Tag Archives: Trump

This Does Answer a Common Question

Each time Trump announces a new nominee for a position in his administration, the same question arises: where does he get these people? (The ones who aren’t family members, that is. Family may be equally unfit, but we do know where he gets them.)

Really, who knew there was a vast pool of corrupt, unqualified, mean-spirited people willing and eager to work with Donald Trump?

Juanita Jean points out that Texas is one good source of appalling folks.

You guys remember Yachting Randy Neugebauer – the west Texas congressman we love around here.  Randy bought a yacht with his campaign funds which is kinda strange since he lives in the desert, was the guy who chewed out the national park service ranger on tv for doing her job during the government shutdown that he voted for, yelled “baby killer” at a Democratic congressman during a debate, and called US border detention centers the lap of lovely, and a whole mess of other stuff including how the hell did his son, Toby, become a billionaire.

“Yachting Randy” had retired from Congress, but it appears he will be joining the Trump Administration. In a match most definitely not made in heaven, he is being considered for a job as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Donald Trump is considering Randy to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren’s old job.  Did you hear me? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Why aren’t you hollering and stomping?

Hell, people, you could not trust that guy with a dime.  He will steal the gold out of your teeth.  Plus, he’s crazier than an internationally syndicated Donald Trump tweet.  He’s got loco camped out in his eyeballs.

So “Yachting Randy” joins the growing parade of “you’re kidding, right?” nominees….

Not long ago, I was having lunch with a friend; we were glumly assessing the various harms likely in a country governed (if you can call it that) by this collection of truly appalling choices, and we concluded that their very incompetence might be our salvation–that most of them were too inexperienced and uninformed to be effective. The Trump Administration seemed likely to resemble the Keystone Kops.

But people like “Yachting Randy” and “Oops Rick Perry” and (most terrifying of all) “Sheriff” Jeff Sessions do have government experience. Their prior performance wouldn’t exactly recommend them for positions in a competent administration, and they may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, as the old saying goes, but they may actually be able to do a considerable amount of harm.

I keep telling myself I’m just having a nightmare…..Could someone please wake me?

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The Power of the Gerrymander

Members of Indiana’s General Assembly will soon vote on an anti-Gerrymandering measure introduced by Jerry Torr, a “good government” Republican. The odds are that with a bit of a push, it will pass the Indiana House; but absent some really effective citizen lobbying, it isn’t likely to make it through the Senate, and that’s a real shame.

If readers of this blog need motivation to participate in that citizen lobbying effort, let me point to an important column by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo, in which he connects the multiple dangers posed by Donald Trump directly to successful GOP gerrymandering. (The emphasis in the following excerpt is mine.)

In a less polarized partisan environment Trump never would have been elected and, if he had, might already be looking at possible impeachment. I think the greatest single explanation of Trump is that his politics profoundly galvanized a minority of the electorate and only a minority of the electorate. Almost everyone who wasn’t galvanized was repulsed. But once he had secured the GOP nomination with that minority, the power of partisan polarization kicked in to lock into place perhaps the next 15% to 20% of the electorate which otherwise would never have supported him. The fact that partisan identification proved stronger than that repulsion is the key reason many, including myself, wrongly discounted Trump’s ability to win. As long as Trump remains “us” to Republican voters I see little reason to think anything we can imagine will shake that very high level of support he gets from self-identified Republicans. That likely means that, among other things, no matter how unpopular Trump gets, Republican lawmakers will continue to support him because the chances of ending their careers is greater in a GOP primary than in a general election.

As I have repeatedly argued, the creation of “safe” seats for either party via partisan redistricting means that the real election occurs in that party’s primary. The people who vote in primary elections are primarily the “party faithful,” and they come overwhelmingly from the party’s fringe. Democratic voters in primaries are demonstrably to the left of the party as a whole, and Republican primary voters are even further to the right of the average Republican.

My Facebook page has been filled with criticisms of the U.S. House and Senate Republicans who have gone meekly along with the seriously disturbed person who occupies the Oval Office. (I can’t bring myself to attach the word “President” to this embarrassing buffoon.) What happened to their patriotism, their cojones? The answer is simple: the gerrymandering that makes them vulnerable to defeat if they cross the crazies of their own party has neutered them.

Gerrymandering is the reason that otherwise reasonable politicians consistently put partisan loyalties above the common good.

It would be nice if a few of them exhibited some integrity, and if Trump continues to threaten democratic norms and fundamental American interests, perhaps some of them will “grow a pair”– especially those getting ready to retire or otherwise leave office, who will not face another election.

The rest of them are caught between self-interest (which requires that they avoid offending the party’s fringe) and (for those that have them) their consciences.

Welcome to the world that gerrymandering has wrought…..

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The 60s Redux?

I had an interesting inquiry from a friend the other day. He wanted to know how I thought the upcoming few years would compare with the turmoil of the late 1960s–and whether I thought American divisions are as deep now as they were then.

As those of you who are regular readers of this blog may recall, when Trump “won” the election, my first prediction was that we were going to see a replay of the 60s, but on steroids. So yes–as I said in response to my friend’s inquiry– I think the country’s divisions are every bit as deep as they were then.

But I also think those divisions are different in kind; I think they run along different lines of demarcation.

When I was doing research for my book “God and Country,” I learned about a phenomenon called paradigm shift—times in human history where social/experiential/intellectual change is so profound that people on either side of the shift can no longer communicate with each other. The phrase was coined by Thomas Kuhn, a physicist and philosopher who, as a student, read Aristotle and realized he didn’t understand him. Kuhn concluded that neither he nor Aristotle was stupid (!), but that the nature of the realities they inhabited had changed so dramatically that they no longer spoke the same scientific language.

Kuhn concluded that competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Today, I think urban and rural Americans, and educated and uneducated Americans (to grossly and unfairly oversimplify the categories) live in those incommensurable different realities.

Election data strongly suggests that a significant percentage of Trump voters harbored sexist and racial resentments. When your world is changing, when technology is confusing and new norms are disorienting and your formerly privileged status is no longer so privileged, it is comforting to have someone to blame for that bewildering new reality. Trump obligingly provided those people with scapegoats: Muslims, African-Americans, women, Mexicans, Jews.

Meanwhile, educated people in urbanized environments, people occupying the new paradigms, comfortable with diverse populations and new technologies, have increasingly embraced that paradigm’s more cosmopolitan and inclusive worldviews.

So — yes, the divisions are certainly as deep as they were in the 60s. On the other hand, while history may “cycle,” it doesn’t actually repeat itself.

The wild card, as I see it, is that Trump is so obviously deranged and dangerous he makes Nixon look normal. Nixon was a much more conventional bad actor, and he did know how government worked, did understand foreign relations. He even championed policies that today’s rightwing would consider unacceptably liberal; he established the EPA, wanted national healthcare, went to China…

Trump is a very different kettle of fish. Moreover, he is pursuing all sorts of “policies” (if you can call his ego tantrums “policies”) that enrage multiple different constituencies. America has never seen anything like Trump, and my guess is that only hard-core neo-Nazis and other White Supremacists are going to stick with him for very long. Furthermore, Nixon did actually win the popular vote, albeit by a very small margin, while Trump started in a three-million vote hole that would have been even deeper but for GOP vote suppression.

Bottom line, in the 60s, not only were the “sides” more equally balanced, the so-called “country club Republicans” were firmly in the anti-flower-child camp. Today, those Republicans– Chamber of Commerce business people, responsible conservatives, mainstream Christians, officials from prior Republican administrations–are appalled by Trump, not by those who oppose him.

The critical unanswered questions are, first, whether several decades of persistent assaults on our constitutional and electoral institutions (gerrymandering, vote suppression, abuse of the filibuster, etc.) has weakened them so badly that a minority of lunatic Republicans can continue to keep control of the federal government despite the fact that majorities of Americans disapprove and are finally engaging politically; and second, if our time-honored checks and balances do fail, what happens then?

Comparisons to the 60s only take you so far. We’re in uncharted waters….

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The Big Lie Era

The expression “the big lie” was coined by Adolf Hitler; in Mein Kampf, he defined it as the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

These days, Americans are so swamped with lies, big and small, that nothing surprises us. Our problem is that we are increasingly reluctant to accept anything as the truth.

Fake news. “Post-fact” analyses of issues. An unremitting war on science and evidence. “Alternative facts.” Self-serving lies by politicians to obscure the reality that they are carrying water for donors and special interests. Big business enterprises peddling confusion and dangerous disinformation (as the tobacco companies famously admitted, “doubt is our product”) to protect their bottom lines.

The debates over Obamacare provide recent examples. Aetna made big news when it announced that it was pulling out of all but four of the 15 states where it was participating  in the Obamacare exchanges because it was losing too much money. A federal judge ruled that was a blatant falsehood— Aetna made its decision primarily in response to a federal antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $37-billion merger with Humana. Aetna had threatened federal officials with the pullout before the lawsuit was filed.

Obamacare has its flaws, but rather than fixing them–rather than providing the tweaks that all new programs require as implementation discloses problems–our lawmakers also chose to lie, in order to escape blame for denying twenty million Americans continued access to healthcare.

The Trumpists have indeed scrubbed the White House’s page detailing the accomplishments of the Affordable Care Act. The previous White House, knowing this was coming, took the precaution of archiving it and saving it for posterity, and for everyone who knows better to have it to point to.

But make no mistake, the theme from the Trump lie machine is going to be that Obamacare was doomed to fail, as Charles Gaba points out. Republicans started this back in December, figuring out how to make the disaster they create when they repeal the law without a replacement all Obama’s fault. And they’re moving forward with that plan.

Today, peddling “big lies”–about Obamacare, about global climate change, about “terrorist threats” or American “greatness”–is much easier than it was in Hitler’s day, because we not only have “alternative facts,” we have “alternative” news sources. A friend who decided to sample news coverage of the massive, spontaneous airport protests following Trump’s horrific Executive Order discovered that Fox News simply didn’t cover them. People who get their (mis)information exclusively from Fox wouldn’t even be aware that the protests occurred.

Steve Bannon, who is effectively running the country while the delusional “President” watches movies and tweets compulsively, ran a propaganda “news” organization prior to his fortuitous (for him) elevation to power. He clearly understands–and embraces– the power of the Big Lie.

Unfortunately, that isn’t his only area of agreement with Hitler.

There has never been a time when real journalism–and the ability of ordinary citizens to distinguish between truth and lies, propaganda and reality–has been more important.

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This is a Test..

Many years ago, there was a television mini-series about the Holocaust. My mother came over and watched the final episode with me and my (very young) children, and I still remember her firm declaration after it concluded, to the effect that she couldn’t understand the “good Germans” who kept quiet, went along and declined to get involved. She was adamant that she would not have been one of them–that she would have resisted.

I remember telling her that I wished I could be so certain. It’s easy to watch injustice and horrific behaviors from the safety of the sofa and reassure ourselves that we would be among the “good guys,” the ones who did what they knew was right no matter the consequences.

Incredible as it seems, it appears we’re going to have a chance to find out what kind of Americans we really are. Will we be among the apologists who dismiss what is happening (after all, the President isn’t coming for people like me…) and characterize the shock and anger displayed by millions of Americans as “hysteria” and “over-reaction”? Will we be like the pious “Christians” who evidently believe that morality only involves what happens below the human waist, and who evidently skipped over all those biblical references to taking in the stranger and caring for the poor and weak? Or will we go along with the self-proclaimed “patriots” we have elected–the ones who always wear a flag pin and ostentatiously carry copies of a Constitution to which they give lip service but which they read selectively, if at all?

Several readers noted that the unAmerican Executive Order refusing to admit refugees and “certain others” wasn’t even the worst thing Trump did yesterday. While that order got most of the attention, he placed his chief political strategist, Stephen Bannon, on the National Security Council, and limited the roles of both the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Bannon–the White Nationalist and neo-Nazi sympathizer who ran Breitbart, the far-Right propaganda site– will now be a regular attendee of the Cabinet-level forum that deals with national security. The Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, however, won’t be.

It is hard to believe the extent of Trump’s assault on American values and institutions in just ten days. And it is dispiriting to see the cowardice of our elected officials in the face of that assault.

It is telling that neither Ryan nor McConnell have spoken out.  No profiles in courage there, or among most GOP Senators and Representatives. (Credit where credit is due: Lindsay Graham and John McCain have spoken out, and strongly.)

So much for checks and balances.

I have no idea what will happen to this country I love over the next few months and years. We are in uncharted territory. But I do know one thing: this assault on the rule of law will challenge the strength of our democratic institutions, our American commitment to liberty and equality, and the willingness of each of us to stand up for those principles.

This is our test, and it’s pass/fail.

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