As the 2020 presidential election neared, Style Weekly kindly offered me another and, I hoped at the time, final swipe at The Mad King. I seized it. Beyond that, this opinion concedes that Jonathan Freedland’s diagnosis of the rot in American political life was uncomfortably accurate.
“A New American Syllabus,” Style Weekly, 14 October 2020, 15 (www.styleweekly.com/richmond/opinion-a-new-american-syllabus/Content?oid=16616782).
It was inevitable that the letter-writing would lead to tinkering with an editorial. This spur for this virgin effort was The Grand Prevaricator’s tapping of the bellicose John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. This was not the choice of a chief executive determined to pursue a reasoned, sober foreign policy. Many hoped that President Stable Genius would never face a crisis for fear of an awful outcome. The installation of the incessantly saber-rattling Mr. Bolton magnified the chances for the genesis of crises where none need exist.
The piece is essentially a call for a Republican, any Republican, to restrain Mr. Trump. No one in the national GOP had done so to this point. The Richmond Times-Dispatch justifiably passed on it because it was double the length of a typical editorial. A pitch was then made to The Huffington Post, but nothing came of it. I then set the essay aside and never returned to it.
Freedland, Trump, Bolton, Lee, Chirac.
While in London in late 2017 I was reading local newspapers and stumbled across an editorial by a favorite writer, Jonathan Freedland (“The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017). As the first year of the Trump administration lurched toward its close, Mr. Freedland reflected on a book he had written two decades ago in which he had professed his admiration for the ideals enshrined in the United States’ founding documents and for the intricate constitutional mechanism devised by the nation’s founders (Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic [London: Fourth Estate Ltd., 1998]). In Mr. Freedland’s view, the colonies had purloined a revolution that by right belonged to the English, hence his call to “bring home the revolution” and reshape the United Kingdom’s government on the American pattern. On 2017’s penultimate day, Mr. Freedland was disillusioned. The first year of the Trump presidency had revealed inherent flaws in the American constitutional order and he despaired of its capacity, despite its manifold merits, to correct itself.
Saddened by Mr. Freedland’s loss of faith, I sent a letter to the newspaper, perhaps as much to “buck up” myself as Mr. Freedland and to assure our transatlantic admirer that, in the words of a British comedy troupe, “we’re not dead yet” (“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism’ and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29). The letter underscored the potency of the “resistance” to Mr. Trump and identified the ultimate corrective to his misrule: the electoral repudiation of his GOP enablers in the 2018 midterms, the removal of Mr. Trump through the ballot box in 2020, and a gradual restoration of normative political practice.
In the months since my sojourn among our British cousins, the United States’ circumstance has gravely worsened and Mr. Freedland’s outlining of a pair of defects in American governance grows in resonance. He asserted first that the proper functioning of the American constitutional system depends upon the election of a chief executive with personal integrity and an unwavering commitment to the public weal. By this standard, it is now incontrovertible that the incorrigible Mr. Trump is a lost cause. Appeal neither to reason nor common decency gives him pause. He stands as a moral and ethical cypher, a man deficient in understanding and allergic to principle, a living syllabus of our darker impulses, the untrammeled national id exposed and unleashed.
Mr. Trump now jettisons one after the another the members of the small and shrinking coterie of “adults” supposed to blunt his impulsivity. He liberates himself from relevant experience, informed opinion, and sober analysis. Still more vexing is his selection of former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. Mr. Trump is installing in this critical post the most unreconstructed, most unapologetic of the neoconservative Iraq War deadenders. A probable Islamophobe and a certain saber-rattler unable to pass the scrutiny of confirmation by a Republican Senate in 2005, Mr. Bolton was a leading light in the Project for a New American Century and among its members who ultimately insinuated themselves deeply into President George W. Bush’s administration. He was a signatory to this cabal’s infamous 1998 open letter exhorting President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power, three years before the 9/11 attacks and five years before Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction became the pretext for the greatest blunder in modern American foreign policy, a misstep whose toll in lost American credibility on the world stage still mounts.
Mr. Trump on his own abrogates American leadership in the community of nations and, when abroad, inflicts misinformed diatribes on America’s allies and seems at his ease only in the company of despots and thugs, a sadly embarrassing affront to every thinking American. Mr. Bolton will neither restrain Mr. Trump nor offer him sage counsel and likely will only encourage Mr. Trump to intermingle American foreign policy with his vanity, vindictiveness, and projection. One must wonder whether Mr. Trump’s personal peccadilloes – his ceaseless need to shift the narrative from his past and present transgressions – will become a driving force in foreign affairs. Be this as may, the elevation of Mr. Bolton near the seat of power pushes the hands of the doomsday clock a few clicks nearer to midnight.
Mr. Trump’s manifest deficiency as chief executive leads to Mr. Freedland’s other critique of the state of play in American governance, his understanding that the constitutional mechanism runs smoothly when political groups operate in good faith, accept the legitimacy of their opponents, and, at any critical juncture, prioritize the national interest above narrow partisan advantage. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is a paragon of political virtue but their defects are asymmetrical, the sins of the GOP active and those of the Democrats reactive. The Democrats in any event are in power in no corner of government. Restraint on an unfettered and perhaps unbalanced executive must come from the GOP. A few months back, one could hope that a drubbing in the 2018 midterms and a few electoral cycles in the political wilderness – an overdue pause for introspection – might return the Republican Party to itself. Mr. Trump’s mercurial conduct unfortunately eliminates the luxury of waiting for a gradual political realignment. Action is imperative. It is incumbent on the governing party to act. The Republican Party must demonstrate that, unlike Mr. Trump, it is not a lost cause.
The signs on this front are not encouraging. GOP senators and congressmen have by and large maintained a studied silence in the face of Mr. Trump’s antics. A few Republican senators – Messrs. McCain, Flake, Sasse, Corker, Graham – have from time to time uttered fine words but a concrete act to constrain Mr. Trump’s misbehavior and malfeasance is nowhere in evidence. The GOP seems to have forgotten a fundamental truth. Retired Sen. Harry Reid has recounted a reminder the late Sen. Robert Byrd gave his colleagues: “I don’t serve under the president; I serve with the president” (Carl Hulse, “Senator’s Farewell: ‘I Just Shake My Head,’” The New York Times, 24 March 2018, A11 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/us/politics/harry-reid-leaves-washington.html]). Do Republicans not recall that the legislature is a coequal branch of government and enjoys pride of place in the Constitution? The federal government is not a parliamentary system, though the GOP sometimes seemingly wishes it were. The political calculus in the US Senate is uncomplicated: A handful of Republican votes in concert with Democrats can serve as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s excesses. This would be less an act of courage than a minimal declaration of fealty to the American constitutional system.
Should Republicans, nevertheless, require an example of political courage to emulate, they need not look far nor to the distant past. In 2001, Rep. Barbara Lee cast the lone dissenting vote in the House against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and there was nary a nay registered in the Senate. Her opposition sprang not from pacifism but from her conviction that the legislature should not abdicate its oversight of the executive in making the most profound decision, to commit the nation’s treasure and its youth to armed conflict. She refused to grant the executive a blank check. To paraphrase Martin Luther, there she stood for she could do no other. The fullness of time has vindicated her adherence to principle. Would that a handful of GOP senators might muster the fortitude of a Barbara Lee.
Despite Mr. Trump’s willful misconduct, the nation still has friends abroad. The stock of goodwill has not yet been exhausted. Hope endures that the United States will return to the first principles that, while often observed imperfectly, made the American constitutional system admired and emulated. Jonathan Freedland’s distress at our present predicament underscores a useful truism: The outsider sometimes perceives us with greater clarity than we see ourselves. Friends also sometimes offer well-meaning advice, counsel that should not be summarily dismissed. The document though which thirteen colonies dissolved its bond to the British crown underscored the importance “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” as the nascent nation embarked on a fateful path. Perhaps in this moment America’s leadership should declaim less and listen more to what the world is saying to it. Nicholas Kristof recently acknowledged his experience of déjà vu, a feeling that 2018 seems uncomfortably like 2002 and 2003 (“I’m Worried Now, as Before the Iraq War,” New York Times, 22 March 2018, A21 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/iraq-war-north-korea-iran.html]). Mr. Kristof is not alone in this. The American political memory can be unforgivably short. As the drumbeat for intervention in Iraq moved to a crescendo, the late French President Jacques Chirac, a man with an abiding affection for America, warned that the country was on the cusp of a potentially momentous mistake. GOP congressmen in response replaced french-fries with “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria and the nation careered toward a grand foreign policy debacle. Must this partisan thickness be repeated? The time for both Democratic and Republican legislators to exercise the prerogatives and responsibilities of their offices is now. This cannot and must not be left to the election.
This letter was written in particular circumstances. The first anniversary of the “American Carnage” inaugural address approached. The GOP’s surrender to the “America first” onslaught and to President Small Hands’ faux populism was apparent, transactionalism stripped to its purest essence. For the Republicans, demolition of the constitutional edifice and open, nearly gleeful corruption and self-dealing were acceptable so long as the Federalist Society’s judicial nominees were jammed onto the courts and the affluent could stuff more money into their pockets through ill-conceived tax cuts. Grover Norquist’s infamous quip – that all the GOP required in a president is “enough working digits to handle a pen” – had proven too prophetic to amuse.
Personal context too is relevant. She Who Must Be Revered and I spent an extended Christmas holiday in California. My father-in-law’s death was a year past and my mother-in-law needed to be moved into an assisted-living apartment and to have her former residence emptied of belongings. It was decided – by whom I’m not certain – that The Better Half and I needed a vacation after this. Cancellation of a professional engagement had left The Beloved One with an unused hotel reservation in Earl’s Court, so a week in London was planned. Subsequent events told us that we might have contemplated before our departure the potential for the sunk cost fallacy being in play. The vagaries of travel soon intervened. Just as we cleared airport security in San Francisco, My Happiness began to feel unwell. We departed anyway, but she was ailing throughout our time in the United Kingdom.
We, whatever the circumstance, were in London. A good deal of time was passed in our postage-stamp sized room but, whenever The Better Half rallied, we ventured out and took in the sights. I maintained a longstanding custom: a copy of The Guardian on weekdays and The Observer on Sundays. On the eve of New Year’s Eve, The Guardian ran an opinion by Jonathan Freedland, a favorite of mine among British commentators. Mr. Freedland has worked in the American Empire as a reporter and he offers a view of the United States from an outsider, a well-informed and mostly sympathetic one. He doesn’t engage in kneejerk anti-Americanism. This undergirds his credibility when he takes America to task. Nearly two decades earlier I had read his delightful polemic, Bring Home the Revolution (1998), in which he argued that the American Revolution snatched away an Enlightenment political movement that belonged by right to the British. In short, Jonathan Freedland “gets” us. His understanding of the American project surpasses that of many citizens, a shameful reality. He realizes that for all its messiness, contradictions, and hypocrisies, much in the American constitutional system remains admirable and worthy of emulation.
Mr. Freedland was disillusioned as 2017 waned. President Big Mac had pressure tested the Constitution and exposed its inherent shortcomings. The opinion emphasized the system’s reliance on honoring of political and constitutional norms. There too is a tacit assumption that American political leaders will conduct themselves with moral integrity and devotion to constitutional principles, not moral turpitude and civic ignorance. The Bridge and Tunnel President’s yearlong tenure had been a practicum in the capacity of an unscrupulous actor to subvert American governance.
Mr. Freedland’s credibility made the editorial a painful read. The Guardian’s guidelines for submissions resemble The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s, so, availing myself of a hotel notepad, I drafted a letter and sent it. Its thrust was that the game was not over; cards remained to be played. The constitutional system had undergone assaults more existential than that posed by a former host of a reality show. There were also glimmers of hope: The Special Counsel’s investigation proceeded, resistance continued, the elections in Virginia signaled a repudiation of The Donald, and the ballot box remained a potent weapon in the arsenal.
The letter appeared online on New Year’s Day 2018 and in print the day after, a speedy turnaround. My Better Half was unwell, so I hiked to a Marks and Spencer Simply Food on Kensington High Street to feed us and found the paper there. It’s satisfying to call He Who Must Be Ridiculed a fascist in print. The photo attached to the letter’s online version is a classic.
The verdict on the letter after passage of time is mixed. Much of Mr. Freedland’s diagnosis of America’s political ills is valid; more will be said about that later. Nonetheless, the ballot box was a bulwark against the worst abuses. There was legitimate fear of authoritarianism had President Yeti Pubes been reelected and this threat remains plausible so long as the GOP continues its canoodling with Trumpism.
Jonathan Freedland, “The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017, 31 (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/30/trump-us-constitution-weakness-founding-fathers).
“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism” and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29 (www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jan/01/trumps-clown-fascism-and-the-us-constitution).
Jonathan Freedland mentioned the musical Hamilton, which he’d seen upon its London opening, as an example of American creative verve. One would be hard pressed to disagree. Because of The Most Excellent Spouse, I saw the original cast in the Manhattan in October 2015, then a touring production in Richmond, then the streaming version last summer. It was inevitable that it would reach London’s West End. I wondered, when I first saw it, how a British audience would respond because of the wicked comic portrayal of George III and because Alexander Hamilton was perhaps the most obscure of the principal founders for non-Americans.
I needn’t have been concerned. Jonathan Freedland’s was the prevailing critical and popular assessment. One afternoon, while in a queue at the Marks and Spencer Simply Food on Earl’s Court Road, I overheard the locals extolling the show’s virtues. Excitement for it was genuine and unqualified. It was the performance to see. To have a ticket was to be envied. Its graceful Atlantic crossing is a tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda.
A final fact about Jonathan Freedland. During a subsequent journey to the United Kingdom (September 2018), I was browsing in a bookstore on Tottenham Court Road and my eyes alit on a paperback entitled To Kill the President. Its cover image was a stars-and-stripes festooned pistol. It seemed like something for the moment, so I examined a copy. The author was Sam Bourne, a nom de plume of Jonathan Freedland, who in his other life cranks out thrillers. The novel has an alternative title – The Plot Against the President – and cover – the White House instead of a firearm – doubtless a concession to American sensibilities. I am curious to know the chronology of the book’s genesis and completion. The president under threat is a barely disguised version of The Mendacious One. The book reached print in June 2017, barely five months after the inauguration. Was Mr. Freedland inspired by The Perambulating Eructation’s candidacy but considered his election an implausibility and devised the plot as a flight of fancy? Or did he think that Mr. Crude Imposition might pull it off and consider his storyline quasi-plausible? Or was the novel mostly written speedily after the 8 November debacle? The paperback traveled to the US in checked luggage. It’s an airport novel no American should read in an airport.