Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Michelle Obama Nails It

I’ve been following the Democratic convention, and I’ve been struck by several things: the high quality of the speeches; the impressive depth of the Democratic bench; the unusual unity on display; and especially the hopefulness (and yes, joy) that have been absent from our politics for a very long time.

I’m one of those old people who can’t stay awake for speeches that begin after ten (I rarely make it past nine…), so I’ve watched selected speeches on YouTube, and I was reminded why I–along with millions of other Americans–so admire Michelle Obama.

Despite her popularity, Michelle Obama has firmly rejected suggestions that she run for office. Instead, she has carved out a special niche in the political world: that of truth-teller. And in her convention speech, she didn’t hold back. She delivered one of the most succinct–and accurate–takedowns of Donald Trump, and she did so without resorting to the third-grade name-calling that characterizes virtually every speech and social media post from Trump.

Heather Cox Richardson quoted that take-down.

“No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business…or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead…we don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something.”

And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It “demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good, big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents taught us better than that.”

In a few short sentences, Obama described the Trump character flaws that distress normal people (flaws that especially annoy those of us who have produced and raised the children whose births are the evident obsession of JD Vance). I don’t know about billionaire parents, but the rest of us taught our children the difference between civility and nastiness, between arrogance and healthy self-regard. Bullying others, making fun of disabled people, and name-calling earned severe punishments in our homes, along with lectures on why such behaviors could not be tolerated, and why they were seen by well-balanced people as evidence of inadequacy and deep-seated feelings of inferiority.

And in my house, at least, there was a “no whining” rule. If things didn’t go your way, you dealt with it. You didn’t blame your mistakes on your siblings or on others–you owned them.

Trump’s behavior reminds me of the occasional “entitled” students who couldn’t accept a bad grade, the ones who were shocked–shocked!–by a B (or an incomprehensible C), and were certain it was attributable to professorial error or bad teaching, never to their own performance.

Actually, Trump’s rants on social media remind me of that Tom Lehrer song “Be Prepared,” in which he advises boy scouts not to write “naughty words on walls that you can’t spell.”

I especially loved Obama’s entirely accurate labeling of generational wealth as affirmative action. It is. Privileged White guys with inherited wealth who begrudge any effort to correct the systemic disadvantages other people face never seem to recognize the extent of their own unearned “edge.”

Philip Bump said it best in the Washington Post.

Obama used a phrase that succinctly and elegantly reframes the ongoing debate over inequality in the United States and how it might be addressed: “the affirmative action of generational wealth.”

It’s concise, centered on two familiar concepts. The first is “affirmative action,” the term used to describe programs generally focused on ensuring that non-White Americans have access to resources and institutions they might not otherwise have. And the second is “generational wealth,” the transition of economic (and social) power through families and, at times, communities….

Generational wealth really is a form of affirmative action.

Because generational wealth presents opportunities to people who might otherwise not have access to them: legacy admissions at Ivy League colleges, tutors and training, vehicles and housing that make entry-level jobs or internships more feasible. These are benefits that derive from social and economic class — a form of affirmative action. 

 It was a great speech.

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Politics: The New Time Religion

Fareed Zakaria is one of our most perceptive pundits. I have purchased his most recent book, Age of Revolutions, and am about halfway through it. Thus far, I’ve found it illuminating.

Zakaria’s recent essay in The Washington Post was similarly illuminating, connecting America’s increased secularization to the growing religious zealotry of the GOP and Trump’s supporters. Here’s his lede:

Reporters have been noticing something new about Donald Trump’s campaign events this time around. They often resemble religious revival meetings. The New York Times notes that where his rallies were once “improvised and volatile,” their finales now feel more planned, solemn and infused with religion. The closing 15 minutes “evokes an evangelical altar call” filled with references to God.

Trump is a shrewd reader of his supporters and has clearly seen what the data show. White evangelicals, who make up about 14 percent of the population, made up about one-quarter of voters in the 2020 election. And about three-quarters of them voted for Donald Trump. Even more striking, of those White voters who attend religious services once a month or more, 71 percent voted for Trump in the 2020 election. (Even similarly religious Black Americans, by contrast, voted for Joe Biden by a 9 to 1 ratio.) The key to understanding Trump’s coalition is the intensity of his support among White people who are and who claim to be devout Christians.
The decline in the nation’s religiosity is one of the many cultural changes that have upset so many Americans. For a number of years, America was an outlier among modern Western nations, most of which had secularized far earlier. (Ironically, scholars mostly attribute this country’s greater religiosity to the Separation of Church and State so despised by Christian Nationalists.) In the 1990s, that began to change, and it has plunged since 2007.
As the scholar Ronald Inglehart has shown, since that year, religious decline in America has been the greatest of any country of the 49 surveyed. By one measure, the United States today is the 12th-least-religious country on Earth. In 1990, according to the General Social Survey, less than 10 percent of Americans had no religious affiliation. Today it’s around 30 percent.
Zakaria considers some of the reasons for the decline, and then turns his attention to what has taken the place of fundamentalist religious dogma: politics. He quotes Walter Lippmann for the observation that modern life has deprived men of the “sense of certainty as to why they were born, why they must work, whom they must love, what they must honor, where they may turn in sorrow and defeat” and notes that Americans who are trying to cope with the loss of that “sense of certainty” have increasingly replaced religious dogma with political extremism.
Over the past few years, this process has been extended even further with those who consider themselves devout Christians defining their faith almost entirely in political terms — by opposing abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights. This in turn has led to a great Democratic dechurching: According to Gallup, Democratic church membership was 46 percent in 2020, down from 71 percent two decades prior. The scholar David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame told the Associated Press, “Increasingly, Americans associate religion with the Republican Party — and if they are not Republicans themselves, they turn away from religion.” This phenomenon — of the right using, even weaponizing religion — is not unique to America or Christianity. You can see it in Brazil, El Salvador, Italy, Israel, Turkey and India, among other places….
This is the great political challenge of our time. Liberal democracy gives people greater liberty than ever before, breaking down repression and control everywhere — in politics, religion and society. But as the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Modern society gives us all wealth, technology and autonomy. But for many, these things cannot fill the hole in the heart that God and faith once occupied. To fill it with politics is dangerous. But that seems to be the shape of things to come.
Those of us who embrace life in secular America, who find the wide diversity of opinions, philosophical commitments and religious beliefs stimulating and thought-provoking, confront a political movement powered by people who find the loss of certainty terrifying, and who have compensated for the loss of religious fundamentalism by turning politics into a (similarly fundamentalist) religion.
The problem is, the essence of productive political engagement and governance is negotiation and compromise. Political engagement doesn’t work when one party sees policy disagreements, but the other sees those same disagreements as a battle between good and evil.
MAGA is a religion, and in religion, battles between good and evil are non-negotiable.
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Age And Skill

I am so sick of the focus on Joe Biden’s age. In the interests of transparency, I will admit to being two years older than the President. I do forget names and dates more frequently than I used to (although I never had much of a memory), but then, like Biden, I have a lot more material to remember and a lot more experience to draw on than younger folks do.

Some people are senile at 50. Some never are. My grandmother, who died just two months before her 100th birthday, was mentally coherent to the end. My husband is 91 and still sharp (so is Willy Nelson, who’s also 91 and still performing). Donald Trump, who is a mere four years younger than Biden, seems to have been born with dementia. (Trump has always been incoherent, so his followers evidently haven’t noticed the extent to which he is visibly continuing to decline.)

The people trying to defeat Biden by claiming he is age-impaired are people who have no persuasive argument with his performance and are desperate to find something–anything–they think will work. The Democrats who are publicly panicking over the issue–or worse, insisting he should allow someone else to run– are providing them aid and comfort. The truth is, Joe Biden has been a great President. (My middle son says Biden is the first person he’s voted for who has exceeded his expectations.)

I thought about the issue of performance when I viewed a powerful ad run by a candidate for U.S. Senate in North Dakota, of all places, sent to me by a (formerly Republican) friend who pointed out that the picture painted by this particular candidate is applicable everywhere, not just in the state of North Dakota. I am going to shorten this post in an effort to encourage you to click through and watch it, because it is a powerful indictment of the “wolves” who have hollowed out America’s middle class and who are attacking Biden because, under Trump, they will be able to continue preying on America.

Joe Biden has done more than any President since FDR to combat the wolves and shore up the middle class, to grow America “from the middle out,” as he likes to say. If the linked video speaks to you, you are a Biden voter! (If, on the other hand, you are throwing your lot in with the wolves, you are clearly a MAGA person…)

Let me be clear (as if I haven’t been!). Given the choice Americans will in all probability face at the ballot box, I will vote for Joe Biden. I would vote for him even if he was in a coma. The only genuine issue with his age isn’t senility–he is clearly in possession of his faculties, and his superior performance as President has been enhanced by the depth of his knowledge and experience and the connections he’s developed over the years that have allowed him to surround himself with highly competent people.  The only downside of his age is an actuarially increased possibility of death sometime during the next four years– and a Kamala Harris Presidency would still be infinitely preferable to the disaster–for America, for democracy, for world peace–that Trump represents.

Watch the video.

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She Has The Receipts…

Oh, snap ! Excuse my  schadenfreude….

Those of us who follow the news have been hearing  about New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation of the Trump Organization for what seems like a century. Yesterday, we finally got to see the results of that methodical investigation–and they were  devastating.

As the saying goes, she brought the receipts.

What made the announcement of James’ suit even more satisfying was the fact that it followed by just a few hours the smackdown of Judge Cannon’s widely derided decision by the Court of Appeals. (It is worth noting that two of the judges on that three-judge panel were Trump appointees.) As Robert Hubbell wrote in his newsletter, “It is difficult to convey the extraordinary rebuke delivered by the 11th Circuit to Judge Cannon.”

Hubbell also quoted from Letitia James’ verbal presentation of her 225 page complaint at the press conference.

For too long, powerful, wealthy people in this country have operated as if the rules do not apply to them. Donald Trump stands out as among the most egregious examples of this misconduct. With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization, Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system. . . . Mr. Trump thought he could get away with the art of the steal, but today, that conduct ends. There are not two sets of laws for people in this country; we must hold former presidents to the same standards as everyday Americans. I will continue to ensure that no one is able to evade the law, because no one is above it.

In all my years of practicing law, I never saw a 225 page complaint; James has used those pages to enumerate in great detail an absolutely breathtaking amount of fraud, employed consistently over many years.  Those of you who want to read the entire document can do so here.

Among the “inaccuracies” Trump supplied to banks, taxing agencies and insurance companies were the following:

  • Trump’s apartment in NY was approximately 10,000 square feet. That’s really big– but of course, not as big as Trump’s ego.  In his financial statements (intended to be relied upon by lenders) he claimed it was 30,000 square feet.  That isn’t an inadvertent measurement error.
  • Trump purchased undeveloped land in Scotland for $12 million dollars.  Eight years later, he claimed it was worth $435 million. (A contemporaneous appraisal found that–if the land was developed–it would be worth $21 million.
  • Then there was the golf course Trump purchased on the  west coast near Los Angeles. He granted a conservation easement to the state, and  an appraisal valued the golf course at $18 million. When Trump claimed a tax deduction for the grant of easement, he claimed the property was worth $25 million–a value that reduced his taxes to the IRS by millions of dollars.
  • 40 Wall Street, a downtown building owned by the Trump Organization, was valued at $200 million on a tax filing in 2010. In the very next year, Trump valued it at an astronomical $524 million.

There is much, much more, and the sheer chutzpah is amazing. James’ office lacks the authority to bring criminal charges, so her case is civil, but she announced that she has made criminal referrals to both the U.S. Attorney for New York and the IRS.

Although James’ case is civil, it’s worth noting that she is seeking what you might call a “corporate death penalty” for the Trump Organization. Among the various remedies she’s seeking are cancellation of corporate certificates (without which businesses can’t operate), the appointment of an independent monitor, an order barring Trump and the Trump Organization from doing loan, real estate and other transactions relating to New York for five years, and permanently barring Trump, three of his adult children (I bet Tiffany is grateful for those years of cold shouldering) from serving as officers or directors of any New York businesses.

And since this is a civil suit, James is free to point to the hundreds of times Donald  and his son Eric refused to answer questions and  took refuge behind the Fifth Amendment. (In a criminal proceeding, prosecutors cannot draw inferences from the fact that a defendant claimed the Fifth; in civil suits, however, the rule is different.)

Vanity Fair ran an article under the headline: “How Screwed Are Donald Trump and his Adult Children?”I think the answer is: royally.  And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving family of grifters.

Pass the popcorn.

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Hitting The Ball Out Of The Park

Despite the headline, this isn’t about George Will’s love of baseball.

I’m not a fan of Will…and that’s putting it mildly. Even when I agree with him, I find his intellectual arrogance off-putting. But fair is fair–a recent column in which he compares Trump to Boris Johnson is delicious.

As people who follow news from “across the pond” probably know, Johnson is currently in danger of losing a vote of confidence. It turns out that, at the same time he was sternly lecturing Brits on the necessity of adhering to strict COVID restrictions, he was ignoring those restrictions and partying. A lot.

Apparently, he shares Trump’s belief that rules are for the “little people,’ and don’t apply to him.

Will’s column addresses the multiple characteristics they share. Both, for example, are inveterate liars. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson might survive, for a number of reasons, one being that he, like two of the five most recent U.S. presidents (Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), has the awesome strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment. Also, to his critics he can fairly respond: “What did you expect?”

He has never disguised his belief that in any situation, truthfulness is merely one option among many, and not to be preferred over more advantageous or just more entertaining choices. As Winston Churchill said of another politician (evidently Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin), he “occasionally had stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”…

Writing in the Financial Times, Rory Stewart, a former Conservative cabinet minister now teaching at Yale University, says Johnson “is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next.” A majority of Conservative MPs voted to make him prime minister after “thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment.” This, Stewart says, is because British culture “remains trapped by the idea that politics is a game.”

Will notes that “mortification loves company” so Americans should feel marginally better from the fact that England has produced a head of government as “shambolic and careless” about truth as our recent president.

However, Will identifies a “deflating difference” between Great Britain and the U.S. Johnson’s net favorability rating has fallen from +29 percent in April 2020 to -52 percent in January 2022, while those Americans who favor Trump “are bound to him as with hoops of steel, come what may.”  

In a felicitous and absolutely accurate phrase, we are told that “total indifference to evidence is today’s ‘American exceptionalism.’”

There is more than a little truth to that conclusion, and it goes beyond the willingness of far too many Americans to ignore the plentiful evidence that Trump is bat-shit crazy. Faced with 900,000 deaths, including those of friends, family and neighbors,  large numbers of Americans still insist either that COVID is a hoax or that vaccinations are more dangerous. Faced with rapidly escalating weather anomalies and literally mountains of scientific evidence, they continue to dismiss the “myth” of climate change. When it comes to economic policy, they cling to their belief that a higher minimum wage will depress job creation in the face of significant and growing evidence to the contrary. 

Despite official FBI  reports that the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd were 95% peaceful, they continue to insist that mobs rampaged through the streets looting stores and burning cities.

Despite copious video evidence of the violence of the January 6th insurrection, they defend the lunatics assaulting police officers and vandalizing the nation’s Capitol, claiming they were engaged in  “legitimate political discourse.”

I could go on, and most of you reading this could add examples of your own.

This stubborn refusal even to consider evidence, or be swayed by it, has become the only real platform of today’s Republican Party–a party whose base has adopted as its informal motto “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” 

Even the Brits who really thought Brexit was a good idea have responded to the evidence of Boris Johnson’s malfeasance. Only in America are members of one of our major political parties absolutely impervious to facts, logic and evidence. 

American exceptionalism indeed…..

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