Imagine If Trump Were Jewish and Had to Seek Forgiveness for His Offenses

Come Sunday at sundown Jews the world over begin a 10 day period of inner reflection. Starting on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and culminating on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, the time is known in Hebrew as “aseret yemai teshuvah,” the 10 days of repentance. 

Just imagine if Donald Trump were Jewish. And orthodox. I know it’s farfetched, but who would have thought Ivanka would convert and be orthodox. 

Anyway, I bring this up because with the onset of Rosh Hashana many Jews engage in a repentance practice called “mechilah.” 

As no one is immune from a fall from grace, particularly as it applies to our dealings with other human beings, mechilah provides a custom to seek and obtain forgiveness from those you might have offended, knowingly or unwittingly, over the previous 12 months. 

Prayers and acts of repentance for transgressions against god’s commandments may secure divine forgiveness. But wrongs committed against another person require two-step absolution. God alone does not grant forgiveness for interpersonal failures. Only the person one has offended can absolve the transgressor before god may intervene. 

So Jews go around asking for mechilah, for forgiveness. 

Return now to the opening premise. Just imagine how peripatetic Trump’s next two weeks would be if he had to seek forgiveness from all he had offended in the last year. 

Where to begin? John McCain? Too late. But there are plenty more on his list from whom to solicit forgiveness. 

Jeff Sessions would be at or near the top of the list, as would Omarosa. Michael Cohen, for sure. Long time favorite target Hillary Clinton would be joined by his new Twitter and campaign rally foil, Maxine Waters. 

A special corner of his list would be dedicated to law enforcement and the intelligence community. Robert Mueller. James Comey. Andrew McCabe. Peter Strzok. Lisa Page. John Brennan. James Clapper. Bruce Ohr. Rod Rosenstein.

Politicians, both domestic and international, engendered Trump outrages in the last year: Jeff Flake. Bob Corker. Chuck Schumer. Nancy Pelosi. Theresa May. Angela Merkel. Kim Jong-un. Justin Trudeau. Of course, a special  measure of forgiveness would be asked of the as yet unknown administration insider and member of the “resistance” who contributed an anonymous, scathing depiction of the Trump presidency to The New York Times. 

Then there are the journalists who have vexed Trump to public insult: Carl Bernstein. Don Lemon. Jim Acosta. Joe Scarborough. Mika Brzezinski. Bob Woodward. 

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations are people, Trump would also have to seek mechilah from Google and Twitter, from Amazon, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. 

Mechilah is generally expected to be a one-to-one forgiveness ritual. But in Trump’s case, perhaps a communal approach might be in order as he seeks mechilah from all Mexicans and from all the Latino families he traumatized by forcibly separating children from their parents when they sought asylum entry into the United States. His disparagement of the Muslim community, at home and abroad, also calls out for forgiveness.

But perhaps the most deserving recipient of Trump’s mechilah plea would be the American people, their values and their institutions which Trump has dishonored and abused time and again. 

We cannot expect our leaders to be perfect. But as was said of John McCain in a tearful eulogy by his close friend Lindsey Graham on the floor of the Senate, “He taught me that honor and imperfection are always in competition. I do not cry for a perfect man. I cry for a man who had honor and always was willing to admit to his imperfection.” 

McCain would be considered a “ba’al teshuva,” a master of repentance. You don’t have to be Jewish to earn that honorific. 

Timing of Trump Presidency in the Balance

In life, it is said, timing is everything.

The future of Donald Trump’s presidency, it may be said, hinges on timing. If one believes the dumpster-in-chief will fire special counsel Robert Mueller, the question becomes not why, but rather, when.

If he wields the twitter ax before the November elections he would galvanize an already white hot opposition, perhaps fueling enough rage to flip the House and Senate into Democratic control. Impeachment proceedings would surely follow in the new year when the next Congress convenes.

He may, therefore, wait to dump Mueller, along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein until after the elections. But that route risks providing Mueller with more than seven full months to further his investigation of Russia’s influence and interference in the 2016 elections and the Trump family’s ties to Russia. 

Does Trump want, in his mind, to be a political piñata seemingly forever? According to CNN, Mueller has indicated he has four main topics he would like Trump to address through questioning: his “role in crafting a statement aboard Air Force One that miscast Donald Trump Jr.’s campaign June 2016 meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, the circumstances surrounding that Trump Tower meeting as well as the firings of FBI Director James Comey and national security advisor Michael Flynn” (https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/21/politics/mueller-four-main-areas-questions-trump/index.html).

Though he has repeatedly said he would welcome talking with Mueller, Trump’s propensity to fabricate and dissemble could place him in jeopardy of perjury. It is hard to imagine any intelligent lawyer permitting Trump to appear under oath before Mueller. Of course, that presumes Trump would listen to any lawyer. He believes he always knows best.

During his campaign Trump boasted he would hire the best people (considering how many firings, resignations and abuses of taxpayer money his appointments have racked up, it is startling to think anyone has any confidence in Trump’s capacity to select competent, honest people to serve in his administration). 

Trump lambasted George W. Bush for his foreign policies, particularly as they affected the war in Iraq. So one wonders how he could hire John Bolton as his new national security advisor. Bolton was a prime contributor to Bush’s foreign policy team (https://nyti.ms/2pz9SnY).

Bolton is as hawkish as they come, giving credence to speculation that Trump is surrounding himself with voices that prefer to counsel combat versus conflict resolution, be it with Iran, North Korea or any other trouble spot. 

Timing, again, comes into play. Trump wanted a tougher team behind him, with Bolton and secretary of state nominee Michael Pompeo, rather than General H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson, as he prepares to meet with North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un and reaches a decision on staying in or abrogating the Iran nuclear deal. 

In the context of what is good for the country or what is good for Trump, he might favor hostilities as history has shown that at least at the beginning of combat the public rallies around a president. 

In the end, however, a sufficient number of voters will come to their senses. As long as the Democrats do not choose an unelectable alternative, Trump’s tenure in office is just a matter of time ticking off until January 2020, or sooner. 

Keeping Up With Trump and Other Dangers to the Republic

The president is being investigated for possible obstruction of justice, but like watching a duck swim serenely on a pond, there’s a whole lot of action—in Washington—going on under the surface, much of it hazardous to the progressive state of the last 80 years.

Last week Politico initiated a new feature: “5 things Trump did while you weren’t looking.” It is difficult, depressing, but required reading, for it goes beyond the orange-topped menace. Trump or Mike Pence or any Republican in the Oval Office would be doing much the same.

Here are links to the articles for first two weeks: 

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/06/09/five-policy-changes-trump-this-week-000455

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/06/16/5-things-trump-did-while-you-werent-looking-week-2-000462

 If you’re not already reading Politico, this series is a good reason to begin.

If you’re not already too bummed out, spend 35 minutes listening to Nancy MacLean tell Leonard Lopate of WNYC about the origin of the conservative movement’s plan to deconstruct government. MacLean is the William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. Here’s the link: http://www.wnyc.org/story/engineer-rights-libertarian-takeover/

A Breadth of Fresh Air: I listened Thursday to Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interview former vice president Joe Biden. It was refreshing to hear a reasoned discussion absent of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement. It got me wondering if we have become enmeshed in an era when intelligent, civil dialogue no longer is expected or the norm. 

Let me not give a wrong impression—neither Gross nor Biden hid their disapproval of Donald Trump. But they did so in articulate, non abusive language and discourse, so different from what so often passes for acceptable practice on talk shows and during public forums.

If you have 40 minutes, do yourself and the country a favor by listening to their discussion: 

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15cad59c689d41d1

Talk To Me: Whenever the subject of talking to oneself comes up I volunteer that I do. I talk to myself, I say, whenever I want good conversation.

Now that The New York Times has published results of studies showing the benefits of talking to oneself (https://nyti.ms/2sWvKc3), I guess we can expect more public displays of private patter.

For some 20 years or more we have seen lots of people babbling as they walked. General reaction at first was that more crazy people were walking among us. It was as if Elwood P. Dowd had developed the procreative trait of his friend, Harvey, the 6’ 3½” rabbit invisible to all but Dowd (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harvey_(film)&oldid=781895785). Only upon closer inspection did we come to realize cellular phone technology was at play.

Of course that meant it was harder to pick out the actual crazy people talking to themselves as they ambled among us.

For all the benefits of talking to oneself noted in the studies perhaps the perils of internal conversation can best be observed from the public admission of our fearless but scare-inducing talker-in-chief. In his famous or infamous interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump made the following admission about his reason for firing FBI director James Comey:

“And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”

And that’s how we have arrived at the point where Comey went before a Senate committee to say before the American public and the world, with klieg lights shining and cameras rolling, the president of the United States is a liar.

Many of us may have thought it but few if any would have had the courage and the character to say it in so public a forum.

Many of you might also have thought Trump is an idiot. In case you missed it, here’s an Op-Ed piece that explains the origin of the word “idiot” and how it might be conferred upon our fretful leader: https://nyti.ms/2se1igv. 

Beauregard Sessions Cares More for His Honor Than for Info on Russian Election Interference

The news business being what it is, the attempted assassination of Republican congressmen Wednesday morning in Alexandria, VA, pre-empted the horrific, deadly London apartment house fire as the lead story throughout the day. Both events co-opted our attention from the more important ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the Trump administration’s seeming lack of interest in safeguarding our national heritage.

Perhaps the most damning piece of testimony from Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ testimony Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee was his admission that he knows nothing more about Russian activity “than what he has read in the (news)paper.”

Asked by Senator Angus King (I-Maine) asked if he believed Russians interfered with the election, Sessions said, “It appears so. The intelligence community seems to be united in that. But I have to tell you, Senator King, I know nothing but what I’ve read in the paper. I’ve never received any detailed briefing on how hacking occurred or how information was alleged to have influenced the campaign.”

Sessions went on to acknowledge he never asked for or attended a briefing from the intelligence community or read a report of their findings. 

Is it possible that our standards for public officials have dropped so low that our top law enforcement officer cares not a whit about actions that could destroy our democratic ideals? And that Trumpettes, masquerading as U.S. senators, coddling favor with their egotistical, autocratic chief, do not show any inkling of consternation or anxiety about the assault on our most cherished right as citizens?

His voice dripping with righteous indignation, Sessions defended his honor against any suggestion he colluded with Russians or knew of any such activity by Trump campaign associates. If dueling were legal, you could easily picture Beauregard—that really is his middle name,  his full name being Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III— slapping the side of Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) face with his glove and demanding satisfaction for his persistent, some might say impolite and impolitic, questioning. 

Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) had hoped his colleagues “would focus their questions today on the Russia investigation,” but he might have been equally well-advised to ask Sessions to be similarly focused, as the attorney general revealed little interest in uncovering the veracity of Russian interference in the 2016 elections or even the widely reported contacts by campaign officials with Russians. That incredulous position prompted comedian Stephen Colbert to say Tuesday night Sessions “really seems to know nothing, which explains why he was the first senator to endorse Trump.”

As political theater the hearing provided some fireworks and little by way of information as Sessions invoked a premature claim of executive privilege on behalf of Trump, an odd practice as executive privilege, which can only be invoked by a president, usually must be cited prior to testimony before Congress. As Trump did not make such a claim, Sessions refused to answer questions just in case Trump would at a later date seek executive privilege. 

What the hearing did provide, however, was the complicity of Republican senators in the administration’s efforts to reject the validity of the allegations that the Trump campaign had contacts with Russians and that former FBI director James Comey was fired because he aggressively pursued an investigation into such activity. GOP senators failed to seek the reasons behind Comey’s dismissal, why Sessions would not answer questions about conversations with Trump, and why he had not immersed himself in the details of the intelligence reports.

The hearing also provided another example of Republican antipathy toward female senators, particularly if they are Democrats. For the second time in a week Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was interrupted, admonished, during her questioning of a witness. Earlier this year Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was cut off on the Senate floor when she tried to read a letter from Coretta Scott King. And let’s not forget that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) chose a group of 13 men–not one woman—to draw up a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. 

Trump: The Inscrutable, Promotional President

With rare exceptions most people have public and private faces, revealing the latter only to their closest confidants or under extreme duress. Countries and political movements operate similarly.

Saudi Arabia, for example, professes to oppose radical Islam but through its funding of madrasas throughout the world it is the number one propagator of extreme Wahhabi Islam that is anti-Semitic, dismissive of any infidels and behind much of the carnage by radical Islamic terrorists.

It is useful and instructive to assess a politician’s, a government’s, a movement’s true intentions by monitoring their words and deeds expressed to and understood by their primary audiences. Take the PLO, for example. Even as some of its leaders say they accept Israel’s existence, it continues to teach children hatred of Jews while lauding terrorists who kill Israelis, even rewarding their families with payments if they die in their efforts. 

It’s a two-sided street. Over the years Bibi Netanyahu has expressed support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but almost everything his government has done in the West Bank territories has undermined the prospect of that ideal becoming a reality.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. Casting himself as the great dealmaker Trump envisions being a peace broker between the Palestinians and Israel as well as a coalition builder of “moderate” Arab states to defeat ISIS.

With an oversized Santa Claus bag of military goodies, Trump curried favor with the Saudi royal family and the dictators of other Sunni lands, but how credible is he in their eyes? Did the rhetoric their ears heard in Riyadh erase what they witnessed and heard for nearly two years, months upon months of attacks on Islam, including in March 2016, “I think Islam hates us”?

Which are his baseline beliefs—his diplomatic use in Riyadh of the phrase “the crisis of Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires,” or the catchphrase “radical Islamic terrorism” featured in all his rallies and in his attacks on President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for their failure to similarly identify Muslim attackers?

One wonders if the Arab Sunni world will be as discriminating as U.S. courts have been concerning Trump’s candor on the campaign trail. In restraining implementation of Trump’s travel ban from seven predominantly Muslim countries, courts have determined candidate Trump’s words are a more realistic reflection of his inner beliefs than his post-election public posturing.

Trump shows his true, unfiltered face when he tweets or departs from prepared remarks. 

Apparently under duress from the probe of alleged Russian influence on his campaign during the election, Trump seemingly revealed his lack of understanding of constitutional restrictions on the powers of the presidency. If James Comey is telling the truth, Trump asked the then-FBI director to stop investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia. It has also been reported that Trump asked the director of national intelligence and the director of the National Security Agency to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. 

Under duress to score political wins, Trump has turned his back on campaign promises never to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid funding. His proposed fiscal 2018 federal budget might not get passed as is, but it is instructive as to Trump’s true feelings. 

His budget calls for an $880 billion cut in Medicaid, a $191 billion cut in food stamps, a $72.5 billion cut in aid to the disabled, and a $21.6 billion cut in welfare over the next 10 years. Many of those reductions would impact the very voters who propelled Trump into the White House. 

Trump also promised to repeal and replace Obamacare with a better, less expensive health care program that would cover more people. But the bill he supported that passed in the House of Representatives would reduce coverage by 23 million over a decade, be more costly and provide less coverage, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (https://nyti.ms/2qXzbSq).

Again, Trump’s core voters would be deeply affected by Trumpcare, if passed as is. 

So how to gauge the true Trump? Might I suggest this measuring stick—consider him the “promotional president” not bound to any rigid doctrine or philosophy. He cares only about the optics of winning, of promoting himself, without regard to those who may be adversely affected by his waffling positions and advocacy for legislation or executive orders that are detrimental to millions of Americans, many of whom voted for him in the expectation he would improve their lives.

We have always had wheeling and dealing presidents, perhaps none better at closing the deal than Lyndon Baines Johnson. Trump, however, does not seem to be rooted in any political principle other than his personal aggrandizement. Perhaps that’s why he reacts so quickly and violently to any slight, real or perceived. Perhaps that’s why he is eager to share the perqs of his office with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, why he is willing to bow down, even curtsy, before the Saudi king, why he could not help himself but risk a constitutional crisis by firing Comey, the man responsible for leading the investigation of his administration. 

Trump is a man of limited vocabulary, limited attention span, limited fealty to the truth, limited appreciation of historical context, limited loyalty to principle. It is not a compliment to say he is inscrutable. One would hope a president of the United States stands for values long forged in the American experience, not someone who favorably compares our values with those of Saudi Arabia where, among many repressive actions, public dissent is illegal, women are considered chattel with few rights, slavery still exists, religions other than Sunni Islam are not tolerated and where the press is restricted. 

Saudi Arabia practices Sharia Law. But that’s okay with Donald Trump. After all, they extended to him a welcome fit for a king, complete with a gold medal, showering him with praise. To get a $110 billion package of military hardware, the Saudis knew just how to appeal to his ego.