Counterpunch, December 20, 2019
In the demented mind of the disgraced fascist oligarch Donald “Perfect Call” Trump, “the Radical Left Democrats have been trying to impeach me from Day 1.” This is nonsense on at least three levels.
First, the reigning forces in the dismal, demobilizing, neoliberal and dollar-drenched Democratic Party are anything but radical or Left. They are deeply conservative, militantly capitalist and imperialist, and centrist. They revealed this yet again even as they were impeaching Trump for setting James Madison’s wig on fire by getting caught trying to trade arms for a foreign power agreeing to dig up dirt on a domestic presidential rival. Two days before the impeachment vote, the preponderant majority of House Democrats voted for a “national security” measure giving Trump $1.4 billion to build his Nativist southern border Wall and setting no limits on his ability to transfer money from the military budget to construct his vicious barrier. Democrats also signed off on a $738 billion Pentagon funding bill. “One of the most expensive military measures in the nation’s history” (the New York Times), this “defense” (empire) funding bill granted Trump his dream of a “Space Force” as a new sixth branch of the U.S. military.
Last week, Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House voted by a giant bipartisan margin, 377–48, to approve the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In what the World Socialist Website (WSWS) rightly calls an “extraordinary juxtaposition of impeachment and political collaboration,” the latest NDAA “removes most provisions to which the White House objected, including barring US military assistance to the Saudi war in Yemen and the deployment of a submarine-launched medium-range missile that would violate the INF treaty. It strips out,” the WSWS reports, “a requirement for Trump to get congressional approval for military strikes on Iran.”
Second, if the Democrats were really a Left opposition party, the majority-Democratic House would already have impeached the Malignant One for any number of fascistic, corrupt, and eco-cidal crimes more harmful to humanity than UkraineGate: concentration camps, child-family separations, kids in cages, abuse of pardon power, violation of asylum law, telling Border Patrol to break the law, fraudulent declaration of national emergency, illegal diversion of taxpayer funds, failure to adequately prepare for and respond to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria, violation of the emoluments clause, incitement of violence, campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and more, including (last but not at all least) the denial and escalation of the climate catastrophe.
Third, House Speaker Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it is” Pelosi (Net Worth: $101 million) successfully kept the lid on impeachment for nearly three years. The CIA whistleblower’s revelation about Donito Trumpolini’s “perfect [July 25th] call” to Ukraine’s newly elected president left the Madame Speaker with no choice but to operationalize the constitutional impeachment clause, designed by the nation’s militantly anti-democratic aristo-republican Founders for precisely the transgression Trump tried to make: using his powerful office to conspire with a foreign leader to perpetuate his domestic power by undermining the electoral process.
Listening to the grotesque Trump blame his “ugly” impeachment on “socialist” Democrats, I (an actual socialist) wonder if anyone in the high liberal media would like to join the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Socialist Equality Party, and a small cadre of Left (and other) thinkers in accurately describing Trump as a fascist. False conflation and demonization of centrists, liberals, and the “radical Left” is a standard and hallmark characteristic of fascist propaganda and conduct. So is very much else in Trump’s record, including his epic and constant assaults on truth, his brazen defiance of basic constitutional principles, his open flirtation with political violence, his palingenetic nationalism, his cultivation of white victimhood, his fake-populism, his rabid demonization of brown-skinned immigrants, his xenophobic nationalism, his dodgy appeal to the rural and small-town white- herrenvolk “heartland,” his “takes the gloves” appear to “law and order,” his white-nationalist and authoritarian petit-bourgeois base, his savage racism, his virulent sexism, his attempted politicization of the military, and more. Trump’s recent suggestion that House Intelligence chair Adam Schiff deserves “tough” and “Guatemala”-style (torture and death-squad) justice ought to be sending chills down our historical spines.
If I, an actual radical Leftist (I doubt Trump has ever met one) were (quite unimaginably) a member of the House of Representatives in early 2017, I would have been seeking Trump’s impeachment for being an eco-cidal neofascist (which he clearly promised to be in 2015 and 2016) “since Day 1” – the day he went over to the CIA’s headquarters to give a bizarre and rambling speech in which he told a stunned and silent audience of intelligence agents and officials that the United States might get another chance to grab Iraq’s oil.