— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) October 30, 2019
Actually, it's hard to take it seriously:
A dark assumption seems baked into Donald Trump’s effort to strong-arm foreign leaders into unearthing dirt on Joe Biden: that Trump’s reelection victory is in the nation’s interests, because he and the nation are one and the same.
More reasonably, he's a narcissist: so he and the entire world are one. It's sort of like the psychiatrist (was that in Douglas Adams somewhere?) who built an asylum by building a very small room, but he declared the world outside the room the asylum, the world inside the room to be the world, because in his assessment everyone was crazy (except him?). Trump seems to really think he's the only person in the world who matters? L'etat, c'est moi? No: Le monde, c'est moi. It seems that, to Trump, he and the world are coterminous. Or, if he is capable of some reason, he's afraid of losing the protection of the Presidency, afraid of what legal peril awaits him when the OLC decision no longer shields him from prosecution. Occam's Razor, if you will. Trump's "dark assumption" is not quite so grandiose or powerful as that of a comic-book villain bent on taking over the world.
When that is a president’s mind-set, schemes that might seem unsavory and possibly impeachable become necessary acts of national service. Legitimate investigations into his behavior become plots against the state. An impeachment inquiry isn’t so much a constitutional process for determining whether a president violated the oath of office as a coup—a crime against country.
Or just violations of his sense of self, his insistence that he is right, and the whole world wrong. Sort of a Romantic hero turned inside out, and with no redeeming moral virtues.
As Trump tries to preserve his presidency, he’s talking in just these grandiose terms, erasing the distinction between country and self, and grooming his base to see things the same way. That sort of thinking could ultimately portend a crisis, if Trump’s actions in the months ahead mirror his rhetoric. If Trump thinks of himself as the state, would he leave office were the Senate to convict him in an impeachment trial, or were he to lose the 2020 election? Or would he count on an embittered electoral coalition to rise up and repudiate the verdict?
The same electoral coalition that's abandoning him now? Trump may think an army of supporters would march on Washington and surround the White House and protect his claim to the office with their bodies, but reality would have a rather different say. There are Marines and Secret Service agents in the White House. Their loyalty is to their oaths and the Constitution, not the President-Who-Was-Not-Re-Elected. It might be a "constitutional crisis" in the headlines (which is where they all seem to occur; when things get really dicey, suddenly it's no longer a "crisis" that the POTUS was selling the national honor for a mess of pottage), but what would keep the Secret Service and a few Marine guards from escorting Trump outside the gates like a fired employee whose desk is cleaned out by security? The angry mob is not going to storm through the gates of the White House and establish a Trump monarchy; not even in Trump's wildest dreams.
Trump is a bad actor, of that there is no doubt (and I refer to his actions, not to any ability to pretend to be a character in a play). He's undoubtedly the worst President in American history (Millard Fillmore is redeemed!). But this kind of fearful speculation is as pointless as the armchair psychoanalysis of Trump that is all the rage in certain quarters. That narrative might well support a 25th Amendment remedy, but the problem with the 25th Amendment is that it requires the approval of the sycophantic Cabinet Trump has put in place (the few ratified Secretaries the nation still has), and all it does is put Pence in power until Trump is deemed fit to return as POTUS. It may be a useful story for driving down Trump's approval ratings, but the impeachment inquiry seems to be far more successful at that than anything else has been.
It’s possible, of course, that Trump’s rhetoric is just that—rhetoric. But what’s clear is that he’s been laying the groundwork for his base to be angry whenever it is that he leaves office. By signaling to his core supporters that his ouster would be a grievous injustice they shouldn’t tolerate, Trump is upending the basic premise that the president is a temporary custodian of the office and subject to laws and oversight. In a recent tweet, he quoted one of his prominent evangelical backers in saying his removal through impeachment would create an irreconcilable split reminiscent of the Civil War. He’s said that two years of his presidency were “stolen” from him by Mueller’s Russia investigation. His ex-lawyer and onetime confidant, Michael Cohen, warned at a congressional hearing in February that he worried that if Trump were to lose the 2020 election, he wouldn’t permit a “peaceful transition of power.”
Well, maybe; then again, one widely accepted theory is that the march to the Right of the GOP began with the defeat of Goldwater, and the certainty in those who backed him that they were entitled to run Washington as they saw fit. Nixon was a raving liberal compared to Goldwater, but they got their wish with Reagan, and then Gingrich taking on Clinton, who was never seen (by them) as any more legitimate than Trump said Obama was. Trump has not swooped down in the planet from a flying saucer and replaced reliable American voters with pod people; he is the end, the goal, the telos, of a process that began more than 50 years ago. It may be, rather than the apotheosis of that process, he is the first real nail in its coffin.
It makes more sense than being afraid, very afraid, of a man who publicly labels himself "a very stable genius" and uses the English language as if he lost touch with it sometime in the 3rd grade, and declares himself more knowledgeable than the rest of the world combined. That's the lunatic declaring the rest of the world crazy, and he the only sane one. There's really not as much challenge in dealing with such a person as we can make it out to be.
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