Taking Trump-Skepticism Seriously

Leave Trump country, fly about 2,000 miles east to Washington, D.C., and you enter a different world. In Trump country 88 percent of Trump voters approve of the job he is doing as president according to a poll by the Democracy Fund.

For all voters than number is 37 percent.

Trump voters elected him to stick it to the Washington establishment and he is doing just that. They also elected him to warn the North Koreans not to tread on us. And to tell our European allies to honor their promises to fund NATO. And to renegotiate or kill the free trade deals that are costing them their jobs and devastating their communities. And to tell the Iranians that enough is enough, and that more sanctions are on the way. And to repeal and replace Obamacare, which he tried to do but was foiled, at least for now, by a Congress that has an approval rating of 16 percent, proving they were right to elect him to get up the nose of the politicians. Circle complete.

Land in Washington and you find a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering $10 million to anyone who can provide “information leading to the impeachment and removal from office of Donald J. Trump.” Never mind that the offer comes from pornographer Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. Serious people here in the capital of the free world are meeting to consider whether to rally support for impeachment, or trigger Article 25 of the Constitution. Which, broadly, provides that a majority of the cabinet can remove a president deemed unfit to carry out the duties of his office. Normally sensible friends here in Washington have become hysterics, convinced that unless the president is somehow removed from office, the nation, and perhaps the world, will not survive the next four years.

By-passing the irrationals, I met with several calmer folks to obtain this composite picture of their concerns: First on their list of immediate worries is Trump’s seeming desire for a shoot-out with North Korean president Kim Jung-un. The Establishment view is that Kim is rationally seeking a nuclear weapon to ensure that his regime does not go the way of the nuclear-free regimes of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (the latter having voluntarily surrendered his nukes). Trump, on the other hand, is irrational, refusing to accept the reality of a nuclearized North Korea, and to negotiate with Kim to contain the threat of nuclear war. One expert sees the chances of such a conflagration at 1-in-10, with millions dead on both sides of the line that divides North from South Korea. Another puts the odds at 1-in-3.