Author: Bruce R. Nelson

THE VERDICT IS IN: JURIES ARE NOT CHANGE AGENTS

Two high profile trials that ended last weekend reminded us that petit juries are no venue for profound social change. In two very different deliberations, jurors did what they were supposed to do: examined the evidence and applied the law to those facts. To say that neither outcome advanced broader underlying causes would be an understatement.

Philando Castile was a black 32-year-old Minnesota school cafeteria worker. He was driving with a broken brake light last July when a suburban St. Paul police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, stopped him. Within minutes, Castile was dead. The officer, after approaching the car window, asked Castile for his license and proof of insurance, which he immediately produced. According to police records, Castile then told Yanez that he was carrying a firearm (duly registered). The officer told him not to pull it out, and then proceeded to fire seven shots at him. Yanez became the first Minnesota police officer in modern history to be charged with manslaughter. On Friday, a jury acquitted him of all charges.

Meanwhile, about 1,200 miles to the east, 12 jurors deliberated for 52 hours in Norristown, Pennsylvania over whether legendary comedian Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted a woman more than a decade ago. The case was a proxy of sorts for at least 59 other women who, going back over more than half a century, claim they were similarly assaulted by Cosby. Only one case, however, was before this jury, and since the alleged incident occurred 13 years ago, strained and inconsistent memories resulted in conflicting testimony. On Saturday, jurors said they were “hopelessly deadlocked” and the judge declared a mistrial.

These two juries, sitting in separate county courthouses 1,200 miles apart, sparked viscerally adverse reactions among those who had hoped for verdicts that would send strong messages on two important issues: racism in policing, and aggressive prosecution of sexual assault.

A Star-Tribune story on the Minnesota verdict started with this sentence: “For black Minnesotans, the acquittal of Jeronimo Yanez in the fatal shooting of Philando Castile was the latest sign of a criminal justice system that often delivers heartbreak.” That angst is more than just a Minnesota thing. In 15 recent instances of black men killed by police nationwide, there were only two convictions. Still, the facts of this case seemed particularly strong. According to prosecutors, Castile did everything right. He was polite and compliant. He wasn’t running from police. There was no weapon in his hand. He just sat there, calmly and quietly, while the officer fired seven shots at him.

While the jury heard those facts, it also listened to Yanez’s tearful testimony about being confused and in fear of his life. Jurors, according to a Bowling Green State University study, are inclined to distinguish between a cop’s serious mistake and manslaughter, particularly if the officer was scared or confused. After 29 hours of deliberations, these 12 people – 10 white and 2 black – decided that the seven shots Officer Yanez fired at Philando Castile did not rise to the level of criminal activity. Jason Sole is the president of the Minneapolis NAACP. He told the New York Times the verdict was “more of the same.” “How are you going to kill this guy and still say we have a fair system? How? Man, this behavior has gotta stop, and they can’t stop so they are going to continue to kill us.”

Back in Norristown, the jury system was also taking it on the chin. Andrea Constand, a former Temple University athletic administrator, testified that Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in 2004. Dozens of other women have come forward with stories of similar Cosby encounters, but have been time-barred from taking action. The jury’s inability to reach a unanimous verdict was seen by some of his accusers as a repudiation of sexual assault victims. For example, Lise-Lotte Lubin, who claims Cosby drugged and abused her in 1989, called the lack of a unanimous guilty verdict one more sign that rape victims are rarely believed.

As a distant observer of both trials, I too was disappointed in the outcomes. I would have gone with guilty verdicts, based on what I had read, together with my values and beliefs (also known as biases). But I wasn’t a juror. I didn’t hear the testimony or see the evidence. I didn’t take an oath to apply the law only to what I heard and saw in those courtrooms. Juries for better or worse, are the centrifuge of our justice system. As a reporter covering courts years ago, I marveled at how well this seemingly quaint and archaic process worked. On the surface, it might seem flawed to plunk 12 random citizens into uncomfortable chairs and expect them to make important decisions outside their comfort zones. Yet, a mammoth review of multiple jury studies by a Cornell University team concluded that jurors consistently take their role seriously, follow the rules, and make decisions based on the evidence and the law, as opposed to crafting their own brand of justice.

And that is precisely the point. Those Minnesota and Pennsylvania jurors were not there to solve the weighty problems of racism, police violence or sexual assault prosecutions. Their job was limited to a single case, with specific facts and legal standards. The real fix for the larger social issues lies in other venues: police leadership, city halls and state legislatures. That’s where the pressure needs to be applied. It’s already happened in the Cosby matter. Many states have eliminated time limits for filing sexual assault charges, a nod to the horde of Cosby accusers who came forward after it was too late to prosecute. With respect to police shootings, if city administrators can’t find a way to stop scared, confused cops from killing people, then it’s time to change the statutes. Make the law crystal clear: a police officer’s fear and confusion are unacceptable defenses to manslaughter.

HOMELAND INSECURITY: A RUSSIAN ATTACK & A PRESIDENT WHO WON’T STOP IT

Remember that old salty story about a kid trying to shovel his way through a towering pile of horse manure, convinced there had to be a pony in there somewhere? It really captures the whole Russia/Trump/FBI brouhaha. Peel away the layers of dung – the Comey memos, the dueling claims of obstruction and vindication, the etymology of “hope” as a command – and there lies the nearly forgotten source of this mess: a foreign adversary’s attempt to sabotage our democracy.

A daily barrage of Trumpian subplots is distracting us from the compelling and frightening antecedent that started everything. That is mind boggling for those of us who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when, as kids, we were less concerned with the bogeyman than we were with a shoe-pounding Nikita Khrushchev and his promise to bury us. Fifty-some years later, Russia is caught screwing with our elections and the country gets all wrapped up in peripheral stuff, like whether the fired FBI director is a leaker.

Every U.S. intelligence agency has been unequivocal: Russia executed an extensive and elaborate plot to interfere with last year’s election. Not one cabinet secretary or member of Congress has disputed that assertion. In fact, most of them, including the Republican House speaker and Senate majority leader, have publically acknowledged Russia’s tampering. There is only one office holder in Washington who refuses to accept this reality: President Donald J. Trump. This president has not only consistently pooh-poohed the growing mountain of evidence that Russia interfered in our election, he has denigrated all of the Congressional and FBI investigations on the matter, calling them “witch hunts”.

Asha Rangappa is a former FBI agent and currently an associate dean at Yale Law School. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, she offered a singularly unique take on James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The real bombshell, she wrote, had nothing to do with Trump’s attempt to stop an investigation or Comey releasing his notes to the media. Instead, Rangappa argued, it was the president’s unwillingness “to preserve, protect and defend” the country from Russia’s attack on our free elections.

“In the nine times Trump met with or called Comey,” she wrote, “it was always to discuss how the investigation into Russia’s election interference was affecting him personally, rather than the security of the country. He apparently cared little about understanding either the magnitude of the Russian intelligence threat, or how the FBI might be able to prevent another attack in future elections.”

This is a president who has not lifted a finger to protect our democratic elections from an outside attack. This is huge, and we should never, for a moment, lose sight of it. The accusation of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians is speculative and unproven right now. Thanks to Comey’s testimony and recent news reports, we know a little more about a possible obstruction of justice charge against Trump, but it remains a close and unsettled question. Yet, by refusing to even acknowledge a foreign adversary’s interference in our election, the president has placed his personal ego needs above his sworn duty to protect this country.

Trump’s repeated refusal to deal constructively with the Russian election threat grows more acute with every revelation of the depth and breadth of the 2016 intrusion. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Russia’s cyber-attacks on our electoral system were much more extensive than originally thought. According to that reporting, Russian hackers made their way into the official voting records of 39 states. Bloomerg quoted a senior intelligence official who expressed fear that the 2016 foray into local election systems gives the Russians three years to use that knowledge in plotting an attack for 2020. Comey echoed that concern in his testimony last week. “They’re coming after America,” he said. “They will be back.”

Donald Trump is doing absolutely nothing to protect us from that attack. That, it seems to me, needs to be part of the Resistance’s messaging in the days ahead. There is no need to prove collusion or obstruction to make this patently obvious charge stick. The Russians are coming after us, and our president is doing nothing about it. If any of the pending investigations subsequently reveal evidence of collusion or obstruction, then his despicable nonfeasance becomes all the more aggravated.

Trump’s obstinate insistence on giving Russia a pass on its attack on our electoral system has the potential to transcend partisanship, even in this bitterly divided country. Just yesterday, in a remarkable rebuke of the White House, the Senate voted 97 to 2 to block any efforts by Trump to scale back sanctions against Russia. That a Republican-controlled Senate doesn’t trust this president on a critical matter of national security is a ready-made lightening rod for changing some minds in Trumpville.

If this nightmare is going to end before 2020, those minds need to be changed. Forget all that nuanced legal analysis about grounds for impeachment. The process is political, not legal. Even if Democrats won back the House and Senate in 2018, an incredibly heavy lift, a two-thirds Senate vote is required for removing a president. An impeachment has to be bipartisan. Congressional Republicans have never been comfortable with Trump, but they have no appetite for incurring the wrath of his base in their own elections. As that base deflates, however, the whole dynamic changes. Trump’s approval rating has been slipping by a percent or two each week and is currently at 37 percent. Since February, a third of that group downgraded from “strongly supports” to “supports”. The momentum is slow but steady. All the more reason to shine the spotlight on the unassailable narrative of Russia’s plot to sabotage America’s elections, and Trump’s refusal to do anything about it. After all, protecting the country from an enemy attack has always been a bedrock value of conservatism.

TRUMP AND HIS BASE: A DECEPTIVE RELATIONSHIP THAT WON’T LAST

Donald Trump’s bizarre presidency is a bastion of smoke and mirrors, an illusion forever under construction. He may owe his celebrity to reality TV, but there is absolutely nothing real about this imposter posing as America’s 45th president.

There he was on Monday, in an elegantly appointed room filled with faux Important People, right out of central casting. He was signing impressive looking documents and handing out souvenir pens, all to the accompaniment of a military band. It was, as the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman reported, Trump’s kickoff of “infrastructure week”, complete with promises of a “great new era” and a “revolution in technology.”

The scene looked very much like a president on the march, a leader focused singularly on his vision for America, showing the world he would not be distracted by annoying FBI investigations. Yet it was all fake. The documents Trump signed during the photo op were neither bills nor executive orders. They were, according to the Times, letters to Congress in support of transferring control of the nation’s air traffic control system to the private sector. Days later, there are still no available details on his infrastructure plan. It was all a sham.

Granted, presidents – and lesser mortals whose job security rests with the ballot box – have been known to spin, obfuscate and prevaricate their way through public service. But the Donald has not just made an art form out of deception, he’s taken it to an entirely new level. It’s no longer about “playing to the base” as a source of leverage to accomplish stuff. With Trump, keeping his base’s love alive is an end in itself.

This guy has but one gear: puffing himself up to look good to his loyal army of passionate supporters. Remember those post-primary commentaries about Trump’s need to pivot for the general election? Never happened. Then he won the election and pundits said he needed to “pivot to the presidential”. Not happening. Forget jumping, this white guy doesn’t even pivot. He just keeps playing to his base like it’s two days before the New Hampshire primary.

For example, legal analysts sympathetic to the president say Trump seriously damaged his travel ban case this week with Twitter messages that not only chastised judges and his own justice department, but used phrases like “people from DANGEROUS countries”. The tweets undermined and contradicted arguments his lawyers had advanced on his behalf. As the Washington Post’s James Hohmann noted, this behavior is beyond goofy Trump impulsiveness. “If Trump truly cared about the underlying ban and wanted it to be in place for the country’s security, as he claims,” wrote Hohmann, “he would not be speaking so freely. The billionaire businessman has been mired in litigation off and on for decades and has demonstrated an ability – when his own money was at stake – to be self-disciplined.”

So why would he deliberately jeopardize such a key platform pillar? The answer is that Donald Trump is unable – or unwilling – to pivot. He is in perpetual campaign mode; all that matters is feeling the love of his base. He is willing to risk a legal defeat over his travel ban in order to let them know how passionate he is about keeping Muslims out of the county. Even if it never happens. Just like the fake bill signing, it’s all about the illusion.

Same story with all of the campaign hits:

• Medical Insurance. Trump is still serenading his base with talk of “fantastic health care for everyone . . .it will cost less and have lower deductibles.” That’s the illusion. The reality is that he never lifted a finger to make any of that happen. He simply supported a House Republican bill he never understood that would eliminate coverage for 23 million people.

• Mexican Border Wall. He celebrated the 100th day of his presidency telling a Harrisburg, PA rally of screaming fans, “Don’t even worry about it. Go home, go to sleep, rest assured, we’ll build the wall.” That’s the illusion. The reality is that a Republican Congress refused to fund the project as part of the 2017 budget and has little to no enthusiasm for taking it up in 2018.

• Climate Change and Job Creation. In another staged Rose Garden celebration, Trump announced the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, touting his campaign promise to “save that coal industry, believe me, we’re going to save it.” That’s the illusion. The reality is that there is no sign of a single coal mining job being created – or saved – as a result of the U.S. pulling out of the Paris agreement.

Right now, the dynamic of this presidency is propelled not by a public policy agenda, but by the symbiotic relationship between Trump and his base: an insecure narcissist looking for love, and alienated voters looking for hope. The president’s problem is with his long game. The harder he works to fuel the illusion of hope, the more damage he does to his already abysmal chances of actually effecting change. There are already signs of disillusionment in his base. Nate Silver, the pollster superstar, reports that 21 percent of the electorate now say they strongly approve of Trump. That’s down from a peak of 30 percent in February, a loss of about a third of his base.

This erosion seems likely to continue. It’s hard to let go of hope, particularly when you’ve gone so long without it. But when the insurance gets worse instead of better, when the jobs don’t come back, when the wall isn’t built, and nobody is more secure, hope starts to feel pretty empty. And when hope dies, so dies the love that has propelled this illusionist president since Day One. The quid-pro-quo deal will have not so artfully ended. Only one question remains: Will “The Apprentice” take him back?

NO WINNERS IN WHITE HOUSE VERSION OF CELEBRITY APPRENTICE

So, it has come to this. In our toxically polarized world, the battle for moral superiority between left and right rests on a surrogate matchup of Kathy Griffin and Ted Nugent, with an undercard starring Bill Maher and Tila Tequila.
In one ring, battling to the death for bragging rights as the most offensive and despicable, is Griffin, clutching a simulation of Donald Trump’s severed skull, and Nugent, with thoughts of an assassinated Obama dancing in his head. In the racist ring is Trump supporter and reality star Tequila, flashing her finest anti-black-and-brown Nazi salute, facing off against TV host Maher and his it’s-only-a-joke N-word banter. Que Michael Buffer: “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
Sadly, the rumbling never stops. Like tinnitus’s constant ringing, this high-pitched, acrimonious roar shows no sign of abating any time soon. It’s enough to make you long for simpler times when a celebrity saying stupid stuff was . . . well, just a celebrity saying stupid stuff. As opposed to an escalation of our endless ideological war.
The latest battleground surfaced last week when, for some inexplicable reason, Griffin, a comedian, released a picture of herself holding a faux bloody Trump head. There was no context, no lead-up, no punchline and, as far as anyone can tell, no laughter. As the excrement hit the fan, Griffin offered the standard comedic defense that she was only trying to be funny, that crossing the line of appropriateness is the heart of humor. Yeah but, there still has to be a hook to make the inappropriateness funny. Years ago, Joan Rivers used this line in her stand-up: “Boy George is all England needs – another queen who can’t dress.” Inappropriate? Sure, but it had a hook, a context that got a laugh – even from Boy George. All Griffin had was a bloody head.

As a result, her world began to crumble. Despite her apology, CNN fired Griffin from her standing New Year’s Eve gig with Anderson Cooper, who independently blasted her for the prank. Most of her summer tour venues have canceled on her. At a tearful press conference Friday, the comedian said Trump was out to get her, insisting, with a level of self-absorption rivaling the president’s, that the White House is “using me as the shiny object so that nobody is talking about his (Trump’s) FBI investigation.” Obviously, it would take much more than a bully comic holding another bully’s head to divert attention from this FBI investigation.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook exploded into a fully involved proxy war. The president’s fans, predictably, expressed wildly indignant outrage over Griffin’s severed Trump head bit, many proposing acts of retribution outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. Then came a quick liberal chorus of “nana nana nana” with posts about Nugent, a 60s rocker who made a sharp right turn, and recently dined with Trump at the White House. Where was the conservative consternation, these posts asked, when Nugent called Obama a “mongrel” and invited him to “suck on my machine gun”? Then came a retrospective of various Obama-in-a-noose memes offered up by his many passionate detractors, raising this bizarre dialectic of moral equivalency: images depicting the lynching of our first black president versus a beheading of his successor. If the founding fathers had envisioned social media, the First Amendment would likely have come with an exclusionary clause.

With no ceasefire in sight, the war opened a new front Friday night when sharp-tongued comedian and Trump critic Maher used the N-word on his HBO show, “Real Time”. A guest, Republican Senator Ben Sasse, jokingly invited Maher to Nebraska to “work the fields.” The host’s response: “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house n***r.” Maher’s subsequent apology did little to subdue the Twitter rants. Conservatives, still bristling from their loss of Fox News idol Bill O’Reilly, demanded that HBO fire Maher. It was, of course, a tough case for them to make in 140 characters, given their party’s dismal track record on matters of race. So the tweets were mostly a gotcha thing, as in: “Fire him! You know that’s what Democrats would say if Sean Hannity used the word.” That provoked a liberal response about Tila Tequila, a fallen reality TV star and Trump supporter who has said vile things about blacks and Latinos and led a white nationalist audience in a “Heil Trump” salute last fall.

Yet, it was refreshing to see a number of messages from the left, many from black leaders, that unequivocally condemned a white comedian for using a racial epithet that has no business even residing in his vocabulary. It is, indeed, possible to abhor the deeply divisive and Draconian policies of the Trump administration while, at the same time, castigating entertainers of our political stripe when they jettison every line of decency.

Unfortunately, social media lulls us into the illusion of tribalism, complete with its us-versus-them modality. We lob our verbal grenades at anyone who seems to be part of the other side, slicing and dicing with an angry indignation that never stops. When one of our own is attacked, it’s time to re-powder, circle the wagons and fire away again, or so we think. These are, without a doubt, the most emotionally strained and troubled political times many of us have gone through. Our country is as torn and divided as it has been since the Civil War. There is so much at stake. To suggest, for even a moment, that Kathy Griffin is a victim worthy of our attention diminishes and denigrates the real Trump victims, like the 23 million people who would lose medical insurance under his plan, displaced workers denied job retraining benefits under his budget, families split and devastated by the cruelty of his deportations.

So let’s take some deep breaths and try to avoid the peripheral skirmishes that really don’t matter. That will make it easier to focus on the real challenge – reversing the course this country has been on since January 20.

AND NOW THE LATEST IN SPORTS: TWEETS THAT ROAR

Sports in general, and motorsport racing in particular, have never occupied much of my cranial real estate. Yet, I spent a good hunk of Memorial Day weekend thinking about both. It all started when Denver Post sports columnist Terry Frei fired off a thoughtless tweet saying he was “very uncomfortable” with a Japanese driver, Takuma Sato, winning the Indy 500.

As the Twittersphere erupted, complete with Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima references, Frei launched what has become the normal protocol for this kind of social media foot-in-mouth disorder: a series of inelegant apologies, one of which included a plug for his latest book. Then, as this formulaic minuet played out, front office honchos from the Denver Post went into full somber-and-righteous mode to declare the offending tweet “disrespectful and unacceptable”. “(It) doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for,” so sayeth the corporate executives in a prepared statement. They also fired Frei, a move that is not always part of this post tweet-gone-bad ritual.

So, besides the fact that Sato can drive really fast, what do we know so far? Number 1: Frei’s tweet was an outrageous thought that should never have left his brain, outside the confidentiality of a therapist’s office. Number 2: the Denver Post’s reaction was the epitome of disingenuousness. The newspaper is owned by a hedge fund that “stands” for only one thing: sucking as much money as it can out of its properties. This company has financially benefited from Frei’s verbal edginess as a four-time winner of the Colorado sportswriter of the year award. If the Indy 500 tweet was linked to his role as a Post columnist, then his editors had every right, if not an obligation, to see it before it went out, just as they read and edited his columns prior to publication. In practice, however, most newspapers encourage or require their writers to tweet and use other social media platforms as a way of plugging the brand and drawing eyeballs to their content. The owners waive their right of advance approval to take full advantage of the spontaneity that is social media. To encourage controversial writing that attracts readers makes sense. Firing the guy when his controversy crosses a line that was never drawn for him does not.

But there is something bigger going on here, namely an epidemic of sportswriters stumbling into the Twitter penalty box. A former football writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer incurred the wrath of his employer when he tweeted that the owner of the Browns is a “pathetic figure”. An ESPN sportscaster was disciplined for a tweet that described his competitors at a Boston television station as “2 washed-up athletes and a 60-yr-old fat guy with no neck.” An Associated Press sportswriter who tweeted about horrible refereeing in an NBA game got into trouble with his employer after the referee filed a law suit. A Chicago Sun Times sports reporter had to delete his Twitter account after his lifetime collection of sexist tweets went viral. A New York Post sportswriter was fired for an inauguration day tweet that said simply: “9.11.2001. 1.20.2017”, apparently an assertion that the Trump presidency was as much a threat to this country as the Twin Towers and Pentagon bombings.

Before social media, sports reporters rarely encountered disciplinary action. As a union rep in this industry, the only sports discipline case I had was a hockey writer who, while at work, bet (and lost) $500 on whether the groundhog would see its shadow on February 2. (The poor chump swore he thought the no-gambling rule was limited to games he covered.) For the most part, sportswriters were in their own little world, far below management’s radar. The other huge difference between then and now is that many sports journalists of old distinguished themselves as top notch writers. Not limited to whatever unfinished and unvarnished thought might be floating in their heads, these literary giants were able to convert a mundane soccer match into compelling prose. I had never read a sports story before taking my first journalism class. I turned in a tepid, mechanical account of a student government meeting and my professor handed me a volume of selected sports articles. I told him I had no interest in sports. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “These are master story tellers. A good story is more than a recitation of facts.” For example:

• Jim Murray (Los Angeles Times) covering a 1960s Rose Bowl game involving an Iowa team: “There were thousands of people in calico and John Deer caps in their Winnebagos with their pacemakers and potato salad, looking for Bob Hope.”
• Shirley Povich (Washington Post) reporting on a New York Yankees pitcher tossing a perfect game in the 1956 World Series: “The million-to-one shot came in. Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. Don Larson today pitched a no-hit, no-run, no-man-reach-first game in a World Series.”
• Red Smith (New York Times) describing an unlikely home run that won the 1951 National League pennant for the New York Giants: “Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Yes, those were the days, my friends. It was a calmer time, before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, a time when journalists faced only two tasks: getting it right and writing it well. In our brave, new, real time world, they are now expected to let loose with every embryotic half-baked thought that enters their heads. And pray that it doesn’t offend the suits who sign their paychecks. That leaves them with only one recourse, and I hope they take it: THINK – long and hard – before you tweet!

WHEN TRUMP TALKS, ENGLISH TEACHERS TRY NOT TO LISTEN

The first review of our 45th president’s verbal skills came seconds after he finished his inaugural address. According to New York Magazine, the 43rd president, George W. Bush, turned to those next to him and said, “That was some weird shit.” This from the guy who once said, “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” Clearly, the torch of presidential inarticulateness has been passed.

Donald Trump makes Bush look like a master wordsmith. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, here’s how the Donald responded to a question about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election: “ . . . there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself – and the Russians, zero.” Weird shit, indeed.

Trump’s difficulty in constructing a compound sentence without merging two disparate thoughts, mixed with a propensity to drain meaning from words through overuse, has been analyzed by a host of academicians. Linguists used something called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to place his speeches at a fourth grade level. Psychologists compared transcripts of Trump interviews in the 1980s with those from the last four months and concluded that there has been significant cognitive decline. All this must be pleasing the president in some perverse way. The very elites who Trump thought were ignoring him are now giving him the kind of rapt attention that Jane Goodall bestowed on her chimps.

As for this expert analysis, I’m inclined to heed the cautionary observation of New York Times columnist David Brooks: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

And beep they do. Responding to the Manchester concert bombing this week, Trump told the world that, from this day forward, he will refer to terrorists not as “monsters, which they would like,” but as “losers.” This nomenclature upgrade, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted, puts suicide bombers in an eclectic grouping. Here are just a few of the prior inductees in Trump’s Loser Hall of Shame: Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Rihanna, Mark Cuban, George Will, an astrologer in Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, John McCain and the Huffington Post. Using the same description for Rihanna and a terrorist empties the word of all meaning.

Yet, this limited vocabulary is not the biggest impediment in deciphering the president’s messages. That prize goes to an attention span that frequently changes subjects multiple times in the same sentence. In the AP interview, for example, Trump was asked about the funding of his proposed wall along the Mexican border. His answer: “People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it – you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. . .The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

Trump’s unofficial record for a run-on sentence came during the Republican primaries when he once managed to utter 285 words on more than 15 subjects, all without ever taking a breath or using a period. Slate posted the monstrosity on its website and invited readers to take a crack at diagramming it with the Reed-Kellogg method, the bane of many an English class back in the old days. In lieu of cluttering this space with a 285-word Trump sentence, here’s the link, if you are up for a challenge. Like most of his off-the cuff soliloquies, it is peppered with repetitive words and phrases, like: “very good, very smart”, “oh, do they do a number” and “who would have thought?” Linguists, reported Slate’s Katy Waldman, have suggested that Trump’s overuse of such semantically non-meaningful words implies that he is “too distracted by the pleasure and theater of vocalizing to deliver any actual substance.”

Emphasizing theatrics over substance, may be an acceptable rhetorical device in sales, but a lot of folks expect meaningful and understandable content from the leader of the free world. Imagine the shock this week when Trump, after flying from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv, told a room of Israeli leaders that, “We just got back from the Middle East.” The smiling president thought he’d just delivered an applause line, but instead got a stunned reaction from an audience wondering how the guy who wants to broker a regional peace deal has no idea that Israel is in the Middle East.

In reporting on advance work for the president’s first trip abroad, Foreign Affairs said White House staff took precautions to protect their boss from verbal stumbles. Heads of state were advised to limit themselves to two-to-four minutes of discussion time, knowing how difficult it would be to hold Trump’s interest past that point. In an effort to keep him on script, Washington Monthly reported that aides tried to limit briefing notes to one page and inserted Trump’s name in every paragraph because, said a staffer, “he keeps reading it if he’s mentioned.”

Say what you want about George W. Bush, and there is a lot to say. Yet, nobody ever had to childproof his foreign trips.

THE WHITE HOUSE HELL WEEK THAT DOESN’T END

Even in a four month presidency that made Alice’s rabbit hole adventures look normal, last week was extraordinarily bizarre. The entire White House staff now understands what it was like in 1969 for those Woodstock revelers who ignored the warnings about the brown blotter acid.

Any other week, Vladimir Putin’s offer to share with Congress state secrets gleaned in an Oval Office meeting would have been hot, above-the-fold, front page news. But not last week. There was way too much competition. It started with the revelation that Trump disclosed highly confidential intelligence while showing off to Russian envoys. Then came the report that the Donald attempted to pull the FBI off its investigation of his former national security advisor, followed by a scoop about 18 undisclosed contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

By week’s end, we were reading about the appointment of a special prosecutor, a possible subpoena for a “person of interest” in the top echelon of the White House, and my personal favorite: Trump telling his Russian visitors that he fired the FBI director because he was “a real nut job”. Depending on the interpreter’s adeptness with pronouns, the Russian officials may have left the Oval Office a tad confused over who the nut job was, the president or the fired FBI guy. Alas, it didn’t really matter. In the context of last week’s totality, they, like the rest of us, were quite capable of figuring it out for themselves.

To quote a favorite cliché of Washington speech writers, “Make no mistake about it.” Last week was some kind of turning point for this country’s 45th president. The New York Times Roger Cohen: “All this is right out of Despotism 101.” The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent: “Trump’s conduct further devolves into truly unhinged autocratic madness.” Conservative blogger Erick Erickson: “The sad reality is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any better.”

After such a dystopian week, it’s easy to fixate on the darkness, finding sweet solace only in thoughts of an impending impeachment. To that I offer two notes, one of caution and the other, oddly, of guarded optimism.

Here’s the caution part: Yes, the White House staff is pulling out the procedural files on impeachment. Most media outlets are running thumb-suckers on the subject. Still, it would be unwise to plan any Trump farewell parties just yet. Donald Trump does not possess the propensity to go gentle into Dylan Thomas’ good night. Most of us counted him out at least a dozen times before the election. His base is still chugging the Kool Aid. More importantly, Republicans control both houses of Congress. They may be disgusted and disheartened by Trump. They may even privately accept that he is brain dead. But they won’t take him off life support until they are certain such a move serves their political interests. Besides, impeachment hardly takes us out of dystopia. It merely gives us Mike Pence, a functioning-but-rabid right winger who has never met a human right he likes (here, here and here).

As for optimism, as guarded as it may be, the architecture of our 241-year-old democracy has so far succeeded admirably in restraining a severe assault from the first authoritarian strongman to hold the presidency. Trump’s election pumped new life into a long forgotten novel by Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Written in 1935, as fascism was slowly taking its hold in Europe, Lewis wanted to wake up sanguine Americans to the realization that they were not immune to such a totalitarian takeover. Against the backdrop of a populist uprising called the “Forgotten Men,” Lewis’s antagonist, Berzelius Windrip, was elected president, largely on the Trump-like premise that he, alone, could solve the problems of the forgotten. Once in office, Windrip made three immediate moves that would have left Trump drooling. He strong-armed Congress into turning all decision-making power over to the president. Then he abolished the courts. Finally, he imprisoned reporters who wrote bad things about him.

Trump would trade Mar a Largo for that kind of power. As it stands, the Art of the Deal president hasn’t gotten one substantive bill through Congress. He has repeatedly railed at all the judges who have dared to block his travel ban and other executive orders. Among the morass of last week’s news stories was the revelation that Trump told the former FBI director that he wants to put journalists in jail. He has had one bromance after another with foreign authoritarian despots who have jailed or killed anyone who dared get in their way, including Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Thanks to our constitutional underpinnings, Donald Trump is only a wannabe dictator. Last week’s crazy chain of events showed that the system is working. As much as he’d like the Russian influence investigation to go away, it’s here to stay, complete with grand jury and subpoena powers. As much as he’d like to take over Congress, there are 535 ego-driven members there worrying much more about their reelections than his. And despite his fantasy of locking up reporters, Trump’s antics have fueled a revival in journalism that defies the business models of the struggling news outlets that employ them.

Although it is always reassuring to get even part way through a hurricane without the roof caving in, this storm is by no means over. Let us remain ever vigilant until the all-clear signal is given. Sinclair Lewis was right: it can happen here. We need to do everything possible to see that it doesn’t.

TRUMP’S FORGOTTEN PEOPLE ARE STILL FORGOTTEN

After a five-day binge of all things Trump and Comey, along comes this story about bad teeth to poignantly capture the essence of our current quagmire. Don’t get me wrong. The coverage of the White House’s latest cataclysmic adventure in governance has been compellingly entertaining. It’s not every day you get to watch the president’s aides frantically scramble to assemble a cover story for firing the FBI director, only to be upstaged by their boss’s declaration that he canned the guy because of the Russia investigation.

But a cracked molar brought it all home, a dental narrative that sadly and succinctly depicted a leaderless America that has lost its way. The Sunday Washington Post ran a front page story on the chronic tooth decay facing millions of the working poor who have neither the necessary insurance nor disposable income to maintain their dental health. The piece described a scene on a cold March morning on Maryland’s eastern shore. More than 1,000 people had huddled in blankets for up to 12 hours, waiting for a chance to get free dental care.

Dee Matello was in that line. She’s a small business owner, but has neither insurance nor budget for dentist bills. She told Post reporters that she’s had a cracked tooth for years. It causes constant pain, forcing her to chew on only one side of her mouth. She also said she was a strong Trump supporter because politicians stopped caring about people who work hard but can’t afford to take care of themselves.

“The country is way too divided between well-off people and people struggling for everything – even to see the dentist,” Matello told the Post. “And the worst part is, I don’t see a bridge to cross over to be one of those rich people.”

Trump, she said, was the only person talking about “the forgotten men and women of our country, people who work hard but don’t have a voice.” It was Trump, Matello recalled, who repeatedly said that he was running to be a voice for those people. She was particularly taken with his assurance that he would create a “wonderful” health care plan that would cost less and provide far more services than Obamacare.

As she shivered in line, waiting to get her tooth fixed, Matello shared her deep political disappointment with the Post. “I am hearing about a number of people who will lose their coverage under the new plan,” she said. “Is Trump the wolf in grandma’s clothes? My husband and I are now saying to each other, ‘Did we really vote for him?’”

More than any story since Trump’s inauguration, this rotting teeth article captures the depth and breadth of last fall’s electoral catastrophe. The daily headlines inundate us with the president’s buffoonery, his never-disappointing adeptness at accessing his ignorance. When I started writing this post, the Comey fiasco was on center stage. It was replaced two paragraphs ago with breaking news about Trump revealing top secret intelligence to Russian officials. But the dental care piece takes us beyond the purview of chaotic stage management, and gives us a direct view into the marrow of a critically wounded American life.

Working adults can’t afford to fix their teeth, and nobody in Washington is doing anything to help them. Those in the investor class, buoyed by a Trump-induced bull market, think nothing of spending thousands a year on cosmetic tooth whitening, while millions of hard-working Americans don’t make enough to pay for basic dentistry. These are the forgotten people, the downtrodden and heartbroken masses left behind by politicians beholden to the moneyed interests that put them in office.

Donald J. Trump was their last hope, an unlikely billionaire hero who took up their cause, spoke their language and promised to drain the swamp of the bought-and-paid-for Washington functionaries catering to the rich and powerful. They voted for him because their anger was his anger. They voted for him because he was wholly different than every slick, smooth-talking, glad-handing politician who came before him. They voted for him because he was going to blow Washington up and get them fantastic jobs and absolutely wonderful health insurance. The forgotten people would never be forgotten again.

Sadly, Trump has only delivered on half the promise. He has, indeed, blown up Washington. He shocked and stunned the FBI, pushed the intelligence community into a state of suspended animation and invoked paralysis on a Republican Congress totally transfixed on the most chaotic White House since Richard Nixon spent long alcoholic nights talking to the portraits of dead presidents.

As for the forgotten people, well, they were promptly forgotten by a president who had something far more important to consider: himself. Donald Trump was absolutely right when he promised never to be tied to special interests and outside influences. This is a man with absolutely no interests outside of himself. He can’t stop talking about his election, how many counties he carried, how remarkable his campaign was, how he got cheated out of the popular vote, how the whole Russian scandal seeks to delegitimize his humungous accomplishment.

The forgotten people? They are still waiting in line to have their teeth fixed. Some 24 million of them will lose health insurance under the House Republican bill that Trump supports but doesn’t understand. Millions more stand to lose job retraining opportunities under his proposed budget. Did he sell them out to special interests? No, not really. It’s just that his whole campaign was about him, not them. It was about his need to be loved and admired, to be seen as a truly remarkable person. He didn’t drain a swamp; he created a new one, a swamp filled with his own insatiable and grandiose ego needs. There is no room there for the forgotten people. Even if there was, this guy doesn’t have the skill or the chops to help them. He is far too busy pretending to be remarkable.

NIXON’S GHOST TO TRUMP: I WAS BETTER THAN YOU!

The nation’s toxic presidency just hit a new low. And I’m not talking about the firing of FBI Director James Comey. The administration’s rock bottom moment of the past 24 hours came when the Nixon Library told the news media to stop comparing Donald Trump to Richard Nixon.

Less than an hour after Comey’s discharge was announced, major news outlets posted sidebars recalling the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973. For those not yet on Social Security – and those recipients with memory loss – here’s a quick scorecard from that October Saturday of 44 years ago: Slowly sinking from the Watergate break-in scandal, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, who was then leading the independent Watergate investigation. Richardson refused the president’s order and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused to fire Cox and resigned. That put Robert Bork, then solicitor general, in charge of the justice department. Bork carried out Nixon’s discharge order. Two days later the bumper stickers were out: “Impeach the Cox Sacker.” Ten months later, with impeachment proceedings underway, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

So, as the inevitable comparisons between Trump’s and Nixon’s motives to fire their investigators surfaced last night, this tweet, with the hashtag “notNixonian”, was sent out by the Richard Nixon Library: “President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI.” You know you are in trouble when the ghost of Richard Nixon distances himself from you. In fairness to both sides of this intense Worst President Ever competition, it should be noted that Nixon didn’t have to fire his FBI director. J. Edgar Hoover died in sleep in May of 1972.

Although an obvious and inviting comparison, the 1973 “massacre” was not the first Nixonian image that jumped into my head as the Comey story broke. Instead, it was Nixon’s dogged insistence, expressed in a five word sentence at a November 17, 1973 news conference.

Here’s what Nixon said: “I am not a crook.”

Here’s what Trump wrote to Comey: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”

In Nixon’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not a crook, you can be pretty sure he is a crook. In Trump’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not under FBI investigation, you know darn well he is under FBI investigation.

The most amazing aspect of this latest piece of Trump theater, is the president’s innate inability to follow his own script. Here’s how it was supposed to go: They get a nonpartisan, career deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, two weeks into the job, to write a memo recommending Comey’s discharge based on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Trump sycophant, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concurs with his deputy’s recommendation, setting the stage for the Donald to fire Comey on the basis of a Clinton investigation that Clinton believes put Trump in the White House.

Get it? The key storyline of this script is that the discharge is wholly apolitical; it’s all about integrity and good government. That’s why he’s firing the guy who messed up his opponent’s investigation. Okay, so it’s not the most believable scenario in the world; it was still their script, crafted in an inexperienced writers room, where everyone figured that Democrats would welcome Comey’s Clinton-linked firing because they blame him for her election loss. Of course, days earlier, according to the New York Times, Comey asked the Justice Department for additional funds for the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and a possible link to the Trump campaign. But that would be omitted from the script. This was about how badly the FBI guy bungled the Clinton matter. Just stick to that storyline and the public will be none the wiser. Then the star had to go and improvise. Badly. He had to throw in that seemingly non sequitur of a phrase, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation. . .” before telling the guy he is fired.

Early in my journalism career, I covered small town and village governments. There wasn’t a staff member in any of them who would have allowed a script like this to be performed. And there certainly wasn’t a mayoral aide who would have allowed their boss to allude to the very subject you are trying to avoid in discharging a department head. In a city of 20,000 people, political pros knew about optics, audience reaction and how to manage both. Those basics are either totally missing in this White House or are being ignored by a president who seems perpetually wired to deliver messages that go against his own interest.

Trump was madly tweeting this morning about Democrats who couldn’t stand Comey expressing outrage over his discharge. It was as if he really anticipated a Palm Sunday reception from the opposition for firing the point guy on the Russian interference investigation. The unanticipated blowback was so bad for the administration that Kellyanne Conway was released from the Witness Protection Program to run interference. She insisted to reporters last night that Comey was fired because Trump had “lost confidence in him,” not because of the Russian investigation. Think about that for a while. Based on what we know about this president, God help us all if we end up with a director of the FBI who has Trump’s confidence.

AFTER 100 DAYS OF TRUMP: NO MORE, PLEASE!

After reading way too many stories about Trump’s first hundred days, it dawned on me that a vital angle of this analytic ritual was missing. Here’s the real question: how have the rest of us coped with 100 days of the Orangeman in the White House? Forget about how the Donald performed. None of us needed a hundred days to figure that one out. When the shock of election night hit, we knew this wasn’t going to be pretty. America had elected everyone’s crazy uncle, a creepy old cuss who says weird stuff, a guy with a 75-word vocabulary and an attention span shorter than his fingers.

Yet, Donald J. Trump, the most unlikely of presidents, has changed our lives in ways small and large, like no other political figure has. For example, people are:

• FREAKING OUT. Remember when we longed for November 9, thinking that our nightmare would finally end? It had just begun. Now we had to accept the reality that our new commander in chief was an accused sexual predator whose foreign policy promise was to “bomb the shit out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.” Understandably, the first 100 days of Trump threw most of the country into high anxiety. In an updated version of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”, you had to be nuts not to go insane over this presidency. Doctors noted a sharp increase of patients experiencing Trump-related high blood pressure, chest tightness and gastrointestinal distress. Psychotherapists in all parts of the country reported soaring caseloads of patients with severe anxiety and depression over the new White House occupant. (Here, here and here.) Many, according to one psychologist quoted by the Philadelphia Inquirer, complained of “insomnia and a dark, permeating sense of fear and powerlessness.” Most large city public school systems have established hot lines and counseling services for students upset by daily Trump news, particularly those from minority, LGBT and immigrant groups.

• RESISTING. Trump has motivated more sustained protests since the Vietnam War and civil rights days of the 1960s. Folks who have never marched before are hitting the streets regularly on behalf of women, LGBT rights, science, Muslims, immigrants, workers, the disabled and a score of other issues. A week has not passed since the inauguration without numerous demonstrations. Much of the resistance’s organizing and advance work is being done by volunteers who had not been politically active before Trump. “To have a sustained (protest), every weekend, every couple of days, and it’s a different issue – I’ve never seen anything like this before,” David Meyer, a sociology professor at University of California-Irvine told CNN. The resistance even managed to launch the first protest in space last month when the Autonomous Space Agency Network floated an anti-Trump banner 90,000 feet into the stratosphere.

• LAUGHING. The Donald has given comedians their first bull market since George W. Bush and his malapropisms moved back to Texas. Alec Baldwin’s career has surged through his Saturday Night Live Trump impressions. Comedy Central hired its own presidential impersonator and launched a weekly parody. Thanks to his acerbic anti-Trump bits, Stephen Colbert rose from the ashes of the late night talk show wars to overtake Jimmy Fallon, who never overcame his pre-election tousling of Trump’s hair. Just a week ago, there was fear and trembling over a potential writers strike and what it would have meant for an anxious nation dependent on a nightly dose of presidential humor. Not to worry. With this president, comedy writers are a superfluous luxury. All these producers need is the original transcript of the president’s words. If he’s not kicking off Black History Month by referring to Fredrick Douglas in the present tense, he’s declaring that Andrew Jackson opposed the Civil War 16 years after he died. Donald Trump is his own parody. Still, when he calls North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a “smart cookie”, or invites his Philippine murderous counterpart, Rodrigo Duterte, to the White House, we’d all sleep better at night if those lines had been delivered by Alec Baldwin. Humor is more fun when it doesn’t have adverse consequences.

• CONSUMING NEWS. Despite Trump’s relentless war against the mainstream media, – or maybe because of it – there has been an unprecedented stampede for news about what this president is doing. In the three weeks after the election, the New York Times added a whopping 132,000 digital subscribers. Then, in the first quarter of 2017, it picked up another 308,000 net new subscriptions. The Washington Post has added more than 60 newsroom jobs this year, an unheard of number in this era of editorial retrenchment. At least six of those positions will be used on a “rapid response” investigative team covering Trump and national news. Television news continues to enjoy record ratings, largely due to an intense interest in what Trump is up to.

Of the 11.6 million articles written about Trump’s first 100 days, my favorite came from the distinguished dean of the conservative punditry, the Washington Post’s George F. Will. He began with: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either.” Will then makes the case that Trump has a “dangerous disability”, and needs to be quarantined. He writes: “His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”

Nothing captures the first 100 days of Trump better than that. As for the rest of us, let’s keep resisting and laughing as much as possible. There are 13.5 additional hundred-day periods left in this administration. I’m pretty sure that at the end of each of them, the lint in that disorderly mind will still be blowing in the gusting wind of factoids.