The Trump Aberration

   


     In America, anybody can be president. That is one of the risks you take.
                                                                                      Adlai E. Stevenson II

     Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time.
                                                                                     E.B. White

     Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
                                                                                     George Bernard Shaw

      Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
                                                                                     H.L. Mencken

     When I use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.
                                                                                    Humpty Dumpty by Lewis Carroll


     If we want to be tactful, we may say that Washington, D.C. is a world unto itself. If we want to be colorful, we may say that Humpty Dumpty could function there. Especially when the pressures of power struggles peak, connivance is a combination of art form and survival skill. Truth becomes a fungible commodity.
     Case in point: The leaking game.  Accomplished Washingtonians like to denounce leaking and do it, too.  Pro forma denials are -- well, pro forma. Veteran observers used to offer former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as an especially vivid example. He allegedly made a practice of denouncing his own leaks.
     At the moment, leaking has become torrential. Multiple sources have informed a respected journalist's new book portraying the White House as a chamber of fear and chaos.  A self-described senior official has written a newspaper article saying that the president of the United States is incompetent, delusional and amoral.
    From all directions, pro forma denials are rolling down  -- if not like justice in an ever-flowing stream, then like the practiced pleas of naughty children poised to blame siblings. And the hunt for culprits is on. An apoplectic president is demanding of his retainers to know who's been telling tales. Given the reality that people in a position to leak must be people with positions in-the-know, some of the leakers have in effect been ordered to track themselves down. In today's Washington -- or at least in today's White House -- this passes for rational response.
     The impact of the book and newspaper article is magnified by their palpable credibility. They have provided chapter and verse to what was already obvious. In Donald Trump, the presidency has passed into the hands of a corrupt, unstable man. Even some Trump partisans admit that they have sold their souls for the sake of prevailing on pet issues.
     Trump is not the first president with dubious mental health. Richard Nixon was episodically a drunk and consistently paranoid. Neither is Trump the first president whose aides -- according to the book and article -- try to trick him into neglecting his worst impulses.  Again, we need reach no farther back than Nixon. When he was in tantrum mode, his staff could turn a deaf ear to some of his directives.
     Nor is Trump the whole of the sickness in our governance. He is abetted by a perfect storm of malfeasance in Congress, where weaklings, opportunists and partisan hacks have combined to sabotage orderly deliberation. Republican leaders can fairly be charged with the architecture of this disgrace.  Beginning with their eight-year effort to undermine President Obama, they have functioned in open contempt for the interests of the millions of Americans who voted for the other party. Now in control, they use might-makes-right techniques to force their views on all comers.
     To speculation on impeachment one writer has added the intriguing notion that Trump might resign.  If equipped with a promise of pardon from Vice President Mike Pence, he could by this means hope to protect the privacy of his children and the secrecy of his finances and tax returns.  The writer presumes that a promise of pardon would be needed given the evidence -- not least in Trump's own frantic behavior -- that as a private citizen he would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
     The November elections will of course be a watershed for better or worse. The lesson of the current situation is not merely that in the push and pull of democracy bad people and bad ideas can gain sway. The lesson especially is that political peril rises if apathetic and inattentive voters leave a vacuum for zealous opportunists to fill. The Trump aberration is dangerous, yes. But voters need not brook it  past November, if only they will so resolve.