Category: The Presidency

AN ELECTION THAT BROUGHT MORE RELIEF THAN JOY IS A GOOD STEP IN A LONGER JOURNEY

Sometimes getting what you wished for falls far short of the anticipated euphoria. For many of us still suffering from the cataclysm of the 2016 presidential election, the midterms were our coping mechanism. They nursed us through tough times, through travel bans and “shithole countries”, through assaults on healthcare and tax cuts for the rich, through migrant children in cages and “very nice” Nazis in Charlottesville. Through all of the darkness, we looked forward to November 6 of 2018. Surely, in an election this critical, voters would send an unequivocal message repudiating Donald Trump’s racism, hatred and dishonesty. On a purely visceral level, I wanted this president to be publicly scorned, humiliated and rejected by the electorate.

Then I woke up Wednesday morning and realized how naïve I had been. A disaster as horrific as the Trump presidency, with its massive tentacles of anger and division, is not going to be cleaned up in a single election cycle. Yes, the Democrats’ seizure of the House was a genuinely feel-good moment for all of us bleeding heart liberals. Yet, it was an outcome that provoked more relief than elation. After all, in this same election we lost crucial Senate and governor races to conservatives, some of whom trotted out the most disgusting racist tropes since Jim Crow days. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly black and brown, were denied a ballot in blatantly cynical acts of voter suppression. And, as if we needed a reminder of the times we are in, within hours of the polls closing, Trump was right back at work, shaking up the Justice Department in order to gain control over the Mueller investigation, and curtailing asylum for Central American migrants fleeing persecution.

Sometimes, in a desperate desire to vote away our anguish, we ascribe far more power to the ballot than is warranted. In a year as politically demented and tortured as this one, no single election is capable of instantly turning darkness into light. That level of change comes only through a sustained movement, one whose trajectory is anything but a straight line. Here’s how a former community organizer named Barack Obama once described a social change movement: “It’s full of frustrations and setbacks and for every step forward that you take, sometimes it feels like there will be two steps back.” Only by continuing to move, can we make a difference.

And this election, more than most, was all about maximizing those forward steps. The movement started the day after Trump was inaugurated. An estimated 4.5 million American women, in nearly every corner of this country, took to the streets to express their disdain for the policies and behavior of the new president, a man elected after boasting about forcing himself on women. Tens of thousands of them were new to politics, and many became activists, even candidates, all in search of a path out of the abyss that was the 2016 presidential election.

From those steps – and they went both forward and backward, just as Obama described – these women, together with other social justice seekers, led the way Tuesday to begin our climb from that abyss. Wresting control of the House from the Republicans was a giant step, and essential to empowering the resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism. And based on post-election demographics, women – as voters, campaign workers and candidates – led the march to make it happen.

As a result, there will be at least 100 women in the House for the first time in this country’s history. Of the those elected to Congress this week, 42 are women of color. Two are Muslim. Two are Native American. At least three are LGBTQ. Together, they are far more representative of America than the hateful white nationalism espoused by our president.

There were other encouraging results Tuesday. A huge segment of suburban women who voted for Trump two years ago, passionately abandoned that camp and went blue this week. More Latinos voted than ever before, the vast majority for Democrats. The millennial vote was way up, and also largely Democratic. That outcome is something to feel good about, a moment to savor and build upon.

And build we must, for Trump’s movement – in the opposite direction – shows no sign of slowing. His hard core base will be with him until the end. The sole source of gratification fueling this president has nothing to do with accomplishments and everything to do with garnering love and affection from those who long for the days of white privilege. Trump will keep them in the palm of his hand by spinning one fictional crisis after another, nonexistent problems that can be solved only by the Donald. Like sending the military to stop an “invasion of violent criminals and gang members,” which has zero basis in reality.

Although his base of true believers is, according to conservative pollsters, less than 25 percent of the electorate, Trump’s complete disregard for truth and decency has spread into the mainstream of Republican politicians. If the president says it, they will repeat it. They jumped on the “invasion” bandwagon, and even kept a straight face while lying about their deep desire to maintain health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. Their new ethical standard is that if abandoning truth works for Trump then it should work for them.

In other words, to paraphrase Obama, we should anticipate that the ugliness will get worse before it gets better. We also need to remember that the movement born on January 21, 2016, is alive and well, with many steps to go before we sleep.

IF TRUMP HAD A SOUL, HE’D SELL IT FOR A MIDTERM WIN

In the interest of good mental health, we should prepare emotionally for a really bad election night. Yes, Democrats are favored to win a majority of House seats. That prediction has been our nirvana, our beacon of light in the darkness of the past 21 months. But we’ve been hurt before, and know only too well the cruel unreliability of conventional political wisdom. We need to brace ourselves for a GOP sweep that would hand Donald Trump a nauseatingly historic win and tighten his stranglehold on our deeply wounded country.

But I don’t have the slightest idea how to prepare for a cataclysm of that magnitude. A category four hurricane? Evacuate. A tornado? Head to the basement. A more powerful, unchecked Trump trampling America’s core values for the next two years? Not even FEMA has a preparatory template for a disaster of that scale.

I haven’t missed an election in the 48 years I’ve been voting. I’ve had far more losses than wins, and the sun always came up the next day. This time is different. Just contemplating a Republican upset that would bolster Trump’s position churns more raw emotional angst than I’ve ever encountered from a matter that is political, rather than personal. For a relatively laid back kind of guy, this level of reaction – to a midterm election, of all things – was startling and confusing. Until I figured it out.

The outcome of this election is not just political. It is deeply personal. Sure, I would hate to see an electorally emboldened Trump get by with shutting down the Mueller investigation, politicizing the Justice Department, enacting more tax cuts for the rich, and building a wall at the border. But none of those things are waking me up at night. What’s eating away at me is the enormity of the pain that will result from two years of supercharged Trumpism, from turning loose on the American people – particularly those at the margins – an unrestrained, unhinged president who has no soul.

There was no hyperbole in that last sentence. The man is truly without a soul, and that’s what makes this election so different from the others. That’s what makes it personal. Donald Trump isn’t evil because of his political beliefs. He is evil because he believes in absolutely nothing outside of himself. He is evil because he will trample anybody or anything that stands in the way of making himself look like a winner.

He recently captured the entirety of his essence in five words. Asked about his mocking and demeaning of Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, the Donald said: “It doesn’t matter. We won.” Nothing beyond the perpetual feeding of his pathologically engorged ego matters to this president. Not decency. Not respect. Not justice. Certainly not truth.

For 242 years, this country has been striving to form a more perfect union, to become a society of equal opportunity, to offer a beacon to those struggling to be free. Despite rampant imperfections and setbacks, we eventually reached the stature of power and moral authority that endowed our presidency with the distinction of being the leader of the free world. Hark, the trumpets now sound! And what words of wisdom sayeth Forty-five? Nothing matters but winning.

A caravan of frightened, desperate refugees ambles through Central America, finding protection in their numbers against the violence they are fleeing. Trump seizes their plight as stagecraft. In an attempt to pull his base to the polls, he insists Democrats organized this illegal march to our borders and that the migrants are gang members, criminals, even Mid-Easterners, hell bent on terrorism, rape and pillage. None of it is true. But if it helps Trump win, it doesn’t matter.

Nor does it matter to the president how much harm he inflicts on 1.5 million transgender Americans with his edict to, in effect, delegitimize their status and degrade their humanity. If that’s what helps to get the Evangelicals to the polls, so be it. It’s all about winning, so it doesn’t matter.

After days of rhetorically contorting himself over the alleged murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Trump’s Saudi Arabian buddies, the president takes to a campaign rally stage and raves about a Republican congressman who body slammed a reporter and pled guilty to assault. Bad timing? Sure. But he has an election to win. Nothing else matters.

It’s not Donald Trump’s evil alone that has me in a pre-election panic. It is this: Unchecked and unrestrained, this evil will metastasize far more quickly throughout the body politic, spreading its venom through hateful, hurtful bullying, racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

It’s already happening. A man groped a woman on a Southwest flight the other day and told authorities that “the President of the United States says it’s ok to grab women by their private parts.” Hateful, racist attacks by Trump’s merry band of white nationalists are an everyday occurrence. Hundreds of GOP congressional candidates have taken the president’s lead and campaigned on his lies of savage, ruthless, Latino killers storming our borders at the behest of Democrats. That’s all happening now. Imagine if Trump ends up owning one more election night. How do you prepare for the consequences of a disaster like that?

This is the most important midterm election of our lives. Sadly, for us liberals, there is little to be gained but much to be lost. If the bluest wave of our wildest dreams washes ashore November 6, Trump and his veto pen will still occupy the White House. Single payer health insurance, wealth redistribution and saving the environment will continue to occupy the cheap seats in our theater of great expectations The fault lines right now are not about legislation. They are about the cancer careening through the veins of a government led by a morally bankrupt, psychologically impaired and utterly incompetent president.

We are engulfed in a spiraling dystopia. There are databases tracking the president’s lies, sexual assault accusations and his insulting and degrading remarks. When we think he can’t get any worse, he does. In the simplistic zero-sum bubble he has drawn us into, there is only one exit strategy. Donald Trump – and all that he represents – must lose. A Democratic midterm victory will not create an end to our nightmare, but it could be a much-needed beginning of the end. This much is certain: We will not get our country back until Donald Trump loses. Right now, nothing else matters.

NOT REPORTING TRUMP’S LIES IS ONE MORE ASSAULT ON TRUTH

Donald Trump’s daily diatribes about “fake news” are drawing support from an unlikely source: academicians and others on the left who insist that the news is, indeed, fake because it distributes the president’s lies. They want journalists to stop reporting Trump’s false statements, arguing that merely labeling them as incorrect fails to mitigate their propaganda value.

Renowned linguist George Lakoff says the news media has “become complicit with Trump by allowing itself to be used as an amplifier for his falsehoods and frames.” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen claims journalists “haven’t been able to assimilate the fact that. . .the president of the United States is a troll”. For that reason, the professor believes reporters should ignore Trump’s inaccurate tweets.

Another journalism professor, Arizona State University’s Dan Gillmor wrote an “open letter to newsrooms everywhere” with the salutation of “Dear Journalists, Stop Being Loudspeakers for Liars.” He begged reporters and editors to “stop publishing their lies”, referring to Trump and members of his administration. He also insisted that White House briefings not be given air time, and that Trump never be allowed on live television because he lies. Instead, Gillmor suggested that the president be “put on a short delay” so his statements could be fact-checked and not aired if found to be incorrect.

With all due respect to these learned thinkers, I say hogwash. When the president of the United States lies, even at the current rate of 8.3 times a day, that’s news we need to know. I’m not unsympathetic with the concerns of Lakoff and others that reporting Trump’s falsehoods and correcting them may keep the lie alive with some news consumers. Lakoff compares that cognitive process to the outcome of telling someone not to think about an elephant. Call me old fashioned, but good journalism is not about trying to get people to think a certain way. It’s about giving them the information they need to make decisions. Besides, in a world where most Trump supporters get their news from Fox and a handful of conservative websites – not to mention @realDonaldTrump and his 53 million followers – it is hard to imagine the efficacy of withholding information in order to combat presidential lies.

The one thing in this angry, bitter, tribalized moment that we all agree on is that we have never had a president like Donald J. Trump. Yes, every president bent the truth a bit, and some told downright whoppers. But the news media and the nation could handle the situation in the normal course of business. Journalists simply told the public what a president said. If subsequent fact-checking or other events cast doubt on his veracity, then that became a new story.

In 1986, every news outlet in the country quoted President Ronald Reagan’s firm and absolute denial that the government had covertly sold weapons to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages. It later turned out that was exactly what happened. After those facts were reported, Reagan had these words: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Sadly, the current occupant of the White House indulges in neither facts nor evidence, choosing instead to make it up as he goes, with the flight of fancy of a five-year-old. So, yes, it took news reporters and editors a while to adjust to this wild aberration in presidential coverage. While the result is a work in progress, it represents a profound – and needed – change in presidential coverage.

Some recent examples:

CNN: “Trump falsely claims nearly 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico ‘did not die.’”

Wall Street Journal: “Trump wrongly blames California’s worsening wildfires on water diversions.”

The Hill: “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.”

Seattle Times: “Trump says crime in Germany is ‘way up’. German statistics show the opposite.”

The Washington Post ran a front page story this week by its fact checker, Glenn Kessler, detailing how Trump “bobb(ed) and weav(ed) through a litany of false claims, misleading assertions and exaggerated facts” on his Sunday night 60 Minutes appearance.

The trend, although not universal, is clearly one of labeling Trump’s statements as false in a first-day story, with later follow-up on the specifics of his misrepresentation. Indeed, it is difficult to find a news story quoting Trump that does not identify at least a portion of his utterances as false. There are exceptions. USA Today recently ran a Trump op-ed that was filled with blatantly false statements. Although the publication later noted the inaccuracies – and included some fact-checking links in the online version – allowing the piece to run with those falsehoods was a gross breach of basic journalistic ethics.

The gold standard for good reporting is truth. Donald Trump announced a few months ago that U.S. Steel was opening six new mills in the U.S. It was completely untrue. The company is not opening any new domestic steel plants, as media reports explained. But here’s the rub: If the edict of those imploring journalists not to report Trump’s false statements had been followed, then the truth that the president lied about the new steel plants would never have been told.

These are depressing and deeply frustrating times for those of us consumed with the nightmare that is our out-of-control and unhinged president. He continues to commit more atrocities in a single day than any of his predecessors did in an entire term. Yet, he is wildly popular with his fanbase, and resoundingly supported by the Republican Party. Those urging the news media to ignore Trump’s deceitful tweets and comments see the strategy as a way of toppling, or at least weakening, the president’s propaganda machine. I believe they are wrong. Truth is a powerful force and it has crushed many authoritarian regimes. The truth right now is that our president lies, every day, in every way. That’s a story no reporter should ever sit on.

TRUMPIAN JUSTICE: OUR CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE UNRAVELING OF AN UNHINGED PRESIDENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCORING HELSINKI: DEEP STATE 1, TRUMP 0

We now have four, not three, branches of government: legislative, judicial, executive and, last – and most assuredly least – Donald-I-Alone-Can-Fix-It-Trump. Yes, our Constitution places the president in the executive branch. The Donald, however, disregards all instruction manuals and briefing memos, preferring to roll instead as his own unattached entity, a government of himself, by himself and for himself.

This unique bifurcation had been in the works since Inauguration Day, but reached full gestation in Helsinki last week when Trump pulled away from his own administration in a nauseating, groveling embrace of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The president not only rejected his advisors’ advice against having such a meeting with Putin, but he was sharply critical of his own government’s findings that the Russian leader had ordered an attack on our country’s elections.

As a result, the “Deep State” that Trump so vigorously campaigned against moved quickly and decisively to right the sinking ship of state. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, a Trump appointee, issued a statement contradicting the president’s remarks that let Russia off the hook for its election interference. Later that week, FBI Director Christopher Wray, the guy Trump appointed after he fired James Comey, pushed back on the president’s claim that the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt”, insisting that “Russia attempted to intervene with the last election, and . . . continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”

So much happens so quickly these days, it is difficult to sit back and take measure, to process what is happening to our country. It is virtually unheard of for high level presidential appointees to publicly disagree with the president. But it gets even more bizarre than that. More than a week has passed since Trump and Putin spent two hours talking to each other with only themselves and their interpreters in the room. Russia has alluded to agreements reached in that meeting, but nobody in our intelligence agencies knows what they are because Trump hasn’t told them. As a result, both the New York Times and Politico have reported that U.S. spies are attempting to tap into Russian intelligence in order to learn what the President of the United States said in that meeting. No reputable publisher would ever accept a spy thriller manuscript with that story line. It’s beyond belief.

If there is a silver lining in this absurdity, it resides in the Deep State. The term loosely refers to knowledgeable government professionals who keep the country running, apart from – and sometimes in spite of – elected leaders. At various times, the Deep State has been scorned by the left and the right. In the 1960s, it was known as the “Industrial Military Complex”, and was deeply eschewed by those protesting the Vietnam War. Decades later, Edward Snowden attributed secret surveillance of U.S. citizens to the inertia of the Deep State. On the other end of the spectrum, the predicate for making America great again was the abolition of the Deep State, which the Trump campaign saw as a swamp in need of draining.

Ideology aside, the Deep State, like most governments, is neither monolithic nor inherently good or evil. It all depends on how it is used. Under our current circumstances, it has proven to be an effective safety net against the autocratic ravages of an unfit president, a “sad, embarrassing wreck of a man,” in the words of conservative columnist George Will. So loudly, confidently and unanimously was the Deep State’s repudiation of Trump’s Helsinki performance that Trump was forced to offer a rare, if lame, correction, allowing that Russia may have interfered with our election, but it “. . . could have been other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”

While the Helsinki summit was the most dramatic presentation of the divide between Trump and the rest of the executive branch, it was by no means the first. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went on Fox News immediately after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville to say that Trump “speaks for himself” on his values, and that the State Department remains committed to “equal treatment of people the world over.”

Minutes after the president disparaged NATO allies at the recent Brussels conference, even questioning whether the United States should continue to participate, current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on Twitter that “NATO is the most successful alliance in history”. According to news reports, Defense Secretary James Mattis deliberately kept a low profile during the NATO meeting and Trump’s European tour to better position himself to help repair the damage later.

Nowhere is the divide between the president and the rest of the executive branch more pronounced than in North Korea. Trump was in an euphoric glow after his smoke-and-mirrors spectacular in Singapore, insisting that nuclear peace is now in hand, thanks to his diplomatic powwow with Kim Jong-un. Pompeo, and the other deep-staters, do not expect the regime to give up their nukes easily, and see nothing but a long slog ahead, as has always been the case with North Korea.

Federal bureaucrats have long been fodder for punchlines. They symbolize what cynics see as a bloated and broken government. And they have a point, particularly when a Social Security deposit is late, or FEMA botches a hurricane recovery, or the SEC fails to stop a Bernie Madoff scheme. Yet, this Deep State also includes bureaucrats who have caught and removed defective medications, recalled dangerous motor vehicles and discovered major breakthroughs in fighting deadly diseases. It includes at least 69 Nobel Prize winners, mostly little known scientists.

Federal servants are bound by a code of loyalty that is very different than the one Trump attempted to extract from James Comey. They pledge “loyalty to country above loyalty to persons, party or government department”. That some cabinet secretaries and intelligence personnel have adhered to that oath and chosen to follow the facts, rather than an unhinged, fact-free president, is an amazing show of patriotism. Long live the Deep State.

NO-PIVOT TRUMP AND THE CAMPAIGN THAT NEVER ENDS

Remember all that talk about Donald Trump pivoting? Once he secured the Republican nomination, he was supposed to pivot from the right to the center. After the election, we waited for him to pivot from candidate to president. When he gave his first speech to Congress without embarrassing himself, there was talk of his having pivoted into a genuine leader. Pundits greeted John Kelly’s appointment as White House chief of staff as the Donald’s major pivot toward becoming presidential. It never happened, none of it. Turns out that waiting for Trump’s pivot was as laborious and fruitless as Vladimir and Estragon Waiting for Godot. Like Godot, the pivot, never came.

Instead, for the first time in our history, we have in the Oval Office a one-dimensional, perpetual candidate, a blowhard with neither core beliefs nor the slightest interest in public policy, a president in name only whose singular vision is his own self-aggrandizement. And this is why our charlatan-in-chief can put children in cages, buy a porn star’s silence, lie 6.5 times a day, and still have a 42 percent approval rating.

All he does is campaign. There is no real governing going on here. Governance to Trump is the art of making stagecraft pass as statecraft. He has created a governing façade that casts himself as the omnipotent, winning superhero, righting imaginary wrongs and taking America back to a joyous, magical place and time that never existed.

We should have seen this coming when Trump filed his reelection documents on the day he was inaugurated, as opposed to waiting until the third year of his term, as all of his modern predecessors did. Or, when he obsessed over the size of his inauguration crowd. Or, when he ordered an investigation of voter fraud, insisting he had been robbed of votes, even though he won. Or when he kept right on holding campaign rallies and leading the faithful in chants about the wall and Crooked Hilary. These are not the actions of a man pivoting from campaign to governance. Alas, the Donald doesn’t pivot. He has only one gear and it’s all about creating adoration for himself.

At this very moment, Trump is preparing the pageantry for a prime-time Monday night announcement of a Supreme Court nominee who will supposedly sound the death knell for abortion rights. He’s been downright giddy about it for days, telling one audience this week, “other than war and peace,” packing the court with the right judges is the most important thing a president can do. Lest you think Trump’s judicial fixation reflects a deeply held reverential respect for the unborn, check out this 1999 clip of him boasting that “I am very pro-choice.” This nomination, like everything in Trump’s life, is purely transactional. He delivers a solid 5-4 conservative majority on the court, and sops up more love and approval from the right. As a bonus, attention is diverted from the thousands of migrant children he pulled away from their parents.

Reach deep into the soul of Donald Trump and you will find absolutely nothing. He is the first president with a totally empty ideological slate, unless winning or self-interest count as ideologies. He has changed party affiliation five times. His position on any issue turns on a dime, based on his instant calculation of what will make him look best in any given moment. Aside from this perpetual self-promotion, he makes no pretense of governing or leading. He doesn’t read briefing memos prepared by his staff. He doesn’t understand many of his own positions or policies. He signs executive orders without reading them or knowing what they do.

By not governing, Trump is able to focus exclusively on the only aspect of his job that appeals to him: campaigning. He pours all his energy into promoting himself and his brand, and demonizing those who decline to worship at his altar. Everyday his 40 million Twitter followers are bombarded with mini campaign messages. Yes, most are in prose that could pass for a middle school message board, but based on polling, they are having an impact.

Here’s a quick sample from the past few days:

• Democrats. . .weak on the Border and weak on Crime.
• We are doing a far better job than Bush and Obama.
• TAX CUTS are already providing historic gains for minorities, women, and small businesses.
• Democrats want anarchy, amnesty and chaos – Republicans want LAW, ORDER and JUSTICE!
• Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!
• The Russian Witch Hunt is Rigged!
• Crazy Maxine Waters, said by some to be one of the most corrupt people in politics.

This is what happens when a candidate for president is incapable of grasping the fact that he won, and must now actually lead. Like a character in an absurdist play, he just keeps on campaigning while his kingdom crumbles. Yet, it does explain why a guy who has accomplished so little, and destroyed so much, manages to hold a 42 percent approval rating. As former Trump University students can tell you, aggressive marketing, laced with a modicum of fraud, can sell a horrible product.

FORGET CIVILITY. FIGHT TRUMP WITH WHATEVER WORKS

It seemed so clear to me when I started writing this post: tossing the president’s press secretary out of a restaurant was wrong. So were the boisterous dining disruptions that protesters foisted upon other Trump surrogates. Aren’t we supposed to go high when they go low? All this does is let the Trumsters play the victim card, right? Then a funny thing happened: I changed my mind.

Believe me, that was a painful experience. We all have our own style and approach to dealing with conflict, born of our life experiences. I spent more than 30 years as a union rep, tangling with some pretty virulent management types. The only real control I had – on a good day – was over myself. I chose civility, decency and respect, not out of a higher moral calling, but because that approach worked for me and my goal of helping union members get the best contract possible. That meant avoiding personal attacks and name-calling, and sticking to the issue at hand, while building power to make a decent deal.

So I cruised right along on my high horse, crafting this ode to civility and respect. I reread my words, searching for a pithy and righteous close. That’s when it struck me. I was wrong. This is Donald Trump’s America now, an ugly, hateful abyss that keeps turning darker and bleaker by the hour. Civility and respectfulness are not going to get our country back anytime soon.

During this past week:

A California woman screamed at a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent that Mexicans are “rapists, animals and drug dealers”, echoing one of Trump’s favorite litanies.

A Tennessee congressional candidate put up a billboard vowing to “Make America White Again”.

A South Carolina woman was charged with beating a black child and screaming racial epithets at him because he was swimming in a pool with white kids.

A North Carolina man who insists that God is a white supremacist and the Jews descended from Satan won the Republican primary for a seat in the state legislature.

Thousands of children, many in diapers, remain separated from their migrant parents as a result of Trump’s unconscionable political power play at the border.

The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban and delivered a serious blow to organized labor. With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, credible court observers predict that abortion rights will be abolished within 18 months, and that the court will tilt severely rightward for decades to come.

In other words, Donald Trump is doing precisely what he promised. He is shaking up the foundations of our country at levels totally off the Richter Scale. This isn’t a collegial debate over tax policy or farm subsidies. This is a historic existential battle for the heart and soul of America. We are in a cold civil war that is getting warmer by the day. It will take more than civility to win this one.

Earlier this week, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters was wildly cheered by a crowd of energized millennials when she told them: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” By the end of the week, Waters had canceled all public appearances because of death threats. Trump called her “unhinged” with an “extraordinarily low IQ” and claimed – incorrectly – that she had threatened to harm his supporters. Then came top congressional Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both blasting Waters for encouraging such incivility. Said Schumer: “If you disagree with a politician . . . vote them out of office. But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Oh yes it is, Senator. The Civil Rights Act did not flow majestically from a reasoned debate by golden tongued orators. It took years of street protests and massive harassment of political opponents. As Jonathan Bernstein, a former university professor, wrote for Bloomberg this week, “From the American Revolution on, the spoils of freedom, fair treatment and equality have not gone to the patient and polite. The spoils have gone to those who are incensed and determined, unafraid and unashamed to raise more than a little hell.”

No, embarrassing cabinet members in restaurants and other direct actions are not going to end our Trumpian nightmare. But they are viable tactics in a broader strategy to do just that, by flipping at least one of the two congressional chambers in November and removing Trump from office in the 2020 election, if not before. It’s all about voter turnout, tapping into the passion of those millennials who cheered Maxine Waters’ call to action, reaching blacks, Latinos and others, disenchanted with both parties, but ready to act now against a president intent on marginalizing them. Those actions pull them in, strengthen the movement and evolve into votes.

As a personal matter of style, I will continue to choose civility. If I owned a restaurant, I’d let Sarah Huckabee Sanders eat there. On the other hand, if someone tosses her out because of the abhorrent policies she has to defend, it reminds us all that these are not ordinary times. It reminds us that the rules of political discourse have to change in order to accommodate the toxicity of an environment that threatens the values we hold dear.

We don’t have to become Trump to beat Trump, but neither should we cling blindly to an honor code of civility when dealing with a lying thug who takes children away from their parents and emboldens bigotry of every stripe. That, Senator Schumer, is what is really not American.

BLATHERER-IN-CHIEF DESERVES ZERO TOLERANCE

This was the toughest week yet in our abominable Trumpian nightmare. The visceral pain of children pulled from their parents’ arms was exasperated by the president’s repeated lies, and the abject dysfunction of a government gone mad.

Still, the Donald managed to trot out a slogan that describes his presidency with amazing accuracy: “Zero Tolerance”. In the interest of truth-in-labeling, those are the words that should adorn his red baseball caps. After this week – and the 75 weeks that preceded it, “Make America Great Again” is a brutally inaccurate description of this dystopia. “Zero Tolerance” really nails it.

This president, and his merry band of hateful sycophants, have zero tolerance for truth, decency, complexity or compassion. They have zero tolerance for the poor, or for those who are neither white nor male. On a deeply personal, existential level, Donald J. Trump has zero tolerance for anyone who is not him, although he has been known to carve out an exception for those who carry his DNA, and/or bow down and worship him.

The atrociousness of this president’s conduct seems to be reaching new lows on a regular basis. It’s like waiting for an addict to hit rock bottom, only to realize there is no bottom, only an indeterminate descension. That means we miss, or forget, so many of Trump’s incomprehensible utterances while preoccupied with the major horror stories of the day. When fixated on images of tormented children wailing in cages, it’s difficult to focus on off-the-wall presidential statements, particularly when there are so many of them.

As a public service, I offer this small sample of presidential inanities, some of Trump’s more bizarre words that may have been lost in the smoke from the American values he’s trying to burn:

JUDICIAL GRAFT. In a speech to a business group this week, Trump ridiculed his own administration’s proposal to hire thousands of new immigration judges to relieve the backlog at the border. Said the president, mocking his own Justice Department, “Seriously, what country does this? Thousands and thousands of judges they want to hire. Who are these people?” Then came the kicker: “Now can you imagine,” the president asked, “the graft that must take place?” This is the president of the United States accusing federal immigration judges of being on the take. Not only is there no evidence, or even a credible accusation, of such corruption, it’s hard to imagine a Honduran migrant stepping off a raft from Mexico with the wherewithal to bribe an immigration judge.

SPACE FORCE. The president proposed a new military branch this week, the “Space Force”. Beaming before the cameras, he boasted that it will be “separate but equal” to the Air Force. Trump is the first president to trot out that old Jim Crow phrase since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate is inherently unequal”.

MINING HIS THOUGHTS. In a Duluth, Minnesota speech Wednesday, Trump addressed a highly controversial local issue involving proposals to mine precious metals in that state. Here’s what he said: “We’ll do it carefully and if it doesn’t pass muster, maybe we don’t do it at all. But it’s going to happen, I will tell you.”

CANADIAN SHOES. In one of his many warning shots over Canadian tariffs, the president claimed that our neighbors to the north are smuggling goods across the border. “They buy shoes,” he said, “then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old.” He offered no further explanation but ended his remarks with this aspiration: “We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country.”

WHATCHAMACALLIT HOUSE. Standing next to the Easter Bunny and the First Lady during last spring’s White House egg roll, Trump tried to thank his wife for keeping “this incredible house, or building – or whatever you want to call it, because there really is no name for it, it is special.” You’d think it would be easy for this white nationalist president to remember that he lives in the White House.

BOWLING FOR TARIFFS. Here’s how Trump, in a recent speech, described how Japan keeps American cars out of their country: “It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify.” It was unclear what he meant and the White House communication office had no comment.

INSPIRING GRADUATES. Here’s the profound inspiration the commander in chief shared with this year’s graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning, you got to win.”

OPIOIDS. In a Nashville speech, Trump boasted – incorrectly – that the country’s opioid addiction problem was lessening, thanks to his program. Here’s how he described that program: “We’re getting the word out – bad. Bad stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm; you come out, you’re a drug addict with this crap. It’s way down. We’re doing a good job with it.”

SPACEY INFINITY. After signing an executive order on space exploration, the president waxed philosophical about what might be out there to explore. “A lotta room out there, right?” he said. “This is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don’t really know. But it could be. It has to be something – but it could be infinity, right?”

THE POOR NEED NOT APPLY. In a Georgia speech, Trump professed his love for the poor but drew the line at hiring them. Here is what he said: “And I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?”

Sadly, there is absolutely nothing about this man, his presidency, or his monopolization of our thoughts these past 16 months that makes the slightest bit of sense. When it comes to Donald J. Trump, all we are left with is Zero Tolerance.