Is more than collusion, tovarich
I understand that the Democrats are having that debate at this very moment. They're divided between the rabid partisans who simply want to "get" Donald Trump at almost any cost and the more thoughtful ones who realize that precisely because the president's base is so completely divorced from reality it would not accept any case made for the president's removal from office, however compelling. They would regard it as some sort of political conspiracy or as a rationale for a constitutionally-engineered coup.
Ours has been a deeply divided and polarized nation for quite a while now. Even though our political leaders and even the media are isolated at the extremes, I continue to believe that at least in instinct the American people retain sufficient pragmatism and contact with reality to seek answers from logic rather than ideology and facts rather than rhetoric. The American center, it seems to me, suffers less from a shortage of adherents than from the lack of a voice and of leadership.
In 2016, faced with two extreme and divisive major party nominees for president, people like Mitt Romney (whom the polls at the time indicated would actually have had a real chance of winning as a third-party candidate) and a host of past and present governors and members of Congress shirked their duty to provide a more reasonable alternative. It was left to Evan McMullin, an obscure former CIA operative and policy advisor to the Republican House caucus, to stage a belated, doomed, ad hoc challenge from the realm of sanity. It would be have been interesting to have seen what would have happened if reason had been able to obtain a better-known champion, or even if the McMullin campaign had been able to get an earlier start and actually get on the ballot on more states. As it was, it performed a meaningful service in allowing me and those like me who otherwise, facing a choice between two equally unacceptable alternatives, would otherwise have simply have stayed home on Election Day.
I've always been amused by the silly notion that McMullin was somehow a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton. I'm sorry, but I still don't see how Mrs. Clinton could have been helped in the slightest by people voting for McMullin who wouldn't have voted for Trump under any circumstances. But partisan rhetoric often has very little to do with reality.
Sadly, some of us few who supported McMullin have now somehow become partisans of our unfit president. McMullin himself went on to found Stand Up Republic, a PAC promoting rational opposition from the center-right not only to the crazy left but also to the authoritarian, nativist Trump-supporting right.
Periodically, Stand Up Republic produces short videos that sum up arguments that need to be made by somebody, and which nobody else is making. It has just come out a new and powerful one, issued in the wake of the Mueller Report. But there is a call at the end for Congress to "act." If by that it means impeachment, then despite my thorough approval of the main point of the video I have to dissent,
The unholy alliance of the alt-right, nativists, ultra-nationalists, authoritarians, and conspiracy theorists who have rallied around Donald Trump and become collectively the new face of the Republican party and even of the conservative movement must be defeated. But this can only happen by a decisive, clear, and unmistakable repudiation of Trumpism by the American people through the democratic process. Doubtless, the Trumpist right will whine about any election which ends in the repudiation of their hero having somehow been "rigged;" a lack of accountability to reality has its advantages when it comes to explaining away failure, and the Trump crowd has never been reluctant to take full advantage of them.
But Trumpism is political cancer. It cannot be removed by ill-conceived means, even means as radical as impeachment. Removing Trump will not remove his supporters from the control of the Republican party or of the conservative movement. It would be like the farmer I read about recently who rather than seeking medical help for a malignant growth on his arm chose to cut it off himself with a knife, only to die subsequently because the cells had metastasized to the rest of his body.
Donald Trump must be removed from office the same way he was placed there: by the voters. Well, ok; the voters actually rejected Mr. Trump; it was the Electoral College which made him president. But electoral repudiation is the only to resolve the problem. To remove him by impeachment would only embitter and radicalize his supporters, confirming their paranoid and illogical belief that any opposition to him is by definition conspiratorial and illicit. That belief lies close to the authoritarian core of the Trump movement's belief system, and impeachment would only reinforce it.
It would also further divide a nation dying of polarization and an inability of its citizens to dialog or even communicate with each other. What we need is healing, not further polarization.
Some in the Republican party are thinking in terms of a primary challenge to Mr. Trump next year. While I applaud the idea in principle, in practice it would be doomed. Donald Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016 by way of a fluke. Had the opposition to him been less divided, he would have been left by the wayside while more serious conservatives like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio led the party to victory in November. Only when his nomination was assured did Mr. Trump's share of the primary vote reach even 40%; throughout most of the primary season, it hovered around one third. An overwhelming majority of GOP primary voters rejected the man throughout the campaign for the nomination, just as a majority of the American people rejected him in November.
But the Republican party is now his. The overwhelming majority of Republicans, sadly, have rallied to his side in an effort to defeat the left at all costs. In our polarized republic, it's become us against them- and for most Republicans, Donald Trump represents "us." Any challenge to his re-nomination is not only doomed but would face utter disaster from the very start.
The Republican party is no longer the party it was before Donald Trump. If it were to deny him re-nomination and thus repudiate all the ugly things he stands for, it would be possible for me and all the others who have left the party due to his nomination and his embrace by the party as a whole to return. But it isn't going to happen. As much as I would rejoice to see the Republican party saved, it's now the party of Donald Trump and will remain so at least for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Trump's Democratic opponent may well, like Hillary, be just as bad as he is, even if for different reasons. America's hope of healing in the short term seems to me to lie in an independent or third-party challenge from the center, perhaps led by someone like former Ohio Gov. John Kasich. While it would have been far easier in 2016, a well-known alternative to both Mr. Trump and whoever the Democrats nominate still seems to me to be our best bet for national salvation.
But that said, we have reason to worry not only about Mr. Trump's personal fitness for the presidency and the malignancy of the movement he leads but about his policies. Whatever one thinks about the whole collusion issue, it's disturbing that the Trump family continues to have, in Donald Jr.'s words, a "disproportionate" percentage of its investments in Russia. It's even more worrisome that rather than divesting himself of these holdings when he became president, Mr. Trump put them into a farcical "blind trust-" under the trusteeship of his own children.
Comparatively few Americans seem even to know that. Few, therefore, have reflected on the worrisome implications of that fact given the reality this video describes, even if one accepts that neither the president nor anyone connected with his campaign had any role whatsoever in the Russian attempt to interfere with our 2016 election.
The president has a serious conflict of interest when it comes to Russia and his behavior toward Russia and President Putin would be a reasonable ground for suspicion even if no member of his campaign had ever met with Russian agents. In fact, a case can be made (and is being litigated in the courts) that he violated the Constitution by even being inaugurated while he was still in a position to use his office as a means to benefit himself financially. The appearance of a conflict of interest, coupled with the president's own behavior, would have justified the appointment of a special prosecutor even if his campaign hadn't been willing to accept illegally obtained information about his opponent gathered by the FSB through espionage whose target was our Secretary of State
It's about accountability. The problem is that Donald Trump refuses to be accountable, and his supporters defend that refusal.
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