Tant: Up to progressive voters to cancel the sordid White House soap opera - Online Athens

By Ed Tant

"Donald Trump takes his oath to protect and defend the Constitution about as seriously as he takes his marriage vows," said Richard Painter, the former White House ethics attorney under George W. Bush, earlier this month.

The Trump White House is day by day becoming more and more like some tawdry soap opera and the president who bellowed "You're fired" when he was a reality TV pitchman could face firing himself if federal prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's trumpery bears fruit and if Democrats manage to take back one or both houses of Congress in the national round of midterm elections this fall.

On Tuesday, Democrat Conor Lamb eked out an apparent razor-thin win in a Pennsylvania congressional district that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the 2016 general election. Democrats have won most of the special elections around the country in recent weeks and months, and the party hopes that such early victories are harbingers of a "blue wave" of electoral wins this year and in the 2020 presidential election.

"Breaking News" bulletins come thick and fast with Donald J. Trump in charge. Trump often seems angry and unhinged, as do so many of his Oval Office cronies and so much of his base of voters. Scandals and skulduggery abound in Trump's administration, but still his benighted base of voters would vote for Trump even if, as he so famously said, he shot a person on Fifth Avenue in New York.

From porn star pay-offs to playing pal with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to packing his administration with plutocrats and plunderers, Donald J. Trump has set new records for corruption and ineptitude during his first year in office. If Barack Obama had done one-tenth of the shenanigans in his eight years in office that Donald Trump has done in just 14 months as president, Republican politicians and voters would have howled. Now GOP boosters show mere profiles in cowardice as they embrace a president who embarrasses America at home and around the world.

Still, if Trump can survive the scandals and investigations that dog his presidency, he may very well win a second term in 2020 because his persona of surly anger and aggressive anti-intellectualism matches well with the mood of much of this country.

When President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday, media organizations were all a'dither over the news of the latest departure from the administration. When Tillerson learned of his ouster via a presidential Twitter post, it had to be the most insensitive severance notice since the infamous Post-It Note break-up message on "Sex and the City." Tillerson was a top oil company executive and a wealthy corporate type like Trump, but there had always been friction in their relationship, no doubt exacerbated by the secretary of state's reported remark that the president is a "moron."

Now Trump is just weeks away from talks with North Korea while the State Department is understaffed and the administration is lacking in leadership and expertise. What could go wrong?

President Trump seems to have admiration for autocrats like those who rule North Korea, Russia, Turkey and the Philippines. Just recently at a GOP fundraiser, the president joked about China's leader, Xi Jinping, who pushed new rules that would make him "president for life" of the world's most populous nation. "I think it's great," laughed Trump. "Maybe we'll have to give that a shot some day."

Though Trump supposedly spoke in jest, his words and actions as president are no laughing matter. When he throws such political red meat to his supporters, Trump is reminiscent of Buzz Windrip, the fictional American dictator in writer Sinclair Lewis's novel about a homegrown Hitler in the United States: "It Can't Happen Here."

Though he is a trash-talking philanderer whose real religion seems to be not God but mammon, Trump is admired by many conservatives who call themselves Christians. Evangelicals like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. have fawned over Trump and rank-and-file evangelicals voted for Trump in numbers even higher than the millions of votes that they cast for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

In the current issue of "The Atlantic," writer Michael Gerson ponders "How Evangelicals Lost Their Way." Speaking about his article in a March 12 TV interview, Gerson explained the conservative white Christians' fealty toward Trump as proof that evangelicals "have come to view themselves as a persecuted minority needing the protection of a strong man."

Though right-wing evangelicals masquerade as a religious movement, their loyalty to Trump shows that they are just another political lobbying group that has forgotten the Biblical warning against gaining the world and losing their souls. Writer Gerson says Trump's Bible-brandishing base of religious reactionaries is now just "one interest group among many."

Trump is gearing up already to try for re-election in 2020. The voters have a chance to disappoint him then and in this year's midterm elections. Young people like those who will march in Washington next weekend to demand gun law reform could be a rising tide against Trump's trumpery if they will flock to the voting booths around this nation. Trump's base of voters will vote for him again if they get a chance.

Political progressives must head to the polls in the spirit of beloved American author and activist Mark Twain, who said, "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it."

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