Special
counsel Robert Mueller’s soon-to-be-delivered report will trigger months of
congressional investigations, subpoenas, court challenges, partisan slugfests,
media revelations and more desperate conspiracy claims by Donald Trump, all
against the backdrop of the burning questions: Will he be impeached by the
House? Will he be convicted by the Senate? Will he pull a Richard Nixon and resign?
In
other words, will America fire Trump?
I
have news for you. America has already fired him.
When
the public fires a president before election day – as it did with Jimmy Carter,
Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover – they don’t send him a letter telling him
he’s fired. They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite
him. He’s not literally gone, but he might as well be.
It’s
happened to Trump. The courts and House Democrats are moving against him.
Senate Republicans are quietly subverting him. Even Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell told him to end the shutdown.
The
Fed is running economic policy. Top-level civil servants are managing the
day-to-day work of the agencies. States are taking up the slack: California,
for example, is now running environmental policy.
Isolated
in the White House, distrustful of aides, at odds with intelligence agencies,
distant from his Cabinet heads, Trump has no system to make or implement decisions.
Action
and excitement have shifted elsewhere, to Democratic challengers, even to a
29-year-old freshman congresswoman too young to run for president.
Don’t
get me wrong. He’s still dangerous, like an old land mine buried in the mud. He
could start a nuclear war.
Yet
even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping give him
tidbits to share with the American public, then do whatever they want.
Why
did America fire Trump? If the nation were to write him a letter informing him
he’s no longer president, then it would go like this:
Dear
Mr. President,
While
many of us disagree on ideology and values, we agree on practical things like
obeying the Constitution and not letting big corporations and the wealthy run
everything.
Your
35-day government shutdown was a senseless abuse of power. So too your
“national emergency” to build your wall with money Congress refused to
appropriate.
When
you passed your tax bill, you promised our paychecks would increase by an
average of $4,000, but we never got the raise. Our employers used the tax
savings to buy back their shares of stock and give themselves raises instead.
Then
you fooled us into thinking we were getting a tax cut by lowering the amounts
withheld from our 2018 paychecks. We know that now because we’re getting
smaller tax refunds.
At
the same time, many big corporations aren’t paying a dime in taxes. Worse yet,
they’re getting refunds.
For
example, GM is paying zilch and claiming a $104 million refund on $11.8 billion
of profits. Amazon is paying no taxes and claiming a $129 million refund on
profits of $11.2 billion. (This is after New York offered it $3 billion to put
its second headquarters there.)
They
aren’t breaking any tax laws or regulations. That’s because they made the tax
laws and regulations. You gave them a free hand.
You’re
supposed to be working for us, not for giant corporations. But they’re doing
better than ever, as are their top executives and biggest investors. Yet
nothing has trickled down. We’re getting shafted.
Which
is why more than half of us support Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent tax on dollars earned in excess of $10
million a year, and more than 60 percent of us support
Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 2 percent tax on households with a net worth of $50
million or more.
You’ve
also shown you don’t have a clue about health care. You promised us something
better than the Affordable Care Act, but all you’ve done is whittle it back.
A
big reason we gave Democrats control of the House last November was your threat
to eliminate protection for people with pre-existing conditions. Are you even
aware that 70 percent of us now favor Medicare for All?
Most
of us don’t pay much attention to national policy, but we pay a lot of
attention to home economics. You’ve made our own home economics worse.
We’ll
give you official notice you’re fired on Nov. 3, 2020, if not before. Until
then, you can keep the house and perks, but you’re toast.
Respectfully,
America
Robert
B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond
Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is
available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
"Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original
documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.