How to Get Rid of Trump

By David K. Shipler

                “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” So said Ralph Waldo Emerson, as recalled by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It is an admonition that ought to be placed as a screen saver on the computers of all the eager Democrats in the House of Representatives who are licking their chops at the prospect of impeaching President Trump. A king who survives an attempt on his throne can be wild with vengeance, especially when backed by zealous toadies and street fighters.

                  If the report by special counsel Robert Mueller turns out to be an anti-climax after nearly two years of hype, Republicans who have circled the wagons around Trump will probably remain in place. As long as they don’t see Trump as a political liability, he’s safe, for impeachment is a legal-political hybrid. Without a smoking gun linking him explicitly to Russian manipulation of the 2016 election, hardly any House Republicans would vote for articles of impeachment, and the Republican-led Senate would fall far short of the two-thirds needed for conviction. The Republican Party of 2019 is a very different animal from the Republican Party of 1974, when its leaders, Senator Barry Goldwater among them, told Richard Nixon to resign or be impeached and convicted.

 Therefore, two other scenarios for dumping Trump seem more conceivable:

                 1. A Democratic electoral sweep in 2020 decisive enough to force the Republican Party into a cowering fit of reform.

This is the preferable outcome. If Democrats take the White House and the Senate, and keep or increase their majority in the House, Republicans might regroup as a more centrist, responsibly conservative movement that conducts serious debates over serious issues. Instead of rightist radicalism that favors the destruction of government, a reborn Republican Party might try to govern on behalf of a broader array of Americans.

America Without Heroes

By David K. Shipler

                There is a vacuum in America. Where leaders of virtue should reside, citizens find only a void, which echoes with yearning.

                So we have to invent heroes, and we rely on myth-making. These days, whenever a decent Republican dies, bringing that endangered species nearer to extinction, the firmament is flooded with rhapsodies of adoration: first, John McCain, now George H.W. Bush, their reputations amplified as counterpoints to Donald Trump. As the outpouring for Bush has shown this week, we love them more after they’re gone. They are never as pure in life as in death.

The hunger for heroes is one reason for Trump’s popularity among a core of supporters whose cheers cannot be dampened by his insults, his lies, his corruption, his racism, his misogyny, his impulsiveness, his ignorance, his hatreds, or his damage to the prized institutions of democracy. We are a needy people, and a large minority of us, it turns out, are excited by a large, brash personality who crashes through convention and waves his fist in the faces of more than half of his compatriots, plus most of the globe.

This infatuation with Trump’s autocratic bullying reveals a deep fault in American society. Coming when the country faces neither war, depression, rising crime, nor widespread terrorism, the readiness to be afraid is remarkable. Bedraggled families seeking refuge are “invaders.” Democrats threaten “mob rule.” Whites and men are victims. The world’s biggest economy is at the mercy of foreign countries. Imagine if the United States confronted actual risk, how vulnerable we would be to demagoguery—which can be a real danger in itself.

The search for heroes, then, can imperil security. It can let loose toxic impulses. It can undermine the constitutional system, which regards traditional institutions and venerable procedures, not individuals, as the protectors of the country’s freedoms. It can flit from one character to another, conferring Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame on the person of the moment.

The Shifting Threshold of Outrage

By David K. Shipler

            Fifty years ago this week, Americans who had believed their leaders’ optimistic lies were stunned by the Tet Offensive, North Vietnam’s lightning assault on scores of South Vietnamese towns and cities. An enemy squad even managed to enter the US Embassy compound in Saigon, giving Hanoi and its Vietcong surrogates a propaganda victory—but not the military victory they had sought. Their forces took heavy casualties as the Americans and South Vietnamese pounded them back.

            Furthermore, the expectations of the North Vietnamese commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, were not fulfilled. As he later revealed, he had predicted that the South Vietnamese army would collapse, the civilian population would rise up in rebellion, and the United States would scale back sharply.

            Yet the American public was not struck by the collision between Hanoi’s goals and the results on the ground. Rather, what pushed much of the country to the threshold of disillusionment and outrage was the collision between American officials’ rosy assessments and the North’s capacity to mount countrywide attacks. Just weeks before the Tet Offensive, the US commander, General William Westmoreland, declared boldly, “We have reached an important point, when the end begins to come into view.” Then the disastrous reality came into view—the prospect of a grinding stalemate at best. It was a psychological turning point in the war.

            That threshold of outrage has risen in recent decades; it now takes a higher dose of deception and corruption to generate sufficient disgust to produce change. President Trump’s chronic lying—he uttered some 2,000 blatant falsehoods and misleading claims during his first year in office—cost him nothing during his campaign. Nor did his boast on tape about grabbing women “by the pussy.” His obvious racism—commending some “fine people” who marched with white supremacists in Charlottesville, and preferring immigration from Norway instead of “shithole” countries in Africa—has not crushed his support among Republicans in Congress or his core of voters.

The Moral Vacuum in Tribal Politics

By David K. Shipler

            To anyone naïve enough to think that sexual decency should be high on a list of virtues, Donald Trump’s news conference just before last year’s second presidential debate was a puzzling scene. Days after the disclosure of the “Access Hollywood” tape that had caught Trump bragging about his predatory exploits, four women who had been victims of sexual assault gave him their support. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump had said on the tape. “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. Do anything.” Nevertheless, the four women sat with him behind a table, endorsed him, and assailed the Clintons.

            Juanita Broaddrick claimed to have been raped by Bill Clinton. Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey said he had groped them. Kathy Shelton’s grievance was aimed instead at Hillary Clinton, who had been assigned by the court as defense attorney for a man who had raped Shelton when she was 12. Her resentment was misplaced, since Clinton was plainly fulfilling the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a defendant’s right to counsel.

 Shelton and the others might have been expected to see sexual crimes as transcendent, well above politics. That they clearly did not—that they backed Trump in the face of detailed accusations against him by a dozen women who were brave enough to give their names—was as much a commentary on the state of social morality as Democrats’ impulse had been to wish away the allegations against Bill Clinton.

Rumors and stories about Clinton were in the air before his first election to the presidency, but they lacked the specificity that would have confronted liberals with a hard choice. Although Paula Jones sued Clinton in 1994, two years before his reelection, her accusations didn’t sway many voters. And his sexual liaisons with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office didn’t become public until after the election. Even then, his supporters generally opposed his impeachment by the Republican-led House and were relieved when the Senate failed to convict him.

“Sexual misconduct,” it seems, is outrageous only when committed by a member of your opposing political tribe. When it’s your own guy, the accusations are fabricated, concocted by conspiracy, discredited by the character of the accuser, undermined by the delay in reporting, or just ambiguous enough to be dismissed as a misunderstanding.

Lies Beget Lying

By David K. Shipler

            If you lie to your children, they will learn to lie to you. If you lie to your spouse, you will create a family culture of falsehood in which he or she will, unless strongly honest, lie to you as well. If you lie to your employees, don’t expect them to pass uncomfortable truths up the chain of command. And if, as president, you lie to the country and perhaps to your staff, many of them will breathe the miasma of fabrication that emanates from the top, and will surely assume that lying is an acceptable way of life in the White House.

            So President Trump’s dismissal of Michael Flynn for lying is like a projection of Trump’s own personality flaw onto his subordinate. It is worth noting that this happened only when the Flynn offense became public, courtesy of the “dishonest” Washington Post, which Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he hadn’t seen—a lie in itself, given that he’d been told two weeks earlier by the Justice Department about the contents of wiretapped conversations between Flynn and the Russian ambassador.

Does anyone think that the then president-elect did not authorize those conversations, that Flynn just flew solo without consulting with Trump? Is it possible that Trump ordered, or at least approved, Flynn’s discussing the post-Ukraine sanctions with the ambassador, perhaps obliquely suggesting that they could be eased by the incoming administration? Then, in the poisonous atmosphere of the West Wing after the inauguration, might Trump have wanted the substance of those discussions held closely, even from Vice President Mike Pence, who is no Russia fan? So, was Flynn just following his boss’s wishes in telling Pence that sanctions had not been discussed?

And by the way, shouldn’t the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency know that the Russian ambassador’s phone calls are monitored by the National Security Agency? Did Flynn figure on Trump’s having his back if transcripts were ever leaked? Note that the day after asking for Flynn’s resignation, Trump called him “a wonderful man” who was treated unfairly by the “fake media” and outed by leakers who committed a crime.

You see, Mr. President, this is what compulsive lying at the top leads to. Everything down below begins to look like a lie as well.

My Composite Candidate

By David K. Shipler

            If only we could Photoshop politicians, taking a keen and honest eye from one, a civil and courteous tongue from another, a brain from one who happened to have one, and a heart from another to place into the one whose vacant soul echoes with unfeeling arrogance. If we could just move parts around with a cursor to combine into the ideal presidential candidate, we could relax instead of grinding our teeth until November. Imagine what a relief it would be if we didn’t have to wish that Bernie were more sensible and Hillary more credible, that Ted had learned something beneficial at Princeton, and that The Donald’s mouth didn’t have to be washed out with soap.

            So just for fun, permit me to irritate almost everybody who reads this by finding in each candidate some quality that would be suitable in a president, then assembling the array of characteristics into a composite.

            First, let’s combine the populist appeals of Trump and Sanders, but without their simplistic rhetoric. We leave behind Sanders’s one-note scapegoating of “Wall Street” so our perfect candidate has room for nuance and sophistication, which will come later in the construction process. Of course we lose Trump’s bigotry, misogyny, bullying, incitement to violence, and ignorance about the American system’s inconvenient obstacles to ruling by fiat.

            Absent those undesirable qualities, you might ask, what’s left? Good question. What’s left is both men’s instinctive talent for touching the legitimate frustrations and disaffections of large numbers of citizens who have suffered a raw deal or have seen others getting kicked. What’s left is both men’s knack for voicing the resentments about a government and an economy that have failed to protect those who have lost their homes, their reliable employment, and their sense of security and well-being.

The Great Manipulator and the Velcro Candidate

By David K. Shipler

            If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, as his admirers enjoyed saying, then Donald Trump is the Great Manipulator, with an uncanny eye for the voters’ nerves of fear and yearning. If criticisms slid off Reagan as if he were coated with Teflon, every one sticks to Hillary Clinton as if she were covered in Velcro. If Trump gets better at what he does, and if Clinton doesn’t unglue the labels of dishonesty and opportunism, the election could be close.

            Trump is dangerously clever at reading the electorate, at least the part of it whose anti-government anger and economic despair have been energized by Republican radicals who now wail as Trump rides the wave that they produced. Talk-show personality Glenn Beck, who incites furious extremism, compared Trump to Hitler in 1929 and warned Americans against voting in anger. “When you’re really angry, you don’t make good decisions,” Beck told a rally for Ted Cruz. “Don’t drive drunk, don’t vote angry.” That’s sage advice from a model of calm reason.

            But if Trump grabs the nomination, it would not be amazing to see him temper his insults, smooth his sharp edges somewhat, and stress the virtue of “flexibility,” a word he used a few times in the last debate. His bare-knuckled bullying appeals to some but repels others, even those who want a tough-guy act in the White House. If he managed to time his evolution deftly, he might just appeal to the wishful thinking of Republicans who want to beat Clinton at all costs. And costs there would be.

Obama and Race

By David K. Shipler

             On Monday’s holiday, Barack and Michelle Obama visited an elementary school in Washington, DC, filled backpacks with books for kids, helped make planters for the school’s vegetable garden, and celebrated the service of AmeriCorps mentors. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day passed with no speech by the first African-American president about race in America. Nor, in his final State of the Union address last week, did Obama include a discussion of the state of race relations, despite the strains and fault lines that have grown more visible in recent years.

            On matters of race, he has not used his bully pulpit very well. Not that he’s ignored the topic: Very occasionally over his two terms, he’s offered some of the most eloquent and insightful commentary heard from any president, usually at a ceremonial or tragic moment. He has initiated a series of concrete policies aimed at improving the lot of minorities, including a task force on policing that might help counter bias in uniform.

But what he has not done, for whatever reasons, is spark and guide the kind of ongoing, searching introspection that the country needs. This is a loss for all of us.

            Bill Clinton, a president whose acute sensibilities were shaped by his upbringing as a white kid in Arkansas during the Civil Rights Movement, organized a national conversation on race during his second term.