What is there left to say? Seriously. After the last few days, most of us are really at a loss. Just think about a few of the things we’ve seen this week. Pursuant to a referral made by special counsel Robert Mueller, a federal judge issued a warrant authorizing the FBI to raid the offices of Michael Cohen, the personal lawyer of the president of the United States. Think about that for a second.
Of course Trump bleated about this being the end of attorney-client privilege, another lie in the service of his own interests, one that conveniently ignores the fact that one loses that privilege when one talks to a lawyer about committing a crime. That’s called the “crime-fraud exception,” and the granting of the warrant means that judge was convinced that Trump’s attorney and personal fixer probably committed a crime. Given the source of the referral, it’s unlikely Cohen was committing a crime on behalf of one of his non-presidential clients. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken White didn’t mince words, noting: “This is an extremely important development. This is Watergate-level stuff.”
This week also saw Trump, not for the first time, dangle the idea of firing Mueller—who is apparently coming close to producing a report on whether the guy in the White House obstructed justice in any of the following four instances:
His intent to fire former FBI Director James Comey; his role in the crafting of a misleading public statement on the nature of a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son and Russians; Trump’s dangling of pardons before grand jury witnesses who might testify against him; and pressuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
Thankfully, an overwhelming majority of the American people appear to oppose removing Mueller, if such a thing matters to the man who lost the popular vote and became president anyway. Quinnipiac found 69 percent opposed such a move, while only 13 percent supported it.
Additionally, Trump on Friday pardoned Scooter Libby—who lied to the FBI, mind you. For those not paying attention to how Donald Trump operates, issuing that pardon in this moment is a signal that anyone who stands with him and refuses to cooperate with Mueller won’t have much to worry about. It may not be obstruction of justice as a matter of law, but the intent is, without doubt, to make justice that much harder to achieve.
And I’m not even going to go into detail about some of the other things we saw, such as a cabinet secretary who has acted in a manner as corrupt, dishonest, and just plain greedy as any in recent history and who still, as of this writing, maintains the support of his president. Yes, the “can you imagine” game is infuriating, so instead of imagining the Republican response to something like this if the shoe was on the other foot, let’s instead point out that under eight years of President Barack Obama, we just didn’t have anything like this. Obama, you see, had principles. Just the kind of guy he was.
There was also Trump’s stunning policy reversal—something that’s positively wholesome by comparison to the criminal stuff—on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Opposition to the TPP was one of the core economic ideas of the Trump campaign and presidency until this past week. The man actually called it “a rape of our country.” Given his bragging about having sexually assaulted women, who knows what he meant by that?
On Syria, after the Assad regime launched a sickening chemical attack that killed dozens of his own people, Trump flailed about like a marlin on the floor of a fisherman’s rowboat. How about the CBO’s report that 80 percent of the benefits of Trump’s rich man’s tax cut would actually flow out across our borders to foreign rich men (and women)? That’s something that, under a normal president, would have been a hugely damaging story, yet it barely made a blip.
As awful for our country as last week was, next week may get even worse. The aforementioned James Comey has written a memoir that will be released on Tuesday. The Republican Party, directed by the White House, has declared political war on the former FBI director and lifelong Republican. Trump showed how classy he is by referring to the man he fired in an attempt to save his own hide as an “untruthful slimeball.”
Comey is a man whom I have criticized harshly. His failings, however, resulted from an outsized ego, not a lack of honesty. Trump, on the other hand? Well, his record on the matter of (dis)honesty speaks for itself. Comey saw how this president operates firsthand, and watched him try to influence the investigation into his own dirty dealings. Here are some of Comey’s assessments of the how the most powerful man in the world exercises that authority:
This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values.
His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty.
Here’s how Comey described the White House environment, one he compared to working for the Mafia:
The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth.
Pushing that comparison, Comey spoke about the night where Trump told him: “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” and also asked him to stop investing disgraced ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn. He likened the conversation to: “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.”
More broadly, Comey issued a serious warning, based on what he saw with his own eyes:
“We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country,” Comey writes, “with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized and unethical behavior is ignored, excused or rewarded.”
Nothing I write here, no stringing together of words, sentences, or paragraphs, can do true justice to the situation our country faces today. Put simply, this is not how American democracy in 2018 is supposed to work. By placing this man in the position he now holds, our democracy has committed a grave failure. It has been revealed as deeply wanting, as painfully and dangerously shallow. It has revealed itself to be frighteningly vulnerable to the kind of unprincipled demagogue our founders feared and against whom our champions of constitutional democracy have long warned.
However, we, the American people, can undo that failure. We can bring back to government not only policies that will help rather than harm the vast majority of Americans, but restore principled government itself.
That lack of principle extends beyond the man sitting in the Oval Office. We can elect leaders who see our democratic system of government not merely as a structure to be abused and gamed in order to achieve specific goals any way they can—something seen most nakedly in the still appalling and unprecedented decision by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to ignore President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court.
As for that other man, the one who wields executive authority, we can replace him by electing someone who values democracy, the rule of law, and the truth above his own interests—or how about someone who values those things in the first place? We can do this, and we must. There is only one question that remains: what are we prepared to do to make that happen?
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).