Welcome to Act III of America's Tragedy

An America tragedy began on November 8, 2016, when an unfit, malignant narcissist won roughly 70,000 more votes spread over three states despite losing the popular vote by 3 million votes.  The tragedy was made cemented when the Electoral College certified Trump's fluke win, ignoring the intent of the Founding Fathers that electors protect the nation from electing an individual who was demonstratively unfit for office and dangerous to national security.  Since that day, the nation has been gripped in an ongoing tragedy that is only intensifying as Vichy Republicans continue to support a would be despot much as the Vichy French collaborated with their Nazi overloads during WWII.  With a large part of the federal government shutdown due to a tyrannical temper tantrum, the nation is moving into Act III, with the growing possibility of a constitutional crisis exploding any day.  Many saw this disaster on the horizon from moment the result were clear on the morning of November 9, 2016.  The question now is whether constitutional democracy will survive.  Andrew Sullivan reviews the growing tragedy and threat to American democracy.  Here are excerpts:   

When is the moment we can say that Trump has clearly gone over the line in erasing democratic and constitutional restraints on his personal power?  I’d say declaring a national emergency when there isn’t one to fund a project he can’t get through Congress pretty obviously qualifies. Wouldn’t you?

He couldn’t manage to get his wall funded when his own party controlled the entire government. He even turned down a bipartisan offer to build a “wall” in return for a path to citizenship for Dreamers last year, because he wanted a reduction in legal immigration as well. He petulantly refuses to accept greater funding for border control and immigration enforcement if his symbolic wall isn’t part of the package. He says he intends to use the military to do what a civilian border force is constitutionally designed for. He even intends to seize private land in order to construct the Great Wall of America, using a military version of “eminent domain.”

His benchmark for when an emergency begins? When Nancy Pelosi refuses to budge. Which is proof that this “emergency” is pulled out of his giant, shapeless ass.

And for all this, he has shut down much of the federal government as leverage to get his way, jeopardizing public safety and health, disrupting the lives (and now paychecks) of millions.

The words he has used to justify all of this are an assault on liberal democratic norms and the rule of law. Emergency powers do exist in the event of a national security crisis — but, as David French has noted, they only apply in an actual national emergency that “may require” the use of the military and even then only for “already authorized” construction projects “essential” to “national defense.” These laws were designed to restrain the executive through the law, not to give him carte blanche to appropriate funds Congress has designated otherwise. The laws were never designed to enable [Trump] the president to do things the Congress had never authorized (the 2006 funds for border fencing have already been used up), and which the Congress actively, indeed strongly, opposes.

There is indeed a crisis at the border — caused by a big increase in the numbers of families with children from Central America applying for asylum. But they are not trying to evade a wall, and even if they were, you couldn’t build one fast enough to stop them. Regular economic migration from Mexico is way down. The overwhelming majority of drugs come through routine ports of entry, not the open border, or, like fentanyl, through the mail from China. Almost everything [Trump] the president has said about all of this is a lie . . . . He just wants his goddamn wall, and he will shut down the government and violate the Constitution if he cannot get it. I’m not against fortifying the southern border. I would have given the man his funds to start his beloved wall a long time ago, as part of a package that would also provide much more funding for immigration courts, detention facilities, more judges, and a path to citizenship for so many caught in the horrible DACA limbo. It’s also vital to see this in a broader context. The Executive branch has been getting more and more powerful and unilateral for a long time, through Bush’s torture program up to Obama’s unconstitutional moves with respect to DACA. But Obama resorted to that in part because tribalism had spiraled, especially on the right, and what should have been complicated but manageable compromises became impossible. Our system has broken down. The Congress is effectively not functioning, elections merely rearrange the tribal deadlock, and reasoned discourse has been tweeted out of existence in the wider public space. This democracy has no effective means to govern itself, except through bitter paralysis or executive fiat.

Now we’ve added an instinctive tyrant to this equation, and the last two years have been blinking bright red for constitutional corrosion and collapse.

It was bad enough when he was fighting his own party, his own Cabinet, and all of our allies. Now he’s lost the House and fired everyone who disagreed with him in his own Cabinet. He runs the country by impulsive, often contradictory diktat, and grips other tyrants— from MBS and Sisi to Putin and Bolsonaro — more closely to his chest. With the Mueller report pending, a docile new attorney general in the wings, and a majority on the Supreme Court inclined to give the executive the benefit of the doubt, we are about to enter Act III of this tragedy.

We all knew this was coming. Our liberal democracy is in abeyance. We now wait to see what the replacement will be. It could come sooner than we think.

Be very, very afraid.

Today I Am Again Ashamed to Be An America

Other than the morning after the 2016 presidential election, I do not think I have ever felt so depressed politically and saddened by the abject moral bankruptcy of far too many Americans.  Friends and neighbors who pretend to be decent moral people continue to demonstrate that they are anything but as they support an occupant of the White House who is the living embodiment of moral bankruptcy and now, the appointment of an unfit individual to the Supreme Court.  A court whose rulings will now lack any legitimacy in the eyes of what I hope is a majority of Americans.  We got to this point, of course, thanks to those too lazy to bother to vote in 2016 and now, the country may be at the point of no return.  The midterm elections are the last chance to stop the descent into authoritarianism and the normalization of the reprehensible.  If those who stayed home in 2016 do so again, it's over,  Did truly decent Germans feel such despair when they saw Hitler cement his lock on power?  

I am not the only one despondent.  At a Hindu client's birthday party last evening (perhaps one of the most responsible and hard working communities in the country), there was lamenting about the state of affairs.  The young black male cab driver who brought me home worried what would happen under a white Christofascist controlled Court and vowed to vote and get out as many others to do so as possible. Educated white women - many of who now view "Christians" with contempt and rightfully so - who see bad omens ahead.  What unites us all is a fear that our rights (and possibly our safety) will be curtailed so that an angry minority can feel good about themselves.  We are also disturbed by the sham investigation conducted by the FBI at Der Trumpenführer's apparent direction.  As a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times notes, the "investigation" seemed to have one goal: clear Kavanaugh and ignore any witnesses that might corroborate his misdeeds.  This is what one would expect in Putin's Russia or the Soviet Union of old - or Hitler's Germany.  Here are article excerpts:

We are, at last, a Third World nation. As the FBI’s work on Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh shows, we pick and choose how justice will be served; we investigate selectively; we make decisions based on what will help the plutocrats and oligarchs; we’re blind to injustice.

Congress passes laws that harm the public while asserting that the “little guy” will benefit. Lawmakers cherry-pick facts and pretend that they’re telling the truth and then blame the opposition for omissions.

We are Turkey, we are Egypt, and the White House and the congressional majority find that acceptable.

We are a country in desperate need of a 21st century Joseph Welch — someone who will face off against abusive officials and ask them, in front of the nation, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”  In the 1950s, the country applauded. Now, the answer to Welch would be, “No, but that’s OK.”

How do we reverse the descent of America into something foul and ugly?  At this late point, voting for Democrats on November 6, 2018, is our last chance.  If Democrats can win control of the House of Representatives, perhaps the much needed investigations into Trump and Kavanaugh will belatedly take place.  A piece in the New York Times shows what could happen:

House Democrats will open an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct and perjury against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh if they win control of the House in November, Representative Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat in line to be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on Friday.

Speaking on the eve of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote this weekend, Mr. Nadler said that there was evidence that Senate Republicans and the F.B.I. had overseen a “whitewash” investigation of the allegations and that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court was at stake. He sidestepped the issue of impeachment.

“It is not something we are eager to do,” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “But the Senate having failed to do its proper constitutionally mandated job of advise and consent, we are going to have to do something to provide a check and balance, to protect the rule of law and to protect the legitimacy of one of our most important institutions.”

He said that if Democrats took power, he would expect the committee to immediately subpoena records from the White House and the F.B.I., which conducted an abbreviated supplemental background investigation into two of the misconduct claims. That document request would include communications between officials at both entities.

The committee would also seek to interview Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers and the dozens of potential witnesses they identified in recent days, most of whom were not contacted by the F.B.I. He said he would also call the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, to testify.

I pray that voters will get out and vote and set the stage for this to happen.  This is the most important election of my lifetime.  If Democrats fail to retake control the House, it's over for America.  Then the only question is whether one stays or chooses to leave.

Fall of the American Empire; the GOP's New Katrina

Thousands dying in Puerto Rico due to the Trump/Pence regime's failure to provide adequate hurricane relief seemingly failed to force far too many Americans to recognize the monster who had been elevated to the White House.  Thankfully, now - although at horrible human cost - the hideous force family separations going on at the nation's southwest border (Trump plans to double down on the barbarism) seem to be belatedly forcing recognize that Trump's election has triggered a national emergency while at the same time showing once and for all that the Republican Party is the party of cruelty and racial hatred.  The irony is that Trump's mind dead, racist and religious extremist base believes Trump is "making America great again" even as he destroys the country's moral standing in the world and is unraveling trade policies and alliances which will only diminish America economically.  One can only hope and pray - if one still believes in prayer - that the daily horrors will convince decent moral Americans and Hispanics in particular that they must turn out as never before and vote to defeat Republicans at every level come November 2018. While removing Trump and Pence from office may be difficult, the cancer they represent can be controlled. Two pieces are worthy of note.  One in Politico looks at how the cruelty on display may harm the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans want to talk about tax cuts. Instead, they’re talking about kids in cages.

Rather than touting lower taxes and a steady job market, House and Senate Republicans are being forced to answer for President Donald Trump’s contentious immigration policies — whether it’s separating migrant kids from their parents, removing DACA protections or building a border wall. And that’s likely bad news heading into November.

[A]s the White House blames Congress for the crisis at the border, GOP lawmakers are struggling to craft a proposal that unites their own party, let alone one that can win bipartisan support and become law. And with no congressional solution in sight, Hill Republicans worry that Trump’s immigration crackdown could swamp their success on the economy and overshadow all the things they want to run on in the midterm elections.

And the renewed focus on immigration is almost all self-inflicted, from Trump’s decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to his relentless focus on the border wall to his “zero tolerance” policy for border-crossers, which has already led to more than 2,300 children being separated from their parents.

Hugh Hewitt, a leading conservative media voice, raised the prospect that the family separation crisis could become “the Republicans’ new Katrina and the president’s new Katrina” in an interview with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) on Monday.

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows that 66 percent of Americans who participated in the survey oppose Trump’s move to separate migrant kids from their parents. But 55 percent of Republicans back the action.

A column in the Washington Post notes in part (take the time to view the picture and see what is being done in the name of every American citizen):

John Moore may have lost the midterm elections for the Republican Party and badly damaged the reelection prospects of President Trump. Moore is the Getty Images photographer who snapped a viral picture of a crying 2-year-old Honduran girl at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, the saying goes. But this one is worth a million tweets. In political consequence, it is like the one taken of President George W. Bush surveying the devastation of Hurricane Katrina— by peering out the window of Air Force One. As Bush himself later acknowledged, the photo made him look “detached and uncaring.” It reinforced his frat-boy image. 

Of course, Trump is nowhere near the crying Honduran girl. But his fingerprints are all over the picture. . . . Moore’s picture is of a very special category — the pain of innocent children. It is reminiscent of the one Nick Ut of the Associated Press took of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack in 1972.  

But back to the Politico piece.  Yes, you read the quote correctly: 55% of Republicans support Trump's horrific and cruel policy.  55% of Republicans support this!  Remember this on election day in November.  

As bad as the forced separation policy may be, the larger damage being done to America by the Trump/Pence regime and its Republican enablers is even more pervasive and seems intended to end the pax Americana that has existed for 70 some years.  All so Trump can appear "tough" and "winning" to his morally bankrupt base. Here are excerpts from a column in the New York Times:

The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

What do these stories have in common? Obviously they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst human being ever to hold his position. But there’s also a larger context, and it’s not just about Donald Trump. What we’re witnessing is a systematic rejection of longstanding American values — the values that actually made America great.

America has long been a powerful nation. In particular, we emerged from World War II with a level of both economic and military dominance not seen since the heyday of ancient Rome. But our role in the world was always about more than money and guns. It was also about ideals: America stood for something larger than itself — for freedom, human rights and the rule of law as universal principles.

By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty.

But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values.

The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force. (There are actually some parallels with the ancient Pax Romana, but that’s another story.) 

[T]he modern world trading system was largely the brainchild not of economists or business interests, but of Cordell Hull, F.D.R.’s long-serving secretary of state, who believed that “prosperous trade among nations” was an essential element in building an “enduring peace.” So you want to think of the postwar creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as part of the same strategy that more or less simultaneously gave rise to the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

So all the things happening now are of a piece. Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs, and breaking up trade agreements are all about ending American exceptionalism, turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations.

And rejecting our ideals won’t make us stronger; it will make us weaker. We were the leader of the free world, a moral as well as financial and military force. But we’re throwing all that away. . . . Trump isn’t making America great again; he’s trashing the things that made us great, turning us into just another bully — one whose bullying will be far less effective than he imagines.

America's National Nightmare Begins

A piece in the Boston Globe provides a timely summary of where America finds itself less than a week from the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, a possible traitor who may have collaborated with a hostile foreign government to steal the presidential election for himself.  Adding to the cause for fear is Trump's clear intention to disregard the U. S. Constitution and the fact that the Republican controlled Congress could care less.  Rather than facing up to and taking action against the perhaps the greatest threat to the nation since the Civil War, Republicans have one fixation: repealing the Affordable Healthcare Act and depriving millions of Americans of health insurance coverage and triggering a crisis within the health care industry that literally could force hospitals to file for bankruptcy close.  If there is any positive glimmer it is that Trump voters will be disproportionately harmed by the policies of the Republicans they voted into office.  Here are column highlights:

I have spent much of my life reading and writing about American politics, but nothing I’ve seen before has prepared me for what happened this week. Increasingly, it feels as though the country is careening out of control and heading straight off a cliff — and nothing can slow it down.

In the past week, admittedly sketchy allegations emerged that the Russian government might have financial and/or personal information that could be used to blackmail President-elect Trump.
 We’ve found out that the Trump campaign may have been in direct contact with the Russian government to throw the election to him. We’ve discovered that the FBI sought and eventually received a FISA warrant to look at phone calls allegedly related to this question.

We found out that the intelligence community found these claims credible enough that they brought them to the attention of both President Obama and Trump.

Information has been leaked that suggests Mike Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, phoned Russia’s ambassador the United States multiple times on the day that the Obama Administration announced sanctions against Russia for its efforts to undermine the US election.

If evidence emerges of collusion between Trump’s advisers and the Russian government, it would represent a potential constitutional crisis. That we are a week away from Trump’s inauguration and we don’t know the truth behind these allegations is terrifying.

As if this isn’t bad enough, we are also a week away from what will unambiguously be a constitutional crisis — namely Trump’s refusal to disentangle himself from his various business enterprises. It’s not an exaggeration to say that at the moment Trump takes the oath of office, he will be in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bans the president from taking gifts or payments from a foreign entity or individual. Since Trump does not believe that conflict of interest laws apply to him at all and that he’s under no obligation to ensure that he is not profiting from being president, he will take office under an ethical cloud that we’ve never seen in the 240-year history of the United States.

 Republicans in Congress are too busy pushing forward with a plan to repeal Obamacare and in the process, take health insurance away from 20-30 million Americans. They are doing this with minimal debate and with no effort to engage Democrats, the American people, or those who are at risk of losing insurance coverage. Worst of all, there is zero indication that Republicans fully appreciate the potentially catastrophic consequences of what they are preparing to do.

Meanwhile, the president-elect is giving press conferences in which he is bashing the news media for reporting stories he doesn’t like and branding it, falsely, as fake news. 

Taken all together, this confluence of events represents perhaps the most profound political crisis that this country has faced since Watergate. We have a president-elect fully prepared to violate the Constitution. We have allegations that his advisers might have worked directly with a foreign government to win the presidential election and who could also, potentially, be blackmailed by that same government. We have a Congress indifferent to these potential crises and focused instead on repealing legislation that will literally cause the premature deaths of thousands of Americans.

It’s almost hard to take all of this in. It’s a disorienting and surreal moment in our history and the worst part is that last week might have represented the calm before the true storm.

CIA Assessment: Russia Sought to Help Trump Win

One of the sad and frightening ironies is that many in rural America who seemingly have less intelligence than Sarah Palin, the idiot of Wasilla, and who view themselves as "real Americans" allowed themselves to be played by a former KGB operative who now sees himself as Russia's new tsar.  As the New York Times and other real news outlets report, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have concluded "that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump."  That Vladimir Putin sought to see Donald Trump elected ought to have been a blaring clarion to anyone rational that Trump is toxic to both the best interest of America and to the survival of democracy itself.  At an LGBT holiday party last evening in Williamsburg heavily populated by LGBT activists, professionals and academics from William & Mary University, the shock at the stupidity/idiocy of Trump voters was a common theme - along with much discussion of how to form a resistance to Trumpism and the coming onslaught against LGBT rights and civil rights in general.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials. . . . Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks. 

“We now have high confidence that they hacked the D.N.C. and the R.N.C., and conspicuously released no documents” from the Republican organization, one senior administration official said, referring to the Russians.

It is unclear how many files were stolen from the Republican committee; in some cases, investigators never get a clear picture. It is also far from clear that Russia’s original intent was to support Mr. Trump, and many intelligence officials — and former officials in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign — believe that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy. The intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to help Mr. Trump was first reported by The Washington Post.

In briefings to the White House and Congress, intelligence officials, including those from the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, have identified individual Russian officials they believe were responsible. Intelligence officials and private cybersecurity companies believe that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by two different Russian cyberunits. One, called “Cozy Bear” or “A.P.T. 29” by some Western security experts, is believed to have spent months inside the D.N.C. computer network, as well as other government and political institutions, but never made public any of the documents it took. (A.P.T. stands for “Advanced Persistent Threat,” which usually describes a sophisticated state-sponsored cyberintruder.)

The other, the G.R.U.-controlled unit known as “Fancy Bear,” or “A.P.T. 28,” is believed to have created two outlets on the internet, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, to make Democratic documents public. Many of the documents were also provided to WikiLeaks, which released them over many weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

Salon pick up on the disturbing story line.  Note how many Republicans seem only too willing to allow a foreign enemy to interfere with our election results so long as their party is the beneficiary. Here are more highlights:

The Washington Post today reported that the CIA now is sure of Russia’s deliberate efforts to help elect Donald Trump as president of the United States. According to the story, “Agency briefers told the senators it was now ‘quite clear’ that electing Trump was Russia’s goal.”

In a report by the Washington Post, officials are named who say they have information related to those connected to the Russian government — the same persons who provided Wikileaks emails that were hacked from the DNC and John Podesta.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

According to several officials, [Senator Mitch] McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

 

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.

 

Trump’s transition team dismissed the findings in a statement Friday, claiming, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

          Read the full story at the Washington Post.

America democracy died on November 8, 2016. Sadly, like a patient with an as yet un-diagnosed terminal cancer, most Americans do not grasp what has happened or, in the case of Trump voters, that they have betrayed the nation and done the bidding of enemy agents.  Perhaps instead of wearing their "Make America Great Again" hats they should wear hats that say "American Traitor."  Be very, very afraid.

David Gergen on Trump: "I Knew I Didn’t Like the Son of a Bitch.”

One of the ironies of Donald Trump's "victory" is that the narcissistic egomaniac believes that he has a "mandate" to force his racist, white supremacist, nativist, xenophobic agenda on all Americans. Never mind that he lost the popular vote by some 2,300,00 votes.  And never mind that he claims he will be a "unifier" even as he  selects racist and homophobes for most of his cabinet positions.  Oh, and did I mention his "victory rallies" that look like a scaled down versions of Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies that were used to incite Hitler's more extreme followers?  For those devoid of a knowledge of history, these rallies were held from 1923 to 1938 and were basically Nazi propaganda events. If you haven't ever watched it, you need to see  Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Watch it and see if you can't see Trump doing something similar.  But back to the caption of this post.  David Gergen has seen and worked with a number of presidents over the years.  His take on Trump is a milder version of my own.  Here are highlights from The Raw Story:

Political analyst David Gergen laid bare his feelings about Donald Trump Thursday after the president elect’s first “victory tour” speech in Cincinnati, Ohio wrapped up, telling a CNN panel, “I knew I didn’t like the son of a bitch.”

Trump beat his “populist” drum throughout tonight’s speech, calling back central pillars of a divisive campaign that netted 2.3 million fewer votes than its opposition. But despite the fractured electorate demonstrated by those numbers, Gergen said Trump made it clear he is going full-steam ahead with his vision of “Make America Great Again.”

 

“I think if there was any doubt that we’re putting an end to one chapter in American history and moving to a new one, he dispelled that tonight,” Gergen said. “This is goodbye to American leadership in the world. Goodbye to globalization. He’s bringing America home. He’s going to lead a nativist, nationalistic, populist movement and if you want to join up with him fine. If you don’t, forget it.”

Gergen argued Trump’s made it clear he’s going to push his nationalist agenda “and he’s going to do it in his pugilistic, narcissistic way.”

“He’s in charge,” Gergen noted. “And he has a lot of support in the Congress. That kind of speech will fire up his base, and it’s going to leave a lot of other people—”

I will finish the phrase: behind and/or targeted as not "real Americans." If we thought Sarah Palin was toxic, I suspect that we haven't seen anything yet. 

Is the Media Putting Lipstick on the Pig, Donald Trump?

As noted previously, much of the main stream media, after normalizing Donald trump's toxic, bigotry filled campaign and constantly conveying false equivalency between trump and Hillary Clinton's "scandals", is now acting as if Trump's election and transition are normal and not an affront to decency.  I book marked a piece in The Daily Beast a while back that deserves note.  The bottom line message?  That the media and pundits alike need to stop putting lipstick on the foul demagogue known as Donald Trump.  Here are article excerpts:

What is happening in America right now is not normal.

It is not normal that a presidential candidate with no prior government or military experience, who unambiguously and repeatedly vowed to violate the Constitution should he be elected president, will soon become commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces.

It is not normal that an individual helming a vast family business empire with holdings domestic and international will soon be in a position to use the instruments of the world’s most powerful government to enrich himself and his kin.

It is not normal that the preferred candidate of conspiracy theoristslike radio host Alex Jones will soon have access to the nation’s top secrets. 

And yet here we are being told to act like all of this is normal. That the voters who willed this unmitigated disaster into being have legitimate grievances and that their collective decision must be respected. While the democratic expression of the American people should of course be respected, that does not make it respectable. To use an analogy to which our insult-strewing president-elect can relate: I refuse to put lipstick on this pig.

We’re hearing a lot these days about how this election result represents a “backlash” to left-wing political correctness gone berserk. There’s no question that many self-described liberals patronize ex-urban and rural Americans. But the call for empathy goes both ways. If it were African-Americans overwhelmingly voting for a black demagogue who bragged about “grabbin’ pussy” (imagine that!), called upon his followers to assassinate his opponent, and asked the Russians to hack her email, would we be treating this hypothetical phenomenon with even one-tenth the amount of sympathy and understanding we’re being asked to confer upon Trump voters?

To comprehend what the electorate has just done, consider that 63 percent of Americans believe Donald Trump lacks the temperament to be president, yet 20 percent of those people voted for him anyway. Figures such as this leave one asking: What sort of man would Trump have to be for his supporters—and those rationalizing their decision as deriving from anything other than ignorance, racism, and misogyny—to conclude that he is not fit to serve as president of the United States?

Would he have to be a sexual predator? A sociopath? A mountebank? What if he were the willing instrument of a subversion operation mounted by a hostile foreign power?  Because all of those things are true of the man who will be swearing the oath of office on Jan. 20.
 “Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress,” 

Rahn is right about the media’s piss-poor predictive capacities. But the normative assessment about what last week’s election result forebodes is another story entirely. Rahn and many others seem to think it justified that people who feel condescended to by liberal elites would respond to this condescension by putting a demagogic clown in the White House (whereas I’m inclined to believe such spiteful behavior confirms the condescension).

Here’s the thing: Hillary Clinton was without question a “deeply flawed candidate,” as Rahn writes. The economy is not working as well as it should be for a large number of Americans. Our society is becoming increasingly stratified in all sorts of discomfiting ways. All of these things are true. And yet none of them justifies a vote for Donald Trump.

The temptation to do so, to normalize the very disturbing things that Trump’s election portends about our democracy and the fate of the world as we know it, is entirely understandable. It’s comforting to tell ourselves that, Trump’s eccentricities aside, everything will turn out OK in the end; that American democracy is resilient and has endured far worse events.

The paradigmatic example of this reasoning’s erroneousness is Nazi Germany, where a movement that nearly destroyed Western civilization came to power democratically in one of the world’s most advanced societies. More recently, a large majority of Venezuelans voted into power Hugo Chavez, and now they’re rioting over toilet paper. Most people used to believe the Earth was flat. I have no doubt that within 40 years—if Trump doesn’t launch the Third World War he warned Clinton would plunge us into—we’ll look back on those who voted for him as the equivalent of flat-earthers.

[E]ven in the best-case scenario, where he abjures the behavior and ideas that have characterized him for 70 years and governs as some sort of latter-day Rockefeller Republican, Trump would still have irreparably poisoned our democratic culture by moving it into a post-modern realm where words and actions have no meaning. Under his reign, America risks become the sort of place where, to cite the title of Peter Pomerantsev’s brilliant book about contemporary Russia, “nothing is true and everything is possible.”

Well said.  Trump and those who voted for him are a toxic evil.  We all need to be honest about this reality and stop being apologists for the indefensible.

Are We Witnessing the End of Democracy?

Yesterday I wrote a post that looked at, at least to me, the troubling parallels between post-election 2016 America and 1933 Germany.  A column in Newsweek looks at some of the frightening future events that may befall America as Donald Trump potentially works to subvert democracy to remain in power.  Assisting him, sadly, will be the Republican Party that is increasingly willing to undermine voting rights and even the U.S. Constitution in order to rig the system before demographic change sweeps them from power.  The author makes sense, in my view, and the importance of resisting in every way possible cannot be overstated.  Here are column highlights:

Among all of the things that Donald Trump could do as president, what is the most frightening? The clear answer is that Trump and the Republicans could effectively end the prospect of free and fair elections. Before getting into that, however, we need to consider some other threats that we now face.

Sadly, there are plenty of other reasons to be scared, including Trump's threats against the free press and his promises to turn the so-called war on terror into an excuse to discriminate against people on the basis of religion, race and nationality. Foreign policy is also a disaster waiting to happen.

Then there is the misogyny. How much damage will be done to women's rights in a world where concerns about sexism and even physical assaults will be dismissed as mere oversensitivity and political correctness? Contraception, abortion, and everything else are now in the balance.

And Trump's economic proposals promise to worsen inequality and make a mockery of his claims that he would help the struggling middle class, especially his blue-collar supporters.

Still, I think that the most profound concern goes beyond all of those fundamentally important looming policy battles. Like many observers, . . . . my concern is that the rule of law in the United States might now be nearing its expiration date.

In my latest column, I argued that there is every reason to think that Trump will be eager to test every supposed limitation on his powers. Tell him that he is not allowed to do something, and his ego and vindictiveness will go into overdrive, leading him to do what he wants while shouting, "Who's gonna stop me?!"

Although government is supposed to be a system of laws and not men, however, it is real human beings in positions of leadership who must step up and stand in Trump's way. Based on the actions of the Republicans throughout the campaign, I am not confident that anyone will even try.

Even so, I do understand what must have driven NeverTrump conservative commentator David Brooks to end his first post-election op-ed with this dig: "After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think."

Even if we might (against all evidence) think that Republicans in the House would dare to impeach Trump, or that a majority of Senators could consider voting to convict him and remove him from office, why would we imagine that they would do so in a vacuum, where Trump is not intimidating them and threatening them every step of the way?

After all, the president controls the military and the FBI, as well as dozens of other agencies with not merely guns but the power to ruin people financially and even arrest them and their families. If Trump is committing impeachable offenses, why would he not use every power available to him to get his way?

For now, however, let me put aside those more dramatic elements of the threat to the rule of law and return to the specific threat that I mentioned at the beginning of this column. Trump and the Republicans have every reason to make free and fair elections a thing of the past. Indeed, they are already well on their way to success.

Republicans could not afford to allow a Democrat to serve as president, even for four years, because she would have done what she could to roll back the Republicans' quite successful voter suppression laws and tactics.

Ryan and his cohorts (including Vice President-elect Pence) could not wait for 2020, because demographic trends are already running against them and even this year their nominee could only win the electoral college by taking states where Republicans have openly engaged in voter suppression tactics.

Time was not on the Republicans' side. In order to avoid electoral oblivion, they had to make a last stand in 2016. Trump ended up being their nominee, which should have driven the Republican leadership away.

But the alternative, in their view, was worse. It was not that Clinton was actually the demon that they made her out to be, but rather that having any Democrat in power was going to make it harder for Republicans to keep changing the election rules to keep themselves in the game. This was an existential threat.

The Republicans' anti-democracy tactics, moreover, have not been limited to voter suppression efforts. There is, of course, the gerrymandered Republican majority in the House.

In some sense, this is incredibly depressing. The courts have done little to nothing to stop gerrymandering, with the result that the Republicans could keep winning the House even if they had the support of, say, only 46 percent of the voters. On the other hand, it means that the Republicans had not completely closed off the possibility of Democrats' winning back the people's house.

And this is where my story becomes one of optimism rather than resignation. Notwithstanding the apocalyptic future histories that I have written here and in my other recent columns, the reason that we all need to fight harder now is that it is simply wrong to say, "It's all over now." Even though I strongly suspect that Trump will stop at nothing to maintain power, there is still reason to fight.

The reasons to fight are thus to prevent those election-rigging strategies from being adopted in the first place, and to win future elections even if we have to overcome all of the obstacles and disadvantages that the Republicans can impose on the majority of our country.

Are We Seeing the End of The American Republic

Ironically, when the Founding Fathers created the structure of America's government, the Electoral College was envisioned as a safeguard against a demagogic strongman coming to power.  Yesterday, we saw the Electoral College deliver the presidency to precisely the type of man that the Founding Fathers feared.   Throughout this just ended campaign, I noted numerous times that I believed we were experiencing something frighteningly akin to the fall of the German Weimar Republic.  Now columnist Andrew Sullivan picks up on that train of  comparison in a piece in New York Magazine.  Here are excerpts:

We are witnessing the power of a massive populist movement that has now upended the two most stable democracies in the world — and thrown both countries into a completely unknown future. In Britain, where the polls did not pick up the latent support for withdrawal from the European Union, a new prime minister is now navigating a new social contract with the indigenous middle and working classes forged by fear of immigration and globalization. In the U.S., the movement — built on anti-political politics, economic disruption, and anti-immigration fears — had something else, far more lethal, in its bag of tricks: a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric. Britain is reeling toward a slow economic slide. America has now jumped off a constitutional cliff. It will never be the same country again. Like Brexit, this changes the core nature of this country permanently.

This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him. The party apparatus will be remade in his image. The House and Senate will fail to resist anything he proposes — and those who speak up will be primaried into oblivion. The Supreme Court may well be shifted to the far right for more than a generation to come. . . .  He will have a docile, fawning Congress for at least four years. We will not have an administration so much as a court.

They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart — and generate pseudo-stories and big lies that, absent any authoritative or trusted media, will dominate the new centers of information, Facebook or its successors. We will be in a new political and media universe in which an authoritarian cult will thrive. This is how fascists tend to govern.

The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept. He cannot bring millions of jobs back if he triggers a trade war. He cannot build a massive new wall across the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. He cannot deport millions of illegal immigrants, without massive new funding from Congress and major civil unrest. He cannot “destroy ISIS”; his very election will empower it in ways its leaders could not possibly have hoped for. He cannot both cut taxes on the rich, fund a massive new infrastructure program, boost military spending, protect entitlements, and not tip the U.S. into levels of debt even Paul Krugman might blanch at.

His support is not like that of a democratic leader but of a cult leader fused with the idea of the nation. If he fails, as he will, he will blame others, as he always does. And his cult followers will take their cue from him and no one else. “In Trump We Trust,” as his acolyte Ann Coulter titled her new book. And so there will have to be scapegoats — media institutions, the Fed, the “global conspiracy” of bankers and Davos muckety-mucks he previewed in his rankly anti-Semitic closing ad, rival politicians whom he will demolish by new names of abuse, foreign countries and leaders who do not cooperate, and doubtless civilians who will be targeted by his ranks of followers and demonized from the bully pulpit itself. The man has no impulse control and massive reserves of vengeance and hatred. In time, as his failures mount, the campaigns of vilification will therefore intensify. They will have to.

And then there will be a terror attack — or several, as he defines the global battle against terror as one against an entire religion and breathes new life into Al Qaeda and ISIS. What he does after such an attack is utterly predictable, given his past statements, and will likely decimate what civil liberties we have left. 

Every single thing we have come to know about this man all but predicts each of these things will come about. All of them portend the end of the America that the world has long known and now must fear.

I see no way to stop this at first, but some of us will have to try. And what we must seek to preserve are the core institutions that he may threaten — the courts, first of all, even if he shifts the Supreme Court to an unprecedentedly authoritarian-friendly one. Then the laws governing the rules of war, so that war crimes do not define America as their disavowal once did. Then the free press, which he will do all he can to intimidate and, if possible, bankrupt. Then the institutions he will have to destroy to achieve what he wants — an independent Department of Justice as one critical bulwark, what’s left of the FBI that will not be an instrument of his reign of revenge, our scientific institutions, and what’s left of free thought in our colleges and universities.

I will leave you with these words about what has now happened to America. Someone saw it coming a long time ago:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

That was George Washington’s Farewell Address.

A country designed to resist tyranny has now embraced it. A constitution designed to prevent democracy taking over everything has now succumbed to it. A country once defined by self-government has openly, clearly, enthusiastically delivered its fate into the hands of one man to do as he sees fit. After 240 years, an idea that once inspired the world has finally repealed itself. We the people did it.

American Literature Contemplated an Authoritarian Like Donald Trump

American writers over the years have written fictional accounts of America falling victim to a home grown dictator.  Typically, these individuals are demagogues, lie profusely and play on the hatreds and insecurities of far too many of the citizenry.  While most of us see these novels as works of fiction, with the rise of Donald Trump, some are revisiting these books and there are chilling parallels between the fictional dictators and Trump.  Frighteningly, too many people - right wing Republicans in particular - despite these warnings continue to flock to Trump's banner.  A very lengthy piece in the Washington Post looks at these disturbing parallels and, among other things, raises the question of whether true patriots will resist or join in the killing of democracy.  As readers can tell, I side with resisting.  Here are article excerpts (please read the entire piece):

Americans have seen this leader before. Boastful, deceptive, crudely charismatic. Dabbling in xenophobia and sexism, contemptuous of the rule of law, he spouts outlandish proposals that cater to the lowest instincts of those angry or frightened enough to back him. He wins the nation’s top office, triggering fears of an authoritarian, even fascistic U.S. government.

Normally, though, this leader resides safely in the pages of American fiction.

Donald Trump’s ascent to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has released a spasm of mea culpas from reporters and pollsters who failed to anticipate the biggest story in national politics — and a spate of literary and film references among those fearing a turn toward dictatorial government. It is Plato’s “Republic” that anticipated the rise of Trump. Or maybe the 2006 political comedy “Idiocracy.” Or the 1981 young-adult novel“The Wave.” Or is it Howard Beale’s mad-as-hell rants in 1976’s “Network” that truly portended the anger erupting four decades later?

In particular, two novels depicting homegrown strongmen have become ways to interpret Trump’s campaign and to imagine his presidency. Sinclair Lewis’s“It Can’t Happen Here” (1935) features a populist Democratic senator named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip who wins the White House in the late 1930s on a redistributionist platform — with a generous side order of racism — and quickly fashions a totalitarian regime purporting to speak for the nation’s Forgotten Men. Salon has dubbed it “the novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal,” while Slate’s Jacob Weisberg writes that you can’t read the book today “without flashes of Trumpian recognition.”
 Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) offers a similarly harsh vision of that era, imagining the slow implosion of a working-class Jewish family when the Republican Party nominates aviator Charles Lindbergh for the presidency in 1940. The victorious Lindy strikes a pact with Hitler, launches federal programs that break apart and resettle Jewish communities, and promotes anti-Semitic thuggery. “Roth’s novel could use another reading in light of the very real possibility that Trump might be the Republican nominee,” David Denby wrote in the New Yorker. “The counter-factual may be merging into fact just as virulently as Roth imagined.”

Reading these works in this moment, it is impossible to miss the similarities between Trump and totalitarian figures in American literature — in rhetoric, personal style and even substance. Yet the American-bred dictators are not the true protagonists. Ordinary citizens, those who must decide how to live under a leader who repudiates democratic values and institutions, are the real story. They must choose: Resist or join? Speak up or keep your head down? Fight or flee?

If Trump is elected and the fears of those crying “fascism” materialize, it is those characters and their choices that become especially relevant. In Donald Trump’s anti-America, what would you do, and who would you be?

Much as Trump claims that only he is tough enough to restore national glory, in “The Plot Against America” Lindbergh is hailed as a “man’s man who gets the impossible done by relying solely on himself.” Republican Party leaders despair over Lindy’s refusal to take any of their wise advice on how to run his campaign. Defenders believe that Lindbergh’s strength of personality will enable him to strike deals — great ones, the best ones — with the world’s bad guys. “Lindbergh can deal with Hitler, they said, Hitler respects him because he’s Lindbergh.”  Oh, and people swoon over Lindy’s cool plane, too.

Like Trump, Windrip works hard to discredit the journalists covering him. “I know the Press only too well,” he declares. “Almost all editors hide away . . . plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good.” As the novel progresses, Windrip detains them and takes over their publications, producing puff stories exalting the governing “Corpos,” members of the newly created American Corporate State and Patriotic Party.

Trump, of course, has repeatedly called the press “dishonest” and has threatened to “open up” libel laws to attack unfriendly journalists. He, too, believes the media’s job is to praise him, not to ask troublesome questions. 

The dictators whom Roth and Lewis conjure share the intolerance underlying Trump’s most controversial proposals — banning Muslims from entering the United States, building a wall straddling the U.S.-Mexico border, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants — but the fictional characters often go further and scarier. Lindbergh moves Jews from urban centers into the rural heartland through an ominous Office of American Absorption, leaving them vulnerable to anti-Semitic violence. Windrip creates concentration camps for dissidents; establishes a sham judiciary; and bars black Americans from voting, holding public office, practicing law or medicine, or teaching beyond grammar school. “Nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief,” Jessup realizes, “as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down.” How ordinary people respond to oppressive authority has been the subject of disturbing studies, from the historical writings of Hannah Arendt to the obedience experiments of psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the novelizations of Lewis and Roth, denial, opportunism, compliance, fear and violence are all at play, driven by high principle, base incentives and self-deception.

Throughout the 2016 race, conservative skeptics and GOP leaders have fantasized that Trump has simply been saying what he must to win, latching on to the fading hope that he would eventually become more “presidential.” This seemed savvy at first; now, desperate.

For others who embrace Trump, resentment is a more powerful motivator than careerism. Much has been made over the bond he has forged with white working-class voters, especially those with relatively less education — “I love the poorly educated!” the candidate gushed after the Nevada primary — and who feel abandoned in the rush toward globalization and multiculturalism. Darker is his tie with the alt-right; his tardy, unconvincing disavowals of white supremacists have done little to deter the growing insults,  threats and onlinetargeting against Jewish journalists by Trump supporters.   This bond is also found in fictional accounts of American dictatorship.