Day 7 of National Emergency: Does a Wartime President Have the Power to Delay Elections?

Our fearless, fearful, fear-mongering draft-dodger leader now embraces a self-proclaimed title of “wartime president.” 

As comically absurd as that moniker sounds, it is true, to the extent that we and the world are at war against the coronavirus. So let’s consider what qualities we might want our president to have.

According to UShistory.org, the website of the Independence Hall Association, some common leadership qualities that good presidents appear to have include: 

*A strong vision for the country’s future

*An ability to put their own times in the perspective of history

*Effective communication skills
*The courage to make unpopular decisions
*Crisis management skills

*Character and integrity

*Wise appointments

*An ability to work with Congress

We want someone with character and integrity who can instill in us trust and confidence. Sadly, from day one of his presidency Trump has spouted falsehoods (let’s call his pre-election humdingers as campaign rhetoric) that undermine any hope we might believe him when it matters. 

Wednesday he promised big news from the Food and Drug Administration. Thursday he said the FDA greenlighted a malaria drug for treatment of COVID-19. But shortly thereafter the head of the FDA had to correct him. The drug had been approved for limited usage and further study as it has severe, sometimes fatal, side effects (https://mol.im/a/8131613).

We’d want a leader who can inspire us with calming, motivating oratory, much like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did during World War II. Or how Obama comforted the nation after several mass shootings. Trump’s communication skills when he isn’t riffing on his standard rally speech are pathetic. He has a hard time reading prepared text, which in itself is anything but inspirational. At the beginning of his presidency Trump made a big to-do about installing Churchill’s bust in the Oval Office. Inspiration is not transferable from a slab or marble. All the more reason to be disappointed by his failure to express compassion for those ill or now unemployed. He is heartless.   

In a crisis we want a leader who recognizes his or her limitations, who can acknowledge his/her imperfections, who can accept the advice of experts, be they generals, scientists or doctors. Trump rated his pandemic response performance a “10,” rejecting his earlier dismissal of the coronavirus as anything more troublesome than the flu. He has repeatedly undercut expert advice. Here are several comments he made about the viral outbreak over the last several months:

“There’s nothing to worry about”

“It’s a Democratic Hoax”

“It'll be over by April”

“It’s a pandemic”

“I take no responsibility”

“I always knew it was a pandemic”

“This snuck up on us” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-coronavirus-snuck-up-on-us_n_5e731e27c5b6eab779424d52)

Hail Caesar: Of all the deaths to be lamented from the pandemic, the most tragic may well be to our democratic republic.

I do not mean to be histrionic. But Trump may as president be able to postpone or cancel next November’s election as part of his emergency powers.

I, along with other commentators, have long opined that Trump would not go lightly from the Oval Office if he loses the election. It doesn’t take a genius to reason out his possible move to negate the election if his polling numbers plummet and he and his hard-core advisors believe he has no way of winning November 3.

The COVID-19 disaster provides the “perfect” shield for a power-grabbing play. Though The New York Times last week said it would be near impossible to postpone the election (https://nyti.ms/2U6p3n5 ), it might easily pass constitutional review given the composition of the Supreme Court.

In the midst of wars and economic depressions no president has invoked emergency powers to deny the American people the right choose their leader every four years. But no president has been like Trump. He has upended norms both domestically and internationally. Moreover, he has cowed the Republican Party into such deep submission that it is doubtful any but a handful of elected GOP officials would object to his postponing an election that might very well cost them control of the Senate and with that future federal court nominations. A sign of their anxiety was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s overture to elderly Republican federal judges to retire so Trump would have the chance to fill their seats with conservative judges. 

Around the world we have seen juntas and strongmen dissolve duly elected governments, proclaiming they did so in the interests of national security and even of democracy, couching their treachery with a vague promise of conducting elections when the emergency has passed. Of course they define when that time arrived, if ever.

Trump has acted like a banana republic president. He has teased about serving beyond the constitutionally mandated two terms. A national emergency declaration abolishing the November election would enable his dream to become a reality.     

The rise of an American autocrat would not occur in a vacuum. Trump has witnessed, envied and even lauded Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, India’s Narendra Damodardas Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammad Bin Salman.

He feels more comfortable with foreign strongmen than with any of his recent predecessors who valued America’s leadership and moral standing throughout the world.

How ironic that an acknowledged germaphobe might achieve his ultimate coronation because of a pandemic. 

Calamity Mitt

There’s an exegesis that major calamities suffered by the Jewish people occurred through the ages on the ninth day of the month of Av, known in Hebrew as Tisha B’Av. Calamities such as the destructions of both temples in Jerusalem 656 years apart, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. 

Tisha B’Av was commemorated over this past weekend, coinciding with Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel and Jerusalem. Need I say more? No, but I will.

Despite what Sheldon Adelson and other near-sighted people, including some of my friends, think, the worst development for Israel would be Romney’s election. As he so mis-ably demonstrated yet again on his “world tour” of England, Israel and Poland, Romney has no idea how to speak diplomatically. After publicly insulting the British, he publicly insulted the Palestinians. No amount of backtracking can remove his lack of diplomacy. Perception is reality in the eyes of the Palestinians. He has given them no reason to believe he would be an honest broker of a fair and equitable peace (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/us/politics/romney-angers-palestinians-with-comments-in-israel.html?_r=1).

Palestinians are industrious. Educated. They have been productive citizens and residents wherever they have been given an opportunity. The tragedy of the Mideast is that too many Arab countries used them as pawns, consigning them to live in squalor instead of absorbing them into society, as Israel did with Jewish refugees who had to flee repression in Arab countries. Romney naively attributed the economic disparity between Israelis and Palestinians to “culture.” That’s but one of the reasons.  I don’t have the time or inclination to expound on the full set of reasons. Perhaps, given all his money, Romney can hire experts who could educate him on the differences between the two peoples.

As could be expected, Romney was well received by Israeli hawks for his no-questions-would-be-asked-nor-criticism-leveled should Israel decide to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Just as candidate Barack Obama in 2008 expressed sympathy for those living near the Gaza Strip under constant danger from missile attacks and condoned retaliation, Romney scored points when he said, “We respect the right of a country to defend itself.” Romney also fawned on the Israelis, and further angered the Palestinians, by saying Jerusalem was Israel’s capital. 

Interestingly, Romney, and for that matter, most other politicians, have chosen to stay silent on a more imminent threat to Israel and other Western countries, namely, the huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction in Syria that could fall into the hands of terrorists or unstable factions should the government of President Bashar al-Assad tumble. Would Israel and the United States risk a foray into Syria to secure these stockpiles? Israel is already distributing gas masks in its northern regions, but the threat would be far wider to the Jewish state, indeed, to the world at large if groups like al-Qaeda or Hezbollah had access to these WMDs. 

Romney always seems to be trying to say what he thinks his audience wants to hear. Back in Great Britain he opined he would restore the bust of Winston Churchill to the Oval Office. Sounds great to an Anglophile. Churchill was the symbol of British grit in World War II, the staunch anti-Communist thereafter, originator of the term “the Iron Curtain.” But what do India and other non-Caucasian members of the United Kingdom think of Churchill? Reading about the fall of the British empire, Gilda has related to me stories of how racist Churchill was, how he felt Indians were inferior people, and thus could be sacrificed (read that, starved) so Anglo-Saxons would have enough food during WWII. Millions in India died after their foodstuffs were shipped to the British Isles. 

Perhaps Romney wasn’t aware of this “small” fact. I, for one, wasn’t aware of it until recently. But I’m not running for president. My comments won’t anger a nation. 

The Blame Game

So the Republican intelligentsia, if I may be so bold to use that descriptor for the Neanderthal-thinking men and women who gave us pre-9/11-ineptitude followed by nine years of tragic war in Iraq and 10 years of tragic war in Afghanistan, are now stumbling over themselves in their haste to criticize Barack Obama for ending our combat in Iraq as of December 31, 2011, conveniently ignoring the fact Obama will be enforcing an agreement forged by his predecessor, George W. Bush the Magnificent, a pact announced during that same memorable press conference in Baghdad when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at the leader of the free world. He missed.

Politics being what it is and always has been, it’s the spin that counts, so it’s not too surprising to find the GOP cranking up the latest stanza in its long-playing song, “Who Lost ?,” as in Who Lost China?, Who Lost Cuba?, Who Lost Vietnam?, Who Lost Iran?.

Safe to say, Republicans have no qualms tagging Democrats for all those losses. Moreover, despite their mismanaging the Iraq and Afghani wars from 2002 through 2008, they are sure to blame Obama and his Democratic cohorts for anything that goes wrong there, while conveniently ignoring any of Obama’s foreign policy successes such as the killings of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki. How disingenuous of the Republicans to give credit to the French and British for the overthrow of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi without recognizing the critical support America provided.

But why should we confine ourselves to chastising just our domestic politicians. How is it that under Bush we aligned ourselves with someone as duplicitous, so openly duplicitous, as Hamid Karzai? The president of Afghanistan told a Pakistani television station last weekend his country would side with Pakistan should it ever engage in a military conflict with the United States or India, both countries with strategic ties to Afghanistan.

Though he has now backtracked, claiming to have been “misinterpreted,” Karzai’s open display of ingratitude for the U.S. investment in lives and resources puts our continued support of his regime into question. Sadly, few if any Republican voices were raised in protest, as they were too busy blasting Obama for closing down the war in Iraq.

Listening today to NPR interview John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire and former chief of staff of the White House under President George Bush the First, I couldn’t stop wondering what political histories these guys read. In coming out for Mitt Romney, Sununu said the best presidents are former governors because they possess executive decision-making experience, unlike Obama who was just a senator and never had to make tough choices. Sununu cited Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as presidents who acted determinedly within their political beliefs.

It’s a nice theory, but doesn’t explain how two former governors—George Bush the Second and Jimmy Carter—screwed up royally, and how such non-governors as Harry S. Truman and three-quarters of those enshrined on Mt. Rushmore (Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln) are considered among our best presidents without having ever sat in a governor’s chair.

Bottom line: It comes down to the man or woman. You don’t have to be an ex-governor, like Bill Clinton, to be a good president. You must be a good politician who has deep beliefs and values that resonate with the American people.

Regardless of who is president, often their most enduring legacy comes from their appointments to the federal judiciary. It doesn’t always turn out the way they intended—Eisenhower thought he was appointing a conservative when he chose Earl Warren to head the Supreme Court. Nixon thought the same of Harry Blackmun, as did Bush the First of David Souter.

Obama’s two Supreme Court appointments, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are quality selections, but he’s left some 80 vacancies on the lower courts. Unless he nominates some judges soon, and fights for their confirmations, any hope of balancing conservative bench strength on the circuit and appeals courts will be lost. That, to me would be the real tragedy of the Obama presidency.

(Editor’s Note: For those counting, this is the 400th blog entry since No Socks Needed Anymore began September 8, 2009. My thanks to all who have stayed with me for the entire run and to those who jumped on board mid-stream.)