Summary: The very public, very theatrical, mental unraveling of Donald Trump has become a tragedy of Greek proportions, played out on the American political stage. His ostentatious public feud with the grieving parents of Capt. Humayun Khan, and now, his equally ostentatious feud with a crying baby at one of his rallies are only the latest ammunition for the #neverTrump movement in the Republican Party. The Hillary Clinton attack ads virtually write themselves. When a Republican presidential candidate loses such normally reliable Republican supporters as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Houston Chronicle, and major poobahs and sachems within the Republican Party establishment, you know that something has gone, or is going, seriously wrong in the Trump campaign.
Simply put, Donald Trump appears to be in the end stages of a serious psychic break. He is plainly unfit to hold office, and the Republicans are becoming painfully aware of it. We Democrats should help them enhance their awareness of Donald Trump’s unfitness be president by heightening the contradictions within the Republican Party, inhibiting their activities, encouraging their closet Clintonite tendencies, and at all events, as Trump continues to collapse, giving the falling wall a push.
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There is an old adage to the effect that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging. Put more bluntly, the sentiment can be expressed as “do not kick the turd;” whatever you do, do not shit in your own punch bowl. One should particularly avoid kicking the turd or shitting in one’s own punch bowl as repeatedly as Donald Trump has contrived to do repeatedly in the days since the Democratic National Convention.
We all know what happened at the Democratic convention. Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the grieving parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq by a car bomb in 2004, took to the stage of the Democratic National Convention where Mr. Khan delivered probably one of the most effective political takedowns of the 2016 election cycle. We do not need to recapitulate Khizr Khan’s epic takedown in detail. It has been covered over and over and over again in both the traditional and digital media. When he told Donald Trump “[y]ou have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he delivered words as powerful as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and as subtle as those of Lincoln’s immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, who had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one.
Khizr Khan, a heretofore unknown Pakistani-American lawyer from the Virginia suburbs of Washington city, spoke with a moral authority that, quite frankly, has not come out of the Indian subcontinent since another lawyer, Mahatma Gandhi, shook the British Empire to its foundations. Speaking as a Muslim, and as an immigrant who loves this country as only an immigrant truly can, Mr. Khan scored a direct hit right to the dark heart and palsied soul of the man who wants to be President.
Donald Trump, of course, the man of seventy going on six, did not handle the criticism very well. In the days since the Democratic National Convention ended, Trump and his vile supporters have waged an unceasing Twitter and media war against Mr. And Mrs. Khan. With each broadside The Donald lobs in the direction of the Khans, their moral position and authority improve while his diminishes. Speaking privately to me yesterday at my gym, a Republican acquaintance of mine uttered partisan heresy, but American morality: “Trump,” my acquaintance told me, “has either lost his mind or he is suffering from a diagnosable mental illness.”
My acquaintance looked around, in that guilty way people sometimes do when they are about to mouth heresy, and then added “I can’t do it. I can’t vote Trump and I won’t throw away my vote on a third-party candidate.” Then, looking at me with a somewhat hangdog expression, he asked me not to tell his boyfriend that he planned to cast his vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Don’t worry,” I replied, concealing my amazement, “your secret is safe with me.”
My acquaintance, who managed for years to reconcile being a gay man with being a registered Republican, with all the Stockholm syndrome implications thereof, had finally reached the end of his tolerance for Donald Trump and for a Republican Party which had prostituted itself so completely on the altar of The Donald’s ego. I knew that my acquaintance, who had once dropped me as a boyfriend because of our irreconcilable politics, was in the same difficult place many Republicans, both straight and queer, find themselves the summer.
Republicans who find themselves unwillingly traveling the Trump train to St. Petersburg’s Finland Station, dreading their arrival at that destination, remind me to some extent of the Democrats of the late 1970s who turned to Ronald Reagan because they thought the Democratic Party had left them. I was one of those Democrats. I could not support Ronald Reagan but, at the time, I felt no enthusiasm for Jimmy Carter and what I saw as a crisis of conviction and courage on the part of the West. I also, candidly, felt that the Democratic Party had left many of us in California behind with its uncritical opposition to Proposition 13, the meat ax waving initiative Howard Jarvis proposed to limit property tax in California.
But Ronald Reagan never commanded my allegiance. Like many moderate Democrats, I could not and I would not support Ronald Reagan. I felt about him much the same way I feel about Donald Trump, that he had done such damage as governor of California that it would take more terms than Jerry Brown could ever possibly have served to mitigate what Ronald Reagan had done to this state. Even now, as Jerry Brown enters the last two years of his fourth term, California is still recovering from the eight bitter winters of Ronald Reagan’s governorship.
Nonetheless, having gone through my own “dark night of the soul” with respect to the Democratic Party, I emerged into the morning light with my Democratic convictions strengthened, my Democratic partisanship enhanced, and my sense of political tribalism reinforced.
For when Ronald Reagan took office he brought with him to Washington City a whole coterie and claque of criminals, losers, and nutcases who should never have been brought into the high reaches of the federal government. From his attorney general, Edwin Meese, to the head of the civil rights division of his Justice Department, who delivered herself of the astonishing view that the disabled’s physical ailments were a reflection of their spiritual worthiness, to Casper Weinberger, who got his metaphorical tit in the ringer over the Iran/Contra scandal, to his wife, Nancy Reagan, and her idiotic “just say no” campaign which accomplished zero in reducing America’s drug habit, Ronald Reagan had an unerring ability to pick losers, criminals, and nutcases to staff his administration.
I see the same kind of criminals, losers, nutcases, and indeed, out-and-out whackjobs forming a Trump administration in waiting. I can foresee that within 72 hours of Donald Trump taking the oath of office, his administration would be mired in scandal and articles of impeachment would be moving through the House. I can also see an exodus from the administration of highly competent senior civil service appointees and military officers and senior enlisted personnel whose jobs should never depend upon the identity of the man or woman in the Oval Office.
And I do not say this simply out of some vague sense of alarmism, but on the basis of evidence out of Donald Trump’s own mouth. Speaking at a rally recently both Donald Trump and surrogate Chris Christie recently declaimed that in a Trump administration every single Obama appointee could expect to be fired. Since the United States has had a merit-based civil-service since the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, I think I am right in regarding this as a pernicious, evil threat to the integrity of the civil service at every level. It took us more than hundred years after independence to free ourselves from the evil of patronage-based civil-service. Yet, Donald Trump wants to bring it back.
And what sort of people might Donald Trump appoint? Well, perhaps, he will appoint the sort of people who believe that Donald Trump is some sort of God Emperor, as noted in several articles in both digital and mainstream media that have emerged in the last few days. If so, I can understand the panic in the End Times community that Antichrist may be upon us. I do not know if arrogating to oneself some sort of tinpot delusion of godhood constitutes impeachable offense, but to this queer Episcopalian it certainly constitutes a very dangerous and pernicious heresy of the type that — and I do not say this very often — is the sort that will send its utterer straight to hell upon death; do hot pass Go. Do not collect $200.
About the only conclusion that we can draw from Donald Trump’s last several terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, is that we are in fact watching some kind of end-stage psychotic break occurring before our horrified, yet fascinated eyes. Certainly, our allies in Europe and in Asia are watching this with scornful wonder and horrified fascination. One would hope that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be watching with the same kind of horrified fascination. Unfortunately, Putin is enough of a son-of-a-bitch that he is probably watching with eager anticipation waiting for the United States to implode so that Russia can move in to take advantage of a compromised security situation in Europe. In Putin’s mind, he visualizes a Russian motor-rifle divisions rolling down the Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Champs Elysées in Paris and the Mall in London. In Vilnius, Riga, and Talinn, in London and Paris, in Tokyo, Seoul, and in Beijing, in Manila, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, and in Canberra and Wellington, government leaders are dreading the kind of power vacuum either an American collapse or an American withdrawal from the Baltic or from Asia would engender.
Yet, all the while, Donald Trump continues to unravel on national television. And as he unravels, we may take some small consolation from indicators that perhaps the media are no longer prepared to give him the uncritical break and pass that he has hitherto enjoyed. A few days ago, CNN broke away from a typical rambling, Castro/Brezhnev-like Trump speech to cover Dianne Feinstein talking about serious intelligence issues confronting the nation. As he pulled away, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said in effect “we’ll come back to Trump’s speech if he says anything of substance,” before pulling away and going to Senator Feinstein’s remarks. This may be a fluke or it may be the beginning of the end of the love affair between the mainstream media and Donald Trump. It may be the end of the mainstream media’s being complicit in what appears to be either Donald Trump’s mental breakdown or a pattern of deliberate and organized treason against the United States.
For, like Antony Babington and the Catholic conspirators against Queen Elizabeth I, Donald Trump has in fact skated very close to, if not over the boundaries of, treason. He may believe that an electoral victory will have the effect of absolving him from having to answer for it, on the theory, expressed by 16th-century English author John Harington that “[t]reason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.” Yet, in a country where faculties of mass communication and community organization exceed those of Elizabethan England by orders of magnitude, Americans can be kept aware of Donald Trump’s treason quite easily, though his national security apparatus would no doubt try to shut down all talk of treason. A president may be impeached for treason, and, as I predicted above, President Trump might well find that by the afternoon of January 20, 2017, articles of impeachment would be circulating in the House of Representatives.
And a #stoppresidentTrump movement among Republicans would be circulating for no other reason than that by January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s mental breakdown will be so complete and so obvious that the Republicans themselves will feel they have no option but to take him out. They may assassinate him or they may impeach him, but the finger on the trigger or the hands that sign the impeachment resolution will be those of Republicans. They may pray that their dirty work will be done by Democrat, but in the same way that Gandhiji was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu terrorist, and not by a Muslim, we Democrats should insist that the Republicans clean up the mess they will have made if they are fool enough to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States.
In the meantime, however, we who stand with Hillary should do everything possible to “heighten the contradictions” our Republican brothers and sisters are feeling. There may surely be enough of them willing to put patriotism over party, hold their nose, and mark their ballots for a woman who, while perhaps uncharismatic, is nonetheless far too sensible to start a nuclear war, and far too well put together to be suffering from the obvious mental disease and deficiency which so plainly afflicts Donald Trump, and unfits him entirely for any office of trust or profit under the United States or any of them. We must encourage their closet Clintonism. We must inhibit their activities to elect Donald Trump. We must heighten the contradictions within the Republican Party and, as a Chinese would say, not hesitate to give the falling wall a push.
