Anti-Trump protesters at the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
21 July 18
t can’t happen here.
That’s more than just the title of a suddenly highly relevant Sinclair Lewis novel
about the rise of an American dictator, written in 1935 — another era
when despots were on people’s minds, for some weird reason. No, “it
can’t happen here” long been the national motto of a United States of
America that has long thought itself immune to the slings and arrows of
everyone else’s world history.
An authoritarian president with nothing but contempt for 242 years of democratic norms,
a free press, and a judicial system untainted by political
interference? It can’t happen here, the American exceptionalists all
told us. An unqualified narcissist gaining the Oval Office with the help of crimes committed by a foreign adversary? Of course it can’t happen here!
And there’s a flip side to all of this denial. The
notion that the will of the people can regain control of the plot
narrative — that also could never happen here, not in America. Remember
what just happened in South Korea in late 2016 and early 2017
(coincidentally, the same months that America was electing and
inaugurating Donald Trump) — the so-called Candlelight Revolution
in which as many as two million people, fed up with their corrupt
president, Park Geun-Hye, took to the streets of Seoul? Those protests
continued until Park was impeached and removed from office and a new
president (who’s conducted a Nobel Prize-worthy campaign for peace on the Korean Peninsula, by the way) replaced him.
That could never happen here, right?
Why the hell not?
In many ways, July 16, 2018, will be another day that will live in infamy in American history.
So much has been written and said about President Trump’s performance
in Helsinki as he stood next to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a ruthless
autocrat who makes a mockery out of elections and murders investigative reporters and political opponents with impunity,
which apparently makes him a role model for America’s 45th president.
Before the two rulers had even walked away from their podiums, CNN’s
Anderson Cooper said, “You
have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by
an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader certainly
that I’ve ever seen.”
Harsh but right on the money. The
Donald Trump who on Monday said he believed Putin more than he believed
either American intelligence agencies or the prosecutors who’ve
indicted more than two dozen Russian operatives working to tip the
2016 election to Trump with illegal hacking, “fake news” and even
infiltrating the NRA, and who responded to this assault on U.S.
democracy by spouting insane Fox-fried scandals about finding “servers”
and Hillary Clinton’s emails, was — to paraphrase the famous words of Minnesota Vikings coach Dennis Green — exactly who we thought he was.
Narcissistic.
Caring more about saving himself than about saving the integrity of the United States.
Weak, impotent and obsequious in front of a savvy and amoral adversary.
More willing to believe either a Russian dictator or
the half-baked conspiracies of a quasi-state-TV-network called Fox News
than to believe the powerful government that he is supposed to lead.
Seemingly deep in debt — for reasons speculated upon but as yet not fully known
— to the foreign power that worked to install him as leader of 320
million Americans, an adversary that is now reaping the benefits of
inevitable chaos.
A man who is uniquely and totally unfit to serve as president of the United States.
Of course, as has been so often the case during Trump’s 18 months in the White House, his Helsinki performance managed to be both shocking and — in the spirit of a man who prefers golf to presidenting — completely par for the course. There have been many other times when Trump has proved his unfitness. His “both-sides-ing” of lethal neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. Calling African nations “shithole countries.” Calling journalists “enemies of the American people” — even after five were massacred in an Annapolis newsroom. Conducting a “family separation” campaign on the southern border that has all but permanently tarnished the idea of America as a human-rights beacon.
Of course, as has been so often the case during Trump’s 18 months in the White House, his Helsinki performance managed to be both shocking and — in the spirit of a man who prefers golf to presidenting — completely par for the course. There have been many other times when Trump has proved his unfitness. His “both-sides-ing” of lethal neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville. Calling African nations “shithole countries.” Calling journalists “enemies of the American people” — even after five were massacred in an Annapolis newsroom. Conducting a “family separation” campaign on the southern border that has all but permanently tarnished the idea of America as a human-rights beacon.
So what are we going to do about this?
The unfortunate events of July 16, 2018, had the
feeling of both a major turning point but also no turning point at all.
The handful of Republicans who’d been mildly critical of Trump in the
past offered much harsher words — Sen. John McCain, suffering from
terminal brain cancer at home in Arizona, accused the president of “naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats”
— while those who’ve been loathe to utter a bad word about their fellow
Republican now at least expressed their vague disappointment.
But missing from this new conversation so far is any
serious talk of action. None of the Republicans who control Congress
seems willing to go beyond mere words — to even introduce a morally
powerful if non-binding resolution of censure, let alone begin the
process of impeachment and removing Trump from office as a clear and
present danger to American democracy.
This is nothing new. Remember Newtown … and then Las Vegas … and finally Parkland?
Doing nothing of any substance is the default position for a democracy that barely functions. But after Newtown, there was
some progress toward making assault weapons harder to get, and in
making it harder for those under 21 to purchase weapons. That pressure
came not from voters, but from consumers. Companies like Dick’s Sporting Goods,
Walmart and Kroger supermarkets stopped selling high-powered weapons
not because the government told them to, but because their customers
demanded it, and would vote with their wallets if the corporations
didn’t listen. That’s where we’re at in America in 2018; Corporations
are only afraid of consumers — and politicians are only afraid of
corporations.
There is a way to take back the real America from the
impostor presidency of Donald Trump, but the road doesn’t go through our
failed democratic institutions — not directly, anyway. Americans are
going to have to hit the oligarchy in the only place it really hurts
them: Its bankbooks. What’s more, everyday people can’t expect the
reward of a Trump-free America without taking some risk.
Since congressional Republicans won’t take serious
moves to restrain Trump, it’s time to boycott the large corporations
that the GOP needs need to finance its fall campaigns, not to mention
the handful of big companies that actively support the short-fingered
vulgarian living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Do you buy a lot of stuff at Home Depot, the nation’s largest home-repair store chain? Well … don’t. That’s because the Home Depot’s co-founder, Bernard Marcus, not
only gave $7 million to aid Trump in 2016, but is spending nearly $5
million more, so far, to keep the House and Senate in GOP hands and
even gave $300,000 to the Super-PAC of Trump’s national security
adviser, John Bolton. Until Marcus tells his clients in Congress to
remove Trump, there’s a Lowe’s just down the street the sells the same
stuff — or you can patronize your friendly local hardware store.
Do you have Dixie Cups or Brawny paper towels at home? Replace them with a different brand, because those products are manufactured by Georgia-Pacific, which is owned by the most powerful GOP donors of all, David and Charles Koch, who plan to spend up to $400 million (!!) on the midterms and who could thus get rid of Trump with one phone call.
You can stop buying your gasoline from Chevron or Valero,
which are also spending millions to keep in power those Republicans who
are keeping Trump in the White House, and for God’s sake don’t answer
the door when Amway — founded by the
Republican-financing family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — comes
ringing. Unless they successfully convince their wholly owned members of
Congress to move on Trump. That is when the boycott ends.
But that’s not all. Helsinki showed the rising danger
posed by Trump means that the American people are going to have kick
things up a notch, in a hurry. It’s time to begin the planning for a general strike
— perhaps right after Labor Day, when school is back in session and
vacation season is over — that would show our ability to shut down the
American economy while this unfit and arguably treasonous president
insists on clinging to power.
That means that millions of workers — on the docks, in
the classrooms, on factory floors, in sweltering warehouses and manning
the checkout line and, yes, in newsrooms — walk off their jobs . Maybe
for a day, maybe for longer, and maybe more than once depending on the
political fallout — but until the comatose American system wakes up. The
general strike is a recognition that while massive weekend protest
marches since Trump’s inauguration have been a thing of beauty, they
don’t strike fear into a corrupt system, either. A general strike is
much more potent.
And it’s not particularly unusual. They’ve happened
everywhere else in the world, from the UK to Italy to Spain to nations
in South America or Africa. It can’t happen here, you say? It did —
right here where I sit, in Philadelphia, where workers who walked off the job across the city in 1835 and won a 10-hour workday and higher wages. This year, a wave of unauthorized teacher strikes from West Virginia to
Oklahoma won remarkable gains. That’s because the strike is perhaps the
most effective tool that everyday people have. There’s no reason why it
can’t be used to end this Trumpian nightmare.
A couple of points and caveats. The general strike
needs to be about Trump, and it needs to be about more than Trump, to
include the other existential threats that far too many people are
feeling in Trump’s America. The powerful student movement against gun violence. Black Lives Matter.
Immigrant activists fighting for entire neighborhoods where people are
afraid to leave their homes. A general strike must include these
powerful movements and their demands. And the nation’s labor unions will
have to get on board to make it work.
Why now?
And then there are those who say, why now? Why not
wait and focus 100 percent of our efforts on November’s midterm
elections? Why fight so loudly for American values, when that might
scare off the elusive moderate voters? Personally, I understand these
arguments — and yet I am not convinced. Some of them are the same folks
who told us not to go overboard with Trump alarmism in the fall of the
2016, who insisted that Hillary’s got this. How’d that work out? I think
back on Martin Luther King and his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail,
in which he condemns the moderate “who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.'”
The “more convenient season” for ousting Donald Trump from the White House is right now — not to wait until he unilaterally decides that an invasion of Venezuela would be a nice diversion,
or when he realizes he’s been double-crossed by Kim Jong-Un and reaches
for the nuclear football, or when he hands over the Baltic States to
Putin, or when he opens up massive internment camps for Central American
refugees.
And yes, a general strike or even massive protests are
well outside of the normal comfort zone for a majority of Americans.
But the question we need to ask ourselves is this: After Helsinki, how
comfortable are we with Donald Trump spending even one more night in the
White House?
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