There is madness everywhere we turn. There is the madness of the President of the United States, increasing in magnitude, and the madness of his drunken and sycophantic Cabinet. Then there are other kinds of madness, like an Australian government pretending that the madness does not exist.
This week:
- Madman theory, cont.
- Deeper derangement
- International solidarity
Madman theory, cont.
Because he is mad, the shadow of impeachment has always loomed over Donald Trump. He was impeached twice in his first term but acquitted both times by the Senate. That meant he was not removed from office, nor prevented from serving as president again. Pressure on impeachment comes and goes with Trump, and it is ramping up once again now. As this Mother Jones piece outlines, one poll has found that “A majority of American adults say that the US House should vote to impeach President Trump—including one-in-five people who voted for him in 2024.” That should be taken with a grain of salt, given it’s only one and it could be an outlier.
But it should also be taken in the context of more noise around the other means of removing a president – the 25th Amendment, which provides for removal should he be judged by the Vice President and the Cabinet “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”.
That…seems unlikely. As Fintan O’Toole writes in his uniquely compelling way, “the same Republican obsequiousness that has made Trump’s madness ever more dangerous makes his removal a practical impossibility.” That leads only one way: to “deeper derangement”.
Deeper derangement
The consequences of that derangement are of course, profound, and spread well beyond the United States. A couple of weeks ago, the Boston Review hosted a panel discussion on the unfolding consequences of the war on Iran. It’s now up as a transcript and video. As one of the panelists, A. Prof. Manijeh Moradian, argues:
What is happening in Iran is about our collective future, politically, economically, and ecologically. That is the future that these fascists have in store for everybody… I think if there’s any hope, it’s that this has provided a new opening for rebuilding forms of international solidarity, internationalism from below, that can link our movements and our desires to find a path out of the nightmare that capitalism and imperialism have brought.
International Solidarity
There is no greater example of that international solidarity in the face of nightmare than Dr. Ruth Mitchell. Ruth is a neurosurgeon and a Nobel Prize winner with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (and, luckily for us, a regular guest on our podcast After America). Ruth has just returned from Gaza, where she was volunteering with the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association.
When she left, Dr Ruth wrote a love letter to the people of Gaza.
Hold on to your humanity x
