Sage Insight Into the Age of Trump from a Pair of Master Essayists

I have two pieces I'd like to designate as required reading for this week.  Each illuminates major pieces of the current puzzle of American politics, though there is some important overlap.  The first is by Rebecca Solnit, who knocks it out of the park with each fresh essay.  In Tyranny of the Minority, she provides a concise yet detailed overview of a central fact that needs to inform all progressive politics: the fact that the Republican Party has for decades, and increasingly into the present, firmly grounded its electoral strategy in an opposition to American democracy.  Here's a sample of her coolly savage indictment:

"Republicans’ furious and nasty war against full participation has taken many forms: gerrymandering, limiting early voting, reducing the number of polling places, restricting third-party voter registration, and otherwise disenfranchising significant portions of the electorate. Subtler yet no less effective have been their efforts to attack democracy at the root. They have advanced policies to weaken the electorate economically, to undermine a free and fair news media, and to withhold the education and informed discussion that would equip citizens for active engagement. In 1987, for example, Republican appointees eliminated the rule that required radio and TV stations to air a range of political views. The move helped make possible the rise of right-wing talk radio and of Fox News, which for twenty years has effectively served the Republican Party as a powerful propaganda arm."

Solnit provides vital historical context for how we got to this Time of Trump, and illustrates the degree to which Trump, rather than being an anomaly, is the culmination of beliefs that have long motivated the Republican Party.  The crux of it is, as Solnit puts it, "Today’s Republicans are democracy’s enemy, and it is theirs."  This is one of the defining facts of our time, born out by decades of evidence and now by the depredations of the current White House occupant.  This is also the Achilles' heel of the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally: their road map for retaining power is fundamentally in conflict with the most basic premises of our country.  The progressive movement needs to push Democrats to put democratic principles at the center of their politics, in ways that are both idealistic and pragmatic.  Everyone can relate to the idea of fair competition, a level playing field, letting the best person win; these principles are violated with every new gerrymandering of a Congressional district, with every new voting restriction that targets minority voters.  The central anti-democratic premise of the Republican Party needs to be discussed, illustrated, and repeated 'til the cows come home.  The evidence is there for all to see; and as we will discuss in more detail soon, it is the throbbing heart of the Trump-Bannon-Sessions triumvirate.  It is a hideous state of affairs that one of the two major American political parties has turned itself into a de facto white supremacist anti-democratic party, but the opportunity this presents is enormous; the Republican Party has essentially let the mask drop, and now is the time to fully confront and defeat this pachyderm grown monstrous and near-unrecognizable.

Tom Englehardt's latest dispatch, The Art of the Trumpaclysm, likewise stresses the continuities of Trumpism with what has come before.  In this second must-read piece, Englehardt writes:

"Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history.  He’s unimaginable without it.  This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics, and governance.  In that sense, to generalize (if you’ll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we’ve been living in for some years now, even if we’d prefer to pretend otherwise."

He homes in on two major changes since 2001: the rise of the generals, and the rise of the billionaires, both of which cadres are represented in his administration to an extreme degree.  To my mind, the widespread lack of public discussion about the connections between the rise of Trump and the politics of terror has been staggering, amounting almost to a blind spot in the national conversation.  Englehardt hardily breaks trail on this underreported context — and even the most recent events back him up, as the administration's proposal to add yet more obscene amounts of money to the Pentagon budget gives us more visibility into the militaristic right-wing nationalism that is Trumpism's vision for America.   

Both these pieces contain more than their share of harsh truths about the dire situation our country finds itself in; but in doing so, they help to guide the shape of our resistance and the path forward.

A Bad Day to Be Jeff Sessions

With Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recusal of himself from involvement in any investigations into the presidential campaign — clearly in response to news first broken by the Washington Post that he met not once but twice with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the 2016 presidential campaign, thus revealing himself to have lied under oath during his confirmation hearings — we are left with as many questions as ever, and no certainty that there will be a high-level investigation to answer them.  But putting aside the big issues for now — what was the extent of Russian intervention in the election, and to what extent, if any, was there collaboration between the Russians and the Trump campaign?, being the two biggest — I've got some smaller ones I want answered.

First, why did Sessions lie under oath?  Even if you were to accept the Republican pushback that Sessions didn't lie so much as incompletely answer the questions he was asked, he has to have realized that were this information to come out later, it would seriously bite him in his Alabama ass.  It is curious to me that in his answer to Al Franken that is the crux of his dissembling, he seems to actually volunteer the fact that he has been "called" a surrogate for the Trump campaign (funny phrasing, because this was a role he clearly and openly played); I am not going to call this the oversharing of a guilty conscience, but today it sure does act as a handy reminder of his closeness to the Trump campaign in nearly the same breath that he fails to mention his contact with the Russians.  

More to the point — why would he think that news of his meetings with the Russians would NOT come out at some point, in this leaky Trump imperium?  Since the meetings weren't secret, the safe assumption would have been that at least the fact of them would enter the public record.  Just at the level of pure optics, it seems like he deferred a problem that has now exploded when it might do maximal damage to himself.  Like National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, he has lied in a situation where there was a high probability of being found out (Flynn would have known that his conversations with the Russian ambassador were being monitored by the FBI, which by my reckoning makes his folly even greater than Sessions').  

Which leads to my next question — and OK, this is a big one — why have two high-level Trump administration officials been caught in lies about their contact with the Russians, when the question haunting this presidency is whether Trump is president because of Russian assistance?  As keeps happening in this story, they are acting like people with something to hide.  Actually, we can state this even more strongly: they actively are hiding the extent of their contact with the Russians, which can only raise a reasonable person's suspicions.  As outlandish as it once seemed, the novelistic idea of Russian interference is a known fact at this point.  The really important question is whether Trump's people, and Trump himself, cultivated that interference.

Another question — why has Jeff Sessions recused himself now?  Isn't this tantamount to being caught out in a lie, and admitting he had something to hide?  Up to now, he has affirmed himself as capable of objectively running an investigation into the presidential campaign.  And one more, just to be mean: if Jeff Sessions lied about this important matter while under oath, what else did he lie about?

Just a day after a speech that too many who should know better lauded as a sign that the Trump presidency was entering a realm of normalcy, Sessions' false testimony and recusal remind us that we will not re-enter normal times so long as Donald Trump remains in the White House.

Trump's Speech to Congress Seeks to Distract

Faith in the press to fight our battles for us is truly a double-edged sword, as the president's first address to Congress was greeted with pretty widespread and fawning headlines from various points of the mainstream media.  But of course there is no new direction from Trump, no kinder, gentler president.  The Trump-Bannon team has at least previously done us the service of broadcasting loud and clear that their intent is to attempt to shock and awe the American republic, and until they are ejected from office, they will continue to do so with still more authoritarian, anti-free press, anti-Muslim, pro-billionaire machinations.  The widespread opposition to Trump is based on overwhelming evidence of his unfit character and rancid anti-American politics, and most people are well aware that the speech to Congress was just another bit of performance art.  And though much coverage of the speech painted it as some sort of softening of his positions, something presidential, it notably contained blatant lies about the raid in Yemen, with Trump using the death of a sailor to distract from questions about the utility of the action; it seems to have yielded little information of use, but, more importantly, brought about the deaths of 25 Yemeni civilians.

(This raid also demonstrates one of the main reasons why we are still fighting an escalating cast of extremists across the broader Middle East a decade and a half after 9/11: by treating this as a military conflict, we are making enemies faster than we kill them.  How can a raid that kills 25 civilians in any way be counted a success, no matter how "important" its other accomplishments?  This idea alone should shock the conscience.)

And the speech comes just after Trump once again is refusing to take responsibility for the raid's shortcomings.  This in particular seems particularly staggering to me — surely even Trump supporters must sense something amiss when the commander in chief can't bring himself to at least go through the motions of accepting responsibility.  I also hope that the many military voters who pulled the lever for Trump are starting to look anew at this pathetic man who now has the power to send them into harm's way.

A Real Kick in Djibouti!

This New York Times article snagged me with its vivid snapshot of geopolitical change, but it's also remarkable for the number of threads for further inquiry that it opens up.  The Chinese are opening a naval base in Djibouti, a stone's throw from a U.S. facility in that African country - and this will be the first unexpected shock for many: forget the Chinese base, what about ours?!  It further turns out that the Chinese are heavy investors in Djibouti, and the article suggests without pinning down any official statements that the Chinese were able to leverage their financial sway over this country into securing the naval facility (for which they are also paying).  While the comments from U.S. officials mainly revolve around the notion of military competition with the Chinese, the real nugget for me is the reminder that while the U.S. is squandering billions to make endless war in the greater Middle East, the Chinese are investing, building, and otherwise conducting an exploitative but rational foreign policy.  The contrast could not be starker.

The Curious Case of the Competent National Security Advisor

As far as I can tell, the difference between departed National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and new pick H.R. McMaster is as stark as you can imagine within the possible parameters of the Trump administration — and in a positive way.  Flynn was a paranoid Islamophobe who apparently had no trouble violating long-standing political rules about conducting government business before he was actually a member of the government, and who lied to Vice President Pence about the substance of his contact with the Russian ambassador.  H.R. McMaster seems to be a general capable of iconoclastic and fact-based thought; in the shitty context of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he applied a subtle understanding of how to fight the insurgency, and he’s written a well-regarded, revisionist book on the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Vietnam War.  This is someone who understands how self-defeating it is to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” unlike his predecessor.

Indeed, the baseline competence of McMaster raises the question of how Donald Trump could move so rapidly from his first pick to his second.  Flynn seemed part and parcel of the anti-Islam, pro-Russian direction that sits nauseatingly at the heart of Trump’s early foreign policy; McMaster seems, if anything, the antidote to that sort of crazy.  What does this choice mean?  Is Trump really not as serious about his anti-Muslim tendencies as the evidence so far would have us believe?  Was he just desperate for a respectable choice that would defuse the sense that his foreign policy team is in disarray?  Does he simply intend to ignore McMaster’s counsel?  Was McMaster the only choice who would take the job?  And, finally, will McMaster be able to effectively serve this deranged president?  I am very curious to see how McMaster’s tenure as NSA plays out, and how these questions are answered.

A Smorgasbord of Slander

You have to marvel at the combination of malice and incompetence that has led our new president to create a diplomatic incident with Sweden, that most neutral of nations.  Apparently fired up by a tendentious anti-immigrant Fox news segment, Donald Trump suggested at his rally in Florida last weekend that a terroristic attack or other serious incident had occurred in Sweden the night before.  A spokesman has since clarified that Trump was speaking not of a specific incident but of the news report.  The ridiculousness of the president’s remarks shouldn’t blind us to the purpose and prejudice that motivated them: this is a man who hears what he wants to hear, and sees what he wants to see, which is all the easier when he feeds himself a diet that includes trash reporting from Fox News.  Incident by incident, these stories about Trump’s ignorance amuse: but over time, and country by country, what essentially amounts to presidential slander and hostility towards American allies is going to erode our security in the world.  The president is the loudest voice of the U.S., after all, and without someone with an equally large media megaphone cleaning up everything in his wake, the world is left with the sense that this is what the U.S. is all about now: anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and contemptuous of our allies.

Electing to Electioneer

The president’s re-election rally in Melbourne, Florida last Saturday provides still more evidence that Donald Trump’s psychological needs preempt whatever his political agenda might be.  Just as he appears to have been driven to give his impromptu, dingbat press conference last week out of a craving for approval and a need for control, in Florida he stepped into a remarkable time machine that simultaneously brought him back to the 2016 campaign, and jumped him forward to the 2020 race (perhaps making use of a little-known wormhole that links all presidential elections in a single continuous campaign dimension — will scientific wonders never cease?!).  As great a threat as Donald Trump poses to our democracy and to our security, his capacity to self-delude with fictions of mass popularity may ultimately work to the advantage of his opponents; unless Trump is able to completely redefine reality, an inability to properly gauge reality (such as the depth of resistance to his policies or his historic unpopularity) should only hurt him in the long run.

Also, just for the record: A RE-ELECTION RALLY?!  This is so absurd that I’m not going to waste any of your time or my energy on further commentary.

Sick of Secrets

If we’re in the midst of a political crisis, then Donald Trump seems to be doing a maximal amount to feed it.  Simply put, he’s acting like someone who has something to hide.  He either fails to recognize the seriousness of the questions that have been raised — the central one being, was there collusion between members of his presidential campaign and the Russian government? — or he recognizes the seriousness, and does nothing to address it.  Instead, as was on full display at his press conference today, he deflects all legitimate issues back onto the media and his enemies, who he claims are lying or purveying fake news.

As TPM notes in this must-read piece, the leaks, and the questions, are actually of the utmost seriousness, as surreal as they sometimes seem.  I particularly wanted to flag this article because Josh Marshall broaches a topic that’s been part of the strangeness of the whole Russia imbroglio: the fact that where we currently are involves the U.S. intelligence community leaking information.  He addresses the narrative that seems to have been fully embraced by Donald Trump (at least in his public pronouncements) that the intelligence community is conducting a sort of war on him.  While Marshall disagrees that such a war on Trump is actually being waged, he identifies the deep seriousness of asking the question — because if such a fight were being waged, it would be a deep attack on our democratic form of government.  Marshall draws a crucial distinction between such a concerted effort against Trump, and the intelligence community’s leaking of information that it wants to move into the public realm, coming down in favor of the existence of the latter but not the former.

But I do think matters might not be quite so cut and dried as that.  If indeed members of the intelligence community are leaking information that they consider vital to understanding what they consider to be the threat that Donald Trump poses to our national security, then no matter how civic-minded those leaks are, and no matter how important they might be for the public to be aware of, they do inevitably constitute an attack on the president.  Now, it may be that Marshall is making the case against an institutional attack against Trump, in which case I gladly concede his refutation of such an attack.  But the leakers themselves are indeed in conflict with the president.

Which leads me to this point: I think all of us common citizens need to be as conscious as possible over how profoundly undemocratic this phase of the Trump crisis is.  Whether or not the leakers believe they are serving the public good, we are in an awkward in-between place, being given glimpses of a larger reality, but absolutely without a clear picture.  This, of course, is where Trump’s own behavior enters the story in force, because he vehemently insists that there is absolutely nothing amiss.  As just a single, telling example: at today’s press conference, the president denied that Michael Flynn had spoken to the Russian ambassador about the sanctions that president Obama was at that time imposing on Russia in retaliation for Russia’s election interference.  Moreover, Trump added that even if Flynn had done so, that would have been all right.  WHAT WHAT?  It’s already been reported that U.S. intelligence has recordings of such a conversation, and that Donald Trump was informed of this conversation.  But from today’s press conference, you’d get the impression that Flynn was fired not by Trump, but by the U.S. media!  Trump asserts that the information in the leaks is lies; but if they are indeed lies, they aren’t really leaks, are they, just misinformation.  He simply makes no sense.  As I said at the start, Trump is acting like someone with something to hide.

But back to the leakers — we are in an untenable, undemocratic place right now.  If there is vital information that the public needs to know that speaks to Donald Trump’s fitness to carry out his duties as president, then those who possess that information should make it public.  The other way through this juncture, of course, is for Congress to investigate, to do its job on behalf of the American people.  But so far, the Republican Party has not been able to move out of its defensive crouch; and so we are left in this place of insufficient knowledge. 

To the Barricades to Protect the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau!

It has been another banner day in Trump meltdown politics — witness his delusional press conference — but I wanted to flag this story from several days ago, because it illustrates an enormous battle that’s shaping up, wherever the various Russia threads lead us: the willingness of Republicans to go after the financial reforms put in place following the 2008 financial crisis.  First off, let’s note the dizzying audacity of Republicans putting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in their crosshairs.  The fact of the matter is that the CFPB has pissed off powerful interests because it’s effectively doing exactly what it was designed for — protecting consumers from predatory business practices.  That an assault on this bureau could even be contemplated, despite the horrific optics, not to mention the actual substance of going after it, speaks to two important points.  The first is that Republicans essentially embrace the principle that businesses need to be free to practice unrestrained exploitation of American consumers.  The second is that the Democrats have to a large degree failed to advertise the success of a government agency that operates to protect the little guy, or else the Republicans would not be so emboldened to tangle with it.

I’m of the belief that broadcasting both of these facts — the blatant anti-consumer attitude of the CFPB’s critics, and the bureau’s fundamental success — will be crucial to reviving the Democratic Party’s fighting spirit, and illuminating the fundamental indecency of the GOP.  This is as black and white an issue as you could hope for in politics; it energizes the base, appeals to moderates, and can peel off moderate Republicans who will only increasingly be looking to possibilities beyond their own party, as Trump melts down and the Republicans attempt to move forward a profoundly anti-worker, pro-corporate agenda.  This is a battle well worth fighting.  The CFPB’s greatest vulnerability is that it’s not nearly widely enough known to the public; it’s time to make this bureau into a household word, as a symbol of big, progressive government at its best (no wonder conservatives hate it).  Attacks on the CFPB should be recognized as the outrage that they are.

The relative vulnerability of the CFPB links up with a larger topic that I’m hoping to explore more in coming months — the strange disappearance of the 2008 financial crisis from recent politics.  We saw this in the 2016 presidential campaign, but more damningly for the Democrats, we saw it disappear from the position of prominence it should have retained during President Obama’s second term.  Trump’s ability to win as many votes as he did speaks not simply to the rise of white nationalism, but to profound economic anxieties shared by millions, which were obviously exacerbated and energized by the 2008 crisis and ensuing recession, and which Obama and the Democrats failed to acknowledge and address.  I understand that it was to Obama’s and Democrats’ general advantage to highlight the economic recovery, but they seem never to draw the full lessons of 2008: that our economy has increasingly become one of exploitation of the many by the powerful few, and that a sustained, pro-citizen pushback is needed if we are to create an economy that benefits the great majority of the country.

A Postmodern Take on The Last Supper at Mar-a-Lago

Amid so many grotesque outrages already committed by this young administration, how is it possible that new and original ones keep getting pumped out?  Maybe this is where the president's truest talent lies, in the imaginative production of increasingly audacious violations of decency?  At any rate, the spectacle that Donald Trump consciously created on a Mar-a-Lago dining patio yesterday, as his team huddled in response to a North Korean missile test, is in some ways the most visually amazing event so far.  Photos taken by nearby diners reveal a setting that may in retrospect be viewed as Donald Trump's very own Last Supper, at which his idiocy and lack of the most basic understanding of his new job's gravity was revealed for all the world to see, as momentous affairs of state were conducted in the Florida night for all to see or overhear.

In a New York Times article by Elizabeth Williamson titled "The 'Caddyshack' President," she writes that "The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look." 

And now, of course, tonight, flashlight holder Mike Flynn has resigned, as allegations of his possibly illegal pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador have finally gained too much gravity to ignore.

One thing, obvious but needing to be made explicit: after all the hounding of Hillary Clinton about her goddamn email server, Trump just up and conducts classified business for all to see and hear, showing off to all the guests willing to pony up $200,000 for club membership.  We have truly entered a debauched, Bacchanalian era where national security is concerned.

American Id

Two articles out this week offer a pair of crucial complementary perspectives on the state of emergency we find ourselves in.  In this piece, Salon's Andrew O’Hehir argues for the importance of accepting that, rather than being an utter anomaly, Donald Trump may as well be stamped with the words “Made in America.”  He writes, “Donald Trump is the culmination of a long historical process in which all those things and many more — all the flaws and contradictions of American democracy and American society — have crystallized in a single figure. In a sense, we have to accept him before we can move past him. He is our creation, an accurate if gruesome reflection of the state of our nation.”  O’Hehir’s formulation is left open-ended in this article, but should be seen in the context of his many acute articles over the course of the election season in which he elaborates on Donald Trump’s existence as a media entity, his status as America’s first “white president,” and the many ways in which Donald Trump was able to exploit the festering weaknesses and conflicts of our politics and society.

I’ve come to think of Donald Trump as a figure who embodies an unleashing of the white American id.  His blatant racism, his undisguised misogyny, the sheer lowest-common-denominator nature of his practice of power (bullying, lying, humiliating), his apparent disregard for contemplation or introspection, his refusal to acknowledge mistakes.  There’s a consciencelessness to the man that can’t be ignored — he comes across as pure want, pure need, without an eye to whether these assertions might come back to haunt him later (as I believe they will).  Various pieces of reporting have observed the way he riffed off crowd reactions during the campaign, as if absorbing and internalizing the rawest feelings of his audience — though I have no doubt that there was not always a great distance between what excited the crowds and what excited him.

So what does it mean, then, if we also accept Andrew Sullivan’s assertion that Donald Trump suffers from a verifiable form of mental derangement, that he is, to put it crudely, mad?  Trump supporters push back that at worst, the president is merely crazy like a fox, always cannily working towards a purpose.  Obviously Donald Trump is a narcissistic, egomaniacal personality — but is he clinical?  Does he truly suffer from a mental illness?  Without an actual diagnosis — which we will never get, as it would require Trump’s cooperation — we are only left with speculation amid inconclusive evidence.  But for the sake of building an opposition to Trump, the more important fact is the following: actions that may or may not reflect the existence of mental instability are actually virtually indistinguishable from the actions of a power-obsessed president with authoritarian inclinations.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what motivates Trump so long as we are clearly able to assess his actions — and to date, he has acted in ways that are a repudiation of basic American principles.  When he says that millions of people voted illegally in the last election, costing him the popular vote, does he really believe this?  There is no way for us to know (and to be honest, for me, it is less chilling to believe that he is self-deluded than that he would knowingly speak such a democracy-corroding falsehood), but what we know for sure is that these words are a lie that lays the groundwork for further voting restrictions.

Sullivan also takes up another topic that bears further contemplation.  He writes, “With someone like this barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind [. . .] One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago.”

His first observation hit me in the gut, because this is indeed what has been happening to all of us — Trump has essentially gotten inside our heads, forcing us to contend with him on an ongoing basis.  Since the election I’ve been thinking that it’s far better that people are upset by Trump than accept him as normal — but it’s disturbing to realize that in dominating the national psyche, he’s already achieved a sort of authoritarian victory.

But while I agree with Sullivan’s second point in theory — that a free society means being able to be free of politics for long stretches at a time — I have to register a pretty hefty dissent on the grounds of reality.  For as long as I’ve been on this earth, it seems to me that at no point has there been a moment when Americans could afford not to think about politics for much of the time.  From Watergate, to the retrograde Reagan administration, to the hollow successes of the Clinton administration and absurd Republican impeachment efforts, to 9/11 and the financial crisis, not to mention a Cold War that kept the specter of nuclear annihilation hovering over civilization for many of those years, we have continuously experienced an urgent need to be aware of politics.

Now, I don’t want to totally overstate my point, because Sullivan is making a solid observation here — we truly are in a state of affairs where, out of a combination of fear and outrage, you don’t want to miss a day of news, and that really is no good at all.  It’s actually kind of scary.  I love politics, and even I have reached a point where there is too much of it; it does not really make me happy that everyone now seems as interested in politics as myself, because the situation is so dire.  But, to bring things back around to the O’Hehir piece, our current crisis has been long in the making, and Trump has fed off existing conflicts and weaknesses in our nation; one of the big ones is a society that has been all-too depoliticized over the years, accepting things like the evisceration of the working and middle class, resegregation of American society, and an unending war on terror with not nearly the appropriate levels of outrage and resistance, much less public articulation of these enormous problems staring us all in the face.  The price we are paying for not thinking about politics enough before is having to think about it all the time now; it’s a price we’d better be willing to pay.

Head Games

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to grasp that not in recent memory has the state of our country been so intertwined with the particular psychology of a single individual.  As a general proposition, there’s no excuse pretending we don’t know what Donald Trump is like — we’ve had nonstop coverage of him for the last year and a half.  He’s petty, vindictive, belligerent, incurious, illiberal, egomaniacal, narcissistic, and otherwise temperamentally unqualified to hold a position of public power — and now he holds the most powerful position in the world.  Apart from the last days of Nixon, we haven’t been in an analogous situation in the nuclear age.  And as we’re reminded in this article, don’t go thinking Trump is going to change.  I’ve thought a few times recently whether the election wasn’t decided so much on politics, as on voters’ basic ability to perceive whether a candidate was an unstable personality (or was a con man). . . 

Speaking of the challenge of dealing with such a deranged personality, though, here’s something that’s been building at the edge of my consciousness since Trump’s inauguration, and that’s finally heaved itself up from the tidal pools of early mentation into the full light of what the fuck: how remarkable it is that a president acting as an America-first authoritarian nationalist is indistinguishable from a deranged egomaniac power-tripping his way through his first days in office.  What we’ve seen so far is an injudicious, destabilizing, self-aggrandizing assertion of power, whether it’s on the part of the presidency or on behalf of the United States operating as a global power.  So although this may be the mode of governing to which Trump’s personality takes him, it’s also a fundamentally knowable one — an authoritarian, demagoguing, self-serving approach to power.  I’m hoping that some of the things that make Trump so dangerous — his lack of restraint and discipline, his need to assert himself against all threats — will ultimately weaken him through overextension and making enemies of too many people in our country.

Melissa McCarthy Drags Sean Spicer Down

Melissa McCarthy was born to do many things, but clearly one of them was to dress in drag and eviscerate Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live.  McCarthy was able to spoof Spicer so effectively because he’s basically acting like the propaganda mouthpiece of a third-rate dictator, something that’s intrinsically amusing and an open invitation to ruthless parody.  This Politico piece indicates that Donald Trump was bothered by the portrayal, which is pretty funny considering Spicer is so lampoon-able precisely because he works so unflaggingly to do exactly what Donald Trump wants him to do. But this line jumped out at me:

“More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him.”

It’s yet sign of Donald Trump’s virulent misogyny that to him, Spicer’s sin isn’t that he’s a soulless hack, but that a woman was able to lampoon him - as if that’s the worst fate imaginable.  Pathetic.

Donald Trump Has Shock and Awed Himself in the Foot

I want to highlight two articles from the last couple days that provide some vital insights into what we are seeing in the Trump phenomenon.  I realize some people may be getting fatigued from all the political strife, and so I also want to note the underlying hope that is the flip side of the darkness that Trump has brought.  In this article, Josh Marshall makes the very important argument that Trump far more represents a rancid nationalism than a little-man’s populism.  In making this point, he highlights a fact that should be central to popping the misconception that Trump is somehow working for working class Americans - his lack of support for basics like unions, inequality, and retirement security.  I describe these points as hopeful because the anti-democratic, anti-worker agenda is pretty much laid bare at this point, and Trump lacks the discipline to dissemble further.  The contradictions lay him open to a powerful counterattack on the grounds of his betrayal of those he promised to help.

This article by Brian Beutler at The New Republic is also my choice for required weekend reading.  Other people had been making similar observations prior to Trump’s inauguration, but Beutler demonstrates how a white supremacist agenda has motivated several key actions of the new administration.  Depressing and scary as hell- but this is an agenda that the great majority of Americans find reprehensible.  Calling it out is a key part of catalyzing a broad-based opposition to Trump.  We are not nearly such a fucked-up country as Trump is counting on.

Both articles reinforce a point that is really beginning to gain strength among the quickly-coalescing Trump resistance - that this situation doesn’t just call for stopping Trump, but for advancing a counter-agenda that moves the country forward by embracing equality, economic fairness, and a super-charged commitment to democratic participation.  Let’s face it - as much of a black swan event as his election was, we were bound to get a would-be dictator sooner or later.  This isn’t to say that there aren’t some dark strains of our current economic and social situation that led to his election - far from it - but that human nature and chance being what they are, someone like Trump was bound to happen.  On the one hand, our form of government essentially counted on this, by instituting the system of checks and balances that we all (or at least most of us) know and love.  Our system reflects a pessimistic view of human nature and the corrupting properties of power; while I agree more with the former point than the latter, these were founding perspectives that currently work in our favor.

We have more than enough tools and forces at our disposal to defeat Trumpism, with its ugly nationalism and white supremacism.  Team Trump proposes to implement what amounts to a pro-rich, pro-white, pro-conservative Christian agenda that flies in the face of America’s ever-increasing diversity and economic inequality.  This is an agenda that takes as a given its permanent minority status; otherwise, why would they need to implement it via “shock and awe?”  And while I’m on the topic, let’s recognize the twisted crudeness of the Trump team employing a phrase originally associated with the U.S.’s illegal invasion of Iraq to describe a political tactic used against the American body politic.  The phrase is useful in one respect, though, in that it highlights how the Trump team’s strategy aims to disorient its opposition.  We need to fully recognize this, and stop being shocked, or disoriented.  Here’s the orienting principle I’ve adopted as something of my personal mantra - anyone who tries to “shock and awe” American society, to disregard majority opinion to implement retrograde and dangerous ideas, is a clear threat to that society who must be stopped by all peaceful means.

My response to shock and awe is to embrace of the idea that we must “shock and awe” the Trump administration right back.So while we need to pursue long-term goals like re-building our economy and political institutions to make a recurrence of someone like Trump as unlikely as possible, we need to embrace the overwhelming objective of ensuring that Trump does not serve out a full four-year term.  Because we have already seen enough to know that, left unchecked, this presidency will end very, very badly, not for Donald Trump, but for our country.  This is a man who has already antagonized multiple allies, falsely claimed millions of people voted illegally in the last election, signaled leniency toward ACTUAL white supremacist groups, attacked a judge who happened to rule in a way he didn’t like, and indicated that the laws put in place to prevent a recurrence of the 2008 financial meltdown have got to go.  Donald Trump doesn’t believe in our democracy?  Well, as awful as this is, we have plenty of remedies, because the fact of the matter is, most of us don’t believe in Donald Trump - not in his fitness to serve or his rancid ideas or his inability to distinguish friend (g’day, Australia) from foe (Russia?!).  While I believe in playing the long game, the Democrats need to internalize the fact that their job is to force Trump from power as soon as possible, whether through impeachment in 2019, leading a charge to force his resignation, or support of an invocation of the 25th amendment to the Constitution.  This may seem like an extreme position, but we are in a dangerous, unprecedented situation.  Donald Trump is not playing by the ordinary rules of our political system, and we shouldn’t either, as long as the rules we DO follow are always grounded in democratic accountability and commitment to the rule of law (both of which groundings Donald Trump has abandoned).  

Finally, in the name of articulating grounds for hope, let’s remember how very dangerous a game most Republican Party members are playing by either embracing Trump or not criticizing his various offenses.  In not standing up to him now, they make themselves vulnerable to the coming backlash; every day that goes by, the Republican Party is seen more and more as the party of Trump, with all the baggage that carries.

State-Sponsored Sadism, Down Under Edition

If anyone would like some added context for Donald Trump’s rough treatment of the Australian prime minister during their conversation this week, I’d urge you to read this deeply disturbing and (rightly) morally outraged article by Roger Cohen about the specific refugees the United States has pledged to take in.  Their desperate plight encapsulates some of the major global disorders that every citizen needs to engage with.  These are people fleeing war torn areas of the world, whose desperation has led them as far as Australia.  Australia, in turn, has instituted a policy of relocating these refugees on two distant islands called Manus and Nauru and keeping them under horrendous and hopeless conditions, basically as a deterrent to other people considering making similar flights to the land down under.  The word “hellish” is not too extreme a description for their plight; to giver you a flavor of their suffering, take this one paragraph:

"The toll among Burmese, Sudanese, Somali, Lebanese, Pakistani, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Iranian and other migrants is devastating: self-immolation, overdoses, death from septicemia as a result of medical negligence, sexual abuse and rampant despair.  A recent United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report by three medical experts found that 88 percent of the 181 asylum seekers and refugees examined on Manus were suffering from depressive disorders, including, in some cases, psychosis."

The refugees have even been attacked by native islanders, leaving at least one of their number killed, prompting one refugee to wonder if he was actually back in Darfur.  This is a clear-cut situation of state-sponsored sadism.  

When Donald Trump attacks the deal that ends this madness, he shows that he’s either ignorant of their plight, or that he’s aware of it and is not moved by it: an incompetent or a monster, take your pick.  And when he tweets that they are “illegal immigrants” and complains to Turnbull that they contain the next “Boston Bombers,” he shows the adoption of a paranoid, immoral vision of the world in which those who flee wars and those who flee for a better life are the same, and that neither deserve basic human decency.  In saying “this is the worst deal ever,” he signals that he cares more about his reputation for anti-foreigner toughness than the United States acting in a moral fashion.   But this isn’t just about morality; it’s good international politics.  Even from a realpolitik perspective, it makes us look beneficent, relieves a deeply immoral situation that is burning out the Australian nation’s soul, and removes a recruiting godsend for extremists.  For Trump not to comprehend these things is frightening indeed.