July 2017 Archives

Dear America,

Washington demagogues are enamored of acronyms and portmanteaus in that they tersely decry the opposition and concisely identify them as populist heroes.  I have a new one for them: Trumpicide.  It has three meanings, depending on who is committing it.  Let me start with Trump himself.

All of the suspicion of his team, both before and since his election, is a function of the actions of Trump himself.  He publicly asked the Russians to produce the purported 30,000 emails missing from the server that Hillary Clinton gave up to investigators when the Republicans latched onto what they perceived as a lethal blow to her campaign.  Eventually, after several contra tempts of that kind, he fired the director of the FBI and then admitted that his motivation was to punish the former director, James Comey, for declining to quash the investigation of the possible connection between Russian meddlers in the American election of 2016 and members of Trump's campaign organization and subsequently his advisory personnel.  Then it came out that his son, Donald, Jr., who is not a member of the White House staff, had a meeting during the election campaign with a former Russian spy and several other Russian operatives, initially claiming that the meeting was about adoption of Russian children by Americans, which turned out not to be the truth.  The meeting was actually about purported damaging information about Clinton, and his own emails demonstrate his enthusiasm for acquiring it.  And now that all this has come out, along with allegations about Trump campaign leaders, like Paul Manaforte for example, it appears that there were at least three Trump acolytes, including Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump says that his son is a "good boy" as if none of this is even questionable.  Add the healthcare controversy in which Trump admits that he is rooting for the collapse of another Washington portmanteau, "Obamacare" as it has been dubbed by the Republicans, or in the alternative repeal of the law, which will leave over 30 million people uninsured if the Republicans can manage to commit the act.  Trump trumpicide: meaning 1.

Then there is what the Republicans are doing in connection with Obamacare.  They are being steered by Trump to do to the American people, even many Trump voters, something that no one on Medicaid is going to thank them for: restrict eligibility for the expanded Medicaid that Obamacare made available, but that only Democratic states and a few Republican ones decided to avail themselves of.   True, even a few Republicans are flouting Mitch McConnell's attempts to make them jump on the sword that he and other party leaders have been wielding as if they believed their own propaganda, but they keep banging away at the effort, thus reinforcing the argument that the Republicans are not the common man's friends.  They continue to indulge in casuistry like the claim that the Democrats are obstructing their effort to legislate even though the Republicans have majorities in both houses, enough members of which they cannot convince that what McConnell wants to do is a good idea.  They claim that the Democrats enacted Obamacare unilaterally even though everyone saw at least one two party conference on the law that was on television for all to see.  And there were dozens of hearings in congress itself, though it is true that no Republicans voted for the law...an example of Republican obstructionism that was echoed over and over again during the period of Democratic legislative hegemony.   Republican trumpicide: meaning 2.

And then there is what the Republicans and Donald Trump are doing to the very people who elected them: denying them healthcare that some of them have never had access to in their lives.  The Republicans are actually trying to kill some of their very own voters, and even if the actual deceased aren't very many in number, their families and friends vote too.  So, when the Republicans go to those very people for support in 2018, and when Trump does so in 2020...well, what are the odds.  Trumpicide against the beneficiaries of Obamacare: meaning 3.

The Republicans are courting disaster, to use one of Donald Trump's favorite words, and they are doing it literally in Trump's own name.  

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State in Kansas, is the vice-chair of Donald Trump's "commission" looking into voter fraud in 2016.  As Kansas Secretary of State, he has prosecuted ten voter fraud cases after claiming to his legislature that he had identified a hundred or more.   He got six convictions, all of double voting and none for voting without the right to do so.  By way of example of the quality of those cases, one involved an elderly man who voted in Kansas, but having a future retirement home in Colorado, he also got a Colorado mail-in ballot, which he submitted voting only on the marijuana referendum because he didn't want pot grown near his house.  Colorado declined to prosecute him, but Kobach went ahead.  Eventually, the 62 year-old Kilian paid a $2,500 fine, apparently realizing that even though his violation of the law was just technical--and Colorado agreed--Koback would crucify him if he got the chance.  Seven of his ten prosecutions were of Republicans, most of them elderly who made one kind of mistake or another, and who knows what the rest of the cases were like, but that is the quality of Kobach's Trump-style claim of rampant voter fraud.  Kobach also championed a Kansas voting law that requires proof of citizenship from those trying to register to vote, which violates federal election law.  Since that law passed in Kansas, it has been litigated in various suits, almost all going against Kobach's law, and one of them is still in progress.  The ACLU sued over a Kansas election officials decision to overrule the federal court on the issue and the picture of Kobach entering a meeting to show his documentation of voter fraud claims to president-elect Trump, having made the national news, became an issue.  The ACLU filed a motion to produce those documents, which Kobach defended against by making certain claims of fact...which turned out to be false.  The federal judge involved fined Kobach $1,000 for misleading the court and ordered him to submit to a deposition held by the ACLU, which order Kobach is appealing.  And he'd better win because lying to a judge is grounds for disbarment in most states.  That's whom Donald Trump has chosen to do his dirty work for him: someone who obviously doesn't mind doing dirty work.

But Kobach is a minor figure in American politics, and his misdeeds are of only passing significance.  What is more important is why Donald Trump has insisted on this putative commission at all.  What is important is why Donald Trump insists on vituperating the former president and criticizing him, sometimes for things that Trump himself advocated at the time, like reluctance to get involved in the Syrian civil war.  And the reason that it all is important is that, along with much other conduct including his incessant tweeting and at best dubious, self-serving claims relating to everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to the size of his hands, betrays a kind of insecurity that is not just unbecoming; it is dangerous.  I suppose that if you have an ego as big as Trump's, it must be quite thin in places as well.  In his case, that translates into fixation on every criticism and refusal to allow for the possibility that he should even consider rethinking an idea.  His prideful arrogance is so imbedded in his job performance that sooner or later, he's going to push the wrong button somewhere and create a mammoth problem.  We can only hope that it isn't a war, but who knows.

I don't think a president can be impeached for being a megalomaniac, nor for being a fool.  George W. Bush proved that point.  But in light of Trump's self-inflicted tendency to err, it may be crucial that we find some reason to get rid of the blatherer-in-chief.  And today, an augury of that reason may just have appeared.  Walter Schaub, Jr., who is the director of the independent Office of Government Ethics, has resigned because he says he cannot accomplish anything more under the conditions that prevail in this administration...the Trump administration.  He has fought with its members and with Trump's surrogates as well about divestment of properties that represent serious potential conflicts of interest, all to no avail.  Boy, has Kris Kobach found a home.

That resignation is just the kernel around which a discussion of the issue of Trump's integrity could coalesce, but it is a start.  One can only live in hope.

Your friend,

Mike