The Mouth and ‘Too Much of a Mouthful’?

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Elon backs down, Donald ramps up. Plenty of commentators note the parallels between Trump’s federalising the National Guard in California and the tactic deployed by so many authoritarians on a power-grab, of inciting dissent in order to crack down on it and use the crack-down as an excuse to grab more power. Germany in the 1930s offers an example: is California Trump’s would-be Riechstag arson?

However, the thought occurs that Trump, who is all mouth and bad breath – the mouth for a sinister collection of heads behind it – might have bitten off more than he can chew. Protests have begun to roil in many more places than Los Angeles. One possible end-point of his provocation in California is a nationwide backlash that unseats him. It isn’t impossible; there are many more Americans who believe in the rule of law and the US’s republican virtues than want a restoration of absolute monarchy. Another possible end-point – Trump’s suspension of the Constitution and assumption of those monarchical powers – is the logical terminus of everything he has been and is doing, unbelievable as it seems to say this. But a frank gaze at this as a possibility, and an unblinking assessment of where White House (currently: Project 2025) policy is pointing – namely, that this indeed is the intended outcome – might spur the reaction that realises the first, unseating, possibility.

It could happen peacefully. In earlier posts I pointed out that a few individuals in Congress and the Supreme Court could bring Trump and Project 2025 to a shuddering halt, the individuals in question being Republicans with a conscience, and just enough of them to expunge the GOP majority in both houses. To date the marvel is not so much that Trump is in the White House but that so many in the GOP have gone – are going – along with him. Congress and the Supreme Court blocking his activities, Congress impeaching and dethroning him, are legitimate and to-hand remedies for what he and his cabal are doing. The question is: are there a few good men and women – a mere dozen – in the system who will do this? What will history say of all those who did nothing – too scared, too craven, to oppose him, or (even worse) who are in favour of what he is doing?

I’m a believer in the idea that transnational, interstate comities such as the EU have great promise for peace, progress and economic flourishing for all within them. But when the betise of Brexit happened, I changed my view about Scottish independence, thinking that Scotland should not be dragged into the withering and diminishment that Brexit promised – and has since delivered in spades – but should go independent and, which is what it wanted, be part of the EU on its own account. The same thought now occurs about California. The state is by itself the fourth largest economy in the world. It is so different, as a society, from most of the other US states that it is a marvel that it belongs to the same political entity as they. Has Trump made a case for California to go independent?

What about New York? By itself it’s the eighth largest economy in the world. Like California it could be independent. The city of New York is a place so distinct from the rest of the US that there is nigh-universal agreement that to know New York is not to know the US. California and New York – and one might add to the latter the New England states – have had Trump imposed on them by the red states; the damage he is doing to the whole country, and – almost as bad – the embarrassment he is causing decent Americans, would be incitement enough.

Such is, perhaps, fanciful speculation only. But the question, ‘Where will it all end?’ has a number of markedly different answers. Which answer turns out to be the one that the people of the US gives depends either on the best among them or the worst among them. The rest of us in the world are not mere bystanders. We all, directly or indirectly, have more than a merely notional stake; and though some stand to benefit from the worst answer, in the long run none of us do.