Adam Boulton Diary – An emergency trip to Washington DC
I wasn’t expecting to be back in Washington DC so soon. Travel restrictions and visas permitting I hoped to be here in time for the Inauguration on 20 January. The Trumpist insurrection on Capitol Hill changed all that.
Instead, the bus from Dulles airport had to break the curfew imposed by the Mayor on Thursday, slinking into town after dark past flashing blue lights and truckers belatedly bringing in heavy barricades.
Around last year’s election I wrote here about the mood in the nation’s capital. Defensive and sullen for fear that Trump might be re-elected, switching to impromptu street parties when it was finally “called for” Biden.
Now as the temporary stands are repaired after the riot for the swearing in celebrations, Washington feels more than ever like a stage set for a suspense drama. Which way is the USA heading? Is it the end of Trumpism, or just the early scenes in what will be decades of reopened wounds? Those scars raw again, as Americans contrast the gentle permissive treatment of the rioters by the cops, to the police’s regular taking of black lives. The Capitol Hill Police Chief has already resigned.
The few remaining days of the Trump Administration will be packed with such political and social challenges.
The Vice President and the cabinet could decide to invoke the 25th Amendment of the constitution to replace a president not fit for office. Already some of cabinet members are resigning, dumping Trump after four years basking in his patronage.
The Congress could attempt a second impeachment at warp speed – inciting a march against the legislature certainly qualifies as a “high crime and misdemeanour”. Trump could even resign his office in a deal to secure a pardon from the Vice President for his ballooning roster of federal offences. Trump introduced a ten-year federal prison sentence for those who desecrate national monuments. He meant to defend the statues of confederate slavers but there is no more hallowed monument than the Capitol.
The Ford/Nixon precedent suggests that a pardon by his successor would have more legal credibility than the do-it-yourself job Trump is considering. Many believe he has been so anxious to overstay his term because of the immunity the Oval Office affords him. But Vice President Pence’s decision to participate in the Biden inauguration is further confirmation that he is unlikely to cut Trump some slack.
Time is running out for any of these constitutional ploys. More important than the fate of one man and his family will be how the American public reacts to the shocking events of 6 January . None of it was a surprise. Trump has repeatedly and profitably rallied the “fine people”, who others see as wilfully ignorant white supremacists. He wrote the lines for the rabble which violated the halls of the Capitol bellowing “this is our house”, “USA, USA” and “Stop the Steal”. They are a potent force, if nowhere near a majority. According to the YouGov snap poll 45% of Republican voters supported the assault on Congress. Even after their hooliganism, more than as hundred Republican congressmen continued, vainly, to breathe oxygen into ectoplasmic claims that Trump somehow was not legitimately defeated by Biden.
The question facing leading Republicans is whether to break with Trump or not, to back him or sack him. Safely re-elected in November for an other six year term, the hitherto Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell made his choice and rediscovered a fibre of principle in his backbone, helped doubtless by the belated realisation that Trumpism’s ultimate aim is to run a steam-roller over the super-structure of electoral politics so expertly exploited by the senior Senator from Kentucky. Mike Pence has made his choice too – he intends to stick around in politics long after his president is in Florida, Moscow, Turnberry or the penitentiary.
The most important word in “Make America Great Again” was always “again”. Trump didn’t win by promising his supporters a better future. His slogan offered them a return to a past where white men had the best jobs and their women felt secure. A world in which Barack Hussein Obama, let alone Hillary Rodham Clinton, would never stand a chance of nomination let alone living in the White House.
Meanwhile the rich would get richer but that didn’t matter to Trump’s working class and middle-class fans. Traditional “country club Republicans”, the John Updikes and his ‘Rabbit is Rich’ brigade swelled their coalition to victory.
In the cornucopia of random media consumption brought on by lockdown my best and most didactic friend pointed me in the direction of “food for thought”: the 25 DeVane lectures delivered in late 2019 on politics and power by the Sterling Professor at Yale University.
Professor Ian Shapiro bears a striking resemblance to late period Rupert Murdoch, though not quite so doppelgangerish as that of Murdoch’s fellow Aussie, the animal rights philosopher Peter Singer. That is where any similarities end. In his survey of democratic politics since 1989, Shapiro is convinced the rot set in with Thatcher and Reagan. He repeatedly bemoans the erosion of trade union solidarity on the left.
Shapiro lived in the UK during the 1970s and shows a subtle understanding of our politics. Inter alia his international musings take in the ideological differences within the Miliband family. No doubt he bemused his American students with video clips of such local luminaries as Harold Wilson, Tony Benn and Simon Hughes. He even begins one lecture with a lengthy excerpt from my former colleague Faisal Islam’s 2016 Sky News interview with Michael “the people have had enough of experts” Gove.
Joking aside, I recommend that you look up the lectures. They are all available on YouTube. Still, it is not surprising perhaps that the clip that most rouses Shapiro’s Ivy League audience is of monkeys in a psychology laboratory. Monkey A is supremely content to be fed cucumber until Monkey B in the cage next door is supplied with grapes. Then Monkey A chucks away his cucumber slices and bangs menacingly on the partition with B.
The psychologist quips to camera “that’s Occupy Wall Street right there”. Shapiro retorts that he has misunderstood his own experiment. Monkey A is not angry with his handler who holds brimming bowls of cucumber and grapes but with his neighbour. Inequity within your immediate social sphere, he suggests, grates far more bitterly than envy of the genuinely rich. This would at least explain how plutocrats such as Trump, Johnson or Rees-Mogg have managed to lead populist columns of the resentful, who feel dispossessed by diversity.
Shapiro has many other insights into such matters, and the merits of weak politics parties versus strong parties or multi party systems versus two party systems. His two underlying assumptions though are Darwinian: politicians, he believes, want to maximize their electoral muscle and the voters want to improve their own well-being.
This century has shown that divide-and-rule and activist minorities within a party organisation can be just as influential as those who seek to construct a tent in the middle ground. The two shocks of 2016, Trump and the narrow vote for Brexit, are proof of that.
Which of those strategies to follow is the dilemma facing not just the Republicans in the US, but the Democrats as well and Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. If they can’t find the answer the danger is that we monkeys will go on smashing up the joint.
Donald Trump’s political legacy are these dangerously disunited states. Maybe the inauguration can restore some calm. It is a uniquely American mix of solemn oratory and folksy pageantry. It certainly felt a moment of unity in 2009 when African Americans thronged the Mall to witness Obama taking the oath of office. Eight years later Trump’s delusional frenzy began when a sparse crowd bothered to witness his declaration of “American carnage”. There was a bigger turnout of pink pussy-hatted female protestors the next day.
Staging an inauguration will be more difficult than ever in these days of Covid and social distancing. Washington DC is hoping Biden can start to restore his nation’s dignity but the city is preparing for more trouble on the streets.