Donald Trump by himself can’t get anything done. Like any
president, he needs an army of managers, economists, engineers, attorneys,
spokespersons and other professional foot soldiers to head and staff departments
and agencies to get the actual work done and documented.
We already know that when it comes to getting his way,
Donald Trump is amoral, unethical and in many cases unconcerned with the
legality of his actions, as long as he doesn’t get exposed. What will happen
when the new president asks one or more of his many supernumeraries to engage
in illegal or dangerous activities? To create an enemies
list? To spy on those who his thin-skin thinks has insulted him? To use the
Internal Revenue Service and other branches of government to punish his enemies
or reward his friends? To put pressure on someone suing him? To transfer U.S.
assets to a Russian bank? To do something specifically for one of his many
business ventures?
Let’s journey back to the early 1970s to learn what will
happen when a professional in government is asked to do something illegal.
Watergate, like the Iran-Contra scandal, the justification for the second war
in Iraq and the creation of the torture gulag, required dozens of people to discuss
and engage in illegal activities. But I want to focus on one incident, the
Saturday Night Massacre.
Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor had decided
to subpoena Nixon to get the tapes he had made of all Oval Office
conversations. Those tapes would show that President Nixon knew about the
Watergate break-in, other dirty tricks and the cover-up of said activities. Nixon
naturally balked at handing over the incriminating material. On Saturday,
October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to
fire Cox. Richardson, as rib-rocked and loyal a Republican as one could find,
refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered the Deputy Attorney General William
Ruckelshaus, another dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong Republican, to fire Cox.
Ruckelshaus also resigned rather than do it.
But there is always some careerist, some amoral technician,
willing to do the dirty work of a powerful person. In the case of Watergate it
was Robert Bork, the Solicitor General, who fired Archibald Cox.
The story has a relatively happy ending. A judge declared
the firing illegal. Nixon had to resign. And Bork was rejected when Ronald
Regan nominated him to the Supreme Court. The country got a modicum of election
finance reform…at least until the Citizens
United decision.
The broader point is that there is always someone willing to
break the law for our leader. Always an Oliver North willing to buy and sell
arms illegally and give the proceeds to an army that Congress had explicitly
put off limits. Always a John Yoo to come up with complicated legal-sounding
mumbo-jumbo to justify illegal torturing of other human beings. And what’s most
scary, is that there are always honorable men like General Colin Powell or Vice
President Hubert Humphrey who will place a single indelible stain on their
reputation to follow the commander’s orders and treat what he knows are
unsubstantiated or already disproven rumors as the truth.
In 1927, the French thinker Julien Bendel wrote in The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (in
French, La Trahison des Clercs) that the
intellectuals—the high level knowledge workers like attorneys, engineers,
economists, writers—betrayed the ethics and principles of their professions to
support the self-serving ideas and proposals of governments, politicians and
the wealthy that they knew were wrong or unprovable. He wrote specifically
about the many European intellectuals who became apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering
and racism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Be they historians, political
scientists, economists, philosophers or theologians, they betrayed the very
foundational principles of their disciplines with false arguments justifying
racism or a particular war. The intellectual who sells out is a standard
character in 20th and 21st century world fiction, be it the fascistic Willy
Stark’s press secretary Jack Burden in All
the King’s Men or the Jewish physicist Victor Strum in Life and Fate. In real life, we have Edward Teller, Kellyanne
Conway and George Will.
Benda never got
into why intellectuals betrayed themselves (and society), but today, we do it
for money.
That’s why I fear
for this country over the next few years. I fear that a lot of talented
educated people will participate in a campaign to reign in our free press,
harass the political opposition and further suppress the vote. I fear that when
President Trump orders the military to drop a bomb—conventional or nuclear—because
of a momentary whim he will find a general willing to implement the order. One
whose family probably has access to a well-stocked bomb shelter.
But it’s only
four years.
I expect Trump to
be a one-term president. His past is just too littered with illegal or
unethical actions for him not to do something so obnoxious or illegal that
Congress is forced to impeach him. Or, the GOP may impeach and convict him
quickly, to gain their revenge and install one of their own, Mike Pence, in the
White House. I reckon that the
likelihood of Trump dying in office, or being assassinated, is very high. I do
not believe the American government participated in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy, but I would wonder about the U.S. military’s involvement if Trump
should take a bullet.
Even if Trump
survives impeachment and assassination, he will rightfully be blamed for the
world-wide depression that implementing ever one of his or the Republican
platform’s half-baked economic ideas would cause. Unless Mike Pence is
president because of Trump’s passing, the Republicans will likely have most of
the country angry at them for one of any number of betrayals by 2020.
African-Americans, Hispanics, the LGBTQ community and left-leaning Democrats
and independents will likely have a good chance of turning the tide and beat
back the politics of selfishness and racist nativism among whites that
catapulted Trump to the presidency.
No comments:
Post a Comment