David Warsh: Trump's stain is indelible, but....

SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Watching the GOP convention last week, I had the feeling that there were two versions of the Republican Party on the program. One was a personality cult built around Donald Trump and his children,  The other professed to be an open, vibrant aggregation of all sorts of people sharing all kinds of concerns: foreign competition, immigration, religion, education, health care, military service, taxes, red tape.

The first party’s convention culminated in an extravaganza straight out of The Hunger Games, in which the coronavirus pandemic had happened long ago.  The second convention resembled a non-alcoholic version of the Democratic Party. All that was missing was inequality and climate change.

If Trump loses the election in November, will he go away?  Of course he won’t.  his tweets will continue as he seeks to retain his hold, But the acknowledgment last week of the existence of that second congregation made it possible to believe that the Republican Party might regain possession of itself sooner than expected.

Certainly, that is not the conventional wisdom, “Whether Mr. Trump wins or loses in November, he now owns the Republicans,” wrote columnist Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “They are now prisoners of the Frankenstein they helped to create.”  Ross Douthat, of The New York Times, wrote, “Even if he loses, his power will probably ebb only slowly, if at all.”  The FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo notes that some Republicans warn that, even if he loses, there is nothing to prevent him from running again in 2024.  In that case, asks an influential Trump critic, “Which Republican would be able to defeat him in a primary?”

That’s easy. For that ghost Republican a party seeking cross-over voters in a future election, the most attractive would be Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.  A point often missed about Trump’s 2016 insurgency is that many of his positions now appeal well beyond his vaunted “base.” An idiot-savant is a person who has a mental or learning disability but is extremely gifted in a particular way, such as the performing of feats of memory or calculation, Trump’s disability is characterological, but his political judgment has, in several instances, been acute, in both their popular appeal and their substance (though never their execution).

Thus tougher trade policy with China, more coherent immigration controls, prudent assessment of America’s foreign wars, realistic relations with Russia are broadly popular positions. Add a revenue-neutral carbon tax to the platform – that being a well-established Republican ambition, at least in policy circles – and the differences between the two parties would turn on their plans for social spending,  tax equity and cultural inequities.

What happens next will depend on the margin in the November election.  If Trump wins, or loses by a very narrow margin, all bets are off.   If Joe Biden wins by a substantial margin, expect the maneuvering among Republicans to begin immediately. Whatever happens to the Senate in 2020, the key to the 2024 Presidential election may be what happens in the Senate elections of 2022, when 22 Republicans seats will be at risk, compared to those of a dozen Democrats.  Would-be presidential candidates must wait to see what happens then.

Biden’s age would make him likely not to run for re-election. Vice President Kamala Harris vs. Nikki Haley would be a most interesting matchup in 2024, one that could go a long way toward restoring a degree of civility to American politics. As the 2016 primaries demonstrated, party machinery tends to swing behind whoever is thought to be capable of delivering a victory.  Under certain circumstances, it is possible to imagine a GOP rostrum in 2024 featuring George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, members of the Reagan, McCain and Cheney families — and no Trump anywhere in sight.

Can Trump be expunged from American politics? Deleted from the record? Of course the answer, again, is no. The stain is indelible. But with some luck, Donald J. Trump will be consigned to the chapter of history books in which he belongs, along with Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Charles Lindbergh, Joseph P. Kennedy, Huey Long and sundry other anti-democracy people of the 20th Century.  It is a pleasant thought, at least, for the last Monday in August.

David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

Llewellyn King: Ditch your optimism: U.S. democracy is imperiled

We are an optimistic people. And in today's world, there's the rub.

By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.

Maybe not this time.

The norms uprooted by President Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.

Consider just some of his transgressions:

· We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.

· America's good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces (INF) treaty.

· The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.

· The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.

But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.

Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Atty. Gen. William Barr – his new Roy Cohn.

The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.

The liberal media rails -- indeed enjoys -- railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).

But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice, and even names for revenge.

There are two other conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.

I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.

In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.

After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.

The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.

Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.=

Maybe it will list more.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Chris Powell: Eisenhower's secret campaign to defeat Joe McCarthy

Ike and McCarthy, by David A. Nichols (Simon and Schuster. $27.95. 379 pages).

With demagoguery now running rampant  across America,  in large part because of a president indifferent to the truth and the dignity of his office, David A. Nichols's book is a fascinating voyage to a similarly threatening time that at least had a happy ending.

Nichols, a scholar of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, aims to correct the misimpression that Ike was timid in the face of the country's second great Red Scare (the first one came right after World War I). Rather, Nichols writes, in his first two years in office Ike became devoted to breaking the scare's primary perpetrator, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with a secret political campaign run from the White House by the president's aides.

The impression of Eisenhower's timidity arose in part from his steady refusal to confront McCarthy or even mention his name as the senator kept charging, usually without evidence, that the federal government was riddled with Communists who were security risks if not outright spies for the Soviet Union. Of course there were Communists and spies, but McCarthy seldom got near one of any importance. Yet Eisenhower restrained himself even when McCarthy updated his smear of the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations, Democratic administrations -- from "20 years of treason" to "21 years of treason" -- encompassing the first year of the Eisenhower administration, the administration of a fellow Republican.

Eisenhower, Nichols writes, loathed McCarthy from the start but didn't want to talk back to him, believing -- or maybe rationalizing -- that this would elevate the senator and give him even more attention. Eventually Eisenhower and his aides decided that the country needed to see more of McCarthy, not less, so that the senator's bullying, intemperance and distortions would become his most prominent characteristics in the public mind.

The result was the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 before a Senate committee, largely staged by the president and his supporters, at which the central issue became not Communist infiltration at all but McCarthy aide Roy Cohn's confidential and unseemly hectoring of the Army to get favors for another McCarthy aide, G. David Schine, who had just been drafted into the Army. Cohn and Schine were suspected of having a homosexual relationship. {Roy Cohn was later a close mentor of Donald Trump.}

Here Nichols makes plain that the supposed good guys were not above McCarthyite tactics themselves. For the Army's lead lawyer, Joseph Welch, who has gone down in history for puncturing the senator with the famous rebuke at a televised hearing -- "Have you no sense of decency, Sir?" -- had just used televised innuendo to suggest Cohn's homosexuality and to exploit prejudice against homosexuals.

Further, Nichols shows, Eisenhower himself, as president, initially flirted with and patronized the fascism of anti-communist politics, at one point proposing to outlaw membership in the Communist Party. The president also dissembled and induced his associates to dissemble about the creation of the Army's report on Cohn's interventions for Schine, even getting Secretary of the Army Robert T.B. Stevens to commit perjury about it.

Journalists of the time don't come out so well either, as Nichols shows many of them sensationalizing McCarthy's reckless allegations and others, including CBS's Edward R. Murrow, colluding with the White House press office against the senator.

Eisenhower, in light of some of those who followed him, turned out to be a pretty good president, siding soon enough with free thought and speech and due process of law. But it is hard not to wonder if the president would have come around so soon if McCarthy had not targeted the Army, from which Ike had retired as the general who had led the Western armies against Hitler.

And while McCarthy quickly fell from national influence, sunk into alcoholism, and died prematurely, his censure by the Senate remains misunderstood. The two counts of the censure had nothing to do with McCarthy's abuse of supposed Communists and their sympathizers and his contempt of due process but rather his affronting the dignity of the Senate itself.

Nichols has told and extensively documented a compelling story. Anyone interested in American history and politics may have a hard time putting this book down.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the {Manchester, Conn.} Journal Inquirer and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.