Tag: Donald Trump

TURNED OFF BY TRUMP, CORPORATE AMERICA TRIES TO GOVERN ITSELF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIME TO RID THE WHITE HOUSE OF ITS RACIST INFESTATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, Trump:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRUMP’S RACISM IS DIMINISHING AMERICA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BEAVER & THE DONALD: DON’T LEAVE IT TO EITHER OF THEM

Remember how idyllic life seemed to be back in the Leave It To Beaver days? Good old dad, Ward Cleaver, was the family’s sole breadwinner who never failed to get home in time for dinner.  His wife, June, was a happy stay-at-home mom, constantly smiling, even while vacuuming the living room in a dress, high heels and a strand of pearls. Their sons, the Beaver and Wally, partook only in wholesome antics and said “golly gee” a lot.  The Vietnam War was percolating. College kids were dropping acid. Racial tensions were imploding all over the place.  But none of that ugliness ever entered the Cleaver household, or their lily white neighborhood.

This 1960s sitcom represents the imagery of the second A in MAGA.  Donald Trump’s promise to his base is to return the country to the fictional greatness of Leave It To Beaver. A more straightforward pitch would have been “Bring Back The Sanctity Of White Privilege And The Subjugation Of Women”. “Make America Great Again” fits better on a cap.

MAGA is all about the Cleaver family and an unambiguous emotional ecosystem in which everyone knew their place. Marriage was between a man and a woman. Husbands were in charge and wives were their obedient servants.  Minority group members, the oppressed few among the dominating white majority, were seen but not heard.   In the six-year run of LITB, there was only one appearance by a black actor. She played a maid in a single episode.

Much to the consternation of the MAGA crowd, the Cleaver days are now long gone, even though they were never anything more than the imaginary figment of a wistful writing staff. America is rapidly changing. Same sex marriage is the law of the land. Not only are rigid gender roles loosening, the concept of gender itself is now seen as amorphous. According to Axios, by the time today’s teenagers enter their 30s, there will be more minorities than whites, more old people than children and more folks practicing Islam than Judaism.  Not exactly Ward and June Cleaver’s America.

So along comes Trump and his MAGA time machine to take us back to the good old days.  The president has been amazingly effective in leading this backward journey.  Sadly, the old days being recaptured look nothing like a Leave It To Beaver rerun. 

Take abortion for example. Back in the early 1960s, aborting a fetus was a felony in 49 states – and a “high misdemeanor” in New Jersey. Countless women, mostly poor, died or were badly injured in black market abortions performed by sketchy characters under incredibly unhygienic conditions.  Since 1973, however, women have had a Supreme Court affirmed right to choose a safe and legal abortion.  Trump, in turning back time, has proudly engineered a court majority he hopes will reverse that 46-year-old decision by denying women the right to control their own bodies.  A number of state legislatures this week adopted draconian abortion bans, reminiscent of the 1950s, all aimed at providing the court with a vehicle to overturn Roe v Wade.  Under a new Alabama law, a physician performing an abortion on a rape victim would serve a longer prison sentence than the man who raped her. 

If there is anything resembling a coherent theme of governance in Trump World, it’s this reactionary retreat into the dark corners of our past.  Numerous studies have documented substantial increases in hate crimes since he took office.  No, Trump didn’t invent racism. He just made it look acceptable, allowing closeted bigots to climb out from under their rocks and go after people who don’t look like them.  The Anti-Defamation League has documented thousands of  racial assaults, intimidation and vandalism in which the perpetrators referenced the president in carrying out their attacks.  

Rarely a day passes without Trump finding some way to turn back the cultural clock on human rights. Earlier this week he scuttled plans put in motion years ago to replace slaveholder Andrew Jackson’s picture on the twenty dollar bill with that of anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman.  The very next day he announced that his administration would make it easier for adoption agencies to reject same-sex couples and transgender people.  Previously, he rolled back LGBTQ protections in numerous areas, including health care, employment discrimination and military service.  

A number of commentators, including the Washington Post’s David Maraniss, have described the Trumpian zeitgeist of fear, demonization and attacks on free speech as eerily reminiscent of the red scare and McCarthyism days of the 1950s.  Back then, wrote Maraniss, “communists and their sympathizers were called un-American traitors. Now Muslims are disparaged as terrorists and Hispanics as ‘illegal’ and worse.”

In yet another instance of this MAGA retreat to an anything-but-great past, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta recently suggested that Trump’s position that he is immune to Congressional inquiry harkens back to 1859. In the White House then was James Buchanan, widely acclaimed by most historians as the country’s worst president, at least until Trump was elected.  Buchanan was being investigated by a House committee for possible illegal activity.  He unsuccessfully argued at the time that Congress was simply a band of “parasites and informers” who had no business poking its nose into the business of the executive branch.  “Some 160 years later,” wrote Judge Mehta, “President Donald J. Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.” In upholding the House’s right to subpoena Trump’s financial records, the judge said Congress has “sweeping authority” to investigate illegal conduct of a president before and after taking office. He ended his decision with this line: “This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”

Unfortunately, this president is not only prepared to roll back that tide, he is obsessed with doing so. It’s the ultimate con by one of the most adept flimflam artists this country has ever known.  True greatness has never been achieved by turning our backs on the present and retreating into selective memories of the past.  Greatness comes only by looking ahead, not back, and always with an eye toward building a better future for all of us. Leave It To Beaver wasn’t real, and neither is Trump’s promise to create grandeur by going backwards. 

CRUISING THE ROAD TO TOLERANCE WITH MY MAGA COUSIN

I’d like you to meet my cousin Jaime. Frequent visitors to this space may have stumbled upon his occasional retorts (here and here) on my leftist pontifications. Jaime is a God fearin’, gun totin’, Trump lovin’ kind of guy.  If Hillary Clinton had ever met him, she would have quickly certified him as one of the deplorables. And Jaime would have worn it as a badge of honor.  

Well, Madam Secretary, I know Jaime Nelson.  We grew up together. Our fathers were brothers, and our families are close. Jaime Nelson is no deplorable. He’s a good man with a gruff exterior and a big heart. He is also a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and his policies, an agenda that many of us view as anathema to all that we hold dear.

This essay is neither a tribute nor a rebuttal to my cousin.  It’s an examination of a widening and dangerous fault line in our current combustible political culture. How do we – or, even, should we – maintain personal and familial connections with those whose world view so diametrically conflicts with our core values. 

We have never had a moment quite like this one.  The Gore-Bush debacle in 2000 was hard-fought, but did little or no permanent damage to family relationships. The reaction to Obama in 2008 was more visceral. Yet, as Republican pollster Frank Lutz told the New York Times, “With Obama, people hated him or people loved him. But you weren’t evil for how you felt.”  In recent polling, Lutz found that at least a third of those questioned said they had stopped talking to a friend or family member as a result of disagreement over Trump.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a conflict resolution consultancy. During the 2012 presidential election, she said her outfit “got not a single message from anybody in the country about incivility.” Once Trump was elected, however, she said her business skyrocketed with pleas for help from clergy members, corporate CEOs and other organization leaders whose constituencies were at each other’s throats. “This is now deep in our homes, deep in our neighborhoods, deep in our places of worship and deep in our workplaces,” Lukensmeyer told a reporter. “It really is a virus.”

Unfortunately, there is no easy vaccine for this virus.  The divide over Trump and his policies cuts deeply through the bone and into the core of our marrow.  To many of us, Trumpism is a vile form of hatred, of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, of the LGBTQ community and others at the margins of our society. Jaime and his fellow Trumpers, however, see themselves marginalized by the political establishment. They have a sense of being left behind by a system that has little regard for native-born American white people who worked hard, only to be looked down upon and shoved aside by immigrants and diversity programs. They feel hated and ridiculed by many of us who resist Trump and his politics of hate and ridicule.

Here is the question: Can we passionately oppose Trumpism and still maintain a connection with the MAGA people in our lives?  Before answering, let me make this even tougher by using Cousin Jaime as an example. Here are two of his recent Facebook posts, both generated by a conservative site.  The first is a picture of an enthused and energetic Beto O’Rourke. The copy reads: “Obama: Now Available In Vanilla”.  Then there’s a picture of Obama and Hillary Clinton embracing under this heading: “This is the only time you will ever see a Muslim hugging a pig.”

Pretty vile, right? They go against everything we bleeding heart liberals believe in.  Why not hit the unfriend button?  Yet, after knowing Jaime for nearly 60 years, I have much more data about who this guy is. He is more than his Facebook page. He has showered my family with repeated acts of kindness over the years.  He’s also posted anti-bullying messages on Facebook, along with this sage piece of advice, attached for unknown reasons, to a picture of John Wayne: “Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you. We need to relearn that in our society.”

Yes, I cringe a bit at a few of his political posts, just as I do with some posted by fellow liberals. Like this one: “At this point, if you still support Trump you are either rich, racist or just plain stupid.”  Or this one: “Why I am not a Republican: I don’t hate women. I don’t hate minorities. I don’t hate the poor. I don’t hate gay people. I’m not greedy and I’m not a traitor.”

As for the question posed a few paragraphs ago, the answer is yes, I believe it is possible – and necessary – for us to maintain personal and family connections with those whose politics we abhor.  The basic tenets of liberalism are based on the values of treating people with kindness, dignity and respect.  One of the main reasons Trump drives us up the wall is that he dehumanizes large groups of people.  He sees Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He wants to ban all Muslims and black and brown people from “shithole countries.”  Writing friends and family members off on the basis that all Trump supporters are stupid or racist is playing a card from our opponent’s hand.

Obviously, every situation is different. I’m not sure I could sit down at the dinner table with a relative who donned a white hood and carried a tiki torch through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  But that’s not everyone in MAGA World.  I suspect Cousin Jaime disagrees with at least 90 percent of everything I have written in this space. Yet, his comments have always been directed at the substance of my content, never an attack on me. The fact that we can vehemently disagree about Trump but still care for each other is a rare ray of hope at a time of intense division and animosity.

In another context, we of the progressive persuasion, have stood steadfast in our belief that our country should build bridges to the world rather than wall ourselves off from it. Regardless of what happens in 2020, the eventual healing process for this virus of division is going to take a long time. Between now and then, we need bridges, not walls, in our relationships with those on the other side of this political divide. As my cousin says, we can choose to disagree without hatred.  For the sake of our country, our families and our own quality of life, that’s a far, far better road to follow. 

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION RECORD IS A CONSISTENT, UTTER FAILURE

Donald Trump has tackled his pet issue of immigration with all of the bluster – but none of the effectiveness – of the Big Bad Wolf.  He has huffed and puffed his way through dozens of lame attempts to keep brown and black people from entering the country.  Unlike the nursery rhyme villain who succeeded in demolishing two-thirds of the Three Little Pigs’ real estate, the Donald’s bloviation has accomplished absolutely nothing. On the contrary, he has managed to make a broken immigration system far worse than it was. 

Strategic thinking, of course, has never been in this president’s wheelhouse.  He’s a tactics-only man, the kind of guy who tosses fecal matter against the wall with no plan to make it stick.  So far, none of it has. As a matter of fact, there is no wall for it to stick to. Mexico won’t pay for it and neither will Congress. All of his tactics have imploded: a government shutdown, family separations, troops at the border, threats of sealing the border, firing Homeland Security officials for not being tough, asking immigration agents to ignore the law by refusing to let migrants into the country.  Now he wants to charge asylum applicants exorbitant fees and eliminate bail for those accused of entering the country illegally. 

Meanwhile, government officials processed more than 103,000 migrants last month, the highest level in more than 12 years.  Not since the Vietnam War, has an administration demonstrated such utter ineptness at problem solving.  Not only have Trump’s mindless and manic remedies failed miserably, they have exacerbated the very crisis that has defined his presidency.

There is nothing simple about America’s long-broken immigration system, but there is one basic truth that has permeated this issue for decades:  deterrence is no magic wand when it comes to keeping migrants out of the country.  Threats of indefinite imprisonment didn’t hold the Cuban or Haitian boat people back in the Carter and Reagan years.  Fences and intense border patrol policing during the Clinton and Bush years simply rerouted migrants through a deadly Arizona desert. The Obama administration’s Central American advertising campaign warning against family migration had no impact.  

Then along comes Trump and his innate inability to comprehend complexities.  His immigration policy consists of insults and an endless barrage of cruelty designed to keep the “animals” and “bad hombres” from entering the country.  He justified his gambit of pulling migrant children out of the arms of their parents as a deterrence mechanism. Never mind the moral ends-means conundrum.  The government’s own figures showed the caging of children separated from their parents had zero impact on the flow of migrants.  

It was almost as if Trump had no knowledge of the great Sonoran Desert diversion of the 1990s. And, of course, he probably didn’t.  Not many people did until New York’s public radio station, WNYC, produced an astounding Radiolab series called Border Trilogy.The documentary told the story of how government immigration officials used a combination of massive border patrolling and fencing to reduce illegal crossing through a swath of Texas.  The strategy was to reroute migrants through Arizona’s deadly Sonoran Desert, a treacherous path certain to produce serious injuries and death.  The thinking was that word of such adverse consequences would serve as a deterrent to entering the country.  Turns out that they had only part of the theory right. Desert deaths went from four or five a year to hundreds as soon as the plan was put into place.  But the migrants were not deterred.  The death toll went as high as 10,000, and may be even higher because many remains, picked over by vultures and other creatures, were never found.   If the threat of death doesn’t deter migrants in search of a better life, what would?

Deterrence theory is predicated on a behavior model foreign to the immigration context. It assumes that the decider is relatively rational and capable of applying a linear cost-benefit analysis to a contemplated action. Most migrants entering the country are fleeing Central America’s northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It’s an area where weak, corrupt and autocratic governance has yielded violent gangs, drug trafficking and rampant human rights abuses. 

One 15-year-old Honduran boy told Stanford University researchers nothing would stop him from trying to make his way to America. “Here we live in fear. . .I’ve thought of it a lot. I will go.” Why?  His sister was killed by gang members.  Five teenagers were gunned down outside of a youth center he regularly went to, and a grocer in his neighborhood had just been shot.  When that’s the only life you know, a cage or tent in El Paso is hardly a deterrent. It may not be what Janis Joplin had in mind, but it certainly fits: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

In order to understand that, however, policy makers have to be able to get out of their own heads and see the world through the eyes of the Honduran boy.  And that is something our empathy-deficient president is unable to do. So he just keeps flinging crap at the wall. For example, take the punitive action of cutting off foreign aid to the northern triangle countries. It may make Trump feel tough, but the result will certainly be a further deterioration in those countries, sending even more migrants to our borders. Similarly, the president’s overzealous approach to arresting asylum seekers, gives him the aura of the powerful new sheriff in town. Yet, the reality is that the country now has a backlog of 850,000 immigration cases, up by more than 200,000 since Trump took office. With fewer than 450 immigration judges, Central American families arriving now know they will have years to spend in this country until their case comes up, the very outcome Trump wants to avoid.

The ultimate solution to this crisis will come from neither all-cap tweets nor scorched earth, stick-it-to-them tactics.  There are multiple pieces to this puzzle and they need to be addressed in a comprehensive immigration-reform legislative package.  Sadly, even before the 2016 election, Congress was unable to rise to the occasion. Such an outcome now is about as likely as Trump replacing William Barr with Robert Mueller as attorney general.  Our only hope is that at least some of those Trump voters who believed their guy would singlehandedly resolve this immigration mess by building a big, beautiful, Mexico-paid-for wall has not only failed to deliver the goods, he’s made matters much worse. 

THE MUELLER REPORT: AN EPIC TALE WITHOUT A HAPPY ENDING

The biggest mystery of the Mueller investigation is why Donald Trump was so obsessed with stopping or stymying it. The outcome, in his post-fact universe, was always destined to be rewritten, revised and repurposed in order to cast the Donald as the perpetual winner he imagines himself to be. 

Not even Lewis Carroll could have envisioned a scene like this:  Trump beaming from ear to ear as he declared himself to be having “a very good day. . .no collusion, no obstruction.”  Such joy and jubilation from a 448-page report that paints a picture of an incendiary White House led by a dishonest, paranoid and prevaricating  president who repeatedly orders his aides to lie and falsify documents. God only knows what it would take for this guy to have a bad day.

Robert Mueller’s meticulous report has been analyzed, annotated and otherwise sliced and diced since its release. In many ways, the magnum opus is the legalese version in the glut of Trump books that hit the market over the past few years.  It portrays 45 as an out-of-control narcissist who views events through a prism of whatever makes him look good in the moment, a man who bows to no norm or ethical standard. 

Yet, there is little in this report to stun an American public that has sadly developed an immunity to Trump shock over these past tumultuous  27 months.  Take one of Muller’s more pedestrian findings: that the president dictated a deliberately falsified press statement relating to the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer and her entourage.  In any other administration, that would have been a page one story for days. Instead, it was merely Trump meeting our expectation of untruthfulness.  After all, we’re talking about a guy who, according to a former Mar a Largo butler, used to falsely tell guests that nursey rhyme tiles in Ivanka’s room were the original work of Walt Disney because, as Trump told his employee, “who cares” if it’s not true? 

One of Trump’s pre-presidential biographers, Michael D’Antonio, prophetically anticipated a major theme of the Mueller report weeks before the inauguration. In describing his vision of the then-incoming presidency, D’Antonio told Politico, “. . .he’ll give orders and they may not be followed, and he wouldn’t care if he doesn’t find out about it. He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government. It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem.”

Therein lies Trump’s biggest ego bruise from the Mueller investigation.  Revelation of his constant fabrications or utter disregard for ethical behavior does not faze him. That’s simply Trump being Trump, a persona he has embraced for 72 years.  For this president, the real kryptonite in Mueller’s findings is that his staff regularly ignores the Donald’s orders, otherwise known, in the words of former White House counsel Don McGahn, as “crazy shit”.   For a man who ran for president on the theme of “only I can fix it”, a pathological egotist who takes counsel from no quarter, the Mueller report had the impact of Dorothy’s dog, Toto.  It pulled back the curtain on this boisterous, vile-tweeting, bombast-spewing loudmouth to reveal that the mighty Oz is actually just a feeble old man who nobody pays much attention to.

Of all of Mueller’s findings, this one sentence carried the heaviest blow to Trump’s ego: “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” 

According to Mueller:

WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL MCGAHNrepeatedly refused Trump’s orders for him to have Mueller fired.

DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF RICK DEARBORN took Trump’s written instructions for the Justice Department to limit the Russia probe to future elections and threw them into a trash can.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS continuously refused Trump’s pleas to “un-recuse” himself from the Russia investigation so he could protect the President.

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DANIEL COATSrefused the president’s request to say there was no link between the Trump campaign and Russia.

DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY DIRECTOR K.T. MCFARLANDrefused Trump’s order to write a witness statement saying that the president hadn’t told her then-boss, Michael Flynn, to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

CHIEF OF STAFF REINCE PRIEBUSignored Trump’s order to fire Jeff Sessions.

DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL ROD ROSENSTEINrefused Trump’s order to falsely announce that James Comey’s firing was Rosenstein’s idea.

The list goes on and on. In many cases, as Trump biographer D’Antonio prophesized, the refusal of presidential orders took the form of passive resistance. They simply ignored the assignment and waited for Trump’s attention to move to the next shiny object.  

While the Mueller report provides the most extensive documentation of how many of Trump’s aides routinely ignored his commands, it’s not the first we’ve heard of this phenomena. His former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, refused Trump’s order to assassinate the president of Syria and provide options for military action against Iran. Aides also prevented Trump from pulling out of trade deals by removing papers from his desk and waiting for him to forget about it.  Other top assistants reportedly declined Trump’s instructions to lobby the Justice Department to prevent the AT&T-Time Warner merger as a way of punishing CNN for what the president regarded as negative news coverage.

There is, of course, only slight solace in the fact that so many of the president’s subordinates found ways to avoid doing “crazy shit”.  Of those identified above, all except Coats have either left the White House or are about to.  

Now that the curtain has been pulled back on the illusion of the great and powerful Oz, passive resistance offers little comfort for the future of Trump’s presidency.  That means, unless we find a way to cut this nightmare short, we will need a pronoun change in what has been the most quoted line in the Mueller report, the part where Trump, upon learning of Mueller’s appointment, said, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”  The truth of the matter is that if his presidency doesn’t end soon, WE are fucked.