Blind Spot

In their responses to Saturday's attempted assassination of Trump, Matt Taibbi and David Frum fail to identify America's constitutional crisis. By Daniel Lazare

At first glance, Mike Taibbi and David Frum seem to have nothing in common.  One is a Bernie Bro famous for his raucous sense of humor who has gone mildly right after coming out as a Covid skeptic.  The other is a Republican speechwriter famous for coining the Dubya war cry, “Axis of Evil,” who has gone mildly liberal.

But both share a blind spot.  It’s an inability to see the forest for the trees or, in this case, to distinguish a partisan battle from the looming constitutional crisis behind it.  In the wake of the Trump shooting, this leads them to say things that sound different but are really the same.  

Take Taibbi.  Within 24 hours of the Pennsylvania shooting, he published a 1,300-word piece on Substack blaming Democrats for the hit.  Entitled “The Slow-Motion Assassination,” it accused a pro-Democratic press of “more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.”  Beginning with Robert S. Mueller and the Russian interference probe, Taibbi went on, “every cell of Trump’s person was systematically attacked, sometimes for show, sometimes for real political effect.”  Political enemies “first wanted him out of office, then out of sight, then deprived of counsel, barred from the ballot, bankrupted, and finally jailed (on the grounds of being a ‘triple national security threat’). Panic set in when that all failed.” Saturday’s assassination attempt is the upshot. This echoes what Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita said a few hours after the shooting, which is that Democrats “tried to keep him off the ballot, they tried to put him in jail and now you see this.…”  The bottom line is that while Dems may not have ordered the crime, they unquestionably set the scene.

Or so Taibbi and his rightwing co-thinkers say.  But now take Frum.  In an article posted on the Atlantic magazine website, one that apparently spurred Taibbi to write his own hit piece, he declared that “the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well.”

“We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life,” Frum wrote.  “...Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable – and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.”

So the guilty party is the GOP.  After pushing politics to the breaking point, Trump is now reaping the rewards — or so Frum maintains.

Two writers, two articles, two opposing points of view.  But what unites them is an inability to distinguish between cause and effect.  Both are so caught up in the moment that they are oblivious to what’s really important, which is a constitutional structure that is hopelessly antiquated, increasingly undemocratic, and yet impossible to fix due to its own inherent structural flaws.  The constitutional breakdown is leading to national breakdown as the country dissolves into civil war.  “Repocrats” are not only two scorpions in a bottle, but two scorpions in a bottle that is shrinking due to the growing crisis.

Both writers are, therefore, equally right and equally wrong.  Taibbi is entirely justified in accusing Democrats of mounting a no-holds-barred campaign aimed at driving out Trump before he even took office.  “The campaign to impeach Trump has begun,” a Washington Post headline announced at literally the same moment in January 2017 that he was raising his right hand to take the oath of office.  As Taibbi notes with regard to the sensational, yet utterly phony Steele dossier:

“Californian Adam Schiff, held hearings on the Steele accusations without even attempting to verify them.  There were widespread hysterical accusations of a capital crime – TREASON – after an anodyne meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. ...  [N]ews that the FBI deployed informants in Trump’s 2016 campaign drew yawns, and no one fretted over lunatic character attacks on former Trump aide Carter Page, or the jailing of figures like George Papadopoulos who committed no real crime.”

Quite correct.  The Democratic character assassination of the otherwise innocent Papadopoulos and Page couldn’t have been more dangerous, while the Democrat-funded Steele dossier was simply the greatest political fraud since the Zinoviev letter, a forgery that Tories used to bring down Britain’s first Labor government in 1924.  (Those wishing to know more about the phony Steele dossier might check out what I wrote at the time here, here, and here.) 

But the same goes for Frum — he’s right in his own way too.  “When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked,” he writes.  With regard to January 6, he says, “Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages,” which is correct as well.  Indeed, if Trump goes ahead and pardons hundreds of J6’ers now behind bars, it will mean, in effect, that they were right to go rampaging through the halls of Congress and that the people who tried to stop them were wrong.  

This is fatal for any country with the slightest democratic pretensions.  Yet none of it is taking place in a vacuum.  On the contrary, anger is exploding because the political machinery has been frozen for a generation.  The more the two parties go at one another hammer-and-tong, the more they engage in a joint cover-up with regard to the underlying cause.  If the Supreme Court is on a rampage, if Congress is at a standstill, if individual senators ruthlessly veto government actions without regard to the larger consequences — Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville used his position to hold up military promotions for months because he didn’t like Pentagon abortion policies — then both sides come up with the same answer: it’s the other party’s fault.  They’re gumming up the works, they’re taking unfair advantage, they’re ruthless and corrupt, they’re unwilling to let go.  

Most of all, the other side is at fault because it fails to uphold “the beautiful, exquisite, brilliant genius of the Constitution,” to quote Pelosi.  This is the idea that the document is always right, always perfect, and that we should slavishly follow whatever it says.  The possibility that an unchangeable document dating from the age of slavery might be at all problematic is beyond their ken.  The idea never enters their gloriously empty heads.

It never enters the gloriously empty heads of the lapdog press either, a category that includes Taibbi, for all his trademark irreverence, as much as it does Frum.  Both are happy warriors throwing themselves into the partisan battle without a thought to the larger picture.  Instead of questioning the constitutional consensus, they wind up reinforcing it.  That’s what the constitutional structure asks of them, and it’s something they’re all too willing to oblige.

Not that we should be monocausal about any of this.  Other societies are also breaking down as the environment decays, migrants flee a growing Third World debt crisis, inflation rises, and economic growth sags.  But the breakdown in political mechanics in this country is unique.  In no other advanced nation are entire branches of government grinding to a halt as key political institutions cease to function.  In no other industrialized society is minority rule allowed to trump democracy so regularly and so often.  In no other comparable nation is structural reform so difficult that people have lost sight of what the term even means.  Constitutional deadlock has already led to one civil war, i.e. in 1861-65, and now it’s leading to another.   No other advanced nation finds itself in a similar plight.

The Republicans and Democrats are epiphenomena.  The constitutional breakdown is what counts.  People like Taibbi and Frum are fiddling while Rome burns.