Hope and Despair in the Age of Trump

Not so much the Kavanaugh appointment as Republicans' reaction to it has left me despairing about our future more than anything else.

On the one hand, there is cause for optimism.  It appears that the country can survive a Trump presidency.  The economy is booming, international crises have (mostly) been avoided, trade wars can be averted by putting a few tweaks on old agreements, and even Obamacare is limping along.

Granted, this is partly because in the early phases of his Presidency Trump had to be saved from himself.  He wanted to blow up NAFTA, destroy the healthcare system Obamacare created, and possibly start a war with North Korea.  Cooler head prevailed.  And Trump and his circle appear to have matured enough to avoid such disasters in the future.

So why despair?

Well, for one thing, Trump is a bully, and a major reason he has been successful is that his bullying tactics have worked.  For people who like me who oppose bullying tactics, this is rather depressing.

But above all, because it is increasingly obvious that the Republican Party, Never Trumpers included, love these bullying tactics when applied to domestic policy.  Right now Republican are applauding Trump for making the Kavanaugh nomination unabashedly partisan and really more about defeating liberals than anything else.  They are proudly proclaiming that finally we have a President who is standing up to those Democratic bullies and character assassins who have so intimidated Republicans up till now. 

And now we have Republicans declaring Democrats to be an intolerable threat to liberty and the rule of law, Republicans calling protesters paid Soros shills, and even Rudy Giuliani retweeting a call to freeze Soros' assets.  Republicans have been trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party for some time, but this latest outburst ramps it up many-fold.

The real value of Democrats winning the mid-term elections is not legislation.  There is no possibility of Democrats winning enough votes to beat a Senate filibuster, let alone override a Trump veto.  And Republicans seem to have given up on passing any seriously controversial legislation, so there is no real need to block them.  The real value in Democrats winning one or another chamber of Congress is to hold real investigations of what Trump has been up to.  But the events surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination are making clear that no matter what such an investigation reveals, Republicans will simply dismiss it as persecution.  Republicans wouldn't turn against Trump if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  Indeed, I am reaching the point that it wouldn't surprise me for Trump to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue just to piss off liberals and therefore rally his base around him.

And so here is where my despair really comes from.  Donald Trump is increasingly applying his bullying tactics to domestic politics.  The evidence thus far seems to indicate that bullying tactics work.  The nation and the world can survive Trump's bullying tactics.  But democracy and the rule of law can't.