Defending Trump Could Doom GOP
Many Democrats of the past owe a heartfelt apology to their future selves. I remember the shock and sadness I felt when I learned that President Bill Clinton had looked us in the eye and lied about having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. I remember first lamenting the fact that his presidency was apparently over. I remember the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting Articles of Impeachment — and I remember my relief that the Senate failed to remove him from office. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been among the Americans loudly and actively calling for Clinton’s resignation.
Of course, we can have no idea what actually would have happened if Al Gore had become president in the last half of Clinton’s term, but I like to think that Gore would have easily won reelection in 2000, that he would have, as Clinton did, also balanced the budget back when the national debt was a paltry $5.5 trillion. Despite the obviously false idea that Democrats spend wildly while Republicans cut budgets, our national debt would never have soared to the $12.5 trillion it had reached at the end of George W. Bush’s term when the Great Recession hit — or if it had, it would have been the result of an all-out effort to slow global climate disruption following President Gore’s vision of “An Inconvenient Truth.” There certainly would have been no second Gulf War in response to the 9–11 attacks and no giant tax cut by a president who claimed that citizens could make better use of “their money” than the government.
As I write, we do not yet know how the Trump impeachment will play out, but the smart money is on the economy holding long enough for Trump to escape removal, and the chances of his re-election, despite a minority who approve of his governance — and his seedy character — are fairly good. But, if he doesn’t seize power, ending the illusion of democracy, it’s likely that the long-term effect of his presidency will mirror that of the Republican overreach in California.
Remember California’s Proposition 187? Prop 187 was a racist law that mirrors the Trump administration’s immigration policy. “The stated purpose of Proposition 187 was to make immigrants residing in the country without legal permission ineligible for public benefits.” It forbade undocumented children from attending public schools or colleges, receiving health care, or holding a driver license. It never went into effect, but it created a progressive backlash. Latinx all over California became citizens, used their right to vote, and the result is that there is not a single Republican holding statewide office in the most populous state in the nation.
Clinton’s crimes pale in comparison to Trump’s — lying about an affair, as opposed to lying about paying off a prostitute to cover up an affair — is only the opening act of a list of Trump’s crimes. Eminently provable criminal acts by our current president include obstruction of justice, obstruction of Congress, violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, real estate and tax fraud in New York City and elsewhere, and using money belonging to Russian oligarchs, laundered through Deutsche Bank, to bail out his real estate business in the 90s. Our president is the most criminal presidential executive of my lifetime — even Spiro Agnew collecting bribes while vice president was far less damaging to our nation. Because of the depravity of Trump’s crimes, it is quite possible that when people realize the depth of his callous indifference to the aims of the United States, we could wind up with as few Republicans in national office as there are in California. Or, we could get a dictator…
Obviously, counterfactuals such as my opinion here cannot be proved, so feel free to challenge my imaginary version of events. I have much to learn from cogent articulation of events other than those I happened to notice over the last two decades — between the days of my Vietnam-era activism and the day I woke up and noticed that a community activist had won the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. But note well the possibility that the long-term effect of our president’s corruption and his party’s indifference to it could end the Republican Party in the US as certainly as it did in California.
