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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MIRACLE OF TRUMP: HE MAKES BLOOMBERG LOOK GOOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angry Socialist
Angry Narcissist

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

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

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

TRUMP’S DIGITAL CAMPAIGN LEAVES DEMOCRATS IN THE DUST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH WORLD WAR THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRUMP & DUCT-TAPED BANANAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump is really bad art.  Sorry, Mom.

THE UNTHINKABILITY OF A SECOND TRUMP TERM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY’S DUELING WORLDS: FACT & FICTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRUMP’S EXTRAVAGANCE DOES NOT EXTEND TO HIS VOCABULARY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that would be so very special.

THE FIRE AND FURY OF AN IMPLODING PRESIDENCY

What we need in this country right now is a slow news day.  Headlines limited to the latest Kardashian pregnancy, or Felicity Huffman’s community service, would be welcomed comfort food for our overtaxed brains.  Small chance of that happening anytime soon.  Instead, we are bombarded with almost hourly reports of a perpetual presidential implosion, stories of such spectacular incredulity that there is barely time to unpack them before another one breaks.

The Trump presidency is looking very much like the grand finale of a fireworks display, those closing moments in which the pyrotechnician tosses up one spectacular explosion after another.  We were bug eyed when the president linked Ukraine’s security to that country’s ability to help Trump’s reelection campaign. Then, poof – before the shock wore off, before we could so much as exhale, the next one exploded. Our president, rejecting unanimous pleas of his military and intelligence advisors, pulled our troops out of Syria, abandoning the Kurds who led our battle against ISIS.

While we tried to absorb the catastrophic results of that move, along came another poof. State Department officials said Trump’s political shenanigans in Ukraine went down only after career diplomats were pulled back so that the president’s private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, could call the shots.  Then another poof: Four of Giuliani’s associates on the Ukrainian caper  were indicted on charges of conspiring to circumvent federal laws against foreign influence. While pondering the mug shots and bios of the first two arrests – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – yup, another poof.  Giuliani himself was reported to be under criminal investigation.

On one level, all this news seems overwhelmingly cumulative and confusing. Who has the time to do endless Google searches on Lev, Igor, the Kurds and Ukraine? Yet, there is a very simple common denominator. Donald Trump is so singularly focused on himself and his interests – petty and large – that he has forsaken everything else. Absolutely nothing outside of himself matters, not the Constitution or the laws of the land, not truth or integrity, and certainly not the welfare of the American people.  To him, this presidency has always been about one thing and one thing only: the needs of Donald J. Trump.

We’ve known since January 20, 2017 that the solipsism of our 45th president would dictate his every action, tweet and utterance. Hours after promising to “faithfully execute” his office, the Donald concocted a lie about how his inauguration crowd was the largest in American history.  That very same day, he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission launching his reelection campaign.  From that day forward, the very essence of his first term was about winning a second term. For the 44 men who preceeded him, winning the presidency meant an opportunity to make a difference in the world.  For Trump, winning was all that mattered, an end unto itself, validation for a dangerously insecure man.

Unfortunately, the articles of impeachment are likely to be narrowly constructed, directed at the president’s attempt to obtain campaign assistance from foreign countries and then obstructing the House’s investigation into the matter.  As odious as those actions were, the circumscribed prosecution is reminiscent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. The fact of the matter is that every single dark moment of this presidency, every injury he has inflicted, has come about through a single course of conduct, namely Trump’s consistent propensity to promote himself, with reckless disregard for the harm inflicted on others. 

Republican leaders in Congress were incredulous over Trump’s cut-and-run in Syria, calling it a foreign policy disaster that will haunt the United States for years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the president’s chief enablers, called it a “grave mistake” and a “strategic nightmare”.  Yet, until and unless the Republican base decides to give up the ghost on this president, the party’s leadership will continue to view him privately as their worst albatross while publicly opposing impeachment.

They choose, charitably, to view the Syrian disaster as a foreign policy disagreement.  It is anything but.  Donald Trump doesn’t have a foreign policy. All he has is a Donald policy. He does whatever he thinks is best for himself, with utterly no regard for the consequences.  He leveraged Ukraine’s security on digging up dirt on the Democrats because the 2020 election is an existential crisis for him. The strategic nightmare in Syria was a product of the same Donald-centric dynamic. He wants to campaign on bringing the troops home.  Because that’s all that mattered to him, he pulled the plug without a single strategic thought about the consequences of such sudden action.

Sadly, we would need at least another 20 Vietnam Walls to list all of the victims of Trump’s it’s-all-about-me approach to governing.  For example, he instituted a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military and has asked the Supreme Court to strike down employment discrimination protection for the entire LGBTQ community, both moves aimed at garnering affection from evangelical Christians and the homophobic portion of his base. 

To keep the love coming from that base, Trump has: 

REDUCED or eliminated food stamp assistance for millions of poor families.

ENDANGERED the economic security of American farmers through his trade wars.

ELIMINATED teen pregnancy programs that provided access to contraception and education.

REFUSED, as part of his anti-regulation political pitch, to ban a pesticide linked to birth defects in children of farm workers.

SEPARATED migrant children from their parents to show how tough he is on immigration.

PROMOTED racism and xenophobia by appealing to forces that fear the loss of white privilege.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  In each instance, the force at work here is not the president’s ideology.  He has none.  It’s all about feeding his base, positioning himself for his next tweet or rally or election.  It’s all about making himself a winner, a legend in his own mind.

That’s why we need a more expansive view of impeachment.  It’s about so much more than trying to get other countries to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.  It’s about a president who, despite his sloganeering, has never once put America first. It’s about  a president clinging so obsessively to a pathological power of self-absorption that nobody outside of himself is safe.

Most importantly, it’s about a president who, for the first time in our country’s history, represents the biggest threat to America’s democracy.