More dangerous than ever
A wounded animal, they say, is the most dangerous. Donald Trump has been politically wounded, with Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, and he is lashing out in truly dangerous fashion.
Trump claimed the election results amounted to a “Big Victory” for him, given that the president’s party almost always loses ground midway through his term.
But his actions on the day after the vote spoke volumes about his true state of mind. Trump has been humbled by the voters and he knows it.
He staged a remarkable public tantrum against the news media and expressed open pleasure at the defeat of members of his own party who distanced themselves from him.
Asked whether the new Democrat-controlled House might step up investigations into his political and financial affairs, he issued an ominous and possibly illegal threat to investigate them in retaliation.
And most concerning of all, he abruptly fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in a move that may make it easier for him to end or severely limit the special counsel looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It isn’t clear how far Trump will dare to go. Democrats and many others are already warning about a “constitutional crisis” if the president tries to shut down the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been investigating possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign.
But the way Trump is proceeding so far already poses a real threat. Far from being hobbled by voters who handed control of the House to Democrats, he is showing he may well be becoming even more dangerous.
To understand that, one need only look at the man Trump named to replace Sessions as acting head of the U.S. Justice Department. Mark Whitaker, Session’s chief of staff, joined the department last year, only a month after he wrote a commentary for CNN.com under the headline “Mueller’s investigation of Trump is going too far.”
In it, Whitaker argued Mueller’s investigation would be “dangerously close to crossing” a line if it delved into the Trump family’s finances as part of its probe into Russian meddling. If that happened, it “would raise serious concerns that the special counsel’s investigation was a mere witch hunt.” And he speculated in a TV interview about slashing Mueller’s budget “so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”
This is the man who has now been put in charge of the Justice Department, and is expected to be given direct oversight of Mueller.
It all raises the spectre of the Mueller investigation being shut down, or at the very least crippled, either by being directed to severely limit the scope of its activities or simply by being de-funded. Either way, it would set the stage for a showdown between Trump and the newly emboldened Democrats, fresh from their victory on Tuesday.
That victory was a real one, even if it fell short of the “Blue Wave” that many hoped for after almost two years of Trump’s misrule, unrestrained by either house of Congress.
Trump proclaimed that the midterms were a “referendum about me,” so it’s not hard to see the vote as a rebuke to his ugly brew of bullying, aggressive nationalism and repudiation of all norms of political behaviour. At last, American voters drew a line on that.
Still, Republicans did increase their majority in the Senate, a rare feat in a midterm election. Trump’s fabled “base” did not desert him, and he could take enough comfort from the results to proclaim that he had “defied history.”
Tuesday’s vote was one step on the road to ending the destructive Trump era. But that fight is far from over, and it’s clear Trump will stop at little to fend off the threat to his power.
Donald Trump has been politically wounded and he is lashing out in truly dangerous fashion