Trump’s Removal Can’t Wait for Impeachment

The most powerful position in the world’s most powerful nation is occupied by a demented fascist oligarch.

He demonizes and scapegoats minorities and immigrants. He provides dog-whistle cover for white supremacists. He sparks racist hate crimes with his vicious nativist words. He speaks with disdain about inner-city black communities. He tells police officers not to “be too nice” with suspects.

He packs the courts with hard-right racists, classists, sexists and eco-exterminists, toxically reshaping the federal judiciary for a generation. He has cultivated and rewarded Christian fascists, one of whom (Mike Pence) is his vice president

He calls African nations shithole countries. He told four nonwhite progressive U.S. Congresswomen to “go back to … the crime infested places from which they came.”

He has absurdly threatened to “end birthright citizenship” (the granting of U.S. citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment) with an executive order.

Trump violates international asylum law and separates migrant children from their parents. He indefinitely detains tens of thousands of migrant children and families in for-profit concentration camps.

He declared a fake national emergency to criminally divert taxpayer dollars to the construction of a nativist border wall that most of the citizenry hates and Congress refused to fund.

Believing his dotard self “the world’s greatest person,” he promotes an absurd cult of personality, proclaiming himself a “stable genius.” He regularly praises dictators and despots the world over. He absurdly claims that Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution means that “I have the power to do whatever I want as president.”

Donald Trump attacks basic press freedoms. He demonizes and falsely conflates liberals and leftists. He mocks and disrespects intellectuals and science.

He absurdly denies climate science and arch-criminally ramps up the eco-exterminist war on livable ecology. He refused to adequately prepare for and respond to the epic climate change-fueled Hurricanes Harvey and Maria. He absurdly blames California’s deadly climate change-driven wildfires on the state’s failure to “sweep the forest floors.”

He threatened North Korea and Iran with nuclear annihilation. He provided cover for the absolutist Saudi Arabian regime’s murderous vivisection of a dissident journalist. He funds and equips the Saudis’ criminal and catastrophic war on Yemen over Congressional opposition. Last Friday he pardoned three murderous U.S. military war criminals.

He has turned the U.S. Attorney General into his own personal attorney. He has conducted a corrupt foreign policy on behalf of his own economic and political self-interest. He brazenly violates the Constitution’s emoluments clause while preposterously calling that clause “phony.” He denies and obstructs Congress’ constitutional right and duty to investigate his conduct. He criminally intimidates witnesses and whistleblowers, calling them “traitors.” He describes a constitutionally appropriate inquiry into his immoral and illegal behavior as a “lynching” and a “coup.”

His far right-wing attorney general, William Barr, argues that his executive powers are essentially unlimited and seeks to undermine the constitutional separation of church and state.

He wages a relentless Orwellian war on Truth, replete with more than 10,000 documentable false statements since his inauguration.

He openly flirts with calling for the use of extra-legal political violence on his behalf by his heavily armed backers, suggesting that impeachment could spark “Civil War.” He is the first president in American history to pose a serious threat of refusing to honor a re-election count that doesn’t go his way.

This is a national, and indeed global, emergency. We need Donald Trump out of the White House. How do we make that happen?

There’s no great mystery about how citizens humble and even overthrow corrupt and tyrannical governments. They take to the streets in significant numbers, engaging in mass disruption for as long as it takes. Look at Algeria, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Ecuador and Chile, to mention six places where mass protest and popular resistance have recently proven highly effective. Look now to Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have marched against corruption, even in the face of lethal live ammunition, and to Bolivia, where workers and peasants are facing bloody repression to resist a neofascist coup that was immediately applauded as a victory for “freedom” and “democracy” by Trump.

It doesn’t take the whole population to change history from the bottom up. Five days of insurrection by 200,000 people forced the French government to back down on its regressive gas tax last year. Extinction Rebellion leader Roger Hallam notes that it requires dedicated resistance by just 3% of the population to overthrow a regime. If Hallam is right, then ten days of rebellion by a quantity of Americans roughly equivalent to the population of the Chicago metropwolitan area could force the U.S. ruling class to get rid of Trump.

It is unthinkable that any but a few marginal voices in the mainstream “liberal” Democrats and their media (CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, et al.) would call for peoples’ power in the streets to bring down the Trump tyranny. The “liberal” elite is fiercely committed to Fake Resistance. It may be obsessed with Trump to the exclusion of practically everything else that ought to matter in national and world events (popular rebellions from France to Chile, Beirut, Quito and Hong Kong included) but they will not embrace the most effective method of collapsing the Trump-Pence regime collapse: mass mobilization and protest. Embracing an authentic people’s resistance movement would open a popular-democratic door that the Democratic establishment prefers to keep shut.

That establishment is instead advancing two tepid, deeply conservative strategies that will likely fail to get Trump out and will come with dreadful downsides—even if they succeed. Both of these strategies are designed keep the U.S. working-class majority functioning not as engaged historical agents, but as passive, system-trusting spectators who accede to a narrow definition of “politics” as little more than the occasional, strictly time-staggered marking of ballots next to the names of candidates selected in advance by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire.

The first of these power-serving strategies is the standard quadrennial get-out-the-vote effort to rally citizens behind yet another corporate-centrist billionaire-pleasing and militaristic “national security” Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Democratic presidential candidate like Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or the newly minted Iowa Caucus front-runner Pete Buttigieg—a silver-tongued right-winger (see Nathan Robinson’s brilliant take-down in Current Affairs last spring) wearing fake-progressive identity cloaking (like a certain technically black Wall Street-serving drone bomber-to-be in 2007). This is the same depressing neoliberal track that has so badly betrayed, divided and demobilized the nation’s working-class majority so as to grease the skids for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America, George Bush Jr, the racist Tea Party and the malignant white nationalist Trump.

With the usual help from the anti-democratic Electoral College and racist voter suppression in battleground states, Trump will likely prevail over yet another dismal, dollar-drenched capitalist Democrat in November 2020. But even if the Democrats are able to win the Electoral College count and induce Trump to leave (with some help perhaps from constitutionalists in the U.S. military command), putting another Wall Street Democrat in the White House will just open door the for another neofascist white-nationalist Republican president in 2024—possibly someone more ideologically dedicated, less obviously corrupt and thus more dangerous than Trump.

(Yes, the Democrats could prevail if they run the self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. But the Democrats’ big money bankrollers and media won’t let that happen. The Democratic establishment’s dirty little secret is that it would rather lose to the right, even to a hard-right nationalist right-wing party, than lose to the mildly left wing of its own party. Even the avowedly “capitalist to her bones” Elizabeth Warren is considered “too far left” by top Democratic Wall Street funders).

The second flawed “liberal” strategy is, of course, impeachment, likely by the end of the year. It requires just a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Democrats hold sway. But (as a remarkable number of U.S.-Americans I encounter seem not to know) removal requires a two-thirds vote in the U.S. Senate, where the nation’s most racist and right-wing regions are absurdly over-represented and the Trumpified Republican Party holds sway. The Republican-run Senate is not going to remove the demented fascist oligarch from office just because he tried to trade New Cold War arms for political dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine—not when a super-majority of Republicans “strongly approve” of Trump’s performance no matter what he does or says. And Trump may well use “exoneration” by the Senate to his electoral advantage next November.

At the same time, the Democrats are pursuing impeachment on chillingly narrow and imperialist grounds that whitewash the crimes of U.S. foreign policy, past and present. Democratic politicos and talking heads proclaim House impeachment testifier Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. a great “national hero” and all-around “good guy” because Taylor was a rifle company commander “serving” in the Quang Tri and Thua Tien provinces in the United States’ beloved 101st Airborne during the so-called Vietnam War. Fellow Ukraine-Gate witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman is upheld as another great patriot for “serving” in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. How depressing: The U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky) murdered 2-5 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975. The arch-criminal U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq killed one million-plus Iraqis.

One need not be a fan of Vladimir Putin’s oligarchic regime to wonder what’s so great about Washington’s sponsorship of the corrupt U.S.-backed capitalist Ukraine government, which is the product of a U.S.-backed 2014 coup and contains neo-Nazis. On what grounds do top Democrats think Washington has the right to play power politics and help fuel hot wars on Russia’s western border? “The U.S. government,” Sheldon Richman tried to remind Americans one year ago, “has no businesses policing relations between Ukraine and Russia. Even if that role were appropriate for some party, the U.S. government would not be the one, because it hardly has clean hands in the matter.”

How would U.S.-Americans feel about Russia and/or China sending military equipment to an anti-U.S. regime in Mexico or Canada? And if Democrats are so committed to democracy around the world, why have none of them beyond Sanders and a few other progressives denounced the recent neofascist coup in Bolivia or voiced support for this year’s popular uprisings in Ecuador and Chile?

Trump deserves removal not just for his crooked Ukraine shenanigans and related obstructions of justice, but for setting up concentration camps, separating babies and children from their families, inciting violence, interfering with voting rights, discriminating on the basis of religion, waging criminal war, criminally threatening nuclear war, abusing his pardon power, violating the emoluments clause, assaulting press freedoms, backing coups in Venezuela and Bolivia, unconstitutionally declaring a fake national emergency, violating campaign finance laws, illegal proliferation of nuclear technology, tax fraud, instructing Border Patrol to violate the law, stripping environmental and public lands protections, and doing everything he can to turn the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber as soon as possible.

Even if impeachment leads to removal, Trump’s defenestration merely for interjecting his personal interests into Washington’s imperialist policy in Eastern Europe could constitute both an undeserved validation of that policy and an exoneration of Trump for his much bigger transgressions. And it would put the dangerous right-evangelical troglodyte Mike Pence in the Oval Office—a chilling prospect.

To make matters worse, impeachment threatens to become a great rallying point for Trump’s ugly white-nationalist base while encouraging the nation’s all-too-silent progressive majority to stay seated in front of glowing Telescreens to watch House Democrats and liberal cable news taking heads falsely claim to be collapsing the Trump regime from the top down.

If we are serious about getting rid of the demented fascist oligarch and his insurance policy, Pence, then we are going to have to join and expand an authentic opposition, a real popular resistance in the streets. The effective and meaningfully democratic way to remove Trump is not through elite procedures designed by 18th century slaveholders for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare. It is through sustained mass civil disobedience—through rebellion by and for those whom the American ruling class fears and hates the most: the working-class majority.

The sooner Trump can be forced out, the better. Curiously enough, impeachment makes the need to form a grassroots movement to overthrow the Trump-Pence regime more urgent than ever. Now that he’s looking at impeachment and a Senate trial, there’s no telling what Trump and his heavily armed minions might do. He has enormous means of mass destruction and mass distraction at his neofascistic fingertips.

We need Trump and Pence out now, not some time next year. The way to make that happen is with a mass movement that will not only sweep him from power but challenge the richly bipartisan racist, sexist, imperial and eco-cidal class rule system that hatched the Trump regime in the first place.