The Nightmare in the White House

While the nation goes into lock down and the economy heads towards a collapse, the malignant narcissist in the White House does what he always does: lies nonstop and throws out boasts to inflate his insatiable ego.  When not lying outright, Trump attacks those in the media trying to get out the truth and accurate information and throws governors - including Republican governors who have previously prostituted themselves to Trump - to their own devices in protecting their citizens. Frank Rich has a column in New York Magazine looks at the ongoing lack of honesty and glaring failed leadership in the White House even as Trump sycophants try to change the subject from the failure of the Trump regime to prepare for the pandemic. Here are column excerpts:

As the coronavirus-related layoffs and medical needs pile up, experts are concluding that a strong federal response is needed. Is the Trump administration capable of rising to the occasion?

The president who is leading this country into battle cares about no one but himself, continues to lie to Americans daily about the most basic imperatives of a public-health catastrophe, and presides over an administration staffed with incompetent, third-tier bootlickers and grifters. And I am not just talking about Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and Wilbur Ross. There are now three college seniors serving in White House positions, thanks to a new purge of ostensibly disloyal staffers being conducted by Trump’s former body man, the 29-year-old John McEntee, recently installed as director of the Presidential Personnel Office. Trump calls himself a “wartime president,” but his only previous wartime experience was partying during Vietnam, when he was spared military service because of “bone spurs.” Those bone spurs long ago migrated to his brain. If America rises to the occasion, it will be despite him, not because of him. We’re at the point where even if Trump were to start telling the truth, no one except the most mad-dog MAGA-ites would believe him.

Right now the country is waiting for a bomb to drop: that much-predicted turning point when the metastasis of illness and mass death in the U.S. could match the curve we’ve seen in Italy. Trump’s nonstop lies — and those of toadies like Pence — are not just intended to cover up the many failures to prepare for the looming apocalypse (“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”), or to blame those failures on China and Obama, or to luxuriate in unearned self-congratulation (“I’d rate it a 10”). What the lies are doing now is throwing gasoline on the gathering fire.

Why does a president cite the Defense Protection Act, which allows him to commandeer industry to produce emergency supplies, while simultaneously telling the states to find much-needed ventilators on their own?

Trump’s answer to that last question was that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” He seemed not to understand that it’s ventilators that the nation’s hospitals urgently need, not the postal service. Such is his minimal comprehension of the urgent tasks at hand that Trump’s level of competence doesn’t rise to that of the skipper of the Titanic. The Titanic’s captain may have hit an iceberg, but at least he recognized the scientific reality that icebergs exist.

Up until now Trump’s motives for lying have been to (1) cover up what may prove the most catastrophic failure in the history of the American presidency; (2) to distract the country from the continuing failure in the effort to keep his reelection campaign afloat; (3) to boost the stock market. But another motive is emerging that’s entirely in keeping with the history to date of Trump’s kleptocratic White House: rewarding his family and cronies financially.

Based on his [Jared Kushner] and his father-in-law’s past behavior, we have every reason to believe that entrepreneurs in the Mar-a-Lago circuit, assuming they are not killed off by the virus, will benefit from any bailouts crafted by the White House and Republicans in Congress, starting perhaps with casino entrepreneurs like Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

This is in keeping with a president who remains passive as athletes and celebrities mysteriously cut the long line to be tested for the coronavirus. It is in keeping with a Vichy Republican Party where the senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler were dumping stocks pre-crash, seemingly exploiting inside information about the coming fiasco for huge personal profit while keeping their own voters in the dark about it. Today Tucker Carlson is receiving some applause for being a rare truth-teller on Fox News because last night he called out Burr in no uncertain terms: “There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis.”

By now, a number of promises Donald Trump has made directly to the press — universal access to testing, a nationwide medical-screening website, the deployment of hospital ships — have failed to pan out after initially receiving breathless headlines. Should the press change the way it covers Trump’s promises?

The challenge to the press remains what it’s been from the start: How do you challenge a lying president on the facts in real time when he is lying as fast as he can speak? The difference now is that more than ever lives are dependent on Americans getting the truth.

Change is needed, and it will require collaboration of the best brains in the news business to reinvent practices and formats. Even hours after Trump had floated bogus miracle drugs before the public yesterday, at least one network evening news broadcast was teasing the story with a hopeful headline before disemboweling it.

Did Trump Appoint a Raging Homophobe to an Advisory Council?

The Trump/Pence regime has had an open door policy toward some of the most extreme homophobes and Christofascists, some of whom claim to be on a "Faith Advisory Council."  Some of these individuals include Tony Perkins of Family Research Council who has documented white supremacist ties (and who boasts of his access to Trump), and noted "Christian" grifters Franklin Graham and Jerry Fallwell, Jr., each of whom routinely use religion and preying on the gullible to enrich themselves. Now, Tim Wildmon of American Family Association ("AFA"), perhaps one of the most rabid anti-gay organizations of them all which routinely disseminates off the charts outright lies and falsehoods (hence a perfect fit with Trump) claims to have been appointed to this Council.  Perhaps embarrassed by Wildmon's off the charts lunacy, the White House is denying that Wildmon received any such appointment and the that the Council exists. A piece in The Advocate looks at the competing claims.  Here are excerpts: 

Tim Wildmon, president of the virulently anti-LGBTQ American Family Association, announced Monday that he had been named to Donald Trump’s Faith Advisory Council — but on Wednesday, a White House spokesman said there had been no such appointment, nor is there any such council.

“I have no idea what he’s talking about,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere told the Washington Blade. “There is no such thing as a White House Faith Council or Advisory Board. There is a Faith & Opportunity Initiative led by an adviser, Pastor Paula White, but it does not include a council or advisory board.”

But the AFA had sent out a press release Monday saying Wildmon had joined the body, which it said is “made up of key leaders who support and help guide the president’s faith-based initiatives, give insight on policy important to evangelicals and, most importantly, pray for the president.” It said other members of the council include White and such well-known Christian right figures as Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and Jerry Falwell Jr., all of whom have worked with Trump on various projects. . . . The press release is still posted on the AFA’s website.

The AFA, based in Tupelo, Miss., is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a progressive watchdog organization, as a hate group because of the dangerous misinformation it spreads about LGBTQ people. It considers homosexuality a sin, as many religions do, but it seeks to infuse public policy with that belief. It is also deeply transphobic, having often portrayed transgender people as predatory, and antichoice, with a recent blog post saying billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett is going to hell because of his support for reproductive rights.

Bryan Fischer, who hosts a radio show for the AFA and blogs on its website, is one of the most hateful commentators in the nation, demonizing LGBTQ people, feminists, Mormons, Muslims, and many other groups. He recently wrote that when the Hallmark Channel agreed to re-air a wedding planner’s ads featuring a lesbian couple, it was caving to the “gay gestapo.” One Million Moms, an AFA offshoot, was one of the groups that had campaigned against the ads.

The Blade sought comment from the AFA on the conflicting reports about Wildmon’s appointment but has so far not received anything. The Advocate has put in its own request for comment with the AFA’s public relations representative, Hamilton Strategies, but also has not received a response.

The Right’s Grifter Problem

Having followed the far right for over two decades, one phenomenon has been constant: groups of bogus experts and supposed lobbyists who are little more than leeches who enrich themselves by fleecing the gullible and ignorant.  Evangelical Christians (who typically have the lowest levels of education) seem to be among the easiest marks for these grifters as exemplified by both scamvangelists - think Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham and a host of others - who live the lives of multi-millionaires as they cajole those struggling financially to tithe to their organizations and "ministries." In the far right political realm, things are little better.  The ignorant and gullible are played time and time again by appeals to their bigotry and/or extremism to hand over money so the scammers and con-artists can live the good life. This situation existed long before Trump, but he has played upon the ease with which much of the so-called conservative base can be suckered.   A piece in National Review and another in New York Magazine look at this ongoing phenomenon of the right.  The National Review piece begins by providing a list of political action committees and groups that have one thing in common: they take in tons of money and very little of it ever gets to the supposed cause. Here's a sampling of what follows:

Politico didn’t specify which 33 PACs they reviewed; if their list overlaps entirely with the RightWingNews list, then the total sum listed above would be $127 million; if they don’t overlap at all, it would be $177 million. That is money that could have gone directly to candidates’ campaigns or other actions that would have advanced the conservative cause in recent cycles. But instead it went into more fundraising expenses, more overhead costs, or into the pockets of those running these PACs.

Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or sent letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.

What’s more, most of these PACs thrive on telling conservative grassroots things that aren’t true. Clarke didn’t want to run for Senate in Wisconsin, Laura Ingraham wasn’t interested in running for Senate in Virginia, and Allen West wasn’t running for Senate in Florida. The PACs propagate a narrative in which they’re the heroic crusaders for conservative values, secure borders and freedom, up against corrupt establishment elites . . . when they’re in fact run by those coastal political operatives and keeping most of the money for their own operations.

We can apply this beyond the realm of politics, as well. Why is America not enjoying a widespread revival of Christian values? There are a bunch of reasons, but we can start with televangelist Kenneth Copeland attempting to justify his purchase of a third private plane, a Gulfstream V.  Copeland’s excuse was that flying commercial “like getting into a long tube with a bunch of demons.” I’m pretty sure I’ve sat next to the passengers he’s describing, and we all got through it okay.

Progressives ought to be cheering the ease with which those on the right get fleeced literally daily.  The New York Magazine continues the examination of this reality and the fact that the right complained about Obama era efforts to stop the frauds:

Republicans have long complained, usually in private, that their fundraising apparatus is overrun with fraudsters. National Review’s Jim Geraghty has a column, “The Right’s Grifter Problem,” saying what many of them have been whispering. Many of President Trump’s most publicly strident loyalists are in the business of raising money for political projects that spend virtually all their funds on operating expenses. 

An unstated irony behind Geraghty’s complaint is that there is an agency tasked with overseeing the kind of misconduct he denounces: the IRS. When the first wave of tea-party scam PACs appeared, the IRS did look into them. Republicans insisted the agency was “targeting” the right for political reasons, probably at the behest of the Obama administration. While they spent years investigating the agency and making wild charges, a series of investigations by the agency’s inspector general, the Senate Finance Committee, and the Department of Justice refuted all their claims. The Obama administration had no involvement in the IRS’s enforcement priorities, and the agency was not even targeting the right at all — its criteria for regulating donors included keywords to search for activists on the left as well as the right. It was in fact clear all along the tea-party fundraising apparatus was rife with grifters. Stephanie Mencimer reported a clearheaded analysis of this in 2013, at the height of the “targeting” hysteria. But Republicans did succeed in their goal of harassing the agency into leaving political donors almost totally unscrutinized. The ironic result is that it has left their own party vulnerable to the financial parasites they rallied to protect themselves from.

The fact Republicans have rejected the conclusions of all these investigations and clung to their targeting theory tells you a lot about the intellectual environment that has proved so welcoming for grifters.

Geraghty’s column lacks any operating theory as to why Republican politics in particular has attracted so many grifters. Such types have exploited two long-standing aspects of conservative thought: a tendency toward Manichaean thinking and a rejection of neutral expertise.

Every victory for the Democratic Party or incremental extension of the welfare state is a twilight struggle to safeguard the last flickering hopes for freedom from the ravages of socialism.

These predictions are not just scare tactics. They reflect the authentic ideology of the American right, which treats liberalism as either indistinguishable from, or an unstoppably slippery slope toward, Bolshevistic central planning. But these beliefs are also very effective as scare tactics. Conservative fears that Democrats will usher in total societal collapse are good ways to scare conservatives into buying gold (an especially lucrative Obama-era conservative grift) or guns.

The right hardly has a monopoly on fearful predictions, of course. But their impact is magnified by the conservative distrust of the intellectual elite. Conservatives have spent decades training their supporters to reject the authority of bureaucrats, professors, the media, or any institution not explicitly committed to the right-wing agenda. Thus kook notions like the Laffer curve and climate-science denial have become cherished precepts of Republican Party thought.

The most supreme unstated irony of Geraghty’s complaint is that Trump himself is a grifter. This is true not only in the general sense of Trump’s lying constantly and exploiting his supporters’ loyalty, but also in the specific sense that Trump ran fraudulent business enterprises.

So it seems a little strange for Geraghty to complain that Republican grifters are letting down President Trump. Donald Trump grifted his way to the presidency and has kept on grifting. It seems positively unfair that his fellow grifters should have to stand down while he keeps wetting his beak. Geraghty complains that many tea-party groups are a “pyramid scheme,” but the essence of a pyramid scheme is that they connect a partnership of con artists with the greatest share of profits flowing to the person at the top.

The fact that the conservative media can publish a column entitled “The Right’s Grifter Problem,” and that the column will depict Donald Trump as a victim rather than a perpetrator, tells you most of what you need to know about why the phenomenon exists in the first place.

Let's hope the right never wises up! 

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.