ABOUT LAST NIGHT

In the famous words of Ted Lasso . . .

"Oklahoma!"

President Joe Biden and Donald Trump took to the stage at CNN's studios in Atlanta last night for what was billed as a ninety-minute debate. 

Because their past meetings, largely if not exclusively on account of Trump's incessant bullying and puerile lack of self-control, had degenerated into the political equivalent of a food fight, the network imposed strict rules.  

There was no audience for anyone to play to. Anytime either candidate was not speaking, his microphone was silenced.  Their mics were also silenced whenever either candidate exceeded the time limits imposed for answers and rebuttals.  

Neither candidate was allowed to bring notes or other materials into the proceedings.  

During the two breaks, neither of them could speak to any staff or advisers.

The debate was hosted by two respected journalists, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. They only asked questions.  And while they were excellent in demanding actual answers when none were given, they did not fact-check either candidate's responses.

If all of this was designed to restrain Trump, it worked but only to a very limited extent.  

He was stopped from interrupting and talking over anyone, which in the past had literally made the proceedings unintelligible. He was not, however, stopped from lying or from engaging in the mindless word salad that characterizes all of his extemporaneous riffs.

In the aftermath of the debate, CNN's own fact-checker, Daniel Dale, listed Trump's lies.  As Heather Cox Richardson pointed out early this morning in her Letters From An American, it took Dale three minutes to get through the list.

The list of lies was mind-boggling.

As CNN reported, "Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate."  His "repeat falsehoods included his assertions that some Democratic-led states allow babies to be executed after birth, that  every legal scholar and everybody in general wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, that there were no terror attacks during his presidency, that Iran didn't fund terrorist groups during his presidency, that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has, that Biden for years referred to Black people as 'super predators,' that Biden is planning to quadruple people's taxes, that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 National Guard troops for the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, that Americans don't pay the cost of tariffs, that he is the president who got the Veterans Choice program through Congress, and that fraud marred the 2020 election."

Concluding, CNN finished its report by noting that "Trump also added some new false claims, such as his assertions that the U.S. currently has its biggest budget deficit and its biggest trade deficit with China.  Both records occurred under Trump."

As Cox Richardson explained, the lies "went on and on, and that was the point.  This was not a debate.  It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop . . . It's a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious argument, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them.  Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don't know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them. It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter." Heather noted that Trump did the same thing to Biden in 2020. Ironically, however, "the lack of muting on the mics" then reduced Biden "to simply saying: 'Will you shut up, man'", while killing the mics last night "made the technique more effective."

Cox Richardson wrote that the Gish gallop can be "combat[ted] . . . by calling it out for what it is." 

I, however, have my doubts. 

Last night, my friend and  high school debate coach wrote that "As a reasonably successful high school debater more than five decades ago, I learned a hard reality. If you are devoted to arguing the facts  and reality and your opponent is willing to employ either false information or misconstrued data against your position, it is almost impossible to win an argument.  The great British linguist and theoretician, Paul Grice, established the rule that, in human communication, we normally expect a speaker to be expressing what is true (the first of the Grecian maxims of communication)."

It is, of course, almost impossible for anyone to go into any interaction with Trump expecting him to tell the truth, and it was not the case that Biden did so last night.  And though Cox Richardson thinks the Gish gallop was effective against Biden because he "retreated to trying to give three pieces of evidence that established his own credentials on the point at hand" rather than calling Trump out, the truth is that Biden often was . . .

Well . . .

Lost.  

So . . .

Oklahoma!

What should we do?

Here's my plan.

First, Joe Biden was bad last night. 

Admit it.  

And because a decent enough number of Americans think he is too old to complete another four years as President and may not have either the mental or physical stamina to do so, those of us who support him must confront this issue head on and refute it.  

Last night, Trump challenged Biden to take a cognitive test.  

We supporters should demand more than that.  

President Biden should publicly commit to immediately undergoing a full medical evaluation by an independent physician that includes tests of his physical stamina and mental acuity. If that evaluation does not clear him for the duty he seeks, he should announce he is not running for reelection and free all the elected delegates to choose a new nominee at the Democratic Party's August convention. 

If the shoe were on the other foot, would Trump or the Republican Party do this?

Not in a hundred years.

But we are different from them.

We aren't the party that is about to nominate a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, pathological liar and coup plotting fascist bent on turning America into a 21st century version of what Germany became in the 1930s.

We are better than them.

They run away from the truth.

We confront it.

At the end of the day, Joe Biden has to be fit for duty.  

This does not mean he must exhibit the energy of a forty-year-old or become a poster child for prevagen.  

Performing as president does not require and is not the work of a soloist. It requires a team.  

One of the major reasons Trump cannot be president is that almost all the competent adults who saved him from himself in his first term have abandoned him this time. The list is long and includes most of his former Cabinet officials, two of his former National Security advisers, one former chief of staff and the former Vice President. The team he intends to put together in 2025 will be a rogue's gallery of sycophants and incompetents and his blueprint for governing will involve retribution, recrimination and revenge.

That is not a problem Biden faces at any level.

His Cabinet is first rate. 

Blinken, Austin, Yellin, Buttigieg, Raimondo, Vilsack, Granholm et al. are all superb.  Vice President Harris is an effective spokesperson, excellent communicator and a fighter. Together, this group is more than able -- and much more able than any group Trump can or  will put together -- to roll up it sleeves and continue to help this old but effective man be the continuing presidential success he has demonstrated he already is.

But first things first.

Oklahoma.

THE EVOLUTION OF A CULTURAL FELONY

Late in the afternoon on May 30, a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. 

At that time, in what was clearly a minority view, I thought the reasons not to comment on the verdict easily exceeded those for doing so.

The charge itself -- falsifying business records -- is ordinarily a misdemeanor.  It can be turned into a felony, though it rarely is, if the false records are generated with an intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid in or conceal the commission of another crime. 

In this case, Manhattan's District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged that the other crime was the violation of section 17-152 of New York's Election Law.  That section makes it a crime for two or more persons to conspire "to promote . . . the election of any person to public office by unlawful means".  The DA claimed -- and the judge agreed -- that the unlawful means could be "(1) violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act otherwise known as FECA; (2) falsification of other business records; or (3) a violation of tax law."  

Jury verdicts in criminal cases must be unanimous.  This means that the twelve jurors must all agree on a verdict of either guilty or not guilty. In addition, to reach a guilty verdict, the jury must unanimously find beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed each element of the crime.  

Here, that meant the jury was  required to unanimously find that Trump conspired to falsify records and did so with the intent to promote his election by unlawful means.

Critically, however, the jury in this case was not required to agree on those unlawful means.  So long as all twelve of them thought Trump had committed at least one of the three illegal acts alleged to constitute the unlawful means, that was sufficient.  Some may have thought he conspired to falsify records with the intent to promote his election by unlawful means by violating FECA; others may have thought he did so by falsifying other records or by violating the tax laws. 

Once you take out the sex and Trump, the combination of which turned it into a prurient daily double, the case was actually a boring one.  

There were thirty four "records" -- either checks signed by Trump, invoices from Michael Cohen or ledger entries in the Trump organization's books and records -- the jury had to conclude were false.  And then it had to further conclude that each record had been created as part of a conspiracy to promote Trump's election by unlawful means.  

The evidence of the first was pretty much irrefutable. The checks, invoices and ledger entries were called payments for legal fees where no legal services had been provided. As to the second, the DA was able to prove that, in the wake of Access Hollywood's  infamous "grab 'em by the p**y" disclosure, Trump and his campaign were intensely concerned about any other adverse stories surfacing, which ultimately resulted in Cohen paying off Stormy Daniels and Trump reimbursing the payment.

The problem in the case was whether the pay-off violated New York's election law. 

To do so, the payment (i) had to be for the purpose of promoting Trump's election and (ii) had to itself be made unlawfully. 

The jury obviously concluded it had. 

The first conclusion was hardly surprising.  

Before his 2016 campaign even started, Trump cut a deal with the National Enquirer's  David Pecker, who agreed to warn the campaign of any bad stories in the offing. As part of that deal, the National Enquirer's parent company actually paid for two stories and then did not publish them, a practice known as "catch and kill". Also as part of that deal, Pecker pressed Trump for reimbursement. Because he had already advanced $180,000 for two stories, Pecker refused to fund the catch and kill of the Daniel's story. At Trump's insistence, Cohen then stepped in to kill that story by paying Daniels himself in exchange for her non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

The second conclusion, however, was problematic.

Because . . .

We have no idea whether the jury agreed on what made the payment to Daniels illegal. 

Was the payment a violation of FECA, made in a way that resulted in the falsification of other records, or made in a way that violated tax law? The jurors were free to choose any of these bases and did not have to agree on that choice.

It's possible, therefore,  that Trump was found guilty of a misdemeanor turned felony based on crimes a less than unanimous group of jurors concluded he had committed.  And as a result, it's also possible the conviction was unconstitutional.  Unanimity has always been required in federal criminal trials, and in 2020 the Supreme Court held it was required in state criminal trials as well. Whether that rule was violated here depends largely on whether the required unanimity on an element of a crime can be satisfied where that element -- unlawful means -- is itself satisfied via a menu of possible illegalities, no one of which must be found unanimously.

Following each day of his trial, Trump headed for the media just outside the courtroom.  

Before the cameras, he repeatedly called the judge corrupt and claimed the process was rigged.  

Though he embraced his right not to do so on the witness stand under oath, his courtside comments also repeatedly proclaimed his absolute innocence. 

Much of what Trumps says, on most of the days he says it, turns out to be garbage.  Childish rants at best. Pathological lies at worst.  Following his conviction, however, one thing he said was absolutely true.

"This is not over."

He was right

He has grounds for appeal here and will undoubtedly pursue them.

At that point, the chattering should have ceased.

Because . . .

There was really no news there anymore.

OK, Trump is the first ex-president ever convicted of  crime.  

Add it to his list of firsts.  

The first ex-president indicted on ninety-one criminal counts in four separate jurisdictions. The first president to attempt a coup in the wake of his defeat at the polls.  The first president  impeached twice. The first ex-president adjudicated a rapist. 

Even the salacious stuff was vintage Trump.  Sex with a porn star followed by a blanket denial no one takes seriously.  We always knew he was a sleaze. 

The point is there was not much here that was new. 

But then came MAGA's unhinged reaction.  

And the reaction of its cowardly following.

And all the reasons for not commenting . . . 

Vanished.

Whatever appellate issues exist, the notion that Trump's trial was anything other than a classic example of the rule of law at work is complete nonsense. 

The indictment was issued by a grand jury.  

A motion to dismiss the indictment was denied and the denial was upheld on appeal.  

A jury was chosen randomly. 

The trial court judge bent over backwards in litigating and then ruling on Trump's on-going contemptuous conduct. Any other defendant who behaved as Trump had would have been jailed.  

Trump's lawyers were vigorous in their cross examination of the DA's witnesses. No one listening or watching -- and certainly no one on the jury -- could have failed to understand that the chief witness against Trump -- Michael Cohen -- was a convicted felon and a serial liar.  No one listening or watching could have missed the fact that the porn star was cashing in on her new-found celebrity.

At the end of the day, the documents -- and two Trump loyalists -- did Trump in.  

The accountants' true up as much as anything else proved that Cohen was telling the truth.  The whole legal fees front was a complete fraud.  And David Pecker and Hope Hicks helped seal Trump's fate by making it clear that a plan was in place to kill bad stories and that plan went into overdrive after the Access Hollywood tape.

All of this, however, is lost on MAGA's acolytes.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called People v. Trump  "a sham show trial" in "a Kangaroo Court" by "a sitting US president weaponizing our justice system against a political opponent."  Speaker Mike Johnson called the trial "shameful".  Ohio's JD Vance said it was "a disgrace to the judicial system." Ted Cruz called it "nothing more than political persecution." Marco Rubio out did them all.  For him, "what happened [was] similar to what I grew up hearing about in Cuba."  Trump's senior aide Stephen Miller demanded that "every facet of Republican Party politics and power . . . go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these communists." To make himself clear, Miller tweeted "Is every Republican state AG opening investigations into voter fraud right now?  Is every House committee . . . using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now?" 

To call these statements unhinged is an understatement.

They are irresponsible.

On the one hand, they are false.

Joe Biden has weaponized nothing.  People v. Trump was a state case. So is the Georgia election case against Trump. Biden had nothing to do with either of them. The two federal cases have been brought by a Special Counsel from whom he is insulated by statute; that counsel can only be fired by the Attorney General and then only for cause. The one case, of course, in which Biden has an interest is the current federal prosecution of his son in Delaware for illegal possession of a firearm. He could have probably stopped it by just appointing a different US Attorney. But he didn't.

On the other, the rants of Abbott, Vance, Cruz, Rubio and Miller are dangerous.

People v. Trump was rightly considered the least important of the four cases brought against Trump. At base, it was about the tawdry cover-up of sleazy sex by a foul-mouthed fraud who routinely lies for a living. It wasn't in the same league as  the Georgia or DC election cases, which charge Trump with attempting a coup, or the Florida federal case, which charges him with illegally retaining national defense secrets. 

In support of Donald Trump's on-going effort to destroy the rule of law, however, the MAGA-fied GOP has upended all of that. 

Their rants literally mean no politician can be fairly tried in any jurisdiction that opposes him. No judge in that jurisdiction can preside.  No jury can be impaneled.  By definition, any such trial would be a sham, any such tribunal a "Kangaroo Court" where "proceedings deviate so far from accepted legal norms that they can no longer be considered fair or just."  

The idiocy inherent in such a construct is transparent.

No Democrat could ever be tried in a red state.

No Republican in a blue one.

Any that were would be living in Marco Rubio's childhood Cuba.

Presumably with all the "communists" Stephen Miller is so anxious to eliminate.

Nice job MAGA.

Alvin Bragg convinced a jury that Trump's misdemeanor was a legal felony.

And you've now turned that into a cultural one as well.

MEMORIAL DAY BY THE NUMBERS

405,000 - 416,000 -- Number of U.S. servicemen killed in World War II's war against fascism.

1945 -- Year President Truman declared "Our debt to the heroic men and valiant women in the service of our country can never be repaid. They have earned our undying gratitude. American will never forget their sacrifice."

360,000 -- Approximate number of Union soldiers killed in the Civil War's war against slavery.

258,000 -- Approximate numbers of Confederate soldiers killed in Civil War.

75-80 -- Percent of Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves and were therefore fighting solely for the interests of others who did.

1865 -- Year former slaves organized earliest Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina.

1866 -- Year Waterloo, New York closed its businesses so residents could decorate the graves of fallen soldiers.

1868 -- Year the Grand Army of the Republic's Commander-in-Chief, Major General John Logan, issued his General Order No. 11 establishing "Memorial Day" as  a Decoration Day to honor those soldiers who died in the Civil War.

58, 220 -- Number of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam War.

1971 -- Year Memorial Day was declared a federal holiday.

53, 402 -- Number of U.S. servicemen killed in World War I.

36,000 -- Approximate number of U.S. servicemen killed in Korean War.

2,448 -- Number of U.S. service members (including CIA personnel) killed in military operations in Afghanistan through August 2021.

147 -- Number of U.S. service members killed in first Gulf War.

154 -- Number of U.S. service members killed in second Gulf War.

2 -- Number of Americans with any possible chance of being elected president in 2024.

1 -- Number of crypto-fascists with any possible chance of being elected president in 2024.

1--  Number of crypto-fascists now running for president who have been indicted in four jurisdictions on ninety-one criminal counts.

3 -- Number of those criminal trials against any crypto-fascists now running for president  that will not go to trial before election day.

3 -- Number of institutions that have delayed the criminal trials against any crypto-fascists now running for president 

1- Number of former Presidents and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

2- Number of former Vice-Presidents and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

5- Number of former cabinet officials and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

22- Number of former executive branch officials and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

6- Number of current U.S. Senators and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

7- Number of former U.S. Senators and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

6 -- Number of current members of the U.S House of Representatives and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

19- Number of former members of the U.S. House of Representatives and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

3 --  Number of current Governors and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

14 -- Number of former Governors and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

4 -- Number of other  current statewide officials and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

6 -- Number of other former statewide officials and members of the Republican Party refusing to endorse a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

3 -- Number of people who won't be president but are running anyway and may help a crypto-fascist become president.

1 -- Number of Kennedys doing this who should know better.

1 -- Number of countries that illegally invaded Ukraine, do not have free and fair elections or any other institutions to hold its leaders accountable, are run by a former member of the Soviet KGB, committed war crimes as part of that illegal invasion, eliminated any dissent against its illegal invasion and has killed a prominent opponent of its war.

1-- Number of countries that illegally invaded Ukraine, do not have free and fair elections or any other institutions that may hold leaders accountable, are run by a former member of the Soviet KGB, committed war crimes as part of that illegal invasion, eliminated any dissent against its illegal invasion, killed a prominent opponent of its war and supports a crypto-fascist for president of the United States.

1 -- Number of major American political parties formally endorsing a crypto-fascist for president in 2024.

1 -- Number of major American political parties that appear to have forgotten the meaning of Memorial Day.

41.3 --  Percent of American voters who say they favor electing an apparent crypto-fascist as president in 2024. 

41.3 -- Percent of American voters who appear to have forgotten the meaning of Memorial Day.

GAME CHANGER

The "banality of evil" is a famous phrase.

It was born in 1962. 

That was the year Hannah Arendt published her account of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel for his role in the Holocaust.  Her articles in The New Yorker and her later book's title, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, gave it life.

Since then, a lot of ink has been spilled figuring out precisely what Arendt meant.

One thing she did not mean was that evil itself was banal.

But one thing she did mean was that Eichmann was banal.

And on that point, she was both right and wrong.

She was wrong in thinking Eichmann was not a committed Nazi and anti-semite. He confessed to as much in both a memoir and an audiotaped interview that were only unearthed years after Arendt wrote her book.  

She was right, however, in describing Eichmann's outward affect, how -- in Erving Goffman's telling construction -- he presented himself in everyday life.  There, according to Arendt, he "was terribly and terrifyingly normal", a staid German who observed the law and did his job. 

Arendt has been criticized for reducing Eichmann to a thoughtless bureaucrat who believed in nothing. In her report she turned him into a careerist:  "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement," she wrote, "he had no motives at all."  This was false. But the fact that it was false has undercut the sense in which Arendt's banality theory was right despite itself.

For the Nazi regime to succeed required not just committed ideologues and rabid anti-semites. It required a commonplace appearance.  And there was no better way to manufacture that appearance than by clothing the regime in the “prosaic careerism" of bureaucratic "thoughtlessness", a performance at which Eichmann excelled.  Not every German in the 1930s and '40s was a Nazi or accepted racial extermination.  But those who weren't or didn't kept quiet. And in maintaining that silence, they were aided and abetted by people like Eichmann, people who could treat the Shoah as an exercise in transit management.

In that world, though evil was not banal . . . 

Banality became a useful disguise.

Today, America is in the grip of its own version of banality.

Last Saturday, the House of Representatives passed a $60 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine. Though more than half of the majority Republican caucus opposed the measure, the Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, allowed the measure to come to the floor for a vote and it passed by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin.

After the measure passed, Dimitry Medvedev, formerly Russia's president (2008-2012) and prime minister (2012-2020) and currently its Security Council's Deputy Chair, issued the following statement: "Considering the russophobic decision that took place, I can't help but wish the USA with all sincerity to dive into a new civil war with themselves as quickly as possible.  Which, I hope, will be very different from the war between the North and the South in the 19th century and will be waged using aircraft, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all types of missiles and other weapons.  And which will finally lead to the inglorious collapse of the vile evil empire of the 21st century -- the United States of America."

Read that carefully.  

A high Russian official living in a country that, but for America's money and material would have become a puppet state of Nazi Germany in the 1940s, and but for the west's victory in the Cold War would be living in a communist state where you had to wait on line to get a quart of milk, is literally praying that America's polarized citizens start killing each other. Unable to win an actual war against the United States, Medvedev nevertheless sees victory for his own fascist autocracy -- and not incidentally the absorption of Ukraine --  in America enlarging its war with itself.

Medvedev's statement should be front-page news here in the United States.

But it isn't.

Instead, more than half the Republican members of the House of Representatives -- 112 of them to be precise -- wanted to cut off funding for Ukraine and permit Russia's seizure of that nation, and the titular head of their party, Donald Trump, supported them. 

By all objective measures, Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago and its subsequent conduct of the war there was and remains unmistakably evil.  

Russian soldiers have kidnapped Ukrainian children from their parents and exported them to Russia.  They have raped Ukrainian women and murdered civilians.  Russia's  army has bombed hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, electric utilities and power stations.  Its propaganda arm has made Ukrainians out to be Nazis and the government has completely stifled any dissent against the war within Russia itself.  It has arrested and imprisoned thousands of protesters. It killed the regime's greatest opponent, Alexei Navalny. And the International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted Putin for war crimes.

MAGA's affection for Vladimir Putin is no secret.  Neither is its disdain for NATO.  Over the years, Trump has either accepted Putin's lies or ignored them.  He routinely threatens to end the NATO alliance and openly told Putin America will not honor its NATO treaty obligations if he is returned to the White House.  Meanwhile, his MAGA acolytes in Congress have pedaled false Russian claims that American aid dollars are being used to purchase yachts for Ukraine's politicians. Or, as GOP Rep. Mike McCaul recently put it: "Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it's infected a good chunk of my party's base."

The likelihood of America actually descending into the kinetic killing field Medvedev conjures is almost certainly nil.  The likelihood, however, that its current divisions could metastasize and so weaken the country that it becomes a latter-day Rome, divided at home and unable to do much abroad, is not so remote.  The plans for a second Trump administration include mass deportations, criminal indictments of political opponents, the militaristic  elimination of protest and dissent, a gutted administrative state. a restricted franchise and a radically gerrymandered Congress, all packaged in a straight-jacketed Constitution read through the prism of another century and thus incapable of protecting Americans living in this one.  In this world, the fact that some portion of America's electorate will have endorsed Trump's Houdini-like escape from accountability may by then be the least of our problems.

Nevertheless . . .

In the presidential race that he should be losing by enormous margins, the candidate who (i) orchestrated an attempted coup in 2021; (ii)  has now come within a whisker of insuring Russia's rapine and illegal conquest of Ukraine; and (iii) is planning to turn the country into a fascist autocracy starting in 2025, is actually in a close contest.  

Here are the two most important questions America now faces:

1. How is this possible?

2. What is the way out?

In the past, I have regularly upbraided America's political elites for having constantly refused to end Trump's political life.  The Senate that refused to convict him in 2021.  The Supreme Court that refused to remove him from the ballot earlier this year. The lawmakers who side-lined Liz Cheney.

I will un-say none of that now.

But there is more going on.  

We Americans think about politics the way we think about football.  There are two sides, two teams.  Each has its stars, strategists, and game plans. The contest has rules.  And referees. The coaches work the refs. So do we fans. There's a clock. The teams play. One side wins. The other loses. There's always a next time. It's impossible to take the game seriously.  In fact, we are told not to.  We are told "It's just a game."

This background mindset is so ingrained that it has become ordinary, commonplace, well-worn, hackneyed.

Some might even say . . .

Banal.

And it is, I believe, giving Trump and MAGA a lifeline neither deserves. 

Because . . .

Shouting at the refs, calling the other side cheaters, running out the clock and always (if sometimes only barely) sticking around for the next tomorrow basically describes Donald Trump's political ethos to a tee.  He thinks it's all a game.  And we, all of us to at least some extent, are letting him do it.

There are plenty of folks who think I'm nuts.

John Bolton, for instance.

Like many who actually worked for the man, Bolton is a (now) unvarnished never-Trumper.  Unlike some of them, however, he isn't planning to vote for Biden (he plans to write-in Dick Cheney) and thinks America's institutions more than able to withstand Trump's onslaughts, even if Trump is given a second term.  He is practicing the optimism of close-calls.  It is the view that things will not be worse in a second term because our institutions held Trump back in his first. It ignores the prospects inherent in a different Cabinet, a different (and more MAGA-fied) Republican party, and a different Vice President.

To me it is a bad bet.

What to do?

Sometimes the game gets serious.  

When Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line in 1946, the nation noticed.  

Because of Robinson, and what he represented, the game became more than a game.  It mattered.  And people -- everywhere -- noticed.

American politics needs a Jackie Robinson moment.

Something that will shake us free from the notion that what we now have going is normal.

Here's mine.

A Joe Biden/Liz Cheney ticket.

Stay with me.

And if you are a loyal Democrat, as am I, don't bite my head off.

Kamala Harris is a good Vice President.  Smart, loyal, a great messenger on the key abortion issue, a brave one on immigration, and fully able to assume the presidency were Biden to die or become incapacitated.  This is not about her. It is, unfortunately, about us.  We need to be stirred -- no, shocked -- out of our complacency.  A politician has to not just tell us it's not a game this year; that politician has to demonstrate it isn't.

"If you want something said," said Nikki Haley recently, "ask a man."

But "if you want something done," she continued,  "ask a woman."

We need something done.

Now.

So, if I were Biden, I'd ask Kamala Harris to ring up Liz Cheney with the following:

"As you know better than most, the country is in trouble. Hopelessly divided and entirely too complacent when it comes to all things Trump.  Many hate him. Many don't. But under no circumstances can we afford him . Or tolerate him. Or really risk him ."

So . . .

"I'm willing to step down."

"If you're willing to step up."

"It won't be easy.  You'd be a conservative Republican in a sea of liberal Democrats. You'd have to tolerate us on choice and taxes, on spending that actually supports the middle class, and on the Supreme Court.  And we'd have to tolerate you . . . 

 On the whole issue of succession."

Apart from Bolton's institutional claims, there are also political arguments against this suggestion.  One is that the polls are really not predictive. The Biden/Harris record on the economy, infrastructure and jobs is superb, and voters in actual elections over the past three cycles (one presidential and two mid-terms) have rejected Trump generally and election deniers with particular vigor.  On this view, the voters will ultimately come around, any enthusiasm gap will close, Biden will win a second term and the disaster of Trump will again have been averted.

Maybe so.

But the available data still makes this a close call.  

In the past, at least some of the optimism was based on the view that Trump would be convicted in one or more of his criminal cases.  The three strongest cases, however, are probably not going to be tried before the election and the New York case, apart from what legal experts concede is appellate risk given the need to turn a misdemeanor fraudulent records claim into a felony, has all the tawdriness of Trump's more prurient scandals, none of which have taken him down. If rape hasn't moved the needle, it's hard to see how hiding sex with a pornstar will. 

So we are back to square one.

Kamala Harris should serve in a second Biden administration.  

She'd be a great Attorney General.

Biden/Cheney is not about throwing her under the bus.  

It's about shocking Americans.

And saving America.

EASTER'S TWO MIRACLES

Easter is upon us.

It is Christianity's most important day.

On it, we celebrate the resurrection of an itinerant Jewish preacher who roamed Galilee in the first century of the so-called Common Era.  

We claim a man was risen from the dead.  

We believe it was an act of God. 

It is Christianity's fundamental miracle.

Without it, there is no "Christ".  

Christ is a word, not a name.   

It is a transliteration of the Greek word christos. 

Christos in Greek  means "anointed one". 

It was used to translate the Hebrew word for "one who is anointed".  

That Hebrew word is  "Messiah."

We believe the miracle was witnessed.

Shortly after it happened. 

By followers -- women and then men -- who carried that witness to the edges of their known world.   

Without them, there is no Christ either.

No messengers.

No good news.

No new commandment of love.

It is Easter's other fundamental miracle.

The one that turned a rag-tag group of frightened followers . . .

Into a committee of the courageous.

On Easter, we celebrate Him for saving the world with His Gospel of love.

And Them for letting the rest of us know.

Teilhard De Chardin was a French paleontologist and Jesuit priest.

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity," he said,  "we shall harness for God the energies of love".

"And then," he continued, "for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

None of us can be God.

But all of us can be disciples.

Happy Easter.

THE FIRST CASUALTY

They say truth is the first casualty of war.

But who exactly are the "they" who say this.

So far, I have found three candidates.

California's Republican Senator Hiram Johnson is reported in 1918 to have said "The first casualty when war comes is truth."  Roughly 2500 years earlier, the Greek playwright  Aeschylus ostensibly coined the phrase as a military maxim, though no one can actually find the place in which he coined it.  Others give credit to Samuel Johnson's long-winded version in his November 11, 1758 essay in The Idler: "Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."

Anytime someone these days says "they" or "some people" are saying or have said something, it is a good idea to figure out who exactly those "people" are and what exactly "they" said.  

Like many duties imposed on us of late, this is one we owe to Donald Trump. Among his ubiquitous verbal tics is the now infamous "Some people are saying. . ."  More often than not, however, it is followed by a fact-free fusillade of fabrication.

Or, in a word . . .

Lies.

Of our three "first casualty" candidates, it is probably best to eliminate Senator Johnson and Aeschylus as the original authors.  At least it is probably best to do so if we are interested in using evidence as the basis for any claim of authorship.  Though among the Senator's supporters the remark is supposed to have been said in 1918, there is no source reporting the comment by him at that time. The only document attributing those words to him is a February 1929 edition of the Local Engineers Journal, and the words themselves were in print in Philip Snowden's Truth and the War two years before the Senator ostensibly spoke them.

So . . .

Senator Johnson was probably quoting Snowden.

And unless Snowden had access to writings from Aeschylus that no one before or since has seen, Snowden was probably quoting -- or at the very least inspired by --  the other Johnson, a/k/a . . .

Dr. Samuel.

Dr. Johnson was a polymath. He was a poet, critic, biographer, historian and journalist.  He wrote in Latin and English.  By the time he wrote in The Idler, he had published his renowned A Dictionary of English Language. It set the standard for proper English until supplanted by the OED in 1928. It was also the reason Oxford (finally) gave him a degree.

As a boy, he travelled the economic ladder, his debt-ridden father having eventually put the family into poverty that only a timely inheritance remitted.  As an adult, he suffered from Tourette's syndrome, though no one at the time knew it, and was saved from debtor's prison on more than one occasion by admiring (and generous) friends. What, however, was an unrequited burden to him may have turned out to be a benefit to us.  The tics and outbursts that define the disease laid waste to so many job interviews that writing became a form of refuge. And, as his fame grew, it paid.

The November 1758 Idler  essay is really about the creation of public ignorance.  The bit about war and truth came at the end.  The lion's share of the essay is a critique of the idleness of the rich and the idiocy that too often encourages.  Johnson was a Tory, a devout Anglican, a monarchist and a loyal supporter of his King.  He did not despise England's economic elite.  He did, however, despise waste, especially of the intellectual sort.

"Money and time," he wrote, "are the heaviest burdens of life". The "unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use."

And so . . .

"To set himself free from these encumbrances, one hurries to Newmarket; another travels over Europe; one pulls down his house and calls architects about him; another buys a seat in the country, and follows his hounds over hedges and through rivers". 

All this according to Johnson would be innocent enough were it left there.

But it isn't.

Because, as he put it  . . .

"One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention".

Every audience, of course, attracts its performers.  Adam Smith's famous laws demand as much and Johnson -- a friend of Smith's -- knew this. 

And so it was for those who sought to "read without fatigue". 

They generated, according to Dr. Johnson, "writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read", the largest of whom were "writers of news" filling the pages of what in the middle of 18th century England were mushrooming numbers of morning and afternoon dailies and weeklies. A reader from this century might be forgiven for thinking Dr. Johnson that century's conservative unable to tolerate a free press.  He wasn't.  Puncturing egos and hypocrisy was his calling card, whether they came in the form of British and French imperialists (the "two robbers", he said, of Native American lands) or would-be American revolutionaries ("How is it," he asked "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?").  

What he couldn't tolerate was ignorance.

The product of those who wrote "not to be studied".

The drug for those who "read without fatigue".

At the end of his essay, Dr. Johnson tells us that "Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth." One reason for this is the natural inclination to take one's side, to praise one's soldiers and abhor the enemy. "In a time of  war," he wrote, "the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves and ill of the enemy." Another, however, is the sheer "attention" war's embellished or one-sided "tale of cruelty"  "awakens".  "The writer of news," he said, "never fails in the intermissions of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins, and, if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province."

As I read (and re-read) Dr. Johnson's essay, I wondered whether today's wars fit his template. 

In Ukraine and Gaza, the fit is imperfect.  

Putin and Hamas are clearly offering their publics fictive justifications for wars each of them started.  Their ""writers" are selling wars in which truth is more than the first casualty.  It is a daily one.  As for "tale[s] of cruelty," the "scene[s] of action" here are not remotely "distant".  Cameras are there every day, 24/7.  Ukraine does not need writers to invent cruelty. It is self-evident. And in Gaza, no one disputes the cruelty of civilian deaths. The issue is whether they can be avoided without insuring Hamas's survival and another attack.

Back here at home, however, Dr. Johnson’s warnings fit like a glove.

The world of "writers not to be studied" and those who "read without fatigue" is the world of America's 45th president.  

Like the multiple morning, evening and weekly gazettes that in the 18th century replaced the single national newspaper Dr. Johnson knew for most of his life, our talk radio, cable and internet outlets have overwhelmed the professional journalism wrought by Adolph Ochs when he purchased The New York Times in 1896 and turned hitherto partisan print into an embarrassment.  

And like the writers Dr. Johnson pilloried, with today's scriveners at FOX, OAN, Newsmax and the GOP twitterati, only "contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary."  As Dr. Johnson put it centuries ago: "He who by long familiarity with infamy has obtained these qualities, may confidently tell today what he intends to contradict tomorrow; he may affirm fearlessly what he shall be obliged to recant".

Yesterday was Super Tuesday.  

Presidential primaries were held in sixteen states

As predicted, Donald Trump ran the table in the Republican contests.  He won fifteen states; Nikki Haley won Vermont and today suspended her campaign. Though her vote totals mean a sizeable percentage of GOP voters do not support Trump, and even suggest that a sizeable number  of them will not vote for him come November, he will be the Republican party nominee. 

A singular cancer, Trump and his enablers in Congress and the right-wing news media have injected three lies into a substantial segment of the American body politic:

1. That he, Trump, won the 2020 presidential election;

2. That Joe Biden, now 81, is mentally unable to serve a second term; and

3. That he, Trump, is the victim of a weaponized criminal and civil justice system that unfairly indicted him on ninety-one counts in four jurisdictions; unfairly fined him $450 million for financial fraud; and unfairly found him liable for sexual assault (and $83 million in damages).

As a corollary to these claims, Trump has convinced a substantial number of Republicans that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was some kind of "inside job" fomented by the deep state, that the hundreds of convicted January 6 defendants are really political hostages, and that Nancy Pelosi failed to call out the National Guard or accept protection that was offered.

All of these claims are false.

Trump lost.  Biden is fit. The January 6 insurrection was an attempted coup that Trump advocated and refused to stop. The indictments are based on mountains of evidence from Republicans and Trump staffers and are to be tried in jurisdictions that cross the political spectrum.  The civil verdicts follow full  bench and jury trials, respectively, and are subject to appellate review of any error. And for its part, the jury that found Trump liable for sexual assault was selected from a venire that also crossed the political spectrum.

One of the signal characteristics of fascist or so-called "strongmen" states is the creation of false narratives and the use of mass media to mainstream lies and have the public accept them.  This is what Mussolini did in Italy in the 1920s and Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s. It is also what Pinochet did in Chile in the 1970s and '80s and Putin is doing in Russia today. 

Trump , FOX and their on-line and off-line imitators are following the same game plan.

There are three reasons Donald Trump has thus far survived politically.  

The first is that the American institutions that could have taken him out have tragically refused to do so.  The US Senate refused to convict him after he was impeached for the second time in January 2021 following his attempted coup, and the US Supreme Court refused to remove him from the ballot this week after a full and fair trial determined he was an oath-breaking insurrectionists barred from office under section 3 of the 14th Amendment.  The former was an example of partisan political cowardice that itself knows no end; even Mitch McConnell, who in refusing to convict Trump still held him "practically and morally responsible" for January 6, today endorsed him. The latter re-wrote the 14th Amendment to make enforcement of its anti-insurrection clause dependent on Congressional action; with Trump and the current Congress, of course, that will never happen.

The second is that Trump and his co-conspirators have successfully followed the fascist approach to mass media.  They have seized the media eco-system run by FOX et al., and that system has repeatedly broadcast and mainstreamed his lies.  Absent such a megaphone, nowhere near the numbers who currently (and falsely) believe Trump won in 2020 or Biden is mentally unfit in 2024 would or could do so. Without radio, Hitler would have been a failed artist.  Without FOX and social media, Trump would  be a failed businessman.

The third is that other actors are being taken off the field more or less as a consequence of their own passivity.  The biggest example of this is the mainstream media. They have literally allowed their love affair with an artificial definition of objectivity (i.e., report "both sides") to preclude a thorough search for and commitment to  truth. 

A believed lie is still a lie. 

A violent insurrection and attempted coup does not become a mere protest turned unfortunate riot just because a lot of people have been brainwashed into thinking it was. 

And a dereliction of presidential duty in refusing to stop that attack does not become less derelict because the narcissist in the White House supported the coup or was joined by lawyers advancing the blanketly illegal demand that a sitting vice president unilaterally refuse to count certified electoral votes.

In this contest against American fascism, no one gets to be neutral.  

If you try to imitate Switzerland, we could wind up becoming Germany. 

The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, other national newspapers, ABC, NBC and CBS should stop seeding Trump's lies.  

It won't be that hard.  

Instead of reporting on a poll announcing some enormous percentage thinks Biden mentally unfit (hardly a surprise inasmuch as  they have been fed this for four years by Trump and his acolytes), they should talk to Biden's doctors,  find out whether that is true (the doctors will tell you it isn't), report he is fit (because, in fact, he is), and play that back ad nauseum and absent the false "other" side until the lie is no longer believed. 

Instead of spinning Nikki Haley's candidacy as a pointless tilt at the Trump windmill, they should cast it as the principled effort it was to stop the party of Lincoln from becoming the party of America's Adolf.  

Instead of perfectly balanced powerhouse round tables with the de rigueur Republican apologist (like Reince Priebus), they should give Liz Cheney the spot. She is more than capable of representing any legitimate Republican views and more than willing to kill the illegitimate ones. 

Finally, when it's over, they should turn off their cameras.  After being assessed $450 million for financial fraud and $83 million for sexual assault, no other litigants in America would get to take free shots at the juries or judges who made those decisions.  If Trump has complaints, that's what appeals are for.  

My analogy to Trump as a form of political cancer was intentional.  Lies metastasize.  They make it difficult to discern any truth, not just the specific truth hidden or denied by the specific lie.  And that is what is going on now with Trump and Republican partisans.  He has so polluted the system that his followers are having difficulty accepting any facts.  

President Biden will deliver his State of the Union tomorrow (he is delivering it in March rather than January because the House's petulant haters in the GOP refused to invite him until now, a Constitutional requirement that never use to cause a ruckus). He has a good story to tell.  The economy is humming.  Unemployment is at historic lows. Inflation has fallen pretty much back to the Fed's desired 2%.  Crime is down and America’s infrastructure is being rebuilt. Biden was willing to shut the border and give the GOP almost all it wanted to tighten the asylum laws, but Republicans decided they would rather have an issue than a solution.  So they now own the border crisis.  To this can be added their ownership of the abortion/IVF crisis, as Alabama's judges turned frozen embryos into people after the Supreme Court gave them the go-ahead by overturning Roe, and their ownership of a crisis to be in the one they will create if they ever succeed in their goal of overturning Obamacare, which has now resulted in the all-time lowest percentage of Americans without health insurance.

Tomorrow, however, half of those sitting in the Capitol and at least 30-40% of those watching at home will believe all of this is a lie.  

This reality is not a case of "both sides doing it". 

As Paul Krugman pointed out last month, the macro-economic numbers today are close to where they were in 2019 when Trump was president riding high on the economy he inherited from Obama, and Democrats feel about as good about today's economy as they did about 2019's; Republicans, however, "have gone from euphoria about the economy under Donald Trump to a very jaundiced view under President Biden."  From a different angle, the same is also true on crime. Locally, Republicans and Democrats have the same view on the "seriousness" of crime where they live and the vast majority (more than 80%) do not think it "extremely or very serious".  Nationally, or where they don't live, the percentages who think it serious go up.  For Republicans, however, that percentage is almost twice as high as for Democrats and approaches 80%.

This is a serious problem and it should not be consigned to the opinion pages of our newspapers.

The job of professional journalism is to report the news.  

That job begins by . . .

Telling us the truth.

On the front page.

THIS WEEKEND

This is the only three-day weekend in the month of February.

January had one as well.

After Christmas, however, those are the only two we get until Memorial Day.

Believers, and any non (or other) believers fine with free-riding, try to save us from this work-a-holic paucity of time off with Easter and Passover.  

The latter starts on  April 22 this year and is an eight-day affair. If you are following the rules, work is strictly forbidden on four of them. The former, which occurs on March 31 this year, really begins on Holy Thursday and celebrates Christendom's singular mystery of tragedy and triumph from then until Easter Sunday.

None of this, however, is mandated.

Nor, given the First Amendment, could it be.

Which gets us back to . . .

This weekend.

In January, we took off to celebrate the unique courage and extraordinary work of Martin Luther King, Jr.  On Memorial Day, we will honor the sacrifice of those who gave the most. In a way, both of these secular events are sacred. 

This weekend we celebrate Presidents Day.

Whether it is sacred . . .

Depends.

As regular readers of this space know, the country as a whole has not been able to agree on precisely who or what is being honored.  See "Celebrating . . . Somebody", 2/21/22.  Some states use the day to honor George Washington alone.  Others use it to honor Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Still others honor any who have held the office. 

Some celebrate on a different day in the year.

Delaware doesn't celebrate at all.

In the presidential pantheon, of course, Washington and Lincoln are gods.  

The first saved us from monarchy, the second from slavery. 

At the time they became president, neither result was assured. 

Washington could have served for life.  He went home after eight years. To the aristocrats who would have addressed him as "His Highness" or "His Excellency", he insisted on the simple "Mr. President". His humility was his superpower. When, in 1783, George III was told Washington was going to resign his military commission, the King said "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." 

He did. 

And in so doing entered august precincts so many others  -- Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin -- claim but never inhabit.  

Byron put it best.  

In his Ode to Napoleon.

        But thou forsooth must be a king,
                And don the purple vest

        As if that foolish robe could wring

                Remembrance from thy breast.

        Where is that faded garment? where

        The gewgaws thou wert fond to wear,

                The star—the string—the crest?

        Vain froward child of empire! say

        Are all thy playthings snatch’d away?

        Where may the wearied eye repose
               When gazing on the Great;

        Where neither guilty glory glows,

               Nor despicable state?

        Yes—one—the first—the last—the best:

        The Cincinnatus of the West

               Whom envy dared not hate,

        Bequeath'd the name of Washington
        To make men blush there was but one.

For his part, Lincoln inherited a fractured country on the verge of Civil War.  Once that war broke out, he honored his oath by fighting it and then carefully re-laid America's Jeffersonian foundation.  

This time, however, equality was made real.  

On January 1, 1863, he ended slavery where he could as commander in chief, and in January 1865 he shepherded through Congress  the 13th Amendment that would ultimately end slavery in its entirety. On February 1, he sent the Amendment to the states for ratification.  Nineteen states had done so by April 14, the day he was shot.  The rest did so by December 6.

If Washington's superpower was humility, Lincoln's was eloquence.

Among presidents, he is our Shakespeare.

In 1861, he pleaded with his countrymen, begging them to slow down and take a breath. 

"You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government," he said "while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend it' "  

He also asked them to remember: 

"We are not enemies, but friends." 

"Though passion may have strained," he continued, "it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Three years later at Gettysburg, he authored America's second founding.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent  a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." 

"Now we are engaged," he continued, "in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."  

He believed it could.

He believed it could because on Gettysburg's "great battlefield" lay thousands who had given "their lives that that nation might live."  

He told us the world would "never forget" what those soldiers "did" there.  

About that, he was right.  

He also told us, however, that  the world "would little note, nor long remember, what we say here." 

And about that, he was dead wrong.

He was wrong because, as he put it,  those "honored dead" were exacting a promise from the living.

The promise was that . . .

From them, "we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. 

That . . . 

"This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom".

And that . . . 

"Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The first speaker that day was not Abraham Lincoln.  

It was Edward Everett. 

He was a former Senator, Congressman, Governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of State, the current president of Harvard University and a famed orator.  

He spoke for two hours, followed by the President.  

He later wrote the President, measuring their words.  

"I should be glad," he said, "if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours,  as you did in two minutes."

Last week, in explaining his departure from the position embraced by his fellow GOP Senators opposing aid to Ukraine,  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that "History settles every account." 

He was right.  

As I write, Russia's Vladimir Putin is basking in support bordering on treason from Donald Trump and his MAGA followers in both the House and Senate.  

The majority of GOP Senators voted against an emergency funding package for Ukraine. Even though the Senate bill passed with votes from the entire Democratic caucus and twenty-three Republicans,  and even though the assistance is needed to stop renewed Russian counter-offensives,  the Republican Speaker of the House refused to take up the Senate bill and instead sent his body home for a ten day recess. 

Last weekend, Trump himself  told Russia that as president he would not honor our obligation to defend NATO allies if they were attacked. 

Last Wednesday, he reiterated those comments.  

And yesterday we learned that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny died in the Arctic prison where he was serving a nineteen-year sentence for opposing Putin.  Navalny, who Putin tried to poison in 2020, ostensibly dropped dead while "walking".  The authorities have yet to release his body. 

Trump's love affair with Putin is long-standing.  

They are both crypto-fascists.  

The only real difference between them is that, while Putin operates in a state whose institutions create no check at all on his power, corruption or ability to rub out opponents, Trump operates in one where he is currently subject to criminal  indictment on ninety-one counts in four courts and has been ordered to pay $350 million and $83 million for financial fraud and sexual assault, respectively.

There is nothing to celebrate in Donald Trump or the MAGA GOP.

They are killing democracy at home and abroad.

Washington would not be a king.

Lincoln appealed to our "better angels" and created a "new birth of freedom".

Trump wants to be a king.

And the only angel he respects is . . .

The fallen one.