Category: Politics

THE AUDACITY OF AUTHENTICITY WITHOUT VIRTUE

What do you call a president who, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, repeatedly spews falsehoods, insults political opponents and praises himself?  A-U-T-H-E-N-T-I-C. You call him authentic.

After all, the 2016 presidential election was all about authenticity (here, here and here). The pundits and the pollsters kept telling us that, for all of his failings, Donald Trump was seen by voters as being authentic. The Donald won the election, the story line went, because he was real and Hillary Clinton was fake.  This bizarre binary standard for evaluating politicians extended into 2020. Reams have been written about potential Democratic presidential candidates and their authenticity or lack thereof. 

Why are we treating authenticity – irrespective of the content of a person’s character – as a virtue?  Clearly, Trump is no phony. He’s the real deal. But the deal is terrible. He is authentically bad, immoral and indifferent to the needs of others. Why is that kind of authenticity virtuous? How did we get here?

Well, don’t blame Aristotle. The architecture he provided for ethical systems that lasted centuries revolved around such virtues as courage, honor, temperance, truthfulness, justice and friendship. Authenticity did not make his list. In fact, Aristotle went in the opposite direction, advising us to emulate others who have these virtues until they become habitual with us. 

Then, in the 18th century, a Genevan philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, advocated an alternative view, one in which authenticity – being true to one’s self – sits atop his ethical hierarchy. Rousseau, according to academicians who studied him, saw pure, unvarnished authenticity as the most important source of happiness and psychological coherence. He believed that people are naturally good and that their authentic selves cannot harm others since “their self-love is moderated by concern for others.”   Rousseau developed this school of thought roughly 300 years before Donald Trump roamed the earth.

The late social critic and academic Christopher Lasch was, however, very aware of the self-absorbed Trumpian archetype. More than 40 years ago, he wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. In it, Lasch noted the similarities between Narcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity. He wrote that narcissism and authenticity are both characterized by “. . . deficient empathetic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed behavior.” In other words:  An authentic narcissist is still a narcissist. And wholly without virtue.

The political fascination with authenticity did not begin with Trump. It exploded with him and, if we are lucky, it will end with him. But this bizarre phenomenon has been building for some time. Think back to the Bush v. Gore election in 2000.  The rap on Gore was that he was too stiff and had a propensity to overinflate his resume. Bush, despite – or maybe because of – an  antipathy toward good syntax, struck people as more real, the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.  

This desire for authenticity in leadership is certainly understandable. Politicians have long been seen as crafty, cagey characters who say one thing and do another, who appear overly buttoned down and tightly scripted.  Add to those perceptions the current environment of rampant distrust and disgust with our government and political systems, and you can begin to see the attraction of someone who simultaneously wants to trash the status quo and appears to be genuinely authentic.  

Like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  Yes, they are lightyears apart in so many ways.  Yet their appeal has embraced the same two elements: being authentic and promising to blow the system up.  Sanders’ brand of authenticity is considerably different than Trump’s.  Bernie is not a narcissist.  But his fans constantly boast about how their candidate hasn’t changed in 40 years.  Indeed, there is a lot of truth to that.  Sanders has forever believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the evil of capitalism and value of class warfare.  

In many ways, Sanders’ authenticity is more pure and moral than Trump’s.  In the finest Rousseauian tradition, Bernie is stridently faithful to his principles. They reflect his true self and he is not of a mind to modify them in order to enlarge his base.  Therein lies a serious problem for a presidential candidate. His allegiance to an ideology makes him authentic, endears him to his followers and advances his movement. But given his narrow appeal to a minority of the electorate, and the absence of the slightest rhetorical nod to wanting to be “president for all Americans”, he lacks the votes to win.  To Bernie, being true to himself is more important than winning.

That is decidedly not the case for Donald Trump.  To him, it’s all about winning. He has no ideology or core beliefs. His positions on . . . well, on everything, change with the wind, depending on what he thinks will help him win.  He spent the first three weeks of the coronavirus crisis insisting it was a hoax that would soon go away. Then he became a “wartime president”, leading the battle against the dreaded enemy virus. As cases started doubling every few days, as temporary morgues were built near hospitals, he talked about a quick return to normal. On Sunday, responding to a bipartisan outcry, he backed away from abruptly ending the war, saying, “Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won.”

 All of these dramatically disparate moves were about only one thing: Trump’s perception of what would best help him win reelection.  That’s authenticity. That’s being true to his narcissistic self. 

It has been said that this life-and-death crisis we are going through will forever change us. Let us hope that one of those changes is a massive rejection of the notion that we should pick our leaders on the basis of unbridled authenticity, regardless of how obnoxious and odious a candidate’s behavior may be.  

Aristotle had it right. Virtue doesn’t lie in being true to whatever kind of self we may have. Virtue is about qualities like courage, honor, honesty and justice that provide a better life for all of us.  Authenticity without virtue is no more than a fool looking into a mirror.

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.

RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH WORLD WAR THREE

If you squint your eyes just right, and try very hard to look beyond and beneath the wreckage of our national politics, it’s possible to find signs of hope, of a new dawn ready to rise out of the ashes of our Trumpian despair. Really. Well, sort of. Anyway, I wanted my first blog post of 2020 to focus on the hopeful, on a vision of transcendence and progressive change. I had 16 pages of notes and was all set to make the case for optimism.  Then our president ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general, and the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of the war drums quickly drowned out all aspirations of hope and change.   

Happy New Year, same as the old year. Only worse. And we thought 2019 got off to a bad start when Trump shut most of the government down.  We should be so lucky to have a shutdown right now. It might have prevented Friday’s drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander.  

Instead, we woke up on the third day of this new year to a cascade of depressing news. Yes, Suleimani orchestrated the deaths of hundreds or thousands (the Prevaricator in Chief says millions) of American and Iraqi troops and citizens. He was also revered as almost a cult figure by Iran’s leaders and allies.  The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised “forceful revenge”.  

As a result, our country went into to full-scale war prep.  The State Department warned all U.S. citizens to leave Iraq immediately.  Thousands of American troops are on their way to the Middle East. U.S. businesses and government agencies were told to prepare for Iranian cyber attacks. “World War III” trended on Twitter.  The Selective Service’s website crashed after being inundated by young men worrying about getting drafted into battle.

Trump, meanwhile, took a hero’s bow at a Miami campaign rally, boasting about Suleimani’s execution-by-drone. “He was planning a very major attack,” said the president, “and we got him!” The crowd roared, and Trump took it to the next level with a single declarative sentence: “God is on our side.”  

If all this had gone down at any other time in our history, the prudent and rational course for us would have been to take a deep breath and engage in watchful waiting as events unfolded.  As unseemly as an assassination of another country’s leader might appear, we would also be mindful of how much we don’t know about the underlying facts of the kill order. The president, after all, is surrounded by military and intelligence experts who carefully weigh all available facts before advising the commander in chief.  If they all thought killing one high ranking Iranian leader would save many American lives, that would warrant a green light in many moral paradigms.  

Sadly, this is not any other time in history. This is now.  This is Donald J. Trump.  His narrative about killing the bad guy in order to save American lives can only be viewed through the lens of a pathological liar, one who, according to the Washington Post’s fact checker, made 15,413 false or misleading statements during his first 1,055 days in office.  He has also demonstrated a propensity to ignore the advice of the experts who surround him, bragging about how, due to the power of his instinct, he knows more than any general.  

Then comes Trump’s single most important behavioral characteristic, at least in terms of predicting the choice he will make in any given situation. He will, without fail, follow the impulse to do whatever he thinks at the time will make him look the strongest and the winningest to his adoring MAGA base.  As a piece of leverage, last year’s government shutdown was a dismal failure for the administration. Trump’s base, however, showered him with adoration for messing up a government they disdain in order to build a wall to keep brown people from “invading” America.  The same please-the-base decision making was responsible for putting children in cages, the transgender military ban and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Treaty, to name but a few. 

The dynamic also explains why Trump rejected the advice of military experts last fall and announced a sudden withdrawal of troops from Syria, leaving our Kurdish allies to fend for themselves.  The president hit the campaign rally circuit in October with boasts of “No more endless wars. I’m bringing them all home.” He basked in the dopamine of cheering crowd approval. 

Not even three months later, the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops into the middle east, gearing up for an Iranian retaliatory strike in response to Suleimani’s killing. Most authorities on the middle east say we are closer to a full-blown war in that region than at any time in the past several decades.  Some say we are already at war, that the drone strike on Suleimani was an act of war.  

How is it that the same president who took bows before a cheering crowd for ending wars is now getting the same reaction for starting one?  Chalk it up to the magic of a freeze frame presidency.  This guy doesn’t do strategy, only tactics in the moment. And whatever that moment portends is all that counts.  Shortly after Suleimani was killed, Trump triumphantly announced that he had “ended a war”, even while thousands of American troops were on their way to the middle east in preparation for Iran’s retaliatory strike. In Trump Time, that neither counted nor mattered.

What makes this horrendous situation even worse is the current political atmosphere in which congressional Republicans have abandoned all moral calculus in order to march in lockstep with a president they know is, at best, unhinged, out of fear that Trump will disparage them on Twitter. These GOP leaders have spent the past few months insisting that there is nothing wrong with a president asking foreign countries to interfere in our elections, a revolting abandonment of long-held norms and values. Add to that now, the party’s acquiescence with the assassination of another country’s leader. 

This rapid and deep abdication of the moral underpinnings of our democracy will one day be laid bare in our history books.  The days we are now struggling through will be correctly portrayed as a major stain on what has been known as the “American Experiment”.  The only control we have over the content of those pages will be the length of that stain, and how we go about removing it and taking our country back.

TRUMP & DUCT-TAPED BANANAS

I wanted to honor this season of love, light, hope and peace by writing something good about Donald Trump. My mother used to insist that good can be found in everyone if you just look hard enough.  After two days of Google searches, I gave up. 

But lo, this is a season of miracles.  No, a star in the east did not infuse me with wisdom.  The epiphany came from a story about an art gallery.  My mom was right.  I had finally found something good to say about our newly impeached 45thpresident.  (Insert drumroll here.)

Donald John Trump is a work of art.  Really.  The revelation hit me as I read about renowned  artist Maurizio Cattelan selling a banana duct-taped to a wall for $120,000. In fact, he sold multiple copies of his exhibit displayed at the Art Basel Miami fair. To be clear, the buyers each got a banana and a piece of duct tape; the wall was not included.  

Why, you may ask, would a duct-taped banana be considered art?  The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, Sebastian Smee, has the answer:  “It’s not the banana . . . that constitutes the art. It’s the grotesqueness of the sale and ensuing spectacle (which included a performance artist freeing the banana from the tape and eating it), and more specifically, it’s the idea that the system is absurd.”

Smee’s explanation was the closest I will ever get to a star-in-the-east moment.  Trump’s presidency has been nothing if not grotesque. The past three years of his administration was a spectacle beyond our wildest imaginations. Roll it all together and what do you get?  An orange-tinted, red-tie-wearing work of art that oozes absurdity through its every pore.  Donald Trump:  not exactly Rodin’s The Thinker, but a genuine piece of art nevertheless.

With that in mind, my gift to you for these tumultuous times, is a collection of Trump art, accompanied not by dreary and predictable political analysis, but by astute, insightful and discerning art criticism:  

PAPERING MARIA.  This allegorical piece, simmering and seething in dramatic contrast, is no more about a president throwing out paper towels to Puerto Rican hurricane victims than Cattelan’s work was about bananas and duct tape.  This work is a bold depiction of powerlessness, of a president so inept and clueless that he brings paper towels to a hurricane-ravaged island, and of the Puerto Rican people who were denied real help by their government because the Bounty Man thought they were foreigners. 

NATO TUSSLE.  Nothing says feng shui to Trump like shoving aside a fellow world leader so he could hold the front and center position in a NATO photograph.  Poor Dusko Markovic from Montenegro was pushed aside by Trump as the NATO gang prepared for a group portrait in 2017. This is quite reflective of the Donald’s unique taste in aesthetics, namely that reverential beauty can be achieved only if it’s about him.

THE QUID-PRO-QUO GIFT. This protracted – and still ongoing – work of performance art is at once whimsical and profound, one part Proust and one part Marx Brothers.   Gordon Sondland, a rich hotel magnate who was never fond of Trump, nevertheless contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural fund because he desperately wanted to become an ambassador in order to fill his life with meaning and purpose (the Proust part).  In exchange for Sondland’s quid, Trump gifted him the European Union Ambassadorship as his quo.  Before he knew it, Sondland was knee-deep in political chicanery involving Ukraine, Trump, Rick Perry and Rudy Giuliani (the Marx Brothers part).   Long story short: Sondland first said Trump told him there was no quid-pro-quo on the Ukrainian stuff, but then, to avoid perjury charges, testified that there was a quid-pro-quo. Although the arc of this performance piece is frustratingly long, its narrative is apt and accessible. It is, indeed, a bold morality play about the ephemeral nature of political relationships. It’s warning is clear: Before you hand over the quid be sure you can handle the quo.    

HEARING WITHOUT LISTENING.  Although Trump’s meeting with Iraqi human rights activist Nydia Murad and her cohort marked a rare Oval Office visit by women, the ensuing photograph brilliantly depicts an unbalanced composition on virtually every sensory level. Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about her torture and rape while in Islamic State captivity. She and her fellow activists are shown engaged and totally in the moment as they focus on pleading their case in the White House.  Trump sits in silence, averting any eye contact with his guests.  It was as if he had no idea who they were, why they were there and when he could get back to watching Fox and Friends. The gestalt effect of this group picture perfectly captures the enormous space between this president and the rest of the world.   

WORDS WITHOUT MEANING.  Writing, of course, is its own art form.  Presidential words last as long as great literature. George Washington wrote: “Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”  Abraham Lincoln wrote: “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”  John F. Kennedy wrote: “The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.”   On the eve of his impeachment, Donald Trump sent a torturous, rambling six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with the stated intent that his words last for 100 years. It had all of the coherence and eloquence of the Unabomber’s manifesto. His artfulness with the written word was characterized with an overabundance of exclamation points and modifiers.  It was filled with terms like “spiteful”, “unfettered contempt”, “egregious conduct”, “disingenuous,” “meritless”, “baseless”, and “a terrible thing”.  And that was only the first page.  From an artistic standpoint, however, the missive drew an accurate portrait of the 45thpresident for anyone interested in looking at it in 2119.  He showed himself to be the man we know only too well:  inarticulate, inaccurate, dishonest, angry and self-obsessed.

Yet, Trump is, indeed, a work of art. And that is as close as I can come to saying something good about him.  There is, however, a caveat.  Although Sebastian Smee, the Washington Post art critic, insisted that the duct-taped banana is art, he also noted that such a label, alone, does not speak to its quality. In other words there is good art and bad art.

Donald Trump is really bad art.  Sorry, Mom.

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.

AN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY’S DUELING WORLDS: FACT & FICTION

Debate students – young people passionate about the art of argumentation and persuasion – should be quarantined from Donald Trump’s impeachment defense.  Either that, or use it as a textbook example of how not to argue a case. 

It may take a leap of faith in these dark moments of American political life, but I’d like to think that we will one day return to the kind of normative discourse in which our dialectic is based on evidence and reason. We will get there only by forever banishing from our brains the intellectually-challenged rhetoric churned out by Trump and his Republican sycophants.

Here is just the tip of the bizarre, otherworldly political climate we are forced to endure:

After days of bruising testimony about how Trump bent foreign policy into a cudgel in an attempt to extract Ukraine’s help with his reelection campaign, the world awaited the president’s exculpatory rebuttal.   And this is what we got through separate tweets:  “The Republican Party, and me, (sic) had a GREAT day yesterday with respect to the phony impeachment Hoax”, and, “NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!” 

Yes, this is Donald Trump being Donald Trump.  From his fictional inaugural crowd to his Sharpie-enhanced hurricane map, facts are foreign to this presidency.  Still, when it comes to a subject as somber and serious as impeachment, it would have been nice to see the quality of debate rise above that of a middle school food fight. 

Instead, Trump responded to a barrage of damaging testimony about his Ukrainian chicanery by calling in to Fox and Friends. His defense? He called Rep. Adam Schiff, who chaired the impeachment proceedings, a “sick puppy”, and insisted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “as crazy as a bedbug”. As for Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the president finally came up with a cause for firing her.  He said – falsely – that the ambassador didn’t post Trump’s picture in the Ukrainian Embassy.

What a difference 20 years makes.  The Bill Clinton impeachment in 1999 felt divisive and acrimonious at the time, but the discourse and arguments presented were thoroughly consistent with the adversarial system of dispute resolution.  Both sides agreed on the facts:  President Clinton had sex with an intern and lied about it.  Republicans argued that the president should be impeached, not for the sexual liaison, but for lying about it.  Clinton’s defenders, on the other hand, posited that a lie about sex does not rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, the constitutional basis for impeachment.  

That all seems so quaint now. The current impeachment controversy can’t, by any stretch of the definition, be called a debate.  Instead, we have two parallel universes. In one, House Democrats systematically assembled evidence to show that the president abrogated his sworn duty to execute policy based on the nation’s interests, not on his own partisan political motives.

For the most part, Trump and his defenders have avoided any engagement with the Democrats’ premise.  Instead, the president called the process a “hoax” and insisted that he is “winning”. After his handpicked ambassador, Gordon Sondland, flipped on him last week and testified that there was, indeed, a quid-pro-quo and that “everyone was in the loop”, Trump triumphantly tweeted “. . .if this were a prizefight, they’d stop it.” 

Meanwhile, two former prosecutors, Preet Bharara and Anne Milgram, issued a special edition of their podcast Thursday night just to rave about how compelling and persuasive last week’s impeachment witnesses were.  They echoed the reaction of many of us by concluding  that the case against Trump has been solidly proven.  Yet, the Donald closed the week by announcing that “. . .we are winning big.”  In a way, both the podcasters and the president are right. That’s because they are operating in separate universes, one factual and the other fictional. 

The political arena’s rhetorical culture is a modified adaptation of the adversary system that has dominated adjudication of legal disputes for more than 200 years.  It rests on the belief that if lawyers for disputing parties advocate fiercely and thoroughly for their clients, through both evidence and argument, a neutral factfinder, such as a judge or jury, will be able to determine the truth of the matter. 

Deliberative bodies, from city councils to the U.S. Congress, have used a similar approach when arguing about legislation.  The legislators marshal evidence that supports their position, along with arguments designed to persuade, not a judge or jury, but their fellow legislators and the voters who control their fate.  Most political debate focuses less on the underlying facts of a controversy and more on the conclusions to be drawn from them.

And then along came a president who eschews facts the way vampires avoid crucifixes.  To him, it’s all about the base. His fevered MAGA crowd has but one truth: the primacy of Donald Trump. He is their savior, their last great white hope against an evolving and diversifying culture they disdain. In this universe, there is no burden of proof because facts, evidence and laws don’t matter. His followers will believe anything he tells them.  Impeachment is a hoax and a witch hunt. Trump is winning and the Democrats are losing. The news media is the enemy of the people. Joe Biden is corrupt. Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton.  His phone calls are perfect.  It doesn’t matter that all of those assertions are demonstrably false. Facts are irrelevant in this universe.

And because his loyal fanbase worships him without question, congressional Republicans, many of whom see Trump as a malignant goiter on their political trajectory, will vote against impeachment out of fear that this president will tweet them out of office. Barring an unimaginable seismic change in this dynamic, the 45th president of the United States will be impeached in the House and acquitted in the Senate, both on party line votes. Trump will call it the greatest presidential achievement in the country’s history.

That leaves only one exit strategy for this dystopia.  Those of us in the other universe, the one where facts and reasoned arguments really do matter, must vote like we’ve never voted before. We don’t yet know the name of our candidate, but truth itself will be on that ballot. It will be the one not named Donald John Trump. Without a hint of hyperbole, this will be the most important vote we ever cast. 

TRUMP’S EXTRAVAGANCE DOES NOT EXTEND TO HIS VOCABULARY

If Donald Trump, God forbid, wins a second term, can someone please teach him a few more words?  His severely limited vocabulary may be the least of our problems, but the president’s propensity to continuously spew out the same monosyllabic mush is way beyond annoying.  

He’s like Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll from the ‘60s. With the pull of a string, she would let loose with one of a handful of preprogrammed phrases.  And then repeat them over and over and over, until a highly agitated parent, in the dark of night, grabbed a scissors and silenced the doll with a snip of her string.

Studies have shown that most adults have a vocabulary in the range of 20,000 to 35,000 words. Trump, it seems, is limited to seven on a good day.   Well, that is a slight exaggeration.  Academicians who put their sanity on the line in order to scientifically analyze the president’s unscripted speech found that he uses 2,605 “unique words”, the lowest of any president.

That means we hear him spout the same utterances ad nauseum: “no collusion”, “build the wall”, “lock her up”, and “believe me”.  One study by USA Today found that Trump used six words more than 500 times while talking about immigration in 2018:   “predator”, “invasion”, “alien”, “killer”, “criminal” and “animal”.

In order to capture the full depth and range of our life experiences, the things we see, hear, touch, smell and feel, along with a vast array of modifiers that help describe them, we have been given an English language of well over one million words.  Because our president ignores 99.9 percent of them, he has to overwork his limited verbal repertoire, forcing a modicum of words to depict vastly disparate meanings.

For example, within a period of three minutes last week, Trump trotted out one of his favorite phrases, “very special”, no less than four times.  The occasion was a Congressional Medal of Honor Ceremony honoring an Army officer.  Since he was still basking in the self-reverential glow from the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the president reminded those assembled that the killing was “something very special.”  Then he placed the medal around the recipient’s neck and announced that “this is a very special thing.”  Introducing the soldier’s relatives, Trump said they are “a very special family.” He wasn’t done.  Trump recognized three Republican senators helping him with his impeachment battle:  Sens. John Cornyn, Ted Cruz and Thom Tillis.  He labeled them “very special warriors.”      

A few days earlier, the Donald called Turkey’s ceasefire in a battle he greenlighted “something very special.”  A quick Google search using the terms “Trump” and “very special”, showed that the latter phrase is not limited to military matters.  Former Playboy model Karen McDougal told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the president handed her money after she was intimate with him.  She said she refused to take it, prompting Trump to tell her she was “very special”.  

In a somewhat awkward moment at the start of the #metoo movement in 2017, the guy who boasted of sexually assaulting women and had been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 25 of them, was asked at a news conference if he had a message on this subject. Said Trump: “Women are very special. I think it’s a very special time.”  Two years later, the president was asked to say a few words to two female astronauts as they walked in space.  “What you do,” Trump told them, “is really something very special.”

Just this past July, he used the same phrase to create profound anatomical confusion. Announcing a new program to combat kidney disease, Trump said: “The kidney has a very special place in the heart.”  As powerful as words can be, they have their limit. To use the same term to describe misplaced organs, the murder of a terrorist leader and a woman who does not charge for sex is definitely pushing the lexical envelope. 

He did the same with “witch hunt”.  The term turns up more than 400 times in the Trump Twitter Archive. In a data base of his speeches, interviews and news conferences, “witch hunt” references far exceed policy discussions.  When former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain ran into sexual harassment accusations in 2011, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When the New York attorney general went after banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When students at Trump University filed a fraud suit against him in 2013, Trump called it a “witch hunt”.  

Then came the Mueller investigation, spawning more than 250 tweets that called the probe the “greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.”  That designation was short lived, however.  In the past month, Trump has called the impeachment inquiry the “greatest witch hunt in American history”.

A recent addition to the abbreviated Trump lexicon has been, for obvious reasons, “corruption”.  Once the whistle blower report surfaced, along with evidence that the president was conditioning assistance to Ukraine on that country digging up dirt that Trump could use in his reelection campaign, a flimsy line of defense emerged: The Donald was pushing Ukraine to clean up its own corruption.

That resulted in Trump using the word “corruption” 29 times in 23 minutes a few weeks ago. Here’s a snippet from his rambling rant: “I’m only interested in corruption. I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about (Joe) Biden’s politics. . .I don’t care about politics. But I do care about corruption, and this whole thing is about corruption. . .This is about corruption, and this is not about politics.”  

Corruption quickly became the word of the month for him.  Asked by a reporter whether he stands by his personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, who is reportedly under investigation for his involvement in the Ukraine fiasco, Trump offered this backhanded compliment: “Rudy is a great gentleman. He looks for corruption wherever he goes.  He’s always looking for corruption.” 

During the Republican presidential primary campaign, Trump frequently boasted about his superior intelligence and spectacular vocabulary.  “I know words,” he told a rally in South Carolina. “I have the best words.”  What he didn’t say is that he can count those words on the fingers of his two tiny hands. Meanwhile, for many of us, there is only one word we long to hear from this president: GOODBYE. 

Now that would be so very special.

TRUMP’S ALTERNATE REALITY IGNORES LAW, TRUTH AND DECENCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MEET THE 2020 CANDIDATE MOST LIKELY TO ASSURE TRUMP’S DEFEAT

Who has the best plan for defeating Donald Trump in 2020?  Is it “electable” Joe Biden and his retrospective of the Obama years? Is it the Democratic Socialism of Bernie Sanders? Is it the policy-in-every-pot approach of Elizabeth Warren?  How about Kamala Harris and her pragmatic idealism?  Or the Minnesota centrist nice of Amy Klobuchar? Maybe the youthful vibrancy of Mayor Pete?

When it comes to crafting the assured destruction of our Trumpian nightmare, there is someone who, hands’ down, tops all of the above.  It is Donald John Trump. Yes, popular mythology has this president coated in Teflon, forever protected from the foibles that would sink any other politician.   He was elected after boasting about his proclivity for sexual assault.  He had babies yanked from the arms of their mothers, insulted all of our allies, took an ax to human rights and environmental protections, all without much of a blip in his approval ratings.  

Yet, there are clear signs that significant numbers of the president’s 2016 supporters are entertaining second thoughts about their guy.  They are embarking on a well-worn path traveled by Trump’s former wives and cabinet members, who learned only too well that what starts off being new and exciting eventually turns into unbearably annoying chaos. 

It is precisely that nerve-shattering mania, in all of its constancy, absurdity and intensity, that may well bring Trump down in 2020.  The guy is a one-trick pony without a second act.  His campaign rallies and tweets are little more than formulaic rants, totally devoid of agility or transformation. Mr. Authenticity is what he is, a pathetic, broken man who couldn’t pivot to save his life. Or his presidency. 

Donald Trump will not be removed from office based on ideas and policies.  Despite all of the fine platform issues advanced by Democratic candidates, it will not be health care, climate change, economic justice, human rights or education policy that drives this presidential election.  It will be chronic and malignant Trump Fatigue, a nauseating state in which, as they say in AA, we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.  

There may be no more poetic way to wrap this story arc than for this bitterly divided country to reach a singular consensus on the only thing that matters right now: the compelling need to stop the constant noise, the deafening drumbeat of useless, irrelevant craziness.  Regardless of where you stand on the critical issues of the day, they’ve all been in a permanent lockdown since January 20, 2017.  It’s been all-Trump-all-the-time. 

That’s how he won the only election he was ever in.  Trump commanded every news cycle and made it all about him. He hasn’t deviated from that schtick for even an hour since 2016. This is not a man with a repertoire of strategies.  He’s a rinse-and-repeat kind of guy.  But here’s the kicker:  It worked three years ago because enough people saw him as totally different from other politicians, a real wild and crazy shit disturber who would fix everything that is wrong with America.  Many of those folks now see him as a crazy old man who never shuts up.  Even in the train wreck metaphor, nobody in their right mind wants to gaze at the same gruesome disaster for three years, let alone eight. 

Think about what we’ve been through just recently. Much of this week has been devoted to the President’s Sharpie-doctored weather map falsely supporting his earlier error in announcing that Hurricane Dorian was headed to Alabama.  Trump’s desire to buy Greenland was a five-day story.  His suggestion that nuclear bombs be used to destroy hurricanes occupied another three days.  Then he “hereby ordered” American companies to stop doing business with China. He called China President Xi Jinping an “enemy” one day, only to reverse course the next day by calling him a “great leader and a brilliant man.” 

For three days last week, Trump focused on marketing his Miami golf club resort as the venue for next year’s G-7 conference, fiercely denying reports that the place is infested with bedbugs. Meanwhile, Trump tweeted to his 64 million followers a picture of an Iranian launch pad that was the scene of a rocket launch failure, except that it turned out the photograph was highly classified as top secret because it could reveal intelligence gathering techniques.  

There is more. Before August ended, Trump, as noted by the New Yorker, called himself the “Chosen One”, flashed a thumbs-up during a photo op with the family of mass-shooting victims, accused Jews who voted for Democrats of “great disloyalty,” and called the chairman of the Federal Reserve an “enemy” of the United States.   He also cheered the burglary of a Democratic congressman’s home and labelled various critics “nasty and wrong,” “pathetic,” “highly unstable, “wacko,” “psycho,” and lunatic,” among other insults.

All this constant, crazy, angry negative noise has begun to turn off previous Trump supporters, folks who voted for him but who were never part of his hard core base.  According to Morning Consult polling, in 15 swing states, including those that won the electoral college count for him in 2016 (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin), Trump has gone from a net positive to a net negative rating between January of 2017 and this summer. (A positive rating means more people approve of him than disapprove, and a negative rating is the reverse.)  

There are other signs of fatigue among 2016 Trump voters.  Although the president’s tweeting has increased substantially over his term ( from 157 times a month during his first six months to 284 times a month for the past six months), his followers are much less active.  Axios reports that Trump’s Twitter interaction rate, measured by likes and retweets, has fallen by 70 percent since he was elected.

Marc Thiessen, the only Washington Post opinion writer who has consistently supported Trump’s policies, recently captured the essence of his guy’s biggest reelection problem: “If you hit the mute button, the administration is doing a great job in many areas,” Thiessen wrote. “But when the sound comes on, the chaos and lack of discipline drown it all out.”

Trump doesn’t do mute. To be sure, his campaign strategists will continue to push their candidate to turn down the volume, assuring him that less is more. A Twitter drought now could pay dividends with a resumption of messaging closer to the election. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” is not merely poetry for lovers, but wisdom for overexposed and overbearing political candidates. 

Fortunately, there is zero likelihood Trump will take that advice.  In his solipsistic heart of hearts, he alone got himself into the White House, and he alone will capture a second term.  God bless him.  If he tried acting less deranged, if he toned down the constant noise of craziness, if he forced himself to appear just a little presidential for a few months, he might well expand his base and win reelection.  

So, by all means, let Trump be Trump. It may well be the best exit strategy out there.