the credentials of an admittedly grandstanding
CNN correspondent whom the president had called ‘a rude, terrible person’ for daring to
challenge him. It was yet another petty response from a man who will never be
able to get his head round the idea that the job of journalists is to do just a
bit more than sing his praises all day. The White House also distributed what
seems to have been a doctored video to bolster its allegation that the correspondent,
Jim Acosta, ‘touched’ a female White House staffer as she tried to wrestle his
mic away from him.
What I saw as I watched the
Trump press conference was a President who is sh*t scared. Scared of what a
Democrat-controlled House of Representatives could start prying into (Tax
returns? Conflicts of interest as visiting foreign dignitaries ‘choose’ to buy
accommodation at Trump properties?), scared of subpoenas that House committees
can now issue, and scared, above all, of what the Mueller investigation might
come up with.
Trump claimed – wrongly, of
course -- on Wednesday that the Mueller investigation ‘got nothing, zero.’
Nothing, that is, except for his former personal lawyer and consigliere Michael Cohen pleading
guilty to campaign finance violations and other charges; his former campaign
chairman Paul Manafort being convicted of filing false tax returns, failing to
disclose offshore bank accounts and bank fraud; his former deputy campaign
chairman Rick Gates pleading guilty to lying to investigators; his former
national security adviser Michael Flynn pleading guilty to lying to the FBI
about his Russia contacts; and twelve Russian intelligence officers being
indicted by a federal grand jury, accused of hacking into Democratic Party
computer networks. (I’ve probably left a few out, but I think you’ll have got
the point.)
And here’s where the
Democrats will have to get canny. They could, if they so wish, go after Trump
on a dozen different fronts, tie him up in Congressional and judicial knots for
the next two years and make his life an absolute misery.
But if they do, how will he
react? Badly, for sure. He will call them ‘enemies of the people’, ‘traitors’,
and much worse. He will blame them for every mass shooting (‘soft on crime’),
for every economic hiccup (‘high tax socialists’) and every act of terrorism
(‘soft on illegal migrants’).
He will challenge every
attempt to rein in his most dangerously autocratic impulses, and if his
challenges end up in the Supreme Court, he may very well win. (Remember how
hard he fought for the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh? Funny, that …)
And when he seeks re-election
in 2020, he will run, as he did in 2016, as the Champion of the Little People,
against the elitist liberals who have hated him – and his supporters – from day
one. And you know what? He could win again.
Far better, surely, for the
Democrats to focus on the things that really could make a difference to voters’
lives: health care, which was a major issue in this week’s elections; opioid drug
addiction; rebuilding roads, bridges and airports; and gun crime.
(More than half of American
voters think gun controls should be tighter, and nearly half think there would
be fewer mass shootings if gun laws were tougher. The most recent tragedy was
on Wednesday, just a day after the mid-terms, in Thousand Oaks, California,
when a former US marine shot dead twelve people in a bar.)
Rather than start trying to
impeach him – which, unless Mueller comes up with something truly
earth-shattering, would be bound to fail in the Senate – it would make more
sense to show voters that Democrats are better for them, their families and
their country. Defeat Trump in two years’ time, and then, if there is evidence
that he may have committed crimes, prosecute him as a private citizen.
Final point: when George W
Bush and Barack Obama each suffered major reverses in mid-term elections in
2006 and 2010, they openly acknowledged that voters had administered what Bush
called ‘a thumping’ and Obama called ‘a shellacking’.
So
when Trump was asked what lesson he took from his losses on Tuesday, how did he
respond? ‘I’ll
be honest: I think it was a great victory … I think people like me.’
Spot on
ReplyDeleteThe Democrats mustn't impeach unless the Senate are certain to convict. This requires a 2/3 majority. This is very unlikely to happen, unless the accusations are so convincingly serious that at least 20 of the Republican Senators side with the accusers. An unsuccessful impeachment will work in Trump's favour
Far better, as you say, is for the Democrats to focus on 2020 - heads down, no mistakes, find a good leader (Pelosi ?) be seen to look after real people in the heartlands, undermine Trump, and try to gain enough Senators in 2020 (class 2 = 12 Dem, 21 Rep for re-election)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classes_of_United_States_Senators#List_of_current_Senators_by_class
JW
The biggest problem I see with Trump is that he has a fairly good following among some areas of the population and he'll scream that he is behind all the good news and that all the bad news is either fake or the fault of the Democrats. And his followers will believe him. I certainly don't wish the western world to have another financial crash, but that's probably the best way of getting rid of him.
ReplyDelete"Better to concentrate on what he actually does rather than his Rant of the Day" might contribute to an informed, constructive, critically thoughtful public dialogue. Imagine how such an approach may have impacted previous administrations. And while this approach strikes me as one sound improvement over what we have, is it an approach in the interest of the media or its sponsors?
ReplyDeleteBBC US columnist Anthony Zurcher informed us post election that one thing we learned was that genuinely progressive Democratic candidates lost to Republicans in conservative states; that they performed substantially better than their Third Way/ triangulated/ Rockefeller-Republican-in-drag- Democrats from previous elections wasn't mentioned. Maybe that exceeded the bounds of All the News that Fits.
Anyway,yes,Trump does appear scared witless, Nixonally so. But if only his wits were more apparent when they were with him, could we be certain.