Author: Bruce R. Nelson

NO SYNDROME ABOUT IT: TRUMP IS A REAL IMPOSTER

Ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in pursuit of the presidency, he has been diagnosed by detractors (here, here and here) with having a severe case of Imposter Syndrome. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

Millions of intelligent, high-achieving adults are plagued with Imposter Syndrome, the false notion that they have faked their way into the limelight and don’t deserve the success they have achieved.  Can you imagine the Donald doubting his success?  This is a guy who spins utter failure into faux success, all the while basking in the illusion that whatever he touches turns to gold, a modern day, orange-tinged Rumpelstiltskin with bad hair.  

Imposter Syndrome emerged in the 1970s through the work of two psychologists, Suzanna Imes and Pauline Rose Clance. It was initially seen as a severe insecurity affliction in mostly high-achieving women, notably in a culture unwelcoming to female achievement. Years later, however, researchers found that men were also prone to the condition. According to the International Journal of Behavioral Science, 70 percent of people experience the syndrome at some point in their lives. It has been described variously as an inability to internalize your own successes, and a “pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, or fraudulence despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” 

That assuredly is not Donald Trump, a man whose toxicity could be significantly reduced through daily injections of self-doubt.  His only relationship to this disorder is that he has undoubtedly validated the distorted feelings of insecurity among those actually suffering from the syndrome. After all, if a genuine, real-deal imposter like Trump can masquerade his way into the West Wing through the hocus-pocus of smoke and mirrors, then how real can anyone’s achievement be?

How, you may ask, could anyone fake their way into the White House?  The same way you get to Carnegie Hall:  practice, practice, practice.  Trump has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of being someone he is not. 

For example:

ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS. It is well established that, as far back as the 1970s, Trump routinely called major news outlets under a variety of fictitious names, claiming to work for the mogul.  In exchange for anonymity, he then concocted brazenly false, boastful  stories about the Donald and his projects.

SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRE MYTH. Trump’s life-defining narrative of having built his empire all on his own, with barely any help from his family was totally decimated by a detailed New York Times investigation showing that the president started his company with at least “$413 million from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”

PHONY CAMPAIGN FOR THE RICH LIST.  Using a pseudonym to impersonate a source inside his company, Trump repeatedly badgered Forbes Magazine with fabricated numbers to get himself high placement on its annual listing of the 400 richest people.  Jonathan Greenberg, the Forbes reporter who took the calls, told the Washington Post he later learned that Trump should not have been on many of those lists. He said he placed him on an early list, for example, on the net worth of $100 million, only to later learn that his actual worth was $5 million.

As president, Donald Trump has consistently played the role of Imposter in Chief.  He said his New York-born father emmigrated from Germany. He insisted he had a “wonderful” healthcare plan as a replacement for Obamacare. There was no plan.  Mexico would pay for the wall, until it didn’t. Then he’d force Congress to fund the wall, until it didn’t.  Now he boasts that part of the wall has actually been built, and then declares the phoniest of emergencies in order to “finish” that which never began. 

This is the direct opposite of Imposter Syndrome behavior.  Rather than performing at a highly competent level but being unable to own his success, Trump has no idea what he is doing but is blinded to his insecurity through an inability to grasp his ineptness .  There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Back in 1999, Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and his student researcher, Justin Kruger, wrote an article for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Its title foreshadowed the Trump presidency:  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.  

Dunning and Kruger found, according to reporting on their work, that there is “a cognitive basis in which the less able people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities.”  Although their work was well respected in academic circles, the Dunning-Kruger Effect went mainstream with Trump’s election.  Dunning wrote a piece for Politico in 2017 in which he said that not only was Trump a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but that his base is “grounded in similar ignorance.”  Wrote Dunning: “. . .they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.”

And so it is that our Dunning-Kruger president stumbles his way through governance. He dismisses global warming on a cold day, calls real news “fake news”, believes Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence experts, and boasts of his peacemaking in North Korea while that regime continues to manufacture nuclear weapons. Not knowing what he doesn’t know pulls him and this country further and further into the abyss.

Decades before academicians framed the duality of the Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, philosopher Bertrand Russell perfectly captured the dynamic in a 1933 essay titled “The Triumph of Stupidity”.  He wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that . . . the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Still, given a choice between the two, always go with doubt.  Used constructively, it can build a path to wisdom.

THROUGH THE BLURRY LOOKING-GLASS OF PAIN AND PILLS

As I closed out my 2018 pontifications, I promised a return to this space in early February. Deadlines are sacred, as I learned at a ridiculously young age from a crusty old editor who insisted that every story didn’t have to sing, but by God it better be on time.  So here I am: on time, but not quite singing.

The purpose of the hiatus was to retreat from the madness of daily news and the brutality of winter, which is apparently now referred to as the polar vortex.  My wife, Melissa, and I snugly nestled ourselves in a beautiful ocean-front condo, fully prepared to soak up a month of Floridian warmth and serenity.  Then, right smack in the middle of paradise, I slipped on a wet kitchen floor and went into a graceless tailspin that ended with my unfortunate merger with a now badly dented wall.  I broke three ribs.  (For avid readers of Gray’s Anatomy, they were ribs 4, 5 and 6.)

There was a time when rib fractures were treated by tightly binding them with tape. That diminished the pain and allowed for healing.  Turns out that approach also caused reduced lung function and frequently brought on pneumonia.  The current protocol for broken ribs, based on the very best medical science available, is to sit quietly for approximately six weeks while enduring a pain level prohibited by the Geneva Convention.  

Well, that is a slight exaggeration.  The torment is mitigated through the wonders of opioid pain medication. You know, the stuff that is currently killing 130 Americans daily. All things considered, wrapping my chest with duct tape seems to be a safer course of treatment.  But I was never that good at science.  So I am following my doctor’s orders and “managing the pain” with Percocet, taken strictly as directed.  

As a recovering drunk with almost 39 years of sobriety, I’ve always regarded pain medication with heavy trepidation.  Yet, when confronted with serious, heavy-duty, mind-crushing pain, you are given a Hobson’s choice. You are either in a state of being where it’s impossible to focus on anything but the pain, or one where the pain subsides but cognitive functioning is reduced to the level of endlessly staring at one of those old television test patterns.  I chose the test pattern, but can’t wait to turn it off. 

That would not always have been the case with me.  In the insecurity and anxiety of my youth,  I would have devoured those pills in order to create the illusion of euphoria that comes with building an existential wall around everything you don’t want to feel or deal with. Fortunately for me, opioids were virtually unheard of in the 1970s. Back then, alcohol was the go-to drug for many of us searching for an emotional and cognitive anesthetic.  It too kills through abuse, just not as quickly as the little pills cranked out by Purdue Pharma. I could so easily have been among the hundreds of thousands who died from this insidious addiction.  The only force holding me back now is my obsession with sobriety manifested in a choice – no, an insistence – to absorb every aspect of life without a perpetual numbing of my perceptive filters.  Well, except for mind-numbing physical pain.    

Having completed four of my six weeks of broken rib recovery, the pain is slowly subsiding and I am lowering my Percocet dosage.  I would not have been able to formulate even these meager and feeble sentences a few days ago.  I’ve tried to follow the news, but it all seemed like a hazy, dream sequence.  I was able to grasp some elements but couldn’t for the life of me process them, or make sense of them.  

Believe me, this medication is, in no sense of the word, recreational.  You wouldn’t believe the hallucinations it caused me.  I watched a clip of the State of the Union speech the other day. There was Donald Trump, in my drug-addled state, talking about unity, coming together, curing AIDS and empowering women.  I know.  Crazy, right? That’s how strong this stuff is.   Not only that, but I somehow got this inane notion that Virginia’s Democratic party was on the verge of collapse because of a lack of male leaders who had not worn blackface or been accused of sexual assault.  That’s what happens to a brain on opioids.  

This is all by way of saying that my commentary will be back in this slot as soon as the ribs heal, the drug regimen ends and all of the mental cobwebs disappear.  Surely the world will look clearer and saner then. If not, at least I can write about it. Thanks for your patience.   

TOO MUCH TRUMP? HERE’S A PAUSE TO REFRESH

Oh what a year it’s been in Trump World.  Among the 2018 memories:  shithole countries, nuclear button sizes, a very stable genius, porn star hush money, an unexecuted order to fire Robert Mueller, a presidential declaration that Steve Bannon lost his mind, and a three-day government shutdown.

And that was just January.

Fear not, dear readers, the other 11 months will not be summarized in this space.  Given our current environment, the journalistic masochism of year-end reviews constitutes cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by Article VIII of the Constitution. Besides, there seems to be an intense desire for a  break from Trump overload.

For all the false superlatives he spouts about himself, this one is true: the American people have taken more breaks from thinking about, watching or listening to Donald Trump than they did under any other president.

Trump Fatigue Syndrome was the Urban Dictionary’s top definition of the year.  Google it and you will see millions of testimonials from folks suffering from too much Trump.  Hundreds of celebrities and others have shared their agony of the “Trump 10”, a reference to weight gain brought on by Trump-induced stress eating.  Media outlets cranked out endless reports of people dealing with Trump fatigue by invoking cold turkey news blackouts (here, here and here).  It has been reported that House Speaker Paul Ryan decided to leave public office largely because of Trump fatigue.  Even Kanye West, a rare celebrity to embrace the president, ended the year taking a break from Trump news, saying it was “all too much”.

And therein lies the predicate behind the decision to take a brief break from producing this blog.  Melissa, my editor and wife, and I are headed south for a month or so.  Barring unforeseen circumstances, I anticipate a return to this spot in early February.  It’s not that I’ve succumbed to Trump fatigue.  For reasons only a good shrink could dissect, I can’t take my eyes off this train wreck.  Its every facet fascinates me.  

What I want to avoid at all costs is reader fatigue. And so it is, on the theory that a brief absence may make the reading fonder, that I bid you adieu for a spell. Thank you for following me, or at least checking in every once in a while.  Our connection means a lot to me.   Happy New Year!

BEWARE OF UNWISE MEN BEARING SIMPLISTIC IDEAS

A long time ago, in what now seems like a galaxy far, far away, conservatives possessed an intellectual rigor that drove their vision of laissez-faire government, individual liberty and a free market economy. Although not my cup of tea, this political philosophy reflected an honest, rational and structured approach to governance.   That’s all gone now, replaced by the impulses of angry, feeble thinkers whose approach to leadership is vastly inferior to that of a gaggle of drunken sailors.  

Surely conservative giants like Barry Goldwater, William Buckley and Milton Friedman are spinning in their graves – to the right of course – as their movement devolves into a frantic rush toward foolish, simplistic and jingoistic responses to complicated problems. Whether it’s Brexit in Europe or Trump’s wall at the Mexican border, we are living in an age of political thoughtlessness.  It’s as if that crazy uncle who delights in listing the inane things he’d do if only he were king, was suddenly wearing a crown.  

Yes, conventional conservatives like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, rank high on the nuisance scale with their trickle-down shell games and burning desire to raid Social Security.  But at least they had the cognitive wherewithal to come up with specific, detailed plans that would further their objectives, as onerous as they be to many of us.  This new breed of right wing populism seems to be propelled by non-ideas.  Instead of concrete plans, we get metaphoric images that whip up the base but offer not the slightest hint of an actual solution.

Donald Trump was jubilant this week over a federal judge’s decision striking down the entire Affordable Care Act, also known – particularly  by Trump rally fans – as  Obamacare.  If the ruling survives appellate review, the president insisted there will be “great healthcare results for Americans!”  The Donald and his disciples have been railing, ranting and raging over Obamacare since the Republican primaries nearly three years ago.  Not once – during the primaries, the general election campaign or his first two years as president – has Trump ever offered the slightest hint of what he thinks “great healthcare” would consist of.  He has never had anything resembling a constructive thought about healthcare. It was all about capturing the adulation of the Obama-haters, with no regard to what happens to people who lose their insurance.  To Trump and his minions, “Abolish Obamacare” was as void of meaning as “Lock Her Up”. The juices of anger flowed, but there wasn’t a single policy thought to be had.

This is the same kind of thought-deprived leadership that has thrown the United Kingdom into a perpetual state of crisis. Just as America-first Trumpism was gaining steam in 2016, conservative populism roared through the UK, emotionally propelled by the simplistic notion that life could be made great again with a one-word plan: LEAVE.  By a 52 percent margin, the Brits voted in a national referendum to secede from the European Union.  Zero thought was given to the practical policy implications of secession, and Parliament, after two painful years of trying to come up with a divorce decree, is nowhere close to an agreement.  That means the separation may well occur in March without a single plan on how to handle such details as trade, taxes, financial payments and immigration policy. The Bank of England has warned of a “deep and damaging recession with worse consequences for the UK economy than the 2008 financial crisis.”  LEAVE made for a powerful chant, but it was completely content-free, void of any details about how the breakup would affect people’s lives.

Back home, Trump has threatened to end the week with a partial government shutdown over another of his one-word campaigns. Like a toddler pleading for a favorite toy, the president has been yammering for his WALL, his “big, beautiful” wall, a magical wall that will restore America’s greatness by keeping people with brown skin out of the country.  

There are few public policy issues more complex and involved than immigration, which is one reason Congress has been unable to tackle the issue in a satisfactory manner for more than 30 years.  And then along comes Trump and his one-word fix.  “Build the WALL”, is at or near the top of the charts for his campaign rally chants. As if architecture could solve one of the world’s thorniest problems.  

As of last year, nearly 60 million people have been forced by violence and conflict to flee their homes. More than half of all refugees are under 18.  According to the United Nations, if all those asylum-seekers and refugees were a country, it would be the twenty-first most populous nation in the world. In the U.N.’s view this crisis is the worst it has been since World War II and will steadily become worse as violent conflicts grow and climate change wreaks havoc. Yet, the alleged leader of the free world directs none of the vast resources at his disposal to find meaningful responses to these problems. Instead, he yaps incessantly about his wall as the magical cure for a broken immigration system.  And on climate change, he offers a rake.

The only upside to the right’s cataclysmic populism, is that it is difficult to envision a scenario where it has staying power. By definition, simplistic solutions to complicated problems fail. The essence of their brief life span lies in the visceral illusion of workability.  Cracks are already bringing to show. Polls track a steady approval increase for the elements of the Affordable Care Act, even among those who disliked Obama.  They don’t want to lose their insurance.  Faced with potentially severe consequences of leaving the E.U., many Brexit supporters have expressed buyers’ remorse. That’s not to say there won’t be serious fallout from this politics of mindlessness. It is merely a reminder of the governing principle that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

PRESIDENTIAL RELATIVITY: HOW 45 TURNED 41 INTO ONE OF THE BEST

Who would have thought we’d be waxing nostalgic over the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush? He was a one-term wonder, a Ronald Regan afterthought who eschewed the “vision thing” and really hated broccoli.  Yet, the nation mourns the passing of 41 this week out of a deep longing for those bygone days when our presidents rarely embarrassed us, no matter how mediocre or inept they may have been.

Bush had been destined to join such non-luminaries as Chester Arthur, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore in the dustbin of presidential obscurity.  Then along came Donald Trump who, in a karmic twist of fate, managed to elevate Bush the Elder to near-Mount Rushmore status.  And so it is that the late president, viewed through the funhouse mirrors of Trump World, casts an idyllic image of the anti-Donald: honest, humble, caring and knowledgeable.  Those are all leadership attributes we once took for granted in our presidents, until they vanished in the 2016 election.

According to news reports, the Bush family secured a creative détente with the Trump White House well in advance of the 94-year-old former president’s death.  Trump would be invited to the funeral and the family would insist eulogists refrain from criticizing the current president.  It seems the Donald was mighty distressed over the ridicule heaped upon him at John McCain’s funeral and wanted to avoid a sequel in the Bush sendoff.  So touched by this gesture from a family he has shown nothing but contempt for, Trump, in a rare moment of lucidity, managed to utter kind words on Bush’s passing. Here’s part of what he said: “President Bush always found a way to set the bar higher.”

That kinder and gentler remark, however, got it wrong. The reality of this moment is that Trump sets the presidential bar so low that George H.W. Bush – along with nearly any Tom, Dick or Mary off the street – rises to the level of revered leaders. Virtually every word used to describe Bush since his death represents a basic human ingredient sorely missing in our current president.  Barack Obama called Bush “a humble servant”.  Bill Clinton said he was “honorable, gracious and decent”.  Jimmy Carter spoke of his “grace, civility and social conscience”. House Speaker Paul Ryan referred to his “decency and integrity”. 

Foreign Policy magazine captured the late president with these words: “modesty, integrity, decency, patience, prudence and intelligence”. It then opined: “When he left office in 1993, his qualities reflected well upon him. Today, they are incandescent.” The Washington Post’s obituary observed: “Although Mr. Bush served as president nearly three decades ago, his values and ethics seem centuries removed from today’s acrid political culture.”  

So there sat 45 at the Bush funeral on Wednesday. Trump was in the first pew of the Washington National Cathedral as the nation paid its last respects to 41. He had, for the first time as president, taken his ceremonial place next to his living predecessors, secure in the deal he cut that nobody there would dis the Donald. His body language, however, belied any notion of a comfort zone. With pursed lips, a vacant gaze and arms folded tightly across his sternum, Donald Trump looked like a gastro patient about to undergo a colonoscopy without anesthesia.  

Alas, what he got was far more painful.  Nobody talked about him.  His name was never spoken. The no-ridicule pledge meant that Donald Trump was totally ignored.  But it was far worse than that for him.  The heartfelt praise visited upon George H.W. Bush must have jabbed fiercely at Trump’s psyche and felt very much like the ridicule he so wanted to avoid.  No, the Bush-Trump ceasefire had not been violated. The problem was that 41 and 45 became reflective mirrors for each other.  Bush’s strengths seemed ordinary 30 years ago, but are now nostalgically prized and mourned because they are tragically absent in the incumbent president.

Although the eulogists were focused singularly on the late president, it was impossible to hear their words without also thinking about Trump’s flagrant inadequacies.  

For example:

Former president George W. Bush:  “In victory, he shared credit. When he lost, he shouldered the blame.”

Former senator Alan Simpson:  “He never hated anyone. Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”

Bush Biographer Jon Meacham:  “His life code was: ‘Tell the truth. Don’t blame people. Forgive’.”

Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney: “. . .when George Bush was president of the United States of America, every single head of government in the world knew that they were dealing with a gentleman, a genuine leader. . .” 

If those memories of what being presidential once meant failed to connect the dots to our current situation, the officiant, the Rev. Dr. Russell Jones Levenson Jr., Bush’s pastor from Houston, brought it all the way home:  “Some have said this an end of an era. But it doesn’t have to be. Perhaps this is an invitation to fill the void that has been left behind.”

And what a void it is.  In the morass of our deeply broken political environment, it’s hard to remember that we once took for granted that our presidents would be kind, decent people, folks not deeply invested in hatred or cruelty, leaders who told the truth most of the time.  When George Herbert Walker Bush received the Republican nomination for president in 1988, he vowed to make the country “kinder and gentler”.  He was mercilessly lampooned by late night comics and editorial cartoonists for setting the bar so low.   

The bipartisan mourning we saw and felt this week was America pleading – from far below that bar – not just for kinder and gentler governance, but for leadership laced with honesty, integrity and decency. It’s been said that we can’t fully apprehend the value of something until we lose it.  Now that it is gone, America’s first order of business is to find a way to get it back. 

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

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

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

CALLED for the prosecution of his political opponents.

OBSTRUCTED an investigation into foreign interference with our elections.

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

THREATENED judges who ruled against him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRUMP OUTSHINES RUSSIAN TROLLS AT DECEIVING AND DIVIDING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some recent examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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