Trump, Comey and the Russians

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
The furor over President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on May 9 was unprecedented. CNN and MSNBC had their “breaking news” signage on-screen for the entire next few days. But even more hysteria was in the offing.

Since the United States has descended into some kind of alternate reality, the man whom Hillary Clinton herself had judged to be “responsible” for her loss, and hence abhorred by the Democrats, suddenly became, for the same people, a martyr.

The dismissal was now considered a blow to American democracy, the start of a dictatorship, something as bad as Watergate – a ridiculous comparison, as that had involved a criminal offense, unlike Comey’s sacking.

These cynical and hypocritical reactions served only to make those voicing them look silly to most Americans.

A few days later the Washington Post carried a story by Jennifer Rubin with a headline that could have come from the National Enquirer, as Trump’s opponents once again tried to tie him to Vladimir Putin.

“Bombshell: Trump Tells Secrets to Russia,” published May 15, asserted that the president revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in a White House meeting on May 10.

According to her, unnamed current and former U.S. officials said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution, an establishment think tank, worried that Trump “will do what he wants, no matter how mad.” They clearly want to make this the “smoking gun” to get rid of him.

Of course the immediate calls for Trump’s impeachment even before this were only to be expected. They’ve been demanding that from virtually his first day in office.

Although not directly calling for Trump’s removal, but certainly, were it true, making it imperative to do so, was an incredible May 12 article in the New York Times asserting that Trump is a fascist, politically similar to Benito Mussolini.

“American Fascism, in 1944 and Today” was written by Henry Scott Wallace, the proud grandson of Henry A. Wallace, a well-known “fellow-traveller” and pro-Soviet sympathizer who ran for the presidency in 1948 for the Communist-backed Progressive Party.

“The main question today is how our democracy and our brash new generation of citizen activists deals with it,” Wallace concluded. Kafka couldn’t have made this up.

A political neophyte who has never held elective office, Trump may be in over his head. He certainly is out of tune with the political culture in government.

As well, the liberal Lilliputians, as in Gulliver’s Travels, have been tying him down with metaphorical legalistic pieces of thread.

Still, I doubt that Trump has yet done anything impeachable. But another solution comes to mind for the political elites, and is already being suggested in the mainstream press.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of the president if a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and, should the president contest his own removal, a two-thirds vote by Congress to confirm the cabinet’s judgment.

The ideal solution, for Trump’s opponents, would be for Trump, knowing this is in the offing, to simply say “who needs this?” He’s not a professional politician and doesn’t need the grief. After he quits, the whole circus around his supposed ties to Russia will fade away, as things return to “normal” under Mike Pence.

This would still be tantamount to overturning a democratic election, regardless of the excuses used.

But the “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton called Trump’s supporters, would take this lesson to heart, and America would devolve into such mutual animosity that it would become like many a Third World country where a coup removes a government the elites don’t like.

Can American democracy recover from this mess?