The Only Way Back

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/04/democrats_must_promise_to_investigate_every_trump_scandal_even_if_it_takes.html

The Only Way Back
Democrats must promise to investigate every aspect of the Trump administration, even if it takes decades.
By Michelle Goldberg


Because I was sentient 100 days ago, I’m old enough to remember a time when American presidents were expected, as a matter of course, not to have paid foreign agents among their senior staff. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if Barack Obama’s national security adviser were revealed to have recently been on the payroll of Turkey’s Islamist government, as Donald Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was. And what if we’d learned that a onetime campaign manager of Obama was a foreign agent of pro-Russian political interests in Ukraine, like Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort? And that he appeared to have kept this entanglement secret, in violation of the law? How about if one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers had admitted to passing documents to a Russian spy, like Trump campaign adviser Carter Page? We’d either have an impeachment, armed right-wing militias marching on the capital, or both. Quotidian political life would, at the very least, have ground to a halt.

It should be grinding to a halt now. But instead, 100 days into Donald Trump’s terrible presidency, a strange miasma has settled over American politics. It’s like a nightmare where you know something hideous is happening, but your legs are leaden and you can’t scream. Certainly, the anti-Trump resistance is working its heart out, but few talk about avoiding the normalization of Trump anymore. The president’s main 100-day accomplishment—besides sticking a reactionary on the Supreme Court—has been to make previously inconceivable levels of corruption and staggering breaches of national security appear normal.

snip//

One could list 100 things that Trump has done—one for each debased day of his wretched presidency—that would be enough to impeach a Democrat. (Not all of Trump’s violations involve Russia, of course, though a bizarre number of them do.) Bill Clinton’s entire presidency was haunted by multiple investigations into Whitewater, a 1978 Arkansas real estate deal in which he and his wife lost money, and no wrongdoing was ever uncovered. In 2008, a Russian oligarch massively overpaid for a Palm Beach mansion owned by Trump, and it’s at best a political footnote.

That’s because Trump’s presidency, like his campaign, is a lowlife carnival; there are so many macabre sideshows and freakish violations of normal political behavior that we’re left stunned and dazed. Much of the mainstream media, and almost all elected Republicans, act as if the horror of this presidency were less than the sum of its parts. The outrages cancel each other out rather than accumulating. This massive inflation in what constitutes a scandal has the potential to be permanently corrupting.

snip//

Every day, Trump shows us what politics look like when the rules only apply to one party. Already, because of Trump, America is a more cynical, corrupt, lawless place than it was 100 days ago. There is only one way back from this, and that is to make sure that someday, when Democrats retake at least one chamber of Congress, they investigate every shady thing that Trump, his cronies, and his relatives have done either in achieving or using public power, even if it takes decades. We don’t need Democrats chanting “lock them up” at rallies, but progressive activists should demand that politicians hoping to represent them promise to end Republican impunity. And then, when and if Democrats wrest back some measure of power from Republicans, activists should hold these politicians to their promises.

We’re going to need a subcommittee—maybe more than one—on foreign emoluments. We should have one specifically devoted to Ivanka Trump’s foreign businesses, as well as to the fund she’s starting to invest in female entrepreneurs, since unlike her father, she’s not exempt from federal conflict of interest statutes. (According to Axios, Ivanka already started soliciting foreign contributions to her fund—a move that’s almost comically hypocritical, given the Trump campaign’s attacks on foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation.) We’re going to have to understand everything that went on at Mar-a-Lago—how Trump sold access to himself, and to whom, and what sort of security protocols were in place while he did so. Not only do we need a full, comprehensive airing of Flynn’s ties to Turkey and Russia, we also need to examine what the administration knew about the ways he might have been compromised. Comey should become the subject of protracted hearings over the political calculus that went into his decision-making during the campaign, just like he feared. The Russia investigation alone should dog Trump for the rest of his days.

One hundred days has not been enough time to fully grapple with how much damage Trump is doing to this country, and to figure out how handsomely he and his family are profiting from their rule. It is enough time to know that the project of holding him and his enablers accountable should stretch far into the American future, assuming that, after Trump, there is one.

[enid602]

1. Nuremburg

We need nothing short of a Nuremberg-style trial.

[CrispyQ]

2. The hypocrisy of the GOP is stunning. Unbelievable, actually, for anyone in touch with reality.

Trump has not created this dynamic on his own. The Republican Party, convinced of its right to rule, has been ethically unbound since Richard Nixon. There is no Democratic equivalent of Watergate, or Iran–Contra, or the deceit of George W. Bush’s administration in selling the Iraq war. (The closest proximate thing was Bill Clinton’s lies about sexual relations with an intern in the Oval Office.) Over the past 50 years, Republican presidencies have been consistently more corrupt than Democratic ones. Yet Republicans have also treated our past two Democratic administrations as illegitimate and have undermined them with endless investigations into phony scandals like Whitewater and Benghazi. The result is that Democrats and Republicans operate under entirely different standards of appropriate political behavior.

And the media never mentions this double standard.

Liberal bastards.

[JudyM]

3. This excerpt is the best crystallization I've seen of this mess. Thanks for pulling it out, CrispyQ.