SEASONS WARNINGS

In this interregnum between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there has been a lot of news.

Most of it has been bad.

In case you're still noticing.

And in those three sentences, I believe I have summarized the core problems facing America today:

(1) The flood of information at rates and in amounts impossible for any of us to process; 

(2) The fact that much of this onslaught is bad; and 

(3) The fact that not noticing it has become a means of survival for many of its victims and a source of power for its proponents.

On Saturday afternoon, there was another mass shooting. This one killed two and injured nine on the campus of Brown University in a classroom where students were taking a final exam days before their Christmas break.  

On Sunday, two shooters killed fifteen people in an antisemitic attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Australia. That same day in Los Angeles, Rob and Michelle Reiner were murdered in their Los Angeles home, apparently by their troubled son Nick. 

On Monday, Donald Trump claimed Reiner, a long-standing Trump critic, had been killed "due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME." (The all caps, of course, are his.)   Later that day, in the face of almost universal condemnation, Trump doubled down on this comment.

In the world in which we now live, and in particular in the country in which we now live, none of this was surprising and none of it shows any sign of stopping anytime soon.

On mass shootings, we have decided that psychology and surveillance are the only solutions and that any form of gun control is either unconstitutional or counter-productive. It does not matter that the assault weapons ban in the '90s actually reduced shootings or that the actual words of the Second Amendment have been ignored in an effort to make common sense regulation illegal. 

At Brown, where the actual shooter is still on the run, critics are upbraiding the university for not having enough cameras in the precise area where the assault occurred and into and out of which the shooter had to travel.

Cameras?

Really?

Last I checked, they never stopped a bullet.

On antisemitism, the debate over Palestinian rights has become a cover for well-organized and well-financed hatred of Jews throughout the world. 

I have a Jewish friend in New York City who is neither a disciple of Netanyahu nor a supporter of illegal West Bank settlements but who is now literally afraid he may be attacked on his own streets because he wears a yarmulke. The same fears were expressed for months by Jewish Australians before Sunday's attacks.

Some people do have more to fear than fear itself.

On Trump, of course, his condemned post was just another act in what has become an endless example of moral degeneracy and mental imbalance.  

Whenever you think he cannot go lower . . .

He exceeds expectations.

I do not have ready-made solutions to any of these problems.

But I do know enabling cannot be one of them.

Following Trump's ugly rant on the Reiner tragedy, The New York Times  ran an article on Tuesday previewing a Vanity Fair piece interviewing Susie Wiles, Trump's current Chief of Staff. She holds the same job in Trump's second term that Reince Priebus, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows held in Trump's first term. 

In the interviews, she claimed that Trump had "an alcoholic personality". Though the president does not drink, Wiles explained that, with "high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink", and that the analogy with Trump is that, like the alcoholic, he behaves as if "there's nothing he can't do."

So, said Wiles . . . 

"Score settling" prosecutions of his enemies, lies about his opponents (she admitted there is nothing in the Epstein files that implicates Bill Clinton, Trump's claim to the contrary notwithstanding), "mistakes" on immigration (like deporting American citizens), or blowing up boats in the Caribbean "until Maduro cries uncle" just come with the turf that is that personality.

This, however, is all a bunch of hooey.

Which Wiles more or less admitted in her interviews.

To function, alcoholics require enablers.

Trump has made sure he is surrounded by them.

And Wiles, in her interviews with Vanity Fair, confirmed she is one.  

According to the Times, she "does not view her role as constraining Trump.  Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far."  The President, of course, is fine with this. Most alcoholics, especially "functioning" ones, would be.  In fact, Trump doesn't even dispute her analogy. In reacting to her interview, Trump conceded his "possessive" or "addictive personality". 

Other fellow enablers in the White House have joined her Amen chorus.  

JD Vance, who Wiles calls "a conspiracy theorist" in the Vanity Fair interview, confirmed her claim with "I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true." He thinks one of them is that Trump won the 2020 election. Russell Vought, the budget director Wiles calls "a right-wing absolute zealot", has no problems with her. "In my portfolio," he said, "she is always an ally . . . And this hit piece will not slow us down." Pam Bondi, the Attorney General who Wiles claims "completely whiffed" on the Epstein files, echoed Vought. She called Wiles a "dear friend" and then said "any attempt to divide this administration will fail."

In the '80s, Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, removed the emperor's clothes by admitting that supply-side economics was a "Trojan horse" that would ultimately benefit the rich and that tax cuts would not generate the growth and therefore revenue needed to close the budget deficit, all of which were the central economic claims Reagan had made in his successful bid for the White House. 

In his own famous words ,Stockman was then promptly "taken to the woodshed".

Things, however, have changed.

Wiles is not being sent to the woodshed.

She's being sent to the head of the class.

As . . .

Enabler-in-Chief.

Memo to Susie:

It never works.

The reality here is that, given his job, Trump is not at all functional.  For all intents and purposes, he has turned the job into half days at the office punctuated by a social media/tv addiction that lasts for some or all of the hours outside the office in which he does not sleep. He does not leave the Oval with a briefcase of binders he later studies.  Either there are no binders or he dispenses with the notion of any study. 

Whatever policy exists is a function of either his own prejudices (for, example, favoring Putin on Ukraine, for reasons unknown but highly suspect, and tariffs on the economy, probably because they were the way the government raised revenue before the Sixteenth Amendment made income taxes, which he hates, legal) or the prejudices of those he leaves alone (for example, Russell Vought on budget cuts and RFK Jr. on the destruction of America's hitherto unequalled public health infrastructure) so long as they are willing to praise him (and in Kennedy's unfortunate case, destroy a legacy).

Meanwhile . . .

The problems mount.

Mass violence.

Affordability.

Antisemitism.

Even on issues where it appears on board, his dysfunctional presidency does not get it right.

Antisemitism is the best example.

The administration stood behind Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It also backed Israel's attack (and launched its own) on Iran's nuclear facilities. In this environment, one would think it wants to confront the current worldwide wave of antisemitism and come up with effective means to remove it.  

But it doesn't. 

And hasn't.

From all I can tell, Trump thinks antisemitism in America resides exclusively in the precincts of Ivy League universities. Since he is certain that liberalism and the so-called deep state that opposes him also reside in those precincts, his attack on Harvard and Brown and Columbia has the advantage in his mind of eliminating two problems. 

In truth, however, it eliminates neither. 

Not the first (because the problem is a lot larger than a cadre of students at elite colleges). 

Nor the second (because the deep state he has conjured actually includes all the experts Elon Musk and RFK Jr. have sidelined and Russell Vought no longer wants to pay).

At this point, the solution to antisemitism is remembering, revising and recommitting.

The world has to remember what happened in the 1940s and beforehand. 

Jews have been vilified, hated and slaughtered for centuries. There is no history in which the peace held or the protection of others worked. Their survival has been entirely a function of their own courage, their own perseverance, their own unity. 

Many non-Jews think the powers-that-be gave them Israel is 1947.  This is false. Nothing was given. Israel had to fight even to exist. It had to fight to actually create one of the two states (its own) authorized by the 1947 United Nations Resolution dividing Mandatory Palestine.

Next, the world has to revise and correct its misunderstandings about those two states. 

The 1947 division could have worked. It failed not because Jews were illegitimate occupiers of a land they never knew or one that was not their own; they have been there for as long as history in any form has been recorded. Instead, it failed because the other side would not allow them to be there in the only form  -- as a nation, beholden to no one, dependent only on themselves -- that could ever make sense to anyone who is Jewish. 

For Jews, the existing and historic alternatives -- pluralism, assimilation, the legal protection of minority rights -- had failed them. 

Repeatedly. 

And often catastrophically.

Finally, after the remembering and the revising, there has to be a recommitment. 

Not to a two-state solution that today cannot exist. 

Rather, to the two-state solution that showed signs of being born in the 1990s. 

When the two state solution is discussed today, those who oppose it say it is impossible either because they do not want Israel to exist (the position of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian government and many Palestinians and other Arabs throughout the middle east) or because they think Palestinian society and culture is inherently antisemitic (the position of those who cite the antisemitic content of Palestinian Authority school curricula and those who think Israel should just seize the entire West Bank).  

So long as either form of opposition exists, two states are impossible.  

The notion, however, that this was always the case is not accurate. 

As recently as the 1990s, the West Bank was not overrun with settlements that are illegal as a matter of international law, and there were significant numbers of Palestinians willing to accept Israel, peacefully coexist, and create a Palestinian state. Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher, former president of Al-Quds University and Palestinian moderate whose own family's roots in Jerusalem extend back more than a millennium, was one of them.

Remembering, revising and recommitting is complex, requires constructive leadership and enormous patience, and will take time.

It requires an all of society approach.

It cannot be done on the fly . . .

In social media posts . . .

Or by an executive whose attention span is at best limited.

It also cannot be done by real estate investors pretending to be (part-time) diplomats . . .

Or by businessmen seeking to line their own pockets.

And it cannot be done in  an environment in which a president flooding the zone with accepted or trivialized outrage, dishonesty and incompetence creates an overwhelming need in the rest of us to shut down just to survive.  

Anyone who does not support Trump, and right now that is about 60% of the country, could literally spend their entire day cataloguing his latest attack on his enemies or on reality and fashioning an appropriate warning and response.  

Because none of us have the time to do this, we turn him off. 

Like alcoholics, he depends on this.

In twelve step programs that provide tools for alcoholics to obtain and retain sobriety, two of the steps ask alcoholics to list all the people they have harmed and then attempt to make amends with those individuals. After overcoming denial, these are two of the more difficult steps to fulfill. Mostly because the list is long and the harm is deep. 

Many enablers -- those who excused, justified, ignored or denied the alcoholism -- are on that list.

In the case of Trump, most of his turn out to be.

And we who turn him off are among them.

The hard to take advice is to not do this.

Don't excuse, justify, deny or ignore.

It is advice especially hard to take this time of year.

Because this is the season to be jolly.

And confronting him is anything but.

As if on cue, last night Trump seized the airwaves to give a loud 18-minute speech repeating some of his standard lies. Gasoline prices are not $2.50/gallon. He did not inherit the “ worst” inflation “in 48 years". He has not cut drug prices by 600 %. 

After the speech, a doctor on CNN called it “manic” and the President “unwell”, and today Robert Hubbell called it “an awful speech delivered in a style of your MAGA loving drunk uncle trying to win a family argument at Thanksgiving by being the loudest person in the room.” 

But Trump had an excuse.

As he told reporters once he had finished . . .

“Susie . . . told him he had . . . to”.