Month: July 2024

2024 Election, Trump

The Gaslighting of America …

Posted on by mjohnson

I filed this column on Thursday before President Biden’s Sunday decision to step out of the presidential race, but that incredibly significant event doesn’t change the essential need for the party of Donald Trump to confuse, lie and distort the reality of the last eight years.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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“Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity. Over time, a gaslighter’s manipulations can grow more complex and potent, making it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth.” — Psychology Today

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In the 105 days until American voters elect their next president, we will experience the greatest deluge of political gaslighting in the long history of the republic.

We’ll be told that God spared Donald Trump at his Pennsylvania rally and, by logical extension, God apparently cared nothing for a retired firefighter who died at that same rally trying to protect his family.

Presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he gives his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S., July 18, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Segar

We’ll be told the one-time views of JD Vance, Trump’s new running mate — like the views of so many others in his party — have “evolved,” that Vance no longer views the three-time Republican presidential candidate as possibly “America’s Hitler,” and that those who vote for him must be “idiots.”

We’ll be told that the inexcusable, horrendous violence that marked the Trump rally was prompted by Democrats and others who have the courage to highlight the manifest dangers of another Trump term. We can and should thank God that Trump was spared, both for the humanity of that thanksgiving but also because — at least temporarily — the violence that might have been set off has been tempered.

We’ll be asked to forget that it was the three-time Republican candidate for president who called fellow Americans vermin, who pledged to provide retribution to match the grievances of his white Christian nationalist followers, who joked about the vicious attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, with a promise that it would be “wild” and then did nothing when that mob chanted: “Hang Mike Pence.”

We’ll be told to disregard Trump’s 34 felony convictions and his civil liability for sexual assault and defamation of his victim.

We’ll be told that “justice prevailed” when a Trump-appointed judge did everything in her power to delay adjudication of charges that Trump illegally removed top secret documents from the White House and stashed them in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. And when delay was no longer enough, the judge totally dismissed the charges citing justification as flimsy as J. D. Vance’s resume.

We’ll be told the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity — a case almost certainly shielding Trump from any future accountability for January 6 and the worst Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott case — was not all that big a deal, just good conservative constitutional rewriting from the bench.

We’ll be told Trump presided over the greatest economy since the beginning of time, that he handled a deadly pandemic and its million victims “beautifully” and that the hundreds of former officials who worked for him and saw him up close and came to consider him unfit are just a bunch of losers.

“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said of the Heritage Foundation’s catalogue of grotesque policy proposals, the so-called Project 2025. We’ll be told time and again that the 140 ex-Trump staffers involved in the plan that would destroy the nonpartisan civil service, gut Social Security, implement mass deportations, cripple the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and heap benefits on the wealthiest among us is nothing more than a random collection of policies, not an astonishingly crackpot blueprint for a second, authoritarian Trump term.

Vance’s positions — a national abortion ban, ending support for Ukraine and opposition to same-sex marriage — will be minimized and, where possible, ignored. He’s a Yale graduate masquerading as a bearded hillbilly from Appalachia. But since he looks the part and coat-checked his character before entering the Senate chamber, he’s the perfect Trumpian Mini-Me.

Inventing “alternative facts” has been the Trump — and now the Republican Party — playbook since they claimed the largest crowd in the history of presidential inaugurations showed up in Washington, D.C., in 2017. And make no mistake: These fabrications are ripped from the playbook of every demagogue, every charlatan, every would-be authoritarian who ever craved public attention and sought unbridled political power.

The gaslighting has only one purpose: to get as many Americans as possible to consume enough “false information that (it) leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves.”

The grifting MAGA podcast host Steve Bannon, now behind bars for refusing to tell Congress what he knows about January 6, distilled the essence of Trumpism when he said it was about “flooding the zone with shit.”

“What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age,” Sean Illing wrote in 2020. “And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.”

Sort the crap from the important while remembering even a fraction of the Trump actions that have brought our country to this extraordinarily dangerous moment is simply exhausting. Many give up and give in.

Yet, facts are facts. The Republican presidential candidate, celebrated this week by his cult following, is a twice-impeached convicted felon who stole national security secrets and owes millions to a woman he defamed after losing a civil trial for sexual assault. He lies repeatedly about a “stolen” election that he lost, and he desperately tried to cling to power by inciting a violent mob to attack the seat of our government. His own vice president stopped the formal part of the Trump insurrection. You can bet a Vice President Vance will carry out any orders no matter how extra-constitutional they might be.

All that is left this a question: Is this the kind of country you want to pass along to a next generation? Do you really want a felon in thrall to Russian President Vladimir Putin with his stubby finger on the nuclear button?

As the always-sensible journalist Margaret Sullivan wrote recently: “Let’s be steered not by political opportunism, delusion and blame-casting, but by a more constant North Star: the rule of law and the truth.”

Were it to be. Were it possible to be.

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Further Reading:

City Manager Announces Resignation, Says She Was Bullied

This may just be one of the most depressing stories I’ve read in a week of depressing stories.

“Despite having moved the city forward on many fronts, Kelsey Young said she has received abusive calls from a handful of people in the community and, as such, has decided to take up a city manager position in another city twice the size of Sweet Home.”

The city manager of Sweet Home, Oregon (apparently not everyone there is all that sweet) is leaving her job because of … threats. The. City. Manager.

Not New York or Atlanta, but Sweet Home, population 9,828.

Read the entire story.

You Think This Year’s Presidential Conventions Will Be Crazy? 1924’s Fights Over the Ku Klux Klan Were Wilder

I’ve long been fascinated by the Democratic convention of 1924, held in New York City and featuring an epic party split over the Klan, and the Republican convention held in Cleveland to bless the candidacy of Calvin Coolidge. Both parties struggled to condemn the Klan (sort of) without alienating its followers.

“In 1924, both Republicans and Democrats tried and failed to find broadly acceptable language to denounce racist hate speech and hate crimes. One hundred years later, the problem remains. It’s not that we can’t find quite the words to express shared values. It’s a frightening lack of clarity about whether the values needed to make democracy work—tolerance, inclusion, equality—are widespread enough in the first place.”

Good piece. And there is a terrific book about the Democratic convention in 1924 – Robert Murray’s The 103rd Ballot. That’s how long it took the party to nominate a guy who lost big time.

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, Nixon, Supreme Court, Trump

Nixon’s Revenge …

Posted on by mjohnson

If you enjoy a little irony to compliment your summer this has been a week for you.

Irony one: on the day the United States Supreme Court dramatically realigned our historic understanding that “no man is above the law,” granting every former president “absolute immunity” for acts committed in their official capacity, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon reported to jail for refusing to provide information to Congress about the failed Trump coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

Bannon in the slammer, Trump leads in the polls

Bannon, whose reason to be centers on dismantling the “administrative state,” is a world-class grifter who stands to enlarge his toxic influence in a second Trump administration. Bannon has no more cause to be near the presidency than does the man he worked for, but while he is paying a (small) price – four months in a minimum security prison – the instigator of the coup, thanks to the Supreme Court, will likely never face any consequence for one of the most heinous acts in the long history of the Republic.

If Trump makes it back to the presidency – an increasingly likely outcome – he will never face a jury for trying to overturn an election or any of his other crimes, while the flabby mouthpiece of white nationalism and a proponent of the January 6 insurrection goes to jail, not for cheerleading the riot but for refusing to talk to Congress about cheerleading the riot.

Another irony: While Americans celebrate the nation’s independence this week, a movement initiated 248 years ago against a mentally unstable English king, the Supreme Court has effectively put the once and future crimes of an American president out of reach of the vaunted “rule of law.”

A certifiably crazy former president is now set to be a certifiably crazy king.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent against the Court’s gobsmackingly outrageous decision – “immune, immune, immune, immune.”  

“We are the United State of Amnesia,” the novelist Gore Vidal once wrote, “we learn nothing because we remember nothing.”

Remembering nothing, for instance, like Richard Nixon. Fifty years after Nixon resigned the presidency under a cloud of crimes associated with the Watergate caper that the Supreme Court has now decided that was no big deal. Nixon acted as president when he authorized the CIA to concoct a cover story for the break in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in 1972. He was acting in his official capacity when he ordered the break in of the doctor’s office where the medical records of the leaker of the Pentagon Papers were housed. Nixon was acting officially when he order hush money payments to keep witnesses quiet.

“As I looked at it, I realized Richard Nixon would have had a pass,” said no less an authority than John Dean, the White House counsel who helped reveal the extent of Nixon’s crimes.

“Virtually all of his Watergate-related conduct,” Dean said and, “virtually all that evidence falls in what could easily be described as ‘official conduct.’”

And here’s law professor Jeffrey Toobin writing in the Washington Post: “The strongest evidence that Nixon obstructed justice in the Watergate investigation was the so-called smoking gun tape of June 23, 1972. In that conversation, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, to instruct the CIA to tell the FBI to curtail its investigation of the Watergate break-in on spurious national security grounds. Nixon told Haldeman: ‘When you get … these people in, say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing. … That will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.

“Under Trump v. United States, Nixon’s statement would not amount to obstruction of justice because it related to his ‘official’ duties — that is, supervising the FBI and CIA. ‘Investigative and prosecutorial decision-making is ‘the special province of the Executive Branch,’ Roberts wrote, ‘and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President.’ Accordingly, ‘the President cannot be prosecuted for conduct within his exclusive constitutional authority.'”

Nixon, of course, accepted a pardon from President Gerald Ford for the simple reason that he knew he faced prosecution for the crimes he committed and abetted. Now, the Supreme Court says forget it. Turns out Nixon was right when, after his resignation, he infamously told interviewer David Frost, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Richard Nixon in a screen shot from his post-presidential interview with David Frost

Toobin argues that the evidence of Nixon’s obstruction, the “smoking gun” audio recording, could not, under Roberts anti-constitutional reading be used as evidence. That’s right. Read it again.

“What the prosecutor may not do, however,” Roberts wrote based on nothing more than his own ideology and aiming for his desired outcome, “is admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”

The ultimate Trump card delivered by not a conservative Supreme Court, but a radical and reactionary court with a majority more activist than judicial, more driven by its desire for a political outcome than by fidelity to the Constitution.

But it that this American way? Do we really want to encourage an already overly powerful president to have the ability to commit crimes in his official capacity and be held immune for his actions? Is this the way our 248 year experiment in checked and balanced government ends?

To see where this is going read the dissents to Chief Justice John Roberts’ outrageous opinion for the court, an entirely ahistorical document that would almost certainly make even the old Watergate defendant squirm.

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.”

Sotomayor ended with this: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

Roberts dismissed such concerns with the high handed authoritarian impulse he has now effectively amended the Constitution to permit. He argues that a president, shielded now with immunity granted by six unelected judges, has the power to be “bold.”

Was Nixon being “bold” when he initiated the coverup of his crimes, all done, by the way, to further his own political prospects and to punish his political enemies?

Unlike Roberts, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has read history. In her dissent Jackson quotes the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and in the process demolishes the claim that the Constitution encourages an all-powerful executive.

The Constitution’s “separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787,” Brandeis wrote in 1926, “not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but . . . to save the people from autocracy.”

Final irony: a former president with autocratic ambitions – Trump took to social media this week to assert, that is to lie, that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney had committed “treason” for investigating his coup activities – has had those ambitions supercharged by the authority of the nation’s highest court.

In short, the Supreme Court majority – three of them appointed by Trump – has vastly increased the likelihood that should he gain office again Trump will rule like the “dictator” he has pledged to become.

Joe Biden had an awful debate last week. He’s too old to be president. He should stand down. Trump’s court has emboldened his desire for absolute power and his lust for revenge against his opponents. What a choice.

We can have a dime store Nixon with a third the mental capacity of that corrupt former president and ten times the venality, or we can have a diminished man whose entire career supports the American ideals the Supreme Court has now kicked in the ditch.

With fear for our democracy, I despair.

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Additional Reading:

A couple of other items of interest …

We may not have kings in America, but we now have ‘official acts’

Montana journalist Darrell Ehrlick captures my own mood of despair with this telling essay.

“The Fourth of July has always been a happy occasion to celebrate the inspired ideals that have set us apart, not because we were able to reach the lofty concepts given to us by our founders, but because they continue to call us to be something exceptional.

“But today, we have the man who wrote ‘Proud to Be An American’ hawking cheap Bibles along with a convicted rapist who talks openly about becoming a dictator on Day One of a presidency and taking revenge on his enemies, and a Supreme Court who says a president is above the law just by uttering a magical incantation of ‘official act.'”

The piece won’t make you feel any better, but it’s heartfelt and honest.

Small cities in US Rust belt are leading an urban transformation charge

Something here at least a bit uplifting.

“At a time when some major US cities are grappling with business closures and high rents, a number of small, post-industrial cities in the midwest are experiencing a boom centered on their downtown cores.

“In Lansing, Michigan, another former industrial hub that’s lost tens of thousands of residents since its mid-20th century heyday, local and state authorities plan to invest more than a quarter-billion dollars on housing, a music and arts center and other community projects.

“Similar experiences are playing out in Dayton, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; and other smaller, once-struggling manufacturing towns.”

From The Guardian.

That’s all I got this week. Stay safe … and cool if you can.