A few days ago, due to some outstanding reporting by the New York Times, we learned that way back in June 2017, President Trump ordered his White House Counsel to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is running the Russia investigation. Indeed, he wanted to fire him only weeks after Mueller began working, so worried was Trump about where this was all headed. Thankfully, the White House counsel talked him out of this path, refusing to do the deed and confident that Trump wouldn’t do it himself. (He was right.)
I wrote a short comment to the post, mostly to vent about what was so obviously wrong about this situation. I wrote:
“He (Trump) is in so far over his head. He doesn’t understand government and he doesn’t understand how law works (except in its twisted version practiced by the likes of Roy Cohn). So he undoubtedly won’t understand why this news story will be eye-popping — even to a population mostly numbed to the multiple shocks to to the nervous system from this presidency.
You see, Mr. President, you’re in office partly because a foreign power unfriendly to us hacked our election in order to undermine your opponent. They succeeded far beyond their initial plans. We the people, yes the people, this is a democracy, have a right to know what went on and who facilitated that historic event. If you had no involvement, as you claim, you should welcome a thorough and credible investigation of the matter — because faith in our elections is important. So, no, you don’t have the right to treat the FBI and the Justice Department like your personal lawyers. They work for us, not for you. You have your own lawyers. These are the people’s lawyers, and you can’t just expect to fire them because you’d rather they not look into things that hurt your “brand.” It doesn’t work that way here in the public sector.
The optics of this, Mr. President, couldn’t be worse. You tried to fire a universally respected Republican career prosecutor not because he did anything wrong, but because he’s doing the job that We The People need him to do, while some semblance of checks and balances still exists.”
The Times no longer sends me an email telling me when my comments get “published,” which really just means screened for inappropriate comment, so I forgot about the post until last night, when a friend said to me at a meeting: did you see that over 5,000 people “recommended” your comment and it got picked by the “NYTimes picks”? So it was: http://nyti.ms/2DWPLbV (link to the article and the published comments).
With some trepidation, I peeked at the 33 comments that others had filed in response to mine. With trollers out there constantly on the warpath, there are always a few who will call you Satanic no matter what you write. I was pleased to see only a couple of negative ones. One particularly gratifying one was:
“I got a bit choked up reading your comment to my wife, Mr. Thomas, and I can see by the high number of recommends that there may be many others who are in heartfelt agreement with you. This truly is our country–not some business venture belonging to Donald Trump as he seems to think it is.
I, and many others, are concerned that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth if we don’t keep this wanna-be dictator and his enablers in check.”
How nice that this reader from Illinois, the land of Lincoln, quoted those memorable lines from the Gettysburg Address as he ended. What Lincoln understood in 1863 and is no less true now: the question we face is whether popular government, i.e., self-government by the people, is an absurdity — whether it can be made to work. The question persists; it did not die at the Appomatox courthouse.
What made America unique in the eighteenth century was the notion that we don’t need monarchs; we can govern our own affairs. Not very easily, as it turned out. Our first government under the Articles of Confederation failed. Our second government, described by Benjamin Franklin as “a Republic, if you can keep it,” has had its perilous moments, as slavery and sectionalism tore the country apart within decades. Six hundred thousand Americans (over three million in proportionality to today’s population) killed each other trying to sort things out. We barely survived as a nation, but then grew into a superpower.
Those underlying divisions have remained. Although the Republican party is no longer the party of liberation and the Democratic Party is no longer the party of slaveholding planters (how far they both have evolved from their roots!), our divisions run deep, exacerbated by irresponsible broadcasts posing as news and hate speech on radio and social media. And of course our President sows division with every action and Tweet that he authors.
So the question of whether this experiment in self-government “shall perish from the Earth” is not a frivolous one. This is our democracy’s stress test. And this is why this Republic (“if [we] can keep it”) needs Robert Mueller to ignore the noise and keep doing his job. Because he’s working for us, not the President, and the more he tries to interfere, the more we must speak up in defense of the truth-seeking process.
As Lincoln said, the issue of whether a government by the people “can long endure” is what’s at stake.
Even We Here 