Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment
Trump's Removal Can't Wait for Impeachment
Mike Vucci / AP
The most powerful position in the world's most powerful nation is occupied
by a demented fascist oligarch.
He demonizes and scapegoats minorities and immigrants. He provides
dog-whistle cover for white supremacists. He sparks racist hate crimes with
his vicious nativist words. He speaks with disdain about inner-city black
communities. He tells police officers not to "be too nice" with suspects.
He packs the courts with hard-right racists, classists, sexists and
eco-exterminists, toxically reshaping the federal judiciary for a
generation. He has cultivated and rewarded Christian fascists, one of whom
(Mike Pence) is his vice president
He calls African nations shithole countries. He told four nonwhite
progressive U.S. Congresswomen to "go back to . the crime infested places
from which they came."
He has absurdly threatened to "end birthright citizenship" (the granting of
U.S. citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil under the Constitution's
14th Amendment) with an executive order.
Trump violates international asylum law and separates migrant children from
their parents. He indefinitely detains tens of thousands of migrant children
and families in for-profit concentration camps.
He declared a fake national emergency to criminally divert taxpayer dollars
to the construction of a nativist border wall that most of the citizenry
hates and Congress refused to fund.
Believing his dotard self "the world's greatest person," he promotes an
absurd cult of personality, proclaiming himself a "stable genius." He
regularly praises dictators and despots the world over. He absurdly claims
that Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution means that "I have the power to do
whatever I want as president."
Donald Trump attacks basic press freedoms. He demonizes and falsely
conflates liberals and leftists. He mocks and disrespects intellectuals and
science.
He absurdly denies climate science and arch-criminally ramps up the
eco-exterminist war on livable ecology. He refused to adequately prepare for
and respond to the epic climate change-fueled Hurricanes Harvey and Maria.
He absurdly blames California's deadly climate change-driven wildfires on
the state's failure to "sweep the forest floors."
He threatened North Korea and Iran with nuclear annihilation. He provided
cover for the absolutist Saudi Arabian regime's murderous vivisection of a
dissident journalist. He funds and equips the Saudis' criminal and
catastrophic war on Yemen over Congressional opposition. Last Friday he
pardoned three murderous U.S. military war criminals.
He has turned the U.S. Attorney General into his own personal attorney. He
has conducted a corrupt foreign policy on behalf of his own economic and
political self-interest. He brazenly violates the Constitution's emoluments
clause while preposterously calling that clause "phony." He denies and
obstructs Congress' constitutional right and duty to investigate his
conduct. He criminally intimidates witnesses and whistleblowers, calling
them "traitors." He describes a constitutionally appropriate inquiry into
his immoral and illegal behavior as a "lynching" and a "coup."
His far right-wing attorney general, William Barr, argues that his executive
powers are essentially unlimited and seeks to undermine the constitutional
separation of church and state.
He wages a relentless Orwellian war on Truth, replete with more than 10,000
documentable false statements since his inauguration.
He openly flirts with calling for the use of extra-legal political violence
on his behalf by his heavily armed backers, suggesting that impeachment
could spark "Civil War." He is the first president in American history to
pose a serious threat of refusing to honor a re-election count that doesn't
go his way.
This is a national, and indeed global, emergency. We need Donald Trump out
of the White House. How do we make that happen?
There's no great mystery about how citizens humble and even overthrow
corrupt and tyrannical governments. They take to the streets in significant
numbers, engaging in mass disruption for as long as it takes. Look at
Algeria, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Ecuador and Chile, to mention six
places where mass protest and popular resistance have recently proven highly
effective. Look now to Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have marched
against corruption, even in the face of lethal live ammunition, and to
Bolivia, where workers and peasants are facing bloody repression to resist a
neofascist coup that was immediately applauded as a victory for "freedom"
and "democracy" by Trump.
It doesn't take the whole population to change history from the bottom up.
Five days of insurrection by 200,000 people forced the French government to
back down on its regressive gas tax last year. Extinction Rebellion leader
Roger Hallam notes that it requires dedicated resistance by just 3% of the
population to overthrow a regime. If Hallam is right, then ten days of
rebellion by a quantity of Americans roughly equivalent to the population of
the Chicago metropwolitan area could force the U.S. ruling class to get rid
of Trump.
It is unthinkable that any but a few marginal voices in the mainstream
"liberal" Democrats and their media (CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The
Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, et al.) would call
for peoples' power in the streets to bring down the Trump tyranny. The
"liberal" elite is fiercely committed to Fake Resistance. It may be obsessed
with Trump to the exclusion of practically everything else that ought to
matter in national and world events (popular rebellions from France to
Chile, Beirut, Quito and Hong Kong included) but they will not embrace the
most effective method of collapsing the Trump-Pence regime collapse: mass
mobilization and protest. Embracing an authentic people's resistance
movement would open a popular-democratic door that the Democratic
establishment prefers to keep shut.
That establishment is instead advancing two tepid, deeply conservative
strategies that will likely fail to get Trump out and will come with
dreadful downsides-even if they succeed. Both of these strategies are
designed keep the U.S. working-class majority functioning not as engaged
historical agents, but as passive, system-trusting spectators who accede to
a narrow definition of "politics" as little more than the occasional,
strictly time-staggered marking of ballots next to the names of candidates
selected in advance by the nation's unelected and interrelated dictatorships
of money and empire.
The first of these power-serving strategies is the standard quadrennial
get-out-the-vote effort to rally citizens behind yet another
corporate-centrist billionaire-pleasing and militaristic "national security"
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Democratic presidential candidate like
Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or the newly minted Iowa Caucus
front-runner Pete Buttigieg-a silver-tongued right-winger (see Nathan
Robinson's brilliant take-down in Current Affairs last spring) wearing
fake-progressive identity cloaking (like a certain technically black Wall
Street-serving drone bomber-to-be in 2007). This is the same depressing
neoliberal track that has so badly betrayed, divided and demobilized the
nation's working-class majority so as to grease the skids for Ronald Reagan,
George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich's Contract on America, George Bush Jr, the
racist Tea Party and the malignant white nationalist Trump.
With the usual help from the anti-democratic Electoral College and racist
voter suppression in battleground states, Trump will likely prevail over yet
another dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist Democrat in November 2020. But
even if the Democrats are able to win the Electoral College count and induce
Trump to leave (with some help perhaps from constitutionalists in the U.S.
military command), putting another Wall Street Democrat in the White House
will just open door the for another neofascist white-nationalist Republican
president in 2024-possibly someone more ideologically dedicated, less
obviously corrupt and thus more dangerous than Trump.
(Yes, the Democrats could prevail if they run the self-declared democratic
socialist Bernie Sanders. But the Democrats' big money bankrollers and media
won't let that happen. The Democratic establishment's dirty little secret is
that it would rather lose to the right, even to a hard-right nationalist
right-wing party, than lose to the mildly left wing of its own party. Even
the avowedly "capitalist to her bones" Elizabeth Warren is considered "too
far left" by top Democratic Wall Street funders).
The second flawed "liberal" strategy is, of course, impeachment, likely by
the end of the year. It requires just a majority in the U.S. House of
Representatives, where the Democrats hold sway. But (as a remarkable number
of U.S.-Americans I encounter seem not to know) removal requires a
two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, where the nation's most racist and
right-wing regions are absurdly over-represented and the Trumpified
Republican Party holds sway. The Republican-run Senate is not going to
remove the demented fascist oligarch from office just because he tried to
trade New Cold War arms for political dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine-not when
a super-majority of Republicans "strongly approve" of Trump's performance no
matter what he does or says. And Trump may well use "exoneration" by the
Senate to his electoral advantage next November.
At the same time, the Democrats are pursuing impeachment on chillingly
narrow and imperialist grounds that whitewash the crimes of U.S. foreign
policy, past and present. Democratic politicos and talking heads proclaim
House impeachment testifier Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. a great
"national hero" and all-around "good guy" because Taylor was a rifle company
commander "serving" in the Quang Tri and Thua Tien provinces in the United
States' beloved 101st Airborne during the so-called Vietnam War. Fellow
Ukraine-Gate witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is upheld as another great
patriot for "serving" in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. How depressing: The U.S.
"crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (Noam Chomsky) murdered 2-5 million
Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975. The arch-criminal
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq killed one million-plus Iraqis.
One need not be a fan of Vladimir Putin's oligarchic regime to wonder what's
so great about Washington's sponsorship of the corrupt U.S.-backed
capitalist Ukraine government, which is the product of a U.S.-backed 2014
coup and contains neo-Nazis. On what grounds do top Democrats think
Washington has the right to play power politics and help fuel hot wars on
Russia's western border? "The U.S. government," Sheldon Richman tried to
remind Americans one year ago, "has no businesses policing relations between
Ukraine and Russia. Even if that role were appropriate for some party, the
U.S. government would not be the one, because it hardly has clean hands in
the matter."
How would U.S.-Americans feel about Russia and/or China sending military
equipment to an anti-U.S. regime in Mexico or Canada? And if Democrats are
so committed to democracy around the world, why have none of them beyond
Sanders and a few other progressives denounced the recent neofascist coup in
Bolivia or voiced support for this year's popular uprisings in Ecuador and
Chile?
Trump deserves removal not just for his crooked Ukraine shenanigans and
related obstructions of justice, but for setting up concentration camps,
separating babies and children from their families, inciting violence,
interfering with voting rights, discriminating on the basis of religion,
waging criminal war, criminally threatening nuclear war, abusing his pardon
power, violating the emoluments clause, assaulting press freedoms, backing
coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, unconstitutionally declaring a fake national
emergency, violating campaign finance laws, illegal proliferation of nuclear
technology, tax fraud, instructing Border Patrol to violate the law,
stripping environmental and public lands protections, and doing everything
he can to turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber as soon as
possible.
Even if impeachment leads to removal, Trump's defenestration merely for
interjecting his personal interests into Washington's imperialist policy in
Eastern Europe could constitute both an undeserved validation of that policy
and an exoneration of Trump for his much bigger transgressions. And it would
put the dangerous right-evangelical troglodyte Mike Pence in the Oval
Office-a chilling prospect.
To make matters worse, impeachment threatens to become a great rallying
point for Trump's ugly white-nationalist base while encouraging the nation's
all-too-silent progressive majority to stay seated in front of glowing
Telescreens to watch House Democrats and liberal cable news taking heads
falsely claim to be collapsing the Trump regime from the top down.
If we are serious about getting rid of the demented fascist oligarch and his
insurance policy, Pence, then we are going to have to join and expand an
authentic opposition, a real popular resistance in the streets. The
effective and 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-through rebellion by and for those whom the American ruling
class fears and hates the most: the working-class majority.
The sooner Trump can be forced out, the better. Curiously enough,
impeachment makes the need to form a grassroots movement to overthrow the
Trump-Pence regime more urgent than ever. Now that he's looking at
impeachment and a Senate trial, there's no telling what Trump and his
heavily armed minions might do. He has enormous means of mass destruction
and mass distraction at his neofascistic fingertips.
We need Trump and Pence out now, not some time next year. The way to make
that happen is with a mass movement that will not only sweep him from power
but challenge the richly bipartisan racist, sexist, imperial and eco-cidal
class rule system that hatched the Trump regime in the first place.
Paul Street
