Month: December 2019

TRUMP & DUCT-TAPED BANANAS

I wanted to honor this season of love, light, hope and peace by writing something good about Donald Trump. My mother used to insist that good can be found in everyone if you just look hard enough.  After two days of Google searches, I gave up. 

But lo, this is a season of miracles.  No, a star in the east did not infuse me with wisdom.  The epiphany came from a story about an art gallery.  My mom was right.  I had finally found something good to say about our newly impeached 45thpresident.  (Insert drumroll here.)

Donald John Trump is a work of art.  Really.  The revelation hit me as I read about renowned  artist Maurizio Cattelan selling a banana duct-taped to a wall for $120,000. In fact, he sold multiple copies of his exhibit displayed at the Art Basel Miami fair. To be clear, the buyers each got a banana and a piece of duct tape; the wall was not included.  

Why, you may ask, would a duct-taped banana be considered art?  The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, Sebastian Smee, has the answer:  “It’s not the banana . . . that constitutes the art. It’s the grotesqueness of the sale and ensuing spectacle (which included a performance artist freeing the banana from the tape and eating it), and more specifically, it’s the idea that the system is absurd.”

Smee’s explanation was the closest I will ever get to a star-in-the-east moment.  Trump’s presidency has been nothing if not grotesque. The past three years of his administration was a spectacle beyond our wildest imaginations. Roll it all together and what do you get?  An orange-tinted, red-tie-wearing work of art that oozes absurdity through its every pore.  Donald Trump:  not exactly Rodin’s The Thinker, but a genuine piece of art nevertheless.

With that in mind, my gift to you for these tumultuous times, is a collection of Trump art, accompanied not by dreary and predictable political analysis, but by astute, insightful and discerning art criticism:  

PAPERING MARIA.  This allegorical piece, simmering and seething in dramatic contrast, is no more about a president throwing out paper towels to Puerto Rican hurricane victims than Cattelan’s work was about bananas and duct tape.  This work is a bold depiction of powerlessness, of a president so inept and clueless that he brings paper towels to a hurricane-ravaged island, and of the Puerto Rican people who were denied real help by their government because the Bounty Man thought they were foreigners. 

NATO TUSSLE.  Nothing says feng shui to Trump like shoving aside a fellow world leader so he could hold the front and center position in a NATO photograph.  Poor Dusko Markovic from Montenegro was pushed aside by Trump as the NATO gang prepared for a group portrait in 2017. This is quite reflective of the Donald’s unique taste in aesthetics, namely that reverential beauty can be achieved only if it’s about him.

THE QUID-PRO-QUO GIFT. This protracted – and still ongoing – work of performance art is at once whimsical and profound, one part Proust and one part Marx Brothers.   Gordon Sondland, a rich hotel magnate who was never fond of Trump, nevertheless contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural fund because he desperately wanted to become an ambassador in order to fill his life with meaning and purpose (the Proust part).  In exchange for Sondland’s quid, Trump gifted him the European Union Ambassadorship as his quo.  Before he knew it, Sondland was knee-deep in political chicanery involving Ukraine, Trump, Rick Perry and Rudy Giuliani (the Marx Brothers part).   Long story short: Sondland first said Trump told him there was no quid-pro-quo on the Ukrainian stuff, but then, to avoid perjury charges, testified that there was a quid-pro-quo. Although the arc of this performance piece is frustratingly long, its narrative is apt and accessible. It is, indeed, a bold morality play about the ephemeral nature of political relationships. It’s warning is clear: Before you hand over the quid be sure you can handle the quo.    

HEARING WITHOUT LISTENING.  Although Trump’s meeting with Iraqi human rights activist Nydia Murad and her cohort marked a rare Oval Office visit by women, the ensuing photograph brilliantly depicts an unbalanced composition on virtually every sensory level. Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about her torture and rape while in Islamic State captivity. She and her fellow activists are shown engaged and totally in the moment as they focus on pleading their case in the White House.  Trump sits in silence, averting any eye contact with his guests.  It was as if he had no idea who they were, why they were there and when he could get back to watching Fox and Friends. The gestalt effect of this group picture perfectly captures the enormous space between this president and the rest of the world.   

WORDS WITHOUT MEANING.  Writing, of course, is its own art form.  Presidential words last as long as great literature. George Washington wrote: “Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”  Abraham Lincoln wrote: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”  John F. Kennedy wrote: “The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”   On the eve of his impeachment, Donald Trump sent a torturous, rambling six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with the stated intent that his words last for 100 years. It had all of the coherence and eloquence of the Unabomber’s manifesto. His artfulness with the written word was characterized with an overabundance of exclamation points and modifiers.  It was filled with terms like “spiteful”, “unfettered contempt”, “egregious conduct”, “disingenuous,” “meritless”, “baseless”, and “a terrible thing”.  And that was only the first page.  From an artistic standpoint, however, the missive drew an accurate portrait of the 45thpresident for anyone interested in looking at it in 2119.  He showed himself to be the man we know only too well:  inarticulate, inaccurate, dishonest, angry and self-obsessed.

Yet, Trump is, indeed, a work of art. And that is as close as I can come to saying something good about him.  There is, however, a caveat.  Although Sebastian Smee, the Washington Post art critic, insisted that the duct-taped banana is art, he also noted that such a label, alone, does not speak to its quality. In other words there is good art and bad art.

Donald Trump is really bad art.  Sorry, Mom.

THE UNTHINKABILITY OF A SECOND TRUMP TERM

Democratic primary voters are facing an excruciatingly painful decision: What’s more important, revolutionary change to benefit the poor and middle class, or getting rid of Donald Trump? As much as we want to believe that both are within reach, the ghost of Election Night 2016 keeps whispering: “Are you sure?”.  If we are wrong, we will have lost it all.

Back in the aspirational 1960s, the Kennedy brothers – John, Robert and Ted – frequently used a poetic line borrowed from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’. I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’.”

That was then and this is now, a pathetically melancholic era in which our aspirations have been Trumped by a villainous, self-absorbed president.  Sadly, our dreams for a better tomorrow may need to be put on hold so we can singularly focus on eradicating this malignancy from the White House.  Former George W. Bush speech writer and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson perfectly captured our dilemma with these words: “Our greatest political passion seems dedicated not to the pursuit of dreams but to the avoidance of nightmares.”

If not for our Trumpian nightmare, 2020 would be the perfect time for Democrats to dream big and bold, to replace the spoils of underregulated capitalism with the dreams of things that never were, like Medicare for All, free college tuition and a Green New Deal.  

Competing for the progressive vote, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have tapped into the understandably unbridled passion for single payer health insurance, known colloquially as Medicare for All.  Finding a way to extend health care to everyone is a concept whose time arrived decades ago.  Originally proposed by Richard Nixon in 1972, it has long been the way of life in most every other industrialized country.  

Passage of Obamacare in 2010 substantially increased the number of insured Americans.  But it did not go nearly far enough.  An estimated 30 million people lack coverage, and another 44 million are so under-insured that they face risk of financial ruin.  Americans borrowed $88 billion in 2018 to cover health care expenses. There are more than 500,000 bankruptcies every year because of medical debt. Most people are insured under employer group plans that carry an annual price tag of more than $20,000 for family coverage. The average employee annual premium share is between $6,000 and $7,000, in addition to deductibles and co-insurance that can run as high as $10,000 or more. 

Based on facts, figures and sound reasoning, the Medicare for All case could not be more compelling. Yet, repeated polling shows strong negative reaction to the proposal (here, here and here), fed mostly by anxiety over the costs and uncertainties of such a major change.  In an election, it’s the perception, not the reality, that wins the day.  Remember what a political albatross Obamacare was for years before winning broad approval. 

It’s a stretch to see either the Sanders or Warren health care plan becoming law even if one of them captures the White House and Democrats win majorities in both houses. The bulk of the party’s 2018 House gains came in either Republican or swing districts, making a vote for single payer health insurance politically difficult. Still, in an ordinary election year, it would make sense for a presidential candidate to campaign for a bold change and, once elected, bargain downward to obtain what’s doable. Alas, the 2020 election will be anything but ordinary.

“Thinking about the Unthinkable” was the title of a 1962 book about nuclear war. It also captures perfectly the prospect of a second Trump term.  Do we spend four more years counting his lies while watching him continue to: ignore the law, dismantle human rights, destroy the planet, insult our allies, rob from the poor and give to the rich?     It’s hard to imagine a more unthinkable scenario.  Yet, in order to escape from our dystopian abyss, we must think about the unthinkable.

There are two paths to defeating Trump, both backed by facially credible theories.  One is for Democrats to nominate a left-of-center candidate, someone promising revolutionary – or at least big and bold – structural changes like Medicare for All, tuition-free colleges and forgiveness of students loans. The strategy here would be to pull in new voters from disaffected and marginalized groups, folks who disdain and distrust traditional politics but whose passion has been ignited by the prospect of a massive system overhaul. Since many in this demographic didn’t vote in 2016, their ballots would have a value-added impact on the Democratic tally, or so the thinking goes.

The other path is aimed at independents, never-Trumper Republicans and Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016.  The math on this is fairly simple.  The Donald won the last election with 46 percent of the vote. Most polling puts his hardcore base at 25-30 percent of voters. The difference between those two measurements represents a sizeable chunk of 2016 Trump voters, a faction seen through polling as disillusioned and irritated with the president.  The theory here is that a moderate Democrat, one not pushing for huge progressive changes, could well flip a sizeable portion of Trump’s non-base voters.

Nine months ago in this space, I advocated for the first of these two paths, a charismatic progressive candidate pushing for profound structural change.  My reasoning was two-fold. One, we desperately need profound structural change. Secondly, I liked the idea of building passion among those outside the political mainstream and pulling them into a growing Democratic tent.

I’m rethinking that position now for two reasons.  First, Trump is even more of an existential threat to our way of life than he was nine months ago (see Ukraine, Turkey and the pardoning of war criminals).  Then there is the Electoral College. Getting more votes in places like California, New York and Massachusetts does nothing to move the 2016 Electoral College needle.  Repeated polling in six swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina) shows Trump either ahead or within the margin of error of his potential opponents.  Democrats will probably need to take at least three of those states in order to recapture the presidency.  

Although the landscape will evolve between now and the election, I find myself growing more risk adverse by the day.  The best candidate in 2020 may not be the one with the best platform. It will be the one who is best able to defeat Trump.  The alternative is just too unthinkable.