What Keeps Happening: The Dumb Responses to Hillary Clinton’s What Happened

The Hot Screen is no great fan of Hillary Clinton — but the various yelps and whines of outrage over her temerity for writing a book about the 2016 campaign are godawfully absurd, if also fully expected and potent reminders of the irrational Hillary-hatred that suffused so much of the coverage of the presidential race.  For us, most telling are the glaringly-visible double-standards when criticisms of Clinton are stacked next to the daily depredations of the man she beat by almost 3 million votes — as if Hillary’s election missteps can at this point be reasonably compared to the actual policies this clown of a president has actually implemented.  It is a classic case of comparing apples and orange hair.

As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, one question recurs in the land of punditry: “Will [Clinton] accept total and unconditional responsibility for our current calamity?”  We would add that some variation of this question has also played out in the progressive electorate at large, among which we would guess that nearly every voter has at one time or another had at least a flash of resentment toward Clinton for letting us down.  But as incisive observers had already noted before What Happened was published, any explanation that puts an inordinate amount of blame on Clinton inevitably ends up downplaying and even discrediting the complementary explanations for what factors came together in 2016 to result in the election of Donald Trump.  All national elections are complicated; but this last one was clearly a humdinger on the complexity scale, and it seems quite a stretch to say that Hillary’s inadequacy was the overriding reason she lost.

There is also a twisted illogic to the blame-Hillary game, in that the very people who are so concerned that she personally doomed her campaign are almost invariably people who actually WANTED HER TO WIN over Donald Trump, and who are disappointed that she did not.  It’s worth noting that a case can be made that too much blaming Hillary, along with Clinton’s own decision to keep clear of the public eye, very well may have already been counterproductive to pressing forward a progressive agenda since Donald Trump’s election.  There seems to have been a collective decision, born out of some combination of shock, horror, and masochism, for the left to downplay the fact that Hillary Clinton won the election by nearly 3 million votes.  With so many Americans feeling victimized by the election of Donald Trump, the last thing many people wanted to do was consider Hillary Clinton to be an even bigger victim than themselves.

As the Hot Screen has written before, the extremism of our political moment requires us to sometimes defer to a cold, ruthless approach to our politics and our political assumptions.  When the losing candidate of the most significant election of our lifetimes writes a memoir about what she thinks is important about the election, we all need to pay attention, regardless of our personal feelings about this candidate and our assumptions and conclusions to date of what transpired.  There will be lessons to learn from what she’s written, even if it takes an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff — an effort necessary when reading the writing of ANY politician, damned or sainted alike.

Is the Trump Administration Hiding Its War on Workers Behind "Entrepreneurship" Smoke and Mirrors? Or Just the New York Times?

This New York Times piece, titled “Trump Shifts Labor Policy Focus From Worker to Entrepreneur,” puts a soft spin on an unsurprising but appalling development — moves by the Trump administration to screw over American workers.  It’s also a reminder that despite the president’s protestations, there’s tons of mainstream, prestige journalism that pulls its punches from clear-cut, outright takes on the starkest betrayals of Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

After detailing an executive branch reversal of the Obama administration’s position in a Supreme Court case on whether “employers can force workers to forfeit their rights to bring class-action lawsuits,” the article goes on to note Trump’s proposed 40% cut for an agency that researches workplace hazards and gutting of a program to educate workers on avoiding injury.  The obvious angle is betrayal of the president's supposed working class base; but the article instead highlights how this approach actually demonstrates Donald Trump’s long-time support of “entrepreneurship,” a term never defined in the article but which seems to refer to people who create jobs and hire people.  

Suggesting that Donald Trump is actually acting in a pro-entrepreneur fashion seems a highly charitable reading of his government’s anti-worker actions, which after all are equally reflective of long-term right-wing efforts to smash labor protections wherever possible.  The article seems to stake its case on the pro-entrepreneurship policies of this administration by citing its changed positions on various technical but important labor rules about joint employers, who gets termed a independent contractor versus an employee, and who qualifies for time and a half pay.

But whether the administration, its supporters, or the author choose to call these policies supportive of entrepreneurship, you could also easily counter that “entrepreneurship” is just a fig leaf for the timeless effort of business owners to pay and compensate their workers as little as possible.  When the article quotes labor-hating, failed nominee for labor secretary Andrew “What a Puzd!” Puzder about the tendency of overtime pay to staunch the job-creating ambitions of hourly workers (apparently by seducing them into settling for being mere workers fairly compensated for their work), the stench of bullshit becomes overpowering.  

The article amusingly quotes David Weil, who was involved with the issue of classifying workers as independent contractors versus employees during the Obama administration, and who notes how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expressed an attitude of “Why are you bothering me with this employee stuff when I’m actually giving people a chance to be entrepreneurs?”  The idea of valorized entrepreneurs arguing that people working for them are actually entrepreneurs, too, and should be happy about it, is an absurd but also quite radical shift in what an employer’s responsibilities to its workers should be.  It conjures a vision of a world in which, through the magic of semantics, there are no longer owners and workers, but just entrepreneurs floating in a sea of equality, as if all the tendencies toward exploitation in the absence of regulation have been whisked away by good will.  But it doesn’t take a cynic to see that anyone — you can call them entrepreneurs, but you can more clarifyingly also call them bosses or owners — who needs other people to help them with their work will always have serious incentives to compensate those people as little as possible — isn’t that the basis of capitalism? — and that such incentives include simultaneous efforts to deny the basic fact that these people are indeed working for them.

In the glorification of the entrepreneur, we see a devaluation of being a “mere worker”; but this sleight of hand rests on the false idea of a heroic, creative few who supply the real drive to the economy, with automaton-like laborers supplying rote and unthinking grunt work to make it all move.  It’s a self-serving notion at odds with the real world, and an insult to the near-infinite contributions made by people who, for a thousand different reasons, don’t have the means or inclination to found a company. 

China Invests in Greece While European Union Prescribes Bad Economics

The New York Times has a fascinating article out about how China has begun to invest heavily in Greece, even as the European Union has imposed strict austerity on that beleaguered country.  As the article notes, “While Europe was busy squeezing Greece, the Chinese swooped in with bucket-loads of investments that have begun to pay off, not only economically but also by apparently giving China a political foothold in Greece, and by extension, in Europe.”  China’s investments include modernizing the port of Piraeus as part of an enormous initiative to create networks for trade with Europe across the Asian continent, which for anyone with even a faint memory of reading about Greek history is an amazing twist for a city that featured in the Peloponnesian War, and speaks to larger global shifts of power and influence in our own time. 

It is amazing to The Hot Screen that as the European Union has imposed what appears to be counter-productive and punitive austerity on Greece, China has essentially moved in and showed the enduring utility of Keynesian economics, creating jobs for Greeks through its investments.  And China’s economic influence is inevitably political, demonstrated most vividly when Greece, along with Hungary (where China is also planning to spend billions), vetoed an annual E.U. effort to condemn China’s human rights record.  The article quotes a Dutch European Parliament member as saying, “The Greek government needs to choose where its alliances lie and realize the E.U. is not only a market, but first and foremost a community of values”; but it seems that the E.U. itself got mixed up on this point when it chose to treat Greece as a market and not a community of fellow human beings needing rescue from economic malaise.  That Greece is now at least sympathetic to an undemocratic competitor to the E.U. is a lesson you’d hope other European politicians would learn the right lesson from, at least if they care about democratic values as much as they claim to.

Early Signs That Macron Doesn't Know How to Fix What Ails France

It looks like France’s experiment with centrist Emmanuel Macron is turning into more politics as usual.  As Sarah Jones at New Republic recounts, his economic proposals would seem to be indistinguishable from what a conservative Republican in the U.S. might propose — tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich, and a weakening of unions.  Jones points to the parallels in the Democratic Party today, where a resurgent Bernie-left movement is working against common wisdom that the center’s where it’s at, even as the center has failed to address spiraling inequality in our country.  Thank god Macron beat Marine LePen, but France’s failure to restore prosperity will only spark new energy for her proto-fascist movement.  Here’s hoping both our countries get it together and start building an economy that works for ordinary people, not the already well-to-do or hyper-rich.

Is Trump a Perfect Storm of Asshole and Empty Vessel?

One of the more bizarre elements of our ongoing national crisis is that we are beset by a president whose ultimate goals seem to be neither political nor ideological, at least not in any traditional sense, but instead fall under a more idiosyncratic desire to assert his own power.  It is of course true that Donald Trump has found himself sympathetic to the furthest-right fringes of the political spectrum, and has also appealed to less extreme conservatives through a combination of economic nationalism and race-based appeals; but these seem more like means to an end, as opposed to someone like, say, Steve Bannon or Jeff Sessions, who seem to have well-though-out (if alternately despicable and discredited) ideas about race, politics, and the economy.  The Hot Screen notes this as prelude to saying how remarkable it is that our greatest Constitutional challenge arguably since the Civil War is coming not through a president with a specific political agenda and ideology, but from one whose main goal is personal aggrandizement — both emotional and monetary — from the presidency.

At any rate: two recent pieces provide insightful assays at what motivates Donald Trump to do like he does.  At long-time THS fave The Baffler, David Roth has penned a haughty and scathing essay, half-lackadaisacal and half-knife-so-sharp-you-don’t-know-you’ve-been-cut-until-your-head-falls-off.  In "The President of Blank Sucking Nullity," Roth diagnoses the president as having a fairly common affliction, though one that’s been badly magnified by his ascent to power: Donald Trump, he asserts, is an asshole, with many consequences that transcend any particular political ideology flowing from this basic fact:

The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him.  Start with this, and you already know a lot [. . .]  The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation.

Roth doesn’t simply leave matters at this basic assholic quality of self-absorption that characterizes Trump and his fellow bottom-dwellers, but identifies the specific ways the president's condition manifests itself: 

It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More.  The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude.

Roth goes on to demonstrate (conclusively or not, we will leave to the reader; hint: the right answer is “conclusively”) that Trump’s asshole status makes quick work of various vexing questions, such as whether Donald Trump is a racist or a neo-Confederate:

There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own.  Is Trump a racist?  Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all.  Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit?  Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite.  Does he even know about . . . Let me stop you there.  The answer is no.

You may or may not agree with Roth’s singular diagnosis, but you have to admit that his is a determined engagement with the question of why our politics has so much come to revolve around the psyche of a single, clearly troubled person.  THS believes that part of the mesmerism of Trump is a simultaneous dissonance/congruity between his singular, self-obsessed personality and the larger socio-political forces he’s tapped into; that is, there is something remarkable in the fact that a man so self-obsessed can be seen by so many to embody THEIR particular aspirations and grievances.  Of course it has to add up, because there he is in the White House, and here we are as a stunned and harshly beset nation.  Roth’s analysis gets at the truth of the matter, which is that on one side of the equation we are facing a general situation of the emperor having no clothes: the man ultimately is not the savior of the working class or even white America, but a huckster out to aggrandize numero uno.  Helping anyone else is purely incidental.

(Lo and behold — it seems that at least one Republican is on board with Roth's diagnosis, though it seems he's reached the conclusion independently of Roth's essay.  Speaking of President Trump, Congressman Duncan Hunter is said to have told colleagues recently, "He’s just like he is on TV.  He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole."  Alrighty then.)

At New Republic, Jeet Heer has a piece out — titled “Cultural Warlord Trump Goes on the Offensive” — that looks at why Trump has adopted so many of the culturally conservative/malignant positions that arguably seemed not to interest him during the 2016 campaign.  (Of course, the idea that he’d back off cultural fights never made much sense — you can’t back off a fight without tacitly supporting the currently winning side.)  Heer suggests a theory that’s been offered by others in various permutations, writing:

[Trump backer billionaire] Peter Thiel (and those who shared his illusion) misjudged Trump because they thought the fact that he wasn’t personally invested in culture-war issues would mean that he would put them on the back-burner.  What they ignored is that Trump has a fundamentally tribalistic approach to politics.  He sees himself as the head of a tribe, whose main goal is to reward his supporters and punish his enemies.

In January 2016, Will Saletan wrote in Slate that “the Republican Party is a failed state, and Donald Trump is its warlord.”  That metaphor deserves an update.  Trump is now presiding over America as if it were a failed state, and he is its avenging cultural warlord.  Trump is styling himself as the chieftain of the Straight White Christian Party who will defend his people against all enemies, be they Muslim terrorists or trans soldiers.  

We might say that Heer’s argument is the complement of Roth’s: Trump, in his assholic emptiness, has become the vessel and defender of a broader white grievance, through some confluence of psychological propensity and alignment with the aggrievements of others — a sort of dizzyingly narcissistic selflessness.  Armchair psychologizing aside, Heer’s characterization of Trump as “chieftain of the Straight White Christian Party who will defend his people against all enemies, be they Muslim terrorists or trans soldiers” resonates with us, and seems to contain not so much a grain of truth as a whole frickin’ nugget’s worth.  

Opposition Grapples with the Implications of the Arpaio Pardon

Political writers continue to weigh in on the ramifications of Donald Trump’s pardon of sadistic Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Pursuing a theme he’s revisited over the past months, Brian Beutler highlights the Republican Party’s position vis-a-vis the pardon.  Pointing to the discouraging silence on the part of nearly all elected Republican officials, he reminds us that the pardon power is a presidential prerogative impossible to counter by ordinary legislative means; it really can’t be constrained by passing a law.  Their only available remedy is impeachment, an option on which the GOP is deafeningly silent.  But Beutler points out that the Republicans who control Congress do have secondary remedies, such as investigating the pardon and passing laws that signal to law enforcement that racism won’t be tolerated — approaches that the GOP currently seems content to leave unexamined.

Beutler also identifies some of the destructive messages contained in this pardon: it encourages abuse by other law enforcement members, encourages white supremacists, and constitutes a test of Trump’s pardon power as a future way to defeat Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.  Paul Krugman goes a step further in Monday’s column, identifying Arpaio as an exemplar of an American fascism, and the pardon as Trump’s endorsement of it; referencing Arpaio’s own description of his tent prison as a “concentration camp,” Krugman writes:

There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style. 

Krugman’s characterization is helpful in part because it also helps explain how we got to this perilous moment; the authoritarian behavior and systematic racism that Trump threatens have been exercised by other Republican politicians for decades now, and broadly excused by the GOP.  Sheriff Arpaio, after all, had been re-elected over the course of twenty years, and indeed was only defeated at the ballot box in November 2016.  And we see various flavors of this behavior across the country, from police killings of unarmed African Americans to the way law enforcement has been turned into a revenue-raising function of the state in towns like Ferguson, where African-Americans have been targeted for “crimes” that, say, a white middle-class person would never be subjected to.

In light of which — Jamelle Bouie connects the dots between the Arpaio pardon and the president’s decision to resume the full-on 1033 program of supplying military surplus to police departments around the country.  He writes, “This too represents an attack on accountability, and together with the Arpaio pardon, they show a key priority for this administration: impunity for those with state authority and attendant disregard for the people that authority is wielded on, often cruelly.”  Bouie also sees in both actions a fetishization of law and order by the president “at the expense of actual rule of law.”  (This opposition of law and order versus rule of law seems to be a bit of a meme lately, and it seems a promisingly concise way to communicate what’s wrong with Trump’s approach on many fronts).

Finally, in a piece on the president’s demented Arizona rally at which he teased the possibility of an Arpaio pardon, Joan Walsh links Trump’s pardon talk to Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, describing the impending pardon, and Trump’s speech more generally, as an attempt to demonstrate to his followers that Bannon’s departure has left him no less virulent a supporter of white nationalism.

Although it's ultimately up to the Republicans whether or not to attempt to constrain the president's abuse of the pardon power, nothing is stopping the Democrats and other opponents of Trump to create an atmosphere that makes such efforts more likely.  It's vital to get the word out on what a vile and undeserving recipient of the pardon Joe Arpaio is, how this pardon connects to broader systemic racism that abuses immigrants and literally kills Americans, and sets a dangerous precedent for further abuse by a president beset by myriad crises of his own making.

Pardon of Joe Arpaio Is a Very Bad Sign of Where We're Heading

President Trump’s Friday pardon of the recently convicted former sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ is the latest bright red neon warning sign that this president is determined to push our system of government to the breaking point in pursuit of his own narrow political interests.  Some are arguing that this pardon itself constitutes an impeachable act; but setting that debate aside, there are layers of perniciousness to this action.  As Bloomberg View columnist and Harvard law professor Noah Feldman wrote a couple days before the pardon was issued, Arpaio’s offense wasn’t simply breaking a law, but flouting the Constitution itself.  Coming so soon after Donald Trump’s endorsement of racists and the neo-Confederate movement in connection with the white riot in Charlottesville, it’s clearly meant as a doubling-down on his supporters’ accurate perception of him as the white supremacist-in-chief.  And in the context of Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Donald Trump, it needs to be read as a signal to anyone caught up in potential crimes that the president is not afraid to use the power of the pardon in controversial, indeed, outrageous ways.

As Feldman summarizes, in 2011 a federal judge enjoined Arpaio to cease “saturation patrols,” which involved rounding up people because they appeared to be Latino, as this was found to constitute unconstitutional profiling and warrantless stops.  However, Arpaio continued to run these sweeps, which in 2016 led the same judge to find the sheriff in civil contempt of court.  This ruling led to a second proceeding to determine if Arpaio was in criminal contempt of court; another judge found this to be the case, and Arpaio was convicted in July of this year essentially for “willful defiance of a federal judge’s lawful order to enforce the Constitution.”  I think it’s worth quoting Feldman at length here, because he sets out very clearly the implications of Trump’s pardon of such a crime:

The only way the legal system can operate is if law enforcement officials do what the courts tell them.  Judges don’t carry guns or enforce their own orders. That’s the job of law enforcement. 

In the end, the only legally binding check on law enforcement is the authority of the judiciary to say what the law is — and be listened to by the cops on the streets.

When a sheriff ignores the courts, he becomes a law unto himself. The courts’ only available recourse is to sanction the sheriff.  If the president blocks the courts from making the sheriff follow the law, then the president is breaking the basic structure of the legal order.

From this analysis it follows directly that pardoning Arpaio would be a wrongful act under the Constitution.  There would be no immediate constitutional crisis because, legally speaking, Trump has the power to issue the pardon.

But the pardon would trigger a different sort of crisis: a crisis in enforcement of the rule of law.

Apart from the grave issue of undermining the rule of law, let’s not forget the context of this pardon: it comes as Americans continue to grapple with the implications of the events in Charlottesville and the clear indications that Donald Trump sympathizes with the vile forces that rallied there.  The line from Charlottesville to the Arpaio pardon is clear because of the nature of the offenses for which Arpaio is notorious, and which led to his conviction.  For going on two decades, Arpaio has pursued racist and inhumane policing against the Latino community in Maricopa County.  His offenses range from the aforementioned racial profiling, to a sadistic, overheated tent city for detainees, to the abuse of his office to pursue political vendettas, to the deaths of those in custody.  His barbaric approach has been a stain on the American conscience for many years, and he has been not just a symbol but enforcer of institutionalized racism.  It was a good day for American justice when Arizona voters voted him out last year.

So it is no coincidence that Arpaio is Trump’s first pardon, or that it comes as the latest act in the program of presidential-level racism that metastasized into undeniable public knowledge after Charlottesville.  The Arizona Republic spells out what this pardon means for the country at large:

[Trump’s] pardon of Joe Arpaio elevated the disgraced former Maricopa County sheriff to monument status among the immigration hardliners and nationalists in Trump’s base. This erases any doubt about whether Trump meant to empower them after the violence in Charlottesville [. . .] Donald Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great [. . .] By pardoning Arpaio, Trump made it clear that institutional racism is not just OK with him. It is a goal.

As he has been doing emphatically since Charlottesville, and indeed since he launched his presidential campaign, Donald Trump is showing that he intends not to be the president of all Americans, but only of a subset for whom no constitutional outrage is too great, so long as it means that non-whites are scapegoated for the country's ills.

The pardon also needs to be seen in the context of Donald Trump’s broader malfeasance, from the anti-Muslim travel ban to his attempts to set up a voter commission intended to deny the vote to millions of Americans.  Particularly, it needs to be seen in the context of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with which by multiple accounts the president is obsessed.  A pardon this early in his administration of a prominent ally sends a clear signal to those in the crosshairs of the investigation; as Democratic strategist Paul Begala told the New York Times, “The Arpaio pardon was awful in and of itself, but I also think it was a signal to the targets of the Mueller investigation that ‘I got your back.’”

At a minimum, the pardon demonstrates Trump’s willingness to use the pardon power for strictly partisan purpose.  Bear in mind that this pardon did not follow the usual procedures followed by previous presidents; here is how the New York Times describes the normal process:

The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, which ordinarily makes pardon recommendations, has an elaborate and lengthy process for considering pardon applications.  It generally requires a five-year waiting period, the office’s application instructions say, “to afford the petitioner a reasonable period of time in which to demonstrate an ability to lead a responsible, productive and law-abiding life."

The department, moreover, usually recommends pardons only after an expression of remorse.

“A presidential pardon is ordinarily a sign of forgiveness,” the instructions say.  “A pardon is not a sign of vindication and does not connote or establish innocence.  For that reason, when considering the merits of a pardon petition, pardon officials take into account the petitioner’s acceptance of responsibility, remorse and atonement for the offense.”

Mr. Arpaio, who has been anything but contrite, did not submit a formal application. Indeed, he had not yet been sentenced.

There are now also reports that in the months prior to this pardon, Donald Trump asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House counsel Don McGahn II about whether the feds could drop the case against Arpaio.  If not an outright attempt to obstruct justice, this is an interest in interference in the legal process that you never want a president to explore, and is more evidence of the president's disregard for our court system, and by extension the rule of law.

It might seem alarmist to extrapolate from a single pardon, but it is not hard to see that a president who chooses to use this Constitutional power repeatedly to protect himself and his supporters from bad acts would in effect end the rule of law in our country, a point that Bloomberg’s Feldman makes.  And again, it is not simply this pardon, but its conjunction with so many other bad acts and behaviors of this president, that make us not simply fear executive excess, but show us that such presidential excess is already in full swing.

It's Time for White America to Think Harder About True Patriotism, Not to Mention Basic Decency

Two of my favorite political columnists, Andrew O’Hehir and Jamelle Bouie, have pieces out that cut to the heart of the discussions people need to be having in the aftermath of Charlottesville and the president's sordid response to the white riots there.  O'Hehir confronts head-on the hideous valorization of the Confederate cause that, to our great sorrow, we have all been reminded still haunts and sabotages our country through the present day.  He recounts the clarity of Ulysses S. Grant’s vision of the Civil War and its aftermath, noting that Grant “saw the slaveholding aristocracy that drove the South into secession as an indefensible criminal regime, rooted in treason and an immoral economy where human beings were 'bought and sold like cattle.'"  O’Hehir goes on to outline the stupefying situation we now face, in which the Confederacy has come to be seen by millions as a glorious era, with all the massive social damage such a false sense of history entails.  He writes:

As if by dark magic, a disgraceful episode that very nearly doomed the entire American project to failure — and was driven by the greed and cruelty of a tiny elite caste — is now widely understood as a profound and mystical expression of the American spirit.  Or, more bluntly, as a sacred covenant of whiteness.

By refusing to face the true legacy of slavery and its aftermath, and embracing an entire universe of “alternative facts” about the Civil War, the Confederacy and race relations, a large portion of white America has in effect enslaved itself to a false sense of history and a false racial consciousness.  We can see the resulting confusion and dysfunction all around us: In the “diseases of despair” and self-defeating politics of the now-infamous white working class. In the appalling street theater of Charlottesville, a new low in our nation’s 21st-century decline.

While Trump blathers on about how Confederate statues are "beautiful" and part of a history we should cherish, it’s becoming clearer than ever that a president as divisive and hateful as Donald Trump could only be elected if U.S. citizens, particularly white Americans, have either learned a false history or have too little grasp of our true one.

It’s also becoming increasingly obvious that white folks are reaching a reckoning time as to whether they continue down this road, with all the newly-escalating racial hatred on their side that it has unleashed, or whether they open their eyes to the full story of our country.  Such is the argument that Jamelle Bouie makes in a column this week entitled “White Americans Have to Make a Choice.”  Contemplating the writing of historian Lerone Bennett Jr. and writer James Baldwin, Bouie revisits the idea that the U.S. doesn’t have a race problem so much as it has a white person problem, and writes of the “myth of innocence” that so many white Americans embrace, and which was fully exploited by Donald Trump in his ascent to the presidency.

Addressing the larger issues that intersect around the fight over Confederate monuments, Bouie gets to the central question for white Americans, and for the survival of this country more generally: 

Indeed, if Confederate statues represent the effort to erase history, then this push to remove them is a request to recover and reckon with it. It’s a demand that those white Americans abandon the comforting fictions of unity and progress and confront the past and present in all of its ugliness. And it’s a call for white Americans to broaden their moral imaginations and consider the impact these monuments make on their fellow citizens, to understand what it means to reify the symbols of a slaveholder’s rebellion. To answer any of this is to answer that question of the era: Who is America for?

Bouie describes the fight to redefine our memory of the Civil War and its white supremacist aftermath as an uphill battle, but after Charlottesville, it seems that there’s no choice but to keep fighting it.  In his closing, he makes a great point that addresses the argument that those troubled by monuments to the Confederacy are simply agitators upset with a settled history: 

It presumes that these monuments were never controversial and that the narratives they represent were never contested. They were. They always have been. And the reason we have this fight is because for more than a century, too many white Americans were content with narratives built on exclusion and erasure. The question now is whether they’re still content, whether they still believe this is a white country, or whether they’re ready to share this country, and its story, with others.

I'll end by offering a parallel question: White Americans need to be asking themselves whether it's preferable to share this country with non-whites, or whether it's somehow more comfortable to share it with the freak-show bigots who showed up in Charlottesville, and who will continue to thrive so long as we've got a commander in chief who acts as their apologist, and as long as enough people look the other way.  If these people don't fill you with horror and loathing, don't ignite your contempt for all we're learning about the deranged history too many have told themselves about race in America, then it's time to take a closer look at your basic value system.

Keeping Trump Pinned to His Support for White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis

The terrible events in Charlottesville last weekend have heightened public awareness of the growing boldness of white nationalists and neo-Nazis alongside the election of Donald Trump.  But the flashpoint of the Robert E. Lee memorial in that city has also thrust the question of Confederate monuments more into public view as well.  Already, the city of Baltimore has removed its Confederate statues from public view, and other cities are beginning to debate the appropriateness of their continued display.

One of the most important pieces of information to emerge more broadly into public view over the last week is that most of these statues were not put up in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to commemorate the Southern war dead.  Rather, most were erected decades after the war, as an affirmation of the establishment of post-bellum white supremacy and the South’s delayed victory on this key front.  Their construction is also related to the way that the North, as a method for reconciling the splintered U.S.,  allowed the South to construct a narrative that the Confederate fight was not to preserve slavery, but was instead a patriotic battle for liberty.  As Josh Marshall discusses at Talking Points Memo, “[w]hat is little discussed today is that the North and the South made a tacit bargain in the years after the Civil War to valorize Southern generals as a way to salve the sting of Southern defeat and provide a cultural and political basis for uniting the country with more than military force.”  As Marshall also notes, this approach was coupled with the North’s move to leave African-Americans in the south to the mercy of their former overlords, leading to decades more of Jim Crow and African-American disenfranchisement.

So the history behind these statues is shot through with racist intent, and the recent right-wing protestors at Charlottesville show us that at least white supremacists know this.  So now that these statues have become a flashpoint for rejection of a far-right resurgence, and their real meaning becomes more broadly understood, what’s the best strategy to take?  Should removal of the statues become a full-court press by progressives?

This seems to me a slightly more fraught question than I had initially believed, because I think most people on the left would agree that there is a larger issue that needs to be addressed, which is defeating Trump and the forces of white supremacism that have energized his presidency.  So, adopting language inspired by the militant backdrop here, the question becomes, how best to use the battle of the statues to advance the war against these retrograde forces?  The right-wing march on Charlottesville, and Donald Trump’s response, have vividly demonstrated the synergy between the president and these illiberal, un-American groups; it is crucial that this synergy be keep in full public view as much as possible.  At this point, there seems to be momentum, including from conservative politicians, to remove them from some Southern cities.  But as much as I personally despise the presence of these statues and instinctively would like nothing more than to knock them all down overnight, I think we need to consider how such a project can be carried out so as to maximize the political damage to Trump, his Republican Party enablers, and white supremacists.

When Steve Bannon says it would be a good idea for his brand of politics if people keep knocking down statues, I don’t think it’s letting Bannon play head games with the left to stop to consider why he might say this.  I think an important part of the answer can be gleaned from Bannon’s phone call to American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner shortly before his departure from the White House, when he said, “The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”  I think the grain of truth in his words is that reinforcing a narrative in which the left seems to ONLY care about race and identity is indeed not a great idea for Democrats and other progressives; it can be leveraged to alienate white voters, and to make the case that the Democrats are a party that no longer cares about economic justice.

I realize the question of identity politics is a fraught and complicated topic, and that I make such a quick digression into it at my peril.  But here’s why I bring it up: I think the moral power of the fight to remove Confederate statues is maximized when progressives and others make it clear that these are emblems not simply of subjugation of African-Americans, but have become a modern-day inspiration to forces that hate nearly ALL Americans - white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates, for whom the only acceptable American is Christian, southern, probably male, and of course white.  Don't make it an issue of black Americans versus white Americans; make it an issue of normal, decent Americans versus treasonous, racist, anti-Americans.  Keeping up the fight is also a huge win by continuing to put Trump’s defense of these hate groups in the public eye as the struggle to remove them continues; because at this point, the clear and immediate danger, more than whatever inspiration the monuments give far-right forces, is the fact that they have a president who showers them with approval from the highest office in the land, laying the groundwork for greater white supremacist violence. 

Bannon’s line of thinking is that the statues are yet another issue that can be used to drive a wedge between Americans along racial lines, while the president continues to talk about “economic nationalism.”  What Bannon seems not to grasp, though, is that the rally in Charlottesville, and the discussion it has opened up about the president’s defense of white supremacists, has made it increasingly difficult for Trump himself to talk about anything else.  Indeed, it makes it easier than ever to see that “economic nationalism” is a euphemism for a politics of benefitting white Americans, including by means of un-American voter suppression efforts, against perceived advantage-taking by privileged minorities; otherwise, why would Bannon be positing some sort of obvious opposition between economic nationalism and the interests of non-whites?  Bannon seems not to understand the significance of the fact that it’s Trump who started this fight, when he gave a nudge and a wink to racist elements during the campaign and after his election.  Trump is the one who stood behind the podium at Trump Tower and talked about the “fine people” at a neo-Nazi rally.  The statues have become a gateway into a heightened discussion of the fact that our president has thrown his weight behind the most hateful and violent fringes of our society.  Removing the statues from their pedestals is a powerful new way to talk about removing Trump from office.

An effective strategy around the statues is also one that doesn’t simply call for tearing down, but for building up - in this case, constructing new statues in the place of the old that celebrate our SHARED American history.  A good place to start are abolitionists and African-American soldiers who served in the Civil War - there are many heroes to be found in both groups, including people who should be better-known than currently.  One name I have seen mentioned is Robert Smalls, whose amazing story encompasses stealing a Confederate ship and being elected to the House of Representatives.  More broadly memorialized, these people would be an inspiration that decent Americans could celebrate together.

And speaking of driving a wedge - there is one area where Democrats and progressives can force Trump’s Republican enablers to choose sides with little risk and maximal moral righteousness.  Ten U.S. Army bases are named for Confederate generals, and now a group of House Democrats has proposed a bill under which the defense secretary would have to rename military bases named after anyone “who took up arms against the United States during the American Civil War or any individual or entity that supported such efforts.”  It is shocking that U.S. military facilities would be named after generals who fought against the United States.  Once again, the roots of this phenomenon go back to a time when it was seen as important to placate the South.  According to Politico, “A number of the bases got those names in the early and mid-20th century, at a time when military leaders needed to fill the ranks and relied heavily on Southern states. Some were named in the lead-up to World War I and others on the cusp of American entry into World War II. Many of the names were put forward by the states, and the Army, in desperate need of manpower, agreed.”

I cannot believe that this is an issue on which the cause of retaining these names will find many defenders.  It is logically nonsensical for a military base to be named after someone who fought against that same military: as nonsensical as, say, naming a base after German general Erwin Rommel.  And if this legislation were to be passed, it would set a powerful precedent that would help to re-define the conversation about Confederate monuments, and those like the president who mistakenly view them as beautiful elements of both our public parks and history.

After Charlottesville, White Backlash Is Indistinguishable From White Supremacy

The Trump presidency has been an precedented mix of norm-breaking, unethical behavior, racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and basic incompetence.  Indeed, looking back to the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump said things that seemed unimaginable for a mainstream candidate to say and still get elected: calling Mexicans rapists and suggesting a Mexican-American judge was prejudiced because of his heritage; calling for the murder of the families of terrorists; inciting violence against protestors at his rallies.  And since his election, it has felt that every day has brought a new affront to basic decency, core American values, and our sense of a shared reality — from Trump’s complaints about misreporting of election day crowds and his lies that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, to his obscene profiting off the office of the presidency, to the Muslim travel ban and his firing of James Comey, to his insane bluster towards North Korea in recent weeks. 

Over the last several months, there have been many points that part of me imagined that THIS must be the straw that broke the camel’s back, that woke the collective conscience of Trump and Clinton voters alike, that would cause his poll numbers to sink, Congressional enablers to slink away, and resignation or impeachment to grow imminent.  But these hopes of course have always came to naught, for reasons that had everything to do with why Trump was elected to begin with — because enough people have lost faith in political business as usual, are worried about their economic prospects, and are comfortable with Trump’s role as avatar of a white backlash against America’s growing diversity.  Because the very things that I and many other people thought would ensure that he would never be elected were what led people to vote for him.  They wanted a disruptor in the White House — and hoo-boy, did they get it.

But the events in Charlottesville last weekend and Trump’s response are a turning point for this presidency, because of the way they fundamentally re-frame the Trump administration for all Americans, supporters and opponents alike.  Until now, Trump supporters who embraced Donald Trump for his pro-white agenda could tell themselves that this was not the same as embracing a white supremacist agenda.  They could tell themselves that white people were being taken advantage of by minorities, that the government was favoring minorities at their expense, and still tell themselves that they weren’t racists themselves.  They just wanted a fair shake, and putting minorities in their place was the way to get that.

The violent eruption of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates in Charlottesville last weekend — groups irrefutably emboldened by and adoring of Donald Trump — has exploded the idea that Donald Trump can assert the primacy of white needs and the need to put minorities in their place without encouraging the evil and stupidity of outright white supremacism.  No one can pretend any longer that his appeals to a white backlash don’t partake of the darkest and most ignorant strains of American history.  This isn’t simply because we’ve now seen the clearest evidence that these anti-American forces have found encouragement in Trump’s election to come roaring out of the shadows.  It’s also because, in his response to their appearance on our collective scene, the president has clearly signaled that he’s on their side.  

Despite the death of a counter-protestor and the clear intent of the white supremacists to intimidate and cause mayhem in the name of hatred, the president initially attempted to blame both sides, and refused to call out the neo-Nazis and their ilk by name.  After severe and sustained criticism, he made a second statement days later that finally called out these hate groups, but still in a hedged fashion.  And then, of course, came Tuesday’s press conference at Trump Plaza, at which he blew up any pretense that he’d believed what he’d said the day before.  He not only doubled down on the grotesquely false equivalency between the right-wing hate groups and a newly conjured “alt-left," he asserted that there were “fine people” among the right-wing protestors. 

By this point, the president’s delays in condemning them had already been read loud and clear by white supremacist groups as the president’s blessing of their cause.  His subsequent remarks at Trump Tower should have made this clear to the rest of America.  But this is hardly the end of the tale — because in the ensuing days, Donald Trump has referred to Confederate monuments as “beautiful” and made it clear that he opposes their removal.  In a move straight out of white supremacist talking points, for example, he falsely equated Robert E. Lee and George Washington — both were slaveowners — and suggested that removing Confederate statues will inevitably lead to removing statues of actual American leaders.  The big difference between Lee and Washington, of course, is that Washington founded our country, while Lee is a traitor and tried to destroy it.  For not simply an American politician to say such things, but for an American president to attempt to blur the distinction between traitorous, racist, secessionists and the man who led the American army to victory over the British, is so far beyond the pale of reason, not to mention basic moral acceptability, that even as I write this I find myself mentally spluttering at the does-not-compute-ness of what is happening in 21st-century America.

I think it is a reasonable concern that Trump may be trying to distract people from his association with neo-Nazis and white supremacists by emphasizing the Confederate statue issue, and trying to spin this into “merely” a North-versus-South conflict.  But Charlottesville made it impossible for the president to ever disentangle these various sordid strains of anti-Semitic, racist, and revanchist movements as a valued part of his base.  When Donald Trump celebrates the statues dedicated to the glory of the Confederacy, he effectively celebrates the cause that was the proximate reason for Heather Heyer losing her life in Charlottesville.  The planned removal of the Robert E. Lee statue was the reason the right-wing hate groups were there.  They are the reason her killer was there.  

When we have a president who has put himself on the side of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and neo-Confederates — enemies of not only common values like racial equality and religious freedom, but of our democratic system of government itself — then Trump supporters can no longer lie to themselves about what the president really stands for.  The president has given them a white backlash, and then some.  He has lent his support to the idea that the white backlash needs to be a white tidal wave, a white rebellion, that can absurdly encompass even avowed enemies of America — so long as they are white.  

At this point, supporters of Trump cannot credibly claim that they are not also supporting the most extreme vision of white supremacism imaginable, because Trump has lent these groups his presidential seal of approval.  Either they begin to examine their values more closely, and turn against the president, or become complicit in a level of widespread race hatred, anti-Semitism, and anti-democratic outbursts that we have not seen for decades.  It really is time to re-consider whether the diminished status they feel is because African-Americans are doing so amazingly well that their average net worth is a tiny fraction of white Americans’, or because the economy and political system have been systematically failing ALL working and middle-class Americans, no matter the color of their skin.  Perhaps this won’t happen.  Instead, maybe Jeet Heer at the New Republic is correct, and that “[as] long as Trump knows that most Republicans are on board, he’ll believe he’s on the right path and continue to appease white supremacists. In doing so, he and his base are ratcheting up extremism in America.”  Perhaps things will get even worse.

But I think this severely underestimates the possibility of arousing what I like to think of as a “patriot-lash” — Americans recognizing that allowing such hatred into our politics will destroy this country.  Because after Charlottesville, anyone in the middle or on the left can no longer not fully grasp the stakes of stopping this presidency in its tracks, and sending Trump home to Trump Tower for good, either via forced resignation or impeachment.  People like just-fired presidential advisor Steve Bannon think that fanning the waves of racism will win them elections, by firing up white voters.  I’m hoping this is much too static a take on American politics, and too cynical a bet on the consciences of people not wired in the same way as the execrable Mr. Bannon.

The President's Incompetence, Not North Korea, Is the True Nuclear Threat

In the days since the president’s extemporaneous “fire and fury” comments about American willingness to annihilate North Korea if it so much as issued threats against this country, North Korea has. . .  issued threats against this country.  Donald Trump, in turn, has continued to employ incendiary language against the communist nation.  He’s averred that his “fire and fury” comments may not have been strong enough, and has indicated that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” to take action.

The most positive spin on the president’s behavior is that Donald Trump is trying to bluster North Korea into backing off its nuclear program; but the risks of this strategy paint it in an overwhelmingly dangerous light.  The idea that a president thinks that he should conduct nuclear diplomacy via impromptu remarks is chilling.  And he recklessly ignores or downplays the possibility that the North Koreans might take his belligerence as an indication of an impending U.S. attack, which could plausibly lead to the North Koreans shooting first, with horrendous consequences for its Asian neighbors, and possibly the U.S. as well.

Likewise, we can take no comfort in the possibility (to give him a generous benefit of the doubt) that the president may have put great care into his nuclear-themed tweets before sending them, for the overwhelming reason that it would be grossly incompetent for any president to conduct nuclear diplomacy via tweet to begin with.  With their imprecision, ambiguity through brevity, and unvetted messaging, the president’s use of tweets puts the fate of the world into the hands of his literal hands, the early-morning scamper of ornery fingers over his smart phone of choice.  It is an indication of how much this president has lowered our collective expectations that this fundamentally incompetent choice for communicating thermonuclear messages isn’t a subject of greater outrage.  

While the president has been on his belligerent tear, White House advisors have issued mixed messages about U.S. intentions, from Defense Secretary James Mattis echoing Trump’s general sentiment that the U.S. could destroy North Korea if it chose, to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson trying to assure people that there’s nothing to worry about and that Americans should sleep soundly.  This offers no comfort that either this president or his administration as a whole has a strategy for defusing the North Korean crisis.

But is there even a North Korean crisis?  North Korea has been working towards acquiring nuclear capabilities and the ability to threaten the U.S. with those capabilities for decades now.  A corner has surely been turned as they near achievement of ballistic missiles that can strike the continental U.S.  Yet the U.S. has relied on the principle of deterrence in its dealings with other nuclear powers throughout the nuclear age: the idea that any nuclear strike on the U.S. would receive a response in kind, making the price for initiating an attack too high for an adversary to contemplate.  So why is the North Korea situation any different?  Well, as Jeet Heer explains in the New Republic this week, it may be better to ask ourselves if we have a Trump crisis rather than a North Korea crisis, as he argues that the stand-off with North Korea is stable, whereas our president is not.

When you enter the rabbit’s hole of possible hostilities with North Korea, you quickly reach a few conclusions.  The first is that a preemptive attack against North Korea is madness, because it runs the risk of provoking a nuclear response from North Korea, if not against the U.S., then against other countries in Asia.  Even in the extremely unlikely possibility that a U.S. attack were able to eliminate every last nuclear weapon they possess, the North Koreans have thousands of conventional weapons, including artillery, with which they could inflict mass casualties on South Korea, including the capital city of Seoul, which lies close to the north-south border.  

And this is just to speak of a conventional U.S. attack on North Korea.  For the U.S. to use nuclear weapons in a preemptive attack would upend our world in terrifying ways.  Nuclear weapons have not been used since the end of World War II.  Use of them now would eliminate a taboo that has helped keep our world safe for the last 70 years.  It is not hard to see other nuclear powers like Russia, China, or India feeling emboldened to use them.  U.S. first-use of nuclear weapons would mean sanctioning mass murder as a legitimate tool of war.  For at the heart of things, nuclear weapons, in their total indiscriminacy and inevitable civilian casualties, are completely immoral.  They are a tool of terror, and their very existence is an affront to our shared humanity.  Even nuclear deterrence, the basis of our country’s nuclear strategy, shares this immorality; though it may keep the peace, it does so through the notion of terror, and the threat of mass murder.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a president who has made violence towards various groups in our country a key part of his appeal and persona should feel deeply attracted to the power of nuclear weapons, with all the terrorizing potential they embody.  Whether or not he consciously realizes the fully horrifying implications of this fact, there seems a very real possibility that the president’s recent tough talk on North Korea is intended only partly or incidentally for North Korea’s leaders, and more to show his supporters how tough he is.  This New York Times piece explores the supportive reaction many conservatives have had to Trump’s rhetoric.  In their commentary, you can also get a sense of the ignorance and derangement of many Americans in matters of war and peace.  They speak casually about death and destruction; evince a lack of worry because the state they happen to be living in is too far inland to be hit by Korean nukes; and view North Korea as some sort of existential threat to themselves, personally.  Paranoid and bloodthirsty, they indeed seem well-matched to this president's disposition.

Finally, it's vitally important not to separate Trump's mishandling of the North Korea situation from the downward spiral of his entire presidency.  His belligerence towards North Korea is likely related to that fact, as he seeks to distract us from his incompetence in so many other arenas.  War is always the last refuge of political scoundrels, and Trump is the biggest political scoundrel of our time.

After Charlottesville, No Quarter for Trump and His White Supremacist Ilk

The president’s reluctance to call out by name the benighted instigators of yesterday’s protests and violence in Charlottesville — the white supremacist, neo-Nazi organizers who have attempted to re-brand themselves as a cuddly “alt-right” — may be the most important single fact to emerge from these awful events.  As Talking Points Memo is noting, politicians, commentators, and the public will wait in vain for Trump to truly denounce these forces — because the truth of the matter is that the president wants their support, and supports them in turn.  This degree of malignant politics on the part of the president is hard for our media and political system to digest: but the faster we all digest it, the better.  Facing head-on the poison that Trump has fed into our politics and society is a basic requirement for building up sufficient popular resistance and the political will to nullify his ability to do further harm.

The other overriding observation to make of this weekend's events is that a rancid, violent far-right is feeling emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, and is creeping out of the darkness to test its strength.  It’s important for displays like the one in Charlottesville to be met with overwhelming counterprotests, with sheer numbers to repudiate their hateful message and deter the possibility of violence by these fools.  On a more specific note, it’s also crucial to take a close look at the behavior of the police during the Charlottesville violence.  Many are pointing out the contrast between peaceful Ferguson protestors having been met with the full force of armored vehicles and police in tactical gear, whereas white protestors who were armed and, in some cases, apparently impersonating National Guard members appear to have received quite different treatment.  This is not to say that a militarized police response would have been the appropriate way to handle things, but to learn from the ways that subtler forms of racial thinking might inform the government’s response to certain types of protest.

As I wrote yesterday, the right-wing protestors have also done a great job all on their lonesome of displaying in irrefutable fashion the lines of commonality between white supremacism, anti-semitism, worship of the Confederacy, and Nazism — lines that they in fact appear to cultivate and embrace.  Their very ideas, when viewed in the clear light of day, are self-defeating.  What sort of anti-American ass would think the Nazis are cool?  I am still barely able to comprehend the deep stupidity and hate behind these people, if I am even able to comprehend it at all. 

A decent number of Republican politicians, including some pleasant surprises like Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch, have criticized the president’s uncharacteristic display of being tongue-tied when it comes to naming the white-wing extremists behind the Charlottesville violence.  But we need to remember how very low the bar has been set here.  Opposing Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists isn’t a controversial position, but in truth within the compass of the most basic definition of American patriotism.  This isn’t a hard call.  And as Ed Kilgore reminds us, it is a long tradition in American politics for racist politicians to paint themselves as moderates by being able to point to the pointy-cloaked, obvious extremists like KKK members.  In this light, the following from a post by Dan Rather today seems particularly spot-on:

“We are once again peering into an abyss, and I am heartened by the response from across the political spectrum. But we cannot merely cleave the most grotesque incarnations of this national malignancy. We must recognize that the seeds for yesterday's carnage can be found in attacking voting rights, demonizing immigrants, the coded words of anti-Semitism, and all the other more subtle forms of discrimination and false victimhood. They are just as dangerous as what was on display in Charlottesville, perhaps more so because they are allowed in ‘polite company’ — with a knowing wink and a blow of the proverbial dog whistle.”

It has always been a good time to push back on the issues Rather notes, but today, and in the weeks and months to come, they’re more important than ever.  This also feels like as good a time as any to demand Trump fire advisors associated with white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, most notably Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and that freaky Sebastian Gorka dude.  

I Guess Home Depot Wasn't Having a Sale on Pitchforks, Too?

What is happening in Charlottesville is a disturbing situation, but a clear victory for the importance of free speech rights to letting our country hash out its conflicts. Free to fully advertise their ideas, these neo-Nazis and white supremacists have in a single blow destroyed their effort to re-brand themselves as the "alt-right"; have demonstrated how they find grotesque and unforgivable inspiration in the ideas and rites of the Third Reich; have shown how these Nazi ideas flow seamlessly into more American-bred white supremacy; have created indelible images of their fundamental American-ness and, frankly, inherent evil; have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the symbols of the Confederacy, its flags and monuments, are not benign ways to honor ancestors, but are vectors for continued racism and hatred; have provoked a backlash across our country that sooner or later will send them scurrying back under their rocks.

Leaked Transcript Sheds More Light on President's Indifference to Australia Refugee Plight

The recent leaks of the full transcripts of Donald Trump’s post-inaugural conversation with the prime minister of Australia has shed further light on the new president’s fundamental inability to see beyond his own narrow interests, let alone to allow facts to interfere with his judgments.  As The Hot Screen noted back in January, early accounts of President Trump’s conversation with Malcolm Turnbull revealed the president’s opposition to a refugee deal with Australia that had been reached by the Obama administration.  Under that arrangement, the U.S. would consider taking in over 1,000 refugees from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries being held by the Australians.  The Australian approach to these immigrants had been brutally efficient: essentially, to make examples of them so as to deter further migrants.  And what better way to do this than to ship them far away from Australia, to purgatories on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus?  Only these purgatories turned into hell for these unlucky refugees, as documented by New York Times writer Roger Cogen, as a combination of crappy conditions, hostile natives (no, really), and a sense of hopelessness decimated their physical and emotional well-being (Cohen has just published a follow-up piece that discusses the leaked transcript, his take on the conversation between the two leaders, and the refugees' current situation).

The U.S.’s planned acceptance of these refugees (following proper vetting) was an act of mercy, not to mention a way for Australia’s government to slip out from the shadow of such a ghastly, inhumane imprisonment of innocents.  Alas, the transcript of the conversation shows Trump insisting, by a determined circular logic, that these refugees must be “bad” because they’re in prison.  He demonstrates absolutely no understanding of their actual circumstances, no shred of compassion, no willingness to compromise for the sake of a shared humanity.  Instead, he worries over the political repercussions of letting in immigrants when railing against this population in general was central to his campaign, and he frets that these wretched migrants might contain the next Boston Marathon bomber.  These are chilling words to hear from the most powerful man in the world.  We have seen nothing since January to change a general impression of the president’s meanness of spirit, obsessive focus on his personal fortunes above all else, and lack of any sober grasp of a president’s life-and-death responsibilities.

Our President Displays An Unhealthy Obsession with Nuclear Annihilation

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States.  They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen ... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

In trying to sound like a sheriff out of a Western from his childhood (“best not make any more threats”), Donald Trump appears to have become the first president in U.S. history to threaten nuclear annihilation in response not to an attack from another country, but in response to another country simply threatening the United States (a bluff already called by North Korea, which has subsequently put out statements about firing missiles around the island of Guam).  It’s the Bush-era pre-emptive doctrine gone apocalyptic, uttered extemporaneously by a man who also appears to have adopted the grandiose language (“fire and fury”) of his North Korean antagonists.  And if I were to get a little speculative, I would hazard that they were the words of a profoundly insecure man who suddenly finds himself at the helm of a vast nuclear arsenal, the very power of which lies in its ability to blast and contaminate all life on our planet: godlike, inhuman, incomprehensible.  This sense is supported by his tweets the next morning about U.S. nuclear capabilities, which seemed to reinforce the idea that he’s become enamored of American death-dealing capabilities.

Will Trump’s belligerence stumble us into nuclear war, or will his generals restrain him, as so many commentators keep insisting?  Senator Lindsey Graham’s remarks last week on NBC’s Today show are not reassuring.  Noting that there’s a “military option to destroy North Korea's [missile] program and North Korea itself,” he went on to say, “If there's going to be a war to stop them, it will be over there. If thousands die, they're going to die over there, they're not going to die here and (President Donald Trump) told me that to my face.”  Let that last sentence sink in for a few moments.  Donald Trump is already contemplating the idea of a nuclear war against North Korea, and has reached the conclusion that the casualties would be confined to Asia.  My fear is that to a damaged personality like Trump’s, a sense of being able to externalize the damage of a nuclear war away from the United States puts it in the realm of something he might actually contemplate starting.

As I’ve said before, Donald Trump is Exhibit Number 1 in the argument for ridding the world of nuclear weapons.  There has always been the possibility of a nuclear war happening through chance or miscalculation, or of course through the acts of an irrational leader.  Well, we have an irrational, unfit leader, and it’s all too easy to see how this might lead our country, and just as likely, North Korea, into miscalculations with literally genocidal consequences.  And God help us if Donald Trump sees starting a war as a way to assert his power in the midst of a downward-spiraling presidency, not to mention exorcising whatever demons of insufficiency have driven him to bully and cheat his way through life, and now into the presidency.