14 The New York Review
another regime-afflicted society in
which the truth loses out. That election
was a case of most white men and white
women voting for the guy they thought
would make a few of them even richer,
and a reaction to a black guy having
been in charge of the money for eight
years—motives that come from the
same storage place for poisonous fumes
in the head.
The hijacking of the Republican
Party by the Tea Party may still prove
the last stand of white supremacy: such
white people no longer represent the
majority of white people as the nation
and the world around them become
ever more nonwhite. But who needs the
Federalist Society, strict constitutional
constructionists, libertarian contrari-
ans, troops of the duped, or limits on
Washington’s ability to support social
engineering? To have no agenda is bet-
ter than any expert’s advice. The only
guideline is to undo whatever the previ-
ous and uppity White House occupant
managed to change.
The Republican administration de-
scended on the federal government,
perverted the remit of federal agencies,
and eviscerated federal departments
in a fury of looting the national assets.
They hadn’t been convinced in 2016
they’d get in. Opportunists have been
running amok ever since. No restraint
at the top means the shit everywhere is
so out in the open and undisguised that
everything feels unprecedented. Too
many white people would rather let
bullies wreck the Republic than have
democracy work if that would mean
the system also working for people they
prefer not thinking about. Plenty of
nonwhites want to be white. Nonvoters
and voters who didn’t care took it for
granted that they’d be fine or just as bad
off no matter who won. These bloody
days have eliminated that category.
The failed Proud Boys rally in Port-
land on September 26 says the numbers
on the militarized right are exagger-
ated, yet insecurity and uncertainty
put us to bed and wake us. Wearing
masks and getting temperatures taken
at entrances are not the new normal.
Nothing is normal in having to reopen
an economy for a population undergo-
ing trauma. A muzzled CDC, an inade-
quate health care system, no renewed
stimulus aid, no cessation of police
violence, no respect for the enormity
of climate disaster—the problem isn’t
that there have been demonstrations
that got out of hand, but that there has
not been more unrest. Passive, safe, if
we are, adjusting to the Zoom way of
business and education, happy in social
distance reunions until a vaccine res-
cues whoever can get it.
I am of the cold war generation that
was given air raid drills in response
to the Soviet threat. That a right-wing
party traditionally captious about
American patriotism did not react
heatedly to evidence of Russian inter-
ference in US elections is bizarre. A
US president taunts the citizenry,
threatens blackmail, will or will not
accept election results, and no one of
that president’s party in Congress has
said publicly that decisions about elec-
tions belong to the Constitution, the
courts—Lord—not to the president.
The survival of the Republican Party
depends on a campaign of incoherence,
chaos, endless reset. It now relates to
its leader as to a dictator. If a dictator
falls, party members fall with him, and
the only way not to be killed or to face
retribution for actions when in power is
never to lose that power.
Every presidential election is critical
to the country’s future, and this election
is to save an autonomous American
state, to redefine the primary facilita-
tor of corporate wheeze and purveyor
of repressive social control. But the
demonization of liberalism throughout
the West over many years from several
sides has created a political black hole
that sucks sanity into it. Liberal institu-
tions are particularly vulnerable to the
wages of guilt. But the spinelessness
of museum directors and the terror of
boards of trustees say that a culture of
philistine denunciation does the work
of the right wing, undermining liberal
values, wasting chances, wasting rage,
missing the point about fascism, or per-haps internalizing it, unconsciously ac-
cepting it.
People are desperate to act, even
destructively. We are a society on the
verge of a nervous breakdown, not civil
war. We are only at the beginning of
a Great Emergency. Something sui-
cidal and reckless is out there. Every-
one gives a shove to a tumbling wall,
the Chinese proverb has it. I live with
a beautiful optimist, someone who has
known war zones, revolution. Do not
go to sleep angry; do not wake in the
middle of the night suffocating from
existential dread. Get up with hope.
Let everyone be a risen sun, starting
with yourself. QThomas Powers
The security clearance for Donald
Trump may soon be up for review. The
one he has came with the job and re-
quired no independent investigation of
his character, judgment, personal con-
duct, financial history, abuse of drugs,
respect for the law, allegiance to the
Constitution, freedom from foreign
influence, or mental and emotional
health. It has been the government’s
general practice to assume that pres-
idents and other high-level officials
continue to enjoy the nation’s trust on
leaving office, but their access to clas-
sified information is a matter of cus-
tom, not of any right established in law.
If he is out of office next January 20,
Trump’s access to secrets would be a
matter for the next president to approve
or deny or ask someone else to weigh
and consider, quietly in committee, or,
perhaps, with a broader end in view, on
the grand scale by a commission.Trump himself has sometimes
wielded a president’s control over se-
crets like a blunt instrument. Two years
ago, angered by criticism, he noisily
revoked the clearance of former CIA
director John Brennan, denouncing
him as “a loudmouth, partisan, polit-
ical hack who cannot be trusted with
the secrets to our country!” Trump
added that he was “evaluating” nine
other government officials for similar
treatment but then let it drop. Even
in Brennan’s case, as so often with
Trump’s promises and threats, there
was no follow-through, and it appears
that Brennan’s access to secret matters
remains intact.
With Brennan, Trump was acting
vindictively. With Trump, a future
president should act soberly and de-liberately to resolve open questions
that go to the heart of the ability of the
United States to govern and protect it-
self—most importantly, to determine
the true nature of Trump’s relation-
ship with Russian oligarchs, Russian
banks, Russian president Vladimir
Putin, and the Russian intelligence ser-
vice. Trump’s path is littered with large
clues, among them his flattery of Putin,
his refusal to credit intelligence find-
ings about Russian interference in the
election of 2016, his casual tolerance of
the Russian seizure of Crimea and its
covert war with Ukraine, and his many
dismissive remarks about the NATO
military alliance on which the security
of most of Europe depends.
About Russia we confront questions
that should not be allowed to go un-
answered. Why do the Russians favor
Trump? Why does Trump let them?
Has he blocked American intelligence
organizations from collecting informa-
tion on these matters or sharing it with
allies? Has he gone beyond the control
of secrets to the purging of intelligence
files? Which officers of the government
have enabled him to establish, main-
tain, and extend his control over what
we know? Trump’s true relationship
to Russia is far from the only question
about his tenure in the White House
needing investigation, but it is proba-
bly the biggest one—unless his efforts
to engineer his reelection are a bigger,
darker, more troubling thing even than
Russia.
Republicans have been afraid of
looking into these matters, but they are
not alone. Democrats are also fearful
of what they might find, and there is a
backdoor at hand. It would be a simple
matter for the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (ODNI) to side-step the question of whether Trump
can be trusted. Trump can ask, but the
ODNI determines what he shall receive.
Former presidents wanting information
these days are routinely given an iPad
with text and graphics that may include
intelligence at all four levels of classi-
fication, from Confidential to Sensitive
Compartmented Information. Or they
may get harmless gossip about foreign
leaders mixed with analytical blather.
ODNI decides.
It has been the custom of presidents
to wipe the slate clean between admin-
istrations, leave troublesome questions
to historians, and pick no big fights
that would invite retaliation after the
next change of administration. When
Barack Obama took office in 2009 he
called for no aggressive investigation
into matters crying for explanation,
like Vice President Cheney’s secret
conversations with big oil companies
while setting energy policy or the de-
cision to invade Iraq. The biggest open
question allowed to die was why the
Bush administration ignored the many
warnings it received of the terrorist at-
tacks that killed thousands of Ameri-
cans on September 11. Obama chose to
leave these questions to the historians.
But Trump falls into a different cat-
egory. Sixteen months ago the ABC
News anchor George Stephanopoulos
asked Trump if his campaign would
accept information from a foreign gov-
ernment or turn it over to the FBI. “I
think maybe you do both,” Trump said.I think you might want to listen,
there isn’t anything wrong with
listening. If somebody called from
a country, Norway, [for example,
and said] “we have information on
your opponent”—oh, I think I’d
want to hear it.Hear what? Obtained how? Promised
when? For what reward?
To ignore these open questions about
the Trump campaign in 2016 is to invite
future candidates, in touch with other
intelligence services, to do the same.
Telling him he cannot be trusted, and
explaining why to the world, will go be-
yond messy. But nobody has ever called
Trump to account, and it is time. QJacqueline Rose
In the run- up to this election and from
this side of the pond, the “special rela-
tionship” between the US and the UK
has never looked so threatening and
bizarre, at least not since the love- in
between Reagan and Thatcher. First
the fact that we are faced with the dire
prospect of having to go on watching
the mutual fascination of two narcis-
sistic male egos in power, with their
shared commitment to bending the law,
national and international, to their own
purposes: Trump’s acceptance of the
Republican Party nomination on the
White House lawn, his refusal to state
that he will abide by the result if he
loses, systematic voter suppression, one
fifth of the federal appeals court bench
now having been appointed by Trump;
Johnson proroguing Parliament to
force through his Brexit deal in 2019, a
move ruled illegal by the UK Supreme
Court, and the recently announced
Brexit “Internal Market Bill,” which,
in addition to placing at risk the Good
Friday accord in Northern Ireland,