Jim Malone: You said you wanted to know how to get Capone. Do you really want to get him? You see what I'm saying? What are you prepared to do?
Eliot Ness: Everything within the law.
Jim Malone: And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these people, Mr. Ness, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won't give up the fight until one of you is dead.
Eliot Ness: l want to get Capone. l don't know how to get him.
Jim Malone: You want to get Capone, here's how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue!
This arresting movie scene came to my mind, I suspect, for multiple reasons the other day, following the abrupt dismissal of James Comey as FBI director by President Trump.
I don’t know what’s bothered me more this week, the fact that Trump abused his power and made a machismo move on Comey with impunity, as if he were in fact untouchable, or that so many fellow citizens seem exasperated and defeated, as if we have no license to check a president with gangster proclivities.
No president is above the law, no president is an untouchable. Unless, of course, we surrender our agency and authority to remind him that the White House is not Trump Tower, that he works for us now, not the other way around. Trump’s got it twisted.
At this point in our wretched relationship with Trump, there are really only two questions that matter: What did we expect, and what are we prepared to do?
There must be a pandemic of memory loss sweeping the country, because we’re barely 100 days in, and folk act like they’ve forgotten the classist, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, egocentric campaign that Trump ran to win the White House.
What did we expect?
If “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” did we really think he wouldn’t be prone to abuse his presidential powers?
Power without humility is always high-risk and hazardous.
Did we really think that his anger wouldn’t become our danger? Did we really anticipate that a guy who had never shown any interest in public service would become a model of honorable citizenship in the Oval Office? Did we really believe that one with no experience at statecraft would not embarrass us almost daily with the whole world watching? Did we really expect Trump the Transformer — that he would somehow transmute from gangster to greatness overnight?
You couldn’t have. I certainly didn’t.
Is he not behaving in the same boorish, infantile, reckless way he was when he introduced himself to us on the campaign trail? How long before we just acknowledge and accept that he is as advertised — that what we see is exactly what we get. How long before we stop grousing, kvetching, and being infuriated to the point of cursing at our TV screens and electronic devices because of his impulsive and intemperate behavior?
Cursing the wind doesn’t change the wind, but harnessing the wind does.
What are we prepared to do?
For the record, and before the Secret Service knocks at my door, unlike Sean Connery in The Untouchables, I am not suggesting violence against our president. I’m with Kevin Costner on this one: "everything within the law.” And it's worth remembering that it was income tax evasion that ultimately brought down Capone.
Connery’s salient point is that you have to commit yourself to the fight. And fight as if your life, and the lives of American children yet unborn, depend on us protecting and preserving what is sacred about the way our democracy functions.
The great abolitionist freedom fighter Frederick Douglass was right: “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.”
Tavis Smiley is host and managing editor of Tavis Smiley on PBS, author of 50 For Your Future: Lessons From Down the Road. Follow him on Twitter @tavissmiley
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