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GELFAND’S WORLD - Sometimes it takes a lot of words to develop a logical discussion. But this one is simpler. It’s just two questions:
1) The president’s approach to foreign issues – an unprovoked attack on Venezuela and continued threats to take Greenland -- are evidence of bizarre and twisted thinking. When are the major television networks going to start reporting on Trump’s craziness as a news story? The president’s mental debility is not only worthy of notice, it is obviously the most important news story there is. So why aren’t they reporting on it appropriately?
2) When are elected Republicans going to put a stop to Trump’s crazy actions, threats, and late-night rants by telling him clearly that he will be removed from office by impeachment and a two-third’s vote of the Senate to convict if he persists?
Pretty simple, yes?
Yet we’re not seeing and hearing these obvious responses.
Note: People like to talk about invoking the 25th Amendment, but impeachment followed by conviction in the Senate is the more effective approach legally. That doesn’t mean that we can have any faith in Republicans to do the right thing, but we should be asking them to do so. Notice that they don’t have to go through with an impeachment, they just have to explain to Trump that he has to back off or he will be gone. I notice that at least one congressional Republican is now moving in this direction.
So that’s it. Not very complicated, and the answers are probably as easy as the questions. The major television networks and newspapers should report the truth because that is supposedly what they do, and because the failure to fight incipient fascism is a dangerous path indeed.
We might continue briefly with talk about what motivates the president. There may be one or more straightforward explanations for his behavior. One is that Trump continues willfully to do damage to American strength and prestige, while attacking our economy, because that has been his program all along. Whether it is due to Putin having compromising material on Trump, or whether it is something else, the results are the same. Alternatively, Trump has identified a couple or three American issues – illegal drug imports, failure to limit immigration, a persistent foreign trade imbalance – and he has then overreacted and misunderstood and basically acted like a not-very-bright six-year-old. In so doing, he has ignored the limits of our legal system and our Constitutional law because to a six-year-old mind, such limits are merely the targets of his latest tantrum.
Addendum
To quote the late Gilda Radner, “It’s always something.” Today’s something is the latest Donald Trump remark, which you can read about here. In brief, Trump points out that because he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize, he is no longer obliged to make peace a top priority. In other words, because Trump feels slighted, he gets to ignore diplomatic realities and what is actually in our national interest. He of course phrases the tantrum a little differently (claiming that he will be acting in the American interest), but the unadulterated reality is that American belligerence towards Greenland would be a disaster both for Europe and for the United States. Once again, a three-year-old response to the way that normal adults behave (is he regressing from his previous six?).
So, here’s one more thing that the news media and the Senate should be saying to Trump: Recognition and adoration are things that you don’t always get, even when you do good works, but you have to try to do the best for your country in any case. Instead, you are striving for recognition and in so striving, you are doing very bad things. Stop it.
And one last thought. There is always another funding crisis and government shutdown over the next horizon. Let’s think briefly about how Democrats in the Senate might respond the next time around.
I’ll start with one approach to all those threats coming from the White House: When we get into the next round of negotiation about a government shutdown, let the Democrats take notice of each new Trump threat (maybe it’s that perennial about criminal investigation of some elected Democrat, or the threat to withhold funding from blue states). Let the Democrats meet briefly, announce that the latest threat is serious, and further announce that they will need to consider that threat for at least a day or two (or maybe a week) and are therefore unable to meet with Republicans to discuss ending the shutdown. Trump can continue to bluster or he can negotiate an end to the next shutdown. He shouldn’t be allowed to do both.
Here is another demand that Democrats should make. The Democrats shall not vote for the new agreement while Kristi Noem is still employed by the federal government. In addition, Democrats should push strongly for an end to the ICE raids, and one approach is to refuse to fund ICE except under carefully defined conditions. We can expect Trump and the Republican leadership to respond with the usual round of tantrums, at which point the Democrats go back into caucus and don’t negotiate for another few days.
In other words, use tools you have to negotiate reforms that are agreed to by a strong majority of Americans.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
