When It's a Good Thing to See the Trees for the Forest

Two recent articles from major media organizations demonstrate that we are not near to exhausting creative and proactive ways of making the threats of climate change feel concrete and understandable to the ordinary citizen.  They come at the issue from opposite sides of the spectrum, but together suggest how technology and education can help shift our perspective on local and global environmental threats.

Vox has published an overview of three tree species — the Brazil nut tree in the Amazon region, the stilt mangrove in Indonesia, and the African teak tree in West Africa — that play vital roles in keeping their ecosystems healthy and climate chaos at bay.  Scrolling visuals provide a bird’s eye view of these trees and the surrounding forests; clean, concise descriptions discuss how they help protect the environment.  It’s an unexpectedly intimate perspective on forests, giving us a fresh look at these trees and the scientists who study them.  It also does something that we could use a lot more of: remind us that there are people around the world who are as concerned about climate change as many Americans are, and that we are all part of a global movement that summons forth our common humanity and interests.  And though it is easy to be haunted by what we are losing around the world, the Vox piece reminds us that there’s still much of nature left to save; it brings a powerful sense of our larger, shared world to our computer and smart phone screens.

From The New York Times comes a bleaker but also effective use of technology to communicate what might otherwise seem abstract.  An exposé of methane leaks from oil and gas facilities in west Texas uses infrared video to show plumes of this greenhouse gas escaping into the air, alongside normal-spectrum shots in which the gas is completely invisible.  It’s like getting a peak into a hidden, toxic reality that lives alongside our own.  The fact that this gas ends up in the atmosphere, where it can be up to 80 times as effective as carbon dioxide in trapping heat, means that these haunting, sci-fi images document harms to us all, not just to workers at the facilities or residents in the immediate area.  They also convey the degree to which those who benefit from the pollutants that drive climate change rely on the unseen nature of the threat to obscure the price they inflict on the rest of us.  The Times piece gives us eyes to see what’s been in front of us all along.

These articles are a good reminder that there’s no silver bullet to informing and inspiring the public to take action on climate chaos.  Multiple and fresh perspectives are called for as we stand at the dividing line between action and despair.

Public Right to Know Should Supercharge Impeachment Inquiry

In his latest column at Crooked.com, Brian Beutler makes a couple points that nicely supplement the overall argument I made yesterday as to why an extended and broad impeachment inquiry makes the most sense for Democrats and the good of the country.  Beutler has been arguing strenuously for a broader impeachment effort, but this piece acknowledges the current state of play by suggesting a lemonade-out-of-lemons compromise: let the Democrats move forward the Ukraine-related articles of impeachment, since these involve the existential matter of the 2020 election and thus an overriding emergency, but keep open other avenues of the impeachment inquiry, with more articles to follow.  

But there’s a specific point he makes that I think strengthens what I was trying to say yesterday: if the ultimate goal of impeachment includes an effort to make the GOP pay a price for their refusal to take their constitutional responsibilities seriously regarding the president’s bad acts, then the least Democrats can do is make them vote multiple times for multiple articles of impeachment.  In this way, Beutler says, the Democrats could make it that much harder for the GOP to assert meaningful distance between any of Trump’s impeachable, corrupt acts and the party’s complicity in covering those up.

Beutler makes a second observation that also provides a great summation of why he thinks the impeachment inquiry should keep going:

Closing the inquiry with the passage of narrow articles of impeachment will be the end of the line for most if not all efforts to expose the full breadth of Trump’s abuses of power. Information the public is entitled to ahead of the 2020 election will remain indefinitely hidden. By contrast, the threat of a second Senate trial pertaining to Trump’s obstruction of Congress, his self-enrichment, his seizure of federal dollars for personal gain, his financial crimes, or for still-concealed aspects of his corrupt foreign policy would preserve the House’s lone means of obtaining new information and commanding the public’s attention to Trump’s misconduct. It might also give Republican senators pause about their intention to acquit Trump of the Ukraine shakedown in January. That vote will be relatively easy for them if they’re confident further evidence will never come to light, harder if they’ll live in a constant state of worry about what shoes are left to drop.

The prospect of making GOP senators “live in a constant state of worry” about oncoming revelations can also be described as the Democrats maintaining the initiative by rightly continuing to uncover the president’s corrupt and impeachable acts.  But Beutler’s point about the investigation making public all sorts of information that voters are entitled to have particularly caught my imagination.  Separate and apart from Trump’s corrupt acts, the public’s basic right to know what its government is doing, and why, might still emerge as one of the overarching lessons of the Trump administration.  In terms of impeachment, it’s an idea that, if wielded by the Democrats, can help refute aspersions that theirs is simply a “partisan” inquiry rather than a necessary defense of our constitutional order.

For example, whether or not you agree that he should be removed from office, it’s indefensible for President Trump to take the position that no close advisors who had dealings with him on the Ukraine plot will be allowed to testify.  The availability of information necessary to appraise the actions of our leaders is separate from whether or not Trump should be removed from office, and is a bedrock requirement of any democracy.  Beutler suggests that we need information about the president’s possible abuses to make an informed decision in 2020; the reverse of this, that without it we are actively being kept in a uninformed state, is another non-partisan point that strengthens the impeachment effort, but that also stands quite powerfully on its own merits.  If the president is innocent, why won’t he let the people who can prove it testify?  This question answers itself, but carries a democratic power separate from its foregone conclusion.  The president’s advisors ultimately serve the public, not him, and we cannot make informed decisions about our government without adequate information.  This is hardly a partisan position.

In Defending Trump, GOP Is Now Party to Plot to Rig 2020 Election

Reading the two articles of impeachment, as damning and grounded in fact as they are, it’s impossible for me to not feel the howling absence of the many other articles that could and should have been drawn up alongside this pair.  The power of these existing articles is partly responsible for igniting the imagination: solidly written and sobering, I can only speculate on what the impact would have been if there had been a whole stack of them, pages and pages of irrefutable indictment.

If impeachment has a vanishingly small chance of turning into a conviction in the Senate, it makes no sense that the Democrats have chosen not to broaden and diversify their case for why the president is unfit for office.  Even as they attempt to demonstrate a pattern of presidential misconduct within the Ukraine scandal, they are passing up an opportunity to paint a far more extensive and darker picture of the president’s pattern of corruption and catastrophic incompetence, from excusing the Russian attack on the 2016 elections and undermining efforts at defense against future foreign subversion, to profiting off the presidency and very likely bending numerous areas of foreign and domestic policy to profit the Trump family at the expense of the national interest.

Far more than the two Ukraine-related articles alone, a broader indictment would help push forward the two defenses of the constitutional order that Democrats can achieve via impeachment: galvanizing the public into opposition to Trump, and demonstrating to the public the GOP’s complicity, by defending Trump, in attempting to transform the United States from a democracy into an authoritarian regime: because authoritarianism is what we will have if the president, supported by his party, can use the power of the U.S. government to make sure Americans don’t have a free and fair choice in deciding whether to re-elect him.

I think most of us have been led astray by a basic misconception encouraged both by Donald Trump’s singular ugliness and more recently by the Democrats’ decision to pursue impeachment against him: that the president is the main source of our democratic crisis, and that removing or neutralizing him politically will resolve it.  The United States does of course face a crisis due to a corrupt and authoritarian-minded president, but it is a subsidiary of a larger crisis: that the GOP as a whole has long laid the groundwork for, and now under Trump has openly embraced, via lockstep support of every malevolent presidential action, the goal of enacting some form of authoritarianism in the United States.  Impeachment, for all my criticisms for how the Democrats are running it, has at least achieved this much: it has demonstrated that the GOP no longer functions like a democratic party in a democratic society.  It is in no conceivable way democratic for every member of a party to parrot discredited and false lines about the president’s behavior, or lies about the Democrats, and to claim that what the president said and did he did not actually do and say.  (That key defenses and lies have their origins in Russian disinformation campaigns meant to support the president and undermine the Democrats is shocking, and indeed unforgivable, given that Republicans cannot legitimately pretend they don’t know of their Russian origins.)

So the United States doesn’t have a Donald Trump problem so much as a Republican Party problem.  And this GOP problem can be summarized thusly: under Donald Trump, the Republican Party has seen the promised land, and it is authoritarianism.  I don’t believe this is the result of some vast conspiracy or long-term plan — in fact, I’m not sure the GOP would have gotten to this point without Donald Trump’s uniquely malevolent skill set and lack of scruples.  But you can’t understand where we are with Donald Trump — a president who has essentially declared his right to rig the 2020 election in his favor — without seeing that he’s only doing on a larger scale what the GOP has been doing for years now: manipulating elections across the country, via voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ensure that they win contests they should rightly lose, and to ensure that those who prefer Democrats are denied free and fair elections.  Even before Donald Trump, the GOP had been gradually backing into authoritarianism for many years.  Authoritarianism was not a conscious end goal, but the logical outcome of the sorts of policies required in order to keep winning elections based on a shrinking base of white voters and preventing majority rule from harshing the party’s mellow as it aimed to serve the interests of wealthy corporate donors.  It took Donald Trump to make explicit all the less vocalized strands of Republicanism beyond the cardinal sin of subverting our elections — the racism, the worship of military might, the misogyny, the view that the earth is merely meant to be exploited for material gain — but nothing he has done is really different from what was latent in the GOP all along.

I understand that the argument I’m making may sound extreme, or difficult to stomach.  If this is the case, I would urge you to go through the exercise of reviewing current events from the GOP’s perspective.  Imagine that you have seen the writing on the wall for years: that demographic changes plus an ideological commitment to promoting the interests of the wealthy over those of the majority mean that you are likely to no longer win the House of Representatives in coming years, or the presidency (absent an electoral college win alongside a popular vote loss).  This has already encouraged you to engage in various, escalating schemes to maximize your vote share by rigging elections against Democrats at the state level.  Now imagine that an unlikely presidential candidate captures the enthusiastic backing of your base, wins the presidency with the help of Russia, and schemes a path to victory by an outright attack, enabled by the power of the presidency, on the 2020 contest in order to secure his re-election.

As a Republican, you’ve already grown accustomed to the idea that elections are not meant to be free and fair, but are something to be manipulated and managed.  From your perspective, President Trump’s effort to enlist Ukraine in a scheme to thrown the 2020 election in his favor might be bigger and badder, but it’s not really different in kind from what the party has been doing for decades.  Also, you realize that given the nearly infinite number of crimes you are pretty sure Donald Trump has committed during his first three years in office, the GOP is basically screwed if the Democrats win the White House in 2020, or actually ever again.  After all, even if the Democrats choose not to weaponize presidential power in the manner of Donald Trump, even a more restrained approach in which the new Democratic president works with a Democratic congress to provide an accounting of Trump’s crimes will be an albatross around the GOP’s neck for a good long time to come.

From this perspective, based on calculations of power and the force of precedent, why wouldn’t the GOP go all in on a scheme that would essentially undo American democracy, potentially indefinitely?

Now, I’m playing somewhat loose with the term “authoritarianism,” which is the subject of reams of scholarship and debate and real-world studies.  Although a good case can be made that various other authoritarian elements are present in the Trump-GOP — as I noted above, from the worship of military might and misogyny to the identification of certain populations as inferior or un-American — that’s not the case I’m trying to make right now (though I’m using authoritarian in part because it does indeed wrap in those important elements.  And I will note for the record here that one of the complicating factors in being able to comprehend and thus address the threat posed by the Trumpist GOP is our lack of terms to describe what we’re experiencing, and the fact that often those terms, even when accurate (such as “authoritarianism”) nonetheless sound academic, alien, and/or insufficient. This is a big problem).  Rather, for the purpose of the point I’m trying to make about how we should think about the issues swirling around impeachment, I’m using “authoritarian” as a super-charged way of saying “anti-democratic,” because I think it gets at the immediate and pre-eminent threat posed by Trump and the GOP: Trump by his actions around Ukraine, and GOP representatives and senators by their complicit defense, are trying to deny all Americans free and fair elections in 2020.  There are obviously many anti-democratic behaviors possible, but the single greatest one is preventing Americans from choosing their president. 

Yet the Democrats, or at least the Democratic leadership calling the shots on impeachment, continues to proceed as if it is the president alone who threatens our democracy with an authoritarian nightmare.  This is simply not true: it was not true when the GOP covered for the president’s lesser yet also impeachable offenses prior to the Ukraine scandal, and it is certainly not true now, when the Senate and House GOP have become largely indistinguishable from the Trump White House in their defense of his actions, pursuing the dual, mutually contradictory tracks of arguing that the president did not do what he clearly did, and that it was 100% OK that he did it.

So we don’t face a problem of a rogue president: we face the problem of one political party desiring to bring about an end to American democracy.

The failure of Democrats to face up to or grapple with this fact has, I think, led to what I previously referred to as a fetishization of the impeachment process, in which impeachment is more or less acknowledged as doomed to stop short of removing Trump, but is nonetheless played up as a terrible, cleansing power that must be done out of a heavy heart and sense of duty, with the ultimate but never overtly stated goal of damaging the president’s re-election chances.  But if you admit that the problem is not a rogue president but what amounts to a scheme by both the president and the congressional GOP to steal the 2020 election (another unexamined angle: the GOP as a whole, not simply Trump, stands to gain from any disinformation campaign against the Democratic presidential nominee), then impeachment as currently constituted neither addresses the larger issue of GOP perfidy nor the fact that it will not prevent the catastrophic subversion of the 2020 election. In effect, impeachment becomes an excuse for an actual strategy to defend American democracy.

Lest you think I’m overstating the threat posed by either the Trumpist GOP in combination with the Democrats’ cognitive blocks to comprehending it, please take some time to read this startling and enraging Politico piece from a few days ago.  This early paragraph gives you a taste of the self-defeating mindset that seems to have taken hold of some congressional Democrats:

Democrats say [. . .] the need to remove Trump from office is so urgent precisely because he's certain to continue threatening the integrity of the 2020 election and stonewalling Congress' ability to prevent it.

Yet Democrats are only just beginning to confront the paradox that their imminent impeachment vote creates: What happens when a remorseless president commits the same behavior that got him impeached in the first place — only this time after the House has already deployed the most potent weapon in its arsenal?

“I have not allowed myself to entertain that sequence of hypotheticals,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a constitutional lawyer. “If he’s just impeached and not removed, we will definitely have to continue to deal with a lawless and ungovernable president.”

Representative Raskin is a smart guy, but the quote above is one of the most discouraging statements I have heard from a politician in my lifetime.  It’s clear that Donald Trump will not be removed by the Senate, and fully intends to continue his impeachable behavior, yet Raskin has not allowed himself “to entertain that sequence of hypotheticals”?  Raskin is hardly an incompetent; rather, he appears to be a victim of impeachment fetishization, that mechanistic worldview in which the Democrats have no choice but to roll out the mighty impeachment cannon, fire it at the president, sit helplessly by while Senate Republicans acquit him, and then run around stunned by the sublime terror of what they’ve inflicted on the nation while the president continues to crime.

Other Democrats quoted in Politico amplify Raskin’s cluelessness.  “‘Should we stop stopping speeders if they still speed?’ wondered Val Demings (D-Fla.), a member of the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. ‘When we vote, we will have done our job.  Then the Senate needs to take these matters seriously and take action.’”

“When we vote, we will have done our job.”  This is a statement that is simply not true, not when you know in advance that the Senate will in fact not “take action.”  But Demings’ quote helps us get to the basic point I want to hammer home: the duty of Democrats, both in the House and Senate, is not to impeach Trump, but to identify the authoritarian menace posed by the GOP and Trump together, and to destroy it.  The Democrats’ job is only done when they have used all means at their disposal to expose and derail this threat.

And here we get to the second cognitive failure of congressional Democrats.  Not only do they refuse, at least publicly, do identify the GOP as a whole as a threat to the constitutional order, but they refuse to treat the GOP as the illegitimate actor it has become.  In defending Trump over the Ukraine scandal, the GOP has indicated, without room for misunderstanding, that it does not believe the U.S. should have free and fair elections, full stop.  This isn’t just some minor point to ding the GOP about: this is an existential threat to the United States and to our way of life, not to mention to the Democrats’ continued viability as a vehicle for Americans’ defense of the republic.

In short, Democrats need to stop acting as if democracy in America is a pre-ordained tragedy in which they are fated to play their heroic yet doomed role via an unsuccessful impeachment effort against the president, and start using the impeachment effort to identify the twin GOP-Trump threat for the unprecedented anti-democratic movement that it is.   Anything else is dereliction of democratic duty.

Another quote in the Politico article neatly encapsulates the flaws in current Democratic thinking around impeachment:

The only way we’re going to stop [Trump] from continuing this is to convict him in the Senate and remove him from office,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), a member of House leadership.

“If this president is not held accountable and my Republican colleagues in the Senate don’t honor their oath of office and convict him based on overwhelming evidence,” said Cicilline, “we will no longer have a democracy.”

So, in other words, we will 100% for sure very soon not have a democracy, since Cicilline knows full well that Republicans in the Senate will indeed fail to hold the president accountable.  Yet, according to Cicilline, GOP senators are the only ones who can stop Trump from continuing his behavior.  Cicilline may be a member of the House leadership, but these are not the words of a leader.  While it may be fine for an anonymous blogger like myself to warn semi-hysterically of the end of American democracy, it is the responsibility of elected Democrats to actually prevent such an outcome, not attest to its inevitability.   I do not see how Cicilline’s statement is substantially any different from Democrats literally throwing up their hands and telling Americans that our democracy is dead, and that they can think of no further defense of 200-plus years of an American experiment that to date has successfully defended itself against the Civil War, the Great Depression, Adolph Hitler, the nuclear abyss of the Cold War, and the mass death of 9/11. A reality TV show host and a party full of conservative hacks were apparently too much for us to handle.

The Democrats must waste no opportunity to describe the terms of this fight in unambiguous terms, hammering home a simple and true message: Trump has attempted and continues to attempt, and the GOP continues to assist, a scheme to rig the 2020 election in the president’s and the GOP’s behavior.  Allow no daylight to exist between party and president, because effectively none does.  Subverting a national election is no different than canceling it, and in fact is arguably worse, because it gives the American people the illusion of democracy while withholding the reality.  Neither Trump nor the GOP deserves to politically survive such a crime against the American people.  Certainly there is no need to pretend that either supports our democracy, or any longer follows an oath to defend the U.S. constitution.

This means using impeachment and continued investigations to make clear that the GOP and Trump are inextricably involved in the grand crime against our democracy of attempting to rig the 2020 election, as well as the various lesser but still impeachable corruptions of the Trump administration.  Democrats must also make sure that there will be no backing down in this fight, no chance that they will ever accept the possibility, in Cicilline’s defeatist words, that we “no longer have a democracy.”  Democracy is the ideal and the weapon with which the Democrats and all other opponents of Trump-GOP authoritarianism will degrade, delegitimize, and defeat the authoritarian monstrosity of the Trumpist GOP, even in the awful circumstance that Trump manages to cheat his way to re-election in 2020. Instead of bemoaning the imminent death of democracy, the Democrats must own and communicate their intention to implacably defend and advance the constitutional order, without compromise, until the boundaries of our democracy are again re-asserted.

Apart from the justness of the cause, the Democratic leadership also needs to recognize that even if elected Democrats are not looking ahead to what comes after impeachment, rank and file Democrats certainly are, and are not reassured by what they see.  It is already deeply discouraging to read on a near-daily basis the myriad routes to victory the president can follow in 2020 by losing the popular vote but still winning the electoral college; when we face the prospect of Wisconsin being the boss of us all, it is hard not to feel physically queasy (however much we might love Wisconsin!) at the prospect of a third popular vote victory in 20 years snatched away by an outdated, slavery-abetting institution.  That such an outcome is now inextricably intertwined with the president’s plan to game the 2020 election via foreign interference requires Democratic leadership do double down on, well, leadership.  Democrats can’t expect citizens to keep fighting if Democratic officials keep insisting to us that the fate of democracy is in the hands of Senate Republicans (who most of us know will be putting party over country in the trial of Donald J. Trump) and that it’s game over once that foreordained conclusion is reached.

This is a politics of bright lines and absolutes that many Democrats are unfamiliar with, yet one they must quickly embrace.  If GOP senators plan to betray their oath of office and not fully consider the charges against the president, then Democrats need to keep the impeachment process going in ways that do maximum damage to the president and the Republican Party.  The GOP has made itself complicit in a scheme to subvert the 2020 election, and the Democrats must hammer this home at every opportunity.

The flip side to the GOP’s descent into full-time lies and propaganda in defense of the president is that the party has made itself deeply, collectively vulnerable to a democratic backlash and revival.  If we can stop Trump in 2020, if we can take back the presidency and at least keep the House, then Democrats will have the opportunity to spend the coming years not only beginning to make the economic and electoral reforms that defuse the forces of inequality and hate that are giving strength to the authoritarian GOP, but will be able to continue to expose the perfidy of this presidency and his defenders by ongoing investigations that publicize what foul deeds have been done in the name of the American people. 

Trump's Despicable Tweet About Greta Thunberg Will Help End His Presidency

In recognition of the tremendous impact that Greta Thunberg has had on accelerating a necessary global uprising to take on climate change — in her case, by directly inspiring climate action by millions of youth, not to mention millions of others of slightly older generations — Time magazine has named her its Person of the Year for 2019. Despite knowing better, I did not brace myself for President Trump’s inevitable tweet in response, and so felt unfiltered a surge of hatred towards him that is a great part of the tweet’s purpose.

Because this particular tweet is so vile — insulting a child with the power of the presidential megaphone, with all the grotesque power disparity and smashing of basic human decency that conveys — and so clearly designed to provoke a backlash, it can provide a lesson in how Trumpism works, and how we can work to destroy him and the authoritarian GOP movement he heads up. First, the sense of outrage that I and millions of people are feeling is the flip side to the tweet’s other main emotional purpose, which is to provoke from his base feelings of hatred toward Thunberg and feelings of solidarity and approval toward the president. The overall point and effect is to break the country into two irreconcilable camps: those the president considers to be his enemies, and those who are loyal and sympathetic to the president. This is the great dynamic of this presidency, and of his authoritarian impulses: to split the country into aggrieved, loyal supporters and everyone else, in the hope that his enraged base will be enough to secure his power, all the while distracting everyone from a more direct consideration of the actual issues before us and disseminating falsehoods that make actual debate difficult if not impossible. This is his one big play. It’s all he’s got: divide, distract, and dissemble.

From this perspective, we would do well to take a step back and stay in touch with a basic truth: this is a strategy rooted in the president’s weakness, not strength. He has no faith in being able to persuade, only manipulate and lie; and he lacks the support of a majority in this country. This is not to say his strategy cannot be frighteningly effective; to fight back effectively, we need to recognize its basic precariousness and origins in weakness. In this particular case, his weakness is highlighted by the fact that he has brought to bear the power of the presidency against a 16-year-old girl, which reveals that the weakness is not simply one of power but of basic morality.

It is always important to be conscious of these dynamics behind Trump’s tweets and other like pronouncements, in order to decline his invitation to tear our country in two, avoid being consumed by hate, keep our eye on the substantive issues of our time, and always remember the fundamental weakness that makes this absurd figure eminently beatable in 2020.

But seeing through the manipulation and inevitable outrage also allows us to understand that this is no ordinary tweet, but represents what can only be described as a clash of realities that Donald Trump is, perversely enough, right to be scared of. Whether he fully realizes it or not, Thunberg, and the mass mobilization on climate action she is helping to catalyze, is exactly the sort of grassroots, radical movement that Trump should fear, because these movements will scour plutocrats and autocrats like Trump out of power and into the proverbial dustbin of history. The fight against climate chaos is quickly emerging as the dominant struggle of our time, bound up with the global crisis of economic inequality, and it has the virtue of being both irreducibly real and undeniably an existential threat to human life as we know it.

In a terrific and terrifying column out this week, Paul Krugman writes of how climate denialism “was in many ways the crucible of Trumpism [. . .] Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the ‘deep state,’ they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.” Ironically but fittingly for Trump and the GOP, climate chaos is now a major reason why both will be pummeled into political oblivion, as their lies can no longer stand up to the horrifying evidence of climate disruption around the world. Substantial numbers of GOP voters, particularly among the young, now view climate change as real and as a threat. The crisis that the GOP helped bring to fruition is a wedge that can crack apart Trump’s base.

In other words, Trump’s tweet is a trifle in the face of the forces that Thunberg is helping to unleash. In fact, we can see that in fact Trump’s tweet is a weapon to be added to our collective arsenal. Whether the cruelty and stupidity of it can persuade 10 voters or 10,000 to vote against the president is entirely up to how boldly we, collectively, are able to wield it.

Oregonian Editorial Board Rips Into Sondland's Sexual Harassment Defense

It’s gratifying and also a bit of a relief to see that The Oregonian’s editorial board has written an op-ed excoriating Gordon Sondland’s response to the three women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.  Gratifying, because this is what Sondland deserves; and a relief, because I’d been wondering how much the generally establishment-oriented editorial board would respond to these allegations against our local businessman-turned-international-man-of-intrigue-and-Trump-co-conspirator.  The writers zero in on the “shallow and outlandish defense mounted by Sondland,” who they say is “trying to prove his innocence through a weird combination of conspiracy theory, smear campaign and victim-blaming clichés.”

Particularly welcome and on point is their refutation of Sondland’s argument that the women’s long delay in making their accusations somehow discredits them; as the board writes, “One of the most profound changes wrought by the #MeToo movement is that the public is finally understanding why victims keep quiet [. . .] New articles have detailed how perpetrators have used threats and retaliation to intimidate victims, making the prospect of going public not worth the hit to victims’ reputations or careers.”  As the three women’s stories involved accounts not only of sexual harassment but of subsequent retaliation by Sondland against their careers or business interests, it is easy to see how well-grounded fears of further retaliation would have inhibited making public their stories.  The Oregonian concludes by writing, “[A] defense built on insinuation, threat and old-timey notions of how women should behave doesn’t stand a chance.”  Let’s hope so.

Impeach It Like You Mean It, Part III

I think we all need to pay closer attention to the cognitive dissonance between the Democrats’ unveiling of articles of impeachment against the president on the same day that they’ve come to an agreement on the revised North American trade deal, or USMCA.  As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer writes, Democrats are “handing Trump a victory on his major domestic policy priority,” which both suggests that the impeachment is just so much “meaningless partisan theater” while also demonstrating that the president fights hard for American workers and is a great dealmaker.  It’s true that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has talked up the importance of getting this USMCA legislation passed as a way to protect more vulnerable Democratic House members — it’s an accomplishment they can bring back to voters to show they’re working for them — but I find Serwer’s points impossible to dismiss.  Whatever the merits of bolstering Democratic House moderates, to do so in a way that validates the political goals and electoral chances of the very president the Democrats assert is a threat to the republic makes little sense.  Indeed, as Serwer suggests, the only way it DOES make sense is if the Democrats don’t actually mean what they say about the threat the president poses to our constitutional order.

This is the third piece I’ve written under the “Impeach It Like You Mean It” moniker, and the ominous juxtaposition of the USMCA announcement with the release of just two, narrowly-focused articles of impeachment makes me think that the Democrats are not actually impeaching like they mean it.  Will Stancil, who’s also been sounding the alarm about the craziness of the Democrats’ support of a USMCA deal with Trump, notes that the Democrats are trying to reconcile two impulses that simply can’t be reconciled: “their irresistible desire to look sober and bipartisan by always compromising” and “the absolute objective unacceptability of Trump.”  Even if you grant the House leadership more pragmatic and tactical reasons for wanting to make a deal with Trump (i.e., to protect some House members in the 2020 election), I think Stancil gets the basic conundrum right, and it points to a basic fact that’s been nagging at me: even as the Democrats are pursuing impeachment against President Trump, they’re not actually behaving as though what they accuse him of is true.

The Democrats are right to impeach Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election in order to ensure his own re-election, but they’ve known all along that there was close to a zero percent chance that the Republicans in the Senate would ever vote in sufficient numbers to remove Trump from office.  It seems that the point of impeachment, then, is some combination of publicizing a damning case against the president that also forces the GOP as a whole to go on record as supporting his corrupt purposes, even as it results in his ultimate acquittal in the Senate; this would seem to be the reasoning behind keeping the impeachment process short and narrowly-focused.  But here’s the thing: while this strategy might work around the margins in terms of persuading some voters to oppose the president and GOP in 2020, it does nothing to actually stop the president from continuing his attempts to subvert the 2020 election: attempts that are in fact ongoing, from Rudy Giuiliani’s latest trip to Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens, to the president and the GOP continuing to propagate lies about how Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on Democrats’ behalf (which has the goal of both undermining Democrats and providing cover for the president’s ongoing subversion efforts).

It’s hard to avoid the sense that congressional Democrats have in a sense fetishized impeachment as the central way to resist Trump, as a ritual they are beholden to enact, and which will have mysterious yet unarticulated powers to stop the president’s bad behavior even if he isn’t removed from office.  But, to borrow a line from Fiona Hill, that is in fact a fictional narrative.  By embracing a method to stop the president that’s doomed to fail to stop him — because of foreordained outcome in the Senate — they’ve effectively signaled that they believe they actually have no way to stop the president.  The feeble power of this unfortunate message has already reached Donald Trump, who has continued to engage in and even escalate a range of activity that shows he considers himself above the law, from the blanket, unprecedented refusal for the White House to participate in the impeachment proceedings, to continued calls for foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 elections.  We have every reason to believe that these efforts will only escalate following an acquittal in the Senate, which both Trump and the GOP at large are likely to pass off as an endorsement of his authoritarian efforts to attack the 2020 vote.

Given these harsh realities, for the Democrats to treat impeachment as a “solemn” (in the words of Nancy Pelosi) duty that’s grave and sober and serious that must be done quickly and efficiently because it’s so damned solemn and serious begins to feel like a whole lot of mumbo jumbo; like going through the motions; like the “partisan theater” Adam Serwer described.  This president is corrupt to his core: from using the presidency for personal profit, to aligning with foreign powers to destroy his domestic opponents, he’s a walking, talking example of why the impeachment power was included in the U.S. constitution.  But in crucial ways, the Democrats’ move towards an impeachment bound to fail is proving a distraction from the actual reason impeachment is in the congressional toolbox - because, given human nature, it was inevitable that sooner or later we would have a president who wanted to be a king, and that Americans would have to figure out a way to stop him.

With removal off the table, refusing to engage in a prolonged impeachment inquiry that would expose the vast extent of the president’s criminality to the full light of day, in an effort to move public opinion firmly against the president — which will be one of the key ways that we are able to beat back the authoritarian project of this president and the Republican Party — feels very much like the Democrats lack the courage of their convictions.  Likewise, with extensive proof that the president intends to deny the United States a free and fair election in 2020, with the very possible outcome that he would be re-elected and the United States effectively reduced to the status of a banana republic, what possible reason is there to treat the president with anything but unremitting contempt and hostility?  Why are the Democrats so insistent on talking about how solemn a process this is, when outrage and indeed rage should be the order of the day?

Another way to frame what I’m getting at: what happens in January or February 2020, after Senate Republicans have used the impeachment trial not only to acquit Donald Trump but to disseminate false stories of how it’s been the Democrats and Ukrainians all along who’ve been attempting to undermine U.S. elections?  And Donald Trump continues, whether openly or secretly, to do all he can to ensure victory in 2020, from launching investigations of whoever the Democratic presidential nominee is, to inviting election interference from abroad?  What is the Democrats’ plan to protect America against Trump-GOP authoritarianism then, once the impeachment bolt has been shot and missed its target? Will the Democrats simply throw up their hands and say they’ve done all they can, or will they finally start acting like American democracy is on the line?

Leaked Emails Confirm a White Nationalist is Driving Immigration Policy

The ongoing impeachment inquiry has muffled the public impact of a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center detailing White House aide Steven Miller’s communications with Breitbart News in the 2015-16 time frame.  Based on emails leaked to the SPLC, the article describes how Miller passed on all manner of white supremacist ideas and story suggestions to a contact at Breitbart.  The communications leave no doubt that Miller is steeped in and inspired by the most hateful and pernicious ideas oozing out of the far right today.  From his praise for the Coolidge-era immigration restrictions admired by Adolf Hitler, to his treatment of the “white genocide” theory (in which non-whites are alleged to have formed a conscious and insidious strategy of breeding whiteness into oblivion), to his ready use of the everyday lingo of white supremacists, we now have evidentiary proof that Miller represents the worst of America.  

The direct line that we can draw from Miller’s race hatred to his key role in the Trump’s immigration policies means that, for all practical purposes, this administration’s immigration policy may as well have been dictated by the KKK itself.  This evidence also clarifies that the Trump administration has drawn an unambiguous line through the American polity: on one side are those who believe non-whites are racially and “culturally” inferior, and on the other are those who believe in a 21st century America where the color of your skin or your country of origin have nothing to do with your Americanness.

The SPLC report crystallized for me a basic fact that’s been hidden in plain view.  In the far-right’s hateful and unfounded claims that non-white immigrants, and indeed non-whites in general, are somehow unfit for or incompatible with American culture, they display the very moral and cultural inferiority they ascribe to non-whites.  Deranged by phantom fears, rotted by racial panic, they hold themselves up as model citizens even as their irrational hatred offers proof of the opposite: that they are everything that America should denounce and work to transcend.  They claim cultural irreconcilability between whites and non-whites, when the actual cultural chasm is between those who believe in our democracy and the common good, regardless of skin color, race, or religious creed, and those who think the Confederate flag represents freedom, racial apartheid equals justice, and being eaten alive by racism and hate is a reasonable way to live your life.

Why has Trump appointed a verified white nationalist as his immigration czar, and why does Stephen Miller still have a job in this administration?  The Democrats need to press this question and its obvious answer now and as long as this immoral and intellectually bankrupt man remains in the White House.  Beyond this, calling out and repudiating the white supremacist agenda of the president needs to be central to the 2020 election, including against the broader GOP that daily signals through silence or active support its complicity in this deranged vision for America.  The racist core of Trumpism is central to its assault on our democracy, as it identifies not only non-white immigrants but non-white Americans as somehow illegitimate members of our society.  Defending America and our fellow Americans means delegitimizing and defeating these modern-day manifestations of the Klan and the Confederacy, whether they’re coming from the sewers of Breitbart or the White House.

Sexual Misconduct Allegations Strengthen Case That Gordon Sondland Is Trump’s Mini-Me

Let’s be honest, the story of Mr. Sondland Goes to Washington has been a real roller coaster ride for a lot of Portlanders.  On the one hand, who doesn’t feel a surge of hometown pride when a local gains national notoriety?  Like I’ve said before, does it really hurt to remind America that despite the idealizing portraits in shows such as Portlandia season 1, Portlandia season 2, and really all the other seasons of Portlandia, and the great deal of truth in those glowing representations of our fundamental goodness, the city contains as they say multitudes, including the full range of human sins both mortal and venial?  

On the other hand, the guy was a key player in the president’s corrupt plan to subvert the 2020 election, so there’s that.  Intriguingly or possibly just annoyingly, Sondland’s appearance before Congress has fed two contradictory takes on his present role in the impeachment inquiry.  On the one hand, his repeated insistence that multiple White House officials, including the vice president and the secretary of state, were “in the loop” on the plan to pressure Ukraine to slime Joe Biden, has raised the possibility that he’s turning on the president he serves and breaking this whole impeachment thing wide open.  On the other, various contradictions in his testimony suggest he’s still not being honest with his questioners.  The latest story to support this take came out a couple days ago: apparently, the September 9 call on which the president supposedly told Sondland “no quid pro quo” . . . may not have actually happened?  Instead, according to the testimony of other witnesses, the EU ambassador may have omitted discussing another call a few days earlier that was far more incriminating for the president, “in which the president made clear that he wanted his Ukrainian counterpart to personally announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents,” as the Washington Post summarizes.

For opponents of the president, of course, the problem with all these contradictions and omissions is that they are steadily chipping away at Sondland’s credibility as a witness, so that even if his testimony is harmful to Trump, it may not count for much (though this can be mitigated through corroborating evidence from others).  Questions as to Sondland’s character and veracity have only been amplified in the last 48 hours with the release of an article jointly reported by Portland Monthly magazine and the investigative journalism outfit ProPublica.  In it, three women allege that they experienced sexual misconduct by Sondland, including incidents of unwanted groping and kissing, during the 2003-2010 time frame.  The three women also contend that Sondland retaliated against them afterward, such as by not going forward with business deals he had previously indicated interest in:

In one case, a potential business partner recalls that Sondland took her to tour a room in a hotel he owns, only to then grab her face and try to kiss her. After she rejected him, she says, Sondland backtracked on investing in her business. 

Another woman, a work associate at the time, says Sondland exposed himself to her during a business interaction. She also recalls falling over the back of a couch trying to get away from him. After she made her lack of interest clear, she says Sondland called her, screaming about her job performance. 

A third woman, 27 years Sondland’s junior, met him to discuss a potential job. She says he pushed himself against her and kissed her. She shoved him away. His job help stopped. 

Significantly, all three women were willing to go on the record and have their identities made known to the public (the first of the women noted above is Nicole Vogel, who is actually the founder and publisher of Portland Monthly (though she had no input into the story’s writing or editing)).  I note this because of the familiar denials and counter-allegations that have been issued by Sondland and his lawyers.  The ambassador denies the women’s accounts, and claims that they are a coordinated political attack on him.  As we have seen so many times before, including with the president himself, we are to believe that all women are simply liars and pawns, and spitefully make up stories of powerful men’s sexual misconduct to move forward sinister political agendas that seek to tear down the righteous.

Unfortunately for Team Sondland, this reasoning leads them to put forth counter-allegations that make no sense.  In a letter, Sondland’s attorney writes to the Portland Monthly and ProPublica that, “[G]iven the timing of your intended story, a reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that you are attempting to affect Ambassador Sondland’s credibility as a fact witness in the pending impeachment inquiry.”  The problem with this assertion, though, is that it is very much in the interest of opponents of Sondland and the president not to undermine his credibility, since they are relying on his incriminating remarks about Trump to move their case forward.  Sondland’s attorney then proceeds to jump the shark by writing, “Given the politically charged climate in which current events are unfolding, some might consider this to be veiled witness tampering.”  Yes, “some” people might consider this to be witness tampering — but those people would be idiots.

What Sondland and his attorney choose not to address is the actual stated purpose Nicole Vogel gives for being the first of the women to come forward with her story: to shed light on Gordon Sondland’s character.  And all three women’s stories, in which Sondland appears to be a man who feels entitled to do as he pleases without regard to morality or good sense, flesh out the picture of a man who wouldn’t think twice about assisting the president of the United States in the biggest attempted ratfucking of his political opponents since Watergate, or maybe ever.  Vogel notes how she related the “transactional” thinking described by Sondland regarding Ukraine to her own experience with the man, in which he clearly thought his interest in financially backing her launch of Portland Monthly entitled him to personal benefits beyond monetary ones.

Vogel also recounts how Sondland told her, when she was seeking his support for her magazine project, that “Portland needed people like her” and that “he was more interested in investing in me, because he felt as if Portland didn’t keep people of high ambition and talent.”  In light of subsequent events, including Sondland’s alleged misconduct toward Vogel and his decision to help the president commit impeachable acts, the idea that Gordon Sondland saw himself as an arbiter of who might be good for Portland is laughable and grotesque.  Vogel was only good for Portland while she was a potential conquest for Sondland; once that was no longer the case, she was no longer worth backing to run a business in the city. 

It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that the president and the ambassador have found their bonds strengthened not only by shared experiences as hotel owners and profanity-spewing ostentatious rich dudes, but also through swapping tales of their shared contempt for women’s bodily autonomy, equality, and dignity.  

Let the Cleansing Impeachment Waters Keep on Flowing

By some measures, the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry would seem to be fated for failure, if the end goal is to remove the president from office via a two-thirds votes in the Senate.  A CNN poll out a few days ago shows the same percentage of respondents backing the president’s removal as a month ago, even after hearings that included numerous damning details as to the president’s unfitness for office.  Crucially, not a single Republican senator has voiced willingness to countenance the president’s removal from office.

Yet not a day goes by when we don’t hear new revelations of the crooked dealings of Donald Trump and his cronies.  In the last few days, there have been two particularly important ones.  First, we’ve learned that the president was aware of the whistleblower complaint that ended up sparking the impeachment effort well before he released the Ukrainian aid that had been held back under his orders.  The importance here is that it hardens our understanding that Trump reversed his hold on the funds because he knew his corrupt plan to subvert the 2020 election had been exposed; as numerous observers have put it, “he got caught.” Second, Donald Trump has begun to deny that Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer and second only to the president in the Ukraine extortion scheme, ever did anything Ukraine-related at his orders, an assertion belied by enormous amounts of evidence.

While neither of these recent developments may seem game-changing in and of itself, they demonstrate two basic realities of the impeachment inquiry that argue for keeping the investigation going rather than prematurely wrapping it up.  The fact that new evidence badly undercutting the president’s lies and misdirection is burbling up on a daily basis means that, as a matter of basic logic, it would be silly to end the fact-finding phase in the next couple weeks.  If we were talking about insignificant details, that would be one thing — but that the president only released the aid because he had been caught is a major blow to his defense, and we should have a decent amount of confidence that more such revelations will arrive in coming days.  

The other fundamental these examples show is that the president is being forced by the weight of the facts to make increasingly implausible assertions to defend his innocence.  Yes, he lies all the time — but now his lies are reaching a point of absurdity.  If he now finds he must deny any connection to Rudy Giuliani — a falsehood contradicted by his own prior words — then we must count this as a win for the impeachment process.  There is little risk and great upside to Democrats to push him further and further into such tremendous contradictions. 

Continuing to squeeze out vital information and pushing the president to further contradict and undermine himself are two compelling reasons to not let up on the investigatory phase of the impeachment inquiry.  But there’s a third reason related to both of these: the impeachment process is getting under Trump’s skin, making him more unhinged than ever, and, I believe, making him prone to more unforced errors that can further the impeachment case against him.  Even if removal from office is unlikely, clearing a path for him to inflict serious political damage on himself through rash and self-defeating maneuvers has at least some hope of limiting his power and scope of maneuver in a post-impeachment Washington.

Which gets us to what may be the overriding reason to keep impeachment going for a whole lot longer: if and when this process fails to remove the president from office, only the most deluded would think that the president won’t redouble his lawless efforts to undermine the 2020 election.  After all, this is a man who personally pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden and his son the very next day after the Mueller hearings ended, when it was clear that the Democrats had failed in their effort to hold Trump accountable for his collusion with Russian in the 2016 election.  If it’s 99% certain the Senate will never convict Trump, due to GOP senators refusing to put country over party, then impeachment’s purpose must be to debilitate the president to the maximum extent possible.

This is also a powerful argument for expanding the scope of the impeachment inquiry, preferably to include the related territory of Trump’s self-enrichment through benefitting his personal businesses via the power of the presidency.  That there is really not a single area of policy where we can trust that he has made decisions in the nation’s interest rather than in his personal interest is the key corruption of this presidency.  As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz write in To End a Presidency, their timely treatise on the impeachment power, establishing a pattern of bad behavior is a legitimate and sometimes necessary approach to capturing the true scope of a chief executive’s malfeasance.  This seems an accurate prescription for our present situation.

Months ago, I read somewhere that the Democrats should pursue impeachment at least to demonstrate that even impeachment has been broken by our current political state, as a sort of existentially clarifying maneuver.  This felt chilling and true at the time, and perhaps even more so now that the process is underway and we see how the GOP strategy is not so much to refute the facts as to convince us that the facts either don’t exist or are the opposite of what they are.  But if impeachment cannot function as the founders exactly intended, on account of the corruption of the president’s own party holding the crucial balance of power in the Senate, this doesn’t mean that the Democrats cannot try to deploy it in the spirit in which it was designed: to stop a chief executive who poses an existential threat to the constitutional order.

And when that chief executive is aided and abetted by the lockstep unity of his fellow party members in Congress, in ways foreseen but feared by the architects of the constitution, then the Democrats act in the national interest to the extent they are able to use impeachment not just as a weapon against the president, but as a tool to expose and publicize the truth about his co-conspirators in the GOP.  The capacity to use impeachment creatively in defense of our democratic order is at a maximum so long as investigations are still underway in the House.  Once the process moves to the Senate, Mitch McConnell will not skip a beat in turning the trial phase into a war on Democrats.  The Democrats will be failing the country, and kneecapping themselves, if they don’t use their time of peak power to full advantage, or adjust the impeachment process to reflect the very slim likelihood of actually removing the president.

Everyone's Invited to the Billionaires' Bawl

So you’ve probably been seeing stories these last few weeks about how billionaires across the U.S. are discovering a vibrant new class consciousness, as the possibility grows that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders might be the next president of the United States.  It’s a sort of grotesque parody of the #MeToo movement, in which the wealthiest people in literally all of human history use their privileged status to confess personal trauma due to taxation that has not even happened yet.  

At the surface level, of course, it’s easy to see this is a straightforward phenomenon: people for whom money (and the power that attends it) is the most precious thing in the world are yowling because some of their most precious thing might be taken away (see: Gollum).  They got rich because they wanted to be rich, and the way they stay rich is to swat away any and all attempts at taxation; and so the big billionaire pushback currently underway can be viewed as the most self-interested and predictable thing imaginable. 

But even as it’s easy to make fun of all the solipsistic whingeing and whining, not all the specific arguments these fired-up plutocrats are making are equally specious, even as they’re tainted and rendered various degrees of insincere by their obvious self-interest in keeping every last penny.  In fact, the power of some of their counterpoints can be seen in the fact that the ideas behind them have held sway in our society for decades now.  For instance, in recent weeks we’ve seen Great Men such as Bill Gates claim that a wealth tax would drain needed investment capital out of the economic system; that such a tax would destroy people’s incentive to work hard to make money; that the government would never invest the money as efficiently as they do; and that a wealth tax would obliterate innovation.

These aren’t claims that are on their face dismissible, and anyone interested in the cause of equality and a healthy economy should try to understand and evaluate the powerful arguments against these points for themselves.  But beyond the fact that reality is not on the billionaires‘ side regarding their specific beefs with higher taxation on the wealthy, we shouldn’t miss our unbelievable good luck that the least sympathetic proponents in America are so clearly articulating these ideas so that they can be soundly refuted.  The fact that the billionaires have been drawn into presenting arguments in their favor, rather than simply proclaiming from on high that greed is good, is progress.

And taking another step back, we can see that their specific arguments against paying higher taxes all have a unifying theme: that the size of the economy, abstracted from any human values, is the ultimate accurate measure of things.  Even on the economic level, this makes no sense: for example, they defend how important it is that vast sums of money be available for “innovation” and “investment” at their wise discretion, while failing to note what a lack of money at the bottom of the income scale is doing to both the economy and to the life prospects of citizens who are being screwed out of their fair share of their labors.  The Washington Post notes that “the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution,” and that “the poorest 60 percent of America has seen its share of the national wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014.”  What’s the point of creating all this wealth if only the upper reaches are getting it?  

There is also the small point that their arguments entirely ignore social needs like health care, education, and protection of the environment.

I’m running through this high-level overview of how weak these pro-billionaire arguments really are because they’re only going to grow more strident as the 2020 election approaches, and so more in need of refutation.  The fact that billionaires themselves are entering the public debate also portends a darker development, in which the wealthy go all-in on keeping Donald Trump in the White House for the sake of protecting their bottom lines.  The Democrats will then face not only a united right-wing opposition, but one supported by more or less limitless amounts of cash, as the GOP attempts to convince middle- and working-class voters that the only way to prevent economic armageddon is to embrace the failing status quo of billionaire hegemony.  This seems to be a credible path to Donald Trump retaining power: an alliance with the ultra-wealthy to protect their mutual interests, in which voters are urged to choose fear over forward progress. 

In such a scenario, it becomes more important than ever that Democrats make this race as much about the unaccountable power and economy-subverting concentration of great wealth as about the president’s corruption, in order to counter Donald Trump’s strategy of racist demagoguery and denouncing the Democrats as socialists.  Forced to choose between paying higher taxes and ceding some of their privilege, and backing the proto-fascist in the White House, I fear that many of the nation’s business leaders and wealthy will find themselves torn.  For the Democrats, winning will necessarily involve taking apart and discrediting their self-serving arguments.

Behind the Scenes, A Sinister Trump Plan for California's Homeless

Along with news that the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has been fired, The Washington Post is reporting that the Trump administration “plans a sweeping crackdown aimed at homelessness in California.”  The Post notes that President Trump has previously promised to take action against California’s homelessness problem, arguing that homelessness hurts the quality of life and the “prestige” of some of its largest cities.”  The paper also reports that, “[A]dministration officials have considered razing tent camps for the homeless, creating temporary facilities and refurbishing government facilities.”

As I wrote a few months ago when news of a White House initiative on homelessness was first reported, the president’s concern appears to have nothing to do with the humanity, suffering, and violated civil rights of the homeless population, and everything to do with his own aesthetic disgust at the dirtiness and poverty they represent, as well as a desire to embarrass California Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.  Given these origins, and the hints of plans to tear down homeless camps and round these unfortunate souls into government facilities, we appear to be at the cusp of a campaign of dehumanization and superficial solutions with parallels to the human rights-violating actions the administration has undertaken at the border.  This time, though, it would be largely American citizens subject to federal abuse.

The idea that homelessness is something that requires a “crackdown,” as if homelessness were a crime, is a clue that we are far from seeking humane solutions to this crisis, and in the realm of targeting a vulnerable population for the sin of existing.  After all, the actual solution to homelessness is known, and can be found in the word itself: it would involve giving those without shelter homes, along with the employment, health care, and other support that would allow our fellow humans to live and thrive.  It is undeniable that at the federal, state, and local level to date, we Americans have collectively decided that we would rather not make these investments, whether due to cost, moral judgment that the homeless are each and every one deserving of their situation, or simple indifference.  Now this immoral verdict has left a gaping hole in our social fabric and in our mutual solidarity, through which a cruel and twisted authoritarian like Donald Trump can issue sinister solutions of his own to homelessness: solutions which have nothing to do with recognizing their fellow humanity and honestly correcting our own collective failures, and everything to do with dehumanizing them, placing them out of sight, and cleansing our collective guilt and anger at the problem we refuse to take responsibility for.

In this homelessness ploy, we can see the familiar elements of Donald Trump’s authoritarian urges.  Identify a certain group of people as the enemy and less than human; enact a solution that involves violating their civil and human rights; thrill his base with his willingness to enact their darkest impulses and prejudices.  What is truly frightening about the homelessness plan is that it’s entirely possible that many who don’t support the president might nonetheless feel grateful to be freed of the burden of guilt and repulsion that homeless people cruelly provoke.  This is a law-and-order play that invites good liberals to join the cruel calvacade of Trumpism, reassuring everyone that they have no responsibility for other Americans, that they are the true victims, that they deserve what they have and no one should be able to make them feel guilty about it.

It is shocking to me that this deeply sinister story is not getting more attention.

Will Impeachment Process Turn GOP Against Trump?: A Humble Reverie

As the Democrats continue to lay out the damning facts of the president’s corrupt scheme to subvert the 2020 election, now via the public testimony of witnesses in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, two irreconcilable realities spark and clash on a daily and escalating basis.  One is a world where facts and truth have an actual chance of persuading enough Republican senators to support removing Donald Trump from office in the name of the national good.  The other is a propagandized, Fox News-supported fantasyland in which the president has done no wrong and is being henpecked by a vast armada of, in the words of the immortal Republican Senator John “not that John Kennedy” Kennedy, “the ‘cultured,’ cosmopolitan, goat’s milk latte-drinking, avocado toast-eating insider’s elite.”  (Pro tip to the senator: throw that goat’s milk latte and avocado toast into a blender along with a manly handful of kale, and you’ve got yourself an absolutely delish (and nutrish!) breakfast treat, best served in an Elizabeth Warren-branded “Billionaire’s Tears” coffee mug.)  The GOP is doing everything it can to protect the president by promoting this alternate reality, from filling their questioning time with the propagation of the same discredited conspiracies that underly the president’s impeachable efforts (and so making themselves complicit with his offenses against the republic) to simply advising Republican voters not to watch the proceedings.

This underlying reality of clashing world views means that the question “What is the point of impeachment?” looms over the proceedings, unanswered by those Democrats with the power to do so.   If no matter what, a sufficient number of GOP senators are 99% likely to vote for acquittal, then the actual goal must obviously be something other than removal of the president.  In that case, the logical point of impeachment would be the full airing of facts in order to convince not GOP senators but persuadable members of the public, with an eye to the 2020 elections, of the president’s unfitness for office.  The other logical point would be to expose the GOP’s collective refuge in conspiracy, lies, and propaganda, again with the political goal of gathering a winning coalition behind the Democrats for 2020.

It is somewhat bothersome that no members of the Democratic leadership are acknowledging either of these practical impeachment goals.  Yet, as I’ve written before, whether you think impeachment has a chance of actually removing the president should strongly inform the nature of the proceedings.  If the Democrats’ real goal is not removal but a full airing of the president’s corruption with an eye to defeating him in 2020, then the refusal to expand the inquiry beyond the Ukraine scandal feels risky and self-defeating.  It would be more powerful to demonstrate a pattern of corruption beyond foreign policy, and to expose multiple upsetting offenses that can change minds for 2020.  Given the centrality to the GOP’s defense of painting Joe and Hunter Biden as corrupt, it feels as if Republicans are all but begging for the Democrats to turn the spotlight on Trump’s profiting off the presidency — and not just his personal aggrandizement, but that of his corrupt brood, with son-in-law Jared thrown in for completeness’ sake.  Likewise, nothing is stopping the Democrats from describing the basic insanity of the GOP’s defense of the president: not only in its distortions and refusals vis-a-vis reality, but also in its end goal of placing the president above all accountability.  A better way of saying the second part is that Republicans agree with the president’s authoritarian vision for America, where not only whatever the president does is legal and good, but where anyone or any institution that questions him is by definition an enemy of the state. The Democrats need to be hammering this home, as the proper context for understanding the GOP’s stance on impeachment.

Against all evidence, though, I still find myself hoping for another way forward, a way that I concede can feel almost as much of a fantasy as the GOP’s hermetically-sealed propaganda bubble: that rather than breaking America more firmly apart, impeachment will end up cracking the Republican authoritarian consensus just as it seems to be at its strongest.  Call it a faith in the power of actual reality, particularly its contingent and unpredictable aspects.  For instance, we have already seen the Republicans blindsided by the increasing number of witnesses to the president’s direct connection to the Ukraine scheme; a phone conversation between Trump and sad-sack EU ambassador Gordon Sondland the day after the president’s infamous July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was overheard by as many as three U.S. officials (not to mention various foreign intelligence agencies, since it was conducted in public on an unsecure phone).  More such evidence will increasingly push the GOP into the cul-de-sac of acknowledging the president’s actions but defending his lawlessness as just fine.  This may be satisfying for GOP die-hards, but it will hamper their work of winning over centrist voters in 2020.

There’s also the matter of Republican congresspersons continuing to claim that they and their staff lawyers are not being allowed to question witnesses. . . . despite the fact that, on national TV, we are watching Republican congressmen and their lawyers questioning witnesses, and, in a meta-twist, making these very same claims that they are not being allowed to do so.  Designed to be played free of context on Fox News and the like, this line of mendacity may work for Republicans in safe red seats.  But for those like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — who faces a credible Democratic opponent who has already raised nearly a million dollars in the last few days by calling out Stefanik’s untruths about not being allowed to speak at the inquiry — has the Fox & Amigos mediasphere reached the point where its self-perpetuating insularity machine is beginning to grind adherents between its infernal vulpine gears?

But it’s the president himself who’s the biggest wild card of all.  Accused of vast and disqualifying corruption, he has attacked witnesses throughout the proceedings.  This includes a tweet denigrating former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch during her actual testimony, which led Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff to note that he takes witness intimidation “very, very seriously” (if you listened closely, you could make out the clackety-clack of a congressional staffer typing up a new article of impeachment).  The tweet blew up the GOP strategy to avoid appearing disrespectful of the ambassador; The New York Times reported that “his inability to hold his fire on Friday raised fresh doubts among his allies and White House advisers about what he will do next week, when eight witnesses are scheduled to testify in public hearings over the course of three days,” and that his tweet left “some of his advisers deeply dispirited.” The president’s willingness to display the very corruption he’s accused of, in real time, may impress the Republican base, but along with unsettling his congressional defenders, it will also further push middle-of-the-road voters into the Democratic camp.

Such behavior by the president, and GOP representatives’ appeals to blatantly false narratives, may rally the most loyal, but I am wondering if the rest of us have been a little taken in ourselves by the power of the right-wing machine and the depth of the president’s support.  Can even the most extreme acts of the president be explained away by the loyal talking heads?  And if the real-time attack on Yovanovitch set off warning lights, couldn’t this happen again?  The machine doesn’t need to break down completely; it is possible that enough cracks in the suffocating narrative of Trump’s rightness could push Republican rank and file into less vigorous support, or neutrality.  Which leads to my second point, the very real possibility that the president’s base is neither as large or committed as generally perceived.  His hard core of support is certainly a minority of the population, but it seems to me that there is a big difference between whether 40% of the country supports him, versus 30% or even 35%.  With 40%, he has a viable path to a narrow electoral college victory in 2020.  At 35% or lower, it starts to look quite iffy.  And Trump’s hold over the GOP has everything to do with whether it perceives he will be re-elected or not.  Even if there is no sure catastrophic tipping point in the size and intensity of his base, even a slow chipping away could change the calculations of GOP politicians, both in the House and Senate.

I’ve frequently dug into the Very Important Idea that the GOP is essentially becoming a permanent minority party in the United States, based on a demographically dwindling white population, and increasingly dedicated to preserving its hold on power by manipulating our political system to prevent majority rule, such as by gerrymandering or, more malignantly in the case of the president, by enlisting the aid of foreign powers to help subvert national elections.  What has been less discussed — because it hasn’t been as imminent as it is now — is whether the GOP is truly willing to irrevocably say goodbye to ever holding a majority in the House of Representatives again, and possibly to ever winning the presidency post-Trump.  

As dangerous and damaging as Trump’s reign has been, he and the GOP have maintained power only at the price of advancing the GOP’s permanent minority status, at least in terms of overall support among the U.S. population, from likelihood to near-certainty.  Addicted to the worship of a faithful base, Trump has made clear that he serves the white, the conservative, and the male, in the process poisoning the GOP’s prospects for winning over anyone else.  The long-term damage will make itself known in the coming years, but at a minimum, we can see signs that he has badly soiled the GOP brand, perhaps irrevocably, among younger voters for whom his presidency is now their formative political experience; for non-white voters who have been told they are not real Americans; and for women appalled by his misogyny and the allegations of his sexual assaults.

Given this reality, to which GOP politicians are hardly blind, impeachment may represent the final, irrevocable decision point for the Republican Party.  They have already seen gerrymandering’s failure to hold the House.  And while the structure of the Senate means that they have a decent chance of maintaining a thin edge there for the foreseeable future, are Republicans really willing to continue to support the president if his support drops below some critical level where his re-election becomes doubtful?  Is the GOP truly ready to be a party that may be able to block legislation, but will increasingly see its ability to wield affirmative power dwindle?  Are Republicans willing to fully embrace permanent minority status as a de facto white nationalist party in order to defend a president unlikely to win in 2020?  Is every single member of the Republican party in Congress down with this vision?  The lockstep approach up to now may prove particularly brittle if even a small number of Republicans begin to look past the immediate future, and towards a future Republican Party that stands for actual conservatism rather than a self-defeating hash of white nationalism, authoritarianism, and capitalism run amok.

GOP Defense of Trump Just Continues His Corrupt Scheme By Other Means

As the impeachment inquiry heads into a phase of public testimony, House Republicans have provided a list of witnesses they’d like to call.  The inclusion of Hunter Biden is a clear sign that they intend to muddy the waters of Trump’s impeachable acts by doubling down on the fictional corruption of the Bidens.  In doing so, they’re making themselves complicit in the same corrupt plot that led to the impeachment process in the first place.  And in a sign that the Democrats are starting to understand the power of pointing this out, Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff indicated in his response that, “This inquiry is not, and will not serve, however, as a vehicle to undertake the same sham investigations into the Bidens or 2016 that the President pressed Ukraine to conduct for his personal political benefit, or to facilitate the President’s effort to threaten, intimidate, and retaliate against the whistleblower who courageously raised the initial alarm.”  This is exactly the sort of hardball and truthful rhetoric that’s needed right now, and I hope Schiff and other Democrats keep pressing the point that the House GOP is offering up more of what Trump is accused of doing, as a way of discrediting this defense and making Republican representatives pay a price for trying to move forward a fake narrative of Biden-related corruption instead of holding a rotten president accountable.

Bloomberg Is the Titanic, and His Billions Are the Iceberg

I’d like to think that former New York mayor and multi-gazillionaire Michael Bloomberg has a snowball’s chance in H-E-double toothpicks of surviving first contact with the Democratic presidential primary, but this may be a case of my revulsion getting the better of me.  After all, a man who has made clear his plan is to buy his way to the nomination may indeed have the firepower to alter the dynamics of the race, though whether in his favor remains to be seen.  As the The New York Times reported:

Advisers said he intended to stake his candidacy on big, delegate-rich primary states like California and Texas, where Mr. Bloomberg’s immense personal fortune could be put to extensive use.

Should Mr. Bloomberg proceed with such a campaign, he would be attempting to take a high-risk route to the Democratic nomination that has never succeeded in modern politics — one that shuns the town hall meetings and door-to-door campaigning that characterize states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and relies instead on a sustained and costly campaign of paid advertising and canvassing on a grand scale.

It seems as likely that his plan will backfire spectacularly, given the presence and momentum in the race of the two major populist candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.  Many have already commented on how his presence is a gift to those two, who will be able to literally point to his presence on stage as the living embodiment of the outsized power of billionaires in our political (and economic) system.  Indeed, the non-negligible possibility that he might actually succeed in using his billions to win the Democratic nomination should be a moment of reckoning for all party members, including moderates who might not have placed income and wealth inequality at the top of their priority lists.  I’d like to think that Bloomberg will supercharge the Warren and Sanders campaigns at the expense of more centrist candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar; not only does Bloomberg serve as living proof of the two populists’ indictments of the corruption of wealth, but he also presents an existential danger to their very candidacies and the progressive movements they both lead and are carried by.

It’s notable that Bloomberg’s plan — mass advertising rather than actual contact with voters — would potentially build his candidacy without cultivating the grassroots networks that would benefit the Democrats beyond just himself.  It would be a shallow movement dedicated to a single candidate, rather than the mass democratizing surge currently underway and desperately needed by this country.  By relying on a financial shock and awe approach, Bloomberg’s strategy threatens to dominate whatever substantive message of liberal social policies and conservative economics he’s hoping to sell us: the campaign medium would (accurately) become the message.

Political Polarization is Wrong Lens for Viewing Impeachment

There are times when my attempts at media criticism feel useless, a shouting into the void.  But this piece by Salon’s Amanda Marcotte reminds me that the stakes are worth the effort, and how invigorating a righteously-worded beatdown can be for the spirit.  Marcotte’s not the only one who picked up on how The New York Times and other media outlets framed the impeachment resolution last week, but hers is surely the sharpest.  She takes the Times to task for a purported analysis that describes the party-line impeachment vote as a decontextualized example of Washington polarization, and that focuses on the inability of both Republicans and Democrats to compromise.  Marcotte writes:

The situation is simple: The Republican Party, both its politicians and its voters, has collectively decided that it's fine for Donald Trump to use his office to run an illegal extortion scheme against a foreign leader in an effort to cheat in the 2020 election. The moral rot of the Republican Party, and its cultist loyalty to a criminal president is the sole reason for this situation. Democrats are — rather too reluctantly! — trying to do something to stop the bleeding.

[. . .] How the parties are supposed to compromise on the issue of whether the president should be allowed to commit serious crimes is not even addressed. After all, to acknowledge that one side is for crimes and the other side is against them might expose how ridiculous this "compromise vs. polarization" framework really is.

The general tendency of the mainstream media to create a false equivalence between opposing political viewpoints is a cliché at this late date, but Marcotte pinpoints how, in the matter of impeachment, it’s been pushed to the point of absurdity and incoherence.  It’s no small detail that in this case, such bias makes the GOP’s position seem more normal in part by suggesting that the Democrats, too, are acting in extreme ways.  In a world where one party capriciously decides to up and impeach a president from the opposing party, why wouldn’t the president’s side stick together?

While it’s not the role of The New York Times to choose sides in our country’s great political conflicts, it’s also not proper for this paper or any other to perversely obscure the public’s ability to process the facts that are reported.  As Marcotte goes on to say, “This isn't an issue where reasonable people arguing in good faith can disagree. This is a black-and-white, wrong-versus-right issue.”  The New York Times does the public a disservice when it refuses to countenance the possibility, despite all available facts, that one of the nation’s two major political parties has simply adopted a position of defending indefensible acts by the president, separate and apart from any ideological conflict with the Democrats.

Reading through the Times piece that got Marcotte so rightly fired up, this paragraph stuck out to me personally as particularly rich in contradiction:

Polarization has consequences, and Democrats have been concerned from the start about running what Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly called an inherently divisive process. The mostly party-line vote threatened to undermine public confidence in the proceedings, making it easier for voters to dismiss it as yet another skirmish in an endless partisan war, rather than a weighty constitutional process. Democrats are now faced with the challenge of mounting a compelling case to the public that can cut through the political noise and generate even the barest of bipartisan consensus, knowing that the greater likelihood is that Mr. Trump will be acquitted in the Republican-led Senate.

This summary of the impeachment vote makes me think of something that Marcotte gets at without stating directly: the way that the “both sides are polarized” argument, once internalized by enough reporters, itself becomes an essential catalyst to a more polarized political environment.  Here, we can see how the cycle works — the Times reporter describes how voters may dismiss the party-line vote “as yet another skirmish in an endless partisan war, rather than a weighty constitutional process”; while this is accurate as far as it goes, it also reinforces this very interpretation of events by attesting to its validity, in an instance where the very high stakes of impeachment mean that the explanatory power of “polarization” is actually at its weakest.  To restate one of Marcotte’s points: when the major fault line between the parties is that one believes in the rule of law and the other rejects it, “polarization” becomes a wildly distorting lens through which to view and describe events.  An emphasis on how the parties are “polarized” increasingly looks like a way to avoid acknowledging the fundamental reasons they can be described as polarized.

Far from showing a lamentable deadlock in our democracy, the Democrats’ decision to stand up to the president’s authoritarianism and lawlessness is a sign of life in American democracy — a wrecking ball swinging not just at our corrupt president, but also at the notion of polarization itself, and the idea that this abstract descriptor accurately describes our ongoing national clash between democracy and authoritarian rule.