Month: September 2017

WARREN HARDING IS NO LONGER THE WORST PRESIDENT

It may have escaped your attention, what with Rocket Man and the Dotard flexing for nuclear war, but historians are pretty sure that Donald Trump has already overtaken Warren Harding as the country’s worst president. This has no doubt brought Harding his first good night of eternal rest since dying in office in 1923.

In many ways, the 29th and 45th presidents are starkly dissimilar. Harding drank too much. Trump, in his singular gift to humanity, is a teetotaler. Harding was suave and debonair. Trump is puffy and orange. Harding was known to woo and enchant women with romance. Trump grabs them the wrong way. Harding was prone to honest self-reflection, having once said, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Trump stares down his massive failures and declares his reign to be “the best presidency ever.”

Yet, both men entered the White House through amazingly similar routes. Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling treatise on the ups and downs of intuitive decision making, “Blink”, devoted a section to Harding as an example of the down side. Harding, the author noted, never distinguished himself when he was in the Ohio legislature or the U.S. Senate. Instead, writes Gladwell, a political sponsor pushed Harding to run because he “looked like a president.” Those looks were enough to get him the Republican nomination at a brokered convention in 1920, and, from there, the presidency. The charisma and presidential confidence that voters saw, however, was a mere façade. Harding lacked the capability of functioning successfully as a president.

Although the Donald hardly brought a Mount Rushmore face to the ticket, he had something just as powerful as Harding’s presidential aura. As a blustery business mogul, Candidate Trump was rude, crude and mad as hell. Eschewing all forms of political correctness, he denigrated every minority group imaginable and ripped into establishment elites for coddling them. For a good chunk of voters, it was a different kind of love at first sight. To the disgruntled, disaffected and disenfranchised – mostly older, angry Caucasians longing for the good old days when white privilege actually counted for something – Donald Trump was their Warren Harding. It wasn’t his looks. It was how he acted, what he said, his anger, his persona. He was one of them, their only hope to take a rapidly changing country back. But there was a problem, the same one Harding’s supporters faced: a deep void behind the veneer. There was no substance, intellect or skill to convert an illusion of competence into effective governance.

And so we have, in the ninth month of this administration, a new paradigm of presidential paralysis, a bizarre, needy codependency between the president and his not-so-merry band of malcontents. It’s a vicious cycle of dysfunction, in which Trump responds to each failure with an outrageous act that disgusts most people, but is lovingly devoured, like a piece of red meat, by his faithful base. As a result, he loses support from moderates and independents, while holding on to a “strongly support” base of around 20%. He keeps on stumbling because, among other reasons, it’s hard to move political mountains with that kind of math. And, with each failure, he trots back to his base with another piece of red meat. Rinse and repeat.

For example, take the crazy NFL brouhaha. Trump had been having a bad week. Yet another shot at Obamacare repeal appeared dead on arrival. He took heat for softening on the dreamers and working with Democrats. The right was all over him for backing an establishment Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. So he rips into the NFL for not firing the “son-of-a-bitch” players who kneel during the National Anthem. By all objective accounts, the move was a disaster. Players, coaches and even team owners who had supported Trump, linked arms before Sunday’s games to protest the president’s comments. Predictably, his base loved it, which meant that Trump was ecstatic. “It’s really caught on, it’s really caught on,” Trump said at a conservative White House dinner Monday night. “I said what millions of Americans were thinking.” Meanwhile, days before his NFL rampage, 66% of Americans told pollsters that Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it.

Solidifying the love of those closest to you, even if others disapprove of your actions, can be a commendable personal trait. But it is not particularly useful in the pragmatics of electoral politics. Every recent president has attempted to broaden their appeal, despite loud outcries from their base. George W. Bush’s pro-immigration stance, and his successful push for a Medicare drug program, infuriated his base but drew in more moderates. Liberals are still complaining about Bill Clinton’s welfare reform move that got him more support from the right. Many on the left, including the Congressional Black Caucus, were privately outraged with what they felt was Barack Obama’s failure to do more for the people who helped him get him elected. Yet it was important to Obama to be more than a black president. He, like his predecessors, wanted to expand his support and broaden his base. That’s what makes presidents more effective.

Trump is forever stuck in campaign mode, a one-trick pony who excels at creating outrage just so he can bask in the glory of a shrinking fringe group. He’s had their adulation since the birther days. They still chant “Lock Her Up” at his rallies because nostalgia feels so much better than the dismal reality of failure. Like Warren Harding, Donald Trump fooled a lot of people into thinking he’d make the perfect president. Unlike Harding, however, Trump fooled himself into believing the same thing. That’s why he has to keep performing for his base. Their applause is what makes his act possible. Without it, the curtain will eventually fall.

LAST RUSH TO REPEAL OBAMACARE IS AN ENDGAME ONLY BECKETT COULD LOVE

Samuel Beckett, theatre of the absurd playwright extraordinaire, would have been absolutely enchanted with the U.S. Congress and its over-the-top obsession to repeal Obamacare. Mindlessly repeating actions, completely unattached to any rational or meaningful result, is the heart and soul of absurdist theatre. In one of his early writings, Beckett captured the utter despair and pointlessness of his character’s life with this line: “If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question of what am I doing.” Beginning to see the connection to this Congress?

Then, in his critically acclaimed play, “Endgame”, Beckett constructs a dialogue reeling with hopelessness between two characters as they shuffle through repetitive actions totally void of meaning. As they talk, a rat scurries across the floor. Clov says to Hamm, “If I don’t kill the rat, he’ll die.” And Hamm says, “That’s right.” Republicans insist that Obamacare is either dead or is dying, but they are rushing to kill it because, if they don’t, it just might live. Worse yet: it could grow into single payer healthcare. No, it doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to. Welcome to Government of the Absurd.

Senate Republicans are just a couple votes away from passing a health care bill most of them don’t like nor fully understand. It is, most analysts say, far more Draconian than the one voted down in July. It will leave tens of millions of Americans without insurance, drastically reduce Medicaid benefits, and remove protections for those with pre-existing conditions. And the list goes on. Republican senators who earlier voted against less egregious versions are either supporting or thinking of supporting this monstrosity. Why? It’s the “last train” available to Obamacare repeal. That’s what a high ranking GOP Senate staffer told Vox this week. Under Senate rules, between now and September 30, Republicans need 51 votes to move that train. Come October 1, it will need 60 votes. With 52 Republicans in the Senate, and a united Democratic opposition, the train isn’t going anywhere after next Saturday.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) used a different transportation metaphor to describe the party’s dilemma: “Look, we’re in the back seat of a convertible being driven by Thelma and Louise, and we’re headed toward the canyon. . . So we have to get out of the car, and you have to have a car to get into, and this is the only car there is.” Neither of the analogists said a word about what the bill would do for people who need healthcare. That’s because, to Republicans, unlike the motivational posters, it’s all about the destination, not the journey. The destination is Obamacare’s death.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) said he could come up with at least 10 reasons why the bill is bad and should never be considered. Yet, he’s a yes vote. His ringing endorsement is right out of a Beckett script: “. . . Republicans campaigned on this (Obamacare repeal) so often that you have a responsibility to carry out what you said in the campaign.”

Look, Congress has taken its share of slings and arrows over the years. Legislating is a messy process and most outcomes leave something to be desired. But this is a whole new height of absurdity. Senators like Roberts and Grassley freely admit that this legislation, this massive thrashing of our healthcare system, sucks. But they are on board – whether by way of the last train or the only car – because the party has been mindlessly chanting “Obamacare Repeal” for seven years.

The Washington Post’s Paul Kane suggested this week that Senate Republicans made a calculated decision that it was better to fail once more in trying to repeal Obamacare than not to even give it a shot. According to Kane, the August recess was really tough for Senate Republicans, given their narrow healthcare bill defeat in July. They faced, he said, “an unrelenting barrage of confrontations with some of their closest supporters, donors and friends,” all pounding them for not making good on their Obamacare repeal promise. Those flames were fanned, of course, by regular tweets (here, here and here) from President Trump on how disgusted he was with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for not delivering the votes on repeal. A Republican donor in Virginia even filed suit against the GOP on grounds that it repeatedly solicited funds for an Obamacare repeal it couldn’t produce. The suit alleges fraud and racketeering. So the party clings to an obsolete goal.

That kind of bizarre thinking is the result of intellectual inertia. From a Republican standpoint, Obamacare repeal made sense in 2010. For all its faults, it was the most progressive national insurance legislation passed in 50 years. Conservatives understandably wanted to attack it and try to undo it. But that window doesn’t remain open indefinitely. Republicans used it effectively for several years, even leveraged it to take control of Congress. Meanwhile, millions of people were added to the health insurance rolls. There was no discrimination for pre-existing conditions. Adult children were covered by their parents’ policies. For the past year, a growing majority of Americans say they like Obamacare and don’t want to lose it. The Republican establishment, however, has not changed gears. It just keeps forging down the same archaic path, mindlessly committed to repealing a program that people now want.

The best outcome for Republicans at this juncture is that their repeal efforts fail once again. A bruised ego ought to be preferred over the wrath of voters stinging from the loss of their healthcare. It’s a result, however, that can’t be taken for granted. Best to call those Republican senators now and urge a no vote. When they answer, ask them just what it is they think they are doing. See if they are honest enough to offer a Beckett answer: “I have no idea.”

LEADERS WHO IGNORE PROCESS WILL END UP BEING TRUMPED

Donald Trump’s most crippling deficiency as president is his innate inability to understand process. His abject failure to even embrace the concept of process, let alone direct and nurture it, is the main reason for his subterranean poll numbers, a dismal legislative scorecard and a rapidly declining base.

Process is everything when it comes to effective organizational leadership. It’s how people interact, manage conflict, decide and work toward accomplishing shared goals. And therein lies the problem for this president. As the closest thing to a genuine solipsist to ever occupy the White House, the Donald is barely cognizant of other people, let alone able to direct productive interactions with them. He simply doesn’t do process.

Take the latest example: Trump brought crowds to their feet last year by characterizing undocumented immigrants as the scourge of the earth. He insisted that they all be deported and that a wall be built to keep them out. “Send Them Home!” and “Build the Wall!” were iconic chants at his rallies. (Here and here.) Once elected, Trump softened a bit on 800,000 young people who grew up in America after being illegally brought into the country as children. These are the “dreamers” who were saved from deportation by the Obama administration in 2012. Trump’s base spent the past eight months pushing him to pull that plug and send the dreamers packing. That’s exactly what he did two weeks ago. He, in effect, nullified Obama’s order, but gave the dreamers a six-month reprieve, allowing Congress to do what it has been unable to do for two decades: enact an immigration bill addressing the issue.

Then, just last week, Trump, over dinner with Democratic Congressional leaders, supposedly indicated he was ready to support a bill allowing the dreamers to remain in the country in exchange for some border security measures that would not include his infamous wall. And all hell broke loose. Red Trump hats are being torched by their disgruntled owners, one of whom tweeted, “Put a fork in Trump. He’s done.” Breitbart News, the ultraconservative website run by Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, called the president “Amnesty Don.” Ann Coulter, a provocateur for all things very right of center and one of Trump’s most steadfast supporters, turned on a dime with this tweet: “At this point who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?”

The president was crushed by the reaction, and has seesawed back and forth on his position ever since, creating the most bipartisan confusion this town has seen since Alexander Haig contended he was in charge of the Regan White House. But Trump brought this turmoil on himself by paying no attention to process. This guy spent 18 months pumping up his xenophobic fan club about all those rotten drugged-up, thieving, raping illegals and now he’s telling them to love 800,000 of them and let them stay.

I learned quickly as a union rep that it was much easier to get a group of mistreated workers up the mountaintop of a contract campaign than it was to get them down again. In collective bargaining, as in politics, you get nowhere without a mobilized base. At the same time, you can accomplish nothing for that base without making a deal that falls short of your campaign rhetoric. Effective leadership means managing expectations and helping your troops slowly descend that mountain. It’s far more art than science, and it requires leaders to prepare folks for gains that are more incremental than revolutionary.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election was a seminal moment in American politics. Against significant odds, a black man promising hope and change was elected president. An enormous crowd gathered in Chicago, chanting “Yes We Can!” while waiting to hear from the president-elect. Obama, an astute student of process from his days as a community organizer, had this message for his cheering supporters: “There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.” Contrast that with this line from Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

The truth is that this president doesn’t understand the system at all. America is not a sole proprietorship where the owner calls all the shots. Sadly, that is all that Trump has ever known about process. That’s why he is exasperated with Congressional rules, and with votes that don’t go his way. He wants his campaign platform implemented by fiat. Every president does. Trump is the only one who actually believed it would happen. All his predecessors were frustrated by the time consuming process of governing, of listening and talking with others, having to know what buttons to push, when to come on strong and when to back off – the basic nitty-gritty of playing well with others. Yet, they persisted. That’s because they grasped the power of process.

Leaders who ignore process do so at their own peril. Take Lemuel Boulware, for example. As head of General Electric’s labor relations in the 1960s, Boulware decided to dispense with the normal rituals of contract negotiations. He saw no reason to engage in drawn-out meetings and an endless give-and-take. He opened – and closed – negotiations with what was seen then as a fairly generous offer and made it clear that the company would neither change nor discuss it, resulting in a very ugly strike. It also coined a new term in the lexicon of collective bargaining: “Boulwarism”, a take-it-or-leave it proposal that usurps process.

The superhero image of Donald Trump singlehandedly draining the swamp was obviously a successful campaign narrative. Like all superhero stories, it was pure fiction. This country’s founders, the people who actually did make America great, constructed a process, complete with three branches of elected and appointed players. Process is not always pretty, or fast, or easy. Neither is democracy. But it is far better than either Boulwarism or Trumpism.

A HURRICANE SEASON AIMED DIRECTLY AT THE EYE OF OUR DENIAL

Tornadoes are the only weather emergencies I remember from my days as a wee lad in Minnesota. Sure, there were blizzards, but we didn’t see them as emergencies; they were just part of winter. Tornadoes never did much to raise our anxiety levels. The city used to sound a siren if a tornado had been spotted. It meant we were supposed to hightail it to the southwest corner of the basement for maximum protection. Most of us, however, went out on our front steps instead. We waved to neighbors under a foreboding sky, and tried to catch a glimpse of a funnel cloud that sounded like a freight train. None of us ever saw a darn thing, except a few dark clouds and a little rain. There were no evacuations. FEMA never showed up.

Those flashbacks to a genteel, stoic relationship with weather seemed as quaint as they were ancient last weekend, as many of us not in Florida worried about those who were. Houston’s Harvey was Irma’s opening act. Burnt deeply into our psyches were images of stunned Texans airlifted from their roofs, tightly clasping all the prized possessions they could squeeze into a 13-gallon garbage bag. As Irma headed for Miami and the Keys, she was said to be bigger and stronger than Harvey, the nastiest hurricane to ever sweep the Atlantic.

The thing about a natural disaster in Florida is that it has empathic legs. Almost everyone knows and cares about somebody in Florida. We all either have people down there or are close to someone who does. That means somewhere in those news story statistics – 2.4 million evacuations, 6 million without power – are the faces of actual people, folks we care and worry about. As we apprehend reports of 170 mph winds and 15-foot storm surges, we confront, in a very real sense, the fragility of life and the insecurity of shelter, not just for those we know in Florida, but for all of us.

The inconvenient truth is that our world is nowhere near as safe as many of us thought it was. And it keeps growing less secure every day. It’s not just hurricanes and flooding. California just experienced the hottest summer on record. As Irma made landfall in Florida, at least 81 major fires raged across 1.5 million acres in the west, from Colorado to California and north to Washington. If there is any good to come from these late, turbulent days of summer it is that our heightened anxiety and insecurity will chip away at our collective denial of the inescapable truth that climate change is destroying our planet.

No, the warming earth is not responsible for hurricanes, fires and other destructive weather events. But, say virtually every scientist, climate change significantly ups the ante. It makes everything worse, more destructive. Warm air carries more water than cool air. That means hurricanes now carry more water from oceans and then dump it on land. Kenneth Kunkel of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies said extreme rainstorms are up more than a third since the early 1980s. The increase has dovetailed with the gradual warming of the water. The same is true of the fires. Obviously we had fire eons before we ever combined the words “climate” and “change”. The warming of the earth’s surface makes those fires worse and harder to control.

The cable news buildup to Irma was, as always, filled with inanities, like a reporter using a hurricane simulator to show viewers what was coming. Yet, the prize for pure insipidness goes to Scott Pruitt, the guy in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. His department has removed mentions of climate change from its website. Asked by a CNN anchor to comment on the intensity of two back-to-back monster hurricanes and the need to deal with global warming, Pruitt said discussing climate change right now is “very, very, insensitive to the people of Florida.”

Well, Pruitt’s fellow Republican, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado, begs to differ: “This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change,” he told the Miami Herald. “If this isn’t climate change, I don’t know what is. This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.” Science is on the mayor’s side. According to Zillow, climate scientists predict that one of eight Florida homes will be under water by 2100.

Days after Harvey devastated the Houston area, Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, sounded optimistic about being able to use tragic weather events to break the wall of denial. “The most pernicious and dangerous myth we’ve bought into when it comes to climate change is not the myth that it isn’t real or humans aren’t responsible,” she wrote in an email to the New York Times. “It’s the myth that it doesn’t matter to me. And that is exactly the myth that Harvey shatters.”

Sociologists have a term for the “dangerous myth” Hayhoe described. It’s called “pluralistic ignorance”. It happens when members of a group adopt a norm, belief, or habit because they mistakenly believe other members of the group share it. Far too many of us, for far too long, have turned a blind eye toward climate change because it seemed that so many others were doing the same thing.

Enough is enough. How many hurricanes on steroids, how many floods, how many fires, how many more inches of global sea level rise, how many evacuations, how many deaths will it take to make us shake off our pluralistic ignorance and save what is left of our planet? Whatever we do, let’s not let the answer to that question blow in the winds of bigger and bigger hurricanes. We need to act now.

TRUMP’S ‘GOOD WEEK’ IS JUST MORE OF THE SAME

To hear Donald Trump tell it, he had his best week yet in Washington. The president bitch slapped his own party’s Congressional leaders. Then he hugged Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and even let House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dictate a Twitter message for him. Not only that, he helped secure rare bipartisan support for a bill that will get Texas some hurricane relief and keep the government open for three more months. Could this, the Donald’s 137th reinvention, be the one that really sticks? Could it be that he has finally become presidential?

Naaaa, of course not. This was just one more iteration of Trump being Trump. When it comes to his core values, he has always been consistent. And what he really values, at his core, is himself, and how he looks to the world at any moment in time. “It’s all over the news,” the president bubbled in a call to Schumer. “The coverage is incredible; everyone is praising me. Even MSNBC is saying nice things about me.” (Here and here.)

And that’s what it takes for Donald Trump to have a very good week. There was a time he had to really work to create the public illusion of grandeur. Like when he impersonated his own press agent in order to spread lurid reports about his love life to gossip columnists. It’s so much easier now. All he has to do is make nice with a couple of Democrats he spent the last six months vilifying.

Back in the real world, North Korea is polishing its nukes, 800,000 young Americans face deportation, and there is no assurance our government will be funded past December 8. Trump’s feel-good days of early September offer no nourishment for a body politic that has been ailing since January 20. For that, we need skilled leadership, someone with credibility, vision, a sense of direction and an ability to subjugate ego needs for the sake of getting the job done. Alas, Trump is a dismal failure in all four areas. He is constitutionally incapable of getting outside of himself in order to lead others. The president’s euphoric week was packed with evidence supporting the previous sentence.

It started with the dreamers, the now young adults whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children. Through a 2012 executive order, the Obama administration protected them from deportation. Trump excoriated Obama for that action during the campaign, promising, if elected, to send them all back to the countries of their birth. Then he softened a bit, telling the dreamers not to worry because he loves them. However, as the songwriter noted, love hurts. On Tuesday the administration pulled the plug on the dreamers, announcing that they would be subject to deportation in March if Congress did not resolve the issue through legislation. That was it. The president took no position on what Congress should do – protect them or evict them. He just wanted the monkey off his back. Amazingly, the New York Times quoted White House aides saying their boss did not appear to fully understand the meaning of his announcement an hour before it was delivered.

The public response was overwhelming negative. So Trump, naturally, turned to Twitter for a mood adjustment. His message: if Congress doesn’t act, he will “revisit” the issue. For someone who fancies himself as a master negotiator, this was an incredibly insipid move. It instantly deflated the leverage he created by linking the dreamers’ deportation to a failure of Congress to act. But it made him feel better for a while.

Then came the infamous Oval Office meeting with Congressional leaders. The Republicans, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, wanted to raise the debt limit and keep government funded for 18 months, getting them past the mid-term elections. Schumer and Pelosi wanted only a three-month extension because it would give them leverage in a year-end funding battle. Ryan called the Democrat’s three-month proposal “ridiculous and disgusting.” Trump’s partner in the meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had just delivered a defense of the Republican’s 18-month plan when Trump shocked the room by siding with the Democrats, whose three-month deal was soon summarily passed by both houses, much to the chagrin of frustrated Republicans.

It was the news of that meeting that gave Trump his good week. He could view himself as a bipartisan deal-maker. Basking in the mania of that image, Trump upped the ante, by joining with “Chuck and Nancy” in supporting a law protecting the dreamers. A day later, he went even further and said he agreed with Schumer that Congress should end the requirement of regularly approving the government’s debt limit, a sacred conservative ritual if there ever was one.

The pundits have had a field day with it all. Some compared it to Bill Clinton’s triangulation. Some wondered if Trump was finally finding his footing. Others, noting that the president was once a Democrat, speculated he might be returning to his roots. The analysis is about as meaningful as trying to figure out why a leaf suddenly falls from a tree. That’s what a leaf does. And this is what the Donald does: grab whatever attention he can to make him look and feel good in the moment. As Poe says, “merely this and nothing more.”

The problem is that moments are outlived by their consequences. Strategies are designed to build a multiplicity of moments that will get you to where you want to go, assuming you know where that is. Trump doesn’t get any of that. He’s too wrapped up in watching himself on cable news to realize that when you blindside associates – on either side, when you yank the rug out from under your treasury secretary, when you love dreamers one day and move to deport them the next, you lack the credibility, integrity and probity needed to lead. You’re just a leaf sailing through the breeze. ‘Tis the wind and nothing more.

TRUMP’S ROAD TO TYRANNY IS PAVED WITH RESISTANCE

Nearly nine months into Trump’s presidency, there is but one saving grace: the early dystopian prediction that our democracy would be usurped by an authoritarian dictatorship has not occurred. Not for want of trying, mind you. Trump tweets, barks and snarls like a banana republic strongman, but when it comes to effectiveness, he more closely resembles a little old man behind a curtain, impersonating a wizard.

Those were some dark days after the November election. One publication declared the danger of pending authoritarianism to be severe. Another said the time was ripe for Trump to turn our democracy into tyranny. Two Harvard professors suggested the new president was positioning himself for an authoritarian takeover.

Our country is clearly at one of the bleakest moments in memory. The president has injected a despicable toxicity into our everyday lives, disrupting relationships, instilling fear in marginalized groups, dominating far too many of our waking hours. Trump’s got the fastest Twitter finger in the West, a cyberbully with nuclear codes. Life in these United States right now is anything but comfortable. Yet, an authoritarian Armageddon does not appear to be at hand. This president has been unable to get a single major bill through a Congress controlled by his own party. Heading toward the last quarter of his first year in office, Donald Trump is the opposite of a strongman. In terms of effectiveness, he has been a bastion of weakness.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly talked about how he, alone, could “drain the swamp” and return America to greatness. It sure sounded like a prelude to authoritarian rule. When he got into office, he started bonding with all of the ruthless strongman dictators around the globe: Russia’s Putin, Malaysia’s Razak,Turkey’s Erdogan, the Philippine’s Duterte, Egypt’s el-Sisi and Thailand’s Chan-ocha. Trump admired the ability of these despots to get things done, regardless of how many bodies had to be buried along the way. He wanted to be like them. And he might have been, except for three major differences between himself and his bully buddies: his tyranny mentors all had substantial military assistance and no significant legislative or judicial oversight. Trump, on the other hand, has had his baser instincts squashed by those same institutions.

Ironically, it was Trump’s affinity for the military that persuaded him to draw three former generals into his inner circle: Chief of Staff John Kelly, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis. They have all struggled valiantly to pull Trump back from his odious moves. Their win-loss ratio has been uneven, but the effort has been a clear reversal of the military’s role with other totalitarian leaders. These generals are trying to contain the damage to our democracy. They reportedly spent the weekend trying to steady Trump’s hand on the North Korea crisis and urging him not to withdraw from a trade agreement with South Korea, at the very moment that such an alliance is so critical to our interests. When Trump taunted North Korea by tweeting that “talking is not the answer,” Mattis immediately issued a statement saying that “We’re never our of diplomatic solutions.” The defense secretary also deftly maneuvered around the president’s order to keep transgender people out of the military by tabling the policy while a panel of experts makes recommendations.

The generals are not alone. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, among others, have publicly distanced themselves from Trump, a previously unheard of move by a cabinet member. Tillerson has done it repeatedly: on North Korea, Qatar, nuclear proliferation, climate change and Charlottesville.

Eliot Cohen, a state department official in the George W. Bush administration, told the Washington Post that these White House objectors are keeping the country safe. He said: “Very few of them are there because they love him. Some of them are thinking: ‘This is potentially a very dangerous time for the country. I will go in and do my best, in effect, to save the country.’”

The judiciary has also played a significant role in holding Trump back, much to his constantly tweeted chagrin. His Muslim travel ban has been repeatedly scaled back by different courts, as has his attempt to withhold funds from municipalities refusing to cooperate in apprehending undocumented immigrants. When the Boston Globe last counted in May, it found 134 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration, setting yet another record for this president. Congress, too, has stepped up to the plate to stop the president from numerous pursuits, thus providing a major block for the would-be authoritarian.

That leaves Trump with only one real club: the power of persuading the American people to support his agenda. It’s here that the Donald’s real weakness shines through the emptiness of his tough talk and tweets. Unlike every president before him, Trump has made no effort to expand his base, to move independent and soft Republican voters into the “strongly support” column. The hardcore, rabid rally-goers and white supremacist marchers are the only audience he cares about, hardly enough to move Congress in his direction. Trump’s approval ratings are at the lowest of his presidency. Not only that, 55% of voters say he is not stable and 58% call him reckless. Politico reported on a recent focus group of Trump voters where the conclusion was that even his base is losing patience. Participants described him with words like “chaotic”, “scary”, “tense”, and “embarrassing”.

Despite all that, Trump can and will cause more damage and pain in the days that pave his uncertain future. At this point, however, there is solace in mitigation. The democracy-protecting strictures put in place by the country’s founders are holding up just fine. They, and other key players in this drama, are keeping the 1776 dream alive. And the very essence of that dream is governance by, for and of the people, not by the whim of a tyrannical king.