Democrats and the progressive movement need to figure out how to balance two very different but equally important imperatives: keeping the heat on Trump for all the egregious scandals of his presidency, and making sure voters and the media fully understand the consequences of the terrible policies being enacted while no one is paying attention because of the Trump distraction machine.
As one of the people who fought the last big impeachment fight and played a modest role in helping Wes Boyd and Joan Blades create the Moveon.org effort around that fight in 1998, I feel like we need an organization named “LetsNotMoveOn.org.” We can’t let Trump get away with shredding the Constitution and violating law after law, and ethical norm after ethical norm, that were put in place after Watergate to safeguard this country from corruption. Trump should not be allowed to obstruct justice and stop the legitimate and extremely important investigations into the attack on our electoral integrity by a foreign adversary.
On the other hand, we can’t be so obsessed by the Donny Show that we stop talking about the issues Democrats have always championed for working families. Trump’s budget is a nightmare for Medicaid, education, the environment, and pretty much every other good thing in the federal budget. His agency heads have a mandate to destroy their own departments with a deregulatory agenda that will make a few corporations far richer while screwing everyone else. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin defended Trump’s reversal on breaking up the Too-Big-To-Fail banks – and failed miserably under scrutiny from Elizabeth Warren.
We can do both. We have to do both, for the sake of our country and the values we care about as progressives and Americans.
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