October 2019 Archives

Dear America,

I'm from New York, so I have been forced to watch Donald Trump manifest his odious nature in many ways over the decades.  It has been unpleasant, but until he became president I could ignore him.  Now, of course, I do not have that luxury, which is just a personal burden to bear, but the nation's future is being effected.  Trump's pettiness, narcissism, conceit, braggadocio, ad hominem imprecation of every critic, vitriol, shamelessness, deceitfulness, perfidy, disloyalty, self-dealing and general lack of either morality or principle are becoming emblematic of the United States.  Frankly, I don't much care whether the rest of the world likes us as long as they leave us alone, but the impression of the international community does matter in this one respect.  What will happen when something occurs that we can't handle alone?  Who will ally with us if we are not faithful allies of others?  Will any other country ever be willing to come to the aid of the United States again?

Assuming that Trump is either convicted upon impeachment or ousted in the 2020 election, we might have a chance to apologize to the rest of the world, so to speak.  We can reaffirm our loyalty to principles that are engrained in the American ethos and have been for centuries by acting as we always have vis-à-vis both our allies and our adversaries in principle.  It will take awhile to reassure what has been our international family, but over a decade during which our electorate stays constant to, and continuously advocates for, the civil and prudent definition and conduct of our affairs by electing decent human beings to high office rather than miscreants like Trump, we can redeem ourselves.  What is important about doing so is that we have adversaries in the world, and they are becoming stronger.  China and Russia are gaining in lethality when it comes to fundamental features of freedom and democracy, and as a matter of fealty to our foundational values, we will need to defend them, perhaps even militarily.  Those two countries primarily, but those that align themselves with them as well, are becoming increasingly acquisitive--even imperialistic--and territory like Pacific islands and central Asian countries like Tibet and Nepal will need at least allies if not outright defending as what we might start calling the "red forces" in the world attempt to dominate it.  We have always been the core of such alliances and defenses, but if the world doesn't trust us to be so, what will the world be willing to do for us when those red forces threaten us.

I believe that we must begin thinking about a future that may not yet be in sight.  We must consider what the world will be like a hundred years from now when, if China and Russia continue on their current paths, the most powerful countries in the world won't be a class of nations that includes the United States.  If it comes to such a point, we will not want to, and perhaps not be able to, stand alone.  That is the future that a successful continuation of the Trump era portends.  And if Trump were reelected in 2020, there is no way to rely on the 22nd amendment to protect us from a third or even a fourth Trump term.  At a recent rally, the crowd began chanting the traditional "four more years," and Trump's response was something like, if you want to freak them out, meaning his adversaries, call for twelve more years.  When I heard him say that I felt near panic.  I have considered, and even written about the threat of repeal of the 22nd, but it seemed only some remote, dystopian horror for Hollywood to contemplate on film.  But now Trump has actually broached the subject.  Now it is a serious threat to civilization as we know it.  It is as dire and the prospect of Adolph Hitler being reincarnated as our president.  

Worst of all to me is that no one even mentioned Trump's reference to twelve more years.  In light of his sycophantic relationship with Vladimir Putin and his praise of R.T. Erdogan as a powerful leader and a "good friend of [his],"  the threat of Trump's pursuit of lifetime autocracy like Putin's and Erdogan's--and you might as well throw in that of Chinese president Xi--becomes not just real but palpable.  Given what Trump has already shown us, he might pursue such a goal out of nothing more than sheer vanity, which he wears on his sleeve like a chevron.  We must all take the threat to our way of life that Trump constitutes seriously.  His overt consideration of even more than one more term is a less than veiled threat.  We should heed it.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As Trump gets deeper into trouble, he flails away in the only way he knows how to ever more desperately, and his desperation becomes more and more overt.  His playground bully tactics intensify every day with the new revelations coming out of the impeachment investigation because he knows no other tactic and never has.  He learned that junk-yard dog routine from Roy Cohn, the vicious lawyer who helped McCarthy and Nixon to do their nefarious worst.  I used to tell my son that the person he should be concerned about in a tight situation was the one who would keep on getting up until one of you couldn't anymore.  That's what Trump sees himself as: the implacable, indomitable foe.  His problem is that in this kind of situation, the ability to get up again and again is a function of intelligence, not strength, and the limitations he is burdened with in that regard are so obvious that his continued popularity with what has been constantly referred to as "his base" is incomprehensible.  How can someone as obviously dumb as Donald Trump...someone who wears his stupidity like a crown...appeal to anyone?

I know how pejorative that assessment is, maybe even gratuitously so, but what is happening in broad daylight is that Donald Trump is beginning to realize that his crown is made of thorns, and that's not because he is some kind of martyr.  It's because that is what he deserves.  As more and more of the dominos begin to shake he becomes increasingly cognizant of the peril he is in and he can't help but expose his fear for public scrutiny.  The more he flails, the guiltier he looks and instead of scaring his foes off, he emboldens them with every howl he raises against them, and people are beginning to have to admit that you can always tell when Trump is lying; his thumbs are moving.  The more he tweets, the more lies hang around his neck like an albatross necklace.  I used to think that impeachment, not to mention conviction, was an impossibility, but I remember thinking the same thing about Nixon's case.  And if Trump could learn the lesson of Nixon's resignation in the face of imminent impeachment, he might still beat the daily-more-damning case being built against him, but Trump doesn't think he can learn from anyone.  He hasn't realized that if Nixon had just cooperated in the investigation of the superfluous, rogue burglary that his campaign team nonsensically decided to attempt--Nixon's lead over McGovern was huge and insurmountable--he would have finished his second term with the only sin he could be accused of being hiring John Mitchell to be his attorney general and campaign manager.  Similarly, if Trump hadn't been obsessed with proving that the Democrats did something wrong in 2016--a fantasy he hatched to vindicate his loss to Hillary Clinton in the popular election by almost three million votes resulting in the narrowest electoral college win since George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter before that--and that his most likely rival in 2020, Joe Biden, is corrupt...if he were just capable of saying nothing for a change, Trump might beat his rap too.  But there's no prospect of that, is there.

No, Trump is hoisting himself by his own petard, as Shakespeare said.  I wouldn't say that his impeachment is ineluctable, but it has become more likely than not, I think.  Of course, the lack of integrity among Republicans is still the most formidable obstacle to conviction in The Senate, but if Trump keeps adding fuel to his funeral pyre, even they may not be able to stay loyal to him.  That's what happened with Nixon.  I remember watching the committee hearing in which the House Judiciary Committee voted to send a bill of impeachment to The House floor.  Most of the Republicans on the committee voted for the bill but their reluctance was reflected in their facial expressions.  They just felt they had no choice.  That's where Trump's volubility comes in.  If he doesn't shut up, he will leave what has been his only hope--mindless and unprincipled allegiance to their man--no choice but to abandon him.   That's the next milestone to be achieved, and with every passing day it seems to be less insuperable.

So what we have to do now is let Trump do his worst, which is his wont.  As long as the Democrats keep taking testimony from Trump insiders, new dominos will keep starting to shake, and eventually, if there is enough time, one will fall.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

There's something I don't understand.  Donald Trump withdraws fifty American troops from the Kurdish region of Northern Syria in furtherance of his campaign promise to get American forces out of foreign wars, this in spite of his knowledge that Turkey intends to invade once he does so and the Kurds cannot defend themselves against a nation like Turkey.  Almost concurrently, he sends 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, in anticipation of military action against that country by a rebel movement in Yemen.  Seems like getting involved in another foreign war to me, but risking sixty times as many Americans in doing so.

Then there's the Biden corruption theme that he is flogging on Twitter and every chance he gets to talk to the press, which keeps on repeating what he says even though it only serves to encourage the liar in chief.  In addition, it effects Trumps intended dissemination of an already debunked claim against a political rival, repeated by Trump for obviously corrupt purposes, but they never ask him about the obvious inconsistency between the withdrawal of fifty soldiers in one place and the insertion of 3,000 more a few hundred miles away.  They also never mention the fact that not only are Trump's two eldest sons traveling all over the world cultivating business relationships in his name--and for the company of which he refused to divest himself--while Trump criticizes Joe Biden because his son does business all over the world in his own name, never involving or benefiting his father, Joe.

I don't understand how Trump gets to use the media, whom he condemns, and the media do nothing to prevent him from using them.  I don't understand how this guy can speak simultaneously out of not just both sides of his mouth, but from the top and the bottom too saying all kinds of things that are mutually exclusive.  I don't understand how people can still support this guy who may actually be fecundating ground that is already fertile for a world conflagration with the contentiousness of parties like Israel, the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Syria rampant in the area.  How can anyone believe him when he claims that someone else is corrupt: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and his son Hunter, or for that matter, anyone else.  How can people ignore the fact that when Trump owned "The Taj", as he called it, a casino in Atlantic City, he sold junk bonds to keep the imminently bankrupt enterprise afloat and then used the money to pay his management company that ran the place just before the Trump company that owned the casino declared bankruptcy...not Chapter 11 intended to help the company reorganize but Chapter 7, which left creditors in this case with next to nothing.  How can people forget that when Trump hired a bunch of Poles to work on his Tower in Manhattan at a promised rate of compensation and then paid them less, he dared them to sue him pointing out that if they did, it would cost them more than they would get if they just took what he was offering.  How can they ignore his hypocrisy?

Well, this is my theory.  He lies at such a prodigious rate that the media don't have time to formulate questions to ask him, which he would demur to anyway.  They never get a chance to confront him for a given lie because another one has almost contemporaneously spilled shamelessly out of his mouth.  There are so many, which ones do you confront?  Between preposterous hyperbole that he sometimes turns into a lie in the same sentence in which he utters them and the defamations, character assassinations and gratuitous lies told just because he wants to aggrandize himself, it's like dodging bullets fired out of an assault weapon, which Mitch McConnell is protecting Trump from having to take a position on by preventing a vote on stricter restrictions on weapon ownership in the form of universal registration.  Trump isn't just supremely deceitful; he has enablers who effectively keep the flow of preposterous invective going.

It's frustrating being sane in a Trump controlled world.  How can this all be happening?  Well, political scientists will be talking about that for decades.  All we can do is vote.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

There is so much to say right now, but unfortunately, Donald Trump is the subject of virtually all of it.  It's useless to talk about him because events will either convince any voters who have not made up their minds about him or they won't.  His nefarious nature is on full display, so people will either care or they won't.  But while we are talking abut natures on display, it is hard to ignore Mitch McConnell.  

For example, he says out loud that he won't call a vote on the two universal gun registration oriented bills sent to The Senate by The House unless Trump expresses a willingness to sign them.  But the reality is that McConnell is just protecting his party and Trump from having to declare themselves on bills that something approaching 90% of the American people support.  Thus, the reason we don't have universal gun buyer checks isn't a lack of public support; it's a lack of political willingness on the part of Republican senators--one in particular--to trust their fates to the electorate.  If McConnell called a vote, the house bills would pass because even Republicans can count when it comes to popular votes.  And Donald Trump wouldn't dare veto the bills for fear of alienating 90% of the American people, which surely includes a majority of even "his base."  So we don't have adequate checks before we allow people to have guns because of Mitch McConnell; he is not just stalling a vote.  He is casting the one vote he has and determining the fate of the nation with it.  That is anti-democratic, and plainly wrong, and I hope the people of Kentucky recognize that.

As to Trump himself, this new furor over his July phone call to the new president of Ukraine may well be the coup de grâce.  Since Trump's Comey letter, I have referred to these things--and there have been quite a few--as wobbling dominos.  This one and those it has spawned are real wobblers, and any of them could fall any time.  Trump's course on all this, including the obstruction of justice allegations in the Mueller report, has been to bluster and vilify his critics, all the while doubling down.  As if to say that the Ukraine allegations are illusory, he publicly asked China to do the same thing...investigate his opposition...as he did Zelensky, Ukraine's president.  Then he takes to twitter and blusters about how it is legitimate because he says so.  It may be explainable with Trump's lack of liberal education, you know, military school...Wharton.  He apparently never read Hamlet.  If he had, he would know the line we all know: "[S]he doth protest too much, me thinks."  If Trump had any sense, he would just keep mum instead of channeling Richard Nixon: another crook who swore he wasn't one.  He would just stay off twitter.  Most of the American people have modified an old joke to fit him: "How do you know Trump is lying? His thumbs are moving."  And they are...all the time.

Your friend,

Mike