Donald Trump Must Go
Twenty-Five years ago, 1994, Richard Nixon died. He was a sick and twisted man, a soul so perverted, a paranoid, delusional man who dragged everyone and everything down with him, including the country that elected him twice, is still with us, haunts us to this day.
I write this because I’d never thought I would see a President or a presidency as bad as Nixon’s. But in the last two years, I have. I have seen a man so ill-equipped, so unprepared for this position, incurious to everything except how it benefits him, an uncouth vulgar, mean and petty man who quite possibly became president in the most underhanded, unscrupulous manner since Nixon 50 years ago.
It will be two years Sunday since Donald John Trump became President. In the 24 months since taking the Oath, he has turned what Churchill once called “the indispensable nation,” into a laughingstock. Shortly after his inauguration, an Australian woman, white, an author on a book tour, was detained at Los Angeles International and given the third degree by Immigration and Customs officials. After three hours, she was let go. So shaken by the events, she rang her publisher and said she was returning home and never coming back.
It was just the beginning.
He has unleashed ICE with a fury not seen since the Gestapo, even detaining American citizens in Kent County, Michigan, among other places. He has attempted all kinds of stunts, usually thwarted by the courts, like the Muslim ban, the ongoing immigration crap and his trampling of civil rights of everyday Americans and endangering their lives by rolling back protections enshrined by the Constitution (that he violates every day) and law (that he flouts) because he has no idea what they mean, is reason enough to start the process of Impeachment.
Trump, unlike Nixon, isn’t a politician. He’s a corrupted, unscrupulous phony who skated his way through life with the help of his daddy, Roy Cohn and, since the late ‘90’s, the Russians. That he won an election he didn’t even expect to win (by a fluke), by stoking white resentment and fear (something Nixon did as well), speaks to the level of a) the civic disengagement of the average American and b) the 40+ years of Hillary hatred.
In his scathing obituary of Nixon 25 years ago in Rolling Stone and later republished by The Atlantic, Hunter S. Thompson called Old Tanned, Rested & Ready “a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time.” Which was true, but with Trump it is more “in your face.” “I’m going to screw you over and there’s nothing you can do about it.” He is a poor man’s version of a rich man, even though he was never rich. The “I’m not a Doctor, I just play one on TV,” syndrome.
Two years ago, Charles Pierce wrote of President Obama, “To be sure, there have been reasons to criticize him on the merits. But the resistance to his own fundamental legitimacy never died. I think, perhaps, he only really got a handle on it in his second term, when he realized that his political opposition was something far deeper than merely political. They were not going to allow him to fulfill the mandate he received when he was elected, twice, through the popular vote and the electoral college, and without the help of the FBI or the FSB.”
The FBI, who many believe screwed the punch in favor of Trump because Jim Comey, in two very highly public actions, made Hillary Clinton a sitting duck. Also, Kevin McCarthy and former Speaker of the House (and asshole-for-life) Paul Ryan, who threw up nothingburger investigations against Mrs. Clinton to make her look corrupt. The FSB is still the KGB, after all, a spy by any other name is still a spy. We may never know if the New York office of the Bureau was wagging Comey’s tail (Comey, for his part, denies it), but the vampire of NYC (Rudy Giuliani) and the Witch of Westchester, Jeanine Pirro, claim otherwise or take credit for it.
We have, somehow, survived two years of this circus. Two years ago, today (January 19), Wayne Barrett died. Barrett was a journalist who first dug into the Trump’s (Fred and son) dealings with unfair housing practices. In the early 1970’s, Fred Trump was cited for violations of the Fair Housing Act. The old man hired Roy Cohn (yes, that Roy Cohn) to fight it. By the late ‘70’s, the height of the disco, Studio 54 days, Don (as he was known as then) had become Cohn’s understudy, a presence at 54, even though he was a non-drinker. Barrett was working on a story about “Don” Trump for the now-defunct Village Voice that first brought attention to the then 33-year-old.
The story originally ran in 1979, long before he became known. The Voice re-ran the story in July of 2015, about a month after Trump rode down the faux gold elevator at Trump Tower, with a preface.
“In 1978, when then–Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett requested several thousand pages of records from the State Urban Development Corporation, the staff there set him up in a conference room so he could review them on site. He sat down alone, at a long table with stacks of papers, and began plowing through them.
Barrett was only 33 years old at the time. He’d been on staff at the Voice for less than a year, but the story he was chasing, about a series of multimillion-dollar real estate transactions, was a big one. Some of the city’s most prominent power brokers were involved — including former New York mayor Abe Beame — and at the center was a brash young developer named Donald Trump.
As Barrett was sitting alone at the table doing his research, lifted the receiver and heard an unfamiliar voice.
“ ‘Wayne!’ ” Barrett says, his voice booming, taking on Trump’s now unmistakable accent. “ ‘It’s Donald! I hear you’re doing a story on me!’ I’d never talked to the guy in my life.”
Though he’d been working on the story for several months, he hadn’t yet approached Trump. He was “circling,” as he puts it today, determined to have his ducks in a row by the time he sat down with his subject.
It was Trump’s way of letting him know he was keeping an eye on him, Barrett says. After all, the story he was working on, which would land Trump on our cover in January of 1979, wearing a sneer and a mop of brown hair, was the first detailed examination of Trump’s business practices to appear in the press. And the results weren’t pretty.”
Nothing about Trump is pretty. Nothing.
Trump also attempted to bribe Barrett by offering him an apartment in Manhattan. Which, of course, didn’t work.
In a way, Barrett is lucky. He hasn’t lived through the past two years of lies and more lies. He spent 38 years living them. Of shifting through the ugliness, vulgarity and outlandishness that the country and the world have been put through. Jimmy Breslin, another thorn-in-Trump’s side, died two months later. He wrote about Trump as well, but this one quote stands out: “All Trump has to do is stick to the rules on which he was raised by his father in the County of Queens: ‘Never use your own money. Steal a good idea and say it’s your own. Do anything to get publicity. Remember that everybody can be bought.’”
Unlike Barrett, who spent the last year-and-a-half fighting cancer, Breslin was, according to his family and friends, vital right up to the end of his life. Where we come full circle on this is the book Breslin wrote about the last 15 months of Watergate, How The Good Guys Finally Won.
He writes of Tip O’Neill, Carl Albert (who almost became the President) and George Beall, the US Attorney for the Western District of Maryland who nailed Spiro T. Agnew’s ass to the wall, despite attempts by his brother John, a sitting Senator from Maryland and a fumbling RNC Chair named George Herbert Walker Bush to stop him. He wrote of the “night school lawyers” and John Doar, who does show up at key moments in history between 1960–75, who eventually, through 3X5 index cards and Xerox machines, pieced together enough of the evidence so that Articles of Impeachment were brought up against History’s Yard Waste.
Three days ago, The Atlantic’s Yoni Applebaum wrote a scathing editorial outlying why Articles of Impeachment against Trump should be drawn up now.
“Trump has evinced little respect for the rule of law, attempting to have the Department of Justice launch criminal probes into his critics and political adversaries. He has repeatedly attacked both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. His efforts to mislead, impede, and shut down Mueller’s investigation have now led the special counsel to consider whether the president obstructed justice.”
You change a few names and we’re transported back to 1974.
“Trump’s actions during his first two years in office clearly meet, and exceed, the criteria to trigger this fail-safe. But the United States has grown wary of impeachment. The history of its application is widely misunderstood, leading Americans to mistake it for a dangerous threat to the constitutional order.
That is precisely backwards. It is absurd to suggest that the Constitution would delineate a mechanism too potent to ever actually be employed. Impeachment, in fact, is a vital protection against the dangers a president like Trump poses. And, crucially, many of its benefits — to the political health of the country, to the stability of the constitutional system — accrue irrespective of its ultimate result. Impeachment is a process, not an outcome, a rule-bound procedure for investigating a president, considering evidence, formulating charges, and deciding whether to continue on to trial.”
The shutdown, unnecessary and wasteful, has affected everyone. From Air Traffic Controllers to people who do the thankless jobs of making sure Social Security claims go through. It will, to borrow a phrase “trickle down,” to other aspects and eventually it will engulf our entire country.
On election night, November 8/9, 2016, no one was more surprised than Donald John Trump at the results. This “Accidental Presidency” which started out with an inaugural speech that left even George W. Bush dumbfounded (“That was some weird shit,” he reputedly said to former Presidents Clinton, Carter and Obama), has turned into an accident that needs to be cleaned up.
If the Buzzfeed article is correct and they are standing by their reporting even though the special council’s office denied it, then the House cannot wait on Robert Mueller’s report to begin the process of impeachment.
In the end, Richard Nixon was alone, having betrayed everyone and everything he loved, including the Presidency. As shady a character that he was, he was a politician and even someone “so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning,” wrote the irreverent Thompson.
Donald Trump is just as crooked, maybe even moreso, than Nixon. He is a vapid, immoral human being, still playing to his base, conjuring up fear of Mexicans, Hondurans, Costa Rican’s and Central American children. He is not acting presidential, in any way, shape, or form. He has never had a human moment in his life. Neither did Nixon, but Trump’s on a whole different level.
He has no grasp of the office and he never will. The longer he stays in office, Americans will suffer, as will the world. If Nixon is History’s Yard Waste, then Trump is History’s Garbage Dump.
Two years on, Pierce writes, “It really is all on us now. We can decide not to be lied to so grotesquely, or we can decide we’re OK with that. We can decide to know everything we need to know about the president*’s dealings with Vladimir Putin and his Volga Bagmen, or we can simply not care about it and go on with our lives. We can be spectators to the diminution of American democracy, or we can fight to stop it. That’s one remarkable thing about it. We can choose suicide. We just can’t duck responsibility for it. We can do what work we can do so that the people doing their work know that there’s still a constituency for democratic norms and institutions. Or we can all sign up for the puppet show, and leave all those people twisting in the wind.”
Donald Trump must go, as must they all.
