TRUMP’S ALTERNATE REALITY IGNORES LAW, TRUTH AND DECENCY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AS THE WHISTLE BLOWS, DEMOCRACY FADES

The ultimate outcome of the Ukraine/whistleblower ordeal is less important than the broader message it portends. In other words, welcome to the tipping point in the unraveling of our democracy.   This is no longer about an unhinged president doctoring a weather map with his Sharpie.  This is about a concerted and rapidly escalating assault on the very democratic values that made America great.

In many ways, Trump’s flagrant flaunting of a whistle-blower statute to keep a report documenting his alleged misdeeds from a congressional committee is neither new nor surprising behavior. This is a guy who has never shown the slightest inclination to let a law, covenant or moral code interfere with his singular motivational force of self-interest.  

Yet, this aberrant behavior pattern is rapidly escalating, from the amusing to the abhorrent.  Back during the 2016 campaign, reporters profiling this unlikely candidate almost uniformly described him as someone who “defied conventions” (here, here and here).  How benign and understated that seems now. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer’s epicurean tastes as defying convention.

As diabolical as Trump has been, there was once room for reasoned optimism regarding the long-term impact of his malignancy on the future of American governance.  After all, our democracy has survived brutal assaults over the past 200+ years.  Surely our system of checks and balances, along with the commitment and integrity of dedicated public servants, would help mitigate against serious damage inflicted by the Donald’s defying of conventions.  Well, that worked for a while. But most of the White House folks with even a modicum of integrity have been fired or quit.  And the checks and balances we learned about in grade school grind at a snail’s pace.

For all practical purposes, our democracy has ceased to function.  This isn’t just Trump’s fault, although he is clearly the triggerman, the guy who took a dysfunctional system and reduced it to the kind of shambles that would warm the heart of a narcissistic authoritarian.  The problem began more than a decade ago when politics became so divisive and polarized that Republican congressional leaders would rather pass no legislation than work with a black Democratic president.  That’s why the biggest problems facing the country – immigration, gun control, health care, climate change – have seen insufficient or no action in the past 20 years.

That opened the door for Donald J. Trump to get elected on the solemn assertion that “I alone” can fix America.  And it’s been downhill ever since.

Remember all that stuff about three “co-equal” branches of government serving as the cauldron of our democracy?  Well, what many of us didn’t learn back in those civics classes was that the system was predicated on at least a modicum of good faith.  It’s common for Congress and a president to be on different pages. What the founders didn’t contemplate was a Trumpian presidency insisting that, it alone, controls the entire book.

So now we have, yet again, an impasse crisis between the president and Congress.  The Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community reviewed a whistleblower complaint supposedly involving, among other matters, a phone conversation Trump had with the new president of Ukraine. The IG found it to be credible and of “urgent concern,” terms of art in the law that requires such matters to be referred to the Intelligence committees of the House and Senate.  The Trump administration is refusing to comply with the statute.  

At the same time, the Donald, out of a mixture of arrogance and invincibility, has been somewhat transparent when it comes to corruption.  That leaves us with the ironic duality of a president openly defying the whistleblower law while tweeting out much of the content likely involved in the matter.  Trump has acknowledged asking the Ukrainian president to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son, and has also admitted sending his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to push Ukraine officials to dig up dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 presidential election.  

Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to spar with each other over potential moves on the impeachment chess board, largely over Trump’s obstruction of justice during the investigation into Russia’s interference in 2016 election.  Their opponent, however, has moved on to get another country to interfere in the upcoming election.  None of those chess pieces are moving right now because Donald Trump has pulled the rug out on the very democratic processes they rely upon.

Despite the constitutional impeachment and oversight responsibilities assigned to Congress, Trump has thumbed his nose at every turn, denying information and testimony that the House and Senate are clearly entitled to.  From the president’s tax returns to Don McGahn’s testimony, to information about immigration policy, bank loans and scores of other subjects, the White House has refused to produce any of it.  The intransigence is totally without precedent.  The result has been litigation and appeals, that may well continue beyond the 2020 election.

But Trump’s ruination of democracy goes much further.  With help from the Supreme Court, he has taken money Congress appropriated for various military projects and deferred it to building part of his wall at the Mexican border, a project specifically rejected by Congress.  The Pentagon now wants more money appropriated to replace the funds diverted to the wall.  According to reporting by the New York Times, White House sources say the president has his eye on diverting any such new appropriation toward additional sections of his wall.  

Freedom House is an independent agency that, for the past 50 years, has ranked countries around the world on how democratic their governments are.  The United States had always been near the top of the chart. Since 2017, however, our ranking has steadily deteriorated due to Trump’s frequent attacks on norms and institutions and the wearing down of democratic checks and balances.  Freedom House now places the U.S. well below other large and long-standing democracies such as France, Germany and Brittan.

Standing alone, the Ukraine/whistleblower episode would be tragic enough.  But on the heels of effectively usurping Congress’s oversight and funding responsibilities, this emboldened, in-broad-daylight rush to get yet another country to interfere in our elections moves this crisis into a whole different realm. Donald Trump is not just a terrible president.  He is not just a threat to our democratic way of life.  He has already dismantled huge parts of our democracy.  With a second term, it is hard to see how we would ever get it back.

TURNED OFF BY TRUMP, CORPORATE AMERICA TRIES TO GOVERN ITSELF

Something quite bizarre and remarkable is happening to American capitalism. Our economic system has long been predicated on the laissez faire sacrament of tethering commerce only to what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market.  Roughly translated, that means those who own the means of production should be allowed to suck up all the profits they can, unencumbered by any duty to their workers, customers or communities.

However, as a dystopic sign of chronic congressional constipation, together with the companion malady of massive Trumpian deregulation, some corporate titans are taking unheard of steps to self-regulate for a broader public good, even if it means loss of revenue.  Milton Friedman must be spinning in his grave.  

To be sure, as incredible as this shift appears, so far its scope is relatively small and limited.  It is not likely to win Hosannas from Democratic Socialists anytime soon. Yet, Its significance lies in the profundity of its message, namely that the federal government has grown so dysfunctional that some major corporate entities are taking a stab at public policy governance. 

What makes the role reversal even more bizarre is that the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have responded to this corporate usurpation of policy making by acting like lobbyists in an effort to influence the outcome of corporate legislating. It’s as if the regulators and the regulated simply switched places but carried on the old dance.

Take the issue of guns for example.  As of the first of this month, there have been 283 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. Yet, Congress has not passed any substantive gun control legislation in more than a generation.  Many business leaders are attempting to fill that regulatory void.  Walmart, on the heels of the murder of 22 customers in its El Paso store, banned the sale of assault weapons, hand guns and most ammunition in all of its locations. Dick’s Sporting Goods took similar action a year earlier. Responding to the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, Dick’s pulled all assault-style rifles and high capacity magazines from its stores at an annual revenue loss of $150 million.  

The giant e-commerce software company, Salesforce.com, stopped doing business with clients that sell military-style weapons.  A number of banks, including Citigroup and Bank of America, adopted prohibitions against lending money to gun dealers who sell assault rifles, and required them to submit background checks on all other gun buyers. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, set up a new line of investment funds that exclude gun manufacturers and retailers.

Amazingly, these sensible gun regulations – stuff that Congress has been unable to legislate – have managed to push Republican officials into action mode. Unfortunately, the action is aimed at maintaining the sacred status of gun sales.  Yes, the party of free enterprise has suddenly turned to its former arch enemy of regulation as a cudgel to protect the free flow of assault weapons. Republican senators, led by Louisiana’s John Kennedy, are pushing legislation that would prohibit banks from “discriminating” against gun buyers.  Kennedy has also asked federal agencies to stop lending institutions from effectively restricting gun sales by adopting their own regulations.

Some of the Republican lobbying techniques against this new self-regulation by businesses trying to reduce gun violence have been even more Draconian.  The country’s biggest credit card issuers, led by Citigroup, decided to take steps that would either restrict or monitor gun sales purchased with a credit card.  This was not without precedent. Smaller companies like PayPal, Stripe, Square and Apple Pay already had explicit policies against transacting online sales of guns and related merchandise.  If big banks took a similar move, it could inflict a substantial dent in gun trafficking.

As reported on a recent episode of the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, senior bank executives went into a meeting with officials from the Security Exchange Commission, ostensibly about some unrelated and arcane financial reporting regulations.  During that session, however, an SEC commissioner made it very clear that the agency would not take kindly to any bank that came out against guns.  That shut down the gun sales credit card gambit, at least temporarily.

 This new corporate resolve to look for ways to push back on a combination of paralysis in some areas, and excessive deregulation in others, has surfaced in a number of other ways.  For example, the Trump administration’s move to roll back rules on methane-emissions was initially seen as a boon for big oil companies. Quite the contrary, most of those corporations – including Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell – were critical of Trump’s move and have said they will stick with the stricter Obama limits out of a desire to be seen as supportive of climate change remedies.

Meanwhile, automakers are balking at Trump’s plan to give them relief from Obama-era rules on fuel efficiency standards.  Here again, the president thought he was doing the companies a favor by rolling back environmental regulations.  But Ford, BMW, Volkswagen and Honda have said they will adopt standards slightly reduced from the Obama rules but much stricter than those Trump is trying to enact.  Other car manufacturers appear headed in the same direction, away from the president’s huge reduction in fuel efficiency rules.  

Mostly, this has to do with California and other states whose fuel standards exceed those pushed by Trump.  But they are also sensitive about being seen as ignoring environmental concerns, a stigma that has never kept the Donald from getting a good night’s sleep.   As a result, Trump is now threatening to hit car companies with anti-trust charges on the basis that they have conspired against him to make cars that don’t pollute enough.  He is also talking about prohibiting states from having stricter environmental standards.

Clearly, the GOP, once the party of big business and states’ rights, has morphed into a demented and unrecognizable entity. It is taking rights away from states, and it is beating up on God-fearing capitalists for trying to do what the government has failed miserably at: making this country a better place.  If this is what MAGA means, someone with a red hat needs to file a consumer fraud complaint. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHEN IT COMES TO WOMEN, THE GOP ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Once upon a time, in a land now unimaginable, the Republican Party was a hotbed of women activists hellbent on fighting for human rights.  Really.  Republican women led the antislavery movement in the 19thcentury and catapulted from there into their own battle for suffrage.  Ida B. Wells, an iconic African American journalist and militant civil rights crusader, was a prominent Republican who saw the party of the late 1800s as the best conduit for hope and change.

Unfortunately, those aspirations did not live forever.  Far from a bastion of human rights advocacy, today’s GOP might as well be called the Grand Old Patriarchy. Out of 535 members in Congress, there are only 20 Republican women.  The party’s gender divide in the House breaks down to 187 men and 13 women, while Democrats in that body have 146 men and 89 women.   At the state level, you can count the number of GOP women governors on one hand, with two fingers left over.  

The race and ethnicity picture is just as bleak. Almost 90 percent of Republicans are white. There are only two African American Republicans in Congress, and one of them – Will Hurd of Texas – just announced he will not run again. Yet, Lindsey Graham, in a rare moment of candor back in the pre-Trump days of 2012, worried that, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” We should be so lucky.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in anthropology to understand why the Republican culture has fed and sustained the party’s demographics.  All you really need to grasp this dynamic can be found in the Archie Bunker theme song:  “Guys like us, we had it made. Girls were girls and men were men. Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

Take South Carolina’s 3rdCongressional District for example.  In the wake of the Republican’s 2018 midterm disaster, which left the party with the lowest number of female House members in more than 25 years, an opportunity to mitigate those losses emerged earlier this year.  An incumbent’s death triggered a special election in this predominately red district.  The party’s female leaders at every level – from Rep. Susan Brooks, the outgoing co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, to Sarah Palin – poured every available resource into supporting a female candidate, who seemed almost perfect for this district. 

Pediatrician Dr. Joan Perry was seen by even her detractors as a smart, personable candidate who rang the bell on virtually every conservative issue, from abortion and immigration to the sanctity of Donald Trump.  Yet her male opponent in last month’s primary election trounced her by 20 percentage points.  

According to the New York Times, Perry’s chief liability was her gender.  The paper quoted a typical voter, a 68-year-old man, saying that Perry was right on all the issues but that, “women, as you well know, sometimes get to be kind of emotional.”  Tapping into that sentiment was the virtually all-male House Freedom Caucus and its leader Rep. Mark Meadows, who endorsed Perry’s opponent on the basis that you “need a strong backbone” to stand up to the liberals. One of its TV spots portrayed Perry as “another lying Nancy Pelosi liberal.”

Research has shown that GOP women fare the worst as candidates in deeply Republican districts simply because of the dominance of Archie-Bunker-like gender stereotyping.    Hartwick College’s Laurel Elder found that the party itself, “and its increasingly conservative ideology . . . is the biggest barrier to women’s representation within the party.”  The real culprit, she said, is the deeply patriarchal culture in which Republican women play a subservient role to male leaders.

When it comes to gender equality issues, polling has demonstrated a gigantic perceptual gap among women in both parties.  For example, only 30 percent of Republican women see sex discrimination as a serious problem.  Among Democratic and Independent women, however, the vast majority see it as an extremely urgent concern.  Similarly, only 26 percent of Republican women  said there was a problem of unequal pay between men and women performing similar work.  

In a country where women make 80 cents for every dollar a man earns, and one that lags far behind other nations in terms of workplace gender equality, it’s not hard to understand the party’s lack of appeal to women.  Add to that the toxic masculinity of a Republican president who has rarely met a woman he doesn’t bully or abuse. Not to mention his policy portfolio totally void of any respect for human rights.  There is no mystery about the GOP’s estrogen deficit.  

Yet, the male leaders of this party (excuse the redundancy) still don’t get it. New York Congresswoman Elsie Stefanik resigned from the party’s congressional campaign committee, saying she wanted to devote her energies to recruiting female candidates and helping them win.  “We need to be elevating women’s voices,” Stefanik said, “not suppressing them.”  Amazingly, her words provoked a stern reprimand from her colleague, Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the GOP’s congressional campaign.  He accused Stefanik of playing identity politics instead of “looking for the best candidate” regardless of gender, race or religion.  In other words, stick with the pipeline of angry white guys.  

Emmer’s position, of course, is hardly new. The “best person” juggernaut has been used for time immemorial by white men to keep folks who don’t look like them out of the power structure.  Way too slowly, however, that insular approach of the white brotherhood has gradually dissipated in most group cultures.  Diversity and inclusiveness are now commonly seen as essential ingredients for organizational effectiveness.  The memo, however, obviously escaped the Republican leadership. Out of the party’s 200 House members, there are 13 women and one African American.  Yet, leaders like Emmer see no value in diversifying.  

Back in 1920, Republican women led the fight for suffrage and obtained the right to vote for the men who would speak for them.  You’d think that the next step in the process would have been for the party to fill at least a substantial number of elected offices with women who could then speak for themselves.  Sadly, that hasn’t happened in 100 years and is unlikely to do so anytime soon. 

TIME TO RID THE WHITE HOUSE OF ITS RACIST INFESTATION

With all due respect to Nancy Pelosi, there is an urgent and compelling need to impeach Donald Trump. I totally get and appreciate the speaker’s concern and pragmatism.  Wrangling for months in the nuanced weeds of the Mueller Report could give Trump a perfect platform for his victimization-by-witch-hunt narrative, and thereby boost his reelection chances. 

So forget the Mueller Report.  Instead, the articles of impeachment need to focus on what a majority of Americans are only too painfully aware of: the president’s racism. His bigotry, meanness and hatred are tearing the country apart. As conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times this week, Trump “is a disgrace to his office, an insult to our dignity, a threat to our Union and a danger to our safety.” It doesn’t get much more impeachable than that. 

As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s impeachment clause was crafted in 1787 with visions of Trump dancing in the founders’ heads. One of them, Benjamin Franklin, argued that some future presidents might “render (themselves) obnoxious.”  In such a case, Franklin posited, impeachment offers a more rational alternative to assassination. (Back in those days, the assassination of Julius Caesar still weighed heavily on the minds of the ruling – and sometimes dueling – elite.)  James Madison suggested that impeachment should be used in the case of a president’s “perfidy”, meaning someone who could not be trusted.  Alexander Hamilton said the impeachment option is designed to remedy “injuries done immediately to the society itself.” 

Donald Trump is not merely obnoxious and untrustworthy, he is inflicting a level of injury on this country that escalates daily.  In another time and place, the Mueller Report’s abundant and substantial evidence of obstruction of justice would have removed any president from office.  Given the moral paralysis of the Senate’s Republican leadership, it will not remove Trump.  Through the lens of the past several painful weeks, a prolonged – and ultimately unsuccessful – impeachment battle over the legal intricacies of the Russia investigation would deflect the focus from the much larger Hamiltonian issue.   This president’s racism and toxic narcissism are creating endless “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The prospect of protracted legislative hearings over what the Donald said to James Comey or Donald McGahn two years ago pales in comparison to the abject damage Trump’s culture of fear and hatred has inflicted on our country.  He has made America far worse than any of us could have imagined.  For that, he needs to be impeached.  

To be sure, Senate Republicans will refuse to remove him from office.  Yet, it is far better to proceed on a basis that viscerally resonates with voters, than on one that amounts to a sequel to Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony.  Only 37 percent of voters say the Russia investigation warrants impeachment.  On the other hand, 59 percent called many of the president’s tweets “un-American”.  Six in 10 people found Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and Muslims. Another poll found that 56 percent of voters believe the president has made race relations worse. Some 57 percent said Trump is a racist.

Every day of this deplorable presidency is filled with horrid moments, the likes of which no dystopian novelist could have ever conjured.  On Sunday, hours after a shooter, using Trumpian phrases like “Hispanic invasion” and “send them back”, killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart, the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to say that the alleged mass murderer developed his anti-immigrant views before Trump was elected.  And how did Mulvaney, know that?  Turns out he lifted the line from the alleged shooter’s “manifesto”.  Another White House first:  political spin ghost written by an accused mass murderer.

Then, later in the week, Trump made the mass shooting circuit, ostensibly to comfort traumatized communities in El Paso and Dayton, where nine people were killed early Sunday. He attacked local politicians in both places, and regaled medical providers, still weary from caring for the wounded and dying, about crowd sizes at his political rallies.  When none of the still hospitalized shooting victims in El Paso would meet with him, Trump’s team had family members bring a baby who survived the shooting to the hospital for a photo op.  The two-month-old infant lost both his mother and father in the Walmart shooting. Totally oblivious to the gravity and somberness of the moment, Melania held the newly orphaned baby and beamed widely with her husband who flashed a victorious thumb’s up for the camera. For that alone, he should be impeached. 

Based on Hamilton’s standard of “injuries done immediately to the society itself”, there is overwhelming evidence supporting impeachment.  

For example, Trump:  

LAUGHED when someone at a political rally yelled that immigrants should be shot.

REBUFFED Department of Homeland Security efforts to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.

USED the word “invasion” or “invade” to refer to migrants in tweets 10 times this year.

CUT funding for a federal program designed to undermine neo-Nazi groups and other violent domestic terrorism.

WAS named as the motivating force by countless perpetrators of hate crimes.

REPEATEDLY attacked people of color with blatantly racist tropes (here, here and here).

CALLED Mexican immigrants “rapists”, Syrian refugees “snakes”, and countries of black and brown people “shit holes”.

Impeachment should never be used to get rid of a merely bad president.  That’s what elections are for.  Yet, our wise founders envisioned the possibility that a day could come when the leader of the free world might be way worse than bad, so toxic, in fact, that our entire society is left in spiraling agony.  Alas, that tragic day has arrived.  

As damning as the Mueller evidence is, this no time to thread a legal needle over whether the president obstructed justice or merely obfuscated it.  All along, the smoking gun was hiding in plain sight, in the president’s tweets, his rally speeches, his everyday actions.  

Donald Trump is a disgrace to his office because he has totally failed to insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, in accordance with the Constitution he swore to faithfully execute.  It is hard to fathom a more compelling case for impeachment.  

DEMOCRATS’ INTERNAL DISSENSION BEATS THE ONE-MAN PARTY OF TRUMP

These times are not easy for any of us, but moderates from both parties seem to be experiencing their own special version of hell right now. On the one hand, they see Donald Trump plunging ever deeper into the hateful abyss of bigotry and division. And then they watch a horde of Democratic presidential candidates play to the party’s leftward flank, leaving them between an orange rock and a very hard place for them to go. 

“I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump,” wrote New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks.“So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?”  

Former Republican operative Rick Wilson begged Democrats, the party he is rooting for in 2020, not to “(rush) to the left with reckless abandon.” 

Mona Charen, a conservative author who worked in the Reagan White House, is disgusted with Trump but worried that Democrats will nominate some starry-eyed socialistic liberal unacceptable to “Republican refugees like me.”

This Never Trumper angst is shared with such prominent centrist Democrats as Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, as well as many of those seeking their party’s presidential nomination.  One of them, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper blasted his more liberal counterparts – Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren – during last Tuesday’s debate.  Referring to their health care proposals and support for the Green New Deal, Hickenlooper said, “. . . you might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”  

With a summer-and-a-half to go before we know the precise parameters of the 2020 presidential campaign, it’s easy to get lost in the noxious electability weeds of specious political prognostication.   We really need to chill, take some deep breaths, and remember that just four years ago we all saw Donald Trump as the most unelectable candidate in either party. The optics of a single moment do not portend a future outcome, particularly in a process as fluid as a lengthy presidential campaign.  

For those of us longing for an end to our Trumpian nightmare, this process will be filled with excruciating anxiety.  Yet, it has to play out. What remains of our democracy depends on it.  We are, after all, left with only one functioning political party.  Trump commandeered  the GOP and drained every last drop of process and policy out of it.  What was once the party of austerity, free trade and limited government is now the party of Trump, a nihilist cabal singularly committed to the insatiable ego needs of a lying, racist megalomaniac.   

When it comes to the basic building blocks of our political system, the Democratic Party has the only tent in the game.  And it has to be big enough to house everyone, from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, to the Bronx’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yes, the dialogue inside that tent will be acrimonious and contentious as we argue over whether to go with big, bold structural change or with steady incrementalism geared toward repairing the damage that Trump wrought. Yet, despite all the chaos churned out by this agonizingly protracted nominating process – or maybe because of it – the Democrats are giving voice to what it means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  The other party has muted the people’s voice in order that Donald Trump alone can rule this country.  

A year from now, the single most important issue of the 2020 election will be whether to take four more years of Trumpian disarray and dysfunction, or go with a candidate who will neither embarrass America nor tarnish its soul.  Sure, issues like health care, immigration, climate change, income inequality and foreign policy are vitally important. The only election prediction I will make is that, come November 3 of next year, the nuances of those policy matters will take a back seat to a referendum on the most excruciatingly toxic presidency this country has ever seen.

However, now is not the time to narrow the debate to a Trump versus Not-Trump dichotomy.  There are two dozen Democratic candidates, each with their own vision for a better America. We watched them battle it out over their ideas and resumes last week.  It wasn’t always pretty or elegant, but it was an extremely important part of the process.  Those candidates – at least most of them – are works in progress on the presidential stage.  And so are their ideas.  

In a normal campaign, there may be cause for alarm when primary candidates tilt too far to the left or right, since most general election voters lean toward the middle. But there is nothing normal about the 2020 election.  The only discussion on the nitty gritty of policy matters is taking place in the Democrats’ tent.  As they joust over Medicare for All versus a modified Affordable Care Act with a public option, Donald Trump has no healthcare plan and never did.  As the Democrats argue among themselves over approaches to immigration reform, Donald Trump has no plan other than his wall and putting children in cages.  The Democratic candidates have ideas – big and small – for wealth redistribution. And here, so does Donald Trump, but it is in the opposite direction: through tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor.

Centrists should lose no sleep over fear of creeping socialism, particularly given the composition of Congress and an abundance of gerrymandered conservative districts. To put this red scare in perspective, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, Congress’ two Democratic Socialists, have authored a bill that would cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent, hardly a stake through the heart of the bourgeoisie. 

The bottom line in this August of 2019 is that Democrats have just begun their process of nominee and issue development. A robust conversation over matters affecting our lives and our country’s future is essential to our democracy and to mobilizing the electorate.  Even a raucous, contentious debate stands in poignant contrast to the status quo, a government of Trump, by Trump and for Trump.  

TRUMP’S RACISM IS DIMINISHING AMERICA

These are the times that try America’s soul in ways that not even Thomas Paine could have envisioned. Since 1776, our country has struggled to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility. Then along comes Donald Trump. Suddenly those noble aspirations bit the dust. They succumbed to the autocratic ravages of hate and division.

The gruesome and bizarre Trump antics of the past week, although certainly not out of character for this pathological egotist, rose to such a level of alarm that it is hard not to worry about how this sad chapter of American history ends without lasting damage to the very fabric of our nation.  

Here was the guy who used his inaugural speech to decry the “American carnage (of) crime, gangs and drugs”, calling out four congresswomen of color for criticizing the country.   As everyone knows by now, not only did Trump call them out for “not loving America”, he dug out the old racist trope of “why don’t they go back to the countries they came from”.  All four of the women are U.S. citizens.  Three were born here.

For days, we were subjected to constant debate and analysis on the insipidly stupid question of whether the president’s words were racist.  That’s like asking whether Minnesota winters are cold. As a matter of fact and law, scores of employers have been found in violation of antidiscrimination laws on the basis of telling minority group employees to go back to where they came from. 

As for Trump, his overt racism has never been a close question.  He called Mexicans “rapists and drug dealers”, said all Haitians have AIDS and that Nigerians would “never go back to their huts in Africa”.  He claimed some neo-Nazis and former KKK members are “very nice people”.  He ended a federal grant for an organization that combats white supremacism. The list is endless.

Trump, of course, says there “isn’t a racist bone” in his body.  He also says “no one respects women more than I do,” despite his boasts of grabbing them by their genitals, and that 17 women have credibly accused him of sexual assault. Facts to this president are whatever he says they are. He could hold an orange in his hand and call it an apple. Yet it would very much remain an orange.  He tried that kind of trick last week by claiming that he attempted to stop a campaign rally crowd in North Carolina from chanting “send her back”,  despite video of the event showing Trump standing in silence for 13 seconds of such chanting.  

Although the story has had longer legs than most of this president’s cataclysmic moments, it will soon fade into the data bank of Trumpian atrocities. If it is still alive by mid-week, the Donald will simply threaten Iran with a nuclear attack or fire another cabinet secretary, anything to change the subject.  Yet, the national psyche will have taken one more serious blow. The cumulative damage from this presidency is unlikely to be healed anytime soon.

That dynamic was captured perfectly on a New York Times podcast last week by conservative columnist George Will.  Here is what he said, in a broader context, about the malignant impact of Trump’s words: “. . .you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for school boy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.” 

Some of that damage has already been measured. Studies have found correlations between Trump’s presidency and various medical conditions, including cardiovascular issues, sleep problems, anxiety and stress and, particularly among Latinos, a high risk of premature birth due to stress.

Research by social scientists at Tufts University found a dramatic reversal in a 50-year trend of honoring a clear social norm of not openly making racist statements. Since Trump started making degrading comments about racial and ethnic minority groups, that norm has been blown to bits, according to researchers. One study showed that people exposed to Trump’s campaign quotes about Mexicans were “significantly more likely” to make similar offensive remarks about not just Mexicans but other identity groups.  They were simply following their leader.

Since Trump arrived on the national scene, there has rarely been a day without reports of racial incidents perpetrated in Trump’s name.  “Donald Trump was right,” said two Boston men convicted of beating and urinating on a homeless man because they thought he might be an immigrant.

Repeated surveys of public school teachers have demonstrated a steady increase in Trump-attributed racial taunts in the classroom.  In one study, 90 percent of the educators responding said their school climate has been negatively affected by Trump’s racist words and actions. The vast majority of them expressed the belief that the impact will be long-lasting. 

Because of a crude, mean spirited, bigoted presidential tweet, millions of young children of color will return to school next month only to be told by a classroom bully to go back to where they came from.  We have reached the point where a racial taunt and a presidential proclamation are one in the same.

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this country has slowly struggled to shape that more perfect union in the form of a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, one that would, at long last, deliver both justice and domestic tranquility for all.  The journey has had its low points (George Wallace) and its high points (Barak Obama).  On net, forward movement outweighed the backslides. Yet, in less than three years, Donald Trump has wiped out decades of progress. We now have miles and miles to go before we sleep.  We cannot let this president take us all the way back to where we came from.   

BUSING: AN UNCOMFORTABLE STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE

Busing to achieve school desegregation has poked its head out of the ash heap of history. Just when we thought the next 16 months would be consumed with the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and the Mueller Report, comes this ghost of issues past, an oldie-but-not-a-goodie. 

What was undoubtedly intended as a metaphor for the generational and experiential gap between two Democratic candidates – Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden – quickly mushroomed into something much more, namely the painful reality that America’s schools remain as segregated today as they were 50 years ago. 

Harris, in the first round of the party’s primary debates, went after Biden for his self-inflicted wound incurred by boasting about his good working relationships with long dead segregationist senators.  As the only black candidate on the debate stage that night, Harris made it personal, identifying herself as “that little girl” who was bused to a white neighborhood school 50 years ago in order to get a better education.  Had Biden and his old racist Senate colleagues had their way, Harris argued, she would have been stuck in an inferior segregated classroom.

The aftershocks from that debate are still being felt.  Biden eventually offered a rare apology for his remarks about working with the segregationist senators, but defended his position on busing, saying that he was never opposed to it on a voluntary basis, but abhorred the idea of the federal government forcing the practice on local school districts.  For her part, Harris noted how Biden’s defense was taken from the segregation playbook, the one that insisted the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. 

Yet, asked after the debate whether she would support forced busing today, Harris initially said she would if states failed to desegregate its schools.  Days, later, however, she modified that position by saying she supported only voluntary busing, a stance not terribly different than Biden’s back in the 1970s. Alas, busing has never polled well. Welcome to a strong jolt of déjà vu, at least for those of us old enough to remember the political perils of busing.  

Through the first half of the twentieth century, public education in this country was structured around race.  Black schools were mostly run down and dilapidated with inadequate and inferior resources. White schools, for the most part, offered a vastly superior education.  The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, said such a separated and segregated system was inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.  And then for the next 17 years, nothing much changed.  In response to that inertia, the Supreme Court, in 1971, went a step further and said segregated school districts needed to bus students to other schools in order to achieve a racial mix.  

That’s when all hell broke loose. The reaction to the judicial edict made Roe v. Wade look like a walk in the park. It wasn’t just the schools that were segregated back then, it was virtually every neighborhood of every major city in the country.  Through decades of predatory real estate practices such as redlining and blockbusting, this country was literally and figuratively divided by race.  Yet, the courts were limited to remedies involving only the schools since that was the legal predicate of the Brown case.  

Many white northern liberals, who cheered the court decisions because they saw them directed at the segregated south, went apoplectic when they learned their kids were about to be bused into a black neighborhood school.  There was major turbulence, ranging from riots to recall votes of local school board members, in places like Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Like Biden, many Democrats who supported busing as a concept quickly reversed course in response to constituent outrage.  

Eventually, as the makeup of the Supreme Court changed, and as the country’s angst over busing continued to grow, there came a series of partial reversals to court-mandated busing. By 1999 only 15 percent of the country favored busing for integration purposes. A few years later, the Supreme Court issued a decision that substantially reduced the circumstances in which local districts could use race as a basis of moving students from one school to another.  For all practical purposes, busing was nothing more than a bad memory of failed policy.

It was not, however, a failure for black children. The racial test score gap was cut in half for many black students. Longitudinal studies showed that black kids in integrated schools were far more likely to graduate from high school, get out of poverty and even live longer than their counterparts in segregated schools.  

Sadly, many of those educational improvements underwent severe setbacks as structured desegregation plans fell by the wayside. According to several studies, a number of school systems are more segregated today than they were a half century ago. Not only that, but black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods and have lower achievement test scores than back in the busing days. 

None of this is surprising. Neighborhood schools have long been touted as the shining exemplar of American public education. Busing was seen as the enemy of that system.  Ignored in such thinking, however, is this fact: The ugly underbelly of neighborhood schools is a funding mechanism – the property tax – based on real estate values.  We have chosen an arrangement in which the quality of a child’s education is based on the income of their parents. As a result, we are left with a bifurcated system every bit as separate-but-inherently-unequal as the one condemned in Brown v. Board of Education.

In a far more perfect world, the remedy for centuries of post-slavery racism and bigotry would have been deeper and broader than simply busing kids from one segregated neighborhood to another. How about integrating the neighborhoods themselves?  How about equal funding for all schools, regardless of local property values?  

As Joe Biden said last week, in his ongoing attempt to extract himself from his busing brouhaha, “There should be first-rate schools of quality in every neighborhood in this nation.”  Since we, as a country, have never come close to such a standard, maybe it’s time to ask this question in the next presidential debate:  Would you support federal control of public schools in order to assure that all students have an equal opportunity to a quality education regardless of race or family income?  If nothing else, it might make busing look more palatable. 

THE REAL ART OF THE DEAL: NEVER EMULATE TRUMP’S NEGOTIATING STYLE

If Donald Trump were a car, he could be immediately disposed of under the lemon laws of most states. Not only is he congenitally incapable of functioning as president, he sold himself to America on the blatantly fraudulent claim that he would be the best deal maker to ever occupy the White House. As it turns out, this guy couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag.

Forget about The Art of the Deal, Trump’s ghostwritten ode to his delusional prowess as a master negotiator.  With this one-trick pony, it’s all about the art of the threat. His singular approach to conflict resolution is to fire off a volley of threats at his opponents, like something out of the Godfather movies.  The only difference is that most Mafia dons are adept strategists. Trump is not.  He simply huffs and puffs and indiscriminately hurls threats with all of the dexterity of an angry drunk denied bar service at last call. 

Rarely a day goes by without this president lobbing a new threat at a perceived adversary.  He’s threated both North Korea and Iran with economic sanctions and/or nuclear annihilation but is nowhere close to an agreement with either country.  He threatened immigrants with an array of Draconian retributions for entering the country illegally and they have continued to storm the borders in record-breaking numbers.  He threated Mexico with all sorts of mayhem if didn’t pay for the wall, which it steadfastly refuses to do.  After first threatening to close the Mexican border as leverage to get that country to stop the flow of immigrants, he backed away and threatened to slap tariffs on imported goods from our neighbor. Then he dropped the tariff threat in exchange for an agreement that merely codified the status quo. For all of his verbal fire and fury, he got nothing he didn’t already have.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  He threatened former FBI director James Comey with releasing tapes that didn’t exist. He threatened to:  end the NFL’s tax cuts;  impose a tax on European cars; cut off aid to countries he doesn’t like; stop health insurance payments for members of Congress until they pass an Obamacare replacement; pull NBC’s licenses because he doesn’t like their coverage of him. In some cases, he actually made good on his threats, like shutting down the government to get his border wall funding. None of these threats, executed or not, delivered the outcome Trump was looking for.  

He does, however, reap a valuable dividend: love and adoration from diehard supporters who worship their action hero president for having the alpha male fortitude to man-up and take on a political system they have grown to despise.  The more Trump threatens and bellows, the more his base loves him.  Yet, remove the smoke and mirrors from the Trumpian bargaining process and you will find nothing resembling a serious, effective negotiation. Just an agitated old man braying at the moon. 

Donald Trump is a cartoonish stereotype of what many people think of when they hear the word “negotiator”, an angry, red-faced, table-pounding blowhard barking demands and hurling insults at the other side. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

“The world’s best negotiators,” said Marty Latz, a well-respected conflict resolution trainer, “are also empathetic, as they deeply listen, understand and appreciate their counterparts’ needs and interests without necessarily agreeing with them.”  Trump, according to Latz, “has undermined (his) effectiveness for years with his lack of preparation, spontaneous gut-level moves, threats, name-calling, an adversarial win-lose approach, and an extremely aggressive and often mean-spirited tone.”

Of course Trump and his merry band of MAGA voters offer a far different narrative of the all-powerful deal maker, one that reflects illusions created by theater of the mind. Take North Korea, for example. The president would have us believe that his bellicose threats to destroy that country with the “fire and fury” of his nuclear button brought North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to his knees, begging for a negotiated peace.  With grandiose visions of the Nobel Peace Prize dancing in his head, Trump has spent the past two years in repeated photo ops with Kim.  To hear the Donald tell it, he is now “in love” with Kim and the two are endowed with a “very special relationship” that, of course, ensued directly from Trump’s threats to bomb Kim and his country into oblivion.  Just yesterday, Trump made front page news by becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korea.  

Yet, we are not an inch closer to a deal ending North Korea’s nuclear capabilities than we were when Trump was threatening to blow the country up.  Kim may be a brutal, murdering dictator, but he, unlike our president, is an effective negotiator. Kim knows his opponent and he is giving him what he needs right now: political cover through the illusion of peace.  Without making a single concession, Kim has elevated his own status on the world stage. More amazingly, he has transformed his relationship with Trump from one of threatened annihilation to that of a bumbling bromance. 

A number of law school professors who specialize in conflict resolution have expressed concern that their students will be influenced by Trump’s approach to deal-making, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything they teach, namely listening, empathy, relationship building and problem solving.  Andrea Kupfer Schneider, director of the Dispute Resolution Program at Marquette University Law School, said she emphasizes to her students, that Trump’s objectives in a negotiation are aimed singularly at his political goals, not at the interests of his client, namely the American people. 

“Although the president might appear to be engaged in negotiating with a counterpart, his goal does not appear to be changing that particular counterpart’s mind,” she wrote. “Instead, his negotiation behavior is often calculated, not necessarily to result in successful negotiations, but to boost his political ratings.”

Remember those days, when America was truly great, and the president was seen as a role model for students?  They have been replaced with a new warning:  If you want to be an effective negotiator, pay no attention to Donald Trump. Alas, there is no art in his deals.