Trump

GOP, Politics, Trump

Only the Worst People …

Posted on by mjohnson

“kakistocracy” – government by the worst people

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The world could not imagine a Syria without an Assad. But it happened, and with stunning speed. The pure evil of that corrupt, malevolent regime has been obvious for years. The weakness behind the Syrian leader was not so obvious until his murderous, incompetent rule collapsed. This is the way of all tyrants.

Before Assad was forced to flee – he’d been in power for 24 years – Syria was described by the U.S. State Department as “a republic ruled by the authoritarian regime … The president makes key decisions with counsel from a small number of security advisors, ministers, and senior members of the ruling” party and “Assad and party leaders dominate all three branches of government.”

Authoritarians seem invincible until they aren’t. I wrote recently that the corruption in the next administration will soon enough become obvious, and for a while it will seem merely odious and then suddenly it will engulf everything around it.

Abandoned by allies and now at the mercy of Putin

Finally, when the end inevitably comes – it always does – it will be brutal and fast, and the wreckage will long linger.

Bashar al-Assad, a brutal sociopath, ran a corrupt, incompetent regime by surrounding himself with the worst people. He’s now living out the remainder of his dictatorial life in Putin’s Moscow.

Meanwhile Donald Trump, a born authoritarian, is constructing a truly awful, inept, corrupt American government, almost certainly the first time a president-elect has purposefully done so. The Trump government in waiting is distinguished only by its utter lack of distinction, a collection of misfits, sexual abusers, billionaires – lots of billionaires – political grifters, reality television fakers and above all loyalists.

Loyalty to the dear leader is, after all, the only real qualification that matters in the mob or in a Trump Administration.

As headlines detail the white supremacist beliefs of the Fox News personality who may soon run the Pentagon and the conspiracy embracing nonsense of the nominee to head the FBI, the stories have read as though this kakistocracy is somehow normal. But, if you are among the nearly half of the American population who thinks this show of schlock and awe is abnormal and frighteningly dangerous then you aren’t among the crazy ones.

As the writer Eliot Weinberger observed recently, only partially summarizing the coming circus:

“The future surgeon general, a Fox News regular, and the future administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, a daytime television host, sell dubious health and weight loss supplements online.

“The future director of the FBI promotes a supplement to reverse the effects of the Covid vaccine.

“The future deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism is the spokesman for a fish oil supplement.

“The future secretary of homeland security stars in an infomercial for a cosmetic dentistry business, in which she exclaims: ‘I love my new family at Smile Texas!’”

With the possible exception of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the secretary of state designate who has served on the Foreign Relations Committee and presumably could find Uganda on a map, the rest of this collection, as Weinberger wrote, “have no connection to the work they will manage, or no experience in the work they will manage, or no experience managing large bureaucracies like the bureaucracies they will manage.”

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Let’s remember this is the same Marco Rubio who in 2016 called Trump a “con artist,” and “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency.” That statement, as was once said in the Nixon White House, is clearly no longer “operative,” begging the question: who changed – Trump or Rubio?

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All these jobs – really, really important jobs – are fundamental to keep Americans safe, the economy working and the essential functions of government operating. Yet, these positions are being gifted to a collection of the worse possible people. It is the American kakistocracy.

Most Americans don’t pay much attention to history, but if they did they might see the historical warnings attached to the coming government.

There will be a crisis in the next four years, likely more than one. We forget now how close the American economy came to complete collapse in 2008. That fiasco left wounds that still bleed, but without a competent adult at the Federal Reserve or a realistic Treasury secretary we might have experienced this generation’s own Great Depression. While many, many mistakes were made no one who saved the American economy back then was selling fish oil supplements.

Competency matters.

And now come the unaccountable oligarchs. America has always had its unfathomably rich men – always men – who used the power of their money and prominence to shape the way we live. A thousand efforts to prevent the kind of outsized influence the uber-rich employ in Russia or the oil kingdoms has given way to a South African immigrant, Elon Musk, becoming the un-elected co-president of the American republican.

The corruption, if you care to see it, will cause eyes to water. In a true oligarchy – and we’re getting there – guys like Musk don’t abide any rules. They act to preserve their wealth and status and polish their egos, even if it means shutting down the government by Tweet.

Journalist David Samuels had it right when he wrote, “Defining ‘corruption’ as a personal hunger for luxuries or stuffing cash in one’s pocket, as Americans often do, is to mistake the essence of the offense, which is to destroy public trust in the institutions that are supposed to keep people safe.”

CEO’s are watching all this and then making the trek to Mar a Lago to hand over their protection checks to the American mob boss. And we ain’t seen nothing, yet.

Add in the retribution, the promise to prosecute Liz Cheney, while suing an Iowa pollster, the coming pardons of January 6 rioters – many convicted for vicious acts – and blatant bullying of the press and you begin to see clearly the next four years, or more.

“Recapturing the presidency in 2024,” says Maryland Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, “is Donald Trump’s ultimate safe haven from the legal consequences of his prior crimes. He believes it will give him all the immunity he needs for the rest of his life.

“And if you think he ever plans to leave office and let the justice system come near him again, you’re too innocent to be let out of the house by yourself.”

The worst people, retribution and rampant corruption. The American mob. Not quite what the Founders had in mind.

So … Merry Christmas.

—–0—-

Additional reading:

A couple of other items of interest …

Climate of fear is driving local officials to quit

A truly frightening reality in a study from California.

“In simple terms, our research suggests that at least two of every three people who serve in public office in Southern California will be threatened, intimidated or harassed during their tenure.

“Survey results suggest the average female elected official who experiences abuse is threatened or harassed at least six times as often as her male peers. Men reported being on the receiving end of abuse about once a year, while women suffer abuse almost monthly.”

Read the full story.

In praise of Christmas

The great George Orwell writing of the first post-war Christmas in 1946.

Orwell about the time he wrote a Christmas essay in 1946

“I only add in passing that when we gorge ourselves this Christmas, if we do get the chance to gorge ourselves, it is worth giving a thought to the thousand million human beings, or thereabouts, who will be doing no such thing. For in the long run our Christmas dinners would be safer if we could make sure that everyone else had a Christmas dinner as well. But I will come back to that presently.”

Orwell was a terrific writer. Read the whole thing.

And a Happy Christmas to all and very best wishes in an uncertain New Year. Thanks for reading.

Trump, U.S. Senate

The Senate Exists for a Reason …

Posted on by mjohnson

The United States Senate is arguably the least democratic (small “d”) institution in any democracy in the world, with the possible exception of the British House of Lords.

The Senate exists without proportional representation. Every state has two senators without regard to population. Wyoming’s two senators represent 586,000 citizens, while California’s 39 million citizens are represented by two senators.

The Senate has quirky rules: unlimited debate (the filibuster); much happens by unanimous consent (or doesn’t happen when one senator objects); seniority rules, meaning a cranky old senator like Chuck Grassley of Iowa, age 91, will soon chair the powerful Judiciary Committee. Grassley has been a senator since 1981, meaning the youngest senator, Jon Ossoff of Georgia, wasn’t alive when Grassley took office.

The Senate has six-year terms, a function of the Founders unfortunately naïve belief that a longer term of office insulates senators from the worst of grubby political pressures.

The Senate has extraordinary powers, again thanks to the original thinkers who came up with the idea of an institution to balance the rambunctious House of Representatives. Senators have the Constitutional duty to “advise and consent” – or not consent – on presidential appointments to the Cabinet and judiciary. The Senate, by super majority vote, can ratify treaties. The Senate judges, when it cares to, the impeachment of high governmental officials. The Senate traditionally has had a major voice in foreign policy. And the Senate, when it cares to, has the power to investigate. Google Watergate, the CIA, Teapot Dome or even the sinking of the Titanic to see what the Senate has historically done to expose and inform.

Now, as the Founders would certainly have appreciated, the Senate faces an enormous historical test – a power-hungry president committed to vastly enlarging executive power at the expense of the legislative branch. Donald Trump has signaled that he expects a GOP Congress will do his bidding no questions asked.

Questions must be asked.

The widely floated idea that the Senate should allow “recess” appointments to critical executive branch jobs should be dead on arrival, but incoming majority leader John Thune of South Dakota hasn’t ruled out the Senate rolling over for Trump.

“I think that all options are on the table, including recess appointments,” Thune said recently while disingenuously suggesting that Republicans might need to forego advising and consenting because Democrats might not “play ball.” But caving on the Constitutional demand for Senate concurrence in major appointments isn’t about Democrats. It’s about Trump.

Still, there are modestly hopeful signs that Republicans won’t diminish their own and the Senate’s power by simply giving a grasping president who he wants in his Cabinet – a sex abuser, vaccine denier or Russian stooge just to flag three of the worst of the nominees.

Guardian columnist Kate Maltby, reviewing the latest release of the hit TV series “Wolf Hall,” compares Trump’s picks to Henry VIII’s loyal hatchet man, a collection of “Thomas Cromwells: the yes men and enablers who will frame US law to fulfil his wishes.”

The incoming chair of the Senate Finance Committee is one of these modern-day Cromwell’s.

“No, I’ll let that be a decision that President Trump makes,” Idaho Senator Mike Crapo told CNN when asked if he would insist on FBI background checks of cranks like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “My position is what President Trump decides to do is what I will support.”

Kash Patel, a manifestly unfit nominee to head the FBI

Idaho’s James Risch, easily one of the most partisan Republicans in the Senate who spent the first Trump term defending the administration’s feckless foreign policy, has – so far at least – refused to commit to supporting some of Trump’s craziest nominees, a group properly termed by commentator Charlie Sykes as a “cabinet of zealots, toadies, and cretins.”

“Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said regarding support for the inconceivable nominations of a Fox New host, Pete Hegseth, to be Secretary of Defense and a Putin apologist, Tulsi Gabbard, to head the national intelligence agencies. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate,” Risch said.

And demonstrating that he recalls his oath of office, Risch added. “The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

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Note: Risch’s entirely reasonable comments about withholding judgment drew almost instant pushback from the ultra right in Idaho. “U.S. Senator Jim Risch, who is the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is a political dinosaur who has been using doublespeak to grift conservative Idaho Republicans since 1974,” fumed a far right website in northern Idaho. “To Senator Risch and the rest of D.C. political swamp: Confirm Trump’s nominations and support the Make America Great Again movement or resign. It’s that simple.”

Prediction: Risch, almost certainly in his last term, he’s 81 years old, will ultimately fold and end up supporting ALL of Trump’s “zealots, toadies, and cretins.” His oath of office is less important than avoiding abuse from his own voters.

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Despite his earlier comments Thune has also shown a hint of backbone, telling a home state audience recently, “Every president is going to come in and try to do as much as they can by executive action … Congress, in some cases, is going to be the entity that sometimes will have to put the brakes on.”

Trump’s return to the White House will test, sooner than later, whether the Senate has the ability – meaning individual senators possess the courage – to use its substantial power to constrain Trump’s most dangerous inclinations, including appointing a gang of woefully compromised incompetents.

Congress also, of course, has the power of the purse and should scotch any Trumpy plan to illegally “impound” dollars appropriated by the legislative branch. Expect Trump to push this issue to the limit. Hope for the sake of the Constitution that Thune and fellow senators resist more effectively than they did when during his first administration Trump diverted military funding to his border wall, a project you may recall that Mexico was never going to pay for.

Republican senators know, certainly better than most of their voters, that Trump cares nothing about the nuts and bolts of the federal government. Trump’s an agent of chaos and destruction.

But the Senate was designed to obstruct and delay would-be tyrants just as it was designed to give small states like Idaho and South Dakota outsized influence in the business of the federal government.

Mike Mansfield, the great Montanan who led the Senate for 16 years, spent his tenure gently persuading fellow senators to behave as national legislators and not merely as partisan representatives of individual states. Mansfield’s perspective has never been more important.

What would Mike do?

“In the end, it is not the Senators as individuals who are of fundamental importance,” Mansfield said in 1963. “In the end, it is the institution of the Senate. It is the Senate itself as one of the foundations of the Constitution. It is the Senate as one of the rocks of the Republic.”

The rock of the Republic must be solid if the Constitution is to hold.

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Additional Reading:

A few other items worth your time …

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.”

illustration with 1679 engraving of the tower of babel with pixellated clouds and pieces disintegrating digitally
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: “Turris Babel,” Coenraet Decker, 1679.

Notre-Dame reopens in Paris 5 years after fire – its reconstruction preserves the past and illuminates France’s modern ambitions

I was fortunate to walk around the great cathedral in the heart of Paris recently, it wasn’t yet open. And the restoration is truly remarkable.

“Notre Dame today embodies the nation’s past and present. A bronze plaque just outside the cathedral’s base marks France’s ‘kilometer zero‘: It is the point from which all distances in France are measured.

French media sometimes refer to Notre Dame as the ‘chantier du siècle.’ It is a phrase that means both the ‘project of the century’ and, more ambitiously, ‘history’s construction site.'”

From The Conversation website.

‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years’: actor Brian Cox on overrated co-stars, charmless politicians and the joy of smoking weed

Actor Brian Cox …

“I ask him why he so often gets cast as grumps. He holds his hands up, nonplussed. Is it because he is one? ‘No, I’m not like that at all. It’s the antithesis of who I am, actually.’ He stops to think about it. ‘No, that’s not entirely true. Of course, I get grumpy. Particularly about politics, I get very grumpy. A lot of that makes me angry. The failure of the Labour party in particular.’ Pause. ‘But I don’t want to get into that.’ Another pause. ‘Listen, I could go on for ages.’ And another.”

A Guardian interview with a great actor.

Don’t give up. See you soon. And thanks for reading.

2024 Election, Trump

America’s Great Mistake …

Posted on by mjohnson

“Robert F. Kennedy’s formal merger with Trumpism will have the effect of making his view of vaccines a de rigueur tenet of MAGA politics. People who pledge fealty to Trumpism will discover that in addition to being required to believe that Trump won the 2020 election they are also required to oppose vaccinations of all types.

“That’s coming. There’s no avoiding it.

“And as sure as day follows night we will see the large-scale reappearance of preventable diseases such as measles and polio. Children will die.”

Jonathan V. Last

—–

America has made a great mistake.

One Trump presidency was an historic aberration, an absurdist romp with a conman TV huckster that was the result of half the country hating Hillary Clinton.

But a second Trump presidency is something else – a great mistake. The millions who voted to return this tragically narcissistic, hopelessly ignorant and blatantly corrupt man to control of the nuclear codes don’t know it yet – and many will never figure it out – but they have imperiled the future of their country, and the world.

The same kind of thinking – magical thinking – that treats Trump like some kind of normal political personality is ignoring the enormous consequences of November 5. Logic attempts to explain his election logically. There is no logic.

The election was about the price of bacon, some will say. Or Joe Biden’s obvious need to earlier disavow a second term. Social media elected Trump. Or the Mexican border did. The traditional media blew it. Democrats lost the plot with white, working-class voters. That explains it.

But all these “explanations” avoid the reality of Trump and Trumpism. We made this decision with eyes wide open. We didn’t elect an adjudicated rapist because Safeway’s bacon is overpriced. We didn’t elect a man who sent a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol and hoped to hang his own vice president because desperate migrants still see our America as the last best hope on earth.

Nope, we wanted more of the distracting non-stop Trump reality show with its Hannibal Lecter rants and shark stories. We chose to believe his lies. Blame the Democrats, blame the press, blame social media, blame the elites, but in the end none of it matters. We chose a leader of vile temperament and odious corruption. We chose our American fascist.

“Elites” didn’t make us want more of the vulgar rhetoric and the obvious lies. Many of us enjoy how he summons up hatred with the absurd claim that the gender of school children is being changed during homeroom. We found comfort in the putdowns of an accomplished Black woman, and we laughed along when he joked about Nancy Pelosi’s husband being nearly killed by a hammer wielding nutjob. We chanted “lock them up” because it felt good to hate and demean and threaten. We saw it and we accepted it.

We embraced – for the second time – what journalist Susan Glasser has correctly termed “the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged.”

We liked the promises of revenge and retribution. It feels good, after all, to go after “those” people, because our side is right, and what harm could a little revenge do?

When the deportation round ups begin how will we feel about the “illegal” people who roof the houses, milk the cows, landscape the lawns, work in our restaurants and pay their taxes? Will we notice when families are separated, and children discarded as collateral damage? Will we laugh at the concentration camps?

One Trump term was an aberration. This Trump term was a choice.

In authoritarian and fascist systems there is a daily need to justify the unjustifiable. They must make the absurd and dangerous normal, so we blame it on the price of bacon, or Joe Biden. We console ourselves that it is just vile talk. It can’t possibly hurt me. My side won. The “other” has it coming.

From the beginning there has been one great failure regarding Trump. We have lacked from his first day the imagination to see where his villainy has taken us and will now take us even farther. Or perhaps we really do see and elect not to care. What’s worse?

Before January 6, 2021 the vast majority of Americans could not have believed the seat of American government might be attacked by a violent mob willing to harm and kill police officers in order to halt the peaceful transfer of power. We couldn’t image it, so now many rationalize it and all the lies he’s told about it.

It wasn’t that bad. Trump really didn’t incite the riot. Maybe you believe that.

But it was bad, and he did incite a riot. And now he will pardon those who committed those outrages. He told us repeatedly that he would do so, and he will. And we elected him again.

He promised to fire thousands of career federal employees who are not “loyal” to him, an unprecedented break with American history, and he will do it.

He will threaten Ukraine just as he did before. He will weaken if not destroy NATO just as he did before. He will politicize the American military just as he tried before and will try again.

Few presidential candidates have been so explicit about their aims. We heard it. We saw it. We embraced it, and not because bacon costs too much.

As the historian Timothy Snyder writes: “It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020 election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will cooperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.”

We knew all this. Many warned us, especially people – many now in danger – who worked with him at close range. They aren’t traitors or partisans, but military leaders and elected officials and Americans. And yet we chose to ignore and embrace all this.

The ultimate collapse attendant to our enormous mistake will appear to come slowly, but then it will immediately be all around us. It is as predictable as his corruption and his revenge and his hate. And we did it to ourselves.

—-0—-

Thanks for reading.

If you are a regular follower of this space you know – or must have concluded – that my nearly 50 years in politics tells me this is the big one – a true existential crisis for our country. Prepare yourself for an America that we could not have imagined a few years ago.

I’ll be back soon …

2024 Election, Fascism, Trump

American Fascism …

Posted on by mjohnson

A dictionary definition of fascism: “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

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Sinclair Lewis, the celebrated novelist and playwright, entitled his dystopian 1935 story of American fascism It Can’t Happen Here. But Lewis knew it could happen here.

One suspects Lewis would not be surprised that American fascism is happening in the form of a corrupt charlatan from the outer boroughs of New York.

It makes sense. Donald Trump is not really an original, but a Hollywood-like character who captures the fears and imagination – and bigotry, of course – of many Americans and Trump rode that to political power, and for him that really means grifting his supporters, padding his enormous ego and getting even with anyone in his way.

American history has had its Huey Longs, and Strom Thurmond’s, Pat Buchanan’s and David Duke’s. Only Trump was fortunate to have arrived at a time when American culture and politics were willing to fully embrace a performative clown, a rapist, a racist, a convicted felon, a guy who inherited his wealth and has made his life’s work celebrating himself.

He failed at selling steaks and vodka and casinos. He is a serial philanderer and a world-class liar. Without his inherited wealth he couldn’t qualify to manage the night shift at a 7-11. No one in their right mind would hire this guy who talks only about himself and his grievances. Yet, he’s mastered what other charlatans of an earlier age also mastered.

He’s got the fascism thing down cold, particular the big lies, the illusion of power and the huge grievances.

Most American journalists and many commentators long resisted calling Trumpism what it is – fascism – but not any longer.

“Donald Trump has been on a fascist romp,” writes The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols. “At rallies in Colorado and California, he amped up his usual rants, and added a rancid grace note by suggesting that a woman heckler should “get the hell knocked out of her” by her mother after she gets back home. But … he outdid himself in an interview on Fox News, by saying that ‘the enemy within’ —Americans he described as ‘radical left lunatics,’ including Representative Adam Schiff of California, whom he mentioned by name—are more dangerous than Russia or China, and could be ‘very easily handled’ by the National Guard or the U.S. military.”

Too many Americans – way too many – have become numb to this completely unprecedented language from an American politician, particularly one trying to return to the White House.

Anne Applebaum, a scholar of Stalin’s war against his own people, says: “In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes.”

Mussolini … as cynical as Trump and just as dangerous

Say it out loud. Donald Trump is a fascist, a modern-day Mussolini, using the precise phrases of El Duce and Hitler. No politician in American history has described his political opponents as “enemies of the people” or an entire class “as vermin,” or threatened to turn the military on opponents. This is the language of fascism.

In addition to the dictionary definition fascism depends, among other factors, upon:

Discrediting an independent press. Trump has done this repeatedly, most recently saying CBS should “lose a license” and be liquidated for broadcasting an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That attack on the press, only the latest from Trump, drew a sharp and rare rebuke from the chair of the Federal Communications Commission. “While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” the FCC’s Jessica Rosenworcel said.

Perpetuating an enormous lie. Trump has many big lies, including the whopper about a stolen election in 2020, and his latest lie attempts to rewrite the history of his insurrection. “His attempt to recast the events of Jan. 6, 2021,” as the New York Times reported, “came on the same day that he compared his supporters who were arrested, convicted and imprisoned for their actions at the Capitol to the victims of the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. And it followed a recent remark in which Mr. Trump declared Jan. 6 a day of ‘love.’”

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984, “It was their final, most essential command.”

This Trump lie is beyond belief. His asking his supporters – indeed all of us – to ignore the riot at the Capitol that he instigated, hoping apparently that an enormous lie will help him avoid his own legal jeopardy as the only president ever to oppose a peaceful transfer of power.

A subservient political and business elite: No sitting Republican member of Congress dares take issue with Trump’s American fascism, and the wealthiest man in the world, South African-born Elon Musk, is spending millions to curry favor with Trump and elect him. He’s not alone. Those who intend to clean up with AI technology or crypto currency are all in. Even those who recognize the folly of Trump’s promise of immense tariffs on imported goods convince themselves it’s just a little fascist rhetoric.

“The Republican officials I talk to are hoping that this is just Trump’s bluster — that he’s not actually serious about imposing tariffs but is rather using tariff threats to bully other nations into becoming more friendly to the U.S.,” Brian Riedl, a former aide to GOP senator Rob Portman of Ohio told the Washington Post. “But they’re in denial about this.” Much like the business elite of Weimar Germany believing a buffoonish Adolf Hitler would be useful to them, but also under their control, were wrong, too.

Fascists depend on perverting the legal system, a tactic Trump has mastered by using the judicial branch’s own rules – and his appointed judges – to stymie any day of reckoning. His hand-picked Supreme Court has, in the most frightening ruling since Dred Scott, given Trump broad immunity for past and future crimes.

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, calls Trump “fascist to the core.” His former chief of staff, John Kelly, a Marine general says, “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Make no mistake. The election on November 5 is not about inflation, housing prices or a migrant crisis, all issues that are international in scope that require hard work and bipartisan cooperation to solve.

The election is about Trump and his fascism. Mark me as an “enemy of the people,” an enemy of the people who would subvert the Constitution, use the American military against political opponents and those who lie about what can be observed with their own eyes.

It’s not as though we haven’t been warned. Trump says he wants to be a dictator, wants to deport 12 million humans – think about the police state that would require – and free the January 6 rioters.

Is this American fascism really the future we want for our country?

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A couple of items for your consideration …

Take the Trump-Vance Deportation Policy Seriously

It’s been said – more than once – that we should take the Republican candidate for president seriously, but not literally.

If you read nothing else before the election read this post from Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian and democracy advocate. He takes Trump seriously and literally.

“As an American, and as a historian who writes about forced population movements, I believe that we are not taking the Trump-Vance deportation plan seriously enough. 

“This failure of imagination could allow extreme repression within our country as well as a fundamental change in its society and politics.”

It is a chilling piece of writing. Take it seriously.

We needed courage. We got cowardice.

There are few people in American journalism I admire more than Margaret Sullivan. She has held a number of high profile positions with important newspapers, including a stint as media columnist for the Washington Post. She has an almost unique perspective on what is happening with Big Media in America,

Sullivan writes about the decision by the Post and the Los Angeles Times to not endorse a candidate for president.

(Stunned silence from me … )

As Sullivan writes:

“Here’s a statement from a group of columnists at the Washington Post — people I really admire, including Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus, Perry Bacon, Catherine Rampell and quite a few others. At the heart of it is the knowledge of what the Post stood for since the Watergate era when — under the great publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee — the paper bravely revealed the corruption of the Nixon administration and had a hand in bringing him down.

“Trump is much worse than Nixon. But the paper is no longer a beacon for democracy.”

I’ve admired the Washington Post for nearly as long as I’ve paid attention to politics. Not always right, but a fierce advocate for facts and accountability. Jeff Bezos, a super-billionaire blew it up on one Friday afternoon.

Read Sullivan’s take here.

Be concerned. Be active. Do something. Democracy is worth fighting – and voting – for.

2024 Election, Harris, Johnson, Trump

A Choice: Enlightenment or Division …

Posted on by mjohnson

I’ve long been a fan of the late journalist Tom Wicker, a Washington, D.C., fixture for a quarter century who covered presidents, assassinations, Watergate, even a deadly prison riot. Wicker’s southern charm — he was born in North Carolina — didn’t prevent him from offering sharp, preceptive and critical comments about presidents of both parties.

Wicker was a truth teller, including his quote that I use to assess today’s politicians:

“The first and most fundamental task of the American politician ought to be that of public education — the enlightenment of the electorate he represents, a constituency that in the nature of the case and in the process of its own business will not have the time, opportunity or inclination that he had to inform itself about the realities of an ever more complex and shrinking world.”

That’s the job — enlightenment — and the recent remarkable presidential debate made it, at times painfully obvious, that the Republican Party’s candidate has no such ability and indeed displays precisely the opposite characteristics.

A good deal has been written since Tuesday night about Vice President Kamala Harris’s mastery of former President Donald Trump, almost all of it bad for Trump.

To cite just one example of post-debate analysis, Jeff Greenfield, writing in Politico, said: “Harris made it Trump’s night — in the worst possible way. The campaign armed Harris with a series of trip wires hoping that Trump would be unable to resist setting them off. Not only did Trump take the bait, he brought a couple of his own, which he tripped over again and again. It was as if Lucy showed up with half a dozen footballs for Charlie Brown to kick, and Charlie himself brought a few more for good measure.”

Media analyst Margaret Sullivan noted: “Even over on Fox News, there were some abnormal glimmers of reality, as when Brit Hume allowed that Trump had ‘had a bad night.’ ”

A race of division vs. decency

What Harris accomplished on the biggest possible stage was, as Wicker said, the business of enlightenment, reminding a country that seems to suffer short-term memory loss that Trump is all about himself and about as stable as his hairstyle becomes in a windstorm.

Peter Wehner, a former George W. Bush staffer, wrote in The Atlantic that “Trump savaged people he had appointed to his administration who have since broken with him. He repeated his claim that Harris wasn’t Black. And then there was the piece de resistance: Trump spreading the conspiracy theory, weird even by his standards, that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrants are abducting and devouring their neighbors’ pets. ‘They’re eating the dogs!’ he roared. ‘The people that came in — they’re eating the cats!’

And he still couldn’t stop himself. When one of the moderators, ABC’s David Muir, rebutted Trump’s claim, the former president said, ‘I’ve seen people on television! People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food!’ ”

What a ridiculous and easily debunked conspiracy theory that at heart is, not surprisingly for Trump, profoundly racist. The fantastical fable wasn’t a George Wallace-style dog whistle; it was literally the blare of a Klaxon. Trump might as well have been saying, “White people don’t eat dogs, only brown-skinned Haitians eat dogs.”

Racism is at Trump’s core and, sadly, is also the beating heart of much of his appeal to many Americans. Trump is running the most openly racist campaign in recent American history, doubling down on the Obama birther smear he literally peddled for years to now openly questioning Harris’ heritage. How galling it must be for him to be soundly shamed by, of all people, a woman of color.

Harris wisely has refused to take Trump’s racial bait other than to raise eyebrows and a “I can’t believe this stuff” smile as he flayed away with nonsense.

If we could wipe away at least some of America’s profound case of historical amnesia, we might have both candidates rather than just one making the case for turning the page on a too long period of division that too often boils over in rage. In a better world, we would remember the still unfinished business of the Civil Rights Act, passed 60 years ago this summer.

Wicker was an astute observer of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the man who signed that landmark legislation. Johnson was, as Wicker wrote, “By blood and geography, a Southerner.” Yet, once in power, Johnson bucked his own region and many of his historic allies to become a civil rights champion. He explained why it was so critically important to move the country on from its old, often deadly past. Johnson was not a naturally gifted speaker, but he could tell a story as he did in one of the greatest political speeches I’ve ever read.

Late in his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, an ultra-conservative who opposed the Civil Rights Act, Johnson knew the once solid Democratic South was no longer solid. To try to reach the region that broadly opposed his civil rights efforts, Johnson sent his wife, Lady Bird, on an eight-state, 47-stop train trip from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans where LBJ met her train.

Lyndon Johnson meets the “Lady Bird Special” in New Orleans in October 1964

In a speech to a packed crowd at a New Orleans on Oct. 9, 1964, Johnson invoked his own history, imploring the many skeptical Southerners listening to embrace a hopeful, pluralistic America, to cast off the old ways and build a stronger, better country.

“There is work to do, and we can either do it together, united, or we can do it divided, eating on each other.

“Now, the people that would use us and destroy us first divide us,” Johnson said. And “if they divide us, they can make some hay. And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us.”

In winning a historic landslide, Johnson lost Louisiana in 1964. There the old divisions won again.

And the same issues confront us today. The Great Debate this week served one critical mission. It was a rare moment of political of enlightenment. In stark contrast, we are offered a candidate promising more division and another recognizing the work to be done.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A couple other items of interest this week …

How Democrats are making a mistake in rural America – by not showing up

There are signs that Vice President Harris’s campaign has read the memo: “Don’t write off rural America.”

As I – and many others – have argued, the Constitutional reality of the Electoral College demands that Democrats craft appeals to voters in rural America. The first task is to merely show up.

“As the owner of MLB Research Associates, Matt Barron specializes in rural Democratic races and is considered one of the nation’s leading political strategists on the rural vote.

Beyond the policy debates, Barron said the blame falls on the Democrats.

A good story to understand what needs to be done in rural America.

Vance, Yost targeting Haitians in Springfield, Ohio with ignorant fear-mongering disturbs me deeply

An Ohio journalist, a native of Springfield, writes with passion and clarity about the appalling, fake story that made it all the way to a presidential debate stage.

A mural adorns a wall in the city of Springfield, Ohio, U.S. September 11, 2024. REUTERS/Julio-Cesar Chavez

“Sometimes the disgusting sewer of presidential year politics hits a little too close to home, and you end up watching a national conversation play out largely divorced from reality or the actual experiences of communities intimately connected to your own life.

“That’s what happened to me Monday as I watched Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance lie about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and — displaying no sense of conscience whatsoever — make an abhorrent insinuation about them. His purpose, it appears, was a trollish attempt to mislead the public and prey on people’s hatreds and fears. I suppose he thinks that’s good politics.”

Read the piece from David DeWitt., editor-in-chief of the Ohio Capital Journal.

And for good measure, J.D. Vance used his appearance on Sunday morning TV today to double down on this BS. God help us.

Horrified Taylor Swift Realizes Football Happens Every Year

A spoof from The Onion.

And, yes, I am too old to “get” the whole Taylor Swift business, but if you were advising the Republican presidential candidate would you tell him to attack the most popular woman in the world?

Read the spoof. Good for a laugh.

Thanks for reading. Stay engaged. All the best.

2024 Election, Churchill, GOP, Trump

Loving Putin, Hating the U.S. Military …

Posted on by mjohnson

At this stage of a presidential campaign it can become difficult to keep up with, let alone keep straight the flood of noise and bombast dominating the television screen or interrupting your dinner with one final desperate plea for – pick one or more – money, a vote, a response to a survey, an attack on a candidate …

I’ve come to value the days when presidential candidates campaigned from their front porches, greeting delegations of visitors and largely ignoring the kind of bat crappery that has become the essence of American political campaigns.

Warren Harding campaigning from his Ohio front porch in 1920

Our campaigns don’t really tell us much about the candidates, but they sure tell us a lot about the country, which is why it’s important to find the few nuggets of enlightenment in our political sewage treatment plant of nonsense.

Two bits of current enlightenment seem important with both casting light on fellow Americans who seem willing to embrace, for the third time, the fake everyman from Queens who promises to be a dictator, but only on his first day back in office.

The first ray of enlightenment involves the former Fox News talking head Tucker Carlson, a trust fund man of the people whose present shtick involved serving as a propaganda vehicle for the Butcher of Kiev, Vladimir Putin. (You may recall that Carlson interviewed the great man a while back, an interview that largely consisted of Putin schooling the Swanson TV dinner heir on the fine points of Russian history – Putin style – since the days of the Czars.)

In every conceivable way the interview was embarrassing, particularly if you understand Carlson’s motive for traveling to Moscow to interview a dictator, which was, of course, to simply kiss up to a dictator. And not just any dictator, but one who has – remarkably – grown in favor with many far-right Americans while trying to wipe Ukraine off the map.

Not incidentally, the Justice Department moved this week to shutdown Russian disinformation schemes again designed to effect the November election.

Wow, it really is the Russia thing – again.

Carlson, a featured speaker at the recent Republican National Convention who helped convince Donald Trump to select J.D. Vance as his running mate, has now doubled down on normalizing historical revision.

On a recent podcast Carlson featured a two-hour interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper – “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson said – who declared Winston Churchill the true “villain” of World War II and preposterously claimed that Adolf Hitler really didn’t seek the most gruesome war in human history.

Winston Churchill WAS NOT the villain of World War II

“He didn’t want to fight,” Cooper said of the man who invaded Poland 85 years ago this month, beginning World War II. For good measure Carlson’s “honest” historian threw in a big dose of Holocaust denial, while the Trump whisperer let him talk and talk and talk.

“Actually, this is pro-Nazi propaganda,” said the conservative truth-teller Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming who was run out of the Republican Party for opposing Trump.

But it is actually worse than mere propaganda. It is calculated Kremlin-inspired disinformation on a vast scale designed to confuse and misrepresent history in the interest of elevating a view that western democracy is at fault in the long twilight struggle against authoritarianism.

Moreover, Carlson is the leading media figure in Trump World, a confidante of the former president, who crackpottery seems to know no boundaries. Carlson speaks and the Trump base responds, no matter the level of offensive BS that tumbles out of his microphone.

Yet, when you consider that the party that once celebrated American exceptionalism is now led by a man who avoided military service, trashes military heroes like the late John McCain, sides with Putin and bases his current campaign on the ridiculous notion that America has failed, it somehow follows that the party’s most prominent media figure is Tucker Carlson, crackpot.

But there is more.

Donald Trump’s gross and grossly incorrect 2015 comments about McCain not deserving hero status because he had been captured should have, in any sane world, ended any thought of him in the White House. That did not happen because party leaders tolerated the McCain slander that only grew, as his Marine general chief of staff confirmed, into calling Americans killed in World War I “suckers and losers” and climaxed with Trump questioning the value of the Medal of Honor.

But since Trump World has no bottom, there is always room to go lower as Trump did with his blatant political stunt at Arlington National Cemetery, a photo op designed to give a draft dodger a platform to criticize his opponent for the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Like the authoritarian leader he intends to become, Trump’s campaign ignored laws about not using hollowed Arlington ground for political purposes, and when confronted manhandled a civilian employee of the cemetery attempting to enforce the law. In the process, as the Washington Post detailed, Trump systematically misrepresented his own role in the Afghan departure to the very people who lost loved ones there.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written extensively about Trump’s attitudes toward those who have served their country. “The record is plain,” Goldberg says. “This is the truth of Donald Trump: He has contempt for men and women who serve their country.”

The military men who served under Trump – Generals John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Mark Milley, among others – confirm his unfitness for office.

So here is a nugget of enlightenment at the dark heart of our politics: Conservatives, up and down the Republican Party, have tolerated and embraced a truly unfit and unAmerican individual as their candidate. And most of them will easily shrug off the Carlson holocaust denial, the Hitler revisionism and the Arlington stunt for reasons that I cannot adequately explain.

We are left with this, again from Jeffrey Goldberg.

“If you could count on anything in America, and especially in Republican politics – if you had a list titled ‘Things Republican Candidates Cannot Do’ – I think ‘insulting war heroes’ would be near the top of that list. Our society venerates combat heroes. Trump very often treats them with open contempt. Just think about how he has repeatedly demeaned wounded veterans, demanding that they be kept out of parades, out of his sight. And yet Republicans have nominated him for president three times. I still cannot adequately explain it.”

There is no explaining such nonsense.

—–0—-

Additional Reading:

If Republicans Want to Win, They Need Trump to Lose — Big

I have little expectation that a Trump loss, even a big loss, would cause a redirection of the Republican Party, or a return to more traditional conservatism. But in this piece Jonathan Martin of Politico makes the case, as I do believe, that many GOP officeholders are sick and tired of the Trump nonsense and chaos.

They want him gone. They just can’t – or won’t – say it.

As Martin writes: “As they’ve demonstrated for going on a decade now, Republican leaders will repeatedly bow to the preference of their base over their own judgment when it comes to Trump.”

Therefore, no reason to think that is going to change. Read the entire piece.

The Baseball Hall of Fame

I had one of my “bucket list” experiences recently during a day-long visit – I could have stayed longer – at the fabulous baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

What a great, great place.

I was particularly moved by an outstanding exhibit devoted to the great Henry Aaron, a great player and I think an even better person.

Hank Aaron is an all-time great

If you enjoy baseball. Go to the Hall. You won’t be disappointed.

Here’s a story about the dedication of the Aaron statute earlier this year.

“The Hall of Fame wanted the Aaron statue at the entrance because that’s how it’d make the greatest impact. As thousands enter the Hall each year, they’ll first be greeted by Aaron, in his Braves uniform, propping himself with a bat.”

Thanks for reading. Do what you can to impact the coming election. Democracy is on the ballot.

2024 Election, Andrus, Trump

The Politics of Nice and Normal …

Posted on by mjohnson

Two things have struck me about the recent selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket.

The first was the guy’s resume before politics – high school social studies teacher and football coach, National Guard sergeant major, duck hunter, state college graduate. Walz won a Minnesota congressional delegation cooking contest with his hot dish recipe. If Walz is what he seems to be – and if he’s faking it he’s doing a really great job – he is a remarkably normal American, something increasingly rare in our politics.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz

[The original version of this column was filed before the Trump campaign attacked Walz’s military record. It’s hard to believe the attacks, or better yet smears – managed by the same guy who “Swift boated” Senator John Kerry in 2004 – will stick to Walz who, after all, spent 24 years in the Guard.]

The second was the obvious joy he brings to politics. Enough to remind you of Hubert Humphrey, another Minnesota vice president. Walz smiles a lot. He laughs. He seems to enjoy the personal interactions of retail politics. He’s the kind of politician who can “work the room,” engaging with total strangers and enjoy it. This, too, has become extremely rare.

I worked for a politician with the same characteristics. His name was Cecil Andrus, and I have always thought he was the most comfortable person in his own skin that I have ever known. Tim Walz reminds me of Cece Andrus, a politician who spent a career overachieving as a Democrat in a very conservative state.

Andrus, the four-term Idaho governor and secretary of the interior, never met a stranger. He loved, absolutely loved, the small personal interactions that can make or break a retail politician. If Andrus walked into a room and spotted a political adversary, someone he had a political difference with, he made a beeline for that person. He’d extend a hand and crack a joke, totally disarming the other person. It was a skill most of us lack, engaging with someone we disagree with.

People still tell me stories about the first time they met Andrus. They remember the details, and while he had a legendary ability to recall names and faces he wasn’t perfect, but most everyone thinks he was.

He could make a joke at his own expense. When was the last time you heard that from our national real estate developer and serial sexual abuser? Or literally anyone in national politics, come to think of it?

Andrus freely appropriated an old joke attributed to the great Arizona Congressman Mo Udall who related walking into an Iowa barber shop in 1976 while campaigning for president. “Good morning, I’m Mo Udall and I’m running for president,” Mo would say. And he would then relate the barber’s reaction: “I know, we were just laughing about that this morning.”

Who doesn’t like a guy who can tell that kind of joke on himself?

Andrus in a typical frame of mind

After riding a horse in the Eastern Idaho Fair parade, a supporter said to Andrus: “Boy, you got a warm reception.” His replay, “Yup, and some were waving all five fingers.”

The Republican ticket is populated by two angry sourpusses. Donald Trump is a raging insult machine. A man selling darkness. He’s running for one reason: to stay out of jail. His running mate is a shape shifting 40-year-old who reinforces the negative. America is going to hell. Dark skinned people are taking your jobs. Meanness is a virtue. Angry cat ladies are ruining the country.

There are two kinds of political campaigns: campaigns built on anger, grievance and destroying the opponent and campaigns centered on hope and the future.

I suspect Kamala Harris chose the former high school teacher from Nebraska because he doesn’t display any grievance. Like Cece Andrus he isn’t a hater.

J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, went to Yale, made a bundle working as a venture capitalist in California and said he despised Trump before he didn’t. Tim Walz went to Chadron State College, taught school in Alliance, Nebraska – I know that place and it is conservative and rural – and later coached a high school football team to the Minnesota state championship.

What do those who have observed him up close say about Vance? “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” Romney told journalist McKay Coppins, who pegs Vance an opportunistic phony. “How do you sit next to him at lunch?”

As Aaron Sanderford wrote in the Nebraska Examiner, “Walz coached linebackers and signaled the defense at Alliance High School under coach Jeff Tomlin.”

“Tomlin said he remembers Walz as an amazing coach and social studies teacher. He called Walz ‘an ordinary guy with the extraordinary ability to have a vision for who he is and who he wants to be.’

“He was an exceptional teacher, one of the best I’ve been around,” Tomlin said.

The Republican campaign has only two gears: negative and nasty. It’s not morning in America, it’s a vision of a shithole country, populated by vile people who, as Trump said this week, “want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

That’s preposterous Trumpian BS, a convicted felon and Putin apologist telling the rest of us about law and order. The Republican campaign will continue to disintegrate day-by-day with Trump, if it is possible, growing more and more unhinged.

One reason Walz will be so effective over the next three months is that, again like Andrus, he’s both decent and tough. He can make a joke, as he did while trolling fellow Governor Kristi Noem, she of South Dakota puppy killing fame, and never mention the subject of the jab. Walz posted a photo of his own dog taking a treat and saying “show me you didn’t shoot your dog and dump it in a gravel pit. I’ll go first.” Noem wasn’t mentioned. Everyone knew. Noem, of course, wanted to be Trump’s vice president and, as if to compensate for not making it, immediately labeled Walz “radical.”   

Another inviolate rule: Politics is a matter of addition. Tim Walz is additive to the Democratic ticket. We’ll be talking about the high school course he developed on the Holocaust, while Vance is still answering questions about calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”

Hope is additive. Grievance is exhausting. We’ll see soon enough if America wants a future of hope or something much darker. 

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A couple of other items of note …

Utah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think we should ban books – period. But Utah is going full speed ahead. Aren’t conservatives always demanding parental control. Let parents decide what their kids can read

“Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries.”

What a travesty. Read the full story.

Steve Symms, senator who was voice of conservative ire, dies at 86

I knew the former Idaho senator pretty well, covered some of his campaigns and moderated the debates Symms had with Senator Frank Church in 1980. He was an Idaho original, and an early adopter of the kind of ruthlessly negative campaigns that now define politics at every level.

Symms at his best delivering a quotable soundbite

The first graph of his obit in the Washington Post is really rather stunning.

“Steve Symms, a former Republican lawmaker from Idaho who made staunch conservative views his political brand and rattled the 1988 presidential campaign by falsely claiming that the wife of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis once burned an American flag, died Aug. 8 at his home in Leesburg, Va. He was 86.”

Read the full piece.

More soon. Thanks for reading. All the best.


2024 Election, Trump, Vice Presidents

The Crap Shoot that is the Vice Presidency …

Posted on by mjohnson

Nine times in American history a sitting vice president has risen to the presidency on the death or, in Richard Nixon’s case, the resignation of a president.

Those nine men represent a cross section of the worst and best of American political history.

Theodore Roosevelt, a rambunctious 42-year old when he became president, clearly fits in the best category. In many ways after succeeding the assassinated William McKinley, Roosevelt transformed the presidency, using the bully pulpit and his well-developed political skills to conserve vast amounts of public land in national forests, parks and wildlife refuges.

Roosevelt was a popular leader and the first American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded for his mediation in the Russo-Japanese war. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

Teddy had a vision about America’s role in the world and arguably was a principal architect of the American Century. Roosevelt was a scholar/politician who read and wrote books. He remains a supremely engaging character.

John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur also became president following the death of a president and there is ample reason none of them are on Mt. Rushmore.

Tyler was a southerner who welcomed the Civil War, effectively committing treason after leaving the White House. Fillmore was a non-entity, best forgotten. Johnson was a horrible racist even by the standards of his time.

Arthur, surely you remember Chester Arthur, was a machine politician who may have been the best of this fairly sorry lot. Sympathetic historians have concluded that Arthur tried hard to be competent and failed to get credit for clearing that low bar. One biographer concluded of 21st president that, “some people just do the best they can in a difficult situation, and sometimes that turns out just fine.”

Calvin Coolidge following Warren Harding, Harry Truman following Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson succeeding John Kennedy and Gerald Ford replacing Nixon have all enjoyed a generally positive historical reassessment.

Coolidge gets graded on the curve in part because Harding, to quote Alice Roosevelt Longworth, “was not a bad man. He was just a slob.” Truman suffered in FDR’s shadow but proved his mettle by staging arguably the greatest presidential comeback in history in 1948. He also recognized Israel, desegregated the armed forces and pushed back against southern segregationists in his own party. Johnson’s record of domestic accomplishment, including the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, compares in impact only to FDR’s. Vietnam was Johnson’s downfall and without it, as has been said, he would have been a great president. That remark caused the eminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith to quip “and except for the mountains Switzerland would be a flat country.”

A new biography of Ford, the accidental vice president, makes a strong case for the man’s decency and common sense. Biographer Richard Norton Smith notes Ford’s decency by remembering that in the last year of his presidency he had the good grace to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a remarkable collection of great Americans: Jesse Owens, Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Rockwell, Lowell Thomas, General Omar Bradley, Irving Berlin, Martha Graham and historians Will and Ariel Durant.

Texan John Nance Garner, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s three vice presidents, reportedly said of the vice presidency that it “isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” But, ol’ Cactus Jack was wrong. Sometimes it’s worth everything, the whole enchilada. (By the way, Garner used a word other than spit.)

Presidents do die in office (or in one case resigns) and the understudy is elevated to the pinnacle.

While we contemplate Donald Trump’s increasingly wrong footed selection of an untested 40-year old former venture capitalist as his running mate it is worth remembering that J.D. Vance could be a heartbeat away from the presidency, while serving with a guy who will be 82 should the country survive him serving out another term.

The Republican ticket …

Vance is being pilloried, and properly so, for what appears to be his voluminous writing and speaking – before become a vice presidential candidate – about gender roles and birthing babies, including his particularly incendiary crack about “childless cat ladies.”

Here’s the full Vance quote: “We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Vance seems like nothing so much as an apostle of the far right fringe Claremont Institute of cultural studies, represented enthusiastically by Scott Yenor, the Boise State University professor who has effectively argued that professional attainment is lost on women whose real place, were it not for “feminism” and civil rights laws, is barefoot and in the kitchen.

Yenor – Vance, too – has argued for a return to a simpler, and in his view better time when old “stereotypes” – man the breadwinner, woman the mom – were in vogue. Make America 1950 Again.

“The problem is this,” Yenor has written. “We have replaced the old ‘stereotypes’ with new, confused ones. Men are thought to be scum. Independent women are taught to have interests that are difficult to reconcile with men and marriage. Education and careers come first. Overcoming old stereotypes becomes the new stereotype. Marriage is delayed. Childbearing is deferred.”

Vance is about as popular right now as Andrew Johnson was when he replaced Abraham Lincoln, with his post-convention polling numbers worse than any vice presidential candidate ever. The first rule of the vice presidency is, of course, “do no harm.” By that token Vance has failed, and with spectacular speed, and he will soon be compared to whatever man Kamala Harris selects as a running mate.

Harris could stumble with her VP pick. It does happen. George McGovern, for instance, bombed with his pick of Thomas Eagleton in 1972 over concerns that seems all these years later a lot less important than arguing that millions of American women – cat lovers or not – should know their place.

Meanwhile, Trump is busy insulting Black Americans and dismissing the guy he’s running with. “Virtually never has it mattered,” Trump said of his strange pick with a beard Chester Arthur might envy. “Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”   

Right. Just ask that famous vice president Sarah Palin.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A few other things I found interesting this week …

Publisher’s Note | Trump and NABJ: What Did We Learn?

It’s hard to tell what impact – if any – Trump’s contentious interview before an audience of Black journalists last week will have on the campaign.

What seems pretty clear to me, at least, that it was a prime example of Trump being Trump, but the nasty exchanges were also calculated. Get the attention off Kamala Harris and back on Trump, even if the attention is altogether negative. And, of course, Trump is a racist appealing the absolute worst instincts of some of his followers. So, he knew precisely what he was doing.

Kimberly Griffin is a Black journalist and publisher of the Mississippi Free Press, a small news operation with a big reach.

I thought her take on the Trump outburst was interesting. Here’s the link.

Sure, 2024 has had lots of news – but compared with 1940, 1968 or 1973, it’s nothing exceptional

Think we’re living in unprecedented times? Check out 1940 or 1968 or 1973 …

Some perspective. Link here.

Walter Shapiro, Political Columnist With a Contrarian Streak, Dies at 77

Walter was one of my favorite reporters, a great sense of news, a fine writer and very funny.

The tributes have flowed following his death recently at age 77.

Here’s an obit worth your time.

See you again soon. All the best for August.

2024 Election, Trump

The Gaslighting of America …

Posted on by mjohnson

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

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

——

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

———

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were it to be. Were it possible to be.

—–0—–

Further Reading:

City Manager Announces Resignation, Says She Was Bullied

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

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

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

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

Read the entire story.

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading. All the best.

2024 Election, Nixon, Supreme Court, Trump

Nixon’s Revenge …

Posted on by mjohnson

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

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

Bannon in the slammer, Trump leads in the polls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With fear for our democracy, I despair.

—–0—–

Additional Reading:

A couple of other items of interest …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something here at least a bit uplifting.

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

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

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

From The Guardian.

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