Tag: Donald Trump

TRUMP’S ONLY SUCCESS: LOWERING THE BAR FOR PRESIDENTIAL BEHAVIOR

If there is a twelve-step program for superlative dependency, someone should throw Donald Trump an intervention. Can you imagine his first support group meeting? “Hi, my name is Donald, and I’m a hyperbole abuser. In fact, I am the most marvelous, magnificent, outstanding hyperbole abuser who was ever born.” Needless to say, his road to linguistic recovery will be long and winding.

According to the Donald, every person he has hired or appointed is absolutely fantastic, even those he later fired or forced to resign. He claims (incorrectly) to have signed more legislation in his first six months than any other president. He once gave an unremarkable, but relatively gaffe-free, speech to a joint session of Congress. He claims it was the best oration ever uttered in the House chamber.

The same is true on the flip side. Trump never experiences run-of-the-mill adversity. It’s always horrendously horrible, beyond all compare. In what had to have been the absolute least uplifting commencement address on record, Trump told Coast Guard Academy graduates in May that he is the world’s most mistreated pol. Here’s how he characterized his allegedly unparalleled plight: “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Never mind that other politicians – at home and abroad – have been assassinated, kidnapped and imprisoned. Donald has to endure CNN and Saturday Night Live. Cue the violin section. Boo hoo. Boo hoo.

Actually, Trump, in many ways, is the most Teflon president in modern history, a rare superlative he’s likely to reject. Throughout the campaign, and during the first six months of his presidency, he got by with more atrocities, flubs and mistakes than any of his predecessors. Who else could have mocked John McCain’s war record, belittled a Gold Star mother and revealed a proclivity for sexual assault, only to go on and become president? Trump entered the office with an expectations bar set so low a Trinidad limbo dancer couldn’t shimmy under it.

Let’s take a close look at just one class of White House transgressions, and compare the repercussions for Trump with those of his predecessors. Numerous presidential tongues have taken bad slips when it comes to declaring a person’s guilt or innocence. This can be quite problematic since the government’s prosecutorial arm – the U.S. Justice Department – serves under the president’s command. Legal experts, including Harvard’s Noah Feldman, say it is an impeachable “abuse of authority” for a president to accuse someone of committing a crime without evidence. It has happened not infrequently over the years. And, in every instance prior to January 20, 2016, the gaffe provoked an immediate dustup of criticism, usually followed by some sort of presidential mea culpa.

In 1970, President Nixon said Charles Manson was “guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders.” Since Manson’s trial had just gotten underway, the president’s declaration of guilt caused considerable pandemonium. Nixon apologized and walked his premature verdict back. In 1980, President Carter accused former attorney general Ramsey Clark and nine other Americans of a crime for defying his order to stay out of Iran. Carter’s declaration of guilt triggered a huge political blow up. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe called his remarks “a terrible blunder.” In 1988, President Reagan stunned his staff when he declared that Oliver North was not guilty in the Iran-Contra scandal, days after a grand jury indicted North on 23 charges. In 1998, President Clinton drew heavy criticism for saying that he didn’t think there should be a plea bargain in the Unabomber case because the defendant, Theodore J. Kaczynski, “if he’s guilty, killed a lot of people deliberately.” In 2009, President Obama opened a week-long media frenzy when he said the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department acted “stupidly” in the arrest of a black Harvard professor who was trying to get into his own home. Obama also took flack for implying that the alleged architect of the September 11 terrorist attacks would be found guilty and executed, should he be tried in U.S. Courts.

Trump, of course, soars far above the separation of powers concept, moonlighting as a wannabe Judge Judy. He pronounces someone’s criminal guilt on a near daily basis. Using Twitter as his gavel, the Donald dispenses his verdicts with terms like: “guilty as hell”, “totally illegal” and “so illegal”. The president has dispersed imaginary convictions for Hillary Clinton, her former campaign manager, John Podesta and his brother Tony; Obama and his former national security advisor, Susan Rice, and his former attorney general, Loretta Lynch; and recently fired FBI director James Comey. Just this morning, he accused his own attorney general and the acting FBI director of ignoring Hillary Clinton’s unspecified and unproven “crimes”. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has managed to issue these totally bogus claims of criminality against his political opponents with total impunity. In fact, they have become a staple of his presidency, akin to an innocuous proclamation for, say, National Condiment Appreciation Week.

Aside from a couple of obscure blogs, like the one you’re reading, there has been no public clamor about Trump bludgeoning his opponents with presidential criminal convictions. Yet, a single similar transgression by previous presidents kept the chattering class in a constant scold for days. This is just one of many ways in which this president has been held to a far lower standard than those who preceded him. There is an abundance of deficiencies that would invite rapt attention to any other president, but where Trump gets a pass. Like his speeches with the prosaic quality of a telephone book, his five-word sentence fragments that are utterly without meaning, his inability to know just what it is he doesn’t know, and his innate lack of intellectual curiosity.

Unfortunately, there is a lesson here for future presidents: If you want to deflect attention from your inherent inadequacies, be sure to collude with a foreign adversary, obstruct justice and tell lots of lies. Nobody will notice the other foibles.

FROM NIXON TO TRUMP: A PASSAGE FROM TAPES TO TWEETS

The Donald’s sly hint of a White House taping system a few weeks back was enough to cast a nostalgic aura of excitement over the nation’s capital. Those of us in the political junkie geezerhood delight in finding Watergate imagery in the growing muck of Trump’s folderol. Our blissfully aging crowd, after all, remembers only too well how Tricky Dick hoisted himself on the petard of his own surreptitious recording system, an electronic treasure trove of every syllable uttered in the Oval Office, some slurred beyond recognition.

Nixon’s own tapes brought him down, but more importantly, they were a gift that kept on giving. For decades to come, transcripts and MP3 files of virtually every private presidential conversation in the Nixon White House were periodically released. The final installment – 340 hours of tape – was made public in 2013. As a result, we were treated to the horrifying-but-compelling opportunity to see the unvarnished version of the 37th president, long after his death. It was not pretty.

For example, this Nixon gem from a 1971 Oval Office diatribe: “The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life.” (As opposed to the “Negros,” Nixon went on to postulate, “who shun conventional family life.”) Now, that’s obviously not the public persona any sane political operative would want to advance, thus the beauty of the Nixon tapes. They let us eavesdrop on the private utterances of a president, it turned out, we barely knew. So when Trump teased that the FBI director he had just fired better hope there were no tapes of their conversations, many of us lit up over the prospect of a whole new batch of presidential recordings.

Alas, another dream shattered. Trump later said he had no such tapes, although he left the door slightly ajar, saying that someone else might have wiretapped his office. Obama, maybe. Then again, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need a hidden tape recorder to know the real Donald Trump. All you have to do is follow him on Twitter or listen to his rally speeches. This is a man who captured the presidency by shouting and tweeting the kind of crude, profane, hateful stuff other politicians wouldn’t whisper to a trusted aide. Nixon had been dead for 20 years before the world heard his less-than-generous thoughts about Mexicans. We knew where Trump stood on that issue way before he became president. Here’s what he tweeted in June of 2015: “Druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers are coming across the southern border.”

We learned in 2001 that Nixon, 30 years earlier, had made it clear to his staff that he did not want women in important jobs. Here’s his private remark: “I’m not for women, frankly, in any job. I don’t want them around. Thank God we don’t have any in the Cabinet.” Trump, on the other hand, came to the White House with an exceedingly transparent position on women. In addition to boasting about his proclivity for grabbing them by their lady parts, there is this analytical tweet from 2013: “The Miss Universe Women totally blow away the Victoria’s Secret Women.” Trump hasn’t placed many women in his cabinet, but he sure packed his swim suit competition with them.

Presidents, of course, serve as the country’s military commander in chief, and have to make many tough decisions with respect to warcraft. Rarely, however, do they speak about the loss of life and limb in crude “locker room” fashion. So, there was shock when the Nixon tapes relayed the president’s reaction to a report that a million pounds of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam: “A million pounds of bombs! Goddamn, that must have been a good strike. I tell you the thing to do is pour it in there every place we can…just bomb the hell out of them.” No need to wait for the posthumous release of secret Trump tapes to hear the Donald’s lack of elegance in describing military strategy. He spent most of the campaign boasting about his desire to “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”

And then there are the courts, a not infrequent nemesis for the executive branch. Yet, out of respect for the founders’ notion of separation of powers, presidents typically refrain from publicly attacking the judicial branch. Thanks to the Nixon tapes, however, we eventually learned of his reaction to a Supreme Court decision denying the government’s request to stop the New York Times from publishing the “Pentagon Papers”, classified documents detailing serious military mistakes in the Vietnam War. Said Nixon at the time: “. . . I was so damn mad when the Supreme Court had to come down. Unbelievable, wasn’t it? You know, those clowns we got on there, I tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards.” Trump, of course, has never hidden his disdain for judges, particularly those who rule against him. During the campaign, he called a judge assigned to a suit involving Trump University a “hater” and a “Mexican”. As president, he tweeted this about one of the judges who ruled against him on his travel ban: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

This Nixon-Trump story of then and now has two morals. One is that, in this great country of ours, every child has the opportunity to become president when they grow up, no matter how uncouth, obstinate or unbalanced they may be. Secondly, we have finally evolved to the point that we can observe our president’s abhorrent behavior in real time. No need to wait for 30-year-old tapes to find out he was nuts.

JUNIOR’S RUSSIAN TALE: DOSTOYEVSKY IT’S NOT

As we soaked up this week’s news of Donald Junior’s induced transparency, and his eagerness for the Russian government’s promised Hillary dirt, we were treated to a music video link featuring beauty pageant contestants, a Russian pop singer and a cameo appearance by Donald Senior. This is what happens when we elect a president whose only experience in foreign affairs was running the Miss Universe competition.

Watergate never produced this kind of entertainment. Oh, it had its share of amusing characters; Bebe Reboso and Donald Segretti come to mind. But neither could have held a candle to Rob Goldstone, the rotund tabloid-journalist-turned-music-publicist, who has the face of a disgruntled carnival worker. The Daily Beast once described Goldstone as a frequent host of “vodka-soaked parties (for) younger acquaintances” at New York’s Russian Tea Room. His credentials were just upgraded from the Tea Room to the Russian election tampering investigation that has transfixed all of American politics.

(Since tracking the characters in this emerging melodrama can be as confusing as trying to follow a Chekhov play, here’s a quick cheat sheet: Goldstone represents Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop singer. Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch, is Emin’s father. He helped sponsor the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, held in Russia and then owned by Donald Trump. Aras also partnered with the Donald on plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow, a project currently on hold, a rare Trumpian nod to optics.)

So in this week’s episode, Junior, after insisting that he never once, in his capacity of working on his father’s presidential campaign, had contact with the Russians, changed his tune a bit and told the New York Times that he had, in fact, met with a Russian lawyer in June of 2016,but insisted it was about adoptions. The next day, Junior altered his story again and acknowledged that Goldstone had offered him a meeting on Emin’s behalf, with a Russian lawyer who had dirt on Hillary Clinton. But, he insisted, the information was not from the Russian government and didn’t amount to anything. By the next day, the Times had obtained copies of an email string between Junior and Goldstone. In it, Goldstone laid out the narrative: Aras received word from the Russian prosecutor that he wanted to get incriminating information about Clinton to Trump. Junior said “love it” and set up the meeting. He tweeted copies of the emails as soon as the Times told him they were going with the story. That got Junior an attaboy from Senior, who congratulated his first born for being so transparent.

All of this, of course, has inevitably dusted off that old Watergate term, “smoking gun”. There were, after all, numerous false or premature sightings of that mythical weapon before Nixon threw in the towel and helicoptered out of the White House for the last time. Most historians say the real smoke didn’t leave the revolver until Nixon was caught on tape ordering the CIA to get the FBI to drop the investigation of the break in. In the current case, several media outlets (here, here and here) declared the imbroglio over Junior’s Russian email exchange a “smoking gun.” Others ran it with a question mark (here and here).

The only smoking gun I see right now is the one Junior used to shoot himself in the foot. As for Senior, don’t count him out just yet. It’s way too early. I respect the legal scholars who found inferences of a criminal conspiracy and violation of campaign finance laws in the emails. But we are talking about a guy who was elected president after admitting on tape that he sexually assaulted women. Impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. Yet, the landscape of this scandal changed dramatically with the email reveal. At a bare minimum, the reference to the Russian “government’s support for Mr. Trump” objectively decimates the President’s characterization of the investigation as a “witch hunt.”

I suspect there are more smoking guns to come, with or without a question mark. What’s needed to end this madness is not necessarily definitive proof that Trump and the Russians cooked the votes and stole the election. The endgame is far more likely to accrue on the basis of cumulative disgust with an out-of-control whack job of a president who represents a clear and present danger to the Republican Party. The out-of-control and whack job standards were met some time ago. The Republicans, unfortunately, need to feel a little more Trump pain before reaching the cut-your-losses stage.

Yet, the needle seems to be moving, slowly but surely, in that direction. Congressional Republicans have stopped trying to defend Trump. That’s a huge change from the early days of this administration. Their default position is to say nothing, except in those outlandish instances where the president, in words or deeds, goes more bonkers than normal.

The Donald’s strategy, if it can be called that, seems aimed exclusively at holding his hardcore fan base, the folks who believe the New York Times isn’t real and that Junior’s transparency is. In the end, that will not be enough to save him. As personally gratifying as cult worship is for a maniacal leader, it rarely ends well for them. (See Jim Jones and David Koresh.) Sooner or later, Congressional Republican leaders will see this president as a pariah, to their cause and to their political futures. That’s what will trigger the endgame, and build an exit strategy for the 45th president. That is the ultimate smoking gun. Disposing of it will be the closest this Congress ever gets to gun control.

TRUMP’S TWITTER FIREWORKS: HOW LOW CAN HE GO?

To nobody’s surprise, Donald Trump’s first shot at presiding over an extended Independence Day celebration has been singularly unique. Other presidents have used the occasion to wax eloquent about American exceptionalism, the dignity of freedom and the inherent goodness of democracy. The Donald dispensed with such trivialities in order to address one of the core issues of our times: Mika’s bleeding facelift.

It’s been a bombs-bursting-in-hot-air kind of holiday weekend. One minute, Trump was calling MSNBC co-host Mika Brzezinski “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and claiming she was once “bleeding badly from a facelift”. Then he took on her co-host and fiancé, Joe Scarborough, tagging him with the moniker “Psycho Joe,” and alleging that he once begged the president to have a National Enquirer story on the couple’s then-unannounced romance killed. As the weekend progressed, he sent out a doctored video that purported to show himself assaulting a CNN broadcaster. Then he went before a faith rally at the Kennedy Center to assert his superiority over the reporters who cover him. Falling far short of John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .”, Trump offered this prosaic little ditty about the news media: “I’m President and they’re not.”

Politicians of every stripe weighed in quickly. Even Republicans were critical of the president’s unpresidential behavior. House Speaker Paul Ryan, specifically addressing Trump’s comments about the MSNBC hosts, said, “Obviously, I don’t see that as an appropriate comment.” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse had this message for the president: “Please just stop. This isn’t normal and it’s beneath the dignity of your office.” His colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham offered this: “Mr. President, your tweet was beneath the office and represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America.”

Anyone who has ever dealt with a deeply troubled family member – an abuser, addict or even someone traveling through the pain of dementia – will recognize what we are going through right now in our broader American family. Normalcy is constantly changing, expanding to include behaviors once thought abhorrent or unimaginable. Over time, they become routine through the process of repetition and escalation. It’s exhausting to constantly react to bizarre, out-of-control behavior. You do it in the beginning, but it gradually becomes more common; not more acceptable, just more known and, to some extent, anticipated. Yet, every so often, no matter how accustomed we’ve grown to this devolving normalcy, a new version of the grievous conduct presents itself, nudging us, once again, to ask, “What on earth has our life come to, and what can we do about it?”

Our reaction to the president’s holiday weekend binge of verbal abuse and indecency is not a result of rational, linear processing. It’s not that he hit a new low; he has said and done much worse. But every once in a while in this deeply abnormal environment we find ourselves in, Trump’s maniacal behavior strikes a new responsive chord, reminding us that we can never, under any circumstance, accept this conduct as normal. No matter how used to it we have become. And that’s a good thing, because it lifts us out of the numbness that repetitive acts of abject abnormality tend to create.

One of the more telling moments in this latest episode came when Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked by reporters for a reaction to the Mika/Morning Joe flap. Now, contemplate this situation. White House spokespeople over the years have been forced to account for a lot of presidential behavior, from Watergate to Iran-Contra, from Monica Lewinsky to the Iraq War. Now comes a question never before proffered to a president’s press rep: deeply personal and hurtful remarks about two television personalities shared with 33 million Twitter followers. Here is how Sanders responded: “The American people elected a fighter. They knew what they were getting when they voted for Donald Trump.”

It may have been the most straightforward, honest response ever issued by the Trump press office. Buyer beware, indeed. We knew Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, just because he could. We knew he was mean, that he delighted in calling women “fat pigs”, and body shaming Miss Universe contestants. We knew he encouraged violence at his campaign rallies. We knew he said vile, hateful things about blacks, Mexicans, Muslims and anybody who got in his way. Shame on us for electing him.

But think about this for a minute. When the person in charge of promoting the president’s image, of presenting him in the best possible light, reaches for the you-knew-what-you-were-getting into-when-you-voted-for-him defense, rock bottom is not too far away. It’s a creepy guy line from way back. Ask any marriage counselor or family court judge. As a reporter in the 1970s, I covered the opening of a new shelter for battered women. There was a sign on the wall that told this story: “A snake was hit by a car. A woman picks him up, feeds him, and gets him to a full state of health. But then he bites her, injecting her with his deadly poison. On her death bed, she asked, ‘After all I did why me?’ The snake responds, ‘You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.’”

The fact that we allowed this snake to be elected and inaugurated as our president, will not take away the venomous sting he is inflicting on the psyche and soul of this nation. And it won’t take away his culpability. In an act of patriotism for the country we love, we must be vigilant for every rattle and snakebite to come. As disheartening and unsettling as that may be, it is an opportunity to strengthen the resistance and to remind people that meanness, cruelty, obstinance and solipsism are not building blocks for America’s greatness.

OBAMACARE REPEAL PROMISE SHOWS ITS AGE, AND IT’S NOT PRETTY

For one brief shining moment, the left and the right have come together in a chorus of Kumbaya. All it took was a singularly pernicious piece of legislation that simultaneously offended all of their principles. You’ve got to hand it to Republican congressional leaders: they came up with a health care bill that almost anyone can hate. Who could have imagined such a collection of odd couples – Planned Parenthood and the Koch brothers, MoveOn.org and the Tea Party, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz – all locking arms in battle?

Yet, even with depleted and exhausted troops, these determined generals – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan – keep trying to climb that seemingly unscalable mountain in order to pound a stake through the heart of Obamacare. It’s a seven-year-old elusive dream that has not aged well. This bizarre mission is draped in a misplaced notion of integrity, of promises to keep. “We’re keeping our word,” Ryan told ABC news. “That’s very important.” Our promise, McConnell has repeatedly insisted, is to “repeal Obamacare root and branch.” The repeal mantra worked for Republicans back in the day. But political slogans need to change with the times. Even George Wallace knew that his 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” line wouldn’t play in the 1980s. Too much had changed. The health care swing was less dramatic but just as real.

The frenzy to pass this legislation is all about a promise that is no longer operative. It served conservative political interests a few years back, when the new health insurance system was confusing, unsettling and, thanks to Republican demagoguery, unpopular. However, people have gotten used to it, including the estimated 17-20 million who now have insurance for the first time. Suddenly, polls show that a majority of Americans like Obamacare. Meanwhile, NPR/Marist polling on the Republican health bill this week gave it a 17% approval rating. In that same survey, 63% of the respondents favored either leaving Obamacare unchanged or strengthening it.

From a pure standpoint of self-interest, the GOP’s health care strategy makes no sense. Politicians have two constituencies: voters and campaign contributors. So far, every health care permutation Republicans have come up with alienates both groups. If anything resembling their current bills pass, between 22 and 23 million Americans will lose insurance. Lower income families and the elderly will see premiums rise by 280%. Taking benefits away from people – or overcharging for them – is not an effective way to win votes. Republican governors get that, which is why many of them oppose their party’s mindless drive to repeal and replace. It’s a promise that has lost its predicate.

And now come the financial heavies, the real power behind the anti-Obamacare movement, all angrily insisting that the Republican bills aren’t a repeal at all. The repeal promise, of course, was not born out of a desire to create a better health care system. It was all about appeasing the Koch brothers and other titans of the corporate right. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s political arm, and a number of similar groups, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of candidates committed to a total dismantling of Obamacare. They are all thoroughly disgusted with the House and Senate bills that upend insurance for millions and slash Medicaid spending. It’s not enough for them, not nearly enough. AFP leader Tim Phillips called the Republican legislation “a slight nip and tuck”, according to the Associated Press. He said it was “Obamacare-lite” and that AFP is poised to go after Republicans who support it. In other words, the only way McConnell and Ryan can satisfy their financial benefactors is to cut much deeper, leaving millions more without insurance, and passing their subsidies on to the rich in the form of tax cuts.

The Washington Post reported today that McConnell was gingerly rearranging pieces of his Senate bill in an attempt to address objections launched from every possible direction. Reportedly, this would involve scaling back tax cuts for the rich in favor of helping lower income people get insurance. That might appease some moderates but will further frustrate the right. To compensate, says The Post, he may strike some Obamacare coverage mandates from the bill. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the bill’s reduction in Medicaid coverage would be significantly higher than originally calculated. Bottom line: the bill is not headed toward a Palm Sunday reception.

McConnell and Ryan are not in this promise trap by themselves. President Trump spent his campaign promising to slay Obamacare on day one. Of course, the president could cram everything he knows about health care and the legislative process into a single tweet, and have 140 characters left over. He says he wants a Senate bill that is not as “mean” as the House version. Yet, Trump threw a Rose Garden celebration for passage of that “mean” House bill, calling it “very, very, incredibly well-crafted . . .a great plan.” Unlike the president, McConnell and Ryan know what they are doing. They just made a huge stumble.

There is a certain nobility attached to fulfilling a promise, but nobility can quickly turn into dung when the underlying conditions behind the promise change. This is one more example of Republicans ignoring science at their peril. Remember the uncertainty principle from physics class? You can determine a particle’s position or its momentum, but you can’t accurately measure both at the same time. That’s because positions and momentum change. The Republican leadership built their repeal strategy on 2010 measurements. Once people who never had health insurance got it, the public’s position on the particle called Obamacare started to change. It’s been moving ever since, but the Senate majority leader and House speaker are just now taking stock of its momentum.

HOMELAND INSECURITY: A RUSSIAN ATTACK & A PRESIDENT WHO WON’T STOP IT

Remember that old salty story about a kid trying to shovel his way through a towering pile of horse manure, convinced there had to be a pony in there somewhere? It really captures the whole Russia/Trump/FBI brouhaha. Peel away the layers of dung – the Comey memos, the dueling claims of obstruction and vindication, the etymology of “hope” as a command – and there lies the nearly forgotten source of this mess: a foreign adversary’s attempt to sabotage our democracy.

A daily barrage of Trumpian subplots is distracting us from the compelling and frightening antecedent that started everything. That is mind boggling for those of us who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when, as kids, we were less concerned with the bogeyman than we were with a shoe-pounding Nikita Khrushchev and his promise to bury us. Fifty-some years later, Russia is caught screwing with our elections and the country gets all wrapped up in peripheral stuff, like whether the fired FBI director is a leaker.

Every U.S. intelligence agency has been unequivocal: Russia executed an extensive and elaborate plot to interfere with last year’s election. Not one cabinet secretary or member of Congress has disputed that assertion. In fact, most of them, including the Republican House speaker and Senate majority leader, have publically acknowledged Russia’s tampering. There is only one office holder in Washington who refuses to accept this reality: President Donald J. Trump. This president has not only consistently pooh-poohed the growing mountain of evidence that Russia interfered in our election, he has denigrated all of the Congressional and FBI investigations on the matter, calling them “witch hunts”.

Asha Rangappa is a former FBI agent and currently an associate dean at Yale Law School. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, she offered a singularly unique take on James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The real bombshell, she wrote, had nothing to do with Trump’s attempt to stop an investigation or Comey releasing his notes to the media. Instead, Rangappa argued, it was the president’s unwillingness “to preserve, protect and defend” the country from Russia’s attack on our free elections.

“In the nine times Trump met with or called Comey,” she wrote, “it was always to discuss how the investigation into Russia’s election interference was affecting him personally, rather than the security of the country. He apparently cared little about understanding either the magnitude of the Russian intelligence threat, or how the FBI might be able to prevent another attack in future elections.”

This is a president who has not lifted a finger to protect our democratic elections from an outside attack. This is huge, and we should never, for a moment, lose sight of it. The accusation of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians is speculative and unproven right now. Thanks to Comey’s testimony and recent news reports, we know a little more about a possible obstruction of justice charge against Trump, but it remains a close and unsettled question. Yet, by refusing to even acknowledge a foreign adversary’s interference in our election, the president has placed his personal ego needs above his sworn duty to protect this country.

Trump’s repeated refusal to deal constructively with the Russian election threat grows more acute with every revelation of the depth and breadth of the 2016 intrusion. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Russia’s cyber-attacks on our electoral system were much more extensive than originally thought. According to that reporting, Russian hackers made their way into the official voting records of 39 states. Bloomerg quoted a senior intelligence official who expressed fear that the 2016 foray into local election systems gives the Russians three years to use that knowledge in plotting an attack for 2020. Comey echoed that concern in his testimony last week. “They’re coming after America,” he said. “They will be back.”

Donald Trump is doing absolutely nothing to protect us from that attack. That, it seems to me, needs to be part of the Resistance’s messaging in the days ahead. There is no need to prove collusion or obstruction to make this patently obvious charge stick. The Russians are coming after us, and our president is doing nothing about it. If any of the pending investigations subsequently reveal evidence of collusion or obstruction, then his despicable nonfeasance becomes all the more aggravated.

Trump’s obstinate insistence on giving Russia a pass on its attack on our electoral system has the potential to transcend partisanship, even in this bitterly divided country. Just yesterday, in a remarkable rebuke of the White House, the Senate voted 97 to 2 to block any efforts by Trump to scale back sanctions against Russia. That a Republican-controlled Senate doesn’t trust this president on a critical matter of national security is a ready-made lightening rod for changing some minds in Trumpville.

If this nightmare is going to end before 2020, those minds need to be changed. Forget all that nuanced legal analysis about grounds for impeachment. The process is political, not legal. Even if Democrats won back the House and Senate in 2018, an incredibly heavy lift, a two-thirds Senate vote is required for removing a president. An impeachment has to be bipartisan. Congressional Republicans have never been comfortable with Trump, but they have no appetite for incurring the wrath of his base in their own elections. As that base deflates, however, the whole dynamic changes. Trump’s approval rating has been slipping by a percent or two each week and is currently at 37 percent. Since February, a third of that group downgraded from “strongly supports” to “supports”. The momentum is slow but steady. All the more reason to shine the spotlight on the unassailable narrative of Russia’s plot to sabotage America’s elections, and Trump’s refusal to do anything about it. After all, protecting the country from an enemy attack has always been a bedrock value of conservatism.

TRUMP AND HIS BASE: A DECEPTIVE RELATIONSHIP THAT WON’T LAST

Donald Trump’s bizarre presidency is a bastion of smoke and mirrors, an illusion forever under construction. He may owe his celebrity to reality TV, but there is absolutely nothing real about this imposter posing as America’s 45th president.

There he was on Monday, in an elegantly appointed room filled with faux Important People, right out of central casting. He was signing impressive looking documents and handing out souvenir pens, all to the accompaniment of a military band. It was, as the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman reported, Trump’s kickoff of “infrastructure week”, complete with promises of a “great new era” and a “revolution in technology.”

The scene looked very much like a president on the march, a leader focused singularly on his vision for America, showing the world he would not be distracted by annoying FBI investigations. Yet it was all fake. The documents Trump signed during the photo op were neither bills nor executive orders. They were, according to the Times, letters to Congress in support of transferring control of the nation’s air traffic control system to the private sector. Days later, there are still no available details on his infrastructure plan. It was all a sham.

Granted, presidents – and lesser mortals whose job security rests with the ballot box – have been known to spin, obfuscate and prevaricate their way through public service. But the Donald has not just made an art form out of deception, he’s taken it to an entirely new level. It’s no longer about “playing to the base” as a source of leverage to accomplish stuff. With Trump, keeping his base’s love alive is an end in itself.

This guy has but one gear: puffing himself up to look good to his loyal army of passionate supporters. Remember those post-primary commentaries about Trump’s need to pivot for the general election? Never happened. Then he won the election and pundits said he needed to “pivot to the presidential”. Not happening. Forget jumping, this white guy doesn’t even pivot. He just keeps playing to his base like it’s two days before the New Hampshire primary.

For example, legal analysts sympathetic to the president say Trump seriously damaged his travel ban case this week with Twitter messages that not only chastised judges and his own justice department, but used phrases like “people from DANGEROUS countries”. The tweets undermined and contradicted arguments his lawyers had advanced on his behalf. As the Washington Post’s James Hohmann noted, this behavior is beyond goofy Trump impulsiveness. “If Trump truly cared about the underlying ban and wanted it to be in place for the country’s security, as he claims,” wrote Hohmann, “he would not be speaking so freely. The billionaire businessman has been mired in litigation off and on for decades and has demonstrated an ability – when his own money was at stake – to be self-disciplined.”

So why would he deliberately jeopardize such a key platform pillar? The answer is that Donald Trump is unable – or unwilling – to pivot. He is in perpetual campaign mode; all that matters is feeling the love of his base. He is willing to risk a legal defeat over his travel ban in order to let them know how passionate he is about keeping Muslims out of the county. Even if it never happens. Just like the fake bill signing, it’s all about the illusion.

Same story with all of the campaign hits:

• Medical Insurance. Trump is still serenading his base with talk of “fantastic health care for everyone . . .it will cost less and have lower deductibles.” That’s the illusion. The reality is that he never lifted a finger to make any of that happen. He simply supported a House Republican bill he never understood that would eliminate coverage for 23 million people.

• Mexican Border Wall. He celebrated the 100th day of his presidency telling a Harrisburg, PA rally of screaming fans, “Don’t even worry about it. Go home, go to sleep, rest assured, we’ll build the wall.” That’s the illusion. The reality is that a Republican Congress refused to fund the project as part of the 2017 budget and has little to no enthusiasm for taking it up in 2018.

• Climate Change and Job Creation. In another staged Rose Garden celebration, Trump announced the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, touting his campaign promise to “save that coal industry, believe me, we’re going to save it.” That’s the illusion. The reality is that there is no sign of a single coal mining job being created – or saved – as a result of the U.S. pulling out of the Paris agreement.

Right now, the dynamic of this presidency is propelled not by a public policy agenda, but by the symbiotic relationship between Trump and his base: an insecure narcissist looking for love, and alienated voters looking for hope. The president’s problem is with his long game. The harder he works to fuel the illusion of hope, the more damage he does to his already abysmal chances of actually effecting change. There are already signs of disillusionment in his base. Nate Silver, the pollster superstar, reports that 21 percent of the electorate now say they strongly approve of Trump. That’s down from a peak of 30 percent in February, a loss of about a third of his base.

This erosion seems likely to continue. It’s hard to let go of hope, particularly when you’ve gone so long without it. But when the insurance gets worse instead of better, when the jobs don’t come back, when the wall isn’t built, and nobody is more secure, hope starts to feel pretty empty. And when hope dies, so dies the love that has propelled this illusionist president since Day One. The quid-pro-quo deal will have not so artfully ended. Only one question remains: Will “The Apprentice” take him back?

NO WINNERS IN WHITE HOUSE VERSION OF CELEBRITY APPRENTICE

So, it has come to this. In our toxically polarized world, the battle for moral superiority between left and right rests on a surrogate matchup of Kathy Griffin and Ted Nugent, with an undercard starring Bill Maher and Tila Tequila.
In one ring, battling to the death for bragging rights as the most offensive and despicable, is Griffin, clutching a simulation of Donald Trump’s severed skull, and Nugent, with thoughts of an assassinated Obama dancing in his head. In the racist ring is Trump supporter and reality star Tequila, flashing her finest anti-black-and-brown Nazi salute, facing off against TV host Maher and his it’s-only-a-joke N-word banter. Que Michael Buffer: “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
Sadly, the rumbling never stops. Like tinnitus’s constant ringing, this high-pitched, acrimonious roar shows no sign of abating any time soon. It’s enough to make you long for simpler times when a celebrity saying stupid stuff was . . . well, just a celebrity saying stupid stuff. As opposed to an escalation of our endless ideological war.
The latest battleground surfaced last week when, for some inexplicable reason, Griffin, a comedian, released a picture of herself holding a faux bloody Trump head. There was no context, no lead-up, no punchline and, as far as anyone can tell, no laughter. As the excrement hit the fan, Griffin offered the standard comedic defense that she was only trying to be funny, that crossing the line of appropriateness is the heart of humor. Yeah but, there still has to be a hook to make the inappropriateness funny. Years ago, Joan Rivers used this line in her stand-up: “Boy George is all England needs – another queen who can’t dress.” Inappropriate? Sure, but it had a hook, a context that got a laugh – even from Boy George. All Griffin had was a bloody head.

As a result, her world began to crumble. Despite her apology, CNN fired Griffin from her standing New Year’s Eve gig with Anderson Cooper, who independently blasted her for the prank. Most of her summer tour venues have canceled on her. At a tearful press conference Friday, the comedian said Trump was out to get her, insisting, with a level of self-absorption rivaling the president’s, that the White House is “using me as the shiny object so that nobody is talking about his (Trump’s) FBI investigation.” Obviously, it would take much more than a bully comic holding another bully’s head to divert attention from this FBI investigation.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook exploded into a fully involved proxy war. The president’s fans, predictably, expressed wildly indignant outrage over Griffin’s severed Trump head bit, many proposing acts of retribution outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. Then came a quick liberal chorus of “nana nana nana” with posts about Nugent, a 60s rocker who made a sharp right turn, and recently dined with Trump at the White House. Where was the conservative consternation, these posts asked, when Nugent called Obama a “mongrel” and invited him to “suck on my machine gun”? Then came a retrospective of various Obama-in-a-noose memes offered up by his many passionate detractors, raising this bizarre dialectic of moral equivalency: images depicting the lynching of our first black president versus a beheading of his successor. If the founding fathers had envisioned social media, the First Amendment would likely have come with an exclusionary clause.

With no ceasefire in sight, the war opened a new front Friday night when sharp-tongued comedian and Trump critic Maher used the N-word on his HBO show, “Real Time”. A guest, Republican Senator Ben Sasse, jokingly invited Maher to Nebraska to “work the fields.” The host’s response: “Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house n***r.” Maher’s subsequent apology did little to subdue the Twitter rants. Conservatives, still bristling from their loss of Fox News idol Bill O’Reilly, demanded that HBO fire Maher. It was, of course, a tough case for them to make in 140 characters, given their party’s dismal track record on matters of race. So the tweets were mostly a gotcha thing, as in: “Fire him! You know that’s what Democrats would say if Sean Hannity used the word.” That provoked a liberal response about Tila Tequila, a fallen reality TV star and Trump supporter who has said vile things about blacks and Latinos and led a white nationalist audience in a “Heil Trump” salute last fall.

Yet, it was refreshing to see a number of messages from the left, many from black leaders, that unequivocally condemned a white comedian for using a racial epithet that has no business even residing in his vocabulary. It is, indeed, possible to abhor the deeply divisive and Draconian policies of the Trump administration while, at the same time, castigating entertainers of our political stripe when they jettison every line of decency.

Unfortunately, social media lulls us into the illusion of tribalism, complete with its us-versus-them modality. We lob our verbal grenades at anyone who seems to be part of the other side, slicing and dicing with an angry indignation that never stops. When one of our own is attacked, it’s time to re-powder, circle the wagons and fire away again, or so we think. These are, without a doubt, the most emotionally strained and troubled political times many of us have gone through. Our country is as torn and divided as it has been since the Civil War. There is so much at stake. To suggest, for even a moment, that Kathy Griffin is a victim worthy of our attention diminishes and denigrates the real Trump victims, like the 23 million people who would lose medical insurance under his plan, displaced workers denied job retraining benefits under his budget, families split and devastated by the cruelty of his deportations.

So let’s take some deep breaths and try to avoid the peripheral skirmishes that really don’t matter. That will make it easier to focus on the real challenge – reversing the course this country has been on since January 20.

WHEN TRUMP TALKS, ENGLISH TEACHERS TRY NOT TO LISTEN

The first review of our 45th president’s verbal skills came seconds after he finished his inaugural address. According to New York Magazine, the 43rd president, George W. Bush, turned to those next to him and said, “That was some weird shit.” This from the guy who once said, “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.” Clearly, the torch of presidential inarticulateness has been passed.

Donald Trump makes Bush look like a master wordsmith. In a recent interview with the Associated Press, here’s how the Donald responded to a question about alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election: “ . . . there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself – and the Russians, zero.” Weird shit, indeed.

Trump’s difficulty in constructing a compound sentence without merging two disparate thoughts, mixed with a propensity to drain meaning from words through overuse, has been analyzed by a host of academicians. Linguists used something called the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to place his speeches at a fourth grade level. Psychologists compared transcripts of Trump interviews in the 1980s with those from the last four months and concluded that there has been significant cognitive decline. All this must be pleasing the president in some perverse way. The very elites who Trump thought were ignoring him are now giving him the kind of rapt attention that Jane Goodall bestowed on her chimps.

As for this expert analysis, I’m inclined to heed the cautionary observation of New York Times columnist David Brooks: “We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.”

And beep they do. Responding to the Manchester concert bombing this week, Trump told the world that, from this day forward, he will refer to terrorists not as “monsters, which they would like,” but as “losers.” This nomenclature upgrade, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank noted, puts suicide bombers in an eclectic grouping. Here are just a few of the prior inductees in Trump’s Loser Hall of Shame: Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Rihanna, Mark Cuban, George Will, an astrologer in Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, John McCain and the Huffington Post. Using the same description for Rihanna and a terrorist empties the word of all meaning.

Yet, this limited vocabulary is not the biggest impediment in deciphering the president’s messages. That prize goes to an attention span that frequently changes subjects multiple times in the same sentence. In the AP interview, for example, Trump was asked about the funding of his proposed wall along the Mexican border. His answer: “People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it – you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. . .The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.”

Trump’s unofficial record for a run-on sentence came during the Republican primaries when he once managed to utter 285 words on more than 15 subjects, all without ever taking a breath or using a period. Slate posted the monstrosity on its website and invited readers to take a crack at diagramming it with the Reed-Kellogg method, the bane of many an English class back in the old days. In lieu of cluttering this space with a 285-word Trump sentence, here’s the link, if you are up for a challenge. Like most of his off-the cuff soliloquies, it is peppered with repetitive words and phrases, like: “very good, very smart”, “oh, do they do a number” and “who would have thought?” Linguists, reported Slate’s Katy Waldman, have suggested that Trump’s overuse of such semantically non-meaningful words implies that he is “too distracted by the pleasure and theater of vocalizing to deliver any actual substance.”

Emphasizing theatrics over substance, may be an acceptable rhetorical device in sales, but a lot of folks expect meaningful and understandable content from the leader of the free world. Imagine the shock this week when Trump, after flying from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv, told a room of Israeli leaders that, “We just got back from the Middle East.” The smiling president thought he’d just delivered an applause line, but instead got a stunned reaction from an audience wondering how the guy who wants to broker a regional peace deal has no idea that Israel is in the Middle East.

In reporting on advance work for the president’s first trip abroad, Foreign Affairs said White House staff took precautions to protect their boss from verbal stumbles. Heads of state were advised to limit themselves to two-to-four minutes of discussion time, knowing how difficult it would be to hold Trump’s interest past that point. In an effort to keep him on script, Washington Monthly reported that aides tried to limit briefing notes to one page and inserted Trump’s name in every paragraph because, said a staffer, “he keeps reading it if he’s mentioned.”

Say what you want about George W. Bush, and there is a lot to say. Yet, nobody ever had to childproof his foreign trips.

THE WHITE HOUSE HELL WEEK THAT DOESN’T END

Even in a four month presidency that made Alice’s rabbit hole adventures look normal, last week was extraordinarily bizarre. The entire White House staff now understands what it was like in 1969 for those Woodstock revelers who ignored the warnings about the brown blotter acid.

Any other week, Vladimir Putin’s offer to share with Congress state secrets gleaned in an Oval Office meeting would have been hot, above-the-fold, front page news. But not last week. There was way too much competition. It started with the revelation that Trump disclosed highly confidential intelligence while showing off to Russian envoys. Then came the report that the Donald attempted to pull the FBI off its investigation of his former national security advisor, followed by a scoop about 18 undisclosed contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

By week’s end, we were reading about the appointment of a special prosecutor, a possible subpoena for a “person of interest” in the top echelon of the White House, and my personal favorite: Trump telling his Russian visitors that he fired the FBI director because he was “a real nut job”. Depending on the interpreter’s adeptness with pronouns, the Russian officials may have left the Oval Office a tad confused over who the nut job was, the president or the fired FBI guy. Alas, it didn’t really matter. In the context of last week’s totality, they, like the rest of us, were quite capable of figuring it out for themselves.

To quote a favorite cliché of Washington speech writers, “Make no mistake about it.” Last week was some kind of turning point for this country’s 45th president. The New York Times Roger Cohen: “All this is right out of Despotism 101.” The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent: “Trump’s conduct further devolves into truly unhinged autocratic madness.” Conservative blogger Erick Erickson: “The sad reality is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any better.”

After such a dystopian week, it’s easy to fixate on the darkness, finding sweet solace only in thoughts of an impending impeachment. To that I offer two notes, one of caution and the other, oddly, of guarded optimism.

Here’s the caution part: Yes, the White House staff is pulling out the procedural files on impeachment. Most media outlets are running thumb-suckers on the subject. Still, it would be unwise to plan any Trump farewell parties just yet. Donald Trump does not possess the propensity to go gentle into Dylan Thomas’ good night. Most of us counted him out at least a dozen times before the election. His base is still chugging the Kool Aid. More importantly, Republicans control both houses of Congress. They may be disgusted and disheartened by Trump. They may even privately accept that he is brain dead. But they won’t take him off life support until they are certain such a move serves their political interests. Besides, impeachment hardly takes us out of dystopia. It merely gives us Mike Pence, a functioning-but-rabid right winger who has never met a human right he likes (here, here and here).

As for optimism, as guarded as it may be, the architecture of our 241-year-old democracy has so far succeeded admirably in restraining a severe assault from the first authoritarian strongman to hold the presidency. Trump’s election pumped new life into a long forgotten novel by Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Written in 1935, as fascism was slowly taking its hold in Europe, Lewis wanted to wake up sanguine Americans to the realization that they were not immune to such a totalitarian takeover. Against the backdrop of a populist uprising called the “Forgotten Men,” Lewis’s antagonist, Berzelius Windrip, was elected president, largely on the Trump-like premise that he, alone, could solve the problems of the forgotten. Once in office, Windrip made three immediate moves that would have left Trump drooling. He strong-armed Congress into turning all decision-making power over to the president. Then he abolished the courts. Finally, he imprisoned reporters who wrote bad things about him.

Trump would trade Mar a Largo for that kind of power. As it stands, the Art of the Deal president hasn’t gotten one substantive bill through Congress. He has repeatedly railed at all the judges who have dared to block his travel ban and other executive orders. Among the morass of last week’s news stories was the revelation that Trump told the former FBI director that he wants to put journalists in jail. He has had one bromance after another with foreign authoritarian despots who have jailed or killed anyone who dared get in their way, including Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Thanks to our constitutional underpinnings, Donald Trump is only a wannabe dictator. Last week’s crazy chain of events showed that the system is working. As much as he’d like the Russian influence investigation to go away, it’s here to stay, complete with grand jury and subpoena powers. As much as he’d like to take over Congress, there are 535 ego-driven members there worrying much more about their reelections than his. And despite his fantasy of locking up reporters, Trump’s antics have fueled a revival in journalism that defies the business models of the struggling news outlets that employ them.

Although it is always reassuring to get even part way through a hurricane without the roof caving in, this storm is by no means over. Let us remain ever vigilant until the all-clear signal is given. Sinclair Lewis was right: it can happen here. We need to do everything possible to see that it doesn’t.