Category: The Presidency

ABRACADABRA! THANK DONALD ALMIGHTY THERE’S PEACE AT LAST

How did a bungling blowhard like Donald Trump became a master illusionist? The guy reaches into a top hat, pulls out absolutely nothing but insists it’s a rabbit. And 40 percent of the country cheers wildly, as if David Blaine had just made the Washington Monument disappear. That pretty much sums up this week’s Singapore Magic Show, where Donald The Magnificent supposedly pulled world peace out from behind the ear of a ruthless North Korean dictator.

Ronald Reagan was known as the “Teflon President” because he could screw up without repercussions. Trump goes way beyond Teflon. He is the Bubble President, encased in a truth-free bubble, hermetically sealed off from our fact-based universe. His illusions are created by neither sleight-of-hand nor clever equipment. Instead, they germinate in a damaged, ego-driven imagination that would make Walter Mitty blush. They go from there, totally unfiltered, directly to his mouth. Reality in Trump World, is whatever the Donald says it is. That’s one mean parlor trick!

But there he was, in front of American and North Korean flags, shaking hands with Kim Jong Un and announcing a “very comprehensive” agreement that will bring peace to the world. He later tweeted that people can “sleep well” now that there is no nuclear threat. Outside the bubble, however, North Korea has not given up a single nuclear weapon and retains the missile system to deliver them. The agreement signed in Singapore contained only promises to work toward disarmament. There was nothing comprehensive about it. In fact, it didn’t go beyond the same kind of general pledges the U.S. secured from North Korea in the past, pledges eventually broken by the totalitarian regime.

Look, after a year of Trump and Kim trading threats to blow each other up, is it better that they are sharing plates of crispy fried pork in Singapore? Of course. What’s unsettling is Trump’s total lack of a grasp on what’s happening. The negotiations with North Korea did not end with the Trumpian stagecraft this week; they have barely begun. The fact that these two oddball leaders are talking to each other is, indeed, an improvement over comparing the sizes of their nuclear buttons, but the immediate reality remains that North Korea has nukes and their elimination has yet to be worked out. Trump’s wholly premature victory lap in declaring himself the architect of world peace when substantive negotiations have barely begun, casts grave doubt on his ability to shepherd such a delicate process to a productive conclusion. Seeing only what you want to see, rather than what is really there, is one of the worst occupational hazards in negotiations.

Yet, that has been this president’s biggest Achilles heel. His pathological tendency to construct his own reality, and then make decisions based on those illusions, has plagued every square inch of his presidency. He went after Obamacare, boasting that he had a plan for much better insurance at a lower cost. There was no plan. He insisted that he had a way of getting Mexico to pay for the wall he wants to build. He didn’t. He claimed to have a scheme for a $1.5 trillion program to repair the country’s infrastructure. He didn’t.

Although Trump’s governance by delusion has been the hallmark of this administration, he took his magical thinking artform to new heights this week. After the photo-op pageantry with Kim, reporters asked the president why he thought the North Korean leader could be trusted to disarm, particularly in light of that regime’s extensive history in breaking promises. Trump’s answer, as reported on a Washington Post podcast? He’s a “good judge of people” and his “gut” tells him North Korea won’t go back on its word. Let that sink in for a minute: We can sleep well now because Donald J. Trump is a good judge of people. Pass the Ambien, please.

A central storyline of this presidency has been Trump’s utter ineptness at judging people. His former national security advisor, a campaign foreign policy advisor, his campaign manager and a deputy manager have been indicted on felonies or have already pled guilty. The Donald has had major falling outs with most of his hand-picked cabinet members and top advisors. Just ask Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director for 10 days and the posterchild for terrible personnel decisions. Steve Bannon was his go-to guy until Trump kicked him to the curb, claiming that Bannon had “lost his mind”. Similar stories for Reince Priebus (Chief of Staff), Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), Tom Price (HHS Secretary), H. R. McMaster (National Security Advisor) and a host of others. No elected first-term president in the past 100 years has had this much turnover in the people he appointed to top positions.

Trump presumably spent considerable time interviewing and reviewing background information on his appointees, and still ended up going sour on most of them. Yet, he meets Kim for the first time and immediately senses a “very special bond” worthy of his trust. This is a man who had his subordinates killed for falling asleep in a meeting or showing “disrespectful posture”. Kim also had his uncle and a brother murdered, along with at least 340 other people whom he felt did not sufficiently respect him. Given that Trump is limited to dealing with his detractors through a mean tweet, the “special bond” here may well be based on envy.

There is no presidential magic that will successfully denuclearize this ruthless, oppressive regime. If that goal can be accomplished, it will come only through steely eyed negotiations, focused on hard facts, not illusions of grandeur, and based on legitimate interests of both parties, not on the ego needs of deranged leaders. It would also be immensely helpful if the Bubble President took a profound cue from the Teflon President’s experience in a similar quandary: Trust, but verify. It beats the bonding of speed dating every time.

SAVING OUR DEMOCRACY THROUGH TRUMP OBSESSION

In case you haven’t noticed, we are obsessed with Donald Trump. He gets far more news coverage than any of his predecessors. We incessantly talk, tweet, post and blog about him. Late night and early morning talk shows digest the Donald’s every move. Four films at this year’s Sundance Festival were about Trump. Psychotherapists are treating patients for “Trump Anxiety Disorder”. Drained by the antics of our 45th president, people are unplugging from social media just to clear their heads.

So, in the vernacular of Brokeback Mountain, why can’t we quit him? What sense does it make to fixate on someone we know will fill our hearts with angst, agony and anger? Why not go on a lean Trump diet of a morsel or two every now and then?

The answer is that Donald J. Trump poses a lethal threat to the core principles of our 242-year-old democracy. Ignoring the elephant in the room doesn’t mean he’s not there. We have every reason to be anxious and angry. Yet, our deliverance from this morass will come from continued vigilance, not escapist denial. And come it must, for our very way of life is at stake.

If you think that last sentence was mere hyperbole, then consider what this president said Monday night in response to a warrant authorizing the search of his attorney’s office: “It’s an attack on our country . . . ; it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” Of course, “what we all stand for” is a nation of laws. The search warrant was sought through those very laws, by top U.S. Justice Department officials appointed by Trump. It was also authorized by a federal judge, representing a separate branch of government. It was as American as apple pie. Yet the president of the United States saw the search as treason simply because it might have adverse consequences for him. Only in an autocracy ruled by a strongman tyrant would that premise make sense.

Therein lies the problem. Trump approaches the presidency as if our constitutional democracy doesn’t exist. He may think he has a bigger nuclear button than his North Korean counterpart, but what the Donald really wants is Kim Jong-il’s title: Supreme Leader. Trump is perpetually mystified and profoundly frustrated with the parliamentary ways of Congress. And he has no time whatsoever for the annoying intrusion of a judiciary he can’t control. As he has said so many times, “I alone” can fix the country’s problems. If only he could find a way to rule the kingdom by himself.

And that is precisely why it is so important for us not to turn our backs on this presidency. Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote a book called How Democracies Die. They cited four markers, all of which have Trump written all over them: They are:

1. Rejecting or showing weak commitment to democratic rule.
2. Denying the legitimacy of political opponents.
3. Encouraging or tolerating violence.
4. A readiness to stifle or limit civil liberties of opponents, including media.

Hanna Arendt, a noted political philosopher of the Twentieth Century, wrote about the characteristics of totalitarianism more than 80 years ago. The ideal subject for totalitarian rule, Arendt wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” According to the Washington Post fact checker, Trump made more than 2,000 false or misleading statements during his first 355 days in office. He has relentlessly gone after the news media, insisting that everything they publish or broadcast is “fake news.” Polls show that a substantial portion of his base believes him.

If Donald Trump ruled this country in the authoritarian style he craves, there would be a total Muslim ban, a complete rollback of LGBTQ rights, a wall around Mexico, eviction from the country of 800,000 young immigrants brought here as children, deportation of millions more, all without due process. To one extent or another, those objectives have either been scaled back or blocked by the courts, or by the actions or inactions of Congress. So far, our democracy is holding, even against the will of a man determined to undermine it.

Yes, the news media has covered Trump more extensively than any other president. And, yes, most of the coverage has been negative. But it’s negative in the same sense that a story about a devastating hurricane is negative. By definition, news is an aberration, something unexpected or contrary to custom and tradition. When Trump, on almost a daily basis, issues statements that are patently false, that’s news. When the president calls impoverished African countries “shitholes”, that’s news. When he says one thing and then does the complete opposite, that’s news. When he repeatedly demeans and insults other governmental leaders, including members of his own cabinet, that’s news.

At this very moment, according to news reports, we are on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Trump wants to fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials in an attempt to shut down the Russian election interference investigation. So far, his own advisors and other Republican leaders have held him back. But, as we know, Trump doesn’t take kindly to advice that runs contrary to his impulse.

Clearly, our democracy is facing more peril than it has in at least 50 years. Now is the time for more Trump news, not less. Now is the time, for us to tune in, not out. A recent poll showed that one in five Americans have participated in protests against Trump. That’s just the vigilance we need to protect our democracy. After all, that is really, in the president’s words, “what we all stand for”.

PORN STAR AND PLAYMATE MASK REAL ISSUE: TRUMP’S SEXUAL ABUSE

A fair triage of Donald Trump’s victims would put Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal near the bottom of the pack. I get how unseemly it is for the president’s high powered legal team to bully a porn star (Daniels), and a former Playboy Playmate (McDougal), into silence. What I don’t get is why any woman who consented to have sex with this bloated, orange-tinted misogynist would want to share that indiscretion with the world.

I don’t mean to be overly judgmental here. We have all led imperfect lives and experienced moments of vile, disgusting behavior. But, as a rule, we don’t confess our sins on “Sixty Minutes”, as Daniels will supposedly do Sunday night. The closest anyone came to that was 26 years ago when Bill and Hillary Clinton used the CBS venue to reaffirm their marital bond in the wake of reports that Bill had been unfaithful. That was when Hillary famously said, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”

Oh my. Those were simpler, more innocent times, even as the country’s moral axis was shifting from a paradigm in which marital infidelity – once acknowledged or proven – was a bar to holding high office. The bar has not merely been lowered, it’s been buried in a swamp of moral depravity. We now have a president who was elected after boasting on tape about forcibly kissing women or grabbing them by their genitals, prompting more than a dozen women to credibly accuse him of doing just that.

If there is any real news in the Daniels and McDougal stories, it rests with the fact that their alleged Trumpian sexual contact was consensual, and therefore a clear break in his behavior pattern. Other than that, there is, sadly, nothing new or even shocking about the notion that Donald Trump chose to bed other women while his wife, Melania, was recovering from giving birth to their son. This is a man congenitally incapable of maintaining anything other than a transactional relationship with another human being. The notion of a deeply textured, soulful connection, or even a trusting, caring friendship, is totally foreign to the Donald. This is true across the spectrum of his relationships: wives, staff, cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries. He lives in a quid-pro-quo world where loyalty is a one-way street.

The only mystery offered by the Daniels and McDougal sideshows is why the president’s lawyers are exerting so much energy to keep two women from talking about their bedroom romps with Trump. This is a guy who used to impersonate his own assistant in order to pass tips to reporters about the women with whom he was supposedly sleeping. This is a guy who has publicly fantasized about dating his daughter, a guy who brought presidential debates to a new low by raising the subject of his penis size. Unless Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal turn out to be Russian agents, the news value in all of this is negligible.

If “Sixty Minutes” wants to crack a real mystery, how about this one: where is the #metoo reckoning for all those women who say Trump sexually abused them? When does #timesup kick in for POTUS? What about Jessica Leeds, who says the Donald groped her on an airplane? Or Kristin Anderson or Jill Harth, both of whom describe similar instances of Trump grabbing their vaginas, just like he bragged about doing on the Access Hollywood tape? Or any of a long list of other women who came forth with similar claims, all backed by credible evidence.

In the post-Weinstein world, powerful men have fallen like bowling pins to similar, or even lesser, accusations. These guys have headed for seclusion, leaving behind public statements that sound like they came from the same damage control template: “I am profoundly sorry to know that I have caused (insert woman’s name here) so much pain. Although I have a different recollection of events, I deeply respect her for coming forward.”

Trump took a different approach. He called all of his accusers liars. He said they were “sick” women seeking fame or money. In a couple of cases, he told cheering campaign rallies that they weren’t attractive enough for him to touch. “You look at her,” he told one crowd, “You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”

As the #metoo movement gained steam, reporters frequently pushed White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to address the president’s accusers. She recites the same sterile stanza and moves on: “. . .this took place long before he was elected to be president, and the people of this country had a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.” Who would have thought that Electoral College math would one day be used to deliver a lifetime clemency for sexual assault?

What’s going on here? None of the other gropers, grabbers and harassers got off the hook with an it-happened-a-long-time-ago defense. “House of Cards” President Francis Underwood might have gotten away with pushing his mistress in front of a speeding Metro train, but the real life actor who portrayed him, Kevin Spacey, was immediately fired from the Netflix series based on accusations that he sexually harassed and abused young men and boys as long as three decades ago. He hasn’t been publicly heard from since.

Donald Trump likes to think that he was elected by what he calls the “forgotten people”, hard-working middle class folks ignored by the powerful elites, or so the spin goes. Well, there are a number of forgotten women out there wondering just how it is that the #metoo movement appears to have left them behind, simply because their transgressor won a presidential election. But this is about a lot more than just those individual accusers. As long as it remains normal and okay for an accused sexual predator to hold the highest office in the land, #metoo remains more of an aspiration than a destination in reach. #timesup will become real only when it pulls in #trumptoo.

THE CURTAIN NEEDS TO FALL ON TRUMP’S ONE-MAN SHOW

The unprecedented mass exodus of presidential appointees is no surprise. After all, the Donald made clear from the outset that he was prepared to go it alone. Remember that line from his Republican convention acceptance speech? “I alone can fix it,” he said. Trump is reportedly exhilarated by all the staff churn and turmoil. Those vanquished cabinet members and senior advisors were merely awkward stagehands, fools who got in his way and stole his scenes. They didn’t understand that this administration is a one-man show.

Donald Trump is absolutely certain that he doesn’t need a merry band of experts telling him how to run this country. As he likes to remind us, President 45 has a power greater than any font of knowledge, an unassailable force guaranteed to lead us to greatness: his instincts. “I rely on myself very much,” he once said. “I just think you have to have an instinct and you go with it.”

A Google search of “Trump instincts” turns up more than 800,000 entries. He points to a passage in a book he wrote in 1999 about Osama Bin Laden being a “shadowy figure,” as evidence of an “instinct” that predicted the 2001 terrorist attacks. He told Bloomberg News that he did no research on immigration but made the issue a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign because he “. . . just knew instinctively that our borders are a mess.” The New York Times reported this week that Trump has told confidants that he’d rather rely on his superior instinct than on advice from his cabinet.

This is, of course, a gigantic load of bunk. Instinct is not a mysterious psychic power. It is a byproduct of our experience, offering a conscious assessment based on patterns instantly detected, and subconsciously based on stored memory. An MIT report suggests a person needs at least 10 years of “domain specific experience” in order to make good instinctive decisions. That means Trump may have a well-honed instinct for real estate transactions, but that power hardly transfers to dealing with Congress or a North Korean dictator.

The president has an alliterative confusion over two approaches to decision making. His is impulse, not instinct. Instinct aligns a pending decision with rhythms drawn from a deep well of experience. Impulse is utterly without cognition and is driven by a lust for immediate pleasure. Trump’s “stable genius” mind is not performing a rapid review of past experiences in search of a pattern that would trigger an instinct. He simply acts on a child-like impulse to say or do whatever he believes makes him look the best in that particular moment, with zero regard for what that choice may reap for him in a future moment.

If the events of the past couple weeks had unfolded in any other administration, it would be meaningful to ask these questions: What’s the strategic game plan behind Trump’s decision to meet with Kim Jong Un? How does a new Secretary of State affect the administration’s approach to diplomacy? Will threats to impose tariffs on South Korea and Japan have an impact on seeking the denuclearization of North Korea? Where is the White House headed on gun control, or relief for young DACA-covered immigrants?

Yet, those and similar questions are predicated on a foundation of deep thought and serious contemplation that is totally foreign to this president. Unless you’re talking about trying to keep a porn star quiet, this is a White House free of strategic planning.

Instead, Trump:

SHOCKED every foreign diplomat and his own advisors by agreeing on the spot to meet with the North Korean dictator, and then rushed to the White House pressroom to alert the media he so despises that a big announcement was about to be made. The Donald’s narrative was that his hard line on Kim has brought the tyrant to his knees, all without a clue as to where to go from there.

INSISTED, days after the Florida school shooting, that now is the time to challenge the NRA and enact meaningful gun control legislation. After basking in self-adoration for such courage, he reversed course and retreated to the NRA party-line.

TOOK at least 14 different positions on protection for the Dreamers, young immigrants who grew up in America, all based on who talked to him last, and/or on the audience he was trying to please at the time.

ANNOUNCED stiff new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, saying “trade wars are good”, just after his Treasury Secretary reassured allies that “We’re not looking to get into trade wars.”

In his bizarrely quixotic campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly complained about how all of his predecessors were so weak that other countries were “laughing at us”. Only he, alone, could win America’s respect back, or so the campaign line went. Well, that’s not happening anytime soon. Trump, and his make-every-moment-all-about-me operating system, has heads shaking all over the globe. As one South Korean newspaper editorial recently noted, “His style of governing, marked by disconnectedness and arrogance, is just mind-blowing.”

The trajectory of this presidency keeps heading for new lows every day. We are long past the point of writing off his fumbles to a mere lack of experience. Like a monster in a bad science fiction movie, Trump grows worse and more out of control with the passage of time. Rather than sensing his inadequacies and failings, and seeking guidance from those with expertise and experience, the president seems almost emboldened by an incompetency he can’t or won’t see.

If a beloved family member had that level of disconnect from reality, we’d be looking for a well-staffed protective care place for them. Unfortunately, the “family” in this case is a congressional Republican majority pathologically adverse to dealing with this delusional head of household, unless and until he gets much worse. Sadly, that time will come. Let us pray that this country is still intact when it does.

TRUMP’S SECOND YEAR IS ALREADY IN THE SHITTER

As dawn breaks on a second year of Republican control, our federal government dangles from this binary precipice of indelicate nuance: shitholes or shithouses? Which term did the president of the United States use to characterize third world countries of black and brown people? If this were a movie, now would be a good time to locate the nearest exit and use it. Who wants to watch such garbage? Alas, this is no celluloid fiction. It’s our life, our new reality, a bizarre sideshow of existence that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

For those fortunate enough to have spent the past few days in a deep coma, here’s a quick recap: Donald Trump met with a few senators in an attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement on immigration. The meeting went badly. According to some participants, Trump kept complaining about having to take immigrants from Haiti and impoverished African countries he called “shitholes.” Instead of opening our borders to, say, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Trump pushed for a “merit-based” system in which we would take only good, lutefisk-eating white folks from places like Norway.

Well, the shithole hit the fan, causing a cascade of impassioned statements of repudiation from leaders throughout the world, Norway included. Initially, there was no denial from the White House. That’s because Trump surveyed his friends who told him not to worry since his base will love the comment. After a few days of constant heat, however, Trump and a couple Republican senators who were at the meeting said the president’s exact words were not “shithole countries.” That created a narrative that Trump had been misquoted, that he never uttered the word “shithole”. It turns out, according to the Washington Post, that what the Republican senators heard Trump say was that he didn’t want to take in people from “shithouse countries.” A quick review of etymological research shows no measurable differences between “shithole” and “shithouse”.

Yet, this unique linguistic dialectic, together with Trump’s incendiary message that non-whites from troubled countries should be kept out of the U.S., is now threating to shut down the federal government. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid such closure, and part of that package was supposed to include immigration reform. Some sort of deal may yet emerge, but for the moment the shithole/shithouse conundrum seems to have brought what’s left of governance to a standstill.

Despite headlines decrying the president’s “vulgarity,” his use of a four-letter word for excrement – “s***”, as many news outlets coded it – was not the offense here. What really offended, stung and hurt was his raw, brazen racism and xenophobia driving his position that our borders should be closed to dark-skinned people from poor countries.

No, this is nothing new. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans racists. He suggested fighting terrorism by executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig blood. He has called black people “lazy” and insisted that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS. His complete list of racist credentials takes up far more real estate than is available here. The most astute and best researched analyses of the 2016 election points to racism as the most important factor driving the Trump victory (here, here and here). So why all the shock over Trump calling impoverished black countries shitholes?

Because Trumpism, in all of its vile and despicable manifestations, remains a relatively new phenomena. We still remember and cling to the real spirit and essence of the American ideal: equality, justice, liberty and opportunity for all. There is precious little on the national scene to feel good about today. But, for now at least, we have this: wide spread disgust with a president who vulgarizes those core values that make it possible for America to be great. Let us hope we never reach the point of NOT being shocked, outraged and saddened by the racist words, actions and policies of this president. Trumpism must never be normalized.

There is another reason why many are shocked by what we’ve come to expect and anticipate from our president. It is difficult to process a constant stream of horror in daily White House utterances and tweets. While we struggle to wrap our heads around Trump’s taunt that he has a bigger nuclear button than North Korea’s, we are hit with the news that the President believes himself to be a “stable genius.” Before we can figure that one out, the shithole story breaks. We are so busy processing all this really weird shit, as George W. Bush might call it, we all have different a-ha moments.

Except, that is, for the Republican establishment. It appears that nothing, not even self-preservation, will dislodge the GOP’s shameful and embarrassing enablement of a pathetic, solipsistic, racist president who continues to degrade the party’s brand on a daily basis. Congressional Republican leaders have had a year of way too many opportunities to cut their losses and distance themselves from a maniacal autocrat who never cared a whit about them or their party. Playing word games, and ignoring the broader racist message, won’t save them now. He’s their president. They own him. Let them all be buried in the same shithole.

IT’S TIME TO ATONE FOR BILL CLINTON’S SEXUAL HARASSMENT

If our come-to-Jesus moment on sexual harassment is going to amount to anything other than a passing blip, we need to accept the painfully awkward truth that Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency for carrying on a sexual relationship with an intern.

For 20 years, we have fooled ourselves into a false state of moral ambivalence over Clinton. We gave a pass to a popular president whose uncanny ability to compartmentalize turned him into a role model for every would-be sexual harasser. This is not a time to let old wounds fade away. There can be no healing for what ails us until they are reopened and appropriately treated.

The only prominent Democrat who has had the courage to speak this truth is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. In an interview with the New York Times podcast, “The New Washington,” Gillibrand was asked if, based on what we now know about inappropriate sexual behavior, Clinton should have resigned when his relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, came to light. In a rare move for a member of Congress, the senator sat in silence while formulating her answer, which was: “Yes, I think that is the appropriate response.” Within hours, the Democratic establishment pounced. Philippe Reines, a long-time political operative for the Clintons, sent this tweet to Gillibrand: “Over 20 yrs you took the Clinton’s endorsements, money and seat. Hypocrite. Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries. Best of luck.”

That is precisely the kind of party line, patriarchal , protect-the-good-old-boys thinking that has allowed sexual harassment to run rampant in most of our male-dominated institutions, which is to say 98 percent of them. Look, Bill Clinton was guilty of classic, textbook sexual harassment. It was not a close case. Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern. Clinton was the president of the United States. It’s hard to imagine a greater power disparity. When White House aides grew suspicious of the relationship, Lewinsky was forced to move from the White House to the Pentagon. When she complained, Clinton promised to bring her back after he won reelection. Her employment conditions were based on a sexual relationship with the leader of the free world.

Incredibly, there was no serious push to remove Clinton from office for this gross abuse of power. Yes, he was impeached by the House and acquitted in the Senate, but the charge was lying about the sex, not engaging in it with an intern. Once framed as a fidelity issue, as in a married man lying about having sex outside the marriage, Clinton’s defense garnered empathy in Washington political circles, even among conservative Republicans. The only problem was that it shouldn’t have been about lying; it should have been about a boss having sex with an intern.

So, does any of this really matter now? Yes, it matters mightily because the Clinton-Lewinsky episode is the original sin supporting a perverse double standard when it comes to sexual harassment and misconduct by elected leaders. In just the past few weeks, this amazing reckoning over sexual behavior has banished all sorts of private sector A-listers to the has-been junk heap of fallen careers: Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, etc. Yet, Roy Moore, accused of stalking and fondling teenage girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s, may well be elected to the Senate from Alabama later this month. Many Alabama voters say they don’t approve of Moore’s conduct but they like his politics. Sound familiar? That’s what a lot of presidential voters said last year when they elected Donald Trump after more than a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct, and he was heard on tape boasting of such behavior. And, of course, that’s what many of us said back in the 1990s about Bill Clinton: he might be a cad, but he was a good president who led us through two terms of peace and prosperity.

Of course, there is more than Monica Lewinsky in this story. Clinton’s accusers of sexual misconduct have told stories ranging from rape to groping. Sadly, these women became pawns of anti-Clinton conservatives because nobody else would hear them out. The Clinton team attacked them relentlessly, not unlike what the right is doing now to Roy Moore’s accusers. Remember this line from former Clinton staffer James Carville?: “If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

People ask why women wait so long to report sexual misconduct. Knowing that they would be called trailer park trash probably had a lot to do with it. Now is the time to the bury that repulsive form of advocacy. Here’s what else needs to go: the notion that a leader’s politics should mitigate against serious and proven transgressions of sexual misconduct and harassment. There is no other way to assure that our workplaces and our governments are free from the toxicity of sexual harassment. There can be no more passes for voting the right way.

If we are really ready to move beyond ruthless victim bashing, and deal head-on with the insidious forces of sexual misconduct, we have to own up to the fact that Bill Clinton didn’t deserve, and shouldn’t have been given, a pass. His choice to have sex with an intern was as disqualifying for retaining his office as it would have been for a corporate executive who engaged in the same behavior.

At some point in this fast-moving morality play on sexual misbehavior, there is apt to be more focus on those still-pending accusations against Donald Trump. If Democrats want to engage in that dialogue with any respect and credibility, they need to follow Sen. Gillibrand’s lead and acknowledge the obvious: Clinton should have resigned. That’s the only way the terrain moving forward is going to be changed.

DONALD TRUMP: AMERICA’S MOST UNPATRIOTIC PRESIDENT

When it comes to demonstrating patriotic respect for this country and all that it stands for, Donald J. Trump takes a knee. To be sure, it is a metaphorical knee, totally lacking the focused purpose and quiet grace of a Colin Kaepernick or Eric Reid. For the first time in American history, we have a deeply unpatriotic president who repeatedly spews disdain and disgust on the very foundations of government he was elected to lead.

Hours after an alleged terrorist killed eight people in Lower Manhattan last week, Trump went on a rant about the need to quickly execute the suspect. Here’s what he said: “We need quick justice and we need strong justice – much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke, and it’s a laughingstock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place.”

Now, there was probably a guy on a barstool in every American tavern who said the same thing last week. But none of them were elected president of the United States. It is easy, and sometimes therapeutic for coping purposes, to tune out the daily stream of inanities from our 45th president. But this one is too stunningly deplorable to ignore. Read that quote again. The leader of our “home of the free” called our system of justice a “joke” and a “laughingstock”. It’s one thing for a citizen, or even a political candidate, to besmirch the integrity of our government. Dissent is as American as apple pie. But when you occupy the Oval Office, when you are this country’s chief representative to the world, those words reverberate with an unpatriotic fervor that no kneeling NFL player has ever approached or contemplated.

But the Donald was just getting warmed up. Later in the week, the president had some choice words for the non-imprisonment sentence handed down in one of the country’s most prominent desertion cases. In 2009, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his military base in Afghanistan, was captured by the Taliban and spent five years in captivity. He pled guilty to desertion and was sentenced to a dishonorable discharge but no prison time. Within minutes, Trump’s Twitter fingers pronounced the judge’s decision “a complete disgrace to our country and to our military.”

As commander in chief, Trump outranks the military judge who conducted a lengthy hearing on Bergdahl’s sentencing. Nevertheless, that judge, Army Col. Jeffrey Nance, had to consider a key defense argument that the president had stomped on Bergdahl’s due process rights. As a candidate, Trump repeatedly called Bergdahl a “dirty rotten traitor” and said he should be executed or returned to the Taliban. As president, he recently referred back to those remarks, indicating they still applied. Judge Nance said Trump’s comments concerned him and warranted mitigation in sentencing.

So, in the course of three days, this president managed to denigrate the country’s justice system by calling it a “joke”, and pull the rug out from under military jurisprudence by labeling a judge’s decision as a “complete disgrace”. But he wasn’t quite done. Just as the special prosecutor in the Russia investigation released two indictments and a guilty plea against former Trump campaign aides, the president renewed his call for an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, insisting once again that she belongs in jail. Like a responsive reading in church, Trump automatically responds to adversity with the call for Clinton’s incarceration. After all, he promised in a 2016 debate that he would put her in jail if he won, a pledge that seems to have gone the way of the Mexican wall and Obamacare repeal.

Not only are these presidential rants against our justice system anti-American, they are also counterproductive to the Donald’s own cause. Bergdahl, for example, would probably have been given prison time if Trump hadn’t called for his execution. In the case of the recent New York terrorist attack, prosecutors anticipate difficulties in jury selection because of the president’s prejudicial remarks. And if any career Justice Department attorneys ever entertained an idea of going after Clinton, Trump’s repeated calls for that prosecution would undoubtedly hold them back just to avoid the aura of political persecution.

“But you know the saddest thing,” Trump said in a radio interview last week, “because I’m the president of the United States I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.” Poor guy. If he had known he couldn’t obstruct justice by tossing his enemies in jail like they do in a banana republic, he would have never taken the job.

Despite the flags he uses as props, despite his National Anthem militancy, despite his “America first” rhetoric, Donald Trump does not love this country. The core of this nation’s democracy is predicated on an independent judiciary, one that dispenses justice through the rule of law, not by political fiat or authoritarian dictate. It’s a system based on a presumption of innocence and a fair trial, not an “off with their heads” order from a strongman dictator. It’s not perfect, this system of ours, and it needs periodic care and maintenance by lawmakers. But for 241 years this has been the essence of American justice. Far from being a joke or a laughing stock, it’s who we are as a county. It’s what America is all about. To reject that, Mr. President, is to reject America. It doesn’t get more unpatriotic than that.

WARREN HARDING IS NO LONGER THE WORST PRESIDENT

It may have escaped your attention, what with Rocket Man and the Dotard flexing for nuclear war, but historians are pretty sure that Donald Trump has already overtaken Warren Harding as the country’s worst president. This has no doubt brought Harding his first good night of eternal rest since dying in office in 1923.

In many ways, the 29th and 45th presidents are starkly dissimilar. Harding drank too much. Trump, in his singular gift to humanity, is a teetotaler. Harding was suave and debonair. Trump is puffy and orange. Harding was known to woo and enchant women with romance. Trump grabs them the wrong way. Harding was prone to honest self-reflection, having once said, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” Trump stares down his massive failures and declares his reign to be “the best presidency ever.”

Yet, both men entered the White House through amazingly similar routes. Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling treatise on the ups and downs of intuitive decision making, “Blink”, devoted a section to Harding as an example of the down side. Harding, the author noted, never distinguished himself when he was in the Ohio legislature or the U.S. Senate. Instead, writes Gladwell, a political sponsor pushed Harding to run because he “looked like a president.” Those looks were enough to get him the Republican nomination at a brokered convention in 1920, and, from there, the presidency. The charisma and presidential confidence that voters saw, however, was a mere façade. Harding lacked the capability of functioning successfully as a president.

Although the Donald hardly brought a Mount Rushmore face to the ticket, he had something just as powerful as Harding’s presidential aura. As a blustery business mogul, Candidate Trump was rude, crude and mad as hell. Eschewing all forms of political correctness, he denigrated every minority group imaginable and ripped into establishment elites for coddling them. For a good chunk of voters, it was a different kind of love at first sight. To the disgruntled, disaffected and disenfranchised – mostly older, angry Caucasians longing for the good old days when white privilege actually counted for something – Donald Trump was their Warren Harding. It wasn’t his looks. It was how he acted, what he said, his anger, his persona. He was one of them, their only hope to take a rapidly changing country back. But there was a problem, the same one Harding’s supporters faced: a deep void behind the veneer. There was no substance, intellect or skill to convert an illusion of competence into effective governance.

And so we have, in the ninth month of this administration, a new paradigm of presidential paralysis, a bizarre, needy codependency between the president and his not-so-merry band of malcontents. It’s a vicious cycle of dysfunction, in which Trump responds to each failure with an outrageous act that disgusts most people, but is lovingly devoured, like a piece of red meat, by his faithful base. As a result, he loses support from moderates and independents, while holding on to a “strongly support” base of around 20%. He keeps on stumbling because, among other reasons, it’s hard to move political mountains with that kind of math. And, with each failure, he trots back to his base with another piece of red meat. Rinse and repeat.

For example, take the crazy NFL brouhaha. Trump had been having a bad week. Yet another shot at Obamacare repeal appeared dead on arrival. He took heat for softening on the dreamers and working with Democrats. The right was all over him for backing an establishment Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. So he rips into the NFL for not firing the “son-of-a-bitch” players who kneel during the National Anthem. By all objective accounts, the move was a disaster. Players, coaches and even team owners who had supported Trump, linked arms before Sunday’s games to protest the president’s comments. Predictably, his base loved it, which meant that Trump was ecstatic. “It’s really caught on, it’s really caught on,” Trump said at a conservative White House dinner Monday night. “I said what millions of Americans were thinking.” Meanwhile, days before his NFL rampage, 66% of Americans told pollsters that Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it.

Solidifying the love of those closest to you, even if others disapprove of your actions, can be a commendable personal trait. But it is not particularly useful in the pragmatics of electoral politics. Every recent president has attempted to broaden their appeal, despite loud outcries from their base. George W. Bush’s pro-immigration stance, and his successful push for a Medicare drug program, infuriated his base but drew in more moderates. Liberals are still complaining about Bill Clinton’s welfare reform move that got him more support from the right. Many on the left, including the Congressional Black Caucus, were privately outraged with what they felt was Barack Obama’s failure to do more for the people who helped him get him elected. Yet it was important to Obama to be more than a black president. He, like his predecessors, wanted to expand his support and broaden his base. That’s what makes presidents more effective.

Trump is forever stuck in campaign mode, a one-trick pony who excels at creating outrage just so he can bask in the glory of a shrinking fringe group. He’s had their adulation since the birther days. They still chant “Lock Her Up” at his rallies because nostalgia feels so much better than the dismal reality of failure. Like Warren Harding, Donald Trump fooled a lot of people into thinking he’d make the perfect president. Unlike Harding, however, Trump fooled himself into believing the same thing. That’s why he has to keep performing for his base. Their applause is what makes his act possible. Without it, the curtain will eventually fall.

LEADERS WHO IGNORE PROCESS WILL END UP BEING TRUMPED

Donald Trump’s most crippling deficiency as president is his innate inability to understand process. His abject failure to even embrace the concept of process, let alone direct and nurture it, is the main reason for his subterranean poll numbers, a dismal legislative scorecard and a rapidly declining base.

Process is everything when it comes to effective organizational leadership. It’s how people interact, manage conflict, decide and work toward accomplishing shared goals. And therein lies the problem for this president. As the closest thing to a genuine solipsist to ever occupy the White House, the Donald is barely cognizant of other people, let alone able to direct productive interactions with them. He simply doesn’t do process.

Take the latest example: Trump brought crowds to their feet last year by characterizing undocumented immigrants as the scourge of the earth. He insisted that they all be deported and that a wall be built to keep them out. “Send Them Home!” and “Build the Wall!” were iconic chants at his rallies. (Here and here.) Once elected, Trump softened a bit on 800,000 young people who grew up in America after being illegally brought into the country as children. These are the “dreamers” who were saved from deportation by the Obama administration in 2012. Trump’s base spent the past eight months pushing him to pull that plug and send the dreamers packing. That’s exactly what he did two weeks ago. He, in effect, nullified Obama’s order, but gave the dreamers a six-month reprieve, allowing Congress to do what it has been unable to do for two decades: enact an immigration bill addressing the issue.

Then, just last week, Trump, over dinner with Democratic Congressional leaders, supposedly indicated he was ready to support a bill allowing the dreamers to remain in the country in exchange for some border security measures that would not include his infamous wall. And all hell broke loose. Red Trump hats are being torched by their disgruntled owners, one of whom tweeted, “Put a fork in Trump. He’s done.” Breitbart News, the ultraconservative website run by Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, called the president “Amnesty Don.” Ann Coulter, a provocateur for all things very right of center and one of Trump’s most steadfast supporters, turned on a dime with this tweet: “At this point who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?”

The president was crushed by the reaction, and has seesawed back and forth on his position ever since, creating the most bipartisan confusion this town has seen since Alexander Haig contended he was in charge of the Regan White House. But Trump brought this turmoil on himself by paying no attention to process. This guy spent 18 months pumping up his xenophobic fan club about all those rotten drugged-up, thieving, raping illegals and now he’s telling them to love 800,000 of them and let them stay.

I learned quickly as a union rep that it was much easier to get a group of mistreated workers up the mountaintop of a contract campaign than it was to get them down again. In collective bargaining, as in politics, you get nowhere without a mobilized base. At the same time, you can accomplish nothing for that base without making a deal that falls short of your campaign rhetoric. Effective leadership means managing expectations and helping your troops slowly descend that mountain. It’s far more art than science, and it requires leaders to prepare folks for gains that are more incremental than revolutionary.

Barack Obama’s 2008 election was a seminal moment in American politics. Against significant odds, a black man promising hope and change was elected president. An enormous crowd gathered in Chicago, chanting “Yes We Can!” while waiting to hear from the president-elect. Obama, an astute student of process from his days as a community organizer, had this message for his cheering supporters: “There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.” Contrast that with this line from Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

The truth is that this president doesn’t understand the system at all. America is not a sole proprietorship where the owner calls all the shots. Sadly, that is all that Trump has ever known about process. That’s why he is exasperated with Congressional rules, and with votes that don’t go his way. He wants his campaign platform implemented by fiat. Every president does. Trump is the only one who actually believed it would happen. All his predecessors were frustrated by the time consuming process of governing, of listening and talking with others, having to know what buttons to push, when to come on strong and when to back off – the basic nitty-gritty of playing well with others. Yet, they persisted. That’s because they grasped the power of process.

Leaders who ignore process do so at their own peril. Take Lemuel Boulware, for example. As head of General Electric’s labor relations in the 1960s, Boulware decided to dispense with the normal rituals of contract negotiations. He saw no reason to engage in drawn-out meetings and an endless give-and-take. He opened – and closed – negotiations with what was seen then as a fairly generous offer and made it clear that the company would neither change nor discuss it, resulting in a very ugly strike. It also coined a new term in the lexicon of collective bargaining: “Boulwarism”, a take-it-or-leave it proposal that usurps process.

The superhero image of Donald Trump singlehandedly draining the swamp was obviously a successful campaign narrative. Like all superhero stories, it was pure fiction. This country’s founders, the people who actually did make America great, constructed a process, complete with three branches of elected and appointed players. Process is not always pretty, or fast, or easy. Neither is democracy. But it is far better than either Boulwarism or Trumpism.

TRUMP’S ‘GOOD WEEK’ IS JUST MORE OF THE SAME

To hear Donald Trump tell it, he had his best week yet in Washington. The president bitch slapped his own party’s Congressional leaders. Then he hugged Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and even let House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dictate a Twitter message for him. Not only that, he helped secure rare bipartisan support for a bill that will get Texas some hurricane relief and keep the government open for three more months. Could this, the Donald’s 137th reinvention, be the one that really sticks? Could it be that he has finally become presidential?

Naaaa, of course not. This was just one more iteration of Trump being Trump. When it comes to his core values, he has always been consistent. And what he really values, at his core, is himself, and how he looks to the world at any moment in time. “It’s all over the news,” the president bubbled in a call to Schumer. “The coverage is incredible; everyone is praising me. Even MSNBC is saying nice things about me.” (Here and here.)

And that’s what it takes for Donald Trump to have a very good week. There was a time he had to really work to create the public illusion of grandeur. Like when he impersonated his own press agent in order to spread lurid reports about his love life to gossip columnists. It’s so much easier now. All he has to do is make nice with a couple of Democrats he spent the last six months vilifying.

Back in the real world, North Korea is polishing its nukes, 800,000 young Americans face deportation, and there is no assurance our government will be funded past December 8. Trump’s feel-good days of early September offer no nourishment for a body politic that has been ailing since January 20. For that, we need skilled leadership, someone with credibility, vision, a sense of direction and an ability to subjugate ego needs for the sake of getting the job done. Alas, Trump is a dismal failure in all four areas. He is constitutionally incapable of getting outside of himself in order to lead others. The president’s euphoric week was packed with evidence supporting the previous sentence.

It started with the dreamers, the now young adults whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children. Through a 2012 executive order, the Obama administration protected them from deportation. Trump excoriated Obama for that action during the campaign, promising, if elected, to send them all back to the countries of their birth. Then he softened a bit, telling the dreamers not to worry because he loves them. However, as the songwriter noted, love hurts. On Tuesday the administration pulled the plug on the dreamers, announcing that they would be subject to deportation in March if Congress did not resolve the issue through legislation. That was it. The president took no position on what Congress should do – protect them or evict them. He just wanted the monkey off his back. Amazingly, the New York Times quoted White House aides saying their boss did not appear to fully understand the meaning of his announcement an hour before it was delivered.

The public response was overwhelming negative. So Trump, naturally, turned to Twitter for a mood adjustment. His message: if Congress doesn’t act, he will “revisit” the issue. For someone who fancies himself as a master negotiator, this was an incredibly insipid move. It instantly deflated the leverage he created by linking the dreamers’ deportation to a failure of Congress to act. But it made him feel better for a while.

Then came the infamous Oval Office meeting with Congressional leaders. The Republicans, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, wanted to raise the debt limit and keep government funded for 18 months, getting them past the mid-term elections. Schumer and Pelosi wanted only a three-month extension because it would give them leverage in a year-end funding battle. Ryan called the Democrat’s three-month proposal “ridiculous and disgusting.” Trump’s partner in the meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had just delivered a defense of the Republican’s 18-month plan when Trump shocked the room by siding with the Democrats, whose three-month deal was soon summarily passed by both houses, much to the chagrin of frustrated Republicans.

It was the news of that meeting that gave Trump his good week. He could view himself as a bipartisan deal-maker. Basking in the mania of that image, Trump upped the ante, by joining with “Chuck and Nancy” in supporting a law protecting the dreamers. A day later, he went even further and said he agreed with Schumer that Congress should end the requirement of regularly approving the government’s debt limit, a sacred conservative ritual if there ever was one.

The pundits have had a field day with it all. Some compared it to Bill Clinton’s triangulation. Some wondered if Trump was finally finding his footing. Others, noting that the president was once a Democrat, speculated he might be returning to his roots. The analysis is about as meaningful as trying to figure out why a leaf suddenly falls from a tree. That’s what a leaf does. And this is what the Donald does: grab whatever attention he can to make him look and feel good in the moment. As Poe says, “merely this and nothing more.”

The problem is that moments are outlived by their consequences. Strategies are designed to build a multiplicity of moments that will get you to where you want to go, assuming you know where that is. Trump doesn’t get any of that. He’s too wrapped up in watching himself on cable news to realize that when you blindside associates – on either side, when you yank the rug out from under your treasury secretary, when you love dreamers one day and move to deport them the next, you lack the credibility, integrity and probity needed to lead. You’re just a leaf sailing through the breeze. ‘Tis the wind and nothing more.