gracchusdixit

Thanks to an avalanche of court filings issued this week, we now know beyond any shadow of doubt that the current President of the United States (”Individual 1,” as he is called in a number of those filings) is a traitorous crook.  It is no longer in dispute that Donald Trump lied to the American people during the campaign about his business dealings in Russia.  Even worse, he appears to have concealed an attempt to bribe Vladimir Putin by offering Putin a $50 million penthouse apartment in a hotel tower he hoped to build in Moscow.  Worst yet, it is now abundantly clear that he, his children, and his henchmen conspired with the Russians to manipulate the 2016 election, not merely for political reasons, but for personal profit.  

It is difficult to imagine a more tawdry or despicable act by a sitting President of the United States.  At any other time in our history, the current occupant of the White House would already be facing impeachment and the prospect of criminal prosecution.   Indeed, any other president would have been forced to resign long ago.

Not Donald Trump.

Thus far, Trump has succeeded in skirting the consequences of his crimes by peddling the fantasy that he is the victim of a baseless “witch hunt” perpetrated by “angry Democrats”.  The threads of this fairy tale fray and grow thinner by the day, but the fabric has yet to pull completely apart.  In this, Trump has been aided, not only by his compliant Republican bag men in the Congress, but also, and more surprisingly, by the mainstream press, which incessantly cautions us that Trump’s actions, however shocking, may still be perfectly “legal”.  

This is arrant nonsense.  There is nothing even remotely “legal” about bribes to foreign officials, hush-money pay-offs to mistresses and porn stars designed to influence the outcome of an election, or outright lies to the electorate.  That the panjandrums and purveyors of conventional wisdom continue to equivocate about the legality of such behavior begs a fundamental question:  Why have we become so passive in the face of what is inarguably the most conspicuously corrupt presidency in American history?

One answer is that a large dollop of Trump supporters are dumber than doornails, having time and again proved themselves stupid enough to ignore or defend his every outrage.   They voted for a man they took to be a brilliant billionaire.  What they got, instead, was a con man, whose actual IQ is lower than the body temperature of a garden snake.  To admit as much would require Trump supporters to confess their own credulity.  For the professional chattering class to call out that credulity would require the country to confront the rather uncomfortable reality that a fair-sized chunk of our fellow citizens are, in fact, dumber than wood.  When Hillary Clinton used the impolite and impolitic word “deplorable” to describe that chunk of the electorate, she was pilloried.  That doesn’t mean that she was wrong.

Whether the deplorable dupes who voted for Trump like it or not, their gullibility is now on full display.  Out-of-work miners in West Virginia were gullible enough to believe his promise to save the coal industry, but coal-fired energy generation is at an all-time low.  Unemployed auto workers in the rust-belt were gullible enough to swallow his preposterous pledge to repatriate manufacturing jobs that migrated to Mexico or China long ago, but General Motors just announced that it’s going to lay off thousands of workers.  Millions of Americans were gullible enough to put their faith in Trump’s nonsense, imagining, against all evidence to the contrary, that his promises would make a difference in their lives.  What they got in return was precisely nothing.

Unfortunately, those who willingly allowed themselves to be duped by Trump are not his only victims.  The sugar-high produced by his tax cuts is wearing off and, like all drug-induced binges, is well on its way to producing a painful hangover.  Economic growth is slowing, the wages of ordinary Americans are returning to stagnation, and the financial markets are tumbling.  Meanwhile, corporate and personal credit card debt are at all-time highs, and the real estate market is choking with a backlog of unsold homes.  Whether all this will produce a recession is anybody’s guess, but it certainly puts a lie to the ephemeral economic “boom” Trump promised to his dumber-than-wood believers.

Whether those believers ever come to their senses is beside the point.  The more important point is that the rest of us must resist the temptation to become numb to the unending awfulness of the Trump presidency.  Bludgeoned by the endless drumbeat of his sexual scandals, financial crimes, and flagrant violations of the law, that temptation is undoubtedly hard to resist.  It would be far easier to crawl under a psychological rock, to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to every outrage, to hope against hope that the storm will eventually blow over.  

It has therefore become the received wisdom of the Democratic Party and the media commentariat that the prudent way to navigate this storm is to tread lightly when it comes to investigating or impeaching Donald Trump and the criminals in his administration.  Concentrate on policy, the political strategists and pundits say; compromise with Trump, when the opportunity arises; focus on passing legislation that will give voters what they want when it comes to healthcare and jobs.  Do all that, the narrative goes, and all come right in the end.

The problem with such advice is that it is fundamentally immoral.  It requires Democrats and the nation as a whole to abandon principle and ignore the existential threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy, all for the sake of pragmatism and political advantage.  

The time for this sort of logic-chopping and ethical compromise is long past.  Too much is at stake.  We must shake off our stupor.  We must recognize that nothing is more important to the future of our country than ridding ourselves of Donald Trump and everything he represents.  If we become numbed to his crimes, we will reveal ourselves to be dumber than his victims.