Bones in Our Throats

Trump, Putin and Boris Johnson

Rishi Sunak, very wealthy, Oxford educated, and Hindu, is now prime minister of Great Britain, the United Kingdom – a nation in some peril of being neither great nor united. What would his predecessor Harold Macmillan,1st Earl of Stockton, say about this fellow Oxford alum bowing to Cambridge graduate King Charles III?

The debacle of British politics this year did accomplish one thing, for the moment. It dealt with the Boris Johnson problem.

Johnson has dominated attention in the realm one way or another for a very long time – as a pundit (never really a journalist), mayor of London, Brexiteer, father of many children in and out of marriage, and all-around media mainstay who came to reckoning between the humiliation of two women prime ministers, Theresa May and Liz Truss, both Tories.

He is out and will doubtless be busy making money from his memoirs and clever public appearances.

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What now for Donald J. Trump and Vladimir Putin?

Watching the unfolding sagas this fall, we are choking on the bones these two men represent. American politics has been in the thrall of Trump since 2015 and no matter the outcome of the midterms November 8, we will still be. There is no need to recap all that has befallen us in this era in which anger and grievance have become the lingua franca of American life.

Vladimir Putin has restored dictatorship in Russia in a way not possible since Stalin. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin were all pushovers by comparison.

The invasion of Ukraine, accompanied by nuclear rhetoric on a scale comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, is Putin’s war. There are no politics of any real consequence in Russia. Even his rumored goddaughter, the Russian television anchor Ksenia Sobchak, has fled abroad using her Israeli passport. “Vovka,” as his school friends called him, rides astride his country, as he prefers, bare chest pumped.

Until the world finally, definitively, gets rid of Trump and Putin, I don’t think the overwhelming sense of dread and danger so widely felt here, there, and elsewhere will dissipate.

With Trump, everything that has been tried did not make much difference -- Mueller, impeachment, a documented record of his completely bizarre persona in our highest office. Nothing, to pursue the bone metaphor, seems to dislodge him.

The only precedent in memory is Richard Nixon, whose presidency was especially mesmerizing once Watergate took hold. And then Gerald Ford, the accidental president, pardoned Nixon, who retreated to San Clemente, while his henchmen -- John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Jeb Magruder, et al. -- went to prison.

For Americans, he was over. And in two years or so, Jimmy Carter, by any measure a good man, was inaugurated as president, presiding with relative calm and unacknowledged success over our democracy. He is now ninety-eight and still married to his one and only wife, Rosalynn.

So, what can we do to get past Trump and all the related threats to our cherished values? In 2026, the nation celebrates its semiquincentennial.

That is where the future defies satisfactory prediction. An indictment would be a guarantee of continued obsession with Trump’s fate. And as for 2024, will DeSantis, Pence, Pompeo, Cruz, and the others step aside and let him run? Who knows? The certainty is that the process will be absorbing, and not in a good way.

In an earlier piece I posited a theory involving Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator while his cohort goes to jail, the way Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen already have. Congress censures Trump (only if the Democrats hold the House) and Biden, having effectively pardoned Trump, announces he will not run again, diminishing the uproar that would otherwise ensue.

I have yet to meet anyone who thinks my scenario will happen.

As for Putin, Russian history does have its precedents. The ousters of Nicholas II and Nikita Khrushchev and the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev come to mind. By whom, and how?  

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war rages on. The Ukrainian people have been heroic. But courage is not enough to defeat Putin. Something else must do that.

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One thought I have had is of the unknown, a “black swan” surprise that overnight and unexpectedly changes everything. In earlier eras there was Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and 9/11, episodes of shocking violence that no one knew was imminent. The use of a nuclear weapon, while no longer unthinkable, would still be earthshaking on a scale of those events in the past.

By their nature, a ”black swan” is not really predictable, even if always possible. For the present, we are choking.