September 2017 Archives

Dear America,

I have been puzzling over what exactly makes Donald Trump's conduct such a mystery.  He does the most unlikely, and frankly self-destructive things so unabashedly.  The recurring theme in my attempts at analysis has been that he is just stupid, and that is still a possibility that I haven't ruled out.  But there is something more...enigmatic about him.  Stupidity wouldn't explain his overt seeming disinterest in what serves him well and more importantly, what doesn't.  He is certainly smug, but that doesn't explain his persistent outbursts from which he has to backtrack later on.  This business with twitter, for example, is a lesson that anyone who was a whole person would have learned by now, and that is what gave me the clue I needed.  His problem isn't that he doesn't learn from his mistakes.  The problem isn't that he doesn't care.  Rather, the problem is that he is obtuse.

He cares because his ego is bruised every time the media point out the bizarre nature of his behavior.  His ego would prevent him from repeating his mistakes if there weren't some other problem...some deficiency in him that permits him to ignore the bruises he has suffered and reform his conduct to avoid them.  In fact, I have always said that he was a walking ego, but that isn't correct.  He is a walking id.  That is why he doesn't notice that others are offended by what he does and thus doesn't seem to know what is in his best interest.  His reaction to everything in the world is spontaneous and oblivious.  He wants what he wants, and he wants it now.  It isn't just because he is arrogant.  He just doesn't know that the rest of us are here.  In his mind...his tiny little solipsistic mind...there isn't anyone else in the world, which is just a figment of his imagination in the first place.  He thinks the world revolves around him because he has created the world in which he lives.  He is the sun.  He is God in his universe, and that removes all complexity from issues he faces.

So, when a football player kneels instead of saluting the flag during the national anthem, Trump doesn't care why.  He superimposes a postulate he has accepted--a patriot blindly salutes the flag whenever asked, and blind patriotism is good--on the situation and condemns the football player and all those who have now joined him.  But the underlying postulate never gets any scrutiny from our president.  Someone taught him to believe in that kind of blind allegiance--probably his father, Fred--and that's the end of it.  It never occurs to him that the flag is just a symbol of something else, and that the something else is what's important.  In this case, Colin Kaepernick, the original football player protesting by "taking a knee" during the national anthem before each game, was protesting police brutality against African-Americans in particular as I understand it.  Such brutality is certainly un-American, this being "the land of the free and the home of the brave" as the national anthem in question posits, and thus it is unpatriotic.  But Trump never considered that underlying proposition.  Postulates are unquestionable by their very nature...assumed to be true...so the mandate he learned vis-à-vis saluting the flag was his unimpeachable motive, fueled of course by the sanctimony of a man who screwed so many people in business but had the temerity to call Hillary Clinton "crooked Hillary" and got away with it.  In this case however, the issue isn't whether he will get elected but what kind of a country we live in.

When I was a kid in high school, I used to stand for both the pledge of allegiance and the prayer we were required to say, but I said nothing.  It wasn't because I didn't respect the United States, or even the flag.  The flag, as a symbol, represented...represented...the principle that all men are created equal and entitled to the pursuit of life liberty and happiness.  It symbolized my freedom to say what I thought with impunity, or for that matter, not to say what I didn't want to say.  The fact is that when we salute the flag or put our hands over our hearts when the anthem plays, we don't do so out of principle.  We do so because we want everyone else to see us doing it, which in and of itself is inimical to the principles for which they stand.  Blind allegiance is not allegiance at all.  It is capitulation, which is fine...unless it is capitulation to tyranny.   And that, I'm afraid, is where we are headed, being led there by Donald Trump.    

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I have to apologize for my irrational and apparently premature exuberance over our president's ostensible bipartisanship.  It appears that there is no deal regarding DACA after all as the White House press secretary now says.  The President may have appeared to the Democratic leadership to have made commitments, but he now denies that he agreed to anything nor did he make any promises, which we all should have anticipated;  just as with his campaign promises, Trump's word is not a bond that anyone can count on.  In fact, the absence of trustworthiness is a function of another flaw in our president: he isn't very bright and thus, he makes decisions without thinking.  Then, when he realizes that his decision is contrary to a prior pronouncement he has made, he just denies saying one thing or the other based on the bizarre assumption that no one will remember the next time he says, "believe me," which he says all the time.  And now, the Republicans are taking another run at the ACA, which presumably Donald Trump will welcome if his party can get out of its own way...definitely not a bipartisan effort, especially in light of his expression of willingness to work with Democrats to amend the ACA.  Will he honor his commitment to work with the Democrats and thus redeem his promise to do so or will he support the senate bill to repeal?  We'll know next week after the Congressional Budget Office scores Republican senator Lindsey Graham's bill to turn Medicaid into a block grant program run by the states and abrogate the ACA's protections lock, stock and barrel, relegating health care benefits to the unreliable legislative process of each state.  What was I thinking when I leapt to the conclusion that Donald Trump might restore functionality to our Congress and bring party comity back into vogue after sixteen years of legislative dysfunction with which the system has been imbued by the Republicans.

To add to all that, Trump is back to name calling, only this time with a foreign megalomaniac who now has nuclear weapons and missiles.  It is one thing for a politician to embarrass himself with sophomoric, polemical tactics like assigning insulting nicknames like "crooked," "lyin'" and "little" to his opposition.  Enough of our people are impressed by bullying tactics to elect such a man to high office, but the absurdity of it all stays here like a Las Vegas peccadillo.  But when he uses the same juvenile tactics on the international scene, labeling a dictator "rocket man" as if he is going to be cowed by a jejune insult the way that domestic politicians seem to have been, he just embarrasses not only himself but his nation, not to mention bringing the world closer to the brink of catastrophe.  The irony is that Kim jong-Un probably takes his new sobriquet as a compliment and will be bragging about it to all those North Koreans who already refer to him as their "Dear Leader." 

These events are all just more Trumpian contretemps...demonstrations of his incompetence, lack of integrity and underestimation of everyone else fueled by his insatiable, id-driven  narcissism, and they are to be expected when you elect an ego with feet to lead your country.  The only real question with regard to Donald Trump is how much damage is he ultimately going to do, and can we recover once he is gone.  Now, even the Republicans have grounds to call for Trump to be impeached.  He is a hazard to all of us regardless of party affiliation, but when was the last time that the Republicans did the right thing.

So the next time that Donald Trump appears to wax rational and self-less remember the last two weeks, not just hurricanes Irma and Maria, but hurricane Donald as well.  He's in office now, so there's not much we can do to interdict his misfeasance.  But we can root for the Mueller investigation, which I will continue to do now that I have apologized for my folly.  

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A couple of weeks ago, I heard an interview with a Republican congressman from California on the subject of DACA.  He supported the idea of allowing "Dreamers," that is, undocumented immigrants who were children below a certain age when their parents brought them to this country illegally, being allowed to stay while they pursued their educations, worked or joined the military, but he decried the manner in which DACA had been created.  When he had finished justifying his position with the claim that Congress should be allowed to act, the interviewer pointed out that the reason for Barrack Obama's executive order was that Congress hadn't acted.  The congressman went on to claim that not to be exactly true, but it was.  Obama issued the executive order only after The Senate passed an immigration reform bill that was bipartisan and The House voted it down.  The interviewer failed to make him acknowledge that such was the case so his false assertion went unchallenged, but it is imperative that such casuistry be challenged whenever a politician employs it, which for the bulk of my political memory tends to be every time a Republican gets caught doing something he or she knows he or she shouldn't.  But that failure to call Republicans out may be at an end.

With his agreement with the Democrat leadership in Congress regarding the debt ceiling and the budget, the Republicans were put on notice that being in the majority will no longer protect them from their failures to act, and thus, eristic explanations and contrived excuses will be of no use anymore.  It's ironic if you think about it since Donald Trump is probably the most casuistic politician to attain high office since states' rights were used to justify the Civil War, but with regard to the Republicans in power, we have to take the allies we can get.  The next issue up for consideration seems to be tax reform, and if Democrats and moderate Republicans can agree on keeping the top 1% from milking the economy with bogus deductions and exceptions any more, anything is possible.  Changing our tax rates so as to reflect common deductions without having to fill out all kinds of forms to get them would be quite an accomplishment so long as we don't have to suffer taxation of our employer-provided health insurance like income and capital gains get taxed more like earnings.  That may be a tough sell to a president whose wealth is not just one, but two generations old, thus allowing him to "earn" his living by having money rather than working, but if it's the only thing he can get in order to keep one of his primary campaign promises, he just might go for it.  The pressure on him to do so may be the best hope this nation has had in a long time for rectifying the disparity of earnings and wealth that have turned us into a caste society.

What a paradox.  Perhaps the most reviled nouveau riche blatherskite to ascend to the presidency of any nation in the history of democracy looks more and more like the salvation of our democratic nation, which was born in the name of equality but has descended into a social stratification based on unearned, financially expropriated and purloined wealth.  Even a step or two in the right direction will be a boon to the vast majority of us, and then we can move on to a single payer health care system...all because Donald Trump may actually stand for something after all.  It seems that he does want things to change by act of Congress, and it is possible that he might even forego personal advantage as a criterion for signing such transformative bills.  Imagine: calling Donald Trump a "populist" may not have been ironical after all.  The Democrats introduce several bills designating goods manufactured by American companies subject to tariffs just like imports during the Obama administration, but the Republican house and senate wouldn't even vote on them.  Maybe just such a measure could pass; after all, it would bring jobs back to this country by making use of foreign labor less profitable making another of Trump's promises more likely to come true.  And maybe controlling drug prices could follow; Donald Trump has already expressed interest in the price gouging that pharmaceutical companies indulge in.  And of course, there is immigration reform, which seems to have set the whole thing in motion.

It could be that we are headed into the next great era in American history, characterized by a true impetus toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, not just the fortunate few.  Too much?  You're probably right, but a man can dream, can't he.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Kudos from the most unlikely places have been pouring into the White House extolling the ostensibly bipartisan deal that The President brokered on the debt ceiling.  He met with both Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and took the Democrats' side in forcing a three month increase rather than the eighteen month increase the Republicans wanted.  At first the wishes of the two parties seems counterintuitive.  The Republicans have made a regular practice of withholding their votes on the debt ceiling as a quid pro quo for something not just distasteful, but odious to the opposition.  So at first blush it would seem that a shorter deal would give the conservatives in the Republican Party more chances to extort what they want from the Democrats.  But this time, the thinking of the Republicans....I assume...was to look magnanimous and offer a long term extension, when in reality their goal was to get past the next election before they tried to trade a debt limit increase for less taxes for their constituents in the top 10%.  It's not that clever a strategy and the Democrats saw through it immediately, but remarkably, Donald Trump saw through it too, and he too wants to avoid giving the Republican Congress that leverage they were seeking.

I don't think much of Trump's perspicacity, so I'm tempted to believe it was just a blunder, but even I can't see Trump being that dumb.  What he has done is--and I don't know whether this just came to him in a flash or he planned it all along--he has started the process of winning over the liberal Democrats and undecided voters who voted against him in 2016 by forcing bipartisanship on those who have been only his reluctant allies in Washington so far.  He apparently sees that the voters support the DACA executive order of his predecessor, but at the same time, he recognizes that he has to do something to repudiate it for the sake of keeping the diminishing base he still has at his side.  Thus, with the six month deadline he gave the Republican-controlled Congress to do something for the "dreamers" protected by DACA,  he has walked the tightrope between the two sides.  Still, he needs something to happen between now and the end of the six month moratorium represented by the deadline or the problem will be right back in his lap, hence the short term debt limit arrangement.  With the portent of another funding battle on the horizon for the Republicans, they understand that they are vulnerable a year from now when control of both The House and The Senate will be at stake.  As long as the debt ceiling will still come up again before November 2018, the Republicans have to behave responsibly; they remember the backlash they suffered every time some loony like Ted Cruz or Newt Gingrich threatened to shut down the government.  And that is as good for Donald Trump, who is already working on getting reelected, as it is for the Democrats, and frankly us, America.  

So, what will the next year look like in political terms.  My guess is that there will be at least one more debt ceiling expiration that has to be negotiated around.  How long the next raise in the debt ceiling will be will depend on whether the Republicans' arms feel sufficiently twisted that they see reason in December and cut their losses.  But my guess is that they won't because of internecine conflict between the right and farther-right wings of the party.  So in December, Trump will broker another short to medium term raise--six months at most, which brings its end to a couple of months before the election and right in the middle of the party primaries that Republicans really don't want to have to worry about--and then, we will be able to smell the Republican feet burning as Trump holds them to the fire.  In the interim between now and then, Congress will pass various fixes to Obamacare making it a moderate success rather than an outright failure as the Republicans like to characterize it, fair and equitable tax reform will be either passed or well on its way, DACA will be the law, all this voter fraud nonsense will be forgotten along with the Russia inquiry and Donald Trump will have broken his arm patting himself on the back...and then, guess what.

He might well get reelected, and he just might deserve it.

Your friend,

Mike