Chuck Hardwick, lifelong Republican, former Pfizer executive, now retired in Florida, voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but not without misgivings. He’d met him in the 1980s and noted a “consuming ego.” Still, elections are about choices, and he disliked the “scheming” Clintons. He was mad at the media for first mocking Trump during the primaries and then turning on him as nominee.
Three years later, Hardwick, 78, whose political career included a stint as speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, is unsure how he will vote in November 2020. Trump confounds him. He admires the president’s energy, his courage in taking on difficult issues like China “stealing its way to prosperity,” his corporate tax cuts, and what he sees as a revitalizing impact on American ambition.
“But if I was on a board that had hired Trump as C.E.O.,” Hardwick tells me, “I’d have to say to him: ‘You’ve got good traits but you can’t manage people. You’re fired.’”
Getting fired by the American people in 2020 is something the Trump ego will not abide. Defeat would shred his I-can-get-away-with-anything operating manual. If there aren’t serious attorneys already looking at how to respond to the shenanigans Trump will deploy in the event of a narrow defeat next year, it’s time they get started.
Getting Trump out the White House is more analogous to removing a leader like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan from office than, say, a Dutch prime minister. Like Erdogan, in power for 16 years, (“I’m a big fan,” said Trump at a joint White House news conference this week), the president will stop at nothing. Trump could describe losing as a “coup” against him, for example.
The president uses words not for their literal meaning but for their disorienting emotional impact. He batters Americans’ hold on reality until they yield their moorings. He does things of breathtaking malice, especially to women, like his defenestration of the honorable former United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was left “devastated” and feeling “threatened,” as she put it at impeachment hearings this week. Then he denigrates her on Twitter as she testifies, his trademark intimidation. Trump no more understands the concept of public service than he knows where Ukraine is. He is a brute.
That’s why I’m interested in people like Hardwick. Democrats have to shift sane, moderate Republicans like him their way to get over the line next November. Recent election results in Kentucky and Virginia suggest they can. Trump’s lies and tumult eat at the fabric of society. It’s not been lost on plenty of people that he legislates for the rich, jabbers for the mob, and gives scarcely a hoot for those in between.
Yet the president’s hand is strong. Trump has an unshakable base of perhaps 35 percent of the country. Pro-guns, anti-abortion voters won’t budge. Trump approval hovers around 40 percent. Then there are all the voters who will look at their 401(k)’s and decide they could use more of this. As impeachment proceedings unfurled, the market soared. The message: Who cares? That gets Trump within range of the 46.09 percent of the vote that was enough in 2016. If a voter like Hardwick won’t reconsider, a second Trump term grows likely.
Hardwick views the impeachment inquiry as a “damaging distraction.” Trump’s reduction of a large European state, Ukraine, to a potential source of dirt on leading Democratic candidate, Vice President Joe Biden, was “not good but not worthy of impeachment.” The broader issues, for him, are Trump’s “inept, clumsy and provocative” style on issues like immigration (even if he is right to take it on); his utter fiscal irresponsibility; and a sense that a second term of Trump tantrums “would do great damage to the Republic.”
“It’s really up to the Democrats for me,” Hardwick says. Echoing in his head are Trump’s words in New Hampshire three months ago: “You have no choice but to vote for me” because otherwise everything, including those 401(k)s, is going to be “down the tubes.”
For Hardwick, Elizabeth Warren is not a choice. He likes her American story, her humble beginnings, her quick mind, but thinks she’s too far left on economic policy for the country to accept.
That’s probably right. When you want to make the United States more like Europe, you always run the risk of destroying what makes America unique: its hustle and unrelenting creative churn. America was born in contradistinction to Europe not as an extension of it. That identity is nonnegotiable.
Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor who has made active preparations to enter the Democratic primary, gives Hardwick a serious option to reject Trump. “I like him — no-nonsense, stable, clear-thinking, data-driven, he would do a good job and keep the economy moving. He looks better to me every day.” Anyone else? “I would not rule out voting for Biden.”
The most devastating thing about the impeachment proceedings this week has been the knowledge that this is not just how Trump treats Ukraine but how he operates in every area of government: wheeling and dealing, threatening, malicious, disregarding the law, dismissive of the national interest, trampling on professionalism and integrity, small-minded, misogynistic, Russia-besotted, valueless, manipulative, untruthful, gross and contemptuous of his oath of office.
I think the Senate has grounds to convict the president. It won’t. Trump will have to be dislodged the conventional way. Think Hardwick.
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How to Dislodge the Brute in the White House - The New York Times
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