(from Literary Hub at lithub.com, a site that will daily email you good stuff)
Why the President
Must Be Impeached
THE SWAMP IS NOT GOING TO DRAIN ITSELF
By Rebecca Solnit
The other evening, when the air quality had become too poor to go
outside because my state was burning, sitting in a window facing another of
those apocalyptic red suns going down we’d gotten used to here, on the week
that the president unleashed more coal on the world and thus more of the
climate change driving the trouble that afflicted oceans and upper atmospheres
and, while the wildfires burned the lungs of asthmatic children, I turned again
to the chaos and destruction emanating from the White House.
The
commission of a crime is not normally the coverup for another crime, but if they
keep them coming, it’s hard to keep your eye on any one or keep track of them
all, or so it seemed on that day last week when the president had tweeted out
some white supremacist bullshit about
South African land expropriation, which maybe distracted people from the fact
that about 36 hours earlier his fixer and lawyer had named him as a
coconspirator in a felony; it was one of hundreds of racist dogwhistles and shouts
he’d broadcast while some people waited for evidence that he had said the
n-word as though his constant insults to black people from Maxine Waters to
LeBron James to Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis and his attacks on
Latinos and immigrants and voting rights were not enough, for it was also a day
that the White House had, with a tweet, turned the murder of a young white woman
into an attack on undocumented immigrants even though the alleged murderer’s
immigration status was unclear and there had been a more recent and more
spectacular murder by a native-born straight white man, who killed his pregnant
wife and daughters and dumped the little girls’ bodies in oil tanks belonging
to his employer, Anandarko Petroleum, that no one made into an indictment of
that murderer’s category, because collective punishment is never for straight
white men (and should not be for anybody).
But you
couldn’t stay focused on the racism alone with the many kinds of destruction
which also, at times, felt like a distraction from the crimes, and that the law
was getting closer to the crimes was clear, as was the president’s fear, for he
had put out another of his all-caps tweet at 1am the night before about
collusion and witch-hunts, those constant refrains of his, because his lies
were the only transparent thing about his administration.
He was a man
who was forever lying and whose lies could not help but point toward the truth
he was anxious about trying to cover up, incapable of leaving alone, like a
murderer returning to the crime scene, like a dog returning to its vomit, like
an elephant in the room, stomping and roaring (and I often thought of him
as being something like a bull elephant that state of enraged excitement called
musth, with his staff trying to herd him away from his most destructive
impulses while fearing getting trampled, for the news was forever full of
stories of their attempts to gingerly dissuade, to nudge away, to redirect, to
correct, and of all the ways they worked around him, and the fact that he is
ignorant, incompetent, and often out of touch with what is legal and eager to
violate the law, a state that would disqualify any other office holder, and
even his statement after the Cohen verdict, that “I have seen it many times. I
have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping and it
almost ought to be illegal,” was not only the language of gangsters—“Trump goes
full Gotti” Vanity Fair put
it—but oblivious about why presidents shouldn’t talk like gansters about
opposition to cooperation with the federal government, though that remark too
had no obvious repercussion).
It was the
week that the Washington Post got tired of calling his lies misstatements and
untruths and got down to saying lie in an article also
noting that he had committed, by their count 4,229 lies during his time in
office, but what they meant by lie in
that article was a whole chain of evolving lies denying categorically
that there had been a Stormy Daniels affair and payoff, to claims he hadn’t
known about it, and various twisted versions from Michael Cohen, and it all
culminated in the desperate inanity of Rudy Giuliani on August 19th saying
that “truth isn’t truth,” because if you sabotage the facts and the record and
the history enough you end up in nihilistic incoherence, in which nothing
means anything, and this seemed to be Giuliani’s specialty, with a sprinkle of
pepper and spray of spit, at this stage of his career.
But the layering of it: it was hard to pay attention to while the
Education Department was trying to destroy education and undermine Title IX
protections when the Housing Department was trying to destroy public housing
while the Environmental Protection Agency aggressively pursued the opposite of
protection for the environment while the Secretary of the Interior tried to
destroy public lands and attack endangered species, and the Department of
Transportation was attacking vehicle efficiency standards that served
everyone’s interest.
Even atop
that rampage on all fronts there were ornamental flourishes and signs of
malicious idiocy meandering in all directions, such as the legal counsel at the
Department of Transportation, Andrew Kloster, formerly of the Heritage
Foundation, tweeting on August 22nd that a Hollywood actress was a
succubus melding together satanism and the Jewish mystical tradition of
Kabbalah in one loopy tweet, a perfect marriage of
antisemitism and misogyny.
That single tweet from Kloster was the kind of thing that used to
fuel a news cycle or be a weeklong scandal—I can still remember the racist and
sexist thing Nixon and Ford’s secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz said and was
fired for in 1976, long before he was jailed for tax evasion. But the Trump
administration: it was like snowflakes falling atop snowflakes, each covering
up the layer below and sometimes it was an avalanche no one could keep up with
and perhaps the answer was not sifting but a snow plow.
Though winter
was itself perhaps a strange metaphor for these people intent on melting the
poles, since, after all, the Cohen verdict had come the day before the news
that “some of the oldest ice in the
arctic is now breaking apart,” and also this week the nominee for
head of NASA, Jim Morhand, waffled about whether humans were driving climate
change, and also climate change research proposals in the Department of the
Interior were being reviewed by a character named Steve Howke, who as climate journalist David
Roberts pointed out, seemed
to have as his sole qualification being an old high-school football buddy of
Secretary Zinke’s from Whitefish, Montana.
It was hard
to remember, with the over-the-top corruption of Michael Cohen and Paul
Manafort frothing up like a badly poured beer, to keep track of the
conspiratorial roles of Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos, long after
everyone had forgotten all about Carter Page, who’d been reported as a foreign
agent by US intelligence while he was toddling about Russia and maybe
making some secret deals with
the oil company Rosneft, or Michael Flynn, who’d been the first to be fired for
corruption, and who’d been convicted for lying to the FBI about his contacts
with Russia, but whose sentence was being held up because he might have further
use for the Special Counsel investigation.
And it seemed
that everyone had forgotten all about Rex Tillerson, the former secretary
of state, fired by tweet way back in March, Tillerson who was
himself an oil titan heading Exxon which had been violating the Magnitsky
sanctions against Russia to make deals, and somehow too Jared
Kushner had disappeared, as had the story about the secret direct communications
channel he’d tried to open up to Russia and discussed in a
meeting with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, who later said on Russian
TV that when it comes to his meetings with Trump officials, “the list is so
long that I’m not going to be able to go through it in 20 minutes,” the same
Kislyak who’d been photographed with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in
the Oval Office, by their own state photographer, in that meeting that US
journalists were barred from, the one that produced those photographs of Trump
looking beseeching and bewildered at the two men laughing at him because they’d
just tricked him into revealing classified secrets.
That meeting was held the day after Trump had fired FBI director
James Comey on May 9, 2017, at first offering preposterous reasons for the
firing—more lies—then admitting that he’d fired him to obstruct justice, the
justice of an investigation into the apparent collusion with Russia that he is
so desperately eager to cover up and in so doing keeps revealing. In his
infinite undiscipline, he was only able to stick to his coverup and stay away
from his preoccupation for a couple of days before he told NBC’s Lester Holt,
the day after groveling before those Putin appointees in the White House, “I
was going to fire Comey… And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to
myself, I said, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up
story….” but who thinks about Comey now, when the blizzard of news makes
visibility so limited beyond a single week’s events?
Those Magnitsky sanctions, which were named after a Russian lawyer
Putin had jailed, tortured and killed for daring to investigate how the
oligarchs were stealing from the Russian state and the people were apparently
part of the topic at the meeting in Trump Tower on June 9 of 2016, along with
the promise of stolen campaign information on the Trump campaign’s rival, and
then the president drafted a coverup about the topic of the meeting with the
help of his assistant Hope Hicks, the one who was dating Rob Porter, the guy
who had to leave the White House because both of his ex-wives testified about
his domestic violence abuse of them.
Though domestic violence wasn’t really an exotic species in the
White House, since among the men charged with it were Trump himself by his
first wife, campaign chair and advisor Steve Bannon, another campaign chair,
Cory Lewandowski, and Andrew Puzder, who had to withdraw his nomination as
labor secretary when old charges surfaced, though of course Porter wasn’t
canned because he beat women but because the charges became publicly known,
since the Administration was so okay with domestic violence that it withdrew it
as grounds for refugee status, condemning myriad refugee women fleeing
murderous spouses to be sent back and maybe be murdered, but that got lost in
the mayhem.
Even ordinary citizens seemed to have forgotten the epic of—what
shall we call it, baby gulags, child torture, or what they called it,
incarceration in “tender age camps,” gratuitous family destruction, contempt
for human life when it wasn’t white human life, because the fury in June about
the imprisoned children and babies had faded, and of course the right-wingers
who claimed to be against abortion because life was sacred had said nothing or
gloated about foreign-born infants being damaged intentionally and irrevocably:
the ones who had believed that Hillary Clinton was part of a child trafficking
ring in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizzeria that didn’t actually have a
basement didn’t seem to care about actual children, since they were the same
people who claimed that the children gunned down in various school shootings
since Sandy Hook were “crisis actors.”
Of course
believing in the reality of mass death by gun might undermine the right’s
advocacy of unfettered arms proliferation domestically, the cause of the
gun-lobby backed NRA that turned out, also, to have been infiltrated by a
Russian agent who introduced senior officials to the wife of another oligarch
in Russia—because NRA officials were just one group in a mass pilgrimage of
right-wingers from Richard Spenser to Rand Paul to Moscow, the mecca of white
supremacy where David Duke had lived for years, the same David Duke who
had thanked Julian Assangefor
handing Trump the presidency, and there’s some way I could probably loop back
from Assange to his visitor Roger Stone or to Putin and also to sex crimes, but
that’s probably a long enough tour of the thicket or the swamp or whatever
filthy thing we just swam across or whatever avalanche of foulness we hacked
our way through.
I remembered this sense of barrage from early in the George W.
Bush Administration, before 9/11, when they’d gone after environmental
regulations and a number of other things that protect the vulnerable all at
once, and it was so overwhelming that it was hard to know which to react to
first or how to react at all. I’d known that we’d face it again if Trump was
elected, and the one thing that remained perfectly clear to me through it all
was that you couldn’t cure much of anything by treating the symptoms, and we
had to go after the cause which meant uprooting the whole illegitimate amateur
criminal syndicate.
It’s why I’m
an advocate of pursuing impeachment, which is certainly unrealizable if we do
nothing and possible if we press for it with all we’re worth, and whether or
not it’s possible a lot of good things could happen on the road there.
It
certainly seems a lot more realistic and widely supported, since last Tuesday’s
revelations, by people who understand what it means that the president is now,
atop all the rest of his abominations, an unindicted coconspirator in some
felonies (because apparently being a profiteer from emoluments specifically
forbidden by the Constitution, as well as the beneficiary of a fatally
corrupted election whose corruption he colluded in, was not enough). And a very
nice new impeachment project has been launched, called By
the People, that looks, to me, very promising.
We got here by disengagement, the disengagement of the progressive
majority; we get out of this fix by engagement. The path to impeachment is one of
engaging civil society in taking back our country from the crooks, in pressing
politicians to take a clear stand on this regime, and in setting a precedent
that we will not accept a corrupt, unaccountable administration, not this one,
not any that may follow. It is how you dig your ice axe in on the slippery
slope. At this juncture sitting on the sidelines is acceptance of irrevocable
destruction of rights, rules, and even the biosphere.
Darkness has fallen as I’ve written, and tomorrow will dawn again
in smoke. But the urgency is clearly visible from here.
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