Category: The Presidency

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.”) 

AMERICA’S BROKEBACK CRY TO TRUMP: HOW DO WE QUIT YOU?

As Donald Trump’s four-year spree of crimes against democracy comes to a close, thought leaders in Democratic and legal circles are trying to figure out what to do with their nemesis. The options run the gamut, from ghosting him into existential oblivion, to a massive judicial inquiry approaching the breadth and depth of the Nuremberg trials. 

Clearly, the ghosting route has immense psychic appeal. As in any bad breakup, vaporizing the object of your disaffection into pure mental nothingness cleanses the mind and soul in preparation for new, and hopefully better, experiences. Alas, the stunt is hard to pull off with a mere mortal, let alone with the Svengali of Narcissus, and the 88 million Twitter followers at his fingertips. 

That narrows the choice to an assortment of investigatory and prosecutorial approaches.  Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell of California proposed a “Presidential Crimes Commission,” a panel of independent prosecutors empowered to investigate any and all of Trump’s legally dubious actions during his presidency.  

Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and George Washington University lecturer, suggested an even broader study by a bipartisan “Trump Crimes Commission” with congressionally selected members and staff from all three branches of government. That body, Kirschner explained in one news account, would investigate everything Trump did to thwart democracy, obstruct justice, and abuse power. He called it a “uniquely American response to our uniquely American atrocity.”

There has been strong support for this type of all-encompassing, spare-no-effort approach to dissecting the misdeeds, missteps and criminal activity of the Trump years.  The rationale was captured quite succinctly in a Financial Times’s interview of former Obama White House lawyer Ian Bassin. “By not confronting wrongdoing, we deprive Americans of an accurate, shared understanding of what happened,” Bassin told the newspaper. 

From a factual standpoint, it’s hard to argue with any of this.  Like a mad bull in a china shop, Donald Trump ran roughshod over every fiber of our democracy. There wasn’t a law, rule, norm, or principle that he didn’t trash if it stood in the way of his self-interest. 

Yet, the last thing this country needs right now is another four-year spotlight on Trump and the nefarious machinations of his presidency.  This is a guy who craves attention like a vampire covets blood. He just held up a COVID relief bill his own administration helped negotiate, and drew substantial bipartisan rancor, all because it gave him a few days of attention.  

Protracted investigations of every nuanced twist and turn, from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to the impeachment trial, would give Trump a daily platform from which to rant and rave about the “witch hunts of the radical left Democrats who stole the election.”  

Yes, the president tried but failed to have Mueller fired. Yes, he tweeted disparaging comments about an impeachment witness during her testimony. It’s hard to see how trying to squeeze felony indictments out of such inane and moronic behavior advances the cause of American democracy. 

No U.S. president has ever been convicted of a crime for actions taken in office. That’s a precedent that can and should be broken for good cause, but a defamatory tweet or the ordered discharge that never happened hardly rise to that level. Sadly, criminal trials for obstruction of justice and witness tampering will bring us no closer to a consensus on what our democracy should look like. 

Unfortunately, our current political environment is not one where it is remotely possible to assemble what Ian Bassin, the former White House lawyer, calls a “shared understanding” of Trump’s wrongdoing.  We can’t even reach a “shared understanding” of who won the election.  More than 70 million people voted for Trump, and two-thirds of them believe their guy when he says he won in a landslide, an evidence-free belief constructed out of pure whim and fancy.

There are far more important issues than Donald Trump facing this country.  The pandemic continues to rage. As it does, the poor and much of the middle class face economic devastation. There is a growing crisis of racial injustice. We are fast approaching the point of no return on climate change. Nearly 29 million people are without health insurance. With narrow partisan divides in the House and Senate, President-elect Joe Biden faces enormous challenges on those and other issues.  Add a prolonged high-profile Trump investigation to that mix, and odds of success dramatically diminish on everything else.

On a deeply visceral level, the image of Trump, clad in an orange jumpsuit, looking frightened and forlorn in his prison cell, is therapeutic enchantment for roughly half the country. If he lands there as a result of relitigating the Russian investigation or the impeachment inquiry, the other half of the country (or at least his base) will see him as a martyred political prisoner.

This is not to say that we should simply ignore the 45th president and the damage he did to our democracy. There is a lot of repair and reparation work to be done, but we don’t need a grand inquisition to do it. If new information related to criminal acts by Trump or his allies surfaces, it should be processed through normal channels in the Justice Department, thoroughly investigated and indictments sought if appropriate.

Trump himself has given us a detailed list of what needs to be fixed. When it comes to blowing up democratic norms, he was an open book. He hid his tax returns. He personally profited from official government business directed to his hotels. He ignored congressional subpoenas. He protected his interests by firing employees who got in his way. He used pardons to protect campaign allies convicted of crimes. The list goes on and on. House Democrats have already started drafting legislation that would close many of the loopholes Trump was able to crawl through.

Finally, the smoothest and most pragmatic route to fulfilling the lock-him-up fantasy, is through the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. His ongoing investigation involves Trump’s business and financial interests and could well result in indictments on multiple charges.  Such crimes are not only pardon-proof, they avoid the optics of political retribution.  Tax evaders and financial cheats don’t garner much sympathy.

Any way you cut it, Donald Trump will remain in our heads and in our news feeds for some time.  Still, the goal should be to diminish the focus on him so we can, at long last, deal with the momentous problems facing our country.

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. 

OUR COMPOUNDED VIRAL CRISIS: COVID-19 & TRUMP

And on the 56th day of the pandemic, Donald Trump crawled out from under his rock of make-believe and denial, to declare: “This is a bad one. This is a very bad one.”  Gone was talk of the coronavirus being a “Democratic hoax.” Gone were assurances that “it will work out well,” and will soon “just go away.” Could it be that The Donald has finally seen the light? Either that or, as the New York Times reported, he saw a new scientific warning that, without drastic actions, 2.2 million Americans could die. Worse yet (for him), he could lose the election.

Many of us thought Trump hit rock bottom when he had children snatched from their parents’ arms and tossed into cages. Wrong. For this volatile and mercurial president, there is no bottom in sight. All we have, as the past few weeks have shown, is a metastasizing obliteration of everything we value in a leader. Like decency, humanity, empathy, humility, insight and competence.

Historians will one day divide the Trump administration into two chronological periods: before and after the plague of COVID-19. Americans rarely experience the fear and pain of a crisis at the same time. Hurricanes, fires, tornadoes and the like devastate regionally, leaving the rest of us to breathe an empathetic sigh of relief as we send thoughts and prayers to the victims.  Not since the 2001 terrorist attacks, have we suffered together as a nation, experiencing the same foreboding – over both the present and the future. There is now, as there was then, a dramatic loss of social equilibrium.

Our world, as we know it, is shutting down.  Churches, schools, restaurants and workplaces have been shuttered. Flights, sporting events, Broadway plays and community festivals have been canceled. From the dark depths of our existential isolation, we ponder the unknowable and unthinkable: How long will this last? Will I lose my job? Will my 401(k) come back? Will I, or people I love, get this virus and die?

This national angst and anxiety cried out for leadership, someone to soothe our souls, acknowledge our pain and provide us with credible information and constructive steps to deal with the crisis.  Bill Clinton did that after the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed. George W. Bush did that after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Barak Obama did that after the Charleston church shooting.

Donald Trump, however, will go down in history as the only president who grabbed hold of a national crisis and made it worse.  Rather than trying to unite the country by appealing to “the better angels of our nature”, as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, Trump turned a deadly virus into a bitterly partisan litmus test. He insisted that talk of an epidemic was designed to hurt him politically.   Until just recently, when U.S. cases of the virus began to grow exponentially, national polling confirmed the absurd and unprecedented results of this politicization of a disease.  Democrats were seriously concerned about the coronavirus. Republicans were not (here, here and here).  

To be sure, Trump did not cause this virus. What he did, however, was inexplicable, inexcusable and downright dumb. This president totally shut down the very essence of who he is. Gone was the bombastic, I-alone-can-fix-it authoritarian, a guy who routinely abandons the rule of law in order to have his way with the world. 

This is the same president who told border patrol agents to break the law in order to keep immigrants from entering the country, promising to pardon them if they were arrested.  He started his presidency by slapping a constitutionally dubious Muslim travel ban together, letting the courts sort it out later. He did the same with cutting off funds for sanctuary cities, placing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, funding his Mexican wall, among many other issues. He moved quickly, unilaterally and often illegally, but won more than he lost in subsequent litigation.

Here’s a thought experiment: Turn back the clock to January 21, when the first U.S. coronavirus case surfaced. Imagine Trump, in his finest bellicose and authoritarian persona, doing what he did Monday with his “bad one” rhetoric, and ordering, in an abundance of caution, a ban on groups of 10 or more gathering together.

Imagine further that he declared a national emergency back then, instead of waiting two months, and issued an executive order closing all schools, non-essential businesses and public transportation, all to protect Americans from the tragic experiences of other countries.   Sure, some of us liberals would have yelled about his authoritarian overreactions. The ACLU might have gone to court.  But, if come May or June there was a substantially smaller spread of the virus here than in other countries, Trump would claim hero status. And for the first time in his life, such self-adulation would have credibility. With mere months to go before the election.

Of course, that would have involved concepts foreign in Trump’s orbit, like strategic thinking, science and planning ahead.  This is a president who lives only in the moment. All that matters to him is how he looks in that moment. He didn’t want the stock market to tank and make him look bad.  So when the Dow took a big dip, he insisted the Democrats created the virus as a hoax to torpedo the economy and hurt his reelection chances.  He insisted there was nothing to worry about and encouraged people to take no precautions.  As the number of infected Americans began to rise, he told one lie after another. When there were 14 cases, he claimed the number would soon drop to zero. The number is now more than 5,000.  He insisted millions of people would be tested. The United States, to this day, remains the least tested among industrialized countries.  He said a vaccine was at hand. It is not.  

As a result, our country is engulfed in two crises of astronomical proportion.  One is COVID-19, a disease caused by a fast-spreading virus that will, according to medical experts, infect at least a third of the country, potentially killing millions of us. The other crisis is one of deplorable and morally bankrupt leadership, a president who can’t see beyond his own ego needs, one who – slogans notwithstanding – has never put the American people first. 

Scientists are confident that the virus will eventually be controlled.  As for our other crisis, the only shot we have at eradicating the poison from our democracy is the ballot box.  May November 3 bring us the vaccine we need to restore dignity and decency to the American presidency.

TRUMP’S DIGITAL CAMPAIGN LEAVES DEMOCRATS IN THE DUST

Although he has been an acute and chronic failure in so many ways, Donald Trump is an accomplished high achiever in the arena that matters most to him: building a base that will deliver votes. 

Leading Democratic strategists scornfully view Trump as a vile malignancy on the body politic, but they are in reverential awe of his ability to use social media as an organizing platform.  David Plouffe ran the 2008 Obama campaign, heralded at the time for its innovations in social media use. In an interview with Politico, Plouffe said that advantage now clearly belongs to Trump. He called the digital imbalance a “DEFCON 1 situation.” Numerous Democratic operatives have recently expressed similar concern over Trump’s ability to digitally out maneuver their party (here, here and here). 

Here’s what they’re talking about:  The fulcrum of Trump’s campaign is a social media engine capable of targeting messages to millions of MAGA types and wannabes. These ads, mostly on Facebook, are far different than conventional political advertising in that they are aimed not just at persuading, but at organizing a movement. With Facebook’s help, they are seen only by those whose online activity has been Trump-friendly. That’s just the starting point. Those ads come with an ask: sign up for a rally, take a survey, make a donation, buy MAGA merchandise.  The responses give the campaign names, zip codes, email, phone numbers, and a ton of demographic data. 

With all of that information – in tandem with Facebook analytics on users who “like” memes and posts about gun rights, undocumented immigrants, and white supremacy, etc. – the campaign’s targeting escalates into microtargeting.  That opens the door on tailoring each social media ad to hyper-specific groups, like 50-something, white male gun owners in the Florida panhandle who own a motorcycle and a dog and attend church infrequently.  This sort of microtargeting is not a Trump exclusive by any means.  His campaign has simply taken it to heights never before seen. In 2016, for example, according to an internal Facebook report, the Clinton campaign placed 66,000 unique ads on the platform, a drop in the bucket compared with Trump’s total of 5.9 million different ads. 

Although Trump and Facebook executives have had their differences, they share one critical value: lying.  The social media platform has been adamant about its policy of running political ads even if they are utterly false.   His campaign, of course, has been only too happy to provide the falsehoods.  Trump’s Facebook ads have spun fairytale story lines about his protection of pre-existing conditions, abating the North Korean nuclear threat, saving America from an imminent Iranian attack, among a plethora of other fantasies. He turned his own impeachment into a fund-raising bonanza, peppered with blatantly false claims about his supposed victimhood and Joe Biden’s imaginary corruption.

As of January 5, Trump’s campaign has spent $35 million to reach 2020 voters through precision-targeted ads on Google and Facebook. The top Democratic candidates have spent a tiny fraction of that amount on digital advertising.  Joe Biden, the purported front-runner, has spent less than $5 million on social media ads. In fact, he recently pulled what little advertising he had on Facebook and moved it to television.  

People spend an estimated one-third to one-half of their lives on their phones and other internet-connected devices. Through microtargeting, Trump is constantly reaching out to, and expanding, his base there.  Meanwhile, Biden and many of his fellow Democratic candidates have slight to no visibility in that digital infrastructure.   While they use more conventional advertising to quibble over Medicare for all versus a public option, Trump is using his online advertising to organize, to fire up his expanding MAGA army through incendiary links to false information about “criminal immigrant invaders” and the “far-left corrupt socialists” who love them.

This Trump advantage gets worse, exponentially worse.  Through artificial intelligence, the campaign is able to have Facebook match target constituencies with what are called “look-alikes”, hundreds of thousands of people who share the same backgrounds and political beliefs as those in the target group.  Once the Trumpers pull new recruits from the look-alikes, that new subset is used to cull more of the same.  Rinse and repeat. Therein lies the growing core of fired-up true believers who Trump hopes will walk through fire on election day to give him a second term.

The campaign has been building this social media organizing machine for more than three years. Trump’s every crazy, insipid, illegal action is put on a digital assembly line where it is completely fictionalized, re-spun, and fed to his fans so that they can be identified and used to reproduce themselves in their own images. For Team Trump, this is the path that will deliver four more years to the only president whose approval ratings never made it to the 50 percent mark.

But hark, help is on the way.  Under the heading of better late than never, there are two recent encouraging signs that Democrats may get their digital act together. Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg has spent $25 million on Google and Facebook advertising. Although he’s a late entrant and a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, his ads are designed to take sharp swipes at Trump, an approach the billionaire says he will continue even if he is not the nominee.

Although Bloomberg’s ad buy is a significant improvement, it will not, by itself, counter the Trump social media onslaught.  Enter “Four is Enough” a unique digital organizing campaign headed by Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, and Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old digital guru who cut her political teeth on the Obama campaign. She is also the CEO of a nonprofit called Acronym that helps progressive groups organize online. They are in the process of raising $75 million to build an online organizing effort, particularly in the swing states that will determine electoral college results.    McGowan told the New York Times that the Four is Enough campaign was the result of “screaming into the abyss” about the Democrats’ weak digital presence, and “finally deciding to take matters into our own hands.”

Let’s hope that it works. As we learned in 2016, being right on the facts doesn’t win elections. Organizing does, and that means using every available digital tool to mobilize disgusted, disgruntled and depressed Americans who know full well that, when it comes to Donald Trump, four years is way more than enough.

THE UNTHINKABILITY OF A SECOND TRUMP TERM

Democratic primary voters are facing an excruciatingly painful decision: What’s more important, revolutionary change to benefit the poor and middle class, or getting rid of Donald Trump? As much as we want to believe that both are within reach, the ghost of Election Night 2016 keeps whispering: “Are you sure?”.  If we are wrong, we will have lost it all.

Back in the aspirational 1960s, the Kennedy brothers – John, Robert and Ted – frequently used a poetic line borrowed from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’. I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’.”

That was then and this is now, a pathetically melancholic era in which our aspirations have been Trumped by a villainous, self-absorbed president.  Sadly, our dreams for a better tomorrow may need to be put on hold so we can singularly focus on eradicating this malignancy from the White House.  Former George W. Bush speech writer and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson perfectly captured our dilemma with these words: “Our greatest political passion seems dedicated not to the pursuit of dreams but to the avoidance of nightmares.”

If not for our Trumpian nightmare, 2020 would be the perfect time for Democrats to dream big and bold, to replace the spoils of underregulated capitalism with the dreams of things that never were, like Medicare for All, free college tuition and a Green New Deal.  

Competing for the progressive vote, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have tapped into the understandably unbridled passion for single payer health insurance, known colloquially as Medicare for All.  Finding a way to extend health care to everyone is a concept whose time arrived decades ago.  Originally proposed by Richard Nixon in 1972, it has long been the way of life in most every other industrialized country.  

Passage of Obamacare in 2010 substantially increased the number of insured Americans.  But it did not go nearly far enough.  An estimated 30 million people lack coverage, and another 44 million are so under-insured that they face risk of financial ruin.  Americans borrowed $88 billion in 2018 to cover health care expenses. There are more than 500,000 bankruptcies every year because of medical debt. Most people are insured under employer group plans that carry an annual price tag of more than $20,000 for family coverage. The average employee annual premium share is between $6,000 and $7,000, in addition to deductibles and co-insurance that can run as high as $10,000 or more. 

Based on facts, figures and sound reasoning, the Medicare for All case could not be more compelling. Yet, repeated polling shows strong negative reaction to the proposal (here, here and here), fed mostly by anxiety over the costs and uncertainties of such a major change.  In an election, it’s the perception, not the reality, that wins the day.  Remember what a political albatross Obamacare was for years before winning broad approval. 

It’s a stretch to see either the Sanders or Warren health care plan becoming law even if one of them captures the White House and Democrats win majorities in both houses. The bulk of the party’s 2018 House gains came in either Republican or swing districts, making a vote for single payer health insurance politically difficult. Still, in an ordinary election year, it would make sense for a presidential candidate to campaign for a bold change and, once elected, bargain downward to obtain what’s doable. Alas, the 2020 election will be anything but ordinary.

“Thinking about the Unthinkable” was the title of a 1962 book about nuclear war. It also captures perfectly the prospect of a second Trump term.  Do we spend four more years counting his lies while watching him continue to: ignore the law, dismantle human rights, destroy the planet, insult our allies, rob from the poor and give to the rich?     It’s hard to imagine a more unthinkable scenario.  Yet, in order to escape from our dystopian abyss, we must think about the unthinkable.

There are two paths to defeating Trump, both backed by facially credible theories.  One is for Democrats to nominate a left-of-center candidate, someone promising revolutionary – or at least big and bold – structural changes like Medicare for All, tuition-free colleges and forgiveness of students loans. The strategy here would be to pull in new voters from disaffected and marginalized groups, folks who disdain and distrust traditional politics but whose passion has been ignited by the prospect of a massive system overhaul. Since many in this demographic didn’t vote in 2016, their ballots would have a value-added impact on the Democratic tally, or so the thinking goes.

The other path is aimed at independents, never-Trumper Republicans and Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016.  The math on this is fairly simple.  The Donald won the last election with 46 percent of the vote. Most polling puts his hardcore base at 25-30 percent of voters. The difference between those two measurements represents a sizeable chunk of 2016 Trump voters, a faction seen through polling as disillusioned and irritated with the president.  The theory here is that a moderate Democrat, one not pushing for huge progressive changes, could well flip a sizeable portion of Trump’s non-base voters.

Nine months ago in this space, I advocated for the first of these two paths, a charismatic progressive candidate pushing for profound structural change.  My reasoning was two-fold. One, we desperately need profound structural change. Secondly, I liked the idea of building passion among those outside the political mainstream and pulling them into a growing Democratic tent.

I’m rethinking that position now for two reasons.  First, Trump is even more of an existential threat to our way of life than he was nine months ago (see Ukraine, Turkey and the pardoning of war criminals).  Then there is the Electoral College. Getting more votes in places like California, New York and Massachusetts does nothing to move the 2016 Electoral College needle.  Repeated polling in six swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina) shows Trump either ahead or within the margin of error of his potential opponents.  Democrats will probably need to take at least three of those states in order to recapture the presidency.  

Although the landscape will evolve between now and the election, I find myself growing more risk adverse by the day.  The best candidate in 2020 may not be the one with the best platform. It will be the one who is best able to defeat Trump.  The alternative is just too unthinkable.

TRUMP’S EXTRAVAGANCE DOES NOT EXTEND TO HIS VOCABULARY

If Donald Trump, God forbid, wins a second term, can someone please teach him a few more words?  His severely limited vocabulary may be the least of our problems, but the president’s propensity to continuously spew out the same monosyllabic mush is way beyond annoying.  

He’s like Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll from the ‘60s. With the pull of a string, she would let loose with one of a handful of preprogrammed phrases.  And then repeat them over and over and over, until a highly agitated parent, in the dark of night, grabbed a scissors and silenced the doll with a snip of her string.

Studies have shown that most adults have a vocabulary in the range of 20,000 to 35,000 words. Trump, it seems, is limited to seven on a good day.   Well, that is a slight exaggeration.  Academicians who put their sanity on the line in order to scientifically analyze the president’s unscripted speech found that he uses 2,605 “unique words”, the lowest of any president.

That means we hear him spout the same utterances ad nauseum: “no collusion”, “build the wall”, “lock her up”, and “believe me”.  One study by USA Today found that Trump used six words more than 500 times while talking about immigration in 2018:   “predator”, “invasion”, “alien”, “killer”, “criminal” and “animal”.

In order to capture the full depth and range of our life experiences, the things we see, hear, touch, smell and feel, along with a vast array of modifiers that help describe them, we have been given an English language of well over one million words.  Because our president ignores 99.9 percent of them, he has to overwork his limited verbal repertoire, forcing a modicum of words to depict vastly disparate meanings.

For example, within a period of three minutes last week, Trump trotted out one of his favorite phrases, “very special”, no less than four times.  The occasion was a Congressional Medal of Honor Ceremony honoring an Army officer.  Since he was still basking in the self-reverential glow from the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the president reminded those assembled that the killing was “something very special.”  Then he placed the medal around the recipient’s neck and announced that “this is a very special thing.”  Introducing the soldier’s relatives, Trump said they are “a very special family.” He wasn’t done.  Trump recognized three Republican senators helping him with his impeachment battle:  Sens. John Cornyn, Ted Cruz and Thom Tillis.  He labeled them “very special warriors.”      

A few days earlier, the Donald called Turkey’s ceasefire in a battle he greenlighted “something very special.”  A quick Google search using the terms “Trump” and “very special”, showed that the latter phrase is not limited to military matters.  Former Playboy model Karen McDougal told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the president handed her money after she was intimate with him.  She said she refused to take it, prompting Trump to tell her she was “very special”.  

In a somewhat awkward moment at the start of the #metoo movement in 2017, the guy who boasted of sexually assaulting women and had been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 25 of them, was asked at a news conference if he had a message on this subject. Said Trump: “Women are very special. I think it’s a very special time.”  Two years later, the president was asked to say a few words to two female astronauts as they walked in space.  “What you do,” Trump told them, “is really something very special.”

Just this past July, he used the same phrase to create profound anatomical confusion. Announcing a new program to combat kidney disease, Trump said: “The kidney has a very special place in the heart.”  As powerful as words can be, they have their limit. To use the same term to describe misplaced organs, the murder of a terrorist leader and a woman who does not charge for sex is definitely pushing the lexical envelope. 

He did the same with “witch hunt”.  The term turns up more than 400 times in the Trump Twitter Archive. In a data base of his speeches, interviews and news conferences, “witch hunt” references far exceed policy discussions.  When former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain ran into sexual harassment accusations in 2011, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When the New York attorney general went after banks in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Trump called it a “witch hunt”. When students at Trump University filed a fraud suit against him in 2013, Trump called it a “witch hunt”.  

Then came the Mueller investigation, spawning more than 250 tweets that called the probe the “greatest witch hunt in the history of our country.”  That designation was short lived, however.  In the past month, Trump has called the impeachment inquiry the “greatest witch hunt in American history”.

A recent addition to the abbreviated Trump lexicon has been, for obvious reasons, “corruption”.  Once the whistle blower report surfaced, along with evidence that the president was conditioning assistance to Ukraine on that country digging up dirt that Trump could use in his reelection campaign, a flimsy line of defense emerged: The Donald was pushing Ukraine to clean up its own corruption.

That resulted in Trump using the word “corruption” 29 times in 23 minutes a few weeks ago. Here’s a snippet from his rambling rant: “I’m only interested in corruption. I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about (Joe) Biden’s politics. . .I don’t care about politics. But I do care about corruption, and this whole thing is about corruption. . .This is about corruption, and this is not about politics.”  

Corruption quickly became the word of the month for him.  Asked by a reporter whether he stands by his personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, who is reportedly under investigation for his involvement in the Ukraine fiasco, Trump offered this backhanded compliment: “Rudy is a great gentleman. He looks for corruption wherever he goes.  He’s always looking for corruption.” 

During the Republican presidential primary campaign, Trump frequently boasted about his superior intelligence and spectacular vocabulary.  “I know words,” he told a rally in South Carolina. “I have the best words.”  What he didn’t say is that he can count those words on the fingers of his two tiny hands. Meanwhile, for many of us, there is only one word we long to hear from this president: GOODBYE. 

Now that would be so very special.

THE FIRE AND FURY OF AN IMPLODING PRESIDENCY

What we need in this country right now is a slow news day.  Headlines limited to the latest Kardashian pregnancy, or Felicity Huffman’s community service, would be welcomed comfort food for our overtaxed brains.  Small chance of that happening anytime soon.  Instead, we are bombarded with almost hourly reports of a perpetual presidential implosion, stories of such spectacular incredulity that there is barely time to unpack them before another one breaks.

The Trump presidency is looking very much like the grand finale of a fireworks display, those closing moments in which the pyrotechnician tosses up one spectacular explosion after another.  We were bug eyed when the president linked Ukraine’s security to that country’s ability to help Trump’s reelection campaign. Then, poof – before the shock wore off, before we could so much as exhale, the next one exploded. Our president, rejecting unanimous pleas of his military and intelligence advisors, pulled our troops out of Syria, abandoning the Kurds who led our battle against ISIS.

While we tried to absorb the catastrophic results of that move, along came another poof. State Department officials said Trump’s political shenanigans in Ukraine went down only after career diplomats were pulled back so that the president’s private lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, could call the shots.  Then another poof: Four of Giuliani’s associates on the Ukrainian caper  were indicted on charges of conspiring to circumvent federal laws against foreign influence. While pondering the mug shots and bios of the first two arrests – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – yup, another poof.  Giuliani himself was reported to be under criminal investigation.

On one level, all this news seems overwhelmingly cumulative and confusing. Who has the time to do endless Google searches on Lev, Igor, the Kurds and Ukraine? Yet, there is a very simple common denominator. Donald Trump is so singularly focused on himself and his interests – petty and large – that he has forsaken everything else. Absolutely nothing outside of himself matters, not the Constitution or the laws of the land, not truth or integrity, and certainly not the welfare of the American people.  To him, this presidency has always been about one thing and one thing only: the needs of Donald J. Trump.

We’ve known since January 20, 2017 that the solipsism of our 45th president would dictate his every action, tweet and utterance. Hours after promising to “faithfully execute” his office, the Donald concocted a lie about how his inauguration crowd was the largest in American history.  That very same day, he filed papers with the Federal Election Commission launching his reelection campaign.  From that day forward, the very essence of his first term was about winning a second term. For the 44 men who preceeded him, winning the presidency meant an opportunity to make a difference in the world.  For Trump, winning was all that mattered, an end unto itself, validation for a dangerously insecure man.

Unfortunately, the articles of impeachment are likely to be narrowly constructed, directed at the president’s attempt to obtain campaign assistance from foreign countries and then obstructing the House’s investigation into the matter.  As odious as those actions were, the circumscribed prosecution is reminiscent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. The fact of the matter is that every single dark moment of this presidency, every injury he has inflicted, has come about through a single course of conduct, namely Trump’s consistent propensity to promote himself, with reckless disregard for the harm inflicted on others. 

Republican leaders in Congress were incredulous over Trump’s cut-and-run in Syria, calling it a foreign policy disaster that will haunt the United States for years. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the president’s chief enablers, called it a “grave mistake” and a “strategic nightmare”.  Yet, until and unless the Republican base decides to give up the ghost on this president, the party’s leadership will continue to view him privately as their worst albatross while publicly opposing impeachment.

They choose, charitably, to view the Syrian disaster as a foreign policy disagreement.  It is anything but.  Donald Trump doesn’t have a foreign policy. All he has is a Donald policy. He does whatever he thinks is best for himself, with utterly no regard for the consequences.  He leveraged Ukraine’s security on digging up dirt on the Democrats because the 2020 election is an existential crisis for him. The strategic nightmare in Syria was a product of the same Donald-centric dynamic. He wants to campaign on bringing the troops home.  Because that’s all that mattered to him, he pulled the plug without a single strategic thought about the consequences of such sudden action.

Sadly, we would need at least another 20 Vietnam Walls to list all of the victims of Trump’s it’s-all-about-me approach to governing.  For example, he instituted a ban on transgender Americans serving in the military and has asked the Supreme Court to strike down employment discrimination protection for the entire LGBTQ community, both moves aimed at garnering affection from evangelical Christians and the homophobic portion of his base. 

To keep the love coming from that base, Trump has: 

REDUCED or eliminated food stamp assistance for millions of poor families.

ENDANGERED the economic security of American farmers through his trade wars.

ELIMINATED teen pregnancy programs that provided access to contraception and education.

REFUSED, as part of his anti-regulation political pitch, to ban a pesticide linked to birth defects in children of farm workers.

SEPARATED migrant children from their parents to show how tough he is on immigration.

PROMOTED racism and xenophobia by appealing to forces that fear the loss of white privilege.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  In each instance, the force at work here is not the president’s ideology.  He has none.  It’s all about feeding his base, positioning himself for his next tweet or rally or election.  It’s all about making himself a winner, a legend in his own mind.

That’s why we need a more expansive view of impeachment.  It’s about so much more than trying to get other countries to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.  It’s about a president who, despite his sloganeering, has never once put America first. It’s about  a president clinging so obsessively to a pathological power of self-absorption that nobody outside of himself is safe.

Most importantly, it’s about a president who, for the first time in our country’s history, represents the biggest threat to America’s democracy.

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.