Bar Him

“He’s Like a King”

I once shook a dictator’s hand.

Flying from Bangkok to Cambodia about 15 years ago for a consultancy, I ended up seated in the plane’s front row. A well-attired man boarded with his wife and large entourage, and sat across the aisle from me. He was the country’s autocratic prime minister, Hun Sen.

As we stood up and our eyes met after landing, he spontaneously shook my hand, said “Welcome to Cambodia” and turned to go. The Thai Airways flight attendant, unaware that I knew who he was, politely told me to wait until he and his scurrying travel party disembarked, because “he’s like a king.”

Which brings me to the point of this post: For all of the ways in that small Southeast Asian nation differs from America, we can learn from its brave democratic forces’ failure to topple Hun Sen when they possibly had him on the ropes several years later. In the coming days, Congress must bar Donald Trump from ever holding public office again.

A Really Bad 50 Years

First, a bit of background on Cambodia. It’s had a horrid half-century.

As a sideshow to the Vietnam War, the country suffered through massive U.S. bombing that started secretly in 1969; an intense civil war that ended in 1975 with the triumph of the fanatical Khmer Rouge communists; the subsequent Khmer Rouge genocide that killed at least 1.5 million people (nearly a quarter of the population); a 1979 Vietnamese invasion that thankfully routed the fanatics; and a nearly decade-long Vietnamese occupation that installed a repressive regime, headed by Hun Sen from 1985 on.

International pressure and negotiations led to the Vietnamese withdrawal and, in 1993, UN-brokered elections. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party lost. But by virtue of its military might, it remained the dominant power in government.

And so it stood for the next two decades, with my fellow plane passenger presiding over human rights abuses, repression, rampant corruption and substantial though highly inequitable economic growth. National elections every five years preserved a veneer of democracy. An increasingly vibrant opposition gradually grew. But there was no real threat to CPP rule.  

Surprise, Surprise

Until, that is, the 2013 elections. Even with the aid of apparent electoral fraud, the CPP performed shockingly poorly and barely beat the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party. As documented by Human Rights Watch and other observers, the CPP very arguably stole the election.

The disappointing CPP showing was an unprecedented show of weakness for Hun Sen. It did not quite reveal that the emperor had no clothes. But he at least had less armor than previously assumed.

Rejecting the bogus results, the CNRP partnered with disgruntled garment factory workers and other reformist groups to mount unprecedented street demonstrations. These rocked the government and brought it to the bargaining table.

However, persuaded by foreign embassies and by its own concerns about a massive loss of life if its mass protests persisted, the CNRP pulled back. It accordingly settled for a weak compromise agreement that the CPP subsequently broke.

And Then There Were None

Fearing another poor performance, in the run-up to the 2018 elections Hun Sen crushed the opposition,  cracked down on journalists and human rights activists and, according to Human Rights Watch, “effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system.”

He’s maintained the repression to this day, including through his government’s current mass trials of opposition leaders on trumped-up charges. (Some courageous, exiled CNRP leaders are now struggling to return to the country for trial and most probably prison in order to take a stand, with Hun Sen’s government blocking them because it fears the negative international attention their presence and jailing would generate.)

Might a more determined CNRP effort in 2013 have toppled Hun Sen or at least spurred a political realignment in Cambodia? We’ll never know.

We certainly can’t second-guess the CNRP’s decision to restrain its demonstrations, in view of how bloody things could have become. Given his repressive track record, Hun Sen would likely have done whatever he deemed necessary to cling to power.

But many dictatorships seem invincible until they’re not. Most experts did not foresee the collapse of corrupt or repressive regimes in the Philippines, Indonesia, Ukraine or Tunisia until it happened; the same applies to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

What we do know is that 2013 represented Hun Sen’s time of greatest vulnerability, when he was relatively down though admittedly not out, and that Cambodia has paid a huge price for his political survival.

Back in the USA…

What does all of this have to do with Donald Trump? Our wannabe dictator is also down but not out. This time of relative weakness is when the Democrats and their small but possibly growing array of Republican allies must do all they can to politically constrain him.

Congress has already impeached Trump. It should convict him and especially ban him from future public office as soon as possible.

I (and many others) have already made a case for impeachment and those associated actions. The example of Cambodia helps make a case for striking while the iron is hot. We can’t simply hope that Trump will remain relatively restrained.

The key goal of all this is not the disgrace that goes with being impeached twice or even the conviction that would result from a Senate trial. Rather, it’s barring Trump from holding public office. If he becomes ineligible to run for president in 2024, his capacity to command attention and funding starts to slide.

The most well-known way of disqualifying him from future office would be a punishment doled out by the Senate, following a conviction. But conviction requires a two-thirds Senate vote, making it difficult (though, given shifting congressional Republican sentiment, less impossible than it seemed just days ago).

A potentially easier alternative that’s recently been bandied about involves utilizing the previously obscure Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted in the wake of the Civil War. It allows the disqualification from public office of insurrectionists and those who’ve given them aid or comfort. Though originally aimed at former U.S. officials who’d defected to the Confederacy, nothing in its language precludes it from applying to Trump.

Exactly how Section 3 would best be implemented is subject to conjecture at this point. It’s like finding and dusting off an old device in a tool shed and figuring out how to use it after years (or really, over a century) of disuse.

Still it’s probably the best option. This alternative only requires majority votes in both houses of Congress, unlike that two-thirds Senate majority needed for an impeachment trial conviction. And while the trial should definitely be pursued, Section 3 should be an immediate Plan B if Trump is acquitted.

Not the End

Banning Trump from running for office would not end his influence. He’s too canny a manipulative showman for that. Many millions of cultlike fans will remain devoted to him.

But, as no longer the president-in-waiting, the man who would be king would no longer be as dominant a center of the far right universe. The media and funding focus would fracture among many rival heirs to his disgraced throne.

Furthermore, the ban should be the beginning of the drive to cut him down to size, not the end. There should be no shortage of investigations that will hold him accountable, bring him to justice or reveal how deep his rot reaches. In combination with the other financial and legal threats he’ll face and his severely curtailed (at least for now) social media presence, these developments would undercut Trump’s power and appeal.

So, as necessary as his impeachment and Senate trial are, the immediate goal in this battle for democracy is to bar, one way or another, Donald Trump from becoming president again. Before he can regroup or before our shockingly short national attention span spins elsewhere, the coming days are the time to get it done.