2020 Election

2020 Election, Climate Change, Fire Policy, Pandemic, Trump

Disbelieving Ourselves to Death…

Posted on by mjohnson

If you could choose just one moment from the last week to capture the utter unreality of our time – and our politics – you could do worse than looking at the highlights of a baseball game played last Monday in Seattle. 

The A’s and Mariners split a doubleheader, but the images that linger from the game have nothing to do with home runs or great defensive plays. The dystopian scene that persists is the reality that the game was played in an empty stadium where seats were filled with smiling cardboard cutouts not fans, with many players wearing face masks and wondering why the games had been played at all. 

The stadium was filled with smoke, not fans

“I think it was OK breathing, but we definitely noticed it,” Mariners centerfielder Kyle Lewis told reporters. “The sky was all foggy and smoky; it definitely wasn’t a normal situation, definitely a little weird.” True statement. 

The Seattle skyline – and every skyline from L.A. to Missoula – was obscured by a mile’s high worth of smoke. The air quality this week in four major western cities is among the worst in the world, all brought to the Seattle ballpark and your lungs by the catastrophic wildfires raging from southern California to the Canadian border, from the Oregon coast to Montana.

The West is burning. The pandemic is raging. The climate is cooking. And a sizable percentage of Americans are willingly suspending their disbelief about all of it, still enthralled with the smash mouth nonsense of the biggest science denier since Pope Urban VIII in the 17th Century decreed that Galileo was wrong and the Sun really does orbit the Earth. 

Pope Urban VIII, an earlier science denier

The suspension of disbelief, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in 1817, is a necessary element of fiction, or perhaps more pleasingly, poetry. It demands, Coleridge said, that we “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” 

You have to want to do this suspension of reality business since it really doesn’t come naturally. A reflective human reaction to things that just don’t seem true is to question what you hear or see. Not anymore. We have reached our “Duck Soup” moment and we are living the line delivered by Chico, one of the Marx Brothers in that 1933 movie: “Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?”

When told by the secretary of the California Natural Resources department, Wayne Crowfoot, that the record three million acres burned so far this year in that state required a response that goes beyond managing vegetation, the president of the United States blithely mumbled: “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.” 

Crowfoot pushed back gently on the science-denier-in-chief saying, “I wish science agreed with you.” But like the surly guy who has to win every argument at the neighborhood bar – back when the neighborhood bar was open – Donald Trump said, “I don’t think science knows actually.” 

Undoubtedly, his many supporters celebrated more of their “poetic faith” even though every eighth grader in the American West knows more about forests and fire than our president from Queens, the same guy who predicted repeatedly that the virus would “just go away.” 

To hear the president on the campaign trail, cheered on by nearly every one of the intellectually bankrupt elected officials in the Republican Party, the pandemic is over, the economy is roaring back and radical thugs are coming to a suburb near you. Reality that doesn’t depend on suspending disbelief would be, as James Fallows wrote this week in The Atlantic, that “Trump is running on a falsified vision of America, and hoping he can make enough people believe it to win.”

The Trump campaign flew into Nevada a few days ago to rally with hundreds of supporters packed shoulder to shoulder in a building in Henderson. The event took place in defiance of not only the state of Nevada’s prohibition against such large gatherings, but the clear guidance of Trump’s own science and medical experts. But, then again, they are all probably “elitists” from liberal colleges and universities. What do they know? 

The Nevada rally and subsequent campaign events in Arizona and elsewhere came at the same time as the release of Bob Woodward’s latest book, in many ways, like all Woodward books, a Washington insiders’ version of the presidency as a decades long exercise in suspended disbelief. There is, however, one thing different about this Woodward book. He’s got the tapes. 

Back in the spring when Trump was daily trying to happy talk his way through the pandemic he said on April 10: “The invisible enemy will soon be in full retreat.” Three days later he spoke by phone with Woodward who recorded the conversation with Trump’s full knowledge and confirmed that he had been lying to all of us for weeks. “This thing is a killer if it gets you,” Trump said on April 13, “if you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.” Trump went on to call the virus that once was magically “just going to go away” a “plague.” 

Trump campaign rally in Nevada violated the state’s ban on large gathering and defied the president’s own science advisors

In an earlier interview with Woodward in February Trump called the virus “deadly stuff” that was “more deadly than your, you know, your — even your strenuous flus.”

At least two things are happening here. Trump was caught in real time lying about a pandemic that will soon have claimed 200,000 American lives, shutdown schools and businesses and devastated the economy in ways we can’t yet imagine. By his ignorance and malevolence, the president, and those most guilty of aiding his mission of chaos and death – read congressional Republicans – continues to wreak havoc on every single one of his constituents. It should go without saying that it didn’t have to happen, and it hasn’t happened in most of the rest of the world. You can look it up. 

Second, the president and his pathetically craven enablers are waging a massive propaganda campaign in an effort to win an election, relying on huge doses of magical thinking larded with suspended disbelief. 

So, sure, Trump’s doing a superb job. It’s going to get cooler and magically that smoke once it’s gone will never reappear. The “deadly stuff” is nothing to fret about. I mean, after all, who ya gonna believe: A guy who lies for a living or your own eyes?

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Some other stories I found interesting this week. Hope you enjoy.

A Nation Derailed

Like most of you, I haven’t been traveling much lately. But long-time readers probably know that I am a big fan of train travel. My last rail trip was almost a year ago now from Montreal to Halifax on an overnight sleeper train. I loved it. 

So, I found this piece by Lewis McCrary a fine primer on why the rest of the world has decent – or in some cases outstanding – rail service, while the U.S. limps along with our sadly underfunded Amtrak system. You can read the story as a metaphor of source for failed American leadership, or at least misplaced American priorities. 

“Since its beginnings 40 years ago, Amtrak has insisted that it can become a self-sustaining operation, largely based upon claims like those made in 1971: in high-traffic, high-density corridors like the Northeast, there is sufficient consumer demand that passenger rail can operate at a profit. There has always been some truth to this line of reasoning, but it ignores a question that is at the heart of interstate transportation policy, both for highways and railroads: who pays the enormous costs of building and maintaining infrastructure? Interstate highways were only made possible through large federal subsidies—handouts not unlike those that created the grand railway network in the late 19th century.” 

Read the whole piece. 

Joan Didion on Bob Woodward 

I confess I have never been a great fan of Bob Woodward’s thick tomes on Washington politics. Few can argue with his role – and Carl Bernstein’s – in exposing the crimes of Watergate, but his books have often been the product of absolutely conventional D.C. wisdom, frequently based on his access to key players who, if they play the access game skillfully, usually come off looking OK.

It’s also always bothered me that often Woodward’s books rely almost entirely on unnamed sources. Footnotes matter, after all. 

And almost always Woodward becomes, as he has recently, a big part of the story. Yes, I think he erred in not revealing a lot soon what Donald Trump was telling him about the virus.

Fear – the new Bob Woodward book

Still, the latest Woodward is a bit different. He has hours of tapes of Donald Trump. No anonymous source, but the source. Still, with all the hype over Rage, the latest Woodward tome, it strikes me there is less here than meets the eye. It is, as I point out above, no great scoop that Trump is a habitual liar.

The great Joan Didion was not a Woodward fan either and in 1996 she did a rather epic takedown of the Washington Post reporter/editor. It’s worth revisiting. 

“Mr. Woodward’s rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him has been generally understood as an admirable quality, at best a mandarin modesty, at worst a kind of executive big-picture focus, the entirely justifiable oversight of someone with a more important game to play . . . What seems most remarkable in this new Woodward book is exactly what seemed remarkable in the previous Woodward books, each of which was presented as the insiders’ inside story and each of which went on to become a number-one bestseller: these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

Here’s the link.

After the Gold Rush 

In September 1990 – thirty years ago – Vanity Fair magazine published a long piece by Marie Brennan on a New York developer and his then-Czech wife. 

Donald Trump and then-wife Ivana in 1990

The story was an early taste, actually a hearty gulp, of the man who now sits in the White House. Reading it today is a little like having a look three decades ago of what the future would look like in 2020. Brennan wrote:

“I thought about the ten years since I had first met Donald Trump,” Brennan wrote. “It is fashionable now to say that he was a symbol of the crassness of the 1980s, but Trump became more than a vulgarian. Like Michael Milken, Trump appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed. His bankers showered him with money. City officials almost allowed him to set public policy by erecting his wall of concrete on the Hudson River. New York City, like the bankers from the Chase and Manny Hanny, allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished. ‘I met with a couple of reporters,’ Trump told me on the telephone, ‘and they totally saw what I was saying. They completely believed me. And then they went out and wrote vicious things about me, as I am sure you will, too.’ Long ago, Trump had counted me among his enemies in his world of ‘positives’ and ‘negatives.’ I felt that the next dozen people he spoke to would probably be subjected to a catalogue of my transgressions as imagined by Donald Trump.”

Read the whole thing if you have a strong stomach. 

The Nazi Menace

I just finished a fine new book by historian Benjamin Carter Hett, a scholar of modern Germany who teaches at CUNY. It’s called The Nazi Menace and focuses on the event immediately leading up to the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. It’s a fine book and I recommend it to anyone wanting a firmer understanding of these central events in 20th Century history.

Another historian I admire, Fredrik Logevall, reviewed the book for the New York Times.

“For the Western leaders and their populations, the second half of the 1930s represented, Hett argues, a ‘crisis of democracy.’ In the minds of influential observers like Churchill and the American columnist Walter Lippmann, it seemed an open question whether the major democracies could respond effectively to the threat from totalitarian states that were primed for war and had ready access to resources. Could Western leaders mobilize their competing interest groups and fickle constituents to support costly overseas commitments? What if these same constituents fell under the sway of fascism, with its racist and nationalist appeals?”

Read the review here.

Thanks, as always, for following along. Be safe and be well.

2020 Election, Lincoln, Politics

Is America Obsolete?

Posted on by mjohnson

What if the American experiment has reached its sell by date?

What are the chances the 244-year run of “the last best hope on earth,” as Lincoln said, is not just in twilight, but already too far gone to save? 

Lincoln’s hope for the world depended on, he said, “plain, peaceful, generous, just” actions by Americans who profoundly disagreed about big issues but were still bound together by a common purpose – to be part of a country bigger and better than its differences.

The “last best hope on earth” or the end of the American story?

What if the United States of the 21st Century is not the place Lincoln thought it to be, but just too big, too diverse, too divided, its population too invested in tribal loyalties and hatred, too eager to condemn, too sure of its own righteousness and too certain of its disdain to survive? What if our 244 years of failing to really confront the original American sin of permitting, indeed encouraging, human bondage has finally visited a reckoning on us? 

What if the parallel crisis of race, pandemic, economic and climate upheaval is just too much for our inadequate leadership, our fractured social compact and our wildly differing views of reality to handle? 

What if surviving world wars, economic collapse, including a decade-long depression, a deadly pandemic a hundred years ago and the catastrophe of civil war in the 1860s was just part of a trial run for ultimate failure in the 21st Century? What if “the last best hope” isn’t? 

I confess that I have never before, even in the abstract, really considered that the end might come. The United States is, after all, as we used to tell ourselves, “the indispensable nation.” The “greatest country” on the planet. We had the biggest economy, the best health care, the most freedom. We are, or we told ourselves we were, “exceptional.” 

But now we see it was all a lie. We told ourselves stories about how great things are and we believed our own press releases. We said the American system – checks and balances, fair and free elections, holding people accountable, the “rule of law” – could be shaken from time-to-time, but would endure. The idea, we told ourselves, was that our very special Constitution would protect us from crooks and charlatans and despots. Congress would exercise its independence and hold a chief executive who got too big for the Constitution accountable. After all, Republicans told Republican Richard Nixon that the jig was up, and he had to go. The system worked. Back then. 

What is really in the American DNA?

Not to worry, we convinced ourselves, American ideals, perhaps never fully realized, like the “all men are created equal” language not really applying to all persons, would still, by hook or crook, prevail.

We got this covered we assured ourselves. A momentary blip in the body politic and before you know it, we’ll be back on the path to perfecting “a more perfect union.” But we aren’t on that path. Our current path is down a long, dark alley were division and discord seem to be the only truly exceptional things about the country. 

As Thomas Geoghegan recently put it perfectly: “we are at a moment like the one the country faced in 1932 – there is not just fear and uncertainty and a sense of being unmoored but also the doubt that our form of government is capable of coping. In a way it is even worse: unlike in 1932, the plot against America is already in full swing, and we as a people are even more uncertain of who we are.” 

A thing to remember about the United States is that it’s just an idea, and an idea built on a very flimsy foundation. It’s not the laws and the Constitution that ultimately matter, but rather that people – citizens and their leaders – will decide, even when it means acting against immediate self-interest, that they will still act in good faith. The idea is that respect for the norms of a democratic society will be observed and that decency will ultimately prevail, even if observing the norms and behaving decently mean that my side is going to lose some of the time. How obsolete that seems today. 

If America is not to pass away into something Lincoln would not recognize, that Franklin Roosevelt would find repugnant, that General and President Eisenhower would reject, we need to recapture a shared sense of national purpose. 

We can begin with a fundamental question. What do we really stand for? It’s not that we stand for any one president or any one political position, but what is really in the American DNA? 

The Catholic scholar Thomas Levergood takes me back to my own belief in my church’s social message, which is to search for and find “the common good.” Levergood recently defined the idea in an essay in the Jesuit journal America: “In a specific sense a common good refers to something that can only be shared in common and cannot be divided in pieces and be possessed by individuals or smaller groups. It is a common end achieved through common actions.”

Levergood continues: “It is in plain view that many of our fellow citizens are so frustrated with our political system that they have fallen for populist rhetoric to condemn all ‘politicians’ or government itself as evil. (Others are taking out their frustrations by tearing down statues.) This situation derives not from bad ideas or faults in the American people but rather from lacking the common good of a functioning political system.” 

We fix what ails America and avoid obsolescence by rededicating ourselves as citizens to creating a functioning political system that aims squarely at the common good, not what’s good for a Republican or a Democrat, a socialist or a libertarian, a conservative or a liberal, but an American. 

Deirdre Schifeling, who heads an organization dedicated to expanding voting rights, recently told The Guardian she believes this election marks a tipping point in America, a moment in which the country, having been jolted out of its complacency, will rebound. “Faith in our democracy is at an all-time low and that is very dangerous. Now the work begins on fixing it.”

Let’s hope she’s right. And let’s find our common purpose before it’s too late. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A collection of pieces I found of interest this week and I hope you will, too.

130 degrees

The climate crisis came home to us in western Oregon this week. The worst and most deadly fires in recorded memory destroyed homes and businesses and brought death – not to mention vast layers of smoke – to often wet and green Oregon.

If you any longer think that climate change is a hoax, I have some air for you to breath on the north coast. And then read this piece by Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books. Absolutely frightening.

Drought, high temps, wind and fuel load have made fires disastrous in Oregon

“Depending on the study, the risk of ‘very large fires’ in the western US rises between 100 and 600 percent; the risk of flooding in India rises twenty-fold. Right now the risk that the biggest grain-growing regions will have simultaneous crop failures due to drought is ‘virtually zero,’ but at four degrees ‘this probability rises to 86%.’ Vast ‘marine heatwaves’ will scour the oceans: “One study projects that in a four-degree world sea temperatures will be above the thermal tolerance threshold of 100% of species in many tropical marine ecoregions.” The extinctions on land and sea will certainly be the worst since the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, when an asteroid helped bring the age of the dinosaurs to an end.

Quite a legacy to live to the kids and grandkids. Read it all here.

The Truth is Paywalled, the Lies are Free

Nathan J. Robinson, writing in Current Affairs, has a really good and provocative piece on access to information. He notes that quality sources of information – the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Review, Times of London, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, among others – have their content (for the most part) behind a “paywall,” while “Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars” are free!

You do get what you pay for (this site not withstanding).

Robinson is really arguing for a system of uniform, free access to all kinds of content that doesn’t screw over the producers of the content. Worth your time.

Joey Biden, He Could Really Talk

The late Richard Ben Cramer wrote what political junkies (like me) consider the best presidential campaign book – ever – called What it Takes.

It might just be the best political book ever. Cramer focused on the candidates who ran for president in 1988, including a guy named Joe Biden.

Trust me, it’s worth your time.

“Joe did not stutter all the time. At home, he almost never stuttered. With his friends, seldom. But when he moved to Delaware, there were no friends. There were new kids, a new school, and new nuns to make him stand up and read in class: that’s when it always hit—always always always. When he stood up in front of everybody else, and he wanted, so much, to be right, to be smooth, to be smart, to be normal, j-j-ju-ju-ju-ju-jus’th-th-th-th-then!

“Of course, they laughed. Why wouldn’t they laugh? He was new, he was small, he was … ridiculous … even to him. There was nothing wrong. That’s what the doctors said.

“So why couldn’t he talk right?” Read the excerpt here.

She laid waste to a “dozen-odd writers and artists

I really loved this piece in the London Review of Books, a book review really of works by and about Maeve Brennan, a long-time writer for The New Yorker. It was said Brennan “could stop traffic” and was the inspiration for Truman Capote’s character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

An iconic photo of the writer Maeve Brennan by Carl Bissinger

“At the New Yorker, with her ‘longshoreman’s mouth’ and ‘tongue that could clip a hedge’, she made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford her ‘bête noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the Town’, the section of the magazine over which [William] Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including [the cartoonist Charles] Addams, Joseph Mitchell and Brendan Gill (all of them her lovers at one time or another), joked that she had served her apprenticeship in hemlines. But it was the ability to spot the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’.”

Good stuff.

Thanks for reading. If you know someone who might be interested in these weekly posting please let me know or have them sign up at the website.

Stay safe. Be well.

2020 Election, Trump

Winning by Losing…

Posted on by mjohnson

Donald Trump has finally settled on his re-election message. He tried a number of alternatives before settling on the 2020 rallying cry. He first tried to advance the fantasy that Joe Biden was some how corrupted by Ukraine. Then he suggested that Biden was senile. “Make America Great Again, Again” just doesn’t roll off the tongue, especially since the country is closing in on 175,000 COVID-19 deaths with 30 million Americans collecting unemployment benefits in July. 

None of that worked so Trump is going for an all-purpose slogan: “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” He actually says that and then repeats it. 

At least Trump is consistent. Nearly four years ago – October 17, 2016 to be precise – then candidate Trump tweeted: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”

Then, of course, a funny thing happened that obviously not even Donald Trump was expecting. He won the election, drawing an inside straight and winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined 79,464 votes. “Large scale voter fraud” immediately became a mandate to oversee the most corrupt and incompetent presidential administration in American history. 

Now, trailing Democrat Biden in every poll and his incompetence in handling the deadly, economy killing, school closing, sports cancelling pandemic laid bare for everyone to see, Trump is back on message: the whole thing is rigged against me. 

It’s the message of a loser, but even more it is the death rattle of a profoundly damaged and damaging man who, if he has his way, will do his best to torch the single most important foundation of democracy: faith in an election. 

It is by now well documented that Trump suffers from “narcissistic personality disorder,” or even more seriously “malignant narcissism,” a condition described by Dr. John Gartner, a 28-year practicing psychologist at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, as  “a diagnosis [that is] far more toxic and dangerous than mere narcissism because it combines narcissism with three other severely pathological components: paranoia, sociopathy and sadism.” 

Or as journalist Jennifer Senor wrote recently: “The grandiosity of narcissistic personalities belies an extreme fragility, their egos as delicate as foam. They live in terror of being upstaged. They’re too thin skinned to be told they’re wrong.”

Trump will never be able – his world view and narcissism prevent it – from accepting defeat. He’s never wrong, never says he’s sorry, never admits a mistake, so how can he possibly lose? In his mind he can’t, so the election must be rigged. 

He began peddling the same line when polls showed him losing to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and now – Trump always repeats his previous tactics – he is salting the ground against a loss to Biden. 

Maybe Trump will succeed in drawing the same inside straight that allowed him to lose the popular vote in 2016 by three million ballots, but still win the Electoral College. But let’s assume for a moment that he doesn’t repeat the feat that even he didn’t think possible four years ago.

Donald Trump is not a strategic thinker. But rather he lives to fight another day by fighting today. He has no grand strategy beyond the November 3rd election. The only point is to survive and, of course, to deflect responsibility when, as it inevitably will, his jerry-built house of political cards is blown away. 

If the U.S. Postal Service – particularly critical in rural western states – is collateral damage in the Trump effort to delegitimize voting by mail so what? What’s wrong with a little slowdown in grandma getting her diabetes medication if the president can manufacture an excuse for “the election was rigged.” 

Delaware Democratic Senator Chris Coons was outside a postal service building in his state this week showing that mail sorting equipment has been dismantled

The American College of Physicians warned this week that, “There are already reports from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which fills 80 percent of its prescriptions by mail, that veterans have experienced significant delays in their mail-order prescription drugs. A delay in receiving a necessary prescription could be life-threatening.” 

Political campaigns typically try to devise strategies to increase voter participation, but Trump – and increasingly his Republican Party – aim to narrow the electorate, making it more difficult for African American voters in larger cities to vote, limiting polling places and blocking efforts to expand mail voting. The Trump campaign, for example, has sued three heavily Democratic counties in Iowa in an attempt to thwart greater absentee voting. 

Trump will continue to sow chaos and division for the next ten weeks. It’s the only approach he knows and elected Republicans, who long ago decided to ride this garbage truck of dysfunction all the way to the landfill, will raise not a peep of concern. 

Trump recently demoted, or more correctly fired, his campaign manager – another reprise from 2016 – and hired a guy who has never run a national campaign. When journalist Olivia Nuzzi went looking for evidence that the shake up had energized Trump efforts in must-win Pennsylvania she found none. Events advertised to recruit volunteers didn’t come off or people didn’t show up. 

Instead of mounting a campaign that might claw back the standing of a guy who close to 60% of the electorate disapproves, Trumpian advisors, Nuzzi wrote, “seem to think that if they got lucky the last time, and proved the conventional wisdom wrong, maybe they’ll just happen to get lucky again.”

But if they don’t get lucky again Trump has already created his post-November 3rd narrative. The whole election was a farce. The other side cheats. It’s a crime. It’s not legit. “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” 

And where will America stand then? Can any Trump partisan really imagine that Joe Biden would claim in losing an election that it was stolen from him? 

Can any American imagine that if Donald Trump loses in November that he won’t say the election was stolen from him? Heck, he’ll make the claim before the polls close in California.

—–o—–

Additional Reading:

Some items I found of interest that you may enjoy.

Trump and the GOP

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and a cultural scholar of fascist Italy. Her recent essay in the New York Review of Books – Co-opt & Corrupt: How Trump Bent and Broke the GOP – applies her study of how authoritarian regimes work to what has happened to the Republican Party under Donald Trump. 

And by the way, for a long time I personally resisted such comparisons as overblown or just too far out there. I no longer do. She writes:

“Trump also needed people who would lie for him and keep his secrets. Corruption is a process, as well as a set of practices. It involves gradual changes in ethical and behavioral norms that make actions that were once considered illegal or immoral seem acceptable—whether election fraud, lying to the public, treasonous conduct, or sexual assault. The discarding of accountability as an ideal of governance makes keeping the fundamental pact of personalist rule—staying silent about the leader’s incompetence and illegal actions—a lot easier.”

Read the entire piece.

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Prince Jared

The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer takes a look at Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. What he finds is both fascinating and appalling.

And just to note: it is easy to forget how completely unusual it is that the son-in-law and daughter of an American president, neither with a lick of government experience, are top aides in the White House. As they say, it’s not normal.

The president and his go-to son-in-law

Kushner is effectively running the Trump re-election effort.

“Kushner may take pride in the plan he devised,” Foer writes, “but current poll numbers suggest he shouldn’t. He has demonstrated little ability to stand up to his surrogate father—who has, at the very least, frustrated Kushner’s plan for bolstering the incumbent’s share of the Black vote. And although Trump may enjoy the frictionless ability to do whatever he pleases, he has entrusted his political future to an overconfident young man who believes he has all the answers. In politics, as in governing, Trump is trapped by kinship, forced to live the reality predicted by the maxim about the perils of mixing business and family. And if the president loses in November, it won’t be himself he will blame.”

Here is the link.

——

The Great Bob Gibson 

The New Yorker recently resurrected a piece on the great St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson. The story by the fabulous Roger Angell – he turns 100 next month – is a classic bit of baseball writing from the master of the craft. The focus is Gibson’s historic performance in the first game of the 1968 World Series against the Tigers. 

“The players in the Detroit clubhouse after Gibson’s seventeen-strikeout game had none of the aggrieved, blustery manner of batters on a losing team who wish to suggest that only bad luck or their own bad play kept them from putting away a pitcher who has just beaten them. Denny McLain, the starting Tiger pitcher, who had won thirty-one games that summer but had lasted only five innings in the Series opener, said, ‘I was awed. I was awed,’ and Dick McAuliffe, the Detroit second baseman, said that he could think of no one he had ever faced with whom Gibson could be compared. ‘He doesn’t remind me of anybody,’ he said. ‘He’s all by himself.’”

A great story.

—–

The Times Volunteer Proofreader 

Some time ago the newspaper of record did away with its copy desk, a feature of virtually every newsroom until the downsizing of print publications turned into a flood of layoffs.

But the New York Times has been contending with a volunteer proofreader, a lawyer in the New York area who scrutinizes the paper daily and then uses his Twitter account – @nyttypos – to point out, often rather harshly, the mistakes in The Grey Lady.

“He’s obviously a smart, well-read, knowledgeable person,” says Jason Bailey, an editor on the national desk at the Times… “And he’s almost always right.” 

The story is terrific.

Thanks, as always, for following along here. Please share with anyone you think might find this of interest. Be well.

2020 Election, Politics

The Death of Shame…

Posted on by mjohnson

Shame, that old political equalizer, had a good long run. But shame is dead, killed off by a political culture of anything goes, particularly if my side is doing it.

Shame died, as well, because we have embraced a culture of lying in public matters. There is no shame without truth.

The notion that certain acts, certain universally condemned behaviors, would so shame, so embarrass a public official, rocking and even ruining a career, is now such an old-fashioned concept as to be irrelevant. 

Just in the last couple of weeks, shame was knifed in a dozen different ways. One of my favorites was pointed out by the conservative writer Tim Miller who offered a succinct assessment of the “debate team” preparing Donald Trump for his one-on-one match ups with Joe Biden. 

Trump’s team consists of former governor Chris Christie; Jared Kushner, the presidential son-in-law; Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien and political advisor Jason Miller. “A motley crew,” as Miller correctly noted. “The first put the second guys dad in jail and made the 3rd guy the fall man for their joint corruption. The 4th guy was kept out of the White House over a hooker scandal.” 

Make America Shame Again. 

Or how about the president’s much ballyhooed “executive orders” that came in the wake of a breakdown in congressional efforts to extend unemployment benefits, forestall evictions and allocate more money to fighting COVID-19. The executive orders, which really were just memos to the file, Trump said, “will take care of, pretty much, this entire situation,” notwithstanding the president has no authority to do much of what he was claiming to do.  

The sheer audacity of the claim, false on its face and laughably shameful was endorsed by nearly every Republican, including Idaho congressman Mike Simpson. Simpson is a particularly troubling case in the annals of the demise of shame. 

He’s an appropriator in the House, one of the top members on the committee that actually determines how your tax dollars are spent, a guy who once jealously guarded his role in a co-equal branch of government. 

Simpson, rather than push back against what Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse immediately called “unconstitutional slop,” praised Trump on Twitter “for taking action to help those who need it most. People are struggling to make ends meet.” Simpson threw in a gratuitous swipe at Nancy Pelosi for good measure, accusing the speaker of the House of not coming “to the table seriously.” 

All politicians are given to the partisan excesses of mischaracterizing the opposition, but Simpson’s claim would warrant serious shaming if shaming of any kind were still in vogue. Simpson effectively praised Trump’s unworkable collection of memos, while slamming a Democrat who passed legislation weeks ago to address the very issues Simpson praised the president for failing to address. The Republican Senate, of course, has refused to take up the House passed legislation. 

Shame died a thousand ways. 

One-time Idaho senator Larry Craig was so shamed by his 2007 arrest in a men’s room in the Minneapolis airport for playing footsy with a guy who turned out to be a cop that Craig said he would resign his position, and then he didn’t. 

Bill Clinton shamed the presidency, but Clinton weaseled and waffled and refused to acknowledge the definition of shame. Richard Nixon disgraced the presidency, too, but had the good grace to actually resign amid his shame. Funny, Nixon is looking better and better. 

In Montana, the state Republican Party recently, blatantly and shamelessly, connived to circulate petitions to get Green Party candidates on the ballot for one crass reason: they hope Green Party candidates will siphon off votes from Democrats. A Montana judge ruled the caper illegal saying, “The actions of the Montana GOP and its agents demonstrate that its misrepresentations and failures to disclose in violation of Montana campaign finance law were intentionally designed to create an advantage for the Montana GOP at the expense of unwitting signers.”

The idea of being so completely and publicly shamed was once reason enough for such sleazy political hijinks to be avoided. But shame, sadly, is dead. Meanwhile, the Montana Republican Party is appealing. 

Trump supporting Republican operatives in Wisconsin have been helping Kanye West’s attempt to get on the ballot there as a presidential candidate. They apparently think the addled rapper will draw Black voters from Joe Biden. The cynicism of such a move is trumped only by its blatant disregard of any level of honor or decency. When winning is all you care about the shame of being disreputable is merely an inconvenience. 

An Idaho state senator made national headlines this week when he advocated a measure to prohibit the state’s public health districts from closing schools. “Listening to experts to set policy is an elitist approach and I’m very fearful of an elitist approach,” Republican Steven Thayn said. “I’m also fearful that it leads to totalitarianism, especially when you say, ‘Well. We’re doing it for the public good.’”

Once such spectacular stupidity – Idaho Statesman opinion editor Scott Mcintosh called it “one of the dumbest yet most telling statements ever made by an Idaho politician” – would have led to calls for Thayn’s resignation, or he might have been shamed by the laughter associated with any mention of his name. But without shame such mental giants just roll on. 

Shame made a brief, but undoubtedly fleeting comeback, in the case of Jerry Falwell, Jr., the once and almost certain future president of Liberty University. Falwell, a huge Trump supporter among the white evangelicals who embrace the president, bounded into the news recently with his pants unzipped, holding a drink, with his arm around a woman not his wife. Falwell first tried to explain away conduct that had he been a student could have gotten him expelled from his own school. Falwell took an extended leave of absence. 

It wasn’t Falwell’s first flirtation with unseemliness. As the conservative writer David French pointed out: “It’s easy to get inoculated against outrageous public conduct in the age of Trump, but even by the new standards, Falwell’s public conduct was simply extraordinary for a Christian leader.” 

But don’t count Falwell out just yet. Shame is dead. It had a good run. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Some other stories that you may find of interest…

The Unraveling of America

Anthropologist Wade Davis – he teaches at the Univeristy of British Columbia – assesses the end of the American era. From Rolling Stone:

“The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.” 

Insightful…and depressing. Read the whole piece.

The Long Hollowing Out of the American Middle Class

Almost a companion piece here from Jim Tankersley, a tax and economics reporter for the New York Times, who has a new book on what has happened to the middle class in America. Here’s an excerpt: 

“The brutality of the financial crisis and its aftermath has obscured, in retrospect, just how lousy the preceding decade was for American workers. Even before the crisis hit, the 2000s had produced the slowest job growth, in percentage terms, of any decade since the 1930s. From January 2000 through the eve of the crisis, in late 2007, the country shed a fifth of its manufacturing jobs—more than 3.5 million of them.

“North Carolina lost nearly a third of its factory jobs in that time. The recession made it worse: by the summer of 2013, there were almost 400,000 fewer North Carolinians working in factories than there had been two decades before. The share of the state’s workers who held manufacturing jobs had been cut in half.”

Read the full piece. 

The Biggest Trump Financial Mystery? Where He Came Up With the Cash for His Scottish Resorts.

Russ Choma writes in Mother Jones about one more Trump mystery:

“His large expenditures in Scotland were notable because they came during a rocky financial stretch for Trump. The year before purchasing the Aberdeenshire estate, he was ousted as CEO of his thrice-bankrupted casino business; in 2008, he defaulted on a large Deutsche Bank loan tied to a development in Chicago.

“Like other Trump wagers, his Scottish gamble has so far not worked out. Both resorts are bleeding millions annually.”

Outstanding reporting. Spoiler alert: Some in Scotland suspect money laundering.

Read the full piece.

The Night Manager

A break from pandemics and American politics for a little illegal Middle Eastern arms sales.

Just finished watching the TV adaptation of John le Carre’s novel The Night Manager. It’s really good.

Now streaming on Amazon.

Thanks for following along. Stay well.

2020 Election, FDR, Trump

A Teeny Bit of Socialism…

Posted on by mjohnson

In the spring of 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt sent Frances Perkins, his impressive Labor Secretary and the first woman to ever serve in a cabinet position, to Capitol Hill to testify before a Senate committee on a legislative proposal that we now call Social Security. 

Some members of the Senate Finance Committee were skeptical of this new idea; a federal government program to tax nearly every citizen, hold those funds in trust and then pay out a benefit to citizens in their golden years. The Great Depression was still crippling the U.S. economy and older Americans, many living such as the living was, on a few dollars a month, or often on charity needed help. 

Labor Secretary Frances Perkins championed Social Security in 1935

One Social Security skeptic was a remarkable senator from Oklahoma by the name of Thomas P. Gore. Gore was a conservative Democrat (and the grandfather of the elegant, prolific author Gore Vidal). He was also blind having lost his eyesight before he was 20 years old, but that did not prevent Gore from serving 18 years in the Senate. 

The senator listened carefully to Secretary Perkins’s testimony and when it came his turn to ask questions Gore was ready. “Isn’t this socialism?” Senator Gore asked. Perkins, not surprisingly, denied there was anything socialist about Social Security. The senator wasn’t having it. “Isn’t this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?” he said. 

Social Security is, of course, a “teeny-weeny bit of socialism,” and has been since Congress overwhelmingly approved it 85 years ago. We just don’t like to think of it as such in large part because unlike every other western democracy we have been conditioned by the knee jerk rhetoric of conservative politicians and commentators to hate socialism. 

Oklahoma Senator Thomas P. Gore

Americans hate their socialism in all its forms: Medicare, subsidized air, rail and highway transportation, federally owned and operated hydroelectric dams on the Snake and Columbia Rivers and subsidized grazing fees. Americans really hate the Postal Service. Co-op utilities, providing electricity to many in the rural northwest and served by a regional power agency owed by you – the Bonneville Power Administration – are surely out of favor. Americans dislike national parks and forests. We loath what one writer calls the “local socialized information repository known as a public library.” We really reject all of this socialism. 

Wait. No, we don’t. 

By huge numbers Americans support a significant level of government involvement in many sectors of the economy, we just hate that word – socialism.  

Republicans, with the help of the American Medical Association, began railing against “socialized medicine” since Harry Truman was in the White House. Even so, according to Kaiser Health News, four in ten Republicans and strong majorities of Democrats support a “public option” that would expand the federal government’s role in health care.

Still, labeling anyone to the left of Sean Hannity “a socialist” has been a staple of the Republican campaign playbook since, well, forever. With a floundering campaign and a horrible economy created by his tragically inept handling of the pandemic, Donald Trump – and Republicans writ large – have reverted to the mean. 

Speaking recently of Venezuela, Trump said Democrats want to visit on Americans the same level of economic chaos a succession of incompetent strongmen has visited on that South American nation. “Now Joe Biden and the radical left are trying to impose the same system — socialism plus — in America,” he said. 

It amounts to utter Trumpian rot like most everything else emanating from the Bombaster-in-Chief. Yet, with 51 million Americans having filed for unemployment benefits since March – you might argue even that benefit is a “teeny-weeny bit of socialism” – and with the country closing in on 160,000 dead from the virus, fulminating about a make believe socialist takeover of the country is something to campaign on, I guess. 

Pro-Trump conservatives howl about a “rising tide of radicalism from the left.” The Associated Press reports that GOP congressional candidates “often used words like ‘socialist,’ ‘radical’ or ‘leftist’ in their campaigns.” Idaho’s newly minted Republican Party chairman thinks the “socialist agenda” of the mayor of Boise is a rallying cry for the state’s GOP voters. 

Spoiler alert: there is no socialist agenda in Boise.

Like Franklin Roosevelt, who dedicated his first two terms as president to reforming the failing American capitalist system to prevent what he feared would be a slide toward anti-capitalism of the left and the right, the vast majority of Democrats are believers in a free enterprise system. They just seek ways to make the excesses of that system less injurious to millions of Americans. And, yes, Americans like Medicare and Social Security because those programs, instituted under Democratic presidents and with broad bipartisan support, really do work to make the country a better, safer, fairer place for millions. 

Which brings us to what the Brits call “a reverse ferret,” which has been on stunning display this week around a popular social media app called TikTok. The company behind the app, popular with young people and a female comedian who makes fun of the president, is owned by a Chinese company and has 100 million U.S. users. 

Donald Trump, that defender of capitalism, first threated to “shut TikTok down” for national security reasons before deciding that it might be OK if Microsoft bought the American part of the company, but only if the government gets paid as part of the deal.

There are no “obvious antitrust or other legal bases” for Trump’s demand, “in effect a payoff to the U.S. government,” Eswar Prassad, an economist at Cornell University told the AP. “The notion of a payment to the U.S. government sets a dangerous precedent of explicit entanglement between national security and economic considerations.”

Here’s where the “reverse ferret” jumps up. That slang term refers to a sudden, complete and inexplicable change of position on an issue. On Monday Trump was warning of radical libs taking over the country. By Wednesday he was threatening to insert the federal government in the middle of a corporate acquisition. Indeed, TikTok may be a real problem, but Trump’s solution is just bizarre. 

But if the Mt. Everest size of Trump’s contradiction strikes you as “a teeny-weeny bit of socialism,” don’t worry, his GOP enablers will remain silent about their leader’s abandonment of the free market knowing that soon enough they’ll all be back on message. 

The real radicals are running to “Make America Great Again – Again.” That con is even greater than a manufactured “socialist agenda,” but when hyperbole and fear are all you have, you need to try to scare some of the people all the time. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

How the Pandemic Defeated America

Ed Yong of The Atlantic has done some of the most impressive in-depth reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. His cover story in the September issue of the magazine is a must read. He writes:

“Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. ‘The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,’ Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.”

How America Lost to the Pandemic

Link to the full story, a genuine first draft of history.

Inside a UK ICU

An insightful piece here from Sarah Whitehead in The Guardian on what it’s been like inside a critical care unit in a London hospital. 

“Because intensive care patients need to be closely monitored, ICUs have the highest nurse-to-patient ratio in a hospital – usually one to one. At the peak of the crisis, the number of patients increased and their average length of stay in the ICU became longer. At times, Montgomery’s department had only one ICU nurse to six patients. ‘Working as an ICU nurse is like flying a plane,’ he said. ‘It is highly skilled and they cannot take their eyes from the controls. They are very, very clever people.’”

Read the story.

Iraqi Kleptocracy 

Robert F. Worth wrote a deeply reported New York Times piece on corruption in Iraq for the New York Times magazine; the corruption a direct result of the tragic decision to invade the country during the George W. Bush Administration. It’s a case study of how an entire society goes off the rails. 

“The fraud was sometimes laughably obvious. In 2017, Iraq officially imported $1.66 billion worth of tomatoes from Iran — more than a thousand times the amount it imported in 2016. It also listed imports of $2.86 billion in watermelons from Iran, up from $16 million the year before. These amounts would be ludicrous even if Iraq didn’t grow large amounts of its own tomatoes and watermelons. Economists told me these official import numbers — still visible on the Iraqi planning ministry’s website — appear to be a poorly disguised cover for money laundering.” 

Read and contemplate the consequences of one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history.

The Enduring Chill of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor – writer

Looking forward to watching a new American Masters episode on PBS about the writer Flannery O’Connor.

Matt Hanson has a preview: “Most of the drama is found in her complex inner life, which was haunted by the contradictions of her native South, the cackling humor of a born satirist, and a tough-minded believer’s faith in redemption.”

Thanks for reading…be well.

2020 Election, Education, Pandemic, Trump

Magical Thinking…

Posted on by mjohnson

“Yeah, the schools should be opened. Schools should be opened. Kids want to go to school. You’re losing a lot of lives by keeping things closed.” 

– Donald Trump, July 13, 2020

———- 

For decades Republicans have preached the gospel of “local control” of schools; the idea that the local school board – the homemakers, the local real estate guy, the small business owner – are the people who should have ultimate say about educating our kids. But like almost every other conviction of bedrock conservatism “local control” is no longer, to borrow a word from the Nixon era, operative. 

You know what else is inoperative: competence. Donald Trump and the collection of inept D-list flunkies that surround the president – Education Secretary Betsy DeVos comes to mind – have spent the last three weeks threatening governors, teachers, parents and common sense. Trump even said he’d withhold money from states refusing to open schools, a hollow threat he cannot possibly fulfil, but one in keeping with this administration’s mendacity. Significant amounts of federal education aide go to the poorest schools and to help children with particular learning needs. 

Trump wants the schools open, many others aren’t convinced

The bullying and demanding from Washington, D.C. isn’t based on any serious concern about how schools might operate in the midst of a still accelerating pandemic, but it is based on Trump’s need to manufacture the optics of “a return to normal” that is only happening between the ears of the “very stable genius.” 

As columnist Rex Huppke put it in the Chicago Tribune: “You brats are going to listen to me and to your president, Donald J. Trump, and you’re going to march your little rear ends off to school come fall. I don’t care if you have to wade through 5 feet of coronavirus to get there, you’re going!” 

Yet the people most affected – parents, teachers, school cafeteria staff, among others – seem impervious to this Trumpian logic. “I have yet to see any data where there are appreciable numbers of people who say, ‘Yes, I want my kids back in school,’” says Glen Bolger, a veteran Republican pollster, in an interview with the New York Times. “They want their kids back in school, but not right now. I think safety is taking priority over education.”

Or as Kristi Wilson, the superintendent of a small district in Arizona told the Washington Post: “Although the administration can apparently absorb the 150,000 COVID deaths without care or consequence, we do not have the luxury of even losing one.” 

It might have been wise to devote the last couple of months to strengthening distance learning and helping parents prepare for a school year without kids in school buildings. What we got instead is the persistent incompetence and quackery of the Trump Administration and the frightened conservative politicians who dare not offend the man who acts like he has all the answers but possesses none of them. 

While the president lamented Dr. Anthony Fauci’s high poll numbers compared to his – “but nobody likes me,” Trump whined, while wondering if it had something to do with his personality – he again touted hydroxychloroquine, the drug the FDA says has no proven effectiveness against the coronavirus. We won’t go into the quack doctor Trump citing who “made videos saying that doctors make medicine using DNA from aliens and that they’re trying to create a vaccine to make you immune from becoming religious.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci back in the old days when Donald Trump let him speak from the White House

Trump era magical thinking has positioned the United States, with only five percent of the world’s population, but with a quarter of all the world’s cases and vastly more deaths than any other country, as a case study of failure when it comes to controlling the virus. 

The squandering of precious time from late March to mid-May when organization of a national strategy to test, trace and isolate cases could have been done, but wasn’t will be this administration’s deadly legacy. The spreading of quack theories about unproven drugs and phony treatment, while making wearing a mask an ideological litmus test is the final proof of the abject failure of Republican efforts to lead and govern. 

U.S. leading the world in COVID-19 deaths and failed response

The GOP has given up on fighting the illness. It’s just too hard for them to handle, a position Idaho governor Brad Little summed up perfectly last week when he was asked if his state’s schools would reopen. “I think the answer is, it depends,” Little said. 

The governor or his counterparts in Florida or Texas or Arizona might have said: “You know, the answer for very much schools is no. We must recognize that the disease is out of control, spreading uncontrollably and we must redouble our efforts to fight it. One step is to end the magical thinking that suggest we should put teachers and children and the grandparents of school children at real risk by too quickly going back to in person schooling. We have more work to do before we can do that.”

Something like that would have been an honest and indeed helpful answer, allowing parents and teachers to plan and prepare, but instead of the functional equivalent of “we will fight on the beaches…we shall never surrender” to the virus we get “it depends.” 

“This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics,” long-time Republican consultant Stuart Stevens wrote recently. He compared the collapse of the party, its abandonment of expertise and common sense and its embrace of a reality television star, to the demise of the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union. In short, what the party says it is bears no resemblance to what is actually is. 

The disconnect between what Republican leaders tell their constituents about issues like wearing a mask and opening school and the relentless, unbending reality of the pandemic is simply not sustainable. The terrible logic of the virus is going to win every time and the way the incompetents continue to handle it signals that we are on track to never put it behind us. 

Ask yourself this logical question: If, as a result of a still little understood disease that will almost certainly claim thousands more American lives between now and Labor Day, your local school board, your health district, your state board of education is reduced to meeting by Zoom to consider reopening the schools is it really such a great idea to reopen the schools?

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

Nespresso…

Great deep dive in The Guardian on the coffee machine and the company behind it.

“Buying a machine grants you membership of the Nespresso Club, literally, and also membership of the Nespresso club, metaphorically – a global fellowship of people who care enough about their morning brew to spend 40 or 50p on 5 grams of it, but not enough to spend more than 30 seconds preparing it. In their homes, the distinctive hum, whirr and clunk of a machine in action has taken its place alongside the churn of a dishwasher.”

Read the whole thing, including a few surprises.

How to think about Jefferson… 

Thomas Jefferson, third president, eternally complicated…and controversial

Alan Taylor is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who teaches at the University of Virginia, the university Thomas Jefferson created. In a recent essay he reflected on the contradictions of the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner who declared all men are created equal. 

“As Hollywood has long known,” Taylor writes, “Americans prefer melodramas that sort people into the good and the evil. So, we treat Jefferson as an icon of our unresolved prejudices and inequalities, which trace to slavery. As that burden becomes conspicuous in our national understanding, partisans wish to cast Jefferson as either an antislavery hero or a proslavery villain. In fact, he was both and neither.”

Your history read today.

Nicholas Baker on FOIA…

Baker is a great writer and a dogged researcher. In his new book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act Baker tries to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to dig into some mysteries. He writes:

“Isn’t it against the law for government agencies to delay their responses to FOIA requests? Yes, it is: the mandated response time in the law is twenty days, not including Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, and if one agency must consult with another agency before releasing a given document, the consultation must happen ‘with all practicable speed.’ And yet there is no speed. There is, on the contrary, a deliberate Pleistocenian ponderousness.”

A fascinating story.

Thanks for reading. Stay well.

2020 Election, Trump

Corruption…

Posted on by mjohnson

“Unprecedented, historic corruption,” says Utah Senator Mitt Romney, one of the last Republicans with a moral compass. Romney was objecting to “an American president commut[ing] the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”

It was just a week ago – a lifetime in American politics – that Donald Trump commuted the sentence of convicted felon Roger Stone, his long-time associate and the man who conspired with Wikileaks to release hacked emails intended to damage the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. 

Considering the entirety of the craven, corrupt, contemptable 42-month Trump presidency, the Stone commutation is clearly the single most obvious – and despicable – Trumpian abuse of presidential power, at least that we know of. History is sure to record it as the most corrupt act by any president, Richard Nixon included. 

Stone commutation: Rank corruption

Curious thing: we knew all along that Trump would engage in this corruption in plain sight. He long ago signaled to Stone that if the self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” kept his mouth shut about what he knows, Trump would keep him out of jail. 

“But the predictable nature of Trump’s action should not obscure its rank corruption,” as Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes wrote at the Lawfare website. “In fact, the predictability makes the commutation all the more corrupt, the capstone of an all-but-open attempt on the president’s part to obstruct justice in a self-protective fashion over a protracted period of time. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s actually not. Trump publicly encouraged Stone not to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation, he publicly dangled clemency as a reward for silence, and he has now delivered. The act is predictable precisely because the corrupt action is so naked.”

Or as former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance White wrote in USA Today, putting a fine point on Trump’s corruption: “Roger Stone knows too much for Donald Trump to permit him to spend a single night in prison. Stone has always known that. The final piece of evidence Mueller didn’t have, but that the American people now possess — Trump provided it himself when he commuted Stone’s sentence.” 

Let’s recap, since it seems like a decade ago that special counsel Robert Mueller, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and former FBI director, issued his report about Russian interference in the last presidential election. Beyond a shadow of a doubt Mueller established that Russian military intelligence officers hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, as well as others at the Democratic National Committee. (It was Watergate just without the five clumsy burglars who were caught in the act in 1972.) The Russian behavior was also confirmed by the nation’s intelligence agencies and congressional committees. 

Cover of the Mueller report

In turn Mueller gained indictments against 13 Russians and three different Russian organizations. But, of course, Vladimir Putin, protected at every turn by an American president, even when he’s placing bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, would never let his agents be extradited so Mueller needed Americans involved in the plot to reveal what they know. Stone refused to cooperate, then lied to Congress, while one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, hoping for his own pardon, also kept quiet. Trump, too, refused to cooperate with Mueller beyond limited written answers that prominently featured phrases like “I don’t recall.” 

Numerous commentators, including George Will, about as far from a liberal as one can find, have equated this corrupt farce to the behavior of a mob boss and his underlings. Yet, a Tony Soprano or Michael Coreleone seem almost professional compared to Stone and Manafort, “dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel” in the words of Will. 

But, a week on from the late Friday night when we learned about this “unprecedented, historic corruption,” Trump’s corrupted Republican Party is moving on, willing once again in silence to embrace ethical depravity merely to serve the amoral conman in the White House. 

Imagine the mental jujitsu necessary for a Republican like Texas senator John Cornyn, a former state attorney general, to look the other way at such corruption. Think about the kind of political Kool-Aid is a guy like Idaho’s Jim Risch is drinking – he never speaks, after all, without reminding us that he was once a prosecutor – in order to stomach the Stone fiasco? 

“There has never been a case of a president buying silence about his own misdeeds with executive clemency,” Tom Nichols, the Never Trump conservative told Politico. “Other presidents have made bad and even corrupt calls with pardons, but this is in a class by itself, which is why the Republicans are either staying quiet or trying to play the ‘whataboutism’ game.”

But the old Republican game of covering for Trump is growing tiresome and increasingly ineffective. Trumpian incompetence, with the country closing in on 140,000 COVID-19 deaths and the administration’s response reduced to trashing Dr. Anthony Fauci, isn’t going to get the economy back in operation or the kids back in school. 

Trumpian corruption – commuting Stone’s felony sentence for lying, while hounding out of the military Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman who risked his career for telling the truth – represents the perfect bookends for this collection of ethically devoid Republican political cowards. The stink extends from Maine to Idaho.

Roger Stone has been a political bottom feeder since he helped found the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) in the 1970s, the group that stormed into Idaho in 1979 to smear the record and reputation of Senator Frank Church. Once a sleaze, always a sleaze. That’s Roger Stone. He’ll go to his just rewards branded a convicted felon who lied and schemed to protect the man who has burned down the Republican Party. He’ll be remembered as a crook just like the Republicans who countenance him and the man he’s protecting. 

In a few months’ time Republicans like Cornyn, Risch, Mike Crapo, and a hundred others, will be trying to convince us they hardly knew Donald Trump. They’ll hope their 42 months of silence will cover their complicit tracks. It won’t work. They’re dirty, too, just like their leader, their careers stunted and warped by their gutlessness in the face of all this corruption and incompetence. 

All that’s left is to ask them not just how could you live with such deceit and decay, but how can you live with yourself? 

—–0——

Additional Reading:

A View of the U.S. from Australia

A friend and regular reader sent me this piece from The Canberra Times, the paper is Australia’s capitol city. It’s a stark reminder of how we are now seen in much of the rest of the world.

“The underlying weakness in present US democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it. COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change and energy policy go unattended.” 

Read the whole thing. 

Notre Dame 

Notre Dame under restoration

French president Manuel Macron has backtracked on a proposal to give the historic restored cathedral in the heart of Paris a modern spire. As Architectural Digest reported: 

“‘The president of the republic has become convinced of the need to restore Notre-Dame de Paris in the most consistent manner possible to its last complete, coherent, and known state,’ the Elysée Palace said in a statement. In other words, the ‘redesign’ will look exactly the same as the original Gothic design, which is what many senior figures in French government were publicly pushing for.”

Well…good. Somethings really are perfect just as they are. Read the story. 

Truman and 1948 

This looks like a must read if you enjoy political history. A. J. Baime is the author of Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America’s Soul.

“The Truman campaign began in earnest with a meeting on the night of July 22, at 8 pm, in the State Dining Room of the White House. Funneling in was a motley crew of Truman friends—hardly a big hitter among them. As the former secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described this bunch: ‘The political figures who surround the President . . . could all be blown out by  one sure breath, as are candles on a birthday cake.’”

LitHub has an excerpt of the new book.

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2020 Election, Trump

George Wallace and Donald Trump…

Posted on by mjohnson

Back in 1968, that awful year of assassinations, racial unrest, campus upheaval, war and political demagoguery – a year the writer Mark Kurlansky has said where “ideologies were seldom clear, and there was widespread agreement on very few things” – a diminutive racist from Alabama was at the height of his powers. 

George Corley Wallace was certainly not the first American politician to mobilize white grievance, but until the arrival on the scene of the current occupant of the Oval Office the Alabama governor did more than anyone else to perfect the politics of fear and division. 

George C. Wallace is shown in this Oct. 19, 1964 photo speaking in Glen Burnie, Md. at a rally supporting Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater. (AP Photo)

It was no accident the historian Dan T. Carter entitled his brilliant biography of Wallace The Politics of Rage. Wallace, who ran for president four different times, was, Carter wrote, “the alchemist of a new social conservatism as he compounded racial fear…[and] cultural nostalgia.” 

When Wallace made his most aggressive presidential run in 1968 at the head of his short-lived American Independence Party, he won the electoral votes of five deep south states. Wallace’s campaign of fear and racial division prompted no less a political strategist than Richard Nixon to later admit that he carefully calibrated his own positions in order to head off Wallace’s appeal to white voters. It worked. 

Wallace’s appeal to white grievance helped birth the Republican “southern strategy” that has been at the heart of the party’s White House calculus ever since. Nixon won every state of the old Confederacy that Wallace failed to carry in 1968 with the exception of Texas, which he only narrowly lost to Hubert Humphrey. 

If Nixon’s long-ago appeal for “law and order” in service of “the silent majority” sounds familiar that’s because it is, updated now and applied to a cratering Trump re-election effort. But Trump is borrowing less from Nixon’s thinly veiled appeal to white grievance than he is appropriating the racist language of George Wallace. 

Nixon: Law and Order

Where Wallace said of civil rights and anti-war protesters “the people know the way to stop a riot is to hit someone on the head,” Trump tells police to “not be too nice” and demands that the nation’s governors “have to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks, you have to arrest and try people.” 

Wallace repeatedly made snarling attacks on street protesters who he claimed, “turned to rape and murder,” while Trump fumes about “Mexican rapists” and immigrants who “aren’t people,” but “animals.”

Trump’s re-election message can’t focus on the economy. It’s in shambles. His handling of the global pandemic, with the U.S. leading the world in death and disease, is a national tragedy and an international embarrassment. In three states – Florida, Arizona and South Carolina – new coronavirus cases are growing faster than in any country in the world. 

There has never been much of a Trump policy agenda and there is even less of one now. All he has is resentment and race. How else to explain the presidential attack on the only Black NASCAR driver or the defense of the Confederate flag and monuments that recall our deeply racist past.

“It’s not about who is the object of the derision or the vitriol,” Eddie Glaude, the chair of the Department of African American studies at Princeton University, told the Associated Press. “The actual issue is understanding the appeal to white resentment and white fear. It’s all rooted in this panic about the place of white people in this new America.”

As outrageous as Trump’s rhetoric has become you can bet it will get worse as the election slips toward an anti-Trump landslide. It is beyond Trump’s ability to give the country what it longs for: a common purpose. 

Imagine had Trump tried to unite the nation behind the shared mission of defeating the pandemic? But he can’t do it.  

“If he could change, he would,” says Cal Jillson, a presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And even when, as Jillson says, the message of fear and racial animosity is “not helping him now. It’s just nonstop. It is habitual and incurable. He is who he is.”

And like ol’ George Wallace more than 50 years ago Trump always digs deeper even as the hole consumes him. In his authoritative history of the 1968 campaign, journalist Michael A. Cohen writes that “Wallace deliberately sought to ratchet up intense, racist emotions at his campaign events” where violence was not uncommon. Cohen quotes a Wallace aide as saying it was all calculated to be “purposely…inflammatory” in order to draw attention and demand press coverage. Cue Fox News. 

Still there are many signs that the old Trump reality show – fear and loathing on the campaign trial – just isn’t working. As Jonathan Lemire and Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press wrote after Trump’s hyperbolic Mt. Rushmore speech: “These are times of pain, mass death, fear and deprivation and the Trump show may be losing its allure, exposing the empty space once filled by the empathy and seriousness of presidents leading in a crisis.

“Bluster isn’t beating the virus; belligerence isn’t calming a restive nation.”

Trump has declared himself “the president of law and order…”

You can hear restive Republicans taking the first tentative steps to distance themselves from the coming disaster. There was panic in the air when five GOP senators announced this week they’ll stay away from the Republican convention in August, a move seen for what it is – distance from Trump. There will be more. 

Still, by ignoring Trump’s racism and division for so long in the interest of allowing their leader to remake their party into a petri dish where white grievance and cultural anger metastasize, Republicans, even those quietly bemoaning his tactics, will never succeed in cleaning this stain. Republicans, like the cowardly sheep who represent Idaho in Washington, D.C., bought the racist and now they own the racism. 

George Wallace, unlike Donald Trump, never made it all the way to the White House, but both men sadly prove an enduring point about our troubled country. The journalist Marshall Frady summed up the consequence – and danger – of such figures when he wrote in 1968: “As long as we are creatures hung halfway between the mud and the stars, figures like Wallace can be said to pose the great dark original threat.” 

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Additional Reading:

Sticking with Trump

Tim Miller is a #NeverTrump conservative, a former top adviser to Jeb Bush and a pretty fair writer on our current politics. His piece recently in Rolling Stone where he sampled Trump opinions from the GOP consulting class received a good deal of attention. It’s good. He writes: 

“These swamp creatures were never the biggest Trumpers in the first place — his initial campaign team was an assortment of d-listers and golf course grunts rather than traditional GOP ad men. So why, as Trump’s numbers plummet, are these establishment RINOs continuing to debase themselves to protect someone who is politically faltering and couldn’t care less about them?” 

The answers are both enlightening and sad.  You can read it here.

How a History Text Book Might Explain 2020 So Far

James West Davidson writes history text books. He says in a piece in The Atlantic:

“By now it seems clear that we are all living through a major turning point in history, one that will be studied for years to come. Future textbook authors will write entries on the year 2020, revise them, and revise them some more with each new edition. What follows is an attempt at—literally—a first draft of history: what I might write if I were wrapping up the last chapter of a high-school history textbook right now.”

Read it and you may be surprised, as I was, about how stunning the events of our time seem when they are compressed into a single, tight narrative.

Tom Hanks 

I don’t normal spend much time with celebrity profiles, but I’ll make an exception for Tom Hanks. 

Hadley Freeman has a charming Hanks profile in The Guardian. She writes: “It’s true that, since I last interviewed him, his demeanor has shifted slightly from the nice Jimmy Stewart ‘aw shucks’-ness he had going on, to something more akin to the beatific kindness of Fred Rogers, ‘a part people like you would say I was born to play,’ he says. ‘For A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I ended up reading a lot of [Rogers] and he put ideas into words for me. There’s no reason not to greet the world with some kind of kindness.’”

Good observation. Read the entire profile. 

And finally…One of Ours 

Cather’s novel won the Pulitzer in 1923

Alex Ross writes in The New Yorker about Willa Cather’s enduring and under appreciated novel of war and loss. “When I revisited One of Ours in recent weeks,” he says, “I found it as haunting as anything I’ve read in this bewildering year. What seized my attention, not unexpectedly, was the section devoted to the flu pandemic of 1918.” 

I love Cather’s book. And am also a big fan of Ross’s book The Rest is Noise, which changed the way I think about music. It’s a classic.  

Thanks for following along here. All the best.

2020 Election, Pandemic

Denial…

Posted on by mjohnson

In 2017, Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, published a book that anticipated our current state of affairs. Nichols’s book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, made an overarching point: with so much information literally at our fingertips everyone can be an expert on everything. Or at least play at being an expert on Facebook. 

One example Nichols cited was a Washington Post poll that found after the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine “only one in six Americans could identify Ukraine on a map; the median response was off by about 1,800 miles.” Yet, this lack of basic knowledge hardly kept Americans from their sure-fire opinions about what action the country should take. 

“In fact,” Nichols wrote, “the respondents favored intervention in direct proportion to their ignorance. Put another way, the people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about using military force there.” 

Turns out our certainty frequently has an inverse relation to our intelligence. Why? Why do so many Americans disdain expertise? 

“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” Nichols wrote. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

The country’s disastrous, fragmented and deadly response to the global coronavirus pandemic is deeply rooted in the America aversion to expertise. Unfortunately for the first time in modern history we have a “fragile ego” in the White House who has made being ignorant about virtually everything a governing principle. 

“Across the rest of the developed world, COVID-19 has been ebbing,” David Frum wrote this week in The Atlantic. “As a result, borders are reopening and economies are reviving. Here in the U.S., however, Americans are suffering a new disease peak worse than the worst of April.” As a result, the European Union this week barred almost all travelers from the United States because we have failed to control the virus, and we have failed because millions of us have rejected fundamental common sense. 

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott largely ignored the virus and now scrambles to control it

Back in February the president and his Fox News echo chamber were calling the virus “a hoax” that was completely under control. It wasn’t and people who have spent a lifetime studying such things knew it wasn’t. Yet, governors in Arizona, Florida and twenty other places embraced Trumpian logic about the virus, waited too long and then acted inadequately. 

From June 15 to the end of the month Arizona’s totals went from about 1,000 cases per day to nearly 5,000 per day. Idaho’s cases seem on a similar trajectory. Little wonder Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, worried this week that the country could soon be headed for 100,000 new cases per day. “I am very concerned,” he said. And for good reason. Death numbers, a lagging indicator compared to cases, will almost certainly begin rising in coming days. 

Meanwhile, every disease expert in the world is recommending the wearing of face masks as a fundamental necessity in slowing the spread. Yet, Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul – hard to believe he is actually a doctor – mused out loud at a hearing where Fauci testified, “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best for everyone.” 

Delegates to the Idaho Republican convention fumed last week about Governor Brad Little’s contact tracing efforts, an effective and proven method of isolating the virus and containing its spread that has been widely implemented in countries that have brought the pandemic under control. 

One “expert,” Heather Rogers, a convention delegate from Lewiston, was quoted by reporter Nathan Brown as saying, “What Governor Little did was frankly, in my opinion, completely unconstitutional.” The key words here are “in my opinion.” 

Donald Trump is scheduled to be at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills Friday for a big fireworks display that defies common sense on at least two fronts. Fireworks displays at the national monument were long ago suspended due to concerns about forest fires and a big crowd of people will create a mountain sized petri dish of virus spread. 

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem welcomes the chaos. “We told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home,” she told NBC, “but those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we will not be social distancing.” 

One of the toughest tasks in politics is to muster the courage to tell your followers that they are wrong. But so many Republicans have lived for so long in the land of science denial, in the universe of expertise bashing, that when confronted with a genuine crisis that can’t be flim flamed away they’re left with little but their own nonsense. 

But at this moment, as David Frum writes, “reality will not be blustered away. Tens of thousands are dead, and millions are out of work, all because Trump could not and would not do the job of disease control” – a task that requires deferring to science, accepting facts and behaving responsibly about things like wearing a mask. The task also involves leading the skeptical. 

From denying climate change and abandoning the international effort to rescue an imperiled planet to embracing the claim that the virus would somehow magically “go away,” the president and a sizeable percentage of the American population have, as Tom Nichols says, chosen to be ill-informed.

They are left with only their anger and their demands because they have abdicated “their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.” 

Meanwhile, the cases continue to grow. 

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Additional Reading:

1932 = 2020

University of Washington historian James N. Gregory looks at the striking parallels between this presidential election year and the year Franklin Roosevelt won the White House. 

“An election looms. An unpopular president wrestles with historic unemployment rates. Demonstrations erupt in hundreds of locations. The president deploys Army units to suppress peaceful protests in the nation’s capital. And most of all he worries about an affable Democratic candidate who is running against him without saying much about a platform or plans.

“Welcome to 1932.”

State of the Race 

Veteran journalist and political watcher Stuart Rothenberg assess whether Joe Biden’s lead in a variety of polls is likely to last.

Stu says: “The burden is now on Trump to change the trajectory of the race, probably by demonizing Biden, who is well known after decades in politics and widely regarded as a decent and empathetic man. The president must pray he can once again squeeze out an Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote by a larger margin than in 2016.” Read his analysis.

Trump’s phone calls alarm U.S. officials

Carl Bernstein of Woodward-Bernstein Watergate fame had a big story this week about the president’s telephone habits with other world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdogan, the Turkish president. I’m betting some of Bernstein’s sources were Trump’s departed national security advisors. He says:

“Erdogan became so adept at knowing when to reach the President directly that some White House aides became convinced that Turkey’s security services in Washington were using Trump’s schedule and whereabouts to provide Erdogan with information about when the President would be available for a call.

“On some occasions Erdogan reached him on the golf course and Trump would delay play while the two spoke at length.” 

Donald Trump and his Turkish strongman pal Erdogan

Whoo. Read the whole thing.

Seattle and the Pandemic 

Knute Berger writes from Seattle about the once booming city’s future. “Downtown is still hollowed out with a ghost-of-itself ambience: The Alaska-bound cruise ships won’t be docking in Elliot Bay this year, nor will the conventioneers fill the bars and restaurants, erasing billions from the local economy. In June, downtown hotel revenues were down over 94% with a midmonth occupancy rate of 13%. COVID-19 is still impacting people’s willingness to travel.”

The Emerald City is looking pretty tarnished.

Finally…Ann, as in Richards

Years ago when Ann Richards was governor of Texas I had a few opportunities to see her in action, including at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. She was a force of nature and the new PBS one-woman show on Great Performances with the great Holland Taylor captures her perfectly.

Highly recommended.

Thanks for reading…be well.

2020 Election, Foreign Policy, Trump

Our National Humiliation…

Posted on by mjohnson

During a week when coronavirus deaths in the United States topped 120,000 and the president of the United States admitted he was trying to slow testing for the virus – more testing means more cases, after all – it might be difficult to fully process that we are also living through a unprecedented time of upheaval in American foreign policy. 

Whether you love him or hate him, Donald Trump has remade American standing in the world with consequences hard measure, but with impact long lasting. Trump’s upheaval has led to dangerous decline.

“Donald Trump has taken America out of key multilateral agreements, crossed swords with allies and pulled the U.S. from a leading role in geopolitical hot spots,” Bloomberg noted this week in an article about how Russian president Vladimir Putin was celebrating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II with a big parade in Moscow. Since Trump’s election in 2016, Putin has expanding his influence, while angling to stay in office much longer. 

The great American decline: Trump at the G-7 summit in 2019

The Trump led retreat from world leadership has, Bloomberg reported, “opened the way for Putin to build influence in Russia’s western flank, the Middle East and Africa, and to tighten an alliance with China. The planes flying in formation … over Moscow are a reminder that others will be eager to fill the gap if the U.S. withdraws further.”

One can deny the existence of Russian election help to Trump in 2016, but it’s impossible to deny the success of Putin’s repositioning at the expense of the United States and out closest, post-World War II European allies. 

Putin is certainly the largest beneficiary of Trump’s reported decision to remove nearly a third of U.S. troops based in Germany, a key NATO ally, a decision the BBC reported that was meet with widespread dismay in Europe, in part because there was no consultation or even warning. Many German officials believe the decision was prompted when chancellor Angela Merkel cancelled her visit to the U.S. because of the pandemic. In other words, the decision had less to do with a coherent national policy than the president’s personal pique. 

The administration’s Asia policy is in tatters with North and South Korea relations on a hair trigger. Trump tariffs on Chinese imports have cost American consumers (and farmers) billions and left the president begging Chinese president Xi Jinping, according to fired national security advisor John Bolton account, to help him win re-election by buying more U.S. goods. 

Bolton’s hefty book, its publication resisted to the very end by Trump, actually matters to our understanding of the feckless, chaotic Trump foreign policy. As conservative columnist Steve Hays argues only the most cultish Trump defender could dismiss a first-hand account “written by a longtime Republican and stalwart conservative—whose mustachioed face has appeared on Fox News more often than just about anyone other than the anchors.”

Pals: Donald and Vladimir

The power of Bolton’s book rests, Hays says, “less in attention-grabbing disclosure than in the relentless, almost mundane stupidity and recklessness of it all.” 

Or as David Ignatius, a long-time observer of American foreign policy, notes: “Among the most startling disclosures in [Bolton’s book] is his account of President Trump’s dealings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkey story — featuring the American president assuring Erdogan he would ‘take care of things’ in an ongoing federal criminal investigation — may be the clearest, most continuous narrative of misconduct by Trump that has yet surfaced.”

Ignatius says, “It’s a tale that connects some of Trump’s closest advisers: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” 

Former John McCain advisor Steve Schmidt says of all this that Trump, “has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.”

Trump is not alone, of course, in creating our unparalleled national humiliation. He had plenty of help, most notably in the foreign policy field from the junior senator from Idaho James E. Risch, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Enabling Trump, encouraging his worst instincts and behavior and assisting his destruction of American standing have been the raison d’être of Risch’s otherwise vacuous Senate career. 

When Trump’s first secretary of state Rex Tillerson was fired sometime after calling the president “a moron,” Risch said nothing, made no inquiry, expressed no concern. The same pattern unfolded when retired Marine general James Mattis quit in dispute with Trump over Syrian policy. When Bolton was fired Risch let it pass. He’s said nothing about Bolton’s disclosures. Following the Trump playbook, Risch regularly bashes China, but like the president has no policy ideas to deal with the Chinese military and economic threat. 

Risch has not pursued the case of brutally murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi but has effectively stonewalled efforts to hold the Saudi crown prince to account for the crime. When the State Department’s inspector general was fired recently for reportedly investigating why the administration sidestepped Congress to sell more arms to the corrupt kingdom, Risch said nothing and then helped the secretary of state evade an appearance before this committee.  

Murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi

Risch has gone down the line with Trump is dismissing Russian malevolence, while ignoring the clear effort by the president to coerce the Ukrainian president into a phony investigation of Joe Biden. And when six Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee recently complained to Trump that his draw down of U.S. troops in Germany would “place U.S. national security at risk,” helping only Putin, Risch was silent.

“We live with the idea that the U.S. has an ability to rebound that is almost unlimited,” Michael Duclos, a top European foreign policy official, told The Atlantic’s Tom McTague recently. “For the first time, I’m starting to have some doubts.” For good reason.

As Jim Risch mounts a low-key campaign for re-election, he’s counting that his weakness, his failure to use his position to stem American decline, won’t matter in the deluge of division and misdirection that will increasingly mark all Republican campaigns. Faced with an opponent who so far has been unable – or unwilling – to highlight the senator’s servile deference to Trump’s plundering of America’s standing, Risch will likely continue a 50-yearlong political career distinguished only by its overwhelming partisanship.

History will not be so forgiving. 

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Additional Reading:

Bolton and the GOP

Michael Cohen writes in the Boston Globe: “I have little doubt that most every member of the GOP caucus, as well as Trump’s Cabinet, knows that Bolton’s account is spot-on, but the price for being a card-carrying member of the modern Republican Party is to regularly refuse to see what is in front of one’s nose. All of this makes the Bolton story more than your garden variety tale of grifters grifting. It’s the perfect parable for Trump’s malevolent presidency and the cabal of corrupted enablers too weak, too greedy, and too feckless to stop it.”

The Painful Reckoning 

Many stories this week about the faltering Trump campaign – I know it’s just June – and many, including this piece by Tim Miller, see the campaign’s recent Tulsa rally as a metaphor. Or as Vice President Mike Pence said – they’re going to make America great again, again.

The underwhelming Tulsa rally

Here’s Miller: “Donald Trump doesn’t know how to manage a global pandemic. He doesn’t understand how said crisis intersects with our economic decline or what to do about it. He is fundamentally incapable of being a uniter or a salve for a country that is raw with pain over police violence and racial tensions. And he doesn’t know what to do about the fact that Joe Biden is schlonging him in the polls.” Read the whole thing.

EU Considers U.S. Travel Ban

As the European Union considers keeping American’s out because of the uncontrolled spread of the virus, novelist Francine Prose asks how did we become a pariah nation?

“Unlike the US states that rushed to reopen too soon, that so clearly prioritized economic recovery over human life, the EU countries are saying they’d rather take the financial hit than see more of their citizens die.”

Gore Vidal

I’ve been reading a collection of essays by the late novelist Gore Vidal who, say what you will about his politics (or whatever), was a truly brilliant writer. Here’s a link to his still controversial post 9-11 essay – “The End of Liberty” – that was commissioned for Vanity Fair, but rejected.

Gore Vidal

And if you want to recall what Vidal was like on television you might find this amazing appearance on Dick Cavett’s show in 1971 interesting – or appalling. Cavett’s other guests were Norman Mailer and Janet Flanner, the great New Yorker writer.

Mailer refused to shake hands with Vidal and, well, it kind of went downhill from there. Watch it here.

And thanks for reading.