Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism. He is a regular columnist for The Village Voice, New York's storied alternative news weekly. He is also a regular contributor to Rolling Stone.
The following re-blog is from the popular "Ask Greil Marcus" feature of his website.
I’d rather see him out of office as soon as possible by any means at all. He is doing enormous and possibly permanent damage to our Constitution, our idea of government, to all the underpinnings of democratic society, in his serious quest to replace public government with private government, the rule of companies and corporations over every aspect of public and private life.
People who say, like Paul Krugman today, that Trump has no “agenda,” that he only cares about “winning” so he can feel powerful, are fooling themselves.
Trumpism is a serious project. The ultimate burdensome regulation that stifles his attempt to remake the country is the Constitution itself, its limits on executive power by means of checks and balances between three (in practical, historical reality) unequal branches of government.
Mike Pence understands this and does not take the very fact of our government, our public life, as a personal affront. Despite his own right-wing politics he would be an infinitely better person to have as president, even if he would be a formidable and likely winning candidate in 2020.
But don’t kid yourself that Trump will be “crushed” in 2020. As of today, against any of the people mentioned as Democratic candidates, he would be the favorite. He is already campaigning, raising huge amounts of money, consolidating the real Republican party, which consists of the Koch network and the Mercers.
Most of the people who voted for him will not only vote for him again, but do so with desperate, enormous, complete enthusiasm, and the very force of their belief will make it hard for actual arguments about actual things to sound real.
Voter suppression will be advanced and substantial, and it will make a difference in states that might otherwise be up for grabs.
You have to realize that everything that looks bad, horrible, unthinkable to MSNBC, the New York Times, maybe you, certainly me, looks absolutely great to a very large and vital part of the country and the electorate. His people will vote to the last man and woman in the 2018 [midterm] elections, and the people who voted for Hillary will not.
Trump will not be impeached, because impeachment is not a self-starting machine, it has to be done by actual people, and Republicans will not impeach him, both because he is, in the main, doing exactly what Republicans want—in all of the departments of government and in the courts—and because he would have them defeated in primaries and replaced by his people if they tried.
He will not be indicted, because Mueller can’t indict anyone and the Justice Department [headed by Jeff Sessions] will not.Trump is not, as some people fantasize, “tired of the job,” not someone to, in even more demented fantasies, “declare victory and leave.”
It is conceivable, though I don’t see the path, that his family and his business facing legal jeopardy could cause him to cut a deal and leave—nothing is more important to Trump than what he calls his company—but someone else would have to explain how real jeopardy could attach itself to Kushner, Ivanka, his sons, etc. without the Justice Department making it happen.
Calhoun Georgia 09/03/17
