Saturday, April 25, 2020

It HAS Happened Here

Donald Trump likes to brag about his prowess as a real estate developer but, when it comes to the man underneath the comb-over, the only thing he's capable of building is a seemingly endless series of moral sub-cellars.  Everytime we learn about some new personal failing on his part, we pray that we've reached the end of the line when it comes to these revelations, and our knowledge of what he's capable of saying and doing can't possibly get any worse.  And, just as soon as we reach a point at which we think our prayers have been answered, the Donald reveals the existence of yet another sub-cellar, proving that he's only capable of descending further and further until he's reached Dante's tenth circle of hell--and, as President, taken all of us along with him.

Which is why I'm struggling right now to determine whether his announcement this past week to consider ingesting Clorox, Lysol, or ultraviolet light as a means of fighting COVID-19 means that he's truly reached rock-bottom, or perhaps is just a sign that this moment, like so many others before it, is just another subway stop on his (our) one-way subway trip to national damnation.

This much I will say for certain:  I can't say it's the single dumbest, most dangerous thing any President has ever said to the American people, because I'm only 63.*  However, I have heard a number of distinguished historians and other experts say that it is in fact the single dumbest, most dangerous thing any President has ever said to the American people.  So I'm going to go with that, and my Clorox and Lysol are staying in the cabinet, where they belong.

But where's the outrage, to quote Bob Dole on the subject of a far less outrageous President?  Where are the calls for his resignation?  Where is there any evidence that the sycophants who make up his Administration might be moved to finally invoke the provisions of the 25th Amendment.  Where is any of this?  Nowhere.  All we get instead is a whole bunch of explainaway malarkey, and a spike in calls to poison control centers.

Trump is officially Jim Jones, and his followers are drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid  There is no longer any reason to suspect that Trumpism is a suicide cult, fueled by racism and misbegotten nostalgia.  That can be considered a confirmed fact.

And so can one other thing.

The debate over where or not "it" can happen over here is now officially over.  Because it has.

Vote this fall like your life and freedom depend on it, and make sure that everyone you know who is 18 and older does the same.

*With apologies to the late drama critic Walter Kerr for that appropriation of a line from one of his more negative reviews of a musical.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Donald Trump Can't Handle The Truth

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

So said our second President, John Adams.  Ironically, this quote has, over many years, become a favorite of conservatives when doing battle with what they regard as the fantasies and fallacies of liberalism.  George Will has frequently used it toward that end.  But, to conservative politicians operating in the age of Donald Trump, the role of facts in their tactical decisions has been significantly altered.  Facts have ceased to be stubborn.  All too frequently, they exist in the alternative, depending upon the exigencies of the moment.  Even more frequently, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, they do not exist at all.

If you've had the stomach to follow Trump's antics over the past four decades, this is utterly unsurprising.  Trump has found that indeed, in his case, facts have frequently not only been stubborn, but close to lethal, given his contempt for the rules and desire to win at all costs.  In response, his preferred method of dealing with them is to hide them as much as possible, even to the point of deliberately creating chaos in order to manipulate the public's ability to both get and/or understand the facts.  Coupled with his ability to turn his press responses to the chaos into dumpster fires that a profit-first press can't possibly ignore, he has thus always been able to walk away from catastrophes that would have destroyed a con artist with any degree of personal shame.

But this is Trump's ultimate forte:  he has no shame.  Would a man possessing shame talk about his adult daughter on television about her potential to be a hot date for him?  Would that man openly mock the disability of a reported who provided unfavorable coverage of him.  Would that man openly brag about how his dubious status as a celebrity permits him to commit sexual assualt, using the coarsest terms the English language contains in order to do so?  Obviously, the answer is no.  At least that would have been obvious prior to the beginning of Trump's presidency; now, one cannot take this thought for granted.

So no one should be surprised that Trump's response to the pandemic followed all of the basics of Trump 101:  deny, dissemble, and then attempt to confuse everyone by openly lying.  And, in this instance, to lie above all about his own responsibility for the rapid spread of the virus, by essentially wishing it away with magical thinking and rhetoric that reflected it.  Let me pause here just for a moment to make this one point as clearly as I possibly can:  Trump has absolutely lied, and continues to do so, about his own neglect when it comes to taking the initiative that could and should have been taken in mitigating the harm that the pandemic has brought to the U.S..  Take a few moments to take a look at this.  Then come back and read on.

Trump has been spinning the coronavirus story in much the same way that he has been spinning the story that he hitherto had hoped would carry him past the dumpster-fire track record of his Administration  and on to re-election:  the economy, which he essentially inherited from Barack Obama, and then artificially inflated with a tax cut that went straight to Wall Street and never made it to Main Street.  Trump did nothing but create numbers, which is all he has ever created.  He knows that, although he would rather die than admit it.  But he knew that the threat of a pandemic might deflate those numbers overnight.  So he tried to spin the looming crisis away.

But that's the problem with spin.  It works much better in the private sector, and especially in the world of real estate development, where much of what is being bought or sold lies not in the reality of goods or services, but what people can be made to believe is being bought or sold.  Transactions in this area involve a host of players from different sectors and, if problems come up, well, the buck of blame can always be passed on to someone else.

The buck, however, is a much different matter when you're sitting where Harry Truman once sat, as Truman himself knew well.  In fact, in any sort of public service, it's a much different matter.  Perhaps because the public knows that the taxes it pays purchase the service it receives, it is a lot more particular regarding the quality of it.  Herbert Hoover, in many respects a much better person than his presidential record would indicate, found that out the hard way.  As Calvin Coolidge's commerce secretary, he directed the federal government's response to the 1927 Mississippi flood, and did so competently, while mastering the art of communication to let the people know how well he was doing.  When he tried to use those skills to sell bad or otherwise non-existent policy responses after the 1929 stock market crash, the result was different:  a new president named Franklin D. Roosevelt, one who combined great policies with great communication skills to carve a unique place in American history.  The moral of the story:  spin only works when it has something of substance to support it, and particularly something that the public can see and believe.  You can read more about this here.

Viruses are perhaps the most stubborn of all facts  They don't respond to spin, no matter how desperately the spin is being performed.  All that matters to a virus is science:  testing and, ultimately, the development of a vaccine.  Had Trump taken the early warnings about the virus, and the testing for it developed by the World Health Organization, he might have been able to greatly contain the spread of it and salvaged much of the stock market gains during his tenure, while otherwise enhancing his leadership credentials and perhaps doubly ensuring his re-election.  But that would have required putting that reputation at some degree of risk, depending on the results of testing and the public's response to those results, to say nothing of being subjected to a nationwide regimine of testing in the first instance.  Again, as I and others have previously written:  Trump is a narcissist, and narcissists countenance no risks to their reputation--even at the expense of other people's lives.

And so Trump spun away.  And, even as the facts grew worse and worse with each missed opportunity to control the coronavirus, he has kept doing so, even as the death toll mounted, because the only option was to tell the truth--which, in turn, would destroy his presidency, and force him back into the public sector to face financial ruin and criminal indictment.

And the press, which has for decades enjoyed the profits generated by covering the Trump three-ring circus, may be finally, reluctantly catching on, as individual reporters are increasing being fed up with being transparently used.  Another stubborn fact, reflected here, as well as here.  How much longer will Republicans, who have largely marched in lock-step with Trump, continue to do so, in the face of his melting media facade.  In an election year, one would think not much longer.  At least one Republican governor seems prepared to follow the facts wherever they go.  (I'm not a Larry Hogan fan, but I respect his response to the pandemic thus far.)

Donald Trump, in the words of "A Few Good Men," can't handle the truth.  He's spent his whole life fight it, successfully up until now.  But at this point, not unlike the Martians in H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," he may find his political career "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this Earth."  By one of them, anyway.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Donald Trump Must Resign

We live in a time when, if you read or watch the news in any format, from any outlet, there is truly only one story.  It is, of course, a story with many different dimensions, almost as many as there are people, and the impact of which is felt in many different ways.

I'm talking about the coronavirus pandemic, of course.  But, when it comes to the United States, I could just as easily be talking about something else, something that is now inextricably linked to the pandemic, and whose future will be entirely defined by how and when the crisis is ultimately resolved.

Not something, actually.  Someone.

The 45th President of the United States.  Donald John Trump.

There, I did it  For the first time, based on my recollection  I've actually written out his full name, without using asterisks to conceal it.  I adopted that style to refer to him because I though it would be a way to discuss his odious term in office, and its disastrous consequences, while denying him the lion's share of the one thing he craves, above all else:  publicity.  To Trump, as it was to P.T. Barnum before him, all publicity is good publicity.  That's the way it has been for him, in his mind at least, for just a bit over four decades.  As they say in show business (which has been Trump's only real business), a helluva run.

But, to quote a line that Robert Downey Jr. made famous last summer (speaking of show business), part of the journey is the end.

And the end has come.

Trump may not see it.  His most devoted followers, that portion of the country's populace too stupid to see through him, may believe, as he does, that there is some brilliantly conceived plan or incredible stroke of luck that will bail him out again, as it has done any number of times in the past.  Most of that luck, of course, came in the form of his father, Fred, who is no longer around to bail him out.  And this time, in any case, his problems go way beyond money.  All of the Russian loan sharks that have paid his bills over the past decade or so can't get him out of the scrape he's put all of us in, not even with an assist from Trump's number one political patron, Vladimir Putin.

As of this weekend, the U.S. leads the world not only in the number of coronavirus cases, but also in the number of coronavirus deaths.  Over 20,000, in fact.  With no end in sight.  Sometimes, despite what many Americans believe, it's not a good thing to be able to say "We're Number One."

To be sure, this is a worldwide crisis.  In its early stages, the virus claimed thousands of victims in other countries.  China.  South Korea.  Italy (which is still suffering greatly).  Spain.  France.

But all of those nations have been able to flatten the statistical curve of cases.  Many others have been able to limit the number of cases within their borders.  In the case of New Zealand, the government has been able to keep the death rate down to one.

Why not here?

Very simply, because Trump is single-handedly responsible for a series of policy failures that has exposed the U.S. to what is already its greatest public health crisis in over a century, and may well end up being the worst one in its entire history.  It has been, to paraphrase Shakespeare, a tragedy of errors so extensive that it has been difficult to keep track of them, although, both for the record and as a guide going forward, doing so is essential.  I recommend this as a method for doing so, especially as it is written by a Never-Trump Republican, so it cannot be fairly accused of partisan hackery.

To sum up, Trump has taken what could have been a difficult but manageable crisis, and turned it into a full-scale disaster right out of a Hollywood movie, complete with empty streets, shuttered businesses, overwhelmed hospitals, and panicked unemployed wondering whether they can buy next week's groceries.  And his response?  Not merely the ugliest form of partisan politics I've witnessed in over a half-century of following events in Washington, but a near-complete abdication of his most basic responsibilities as an elected official--an abdication that, in many ways, borders on the criminal.

Instead of using the full power of his office to battle the pandemic, he is using it to conduct an ever-meaner advancement of his political agenda, whether that means promoting pollution, blocking access to health insurance, or settling personal scores within and without the nation.  One particularly egregious example of the latter tendency:  forcing states to act on their own to obtain medical supplies, and then confiscating them when those states do so.  One is forced to wonder whether the goal is to use these supplies for political payoffs, as opposed to distributing them based on who has the greatest need for them.  I'm not alone in raising that concern.  Even some conservatives think that Trump is willing to let people die, so long as he looks good in the process.

And then, there's the evidence that comes from the mouths of Trump himself and his fellow-travellers in the media.  Here, Trump begs his blindly loyal followers to vote for him, even if it means dying from infection by coronavirus in the process.  And, if that happens, well, that's just the way the breaks fall, if you're looking at it from Bill O'Reilly's perspective.  These statements and others like them, taken together, amount to a confession that Trump and everything he represents is finished.  After all, he's admitted that voter suppression is the only way his party can win elections.

The fundamental cause of all this, as I've said before, is the fact that Trump is a narcissist, and all of the characteristics of the narcissistic personality are on display in his response thus far to the pandemic.  Again, if you want a concise recap of this display, I can do no better than to direct you to the New York Times on this subject.  I do, however, have a few things to add to it.

One of the worst aspects of narcissism is a tendency toward magical thinking, a belief that everything will always break your way, so you can avoid dealing with potential problems by ignoring them (after all, why ask for trouble?).

So, you ignore them,   In fact, you do so more than once.  And you go out of the way to avoid the blame.

And, since you can't stand giving others credit for anything, you destroy their good works.
      .
And, since you're addicted to pleasure, you abuse your body to such an extent that you can control neither it nor your thoughts.

And, since you crave popularity, losing it may be likely to make you "act out" in ways that don't take into account the interests of others, especially if it goes this far.

All of this leads inevitably to one conclusion:  Donald Trump, as President of the United States, is a menace to the survival of the nation and its people.  He cannot be allowed to stay in place.  He has to go.  Now.  Not tomorrow, and certainly not all the way to next January.  NOW.

As I'm writing this, I'm watching MSNBC and listening to an interview with Jon Meacham, the historian.  He's just said that this moment in our history is not merely about the character of our leadership, but also about our character as a people  Character, he is saying, is destiny.  Or fate.  And, with a narcissist in the White House, our destiny--or fate--is on all of us.

So, what should we do?

In the film version of Alistair MacLean's "The Guns Of Navarone," the soldiers attempting to destroy a German artillery installation face, in two separate instances, a crisis which requires them to ponder three different, difficult choices.  In each case, the third choice involves shooting an unarmed individual.  In the first instance, the third choice is avoided; in the second one, it isn't.

I'm about to broach a subject where it is incumbent on the person raising it to tread carefully.  So I want to make it clear that I am not now, nor have I ever been or will be, an advocate of any form of violence.  But, as a student of both American history and human nature, I am painfully aware of the fact that not everyone in this country feels this way.  And, when it comes to discussing the future, I am frankly tired of doing so one day at a time.  Just as we need to get ahead of the curve when it comes to responding to the coronavirus crisis, we also need to get ahead of the curve when it comes to the American people's response not only to the crisis as a whole, but to its impacts on individual people.

It's not in the American character to deal well with restrictions on their freedoms, especially freedom of movement.  We can tolerate it for a period of time, but not a long one.  And we can only tolerate it at all if we have full confidence in leadership at the top.  That confidence no longer exists.  And, given the violent nature of the American character, I worry a lot about someone, somewhere, deciding that the third option is the best option.  And again, I speak as someone who is virulently opposed to the third option.

Which, for discussion purposes, leads me to conclude that there are only, in fact, two options.  Trump's impeachment, and Trump's resignation.  And we need to discuss them urgently, as much as for any reason so as to avoid the third option, which is a path to tragedy for everyone.

Impeachment?  Well, we've been through that already, due to a different form of malfeasance other than ignoring and then failing to mitigate the spread of a pandemic.  The current malfeasance, in my judgment, is more than enough to justify a second bite of that apple.  The political circumstances, however, do not.  The previous impeachment trial demonstrated what has been already demonstrated more times than I care to admit:  the United States Senate is currently being controlled by a cabal of lobbyist agents who will do anything, quite literally, to keep Trump in place.  Even if that means holding a trial that isn't really a trial, and that worked overtime to thwart every effort to make it one.

Which leaves us with only one option.

Resignation.

Trump won't want to do it.  He loves being President, which is to say that he loves the perks of the office.  The publicity.  The access to taxpayer money for personal purposes.  The immunity to prosecution.

But not even Trump would be able to resist an outcry from the public so overwhelming that it virtually amounted to a national consensus.  And I believe that we are at that point.  He is, slowly but surely, losing his party.  He is even, slowly but surely, losing the press

And, if the press has finally lost the timidity with which it has tiptoed around him for the past four years, why shouldn't the rest of us?  Why wait, at this point for next year?  In the face of this much suffering, why wait at all?  True, it would lead us with Mike Pence in the Oval Office, and he hasn't shown any independence from Trump.  But having him there, with Trump's bad behavior as a model of what not to do, and with Trump having paid a price for it, gives us some chance for an improvement in the decision-making process going forward.

It's a chance I'm willing to take.

Quite frankly, it's a chance I think that all of us need to get behind.

Right now.