This turkey of a President diminishes America’s place in the world
It’s highly unlikely that Peas and Carrots, the two turkeys pardoned by President Trump at the White House yesterday, could comprehend the nature of the freedom they had just been granted. Whatever passed through the little gobblers’ tiny minds, it’s pretty sure to have been something other than a meditation on the nature of forgiveness.
Having said that, the pardon may well have made more sense to them than the pardon granted to the nation of Saudi Arabia and its nominal leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by Donald Trump did to the international community.
“The world is a very dangerous place!” read the statement released just before the ceremony in the White House garden. It went on to explain why this administration would take no further actions over the extrajudicial killing (and dismemberment) of Washington Post journalist Jamil Khashoggi. In a rambling statement that had every indication that it had been parsed through the presidential brain, Trump cried “America First!” and went on to admit that America’s trade with Saudi Arabia is far too important to risk over a matter as tricky as morality.
Trump’s Tuesday, then, amounted to his saving the lives of two turkeys and ignoring the murder of a journalist. One wonders who in America has any reason to give thanks today.
There is, if there’s nothing else (and there might well be nothing else), a brutal honesty about the Trump presidency that’s rarely seen in contemporary politics. Leaders of most democratic countries experience some degree of moral anguish when it comes to these matters of life, death, and trade. The calculation that jobs at home mean more than deaths abroad is more difficult to balance than many of us would idealistically hope. State visits are offered to leaders who have overseen atrocities of various kinds, but governments tend to negotiate these difficulties through clever manipulation of the news; condemning from one side of the mouth whilst praising from the other. They make a great show of giving protestors an opportunity to protest, whilst ensuring that the protests do nothing to distract from the welcome extended to those that sign the trade deals with a tarnished pen.
Trump, however, has decided to forgo even the pretence of moral indignation. He’s only there for the trade deals, which get bigger with every telling. This is what Trump seems to mean by nationalism: a form of capitalism where America’s moral precepts are given a dollar value and traded away for the price of a few fighter jets.
And while it’s convenient to look at the latest outrageous decision by this president and think it will soon bring him down, we’re no longer that naïve. Even as he damages American’s national interests, he speaks of defending America. Yet Trump has made a concession to dictators everywhere who now know they can push the red line closer to American shores, just as a nerve agent in Salisbury marked an extension of Russian aggression towards the West.
Khashoggi was resident in America but he was still a Saudi citizen; a distinction that gives Trump enough wriggle room in the very same way that Puerto Rico is a US unincorporated territory but not a proper state (with votes in the electoral college). These are the distinctions that matter to Donald Trump, who is no more suited to moral leadership today than he was back when he was ogling teenage girls at one of his beauty pageants.
America has long come to realize it has a degenerate-in-chief and the Access Hollywood tapes are now the blueprint for foreign policy: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Tuesday was another remarkable day, then, even compared to all the remarkable days that came before it. Stories broke that in any normal mode of American politics would amount to a major scandal. That none seem to harm the President is down to the usual calculations: GOP senators looking the other way, Democrats lacking the power to respond, and a system of government that has remarkably few teeth when it comes to dealing with an executive out of control.
Things might, however, be changing.
The Democrats have now enjoyed what they’d originally hoped from the midterms. On election night and the days after, the “blue wave” that was expected was noticeably absent. The early projection that they would take twenty plus seats in the House amounted to a disappointing return compared to what they’d expected. Now, however, the victory is more defined. Many of the seats were called after recounts and the slowest moving blue wave in the history of the Republic has finally reached Washington. Democrats have now taken 38 seats in the House, with others yet to be called. By any metric that is a wave.
The politics that result from the wave will be similarly slow to become obvious. Republicans must now settle themselves down for two years with a president who is historically unpopular. Ideally, they need a serious candidate to challenge him for the nomination, though any such challenger must also know that he remains hugely popular among a large section of their base. Unpopular with the country, popular with the base: Trump is the Republican’s worst nightmare going into 2020. We should expect more dissent from within his own party and, certainly, some of that is already apparent with Republicans particularly concerned by his capitulation to the Saudi regime.
The President also emerges from the midterms understanding that life is about to get more difficult. That difficulty begins with the news that his daughter and advisor, Ivanka, is now under investigation for the same “high crime” that many on the right wanted Hillary locked up in a federal supermax. Nothing will ultimately come of this email “scandal” but we can be sure that the Democrats in the House will enjoy every moment of making Ivanka’s life uncomfortable. It is just a small indicator of how the climate around Washington is getting chilly around this administration.
More pressing, perhaps, was the other news that broke late last night and provided Democrats with an extra Thanksgiving treat. It was the revelation that, earlier this year, Trump pressed officials in the Department of Justice to prosecute both Hilary Clinton and James Comey and was only placated (for the moment) when White House counsel, Don McGahn, explained how that would imperil the President. It still might. This wasn’t a matter of Trump asking the DoJ to investigate. It was a matter of President seeking to prosecute his political enemies. In the past two years, Trump has ridden out such scandals thanks to a compliant Congress. He can no longer be sure to do that.
There were a pair of turkeys on the White House lawn yesterday but also one lame-duck President. Two of the three were blissfully unaware of the freedom they’d gained, the other only dimly aware of the liberties he is about to lose.