THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

There are many outrages in the (now 99 day old) Trump Administration.

They include hypocrisy,  nepotism,  corruption,  incompetence and dishonesty.

Just to name a few.

But the biggest outrage, and the one that gains the least attention, is the outrage inherent in how he does it.  

Trump's approval rating is at 40% and was lower for much of the past few months, it having advanced ever so slightly in the last two weeks largely as a consequence of the bombing in Syria. These are historically low approval numbers.  In fact, they are the lowest in the history of presidential polling for the first 100 days of any administration.  They reflect Trump's practiced and continuing aversion to the truth, his rampant narcissism and in-your-face "I am the greatest" sheer boorishness, and the fact that, lacking any real commitments on policy that extend beyond a video clip designed to boost ratings, he has been captured by the far right in the Republican Party and is supporting their extreme agenda.  That agenda includes gutting health care, enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, de-funding environmental protection and education, and a somewhat schizophrenic foreign policy in which the Commander-in-Chief talks tough and threatens unilateral action in his service to "America first" nationalism,  while his seconds tour the planet re-assuring a nervous world that we remain committed to our longstanding strategic alliances.

The domestic side of that agenda is radically unpopular and, on foreign policy, the Administration is at no better than break even.

  

As an example of the former, Trump's and the GOP's on-going effort to repeal Obamacare comes in the face of the Affordable Care Act now being supported by 60% of the country.  Americans understand that Trumpcare -- or, more accurately, Ryancare -- would eliminate insurance for more than 20 million people and, in the latest proposal now being bantied about on Capitol Hill, would also likely eliminate coverage for many with pre-existing conditions. The right-wing GOP's new proposal allows states to avoid the ban on exclusions for those conditions that Obamacare enacted and the public overwhelmingly supports.  It does so by allowing states to claim their own plans will result in lower premiums overall and ostensibly equal or greater coverage as a consequence of that lower cost. 

Conservatives claim they can accomplish this hat trick through the creation of high risk insurance pools. 

Good luck with that.  Because . . .

Absent enormous government-funded subsidies, those high risk pools into which all those "pre-existing" diabetics and cancer patients will be thrown will be pools where premiums will  be extraordinarily high and therefore unaffordable for many who need the coverage most.

And when was the last time Mississippi ever voted to subsidize those who can't afford something?

Nevertheless, among the 62 million or so who actually voted for Trump last November, 96% still support him.

This is what is known as a disconnect.

It exists for two reasons. 

First, among that portion of those 62 million voters who are wealthy, Trump is a windfall waiting to happen.  They are willing to forgive and forget his transparent personal failings (narcissism, sexism, dishonesty, and ignorance) in exchange for the millions in tax cuts he promises and the right wingers in Congress are eager to enact. Second, among the middle and poor swaths of that voting group -- in other words, among the rural, white working class that hasn't had a raise in thirty years and is moving down, not up, the economic ladder -- Trump has sold them a bill of goods that holds immigrants abroad, minorities at home, and globalists in D.C. responsible for their economic plight.

The sale was and is fraudulent.  

But those who want to repeal Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society have been making this same  pitch for more than thirty years.

And it is working.

There are really only two ways to improve economic conditions for those in the middle and at the bottom.  The first is to improve economic productivity as a whole, and the second is to both  insure that the gains from any improved productivity are distributed widely on the one hand while re-distributing wealth to those who still lose out on the other.  Fair productivity distribution depends largely on the existence of equal bargaining power between capital, the investing class, and laborers, the working class, and  re-distribution can take many forms -- unemployment insurance, food stamps, housing subsidies, college loans, increased payments under social security, increases in the minimum wage, even old-fashioned work of the sort created by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  

But you can't improve without both.  

And for thirty years we haven't had both.  

Unions have been weakened to the point of practical non-existence and globalism without labor standards has arbitraged wages down even as cheap imports have helped consumers.  You can't consume if you don't have a job, and as a consequence, the lives of all those West Virginians living in poverty (18% of the state's population at last count) have not been improved much merely because tchotchkes in Wal-Mart became cheaper.  Meanwhile, the GOP's love affair with tax cuts and inflated defense spending has put enormous and predictable pressure on any spending designed to redistribute or level the playing field.  In fact, that was the whole point of their tax cuts in the first place.  They were designed to "starve the beast" of government, as President Reagan's first budget director, David Stockman, admitted in a moment of honesty back in the '80s. With high deficits and lower revenues, the safety net has been gutted and even Social Security and Medicare have been put on the potential chopping block.

None of this should sell in West Virginia.

But it does.

Because the right wing's corrupt bargain between Wall Street's rich and West Virginia's poor is that the former get their tax cuts and de-regulation windfalls so long as the latter believe their poverty has its roots in illegal immigration and affirmative action.

Trump did not create that bargain.  

But his neo-fascist campaign and Presidency by insult, thuggish rallies, and fact free propaganda has done more than anything in the last thirty years to seal it.

PRETENSE AND REALITY

PRETENSE AND REALITY

Sooner or later, it happens to them all.

Reality intervenes.  

And what, until then, at least resembled the assumed menu of challenges and options on which one had puzzled for some time and about which arguably workable solutions existed, becomes the rough equivalent of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force.

For JFK, that day came in April 1961, only months into the New Frontier, when he authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA trained para-militarists who counted on igniting ostensibly homegrown opposition to the Castro regime in the expectation that this would lead to the regime's fall.  

For George W. Bush, it came on September 11, 2001, again months in, when a mildly unpopular Presidency  focusing on the education of elementary and middle schoolers in Florida was startled by news that what the CIA had warned them about in August, and about which the President himself had been somewhat dismissive, turned into a full blown terrorist attack on New York City and the Pentagon.

For Donald Trump, that day came yesterday, when Bashar Al Assad unleashed chemical weapons on rebels in Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria,  and North Korea test launched yet another ballistic missile mere days before a scheduled meeting between Trump and China's President Xi.  

Assad's attack killed sixty-five, including eleven children, all of whom writhed in pain from inhaling either sarin gas or chlorine, and injured another 350.   Meanwhile, Trump's Secretary of State appeared to have invited Assad's attack and ignored North Korea's launch.  The day before, he said that Assad's fate was up to the Syrian people, implying that America's long-stated policy that Assad must go had been jettisoned.  And in the wake of the North Korean launch, he said nothing (or, as he put it, "North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.").

For his part, Trump did not do any better.

Though he condemned Assad's use of chemical weapons, he spent a large part of his statement on the attack blaming President Obama. On this view, Obama's unheeded "red line" warning to Assad years ago, before chemical weapons had been used, followed by his accession to an internationally negotiated protocol (under which Syria's chemical weapons were to be destroyed) in lieu of an international military operation, after chemical weapons had been used, is the cause of yesterday's attack, and Tillerson's pass on Assad's on-going status -- along with the implied change in American policy -- is beside the  point.  As to North Korea, among the Administration's words "spoken enough" about the subject have been Trump's own, in an interview two days ago with the Financial Times: "If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will."

Trump is in a box.

In his pretend Presidency of tweets and bombast, everything is clear, winning is inevitable, and all that stands between the (way more often than not) invented failures of yesterday and the promised successes of tomorrow is Trump himself.  In that world, there is health care for everyone without the Affordable Care Act, Executive Orders banning travel from six (and at first seven)  majority-Muslim countries without deference to the Constitution, a right-wing Supreme Court without loss of the Senate filibuster,  and enormous economic growth (north of annual rates of 4%) without trade deals like NAFTA or the TPP. 

He has already failed in his effort to "repeal and replace" Obamacare and (thus far) in his effort to turn his campaign promise of a ban on Muslim entry into a legal travel ban.  The former effort failed because the replacement was almost universally despised. It would have resulted in the loss of insurance for about 24 million Americans while providing enormous tax breaks to the wealthy. That alone should have been sufficient to kill it.  But, in addition, the so-called Freedom Caucus in the House (a group of forty or so hard-right legislators) objected because the replacement bill did not go far enough in getting rid of Obamacare; in addition to getting rid of the individual mandate, the right wingers wanted to in effect repeal the ban on insurance company exclusions for pre-existing conditions and end essential benefits requirements.

Similarly, on the travel ban, Trump's second order has fared no better than his first, even though the second was supposedly written to avoid the constitutional infirmities which plagued the first. Those infirmities were stark -- the first ban created a religious test by favoring Christians in any post-ban entry petitions.  In the case of the second ban, the explicit religious test is gone but Trump's words haunt him (and the courts); put differently, when Trump said during the campaign that he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the country, the judges believed him and now think the second travel ban is just a "Muslim ban" in not particularly good disguise.

How quaint!  

Maybe words matter after all.

Meanwhile,  the GOP's Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, plows on with his pledge that Judge Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed "this week" to the Supreme Court.  The Democrats have announced they will filibuster Gorsuch, thus precluding an up or down determination, and they have the votes to do it.  In response, McConnell has told the Democrats that, if they do this,  he will have the Senate eliminate the filibuster.

In which case, the old politics of personal destruction will merely have led to the new politics of institutional destruction.

The US Senate is considered the "greatest deliberative body" for a reason.  The reason is that it takes sixty votes, a more or less super-majority these days, to cut off debate on most issues.  In other words, if you can't get to sixty, you have to talk some more, i.e., deliberate, and persuade your colleagues that the time has come to vote.  Eliminate the filibuster and the Senate turns into another version of the House of Representatives, where there is no real debate and a gerrymandered majority controls the floor.  This is not to say that the filibuster does not have real costs -- for liberals as well as conservatives, Democrats as well as Republicans.  In fact, for much of the century following the Civil War, it effectively made the passage of any Civil Rights bills impossible.  Now, however, it is just standing in the way of the theft of a Supreme Court appointment that President Obama was entitled to make last year.

Either Gorsuch or the Senate loses here.   Both can't win.

More reality.

And you can't understand it -- or change it -- with tweets.

The same is true with Assad and North Korea.  On the first, Trump has few if any options and none that will be acceptable to Vladimir Putin, whom Trump never criticizes (itself extraordinary inasmuch as he seems to criticize everyone else).  You can put American boots on the ground, enforce a no-fly zone to protect humanitarian enclaves, and/or arm some rebels.  The first option is opposed by the country in view of our less than stellar results in Iraq and Afghanistan; it also runs the risk of becoming open ended inasmuch as the middle east's locals never seem to get around to peacefully resolving disputes the American military is effectively containing by its presence.  The second risks military run-ins with Russian and Turkish fighter jets now up in that air space.  And the third could result in arms winding up in the hands of ISIS or other terrorists.

On the second, the only thing Trump can do to North Korea if he acts alone is bomb their missile sites or invade, and he will do neither, mostly because either approach would likely provoke an attack on Seoul, as well as the re-emergence of China as a real supporter of the North.  The Chinese are not perfect on this issue but they are, as they say, "all we got."  They are keeping Kim Jung Un on a short economic leash and have on occasion voted in favor of UN sanctions against North Korea's earlier missile tests. But China won't allow the fall of the Communist party in the north.  

And since they are what "we got," Trump had better find a way to work a deal with them . . .

In other words,  do what  The Art of the Deal said he was good at.

Unfortunately, in this tweetstorm of a Presidency, where the lead guy -- in love with lies, pre-occupied with past opponents and score settling, and looking at personal poll numbers that drive him to distraction -- has an attention-span not all that large to begin with and infinitesimal knowledge on questions of actual policy . . .

Maybe that too was just pretense.

SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

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.

MEET THE MESS

MEET THE MESS

Well, "Meet the Press" it wasn't.

More like "Meet the Mess".

Yesterday we witnessed an unhinged President at his first solo news conference since assuming the office.  Ordinarily this would be news. In the case of Donald John Trump, however, it is par for the course. Failure is always success.  Whatever he has done is always great. He is always the victim . . .

And someone else is always to blame.

Yesterday, it was the "dishonest media," "bad courts" and, of course, "Hillary."  No one cares anymore.  The 30-40% who are with him 'til the last dog dies just laugh at the so-called "urban" elite, mocking the supposed mockers who for years, it is claimed, have turned up their noses at all those Trump travelers in outside-the-beltway America . And as for the rest of us . . .

We've stopped being surprised . . .

Even as we gape in amazement at the sheer idiocy of it all.

By any objective measure, Trump's first month in office has been a disaster.  

The tweets and lies continue unabated.  

At yesterday's press conference, at least fifteen of his claims were either flatly false or so removed from reality as to amount to that. He repeated the claim that he had won the Presidency by the largest electoral college margin since Reagan (in fact, Obama (twice), Clinton (twice), and the first Bush all exceeded his count).  He took credit for the stock market being at record highs (after having decried as one big "bubble" all the gains during Obama's tenure).  He claimed the press has a lower approval rating than Congress (it doesn't; in fact, the two aren't close).

He asserted that Hillary as Secretary of State -- one of his go to pinatas -- had given away 20% of the nation's uranium (she didn't); that Wikileaks' information dump last year contained no leaks of any classified information (false; it leaked hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables); that he as President had "inherited a mess at home and abroad" (nonsense when compared to what Obama "inherited" -- a 7% unemployment rate and two wars -- in 2009); that he has "nothing to do with Russia" (he and his campaign spoke to numerous Russian operatives during the election; he for years sought business in Russia, as do his sons to this day);    and that . . . 

The roll-out of the travel ban Executive Order two weeks ago was "smooth."

Cue the laughter.

And the subpoenas.

His Cabinet and White House appointees count among them a rag-tag bunch of the uninformed (DeVos at Education, who knows nothing at all about the subject, and Pruitt at EPA, who thinks climate change is a hoax), the uncaring (Price at HHS, who has no replacement for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that could leave 20 million without health insurance, and Mnuchin at Treasury, who made millions as a "foreclosure king" in the wake of the 2008 financial implosion), the unethical (Sessions at Justice, who along with former NSA chief Mike Flynn was part of the Trump campaign's "national security advisory council" but who is now pretending he does not have to recuse himself in any investigation of Flynn's -- or Trump's -- Russian connections, and who won't appoint a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of his boss's love affair with Vladimir Putin), the unconfirmed (Puzder at Labor, who withdrew amid allegations of long ago domestic violence), and the now uninvited (Flynn, the erstwhile National Security Adviser, who was fired after he lied to Mike Pence about what he, Flynn, told a Russian ambassador on the question of sanctions).

Meanwhile, his chief political adviser (Stephen Bannon) has told the media to "keep its mouth shut," his "senior" policy adviser (the guy is 31, looks like he's 17, and basks in ignorance) has claimed that "the powers of the President . . . will not be questioned," and Himself more or less equated the US to Russia when FOX's Bill O'Reilly pointed out that Putin was a killer.  

Said the Donald: "There are lots of killers.  You think our country's so innocent."

The courts have stopped his travel ban. Though he promised yesterday to come up with a new one next week that tracks the Ninth Circuit's decision staying enforcement, that too will be subject to litigation given the known-fact that its purpose (as with the initial order two weeks ago) is to turn the campaign's unconstitutional "Muslim ban" into a rule that can get through courts. There is no guarantee this approach won't work.  Presidents have a lot pf power when it comes to aliens at the border, even if --  pace Stephen Miller  -- that power can be questioned.  

Nevertheless, it is generally a bad idea to start with the notion that your goal is to stop Muslims from coming here.

Or that your Executive Order is merely designed to clothe that illegal object in legal dress.

The Muslim ban itself, along with "the Wall", Trump's grotesquely false view of immigrants as job stealing criminals, and the sad spectacle of mothers being deported as routine office visits turn into deportation ambushes, resulted in yesterday's nation wide "Day Without Immigrants".  

This was a sort of wildcat strike by the nation's bodega owners, gardeners, workers, DREAMERS and their parents. It showed us all where life in America would be without them.  Namely . . .

At a standstill.

Trump is imploding . . .

Claiming he isn't ranting and raving . . .

Even as he rants and raves.

His popularity is at historically low levels (he lies about that too).  His administration is under investigation by the FBI for its contacts with Russia during the election.  His employees are leaking like sieves, so much so that he is threatening the group of them with criminal prosecution.  

And he is getting nothing done.

No budget.  No tax bill.  No ACA replacement. No trade deals.

And no more jobs at middle class wages for all those old economy workers who put him in the Oval Office.

The Republicans in Congress will tolerate this for a long time.  Far longer than the Republicans in 1974, who finally took out Nixon.  The class of '74 was independent and contained some giants (Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater, and Hugh Scott come to mind).  Today's GOP, however, is too sycophantic and those with real courage (McCain, Graham, Sasse) need more company.

The press, however, will be relentless.  They will leave no stone un-turned as they attempt to unearth what's in Trump's tax returns, who said what to whom in Russia during the campaign, what the President knew and when he knew it on Russian hacking, or what portion of that MI6 dossier is true. Trump can squeal "fake news" all he wants. His base may buy it. The rest of us won't.  

And the free press doesn't care what Trump thinks about them . . . or how often he insults them. 

I grew up with journalists.  My father was one and my grandfather worked for a newspaper.    They're used to abuse.  It comes with the territory.

Yesterday Trump tried to control the day and the news cycle.

He didn't.

Mostly because . . .

He can't control himself . . . 

Or the facts.

EXECUTIVE DISORDERS

EXECUTIVE DISORDERS

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

Well, I'm gonna need a bigger thesaurus.

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

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

The running noun is "lies".

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

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

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

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

And then the new week started.

We tried to catch our breath but couldn't.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would then be paying for the wall.

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

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

So he did . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For this act of courage, Yates was fired.  

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

Their boss had to resign less than a year later.

Donald Trump . . .

Meet Richard Nixon.

THE ART OF THE SPIEL

THE ART OF THE SPIEL

So, the art of the spiel . . .

It wasn't.

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

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

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

And then he spoke.

And all the good will evaporated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empty and hollow.

Look at the words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's be clear here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is President Trump's isolationist vision:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are scared to death.

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

Fabulous.

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

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

Which makes Republicans happy . . .

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

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

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

You just keep hitting the snooze button.

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

I have been thinking about Christmas this week.

Actually, I have been thinking about Christmas Eve, which is today. And which, it seems to me, captures more of the essence of Christmas than even the day itself.

Christmas is about anticipation. About what will happen, not what has occurred. It's about the future, whether that future is mere hours in the offing or a millenia away. And it unites, in perhaps a way that no other holiday can or does, the pedestrian with the profound. In fact, it makes the pedestrian profound.

Kids will go crazy tonight. Most won't be able to sleep. Those not afraid of some cosmic retribution will sneak a peak out the window or down the stairs in search of Santa Claus. Others will become inveterate Holmes-es (Sherlock, that is), carefully processing every errant sound from a squeaky baseboard to determine if he has come down the chimney, with care or otherwise, along with a satchel of goodies. A few years ago, a friend told me his son had come into his bedroom in the middle of the night, swearing to his father that "Rudolph was in the driveway."

Two thousand years ago, it was all about anticipation too. We have encrusted that day with layers of theological speculation, so much so that we are now almost in need of theo-archaeologists to carefully remove the layers without destroying the initial insight. It was, after all, about the future, about hope -- cosmic and otherwise. Lots of us call it salvation, and tonight or tomorrow, when many of us cross the church threshold (some for our biennial visit, others for the second time this week), we will hear the ancient story of the incarnate One and be told it was the day we were saved.

Which has, of late, got me to wondering.

What for?

And the best answer I can come up with is . . .

Tomorrow.

And so that's what Christmas is about for me. Tomorrow. All the endless tomorrows. With their hopes and dreams and disappointments. Their risings and fallings. And tears and laughter. Even on the day I die, when tomorrow will be unpredictably exciting. In fact, especially then.

A friend recommended a book earlier this year by a theologian named John Haught. In it, Haught talked about the need to square Christian theology with the fact of evolution. One point he made is that theology should never compete with science, that the truths of the latter are not to be denied by the former, and vice versa. So the earth and all its inhabitants weren't created in six days, the universe (or multi-verse, we really do not know) is billions of years old, the human story represents hardly a nanosecond in this evolutionary time line, and the possibility of intelligent life in spheres beyond our third rock from the sun is hardly remote. The one thing certain is that, whoever and whatever we and our world are, it will not be the same tomorrow.

In fact, in the deep time of our evolutionary tomorrow, it's gonna be very different.

Which brings me back to Christmas. Or more precisely Christmas Eve. The one day when we think about nothing but tomorrow. And really look forward to it.

I am ready this year. All the presents are wrapped. The house is clean (I vacuum). Charles Darwin and Jesus Christ have become bosom buddies in my mind, the former telling me that nothing is forever as the world and its inhabitants constantly morph into newer forms, the latter teaching me that this in itself is a good thing and that somewhere over this evolutionary rainbow there is still a tomorrow that embraces us all.

And I have a shovel ready.

In case Rudolph leaves something in the driveway besides a missing sleigh bell.

Merry Christmas.

(This post was first published on Christmas Eve 2008.  A lot has changed since then. But not my view of Christmas.)