America's Other Contagion: Conservative Irrationality

America continues to reel from the coronaviris pandemic - a situation made worse by the Trump/Pence regime's delayed reaction and initial ignoring of the warnings coming from numerous experts.  Now, the same mindset that set the stage for a worsened impact on the nation is being exhibited by many on the right who want to prematurely "reopen the economy," largely out of fears that following the advice of medical experts will dim Donald Trump's re-election chances.  And for Trump, it is always only about him.  Increased deaths is I suspect an easy trade off in his mind if it improves his re-election outlook.  Thankfully, Trump cannot force governors and mayors to drop socially distancing orders and we may be saved from the embrace of "alternate facts" by the increasingly irrational right wing.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Trump/the right's continued refusal to accept medical and scientific fact.  Here are excerpts:

The most dangerous contagion we now confront is the coronavirus, which has killed more than 20,000 Americans and thrown more than 16 million out of work. The second-most-dangerous contagion is the conspiracy-mongering, hostility to science and outright irrationality promulgated by President Trump and his loudmouth media enablers. It will take intensive contact tracing to follow the spread of crackpot ideas: Is Trump infecting the cable news hosts, or are they infecting him? Suffice it to say, [Trump] the president and his media fans are both afflicted with perilous misconceptions that are making the threat from the coronavirus far more acute.

At first, both Trump and his media toadies dismissed the threat from the coronavirus, claiming it was no worse than the flu and that it would miraculously disappear by April. Any suggestion that Trump was mishandling the threat was dismissed as a “hoax.” Then on March 13, Trump finally declared a national emergency, and the tone among the Fox News propagandists instantly changed — from deriding concern about the coronavirus among liberal bed-wetters to lauding Trump’s heroic wartime leadership.

The new resolve did not last long: Within days, the drum beat on the right evolved into “the cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Conservative talking heads argued that the economy had to be reopened even if it meant sacrificing the lives of the aged and infirm who are most vulnerable to covid-19. Trump was listening: On March 24, he announced that he would “love” to restart the economy by Easter.

On March 29, Trump had spoken of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths as a likely scenario. Now an influential model from the University of Washington projects “only” 61,545 coronavirus deaths. (Other models are more pessimistic.) But instead of concluding that social distancing works, many on the right are now arguing, with characteristic illogic, that the threat was overhyped all along and that we can all go back to work.

There is even a budding subculture of coronavirus truthers who claim that death figures are exaggerated by a liberal media conspiracy to make Trump look bad. Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, Brit Hume and “Diamond & Silk,” among others, have all claimed that, as Hume put it, the “fatality numbers are inflated.” In fact, the official death toll is likely a vast underestimate because so many people are dying without being diagnosed with covid-19.

But because the Trumpified right lives in a world of “alternative facts,” we are back to where we were a few weeks ago, with many conservative commentators and administration officials once again braying for the economy to reopen. Trump — Fox viewer No. 1 — is listening intently, and he is receptive to the message because he is seeing his poll numbers fall as the unemployment numbers rise.

Internal government projections, reported by the New York Times, show that “if the administration lifts the 30-day stay-at-home orders, the death total is estimated to reach 200,000.”

The consensus of experts — you know, the people whom right-wingers don’t listen to — is that it will be impossible to lift social distancing requirements until much more widespread testing and contact tracing are in place.

It’s hard to talk sense into [Trump] a president who thinks that a virus can be defeated by antibiotics. Public health officials such as Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx are like the passengers in a car that Trump is slowly driving down a winding mountain road: Can they convince the president that we won’t get to our destination faster by simply going straight off the cliff?

Few Voters Think Trump Cares About "People Like Me"

I continue to be shocked by how lacking in intelligence many Americans appear to be - like the supposed 49% who think Donald Trump is doing a "good job" handling the coronavirus crisis.  How can this be when some news outlets are beginning to cease coverage of his press conferences because they are so filled with lies and untruths.  Meanwhile, Trump wants to end social distancing perhaps by the end of net week to spur on the economy even though medical experts say this could lead to a large number of deaths. The only positive news is that Americans as a whole are coming to realize that Trump cares nothing for what these citizens would describe as "people like me."    A piece in the Washington Post looks at this realization that is long, long overdue.  Trump may pander to the racism and/or religious extremism of his base, but he cares nothing about them as living, breathing people.  Here are article highlights:

As both a presidential candidate and president, Donald Trump has been said to have a special connection to “ordinary Americans” or “average Americans” while his “elitist” opponents are said to look down on them.

Of course, Trump’s fame and wealth make him as much an elite as, say, the party’s previous presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. But Romney was widely derided as an out-of-touch plutocrat, a characterization that squared with decades of polling on voter beliefs about the class interests of GOP politicians. Trump, by contrast, was called “the people’s billionaire” and credited for his populist appeal, . . . .

But three years into his presidency, most Americans do not perceive Trump as particularly concerned about the middle class, the poor or people like them. They do see him as concerned about the wealthy, however. In fact, Trump is perceived no differently than Romney was at the end of the 2012 presidential campaign. Instead, it is Trump’s likely Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who is more widely perceived as sympathetic to the middle class. A president who once seemed ready to remake the GOP brand has been recast in its image — and that could have consequences for his reelection.

One way to show how voters perceive the interests of politicians is to ask Americans how well different leaders are described by the phrases “cares about the wealthy,” “cares about the middle class,” “cares about the poor” and “cares about people like me.” When respondents were asked these questions about Romney in a YouGov survey conducted right before Election Day in 2012, 88 percent said that “cares about the wealthy” described Romney somewhat well or very well.

By contrast, 56 percent of Americans thought that Obama cared about the wealthy. Compared to Romney, more said that Obama cared about the middle class (57 percent), the poor (61 percent) and “people like me” (54 percent). In 2016, it looked as if Trump might be different than Romney. . . . . But as of today, Trump does not look much different than Romney did. In a March 2020 Democracy Fund-UCLA Nationscape survey, the vast majority of Americans (83 percent) said that Trump cares about the wealthy — many more than said he cares about the middle class (45 percent), poor (38 percent), and “people like me” (40 percent). Indeed, 74 percent of independents and even 23 percent of Republicans said that Trump did not care about “people like me.” If anything, Americans may see Trump as less in touch with ordinary Americans than Romney was. Meanwhile, many fewer Americans view Biden and especially Sanders as sympathetic to the wealthy (61 percent and 41 percent, respectively). More Americans describe them as sympathetic to the middle class, the poor, and people like me. These differences in how Americans perceive Democratic and Republican candidates reflect broader images of the two political parties. Early on, it appeared that Trump could change the GOP’s image. In his speech announcing his candidacy, he famously promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, which are crucial to many Americans of modest means. But Trump has governed much like a traditional Republican. The tax law he signed gave the largest tax breaks to the wealthy. His administration has proposed changes that could reduce the number of poor people eligible for Medicaid and for food stamps. He has even flirted with cuts to Medicare and Social Security, . . . . Today Trump embodies the GOP’s long-standing image as the party of the rich. The likely economic devastation caused by the coronavirus complicates Trump’s ability to claim, as he did in his State of the Union address barely two months ago, that we were in the midst of a “blue-collar boom.”

And Trump’s struggle to communicate sympathy for people with the virus or fearful of its effects makes it difficult for him to project a different image as a leader. Democrats were already arguing that, as Biden put it, Trump has “no empathy” for the middle class. That line of attack may be even more tempting if the virus and ensuing recession continue to wreak havoc in the lives of ordinary Americans.

[P]erceptions of the presidential candidates’ empathy are no magical predictor of who will win the election. . . . . But public perception of Trump matters whether he wins or loses in November. The apparent fragility of his populist image shows how even politicians who appear to be “outsiders” flouting the norms and orthodoxies of their political party struggle to escape long-standing party stereotypes.

Message to Republicans: You Can’t Gaslight a Virus

Donald Trump and his supporters live in a bizarre alternate universe where facts do not matter and lies are offered as truth.  In right wing politics this has worked to a large extent as Trump denies climate change and invents lies against hi political opponents,  This alternate universe appears poised to crash head on with objective reality as the coronavirus continues to spread in the USA (there are now cases in Virginia, but so far only in Northern Virginia) and the Trump/Pence regime increasingly demonstrates that it is not up to the task of dealing with the outbreak. Meanwhile, the world's stock markets continue to drop and trade and travel become increasingly disrupted. A column in the New York Times looks at the fact that gaslighting the public as Trump has done for so long may have met its match and that Trump himself is now a public health threat.  Here are column highlights:

In the Donald Trump era, Democrats and Republicans generally live with two completely different concepts of reality. Their views of Trump, his competence and character, could hardly be more different.

The Pew Research Center last week released the results of a poll that found that an overwhelming majority of Republicans and independents who lean Republican viewed Trump as intelligent.

But, they are largely alone on that island. Only 19 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view Trump as intelligent.

Furthermore, 71 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners believe that Trump is honest, even though he has single-handedly provided a jolt of energy and a shield of job security to fact-checkers.

Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims — a milestone that would have been unthinkable when we first created the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.”

Trump is a lying machine. It is pathological. It is compulsive. It is unrepentant.

Sixty-two percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents see Trump as morally upstanding. This is a thrice married man whom multiple women have accused of sexual misconduct, and at least one has accused of rape. This is a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, who was outed for paying off women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with him, and who has appeared (clothed, thankfully) in at least three soft-core pornographic films.

Again, precious few Democrats and their leaners agreed with this assessment of Trump’s morality.

But, there were a couple of areas of general agreement among Democrats and Republicans, one of which was that overwhelming majorities of both groups viewed Trump as self-centered.

That self-centered sensibility has been on full display since the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Trump sees this budding pandemic through the lens of how it will affect him and his re-election prospects. The fact that the people infected and those fearful of becoming so are real people who desperately need the steady hand of a steady leader is lost on him.

Instead of being the president that the country needs in a time of crisis, he has chosen to employ his worn political strategy: lying. Rather than addressing the issue straightforwardly, he has told lie after lie, and in some cases contradicted the scientists trying to manage this issue.

This has real-world consequences for people’s health and the management of the virus’s spread. As a Reuters/Ipsos poll last week found, “Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States,” and “More Democrats than Republicans say they are taking steps to be prepared, . . . . .

Furthermore, when asked last week if he would consider canceling some of his large political rallies to avoid the risk of spreading the virus, Trump responded, “It doesn’t bother me and it doesn’t bother them at all.”

Trump could be making his most ardent supporters a petri dish of disease.

But in his mind, it’s not really about them, and certainly not about the rest of us. This is about him, only, always.

Whereas his supporters can be lied to and gaslighted, a virus cannot. A virus is going to do what a virus does. Viruses are not thinking and aware. Technically, they’re not even living things. They are like an army of androids, multiplying as they attack and infect living things.

So none of the tricks that Trump has learned and deployed will work against this virus. Only science, honesty, prudence and genuine concern for public safety will work now.

And precisely for those reasons, this virus exposes Trump’s enormous weaknesses as the chief executive officer of this country.

The public needs to be assured that we have a real leader at the helm, but we are being shown that just the opposite is true. The fact that he wants to spin media coverage of the virus as politically motivated, the fact that he keeps lowballing the number of people infected, and the fact that he has said that the virus may miraculously disappear, all show that Trump is as much a public health threat as the virus itself.

One has to wonder how bad the virus' spread must become before some of Trump's mindless followers - and educated Republicans who ought to know better - belatedly realize that they have been played for fools - yet again?

The Other German Autocrat Trump is Channeling

There are many accurate parallels between Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, and Adolph Hitler.  Both held simmering hatred towards certain groups - for Hitler, it was Jews, for Trump it is non-whites - and were narcissists to the extreme.  But there is another German autocrat that bears remarkable parallels to Trump who, like Hitler, lead that nation to catastrophic loss. Trump, who doesn't read books and seems to have no interests in knowing or understanding the lessons of history (he accused Canada of burning the White House in the War of 1812 when it was burned by the British Army), likely doesn't even know this former ruler's name: Kaiser (i.e., emperor) Wilhelm II.  Like Trump, Wilhelm thought he knew everything and thought he was a wonderful negotiator and could connect with people. Reality, of course was the exact opposite. Wilhelm was an idiot and took Germany to War in 1914 with terrible results.  The thick history book, "Ring of Steel" goes into great detail about the lead up to WWI and German's many wrong assumptions and the reality that Germany was doomed to defeat in any protracted war. A piece in New Yorker remind us of the other tyrant Trump seemingly tries to emulate.  Here are article excerpts:

One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. A particular specialty was insulting other monarchs. He called the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy “the dwarf” in front of the king’s own entourage. He called Prince (later Tsar) Ferdinand, of Bulgaria, “Fernando naso,” on account of his beaky nose, and spread rumors that he was a hermaphrodite.  

After a visit to Germany, in 1909, during which the Kaiser slapped him on the bottom in public and then refused to apologize, Ferdinand awarded a valuable arms contract that had been promised to the Germans to a French company instead.

Not that this deterred the Kaiser. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. 

In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia—the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II  . . . . into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered.

About a decade ago, I published “George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,” a book that was, in part, about Kaiser Wilhelm, who is probably best known for being Queen Victoria’s first grandchild and for leading Germany into the First World War. Ever since Donald Trump started campaigning for President, the Kaiser has once again been on my mind—his personal failings, and the global fallout they led to.

Trump’s tweets were what first reminded me of the Kaiser. Wilhelm was a compulsive speechmaker who constantly strayed off script. Even his staff couldn’t stop him, though it tried, distributing copies of speeches to the German press before he’d actually given them. Unfortunately, the Austrian press printed the speeches as they were delivered, and the gaffes and insults soon circulated around Europe.

The Kaiser reserved particular abuse for political parties that voted against his policies. “I regard every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Fatherland,” he said, and he denounced the German Socialist party as a “gang of traitors.” August Bebel, the Socialist party leader, said that every time the Kaiser opened his mouth, the party gained another hundred thousand votes.

When Wilhelm became emperor, in 1888, at twenty-nine years old, he was determined to be seen as tough and powerful. He fetishized the Army, surrounded himself with generals (though, like Trump, he didn’t like listening to them), owned a hundred and twenty military uniforms, and wore little else. 

In fact, Wilhelm didn’t accomplish very much. The general staff of the German Army agreed that the Kaiser couldn’t “lead three soldiers over a gutter.” He had neither the attention span nor the ability. “Distractions, whether they are little games with his army or navy, travelling or hunting—are everything to him,” a disillusioned former mentor wrote. “He reads very little apart from newspaper cuttings, hardly writes anything himself apart from marginalia on reports and considers those talks best which are quickly over and done with.” The Kaiser’s entourage compiled press cuttings for him, mostly about himself, which he read as obsessively as Trump watches television. A critical story would send him into paroxysms of fury.

To add to the confusion, Wilhelm changed his position every five minutes. He was deeply suggestible and would defer to the last person he’d spoken to or cutting he’d read—at least until he’d spoken to the next person.  . . .  Wilhelm’s staff and ministers resorted to manipulation, distraction, and flattery to manage him. “In order to get him to accept an idea you must act as if the idea were his,” the Kaiser’s closest friend, Philipp zu Eulenburg, advised his colleagues, adding, “Don’t forget the sugar.” 

More sinisterly, Wilhelm’s patronage of the aggressive, nationalistic right left him surrounded by ministers who held a collective conviction that a European war was inevitable and even desirable. Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany’s Naval chief—who realized at his first meeting with the Kaiser that he did “not live in the real world”—consciously exploited Wilhelm’s envy and rage in order to extract the astronomical sums required to build a German Navy to rival Britain’s, a project that created an arms race and became an intractable block to peace negotiations.

I spent six years writing my book about Wilhelm and his cousins, King George V, of England, and Tsar Nicholas II, and the Kaiser’s egotism and eccentricity made him by far the most entertaining of the three to write about. After a while, though, living with Wilhelm—as you do when you write about another person over a long period—became onerous. It was dispiriting, even oppressive, to spend so much time around someone who never learned, and never changed.

The Kaiser wasn’t singly responsible for the First World War, but his actions and choices helped to bring it on. If international conflict is around the corner, it would seem that you really don’t want a narcissist in control of a global power. Wilhelm’s touchiness, his unpredictability, his need to be acknowledged: these things struck a chord with elements in Germany, which was in a kind of adolescent spasm—quick to perceive slights, excited by the idea of flexing its muscles, filled with a sense of entitlement. At the same time, Wilhelm’s posturing raised tensions in Europe. His clumsy personal diplomacy created suspicion. His alliance with the vitriolic right and his slavish admiration for the Army inched the country closer and closer to war.

The defeated Germany sank into years of depression, resentments sharpened, the toxic lie that Germany had been “robbed” of its rightful victory in the war took hold. The rest, as they say, is history.

I’m not suggesting that Trump is about to start the Third World War. But recent foreign developments—the wild swings with North Korea, the ditching of the Iran nuclear deal, the threat of a trade war with China—suggest upheavals that could quickly grow out of American control. Some of Trump’s critics suppose that these escalating crises might cause him to loosen, or even lose, his grip on the Presidency. The real lesson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, may be that Trump’s leaving office might not be the end of the problems he may bring on or exacerbate—it may be only the beginning.

Unlike the German political parties of Wilhelm's time, the Republican controlled Congress could rein Trump in.  Yet it doesn't. Why? Congressional Republicans care more about remaining in office and living well of the taxpayer teet. Like Trump, the focus is all on themselves and they don't give a damn about what happens to the nation or everyday Americans.  History provides many lessons.  Sadly, our education system gives it short shrift.  We are about to pay the consequences.  Let's hope Trump, like Wilhelm, finds himself thrown from office and his dreams of empire destroyed.

Kaiser Wilhelm - who lead Germany to disaster.

Las Vegas Gunman Was a Trump Supporter

As yet no motive for the mass shooting in Las Vegas has been determined by police and other authorities.  One fun fact is that apparently the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a Donald Trump fan and shared similar personality traits with Der Trumpenführer: he was a narcissist and obsessed with his status as wealthy high roller.  In my view, he shared one other trait exhibited by Trump and his supporters: a contempt for others and a willingness to harm others to inflate his own ego/sense of worth or satisfy his own prejudices.  The lives of others obviously meant nothing to Paddock, a mindset that now thrives in the White House.  Newsweek has detail on Paddock's enthusiasm for Der Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights:

Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock was quite the fan of President Donald Trump before he killed 58 people and left another 500 injured—the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history. 

Paddock, a millionaire who reportedly would gamble up to $1 million a night in casinos, was attracted to the president's politics because of the boost the stock market has enjoyed since Trump took office, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told KLAS, a local CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, during a two-hour interview. 

Paddock said "he was happy with Trump because the stock market was doing well," Lombardo said.

Lombardo said he didn't know offhand who Paddock was talking to when he was talking about Trump, adding that it's the "only thing that we have seen that references politics." Authorities do not believe it correlates to a motive in the shooting. 

Many have questioned Paddock's political affiliations since no clear motive was evident in the attack, and also because the shooting happened about four months after members of Congress were targeted in a Virginia attack during a baseball practice. 

He said Paddock had no affiliation or communication with terrorist or extremist organizations, and is there no proof that he went overseas or met with any extremist groups. 

Investigators have been able to compile a pretty thorough psychological profile on Paddock, Lombardo said, gleaning from interviews that he was narcissistic and obsessed with his status as one of Las Vegas's elite. 

However, Paddock had lost a "significant amount of his wealth" since September 2015, which caused him to become depressed, Lombardo said, adding that the sudden changes could have been a "determining factor" in Paddock's plan. 

Lombardo added, authorities still haven't been able to figure out the trigger point that led to Paddock choosing October 1 as the date for his rampage, or why he chose the Route 91 Harvest festival as his target. Lombardo said the police and the public may never know Paddock's reasoning behind the shooting.  

Trouble for Trump: Strong Bipartisan Affirmation of Findings on Russian Hacking

Like another former Republican blogger that I know and follow, my suspicion is that the reason that Donald Trump is striving to blow of the intelligence community's finds on Russian hacking efforts to swing the 2016 election is because he and/or his campaign not only knew about the hacking efforts by collaborated with them.  How else to explain Trump's embrace of Julian Assange - a man in hiding in a foreign embassy in London rather than face rape charges in his own country - and rejection of the combined findings of the CIA, FBI, NSA and other agencies? Oh, and as for Trump's claim these agencies were wrong about WMD's in Iraq, the error was not on the part of the agencies in question but rather the lies initiated by Dick Cheney, a liar and authoritarian after Trump's own heart.  Trump's real fear I suspect is that there will yet be information that links his campaign to the Russian actions.  Can we then say the word treason?  A piece in the New York Times looks at yesterday's U.S. Senate hearings.  Here are highlights:

A united front of top intelligence officials and senators from both parties on Thursday forcefully reaffirmed the conclusion that the Russian government used hacking and leaks to try to influence the presidential election, directly rebuffing President-elect Donald J. Trump’s repeated questioning of Russia’s role.

They suggested that the doubts Mr. Trump has expressed on Twitter about the agencies’ competence and impartiality were undermining their morale.

“There’s a difference between skepticism and disparagement,” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Russian hacks. He added that “our assessment now is even more resolute” that the Russians carried out the attack on the election.

The Senate hearing was the prelude to an extraordinary meeting scheduled for Friday, when Mr. Clapper and other intelligence chiefs will repeat for Mr. Trump the same detailed, highly classified briefing on the Russian attack that President Obama received on Thursday. In effect, they will be telling the president-elect that the spy agencies believe he won with an assist from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Then Mr. Trump will have to say whether he accepts the agencies’ basic findings on Russia’s role or holds to his previous contention that inept, politicized American spies have gotten the perpetrator of the hacking wrong. That would throw the intelligence agencies into a crisis of credibility and status with few, if any, precedents.

Early next week, the public will get its fullest information to date on the evidence the agencies have to support their contention that Mr. Putin’s government used the hacked emails to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Mr. Trump’s. Mr. Clapper said he would “push the envelope” to include as much detail as possible in the unclassified version of the intelligence agencies’ report on the Russian operation.

The hacking, he added, was only one part of that operation, which also included the dissemination of “classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news.”

The Senate hearing on Thursday, devoted to foreign cyberthreats, was unusual as much for its context as its content — a public, bipartisan display of support for the intelligence community that seemed aimed, at times, at an audience of one.

Though Mr. Clapper and most Republican senators were careful to avoid antagonizing the president-elect directly, the hearing spoke to the rift Mr. Trump has threatened to create between the incoming administration and the intelligence officials assigned to inform it.

Mr. McCain and his colleagues seemed to undercut Mr. Trump’s past messages of support for Russia, and for Mr. Assange of WikiLeaks.  “Do you think there’s any credibility we should attach to this individual?” Mr. McCain asked.  “Not in my view,” Mr. Clapper said. Another witness at the hearing, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, said he agreed.

Senator Joe Donnelly, Democrat of Indiana, told Mr. Clapper that in the conflict between the intelligence agencies and Mr. Assange over Russian responsibility for the attack, “We’re on your side every time.” He asked Mr. Clapper to convey his level of confidence in attributing the election attack to Russia, rather than “someone in his basement.”  It’s, uh, very high,” the laconic intelligence director replied.

At one point, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, wondered aloud “who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community.”

No Republican lawmakers embraced Mr. Trump’s remarks casting doubt on the intelligence conclusions, though some were more conspicuous than others in their efforts to distance themselves.

[Lindsey] Graham issued a warning for fellow Republicans who might be inclined to brush off any attack on an opposing party. “Could it be Republicans next election?” he asked. “It’s not like we’re so much better at cybersecurity than Democrats.”

The thing to remember about Donald Trump is that he cares nothing about anyone but himself and his inflated view of himself.  He doesn't give a rat's ass about average Americans and those who voted for him thinking that he does were played as utter fools. The man is a clear and present danger to America and the world and needs to be exposed and driven or removed from office as soon as possible.  

Trump Has Released a Malevolent Spirit Upon America

I truly do not remember a year end where I have had such a sense of dread and foreboding as the new year approaches as I am now feeling.  In 23 days a dangerous demagogue with fascist leanings will be sworn in as president after which havoc will be wreaked on the federal judicial system and many other institutions and programs.  Of course, as a gay man, I have much to fear, especially if Trump keeps his promise to the Christofascists and signs the disingenuously named "First Amendment Protection Act" into  law.  A law that will give Christian extremist total freedom to ignore non-discrimination laws and ordinances if they infringe on Christofascists "religious beliefs."  As written, the law opens the door to bullying and worse.  In short, it is hard to thing of 2017 with anything other than dread.  Kathleen Parker picks up on this foreboding in a column.  Here are excerpts:

As usual, the year’s end brings reflections and ruminations on what was and what is to be. This time around, however, it feels as though an era is coming to an end.

That gentle frisson between past and future about which columnists customarily write feels vaguely apocalyptic as we approach the new year.

The usual regrets — too much ice cream, not enough exercise, too quick with a retort, not enough thank-you notes — all feel quaintly irrelevant juxtaposed against a collection of very real fears about the future. During a year of bitter political infighting — sister against sister, neighbor against neighbor — we’ve lost a better part of ourselves and unleashed armies of vengeful strangers.

To put a fine point on it, Donald Trump’s election has released a malevolent spirit upon the land. He invoked the magic message — essentially them vs. us — and the demons disembarked from their dark hiding places. He raided the lost ark and lifted the lid, and the whirlwind of humankind’s worst impulses escaped.

[W]hen the next leader of the free world casually comments that we need to build up our nuclear arsenal — and seems to welcome a return of the Cold War — alarm expressed in the strongest terms possible is required. When such alarm did find expression around the nation and the world, the president-elect huddled in his “fake news” bunker and claimed that his remarks were quoted incompletely. 

My guess is the rest of the world is thinking the exact same thing: This president-elect is not in his senses — and he makes no sense.

And, really, again. What’s with making such war-mongering threats when you’re not in the White House yet? Tweeting on matters of such import is unpresidential, not to mention unmanly. Also, it’s insane !

I could pause here and write verbatim the emails and social-media comments certain to follow these observations. They’re as predictable as a 3 a.m. tweet from Trump Tower. This, too, is part of what’s frightening as we take our leave of 2016. People who voted for Trump refuse to critique his behavior through any lens but that of having won a contest.

“We won, you lost — get over it” is what now passes for a serious dialogue about matters of immense importance.

The notion that people who still express concerns — including three professors of psychiatry who’ve signed a letter suggesting the man isn’t well — are just sore losers is nonsense. When the president-elect of the United States so cavalierly threatens to unravel the fragile threads that hold civilization together, there are no winners. He or she who is not worried is not paying attention.

These are also not simple partisan fears. Many Republicans I know are “slightly terrified,” as one Trump voter recently put it to me. That most, if not all, Democrats are, too, doesn’t have to mean they’re all excessively disappointed, though many surely are. And when it comes to abusing logic, Trump wins hands down.

With three children of my own and five young grandchildren I am truly terrified what their future may be given that we are about to have a narcissistic sociopath sworn in as president.  #NotMyPresident. 

 

Trump Will Rule By Threats and Intimidation

As Adolph Hitler rose to power, many conservative politicians and wealthy industrialist thought that they would be able to control Hitler and moderate his extremism.  History, of course, showed that these individuals were hubris filled fools.  A similar hubris has been on display among many Republicans, especially those like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who throughout the GOP primary and presidential campaign have smugly thought that they could rein in Donald Trump.  Now, with Trump maintaining his own security forces - hired mercenaries, if you will - unlike any previous president or president elect and his clear intent to threaten and intimidate Republicans who oppose him, it is quickly becoming apparent that these members of the GOP are just as stupid as their German counterparts from over eight decades ago.  In some ways, it will be delicious to watch these Republicans be crushed by Trump.  The draw back, of course, is that such defeats will only increase Trump's authoritarian rule.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the nightmare Republicans have brought onto themselves and the nation.  Here are highlights:

Back when Republicans were fretting about Donald Trump’s ideological inconsistencies and lack of devotion to conservative orthodoxy, one might have predicted that if he became president there would be constant tension within the Republican world, as everyone sought to shape administration policy and maximize his or her own influence.

That looks to be true — just not quite in the way we thought it would be. Instead of conservatives outside the administration pressuring Trump to adhere to conservative principles, we may see a situation where the pressure moves in a different direction, enforcing unanimity behind Trump’s agenda, whatever it may turn out to be. Rachael Bade reports today that there’s already a system being constructed to punish anyone on the right who questions Trump:

Since the election, numerous congressional Republicans have refused to publicly weigh in on any Trump proposal at odds with Republican orthodoxy, from his border wall to his massive infrastructure package. The most common reason, stated repeatedly but always privately: They’re afraid of being attacked by Breitbart or other big-name Trump supporters. . . . . An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear is well-founded.

Bade tells an interesting story about one Republican congressman who made some mild comments about how there might at some point be areas of disagreement between Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill. He was skewered in Breitbart, then Sean Hannity — who has made himself into Trump’s Renfield — took up the criticism, and in short order the congressman was deluged with threats and abuse.

It’s awfully handy that the administration has Breitbart at its disposal, an influential (at least within the right) media outlet that can not only echo the White House line but also target dissenters for retaliation, supported by an army of online enforcers standing ready to take anyone who strays and make his or her life miserable.

What we’re seeing so far is a conservative movement that, whatever its prior feelings, is now utterly devoted to the greater glory of Trump. And the message is going out that anyone who objects is going to regret it. This is something conservatives have practice at — after all, the tea party movement spent a great deal of its time punishing those who showed any signs of insufficient devotion to the cause and maintaining unanimity through fear.

[N]ow, no matter what they thought before, members of the right are coming together around the idea that their goals demand unswerving loyalty to Trump. As Tim Alberta reports in National Review, conservative lawmakers “are understandably reluctant to preemptively criticize an incoming president who’s popular with their constituents back home — and who could jeopardize their political careers and livelihoods with a single retaliatory tweet.

[P]ublic dissent is going to be met with swift retribution. We know that Trump is hypersensitive to even the mildest criticism and intensely vindictive when it comes to those he feels have crossed him. It looks as though those tendencies are going to be embodied not just in his administration but also in the entire conservative movement.

 

The moral, of course, is that an amoral narcissistic bully should never be elected to any high office, particularly the presidency.  Sadly, what should have been so obvious to anyone rational was beyond the comprehension of angry white Trump voters that put emotion and their desire to reclaim their so-called white privilege ahead of all else, including the best interest of the nation.  We all will pay a high price I fear before this is all over.

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. 

Are We Headed to a Constitutional Crisis?

As a post yesterday noted, once Donald Trump assumes the presidency - unless the Electoral College does its job and voids his election - America will be governed by the most corrupt regime in the nation's history.  For those who doubt this, one need only look at Trump's behavior over the last 19 days and all the actions taken to further his business interest at the potential expense of the nation's interest.  Like Putin and other tyrants and dictators, Trump seemingly sees his own financial interests and further accumulation of wealth as synonymous with the national interest even when the two sharply diverge.  His behavior would seem set on a collision course the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution that forbids elected officials from receiving benefits, a/k/a bribes from foreign powers.  The one question is whether or not Congress will act to stop Trump's excesses.  If the issue is left to Congressional Republicans, don't count on it.  Republicans in the Senate refused to do their constitutional duty and vote on Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee.  Why think they will care about unrestrained corruption and payoffs, especially if they receive some of the loot.   A piece The Guardian looks at the coming confrontation and constitutional crisis.  Here are excerpts:

Constitutional lawyers and White House ethics counsellors from Democratic and Republican administrations have warned Donald Trump his presidency might be blocked by the electoral college if he does not give up ownership of at least some of his business empire.

“The brand is certainly a hotter brand than it was before,” Donald Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday, and his election victory buzz does indeed seem to have been good for business.

Since the surprise outcome of the 8 November vote, foreign diplomats have been flocking to the newest Trump hotel in Washington to hear sales pitches about the business and vie to book their delegations into its rooms overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue for the inauguration on 20 January.

Trump, meanwhile, used a meeting with a delegation of Brexit activists including his closest British ally, Nigel Farage, to urge them to oppose wind farms which he felt would spoil the view from one of his Scottish golf courses. He also took time out from selecting cabinet officials to meet his Indian business partners and pose for pictures with them, while the Philippines government announced it was appointing his business partner in Manila as its next ambassador to Washington.

A day after a phone conversation between President-elect Trump and Argentinian president Mauricio Macri, Trump’s Argentinian associate – who was reported to have organised the call – confidently predicted that construction would start next year on the planned Trump Tower Buenos Aires, to be completed by 2020.

The associate, Felipe Yaryura, seemed supremely confident that the zoning restrictions that had stalled the project for years would soon be swept away.

[M]uch of what he has said and done since winning the election suggests that Trump comes to the presidency in the spirit of a tycoon making a new acquisition, overseeing the merger of Trump Inc and America Inc – a merger in which it is far from clear which would be the senior partner.

“It clearly degrades the presidency,” said Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of the Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm.

“It is going to undermine the legitimacy of the US around the world. Soft power has been about being able to project values. That already took a hit. It really comes to an end with this election.”

Although the president-elect claims to have handed the day-to-day running of the Trump Organization to some of his children, he has so far retained his ownership stake and those same children are sitting in on his meetings with foreign leaders. 

When the constitution was written, the founding fathers wrote the rules so that people like themselves, whom they expected to fill the presidency, could do so without having to sell off plantations or slaves.

The president is exempt from conflict-of-interest laws that constrain other office holders. The discovery of this loophole seems to have surprised and delighted Trump.

It was an interpretation of executive power that did not work out well for the US, nor for the president in question, Richard Nixon.

Constitutional lawyers are now warning that Trump’s presidency is in danger of going the same way as Nixon’s before it even gets started. Some say that unless Trump takes urgent steps to fully divest himself from his business interests, he might not even enter the Oval Office as president.

Trump seems to have received only a partial legal briefing on his exposure. Although the conflict-of-interest clauses do have a loophole for presidents, there is no such loophole for the “emoluments clause”, Article I, Section 9 of the constitution, which prohibits public officials from taking payments “of any kind whatever from any king, prince or foreign state”.

“Trump was totally wrong when he said the conflict of interest doesn’t apply to me,” said Norman Eisen, a former ethics counsellor to the Obama administration. “It shows he doesn’t know the constitution.

“The most fundamental conflict clause in the US constitution is the prohibition on emoluments on payments, presents or other things of value being given to American political officials including the president.”

Before Trump can even take that oath, he will have to be elected by the electoral college, another legacy of the founding fathers. . . . . The electors are under more pressure than usual because although Trump won the majority of seats in the electoral college, he lost the nationwide popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2m ballots. Some legal experts argue that the electoral college cannot approve a candidate like Trump, who does not fulfill the basic legal requirements to be president.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe said in an email that the “electors who are to cast their votes for president on 19 December not as automatons but in light of constitutional constraints and principles cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump as president of the United States unless he fully divests himself of economic interests dependent on the fortunes, for good or ill, of the private Trump empire”.

That view is not restricted to academics and Democrats. Richard Painter, George W Bush’s chief ethics counsel, agrees that without a major reconfiguration of the Trump Organization, the president-elect is heading for a constitutional collision with the electoral college.

Eisen and Painter called on the Trump transition team to take urgent steps to address the problem, before it triggers a constitutional crisis. They recommended he sell all his business holdings and put the proceeds in a blind trust, the composition of which would remain unknown to him, as his predecessors have done for the past four decades. Painter offered his advice to the Trump circle as a fellow Republican, but has not received any response.

The optimist part of me hopes that the Electoral College voids Trump's election.  The pessimist expects it to rubber stamp the madness of a minority of voters - some 2 million fewer than those who voted for Clinton - and thereby cast the nation on the road to disaster and a constitutional crisis.