Complicity

Racism is not going to be my topic this week. But there are those who say that silence is complicity, so let me get this out of the way. Of course Donald Trump is racist. It could not be more obvious. It did not come out of nowhere when he made his comment last week about “shithole countries”. It goes back further than his statement regarding Charlottesville that there were fine people on both sides. It didn’t begin when he called Mexicans rapists when he announced his campaign. It wasn’t just a matter of Trump playing to his base when he promoted the birther myth about Barack Obama. Donald Trump is not simply playing to his base when he says and does these things. It is not an act. The record goes all the way back to his first public acts, discriminating against potential black tenants in his properties, even in defiance of an order from the Department of Justice. It took a second order to get the discrimination to stop, and this was forty years ago. The times when Donald Trump’s racism emerges are the few times when we are seeing honesty from this man, and his honesty is even uglier than his lies.

But that is all I want to say on the subject, because it has been covered by better writers than I. If you need to see more, you can start here. Also, being a lifelong resident of New Jersey, I count Corey Booker as one of my Senators. We have our differences, but he made me proud last week with this. Booker uses the word “complicity” several times, and that is the topic I want to address. Donald Trump can be openly racist because his Party does not mind. They make excuses for it and for him, in the name of serving their donors. Secretary Nielsen, the target of Corey Booker’s ire, has convenient memory lapses, but she is hardly the only one. And it isn’t just about racism either.

Consider the state of the investigations concerning the 2016 election and the Russian interference therein. Robert Mueller’s investigation continues apace, but the committees in the House and Senate have veered into dangerous territory. We are hearing the term “deep state” all over the place suddenly. The term has broader application, but the current usage in Washington comes from right wing media sources such as Breitbart, where Steve Bannon championed it. It is the basis of a conspiracy theory that says there are unelected officers, especially within the FBI, who are seeking to undermine the Trump administration. According to this idea, the Mueller investigation is biased, and is part of this supposed conspiracy. So now we have calls by prominent Republicans to investigate this instead of the Russian involvement in the election. Some of this is surely self defense, since it started when Mueller announced he was expanding his investigation to examine the role of the Republican National Committee in the possible compromising of not only the presidential race, but possibly Senate and House races as well. But the upshot is that committees which are supposed to be investigating the election are instead working to promote right wing propaganda designed to delegitimize Mueller and his investigation. This is not thoroughness on the part of these committees, and the Democrats on the committees rightfully want no part of it. No, let us call this what its: obstruction of justice. The Republicans promoting the “deep state” theory are seeking to interfere in and undermine an ongoing investigation. It is time for us as citizens to call on Mueller and other relevant authorities to call witnesses and bring charges if necessary against members of the House and Senate who are engaging in these tactics. We must send a clear message that these tactics are unacceptable. We must shut down calls for any investigation of the “deep state”, before this goes any further.

As I say this, I can hear the cries of “witch hunt”. I can imagine comparisons to the last time there was an attempt to root out “evil doers” in Congress, and the name Joe McCarthy comes up. But I am not calling for a new McCarthy era. If anything, the McCarthy era represented an earlier time when a “deep state” theory took hold, and became a basis for policy decisions. I am calling for a Constitutional remedy to stop this in its tracks. McCarthyism was ultimately halted in disgrace, but not before political enemies were subdued and important progressive voices were permanently silenced. With new energy on the left, the country is at a critical point. The Republican strategy for attempting to turn back the blue wave is beginning to reveal itself, and the “deep state” theory is the opening salvo. Now is the time to end this, while we still can.

For music this week, I will circle back to the topic of racism after all. Joni Mitchell’s brilliant collaboration with Charles Mingus produced this gem, which sums it up nicely:

Rules of Engagement

Starting immediately after the election of Donald Trump, I began to see a lot of hand wringing over the question of how to talk to a Trump supporter. Some people agonized over losing a friendship of long standing, or even the prospect of banishing a family member from their lives. Then, last year, some of these same people began to report, almost with pride it seemed, that they had blocked these people on social media, or taken that step in some other way to cleanse these people from their lives. But now it is 2018, and we have an election to win. We need not just to capture both parties of Congress, but to reengage with the rest of our nation to make sure our victory is something we can build on in years to come. We need to talk to the enemy because it is still one country that belongs both to us and to them, and we all want a better future than we can expect if things go on as they are.

I am not suggesting that anyone is owed any apologies here. Nor do I expect that reengagement will be easy. But I think there is a way forward. Start by realizing that the typical Trump supporter does not respond to facts and figures, nor do they want to be told what is good for them. Yes, the facts are on our side, and yes, a vote for Trump was a vote for a set of policies that will hurt greatly most of those who made his presidency possible. But that was not why they voted for him in the first place. It was not a rational decision, and neither is their continued support, but it did and does follow its own weird logic. To successfully reengage with a Trump supporter, especially one who was once important in your life, you must first understand that logic.

As the 2016 election cycle wore on, there was an increasingly prevalent view that the system had failed. The working class, in this view, had no champion to turn to. Aided by what we now recognize as a sophisticated Russian propaganda operation, many came to believe that Bernie Sanders was the only politician who wasn’t part of the system, and who cared. Later, again with Russian assistance, the idea spread that Sanders was undone not by a late start or a key lack of organizational efforts in minority communities, but by a sinister conspiracy perpetrated by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. Almost all of the negatives that surrounded Hillary Clinton originated either in right wing media sources or in Russia, but the Russians especially made sure that this information found its way to left wing political sites, from whence it spread like wildfire. Of course this meant that anger was a prominent feature of the 2016 general election. It drove many to sit this one out, and many more saw in Donald Trump an instrument of revenge. His policy positions made no difference; he was going to destroy the system that gave us these awful choices in the first place. For many, that is still what they want from him. Don’t tell them that this is not normal, because normal never helped or cared about them. If you point out how horrible he is, you may be told how the resistance to Trump is something that never would have happened if someone less horrible sat in the White House. By this line of reasoning, we need Trump to give us something to get us activated and organized. That argument is harder to rebut because there is some truth to it, but it has a horrible cost.

So I think the way to reengage is to present an honest desire to understand where a Trump supporter is coming from. Ask key questions, and then listen like crazy. Don’t try to rebut their arguments; instead, use your questions to subtly guide them to common ground, because it does exist. Let’s consider some questions you could ask.

Do you think the healthcare system in this country could work better for you and your family? How would you change it if you could? How would you pay for those changes? The idea here is not to push universal healthcare on anyone. In answering the question, they may get there on their own, but they may also go somewhere else that is worth the trip. Your job when reengaging is to let them take you there, and then take their ideas seriously.

Can you name one action Donald Trump or the Republican Congress has taken on the economy that has benefitted you or your family personally? If you know someone else who has benefitted, it may be that they have left out important details, so please tell me your story. Here you have the chance to follow up with probing questions, but do not be confrontational. You are asking them not to share your viewpoint, but to help you understand. In doing so, you are helping them to understand as well.

Do you personally know any first generation immigrants to this country? Are any of them working at jobs that you or a family member would want and are qualified for ? Here you are asking them to challenge their own xenophobia, rather than challenging it yourself. Once again, avoid being confrontational; the confrontation that occurs must be within them, not between you. Not everyone you talk to will be a racist or a xenophobe at all. In that case, this question could be a great way to break the ice.

These are just suggestions. I’m sure you can now think of questions of your own, and I hope you will share them in the comments. I hope you will also seek out these conversations, and tell us in the comments how it went. Since the 2016, we have been getting better at fighting for what we want, and that is important. But we must also start to prepare for the peace that I hope will follow that fight. When we finally win back everything we are losing now, how do we keep those wins? I believe we start with a few simple conversations.

I plead guilty to the charge of irony, but there could really only be one song this week:

Paying at the Pump

I don’t want to see the economy collapse. I am not even wishing for a mild recession. But I watch as Wall Street continues to celebrate the Trump presidency, and I know this can not end well. I once worked as a financial advisor for Morgan Stanley. There are many reasons why it did not work out for me, but one was the toxic political environment I found there. There was a near religious belief in Republican policy prescriptions, despite the fact that the market had ultimately fallen in every Republican administration, and risen in every Democratic one, since World War II. That was in 2001, but even though it remains true today, Wall Street does not seem to have learned anything from this streak. I have talked about the reason for this disconnect before: the market is not the economy. Supporters of Donald Trump like to point to the Wall Street rally under his rule so far as evidence that the Republicans got it right this time, so let’s take a look at why the market, and corporate profits, are doing so well, and why that might not continue. I am not an economist, so I am going to focus on something most people aren’t talking about yet: the price of oil.

The price of oil is something anyone can see for themselves at the gas pump. It has a great impact on consumer spending. Far away from Wall Street or Capitol Hill, most Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, so more expensive oil means we must cut costs elsewhere in order to afford fill our tanks. When gas prices jump, there is a period of denial, in which Americans increase borrowing to make up the difference. We are in such a period now, but borrowing has its limits, so gas prices must come back down soon if consumer spending is to remain unaffected. Even now, Wall Street is being surprised by earnings reports in the retail sector. There are some exceptions, but the story these earnings reports are trying to tell is that Americans are downshifting their spending, so McDonalds and WalMart are doing well, but mid-range retailers and restaurants are not.

So what does Donald Trump have to do with the price of oil? Americans enjoyed a sharp drop in oil prices during the Obama administration. To give credit where it is due, this was partly due to a continuation of energy policies started in the administration of George W Bush that promoted and greatly expanded domestic oil production, and Trump is continuing this effort, possibly even expanding it by pushing for exploration and drilling on public lands. That’s bad news for the environment, but it helps keep prices lower at the pump. However, Obama also applied downward pressure on oil prices with his push for alternate energy, and here, Trump has completely dropped the ball. Trump has exerted upward pressure on oil prices by placing obstacles in the way of alternative energy development, thereby freezing our dependence on oil at current levels.

Less obvious but possibly more important is the conduct of foreign policy. Obama had a fully staffed State Department, and he understood the subtleties of diplomacy. While he was president, OPEC was knocked off balance, and it became harder for them to commit to unified actions to control the global market for oil. Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but Trump believes the State Department is wasteful, and he has deliberately left many key positions unfilled. He also appointed as Secretary of State former oil executive Rex Tillerson. Tillerson knows that more expensive oil globally means increased profits for companies like the one he used to lead. Just recently, OPEC seems to have recovered their balance: their recent agreement to lower production quotas has been the main driver behind the recent rise in oil prices.

There is one other driver to consider, and that is the Republican tax plan. Tax cuts and credits for the working poor and the middle class translate to consumer spending. But when you have all the money you need already, a big tax cut allows you to put more away for the purchase of stocks and more speculative investments. One of those speculative investments is oil futures. The price of oil on world markets includes a speculative premium. By that, I mean that investors buy oil futures, and those purchases translate into higher prices at the gas pump than you and I would otherwise pay. In normal times, this speculative premium is modest, and the sale of futures helps to stabilize prices. But now the Republican tax plan threatens to provide oil speculators with additional funds to play the futures market. No one wants to miss the party, and we have seen that other trends are favorable, so the speculative premium for oil is increasing in anticipation of the Trump tax cuts. This is true even if the tax cuts do not ultimately pass, because speculators do not want to wait to take their positions until the tax bill is law, for fear of missing the profits to be had in the meantime.

So I expect that oil prices will at least remain at their current elevated levels, and possibly go higher still from here. That will put pressure on consumer spending, as would any cuts to safety net programs that Republicans manage to pass. Eventually, even Wall Street will notice, and with stock prices already high by most historical measures, that won’t be pretty. It is notoriously difficult to predict the timing of the stock market, and I failed badly last December. So I will simply leave you with this meditation on oil, and a song about oil prices from forty years ago:

The Storm Before the Storm

This is not the time to praise or criticize Donald Trump with regards to Hurricane Harvey. For now, he is simply one man who is as powerless as most of us to do anything concrete in the face of the disaster that is continuing to unfold. As president, he can make sure the right words are said, which he chose to do on Twitter. But the concrete work of a president in the face of a natural disaster comes in the aftermath of the event. Trump should be judged by how well he helps to mobilize federal relief efforts in the days ahead. For now, our thoughts and prayers must be with the people of Texas who are being struck by the storm. I have already seen one article pointing out that the storm is hitting a state whose Republican Senators both voted against aid for victims of Hurricane Sandy; this too is inappropriate now. I would hope that anyone who has the ability to volunteer to help the victims of the storm would not make life and death decisions based on how the victims may have voted last year.

A natural disaster of this magnitude can make or break a political career, so it comes at a key moment for Donald Trump. In 2005, George W Bush was serving the first year of a second term that he won by a landslide, based on the idea that he was leading the nation’s response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. In the 2004 elections, the majority of the voters did not question whether he was the most competent man to serve the nation in an emergency; nor did they consider the question of whether he lied to get us into the war in Iraq. Hurricane Katrina changed all of that. Bush had, as part of his push for huge tax cuts for the wealthy, made savage budget cuts, particularly impairing FEMA and other programs designed for emergency responses. He had also appointed as the head of FEMA Michael Brown, a man who had no qualifications for the job. The federal response to Katrina became part of the disaster, and the American people turned on Bush, with his approval ratings plummeting. Suddenly, everything he had done up to that point became fair game, and people began to accept that he had led us into war under false pretenses. The American people as a whole never trusted him again.

In 2012, another Republican met another disastrous storm. Like Bush, Chris Christie, then and now the governor of my state of New Jersey, had imposed cuts to key programs in the name of providing large tax cuts to the wealthy. Like Trump now, Christie was known for his abrasive personality. He was considered a political bully, although the Bridgegate scandal would come later. The Democrats had good reason to believe that they could foil his reelection bid in 2013 until Hurricane Sandy hit. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Christie took full advantage of the fact that Barack Obama had rebuilt FEMA and the federal government’s disaster response capabilities in general. Christie even took advantage of Obama’s visit to the disaster area for a photo op with the president, allowing Christie to share the credit for the success of federal relief efforts. At the time, this photo op was consider fatal to Christie’s chances of winning the Republican nomination for president in 2016, but played well in my state, which had gone for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Christie then vandalized a state fund which was supposed to go for public service announcements to help further with disaster aid to create the “Stronger Than the Storm” ad campaign that unofficially marked the beginning of his gubernatorial reelection campaign. In the wake of that, the Democrats made no serious effort to oppose him the next year, holding back their most promising candidates for this year instead.

All of which brings us back to the present. If you have been reading this blog, you are well acquainted with all of the reasons Donald Trump is historically unpopular. Like George W Bush, Trump wants to severely impair the federal government’s ability to respond to a disaster in the name of providing a massive tax cut for the wealthy. But that has not happened yet. Hurricane Harvey comes at a time when the government is still operating under president Obama’s last budget. Trump also has the benefit of the efforts by Obama to rebuild the government’s disaster response capabilities in the wake of the damage done by Bush. Where Trump does deserve some credit is in the confirmation of Brock Long on June 19 to lead FEMA. Long is no Michael Brown; he is by all accounts highly qualified for his new job, unlike so many other Trump appointees.

We can hope for the sake of the people of Texas that this all means they will get the help they deserve and need. We can expect Trump to try to take credit for this, and it could easily turn his approval ratings around. Going forward, we as progressives should celebrate the successes of the relief efforts, while making sure we keep shining a bright light on Trump’s failures in so much else. If you are able to make donations to the victims of Harvey, or even provide material aid now, I would hope you would not withhold such aid for fear that Trump will take credit for it. We as progressives support an agenda that helps all of the people of this country, and our concern now must be for them.

My song choice this week could not be more obvious:

Simple Truth

I was disturbed this morning by the reporting in my local newspaper of the events this weekend in Boston. They reported that a small group of “conservatives” had to end their demonstration early because of the actions of the “anti-hate activists” who showed up to oppose them. Language matters, and the paper was taking sides here. Substitute “white supremacists” for “conservatives”, and “civil rights groups” for “anti-hate activists”, and you will see what I mean. Technically, the “conservatives” in question were not white supremacists at all. They were not invading the streets of Boston, carrying swastikas and Confederate flags, and they were not armed to the teeth. They were assembling for what was billed as a free speech rally, but there can be no doubt that their interest in “free speech” applied mainly to the hate groups that terrorized Charlottesville VA a week earlier.

There is a sick irony in the fact that we are still talking about this a week later. President Obama had to respond to hate crimes during his time in the White House with appeals for a national conversation on race, but it is the reprehensible reactions of Donald Trump that have kept this conversation alive this time. Donald Trump looks at swastikas and Confederate flags, and hears hateful chants of torch bearing peasants, and he sees “great people” marching to honor “beautiful statues”. Many people have chimed in with all of the reasons Trump is wrong about this, so I am going to keep it simple.

When I see a swastika, I don’t see “great people”. I see a brutally broken family tree. I am a Jew. My immediate family came here long before World War II, so we have no stories of narrow escapes from the Nazis, or of relatives who died in the concentration camps. But I have no doubt that I have distant cousins who have such stories. That I can not find them in my personal experience does not matter. Nor does it matter that I was raised an atheist. We are all one people, and we celebrated that fact every year at Passover when I was growing up. What was done to any of us was done to all of us.

I can speak even less authoritatively of what a black person sees when they view the Confederate flag. I have had many black friends over the years, but this was not something we discussed. But I imagine that they also do not see “great people”. I imagine that they see these symbols, and these “beautiful statues”, and they think, “we were slaves”.

We were slaves. In Hebrew it’s avadim hayinu. In my family, we equated the time of slavery in Egypt with the time of oppression under the Nazis. We celebrated the freedom fighters in the Warsaw ghetto. And we also always included Martin Luther King in our seders. Maybe Jared Kushner’s seders when he was growing up were different. All we know for sure is that Donald Trump does not understand this simple truth about these symbols, and there does not seem to be anyone close to him who can explain it to him.

I could choose a Hebrew or Yiddish song this week, and go into a long explanation of my choice. But I am keeping it simple, so Bob Marley gets the nod:

Context Matters

Earlier in the week, I had decided that I wasn’t going to write about Donald Trump Jr’s e-mail reveal. This is the biggest revelation so far in the seemingly endless stream of news regarding the Russian connection to last year’s election. Here at last we have evidence of an actual crime committed by someone close to Donald Trump Sr, his own son and son-in-law. The e-mail string makes it clear that they and Paul Manafort, Jr in particular, took the meeting with Natalia Vilnetskaya in the hopes of receiving information they could use against Hillary Clinton. Here is clear proof of intent, which is required to prove collusion. But I wasn’t going to write about it because everyone else already did. What more was there for me to add to the conversation, given the great reporting on this that I was seeing? I finally did decide that what I could add was context. By putting a collection of historical details together in one place, I hope to shed additional light on where we are and where we might be going from here.

Donald Trump Sr began his career in the 1970s in the family real estate business. It was immediately clear that he was not at all concerned with the legality of his actions. When he and his father were cited by the government for discriminating against minorities in their rental policies, they went right back to the behavior that had earned them the first citation, and were cited a second time. Clearly, they regarded this as an acceptable cost of doing business, part of their calculations of profit and loss. There was no consideration of the moral or legal aspects of what they had done. We know that Donald Trump still thinks this way: last year’s out of court settlement of the fraud charges against Trump University cost Trump $25 million, but that left him with a tidy profit.

In the 1980s, Trump began to cultivate ties with organized crime figures. To be fair, the mob controlled the concrete industry in New York City at the time, so you had to deal with them if you wanted to build something in the city. But the story that emerged last year of the alleged rape Trump may have committed twenty years earlier was chilling to me. In that case, “Jane Doe” persuaded a judge to ignore the statute of limitations because she had feared for her life, which was why she had not come forward sooner. She said Donald Trump had raped her repeatedly over a series of sex parties he attended. She further stated that she submitted to this, and did not speak out at the time, because another girl at these parties, identified as “Maria”, was going to speak out, but she disappeared instead. “Jane Doe” said further that Trump himself had led her to believe that she would share “Maria’s” fate if she resisted or went public with what she knew. Two things about the case particularly bother me. Did Trump have friends at the time who he could count on to make inconvenient people disappear? And, the case was quietly dropped last year after the election when “Jane Doe” began to receive death threats. Since her identity was never made public, who knew who she was, and how did they know? No jury ever got the chance to consider any of this, so we don’t know for sure if this account is what happened. But someone appears to have gone to some trouble to make sure of that.

Now at last we come to the Russian connection. Last year, in the heat of the campaign, something Donald Trump Jr said in 2008 came to light: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets”. In fact, starting with the first Trump bankruptcy in 1990, it became increasingly difficult for Trump to obtain financing from western banks. Trump’s business credit was shot, following a deal in which the banks never recovered what they were owed. So, even without Trump’s tax returns, we know that Russian interests provided important funds that were used for Trump’s operations. In return, they got space in Trump owned or operated buildings, and proceeded to use these spaces to conduct money laundering. Some of Trump’s new associates may also have been involved in sex trafficking and illegal drug and gambling operations. These are shady figures, so it is difficult to prove anything, but you can find more details here. It may be that Trump himself was unaware of these activities in his own buildings until they were discovered by the authorities. But at least one of these suspicious Russians, Felix Sater, had personal meetings with Trump and appears to have done business with him. The kindest interpretation is that Trump may have had some idea of what was going on, but refused to delve into the details, thereby evading personal or legal responsibility.

Given all of this, it seems likely that Trump already had the Russian contacts he needed to fix the 2016 election before the Vilnetskaya meeting. It does not seem to be much of a stretch to say that the Kremlin had reason to believe his campaign would be receptive to their overtures. As detailed here, the meeting seems to have been a feeler from Russian interests to make sure the Trump Campaign would accept their help before moving on to more substantive operations. The Russians wanted to know that Trump’s people would take the meeting and not report it to any authorities, and the Trump campaign passed the test with high marks.

I must hasten to add that I can not offer proof of many of the things I have stated in this post. I can observe that Robert Mueller seems to be thinking about at least some of these questions as he pursues his investigation. Why else would he have added to his team experts on money laundering, for example? But we must wait for more evidence to emerge before jumping to conclusions. Donald Trump Jr’s e-mail string and the subsequent revelations regarding the Vilnetskaya meeting are an important break, but this is only the beginning. Many years of possible wrongdoing are bound up in this knot, and we should not expect that it will be unraveled all at once.

For my musical selection this week, The Specials seem perfect to me:

Unmasked

Trump’s European trip last week provided another occasion for pundits to proclaim that “this is not normal.” In fact, Trump is almost completely normal for today’s Republican Party. His views of what government should be and do represent the logical endpoints of positions that various factions within the Republican Party have been promoting for many years. What is new is Trump’s bluntness, his complete lack of subtlety. To his supporters, this is seen as refreshingly honest. Even Trump’s many lies are so crudely executed that they count for his adherents as signs of authenticity. He speaks his mind, as they see it, without any premeditation, which is often offensive and frequently inaccurate, but is always a true picture of his feelings at that moment. It is this quality that won him the Republican primaries last year.

Trump’s already notorious Poland speech last week presented an undisguised contempt for American traditions. His model for governance as laid out in the speech was medieval in its depiction of a holy war between a West that includes Putin’s Russia and the Islamic world. This is where Trump’s insistence on the term “Radical Islam” leads us. In this worldview, the United States is a Christian nation with a sacred mission to take on the greatest enemy of the faith. The notion of the US as a Christian nation is one that Trump certainly did not invent. The Republican Party has been actively seeking to fan and exploit religious feeling at least since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. The religious right was a well developed and cultivated phenomenon by the time Trump began his candidacy in 2015. Likewise, it was George W Bush, in the wake of the 2011 attack, who first exploited these views in his foreign policy decisions.

Trump is considered “not normal” too for his overt racism and xenophobia. Here too, however, he is simply saying openly what has been spoken of in code until now. This is Nixon’s southern strategy run amuck, but is not something new in Republican thought. The job of the president and the government, in this view, is to represent “real Americans”. Reagan’s welfare queens and the infamous Willie Horton ad are two of the precedents for Trump’s embrace of the ideas of people like Steve Bannon. This manifests as policy in the longstanding attempts by the Republican Party to destroy safety net programs by depicting them as handouts to people who “are not like us”, so it should come as no surprise that such attempts have become more ferocious in the current Congress. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have been working on this since long before Trump came to power, but he leaves no doubt that he will sign whatever legislation they can send him.

In the European trip, Trump reminded us of his admiration for Putin’s model of how to wield power. Russian elections are nothing more than endorsements of the prevailing ruling power. Their outcomes are entirely predictable, because they are controlled. But Trump did not invent American strategies for voter suppression. Here too we see the exploitation of something that was a Republican initiative long before Trump. By the same token, even if the Trump campaign did collude with the Russians to sabotage the election last year, both Trump and Putin were simply exploiting a media landscape that was born when Republicans succeeded in eliminating the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1973. Modern technology, the internet in particular, have made it far easier to spread biased and even false information, but the removal of the requirement to present opposing viewpoints is what set us on this course.

Trump is also not the first Republican president to believe that his will should be law. In Russia, Putin is wielding power in much the same way as the Communist leaders of old. Nixon also believed that the presidency allowed him to use power however he pleased, but our system of checks and balances held him back then. Now, with the modern Republican Party in control of all branches of our government, it is not clear that Trump’s misuses of power will be checked. There have been almost no signs of any Howard Bakers, ready to challenge the authority of a president from his own party in the name of the greater good. It comes down to a view of government that should be unconstitutional, and would be if Republicans over the years had not made so many judicial appointments, particularly to the Supreme Court.

The sick irony here is that this is just the kind of governance the Founding Fathers of our nation were rebelling against. State religions were a phenomenon of European nations at the time, England in particular. The modern Tea Party stands in opposition to the ideals that prompted the actual Boston Tea Party. Those original Americans wanted elections that empowered all free men, although they lacked the foresight to include women, and they lacked the vision to abolish slavery. What they did do is deliberately create a system that would facilitate these improvements later. They wanted elections where the outcome was uncertain, where the best man could win. They tried to build in safeguards to prevent a man like Donald Trump from becoming president, or to facilitate his removal if that became necessary. Some of the most important of those safeguards were the rights of free speech, a free press, and the right to peaceably assemble and protest. The Founding Fathers knew that we needed to have a free flow of good information in order to make the best choices for the governing of our nation.

So yes, Donald Trump embraces racism, seeks absolute power, and hopes to use the religious right to further his agenda. What is new is that Trump does so so openly and bluntly. He couches nothing in polite language. Where other Republicans might be playing an elaborate chess game, Trump resorts to professional wrestling. It’s ugly, seeking to appeal to our basest impulses, but it allows him to present his battles as entertainment. He can make the Poland speech, because he has conditioned us to expect him to say outrageous things, but he hopes to blunt our outrage through repetition and sheer fatigue. The goals, and the worldview that supports them, have been part of the Republican Party for decades. Trump was simply the first one to realize that it was time to express them openly.

For my musical selection this week, I present Kate Bush contemplating the risks of deception. This one has an official music video that is a fine example of just how bad 1980s music videos could be. Trust me, it’s much better to just stare at the album cover, and let your imagination do the rest of the work:

A Morality Play

The takeaways in the media from James Comey’s testimony last week were certainly interesting. For many, the argument to be had was over whether Comey was saying that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice. Comey was very careful to not say that himself, but he also explained why not. Comey as a private citizen has no standing to bring that charge, and that legal distinction is important to him. Keep in mind that Comey was our nation’s top law enforcement officer until Trump fired him. However, his testimony was an offering to Robert Mueller. If Mueller wants to pursue the charge of obstruction, Comey just let him know what his evidence would be. The media also spent a lot of time on the Republican’s attempts to defend Trump. But if Trump was just inexperienced at governing, or just too immature at age 70 to know better, why did he have everyone leave the room, even waiving off Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions when they tried to stay behind, before discussing the Michael Flynn case with Comey. That was a clear act of intent. You do that only if you want to make sure there are no witnesses later to what you are about to do. If the Republican excuse that Trump was simply handling things the way he did as a businessman was true, that is very interesting information, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t obstruction. It just means that when he pursued this tactic as a businessman, he grew used to it working so well that we never heard of it until now. Meanwhile, what Comey was willing to come right out and say was that Trump’s lies about the Comey firing constituted defamation of character. Comey knows that that is a legal charge, and that he has the standing as a private citizen to bring it. He is not a man to use the words without being fully aware of the legal implications.

But the larger picture is that the testimony gives the Democrats a huge marketing opportunity for the 2018 elections and beyond. The Republicans, in their responses to the Comey testimony, showed a complete lack of morality. When the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal arose, the Democrats had the decency to be ashamed that one of their own could behave in such a manner. Privately, that stance may well have involved cynical calculations, but the public act is what concerns me here. The Democrats make mistakes, but they have the good grace to be ashamed, and to apologize. The Republicans do not. John McCain surrendered the last claim he may have had to be the conscience of the Republican Party with his line of questioning. Republicans, faced with behavior that was clearly wrong, rush to explain why they are OK with it. And it’s not just the Comey testimony either. Donald Trump sat back and let the Republicans in the House and now in the Senate craft their own versions of a healthcare bill, and the results once again show a complete lack of morality. As long as there are tax cuts for their donors, Republicans simply do not care at all who their legislation hurts. Remember too that it was not the current Republican president who wove an elaborate tapestry of lies to get the nation into a completely unjustified war that may have been nothing more than a personal vendetta. Here again, there was no concern with the innocent Iraqi or even American lives that would be lost. The Republicans do pretend to care what happens to the veterans of that war, but their legislative actions say otherwise

. So the Democrats must put all of this together, and start making the case to the American people that the Republicans are a once respected legislative partner that has lost their way. It is not simply that Donald Trump is immoral, although he certainly is. But he is a Republican for a reason, and the Democrats need to say soon and often what that reason is. Make Republican a bad word, in the same way that the Republicans made being a liberal anathema. There were articles last year about how the Republicans were destroying themselves by making Trump their standard bearer. What we should have learned from his victory is that that destruction will not happen by itself. We need to help it along, and we were just handed an easy way to get started.

Muddy Waters gets the nod for the song this week:

The Logic of Trumpism

There have been many attempts to understand how anyone could have voted for Donald Trump, and how anyone could still support him now. In this blog, I myself have marshalled various logical arguments that one might use to try to turn someone from the path of Trumpism. But there is a hard core of Trump support that does not respond to appeals based on the kind of logic most of us understand. They have a weird logic of their own, in which the worse things get under Trump, the closer they are to their goal. Fortunately, this hard core represents the floor for Trump’s approval rating, and the figure now appears to be 35% or less of the voters. That’s still enough to win elections in some parts of the country, but not to keep control of the nation as a whole. For now, these people are aided and abetted by cynics like Paul Ryan, who believe that they can control the Trumpites, and use their support to advance their own agenda. Ryan is from the faction I described over the last two weeks, who can not tell the difference between the financial markets and the economy. The Trumpites, however, have a completely different set of beliefs and goals.

The Trumpites believe that our system of laws and governance has failed. They do not distinguish between themselves and anyone the system may have worked for, believing instead that it has failed everyone. Hillary Clinton’s promise to defend the status quo was the last thing they wanted to hear. Where Bernie Sanders promoted the argument that it was a moral imperative to do better, the failure of his vision for positive change only reinforced the Trumpites’ idea that the system we have would never allow such change to occur. It doesn’t matter who has rigged the system in this worldview, only that the system is rigged. The only way to change this pattern, in the eyes of the Trumpites, is to first utterly destroy the system we have now. For these supporters, Donald Trump’s job, the one they helped elect him to do, is to be the agent of this destruction. Trump’s performance over the last two weeks was a great success in this view. Trump placed strain on our alliances in Europe and pledged to remove us from the Paris Accord. It’s all good, the Trumpites feel, because it attacks the established order of the world. Trump’s budget represented a frontal assault on the welfare state, and that too must be destroyed.

The Trumpites did not suddenly emerge during the election last year. They represent the logical end point of ideas the Republicans have been promoting for years, only in a context that establishment Republicans never imagined. Paul Ryan is only the most recent in a series of warriors devoted to shredding the social safety net and undoing the legacy of the New Deal. Grover Norquist has long promoted the notion of “starving the beast”, cutting taxes to the point where the government could no longer afford to help the needy. Republicans have also long promoted the notions of restoring American purity in their arguments for immigration reform. But, where establishment Republicans pursue these goals within our systems of governance and laws, Trumpites want to see it all destroyed. They perceive a government that has never done anything for them, and they have no further use for it. They have been taught by Republicans for years that it is shameful to take government handouts, that it is a sign of moral weakness, so why should they care if those “handouts” cease to exist? And why should they care if those who are morally weak suffer as they wreak their destruction?

The Trumpites are of course what the media have decided to call the “alt right”. Given my formulation, you can see how evangelical Christians fit in. Trump, for them, is a deeply flawed human being, but he is the agent of change who will bring on the end days. While certainly a sinner himself, his proposals will redeem him by punishing the real sinners, and cleansing our society. The racial and ethnic implications of this make it clear why the Trumpites include racist and neo-nazi organizations. What may be less clear is the fact that some former progressives also fall into this camp. I touched on how this can be with my comment earlier about Bernie Sanders. Look up the story of a man named David Horowitz. Horowitz was, at one time, very involved in the left wing politics of the Vietnam War era. He was even an editor at Ramparts. But one day, he woke up disillusioned, and quickly became a rabid “conservative”. Horowitz was an important mover behind the scenes in last year’s election, with Trump benefiting greatly from his help.

On the left, we also feel a great deal of anger. We find it hard to accept a system that can not give us either universal healthcare or sensible gun control, even in the face of clear public support for both policies. The vitriol that was exchanged during the primaries between the Sanders and Clinton camps was a symptom of this frustration. We must be aware that, as Yoda said, “that way leads to the dark side.” Trumpism is that dark side, and David Horowitz is proof that any of us can go there. So engaging with the Trumpites and trying to reason with them is dangerous for us. Their anger may prove contagious. The Trumpites are properly understood not as some edgy new genre, “alt right”, but as dangerous extremists, right wing anarchists who represent a tangible threat to our way of life. And they should not be allowed to call themselves patriots as they trample on the Constitution. Patriots can believe that our system of laws and governance is ailing, as long as we recall that the means for a cure are built into the system itself. I have a primary to vote in on Tuesday, where I will do my bit to try to affect a cure.

Jackson Browne wrote Before the Deluge in 1974. At the time, all of the implications of the loss of 1960s idealism were not yet obvious, but Browne instinctively knew at least some of the dangers.

The Big Man

This week, the comparisons of Donald Trump to Hitler had to take a back seat to comparisons to Richard Nixon. But I would like to make a different comparison, one that I think has much to tell us about the unique threat that having Donald Trump in the White House poses to our nation. Allow me to present Donald Trump, mob boss.

In fact, we know that Trump has had dealings with mob figures in the past. This was waived off during the campaign by some who pointed out that anyone who wanted to build something in New York City in the 1970s had to deal with the fact that the mob controlled the local concrete market. But Trump also had such figures as honored guests in his casinos, even enforcing their wishes not to be served by black employees on at least one documented occasion. More disturbing to me was a case that emerged during the campaign that resulted in statutory rape charges being brought and then dropped against Trump. The story goes that Trump attended a series of sex parties in the 1990s organized by Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was convicted of similar activities, and is now a registered sex offender. Trump admitted to his friendship with Epstein in the 90s, but he was not a party to the charges that led to Epstein’s conviction. During the campaign, a “Jane Doe” emerged who said Trump raped her at these sex parties, and that he knew she was thirteen at the time. She had a witness, identified as “Tiffany”, who worked as a procurer of underage girls for these parties. The judge in last year’s case ruled that the charges could be brought even though the statute of limitations had expired, because he found credible the claim by Jane Doe that she had received death threats to her and her family, and it had taken her this long to feel safe. Jane Doe told a story, backed up by Tiffany, of a girl she called Maria, who was going to bring charges of her own back in the 90s until she disappeared one day.

All of this must be regarded as hearsay. Jane Doe dropped her case abruptly last year, saying she was once again receiving death threats. So the case was never tried, and the evidence was never weighed in court. Around the same time, the fraud case against Trump University was settled out of court. We never learned the extent of Trump’s involvement in that one. This speaks to a perverse kind of privilege that Trump has known all his life. He is the son of a man who made his fortune in part by surrounding himself with cleaners, men who could make any story that could have damaged his reputation go away. Trump the son has always had his own cleaners as well, and now some of them are in the House and the Senate. Mitch McConnell, Devin Nunes, and Paul Ryan come to mind. It’s not hard to see that Trump hoped James Comey would become one of these cleaners as well. That would be why he tried to get Comey to swear loyalty to him at that dinner in January. If you grow up believing that the laws of this land only apply to those who don’t know how to make them go away, this would seem to be a natural role for the FBI, and it gives us an idea what qualities Trump will be looking for in a new FBI director.

Cleaners know the job they have to do. Bad stories must be made to disappear, and no knowledge of how it was done must ever be traceable to the boss. The boss makes statements that, for example, the investigation into Russian meddling in the election is over, and the cleaners make it so by whatever means necessary. People who say, or worse insist, otherwise get silenced, and sometimes vanish. A phrase we learned during the Watergate case does apply here. The boss must at all times have plausible deniability. This week, we crossed a line in the chronicle of alleged misdeeds by Trump. First with the testimony of Sally Yates, and then with the events surrounding the firing of James Comey, we learned of attempts at damage control that occurred since Trump took office. If this turns out to be the first hints of an illegal cover up, this will matter because only illegal actions that occur while a president is in office are impeachable offenses. So Trump’s cleaners now have their hands full.

With so much of a protective shell around them, what can bring down men like Donald Trump? For Al Capone, it was income taxes. A more spectacular downfall can come from a stool pigeon. One guy sings, and suddenly the whole structure begins to collapse. That is what happened in the Watergate case. Our best hope now lies with the planned testimony of Michael Flynn. This also made it easy to pick this week’s song:

Great Irresponsibility

Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben tries to teach him that, ”With great power comes great responsibility.” During Spiderman’s origin story, after Parker gains his powers and Uncle Ben dies in his arms, these words become the guiding principal that makes Spiderman a hero. But, after fifty issues, that responsibility becomes so great a burden that Peter Parker considers giving it all up, and trying to have a normal life instead. The image above is from that fiftieth issue. There is no supervillain, just a young man battling the words of his uncle, and those words finally win.

This past week, anyone who did not already know learned that Donald Trump and the Republicans in the House do not have any sense of responsibility to anyone to go with the power they wield over all of our lives. How else can you explain the passage in the House of the atrocity known as the American Health Care Act? Despite the late addition of an amendment to provide political cover for moderate Republicans, this was not a serious effort to improve health care for anyone. Instead, there was the actual goal of making savage benefit cuts in order to try to pave the way for huge permanent tax cuts for the wealthy. There was a mad rush to get the bill passed for several reasons. For Donald Trump, the fact that his first one hundred days in office passed with no major legislative victories was galling. His ego demanded the passage of something to brag about, no matter what its merits. For Paul Ryan, the bill is his greatest victory in his nearly religious crusade against the safety net. For the Republican leadership in general, two deadlines were looming that meant they had to get the votes, even if no one had so much as read the bill they were voting for. They knew the bill was doomed if the Congressional Budget Office had a chance to score the AHCA, giving precise details of how much harm it would do. And the Republican leadership also didn’t dare let their members leave on recess, and face their constituents in town halls, with the AHCA vote pending on their return. There was to be no epiphany, no chance for anyone to wake up and realize that the nation needed them to do what is right.

The greatest danger we face now is complacency. We must not assume that the ACHA will die in the Senate. We assumed that Donald Trump could not possibly win the Republican nomination, and I like so many others wrote about that. Then we assumed that he could not possibly win last November, and again, I am as guilty as anyone else, having written about how we should handle a Hillary Clinton presidency. Finally, we assumed it was time to move on to other issues, with the AHCA dead in the House without a vote in March. Now we have a last chance to prevent this atrocity from becoming law. We must pressure Senators of both parties to craft a much better, and substantially different bill. But our job does not end there. We must then make sure that the House and Senate can not reconcile the two and pass anything that even remotely resembles the AHCA. We have the majority of the American people on our side, despite the result last November. But, as Peter Parker discovered, we have a power, and with it the responsibility to use it for the greater good. Like him, we must not walk away again until the job is done.

My song choice this week may seem to have nothing to do with this post. But Luka is about what happens when someone misuses the power they have over another person. I always interpreted the song as being about a woman, but the video suggests that Luka is a child. Either way, I am calling out Trump and the House Republicans for abusive behavior towards the American people, and I stand by that:

A Toxic Environment

I wish Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke could be made to take a hike on one of the trails near my house, through the woods of central New Jersey, with a guide to help them understand what they are seeing. In the air, they might observe a large bird with a mostly black body, but having beautiful white markings on the undersides of its wings. They might also come upon young holly bushes growing in the wild. I go hiking with a good friend who serves as such a guide. He has explained to me that the bird is the black vulture, a species that has not been known to range this far north until just recently. Likewise, the holly bushes grow very well here when planted on people’s lawns, but they only just become viable in the wild. It is one thing to blame a string of warm days in March on climate change, but it is observations of changing ranges of plants and animals that really make the case. Anyone can observe these changes if you know what you are seeing. Once you confirm with your own eyes that climate change is real, there is a large body of research to draw upon to explain why it is happening.

Of course, taking Trump and his cohorts on such a hike might not be enough to change the disastrous course they have set for environmental policy. The closest thing Donald Trump has to an ideology is a pathological need to undo any policy that was implemented by Barack Obama. An overview of this administration’s actions on the environment shows this quite clearly. In addition, there is Trump’s bizarre obsession with “saving” the coal industry through deregulation. So the mining industry now has permission again to release their toxic waste into our waterways, poisoning both wildlife and human beings unfortunate enough to live downstream. Trump has also signed off on measures to allow oil drilling in formerly protected forests and fisheries.

There is, unfortunately, very little that we as concerned citizens can do to stop this. Here is where Trump’s use of executive orders has been most effective. Some can be challenged in court, but the president has a great deal of latitude regarding the environment, and many of Trump’s actions here simply reversing executive orders that were signed by Obama. So, since no legislation is needed, protests at town halls of moderate Republicans will not win this fight. Trump has also practiced action by neglect here. Simply by refusing to appoint the necessary staff, Trump has hampered the ability of the federal government to enforce even those regulations that he can not eliminate.

One cause for optimism comes from a source that certainly surprised me: Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg has a new book out, written with former Sierra Club chairman Carl Pope. The book is a reminder that the words conservative and conservation have the same root. A conservative, in the old meaning of the word from before the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the Tea Party, used to be someone we could count on as an ally on environmental issues. Indeed, Bloomberg and Pope lay out the capitalist case for sound environmental policy. Coal is dying for market driven reasons, not because of overregulation. Bloomberg and Pope make the case that stewardship of the environment is not only good for the planet but also smart business. Bloomberg was the mayor on New York City for two terms, so it is not surprising that he sees solutions as coming from cities, especially at a time when the federal government is so misguided about the environment. To be fair, I have read about the book, but I have not read it yet. But it seems to me that these are arguments that can only help our cause. As activists, we should be making arguments that help us attract the widest possible backing. We stand in opposition to a president whose positions are far from the mainstream. On the environment, as on so much else, we need to draw support from everywhere, and press the advantage we have. The majority of Americans agree with us. We don’t even need to take them into the woods to help them see it.

For my musical selection, a bit of irony felt appropriate:

War Shopping

Donald Trump has started shopping for a war. Two weeks ago, his approval ratings were almost impossibly low. This is very important to him. In fact, his personal popularity may be the thing that motivates Trump before anything else. He knows that becoming a wartime president is the quickest way to become more popular. If he had any doubts on this point, he saw it work powerfully for George W Bush. Ultimately, Trump knows that he needs a war that is long enough to establish him as a wartime president. But he also knows that the right war is important. He is old enough to remember how the Vietnam War made Lyndon Johnson hugely unpopular. So Trump has been trying different wars out, to see how they play.

First, there was the missile attack against Syria. This one made Trump a hero, in that he was acting nobly, in response to Assad’s gas attack on his own people. It played well, giving Trump’s approval ratings a nice bounce. But it was a theater piece. Trump had to get permission from Vladimir Putin to launch the strike, which meant Assad knew in advance of the attack. So there was no lasting damage, but Putin played his part publicly, making it look like the attack “proved” that Trump was willing to stand up to Russia. The attack served its immediate purpose, which was to deflect attention from the probe into Russia’s meddling in our election with the Trump campaigns possible cooperation. But Trump clearly owes Putin a debt of gratitude, so a sustained campaign against Assad is not an option.

Next, Trump tried a provocation against North Korea. That nation’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, is a good choice for an enemy, a man who is almost as unpopular among Americans as Trump himself at his low point. But there are two wild cards here that make a shooting war too frightening to pursue, at least for now. Kim Jong-un is perceived as being crazy enough to actually use nukes, and even the generals around Trump do not want to go there. Even more frightening is the possibility that China could become involved. China would be a potent enemy on the battlefield, and there would be great damage to our economy as well. China is a major provider of cheap labor and goods for us, and is also a major buyer of our goods. Trump may not be capable of seeing that far ahead, but surely someone in his circle has pointed it out. This one, however, is still simmering, and there is the horrifying possibility of having a battle of bluster lead us to a place where Trump feels he must start a shooting war.

And then there was the bombing of the cave complex in Afghanistan, with ISIS as the target. In this one, we dropped the “Mother Of All Bombs”, a gigantic bomb as devastating as possible without going nuclear. For Trump’s shopping, the problem here is there is no possible follow up. A weapon that powerful is supposed to be a closer. We were already fighting against terrorists in Afghanistan, so this attack should have finished the job. There is also the absurd claim that every precaution was taken to avoid civilian casualties. You simply do not use a weapon like this if you are trying to spare civilians.

So none of these situations give Trump the war he wants. For that he needs an enemy foolish enough to attack out shores, or a terrorist attack similar in scale to 9/11. He needs a situation that makes it clear that he is standing up for all of us, responding to a new enemy or threat. He needs, in short, a justification for a sustained campaign against a nation we can all agree is dangerous enough to us to justify the sacrifice of American blood. Anything else will only be good enough for a short term popularity boost, doomed to fade in the absence of any peaceful domestic successes.

All of this is disturbing enough, but we also need to be concerned about Trump’s choice of weapons. Barack Obama seemed almost embarrassed by the need to wage war. He favored weapons which were subtle and precise. These are not very splashy, but they actually do limit civilian casualties as much as possible. Trump, on the other hand, likes big explosions. Even though the Syrian airfield was somehow usable the next day, 59 Tomahawk missiles made quite a show. Like a drug addict needing a bigger fix, Trump topped that by using the “Mother Of All Bombs” in Afghanistan. It’s not even clear why this weapon exists. It is hard to drop, and there are very few situations, if any, where its deployment makes any strategic sense. The man who designed it must have been a bit unbalanced. Now it seems that Trump must find a new weapon to top this for next time, and that scares the hell out of me. I hope he understands that any place we nuke will not be a suitable place to build a Trump-branded property during the rest of Trump’s lifetime, because that may be all that saves us.

I would very have preferred that tonight’s song had become obsolete, but it may be even more relevant now than when Tom Lehrer wrote it:

Giving Us the Business

During last year’s campaign, one argument that was made for Trump was that his business experience would make him an effective manager of the country. In response, it was pointed out that he had filed for bankruptcy four or six times. But while we were debating his business acumen, we should have been discussing his approach to making money instead. The release this week of his budget proposal shows why this matters.

It is helpful to consider how a billionaire makes his money. Warren Buffet shows us one possible model. Buffet nurtures and tends to his fortune. He seeks to identify hidden value in the companies he acquires, and then he makes the best moves he can and waits for the results. He is patient, and he never gets involved in a business that he has doubts about. Buffet thinks in the long term. Donald Trump is the complete opposite of this. Trump is a money junkie, always seeking the quick high. He puts money into projects that have the potential to provide a quick payoff, and he doesn’t mind risk. His plan is based on the idea that he can monetize the failures in the form of tax write-offs, and his home runs can payoff enough to outweigh the strikeouts. This is a short term approach, with no patience for anything that does not pay off quickly, and the budget reflects this kind of thinking.

Where Warren Buffet might see investing in cultural programs as a way to produce a better educated and more well rounded workforce that would benefit the country over several generations, Trump sees money flowing out of federal coffers for no immediate gain. Likewise, Trump sees any money spent on programs for the poor as wasteful. He can not understand that these programs can boost consumer spending, eventually producing demand and then jobs. Military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy, on the other hand, produce immediate tangible benefits for wealthy people like him, and this is what Trump understands. The long term problems caused by income inequality are why Warren Buffet has spoken out in favor of an increased minimum wage, but Trump sees them as something he can personally dodge while continuing to monetize the here and now.

Trump also sees business as a battleground. Collaborative efforts for mutual benefit do not make sense to him. Instead, he views his gain as always somebody else’s loss, and he does not know how to be concerned about this. So scientific research and other government collaborations with the private sector get the axe; they are on their own. Companies, in his view, should be able to take the risks on their own, and he wants to clear the way for the winners to sort themselves from the losers without any government influence. This idea is also behind his zeal to deregulate.

As with so much else about Trump, his priorities here represent values that have guided the Republican Party more and more since at least the rise of Reagan. What has changed is that Trump makes no pretense now that he has the presidency of caring who gets hurt. This is also true of the racism and xenophobia that were so helpful to his campaign. The venality that represents the dark side of big business is now on full display, without the pretense of a Paul Ryan, for example. Trump makes no effort to explain how this will supposedly be good for the people who oppose him, and his surrogates flounder when they try to do so. There are no sops in the Trump budget proposal to make him look like a nice guy. This is unbridled greed, and Trump doesn’t care who knows it. It is, in his view, what has made him a winner. The rest of us lose, but that is how Trump believes the game is played. What has changed is that now he has the power to tilt the rules in his favor, and the budget proposal is his opening move.

So far, this is a pretty dark post, so let me close by offering some hope. Trump does not yet understand that a government is not a business. There is no board of directors, supposedly independent but actually pliant. Instead, Trump’s initiatives must be approved by Senators who must be answerable to their states, and by Representatives who are answerable to an even smaller group of districts. We can already see how local actions have slowed the march of “repeal and replace”, and the same thing must happen here. We must understand the hidden value and long term benefit of the programs that are currently threatened, and we must bring these arguments to our Senators and Representatives repeatedly. We must let them know that we are watching. The greatest danger we face is exhaustion, but our great offsetting advantage is sheer numbers. There are plenty of us, so nobody has to be the hero and do everything, as long as each of us does what we can.

I have been featuring music fairly regularly, because I believe it can help us keep our spirits up. When I can add a bit of humor, I will certainly do so. Hence, tonight’s selection:

A Revolution of Storytellers

Donald Trump has been carrying out a campaign against the truth itself. It started when he announced that he was running for president, and it has only intensified since the inauguration. He seeks to make the American people doubt everything we are told, and to discredit our most trusted media sources. The antidote to this campaign is a campaign of our own, committed scrupulously to telling the truth ourselves. But that doesn’t mean fact checking everything, and rebutting as needed, although that is important. We have more important truths to tell, and it is starting to happen.

To understand why rebuttals are not enough, consider Trump’s claim that Obama ordered the wiretapping of Trump Tower. It’s nonsense of course. The clearest proof that it never happened is the fact that we don’t know what was discussed in the newly revealed meeting between Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Sergey Kislyak. We also don’t know what other meetings may have taken place that have not yet been revealed. But what would happen if you confronted a Trump supporter with this appeal to logic? Couch it in the gentlest terms you can, but you are still calling anyone who believed Trump’s lie a fool and a dupe. You might even convince them that you are right, but they will not thank you for it. Likewise, we have Trump’s brag that he reduced the federal deficit in his first thirty days in office, while Obama dramatically increased it in his first thirty days. It does no good to ask a Trump supporter what actions of Trump’s can account for this, in a period when Trump spent as much taxpayer money on vacations in his first thirty days as Obama did in his first year. These facts are on our side, but they will not win us the argument.

Instead, we must tell personal truths. It is starting to happen. There was some great human interest reporting when the Moslem ban was announced, stories of how real people with real lives were devastated by this action. There are great videos of people standing up at town halls and talking about how the Affordable Care Act saved their lives, and there have been great stories on this in print as well. The words “Let me tell you a story” are the greatest weapon we have. This is how we can win hearts and minds. This is how we can bring people in instead of pushing them out. I told the story of my immigrant grandfather in a previous post. We all have such stories, although not for every issue. But together, we can find and tell the stories we need for any battle we will face.

It won’t always be as easy as it has been so far. Many people can tell stories of their immigrant heritage, and of their healthcare issues. But how do you fight threats to the environment? As I said, not all of us have a story for every issue, but together we can find these stories and make sure they get told. Environmental issues are usually abstract, but not to a family that can say what drinking the water in Flint Michigan has meant to them. The issue of abortion is one we usually lose, but we may know a mother or a grandmother who can talk about what it was like to have an abortion before they were legal, and can explain in personal terms why she took the risk. Many of us can talk about good and kind Moslem immigrants who have made a positive difference in our lives.

In telling our stories, we must be careful to just tell them, to avoid pushing them on people. Say what happened, but don’t give the moral of the story. Count on basic human decency, and assume your listener will find the moral for themselves. I know all of the horrible things Trump stood for in the campaign, and the fact that his supporters had to make their peace with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., to vote for him. But if you assume your audience is deplorable, they will reward your expectations. Instead, what will hopefully happen is that they will want to tell you their story. When that happens, try to listen without judgment. It won’t always be easy, but success will mean a connection has been made. It will mean that someone new now cares if something Trump and his enablers do hurts you and yours. That is how you win a revolution.

Music is, of course, a powerful medium for telling stories. Paul Simon says it well:

How Not To Run For Reelection

Donald Trump is running for president. Less than a month into his administration, he has already held a rally to begin the 2020 campaign, and he is accepting campaign contributions. His speech this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, (CPAC), also found him, after 15 minutes of incoherent whining about the evils of the press, in campaign mode. The speech was full of boastful promises of all the wonderful things he would do if elected.

There are two problems with this that come immediately to mind. First, given that Trump is already being watched by the press and others for any concrete signs of conflicts of interest, soliciting donations this early only worsens the problem. But Trump’s speech also shows that he does not understand how a reelection campaign is different from an election campaign. Trump was able to get elected by making a series of promises, and by striking a pose as the champion of the little guy. Some of his promises were frightening, and his supporters would tell you that he wasn’t really going to do these terrible things. The wall, paid for by Mexico, to keep “bad hombres” out was an obvious fantasy, they might say, but it showed his concern about American jobs bleeding away to other countries. A total ban on Moslems entering the country was another obvious fantasy, they would tell you, but it showed he would be tough on terrorists. His supporters by and large had bought the story that Obamacare was the evil replacement for the Affordable Care Act, and Trump would replace it with something so much better.

When you run for reelection, however, you don’t get to run on just promises, and you don’t have supporters who can say you won’t really do what you have already done. You run for reelection based on what you have actually done, and how it has played out. Donald Trump is running for reelection at a time when he has accomplished remarkably little, and what he has accomplished has shown that the worst fears that his defenders tried to brush off are not just fantasies. On Tuesday, Trump will submit his first budget to Congress, but up to now he has sent no major legislation there, and there is no sign that he is ready to do so. Given the reported disarray within his cabinet, expectations for any coherence in the budget document are low. Meanwhile, Trump arrived in the White House thinking he could govern entirely by Executive Order, and he immediately tried to institute the Moslem ban. He was shocked to discover that our nation has a system that places checks on his power, and the ban was thrown out in court. The promised new executive order to reinstate the ban has yet to emerge, probably because there is simply no legal way to do it, but Trump keeps trying. He continues to brag about how he is going to get that wall built, but people are starting to understand that it will be the American people who will pay for it through higher taxes. Trump has also ramped up deportations of illegal immigrants. In this case, there has been some great coverage of the human cost of this policy. It becomes much harder to campaign on being tough on illegals when the press is reporting about hard working parents who fear that their children will be orphaned one day because their parents will be stolen from them. Stories of overreach by immigration officials, such as beloved children’s author Mem Fox promising that she will never again visit the United States, have also made the Moslem ban harder to campaign on. Trump is still trying to campaign on his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, but he has left Congress flailing away at how to do this, while he has failed to provide any direction or guidance. The town hall protests have brought out many stories in the press about how repealing the Affordable Care Act would harm real people, including many who voted for Trump. Trump his also tried to take credit for the performance of the economy since he took office, but it was immediately pointed out that this shows instead the success of Obama’s economic management. There has been no time yet for anything Trump might have done to have any effect on the economy, and even that budget won’t make a difference for another year.

Altogether, Trump has very little in the way of accomplishments to campaign on at this point, and what he has done has been shown to be harmful to real people who are telling their stories. So the empty promises and the 2020 campaign continue.Trump ended his CPAC speech with these words:

There is no dream too large, no task too great. We are Americans, and the future belongs to us — the future belongs to all of you. And America is coming about, it's, and it's coming back and it's roaring and you can hear it. It's going to be bigger and better. It is going to be, it is going to be. Remember. And it's roaring. It's going to be bigger and better and stronger than ever before.

I was chilled, thinking of this:

The Trump Bubble

Something very strange happened in the 24 hours following the election. Going in, everyone on Wall Street “knew” that Hillary Clinton would win. It is an old adage that Wall Street hates surprises, so everyone also “knew” that the stock market would get clobbered if Trump somehow won by mistake. Indeed, as the results became known, markets in first Asia and then Europe plunged. Futures for the US stock market began to predict a brutal day for American stocks as well. But, as 9:30 AM November 9 approached, (which marked the opening of the US stock market), European markets and US futures began to recover strongly. In fact, US stocks as measured by the S&P 500 index not only rose strongly that day, but they have gone on a tear ever since, in what has come to be called “the Trump rally”. Literally overnight, the market went from fear and despair to euphoria. Euphoria is something Wall Street is very good at, but it usually ends badly. So call this my year end forecast edition.

Before I look forward, however, I should provide some background. It is vital to keep in mind that the stock market is not the economy. In the best example of this, when companies merge or lay off workers for any reason at all, unemployment increases, which then reduces consumer spending and thereby hurts the economy over a longer period of time than most people appreciate. But an announcement of a merger or layoffs almost always boosts the price of a stock, because profits increase. What is good for stocks more broadly can also be bad for the nation, so a new law or president that greatly weakens the EPA for example increases the profits of companies that pollute, but it means poisonous air and water for the rest of us. Given this, you might expect that voters would reject any candidate that Wall Street liked, and indeed there are some progressives who vote that way. But that ignores that fact that Wall Street is not monolithic. Individuals like George Soros may be hedge fund billionaires, but they recognize that, over time, progressive causes are good for the country and the markets.

You also can not say that voters are going against their own economic interests without thinking about the 401(k). Today, it is easy to think that 401(k)s have always existed. In fact, however, they are named for a section of the tax code in a 1978 law, and they only took off after a rule interpretation in 1981. Look at a graph of income inequality, and you will see that our current situation has its roots around this time. Yes, Reagan’s tax policies also made a big difference, but 401(k)s have made a big difference in our politics. Before the 401(k), companies provided retirement benefits through defined benefit plans. This meant that you were guaranteed a pension that grew predictably over time, no matter what the stock market did. The 401(k) is another matter, and it has replaced completely the old defined benefit plans for most workers. With a 401(k), you contribute to the plan with an employee match, but how it grows is entirely based on how the stock market performs. I’m simplifying somewhat, since most 401(k)s also offer money market and bond options, but the big gains are to be had in the stock funds offered. The greater risk is also to be found in these funds, but too few people appreciate that. What’s important is that 30 years on, voters now have to weigh the health of the nation against the possible impact on their retirement funds. The Trump rally is good for Wall Street traders, but it is also good for your 401(k).

This, of course, is short term thinking, but that is how many people vote. Retirement planning done properly however involves thinking in the long term. Policies that provide a social safety net and help share the wealth throughout society boost consumer spending over time, thereby creating jobs, which create more consumer spending. On the other hand, policies such as tax cuts for the rich and assaults on safety net programs concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, reducing both employment and consumer spending over time. This is ultimately bad for stocks and corporate profits, which is why the market consistently performs better during Democratic presidencies than Republican ones. And the difference is not small.

The Trump rally is short term thinking at its finest. After the initial panic, analysts began drool of the prospect that expensive regulations would be swept away by the new president and the Republican congress. Healthcare companies and insurers expect increased profits as the Affordable Care Act gets kneecapped. That means they will pay less and we will pay more for healthcare. The demise of environmental regulations is expected to be profitable for polluters in raw material industries. Military contractors look forward to a new arms race with Russia. Investing in general and the mortgage industry in particular will see a return to the casino environment that preceded the 2008 financial crisis. But the most absurd part of the Trump rally is the idea that Trump’s infrastructure plans will mean a huge increase in government spending. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s infrastructure proposals would have had that effect, but Trump is talking about tax incentives and privatizing things like toll roads and bridges, many of which are currently free. Initially, companies will reclassify existing projects wherever they can to get the tax benefit, diluting the power of these programs to create jobs. Over time, the new toll roads and bridges will be a burden on drivers, and therefore a drain on consumer spending. So, once again, your 401(k) may benefit in the short term, but the economy will suffer in the long term. Actual infrastructure spending by the government would never pass in this congress, even if that was what Trump had in mind.

So, here is my stock market prediction for the Trump presidency. In 2017, we will be operating under the last Obama budget, and many of our current laws will still be in effect. The economy will continue to create jobs for which Trump will try to take credit, but in reality job growth will slow as Trump’s changes begin to take effect. The stock market will drop somewhat in January as the current rally stalls, but the market will be up slightly at year end. In 2018, we will begin to see the full effect of Trump’s policies. From that point to the end of his presidency, the market will fall. We will see a new recession by 2020, the severity of which will depend on whether the Democrats can gain control of the Senate in 2018 and curb some of Trump’s worst impulses. The market will also fall if Trump finds a way to get himself impeached. That seems likely when you consider his contempt for our system of laws and the Constitution. So over all, voters can look forward to four lost years for their 401(k) plans.

R I P

Tonight my Facebook feed is full of words like “grieving”, “mourning”, and “freaking out”. I am seeing profanities from people who don’t normally use them. I am sorting out my feelings as I write this, but I agree with all of this. How could this happen? I feel that the only nation I have ever called home, the nation that became a refuge to my family when they were fleeing progroms, that nation has betrayed me. This country has been swayed by lies when we should be defenders of truth. America has just gotten a lot more dangerous for immigrants, sure, but also for persons of color, LGBTQ people, even people on the autistic spectrum. For anyone who is different. Income inequality just got exponentially worse. The legal protections that ensure everyone the right to vote just got much weaker. There will now be a “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and Citizens United is with us for at least that long. Gays may lose their right to marry, women to have a legal abortion. What exactly is it that “conservatives” conserve these days?

I hope some good can come of this. I hope the news media will take a good look at their complicity in this, and vow never to bow to the god of false equivalency again. I hope the Democratic Party agonizes over this, and realizes that they should have given us a range of real choices in the primaries, not anointed a deeply flawed Hillary Clinton as the only real choice. Don’t get me wrong on that one; I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, but I don’t buy the argument that he would magically have beaten Trump either. Sanders’ biography would have offered the right wing hate machine all sorts of juicy points of attack, and the campaign would have been just as ugly as the one we had. But surely there must have been someone who could have stood for the Democrats that could have brought the same empathy and dignity to the campaign that Barack Obama did to the last two.

There will be better days for this country. I have to believe that. Those of us who feel that America at its best is a refuge will have to pull together and take care of each other in the bad times just ahead. We will have to accept that there are differences between us, but we can unite for the greater good. Right now I am angry at anyone who took this one for granted and did not vote at all, but I can not find a state where third party votes made the difference. I will need some time, but we need to put all of that aside, and find a way to work together if we are to have any hope of making things better. We can start by working our asses off to make some gains for the good guys in the 2017 elections.

For myself, I will try to keep my friends and family always in mind, and look for small and large ways to help. I will continue to speak out, and I will encourage others to do likewise when I can. In sadness, fear, and anger, I will try to remember to love.

One Final Word

I know I said my previous post would be my final one before the election, but this one came to me today and demanded to be written. If you are a writer, I am sure you know what I mean.

I have voted in every presidential election since 1980, and I have always tried to ignore a candidate’s personal life in making my choice. In particular, I said to anyone who would listen in both 1992 and 1996 that I did not care about Bill Clinton’s infidelities, that they had nothing to do with how he would govern. This year, I do not care that Hillary Clinton has a husband who cheated on her; the Clintons have resolved the matter between them, and that is good enough for me. To be fair, I also do not care that Donald Trump very publicly cheated on a previous wife, and I do not hold against him that two previous marriages have failed. However, I do care that he has boasted of sexually abusing and harassing women, and I do care that he will stand trial in December for raping a minor. I believe other actions and statements of his reinforce the importance of these transgressions, and help to demonstrate why they make him unfit to be president. Before you call me a hypocrite, I can explain in one word why these actions are different, and why I feel they are not just private matters to be dismissed as locker room talk or simple mistakes of a younger man.

That word is consent.

Bill Clinton’s infidelities did not leave a trail of victims, because the women involved were all willing participants. As I said, the Clintons made their private peace with what happened. Not so with Donald Trump. He has left a trail of victims because he has never cared about anyone’s consent for anything. This attitude extends well beyond his sexual activities and appetites. At the beginning of his real estate career, he demonstrated that he did not need anyone’s consent to discriminate against minority tenants. He settled one discrimination case, only to go right back to the behaviors that got him in trouble in the first place. Of more immediate concern, we have a concept that is one of the foundations of our system of government: the consent of the governed. It means there is no question that we will accept the judgement of the voters and gracefully concede when we lose an election. No one has to ask Hillary Clinton if she will accept the results if she does not win; before Trump raised the issue, the idea would have been absurd. The consent of the governed also means that a president accepts that there are constitutional limits to his power, that voters also choose Congress separately for just this reason. When Donald Trump criticizes Hillary Clinton for not accomplishing more in 30 years of public service, however, he is saying that he believes in a form of absolute power that yields to no one. She should have been able to do whatever she wanted, because that is what he would do.

Consent also has to do with honoring our treaties and alliances. Hillary Clinton will do that, and she will not order prisoners of war to be tortured, because she respects international law. Donald Trump, when he talks about foreign policy, clearly believes that, as the most powerful nation on earth, no other nation has the right to tell us what to do. He also regards torture and treaty violations as a show of strength. He believes that women should be afraid of him, and so should nations.

When you frame all of this in terms of consent, you realize that Donald Trump did not arise from a vacuum. It was George W Bush, not Trump, who made us a nation of torturers. The issue of reproductive rights is all about consent, and it has been a mainstay of Republican politics for many years. Since 2008, the Republican Party has refused to govern unless one of their own was in the White House; most of Barack Obama’s greatest accomplishments date from the brief period when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. The Republicans who are now promising not to confirm a Supreme Court justice until he or she is chosen by a Republican president are violating the principal of the consent of the governed. Make no mistake, this is a fundamental difference between the two major parties as they exist now. The Democrats would never behave this way, nor have they. In doing so, the supposedly patriotic Republicans are displaying as great a contempt for the Constitution as their presidential candidate.

On Tuesday, I will give my consent as one of the governed to someone who cares about that consent. I will do so up and down the ticket. I hope the results will show that the American people still care about the consent of the governed. Donald Trump has shown that he does not care about that consent, and his treatment of women is a facet of that.

It’s the Economy

This is likely to be my last post before the election, so it’s time to filter out all of the noise. There has been an incredible amount of noise in this campaign. So, for the purposes of this post, I will pretend that having a husband who cheats on you is the equivalent of being an unregistered sex offender. I will pretend that a foundation that openly reports all of its donors and uses almost 90% of its funds for good works is somehow the equivalent of a foundation with secret donors that engages in self-dealing and pays bribes to state attorneys-general to drop fraud investigations. And so on. Instead, I want to focus on what the likely impacts on regular people would be of a Clinton or Trump presidency. Specifically, I want to talk about the economy.

As it happens, excellent work on this subject has already been done by people who are much wiser about the economy than I am. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics assembled a team over the summer, and presented detailed analyses of how the economy would perform under a Trump or a Clinton presidency. I don’t expect everyone to read these all the way through, so check the conclusion section of each of the three scenarios presented, and then read the overall conclusion. Zandi’s team says of a Clinton presidency:

“…the upshot of our analysis is that Secretary Clinton’s economic policies when taken together will result in a stronger U.S. economy under almost any scenario.”

Of Trump, he says:

“The upshot of Mr. Trump’s economic policy positions under almost any scenario is that the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished.”

To see why this so, consider the historical precedents for what each candidate wants to do. Broadly speaking, Hillary Clinton wants to continue and strengthen the policies of the Obama administration. Obama rescued the country from the brink of an economic disaster that could have rivalled the Great Depression. He has also presided over the longest streak of months of uninterrupted job growth in US history. Under his stewardship, the deficit has dropped more in dollars than under any other president. Hillary Clinton will keep that going. Strengthening the Affordable Care Act, including the addition of the public option, would provide a boost to consumer spending, creating jobs. Increasing the minimum wage would cost the government nothing, and it too would boost consumer spending. That is why, one year later, Seattle saw so a big boost to employment after raising their minimum wage to $15/hour, despite the dire predictions of opponents.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, wants to follow the model of George W Bush, only take it much further. Bush passed the largest tax cut for the wealthy in US history, and he pushed for deregulation. The result was that Bush took the first budget surplus since at least the 1950s, (gifted to him by the policies of Bill Clinton, by the way), and turned it into the largest deficit in our history. Trump thinks Bush did not go far enough, as though creating the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis wasn’t severe enough. Trump may really think this, since he was able to personally profit handsomely from the 2008 crisis. Bush presided over the worst economic performance of any president since Herbert Hoover.

I should note that Mark Zandi is one of the most respected economists on Wall Street. He can not afford to have his reputation sullied by even a hint of partisanship. He has customers of all political persuasions, and his success depends on all of their trust. I also want to add a note for anyone who says Hillary Clinton lies and Trump tells it like it is. Donald Trump can stand in the lobby of one of the hotels he built with illegal Chinese steel, dressed in one of his name-brand suits which are made in China, and tell you how he wants to prevent American jobs from being shipped overseas. Something doesn’t compute. Please think about that before you vote on Tuesday.