America Just Got Kicked in the Kavanuts

If there is one very cold comfort to be had from the shit-show confirmation and approval of a likely would-be rapist, perjurer, and far-right partisan to the highest court in the land, it’s that it clarified for millions of Americans that this country doesn’t have a Trump problem so much as a Republican Party problem.  Under the cover of a fake FBI investigation, GOP senators were happy to approve a justice whose personal character, much like the president’s, rendered him unfit for high office.  There’s a good case to be made that it was Brett Kavanaugh’s very Trumpian performance before the Senate — in particular, his testimony following that of Christine Blasey Ford — that cinched the deal.  In this, you can see the outlines of a deeply disturbing synthesis between traditional Republican goals embodied in a justice like Kavanaugh — aggrandizement of the rich, repression of the poor, disenfranchisement of left-leaning voters — and a Trumpian style that rouses resentment, rage, and fear to push forward the traditional goals while rewarding the base with defeat and humiliation of women, minorities, and other purported enemies of true Americanism.

Pieces by Josh Marshall and Adam Serwer this week argue variants of this point, and should not be missed if you want to understand some basic facts about our current political reality.  Serwer in particular has been on fire this week — I can honestly say that if you’re not reading him, you’re missing out on critical insights into American politics, both generally and on more specifically on the Kavanaugh front.  A piece titled “The Guardrails Have Failed” makes the chilling case that the Kavanaugh nomination embodies that GOP’s dissolving of the lines between the three branches of government, and shows a belief in party over country that points the way to great abuse of power to come.

Equally crucial, though, is Serwer’s recent article about the role of cruelty in Trumpian and GOP politics, which gets at a central fact and conundrum of where we are.  Drawing on the history and social dynamics of lynching, he makes the case for the central role of cruelty in the ability of Trump and Republicans to advance their agenda.  As Serwer puts it, “It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”  As if this weren’t bad enough, he ties this cultivation of rage and punishment to Trump’s re-definition of the rule of law:

Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Serwer’s peroration capture something of the depravity and challenge of our moment:

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Serwer doesn’t say so explicitly, though he hints at it in his final line, but this presidential-level appeal to the worst impulses of his supporters not only rallies support against those deemed un-American, but provides a near-perfect cover for the monied interests of the GOP to continue to fuck over and otherwise exploit the rank and file GOP voter.  The Kavanaugh appointment captures this perfectly: as much as Kavanaugh will be sure to vote to restrict abortion rights and the suffrage of minorities, he’s as sure to screw over working Americans through anti-union rulings and other votes on behalf of corporations and bosses at the expense of everyone else.

I started off by saying that, if nothing else, the Kavanaugh nomination process made it that much easier to see that our true problem is not just Trump as our president, but a GOP that both absorbs and elaborates on his awful politics.  Of course, while it is good that the truth is now more evident, the nature of this truth is awful almost beyond words.  One of the two major American political parties has embraced anti-democratic attitudes and policies, whether it’s the encouragement of hate against political opponents, protection of the president against overwhelming evidence he received the assistance of Russia to gain the presidency, or the continued push to make it harder for ordinary Americans to vote.  The party has embraced these policies not only as (bad) ends in themselves, but as a way to further strengthen its grip on power and prevent the other party from using democratic means to win elections or implement progressive policies.

It may be that I am still raw from the success of the Kavanaugh nomination; but it seems to me a warning that worse is still to come in terms of the GOP’s willingness to gin up hatred and revenge to drive forward their agenda.  They started the Kavanaugh nomination at least pretending he was a moderate, judicious guy; they pushed the nomination through by having him go full Trump, as recounted by Josh Marshall.  This lesson will not be lost on the party as a whole.  While even a short while ago I might have thought this to be a good development on balance — both for revealing the lack of daylight between Trump and the GOP, and for the way it might promise to let the mass of citizens see the true nature of the party — I am less secure saying so today.  The forces being mobilized are primal, violent, and incompatible with the mutual tolerance and respect a democracy requires.

Equally unsettling is that so far, the GOP sees this path as a way to win, no matter the damage to American democracy.  And this gets us to the heart of the crisis: how does the opposition beat back this threat, and regain control of the narrative of American democracy?  I am less sure than before that the revenge politics of Trump on behalf of a minority of the population will naturally provoke an overwhelming backlash, or that the backlash isn’t without its dangers.  It seems more important than ever that the opposition engage in a frank, far-reaching discussion about the nature of American democracy, both in order to understand our goals, and, perhaps just as importantly, to describe the peril in which the contemporary GOP places the American experiment.  It seems that whatever set of rules the Democrats have been playing by have been an abject failure, not only in terms of the party’s loss of power, but also as measured by its lack of success in protecting our democracy itself.

Beyond the specifics of what Democratic goals should be, it is far past time that they embrace a messaging strategy that puts openness and democratic consensus as the center of what the party stands for.  This would stand in vivid opposition to the Republicans’ policies of bait and switch, in which working Americans are continually sold out and democracy itself undermined.  Such an approach should include a determined effort to describe GOP policies for what they are.  As a ballpark example: while the events of the Kavanaugh nomination are fresh in everyone’s minds, we need to talk about the way the president and the GOP essentially embraced an anti-woman, pro-rape worldview in which women are always lying about being raped and immoral men can continue the practice with impunity.  This Republican rhetoric threatens women with real-world consequences, and stands as an irrefutable example of the second-class citizenship to which they’d relegate half the population. 

This issue also opens up into the crucial question of how to counter the GOP’s embrace of cruelty and mass sadism as a political tool.  Any successful strategy will hit back hard against this meanness.  It is safe to say that beneath the surface contempt and cruelty one finds the weakness and cowardice of those who can only feel good if someone else is feeling bad, and who only make their views known when they are surrounded by sufficient numbers of their cohort to provide cover or anonymity.  Donald Trump is a coward; his followers are cowards; and Republican officials are cowards.  I don’t know if we can’t get them to feel shame, but I do know that behind their viciousness is a fundamental weakness, and we should exploit this fact in all its facets, whether in trying to understand how they can be persuaded back into comity with their fellow citizens, or how to make a larger argument about the invalidity of their politics.

This last point sometimes feels to me like the biggest challenge of all: how do you fight anti-democratic hate in a democracy?  How do you continue to hold out an open hand to citizens who’d deny you full participation in that democracy?  A hard burden and challenge has been placed on the democratic opposition, whose goal is not simply to rip the country to shreds so long as their cohort ends up feeling good, but knitting the country together and reversing the forces of inequality, greed, and insecurity that have allowed Donald Trump to emerge like Mothra from the radioactive cocoon of the GOP.  How do you fight back without embracing the same mentality of zero-sum competition and treating your opponents as illegitimate?


This Nomination is Just Plain Kavanuts, Part II

Yesterday, I noted the basic persuasiveness of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  But due to their initial refusal to recommend an FBI investigation of either her or other women’s accusations against Kavanaugh, GOP senators last week deliberately turned matters into a he said-she said confrontation between Ford and Kavanaugh.  So what of the judge’s unequivocal denials of Ford’s claims of sexual assault, freshly delivered with great sweaty dollops of partisan rage, self-pity, and spite?  To me, the matter of Kavanaugh’s heavy drinking in high school and college is crucial in determining how we assess this question.  If he was indeed a serious drinker, described as “belligerent” when drunk by various classmates, then this increases not only the probability that the events Ford describes did occur, but also the possibility that Kavanaugh has a distorted memory or even blind spot regarding the events.  When placed against Dr. Ford’s keenly remembered traumatic memories of that night — particularly her 100% certainty that Kavanaugh was the assailant — the judge’s lack of memory based on heavy drinking begins to appear quite troubling.

This is why it’s so important that Kavanaugh deny such heavy drinking, and why he now finds himself caught up on the perjury front as well, having already testified to only moderate drinking but currently facing an erupting woodwork of naysaying former classmates.  This suspicion is only confirmed by the White House’s apparent restriction on the FBI from investigating his drinking as a young man now that some sort of limited investigation is under way. 

Of course, Kavanaugh’s capacity to even slightly reasonably deny memory of assaulting Dr. Ford based on (unacknowledged) blackout drinking is a level of plausible deniability laced with sociopathic assholery that should make any civilized person retch.  Apart from suggesting some yet-unmade Black Mirror episode in which criminals game future mind-reading tech by erasing memories that might incriminate them, it also suggests that while Kavanaugh might not remember the events, he knows at some level that they could have happened — making his blanket denials self-serving in a way that should be unacceptable for any legitimate Supreme Court Justice.  As Talia Lavin observes at the Huffington Post, it is a sort of upside-down immaculate conception argument for this self-proclaimed virgin-until-after-college, and one that uncannily ties into the profound misogyny and immorality of the anti-abortion forces who, alongside the economic royalists, long for his elevation to the highest court in the land.  If the rape of Dr. Ford had succeeded — and even some Kavanaugh supporters accept she was indeed assaulted, only by someone other than Kavanaugh — and she had become pregnant, it is a real doozie to consider that this judge and his ilk would have opposed her seeking an abortion to end such an unwanted pregnancy.  In this theoretical, we can see the closed circle of a mindset that would allow a woman no control over her own body, either in sexual or reproductive terms, but merely views her as a vessel for any man’s domination.

This Nomination is Just Plain Kavanuts, Part I

I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Donald Trump selected Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice based on advance knowledge of the sexual assault allegations that have come to haunt his nomination process, but doesn’t it feel crudely inevitable that this was bound to happen?  That Trump, a man caught dead to rights on tape casually describing how his wealth and power allow him to grab women by the genitals, would nominate a Supreme Court justice with the same privileged and cruel sexual contempt for womankind?  The Republican Party’s decision to rally around Trump in 2016 despite such accusations clarified the GOP’s adherence to an official worldview best described as paranoiacally patriarchal, in which sexual assault is swatted away as always a lie by a woman in league with other women in a conspiracy to wrongly undermine men.  The fact that many Republicans privately acknowledged the likely reality of the charges against Trump suggests that the GOP’s unspoken adherence is actually to a sadistic, American-men-first view of the world, in which sexual assault is no big deal.  The paranoid tale of a female conspiracy thus has a double purpose: it’s a way to discredit the accusations, but also acknowledges and counteracts a suppressed reality that women have great cause to band together to tell the truth and act against the evils committed against them.

This “conspiracy of psycho bitches” is at the heart of the GOP’s present defense of Brett Kavanaugh.  To a neutral observer, Christine Blasey Ford appears to be telling the truth, and to have no good motivation to lie.  Unlike Judge Kavanaugh, she has no record of being any sort of committed partisan.  In fact, from her profession as a psychologist, backed up by her testimony and the cautious way in which she revealed her story to Senator Diane Feinstein, we can infer that she’s a judicious and cautious person.  For the Republican Party, though, there is only one truth: that any woman claiming sexual assault against a conservative politician must not only be lying, but be part of a vast feminist-liberal conspiracy to undermine men everywhere that is positively Pynchonian in its extravagance.  And so this template is absurdly applied to Dr. Ford, despite the facts of the case.

Just as the GOP’s embrace of Donald Trump in 2016 was equally an embrace of misogyny, it also showed the degree to which its desire for power overrides the most basic moral considerations.  A president who would support GOP goals was worth it, no matter his personal predilection not only for pussy grabbing, but for scamming students, stiffing contractors, and running businesses into bankruptcy.  Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court would exponentially increase the GOP’s hold on power in this country, by cementing a conservative majority that could potentially derail any future progressive legislation on behalf of workers, voters, and of course women.

In this way, the appeal to a feminine conspiracy is essential to an anti-democratic power play that could see future Court rulings that not only outlaw abortion, but also restrict voting, eviscerate unions, and blunt efforts to regulate and reform an economy that aggrandizes the wealthy at the expense of working Americans.  Put another way: a profoundly anti-woman perspective that essentially renders them as second-class citizens — for how else do you describe a person whose claims of mistreatment are automatically discredited on the grounds of being part of a vast anti-male conspiracy? — is in turn being used to clear the path for a man who will not only work to keep men on top, but to make nearly all of us, men and women both, second-class citizens as well, unable to exercise democratic governance through majority rule.

Making Sense of Why the Blue Tilt Is Turning Tectonic

Apart from his willingness to articulate grand historical takes on what’s happening in U.S. and international politics, I’ve long admired Andrew O’Hehir’s weekly Salon pieces for their unsentimental and realistic attitude to his topics.  Calling him “contrarian” might be tempting, but it’s almost never accurate; rather, I’d say his interest in getting to the root of the matter leads him to places where undue optimism and sometimes hope are either irrelevant or just another part of what keeps us from perceiving the truth.

I said O’Hehir is “almost never” a contrarian with one particular essay in mind — his argument back in May 2017 that the Democrats would not be capable of pulling off a “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms.  Writing in the wake of Democratic defeats in Georgia and Montana special elections to the House of Representatives, he pointed to the infighting and general disarray of the party as precluding a comeback in a year and a half, as well as structural impediments like gerrymandering and the sheer number of Democratic Senate seats playing defense in the next election cycle.  His enumeration of the challenges seemed spot-on, but the declaration of hopelessness so far out from November 2018 seemed to me somewhat exaggerated.

This past weekend, though, he’s done a very O’Hehir-ian thing and written a critique of that very prognostication.  Viewing the polls and other evidence that the Democrats may well take back the House and perhaps even the Senate in the 2018 midterms, O’Hehir first zeroes in on the way that the female backlash to Republican rule is driving a Democratic resurgence.  Acknowledging his own slowness in anticipating and grasping this sea change, he notes how this development has also caught many other progressive men unawares as well.  His diagnosis of what may be happening is intriguing: that “the ingrained and often unconscious reluctance among many male voters to support a female candidate is being burned away in the Trump era.  Or to put it another way, most men motivated by sexist impulses have been driven into the camp of the most overtly misogynistic political figure in modern history, and the rest of us have been forced to reckon with reality at last.”  

This take reminds me of the argument I’d made about Trump’s effect on racism: that many white Americans, seeing the racial vileness of the president, were beginning to reflect on their own racial attitudes as a form of reaction to his repellent racism.  O’Hehir seems to be arguing for something analogous (and perhaps more persuasive) on the gender front.  Faced with a president who embodies and displays a shameless misogyny, American males are effectively being made to choose sides, Trump having rendered unpalatable a formerly acceptable middle ground.  

The larger lesson here is that, in times of political upheaval, we can’t anticipate the full forces of reaction and counter-reaction, or what forms they might take: reality is really complicated, for Pete’s sake!  Yet we live in a media environment in which one of the meta-messages is that we’re being kept fully informed of all developments at all times, and that nothing will ever take us by surprise.  This blow-by-blow focus results in a sort of “can’t see the forest for the trees” syndrome, in which we are led to forget that which is not so easily measured and the fundamental dynamism of reality.

So it’s actually deeply hope-inspiring but also darkly amusing that O’Hehir and many, many other observers would not have anticipated a female backlash to Trump large enough to shape politics in 2018 and beyond.  We saw early signs in the women’s marches right after Trump’s inauguration; what has ensued since then, of course, are massive waves of organizing and political commitment by countless women, who through their actions have changed what we can count on as our fundamental assumptions about politics, both in 2018 and beyond.  Meanwhile, Donald Trump has continued to remind everyone on a daily basis of his fundamental misogyny, fueling resolve to reject the president and the party that enables him.  Even in a worst-case scenario, in which female candidates were somehow widely rejected by the electorate, is there really any question that this wave would stop?  That women would simply pack up their electoral toolkits and go home?  We certainly wouldn’t expect men to give up; why would anyone expect this female revolution not to continue even if the current wave doesn’t reach as high as one could wish?

Other events since O’Hehir wrote his initial article have shown that fears about Democratic inertia and infighting have proven to be overstated.  In some ways, this is because more optimistic outcomes have been coming to fruition — enough progressives are seeing the Democratic party as a vehicle for their political platforms that they are transforming it from below, forcing more centrist and established politicians to make way or modify their own politics in a more progressive direction.  Intriguingly, O’Hehir notes that the Democrats are now beginning to look more like they did in the decades between World War II and the Reagan administration: a party that embraces a wide variety of political views, yet maintains cohesion partly by allowing space for its conflicts to be aired and debated.  He writes that: 

For close to 30 years, Democrats have operated on the principle that intra-party conflict had to be suppressed — indeed, that ideology itself had to be suppressed — and the progressive left had to be purged or silenced, because those things were electoral poison. It took an embarrassingly long time for the party to figure out that the neoliberal, anti-ideological orthodoxy of the Bill Clinton “New Democrat” years (in which issues of economic justice, for instance, were deemed not to exist or not to matter) was the real poison. I think we can conclude that era is now over, thank the goddess.

There are enormous and perhaps even irreconcilable conflicts within the Democratic coalition - will the party be able to hold on to those in the 1% earning bracket when it ends up raising their taxes in order to fund the college education of middle-class kids? - but in the age of Trump, there are also unifying beliefs that it would serve the party well to highlight.  I am thinking in particular of a fundamental commitment to the Constitution and American democracy, a commitment that is only highlighted by the current president and the GOP’s embrace of his authoritarian tendencies.  A common adherence to the rules and norms of American democracy can unite red state senators and democratic socialists, and outcomes based on these rules are more likely to gain acceptance across the party.  Even if you don’t like a result, you are more likely to accept it if you think that your concerns were heard, and that the process for reaching it was at least based on majority rule.

The party’s essential normalcy in contrast to Donald Trump’s deranged and anti-democratic tendencies also adds to the party’s general appeal. And in providing cover for the president, the GOP as a whole is deeply complicit in policies and attitudes deeply at odds with American values and the wishes of the majority. Not only does this leave the Democrats as the only “normal” American party, but it also gives them more room for maneuver, whether in terms of hashing out intra-party conflicts or putting forward more progressive policies like Medicare for all. We could also speculate that Donald Trump’s attacks on both decorum and a bipartisan economic consensus means that there is more room for ideas previously considered outside the bounds of possibility, and that Americans will end up preferring policies and ideas that build up our country rather than tear it down and tear us apart.

Finally, I think it will become increasingly clear that our concepts of what is far-left versus far-right will be increasingly viewed as far more obscuring that illuminating, as Americans realize that there is no equivalence between a “far-left” idea like universal healthcare and a “far-right” idea like mass internment for undocumented immigrants. The inequality and every-man-for-himself savagery of our dominant economic arrangements have created fertile ground for a humanistic, egalitarian backlash just as surely as it’s created the grounds for right-wing demagogues like Trump.

In Hollow Spectacle of John McCain's Funeral, A Reminder That We Are in Uncharted Political Waters

This Twitter thread by Jeet Heer is the best analysis I’ve seen about why the apparently bipartisan anti-Trumpism at John McCain’s funeral struck me, and many others, as so unsettling and inadequate to our present needs.  Heer argues that while the funeral was meant to contrast the “old establishment” with Trump’s behavior, this is actually a “false dichotomy,” since it was the old establishment itself that created Donald Trump.  He points to Trump as the inheritor of the GOP’s race-baiting Southern Strategy, and to McCain’s choice of proto-Trump figure Sara Palin as his vice presidential candidate in 2008.  Crucially, he also cites the Iraq war, mainstreamed Islamaphobia, the 2008 financial meltdown, and the Obama administration’s non-prosecution of those responsible for the financial crisis.  In suggesting that things would be better if elites like them were back in control, those attacking Trump at the funeral undermined their own claims by ignoring their clear responsibility for getting us where we are.  As Heer humorously and chillingly puts it, “The American elite really thinks they can subtweet their way out of a fascist crisis. It's not so easy, my friends [. . . ]  We've had decades of elite failure, elite impunity, and elite coddling of racism, elite promotion of anti-intellectualism (think of climate denial). Are we surprised that the end result is President Trump?”  For good measure, Heer also asks whether, given high-level tolerance of corruption for literally decades, it is “Any surprise they would take the next step & elect, with foreign help, Trump?”

But even more importantly than contextualizing the hollow resistance on display at McCain’s funeral, Heer’s concise summary reminds us that one of the under-appreciated aspects of our current political crisis is the basic difficulty the American public faces in fully understanding its nature and scope.  To some extent, of course, this is just how reality goes: it’s always a complicated, contested thing, and establishing an illuminating framework within which people can better understand their experiences and knowledge is itself a political task necessarily subject to constant dispute and revision.  But Jeer’s diagnosis of the McCain funeral dynamics helps demonstrate that our public discourse remains cluttered up, if not outright dominated, by an establishment perspective that has lost both its way and its legitimacy.  The dominant storyline in the funeral coverage, after all, accepted that those politicians who spoke at McCain’s funeral possessed standing to criticize Trump.  Jeer’s analysis, by contrast, shows us that there are real limits to relying on elites who are complicit in his rise to effectively critique or counter him.  Proceeding as if they do possess such standing obscures a more accurate assessment of our current plight: that in many ways, the American citizenry is in uncharted waters, without an acceptable status quo to return to, and so with no choice but to create a new political and economic order.  

Donald Trump offers one explanation for where we are and a related way forward (although as many have pointed out, his way forward looks a lot like a return to a past that’s both retrograde and imaginary).  America has problems because its establishment has sold out the American people (many grains of truth), but the way the establishment has sold us out is by privileging immigrants and minorities over the American people (racist lies).  Thus, the solution is to elect Trump, give him maximal power because no one else can be trusted, and to implement a white supremacist agenda that will, if nothing else, ensure that white Americans at least feel like they’re better off politically and economically than Americans of color.  This white supremacist agenda is doubly important because of Trump’s economic policies, a mishmash of trade wars that drive up costs for consumers without commensurate compensation in wages or job creation, and a tide of pro-plutocratic policies which will raise not all boats but just the yachts of the already rich.

But the main point I want to make here is that this explanatory framework for what’s gone wrong with the United States and what the fix is has a significant presence in our current political discussions, via Donald Trump’s election as president and his massive media presence and expertise.  It jostles up alongside a more mainstream, establishment perspective that is critical of Trump, yet has a vested interest in ignoring the untenable nature of pre-Trump America, let alone its role in bringing Trump to power.  Between these two major frameworks, the American public receives only a distorted, partial view of our collective situation.  Many people understand something has gone wrong, but we are daily presented with news and perspectives that continue to confuse more than clarify.

On the positive side, there are plenty of writers and news organizations that are zeroing in on the political and economic injustices and inequalities that provide a more accurate view of our collective lives.  There are also lots of politicians, pretty much all on the progressive side of the spectrum, who appear to recognize the true stakes and challenges we face.  But at this moment, it feels important to note how structured by bad and discredited ideas our national dialogue remains, and how important it is to win this fight to accurately define our American reality.

Neo-Nazi Riots in Germany Highlight the Danger and Moral Bankruptcy of Far-Right Movements Worldwide

For The Hot Screen, there is no news in the last week more unsettling and requiring the spotlight of international condemnation and outrage than the neo-Nazi-led protests and assaults of immigrants in the German city of Chemnitz.  Purportedly meant to protest the alleged killing of a German man by a Muslim and a Syrian refugee, these activities are clearly intended to demonize and physically intimidate Germany’s immigrant population in order to increase the power of extremist political parties, at the cost of human rights and the rule of law. 

Whatever legitimate cultural and economic concerns may exist in the wake of Angela Merkel’s decision to let in a million refugees from parts of the world ravaged by civil strife have been overshadowed by a disproportionate and vicious response that hearkens back to German behavior in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Once again, scapegoating of minority populations is the order of the day.  And so a small but growing group of citizens in the country that started both world wars, implemented the Holocaust, and found part of itself occupied for 40 years by a brutal Soviet overlord are now convinced that all their problems are the fault of. . . a tiny minority of Muslim immigrants, most of whom only entered the country in the past few years?  These citizens apparently believe so much in the sanctity and superiority of German values that they now hunt these immigrants in the streets in order to beat and bloody them, or attend rallies alongside those who participate in such activities.

One can only imagine the moral turpitude of any German who, faced with his or her country’s history, looks at the model of Nazism and thinks, “Hey, that sounds pretty good to me.”

This deranged and violent response by German protestors ironically defeats the participants’ own claims that the German race is special and needs to exclude outside influences.  If ever a country needed to let in fresh cultural air and extirpate notions of national purity, Germany is that country.  It’s significant, and may offer some hope, that these protests are happening in East Germany, which until 1990 was not part of modern Germany and its democratic institutions and culture, and is a part of the country that suffered Soviet occupation until 1990.

The bad faith of the German right is in plain view.  The demonization and, on the farther fringes, outright violence against primarily Muslim immigrants, tells the story.  Faced with a group of people that the German state itself has allowed into the country, the right turns a political issue that might be resolved by normal political dialogue and decision-making into an existential threat to the German state — not with the intent of fixing the problem, but of exasperating it with the goal of transforming the nature of German society and politics itself in an illiberal direction. 

In the case of Germany, a simple mental exercise helps clarify the situation.  Let’s say that a new German government decided to completely reverse the liberalized refugee policies of recent years, and went so far as to expel the million newcomers.  Is there any doubt that this would hardly satisfy the nativist forces who claimed to want this outcome?  Rather, it seems more likely to me that these forces would continue hunting for new enemies to demonize and blame for their troubles.  Once they run out of Muslims, what religious minority might they target next?

The attempt to paint all immigrants as violent based on the acts of a few significantly parallels President Trump’s strategy to do the same to Latino immigrants to the United States.  There is a logic to the contemporary right-wing, white supremacist playbook that reaches now to both sides of the Atlantic.  It’s a right-wing populism that at its core defines a legitimate, deserving us (aka “The People”) in opposition to a parasitic, undeserving other.  In Germany as in the United States, the relatively weak position of immigrants in comparison to the power of the state and its citizens is rhetorically reversed, so that the immigrants are seen as all-powerful and the vast majority as weak and under dire threat.

What we are witnessing in Germany is not just a challenge to that country, but a challenge to the United States as well.  We lost many thousands of lives extirpating fascism from Europe during World War II, and the idea that the inheritors of this sick world view are now on the march, even in small numbers, should resolve all Americans to do what they can to support the great majority of decent and democratically-minded Germans against this threat.  Without any legitimate or helpful way to intervene directly in a challenge that Germans must resolve on their own, there is one vital means by which Americans can support the resistance against this Teutonic illiberalism: vote out Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, and stop their efforts to impose a nativist, anti-immigrant vision on the United States.  The far right in Germany should not be able to look to the United States for moral support of its retrograde agenda; instead, Germans should be able to look to the United States as an example of a democracy that’s stronger for its multiculturalism and humanitarianism, not weaker.

Do Democrats Just Need to Dream As Big as Trump?

In an opinion piece at Crooked.com, Tim Miller notes Donald Trump’s “expansive view of the possible,” a quality that led the president to place “no artificial limits on his aspirations in business or in life,” up to and including the presidency.  In contrast, Miller observes, opponents of Trump lack any commensurate imagination in opposing him, viewing the president as somehow invulnerable.  Nowhere is this divide more telling or dangerous, he notes, than in our current moment, in which “the writing of [Trump’s] demise is on the wall and it is past time his critics started acting like it.”

Miller concentrates the majority of his critique on fellow Republicans who have failed to stand up to the president, though he damningly notes that the Democrats appear to have largely decided to keep their powder dry for now in the hope that the midterms bring a hoped-for blue wave.  This, along with his observation that not a single likely Democratic presidential contender has thrown him- or herself wholesale into gumming up the ability of the Senate to get any work done as means of slowing down this presidency, provide a good summary of what lack of imagination looks like on the Democratic side of the aisle, for good and for bad.  The Democrats are largely committed to resolving the crisis of the Trump presidency at the ballot box in November and beyond, and by avoiding the substance or reputation of being a purely obstructionist party while still opposing Donald Trump on most or nearly all matters of substance.

What Miller suggests with his “lack of imagination” critique is that the Democrats may have failed to understand that their attempt to thread the needle in their opposition to Trump ignores or downplays two factors: that unyielding opposition might in fact weaken the president and/or strengthen the Democratic Party, and that this presidency has now arrived at a point where Trump is much more vulnerable than his opponents suppose him.  In fact, this new, weakened phase of the Trump presidency should encourage the Democrats to re-think and stiffen their opposition to the president.  In many respects, this is due to the specific nature of his vulnerability: the mounting and irrefutable evidence that Donald Trump has been, and continues to be, enmeshed in criminal enterprises of diverse scope, from conspiracy to break election laws, to using his charitable foundation for personal gain, to accepting the assistance of Russia to gain the presidency.

The Democrats’ fears of being pigeon-holed and punished as the party of "no" have been amplified by their ongoing internal struggle over identity and direction; the risk of being seen as obstructionist logically rises along with a lack of a clear agenda being advocated.  But I think the Democrats have greatly underestimated the room for maneuver Trump has given them to adopt policies and arguments that can unite the vast majority of Democrats, a great many independents, and even non-Trump-worshipping Republicans.  For instance, in his subversion of the rule of law and attacks on voting rights, the president has opened up great swathes of uncontroversial American values for the Democratic Party to claim as its own.  This is one area in which “lack of imagination” is a decent critique for why the Democrats are not moving more forcefully to identify themselves as the party of law and defense of the Constitution.  The Democrats may still have troubling and serious conflicts to work out, but for the time being, there is plenty of common ground on which to put forward substantive policies.

Likewise, “lack of imagination” might describe the failure so far to press the case that the Trumpified GOP is simply no longer fit to hold power in our democracy.  Republican officials have largely compromised themselves by running cover for this administration’s law-breaking, collusion, larceny, and general corruption.  All opposition to Trump should ever and always be tied to a larger strategy to make the GOP pay for becoming indistinguishable from this absurd president.  A party that has adopted policies of voter suppression and ginning up support for white nationalism in order to maintain its grip on power until the end of time deserves only to be discredited and defeated.

Thinking imaginatively also seems like a good prescription in light of the dangers that accompany the president’s increasingly besieged state.  There’s a good case to be made that we’re entering the most dangerous phase yet of the Trump presidency.  The heartening news, though, is that Trump’s behavior to date means that his maneuvers in the coming months will follow predictable patterns.  Such predictability provides an opportunity for his opponents to anticipate and either block or mitigate the harm he might do.  At worst, putting forward a narrative of an increasingly desperate president who will do anything to save himself will provide a framework for public understanding of the awful intent of his actions, and help build a case for unyielding opposition.  At best, such a narrative will constrain the president from doing his worst out of concern for engaging in actions already painted in the public sphere as unacceptable.  At the most fundamental level, Democrats need to regain the initiative against this president, which is at odds with their deference to the Mueller and other investigations, but necessary when faced with a president who is willing to undermine the rule of law in order to save his own skin.

If Climate Change Doesn't Exist, Then Why Does Big Oil Want Government Money to Protect Against It?

In an article titled “Big Oil Asks Government to Protect It From Climate Change," the Associated Press reports on plans to spend billions in public funds on infrastructure intended to protect the oil industry from climate change, primarily in the form of seawalls and other barriers off the Texas coast.  The grotesquerie of the single most culpable industry in the matter of global warming now benefitting from taxpayer money as it seeks to evade the consequences of its contributions to this crisis should be apparent to anyone not blind to scientific fact; it is, in fact, totally enraging, depraved, depressing, and, above all else, unacceptable.  

The hypocrisies alone should be enough to qualify as a new form of toxic gas.  The climate change-denying oil industry is happy to accept government protection for its crimes against nature, while anti-government spending senators like Ted Cruz and John Cornyn happily back the disbursement of massive federal funding.  But beyond the hypocrisy loom profound and interconnected questions of justice and the best way to spend finite public resources addressing climate change.

There should be no question around this basic principle: if a company has contributed to the denial of human-caused climate change while benefitting economically from the destruction of our planet’s environment, then it should receive not a single penny in public benefits to protect it from the consequences of its immoral actions.  This position would be the right one under any circumstances, but what seals the deal is that oil companies are some of the most profitable, if not the most profitable, companies in the history of the world.  Certainly in the United States, they have long evaded paying anything near the taxes they should.  

Rather than benefitting from public largesse, the fair situation is clearly the reverse: oil companies should be taxed at a maximal rate that will pay for public efforts both to deal with the effects of climate change and to arrest its progress.  The question of how to prioritize spending is a disputed one, even among those who understand that climate change is human-caused and have made addressing climate issues their life’s work.  But the idea that we should spend money on protecting the industrial sites that are ground zero for our climate crisis — the production of oil, gas, and other carbon fuels — should be given extremely close scrutiny and treated with deep skepticism.  Certainly it doesn’t make sense to protect all our oil infrastructure if it’s necessary to wean ourselves away from oil at the quickest possible pace?  Shouldn’t there be a discussion about which facilities should be closed down?  Every dollar spent on projects merely to mitigate the effects of climate change is a dollar not spent to fight the sources of climate change, whether it be construction of new renewable energy facilities or massive reforestation projects that will help sequester carbon.

Predictably, advocates of the crazily expensive sea barrier projects along the Texas coast point to national security, that last refuge of scoundrels and contractors, as the argument-ending reason why the government just needs to spend this money: otherwise, they say, the economic consequences for everyone will be devastating should a storm knock out enough of the country’s oil processing industry.  But while this raises legitimate concerns about the extent we need to protect the industry while we transition it into obsolescence, it also conveniently short-circuits a debate about who should pay for this protection.  It feels as if the public is being blackmailed into giving the oil industry what it wants, when this industry helped create this crisis to begin with.  But are they really in a position to blackmail the rest of us?

I suspect there is a far larger public appetite than is currently acknowledged for making the oil industry pay, both literally and morally, for its crimes against humanity and our planet.  It seems absurd that anyone should be profiting off a business whose regular side effect is to degrade the ability of current and future human beings to live.

Can Public Banks Help Re-Establish an Economy That Works for the Majority?

The New Republic’s Sarah Jones is reporting on how citizens in Los Angeles will be voting on a ballot initiative about whether the city should be permitted to create a public bank.  She provides a concise overview of what public banks are and what they do.  But don’t feel confused if you’ve never even heard of them: only one — the Bank of North Dakota — exists in the entire United States.

As with a couple other economic reforms we’ve discussed recently — ending stock buybacks and requiring that workers have a place on company boards of directors — two contradictory thoughts come to mind.  Like these other proposals, public banks seem like common sense, but clearly face an uphill battle against status quo thinking that the private sector and the free market will take care of all the public’s needs.  What’s particularly intriguing about all three of these reforms, though, is how they challenge mainstream thinking about the economy in a way that exposes how preferential to wealthy interests our current economic arrangements are, and how such public-minded reforms can actually move us in the direction of actual free(er) markets.  

Since the 2008 financial crisis, big banks have clawed their way back into respectability and ensconced themselves ever more firmly in the economic firmament.  Too big to fail has become an accepted reality of the financial sector, with entities like Citigroup having successfully resisted moves to chop them down to less systemically-threatening size.  Since the election of Donald Trump, we’ve also seen the rollback of various Dodd-Frank requirements that sought to protect the economy from another financial meltdown.

Despite these unfortunate developments, though, 2008 and its aftermath have left an indelible impression on the public consciousness, and offered living proof, that there is nothing sacrosanct, let alone inherently robust, about our privatized banking system.  In this context, public banks might be seen as a necessary addition to the financial sector that would provide stability the next time our profit-hungry banks overreach and threaten to take us all down with them.  In terms of competition, too, it’s hard to argue that more banks would somehow not be a good idea.  And after the countless instances of banks exploiting their customers by misrepresenting mortgage terms and gouging them with random bank fees, it’s laughable to say that there’s not a need for a public-oriented banking sector to balance out private finance’s propensity to screw ordinary Americans.  That would give consumers a real choice, more so than asking people to grapple with whether Wells Fargo or Bank of America would abuse them the least.

In a parallel fashion, ending stock buybacks and putting workers on company boards also directly address glaring imbalances in how rewards and power are distributed in our economic system.  By doing so within the existing framework, and in fact in ways that arguably would strengthen it, they demonstrate that our current arrangement is merely one among many that are possible.  And as with the banking sector, the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath of slow growth and increasing inequality put into question the fairness of buybacks and exclusion of workers from business decisions.  It’s clearly time to try something else, as more extreme versions of the same old thing fail the basic test of logic.  Co-determination and public banks also have the great and necessary virtue of reforming the economy by making it more democratic; in doing so, they'd also contribute to the revitalization of American democracy, which will only return to health when economic matters are brought more firmly under its scope.  Political and economic justice are two sides of the same coin. 

Mafia Don

Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general during the Obama administration, has an opinion piece in The New York Times that cuts to the heart of the import of Michael Cohen’s claims that he made hush money payments to two women at Donald Trump’s direction.  Katyal writes that, aside from the specific crime of violating campaign laws that appears to have been committed, these claims also means that Cohen and Trump were in a conspiracy to break the law.  And conspiracy, as he notes, is a particular and serious crime in and of itself.

Describing why two people who might have received six-month sentences for each selling a marijuana joint would both receive five years of jail time if they conspired to sell a single joint, Katyal writes:

The answer has to do with the harm to society when individuals agree with one another to commit criminal acts.  These acts are seen as possessing a higher level of moral culpability and are also more dangerous.  Two people can often do more harm than one.  And those criminal economies of scale are sometimes supplemented by psychological dangers.  People tend to take more risks in groups than alone.  For these reasons, the law has always treated conspiracy harshly. 

I'd push this thinking somewhat further, though: conspiracy can be seen as requiring forceful punishment because it is not only a scaled-up effort to break the law, but also both an agreement that the prevailing law itself does not matter and that the conspirators de facto agree to adhere to a different set of rules.  In essence, the conspirators tacitly set themselves up as a subversive, quasi-political entity that challenges the legitimacy of the prevailing legal structure.

This might seem a gross overstatement when we’re talking about two amateur pot dealers who work together to move a single joint - why dignify them as revolutionaries when they’re plainly just criminals working together, any supposedly political dimension to their act ending with their single sale?  However, I think this perspective begins to hold a lot more water when we think about the case of a powerful person like the president, whether in the Cohen payoff matter or in his general attitude toward the law.  For the president to engage in a conspiracy, and to then either deny the conspiracy or say that no law was broken, is for him to very much argue that he lives by a set of rules that he has established and has effectively invited his supporters to agree to, not by the law as we commonly know it.  And when the president does this, is it really much of a stretch to say that he has set himself up in an insurrectionary manner in opposition to our legal system, not just breaking the law but setting up an entirely new framework as he sees fit?

It’s not surprising that the president’s criticism of the practice of “flipping” witnesses against higher-value targets comes in the context of his “no conspiracy to see here” pushback.  Not only is flipping how conspiracy charges are often made to stick, but even more basically, it’s a commonly used, legal practice in American jurisprudence.  Yet, out of the blue, we now behold the president speaking with the perspective of a mob boss, talking about what a shame it is that the feds have a way to convict high-value criminals.  In raising the possibility of a world in which the government is not allowed long-established legal norms to bring lawbreakers to justice, we can see the president tracing out an alternative system of law for our country.  And conspiracy is the key concept here, because for the president’s subversion of the law and its replacement with a criminal-friendly perspective to work, he must recruit other political figures into agreement with this deranged and authoritarian perspective.  The political dimensions of conspiracy, when conducted by the president, become quite glaring.

Thinking about conspiracy provides a basic insight about the nature of this presidency.  We talk so much about the president’s disregard for the law, but that’s only the half of it.  He’s not simply breaking the law, but, due to the conspiratorial acquiescence of his base and of GOP politicians, attempting to substitute a new legal framework on our country.  Its principles are really very simple: if the president does it, it’s legal.  Also, if a wealthy and/or powerful person does it, it's also legal, unless the president doesn’t think so, in which case it's illegal until proper arrangements can be made to allay the president’s concerns.

At a rally here in Portland a couple months ago against Trump’s immigrant family separation policy, one of the speakers reminded those assembled that the word “conspire” literally means “to breathe together.”  In doing so, she was urging the protestors to playfully adopt the idea of "conspiring" against the bad actions of the Trump administration, as a collective action we were taking by literally all showing up at a particular place and sharing the same morning air.  The elegance of this idea, and its ironic reminder that our democracy is no conspiracy at all but a society-wide understanding that we hash out our differences and make a nation through open discussion, is the antithesis of the president’s suggestion that prosecuting little fish to bring down kingpins is the height of unfairness.  We don’t need to pretend that our legal system is at all perfect or not in need of major reforms to recognize that the president’s remarks don’t pass even the most basic tests of good faith or bullshit detection.  When Donald Trump talks like a mafia don, we hear two things: a very powerful man threatening to impose his laws for our own, and a very ridiculous man clearly trying to save his own ass with transparently self-serving arguments.

Trump's Terrible Tuesday

At various points in the last two years, many of us have had the feeling that the tide was finally turning against Donald Trump, only to realize a day or a week later that he had weathered a self-inflicted wound or external catastrophe that would have ended any previous presidency.  However, I do think the one-two punch of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s conviction yesterday has done real damage to this presidency, both in and of itself and in its promise of still more to come. 

Although neither event directly involves collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to secure the presidency for Donald Trump, both are the result of the special counsel’s investigation of such allegations.  It is highly likely that prosecutors have acted against both Manafort and Cohen not simply because they discovered crimes incidental to collusion, but because they see pursuit of these crimes as key ways to move forward the collusion investigation.  In the case of Manafort, conviction on eight of eighteen charges means that the government has now secured real leverage against him in the larger investigation.  Likewise with Cohen, his guilty pleas mean that the government has created an enormous incentive for him to cooperate on the collusion front — cooperation that Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, has already indicated will be forthcoming (though it remains unclear if an official cooperation agreement has yet been struck by the two sides). 

In a broader sense, the way that yesterday’s events move forward the collusion investigation demonstrate how the broader collision between the steady grinding forward of our legal system and the president’s ongoing attempts to defame and discredit the investigation will likely play out in the coming months.  The special counsel's team is following a methodical legal strategy aimed at proving its case as to what happened between Trump and Russia.  Yesterday, we got a high-impact view of this strategy in action.  Whatever Donald Trump’s attempts to discredit the investigation, Americans still by and large believe in the reality of guilty pleas and guilty verdicts; in this sense, the events of yesterday are like an antidote to Trump’s daily river of propaganda.  Indeed, according to Politico, officials close to the president are expressing worry that these developments will “lend new credence to the Mueller probe.”  But beyond public opinion and the battle of perceptions, yesterday also reminds us that we do still live in a country of laws where wrongdoers are sometimes punished for their bad deeds.  To me, this makes the possibility of charges against more administration officials, up to and including Trump, likelier than ever.

But it gets even worse for the president when we focus specifically on the Cohen plea, which includes claims that the president directed him to make illegal payments to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.  This is a separate issue from Russian collusion, and it is incredibly serious for the president.  As many people are pointing out, Trump is now essentially an unindicted co-conspirator to Cohen’s actions, the same ignominious status that Richard Nixon achieved during the Watergate investigation.  Trump, in other words, is one short step from being accused of a crime himself. 

The illegal payoffs (illegal because they constituted illicit campaign contributions by Cohen) gain greater significance beyond their basic criminality when we consider how very close the 2016 election was, and the very probable impact news of Trump’s affairs with these two women would have had on the number of votes he received.  Only 30,000 votes spread across three states decided the last election; it certainly seems possible that stories of these affairs could have turned it in Hillary Clinton’s favor.  Even if this question is unresolvable, it points up the seriousness of such illegal campaign contributions: it was not just the amount of money — which was a drop in the bucket compared to overall expenditures by and on behalf of the Trump campaign in 2016 — but the way illegal activity was conducted to avoid serious, even fatal, damage to the campaign.  Such allegations threaten the very legitimacy of this presidency.

Overall, the damage to the president from yesterday’s legal developments is so significant because it suggests far greater harm still to come.  It’s important, though, to step back and reckon the consequences not just for the president, but for the GOP as a whole, because of this basic fact: by providing unquestioning cover both for the president’s efforts to derail the Russia investigation and for his corruption more generally, the GOP has made itself complicit in those efforts.  Now, as the reality of the Mueller investigation makes a quantum leap forward, and as the president’s corrupt acts on his way to the Oval Office are further exposed, the GOP will be increasingly tainted by that wrongdoing.  The overall Republican response so far only verifies this theory, since the strategy, in talking points and in practice, has simply been to double down on calls to end the Mueller probe and to try to discount the significance of yesterday’s events.  The GOP has so closely tied itself to Trump’s narrative that it has no choice but to continue on, lashed to the mast of this deranged presidency as it crashes forward into stormier seas.

The GOP’s implication in Trump’s corruption isn’t helped by the charges announced yesterday against Representative Duncan Hunter of California; according to The New York Times, these include “allegations that he spent tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds on family trips to Hawaii and Italy, private school tuition for his children and even a $600 airline ticket for a pet rabbit.”  What makes this worse for the Trump-GOP death embrace is that Hunter was the second congressman to endorse Donald Trump for president; the first, Chris Collins of New York, was also recently indicted on insider trading charges.  However the collusion investigation plays out, the idea that Trump and the GOP are mutually enabling massive corruption is beginning to achieve irresistible narrative force.  This is obviously bad news for the Republicans in the midterms and beyond.

Finally, I’m still not sure what to make of reports that Republican officials are worried that these new developments give the Democrats more ammunition to seek impeachment of the president, but I do find them noteworthy.  Until now, the GOP’s line has been that impeachment is a great issue for them in the midterms, as it serves to rile up their base to come out and vote in order to protect Trump.  At the same time, many Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have downplayed impeachment as a possibility, seeming to agree with the Republicans’ assessment that it’s a net winner for Republicans as a campaign issue.  At just a basic level, though, it feels like the momentum is shifting when Republican officials actually worry aloud about impeachment as a real possibility, rather than an abstraction they can use to gin up votes.  Pelosi’s response to yesterday’s news — she released a statement that “Cohen’s admission of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money ‘at the direction of the candidate’ to influence the 2016 election shows the president’s claims of ignorance to be far from accurate, and places him in even greater legal jeopardy” — seems to strike a politically savvy position.  When the legal system is bearing down on the president, letting the implications of his complicity and criminality work their way into public consciousness arguably does more to damage the president and help the Democrats than inserting impeachment talk into the mix.

McGahn's Cooperation with Special Counsel Shows Not Everyone's Top Priority is Saving the President's Skin

Two articles out this past weekend from The New York Times detail the cooperation provided by White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II to the special counsel investigation, as well as the revelation that Trump administration officials had been previously unaware of the extent of McGahn’s assistance.  There are now reports that this news has the Trump administration in a tizzy, evidenced as well by the president’s Twittered weigh-in on the articles and escalated attacks on Robert Mueller’s team (in particular, referring to the government prosecutors as “thugs”).

It’s remarkable that a White House counsel has given such extensive testimony in an investigation against a president.  According to the Times’ reporting, McGahn has provided information that the investigators would not have known otherwise, such as Trump's attempts to fire Mueller.  We don’t know the extent of his other testimony, but it seems quite possible that there’s much more.  This is incredibly bad for a president who, pretty much beyond a shadow of a doubt, colluded with a foreign power to gain the presidency, has worked to protect that foreign power’s efforts from full discovery, and who has also worked non-stop to protect himself from the repercussions of his treasonous actions.

The account of McGahn’s rationale for fully cooperating with the investigation is also noteworthy.  Not only was he acting in accordance with the strategy of openness advocated by Trump’s original outside counsel, but McGahn also apparently feared that he might be made the fall guy for some of Trump's illicit activity.  Thus, he acted out of a basic instinct for self-preservation that can be sourced, at least in part, back to the environment of distrust and disloyalty created by the president himself.  McGahn also seems to have been aware of the legal risks that non-cooperation posed to him and other White House counsel.  This raises the intriguing point that the president may have been undercut by the White House attorney possessing at least some minimal sense of lawyerly ethics.  This, in combination with McGahn’s professed belief that he serves the presidency, not the president, suggests a professional roadblock to the president’s scorched earth attempts to derail and discredit the Mueller investigation.

These Times pieces are remarkable for the picture of incompetence they draw around this president and those who advise him.  The idea that not until the first Times article was published did they know about the extent of McGahn’s testimony is mind-boggling.  Did no one really not stop to consider what McGahn might be saying to investigators until now?  The reports of surprise on the part of the president and his staff suggests a massive blind spot, and raises the question of what other gaping holes in their defense they’ve left open for the special counsel investigation to ride through.

This massive oversight on the part of Trump and his staff brings into sharper relief than ever a fundamental dynamic of the president’s frantic and transparent attempts to escape the consequences of his various bad actions.  Even as the president attempts to subvert not only our justice system, but arguably our entire political system to hide his guilt and stave off punishment, the system itself is chugging methodically along in a way that increasingly appears set to unleash catastrophic consequences on this president.  Donald Trump has created the highest stakes both for himself and our democracy: he has bet his defense on burning down our country’s institutions, but the price of failure increasingly means devastating legal repercussions for his team and likely himself, not to mention toxic political fallout for the Trump-enabling GOP as a whole.  McGahn's testimony and the amazing failure of this administration to fully anticipate it reminds us that this president really has bet the farm on blowing up our country in order to save himself.  If we can manage to win the political fight against him, and hold his authoritarian efforts at bay, then we might still hope to see justice prevail.

When Reality Rains Lemons on Your Parade, Turn Those Lemons Into Even Sourer Lemons by Blaming Everyone But Yourself

Can we call Trump's cancellation of his Trump Victory Parade a win for the good guys?  Or was this just a self-inflicted wound that finally had to be staunched due to excessive financial bleeding?  Be you pacifist or warmonger, Americans of all stripes largely agreed that a military parade celebrating nothing but the childish whims of a non-veteran commander in a chief would be a supreme waste of taxpayer money, and an insult to the armed forces’ actual responsibilities.  In light of the president’s rock-bottom popularity and mounting peril in the face of the Russia probe, this exercise was always what it looked like: a ploy by an unpopular and unfit president to wrap himself in the sacrifice and bravery of American servicemen and -women.

Once the estimates of its cost escalated from $12 million to $92 million, reality at long last rained on this parade.  This being the Trump administration, the president has done what he can to extricate himself from this stupid idea with his usual grace and tact, falsely blaming the high costs on attempts by Washington, D.C. officials to gouge the federal government.  You need look no further than the fact that only 4% of D.C. voters cast their votes for Trump, and that its mayor is an African-American woman, to see that a sour, race-baiting response by the president to the demise of his parade plan under its own weight was pretty much inevitable.  We also need to give a shout out to the president's claim that if there's a cheaper parade in the future, the money saved can be spent on buying more fighter jets.  Huh?  Even the most die-hard Trump supporter should feel a bit queasy about this delusionary sense of how the government "saves" money: propose outlandish, expensive ideas; cancel them; claim the non-existent costs as massive savings for the taxpayer.

Just as the parade began as a scam that claimed to celebrate the military while in reality aggrandizing the president, so it ends as a scam, with the president using the cancellation to propound insane budgetary ideas and blame anyone but himself for this predictable fiasco.

The Devil's Apprentices

In the last few days, I’ve read several articles that serve up amusing, schaden-freudy takes on the way Donald Trump has spawned imitators who are now using his own media-savvy tactics against him; check them out here, here, and here.  The proximate cause for these pieces is the heartburn/brewing crisis in the West Wing caused by former Apprentice star and presidential staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman publishing her memo and dropping secret recordings of White House interactions in quick succession over the last week.  But these observers note that not only Manigault Newman, but Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti as well, represent this trend of "mini-Trumps."  Of course, with Manigault Newman, you may have the most distinct instance of the phenomenon: a person who not only has learned to emulate Trump’s tactics, but at a deeper level seems to share many of his darker character traits.

I’ll admit it: on a gut level, the idea that Trump has both created (in the cases of Manigault Newman and Cohen) and inspired (in the case of Avenatti) opponents who are able to throw him off his game and potentially do him real damage is deeply satisfying.  In his article on the phenomenon, Josh Marshall refers to them as Trump’s “nemeses,” which I think playfully captures some of the surreal justice of these figures rising up to smite the president.  But it’s in the strong sense that we are watching a Godzilla versus Mothra battle of nuclear fallout-spawned titans that we begin to understand that no matter who wins these battles, the American people are certain to lose.

If it hadn’t been clear when our attention was focused solely on Trump, it’s come into focus now: those who embrace and evolve strategies of media manipulation and information warfare can really only use these tools to destroy, never to build up.  They might or might not be able to beat each other, but their scorched earth tactics and personal aggrandizement are antithetical to the consensus-building and mass participation necessary for healthy democratic politics.

And yet, in the spectacle of their demonic clash, it’s difficult to look away from the fireworks, the raw animus, the pure drama.  The pieces I've read all draw clear parallels to the mechanisms of reality TV.  Ultimately, these are tactics meant to draw viewers and build ratings; while there’s no denying their magnetic power, they get us nowhere good as a country.  Confusing matters in the case of all three of the “mini-Trumps” I’ve noted are extremely serious matters of public concern in which they're embroiled, whether it’s Cohen’s knowledge of illegal activities by the president, Trump’s use of campaign funds to pay off Avenatti’s client Stormy Daniels, or the fact that Trump is all too comfortable using the “N” word, as alleged by Manigault Newman.  These hard stones of substance end up conferring legitimacy on the debased tactics of these three, providing cover for their primary goal of self-promotion and, for Manigault Newman and Cohen, self-exoneration.

Avenatti raises the most worrisome concerns by far.  He’s suggested interest in seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, which is both deeply insane and also uncomfortably plausible given his success to date as an anti-Trump trickster-lawyer media savant.  It’s hard to see Avenatti actually winning — too many Democrats would rebel at his opportunism — but it’s believable that he’d gain some sizable following as someone who can fight on Trump’s level, the substance of his ideas be damned.  As likely, he would perform the same feat as Trump did in the 2015-16 primaries, sucking away oxygen from other candidates due to a combination of freak show appeal and publicity smarts.  This would potentially be catastrophic for the Democrats in a few ways: it would divert attention from hashing out the real policy and strategy questions that the party faces, increase the chances that the Democratic Party adopts a stance that prioritizes attacking Trump over putting forward a constructive agenda for America, and undercut the eventual nominee.

But it’s with that last point — the damage someone like Avenatti would inflict on the actual Democratic candidate for president, whether through direct attacks or simply suctioning off news coverage — that reality really begins to warp and weave in a nauseatingly familiar way.  Whether or not Avenatti runs, the Democratic nominee will still have to face Trump’s analogous ability to swim the currents of the media like a fish in water.  The big question, then, is whether Democratic politicians can figure out a way to counter Trump’s mastery of the contemporary media environment without adopting his nihilistic, manipulative, and essentially anti-democratic tactics, in which politics is alternately primal, apocalyptic, a joke, a lie, and a Darwinian survival of the Twitter fittest.

In a recent interview of media and technology guru Zeynep Tufekci, Ezra Klein discussed with her the idea that technology shapes how we perceive reality, including politics.  Television has arguably led us to see everything in terms of entertainment, with our reality show president a logical outgrowth of this tendency.  But Tufekci and Klein also talked about the fact that we’re in, or at least moving into, a world in which social media is now serving as the central paradigm for how we conceive of the world.  The nature of this new structure is both in flux and subject to debate, but ideas such as information or attention overload and a prioritization of personal and mass anger and resentment come forward as prime characteristics.  Regardless of its specific nature, it seems incontrovertible that our communications networks, and by extension our sense of how we view reality, have changed.

The basic question that I keep coming back to is this: in such an environment, is it even possible to counter the new Trumpian media approach to politics without simply becoming uncomfortably like Trump himself?  No good has come of the way we have collectively viewed politics as entertainment (a propensity that still continues, and is interacting with social media technology), and it’s hard to be optimistic that this latest mutation will bring anything good (particularly with Donald Trump as the avatar of this new dispensation).  It seems impossible for any successful Democratic presidential candidate to avoid grappling with what really are existential issues for American politics.  My nightmare is a repeat of 2016, with an “analogue” Democratic candidate never being able to break through the media frenzy surrounding a widely-despised opponent.

But I suppose It’s possible I’m worrying too much.  After all, despite her many flaws and media disadvantage vis-a-vis Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton still beat him by a good margin in the popular vote — a point we should not lose track of.  Similarly, it was Trump’s revanchist and populist message that gained him so many votes, without which his mastery of the media would have meant far less.  But then I start to think that an environment that favors lies, disinformation, and rage will always favor the candidate who seeks to break us down into a mythical past, not the candidate who runs on facts and conscious, collective change. . .