Things fall apart when the centre cannot hold as Trump takes office
Every part
of the US
government appears to be fighting or preparing to fight the other. Partisan
politicking is driving the affairs of the American state as never before
Rashmee Roshan Lall
Donald Trump has taken charge of an America in which various arms of the government are indiscriminately raining blows upon the body politic.
The FBI is being investigated by the justice departments internal watchdog to check for bias, if any, against Hillary Clinton. Congressmen allied with the president-elect are threatening to investigate the head of an independent government watchdog, to check for bias, if any, against Mr Trump. The legislature has already resuscitated an obscure 1876 rule that would allow punitive selective sanctions against one or many federal government employees, prompting fears of mass firings for political reasons. And the incoming president has declared himself unimpressed by Americas intelligence agencies and promised sweeping change in a way that sounds like a threat.
Every part of the US government appears to be fighting or preparing to fight the other. Partisan politicking is driving the affairs of the American state as never before. For all that it is the worlds richest, most militarily powerful country, the Unite States is arguably the weakest it has ever been in heart, spirit and soul. Is this political auto-cannibalism? Is America literally consuming itself? Is a great power that has faced down many external challenges in the past 240 years on course to be defeated by itself?
Those who scoff at the question as gross exaggeration will argue that every country is entitled to the short-term chaos that marks big political changeovers.
Yes, but it is not business as usual for an incoming American presidents chief of staff to threaten the director of the office of government ethics for daring to say that Mr Trumps approach to his conflict of interests doesnt meet the standards ... that every president in the last four decades has met. Former ethics lawyers Richard Painter and Norman Eisen, who respectively worked in a Republican and Democratic White House, recently described incoming chief of staff Reince Priebuss behaviour on national television as follows: In a scene like something out of a gangster B-movie, Priebus warned the director that he ought to be careful Priebuss glare of menace was unmistakable. The only thing he left out was cracking his knuckles.
It is also not a normal feature of a presidential transition for the incoming commander-in-chief to belittle his intelligence agencies. By putting the word intelligence in quotation marks in tweets, comparing operatives to Nazis, accusing them of politically motivated leaks against him and publicly commending WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Russian president Vladimir Putin as more believable, Americas new president risks provoking deep and corrosive internal conflicts.
Its worth remembering that the US has remained stable and prospered mainly because it has treated bipartisan political norms as sacrosanct and also paid equal heed to informal standards that are upheld without enforcement by law. As Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan warned after Mr Trumps election victory, no one is saying that the US government is disappearing overnight but growing tolerance for conflicts of interest in government, limitations on media access and accountability, and harsh treatment of minority groups can accumulate.
In other words, perhaps the only power that can defeat mighty America is itself.
The writer specializes onglobal affairs
