Month: October 2018

IF TRUMP HAD A SOUL, HE’D SELL IT FOR A MIDTERM WIN

In the interest of good mental health, we should prepare emotionally for a really bad election night. Yes, Democrats are favored to win a majority of House seats. That prediction has been our nirvana, our beacon of light in the darkness of the past 21 months. But we’ve been hurt before, and know only too well the cruel unreliability of conventional political wisdom. We need to brace ourselves for a GOP sweep that would hand Donald Trump a nauseatingly historic win and tighten his stranglehold on our deeply wounded country.

But I don’t have the slightest idea how to prepare for a cataclysm of that magnitude. A category four hurricane? Evacuate. A tornado? Head to the basement. A more powerful, unchecked Trump trampling America’s core values for the next two years? Not even FEMA has a preparatory template for a disaster of that scale.

I haven’t missed an election in the 48 years I’ve been voting. I’ve had far more losses than wins, and the sun always came up the next day. This time is different. Just contemplating a Republican upset that would bolster Trump’s position churns more raw emotional angst than I’ve ever encountered from a matter that is political, rather than personal. For a relatively laid back kind of guy, this level of reaction – to a midterm election, of all things – was startling and confusing. Until I figured it out.

The outcome of this election is not just political. It is deeply personal. Sure, I would hate to see an electorally emboldened Trump get by with shutting down the Mueller investigation, politicizing the Justice Department, enacting more tax cuts for the rich, and building a wall at the border. But none of those things are waking me up at night. What’s eating away at me is the enormity of the pain that will result from two years of supercharged Trumpism, from turning loose on the American people – particularly those at the margins – an unrestrained, unhinged president who has no soul.

There was no hyperbole in that last sentence. The man is truly without a soul, and that’s what makes this election so different from the others. That’s what makes it personal. Donald Trump isn’t evil because of his political beliefs. He is evil because he believes in absolutely nothing outside of himself. He is evil because he will trample anybody or anything that stands in the way of making himself look like a winner.

He recently captured the entirety of his essence in five words. Asked about his mocking and demeaning of Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, the Donald said: “It doesn’t matter. We won.” Nothing beyond the perpetual feeding of his pathologically engorged ego matters to this president. Not decency. Not respect. Not justice. Certainly not truth.

For 242 years, this country has been striving to form a more perfect union, to become a society of equal opportunity, to offer a beacon to those struggling to be free. Despite rampant imperfections and setbacks, we eventually reached the stature of power and moral authority that endowed our presidency with the distinction of being the leader of the free world. Hark, the trumpets now sound! And what words of wisdom sayeth Forty-five? Nothing matters but winning.

A caravan of frightened, desperate refugees ambles through Central America, finding protection in their numbers against the violence they are fleeing. Trump seizes their plight as stagecraft. In an attempt to pull his base to the polls, he insists Democrats organized this illegal march to our borders and that the migrants are gang members, criminals, even Mid-Easterners, hell bent on terrorism, rape and pillage. None of it is true. But if it helps Trump win, it doesn’t matter.

Nor does it matter to the president how much harm he inflicts on 1.5 million transgender Americans with his edict to, in effect, delegitimize their status and degrade their humanity. If that’s what helps to get the Evangelicals to the polls, so be it. It’s all about winning, so it doesn’t matter.

After days of rhetorically contorting himself over the alleged murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Trump’s Saudi Arabian buddies, the president takes to a campaign rally stage and raves about a Republican congressman who body slammed a reporter and pled guilty to assault. Bad timing? Sure. But he has an election to win. Nothing else matters.

It’s not Donald Trump’s evil alone that has me in a pre-election panic. It is this: Unchecked and unrestrained, this evil will metastasize far more quickly throughout the body politic, spreading its venom through hateful, hurtful bullying, racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

It’s already happening. A man groped a woman on a Southwest flight the other day and told authorities that “the President of the United States says it’s ok to grab women by their private parts.” Hateful, racist attacks by Trump’s merry band of white nationalists are an everyday occurrence. Hundreds of GOP congressional candidates have taken the president’s lead and campaigned on his lies of savage, ruthless, Latino killers storming our borders at the behest of Democrats. That’s all happening now. Imagine if Trump ends up owning one more election night. How do you prepare for the consequences of a disaster like that?

This is the most important midterm election of our lives. Sadly, for us liberals, there is little to be gained but much to be lost. If the bluest wave of our wildest dreams washes ashore November 6, Trump and his veto pen will still occupy the White House. Single payer health insurance, wealth redistribution and saving the environment will continue to occupy the cheap seats in our theater of great expectations The fault lines right now are not about legislation. They are about the cancer careening through the veins of a government led by a morally bankrupt, psychologically impaired and utterly incompetent president.

We are engulfed in a spiraling dystopia. There are databases tracking the president’s lies, sexual assault accusations and his insulting and degrading remarks. When we think he can’t get any worse, he does. In the simplistic zero-sum bubble he has drawn us into, there is only one exit strategy. Donald Trump – and all that he represents – must lose. A Democratic midterm victory will not create an end to our nightmare, but it could be a much-needed beginning of the end. This much is certain: We will not get our country back until Donald Trump loses. Right now, nothing else matters.

NOT REPORTING TRUMP’S LIES IS ONE MORE ASSAULT ON TRUTH

Donald Trump’s daily diatribes about “fake news” are drawing support from an unlikely source: academicians and others on the left who insist that the news is, indeed, fake because it distributes the president’s lies. They want journalists to stop reporting Trump’s false statements, arguing that merely labeling them as incorrect fails to mitigate their propaganda value.

Renowned linguist George Lakoff says the news media has “become complicit with Trump by allowing itself to be used as an amplifier for his falsehoods and frames.” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen claims journalists “haven’t been able to assimilate the fact that. . .the president of the United States is a troll”. For that reason, the professor believes reporters should ignore Trump’s inaccurate tweets.

Another journalism professor, Arizona State University’s Dan Gillmor wrote an “open letter to newsrooms everywhere” with the salutation of “Dear Journalists, Stop Being Loudspeakers for Liars.” He begged reporters and editors to “stop publishing their lies”, referring to Trump and members of his administration. He also insisted that White House briefings not be given air time, and that Trump never be allowed on live television because he lies. Instead, Gillmor suggested that the president be “put on a short delay” so his statements could be fact-checked and not aired if found to be incorrect.

With all due respect to these learned thinkers, I say hogwash. When the president of the United States lies, even at the current rate of 8.3 times a day, that’s news we need to know. I’m not unsympathetic with the concerns of Lakoff and others that reporting Trump’s falsehoods and correcting them may keep the lie alive with some news consumers. Lakoff compares that cognitive process to the outcome of telling someone not to think about an elephant. Call me old fashioned, but good journalism is not about trying to get people to think a certain way. It’s about giving them the information they need to make decisions. Besides, in a world where most Trump supporters get their news from Fox and a handful of conservative websites – not to mention @realDonaldTrump and his 53 million followers – it is hard to imagine the efficacy of withholding information in order to combat presidential lies.

The one thing in this angry, bitter, tribalized moment that we all agree on is that we have never had a president like Donald J. Trump. Yes, every president bent the truth a bit, and some told downright whoppers. But the news media and the nation could handle the situation in the normal course of business. Journalists simply told the public what a president said. If subsequent fact-checking or other events cast doubt on his veracity, then that became a new story.

In 1986, every news outlet in the country quoted President Ronald Reagan’s firm and absolute denial that the government had covertly sold weapons to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages. It later turned out that was exactly what happened. After those facts were reported, Reagan had these words: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Sadly, the current occupant of the White House indulges in neither facts nor evidence, choosing instead to make it up as he goes, with the flight of fancy of a five-year-old. So, yes, it took news reporters and editors a while to adjust to this wild aberration in presidential coverage. While the result is a work in progress, it represents a profound – and needed – change in presidential coverage.

Some recent examples:

CNN: “Trump falsely claims nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico ‘did not die.’”

Wall Street Journal: “Trump wrongly blames California’s worsening wildfires on water diversions.”

The Hill: “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.”

Seattle Times: “Trump says crime in Germany is ‘way up’. German statistics show the opposite.”

The Washington Post ran a front page story this week by its fact checker, Glenn Kessler, detailing how Trump “bobb(ed) and weav(ed) through a litany of false claims, misleading assertions and exaggerated facts” on his Sunday night 60 Minutes appearance.

The trend, although not universal, is clearly one of labeling Trump’s statements as false in a first-day story, with later follow-up on the specifics of his misrepresentation. Indeed, it is difficult to find a news story quoting Trump that does not identify at least a portion of his utterances as false. There are exceptions. USA Today recently ran a Trump op-ed that was filled with blatantly false statements. Although the publication later noted the inaccuracies – and included some fact-checking links in the online version – allowing the piece to run with those falsehoods was a gross breach of basic journalistic ethics.

The gold standard for good reporting is truth. Donald Trump announced a few months ago that U.S. Steel was opening six new mills in the U.S. It was completely untrue. The company is not opening any new domestic steel plants, as media reports explained. But here’s the rub: If the edict of those imploring journalists not to report Trump’s false statements had been followed, then the truth that the president lied about the new steel plants would never have been told.

These are depressing and deeply frustrating times for those of us consumed with the nightmare that is our out-of-control and unhinged president. He continues to commit more atrocities in a single day than any of his predecessors did in an entire term. Yet, he is wildly popular with his fanbase, and resoundingly supported by the Republican Party. Those urging the news media to ignore Trump’s deceitful tweets and comments see the strategy as a way of toppling, or at least weakening, the president’s propaganda machine. I believe they are wrong. Truth is a powerful force and it has crushed many authoritarian regimes. The truth right now is that our president lies, every day, in every way. That’s a story no reporter should ever sit on.

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.