Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
It wasn't to be, but had it been, Hillary Clinton would have become not only the first woman president, but the first president to enter the Oval Office as a lame duck. For Republicans in (and out) of a Congress they totally controlled, it would have been scorched-earth tactics all the way. Not a law, not a Supreme Court justice, not an achievement would they have allowed her. The investigations, which never really ended, would have revved up instantly. Impeachment was already on the table before Election Day. And yet, in one area she would have been on the job and had a free hand from day one: foreign policy, especially in America's wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East and Africa.
For that, a president no longer really needs a Congress for which "war powers" are a thing of the past, a Congress that, in twenty-first-century America, couldn't defund a war if the planet's future depended on it. Wars, assassination campaigns, military "pivots," and Special Ops raids across significant parts of the planet are now really just the commander-in-chief's business. From Washington to Detroit, Kansas City to Portland, Hillary Clinton would have been dead in the water, but from Syria to Afghanistan, Yemen to Libya, Iraq to Somalia, the Clinton White House would have been on the job.
Of course, in Donald Trump's America, in those first 100 days, there will be no lame ducks. Anything will, after a fashion, be possible. Any corporate or 1% dream will be imaginable. Taxes? Don't fret for a sec if you're already raking it in. Environmental protections? What in the world were they for anyway? Climate change? A footnote at best in a Washington to be ruled by Big Energy and its lobbyists. The first woman president has already been obliterated. Domestically speaking, once Trump & Co. have done their damnedest, the first black president will, in essence, never have existed.
And when it comes to foreign policy, The Donald and his crew will have the same freedom Clinton would have had to do anything they want and use the U.S. military any way they please. The difference, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse points out today, is that, while we had a pretty clear sense of what Clinton would do abroad (and the damage it would have caused), we really have no idea what The Donald's still nonexistent national security team will do (only, of course, that if you had to put your money down, it's bound to be grim and chaotic). So take a little trip with Turse into a very dark place and think about where this country, its wars and policies, may be heading.