Although the Trump administration continues to do long-lasting harm to our norms and institutions, the return of the House to Democratic power in 2018 provided a crucial bulwark against the ongoing evisceration of our democracy.
Unfortunately it is also true that, beyond this single major electoral defeat, neither the administration itself nor its Republican enablers have paid much of a price for their ongoing treachery.
Trump’s uniquely shameless and utterly cynical approach to politics allowed him to capture the presidency, and despite his enduring ineptitude, Republicans’ slavish obedience to his every whim has endowed him with a superhuman capability to evade punishment for his various misdeeds. However, he also tends to burn every bridge he crosses, and this causes him to rack up detractors, bad publicity, and latent criminal liability at a breakneck pace.
To wit, despite Trump’s seeming imperviousness to the usual consequences for repeatedly violating norms and breaking laws, there are some reassuring signs that political gravity still applies. And although the impeachment mechanism has turned out to be essentially ineffective when the president’s party controls the Senate, employing it in response to Trump’s sprawling corruption and rampant illegal behavior was certainly the morally correct and legally just course of action, if the rule of law is to be valued above the prerogatives of the executive.
And whether by impeachment, election, or divine intervention, Trump’s uppance will eventually come. Forces of his own making are constantly working against him and something must give. His most significant vulnerabilities can be grouped into three major categories, which we will explore below.
Vulnerability the First: Trump is incapable of exerting self-control
Trump’s constant bad behavior hurts him with non-Republicans
Trump’s various swindles and scandals are starting to catch up with him, as they always do, and, in combination with his inability to pull himself away from his TV and phone to focus on his job, they will help initiate and accelerate his undoing.
Why? Because even though most Americans are unengaged with politics and poorly informed about Trump’s many failures, nobody can repeatedly screw over such a large population and expect them not to eventually catch on. Even Trump, arguably the world’s greatest living con man, has learned this lesson in the past.
Well, to be more precise, he has been taught this lesson; the fact that he hasn’t actually learned it is what may well precipitate the collapse of this greatest of all cons he is currently struggling to pull off.
Consider this: Throughout his business career, a significant proportion of Trump’s partners, investors, contractors, lenders, employees, and customers–basically everyone he comes into contact with who is not a member of his immediate family–have turned on him once they discovered what type of person they were dealing with and how little he cared about honoring his commitments to them. The more time people spend with Trump, and the more they get to know him, the less they trust and like him.
This is why US banks will no longer lend to him, which in turn is why he has had to resort to seeking financing from distressed German and Austrian banks as well as shady Russian oligarchs. It is also why he has, over the course of his career, had to settle or pay out judgments in well over 100 lawsuits brought by parties he previously counted as allies and friends. He has managed to stay out of jail primarily due to 1) his wealth, and 2) his ability to straddle the line between simply reprehensible and outright illegal conduct.
But this time is different, because he has now foisted himself upon the world stage with too much arrogance and too little preparation. His antagonists are formidable and numerous, and they’re playing for keeps. Even if he “can’t” be charged while in office, the strengthening stink of his toxic and plainly illegal conduct will repel undecided and independent voters. He needs them to win, so if they stay home or vote for someone else, he’s toast.
Vulnerability the Second: Trump is incompetent
He’s terrible at his job, and the pandemic is making this fact more clear than ever
Up until recently, the best (and really the only good) thing that could be said about the Trump administration was that it had managed not to cause or exacerbate any truly serious crises since taking power in 2017.
Its main accomplishment was a gigantic tax break for corporations and the wealthy (coupled with a much smaller one for the middle class) that it didn’t even try to pay for, but that type of debt-financed giveaway to those at the top is exactly what you’d expect from the modern Republican party. Pointless and irresponsible, to be sure, but not unexpected.
Other than that one bill, plus a few miles of reinforced fencing along the southern border, Trump has approximately nothing to show for his 3-plus years in office.
Right-wingers will of course be pleased with the large number of “conservative” judges that have been appointed during this time, but that’s a dubious accomplishment at best, and would also have happened under any Republican president in any case.
On the bright side though, Trump did at least manage not to stumble us into any new wars with e.g. Iran or North Korea. And while he’s done nothing to measurably improve the lives of most Americans, up until recently he had largely avoided doing anything to make peoples’ lives dramatically worse in any clearly observable or reportable way.
However, that all changed with the arrival of COVID-19. This was exactly the type of catastrophic, life-threatening crisis that Trump’s many critics feared he would be unable to handle, and, to precisely nobody’s surprise, he is bungling it magnificently.
First, he ignored the many warnings delivered in his daily Intelligence briefings throughout January and February, while the virus was ravaging China and beginning to spread to other countries. This led to a total lack of planning for the virus’ eventual arrival.
Then, as cases began to pop up in the US and it became clear this could become a very real threat to public health and/or national security, he dismissed these concerns and downplayed their seriousness on at least 34 separate occasions (and counting). This allowed continued travel to infected regions, forestalled the activation of disease response infrastructure, and even resulted in direly needed N95 masks and other PPE shipping out to other countries long after the first several hundred cases had been detected in the US.
And then, as anyone who knows how Trump operates could have predicted, when the seriousness of the threat became unavoidable and people started questioning the sluggishness of his administration’s response, Trump began casting about for others to blame. His list of scapegoats is long and unsurprising, and includes many of his greatest hits, such as any and all Democrats as well as generic non-white foreigners. The key takeaway from all Trump’s finger pointing? He doesn’t take responsibility at all.
But of course, he is responsible because he’s in charge. He said so himself. And while he did not create or cause the virus, he’s the one who dismissed, denied, and downplayed it for months. He’s the one who directed his underlings to fire the pandemic response team that Obama had put in place after the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15. And he’s the one who foolishly discarded the NSC pandemic playbook that emerged from the handling of that same crisis.
Trump has treated many Bush- and Obama-era institutions and policies with this same casual derision, and has gone out of his way to undo as many of Obama’s executive orders and legislative achievements as possible. Most of these rollbacks have hit areas like auto efficiency standards, diplomatic efforts, and pollution controls, so the harm of undoing them has in most cases not been immediate or obvious.
His gross mismanagement of the US coronavirus response is different.
Between his elimination of the infrastructure set up to counter a pandemic, and his petulant disregard for the lessons passed on to him by his predecessors, Trump has fulfilled the worst expectations of his numerous and diverse antagonists. Because of his careless actions and refusal to accept responsibility for difficult decisions, America was unprepared when the virus first emerged and slow to react as it morphed into a pandemic.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will unnecessarily be sickened, and thousands or tens of thousands will unnecessarily die, all because Trump can’t be bothered to read briefings and refuses to let his actions be guided by science and logic. Hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of deaths are perfectly acceptable to him, so long as they don’t prevent his re-election.
This is not an isolated occurrence but rather a continuous pattern of behavior for him. Selfish, zero-sum thinking is the hallmark of his career, if not his entire existence. If some small consolation can be taken amidst the mounting death toll (130,000 and counting), it is that this horrific and largely avoidable outcome may finally bring Trump’s many failures into the national spotlight and keep them there until either he demonstrates real leadership or is ejected from office in the fall.
Vulnerability the Third: Trump engenders disloyalty
Trump’s disloyalty inspires disloyalty in his staff, allies, and followers
For all the right-wing media misdirection and propaganda targeted at any attempt to hold Trump accountable, everyone with eyes knows things are not looking good on a long-term basis for the Trump Crime Family Syndicate (hat-tip to Crooked Media for coining that one).
Mueller alone racked up close to 200 federal criminal charges against 35+ Trump campaign members and Russian agents, and dozens if not hundreds more indictments are likely in the offing once all the state-level investigations have run their course.
To recap the progress to date: Paul Manafort is down for the count, Michael Cohen decided to cooperate and implicated Trump in a number of campaign finance felonies, Roger Stone got convicted on all counts, and these three are just the first mid-sized dominos to fall.
Sure, most of this stuff is ultimately unlikely to lead to serious prison time for the perpetrators, but as has already been explained by others, the point of obtaining guilty pleas to relatively minor offenses is not to impose the maximum penalty on the small fish.
Indeed, the intent at the core of such a strategy is quite the opposite: by offering essentially painless outcomes to a chorus of increasingly senior operatives and advisors in order to secure their cooperation and vocal participation, Mueller and others have built such a comprehensive and airtight case that there is absolutely zero doubt as to the ultimate culpability of the Prima Donald.
To his rare credit, Trump, a.k.a. “Individual 1,” appears to grasp this, as he appeared on Fox News at the height of the Cohen intrigue to suggest, in his inimitable ham-fisted fashion, that cooperating with prosecutors in order to secure a lighter sentence should be made illegal.
As the various state-level legal cases continue to build, and the body politic continues to coalesce against the inexcusable actions of Trump and his acolytes, the tide of public opinion will begin to propel ever more Trumpkins away from the increasingly toxic object of their grievance-fueled affections.
It may still take a while yet, but just as surely as rats will flee from a sinking ship, it is a safe bet that when Trump eventually begins to suffer his long overdue fall from grace, Republicans will be tripping over each other to disown him and broadcast their laughable claims that they were secretly opposed to him all along. We should not let them get away with it. Every single one of these assholes who stood by and did nothing while Trump trashed America should be held to account in their next election. Clips of them endorsing him, forgiving his actions, and pleading ignorance of or indifference to his crimes should be cut together and weaponized into surround sound advertising campaigns. We should blanket the airwaves with these ads, stuff voters’ facebook and twitter feeds full of them, and ensure that every time any Republican politician sits for an interview, they are grilled about their complicity in (and if applicable their active support for) Trump’s long list of offenses.
Capitalizing on Trump’s Vulnerabilities
How to hasten, and worsen, his fall
At this point, it bears repeating that, while each neutral or independent voter who can be mobilized to cast their ballot against Trump gets us one point closer to defeating him in November, each of his supporters who turns bestows a net gain of 2; i.e. a loss of one vote for him PLUS a gain of one vote against him, should we persuade them to vote their interests.
And so we in the weary, reality-based majority should capitalize on their potential disloyalty and make a sincere and concerted effort to welcome these folks back to the right side of history. We should also do our best to understand the conditions that led them to support an unstable egomaniac in the first place.
After all, they probably will have been victimized by one or more of Trump’s boneheaded policies, executive orders, or trade wars, so they will be traumatized enough already. They’re not necessarily stupid and they’re mostly not bad people, they just got conned. Hard.
We should do the right thing here not because it is the easy thing, but because it is the correct and charitable thing to do for the good of the country.
Forgiveness depends upon the admission of fault and an expression of regret, which both seem unlikely in this hyper-polarized moment. But cooperation only requires common values and goals, which are easy to identify even in a partisan environment.
Plus, these new converts will be more likely to stay converted in the future if we are able to help them understand that the primary source of their misery is in fact Trump himself (and the forces that gave rise to him), rather than, as Fox and other RNC puppet media outlets are trying to convince them, those who fiercely opposed him from the start.
Even though their thoughts and actions are their own responsibility, we should understand them in the context of the real and perceived vulnerability that many of us feel on a daily basis. The struggles and fears we all feel are real, especially now in the midst of a raging pandemic, and we need to find ways to address them if we wish to inoculate people everywhere against the lures of the next Trump-like faux-populist wing-nut. Because make no mistake, as terrible as Trump is, he is by no means the first criminal narcissist to run for or hold elected office, and he is very unlikely to be the last.
What Else Can You Do?
So what, you may ask, can you do about your desire to unleash broadsides of righteous indignation against the people you genuinely believe have intentionally acted to harm our society’s prospects for peace and prosperity?
Never you fear my friends, for you may direct your wrath toward countering the most active and wide-reaching propaganda arms of the Republican party, a.k.a. Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group, OANN, Breitbart, and their various imitators and promulgators.
These noxious outlets continue to prop up President Pussygrabber despite his escalating string of betrayals and failures, and they are guilty on a daily basis of actively preventing the transmission of accurate information to their viewers, listeners, and readers. In a world where clear, reliable information should be at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection, this deliberate daily force-feeding of baseless bullshit is unforgivable.
This is where we at Fake News Media come in. We can all agree that creating a left-wing Fox News is not the answer; the last thing we need in our political dialogue is more fact-free venom delivered by intolerant hypocrites. The “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” approach is tempting, but ultimately incorrect here.
We have to do better, and thankfully these clowns haven’t set the bar very high.
Rather than joining the fray on their level, slanting our coverage in favor of our preferred perspective and deliberately misrepresenting the facts on the ground to bolster a blatantly partisan narrative, we will spend most of our time simply discussing what’s happening, how the pieces fit together, and how the outcomes affect people—telling it like it is, as much as possible.
When appropriate, we will also seek to provide a layer of incisive commentary on top of that foundation, and when we have time, we’ll put up some background and explainer pieces to help people understand why our system is so broken in the first place.
And, of course, since we were willed into existence by Trump’s non-stop nonsense, we have a responsibility to be the faithful boogeyman he has imagined for himself. We also want to have some fun with it, so we will spare some effort to give the MAGA media a taste of their own medicine when the opportunity presents itself. Trolling the trolls may not be the most mature response to bad behavior, but it can certainly be an entertaining and satisfying one, and it will provide some levity in what will otherwise be a rather serious and factual library of content.
So, if you like the cut of our jib and want to get in the game, you can sign up to receive occasional announcement emails, follow us on twitter, shoot us ideas for articles and other content, or check out our store.
We are working on a nice little range of merch options, from t-shirts, hats, and bumper stickers to funnier items that we are developing on a longer timescale (more info to come on those) .
In the meantime, check out the final, and hopefully slightly more uplifting, installment of this 3-part series: Put this great country together again.
