History's Verdict on Trump Will be Devastating

A biographer of Donald Trump has a column at CNN which lays out what any sentient American not motivated by racism, religious extremism and bigotry in general ought to know, namely that Trump is a disaster as president and that history will be brutal in its assessment of him.  This is particularly true of his utterly incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic where all of his defining traits - narcissism, lack of empathy, rejection of experts and objective fact, and divisiveness - are on constant display.  Hopefully, history will judge him extremely harshly,  But history needs to be equally harsh in its judgment of those who voted for him and, worse yet, continue to support him. Good, moral people cannot support an individual like Trump and his supporters - especially evangelical Christians - have shown their moral bankruptcy to the world. Here are column excerpts:

In a crisis, all is revealed.  After a lifetime devoted to avoiding responsibility and accountability -- for his lies, his deceptions, his hype, and his cruelty -- President Donald Trump has met his match in the pandemic of 2020. His bluff and bluster are powerless as thousands of Americans die and the blame falls, in part, on his failure to heed the warnings and execute a robust national response. This occurred even though a pandemic playbook had been left behind by the Obama administration.

On one level, Trump's failure can be traced to his original lie: the false image he sold to the American people in order to hide his shortcomings. Never a competent manager of complex organizations -- witness his many bankruptcies -- Trump rose to fame pitching the illusion that he was a great businessman. As he sought the presidency he used counterattacks, lies, and skillful denials to avoid answering for his record and gain the White House.

As someone who has studied Trump for years, I thought it was inevitable that he would eventually reach a moment of reckoning as president. I couldn't have imagined that it would come with the catastrophic consequences now facing the nation. . . . . Trump's profound personal shortcomings -- deficiencies of his heart and mind -- helped bring us to this moment.

The first of Trump's weaknesses? His lack of emotional intelligence and empathy, which causes him to struggle to relate to human suffering. The developer who made tenants miserable so they would move out allowing him to build luxury condos, became the president who downplayed hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico, and now barely speaks of those stricken and killed by the coronavirus. Instead, he obsesses over TV ratings . . . .
 The second of Trump's deficiencies is a habit of mind that discounts expertise and elevates convenient opinions supported by cherry-picked sources of misinformation. Businessman Trump exhibited this willful ignorance when, for example, he said the scientific connection between asbestos exposure and disease was a matter of a conspiracy carried out by mobsters. Candidate Trump discounted the expertise of experts leading the war on terror. [I]t puts America's fate into the hands of a man who was incapable of learning even from his own aides. Faced with an enemy that is literally killing people he stayed true to form as he pushed an unproven coronavirus treatment that's still under scientific review. Ignorant as he can seem, [Trump] the President seems to sense that this moment will establish his reputation in perpetuity. He said as much last week when he observed that, "the history books will never forget" America's response to the coronavirus. What he did not mention, however, is that his response to the pandemic will be examined in minute detail -- it is this prospect, the prospect of accountability, that looms over him now. Until this crisis, Trump had avoided accountability with remarkable consistency. Born into astounding wealth, he avoided accountability by persuading creditors that he was too big to fail even after he ran businesses into the ground. In politics, he deflected accountability by blaming others, especially the press and Democrats, for problems that occurred on his watch. Historians will eventually write books detailing what journalists already know about the Trump administration's dereliction of duty when the pandemic hit. America's Covid-19 death toll now passes 2,800 and the caseload exceeds 157,200 cases, But through much of the time that the number of cases was growing, the White House offered no coherent national response to the crisis. No federal agency is rallying health care workers to move to hot spots where they are needed. Instead of assertively coordinating and distributing vital equipment, the administration is letting states, hospitals, and federal agencies compete against each other. Recently Trump introduced a bit of personal petulance to this dynamic, suggesting that governors who aren't sufficiently deferential should be ignored by the White House. [Trump's] The president's complaints about not being appreciated remind us that he takes everything personally and that his personal qualities of heartlessness and intellectual dishonesty will hobble his response to our suffering. Acutely attuned to his own feelings, he's so numb to the pain of others that he avoids talking about it. . . . . Likewise, he remains devoted to discounting reliable scientific information that shows things getting worse in favor of happy talk. Meanwhile, governors across the country are demonstrating what competence, empathy, and intelligence look like. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for one, has used his televised briefings to offer accurate information and authentic human concern. . . . Where Trump repeats buzzwords and tries to sell himself as all-powerful, Cuomo demonstrates that he understands the pandemic and can communicate the facts. Cuomo has been reminding us that the worst of the crisis is just beginning. The same is true for history's assessment of President Trump. The coronavirus is immune to his manipulation and spin. It is the defining challenge of his presidency and of his life. Compared with other presidential crises, like the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina, it has occurred slowly, with ample warning, giving [Trump] the president many opportunities to act and, we see now, fail.
 The accounting will continue. And like the pandemic, it will be devastating.

It’s the Cruelty, Stupid

There are several characteristics that link Donald Trump to his hard core supporters. The first two are related: hatred towards others and a willingness - perhaps even a delight - in inflicting cruelty on these that they see as "other."  These traits are true of white supremacists and for evangelical Christian extremists as well as ultra-far right Catholics.  A third trait applies to some of my affluent Republican "friends" who are indifferent to the hate and cruelty that motivates the hard core Trump base: for them support of Trump comes from greed.  Greed in the form of wanting to avoid taxes at any cost, including countenancing cruelty to others and allowing the less fortunate to suffer. Nowhere do any of these Trump supporters embrace Christ's social gospel message.  They may feign piety and religiosity, but to the extent they do so, it is to parse Old Testament passages to condemn others while preening in their own self-bestowed self-righteousness. Am I too harsh?  I think not and, as a column in the New York Times notes, history will judge Trump and his followers harshly.  But the rest of us will be judged too based on how vigorously we opposed hate and cruelty and whether we spoke out against cruelty or simply looked the other way.  Here are column highlights:

There are tanks in the nation’s capital and concentration camps on its border. The slide of this nation into a nearly unrecognizable state continues unabated. Donald Trump is recreating America in his own image: an abominable one.

He brags about trading valentines with the ruthless North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, saying at a political rally in September: “I was really being tough. And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love, O.K.? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love.. . . .

According to Human Rights Watch, North Korea under Kim not only “restricts all civil and political liberties, including freedom of expression, assembly, association and religion,” it systematically extracts “forced, unpaid labor from its citizens,” and “women in North Korea suffer a range of sexual and gender-based abuses” that include “rape and other sexual violence and torture in detention facilities, sexual exploitation, or forced marriage of North Korean women in China, and sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination.”

And this says nothing of the hundreds of people Kim is thought to have had executed since coming to power in 2011.

And this is the man that the president of the United States brags about being in love with.

Last month Trump joked with Russia’s Vladimir Putin about getting “rid of journalists.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 28 journalists have been killed in Russia since Putin took office in 2000.

Last week in Osaka, Japan, Trump said of the Saudi crown prince: “It’s an honor to be with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a friend of mine, a man who has really done things in the last five years in terms of opening up Saudi Arabia.”

Let’s be clear: That friend is believed to have ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And, murder may in fact be too antiseptic a word. Turkish officials claim that after Khashoggi was killed, his body was hacked up with a bone saw, then disposed of.

Not only has Trump never delivered a full-throated condemnation of the Saudi leader, he plans to reward the kingdom with more arms sales unless Congress is able to stop him.

Why does the American president have such an affinity, a fetish even, for the world’s dictators while at the same time spurning many of America’s traditional allies? And how does this turn to the darkness reposition this country in the annals of history?

I believe that it speaks to a blindness, or more precisely, an indifference to cruelty. This also crops up in domestic policy, where the indifference is particularly acute when those who suffer are somehow other: black or brown, female or trans, Muslim or migrant.

I do not believe that a parent seeking asylum — which is still legal in this country, it bears repeating — should have a child ripped from his or her arms. I don’t believe that people — including children — should be caged like animals and deprived of basic human necessities and basic human dignity.

What is happening at our border is unconscionable, a violation of basic human rights, a complete moral violation. And yet the president on Thursday will make a mockery of the country’s freedom celebration by turning it into a muscle-flexing political pep rally.

Stop thinking that this is only about partisanship or polarization. It’s the cruelty, stupid. It has always been about cruelty: racial cruelty, gender cruelty, religious cruelty. It has always been about bending the rest of America, the rest of reality, really, into subordination to the white supremacist patriarchy.

If the emerging culture of the world has to be put under boot for the established culture to maintain power, so be it. This is the white supremacist mantra; this is the Trump message.

Trump cares nothing about the suffering of racial minorities here — other than to increase the pain — nor does he care about the suffering of nonwhite people abroad.

[H]istory is sitting in judgment, that when this dark era draws to a close, an accounting must be made, a record made. None of us will be immune.

The questions will come without room for equivocation or adjustment: Where were you when the bodies floated in the Rio Grande? What did you say when this president bragged about assaulting women and defended men accused of doing the same? What was your reaction when he saw very good people among the Nazis? Where was your outrage when thousands died in Puerto Rico?

What did you do? What did you say? And for others in my profession, what did you write?

I for one, will not be silent.  Would that I could do more to rid America of the pestilence that Trump and his supporters comprise. Will my Republican "friends" like this post?  Probably not, but until they take a good look at themselves in the mirror and reject these enumerated traits, America will continue its decline and degradation.  If they vote to re-elect Trump next year, I hope history will be most cruel in it judgment of them.  

Are Republicans Already Beginning to Worry About the Judgment of History?

Democrats condemning GOP white washing - will history do likewise?

Yesterday, the Republican members of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee released a report finding that the committee had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.  The report was released over the protests of Democrat members of the committee and after the Republican majority had refused to interview witnesses and/or review other evidence that might have led to a contrary finding.   Driving home I happened to catch statements of former RNC chair Michael Steele who suggested that history might be far less than kind to these Republicans.  Indeed, in my own mind - and I am a former Republican myself - the House Intelligence Committee Republicans opted to side with possible, if not likely, treason.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at some GOP members of the committee who seem to be trying to cover their despicable behinds.  Here are article excerpts:

The leader of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation seemed to back off Tuesday from the most surprising finding in the GOP’s report that Russia was not trying to help President Trump, as the panel’s top Democrat trashed the product as a political gift to the White House.

Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.) told reporters Tuesday that “it’s clear [Russian officials] were trying to hurt Hillary [Clinton]” by interfering in the 2016 election and that “everybody gets to make up their own mind whether they were trying to hurt Hillary, help Trump, it’s kind of glass half full, glass half empty.”

That equivalence stands in sharp contrast to the conclusions of a 150-page GOP-drafted report Conaway announced to the news media on Monday that concludes that the intelligence community “didn’t meet the standards” of proof necessary to determine that Russia meddled in the 2016 election with the aim of helping Trump.

His comments came after other panel Republicans, including Reps. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) gave interviews in which they stressed that there was evidence that Russia had tried to damage Clinton’s candidacy.

The report’s findings on Russia’s intentions in interfering is just one area of the document with which Democrats on the panel took issue Tuesday after being presented with it in the morning.

The panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who called the report “not a serious work,” said the document was proof that Republicans were willing only to “go through the motions of an investigation . . . to give the pretense of trying to find the truth.”

Schiff added that the report was “little more than another Nunes memo in long form,” . . . . Democrats accused Republicans of using the Nunes memo to undermine the Russia investigation — a charge they also applied to Tuesday’s GOP report.
 Schiff and other Democrats on the committee released a 22-page “status update” Tuesday night, listing the various witnesses, firms and documents the panel had declined to subpoena or otherwise examine, along with the reasons that each would be relevant to the investigation. It also lays out areas of inquiry that the minority members say the GOP abandoned by terminating the probe earlier than Democrats would have liked. Democratic committee members pledged to forge ahead with the investigation and eventually issue their own report, although they do not have the ability to subpoena witnesses and other information without the panel chairman’s buy-in.

They reserved special vitriol for the GOP’s decision not to more aggressively pursue uncooperative witnesses such as former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, whom Conaway had previously considered holding in contempt.

Schiff said. “This majority doesn’t want to know the answers, and it has set a precedent now that will affect future congresses’ ability to get answers from the executive.”

Like too many Republicans of today, German politicians in the late 1920's ands early 1930's sold their souls to Hitler and the Nazi Party for what they saw as short term advantage.  Long term they sold their souls and have been damned by history and left their descendants  bearing a burden of shame.   I truly do not understand the mindset that predominates within today's Republican Party. 

Donald Trump: None Dare Call it Treason

Today the Electoral College will vote and, if it confirms the election of Donald Trump, I suspect that future historians will note that today was the day that the 227 year old American republic died.  True, the trappings of the republic will linger for a while just as the Roman Senate and other offices of the Roman Republic lingered after Augustus made himself emperor.  But the constitution will have been gutted and America that all of us grew up in until now will be dead.  What I find most disturbing is that far too many Americans simply do not seem to care.  The situation is eerily similar to 1933 Germany when indifference and intellectual laziness and selfishness set Germany and the world on a course for disaster.  Similarly, few want to call out Trump for what he is: a traitor.  Bill Moyers has a piece that looks at what too few are to cowardly  to say.  Here are highlights:

Now that the CIA has determined that the Russians intervened in the presidential election to help Trump win, the Cold War politics of left and right have been flipped. If Stormer rewrote his book for 2016, its thesis might go like this:

Beware of Donald Trump. Witlessly or willfully, he’s doing the Kremlin’s bidding. Anyone who enables him — on his payroll or in the press, by sucking up or by silence, out of good will or cowardice — is Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. This is a national emergency, and treating it like normal is criminally negligent of our duty to American democracy.

Trump as traitor: I can just imagine the reaction from the Tower penthouse. Lying media. Paranoid hyperbole. Partisan libel. Sour grapes. A pathetic bid for clicks. A desperate assault on the will of the people. Sad! (Note to the tweeter-in-chief: You’re welcome.)

As a kid in a New Jersey household where Adlai Stevenson was worshipped, I thought Stormer was a nut job, so I won’t pretend that accepting the modern inverse of his case is a no-brainer. I’m also not trying to recast my political differences with the president-elect as a national security crisis. Trump won. Elections have consequences. I get that.

I may not like it, but I’m not surprised that Trump tapped Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a crusading climate change denier and an advocate of dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, to run the EPA, presumably into the ground.

I’m infuriated, but not startled that Trump refuses to disclose his tax returns, divest his assets, create a credible blind trust, obey the constitutional prohibition of foreign emoluments or eliminate the conflict between fattening his family fortune and advancing American interests. That’s not draining the swamp, it’s drinking it.

It’s abysmal that Democrats didn’t have a good enough jobs message to convince enough Rust Belt voters to choose their economic alternative to Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. It’s disgraceful that the media normalized Trump, propagated his lies, monetized his notoriety and lapped up his tweet porn. It’s maddening that the Electoral College apportions ballot power inequitably. But as enervating as any of that is, none of it is as dangerous to democracy as the CIA’s finding that Putin hacked the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. Without firing a single shot, the Kremlin is weeks away from installing its puppet in the White House.

It’s entirely conceivable that Russia has something on Trump. They may hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Trump debt. They may have spousally unsettling video of him — a KGB specialty, and a plausible Trump susceptibility. Surely the Kremlin has mapped his character disorder. In the third debate, when Trump said Putin had no respect for Clinton, and she shot back, “Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president,” Trump’s interruption — “No puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet, no, you’re the puppet” — sounded like a third-grader. Actually, it was a confession, what clinicians call projective identification. Putin’s psy ops must know every such string on him to play.

Trump blew off the Kremlin’s intervention in our election the way Putin denied Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Do we call that a lie, too? 

Maybe there’s a better word we should dare to use.

Illinois Becomes Fifteenth State To Approve Gay Marriage

While Virginians continue to bite their finger nails awaiting final election results (NBC and CBS have both now called the election for McAuliffe), on the positive news front, Illinois passed gay marriage today, bringing the tally to 15 states plus the District of Columbia that afford sames sex couples equal marriage rights.  Queerty has details.  Here are some highlights:

It was a long and bumpy ride, but the quest for marriage equality in Illinois has finally succeeded. The state House of Representatives voted 61-54 in favor of a marriage measure on Tuesday, clearing the final hurdle for the bill. Gov. Pat Quinn has already said he will sign the bill, which will make Illinois the fifteenth state to approve marriage equality. The state will begin to issue marriage licenses on June 1, 2014.

“To treat all our citizens equally in the eyes of the law we must change this,” Rep. Greg Harris, the sponsor of the bill, said on the floor. “Families have been kept apart.”

There was plenty of drama in the months leading up to the vote. The state Senate passed the bill last February. The House considered the measure last May, but after an agonizing period of prevarication couldn’t muster the votes for passage. Meantime, the state Republican party was roiled by internal division, as the state party chair Pat Brady was ultimately pushed from his job because of his support for marriage equality. (Brady was subsequently hired to lobby for the bill, so he wins last-laugh rights.)

The bill now goes back to the Senate to be reconciled with the measure that it passed 9 months ago. Illinois is another in an unending string of losses for religious conservatives trying to stem the tide of marriage equality. “A ‘no’ vote today does not mean you’re a bigot. It doesn’t mean you’re homophobic,” said Rep. Tom Morrison, who voted against the measure. History may think differently.

The Christofascists and their political whores in the Republican Party are fighting a losing rear guard battle.  Personally, I believe history will have a very dim view of them and, contrary to what Rep. Morrison stated, a "No" vote DOES make you a bigot. 

Rhode Island Becomes 10th State To Approve Marriage Equality

The gay haters and Christofascists at the National Organization for marriage have not had a good last week and a half.  Uruguay and France approved gay marriage despite the efforts of NOM allies and now Rhode Island has joined the ranks of American states granting full marriage rights to gay couples.  And the Rhode Island Senate vote occurred despite extreme efforts by NOM and the Roman Catholic Church to intimidate senators into voting against the bill.  Worse yet in the eyes of the NOM hate merchants, Delaware seems possibly poised to follow Rhode Island's example - e.g., the Delaware House passed a gay marriage bill today.   Think Progress looks at the developments in Rhode Island today.  Here are excerpts:

The Rhode Island Senate just voted 26-12 to approve marriage equality, guaranteeing that The Ocean State will be the 10th state to allow same-sex couples to legally marry. Because the Senate made some revisions to the bill, it still requires a final passage in the Rhode Island House, which will likely happen next Thursday. Back in January, it passed easily there by an overwhelming 51-19 vote. Gov. Lincoln Chafee (I) has promised to sign the bill.

During today’s discussion, only one amendment was advanced, which would have allowed a referendum on the question, and it was defeated by a 10-28 vote. A similar proposal failed in committee on Wednesday. Though numerous religious exemptions allowing discrimination watered down the civil unions bill passed in 2011, no such amendments were offered for this bill. Rhode Island Sen. Harold Metts (D) was one of the few Senators who spoke extensively in opposition to the bill, launching into a 12-minute religious condemnation of same-sex marriage. Sen. James Doyle (D), who just came out for marriage equality a month ago, countered that if he gets to Heaven and the Lord’s first concern is how he voted on same-sex marriage, then he’s “doing pretty good.” Sen. Maryellen Goodwin (D) notably changed her position to support the bill just before the vote, adding that she was voting on the side of love.

Not only will Rhode Island be the 10th state (plus the District of Columbia) to allow marriage equality, but with it, all of New England will now recognize same-sex couples’s marriages.

 The trend line of history is clear.  The question is whether or not the justices of the U. S. Supreme Court will have the courage to embrace equality under the civil laws for ALL citizens.