Buster Keaton’s “Seven Chances” contains one of the funniest sight gags in film history. Our hero is fleeing trouble and begins running down a steep hill dislodging a few stones. One thing leads to another and he’s soon dodging an endless avalanche of bigger and bigger boulders. You can find a clip at “Buster Keaton chase scene” on YouTube.
This scene offers a visual metaphor for the last few weeks in the life of the Trump administration. One anonymous whistleblower who has heard some disturbing rumors leads to a few witnesses, then more come forward, and soon there is an avalanche of impeachment testimony describing a shadow foreign policy aimed at extorting a smear of a Trump rival in exchange for the delivery of already appropriated aid to an embattled Ukraine. When will it stop? Who knows?
We know that Trump has spent a lifetime breaking the law and dodging any reckoning. He has cheated customers and contractors, engaged in forbidden housing practices, tax evasion, false advertising, and serial bankruptcy, leaving many victims in his wake. He was forced to pay off Trump University suckers, pay a fine for using a charity as a personal piggy bank, and to buy the silence of sexually exploited women, ex-wives, and former employees. He has spent millions on lawyers to fend off those he has wronged.
Lately, however, his efforts to upend the established government order or to hide his personal crimes have been meeting wth trouble. Courts have ruled against his executive fiats 63 times by one count. He has lost on issues like denial of Medicaid, elimination of DACA and the Affordable Care Act, environmental de-protection, including attempts to drill offshore and in the arctic. He has been ordered to cooperate with various subpoenas and his accountants to turn over his tax records. Appeals are under way, of course.
In the impeachment inquiry, government professionals have ignored his orders not to testify with revealing results not pleasing to the president. He has attacked Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, and Lt. Col. Vindman, continuing a pattern. He needs to seem more powerful than strong women and military men to whom he obviously feels inferior. Because or the draft dodging or Mommy issues?
The unkindest cut may have come from Gordon Sondland, a hotel mogul like Trump who understands transactional relations all too well. He gave $1 million in exchange for an ambassadorship, but decided Trump wasn’t worth a perjury rap. He amended his testimony and said not only was there a quid pro quo but it was common knowledge.
“Everyone was in the loop,” including Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, and White House Chief of Staff Mulvaney. Not to forget Attorney General Barr who Trump identified as the contact for the president of Ukraine when reporting the results of the investigation to smear Biden.
Trump didn’t take long to go from calling Sondland “a great American” to “not a man I know at all.” When asked about this ingratitude, Sondland said, “Easy come. Easy go.” It wasn’t clear whether this meant he understood Trump regarded other people as disposable or that he could live without the president’s regard, now that he was toxic. Clearly, they are a matched set.
The question now is whether the avalanche will continue. How many government professionals may be inspired to tell their own stories. Or will they be intimidated by the treatment of Jovanovic and the rest who have not just lost their jobs or had their professionalism impugned but have found themselves threatened by the Trump trolls that haunt the internet.
The Ukraine mess began wth a small attempt to smear a rival and distract attention from the elaborate Russian efforts to aid the Trump campaign in 2016 by blaming it on Ukraine. By putting a spotlight on it, however, Trump may have launched a boomerang. His quid pro quo arm-twisting and cover up adds to the pattern of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller report and may lead to one or more additional Articles of Impeachment.
We know Ukraine is far from a one-off. Throughout the far-flung departments of government there are surely more Trump minions like Sondland, Perry, Volker, Giuliani, Pompeo, and Mulvaney slavishly following questionable orders who may begin to have second thoughts and decide to save themselves if it isn’t too late. And what about all the non-partisan, government professionals like Vindman, Holmes, Kent, Taylor, Hill, and Yovanovitch, who the bent Trumpers must rely on to perform their dirty work or look the other way when it is in plain sight?
It is possible that since whistles have been blown and testimony offered without the sky falling, more witnesses to maladministration and criminality who have clammed up until now will begin to sing. But it is perhaps even more likely that evil will triumph over good. That seems to be the tenor of our times.
No Republicans seem likely to join in the vote to impeach in the House, and no Republican Senators are going to vote to remove Trump so long as his base remains in his thrall and impervious to facts. He might even win a second term if the Democrats don’t up their game. Unfortunately coal miner’s daughter Fiona Hill, a smarter, tougher customer than any of the Democratic candidate currently on display, is unable to run against him in 2020 since she is not a “natural-born”citizen of America. One more Constitutional Amendment waiting to be made.
Still, the fault is not in our civil servants or politicians, but in our electorate. Trump won 63 million votes. Hillary Clinton won 66 million. And seven million votes were squandered on third-party candidates. Even worse, 102 million eligible voters stayed home and sat on their hands. Will the events of the last three years change that equation? For the better or for the worse?
Color me pessimistic. Despite the avalanche, at the end of the film Buster Keaton walks away unharmed. If one clown can survive certain annihilation, why not another?