Category: The Presidency

MEET THE 2020 CANDIDATE MOST LIKELY TO ASSURE TRUMP’S DEFEAT

Who has the best plan for defeating Donald Trump in 2020?  Is it “electable” Joe Biden and his retrospective of the Obama years? Is it the Democratic Socialism of Bernie Sanders? Is it the policy-in-every-pot approach of Elizabeth Warren?  How about Kamala Harris and her pragmatic idealism?  Or the Minnesota centrist nice of Amy Klobuchar? Maybe the youthful vibrancy of Mayor Pete?

When it comes to crafting the assured destruction of our Trumpian nightmare, there is someone who, hands’ down, tops all of the above.  It is Donald John Trump. Yes, popular mythology has this president coated in Teflon, forever protected from the foibles that would sink any other politician.   He was elected after boasting about his proclivity for sexual assault.  He had babies yanked from the arms of their mothers, insulted all of our allies, took an ax to human rights and environmental protections, all without much of a blip in his approval ratings.  

Yet, there are clear signs that significant numbers of the president’s 2016 supporters are entertaining second thoughts about their guy.  They are embarking on a well-worn path traveled by Trump’s former wives and cabinet members, who learned only too well that what starts off being new and exciting eventually turns into unbearably annoying chaos. 

It is precisely that nerve-shattering mania, in all of its constancy, absurdity and intensity, that may well bring Trump down in 2020.  The guy is a one-trick pony without a second act.  His campaign rallies and tweets are little more than formulaic rants, totally devoid of agility or transformation. Mr. Authenticity is what he is, a pathetic, broken man who couldn’t pivot to save his life. Or his presidency. 

Donald Trump will not be removed from office based on ideas and policies.  Despite all of the fine platform issues advanced by Democratic candidates, it will not be health care, climate change, economic justice, human rights or education policy that drives this presidential election.  It will be chronic and malignant Trump Fatigue, a nauseating state in which, as they say in AA, we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.  

There may be no more poetic way to wrap this story arc than for this bitterly divided country to reach a singular consensus on the only thing that matters right now: the compelling need to stop the constant noise, the deafening drumbeat of useless, irrelevant craziness.  Regardless of where you stand on the critical issues of the day, they’ve all been in a permanent lockdown since January 20, 2017.  It’s been all-Trump-all-the-time. 

That’s how he won the only election he was ever in.  Trump commanded every news cycle and made it all about him. He hasn’t deviated from that schtick for even an hour since 2016. This is not a man with a repertoire of strategies.  He’s a rinse-and-repeat kind of guy.  But here’s the kicker:  It worked three years ago because enough people saw him as totally different from other politicians, a real wild and crazy shit disturber who would fix everything that is wrong with America.  Many of those folks now see him as a crazy old man who never shuts up.  Even in the train wreck metaphor, nobody in their right mind wants to gaze at the same gruesome disaster for three years, let alone eight. 

Think about what we’ve been through just recently. Much of this week has been devoted to the President’s Sharpie-doctored weather map falsely supporting his earlier error in announcing that Hurricane Dorian was headed to Alabama.  Trump’s desire to buy Greenland was a five-day story.  His suggestion that nuclear bombs be used to destroy hurricanes occupied another three days.  Then he “hereby ordered” American companies to stop doing business with China. He called China President Xi Jinping an “enemy” one day, only to reverse course the next day by calling him a “great leader and a brilliant man.” 

For three days last week, Trump focused on marketing his Miami golf club resort as the venue for next year’s G-7 conference, fiercely denying reports that the place is infested with bedbugs. Meanwhile, Trump tweeted to his 64 million followers a picture of an Iranian launch pad that was the scene of a rocket launch failure, except that it turned out the photograph was highly classified as top secret because it could reveal intelligence gathering techniques.  

There is more. Before August ended, Trump, as noted by the New Yorker, called himself the “Chosen One”, flashed a thumbs-up during a photo op with the family of mass-shooting victims, accused Jews who voted for Democrats of “great disloyalty,” and called the chairman of the Federal Reserve an “enemy” of the United States.   He also cheered the burglary of a Democratic congressman’s home and labelled various critics “nasty and wrong,” “pathetic,” “highly unstable, “wacko,” “psycho,” and lunatic,” among other insults.

All this constant, crazy, angry negative noise has begun to turn off previous Trump supporters, folks who voted for him but who were never part of his hard core base.  According to Morning Consult polling, in 15 swing states, including those that won the electoral college count for him in 2016 (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin), Trump has gone from a net positive to a net negative rating between January of 2017 and this summer. (A positive rating means more people approve of him than disapprove, and a negative rating is the reverse.)  

There are other signs of fatigue among 2016 Trump voters.  Although the president’s tweeting has increased substantially over his term ( from 157 times a month during his first six months to 284 times a month for the past six months), his followers are much less active.  Axios reports that Trump’s Twitter interaction rate, measured by likes and retweets, has fallen by 70 percent since he was elected.

Marc Thiessen, the only Washington Post opinion writer who has consistently supported Trump’s policies, recently captured the essence of his guy’s biggest reelection problem: “If you hit the mute button, the administration is doing a great job in many areas,” Thiessen wrote. “But when the sound comes on, the chaos and lack of discipline drown it all out.”

Trump doesn’t do mute. To be sure, his campaign strategists will continue to push their candidate to turn down the volume, assuring him that less is more. A Twitter drought now could pay dividends with a resumption of messaging closer to the election. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” is not merely poetry for lovers, but wisdom for overexposed and overbearing political candidates. 

Fortunately, there is zero likelihood Trump will take that advice.  In his solipsistic heart of hearts, he alone got himself into the White House, and he alone will capture a second term.  God bless him.  If he tried acting less deranged, if he toned down the constant noise of craziness, if he forced himself to appear just a little presidential for a few months, he might well expand his base and win reelection.  

So, by all means, let Trump be Trump. It may well be the best exit strategy out there.  

TIME TO RID THE WHITE HOUSE OF ITS RACIST INFESTATION

With all due respect to Nancy Pelosi, there is an urgent and compelling need to impeach Donald Trump. I totally get and appreciate the speaker’s concern and pragmatism.  Wrangling for months in the nuanced weeds of the Mueller Report could give Trump a perfect platform for his victimization-by-witch-hunt narrative, and thereby boost his reelection chances. 

So forget the Mueller Report.  Instead, the articles of impeachment need to focus on what a majority of Americans are only too painfully aware of: the president’s racism. His bigotry, meanness and hatred are tearing the country apart. As conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in the New York Times this week, Trump “is a disgrace to his office, an insult to our dignity, a threat to our Union and a danger to our safety.” It doesn’t get much more impeachable than that. 

As a matter of fact, the Constitution’s impeachment clause was crafted in 1787 with visions of Trump dancing in the founders’ heads. One of them, Benjamin Franklin, argued that some future presidents might “render (themselves) obnoxious.”  In such a case, Franklin posited, impeachment offers a more rational alternative to assassination. (Back in those days, the assassination of Julius Caesar still weighed heavily on the minds of the ruling – and sometimes dueling – elite.)  James Madison suggested that impeachment should be used in the case of a president’s “perfidy”, meaning someone who could not be trusted.  Alexander Hamilton said the impeachment option is designed to remedy “injuries done immediately to the society itself.” 

Donald Trump is not merely obnoxious and untrustworthy, he is inflicting a level of injury on this country that escalates daily.  In another time and place, the Mueller Report’s abundant and substantial evidence of obstruction of justice would have removed any president from office.  Given the moral paralysis of the Senate’s Republican leadership, it will not remove Trump.  Through the lens of the past several painful weeks, a prolonged – and ultimately unsuccessful – impeachment battle over the legal intricacies of the Russia investigation would deflect the focus from the much larger Hamiltonian issue.   This president’s racism and toxic narcissism are creating endless “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

The prospect of protracted legislative hearings over what the Donald said to James Comey or Donald McGahn two years ago pales in comparison to the abject damage Trump’s culture of fear and hatred has inflicted on our country.  He has made America far worse than any of us could have imagined.  For that, he needs to be impeached.  

To be sure, Senate Republicans will refuse to remove him from office.  Yet, it is far better to proceed on a basis that viscerally resonates with voters, than on one that amounts to a sequel to Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony.  Only 37 percent of voters say the Russia investigation warrants impeachment.  On the other hand, 59 percent called many of the president’s tweets “un-American”.  Six in 10 people found Trump’s actions to be bad for Hispanics and Muslims. Another poll found that 56 percent of voters believe the president has made race relations worse. Some 57 percent said Trump is a racist.

Every day of this deplorable presidency is filled with horrid moments, the likes of which no dystopian novelist could have ever conjured.  On Sunday, hours after a shooter, using Trumpian phrases like “Hispanic invasion” and “send them back”, killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart, the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went on television to say that the alleged mass murderer developed his anti-immigrant views before Trump was elected.  And how did Mulvaney, know that?  Turns out he lifted the line from the alleged shooter’s “manifesto”.  Another White House first:  political spin ghost written by an accused mass murderer.

Then, later in the week, Trump made the mass shooting circuit, ostensibly to comfort traumatized communities in El Paso and Dayton, where nine people were killed early Sunday. He attacked local politicians in both places, and regaled medical providers, still weary from caring for the wounded and dying, about crowd sizes at his political rallies.  When none of the still hospitalized shooting victims in El Paso would meet with him, Trump’s team had family members bring a baby who survived the shooting to the hospital for a photo op.  The two-month-old infant lost both his mother and father in the Walmart shooting. Totally oblivious to the gravity and somberness of the moment, Melania held the newly orphaned baby and beamed widely with her husband who flashed a victorious thumb’s up for the camera. For that alone, he should be impeached. 

Based on Hamilton’s standard of “injuries done immediately to the society itself”, there is overwhelming evidence supporting impeachment.  

For example, Trump:  

LAUGHED when someone at a political rally yelled that immigrants should be shot.

REBUFFED Department of Homeland Security efforts to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority.

USED the word “invasion” or “invade” to refer to migrants in tweets 10 times this year.

CUT funding for a federal program designed to undermine neo-Nazi groups and other violent domestic terrorism.

WAS named as the motivating force by countless perpetrators of hate crimes.

REPEATEDLY attacked people of color with blatantly racist tropes (here, here and here).

CALLED Mexican immigrants “rapists”, Syrian refugees “snakes”, and countries of black and brown people “shit holes”.

Impeachment should never be used to get rid of a merely bad president.  That’s what elections are for.  Yet, our wise founders envisioned the possibility that a day could come when the leader of the free world might be way worse than bad, so toxic, in fact, that our entire society is left in spiraling agony.  Alas, that tragic day has arrived.  

As damning as the Mueller evidence is, this no time to thread a legal needle over whether the president obstructed justice or merely obfuscated it.  All along, the smoking gun was hiding in plain sight, in the president’s tweets, his rally speeches, his everyday actions.  

Donald Trump is a disgrace to his office because he has totally failed to insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty, in accordance with the Constitution he swore to faithfully execute.  It is hard to fathom a more compelling case for impeachment.  

TRUMP’S RACISM IS DIMINISHING AMERICA

These are the times that try America’s soul in ways that not even Thomas Paine could have envisioned. Since 1776, our country has struggled to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility. Then along comes Donald Trump. Suddenly those noble aspirations bit the dust. They succumbed to the autocratic ravages of hate and division.

The gruesome and bizarre Trump antics of the past week, although certainly not out of character for this pathological egotist, rose to such a level of alarm that it is hard not to worry about how this sad chapter of American history ends without lasting damage to the very fabric of our nation.  

Here was the guy who used his inaugural speech to decry the “American carnage (of) crime, gangs and drugs”, calling out four congresswomen of color for criticizing the country.   As everyone knows by now, not only did Trump call them out for “not loving America”, he dug out the old racist trope of “why don’t they go back to the countries they came from”.  All four of the women are U.S. citizens.  Three were born here.

For days, we were subjected to constant debate and analysis on the insipidly stupid question of whether the president’s words were racist.  That’s like asking whether Minnesota winters are cold. As a matter of fact and law, scores of employers have been found in violation of antidiscrimination laws on the basis of telling minority group employees to go back to where they came from. 

As for Trump, his overt racism has never been a close question.  He called Mexicans “rapists and drug dealers”, said all Haitians have AIDS and that Nigerians would “never go back to their huts in Africa”.  He claimed some neo-Nazis and former KKK members are “very nice people”.  He ended a federal grant for an organization that combats white supremacism. The list is endless.

Trump, of course, says there “isn’t a racist bone” in his body.  He also says “no one respects women more than I do,” despite his boasts of grabbing them by their genitals, and that 17 women have credibly accused him of sexual assault. Facts to this president are whatever he says they are. He could hold an orange in his hand and call it an apple. Yet it would very much remain an orange.  He tried that kind of trick last week by claiming that he attempted to stop a campaign rally crowd in North Carolina from chanting “send her back”,  despite video of the event showing Trump standing in silence for 13 seconds of such chanting.  

Although the story has had longer legs than most of this president’s cataclysmic moments, it will soon fade into the data bank of Trumpian atrocities. If it is still alive by mid-week, the Donald will simply threaten Iran with a nuclear attack or fire another cabinet secretary, anything to change the subject.  Yet, the national psyche will have taken one more serious blow. The cumulative damage from this presidency is unlikely to be healed anytime soon.

That dynamic was captured perfectly on a New York Times podcast last week by conservative columnist George Will.  Here is what he said, in a broader context, about the malignant impact of Trump’s words: “. . .you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for school boy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. This will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries did.” 

Some of that damage has already been measured. Studies have found correlations between Trump’s presidency and various medical conditions, including cardiovascular issues, sleep problems, anxiety and stress and, particularly among Latinos, a high risk of premature birth due to stress.

Research by social scientists at Tufts University found a dramatic reversal in a 50-year trend of honoring a clear social norm of not openly making racist statements. Since Trump started making degrading comments about racial and ethnic minority groups, that norm has been blown to bits, according to researchers. One study showed that people exposed to Trump’s campaign quotes about Mexicans were “significantly more likely” to make similar offensive remarks about not just Mexicans but other identity groups.  They were simply following their leader.

Since Trump arrived on the national scene, there has rarely been a day without reports of racial incidents perpetrated in Trump’s name.  “Donald Trump was right,” said two Boston men convicted of beating and urinating on a homeless man because they thought he might be an immigrant.

Repeated surveys of public school teachers have demonstrated a steady increase in Trump-attributed racial taunts in the classroom.  In one study, 90 percent of the educators responding said their school climate has been negatively affected by Trump’s racist words and actions. The vast majority of them expressed the belief that the impact will be long-lasting. 

Because of a crude, mean spirited, bigoted presidential tweet, millions of young children of color will return to school next month only to be told by a classroom bully to go back to where they came from.  We have reached the point where a racial taunt and a presidential proclamation are one in the same.

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this country has slowly struggled to shape that more perfect union in the form of a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, one that would, at long last, deliver both justice and domestic tranquility for all.  The journey has had its low points (George Wallace) and its high points (Barak Obama).  On net, forward movement outweighed the backslides. Yet, in less than three years, Donald Trump has wiped out decades of progress. We now have miles and miles to go before we sleep.  We cannot let this president take us all the way back to where we came from.   

THE REAL ART OF THE DEAL: NEVER EMULATE TRUMP’S NEGOTIATING STYLE

If Donald Trump were a car, he could be immediately disposed of under the lemon laws of most states. Not only is he congenitally incapable of functioning as president, he sold himself to America on the blatantly fraudulent claim that he would be the best deal maker to ever occupy the White House. As it turns out, this guy couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag.

Forget about The Art of the Deal, Trump’s ghostwritten ode to his delusional prowess as a master negotiator.  With this one-trick pony, it’s all about the art of the threat. His singular approach to conflict resolution is to fire off a volley of threats at his opponents, like something out of the Godfather movies.  The only difference is that most Mafia dons are adept strategists. Trump is not.  He simply huffs and puffs and indiscriminately hurls threats with all of the dexterity of an angry drunk denied bar service at last call. 

Rarely a day goes by without this president lobbing a new threat at a perceived adversary.  He’s threated both North Korea and Iran with economic sanctions and/or nuclear annihilation but is nowhere close to an agreement with either country.  He threatened immigrants with an array of Draconian retributions for entering the country illegally and they have continued to storm the borders in record-breaking numbers.  He threated Mexico with all sorts of mayhem if didn’t pay for the wall, which it steadfastly refuses to do.  After first threatening to close the Mexican border as leverage to get that country to stop the flow of immigrants, he backed away and threatened to slap tariffs on imported goods from our neighbor. Then he dropped the tariff threat in exchange for an agreement that merely codified the status quo. For all of his verbal fire and fury, he got nothing he didn’t already have.

The list, of course, goes on and on.  He threatened former FBI director James Comey with releasing tapes that didn’t exist. He threatened to:  end the NFL’s tax cuts;  impose a tax on European cars; cut off aid to countries he doesn’t like; stop health insurance payments for members of Congress until they pass an Obamacare replacement; pull NBC’s licenses because he doesn’t like their coverage of him. In some cases, he actually made good on his threats, like shutting down the government to get his border wall funding. None of these threats, executed or not, delivered the outcome Trump was looking for.  

He does, however, reap a valuable dividend: love and adoration from diehard supporters who worship their action hero president for having the alpha male fortitude to man-up and take on a political system they have grown to despise.  The more Trump threatens and bellows, the more his base loves him.  Yet, remove the smoke and mirrors from the Trumpian bargaining process and you will find nothing resembling a serious, effective negotiation. Just an agitated old man braying at the moon. 

Donald Trump is a cartoonish stereotype of what many people think of when they hear the word “negotiator”, an angry, red-faced, table-pounding blowhard barking demands and hurling insults at the other side. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

“The world’s best negotiators,” said Marty Latz, a well-respected conflict resolution trainer, “are also empathetic, as they deeply listen, understand and appreciate their counterparts’ needs and interests without necessarily agreeing with them.”  Trump, according to Latz, “has undermined (his) effectiveness for years with his lack of preparation, spontaneous gut-level moves, threats, name-calling, an adversarial win-lose approach, and an extremely aggressive and often mean-spirited tone.”

Of course Trump and his merry band of MAGA voters offer a far different narrative of the all-powerful deal maker, one that reflects illusions created by theater of the mind. Take North Korea, for example. The president would have us believe that his bellicose threats to destroy that country with the “fire and fury” of his nuclear button brought North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to his knees, begging for a negotiated peace.  With grandiose visions of the Nobel Peace Prize dancing in his head, Trump has spent the past two years in repeated photo ops with Kim.  To hear the Donald tell it, he is now “in love” with Kim and the two are endowed with a “very special relationship” that, of course, ensued directly from Trump’s threats to bomb Kim and his country into oblivion.  Just yesterday, Trump made front page news by becoming the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korea.  

Yet, we are not an inch closer to a deal ending North Korea’s nuclear capabilities than we were when Trump was threatening to blow the country up.  Kim may be a brutal, murdering dictator, but he, unlike our president, is an effective negotiator. Kim knows his opponent and he is giving him what he needs right now: political cover through the illusion of peace.  Without making a single concession, Kim has elevated his own status on the world stage. More amazingly, he has transformed his relationship with Trump from one of threatened annihilation to that of a bumbling bromance. 

A number of law school professors who specialize in conflict resolution have expressed concern that their students will be influenced by Trump’s approach to deal-making, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything they teach, namely listening, empathy, relationship building and problem solving.  Andrea Kupfer Schneider, director of the Dispute Resolution Program at Marquette University Law School, said she emphasizes to her students, that Trump’s objectives in a negotiation are aimed singularly at his political goals, not at the interests of his client, namely the American people. 

“Although the president might appear to be engaged in negotiating with a counterpart, his goal does not appear to be changing that particular counterpart’s mind,” she wrote. “Instead, his negotiation behavior is often calculated, not necessarily to result in successful negotiations, but to boost his political ratings.”

Remember those days, when America was truly great, and the president was seen as a role model for students?  They have been replaced with a new warning:  If you want to be an effective negotiator, pay no attention to Donald Trump. Alas, there is no art in his deals.

THE MUELLER REPORT: AN EPIC TALE WITHOUT A HAPPY ENDING

The biggest mystery of the Mueller investigation is why Donald Trump was so obsessed with stopping or stymying it. The outcome, in his post-fact universe, was always destined to be rewritten, revised and repurposed in order to cast the Donald as the perpetual winner he imagines himself to be. 

Not even Lewis Carroll could have envisioned a scene like this:  Trump beaming from ear to ear as he declared himself to be having “a very good day. . .no collusion, no obstruction.”  Such joy and jubilation from a 448-page report that paints a picture of an incendiary White House led by a dishonest, paranoid and prevaricating  president who repeatedly orders his aides to lie and falsify documents. God only knows what it would take for this guy to have a bad day.

Robert Mueller’s meticulous report has been analyzed, annotated and otherwise sliced and diced since its release. In many ways, the magnum opus is the legalese version in the glut of Trump books that hit the market over the past few years.  It portrays 45 as an out-of-control narcissist who views events through a prism of whatever makes him look good in the moment, a man who bows to no norm or ethical standard. 

Yet, there is little in this report to stun an American public that has sadly developed an immunity to Trump shock over these past tumultuous  27 months.  Take one of Muller’s more pedestrian findings: that the president dictated a deliberately falsified press statement relating to the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer and her entourage.  In any other administration, that would have been a page one story for days. Instead, it was merely Trump meeting our expectation of untruthfulness.  After all, we’re talking about a guy who, according to a former Mar a Largo butler, used to falsely tell guests that nursey rhyme tiles in Ivanka’s room were the original work of Walt Disney because, as Trump told his employee, “who cares” if it’s not true? 

One of Trump’s pre-presidential biographers, Michael D’Antonio, prophetically anticipated a major theme of the Mueller report weeks before the inauguration. In describing his vision of the then-incoming presidency, D’Antonio told Politico, “. . .he’ll give orders and they may not be followed, and he wouldn’t care if he doesn’t find out about it. He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government. It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem.”

Therein lies Trump’s biggest ego bruise from the Mueller investigation.  Revelation of his constant fabrications or utter disregard for ethical behavior does not faze him. That’s simply Trump being Trump, a persona he has embraced for 72 years.  For this president, the real kryptonite in Mueller’s findings is that his staff regularly ignores the Donald’s orders, otherwise known, in the words of former White House counsel Don McGahn, as “crazy shit”.   For a man who ran for president on the theme of “only I can fix it”, a pathological egotist who takes counsel from no quarter, the Mueller report had the impact of Dorothy’s dog, Toto.  It pulled back the curtain on this boisterous, vile-tweeting, bombast-spewing loudmouth to reveal that the mighty Oz is actually just a feeble old man who nobody pays much attention to.

Of all of Mueller’s findings, this one sentence carried the heaviest blow to Trump’s ego: “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” 

According to Mueller:

WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL MCGAHNrepeatedly refused Trump’s orders for him to have Mueller fired.

DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF RICK DEARBORN took Trump’s written instructions for the Justice Department to limit the Russia probe to future elections and threw them into a trash can.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS continuously refused Trump’s pleas to “un-recuse” himself from the Russia investigation so he could protect the President.

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DANIEL COATSrefused the president’s request to say there was no link between the Trump campaign and Russia.

DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY DIRECTOR K.T. MCFARLANDrefused Trump’s order to write a witness statement saying that the president hadn’t told her then-boss, Michael Flynn, to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

CHIEF OF STAFF REINCE PRIEBUSignored Trump’s order to fire Jeff Sessions.

DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL ROD ROSENSTEINrefused Trump’s order to falsely announce that James Comey’s firing was Rosenstein’s idea.

The list goes on and on. In many cases, as Trump biographer D’Antonio prophesized, the refusal of presidential orders took the form of passive resistance. They simply ignored the assignment and waited for Trump’s attention to move to the next shiny object.  

While the Mueller report provides the most extensive documentation of how many of Trump’s aides routinely ignored his commands, it’s not the first we’ve heard of this phenomena. His former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, refused Trump’s order to assassinate the president of Syria and provide options for military action against Iran. Aides also prevented Trump from pulling out of trade deals by removing papers from his desk and waiting for him to forget about it.  Other top assistants reportedly declined Trump’s instructions to lobby the Justice Department to prevent the AT&T-Time Warner merger as a way of punishing CNN for what the president regarded as negative news coverage.

There is, of course, only slight solace in the fact that so many of the president’s subordinates found ways to avoid doing “crazy shit”.  Of those identified above, all except Coats have either left the White House or are about to.  

Now that the curtain has been pulled back on the illusion of the great and powerful Oz, passive resistance offers little comfort for the future of Trump’s presidency.  That means, unless we find a way to cut this nightmare short, we will need a pronoun change in what has been the most quoted line in the Mueller report, the part where Trump, upon learning of Mueller’s appointment, said, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”  The truth of the matter is that if his presidency doesn’t end soon, WE are fucked.  

NO SYNDROME ABOUT IT: TRUMP IS A REAL IMPOSTER

Ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in pursuit of the presidency, he has been diagnosed by detractors (here, here and here) with having a severe case of Imposter Syndrome. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

Millions of intelligent, high-achieving adults are plagued with Imposter Syndrome, the false notion that they have faked their way into the limelight and don’t deserve the success they have achieved.  Can you imagine the Donald doubting his success?  This is a guy who spins utter failure into faux success, all the while basking in the illusion that whatever he touches turns to gold, a modern day, orange-tinged Rumpelstiltskin with bad hair.  

Imposter Syndrome emerged in the 1970s through the work of two psychologists, Suzanna Imes and Pauline Rose Clance. It was initially seen as a severe insecurity affliction in mostly high-achieving women, notably in a culture unwelcoming to female achievement. Years later, however, researchers found that men were also prone to the condition. According to the International Journal of Behavioral Science, 70 percent of people experience the syndrome at some point in their lives. It has been described variously as an inability to internalize your own successes, and a “pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, or fraudulence despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” 

That assuredly is not Donald Trump, a man whose toxicity could be significantly reduced through daily injections of self-doubt.  His only relationship to this disorder is that he has undoubtedly validated the distorted feelings of insecurity among those actually suffering from the syndrome. After all, if a genuine, real-deal imposter like Trump can masquerade his way into the West Wing through the hocus-pocus of smoke and mirrors, then how real can anyone’s achievement be?

How, you may ask, could anyone fake their way into the White House?  The same way you get to Carnegie Hall:  practice, practice, practice.  Trump has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of being someone he is not. 

For example:

ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS. It is well established that, as far back as the 1970s, Trump routinely called major news outlets under a variety of fictitious names, claiming to work for the mogul.  In exchange for anonymity, he then concocted brazenly false, boastful  stories about the Donald and his projects.

SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRE MYTH. Trump’s life-defining narrative of having built his empire all on his own, with barely any help from his family was totally decimated by a detailed New York Times investigation showing that the president started his company with at least “$413 million from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”

PHONY CAMPAIGN FOR THE RICH LIST.  Using a pseudonym to impersonate a source inside his company, Trump repeatedly badgered Forbes Magazine with fabricated numbers to get himself high placement on its annual listing of the 400 richest people.  Jonathan Greenberg, the Forbes reporter who took the calls, told the Washington Post he later learned that Trump should not have been on many of those lists. He said he placed him on an early list, for example, on the net worth of $100 million, only to later learn that his actual worth was $5 million.

As president, Donald Trump has consistently played the role of Imposter in Chief.  He said his New York-born father emmigrated from Germany. He insisted he had a “wonderful” healthcare plan as a replacement for Obamacare. There was no plan.  Mexico would pay for the wall, until it didn’t. Then he’d force Congress to fund the wall, until it didn’t.  Now he boasts that part of the wall has actually been built, and then declares the phoniest of emergencies in order to “finish” that which never began. 

This is the direct opposite of Imposter Syndrome behavior.  Rather than performing at a highly competent level but being unable to own his success, Trump has no idea what he is doing but is blinded to his insecurity through an inability to grasp his ineptness .  There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Back in 1999, Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and his student researcher, Justin Kruger, wrote an article for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Its title foreshadowed the Trump presidency:  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.  

Dunning and Kruger found, according to reporting on their work, that there is “a cognitive basis in which the less able people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities.”  Although their work was well respected in academic circles, the Dunning-Kruger Effect went mainstream with Trump’s election.  Dunning wrote a piece for Politico in 2017 in which he said that not only was Trump a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but that his base is “grounded in similar ignorance.”  Wrote Dunning: “. . .they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.”

And so it is that our Dunning-Kruger president stumbles his way through governance. He dismisses global warming on a cold day, calls real news “fake news”, believes Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence experts, and boasts of his peacemaking in North Korea while that regime continues to manufacture nuclear weapons. Not knowing what he doesn’t know pulls him and this country further and further into the abyss.

Decades before academicians framed the duality of the Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, philosopher Bertrand Russell perfectly captured the dynamic in a 1933 essay titled “The Triumph of Stupidity”.  He wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that . . . the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Still, given a choice between the two, always go with doubt.  Used constructively, it can build a path to wisdom.

TOO MUCH TRUMP? HERE’S A PAUSE TO REFRESH

Oh what a year it’s been in Trump World.  Among the 2018 memories:  shithole countries, nuclear button sizes, a very stable genius, porn star hush money, an unexecuted order to fire Robert Mueller, a presidential declaration that Steve Bannon lost his mind, and a three-day government shutdown.

And that was just January.

Fear not, dear readers, the other 11 months will not be summarized in this space.  Given our current environment, the journalistic masochism of year-end reviews constitutes cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by Article VIII of the Constitution. Besides, there seems to be an intense desire for a  break from Trump overload.

For all the false superlatives he spouts about himself, this one is true: the American people have taken more breaks from thinking about, watching or listening to Donald Trump than they did under any other president.

Trump Fatigue Syndrome was the Urban Dictionary’s top definition of the year.  Google it and you will see millions of testimonials from folks suffering from too much Trump.  Hundreds of celebrities and others have shared their agony of the “Trump 10”, a reference to weight gain brought on by Trump-induced stress eating.  Media outlets cranked out endless reports of people dealing with Trump fatigue by invoking cold turkey news blackouts (here, here and here).  It has been reported that House Speaker Paul Ryan decided to leave public office largely because of Trump fatigue.  Even Kanye West, a rare celebrity to embrace the president, ended the year taking a break from Trump news, saying it was “all too much”.

And therein lies the predicate behind the decision to take a brief break from producing this blog.  Melissa, my editor and wife, and I are headed south for a month or so.  Barring unforeseen circumstances, I anticipate a return to this spot in early February.  It’s not that I’ve succumbed to Trump fatigue.  For reasons only a good shrink could dissect, I can’t take my eyes off this train wreck.  Its every facet fascinates me.  

What I want to avoid at all costs is reader fatigue. And so it is, on the theory that a brief absence may make the reading fonder, that I bid you adieu for a spell. Thank you for following me, or at least checking in every once in a while.  Our connection means a lot to me.   Happy New Year!

PRESIDENTIAL RELATIVITY: HOW 45 TURNED 41 INTO ONE OF THE BEST

Who would have thought we’d be waxing nostalgic over the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush? He was a one-term wonder, a Ronald Regan afterthought who eschewed the “vision thing” and really hated broccoli.  Yet, the nation mourns the passing of 41 this week out of a deep longing for those bygone days when our presidents rarely embarrassed us, no matter how mediocre or inept they may have been.

Bush had been destined to join such non-luminaries as Chester Arthur, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore in the dustbin of presidential obscurity.  Then along came Donald Trump who, in a karmic twist of fate, managed to elevate Bush the Elder to near-Mount Rushmore status.  And so it is that the late president, viewed through the funhouse mirrors of Trump World, casts an idyllic image of the anti-Donald: honest, humble, caring and knowledgeable.  Those are all leadership attributes we once took for granted in our presidents, until they vanished in the 2016 election.

According to news reports, the Bush family secured a creative détente with the Trump White House well in advance of the 94-year-old former president’s death.  Trump would be invited to the funeral and the family would insist eulogists refrain from criticizing the current president.  It seems the Donald was mighty distressed over the ridicule heaped upon him at John McCain’s funeral and wanted to avoid a sequel in the Bush sendoff.  So touched by this gesture from a family he has shown nothing but contempt for, Trump, in a rare moment of lucidity, managed to utter kind words on Bush’s passing. Here’s part of what he said: “President Bush always found a way to set the bar higher.”

That kinder and gentler remark, however, got it wrong. The reality of this moment is that Trump sets the presidential bar so low that George H.W. Bush – along with nearly any Tom, Dick or Mary off the street – rises to the level of revered leaders. Virtually every word used to describe Bush since his death represents a basic human ingredient sorely missing in our current president.  Barack Obama called Bush “a humble servant”.  Bill Clinton said he was “honorable, gracious and decent”.  Jimmy Carter spoke of his “grace, civility and social conscience”. House Speaker Paul Ryan referred to his “decency and integrity”. 

Foreign Policy magazine captured the late president with these words: “modesty, integrity, decency, patience, prudence and intelligence”. It then opined: “When he left office in 1993, his qualities reflected well upon him. Today, they are incandescent.” The Washington Post’s obituary observed: “Although Mr. Bush served as president nearly three decades ago, his values and ethics seem centuries removed from today’s acrid political culture.”  

So there sat 45 at the Bush funeral on Wednesday. Trump was in the first pew of the Washington National Cathedral as the nation paid its last respects to 41. He had, for the first time as president, taken his ceremonial place next to his living predecessors, secure in the deal he cut that nobody there would dis the Donald. His body language, however, belied any notion of a comfort zone. With pursed lips, a vacant gaze and arms folded tightly across his sternum, Donald Trump looked like a gastro patient about to undergo a colonoscopy without anesthesia.  

Alas, what he got was far more painful.  Nobody talked about him.  His name was never spoken. The no-ridicule pledge meant that Donald Trump was totally ignored.  But it was far worse than that for him.  The heartfelt praise visited upon George H.W. Bush must have jabbed fiercely at Trump’s psyche and felt very much like the ridicule he so wanted to avoid.  No, the Bush-Trump ceasefire had not been violated. The problem was that 41 and 45 became reflective mirrors for each other.  Bush’s strengths seemed ordinary 30 years ago, but are now nostalgically prized and mourned because they are tragically absent in the incumbent president.

Although the eulogists were focused singularly on the late president, it was impossible to hear their words without also thinking about Trump’s flagrant inadequacies.  

For example:

Former president George W. Bush:  “In victory, he shared credit. When he lost, he shouldered the blame.”

Former senator Alan Simpson:  “He never hated anyone. Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in.”

Bush Biographer Jon Meacham:  “His life code was: ‘Tell the truth. Don’t blame people. Forgive’.”

Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney: “. . .when George Bush was president of the United States of America, every single head of government in the world knew that they were dealing with a gentleman, a genuine leader. . .” 

If those memories of what being presidential once meant failed to connect the dots to our current situation, the officiant, the Rev. Dr. Russell Jones Levenson Jr., Bush’s pastor from Houston, brought it all the way home:  “Some have said this an end of an era. But it doesn’t have to be. Perhaps this is an invitation to fill the void that has been left behind.”

And what a void it is.  In the morass of our deeply broken political environment, it’s hard to remember that we once took for granted that our presidents would be kind, decent people, folks not deeply invested in hatred or cruelty, leaders who told the truth most of the time.  When George Herbert Walker Bush received the Republican nomination for president in 1988, he vowed to make the country “kinder and gentler”.  He was mercilessly lampooned by late night comics and editorial cartoonists for setting the bar so low.   

The bipartisan mourning we saw and felt this week was America pleading – from far below that bar – not just for kinder and gentler governance, but for leadership laced with honesty, integrity and decency. It’s been said that we can’t fully apprehend the value of something until we lose it.  Now that it is gone, America’s first order of business is to find a way to get it back. 

THE BATTLE AT HALFTIME: THE RULE OF LAW vs THE RULE OF TRUMP

I once made the case in this space that Donald Trump’s disregard for truth and the rule of law was unlikely to push the country into an authoritarian abyss. My prophecy then was that career civil servants, steeped in democratic traditions, values and rules would serve as a strong buffer against the aspirational ravages of Trumpism. Now I am not so sure.

As this maniacal presidential term approaches halftime, the carnage from Trump’s brutal assault on our democracy seems to be steadily growing, almost exponentially. As a quick thought experiment, think back to any presidency in the past 30 years, Republican or Democrat. Could you have imagined then a president who:

CALLED for the prosecution of his political opponents.

OBSTRUCTED an investigation into foreign interference with our elections.

DEFENDED a Saudi leader who the CIA says ordered the murder of a Washington journalist.

THREATENED judges who ruled against him.

And now comes this unseemly B-movie plot in which Trump’s former campaign manager and convicted felon feigns a cooperative stance with the special prosecutor in order to channel investigative intelligence to the president in exchange for a pardon.

I’m not saying it’s time to start whistling that old Barry McGuire ditty about the “Eve of Destruction”. Not yet anyway. Still, this president has clearly intensified his attack on our democracy and the rule of law. He has also become more adept at finding lieutenants who will aid and abet that mission.

The New York Times reported that Trump ordered the prosecution of Hillary Clinton and James Comey, despite the absence of any evidentiary predicate. According to that reporting, then White House counsel Don McGahn told him that a president can’t order criminal prosecution of his enemies and, if he recommended doing so, it could get him impeached. So Trump backed off, just as he did a year ago when he was hell bent on firing special prosecutor Robert Mueller and McGahn threated to quit.

Eventually, Trump tired of being reined in by his legal advisor and McGahn resigned. His replacement, Pat Cipollone is said by former U.S. attorney Harry Litman to have more “moral malleability” than his successor, just what this president is looking for. That’s how Matt Whitaker, an outré lawyer with an underwhelming legal career, became acting attorney general. Not only has the new AG been openly critical of Mueller’s investigation, he has also made music for Trump’s ears by declaring the judiciary to be the “inferior branch” of government.

And we thought Jeff Sessions was in the running for Worst Attorney General Ever. The divide here is not about conservative versus liberal. It’s about respecting the rule of law versus the opposite, namely letting Trump be Trump. Both Sessions and McGahn are right-of-center purists. They are also imbued with the culture, traditions and rules of our democracy, putting them both on an unavoidable collision course with this White House. Trump saw Sessions and McGahn as his guys and expected them to do his bidding, to protect him at all costs. They saw themselves as “officers of the court”, with a sworn fealty to the legal process.

Remarkably, our system of government has held up over the years not because of the brilliance of our laws or the unique architecture of our constitution. Instead, our success has come from a source far more nebulous, one rarely mentioned in civics textbooks, namely our deeply held norms and customs that place the rule of law above the command of any one ruler. As Harry Litman, the former U.S. attorney, noted in the New York Times, Russia has “legal protections no less extensive and high-minded than ours”, but they don’t stop Vladimir Putin from locking up his political opponents.

In other words, our system works because we believe in the rule of law and accept it as our way of life. We went weeks without knowing the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, as armies of lawyers for both sides litigated their way from Florida state courts to the U.S. Supreme court, where, on a 5-4 vote, the justices, in effect, handed the presidency to George W. Bush. His opponent, Al Gore, quickly conceded. The law itself was not responsible for that peaceful transition of power, rather it was a national consensus and commitment to follow the rule of law.

That consensus and commitment to our democratic traditions has never been so volatile. Pew Research Center studies show that 61 percent of those polled say they distrust the basic framework of government and want to see it fundamentally restructured. That ripens the conditions for demagogic rule. Therein lies the inherent power of Donald J. Trump. It makes it possible for him to repeatedly lie without consequences. It lets him dismiss fact-based research of government agencies. It lets him verbally attack judges who rule against him. And, with the “moral malleability” of newly appointed legal advisors, it may well let him use the Justice Department to lay waste to his political adversaries.

Question: faced with a 2000 Gore-like situation, what would Trump do? Right. And that is just how fragile our system is right now.

TRUMP OUTSHINES RUSSIAN TROLLS AT DECEIVING AND DIVIDING

Russia’s byzantine efforts to infect American politics with chronic misinformation and rampant discord may be about to end. And we have none other than Donald J. Trump to thank. With a president so deeply skilled at dividing people and turning truth on its head, there is no need to subcontract that work to the Russians. Who needs an elaborate Russian troll farm to crank out social media posts about the evil of black protesters and invading brown immigrants, when Trump can do it himself with the flick of his Twitter finger or the roar of his bully pulpit?

Remember those 13 Russians charged with clandestinely promoting Trump’s 2016 candidacy? They were accused of stirring the social media pot with totally fabricated posts touching on racist and xenophobic fears. The February indictment says their goal was to “sow discord in the U.S. political system. . .through information warfare (designed) to spread distrust towards the other candidates and the political system in general.” Well, the Donald has shown he can do all of that on his own. He was an excellent student of his Russian mentors, so much so that he no longer needs foreign aid.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has written extensively about how the Russians pioneered the whole concept of “fake news” in the 1990s and 2000s. In his book, The Road to Unfreedom, Snyder explains that Vladimir Putin’s post-Cold War strategy was to make up for the regime’s lack of economic and technological power by flooding the Internet and television with misinformation and demonizing the institutions charged with uncovering facts, “and then exploit the confusion that results.” Wrote Snyder: “They cultivate enough chaos so people become cynical about public life and, eventually, about truth itself.” Then, in the 2010s, Snyder notes, Putin took that successful formula on the road in an effort to destabilize Western democracies. Low and behold, there was Donald Trump, ascending the golden escalator to launch a presidential campaign based on division and fabrication. It was a marriage made in Moscow.

One of the many examples of Russian skullduggery cited by the Mueller investigation involved an authentic photo of a Latino woman and her child holding a sign that said, “No Human Being is Illegal”. According to the indictment, the Russians digitally altered the sign to read, “GIVE ME MORE FREE SHIT” and plastered it on social media. Flash forward to the recent release by the White House of a doctored video that made it falsely appear that CNN’s Jim Acosta had aggressively grabbed the arm of a press aide. No need for foreign subterfuge when you can do it yourself.

In that same Russian indictment, a Kremlin operative was accused of circulating a fake news item under the heading of, “Hillary Clinton has Already Committed Voter Fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.” As Snyder noted, the heart of the Russian game plan is not about ideology, it’s about getting people to accept that “there’s no reason to believe in anything. There is no truth. Your institutions are bogus.” But you hardly need a Russian troll farm to sow those seeds, when the president of the United States accuses the Democrats of voter fraud in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, the second he realizes his candidates might not win.

Most of the fabricated posts cited in the Russian indictment involved race, immigration and religion, obviously visceral hot-button issues that trigger deep divisions. They contained outrageous lies and threats about Black Lives Matter taking over major cities, Muslim terrorists hiding behind burkas and illegal immigrants destroying American communities. In other words, pretty much the same game plan Trump trotted out for the midterms. The only difference is that presidential pronouncements enjoy a wider circulation and carry more weight than Facebook posts. Based on Trump’s campaign rally speeches and his Twitter feed, Americans were alerted daily to the presidential fiction of a pending invasion of killer immigrants and middle east terrorists approaching the U.S. border. He totally outdid his Russian counterparts on this one by ordering the military to protect us from the fabricated attack.

For a president who celebrated his inauguration by lying about the size of the crowd, it’s hardly news that Donald Trump enjoys a perverse relationship with the truth. But he’s really outdone himself lately. He told one campaign rally that Democrats will give illegal immigrants free cars just for sneaking into the country. At another one, he berated Democrats for ignoring the health needs of veterans and boasted about how he got Congress to pass a bill allowing vets to use their own doctors if the VA wait time was too long. Only problem was that the bill he was talking about was passed in 2014 and signed by Obama. On the night that Democrats won a majority in the House, flipped seven governorships and eight state legislative chambers, Trump called the results “close to complete victory”. When his latest choice for attorney general drew fire, Trump absurdly insisted that he doesn’t even know the guy.

This behavior would be amusing if it came from a crazy oddball uncle, something to chuckle about on the way home from family gatherings. But this crazy uncle is our president, and he is using the Russian playbook to, as Snyder, the historian, calls it, “create chaos from inside” by making a mockery of truth and denigrating the instruments of democracy. For the Russians, such an outcome weakens their main adversary. For Trump, it’s just a way to get through another day. For the rest of us, it’s another reason to keep searching for an exit from this nightmare. Without truth, without faith in our democratic institutions, America’s greatness is as phony as Trump’s invasion from Central America.