Month: August 2018

TRUMPIAN JUSTICE: OUR CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Like a drunk progressing from slurred speech to crashing the family car, the presidency this week continued its rapid descent toward rock bottom. Regardless of your politics, is there anyone out there who wasn’t jarred – at least a little bit – to hear our president praise a convicted felon for refusing to cooperate with the federal government he defrauded? Sure, Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, but historically presidents have paid fealty to the law, not to the lawbreakers.

The president, after all, is the chief executive of that federal government, including its Department of Justice, which, a few days ago, Trump called a “joke”. This is totally contrary to those civics textbooks now welcoming students back to school. No president has ever repudiated his justice department. We inch ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

Here’s how fast we’ve fallen: In April of 2017, legal scholars expressed outrage when Trump accused a former Obama aide of having committed a crime. Since the justice department reports to the president, such a declaration of guilt without due process was seen by numerous observers as a flagrant abuse of presidential power and possible grounds for impeachment. They noted, as summarized in this space back then, that many similar slips of the presidential tongue over the years were immediately walked back. Prime example: Richard Nixon declared cult leader Charles Manson guilty before his trial began. He immediately withdrew his comment, saying, “the last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstance.” Trump, however, walks nothing back and has no qualms about prejudicing anyone’s legal rights.

What happened this week makes the president’s earlier comments look like jay walking. While Manafort’s unsequestered jury was deliberating, Trump repeatedly fired off messages claiming – in full Twitter shot of the jurors – that the trial itself was a “sad day for our country” and that Manafort was “a very good person”. The presidential attempt at verdict influencing, however, did not stop the jury from convicting Manafort on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud.

Hours later, Trump took to the stage of a political rally in one of those theater of the mind moments that flow from the bizarre politics of separate realities. With his former campaign chairman tucked neatly into a jail cell, and his personal attorney having just pled guilty to a felony charge that implicated the president, the Donald led the crowd in the ritualistic chant of “lock her up,” a vintage reference, of course, to Hillary Clinton, who has not been charged with a crime.

If you think that Trump was simply having a bad day and reverted to the Hillary ditty out of a pathetic combination of inertia and nostalgia, you would be wrong. Every day since that rally, Trump has eviscerated his justice department, along with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Never a strict constructionist on punctuation matters, the president said he now puts quote marks around “justice” when referring to the department because he sees no real justice there. He called Manafort “brave” for refusing to flip on him, like his attorney, Michael Cohen, did.

One of the federal prosecutors who helped convict mob boss John Gotti told Washington Post reporters that Trump’s recent statements about the criminal justice system struck him as “the modern-day version of a particularly inarticulate mobster.” That pretty well captures the moment we are living in.

Every day, the president lists names of more Democrats he thinks should be prosecuted by his “Justice” Department (here, here, here and here). Clearly, he has turned the notion of justice on its head. To him, it has nothing to do with the rule of law. It’s about using political power to protect himself and punish his enemies. Trump hasn’t merely hinted at that notion, he’s said it. He told Fox News this week, “the only reason” for appointing Sessions as attorney general was because he “felt loyalty” and expected his guy to protect him in the Russia investigation and then go after Democrats. Trump has never forgiven Sessions for recusing himself from the special prosecutor’s investigation.

The Washington Post has reported that the chief White House counsel and other top aides have repeatedly told Trump that he can’t call Justice and give orders, but the president refuses to embrace that concept. Here’s what a former senior administration official told the Post yesterday: “The president has not a whit of respect for institutions, whether it’s the DOJ or the Fed or the FBI. If you are a threat to him, he is going to try to kill you.”

Most of the news analysis and commentary produced by this historically tumultuous week has been focused on the future. Will Manafort flip for a reduced sentence? Will Trump pardon him? How much additional dirt does Cohen have on the president? What about impeachment? Will Mueller subpoena Trump? How will all of this play in the midterms? So many questions, and so little time to fully absorb the depth of depravity our country faces right now, in this moment, regardless of what happens later.

We have a president who has rejected the rule of law, who calls the Justice Department a “joke”, who thinks nothing of tampering with a jury, and who will do whatever it takes to subvert the processes of government in order to protect his own hide and punish his enemies. This is no longer an esoteric debate on the efficacy of a president opining on a person’s guilt or innocence. This is – right now, in this moment – a full scale assault on this country’s very concept of justice, with or without quote marks. Whatever may lie ahead, let us never accept a mobster’s notion of justice as our new normal.

THE UNRAVELING OF AN UNHINGED PRESIDENT

Say what you want about Donald Trump, keeping in mind that it matters dearly to him. In fact, it may be the only thing that does matter to this president. The Donald traverses a relational line that is, at once, simple and binary. It goes from commendation to condemnation, from singing praise to a dirge of denouncement. There is nothing in between and directions are often quickly reversed. So too are the presidential rewards and penances that accompany those changes. Just ask Omarosa Manigault Newman and John Brennan, names you would never expect to appear in the same sentence.

Omarosa, as she is now mononymously known, has owned the news cycle for the past week on the basis of her aptly named memoire, “Unhinged”. In it, she takes a verbal machete – along with a tape recorder – to the president who gave her a high level White House job, a position that consisted mainly of saying nice things about him. Omarosa, a former reality tv star, started writing her tell-all shortly after she was booted from the administration last December. Why was she hired in the first place? As Trump tweeted, “She was vicious but not smart. . .but (she said) such wonderful and powerful things about me. . .until she got fired.” (Here and here.) The president, who once heaped effusive praise on his mentee, quickly reversed course, calling her “whacky”, a “lowlife” and a “dog”.

Former CIA director Brennan has only known one of Trump’s polarities; they have only spoke ill of each other. In the ring of alpha male one-upmanship, being leader of the free world has its perks, and the president used them last week to punish Brennan’s criticism by withdrawing his top security clearance. Trump was so thrilled with this new toy he’s made a long list of other current and former intelligence types he wants to use it on. And that, in turn, has alarmed serious policy wonks who see the president’s rush to silence critics as another giant step toward authoritarianism.

That may well be, but it’s also, in the nauseating expression of his sycophants, “Trump being Trump”. The Donald has always had his own ridiculously simplified version of the Myers & Briggs personality assessment. People who praise him are “amazing”, “tremendous”, “terrific”, “incredible”, “tough” and “smart”. Those who criticize him are “weak,” “crooked”, “low energy”, “phony”, “pathetic” and “low IQ”. Or, as in the case of Rosie O’Donnell back in 1996, a “disgusting slob with a fat, ugly face”.

Donald Trump is the same vicious, emotionally crippled narcissist he always has been, wholly unable to situationally modify his behavior based on circumstances. The only thing that has changed is the amount of power he wields. And that’s what makes him so very dangerous.

A recent story line, one which Congressional Republicans are refusing to touch out of understandable disgust and embarrassment, is that Trump shows his blatant racism by calling his black critics unintelligent. He’s labeled Rep. Maxine Waters as “low IQ” seven times this year alone. He recently called LeBron James and CNN’s Don Lemon “dumb” or “stupid”. He used similar pejoratives on Omarosa, the only high-ranking African American on his staff prior to her discharge.

In a moment resembling a Saturday Night Live sketch, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended her boss against racism charges by noting that he has also called a number of white people stupid. To carry this absurdity even further, the Washington Post produced a graphic tracking Trump’s insults of stupidity by race. The upshot was that he used that label mostly for white Republicans during the primaries, then targeted white Democrats during the general election, but has mostly aimed his low-intelligence barbs at blacks since taking office. They never covered this metric of investigative reporting back when I went to journalism school.

There is but one constant when it comes to Trump’s word choices. It matters only whether he has been praised or criticized. For example, he once said of Germany’s Angela Merkel, shortly after she treated him nicely, that she is “a really great leader; I was always a Merkel person.” Then the chancellor took exception with something Trump said, drawing this response from him: “The German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman.”

He called foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos an “excellent guy”. That was before Papadopoulos reached a plea deal in the Mueller investigation and drew this Trump tweet: “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George who has already proven to be a liar.”

Before former Texas governor Rick Perry started complimenting Trump, the president had condemned him with tweets: “should be forced to take an IQ test”, “should be ashamed of himself”, “failed on the border”, and “doesn’t understand what the word demagoguery means”. Once Perry offered praise for Trump, he was given a cabinet position by the president who heaped several paragraphs of syrupy praise on him.

When Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents publicly supported the president on a couple of pieces of legislation, he was rewarded with these Trumpian words at a Florida rally: “I want to express our deep gratitude to a man who has really become a friend of mine. He is tough. Man, he is tough, and he is good, and he loves you”. That was quite a change from calling Rubio a “lightweight” in 21 tweets, in addition to those that said the senator was “dishonest”, “a joke”, a “phony”, “scamming Florida”, “bought and paid for by lobbyists”, has the “worst voting record in the U.S. Senate”, and “truly doesn’t have a clue”.

Words mean absolutely nothing to Donald Trump. They are mere pieces of a bizarre Rorschach test, measuring his friend-or-foe assessment of the moment. There is nothing remotely relational about them. It’s all transactional. He thinks Vladimir Putin once said he was “brilliant, a genius”. That was actually a mistranslation. Putin’s terminology was closer to “colorful”. But it was enough to shape Trump’s mind-boggling pro-Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin hardly needs blackmail to curry favor when sweet nothings work so well.

This would all be amusing if the fate of our country, perhaps the world, were not at stake. We don’t need Omarosa’s book or tapes to know that our president is unhinged. All we have to do is read his tweets and listen to his rants. And then pray that this out-of-control reality show is canceled before our democracy is totally destroyed.

CUEING THE Q: TRUMP’S WALK ON THE DARK SIDE

There they were at the Trump rally in their “Q” t-shirts and MAGA caps, their eyes fixed in an intense-but-vacant stare, looking like a large, stoned bowling team, perpetually waiting for a lane that would never open. Yes, this is what it means to live in this 19th month of Donald Trump’s America: crazy people getting secret messages from the president, White House reporters with bodyguards, and the tote board of false or misleading presidential statements clocking in at 4,229. Turns out that Make America Great Again is a really bad science fiction film, with no finale in sight.

Welcome to “QAnon,” a growing contingent of dark internet groups devoted to a bizarre bouillabaisse of conspiracy theories. Q refers to the supposedly high-level security clearance of the contingent’s anonymous founder. The basic gist is that all presidents before Trump conspired with evildoers, including pedophile rings, to create and maintain a “deep state” that runs the government. The military, according to this storyline, got Trump to run for president in order to take back the country from evil forces.

QAnon believes the deep state perpetrators will end up in prison after “the storm”. This refers to comments Trump made last year while posing for a picture with senior military officers: “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” These Trumpian foot soldiers insist that the Russia investigation is a mere decoy, and that the president and special counsel Robert Mueller are working together to imprison numerous left-leaning pedophiles, including, of course, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Until Trump’s rally in Tampa, the Q people confined themselves to a few obscure dark places on the Internet. Apparently, they decided to come out after receiving what they saw as coded encouragement from the Donald. In a recent speech, Trump talked about how he tried to avoid Washington, D.C. before he was elected. He said he had only been in Washington 17 times, a number he repeated frequently in that presentation. BINGO! Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and a delirious presidential seal of approval for the Q-nuts.

Not only that, on the morning after their Tampa coming-out, QAnon got another wink and a nod from the West Wing. After months of tweeting about “Mueller and his 13 Angry Democrats” the number suddenly changed. Now it was “17 Angry Democrats”. QAnon’s Mashable site went crazy.

Although Trump has never acknowledged his Q fans in a straightforward fashion, he has also refrained from disavowing them. That’s not surprising, given this guy’s obsession with being loved by his base. According to the New York Times, QAnon’s Facebook page has 40,000 followers. Its subreddit board has 49,000 participants. YouTube videos explaining QAnon have had millions of views. Earlier this year, an app called “QDrops” was among the top ten most downloaded in the Apple Store. That’s a lot of love for any narcissist to walk away from.

But here’s the problem: These people are every bit as whacked out of their minds as the guy who shot up a Virginia pizza place after reading on the Internet that Hilary Clinton was using it to run a pedophile ring. There have been at least two Q-nuts arrested this summer, both in Arizona. One armed man parked his self-made armored car on the bridge next to the Hoover Dam, blocking traffic while he waved Q signs. The other occupied a cement plant in Tucson because he thought it was part of a child sex trafficking operation. Meanwhile, our president continues to find clever ways to tweet the number 17 to gin up the most unhinged in his base (here, here and here).

Sadly, this sick behavior pattern has been firmly in place since January 20, 2017. This president thinks nothing of compromising the security of the American people if he thinks it will help ingratiate him with his fans. As of August 1, his daily average of lies, according to the Washington Post’s data base, was 7.6, totally nullifying truth as a commodity in this administration. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop Russia from sabotaging our elections because it might tarnish the shine of his 2016 election that he clings to like a security blanket. He tells us he has solved the North Korea problem and that we are completely safe, while that regime continues to produce nuclear weapons.

And now he has escalated his Machiavellian war on news reporters to the extent that media outlets are hiring bodyguards to protect the people who cover the president. Trump has moved from calling reporters the “enemy of the people,” to saying they are “very dangerous and sick” and cause wars. Of course, this helps reinforce the credibility of Trump’s lies since he is letting his base know that the truth-based media is the enemy. Never mind that NBC’s Katy Tur is getting messages warning of her being raped and killed, or that CNN’s Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, along with New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens were threatened with being shot. Trump’s diabolical and unprecedented attacks on reporters have drawn strong rebukes from the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agencies used to taking on these issues with dictatorships of authoritarian countries.

In many ways, this behavior – Trump’s total indifference to truth, decency and the sanctity of human life – is a far greater offense than any Russian collusion or obstruction of justice charges that might come out of the Mueller investigation. This man – the president of the United States – is so singularly consumed, in his every moment, with elevating his ego through perverse delusion that he doesn’t give one hoot that people might be maimed or killed by his self-serving recklessness. If that doesn’t constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then I don’t know what does.

A BOY ON AN INNER TUBE BEFORE “ZERO TOLERANCE”

If you want to beat the political ramifications of inflicting major trauma on young children, it’s better to have thousands of victims rather than just one. That’s the lesson we’ve learned from the Trump administration’s toxic “zero tolerance” campaign. This is the border war that left toddlers bruised, battered and neglected, and forced infants, torn from their parents’ arms, to represent themselves in front of immigration judges.

Six weeks ago, the nation was transfixed by images of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages. A recording of screaming babies and toddlers wailing for “Mami!” and “Papá!” went viral, leaving listeners in chills and tears.

Six weeks is an eternity in our current political environment. During that span of time, our attention has been diverted to a whole string of shiny objects, including Trump’s Helsinki love fest with Putin, the failure of his imaginary peace with North Korea, his threats against Iran, audio of his plans for a Playboy model payoff, and a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by his trade war, among far too many others. It’s hard to keep the focus on the thousands of children torn from their parents, and emotionally maimed for life by the country that once welcomed immigrants with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

Turn the clock back 19 years, to a simpler place and time, though it didn’t seem like it then. The nation was captivated by a similar story, except that this was a single 6-year-old migrant child, a Cuban separated from his parents while politicians fought bitterly over his fate. Elián González was found stranded on an inner tube near the Fort Lauderdale shoreline in 1999. Like the Central American parents caught up in Trump’s zero tolerance nightmare, Elián’s mother had been desperately searching for a better place to raise her son when they set sail on a rickety raft to escape deteriorating economic conditions. Sadly, she drowned en route. Elián was rescued by two fishermen and eventually taken in by extended family members in Miami – Elián’s great uncles – who had themselves fled Castro’s Cuba years earlier.

That might have been the end of the story if not for two salient subplots: Elián had entered the country illegally, and he had a father in Cuba who wanted him to come home. The battle lines were drawn. On one side was Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban community, fully backed by Republicans, insisting that poor, little Elián should be lovingly embraced by the welcoming America of his mother’s dreams. On the other side was the boy’s father, backed by the Castro government and Democrats on the basis that Elián was a Cuban citizen who, by rule of law in both countries, belonged with his father.

While the court battles raged on, Elián’s story evolved into a year-long media frenzy. By the end of 2000, the tale of this one child had been given the second largest volume of television coverage in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O.J. Simpson case. There were books, films, talk radio programs, songs, t-shirts, posters, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, even a South Park episode devoted to the fate of this one young child. Ultimately, the federal courts determined that the government has a duty to “(reunite) unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad. . .” To carry out that order, armed U.S. marshals stormed into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives, and removed the boy at gunpoint. He was ultimately reunited with his father in Cuba where he was treated like royalty by Fidel Castro. Elián is now an engineer and a frequent good will ambassador for the Cuban government.

What a difference two decades make. Donald Trump carried Florida in the 2016 election, in large part, with the backing of Miami’s Cuban-American immigrants who were still angry with the Clintons for supporting Elián’s return to Cuba. Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican attorney who unsuccessfully argued the case for keeping the boy in the U.S. so he could have a better life, is now the Supreme Court nominee of a president who ordered children snatched from their parents in order to keep “shithole” riffraff out of the country.

The biggest change, however, is in the numbers. Elián was a singular emblematic symbol who resonated with deep tones of empathy on both sides of the battle. His boyish face, his smiles, his tears were with us for 13 months, embedding themselves into the fabric of our lives, at a time of far fewer distractions.

We now have thousands of babies, toddlers, young children, separated from their parents and enduring forms of abuse that would trigger an immediate social service intervention in any jurisdiction. What we don’t have are their names or pictures. We don’t have anything resembling the Elián González story arc to keep this dystopian drama on the center stage of public life.

All we know is that 711 children remain in perpetual custody, with no end to their family separations in sight. One young toddler died of a respiratory illness after her release from a Texas detention center. A six-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in an Arizona lockup, and then forced to sign a form agreeing to keep her distance from her alleged assailant. Then she was molested again. A least 70 babies, all under a year old, have been hauled before immigration judges. They have no legal representation and are absurdly asked, by rules of the court, whether they understand the deportation proceedings against them.

Ivanka Trump this week called her father’s family separation plan the “low point” of his administration, as if this brutal, premeditated assault on humanity was a mere past tense blip. Hardly. The government, which was warned in advance of launching this draconian immigration offensive that separating children from their parents would cause “traumatic psychological injury”, says 460 parents of kids in federal custody have already been deported. Nobody knows what will become of their children, now languishing in unsafe and unregulated makeshift detention facilities.

Republicans once saw America as a welcoming beacon in the night to little Elián on his inner tube. No more. They are now enabling a broken and demented president, a man who, by his own admission, would rather look strong than show compassion for defenseless children. Somehow, some way, we must persevere through the daily din of Trumpian noise, and make sure that the electorate never forgets the lasting pain and trauma this man inflicted on all of those children who came looking for a better life and ended up in cages.