Category: Democracy

COVID’S LESSON IN UNCERTAINTY IS A HARBINGER FOR FUTURE PLANNING

This pandemic has not only taken close to two-thirds of a million American lives, it has also killed one of our most powerful life forces, the illusion of certainty.  Depending on how we play it, that latter loss could well offer a silver lining.

Think back to very early 2020.  The rhythms of our lives were as measured as the clicks of a metronome. Everyone was up at the sound of an alarm. Kids went to school; parents went to work.  Dinner was at a set time.  So was bedtime. So were the electronic payroll deposits, and the bill payments they covered. Sure, there were little surprises here and there, just to keep things interesting.  But, for the most part, there was a structured certainty to our lives.  Or so we thought. 

Then came COVID-19, updated a year later by the delta variant.  The metronome is silent now, while everyone – from essential workers to bank presidents, from middle schoolers to university professors, from bartenders to Fortune 500 CEOs – mourn the loss of what they believed was certainty. 

Quite clearly, COVID has two lines of attack. One comes through a deadly coronavirus that infects the body’s respiratory system. The other launches a brutal assault on the psyche. It infects the body’s equilibrium, diminishing or eliminating our senses of order, structure and certainty.  

Before you dismiss all that as so much overwritten hyperbole, take a look at a small sampling of news headlines from the past few weeks:

  • America’s Children Head Back to School Amid Growing Uncertainty. (U. S. News)
  • U.S. Mortgage Rates Fall Again as COVID-19 Delivers Yet More Uncertainty. (Yahoo Finance)
  • Uncertainty Is Back on Main Street as Delta Variant Rattles Reopening Plans. (CNBC)

On one end of the spectrum, is an unemployed single mother. She doesn’t know whether to take a new job, fearing that a sudden quarantine might close her 6-year-old daughter’s school without notice.  On the other end, is McKinsey & Company, the Cadillac of management consultants. From its recent client advisory:  “The COVID-19 crisis has undermined most of the assumptions of the traditional planning cycle. Meticulously prepared status reports are now outdated before they reach senior managers.”  

Everyone, it seems, is in their own individual hell of uncertainty.  And it’s about so much more than the efficacy of vaccines, masks, and social distancing.  Most of us thought we had a bead on the trajectory of our lives. It took a deadly pandemic to teach us what survivors of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires already knew: Life does not come with a warranty of certitude.   The axiom holds for people and countries.

In many ways, COVID has already shaken government and business organizations out of their cultural inertia and into meaningful change.  Before the pandemic, a $15-an-hour minimum wage was seen by the business community as a socialist plot. Many entry-level positions at restaurants and other establishments are now paying at least that much. Virtual “telehealth” visits between patients and medical providers exploded during the pandemic, and have become a significant component of our health care system.  There has also been a dramatic transformation of organizational structure built around the concept of remote work, all because COVID forced managers to discover that their employees could perform well from home. 

Comes now the potential silver lining, a long shot to be sure, but a very real opportunity to improve our lives. Ready?  We embrace uncertainty.  Once and for all, we rid ourselves of all spurious notions that it can’t happen here, that for all its foibles, the status quo is pretty darn good, so don’t mess with it. Put another way, we step out of our comfort zone, let go of our inertia, and build better a better life before a another crisis totally engulfs us. 

As the American Medical Association noted, our country was not prepared to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude.  Our illusion of certainty kept it off the priority list because nothing like it had happened in our lifetime, despite the warnings of experts.  

The same is true with climate change. A recent UN report called the devastating impacts of global warming unavoidable, with a small window to stop it from worsening. Scientists have been tracking this existential crisis for decades, with little to nothing in terms of policy changes.  The good news, says environmentalist Paul Gilding, is that things are so bad right now we will be forced to deal with the crisis. “We are slow, Gilding said, “not stupid.” The motto, sadly hopeful and optimistic, needs to be printed on our currency.

Then there is the matter of our democratic way of life. We were brought up to believe that our country was the envy of the world.  We wrote the book on democracy. We fought wars over democracy. It’s what American Exceptionalism was all about.  Yet, the majority of one of our major political parties still believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.  Some 147 Republican members of Congress voted against accepting the results of the Electoral College vote. Yes but, comes the certainty argument, Trump’s attempt to override election results was rejected by judges throughout the country.  Meanwhile, many state legislatures have passed, or are considering, bills, that would allow state officials to reverse election results on some of the same grounds those judges rejected last year. They would also make it more difficult for Black people to vote.  Alas, there is nothing certain about the perpetuity of American democracy. 

As a joke, I donned a MAGA hat back in 2015, saying to friends that I totally supported Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, simply because he could never be elected president.  Of that, I was certain. That’s why I am done with the mirage of certainty.  Horrible things we were certain could never happen can, indeed, happen. And have. To avoid, or mitigate against, future catastrophes, we need to be mindful, vigilant and intentional in our actions.  In a perfect world, we would have figured all this out earlier.  But it’s not too late.

After all, we are slow, but not stupid.

GOP QUEST: TO BELIEVE IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

Truth has long been an aspirational jewel in the crown of our democracy. 

Who would have ever thought it would lose its luster? Particularly now, deep into the Information Age. We have the technology to evaluate a gazillion datapoints in a nanosecond, but without fealty to truth those results have limited meaning.  This may be the saddest paradox of our times.

To be sure, truth is often illusive. It evolves with new discoveries and thoughts.  For example, caffeine’s impact on our cardiovascular system constantly vacillates between safe and dangerous, based on the most recent medical study (here and here). Many of us thought George W. Bush was an idiot until Trump came along and made him look like a Rhodes Scholar.  Yet, our one epistemological constant has been the value we attach to truth.  It’s what distinguishes justified belief from a convenient whim.

Unfortunately, we seem to be entering a totally different dimension, a bizarre post-factual space where truth is utterly without value.   

A few signs of life untethered to reality:

  • Rep. Liz Cheney was removed from her House Republican leadership position for saying there was no rampant voter fraud in last year’s election. The facts? At least 86 judges, along with Trump’s own Justice and Homeland Security Departments, completely rejected any notion of a rigged election.
  • Several House Republicans last week described the January 6 Capitol riot as an orderly affair. One said it was a “normal tourist visit.”  The facts?  More than 2,000 criminal charges filed against 411 suspects; some 140 police officers injured, many beaten with flagpoles and baseball bats; five people died.
  • Tucker Carlson told his Fox News audience that the “death toll” from COVID-19 vaccines is “disconcertingly high.” The facts: there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim.

Sure, politicians and political influencers have always lied.  Remember Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman. . .”?  Or Richard Nixon hiding the secret bombing of Cambodia?  Or Ronald Regan denying the Iran-Contra scandal?  The difference is that back then, once the truth was known, there was no sycophantic partisan chorus perpetrating the lie. Congressional Democrats in 1998 did not flood the Sunday morning shows with testimonials about Clinton’s deep and abiding commitment to marital fidelity.   

That’s when truth had value, and untruth was best mitigated by changing the subject and moving on, without relentlessly repeating the lie.  That is decidedly not the case today for many conservatives. This putrid pack of prevaricators seems to have traveled through Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass.  They, like Alice, were mentored by the White Queen on the art of believing “at least six impossible things before breakfast.”

It’s this obsessive drive to believe impossible things – more than the lies themselves – that is gnawing a hole in the fabric of our democracy. Congressional Republicans know full well that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but many of them cling to the public position of voter fraud to stay in Trump’s good graces, and help state legislatures to pass voter suppression laws. According to recent polling, however, a strong majority of Republican voters cling strongly to the belief that Trump actually won the election.  

Just a week ago, QAnon sweetheart and GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene began her speech to a packed Florida ballroom of the party faithful with this question: “Who is your president?”   

“Donald Trump,” they yelled in a thunderous roar, according to NPR. 

This malignant phenomena of believing impossible things has metastasized way beyond political rallies.  Take the pandemic, for example.  Trump knew in February of 2020 that COVID-19 was destined to become the most destructive virus to hit this country in more than 100 years.  But he lied, and said it was no big deal and would soon disappear. 

Months later, as the pandemic death toll climbed into the hundreds of thousands, acolytes of Trump and Fox News continued to view this coronavirus as a hoax.  They partied like it was 2019, disavowing any need for facemasks or social distancing.  Over the past year, news outlets reported countless cases of otherwise intelligent people insisting the virus wasn’t real, even as they or a family member took their final breath in a COVID critical care unit (here, here, here, here, and here ) .

Psychologists have long noted the tendency of some folks to deny the seriousness of a pending disaster as a mechanism for reducing anxiety.  Studies on the deadly 1918 flu, for example, cite instances of people referring to it as a hoax or treating it as no big deal.  However, the research shows far fewer instances of such denial, compared to our most recent experience.  

In 1918, of course, the country was deep into a world war. The only news organizations were newspapers, and they went along with the government’s request to play down the reporting on the virus in order to protect the country’s war efforts. John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the 1918 flu, The Great Influenza, noted in a recent interview with The New Republic that President Woodrow Wilson and other political figures remained virtually silent on the pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans.  

Now, take the prompt-free coping mechanism of denial, and mix in Trump’s goofy affirmations of the same. Then add a constant bombardment of hoax advocacy by Fox News and miscellaneous trolls. Stir well, and you have the official lethal stew of our current pandemic. 

This is what happens when millions of Americans insist on believing impossible things.  They snickered about the myth of COVID a year ago. Now, they heed the warnings of know-nothings like Tucker Carlson and popular podcaster Joe Rogan, and refuse to be vaccinated.  As a result, according to the New York Times, most infectious disease experts say we may never hit the level of herd immunity needed to eradicate the virus. 

Sadly, it will take substantially more than a shot in the arm to restore truth as the loadstar in our quest for knowledge. For that to happen, facts need to matter again. Fiction can be a wonderful escape while sitting on a couch on a rainy afternoon. 

As a governing principle, it’s a total disaster.

GOP TO BIDEN: UNITY MEANS GIVING US WHAT WE WANT

It came as no surprise that Joe Biden’s clarion call for unity quickly devolved into a definitional food fight.  Every time the new president dropped the u-word during his inaugural speech, you just knew that Mitch McConnell’s lower lip was quivering, even as rhetorical retorts danced in his head.

Alas, in this malignant moment of putrid politics, when it comes to the meaning of unity, there is no unity. Only an overabundance of sophistry. 

McConnell whined to Fox News the other day about how Biden “talks a lot about unity,” but continues to push the Democrats’ agenda. Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that the president’s call for unity was a “lie” because the person he chose to direct the administration’s Iran policy was not sufficiently hawkish.

Another Republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas, put out a tweet lambasting Biden for ignoring unity by overturning Trump’s ban on transgender troops serving in the military. Not to be outdone, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy told Politico that Biden turned his back on unity by offering a plan that would give undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. A large majority of Americans support the President’s position on both issues (here and here).

In each case, these Republicans defined unity as the process of giving them what they want. How utterly silly. Someone sticks a gun in your face and says, “Give me your money.” If you hand over your money, are you then in unity with your robber?  Of course not. Capitulation is not unity.  

The Cambridge Dictionary offers this simple definition of unity: “the state of being joined together.”  That nicely captures the heart of Biden’s inaugural peroration on the subject. Said the President: “My whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation, uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.” 

In other words, we can disagree with each other on everything from tax policy to environmental regulation, but we remain “joined together” as Americans. We can do passionate political battle over ideas and values, and still respect each other as members of the American family. This type of unity is more of an aspirational construct than a governance rulebook. That’s why Biden, in his inaugural address, called unity, “. . .that most elusive of things in a democracy.”  

Other dictionaries define unity as “agreement, accord, a condition of harmony.” This is the meaning many congressional Republicans are attaching to the word. However, they go much further and posit – self-servingly – that only by agreeing with them can there be unity. 

It’s important to remember the context for President Biden’s unity speech. He spoke those words only days after his predecessor sicced a violent mob on the Capitol in a last ditch effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.  It was the lowest point for American unity in our lifetimes.  No serious person could rationally conclude that the Joe Biden who left retirement in the twilight of his life to “restore America’s soul” would see unity as capitulating to the Republicans. 

Besides, even in better times, why would we want the type of unity that insists on an absence of disagreement? Vigorous debate over clashing viewpoints is the lifeblood of democracy. Voicing contrary opinions in places like Russia and North Korea will get you killed or sent to prison.  

Donald Trump was a master at creating that kind of forced unity, all based on people blindly following him.  He called folks who disagreed with him traitors or treasonous. He pushed Republicans to make the party’s platform whatever Trump wanted it to be.  Even after inciting a deadly insurrection, the vast majority of congressional Republicans stand united with him.  That’s the kind of unity to avoid at all cost.

And it certainly wasn’t the kind of unity President Biden summoned us to in his inaugural address. He didn’t equate unity with unanimity, nor did he call for the elimination of all opinions other than his own.   His plea to this very broken and angry country was simply to chill a bit, to take a collective deep breath, to turn down the vitriol a few notches, to remember that we are all Americans and that we are in this together.  

Early in my newspaper career, I covered the Minnesota Legislature. There was a phrase I heard often in those days, from lawmakers of both parties: “Let’s agree to disagree.”  I was young and cynical then, and always rolled my eyes when the line was spoken. It seemed trite and obvious. Looking back, however, I realized that those legislators – in a very different political climate – were doing what Biden called on us to do now. They dealt respectfully with each other, agreeing on some issues and agreeing to disagree on others, all without the need to call in the National Guard.  Agreeably disagreeing was unity.

We are lightyears away from that kind of environment right now. Members of Congress are wearing bulletproof vests and require police protection when traveling. The Washington Post just ran a story about the juxtaposition of a restaurant and a hospital in Michigan. The restaurant defied state laws on mask wearing and social distancing in order to cater to customers who believed the pandemic was a product of a left wing, socialist hoax.  Like minded folks drove miles out of their way in order to dine like it was 2019.  Down the road, the local hospital’s intensive care unit was filled to capacity with COVID-19 patients. 

Yet, there is every reason to believe that our long journey back to the civility of unity has begun. In the nearly three weeks our new president has been in office, we haven’t heard a single insult out of the White House.  Biden seems to have gone out of his way to avoid talking about Trump or his impeachment. On top of all that, he spent two hours last week hosting a meeting of Senate Republicans in the Oval Office.

Although it now appears that the president’s $1.9 billion stimulus bill will be passed with only Democratic votes, don’t believe the predictable punditry about Biden backtracking on unity. He can do two things at the same time: Seriously listen to and consider Republican arguments and suggestions for change, and get the best package possible for the Americans who desperately need it.  

That’s what agreeing to disagree is all about.

DEMOCRACY DESECRATED BY DONALD ALMIGHTY’S MOB

For his End of Days’ performance, Donald Trump should have just gone to the middle of New York’s 5th Avenue and shot someone. As he predicted in 2016, it probably wouldn’t have altered his standing. But no, he had to incite a riotous takeover of the Capitol that terrorized Congress, left five people dead and a nation sick to its stomach.

Many of us spent four years wondering if there is any dastardly move this guy could make that would penetrate his cloak of invincibility. At long last we have our answer, although it comes without an ounce of solace. Let the record show that Trump’s instigation of a violent attempted coup d’état was, in fact, the bridge too far that we thought would never come.

The 45th president has been excoriated by members of his own staff and Cabinet. Influential – and not exactly left leaning – groups as divergent as the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Union of Concerned Scientists have called for Trump to resign or be removed from office. The House of Representatives appears ready to impeach him for a second time. Even worse for him, he’s been kicked off of Twitter.

Yet, he persists.  Two days after the Trump-inspired assault on the Capitol, the Republican National Committee sang his praises and encouraged his continued leadership of the party. According to social media chatter reported by The Washington Post, the president’s hard core base is so pleased with last week’s riot that they are planning an encore for the inauguration of Joe Biden, the guy they believe stole their hero’s office.

How in the world did we get to this point?  In large part, through faith. It wasn’t just the Donald’s lie about a stolen election that triggered this war. It was his army’s unwavering faith in the sanctity of Donald John Trump.  After stirring up his troops last Wednesday, this false prophet sent them off to invade the Capitol with these words of inspiration: “You will never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” 

To be sure, many in that invading mob were veteran white supremacist agitators who were symbiotically using Trump as much as he was using them.  But others were clearly on a mission of faith. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported that a portion of the pre-riot rally consisted of prayers conflating Jesus and The Donald. Goldberg wrote that one large group formed a circle and cheered when their leader said, “Give it up if you believe in Jesus,” but were even louder in their response to, “Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump.”   

This is not, in any way, a knock on religion. Abiding faith in a power greater than ourselves, or in principles and values that guide our lives, is as essential to our existence as the air we breathe and the food we eat. Yet, the slope between a faith that nourishes and enhances, and one that diminishes and endangers, is extremely slippery.  

Most organized religions – including Christianity, Judaism and Islam – recognize this conundrum through strict prohibitions against idolatry, the worshipping of other gods.  Think of it as an exclusive jurisdiction clause: Embrace only the one true God and the religion’s articles of faith with unquestioning acceptance, but don’t do that for anyone else.

Unfortunately, many in Trump’s base never got the false prophet  memo.  More than any other political figure in our lifetime, he has been worshiped by supporters who follow him on total faith, without doubt or question. His former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was called by God. Conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root called him the “second coming of God,” and the “King of Israel.” Evangelical leaders Paula White, Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham have repeatedly asserted that Trump’s presidency is divinely inspired and mandated.

Then there is the QAnon phenomenon. This growing contingent of hard core Trumpians believe the president has been divinely anointed to defend the world against a massive network of Satanic pedophiles in the Democratic party and the deep state. Many of the Capitol rioters were QAnon followers, including a woman who was killed in the melee.  

In his book, The Cult of Trump, cult expert Steven Hassan says Trump checks every box on the list of what it takes to have an effective cult.  “It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality,” he said in an interview with Vox. “And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the leader.” One of the chapters in Hassan’s book is on malignant narcissism as a characteristic of destructive cult leaders.

To have faith is to accept without doubt, without question. In a religious context, faith has brought peace and comfort to millions of believers. It removes the angst of uncertainty over deeply profound questions about existence, including the ultimate: What happens when we die?”  

In the political context, however, doubt is an essential intellectual tool for drafting, synthesizing and reviewing ideas, policies, legislation and candidates. Truth and knowledge come from exploring doubts. Doubt begs the question, “Are you sure?” Doubt seeks more data, more opinions, more input. Used in moderation, it is also a healthy introspective tool. Who, besides our 45th president, has not indulged in self-doubt to become a better person?  

These past four years have taught us that the deity delusion is the of bane of democracy. Donald (“I alone can fix it”) Trump worships himself and believes in nothing outside of his own infallibility. Worse than that, he has an enormous contingent of venerating followers who accept his every word as gospel, and are willing to desecrate and destroy the citadel of our government along with the democracy that drives it.

As we evaluate the damage and devastation inflicted by the outgoing administration, as we make our list of needed repairs, let’s put this one at or near the top: Truth matters. 

And the road to truth is paved with doubt. 

AMERICA’S BROKEBACK CRY TO TRUMP: HOW DO WE QUIT YOU?

As Donald Trump’s four-year spree of crimes against democracy comes to a close, thought leaders in Democratic and legal circles are trying to figure out what to do with their nemesis. The options run the gamut, from ghosting him into existential oblivion, to a massive judicial inquiry approaching the breadth and depth of the Nuremberg trials. 

Clearly, the ghosting route has immense psychic appeal. As in any bad breakup, vaporizing the object of your disaffection into pure mental nothingness cleanses the mind and soul in preparation for new, and hopefully better, experiences. Alas, the stunt is hard to pull off with a mere mortal, let alone with the Svengali of Narcissus, and the 88 million Twitter followers at his fingertips. 

That narrows the choice to an assortment of investigatory and prosecutorial approaches.  Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell of California proposed a “Presidential Crimes Commission,” a panel of independent prosecutors empowered to investigate any and all of Trump’s legally dubious actions during his presidency.  

Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and George Washington University lecturer, suggested an even broader study by a bipartisan “Trump Crimes Commission” with congressionally selected members and staff from all three branches of government. That body, Kirschner explained in one news account, would investigate everything Trump did to thwart democracy, obstruct justice, and abuse power. He called it a “uniquely American response to our uniquely American atrocity.”

There has been strong support for this type of all-encompassing, spare-no-effort approach to dissecting the misdeeds, missteps and criminal activity of the Trump years.  The rationale was captured quite succinctly in a Financial Times’s interview of former Obama White House lawyer Ian Bassin. “By not confronting wrongdoing, we deprive Americans of an accurate, shared understanding of what happened,” Bassin told the newspaper. 

From a factual standpoint, it’s hard to argue with any of this.  Like a mad bull in a china shop, Donald Trump ran roughshod over every fiber of our democracy. There wasn’t a law, rule, norm, or principle that he didn’t trash if it stood in the way of his self-interest. 

Yet, the last thing this country needs right now is another four-year spotlight on Trump and the nefarious machinations of his presidency.  This is a guy who craves attention like a vampire covets blood. He just held up a COVID relief bill his own administration helped negotiate, and drew substantial bipartisan rancor, all because it gave him a few days of attention.  

Protracted investigations of every nuanced twist and turn, from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the impeachment trial, would give Trump a daily platform from which to rant and rave about the “witch hunts of the radical left Democrats who stole the election.”  

Yes, the president tried but failed to have Mueller fired. Yes, he tweeted disparaging comments about an impeachment witness during her testimony. It’s hard to see how trying to squeeze felony indictments out of such inane and moronic behavior advances the cause of American democracy. 

No U.S. president has ever been convicted of a crime for actions taken in office. That’s a precedent that can and should be broken for good cause, but a defamatory tweet or the ordered discharge that never happened hardly rise to that level. Sadly, criminal trials for obstruction of justice and witness tampering will bring us no closer to a consensus on what our democracy should look like. 

Unfortunately, our current political environment is not one where it is remotely possible to assemble what Ian Bassin, the former White House lawyer, calls a “shared understanding” of Trump’s wrongdoing.  We can’t even reach a “shared understanding” of who won the election.  More than 70 million people voted for Trump, and two-thirds of them believe their guy when he says he won in a landslide, an evidence-free belief constructed out of pure whim and fancy.

There are far more important issues than Donald Trump facing this country.  The pandemic continues to rage. As it does, the poor and much of the middle class face economic devastation. There is a growing crisis of racial injustice. We are fast approaching the point of no return on climate change. Nearly 29 million people are without health insurance. With narrow partisan divides in the House and Senate, President-elect Joe Biden faces enormous challenges on those and other issues.  Add a prolonged high-profile Trump investigation to that mix, and odds of success dramatically diminish on everything else.

On a deeply visceral level, the image of Trump, clad in an orange jumpsuit, looking frightened and forlorn in his prison cell, is therapeutic enchantment for roughly half the country. If he lands there as a result of relitigating the Russian investigation or the impeachment inquiry, the other half of the country (or at least his base) will see him as a martyred political prisoner.

This is not to say that we should simply ignore the 45th president and the damage he did to our democracy. There is a lot of repair and reparation work to be done, but we don’t need a grand inquisition to do it. If new information related to criminal acts by Trump or his allies surfaces, it should be processed through normal channels in the Justice Department, thoroughly investigated and indictments sought if appropriate.

Trump himself has given us a detailed list of what needs to be fixed. When it comes to blowing up democratic norms, he was an open book. He hid his tax returns. He personally profited from official government business directed to his hotels. He ignored congressional subpoenas. He protected his interests by firing employees who got in his way. He used pardons to protect campaign allies convicted of crimes. The list goes on and on. House Democrats have already started drafting legislation that would close many of the loopholes Trump was able to crawl through.

Finally, the smoothest and most pragmatic route to fulfilling the lock-him-up fantasy, is through the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. His ongoing investigation involves Trump’s business and financial interests and could well result in indictments on multiple charges.  Such crimes are not only pardon-proof, they avoid the optics of political retribution.  Tax evaders and financial cheats don’t garner much sympathy.

Any way you cut it, Donald Trump will remain in our heads and in our news feeds for some time.  Still, the goal should be to diminish the focus on him so we can, at long last, deal with the momentous problems facing our country.

INSTEAD OF MAKING AMERICA GREAT, TRUMP DAMN NEAR BLEW IT UP

The Grand Trump Finale is playing out like the massive close of a fireworks display, an insipid amalgam of his greatest hits, along with new explosions guaranteed to shake the rafters of our democracy.  As if he had to prove himself, The Donald’s pyrotechnic departure show reinforces the incontrovertible: When it comes to blowing stuff up, nobody does it better than 45.

Joe Biden delivered on his signature campaign promise, to “beat Trump like a drum.” He won a higher percentage of the popular vote than any challenger to a sitting president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. His electoral college margin was the same as Trump’s in 2016, a victory Trump characterized as a “landslide.” 

But, but, but, says the lame duck president, insisting with a straight face that he actually won this election by a huge margin.  The magnitude of his overwhelming victory will be seen, he promises, once all those Biden votes from Black people in places like Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta are thrown out. Those ballots, Team Trump argues, were fraudulently cast through a system designed by living and dead leftist dictators in Venezuela and Cuba.

As much as this sounds like a farfetched, over-the-top Saturday Night Live sketch, it’s not. Instead, Trump’s latest (un)reality show poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. His brazen attempt to strong arm himself into four more years of chaotic autocracy by subverting the will of the voters appears almost certain to fail.  Yet, by so openly smashing the norms and values of our voting traditions, and by stomping on the weary fault lines of this 244-year-old democracy, Trump has left a blueprint for a less clumsy autocrat to skillfully execute in the years to come.

As every reputable news organization reports numerous times a day, there is simply no evidence of rampant voter fraud (here, here and here).  Consistent with what we have come to know as Trumpian Theater, the moving force is noise, not facts.  The noise in this case – the president’s constant talk about Democrats stealing the election – was designed as a predicate for Trump to actually steal the election.  He came frighteningly close to pulling it off.

Americans have long viewed the ballot box as the fulcrum of our democracy, an almost sacred form of governance personified by the motto, “Let The People Decide.”  Unfortunately, that sentiment was not shared by our founders.  They were, in fact, adamantly opposed to having the president elected by a direct vote of the citizenry.  Lacking cable news, social media and Nate Silver in the 18th century, their concern was that “the people” wouldn’t know enough to decide. 

As a result, we have a constitution that is not only silent on the popular vote, but actually sets up a system in which state legislatures determine the method of selecting electors, who in turn elect the president.  That means the only votes that count under the Constitution are those cast by 538 electors.  As the country evolved – in size and democratic values – the concept of involving the people in this process took off in a big way.  Presidential campaigns now run close to two years, all in search of the peoples’ votes. 

The Constitution, however, remains unchanged. The president is chosen by the electors designated in each state.  The fix, over time, was for states to pass legislation requiring its electors to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in their state. For the most part, this has worked, although not without hiccups.  On five occasions, most recently in 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won the popular vote lost the election based on the electoral college count.

As undemocratic as those results were, Donald Trump’s post-election machinations took things to a whole different level.  He and his deleterious legal team hatched a plot in a handful of swing states to override Biden’s popular vote victory there by trying to get Republican legislatures to send Trump-friendly electors off to the electoral college. This election nullification would ultimately need a handful of state legislatures to rescind their laws requiring electors to vote for the state’s popular vote winner. 

The false “massive election fraud” narrative that Trump introduced months before the polls opened was never going to work, in and of itself.  There were zero facts to back it up. Trump’s hope was that his fog of falsehoods would be widely accepted, providing cover for Republican leaders in states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania to, in effect, demolish Biden’s victory and instruct electors to vote for Trump. Fortunately, Republican leaders in those states did not have the appetite for such skullduggery. If they had, Trump’s electoral vote count would have gone from 232 to 284, and Biden’s would have dropped from 306 to 254.  

Sure, the whole con job would have ended up before the Supreme Court. Given the majority’s rapture with originalism – the notion that language should be interpreted in the context of its original intent – it is hardly farfetched to suggest that Trump would have prevailed, despite his 7 million vote deficit. After all, the founders had zero interest in a popular vote and gave the states the power to pick a president with electors of their choosing.  To originalist justices, the matter would have boiled down to this simple question: Were the electors selecting the president duly chosen by the state legislatures?  It wouldn’t matter that Trump lied about election fraud and pressured state lawmakers to pack the electoral college with his supporters.  

Although it appears that this second term heist has failed, our democracy will not be easily healed. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election.  A number of GOP congressional candidates who lost their races by overwhelming margins are following their leader by claiming fraud and refusing to concede. What happens next time when a more skillful Trumpian candidate loses the election by a thin margin, and needs only one state legislature to hand him an electoral college victory by rescinding the popular vote mandate?

Until now, no one in either party ever attempted to subvert the will of the voters through this kind of electoral college jujitsu.  Although Donald Trump didn’t succeed in blowing our democracy up, he caused it to take a great fall. 

 May our recovery and healing begin, so that our better angels can eventually put America back together again.

HOW DONALD TRUMP SOLD ME ON PATRIOTISM

Here’s a sentence you may never have expected to see in this space: Donald Trump has done more than any other president to instill a visceral sense of patriotism in me.

It’s taken me a while to figure this out, so let me explain.

A week ago, I sat in front of a blank computer screen, fully intending to compose a pre-election piece.  Bits and pieces of the past four years came back to me: the lies, the hate, the overt racism, the gratuitous cruelty, the abject meanness of this president. Some of it seemed unreal. Did he really put children in cages? Did he really coddle white supremacists? Did he really call the news media the “enemy of the people?” Of course he did. And so much more. 

I wanted to write about what a second Trump term might look like, should the pollsters and prognosticators blow it again.  An hour later, my screen was still blank, my brain a jumble of horrifying thoughts.

 I was, in the words of the late military strategist Herman Kahn, “thinking about the unthinkable.” As Kahn applied that phrase to nuclear war, he defined “unthinkable” as a mind-numbing sense of raw fear and terror that transcends language.  That’s what I felt, there at my desk, days before the election.  I couldn’t formulate a single sentence. Not only did I turn the computer off, I went cold turkey on what had become a steady diet of political podcasts, news and polling sites.

Anxiety does not come naturally to me, and the last place I expected to encounter it was in the political arena. In another lifetime, I was a newspaper reporter. I covered elections. Somebody won, somebody lost; I’d write the story and life went on.  Then I became an advocate, but even with a horse in the race – one that lost more times than I can count – I  never missed a minute of sleep.  Life still went on.  And so did the country.

This time was different.  You know that feeling you get when your kids, or another loved one, are MIA way after they said they would be home?  And you can’t reach them by phone?  You begin to imagine the worst, and then try to push those thoughts away because  . . . well, because they are just too terrifying – too unthinkable – to contemplate.  That’s what I, and I suspect many of us – were feeling during the days leading to this election.  This vote went way beyond the political. It was deeply personal.

Now trace those feelings to their roots. That’s where you will find patriotism.  Sitting before that blank screen and thinking the unthinkable was my aha moment. I learned how much I love this country only by arriving at the precipice of losing it.     

I came of age during the Vietnam War. I wrote obituaries for my hometown newspaper of boys I sat next to in high school, kids who, like me, had never heard of Vietnam and didn’t have the slightest idea what it was all about.  Patriotism in those tumultuous times was expressed in a  bumper sticker that read, “America: Love it or Leave it.”  It was a simple, jingoistic false dichotomy that deliberately omitted the third-party candidacy of “Change it.” 

Needless to say, those experiences did not turn me into a flag-waving, America-right-or-wrong kind of guy. There are many aspects of this country to greatly admire:  our exuberance for democracy, our international leadership in human rights, the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press.  There are also a host of deep impediments blocking the pursuit of happiness for far too many Americans: people of color, those living in poverty, women, LGBTQ folks.  

Yet, the bottom line has always been that the institutions of our democracy – the  very architecture of our government – are equipped to solve those problems. The political cliché, “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” contains more than just a kernel of truth. 

At least it used to.  The revelation that hit me, as I sat staring at the blank screen, was that I had been taking “all that is right with America” for granted.  Many previous presidents made policy decisions I vehemently disagreed with.  But they all, with the notable Nixon/Watergate exception, respected and upheld the norms, rules, laws and institutions that provide our very structure of governance. 

During these past four years, however, we’ve had a president who was guided by none of the above, a deeply troubled man whose only operating principle was to feed his voracious appetite of self-interest, regardless of the consequences.  The further he got into his term, the more brazen and reckless he became.  Weeks before the election, Trump was insisting that the Justice Department indict Barack Obama and Joe Biden on some phony, unspecified charge.  On election night, with tens of millions of ballots still to be tabulated, the president of the United States declared a totally fictitious victory and demanded that the counting cease. 

Just thinking about the extrapolation of this behavior over an additional four years, was enough to jar me out of my complacency. Although far from fragile, our democracy is by no means bullet proof.  With a second Trump term, it could well have been unrecognizable by 2024. Thankfully, in this year of cascading calamities, we finally caught a break: the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The Trump presidency changed me.  It forced me to see America in a new light.  Our democratic way of life should never be taken for granted. One man came perilously close to replacing it with his own brand of authoritarian selfishness.  The contemplation of that loss connected deeply with a love for this country that I never knew I had. 

My new bumper sticker?  AMERICA: LOVE IT SO YOU DON’T LOSE IT!

TRUMP & COVID ARE THE KILLERS OF NORMALCY

Riddle me this: What’s the difference between Donald Trump and the novel coronavirus? Other than the fact that the virus doesn’t lie, discriminate or emit offensive tweets, not much. 

If you were expecting a pithy one-liner, my sincere apologies. Alas, there is nothing funny about the destructive duality of Trump and this pandemic.  Together, they are responsible for the most powerful and tenacious one-two punch ever leveled against our norms, values and way of life. 

Not that long ago, most of us were living relatively stable lives. Sure, we had our problems: racism, misogyny, income inequality, climate change, among many others. We dealt with those matters mostly through elections, by voting for folks who share our values.  Meanwhile, kids went to school and parents went to work. Weekends were for shopping, barbecuing and a movie. Summers were for vacation trips, crowded beaches, fairs and festivals.  Despite our periodic frustrations with the government, we believed that our founders endowed us with a democracy inherently respectful of our rights, liberty and humanity.

Then along came Trump and the killer virus he tried to cover up.  Suddenly, our relatively ordered lives, along with the norms and traditions that held us together, are nowhere to be found.  Instead, we are on edge and out of sorts.  Life seems upside down and inside out. Stuff we used to count on and take for granted has vanished.  It feels like we are bobbing in a psychic sea of anomie and entropy, struggling to keep our heads above water. 

Sociologists tell us that norms are essential to maintaining social order (here, here and here). They take the randomness out of everyday life by instilling in us a sense of predictability. Norms mean we don’t grab an item out of another customer’s grocery cart; we knock or ring a doorbell before entering someone’s  house; and although we may not agree with our president’s politics, we assume he (and eventually “she”?) will protect us and our country from harm.

To be sure, norms change periodically as they adapt to evolving culture and technology. Think gay marriage, #metoo, not buying Twitter followers. For the most part, norm modifications gradually grow into acceptance. The problem comes when huge chunks of our normative lives are suddenly upended, leaving us without a trace of social equilibrium. 

This is happening to us on two fronts. First, our president is obliterating every norm and symbol of our democracy, turning America from a beacon of hope into an unrecognizable cauldron of chaos and despair.  Secondly, our own lives have been diminished and fractured by the contents of that very cauldron.

The crisis has been building for years.  We probably should have seen it coming when we elected a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women, and labeled Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. Although we missed those signals, Trump handed us a gem of a clue when he had babies snatched from their mothers’ arms and put into cages on our southern border.  Even then, as abhorrent as that behavior was, it was hard to imagine the normative evisceration that lay ahead.

Yet, day in and day out, this 45th president shreds one touchstone of decency after another. He traffics in racist putdowns. He affirms white supremacists. He threatens to jail political opponents. He lies constantly. He solicits foreign leaders to tamper with our elections. He hurls words like “dumb, stupid, terrible and dishonest” at those who disagree with him. The list is endless.  Donald Trump has managed to discard every standard of presidential behavior that our country holds dear.

Like an addict falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of the bizarre and aberrant, this president’s decline is rapidly accelerating.  More norms fall every day.  We just learned from The Atlantic that the commander in chief refers to dead and wounded soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”  Thanks to journalist Bob Woodward, we now know that Trump deliberately lied to the American people when he said the novel coronavirus was nothing to worry about. He knew its lethality and did nothing to stop it.

There is so much more. He is:

  • Supporting white supremacist and conspiracy theory groups.
  • Encouraging armed right wing militias to take on Black Lives Matter protests. 
  • Using the Justice Department to defend him in a rape suit.
  • Pressuring security analysts to doctor their reports to protect his political position.

The cumulative weight of all this norm-busting behavior not only adds to the anxiety of most Americans, it leaves us with the inescapable apprehension that our president will stop at nothing in serving his interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on the rest of us.

More directly, we feel the angst and pain from the normative destruction in our own lives.  The pandemic, of course, would have torpedoed many of our daily norms, even under the best of leadership.  But we had the worst.  As a result, we’ve spent the past six months fighting over masks, social distancing, covid testing, school closings and Clorox injections. Our ultimate escape – a vaccine – is now in peril because of the fear that our president will push through a snake oil remedy just in time for the election.

As the number of cases and deaths continue to mount, much of our lives remain on hold. The rituals that connected us and filled life with meaning and richness now live only in our memories. We avoid family gatherings. We don’t hug anymore. We wait to bury the dead, and then limit the number who can attend a funeral. We avoid stores, and burden minimum wage workers to get us our supplies. We don’t look forward to a lot because we have no idea when this nightmare will end.  

Although this dystopian saga has depleted our supply of norms, it has been rich in the production of ironies, the biggest of which is this:  Donald J. Trump entered our lives by promising to Make America Great Again. He damn near destroyed it. 

Now comes Joe Biden, our only shot at – in the words of Langston Hughes – “Making America, America again.”

TRUMP’S ALTERNATE REALITY IGNORES LAW, TRUTH AND DECENCY

Amazingly, Donald Trump has a cohesive foreign policy after all.  By off-shoring his reelection campaign’s opposition research function, he has brought countries as disparate as Ukraine, Russia, China and Australia together for the common goal of digging up dirt on his political opponents. 

Remember “America First”? That was so 2016. We’re now into the Donald First school of international relations.  No nation is too small or too corrupt to join the foreign legion of Trump campaign operatives.  All you need to secure favorable treatment by the United States government are sordid details and conspiracy theories involving the president’s political opponents. Truth is not required.  

In describing what we are going through right now, historians will eventually note that we lived in singularly unique times.  Their reports, however, will not begin to capture the angst, agita and anxiety of watching a bizarre dream-like sequence in which our president floats about in an alternate reality, auctioning off our democracy, piece by piece. 

I suppose we should be used to it by now, but it’s still painful to watch the purported leader of the free world babble his way through a constant state of disassembling. First, he calls the whistleblower’s report a “partisan hoax”, and then releases a modified transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president that substantiates the accusation.  

Next, he insists he withheld Ukraine’s funding, not as a quid-pro-quo for getting dirt on Joe Bidden, but because he was concerned about wide spread Ukrainian corruption.  Hours later, he switches excuses, saying he held up the money because he wanted European countries to also pony up aid for Ukraine.  Only in Trump World would it make sense to encourage other countries to send money to a corrupt regime.  

Our president is clearly outdoing Lewis Carroll’s Queen from Alice in Wonderland, who boasted that she “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. The most impossible thing to come out of Trump’s mouth last week was that he absolutely did not pressure the Ukrainian president to help his reelection campaign by investigating Bidden.  “No pressure,” he insisted with a straight face, “no quid pro quo.”   

Never mind that the president’s own record of the Ukrainian call, together with extensive text messages among top diplomats, establish both a pressure campaign and an iron clad quid-pro-quo.  The very essence of Donald Trump’s negotiating style is the tit-for-tat MO of holding out a carrot or a stick (usually a stick) to get what he wants. Asked by a reporter in August why he keeps threatening China with more tariffs, the president replied, “Sorry, it’s the way I negotiate. It has done very well for me over the years. It’s doing even better for the country.”

Trump is a one-trick, transactional pony. His every ask is tied to a quid-pro-quo. He threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea in order to get a better trade deal with Seoul. He talked of imposing tariffs on European car imports if he couldn’t get the trade agreement he wanted with the European Union.  He threatened to use the government’s power to license television airways to punish NBC’s news coverage of his administration.  When the Palestinian Authority president declined to meet with Vice President Mike Pence, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Palestine. He told the NFL he would eliminate the league’s tax breaks if it couldn’t get players to stop kneeling during the national anthem. He said he would force all American businesses to leave China if that country wouldn’t accept Trump’s trade proposals.  He allegedly got Stormy Daniels into his bed by promising her a guest shot on the Apprentice. The list is endless. 

The contention that Donald Trump went after Ukraine for campaign assistance without pressure or a quid-pro-quo is every bit as impossible to believe as his assertion that all 24 women accusing him of sexual misconduct are lying. Yet, when it comes to this wretchedly amoral, unhinged and incompetent president, vast segments of our society – Fox News, congressional Republicans and true believers in red hats – have joined the Queen in believing impossible things.

And therein lies the source of our disquietude.  Prior to the arrival of our 45thpresident, most of us enjoyed a shared reality based upon a belief in possible things.  Republicans, Democrats and Independents cried and grieved together when the planes struck the towers on September 11 of 2001.  We repeated that mourning over and over again as school children were gunned down in their classrooms in places like Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland. 

Based on our politics, we had different and conflicting responses to those tragedies, but there was a shared sense of their factual underpinnings.  Sure, there were some off-the-wall, crazy conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attack being an inside job and the school shootings nothing more than staged events with actors.   Outside of those small, dark pockets of derangement, facts mattered and mainstream America apprehended a shared sense of truth.

That has all changed now. Our president came to the White House from one of those dark pockets, one where truth has no value. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Trump told a cheering crowd of his followers.  The man who doctors weather maps, invents “invasions” at our southern border, talks of “riots” that never happened and pulls figures out of thin air, holds the highest office in the free world. As a result, his followers shower him with hosannas by screaming “fake news” at what the rest of us see as facts.

So, we emit deep sighs, our eyes briefly closed, wondering when it will all end, wondering when we will return to a world with shared meaning, a world where truth is valued. How many more lies, how many more atrocities, how many more wounds to our democracy, will it take for the Trumpian crowd to see that this is no longer about politics? This is about saving a country we all love from the ravages of a deeply disturbed man who will stop at nothing when it comes to feeding his ravenous and demented ego needs. 

It is impossible to know when this terror will end.  Yet, I cling to all the optimism I can muster in order to believe that the end will, indeed, come, and that we will somehow be able to rebuild our shaken democracy. With all due respect to the Queen, I pray that I am not believing in an impossible thing. 

AS THE WHISTLE BLOWS, DEMOCRACY FADES

The ultimate outcome of the Ukraine/whistleblower ordeal is less important than the broader message it portends. In other words, welcome to the tipping point in the unraveling of our democracy.   This is no longer about an unhinged president doctoring a weather map with his Sharpie.  This is about a concerted and rapidly escalating assault on the very democratic values that made America great.

In many ways, Trump’s flagrant flaunting of a whistle-blower statute to keep a report documenting his alleged misdeeds from a congressional committee is neither new nor surprising behavior. This is a guy who has never shown the slightest inclination to let a law, covenant or moral code interfere with his singular motivational force of self-interest.  

Yet, this aberrant behavior pattern is rapidly escalating, from the amusing to the abhorrent.  Back during the 2016 campaign, reporters profiling this unlikely candidate almost uniformly described him as someone who “defied conventions” (here, here and here).  How benign and understated that seems now. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer’s epicurean tastes as defying convention.

As diabolical as Trump has been, there was once room for reasoned optimism regarding the long-term impact of his malignancy on the future of American governance.  After all, our democracy has survived brutal assaults over the past 200+ years.  Surely our system of checks and balances, along with the commitment and integrity of dedicated public servants, would help mitigate against serious damage inflicted by the Donald’s defying of conventions.  Well, that worked for a while. But most of the White House folks with even a modicum of integrity have been fired or quit.  And the checks and balances we learned about in grade school grind at a snail’s pace.

For all practical purposes, our democracy has ceased to function.  This isn’t just Trump’s fault, although he is clearly the triggerman, the guy who took a dysfunctional system and reduced it to the kind of shambles that would warm the heart of a narcissistic authoritarian.  The problem began more than a decade ago when politics became so divisive and polarized that Republican congressional leaders would rather pass no legislation than work with a black Democratic president.  That’s why the biggest problems facing the country – immigration, gun control, health care, climate change – have seen insufficient or no action in the past 20 years.

That opened the door for Donald J. Trump to get elected on the solemn assertion that “I alone” can fix America.  And it’s been downhill ever since.

Remember all that stuff about three “co-equal” branches of government serving as the cauldron of our democracy?  Well, what many of us didn’t learn back in those civics classes was that the system was predicated on at least a modicum of good faith.  It’s common for Congress and a president to be on different pages. What the founders didn’t contemplate was a Trumpian presidency insisting that, it alone, controls the entire book.

So now we have, yet again, an impasse crisis between the president and Congress.  The Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community reviewed a whistleblower complaint supposedly involving, among other matters, a phone conversation Trump had with the new president of Ukraine. The IG found it to be credible and of “urgent concern,” terms of art in the law that requires such matters to be referred to the Intelligence committees of the House and Senate.  The Trump administration is refusing to comply with the statute.  

At the same time, the Donald, out of a mixture of arrogance and invincibility, has been somewhat transparent when it comes to corruption.  That leaves us with the ironic duality of a president openly defying the whistleblower law while tweeting out much of the content likely involved in the matter.  Trump has acknowledged asking the Ukrainian president to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son, and has also admitted sending his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to push Ukraine officials to dig up dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 presidential election.  

Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to spar with each other over potential moves on the impeachment chess board, largely over Trump’s obstruction of justice during the investigation into Russia’s interference in 2016 election.  Their opponent, however, has moved on to get another country to interfere in the upcoming election.  None of those chess pieces are moving right now because Donald Trump has pulled the rug out on the very democratic processes they rely upon.

Despite the constitutional impeachment and oversight responsibilities assigned to Congress, Trump has thumbed his nose at every turn, denying information and testimony that the House and Senate are clearly entitled to.  From the president’s tax returns to Don McGahn’s testimony, to information about immigration policy, bank loans and scores of other subjects, the White House has refused to produce any of it.  The intransigence is totally without precedent.  The result has been litigation and appeals, that may well continue beyond the 2020 election.

But Trump’s ruination of democracy goes much further.  With help from the Supreme Court, he has taken money Congress appropriated for various military projects and deferred it to building part of his wall at the Mexican border, a project specifically rejected by Congress.  The Pentagon now wants more money appropriated to replace the funds diverted to the wall.  According to reporting by the New York Times, White House sources say the president has his eye on diverting any such new appropriation toward additional sections of his wall.  

Freedom House is an independent agency that, for the past 50 years, has ranked countries around the world on how democratic their governments are.  The United States had always been near the top of the chart. Since 2017, however, our ranking has steadily deteriorated due to Trump’s frequent attacks on norms and institutions and the wearing down of democratic checks and balances.  Freedom House now places the U.S. well below other large and long-standing democracies such as France, Germany and Brittan.

Standing alone, the Ukraine/whistleblower episode would be tragic enough.  But on the heels of effectively usurping Congress’s oversight and funding responsibilities, this emboldened, in-broad-daylight rush to get yet another country to interfere in our elections moves this crisis into a whole different realm. Donald Trump is not just a terrible president.  He is not just a threat to our democratic way of life.  He has already dismantled huge parts of our democracy.  With a second term, it is hard to see how we would ever get it back.