Author: Bruce R. Nelson

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

KAVANAUGH RIDES THE RAPIDS ON TRUMP’S RIVER OF DENIAL

As Brett Kavanaugh continues to deny his way to the Supreme Court, we are witnessing the nauseating effects of Trumpian Justice, a bizarre jurisprudential model in which the vigor of denial obliterates any search for the truth.

There’s an amazing passage in Bob Woodward’s just-released book that perfectly captures the Republican game plan to beat back sexual misconduct accusations against the judge. The author recounts a conversation in which Trump offered advice to a friend who had acknowledged some “bad behavior toward women.” According to Woodward (Page 175), the president told his buddy never to show weakness.

“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” Trump is quoted as saying. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny everything that’s said about you. Never admit.”

This is the closest thing Trump has to a moral code. At least 16 women accused him of sexual misconduct. He called each one of them a liar. Then he was elected president. Denial worked well for him, and he has been championing it ever since. He was the only major Republican leader to stand by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in the face of credible accusations that Moore molested young teenagers years ago. “He totally denies it,” said Trump in his endorsement of Moore. “You have to listen to him.” Even after former aide Rob Porter resigned over domestic abuse allegations from two ex-wives, the president stood by his man. “He said very strongly that he’s innocent,” Trump told reporters. “. . .you have to remember that.”

The Donald even carried his denial creed into foreign policy. Remember the Helsinki summit? Discarding his own intelligence agencies’ compelling evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president stood with the Kremlin, saying: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” He’ll take a good strong denial over facts any day, particularly if it advances his interests.

Right now, Brett Kavanaugh could not have a better denial mentor than Donald Trump. In pursuing his personal manifest destiny of a lifetime Supreme Court seat, the judge has stuck steadfastly to the Trumpian script. Responding to allegations of an attempted rape in high school and an incident a year later when he allegedly flashed his penis in front of a fellow Yale student, Kavanaugh used phrases like, “completely false allegation”, “this never happened”, and “a smear, plain and simple”.

No wishy-washy, plain vanilla denials for this guy. No, these were Trump-trademarked denials, filled with righteous indignation of steroidal strength. The judge didn’t merely deny the allegations, he “categorically and unequivocally” denied them. So strong were the denials that news organizations exhausted a thesaurus of adverbs expressing strength. Fox News had Kavanaugh “vigorously” denying the claims. In USA Today, he “forcefully” denied them. He “strongly pushed back” on NPR, “fiercely denied” the accusations in The Hill, and “strenuously” denied them in The Daily Beast.

Leave it to conservative Republicans to throw cold water on this culture-changing #MeToo moment. In their desperate rush to stack the court before the midterms, they have brought a year’s worth of momentum to a grinding halt. Prior to this sorry episode, we seemed to be on our way to changing the protocol for sexual misconduct claims. The accusers were to be taken seriously, respected and listened to. Thorough investigations were to be conducted. And any unwanted sexual contact was absolutely wrong.

For virtually every man so accused during the reckoning, there were thorough investigations that lasted weeks, if not months (examples: Leslie Moonves, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Tambor). Many of the men accused of inappropriate behavior issued apologetic responses and went out of their way to respect their accusers, a huge cultural shift in tone from days gone by (examples: Lauer, former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, Geraldo Rivera, James Franco and Richard Dreyfuss). Compare, for example, Kavanaugh’s fortified denials to Charlie Rose’s response to multiple sexual misconduct allegations: “It is essential these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior.”

It is now throw-back September – in an election year – and the retro-Republicans of the United States Senate appear hell-bent on ignoring sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh while bullying and disparaging the women who made them. It’s altogether proper to thoroughly investigate sexual impropriety accusations against a celebrity chef before letting him back into the kitchen, but if we’re talking about a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, don’t waste time looking at the facts, just measure the guy for his robe and get him on the bench before the base heads to the polls.

Unless at least two Republican senators decide to put process above politics, Brett Kavanaugh will soon take his place on the bench of the nation’s highest court. There will be no FBI investigation into the accusations against him. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will take their victory laps. It will be left to the rest of us to sort through the ashes of this disaster. We must find a way to make sure that our values of gender equality, fairness and decency are never again torched in the public square, and that even the strongest of denials never trump an honest search for the truth. The first step in that journey begins on election day.

A SCRIPT FOR THE KAVANAUGH FINALE

Here’s a modest proposal for ending the Brett Kavanaugh melodrama: Strap down the judge with polygraph equipment and ask him about Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations. If he fails the lie detector test – the same one Blasey Ford has already passed – his nomination is off the table. If he passes? Then he joins Clarence Thomas as the shamed-but-confirmed male caucus of the United States Supreme Court. Put the whole thing on pay-per-view and give the proceeds to a #MeToo organization, just like CBS is doing with Les Moonves’ severance pay.

Okay, as Jonathan Swift did with his Modest Proposal, I jest. Still, there is more poetic justice in that scenario than we are apt to see from Chairperson Charles Grassley and his 10 fellow white male Republican elves who control the Senate Judiciary Committee. Oh, to see the gnashing of all those pearly white conservative teeth over the sight of an originalist judge wired to a lie detector machine! Would the American Civil Liberties Union come to his rescue? The ACLU has long led the legal battle against polygraph testing in employment situations. On the other side? You got it: the conservative, originalist bar, including Kavanaugh and his Federalist Society buddies.

The far right has long adored lie detectors. Just ask Vice President Mike Pence. Only days ago, he offered to be polygraphed in order to prove that he did not write the anonymous New York Times op-ed that labeled Donald Trump amoral and unhinged. (Do we live in interesting times, or what?) Kavanaugh himself has waxed eloquently on the usefulness of lie detectors “to screen applicants for critical law enforcement, defense and intelligence collection roles”. Writing the decision in a 2016 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case, Kavanaugh called polygraph testing “an important tool” to keep undesirables out of significant jobs.

It may be an important tool to Judge Kavanaugh in the abstract, but now that it affects him personally, don’t expect to see him in a blood pressure cuff and skin sensors anytime soon. The polygraph is not going to resolve this issue. The question before the Senate is not about truth. It’s about votes. As long as the Republicans hold together, they can push the nominee over the finish line, and lock in a conservative majority on the court for a generation or more. As soon as two Republican senators jump ship, however, Kavanaugh is finished and Trump pulls out his Federalist Society list of reasonable facsimiles.

Meanwhile, this Capitol Hill political crisis has brought out hardball tactics eerily reminiscent of the ugliness that surrounded the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill fiasco 27 years ago. The focus inside the beltway is much more about counting votes than addressing the meta issue of what happens to women who accuse powerful men of sexual assault.

The Republican boys club in the Senate has attacked Blasey Ford’s veracity and “suspicious” timing every day since the California research psychologist went public with her accusation. Overcome with their hunger to get their man on the court, this aging Senate fraternity of old white guys wants to know why these women wait so long to make their accusations. How many television appearances, books and op-eds by sexual assault survivors will it take for us to learn that women who speak up subject themselves to a whole new round of abuse that, in many cases, is worse than the original assault?

Last week at this time, Christine Blasey Ford was in the middle of her life: doing research, teaching classes, raising children. Following a torrent of death threats after her name was revealed, she and her family had to flee their home. She is unable to work. She and her husband are in an undisclosed location and the children are being cared for elsewhere. Why, indeed, don’t women speak up more often about this stuff?

Meanwhile, Grassley and his crew are busy planning the stagecraft of a Senate hearing, should Blasey Ford decide to appear. Mindful of the horrendous optics from the Anita Hill hearing, where the young law school professor was grilled by a gaggle of old white men, Grassley suddenly noticed that all of the Republicans on his committee are men. He said earlier this week that they may bring in a woman to interrogate Blasey Ford. Borrowing from their own rhetoric, the Republicans have had 27 years to put women on that committee. Why wait until the last minute?

Over at the White House, Kavanaugh is being thoroughly prepped for his testimony. I get the importantance of preparing a judicial candidate for testifying about various legal nuances, like saying, “Roe v Wade” is “settled law”, but declining to call it “correct law” so he can vote later to unsettle it. But how many more ways are there to say that he did not, in a moment of drunken abandon at the age of 17, throw himself on Blasey Ford, grope her, cover her mouth to stifle her screams and try to undress her?

It’s important to remember that this moment in time is not just about the political composition of the Supreme Court. It’s also about how we view sexual assault and harassment, and how we treat the perpetrators and the accusers. We are, after all, in the middle of a reckoning on that subject. Giving Christine Blasey Ford, in 2018, the Anita Hill Bum’s Rush Treatment of 1991 is a perverse reversal of moral thought in this post-Harvey Weinstein world.

Here’s how this story should end: Without making a factual determination on the sexual assault allegation, the Senate should reject Kavanaugh’s nomination. Such a decision does not “convict” the judge of anything. But it acknowledges the reality that Blasey Ford could be right. Why take the risk of putting a man who attempted to rape her – and then lied about it – on the country’s highest court? It’s not as if he is facing jail time. He remains on the country’s second highest court. He can commiserate with fellow Judge Merrick Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court seat by Senate Republicans without so much as a whisper of bad behavior.

Such an endgame doesn’t alter Republican dreams of a conservative Supreme Court. The bull pen is packed with like-minded ideologues just waiting to take a seat on the bench. What it does do, however, is send a clear message that we have entered a new era, a time when we take accusations of sexual assault seriously, a time when one brave woman coming forward can change the face of history, and not ruin her life. Sadly, I strongly suspect we have not yet reached that time.

CLARENCE THOMAS AND ANITA HILL REDUX

Right smack in the middle of an optimistic #metoo reckoning comes a revolting development, casting serious doubt over whether our misogynistic culture has changed at all in the past 30 years. Welcome to the Anita Hill Story – The Sequel.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Christine Blasey Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist, said she was sexually assaulted at the age of 15 by then 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who is a Senate vote away from becoming a Supreme Court justice. She told the newspaper that Kavanaugh was “stumbling drunk” when he threw her down on a bed during a party. While his equally intoxicated friend watched, Ford said, Kavanaugh pinned her down on her back and groped her while attempting to remove her clothes. She said she tried to scream but Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth. She said she was able to escape only when Kavanaugh’s friend jumped on top of them, momentarily freeing her assailant’s hold. She said she then ran into a bathroom and locked the door. Ford did not report the attempted rape at that time, but says she has been traumatized by it throughout her adult life and has undergone therapy to deal with it. She provided The Post with notes taken by her therapist detailing the assault.

So, does that change anything with respect to Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination? “No way, not even a hint of it,” says a lawyer close to the Trump Administration. “If anything, it’s the opposite,” said the attorney. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Roll the clock back 27 years. Anita Hill, a young law school professor, accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with the policing of such workplace conduct. With Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination hanging in the balance, Hill told how her boss made repeated advances to her, talked about the size of his penis and described vivid scenes from pornographic movies. None of that kept Thomas off the court. Hill was excoriated by an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, with a seemingly bipartisan mission to get past the discomfort of Hill’s testimony in order to put Thomas on the bench. Said one of the senators back then, “If that’s sexual harassment, half the senators on Capitol Hill could be accused.”

As a measurement of just how far we haven’t come in nearly three decades, compare that unintended condemnation of the male gender to today’s utterance from the White House. At least the 1991 version exonerated half of the men in Congress. The Trump lawyer put the entire gender at risk of a sexual assault accusation.

Let’s get something straight here. This is not about the politics of a Supreme Court nomination. As noted earlier in this space, there is an overflowing pipeline of ultra-right-wing judicial candidates waiting to replace Kavanaugh. Surely they aren’t all attempted rapists. This is about coming to grips with a critically deep cultural divide over the way men use sex as a cudgel of power over women.

Even after a year of growing #metoo awareness and conversation, there is abundant evidence that we have not fully apprehended the depths of our divide. There remains a painfully enormous lack of symmetry between the accusers and the accused, or – in 99 percent of the cases – between the women harassed or assaulted and the men responsible.

Finally-fallen CBS CEO Leslie Moonves whines about “ancient” accusations from more than 12 women who he sees as destroying his career. One of those women, Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, is now in her 80s. According to Ronan Farrow’s reporting for the New Yorker, Golden-Gottlieb has been tormented for half her life by memories of Moonves forcing her to perform oral sex. To her perpetrator, it was just another day in the office. To her, it was jarring her soul and traumatizing her life.

Then there is Tom Brokaw, former NBC news anchor and a revered journalist. Multiple women came forward to recount, in the kind of detail that seemed etched in their minds forever, how he forced himself on them. Here’s how Brokaw described his reactions to those accusations: “I was ambushed and then perp walked across the pages of The Washington Post and Variety as an avatar of male misogyny, taken to the guillotine and stripped of any honor and achievement I had earned in more than a half century of journalism and citizenship.” What his accusers lacked in eloquence, they made up for in detail, a result of painful memories of being forcibly kissed and/or groped by a man far more powerful and respected than themselves, as long as 50 years ago.

The examples go on and on. Some of the men are simply slimeballs, incorrigible serial abusers. Others, however, have led decent, respectable, productive lives. Their transgressions – big or small, multiple or single – share a common thread. They all crossed the same line by abusing power to obtain some form of nonconsensual intimacy. In many cases, those moments of transgression may have long been erased from the perpetrator’s memory bank, by way of an alcoholic backout, or the redundancy of similar behavior. Meanwhile, their actions were deeply seared into the psyches of the women they hurt, leaving lifetimes of deep scar tissue.

The days ahead offer a poignant moment in dealing with this cultural divide. If Christine Ford ends up ridiculed and shamed like Anita Hill was, the damage will be far, far worse than simply seating Justice Kavanaugh next to Justice Thomas. It will mean we need a complete resetting of our moral compass. It will mean that even an enlightening #metoo movement is insufficient to make us grasp the difference between right and wrong. And to understand that when it comes to this type of wrong, there is no statute of limitations.

FOR RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGY, IT’S OUT OF THE SHADOWS AND ONTO THE BENCH

As a proud member of the Liberal Geezerhood, I have lowered my imaginary flag to half-mast in the melancholic recognition that, for the rest of my life, America’s federal judiciary will be in the hands of a right-wing cabal. The Supreme Court is on the cusp of having a rock solid conservative majority, which based on actuarial tables, will keep growing long before it dissipates. Two appellate circuits have already flipped to the right, and another two are on the verge of doing so.

Yet, as a life-long student of the political process, I can’t help being impressed with the skill, chutzpah and dogged determination behind a quiet, 36-year revolution that very few of us saw coming – until it was too late. When it comes to effective organizing principles, this amazing coup d’état could teach the left a thing or two.

We baby boomers grew up taking for granted that the role of the Supreme Court was to give life to the Constitution’s noble-but-ambiguous aspirations, core values like “equal protection”, “due process”, and “right to counsel”. Through those principles, we saw the court put an end to school desegregation, allow women to have access to contraceptives and abortion, require states to provide attorneys for low-income criminal defendants and prohibit police interrogations without advising suspects of their right to remain silent.

Meanwhile, a handful of ultra conservative lawyers and law students stewed quietly over what they saw as an overly activist judiciary and a liberal bent in most law schools. In 1982, that angst gave rise to something called the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a name far more elegant than either its origins or mission warrant. According to most histories of what is now known simply as the Federalist Society, the germination began with small chapters of disaffected and extremely conservative law students at Yale, Harvard and the University of Chicago. They felt disenfranchised by what they saw as an overly liberal legal profession and gathered together to share in that bond. With the help of some of the right’s most well-known attorneys, including Edwin Meese and Robert Bork, the movement quietly evolved into a pipeline aimed at mainstreaming conservative legal thought and producing an army of Federalist Society judges that could turn American jurisprudence on its head.

Today, the Federalist Society has 70,000 members, chapters at more than 200 law schools and over $25 million in net assets. Their patron saint is the late Justice Anton Scalia, revered by the society for his “originalist” approach to interpreting the Constitution. Once an outlier in judicial thought, originalism endeavors to freeze the Constitution at whatever strictly constructed meaning it had back in 1787. Since the founders back then were not thinking about things like abortion, racial segregation or gay marriage, then today’s courts should stay clear of all such current controversies. Or so the Federalist Society believes.

The truth, however, is that originalism is a cheap intellectual illusion intended to mask the brazen political goals of right-wing ideologues. After all, it was Scalia himself who, in a landmark gun rights case, found a private right to own a pistol in Second Amendment language that speaks of bearing arms in the context of a “well-regulated militia”. A credible argument perhaps, but one that stabs a dagger through the heart of originalist purism.

Here’s how fast the Federalist Society and originalism have evolved: When George W. Bush nominated now Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the White House insisted that the nominee “was not now and never has been” a member of the Federalist Society. It was as if mere association with this group posed a threat to his confirmation. Roberts is now proudly out of the closet as a card-carrying Federalist, along with his fellow society brethren Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

If you are counting, that makes four Federalist Society members on the nine-member court. Number five is just a Senate vote away. Brett Kavanaugh has been a Federalist activist for more than 20 years. In fact, when he worked for Bush, he was the one who persuaded his boss to nominate the then-closeted John Roberts. That is precisely how this once obscure organization works. It jams an extensive pipeline with well-groomed right-wing thinkers and sends them through a labyrinth of channels, from clerkships to partnerships to judgeships.

How did all that happen? Enter Leonard Leo, a quiet, far right ideologue and a brilliant organizer. Leo is a member of the secretive, reactionary Knights of Malta, a Catholic order founded in the 12th Century that is to the extreme right of the Vatican. According to close associates, Leo declared 20 years ago that conservatives had lost the culture wars – abortion, gay rights, contraception and diversity. He said the only solution was to “stack the courts”. He signed on with the Federalist Society as its fulltime paid operative and the stacking was quickly underway.

Roberts and Alito – and a couple of circuit appellate judges – were big wins for Leo during the George W. Bush years. But the floodgates opened wide for him when he joined forces with one of the most ideologically impure politicians in American political history. According to the New York Times, Leo repeatedly refused to meet with candidate Donald Trump in 2015 and early 2016. Eventually, however, he was persuaded to take a meeting. To Leo’s astonishment, Trump told him to come up with a list of Supreme Court candidates, and that he would publicly promise to fill the Scalia vacancy from that list. Months later, Neil Gorsuch moved from Leo’s list to the United States Supreme Court, soon to be followed by Brett Kavanaugh. Court watchers have estimated that by the end of the year, 26 percent of the federal appellate bench will have come through the Federalist Society pipeline. How amazing. How frightening. The selection of lifetime judgeships has been subcontracted to an outfit that the last Republican administration disavowed as too dark and shadowy.

Sadly, at this moment, there is nothing for liberals to do but grit our teeth and shake our heads. We have been outmaneuvered by a skilled right-wing court stacker. As the moment passes, however, we need to learn from him. We need to build our own pipeline of brilliant young lawyers willing to don judicial robes and apply the constitutional values and principles set forth by the founders to our current lives. Yes, it’s enormously sad to see the death of the judicial thinking we grew up with. But, as the late, great Joe Hill said in a different context, “Don’t mourn, organize.”

FORGET GOOD AND BAD, WE’RE ALL PACKAGE DEALS

A week of eulogies and retrospectives on the life of John McCain gave us a long-overdue lesson on how to evaluate our leaders. What we saw, with apologies to Charles Dickens, was a Tale of Two Senators. John McCain was our best of times, and our worst of times. He represented the age of wisdom, and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, and the epoch of incredulity. His was the season of Light, and the season of Darkness, the spring of hope, the winter of despair.

In less Dickensian prose, the late Arizona senator was, like all of us, a package deal, a complicated amalgam of good and bad, of decency and chicanery, of success and failure. He was a man of honor and principle. He was also a man of political expediency. He had moments of greatness and moments of shame.

Death has a way of triggering a contemplative introspection in the living. It’s an opportunity to hold a mirror to our lives and thought processes, with an eye toward making necessary adjustments. An adjustment is precisely what we need right now. We are living in a pathologically polarized moment, right smack in the middle of a highly charged civil war of deeply held values. It’s us against them, and we’re playing for keeps. As many noted psychologists (here and here) have observed, that kind of tribalism gives way to rigid, binary thinking. We see people as good or bad, either with us or against us. It’s a deeply skewed and destructive perception. To build and sustain the kind of political movement that can take us to a better place, we need to look beyond what we want to see in order to know what is really there.

Minutes after McCain died, my Facebook feed was filled with reactions. He was described with words like: honorable, brave, decent, compassionate and honest. He was praised for being against discrimination and reasonable on immigration Within an hour, the rebuttals appeared. They were from those who came to bury the senator, not to praise him. Their counterpoints? McCain cheated on his first wife, was deeply involved in an influence peddling scandal, opposed to making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, cast a deciding vote upholding a presidential veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act, and referred to his North Vietnamese captors as “gooks”.

What appeared as two factions fighting over an epitaph was an illusion. They were both right. John McCain was good and bad. Or, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “. . . nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” And “thinking” can be distorted by passionately held beliefs that filter people and events so that we see what we want to see.

McCain was the posterchild of the package deal approach to evaluating people. More than any of his contemporaries, he both owned his mistakes and had no problem abandoning fealty to partisan dogma when it suited his purposes. His death – as well as our reaction to it – offers a reminder that binary, black-or-white, either-or thinking, as tempting as it might be, is not a helpful way of understanding our world. Our desire to label people as heroes and villains, although understandable, is a fool’s errand.

Take Pope Francis, for example. Until last week, even I, as a recovering Methodist, was ready to nominate him for sainthood. “Who am I to judge”, he said of the Church’s position on gays. He focused on problems like poverty, climate change and corporate wrongdoing with an abiding intensity. He advocated for women’s equality and expressed an openness to allowing priests to marry. Then came the seemingly credible accusation that Francis had covered up a cardinal’s history of sexual abuse and pedophilia, triggering calls for his resignation. Do we move him from the good column into the bad? No. The amazing gifts this pope brought to his believers – and the rest of us – coexist with his human fallibility, one that may well have succumbed to a malignancy that seems to have permeated the culture of his church’s hierarchy. It’s a package deal. It’s important to see the entire package.

Every historical figure we’ve ever placed on a pedestal is a mere Google search removed from their warts. Mother Teresa, who became a saint last year, was accused of gross mismanagement and providing negligent medical care. Martin Luther King was found to have plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. Mohandas Gandhi is said to have been openly racist toward blacks in South Africa and frequently shared a bed with his 17-year-old great-niece. The great emancipator himself, Abe Lincoln, was responsible for the country’s largest mass execution. In 1862, he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux tribal members in Minnesota. Package deals, all of them.

The moral of this story is that we need to look at the whole package, and see all of its parts, in order to have anything close to an accurate understanding. The alternative is what organizational communication experts call a “frozen evaluation”. That means we lock in our assessment of someone – or something – and see only that which is consistent with our frozen evaluation. To ignore the fact that we are all complicated works-in-progress is to miss opportunities for meaningful, constructive connection.

Our current toxic environment of dark, deeply divided and angry discourse will not last forever. The McCain memorials laid bare our longing for harmony, or at least decency, in our politics. Our behavior can take us there. We can begin that journey by not writing everybody off who disagrees with us. As the late senator said in his farewell letter, “We weaken (America’s greatness) when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down. . .” There are many kinds of walls, including the ones we build around others who don’t share our views. To escape our current quagmire, we need to replace those walls with bridges. We will not reach everyone, but somewhere in all those package deals out there lies an opportunity to connect. Real change will not happen until we seize that opportunity.

TRUMPIAN JUSTICE: OUR CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Like a drunk progressing from slurred speech to crashing the family car, the presidency this week continued its rapid descent toward rock bottom. Regardless of your politics, is there anyone out there who wasn’t jarred – at least a little bit – to hear our president praise a convicted felon for refusing to cooperate with the federal government he defrauded? Sure, Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, but historically presidents have paid fealty to the law, not to the lawbreakers.

The president, after all, is the chief executive of that federal government, including its Department of Justice, which, a few days ago, Trump called a “joke”. This is totally contrary to those civics textbooks now welcoming students back to school. No president has ever repudiated his justice department. We inch ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

Here’s how fast we’ve fallen: In April of 2017, legal scholars expressed outrage when Trump accused a former Obama aide of having committed a crime. Since the justice department reports to the president, such a declaration of guilt without due process was seen by numerous observers as a flagrant abuse of presidential power and possible grounds for impeachment. They noted, as summarized in this space back then, that many similar slips of the presidential tongue over the years were immediately walked back. Prime example: Richard Nixon declared cult leader Charles Manson guilty before his trial began. He immediately withdrew his comment, saying, “the last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstance.” Trump, however, walks nothing back and has no qualms about prejudicing anyone’s legal rights.

What happened this week makes the president’s earlier comments look like jay walking. While Manafort’s unsequestered jury was deliberating, Trump repeatedly fired off messages claiming – in full Twitter shot of the jurors – that the trial itself was a “sad day for our country” and that Manafort was “a very good person”. The presidential attempt at verdict influencing, however, did not stop the jury from convicting Manafort on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud.

Hours later, Trump took to the stage of a political rally in one of those theater of the mind moments that flow from the bizarre politics of separate realities. With his former campaign chairman tucked neatly into a jail cell, and his personal attorney having just pled guilty to a felony charge that implicated the president, the Donald led the crowd in the ritualistic chant of “lock her up,” a vintage reference, of course, to Hillary Clinton, who has not been charged with a crime.

If you think that Trump was simply having a bad day and reverted to the Hillary ditty out of a pathetic combination of inertia and nostalgia, you would be wrong. Every day since that rally, Trump has eviscerated his justice department, along with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Never a strict constructionist on punctuation matters, the president said he now puts quote marks around “justice” when referring to the department because he sees no real justice there. He called Manafort “brave” for refusing to flip on him, like his attorney, Michael Cohen, did.

One of the federal prosecutors who helped convict mob boss John Gotti told Washington Post reporters that Trump’s recent statements about the criminal justice system struck him as “the modern-day version of a particularly inarticulate mobster.” That pretty well captures the moment we are living in.

Every day, the president lists names of more Democrats he thinks should be prosecuted by his “Justice” Department (here, here, here and here). Clearly, he has turned the notion of justice on its head. To him, it has nothing to do with the rule of law. It’s about using political power to protect himself and punish his enemies. Trump hasn’t merely hinted at that notion, he’s said it. He told Fox News this week, “the only reason” for appointing Sessions as attorney general was because he “felt loyalty” and expected his guy to protect him in the Russia investigation and then go after Democrats. Trump has never forgiven Sessions for recusing himself from the special prosecutor’s investigation.

The Washington Post has reported that the chief White House counsel and other top aides have repeatedly told Trump that he can’t call Justice and give orders, but the president refuses to embrace that concept. Here’s what a former senior administration official told the Post yesterday: “The president has not a whit of respect for institutions, whether it’s the DOJ or the Fed or the FBI. If you are a threat to him, he is going to try to kill you.”

Most of the news analysis and commentary produced by this historically tumultuous week has been focused on the future. Will Manafort flip for a reduced sentence? Will Trump pardon him? How much additional dirt does Cohen have on the president? What about impeachment? Will Mueller subpoena Trump? How will all of this play in the midterms? So many questions, and so little time to fully absorb the depth of depravity our country faces right now, in this moment, regardless of what happens later.

We have a president who has rejected the rule of law, who calls the Justice Department a “joke”, who thinks nothing of tampering with a jury, and who will do whatever it takes to subvert the processes of government in order to protect his own hide and punish his enemies. This is no longer an esoteric debate on the efficacy of a president opining on a person’s guilt or innocence. This is – right now, in this moment – a full scale assault on this country’s very concept of justice, with or without quote marks. Whatever may lie ahead, let us never accept a mobster’s notion of justice as our new normal.

THE UNRAVELING OF AN UNHINGED PRESIDENT

Say what you want about Donald Trump, keeping in mind that it matters dearly to him. In fact, it may be the only thing that does matter to this president. The Donald traverses a relational line that is, at once, simple and binary. It goes from commendation to condemnation, from singing praise to a dirge of denouncement. There is nothing in between and directions are often quickly reversed. So too are the presidential rewards and penances that accompany those changes. Just ask Omarosa Manigault Newman and John Brennan, names you would never expect to appear in the same sentence.

Omarosa, as she is now mononymously known, has owned the news cycle for the past week on the basis of her aptly named memoire, “Unhinged”. In it, she takes a verbal machete – along with a tape recorder – to the president who gave her a high level White House job, a position that consisted mainly of saying nice things about him. Omarosa, a former reality tv star, started writing her tell-all shortly after she was booted from the administration last December. Why was she hired in the first place? As Trump tweeted, “She was vicious but not smart. . .but (she said) such wonderful and powerful things about me. . .until she got fired.” (Here and here.) The president, who once heaped effusive praise on his mentee, quickly reversed course, calling her “whacky”, a “lowlife” and a “dog”.

Former CIA director Brennan has only known one of Trump’s polarities; they have only spoke ill of each other. In the ring of alpha male one-upmanship, being leader of the free world has its perks, and the president used them last week to punish Brennan’s criticism by withdrawing his top security clearance. Trump was so thrilled with this new toy he’s made a long list of other current and former intelligence types he wants to use it on. And that, in turn, has alarmed serious policy wonks who see the president’s rush to silence critics as another giant step toward authoritarianism.

That may well be, but it’s also, in the nauseating expression of his sycophants, “Trump being Trump”. The Donald has always had his own ridiculously simplified version of the Myers & Briggs personality assessment. People who praise him are “amazing”, “tremendous”, “terrific”, “incredible”, “tough” and “smart”. Those who criticize him are “weak,” “crooked”, “low energy”, “phony”, “pathetic” and “low IQ”. Or, as in the case of Rosie O’Donnell back in 1996, a “disgusting slob with a fat, ugly face”.

Donald Trump is the same vicious, emotionally crippled narcissist he always has been, wholly unable to situationally modify his behavior based on circumstances. The only thing that has changed is the amount of power he wields. And that’s what makes him so very dangerous.

A recent story line, one which Congressional Republicans are refusing to touch out of understandable disgust and embarrassment, is that Trump shows his blatant racism by calling his black critics unintelligent. He’s labeled Rep. Maxine Waters as “low IQ” seven times this year alone. He recently called LeBron James and CNN’s Don Lemon “dumb” or “stupid”. He used similar pejoratives on Omarosa, the only high-ranking African American on his staff prior to her discharge.

In a moment resembling a Saturday Night Live sketch, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended her boss against racism charges by noting that he has also called a number of white people stupid. To carry this absurdity even further, the Washington Post produced a graphic tracking Trump’s insults of stupidity by race. The upshot was that he used that label mostly for white Republicans during the primaries, then targeted white Democrats during the general election, but has mostly aimed his low-intelligence barbs at blacks since taking office. They never covered this metric of investigative reporting back when I went to journalism school.

There is but one constant when it comes to Trump’s word choices. It matters only whether he has been praised or criticized. For example, he once said of Germany’s Angela Merkel, shortly after she treated him nicely, that she is “a really great leader; I was always a Merkel person.” Then the chancellor took exception with something Trump said, drawing this response from him: “The German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman.”

He called foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos an “excellent guy”. That was before Papadopoulos reached a plea deal in the Mueller investigation and drew this Trump tweet: “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George who has already proven to be a liar.”

Before former Texas governor Rick Perry started complimenting Trump, the president had condemned him with tweets: “should be forced to take an IQ test”, “should be ashamed of himself”, “failed on the border”, and “doesn’t understand what the word demagoguery means”. Once Perry offered praise for Trump, he was given a cabinet position by the president who heaped several paragraphs of syrupy praise on him.

When Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents publicly supported the president on a couple of pieces of legislation, he was rewarded with these Trumpian words at a Florida rally: “I want to express our deep gratitude to a man who has really become a friend of mine. He is tough. Man, he is tough, and he is good, and he loves you”. That was quite a change from calling Rubio a “lightweight” in 21 tweets, in addition to those that said the senator was “dishonest”, “a joke”, a “phony”, “scamming Florida”, “bought and paid for by lobbyists”, has the “worst voting record in the U.S. Senate”, and “truly doesn’t have a clue”.

Words mean absolutely nothing to Donald Trump. They are mere pieces of a bizarre Rorschach test, measuring his friend-or-foe assessment of the moment. There is nothing remotely relational about them. It’s all transactional. He thinks Vladimir Putin once said he was “brilliant, a genius”. That was actually a mistranslation. Putin’s terminology was closer to “colorful”. But it was enough to shape Trump’s mind-boggling pro-Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin hardly needs blackmail to curry favor when sweet nothings work so well.

This would all be amusing if the fate of our country, perhaps the world, were not at stake. We don’t need Omarosa’s book or tapes to know that our president is unhinged. All we have to do is read his tweets and listen to his rants. And then pray that this out-of-control reality show is canceled before our democracy is totally destroyed.

CUEING THE Q: TRUMP’S WALK ON THE DARK SIDE

There they were at the Trump rally in their “Q” t-shirts and MAGA caps, their eyes fixed in an intense-but-vacant stare, looking like a large, stoned bowling team, perpetually waiting for a lane that would never open. Yes, this is what it means to live in this 19th month of Donald Trump’s America: crazy people getting secret messages from the president, White House reporters with bodyguards, and the tote board of false or misleading presidential statements clocking in at 4,229. Turns out that Make America Great Again is a really bad science fiction film, with no finale in sight.

Welcome to “QAnon,” a growing contingent of dark internet groups devoted to a bizarre bouillabaisse of conspiracy theories. Q refers to the supposedly high-level security clearance of the contingent’s anonymous founder. The basic gist is that all presidents before Trump conspired with evildoers, including pedophile rings, to create and maintain a “deep state” that runs the government. The military, according to this storyline, got Trump to run for president in order to take back the country from evil forces.

QAnon believes the deep state perpetrators will end up in prison after “the storm”. This refers to comments Trump made last year while posing for a picture with senior military officers: “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” These Trumpian foot soldiers insist that the Russia investigation is a mere decoy, and that the president and special counsel Robert Mueller are working together to imprison numerous left-leaning pedophiles, including, of course, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Until Trump’s rally in Tampa, the Q people confined themselves to a few obscure dark places on the Internet. Apparently, they decided to come out after receiving what they saw as coded encouragement from the Donald. In a recent speech, Trump talked about how he tried to avoid Washington, D.C. before he was elected. He said he had only been in Washington 17 times, a number he repeated frequently in that presentation. BINGO! Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and a delirious presidential seal of approval for the Q-nuts.

Not only that, on the morning after their Tampa coming-out, QAnon got another wink and a nod from the West Wing. After months of tweeting about “Mueller and his 13 Angry Democrats” the number suddenly changed. Now it was “17 Angry Democrats”. QAnon’s Mashable site went crazy.

Although Trump has never acknowledged his Q fans in a straightforward fashion, he has also refrained from disavowing them. That’s not surprising, given this guy’s obsession with being loved by his base. According to the New York Times, QAnon’s Facebook page has 40,000 followers. Its subreddit board has 49,000 participants. YouTube videos explaining QAnon have had millions of views. Earlier this year, an app called “QDrops” was among the top ten most downloaded in the Apple Store. That’s a lot of love for any narcissist to walk away from.

But here’s the problem: These people are every bit as whacked out of their minds as the guy who shot up a Virginia pizza place after reading on the Internet that Hilary Clinton was using it to run a pedophile ring. There have been at least two Q-nuts arrested this summer, both in Arizona. One armed man parked his self-made armored car on the bridge next to the Hoover Dam, blocking traffic while he waved Q signs. The other occupied a cement plant in Tucson because he thought it was part of a child sex trafficking operation. Meanwhile, our president continues to find clever ways to tweet the number 17 to gin up the most unhinged in his base (here, here and here).

Sadly, this sick behavior pattern has been firmly in place since January 20, 2017. This president thinks nothing of compromising the security of the American people if he thinks it will help ingratiate him with his fans. As of August 1, his daily average of lies, according to the Washington Post’s data base, was 7.6, totally nullifying truth as a commodity in this administration. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop Russia from sabotaging our elections because it might tarnish the shine of his 2016 election that he clings to like a security blanket. He tells us he has solved the North Korea problem and that we are completely safe, while that regime continues to produce nuclear weapons.

And now he has escalated his Machiavellian war on news reporters to the extent that media outlets are hiring bodyguards to protect the people who cover the president. Trump has moved from calling reporters the “enemy of the people,” to saying they are “very dangerous and sick” and cause wars. Of course, this helps reinforce the credibility of Trump’s lies since he is letting his base know that the truth-based media is the enemy. Never mind that NBC’s Katy Tur is getting messages warning of her being raped and killed, or that CNN’s Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, along with New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens were threatened with being shot. Trump’s diabolical and unprecedented attacks on reporters have drawn strong rebukes from the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agencies used to taking on these issues with dictatorships of authoritarian countries.

In many ways, this behavior – Trump’s total indifference to truth, decency and the sanctity of human life – is a far greater offense than any Russian collusion or obstruction of justice charges that might come out of the Mueller investigation. This man – the president of the United States – is so singularly consumed, in his every moment, with elevating his ego through perverse delusion that he doesn’t give one hoot that people might be maimed or killed by his self-serving recklessness. If that doesn’t constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then I don’t know what does.

A BOY ON AN INNER TUBE BEFORE “ZERO TOLERANCE”

If you want to beat the political ramifications of inflicting major trauma on young children, it’s better to have thousands of victims rather than just one. That’s the lesson we’ve learned from the Trump administration’s toxic “zero tolerance” campaign. This is the border war that left toddlers bruised, battered and neglected, and forced infants, torn from their parents’ arms, to represent themselves in front of immigration judges.

Six weeks ago, the nation was transfixed by images of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages. A recording of screaming babies and toddlers wailing for “Mami!” and “Papá!” went viral, leaving listeners in chills and tears.

Six weeks is an eternity in our current political environment. During that span of time, our attention has been diverted to a whole string of shiny objects, including Trump’s Helsinki love fest with Putin, the failure of his imaginary peace with North Korea, his threats against Iran, audio of his plans for a Playboy model payoff, and a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by his trade war, among far too many others. It’s hard to keep the focus on the thousands of children torn from their parents, and emotionally maimed for life by the country that once welcomed immigrants with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

Turn the clock back 19 years, to a simpler place and time, though it didn’t seem like it then. The nation was captivated by a similar story, except that this was a single 6-year-old migrant child, a Cuban separated from his parents while politicians fought bitterly over his fate. Elián González was found stranded on an inner tube near the Fort Lauderdale shoreline in 1999. Like the Central American parents caught up in Trump’s zero tolerance nightmare, Elián’s mother had been desperately searching for a better place to raise her son when they set sail on a rickety raft to escape deteriorating economic conditions. Sadly, she drowned en route. Elián was rescued by two fishermen and eventually taken in by extended family members in Miami – Elián’s great uncles – who had themselves fled Castro’s Cuba years earlier.

That might have been the end of the story if not for two salient subplots: Elián had entered the country illegally, and he had a father in Cuba who wanted him to come home. The battle lines were drawn. On one side was Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban community, fully backed by Republicans, insisting that poor, little Elián should be lovingly embraced by the welcoming America of his mother’s dreams. On the other side was the boy’s father, backed by the Castro government and Democrats on the basis that Elián was a Cuban citizen who, by rule of law in both countries, belonged with his father.

While the court battles raged on, Elián’s story evolved into a year-long media frenzy. By the end of 2000, the tale of this one child had been given the second largest volume of television coverage in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O.J. Simpson case. There were books, films, talk radio programs, songs, t-shirts, posters, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, even a South Park episode devoted to the fate of this one young child. Ultimately, the federal courts determined that the government has a duty to “(reunite) unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad. . .” To carry out that order, armed U.S. marshals stormed into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives, and removed the boy at gunpoint. He was ultimately reunited with his father in Cuba where he was treated like royalty by Fidel Castro. Elián is now an engineer and a frequent good will ambassador for the Cuban government.

What a difference two decades make. Donald Trump carried Florida in the 2016 election, in large part, with the backing of Miami’s Cuban-American immigrants who were still angry with the Clintons for supporting Elián’s return to Cuba. Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican attorney who unsuccessfully argued the case for keeping the boy in the U.S. so he could have a better life, is now the Supreme Court nominee of a president who ordered children snatched from their parents in order to keep “shithole” riffraff out of the country.

The biggest change, however, is in the numbers. Elián was a singular emblematic symbol who resonated with deep tones of empathy on both sides of the battle. His boyish face, his smiles, his tears were with us for 13 months, embedding themselves into the fabric of our lives, at a time of far fewer distractions.

We now have thousands of babies, toddlers, young children, separated from their parents and enduring forms of abuse that would trigger an immediate social service intervention in any jurisdiction. What we don’t have are their names or pictures. We don’t have anything resembling the Elián González story arc to keep this dystopian drama on the center stage of public life.

All we know is that 711 children remain in perpetual custody, with no end to their family separations in sight. One young toddler died of a respiratory illness after her release from a Texas detention center. A six-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in an Arizona lockup, and then forced to sign a form agreeing to keep her distance from her alleged assailant. Then she was molested again. A least 70 babies, all under a year old, have been hauled before immigration judges. They have no legal representation and are absurdly asked, by rules of the court, whether they understand the deportation proceedings against them.

Ivanka Trump this week called her father’s family separation plan the “low point” of his administration, as if this brutal, premeditated assault on humanity was a mere past tense blip. Hardly. The government, which was warned in advance of launching this draconian immigration offensive that separating children from their parents would cause “traumatic psychological injury”, says 460 parents of kids in federal custody have already been deported. Nobody knows what will become of their children, now languishing in unsafe and unregulated makeshift detention facilities.

Republicans once saw America as a welcoming beacon in the night to little Elián on his inner tube. No more. They are now enabling a broken and demented president, a man who, by his own admission, would rather look strong than show compassion for defenseless children. Somehow, some way, we must persevere through the daily din of Trumpian noise, and make sure that the electorate never forgets the lasting pain and trauma this man inflicted on all of those children who came looking for a better life and ended up in cages.