Category: Politics

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!

KING DONALD AND COVID: WHERE IS SHAKESPEARE WHEN WE NEED HIM?

Out there in some afterlife, is a very frustrated William Shakespeare begging for a chance to write and produce a play based on America’s 2020 presidential election. Think of it: King Donald The Maskless, shaping an entire campaign around the denial of a plague, and then being stricken by it just as voting begins. 

Americans aren’t used to presidential elections with this kind of high drama and daring plot twists.  We’re much more accustomed to Al Gore and his demand to put “Social Security in a lock box,” or George H.W. Bush’s cry of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” or, Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in.”  

It’s hard for us to wrap our weary heads around such a diabolical storyline: An accidental and bombastic king is so taken with himself that he repeatedly tells the citizenry to ignore talk of a disease infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. He says it will all go away soon.  And then the virus suddenly swoops in and attaches itself to him, capturing not only his body but also his fate. 

Oh, what the Bard could have done with this material!  He was the master of plot twists and iconic irony.  In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare had the King of France send a crate of tennis balls to the young Henry as he assumed England’s throne. The gift was intended to mock him for his carefree, pleasure-seeking ways. Unamused, Henry upped his game from tennis balls to cannonballs, with which the military used to invade France in an epic battle. To top it off, Henry married the French princess, his adversary’s daughter.  

In The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, a Macedonian king, was traveling with his infant daughter. He tells the audience that a vision appeared to him in a dream and warned him that he would never see his home or his wife again. Antigonus laid his daughter down in the woods.  As he walked away, a bear attacked and killed him. Soon a shepherd and his son, a clown, found the abandoned baby. They vowed to raise the child themselves.  Really.

In Shakespeare’s storytelling, events follow a karmic pattern of actions begetting reactions, of causes and effects colliding on a sometimes slippery slope.  The playwright would have been fascinated with the Donald Trump character, a rude, profane elite wannabe, born to aristocratic, emotionally sterile parents. 

Think about it.  Here’s this 74-year-old orange-tinted man-child, the most unpresidential of presidents, the product of an election he was not supposed to win.  All he really wanted was to pump up his brand a bit so he could sell more condos, steaks, bottled water and neckties. He billed himself as a business genius who, alone, would solve all of our problems.  In truth, he was deep in debt and badly needed to hawk more stuff.  He saw a presidential campaign as a road to two riches that had always eluded him: financial stability and an adoring fan base. 

As we work our way through the final act of this tragedy, King Donald’s election opponent is technically Joe Biden.  But the King’s real foe is COVID-19.  Right now, the battle between the two of them is both actual and metaphorical.  

Although Trump knew since February how lethal this virus is, he kept telling his kingdom that it was nothing to worry about. Even as the pandemic shook every corner and cranny of this country, leaving behind a terrorized trail of loss and raw fear, the president, rather than managing the disaster, continually minimized the virus. Just a week ago, with 7 million Americans infected and more than 200,000 dead,  King Donald insisted that this disease “affects virtually nobody.”

And then, just a few days later, he got it.  The “harmless” virus invaded Trump’s body.  It also infected a growing list of GOP office holders and staff who had earlier gathered – maskless  – in a Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.  Right now, there is nothing in this world that affects Donald Trump’s future more than this novel coronavirus.

Shakespeare’s fascination with this development would hold regardless of the outcome of Trump’s disease. The conflict is not one of life and death. Instead, it’s about a powerful ruler’s battle between truth and deceit, between science and the will of a fool. 

This president constructs his own reality to please himself and his loyal fans.  He insisted Hilary Clinton was a crook, and his fans chanted “lock her up.”  He claimed caravans of violent migrants were invading our border, and his fans grabbed their guns and headed south. He says the Democrats have rigged the election against him, and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist, white supremacist group, is “standing by.”

That Donald Trump has desecrated all notions of truth is no longer in dispute.  According to the Washington Post, his current average is 23 falsehoods a day.  The culture of deceit in this White House is so deep that the first 48 hours after Trump was hospitalized were dominated by false and conflicting reports on his condition. Not only that, but there has been widespread speculation on the left that Trump is lying about having COVID in an attempt to move his poll numbers.  What else could we expect from a fact-free administration?

Science, however, does not lie.  For all of the 7.6 million Americans infected with this virus, including the 210,000 who died, there are tens of millions more – family members, friends and neighbors – who know first-hand how real and how devastating this disease in.  They also know how wrong Trump was when he tweeted from his hospital bed: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”  In this bizarre election drama, those are merely sad, close-to-final lines of a sick man and a failing candidate.

What would Shakespeare think of it all?  Well, he gave us a hint in the second act of Measure For Measure:

“. . . proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”

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. 

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.”

WILL A POST-TRUMP GOP RETURN TO ACTUAL BELIEFS & VALUES?

Here’s a history question to kick off our quadrennial political party conventions: Name the candidate whose nomination acceptance speech contained these five sentences:

  • “Everyone, from immigrant to entrepreneur, has an equal claim on this country’s promise.”
  • “Bigotry disfigures the heart.”
  • “Corporations are responsible to treat their workers fairly and to leave the air and waters clean.”
  • “Greatness does not rise or fall with the stock market.”
  • “True leadership is a process of addition, not an act of division.”

So, who spoke those words?  John Kennedy in 1960? Lyndon Johnson in 1964?  Hubert Humphrey in 1968? How about Barak Obama in 2008?   

Try George W. Bush in 2000.  Yes, those compassionate, caring  and inclusive thoughts came from the last Republican president prior to the dark and daunting dawn of Trumpism, an era that began with quite a different nomination acceptance speech:  “I alone can fix it.”  

It’s jarring to read Bush’s speech just as Trump prepares to accept the GOP nomination for four more years of chaos and corruption. Although only two decades have passed, it’s easy to forget that the Republican party once had actual values, that it stood for principles larger than electoral self-preservation.

Here’s how Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican operative, put it in a Washington Post op-ed: “Most Republicans would have said that the party stood for some basic principles: fiscal sanity, free trade, strong on Russia, and that character and personal responsibility count. Today, it’s not that the Republican party has forgotten these issues and values; instead, it actively opposes all of them.”

Donald Trump not only owns this party, he has remade it in his own image.  Most historians mark the birth of Republicanism in 1854 when members of the Whig party broke away over the Whigs’ embrace of slavery.  Little did they know that, 166 years later, their anti-slavery movement would evolve into a white grievance party. 

This bizarre evolution, however, has less to do with conscious and deliberate policy changes, and everything to do with raw fear. It wasn’t as if Trump got congressional Republicans to alter their beliefs and values based on the strength and logic of his argument. Instead, it was that figurative gun he held to their heads, a weapon in the form of a single tweet that could end their political careers faster than a speeding bullet.

Focusing strictly on Trump’s merits back in 2016, many prominent Republicans rejected him. That rejection was a gift in disguise. He used it to fire up his base, to bond with them over their shared disdain and distrust for the elite political class.  This president’s fire power has always been his base, a passionate contingent of fed up white folks searching in vain for a rebirth of the 1950s. 

Here’s what some of the GOP stars were calling Trump before the 2016 election:  

Senator Lindsey Graham:  “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

Senator Ted Cruz:  “pathological liar, utterly amoral,  a sniveling coward.”

Former Congressman Mick Mulvaney:  “terrible human being.”

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry:  “a cancer on conservatism, a barking carnival act.”

Once Trump was elected, and his base displayed its steroidal bona fides, the Republican establishment caved, abandoning all remnants of beliefs, values and decency. Winning elections was all that mattered. That meant keeping The Donald happy and avoiding a demeaning tweet. So, Graham became Trump’s golf buddy, confidant and best friend in the Senate. Cruz sang his praises whenever possible. Mulvaney became his chief of staff. Perry joined the Trump Cabinet as Energy Secretary. 

Those few congressional Republicans who refused to march in lockstep with Trump either retired or were defeated for reelection. For the most part, their replacements have been sycophantically aligned with the president.

This is not at all how Republicans envisioned its future a mere seven years ago. In 2013, GOP leaders, ordered a probing and strategic evaluation of the party. It had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Many key states that had been considered Republican territory were increasingly voting Democratic. The result was an eye-opening reckoning with demographics. 

Here’s the upshot of that study: In a country where the Caucasian majority is on a steadily downward spiral to minority status, and where women and LGBTQ folks are both growing as a constituency and gravitating to the Democrats, the GOP needs a much larger tent.  In other words, white men alone will not save Republicans from extinction. Under the banner of the Growth and Opportunity Project, the party allocated $10 million to back comprehensive pro-immigration reform and outreach to women, Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ voters.

And then along came Donald Trump. As Stuart Stevens, the Republican political consultant, put it, Trump “didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will.” Instead, he sensed correctly that there was no burning desire for big tent diversity in this party. So he, in Stevens’s words, “offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger.”  

What most of us saw as acts of compassion, caring and inclusion, Trump decried as political correctness. He encouraged division and white supremacy as the justifiable fruits of political incorrectness. “Trump didn’t make America more racist,” Stevens wrote, “he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. . .and let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.” 

Like everything Trumpian, this mind-boggling 2016 course correction – a reversal, actually – was rooted only in the moment it happened, with absolutely no thought of long-term strategy. Even in that moment, it just barely worked. Trump won with 46.1 percent of the vote. 

The GOP’s 2013 study is more germane than ever. A party tailored to the enmity of angry white men has no long-term future in a country that is growing more racially and ethnically diverse by the day. 

The only hope for Republicans is that Joe Biden scores an overwhelming victory in November. That might be enough for them to finally realize that the pro-slavery Whigs their party broke from 166 years ago was reincarnated into the Party of Donald Trump.  

They badly need to sever those bonds.

AS AMERICA BEGINS TO ATONE FOR RACISM, TRUMP EMBRACES IT

It’s been a head-splitting two months since George Floyd died for the sins of white privilege.  Outside of the White House, important Caucasians in all walks of life are suddenly rushing to atone for the totems of racism. 

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben have finally been put to rest, a scant 158 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. NASCAR banned the confederate flag. HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its streaming platform. Walmart stopped locking up Black hair products.  The Dixie Chicks drove old Dixie down, and will forever be known as simply the Chicks. 

None of these symbolic gestures, of course, begin to touch the deeply entrenched economic and quality of life disparities based on race. Still, it is hard to remember a point in our history when attitudes on racial injustice changed so dramatically in such a short period of time.  Four years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement’s approval rating hovered around 40 percent.  As of two weeks ago, more than two-thirds of the country supported the BLM protests. One poll showed that 88 percent of white respondents found the protests to be justified.  

With the election only three months away, America faces its most profound racial reckoning since the 1960s. Two opposing forces are at work. One is a sustained and rapidly growing movement to eradicate systemic racism. The other is a racist president, doubling down on the white power ethos that propelled him into office. That we are trapped in this bizarre odyssey more than two decades after the death of George Wallace is depressingly mindboggling.

Donald Trump entered this arena by enthralling his supporters with the racist lie that the nation’s first black president was a Kenya-born Muslim. He’s been playing to that crowd ever since. Yet, anyone who has ever run for office, from student council on up, knows that political resiliency flows from an ability to read your constituency and pivot accordingly.  Trump neither reads nor pivots.  Instead, he clings to his signature bigotry, and is cranking it up several notches.  

As a result, our president is now far to the right of Mississippi Republicans. That party’s governor and legislators just passed a law removing the confederate symbol from the state’s flag. Trump, on the other hand, spent the past several weeks as a national spokesman for confederate flags, monuments and ideology. He has opposed his own military advisors and Senate Republican leaders who support changing the names of military bases named for confederate generals. He insists that preserving the memory of men who fought to retain slavery as a vital part of our “Great American Heritage.”

The Mississippi GOP is by no means the only entity that showed our president up when it comes to shedding the worn and weary cloak of white power. The Washington, D.C. football team, over Trump’s objections, is ditching the “Redskins” nickname.  The NFL, also over Trump’s objections, reversed itself on the practice of players taking a knee during the National Anthem to protest police violence against Blacks. Juneteenth, commemorating the freeing of enslaved people, has been made a paid holiday by a number of states and large companies. The American Medical Association declared racism a public health crisis and called for an end to police brutality against Black Americans. Many corporate leaders have resigned after claims of racism and a toxic organizational culture.

All of this happened since George Floyd’s Memorial Day death under the asphyxiating knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.  Through it all, Donald Trump has stood alone as a force against the dismantling of systemic racism.  He insists it doesn’t exist, an assertion with all of the credibility of his earlier claim that the coronavirus was no big deal and would be gone by April.

So here’s the narrative of Trump’s reelection campaign: An unpopular president, already wounded from his failure to manage a pandemic response, hits the accelerator on racism at the height of a seismic racial justice movement.  Outside of an Ayn Rand novel, the storyline makes no sense.  A Marist poll found that 67 percent of Americans say Trump has increased racial tensions since Floyd was murdered. Why is this guy going full bore on racism while the vast majority of Americans are all in for racial reconciliation?

The answer is quite simple: That’s who Donald Trump is. This president’s belief in white supremacy is the closest he gets to an actual ideology.  On all other issues, Trump formulates a position based not on core values and beliefs, but on whatever he thinks is best for him at the time. His racism, however, has been forever embedded in his heart and soul. 

Back in 1973, the federal Justice Department accused the Trump organization of discriminating against Black Americans at its housing project in Brooklyn. As part of the litigation, Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer, questioned the now-president in a deposition. According to Goldweber, Trump walked up to her during a coffee break and said, “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

With anyone else, you could say that was 47 years ago, enough time to grow out of that mindset.  Not Donald Trump.  Just last week he sent out this tweet: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”  

Trump lifted an Obama-era requirement that municipalities receiving federal housing funds had to address biased practices connected with low-income areas. His tweet was no dog whistle. The president of the United States was telling suburban white folks that he was protecting them from Black people.  (As The Washington Post’s Eugene Scott noted, most of today’s suburbs are quite diverse, as opposed to the white flight days of the ‘60s and ‘70s, an era Trump equates with greatness.)

Clearly, racism will have more presence on the November ballot than it has had in more than 50 years. Despite all of the polling that shows widespread support for racial equality and justice, Donald Trump believes there is a “silent majority” out there that will give him four more years of bigotry. We’ve got about 90 days to do everything we can to prove him wrong.

NEW PRESIDENTIAL MATH: COUNTING SEXUAL ASSAULT ACCUSATIONS

Tara Reade’s sexual assault accusation against Joe Biden has produced some apoplectic commentary predicting the death of the #MeToo movement (here, here and here).  It’s time for a collective deep breath. The movement may be undergoing some natural growing pains, but it is very much alive and well.  If you don’t believe me, ask Harvey Weinstein (New York State Correctional Facility) and Bill Cosby (Pennsylvania State Prison).

The theory of the case for a faltering movement lies with an ambitious rhetorical flourish that guided #MeToo’s branding: “Believe Women.” It perfectly captured the abrupt – if long overdue – paradigm reversal involving sexual misconduct. Suddenly, hundreds of powerful men were losing their jobs and reputations based on women’s sexual harassment and assault complaints, along with substantial corroborating facts.  

For way too many years, women complaining of sexual abuse were not only disbelieved, they weren’t taken seriously. The men said it never happened, or if it did, it was consensual: “He said, she said.” And “he said” was the default position for being taken seriously. The #MeToo movement reversed those power dynamics and made “she said” the default position.  Hence, “Believe Women.”

Yet, the phrase was never intended as a legal standard of proof. It didn’t advocate that a woman’s accusation of sexual abuse, in and of itself and without regard to evidence, meant the guy did it, end of story. In hindsight, “Listen To Women” might have been a more elegant choice of words.  But “Believe Women” had a righteous symmetry to it in a culture where many sexual assaults went unreported due to the cultural propensity to believe men and disbelieve women. 

Now comes our malignantly divisive political environment where everything in sight is a potential weapon.  During the 2018 confirmation hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, a parade of Democratic leaders, including Joe Biden, trotted out the “Believe Women” mantra after Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school.  Kavanaugh denied the allegation, just as Biden denied Reade’s accusation.  That has produced an uproarious Republican chorus of hypocrisy charges against Biden and his defenders.  Tara Reade is a woman, their syllogism notes, so she must be believed, just as Biden and the Democrats insisted that Blasey Ford must be believed. 

Inconsistencies, particularly those based on disparate facts, is a way of life in politics. They also constitute fair game for criticism. But here’s what they won’t do: turn the clock back on the #MeToo reckoning that women’s sexual abuse charges must be taken seriously. The very fact that Reade’s accusation against Biden has been the biggest non-pandemic story for the past 10 days is evidence that she is very much being listened to.

What, then, do we do about that story?  For starters, we ought to feel sad. Really sad.  The Democratic primary process discarded every candidate who was not a white male pushing 80. In an understandable obsession to dump Trump, the working assumption was that this wasn’t the year to “risk” nominating a woman or a person of color.  The final two white geezers standing were Biden, 77, and Bernie Sanders, 78. Since the former vice president was seen as electable, and Sanders was seen as a socialist, the endgame didn’t last long.  As a result, in the most important election of our lives, the presidential sexual abuse allegation box score now stands at: Biden 1; Trump 20+. Although the forced choice is clear, just doing the math is sad. (Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for this, but if she were the nominee it wouldn’t be needed.  Just sayin’.)

We need to take Tara Reade’s accusation seriously. Based on everything I’ve read, her complaint, although definitively unprovable, is nevertheless credible. Reporters spoke with two of her friends who said Reade described the alleged 1993 assault to them back in the 1990s. Most of the 20-some sexual assault and misconduct complaints made against Trump involved similar corroboration. 

The natural inclination in this overheated political moment is to grab hold of those facts that support our desired election outcome. The Trump campaign has already produced video ads portraying Biden as a creepy groper. Some Biden supporters are attacking Reade’s veracity and questioning her motives. In the Twittersphere, there is a battle between “I Believe Tara Reade” and “Tara Reid is a Liar.” Viewing sexual assault charges through a political lens diminishes the gravity of all such offenses. 

Biden’s response to Reade’s accusation was a mixed bag. On the positive side, he didn’t call her a liar, question her motives or denigrate her in any way. In other words, he totally discarded Trump’s playbook on dealing with sexual assault charges.  On the down side, he waited too long before responding, relying instead on leading Democratic women, many of them his potential vice presidential candidates, to sing his praises.  

When he finally issued a 1,006-word response, 659 of those words were about pro-women policies he supported. Although his record on women’s issues is certainly relevant to the campaign, making it the major portion of his defense to a sexual assault charge was cringeworthy. At best, it was a non sequitur. At worst, it was using a voting record to get a pass on a sexual abuse accusation. Either way, it was tone deaf.

Yet, on balance, it was a more enlightened Joe Biden than the one who ramrodded Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination through his Senate Committee in 1991, never taking Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Thomas seriously.  Even at 77, the former vice president remains an educable work-in-progress. The same cannot be said of Trump.

Therein lies the reason why there is no lingering mystery about what to do on November 3. Our choice is between Trump and Biden. It’s the difference between darkness and light, between ineptness and competence, between evil and mostly good. So, take Tara Reade seriously. You can believe her every word and still be compelled to vote for Biden.

Here’s why: Donald Trump is an accused serial sexual assaulter and admitted groper, who just let tens of thousands of Americans die while he denied the Coronavirus. He needs to go, and a vote for Joe Biden is the only way that will happen.

As Don Rumsfeld said in another context, you go into an election with the candidate you have, not the candidate you want.

SEARCHING FOR HOPE IN A PANDEMIC

I was drunk through most of the 1970s. As I twelve-stepped my way into sobriety 40 years ago, I severed all ties with pessimism.  Granted, there wasn’t much about the ‘70s to get all giddy and gaga about, unless you really adored leisure suits. My negativity and cynicism mixed much better with a beer and a bump than it did with AA meetings and bad coffee. The lesson learned was that we can’t always control the events in our lives, but we can chose how to react to them.  So I’ve been a registered optimist since 1980 and, as a result, a lot happier.  

These past couple of months, however, have posed the single largest challenge to that world view since my conversion to hopefulness. With apologies to Thomas Paine, these are the times that try the optimist’s soul. 

How do you find even a thin ray of light in the darkness of our new existence? The soaring numbers of coronavirus infections and deaths are baked into the daily metrics of our lives, like the pollen count and chances of measurable precipitation. More than 26 million American jobs have been lost. Economists predict that 21 million of us will be pulled into poverty.  Food bank waiting lines stretch for miles throughout the country.  Not exactly the kind of stuff that lends itself to an optimistic spin.

The basic contours of any crisis are pollenated with an abundance of pessimism.  Yet, with effective, focused, purposeful leadership, we can optimistically and hopefully work our way out of the abyss. On a national level, however, those were not the cards we were dealt.  Instead, 2020 will forever be known as the confluence of two hideous events: the most deadly pandemic in a century, and the reign of our most unhinged and incompetent president ever.  

Donald Trump addresses the crisis in protracted daily news conferences.  I challenge you to find even the tiniest needle of genuine hope in his haystack of delusions, reversals, fabrications and other cognitive constipations he brings to the table.  The diabolical intersection between Trump and this pandemic was on full display Thursday when, on that single day, our country’s COVID-19 body count surpassed 50,000, and warnings rang out to ignore the president’s soliloquy on injecting bleach. 

It’s not just his crisis management incompetence that clouds any path to optimism. Trump failed miserably at what should have been his easiest task: pulling this fractured and wounded nation together, united – despite political differences – in the singular goal of working together to survive this virus.  History offers an abundance of precedence for that approach. For most of us, a threat to our survival outranks partisan and policy differences. Our humanity, in the broadest sense of the word, becomes our loadstar.  

Donald Trump, however, was born without a humanity gene. Not once has this president showed a modicum of empathy for those who lost their lives or their livelihoods in this pandemic.   The closest he comes to expressing grief is when he ruminates about the loss of an economy he thought would buy him reelection. 

It’s the same old story. Unable to pivot, Transactional Donald sticks with the schtick that brought him to the party: an unnatural enthrallment with himself, and intense grievances with everyone not wearing a MAGA hat.  Although the virus infects without regard to party affiliation, the national response is all tangled up in red and blue.   To mask or not to mask became a political litmus test as soon as Trump announced he wouldn’t wear one.

Given all that doom and gloom, you may be wondering whether I have abandoned my vow of optimism.  No, not even close.  The optimistic viewpoint is not a snapshot in time. It’s not looking at a train wreck and calling it “fantastic,” (as Trump might if he thought it would get him votes).  That’s being delusional, not optimistic. Optimism is being hopeful that the horror of now can eventually be converted into a better place.  No successful movement for change has ever been propelled by the hopelessness of pessimism. 

The most hopeful sign lies in the answer to this constantly asked question:  When will we get back to normal?  Never.  When normalcy left us, it did not buy a return ticket. It’s not coming back. And that is very good news.  What is happening to us right now is so deep and pervasive that it will change us in profound ways, and give us a unique opportunity to create a brand new normal. 

Those New Deal programs of the 1930s that lifted up millions of poor and working class Americans didn’t just serendipitously appear one day.  They evolved as the new normal from out of the ashes of the Great Depression, a disaster every bit as devastating and painful and game-changing as this pandemic.  Then, like now, the crisis dramatically identified the cracks, strictures and gaping holes in our body politic.  There was no going back to normal again.

Through the audacity of pain, this pandemic has drawn us a road map for change. Things like wealth redistribution, universal health insurance, paid sick and family leave for workers were mocked as “socialist tropes” by many on the right just months ago. Yet, the multiple trillion dollar relief bills passed by Congress recently made strides in all of those directions. Even some Republicans are pushing the Trump administration to confront the pandemic’s disparate impact on people of color and to address racial disparities in health care. As we eventually attempt a reset on normal, it’s hard not to see momentum on those issues continuing.  

There is something else to be guardedly hopeful about.  For the first time in his presidency, Trump is struggling – really struggling – to shake off his brazen ineptness and idiotic stumbles. This is decidedly not normal.  This is the man who boasted about sexually assaulting women. He put children in cages. He colluded with Russia. He obstructed justice. He tried to force foreign countries to help him win reelection. He was even impeached, and then acquitted.  Through it all, his approval ratings, although low, were relatively constant.  Recent polling shows that the president is rapidly losing the public’s confidence in handling the pandemic.  

Just think about that: The guy who says he could get by shooting someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue is politically done in by a virus he said would be gone by April.  That’s the meaning of – that’s the beauty of – optimism.