From:
slider@anashram.com
Nine months after the election he comprehensively lost, the spectre of
Donald Trump – darkly menacing, subversive and apparently immune from prosecution – continues to cast a shadow over US democracy and America’s global standing, distorting policy and poisoning political life. How can
this be? Why is this horror movie still running?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/08/gentleman-joe-versus-the-maga-champion-machiavelli-would-die-laughing
Trumpism, like other fascist variants, is a disease, a blight – a noxious far-right populist-nationalist miasma that taints and rots all it touches. Older Europeans share a folk memory of fascism. But too many Americans
just don’t get it. The will to stamp out this sickness before it returns
in more virulent form is alarmingly lacking.
By refusing to confront his crooked predecessor and bring him to justice,
Joe Biden feeds delusional Trump’s sense of godlike impunity, and the
dread prospect of a blasphemous second coming. To a watching world, his paralysis smacks of weakness. It puzzles friends. It leads foes to hope
that he, not Trump, is the blip.
Maybe Biden lacks the killer instinct. Yet you don’t have to be Niccolò Machiavelli to know Trump poses an existential threat to democratic norms. There will be no reciprocal forbearance, no forgiveness, if he gets a
second chance, only vendettas, score-settling and ever greater abuse of
power.
For now, Trump skulks at Mar-a-Lago, biding his time and endorsing
loyalists for future contests. He claimed a success last week when an arch-sycophant won a congressional race in Ohio. He’s raising money – his war chest already totals over $100m. Polls show he remains easily the most popular presidential choice among Republican voters.
Stripped of its social media platforms, his spiteful voice does not carry
as it once did – though he found space last week to attack “woke” women soccer players. But this relative quiet is deceptive. There’s a phoney war going on ahead of next year’s midterm election campaign – which Trump
views as a warm-up for 2024.
Author Michael Wolff last month warned complacent Democrats that Trump was preparing for battle. “Trump [is] always ready to strike back harder than
he has been struck, to blame anyone but himself, to take what he believes
is his... Sound the alarm,” Wolff wrote. He said he was certain Trump
would run again.
Who will cure this disease? Who can cleanse this blemish from the face of America? Disqualifying him as criminally unfit for public office is the
obvious way to avert more West Wing mayhem. Yet “Gentleman Joe” and his fight-shy attorney general, Merrick Garland, keep pulling their punches.
What of the numerous counts of obstruction detailed by Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry? No action by Garland’s justice department. What about multiple allegations of corruption and tax fraud? No federal prosecution
in sight. Or a string of alleged sexual assaults? No criminal charges
pending.
Asked what he would do about Trump’s crimes, Biden said last August that
to pursue his predecessor in court would be “very unusual”. It was “not good for democracy to be talking about prosecuting former presidents”. In short, he’d prefer to ignore the problem.
Yet since he spoke, Trump has fomented insurrection – the 6 January
assault on Congress – for which hundreds have been charged, though not he.
He pushes his mendacious, destabilising “big steal” narrative. It has also emerged he pressured the justice department, as well as state officials,
to discredit the election.
It’s not “good for democracy” to ignore blatantly unconstitutional wrongdoing by its highest office-holder. Doing so helps Trump dismiss everything as a hoax. It sets a dreadful political and ethical precedent
at home. It damages America’s reputation abroad. But still Biden and
Garland sit on their hands.
Trump blight is meanwhile taking a terrible toll. In deference to him and
his base, it seems, cruel anti-migrant policies remain in place,
progressive action on racial justice has stalled, and attacks on voting
rights advance. The Republicans are now more cult than party.
This poisoning of the body politic extends overseas, too. Why, for
example, should Tunisia’s president heed US homilies about democratic principles and the rule of law when they go undefended in America itself?
Why should China? Why should anyone take Biden’s presidency seriously if
the Maga champ can run rings around him from a Florida golf cart?
Iran vividly illustrates Trump’s malign influence at work. When he
stupidly abandoned the 2015 nuclear pact, he empowered Tehran’s
hardliners. Now they have seized Iran’s presidency, exploiting fears of Trump’s return. They warn the US cannot be trusted. It’s a message with legs.
The coddling of dictators from Moscow to Manila, the 2020 Taliban talks giveaway in Doha (which led directly to today’s Afghan meltdown), Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace-for-cash scam, and official denial of the
climate crisis are all additional products of Trump blight. Biden
struggles daily with the toxic fallout.
Some argue that Trump disease is exaggerated, that Biden’s bipartisanship
is producing results – witness his new infrastructure plan. But if the impression takes hold that he cannot put his own house in order, the world
– and American voters – will turn their backs on him.
Bottom line: the once and future king’s foreign fiascos continue to
bedevil America abroad in the same way his corrosive contempt for
democracy, law and common decency divides and debilitates it at home.
Surely this situation cannot go on.
What other leader in the world would allow serial wrongdoing to go
unpunished, would tolerate unceasing acts of subversion and disruption by
so prominent and hostile a figure? If he wasn’t already dead, Machiavelli would die laughing.
Too-nice Joe must stop being polite, take the gloves off – and neutralise
the Trump variant before it hits pandemic levels. Isolation and social distancing would help. So lock him up!
### - it's true that the world is waiting for biden to act in some manner,
to finally start doing things perhaps more befitting his own views, to
begin putting his personal stamp on world history as befitting any united states president and leader of the free world to date... trump certainly
did, didn't he, with an armed face-down of north korea?
biden, however, seems to have spent all his time, so far, on
damage-limitation from the fallout of trump alone... some mention of an infrastructure plan, and of changing/challenging the voting system, being
all that he seems to have mentioned otherwise? he's certainly not rushing
into anything!
methinks he's probably a good man... he's on the right team (imho anyway
heh: the left) and is certainly a highly experienced statesman after a near-lifetime in politics, so at least he knows wtf he's talkin' about
compared to 'some' one might mention hah!
so then, after these initial few months, he must by now be finally getting
his feet under the table so to speak huh; after all those 'years' in
politics (48 years?) here he finally is: the president of the free world,
damn!
hopefully, he'll last-out the full 8 year term, and by then we'll all know
what biden had really been all about and did, and accomplished or not?
it just being a shame, really, that someone like biden hadn't immediately followed along straight behind obama instead of the world having to endure
the upheaval of trumpism, which, let's face it, didn't really accomplish anything other than the resulting sheer chaos of the old 'divide & rule'
ethic that is the standard staple of right-wing politics...
let's give biden a chance eh?
who knows, maybe he's a white version of obama ;)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)