Imagine that an impeachment
resolution against Trump passes the House. Trump claims it’s the work of the “deep
state.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity demands every honest patriot take to the streets. Rightwing
social media call for war. As insurrection spreads, Trump commands the armed
forces to side with the “patriots.”
Or it’s November 2020 and Trump has
lost the election. He charges voter fraud, claiming that the “deep state”
organized tens of millions of illegal immigrants to vote against him, and says
he has an obligation not to step down. Demonstrations and riots ensue. Trump
commands the armed forces to put them down.
If these sound far-fetched,
consider Trump’s torrent of lies, his admiration for foreign dictators, his off-hand
jokes about being “president for life” (Xi Xinping “was
able to do that,” he told admirers in March. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll
give that a shot some day.’), and his increasing invocation of a “deep state”
plot against him.
The United States is premised on an
agreement about how to deal with our disagreements. It’s called the Constitution. We
trust our system of government enough that we abide by its outcomes even though
we may disagree with them. Only once in our history – in 1861 – did enough of
us distrust the system so much we succumbed to civil war.
But what happens if a president claims
our system is no longer trustworthy?
Last week Trump accused the “deep
state” of embedding a spy in his campaign for political purposes. “Spygate” soon
unraveled after Republican House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy dismissed it,
but truth has never silenced Trump for long.
Trump’s immediate goal is to discredit
Robert Mueller’s investigation. But his strategy appears to go beyond that. In tweets
and on Fox News, Trump’s overall mission is repeatedly described as a “war on
the deep state.”
In his 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré describes the
“deep state” as a moneyed élite — “non-governmental insiders from banking,
industry, and commerce” who rule in secret.
America already may be close to that sort
of deep state. As Princeton professor Martin
Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University found after
analyzing 1,799 policy issues that came before Congress, “the preferences of
the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically
non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Instead, Gilens and Page concluded,
lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed
business interests.
Gilens’ and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002,
before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens
United” decision. It’s likely to be far worse now.
So when Trump says the political
system is “rigged,” he’s not far off the mark. Bernie Sanders said the same
thing.
A Monmouth Poll released in
March found that a bipartisan majority of
Americans already believes that an unelected “deep state” is manipulating
national policy.
But here’s the crucial distinction.
Trump’s “deep state” isn’t the moneyed interests. It’s a supposed cabal of government
workers, intelligence personnel, researchers, experts, scientists, professors,
and journalists – the people who make, advise about, analyze, or report on
public policy.
In the real world, they’re supposed
to be truth-tellers. In Trump’s conspiracy fantasy they’re out to get him – in
cahoots with former members of the Obama administration, liberals, and
Democrats.
Trump has never behaved as if he thought
he was president of all Americans, anyway. He’s acted as if he’s only the
president of the 63 million who voted for him – certainly not the 66 million
who voted for Hillary or anyone who supported Obama.
Nor has he shown any interest in unifying
the nation, or speaking to the nation as a whole. Instead, he periodically throws
red meat to his overwhelmingly white, rural, and older base.
And he has repeatedly shown he couldn’t care less about the
Constitution.
So what happens if Trump is about
to be removed – by impeachment or even an election?
In early April, Sean
Hannity predicted that if impeachment began, “there’s going to be two sides of this
that are fighting and dividing this country at a level we’ve never seen” –
“those that stand for truth and those that literally buy into the corrupt deep
state attacks against a duly elected president.”
Last summer, Trump consigliore Roger Stone warned of “an insurrection like you’ve never seen,”
and claimed any politician who voted to oust Trump “would be endangering
their own life.”
A second civil war? Probably not. But
the way Trump and his defenders are behaving, it’s not absurd to imagine serious social unrest. That’s how low he’s taken us.
