OUR LONG DYSFUNCTION

Wednesday, June 21, 2023, was the longest day of the year.

It was also the day the House of Representatives censured California Rep. Adam Schiff and John Durham testified for six hours before the House Judiciary Committee.  The fact that both took place on June 21 is fitting.  Because the longest day was host to yet another episode of America's long dysfunction, one that began in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump and continues to rear its ugly head even as our better angels fight mightily to rescue us.

House Republicans, themselves a dysfunctional lot on so many levels, decided to censure Schiff for investigating Russia's now proven efforts to elect Donald Trump and for leading the first impeachment inquiry of the former president.  Meanwhile, over at the Judiciary Committee, John Durham was ostensibly defending his recently issued 306-page report on the FBI's 2016 investigation of Trump.  In both cases, the GOP claimed that there was no basis for any investigation of Trump's ties to Russia during his first presidential campaign.

The claim is borderline frivolous but emblematic of what counts for deep analysis these days by House Republicans.

First, some background.  

The evidence that Trump's campaign colluded with the Russians is beyond peradventure.  

The dictionary defines collusion as "people working secretly together for dishonest purposes." Hence, when  -- as has been proven to be the case -- Trump's then campaign chairman Paul Manafort secretly shared the campaign's polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian Intelligence Services operative, the campaign was colluding with the Russians.  Similarly, when Don Jr. took a meeting with a Russian lawyer in order to obtain "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, the campaign was again colluding with Russia.  And when George Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy advisor, told an Australian diplomat in May 2016 that Russia had dirt on Clinton and had hacked her campaign emails, the latter of which it began to release two months later, Papadopoulos at the very least created the impression that either he knew someone in Trump world was colluding with Russia or was doing so himself.

That neither the Kilimnik leak nor Junior's eagerness resulted in a federal conspiracy charge, in the first case because Robert Mueller could not determine what Russia did with the polling data or why Manafort gave it to them and in the second because the lawyer provided no dirt, proves the absence of sufficient evidence of the crime of conspiracy; it does not, however, demonstrate the absence of collusion.  And when combined with the fact that Russia undertook a massive (and fraudulent) social media campaign on behalf of Trump, stole 20,000 Clinton  campaign emails that it then released in order to embarrass the Democratic nominee, and was literally invited by Trump -- who routinely praised Putin -- to do more to subvert Clinton ("Russia, if you're listening . . ."), the notion that Trump's campaign was not in cahoots with the Russians is laughable.

Now, however, comes the House GOP and John Durham pretending that any investigation into Trump's relationship with Russia was improper from the get go. Durham gets there by splitting hairs.  His voluminous report states that the FBI should have started only a "preliminary" assessment or investigation of Trump and then stopped. Why this should be so is unclear. The Papadopoulos tip was passed to the FBI at the time Russia began revealing hacked Clinton campaign emails. The hacking and a Trump operatives apparently prior knowledge of Russia's involvement was the initial basis for the FBI opening an investigation in July 2016 and that investigation, ultimately taken over by Robert Mueller, revealed the Kilimnik leak, the Don Jr. meeting, and the enormous scope of Russia's election interference.

Although Mueller concluded he had insufficient evidence (i.e., evidence that would not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt) to charge a federal conspiracy, he had plenty of evidence of obstruction by Trump world.  Papadopoulos lied about the timing of his contacts with and information obtained from apparent Russian operatives; Manafort lied about his contacts and data sharing with Kilimnik; Roger Stone lied about tipping the Trump campaign on Russia’s leaks of Clinton campaign emails; and Trump himself repeatedly gave what Mueller  deemed to be “evasive and misleading” answers to written interrogatories.  As for Don Jr., he just took the Fifth on many questions, and though perfectly legal, it stymied the quest for relevant information. 

We will never know whether the Trump campaign or Trump himself illegally conspired with the Russians in 2016. But there’s no doubt that his campaign “worked secretly for dishonest purposes” or in other words colluded with them.

No American campaign can solicit gifts from foreigners. 

Trump’s did that in spades.

From Russia. 

A country run by a fascist war criminal . . .

Longing for his Soviet past.

The nation fighting that fascist as we speak is Ukraine. It’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been widely hailed for uniting his countrymen and women, crippling Russia’s initial attempt in 2022 to overrun it and install a puppet regime in Kyiv, and now fighting offensively to retake eastern sections occupied by Russian invaders. In July 2019, Trump tried to bribe him into announcing a fraudulent investigation of Joe Biden by withholding appropriated military aid Ukraine desperately needed. Zelensky, however, would not bite and when Trump’s solicitation became public, the House impeached him for the first time. For being the lead prosecutor in that first impeachment, and for previously saying "there was evidence of collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia" (as noted above, there was), the GOP led House has now censured Adam Schiff.

The censure was a farce.

Designed to assuage its MAGA base, and as I put it in this space back then (see "Playing For History", January 17, 2020), the GOP ignored the  "mountain of evidence establishing [Trump's guilt of the first impeachment charges] -- witnesses (e.g., Lt. Col. Vindman) who recount[ed] Trump asking Ukraine's Zelensky in a July phone call to investigate Biden; the actual read out of the call produced by the White House; contemporaneous accounts from Ambassadors Sondland, Volker and Yovanovitch confirming that Trump held up aid to get his demanded 'investigations'; other witnesses confirming that Ukraine knew it was being held hostage; and complete stonewalling by the White House in response to subpoenas for documents and witnesses. No witnesses were given permission to testify.  Those who did simply defied the White House."

In his closing argument to the Senate in that first impeachment trial, Schiff was prescient.  "[Y]ou know that what [Trump] did was not right," he told the Senate, "[a]nd you know you can't trust [him] to do what's right".  "You can trust he will do what's right for Donald Trump.  He's done it before. He'll do it for the next several months.  He'll do it in the election if he's allowed to. That's why . . . he should be removed." On Wednesday, responding to the censure vote, Schiff reprised the warning from that first impeachment that  Trump "would go on to do worse ."

"Of course," said Schiff, "he did worse ".

"In the form of a violent attack on the Capitol".

No truer words were ever spoken

In 2019, Trump held Ukraine hostage, demanding a fraudulent investigation.

In 2021, he sent insurrectionists to the US Capitol to hold Congress hostage, demanding they ignore America's electorate and endorse the demonstrable lie that he won an election he clearly lost.

Today, the GOP continues to be held hostage to that lie.

Censure?

For his work as the lead prosecutor in Trump's first impeachment?

Seriously, America . . .

Adam Schiff  deserves our praise, not our censure.  

In a tradition as old as John the Baptist . . .

He told us what was coming.

The dysfunction is that not enough of us were listening.

The long dysfunction is that those in the GOP House . . .

  

Still aren't.

THE MYTHS OF MAY

Oxford Languages, the umbrella organization of the Oxford University Press whose products include the Oxford English Dictionary, defines the word "myth" as "a widely held but false belief". It lists the words "fallacy", "fiction", "delusion" and "lie" as among the word's many synonyms.  

Oxford Languages also defines the word "myth" as "a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events".  For this definition, it lists "story", "legend", "tale" and "allegory" as synonyms.

The definitions are by no means consistent.  

Legends, as the second definition makes clear, are often designed to explain actual, observed phenomena.  An allegory, as Plato's Cave made clear, can disclose a truth. Those shadows on the wall are what you perceive, not what is real.  And as for God, or the gods, though any decent theologian will concede that religion can only begin where science ends, any decent scientist will concede that religious truth is possible where scientific truth is not.  

The Big Bang may have had a Big Banger.

So . . .

When does an allegory become a delusion, a legend a fallacy, a story a fiction, a belief a lie? 

When does a myth become a myth?

Some cases are easy, even in retrospect and even avoiding the tendency to assume the regress of the past must be judged by the progress of the present.  

Hitler's Holocaust, Stalin's Gulag and Mao's Cultural Revolution were based on lies from the beginning. So was slavery in this country. The notion that an entire race could and should be liquidated -- either actually in the case of Hitler, Stalin and large parts  of Maoism or structurally as with American slavery -- was sufficient in itself to constitute evil. And the absence of specific intent on the part of large numbers of the enablers,  the "banal" part of the evil made famous in Hannah Arendt's telling phrase, did not minimize the inherent depravity. 

Other cases, though more ambiguous, can cross the line for different reasons.  

The racism that pervaded America in the wake of the Civil War and still rears its ugly head even today has over time been both accepted and combatted.  Jim Crow and segregation ultimately gave way to Brown v. Board of Education, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the steady emergence of a black middle class (albeit with economic resources below its white counterpart) and Barack Obama. At the same time, while the Klan is gone, black Americans today are still three times more likely than whites to be killed by the police.  And while the Supreme Court pretends conditions today are so different that federal oversight of jurisdictions which historically disenfranchised minorities is no longer needed, the reaction of many of those jurisdictions has been to create new rules (e.g., limiting early voting, closing drop boxes, computerized gerrymandering) to either suppress the minority vote or render it meaningless.  

Though most of us believe racism is wrong, the myth of equal protection and the reality of discrimination are still fighting an ongoing battle.  

Finally, there is the case where lies or lunacy interact with a myth that in itself is not particularly nefarious but becomes so by virtue of the permitted alchemy.

That is the place MAGA Republicans find themselves in today.

The innocuous myths that form the foundation of the MAGA GOP are myths about the American Constitution and the American citizenry. The constitutional myth is that the founders created a limited federal government and that powers not expressly delegated to it were retained by the states and the people. The citizenry myth is that Christian settlers from Europe came here and created Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill.  

Neither of these myths is inherently dangerous or incoherent, 

Both of them become so, however,  once they are married to Trumpism. 

A pathological liar and narcissist, Trump constantly changes his positions without explanation and oblivious to contradiction. As president he said we should never question the nation's debt or leverage the need to pay it by demanding budgetary concessions; Congress then increased the debt limit three times during his tenure without any conditions.  As an ex-president, however, Trump is now telling the GOP to let the government default unless the Senate passes the House's bill freezing spending at last year's levels for a decade (it won't) and Biden signs that freeze into law (he won't).  

If the House bill actually became law, Congress would have to find $4.8 trillion in spending cuts over that same period, $3.6 trillion of which are not specified in the bill.  The $1.2 trillion that is specified comes from imposing work requirements on food stamp and Medicaid recipients, recouping unspent Covid relief, repealing some of the just enacted energy and climate measures designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions, blocking student loan forgiveness and cutting IRS funding, and is pretty much a laundry list of the usual suspects from whom the GOP typically demands sacrifice -- the poor, the sick, the young and any government agency that goes after tax cheats.  The GOP cannot specify the rest because it refuses to cut defense or raise taxes and does not want to be blamed for cutting Social Security or Medicare, all or part of which would have to happen to get anywhere near $3.6 trillion. 

Default, of course, would be catastrophic.  Both the Congressional Budget Office and Council of Economic Advisers believe it would reverse the employment gains of the last two years and create a recession.  If prolonged, unemployment would rise to 5%, the gross domestic product would decline by 6% and interest rates would skyrocket.  The stock market would tumble, along with the nation's retirement accounts.

Trump does not really care about the full faith and credit of the United States. He does, however, care about staying out of jail and, with  one criminal trial pending and two other criminal investigations coming to a head, he views the presidency as a means to that end.  

For that reason, he is stoking the MAGA base.  

Per usual, part of that stoking involves pissing off his opponents.  

When asked why he had changed positions on the issue of default, he said he was president then but isn't now.  It's hard to understand precisely what that meant (or even if it had any meaning), but if we are looking for answers, Trump's narcissism is as a good a place as any to start.  Thus, when default carried with it the potential to hurt his presidency, he opposed it; now that it has the potential to hurt Biden's, he is for it.

The stoking also involves acts of serial outrage.  

One day he is found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay her $5 million in damages; the next he is re-libeling her as a "wack job" at a CNN Town Hall, thus creating additional damage; the day after that he threatens to out Brett Kavanaugh if evangelicals refuse to endorse him in 2024; and the day after that he demands America default on its legally assumed bills if the Democrats refuse to sign on to unspecified spending cuts. 

Tearing down is all Trump is good at.

Whether he is tearing down a victim he sexually assaulted.

Or . . .

The country he incompetently ran.

Nor do Trump or his MAGA enablers stop at the water's edge.  

Trump himself is part of a crypto-fascist cabal of western politicians currently reminding the world of what it thought it killed in the 1940s.  With Putin in Russia and Orbán in Hungary, they are fact-free authoritarians who thumb their noses at the rule of law and readily endorse violence as a means to political power.  

Putin himself has tried to remove Ukraine from the map and is counting on western weariness and the support of anti-war Americans like Marjorie Taylor Green and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to ultimately forestall Ukraine's defenses and turn a war of attrition into a Russian victory, however pyrrhic. He has openly endorsed Trump, imposed financial and travel restrictions on Americans who have no connection to Ukraine policy but oppose the former president  (e.g., NY Attorney General Letitia James and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger), and now calls the Trump-led insurrectionists who sought to stop the electoral count on January 6 "dissidents" who the American government is "persecut[ing]" (and who Trump himself is promising to pardon if he returns to the White House).

In his CNN Town Hall, Trump claimed he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end in a day.  

He also refused to say how.  

Claims of omnipotent ability are part of Trump's typical pose but have never been remotely predictive.  As to this one, his former national security adviser, John Bolton, dismissed it out of hand. "No rational person believes you can get the Ukrainians and the Russians to agree on how to resolve it in 24 hours," said Bolton, "It shows [Trump is] utterly out of touch with what the war is all about and what the implications of Russia's aggression . . . are all around the world." Earlier in the interview, Bolton explained that the world leaders with whom he interacted when he led the NSC thought Trump a "laughing fool".

Nonetheless, Trump is a fool who admires dictators -- Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Kim Jung Un in North Korea, all of whom he has variously termed smart, savvy, top of the line. open or honorable.

And he is a fool who still stands a chance of again becoming president.

To date, there are only four Republicans opposing him -- former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), all of whom have announced their candidacies, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will do so later today.  Of those four, Trump led DeSantis by 31 points in the May 1 CBS poll, by 23 points in the last ABC News/Washington Post poll, and by 27 points in this week's CNN poll. The other three barely register.  

If, however, Trumpist mythology is the GOP's ball and chain, DeSantis is hardly suited to remove it. 

Both of them activate the MAGA base by appealing to the base's sense of grievance.  For the base, the constitutional and citizenry myths are exclusive.  The myth of limited federal government allows the states to ban abortions and books and the myth of Christian and European settlement allows today's citizens to shut the southern border and eliminate gay bars (and gay rights). 

Neither of them, however, can appeal to those outside the base.

Trump is unable to appeal to moderates and independents because they do not want an unhinged psychopath's finger on the nuclear button.  DeSantis is unable to appeal to moderates and independents because they do not want to make abortion illegal at six weeks, ban books, limit fee speech on college campuses or declare war on Disney and Mickey Mouse.  Moderates and independents also do not want Russia annexing Ukraine and do not much care whether that occurs because the American president is in Putin's pocket (as is Trump) or ignorantly treats Russia's seizure as a mere "territorial dispute" (as does DeSantis).  They will vote for neither of them.

At a baseball game last summer, erstwhile Trump supporter Anthony Scaramucci told me that the Republican party had to eliminate Trump and MAGA root and branch to be successful going forward.  

It hasn't. 

Because the other truth about myths is that they . . .

Last long . . .

And die hard.

 A POLL THAT COUNTS

As a general rule, polls have limited value.  

As any expert will tell you, they are mere snapshots in time.  

When used to predict outcomes, their accuracy is off by anywhere from three to five percentage points.  Pollsters call this the margin of error. That error can be the result of a flawed or limited sample size.  In that case, the predicted outcome is likely to be erroneous because the people polled are not the people who later (and actually) decide. This is especially significant when the poll also reports the views of smaller sub-groups.  

There have been two polls much in the news this past week.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that 36% of its respondents approved of the job being done by President Biden. 56% disapproved and 8% had no opinion.  This was a decline of six points from its last survey conducted two months ago. The poll also showed both former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis beating Biden in a head-to-head by seven points.  And it reported that 54% of the respondents thought Trump did a better job handling the economy, an eighteen-point edge over those who favored Biden on this issue.

To say the poll immediately provoked sustained concern among Democrats would be an understatement.  

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazille said the poll, which was released just after midnight on Sunday, "kept [her] up" and told the administration that it should "wake up".  On Monday, The New York Times reported that "the data has left many Democrats feeling anywhere from queasy to alarmed". And on Tuesday, Robert Hubbell, a Democratic partisan whose blog Today's Edition Newsletter is widely read, reported that he had received "dozens of emails from distraught readers over the last forty-eight hours" in reaction to the poll.  

The poll was not without its critics.  

As a matter of statistics, it is an outlier.  

Other polls give Biden higher marks and the average of all polls in Five Thirty-Eight's daily tracking charts the president's approval rating at 42.5%, which is just about where it has been for the past two months (or the same period surveyed by the Post and ABC).  

At least one pollster, Cornel Belcher, called the Post/ABC poll "trash". 

Belcher, who was Obama's pollster and otherwise claimed to have had "respect for the poll in the past", criticized its methodology as "problematic".  The sample size (1006 adults) was inordinately small, worse (only 900 registered voters) on the Biden/Trump match-up, and more or less useless in evaluating the views of relevant sub-groups (by race and age and of independents, the latter of whom will be critical in 2024). 

In the published poll itself, there was no report of the so-called "demographic" questions or of the numbers of respondents that fell into each demographic group, however defined,  and thus it was impossible to understand the significance of any of the so-called "cross tabs" reporting the approval and match-up results for those specific groups.

Its defenders are noting that the current Post/ABC poll is reporting the same trends the poll reported earlier in its January and September iterations and thus less an outlier than what might otherwise be thought. 

A Nate Cohn wrote in today's Times, "This consistent pattern requires more than just statistical noise and random sampling.  Something else is at play, whether that's something about the ABC/Post methodology, the underlying bias in telephone response patterns these days, or some combination of the above." Cohn then suggested what that "something else" might be, noting that "the ABC/Post poll is nearly the last of the traditional, live-interview, random-digit-dialing telephone surveys that dominated public polling for much of the last half-century".

The bottom line here is that the Post/ABC poll tells us a lot about today but nothing about November 2024.  

As for today, the poll tells us that a roaring economy with 3.4% unemployment and declining (but still annoying) inflation is not making Americans feel better about their particular circumstances (or their particular president).  This is probably because (i) the top-line employment number does not cure the reality that employment is not guaranteed and inequality is still rampant and (ii) unlike unemployment, inflation and high interest rates impose costs on a much wider swath of the public.

As for November 2024, however, the poll tells us nothing.  

Or . . .

Too much of everything . . .

Which gets you to the same place. 

Though the poll makes it clear that Biden is unpopular, it says Trump is too.  It reports that more than 63% believe Trump is a liar, more than half think he should be indicted in connection with the January 6 insurrection and his retention of classified documents, and about half deem Manhattan District Attorney Bragg's indictment appropriate. As for the man who gave us the Court that killed Roe, 78% believe abortion should be between a woman and her doctor.

The second poll conducted this week had none of the uncertainty of the first.

This one was conducted in New York City.

In a federal courthouse.

In it, nine jurors unanimously voted that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s and then defamed her after he left the presidency by calling her claim a "hoax and a lie" and a "complete con job" in October 2022.  (A separate defamation case for comments he made about the case while he was president is still pending.)

There are enormous differences these days between legal proceedings and presidential campaigns.  

The first are governed by rules of evidence and procedure and subject to review.  The second are pretty much no holds barred slugfests.  

In the first, facts matter and witnesses testify under oath and on pain of perjury.  In the second, media groups routinely fact check the claims of the candidates, many of which are found wanting or false.  

In the first, jurors deliberate under strict guidelines concerning the applicable law and the degree of certainty they must reach before rendering a verdict.  In the second, 35% (and before 2020 usually more) of those eligible to participate decide for one reason or another (or none at all) not to, and a sub-set (so-called "low information voters") do so with little thought or analysis.  

Following yesterday's verdict, Trump repeated his (now demonstrably false) claim that he did not know Ms. Carroll and did not assault her.  He attacked both the jury that heard the case and the judge who presided over it. He said the latter was biased because he was appointed by Bill Clinton, the former because it was empanelled from "an anti-Trump area."  This last charge was echoed by Senators Graham, Rubio and Tuberville, the last of whom said that with "a New York jury, [Trump] had no chance."

All of this is standard issue Trump talk and standard issue GOP denial.

In 2020 and the months following the November election, Trump and his GOP enablers twisted themselves into knots claiming the presidential election Trump lost was rigged but the House races the GOP won on the same ballots were legitimate.  

And yesterday, Trump and his enablers all sang from the same "no chance with a New York jury" chorus even though that same New York jury had decided Ms. Carroll did not prove Trump raped her.

As Yogi Berra would say, it was déjà vu all over again.

With Trump, only blue state votes . . .

And blue state juries . . .

Are rigged.

Even if they're not. 

When all the dust settles and smoke clears, two facts will be undeniable and featured prominently in any Democratic campaign for the presidency in 2024.

One is that, on January 6, 2021,  Donald Trump sponsored an insurrection to overturn a legitimate election.

The other is that, on May 9, 2023, a jury declared him to be a sexual predator.

And that is . . .

A poll that counts.

 JOE 2.0

In a rational world, Joe Biden would easily be re-elected as President in 2024.

Both at home and abroad, he has brought America back from the brink.  

At home, the January 6 insurrectionists are being investigated and prosecuted and election deniers were routed in last November's midterms. Unemployment is at historic lows and the inflation caused by Covid's disruption of worldwide supply chains has been brought down.  

Abroad, NATO has been revived and fashioned a united and (so far) effective response to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine.  And though China in the person of its president, Xi Jinping, has decided to resurrect a sort of crypto-Maoism as its Communist Party thwarts the openness an otherwise neo-capitalist economy was making possible, Biden's pas de deux with Taiwan and his  Australian nuclear subs deal, along with Russia's failure in Ukraine, has at least made it cautious on the world stage.  Unlike Putin, Xi does not have to pretend he is strong and -- pace John Quincy Adams -- has no need to go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy".

So, as I said, in a rational world, a Biden second term would be a given.

We, however, do not live in a rational world.

We live in America.

Where reason often takes a holiday.

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Jeb Bush said he would be a chaos president if he won. That was an understatement.  Trump, as it turned, out, was a crypto-fascist and had no qualms about taking down the republic either to advance his own interests or save his own skin. His false claim to have won the November 2020 election and two-month effort thereafter to force state and then federal officials to change the result and make him president, the latter of which culminated in a violent attack on Congress on January 6, 2021 as it counted electoral votes, was the capstone of that fascism. But he had been putting the building blocks in place for years.

As with all fascists, Trump succeeded by taking over an institution that he then used to obtain ultimate power.  In his case the institution was the contemporary Republican Party. Armed with a psychopathic narcissism, an allergy to truth, and an unerring eye for grievance, he convinced non-degreed, rural, white men that their precarious economic condition was the fault of illegal brown immigrants and college-educated city liberals, none of which was true, and then rode a series of narrow primary victories to the Republican presidential nomination.

Once nominated, he never thought he'd win.

But once elected, he thought -- as do all narcissists who get lucky -- the result ordained.

And so . . .

He governed as he had run.  

Lying, demonizing, breaking the law, embracing fellow-travelers.

His inaugural crowd was the largest. Covid was the flu. Bleach was medicine.  Attempted bribery was a "perfect call". Charlottesville's neo-Nazis were fine people. Robert Mueller's investigation was a witch-hunt. Nancy Pelosi was crazy. 

Obstruction of justice became a habit. 

The Supreme Court a disaster waiting to happen.

And Vladimir Putin . . .

An ally.

By January 20, 2021, the Capitol was on lock-down and we were all exhausted.

In 2020, Joe Biden's  biggest selling point was that he was not Donald Trump. 

And it still is. 

It is important, however, to understand why it still is and what that means.

First, the why.

Trump is not going away.  

I said above that fascists succeed by taking over institutions and that the institution Trump took over was the Republican Party.  That has not changed.  Trump still has the support of anywhere from 30% to 50% of Republican primary voters. In the latest polls, he is beating his closest GOP competitor by thirteen points and the others are barely registering. Republican primary voters do not think of January 6 as an insurrection and two-thirds of them think the only criminal indictment  against the former president so far is just a political hit job.  In February 2021, Senate Republicans could have rid the GOP of Trump by convicting him in his second impeachment trial.  But they refused. Even some who condemned him for January 6 refused.  

So, whether they like it or not, Trump still controls the party.

And that control matters.

Because . . .

Unlike Democratic Party primaries, Republican primaries generally award the winner all or most of the delegates at issue rather than that candidate's proportionate share.  In a multi-candidate field, this creates significant structural advantages for the front runner and even greater advantages for a front-runner candidate, like Trump, with a lock on 30-40% of the vote. 

Now the what.

In his first term, Trump was at least bridled.

In his second, however, he would be unleashed.

Trump is not stupid.  He thinks his presidency was hobbled by the absence of loyalists in his cabinet and the federal government's executive agencies and means to insure this is not the case in any second term.  There will not be any Bill Barrs (Attorney General)  or Jim Mattises (Defense) or Rex Tillersons (State) in a Trump II cabinet. Similarly, there will not be any White House chiefs of staff in the mold of John Kelly or H.R. McMaster.  There probably will not even be any White House counsels  like Don McGahn or Pat Cipollone, the former of whom ignored Trump's directive to obstruct justice during the Mueller investigation, the latter of whom demanded he call off the January 6 insurrectionists.  

Bottom line . . .

Trump will not appoint anyone in a second term with even a hint of independence.  

Instead, he will tap true believers. 

Think Stephen Miller or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz.   

They will not criticize him.

And they will not be able to stop him. 

Right now, many of the federal agencies are independent and manned by career civil servants.  Those employees have made careers implementing federal policy without regard to ideology or partisanship.  The FDA, for example, approved mifepristone and was not swayed one way or the other by the abortion debate.  The EPA has cleaned our air and water.  In a world getting smaller and more interdependent, the CDC detects and tracks diseases wherever they are in order to prevent them from coming here.

Trump, however, could change all that.  

Or the Supreme Court -- whose conservatives appear to be seriously considering a review of Chevron deference -- could do it for him.

Which gets us to . . .

The Court.

Whoever is the Republican nominee in 2024, he or she will be hamstrung by that party's extreme opposition to abortion.  In overturning Roe v. Wade last year, the Supreme Court did the GOP no favors. To the contrary, the decision was critical to the Democrats retaining control of the Senate and cutting their losses in the House.  

That dynamic will not change in 2024 and may get worse. Trump himself takes credit with the GOP base for putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett on the Court and thus making it possible to kill Roe.  But he stops there.  (As with many of his commitments, this one was transactional; he needed to be anti-choice to win the GOP nomination in 2016; prior to running, he had been pro-choice.)  

The GOP base, however, does not.  

Some of them want to ban interstate travel for abortions. Others want to ban medical abortions -- which account for half the abortions and 90% of the early term abortions -- and the drugs that make them possible.  Still others want to make it more difficult for states to conduct referenda on abortion, having noticed what happened last year in Kansas when that erstwhile red electorate voted against a proposed constitutional amendment that would have made abortion illegal.

Stay tuned. 

The only real rap on Biden is that he is old.  He is now the oldest person to have served as president and would be 86 were he to complete a second term.  2024, however, is not your grandfather's twentieth century.  Medicine has improved and the aged are not categorically infirm.  While the Biden haters in the GOP and elsewhere pretend he is or may be "cognitively" impaired, there is no evidence at all for this.  And while the GOP talks ad nauseum about this president's age, they are mum when anyone mentions Republican Senator Grassley (who at 89 was reelected to the Senate last year), as they were in the past when anyone mentioned Strom Thurmond (who did not retire from the Senate until he was 99).

Nor do Republican voters seem all that willing to apply a disqualifying age test to their own candidates.

Of the currently mentioned and actual GOP presidential candidates,  the age line-up is as follows:  Pence (63), Tim Scott (57), Nikki Haley (51),Ron DeSantis (44), Trump (76).  Of that group, all but Trump are appreciably younger than Biden. Republican voters, however,  prefer Trump by a large margin. By November 2024, he will be 78 (the same age Biden was in November 2020) and thus no spring chicken. 

But they don't care.

Nor should we.

Joe Biden is not perfect.  He is, however, steady and engaged and always on the job.  

And he delivers.  

Unemployment is at an all-time low, inflation is coming down, wages are going up, domestic manufacturing is returning and the government is putting real money in the pockets of the middle classes with infrastructure spending, prescription drug relief, and expansions of Obamacare.

Biden deserves a second term.

And America cannot risk a second Trump.

I do not know if any other Democrat can beat Trump.

No one does.

I do, however, know that Biden can.

Because he has.

SHUT UP AND WAIT

Trump has been indicted.

None of us know specifically what is in that indictment.

We will presumably discover what is in it this coming Tuesday, when the former president will reportedly surrender to the authorities in New York City and be arraigned.  At that time, the indictment will become public

In the meantime, what should all of us do and how should all of us react?

Here's my answer in three words.

Shut up and wait.

No one, however, is following that advice.  

As far as I can tell, no one is even giving it.  

Instead, on the right, the left and in the center, everyone is sallying forth with their respective opinions on what is merely the latest piece of unique news to be attached to an American president who literally has raised the notion of uniqueness to an art form.  In truth, he has been so unique so outrageously and so often that we have lost count. He has exhausted our ability to attend to his acts, to notice them, to calmly evaluate them.

He has even exhausted our ability . . .

To wait.

Why is this?

Is it all about him?

Or is it about us?

For as long as I can remember, I have been confronted -- attacked really -- by the notion that perception is reality. 

I don't know whether it took root in my collegiate studies of philosophy, or in a now fifty-plus-years devotion to American politics, or in the complexities of interpersonal relationships that have both failed and succeeded.  

But it has always been thus.  

Efforts to embrace or argue from reality were subject to the rejoinder that people simply did not see it that way.  

The critics were astounded by my supposed naivete.

Perception is reality, they would say.

Reality is reality too, I'd retort.

Not in the real world, they'd reply.

This is the sort of conversation college kids (or at least the ones I hung with) have over late-night drinks in dark bars.  It is also the kind of conversations therapists have with patients.  The problem, I think, is that absent analytic rigor, accepting perception as reality or awarding it too much credence is very dangerous.  Perceptions can be wrong. They can also be manipulated. At worst, they can be lies.

For the past eight years, that sort of contest has been played out in the world of all things Trump. He creates his own reality and by doing so makes the perceptions he creates in others their reality.  People then act on those perceptions, often in ways that are unexpected and dangerous.  

The January 6 attack on the US Capitol was the worst example of this. 

Having created the false perception among millions that he had won an election he clearly lost, thousands who lived in that perceptual vacuum stormed the Capitol, stopped an electoral count, assaulted the police and threatened to kill the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

Trump's election in 2016 was another one.  

The economically depressed rural and ex-urban voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who made Trump president in 2016, like the ones who made JD Vance Ohio's Senator last year, embraced the notion that they were the victims of woke elites and illegal immigrants while ignoring the reality of tax cuts for the rich, de-regulation, right to work anti-unionism and outsourced manufacturing, all of which are the real reasons they are struggling. 

Fast forward to today.

Trump and his acolytes are at it again.

Weeks before the indictment was even announced, the former president warned of "potential death and destruction" were he charged.  And once it was announced, right wing commentators and virtually every elected official from the Republican Party immediately condemned it as an un-American assault on the rule of law. Mark Levin called the indictment an act of "tyranny", a "grotesque, Stalinist, Maoist-type action".  Mike Pence called it "outrageous".  Kevin McCarthy said it was an "injustice" and "an unprecedented abuse of power". Governor DeSantis said he'd refuse to obey the law if he was asked to extradite Trump to New York, and Tucker Carlson suggested it might not be a good time for anyone to get rid of their AR-15s.

None of them have seen the indictment.

But all of them have condemned it.

The now announced case of People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump is going to be a long slog.  After the indictment is made public on Tuesday, it will take at least a year and a half for the case to conclude.  The former president is represented by competent counsel (full disclosure: one of his attorneys is my friend).  There will be motions to test the sufficiency of the indictment, a period of discovery in which the DA will be required to disclose all of his evidence (both the good and the bad for his case), jury selection, a trial at which Trump and his lawyers will get to cross examine the state's witnesses, jury deliberation, a verdict and possible appeals.  Between the beginning and the end, the case may change.  In fact, some or all of it may end long before any trial.  

Far from evidencing an assault on the rule of law, the whole process will be testimony to its continued existence.

The rest of us should stifle any advice to react on cue and let that happen.

In other words . . .

Shut up and wait.

OUR DAY

In the more than fifteen years I have been writing Discovery, Democracy and Devotion, I've only mentioned or written about St. Patrick's Day  twice.  The first time was in 2016.  On the actual day that year, I gave a lecture at Mt. Aloysius College in Pennsylvania entitled Voices of Immigration - Old and New.  Two weeks later, a version of that lecture appeared here under the title A Terrible Beauty. 

The next year . . .

I took on the day itself. . .

On the day itself.

On this St Patrick's Day, I wonder  if either  has stood the test of time.  

So I dusted them off to find out.

And here they are.

Saint Patrick's Day from March 17, 2017.  

Followed by A Terrible Beauty from March 30, 2016.

                                       *    *    *    *    

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

Today is St. Patrick's Day.

This means the Irish diaspora across the world will parade, drink and . . .

Talk.

All the parade go-ers -- and watchers -- will be festooned in sweaters, hats and shamrocks  that form  a sea of kelly green. Whether fueled by grain or grape, or by their own unquenchable desire to share, many will be loud.  A large number will sport buttons that read "Kiss Me, I'm Irish." 

Pay those buttoneers no heed.  They don't mean it.  What they're really saying is . . .

"Listen to me, I'm Irish."

Talk -- I have discovered --  is the activity that most closely captures the Irish soul.  It's an escaping soul.  You cannot be the product of organized famine, or suffer the pain of separation its survival ordained, without an almost genetic need to run away.  

So, we Irish have been running away.  

For centuries.    

From the land and language of our birth. And from the arms and British nation that enslaved and impoverished us.

But you cannot run from memories.  You cannot escape them.  

So ours is also a becoming soul.  We tell the stories of our history. We invent and regale.  We massage our past so that it does not poison our future.  We . . .

Talk.

At home, I am known as a storyteller.  This is not always a compliment . . .

Essentially because I tell the same stories . . .

Again and again. 

Sometimes the stories change.  Actually, they change in some respect, minor or major, all of the time. That's because stories are as much about what is happening now as they are about the facts recounted from some far away (or near-away) . . .

Then.

My father once told me that you "should never let the facts f**k up a good story."  At the time, I found this bit of advice either incongruous . . . or the product of the martini he was then drinking. Later, however, and long after he gave up the martinis, he soberly repeated the injunction.  The oddity is that he was a journalist.  He made his money getting the facts right. 

So . . .

Why this disdain for facts, for the very bread and butter of his (and my) life?

I figured that out today, St. Patrick's Day.

Fact must be respected.  They cannot be ignored.  

But neither can they be allowed to enslave.  

They have to empower us, not paralyze us.

In a weird way, the current President of the United States gets this. That may be the reason Irish Catholics voted for him in substantial numbers last November.  He never lets the facts get in his way. 

But we Irish need to be very careful here.  Trump isn't engaged in Irish story telling. To the contrary, he is massaging the past in a way that will poison the future.  In grossly distorting Obamacare, defaming immigrants, insulting his opponents (all of them), belittling the intelligence services, demonizing Muslims, and falsely accusing his predecessor of felonious wire-tapping, he is inventing a past that did not exist and was not tragic in order to create a future that will be.  

And we Irish cannot afford to aid and abet him in this effort. 

Because . . .

Between hope and history, the former is always the better choice when the latter is a tragic one.

But only then.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

                                         *    *    *    *    

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

Here's the weird part.

I may have to thank Donald Trump.

Who got me thinking about immigration.

I am Irish and proud of it.  My full (and formal) name -- Cornelius Patrick McCarthy -- shouts Irish from the rafters.  I will regale any who listen with tales of great grandparents and grand uncles and aunts from Cork who came and manned the mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts and the precincts of New York City.

Of course, I am not  actually Irish.  I am American.

And though Americans whose grand parents were born in Ireland  can become dual nationals, I am not one of them either.  All my grandparents were born here.  In fact, that fourth paragraph is a bit of a stretch.  

Because, truth be told, three quarters of my great grandparents were born here as well.

So, is this whole Irish thing a big put on?  Am I just one of those white-haired, fair-skinned, unmistakably celtic-looking pretenders who wears green,  eats corned beef (which the Irish themselves do not eat),  and dodges drunks  on Paddy's Day?

Or am I the real thing?

In fact, what is the real thing?

And that's where The Donald comes in.

After the insults, adolescent narcissism and misogyny,  Trump's signature move in this presidential season has been his stand on immigration.  There are three parts to his dance. First, there is "the Wall."  "A nation without borders is not a nation," says Trump; what he really means, however,  is that "a nation which can't keep out illegals is not a nation."  So Trump will build a wall across the 1,954 mile border between the US and Mexico, and every time Mexico complains, the wall will get bigger.  

Second, there is the racist xenophobia.  At the announcement of his candidacy, Mexican immigrants became "rapists" and "criminals" -- who were "not you" -- being sent north by a country off-loading its undesirables.  

Finally, xenophobia and nativism on immigration is side-carred with religious bigotry as a tool in the fight against terrorism. In this phase of Trumpism, the need for better intel and -- in Europe -- interstate coordination and information sharing is either jettisoned (or put on hold) as the principal approach in exchange for a wholesale ban on non-citizen Muslim entrants into the country until the government "can figure out what is going on."  It is apparently irrelevant that the government has already "figured out" that the vast  majority (99.99%) of Muslims are not terrorists.  

Or that most terrorist acts since 1985 have been committed by non-Muslims.

It's very easy to chalk all this up to Trump's inherent flaws.  He is a clown, a charlatan and a con-man. He has no respect for truth or facts.  He is immature in ways that are both clinical and scary.

Nevertheless, his views on immigration are shared by a large group of Americans who share none of these flaws.  Which begs the ultimate question.

Which is . . . 

Why?

Here is my answer.

Trump is plowing very fertile ground.

At least three myths define the story of immigration in America.  The first is the myth of the melting pot and its first cousin -- assimilation.This is a myth about history. It claims that, in our nation of immigrants, everyone who came somehow morphed into an androgynous American whole.  The second is the southern border myth; this is the one Trump highlights with impunity in  his "a nation without borders is not a nation" mantra; it treats the line between Mexico and the US as inherent (and sacred) when in fact it was accidental (and utterly profane).  The third is the illegality myth, the notion that the number of illegal or undocumented aliens is increasing and reeking economic havoc, principally in the form of wage suppression.

These are myths because none of these claims are factually correct. As a general rule, immigrants historically have learned English and integrated into the American economy. They have not, however, assimilated, at least not in the sense set forth in the dictionary, which defines the word to mean one who conforms to or resembles the group. In fact, to the contrary, immigrant groups stuck together and still do.  Each group brought its distinctive cultures, foods, and prayers to these shores. They may have acquired a new identity, but they did not lose their old one.

The southern border myth is equally mistaken.  There was nothing pre-ordained about our southern border,  and it certainly cannot be used to define the nation.  The border itself was the product of a war -- the Mexican-American War of 1846 -- fought largely as a consequence of a linguistic dispute over which river properly constituted the Rio Grande separating the two countries.  Texans thought it was the southern Rio Grande and Mexicans thought it was the northern one, which Texans called the Nuesces.  Today that dispute would be arbitrated.  In 1846, however,  it became the pretext for a show of force designed to provoke an attack that would allow the US the seize the greater part of what was then northern Mexico (and is now our southwest plus California).

It did.

And then the US did.

One of the ironies is that the Mexican-American War was itself rooted in the earlier war between Texas and Mexico, an earlier war caused by Mexico outlawing slavery in 1829 and making American immigration into Texas (then a Mexican province)  illegal.  This, however, did not stop the Americans, who entered illegally anyway and then later fought for and won their independence. (Remember the Alamo!)

The irony, of course, is that Americans were illegal immigrants into Mexico long before any Mexicans violated "our" southern border. Another irony is that, once the US prevailed in the war, the largest part of the new southwestern US and California was composed of hitherto Mexican citizens and was marked by an Hispanic culture that left its imprint on law, architecture, and names.  Today, the oldest capital city in the US is not located in New England or Virginia.  It is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  And the coast of California is not dotted with cities and towns named for dukes or English shires. The names are largely those of Catholic saints provided by Spanish missionaries.

In any case, so much for the sanctity of the southern border.  It definitely established a boundary.  It did not, however,  define a culture or a nation.

Then there is the illegality myth, the myth that more illegals are entering than leaving and that they are doing some kind of permanent damage to our economy.  It is false on both counts.  On the one hand, the population of undocumenteds or illegals has declined significantly over the last nine years and more are now leaving than coming.  On the other, economic studies have shown that immigration -- including the work of undocumented immigrants -- is a huge plus for both the economy as a whole and even for low income workers.  In fact, President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers estimated in 2008 that American workers actually make $30 billion annually in wage gains as a result of immigration.

So, where to from here?  

Trump is only the latest xenophobe.

There is, however,  no way we can even hope to make him the last unless we eliminate the myths.

And tell a new -- and more accurate -- story about our "nation of immigrants." 

In that new narrative, America is not a melting pot.  It is a mosaic.  It is stitched together to be and remain whole.  But its parts are distinct -- multi-colored and multi-textured.  Each of us who claims immigrant heritage (and, since most of us must, even those who blindly ignore it) is a hyphenated American.  (Or, as Will Ferrell put it in a recent SNL skit, "Unless your name is Running Bear, we are all anchor babies.").  What makes me American are the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, not the the line drawn between me and Canada or me and Mexico. 

And what makes me Irish are my ancestors and (therefore) my genes. There is nothing phony about it.

The poet William Butler Yeats once wrote: 

                                Now and in time to be,
                                Wherever green is worn,
                                Are changed, changed utterly:
                                A terrible beauty is born.

Though he  was speaking of the Irish Rising of  1916, his words are as apt for the Irish immigrants who peopled these shores by the millions in the 19th century.  In art, literature, music, politics and sport, those immigrants changed the face of America.

Which today basks in the "terrible beauty" they -- and all their immigrant neighbors -- created.

PS --  A larger version of this essay was presented as the Spring Honors Lecture at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania on St. Patrick's Day.  For any who are interested, the link to that lecture is available here

                                       *    *    *    *    

In the 2017 piece, I said we like to talk.

We like to write too.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE OF OUR UNION

In 1963, President Kennedy sent a general and a State Department official to South Vietnam to report on conditions there. When they returned, the general reported that the American-backed government in Saigon was widely supported, the Viet Cong were disrespected and  South Vietnam was winning the war.  He advocated that America stay the course. The State Department official said that the Saigon government was corrupt, the Viet Cong were gaining respect and South Vietnam was losing. He said disaster was imminent.

After listening to them, Kennedy asked a question.

"You two did visit the same country, didn't you?"

On Tuesday night, President Biden delivered his state of the union address to Congress and the American people and Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders followed that with the GOP's response.

For close to an hour and a half, President Biden told us the state of the union was  pretty good.

Unemployment is at fifty year low.  Inflation is coming down.  Manufacturing jobs are returning. Democracy has been rescued.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, however, was having none of that.

According to her, the state of the union is . . .

Old 

("At 40, I'm the youngest governor in the country.  At 80 [Biden] is the oldest president in American history.") 

Confused 

("I'm the first woman to lead my state," she said, "and he's the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is.")

And crazy 

("The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.")

All of which, sixty years later,  raises JFK's question anew . . .

You two did visit the same country, didn't you?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

For the past forty years, the yin and yang of American politics has fluctuated between Republican presidencies and Congresses committed to winner take-all economics and cultural conservatism on the one hand and Democratic presidencies and Congresses that have had to either reverse economic slumps or clean up economic disasters while defending old civil rights and fighting for new ones on the other.  

Twelve years of Reagan and Bush I were answered by eight years of Clinton. Eight years of Bush II were answered by eight years of Obama.  And four years of Donald Trump are now being answered by Biden.  

During that same period, fourteen years of Democratic Congresses in the Reagan/Bush and first two years of the Clinton era were replaced by twelve years of Gingrich's (and Hastert's) Republicans, who in turn were replaced by Pelosi's Democrats (four years), Boehner's and Ryan's Republicans (four years), Pelosi's Democrats again (four years) and now Kevin McCarthy's Republicans.

Over this time frame, the arguments of both parties have changed.

And to understand the real state of the American union circa 2023, it's important, I think, to understand those arguments and those changes.

Start with the Democrats.

Between 1980 and today, they have gone through two fundamental changes.  The first began in the 1980s and came to fruition in the Clinton years. The party moved away from its New Deal or Rooseveltian (as in FDR) roots, conceded that globalization was a reality, helped at some level in creating the new architecture of globalism with things like NAFTA and other trade deals, but stood firm in preserving Social Security and Medicare and in continuing to fight to preserve the historic gains of the '60s and '70s on civil rights and woman's rights.  This approach conceded a lot to the so-called free market and actually helped create the enormous gap in wealth between the richest Americans and everyone else.  Labor was weakened and jobs were off-shored. 

The second is occurring now.  

It involves an effort to articulate and pass an economic program that actually is not winner take-all but instead creates opportunity and some security for the middle and lower middle classes and the poor. Think of things like Obamacare, childcare credits, student loan forgiveness, and infrastructure spending and in-country manufacturing that generates well-paying, non-college degreed jobs.  It also involves a continuing effort to preserve woman's rights and minority rights and a willingness to enlarge those  rights to recognize historically marginalized communities (like gays and lesbians), protect new ones (like the trans-gendered), and re-imagine the scope of some old ones (like Me-Too). 

Now to the Republicans.

They too have gone through two fundamental changes in the past forty years.  

Unlike the Democrats, however, their changes have been process more than policy changes.  

They have changed how they campaign for office, how they message, how they target voters and attempt to win.  The change started with Newt Gingrich and reached its zenith under Donald Trump. In a word, they now demonize their opponents.  Democrats became corrupt, unpatriotic, girly-men in the Gingrich years and first decade of this century and then were graduated to baby-killers, radicals, socialists, losers, electoral thieves, anti-white racists and the woke mob as we moved through the first decade of this century to the Tea Party and Trump and today.  The natural consequence of this evolution was the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the attempt by an actual mob to overturn a presidential election.

The other process change is that, over the past forty years, the Republican Party has eschewed traditional norms and exercised raw power to obtain its desired results.   Examples include impeaching President Clinton essentially over lying about sex, refusing to allow President Obama to fill Justice Scalia's Supreme Court seat ostensibly because it became vacant in an election year, voting to advance Justice Coney-Barrett to the Court even though it was an election year, using the filibuster to stop Obama's lower court appointees but abolishing it to put Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and playing chicken with debt ceiling increases anytime a Democrat is in the White House (but not otherwise).

These changes have had electoral consequences for both parties.  

For the Democrats, and even though it has in the new Biden administration started to address the problem, its historic working-class base has eroded, especially among white, non-college educated men living in the mid-west and the south.  Its coalition is now composed of metropolitan and suburban voters and includes women and minorities.  Because its voters are  geographically concentrated, the party has a hard time winning in the south and the rural plains.

As for the other side . . .

Since 1992, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election but one.  It has for the most part been non-competitive in big cities and surrounding suburbs.  It is largely a southern and plains state party. It's ability to win the presidency is a function of the electoral college (which made Bush II president in 2000 and Trump president in 2016).  Its ability to win or even be competitive in the Senate is a function of each state having two senators regardless of size. And its ability to win the House is based entirely on gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The two parties now have little to nothing in common.  

The Democrats attempt to govern the old-fashioned way.  They try to persuade independents and non-affiliated voters in an effort to create governing coalitions and pass laws.  The Republicans do no such thing. They appeal to their narrow base and otherwise divide and incite to get that base to the polls.  Other than supporting tax cuts for the super-wealthy, which they rely on to fund their political operation, and wrapping themselves in the flag that was desecrated on January 6, they invent problems that do not exist (e.g., anti-white racism, or the teaching of so-called Critical Race Theory or gender identity in grammar schools), all in an effort to create anger in and generate and retain the loyalty of working-class voters who get no benefit from their winner take-all economics. 

Some of their biggest personalities (e.g., Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Green) are preternaturally rude and regularly incite violence in an effort to get their way or cower their opposition. After 45, a genuine narcissist and pathological liar, it is hard to believe that any of his erstwhile supporters would now attack his successor as a "liar"  or "crazy". But their level of hypocrisy is off the charts, even for politicians. 

So . . .

What is the state of the union?

It is  schizophrenic.

On Tuesday night, playing to type, Governor Sanders bathed herself in the patriotism of former President Trump's 2019 Thanksgiving visit to the troops in Afghanistan, reporting that a soldier had yelled "Mr. President, I reenlisted in the military because of you." Left unsaid was that same soldier's reaction a little more than a year later when the president for whom he reenlisted incited an attempted coup to stay in the White House.  Otherwise, she pretended that an anti-white, trans-gendered, gerontocracy was destroying the freedom of millions of Americans by indoctrinating children, mandating vaccines and opening the southern border.  "I'm for freedom," she said, "[President Biden is] is for government control." 

None of this is true.

The border is not open. The notion that schools are teaching kids to be anti-white or change their sex is laughable.  And Covid is well contained, largely as a consequence of the (expired) mandates Sanders so blithely condemned.

In the meantime, unemployment is at an all-time low, inflation is coming down rather rapidly, wages are going up, domestic manufacturing is returning and the government is putting real money in the pockets of the middle classes with infrastructure spending, prescription drug relief, and expansions of Obamacare.

In truth, President Biden and Governor Sanders do not live in the same country.

Fortunately, however, the one Biden lives in . . .

Actually exists.