Donald Trump Is Getting Off Easy
Donald Trump Is Getting Off Easy
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When the seemingly endless Russiagate investigation finally fizzled over the
summer, the long-awaited impeachment of Donald Trump seemed to be a dead
letter. Liberal cable news shifted from its two-year immersion in the
Russia conspiracy trap (Masha Gessen)with occasional interruptions for
mass shootings, hurricanes, war scares, presidential tweets and other
mattersto its next populace-paralyzing fixation: the big money, major party
candidate-centered quadrennial presidential electoral extravaganza.
Then came UkraineGate, like a bolt from the sky, courtesy of a Central
Intelligence Agency officer, other national security operatives and the
non-Fox corporate media. In the last week of September, the world learned
that on July 25, 2019, the very day (ironically enough) that special
Russiagate prosecutor Robert Mueller gave his woefully unimpressive
testimony to Congress, Trump called the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr
Zelenskiy. During his conversation, Trump used the threat of withholding
American military assistance to pressure Zelenskiy into helping Trumps
ridiculous personal lawyer, the fake diplomat Rudy Giuliani, dig up
political dirt on Trumps perceived 2020 presidential rival, former vice
president Joe Biden.
As of now, it appears likely that Trump will be impeached by the U.S. House
of Representatives for this technically criminal abuse of power (compounded
by Trumps subsequent illegal intimidation of a whistleblower) before the
end of the year. It is unlikely but not unimaginable that Trump will be
removed from office by the U.S. Senate early next year.
What shall we make of it on the portside? Its been hard not to enjoy
watching Trump and his defenders squirm. Surely there is no public
humiliation too great for this racist, sexist, ecocidal and fascist menace
who befouls and endangers the world with his presence in its most powerful
office.
No left worthy of the label would stand in the way of the constitutional
defenestration of the neofascist malignancy. This isnt the oligarchic
political class trying to investigate, impeach and remove a President Bernie
Sanders for trying to tax the rich and/or slash the Pentagon budget to pay
for universal single-payer national health insurance and/or a Green Jobs
program. This is about a leading faction in that class-wielding
constitutional powers to consider indicting and perhaps even expelling a
neofascist menace.
Still, an impeachment that is all or mainly over Trumps Zelesnskiy call
threatens to give Trump implicit exoneration for numerous other and bigger,
impeachable crimes and abuses. The progressive activist Roots Action
website gives the following daunting list of offenses for which Trump
deserves impeachment: violation of Constitution on domestic emoluments;
violation of Constitution on foreign emoluments; incitement of violence;
interference with voting rights; discrimination based on religion; illegal
war; illegal threat of nuclear war; abuse of pardon power; obstruction of
justice; politicizing prosecutions; collusion against the United States with
a foreign government; failure to reasonably prepare for or respond to
Hurricanes Harvey and Maria; separating children and infants from families;
illegally attempting to influence an election; tax fraud and public
misrepresentation; assaulting freedom of the press; supporting a coup in
Venezuela; unconstitutional declaration of emergency; instructing Border
Patrol to violate the law; refusal to comply with subpoenas; declaration of
emergency without basis in order to violate the will of Congress; illegal
proliferation of nuclear technology, and illegally removing the United
States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Roots Action should have included Trumps worst offense: the criminal
acceleration of ecocide, the biggest issue of our or any time. Trump has
brazenly violated his oath to serve the general welfare by doing everything
he can to turn the world into a giant greenhouse gas chamber as soon as
possible.
Here we would do well to recall Noam Chomskys criticism of the de facto
impeachment and removal of President Richard Nixon. Watergate was about
Nixons breaking of ruling-class norms by needlessly burglarizing the other
major imperial partys candidate headquarters.
The Watergate hearings evaded Nixons and Kissingers mass murderous
bombings of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, their criminal support for a fascist
coup in Chile, and Nixons vicious, fascist-style police-state repression of
the antiwar, back freedom and radical left movements. Nixons biggest crimes
went un-aired and unpunished. It was officially fine for Nixon to inflict
monumental murder and mayhem on anti-imperial freedom fighters, peasants and
the left at home and abroad. Nixons only authorized sin was to have
stupidly messed with the other American ruling class and imperial party, the
Democrats, at home.
To make matters worse, Trumpeachment under the supervision of corporate and
imperial Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif., net worth of
$64 million) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and their
deep state informants is about Trump putting his personal self-interest
above a principle that rests on a great imperialist myth: the national
interest.
Trump isnt in trouble for bullying Ukraine. Superpower Uncle Sam bullies
other countries all the time. Trump is in hot water because he got caught
with his hands in the cookie jar clumsily injecting his selfish domestic
political interests into the all-too-standard U.S. practice of imperial
coercion. U.S. foreign policy is supposed to be about the national
interest, not the political self-interest of one man who would like to be a
king or dictator with the help of other heads of state.
But what is this grand national interest the reigning bipartisan U.S.
political, intellectual and media cite like some holy incantation, with
Democrats and their media allies in the lead in the Age of Trump? The great,
prolific American historian Charles Beard was run out of U.S.
public-intellectual life for having the audacity to in numerous books,
including The Idea of the National Interest (1934) and The Open Door at
Home (1934) that the national interest was a veil for ruling class
imperialism. Empire, Beard argued, worked against the interests of most U.S.
citizens by hitching economic growth to the profit-lust of those atop what
would come to be known as the military-industrial-complexand by enmeshing
the United States in what Beard called (anticipating Orwell) perpetual wars
for perpetual peace.
In the wake of Beards warnings and observations, the Pax Americana bloomed,
spreading U.S. power across vast stretches of the planet. The United States
has been enmeshed ever since in an endless series of wars, interventions and
conflicts, few if any of which have ever had the slightest thing to do with
the United States national security. Quite the opposite: the American
Empirereplete now with more than 800 bases spread across more than 100
sovereign nationshas put ordinary Americans at risk at home and abroad
while distributing wealth and power upward. The costs of this empire have
been born by society at large. The benefitsincluding the massive transfer
of taxpayer money away from domestic social needs to giant public subsidies
for high-tech corporations like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and global
military protection to multinational U.S. corporations and investorshave
reverted to the wealthy Few and their political and military agents and
allies.
The bloated military-Keynesian Pentagon system has bankrupted social
programs, feeding savage domestic socioeconomic disparity while fueling the
deadly militarization of society. It has hitched American prosperity to a
permanent war economy that is helping drive the world over an ecological
cliff while constantly developing new super-weapons capable of decimating
the world many times over.
It is pathetic, contemptible and criminal for Trump to have strong-armed
Ukraine in an effort to enlist foreign assistance for Trumps domestic
political ambitions. But it is stupid to think that the more standard
practices of American imperialism have anything to do with the national
interest of all Americans. The national interest is a great imperial,
ruling-class and Orwellian lie in the hands of the nations dominant
ideological authorities.
Even if its scope is broadened beyond UkraineGate, impeachment is not a
popular rebellion against the main capitalist oppression structures of our
time, which now pose an existential threat to human survival and must be
overcome if we are to preserve chances for a decent and organized existence.
Its an elite process designed by the nations wealthy Founders, who
considered policy and politics the special preserve of the propertied Few.
The early republics slave-owning and merchant-capitalist masters believed,
and their ruling class counterparts believe today, that the property-less
and property-poor Manythe rabbleare not to be trusted with political
power. We on the left want to put the rabblethe working-class majority
citizenryin the streets to confront not just the fascistic Trump-Pence
regime and the fascistic Trump base but also the broader system of empire
and inequality of which the Trump regime and Trumpism are part and symptom.
Trump is awful, of course. But so is the richly bipartisan system of class
and imperial rule that gives rise to monstrous neofascist and
white-nationalist actors and forces like Trump, Pence and Trumpism in the
first place. Establishment Democrats like Pelosi and Schiff and their donors
sit atop the other major party wing of the same American corporate-imperial
bird of prey. They are so vile that several top Democratic Party campaign
bankrollers, according to CNBC, are ready to back the malignant neo-fascist
Trump not just over the progressive populist and self-declared socialist
Bernie Sanders but even over the self-declared capitalist and center-left
Democrat Elizabeth Warren.
The meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not through elite
procedures designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the
ultimate nightmare. It is through sustained mass civil disobedience within
and beyond the streetsthrough rebellion by and for those whom the American
ruling class fears and hates the most: the working-class majority. The left
should mobilize to bring the ghastly neofascist Trump-Pence regime down in
the same ways the people of Puerto Rico forced out their corrupt and
racist-sexist governor Ricardo Rosselló last summer; the people of Hong Kong
won the repeal of an authoritarian extradition law last spring; the French
Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) won the repeal of a regressive tax last
December; the people of Ecuador won the repeal of a regressive fuel tax and
broader neoliberal austerity program last Sunday; the people of Algeria
overthrew an authoritarian regime last spring, and Extinction Rebellion has
put the environmental question front and center in England.
The left must not let the impeachment extravaganza keep millions seated in
front of glowing telescreens to be told how the unmentionably disastrous
two-party system, the ruling class corporate media and the U.S. Constitution
work for democracy and the common good. They do no such thing.
Does the American ruling class and power elite really and at long last want
to rid itself of the racist, sexist, neofascist and ecocidal atrocity that
is Donald Trump? Good. Let them proceed. We certainly wont stand in their
way. There can no defense of the wannabe fascist strongman Trumpthe first
president in American history who poses a serious threat not to honor the
results of a re-election attempt that doesnt fall his wayon the portside.
But, as I have been saying from the start, the elites hate Trump for reasons
very different than ours. Trumpeachment a la Pelosi and Schiff is not really
our battle. The lefts fight is to build as quickly, deeply and widely as
possible a popular grassroots movement against the fascistic White House and
the racist, sexist, imperialist and ecocidal system of class rule that gave
rise to it.
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League. Street is also the author of numerous books,
Paul Street
