The flood of deeply disturbing news from Washington never stops rising, no matter how badly we wish that the president and his administration could declare victory on all fronts and let us have some peace. We had better face the facts: this is what we have to look forward to for at least the next 31 months. Chaos reflects the nature the president and his administration, and they will generate more and more of it because it is all that they know how to do. Here, in no particular order, are some (and probably not all) of the key aspects of this problem.
In foreign affairs, President Trump has discovered a new role, the King of Regime Change. And not for him the discreet, CIA-inspired coup--he favors the dramatic military kidnapping of the targeted foreign leader, or, when possible, the total economic blockade that will make life in the targeted country almost impossible. His administration has no respect for international sovereignty or international law, and seems to be planning military strikes against drug cartels in foreign countries, as well as more attacks upon fishing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Regime change did not take place in Iran--not, at least, in the form that the US government intended--but it looks to me as if we shall have an endless series of crises, punctuated by military action, in our relations with that country. Any agreement that the two sides reach will be vague on critical points, thereby allowing the president to discover new violations of it and threaten drastic action whenever it suits him. For the president, any retreat is tactical and temporary, and evidence suggests that he has not given up his designs upon Greenland, either. All this will destroy any credibility of the US government as a reliable partner in international affairs.
Similarly, despite ICE's retreat from its big operation in Minnesota, that agency will almost surely open up new big operations on other fronts. They may be designed to provoke confrontations with the governments of blue states, many of which, including my own, have been passing laws forbidding various forms of cooperation with ICE. And like the Communist insurgency in Vietnam, the immigration problem is too big to succumb to a series of operations like the Minnesota one. The number of illegal immigrants in the US may drop during the next two and a half years, but there will still be millions of them, and we shall still lack any consensus about what to do about their status. I doubt that any Democrat will run on legalizing it in 2024.
The president loves transforming landscapes, and seems to regard the city of Washington as his private royal domain. Already a wing of the White House has been replaced by a large hole in the ground, and the administration is struggling with the courts to implement new plans for it. In a separate case, a federal judge has just blocked Trump's plans for renovation (and renaming) of the Kennedy Center, and the administration will surely appeal that decision. I suspect the president will undertake new transformation projects, in Washington and elsewhere. He will also try to secure congressional authorization for the projected new $250 bill with his face on it.
The pursuit of new cases against former officials and US citizens who have opposed, criticized, or leveled accusations against Donald Trump will surely continue. Trump's social media feed (available gratis at rollcall.com) suggests that a "grand conspiracy" case accusing most of the Obama administration of trying to bock his election is being studied, and I will not be surprised by a huge indictment along those lines. The president also reposts stories from friendly media outlets detailing how his first impeachment was based on fraudulent evidence, and how the January 6 riot was the work of the FBI. Those accusations could find their way into court, too.
And last, but hardly least, there is the matter of November's election. It seems unlikely that Congress will pass the legislation the administration is pushing to end most mail-in balloting and require new proofs of citizenship for people to vote. That very failure, however, will almost surely become the president's excuse to discredit the results of that election, especially if the Republicans do in fact lose one or both Houses to Democratic control. Republican losers may be encouraged to dispute the election results--just as Trump and his allies tried to do in 2020--and the House and Senate would have the power to rule on any contested elections, as they have many times in the past. (I plan to do more research on this soon.) When the House (for example) votes to decide the results of contested elections, representatives from contested districts are presumably not allowed to vote. Challenges to a sufficient number of Democratic seats might maintain a working Republican majority in the debates over those seats, allowing it to decide contested elections in favor of Republican candidates. This could lead to our worst crisis since the Civil War.
All these potential disasters reflect the administration's total loss of respect for any established procedures, any guarantees of fairness in our political and legal systems, and any independent, impartial truths. That loss of respect has been growing in the United States for decades, on both sides of the political fence, and this is the result. For the many Americans who have drawn emotional sustenance from their belief in our institutions, this is a personal crisis as well as a political one. We can all draw on other kinds of sustenance to try to keep things in perspective, as others have in other places and other times.
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