Category: Elections

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.

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’S NEW ELECTION PLAN: “GET RID OF THE BALLOTS”

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, comes now another reason to forgo a good night’s sleep: What happens if Donald Trump loses the election but refuses to leave the White House?

The punditry class has been quaking over this diabolical conundrum for weeks, largely out of boredom. After all, stories about Trump ignoring a deadly virus, encouraging racial unrest, destroying environmental protections and sexually assaulting women have gotten quite stale. So let’s entertain a new disaster, like whether The Donald can force himself on us for four more years. 

The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman filled the current issue’s cover story, “The Election That Could Break America,” with a frighteningly persuasive argument that, in the author’s words: “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result.”

A few days later, someone else presented a far stronger case in support of Gellman’s dystopian narrative.  It came from Trump himself.  He is now refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of an election loss. The president of the United States actually stood before a news conference and insisted that we need to “get rid of the ballots.” He was presumably talking about mail ballots. Polling shows that 37 percent of registered voters plan to vote by mail, and most are Biden supporters.  Trump, who votes by mail, contends – without evidence – that Democrats somehow plan to rig the election through mail ballots. 

So here we are, a tad more than a month before election day, and the incumbent candidate is demanding to either eliminate or not count mail ballots because of what only he sees as rampant election fraud. It’s not too hard to imagine Trump, with full support from his obsequious  attorney general, sending federal marshals into swing states to impound mail ballots before they are counted. 

Although the Constitution unambiguously provides that a president’s term “shall end” at noon on January 20, here’s Gellman’s what-if:  “. . . two men show up to be sworn in, and one of them comes with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.”  

Here’s how Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, responded to that question in The Atlantic piece: “We are not prepared for this at all.”  The professor’s observation aptly applies to everything about Donald Trump. We were not prepared for his election. We were not prepared for his presidency. And we are certainly not prepared for what may well be the country’s most fraught and chaotic transfer-of-power-exit.  

In crafting our democracy, our founders covered many exigencies. One that they missed was what to do when a president is so deranged and delusional that he has zero understanding of reality.  As journalist Bob Woodward, after 18 interviews with Trump, said last week, “I don’t know, to be honest, whether he’s got it straight . . . what is real and what is unreal.”  

Donald Trump’s reality is whatever makes him feel good about himself at the time, regardless of clearly observable evidence to the contrary.  We learned this about him in the first few minutes of his presidency.  It rained during his inaugural speech, but he falsely insisted later that, just as he began to speak, the clouds parted to allow the sun to shine down upon him. If we had selected the president by lottery, if we had randomly handed the keys to the Oval Office to some poor schlub off the street, the odds are enormously high that he or she would have been able to tell the difference between rain and sunshine.

Instead, we ended up with a delusional narcissist, totally untethered from science, the English language, basic facts, and a nation-in-crisis yearning for competent leadership. Our source of angst and despair in this autumn of 2020 is not about the appointment of conservative judges, tax cuts for the rich, or the decimation of environmental protections. Policy in a democracy is all about politics; to the victors go the spoils. 

This pain we feel now is much different.  It’s about the raw, gnawing fear of what more is to come from this acutely deranged man, who has never met a boundary of decency and decorum that he hasn’t demolished or leaped over. Never has a leader had a wider gap between vision and reality. 

This is, after all, the guy who looks past the seven million COVID infections and 203,000 deaths and says, as he did in Ohio this week, that the virus “affects virtually nobody.”  He’s the guy who threw paper towels at hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans and called the island “the most corrupt place on earth,” and then this week claimed that he was “the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.”  He’s the guy who criticized the Obama administration for not stockpiling any ventilators while 19,000 of them were sitting in storage. He’s the guy trying to force government scientists to skip safety steps in releasing a coronavirus vaccine before the election, while the Trump National Doral Miami resort opens its doors for an early October conference of the nation’s anti-vaccine movement. 

To be sure, Donald Trump is not the first person seemingly incapable of grasping reality. The difference between him and his delusional cohorts is that he is in the White House while the others are either hospitalized or under close supervision.  A review of the medical literature shows that many delusional patients insist that they are the president of the United States.  Unlike Trump, however, they do not have access to the nuclear codes.

The only remedy we have in this nightmare is to vote. Even then, there is no guarantee that a Biden electoral victory will be enough to trigger a peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of our democracy for more than two centuries. Still, the bigger the Biden margin, the bigger the likelihood that non-delusional forces in our system will find a way to ship Trump off to Mar a Largo in January.  

Since reality doesn’t matter to him, The Donald can bask away in the Florida sun and insist he is still president. Just like his hospitalized counterparts. 

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING BUT TRUMP REMAINS THE MASTER OF HIS OWN CHAOS

The Russians are supposedly working hard to tamper with our elections. Their goal, according to intelligence agencies, is to sow confusion and disarray.  How utterly redundant of them. Don’t they realize their guy Trump has already infused our democracy with perfect chaos?   Here in the fourth year of our Kafkaesque nightmare, there is zero demand for imported havoc. 

This bizarre dichotomy of home grown versus off-shored chaos reached a daunting and ironic crescendo recently when Trump fired his national intelligence director for, in effect, doing his job. The agency reported that Russia was up to its old election interference tricks in an effort to confuse Americans by blurring fact from fiction and eroding their confidence in democratic institutions.  The Donald, of course, has always guarded fact blurring and confidence erosion as part of his exclusive jurisdiction.  

For that reason, and because his ego enters apoplexy at the mere suggestion that he can’t get elected without Russia’s help, Trump stirred the chaos pot by firing the intelligence director over the detection of Russian election interference designed to create chaos.  Somewhere in that mess is a delicious irony. And a question: Why knock yourself out, Russia, when your candidate is doing such a superb job of turning the country into a cauldron of confusion and obfuscation all by himself?

Intelligence experts say Russia’s main weapons in its disinformation war against us are phony news items and social media messages aimed at attacking many of Trump’s opponents and turning American voters against each other.  Really?  That’s it?  The South Carolina Democratic debate – back when there were seven candidates – resembled an inelegantly choreographed fight scene from West Side Story. As far as social media attacks go, nothing spewing from a Russian bot can be more mean or vitriolic than the daily political discourse among real-life friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.  And we have somehow survived all that. So far.

What may be far less survivable, however, is the tsunami of chaos that Donald J. Trump creates – and basks in – on a daily basis.  During just the past week, for example, our president managed to produce a level of mass confusion that had to be the envy of every Russian troll farm. During our national panic attack over the $400-a-bottle-Purell-coronavirus, Trump, rather than offering clear and accurate guidance, spouted the obfuscatory gibberish of a Veg-O-Matic salesman.

Trump said the disease will soon disappear, “like a miracle,” probably in April when the weather is warmer.  Government health experts said the epidemic is likely to be bad and long.

Trump told a campaign rally in North Carolina that the coronavirus is a plot by Democrats to make him look bad. “This is their new hoax,” he said.  Government health experts said this is a “very serious virus” and Americans must prepare to deal with it.

Trump said the virus is no more lethal than the flu and minimized it through branding, calling it the “corona flu”.  Government health experts said the coronavirus is far more dangerous than the flu.

Trump said tests for the virus are available for anyone who wants one.  Government health experts said there is a serious shortage of tests.

Trump said a coronavirus vaccine will be available any day now. Government health experts said it will take more than a year to develop a vaccine.

In other words, who needs Russian subterfuge to stir chaos and panic in our body politic?  Trump has this stuff down pat. Sure, Russia is proficient at creating fake websites and social media posts to deviously spread false information on their political opponents.  But Trump has also mastered this niche of deception.  Check out this phony Joe Biden site. At first glance, it looks real and official. Then come the pictures and videos of Biden touching, hugging and patting the shoulders of various women and young girls. It also features a collection of the former vice president’s more embarrassing gaffes and his less-than-popular Senate votes.  The site is the handiwork of one Patrick Mauldin, who produces video and digital content for Trump’s reelection campaign.

Trump himself sent out a “deep fake” video on Facebook and Twitter purporting to show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripping up pages of the president’s State of the Union speech immediately following Trump’s commemoration of the accomplishments of various citizens.  Pelosi did, indeed, rip up the speech, but only at its conclusion, not at those poignant moments honoring audience members. The doctored video deliberately altered the context.

Intelligence reports say Russia is attempting to tamper with our actual voting process in hopes of delegitimizing the elections and keep some folks from voting.  Again, Trump and his party are way ahead of their foreign counterparts.  The GOP leadership in Georgia has purged tens of thousands of voters, mostly people of color for such minor discrepancies as having a misplaced hyphen in a name.  In another Republican-governed state, Texas has closed 750 polling places since 2012, predominately in black and Latinx neighborhoods that typically vote Democratic.  One man waited seven hours to vote in last week’s Texas Democratic primary election. Many others left long lines without voting.  Research by University of Houston political science professors showed that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel further to cast their ballots.

In a recording obtained by the Associated Press, Justin Clark, a senior Trump campaign advisor, spoke candidly about his camp’s efforts to suppress likely Democrats from voting.  Here’s what he said: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. . .Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

It is, of course, insidious and vile that a foreign adversary would invade the contours of our sovereign democratic elections in order to sow confusion and suppress voting.  Yet, based on all available evidence, the incumbent president and his party are far more effective at accomplishing those goals than their foreign allies. Obviously, that’s why Vladimir Putin wants him reelected. Nobody does chaos better than Donald Trump.

THE MIRACLE OF TRUMP: HE MAKES BLOOMBERG LOOK GOOD

The Democrats’ exhausting search for a presidential candidate has been a free-fall through Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In the beginning were the aspirations of self-actualization:  racial and economic justice, universal health insurance, combatting climate change, education reform. Now?  Survival is all that matters. That means grabbing any warm body, regardless of how broken, who can beat Trump.  

How many of us on the liberal spectrum could have imagined just four years ago supporting Mike Bloomberg for president?  The guy is an arrogant billionaire, a former George W. Bush-backing Republican who, as a business owner and mayor of New York, indulged in racism, sexism and transphobia.  But, hey, he is nowhere near as bad as Donald Trump.  The same could be said for at least 75 percent of the country’s prison population.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren succinctly and accurately summarized our free-fall in last week’s debate when she noted that Bloomberg “has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk.”  And then came the qualifier that perfectly captured our new normal: “Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is.”

She is, of course, exactly right.  Bloomberg would be the most flawed Democratic presidential nominee in modern history.  But, regardless of his physical stature, “Mini Mike” would be head and shoulders above Trump.  This is how far our civilization has crumbled since 2017. Elections used to be about dreaming of a better future.  This one is about ending a nightmare so that we might dream again. Someday.

We Democrats have been smugly disdainful of the hordes of evangelical leaders and once-honorable Republican office holders who ignore the hard evidence of Trump’s utter moral depravity. His repeated lies, ignorance and trashing of laws and decency may make them cringe privately, but publicly they back him because he delivers on the political ends that matter to them:  anti-abortion policies, conservative judges, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation of almost everything. 

Well, now it’s our turn to craft a Faustian bargain.  Despite a dismal first appearance on the debate stage last week, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver reports that Mike Bloomberg remains very competitive in many Super Tuesday states. The billionaire has already spent $464 million of his own funds in his quest to capture the nomination of the party aligned against big-money corruption of politics. Will we ignore the millions of young black and brown men thrown against the wall and frisked by New York cops under Bloomberg’s unconstitutional policing policies?  How about his criticism of minimum wage laws, or his defense of fingerprinting food-stamp recipients?  Do we pretend he never ridiculed those who advocate for transgender rights, that he didn’t refer to women as “horsey-faced lesbians” and “fat broads”?

Put another way, would we support a candidate who has trampled on some, but not all, of our values in order to end the presidency of a megalomaniac who values absolutely nothing outside of himself?  Of course we would.  An election is not a completion test. It’s multiple choice.  It’s about making the best deal that you can, not necessarily the one you want.  

As abhorrent as some of the former New York mayor’s behaviors have been, as disqualifying as they would be in any other presidential election, if the package deal of Mike Bloomberg – a mixture of despicable negatives and considerable positives – is the price for ending our Trumpian nightmare, it’s a deal worth making. (Those positives, by the way, include 12 years of running – in a mostly competent fashion – New York City, an entity larger than 37 states; a strong climate change record; a proven commitment to using scientific research in enacting public policy; and philanthropic support of progressive causes such as public health and gun control.)  

Bloomberg may well turn out to be little more than a supporting actor in this process, one whose quixotic presidential run loses steam in the spring primaries. Yet, his current standing as a major contender is but one more sign of how far we have fallen down the rabbit hole.  In Donald Trump’s America, being a merely bad candidate is relatively good since the incumbent is horrendously terrible. 

For example, Bloomberg was quoted by the Washington Post as saying the following at a New York event in March of 2019:  “If your conversation during a presidential election is about some guy wearing a dress and whether he, she or it can go into the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a winning formula for most people.”  Setting aside the fact that 76 percent of Democrats support transgender rights, this cruel, ridiculing remark would have ended a candidacy in that party in almost any other context.

In a forced choice between Bloomberg and Trump, however, the former comes off looking positively empathetic and supportive of human rights.  Trump, after all, overrode his own Defense Department and banned transgender persons from serving in the military.  His administration, through regulations and court cases, has gone after transgender and sexual orientation discrimination protections in a vast array of other contexts. (Here, here and here). 

So it goes, this relativism of moral leadership.  Bloomberg has made gross, sexist comments to women.  Trump is on tape boasting about forcibly kissing them and grabbing their genitals. Dozens of women have accused him of sexual assault.  Bloomberg may have stretched the truth from time to time.  Trump, according to the Washington Post, told 16,241 lies in his first three years in office.  Bloomberg got to serve 12 years as New York’s mayor by pushing the City Council to change the term limit rule.  Trump has openly and flagrantly abandoned any pretense of following any rule of law.  

Remember how hard it was four years ago to imagine that Donald Trump would actually be elected president of the United States?  As we experienced that reality – and felt the earth tremble beneath us – nobody could ever have anticipated that Michael Bloomberg would emerge as our savior. Ultimately, that may not happen, but if it does, I will have my bumper sticker ready: “BLOOMBERG: NOT AS BAD AS TRUMP”.   Inspirational?  No, but it’s the damn truth.

(Inspiration for this post was provided by the hilarious musical parody, “The Day Democracy Died”, by The Founding Fathers. If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out here.)

SANDERS COULD WIN, BUT THE RISK ISN’T WORTH IT

Bernie Sanders has done more than any modern political figure to advance the cause of economic justice.  In less than four years, he managed to move issues like single payer health insurance, free college tuition and the sanctity of a living wage from the fringes of the political left into the mainstream of American thought. He is arguably one of the most important and effective change agents in our time.  But I so hope he isn’t the Democratic nominee for president.

In another time and context, I could have been a screaming, stomping, shouting Bernie Bro. But not now, not this year. Our democracy is hanging by the thinnest of threads. We have a deranged, narcissistic authoritarian in the White House; a cruel, mean, vindictive man who defies every norm of decency, every rule of law; a man firmly committed to lying, cheating and stealing his way to a second term. We have one shot to stop him. Please tell me we aren’t going to bank it all on an almost-80-year-old socialist who is recovering from a heart attack and hellbent on revolution.

On an aspirational level, I’m totally good with the dictatorship of the proletariat.  But right now, in this moment of despair, revolutionary change has to mean ending the Trump revolution before starting a new one.  Our immediate focus needs to be less on toppling the moneyed elites and redistributing the wealth, and more on capturing electoral college votes in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona. 

A number of pundits (here and here) have insisted that Sanders can’t win.  I disagree. They said the same thing about Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.  Nobody thought Donald Trump could win, not even Donald Trump.  Sanders could, indeed, win.  The likelihood of such an outcome, however, seems far riskier than it would be with others in the Democratic gaggle of presidential candidates. 

Numerous studies (here and here) have shown that candidates with hardened ideologies – on both the left and right – suffer electorally, substantially raising the risk of loss. (Think Goldwater and McGovern.) If ever there were a time to be risk adverse, it is now.

While some of Sanders’ positions have popular support, many are apt to pose a serious problem in a general election.  He is unabashedly in favor of raising taxes to pay for a Medicare for All program that would eliminate private health insurance, a move polls show is opposed in most swing states.  There is a long list of other Bernie proposals that certify his leftist credentials but are likely to be an albatross for him:  banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, eliminating ICE and giving free health care to undocumented immigrants. 

Then there’s the socialist thing.  Trump, of course, will redbait any Democrat who runs against him. He calls anyone who opposes him a “socialist,” among other labels picked from his limited vocabulary: “scum,” “horrible,” “dirty,” “crazy,” and “lowlife.”   Bernie is a Democratic Socialist, a political philosophy not that far removed from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the distant past, however, he supported the Socialist Workers Party, a Marxist-Trotskyite group that now criticizes Sanders for being too conservative.  

To be sure, such nuance will do little damage control in an election campaign.  Bernie is on tape supporting Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba in the 1960s. Twenty years later, he backed the Sandinistas’ Marxist regime in Nicaragua while the U.S. was financing a rightwing overthrow there.  He attended a Nicaraguan rally where the crowd chanted “Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.”   Such ancient history is hardly disqualifying in this post-cold-war era.  Still, it might well be enough to give Trump a lock on electoral-vote-rich Florida where there is a large contingent of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans.

Beyond his radical past and out-of-the-mainstream positions, there is a far deeper problem with Sanders’ candidacy.  He is, in many ways, the leftwing version of Donald Trump, albeit a kinder and more intelligent one.  They share many characteristics. They are both populists. They are both angry and yell a lot. They both see the government as a swamp needing to be drained. They both play not to a diverse spectrum of Americans, but to a much smaller, passionate and very fired-up base.  

A Sanders versus Trump contest is an easy call for liberals. It’s Bernie in a heartbeat. But what about independents, or Republicans feeling the same Trump stress disorder that keeps us up at night?  An angry old white guy trying to bring Wall Street to its knees by braying at the moon could have been refreshing after four years of a Jeb Bush administration. But not now. If you believe the psychotherapists, Trump has so stressed out millions of Americans with his constant bellicose bellowing that they long for a merely competent president, a quieter, more serene leader. Although competent, Bernie Sanders does not do quiet or serenity.  

Angry Socialist
Angry Narcissist

The Vermont senator’s 2016 presidential run was not about winning. It was, as Politico noted, about organizing a movement to shift power from corporate billionaires to the working class, Bernie’s life-long goal.  He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.  Issues of his that were seen as extremist four years ago are now on center stage of the 2020 campaign. The very fact that Sanders is now a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination has moved the party to the left.  If he becomes the nominee, the leftward tilt will be that much stronger. Even if he loses.

Yes, even if he loses, Bernie Sanders will have won, simply by advancing his agenda and moving a major political party that much further to the left.  For well over a century, leaders of the class struggle have counseled patience in building the revolution. It’s one small step, followed by another, and another, for as long as it takes.  Famed Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, taught that “strife is the father of all things,” and that “revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.” From that perspective, Bernie’s revolution would be well positioned if he gets the nomination and loses in November.  Four more years of Trump will certainly produce sufficient strife to father that inevitable revolution. 

Either that or we slip deeper and deeper into the autocracy of the Trumpian abyss.  With all due respect to Brothers Sanders and Trotsky, let’s go with a Democratic candidate who appeals to a broader swath of the electorate. The revolution will wait.

TRUMP’S DIGITAL CAMPAIGN LEAVES DEMOCRATS IN THE DUST

Although he has been an acute and chronic failure in so many ways, Donald Trump is an accomplished high achiever in the arena that matters most to him: building a base that will deliver votes. 

Leading Democratic strategists scornfully view Trump as a vile malignancy on the body politic, but they are in reverential awe of his ability to use social media as an organizing platform.  David Plouffe ran the 2008 Obama campaign, heralded at the time for its innovations in social media use. In an interview with Politico, Plouffe said that advantage now clearly belongs to Trump. He called the digital imbalance a “DEFCON 1 situation.” Numerous Democratic operatives have recently expressed similar concern over Trump’s ability to digitally out maneuver their party (here, here and here). 

Here’s what they’re talking about:  The fulcrum of Trump’s campaign is a social media engine capable of targeting messages to millions of MAGA types and wannabes. These ads, mostly on Facebook, are far different than conventional political advertising in that they are aimed not just at persuading, but at organizing a movement. With Facebook’s help, they are seen only by those whose online activity has been Trump-friendly. That’s just the starting point. Those ads come with an ask: sign up for a rally, take a survey, make a donation, buy MAGA merchandise.  The responses give the campaign names, zip codes, email, phone numbers, and a ton of demographic data. 

With all of that information – in tandem with Facebook analytics on users who “like” memes and posts about gun rights, undocumented immigrants, and white supremacy, etc. – the campaign’s targeting escalates into microtargeting.  That opens the door on tailoring each social media ad to hyper-specific groups, like 50-something, white male gun owners in the Florida panhandle who own a motorcycle and a dog and attend church infrequently.  This sort of microtargeting is not a Trump exclusive by any means.  His campaign has simply taken it to heights never before seen. In 2016, for example, according to an internal Facebook report, the Clinton campaign placed 66,000 unique ads on the platform, a drop in the bucket compared with Trump’s total of 5.9 million different ads. 

Although Trump and Facebook executives have had their differences, they share one critical value: lying.  The social media platform has been adamant about its policy of running political ads even if they are utterly false.   His campaign, of course, has been only too happy to provide the falsehoods.  Trump’s Facebook ads have spun fairytale story lines about his protection of pre-existing conditions, abating the North Korean nuclear threat, saving America from an imminent Iranian attack, among a plethora of other fantasies. He turned his own impeachment into a fund-raising bonanza, peppered with blatantly false claims about his supposed victimhood and Joe Biden’s imaginary corruption.

As of January 5, Trump’s campaign has spent $35 million to reach 2020 voters through precision-targeted ads on Google and Facebook. The top Democratic candidates have spent a tiny fraction of that amount on digital advertising.  Joe Biden, the purported front-runner, has spent less than $5 million on social media ads. In fact, he recently pulled what little advertising he had on Facebook and moved it to television.  

People spend an estimated one-third to one-half of their lives on their phones and other internet-connected devices. Through microtargeting, Trump is constantly reaching out to, and expanding, his base there.  Meanwhile, Biden and many of his fellow Democratic candidates have slight to no visibility in that digital infrastructure.   While they use more conventional advertising to quibble over Medicare for all versus a public option, Trump is using his online advertising to organize, to fire up his expanding MAGA army through incendiary links to false information about “criminal immigrant invaders” and the “far-left corrupt socialists” who love them.

This Trump advantage gets worse, exponentially worse.  Through artificial intelligence, the campaign is able to have Facebook match target constituencies with what are called “look-alikes”, hundreds of thousands of people who share the same backgrounds and political beliefs as those in the target group.  Once the Trumpers pull new recruits from the look-alikes, that new subset is used to cull more of the same.  Rinse and repeat. Therein lies the growing core of fired-up true believers who Trump hopes will walk through fire on election day to give him a second term.

The campaign has been building this social media organizing machine for more than three years. Trump’s every crazy, insipid, illegal action is put on a digital assembly line where it is completely fictionalized, re-spun, and fed to his fans so that they can be identified and used to reproduce themselves in their own images. For Team Trump, this is the path that will deliver four more years to the only president whose approval ratings never made it to the 50 percent mark.

But hark, help is on the way.  Under the heading of better late than never, there are two recent encouraging signs that Democrats may get their digital act together. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent $25 million on Google and Facebook advertising. Although he’s a late entrant and a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, his ads are designed to take sharp swipes at Trump, an approach the billionaire says he will continue even if he is not the nominee.

Although Bloomberg’s ad buy is a significant improvement, it will not, by itself, counter the Trump social media onslaught.  Enter “Four is Enough” a unique digital organizing campaign headed by Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, and Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old digital guru who cut her political teeth on the Obama campaign. She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called Acronym that helps progressive groups organize online. They are in the process of raising $75 million to build an online organizing effort, particularly in the swing states that will determine electoral college results.    McGowan told the New York Times that the Four is Enough campaign was the result of “screaming into the abyss” about the Democrats’ weak digital presence, and “finally deciding to take matters into our own hands.”

Let’s hope that it works. As we learned in 2016, being right on the facts doesn’t win elections. Organizing does, and that means using every available digital tool to mobilize disgusted, disgruntled and depressed Americans who know full well that, when it comes to Donald Trump, four years is way more than enough.

THE UNTHINKABILITY OF A SECOND TRUMP TERM

Democratic primary voters are facing an excruciatingly painful decision: What’s more important, revolutionary change to benefit the poor and middle class, or getting rid of Donald Trump? As much as we want to believe that both are within reach, the ghost of Election Night 2016 keeps whispering: “Are you sure?”.  If we are wrong, we will have lost it all.

Back in the aspirational 1960s, the Kennedy brothers – John, Robert and Ted – frequently used a poetic line borrowed from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’. I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’.”

That was then and this is now, a pathetically melancholic era in which our aspirations have been Trumped by a villainous, self-absorbed president.  Sadly, our dreams for a better tomorrow may need to be put on hold so we can singularly focus on eradicating this malignancy from the White House.  Former George W. Bush speech writer and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson perfectly captured our dilemma with these words: “Our greatest political passion seems dedicated not to the pursuit of dreams but to the avoidance of nightmares.”

If not for our Trumpian nightmare, 2020 would be the perfect time for Democrats to dream big and bold, to replace the spoils of underregulated capitalism with the dreams of things that never were, like Medicare for All, free college tuition and a Green New Deal.  

Competing for the progressive vote, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have tapped into the understandably unbridled passion for single payer health insurance, known colloquially as Medicare for All.  Finding a way to extend health care to everyone is a concept whose time arrived decades ago.  Originally proposed by Richard Nixon in 1972, it has long been the way of life in most every other industrialized country.  

Passage of Obamacare in 2010 substantially increased the number of insured Americans.  But it did not go nearly far enough.  An estimated 30 million people lack coverage, and another 44 million are so under-insured that they face risk of financial ruin.  Americans borrowed $88 billion in 2018 to cover health care expenses. There are more than 500,000 bankruptcies every year because of medical debt. Most people are insured under employer group plans that carry an annual price tag of more than $20,000 for family coverage. The average employee annual premium share is between $6,000 and $7,000, in addition to deductibles and co-insurance that can run as high as $10,000 or more. 

Based on facts, figures and sound reasoning, the Medicare for All case could not be more compelling. Yet, repeated polling shows strong negative reaction to the proposal (here, here and here), fed mostly by anxiety over the costs and uncertainties of such a major change.  In an election, it’s the perception, not the reality, that wins the day.  Remember what a political albatross Obamacare was for years before winning broad approval. 

It’s a stretch to see either the Sanders or Warren health care plan becoming law even if one of them captures the White House and Democrats win majorities in both houses. The bulk of the party’s 2018 House gains came in either Republican or swing districts, making a vote for single payer health insurance politically difficult. Still, in an ordinary election year, it would make sense for a presidential candidate to campaign for a bold change and, once elected, bargain downward to obtain what’s doable. Alas, the 2020 election will be anything but ordinary.

“Thinking about the Unthinkable” was the title of a 1962 book about nuclear war. It also captures perfectly the prospect of a second Trump term.  Do we spend four more years counting his lies while watching him continue to: ignore the law, dismantle human rights, destroy the planet, insult our allies, rob from the poor and give to the rich?     It’s hard to imagine a more unthinkable scenario.  Yet, in order to escape from our dystopian abyss, we must think about the unthinkable.

There are two paths to defeating Trump, both backed by facially credible theories.  One is for Democrats to nominate a left-of-center candidate, someone promising revolutionary – or at least big and bold – structural changes like Medicare for All, tuition-free colleges and forgiveness of students loans. The strategy here would be to pull in new voters from disaffected and marginalized groups, folks who disdain and distrust traditional politics but whose passion has been ignited by the prospect of a massive system overhaul. Since many in this demographic didn’t vote in 2016, their ballots would have a value-added impact on the Democratic tally, or so the thinking goes.

The other path is aimed at independents, never-Trumper Republicans and Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016.  The math on this is fairly simple.  The Donald won the last election with 46 percent of the vote. Most polling puts his hardcore base at 25-30 percent of voters. The difference between those two measurements represents a sizeable chunk of 2016 Trump voters, a faction seen through polling as disillusioned and irritated with the president.  The theory here is that a moderate Democrat, one not pushing for huge progressive changes, could well flip a sizeable portion of Trump’s non-base voters.

Nine months ago in this space, I advocated for the first of these two paths, a charismatic progressive candidate pushing for profound structural change.  My reasoning was two-fold. One, we desperately need profound structural change. Secondly, I liked the idea of building passion among those outside the political mainstream and pulling them into a growing Democratic tent.

I’m rethinking that position now for two reasons.  First, Trump is even more of an existential threat to our way of life than he was nine months ago (see Ukraine, Turkey and the pardoning of war criminals).  Then there is the Electoral College. Getting more votes in places like California, New York and Massachusetts does nothing to move the 2016 Electoral College needle.  Repeated polling in six swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina) shows Trump either ahead or within the margin of error of his potential opponents.  Democrats will probably need to take at least three of those states in order to recapture the presidency.  

Although the landscape will evolve between now and the election, I find myself growing more risk adverse by the day.  The best candidate in 2020 may not be the one with the best platform. It will be the one who is best able to defeat Trump.  The alternative is just too unthinkable.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

CBS’s timing for the third revival of its other-worldly series The Twilight Zone could not have been more impeccable.  As we approach the precipice of a presidential election campaign, we are, indeed, about to enter another dimension. With apologies to the late Rod Serling, here is the introductory narrative:

Imagine if you will, a score or more of ambitious politicians, a horde of men and women of various shades of liberalness, all seeking their party’s nomination. It is, by and large, an honorable constellation of star candidates. Except for one thing. Each of them possesses a flaw. Although neither felonious nor disqualifying, these foibles haunt the presidential aspirants like a Dickensian ghost. Meanwhile, the other party has but one candidate, the incumbent president, an utterly immoral, soulless, bloviating shell of a man who routinely performs at least a dozen despicable acts before breakfast. What does it mean, you might ask, that a good candidate, even with a minor peccadillo, would not be a shoo-in when pitted against a deplorable bastion of evil?  It means that we are now in the Twilight Zone.

And we’d better get used to it. Between now and November of next year, this country’s quest to elect a president will be subsumed in a bizarre and preternatural odyssey unlike anything we have experienced.  The campaign will be void of symmetry, packed with irrationality and mired in a Byzantine battle of facts versus alternative facts.  

For the Democratic candidates, the focus will be on benign blemishes, things like having a faux American Indian identity, bullying staff members, being too close to Wall Street, dating a much older political figure decades ago, or having a rope line reputation for pressing the flesh a tad too much.

On the Republican side is Donald Trump, a rapidly growing malignant goiter on the body politic.  So far in 2019, he has clocked in at an average of 22 lies a day. He took migrant children away from their parents and caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. He said some neo-Nazis and Klan members are “very fine people”, and complained that Nigerians won’t “go back to their huts” and that Haitians “all have AIDS”.  He shared highly classified data with top Russian officials, and has sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies.  

In just the past few days, Trump has outdone himself when it comes to unraveling. He threatened to close the country’s southern border, and then backed off and said he’d use tariffs to force his will on Mexico. Then he urged border patrol agents to force asylum-seeking immigrants to turn around and go home because there is no room for them, completely contrary to facts and law. He promised a top Homeland Security official a presidential pardon if he ignored the legal rights of migrants. His record is so bad on this issue that there have been at least 25 federal court rulings that have blocked nearly every move Trump has made on immigration.  

Clearly, no American president has stood for reelection with a record as odious as Trump’s.  Yet, it is very possible that he will win a second term in 2020.  He remains revered by his base as the Great White Hope in a country that has grown far too diverse for his supporters’ tastes. And he remains acceptable to many mainstream Republicans who may hold their noses privately while publicly applauding his tax cuts for the rich and appointment of conservative judges.  Besides, his acts of atrocity are so numerous and frequent, they have a way of fading into the ether to make room for their successors.  That leaves us with this bizarre, irrational and asymmetrical  environment in which the quotidian flaws of Democratic candidates have a staying power that outlasts the cumulative horror that has been Trump’s presidency. Not only that, the challengers’ flaws pale in comparison to Trumpian foibles in the same category.

For example:

AMY KLOBUCHAR has been accused of bullying staff members.  Trump routinely insults, demeans and verbally abuses not only staff but cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries.  

ELIZABETH WARREN has been unable to shake the criticism that she incorrectly claimed to be an American Indian.  As of March 17, Trump told 9,179 lies since taking office. One of them was that his father was born in Germany.

KAMALA HARRIS is constantly bombarded with reports that, as a young political apprentice, she dated – more than 20 years ago – a much older Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco. This barely even qualifies as a flaw but she has been getting flack on it. Harris was single at the time, although Brown was technically married but estranged from his wife. Trump’s alleged flings with a porn star and a Playboy Playmate, along with hush money paid to both, don’t even make the top ten list of his aberrant behaviors.

CORY BOOKER has been on the carpet for having close ties to Wall Street.  From day one of his presidency, Trump has catered to the moneyed class, filling his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alumni, rolling back regulations for the financial sector and cutting taxes on the mega rich.

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND has acquired the “flip flop” label as a result of becoming more liberal after she moved from a moderate House district to her current New York Senate seat. Trump has not only spent his life flip-flopping (abortion, gun control, LGBTQ rights), but lately, as noted above, he has been reversing himself on an almost hourly basis (border closing, health insurance, Special Olympics funding). A creative entrepreneur has had great success in selling “Presidential Flip-Flops”, sandals that carry Trump’s contradictory tweets on the straps of the footwear.

JOE BIDEN has run into problems with his habit of expressing affection with hugs, kisses and caresses that sometimes make people feel uncomfortable.  Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 23 women and boasted on the Access Hollywood tape of grabbing them by their genitals.

The good news in all of this is that any of the Democratic candidates would be head and shoulders above Trump. The bad news is that it does not assure electoral victory. That will come the way it always has, through good messaging and the hard work of voter registration and turnout. It’s either that or four more years in the Twilight Zone.