'I'm Done Being Quiet'

Those words were spoken last week by the ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, finally defiant at her cruel scapegoating by President Trump in his deepening fear of impeachment.

I’m with her.

I used to question whether any columnist outside the media capitals of New York and Washington ought to write about national affairs. I once wondered if I shouldn’t defer to writers closer to the action.

No more. The Trump Effect is unfolding very broadly now, not only in Washington but everywhere. From the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate, the norms of our nation are under attack. Not only from the outside, which you expect, but from the inside too.

Ms. Page’s words have haunted me since the day I read her statement. I have come to understand that to be silent in this dangerous time is to risk making matters worse. Much, much worse.

For three years, Trump’s purposeful erosion has been steady. As this old year ends, the wreckage of his behavior is abundant and clear. It’s become as visible and dispiriting around the G-7 table, most recently in London, as around our dinner tables here at home.

Trump’s aberrant, anti-historical way surfaces mostly without warning. He takes no advice, trusts only his insufficient gut instinct, and therefore he must repeatedly back-track (see Syria). Along the way he encourages the world’s worst dictators and keeps our most important allies guessing, distrustful of our government, and doubting America’s word.

Yet this is how he rolls, embracing turmoil, keeping everyone guessing at what he will or won’t do or say next. The only real mystery about any of this anymore is why the White House press corps (whom he also berates) still insists on making his outbursts into “news” every day.

In the early 1930s, in Germany and then Italy, citizens learned the hard truth the hard way. The behaviors of Hitler and Mussolini – their strutting, their outbursts and insults, their racism – were mildly amusing until they murderously weren’t.

Nobody should remain silent now. None of us. In America today, anyone with a platform should use it, and with a deep sense of urgency.

o

We arrive at our own epiphanies in different ways. My clarity has come from several sources, all of them freely available to you, too:

·     Actually reading the Mueller Report (see especially Volume 2).

·     Actually listening to the warnings of the U.S. intelligence agencies – FBI, CIA, Defense – and not to Trump’s disparagement or dismissal of them. We know now the truth of why he has done that with such vehemence.

·     And hearing the words of those career professionals from the State Department and National Security Council who sat at Congress’ witness table and dispassionately spoke their truth – not to the attacks upon them by this conflicted President and his soulless enablers.

In fact, for me this is no longer about Trump’s capacity to be our President. He has answered that question for us, has shown us the extent to which he is manifestly unfit and always has been. I also no longer even wonder what motivates him. Clearly, it’s been the wrong things, wrong countries, and wrong people.

Trump’s fealty to the Russian president is as complete, as pandering and unwavering, as it is frightening and dangerous for us all. His enabling of white nationalists is likewise reprehensible. Whether he does these things because there’s high treason or low racism in his heart, or because he knows the shock of it will make the rest of us crazy, all that is beside the point now. The point is simply that it’s time for him to go.

Nor am I am distracted any longer by what it might have been in Trump’s damaged childhood that makes him the way he is today – his childish need to insult and ridicule and berate, his inability to admit any mistake, his chronic mockery of the leaders of democracies across Europe. Instead, it is time for him to go.

And no, please, I don’t hate him – that empty, simplistic dodge of his defenders high and low. I don’t hate anybody. I do grieve for my country and wonder what will come next from this man with the White House and his Twitter account as playthings.

o

I finally came to my own clarity on the question of impeachment. Definitely, it should go forward, as professionally and thoroughly as possible. This impeachment is about establishing facts:

·     Did Trump use his office for his own selfish purposes?

·     How exactly did that happen?

These central questions are no longer about the success or failure of one elected official, but of our country’s.

What we need from Congress now is the factual record – make crystal clear the story of what happened, putting aside as much of the partisanship as possible, putting aside whatever might happen afterward in the Trump-enslaved Senate.

Once that record is established, never mind that the Senate may or may not have the guts to remove Trump, at least history will remember it all, informing the 2020 election. The full record, if nothing else, will help our country eventually correct this maddening wayward course, and move forward from the wreckage of this moment.

This is not about the tax-cut, please, nor the stock market nor your 401K. It’s about the damage being done to our republic and our freedom by a selfish regime using intentional disruption, calculated outrage, and its reckless embrace of bad people whose bad behavior is enabled when this wrong leader undermines our social order.

Our history will need a full record of what has happened here. For our children’s sake, at least, there must one day be a means for remembering what occurred in this time of gross distortion and why it all mattered so much.

o

What will the 2020 election say about the soul of our country?

All we can know is ourselves – what’s in our own individual hearts.

We cannot even know what’s in our neighbors’ hearts, or the folks who live in other states - at least not until there’s an election. This is also part of the particular wreckage of Trump’s very intentional and cynical program to undermine our confidence in law enforcement, traditional news media, and essential alliances.

I no longer wonder in my own heart about Trump the man. We know him now and his limitations, because he has daily shown us. We now fully grasp what and who he is, his pathologies, and where his true loyalties lie.

No. What I worry about most, here at the end of 2019, is what the election of next November will confirm about the rest of us.

Are we, the American people, as I hope, truly better than our President’s behavior? Or has his campaign to daily divide and destroy all our norms been successful to the point we doubt ourselves and fear each other and dread the futue?

In politics, one old saw is that nothing clarifies things like a good election. But even our hope of that, in this time of Trump, seems suspect when millions more who can vote are wrongly purged of their registrations because in some states the wrong people are in charge of elections, or too many become irretrievably weary of the whole mess and just stay home. In eleven months, we shall see.

My most favorite Americans now are the activists who help register voters, fight against the unfair purges, and work to make voting places more accessible, not less.

My least favorite people are those paralyzed members of Congress who cannot free themselves from the quagmire, who fear losing their Washington jobs because Trump in his thin-skinned anger takes it all personally. That is a truly dark predicament for our democracy.

o

But we cannot let go of our hope.

My hope is that before next Christmas, it will be the courageous ones who will have triumphed – that a robust voter turnout will put an end to this destructive madness, that one good election fully participated in will re-confirm what it means to be an American.

We shall see. Until then, I am done being quiet.