Tag Archives: Trump

Resisting

I have often opined that there is one question that dominates times like these. That question is: what do we do?

It’s one thing to understand the importance of resistance to Trump and his clear intention to implement the proposals in Project 2025–it’s another to figure out how, to answer the question: what can an individual do? I’ve wrestled with that question in previous posts, but it is obvious that a true resistance will require the emergence of a movement, the creation of a variety of organizations cooperating to restrain, delay and when possible, reverse the damage.

An article from the website “Waging Nonviolence” addressed that issue.

No analysis will change the fact that the election delivered a serious blow to America’s most vulnerable communities, and promises to deliver a devastating setback for economic and social justice. It’s understandable that many of us are taking this moment to grieve for what we have lost–very much including (at least in my case) a belief in the essential good sense of the American public.

But even amidst our feelings of sorrow or hopelessness, we can recognize that political conditions are not static. As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge. And in making this happen, we can draw on lessons from what has worked in the past and what we know can be effective in confronting autocrats. Our job will be to take advantage of the moments of opportunity that arise in coming months to hold the line against Trump’s authoritarianism — and also link them to a vision for creating the transformative change we need in our world.

The article went on to explain why we can expect resistance movements to emerge, especially the fact that the election was in all probability a “trigger event,” defined as a moment when

issues of social and economic injustice are thrown into the spotlight by a dramatic or expected public event: A shocking scandal, a natural disaster, a geopolitical conflict or an investigative report revealing gross misconduct stokes widespread outrage and sends people into the streets.

In 2016, Trump’s election itself served as a trigger event. A wide range of groups, from the liberal ACLU to the more radical Democratic Socialists of America, saw membership and donations surge as concerned progressives braced for what was expected to come from his administration. New groups also emerged, such as Indivisible, which began as a viral Google Doc about how to confront elected officials and compel them to resist the Trump administration. It then quickly grew into an organization with more than 4,000 affiliated local groups by 2021. 

The article noted that two days after the election, a call that had been organized by a coalition of 200 groups — including the Working Families Party, MoveOn, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action — drew well in excess of 100,000 people, and that thousands more signed up for follow-up gatherings.

There is a tendency by the “Chattering classes” (people like David Brooks of the New York Times) to minimize the importance and effects of mass protests. The author of the article conceded that marches and other mass protests cannot effect change merely by occuring. However, as he pointed out, they can and do motivate change and activate other efforts.

And they send the message that We the People have not abandoned hope and resolve.

If ever there was a time to allow ourselves a space for mourning as we contemplate the fate of our country, it is now. But ultimately, only we can save ourselves from despair. David Brooks intended to be dismissive in characterizing collective protest as “mass therapy,” but in one respect he is onto something: There is no better antidote to hopelessness than action in community. 

Our past experience tells us that coming months and years will offer moments that trigger public revulsion. Social movements provide a unique mechanism for responding, creating common identity and purpose between strangers and allowing genuine, collective participation in building a better democracy. If we are to make it together through Trump’s second presidency and emerge in its aftermath to create the world we need, this may be our greatest hope. Indeed, it may be our only one.

Our choices are stark. We can either abandon ship, or join our like-minded friends and neighbors in efforts to make the one we’re in seaworthy.

Comments

Connecting The Dots…

So..how did we get to Never-Never Land?

As the increasingly surreal incoming administration rolls out its roster of incompetent-to-insane nominees, proposes to eliminate constitutional checks and balances and empower man-child Elon Musk to decimate the federal government, it may serve us well to take a step back and identify which elements of the American status quo brought us to this place.

I have posted a number of discrete analyses–some my own, some from others. Those separate observations, however useful or relevant, fail to point us to useful solutions, fail to suggest what we will need to do when the fever subsides.

The various elements that contributed to Trump’s receipt of (under) 50% of the vote (as the votes have been counted, the thinness of his margin has become more obvious) include the interaction of economic unfairness with the information/disinformation environment, and widespread civic ignorance.

Those elements, working together, fed the multiple bigotries still rampant in American society.

There really are no short-term fixes for the widespread lack of basic civic knowledge and engagement. Heather Cox Richardson recently noted a study showing that people who paid “a great deal” of attention to political news voted for Harris +6, while those who paid “none at all” went +19 for Trump. Many of those voters obtained what little news they did get from the right-wing propaganda network I’ve previously referenced.

It’s easy to sneer at people who make no effort to understand and engage with the world they live in, but those of us who are financially comfortable need to recognize how different life is for people struggling to put food on their tables. When every day is consumed by the effort to make an inadequate paycheck stretch, when a flat tire or sudden illness increases financial hardship, accessing the news–let alone trying to confirm its accuracy– becomes a luxury you can ill afford. That’s why the enormous gap between not just the rich but also the secure middle-class and the rest is at the very base of our other problems.

Stable democracies have large middle classes. Ours has continued to shrink.

There is a mountain of research confirming the importance of economic justice to political life (and another mountain confirming that economic justice produces more robust economies). Inadequate and underinclusive social safety nets exacerbate social tensions. Studies tell us that people in impoverished households experience cognitive stresses that affect IQ, and that children from impoverished families in poor neighborhoods lack access to nutrition and good schools.

Economic deprivation accounts for much civic and political disengagement, while America’s current corporatist economic system is deeply implicated in the proliferation of disinformation. The plutocrats who benefit from a rigged economy don’t just deploy lobbyists and buy influence with political donations. The business model of Fox News and its progeny is based upon delivering the propaganda that reinforces the plutocrats’ dominance by assuring their audience that poverty (especially of Black people) is the result of laziness and/or moral deficit and wealth is evidence of brilliance, hard work and God’s approval.

I am a huge proponent of market capitalism, but a working capitalism requires a level playing field, and a level playing field requires adequate regulation. A working market economy also requires an accurate assessment of the nature of the public goods that markets cannot provide. Properly regulated markets are marvelous mechanisms for producing all manner of consumer goods, but (as I have argued repeatedly) health care and education are not consumer goods.

We are about to experience extreme social and governmental upheavals. Much–indeed, most–of what Trump, Vance, Musk et al want to accomplish is immensely unpopular. In the linked Richardson Letter, she notes that one of the largest programs that would be cut by Trump’s new (and illegitimate) “Efficiency Department” proposal would be veterans’ medical care.

The arrogance of his ridiculous cabinet choices and his evident belief that he can ram those choices down the throats of the  spineless Republicans in the Senate may prove to be a miscalculation. (Some of them might actually grow a pair, although I’ll be the first to admit that the jury on that is out.)

All of this points to an important task of the resistance. While we are working to delay or stymie the most damaging goals of this administration–the intended concessions to Putin and other autocrats, the decimation of social programs, the assaults on immigrants, education and public health, the further enrichment of the already-rich–we need to forge a working consensus on what should come next. What systemic changes will be necessary to restore and advance the American Idea?

In coming posts, I intend to address that incredibly important question.

Comments

Who We Are

Four days before election day, Dana Milbank wrote a column that said it all. 

His point was simple: unlike the election in 2016, no sentient American could fail to be aware of who and what Donald Trump is. As he said, in four days, we will look in the mirror and see who we are.

Have we become so coarse that we would choose as our head of state a man whose climactic campaign rally at Madison Square Garden was a grotesque collection of four-letter words, vulgar sexual references and explicitly racist attacks against Black people, Latinos, Jews and Palestinians?

Have we become so disoriented by disinformation that, even though the economy is booming, inflation and illegal border crossings are sharply down, and crime is below where it was when Trump left office, we accept as reality Trump’s preposterous inventions about America being “destroyed” and an “occupied country” under the control of immigrant criminals?

Have we lost so much of our democratic muscle memory and civic culture over 10 years that we no longer flinch at a presidential candidate who talks of suspending the Constitution and imprisoning political opponents?

Have we become so numb to brutality that we no longer notice his support for vigilante violence and for using the military to attack Americans?

And are we willing to risk everything on a man who has clearly become more erratic and dangerous with age?

That was the question on our ballots yesterday.

Milbank followed that question with a litany intended to remind readers of Trump’s actual threats and “promises”–to go after his personal enemies, to remake the Justice Department into an instrument of his personal vengeance, to jail his opponents, to free the “patriots” that have been convicted of insurrection…the list went on. He reminded readers of the neo-Nazi rhetoric: migrants are “poisoning the blood” of good White Christian Americans, immigrants are “animals.”

Milbank noted the unprecedented number of Republicans–not just from prior administrations, but from Trump’s own–who warned that he is a fascist who should never be allowed to exercise power. And he compared the candidates’ closing messages.

The warm-up acts for Harris included a woman who nearly died because she couldn’t get an abortion despite severe complications; a daughter of refugees; a woman who gets health care for her son through the Affordable Care Act; Republican farmers from Pennsylvania; and the brother of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died from strokes the day after defending the Capitol on Jan. 6. “I’ve had enough of Trump’s politics of chaos, anger and hate. It has real and dangerous consequences for all of us,” Craig Sicknick said.

The warm-up acts for Trump? Tony Hinchcliffe, a supposed comedian, called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and said: “These Latinos, they love making babies. … There’s no pulling out; they don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” He mocked a Black man’s do-rag in the audience (“What the hell is that, a lampshade?”) and spoke of Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins. He remarked: “Rock, paper, scissors. You know the Palestinians are going to throw rock every time. But you also know the Jews have a hard time throwing that paper,” referring to money.

Another speaker raised his middle finger to Democrats and called Trump “the greatest f—ing president.” Others called Harris “the Antichrist” who, with her “pimp handlers,” will destroy our country, and labeled Doug Emhoff “a crappy Jew,” Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a bitch” and Democrats “a bunch of degenerates.”

Bottom line: the choice between Trump and Harris amounts to a choice of who we are. The election result will tell us how many Americans cling to the aspirations of our constituent documents– and how many angry, resentful people cast votes for hate and division.

Yesterday’s election really boiled down to one question: are we better than this?

When I went to bed last night, I didn’t know the answer to that question–but one fact had become undeniable. Realizing that so many people cast votes for this truly despicable man–a man who threatens every American value, not to mention global stability– has plunged me into a very dark place. There’s no denying the bleak truth: millions of my fellow Americans rejected civility, logic, and simple humanity…..

I guess I know who we are…..and it isn’t pretty.

Comments

Who Drinks The Kool-Aid?

There’s a thread running through my political conversations. (Granted, those conversations are with friends and family, all of whom detest MAGA and Trump.)  Why do all the indicators point to a close election? Why isn’t Harris easily eclipsing Trump?

Think about it. Even voters who don’t particularly like Harris surely understand that she is a normal politician, infinitely preferable to a senile narcissist with a third-grade vocabulary and a raft of “policies” that would plunge America into a recession (or worse) and threaten world peace.

Hundreds of members of former Republican administrations–including his own–warn that he is a fascist, a dangerous lunatic, a self-regarding autocrat who should not be allowed anywhere near power, let alone the Oval Office.

Trump is a convicted felon, an admitted sexual predator, a congenital liar, a six-times bankrupt “titan of industry”…I could go on, but readers of this blog are well aware of the extent of his depravity.

How, then, is he at all competitive for the Presidency?

It certainly isn’t due to his “policies.” To the extent that he even has them, those policies are anything but the conservative political positions traditionally held by the bygone GOP. The striking departures from those traditional positions means it also can’t be loyalty to the ideology that once characterized the GOP.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded us, Trump has boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.” As Richardson put it, the GOP

had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.

Once in office, Trump put that racist and sexist base in the driver’s seat. He attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.

In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.

As Richardson explained, establishment Republicans had wanted a largely unregulated market-driven economy. MAGA Republicans, however,

want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.

Support for MAGA and Trump isn’t motivated by admiration for his character, intellect or personality. It isn’t motivated by his economic plans, which even conservative economists warn would severely damage the economy, or by loyalty to the GOP, which he has remade into a cult dominated by what used to be its disreputable fringe.

So–What explains his support?

I recently had a discussion with a local philanthropist who served in a state Republican administration, and I agree with his analysis. He ticked off three reasons he believes people support Trump.

  • Some subset of wealthy individuals care more about promised tax cuts for the rich than for the health and wellbeing of the country.
  • Some people are truly ignorant. Perhaps they get all their “news” from Fox and its clones, or they lack the intellectual capacity to understand what is at stake, or to evaluate competing political claims.
  • True MAGA movement folks–by far the largest group of Trump supporters, the ones who’ve “drunk the Kool-Aid”– are disproportionately people who are unhappy with their lives. They haven’t achieved the status or security or love or whatever else they believe they were entitled to, and they’re convinced it couldn’t be their fault; it must be the fault of “those people.” Trump gives them permission to point fingers and give voice to their bigotries: it’s those immigrants, those gay people, those uppity women and/or Blacks.

If the polls are right that the election is close, there are a lot more people in those three categories than I ever imagined…

Comments

Trump’s Mental Decline

There are ten days until November 5th, millions of Americans have already cast their ballots, and finally–finally–the media has begun to focus on the fact that a major-party candidate for President is bat-shit crazy.

Do MAGA voters even care? Or does their hatred of “those people” [fill in the minority of your choice] outweigh the very real prospects of domestic autocracy and potentially, World War III? Do they even understand that Trump’s mental breakdown means they are actually voting for a JD Vance presidency?

Google “Trump’s mental breakdown” or something similar, and Google obliges with numerous hits. Even the New York Times, which has been inexplicably unwilling to hold Trump to the same standards they applied to Biden, has noted the evidence. Under the headline “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age,” the Times noted Trump’s age and the fact that

the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Other outlets have been less restrained. The Boston Globe addressed the seeming reluctance to call a lunatic a lunatic:

We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy. So why are Republicans and the press holding Trump to a different standard than Biden?…

President Biden, after struggling with his answers during a June debate with Trump, ended his bid for a second term in July. That decision came after Democrats publicly voiced concern about Biden’s cognitive fitness and the press pursued the controversy breathlessly for weeks. Editorial boards, including the Globe’s, had even urged Biden to step aside.

Yet neither the media nor Republicans have shown that kind of urgency as Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be, to put it kindly, unwell. That is not only unfair and irresponsible, it is dangerous for the future of our country.

Forbes —hardly a Left-wing publication–has also weighed in, noting that

In interviews and speeches that have grown progressively longer during his third White House campaign, Trump often leaps back and forth from one topic to the next, appears increasingly unhinged, and mixes up and mispronounces words.

The article went on to catalog the reasons for concluding that Trump’s senility has become too obvious to ignore. And the New Republic–which is Left of center–recently noted that efforts to normalize what is decidedly not normal have finally given way to concerns over Trump’s very obvious mental incapacities.

Newsweek has also covered Trump’s decline. The article quoted Trump’s niece and fierce critic, Mary Trump, a psychologist by training, who pointed out that her uncle is “the oldest person in American history ever to run for the presidency,” and that “he can’t pronounce words or stay on topic,” and “engages in a worrisome degree of tangential thinking.”  Huffpost ran a similar critique by an unrelated mental health expert,. who warned that Trump’s “diminishing cognitive ability can’t be ignored.”

“There’s reasonable evidence suggestive of forms of dementia,” clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis told the website. “The reduction in complexity of sentences and vocabulary does lead you to a certain picture of cognitive diminishment.”

There’s much more, but the relative recency of these articles is unnerving, because rational observers have noted his mental issues–including an inability to engage in complex thought or analysis– for far longer. Yet the same media that hounded a much more mentally-competent Joe Biden out of the race basically engaged in what has been aptly called “sane-washing.”

As a September article from Mother Jones put it:

In recent days, I came across what seems to be a new term to describe much media treatment of Donald Trump: “sane-washing.” This is similar to the more common phrase “normalization,” but it extends beyond what we’ve seen for years—the media reporting on Trump as if he is a regular politician who operates within the conventional bounds of political spin and human actions—to covering up (or sidestepping or downplaying) Trump’s apparent cognitive flaws.

Among other examples, the article cited Trump’s claim that schools are providing sex change operations to children without their parents’ consent. Direct quote: “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school.’ And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

What is wrong with our country is the prospect that this lunatic will get millions of votes.

Comments