Fire, pestilence and a country at war with
itself: the Trump presidency is over
Robert Reich
A pandemic unabated, an economy in meltdown, cities in
chaos over police killings. All our supposed leader does is tweet
Published
onSun 31 May 2020 06.00 BST
You’d be
forgiven if you hadn’t noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but
Donald J Trump is no longer president of the United States.
By having
no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing
America, Trump has abdicated his office.
He is not
governing. He’s golfing, watching cable TV and tweeting.
How has
Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of
George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his
neck for minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?
Trump
called the protesters “thugs” and threatened to have them shot. “When the
looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted, parroting a former Miami
police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.
On
Saturday, he gloated about “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons”
awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through
Secret Service lines.
In reality,
Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage
anything
Trump’s
response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has
been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a “Democratic hoax” and
muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus
to the states.
Governors
have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment
for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against
each other. They have had to decide how, when and where to reopen their
economies.
Trump has
claimed “no responsibility at all” for testing and contact-tracing – the keys
to containing the virus. His new “plan” places responsibility on states to do
their own testing and contact-tracing.
Trump is
also awol in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
More than
41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction
moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed
rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the
end of July.
What is
Trump’s response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said “the worst is behind
us” as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing
about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3tn relief
package on 15 May. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking
action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.
What about
other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has
passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change,
enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize
the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing
in McConnell’s inbox. Trump doesn’t seem to be aware of any of them.
There is
nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if
that’s pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in
crises, he is not a president.
Trump’s
tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.
When he’s
not fomenting violence against black protesters, he’s accusing a media
personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female
politician’s weight and the House speaker’s looks, conjuring up conspiracies
against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and
encouraging his followers to “liberate” their states from lockdown
restrictions.
He tweets
bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states
that expand absentee voting, “overruling” governors who don’t allow places of
worship to reopen “right away”, and punishing Twitter for factchecking him.
And he lies
incessantly.
In reality,
Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage
anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or
supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for
briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.
His
advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and
relatives.
Since
moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of
interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.
But it has
taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed
abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his
office.
Trump’s
nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to
traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished
the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.
He is no longer
president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.
Robert
Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For
the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged
It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário