Tag: Donald Trump

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

KAVANAUGH RIDES THE RAPIDS ON TRUMP’S RIVER OF DENIAL

As Brett Kavanaugh continues to deny his way to the Supreme Court, we are witnessing the nauseating effects of Trumpian Justice, a bizarre jurisprudential model in which the vigor of denial obliterates any search for the truth.

There’s an amazing passage in Bob Woodward’s just-released book that perfectly captures the Republican game plan to beat back sexual misconduct accusations against the judge. The author recounts a conversation in which Trump offered advice to a friend who had acknowledged some “bad behavior toward women.” According to Woodward (Page 175), the president told his buddy never to show weakness.

“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” Trump is quoted as saying. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny everything that’s said about you. Never admit.”

This is the closest thing Trump has to a moral code. At least 16 women accused him of sexual misconduct. He called each one of them a liar. Then he was elected president. Denial worked well for him, and he has been championing it ever since. He was the only major Republican leader to stand by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in the face of credible accusations that Moore molested young teenagers years ago. “He totally denies it,” said Trump in his endorsement of Moore. “You have to listen to him.” Even after former aide Rob Porter resigned over domestic abuse allegations from two ex-wives, the president stood by his man. “He said very strongly that he’s innocent,” Trump told reporters. “. . .you have to remember that.”

The Donald even carried his denial creed into foreign policy. Remember the Helsinki summit? Discarding his own intelligence agencies’ compelling evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president stood with the Kremlin, saying: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” He’ll take a good strong denial over facts any day, particularly if it advances his interests.

Right now, Brett Kavanaugh could not have a better denial mentor than Donald Trump. In pursuing his personal manifest destiny of a lifetime Supreme Court seat, the judge has stuck steadfastly to the Trumpian script. Responding to allegations of an attempted rape in high school and an incident a year later when he allegedly flashed his penis in front of a fellow Yale student, Kavanaugh used phrases like, “completely false allegation”, “this never happened”, and “a smear, plain and simple”.

No wishy-washy, plain vanilla denials for this guy. No, these were Trump-trademarked denials, filled with righteous indignation of steroidal strength. The judge didn’t merely deny the allegations, he “categorically and unequivocally” denied them. So strong were the denials that news organizations exhausted a thesaurus of adverbs expressing strength. Fox News had Kavanaugh “vigorously” denying the claims. In USA Today, he “forcefully” denied them. He “strongly pushed back” on NPR, “fiercely denied” the accusations in The Hill, and “strenuously” denied them in The Daily Beast.

Leave it to conservative Republicans to throw cold water on this culture-changing #MeToo moment. In their desperate rush to stack the court before the midterms, they have brought a year’s worth of momentum to a grinding halt. Prior to this sorry episode, we seemed to be on our way to changing the protocol for sexual misconduct claims. The accusers were to be taken seriously, respected and listened to. Thorough investigations were to be conducted. And any unwanted sexual contact was absolutely wrong.

For virtually every man so accused during the reckoning, there were thorough investigations that lasted weeks, if not months (examples: Leslie Moonves, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Tambor). Many of the men accused of inappropriate behavior issued apologetic responses and went out of their way to respect their accusers, a huge cultural shift in tone from days gone by (examples: Lauer, former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, Geraldo Rivera, James Franco and Richard Dreyfuss). Compare, for example, Kavanaugh’s fortified denials to Charlie Rose’s response to multiple sexual misconduct allegations: “It is essential these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior.”

It is now throw-back September – in an election year – and the retro-Republicans of the United States Senate appear hell-bent on ignoring sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh while bullying and disparaging the women who made them. It’s altogether proper to thoroughly investigate sexual impropriety accusations against a celebrity chef before letting him back into the kitchen, but if we’re talking about a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, don’t waste time looking at the facts, just measure the guy for his robe and get him on the bench before the base heads to the polls.

Unless at least two Republican senators decide to put process above politics, Brett Kavanaugh will soon take his place on the bench of the nation’s highest court. There will be no FBI investigation into the accusations against him. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will take their victory laps. It will be left to the rest of us to sort through the ashes of this disaster. We must find a way to make sure that our values of gender equality, fairness and decency are never again torched in the public square, and that even the strongest of denials never trump an honest search for the truth. The first step in that journey begins on election day.

TRUMPIAN JUSTICE: OUR CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

Like a drunk progressing from slurred speech to crashing the family car, the presidency this week continued its rapid descent toward rock bottom. Regardless of your politics, is there anyone out there who wasn’t jarred – at least a little bit – to hear our president praise a convicted felon for refusing to cooperate with the federal government he defrauded? Sure, Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, but historically presidents have paid fealty to the law, not to the lawbreakers.

The president, after all, is the chief executive of that federal government, including its Department of Justice, which, a few days ago, Trump called a “joke”. This is totally contrary to those civics textbooks now welcoming students back to school. No president has ever repudiated his justice department. We inch ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

Here’s how fast we’ve fallen: In April of 2017, legal scholars expressed outrage when Trump accused a former Obama aide of having committed a crime. Since the justice department reports to the president, such a declaration of guilt without due process was seen by numerous observers as a flagrant abuse of presidential power and possible grounds for impeachment. They noted, as summarized in this space back then, that many similar slips of the presidential tongue over the years were immediately walked back. Prime example: Richard Nixon declared cult leader Charles Manson guilty before his trial began. He immediately withdrew his comment, saying, “the last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstance.” Trump, however, walks nothing back and has no qualms about prejudicing anyone’s legal rights.

What happened this week makes the president’s earlier comments look like jay walking. While Manafort’s unsequestered jury was deliberating, Trump repeatedly fired off messages claiming – in full Twitter shot of the jurors – that the trial itself was a “sad day for our country” and that Manafort was “a very good person”. The presidential attempt at verdict influencing, however, did not stop the jury from convicting Manafort on multiple counts of tax and bank fraud.

Hours later, Trump took to the stage of a political rally in one of those theater of the mind moments that flow from the bizarre politics of separate realities. With his former campaign chairman tucked neatly into a jail cell, and his personal attorney having just pled guilty to a felony charge that implicated the president, the Donald led the crowd in the ritualistic chant of “lock her up,” a vintage reference, of course, to Hillary Clinton, who has not been charged with a crime.

If you think that Trump was simply having a bad day and reverted to the Hillary ditty out of a pathetic combination of inertia and nostalgia, you would be wrong. Every day since that rally, Trump has eviscerated his justice department, along with his attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Never a strict constructionist on punctuation matters, the president said he now puts quote marks around “justice” when referring to the department because he sees no real justice there. He called Manafort “brave” for refusing to flip on him, like his attorney, Michael Cohen, did.

One of the federal prosecutors who helped convict mob boss John Gotti told Washington Post reporters that Trump’s recent statements about the criminal justice system struck him as “the modern-day version of a particularly inarticulate mobster.” That pretty well captures the moment we are living in.

Every day, the president lists names of more Democrats he thinks should be prosecuted by his “Justice” Department (here, here, here and here). Clearly, he has turned the notion of justice on its head. To him, it has nothing to do with the rule of law. It’s about using political power to protect himself and punish his enemies. Trump hasn’t merely hinted at that notion, he’s said it. He told Fox News this week, “the only reason” for appointing Sessions as attorney general was because he “felt loyalty” and expected his guy to protect him in the Russia investigation and then go after Democrats. Trump has never forgiven Sessions for recusing himself from the special prosecutor’s investigation.

The Washington Post has reported that the chief White House counsel and other top aides have repeatedly told Trump that he can’t call Justice and give orders, but the president refuses to embrace that concept. Here’s what a former senior administration official told the Post yesterday: “The president has not a whit of respect for institutions, whether it’s the DOJ or the Fed or the FBI. If you are a threat to him, he is going to try to kill you.”

Most of the news analysis and commentary produced by this historically tumultuous week has been focused on the future. Will Manafort flip for a reduced sentence? Will Trump pardon him? How much additional dirt does Cohen have on the president? What about impeachment? Will Mueller subpoena Trump? How will all of this play in the midterms? So many questions, and so little time to fully absorb the depth of depravity our country faces right now, in this moment, regardless of what happens later.

We have a president who has rejected the rule of law, who calls the Justice Department a “joke”, who thinks nothing of tampering with a jury, and who will do whatever it takes to subvert the processes of government in order to protect his own hide and punish his enemies. This is no longer an esoteric debate on the efficacy of a president opining on a person’s guilt or innocence. This is – right now, in this moment – a full scale assault on this country’s very concept of justice, with or without quote marks. Whatever may lie ahead, let us never accept a mobster’s notion of justice as our new normal.

THE UNRAVELING OF AN UNHINGED PRESIDENT

Say what you want about Donald Trump, keeping in mind that it matters dearly to him. In fact, it may be the only thing that does matter to this president. The Donald traverses a relational line that is, at once, simple and binary. It goes from commendation to condemnation, from singing praise to a dirge of denouncement. There is nothing in between and directions are often quickly reversed. So too are the presidential rewards and penances that accompany those changes. Just ask Omarosa Manigault Newman and John Brennan, names you would never expect to appear in the same sentence.

Omarosa, as she is now mononymously known, has owned the news cycle for the past week on the basis of her aptly named memoire, “Unhinged”. In it, she takes a verbal machete – along with a tape recorder – to the president who gave her a high level White House job, a position that consisted mainly of saying nice things about him. Omarosa, a former reality tv star, started writing her tell-all shortly after she was booted from the administration last December. Why was she hired in the first place? As Trump tweeted, “She was vicious but not smart. . .but (she said) such wonderful and powerful things about me. . .until she got fired.” (Here and here.) The president, who once heaped effusive praise on his mentee, quickly reversed course, calling her “whacky”, a “lowlife” and a “dog”.

Former CIA director Brennan has only known one of Trump’s polarities; they have only spoke ill of each other. In the ring of alpha male one-upmanship, being leader of the free world has its perks, and the president used them last week to punish Brennan’s criticism by withdrawing his top security clearance. Trump was so thrilled with this new toy he’s made a long list of other current and former intelligence types he wants to use it on. And that, in turn, has alarmed serious policy wonks who see the president’s rush to silence critics as another giant step toward authoritarianism.

That may well be, but it’s also, in the nauseating expression of his sycophants, “Trump being Trump”. The Donald has always had his own ridiculously simplified version of the Myers & Briggs personality assessment. People who praise him are “amazing”, “tremendous”, “terrific”, “incredible”, “tough” and “smart”. Those who criticize him are “weak,” “crooked”, “low energy”, “phony”, “pathetic” and “low IQ”. Or, as in the case of Rosie O’Donnell back in 1996, a “disgusting slob with a fat, ugly face”.

Donald Trump is the same vicious, emotionally crippled narcissist he always has been, wholly unable to situationally modify his behavior based on circumstances. The only thing that has changed is the amount of power he wields. And that’s what makes him so very dangerous.

A recent story line, one which Congressional Republicans are refusing to touch out of understandable disgust and embarrassment, is that Trump shows his blatant racism by calling his black critics unintelligent. He’s labeled Rep. Maxine Waters as “low IQ” seven times this year alone. He recently called LeBron James and CNN’s Don Lemon “dumb” or “stupid”. He used similar pejoratives on Omarosa, the only high-ranking African American on his staff prior to her discharge.

In a moment resembling a Saturday Night Live sketch, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended her boss against racism charges by noting that he has also called a number of white people stupid. To carry this absurdity even further, the Washington Post produced a graphic tracking Trump’s insults of stupidity by race. The upshot was that he used that label mostly for white Republicans during the primaries, then targeted white Democrats during the general election, but has mostly aimed his low-intelligence barbs at blacks since taking office. They never covered this metric of investigative reporting back when I went to journalism school.

There is but one constant when it comes to Trump’s word choices. It matters only whether he has been praised or criticized. For example, he once said of Germany’s Angela Merkel, shortly after she treated him nicely, that she is “a really great leader; I was always a Merkel person.” Then the chancellor took exception with something Trump said, drawing this response from him: “The German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman.”

He called foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos an “excellent guy”. That was before Papadopoulos reached a plea deal in the Mueller investigation and drew this Trump tweet: “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George who has already proven to be a liar.”

Before former Texas governor Rick Perry started complimenting Trump, the president had condemned him with tweets: “should be forced to take an IQ test”, “should be ashamed of himself”, “failed on the border”, and “doesn’t understand what the word demagoguery means”. Once Perry offered praise for Trump, he was given a cabinet position by the president who heaped several paragraphs of syrupy praise on him.

When Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents publicly supported the president on a couple of pieces of legislation, he was rewarded with these Trumpian words at a Florida rally: “I want to express our deep gratitude to a man who has really become a friend of mine. He is tough. Man, he is tough, and he is good, and he loves you”. That was quite a change from calling Rubio a “lightweight” in 21 tweets, in addition to those that said the senator was “dishonest”, “a joke”, a “phony”, “scamming Florida”, “bought and paid for by lobbyists”, has the “worst voting record in the U.S. Senate”, and “truly doesn’t have a clue”.

Words mean absolutely nothing to Donald Trump. They are mere pieces of a bizarre Rorschach test, measuring his friend-or-foe assessment of the moment. There is nothing remotely relational about them. It’s all transactional. He thinks Vladimir Putin once said he was “brilliant, a genius”. That was actually a mistranslation. Putin’s terminology was closer to “colorful”. But it was enough to shape Trump’s mind-boggling pro-Russian foreign policy. The Kremlin hardly needs blackmail to curry favor when sweet nothings work so well.

This would all be amusing if the fate of our country, perhaps the world, were not at stake. We don’t need Omarosa’s book or tapes to know that our president is unhinged. All we have to do is read his tweets and listen to his rants. And then pray that this out-of-control reality show is canceled before our democracy is totally destroyed.

CUEING THE Q: TRUMP’S WALK ON THE DARK SIDE

There they were at the Trump rally in their “Q” t-shirts and MAGA caps, their eyes fixed in an intense-but-vacant stare, looking like a large, stoned bowling team, perpetually waiting for a lane that would never open. Yes, this is what it means to live in this 19th month of Donald Trump’s America: crazy people getting secret messages from the president, White House reporters with bodyguards, and the tote board of false or misleading presidential statements clocking in at 4,229. Turns out that Make America Great Again is a really bad science fiction film, with no finale in sight.

Welcome to “QAnon,” a growing contingent of dark internet groups devoted to a bizarre bouillabaisse of conspiracy theories. Q refers to the supposedly high-level security clearance of the contingent’s anonymous founder. The basic gist is that all presidents before Trump conspired with evildoers, including pedophile rings, to create and maintain a “deep state” that runs the government. The military, according to this storyline, got Trump to run for president in order to take back the country from evil forces.

QAnon believes the deep state perpetrators will end up in prison after “the storm”. This refers to comments Trump made last year while posing for a picture with senior military officers: “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” These Trumpian foot soldiers insist that the Russia investigation is a mere decoy, and that the president and special counsel Robert Mueller are working together to imprison numerous left-leaning pedophiles, including, of course, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Until Trump’s rally in Tampa, the Q people confined themselves to a few obscure dark places on the Internet. Apparently, they decided to come out after receiving what they saw as coded encouragement from the Donald. In a recent speech, Trump talked about how he tried to avoid Washington, D.C. before he was elected. He said he had only been in Washington 17 times, a number he repeated frequently in that presentation. BINGO! Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, and a delirious presidential seal of approval for the Q-nuts.

Not only that, on the morning after their Tampa coming-out, QAnon got another wink and a nod from the West Wing. After months of tweeting about “Mueller and his 13 Angry Democrats” the number suddenly changed. Now it was “17 Angry Democrats”. QAnon’s Mashable site went crazy.

Although Trump has never acknowledged his Q fans in a straightforward fashion, he has also refrained from disavowing them. That’s not surprising, given this guy’s obsession with being loved by his base. According to the New York Times, QAnon’s Facebook page has 40,000 followers. Its subreddit board has 49,000 participants. YouTube videos explaining QAnon have had millions of views. Earlier this year, an app called “QDrops” was among the top ten most downloaded in the Apple Store. That’s a lot of love for any narcissist to walk away from.

But here’s the problem: These people are every bit as whacked out of their minds as the guy who shot up a Virginia pizza place after reading on the Internet that Hilary Clinton was using it to run a pedophile ring. There have been at least two Q-nuts arrested this summer, both in Arizona. One armed man parked his self-made armored car on the bridge next to the Hoover Dam, blocking traffic while he waved Q signs. The other occupied a cement plant in Tucson because he thought it was part of a child sex trafficking operation. Meanwhile, our president continues to find clever ways to tweet the number 17 to gin up the most unhinged in his base (here, here and here).

Sadly, this sick behavior pattern has been firmly in place since January 20, 2017. This president thinks nothing of compromising the security of the American people if he thinks it will help ingratiate him with his fans. As of August 1, his daily average of lies, according to the Washington Post’s data base, was 7.6, totally nullifying truth as a commodity in this administration. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop Russia from sabotaging our elections because it might tarnish the shine of his 2016 election that he clings to like a security blanket. He tells us he has solved the North Korea problem and that we are completely safe, while that regime continues to produce nuclear weapons.

And now he has escalated his Machiavellian war on news reporters to the extent that media outlets are hiring bodyguards to protect the people who cover the president. Trump has moved from calling reporters the “enemy of the people,” to saying they are “very dangerous and sick” and cause wars. Of course, this helps reinforce the credibility of Trump’s lies since he is letting his base know that the truth-based media is the enemy. Never mind that NBC’s Katy Tur is getting messages warning of her being raped and killed, or that CNN’s Brian Stelter and Don Lemon, along with New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens were threatened with being shot. Trump’s diabolical and unprecedented attacks on reporters have drawn strong rebukes from the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, agencies used to taking on these issues with dictatorships of authoritarian countries.

In many ways, this behavior – Trump’s total indifference to truth, decency and the sanctity of human life – is a far greater offense than any Russian collusion or obstruction of justice charges that might come out of the Mueller investigation. This man – the president of the United States – is so singularly consumed, in his every moment, with elevating his ego through perverse delusion that he doesn’t give one hoot that people might be maimed or killed by his self-serving recklessness. If that doesn’t constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors”, then I don’t know what does.

A BOY ON AN INNER TUBE BEFORE “ZERO TOLERANCE”

If you want to beat the political ramifications of inflicting major trauma on young children, it’s better to have thousands of victims rather than just one. That’s the lesson we’ve learned from the Trump administration’s toxic “zero tolerance” campaign. This is the border war that left toddlers bruised, battered and neglected, and forced infants, torn from their parents’ arms, to represent themselves in front of immigration judges.

Six weeks ago, the nation was transfixed by images of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages. A recording of screaming babies and toddlers wailing for “Mami!” and “Papá!” went viral, leaving listeners in chills and tears.

Six weeks is an eternity in our current political environment. During that span of time, our attention has been diverted to a whole string of shiny objects, including Trump’s Helsinki love fest with Putin, the failure of his imaginary peace with North Korea, his threats against Iran, audio of his plans for a Playboy model payoff, and a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by his trade war, among far too many others. It’s hard to keep the focus on the thousands of children torn from their parents, and emotionally maimed for life by the country that once welcomed immigrants with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

Turn the clock back 19 years, to a simpler place and time, though it didn’t seem like it then. The nation was captivated by a similar story, except that this was a single 6-year-old migrant child, a Cuban separated from his parents while politicians fought bitterly over his fate. Elián González was found stranded on an inner tube near the Fort Lauderdale shoreline in 1999. Like the Central American parents caught up in Trump’s zero tolerance nightmare, Elián’s mother had been desperately searching for a better place to raise her son when they set sail on a rickety raft to escape deteriorating economic conditions. Sadly, she drowned en route. Elián was rescued by two fishermen and eventually taken in by extended family members in Miami – Elián’s great uncles – who had themselves fled Castro’s Cuba years earlier.

That might have been the end of the story if not for two salient subplots: Elián had entered the country illegally, and he had a father in Cuba who wanted him to come home. The battle lines were drawn. On one side was Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban community, fully backed by Republicans, insisting that poor, little Elián should be lovingly embraced by the welcoming America of his mother’s dreams. On the other side was the boy’s father, backed by the Castro government and Democrats on the basis that Elián was a Cuban citizen who, by rule of law in both countries, belonged with his father.

While the court battles raged on, Elián’s story evolved into a year-long media frenzy. By the end of 2000, the tale of this one child had been given the second largest volume of television coverage in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O.J. Simpson case. There were books, films, talk radio programs, songs, t-shirts, posters, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, even a South Park episode devoted to the fate of this one young child. Ultimately, the federal courts determined that the government has a duty to “(reunite) unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad. . .” To carry out that order, armed U.S. marshals stormed into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives, and removed the boy at gunpoint. He was ultimately reunited with his father in Cuba where he was treated like royalty by Fidel Castro. Elián is now an engineer and a frequent good will ambassador for the Cuban government.

What a difference two decades make. Donald Trump carried Florida in the 2016 election, in large part, with the backing of Miami’s Cuban-American immigrants who were still angry with the Clintons for supporting Elián’s return to Cuba. Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican attorney who unsuccessfully argued the case for keeping the boy in the U.S. so he could have a better life, is now the Supreme Court nominee of a president who ordered children snatched from their parents in order to keep “shithole” riffraff out of the country.

The biggest change, however, is in the numbers. Elián was a singular emblematic symbol who resonated with deep tones of empathy on both sides of the battle. His boyish face, his smiles, his tears were with us for 13 months, embedding themselves into the fabric of our lives, at a time of far fewer distractions.

We now have thousands of babies, toddlers, young children, separated from their parents and enduring forms of abuse that would trigger an immediate social service intervention in any jurisdiction. What we don’t have are their names or pictures. We don’t have anything resembling the Elián González story arc to keep this dystopian drama on the center stage of public life.

All we know is that 711 children remain in perpetual custody, with no end to their family separations in sight. One young toddler died of a respiratory illness after her release from a Texas detention center. A six-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in an Arizona lockup, and then forced to sign a form agreeing to keep her distance from her alleged assailant. Then she was molested again. A least 70 babies, all under a year old, have been hauled before immigration judges. They have no legal representation and are absurdly asked, by rules of the court, whether they understand the deportation proceedings against them.

Ivanka Trump this week called her father’s family separation plan the “low point” of his administration, as if this brutal, premeditated assault on humanity was a mere past tense blip. Hardly. The government, which was warned in advance of launching this draconian immigration offensive that separating children from their parents would cause “traumatic psychological injury”, says 460 parents of kids in federal custody have already been deported. Nobody knows what will become of their children, now languishing in unsafe and unregulated makeshift detention facilities.

Republicans once saw America as a welcoming beacon in the night to little Elián on his inner tube. No more. They are now enabling a broken and demented president, a man who, by his own admission, would rather look strong than show compassion for defenseless children. Somehow, some way, we must persevere through the daily din of Trumpian noise, and make sure that the electorate never forgets the lasting pain and trauma this man inflicted on all of those children who came looking for a better life and ended up in cages.

SCORING HELSINKI: DEEP STATE 1, TRUMP 0

We now have four, not three, branches of government: legislative, judicial, executive and, last – and most assuredly least – Donald-I-Alone-Can-Fix-It-Trump. Yes, our Constitution places the president in the executive branch. The Donald, however, disregards all instruction manuals and briefing memos, preferring to roll instead as his own unattached entity, a government of himself, by himself and for himself.

This unique bifurcation had been in the works since Inauguration Day, but reached full gestation in Helsinki last week when Trump pulled away from his own administration in a nauseating, groveling embrace of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The president not only rejected his advisors’ advice against having such a meeting with Putin, but he was sharply critical of his own government’s findings that the Russian leader had ordered an attack on our country’s elections.

As a result, the “Deep State” that Trump so vigorously campaigned against moved quickly and decisively to right the sinking ship of state. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, a Trump appointee, issued a statement contradicting the president’s remarks that let Russia off the hook for its election interference. Later that week, FBI Director Christopher Wray, the guy Trump appointed after he fired James Comey, pushed back on the president’s claim that the Mueller investigation is a “witch hunt”, insisting that “Russia attempted to intervene with the last election, and . . . continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”

So much happens so quickly these days, it is difficult to sit back and take measure, to process what is happening to our country. It is virtually unheard of for high level presidential appointees to publicly disagree with the president. But it gets even more bizarre than that. More than a week has passed since Trump and Putin spent two hours talking to each other with only themselves and their interpreters in the room. Russia has alluded to agreements reached in that meeting, but nobody in our intelligence agencies knows what they are because Trump hasn’t told them. As a result, both the New York Times and Politico have reported that U.S. spies are attempting to tap into Russian intelligence in order to learn what the President of the United States said in that meeting. No reputable publisher would ever accept a spy thriller manuscript with that story line. It’s beyond belief.

If there is a silver lining in this absurdity, it resides in the Deep State. The term loosely refers to knowledgeable government professionals who keep the country running, apart from – and sometimes in spite of – elected leaders. At various times, the Deep State has been scorned by the left and the right. In the 1960s, it was known as the “Industrial Military Complex”, and was deeply eschewed by those protesting the Vietnam War. Decades later, Edward Snowden attributed secret surveillance of U.S. citizens to the inertia of the Deep State. On the other end of the spectrum, the predicate for making America great again was the abolition of the Deep State, which the Trump campaign saw as a swamp in need of draining.

Ideology aside, the Deep State, like most governments, is neither monolithic nor inherently good or evil. It all depends on how it is used. Under our current circumstances, it has proven to be an effective safety net against the autocratic ravages of an unfit president, a “sad, embarrassing wreck of a man,” in the words of conservative columnist George Will. So loudly, confidently and unanimously was the Deep State’s repudiation of Trump’s Helsinki performance that Trump was forced to offer a rare, if lame, correction, allowing that Russia may have interfered with our election, but it “. . . could have been other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”

While the Helsinki summit was the most dramatic presentation of the divide between Trump and the rest of the executive branch, it was by no means the first. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went on Fox News immediately after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville to say that Trump “speaks for himself” on his values, and that the State Department remains committed to “equal treatment of people the world over.”

Minutes after the president disparaged NATO allies at the recent Brussels conference, even questioning whether the United States should continue to participate, current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on Twitter that “NATO is the most successful alliance in history”. According to news reports, Defense Secretary James Mattis deliberately kept a low profile during the NATO meeting and Trump’s European tour to better position himself to help repair the damage later.

Nowhere is the divide between the president and the rest of the executive branch more pronounced than in North Korea. Trump was in an euphoric glow after his smoke-and-mirrors spectacular in Singapore, insisting that nuclear peace is now in hand, thanks to his diplomatic powwow with Kim Jong-un. Pompeo, and the other deep-staters, do not expect the regime to give up their nukes easily, and see nothing but a long slog ahead, as has always been the case with North Korea.

Federal bureaucrats have long been fodder for punchlines. They symbolize what cynics see as a bloated and broken government. And they have a point, particularly when a Social Security deposit is late, or FEMA botches a hurricane recovery, or the SEC fails to stop a Bernie Madoff scheme. Yet, this Deep State also includes bureaucrats who have caught and removed defective medications, recalled dangerous motor vehicles and discovered major breakthroughs in fighting deadly diseases. It includes at least 69 Nobel Prize winners, mostly little known scientists.

Federal servants are bound by a code of loyalty that is very different than the one Trump attempted to extract from James Comey. They pledge “loyalty to country above loyalty to persons, party or government department”. That some cabinet secretaries and intelligence personnel have adhered to that oath and chosen to follow the facts, rather than an unhinged, fact-free president, is an amazing show of patriotism. Long live the Deep State.

NO-PIVOT TRUMP AND THE CAMPAIGN THAT NEVER ENDS

Remember all that talk about Donald Trump pivoting? Once he secured the Republican nomination, he was supposed to pivot from the right to the center. After the election, we waited for him to pivot from candidate to president. When he gave his first speech to Congress without embarrassing himself, there was talk of his having pivoted into a genuine leader. Pundits greeted John Kelly’s appointment as White House chief of staff as the Donald’s major pivot toward becoming presidential. It never happened, none of it. Turns out that waiting for Trump’s pivot was as laborious and fruitless as Vladimir and Estragon Waiting for Godot. Like Godot, the pivot, never came.

Instead, for the first time in our history, we have in the Oval Office a one-dimensional, perpetual candidate, a blowhard with neither core beliefs nor the slightest interest in public policy, a president in name only whose singular vision is his own self-aggrandizement. And this is why our charlatan-in-chief can put children in cages, buy a porn star’s silence, lie 6.5 times a day, and still have a 42 percent approval rating.

All he does is campaign. There is no real governing going on here. Governance to Trump is the art of making stagecraft pass as statecraft. He has created a governing façade that casts himself as the omnipotent, winning superhero, righting imaginary wrongs and taking America back to a joyous, magical place and time that never existed.

We should have seen this coming when Trump filed his reelection documents on the day he was inaugurated, as opposed to waiting until the third year of his term, as all of his modern predecessors did. Or, when he obsessed over the size of his inauguration crowd. Or, when he ordered an investigation of voter fraud, insisting he had been robbed of votes, even though he won. Or when he kept right on holding campaign rallies and leading the faithful in chants about the wall and Crooked Hilary. These are not the actions of a man pivoting from campaign to governance. Alas, the Donald doesn’t pivot. He has only one gear and it’s all about creating adoration for himself.

At this very moment, Trump is preparing the pageantry for a prime-time Monday night announcement of a Supreme Court nominee who will supposedly sound the death knell for abortion rights. He’s been downright giddy about it for days, telling one audience this week, “other than war and peace,” packing the court with the right judges is the most important thing a president can do. Lest you think Trump’s judicial fixation reflects a deeply held reverential respect for the unborn, check out this 1999 clip of him boasting that “I am very pro-choice.” This nomination, like everything in Trump’s life, is purely transactional. He delivers a solid 5-4 conservative majority on the court, and sops up more love and approval from the right. As a bonus, attention is diverted from the thousands of migrant children he pulled away from their parents.

Reach deep into the soul of Donald Trump and you will find absolutely nothing. He is the first president with a totally empty ideological slate, unless winning or self-interest count as ideologies. He has changed party affiliation five times. His position on any issue turns on a dime, based on his instant calculation of what will make him look best in any given moment. Aside from this perpetual self-promotion, he makes no pretense of governing or leading. He doesn’t read briefing memos prepared by his staff. He doesn’t understand many of his own positions or policies. He signs executive orders without reading them or knowing what they do.

By not governing, Trump is able to focus exclusively on the only aspect of his job that appeals to him: campaigning. He pours all his energy into promoting himself and his brand, and demonizing those who decline to worship at his altar. Everyday his 40 million Twitter followers are bombarded with mini campaign messages. Yes, most are in prose that could pass for a middle school message board, but based on polling, they are having an impact.

Here’s a quick sample from the past few days:

• Democrats. . .weak on the Border and weak on Crime.
• We are doing a far better job than Bush and Obama.
• TAX CUTS are already providing historic gains for minorities, women, and small businesses.
• Democrats want anarchy, amnesty and chaos – Republicans want LAW, ORDER and JUSTICE!
• Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!
• The Russian Witch Hunt is Rigged!
• Crazy Maxine Waters, said by some to be one of the most corrupt people in politics.

This is what happens when a candidate for president is incapable of grasping the fact that he won, and must now actually lead. Like a character in an absurdist play, he just keeps on campaigning while his kingdom crumbles. Yet, it does explain why a guy who has accomplished so little, and destroyed so much, manages to hold a 42 percent approval rating. As former Trump University students can tell you, aggressive marketing, laced with a modicum of fraud, can sell a horrible product.

FORGET CIVILITY. FIGHT TRUMP WITH WHATEVER WORKS

It seemed so clear to me when I started writing this post: tossing the president’s press secretary out of a restaurant was wrong. So were the boisterous dining disruptions that protesters foisted upon other Trump surrogates. Aren’t we supposed to go high when they go low? All this does is let the Trumsters play the victim card, right? Then a funny thing happened: I changed my mind.

Believe me, that was a painful experience. We all have our own style and approach to dealing with conflict, born of our life experiences. I spent more than 30 years as a union rep, tangling with some pretty virulent management types. The only real control I had – on a good day – was over myself. I chose civility, decency and respect, not out of a higher moral calling, but because that approach worked for me and my goal of helping union members get the best contract possible. That meant avoiding personal attacks and name-calling, and sticking to the issue at hand, while building power to make a decent deal.

So I cruised right along on my high horse, crafting this ode to civility and respect. I reread my words, searching for a pithy and righteous close. That’s when it struck me. I was wrong. This is Donald Trump’s America now, an ugly, hateful abyss that keeps turning darker and bleaker by the hour. Civility and respectfulness are not going to get our country back anytime soon.

During this past week:

A California woman screamed at a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent that Mexicans are “rapists, animals and drug dealers”, echoing one of Trump’s favorite litanies.

A Tennessee congressional candidate put up a billboard vowing to “Make America White Again”.

A South Carolina woman was charged with beating a black child and screaming racial epithets at him because he was swimming in a pool with white kids.

A North Carolina man who insists that God is a white supremacist and the Jews descended from Satan won the Republican primary for a seat in the state legislature.

Thousands of children, many in diapers, remain separated from their migrant parents as a result of Trump’s unconscionable political power play at the border.

The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s Muslim travel ban and delivered a serious blow to organized labor. With Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, credible court observers predict that abortion rights will be abolished within 18 months, and that the court will tilt severely rightward for decades to come.

In other words, Donald Trump is doing precisely what he promised. He is shaking up the foundations of our country at levels totally off the Richter Scale. This isn’t a collegial debate over tax policy or farm subsidies. This is a historic existential battle for the heart and soul of America. We are in a cold civil war that is getting warmer by the day. It will take more than civility to win this one.

Earlier this week, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters was wildly cheered by a crowd of energized millennials when she told them: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. You push back on them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” By the end of the week, Waters had canceled all public appearances because of death threats. Trump called her “unhinged” with an “extraordinarily low IQ” and claimed – incorrectly – that she had threatened to harm his supporters. Then came top congressional Democrats, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, both blasting Waters for encouraging such incivility. Said Schumer: “If you disagree with a politician . . . vote them out of office. But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Oh yes it is, Senator. The Civil Rights Act did not flow majestically from a reasoned debate by golden tongued orators. It took years of street protests and massive harassment of political opponents. As Jonathan Bernstein, a former university professor, wrote for Bloomberg this week, “From the American Revolution on, the spoils of freedom, fair treatment and equality have not gone to the patient and polite. The spoils have gone to those who are incensed and determined, unafraid and unashamed to raise more than a little hell.”

No, embarrassing cabinet members in restaurants and other direct actions are not going to end our Trumpian nightmare. But they are viable tactics in a broader strategy to do just that, by flipping at least one of the two congressional chambers in November and removing Trump from office in the 2020 election, if not before. It’s all about voter turnout, tapping into the passion of those millennials who cheered Maxine Waters’ call to action, reaching blacks, Latinos and others, disenchanted with both parties, but ready to act now against a president intent on marginalizing them. Those actions pull them in, strengthen the movement and evolve into votes.

As a personal matter of style, I will continue to choose civility. If I owned a restaurant, I’d let Sarah Huckabee Sanders eat there. On the other hand, if someone tosses her out because of the abhorrent policies she has to defend, it reminds us all that these are not ordinary times. It reminds us that the rules of political discourse have to change in order to accommodate the toxicity of an environment that threatens the values we hold dear.

We don’t have to become Trump to beat Trump, but neither should we cling blindly to an honor code of civility when dealing with a lying thug who takes children away from their parents and emboldens bigotry of every stripe. That, Senator Schumer, is what is really not American.

BLATHERER-IN-CHIEF DESERVES ZERO TOLERANCE

This was the toughest week yet in our abominable Trumpian nightmare. The visceral pain of children pulled from their parents’ arms was exasperated by the president’s repeated lies, and the abject dysfunction of a government gone mad.

Still, the Donald managed to trot out a slogan that describes his presidency with amazing accuracy: “Zero Tolerance”. In the interest of truth-in-labeling, those are the words that should adorn his red baseball caps. After this week – and the 75 weeks that preceded it, “Make America Great Again” is a brutally inaccurate description of this dystopia. “Zero Tolerance” really nails it.

This president, and his merry band of hateful sycophants, have zero tolerance for truth, decency, complexity or compassion. They have zero tolerance for the poor, or for those who are neither white nor male. On a deeply personal, existential level, Donald J. Trump has zero tolerance for anyone who is not him, although he has been known to carve out an exception for those who carry his DNA, and/or bow down and worship him.

The atrociousness of this president’s conduct seems to be reaching new lows on a regular basis. It’s like waiting for an addict to hit rock bottom, only to realize there is no bottom, only an indeterminate descension. That means we miss, or forget, so many of Trump’s incomprehensible utterances while preoccupied with the major horror stories of the day. When fixated on images of tormented children wailing in cages, it’s difficult to focus on off-the-wall presidential statements, particularly when there are so many of them.

As a public service, I offer this small sample of presidential inanities, some of Trump’s more bizarre words that may have been lost in the smoke from the American values he’s trying to burn:

JUDICIAL GRAFT. In a speech to a business group this week, Trump ridiculed his own administration’s proposal to hire thousands of new immigration judges to relieve the backlog at the border. Said the president, mocking his own Justice Department, “Seriously, what country does this? Thousands and thousands of judges they want to hire. Who are these people?” Then came the kicker: “Now can you imagine,” the president asked, “the graft that must take place?” This is the president of the United States accusing federal immigration judges of being on the take. Not only is there no evidence, or even a credible accusation, of such corruption, it’s hard to imagine a Honduran migrant stepping off a raft from Mexico with the wherewithal to bribe an immigration judge.

SPACE FORCE. The president proposed a new military branch this week, the “Space Force”. Beaming before the cameras, he boasted that it will be “separate but equal” to the Air Force. Trump is the first president to trot out that old Jim Crow phrase since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate is inherently unequal”.

MINING HIS THOUGHTS. In a Duluth, Minnesota speech Wednesday, Trump addressed a highly controversial local issue involving proposals to mine precious metals in that state. Here’s what he said: “We’ll do it carefully and if it doesn’t pass muster, maybe we don’t do it at all. But it’s going to happen, I will tell you.”

CANADIAN SHOES. In one of his many warning shots over Canadian tariffs, the president claimed that our neighbors to the north are smuggling goods across the border. “They buy shoes,” he said, “then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old.” He offered no further explanation but ended his remarks with this aspiration: “We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country.”

WHATCHAMACALLIT HOUSE. Standing next to the Easter Bunny and the First Lady during last spring’s White House egg roll, Trump tried to thank his wife for keeping “this incredible house, or building – or whatever you want to call it, because there really is no name for it, it is special.” You’d think it would be easy for this white nationalist president to remember that he lives in the White House.

BOWLING FOR TARIFFS. Here’s how Trump, in a recent speech, described how Japan keeps American cars out of their country: “It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify.” It was unclear what he meant and the White House communication office had no comment.

INSPIRING GRADUATES. Here’s the profound inspiration the commander in chief shared with this year’s graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning, you got to win.”

OPIOIDS. In a Nashville speech, Trump boasted – incorrectly – that the country’s opioid addiction problem was lessening, thanks to his program. Here’s how he described that program: “We’re getting the word out – bad. Bad stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm; you come out, you’re a drug addict with this crap. It’s way down. We’re doing a good job with it.”

SPACEY INFINITY. After signing an executive order on space exploration, the president waxed philosophical about what might be out there to explore. “A lotta room out there, right?” he said. “This is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don’t really know. But it could be. It has to be something – but it could be infinity, right?”

THE POOR NEED NOT APPLY. In a Georgia speech, Trump professed his love for the poor but drew the line at hiring them. Here is what he said: “And I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?”

Sadly, there is absolutely nothing about this man, his presidency, or his monopolization of our thoughts these past 16 months that makes the slightest bit of sense. When it comes to Donald J. Trump, all we are left with is Zero Tolerance.