Godfathered

 

Readers of last week’s column, which highlighted Trump’s bizarre claims about the extraneous Arizona election audit, are now convinced he’s a pathological liar or clinically insane. After this week’s, none will doubt he’s a would-be Mafia Don. Capo di tutti capi. Who controls a nationwide criminal organization intent on taking down democracy the way the Sicilian Mafia took down the few brave police and prosecutors who stood in their way.

(Having just spent time there, seeing memorials, everywhere, to those selfless resistors and the pride Sicilians deservedly take in finally standing up to the mob, we hope for comparable monuments in a future America. Assuming she has a future.)

Despite Republican/Trumpist/Foxian efforts to disappear it, some Americans might remember January 6. Some may even have sought legitimate, Fox/Newsmax/OAN-free sources of information about it, and discovered how Trump nearly accomplished overturning a legitimate, fraud-free election, by way of corrupt insiders and orchestrated insurrection. And the extent to which prominent Rs abetted the sedition. And still are. 

So, though its Republican members would like to rub it out, we have a Congressional Commission looking in. Subpoenas have been issued to Trump’s henchmen and consiglieri, as well they should. Because Congressional oversight is how our democracy protects itself from despotism. It’s in the Constitution – that hoary document which, while claiming willingness to die for it, today’s Republicans and their draft-dodging leader are setting on fire to light their torches of demographic resentment.

Overseeing the Executive is our Constitution’s second-most important safeguard. The Declarative Dads got several things wrong (slavery, women, Electoral College, too-skewed Senate), but, familiar with the tyranny of monarchical power, that part they got right. Without it, dictatorship is inevitable, and getting all too close.

Venerated parchment has no power of its own. Absent universal, non-partisan buy-in, calligraphic words are vapor. We’ve seen how close we came to a failed republic when Trump put lawless lackeys in charge of critical institutions. And we’ve heard the Republican hos and hums that followed.

Don Trumpleone doesn’t buy in, nor do members of his party in Congress. Or out in the states. So, despite lacking the power of office, but supported by his 24/7 network of media wiseguys, he made an offer they couldn’t refuse: Defy the subpoenas. Put concrete shoes on the rule of law. Shove it through smashed windows. Reveal yourselves as an anarchic crime family. It worked during impeachment, consequence-free. The party of law, patriotism, family values, and fiscal responsibility: making words meaningless; getting away with it.

Defy them they did. Which bids us to remind their cheerers-on, in case they’ve forgotten, that when a Republican Congress blamed Hillary Clinton for all our country’s woes, she, believing in law and order, answered their subpoenas, sat for eleven hours straight while trumped-up charges kangarooed her way; amounting, in the end, to nothing.

Contempt of Congress is a punishable crime, as it must be. This time, actual crimes were committed. Trump’s Department of Justice, upon which the responsibility of prosecution falls, was headed by an obsequious lieutenant, willing to lie to America, who considered his job protecting the godfather, rather than the law.

Now it’s Merrick Garland, a man of unquestionable integrity. Understanding and committed to preserving the independent role of his Department, unlike his conscience-free, Trumpophilic predecessors, it’s likely he’ll see justice served. And, accordingly, that our democracy and respect for its laws are preserved. 

At least we hope so. If not, it’s over. Foxotrumpification has brought us closer than the founders imagined possible. Not just politicians, and not just their disingenuous repetition of Trump’s Big Lie.

With deliberately incendiary language, amoral Foxfather Tucker Carlson, in it for money and the orgastic thrill of power over the incurably incurious, called on viewers to attack school boards for requiring masks. Criminal child abuse, he called it. They did as commanded. Such malleable idiocy is inimical to democracy and an embarrassment to long-gone Republicanism. It’s only one example of what they’ve become. 

More powerful than Congressional oversight, fair and free elections are the ultimate bulwark against authoritarianism. While proclaimed “conservatives” cheer in deadly silence, red states are close to obliterating that, too. With ever more egregious and blatantly race-based gerrymandering, along with phony laws aimed at non-existent fraud, the Trumpist gang has ordered a hit on majority rule. A carefully-calibrated coup. 

Without resistance from within, of which there’s little left, the Don and his transcontinental crime family will confirm how powerless our Constitution really is, when so few on the right actually believe in it.

But don’t take it from me. Take it from one of their most-targeted truth-tellers.

Oversights And Oversight

My next newspaper column:

What an amazing week, the one when Trump’s bone spurs didn’t keep him from Vietnam and Michael Cohen spurred the bones of Trumpworld. Our reprise begins with Trump’s behavior around dictators: 

What world leader takes a high-profile trip across the seas, after his or her people had been working on an important international agreement, without having it nailed down? Or, putting it another way, who but a delusional narcissist would believe his deal-making skills were so phenomenal that he could single-handedly hammer one out, in a day or two, with a murderous dictator known for his creative methods of offing relatives?  

Well, he tried. Called Kim a great leader, a great guy, said they “like each other.” (Last time, it was “fell in love.”) Took his word, that of a malevolent tyrant who surely knows what goes on in his torture chambers, that he, Kim, knew nothing about the merciless, slow assassination of American Otto Warmbier. 

Buttering up the person across the table can be a useful tactic, but this? A despotic starver and punisher of his own people, who demands absolute fealty, on pain of death? Trump also takes Putin’s word over our intelligence agencies’, even as Russia openly called for Kim not to give up his nukes. And Putin’s emissary was in Hanoi. 

Fudging the fiasco, Trump said “walking away” was smart. After such embarrassing failure, it surely was, but it didn’t erase the travesty by which Kim made Trump look weak and ineffectual, lost nothing, and won another cancelation of US-South Korea war games. Last year Trump announced the nuclear threat from NoKo was NoMo: “Sleep better at night,” he beamed. This failure was over denuclearization. Fake news back then, from its primary purveyor. 

After Trump’s decampment, North Korea called him a liar. And we’ve just learned Kim is buffing the missile site he’d promised to dismantle. Played like a janggu.  

On, now, to Michael Cohen, starting with obvious questions for his Republican interrogators: If your point is that he’s a liar, cheat, and felon, what are your thoughts on the man who employed him for a decade? (The RNC did, too, for a while.) Although you never will, is it inconceivable that a person who rolled over for a crook found a conscience? What does Cohen, already heading to federal prison for years, have to gain by lying now? 

Trump called Cohen a rat, possibly ill-advised mob-speak for a guy who squeals. There are prior examples of testimony before Congress from convicted felons that blew doors open on criminal enterprises for which they worked, leading to bipartisan action. But that was when both parties had integrity.  

The extent to which Michael Cohen is deemed credible depends, we know, on one’s political leanings and ability to compartmentalize. For example, Trump bleated that everything Cohen said is a lie except the “no collusion” part. Per usual, Trump was lying about Cohen’s statement, which was not that there was no collusion; only that he’d not witnessed it. Suspected it, though, and provided reasons. 

No Republican attempted to exculpate Trump from Cohen’s disclosures; how could they? For that matter, excepting Justin Amash, none showed a molecule of interest in exploring the possibility of criminal activities by an American “president.” A dais of deplorables, it was.  

How likely is it that Trump’s career as a lying conman, bully, and swindler ended when he took office? It’s public record: Bankruptcies, stiffing contractors. Scam businesses, racist housing policies. Tax evasion, insurance fraud. When his tax records are made public, we’ll understand why he wanted them hidden. 

Because Trump’s crimes are self-evident, Michael Cohen’s testimony was mostly unsurprising, but, in this political climate, it was undeniably brave. What was surprising was the incoherence of Republican inquisitors. Repeating irrelevant questions, cherry-picking the record, flinging discredited falsehoods, they even whined the hearing lasted too long. The guys who chased Hillary Clinton for eight years, whose investigations of Trump when they were the majority were being exposed, before their eyes, as vaporous shams. That week, we saw what Constitutionally-mandated oversight looks like, when the majority and its chairman have rectitude. We’ll see more.  

A constantly lying “president” can’t expect to be believed when he proclaims innocence, nor should he be. So, off he went to CPAC, whipping up resentment, disgorging a record-breaking torrent of lies, spewing unprintable obscenities to the adoring, “conservative,” “family-values,” USA-USA-chanting throng.

[Image source]