I’m thinking we’ve been dragged into a new Civil War — dragged, quite appropriately, by white supremacists, male and female, whose need to express their endless hatred for women and black women got them to Trump.
Their cause is as amoral, ahistorical and rotten as it ever has been. Their leaders are much lower in, uh, quality than Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. (Who, I’m sure you realize, lost that Civil War.) Trump, his voters and his oncoming administration are nuts, dumb and incompetent.
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I’ve been picking up some sane thinking about our situation. New York’s Attorney General, Tish James, gave a sober, quiet and fierce speech about the election, which brought home to me how we the people will function in the next few years.
- Our Democratic states will in effect become our government. The twenty-three Democratic Party governors are not mild-mannered wimps; they will do what they have practice in doing — coalescing into a single-minded unit to provide us with our governmental needs — those the Trump government has bragged it will deprive us of.
- Our Democratic Attorneys General will continue their alliance — the one which made friends and allies of once-AG Kamala Harris and once-AG Josh Shapiro and other AGs — but now, as Tish James said, will have meat to grind in opposition to the Trump administration and will in no way shrink from the opposition. The Democratic AGs will in effect become a collective Department of Justice. The federal DOJ looks to be peopled with the sort of nutty, out of the woodwork mediocrities Trump needs in order to convince himself he’s the brightest guy in the room. Each of these AGs is so much smarter than Trump’s entire mob.
I intend to live fully in my state, the State of New York.
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Every day I get some stuff from the Atlantic and today I came upon Tom Nichols in my email. On this weird, awful, infuriating day, after reading a whole heap of grief and dire predictions on TAFKAT, Nichols’s essay came as a bracing sea breeze on my face. Some of his thoughts:
An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.
The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.
Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threats that appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.
So now what?
The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.
For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.
Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.
“Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people.” Reminds me of a brilliant phrase from my cousin Ben Wittes when he evaluated Trump’s early presidency: “Malevolence tempered by incompetence.”
The malevolence has gotten much worse — but so has the incompetence.
These are not dark thoughts.