We shouldn’t be thinking of Trump’s campaign shenanigans with the Russians and his payoffs to silence former mistresses as normal, Watergate-style scandals. Either of these clumps of mini-scandals would be enough to bring a normal presidency crashing to the ground, but they are more likely to end up a footnote, remembered not for their intrinsic importance but as the threads investigators first pulled on that ultimately unraveled the Republican party and exposed the bizarre epochal political disaster that started America on an historic decline as a world power.
What’s going on is widely recognized as a scandal, but it’s not usually spoken of in such cataclysmic terms. Is this author overly excited or will we look back one day and feel that the mainstream press missed something obvious?
The media is struggling because what’s going is unprecedented. To be fair, everyone else is struggling too: law enforcement, our intelligence apparatus, the courts; even the KGB doesn’t know quite what to do. Trump’s Russia problem is morphing into that rarest political thing: something new under the sun.
More than ever before, our shared world is constructed of images. We talk a good game about facts but the connection between our collective memory and history as documented by journalists and historians is more tenuous than we ever imagine.
April 1975 when United States Navy sailors dumped helicopter after helicopter overboard to make room for the fleeing troops, and the embassy staff, protected by M16-wielding marines, evacuated the city as North Vietnamese Army (NVA) tanks rolled into town.
We’re only a little more than 1/3 of the way through the first term of the Trump presidency and it already bids fair to end the tenure of the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower.
The similarity goes far beyond their extremely distinctive hair. (Trump’s elaborate blond comb-over is easily matched by the Kaiser’s trademark handlebar mustache with tips that stood straight up an inch high on the ends.)