EXECUTIVE DISORDERS

EXECUTIVE DISORDERS

There's that famous scene in JAWS when Roy Schneider, having come face to face with the great white, returns to Quint in the bow of the boat.  For seconds, Schneider stands in stunned silence. Then he tells Quint: "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

Well, I'm gonna need a bigger thesaurus.

Because I'm running out of words to properly describe Donald Trump.

We're ten days into the new Administration and the running adjectives are "childish",  "arrogant", "incompetent" and "embarrassing".

The running noun is "lies".

First there was the divisive Inaugural Address, where an inaccurate picture of American "carnage" became the stage for illusory promises to the "forgotten" that will not be kept because there are no policies planned or in place to do so.  The next day, the President went to the CIA, stood in front of its Memorial Wall to  un-named heroes who have died in our service, falsely blamed the media for divisions between him and the CIA (which in fact were based on his early refusal to accept findings regarding Russian hacking), and then spoke about . . .

The size of the crowd on the mall at his Inaugural.

Later that afternoon, because he is obsessed with size, Trump sent Sean Spicer, his Press Secretary, out to claim, contrary to unequivocal photographic evidence, that his Inaugural crowd had been the biggest in history and that anyone broadcasting evidence to the contrary was "shameful".

Meanwhile, Trump watched TV in the White House and became enraged as the Woman's March generated crowds in Washington and throughout the country and the world that truly were historic in size, giving notice in the process that (i) there will be no honeymoon for this Administration and (ii) Congress had better stand up and take notice or it would not be invited back come November 2018.

And then the new week started.

We tried to catch our breath but couldn't.  

On Sunday, Kellyanne Conway told Meet the Press that Spicer's lies were just "alternative facts."  

On Monday, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal and re-issued the gag rule prohibiting Planned Parenthood, all other NGOs, and foreign nations from receiving any federal monies for abortion services.  This gag order went further than those issued by the two President Bushes and President Reagan because it also de-funded family planning.

That night, in a conversation with lawmakers at the White House, Trump repeated the lie that he had lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because three million illegal aliens had voted.   On Wednesday, he announced that  there would be a "major investigation" into that issue and that night again repeated the lie in an interview with ABC News.   When pressed, Trump did what he always does when one of his lies is exposed.  He claimed that "many people" believe this.

Which, even if true (it isn't, once the sycophants are eliminated), would merely prove that he is not the only idiot or liar (or both) out there.

Meanwhile, and also on Wednesday, Trump issued instructions to various agencies to begin building the promised wall between the US and Mexico.  Mexico's President, Enrique Pena Nieto, then warned Trump that he might cancel the meeting he and Trump had planned for the next week, and on Thursday morning, Pena-Nieto did so.  

Because Trump can't admit he was -- as my kids say -- "dissed and dismissed",  he then announced that the cancellation had been mutual, indeed necessary in view of Mexico's unwillingness to pay for the wall.   Back at the ranch, Spicer said that the wall could be paid for with a 20% border tax on imports from Mexico.

That  tax -- of course -- would fall on Americans. 

Who would then be paying for the wall.

As we headed into Friday, one would think that nothing could top the week that had been.  

But Trump, being Trump, had to out-do even himself.  

So he did . . .

With the Executive Order banning refugees from anywhere for 120 days and banning anyone from seven nations -- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya -- indefinitely.  

Neither the new Secretary of Defense, the new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, nor the new head of the CIA were asked to weigh in on this Order.  Instead, it was written by the White House's resident white-supremacist, Steve Bannon, and Bannon's assistant and Senior Policy Adviser, Stephen Miller.

(Bannon is the guy who, mid-week, called the free press the "opposition party", which Trump then later repeated, said that it should "keep its mourth shut", and admitted he had been behind the earlier idea to ban the press from the actual White House.  As one of my friends, Jack Levin,  wrote on reading an earlier version of this post, "Why don't they just tell the truth.  Why don't they say the words 'President Bannon'?")

The refugee order and seven-nation ban is both incredibly foolish and un-constitutional.  It is foolish because it alienates our allies in the Middle East, who now must field claims that US policy is targeting all Muslims and not just terrorists, and whose adversaries -- including ISIS -- have now been handed a gold-plated recruiting tool.  And it  is unnecessary because refugees and anyone else coming to the US from the seven named nations are already subject to multi-layered review prior to the issuance of any visas. This program, initiated by Obama, has been working fine.  There have been no terrorist attacks here by nationals coming in from any of those target states, or by any refugees.  There have, of course, been attacks from those who came from other states (e.g., Saudi Arabia, which was home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists; the other four came from Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates), but none of those other nations were on Trump's list.

The Order is also unconstitutional because it effectively utilizes a religious test.  Trump claims this is not the case because the ban is on refugees and others from target nations, not a target religion. The targeted nations, however, are all majority-Muslim nations.  More to the point, however, the Order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security, after the 120-day hiatus on refugee entries, to favor refugee applications from those in the targeted nations that belong to minority religions, i.e., Christians.  This, of course, is a religious test, and it is unconstitutional.  Christians are by no means the only religions persecuted by ISIS (ask the Shia Muslims)  and to separate them out for favorable treatment violates the Establishment Clause.

The day Trump announced his Order, three federal judges issued stays against it.  The case filed in Brooklyn featured as a lead plaintiff an Iraqi interpreter who had worked for ten years with the American military in Iraq and who, it appeared, had been targeted for assassination. He was blocked from entering the US at JFK airport on account of Trump's Executive Order and  was released only after a federal judge ordered his release. (Meanwhile, Trump's Defense Secretary, General Mattis, is reportedly livid that he was not consulted more fully in the run-up to the Order, and is now trying to get the Order revised to exclude such individuals.)  

The next day, thousands showed up at airports and in cities across the country to protest the Order. And yesterday, Sally Yates, the Acting Attorney General (Jeff Sessions has not yet been confirmed), announced she would not let the Justice Department defend the Order because she was not convinced it was legal.  

For this act of courage, Yates was fired.  

The last time a Justice Department attorney was relieved of his job after refusing to take action to implement an illegal Presidential Order was in 1973, when Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus resigned, seriatim, from their positions as Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, respectively. 

Their boss had to resign less than a year later.

Donald Trump . . .

Meet Richard Nixon.

THE ART OF THE SPIEL

THE ART OF THE SPIEL

So, the art of the spiel . . .

It wasn't.

Trump went to Washington today and was inaugurated as America's 45th President.  All was sweetness and light.

President Obama and the First Lady warmly greeted Trump and his wife as they arrived at the White House for the traditional pre-Inaugural morning coffee.  Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and their wives, Trump opponents all, dutifully showed up at the Capitol to give real witness to the peaceful transfer of power.

The Inaugural stand, looking west to the Washington Monument and thinner but still large crowds compared to some inaugurations past, was filled with bi-partisan bonhomie.  Legislators, justices, ex-Presidents and Vice-Presidents (Quayle and Cheney showed up), along with clerics, choirs and even the geriatric set (in the presence of Bob Dole), rubbed shoulders at America's unique quadrennial celebration of its experiment in republican government.

And then he spoke.

And all the good will evaporated.

Inaugural addresses are supposed to unite.  This one divided. Incoming Presidents are supposed to be graceful.  This one was loud and angry.  The new President's rhetoric is supposed to uplift.  This one just deflated.

Instead of speaking to the entire country, Trump did what he always does.  He spoke to his base. They are a substantial group.

But they aren't the rest of us. And they are by no means a majority of the country, most of whom do not like or trust the new President.

Many to whom President Trump spoke today are hurting and angry. They've lost jobs and watched their standard of living decline.  They are right to blame -- in part --  globalization in the form of trade deals that did not protect manufacturers and wages here at home. They are also right to embrace Trump's claim that the establishment has let them down.

The problem, however, is that the establishment which let them down are the same Republicans now running the show, and their leader, for all his bluster, is just another member of that establishment.

Trump prospered to the tune of billions on the same globalized order he is now condemning. He hired the same cheap labor he today told us would never again steal jobs from Americans.  His party went all in on NAFTA and the other trade deals and was opposed to any riders that would have enforced fair labor or environmental standards and thus narrowed the gap between first and third world wages.

And all those years ago, Trump was right there with them.

So his speech today, catnip for his base, was like most of the speeches he gave during his campaign.

Empty and hollow.

Look at the words:

For too long, a small group in our nation's Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished -- but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered -- but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's Capital, there was little to celebrate all across our land.

He is right.  But he has no program to solve the problem he identifies.  And neither does the political party under whose banner he won the Presidency.

His promises were all highfalutin.  For the unemployed and the broke, he was emphatic:

That all changes -- starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment; it belongs to you . . . The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer . . . Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.

And how -- precisely -- does he propose to do any of this?  He has not said.   Or what he has said -- tax cuts for the very wealthy and a wall -- won't do it.

Let's be clear here.

All those pseudo-illegals (they aren't real because more are leaving than coming) aren't stealing $30-$50 dollar per hour wages from auto workers or anyone else.  Tax cuts for billionaires may create jobs for Wall Street brokers but they don't for Pennsylvania's ex-steelworkers. And the repeal of the Affordable Care Act will actually make things worse for precisely the people Trump claims to represent.

Trump's tip of the hat to the "forgotten man" was cribbed from Franklin Roosevelt.  Here is FDR in 1932:

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but indispensable units of economic power, for plans . . . that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

The difference is that FDR had a program to lift the forgotten man up.  It came in the form of social security for the aged, unionization and collective bargaining for workers, price supports for farmers, and a host of programs in his famous alphabet soup of initiatives that put artists, construction workers and conservationists to work on federal projects.  The very road in New York City Trump took to LaGuardia Airport yesterday -- the East River Drive -- was built by Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA).  In fact, so was LaGuardia Airport.

On what would pass for foreign policy, Trump's Inaugural was even worse.

The would-be heir to Truman's Marshall Plan, four decades of bi-partisan engagement that won the cold war, and a liberal world order that has improved the lives of billions, was all about flooding the moat and drawing up the bridge.

Here is President Trump's isolationist vision:

For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry;

Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military;

We've defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend our own;

And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay;

We've made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon . . .

But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power.

From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.

From this moment on, it's going to be America First.

The number of lies in the above paragraphs is difficult to count:

• Truman's Marshall Plan re-built Europe.  It created a market for our goods.  It did not enrich foreign industry at our expense.  And globalization has on balance been an enormous win for American consumers.
• Our military is the largest in the world.  We spend more on defense than all other nations combined.  The military is not remotely "depleted".
• And we haven't "refus[ed] to defend our own" borders.  The Obama Administration more than doubled spending on border control and it also deported record numbers of illegals; what it refused to do was deport innocent children whose illegal status was no fault of their own.

Trump is the latest American First-er.  But he is not the first.  The term itself was born in the isolationism of the pre-World War II '30s, and the group that took its title -- the America First Committee (AFC) -- created substantial roadblocks to efforts to assist England and the other allies prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Had they succeeded, the western alliance might very well not have been formed.  And but for Hitler's declaration of war on the US the day after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, they very well might have.

To some, all of this is ancient history that should not be laid at the feet of President Trump.  In other words, his America First and the AFC's do not fly in the same orbit.

To our NATO allies, however, the term is anathema.

Because they look at Trump, see a US Commander-in-Chief in love with Putin who is more focused on whether an ally is current on their dues than on  who has seized Crimea, hear today's "from this moment on . . . America First" rhetoric, and . . .

Are scared to death.

Meanwhile, Trump is all in on "eradicat[ing]" "completely" "Radical Islamic Terrorism" " from the face of the earth."

Fabulous.

But we still haven't heard a word about how this will be done.  Or what Trump will do different from what Obama has done . . . 

Other than use the words -- all with initial capitals -- "Radical Islamic Terrorism."

Which makes Republicans happy . . .

Even if it inflames peaceful Muslims not happy with the fact that our 45th President is painting an entire religion with the brush of terrorism, while they are trying to make sure their young are not radicalized or their civilization destroyed.

Toward the end of his speech today, Trump said "The time for empty talk is over."

Actually, Mr. President, that alarm clock rang long ago.

You just keep hitting the snooze button.