Taking Stock of Comey's Testimony

Whether or not you consider James Comey to have dropped any bombshells in his testimony before the Senate last week, the former FBI director provided details of his interactions with Donald Trump that should disturb all Americans.  Indeed, as various observers have been pointing out, the ever-escalating outrages perpetrated by this president are making it difficult for many to fully comprehend the seriousness of Comey’s testimony.  In various ways, Comey’s testimony dramatized and embodied the confrontation between our system of laws and Donald Trump’s tendencies towards lawlessness.  The setting itself, an open Senate proceeding, contrasts sharply with the series of interactions that Comey described, in which the president sought, in one-on-one sessions, to pressure Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president and abandon FBI investigations.  And Comey’s sworn and precisely worded testimony couldn’t be further from the contradictory lies and story lines that the president has tweeted and otherwise uttered about the events in question.  

Indeed, the sense that Comey is telling the truth is only enhanced by Trump’s self-serving responses to his testimony.  In the way that Team Trump has declared itself vindicated by what the Comey said, they’ve engaged in a form of obvious cherry-picking.  On the one hand, Trump has said that Comey lied in his testimony; on the other, Trump is relying on certain statements by Comey to support Trump’s own positions.  But by the president’s logic, of course, how can we trust anything Comey has said?  And how then does it make any sort of logical sense that the president’s attorneys are going to file a complaint about Comey’s leak of his own memos about his conversations with the president, when the president himself says that what Comey wrote in the memos are lies?

You can see more clearly than ever the two fields of struggle where the question over Donald Trump’s fitness for office is being played out.  There is the legal inquiry into whether Trump or people around him broke any laws; in the case of the president, Comey’s testimony highlighted whether Trump has engaged in obstruction of justice.  But there is also the political realm, where Trump clearly would prefer to battle things out.  Among other things, politics is the realm where appearances matter, and so it’s important for Trump to claim vindication from the Comey testimony even when the testimony clearly raised the possibility of real legal risk for the president.  This is also the realm where Trump can use the power of his bully pulpit to disparage and otherwise malign the former FBI director.  And short of charges actually being brought against the president (which many experts say the Justice Department would never do), whether this president is removed from office will be a political judgment made by Congress, in a decision whether to impeach and convict the president based on the facts the investigations have brought and will continue to bring to light.

Our gut feeling at this point is that the president and his team know they are likely to lose the legal fight, and so are determined to play this out on the political battlefield.  But this only shows the weakness of their position.  The investigations are truly a ticking time bomb for this administration, and if enough damning facts come to light, their ability to spin them away will become increasingly fraught.  Indeed, there may come a point when spin in the face of undeniable reality becomes transparently self-serving and self-destructive.

It is also worth noting that at a basic level of legal competence, the president appears to be relying on lawyers who are loyal and known to him at the expense of lawyers who might be better suited to the particular legal peril he finds himself in.  And this piece raises the possibility that in his relentless push to protect numero uno, Trump may end up alienating members of his administration in ways that could come back to haunt him.  This can be contrasted with the legal team special counsel Robert Mueller is putting together, which appears to be a formidable collection of expertise and experience.

CNN Whiffs Story on Trump-Obama Relationship

This opinion piece by Kevin Liptak at the CNN website this weekend is a great example of the way that Donald Trump’s malfeasance makes nonsense out of attempts at journalistic balance.  While the preponderance of incidents and details in the article makes it clear that Trump has been the main actor in freezing relations between the current and preceding presidents, Liptak finds himself unable to say this outright, or to give the proper label of perniciousness to Trump’s actions towards Obama.  Attempting to summarize the downward spiral from the high point of Obama’s efforts to welcome Trump and Trump’s description of their “warm” ties, he writes that “Once Trump was installed in office, however, things progressively soured, culminating in Trump’s March tweets accusing Obama of ordering surveillance of Trump Tower.”  But to say that “things progressively soured” is like describing Germany’s invasions of its European neighbors during World War II by saying “a lack of peace progressively spread across the continent."  As the actual details in the CNN article make clear, there was one person doing the souring, and that was Donald Trump.

And of course “soured” turns out to be the key miswording here, because it serves to downplay the unprecedented and frighteningly serious main event: that Donald Trump accused Barack Obama, without a shred of proof, of wiretapping his campaign.  Whatever tensions may have existed between the two men up to that time, Trump’s unfounded accusation of an arguably impeachable offense was an obvious attempt to sully and degrade his predecessor’s reputation; was, in fact, a de facto declaration of war against Barack Obama.  So when the article notes that “Neither has made any real attempt to reconcile after Trump accused Obama of ordering wiretaps at his skyscraper in New York,” we’re left to scratch our heads in wonder.  How, exactly, might there be reconciliation?  Donald Trump has accused Barack Obama of a tremendous crime, and has refused to back down.  How on earth could they “reconcile” while this slander stands?  “Reconcile” suggests that some of the onus is on Obama to reach out to Donald Trump, but nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, this grave lie leveled against Obama makes it necessary for Obama to have absolutely no relationship to Trump, because to do so would suggest that there is something normal or non-shocking about Trump’s lie that might still allow space for a relationship between the two.

So when the article ponders that “it’s unprecedented for a sitting president and his predecessor to eschew the faintest of ties,” it hammers home a cluelessness about its topic, and the fact that the deterioration in relations has been orchestrated by one particular party in the relationship.  In point of fact, the decisive “unprecedented” event is for a sitting president to accuse a former president of high crimes and misdemeanors, without evidence and with clear intent to distract from his own personal wrongdoing.  After such an event, the lack of relations can better be described as “obvious” or “a no-brainer.”  We need look no further than Trump’s conversations with former FBI Director James Comey to comprehend the peril of deceit and slander in which anyone who speaks to Trump places him- or herself.  And now that Trump faces the increasing possibility of legal peril based on the Russia investigation, it seems like common sense would call for Obama to steer clear of giving Trump advice or counsel, even were the president to ask him, out of the risk of having even the most tangential association with this tainted presidency.

And to be totally clear: even before Trump made his decisive accusation against Obama, Trump had not contacted Obama since Trump’s inauguration, and it is obviously on the sitting president to reach out to a predecessor, not for the predecessor to rush forward to offer unwanted advice to his successor.  The article notes that Trump has in fact not reached out to any other former presidents since taking office, which points to a larger isolation and arrogance that, again, is less about the Trump-Obama conflict and more about the character of the Oval Office’s current occupant.

Finally, the article notes the “long and bitter history” between Obama and Trump, but without making clear that it’s Trump who years ago started the tension between the two men, with another unprecedented act: accusing then-president Obama of not being an American citizen.  Trump’s self-appointment at the head of the birther movement was a racist, despicable action.  I can barely imagine the equanimity and self-control that kept Barack Obama from expressing anger at Trump’s denigrating birther slander, though he clearly did enjoy insulting Trump at the 2011 White House correspondent’s dinner.  But that decisive evening of Trump-roasting only proves the point: Trump started a fight against Obama, not the other way around — a fight that from the very beginning was built on a foundation of racism and lies, and likely continues now because the reality is that Obama represents a competence, intelligence, and commitment to our democracy that serves as a daily reminder of Trump’s incompetence, recklessness, and authoritarian inclinations. 

In a larger sense, this CNN piece is another example of how Trump tends to corrupt everything he touches, including news coverage.  In our opinion, the article fails to take into account the seriousness of Trump's past and present accusations against Obama, which leads to an inaccurate, pox-on-both-their-houses spin on the two men's relationship.  An honest, clear-eyed article would have taken the reality of Trump's basic culpability as its premise, and would also have acknowledged another basic point that should be obvious to all by now: Trump really doesn't seem to have relationships with anyone, if a relationship is understood to involve some sort of give and take and some acknowledgment of commonality.  Rather, Trump seeks to dominate everyone he meets; and those he can't dominate, like Obama, become the enemy.  This is a difficult place for journalism to be, not to mention a hideous pass for our country.  But it's a disservice to the public to act like this president isn't as abnormal as he truly is.

That Not-Funny Feeling of Being Stuck in a Racist Fever Dream

The Hot Screen highly recommends this recent article by Jamie Bouelle over at Slate.  Addressing the killing of two men by a white supremacist in Portland, he fits this horror into a longer string of recent racist attacks and killings.  He points out that President Trump’s own rhetoric as a candidate and as a president has helped unleash such violence, by sending a message of its acceptability.

But Bouelle’s broader concern in this piece is how our current moment is a manifestation of a broader historical pattern in which racism espoused by politicians is paralleled by acts of violence in the real world.  He writes: 

Key to all of this is the interplay between racism in culture, in politics, and in public life. Each reinforced the other, creating an atmosphere of hostility and violence that wasn’t otherwise inevitable, even as it had its antecedents. Put differently, racist violence isn’t spontaneous; it creeps up from fertile ground, feeding on hate and intolerance in the public sphere [. . .] Today, the rising pace of hate crimes is tied to a political style that has harnessed and weaponized white resentment by way of an ethno-nationalist movement that sees America in narrow, racially exclusionary terms.

The Age of Trump has its own particulars, but we are experiencing a new iteration of a very old American dynamic.  When we recognize the racist elements of Trump’s appeals, we are reminded that a fight against Trump is also a fight against the darkest strains of our history, and of our present.  When we see the recrudescence of an ancient violence, we must all rise to the challenge of answering it with solidarity, non-violence, and a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes.

Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to Our Alliances with Democracies

It’s bad enough that President Trump poses the greatest threat to American democracy that most of us have seen in our lifetimes, from his lies about millions of illegal voters who cost him the popular vote and subsequent support of a commission to “fix” this fictitious problem (all in the name of disenfranchising likely Democratic voters), to his firing of the FBI director for the admitted reason that the president didn’t want the Russia investigations to continue (obstruction of justice, anyone?).

But the danger in which this president is placing the United States’ fundamental alliance with the democracies of Europe is also deeply distressing, as it’s paired with growing authoritarianism and right-wing strength around the globe, whether already well established as in Russia, just now coming into full murderous bloom in the Philippines, or in the strong showing of the National Front in France’s recent elections.  Almost needless to say, Trump's attitude toward our European allies is one strain of a broader incompetent foreign policy that encompasses everything from the president’s dangerous bluster over North Korea to his refusal to accept the reality of global warming.

The Hot Screen is well aware that not everyone shares our nerdy and occasionally bombastic interest in foreign relations and the grand clashing tides of capitalism, democracy, authoritarianism, etc. — and that’s OK!  But though these international issues can feel deeply abstract compared to the nitty gritty of national politics, where what happens in Washington can have an immediate, profound affect on our daily lives (such as whether we have access to health care or suddenly find our non-white friends living with increased apprehension over their everyday safety), we believe there is an overwhelming case for bringing these foreign policy threats more fully into public consciousness and into the political dialogue about why Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency.  

It makes zero sense to alienate long-term allies with which we share a wealth of political and cultural ties.  Whether it’s as mutual adherents to the cause of democracy or as allies in fighting terrorism, our ties to Europe have been fused into place by our participation in two world wars and the decades-long Cold War.  The democratic state of modern Europe owes everything to the thousands of servicemen who fought and died to save Europe, as well as to an overall U.S. commitment to promote democracy on the continent.  

Talking Points Memo has been doing the most pointed job I’ve seen of calling out this president’s radical about-face on how the U.S. treats its long-standing alliances, and a consonance between Trump’s goals and those of Vladimir Putin’s Russia that should raise alarm bells for our citizenry (that the president is acting in a way that benefits the Russians is of course a real live wire and an issue in and of itself, given our steadily expanding understanding of the links between Russia and the Trump campaign).

In his visit to Europe last week, Trump seemed to use criticism of European nations’ financial contributions to NATO as a cloak for undermining the alliance more generally — a point most chillingly driven home when he refused to endorse the principle of mutual defense that’s the heart of the organization’s purpose and power.  As TPM elaborates, the financial criticisms are tendentious and mostly lies, and it must be clear to our European allies that Trump is quite deliberately picking a fight with them.  Indeed, we saw this past week that both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have made strong comments about the already-shifted nature of U.S. - European relations, with Merkel essentially signaling that the Europe can no longer count on the United States.  TPM points out that European leaders seem to be realizing that “it’s not just that Trump is greedy or impulsive or unreliable, indifferent to the North Atlantic alliance but that he is positively against it.”

It may be that Donald Trump’s visit to Europe will catalyze coverage and broaden Americans’ consciousness of the catastrophic damage he’s perpetrating on our country’s most fundamental partnerships.  Today brings two relevant articles: here, Brian Beutler at New Republic provides an overview of how long-term harm from Trump’s attempts to restructure our foreign policy is made possible by Republican complicity; and here, the New York Times reports on the startling efforts that Russia is making to pull Italy — yes, ITALY! — out of its close ties to the U.S. and nearer to itself.

This President is No Christian: Andrew Sullivan Writes the Takedown We've Been Needing

Over at New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan has written a searing post on Donald Trump as the antithesis of Christian ideals.  Of all the lies surrounding Donald Trump, his claims of religious belief are perhaps the most staggering; Sullivan's article makes crystal clear why they should stagger all of us.  Here's a taste of the piece and its thesis:

Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic, genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact, the antithesis of Christianity — and his life proves it. He is neither religious nor irreligious. He is pre-religious. He is a pagan. He makes much more sense as a character in Game of Thrones, a medieval world bereft of the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, than as a president of a modern, Western country.

The Hot Screen believes in the absolute necessity of building bridges to Trump voters, both for the sake of persuading them to turn against the president and in building an American politics based on a broader common ground.  We profess no particular religion here at The Hot Screen (and for the record, no, our flaming logo is not a subliminal endorsement of Lucifer or his lifestyle); however, we do see our current political moments as a crossroads of our political faith, a grand historical reckoning wherein Americans face a stark choice between an authoritarian, sectarian nightmare of a future, or a renewed, expanded commitment to shared democratic vows.  Connecting with people of faith, particularly Christians, about why Donald Trump represents a repudiation of the most basic Christian beliefs, is key to moving our country past this current administration of moral turpitude and creeping authoritarianism.

Memo to Oregon Politicians: White Supremacists Are Public Enemy #1, and It's Time to Act Like It

In the first days and weeks after Donald Trump’s election, for me one of the most heartening signs of immediate grassroots opposition to the president and his foul agenda was the number of people who made it clear that they would not stand idly by while Muslims in our country were harassed and demonized, whether by government actions or by individual assholes.  Many resolved to intervene to deescalate and defend if they were ever to witness such harassment in person.

In Portland yesterday, three men stepped to the defense of a pair of girls, one of whom was Muslim, who were being threatened by a man who has turned out to be a white supremacist.  Two of those men’s bravery cost them their lives; the other man received serious injuries.

I don’t know if these three were among those who had previously given thought to how they’d respond if they saw Muslims specifically threatened, or whether they simply acted out of a basic, instinctual human decency; this matters not a whit in judging their bravery, as they did the right thing in the moment.

The simple fact of their right action when faced with an existential choice is a reminder that the ongoing threat to Muslims is a threat to all Americans, regardless of race or religion, because conscience, common humanity, and adherence to our country’s core values means that Americans don’t stand idly by when others are threatened by hate.

We all need to get really clear on something really fast: attacks like the one we’ve just witnessed here in Portland are the tip of the spear of a right-wing, white nationalist movement that has its roots in the darkest passages of American history, finds its foot soldiers in fools like yesterday’s killer, and whose most potent enabler is the current occupant of the White House, for whom anti-Muslim hatred is part of a larger package of racial and Christianist supremacy.  Let us never forget that Donald Trump named as his chief advisor Steve Bannon, a central figure in mainstreaming the vile white nationalist movement.  A less overtly violent strain of this movement has overtaken the Republican Party, whose electoral strategy is based on gerrymandering and voter restrictions that disproportionately affect people of color to ensure that majority rule in our country is deferred indefinitely.

What we saw in Portland yesterday reminds us that what might seem like violent outliers are the inevitable byproduct of a world view that essentially breaks us down into those who are fully citizens and those who are not, and by extension those who are fully human and those who are not.  As a glaring example: how can anyone look at efforts in states like Texas and North Carolina to restrict voting rights in ways that obviously target African-Americans, and not see a clear line back to the three-fifths compromise embedded in the U.S. Constitution, whereby certain human beings were deemed not to count as fully human at all?

As Dan Rather has pointed out this morning, Donald Trump has not yet voiced (or even tweeted) his recognition of the two American heroes who died here in Portland.  Frankly, I don’t expect that he will, and here is the chilling reason why: to Donald Trump, the victims of this incident were not real Americans — neither the two girls (one African-American and the other Muslim), nor the three casualties of the attack, who proved their un-Americanness by acting heroically against a man motivated, directly or indirectly, by hatreds promoted from the highest office in the land.

For Trump, and increasingly for the Republican Party as a whole, real Americans are the thirty-five or forty-percent of overwhelmingly white citizens who unquestioningly support Donald Trump, who are in fact far along the road to embracing a racist identity politics fused with a cult of personality based on Donald Trump himself, so that in the end the only real American is one who unswervingly accepts whatever insane actions and words that are vomited out by this deranged administration.

Violence and political repression are symbols of the right wing’s weakness, not strength.  Simply put, you don’t resort to violence when you have a popular agenda that can win fair elections.  That a party ostentatiously committed to law and order is increasingly winking and nodding as violence is inflicted on those they perceive as their enemies — the press, protestors at Trump rallies — is a scary subset of this fact: when forced to choose between maintaining power at the expense of giving up its unpopular policies in order to gain new voters (aka normal politics in a democracy), and maintaining power by undemocratic, anti-American means (gerrymandering, opposing stricter accountability for police departments inflicting injustice on African-American communities, supporting and enabling a president who has by this point committed gross abuses of power), they have chosen power over all.  We are at the point where it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that the Republican Party as a whole has begun to forfeit its claim to be a legitimate American political party, if legitimacy is measured by a commitment to actual rule of law and equal political rights for all Americans.

At the Oregon state and local level, it’s reassuring that politicians have overwhelmingly called out the hatred and violence of this attack.  But it's hardly enough to stop there, not by a long shot.  A white supremacist movement, thriving in an atmosphere created by one of our two major political parties, has effectively declared war on our free and open society, insinuating the possibility of violence into as mundane an activity as taking mass transit to get to work or go shopping.

We need to make it clear to our elected officials that we expect the full power of our law enforcement agencies to come down like a hammer on these right-wing extremists — to ascertain whether the killer was acting alone or had accomplices, to determine whether he is part of a larger cell, and to infiltrate and dismantle this violent movement before its adherents shed more blood.

We need to broadcast the connections between the G.O.P. and this resurgent bigotry and violence, and to force that party to disown and reform itself, or face electoral destruction.

We need to impress upon Democratic politicians that voters have a zero tolerance policy for enablers of violence, and that we expect them to fight the Republicans every step of the way where voting rights, religious protections, racism, and the free press are concerned. 

And in our cities and towns, we need to make it clear to each other — to our friends, to our neighbors, to people of different faiths and races from ourselves — that we have each other’s backs.

Catching Our Breath Before the Next Deluge

Simply because there have been no gut-punch Trump corruption stories in the last 48 hours or so, it feels as if we’ve entered a respite of sorts.  But anyone paying attention to our politics is still reckoning and piecing together all that has happened and been reported over the past week.  Here’s a rough outline of stunning stories that we’ve pulled from a helpful CNN rundown: Donald Trump fires FBI Director James Comey; Trump reveals in an interview that he did so because of the Russia investigations; Trump threatens Comey against speaking out; stories break of Trump having shared highly classified information with top Russian diplomats at a still-otherwise-disturbing Oval Office meeting; there are reports that Trump met with Comey one-on-one to ask that he drop the investigation of General Michael Flynn (on top of various other stories about Comey's concern that Trump was trying to compromise his independence, and this on top of an earlier story that Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president); Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel for the Russia campaign interference/Trump campaign collusion investigation; news breaks that at the fateful Trump-Russian diplomat Oval Office meeting, Trump bragged of firing Comey, referred to him as a “nut job,” and talked about how the pressure over Russian had been “taken off” by Comey's dismissal; and, last but not least, reports that a current advisor to the president is under criminal investigation  

And let’s not forget that we also learned this past Friday that James Comey will be giving Senate testimony, in public, at some soonish date.

It’s not just that Donald Trump himself has, both in the public eye and out of it, engaged in behavior that looks very much like obstruction of justice to cover up what seems like corrupt actions by himself and/or his advisors in relation to Russian interference in the election, though this alone would be deeply disturbing.  There’s also the way other details about Trumpworld have been emerging, which make it increasingly clear this administration has a Turkey problem in addition to the more well-known Russia issues (as a big for instance, there is the fact of Flynn’s paid engagement by the Turkish government while he made crucial decisions about U.S. dealings with the Kurds).  And maybe most importantly of all for helping us understand the gravity of the various threads, we are starting to understand the relation of one story to another, and to put together timelines that present an increasingly damning perspective on the behavior of Trump and his political intimates.

In the face of this seething vastness of political crisis and possibly criminal malfeasance, The Hot Screen feels the constraint of an understandable but inappropriate cognitive paralysis — what to talk about?  Where, in the name of all that is holy, to start, when if ever there were a time not to be overwhelmed, this is it?

So we’re letting the gut lead us forward, and our gut is saying one thing above all else: Donald Trump is an amazingly self-incriminating, self-sabotaging monster, and no matter what bad acts he may or may not have committed during the campaign, his clumsy efforts to protect himself now are providing his opposition with cudgels that will continue to do political damage to him as long as he remains in office.  This president seems to be doing everything he can to assure that the escalating resistance to his misrule will be rightly seen as a fight between defenders of our democracy, and an illiberal, intemperate, anti-democratic wrecking ball of a former reality show host.

How to Clean the Trumpian Stables

As we’ve noted before, The Hot Screen has a predilection for fire and brimstone.  But look at who we’ve got in the White House — can you blame us, really?  A couple of recent articles by Michelle Goldberg of Slate, though, have got us thinking about the most methodical, effective politics for raining holy hell upon Donald Trump and the Republican Party to ensure that nothing like we’re currently experiencing happens again for — well, for as long as humanly possible.  

We’re writing hours after the New York Times broke today’s huge news that back in February, President Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to back off the investigation into Michael Flynn.  Part and parcel of this story is that Comey apparently memorialized their conversation in a memo, and also shared it with a few colleagues at the time.  The White House is denying that such a request occurred, which seems to have backed Team Trump into a pretty undesirable corner, given that in the opposite side of the ring is a man dedicated to the legend of his own probity who, let us repeat, memorialized the conversation.  

The Hot Screen is confident to a high degree of certainty that only one man is telling the truth about the conversation between the president and the FBI director, and that it’s not Donald Trump.  The Hot Screen is also of the opinion that we are now well on our way to a fight over impeaching and removing the president from office.

As we stand at the cusp at how the body politic responds to Trump’s corruption, Goldberg’s essay titled “Democrats Must Investigate Every Trump Scandal, Even If It Takes Decades” provides a broader context for how the opposition party should think about taking on Trump's malfeasance.  She makes the case that Trump has continued, on a larger scale, a pattern of corruption that has become institutionalized by the Republican Party over the past several decades: not only major events like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the bogus arguments for the invasion of Iraq, but the pressing of fake scandals against Democratic presidents, such as Whitewater and the Benghazi imbroglio.  “Every day, Trump shows us what politics look like when the rules only apply to one party,” Goldberg writes.  “Already, because of Trump, America is a more cynical, corrupt, lawless place than it was 100 days ago.”

The solution she suggests: once they’ve gotten back the House, Senate, or both, Democrats and the left should investigate the living shit out of Trump, as a means of restoring transparency and balance to our political system.  The Hot Screen couldn’t agree more, and believes that accountability must be the name of the game for Democrats going forward.  But along with this must be a relentless effort to trace the ways that Trump’s behavior indeed fits a larger Republican pattern, and how his specific corruption has been aided and abetted by the party at large.  Since his election, after all, the G.O.P. has largely chosen to look the other way as an avalanche of evidence has continued to pile up regarding possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, all in the name of pushing through a Republican agenda very much at odds with majority opinion in the country.  The Republicans have chosen tax cuts for the rich over extirpating the influence of a foreign power from our politics, and they need to pay a maximal price for their staggeringly immoral and unpatriotic choice.

The other piece by Goldberg that's caught our eye today is a not-entirely tongue in cheek cajoling of Trump advisors to speak out against their feared leader, not simply for the good of the country, but because they have a decent chance of scoring some sweet tell-all book deals.  This is far better, she writes, than sticking around too long and getting irrevocably mired in the scandals sure to come.  The Hot Screen finds this perspective welcome and refreshing; we’re persuaded that in the case of this deranged presidency, the profit motive might do some good when folks see a choice between big bucks and obeisance to a twisted man-child.  

But just as it’s important for Democrats to investigate and expose Trump’s deeds for all voters to see, it’s also crucial to balance rewards for those who speak out against Trump with appropriate shaming and career punishment of those who stick by him.  Lickspittles like Sean Spicer should receive a message that their services in the public sphere are no longer required or respected.  They need to be shunned in such a way as to create a deterrent effect for anyone who might consider serving in a future Trump-like administration.  The same goes for the politicians who have stood close to him, like Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions and frankly anyone else who was willing to join his cabinet.

Quote of the (Comey Memo) Day

"There is no need to document the conversations with people who are truthful or situations that are routine. It's when you have situations that are not routine and people who are not truthful, you would write a memo to file," the source said. "There have been other occasions where he has done this but not everyday."

Comey had Trump's number.  There's no way this ends well for the president.

More Thoughts on the Comey Firing

It's extremely difficult for The Hot Screen to believe that President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent parade of contradictory explanations — including some proferred by his staff and later contradicted by Trump himself — have not opened up a world of permanent hurt for the president.  As noted in our last post, Donald Trump himself said in an interview with NBC News that the investigation of Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion between that country and his own campaign, was on his mind when he fired Comey.

Whether or not this admission meets the legal definition of obstruction of justice, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that Trump has put his personal agenda ahead of the nation’s interest in determining the extent of interference by a foreign power in the 2016 presidential election.  From other remarks made in the interview, Trump doesn’t seem able to separate the idea of an investigation into Russian interference from the inquiry into possible collusion between his campaign and the Russians.  The two are obviously linked; but he seems to see both as a threat to him, when in fact only one of those lines of inquiry really is; even if it were somehow determined that it was only through Russian interference that he was elected president, it’s all but impossible to see how this could lead to the results of the election somehow being set aside — there’s just no mechanism for that.  Of course, it would weaken the country’s sense of his legitimacy, and this may be Trump's larger fear — but when weighed against the integrity of our electoral process and our democracy itself, this personal cost must be counted as mere peanuts, and his inability to see this as disqualifying for a chief executive.

But the actual firing of Comey has now expanded to invoke a far larger constellation of related words and events, as reporting on this decision and the relationship between Trump and Comey continues to turn up new information.  There is the dinner the two had, at which Trump reportedly asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to Trump, and at which Trump claims Comey asked Trump to keep him on the job.  There are Trump’s repeated statements that Comey assured him that the president himself is not under investigation — if false, this is another pernicious lie by Trump, and if true, it raises the damaging issue of inappropriate inquiries by Trump.

And of course, as a sort of piece de resistance, cherry-on-top-of-the-whole-shit-sandwich, there is Trump’s amazing tweet that “James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”  We all know at this point that the Trump administration is, among other things, a grotesquely dirty snowball of accumulating outrages and violations of our political norms — but a more or less overt threat against a former FBI director really takes the cake!  Part of the wonder is how Trump’s threat so badly backfires on himself, in simultaneously invoking shades of Richard Nixon and all but calling Comey’s bluff by suggesting Comey has more to lose than he does — considering that Trump has already done his worst against Comey, firing him in humiliating fashion, the threat seems particularly reckless and somewhat power-mad.

One major deciding factor in how things play out in the coming days and weeks, and how quickly, will be whether substantial numbers of Republican representatives and senators begin to speak out against the president.  The evidence so far is not encouraging.  And with the Comey firing, continued Republican support of the president means that the party as a whole is further committing itself to a lawless, anti-democratic presidency in a way that is without precedent in our history.  Some are pointing to how Republicans who turned on Nixon during the Watergate crisis were crucial to forcing him out of office, but there are major differences between the dynamics then and now.  The Republicans were in the minority in both houses at the time; the Democrats were in fact in the midst of a decades-long dominance of the House of Representatives.  The pendulum has swung the other way in our time, and the Republicans now hold the Senate and House.

Whereas jettisoning Nixon could be seen as a way to ensure the Republicans were not permanently tainted by his corruption, the Republicans now find themselves at a precarious pinnacle of power, one they are loathe to abandon now that they’ve achieved it.  Republican politicians are aware that though they hold the reins, they are, and are increasingly likely to remain, a minority party in terms of raw voter numbers.  Hilary Clinton, after all, won the election by millions more votes than Donald Trump, and in recent elections Democratic senators and representatives have received more votes than the Republicans, even if this has not always resulted in control of the legislature.  In short, as this guy and others have argued, the Republicans have major incentives, based on issues of democratic legitimacy that echo Trump’s own, to continue to defend Trump.  And the longer they do, and the more deeply implicated they become, the more of a perverse incentive they’ll have to keep supporting him, as a way to keep at bay a backlash and the inevitable weakening of Republican power should Trump be forced out of office.

Everything we have seen about Trump points to one thing: his outrages will only get worse.  This hellish elevator of a presidency has only one direction - down - and one speed - faster and faster.  And so we end with this quote from Laurence Tribe, who is interviewed this week at Slate about Trump's offenses against our country and constitution: “[D]eceiving the American public on matters directly pertinent to the institutions and processes of government, taking advantage of one’s high federal office to give one’s lies both cover and credibility, is certainly a grave abuse of executive power — and is indeed the essence of the unenumerated offenses the Framers clearly contemplated by the open-ended phrase, “high crimes and misdemeanors."  Even if lying to and/or misleading the public — as opposed to deceiving official bodies under oath — is not and could not be made a civil offense, that by no means implies that such a pattern of deliberate deceit is irrelevant to the ultimate inquiry of whether one has forfeited the public trust that alone entitles one to retain a position of power in the United States government.”

Discuss.

The President Gropes His Way Toward Free Fall

The truth of the point made in this post at Talking Points Memo has been hovering out there for all to see these past few days, colored in by much circumstantial evidence, and now President Trump has admitted as much in an interview today: he fired Comey because Trump doesn't like the Russia inquiry.  This doesn't mean there weren't other motivations behind the termination — Trump seems particularly aggrieved by Comey's suggestions that the FBI director's maneuvers around Hilary Clinton's emails might have affected the election in Trump's favor (thus removing some of the glory of Trump's glorious victory) — and it also doesn't prove that Trump himself has something to hide.  But for purposes of establishing a public record of his lawlessness, it's enough that he's interfering with such a crucial investigation — an investigation that, at its heart, has to do with the possible subversion of our democracy by the Russian government.  To interfere in such an investigation, to preemptively decide single-handedly that there's nothing to see here, even if the minimal explanation is that Trump is tired of his agenda being sidetracked by Russia talk, is deranged and contemptible behavior when the person doing the interfering is the president of the United States.

Is Trump Going Full Nixon On Us, So Soon?

Shit just got realer.

President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey is a shocking and fast-moving story; it’s less than a day old at this point.  So, first, a general observation, in the name of orienting ourselves, and providing a dose of context (if not necessarily reassuring context): it’s almost uncanny how the Trump administration is proceeding along the lines of incompetence and authoritarian threat that his opponents during the election warned about.  Who would have thought that Trump would fire the FBI director months into office, on grounds that are obviously a lie, positioning himself to appoint an ally into this extremely powerful law enforcement role?  As shocking as it is, it’s also not surprising for many people, given what we observed about the man during the endless 2016 campaign.

The most salient fact is that Comey was in charge of an investigation into whether Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to support Trump’s election as president of the United States; in firing Comey, Trump has directly interfered with this investigation.  The Trump administration, not surprisingly, does not want us to see the bigger context, and instead is focusing on a specific, narrow storyline about Comey’s firing.  A big part of the pushback is to defer to the memos Trump’s termination letter to Comey cited in support of the firing: these memos, written by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, essentially make the case for why Comey should not be the FBI Director.  But as is being furiously unpacked here and elsewhere, the reasons they provide don’t make sense.

The incoherence starts with the fact that the stated reasons contradict Trump’s own prior praise for Comey.  The memo from Rosenstein criticizes Comey’s disparagement of Clinton when announcing that no charges would be brought against her in the email investigation, as well as Comey’s announcement of re-opening the Clinton investigation days before the election.  As we can all recall, both of these actions by Comey were wildly celebrated and amplified by Trump, who used them to further his argument that Hilary Clinton was a criminal who should be locked up.  The idea that these are now firing offenses for a Donald Trump concerned with the FBI’s image and objectivity requires us all to forget recent history.

Then there’s Trump’s actual letter to Comey, which contains a remarkable non sequitur that may turn out to be something of a smoking gun.  Apropos of nothing, Trump writes, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau” [emphasis added].  This feels very much like Trump trying to lodge into the public record what Comey allegedly told him, as a way of asserting his innocence regarding such investigations, as well as trying to provide cover against suspicions that personal animus led Trump to fire Comey — after all, Trump is grateful to Comey!

But the lack of context is eye-catching, and decisively so when the investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign is the number one suspect for why Trump fired Comey.  Trump’s line becomes more significant still when basic logic says that the ongoing investigation might still implicate Donald Trump, even if he is not currently under investigation.  This adds to the overall circumstantial sense that Trump is attempting to freeze the Russia investigation while he still can, before anything leads back to him.  Finally, the logic of its inclusion falters under the fact that Trump is essentially firing Comey for his incompetence: if Comey can’t be trusted to lead the FBI, how can Trump trust his comments about the president not being under investigation?

There have been reports that Donald Trump decided on firing Comey a week ago, at which point he set his team at finding a rationale to fire him.  This is another way of saying that Trump has a reason to fire Comey that he does not want to share publicly.  The Russia investigation is the most probable one: but even if it’s not, the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t want to disclose his real motivation for firing Comey, and is covering it with a lie, is very disturbing.  At any rate, this story from Politico provides more circumstantial evidence that Trump’s concerns about the Russia investigation were the prime motivator. 

Trump is acting like a cornered animal; he has something to hide, and he’s not afraid to aggrandize his own power in order to protect himself.  As we are reminded here, Trump sees the government as an extension of himself — he even sent his long-time personal bodyguard to hand-deliver Comey’s termination letter, a touch that is both creepy and telling of how Trump conceived of this firing in deeply personal terms.  The Republican Party has so far acted as his co-conspirator, and it is naive to think that they will suddenly back down, when that means opening up the president to even greater scrutiny, with impeachment or resignation as possible outcomes.  But if Trump thinks he can get away with this transparently self-serving firing, what’s to stop him from setting his sights even higher, such as appointing a dedicated ally in the traditionally non-partisan role of FBI director?

And breaking just now — a story from the New York Times that only days ago, Comey asked for an expansion of the Russia investigation.  Who did he ask, you wonder?  Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG who just helped fire him.  

If You Want to Make a Political Satire Omelette, You’re Going to Have to Break a Few Cock Holster Jokes

In perusing the headlines of this past week, The Hot Screen has descried an unholy trinity of news stories that remind us of the importance of and ever-present battle for free speech rights.  Getting the most play is Stephen Colbert’s joke on “The Late Show” that Donald Trump’s mouth is Vladimir Putin’s “cock holster” — a line that’s received fire from both Trump supporters and those who say the line was homophobic.  The Federal Communications Commission has received complaints, and is looking into whether the material was “indecent” or “profane”; if it finds this was the case, CBS may be hit with fines.

As is all but inevitable when television is involved, vital context has been lost here, especially pernicious in a situation like this when context is everything.  Go ahead and listen to Colbert's entire monologue, and then consider whether it’s at all possible or even rational to attempt to separate criticism of this single line from the rest of the bit.  The first part intertwines Colbert’s mockery of Donald Trump with excerpts from recent interview of the president; Trump manufactures the rope with which Colbert proceeds to hang him.  The president sounds like an idiot and a liar based on his own words, with Colbert hilariously savaging the ignorance and lies.  Colbert shows the clip of the end of one of the interviews, in which Trump dismisses CBS's "Face the Nation" journalist John Dickerson when the president doesn’t want to answer a question about Trump’s accusations that President Obama had him wiretapped.  We have seen such Trumpian behavior before, but The Hot Screen still found it somewhat shocking; like a squid squirting ink to escape danger, Trump emits a cloud of bluster, then scuttles behind his presidential desk like that same squid hiding behind a coral reef.  The president then proceeds to shuffle through and read the papers on his desk, like a bad impersonation of a busy businessman, in an obvious continuation of that same bluster.

But then Colbert reveals that even this was not the worst moment that journalist Dickerson had to endure, running a clip in which Trump sneers that he calls Dickerson’s show “Deface the Nation.”  Dickerson may be held back by his personal dignity and journalistic ethos from responding, but Colbert, says Colbert, is not.  He then unleashes a paint-blisterer of a tirade against Donald Trump, as if what came before had only been a warm-up, though we also realize that the mockery up to now has also been driven by his outrage over the treatment of Dickerson.  And it is this context of a self-consciously delivered verbal beatdown of the president that the “cock holster” line is delivered.

The unwitting meta-joke/deadly serious point that surrounds the FCC investigation of whether Colbert’s words were “indecent” or “profane” is that Colbert resorted to such language in his effort to communicate the idea that Donald Trump’s actions are indisputably both indecent and profane, that this dunce’s presidency is an obscenity.  Colbert used foul language because that’s what he judged necessary to communicate the reality of a foul politics.  It’s a testament to his wit that this was the only point he crossed an obvious linguistic line; but it’s also clear that he knew the importance of hitting Trump hard with shocking and graphic language.  It’s not the job of comedians not to go too far; in fact, going too far is an occupational hazard and occasional necessity.  But it IS their job to try to tell the truth of things while making us laugh.  

In a neat bookend to the Colbert kerfluffle, a protestor at Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing in January has been convicted of. . . laughing at Jeff Sessions.  Desiree Fairooz guffawed after Senator Richard Shelby praised Sessions’ “extensive record of treating all Americans equally under the law”; now Fairooz has been convicted of unlawful conduct for disturbing the proceedings, though she contends she only emitted a “reflexive noise.”  Whether or not this charge was technically correct, the idea of convicting someone for laughing at a politician is, well, laughable.  This is a judgment that only a totalitarian would love.

And finally, the story completing the sad anti-free speech absurdity of the last week: The Republic of Ireland is investigating whether comedian and actor Stephen Fry blasphemed when he responded to an interview question in 2015 about what he’d say to God if he had the chance.  Fry faces possible charges under a law passed in 2009, although it sounds like such charges are unlikely.

His answer included the following lines: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It's not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"  Far be it from us to judge Ireland’s particular mix of religion and free speech, but clearly Fry raised the most basic of theological questions — why is there evil in the world? — for which punishment seems nonsensical.

Along with the cases of Colbert and Fairooz, we are seeing attempts to limit speech allegedly to protect the sanctity of some public good — television broadcasting in the case of Colbert, a Congressional proceeding in the case of Fairooz, the beliefs of the Catholic Church in the case of Fry — when in fact the larger purpose is to limit challenges to the prerogatives of the powerful to propagate a world view of their choice.  This trio of heavy-handed anti-free speech incidents may be only incidentally linked, but they remind us that claims of indecent, inappropriate, or blasphemous language often serve to obscure a reality that the powerful would rather keep unexamined.

2017 is shaping up to be a hell of a year for our sense of humor.

Forget About Trump’s First Hundred Days: It’s Time to Mess With Texas (Politics)!

For an antidote to premature sighs of relief that we’ve weathered the worst of Trump and the larger populist wave hitting the Western world, you couldn’t do much better than catching up on Andrew O’Hehir’s recent political columns over at Salon.com.  This week’s piece points up the way in which the Marine Le Pen versus Emmanuel Macron run-off may well only prolong, not resolve, whatever reckoning French politics is heading towards, and how mainstream commentators repeatedly seize on evidence that any apparent ruptures in Western politics are going to be healed, lickety-split.   

Among other things, O’Hehir argues that establishment politicians and media have a tendency to believe the political-economic system is fundamentally sound and self-correcting, and work to promote this idea in a hundred ways large and small; an underlying assumption is that it is also fair, insofar as the current arrangements should continue without major changes.  The underlying point he makes, not so explicitly, is that ordinary citizens must inevitably struggle against a myopic world of purported expertise that in some ways is inherently incapable of admitting the significance of very real changes and conflicts in our world.  For O’Hehir, these issues of perception are front and center today as the world enters what he considers to be an age of revolution around political and economic systems, with an outcome still very much to be determined.

As we pass the 100-day point of the Trump presidency, I’ve got two contradictory feelings that correlate intriguingly with O’Hehir’s observations.  On the one hand, I’m gratified that resistance to Trump has been so strong, and that our constitutional system has slowed down initiatives like the Muslim ban: hey man, our system works!  No dictatorships or religious tests in this country, buddy!  On the other hand, as Trump embraces a more straightforward plutocratic, self-dealing agenda, sets course toward voter suppression and a hands-off approach to police violence, proposes tax “reform” that will drive income inequality to new, unfathomable extremes, and dismantles a bare-bones federal effort to fight global warming, there are signs that the political system and media coverage are beginning to relax into familiar territory; it is as if the message is, “Yes, Trump is crazy, but the system has constrained him; and now we are back in the charted world, of tax plans, health care, and the like.”

But even if accepting for the moment that the particular danger represented by the personal derangements of Trump has passed (which I don’t), the world of “regular” politics and economics is where the real emergency ultimately lies: our failures as a polity and a society are what gave rise to this wrecking ball of a presidency in the first place.  Trump, after all, was elected on a promise to break or reform a system that many people, particularly the working class, correctly see as no longer working for them.  So if Donald Trump now pursues policies that will worsen those problems, one possible outcome is that he’s laying the groundwork for worse Trumps to come.

The most dangerous tendency of the Democrats right now is to believe that all they have to do is let Trump and the Republicans keep shooting themselves in the foot, and to sit back without a full agenda of opposition.  By keeping themselves above the fray, their larger message is that the overall economic and political arrangements are acceptable, and all they have to do is swoop in at some point and tinker at the edges.  In a way, Donald Trump is a godsend for cautious Democratic politicians; they can oppose Trump without having to deal with the real problems that helped him come to power.

While many Democrats continue to believe that Trump and the Republicans’ self-destructive tendencies will sweep them back to power, the good news is that the bigger story is the ongoing battle in the Democratic Party over the issues that I’ve been talking about: whether the party will be driven by grassroots concerns, or continue to be an entity of the status quo.  And on this note, I want to flag this article by Andrew Cockburn, entitled “Texas Is the Future,” that reports on some news that most people are probably not aware of: that while much of progressive America cried and/or drank itself to sleep last November 8th, Democratic voters in Houston and other parts of Texas were cheering victories in various local races.

For those of us who believe that the answer to our political and economic problems is always more democracy — democracy defined as civic engagement, education, economic opportunity, and fighting for values like dignity, fairness, and fair wages — what progressives have been accomplishing in Texas comes like a welcome glass of cold sarsaparilla on a hot summer day.  In the face of Democratic electoral annihilation since the 1990’s, progressive organizers in Texas, including members of the Texas Organizing Project, have gone back to the basics.  They’ve identified crucial issues that harm or hold back working class voters and voters of color, and have mobilized voters around solutions to those issues.  They combined research into voting patterns with focus groups on basic political questions, such as why potential Democratic voters don't show up to the polls (the most-common answer: nothing seemed to change when they do, so why bother?)

These activists saw the need to deliver concrete results, and for community engagement to be ongoing, not just at election time.  And by acting directly on issues that affect the poor, like the punitive fines that can turn minor driving offenses into major financial burdens, not to mention jail time, they’re also pushing back on trends that have been turning us into a nation of have’s and have-not’s. In short, what they did was dogged, common-sense, and essential; they re-expanded the definition of democratic politics from elections to actually making changes and expanding the idea of democratic participation.  In the context of a Democratic Party that has too often passively relied on the notion of changing demographics to push it into the political majority, these state organizers’ efforts come across as mind-blowing.

To give you a sense of what they've been up to, there’s this:

“Ever since the era of [former governor] Ann Richards, Democrats had been focusing their efforts (without success) on winning back white swing voters outside the big cities. But [TOP organizer Crystal] Zermeno realized that there was no reason ‘to beat our heads against the wall for that group of people anymore, not when we’ve got a million-voter gap and as many as four million non-voting people of color in the big cities, who are likely Democrats.’ By relentlessly appealing to that shadow electorate, and gradually turning them into habitual voters, TOP could whittle down and eliminate the Republican advantage in elections for statewide offices such as governor and lieutenant governor, not to mention the state’s thirty-eight votes in the presidential Electoral College. In other words, since the existing Texas electorate was never going to generate a satisfactory result, TOP was going to have to grow a new one.”

Here’s another way of thinking about what the TOP organizers did: they stopped playing by the old rules, expanded the electorate, and ended up changing the game.  To give you a sense of how revolutionary this organizing work has been: in November, the Democrats dominated the election in Harris County, in which Houston is located, including electing a sheriff and district attorney.  And here's an amazing statistic: Hillary Clinton got in excess of 160,000 more votes than Donald Trump in the county, even though Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there by only a few thousand votes in the last election.  

There's been a lot of excitement about the Democrats competing in the handful of special elections that have been happening; but clearly immense changes have been occurring below the radar of national elections that need to be replicated and expanded if progressives are going to push the country in a better direction.

All States Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others?

For being our country’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sure is awfully loosey-goosey with his words!  Last week, he referred to the state of Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific” — technically accurate, sure, but politically reprehensible, as the description was part of an effort to discredit the ruling of a federal judge based in Hawaii against the Trump administration’s latest Muslim travel ban.  (Sessions' full phrasing referred to a "judge sitting on an island in the Pacific," which is great because it conjures up the image of a robed jurist sprawled in the sand on a Spring Break bender, rum daiquiri in one hand and un-American ruling in the other — do judges ever even work!?)

Because absolutely nothing in the man’s record might suggest racist motivations — save for that time in the 1980's when the Senate rejected him as a federal judge based on evidence that he was racist — it’s clear Sessions was only tweaking the geographical remoteness and Johnny-come-lately entry of Hawaii into our blessed union, and that his choice of words had nothing to do with the fact that Hawaii’s population contains the smallest proportion of whites of any U.S. state.  Obviously, he would have directed similar innuendo at distant, frozen, Russia-kissing, second-to-last-state-to-join-the-union Alaska.

On the plus side, though, this means it’s open season on technically accurate but "accidentally" tendentious descriptions of Sessions’ home state of Alabama — which from now on we’ll be referring to (metaphorically, of course) as "a formerly-secessionist island of slavery in the ocean of the Confederate States of America."

And now this weekend Sessions is telling us, without evidence, that “mostly Mexicans” are receiving billions in excess tax credits from the U.S. government.  He made this intriguing assertion as part of a possible absurd new argument from the Trump administration that Mexico really IS going to be paying for the border wall.  See, we’re going to fund it by taking away tax credits going to “mostly Mexicans” — and because Mexicans are clearly from Mexico (not like that confusing situation where Americans are from Hawaii — still wrapping our heads around that one, sorry!), Mexico is actually gonna pay for the wall, via the transitive property of Mexican-ness!

In the interest of resuming contact with reality: the Wall Street Journal had an article last week describing how zero percent of U.S. senators and representatives from districts and states that would see construction of a border wall actually support it.  When even those who are supposed to benefit the most from the wall don’t want it, you know you’ve got problems.