June 2023 Archives

Dear America,

With each new miscue in the Trump saga, I despair more deeply for my country.  He persists in plummeting to new lows mentally, intellectually, morally and in every other respect, even for him, but his support persists with him.  Most recently,  a copy of the tape recorded voice of our emeritus miscreant-in-chief fulminating over and bandying about a document he had been given (and had kept) by an army general officer outlining a plan for attacking Iran.  The document, Trump stated, was marked such as to make it not for popular dissemination, but you can hear it crackling as he manipulates it in his hands and shows it to a group of his obsequious insiders, more than one of whom were taping the conversation with Trump's knowledge. One of them even opined that the classification of the document was now a problem, meaning now that it had been shown I assume.  Of course, the fact that he was on the record gave him no pause as he confessed that he hadn't declassified the document when he took it and it was too late now since he was no longer president.  Notably, a transcript of this tape was part of the "speaking indictment" filed against Trump in federal court, and Brett Baier of Fox interviewed Trump about it.  Brazen as always, Trump, looking haggard and disheveled, denied that the content of the tape was what it undeniably turned out to be when it was played on CNN a couple of evenings ago.  And in the aftermath of the publication of that tape on the air for the entire nation to hear, Trump sought to make himself out to be the wronged party because CNN's acquisition of the tape had not been declared.  He didn't seem to understand that the image of him standing over a bludgeoned body with a bloody fireplace poker in his hand wouldn't have been more categorically damning, and the last thing anyone would care about was how the picture came to light.

But, that's Trump.  He continues to think that denial is the same as refutation, and he won't relent in that misguided belief until he's being sentenced for his crime, if then.  He became president by winning the electoral college, though he won nothing else, and he also continues to consider that a great victory when in reality it was simply the manifestation of an idea that Alexander Hamilton had misconceived.  To use his two favorite pejoratives, he is disgusting and disgraceful, but we all know that, and what he does to confirm that fact is no surprise at all.  What is a surprise, however, is that his loyal followers cannot be dissuaded from taking his part.  The man insists on reaffirming the fact that he isn't fit for anyone's trust, but his political supporters refuse to acknowledge his best efforts to undermine himself and they trust him anyway...or do they?  I've said this before and I am sure I will say it again many times.  Loyalty to Trump has nothing to do with what Trump is.  It has to do solely with what he legitimates in those loyal to him.  He is the opposite of what Lincoln referred to as "our better angles," and that is his appeal.  He lets their worst selves believe that they're alright in spite of their deviation from what we have fooled ourselves as a nation into believing was a reality: American exceptionalism.  In reality, we have in this country a segment of our population that is just as vile and despicable as the worst that inhabit any other country: Russia, China, Belarus, Iran...  They love him because he says to them, "I'm okay, so you're okay," which is why my despair is so deep.  It's not okay to be like Donald Trump...not here or anywhere else.  And what his supporters don't recognize is that if Trump were in Russia, he'd by Vladimir Putin, and we, America, would not be a democracy.  We'd be the fiefdom of a tinhorn autocrat, just as Russia is.

Eventually, and probably not too far down the road, the petard that is this series of Trump crimes will hoist him in the Shakespearean sense.  But that is the actual source of my despair.  So what?  Even if he is convicted of a crime, his sycophants will still vote for him.  And being a convicted felon isn't a bar to being president.  Thus, what Trump represents is a sort of ineluctable current in our society into his misfeasor corp.  He is like a pied piper leading our nation to the edge of an abyss...to the verge of being what we eschewed when we started our revolution in 1776.

Donald Trump is the end of the American experiment.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Trump indictment is bringing out the true color of the Republican Party, especially that of some of the stalwart hacks who will say anything to distract from the real issues.  Jim Jordan, for example, said that the indictment was the worst partisan attack he has ever seen.  He must have had his eyes closed for the entirety of his political career.  I can recall him uttering some utter nonsense during the congressional hearings about Trump's efforts to direct President Zelensky of Crimea toward investigating Hunter Biden and his father, our current president, Joe in furtherance of his own campaign.  He repeated one line over and over again, but it was so inane and blatantly contrived that I have forgotten it now like the embarrassment to this country that it was.  And when he claims that Trump is being singled out for persecution he seems to be forgetting that Bill Clinton was impeached by the Republicans for his affair with a White House intern and then lying about it, whereas Trump lied at deposition in the case brought to a jury of Trump's peers...and WON...by E. Jean Carroll about the allegation that he sexually assaulted her, which a jury found to be true.  Trump could legitimately be prosecuted for his perjury in that case at least, and certainly would be if the system were biased against him, but he hasn't been, has he Jim?  Of course this is all that comes to mind right at the moment regarding only Jim Jordan, probably the most transparent party hack in congress today short of Lindsey Graham.

Graham is equivocating about Trump's indictment, recently mentioning politicians making "unforced errors" in a senate hallway when asked about the indictment.  And in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Graham insisted on harping on Hillary Clinton's--she is as big an idiot as Trump is in my opinion--ill-advised use of a private server during her tenure as secretary of state and analogizing it to Trump's possession of classified, and even top secret documents, insisting that Trump's conduct was not espionage, and I think he may be right.  But all the while he was skipping over Trump's attempts to suborn the perjury of his attorneys regarding the presence of those documents, and even trying to induce them to remove the documents so that they couldn't be collected under the subpoena with which Trump had been served for their return to the federal government.  And though Graham never relented, he eventually quelled his contrived outrage and admitted that he didn't necessarily approve of Trump's conduct, but that there will be a trial, though he declined to admit what for.  While Jordan is an inveterate Republican fabricator and apologist, Graham adds to those sins his apostasy and even cronyism after condemning Trump during the 2016 campaign for, among other things, idiocy and dishonesty.  Graham went from being a relatively reasonable member of the Republican establishment to the status of toadie for a man he had condemned as a miscreant just months earlier and thereby went from statesman to poltroon in a single bound.

And of course the cadre of Republican Party blind loyalists is almost unanimous as of today, so Jordan and Graham are really little more than poster boys for an insidious ethical deficiency.  The shamelessness of the big-name hardcore "conservatives" is appalling and it shames our nation internationally, but of course Vladimir Putin has had the same affect on the Russian polity as Trump has had here.  But one of the differences is that Trump practically curled up in Putin's lap when he confronted Putin over his election interference, insisting that he didn't see Putin as guilty as he was "strong and powerful" in his closed-meeting denials.  I don't know which is worse, the lap dog or the one who puts it in his lap and pets it.  And worst of all is that the Republican base doesn't even turn a blind eye to it all.  They just continue to deny what is in plain sight, virtually admitting that integrity, candor, intellectual honesty and the rest of the virtues that we used to revere when we elected Abe Lincoln and people like him to high office no longer matter.  Lincoln at one time during his campaign for reelection in 1864 exhorted us to evoke the "better angles of our nature," but as I have thought since Trump was elected, those angles are elsewhere now, and what has replaced them is our basest instincts.  The Trump right is motivated by Chauvinism, xenophobia, white supremacy and a kind of conservatism that embodies the notion that freedom is only for those who qualify as true believers, not those of us who truly believe in democracy for all.

This is a time of moral hazard.  It is the case that the Republican Party is a small minority of our electorate, and that only about 70% of it is die-hard Trumpist.  I figure that those voters represent only about 18% of the voters who will cast votes next year, and they will be more than offset by rational Americans who understand the mandate that is being a true patriot and democracy loyalist.  But there is about half of the electorate is wild cards, and they are the ones we have to worry about.  With whom will they stand: what passes for the American way today or what passed for the American way when it was something to be lauded.

Your friend,

Mike