Is stopping Trump beyond our political will?

I am confident there are others out there who, in their own manner and in their own orbit, are calling for the world to remove Trump before he gets started. While there are apparently no laws prohibiting a president-elect from holding massive commercial interests, and blatantly and tyrannically refusing to put those businesses into a blind trust, and while there is no evidence that the number of votes cast in November elect anyone other than Mr. Trump, there is nevertheless, a small matter of the president elect’s insult, even brutal assault on the common decency of the relationship between the people and the White House to be considered.

Maybe his hubris keeps him from seeing such subtle realities, or from hearing the cries for his “deportment” to change, and his laser-like strangle-hold on the machinery of government. Surely it is that same hubris that calls serious intelligence reports about Putin’s direct interference in the election through Russian hacking, allegedly for the purpose of cutting Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the knees, “ridiculous” while Putin himself calls for “proof”. Yet in a alternate universe in which there are no “facts” only lies, denials and obfuscation, the obvious, if hidden, link between the Russians and Trump (witness the Trump choice for Secretary of State, a close friend of Putin and Friendship Award winner from the Russian government), and a dramatic rise in anxiety among European countries, not to mention the American people some of whom must be awakening to the truth that they have elected a political, social and ethical monster.

The underlying trouble with generating a state in which the letter of the law dominates most political thought and thereby imposes severe restrictions on the public conception of wrong.

While working in the U.S., I encountered a situation in which a middle-aged man died of what was believed go be cirrosis of the liver. His partner was also almost literally pickelled with alcohol. The two had been imbibing voraciously for decades, according to those who knew them. When I approached a social services worker about getting help for the surviving spouse, I was informed in rather abrupt terms and manner, there is nothing anyone can do, unless or until she hurts or kills someone. It seems the analogy fits the national conundrum of how to stop the trump coup!

So the question of her health, even as an act of grief support, was ruled out by the “law”. And so, the limits of the law are both real and often defying common sense.

Another life was going to have to be wounded, maimed, or even killed, before any public action was permissible under the law.

What are the extremes to which Trump will have to go, in order to invoke the wrath of the Senate and the House of Representatives, who, together, could bring articles of Impeachment against him? Are there legal minds far brighter and far more steeped in the constitutional history and the legal compendium of the last two-hundred-plus years than this scribe, who are already plodding through the case law, and the political history, with a view to finding that one or two slivers of light that could bring him down? Is there a fund, somewhere, taking shape, with an open trust account into which donations are already flowing, to imburse those lawyers?

A quick cursory look at the internet discloses buses in London and soon Berlin that are displaying “Stop trump” banners, Emily’s list a PAC that tried to stop him prior to the election has a website entitled “Bustle” whose purpose is to ‘help women stop Trump from entering the White House. News York daily papers are aiming some of their ink straight into the eye of the man, and his potential for devastation.

Nevertheless, his supporters are so emblazoned that they would only conduct an all-out attack on any group strong enough mount an effective “STOP” campaign.

And there is mounting evidence of the dangers of a Trump presidency.

The government of the Philippines, under dictator Duerte,has appointed a Trump business partner as their official government representative to the United States. He has already cut millions of dollars in cheques to the Trump family. Meanwhile  the president-elect has also expressed unbridled praise for the dictator’s killing of some 4000 drug addicts. (This information emerged from the MSNBC AMJoy program this morning, from Kurt Eichenwald, Newsweek, one of Joy Reid’s guests.) Already, there are signs that foreign governments are lining up to pad the bank account of the businesses bearing the trump banner. It is not a stretch of one’s imagination to consider that terrorists are also taking aim at the many foreign and American holdings of the trump empire. And this theme is only going to grow stronger with more evidence of foreign powers attempting to gain favour with the new administration, while lining the pockets of the trump vault.

And while both Senators Elizabeth Warren and Senator Barbara Feinstein are working on a bill to activate and enforce the emoluments legislation to confront Trump’s multiple conflicts of interest, there is so little likelihood that a majority in both houses dominated by Republicans will ever agree even to entertain such bills.

It will take a tidal wave of public protest, led by thousands, if not millions of activist citizens, to mount such a political wave of protest/opposition/militancy/editorial ink and public debate to which the Republicans cannot turn a deaf ear or a blind eye. And, along with the Democrats, even a few honourable, courageous and independent minded Republicans willing to put the cause of the country ahead of their personal political career, including membership in the Republican Party can form a majority calling for impeachment.

I never believed I would ever find myself supporting such an historic and turbulent movement as the impeachment of an American president. And yet, never have the honourable aspects of American history been so overturned, and continue to be threatened under the total demagogic domination of this person.

He refuses normal tradition and normal political expectations like releasing his tax returns, and the media, along with the public lets him move on, making more distracting headlines to cover for his omission. He did the same thing this week, December 15, his own announced date to declare in a Press Conference, the details of the divestiture of his business interests from his presidency, another honourable tradition and expectation of the country, based on its honourable history. Rather than hold the press conference, now postponed until January, his “highness” hosted a string of public figures, NFL retirees, Kanye, and made television appearances, at least with Kanye, telling the world ‘he is a good man,’ and ‘we talked about life’…all of which was reported, as if they belonged on the desk of national media editors in the scheme of events falling like a new form of hurricane of chicanery, deception, and survival techniques for which this man has a full repertoire, and the skills of a Barnum and Bailey huckster.

And of course, to any respectable editor, they do not matter, except that every editor knows that, without the ratings that cling to every tweet and every “on-camera” appearance of the “Great Man” s/he will not hold the editor job very long.

And so, with the public sucking up the kool-aid, and the media acting as sycophant bar tenders sloshing the inebriating menu across the national bar, (the alcohol content far surpassing the .08% intoxication rate) as the whole country imbibes in the largest and most tragic orgy of political manipulation, including the dissing of the Russian/Putin intervention to distort the result of the election, including the positioning of cabinet members who have been engaged in the hypothetical destruction of the very secretariats they now are slated to head.

This is the beginning of a monstrous political coup, by a master manipulator who has so easily and so blatantly seduced the country into insouciant compliant with the greatest political tragedy not only of the twenty-first century but of the history of the nation.

Critical thought has been drowned by the intoxicated votes of enough voters to threaten not only the democracy of the United States, but also the very lives of millions of citizens of the planet.

And the world watches, drinking in the headlines just as it watches unconscious to the devastation pouring blood, broken bones, and devastated dreams (except those of Assad and Putin) in Syria, seemingly impotent, and seemingly too drunk on the thrill of the spectacle.

Has entertainment/reality television completely replaced public order, good government and what once prided itself as the greatest democracy in the history of western civilization? It seems the answer is a clear and unequivocal YES!