How Trump is helping to save our democracy
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
Sep 22 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-trump-is-helping-to-save-our-democracy/2017/09/22/539b795e-9a1f-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html
E.J. Dionne Jr., Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein are the authors of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported,” from which this essay is adapted.
The election of Donald Trump could be one of the best things that ever happened to American democracy.
We say this even though we believe that Trump poses a genuine danger to our republican institutions and has done enormous damage to our country. He has violated political norms, weakened our standing in the world and deepened the divisions of an already sharply torn nation.
But precisely because the Trump threat is so profound, he has jolted much of the country to face problems that have been slowly eroding our democracy. And he has aroused a popular mobilization that may far outlast him.
Many of the trends that led to Trump’s election have been with us for years; he has created a crisis by pushing them to their alarming endpoints. Political norms, for example, have been decaying for decades, but Trump has eschewed norms altogether. One reading is that there will be no going back from the diminished public life he has created, and it’s certainly true that the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: Behavior previously considered inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others. Yet Trump’s sheer disregard for the normal practices and principles of presidential behavior has cast a spotlight on the vital role that norms play in regulating and protecting our democracy. Only when norms disappear are we reminded of how important they were in the first place.
The steady radicalization of the conservative movement since the 1960s paved the way for Trump by undermining trust in government and promoting a sense that public officials are not interested in solving the problems of everyday Americans. This was a successful strategy for the Republican Party, but it produced the least-qualified and least-appropriate president in the nation’s history. While many Republicans remain in denial, hoping that Trump will deliver them policy victories and court seats, some of them are starting to reexamine their consciences and their long-term political interests.
A large group of influential conservative thinkers — Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, Max Boot, George F. Will, Peter Wehner, William Kristol and Tom Nichols, to name just a few — has spoken out against the nativist and xenophobic strain in the Republican Party that gave rise to Trump and against his manifest disrespect for our institutions. They want a problem-solving Republican Party, a necessity for our political system to operate. Only a handful of Republican politicians have joined them, but their ranks are growing and include Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona.
Meanwhile, Republicans’ failure to pass any major piece of their legislative agenda, despite their control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, is a sign that tea partyism provides no plausible path to governing. A purely anti-government creed is out of touch with an American majority that may mistrust government but still expects it to provide significant services, social protections and help in time of catastrophe. We have seen this in the backlash to the efforts to repeal Obamacare. Republicans were scrambling this past week to pass another destructive repeal billthat would leave millions without health insurance, simply because the congressional majority is desperate for a legislative victory. But they have already lost the battle for public opinion.
The Trump era has pushed corporate leaders out of their comfort zones, too. The mass resignations of chief executives from White House business advisory groups in the wake of Trump’s shamefully equivocal remarks about the violence in Charlottesville were one sign of this. So was the strong pushback — from Apple’s Tim Cook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Meg Whitman and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, among many others — against Trump’s elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program protecting immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.
And Trump’s victory has led to soul-searching in the media. The election was a near-perfect case study in the dangers of false equivalence, as Hillary Clinton’s significant but certainly not disqualifying problems were often portrayed as more or less comparable to Trump’s obvious inappropriateness for the presidency, his hateful rhetoric and his astonishingly long list of scandals. But many of the country’s leading news organizations have covered the Trump White House’s lying and evasions with straightforward vigor. If Trump has exacerbated the problem of media echo chambers, particularly on the right, he has also created a newly powerful constituency that cherishes a free press — witness the soaring digital circulation numbers of The Washington Post, the New York Times and many other media outlets devoted to hard-hitting reporting and analysis.
The Trump jolt has done more than force the country to a necessary reckoning. It has also called forth a wave of activism, organizing and, perhaps most important, a new engagement by millions of Americans in politics at all levels.
The election was a near-perfect case study in the dangers of false equivalence, as Hillary Clinton’s significant but certainly not disqualifying problems were often portrayed as more or less comparable to Trump’s obvious inappropriateness for the presidency, his hateful rhetoric and his astonishingly long list of scandals.
The problem with false equivalency is so much more widespread than that. It has become ubiquitous in political debate, regardless of the subject, as demonstrated daily here on NT. I blame the general dumbing down of society, with interests in sports and celebrity taking the place of sociopolitical conversation at the water cooler.
These should be the best days of Trump's presidency. In another few months it will be a new year and an election year and things will get testier. Any Republicans in swing districts or states will be forced by reality to disagree with Trump more than they do now. The following year, 2019 will be the start of the 2020 presidential election campaigns. Trump may very well be primaried. Does anyone think Trump will become a unifer while he is being primaried by a John Kasich?
This is his prime time, and he is wasting it by grandstanding about Rocket Man and Colin Kaepernick, etc etc etc.
Why? It is sinple, he doesnt know what else to do and needs to distract from the fact that he isnt qualified to be president of the United States.
I have faith that the current investigations against him will eventually preclude him from finishing his term.
One can only hope. Even if we can rid ourselves of this buffoon we are left with a regime filled with white supremacists, fascists, oligarchs, and Nazi sympathizers. A regime that kinda resembles a junta, I have to say.
None of this is going to have a pleasant ending and I expect we will all be behind barricades engaged in a fight before it all ends.
I think Charles Blow might be correct in his musings of Trump creating his own private militia among the alt right and blood and soil frat boys for the purpose of resistance if deposed. It is certainly not beyond the realm of intelligent consideration these days.