WHO’S GOING TO STEP UP AND SAVE OUR COUNTRY?
News in the Trump administration rarely remains still for an entire news cycle, let alone a weekend.
But there is one thing we can always count on: Donald J. Trump will never make news by being presidential, by being a leader, by being steady or by being stable.
So now what? What’s next? Who — with authority — will step forward and say that America must have steadiness and stability. Now.
Who — and there must be more than one, in fact there must be a Cabinet full and a Congress full — will say the leadership of our country is more important than the next insult on immigrants, the next Supreme Court justice hearing, the next tax break?
What more does our craven Congress and Donald Trump’s yes-man Cabinet need to see to know that the president’s white nationalist leanings, gropings, porn star affairs, Russian campaign help, trade policy blowups, foreign policy debacles and smarmy, swampy giveaways can no longer be ignored — or worse, covered up? What more does anyone need to see to understand that these profound embarrassments are more than one-off happenings with him and his administration?
Last week’s revelations from Bob Woodward’s book excerpts really told us nothing we didn’t already know. Nor did an insider’s anonymous op-ed in The New York Times that noted some senior administration officials already have considered and dismissed embracing the 25th Amendment to rid our country of Trump and his unstable mind and corrupt heart.
Taken together, however, the book and the op-ed provided what The Washington Post termed a “stark” and “breathtaking” warning “without precedent in modern presidential history.”
Historian Douglas Brinkley told The Post: “For somebody within the belly of the White House to be saying there are a group of us running a resistance, making sure the president of the United States doesn’t do irrational and dangerous things, it is a mind-boggling moment.”
But again: It’s not like we didn’t know. We’ve just turned our eyes away and waited for the next guy to do something — especially if “we” were Republican.
“This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from Day One,” our own senator, Bob Corker, told reporters. “That’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the president to stay.”
Well, sir, neither you nor your other let’s-get-the-heckout-of-Dodge comrades took any obvious action beyond talk. You may have grabbed a few headlines, but even you know it was nowhere near enough.
It’s true enough that Corker spoke up as early as last summer when he told the Chattanooga Rotary Club that Trump hadn’t been able to demonstrate the “stability” and “competence” to be a successful president. And he tried again in October, calling the president’s then-three top advisers all that stood between America and chaos. FYI: One of those three chaos-preventers is long gone now, and a replacement for a second is increasingly under White House discussion. So, come on, folks. What’s next?
When will somebody get serious about invoking the 25th Amendment or impeachment to remove Trump from office? We don’t have time — clearly we’ve never had time — to wait on special counsel Robert Mueller to make an indictable or Congress-proof case against Trump. Frankly, it’s beginning to look as though Mueller would have to have indictable or impeachable cases against most of the Republican Congress, too, before a majority of GOPer’s would grow spines.
Maybe three recent polls putting Trump’s approval rating at 36 and 37 percent just ahead of November mid-terms might be getting more of their attention than all the president’s rantings.
The bottom line is that this White House — and especially this Congress — is an abject shame to America.
Coupled with the fact that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appears to be headed to the nation’s high court, it seems that saving our country is up to voters.
Will we be up to the challenge?