Month: November 2018

THE BATTLE AT HALFTIME: THE RULE OF LAW vs THE RULE OF TRUMP

I once made the case in this space that Donald Trump’s disregard for truth and the rule of law was unlikely to push the country into an authoritarian abyss. My prophecy then was that career civil servants, steeped in democratic traditions, values and rules would serve as a strong buffer against the aspirational ravages of Trumpism. Now I am not so sure.

As this maniacal presidential term approaches halftime, the carnage from Trump’s brutal assault on our democracy seems to be steadily growing, almost exponentially. As a quick thought experiment, think back to any presidency in the past 30 years, Republican or Democrat. Could you have imagined then a president who:

CALLED for the prosecution of his political opponents.

OBSTRUCTED an investigation into foreign interference with our elections.

DEFENDED a Saudi leader who the CIA says ordered the murder of a Washington journalist.

THREATENED judges who ruled against him.

And now comes this unseemly B-movie plot in which Trump’s former campaign manager and convicted felon feigns a cooperative stance with the special prosecutor in order to channel investigative intelligence to the president in exchange for a pardon.

I’m not saying it’s time to start whistling that old Barry McGuire ditty about the “Eve of Destruction”. Not yet anyway. Still, this president has clearly intensified his attack on our democracy and the rule of law. He has also become more adept at finding lieutenants who will aid and abet that mission.

The New York Times reported that Trump ordered the prosecution of Hillary Clinton and James Comey, despite the absence of any evidentiary predicate. According to that reporting, then White House counsel Don McGahn told him that a president can’t order criminal prosecution of his enemies and, if he recommended doing so, it could get him impeached. So Trump backed off, just as he did a year ago when he was hell bent on firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller and McGahn threated to quit.

Eventually, Trump tired of being reined in by his legal advisor and McGahn resigned. His replacement, Pat Cipollone is said by former U.S. attorney Harry Litman to have more “moral malleability” than his successor, just what this president is looking for. That’s how Matt Whitaker, an outré lawyer with an underwhelming legal career, became acting attorney general. Not only has the new AG been openly critical of Mueller’s investigation, he has also made music for Trump’s ears by declaring the judiciary to be the “inferior branch” of government.

And we thought Jeff Sessions was in the running for Worst Attorney General Ever. The divide here is not about conservative versus liberal. It’s about respecting the rule of law versus the opposite, namely letting Trump be Trump. Both Sessions and McGahn are right-of-center purists. They are also imbued with the culture, traditions and rules of our democracy, putting them both on an unavoidable collision course with this White House. Trump saw Sessions and McGahn as his guys and expected them to do his bidding, to protect him at all costs. They saw themselves as “officers of the court”, with a sworn fealty to the legal process.

Remarkably, our system of government has held up over the years not because of the brilliance of our laws or the unique architecture of our constitution. Instead, our success has come from a source far more nebulous, one rarely mentioned in civics textbooks, namely our deeply held norms and customs that place the rule of law above the command of any one ruler. As Harry Litman, the former U.S. attorney, noted in the New York Times, Russia has “legal protections no less extensive and high-minded than ours”, but they don’t stop Vladimir Putin from locking up his political opponents.

In other words, our system works because we believe in the rule of law and accept it as our way of life. We went weeks without knowing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, as armies of lawyers for both sides litigated their way from Florida state courts to the U.S. Supreme court, where, on a 5-4 vote, the justices, in effect, handed the presidency to George W. Bush. His opponent, Al Gore, quickly conceded. The law itself was not responsible for that peaceful transition of power, rather it was a national consensus and commitment to follow the rule of law.

That consensus and commitment to our democratic traditions has never been so volatile. Pew Research Center studies show that 61 percent of those polled say they distrust the basic framework of government and want to see it fundamentally restructured. That ripens the conditions for demagogic rule. Therein lies the inherent power of Donald J. Trump. It makes it possible for him to repeatedly lie without consequences. It lets him dismiss fact-based research of government agencies. It lets him verbally attack judges who rule against him. And, with the “moral malleability” of newly appointed legal advisors, it may well let him use the Justice Department to lay waste to his political adversaries.

Question: faced with a 2000 Gore-like situation, what would Trump do? Right. And that is just how fragile our system is right now.

TRUMP OUTSHINES RUSSIAN TROLLS AT DECEIVING AND DIVIDING

Russia’s byzantine efforts to infect American politics with chronic misinformation and rampant discord may be about to end. And we have none other than Donald J. Trump to thank. With a president so deeply skilled at dividing people and turning truth on its head, there is no need to subcontract that work to the Russians. Who needs an elaborate Russian troll farm to crank out social media posts about the evil of black protesters and invading brown immigrants, when Trump can do it himself with the flick of his Twitter finger or the roar of his bully pulpit?

Remember those 13 Russians charged with clandestinely promoting Trump’s 2016 candidacy? They were accused of stirring the social media pot with totally fabricated posts touching on racist and xenophobic fears. The February indictment says their goal was to “sow discord in the U.S. political system. . .through information warfare (designed) to spread distrust towards the other candidates and the political system in general.” Well, the Donald has shown he can do all of that on his own. He was an excellent student of his Russian mentors, so much so that he no longer needs foreign aid.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written extensively about how the Russians pioneered the whole concept of “fake news” in the 1990s and 2000s. In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s post-Cold War strategy was to make up for the regime’s lack of economic and technological power by flooding the Internet and television with misinformation and demonizing the institutions charged with uncovering facts, “and then exploit the confusion that results.” Wrote Snyder: “They cultivate enough chaos so people become cynical about public life and, eventually, about truth itself.” Then, in the 2010s, Snyder notes, Putin took that successful formula on the road in an effort to destabilize Western democracies. Low and behold, there was Donald Trump, ascending the golden escalator to launch a presidential campaign based on division and fabrication. It was a marriage made in Moscow.

One of the many examples of Russian skullduggery cited by the Mueller investigation involved an authentic photo of a Latino woman and her child holding a sign that said, “No Human Being is Illegal”. According to the indictment, the Russians digitally altered the sign to read, “GIVE ME MORE FREE SHIT” and plastered it on social media. Flash forward to the recent release by the White House of a doctored video that made it falsely appear that CNN’s Jim Acosta had aggressively grabbed the arm of a press aide. No need for foreign subterfuge when you can do it yourself.

In that same Russian indictment, a Kremlin operative was accused of circulating a fake news item under the heading of, “Hillary Clinton has Already Committed Voter Fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.” As Snyder noted, the heart of the Russian game plan is not about ideology, it’s about getting people to accept that “there’s no reason to believe in anything. There is no truth. Your institutions are bogus.” But you hardly need a Russian troll farm to sow those seeds, when the president of the United States accuses the Democrats of voter fraud in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, the second he realizes his candidates might not win.

Most of the fabricated posts cited in the Russian indictment involved race, immigration and religion, obviously visceral hot-button issues that trigger deep divisions. They contained outrageous lies and threats about Black Lives Matter taking over major cities, Muslim terrorists hiding behind burkas and illegal immigrants destroying American communities. In other words, pretty much the same game plan Trump trotted out for the midterms. The only difference is that presidential pronouncements enjoy a wider circulation and carry more weight than Facebook posts. Based on Trump’s campaign rally speeches and his Twitter feed, Americans were alerted daily to the presidential fiction of a pending invasion of killer immigrants and middle east terrorists approaching the U.S. border. He totally outdid his Russian counterparts on this one by ordering the military to protect us from the fabricated attack.

For a president who celebrated his inauguration by lying about the size of the crowd, it’s hardly news that Donald Trump enjoys a perverse relationship with the truth. But he’s really outdone himself lately. He told one campaign rally that Democrats will give illegal immigrants free cars just for sneaking into the country. At another one, he berated Democrats for ignoring the health needs of veterans and boasted about how he got Congress to pass a bill allowing vets to use their own doctors if the VA wait time was too long. Only problem was that the bill he was talking about was passed in 2014 and signed by Obama. On the night that Democrats won a majority in the House, flipped seven governorships and eight state legislative chambers, Trump called the results “close to complete victory”. When his latest choice for attorney general drew fire, Trump absurdly insisted that he doesn’t even know the guy.

This behavior would be amusing if it came from a crazy oddball uncle, something to chuckle about on the way home from family gatherings. But this crazy uncle is our president, and he is using the Russian playbook to, as Snyder, the historian, calls it, “create chaos from inside” by making a mockery of truth and denigrating the instruments of democracy. For the Russians, such an outcome weakens their main adversary. For Trump, it’s just a way to get through another day. For the rest of us, it’s another reason to keep searching for an exit from this nightmare. Without truth, without faith in our democratic institutions, America’s greatness is as phony as Trump’s invasion from Central America.

AN ELECTION THAT BROUGHT MORE RELIEF THAN JOY IS A GOOD STEP IN A LONGER JOURNEY

Sometimes getting what you wished for falls far short of the anticipated euphoria. For many of us still suffering from the cataclysm of the 2016 presidential election, the midterms were our coping mechanism. They nursed us through tough times, through travel bans and “shithole countries”, through assaults on healthcare and tax cuts for the rich, through migrant children in cages and “very nice” Nazis in Charlottesville. Through all of the darkness, we looked forward to November 6 of 2018. Surely, in an election this critical, voters would send an unequivocal message repudiating Donald Trump’s racism, hatred and dishonesty. On a purely visceral level, I wanted this president to be publicly scorned, humiliated and rejected by the electorate.

Then I woke up Wednesday morning and realized how naïve I had been. A disaster as horrific as the Trump presidency, with its massive tentacles of anger and division, is not going to be cleaned up in a single election cycle. Yes, the Democrats’ seizure of the House was a genuinely feel-good moment for all of us bleeding heart liberals. Yet, it was an outcome that provoked more relief than elation. After all, in this same election we lost crucial Senate and governor races to conservatives, some of whom trotted out the most disgusting racist tropes since Jim Crow days. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly black and brown, were denied a ballot in blatantly cynical acts of voter suppression. And, as if we needed a reminder of the times we are in, within hours of the polls closing, Trump was right back at work, shaking up the Justice Department in order to gain control over the Mueller investigation, and curtailing asylum for Central American migrants fleeing persecution.

Sometimes, in a desperate desire to vote away our anguish, we ascribe far more power to the ballot than is warranted. In a year as politically demented and tortured as this one, no single election is capable of instantly turning darkness into light. That level of change comes only through a sustained movement, one whose trajectory is anything but a straight line. Here’s how a former community organizer named Barack Obama once described a social change movement: “It’s full of frustrations and setbacks and for every step forward that you take, sometimes it feels like there will be two steps back.” Only by continuing to move, can we make a difference.

And this election, more than most, was all about maximizing those forward steps. The movement started the day after Trump was inaugurated. An estimated 4.5 million American women, in nearly every corner of this country, took to the streets to express their disdain for the policies and behavior of the new president, a man elected after boasting about forcing himself on women. Tens of thousands of them were new to politics, and many became activists, even candidates, all in search of a path out of the abyss that was the 2016 presidential election.

From those steps – and they went both forward and backward, just as Obama described – these women, together with other social justice seekers, led the way Tuesday to begin our climb from that abyss. Wresting control of the House from the Republicans was a giant step, and essential to empowering the resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism. And based on post-election demographics, women – as voters, campaign workers and candidates – led the march to make it happen.

As a result, there will be at least 100 women in the House for the first time in this country’s history. Of the those elected to Congress this week, 42 are women of color. Two are Muslim. Two are Native American. At least three are LGBTQ. Together, they are far more representative of America than the hateful white nationalism espoused by our president.

There were other encouraging results Tuesday. A huge segment of suburban women who voted for Trump two years ago, passionately abandoned that camp and went blue this week. More Latinos voted than ever before, the vast majority for Democrats. The millennial vote was way up, and also largely Democratic. That outcome is something to feel good about, a moment to savor and build upon.

And build we must, for Trump’s movement – in the opposite direction – shows no sign of slowing. His hard core base will be with him until the end. The sole source of gratification fueling this president has nothing to do with accomplishments and everything to do with garnering love and affection from those who long for the days of white privilege. Trump will keep them in the palm of his hand by spinning one fictional crisis after another, nonexistent problems that can be solved only by the Donald. Like sending the military to stop an “invasion of violent criminals and gang members,” which has zero basis in reality.

Although his base of true believers is, according to conservative pollsters, less than 25 percent of the electorate, Trump’s complete disregard for truth and decency has spread into the mainstream of Republican politicians. If the president says it, they will repeat it. They jumped on the “invasion” bandwagon, and even kept a straight face while lying about their deep desire to maintain health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. Their new ethical standard is that if abandoning truth works for Trump then it should work for them.

In other words, to paraphrase Obama, we should anticipate that the ugliness will get worse before it gets better. We also need to remember that the movement born on January 21, 2016, is alive and well, with many steps to go before we sleep.