When a politician weakens the dollar and strengthens the price of gold, when his policies undercut the American farmer and enrich America’s strongest foe, when he goes against the grain in so many ways, angering the friends of liberty while befriending the enemies of freedom, critics call him a genius.
When another politician leaves his farmhouse for the White House, when this Sunday school teacher delivers his least Christian sermon on the first Friday in January, when he embargoes the sale of loaves and fishes, when he closes a market to America’s farmers, pushing family farms into foreclosure, he cites the support of Congress and the interests of world peace.
Politicizing wheat for SALT is not an impeachable offense, apparently, but making a phone call is.
When the politician in question is Donald Trump, he is either the most criminal president since Richard Nixon or the one president Jimmy Carter believes is illegitimate.
If President Trump is guilty of the crime of politics, if his conduct of foreign policy is so foreign as to be criminal, if his crime is one of words rather than deeds, then all future presidents should forgo the telephone for written notes and in-person meetings.
If his deeds are also criminal, then diplomacy itself is wrong, because statecraft is more about what the record hides than reveals.
To see everything requires a constant state of surveillance, so nothing—not even movement itself—can elude detection or escape interpretation.
Either we turn our screens into one vast telescreen in which the reality we see is the role Congress mandates the president play, or we have the president play to the screen by ignoring the audience. Either scenario is dreadful, but one is particularly awful.
The man who thinks he is a leader because he looks like one, a man like Mitt Romney as president—this is the man we should fear.
That man, whether he is a product of Harvard and a resident of Park City, Utah, whether he is a Republican born in Michigan and raised to govern (for one term) a majority of Democrats in Massachusetts; whether he is a blue mayor from a red state, whether he is Pete Buttigieg in name or Romney down the line, that man should not be president.
That man is of a type.
Typical in his politics, he seeks to impeach and remove the most atypical man in politics.