If the majority of that title sounds familiar to you, it might be because of this, which I published in this space in this space two and a half months ago. Otherwise known, in the age of digital politics and media, as an eternity. I'd love to tell you that there was no longer a reason to have to write about this subject again. I'd like to tell you that, with or without my voice, the demands for Donald Trump's resignation have reached the level at which, even for an individual as narcissistically stubborn as Trump. I'd like to be able to tell you that, given the rate at which his perfidy geometrically expands on a daily basis, we've moved on to not-much-of-an-improvement Mike Pence in the Oval Office, and have even more hope for the potential that this fall's election can bring.
But I can't.
Because Trump is still where he never should have been in the first place: holding the fate of the United States, and its people, in his untrustworthy hands.
I know I'm not alone in asking Trump to resign; I see people making the same demand in my Twitter feed on a regular basis. I know that at least some prominent media figures have made the same demand. Well, at least one of them, anyway.
This should, at the very least, puzzle many of us. All the more so, if you take a moment, or longer, to flash back to our political life in the late 1990s.
Back then, we had a President, Bill Clinton, whose extramarital affair with an intern (and subsequent attempts to conceal said affair) led to his becoming only the second president in our 200-plus history to be impeached, and tried in the Senate. Whether you liked the use of the impeachment process on Clinton (and I didn't), you have to admit that it didn't come to pass as a result of a media vacuum. Over 100 newspapers used the power of their editorial pages to demand that Clinton spare the nation the trauma of impeachment by resigning.
How many of those newspapers, how many of all newspapers, have been "bipartisan" enough to make the same demand of Trump? Even more specifically, how many of those newspapers have done so in response to the recent revelation that Trump knew about, and did nothing to stop, his political patron, Vladimir Putin, from paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops. Let me repeat that, with emphasis: paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops. Perhaps the ultimate dereliction of presidential duty, and certainly of a far greater moral magnitude than a concealed extramarital affair. And one that is compounded by the fact that, during the period in which Trump and his team knew about the bounties, he continued to attempt showering Putin with favors.
Well, how many?
{crickets}
That's right, folks. Zero.
As noted above in the link, this failure has not gone unnoticed by any means. In fact, CNN has covered this failure of the Fourth Estate, and come up with a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed explanations, ranging from the highly polarized nature of our current decline of bipartisanship to fear of reprisals from Trump fanatics. In the wake of the Capital Gazette tragedy two summers ago, I can't say that the latter concern is a perfectly unreasonable one.
But it's not good enough, and neither is the polarization excuse. The Civil War itself did not stop newspapers from publishing editorials. And the point of having freedom of the press enshrined in our Constitution is to give the press the power to say unpopular things that, despite being unpopular, need to be said and heard If it's truly the case that, in 21st century America, the decision to let Second Amendment rights trump First Amendment ones has been effectively made then, for all practical purposes, there's no Constitution to defend in the first place. If the publishers of our nation's newspapers have made the calculation that surrendering some degree of their Constitutional authority will guarantee the economic future of their product, they are desperately wrong. The truth is that a world filled by the Internet with questionable voices needs to be supplemented--even protected--by as many authoritative ones as possible.
Freedom isn't free. If media companies need better security at their offices against right-wing fanatics, higher better security, pass along the costs, and be worth paying for in the first place. The most effective antidote to bad speech, ultimately, is good speech, to paraphrase Justice Louis Brandeis. Not surrendering speech, and democracy, to the barbarians.
So I hope and pray--and you should at least join me in hoping--that editors and publishers across this country will find a way to screw up what's left of their courage, and do the right thing: demand what I demanded in April.
Donald Trump must resign.
NOW.
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