Tag: Donald Trump

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE POLITICAL DIVIDE — HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

There has been an abundance of trepidation about Thanksgiving this year. The fear and trembling is over the prospect of bringing Trump and Clinton voters to the same family table just 16 days after the Election from Hell. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran long trend articles about family holiday plans shattering to pieces in the wake of a divisive election. They quoted psychotherapists worried about their patients’ ability to talk turkey and politics with loved ones who voted differently.

Poor Thanksgiving. It hasn’t been under such an ominous cloud since the great Cranberry Cancer Scare of 1959. One woman, a distraught Hillary backer with two pro-Trump brothers was beside herself. “Thanksgiving,” she said, “has always been a time for people with shared values to join together in a celebration of peace and love.”

Really? She hasn’t been at my Thanksgiving dinners. Let’s not mistake a Norman Rockwell painting for the real thing. After all, this holiday got its start in 1621 when the Indians and the white immigrant pilgrims who were trying to steal their land decided to chill for a day and break bread together. According to the history books, it was a bountiful gathering and a good time was had by all. But the next day they went right back to fighting over property rights, a work still in progress 395 years later. (See Standing Rock Sioux v. Dakota Access Pipeline.)

Yet, the original Thanksgiving taught us a remarkably helpful lesson in conflict management. It demonstrated the value of engaging with people whose thoughts, interests or backgrounds are different than our own. It is a lesson well worth heeding today, now more than ever.

I can’t remember a time since the civil rights and Vietnam War struggles of the 1960s when this nation has been more splintered and on edge. Gallup released a poll today showing that 77% of Americans see the country as deeply divided on “the most important values.” That’s the most division Gallup ever measured since it started polling on the question. People were also asked whether they thought Donald Trump would unite or further divide us. Not surprisingly, we are split on that issue as well, with 45% saying he will unite us and 49% predicting more division.

This chasm has been building for some time and runs deep into the country’s psyche. There is no quick fix and it certainly doesn’t need to be relitigated before the pumpkin pie is served. On the other hand, a nation hurting from division will not heal in separation. At some point, we have to start listening to each other. Really listening, not just talking and shouting and interrupting. Hearing each other is the first step toward looking for common ground.

For those of us on the losing end of this election, that’s a tall order. It probably means enduring a smirking gloat and fist pump from a pro-Trump cousin or uncle. A couple of deep breaths will help. So will the silent recollection of two consecutive Obama victories when you all somehow made it through dinner without acts of violence. We have four long, rough years ahead of us in this tug-of-war over America’s values. It just seems so incredibly sad to start the journey by avoiding family members who didn’t vote the way we did. If there was enough love and connection to establish a Thanksgiving ritual together, there ought to be a way to enjoy another joyous meal in that company, regardless of the Electoral College vote count.

If we can’t bridge this political divide in our families, we’re going to have a real tough time pulling this country back together. I’m not sure just when it was that we started to segregate ourselves by thoughts and beliefs. It’s happened with cable news, and political websites and social media. As the Washington Post noted recently, it has happened with D.C. bars and restaurants. Bipartisan social gatherings were once commonplace among the city’s politicos, but now they tend to drink and dine by party affiliation. Nobody is listening to the other side, and the outcome has been legislative intransigence.

So why not start small this Thanksgiving? Don’t cancel plans to feast in a mixed partisan gathering. Let us all gather together, the elites and the deplorables, with good cheer and low expectations, with a vow to listen more and proselytize less. And if all that fails, turn on the football game.

Happy Thanksgiving!

WHERE HAS ALL THE REAL NEWS GONE?

As if we didn’t have enough to feel crappy about on this first Trump Nation Thanksgiving, it now appears that fake news is in and real news is on its way out. Given the populace’s disgust and disdain for the news media, there may not be a lot of tears shed over this development. But there should be. The newspaper industry has been suffering an agonizingly slow death for more than a decade while its chieftains search for an elusive cure, one that would somehow monetize the real news it’s been giving away for next to nothing. So now, insult joins injury, like a bad Monty Python sketch, as a swarm of mischievous entrepreneurs rake in the dough by making stuff up and calling it news.

Let’s sort this out. As the digital world took off 20 years ago, newspaper companies rushed to put their content online. They had a “Field of Dreams” business model: if we build it, the money will come. They’ve been waiting for Godot ever since. The problem is two-fold. First, newspaper online advertising produces a small fraction of what the print product brought in. Secondly, Google and other search engines swooped up the free news content and fed it to readers with lucrative targeted ads. A search on duck hunting will take you to a newspaper story on the sport, along with ads for shotgun shells and decoys. Google gets the ad revenue and the newspaper that produced the story gets zilch.

As a result of all that, both circulation and advertising for the print product has been in freefall. At least 15 newspapers have closed. Many others killed off the print version and publish only online. More than 20,000 journalism jobs have been eliminated. Nineteen newspapers pulled their journalists from covering the federal government. The number of full time newspaper reporters assigned to cover state government fell by 35%. The retrenchment strategy, of course, has had predictable results. With less news and dumbed down content, even more subscribers and advertisers flee.

Meanwhile, teenagers in Macedonia are raking in $3,000 a day by cranking out totally made up stories on old laptops in their parents’ basements. And they are a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the burgeoning fake news industry. Gone are the days when only the wealthiest of families – the Hearsts, the Sulzbergers, the Bancrofts, the Grahams – could afford to publish a newspaper. It can now be done without money or real news. One of those Macedonian kids, for example, cobbled together a website in less than an hour and published a fake pre-election story about Hillary Clinton endorsing Donald Trump. He then shared it on Facebook. According to BuzzFeed, it generated 480,000 clicks in a one-week period. Those clicks turn into dollar signs thanks to online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.

To throw some perspective on this 480,000-clicks-in-a-week fake news, BuzzFeed also reports that the New York Times real story on Trump declaring a $916 million loss on his 1995 income taxes generated a mere 175,000 Facebook interactions over a one-month period. Making this phenomena even more absurd is the fact that fake news played a very real role in the campaign. The Washington Post reported last week that some of the campaign issues were the invention of Paul Horner, a passionate Trump detractor who makes his living from click bait advertising fed by his totally fabricated news stories. For example, Horner’s fake blurb about a Trump protester being paid $3,500 by the Clinton campaign went viral on social media, bringing in a nice piece of change for him. It also became a talking point for the Trump campaign which retweeted Horner’s post and blasted Clinton for hiring protesters which, of course, never happened. Despite feeling crestfallen to think his antics might have helped elect Trump, Horner has not abandoned his lucrative career. His “breaking news” about President Obama issuing an executive order for the running of a new election gathered 250,000 Facebook shares in one week.

Back in the real news world, major publishers are bracing for yet another massive round of job cuts. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and its national string of Gannett-owned dailies will eliminate hundreds of very real journalism jobs. That would be a travesty at any point in time. Right now, it is a national tragedy because we are about to inaugurate a president who has a pathologically adverse relationship with the truth. It will take much more than a bunch of Macedonian kids and their laptops to protect our democracy. We need real journalism. And we need it now.

TRUMP NATION ONE WEEK LATER

It’s been a week now since our election earthquake, and true to seismic form, our life has become one aftershock after another. White nationalists, formerly known as bigots, are crawling out of the shadows of the netherworld en route to the West Wing. Muslims, Latinos, blacks and Jews are being brazenly attacked by emboldened racists, freed from their closets by their victorious shake-things-up change candidate. Meanwhile, many on the left are feeling shockwaves from President Obama’s seemingly sanguine acceptance of his successor.

Nobody escaped the severity of these aftershocks, not even the quake’s walking epicenter himself, President-elect Donald J. Trump. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump left his White House meeting with Obama Friday totally stunned over the depth and breadth of the job he just won. Apparently, it has now dawned on him that this presidency gig may take more than a few 3 a.m. tweets to pull off. Obama has agreed to spend more time mentoring Trump before the inauguration. The president also told reporters he believes The Donald will soften many of his more provocative campaign promises.

The president’s subdued reaction to the guy he once called a “carnival barker,” has riled progressives and prompted a Washington Post think piece to speculate that Obama is still working his way through the denial stage of the grieving process. I think there may be a better explanation: after an eight-year search, Obama finally found a Republican in Washington who will listen to him. As a longtime advocate for special needs students, I wholeheartedly salute this tutoring project.

Unfortunately, I suspect that most of Obama’s lessons will be geared toward procedural matters, maybe with a shot or two at trying to nudge his student’s policy positions slightly forward from deep right field. What Trump desperately needs help with is that other part of the presidency, the one that aims to reach people’s hearts and pull the country together in times of severe distress. You know what I’m talking about. It’s what Obama did after the Charleston church shooting; what George W. Bush did after 9/11; what Bill Clinton did after the Oklahoma City bombing and, what all presidents have done on so many difficult occasions.

No, there has been no terrorist attack, no mass shooting. But large portions of this country are hurting right now. Given his campaign’s vitriol and rhetoric directed at various ethnic and underrepresented groups, the fear and trembling of living in Trump Nation has been rampant everyplace, from elementary schools to college campuses and beyond. For some time now, at least in most communities, overt racism has been a cultural taboo. People have been fired for using the N word. Those who openly attack others based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity are quickly called on it and ostracized. It’s what most of us call civility and decency. Sadly, there is a faction of Trump voters who see it as a state of political correctness that just died in the electoral college. Unleashed since the election, this cabal has spread its hate and ugliness throughout the land. For example:

In Delaware, a black woman was accosted by four white male Trump supporters boasting how they “no longer have to deal with n*****s.” She said one asked her, “how scared are you, you black bitch? I should just kill you right now, you’re a waste of air.”

In San Jose, a Muslim student said she was attacked from behind in a parking garage by a man who pulled at her hijab and choked her.

In Texas, fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, were distributed throughout Texas State University. Here’s what they said: “Now that our man Trump is elected, (it is) time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.”

In Maryland, a sign advertising Spanish services at an Episcopal church in Silver Spring was ripped and vandalized with the words, TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY.”

In a “60 Minutes” interview, Lesley Stahl asked Trump to respond to reports of racist attacks by his supporters. He seemed stunned by the news. Asked by Stahl what he would say to his supporters doing things like that, Trump said, “I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, because I’m going to bring this country together.” Pressed by Stahl for an even stronger response, Trump tried to crank it up a notch, like he was in a role playing exercise: “I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it—if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’”

Therein lies the problem in elevating to the presidency a man whose only notion of leadership is making decisions and barking orders. Even a city council member in the smallest of towns has a better instinctive feel for reaching out to people and appealing to their better angels. Trump has never had to do anything like that before. He doesn’t know where to begin. He is a fish out of water. What makes it even more sad is that it is in his own interest to reach out to America right now, to condemn the attacks and the racism, to apologize for any hurt he caused in an overzealous campaign moment. No, such an approach wouldn’t change the minds of the never-Trump voters, but it would mitigate his negatives a bit, soften his tone, make him seem a little more human, a little more caring. It’s the thing good leaders do. Unfortunately, it is simply not in his wheelhouse. And that’s one more thing we’re just going to have to get used to here in Trump Nation.

THE ELECTION IS OVER BUT THE REAL FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN

If there is any certainty in these hazy, wobbly, loopy post-election days, it is this: not only has the Campaign from Hell not ended, it has only just begun. Yes, the electoral maps have been colored adnauseam, and with far too much red. Hillary conceded. Donald accepted. Michelle went high and shared low tea with Melania. But this battle for the heart and soul of America is no more resolved than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It may never end.

Early on that post-election morning of despair, when visualizing the word “President” in front of “Trump” induced projectile vomiting and sudden support for the physician-assisted suicide movement, I frantically searched for something good about this train wreck. Whenever anything bad happened to me as a child, my mother told me to look for the good. It struck me, even when I was 10, as a dubious proposition, something they must teach in mom school. But I was desperate now and would grasp any ray of sunshine I could find. All I came up with was that those annoying daily fund raising emails and phone calls would stop now that the election was over. WRONG!

The first one came from an outfit called “Courageous Resistance,” along with a logo of a black bear and a gold star and, of course, an Armageddon-like plea for cash to stop this “hateful demagogue (who) has risen to power in the United States.” Then came Democracy for America, citing the Trump administration’s threat to our values and ideals, with a red “DONATE” button to click that would conveniently bill the same credit card I used to contribute to the Clinton campaign. They called it a “seamless transition,” clearly the only one of its kind to emerge from this fiasco. I heard from the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, Move On.org, Our Revolution.com, the conservationists, abortion rights advocates, gun control supporters, two LGBT groups and a guy named Marcus who asked if I would install a button on my webpage so folks could donate to a Trump impeachment fund. Clearly Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief have expanded to include a sixth: fundraising.

Yet, once I shook off my initial cynicism over this solicitation inundation, it occurred to me that, just maybe, my mother was right: there is a silver lining in this tragedy. No, it doesn’t lie in emptying out my bank account for progressive fundraisers. Those donation requests, however, combined to offer an important and powerfully hopeful reminder that our democracy is more than one election. It’s a continual, fluid process and, as such, subject to being shaped by mass movements of agitation, resistance and, yes, sometimes revolution.

That’s not to deny the darkness of this moment. For many of us, no political moment has ever been this bad. A disgustingly divisive, hateful, hurtful, bigoted, bloviated buffoon is about to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. What we have to remember, once the tears dry and the self-flagellation wanes, is that this is only a moment. There are new moments coming every day and we have the ability and the power to affect their outcome. To be sure, there will be significant losses in the days ahead. We who care about those in the shadows, and yearn for more diversity and a redistribution of wealth and power, were dealt a really lousy hand last Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean we throw in the cards and call it a night. The challenge is finding the best way to play the hand we were dealt. The groups I heard from are doing just that. They are gearing up to fight in every way they can, just like the protesters who’ve taken to the streets every night since the election.

It’s easy in our malaise to reject such responses as foolish and ineffective, retreating instead into a cocoon of despair. There may be some emotional comfort there, but it is a venue that offers nothing to protect the values we care about. Look, there are really only two givens for Donald Trump right now. One is that he symbolizes everything we despise. The other is, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote today, this complete uncertainty over what Trump will do as president. It is impossible to predict the future moves of a pathological narcissist, with no semblance of a genuine political philosophy. Less than 48 hours after he won, Trump started backing off some of his campaign promises. Hillary voters aren’t the only ones feeling anxiety.

This election was one of those rare occurrences that instantly guaranteed a dramatic sea change in the course of our nation’s history. In terms of its role as a change agent, It was on a par with Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11. As with those other seminal events, all we know immediately is that profound change is coming. Just exactly what it will be depends entirely on how everything plays out. Therein lie the moments we can affect, the ones that offer genuine opportunity to make a difference, to write the rest of the story. The immediate thinking in November of 1963 was that hopes for meaningful civil rights reform died along with Kennedy. Yet, thanks to relentless agitation, street protests and the cunning tenacity of a newly installed southern president, a landmark civil rights law was passed nine months later. Nobody in Dallas on November 22, 1963 would have predicted that outcome.

Of course, the partisan politics of that analogy doesn’t hold. Donald Trump is no Lyndon Johnson. The movement politics, however, does follow. It means building a campaign with the embers of our election loss to salvage as much as possible in the not-yet-defined skirmishes we know are coming. Remember Mitch McConnell’s election night pledge of 2008? His number one legislative objective was to deny President Obama a second term? With an effective mass movement built on the visceral passions of the voting majority, we ought to be able reach much higher than that and find effective ways to mitigate as much Trump damage as possible during the years ahead. I think I have just persuaded myself to go back to some of the fund raising emails and make a donation or two. Four years is a long time to go just being sad and angry.

THE MOURNING AFTER BLUES: WHAT NOW?

It’s mourning in America.

After the tumultuous darkness of election night gave way to the light of another day, I reluctantly awoke to a foreboding sense of loss. It wasn’t just that my candidate was defeated and the other one won. That’s what happens in elections, and I am a seasoned veteran at losing them. No, this time was different. This time it was about values, about who we are as a country. This time it was about America’s soul. This time it was about what is in our hearts. To me, the pain of this new day comes from the victory of hate over love, walls over bridges, exclusion over diversity, autocracy over working together.

At least that’s how it looked and felt to me. I readily admit, however, that people voting differently than I did were not all intentionally pulling a lever for hate, disharmony and exclusion. Many of them were voting against a rigged system they saw as beyond dysfunction, one that left them behind, one that is owned and controlled by a moneyed elite that cares nothing about their lives and what has become of them. In other words, many of those in yesterday’s “silent majority” voted out of a world view that was not that different from the one shared by those of us in the minority. We differed on the solution, not on the problem.

I’m still too stunned and broken over this election to even begin to think about how this badly battered and bruised nation can effectively come together in a meaningful way, one that reverses course and helps people build better lives with a more even distribution of opportunities. It has been said the longest journey begins with a single step. I think that step needs to start with how we treat each other. This campaign seemed to boil with an anger unlike any other. It split families, divided friends and damaged relationships. We can – and should – choose to do some repair work for at least two reasons. The obvious one is that relationships are important, regardless of the political divide. Secondly, as noted earlier, there is more common ground than there might appear between our two camps. If we really want meaningful change in how this country is governed, we need to listen to each other again.

In that spirit, and in the unlikely event that any of my Republican friends are reading this, please accept my sincere congratulations on your candidate’s victory. I do have a number of conservative Facebook friends and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them unfriended me during this campaign, nor did I let any of them go. I feel good about that. Respectful disagreement is an essential element in constructive relationships. That’s pretty easy to do in the abstract. We can disagree over tax policy or foreign relations and still have an enjoyable dinner conversation.

But as soon as Donald Trump entered the picture, things got pretty hot and heavy, and it’s been downhill ever since. Of course most candidates have their passionate followers and detractors. That was certainly true of both Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But Trump was a whole different deal, largely because of the sharply conflicting roles assigned to him by his followers and opponents. Many of us could not understand how any rational person would support someone who bragged about forcibly groping women, repeatedly made racist comments and seemed to be utterly unprepared for the presidency. His supporters, on the other hand, saw his candidacy in an entirely different light. To them, Trump’s total otherness, including his bombastic buffoonery, was just what they were looking for in order to turn the entire messed up system on its head. One of the more telling exit polls showed that a quarter of Trump voters said he was not qualified to be president. In fact, as much as they detested Clinton, these Trumpians saw her as more qualified. The point is they were not shopping for a qualified candidate to just keep on keeping on. They wanted everything shook up. While I obviously disagree with that methodology, I do understand it. As much as I came to abhor Trump as a person and a candidate, there is both rationale and precedent for their approach. It’s actually a radical leftist organizing tactic: don’t fix problems in a broken government, make it worse so that it can be replaced with a new system. The big difference, of course, is the Trump folks have no system ready for substitution; they just know that the one we have now must be blown up.

Therein lies an opportunity. Our current government is pretty badly broken. The distribution of wealth and power is way out of whack. People are hurting and there is no sign of help on the way. It does not take great clairvoyant powers to foresee an eventual disillusion with Trump on the part of at least some of his supporters, particularly those waiting for “terrific jobs” and a “fantastic life.” Those goals are consistent with the progressive agenda and only a unified and organized electorate can eventually deliver the votes to make it happen. These folks should not be left behind. It will get worse before it can get better, but our focus has to be on making sure it gets better. We must look past the differences between them and us so we can see the similarities.

As the late great poet, Maya Angelou, wrote:

“I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.”

And as that other late great poet, Joe Hill, wrote:

“Don’t mourn, organize!”

FBI, PIGS AND LIES, OH MY!

There is an old crusty political tale that I first heard more than 40 years ago while covering one of Walter Mondale’s senate campaigns in Minnesota. It may well have been apocryphal, except for the fact it was about Lyndon Johnson, whose biography is far more colorful than most fiction. Here’s Mondale’s story: “Lyndon was in a tight race for Congress and he called his staff together and told them to leak word that his opponent fucks pigs. ‘But, sir, we don’t know that to be true,’ complained a staffer. ‘Okay,’ said Johnson, ‘then, let’s get out a report that he doesn’t fuck pigs. Either way, voters will associate him with pig fucking.’”

That story immediately came to mind this morning as I grabbed the Washington Post off the front step and glanced at the banner headline: “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. In the Lyndon Johnson’s Texas School of Campaign Pragmatics, there is no difference between “FBI may pursue charges against Clinton” and “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. Forget about the choice of a modal verb – may or won’t – all that matters are the words “FBI”, “charges” and “Clinton”. Either way, it’s still pig fucking.

So can we now please place a moratorium on any more nauseating stories or op-ed pieces about how much integrity James Comey has, or how he was caught in an untenable position? None of it survives a basic smell test. Based on his own account, the head of the FBI, in a letter to Congressional leaders, publically announced 11 days before the election that the agency was going to investigate emails it had never seen that might, once they were seen, implicate Hillary Clinton in criminal activity. Then, 36 hours before the polls open, Congress’ favorite pen pal strikes again, plagiarizing by paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s declaration that “there is no there there.” Lo and behold, Director Comey announces that criminal charges will not be pursued against the Democratic presidential nominee. And so voters trot off to the polls associating Clinton with dishonesty, corruption and criminal charges.

Sadly and completely unjustifiably, that false narrative feeds Hillary Clinton’s single largest negative character trait with voters. In the major polls released this weekend, Clinton significantly topped Trump in all aspects of the presidency, save for one: trustworthiness. By sizable margins, voters prefer her over him when it comes to personality and temperament, general qualifications, moral character and someone who has an understanding of “problems of people like you.” But when asked which candidate is the most honest and trustworthy, Trump beats Clinton by 44 to 40.

Of course winning a contest where only 44 percent of the people rate you as honest is not exactly something for Trump to slap in his trophy case, perhaps where the Emmy Award he never won would have gone. It is, however, a significant measure of one of the many perception-to-reality gaps in this despicable campaign. Construing the facts in the most unfavorable light from Clinton’s perspective, she was guilty of carelessness and bad judgment in using her private email server while in the State Department and, true to form from a lifetime of right wing persecution, she was slow to own up to the mistake. But none of that even begins to rise to the level of the kind of throw-her-in-jail frenzy Trump and his disciples whip up at their rallies.

Therein lies one of the biggest paradoxes of this campaign. Hillary Clinton loses the honesty vote to Trump only on the basis that he has repeatedly, in a thoroughly dishonest manner, characterized his opponent as corrupt, even threatening to throw her in jail if he is elected. He has never once laid out a set of specific facts constituting evidence of corruption. That’s not the way this guy rolls. He simply constructs his own reality out of thin air. As Lyndon Johnson knew so well, if you say false stuff enough, people begin to believe it. One of the amazing facts of this election season has been that the candidate seen as the most honest is the one who fact checkers say tells the truth only 9 percent of the time, a record low never before seen or approached in the history of political fact checking. Unfortunately, Trump’s campaign of lies had way too many enablers and co-conspirators, including parts of the news media and, of course, James Comey.

The only mitigation in the FBI Director’s deplorable and grossly negligent conduct may come from the fact that this campaign has been conducted so deep inside Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole that it may well make no discernable difference in the election’s outcome. So far, most polling activity has given credence to that proposition. If, on the other hand, the final results repudiate the pollsters and Clinton loses, Comey needs to be severely punished for his sins. Forcing him to serve four years in a Trump administration ought to be enough to make him deeply regret his inexcusable misdeeds and wish like hell he had become a Texas pig farmer.

WORKING THROUGH THE PAIN OF A HORRENDOUS CAMPAIGN

Pain has been my constant companion these past several months. Like all long-term relationships, it’s had its ups and downs, and now seems to have settled in – for better or worse – as a member of the family. No, this isn’t just about my recent surgeries. I’m also addressing a much greater source of pain: the 2016 presidential election.

There are remarkable similarities and distinctions between the two, the burning and stabbing at the nerve center of my most recent surgical site, and the foreboding fear and angst invoked by a dystopian political campaign of Trumpian proportions. Experiencing both simultaneously was an opportunity for introspective reflection on how the mind processes and copes with negative stimuli. I know that sounds, alternatively, like a bad grad school dissertation subject or a prisoner of war tactic banned by the Geneva Convention. Bear with me. A point will soon emerge.

As frequent visitors to this space know, I’ve spent some time in a medical odyssey of broken ribs and reoccurring tumors large enough to qualify for their own zip codes (here and here). My daily challenge has entailed searches for pain reduction by finding just the right way to sit. A large pillow to the left of me, a smaller one to the right, another behind my back, adjusted ever so slowly and slightly so as to find just the right combination to take me to that wonderful sweet spot, a euphoric moment in time when there is . . . absolutely . . . no . . . pain. It sometimes takes hours for me to get to that place, but once I’ve landed? There is no greater glory to be found. This is pain’s hidden blessing, the bliss that plays the yin to pain’s yang. People sit in chairs every day and feel nothing at all. But when pain has gripped your entire being, clogged all of your senses and shut out the world, only to suddenly disappear once you have arranged your body and pillows in just right way, well, that’s a high unmatched by any opioid. If you don’t believe me, here’s a little experiment you can try at home: Lift one end of a large couch three to five inches from the floor. Place one foot under the couch and drop it. Quickly lift the couch off your foot. Bask now in the momentary delight of instant pain relief!

So picture me, perfectly contorted in my reclining office chair, bathing in the nirvana of painlessness. Careful not to do anything that would unblock my nerve receptors, I slowly extend my right hand to the cordless mouse and double click on Politico’s Playbook. Another woman told her story of being forcibly groped by Donald Trump, who just issued a denial on the basis that she was too unattractive to grope. The crowd cheered and chanted – what else? – “Lock Her Up!” I quickly manage another mouse click to the Washington Post. There’s a picture of a white biker at a Trump rally waving a confederate flag in one hand and, in the other, a sign that says “Blacks for Trump.” Another mouse click to the Real Clear Politics polling site. The average of national tracking polls is within the margin of error.

Through it all, my physical pain remains at bay, but I am overcome now with an entirely different form of trauma, a deeper and darker sense of angst, an existential foreboding that somehow manages to shake the very foundation of. . .well, everything. Never in our lifetime, or before, have we come so close to having as our president a racist, misogynistic autocrat morally and intellectually incapable of leading. This is a much different kind of pain and there aren’t enough pillows or positions to manage it. Earlier this fall, there was some momentary relief in rapid mouse clicking, landing on a really good poll or a story or two about Republicans repudiating their candidate or a particularly poignant rebuke of the latest Trump atrocity. As a last resort, there are always those left-of-center sites like Talking Points, Daily Kos and Teegan that offer some momentary solace, but that’s more by way of escape, denial or support, than meaningful, lasting relief.

Some pain simply demands that it be felt in all of its agony. Dodging or denying it only makes things worse. Trump pain is that kind of pain. His campaign has done exactly what his true believers wanted it to do. They really don’t care what kind of a beast he is. They are disgusted with the status quo and they want Trump to “shake things up.” And that he has done. He has shaken this country and our lives to the rafters. He has shredded the basic values many of us hold dear: democracy, civility, decency, respect, justice, dignity, inclusion and diversity. This is pain that we can’t avoid or turn our backs on.

The challenge will be how to constructively work through that pain after Tuesday’s election. If Trump wins, we must be ready to find effective ways to fight for the values he’s stomped on. If Hillary Clinton wins, we will have dodged a bullet but the pain will linger and the gun will remain loaded. She is the first presidential candidate in history to attract impeachment talk before election day. The biggest challenge, and one of the most important, will be to do what we should have done long ago – reach out to many of those ardent Trumpians, people who have been ignored, neglected or left behind, and pull them into a real movement that addresses their needs without destroying the fabric of this country. That’s a tall order, but it’s the only way of overcoming a deeply embedded pain.

FBI IS THE WEINER OF THIS ELECTION

We probably should have seen this coming, but the quadrennial dialectic over our country’s governance, has devolved into a shambles that makes a middle school food fight look profound. Let’s review:

Four years ago this week, a divided nation, torn between giving a second term to President Barack Obama or replacing him with Mitt Romney, was transfixed on the question of whether tax cuts scheduled to expire should be renewed. Four years earlier, the closing argument between Obama and John McCain was how to best recover from the country’s economic collapse. And four years before that, when John Kerry ran against President George W. Bush, the focus was on the Iraq War – was it a mission of folly or an essential predicate for stability in the Middle East?

And now? Forget about tax policy, job creation or wealth redistribution. The endgame for this 2016 presidential campaign has us slowly twisting. . .no, make that sinking, in a quagmire of pussy and Weiner. Up until Friday afternoon, Donald Trump was having another bad week. On Thursday, Miss Finland of 2006 became the twelfth woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, in effect adding to the validation of his “Access Hollywood” claims that he uses his star power to forcibly kiss women and/or grab their private parts. She said Trump squeezed her rear end while she and Miss Australia, Miss Puerto Rico and Miss Columbia posed for a picture. And that is as close as his campaign got to a discussion of foreign affairs this week.

By Friday, however, The Donald was suddenly a born-again believer in the sanctity of U.S. elections and his chances of securing the presidency. That’s because the FBI supposedly stumbled upon some Hillary Clinton related emails while conducting an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s exchange of sexually oriented texts with a 15-year-old girl. Or, as the New York Post headline put it: “Stroking Gun”, with a kicker of “Dickileaks: FBI Reopens Email Case”.

The unfortunately named Weiner, of course, is the now the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s top aides. The FBI had subpoenaed his laptop in search of underage sexting evidence and came across emails that might be related to Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state. From a strictly factual matter, of course, the FBI did not say it was “reopening” the closed investigation of Clinton’s email. Nor did it say that it found any emails that it had not already reviewed, or even if any of them came from candidate Clinton. But none of that matters much when you are Donald Trump and trying desperately to move the conversation away from the growing parade of women he allegedly groped, fondled, squeezed and/or forcibly kissed.

“This is bigger than Watergate,” the always hyperbolic Trump said yesterday. “This changes everything.” Actually, it changes absolutely nothing. It is merely one more piece of bizarre absurdity in a campaign jammed packed with them. The most important byproduct of a national election is the conversation it creates about the kind of country we want. How people should be taxed, corporations regulated, students educated, justice distributed. There has been nothing resembling a conversation this year. Just shouting: “Lock her up!” “Build the wall.” “Nasty woman.”

The only serious policy positions in this campaign have come from the Clinton camp because, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton has spent her political life as a policy wonk. She has always been more comfortable in the deep weeds of complicated issues than pressing the flesh on a rope line. But you wouldn’t know much about her positions unless you visited her website. Trump has ignored public policy altogether, relying instead on simplistic but dangerous solutions to complicated problems: “build the wall”, “keep Muslims out”, “America first”. That lack of substantive symmetry has made serious policy conversation impossible. Saying “wrong” seven times in one debate does not qualify as a national conversation.

In lieu of substance, campaign media coverage has focused, understandably, on the elephant in the room. That would be Trump and all of the off-the-wall stuff he says and does, whether it is promoting one of his hotels, introducing women who claim Bill Clinton groped them 30 years ago or repeatedly calling Hillary “crooked” or “corrupt” without a scintilla of substantiation. As soon as the FBI director mentioned the existence of Clinton emails, Trump immediately characterized his opponent as a modern day Lizzie Borden.

Meanwhile this week, it was just another day on the Trump rally circuit. According to the Raleigh News Observer, a young black man, a Trump supporter, wandered up to the stage of the Kinston, NC get-together, intending to hand his candidate a note containing some tips on how he could appeal to more African Americans. A black face stands out in the whiteness of Trump Land. Security was called and they hauled the man away, presumably for being black at a Trump rally, while The Donald goaded him with accusations of being a paid disrupter.

When the Weiner Gate dust finally settles, we will be right back where we always have been: the worst excuse for a presidential campaign in the country’s history. And a choice between a razor sharp woman who knows policy inside and out, but has made her share of mistakes over the years, and a racist buffoon who abuses women and has never developed a serious public policy position in his life. In my book, that’s an easy decision – even if those emails spell out top state secrets in Haikou.

SEARCHING FOR MR. GOOD TRUMP

I am, hopefully, less than 24 hours away from yet another surgical attempt to extricate the latest in a series of invasive protrusions on my upper back. As reported earlier, these benign-but-annoying tumors have been popping up faster than Donald Trump’s sexual assault victims. The current one expands its girth on a daily basis, rubbing up against a muscle and creating general havoc on my central nervous system. I’ve found some mitigation from a delicate and precise arrangement of pillows on the back of my office chair. That and 10 milligrams of Percocet every six hours.

It is from that opioid induced fog of critical thinking that I address you now. Reviewing my last few posts in this space, it occurs to me that I have been exclusively critical of the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. My late mother raised me with the mantra of “always look for the good in people.” In the heat of this most divisive presidential campaign, I regret that I have failed to follow her edict. I have not sought out the goodness in Donald J. Trump. With tomorrow’s scheduled surgery, I am one slip of the knife away from having written my final blogpost. So this one is for Mom: a compendium of Trump Goodness.

1. A Trump presidency would give President James B. Buchanan his first good night’s sleep in 160 years. Buchanan has long been regarded by most historians as the worst president in U.S. history. If elected, Trump, in a selfless act of charity, would relieve the 15th President of the burden of being the worst.

2. Trump is singlehandedly responsible for taking Billy Bush off the air.

3. Thanks to The Donald, business is booming for Taco Trucks.

4. He performed a miracle by making Mike Pence, a raving lunatic of a wingnut, look like the adult in the room and, as a two-for, spared the good citizens of Indiana from the possibility of a second Pence gubernatorial administration.

5. He prompted the Tic-Tac company to issue a statement in support of women.

6. Trump has done more than any other individual to spur Latino voter registration.

7. He has pulled record numbers of American Muslims into the country’s political process.

8. In the waning moments of print journalism, Trump framed a brand new issue for vigorous debate in the daily news huddle: “Can we use the word ‘pussy’ in a headline?”

9. He created unlimited possibilities for memes, country western songs and B movies with his delectable combination of “Nasty Woman” and “Bad Hombres.”

10. Finally, and best of all, Donald Trump appears to be on the verge of his most significant act of goodness – making it possible for the United States to have its first woman president.

And that concludes my pre-surgery act of contrition. The next time you hear from me, I shall be lumpless. And with nothing good to say about The Donald.

EVEN WITHOUT CONCEDING, TRUMP IS A LOSER

I am struggling to understand the universal shock-and-awe reaction to Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of this election. My lack of comprehension may well be a side effect of the pain meds I’ve been on this week, but I really don’t get it. Every major news outlet led its Wednesday night debate coverage with Trump’s remarks challenging the legitimacy of an election he appears to be losing.

The lede on the Associated Press debate story began with these words, “Threatening to upend a basic pillar of American democracy. . .” Serious politicians and thinkers of all political stripes have been shaking their heads in deep disdain ever since.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the defeated 2008 Republican nominee for president: “A concession . . . is an act of respect for the will of the American people, a respect that is every American leader’s first responsibility.”

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer: “This is political suicide.”

Veteran Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, saying Trump’s remarks were “disqualifying,” added, “The campaign is over.”

New York Times editorial: “Donald Trump turned . . . from insulting the intelligence of the American voter to insulting American democracy itself.”

Believe me, I am not rising to his defense. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the validity of the election process he willingly entered into was absurd and nonsensical. But I would submit, from the totality of the record, that, (a) we should not have been at all surprised, and, (b) he has repeatedly repudiated decency, respect for law and the American way of life. When it comes to graven depravity of political thought, Trump has mastered the art of consistency.

After all, The Donald has called for: the assassination of Kim-Jong-um and the families of terrorists, shutting down the mosques, deporting U.S. citizens whose parents entered the country illegally, reducing U.S. debts by defaulting on them and banning Muslims from entering the country. This is the candidate who wished for the housing market to crash so he could make money off it, kept a collection of Adolph Hitler speeches in a cabinet by his bed, refused to rule out using nuclear weapons on ISIS, fraternizes with avowed white supremacists on Twitter and urged supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies. And this is the candidate who secured his party’s nomination on the back of one word: “winning.” America doesn’t win anymore, he said. The other candidates were weak losers. Trump defined himself as a winner, the only person who can make our country win again.

Did we actually expect him to walk onto that final debate stage, down seven points and falling, and tell Chris Wallace that yes, of course, he would graciously concede this hard fought election to Hillary Clinton, should that be the outcome, and then pledge to do everything he can to help the Clinton Administration Make America Great Again? If he had, that would have been one hell of a story. First year journalism students are taught that it’s not news when a dog bites a person, but you’ve got yourself a story when a person bites a dog. In Wednesday’s debate, Trump merely bit himself, just as he has been doing since the start of this campaign. Had Mitt Romney or John McCain said the same thing about not recognizing the validity of the election process, it would have been a stop-the-presses moment. In 2016, it was merely Trump being Trump.

It is abundantly clear that this guy is, in every way, totally ill-equipped to handle even the lowest level of public leadership, let alone the presidency. He lives in his own world, constantly creating and revising a reality to suit him for the moment. He supported the Iraq War when he thought it was the thing to do, but denies it now. He supported abortion rights, but says he didn’t. He spent his life objectifying, denigrating and sexually assaulting women, but insists that “nobody respects women more than I do.” The very predicate of his presidential candidacy is that he, Donald J. Trump, is a winner. When he wakes up on Nov. 9 with less than 270 electoral votes, he will experience the worst bout of cognitive dissonance in his life. He will sputter with foolish excuses and scapegoats. Ultimately, it won’t matter. Our country is stronger than that. Under the law of the land and in our hearts, The Donald will be what we’ve always known him to be: the World’s Biggest Loser.