Tag: Joe Biden

ANTI-VAXXERS, NOT BIDEN, OWN DELTA

Fully vaccinated and maskless, many of us were basking in what we thought was COVID’s summer endgame. Then along came delta, an ill-timed pandemic redux. Suddenly, there was déjà vu all over the place.

Along with skyrocketing infections, came thunderous news reports of President Biden falling asleep at the coronavirus switch.  After all, the guy was elected on the promise of cleaning up Trump’s horrendous COVID mess.  Biden was credited for taming the virus, so he must now be blamed for its sequel.  Or so it would seem from reports like these:

  • “Biden’s Struggles on Delta Overshadow Infrastructure Victory”. (World News Network)
  • “For President Joe Biden, who pledged a ‘return to normal’ on July 4, (delta) is a tacit admission that competence alone won’t vanquish the coronavirus.” (Politico)

My admiration and respect for these and other major news outlets comes with a cautionary warning: Always read the whole report.  Relying on only headlines or story tops can grossly distort the full picture. In this instance, looking solely at these blurbs, it would be easy for a casual news consumer to conjure an image of Biden personally cranking out this new viral strain from his own Wuhan-like lab, deep in the bowels of his Wilmington, Delaware basement. 

Read a little further, however, and a demonstrably different picture surfaces: This highly contagious delta variant emerged in India last December. It inundated that country and Great Britain before making its way to the United states a few months ago.  It quickly blew up our descending trajectory of new infections, going from an average of 13,500 a day in June to 92,000 as of August 3. Some models forecast more than 200,000 new cases a day by this fall.  The delta variant now accounts for 85 percent of new infections.  Most of them are in people who have not been vaccinated. 

So how does any of that put Joe Biden in a pickle?  Where exactly was his stumble?  Much of this honeymoon-is-over reporting was predicated on the President’s July 4 “declaration of independence” from COVID. At that point, 67 percent of adults had at least one vaccine shot, and pandemic cases were down in all 50 states for the first time.  The media wrap on Biden was simply that he said things were getting better, but then they got worse.

Sure, the president congratulated the country back in July for getting vaccinated and helping to turn the corner on this virus.  But here’s what else he said then: “Now, I can’t promise that will continue this way. We know there will be advances and setbacks, and we know that there are many flare-ups that could occur. But if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other unvaccinated people around them. If they do not, states with low vaccination rates may see those rates go up – may see this progress reversed.”  

And that is precisely what happened.  The areas hit hardest by delta are those with the highest rates of unvaccinated residents.  This demographic through-line also aligns those concentrations of anti-vaxxers with counties Trump carried in 2020.  Sure, there are multiple reasons behind vaccine reluctance.  But the spiteful Trumpian politics of refusing the shots Biden is pushing is a big part of this picture.  That makes the news media’s flippant narrative all the more insidious.  Blaming Biden for a delta flare up caused by 93 million unvaccinated Americans has to be putting at least a small smile on the grievance-obsessed face of Donald Trump.  

The sad irony is that some journalists feel the need to demonstrate their fairness and balance by attaching a negative spin to a political leader who has received considerable positive coverage. This phenomena, which is neither fair nor balanced, is even more pronounced in this post-Trump era.  The former president did and said mostly off-the-wall bizarre stuff, resulting in negative stories that Trump called “fake news.”  Then comes Joe Biden, who as the anti-Trump, presents as a bastion of competence and composure, resulting in generally positive news coverage.  Yet, some reporters have this weird balance itch that needs to be scratched. So when Biden’s July 4 reference to the light at the end of the COVID tunnel turned out to be a train called delta, they just had to take him to task.

Meanwhile, Biden remained calm and competent. He and his team assessed the delta data and made major changes in their strategy to conquer this pandemic.  The communication from this White House has been clear and concise: The only way out of this mess is vaccination.  So he is requiring some 11 million federal employees and contractors to either get vaccinated or face adverse employment consequences. Same goes for the military.  

This move, as intended, triggered mandatory vaccination programs in a number of other state and municipal governments, along with a growing list of large companies, including Google, Facebook, Anthem, BlackRock, Cisco, Delta Airlines, Door Dash, Equinox, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Lyft and Microsoft. Theaters and other entertainment and cultural venues have instituted mandatory vaccination policies for customers and employees.

All this happened at the same time headlines had Biden “stumbling” his way into a “pickle” over a dramatic rise in new COVID cases. Yet,  CNN reports, that the number of newly vaccinated people in the eight states with the highest delta caseloads has increased on an average of 171 percent each day over the past three weeks. 

Results like that don’t come from a stumble.  They come from a leader who assesses the rapidly evolving terrain of this pandemic and then responds with appropriate strategic adjustments. Earlier this year, Biden was adamant about avoiding mandatory vaccinations. He not only wanted to dodge the political fallout from such a move, he believed that the overwhelming majority of Americans would vaccinate out of self-interest.  When the carrot approach left 30 percent of the country unvaccinated, and delta began its rampage, the president set politics aside and turned immediately to the stick of making inoculation mandatory wherever possible. 

When the final chapter of this pandemic is written, my bet is on Politico being wrong: Joe Biden’s competence will, indeed, have vanquished this virus.  

SAID THE BISHOPS TO THE PRESIDENT: DO AS WE SAY OR NO COMMUNION

Bless the bishops, Father, for they have sinned.

A substantial majority of U.S. Catholic bishops voted last week to initiate a process that could force President Biden to either alter his position on abortion, or never be allowed to take Communion again.  It’s a new spin on the old stick-up trope of “Your money or your life.” The operative dichotomy here is: “Your politics or your faith.”

You’d think the hierarchy of American Catholicism would be enthralled with having the first Catholic president in 60 years – only the second in the country’s history.  But come now the bishops with a theological ransom scheme designed to extort the White House. 

As a recovering Methodist, I mean no sacrilege.  Although I disagree with the Catholic position on abortion, I have always respected it as an understandable extension of the Church’s sanctity and dignity of life presumption, a principle it has applied to a panoply of social justice issues.  (See capital punishment, gun control, medical care, racial justice, income inequality and the just war theory.)

But these bishops have taken their anti-abortion advocacy to an utterly cruel and immoral level.  Catholics regard the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as the Church’s most important sacrament. According to its teaching, the bread and wine taken during Mass literally transforms into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. To deny Communion to an observant Catholic is to deny the presence of Christ (here and here).

Although he has never worn his religion on his sleeve, Catholicism has long been an important part of Joe Biden’s life.  According to the Washington Post, he was taught by nuns in Catholic schools, seriously contemplated entering the priesthood, rarely misses Mass and clutches rosary beads when making major decisions. The bishops’ threat is built upon the leverage of Biden’s deeply held faith.  And that is why this extortion effort is so very wrong.

Without getting deeply into the weeds of Canon Law, the bishops going after Biden cite a provision that says Catholics cannot receive Communion if they are “conscious of grave sin.” That basically means knowingly and repeatedly engaging in a mortal sin without repentance. Since the Church views abortion as murder, the bishops argue that the president’s support for abortion rights is a disqualifying “grave sin.”  

Over the centuries, Catholic theologians have drafted numerous lists of acts rising to the mortal sin level.  Among the entries is extortion.  Threatening someone with an adverse action in order to achieve something of value is seen as a “grave sin.”   That’s why I wrote what I did in this piece’s first sentence. The bishops trying to extort the president of the United States are, themselves, committing a grave sin. 

Of course, grave sins are nothing new to many of the Church’s priests and bishops.  According to the Bishop Accountability Project, more than 7,000 American Catholic clerics have been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than 20,000 victims, most of them children.  For years, many bishops and other Church leaders were aware of the problem but covered it up, thereby allowing assaultive priests to continue offering Communion to their parishioners. Sins don’t get much graver than that.

Clearly, the bishops’ motive here has far less to do with the sanctity of the sacrament and far more to do with attempting to strongarm the president.  In their rhetoric, the bishops would have us believe that they would deny Communion to any political figure who supported either abortion or capital punishment.  Yet, none of them denied the Communion chalice to former Attorney General William Barr as he expanded the number of federal executions.  

My immediate visceral reaction to the bishops’ vote last week was directed at the raw meanness of it all.  Here’s Joe Biden, the person. At 78 he is actuarily in the twilight of his life, a life defined by his losses and his victories. He buried a wife and two children. His religion is deeply important to him. The hymns, the Bible verses, the prayers, the sacraments and all the other rituals come together as a tapestry that somehow sustains him, Joe the guy.  How dare men of power in this Church even think of ripping out major threads of that tapestry by converting the Sacrament of Holy Communion into a political weapon. 

This ugly predicament, however, offers up another consideration:  What if the bishops’ extortion plan worked?  What if the president, in order to be assured of access to Communion, pulled back all of his executive orders supporting a woman’s right to choose, and made it clear that, from this point forward, his administration would do everything possible to make abortion illegal?  Never mind the fact that 60 percent of the country – and 57 percent of Catholics – support abortion rights.  The result of such a power play is almost unthinkable: a bunch of men with “bishop” in their title would have commandeered the presidency of the United States.

Fortunately, that’s only a hypothetical, and one very unlikely to ever surface.  Biden would never cave to this extortion attempt. Asked about the threat last week, he told a reporter, “It’s a private matter, and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”  The leaders of the two dioceses where he worships most frequently, Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware, have made it clear they have no intention of keeping Biden away from Communion in their jurisdictions. Yet, the mere fact that a sizeable group of Catholic leaders in this country have come this far in their threat to force the president’s hand on one of the most volatile issues of the day is, to say the least, cause for great alarm.  

It is very possible – even likely – that the U.S. Supreme Court will one day drive the final nail into the coffin of Roe v. Wade. As sad as that would be for a majority of Americans, it would nevertheless be in accordance with our democratic, three-branch system of government.  A similar result coming from a takeover of the Executive Branch by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops would be more than catastrophic.

It would be a grave sin.

CONGRESSIONAL ABDICATION NEEDS TO END, AND SO DOES THE FILIBUSTER

With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden made many of us smile again.  The Muslim ban is gone. The Paris climate accord is back. The DREAMers are saved from deportation. Transgender Americans are welcomed back into the military. What a euphoric breath of fresh air after a four-year bout of Trump derangement syndrome! 

The trouble with euphoria, of course, is that it’s a temporary condition. As the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, “. . .even in heaven they don’t sing all the time.”  Although some of Biden’s sweet songs will keep playing for at least the next three years and nine months, at some point the music will stop, and the magic pen will be in the hands of a new president. 

Therein lies our problem. The structure of our government has become so flawed and broken that we have come to accept these massive bi-polar waves of transformation every four years. A Republican senate stonewalled Barak Obama, so he turned to executive orders to deal with immigration, climate change and human rights.  Donald Trump molded his presidency around undoing everything Obama did.  Then along comes Joe to undo what Trump did. 

The last thing the authors of our Constitution wanted was a government run by executive edict.  They’d had enough of the monarchy stuff. They saw Congress as the strongest of the three branches, and vested it with the power to enact laws through deliberation.  The president would then execute those laws.  It was the founders’ way of eliminating policy limbo, of protecting us from the vertigo of a revolving door of presidential fiat. 

And presidential fiat is precisely what we have now.  Congress, particularly the Senate, has abdicated it’s role of lawmaking. One study, for example, found that Congress has spent only a few days over the past five years even talking about the pressing issue of immigration, with no resolution.  The record is similar on other critical issues.  As a result, the president has become a one-person legislature.

The United States Senate was once touted as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Sadly, it has morphed into a dysfunctional morass. Gone are the days of scintillating debate and creative problem-solving. In their place is a dreary, vacuous rhetoric on an intellectual par with a dismissive schoolyard taunt.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats will do whatever they have to in order to pass legislation on gun control, voting rights and infrastructure, even if it means eliminating the filibuster. That’s the rule requiring 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to pass most measures.

Comes now Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who needs to gain only one GOP senate seat in the next election to retake the majority. After hissing at Schumer’s quest to pass a liberal agenda on the heels of blowing up the filibuster, McConnell went into full toxic na-na-na-na-boo-boo mode.  If Democrats kill the filibuster, McConnell said his party, once it regains majority status, will “ram through” sweeping abortion restrictions, a hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border, nation-wide anti-union laws, defunding of Planned Parenthood and expansion of gun rights. Some of us are old enough to remember when Republican leaders designed legislative agendas based on well thought out policy concepts, rather than their value as weaponry.

We probably shouldn’t have been surprised to hear McConnell trot out the cold war trope of mutual assured destruction. In his mind, the Democrats passing voting rights protections by a one-vote majority, is a nuclear bomb, and must be met with a commensurate warhead of, say,  draconian abortion restrictions.  The strategy, of course, is to leave both sides so afraid of their opponent’s agenda that neither push the nuclear button. (See the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

At least so far, mutual assured destruction has protected us from the apocalypse by creating an absence of nuclear war.  The problem with transporting that strategy into the legislative arena, however, is that we end up with an absence of legislation.  And that is precisely the dysfunctional mess we have been in for some time.  The filibuster rule has so paralyzed the Senate that it no longer even attempts to deal with the pressing issues of the day.  

The Democrats need to call McConnell’s bluff. Drop the damn nuclear bomb already. Blow up the filibuster, pass strong voting rights protections, along with gun safety, immigration reform and a long-overdue increase in the minimum wage.   Let the legislative process play out the way the founders intended and the Constitution provides. 

Lawmaking was placed in the hands of Congress principally because legislators are ultimately accountable to the people in their districts or states. By sizeable majorities, those people support Row v. Wade, union rights and sensible gun laws, and oppose anti-immigration policies and defunding Planned Parenthood. If Republicans regain control of the Senate, they would be quickly throwing it away by enacting McConnell’s punitive agenda. Call his bluff. Even if he carries out his threat, voters will have an opportunity to respond in the next election.  Either way is better than a paralyzed Congress and the revolving door of executive orders.

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison described the Senate as a “necessary fence” to protect “the people against their rulers.”  In this aspirational vision, deliberation, shared thoughts and healthy give-and-take before a simple majority vote would serve democracy far better than the king-like whims of a president.   Unfortunately, the Senate subsequently stumbled its way into paralysis, first through the filibuster rule, and more recently by a hyper partisanship centered on playing to the party base. 

Madison’s fence is sorely needed today, more than ever. It will not be easy to get there. But all journeys begin with a single step. 

It’s time to take that first step by killing the filibuster, and returning the Senate to majority rule.  

EPILOGUE:  Out of total disrespect for the timing of this post, Senator Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, just announced that he will never vote to kill or weaken the filibuster. To quote a former president: “Sad.”   In politics, however, “never” can have a fairly short life. (See “Read my lips: No new taxes.”) 

GOP TO BIDEN: UNITY MEANS GIVING US WHAT WE WANT

It came as no surprise that Joe Biden’s clarion call for unity quickly devolved into a definitional food fight.  Every time the new president dropped the u-word during his inaugural speech, you just knew that Mitch McConnell’s lower lip was quivering, even as rhetorical retorts danced in his head.

Alas, in this malignant moment of putrid politics, when it comes to the meaning of unity, there is no unity. Only an overabundance of sophistry. 

McConnell whined to Fox News the other day about how Biden “talks a lot about unity,” but continues to push the Democrats’ agenda. Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that the president’s call for unity was a “lie” because the person he chose to direct the administration’s Iran policy was not sufficiently hawkish.

Another Republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas, put out a tweet lambasting Biden for ignoring unity by overturning Trump’s ban on transgender troops serving in the military. Not to be outdone, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy told Politico that Biden turned his back on unity by offering a plan that would give undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. A large majority of Americans support the President’s position on both issues (here and here).

In each case, these Republicans defined unity as the process of giving them what they want. How utterly silly. Someone sticks a gun in your face and says, “Give me your money.” If you hand over your money, are you then in unity with your robber?  Of course not. Capitulation is not unity.  

The Cambridge Dictionary offers this simple definition of unity: “the state of being joined together.”  That nicely captures the heart of Biden’s inaugural peroration on the subject. Said the President: “My whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation, uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.” 

In other words, we can disagree with each other on everything from tax policy to environmental regulation, but we remain “joined together” as Americans. We can do passionate political battle over ideas and values, and still respect each other as members of the American family. This type of unity is more of an aspirational construct than a governance rulebook. That’s why Biden, in his inaugural address, called unity, “. . .that most elusive of things in a democracy.”  

Other dictionaries define unity as “agreement, accord, a condition of harmony.” This is the meaning many congressional Republicans are attaching to the word. However, they go much further and posit – self-servingly – that only by agreeing with them can there be unity. 

It’s important to remember the context for President Biden’s unity speech. He spoke those words only days after his predecessor sicced a violent mob on the Capitol in a last ditch effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.  It was the lowest point for American unity in our lifetimes.  No serious person could rationally conclude that the Joe Biden who left retirement in the twilight of his life to “restore America’s soul” would see unity as capitulating to the Republicans. 

Besides, even in better times, why would we want the type of unity that insists on an absence of disagreement? Vigorous debate over clashing viewpoints is the lifeblood of democracy. Voicing contrary opinions in places like Russia and North Korea will get you killed or sent to prison.  

Donald Trump was a master at creating that kind of forced unity, all based on people blindly following him.  He called folks who disagreed with him traitors or treasonous. He pushed Republicans to make the party’s platform whatever Trump wanted it to be.  Even after inciting a deadly insurrection, the vast majority of congressional Republicans stand united with him.  That’s the kind of unity to avoid at all cost.

And it certainly wasn’t the kind of unity President Biden summoned us to in his inaugural address. He didn’t equate unity with unanimity, nor did he call for the elimination of all opinions other than his own.   His plea to this very broken and angry country was simply to chill a bit, to take a collective deep breath, to turn down the vitriol a few notches, to remember that we are all Americans and that we are in this together.  

Early in my newspaper career, I covered the Minnesota Legislature. There was a phrase I heard often in those days, from lawmakers of both parties: “Let’s agree to disagree.”  I was young and cynical then, and always rolled my eyes when the line was spoken. It seemed trite and obvious. Looking back, however, I realized that those legislators – in a very different political climate – were doing what Biden called on us to do now. They dealt respectfully with each other, agreeing on some issues and agreeing to disagree on others, all without the need to call in the National Guard.  Agreeably disagreeing was unity.

We are lightyears away from that kind of environment right now. Members of Congress are wearing bulletproof vests and require police protection when traveling. The Washington Post just ran a story about the juxtaposition of a restaurant and a hospital in Michigan. The restaurant defied state laws on mask wearing and social distancing in order to cater to customers who believed the pandemic was a product of a left wing, socialist hoax.  Like minded folks drove miles out of their way in order to dine like it was 2019.  Down the road, the local hospital’s intensive care unit was filled to capacity with COVID-19 patients. 

Yet, there is every reason to believe that our long journey back to the civility of unity has begun. In the nearly three weeks our new president has been in office, we haven’t heard a single insult out of the White House.  Biden seems to have gone out of his way to avoid talking about Trump or his impeachment. On top of all that, he spent two hours last week hosting a meeting of Senate Republicans in the Oval Office.

Although it now appears that the president’s $1.9 billion stimulus bill will be passed with only Democratic votes, don’t believe the predictable punditry about Biden backtracking on unity. He can do two things at the same time: Seriously listen to and consider Republican arguments and suggestions for change, and get the best package possible for the Americans who desperately need it.  

That’s what agreeing to disagree is all about.

INSTEAD OF MAKING AMERICA GREAT, TRUMP DAMN NEAR BLEW IT UP

The Grand Trump Finale is playing out like the massive close of a fireworks display, an insipid amalgam of his greatest hits, along with new explosions guaranteed to shake the rafters of our democracy.  As if he had to prove himself, The Donald’s pyrotechnic departure show reinforces the incontrovertible: When it comes to blowing stuff up, nobody does it better than 45.

Joe Biden delivered on his signature campaign promise, to “beat Trump like a drum.” He won a higher percentage of the popular vote than any challenger to a sitting president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. His electoral college margin was the same as Trump’s in 2016, a victory Trump characterized as a “landslide.” 

But, but, but, says the lame duck president, insisting with a straight face that he actually won this election by a huge margin.  The magnitude of his overwhelming victory will be seen, he promises, once all those Biden votes from Black people in places like Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta are thrown out. Those ballots, Team Trump argues, were fraudulently cast through a system designed by living and dead leftist dictators in Venezuela and Cuba.

As much as this sounds like a farfetched, over-the-top Saturday Night Live sketch, it’s not. Instead, Trump’s latest (un)reality show poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. His brazen attempt to strong arm himself into four more years of chaotic autocracy by subverting the will of the voters appears almost certain to fail.  Yet, by so openly smashing the norms and values of our voting traditions, and by stomping on the weary fault lines of this 244-year-old democracy, Trump has left a blueprint for a less clumsy autocrat to skillfully execute in the years to come.

As every reputable news organization reports numerous times a day, there is simply no evidence of rampant voter fraud (here, here and here).  Consistent with what we have come to know as Trumpian Theater, the moving force is noise, not facts.  The noise in this case – the president’s constant talk about Democrats stealing the election – was designed as a predicate for Trump to actually steal the election.  He came frighteningly close to pulling it off.

Americans have long viewed the ballot box as the fulcrum of our democracy, an almost sacred form of governance personified by the motto, “Let The People Decide.”  Unfortunately, that sentiment was not shared by our founders.  They were, in fact, adamantly opposed to having the president elected by a direct vote of the citizenry.  Lacking cable news, social media and Nate Silver in the 18th century, their concern was that “the people” wouldn’t know enough to decide. 

As a result, we have a constitution that is not only silent on the popular vote, but actually sets up a system in which state legislatures determine the method of selecting electors, who in turn elect the president.  That means the only votes that count under the Constitution are those cast by 538 electors.  As the country evolved – in size and democratic values – the concept of involving the people in this process took off in a big way.  Presidential campaigns now run close to two years, all in search of the peoples’ votes. 

The Constitution, however, remains unchanged. The president is chosen by the electors designated in each state.  The fix, over time, was for states to pass legislation requiring its electors to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in their state. For the most part, this has worked, although not without hiccups.  On five occasions, most recently in 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won the popular vote lost the election based on the electoral college count.

As undemocratic as those results were, Donald Trump’s post-election machinations took things to a whole different level.  He and his deleterious legal team hatched a plot in a handful of swing states to override Biden’s popular vote victory there by trying to get Republican legislatures to send Trump-friendly electors off to the electoral college. This election nullification would ultimately need a handful of state legislatures to rescind their laws requiring electors to vote for the state’s popular vote winner. 

The false “massive election fraud” narrative that Trump introduced months before the polls opened was never going to work, in and of itself.  There were zero facts to back it up. Trump’s hope was that his fog of falsehoods would be widely accepted, providing cover for Republican leaders in states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania to, in effect, demolish Biden’s victory and instruct electors to vote for Trump. Fortunately, Republican leaders in those states did not have the appetite for such skullduggery. If they had, Trump’s electoral vote count would have gone from 232 to 284, and Biden’s would have dropped from 306 to 254.  

Sure, the whole con job would have ended up before the Supreme Court. Given the majority’s rapture with originalism – the notion that language should be interpreted in the context of its original intent – it is hardly farfetched to suggest that Trump would have prevailed, despite his 7 million vote deficit. After all, the founders had zero interest in a popular vote and gave the states the power to pick a president with electors of their choosing.  To originalist justices, the matter would have boiled down to this simple question: Were the electors selecting the president duly chosen by the state legislatures?  It wouldn’t matter that Trump lied about election fraud and pressured state lawmakers to pack the electoral college with his supporters.  

Although it appears that this second term heist has failed, our democracy will not be easily healed. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election.  A number of GOP congressional candidates who lost their races by overwhelming margins are following their leader by claiming fraud and refusing to concede. What happens next time when a more skillful Trumpian candidate loses the election by a thin margin, and needs only one state legislature to hand him an electoral college victory by rescinding the popular vote mandate?

Until now, no one in either party ever attempted to subvert the will of the voters through this kind of electoral college jujitsu.  Although Donald Trump didn’t succeed in blowing our democracy up, he caused it to take a great fall. 

 May our recovery and healing begin, so that our better angels can eventually put America back together again.

HOW DONALD TRUMP SOLD ME ON PATRIOTISM

Here’s a sentence you may never have expected to see in this space: Donald Trump has done more than any other president to instill a visceral sense of patriotism in me.

It’s taken me a while to figure this out, so let me explain.

A week ago, I sat in front of a blank computer screen, fully intending to compose a pre-election piece.  Bits and pieces of the past four years came back to me: the lies, the hate, the overt racism, the gratuitous cruelty, the abject meanness of this president. Some of it seemed unreal. Did he really put children in cages? Did he really coddle white supremacists? Did he really call the news media the “enemy of the people?” Of course he did. And so much more. 

I wanted to write about what a second Trump term might look like, should the pollsters and prognosticators blow it again.  An hour later, my screen was still blank, my brain a jumble of horrifying thoughts.

 I was, in the words of the late military strategist Herman Kahn, “thinking about the unthinkable.” As Kahn applied that phrase to nuclear war, he defined “unthinkable” as a mind-numbing sense of raw fear and terror that transcends language.  That’s what I felt, there at my desk, days before the election.  I couldn’t formulate a single sentence. Not only did I turn the computer off, I went cold turkey on what had become a steady diet of political podcasts, news and polling sites.

Anxiety does not come naturally to me, and the last place I expected to encounter it was in the political arena. In another lifetime, I was a newspaper reporter. I covered elections. Somebody won, somebody lost; I’d write the story and life went on.  Then I became an advocate, but even with a horse in the race – one that lost more times than I can count – I  never missed a minute of sleep.  Life still went on.  And so did the country.

This time was different.  You know that feeling you get when your kids, or another loved one, are MIA way after they said they would be home?  And you can’t reach them by phone?  You begin to imagine the worst, and then try to push those thoughts away because  . . . well, because they are just too terrifying – too unthinkable – to contemplate.  That’s what I, and I suspect many of us – were feeling during the days leading to this election.  This vote went way beyond the political. It was deeply personal.

Now trace those feelings to their roots. That’s where you will find patriotism.  Sitting before that blank screen and thinking the unthinkable was my aha moment. I learned how much I love this country only by arriving at the precipice of losing it.     

I came of age during the Vietnam War. I wrote obituaries for my hometown newspaper of boys I sat next to in high school, kids who, like me, had never heard of Vietnam and didn’t have the slightest idea what it was all about.  Patriotism in those tumultuous times was expressed in a  bumper sticker that read, “America: Love it or Leave it.”  It was a simple, jingoistic false dichotomy that deliberately omitted the third-party candidacy of “Change it.” 

Needless to say, those experiences did not turn me into a flag-waving, America-right-or-wrong kind of guy. There are many aspects of this country to greatly admire:  our exuberance for democracy, our international leadership in human rights, the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press.  There are also a host of deep impediments blocking the pursuit of happiness for far too many Americans: people of color, those living in poverty, women, LGBTQ folks.  

Yet, the bottom line has always been that the institutions of our democracy – the  very architecture of our government – are equipped to solve those problems. The political cliché, “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” contains more than just a kernel of truth. 

At least it used to.  The revelation that hit me, as I sat staring at the blank screen, was that I had been taking “all that is right with America” for granted.  Many previous presidents made policy decisions I vehemently disagreed with.  But they all, with the notable Nixon/Watergate exception, respected and upheld the norms, rules, laws and institutions that provide our very structure of governance. 

During these past four years, however, we’ve had a president who was guided by none of the above, a deeply troubled man whose only operating principle was to feed his voracious appetite of self-interest, regardless of the consequences.  The further he got into his term, the more brazen and reckless he became.  Weeks before the election, Trump was insisting that the Justice Department indict Barack Obama and Joe Biden on some phony, unspecified charge.  On election night, with tens of millions of ballots still to be tabulated, the president of the United States declared a totally fictitious victory and demanded that the counting cease. 

Just thinking about the extrapolation of this behavior over an additional four years, was enough to jar me out of my complacency. Although far from fragile, our democracy is by no means bullet proof.  With a second Trump term, it could well have been unrecognizable by 2024. Thankfully, in this year of cascading calamities, we finally caught a break: the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The Trump presidency changed me.  It forced me to see America in a new light.  Our democratic way of life should never be taken for granted. One man came perilously close to replacing it with his own brand of authoritarian selfishness.  The contemplation of that loss connected deeply with a love for this country that I never knew I had. 

My new bumper sticker?  AMERICA: LOVE IT SO YOU DON’T LOSE IT!

TRUMP’S NEW ELECTION PLAN: “GET RID OF THE BALLOTS”

As if we don’t have enough to worry about, comes now another reason to forgo a good night’s sleep: What happens if Donald Trump loses the election but refuses to leave the White House?

The punditry class has been quaking over this diabolical conundrum for weeks, largely out of boredom. After all, stories about Trump ignoring a deadly virus, encouraging racial unrest, destroying environmental protections and sexually assaulting women have gotten quite stale. So let’s entertain a new disaster, like whether The Donald can force himself on us for four more years. 

The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman filled the current issue’s cover story, “The Election That Could Break America,” with a frighteningly persuasive argument that, in the author’s words: “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result.”

A few days later, someone else presented a far stronger case in support of Gellman’s dystopian narrative.  It came from Trump himself.  He is now refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of an election loss. The president of the United States actually stood before a news conference and insisted that we need to “get rid of the ballots.” He was presumably talking about mail ballots. Polling shows that 37 percent of registered voters plan to vote by mail, and most are Biden supporters.  Trump, who votes by mail, contends – without evidence – that Democrats somehow plan to rig the election through mail ballots. 

So here we are, a tad more than a month before election day, and the incumbent candidate is demanding to either eliminate or not count mail ballots because of what only he sees as rampant election fraud. It’s not too hard to imagine Trump, with full support from his obsequious  attorney general, sending federal marshals into swing states to impound mail ballots before they are counted. 

Although the Constitution unambiguously provides that a president’s term “shall end” at noon on January 20, here’s Gellman’s what-if:  “. . . two men show up to be sworn in, and one of them comes with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.”  

Here’s how Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, responded to that question in The Atlantic piece: “We are not prepared for this at all.”  The professor’s observation aptly applies to everything about Donald Trump. We were not prepared for his election. We were not prepared for his presidency. And we are certainly not prepared for what may well be the country’s most fraught and chaotic transfer-of-power-exit.  

In crafting our democracy, our founders covered many exigencies. One that they missed was what to do when a president is so deranged and delusional that he has zero understanding of reality.  As journalist Bob Woodward, after 18 interviews with Trump, said last week, “I don’t know, to be honest, whether he’s got it straight . . . what is real and what is unreal.”  

Donald Trump’s reality is whatever makes him feel good about himself at the time, regardless of clearly observable evidence to the contrary.  We learned this about him in the first few minutes of his presidency.  It rained during his inaugural speech, but he falsely insisted later that, just as he began to speak, the clouds parted to allow the sun to shine down upon him. If we had selected the president by lottery, if we had randomly handed the keys to the Oval Office to some poor schlub off the street, the odds are enormously high that he or she would have been able to tell the difference between rain and sunshine.

Instead, we ended up with a delusional narcissist, totally untethered from science, the English language, basic facts, and a nation-in-crisis yearning for competent leadership. Our source of angst and despair in this autumn of 2020 is not about the appointment of conservative judges, tax cuts for the rich, or the decimation of environmental protections. Policy in a democracy is all about politics; to the victors go the spoils. 

This pain we feel now is much different.  It’s about the raw, gnawing fear of what more is to come from this acutely deranged man, who has never met a boundary of decency and decorum that he hasn’t demolished or leaped over. Never has a leader had a wider gap between vision and reality. 

This is, after all, the guy who looks past the seven million COVID infections and 203,000 deaths and says, as he did in Ohio this week, that the virus “affects virtually nobody.”  He’s the guy who threw paper towels at hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans and called the island “the most corrupt place on earth,” and then this week claimed that he was “the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.”  He’s the guy who criticized the Obama administration for not stockpiling any ventilators while 19,000 of them were sitting in storage. He’s the guy trying to force government scientists to skip safety steps in releasing a coronavirus vaccine before the election, while the Trump National Doral Miami resort opens its doors for an early October conference of the nation’s anti-vaccine movement. 

To be sure, Donald Trump is not the first person seemingly incapable of grasping reality. The difference between him and his delusional cohorts is that he is in the White House while the others are either hospitalized or under close supervision.  A review of the medical literature shows that many delusional patients insist that they are the president of the United States.  Unlike Trump, however, they do not have access to the nuclear codes.

The only remedy we have in this nightmare is to vote. Even then, there is no guarantee that a Biden electoral victory will be enough to trigger a peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of our democracy for more than two centuries. Still, the bigger the Biden margin, the bigger the likelihood that non-delusional forces in our system will find a way to ship Trump off to Mar a Largo in January.  

Since reality doesn’t matter to him, The Donald can bask away in the Florida sun and insist he is still president. Just like his hospitalized counterparts. 

BIDEN’S VP LIST: A WHO’S WHO OF HIGHLY SKILLED WOMEN LEADERS

Joe Biden’s commitment to name a woman as his running mate has drained the boredom out of one of the more unremarkable rituals in our quadrennial election pageantry.  Instead of filling the summer with coy no-comments from a predictable cast of ambitious white guys, Biden has introduced us to an ever-growing list of strong, accomplished women generally unknown outside of their states or districts.

Critics of this women-only selection process have pontificated about the evils of filling such an important job on the basis of gender. How silly is that? For the past 231 years, all of our presidents and vice presidents have been men. The argument is vanquished by its own speciousness. Biden’s veepstakes are expanding, not limiting, our notion of what presidential looks like.

Other than Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Kamala Harris (CA), who competed alongside Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, most of the potential veep names bandied about are those of female leaders whose skillsets have been hiding in the shadows of national obscurity. 

They include:  Senators Tammy Baldwin (WI), Tammy Duckworth (IL), Maggie Hassan (NH); Congresswomen Val Demings (FL) and Karen Bass (CA); Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island, and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico; former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano; Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms; former Georgia legislative leader and candidate for governor Stacey Abrams; and former national security advisor Susan Rice. 

These candidates have been the subject of considerable news coverage these past few months. Most of them went from a Google trending flatline of zero to the top of the search metric within days of being identified as a possible vice presidential nominee.  Never has there been so much focus on highly skilled women leaders. Of course, in a government dominated by white men, there hasn’t been a lot of competition for that distinction.  After all, we’re talking about a country where women account for less than 25 percent of the Congress and 18 percent of the governorships.

Yet, this protracted national conversation about the comparative skills and backgrounds of a dozen or more top notch women leaders doesn’t, in itself, bend the aging arc of patriarchy into a magic wand of gender parity.  But it’s a much needed start, particularly compared to where we were at the conclusion of this year’s Democratic primary process.  

Only months ago, the Dems were rightly boasting about their unprecedentedly diverse cast of presidential candidates. They were male and female; young and old; gay and straight; white, black, Latino and Asian. Yet, when the dust settled, Joe Biden,  a 77-year-old icon of the white male establishment, assumed the mantle of the party’s presumptive nominee. 

So when Biden announced in March that “there are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow,” and that he would select one as his running mate, eyes were understandably rolling in many feminist circles. After all, the guy had just kept the glass ceiling intact by securing four more years of a “Men Only” sign for the oval office.  There was no mood to break into a round of the Hallelujah Chorus for the veep consolation.

The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse perfectly captured this sentiment when she adroitly wrote: “Most feminist voters I know don’t want ‘a woman’ in the White House just because an older man announced in advance that he’d earmarked a special lady-slot for someone wearing a pantsuit.” 

We are now four months past Hesse’s touché moment.  Biden’s lady-slot move seems to be having a sustained positive impact on actually getting to know the strengths and skills these women bring to the table.  Until recently, most of them were seen first as representatives of their gender, and secondarily – if at all – as serious thought leaders. 

Social and organizational scientists have been tracking this phenomenon for decades (here and here).  Those who are the demographically few among the many in any organizational setting have a difficult time freeing themselves from their gender, race, or other identity status. They find it much harder to be taken seriously by the many, typically a male majority.  

For example, we knew Rep. Demings was the “black woman” named as a Trump impeachment manager. Now we know her background as a social-worker-turned-cop who served as Orlando’s police chief. We also know her ideas about dealing with the ongoing issue of police violence in the black community.  The same goes for every name on Biden’s list.  The news these past few months has been filled with stories about their backgrounds, including details of their accomplishments and policies they have supported.  

Think back four years ago. Who were the women Hillary Clinton considered for her running mate? There was only one: Elizabeth Warren. The other eight were men. How about Barak Obama in 2008? Again, only one woman: Kathleen Sebelius, then governor of Kansas. The other seven on his short list were men. Warren and Sebelius were both the few among the many, and neither received serious or substantive attention as a possible veep pick. 

As cheesy and patronizing as Biden’s no-men-allowed standard might have looked in March, the process nevertheless delivered a stunning antidote to the perverse leadership numbers game that has kept the national spotlight away from the few women among the many men.  When it comes to “Joe’s List,” women have gone from the few to the only. For the first time in their careers, most of them have appeared on the Sunday talk shows and have written op eds for the New York Times. Freed from being tokens of their gender, we get to know them for their character and substance.

The openness with which these women have approached their vice presidential candidacies stands in sharp contrast to the annoying male norm of publicly feigning interest while jockeying for the job behind the scenes.  Stacey Abrams captured the reason for such an assertive, straight-forward approach when she told the New York Times: “We know extrapolations are made from single moments,” she said. “Part of my directness in answering the question about V.P. is that I don’t want anyone” — whether a Southerner, an African-American, a woman, or all of the above — “to ever look at my answer and say, ‘Well, if she can’t say it, then I can’t think it.’”

The Biden project is by no means a cure-all for gender disparity in our political system. But it’s a worthy first shot at leveling the playing field.  If it gets more people to completely reimagine what a president or vice president looks like, to apprehend that they don’t have to come in pin-striped power suits and red ties, it will have been a step well worth taking. 

NEW PRESIDENTIAL MATH: COUNTING SEXUAL ASSAULT ACCUSATIONS

Tara Reade’s sexual assault accusation against Joe Biden has produced some apoplectic commentary predicting the death of the #MeToo movement (here, here and here).  It’s time for a collective deep breath. The movement may be undergoing some natural growing pains, but it is very much alive and well.  If you don’t believe me, ask Harvey Weinstein (New York State Correctional Facility) and Bill Cosby (Pennsylvania State Prison).

The theory of the case for a faltering movement lies with an ambitious rhetorical flourish that guided #MeToo’s branding: “Believe Women.” It perfectly captured the abrupt – if long overdue – paradigm reversal involving sexual misconduct. Suddenly, hundreds of powerful men were losing their jobs and reputations based on women’s sexual harassment and assault complaints, along with substantial corroborating facts.  

For way too many years, women complaining of sexual abuse were not only disbelieved, they weren’t taken seriously. The men said it never happened, or if it did, it was consensual: “He said, she said.” And “he said” was the default position for being taken seriously. The #MeToo movement reversed those power dynamics and made “she said” the default position.  Hence, “Believe Women.”

Yet, the phrase was never intended as a legal standard of proof. It didn’t advocate that a woman’s accusation of sexual abuse, in and of itself and without regard to evidence, meant the guy did it, end of story. In hindsight, “Listen To Women” might have been a more elegant choice of words.  But “Believe Women” had a righteous symmetry to it in a culture where many sexual assaults went unreported due to the cultural propensity to believe men and disbelieve women. 

Now comes our malignantly divisive political environment where everything in sight is a potential weapon.  During the 2018 confirmation hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, a parade of Democratic leaders, including Joe Biden, trotted out the “Believe Women” mantra after Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school.  Kavanaugh denied the allegation, just as Biden denied Reade’s accusation.  That has produced an uproarious Republican chorus of hypocrisy charges against Biden and his defenders.  Tara Reade is a woman, their syllogism notes, so she must be believed, just as Biden and the Democrats insisted that Blasey Ford must be believed. 

Inconsistencies, particularly those based on disparate facts, is a way of life in politics. They also constitute fair game for criticism. But here’s what they won’t do: turn the clock back on the #MeToo reckoning that women’s sexual abuse charges must be taken seriously. The very fact that Reade’s accusation against Biden has been the biggest non-pandemic story for the past 10 days is evidence that she is very much being listened to.

What, then, do we do about that story?  For starters, we ought to feel sad. Really sad.  The Democratic primary process discarded every candidate who was not a white male pushing 80. In an understandable obsession to dump Trump, the working assumption was that this wasn’t the year to “risk” nominating a woman or a person of color.  The final two white geezers standing were Biden, 77, and Bernie Sanders, 78. Since the former vice president was seen as electable, and Sanders was seen as a socialist, the endgame didn’t last long.  As a result, in the most important election of our lives, the presidential sexual abuse allegation box score now stands at: Biden 1; Trump 20+. Although the forced choice is clear, just doing the math is sad. (Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for this, but if she were the nominee it wouldn’t be needed.  Just sayin’.)

We need to take Tara Reade’s accusation seriously. Based on everything I’ve read, her complaint, although definitively unprovable, is nevertheless credible. Reporters spoke with two of her friends who said Reade described the alleged 1993 assault to them back in the 1990s. Most of the 20-some sexual assault and misconduct complaints made against Trump involved similar corroboration. 

The natural inclination in this overheated political moment is to grab hold of those facts that support our desired election outcome. The Trump campaign has already produced video ads portraying Biden as a creepy groper. Some Biden supporters are attacking Reade’s veracity and questioning her motives. In the Twittersphere, there is a battle between “I Believe Tara Reade” and “Tara Reid is a Liar.” Viewing sexual assault charges through a political lens diminishes the gravity of all such offenses. 

Biden’s response to Reade’s accusation was a mixed bag. On the positive side, he didn’t call her a liar, question her motives or denigrate her in any way. In other words, he totally discarded Trump’s playbook on dealing with sexual assault charges.  On the down side, he waited too long before responding, relying instead on leading Democratic women, many of them his potential vice presidential candidates, to sing his praises.  

When he finally issued a 1,006-word response, 659 of those words were about pro-women policies he supported. Although his record on women’s issues is certainly relevant to the campaign, making it the major portion of his defense to a sexual assault charge was cringeworthy. At best, it was a non sequitur. At worst, it was using a voting record to get a pass on a sexual abuse accusation. Either way, it was tone deaf.

Yet, on balance, it was a more enlightened Joe Biden than the one who ramrodded Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination through his Senate Committee in 1991, never taking Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Thomas seriously.  Even at 77, the former vice president remains an educable work-in-progress. The same cannot be said of Trump.

Therein lies the reason why there is no lingering mystery about what to do on November 3. Our choice is between Trump and Biden. It’s the difference between darkness and light, between ineptness and competence, between evil and mostly good. So, take Tara Reade seriously. You can believe her every word and still be compelled to vote for Biden.

Here’s why: Donald Trump is an accused serial sexual assaulter and admitted groper, who just let tens of thousands of Americans die while he denied the Coronavirus. He needs to go, and a vote for Joe Biden is the only way that will happen.

As Don Rumsfeld said in another context, you go into an election with the candidate you have, not the candidate you want.

AS THE WHISTLE BLOWS, DEMOCRACY FADES

The ultimate outcome of the Ukraine/whistleblower ordeal is less important than the broader message it portends. In other words, welcome to the tipping point in the unraveling of our democracy.   This is no longer about an unhinged president doctoring a weather map with his Sharpie.  This is about a concerted and rapidly escalating assault on the very democratic values that made America great.

In many ways, Trump’s flagrant flaunting of a whistle-blower statute to keep a report documenting his alleged misdeeds from a congressional committee is neither new nor surprising behavior. This is a guy who has never shown the slightest inclination to let a law, covenant or moral code interfere with his singular motivational force of self-interest.  

Yet, this aberrant behavior pattern is rapidly escalating, from the amusing to the abhorrent.  Back during the 2016 campaign, reporters profiling this unlikely candidate almost uniformly described him as someone who “defied conventions” (here, here and here).  How benign and understated that seems now. It’s like describing Jeffrey Dahmer’s epicurean tastes as defying convention.

As diabolical as Trump has been, there was once room for reasoned optimism regarding the long-term impact of his malignancy on the future of American governance.  After all, our democracy has survived brutal assaults over the past 200+ years.  Surely our system of checks and balances, along with the commitment and integrity of dedicated public servants, would help mitigate against serious damage inflicted by the Donald’s defying of conventions.  Well, that worked for a while. But most of the White House folks with even a modicum of integrity have been fired or quit.  And the checks and balances we learned about in grade school grind at a snail’s pace.

For all practical purposes, our democracy has ceased to function.  This isn’t just Trump’s fault, although he is clearly the triggerman, the guy who took a dysfunctional system and reduced it to the kind of shambles that would warm the heart of a narcissistic authoritarian.  The problem began more than a decade ago when politics became so divisive and polarized that Republican congressional leaders would rather pass no legislation than work with a black Democratic president.  That’s why the biggest problems facing the country – immigration, gun control, health care, climate change – have seen insufficient or no action in the past 20 years.

That opened the door for Donald J. Trump to get elected on the solemn assertion that “I alone” can fix America.  And it’s been downhill ever since.

Remember all that stuff about three “co-equal” branches of government serving as the cauldron of our democracy?  Well, what many of us didn’t learn back in those civics classes was that the system was predicated on at least a modicum of good faith.  It’s common for Congress and a president to be on different pages. What the founders didn’t contemplate was a Trumpian presidency insisting that, it alone, controls the entire book.

So now we have, yet again, an impasse crisis between the president and Congress.  The Trump-appointed inspector general for the intelligence community reviewed a whistleblower complaint supposedly involving, among other matters, a phone conversation Trump had with the new president of Ukraine. The IG found it to be credible and of “urgent concern,” terms of art in the law that requires such matters to be referred to the Intelligence committees of the House and Senate.  The Trump administration is refusing to comply with the statute.  

At the same time, the Donald, out of a mixture of arrogance and invincibility, has been somewhat transparent when it comes to corruption.  That leaves us with the ironic duality of a president openly defying the whistleblower law while tweeting out much of the content likely involved in the matter.  Trump has acknowledged asking the Ukrainian president to investigate alleged wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s son, and has also admitted sending his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to push Ukraine officials to dig up dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 presidential election.  

Meanwhile, House Democrats continue to spar with each other over potential moves on the impeachment chess board, largely over Trump’s obstruction of justice during the investigation into Russia’s interference in 2016 election.  Their opponent, however, has moved on to get another country to interfere in the upcoming election.  None of those chess pieces are moving right now because Donald Trump has pulled the rug out on the very democratic processes they rely upon.

Despite the constitutional impeachment and oversight responsibilities assigned to Congress, Trump has thumbed his nose at every turn, denying information and testimony that the House and Senate are clearly entitled to.  From the president’s tax returns to Don McGahn’s testimony, to information about immigration policy, bank loans and scores of other subjects, the White House has refused to produce any of it.  The intransigence is totally without precedent.  The result has been litigation and appeals, that may well continue beyond the 2020 election.

But Trump’s ruination of democracy goes much further.  With help from the Supreme Court, he has taken money Congress appropriated for various military projects and deferred it to building part of his wall at the Mexican border, a project specifically rejected by Congress.  The Pentagon now wants more money appropriated to replace the funds diverted to the wall.  According to reporting by the New York Times, White House sources say the president has his eye on diverting any such new appropriation toward additional sections of his wall.  

Freedom House is an independent agency that, for the past 50 years, has ranked countries around the world on how democratic their governments are.  The United States had always been near the top of the chart. Since 2017, however, our ranking has steadily deteriorated due to Trump’s frequent attacks on norms and institutions and the wearing down of democratic checks and balances.  Freedom House now places the U.S. well below other large and long-standing democracies such as France, Germany and Brittan.

Standing alone, the Ukraine/whistleblower episode would be tragic enough.  But on the heels of effectively usurping Congress’s oversight and funding responsibilities, this emboldened, in-broad-daylight rush to get yet another country to interfere in our elections moves this crisis into a whole different realm. Donald Trump is not just a terrible president.  He is not just a threat to our democratic way of life.  He has already dismantled huge parts of our democracy.  With a second term, it is hard to see how we would ever get it back.