http://themilitant.com/2017/8129/812906.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 29 August 7, 2017
(front page)
Liberals witch hunt to impeach Trump driven by fear of the working class
BY SETH GALINSKY
The shrill and unrelenting witch hunt by liberal Democrats, some
Republican politicians and most of the bourgeois news media who accuse
President Donald Trump of “colluding” with Moscow to “influence” the
2016 presidential elections, has reached a new fever pitch. These forces
thought they had finally reached a “gotcha” moment when Donald Trump Jr.
admitted he had had a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin in June 2016.
The witch hunt is aimed at criminalizing what are in fact political
differences in order to force the impeachment or indictment of President
Trump and bring down his administration.
Trump is the target of an open-ended investigation by special counsel
and former FBI chief Robert Mueller, as well as both the Senate and
House intelligence committees.
The New York Times giddily ran an article July 22 that they had
uncovered a memo by Kenneth Starr, who served as special counsel
assigned to look into possible impeachment of then President Bill
Clinton, that said a sitting president could be criminally indicted.
Liberal papers, nighttime TV talk shows, morning commentators and
countless others with blood in their mouth are full of calls to bring
Trump down.
This is not normal capitalist politics.
The capitalist rulers saw something new and different in the 2016
elections that kindled fear of the working class. The object of their
fear isn’t Trump, but the workers they saw behind his victory. Millions
of workers and farmers are beginning to see that the capitalist
political parties have no solutions for the carnage they face from
today’s deepening crisis of capitalism — except throwing the monetary
and human costs of their crisis onto the backs of working people. The
rulers fear what they see coming out of this — sharpening class struggle.
“The media often reports that Trump won a majority of voters without
college degrees, which is taken by Trump supporters as just a nicer way
of being called stupid,” Gary Abernathy, editor of the Times-Gazette in
Hillsboro, Ohio — where Trump won 75 percent of the votes — wrote July
21. For millions of people, he says, when Trump calls charges of
collusion with Moscow “fake news,” he “strikes a chord because the
Russia hysteria is not real news, either, not compared with the issues
that impact their daily lives.”
What is important here for class-conscious workers is not that Trump is
better politically than the liberals, he isn’t. His goal, like theirs,
is to defend the interests of the capitalist system in a time of crisis.
But the appointment of a special counsel, and fawning praise from the
liberals for this former FBI top cop, is dangerous for the working
class. The special counsel is called out when the rulers are looking to
get someone. He starts with a target and then goes to work to find
something to use. He digs with no time limit, no limits on what he can
investigate or the charges he can bring. His appointment undercuts the
constitutional protections to due process in the Bill of Rights.
And bringing down Trump would tell millions of workers who voted for him
that their votes are less meaningful then the liberals’ political vendetta.
Trump fights back
Trump has begun to call out those he suspects of being part of the
“leakers” feeding the press frenzy. And others he believes have made it
easier for the liberals to use whatever they can get their hands on to
take him down.
This is what’s behind his complaints that Attorney General Jeff Sessions
betrayed him when he recused himself from having anything to do with the
“Russian collusion” charges.
And Trump criticized Sessions for failing to investigate Hillary Clinton
over the scandal that found she had illegally sent and received
“top-secret” information on her personal computer.
In a remarkable turnabout, the liberal press has now become a champion
of Sessions, a politician they have pilloried as a racist and
reactionary. The July 27 Economist ran an article headlined, “Jeff
Sessions Is in Peril; So Is America.”
Trump went back on the road to mobilize the workers who elected him
against the liberals’ crusade. He spoke to an overflow crowd of more
than 6,000 in Youngstown, Ohio, July 25.
When he said he was glad to be “back in the center of the American
heartland, far away from the Washington swamp,” he got some of the
biggest cheers of the night, with loud chants of “Drain the swamp.”
“I don’t care for the hatred directed towards him or the people who
supported him,” Dave Torrance, an African-American Trump supporter who
attended the rally from Hermitage, Pennsylvania, told the New York Post.
“There have been plenty of presidents I did not vote for, but I always
want them to be successful so that our country is successful.”
“He’s exactly who we wanted, someone fresh, different, not a
politician,” Roxanne Jewell, of Orangeville, Ohio, told the Post.
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