President
Trump is at war with the rule of law. This won't end well
Rebecca
Solnit
At the top
there’s corruption, down below there’s dismantling and disarray. Americans are
entering a period of immense danger
Wed 9 Oct
2019 07.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 9 Oct 2019 10.14 BST
‘William Barr has been bouncing all over the
globe pushing the president’s lawless agenda to promote conspiracy theories,
smear rival candidates, use foreign aid as bribes or withhold aid as
punishment.’
Do
Americans still have a government? I do not know. What I do know is that
President Trump and the upper echelons of the executive branch are at war with
the legislative branch, the rule of law, the constitution, federal civil
servants and the American people. It’s a conflict that pulls in many
directions, and if the president threatened civil war the other day as something
that could happen if he doesn’t get his way, we can regard the ordinary state
of things as a low-intensity civil war or a slo-mo coup that’s been going on
from the beginning. Tuesday’s White House refusal to cooperate with the
impeachment inquiry only escalates their defiance and their chaos.
The chaos
takes so many forms. Innumerable stories have made it clear that even the
president’s own aides and cabinet members treat him like a captive bear or a
person having a psychotic breakdown – like someone unstable who must be kept
from harming himself and others. They have done that by heaping on the
flattery, and by warping and limiting the information he receives, and often by
doing their best to prevent his directives from being realized.
The New York
Times recently reported on a March meeting about the border. According to
aides, Trump “suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them
down”. When he was told that wasn’t allowed, he ordered that the border be
closed. That set off a “frenzied week of presidential rages, round-the-clock
staff panic and far more White House turmoil than was known at the time. By the
end of the week, the seat-of-the-pants president had backed off his threat but
had retaliated with the beginning of a purge of the aides who had tried to
contain him.”
Passivity and disengagement got us here;
political engagement will get us out
This is the
kind of story we’ve become used to – outrages and viciousness and inanity and
all – but it’s worth reading another way, as a story about a bear lashing out
at whatever’s around him and gobbling up the scraps they feed him while he is
still chained to the wall. When we refer to the “president” we really mean
whatever ad hoc group of people with proximity is manipulating him, lying to
him, or preventing him from knowing or doing something. They sometimes prevent
harm or illegality. But this is only half of the administrative “team.” The
other half consists of those serving his personal agenda, and in this respect
the federal government has become a subsidiary of Trump Incorporated.
William
Barr is supposed to be this nation’s attorney general, whose job the Judiciary
Act of 1789 defined as “to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law
when required by the president of the United States.” But Barr has been
bouncing all over the globe pushing the president’s self-serving conspiracy
theories and smears of rival candidates, a stunning violation of his role.
Mike
Pompeo, the secretary of state, took an oath to “support and defend the
constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”
and has since become one of those enemies in service of others. He was on the
July phone call in which Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate
Trump’s potential 2020 rival Joe Biden and discredit the story of the Russian
intervention in the 2016 election. The leverage for this request seems to have
been the hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid – taxpayer dollars –
withheld by President Trump at the time.
The
Guardian reported a few days ago that Pompeo “dismissed summonses from
Democratic committee chairmen in the House of Representatives for five current
and former state department officials to testify on the president’s attempts to
push Ukraine to dig up dirt on his leading political rival.” And Tuesday,
Pompeo’s State Department blocked former ambassador to the European Union
Gordon Sondland, who’s implicated in the Ukrainian shakedown, from testifying
to Congress, a clear and open obstruction of justice.
The phrase
“party over country” has been used to describe Republicans for years, but at
this point it’s more or less puppet over country, because the loyalty is to
Trump’s corrupt, delusional, floundering endeavors to keep himself in power and
out of trouble with the law. Trump’s own loyalties are to himself, his profits,
and his next political campaign—and perhaps to Vladimir Putin, before whom he
grovels regularly, and whose agenda he has served even with this undermining of
our relationship with Ukraine and the search for evidence to exonerate Russia
in the 2016 election.
Another
unsurprising detail emerged in a recent New York Times story: “In Ukraine,
where officials are wary of offending President Trump, four meandering cases
that involve Mr Manafort, Mr Trump’s former campaign chairman, have been
effectively frozen by Ukraine’s chief prosecutor. The cases are just too
sensitive for a government deeply reliant on United States financial and
military aid, and keenly aware of Mr Trump’s distaste for” special counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation “into possible collusion between Russia and his
campaign.”
So at the
top there’s corruption. But down below there’s dismantling and disarray. The
Trump administration’s has a habit of firing or sidelining federal employees
whose work is politically inconvenient. In 2017, Joel Clement, formerly head of
policy analysis at the interior department, wrote about being taken away from
his work on the impact of climate change on Native Alaskans and reassigned to
“an unrelated job in the accounting office that collects royalty checks from
fossil fuel companies.” There are numerous stories like his, of employees doing
valuable work told to move across the country to keep their jobs, a maneuver
that at best burdens them or renders them ineffectual, but often drives them
out of their positions. The country is hemmorhaging people who provide
oversight and keep key systems working.
The Federal
Election Commission normally has six members and needs four to have a quorum;
it is currently at three with no sign of a new appointment in sight. “Without
the quorum,” the New York Times reports, “the FEC can’t investigate complaints,
issue opinions, or fine violators.” I didn’t formerly think of myself as a big
fan of rule of law, since those laws have always been applied harshly to the
most vulnerable and most marginalized and were often written to embed racism,
misogyny, and homophobia into law. But we now face something worse: the
corruption and decay of rule of law in the service of billionaires and misogynistic
white supremacists, a system in which the most powerful gain power and shed
accountability.
We are
entering a period of immense danger in which this self-serving president’s
stupidity and ruthlessness could lead to almost anything—and I wrote that
sentence before the feckless decision about Syria and Turkey. Congress will
have to stand strong against whatever he unleashes. The fact that we may also
have to rely on a supreme court with two appointments made by this illegitimate
president is also alarming.
But we must
not lose hope. In addition to the three branches of government, there is an
unofficial fourth – civil society – which must exert itself. The will of the
people is both what is at stake when a government becomes unaccountable and the
force that can protect our embattled public interest. Passivity and
disengagement got us here; political engagement will get us out.
Rebecca
Solnit is a columnist for the Guardian US
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