THANKSGIVING 2024 -- SOUND AND FURY

For inveterate opponents of Donald Trump, and I am one, it seems a bit forced to be happy this Thanksgiving.

And nothing done in his brief tenure as President-elect has made that exercise easier. 

The big news since election day has been the rogue's gallery of incompetents Trump intends to appoint to  his Cabinet. 

For Defense, we have been given a FOX news host who thinks woman can't fight, war crimes are just fine, and the military can be used against any domestic political opponents he deems "Marxist" (the list is long); as the new DNI, an apologist for Putin and Syria's Assad who claimed the US funded biolabs in Ukraine to release deadly pathogens; at the Department of Health and Human Services, a lost Kennedy who thinks vaccines cause autism; and under him, the quack TV Dr. Oz to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Trump's first would-be (but now withdrawn) attorney general (Matt Gaetz) was despised in Congress, probably a statutory rapist, and in any case -- judging from pictures he was said to have shared on the floor of the House -- more than comfortable in whatever locker room Trump occupied during his now-infamous bus ride with Billy Bush.  

His next candidate, ex-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, is more qualified than Gaetz could ever be and is not a criminal so far as we know. She did, however, serve as one of Trump's defense attorneys in his first impeachment trial and supported his election denial lie. Her selection also makes both the nominated number one and number two (Todd Blanche) at DOJ Trump's former lawyers.

Trump thinks federal employees belong to him. In his first term he routinely referred to Defense Secretary Mattis, DHS Secretary Kelly and National Security Adviser McMaster as his generals and was livid when his two Attorneys General -- Jeff Sessions at the beginning of his term on the Mueller probe and William Barr at the end on President Biden's win -- would not do his bidding. He expects he has now insured nothing along those lines will ever happen again.

If he is right . . .

The fifty-year era of independence at the Department of Justice will have officially ended.

(Pro tip sidebar to Speaker Johnson: when your to-do list includes deep-sixing a report that shows your AG nominee is a statutory rapist while making sure a trans-sexual female cannot use  the House's women's rooms, stay home. It's always a bad look to cover up the sexual crimes of one in your party as you pander to the sexual prejudices of another.) 

In his first term, Trump appointed people who for the most part had a reasonable familiarity with their department's duties and capacities.  He also appointed people willing to follow the law and, as importantly, willing to require that Trump himself follow the law. In this go round, he is giving notice that no one need care.  The only obvious requirements are loyalty to Trump himself and a demonstrated willingness to piss off those who oppose him. 

If competence comes in (or, in the rare case, without) that package, as it does with Sen. Rubio at the State Department and would with either Kevin Warsh or Robert Lighthizer at Treasury (or the latter returned to the USTR), that is accidental. It may also be unnecessary.  Trump and his MAGA minions believe the entire federal bureaucracy is a sea of opposition that must be emptied.  He claims the bureaucrats routinely opposed him in his first term (which, thank God, was often true) and unfairly indicted him after he left office (which is false; Trump earned those indictments and the fact that trials are being aborted is yet another failure of America's institutions, which did not protect us from Trump or, as the last election demonstrated, ourselves). 

With rare exception (Rubio, Warsh, Lighthizer), therefore, lieutenants who might competently run the government are not on his wish list.  

Incompetent loyalists who could help him dismantle it are.

Trump's desire for revenge is also married to the GOP's knee-jerk hatred of government. For decades now, Republicans have won elections convincing Americans that government (or at least the part of government which does things for others but not them) can do no good.  In this world, incompetence is a feature, not a bug, the rule, not the exception. It fulfills the GOP's prophecy.

Because . . .

The easiest way to demonstrate government sucks is to appoint people so inept they prove it.

Trump now thinks he is bullet-proof.  And his fellow travelers are not disabusing him of that notion.  To the contrary, they are claiming he has a "mandate". A "decisive" one, say his billionaire bros Musk and Ramaswamy. To "disrupt", whatever that means. Beyond tax cuts, tariffs, deportations, an inchoate promise to magically negotiate a wars end in Ukraine, or the inherent nature of his personality, we are not being told.

And with that, we can finally get to this years . . .

Thank yous.

Which must be . . . 

To the 74.2 million people, myself included, who voted against Trump.

Thus rendering all this mandate talk . . . 

"a tale    

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

We can thank Shakespeare (or, if you prefer, Macbeth) later.

Once the idiot leaves the stage.

In politics, mandate talk is generally useless and has been for the past sixty years. In that period, the only credible mandate claims were those made by LBJ in 1964 and President Reagan in 1980, each of whom won enormous popular and electoral college majorities and control of Congress (in LBJ's case by almost super-majority margins).  Since 1980, no one has come even close; in fact, the only remote contender was President Obama in 2008. Everyone else won by small margins and governed in the face of significant opposition. Two -- Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 -- lost the popular vote.

Today, Trump marches to the Oval Office having won less than 50% of the popular vote and only slightly more than Harris.  His party has a non-filibuster proof  four-vote margin in the Senate and an infinitesimal (as low as three and no more than five, depending on final counts) margin in the 435-member House of Representatives. Thirty-three senators (twenty-six of them Republicans) will be up for re-election in 2026, as will the entire House. None of their lives will be made easier by Trump, who has always been long on outrage but notoriously short on actual accomplishment. Indeed,  his party was slaughtered in the 2018 mid-terms, i.e., even in the so-called glory days of the pre-pandemic economy Trump continually touts.

Lots of people have never liked him.

Lots still do not.

And he has a habit of keeping it that way.

Mandate lovers -- and perpetually panicked Democrats -- are very good at ignoring reality.  This time, in addition to the small numerical margins, one of the realities being ignored is that Democratic candidates for the Senate actually won in four (Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin) of the seven swing states Trump won, came close in a fifth (Pennsylvania) and won the gubernatorial election in a sixth (North Carolina). In those Senate races, three of the winners (Rosen, Baldwin and Slotkin) were women. Had Harris not failed where they succeeded, she'd be the President-elect today.

In his victory speech in the early hours of November 6, Trump said his "promises made" would be "promises kept."  If so, he is off to a bad start as nothing on order thus far -- tax cuts, tariffs and deportations --  will return the price of groceries to their pre-pandemic level or remedy the severe economic inequality plaguing rural and non-college educated Americans.

Meanwhile, he will appoint judges bent on eliminating substantive rights and Cabinet and agency heads bent (again with notable possible exceptions) on rubber-stamping his whims.

Part of the problem here is that Trump, when he is not dangerous (which is way more often than not), is lazy and not interested in policy.  If he seriously wanted to put a dent in inequality, he'd have to invest his political capital in convincing his party that redistributing some wealth is not a bad idea.  That's the only way it's been done in this country since the frontier closed and moving west could no longer be America's de facto growth and/or welfare policy.  Think anti-trust law, the 16th Amendment (which allowed the federal income tax), the Federal Reserve, Social Security, unionization, the GI Bill and a minimum wage; the Civil Rights laws in the 1960s then removed the racism FDR had been forced to swallow in order to pass his New Deal. Collectively, these measures restrained the top, distributed productivity gains more evenly, and created the middle class.

All of them, however, are anathema to the GOP. 

While Trump is in love with any form of hatred that gives him votes (hence his fascistic claims against immigrants), that's as far as he ever gets. Tax cuts will not cure inequality, and tariffs and deportations will actually exacerbate it, the first by inflating prices, the second by cutting the labor force that creates a lot of the agricultural supply. Real immigration reform replete with paths to citizenship and reasonable guest worker programs would avoid this problem; deportation will only make it worse. Meanwhile, if Musk and Ramaswamy, neither of whom understands how federal spending works, take their proposed meat-ax approach to cuts by eliminating programs where specific authorizations have lapsed, some of the very programs the most vulnerable rely upon (e.g., veterans health benefits) will die.

In a world where a free and aggressive press laid bare the implications of Trump's approaches, the GOP might be forced to change.  That, however, is not today's world.  For, in addition to having convinced struggling white guys that their economic woes are caused by illegal (brown) aliens and affirmative action, Trump and the GOP have also convinced them that FOX is real news and the mainstream media (The New York Times, Washington Post, and three major networks) are not. 

So . . .

Brainwashed, the MAGA base will continue to live in a world of resentment and fact-free pseudo-solutions.  

If we survive that world and Trump's own disorders . . .

The thank yous to Harris voters will be voluminous.

In the meantime, this Thanksgiving . . .

In this year's parade . . .

They get mine.

MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKS

There's a reason they are on the sidelines.

Monday morning quarterbacks, that is.

It's because they aren't playing in the real game.

The 2024 election is now a week old. Trump won.  Harris lost.  That wasn't all that hard to say.  Too bad Trump couldn't say it four years ago.  Too bad millions of Americans couldn't either.  As I write, Trump is going to the White House today to meet President Biden for the post-election congratulatory meeting where the new guy and the old guy (unfortunately, they've all been guys thus far) meet to assure America that the transition will be seamless and peaceful.  Too bad that didn't happen last time either.  Five people died and hundreds were injured as a result.

For the past week, we have been flooded with "analysis" on why Trump won and Harris lost.

The simple answer is Trump got more votes in states where it counted.  

Not a ton more.  

But enough to win.  

Four years ago Biden got not a ton more but enough to win in those states and in the election before that Trump did.  

Frankly, for all the presidential elections that have been held since 1988, that has been the pattern.  

There haven't been any blow-outs.  

America is a divided country.

And has been for over thirty years.

There's also been a see-sawing quality to these results.  In 1992 and '96, the Democrat won. In 2000 and '04, it was the Republican.  Back to the Democrat in 2008 and 2012. Then a Republican (2016), a Democrat (2020), and now a Republican again.

Into this sea of apparent indecision, or at least a sea of different decisions over a relatively short span of historical time, have waded a boatload of analysts ready to tell us the reasons why. Typically, this being America, the loser in this analysis takes it on the chin and the winner is perceived to have wrought some sort of personal triumph. 

Back in 2000, when Florida's hanging chads and a ballot that had Jews in Palm Beach voting for Pat Buchanan allowed members of the Supreme Court to vote twice and thereby make George W. Bush president, Al Gore was upbraided for sighing and making faces during that year's debates, signs -- it was said -- that meant he wasn't the guy you'd want to have a beer with in an election so close that the would-you-have- a- beer-with-that-guy vote had to have mattered.

In 2004, another close one, a war hero lost because he was supposedly a wind-surfing Nantucket elitist.

 In 2016, Hillary allegedly went down for being "unlikeable".  

Hard to believe the "pussy-grabbing" alterative was more likeable.

But what do I know.

Now the swords are out for Kamala Harris.

A week before the election, people were praising her flawless campaign.  

They were marveling at her adept eleventh-hour entry following President Biden's departure and praising the speed with which she herded the cats that are her party, avoided the expected bloodletting, and fought Trump to a toss-up that might be won.

Now . . .

She either wasn't dishonest enough to repudiate Joe Biden.

Or progressive enough to win back the working class.

Or specific enough to sway the undecided.

Or wise enough to pick Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro as her running mate.

Or a candidate long enough to have battled through primaries that, I guess, would have somehow increased her appeal among black and Hispanic men . . .

Or resulted in a different candidate with all of her attributes but none of her flaws.

The problem with all of this is that in a race as close as the one we just witnessed, any of these explanations might be right. Or they might be wrong.  In the real world, there is no way to know.  We'd have to redo the election with all these variables changed and see the results.

My own view is that none of them would have mattered.

Because . . .

They all ignore the other side.

They get to have a say too.

Even when they shouldn't.

I think election analysts should have to be certified.  Others are.  Lawyers pass bar exams.  Doctors are licensed. My wife just spent thousands becoming a CFRE.  That's short for certified fund-raising executive.

Here's a modest proposal.

Before you decide why someone lost an election, run in one.

Put your name on a ballot.

Make all these decisions in real time.

In the game.

Not on the sidelines.

I have and I cannot tell you why Kamala Harris lost other than to say Trump got more votes. 

Shit happens. 

Whether Trump should be president is a different question.  

He shouldn't be.  

He is a rapist, a felon and a fascist. 

His election does not change any of that.

The people who voted for him are responsible for putting him back in the Oval office come next January.  They made a bad decision, one that I believe over time they will regret and one that has already done serious damage to the country and will do even more damage in the future. Even as I write, Trump is naming yes-men and women to his Cabinet, demanding that he be allowed to make recess appointments to avoid the need for Senate confirmation, and fulfilling Liz Cheney's dire predictions of a government beholden only to his dictatorial impulses. Abroad, Vladimir Putin is emboldened, Europe and Ukraine prepare for American cowardice, and China eyes Taiwan. 

The voters, however, are not the only responsible parties.

The institutions of America failed.

The two biggest failures were the US Senate and the US Supreme Court.  

Following the carnage of January 6, 2021, the Senate should have convicted Trump on his impeachment and made it impossible for him to ever be president again.  For the same reason, the Supreme Court should have enforced the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause and made it impossible for him to run again.  Both had the power to do so. The impeachment and insurrection clauses in the Constitution were designed precisely to confront and eliminate the problem Trump presents, an autocrat as president who dishonestly and regularly violates the rule of law, seeks to exercise dictatorial power, and resorts to violence as a means to that end. 

The Founders and the authors of the 14th Amendment knew that elections alone could not be counted on to preserve American democracy and a Constitutionally-based republican form of government.  

Sadly, the Senate and the Supreme Court forgot that lesson. 

The fact that Trump won the 2024 election means he will be president again.

It does not mean he should be. 

The fact that Trump won means Harris lost.

And that doesn't mean she should have either.

LOST YOUTH

I am sixty-eight years old.

But I remember August 6, 1968 like it was yesterday.

That was the day my Uncle Al died.  He was forty-two, a New York City cop. Our whole extended family was on vacation at a small house my mother had purchased in Highland Lakes, NJ with her share of the proceeds from the sale of our family home in Brooklyn.  That home had been sold after my parents separated and we moved in with my grandparents. Uncle Al had spent the first week of his vacation painting the new house with my grandfather. On the weekend, however, he woke up sick and had to go to a doctor.  

The doctor immediately put him in the hospital.

A day later he was moved to another hospital.

A day after that he died.

The hospital was not that close to Highland Lakes so my mother and Aunt El were staying in a motel near the hospital.  The hospital called at 5 am and told my mother, who was a nurse, that they had to come over quickly.  When they got there, they were told Uncle Al had died.  They drove back to Highland Lakes and told the rest of us -- my grandmother, grandfather, sister and cousin, Uncle Al's oldest son. His other son, the baby John, was a year old in his play pen.

It was a gut punch to the entire family.

My forty-two-year old aunt had lost her husband of eighteen years.  My twelve-year old and baby cousins had lost their father, my sister and I our uncle and the guy who in many respects had become a surrogate father given our mom and dad's separation.  My grandmother had been through two wars and raised her own (and a good chunk of her extended) family in the when-there-was-no-safety-net Depression.  She was a rock.  

But that day she just kept crying.

Our big Irish-Catholic family held a wake and a funeral. It was and remains the biggest I've been to. After the funeral Mass, a two-block line of cars moved slowly from the church in Brooklyn to the cemetery at Pinelawn in Suffolk County. At the wake, lots of men had promised my cousin they'd take him fishing. He and his father had loved to do that. They'd wake up at 4:30 am and head out to Sheepshead Bay to catch a 6:30 half-day charter for fluke or bluefish.

After August 6, there weren't any fishing trips.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a reporter, Mary McGrory, told Daniel Patrick Moynihan "We'll never laugh again."  Moynihan replied "Mary, we'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again."

Actual tragedy is weird.  It's not like history, where you know the future. It's more like perpetual uncertainty.  You know it's bad but you have no idea how all that badness will play out. There's a sense of emptiness.

That's how I felt on August 6, 1968.

It's how I felt yesterday, November 6, 2024.

America will never be young again.

TRUMP'S LASTING LEGACY -- THE INDECISION TRAP

Sometime this week I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris for President.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

Long after this election is over, history will write its epitaph.  And no matter what the actual outcome is next week, history will not be kind to Donald Trump or those who supported him.  

If Trump wins, he will govern as he has promised.  

Perhaps his only positive quality is his utter transparency. 

He does not disguise any of the ugliness. 

And the government he will lead will be ugly.  

The economy will crater under the burden of inflationary tariffs and trade wars. Human rights -- indeed, simple decency -- will be discarded as 11 million immigrants, many of them innocent children, are seized, jailed and thrown out.  Constitutional norms will collapse as he creates a Department of Justice that takes political opponents off the field and rubber stamps his every lunatic move. America's alliance of democracy will collapse as he sacrifices Ukraine to Putin and the depravity of Russian rape and pillage. 

The courts will throw up their hands in frustration.  

If they disagree with him, he will ignore their decrees, certain that no consequence will follow. He has been  freed from the rule of law by the permission slip John Roberts created when six conservatives on the Supreme Court voted to give presidents immunity for the crimes they commit on duty and by the lemming-like refusal of remaining Republican office holders to ever impeach and convict him no matter how high his crime or misdemeanor.

But what if Trump loses.

How will history treat him then?

The answer is . . .

No better.

Trump has become worse, much worse, over time. 

What started out as puerile schoolyard bullying in a 2016 campaign no one took seriously has become, in the chilling words of Yale author (How Fascism Works) and professor Jason Stanley, "textbook Mein Kampf."  Political opponents are no longer "Crazy Nancy" or "Shifty Schiff".  They are the Hitlerian "enemy within". His attempted coup on January 6, 2021 proved that his love affair with lying, and with himself, is not merely rhetorical. 

He is serious. 

Deadly so.

But too many cannot or will not see this.

These days, even some who used to see, like the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, have put on blinders.

Why?

I think Hannah Arendt knew the answer.

In a 1974 interview with the French jurist and scholar Roger Errera, Arendt said "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."

"This is because lies," she continued, "by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie . . . but . . . a great number of lies".

Unique among politicians in contemporary America, Donald Trump has done more than any other individual to convince the American citizenry that "everybody always lies". 

His own lies are constant and over time have become voluminous. And because he insists upon and enforces blind loyalty, his lies have metastasized. Though often but not always repeated verbatim, his followers never reject his lies. Instead, and as Arendt foretold, they rewrite them. 

Trump's lie that he won the 2020 election becomes JD Vance's lie that he and Trump were merely pointing out "problems" . . .

Or Trump's refusal for three hours to call off the January 6 carnage at the Capitol becomes Vance's  lie that he merely advocated peaceful protest . . .

Or Trump's departure on January 20 becomes Vance's lie that the transfer was "peaceful" and January 6 is beside the point.

Nor does Trump limit his serial prevarications to the 2020 election and subsequent attempted coup.  

As President, he lied about COVID, pretending early on that it would end with warm weather and later that it might be cured with bleach.  Tens of thousands died as a consequence. Throughout the current campaign, he has lied about abortion, claiming the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade was approved by all. It was not. 

He also lies in claiming the decision jeopardizes no one. 

Three women have died in anti-abortion fetal heartbeat states because they could not get the medical care needed to treat their miscarriages or other complications. Given the lag time in undertaking and then reporting on reviews of pregnancy-related maternal deaths subsequent to Roe's reversal, "there are," as Pro Publica reports, "almost certainly more."

"The result," Arendt explained in her 1967 essay Truth and Politics, "is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end -- is being destroyed."

This is fatal to  democracy. 

Because . . .

It is fatal to judgment.

To our ability to think.

"A people that no longer can believe anything," Arendt concluded in her interview with Errera, "cannot make up its own mind.  It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

This is where we are with Trump.

And it is where we will be even if he loses next week.

Over the course of the last four years, I have always been amazed that there were any people undecided on Trump.  I thought his acts so clear and so reprehensible that no one could really avoid not only a decision but also one that unhesitatingly rejected him. The man is a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, business fraud and charlatan. As demonstrated most recently at last Sunday's rally at Madison Square Garden, his campaign is a foul-mouthed verbal sewer of racism and denigration never before witnessed in American politics.  His fascism is his worst but by no means only disqualifying trait.

How could anyone be undecided?

Now I know.

It's not that people are undecided.

It's that Trump has undermined, and for some even killed . . .

Their ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Or what is true from what is false

Their ability . . .

To evaluate.

To judge.

To think.

Decisions are different from reactions. Reactions are reflexive, automatic.  Decisions at least at some level are considered. If, as Arendt lamented in the face of a culture of lies, we lose "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world -- and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end", decisions become impossible and all manner of reflexive reaction takes over. There are no facts. And therefore no gatekeepers, no experts, no standards. 

Everything can be excused because nothing is true. 

And because there are no standards, opponents can be falsely or at the very least hypocritically judged . . .

Or disgustingly dismissed . . .

Or even jailed. 

All of which, in the current campaign, has been done to or threatened against Kamala Harris . . .

And Liz Cheney . . .

And Generals Milley and Kelly.

Kamala Harris is a normal politician with more or less standard Democratic party positions on the issues.  As Biden's Vice President she participated in an administration that led us through COVID, rescued us from economic catastrophe, created jobs, tamed inflation, renewed NATO, helped preserve the post-World War II rules-based order and appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. In any other time, with an economy the envy of the world, this would be a record that would seal victory at the polls. In any other time, with the threat to women's rights at an all-time high, the margin would not be close.

But we do not live in any other time.

We live in Trump time.

The time of lies and Hannah Arendt's worst nightmare.

An era where, as the internet meme puts it, "he gets to be lawless and she must be flawless."

It's not that people are undecided. 

It's that they can no longer decide. 

I'm voting for Kamala.

You should too.

Do it for your grandchildren.

If you can't decide, do it for them anyway.

History may not treat you kindly.

But they certainly will.