Tag: Donald Trump

ABRACADABRA! THANK DONALD ALMIGHTY THERE’S PEACE AT LAST

How did a bungling blowhard like Donald Trump became a master illusionist? The guy reaches into a top hat, pulls out absolutely nothing but insists it’s a rabbit. And 40 percent of the country cheers wildly, as if David Blaine had just made the Washington Monument disappear. That pretty much sums up this week’s Singapore Magic Show, where Donald The Magnificent supposedly pulled world peace out from behind the ear of a ruthless North Korean dictator.

Ronald Reagan was known as the “Teflon President” because he could screw up without repercussions. Trump goes way beyond Teflon. He is the Bubble President, encased in a truth-free bubble, hermetically sealed off from our fact-based universe. His illusions are created by neither sleight-of-hand nor clever equipment. Instead, they germinate in a damaged, ego-driven imagination that would make Walter Mitty blush. They go from there, totally unfiltered, directly to his mouth. Reality in Trump World, is whatever the Donald says it is. That’s one mean parlor trick!

But there he was, in front of American and North Korean flags, shaking hands with Kim Jong Un and announcing a “very comprehensive” agreement that will bring peace to the world. He later tweeted that people can “sleep well” now that there is no nuclear threat. Outside the bubble, however, North Korea has not given up a single nuclear weapon and retains the missile system to deliver them. The agreement signed in Singapore contained only promises to work toward disarmament. There was nothing comprehensive about it. In fact, it didn’t go beyond the same kind of general pledges the U.S. secured from North Korea in the past, pledges eventually broken by the totalitarian regime.

Look, after a year of Trump and Kim trading threats to blow each other up, is it better that they are sharing plates of crispy fried pork in Singapore? Of course. What’s unsettling is Trump’s total lack of a grasp on what’s happening. The negotiations with North Korea did not end with the Trumpian stagecraft this week; they have barely begun. The fact that these two oddball leaders are talking to each other is, indeed, an improvement over comparing the sizes of their nuclear buttons, but the immediate reality remains that North Korea has nukes and their elimination has yet to be worked out. Trump’s wholly premature victory lap in declaring himself the architect of world peace when substantive negotiations have barely begun, casts grave doubt on his ability to shepherd such a delicate process to a productive conclusion. Seeing only what you want to see, rather than what is really there, is one of the worst occupational hazards in negotiations.

Yet, that has been this president’s biggest Achilles heel. His pathological tendency to construct his own reality, and then make decisions based on those illusions, has plagued every square inch of his presidency. He went after Obamacare, boasting that he had a plan for much better insurance at a lower cost. There was no plan. He insisted that he had a way of getting Mexico to pay for the wall he wants to build. He didn’t. He claimed to have a scheme for a $1.5 trillion program to repair the country’s infrastructure. He didn’t.

Although Trump’s governance by delusion has been the hallmark of this administration, he took his magical thinking artform to new heights this week. After the photo-op pageantry with Kim, reporters asked the president why he thought the North Korean leader could be trusted to disarm, particularly in light of that regime’s extensive history in breaking promises. Trump’s answer, as reported on a Washington Post podcast? He’s a “good judge of people” and his “gut” tells him North Korea won’t go back on its word. Let that sink in for a minute: We can sleep well now because Donald J. Trump is a good judge of people. Pass the Ambien, please.

A central storyline of this presidency has been Trump’s utter ineptness at judging people. His former national security advisor, a campaign foreign policy advisor, his campaign manager and a deputy manager have been indicted on felonies or have already pled guilty. The Donald has had major falling outs with most of his hand-picked cabinet members and top advisors. Just ask Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director for 10 days and the posterchild for terrible personnel decisions. Steve Bannon was his go-to guy until Trump kicked him to the curb, claiming that Bannon had “lost his mind”. Similar stories for Reince Priebus (Chief of Staff), Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), Tom Price (HHS Secretary), H. R. McMaster (National Security Advisor) and a host of others. No elected first-term president in the past 100 years has had this much turnover in the people he appointed to top positions.

Trump presumably spent considerable time interviewing and reviewing background information on his appointees, and still ended up going sour on most of them. Yet, he meets Kim for the first time and immediately senses a “very special bond” worthy of his trust. This is a man who had his subordinates killed for falling asleep in a meeting or showing “disrespectful posture”. Kim also had his uncle and a brother murdered, along with at least 340 other people whom he felt did not sufficiently respect him. Given that Trump is limited to dealing with his detractors through a mean tweet, the “special bond” here may well be based on envy.

There is no presidential magic that will successfully denuclearize this ruthless, oppressive regime. If that goal can be accomplished, it will come only through steely eyed negotiations, focused on hard facts, not illusions of grandeur, and based on legitimate interests of both parties, not on the ego needs of deranged leaders. It would also be immensely helpful if the Bubble President took a profound cue from the Teflon President’s experience in a similar quandary: Trust, but verify. It beats the bonding of speed dating every time.

APES, CUNTS & TWITTER, OH MY!

What’s worse on the hierarchy of insults: calling a black person an ape or the president’s daughter a cunt? That insightful question is at the heart of our latest national conversation. Remember when our national conversations focused on substantive, compelling issues, like race, sexual harassment, gun control and income disparity? We are so through the looking glass right now, it’s hard to distinguish a Saturday Night Live sketch from the Nightly News. We have become our own parody.

Yet, for one, brief shining moment, it seemed that the hateful, racist, misogynistic depravity that has been gushing into our cultural veins since the 2016 presidential election had finally encountered a substantial abatement. A major corporation, ABC, acted against significant financial interests in an unambiguous repudiation of racism. The Disney-owned company summarily canceled the “Roseanne” show after its star, Roseanne Barr, tweeted that former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, an African-American, looked like the offspring of “the Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

Channing Dungey, president of ABC Entertainment, called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values.” For at least 24 hours, hardly anyone disagreed with her. It was an amazing, almost redemptive, moment in our Trump-induced dystopia. A corporate conglomerate slaughtered its cash cow in order to take a principled stand against racism. There was no instant rebuttal from the right, no white nationalist defense of the centuries-old African-simian racist trope. You could almost make yourself believe that there was a national consensus that this kind of blatant, hateful bigotry was simply wrong and unacceptable. It was so pre-Trump.

Then comedian Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, and all hell broke loose. Bee, on her cable show, had shown a warm, loving picture of Ivanka and her young son, and contrasted that touching parental moment with the Trump Administration’s policy of separating children from their immigrant parents. Said the comic, “You know, Ivanka, that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child. But let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt!”

The Twittersphere was apoplectic with demands for equal justice for foulmouthed entertainers, an insistence that if Roseanne had to be sacrificed for her racist criticism of an Obama confidant, then surely Samantha should be fired for calling Trump’s daughter a cunt. Needless to say, the illusion that ABC’s principled stand in canceling “Roseanne” was a positive turning point in our culture wars, was now dead. What had briefly looked like a constructive consensus was now a full frontal battle between ape and cunt, a bizarre false equivalency between racial hatred and the use of a crude profanity.

The ensuing dialogue had nothing to do with civility or decency. It was all about politics, in the most decadent use of that term. Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Sanders announced that “such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned,” leaving the door open, of course, to condone use of the c-word for Hillary Clinton, as many Trump t-shirts and campaign signs did during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself weighed into the battle, insisting that Bee be fired since that was the fate his buddy Roseanne suffered. That left us with yet one more unimaginable absurdity about the times in which we live: you can be elected president after admitting that you grab women by their pussies, but calling the first daughter a cunt is a dischargeable offense for a comedian.

Then the left fired back with numerous examples of Trump having used the c-word, along with the often told story of singer Ted Nugent calling Hillary Clinton a cunt and then being invited to dinner at the Trump Whitehouse. Moving right along with this scintillating intellectual exchange, the conservative surrebuttal hit its stride with counterclaims to Barr’s dismissal, including a Bill Maher episode featuring side-by-side pictures of Trump and an orangutan. As is so often the case with political discourse these days, the parties use whataboutism the same way a drunk uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.

There is simply no moral equivalency between a brutally racist comment and the use of the c-word, particularly in this context since it was not used to demean women on the basis of their gender. Bee offered a sincere apology, as she should have. Her sin was not so much the offensiveness of the word, but the fact that its use predictably detracted from her overall valid message about the hypocrisy of Trump family values versus the treatment of immigrant families.

This is, obviously, a powerful word that packs a seismic etymological punch. Yet, it has not always been so offensive. In Middle English, the term was a standard reference for the female genitalia. The earliest reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the name of a 13th century London red light district street, Gropecuntlane. Chaucer used a variant for the word in two of his works. Shakespeare spun puns from the word in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. By the mid-1900s, the c-word had become quite notorious, generally considered one of the vilest of obscenities. It was used mostly by men to demean women, an angry, hateful, misogynistic slur, like “bitch” squared. That began to change in the 1990s. Many prominent women entertainers, prompted by playwright Eve Ensler and her The Vagina Monologues, began using the word, in effect reclaiming it from the misogynists. That new meaning was reflected in actress Sally Field’s reaction to this week’s brouhaha. Bee, she said, was “flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt (because) cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.” So sayeth the Flying Nun.

As the dust begins to settle from this latest culture wars skirmish, we seem to be in a pretty good place. Roseanne remains canceled, and an apologetic Samantha is still going strong. When it comes to evil, racism trumps obscenity. After all, cunt is just a vowel movement away from can’t. Now, there’s a bumper sticker for you!

A RAINBOW SHINES OVER CUBA’S STORM CLOUDS

A rainbow was the last thing I expected to find in Cuba. This was, after all, our hemisphere’s epicenter of evil back in the 1960s. I had to practice hiding my rotund body under a grade school desk because Cuba had Soviet missiles pointed at us. After suffering such an indignity, you’d think I’d prefer sailing to Dante’s Inferno rather than to Castro’s Cuba. Alas, Norwegian Cruise Lines has no Inferno itineraries. So, off to Havana we went.

Rainbow spruces up Havana Harbor.
(All photos by Melissa Nelson)

And there it was, this strikingly brilliant rainbow, glowing like a celestial chandelier above the Havana Harbor. There was, to be sure, no pot of gold in sight, only remnants of a broken and crumbling infrastructure in a country where time, in many ways, has stood still since 1959. Yet, this stunningly beautiful rainbow, casting its glow on a people who persevered through one existential threat after another, is a perfect metaphor for Cuba. This country shouldn’t be judged by its storm clouds alone. You have to look for the rainbow, as well.

If you want a vacation destination totally void of nuance, contradictions and complexities, a place filled with perpetual smiles, sunshine and laughter, get thee to a Disney property pronto. The Havana port of call is not for you. On the other hand, if you’ve been frustrated by knowing Cuba only through the endless dialectic of the left and right, and have longed to see it, hear it, breathe it and feel it, up close and personal, go there now, before our president completely closes the door on that opportunity.

Cuba is an island of warts and wonders, an ideological Rorschach test, designed to slot you on a scale from Che Guevara to Oliver North. Fidel Castro is dead and his brother, Raul, just retired, but the legacy of their 1959 Revolution is very much alive and on the minds of the tour guides ushering Americans through the streets of a country once considered our mortal enemy. From the windows of our tour bus, we see collapsed roofs and walls splitting apart. Window glass is missing and paint has long vanished. As we take all that in, like we were inspecting the damage of a Category 5 hurricane, our guide quickly notes the complete absence of homelessness, “thanks,” she says, “to the Revolution.”

Much of Cuba’s infrastructure is missing its 1959 sparkle.

Yes, the tour guide works for the government, the commies who inherited the Revolution. So does most everyone else in Cuba. But her spiel was far from empty spin. Based on independent fact-checking, there was far more accuracy in her three-hour presentation than in, say, a random Trump tweet. She correctly boasted that every Cuban is guaranteed quality health care at no charge, along with a free education, up to and including graduate school. She accurately noted that the Revolution eliminated illiteracy and gave everyone a place to live.

And then came a question from the back of the bus: “What’s the average income here?” The poor woman sighed, knowing that her pitch for a very beloved Cuba was about to sink into the international weeds of cultural dissonance. This, after all, was a bus tour, not a microeconomics lecture hall. Her quick answer: about $50 U.S. a month. That might be slightly exaggerated. Most sources peg it at $25 to $30. She quickly added that those amounts have very different meanings, depending on whether you live in Cuba or the U.S. That’s a tough message to get through to American vacationers who had just been charged more than a month of Cuban wages for bottled water on their cruise ship.

Only a few Cubans own cars, and they are all pre-Revolution models, most hobbled together with junkyard auto parts.

But she was right. Money means drastically different things in these two countries. The goal of Cuba’s 1959 Revolution was to dismantle private wealth in order to create a life where people’s basic needs were taken care of by the government. To this day, Cubans stand in lines daily to receive a loaf of bread and other rations. Their housing is paid for, as is their medical care and education. That means a medical doctor, a teacher and a store clerk all make about the same amount of money, and all get the same services from the government. Job selection is based on interest, skill and satisfaction, not economic opportunity.

It’s not easy for us Americans to wrap our heads around a system that devalues money. We are so accustomed to using our adjusted gross income as we did our GPA in college, as a measure of our worth and value. The American Dream is rooted in the belief of working hard in order to move up the economic ladder. That makes it tough for us to understand a place like Cuba where people are supposedly content in their subsistence, without ever having the chance to improve their lot.

Sunset on Havana Harbor.

The truth is that both these countries, despite their ideological animus, are more alike than they are unalike. Yes, one is rooted in capitalism and the other in Marxism. But both systems have produced amazing flashes of a quality life. And both have experienced dismal failures, a result of opposing operating systems running amuck. Cuba remains economically cut off from the world, struggling to survive. Yet, it manages to educate, feed and house its people, and provide them with top-notch medical care. On the other hand, dissidents are jailed without due process and there is no freedom of speech or other hallmarks of democracy.

Yet, here in the good old U.S. of A., we’re not exactly without our own warts. In fact, we just elected one as president. The great middle class has been rapidly shrinking. Some 20 percent of the nation’s wealth is owned by 1 percent of the population. The bottom half takes in only 13% of the income. Millennials are saddled with absurd amounts of college debt, even as their job market declines. Meanwhile, 32 million Americans can’t read or write and 28 million have no health insurance.

Unlike in those Soviet-inspired missile crisis days of yore, Cuba no longer poses a threat to us. Much of the economic embargo we imposed on our southern neighbors in the early 1960s, was lifted during the Obama Administration. Trump then reinstated the bulk of those sanctions. That was a severe blow to the Cuban people, with no benefit to U.S. interests. It’s time to return to that détente mediated by Pope Francis. Let’s lift those meanspirited sanctions. Somewhere over the rainbow, let there be solidarity between the people of Cuba and the United States.

FORGET STORMY, COMEY & MUELLER, TRUMP IS TRASHING AMERICA

President Trump should be grateful for the Mueller investigation. Thanks to the special counsel’s work, news producers and consumers are obsessed with the daily minutia of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice theories, not to mention the deeply profound question of who paid Stormy and why. Easily missed is the most important story of this administration: Donald Trump is making America terrible again.

Yes, Russia’s interference in our elections is a big deal. So are alleged presidential attempts to interfere in the investigation of that foreign intrusion. But the daily bombardment of speculation, Trump attorney churn and bizarre Rudy Giuliani proclamations seems to have crafted a useful, even if inadvertent, cover for the severe damage the 45th president is doing to our country.

We desperately need an end to this American nightmare. Yet, unless a Nixonian-like smoking gun tumbles out of Mueller’s shop, impeachment is a longshot. A two-thirds Senate vote is needed to remove a president. That’s never happened, and it’s unlikely to any time soon, absent blockbuster evidence that would pull Republican senators away from a president who remains dismayingly popular with his party. A shoot-and-miss runs the risk of burnishing Trump’s outside martyr credentials for a 2020 reelection campaign. Six-and-a-half more years of Trump shredding America’s values is unthinkable.

That’s why Democrats need to march into the midterm elections with a substantive agenda for truly turning this country around. That means quantifying the damage done these past 16 months and offering a plan to reverse it, not merely running on an impeachment promise.

Here’s just some of the ways Trump’s administration has reversed decades, if not centuries, of American progress:

BIGOTRY RUNS RAMPANT. Emboldened by their president, bigots have come out from under their rocks, openly spewing their hate at anyone who is not an American-born white male. Every published study shows dramatic increases in hate crimes against blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, and the LGBTQ community. One source pegged such incidents at 250,000 a year. Another study showed that one in five hate crimes was committed by people using Trump’s name. For example, this letter sent to at least 10 mosques across the country in 2017: “To the children of Satan, you Muslims are vile and filthy people. . .There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. . .You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS are encouraged. The Trump administration suspended a rule requiring communities receiving federal housing funds to assess patterns of segregation and barriers to fair housing and devise plans to combat them. HUD Secretary Ben Carson called such desegregation goals “failed socialist experiments”.

SICK CHILDREN are shortchanged. Just this week, Trump asked Congress to cut more than $7 billion out of already approved funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to demonstrate fiscal constraint in the wake of huge budget deficits brought on by tax cuts for the rich.

MIGRANT CHILDREN are being separated from their parents. Trump’s Justice Department announced Monday that it will prosecute every migrant fleeing violence in Central America who crosses illegally into the United States. That means children will be taken away from their parents who will be immediately incarcerated. The previous practice was to treat such migrants as asylum seekers, not criminals, and allow the families to remain together in this country while their asylum request was considered.

HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS are soaring. Insurers say Trump’s successful push to end the individual mandate that required everyone to be insured has created a “death spiral” for the market. Insurance executives predict that premiums will increase by steep double-digits in 2019 as a result of healthy people stopping their coverage.

CONSUMER PROTECTION has been gutted. Trump has brought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to a virtual standstill. Investigations into questionable business practices have ended. Hiring is frozen. No data is being collected and a database of consumer complaints is in the process of being dismantled. Existing cases against companies are being closed or put on indefinite hold. The department is expected to drop a major case against Navient, the student loan company accused of cheating borrowers.

The list of hits to the American people goes on and on. Trump’s much ballyhooed tax bill did zilch for the working class. Corporations, for the most part, used their enormous windfalls to repurchase about $800 billion of their own stock. Meanwhile, worker pay has barely moved. Close to a million immigrants, most with black or brown skin, are subject to deportation under Trump’s policies. This includes hundreds of thousands of young people brought here as children and who know no other home. The environment has been devastated by such Trumpian moves as eliminating regulations on carbon emissions from coal-based power plants, opening vast swaths of Alaskan wilderness to new oil and gas drilling and the reversal of another 29 environmental regulations.

Never has this country fallen so quickly from its core values. That’s why Democrats need to make the midterm elections all about truly restoring America’s greatness – without the red hats. As despicable as this president has been, this campaign cycle has to be about more than just Trump. We’ve been in an All-Trump-All-The-Time world since November 8, 2016. We need to focus now on the specific ways we can disengage from this dystopia and take our country back.

That means talking about true tax reform and a fair redistribution of wealth that will provide meaningful help to the poor and middle class. It means finding a way to let every kid who wants a college education to have one, without crippling student loans. It means having a sensible, fair and compassionate immigration policy, one that never closes our borders on the basis of race or religion. It means taking reasonable steps to protect our planet. It means renouncing every form of bigotry, and unabashedly protecting human rights whenever, and wherever, they may be endangered. This, after all, is what America is all about. As Trump mania blasts at us 24-7, let us never lose sight of that fact.

(Scheduling note: Due to a long-planned retirement trip in honor of my wife and editor, Melissa, this space will remain dark for a couple weeks. We will be back shortly after Memorial Day.)

ONE TOKE OVER THE RED LINE, SWEET SYRIA

If the first casualty of war is truth, surely the second must be moral clarity. In the case of Syria’s civil war, both Presidents Obama and Trump, men with wildly disparate world views, drew the same “red line” of morality. Here’s their shared ethical standard: Killing and maiming thousands of noncombatant men, women and children with guns, bombs and explosives is acceptable, but if chemical weapons are used to accomplish the same results, there will be hell to pay.

Three times now in recent years, we’ve gone through the to-bomb-or-not-to-bomb drama of responding to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad’s decision to leap over that red line. The first was in 2013 when Obama pushed for a missile attack to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. Congress, however, declined to authorize the bombing. There were similar gas attacks in 2017 and earlier this month. On both occasions, Trump sent the bombs dropping on Syrian military facilities as a way of denouncing the regime’s “evil and despicable” use of chemical warfare. Both actions won him more bipartisan praise than anything he has done in office.

Most of the news coverage these past few days has focused on the narrow issue of whether Trump’s punitive air attacks were effective. The general consensus of military leaders is that Saturday’s bombing might have put a dent in Assad’s chemical arsenal, but is unlikely to hold the regime back from making and using new ones. Scant attention has been given to the broader matter of whether we are drawing the red line in the right place. In other words, do we really want a moral imperative that limits evil to one category of weapons? Is it a greater wrong to kill civilians with gas than it is to shoot or bomb them to death?

What started as anti-government protests seven years ago, quickly evolved into full scale civil war in Syria. There is no end in sight. More than a half million people have died, and the vast majority of them were civilians, including tens of thousands of young children. Yet, it’s only the chemical attacks that show up on Trump’s outrage meter or Twitter feed. In the most recent incident, 70 civilians died from Assad’s use of what is believed to have been sarin, a chemical nerve agent that can cause agonizing death in minutes.

Here’s what Trump said in justifying the retaliatory bombing: “The evil and the despicable attack left mothers and fathers, infants and children thrashing in pain and gasping for air. These are not the actions of a man. They are the crimes of a monster instead.” In calling Assad a monster, Trump was uncharacteristically without hyperbolae. Yet, the president’s moral offense was aimed at the specific method of the dictator’s mass murder, not the broader act of having spent seven years killing his own people.

There is, of course, a case to be made that chemical weapons are more evil than their conventional counterparts. As Obama noted in 2013, the weaponization of poisonous gases conjures up dark moments of thousands of American GIs dying from mustard gas in World War I and, of course, the Nazis’ use of gas in the Holocaust during World War II. The civilized countries of the world have agreed not to use chemical weapons. In arguing for a punitive strike after Assad’s 2013 chemical attack, Obama said such action would reinforce the taboo of chemical warfare.

Yet, in the context of this ongoing Syrian massacre, limiting our moral outrage to the relatively small number of deaths caused by chemical weapons is a de facto acceptance of the other 500,000 murders at the hands of weapons just as lethal and painful as gas. NPR reported that the regime has used crude but deadly barrel bombs almost exclusively on civilians. An international team of scientists found that 97 percent of the deaths from these devices have been noncombatants, mostly women and children. Another report found that at least 14,000 children have been killed in Syria by snipers, machine guns, missiles, grenades, roadside bombs and aerial bombs. Another 1,000 children have been executed and more than 100 have been tortured and then executed. None of those atrocities, however, are included in our government’s outrage and punitive air strike over Assad’s use of chemical weapons.

Leaving the battlefield for a moment, let’s apply the same moral relativism to a pair of terrorist attacks. In 1995, a religious cult used sarin to kill 12 people on the Tokyo subway. In 2005, terrorists set off bombs in the London subway, killing 52 and injuring more than 700. Are we really prepared to view the latter as more morally acceptable than the former? Steve Johnson, an academic expert on chemical weapons, says he “can understand why (chemical warfare) feels emotive to us – it is insidious, there is no shelter, it is particularly effective on the young, elderly, and frail, and can be a violent and excruciating death. When one breaks it down ethically, though, it seems impossible to say that it is more acceptable to kill 100 people with explosives than with nerve agent.”

This is much more than a mere intellectual exercise in moral philosophy. It’s about adopting a coherent and meaningful standard with respect to regimes that murder their own people. Trump’s Tweetstorm about the evil of killing children with chemical weapons, followed by tough talk and a quick act of cruise missile theater, does absolutely nothing to address the daily atrocities faced by the Syrian people. As George Washington University professor Stephen Briddle put it, “That’s not a Syria strategy. It’s a psychodrama.”

Although Trump boasted that his response to Assad’s chemical weaponry reflected his “concern for humanity,” that concern is no larger than a pin prick. By the end of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. welcomed 15,479 refugees from Syria into the country. These were men, women and children, literally fleeing for their lives. Under Trump’s travel ban, however, the door slammed shut for Syrian refugees. So much for humanity. A moral code that rejects chemical weapons but gives a dictator a pass at killing by any other means – and offers no safe shelter to his victims – is anything but moral.

SAVING OUR DEMOCRACY THROUGH TRUMP OBSESSION

In case you haven’t noticed, we are obsessed with Donald Trump. He gets far more news coverage than any of his predecessors. We incessantly talk, tweet, post and blog about him. Late night and early morning talk shows digest the Donald’s every move. Four films at this year’s Sundance Festival were about Trump. Psychotherapists are treating patients for “Trump Anxiety Disorder”. Drained by the antics of our 45th president, people are unplugging from social media just to clear their heads.

So, in the vernacular of Brokeback Mountain, why can’t we quit him? What sense does it make to fixate on someone we know will fill our hearts with angst, agony and anger? Why not go on a lean Trump diet of a morsel or two every now and then?

The answer is that Donald J. Trump poses a lethal threat to the core principles of our 242-year-old democracy. Ignoring the elephant in the room doesn’t mean he’s not there. We have every reason to be anxious and angry. Yet, our deliverance from this morass will come from continued vigilance, not escapist denial. And come it must, for our very way of life is at stake.

If you think that last sentence was mere hyperbole, then consider what this president said Monday night in response to a warrant authorizing the search of his attorney’s office: “It’s an attack on our country . . . ; it’s an attack on what we all stand for.” Of course, “what we all stand for” is a nation of laws. The search warrant was sought through those very laws, by top U.S. Justice Department officials appointed by Trump. It was also authorized by a federal judge, representing a separate branch of government. It was as American as apple pie. Yet the president of the United States saw the search as treason simply because it might have adverse consequences for him. Only in an autocracy ruled by a strongman tyrant would that premise make sense.

Therein lies the problem. Trump approaches the presidency as if our constitutional democracy doesn’t exist. He may think he has a bigger nuclear button than his North Korean counterpart, but what the Donald really wants is Kim Jong-il’s title: Supreme Leader. Trump is perpetually mystified and profoundly frustrated with the parliamentary ways of Congress. And he has no time whatsoever for the annoying intrusion of a judiciary he can’t control. As he has said so many times, “I alone” can fix the country’s problems. If only he could find a way to rule the kingdom by himself.

And that is precisely why it is so important for us not to turn our backs on this presidency. Two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, wrote a book called How Democracies Die. They cited four markers, all of which have Trump written all over them: They are:

1. Rejecting or showing weak commitment to democratic rule.
2. Denying the legitimacy of political opponents.
3. Encouraging or tolerating violence.
4. A readiness to stifle or limit civil liberties of opponents, including media.

Hanna Arendt, a noted political philosopher of the Twentieth Century, wrote about the characteristics of totalitarianism more than 80 years ago. The ideal subject for totalitarian rule, Arendt wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.” According to the Washington Post fact checker, Trump made more than 2,000 false or misleading statements during his first 355 days in office. He has relentlessly gone after the news media, insisting that everything they publish or broadcast is “fake news.” Polls show that a substantial portion of his base believes him.

If Donald Trump ruled this country in the authoritarian style he craves, there would be a total Muslim ban, a complete rollback of LGBTQ rights, a wall around Mexico, eviction from the country of 800,000 young immigrants brought here as children, deportation of millions more, all without due process. To one extent or another, those objectives have either been scaled back or blocked by the courts, or by the actions or inactions of Congress. So far, our democracy is holding, even against the will of a man determined to undermine it.

Yes, the news media has covered Trump more extensively than any other president. And, yes, most of the coverage has been negative. But it’s negative in the same sense that a story about a devastating hurricane is negative. By definition, news is an aberration, something unexpected or contrary to custom and tradition. When Trump, on almost a daily basis, issues statements that are patently false, that’s news. When the president calls impoverished African countries “shitholes”, that’s news. When he says one thing and then does the complete opposite, that’s news. When he repeatedly demeans and insults other governmental leaders, including members of his own cabinet, that’s news.

At this very moment, according to news reports, we are on the verge of a constitutional crisis. Trump wants to fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials in an attempt to shut down the Russian election interference investigation. So far, his own advisors and other Republican leaders have held him back. But, as we know, Trump doesn’t take kindly to advice that runs contrary to his impulse.

Clearly, our democracy is facing more peril than it has in at least 50 years. Now is the time for more Trump news, not less. Now is the time, for us to tune in, not out. A recent poll showed that one in five Americans have participated in protests against Trump. That’s just the vigilance we need to protect our democracy. After all, that is really, in the president’s words, “what we all stand for”.

PORN STAR AND PLAYMATE MASK REAL ISSUE: TRUMP’S SEXUAL ABUSE

A fair triage of Donald Trump’s victims would put Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal near the bottom of the pack. I get how unseemly it is for the president’s high powered legal team to bully a porn star (Daniels), and a former Playboy Playmate (McDougal), into silence. What I don’t get is why any woman who consented to have sex with this bloated, orange-tinted misogynist would want to share that indiscretion with the world.

I don’t mean to be overly judgmental here. We have all led imperfect lives and experienced moments of vile, disgusting behavior. But, as a rule, we don’t confess our sins on “Sixty Minutes”, as Daniels will supposedly do Sunday night. The closest anyone came to that was 26 years ago when Bill and Hillary Clinton used the CBS venue to reaffirm their marital bond in the wake of reports that Bill had been unfaithful. That was when Hillary famously said, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him.”

Oh my. Those were simpler, more innocent times, even as the country’s moral axis was shifting from a paradigm in which marital infidelity – once acknowledged or proven – was a bar to holding high office. The bar has not merely been lowered, it’s been buried in a swamp of moral depravity. We now have a president who was elected after boasting on tape about forcibly kissing women or grabbing them by their genitals, prompting more than a dozen women to credibly accuse him of doing just that.

If there is any real news in the Daniels and McDougal stories, it rests with the fact that their alleged Trumpian sexual contact was consensual, and therefore a clear break in his behavior pattern. Other than that, there is, sadly, nothing new or even shocking about the notion that Donald Trump chose to bed other women while his wife, Melania, was recovering from giving birth to their son. This is a man congenitally incapable of maintaining anything other than a transactional relationship with another human being. The notion of a deeply textured, soulful connection, or even a trusting, caring friendship, is totally foreign to the Donald. This is true across the spectrum of his relationships: wives, staff, cabinet members, congressional leaders and foreign dignitaries. He lives in a quid-pro-quo world where loyalty is a one-way street.

The only mystery offered by the Daniels and McDougal sideshows is why the president’s lawyers are exerting so much energy to keep two women from talking about their bedroom romps with Trump. This is a guy who used to impersonate his own assistant in order to pass tips to reporters about the women with whom he was supposedly sleeping. This is a guy who has publicly fantasized about dating his daughter, a guy who brought presidential debates to a new low by raising the subject of his penis size. Unless Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal turn out to be Russian agents, the news value in all of this is negligible.

If “Sixty Minutes” wants to crack a real mystery, how about this one: where is the #metoo reckoning for all those women who say Trump sexually abused them? When does #timesup kick in for POTUS? What about Jessica Leeds, who says the Donald groped her on an airplane? Or Kristin Anderson or Jill Harth, both of whom describe similar instances of Trump grabbing their vaginas, just like he bragged about doing on the Access Hollywood tape? Or any of a long list of other women who came forth with similar claims, all backed by credible evidence.

In the post-Weinstein world, powerful men have fallen like bowling pins to similar, or even lesser, accusations. These guys have headed for seclusion, leaving behind public statements that sound like they came from the same damage control template: “I am profoundly sorry to know that I have caused (insert woman’s name here) so much pain. Although I have a different recollection of events, I deeply respect her for coming forward.”

Trump took a different approach. He called all of his accusers liars. He said they were “sick” women seeking fame or money. In a couple of cases, he told cheering campaign rallies that they weren’t attractive enough for him to touch. “You look at her,” he told one crowd, “You tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”

As the #metoo movement gained steam, reporters frequently pushed White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders to address the president’s accusers. She recites the same sterile stanza and moves on: “. . .this took place long before he was elected to be president, and the people of this country had a decisive election, supported President Trump, and we feel like these allegations have been answered through that process.” Who would have thought that Electoral College math would one day be used to deliver a lifetime clemency for sexual assault?

What’s going on here? None of the other gropers, grabbers and harassers got off the hook with an it-happened-a-long-time-ago defense. “House of Cards” President Francis Underwood might have gotten away with pushing his mistress in front of a speeding Metro train, but the real life actor who portrayed him, Kevin Spacey, was immediately fired from the Netflix series based on accusations that he sexually harassed and abused young men and boys as long as three decades ago. He hasn’t been publicly heard from since.

Donald Trump likes to think that he was elected by what he calls the “forgotten people”, hard-working middle class folks ignored by the powerful elites, or so the spin goes. Well, there are a number of forgotten women out there wondering just how it is that the #metoo movement appears to have left them behind, simply because their transgressor won a presidential election. But this is about a lot more than just those individual accusers. As long as it remains normal and okay for an accused sexual predator to hold the highest office in the land, #metoo remains more of an aspiration than a destination in reach. #timesup will become real only when it pulls in #trumptoo.

THE CURTAIN NEEDS TO FALL ON TRUMP’S ONE-MAN SHOW

The unprecedented mass exodus of presidential appointees is no surprise. After all, the Donald made clear from the outset that he was prepared to go it alone. Remember that line from his Republican convention acceptance speech? “I alone can fix it,” he said. Trump is reportedly exhilarated by all the staff churn and turmoil. Those vanquished cabinet members and senior advisors were merely awkward stagehands, fools who got in his way and stole his scenes. They didn’t understand that this administration is a one-man show.

Donald Trump is absolutely certain that he doesn’t need a merry band of experts telling him how to run this country. As he likes to remind us, President 45 has a power greater than any font of knowledge, an unassailable force guaranteed to lead us to greatness: his instincts. “I rely on myself very much,” he once said. “I just think you have to have an instinct and you go with it.”

A Google search of “Trump instincts” turns up more than 800,000 entries. He points to a passage in a book he wrote in 1999 about Osama Bin Laden being a “shadowy figure,” as evidence of an “instinct” that predicted the 2001 terrorist attacks. He told Bloomberg News that he did no research on immigration but made the issue a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign because he “. . . just knew instinctively that our borders are a mess.” The New York Times reported this week that Trump has told confidants that he’d rather rely on his superior instinct than on advice from his cabinet.

This is, of course, a gigantic load of bunk. Instinct is not a mysterious psychic power. It is a byproduct of our experience, offering a conscious assessment based on patterns instantly detected, and subconsciously based on stored memory. An MIT report suggests a person needs at least 10 years of “domain specific experience” in order to make good instinctive decisions. That means Trump may have a well-honed instinct for real estate transactions, but that power hardly transfers to dealing with Congress or a North Korean dictator.

The president has an alliterative confusion over two approaches to decision making. His is impulse, not instinct. Instinct aligns a pending decision with rhythms drawn from a deep well of experience. Impulse is utterly without cognition and is driven by a lust for immediate pleasure. Trump’s “stable genius” mind is not performing a rapid review of past experiences in search of a pattern that would trigger an instinct. He simply acts on a child-like impulse to say or do whatever he believes makes him look the best in that particular moment, with zero regard for what that choice may reap for him in a future moment.

If the events of the past couple weeks had unfolded in any other administration, it would be meaningful to ask these questions: What’s the strategic game plan behind Trump’s decision to meet with Kim Jong Un? How does a new Secretary of State affect the administration’s approach to diplomacy? Will threats to impose tariffs on South Korea and Japan have an impact on seeking the denuclearization of North Korea? Where is the White House headed on gun control, or relief for young DACA-covered immigrants?

Yet, those and similar questions are predicated on a foundation of deep thought and serious contemplation that is totally foreign to this president. Unless you’re talking about trying to keep a porn star quiet, this is a White House free of strategic planning.

Instead, Trump:

SHOCKED every foreign diplomat and his own advisors by agreeing on the spot to meet with the North Korean dictator, and then rushed to the White House pressroom to alert the media he so despises that a big announcement was about to be made. The Donald’s narrative was that his hard line on Kim has brought the tyrant to his knees, all without a clue as to where to go from there.

INSISTED, days after the Florida school shooting, that now is the time to challenge the NRA and enact meaningful gun control legislation. After basking in self-adoration for such courage, he reversed course and retreated to the NRA party-line.

TOOK at least 14 different positions on protection for the Dreamers, young immigrants who grew up in America, all based on who talked to him last, and/or on the audience he was trying to please at the time.

ANNOUNCED stiff new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, saying “trade wars are good”, just after his Treasury Secretary reassured allies that “We’re not looking to get into trade wars.”

In his bizarrely quixotic campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly complained about how all of his predecessors were so weak that other countries were “laughing at us”. Only he, alone, could win America’s respect back, or so the campaign line went. Well, that’s not happening anytime soon. Trump, and his make-every-moment-all-about-me operating system, has heads shaking all over the globe. As one South Korean newspaper editorial recently noted, “His style of governing, marked by disconnectedness and arrogance, is just mind-blowing.”

The trajectory of this presidency keeps heading for new lows every day. We are long past the point of writing off his fumbles to a mere lack of experience. Like a monster in a bad science fiction movie, Trump grows worse and more out of control with the passage of time. Rather than sensing his inadequacies and failings, and seeking guidance from those with expertise and experience, the president seems almost emboldened by an incompetency he can’t or won’t see.

If a beloved family member had that level of disconnect from reality, we’d be looking for a well-staffed protective care place for them. Unfortunately, the “family” in this case is a congressional Republican majority pathologically adverse to dealing with this delusional head of household, unless and until he gets much worse. Sadly, that time will come. Let us pray that this country is still intact when it does.

SEARCHING FOR DUE PROCESS AT THE ALTAR OF GUN WORSHIP

In an odd rhetorical twist, our latest national conversation on guns has embraced an unlikely term: due process. After all, guns are the antithesis of due process. They kill instantly and indiscriminately, not on accepted rules of justice, but on the capricious basis of a sight line. Yet, some of the suggestions aimed at reversing the growing phenomena of mass shootings raise critical due process concerns – on both sides of the gun control divide.

Take poor Donald Trump, for example. In a rare and short-lived moment of sensibility, he suggested that we might want to think about relieving dangerous people of their guns before giving them due process. His acolytes at the NRA and Fox News went apoplectic. To them, the president sounded very much like Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts in the infamous case of a tart-stealing Knave. So eager was her Highness to have the suspect beheaded, she called for a reordering of jurisprudence: “First the sentence, then the verdict.”

In fairness, that’s not exactly what Trump had in mind last week when he opined that, in the case of deeply disturbed people, we should “take the guns first, (and) go through due process second.” The concept seems eminently reasonable. If the issue before the court is whether a gun owner is a raving lunatic filled with homicidal rage, you don’t want him fiddling with his AR-15 semi-automatic on the witness stand while a judge determines if he is dangerous. Yet the reaction from the well-armed right was predictable. They have long been programmed to go into immediate convulsions upon hearing the words “take the guns”. This crowd’s favorite slogan has long been: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” They don’t take kindly to talk of gun taking.

The concept of due process has been around a lot longer than guns and dates back to early English common law. It was codified in the Magna Carta in 1215, and our founders later did a cut-and-paste, inserting those words into both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Although the nitty-gritty of what constitutes due process is an ongoing judicial work in progress, the basic notion is that government can’t take people’s life, liberty or property without going through a fair and just judicial process.

To the NRA, the only due process that should ever separate a guy and his gun is an involuntary commitment to a mental institution or an adjudication of being a “mental defective”. That standard would have kept 97 percent of recent mass shooters legally armed and ready to fire. The well-heeled gun lobby claims to have pulled Trump back from his momentary lucidity that gave rise to the concept of take-the-guns-first-and then-have-a-hearing. Fox News labeled the idea as “un-American as imaginable”.

Quite the contrary, Trump’s suggestion was deeply seeped in American due process tradition. For example, police can detain suspects on the “reasonable suspicion” that they committed a crime. They then go before a judge within a reasonable time period and the state must show “probable cause” to hold them for trial. Finally, in order to trigger a prison sentence, the state needs a conviction that comes only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the same sequential approach Trump was talking about before he was reined in by his NRA handlers. There was ample evidence that the 19-year-old man charged in the recent Florida shooting was deeply distressed, armed with assault rifles and threatening to shoot up a school. Those facts should have been sufficient to temporarily confiscate his guns, pending a due process hearing on the question of his dangerousness.

In fact, that is precisely what happens right now in five states – California, Connecticut, Indiana, Washington and Oregon – that have adopted so-called “red-flag” laws. Based on evidence from friends, family or police of a credible threat, a judge can order the temporary confiscation of a person’s guns, pending a future hearing on the issue. Studies have shown that those laws have resulted in a significant reduction in gun homicides and suicides.

Trump came up with another brain storm on the gun issue last week, and this one would blow the entire concept of due process to smithereens. Waxing nostalgic about nineteenth century insane asylums, the president suggested this might be a way to lock up potential shooters when there is no evidence to support apprehension. “You know,” said Trump, “in the old days we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this (the Florida shooter), because they knew something was off. (Then) he’s off the streets.”

Trump’s memory of the days when you could “nab” undesirables and toss them into the loony bin represents one of the more inglorious chapters of this country’s history. Based on a belief that mental illness could be dealt with only by locking people up, hundreds of thousands of Americans were confined to these draconian dungeons with little or no due process, many because they just seemed to be different. Once locked up, they were constantly sedated and, in many cases, surgically lobotomized. Prodded largely by rapid advances in mental health treatment, the Supreme Court ruled in 1975, that people could be involuntarily committed to mental hospitals only upon proving to a judge that they are a danger to themselves or others.

Even if the law changed, it’s hard to imagine building enough insane asylums to house all of the angry, socially awkward young men who have guns and talk about killing people. Recent reports indicate that the internet is filled with hundreds of group chats involving thousands of mostly young males who venerate school shooters and fantasize about joining their ranks. While carting them all off to a mental hospital and sedating them until their fiftieth birthday might reduce mass shootings, it totally destroys any semblance of due process.

There is a better solution: take their guns. After all, those students they are yammering about killing are also entitled to due process. Maybe one day, when the Congress and the White House are no longer owned by the NRA, we can finally get around to protecting that right to life, free from weekly mass shootings.

TRUMP’S EDUCATION PLAN: TEACHERS WITH GUNS

Until last week, Donald Trump had been the first president in modern history not to have an education policy. But no longer are America’s public schools a blank slate in the White House’s policy shop. The Donald has a plan, and he’s mighty pumped about it. He wants to give teachers guns and train them to shoot. Welcome to the 2018 edition of education reform: No Glock Left Behind.

As a nation mourned the shooting deaths of 17 students and faculty at a Florida high school, our self-absorbed reality star president maneuvered himself into the spotlight. Survivors of the massacre, along with some of the victim’s family members, were summoned to the White House for a “listening session”. There, with the cameras rolling, Trump clung to a note card reminding him to offer an empathetic “I hear you” after his guests laid bare their raw emotions of profound loss.

And when it was all over, our leader of the free world had been majestically infused with the wisdom that would forever stop school shootings: a well-armed faculty. He had not sounded so bubbly and manic since he described his mating rituals on that “Access Hollywood” tape. “We have to harden these schools, not soften them,” Trump said. He then constructed a truly original simile: “A gun-free zone to a killer. . . that’s like going for the ice cream. These people are cowards. They’re not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns – it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent. And what I’d recommend doing is the people that carry, we give them a bonus. We give them a little bit of a bonus.”

There you have it: Trumpian education policy. At long last, underpaid and under-appreciated public school teachers would no longer have to worry about teaching to the test in order to capture merit pay. They just have to pack heat and pick up their loaded gun bonus.

Many astute political observers have dismissed this call to arms for teachers as just another crazy flight of fancy from a president totally void of serious policy chops. Others have gone so far as to suggest it’s an intentional diversion designed to deflect a renewed push for gun control, to buy time until the anti-gun fervor cools. Maybe. Yet, it’s not hard to see the arming of educators as the absurd-but-understandable result of a decades’ long practice of expecting our public schools to somehow magically solve every societal ill. It’s an American obsession that has never worked, and has, in fact, repeatedly impaired the delivery of quality education.

Take race, for example. The tumultuous civil rights struggles of the 1960s eventually, through judicial and congressional actions, created a more just society, at least on paper. Yet, the rigidity of segregation was not about to go quietly into that good night. So we moved kids from one neighborhood school to another. Public schools became the national laboratory for the dismantling of segregation and the racism that created it. Black students were bused into white neighborhood schools, and vice versa, albeit more vice than versa. Learning was trumped by transportation. The result? The enormous achievement gap between black and white students of the 1960s has narrowed only slightly over 50 years. It was wrong, noted the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1973, to turn the attention of communities “from the paramount goal of quality education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where.” A North Carolina NAACP official at the time put it even more succinctly: “My daughter does not need to sit beside a white person to learn.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t learn our lesson back then. There has not been a major social problem that we haven’t schlepped to the front door of the public school house. Take poverty for example. More than half of public school students come from low-income families. Here’s what a New Mexico Kindergarten teacher told the Washington Post her day was like: “When they come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean?” She cleans them up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes. At her own expense, she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. She is the face of anti-poverty policy to those children, but is left with precious little time to teach.

Once upon a very long time ago, teachers had control over their teaching. They used their skills and experience to map out a learning strategy for their students. Not anymore. As Stanford University Education Professor Larry Cuban noted, “policy elites” at the local, state and federal level have taken over by mandating schools to solve an array of social, economic and political problems. Policy makers, Cuban says, have not hesitated to foist upon classroom teachers such issues as: alcoholism and drug addiction, tobacco use, teenage pregnancy, AIDS prevention, automobile accident reduction, environmental protection and test-driven accountability for producing graduates who can help companies make even more money in the global market place.

A recent study of 30,000 classroom teachers reported that 89 percent said they were “strongly enthusiastic” when they began teaching, but just 15 percent felt the same way today. No wonder many areas of the country are experiencing a teacher shortage. There has been a huge exodus from the profession in recent years. With all the mandates and expectations thrust upon them, teachers have precious little time to do that one thing that drew them into this line of work: teach.

And now the president of the United States wants to turn them into gunslingers. It’s a fitting parody on this society’s long degrading march to dismantle the essence of what it means to be a teacher. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is no satirist. To borrow his phrasing, he’s a “sicko” with “demented” thoughts.