We Are Trump's Hostages - By Andrew Sullivan
Is there anything we know now that we didn’t know, say, a month ago? Or a year ago? Or two years ago?
The Bob Woodward book has some astounding details — including evidence of outright subordination by senior officials — but in its essence, it’s just a much more reliable confirmation of the basic thrust of Michael Wolff’s picture of complete chaos and near-insanity in the cockpit of the world’s most powerful nation. The New York Times’ anonymous op-ed falls into the same camp. From the moment very early on when we learned about the content of the deranged conversation between the president and Malcolm Turnbull, then prime minister of Australia, we knew that people in the White House had leaked it, in both an astonishing betrayal of confidence, and a clear attempt to warn the country of the unique danger this unfit president poses. Almost all the excellent reporting of the last year and a half has also been fed by constant distress signals from within the White House, where grown-ups have had to contend with a psychologically disturbed, delusional, and hugely ignorant president, who has no capacity or willingness to learn.
We also know that the president is unfocused, inarticulate, prone to tantrums like a 5-year-old, incapable of reading a memo that doesn’t have big pictures or graphics on it, that he insults everyone, often explosively, as his mood fits, spends hours watching cable news, tweets like a distracted animal, and has lied and lied so much fact-checkers are close to exhaustion. And we know he is incapable of admitting a lie, issuing a correction, or adjusting to reality. We know he just makes things up all the time. We know all this because we have eyes and ears. You could see he was mentally unwell from his first day in office, when he made those surreal assertions about the size of his Inaugural crowd. (We now find out he actually had the photographs doctored subsequently to fit his own reality — that’s how deranged he is.) This emperor has had absolutely no clothes from the very beginning. The only thing in doubt all along has been the Republican Party’s complicity.
And that complicity remains. If anything, it is intensifying. As Jim Fallows constantly points out, any single Republican senator — Sasse, Corker, Collins, Graham, Paul, Murkowski — could check this president by voting against him, on any number of issues, including the protection of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Instead, they are now happily supporting a Supreme Court nominee whose deference to executive power is near-total, whose partisanship is profound, and who will reliably back Trump in any constitutional crisis the Supreme Court may find itself having to resolve in the near-future. In the looming conflict between Trump and the rule of law, the GOP has already told us whose side it is on. For good measure, it is now openly preparing to acquiesce in the appointment after the midterms of a new attorney general whose primary goal will be the complete politicization of the Justice Department, as an instrument for the president to punish his enemies, real and imagined, and, more importantly, to protect his criminal friends and allies. And in this situation, Kavanaugh won’t even commit on a president’s ability to pardon himself!
The Times’ Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous is part of that complicity, knowing full well what a nightmare this president is, and yet sticking with him for policy gains he prefers. For that, he is part of the problem rather than the solution. But, in his defense, he is in a very tough spot. The shrinking GOP base is more committed to this mad king than to any other Republican president at this point in his term. Almost every Republican senator knows that the president is profoundly unfit, a danger to the republic and the world, a madman child in charge of Crazytown … and does absolutely nothing at all.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/andrew-sullivan-we-are-trumps-hostages.html
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