Beginnings | Trump Week 1 | January 1-7 2017

This is the first installment in a series on the history of how the modern Republican Party devolved week-by-week into a fascist cult, and what the Democratic Party did, and didn’t do, about it. 

The intention with this series is to get deeper into what happened during the Trump era than the news media was able to at the time, and to do it before this time period gets far enough away that the real details are lost to everybody but professional historians.

We’ll start, in this first installment, with the first week of January 2017. To set the stage, Donald Trump had been elected President almost two months earlier, and it would be another 20 days before he will be sworn in as President.

In Congress

The 115th Congress of the United States, which will govern for the next two years, is sworn in. Republicans control the Senate, 52-48, and in the House of Representatives, Republicans have more than 240 seats while Democrats have less than 195.

The Republican majority immediately began working on one of their top priorities for the first year of the Trump era: Repealing Obamacare.

Because Democratic Senators would obviously filibuster any attempt to pass a repeal of Obamacare through the Senate, repeal could only be done through a process called budget reconciliation, in which the Senate can pass a bill that is not subject to being filibustered. But that process comes with other limitations, one of which is that the whole process takes months, and requires many votes by both the House and the Senate, and by several committees in both chambers. And before those votes can occur, many hours of argument and debate are required.

The Republican-controlled Senate began that process this week, initiating days of debate before the first vote, which is on the question of whether the Senate will officially order the various Senate committees to draft an Obamacare repeal bill.

Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Chris Murphy of Connecticut try to draw public attention to the amount of damage this will do the lives of millions of Americans:

Meanwhile, the Republican majority in the House began their more-or-less constant attempts at deregulation this week.

They passed two bills on party line votes, both of which would have significantly changed the legislative process regarding how Congress deals with federal regulations. The first bill would have made it significantly easier for Republicans in Congress to undo federal regulations enacted under Democratic Presidents. The second bill would have made it significantly more difficult for federal agencies to enact regulations in the first place.

Neither bill ever became law, because Democratic Senators would have filibustered them both if the Republican Senate tried to pass them. Obviously the Republicans in the House knew that. So, you might ask, why did they pass them? We’re going to see an enormous number of bills like this. When Republicans control the House, they more-or-less constantly pass bills that never get a vote in the Senate, and most of them are bills that almost nobody in the public ever hears about. Political journalists also know these bills will never even get a vote in the Senate, so they barely bother to report on them, if they bother to report on them at all.

But you know who does know about these bills? Who is watching? The oligarchs that fund the Republican Party. They want these bills to become law. Corporate deregulation is almost as important to them as tax cuts for billionaires, and this is how Republican politicians continually demonstrate to those oligarchs that if they keep paying for GOP political campaigns, if they can just get a couple more seats in the Senate, these bills will become the law.

In the Executive

Outside of Congress, in the Executive branch this week, the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified, public report, in which the US Intelligence Community concluded with high confidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to help Trump win.

To quote from the conclusion of the report, “We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. ...Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances”

Before this unclassified version is released to the public, President-elect Trump is personally briefed on the classified version of the report by the Director of the CIA, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of the NSA. He’s shown the intelligence behind their assessment, including human sources confirming Putin's role, and American, British, and Dutch intelligence services seeing stolen Democratic National Committee documents inside Russian military networks.

I mention that because Trump, and the entire Republican Party, will spend the next several years pretending that this is an absurd lie invented from nothing by Democratic political operatives within the US national security infrastructure, and so it’s worth remembering that Trump was shown, from the very beginning, exactly which facts the conclusion was based on.

I know that a lot of people on the left have a real issue with anyone taking this whole topic seriously. Some people think that talking about the Russian military intelligence attack on the 2016 US election distracts from the fact that Hillary Clinton lost that election in significant part because she ignored and largely ran against the policy agenda put forward by Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Presidential primary.

I think that probably is a major reason why she lost, but I can think that and also think it is bad if a hostile government is deliberately attempting to drive large numbers of Americans insane in order to try to get them to elect a demented white supremacist as President of the United States.