Trump's Troubling First Days

Now the new president has placed his spooky senior counselor Steve Bannon on the National Security Council. This is a man so far to the right he called William Buckley's National Review and William Kristol's The Weekly Standard "both left-wing magazines." During his reign as chief of Breitbart News, he tolerated racist and sexist attitudes, and announced to a real journalist, "I am a Leninist." He went on to explain: "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."

At least until the President gets fed up with the attention Bannon's receiving and fires him, the gruesome twosome appear to have settled on their mode of governance: Trump does the theatrics, Bannon does the policy. Bannon writes the executive orders, Trump signs them.

With all this instability, it's not surprising that not only progressives but also thoughtful conservatives already have had it with the President. Here's neo-con Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic: "Trump, in one spectacular week, has already shown himself one of the worst of our presidents, who has no regard for the truth (indeed a contempt for it), whose patriotism is a belligerent nationalism, whose prior public service lay in avoiding both the draft and taxes, who does not know the Constitution, does not read and therefore does not understand our history, and who, at his moment of greatest success, obsesses about approval ratings, how many people listened to him on the Mall and enemies. He will do much more damage before he departs the scene, to become a subject of horrified wonder in our grandchildren's history books."

At Washington Monthly, Martin Longman agreed. "Cohen and I couldn't be more different in our personal politics or our foreign policy priorities," he wrote, "and yet we're singing from the exact same hymnal on Trump. ... I honestly do not think this country can endure a four-year term of Trump as our president, and the prospects for worldwide calamity are so great that I can't avoid saying very radical sounding things about where we stand and what must be done."

Those "things" could be impeachment or implementing Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, the one that says that if it's determined that the President "is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President."

Ladies and gentlemen, we are already in the midst of a national emergency. The radical right -- both religious and political -- have been crusading for 40 years to take over the government and in Trump they have found their rabble-rouser and enabler. They intend to hallow the free market as infallible, outlaw abortion, Christianize public institutions by further leveling the "wall" between church and state, channel public funds to religious schools, build walls to keep out brown people and put "America first" on the road to what Trump's nominee to be Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has called "God's Kingdom."

You can see in the chaos a pattern: the political, religious and financial right collaborating to move America further from the norms of democracy with the triumph of one-party, one-man rule. There's never been anything like it in our history. But many in the media are catching on, which explains the strategy Trump and his pack have adopted to discredit journalists, as Bannon tried last week when he proclaimed that the media "should keep its mouth shut."

That's not going to happen. Nor does it look as if the hundreds of thousands of protesters who marched the day after the inauguration and this past weekend at the nation's airports to protest the refugee ban are about to stop either. A sturdy line of resistance is forming as the press, the people and patriotic lawyers join in fighting for our rights in the nation's courts of justice and in the court of public opinion. Perhaps some brave Republican legislators, uncharacteristically demonstrating a profile in courage, will take a stand, too, against the despotic urges now roiling the Republic.

*Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America, East, was the senior writer for Bill Moyers Journal.

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