Taking Trump To Task

Trump’s refugee/visa ban contains all the hallmarks of his crude authoritarianism but also his personal erraticism (the intelligence community were neither consulted regarding it, nor would they approved it had he done so). The legitimate fury and fear it has elicited across the world will no doubt embolden him, energising his base in the US and strengthening his ‘America First’ credentials.

All the understandable public expressions of opprobrium and protest calls will only add to a mood of near-hysteria in the coming days and weeks.

I doubt none of this course of events will very much displease Trump and Steve Bannon. As terrorists seek to summon fear, so this particular demagogue, with his dizzying blitz of Executive Orders, must be expecting to invoke panic and bewilderment now being played out on your social media stream. They will feel they have the wind with them if the anger can be characterised as emanating from metropolitan liberals at home and abroad.

Our ability to express ourselves in public without asking anyone’s permission is one of the greatest societal advances of our age. However that the most successful exponent of it — in an age of tumultuous economic and social change -is a narcissistic authoritarian is hardly astonishing.

How to respond? Let’s hope with cool heads and clear eyed.

It is easy to forget for all his bombastic populist anti-establishment rhetoric Trump’s passage to the White House was facilitated by two of the great American establishment institutions, the Republican Party who embraced him and the Constitution (via the Electoral College) which saved him.

Republicans having rallied to him now have a special responsibility to check his excesses as others in the constitutional firmament must. We’ll need more of this https://twitter.com/SenSasse/status/825465090866573313

Ultimately the best hope we have now is not to match Trump’s trademark dark fearfulness with our own, not to drown out his hateful tweets with ours but to turn to party of Abraham Lincoln and the founding fathers and their ‘auxiliary precautions’.

Yes get angry but sure as hell let’s get focused.