ЧTO ДEЛATЬ?

ЧTO ДEЛATЬ?

The Russian title of this essay transliterates as “chto delat’?” It translates literally as “what to do?” It is the title of a work by Vladimir Lenin that is usually translated as “What Is To Be Done?” Yes, I know. It probably isn’t wise to quote Lenin about anything. He did after all institute a brutal regime that was bad enough during his lifetime and that became under Stalin after Lenin’s death one of the most brutal and oppressive political and economic regimes in human history. Yet I always think of Lenin’s title if not of much else from him when I am faced with what appears to be an intractably bad political situation in my own country. No, the United States in 2018 is not Imperial Russia in the first years of the twentieth century. We don’t have an ineffective tsar who holds his title by inheritance and who is utterly incapable of dealing with his country’s many problems like Nicholas II. We don’t have a largely illiterate population like Russia did. We aren’t struggling with a transition from an inefficient agricultural economy to an industrial one like Russia was. We have great power pretensions like Russia did, but ours are less likely to destroy our economy than Russia’s were. We aren’t struggling with the tensions between a largely Asiatic foundation and an overlay of western culture like Russia was. So no, we are not late imperial Russia.

We are, however, faced with what seem to be intractable political, economic, social, and cultural problems. All of those problems have coalesced around one person. They have coalesced around Donald Trump, the forty-fifth President of the United States. He represents the worst of America. He was put in office by a minority of American voters in the 2016 presidential election under the undemocratic electoral college system of the United States Constitution. He represents the racism of white Americans fearful of the country’s demographic trend of becoming more brown and less white. He represents poorly educated workers who have lost their jobs in dying industries like coal mining and steel production and who are unable or unwilling to retrain for jobs in the new economy. He represents the resentment of sexist men toward the growing freedom of women in the US economy and US culture. He represents a nativist xenophobia that blames immigrants, especially immigrants of color, for the country’s problems. He represents American anti-intellectualism, a destructive strain of American culture that looks with suspicion rather than respect at highly educated people and their contributions to American life. In all of these ways and probably more Donald Trump represents and is a product of the wrong side of the many divides and strains in American life.

Yet while he represents the worst of American culture, he is actually worse than the worst of American culture. The men and women who put Donald Trump in the White House thought they were doing a good thing. They are not fundamentally immoral people. By that I don’t mean that they always stand for what is right. Much of the time they don’t. I mean rather that they at least operate within the concepts of right and wrong. They operate within the concepts of true and false. They think they stand for what is right. They think they believe in what is true. Donald Trump is different. He simply does not operate within the categories right and wrong, true and false. Right and wrong have no ethical or moral meaning for him. He operates rather within the categories works and doesn’t work. It appears never to occur to him to ask if a statement he is going to make is true or false. All the available evidence indicates that those categories just don’t matter to him. How else could he make false statements, including easily demonstrably false statements, as he does? As with questions of right and wrong he asks only will a particular statement have the effect he wants. Yes, he is a liar, but he’s a liar because the categories true and false never occur to him. He never asks is a statement true or false. He asks only if he thinks it will produce some effect he wants. He isn’t so much untruthful (though he usually is) as he is a-truthful. Truth just doesn’t matter to him, and that is a much more serious problem than is a president who knows if something is true or not and says something that isn’t true anyway like say Richard Nixon was.

Author Brené Brown gives us a useful distinction in this regard. She distinguishes between lying and what she calls “bullshitting.” She says that lying is “a defiance of the truth” and bullshitting is “a wholesale dismissal of the truth.”¹ A liar knows they are saying something untrue and may even feel a bit bad about about saying it. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether what they say is true or not. It never occurs to a bullshitter whether what they are saying is true or not. It only occurs to them whether the thing they are saying is advantageous to them. “Bullshitting” is Brown’s coarse term for what I have here called “a-truthful.”

Donald Trump is a bullshitter in Brown’s sense. That’s why there is no reason to take anything he says seriously. For example, he more or less denied that he called Haiti and the countries of Africa “shithole countries” as reported. That he denies it tells us only that he denies it. Because truth is not a category within which he operates his statement tells us nothing at all about the actual facts of this or any other matter. He is a-truthful. Truth and falsehood just don’t matter to him, and that makes him especially dangerous. It makes him especially dangerous because there is nothing he will not say if he thinks saying a thing is advantageous to him. Much of what he does is immoral, but he does immoral things because he is fundamentally amoral. The question of good and bad doesn’t occur to him, only the question of advantage or disadvantage, and that usually only for himself personally. Because neither truth or morality matter to him, there are no limits on what he might do. The most dangerous personality is one who operates outside the accepted moral and ethical norms of the person’s society and culture. We have precisely such a person serving as President of the United States of America. That we do creates immense danger for our country and indeed for the world.

So to return to the title of this essay: What is to be done? What can we do to remove Donald Trump from the presidency and restore a sense of right and wrong and of truth and falsehood to the highest levels of our government? That is not an easy question to answer. It is not an easy question to answer because the Republican politicians in Congress and in Trump’s administration are as yet unwilling to use either of the two Constitutional means of removing a president from office. Those are impeachment and removal under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. The Constitution as originally written provides that Congress may remove a president from office through the process of impeachment. In this process the House of Representatives approves “articles of impeachment” that accuse the President of what the Constitution calls “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Senate then holds a trial of the president for the misdeeds specified in the articles of impeachment. If it finds that the House’s articles of impeachment are established the president is removed from office.

No president has ever been removed from office through impeachment, and only two presidents have ever had articles of impeachment voted against them. In both cases, the cases of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, the vote of the House to impeach was quite clearly only a political act done by politicians who didn’t like the president’s policies. That is not a proper use of impeachment. Impeachment is not a parliamentary vote of no confidence. It is a political act in that it is carried out by the Congress, a political body by its very nature. It focuses however not on political disagreement but on actual wrongdoing by the president. That Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses is beyond doubt.² He has lied to the American public about matters of great importance in our life together. He has endangered the United States and the world with his reckless talk about using nuclear weapons. He may have cooperated with Russia in undermining the American electoral system. He has disgraced the country and betrayed her core values by expressing admiration for anti-democratic leaders, especially for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He may be guilty of money laundering for Russian oligarchs. The Mueller investigation is far from completed, but it is already apparent that grounds exist for the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump if Congress wanted to do it. So far it doesn’t.

The other Constitutional means for removing a president from office is the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Section 4 of that Amendment provides that the Vice President and a majority of Cabinet secretaries may declare a president unable to perform the duties of his office. If they do, the Vice President becomes the acting president. The president may in effect appeal the declaration that he is unable to perform the duties of his office to the Congress. If two-thirds of both houses of Congress find that the president is unable to perform the duties of the office the Vice President shall continue to serve as acting president. If they don’t, the president resumes the office of president.

Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment has never been invoked. There is one situation in American history in which it may well have applied had it been in effect at the time. Toward the end of his second term President Woodrow Wilson was so incapacitated by the effects of a stroke that he could not serve as president. It appears that his wife Edith was actually performing some of the duties of the office and delegating others to appropriate people. It seems unlikely that the Twenty-fifth Amendment will be invoked in the case of Donald Trump. Many of us believe that Trump is unfit to be president, but the Twenty-fifth Amendment doesn’t speak of unfitness. It speaks of inability. It doesn’t define inability. It clearly would apply in a case like Woodrow Wilson’s, but under what other circumstances it might apply is unclear. The Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy. It seems likely that Section 4 was intended primarily to deal with the situation that would have arisen had President Kennedy survived being shot but had been rendered physically unable to serve as president by his wounds. The language of the Amendment does not limit it to that situation, but by its terms a president must be “unable” to serve before the Amendment applies. Donald Trump serves very badly, but absent a finding of mental or physical disability I don’t think we can say he is “unable” to serve. It is less likely that a Congress controlled by the Republicans will find him unable to serve.

So: What is to be done? Since it is unlikely that Trump will be removed from office by Constitutional means, what else is left to us to get rid of him? The only answer that doesn’t involve violence (and I will never advocate violence) is massive public pressure. I doubt that any amount of public pressure will ever get Trump to resign, but sufficient public pressure might get Congress to rein him in and prevent or mitigate his most egregious actions and statements. The first opportunity we will have at the ballot box to show opposition to Trump is the 2018 Congressional election. I find it irritating in some ways that I do not have a Senator or Representative who supports Trump to vote against, but a great many Americans do. We must employ every legal means at our disposal to encourage them to do so.

Beyond that, the First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees our right to assemble peacefully and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Donald Trump surely is a grievance by his mere presence in office. The people have the right, however, to assemble as a means of demanding government action. We can march to demand impeachment. We can march against destructive policies advocated or implemented by Trump and his benighted allies in Congress and his administration. Such a march is scheduled in many cities across the nation on January 20, 2018, the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. That one is however billed as a women’s march. We need more broadly based demonstrations in every village, town, and city in this country to demonstrate that the American people simply will not tolerate Trump’s outrages. We will not tolerate Trump as our president. Most of us didn’t vote for him. His approval ratings are lower than those for any other president during his first year in office. He doesn’t represent our country. He surely doesn’t represent the best in our country. He is a manifestation of the worst aspects of the United States—racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and essentially every other evil that besets us.

So what is to be done? Get out in the streets. Demonstrate. Engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. Go to jail if need be, but don’t take Donald Trump lying down. Donate to political organizations like MoveOn.org and legal organizations like the ACLU that work to counter Trump’s policies and to make sure he doesn’t get reelected in 2020. Support elected officials who oppose Trump and make sure they know you support them. If you are the praying sort pray that he may be removed from office and that our country and the world will survive his efforts to destroy them. If you are a church person get your church on record as opposing his policies, his language, his lying, and so many other negative things about him. The IRS says nonprofits like churches can’t endorse candidates, but we can and must oppose policies that harm people and damage God’s good earth. The gospel of Jesus Christ leaves us no choice about that. Our duty as American citizens leaves us no choice but to do everything we can, nonviolently, to blunt Trump’s destructive policies, to show the world that he does not represent us, and if possible to remove him from office before his term expires. May it be so.

1Brown, Brené, Braving the Wilderness, The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, Random House, New York, 2017, p. 90.

2That statement is a change from an earlier position of mine expressed elsewhere. The evidence of impeachable offenses committed by Trump just keeps piling up. It’s time to say it straight: Trump has committed impeachable offenses.