December 2020 Archives

Dear America,

It's been strange not having any Trump contretemps  to complain about.  Since Trump has tucked his tail between his legs and retreated to the executive mansion, it's been pretty quiet in America.  I'm not complaining; that's good.  But between the pandemic and non-Trump news, things have been pretty unremarkable...until the past couple of days that is.  Now Trump is creating a tempest in a teapot over the national indiscretion of naming military installations after what would be war criminals in any circumstance other than our civil war: a coup that got big enough that its leaders couldn't be condemned without alienating half the population of the country.  Oh, and he has fabricated a new issue by demanding that congress add more to his deficit by increasing the recovery payments authorized in the most recent pandemic relief package.  It's grandstanding, probably in the faint hope that there will be a groundswell of support for his own coup attempt, a subject that was apparently bandied about in at least one high level administration conclave.  I say that because if Mitch McConnell had thought for a moment that Trump would sign for any amount, a bill authorizing it would have gone before a joint session and would surely have passed.  After all, the Democrats in The House passed a bill with much more relief in it months ago and have been arguing for it ever since, and the pusillanimous Republicans in The Senate wouldn't dare vote against something that Trump let it be known he was for.

What this is actually, at least in my opinion, is Trump saying to the Republicans, if you won't throw the electoral college results out and elect me over the objections of 80 million American voters, I'm going to sabotage your efforts to reclaim your dignity, credibility and integrity after I'm gone.  I'll keep you from passing what the American people want and need, because as you know, I don't give a damn about them or anyone other than myself.  Then, in 2024, I can campaign for the opportunity to save America from both parties.  Maybe I can win that way after losing the popular vote twice as a Republican.  And if you show callousness by going home for a ten day Christmas break, I won't even have to do anything because your bill will die in my pocket as long as I don't sign it, and you won't even be able to override that kind of "pocket veto."  As to refusing to sign the current defense and stop gap funding bills, you can all go swing.  You'll get it done, it just won't by as easy for you, and in the bargain, I lock up the bigot vote for 2024 by opposing renaming bases named after confederate slavers.  How's that for proof that I'm a stable genius.

The irony of it all is that McConnell and the minority leader in The House, Kevin McCarthy (who's as much of an idiot as Donald Trump is), are now going to be hoist by their own petard.  They have spent four years sucking up to a sociopath...a devious, narcissistic megalomaniac who is now plying his talents at their expense, and they can't get out of the way.  The monster they created is going to devour them, and all they can do is whimper and flail about.  Trump will make his point in spite of anything they will do, and the only possible beneficiaries of Trump's scheming will be either him or the Democrats, who can turn to you, America, and say, "you see? I told you so!"

Personally, I would bet on the Democrats in this whole thing.  We won't know the outcome for maybe a couple of years or more, but I think that most Americans feel now that we will have dodged a bullet if Trump doesn't try to marshal the U.S. military in an attempt to usurp the power he has always coveted.  But I think that what will happen is that the American people will recognize that the name Donald Trump is a stain on not just the American presidency, but on America as a whole.  He represents our basest, and ironically-most-self-destructive instincts as a culture, and we let him into our house...our White House.  True, the majority of us can just shrug and say, hey, it wasn't me who let it happen.  It was the basket of deplorables who did it.  We cast our votes, but thanks to Alexander Hamilton and a few other "founding fathers", our system allowed them to have their internecine way with the first modern democracy.  

That's what I think will be the course of human events in America.  But then, I thought even Hillary could beat him.

Your friend,

Mike

P.S.:  Happy Holidays 

Dear America,

Finally, a significant percentage of the main stream media are paying attention to the portent of Donald Trump's megalomania and his dementia.  I have noticed in much of what I read and hear on NPR and PBS, see on the commercial station news and read in the New York Times that there is now a universal recognition of the man's psychoses.  His tacit endorsement of various conspiracies and his insistence upon proliferating and perpetuating this fantasy about fraudulent abuse of the election process by some monolithic liberal entity have sufficiently demonstrated the unreliability of his sanity that it is being talked about openly and in no uncertain terms.  But for the first time I am now seeing an acknowledgement of the distressing proportions of the subscription to his delusions in what has euphemistically been called "his base."  And as more notice of the magnitude of his following appears, a gradual awareness of the fact that this is no longer a joke seems to be dawning on those who have the platforms from which to speak about it.  This past weekend is the first time that I read more than one opinion piece on the subject, and also saw them laced with some statistical support for the fact that there is danger lurking behind the ludicrous text of Trump's message.  Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorable" are openly acting deplorably with threats of violence and actual plots to undertake it.  Sadly, I can't see that we can avoid at least one tragedy in the near future.  People have already been arrested for conspiring to kidnap officials involved in tallying the vote or certifying it, and it can only be a matter of time before some disturbed cabal escapes the notice of law enforcement and gets through to someone who is just doing his or her job.

But there is danger beyond individual tragedies, and it is only now becoming a subject of public discussion, and in only modest proportions at that.  I remember writing to you about my perception that Trump was on the same trajectory as Hitler was in the late twenties and early thirties, and thinking that perhaps that was too much.  Perhaps it was tantamount to the conspiracy theories of the reactionary conservative fringe, only perceived from the left of the political spectrum rather than from the right.  I was willing to entertain the thought that Trump's riposte to a crowd yelling "four more years" in the form of his taunt that they should ask for twelve was just idiosyncratic Trump...stupidity that could never be manifested in actions by him or his followers.  But now his designs on either retention or reclamation of power have been reified in the form of public fulminations and they have been endorsed by significant numbers of, in my opinion, deranged adulators.  And in furtherance of his delusions of grandeur, Trump has managed to enlist a cadre of coconspirators like Rudy Giulianni and his posse of legal nihilists, all of them bolstered by an astounding number of Republican poltroons who fear Trump's opprobrium enough that they have sold their souls to him out of an instinct for self-preservation.  The conditions are ripe for the subordination of democracy to a cult of personality that will ultimately tyrannize us all, even those of us who warned of its nascence in the form of the crackpot fringe that shamelessly fawns over a man who in any other time would be despicable to virtually all, if for no other reason than his moral and ethical bankruptcy. I would have anticipated his repudiation before 2016, but apparently, I don't know the American ethos as well as I thought I did.

There was a time when there was such a thing as secular virtue.  As a nation we respected such instincts as fealty to our fellows rather than vainglorious pride in a flag; generosity of spirit rather than boastfulness and avarice; mutual respect rather than ad hominem assignment of pejoratives to those we didn't like in lieu of legitimate disquisition.  But Trump personifies everything that we would have despised as a nation fifty years ago, or even last decade, which inspires me to wonder how our nation could have fallen this far this fast.  We are no better than what thousands of Americans ostensibly fought and died to extinguish in the world...to liberate our fellow human beings from. 

Trump has complained of every move against his peccancy, his meretriciousness and his shameless corruption in general that it was a coup in its essence.  Yet, here he is effectively plotting a coup in the open, and for some reason, the German phrase, "Bierkeller Putsch" keeps ringing in my ears.  So here's a stark warning, my fellow Americans.  The world has seen this before, and as one might expect, we are seeing it again in Russia.  The question for us is, do we want to see it here?

Your friend

Mike