First, Immigrants Were the Enemy. Now, U.S. Cities and States Are.

The Trump administration plans to deploy a hundred members of the Border Patrol’s BORTAC tactical teams to assist ICE agents with arrests of undocumented immigrants in the United States, including in sanctuary cities.  Officials say these personnel are being deployed to make up for challenges ICE faces due to the lack of cooperation of sanctuary cities, but the New York Times notes that “immigration agents in cities are enforcing civil infractions rather than criminal ones. They are not allowed to forcibly enter properties in order to make arrests, and the presence of BORTAC agents, while helpful in boosting the number of agents on the ground, may prove most useful for the visual message it sends.”

It would be naive at this point to think this “visual message” is not only meant to intimidate immigrants, but the cities and their citizens who oppose the Trump administration’s criminalization and dehumanization of the undocumented.  Last week, we learned that the administration is banning New Yorkers from an expedited re-entry program when returning to the country from abroad; officials made clear that this move was in retaliation for New York’s approval of driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, as well as for the state’s refusal to allow Homeland Security access to its DMV database.  In the quest to turn immigrants into a hated other, the Trump administrations is now embarked on a strategy to punish our own citizens and states for opposing its crackpot crackdown.  First, immigrants were the enemy; now, our fellow Americans apparently are.

This is alarming, authoritarian behavior, but it also reflects the self-defeating agenda of the right-wingers in the White House.  The sight of heavily armed law enforcement rolling up on immigrant communities might thrill his die-hard base, but most Americans will see instead the disparity between the body armor and the unarmed civilians in their path.  It’s a stupid person’s idea of strength, in the same way that Donald Trump has been described as a stupid person’s ideas of a smart person.

As Donald Trump engages in an escalating pattern of outright criminality in the wake of Republican senators’ abdication of their impeachment duties, it’s important to his survival that he divert attention away from the White House’s crime spree.  An escalated campaign against immigrants creates the false impression of crisis and escalation caused by undocumented immigrants, when in fact this newest outrage in the anti-immigrant war is ultimately a sign of the president’s fundamental weakness: that he is a man who must prey on the weak to make himself feel strong, and to distract others from his essential inadequacy to the task of being president.  In this, he is both dangerous and deeply pathetic.

Virginia Democrats Foolishly Punt on Strengthening State's Unions

Last year, Democrats took control of the legislative and executive branches in Virginia for the first time in a generation, bringing to fruition an electoral re-alignment many years in the making.  Yet despite its political power, the Democratic leadership has decided to retreat from a legislative initiative to repeal the state’s right-to-work law, which means that union employees will continue being able to join unions without paying dues — a long-standing anti-labor strategy to starve unions of funding.

As Eric Levitz writes at the Intelligencer, this decision was based on a surely-unscientific and biased survey of CEO’s in the state who pointed to a likely loss of jobs to right-to-work states, while failing to weigh the potential economic benefits of higher-paid workers who could afford more goods and services.

While this particular story involves a single state — one with its own particularly strong anti-labor history — there are warning signs for the Democratic Party at large when Virginia Democrats fail to acknowledge the importance of strengthening the labor movement.  The GOP has long seen smashing unions as key to gaining and maintaining power, despite the fact that many of the working-class voters it purports to represent have been well-served by organized labor.  Of course, Democrats across the nation have enacted their own betrayals of the labor movement over the years, including President Obama’s difficult-to-understand unwillingness to back a card-check bill early in his administration — a simple change in law that could have helped jump-start organizing by working people as the economy struggled out of a recession caused by some of the richest and most powerful economic interests in America.

What’s particularly galling to me, though, isn’t the economic stupidity of not doing everything possible to boost working people at a time of obscene inequality and stagnant wages, when strengthening the earning power of the working class would both help them and the economy at large.  It’s the fact that Democrats, even moderate, labor-skeptical types in Virginia, would still refuse to understand that the failure to court, strengthen, and support unions has helped ready us for the ongoing Trump disaster and what increasingly feels like a life-and-death struggle to stop authoritarianism from taking root in the United States.  The current president can court the support of working-class Americans in part because so many of these workers see no other power in the nation willing to fight for them.  Without a union, or a concept of labor power, they feel atomized and powerless; rather than joining together to make change, they’ve been convinced that the only way to change things is by putting a strongman in charge to bring order to what feels like a chaotic and unfair economy. 

A country with a strong labor union would be far less vulnerable to the false promises and authoritarian pretensions of a leader like Donald Trump.  Workers would see themselves as powerful, rather than in need of a crooked real estate developer to save them.  When Democrats fail to fully support working people’s economic aspirations, they self-destructively help create the conditions of their own political doom, alienating those who should be allies and degrading those allies’ ability to act as bulwarks of democracy.

Instead, we see Democrats like those in Virginia choosing the interests of CEOs over blue-collar workers.  This chillingly echoes a phenomenon that I fear we will see more of as the 2020 election ramps up — corporate America determining that it would rather accept authoritarian rule so long as it guaranties low taxes and docile labor, rather than democracy and the specter of a pro-labor Democratic president who doesn’t value money higher than human lives and happiness.  It is disheartening to see that some Virginia Democrats can’t see the larger stakes here, and would rather enable local businessmen to squeeze working people, even if the political cost is to weaken the movement to turn back the authoritarian GOP.

Crisis and Opportunity in the Post-Acquittal Political Universe

Greg Sargent has an excellent run-down of what the Democrats should specifically do to reign in Trump’s post-impeachment efforts to rig the 2020 election.  As he notes, the plot to smear Joe Biden “is still in operation today. Republicans have been running ads in Iowa that echo the fabricated narratives of Biden corruption in Ukraine. Giuliani has been meeting with former Ukrainian officials to further validate that narrative.”  He also points out that though impeachment has failed to remove the president, it has produced copious damning evidence and further avenues of inquiry regarding the president’s corrupt behavior.

This gets to a point that I’ve tried to hammer home over the past couple months: no one should confuse the impeachment effort with the larger, overriding goal of exposing and ejecting from power this president and his allies in the Republican Party.  Everyone knew that impeachment was highly unlikely to end with the president’s removal; but as I wrote a few days ago, the end of the impeachment process in no way ends our collective need to counter the malevolently anti-democratic agenda of this presidency.  In this unsettled time between acquittal and whatever new phase we’re about to enter, the Democrats would be foolish to cede the initiative to the president.  In the face of Trump trumpeting his acquittal, the Democrats need to signal that the president remains as much a danger today as he did the day before the Senate vote.  The message should be that far from being cleared, the president’s corruption now extends to the vast bulk of the Republican Party, which has become a willing accomplice to his authoritarian goals.

In this, the Democrats perversely have both the GOP and Trump on their side.  In chilling plain view, not only does the president continue to pursue his original scheme to smear Joe Biden, but the GOP is taking an active role in helping the plot along: just yesterday, we learned that two GOP senators had obtained Treasury department records of Hunter Biden’s financial information.  That they no longer see a need to hide their illicit efforts to defame political opponents is chilling, but this offers the Democrats the chance to draw a stark distinction between themselves as defenders of American democracy and the GOP’s descent into banana republic shenanigans.  

Acquittal has emboldened Trump and the GOP to escalate their movement toward anti-democratic rule, but in this they reveal their own confusion about the meaning of the impeachment process.  They are pretending that acquittal means the president is innocent of the charges against him, but the actual meaning of acquittal was to establish that Trumpian corruption now extends through the bloodstream of the GOP as a whole.  The facts remain what they were before, and new efforts to twist our government into Trump’s re-election machine reinforce what we already knew and provide fresh evidence of their unfitness to govern.  They are betting everything on enough Americans being OK with unbridled corruption and authoritarianism; in response, the Democrats must double down on our democracy, on the rule of law, on free and fair elections.

The danger of this moment is great; but just as we shouldn’t underestimate its true dimensions, we also shouldn’t underestimate the simultaneously growing vulnerability of Trump and the GOP.  Every step further they take to dismantle our democracy is one more sign of contempt for our shared American project.  The fact that many or even most in the GOP are taking Trump’s lead out of fear rather than out of any fully-articulated ideological agreement signals their cowardice, but also the underlying ad-hoc nature of this authoritarian slide.  In a substantial way, Team GOP has turned to outright opposition to our democratic norms because they know they can no longer win any other way, given this country’s demographic and ideological changes in combination with the party’s refusal to shift with the tides of history and justice.  This makes them losers on a vast, even cosmic scale; all who oppose them should cheer themselves with this fact, and spare no effort in hammering home the cowardice and weakness of a party that has given up on persuasion, debate, and majority rule.  As much as it’s trampling the constitution and engaging in corrupt activity, the GOP is also to a great degree trying to bluster and bluff its way to permanent power.

Impeachment Charade Will Help End the GOP

During the impeachment process, Democrats have at times invoked the permanent and devastating damage to the constitutional order that would result should the Senate fail to remove Donald Trump from office.  Aimed more at the broader public, as a way to convey the seriousness of the president’s offenses, than at essentially unpersuadable Republican senators, this line of argument — sorrowful, elegaic, even despairing — points up the contradiction between the depth of Trump’s crimes and the near-inevitable failure of impeachment to end his reign.

While it is true that long-term damage could well result from the precedents that Trump is setting, both in terms of his own room for maneuver and the ability of future presidents to act in similarly corrupt fashion, impeachment was an important tool for stopping him — but not the only tool.  And acquittal by the GOP-controlled Senate doesn’t mean that his crimes aren’t as grave as they’ve ever been, only that the Republican Party has now made itself party to those crimes.  And just because impeachment has failed to remove him does not mean that the Democrats are to any degree discharged of their duty — political, moral, and constitutional — to fight tooth and nail to continue to expose this president’s corrupt behavior, particularly his attempts to rig the 2020 election in his favor, and to put a stop to it.  

Yes, it is undeniably sad, even tragic, that our constitutional order has failed to remove a corrupt president when backed by the lockstep support of his party in the Senate — but it is also enraging and completely unacceptable.  Donald Trump tried to use the power of the presidency to blackmail a foreign country into interfering into the 2020 election against a likely opponent, Joe Biden, and the Republican Party has determined that this is reasonable behavior for a president.  In doing so, GOP congressmen and senators have nearly universally shown the public their unfitness to hold office in our democracy.  There is no line they will not cross after this: not the president, and not his supporters in Congress.  Already, senators are talking of investigating the original whistleblower after the impeachment trial ends, and of impeaching Joe Biden for his fictional Ukraine offenses if he is ever elected president.  These are not the policies of an American political party, but of authoritarian regimes like those that exist in countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

Canny observers have made the case that the Democrats’ impeachment effort ultimately meant to put Senate Republicans on trial as much as, or more than, the president; was intended to show that they will excuse any act by Donald Trump, no matter how heinous or treasonous, and in the process set up more vulnerable members for electoral retribution in 2020.  I desperately hope that this was part of their game plan all along, because it would indicate a greater awareness of the danger our country faces than the Democratic leadership sometimes shows.

At this point, alongside continued efforts to expose and stop as much of the president’s wrongdoing as possible, Democrats should build on what impeachment has revealed about the corruption of both Trump and the GOP, and make the case to voters that the Republican Party of today bears only a superficial resemblance to the Republican Party the GOP would have us believe it to be.  Under the catalyst of Donald Trump’s morally empty leadership, the party has fully transformed into a vehicle of electoral corruption, treachery, and white nationalism that has no rightful place in American politics.  Fortunately for the Democrats, the manner in which the GOP has turned back the impeachment effort only amplifies the case that the president and his party are a menace to the nation: polls consistently show that large majorities of Americans thought there should be witnesses and evidence at the Senate trial, and most American are savvy enough to know what it means when one side think witnesses won’t do its case any good.

The congressional GOP’s wholesale fusion with the agenda of the president makes the party deeply vulnerable to further revelations of presidential wrongdoing, but we shouldn’t skip over the fundamentally chilling fact of such unwavering mass support.  As Josh Marshall reminds us in a recent effort to unpack how Trump’s dominance has come about, the fact that the whole party has more or less fallen in line with him has helped tremendously to normalize Trump’s extremism; indeed, as Marshall points out, when an entire party embraces a group of extreme positions, there are logical problems with calling them outside the mainstream (even if they objectively are).  

In a quite frightening way, this turn to authoritarianism has happened so quickly that it’s simultaneously deeply uncanny but also superficially banal.  Yet the Democrats cannot give an inch in this confrontation.  They cannot agree to any move that sets this country further towards authoritarian rule, and they must accept the reality that the GOP cannot be compromised with, only defeated and discredited.  Among other things, they need to start calling Trump-GOP authoritarianism out by name.  Its manifestations include not only attempts to rig the 2020 election, but wider efforts to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and otherwise prevent majorities from electing the representatives of their choice.  It seems undeniable that the GOP has come to the realization that it can no longer win the majority of voters anymore, and that this has led it to the logical but deeply immoral conclusion that democracy itself has become its enemy.  After all, the Republicans have lost the popular vote 5 times out of the last 6 presidential elections, and won less votes than Democrats for Senators in the last 3 elections.  It took a massive turnout in 2018, plus widespread revulsion at the Trumpian GOP, for the Democrats to re-take the House in the face of massive gerrymandering and voter suppression (even as they failed to re-take the Senate despite Democratic Senate candidates overall receiving more votes).

In other words, there is a perverse but extremely real reason why the GOP has finalized its turn to the hard right — and Democrats need to be talking about this as well.  This awful turn in our history did not come out of nowhere, and it is based on undemocratic conclusions on the part of the GOP that need to be exposed and discredited.  So while we can’t completely dismiss the sorrow of this moment, when the GOP has greenlighted and indeed made itself complicit in the president’s efforts to scam his way to re-election, we can’t confuse defeat of impeachment with defeat of American democracy. That fight is just getting started, and at the very least, millions of Americans now have a far clearer idea of the danger we face, and that defeat is not an option.

Will Trump's Hate Rallies Help Doom His Re-Election Effort?

Since even before his election, the idea that the media might normalize Donald Trump’s language and ideas has vexed many an observer.  On the one hand, the extensive and unfiltered coverage of his candidacy by CNN and other outlets mainlined literally hundreds of hours of illiberal, racist, and misogynistic discourse into the body politic; this raised the possibility that a sort of politics previously considered outside the mainstream might either numb the nation into submission, or grant fringe ideas a legitimacy through repetition by this major presidential candidate.  Both of those threats have to some extent come to pass.  Three years into his presidency, I suspect that very few opponents of Trump haven’t built up internal filters to prevent being constantly outraged by the president’s vileness; and he was elected in great part by stoking the resentment and racism of millions of Americans who responded to his nativist, white nationalist message.

But the other great normalization threat has also come to pass: the media, whether overwhelmed or looking to avoid criticism that accurate descriptions of the president are the same as anti-Trump sentiments, has repeatedly attempted to depict Trump as less offensive than he is, whether by outright omission of damning details, or by analyses and opinion pieces that impute sophisticated reasoning where there are only brute, self-serving instinct and authoritarian stratagems.

Vox’s Aaron Rupar re-visited this latter issue last week — first covering in its gory detail a Trump rally in Milwaukee, and then re-visiting the issue of de facto press suppression of the president’s extremism in light of a National Public Radio report of the same rally that essentially re-wrote its offensiveness and weirdness out of the story.  Rupar witnessed a rally in which Trump not only obsessed about lightbulbs and improperly-flushing toilets, but also praised war crimes, talked about locking up Hilary Clinton, and spoke of a former president possibly being in hell.  The NPR report of the same event, though, communicated the speech of a merely plucky president, one who “snapped back at Democrats for bringing impeachment proceedings” and was “taking on Democrats on their own territory.”  Absent from the NPR report were the details by which an ordinary American might conclude that the president was engaging in authoritarian rhetoric unfit for a democracy, or that he might even be a few cards short of a full deck.

In terms of simply ensuring that the American people are receiving accurate information about their leader, this NPR story is quite unnerving.  And though NPR in other instances has done a far better job of accurately reporting on the president’s remarks — a point NPR’s defenders were quick to make following Rupar’s critique — it is obvious that many other outlets have engaged in similar whitewashing, all feeding an inaccurate view of this president that works out in his favor.

Over at The Plum Line blog, though, Greg Sargent brings up a possibly even more disturbing point about the media impulse to soften reporting on the president for fear that accurate reporting will invite accusations of anti-Trump bias.  He observes that Trump has settled on a re-election strategy in which he will seek to “electrify” his base voters via the illiberal playbook on display in Milwaukee:

These rally performances are all about achieving that electrification. The need to do this is why he paints the opposition as illegitimate, works to deceive those parts of the country into believing his impeachment is an effort to overturn their electoral will, rages at Rep. Adam B. Schiff and his “pencil neck,” slimes urban districts as being infested with rodents.”

But Sargent sees a downside to Trump’s approach: the possibility that it might lose him more votes than it gains him:

One key question is whether Trump can supercharge those parts of the country with such tactics without activating a backlash — among young and nonwhite voters, and among the sort of suburban and educated whites who remain alienated by Trump — that overwhelms the numbers in even hyper-energized Trump country. This plainly worries Trump’s advisers, who know the base might not be enough.

And this is where the issue brought up by Rupar becomes extremely relevant, because it raises the possibility that Trump may be able to rally his base via fascistic language and spectacle while the larger public doesn’t realize this is even going on, as Sargent writes:

Press coverage that sanitizes away the wretched, hateful sides of Trump’s performances could help his appearances carry forward Trump’s mission of electrifying the base, under the radar, without clearly conveying to all those other voters — those who may not be tuning in as attentively to the 24/7 manure show that is this presidency — the truly depraved nature of what he’s dumping in their backyards.

He ends by noting that it’s not clear how widespread this disparity between coverage and full Trumpian horror show might be, but I think Sargent actually sells his excellent point a bit short.  I agree that Trump’s effort to rally his base will be paramount in the upcoming election, and that this will create a huge backlash from Americans repelled by the increasingly extreme language and positions he will deploy to get them angry and motivated to vote.  This backlash is already in great evidence all around us, from the Democratic wave that took back the House in 2018 to the huge energy apparent in the Democratic presidential primaries.  

Sargent speaks from the perspective of a journalist and media critic, but it’s important to note that the Democrats can play a major role in remedying deficiencies in coverage that might otherwise allow Trump’s authoritarian rallies to go unremarked.  We can assume that his rallies will only become more extreme and unhinged as election season gets fully under way, and that they will veer increasingly in the direction of the darkest examples we’ve seen so far, such as his imprecations of hate against Muslim members of Congress and the incitement of “Send them back” chants among the faithful.  This is a president who can no longer credibly pretend in any way to represent moderate or middle-of-the-road strands of American politics; there is no erasing the trail of racism, white nationalism, and cruelty that he has left in his wake.

For Trump, there is only forward: forward ever deeper into the cult of personality, into the lure of authoritarianism, into the realm of unbridled white power.  Of course the Democrats need to show a constructive, positive vision for the future, but they also need to render crystal-clear the vileness at the center of Trump’s approach to politics.  Turn his hate rallies into 30-second TV spots, show voters the repulsive hatred that twists the faces of his admirers, that poisons the hearts of the children brought along to these sordid gatherings, that shows attendees as members of a political death cult and not a movement fit for a democracy.

The Fight Against Trumpism Won't End With the 2020 Election

As I’ve discussed before, it’s possible for the Democrats to beat Donald Trump the wrong way in 2020.  What do I mean by the “wrong way”?  I am thinking in particular of a victory based on a political strategy, both electoral and legislative, of trying to go back to some “normal” pre-Trump time that never existed, and that fails to address the root causes that have led to the rise of Trumpism to begin with, particularly massive inequality, systematic racism, and anti-democratic aspects of American government and politics.  Such a pyrrhic victory would also involve the Democrats failing to make clear that their larger objection is not to Trump but to Trumpism, the authoritarian and white nationalist mindset that now has nearly the entire GOP in its grip.

The form of a healthy Democratic critique, and a positive alternative vision for the United States, can certainly take a range of forms — forms that we see being debated right now by the Democratic candidates for president.  Even as centrist a figure as Joe Biden is talking about fairly substantial progressive programs that would represent a move left from the Obama administration.

But as crucial as a vision for the future is for pulling ourselves clear of the cesspool of Trumpism, the Democrats would be foolish and self-defeating if they failed to offer a sustained critique and investigation of what this country has gone through during the Trump administration.  It’s been a time of massive disinformation from the heights of government; of betrayal of the people’s interest in favor of unfriendly or hostile foreign governments; of human rights abuses that have done great harm to thousands of immigrant families and individuals; of a presidency run like a crime family as Donald Trump sought to kneecap political rivals and subvert the 2020 election; of a sustained anti-democratic assault on facts and the very idea of truth.

We can allow none of this abominable history to be swept under the rug, or to let either the Trump administration or the GOP at large off the hook for their assault on American democracy.  We cannot move on, or work effectively to prevent a recurrence of these nightmarish years, without a full accounting and airing of what has happened.

It seems to me that there should be two major thrusts.  The first should target the crime and corruption of the Trump administration.  I had initially been thinking that this would primarily be done via open-ended congressional investigations, but in the last several days, Elizabeth Warren has announced plans to involve the executive branch in exposing Trump administration corruption.  According to the Boston Globe, Warren would direct “the Justice Department to appoint an independent task force to investigate corruption that took place during the Trump administration,” which would  “investigate Trump administration officials for potential violations of federal bribery and insider trading laws.” The Globe also reports that Warren says she “won’t hesitate to use her for-cause removal authority for heads of independent agencies who neglect their duties or engage in malfeasance while in office.”

This is exactly the sort of aggressive action against the Trump administration that Democrats should embrace.  They must not falter in the face of accusations that they are seeking payback or doing something unprecedented.  What is actually unprecedented is the corruption of this administration, its utter contempt for the safety and welfare of the American people, its lack of even the haziest notion of serving the public good rather than the private interest of the president and his henchmen.  This is a case where principle and political interest align for the Democrats.  

Investigations of the Trump administration’s malfeasance will undoubtedly produce a stream of revelations and evidence that will easily counter accusations that Democrats are seeking payback.  Indeed, likely cries of foul by defenders of Trump would only highlight the extent of their corruption, easily folding into a narrative that the Trump administration considered itself above the law.   The Democratic Party should use a dedication to rooting out corruption as proof of its fundamental difference from the GOP: that it believes in the rule of law, in facts, in truth, in the public interest.  The Democrats should not be afraid of being accused of playing politics, when those accusations are rooted in the basic fact that the Democrats are acting in the public interest and as a scourge to Trump administration corruption.

But beyond the need for sustained investigations that steadily expose and discredit the Trump administration and its allies, Democrats need to engage in a broader political and cultural investigation, of how our country got to this point where we teeter on the edge of being ruled by authoritarian ethno-nationalists, as if were were Turkey or Hungary and not the greatest democracy in the world.  Something has gone terribly wrong, and a public airing and discussion is badly needed.  Let both parties bring in experts and witnesses.  In the full light of day, let the Republicans make the public case for why gerrymandering is good and immigration is bad, why voter suppression is permissible, why the president should have the powers of a king, and why massive inequality in wealth is simply evidence of god’s will.  Let’s hear from people who are convinced their jobs have been stolen by immigrants and who see their status and power in American society diminishing.

But let’s also hear from African-Americans who can speak of their frustration and anger at continuing to face discrimination and state violence 150 years after slavery ended; from immigrants who help the economy hum along; from middle-class Americans in liberal cities who help build their communities and are married to immigrants and have gay children; from women whose career prospects have been derailed by sexism in the workplace; from small business owners hobbled by oligopolies like Amazon. We need to use politics to work through our differences — but not just via the conflict of elections, but by bringing the full mechanisms of governance to bear, in the form of hearings that facilitate discussion, promote facts over fear, and undermine right-wing tendencies toward dehumanization, propaganda, racism, and destructive nationalism that have been turning our politics into a zero-sum, undemocratic horror show.

Obsession With Trump Blinds Us to His Partners in White Supremacist Crime

Most of us, even the best-intentioned, are to some degree undermined by a key logical fallacy of our times: that Donald Trump is the sole actor in our national nightmare, that he alone is subverting the constitution and betraying the national interest, that he alone is to blame for where we are.  I count myself among the guilty; it’s hard not to think this way to at least some extent, given the president’s unique mixture of malice, bravado, sociopathy, and sheer improbability.  And after all, he IS the president.

But I think at this late stage of his catastrophic term in office, this emphasis on the man over the larger movement he seems to have coalesced and accelerated is not at all helpful.  It is blinding us to the full danger of the moment, allowing his weaknesses to hide the clear strength, both in numbers and in frenetic, hateful energy, of a white nationalist, authoritarian movement that is asserting power and gaining strength via his presidency.

The most obvious way to think of this is that the president is hardly coming up with the full range of his crackpot policy ideas and strategies of hate and division all by his lonesome.  He’s surely got an instinct for demonizing the vulnerable and stoking the prejudices of his base, but he’s been aided by advisors who, using their own ideology and experience, have worked to bring into reality what the nation is experiencing as Trumpism.

White nationalism is at the center of Trump’s governing strategy and substance, and no one appears to have been more important to helping him articulate it than Stephen Miller, the former aide to Senator Jeff Sessions who became the architect of this president’s unforgivable immigration policy: a policy that looked back to the America’s darkest days of immigration restrictions for inspiration, and sees no act too cruel so long as it’s perpetrated on those lacking the virtue of white skin.  There’s already been ample documentation of Miller’s white nationalist links; but as this Rolling Stone article makes clear, Miller in turn is acting in concert with fellow travelers of anti-immigrant, white nationalist sentiment within the U.S. government.  These include an ICE employee who used to belong to an anti-immigration center considered to be a hate group, another former employee of a second anti-immigration group, and a former writer at the right-wing Breitbart site.  

Every day that Stephen Miller, with his extensive ties and alignment with the vilest strains of white nationalism, continues to work in this administration is a deep offense against our nation and against our common humanity.  But the fact that Miller has a network of like-minded individuals working with him to create a fundamentally racist and nativist immigration policy should light a fire under anyone who doesn’t already feel a sense of outrage at what we’re facing.  We have far more than a Trump problem.  Adherents of a revanchist movement that sees non-white immigrants not only as unworthy, but as less than human, criminal, and disposable are now literally helping make decisions on the very issues they should be kept a million miles away from.  They seek to reconfigure the demographics of the United States for potentially decades upon decades into the future, based on a toxic stew of racism, lies, hate, cultural slander, and a love of cruelty.

Seldom have the white supremacists been so upfront about their sick visions for America, and so empowered to make them a reality.  It’s not just Trump who needs rooting out; the whole white nationalist gang has to be rousted from the government jobs they never should have held to begin with.

Manipulation of Public Is a Defining Feature of Iran Conflict

As the American people have been spun up and down the War-with-Iran roller-coaster — first beset by dread and then relief as the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani seems not to have led to a descent into full-scale war, at least not yet — we may be forgiven for not realizing that mass manipulation of public sentiment has been the major unexamined story of the last week.  To begin with, the Trump administration has pretty clearly lied to the American people about the purpose of the assassination, claiming it was carried out to forestall “imminent” attacks that officials are unwilling and unable to provide evidence for.  Rather, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias writes, “the administration instead simply made a calculated decision to escalate American pushback on Iran as part of a larger series of back-and-forth actions that began with the US pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.”  Yglesias points to the influence of administration members and others who want war with Iran, and who see provoking Iran into a cycle of escalation as a way of producing the desired outcome: by lying to Americans about the real purpose of our attacks on Iran, and provoking Iranian responses to American attacks, the Trump administration is relying on basic dynamics of public opinion to help make its case for war. 

In other words, the Trump administration is arguably not only trying to foment a war with Iran, but to prevent the American people from realizing this is what they’re doing.  And in keeping vital information from us, they’re also telling us that we don’t really have a role to play in deciding whether to go to war. 

Now, it’s within the realm of possibility that President Trump doesn’t want a full-blown conflict with Iran.  After all, as this New York Times overview of the last week describes, the administration was careful to communicate to Iran the desire to avoid further escalation following the assassination, and did not seize on Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks against U.S. air bases in Iraq as an excuse for further violence.  But even if the killing of General Soleimani was intended as a reasonable response to earlier Iranian provocations, such as the violent protests at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, this still opens up the possibility of an unstoppable cycle of violence, despite this actually being the U.S.’ intent.  And so in even this more benign reading of events, we are being told that events that might easily lead to war are somehow not a matter to be decided by the American people through their representatives in Congress.  This is clearly neither in the public interest nor in the spirit of the American constitution, which reserves to Congress the decision to declare war.

A second glaring manipulation of the past week is the president’s clear intent to use action against Iran to boost his political position.  It strains credulity to think that throwing sand in the gears of the impeachment effort was not a consideration in his decision-making; certainly, this is an angle that congressional Republicans have not been afraid to play up, as they hammered Democrats for making the president look weak by pursuing impeachment during a national security crisis.  And we are beginning to see firmer evidence that impeachment was a factor in the president’s decision-making; for example, the Times piece states that Trump “told some associates that he wanted to preserve the support of Republican hawks in the Senate in the coming impeachment trial, naming Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas as an example.”  Given the lies already exposed about the administration’s intentions toward Iran, Democrats need to uncover any evidence that the president is using war to nullify the impeachment effort.  If there’s sufficient evidence, this should be added to the articles of impeachment.

A third thread of the manipulation narrative is the Republicans’ alacrity in using the Iran conflict as a cudgel for accusing the Democrats of being unpatriotic, and worse.  In other words, an event seemingly calling for national unity was seized on by the GOP as an opportunity to divide America into patriots and traitors.  As some pundits have already noted, Democrats were quick to push back against these attacks.  But what’s remarkable is the way that the GOP slipped so quickly into a familiar pattern of attempting to leverage national security issues into a way to smear Democrats with preposterous claims.  

And this leads me to the fourth facet of this week’s manipulations: the media’s default coverage of national security and international events as a realm far more divorced from domestic politics than it actually is.  This is perhaps less of an overt manipulation than those I’ve already described, but it’s a framing that nonetheless ends up promoting something untrue: making the public believe that the government is acting in its interests at least to some degree because the actions are taking place abroad.  In other words, more than in the domestic arena, President Trump’s actions are given the benefit of the doubt as being in the national rather than his personal interests.  In this sense, Trump is exploiting the wide latitude for action overseas exploited by presidents over the past 70-plus years, and increasingly since 9/11.

But just as George W. Bush saw the Iraq invasion as a way to assure his re-election — it was, after all, clearly a war of choice — we can also see how President Obama’s initial escalation of a pointless war in Afghanistan was driven by a need to appear tough to domestic critics (if you have not already, please check the staggering Washington Post Afghanistan Papers series on the lies both the Bush and Obama administrations relied on to maintain a U.S. presence in that country).  So even as the wars following 9/11 should have shattered the idea that foreign policy is somehow a realm where the president should be accorded wide latitude in his or her decision-making, the media has broadly covered it as an ethereal realm where the president’s actions are by default thought to be selfless and pure.  Given all we know of Donald Trump’s subordination of American interests to those of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other foreign governments in other areas, to give him any benefit of the doubt signals that the lessons of both the past few decades and the past three years are being ignored in favor of a fictitious selflessness on the part of the president when it comes to matters of war and peace.  This is extremely dangerous for our country, and in no way serves the public interest.

Indeed, the overarching offense that ties together the various manipulations I’ve been describing may be the president’s exploitation of Americans’ good faith belief that the president will act in their interest. That is, manipulation is only possible because many Americans still behave in a rational, patriotic way; despite so many experiences to the contrary, it still seems outlandish that a president would abuse powers of life and death, war and peace, for the wrong reasons. Whether it’s the president lying to the public about the reasons for conflict with Iran, the GOP’s contention that Democrats are standing in the way of the national defense, or the media’s inclination to suggest a hard divide between domestic politics and foreign affairs, such efforts are premised on the basic credulity of the American people regarding the ethical behavior of their government. One of the tragedies of our moment is that so many Americans continue to extend such faith, even when we’ve had so much evidence that our leaders will be ruthless in taking advantage of it; but as I’ve tried to describe above, it’s clear that the efforts to confuse and manipulate us are pervasive.

Australia's Catastrophic Fires Are Burning Away Lies of Climate Change Deniers

As we read and watch coverage of the apocalyptic fires across Australia — for a sense of scale, they have already burned an area nearly the size of West Virginia; at least 25 people are dead; and 500 million animals are thought to have died — a decisive political lesson is emerging from the response of that country’s prime minister and other political leaders.  Australian novelist Richard Flanagan describes how “since 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries.”  Yet in the face of fires that are unquestionably accelerated by man-made changes to the climate, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has declared that now is not the time to talk about climate change.  Meanwhile, Flanagan writes, “While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mining communities expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports.”

In short, dealt a catastrophic blow by fires supercharged in part by Australia’s extractive energy industry, much of that country’s political class has decided to double down on apocalypse.

As Masha Gessen writes in a fascinating analysis of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and the way she is Donald Trump’s opposite in every way imaginable, this basic clash between realities playing out in Australia is at the heart of the climate fight worldwide: you either believe there is a moral obligation to save the world, or you believe the world, and life in general, are something to be exploited and thrown away in a nihilistic belief that nothing matters beyond the here and now.  What the horrific situation in Australia makes clear (where “horrific” encompasses both the environmental catastrophe and the failure of its leaders to acknowledge it) is that there’s ultimately no compromise possible around climate change.  Either you are for environmental apocalypse, or you are against it.  In continuing their denialism and addiction to a fossil fuel future, much of Australia’s leadership has made this choice as clear as can be.

So reality swamps the lies of the denialists and the do-nothings, at least in Australia — but does that mean that reality will actually win out?  Flanagan sees echoes of the past that suggest that the side of denial and death holds the losing hand at this point:

The situation is eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the ruling apparatchiks were all-powerful but losing the fundamental, moral legitimacy to govern. In Australia today, a political establishment, grown sclerotic and demented on its own fantasies, is facing a monstrous reality which it has neither the ability nor the will to confront.

[. . .] As Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, once observed, the collapse of the Soviet Union began with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. In the wake of that catastrophe, “the system as we knew it became untenable,” he wrote in 2006. Could it be that the immense, still-unfolding tragedy of the Australian fires may yet prove to be the Chernobyl of climate crisis?

Not just in Australia, but around the world, I am hoping that we will see this dynamic begin to play out more and more.  This is not a political debate with any sort of moral ambiguity.  One side is 100% wrong, only it continues to lie and distort and appeal to the worst, most selfish aspects of our individual natures.  As with the model of the Soviet Union, the limitless incompetence and irrelevance of politicians and parties around the world who refuse to meet the challenge of climate chaos should cause them to lose their public legitimacy sooner rather than later.

But there are no rules of history, no assurances that these fools will in fact be turned out of power anytime soon.  It’s up to all of us to make this happen. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about David Wallace-Wells’ warning that climate change might cause populations around the world to turn their sympathies inward, to their own nations and neighbors. This would be self-defeating, as we need global, coordinated action and empathy to resolve global warming before its damage becomes still-more horrendous. Wallace-Wells worries that coverage and reactions to Australia’s fires so far might signal such indifference, but clearly this story is still unfolding, and the possibility of conveying it to the world is still very much possible. Americans need to make known their sympathy to the Australian people, and outrage toward the Australian government. And when the government of a close ally like Australia so seriously betrays the interests of its citizens, the U.S. should use its diplomatic clout to pressure that government to do the right thing. As much as anything, Australia’s crisis is a reminder that the United States needs to get its own house in order, and to elect a Congress and a president who give fighting climate change the highest priority.

Defense of Democracy and Planet Will Be Inseparable In New Decade

Does anyone else feel like the dawn of a new decade caught them unawares?  Until a couple weeks ago, I thought of 2020 as just the plodding follow-on to 2019, which had shared the same incremental relationship to 2018, and so on.  Personally, I blame the millennium — after a once-every-thousand-years roll-over, how can a simple new decade ever compete?  Throw in the fact that we’ve spent the last 20 years not even well settled on what to call where we are. The “oughts” never felt natural (sort of British and controlling all at once); meanwhile, the “teens” never fully won their fight with the “2010s,” the two diluting each other’s potential dominance in a way reminiscent of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren splitting the progressive vote in the Democratic presidential primary.

So here we are in the 20’s, at least back in the land of certain naming conventions, but not sure yet if they will roar or whimper.  What we can be sure of, though, is that we’ve got a great if artificial turning point for looking back at the last ten years and thinking about the themes that emerge.  The two enormous ones I’ve been thinking about aren’t just in the past, though, but will continue to dominate our not-really-new age for years to come.

The first is climate change, which at last is hammering its way into mass consciousness as the existential threat that it’s been all along; according to this Washington Post article, “76 percent of American adults view the issue as a ‘major problem’ or a ‘crisis.’”  This Post story can stand in for the many other recent ones that identify the last ten years as a “lost decade” in the fight against climate change.  While the average global temperature and concentration of carbon in the atmosphere both continue to rise, the 2010s were an era when countries around the world went through the motions of making climate change agreements and then failing to abide by them.  In 2010, the United Nations estimated the world would need to decrease emissions by around 3% annually; having failed to do so, the present estimate is that we need to cut emissions by 7.6% each year to stabilize temperatures.  The disastrous consequences of these failures are mounting, from great swathes of Australia ablaze and dangerous to human health, to acidifying oceans and unprecedentedly monstrous storms.

And this is after temperatures have risen just a single degree Celsius due to the burning of fossil fuels.  On our current trajectory, we’ll hit a 3.2-degree rise by the end of the century.  Scientists have identified 1.5 degrees as a crucial point, and describe a 2-degree rise as something that would be disastrous for many parts of the world.  What many people are just starting to grasp is that many parts of the world are already experiencing this extreme change; a Washington Post analysis “found roughly 10 percent of the globe has surpassed 2 degrees of warming since the preindustrial era.”

At the same time, we’re also getting into the realm of tipping points and feedback loops.  For example, the melting of Arctic ice means that there’s less of it to reflect sunlight, so that the water simply absorbs the heat instead, feeding the melt-off, while elsewhere in the far north the melting of permafrost releases methane into the atmosphere that likewise feeds the cycle.  Similarly, we’ve recently heard about how enough of the Amazon rainforest has been compromised that self-perpetuating desertification may take hold in vast areas of it.  Even as scientists offer some faint reassurance that even the worst scenarios don’t necessarily mean the end of all human life on the planet, it is becoming as clear as anything that there are all sorts of catastrophes short of a full-on apocalypse that many millions of people are increasingly being forced to endure.

The second overriding issue I’ve been thinking about is the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism around the world and in the United States.  From Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Narendra Modi in India, from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Vladimir Putin in Russia, it’s undeniable that a rollback of democracy is well underway.  The reasons for this are complex and manifold, and to a great extent relate to the history and politics of individual countries.  Yet this is also a global phenomenon with some common roots, perhaps none more important than increasing economic inequality worldwide and the avenues this opens up to the manipulation of mass resentments and the incitement of blame and hatred against those labeled as being outside the nation.

Looking back over the last 10 years and more, we can see how in the U.S. the Republican Party has embodied the American strain of this global virus, ending with a full-blown case of authoritarian fever in the form of Donald Trump.  As I’ve tried to describe over many, many posts, GOP initiatives like its redistricting schemes after the 2010 census and its embrace of voter suppression as a key electoral strategy are anti-democratic maneuvers that secured the way for the full-blown authoritarian tendencies of our current president and the zombie GOP that worships him like a god.  I highly recommend this piece by David Daley, who literally wrote the book on the Republicans’ REDMAP (for Redistricting Majority Project) plan to secure majorities in state houses and Congress even in the face of popular vote losses.  Daley describes how manipulation of redistricting in favor of Republicans acts as a sort of gateway drug to increasingly authoritarian tactics:

Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were “surgically” crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. And after the U.S. Supreme Court undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came a flood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.

And then, of course, along came Donald Trump, who not only embodied a whole host of authoritarian attitudes that were latent in the GOP all along — the longing for a strong man, the overly-zealous deference to authority — but the racist and white nationalist elements to which the authoritarian impulse in America is inextricably tied.  After all, a central point of all these anti-democratic attitudes is to make sure that white Americans continue to hold power in the country, and that non-whites are denied their fair say in its destiny (at The Nation, Joan Walsh has a fantastic run-down of the way the GOP has transformed into a white nationalist party in plain view of us all, benefitting from denialism in both the media and in a Democratic Party that it still coming to grips with its rival party’s squalid transformation).

This is also as good a time as any to remind everyone of the startling fact that the Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1992 — a piece of information so startling that I did a literal double-take when I came across it again the other day, and a crucial data point for understanding the GOP’s desire for undemocratic mechanisms to maintain its grip on power.

Both of these crises — that of the environment, and of democracy — have extensive parallels.  Denial and disinformation are key to how bad things have gotten, whether it’s oil companies engaging in campaigns to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change, or the use of propaganda by authoritarian leaders to maintain power.  And both are rooted in the needs of the few overpowering those of the many; our planet is being wrecked to make a smaller and smaller number of people extremely rich, while authoritarian government ultimately serves only those at the apex of power.

But I think one of the big themes of the coming decade will be our collective realization of how these two issues are in fact interlinked to the point that neither can be resolved separately from the other.  Authoritarian rule stands in the way of the profound economic and political shifts countries must make in order to head off still more obscene and unacceptable damage to our planet.  It is no coincidence that here in the U.S., the GOP both increasingly opposes democracy and denies the reality of climate change.  As political scholars have noted, the authoritarian-nationalist mentality is one of exploitation and degradation, with no real belief in a better future, looking instead nostalgically toward a mythologized, glorious past.  The idea of needing to live in harmony with nature is a challenge both to the limits of the leader’s power and to the centrality of a nationalist message.

Conversely, some climate experts are warning of pernicious social and political feedback loops that might develop in response to the increasing devastation of global warming.  Vox writer David Roberts describes this line of thinking:

As climate damages mount and countries begin dealing with more heatwaves, floods, and storms, continued investment in sustainable alternatives will become more difficult. Adaptation spending will rise relative to mitigation spending.

Climate change will primarily manifest as a series of traumas, and as a general matter, stress and trauma cause people to draw their circles of concern inward. Yet addressing climate change requires a circle of concern that encompasses all of humanity. It requires international cooperation. And the escalating damages of climate change are likely to make the very cooperation necessary to fight it more difficult. Local concerns and fears will come to dominate.

In other words, climate chaos could very well accelerate the forces of nationalism and urges for strongman leadership that are the diametric opposite of what’s needed to actually stop climate change.  Chillingly, David Wallace-Wells sees the global response to the catastrophic Australian fires over the last few months as an early sign of how climate change might inspire “system of disinterest defined [. . .] by ever smaller circles of empathy.”  

These possibilities of global political and climate doom are frightening and depressing almost beyond comprehension — but understanding the profound linkages on these two fronts is ultimately clarifying, even electrifying.  For anyone who believes in democracy and a healthy planet, there is no way forward but by defending and advancing both.  There is no environmentalism without democracy, and there is no democracy without environmentalism.  

Straight Out of Dickens

We’ve discussed a few times in the past couple months the ominous and politicized plans emerging out of the Trump White House to “crack down” on homelessness in order to embarrass the president’s political enemies and rid American cities of the aesthetic blight of those who lack basic shelter.  The bad news has continued, as a couple weeks ago the president chose Robert Marbut as executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.  Marbut has consulted with many American cities on how to address homelessness, and his views are both controversial and at odds with the consensus that has emerged over the past couple decades on the best approaches to this crisis.  During that time, a broad agreement emerged among those who concern themselves with this crisis that, perhaps not surprisingly, finding housing for those who lack this basic human right should be integral to the cause.  As NPR describes it, this “Housing First” approach means that “you need to get people into housing before you can effectively solve the other problems that they may be having.”

Disappointingly, Marbut is not on board with this consensus position, and embraces more of what some might call a tough love, and what others might call a sadistic, approach to helping Americans in need.  His preference is for services over shelter, and for an approach that sounds a lot like criminalizing homelessness.  For instance, the Tampa Bay Times reports that for Clearwater, Florida, he recommended “preventing the homeless from lying down on sidewalks, banning bathing in fountains and sleeping in public places, expanding rules about panhandling and 'hoarding' in backpacks or shopping carts, and expanding police arrest authority for what are now minor offenses that now just result in a ticket.”

And a letter co-signed by 75 members of Congress who object to his appointment describes some of Marbut’s other efforts:

In one [. . .] campus that he created in St. Petersburg, people experiencing homelessness were made to first sleep on mats in a courtyard outside the facility; only with “good behavior” could people make their way indoors to the air conditioning and, after further proving their worthiness, bunk beds.

Marbut also takes issue with feeding homeless people on the street, we can only assume for fear of encouraging their dependence on food. 

Homelessness is an issue that has vexed politicians of both parties and the efforts of many, many compassionate and dedicated individuals, including some who have made it their life’s work to help people in such dire need, and there has been no silver bullet to this crisis.  But as I’ve said before, particularly frustrating is that American failures on homelessness are hardly the sole fault of Donald Trump or the Republican Party.  Disappointingly, plenty of Democratic politicians have enacted policies criminalizing the homeless in cities across the United States.

Yet it is undeniable that since 2010, and particularly since the Obama administration’s implementation of Opening Doors, described as “the nation’s first strategic plan to solve homelessness,” the number of people in the United States without shelter has decreased significantly. 

Rather than building on progress that’s been made, Donald Trump appears set to reverse the gains made in sheltering vulnerable Americans, both out of ignorance of the best practices developed over time, and out of an overriding need to politicize this issue to attack his political enemies.  Since Christmas, the president has resumed his Twitter obsession with homeless people in California and New York, and accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of shirking their responsibilities on this front.  As Aaron Rupar at Vox points out, though, Trump tellingly continues to hold his fire on GOP politicians in Florida, the state with the third-largest unsheltered population.  It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the president has no problem making the homeless crisis worse, in order to increase the size of the cudgel he thinks he can wield against Democrats.  After all, among his comments about this issue, you will search in vain for even a glimmer of acknowledgment that most of the unhoused are fellow Americans, and all of them fellow human beings, deserving of both compassion and respect.

Moving steadily to eliminate homelessness means providing homes and adequate services to this population, not sweeping them into holding camps and making them jump through hoops to earn a bed to sleep in.  Revulsion at Trump’s plans on this issue should go far beyond turning it into a political liability for the president.  This is a crisis for our entire society and any claims we have to a common morality.  There are many elements of our status quo that will shock the conscience of those Americans who come after us, but surely our tolerance and mass indifference to those without shelter will be near the top of the list.  That we have struggled so long to form a national consensus that people without housing should unconditionally be provided this basic human right is a sign of our society’s moral shortcomings, not the shortcomings of those without housing.  Prolonging a humane resolution of this crisis due to a collective reluctance to commit adequate resources is doubtless a component of our inability to address the pressing needs of those in less perilous but still abominable circumstances, from students crushed by college debt to Americans imperiled by a lack of health insurance.  When we establish no clear floor to how far we will allow anyone to fall in our society, we are all left floundering for less basic but still vital needs.  Promoting false solutions to homelessness assaults our common dreams far beyond the crisis of Americans living on the street. 

Embrace of War Criminals Is a Back-Door Assault on Rule of Law in America

As with many of his other offenses against the United States, Donald Trump’s interventions in the case against Navy SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher have been rendered even more indefensible by the passage of time.  Gallagher was accused by fellow SEALs of executing a wounded prisoner and killing unarmed civilians, but ended up being convicted on only a charge of posing with the body of the dead prisoner he had been accused of killing.  But when the Navy moved to demote Gallagher and to remove him from the SEALs, the president intervened on his behalf, based on the general argument that there is nothing that American service members can do that is beyond the pale.

Unfortunately for the president, The New York Times has published a disturbing article based on video interviews of the SEALs in Gallagher’s unit conducted as part of the investigation, as well as text messages unit members sent each other regarding their commander and the actions he was accused of.  While he was acquitted of the crimes of murder, multiple members of his unit describe in vivid and corroborating detail Gallagher’s multiple killings of civilians, the murder of a prisoner, and a general unit-wide sense that he was a psychopath who endangered his own men.  It is difficult to read this account and not conclude that the prosecution of Gallagher was badly botched and resulted in a travesty of justice.

But it’s the larger picture that deserves far more public attention that it’s getting.  Before his intervention into Gallagher’s case, the president had already pardoned two convicted war criminals, men who were found guilty of killing civilians.  As many people have already noted, through these actions and his own explanations for his actions, the president is making an embrace of American war criminals central to his political identity.  He has even made it clear that he intends to campaign with them in 2020.

The single best discussion of why this is happening and why it’s important may be Adam Serwer’s “The War-Crimes President” in The Atlantic.  Serwer contends that Trump’s actions are “a rational extension of Trumpist nationalism, which recognizes no moral, legal, or institutional restraints on the president worth upholding, and which sees violence against outsiders as a redemptive expression of national loyalty.”  Serwer writes:

It would be a mistake [. . .] to view Trump’s pardons as stemming from a deep reverence for the military or an understanding of the difficulties faced by service members. Rather, he views these crimes as acts of nationalist solidarity against Muslims, against whom crimes are not simply acceptable but praiseworthy. Trumpists are capable of recognizing the evils of excessive state power — but only when it is directed at those they see as like themselves. When it is directed at those they hate and fear, such excesses are not crimes but virtues.

The crimes of which these service members are accused were committed against people the president does not consider fully human. It would not do to punish Americans for killing people whose lives, in the eyes of the president and many of his supporters, do not matter.

Serwer sees Trump’s broader end as an attempt to divide America into those who are loyal to such an America-first and Trump-first ideology, and those who are not.  After all, objecting to his pardons of war criminals means to implicitly take the side of the rights of those non-Americans against whom they committed their crimes.  Doing so shows “disloyalty and weakness,” while denying the existence of foreigners’ humanity display “patriotism and strength.”  Stoking such division through an embrace of war criminals is paralleled by Trump’s demonization of Muslims, Mexicans, and African-Americans; in all these cases, Trump would split the country into the camp of the loyalists and the camp that is, or defends, the supposed outsiders.

So there’s a deep and pernicious political strategy at play in these pardons, but the equally sinister attack on the very idea of war crimes needs to be called out as well.  Jeet Heer observes that though there’s been a lot of legitimate and necessary criticism of Donald Trump interfering in the military chain of command, with all the deleterious effects that will have on the military’s effectiveness, the larger problem with his pardons is that they’re “part of a larger push to normalize war crimes.”  The fundamental immorality of war crimes should be plain to see for all civilized people, but beyond this are the pernicious, practical downsides.  As Waitman Wade Beorn writes, “The effects of a malfunctioning moral compass extend past our borders. Allies and host nations will be more hesitant to work with the United States if they cannot count on us to effectively punish those who cross ethical boundaries. This can imperil our troops overseas and threaten our strategic safety.”  In other words, if the United States ignores the laws of war, it is likelier that American soldiers and civilians will pay the price for this down the road, and that American power will suffer.

As Beorn pithily puts it, “Trump is now breaking the moral backbone that prevents war crimes, demolishing America’s military institutions and replacing them with his own cult of personality and bankrupt values system.”  Trump has sent a message that not only are war crimes acceptable, but that anyone who reports those crimes now risks harm to their career.  The president has thus assured that our military is now at war with itself, between those who see themselves subject to the unequivocal pro-war crimes message of an unfit commander in chief, and those who rightly view themselves as bound to the rule of law. Such a division can only have a profoundly destructive impact on the effectiveness and order of the U.S. military.

But of course it is not simply the rule of law in the armed forces that is under assault by the president’s endorsement of war criminals, but the rule of law in the United States more generally.  In American war-fighting, the president has essentially found a weak link or back door in Americans’ attitude toward the rule of law and its premise that the law applies to all equally.  It is far easier to argue that foreigners, even civilians, deserve no protection under U.S. law so long as the U.S. is fighting a war, than to argue that certain segments of the U.S. population are simply not as American as the rest of us.  But as Serwer describes, both are part of the same us-versus-them mentality, the division of the world into Trump loyalists and Trump enemies.  By seizing on a realm where the idea of the law seems to be at its weakest, the president clearly sees a way to normalize not just war crimes but the substitution of his personal will for the rule of law more generally, based on the general Nixonian principle that if the president says it’s right and legal, it is.

In this, Trump is aided by the generalized and unexamined American worship of the U.S. military as a paragon of virtue and selflessness .  Service members do exemplify admirable traits of public service and duty, but Americans have generally taken this admiration to mystical and dangerous levels.  Our collective guilt over their sacrifice in two wars now generally understood to be pointless and counter-productive is immense, and so our ability or willingness to view the armed forces with clear eyes has been deeply compromised in favor of a sentimentalized idea of military service.  Ironically, the first president to fully criticize these wars has not hesitated to take advantage of the public trust held by the military for his own ends: in this case, to declare that members of the military are incapable of committing war crimes.  In doing so, he uses the unimpeachability of service members to aggrandize his own ability to declare what is right and wrong, and who deserves to live and who deserves to die. 

It is also no coincidence that the president is undermining the rule of law via the one public institution in America that, beyond the hero worship that has entered our culture, is the least democratic.  As a hierarchical organization based not only on a strict chain of command but an institutional class system of officers and enlisted men, the military in fact functions in ways that are utterly anathema to our democratic ideals and system of government.  This has always been a deeply worrisome element of Americans’ increasingly broad and unquestioning admiration for the military.  The perniciousness of this contradiction — mass admiration for an undemocratic institution — was brought home to me by The New York Times describing the code of silence among Navy SEALs that generally keeps them from speaking out about wrongdoing in their ranks.  An institution that excludes the rule of law as a bedrock principle should be viewed with deep skepticism by a democratic, law-abiding people.  In this case, there are two instructive lessons.  First, the basic despotism and hierarchy of the military meant that a squad leader could commit war crimes without his unit being able to stop him (even when members went around him and up the chain of command to warn of their chief’s behavior, they were told to remain quiet).  Second, it required unit members to act against the code of silence in order to do the right thing and behave as American citizens.  The idea that it’s OK for commando-type units to have their own code was a small chink in our collective adherence to the rule of law that an authoritarian-minded president like Donald Trump has not hesitated to exploit.

At this point, we need to be talking about how the president is seeking to undo the rule of law in the country, which is of course happening across a broad spectrum beyond just these war crimes pardons.  But in their extremity, it’s absolutely necessary to defend the rule of law around war crimes, precisely because they involve value and emotions that Trump obviously sees as advantageous to himself.  “Kill our enemies and let god sort it out,” he is essentially saying, and we can’t ignore the appeal of righteous retribution and unfettered American power, or the way he employs such primal emotions to split the country apart.

So how do we roll back this assault on the rule of law?  Talking about it and exposing the president’s strategy is necessary, but we also need to go on the offensive. Adam Serwer get at the perversity of how Trump’s lawlessness is playing it out in the military, but also offers a clue as to how to fight back: 

Although Trump insists that he is honoring the U.S. military, in fact the pardons render the law-abiding majority of American service members disloyal for following rules that others were loyal enough to break. Under this twisted moral framework, it is the service members who turned in and testified against their comrades for violating the laws of war who showed insufficient patriotism.

Even as Trump seeks to elevate those who follow his malevolent view of America’s and his own power, the vast majority of service members and Americans in general see the evil in acts like killing civilians and prisoners.  In particular, members of the military need to speak, against a corrupt commander in chief and in support of the laws of war, and by extension, the rule of law more generally.  But the rest of us also need to be talking about how the president has placed members of the military in which they either act as Americans or as Trump loyalists, a choice that is simply inexcusable. It is powerfully in our favor that Trump’s embrace of war crimes ends up making law-abiding service members into criminals and criminal service members into loyal heroes. Needless to say, there are far, far more service members who do the right thing, and by sticking up for their cause, we also stick up for the broader cause of the rule of law.

And as Jeet Heer emphasizes, we need to make sure that this is not treated as a matter of Trump violating the military’s procedures, but as the more fundamental embrace of criminality that it is.  The fact that members of the military are now being asked to choose sides by the president — either him or the constitution — is a depraved and unforgivable demand — but one which members of the public can easily understand as fundamentally un-American.

The Democrats, and the Democratic candidates for the presidency in particular, need to engage Trump directly on his corruption of the military, both for its pernicious effect on the armed forces and on the rule of law more generally. They need to recognize and exploit the fact that Trump’s position on war crimes is a profound vulnerability to the president, even as it poses a profound threat to the rule of law; his is a high-stakes gambit for which he must be made to pay a deep cost. Beyond this, the idea that Trump may be working to bend the military to his undemocratic and authoritarian system of values is a direct threat to civilian control of the military and to American democracy itself. At the same time, making the case that Trump’s embrace of war criminals debases the vast majority of law-abiding service members can play a role in fracturing his electoral coalition and his deranged authoritarian, white nationalist movement. In the face of the president’s efforts to divide our country into loyalists and enemies, it is fair game for Democrats to make plain the choice between being pro-military and pro-Trump. The first modern American president to openly embrace war crimes must also be the last.

Unpacking the President's Lies About the Environment, Part II

A few days ago, I talked about how the lies behind President Trump’s anti-environmental screeds can be used against him.  One big point that I didn’t make is that it’s a mistake to over-emphasize what seems to be Trump’s sheer craziness (“wind turbines cause cancer”) rather than focus on the more substantive message of his comments.  Though there’s plenty that he says about environmental issues that might be added to the already-overwhelming case that the prez is off his rocker, Donald Trump is also communicating a powerful right-wing worldview that he shares with much of the GOP.  When he tells us that the government has no right to tell people what sort of lightbulbs to use, even when such energy- and cost-saving policies are the result of the implementation of laws passed by Congress and signed by a previous president, he is basically making an argument that the government acts illegitimately when it acts democratically.  This might sound absurd, since we all agree, at least at some level, that we live in a democracy, but it is of a piece with long-standing right-wing arguments that seek to label majority rule under a democracy as some sort of Soviet-style “collectivism.”  This is the strain of conservative thought that identifies any government action it opposes, even when authorized by a democratically-elected government, as trampling on individual rights and free choice.

The flip side of this mentality is a belief that Americans really should not be trying to act collectively to solve common problems via our government.  We are effectively instructed to be uncomfortable, if not outright rebellious, towards banding together for the common good.  Instead, whatever we decide in our daily individual lives, via choices as consumers, is the main way our democracy should function.  Dollars spent, not votes, reveal the will of the people.  Collective action via politics for common ends is seen as dangerous and un-American.

But in the case of the environment, this proscription against collective action is supercharged by another powerful idea that is hardly Trump’s alone, but that’s elemental to his anti-environmentalism: the idea that there are no limits to what we can extract from and inflict on the planet.  This really is at the root of the idea that we don’t need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, don’t need renewable energy, don’t need to change anything at all in how our economy runs or how we live our lives.  It is a denial of reality, sure, but it’s an intoxicating denial, and anyone who wants to beat Trump and the Grand Old Party of environmental apocalypse needs to counter this position.  For instance, you can see how a strategy like the Green New Deal tries to turn this crisis into opportunity, showing how the economy and our wealth can actually grow by transitioning to a carbon-neutral world.  But much more thought and perspectives are needed to push back and replace this powerful strain in American thought that we don’t need to ever consider our relationship to the natural world.  Just because Trump sounds stupid when he talks about low-flow toilets being a pain in the ass shouldn’t blind us to the powerful tropes of dominance of nature that have been with us for centuries, and that he channels in his rants.

You can also see how this idea of no limits has perverse connections with the conservative notion that collective action is illegitimate and unwise.  Since we are all just individuals with minimal individual impacts on the planet, how on earth could the planet be impacted by what each of us does?  And since this is the case, collective action directed at a phantom problem is rendered even more suspect and unwise.

Absurd Lies About Environmental Protection and the Economy Will Come Back to Haunt the President

Following President Trump’s most recent attack on wind turbines as a source of clean and renewable energy, The Washington Post is out with an article that frames his comments as part of a campaign strategy for 2020.  The Post notes that the president has also “zeroed in on consumer issues such as energy-efficient appliances, carbon-reducing fuel standards and plastic straw bans” in an effort to contrast himself with the environmental policies of the Democrats. Mission accomplished, I would say!  The article makes much of the president’s personal feelings on these issues, but the larger unifying factor is Trump’s use of hot-button issues to distract from the overwhelming and existential climate crisis that’s upon us.  In this, the president is hardly acting only out of his own impulses, but advancing the interests of the oil and gas industries that have done so much to bring us to this awful point.  He’s also obviously got his eye on stirring up a cultural clash between his base and the know-it-all liberals who don’t want Americans to use sippy straws or incandescent lightbulbs.

It is never anything but sickening to hear the most powerful man on the planet claim that climate change is not real, but as with his attacks on Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump is providing his opponents with powerful weapons that we can all use to bring this sordid presidency to an end in 2020.  It’s not just that his remarks on such important topics are so deeply bizarre, misleading, and contradictory that, for example, the Post felt compelled to run a whole separate article on his latest wind power comments just to explain why the president isn’t as crazy as he sounds.  Beyond this, Donald Trump’s anti-environment policies are built on a structure of interlocking and self-defeating lies that obscure a basic fact: his policies rip off, poison, and risk the planetary future of all Americans, his base and his opponents alike.

Take the White House’s reversal of an Obama-era policy to ban incandescent and halogen bulbs, to have been effective January 1, 2020.  The Trump administration presents this as an economic victory for Americans, except that it’s not.  The more energy-efficient bulbs might be more expensive up-front, but they would save the United States $14 billion in energy costs every year, along with eliminating 38 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.  At the most basic level, Trump expects that most Americans don’t understand basic economics — that sometimes you need to pay more upfront to save money long-term.  Instead, this common-sense idea is ignored in favor of a MAGA narrative in which a tyrannical government tries to micro-manage the bulb choices of Americans.

The same dynamic plays out in the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back auto emissions standards.  It doesn’t take a math whiz to realize that Americans won’t benefit by paying more for gas to run their cars and trucks every years, even putting aside the broad environmental benefits.  But why put aside the environmental benefits? - less exhaust in the air wouldn’t just help fight climate change, it would also help local air quality. This is to say nothing of how gas-guzzling American cars will be shunned by buyers abroad, as American manufacturers see market share taken away by environmentally-savvier competitors.

Things get weirder, but arguably even dicier for the president, as his critiques get narrower and more obscure.  He’s been on a tear against low-flush toilets and water-efficient dishwashers, which as most people know are elements of a vicious plot to deny god fearing-Americans the grace of cleanliness.  Indeed, according to the Post, Trump “has specifically asked for the chance to weigh in on a change to dishwasher standards that will be finalized next year.”  Yet by the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimates, “the typical American family can save $380 in annual water costs and save more than 17 gallons of water each day by buying appliances that meet” upcoming energy standards. Why does Trump want us to waste an extra $400 year on literal waste?

Particularly frustrating, but also an area of great vulnerability for the president, is the enormous lie that rollbacks on environmental protections do no harm to the environment.  According to White House spokesman Judd Deere, “While eliminating harmful and unnecessary regulations, this President has unleashed the American economy, provided greater regulatory certainty, achieved energy independence, and continued to safeguard the water supply and improve air quality.”  The assertions that the president is either keeping water safe or improving air quality are demonstrably untrue.  According to an analysis at CNBC, just a handful of Trump administration regulatory rollbacks are set to poison communities around the U.S. and accelerate global warming.  From refusing to hold oil and gas producers responsible for methane emissions, to allowing industry and farmers to poison drinking water without consequence, to helping coal plants keep on chugging, Trump policies are set to degrade our environment and our health.  It is one thing to make the case that environmental regulations hurt the economy — an argument, of course, that dismisses the right of all Americans to clean air and water — and quite another to simply lie about the inevitable results of your policies.  

Donald Trump can try to pretend that all government action on the environment is a form of tyranny, but when he opposes policies that combat climate change while also saving Americans money, the lies start to come apart.  Throw on an extra helping of self-serving mendacity about how more pollution means the environment is cleaner, and you’ve got a combustible mix of stupidity and lies waiting for his opponents to light it up and toss it back to him like a renewable energy Molotov cocktail.  

New Information About Funding of Ukraine Plot Strengthens Case for Open-Ended Impeachment Inquiry

There is blockbuster news out about Rudy Guiliani that, among other things, points up the folly of the Democrats’ rush to finish up the impeachment of Donald Trump while damning facts continue to emerge. We have now learned that Lev Parnas, an associate of Guiliani who assisted in the campaign to conscript Ukraine in a scheme to slander Joe Biden, received $1 million in funds from a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. As Jonathan Chait summarizes the import of the this information, “Trump’s Ukraine plot appears to have been financed by Russia.”

Of course, this news is only politically harmful to Donald Trump if the Democrats choose to place it in the larger story they have been telling of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office. It seems incredible to me that Russian funding of the president’s scheme wouldn’t be promoted to the forefront of their allegations against him.