“I do not need the Senate. These people work for me. They're placeholders until I decide they're not useful anymore.”
This was the “private” statement by
Donald Trump that reached the ears of some key Republican senators. They
reportedly had a recording of it. And it apparently set off alarm bells with
some of the most senior ones.
There is a sensation in Washington that
a few of the less obtuse—or less compromised—of the Republican old guard are
starting, very late in life, to realize that, while Trump demands loyalty, it
is seldom if ever a two-way street. Once he has gotten those who (according to
him) work for him to humiliate themselves, crawl to him, give up all autonomy,
betray their own values and those of their country, ignore the Constitution,
and justify the unjustifiable beyond the law and beyond all reason, if he no
longer sees them as useful, they are discarded (read: primaried).
Of course, all they had to do was ask
any of the myriad executives who ever did business with Donald Trump and got
stiffed—an extremely high percentage—to know this was his modus operandi. I
mean, Trump is a simple man to understand. The main rule is, if there is a
choice between right and wrong, he will always choose wrong. But all too
many politicians live life from poll to poll. They are only thinking about
surviving until their next election and, hopefully, keeping their seat, that
sacred place from which they are open for business to every perk and deal
imaginable.
In the continuing era of Trump, however,
even that looks like an iffy strategy, since, no matter how they may lie to the
public, most senior GOP politicians are savvy. They know the score and know the
reality and they are watching Trump’s popularity plummet with almost everyone
withdrawing—independents, swing states, swing voters, and generally pissed-off
consumers—and they know that his most brainwashed and most blindly loyal base
just isn’t big enough to get them reelected, especially if the boss decides to
endorse someone else, or at least not to campaign actively for them. So, what’s
the upside of continuing to let the president run rough-shod over their
co-equal powers?
Independent media outlets are excitedly
reporting on this incipient split between the Senate GOP and Trump, no matter
what sort of evasive falsehoods politicians are telling the mainstream media.
And I’m not talking about—and I mean no disrespect, because I am, myself, a
maverick—citizen journalists reporting from the makeshift basement studios in
their homes. These are major independent voices, like conservative veteran
commentator George Will (who seems to have developed permanent party heartburn
ever since Trump usurped the GOP in 2016), Lawrence O’Donnell, and Rachel
Maddow on her independent social media channels.
These are people with impeccable sources
in Washington and elsewhere, people with access that no one else has, and, in
the case of Will, decades of insider knowledge of the Republican Party and its
top operators. In other words, when Will goes on record, it’s not with a story
so thin as to be a mirage. On the contrary, what he says into the mic and the
camera or types on his screen is the scoop, the tip of the iceberg. But you can
bet there is a whole lot more as yet unconfirmed that he is probing beneath the
surface. So, here's the story these and other independent journalists were
covering this week.
To a man and woman, these stellar
reporters, whose fingers have long been on the pulse of the nation, prefaced
their reports by indicating that what they were about to tell viewers was not
political theory or another headline fighting for attention. These are,
they said, documented events from a 48 hour window that
has effectively blown apart the Republican party's power structure as
we've known it.
According to detailed reporting by these
and other independent journalists, Wednesday morning shortly before 8am,
several of the most powerful Republicans in the country walked into the
office of Mitch McConnell—whose Senate career spans more than four decades—for
what was supposed to be a routine meeting. They walked out less than
an hour later and had reached an agreement to claw back the power that the
Republican-controlled Senate has been relinquishing to the president. They were
determined to take concrete institutional steps to limit the power of an
administration that has become increasingly authoritarian by the day.
Within two hours the handful of
influential Republicans had contacted and convinced more than a dozen other
senators to stand with them against the president’s burgeoning unilateral
power. And just like that, the GOP was deep into an internal crisis of its own
making, with the battle lines being drawn between Senate institutionalists and
Trump loyalists.
In historical terms, this marks the most
serious internal Republican revolt since the Nixon administration and
the Watergate scandal. As these independent commentators point out, this isn't a
fight over ideology. This is about senior Republicans with institutional
traditions that stretch far beyond the Trump Era and the personality cult
loyalties that it has bred, quietly concluding that Donald Trump is off
the rails and out of control.
It wasn’t just the arrogant quote with
which I opened this essay that triggered the meeting of senior senators. It was
also an increasingly “boss-employee” relationship that Trump seems determined
to apply in dealing with the upper house of Congress. That same morning, at a
quarter past two, Trump had reportedly called Senate Majority Leader John
Thune. He wasn’t calling in the wee hours of the morning to negotiate emergency
powers legislation. He was calling to demand that Thune organize an
immediate vote on the Emergency Powers Act.
The draft legislation in question was no
small thing. It was no less than a radical re-write of American governance.
Among other things, it was designed, in the name of supposed “efficient
national security”, to permit the president to completely sideline the Senate
when it came to confirming (or rejecting) all cabinet and Armed Forces
leadership appointments—something that would give an already inordinately
powerful executive unprecedented power as both president and
commander-in-chief.
Like an all-powerful boss talking to an
employee who was either bound to listen or bound to lose his job, Trump wasn’t asking
Thune, he was telling him, and the president punctuated his demand with
a threat: Pass the emergency Powers Act by Friday, “or I’ll primary every one
of you.”
By 6am, the reported recording of Trump
saying, “I do not need the Senate. These people work for me. They're
placeholders until I decide they're not useful anymore,” had made the
rounds of the senior party leadership, and by less than two hours later, it had
become the elephant in the room during the
meeting in McConnell’s office, which was reportedly attended by Majority
Leader Thune and none other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others,
including Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.
But this sort of behavior on Trump’s
part is nothing new, and if a handful of Republicans—fearing for their own
political power and nothing else (there is no noble cause here; this is
political survival mode)—are now finally being jolted awake and deciding to
rebel, it may be way too little and, perhaps, too late. For nearly a decade, Senate
Republicans’ performance has been one of supine cowardly appeasement of a
megalomaniacal despot. Instead of standing up to Trump, instead of risking all
for the nation and for democracy, they have cringed in fear and compliantly
watched as those who did have the courage to call Trump out—Cheney, Kinzinger,
Romney, Gonzalez, Herrera Beutler, Katko, Meijer, Newhouse, Rice, Upton, Valadao,
etc.—were all turned into political non-persons by the MAGA machine. Worse
still are the cases of Bill Cassidy and Kevin McCarthy who provided Trump with
his every desire short of carnal relations, and still ended up sidelined and
barred from Trump’s inner circle.
According to Rachel Maddow, “When
that recording hit the encrypted group chats of senior Republicans,
the reaction wasn't the usual silence. It wasn't compliance. It was
fury. For the first time, the institution felt a knife at its throat.
And for the first time, it decided to strike back.”
I’m not so sure. In most cases I’m
thinking it’s the blade at their own throats, not that of the institution that
is motivating them.
Perhaps in the case of McConnell it is
purely institutional, if also a bit of a Hail Mary, before he closes out his
career and goes home to live out his last days and die. Maybe it’s atonement
for his past cowardice, since, more than anyone else, McConnell had it in his
hands, and had the standing, to seek the impeachment and political trial of
Trump when he tried to overthrow the government and steal the election in
January of 2021. That was precisely when his decisive leadership was needed. Instead,
he punted.
He admitted that Trump was to blame for
it all, admitted that the president had violated the constitutional order and
encouraged sedition. But he said the Senate would leave it to Justice—and the
next (Democratic) administration—to deal with it. That day, he was the key to
Trump’s never being able to hold public office again, and he clutched,
demurred, chickened out.
That was also the day when Lindsey
Graham declared that he was done with Trump, that Trump had crossed the line
and had to go for good. But as soon as it was clear that Trump was going for a
comeback, Graham—whose political backbone, if it ever existed as anything but a
lunar reflection of the light from a great Republican politician, died and was
buried with American hero and Trump foe, Senator John McCain—was again doing
Trump’s every bidding. He has followed
him around grinning, cheering and panting like his lapdog ever since.
Now, Lindsey Graham is one of the 17
Republican rebels joining McConnell and friends. Trump is reported to have
called Graham when he found out and said, “You’re dead to me.” To which Graham
allegedly responded, “Then I’m dead.”
We shall see, but it’s really hard to
trust a man with the spine of a jellyfish and the ethics of a pickpocket.
Still, in a Senate split of 53
Republicans to 47 Democrats, the rebellion of even a dozen GOP senators, if
their resolve holds, is devastating to MAGA.
Perhaps as Maddow and Will say, inside
that 47-minute meeting in McConnell's office, the reality finally set
in. And that reality was that loyalty to Trump was no guarantee for immunity
from harm. The rules had changed. The fear senior congressional leaders
felt in the past was from having watched the political demise of the GOP
politicians I mentioned before. In all cases, Trump and his MAGA associates
made sure that their ostracism was, as Maddow describes it, “brutal, public, and unmistakable, to keep the
rest in line.”
There’s even a name for it in political
science: authoritarian co-option. The idea encompassed by that term is to
convince those who band together that doing so will carry a higher penalty than
standing alone and keeping their mouths shut.
It’s a tactic often used in military
training. I recall being a rebellious youth in my first week of basic combat
training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. We had a tough DI—think of Gunnery
Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, and you get the picture—and just
about everybody in my platoon was beat at the end of that first week. The DI
kept getting us up earlier and earlier. We were stressed and exhausted,
unaccustomed as most of us were to intense training. So, remembering my Spartacus,
I went all Norma Rae and organized a “slave revolt.” When the sarge came in
banging on a garbage can and calling us maggots at 4am, we would all remain in
our bunks. If we didn’t move, what was he going to do, fight us all? He was
just a man, after all, and there were 40 of us.
Obviously, 4am came, the DI arrived with
his garbage pail alarm clock, and I could hear him going from bed to bed,
cursing and shouting, rocking bunks and kicking footlockers across the room. I
kept my eyes shut and thought, “I can’t let him scare me. I owe it to the other
guys to stick together with them.”
Suddenly the barracks was quiet, and
then the DI was leaning over me in my lower bunk so close that the brim of his
campaign hat was touching my face. In a low, menacing voice, he said, “And how
‘bout you, Sleepin’ Beauty? What’s your major fucking problem.”
I opened my eyes and, trying my best to
lie at attention, I said, “We’re not starting training this early today, Drill
Sergeant. We’re exhausted and need to sleep.”
He straightened up and looming over me
said, “Who the fuck’s we, maggot?” I glanced past him and saw that all
of the others were standing tall in their skivvies by their bunks. And then the
DI had me by the throat, jerked me from the bunk, and tossed me onto my hands
and knees on the linoleum floor before giving me a swift kick in the ass with
his paratroop boot.
I spent the morning low-crawling around
the company streets in my underwear under the watchful eye of a corporal
assigned to the task, and the afternoon and evening doing the dirtiest KP jobs
there were, including cleaning out the mess hall’s grave-size grease trap.
“Brutal, public, and unmistakable”…and
add “humiliating.” And it worked. We each remained silent, passive and alone,
except when the authority ordered us to act together.
Says Maddow, “Fear
becomes discipline. Silence becomes survival.
But this week, that calculation collapsed. For the first time, the
cost of submission outweighed the risk of resistance…The senators
in that room understood something immediately. Passing the
Emergency Powers Expansion Act wouldn't protect their careers. It
would erase them. They wouldn't be preserving their seats.
They'd be voting themselves into irrelevance.”
If independent analysts are right,
rebelling senators have finally realized that, if they don’t stop Trump
now, there may soon be no US Senate as such. Congress could become a
rubber stamp legislature for the justification of executive decrees. And then
the hollow fear of losing Trump’s waning base in elections would be overridden
by the legislature’s own demise.
And the reality is that, thanks to
Trump’s plummeting popularity, polling shows GOP candidates down by crucial
margins in vital states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Montana.
Meanwhile, federal agents occupying
Minnesota have just summarily executed another citizen, a 37-year-old intensive-care
nurse. Say his name: Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Aso, rhetoric surrounding Trump’s
so-called Board of Peace and his justification of it to “replace the UN” continues
to raise hackles worldwide. Moreover, his continuing threats to invade a NATO
country’s sovereign territory—the name of which he seems to have trouble
recalling—is pushing national security to the limits and the fallout from
the Greenland debacle has pushed the national security establishment
to its breaking point.
There is reason to believe that, while
part of his aggression at home and abroad is simply an outgrowth of Trump’s
megalomania and psychopathy, it also plays to his complete lack of a moral
compass, and that it is not beyond him to start simultaneous civil and
international wars in order to take the world’s sights off of his close
connection to one of the most prolific pedophiles in the history of the world.
George Will points out that our former
European allies in NATO—now potential rivals in Greenland (not Iceland, Mr.
President)—this week held an emergency meeting. The subject: To determine the
current stability status of the US. Never before has this happened. US
stability was never an issue before the Era of Trump. The US was, in fact, the
cornerstone of the NATO alliance for eight decades. Trump has destroyed that
overnight, and even if and when the Trump Era ends, it will take decades of
stability for the US to ever be trusted again.
Will explains that NATO is now quietly
withholding intelligence from the US, for the obvious reason that its
leadership isn’t trustworthy. And that puts US security at much heightened
risk.
Will concludes that weakness in
Congress, and especially in the Senate has always been a choice regarding
Trump, not an inevitability. And he indicates that this unprecedented rebellion
could end up halting Trump’s reign of terror. I hope and pray his analysis is
sound and that rebelling GOP politicians stand firm. But excuse me if I don’t
hold my breath.
Says Will, “(R)ight now
the Republican Senate is in open revolt, not against Democrats, not
against the media, but against Trump himself. And at the center of
this rebellion is a war powers resolution that threatens to
do something Trump fears more than bad headlines. It threatens to
legally limit his ability to use military force as a personal
political weapon.”
This is important, because Trump never
plays his cards close to his vest. It’s all out there to see. On the home
front, his prolonged full-scale invasions of Democrat-led American cities and
states is clearly designed to sow chaos, and, if he’s lucky, an incipient civil
war. Anything to justify invoking the Insurrection Act and the declaration of
martial law, as a means of taking the midterm elections, which the GOP stands
to lose, off the table. Americans have trouble believing that could ever happen
in the USA. But if Republicans fail to get a leash on the monster they have
sicked on democracy, it will.
The strategy, if you can call it that,
for trying to rustle up conflicts abroad is, in my opinion, multi-faceted. The
elements include a childish tantrum over not being awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, envy over what he sees as his friend Vladimir Putin’s strongman status, a
desire to show the world who’s boss, and a burning need to create a diversion
to direct attention away from the Epstein Files.
So, does the Senate still control
foreign policy, or has it been abandoned to the whims of a madman? And are
members of Congress still representatives of the people, or are they the
submissive vassals of a demented tyrant?
Those are questions the rebelling
senators need to ask themselves when their resolve starts to falter. Whether
their cause is the noble idea of restoring democracy, or if they are simply
trying to save their own asses, they need to know that whether Trump’s
dictatorial reign ebbs or if he is allowed to double down and finish destroying
American democracy, and, perhaps the world order, all depends on what they do
with the decision they signed onto this past week.
If there was ever a time to assert
themselves, and the Congress they represent, now is the time.
