Obama Implores Americans to Defeat Trump

As I have noted both on this blog and on Facebook, the 2020 presidential election is a stark choice between (i) morality - i.e,. anyone other than Trump - and (ii) immorality as embodied in Donald Trump, a malignant narcissist whose stock in trade is endless lies, hate and bigotry and an utter disregard for the best interests of the majority average Americans. There truly is no middle ground, some my Republican friends will be confirming whether or not they are moral and decent individuals or not based on how they cast their vote come November.

 While Barack Obama made mistakes while president (we are all mortals after all), overall I believe he stands for morality, the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution.  That is certainly the feeling I got the one time I was up close to him and heard him speak at a campaign event in 2012.  Trump, as noted, is the antithesis of morality, equality under the law, and constitutional government.  Indeed, in my view, Trump is nothing less than evil. Hence why Obama is now beginning a series of campaign appearances for Joe Biden and other Democrat congressional candidates.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Obama's message to Americans.  Here are highlights:

Joe Biden’s campaign has long viewed his partnership with former president Barack Obama as one of his chief assets in running for president. He spoke often of “my buddy Barack” during campaign events. . . . . But for the past year and a half, there has often been a critical piece missing: Obama.

That began to change in April, when Obama endorsed Biden. On Tuesday, it went a step further, as Obama and Biden made their first joint appearance in years, the former partners allied as they attempt to defeat President Trump.

Obama was the main draw at a virtual fundraiser for Biden, raising more than $7.6 million from 175,000 individual donors, according to Biden’s campaign.

“You’re all feeling a sense of urgency, the same kind of urgency I’m feeling right now,” Obama said near the start of the fundraiser. “I’m here to say: Help is on the way.”

Obama launched into an in-depth criticism of Trump, without mentioning him by name, and said that while his own administration inherited problems, “the foundation stones, the institutions we had in place, were still more or less intact.”

“My predecessor, who I disagreed with on a whole host of issues, still had a basic regard for the rule of law and the importance of our institutions and democracy,” he said.

“What we have seen over the last couple of years is a White House enabled by Republicans in Congress and a media structure that supports them . . . that suggests facts don’t matter, science doesn’t matter,” Obama said. “That suggests that a deadly disease is fake news. That sees the Justice Department as simply an extension and an arm of the personal concerns of the president. That actively promotes division. And considers some people in this country more real as Americans than others.”

[T]his is serious business. Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough . . . We have to do more,” Obama said. He warned Biden supporters of Trump’s strength, and not to underestimate his ability to harness his supporters.

“We can’t be complacent or smug or say it’s so obvious this president hasn’t done a good job,” Obama said. “Look. He won once.”

Obama also turned toward Biden, touting his work with “our presidency” and saying that the tragedies in the former vice president’s life allow him to better understand the lives of average Americans. “This is somebody who has been touched by tragedy in a direct, profound way and as a consequence has enlarged his heart to embrace other people who are undergoing tragedy,” he said.

The event marked a new phase for Obama, who is expected to increase his campaigning not only for Biden but also a full slate of Democrats aiming to preserve the House majority and win back the Senate.

Obama is seen as vital to energizing elements of his coalition with whom Biden has struggled, including young black voters and liberal voters who have distrusted the former vice president, who built his career as a moderate who could work with Republicans. He appeared to target one of their disconnects with Biden when he directly addressed his age.

“I’ll be honest, and hope Joe doesn’t take offense,” he said. “Joe’s been around a while. Sometimes what happens is we take that for granted.

“There’s a tendency to always look for the new and shiny object. But for my money, one of the things that counts the most is to have somebody, whatever mistakes they’ve made or hardships they’ve gone through, have they shown the kind of character that stands up,” he said. “And my experience with Joe Biden is that’s who he is.”

After Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suspended his campaign in April, Obama released a lengthy video endorsing Biden. In the video, he reflected on the shifts within the party he once led and called for more assertive action.

“To meet the moment, the Democratic Party will have to be bold,” Obama said. “I could not be prouder of the incredible progress that we made together during my presidency. But if I were running today, I wouldn’t run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008. The world is different. There’s too much unfinished business for us to just look backwards. We have to look to the future.”

Trump can use opposition to Obama to mobilize his supporters — on Tuesday, his campaign sent out a fundraising email with sirens and the subject line “BARACK OBAMA” — but Obama is generally viewed favorably by most Americans. A recent Fox News poll had Obama with a net favorability of 28 points, compared with minus-12 points for Trump.

Obama has recently shed some of his reluctance to engage in national politics, sharply criticizing Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic last month by calling it “an absolute chaotic disaster” during a call with a network of former staffers and supporters.

On the call, he also criticized the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against Michael Flynn, who served as Trump’s first national security adviser, saying that it was “the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that . . . our basic understanding of the rule of law is at risk.”

Obama is expected to ramp up his campaign activities over the coming months, with those close to him pointing to his 2018 involvement as a template: He spent the summer raising money before doing two rounds of endorsements and stumping in 11 states as Election Day neared.

Honor and Morality vs. Trump

One way to think about what we are witnessing as the public impeachment hears unfold is to think of a mix between the movie "The Godfather" and sleazy real estate investors/developers who skirt the laws and often rely on bribes and treats to push their projects along.  Donald Trump - and sadly most of those who have signed on to his administration - embody this combination of criminality and moral haziness, if not out right moral bankruptcy.  As the hearings unfold in contrast to this corruption and lawlessness, one is witnessing individuals cut from the cloth of old school career diplomats who, unlike Trump, put honor, professionalism, and country ahead of squalid personal gain.  An op-ed in the Washington Post co-authored by a law school classmate, Evan Thomas, who has written numerous historical works looks at this stark contrast between Trump world and what ought to be the standard for government service.  If Trump avoids removal from office, it will be a sad day for America.  It will also be a sign that morality has been kicked into the gutter by someone little better than a mob boss and that immorality is now the hallmark of the Republican Party.  Here are column highlights: 

Geography, Napoleon is reputed to have remarked, is destiny, and this axiom came to our minds this week as we watched two very different but neighboring universes collide before the House Intelligence Committee. The ramrod-straight William B. Taylor Jr. and the bow-tied George Kent, two diplomats from the largely WASP ethos of the post-World War II foreign policy establishment, one headquartered at places such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ imposing Harold Pratt House at 68th Street and Park Avenue, found themselves bearing noble witness amid an impeachment imbroglio that may be best understood by an appreciation of the wilder mores of midtown Manhattan. 

Only a few blocks away from the portrait-lined walls and genteel cocktails of the Council lies the real center of gravity in the politics of 2019: the gilded Trump Tower, built on the fluid morals and cutthroat deal-making of New York real estate. The Tower sits cheek-by-jowl (the image is chosen purposely) with the Grand Havana Room, a cigar club frequented by Rudy Giuliani, atop a Fifth Avenue building owned by the family of Jared Kushner. Walk a bit farther south — you don’t even need a Town Car — and you reach Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of Fox News and the New York Post.

To Trump supporters, the testimony Wednesday was the “deep state” surfacing briefly from the depths of white papers, institutional knowledge and a facility with U.S. military and diplomatic history. (Kent’s evocation of von Steuben and Lafayette was straight out of a Ward Just novel.)

To Trump’s critics and defenders of constitutional norms, the Republican narrative that the president’s threats to deny security assistance to Ukraine was just the kind of thing tough guys do (and, after getting caught, he didn’t do it!), suggested that tabloid hyperbole, Fox News arcana and New York hardball had replaced the real world.

The story of upended conventions and of a president who careens between self-parody and serious lawlessness is by now familiar, as old as the Age of Trump itself. The distinction is that the impeachment hearings have given us perhaps the clearest example yet of the triumph of political demimonde wise guys such as Trump, Giuliani and the Rogers Stone and Ailes over the latter-day Robert Lovetts and Dean Achesons. And it’s not just Wise Men, of course: Jeane Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice hailed from the establishment world, as do Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill. The moment of decision between the Wise Men and the wise guys on Wednesday was subtle but nevertheless clear. It came when Rep. Michael R. Turner, a Republican, noted that diplomats such as Taylor and Kent “deal in words of understanding. Words of beliefs and feelings, because in your profession, that’s what you work with to try to pull together policy.” Theirs, the lawmaker was implying, was almost a touchingly naive way of life in which one trusted what one was told, assumed the fundamental truthfulness of, say, a presidentially appointed ambassador, and believed that a president himself meant what he said.

No longer: The midtown game of wheeling and dealing, often done over a cigar at the Grand Havana or perhaps an overpriced steak at 21, has now gone global as the denizens of Trump’s neighborhood run shadow foreign policy ops seeking 2020 election help and good paydays.

Had any other president, Taylor was asked, linked official aid in the American interest to private or political benefit? With a stoicism and brevity that would’ve made George Marshall quietly proud, Taylor replied, “No.”

To be sure, the establishment has been far from perfect, its fall from preeminence more than partly self-inflicted. Elite education and conventional expertise don’t guarantee good results, and America has been shaped by the battle between the privileged and the populist since long before Andrew Jackson. Such establishment condescension also fueled the rise of Joe McCarthy and of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who served as lawyer and mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to a young developer from Queens who was looking to make it big in Manhattan. And Donald Trump never forgot a thing Cohn taught him. In midtown Manhattan, Trump learned to dominate the news — in his rise, that meant the New York Post, with its screaming, one-sourced stories, an early harbinger of the presidential Twitter strategy. He learned the power of TV. And he learned that tough guys — or “killers,” in a favorite approbation of Trump’s — like Ailes, who presided over this stew of often-abusive power, money and misinformation, were the kinds of guys he could count on.

For one thing was certain: The Wise Men of 68th Street or the United Nations or any of the traditional institutions of expertise weren’t his guys. The question America now faces in impeachment and, should Trump prevail, in the 2020 election, is whose New York will serve us best in the long run — the wise guys’ or the Wise Men’s?

Be very, very afraid.

The Vindication of Never Trumpers

Recently I saw a Facebook post that had a simple message: good people do not support bad people. I'd expand that a bit further and say that decent, moral people do not support immoral people.   By and large, the Republican Party ignored this simple test of morality that shows much more about one's true moral compass than feigning piety, sitting in church pews on Sundays, and hating gays - the hallmarks of today's evangelicals whose loyalty to Donald Trump is steadily killing the Christian brand among the millennial generations only 49% of which now view themselves as Christian. Even as the majority of Republicans - especially its white supremacist, evangelical base - demonstrated total moral bankruptcy by its embrace of Trump, there were some Republicans (most now are former Republicans) who said "no" and became labeled as never Trumpers, a group that Trump has called "human scum" suggesting that he must have been looking in the mirror when he uttered the statement. A column in the New York Times looks at these never Trumpers and the manner in which they have been vindicated even as their former colleagues have proven their lack of true morality.  Here are column highlights:

Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his tweet of Oct. 23 — the one that called NeverTrumpers “human scum” — plumbed new depths in the debasement of presidential speech.

But what else has changed? If Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, were given the job of finding Trump’s moral bottom, he’d fail.

Far more revealing in Trump’s tweet was its first sentence. “The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats,” [Trump] the president wrote, before warning of their scummy natures.

If the few remaining NeverTrump conservatives can still be that dangerous while we’re on respirators, we must be powerful indeed. Somewhere in eternity’s permanent exile, Leon Trotsky is smiling. . . . As a movement, NeverTrumpism is on life support. And [Trump] the president has greater reasons than ever to fear it.

Three years ago, on the eve of the election, the NeverTrump coalition was a wide one, ranging from hard-core conservatives like Erick Erickson and Ted Cruz to somewhat squishier ones like Michael Gerson, John Podhoretz, and, well, me.

Then Trump won. The guy who was supposed to lead his party to a catastrophic defeat became the man who, in the eyes of the right, uniquely figured out how to save the country from Hillary Clinton. The coarseness of speech and crudeness of character that were supposed to be his central flaws became evidence of his gutsy indifference to liberal reproach.

There were also those conservative policy and political victories. Regulatory rollback. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and all the lower court judges. Increased military spending. The tax cut. Withdrawal from the Iran deal. An expanded G.O.P. majority in the Senate.

The NeverTrumpers scattered. Some became ex-conservatives. Others, full-on Trumpers. Still others, anti-anti-Trumpers — which only meant they were smart enough to see [Trump] the president for what he is and churlish enough to be angry at those who wouldn’t join them in capitulating to it.

Yet the NeverTrumpers never scattered entirely, and thank heavens for that. Every political system will always have a conservative faction, and every healthy democracy needs that faction to be rooted in some combination of classical liberalism and moral traditionalism. Trump’s G.O.P., whatever its political fortunes, is the opposite: a nativist party led by a libertine.

At some level, conservatives know this. Trump knows they know it. Which explains why he has turned his sights on Never Trumpers: What despots and demagogues fear most is their followers developing a conscience.

No wonder [Trump] the president chose to lambaste Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” The combat veteran had the simple decency of being scandalized by what he heard from the president on the Ukraine phone call, and by what he knew of the discrepancies between what he heard on the call and the account of it released by the White House.

The decency of being scandalized is what being NeverTrump is centrally about, and why the movement remains important. It’s the opposite of the opportunism required to go along with [Trump] the president because you might get something out of him.

It’s the same sense of scandal that led to the first significant G.O.P. revolt against Trump since John McCain turned his thumb down on Obamacare repeal in 2017: The suppurating disgust even pliant conservatives like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham feel at Trump’s cavalier betrayal of the Kurds.

And it helps explain why [Trump's] the president’s support with his base is slipping at last. A new poll finds Trump’s support among Republicans at 74 percent — an eight-point decline since September and the lowest since he was elected. Nearly one in five Republicans support impeachment and removal. So do 47 percent of independents. These numbers will not move in Trump’s favor if the truth about his “drug deals” (to borrow Bolton’s phrase) continues to come to light.

I doubt any of this will be sufficient to get at least 20 Republican senators to vote for Trump’s removal from office. But Trump knows that the number needed to spell his moral defeat on impeachment is four. If Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and one other Republican join the Democrats to convict, the political humiliation will be thunderous. And, as my colleague David Leonhardt has convinced me, it could devastate his re-election chances. If the administration thinks impeachment is such a political winner, they wouldn’t be fighting it this hard.

In the meantime, someone ought to print “Human Scum” on a limited-edition T-shirt. Given who said it about whom, it turns out to be a badge of honor. 

The real human scum are those who continue to support Trump either out of racism, homophobia and religious extremism, or simple greed and a focus solely on tax cuts. Any of those reasons for supporting Trump underscore a serious moral deficiency that feigned piety, condemnation of gays, avoidance of alcohol, and other evangelical forms of wearing religion on their sleeves will not wash away.   

Donald Trump’s Amoral America

The con job of the gullible and stupid continues.

P. T. Barnum is widely credited with coining the adage "There's a sucker born every minute."  Whether he in fact coined the phrase or not, Barnum is remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and for founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Part of Barnum's success was that he recognized the reality that for a con to work, one need both (i) the entertainer/con-artist and (ii) an audience willing to be duped. All of which brings me to Donald Trump's base which falls in the latter category.  Running errands yesterday, I heard portions of Trump's address to CPAC - which in my view should stand for "crazy people acting crazy" - and was struck by both the insincerity of Trump's remarks and how stupid/intellectually dull the audience had to be to eat up the bullshit Trump was spewing. On the other hand, perhaps I should not have been surprised since evangelicals make up the core of Trumps base and studies have shown that of the various religious denominations, evangelicals as a whole have the lowest levels of educational attainment. A column in the New York Times looks at the willingness of some Americans to embrace a fraud and the amorality with which Trump has promoted himself and lied to his idiot supporters.  Here are excerpts:

Maybe the best book I read last year was “Bad Blood,” about the epic sham of the biotech start-up Theranos and its delusional creator, Elizabeth Holmes. I had trouble shaking it, and it roared back into my mind on Wednesday, when Michael Cohen testified publicly before the House Oversight Committee and retraced the mountain of lies buttressing Donald Trump’s business empire and the clouds of fiction preventing any clear view of it. This country of ours doesn’t lack for frauds . . . . We were probably bound to elevate one to the highest office in the land.

In November 2016 we did. As anyone paying close attention then knew and anyone who finally woke up over these last few ugly days must now admit, we gave the supreme prize and ultimate compliment — leadership of the most powerful nation on earth — to a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it raced toward him with sirens blaring, ran over him, then backed up and did it again; whose loyalties stand as firm as a strand of overcooked linguine; whose vanity makes Narcissus look like a mere pretender; and who will sacrifice whatever and whomever he must on the altar of his own spurious magnificence. What he lacks in moral fiber he makes up for in gilt. It sufficed to bring him his treasure and, for 72 years and counting, spare him his reckoning.

There are several kinds of success stories. We emphasize the ones starring brilliant inventors and earnest toilers. . . . . But for every ambitious person who has the goods and is prepared to pay his or her dues, there’s another who doesn’t and is content to play the con. In the Trump era and the Trump orbit, these ambassadors of a darker side of the American dream have come to the fore. What a con Holmes played with Theranos. . . . . And for a good long while it worked, which was more than could be said of the product that Theranos peddled, a magical black box that was supposed to be able, with just a few drops of blood from the prick of a finger, to screen for scores of ailments and diseases.

She was eventually found out, and faces criminal charges that could put her in prison. But there’s no guarantee of that. Meantime she lives in luxury. God bless America. Theranos was perhaps an outlier in the scope of its deceptions, but not in the deceptions themselves. . . . “As the list of start-up scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking ‘fake it till you make it’ too far.”

Interesting word there: fake. A president who’s a textbook study in the psychological phenomenon of projection — by which you attribute to others the flaws that you possess — uses it all the time. What did he call Cohen’s interchanges with House lawmakers on Wednesday? “A fake hearing,” of course.

Dangle the prospects of celebrity and riches, and plenty of charlatans rush forward. So it stands to reason that a country of supersize celebrity and riches would have a surfeit of charlatans, including some who see even the White House as fair game. Cohen’s testimony confirmed yet again how much pure bluster fueled Trump’s quest, and how heavily Trump’s entire career leaned on shady arithmetic, personal myth making and intimidation: all arrows abundant in the quivers of Holmes and her Silicon Valley kin.

But that testimony was also a reminder of how gullible their audiences are, how readily we all believe when we perceive some benefit in the transaction. This isn’t just the land of the fraud but the home of the knave, and Cohen implored Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters nationwide to learn from his own credulity. It takes two to bamboozle: the illusionist and the enraptured.

[W]hen Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower, he didn’t just begin a presidential campaign. He pinched the edge of a scab on our body politic and began to tug, revealing all the racism, resentments and partisan fury beneath it. He gave us a fresh, jolting glimpse of just how much depravity and even criminality exist among the powerful (and the power-mad). Look at his own collaborators: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, David Pecker and lesser reprobates who either still serve in his administration (Alex Acosta, Jared Kushner) or did until they went too far (Tom Price, Scott Pruitt).

They’re favor traders, corner cutters, rule breakers, perk hoarders. . . . . They also have a competitive advantage: They’re without shame. There’s a whole lot you can do once you’ve slipped that tether. To the unscrupulous go the spoils.

Trump’s amorality play contradicts our paeans to the Puritan work ethic. It’s not the script that we teach our children. But with Trump in the White House, validated by tens of millions of votes, it may well be what some of them are learning.

I shudder to think the lesson my grandchildren may be learning having someone so morally bankrupt in the White House.  Honor, duty, truthfulness, and basic decency have all been thrown on the trash heap by Trump, his supporters and, of course, his Republican enablers. 

A Republican Challenge to Trump?

As often noted, I grew up in a family of Republicans and even held a precinct seat on the City Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach for eight years (if you check the Virginia State Corporation Commission records I was the incorporator of that body).  I left the GOP when it became clear to me that (i) the party no longer grasp the concept of separation of church and state and (ii) increasingly stood for racism and policies diametrically opposed to Christian principles.  The irony, of course, is the latter shift directly correlated with the rise of evangelical Christians in the party, perhaps the most un-Christian folks one will ever encounter.  Donald Trump is the outcome of that ugly transformation of the party.  With polls indicating the 58% of Americans say they will vote against Trump if he runs in 2020 and his support eroding even among his Christofascist and white supremacist base (in my view, the two are one and the same), there are noises that Trump - assuming he's still in office - will face a primary challenge for the 2020 nomination.  Such a move might save the GOP from a form of suicide and might allow the party to again claim some semblance of support for common decency and morality.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the growing chances of a primary challenge.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump’s job approval rating now stands at a paltry 39 percent, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, while his disapproval rating is 53 percent — a net decline of seven percentage points from last month when the government shutdown began.  No surprise there.

What’s surprising, and potentially more hope-inspiring, is that [Trump's] the president’s support from his base is also beginning to tumble, according to the same poll. It’s down since last month by a net of 10 points among Republicans, a net of 13 points among white evangelicals, and a net of 18 points among suburban men. Even white men without college degrees — the very core of his base — are turning on him, with 50 percent approving of his performance and 35 percent disapproving, down from 56 to 34.

All of which raises the question: Might the waters be getting a little warmer for a potential Republican primary challenge to Trump?

Larry Hogan, the recently re-elected centrist Republican governor of Maryland, isn’t about to announce — but neither will he rule out a run. “I’m very frustrated and concerned about the direction of the Republican Party and the country,” he tells me in a phone interview on Friday.

Hogan is attracting notice partly because he just romped to re-election over the progressive Democrat Ben Jealous — becoming the first G.O.P. governor to win re-election in Maryland since 1954 — and partly because he’s one of only three Republican governors in deep-blue states (Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Vermont’s Phil Scott are the other two). His approval rating is 68 percent in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.

But mostly Hogan makes no secret of his disdain for [Trump] the president, though he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning his name. . . . . his father, the late Congressman Lawrence Hogan, was “the first Republican to come out for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.”

“Despite tremendous political pressure,” Hogan said of his dad, “he put aside partisanship and answered the demands of his conscience to do what he thought was the right thing for the nation that he loved.”

The downside of any primary challenge is that it is guaranteed to be nasty: Nobody emerges from an encounter with Trump without feeling soiled. It’s also likely to be losing: With the qualified exception of Lyndon Johnson in 1968, no incumbent president who sought his party’s nomination has failed to win it since Chester A. Arthur in 1884.

Then again, there are upsides to a potential challenge. Three in particular.

First is the fact that Trump is losing his showdown over the shutdown. Having volunteered — on camera, no less — that he was “proud to shut down the government for border security,” he cannot disavow the consequences. . . . . it will cost [Trump] the president political support that a bold primary challenger could reap.

Second, it is no longer mere wishful thinking that Trump either won’t serve out his term or won’t be on the ballot next year. . . . . there is no question the president's legal jeopardy is increasing. A Republican who challenges him early could reap benefits in fund-raising and visibility, not to mention personal honor.

Most important, though, is the future of the G.O.P. itself. Every democracy is bound to have a party that represents society’s conservative instincts. The question is: What kind of conservatism? As Jerry Taylor of the Niskanen Center puts it, “The party deserves a choice about whether it wants to continue down the path of Le Pen-style blood-and-soil nationalism or return to its noble origins as the party of Lincoln.”

Larry Hogan isn’t the only Republican who understands the need for that choice. But he is one of the few who can offer a serious and meaningful alternative to the corroded conservatism we have in Washington today. Stepping forward now would mean stepping fully into his father’s shoes.

Karen and Mike Pence's Moral Hypocrisy

Mike and Karen Pence: modern day Pharisees.

In today's America, nothing more defines evangelical Christians than their hypocrisy.  And no one better personifies this hypocrisy better than Mike Pence - a man who, to me, has all the hallmarks of a self-loathing, closeted gay - and Karen Pence who is now working for a stridently anti-gay "Christian" school.  Of course, if one believes in Christ's gospel message as set forth in the New Testament, there is little Christian about this school and its policies of exclusion and condemnation.  Instead, it more closely mirrors a gathering of Pharisees of the type repeatedly condemned by Christ in the New Testament.  Meanwhile, the Pences and the vast majority of evangelicals continue to blindly support Donald Trump, the most morally bankrupt individual to ever occupy the White House.  With such hypocrisy - and hatred on others - on such open display, it's little wonder that now 40% of the under 30 generations have walked away from religion.  A piece at CNN calls out the Pences' hypocrisy.  Here are highlights:

Karen Pence, the wife of America's vice president, Mike Pence will be teaching art at a Christian school in Virginia that bans LGBTQ children and requires employees to declare their religious beliefs. Like a real-life setting for "The Handmaid's Tale," Immanuel Christian School insists applicants initial a pledge to "live a personal life of moral purity."

Listen to what else the pledge says: "I understand that the term 'marriage' has only one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive covenant union as delineated in Scripture." It asserts that God intended sexual acts only between "a man and a woman who are married to each other." It identifies "moral misconduct" that would disqualify employees as premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex, homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity, any other violation of the unique roles of male and female."

This language is disgusting and insults millions of taxpaying American citizens, many who have served their country. That it is acceptable to the wife of the man who is a heartbeat away from the presidency should horrify and alarm all Americans. For all their professed beliefs, Pence, and his wife, show unwavering support for a man who has been married three times, divorced twice, has had five children with three women and who has been accused of (though denies) paying a porn star and a Playboy model hundreds of thousands of dollars to conceal affairs he'd had with them. The hypocrisy here, and indeed from white evangelical Trump supporters, is astonishing. . . . . Obama, a man who had no sex scandals, was never accused of sexual harassment, had two children with the same woman, couldn't crack 25% white evangelicals. Of course, race is a huge reason, but Hillary Clinton only received 16% of the white evangelical vote.
 For white evangelicals, it appears to be Trump over country -- and Karen Pence is a glowing example.   The school where Karen Pence will work — and indeed she has taught there in the past, for 12 years -- does have a legal right to its brand of hate. But it is deplorable for the wife of the vice president to work in this space. If the Pences love their God so much, then they would not sit in a White House with a man who shows no moral compass and said he never asks for forgiveness. They would be on the White House lawn, with the King James Bible in hand, disavowing a President who is a horrible representation for our children. If Karen Pence loves "moral purity," she would have denounced Melania Trump for — for example -- posing naked and in handcuffs for a men's magazine when she worked as a model. If she and her husband want to sign a pledge of moral purity, they should first hand it to the President of the United States for his own signature. Do Karen and Mike Pence (who, incidentally, supports conversion therapy) not see LGBTQ people as humans deserving the same respect and rights as anyone?

Mike and Karen Pence, where is your Jesus?

Did the Special Counsel Mueller Set Manafort/Trump Up?

As Donald Trump increasingly appears to be committing obstruction of justice in plain view by dangling a possible pardon before Paul Manafort and likely lying in his written responses to special prosecutor Robert Mueller, some are speculating that Mueller may have planned to allow Trump and Manafort to figuratively hang themselves.  Trump is incapable of telling the truth and thinks (i) he's smarter than anyone else and (ii) thinks he's above the law.  Combine this with Manaforts sleazy history and it's a recipe for obstruction charges - not to mention additional charges against Manafort for lying to the FBI.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at whether Mueller set this trap or if it's the natural result of two despicable and utterly dishonest men, i.e., Trump and Manafort.  Here are excerpts:

It is the kind of fine print to which lawyers devote many billable hours crafting and reviewing. Rick Gates’s plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller includes this line: “The defendant agrees not to reveal his cooperation, or any information derived therefrom, to any third party without prior consent of the Office.” The language of Paul Manafort’s cooperation deal is almost identical—with the exception of that sentence about disclosing information to third parties. “The absence of that gag order is not an oversight,” says Katya Jestin, a former federal prosecutor. “This could be part of a larger strategic play by Mueller. Which gives this a John le Carré aspect.” 

On Monday, Mueller went to court to take the rare step of invalidating a plea deal, accusing Manafort of lying after agreeing to cooperate with the government; Manafort maintains that he told the special counsel the truth. The stunning collapse of Manafort’s deal raises a bigger and more intriguing question: who created that loophole about talking to third parties, and is it part of a sophisticated game Mueller is playing? Or did President Donald Trump just blunder into incriminating himself? The greatest likelihood is that the special counsel agreed to leave out the prohibition on talking to third parties because Manafort had little rational incentive for doing so—and could be punished for bad behavior. Indeed, Mueller is now asking the court to sentence Manafort immediately, and will probably ask for a longer prison term. Yet Mueller’s team has always thought strategically about how to deal with Trump—for instance, farming out portions of the investigation to other jurisdictions who couldn’t be shut down by [Trump] the president. Did they agree to omit the third-party clause as a way to test Manafort and Trump? The tantalizing possibility is that Trump, basing his answers on what he was hearing from Manafort, lied in those written answers and has now stumbled into strengthening the obstruction of justice case against him. “Mueller built the plea agreement to permit Kevin Downing to continue to share information with Rudy Giuliani,” says Marcy Wheeler, a national security expert who blogs under the name Emptywheel. “So in the eventuality Manafort lied and Mueller didn’t tell them what evidence they had that he was lying, then that would in a sense be negative reinforcement for Trump. He would think that he was going to get away with it, just like Manafort was.” “Andrew Weissmann is a chess player, for sure,” says Jestin, who is a former colleague of Weissmann, Mueller’s top adjutant. “So maybe that was lurking in the back of their minds: ‘Manafort doesn’t want a gag order? Fine. Let’s not give them a gag order. If they screw up, they’re facing potential obstruction.’ Sam Buell worked alongside Weissmann in 2003, constructing the government’s case against Enron. “Why was it left out of the agreement? They are so darn careful, it had to have been deliberate,” Buell says. “I’m at a loss. But nobody wants to create obstruction, especially a careful, by-the-book guy like Mueller. Obstruction is bad from the prosecutor’s standpoint. In an ideal world, you would like the president and the White House to be completely out of this: Shut up, sit on the sidelines, don’t meddle, let them do their job.”

We are a long way from an ideal world, though, and Trump is pathologically incapable of shutting up. If [Trump] the president and his former campaign manager colluded to try to deceive Mueller, Wheeler says, it’s clear where the blame belongs. “If these two men, Manafort and Trump, chose to continue to share notes through a period when they’re both being questioned by the special counsel,” she says, “and they don’t understand that Mueller isn’t telling either one of them how much evidence he has, that’s their own damn fault, not Mueller’s.”

Trump Supporters: Maybe They’re Just Bad People

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

The previous post looked at what is in my view the moral bankruptcy of Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure who have sold out the LGBT community out of sheer ego and perhaps narcissism by hitching their star to Donald Trump.  The immorality of Trump and the harm he and Mike Pence are doing to members of the LGBT community means nothing to them as long as their are on guest list along with other Trump sycophants who live for perks and perceived privileges that stroke their egos.  But White and Eure are hardly alone in their willingness to suck up to Trump displaying an attitude of what's in it for me and to hell with everyone else or the good of the country.  Columnist Michelle Goldberg makes this point in a recent column.  I've been involved in politics for decades not for what it might bring to me monetarily or in terms of status, but because I want to make a difference and I worry about the future of the country that my grandchildren will be living in.  My gay rights activism stems for wanting to make sure younger generations avoid the hell that so many of us older gays endured.  But for White, Eure and I suspect most Trump supporters, it is only about power and satiating overwhelming egos - the same motivations that drive Der Trumpenführer.  In today's America, supporting Trump requires rejecting true morality, decency and true Christian/gospel values (which I view as positive even if I reject the Christian label).  Here are column excerpts:

Seven years ago, a former aide to Ralph Reed — who also worked, briefly, for Paul Manafort — published a tawdry, shallow memoir that is also one of the more revealing political books I’ve ever read. Lisa Baron was a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, hard-partying Jew who nonetheless made a career advancing the fortunes of the Christian right. She opened her book with an anecdote about performing oral sex on a future member of the George W. Bush administration during the 2000 primary, which, she wrote, “perfectly summed up my groupie-like relationship to politics at that time — I wanted it, I worshiped it, and I went for it.”

It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige.

Baron’s book, “Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All,” is useful because it is a self-portrait of a cynical, fame-hungry narcissist, a common type but one underrepresented in the stories we tell about partisan combat. A person of limited self-awareness — she seemed to think readers would find her right-wing exploits plucky and cute — Baron became Reed’s communications director because she saw it as a steppingstone to her dream job, White House press secretary, a position she envisioned in mostly sartorial terms.

It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn't forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.

That brings us to Monday’s New York Times article about Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, headlined “How a Liberal Couple Became Two of N.Y.’s Biggest Trump Supporters.” The answer: ego.

This story, like Baron’s book, is arresting in its picture of shameless, unvarnished thirst. White and Eure mouth some talking points about disliking “identity politics” and valuing “authenticity.” Like a lot of Trump apologists, White insists the president isn’t racist because African-American employment figures have improved during his administration. But the lurid opportunism that’s driving him and his husband to embrace Trump is obvious. Such opportunism is far from rare; it’s just not often that we see it exhibited so starkly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers — White and Eure, after all, used to be Clintonites.

But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral.

There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity.

As I keep stating, my Republican friends are running out of time to demonstrate that they are not among the ranks of the immoral and amoral.  The choice is between continued support for a pathological liar who endorses using tear gas- or worse - against women and small children and simple morality and decency. They cannot have it both ways.  And, I'm sorry, but wanting lower taxes does not justify embracing immorality.

Why Trump Supporters Ignore His Corruption and Moral Bankruptcy

One of the continued puzzles to many is how Trump's supporters continue to close their eyes or look the other way at Trump's utter corruption and general moral bankruptcy.   Having followed the so-called "Christian Right" for decades, this group believes that the end sought justifies any mean to accomplish it whether it be deliberately disseminating known lies and untruths to spewing hatred towards others.  Thus, in exchange for Trump's promises to appoint reactionary judges and supreme court justices and to push an anti-gay agenda, evangelical Christians rallied to Trump. Never mind his three marriages, his self-admitted and boastful sexual assault of women and his fraudulent business practices.  Outside of the "Christian Right" others in the Trump base seem to be similarly focused on what boils down to a racist and/or reactionary agenda that longs for the "good old days" when white men were supreme on the social peeking order and women and minorities knew their place. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon and how Trump supporters seemingly have redefined "corruption" and immorality while ignoring illegal activity and non-stop lies.  The take away?  Trump supporters, whether or not they admit it, are either racists, misogynists, male chauvinists and/or reactionary religious extremists.  Here are highlights: 

On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohen’s admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trump’s mistresses. It was the alleged murder of a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera.

On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But dig deeper and the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.

Cohen’s admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trump’s supporters say they care about corruption. . . . And yet, Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes. Even Cohen’s allegation is unlikely to change that.

The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”

Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences.

The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.

[F]or Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense.

Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.

Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.

Stated succinctly, Trump's supporters want a return to the white Christian dominated era of the 1950's when America economically dominated the world, gays were closeted, blacks were subjected to the Jim Crow laws, and women were largely confined - at least in their mythic world - to being June Clever styled house wives and homemakers.  As long Trump continues to bring back that awful period in time, there is no wrong he can do in the eyes of his very scary would be fascist supporters.  To my Trump supporting "friends," I suggest they take a good long look at themselves in the mirror and admit what really motivates their support for Trump.

Saudi Arabia Brutality and Trump's Love of Autocrats

Last week I wrote about the latest Saudi Arabia brutality and that autocratic theocracy's latest spat with Canada because of Canadian condemnation of Saudi human rights abuses.  In his weekly column, Andrew Sullivan expands on coverage and notes distressingly how Saudi brutality and human rights abuses has not disturbed the Trump/Pence regime and Trump has remained silent on Saudi misdeeds.  Indeed, Sullivan suggests - correctly in my view - that Trump admires autocratic regimes and, in my view, longs to rule America in a similar manner.  Frighteningly, I suspect such brutal authoritarian rule would be applauded by much of Trump's base so long as the brutality was targeted at blacks, Hispanics, gays and non-right wing Christians. Despite its ugly history - genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, etc. - America had achieved moral authority in the world.  Now, that moral authority has been thrown away by Trump/Pence and that regime's evangelical Christian and white supremacist base.  Here are column highlights:

It wasn’t so long ago that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman o[“MBS”] of Saudi Arabia was doing the rounds of various American muckety-mucks in business, politics, and pop culture. On his world tour, the fawning was extraordinary. He met Oprah and the Rock, Bloomberg and the Clintons, Bush after Bush, Gates and Bezos, Hollywood moguls and Wall Street machers, as well as his plutocratic wing man, Jared Kushner. . . . . the general tenor of the public-relations campaign was that of a Saudi spring, especially for women, and a thawing of some of the most repressive theocratic tendencies of the regime.

So it must come as a surprise to all of MBS’s friends in the American elite that this youthful reformer returned from his Western tour and soon launched a new campaign against the very women who had most fervently resisted the theocracy’s misogyny. On May 19, “the Saudi Arabian authorities and government-aligned media launched a public smear campaign to try to discredit six prominent detained women’s rights defenders as ‘traitors’ following their arrest. 

This campaign was completed last week with the detention of the last two prominent women’s rights activists, Nassima al-Sada and Samar Badawi. Badawi is the sister of a Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who set up an open forum website and was therefore lashed a thousand times in public and is currently serving a prison term of ten years. Both women have been persecuted for years.  In response to the latest crackdown, the Canadian government tweeted its concern: “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights advocates in #SaudiArabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful human rights activists.” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, spoke out in part because Raif Badawi’s wife and three kids now live in Canada, and have been citizens since July.

In response, MBS has thrown a hissy fit of Trumpian proportions. The Canadian ambassador was given 24 hours to leave; 15,000 Saudi students in Canada were recalled home; trade with Canada was suspended; an order to sell all Saudi central bank and state pension fund shares in Canadian interests was proclaimed, according to the Financial Times. Saudi subjects receiving medical treatment in Canada are being transferred out of care, and about 800 Saudi medical residents and fellows in Canada have been ordered home.

As a kind of coda to the entire affair, the Saudis decided to, yes, crucify a criminal this week, a rare but gruesome spectacle, in which someone’s executed corpse is hung out in the open as a warning to others. You may remember such scenes from Game of Thrones. But this kind of barbarism still exists — and the regime that behaves this way has [Trump's] our president’s full support, and billions in arms sales.

Then, of course, there is the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The crown prince has been waging a brutal war on the Shi’a of Yemen, the Houthis, in coalition with the U.S. and the U.K. The relentless bombing campaigns — including indiscriminate attacks on civilians — have killed thousands, uprooted more, and generated famine and disease. This week in the horror show saw the Saudi coalition forces bomb a bus of schoolkids, many under the age of 10. A little under 30 children were killed, . . . And this record of regional mayhem doesn’t even count the time when MBS decided it would be a great idea to invade Qatar, another U.S. ally.

It’s at this point that you begin to absorb quite how indifferent the Trump administration is to any concept of human rights. Trump’s initial response to the Saudi attacks on Qatar was to endorse them enthusiastically (even as what was left of the State Department tried to keep the peace). And his administration’s response to the Saudi assault on Canada is to take no side in the dispute. Between a barbaric absolute monarchy that jails and tortures dissidents, obliterates women’s opportunity, and crucifies criminals in the streets … and Canada, for Pete’s sake, Trump cannot pick a side. 

Despite no official relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, MBS and Netanyahu are now joined at the hip with Trump because they all want a war against Iran (and are having considerable success laying the groundwork). The Saudis are also useful to the Israelis as a way to delegitimize any genuine form of Palestinian self-determination — because the Saudis have been prepared to throw their Arab neighbors under the bus in order to fight a regime in Tehran that MBS has said “makes Hitler look good.” Trump’s hatred of Iran and Kushner’s hopes for Israel’s expansion keep this unholy trinity together. The idea that either Trump or his mute dauphin give a hoot about human rights is preposterous. The more brutal a regime’s human rights abuses are, the more likely it is that Trump admires it.

Canada will survive, of course, despite the intense international bullying from the Saudis, and America’s and Britain’s abandonment of their ally. Canada will even survive Trump (though whether America does is another matter). But to watch the West disintegrate as a moral force, even on a purely rhetorical level, is beyond depressing. And yet it appears to be our future. It’s also a much darker one for every dissident in every political prison across the planet.

Be very afraid.

Why Trump Has Such a Soft Spot for Russia

I for one continue to believe that the Trump campaign both colluded with Russia in 2016 and that Vladimir Putin in all likelihood has damaging blackmail information he is using against Donald Trump.  These conclusions are fully in keeping with how Trump has run his often shady real estate activities for decades.  Similarly, it is totally in keeping with how Putin and the Russian intelligence services have done business for decades as well. Lies, underhanded and illegal activities have been the norm for Trump and Putin.  Why expect anything different now.  Interestingly, Andrew Sullivan makes the case in a piece in New York Magazine that even if by some fluke Trump isn't under Putin's thumb, Trump would nonetheless be enthralled by Putin and seeking to take a wrecking ball to western civilization.  Trump has no morals and he views everything as a zero sum game where someone losses so that another can win.  Of course, that one who wins is Trump and his similarly morally bankrupt sycophants.   Here are excerpts:

The slackened jaws, widened eyes, and general shock that greeted his chuffed endorsement of the Kremlin over Washington this past week were understandable but misplaced. Everything Trump did in Europe — every horrifying, sick-making, embarrassing expostulation — is, in some way, consistent, and predictable, when you consider how he sees the world. It’s not a plan or a strategy as such. Trump is bereft of the attention span to sustain any of those. . . . The lies come and go. But his deeper convictions really are in plain sight.

And they are, at root, the same as those of the strongmen he associates with and most admires. The post-1945 attempt to organize the world around collective security, free trade, open societies, non-zero-sum diplomacy, and multicultural democracies is therefore close to unintelligible to him. Why on earth, in his mind, would a victorious power after a world war be … generous to its defeated foes?

There’s nothing in it for him to like. It has empowered global elites over national leaders; it has eroded national sovereignty in favor commerce and peace; it has empowered our rivals; it has spread liberal values contrary to the gut instincts of many ordinary people (including himself); . . . and it has unleashed unprecedented migration of peoples and the creation of the first truly multicultural, heterogeneous national cultures.

He wants to end all that. He always hated it, and he never understood it. That kind of complex, interdependent world requires virtues he doesn’t have and skills he doesn’t possess. He wants a world he intuitively understands: of individual nations, in which the most powerful are free to bully the others. He wants an end to transnational migration, especially from south to north. It unnerves him. He believes that warfare should be engaged not to defend the collective peace as a last resort but to plunder and occupy and threaten.

He’s the kind of person who thinks that the mafia boss at the back table is the coolest guy in the room. This is why he has such a soft spot for Russia. Its kleptocratic elites see the world in just the same way. And if you wanted to undo the international system created by the U.S., an alliance with Russia is the first step you’d take. Aligning with Moscow against London, Berlin, and Paris is critical to breaking up multilateral institutions like the E.U. and NATO. Trump is not reticent about this. His trip to NATO included the first-ever threat by a U.S. president to walk away from it entirely, and to condition Article 5 on prompt payment of dues. His visit to the U.K. began with an attempt to undermine the government of Theresa May for her attempt to prevent the hardest of Brexits. He backs the new populist anti-immigrant government in Rome, because it too threatens a common European migration policy. And he is indifferent to Russian meddling in Western elections and media because it is designed to aid exactly those forces that Trump supports, from Brexit to Le Pen, and the Trump wing of the GOP (which is now, of course, simply the GOP). Yes, it’s perfectly possible that he knowingly accepted Russian help in defeating his opponent in the last election, and is even now encouraging Russia to help him again. But that’s simply the kind of unethical thing Trump has done for years, without batting an eyelid. He sees no more conflict here than he did in seeking Russian funding and German loans for his businesses.

It seems to me he is maddened by the Mueller investigation not just because it may cast some doubt on the legitimacy of his election, but because it has impeded his attempt, alongside Putin, to reconstruct a new world order on nationalist, rather than internationalist lines.

And he knows he is immune to impeachment, because his cult followers control a third of the Senate for the foreseeable future. What he wants from Putin is simply what he has always said he wanted: an alliance to advance his and Putin’s amoral and cynical vision of world politics. Putin acts with impunity on the world stage, invading Crimea, all but annexing parts of Ukraine, poisoning enemies in England, devastating civilians in Syria, discrediting his democratic rivals — all of it amounting to Trump’s wet dream of what being a strongman is. Putin mirrors Trump’s domestic politics as well: the cultivation of the religiously orthodox and the socially conservative in defense of a kleptocratic cult. [I]f I were an Estonian or a Montenegrin I’d be nervous, wouldn’t you? If I were a German, I’d be unnerved. If I were still British, I’d be very leery of door handles. There’s no Uncle Sam to look to for help anymore. The Americans are on the other side.

And we know now that the whole Kabuki drama in which we keep asking when the GOP will resist this, or stop it, or come to its senses, is simply a category error. This is what the GOP now is. It’s an authoritarian, nationalist leadership cult, hostile to the global order.

It is not an attack on America, but on a version of America, the liberal democratic one, supported by one of the great parties in America. It is an attack on those institutions that Trump believes hurt America — like NATO and NAFTA and the E.U. It is a championing of an illiberal America, and a partnering with autocrats in a replay of old-school Great Power zero-sum politics, in which the strong pummel and exploit the weak. Trump is simultaneously vandalizing the West, while slowly building a strongman alliance that rejects every single Western value.

Be very afraid.  Of course, what is most frightening is the number of Americans - especially Republicans - who are perfectly fine with this destruction. They prefer to indulge their racism and bigotry or to fill their coffers with lot at the expense of the many with no thought that at some point they themselves may out live their usefulness to despots. I fear for the world in which my grandchildren will grow up. Decency, morality, and individual rights may be deemed worthless unless the majority of citizens acts to take back America in November.