The Presidency, Trumped

Though it may not have been very widely noticed given his probability of spit flinging to a backdrop of noise, the disabling of the President's Twitter account (a rather unfitting verb for his rantings, even by its later and less soothing connotations) has affirmed, for once, the determined response that so many of both camps have called for against the man who broke every expectation to rule and is now - even by his most vitriolic detractors - expected to break every rule.

But beyond the mere haphazard guilt-free loathing expressed to cheer the song of his anger, the action of this one rebel enjoying the audacity of an unpenalisable (is that a word?) action has a keen sense of timing. The noose slowly and delicately tightened around the neck of US President Trump has, since and before his inaugural, been compared to the proceedings of the Watergate Scandal (and, perhaps less admiringly, the Iran-Contra affair and President Reagan's unkeenly disturbing assurance to the nation that his memory could not instruct him of his well-established complicity) and thus its sordid and so far unique conclusion. This is a fact perhaps as much subject to desires and whims as to the revelations expected by the ongoing Mueller investigation, a tribute to the culture persisting since the Clinton days and the second impeachment in American history. Now, with pressure mounting on both sides of the proverbial aisle for such a conclusion, it is perhaps time to ask whether Trump will consume - if not collapse - the Grand Old Party with its unsteady rider. Or else, he may be destroyed by the beast into whose maze he ventured. After all, the grand old man is not Pericles.

The dejected state of the horde of far above 300 (and well below 300 million) was the most dreaded thing to be expected from a Trump defeat. As Swedish columnist Johan Norberg poignantly expressed, perhaps there was less to fear in victory than defeat for the Kekist cause. Yet, a deliberate aggrandisement of the "deplorables", or of the green one, is not to be taken lightly. Remember that Whig, and Tory, and suffragette were once words to be flung as insult. As was democrat, lower case.

The Kekist rebellion against, rather than within the Republican party (with its counterparts and partly overlapping tendency behind the banner of the donkey) is greater than one man, and will not vanish even if Trump is convicted, killed or, perhaps least likely, resigns in disgrace and hailed as Leonidas drowned by a Thermopylean swamp. One of my hopes, more general and perhaps as inexplicable to a general audience, was that the loathing - usually accompanied by self-loathing by anyone of conscience - and critique of his indecency would result in the relative stagnation of the presidency, akin to that after Andrew Johnson's just as cumbersome and race-related (alright, give the man a break) feud with both parties one and a half century ago, which resulted in his conviction and the elevation of the first senator to the highest office but for one principled vote. (I count my opinion to that of Edmund Ross, who lined up with six "Nay" Republicans out of respect for the office, which he may just as likely have denigrated, and subsequently lost his seat.) I quite recall the relative silence to the actions of president Obama on numerous fields and legal excesses, and for this reason as much as the prospect of an enduring Kekist movement, with further spawns down the avenue of race-based politics, it would be soothing to see its powers even more restrained than critics and cheerleaders have this year found them to be... in practice if not by the first constitutional amendment since 1992.

However, despite the persistence of these desires-predictions, I believe there is no breakthrough to be had soon. Mueller's investigation, with double expectations of a legal coup d'etat or conspiracy - both with the questionable elevation of a man of Wade's party affiliation, but not much more to fit even into the crumbiest of clauses to his merit - mounting, will is more like to drag on until election defeat has passed or is looming. Wait - do I believe that he will be defeated? This list of possible contenders, smugly including Zuckerberg - in the end, and given the recent past, not a choice of sensationalist garbling - and probably putting obvious long-shots Biden and Sanders too high (Jerry Brown, however, does make the mind spin; for all his flaws and near-octagenarian state he is spry, a liberal with good outreach and astounding experience, a bridge between new and old, the quirky Indie-thinker and the established administrator, "alt-centrism" defined - and besides, if he selects his running mate in a mood for balance, we could end up with a single-name sticker) is worthy of thought, and contains more than enough material to cancel the mistakes of the Clintonista machine. And, I must admit, put a reversal to the sordid result of the 1992 primaries.

Too old to be president... or old enough? Indeed, Deng Xiaoping - true father of modern China and the role model of its Zhuxi, or literally "Chairman" - maintained supreme power until at least 1990, age 86, the age Governor Brown would be after a single-term hiatus from his life post-defeat against Clinton two years later. Could he beast the rebel who broke that dynasty, set that record for America, and be the first Democrat since Knox Polk to surrender willingly after half his bounty? Time is likely his enemy, but may tell us differently.

But individual hopes will fuel no more than aggregate hatred. So far, the Democratic leadership has handled its role in opposition poorly. Despite the ravings, often near-uniform, against a president who, while not (yet) the most poorly equipped or most worthy of spite in American history, has seen already questionable polling numbers plummet to depths from which ascent would prove an even more unlikely experience than his impossible coronation. Mere disgust and objection to the thing in itself will not fuel a rebound, and the elections of 2018 are already predetermined to maintain a workable GOP majority in both chambers. It is my belief, thus, that a backlash may be expected in 2020, not so much against Trump as the dreaded and only sustained through fear-of-else policies soundly and firmly rejected in 2012, which has so far been the bulk of what has been enacted. The fruits of the promise of Trump, as much in line with isolationists like Buchanan and the European nativist right and their ilk, has been the degeneration (which, like cancer, would have happened anywise at a later date) of the American empire abroad, and the slowing of the globalisation process equally inexorable. Both these facts will empower the isolationist, protectionist left, a trend already unraveling, whose more populist elements will try to pick up the promise of the infrastructure package as well, where Trump will fail or renege the promised deliverance.

An interesting prospect to consider... a battle of the new, waged by the aged. Regardless if they both lose, in the long run, their spirits will hang over electoral politics in the same manner Goldwater's and McGovern's undeniably have for decades.

A bid against Bernie Sanders in 2020 would be a cross-prosecution of traitors, one alleged and one well underway, of broken promises by the man hailed as a new type of Republican, and the crossing of Trump voters across the line. I firmly believe that both Bernie and Jerry have a sound chance, just as I believe they will not win their primaries. Neither will Ben Sasse, or whoever the never-Trump movement will field, if not in an attempt to impeach by ballot so as to throw an impossible man into the simmer and bubbles to feel the heat, or Governor Kasich or any other who might deem the emperor vulnerable in his own camp and grasp the hilt while in the mind rising to proclaim a moderate conservative message built on optimism and breaking gridlock (the term has gone out of fashion, but in this case out of an overuse for its need rather than the opposite). Mueller will be the Republican, if any, to put an end to the Trump administration. Or, conceivably and in his own words, one of the second amendment people.

You should be... "Thnxful". If not shameless. The denigration - if not dismemberment - of words and terms, including flinging epithets such as this against Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, shows the distortion and de-rationalisation of politics on all fringes, if not also creeping to the centre. Trump may have earned the tongue-in-cheek moniker of the first post-modern president. He will unlikely be the last.

Meanwhile, for those who do not believe that Trumpism, or Kekism in power - an unsafe assumption - is heralding the breakup of American democracy, if indeed not already having it underway, the question of the future of the Democratic party is haunting. A little more than a year past, I all but predicted the end of the GOP in power for ages to come - if not from its seemingly unimpeachable gerrymandered lock on the House of Representatives. For all the failures that underlined that assumption, and the prospect (probably already failed, as repeatedly demonstrated) of a Kekist-Republican predominance for many years to come, the question still remains: Where will the donkey lead us, when it is burdened and clatters into motion again?

Here, there are often as disturbing, if not as powerful signals of a downwards spiral both in intellectual dissonance as well as faith in the democratic process and marketplace of ideas which made America great, whenever that was, and a steadfast rebellion against truth, mainstream media, and politics as a vocation, with its tragically known counterpart on the other side of the conservative-liberal divide. If you could, by the widest stretch and with good conscience, use the latter term. Dissidence is oppression, speech is hatred, words are punches. Jews hounded and issued threats laced with anti-Semitism after departing and denouncing Breitbart News are good Nazi sympathisers. The examples are piling up, the overtures to overtly totalitarian assumptions of a society purified from all that is unsafe, all that which makes discomfort and aggression - in one pitiful slogan, all that is "Fascist Intellectual Thuggery in the service of the Trump/Pence Fascist regime" - very real and very dangerous to the spirit of democracy, if not its institutions and practices. Whoever will lead against the Republican ticket in 2020 will have to either spearhead against this trend, and (wisely) adapt the notion carelessly or graciously put out by Stephen Bannon regarding the failure of the left, or catalyse on it.

As with the example of the often self-promoted King Aerys, the use of Fascist twice in one sentence says more about the user than the arguments that may be perceived beneath it. And wherever it is actually applicable, as George Orwell established in the 1930s - he shortened it, wherever individuals do not self-identity as fascist, to "bully" - it is just as much a case of its users as the people of whom it is used. And just as with their perceived counterparts on the end of a spectrum of increasingly hate-infested and divisive politics, it is a movement whose momentum may be harnessed and used by authoritarian power-seekers also from among the Democrats. No names issued here.

A doable duo (left) when the Republican checks out? Will the grand old man have the affiliation at the time or be the first since Tyler - quite a long time ago, though I hear he also has living grandchildren - to hold, and to leave, the supreme office as a non-partisan?  

The future of the presidency and the nature of the end of the Trump administration disregarded, I would like to say this; the corrosion of the great American experiment, to whatever degree, has been a work of bad people on both sides - on all sides I would say, to escape the somewhat treacherous binary of a two-party system - and while the Grand Old Party since the mid-1990s (in some sense the 1960s) has laid the groundwork for a very confrontationist and ultra-purist form of conservatism - with its seemingly unique contribution to its maybe terrible consequences of the weakening of the American mission undergoing since Truman as well as its more ominous internal subversion, But there is equally good here on the state and local levels as there is filth and bigotry on and outside the shores and jetties of the party of Jackson (as there has been at least since its foundation). There is also something to be said of the terrible bipartisan consensus - yes, today that term might seem a mark of insanity - on the issues which truly catapulted the Trump campaign to office long before it was conceived, and nearly put a self-proclaimed socialist (with victories in Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Idaho, Utah, West Virginia - not the promised land of progressive thinking even in the time of the Populists and Eugene Debs) as its main contender if not its bane. (On the issue of whether Sanders ought to have been, as well as might better have served as nominee than Clinton there is, as we see, plenty to be said, and more tears to be spared from the reading experience of what supposedly happened.) Free trade, migration, increasingly climbing debt ceiling, an arguably un-American American empire stretched and stretching itself and its increasingly strained confidence and resources across the globe - these points of view long since entering the tiresome dictuum of consensus, but have since far longer held long-standing opposition never embodied, or allowed, representation within the national political spectrum for decades, with an unkeen pressure cooker effect once the promise of established politicians have gone so low that the electorate will look at almost any quarter for salvation. (Enter, I say already, the next to carry the banner of repeal and replace the seemingly unshakable order.)

Perhaps it is the electoral system must change - beyond the cause for reforming the Electoral College, which will before long will be taken up by Democratic frontrunners, and equally repelled by Republicans. Perhaps the powers of the supreme office must be curtailed. And perhaps, though unlikely, the powers of "Washington" must retreat from both globe and the vast-enough stretches of the American nation, again to put it allegiance and politics with the citizens of the individual states, now all but geographic swathes allocated a number of equally obscure "electors". This is one point where my views would in principle align with those of traditionalist conservatives, and arguably - I would say - in the interests of many progressives, whose solutions would be better tested with policy directed and funded at the state level and thus for a greater expanse of ideas to be tested, and not merely long discussed and argued and finally lit, and then snuffed out (and if you think Vermont is an extreme hopeless case surely Maine, Minnesota or, well, California would not be strong enough in its popular base to see if it is to be mimicked; indeed, in this case Canada and the neither populous, nor very progressive Saskatchewan proved more decentralised and innovative, to the benefit of much of the country).

Whether the established political clubs, from which you could exclude Sanders and Trump, will take the cue or a new flora of parties, or a new consensus must emerge, we who are younger than the aforementioned couple are like to see, if yet to a price. What is clear is that the fact that both have turned on the savage beast, now being savaged piece by piece, will not take away the current momentum of hate-and-fear-driven rage which may yet carry a true messiah, or a true autocrat (I can ofttimes hardly separate the two) into the position where - now it has been proven, and to the credit of American democracy - he cannot do so much harm, but where there is so much more harm to be done. Ending it on a sudden note and a beacon of obscurity, how about we pick up on President Wilson's proposal from 1884, when he was a doctoral student at Princeton - the first and only such to reach the supreme office, and then under auspicious and perhaps prescient circumstances - and penned a little-known but profound critique of the system which would bear him, and his country, into the workings of world affairs from which it now seems so reluctant and simultaneously audacious to retreat.

There, I've said it.