Tag: Election

TRUMP’S GUIDE TO LEADERSHIP: THE ART OF THE HEEL

Donald The Swamp Drainer is now fully enmeshed in the morass of governance, but none of the ensuing noise and chaos has led to a single dollop of drainage. If this guy has anything even remotely resembling a strategy, on any issue, it has to be the best kept secret in Washington. All we’ve seen in the first 200 days of this presidency is a bizarre jumble of impulsive, sophomoric tactics that have done absolutely nothing to advance his agenda.

A theory emerged during the 2016 campaign that, instead of being loony, Trump was a brilliant four-dimensional chess player, always strategizing multiple moves ahead of his opponents. The concept has the same level of evidentiary support as the flat earth and faked moon landing propositions. Take a quick look at the Donald’s recent chessboard navigation.

Trump:

• Publicly threatened a number of Republican senators with various forms of retaliation if they didn’t vote to repeal Obamacare. Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t win their votes and the bill went down in flames. Senators’ job security rests with voters in their home state. Caving in to a public threat is not an image that curries favor with the electorate.

• Said the Senate healthcare vote made Republican leaders “look like fools” and promised to stop funding the lawmakers’ own medical insurance if they didn’t cancel their August recess and try again to repeal Obamacare. The Senate recessed and left town within 48 hours of the president’s threat and name-calling.

• Announced suddenly via Twitter that transgender people will no longer be allowed to serve in the armed forces. This was supposedly a Trump “strategy” to end a squabble over whether the military should pay for trans-related medical costs. That disagreement, which reportedly was well on its way to resolution, is holding up a spending bill that includes funds for Trump’s Mexican wall. Paralysis quickly ensued from the president’s transgender ban tweet, and nothing has moved since – on either the ban or the wall.

• Attacked, loudly and repeatedly, the Russian sanctions imposed by the Obama administration for Moscow’s interference in last year’s election. Congress, controlled by Trump’s own party, responded by passing veto-proof legislation enhancing the sanctions and specifically prohibiting the president from altering them.

• Ridiculed and demeaned his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, in an attempt to get him to resign so he could replace him with someone who would either control or fire Robert Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia’s election tampering. Sessions refused to resign. The Senate initiated a parliamentary maneuver that prevents Trump from making a recess appointment during the current congressional break. There is also a bipartisan push for legislation that would allow Mueller’s removal only on approval of a federal judge.

Every day – every tweet – brings more examples. There isn’t a single strategy to be found in Trump’s arsenal, only a limited repertoire of tired, angry, bullying tactics, the same kind of shtick he used to throw at Rosie O’Donnell and Cher. A very prophetic 5th century BC military strategist, Sun Tzu, wrote, “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Trump likes to announce phony victories – initial passage of healthcare in the House, release of his own budget that has gone nowhere, etc. – with the phrase, “This is what winning looks like.” Well, Mr. President, right now, this is what losing looks like: all tactics and no strategy; the noise before defeat.

I came across Sun Tzu’s wisdom early in my career as a union negotiator. I had just verbally pulverized an opponent at the bargaining table. I had done my research and really had the goods on this guy. I let everything fly, humiliating and embarrassing him in front of his peers. Before I could take a bow, my mentor whispered into my ear, “Now what? You just destroyed him, but how is that going to help us reach a contract settlement?” That’s when I first read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”. My insults were an empty tactic, totally lacking any strategic connection to the goal of negotiating a decent agreement. That painful memory came rushing back yesterday, after it was reported that the president warned his unhinged North Korean counterpart that “threats will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” So, now what? What’s the next move on the road to world peace?

And so it goes with Trump. He knows no art of the deal when it comes to leading our country. Other than the late Don Rickles, nobody has ever achieved success by lobbing insults at people. Yes, the president’s hard core base loves it. They adore Trump for his anger, and his total disregard for civility and respect in dealing with the swamp dwellers. They cheer him for it at his rallies, and then chant, “lock her up,” and other golden oldies. Some of them will stay with their angry guy all the way to the end, even if the swamp is never drained. To them, Trump is like a country-western crooner, singing the same old sad songs that somehow make them feel better, even though their lives are no less wretched when the concert ends.

Yet, polls show that Trump’s ineffectiveness in enacting his promised swamp drain is bringing his numbers down in every category, including his treasured demographic of white men without a college education. The New York Times reported Sunday that many key Republicans are already maneuvering for the 2020 presidential election with the belief that Trump will not be the party’s candidate. Regardless of what happens three years from now, it’s hard to see how this president can hope to successfully govern with no strategy beyond a string of angry tweets. A devoted and enraged base, in the low 20% range, screaming “fake news” at an occasional rally, is neither a strategy nor a mandate to govern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ELECTION IS OVER BUT THE REAL FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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