Author: Bruce R. Nelson

SAVING OUR DEMOCRACY THROUGH TRUMP OBSESSION

In case you haven’t noticed, we are obsessed with Donald Trump. He gets far more news coverage than any of his predecessors. We incessantly talk, tweet, post and blog about him. Late night and early morning talk shows digest the Donald’s every move. Four films at this year’s Sundance Festival were about Trump. Psychotherapists are treating patients for “Trump Anxiety Disorder”. Drained by the antics of our 45th president, people are unplugging from social media just to clear their heads.

So, in the vernacular of Brokeback Mountain, why can’t we quit him? What sense does it make to fixate on someone we know will fill our hearts with angst, agony and anger? Why not go on a lean Trump diet of a morsel or two every now and then?

The answer is that Donald J. Trump poses a lethal threat to the core principles of our 242-year-old democracy. Ignoring the elephant in the room doesn’t mean he’s not there. We have every reason to be anxious and angry. Yet, our deliverance from this morass will come from continued vigilance, not escapist denial. And come it must, for our very way of life is at stake.

If you think that last sentence was mere hyperbole, then consider what this president said Monday night in response to a warrant authorizing the search of his attorney’s office: “It’s an attack on our country . . . ; it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” Of course, “what we all stand for” is a nation of laws. The search warrant was sought through those very laws, by top U.S. Justice Department officials appointed by Trump. It was also authorized by a federal judge, representing a separate branch of government. It was as American as apple pie. Yet the president of the United States saw the search as treason simply because it might have adverse consequences for him. Only in an autocracy ruled by a strongman tyrant would that premise make sense.

Therein lies the problem. Trump approaches the presidency as if our constitutional democracy doesn’t exist. He may think he has a bigger nuclear button than his North Korean counterpart, but what the Donald really wants is Kim Jong-il’s title: Supreme Leader. Trump is perpetually mystified and profoundly frustrated with the parliamentary ways of Congress. And he has no time whatsoever for the annoying intrusion of a judiciary he can’t control. As he has said so many times, “I alone” can fix the country’s problems. If only he could find a way to rule the kingdom by himself.

And that is precisely why it is so important for us not to turn our backs on this presidency. Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote a book called How Democracies Die. They cited four markers, all of which have Trump written all over them: They are:

1. Rejecting or showing weak commitment to democratic rule.
2. Denying the legitimacy of political opponents.
3. Encouraging or tolerating violence.
4. A readiness to stifle or limit civil liberties of opponents, including media.

Hanna Arendt, a noted political philosopher of the Twentieth Century, wrote about the characteristics of totalitarianism more than 80 years ago. The ideal subject for totalitarian rule, Arendt wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” According to the Washington Post fact checker, Trump made more than 2,000 false or misleading statements during his first 355 days in office. He has relentlessly gone after the news media, insisting that everything they publish or broadcast is “fake news.” Polls show that a substantial portion of his base believes him.

If Donald Trump ruled this country in the authoritarian style he craves, there would be a total Muslim ban, a complete rollback of LGBTQ rights, a wall around Mexico, eviction from the country of 800,000 young immigrants brought here as children, deportation of millions more, all without due process. To one extent or another, those objectives have either been scaled back or blocked by the courts, or by the actions or inactions of Congress. So far, our democracy is holding, even against the will of a man determined to undermine it.

Yes, the news media has covered Trump more extensively than any other president. And, yes, most of the coverage has been negative. But it’s negative in the same sense that a story about a devastating hurricane is negative. By definition, news is an aberration, something unexpected or contrary to custom and tradition. When Trump, on almost a daily basis, issues statements that are patently false, that’s news. When the president calls impoverished African countries “shitholes”, that’s news. When he says one thing and then does the complete opposite, that’s news. When he repeatedly demeans and insults other governmental leaders, including members of his own cabinet, that’s news.

At this very moment, according to news reports, we are on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Trump wants to fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials in an attempt to shut down the Russian election interference investigation. So far, his own advisors and other Republican leaders have held him back. But, as we know, Trump doesn’t take kindly to advice that runs contrary to his impulse.

Clearly, our democracy is facing more peril than it has in at least 50 years. Now is the time for more Trump news, not less. Now is the time, for us to tune in, not out. A recent poll showed that one in five Americans have participated in protests against Trump. That’s just the vigilance we need to protect our democracy. After all, that is really, in the president’s words, “what we all stand for”.

JOURNALISM’S FUNERAL MARCH LED BY CORPORATE VULTURES

Eons ago, I covered the Minnesota Legislature for the St. Cloud Daily Times. It was approximately 1970, and I was paid $1.45 an hour, the then prevailing minimum wage. Thanks to my parents, I was able to pay for my Greyhound Bus trips to and from the Capitol in St. Paul. The newspaper had been in the hands of a local family for decades. The publisher was a miserly old Dickensian character who deeply resented having to shell out money for a news operation. One day, I was chatting with a coworker who sold ads for the paper when Scrooge staggered up to us, moderately anesthetized by a long martini lunch. He slapped the ad guy on the back and slurred, “asset”. He poked me in the chest and said, “liability”. That was pretty much his business plan.

Little did I know then that those were the good old days of journalism. Owning a newspaper was a license to print money. Advertisers had few viable alternatives for marketing their wares back then. The formula was simple: subscribers read the papers for the news and then stumbled onto the ads. The result was newspaper profit margins ranging from 30-something to 40-something percent. Scrooge wouldn’t pay my expenses to cover the legislature because that would diminish his profits. Besides, he knew he could get the work on the cheap because I wanted the experience and the story clips to get a better job on a larger paper. As a result of this capital-labor symbiosis, he got rich, I got hired by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and more importantly, people in St. Cloud got to read about what their legislative representatives were up to.

Those days are so gone. The once idealistic, if naïve, illusion that for-profit journalism is a calling, a search for the truth, a check on those in power, has been brutally shattered by sheer, unbridled greed. It’s capitalism run amuck. Yes, the Internet knocked newspapers for a loop. Ad revenue plummeted. Pages, stories and jobs were eliminated. But for the most part, these media companies struggled to survive, to reinvent news delivery on multiple platforms, to find some way to make their product – journalism – relevant and vital.

Then the hedge funds took over. Newspapers across the country have been gobbled up by vulture capitalist companies for the sole purpose of sucking all remaining value out of them, and then letting these once vital community assets die or go bankrupt. Their business objective is the direct opposite of viability. They just want to pick the bones, sell off the real estate, fire upwards of 90 percent of the journalists. It’s the same thing that happened to Toys R Us. The gigantic toy retailer was hurting from online competition, but was still profitable when purchased by a vulture fund. Rather than scaling back and finding a way to keep the operation going, the new owner simply bled it until it was no more, at a significant profit for its shareholders. Since 2004, Julie Reynolds writes in the Nation, “speculators have brought and sucked dry an estimated 679 hometown newspapers that reached a combined audience of 12.8 million people.”

As tragic as the Toys R Us implosion was for the 31,000 workers who lost their jobs without a dime in severance pay, the dismantling of community newspapers moves the needle to an even higher level of evil. Consumers can still obtain their favorite Hasbro action figures. Former newspaper subscribers, however, have nowhere else to go to find out what is going on with their local school board, city council or municipal leaders.

When I worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the 1970s and early 1980s, there were well over 200 journalists on staff. That number now stands at 25 and falling, thanks to its current owner, Alden Capital, a private equity firm that acquired Digital First Media (DFM), now the second largest newspaper company in the country. This outfit has zero interest in journalism. In fact, it makes money by dismantling whatever journalism was left. DFM is leaving its footprint of news annihilation across the land. Once clearly one of the ten best newspapers in the country, the San Jose Mercury News has gone from a news staff of 400 to 40. Denver once had 600 journalists reporting the news at two papers. Only one remains, The Post, and Alden, true to its 90 percent reduction rule, has taken the newsroom count to around 60. The same thing is happening all over, from the Orange County (CA) Register to the Boston Herald.

These newspapers are being gutted, drained of all remaining value. Despite the fact that Alden’s media properties are operating on profit margins as high as 20-some percent, there is no pretense of maintaining ongoing viability. The strategy is simply one of managing decimation in a way that maximizes profits until death arrives.

Think for a moment of all the local news stories that have mattered to us over the years: city building inspectors on the take; school administrators doctoring test scores, police corruption, school busses that fail safety inspections, sexual harassment at City Hall. The list is endless. Those are the stories that come from reporters sitting through endless meetings, cultivating sources, pouring through public records that ordinary citizens don’t have the time to look at.

Killing a newspaper is not like killing a toy store. “Democracy,” as the Washington Post motto has it, “dies in darkness.” It’s a death brought on not only by authoritarian tyrants, but also by the sheer immorality of unregulated capitalism. Life in a civilized society demands that we weigh conflicting rights and values in order to remain true to our core principles. Surely, there must be a way in which the interests of corporate billionaires can be tempered just enough to prevent the premeditated slaughter of the public’s right to know. We need to find that way before the darkness consumes us.

PORN STAR AND PLAYMATE MASK REAL ISSUE: TRUMP’S SEXUAL ABUSE

A fair triage of Donald Trump’s victims would put Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal near the bottom of the pack. I get how unseemly it is for the president’s high powered legal team to bully a porn star (Daniels), and a former Playboy Playmate (McDougal), into silence. What I don’t get is why any woman who consented to have sex with this bloated, orange-tinted misogynist would want to share that indiscretion with the world.

I don’t mean to be overly judgmental here. We have all led imperfect lives and experienced moments of vile, disgusting behavior. But, as a rule, we don’t confess our sins on “Sixty Minutes”, as Daniels will supposedly do Sunday night. The closest anyone came to that was 26 years ago when Bill and Hillary Clinton used the CBS venue to reaffirm their marital bond in the wake of reports that Bill had been unfaithful. That was when Hillary famously said, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”

Oh my. Those were simpler, more innocent times, even as the country’s moral axis was shifting from a paradigm in which marital infidelity – once acknowledged or proven – was a bar to holding high office. The bar has not merely been lowered, it’s been buried in a swamp of moral depravity. We now have a president who was elected after boasting on tape about forcibly kissing women or grabbing them by their genitals, prompting more than a dozen women to credibly accuse him of doing just that.

If there is any real news in the Daniels and McDougal stories, it rests with the fact that their alleged Trumpian sexual contact was consensual, and therefore a clear break in his behavior pattern. Other than that, there is, sadly, nothing new or even shocking about the notion that Donald Trump chose to bed other women while his wife, Melania, was recovering from giving birth to their son. This is a man congenitally incapable of maintaining anything other than a transactional relationship with another human being. The notion of a deeply textured, soulful connection, or even a trusting, caring friendship, is totally foreign to the Donald. This is true across the spectrum of his relationships: wives, staff, cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries. He lives in a quid-pro-quo world where loyalty is a one-way street.

The only mystery offered by the Daniels and McDougal sideshows is why the president’s lawyers are exerting so much energy to keep two women from talking about their bedroom romps with Trump. This is a guy who used to impersonate his own assistant in order to pass tips to reporters about the women with whom he was supposedly sleeping. This is a guy who has publicly fantasized about dating his daughter, a guy who brought presidential debates to a new low by raising the subject of his penis size. Unless Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal turn out to be Russian agents, the news value in all of this is negligible.

If “Sixty Minutes” wants to crack a real mystery, how about this one: where is the #metoo reckoning for all those women who say Trump sexually abused them? When does #timesup kick in for POTUS? What about Jessica Leeds, who says the Donald groped her on an airplane? Or Kristin Anderson or Jill Harth, both of whom describe similar instances of Trump grabbing their vaginas, just like he bragged about doing on the Access Hollywood tape? Or any of a long list of other women who came forth with similar claims, all backed by credible evidence.

In the post-Weinstein world, powerful men have fallen like bowling pins to similar, or even lesser, accusations. These guys have headed for seclusion, leaving behind public statements that sound like they came from the same damage control template: “I am profoundly sorry to know that I have caused (insert woman’s name here) so much pain. Although I have a different recollection of events, I deeply respect her for coming forward.”

Trump took a different approach. He called all of his accusers liars. He said they were “sick” women seeking fame or money. In a couple of cases, he told cheering campaign rallies that they weren’t attractive enough for him to touch. “You look at her,” he told one crowd, “You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”

As the #metoo movement gained steam, reporters frequently pushed White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to address the president’s accusers. She recites the same sterile stanza and moves on: “. . .this took place long before he was elected to be president, and the people of this country had a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.” Who would have thought that Electoral College math would one day be used to deliver a lifetime clemency for sexual assault?

What’s going on here? None of the other gropers, grabbers and harassers got off the hook with an it-happened-a-long-time-ago defense. “House of Cards” President Francis Underwood might have gotten away with pushing his mistress in front of a speeding Metro train, but the real life actor who portrayed him, Kevin Spacey, was immediately fired from the Netflix series based on accusations that he sexually harassed and abused young men and boys as long as three decades ago. He hasn’t been publicly heard from since.

Donald Trump likes to think that he was elected by what he calls the “forgotten people”, hard-working middle class folks ignored by the powerful elites, or so the spin goes. Well, there are a number of forgotten women out there wondering just how it is that the #metoo movement appears to have left them behind, simply because their transgressor won a presidential election. But this is about a lot more than just those individual accusers. As long as it remains normal and okay for an accused sexual predator to hold the highest office in the land, #metoo remains more of an aspiration than a destination in reach. #timesup will become real only when it pulls in #trumptoo.

THE CURTAIN NEEDS TO FALL ON TRUMP’S ONE-MAN SHOW

The unprecedented mass exodus of presidential appointees is no surprise. After all, the Donald made clear from the outset that he was prepared to go it alone. Remember that line from his Republican convention acceptance speech? “I alone can fix it,” he said. Trump is reportedly exhilarated by all the staff churn and turmoil. Those vanquished cabinet members and senior advisors were merely awkward stagehands, fools who got in his way and stole his scenes. They didn’t understand that this administration is a one-man show.

Donald Trump is absolutely certain that he doesn’t need a merry band of experts telling him how to run this country. As he likes to remind us, President 45 has a power greater than any font of knowledge, an unassailable force guaranteed to lead us to greatness: his instincts. “I rely on myself very much,” he once said. “I just think you have to have an instinct and you go with it.”

A Google search of “Trump instincts” turns up more than 800,000 entries. He points to a passage in a book he wrote in 1999 about Osama Bin Laden being a “shadowy figure,” as evidence of an “instinct” that predicted the 2001 terrorist attacks. He told Bloomberg News that he did no research on immigration but made the issue a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign because he “. . . just knew instinctively that our borders are a mess.” The New York Times reported this week that Trump has told confidants that he’d rather rely on his superior instinct than on advice from his cabinet.

This is, of course, a gigantic load of bunk. Instinct is not a mysterious psychic power. It is a byproduct of our experience, offering a conscious assessment based on patterns instantly detected, and subconsciously based on stored memory. An MIT report suggests a person needs at least 10 years of “domain specific experience” in order to make good instinctive decisions. That means Trump may have a well-honed instinct for real estate transactions, but that power hardly transfers to dealing with Congress or a North Korean dictator.

The president has an alliterative confusion over two approaches to decision making. His is impulse, not instinct. Instinct aligns a pending decision with rhythms drawn from a deep well of experience. Impulse is utterly without cognition and is driven by a lust for immediate pleasure. Trump’s “stable genius” mind is not performing a rapid review of past experiences in search of a pattern that would trigger an instinct. He simply acts on a child-like impulse to say or do whatever he believes makes him look the best in that particular moment, with zero regard for what that choice may reap for him in a future moment.

If the events of the past couple weeks had unfolded in any other administration, it would be meaningful to ask these questions: What’s the strategic game plan behind Trump’s decision to meet with Kim Jong Un? How does a new Secretary of State affect the administration’s approach to diplomacy? Will threats to impose tariffs on South Korea and Japan have an impact on seeking the denuclearization of North Korea? Where is the White House headed on gun control, or relief for young DACA-covered immigrants?

Yet, those and similar questions are predicated on a foundation of deep thought and serious contemplation that is totally foreign to this president. Unless you’re talking about trying to keep a porn star quiet, this is a White House free of strategic planning.

Instead, Trump:

SHOCKED every foreign diplomat and his own advisors by agreeing on the spot to meet with the North Korean dictator, and then rushed to the White House pressroom to alert the media he so despises that a big announcement was about to be made. The Donald’s narrative was that his hard line on Kim has brought the tyrant to his knees, all without a clue as to where to go from there.

INSISTED, days after the Florida school shooting, that now is the time to challenge the NRA and enact meaningful gun control legislation. After basking in self-adoration for such courage, he reversed course and retreated to the NRA party-line.

TOOK at least 14 different positions on protection for the Dreamers, young immigrants who grew up in America, all based on who talked to him last, and/or on the audience he was trying to please at the time.

ANNOUNCED stiff new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, saying “trade wars are good”, just after his Treasury Secretary reassured allies that “We’re not looking to get into trade wars.”

In his bizarrely quixotic campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly complained about how all of his predecessors were so weak that other countries were “laughing at us”. Only he, alone, could win America’s respect back, or so the campaign line went. Well, that’s not happening anytime soon. Trump, and his make-every-moment-all-about-me operating system, has heads shaking all over the globe. As one South Korean newspaper editorial recently noted, “His style of governing, marked by disconnectedness and arrogance, is just mind-blowing.”

The trajectory of this presidency keeps heading for new lows every day. We are long past the point of writing off his fumbles to a mere lack of experience. Like a monster in a bad science fiction movie, Trump grows worse and more out of control with the passage of time. Rather than sensing his inadequacies and failings, and seeking guidance from those with expertise and experience, the president seems almost emboldened by an incompetency he can’t or won’t see.

If a beloved family member had that level of disconnect from reality, we’d be looking for a well-staffed protective care place for them. Unfortunately, the “family” in this case is a congressional Republican majority pathologically adverse to dealing with this delusional head of household, unless and until he gets much worse. Sadly, that time will come. Let us pray that this country is still intact when it does.

SEARCHING FOR DUE PROCESS AT THE ALTAR OF GUN WORSHIP

In an odd rhetorical twist, our latest national conversation on guns has embraced an unlikely term: due process. After all, guns are the antithesis of due process. They kill instantly and indiscriminately, not on accepted rules of justice, but on the capricious basis of a sight line. Yet, some of the suggestions aimed at reversing the growing phenomena of mass shootings raise critical due process concerns – on both sides of the gun control divide.

Take poor Donald Trump, for example. In a rare and short-lived moment of sensibility, he suggested that we might want to think about relieving dangerous people of their guns before giving them due process. His acolytes at the NRA and Fox News went apoplectic. To them, the president sounded very much like Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts in the infamous case of a tart-stealing Knave. So eager was her Highness to have the suspect beheaded, she called for a reordering of jurisprudence: “First the sentence, then the verdict.”

In fairness, that’s not exactly what Trump had in mind last week when he opined that, in the case of deeply disturbed people, we should “take the guns first, (and) go through due process second.” The concept seems eminently reasonable. If the issue before the court is whether a gun owner is a raving lunatic filled with homicidal rage, you don’t want him fiddling with his AR-15 semi-automatic on the witness stand while a judge determines if he is dangerous. Yet the reaction from the well-armed right was predictable. They have long been programmed to go into immediate convulsions upon hearing the words “take the guns”. This crowd’s favorite slogan has long been: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” They don’t take kindly to talk of gun taking.

The concept of due process has been around a lot longer than guns and dates back to early English common law. It was codified in the Magna Carta in 1215, and our founders later did a cut-and-paste, inserting those words into both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Although the nitty-gritty of what constitutes due process is an ongoing judicial work in progress, the basic notion is that government can’t take people’s life, liberty or property without going through a fair and just judicial process.

To the NRA, the only due process that should ever separate a guy and his gun is an involuntary commitment to a mental institution or an adjudication of being a “mental defective”. That standard would have kept 97 percent of recent mass shooters legally armed and ready to fire. The well-heeled gun lobby claims to have pulled Trump back from his momentary lucidity that gave rise to the concept of take-the-guns-first-and then-have-a-hearing. Fox News labeled the idea as “un-American as imaginable”.

Quite the contrary, Trump’s suggestion was deeply seeped in American due process tradition. For example, police can detain suspects on the “reasonable suspicion” that they committed a crime. They then go before a judge within a reasonable time period and the state must show “probable cause” to hold them for trial. Finally, in order to trigger a prison sentence, the state needs a conviction that comes only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the same sequential approach Trump was talking about before he was reined in by his NRA handlers. There was ample evidence that the 19-year-old man charged in the recent Florida shooting was deeply distressed, armed with assault rifles and threatening to shoot up a school. Those facts should have been sufficient to temporarily confiscate his guns, pending a due process hearing on the question of his dangerousness.

In fact, that is precisely what happens right now in five states – California, Connecticut, Indiana, Washington and Oregon – that have adopted so-called “red-flag” laws. Based on evidence from friends, family or police of a credible threat, a judge can order the temporary confiscation of a person’s guns, pending a future hearing on the issue. Studies have shown that those laws have resulted in a significant reduction in gun homicides and suicides.

Trump came up with another brain storm on the gun issue last week, and this one would blow the entire concept of due process to smithereens. Waxing nostalgic about nineteenth century insane asylums, the president suggested this might be a way to lock up potential shooters when there is no evidence to support apprehension. “You know,” said Trump, “in the old days we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this (the Florida shooter), because they knew something was off. (Then) he’s off the streets.”

Trump’s memory of the days when you could “nab” undesirables and toss them into the loony bin represents one of the more inglorious chapters of this country’s history. Based on a belief that mental illness could be dealt with only by locking people up, hundreds of thousands of Americans were confined to these draconian dungeons with little or no due process, many because they just seemed to be different. Once locked up, they were constantly sedated and, in many cases, surgically lobotomized. Prodded largely by rapid advances in mental health treatment, the Supreme Court ruled in 1975, that people could be involuntarily committed to mental hospitals only upon proving to a judge that they are a danger to themselves or others.

Even if the law changed, it’s hard to imagine building enough insane asylums to house all of the angry, socially awkward young men who have guns and talk about killing people. Recent reports indicate that the internet is filled with hundreds of group chats involving thousands of mostly young males who venerate school shooters and fantasize about joining their ranks. While carting them all off to a mental hospital and sedating them until their fiftieth birthday might reduce mass shootings, it totally destroys any semblance of due process.

There is a better solution: take their guns. After all, those students they are yammering about killing are also entitled to due process. Maybe one day, when the Congress and the White House are no longer owned by the NRA, we can finally get around to protecting that right to life, free from weekly mass shootings.

TRUMP’S EDUCATION PLAN: TEACHERS WITH GUNS

Until last week, Donald Trump had been the first president in modern history not to have an education policy. But no longer are America’s public schools a blank slate in the White House’s policy shop. The Donald has a plan, and he’s mighty pumped about it. He wants to give teachers guns and train them to shoot. Welcome to the 2018 edition of education reform: No Glock Left Behind.

As a nation mourned the shooting deaths of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school, our self-absorbed reality star president maneuvered himself into the spotlight. Survivors of the massacre, along with some of the victim’s family members, were summoned to the White House for a “listening session”. There, with the cameras rolling, Trump clung to a note card reminding him to offer an empathetic “I hear you” after his guests laid bare their raw emotions of profound loss.

And when it was all over, our leader of the free world had been majestically infused with the wisdom that would forever stop school shootings: a well-armed faculty. He had not sounded so bubbly and manic since he described his mating rituals on that “Access Hollywood” tape. “We have to harden these schools, not soften them,” Trump said. He then constructed a truly original simile: “A gun-free zone to a killer. . . that’s like going for the ice cream. These people are cowards. They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns – it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus.”

There you have it: Trumpian education policy. At long last, underpaid and under-appreciated public school teachers would no longer have to worry about teaching to the test in order to capture merit pay. They just have to pack heat and pick up their loaded gun bonus.

Many astute political observers have dismissed this call to arms for teachers as just another crazy flight of fancy from a president totally void of serious policy chops. Others have gone so far as to suggest it’s an intentional diversion designed to deflect a renewed push for gun control, to buy time until the anti-gun fervor cools. Maybe. Yet, it’s not hard to see the arming of educators as the absurd-but-understandable result of a decades’ long practice of expecting our public schools to somehow magically solve every societal ill. It’s an American obsession that has never worked, and has, in fact, repeatedly impaired the delivery of quality education.

Take race, for example. The tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s eventually, through judicial and congressional actions, created a more just society, at least on paper. Yet, the rigidity of segregation was not about to go quietly into that good night. So we moved kids from one neighborhood school to another. Public schools became the national laboratory for the dismantling of segregation and the racism that created it. Black students were bused into white neighborhood schools, and vice versa, albeit more vice than versa. Learning was trumped by transportation. The result? The enormous achievement gap between black and white students of the 1960s has narrowed only slightly over 50 years. It was wrong, noted the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1973, to turn the attention of communities “from the paramount goal of quality education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where.” A North Carolina NAACP official at the time put it even more succinctly: “My daughter does not need to sit beside a white person to learn.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t learn our lesson back then. There has not been a major social problem that we haven’t schlepped to the front door of the public school house. Take poverty for example. More than half of public school students come from low-income families. Here’s what a New Mexico Kindergarten teacher told the Washington Post her day was like: “When they come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean?” She cleans them up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes. At her own expense, she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. She is the face of anti-poverty policy to those children, but is left with precious little time to teach.

Once upon a very long time ago, teachers had control over their teaching. They used their skills and experience to map out a learning strategy for their students. Not anymore. As Stanford University Education Professor Larry Cuban noted, “policy elites” at the local, state and federal level have taken over by mandating schools to solve an array of social, economic and political problems. Policy makers, Cuban says, have not hesitated to foist upon classroom teachers such issues as: alcoholism and drug addiction, tobacco use, teenage pregnancy, AIDS prevention, automobile accident reduction, environmental protection and test-driven accountability for producing graduates who can help companies make even more money in the global market place.

A recent study of 30,000 classroom teachers reported that 89 percent said they were “strongly enthusiastic” when they began teaching, but just 15 percent felt the same way today. No wonder many areas of the country are experiencing a teacher shortage. There has been a huge exodus from the profession in recent years. With all the mandates and expectations thrust upon them, teachers have precious little time to do that one thing that drew them into this line of work: teach.

And now the president of the United States wants to turn them into gunslingers. It’s a fitting parody on this society’s long degrading march to dismantle the essence of what it means to be a teacher. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no satirist. To borrow his phrasing, he’s a “sicko” with “demented” thoughts.

MENTAL ILLNESS IS DRIVING OUR GUN CULTURE

Donald Trump is right: Our country’s epidemic of gun violence is, first and foremost, a mental health problem. The president and his Republican sycophants are nuts. They are in an ideologically-induced fugue state, so far removed from reality that sacrificing the lives of children is but a mere normal and necessary function of gun idolatry.

The nation’s latest fuselage of assault rifle bullets had just terrorized a Parkland, Florida school, leaving 17 dead. As the bodies were being cleared from the locker-laced hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the NRA’s hypnotized Republican automatons were right on script. The word “gun” stricken from their vocabulary, suddenly the party of just-say-no to health care couldn’t stop talking about the need to treat mental illness.

“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed,” said Trump.

“This individual appears to have significant issues with mental illness,” said Senator Ted Cruz.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott talked about the need to care for the “mentally ill”.

Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar II promised that the administration will be “laser-focused on getting Americans with mental illness the help they need.”

Gentlemen, heal yourselves!

The real insanity facing this country is the lethal delusion of elected leaders that we can go right on making guns more accessible than drinking water without, on a daily basis, having to bury school children, concert-goers and other innocents. The Florida massacre was the 30th mass shooting in a year not even two months old. There were 345 such shootings in 2017. While many countries have a mental illness rate far in excess of that for the United States, no other nation comes close to us in terms of the number of guns or mass shootings.

“Insanity,” goes the old quote of disputed origin, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In this case, It’s a cliché that speaks truth to power. Republicans mourn and grieve over the victims of the latest shooting spree, mumble their mantra about not blaming the guns, and keep doing nothing to restrict their availability. And then wait a day or so for the next mass killing, rinse and repeat. Think that’s insane? It’s just the tip of the GOP’s mental disturbance iceberg when it comes to this issue.

For example:

MISSOURI state Rep. Mike Leara introduced a bill last month that would make it a felony for any of his fellow lawmakers to propose legislation that would restrict an individual’s right to buy, carry and shoot guns.

FEDERAL law prohibits the sale of a handgun to people under 21, but it allows 18-year-olds – like the Parkland shooter – to buy semiautomatic assault rifles.

VIRGINIA Republican legislators recently killed a bill that would have required a minor to get parental permission before keeping guns in their home. They also buried a measure that would have required licensed child-care facilities to keep guns locked up while children were being cared for.

FLORIDA passed a law, later struck down in federal court, prohibiting physicians from talking to their patients about guns.

GEORGIA is home to numerous local ordinances requiring every home to be armed with at least one gun.

MONTANA voters approved a referendum giving local police authority to arrest any FBI agent who attempted to enforce one of the few meager federal gun regulations.

SOUTH DAKOTA allows all teachers, Kindergarten through grad school, to carry loaded guns in the classroom.

This is the real story of mental health and guns. Somewhere along the way, sanity was totally eliminated from what once was a healthy give-and-take on gun issues. Assault rifles have become more sacred than the lives of our children. It doesn’t get much crazier than that. The president’s sudden interest in reducing gun violence through mental health and school safety initiatives is a sad, cynical, transparent deflection from dealing with the only public policy issue that matters here: gun control. Just a year ago, Trump signed a bill that repealed an Obama era initiative that made it more difficult for people receiving Social Security disability for serious mental illness to buy guns. As he told the NRA last fall, “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”

Two days before the Florida shooting, Trump submitted a budget request to Congress that called for a $25 million reduction in funds for national school safety programs, and for elimination of a $400 million grant program designed to help schools prevent bullying or provide mental health assistance.

The president routinely decries our “open borders” as a source of the “. . .loss of many innocent lives.” “This American carnage,” he said at his inauguration, “stops right here and stops right now.” Of course, it didn’t. Murders committed by illegal immigrants are a drop in the bucket compared to those carried out by American white men using semiautomatic assault weapons. The president doesn’t lift a finger to stop that kind of carnage. That’s not what coming through for the NRA is all about.

The noxious absolutism of Second Amendment gun worship is pathologically insane. Our Bill of Rights is a masterful document, but unlike Moses’ Commandments, the protections are not absolute. Speech is free, as they say, but you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Why should the right to bear arms mean carte blanche access to rapid-fire military assault weapons? As every other industrialized country has recognized, there is a need to balance the rights of gun enthusiasts with legitimate concerns for public safety. A society that puts a gun collector’s right to stockpile AR-15 rifles above the lives of school children is, well, mentally ill.

IMMIGRATION REFORM: TRUMP’S WHITE POWER MOVEMENT

Every once in a while, even as we grow numb with the clownish inanity of all things Trump, there arises a clarion call of meaning about this presidency, a diabolical message seeped in the worst traditions of America’s past. It was there in his nod to white supremacists in Charlottesville. It was there when he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” And, most assuredly, it was there in a recent Washington Post analysis showing that Trump’s immigration plan would let white people cling to their majority status for up to five more years. In case there was ever a doubt, making America white again is what the Trump odyssey is all about.

The president is insisting that any immigration bill must drastically reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the country. According to the Post, such a move would disproportionately affect black and brown immigrants. Current census projections predict that whites will become a minority in this country in 2044. Trump’s proposed immigration restrictions could delay that seminal demographic shift until 2049. Those are metrics most of us rarely think about, but they represent the lifeblood of Trump diehards, angry white folks who feel they are being pushed aside by people of other races and ethnicities.

Racism isn’t merely one of many character flaws of our 45th president. It was the driving force behind his candidacy and it continues to fuel a cult-like base that worships at Trump’s altar and sees him as their last Great White Hope. This is not to say that the president is not also misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. There is no human right this guy won’t obliterate. Yet, the race card is always on top of his deck. And for good reason: Without the divide between white and non-white, this presidency is finished.

There is an overwhelming mountain of evidence that racism fueled Trump’s ride to the White House (here, here and here). He tapped into . . .no, he plowed into . . . a visceral strain of Caucasian anxiety and resentment, a feeling that white folks were being left behind in a country of people who no longer looked like them. Trump did something that no politician since the early days of George Wallace had even attempted: He made bigotry great again. For his followers, that is. He pulled it out of the darkness and onto the center stage of his campaign. Immigration policy is complicated, layered and nuanced, and Trump can’t be bothered with the details. All he cares about is the bottom line. If the number of black and brown people in this country can be significantly reduced, it’s a good day for Team Trump and the base.

As shocking as this phenomena may be to millennials – and to boomers with fading memories – there is nothing new here. Before the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ink was dry, Republicans were pushing their “Southern Strategy” to cash in on a raging white backlash against the end of Jim Crow laws. In every national election since, the GOP has milked white racism to its advantage, albeit with dog whistles through talk of “law and order”, “welfare queens” and “states’ rights”. Trump got rid of the dog whistles and dropped the subtlety. As much as we may have wanted the stain of our dark racial history to have remained in the past, it is very much part of our present. A major 2016 study showed that the number of slaves owned in southern counties more than 150 years ago accurately predicts the number of white voters who today identify as Republican and express racial resentment toward blacks. The higher the number of slaves, the more anti-black Republican voters.

A Richard Nixon campaign aide told the New York Times in 1970 that “. . .political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices.” Nixon’s Southern Strategy carried the day for him in 1968. According to historians, Nixon’s appeal to white racists came through his running mate, Spiro Agnew, a Trump-like persona with a larger and more alliterative vocabulary. Agnew once called an Asian-American reporter a “fat Jap” and referred to the press corps as “nattering nabobs of negativism”. He expressed nothing but contempt for black civil rights leaders, calling them “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type leaders.”

As the New Republic’s Jeet Heer observed, this Southern Strategy of turning white racial resentment into GOP votes was “the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.” Republican elites like Paul Ryan, who called Trump a racist during the campaign but has embraced him ever since, now own him and his unvarnished racism. “In truth,” as Heer put it, “he is their true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party pursued for more than a half a century.”

There is something to be said for clarity. As the unapologetic cheerleader for white supremacy, Trump has given us a binary choice, more stark, momentous and crucial than this country has faced since the start of the never-ending Civil War. He has put racism on the ballot. Now that bigotry is no longer disguised with code words and knowing winks, the choice is clear. If you believe in racism, Trump is your guy. If you reject racism, you have to reject Trump, and with him, all the Republican sheep in his flock.

Long live the Resistance! Either we nail this, or we slip ever further into the abyss of highly uncivil rights.

DUMB GUYS REACT TO #METOO BY BOYCOTTING WOMEN

From Clarence Thomas bantering about pubic hairs on Coke cans, to Harvey Weinstein spilling his seed into a potted plant, we’ve had more than a quarter-century of teachable moments on sexual harassment. Every news cycle for the past four months has brought yet another revelation of once-important men falling rapidly into the abyss because they used their power to sexually harass female colleagues and subordinates. Surely by now, guys must get it, right?

No, not all of them. Not by a longshot. Sadly, it appears that many men extracted a bizarrely distorted lesson from the never-ending trail of #metoo stories. Professing profound confusion over how to avoid career-ending sexual harassment accusations, these organizational wizards have decided to keep their distance from women in the workplace, afraid that they might be branded as a sexual harasser. As a result, women are being kept out of key meetings, held back from crucial out-of-town trips and denied mentoring, all essential building blocks to career advancement in most organizations.

No good reckoning, it seems, goes unpunished. Consider, for example, these recent developments:

Major companies are telling men not to take female colleagues on business trips and even banning them from sharing rental cars with women coworkers.

Male investors in Silicon Valley are declining one-on-one business meetings with women.

Private work meetings with colleagues of the opposite sex were found to be inappropriate by a quarter of respondents in a recent poll.

A Texas public official was reprimanded last month for refusing to meet with female employees and ending his regular mentoring sessions with one of them.

Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook told of many men in the business community reacting to the #metoo phenomena by saying, “This is why you shouldn’t hire women.”

Then there is Dr. Mukund Komanduri, a Chicago area orthopedic surgeon who says he now stands at least 10 feet away from female colleagues and avoids being alone with them. He told the New York Times, “I’m very cautious about it because my livelihood is on the line. If someone in your hospital says you had inappropriate contact with this woman, you get suspended for an investigation, and your life is over. Does that ever leave you?”

Really, Doctor? Have we been reading the same stories? These guys were flashing their penises and groping, grabbing and forcibly tonguing their female associates. That’s why you can’t consult with a woman resident over a hip replacement procedure? Give me a break!

To be sure, this insipid overreaction has not been universal. Not every man has adopted the Mike Pence protective shield of never being alone with a woman other than his wife. But it has been widespread enough to spawn new corporate training programs, including one on “safe mentoring” which teaches male executives “how to mentor young women without harassing them”. Let that one sink in for a moment. That’s like teaching bank employees how to handle money without stealing it.

The #metoo effort has been enormously effective in shining a spotlight on the depth and pervasiveness of sexual harassment, but it is, by no means, a cure for all that plagues women in most workplaces. That will come only when they are on at least equal footing with men in running those workplaces. Yet, if the response to sexual harassment is to hire and promote fewer women and further marginalize the ones who are there, the goal posts of gender equality will have been moved back to the 1950s.

Not surprisingly, studies show that companies with the lowest incidence of sexual harassment are those where women hold at least half the key leadership positions. Conversely, consider the example of Amazon. One of the first post-Weinstein casualties involved Amazon executive Roy Price. He left the company late last year after accusations that he made repeated and unwanted sexual advances on a woman at a corporate social function. It turns out that the full episode had been reviewed by Amazon in 2015, and Price was told to drink less at company parties. Amazon is run by an elite group of 16 senior executives. Fifteen of them are men. It’s hard to imagine the same outcome if women had dominated the corporate leadership.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many of those places.

One recent investigation showed that women hold 46 percent of the entry level positions in large corporations, but only a small fraction of the key management jobs. There is an abundance of reasons for turning this around. Egalitarian organizations have not only been found to be more effective, but also more profitable.

So what’s the holdup? Power, mostly, specifically the power of male privilege. Numbers are power, as sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter noted in her seminal research decades ago. As long as women are, as Kanter put it, “the few among the many” in an organization, they remain underpaid, under-promoted and at a distinct disadvantage to change the dominant culture that enables sexual harassment.

Therein lies the quandary. In order to eradicate sexual harassment from our workplaces, we need to infuse more women into the leadership strata of those organizations. How do you that when anxious men are excluding female coworkers from the very activities that can lead to the advancement pipeline? Do we need more training? Maybe seminars that make it clear to these insecure males that, as long as they don’t act like they are in a pick-up bar at last call, it’s all right to work with women and treat them as equals? Seems like an incredulous message for 2018. But clearly, there are way too many guys who still don’t get it.

ENDING THE SHUTDOWN MAY HAVE AVERTED A DREAMER NIGHTMARE

Senate Democrats didn’t mess up by ending an embryonic government shutdown. Their mistake was using the tactic in the first place. Quickly retreating from a bad decision, a foreign concept to the current president and his Republican sycophants, is smart and effective leadership.

Linking immigration rights for the Dreamers with the GOP spending bill made sense earlier this month – an eternity ago in this bizarre political climate. Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes to pass a resolution keeping the government open. Democrats needed to find a way to keep undocumented young people brought into the country as children from being deported. Donald Trump told the world that he wanted to save the Dreamers through a “bill of love” and would sign any bipartisan immigration measure the Senate came up with.

The Capitol was hardly ensconced in a spirit of peace and love, but – for one brief, shining moment – there was real anticipation of at least a little give-and-take, the likes of which have not been seen here in more than a generation. Then Trump offered his “shithole countries” soliloquy, and Kumbaya morphed into a war chant.

The Donald’s boasts about his stellar negotiating skills have all the credibility of his claim to the be the world’s least racist person. There isn’t a rule of effective negotiating that he doesn’t regularly violate, including the one about not going back on your word. Days after telling a bipartisan Senate delegation that he would accept whatever immigration plan they came up with, and two hours after signaling his agreement with their proposal, Trump did a complete reversal and embraced the entire draconian screed of the anti-immigration hawks.

Although the rug had been pulled out from under them, Democrats stayed the tactical course of making immigration the quid-pro-quo for producing the needed votes to avoid a shutdown. The narrative quickly changed. It was no longer about Democrats helping Republicans pass a budget bill in exchange for protecting the Dreamers. It had become, through optics pushed by right wing messaging, a matter of Democrats forcing a shutdown to protect illegal immigrants. Besides, the leverage had no juice. The Trumpian gang got where they are by promising to drain the swamp. They abhor government. It’s the Democrats who believe in government and what it can do to make people’s lives better. Although the Dreamers have had strong public support, most polls showed substantial public anxiety over a prolonged government shutdown on their behalf.

That left Democrats in a weakened strategic position. Closing the government was hardly an effective club to use on a party that dislikes government. Yes, the talking point here was that Republicans would suffer from a shutdown since they control Congress and the White House. But the reality was that government closed because Democrats insisted to impasse on an immigration deal in exchange for the spending measure. That had the potential, particularly for the long haul, of weakening public support for the Dreamers.

I get the angst and disappointment of my friends on the left, and particularly on the part of those young people who grew up as Americans and see the clock ticking on possible deportation to countries they view as foreign. The pre-shutdown rhetoric of Democratic leaders about there being no spending bill without taking care of the Dreamers was powerful, passionate and hopeful. But, despite the message of many self-help books, a determination to win doesn’t guaranty victory. A prolonged government shutdown was simply not the instrument to induce surrender by a majority party that cares nothing about the fate of young immigrants, government workers or the people they serve. It would be like kidnapping Hillary Clinton and asking Donald Trump to pay the ransom.

By agreeing to fund government for another three weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not only bought time, he also brought the narrative back where it belonged, namely on how to keep the Dreamers from being deported. No longer is Trump’s campaign machine cranking out ads about Democrats shutting down government in order to help “illegal aliens.” Instead, late this week, the president put the White House on record for the first time in support of a bill that would not only give work permits to about 1.8 million young immigrants but would also grant them a path to citizenship.

Yes, Trump’s blink on the Dreamers, was in the context of an overall immigration proposal that would also include $25 billion in funding for his wall, along with severe reductions in the number of immigrants allowed into the country. It now seems more likely than ever that a bipartisan group in the Senate will produce a bill that follows the president’s position on the Dreamers but pushes back in some other areas.

To be sure, we are not yet at the end of the road on all of this. It remains very much an uphill battle for Democrats. They are, after all, Washington’s minority party right now. But hard, fruitful negotiations are still ongoing. And that would not be happening if the government remained shut down. The chatter would never have risen above the finger pointing.

Instead, the endgame offers two broad scenarios . One is a deal that overcomes the worst of right wing ideology and paves the way for nearly two million young people to become citizens. The other is, at the hands of Republicans, a defeat for any Dreamer protection legislation. That would be one more clarion call for a congressional realignment in this fall’s midterm elections. Either outcome is better than a protracted government shutdown with both sides accusing the other of causing it.