A Radical Idea to Limit National Discord: Restrict Trump's Voice on Mainstream Media

The pain, the anguish, their overwhelming sense of loss, was not an act. Grief, despair, even more than a tinge of desired revenge, could be discerned from the amalgam of parents who lost children at the hands of undocumented immigrants, witnesses Donald Trump presented last Friday as counter evidence to the trauma of family disruptions he created by ordering a zero-tolerance border security policy that wound up forcibly separating children from parents. 

Trump hoped to win a contest of optics. His congregation of aggrieved parents lamenting their permanent loss of a child versus pictures and audio in Spanish of crying children wailing for their mothers. 

During the run-up to his election Trump trotted out a similar group of parents to buttress his claim that illegal migrants are dangerous. That they are murderers and rapists. That they are the worst elements of Latino society. 

Statistics, however, do not support his argument, unless you are willing to accept, as he did Friday from a parent, an unsubstantiated claim that 60,000 Americans have been killed by “those people” since the beginning of the century.

On the contrary, statistics from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies show violent crimes are committed by illegal immigrants at a rate lower than the number perpetrated by native-born American citizens. Crime in major cities such as New York, where many illegals live, is at or near record lows. In Germany, where more than a million refugees have received sanctuary, crime is down. Yet Trump disseminates falsehoods by saying crime is up in Germany, part of his dissembling strategy to inject fear into the populace. 

The demonization, the dehumanization of the Latino community is a crucial part of Trump’s governing and election strategies. He must inflate bogeymen to fan fear and resentment among white Americans. It seems to be working. His approval rating among rank and file Republicans is at 90% (https://nyti.ms/2MS7Edj). I’d venture to say it is even higher among Republican politicians. 

Trump’s lies become ever more outrageous. As do those from the pols who would follow his footsteps. Technology is making their obfuscations easier and more infernal as Timothy Egan displayed in The New York Times (https://nyti.ms/2MQtCNM).

It is futile to try to match outrage with Trump. Sadly, his “true believers” cannot be swayed to abandon falsehoods for truth. Their allegiance, strangely enough, is reinforced by evidence of Trump’s lies (https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-cynical-immigration-strategy-might-work-for-himagain). 

So scrubbing their brains won’t work. What should be done? Sadly, again, it must be said that effort should not be wasted on the “lost.” Triage provides the example. Put effort behind those who may be educated and informed by facts and decency. 

In Trump-world the news cycle races from outrage to unbelievable seemingly in nano seconds, nano tweets. The media, at least the media that cares about our democracy, must not let his transgressions be forgotten or supplanted by trivial pursuit of a nonsensical tweet or action. They need to stay focused on what really matters. 

The story of the day, of the last week, is Trump’s treatment of children at the border, not his wife’s jacket or his press secretary’s ouster from a restaurant. As Michelle Goldberg opined in The Times, “We have a crisis of democracy, not manners” (https://nyti.ms/2MZPUx1). Politico’s Marc Caputo and Daniel Lippman provided added perspective: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/25/liberals-attack-bondi-sanders-trump-667934.

Trump repeats, retweets, lies until they are accepted as truth by his followers. In this dastardly endeavor Fox News is complicit. Not only does it broadcast misinformation and untruths that Trump regurgitates as fact but it also chides other media outlets for failing to preempt their regular programs to air Trump campaign rally speeches (https://apnews.com/7ea133bf32394cd6aaa1b0a6040a436d).

Responsible, fact-based media must repeat and repeat his faults. They cannot allow him to gain legitimacy beyond his delusional core. 

This is a war of optics. We know on whose side Fox News is. We know MSNBC and CNN are against him. CBS, NBC, and ABC must choose dedication to truth over a warped interpretation of balanced reporting that gives equal weight to Trump’s lies. Our democracy is at stake. 

It is a radical stance from a (retired) journalist but we are navigating choppy, unchartered political waters. Evidence of national discombobulation is everywhere, at restaurants movie theaters and public gatherings. Comity has evaporated. Moreover, at this time of national agitation we cannot expect any soothing thoughts or gestures from the provocateur-in-chief.  

Democrats are divided as to the most proper way to respond. Do they follow Michelle Obama’s encouragement to “go high” when Trump and his acolytes “go low,” or do they listen to Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ call for in their face confrontation whenever and wherever Trumpsters appear in public.

My take is trading insults and belligerence would not be effective. It wouldn’t change any of Trump’s committed voters and could turn undecideds and independents into abstainers in the upcoming midterm elections and in 2020 as they would not distinguish any difference between the parties. 

A more effective countermeasure requires the cooperation of the mainstream media. Fox News has all but changed its name to Trump News. Trump and Fox News have become a circle of reactionary misinformation, demagoguery and bigotry. 

But is it ethical for the mainstream media to limit, even censor, Trump? Here’s part of Bryan W. Van Norden’s reasoning (Van Norden is a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University, Yale-NUS College and Vassar College):

“Donald Trump, first as candidate and now as president, is such a significant news story that responsible journalists must report on him. But this does not mean that he should be allowed to set the terms of the debate. Research shows that repeatedly hearing assertions increases the likelihood of belief—even when the assertions are explicitly identified as false. Consequently, when journalists repeat Trump’s repeated lies, they are actually increasing the probability that people will believe them” (https://nyti.ms/2lyyr2c).

Trump will always have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and extreme right wing news outlets to spout his venom. There is no need to inflict the populace at large with his mean-spirited, egotistical, abusive monologues. The mainstream media should concentrate on exposing the consequences of his actions on our citizenry, those who long to become part of the American fabric, and the rest of the world that depends for leadership on a stable, liberal, democratic United States. 

Trump Benefits From Apple (a day) Windfall

An Apple a day, or a week, or a month, could keep Trump in the White House through 2024. 

Apple’s announcement Wednesday that because of the new tax law it would repatriate $252 billion in cash that it held overseas while investing heavily in new infrastructure and employees over the next five years has the Trump administration and Republicans crowing that their fiscal strategy is working to, what’s that phrase?, “make America great again.” 

Apple isn’t alone in feeding the Trump broadcast of vigorous economic resiliency unleashed by the new tax bill (https://nyti.ms/2FOcNQ2). The stock market is at record highs. Unemployment is at or near record lows. Consumer confidence is way up. Oh what a triumphant Trump we will see Saturday on the first year anniversary of his inauguration.

Is it all Trump magic? No doubt he deserves some credit, but to use a sports analogy, ex-New York Yankees manager Joe Torre could not have led his team to four championships in five years without the building blocks (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettite, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams) his predecessor Buck Showalter and former general manager Gene Michaels left him. Similarly, Trump inherited an already vibrant economy from Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama’s task was much harder as he had to rebuild a devastated economy left by George W. Bush. Too many Trumpsters fail to remember this and fail to give Obama credit for turning the economy around.

If the “economy, stupid” is the key to winning the next presidential election and the 2018 mid-term congressional contests, Republicans would seem to be sitting quite comfortably in the driver’s seat. 

Yet, there are signs that all is not hunky-dory in Trumpland. The president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing criticized Trump for not following through on his promise to restore the competitiveness of American steelworks (https://nyti.ms/2FOwes0). Factory workers in Indianapolis are reportedly angry their jobs weren’t saved (https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/1610a4c72aef4cd3). How effectively laid off workers return to their jobs in the coal and steel industries, in Rust Belt manufacturing, may tip the balance at election time.

No need to rehash Trump’s boorish behavior. If you aren’t aware of it you qualify for the Rip Van Winkle dummy award. But seriously, are 2018/2020 shaping up as referenda on economic self- and national interest vs. personal- and national values? It appears so.

As a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Trumpster, I am wary of this election choice, wary because too many lack compassion, what has been called Christian charity, for their less well-off neighbor. I worry that with the increase in standard deductions to $24,000 for married couples and the resulting fewer itemized deduction tax returns, less charity will be donated to the hungry, to the barely clothed, to the poor who live in squalor, to the infirm, to research to cure the sick. When the choice becomes personal vs. public standing, too many may seek cover under a private, secret ballot.

I fret that selfishness will triumph over generosity, that accessible borders will yield to restricted entry, that democratic values will be toppled by autocratic whims, that intolerance of the strange and different will supersede tolerance, that history and science will be dismissed as irrelevant. 

I am troubled that Trump exacerbates, even encourages, this meanness of the American spirit. 

Perhaps most troubling is the separation of our citizenry from the ideal of E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) into a multi-fractured hash of special interests, denying the legitimacy of others and not willing to dialogue earnestly with them. 

Without doubt Trump is not the person who can unite us, not that anyone else jumps to mind at this time. It’s a sobering realization that for the foreseeable future we will remain a much divided country. 

A Video Presidency: In case you didn’t see this analysis on Politico, here’s an interesting perspective on Trump’s attention to his physical presentation: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/19/donald-trump-accomplishments-216481

Goodbye HuffPost: My gig and that of 100,000 other writers as non paid contributors to HuffPost is over. The Web site announced Thursday it no longer will accept unsolicited independent articles. 

Since April 2016 I have had 99 submissions published on HuffPost. 

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. 

Trump and the Truth: Never the Twain Shall Meet

And so it begins. A new president who vowed in his inaugural address to fight for the American people wasted little time embarking on a Twitter war to soothe his ego at not drawing a crowd as large as Barack Obama’s first inauguration. The people’s president has shown his true colors as the me-me-me president. 

And so it begins. Four, maybe even eight, years of living in an alternative universe where facts and realities that do not align with our feckless leader’s views are contradicted by his Twitter feed or removed from public disclosure by cowed government agencies. 

Here’s how Politico reported the Trumpest-in-a-teapot brouhaha on crowd size: 

“A clear signal was sent to federal employees that public dissent would not tolerated after the National Park Service’s Twitter account posted pictures showing the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was far smaller than that which attended Barack Obama’s 2009 swearing-in. A memo was quickly sent that agencies within the Department of the Interior were to cease activity on Twitter. The posts in question were deleted, and the NPS returned to Twitter Saturday with an apology.

‘We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you,’ the agency said, posting a picture of a buffalo with the message.” (http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-day-two-233966)

What’s next are at least four years of “America First,” an  America in the words of our new president Donald J. Trump, that will buy American made goods and employ Americans first before foreigners. 

I am trying to imagine the euphoria Trumpsters are feeling with the inauguration of The Donald. 

The natural inclination is to compare the ecstasy to that experienced when Obama took the oath of office eight years ago, a time when his supporters felt barriers of inequality would finally be surmounted, prosperity would emerge for all from the financial crisis inherited from Republican mismanagement and benign neglect, and our standing in the world would be restored. 

For sure the Obama years did not reap all that was hoped for. But our country still is the greatest in the world which makes Trump’s slogan—Make America Great Again—a dark, cruel commentary on reality, somewhat softened by the outpouring Saturday of millions who rallied in cities across the country and the world in support of women’s rights. 

Those swing state voters who fervently hope and believe Trump can resurrect factories and their jobs are to be pitied, not chastised, for their ignorance of economic trends and realities. 

Trump is critical of companies that replace factories in the U.S. with plants abroad. But if you believe in capitalism and in the rule of law you must appreciate that Trump is asking corporate executives of public companies to violate their fiduciary responsibilities to maximize the investment of shareholders, a task Trump admitted during the primary season was his primary motivation as a businessman. 

So while he may secure public relations points when some high profile companies keep some jobs in America the trend line will remain tipped toward foreign manufacturing. The public might say they want goods Made in America but if confronted by higher price tags consumers will reject domestic products in favor of merchandise made abroad at a fraction of the labor cost. 

And, since Trump is against a higher minimum wage, he will not make it any easier for workers to afford higher priced American made merchandise.

Trump’s inaugural speech lacked flowery passages. It was meat and potatoes. Nothing wrong with that. Trump campaigned and won on bleak messages, so it would have been out of character for him to turn poetic on his big day. He even showed some decency by abstaining from declaring he would repeal and replace Obamacare, perhaps in deference to the presence of President Obama seated directly to his left. But he did begin the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act by signing an executive order later in the day. How he will manage to replace Obamacare and sustain comparable coverage at a lower price for the more than 20 million Obamacare participants is a challenge I hope he can meet for the sake of all the people he says he cares about.

One can be unhappy with policy decisions on health care, the environment, global alliances and more, but respectful that in a democracy the victor gets to set the agenda. 

However, a much deeper problem is the erosion of truth, the falsification or denial of facts for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, the degradation of opponents, the manipulation of public opinion—all tactics autocrats practice to consolidate power.

They are not an impeachable offenses but they are the very foundation of what may come later. It is like what happens with credit card fraud. First, perpetrators use a stolen card to make a 99 cents charge. If it gets approved and undetected they move on to larger, fraudulent purchases. 

Trump is testing how far he can go in stretching, nay creating, the truth and in painting the media as corrupt and liars. It will not be enough for journalists to call him out. It will not be enough for Democrats to say the emperor has no clothes. Those dissenters are to be expected.

The truth must be defended by Trump’s staff—the Kellyanne Conways, the Sean Spicers who must trot out his absurdities and fabrications—and by vice president Mike Pence and Republican senators and congressmen who should care more about our republic than for the man in the Oval Office. They, after all, took an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.”  

For the last 19 months we have watched as Trump campaigns and now governs. For him it always comes down to size. The size of his hands. The size of his penis. The size of inaugural crowds. 

As Trump himself would tweet, the situation is SO SAD!

Reading Real News, Not Fake News, Really Matters in the Age of Trump

How much do you read? I don’t mean books. I mean newspapers and news Web sites.

I will answer first—not enough. And I’m mostly retired so I have no “time excuse.” That said, how much do you read? Specifically, how much of The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal or The Boston Globe or The Chicago Tribune or The Los Angeles Times do you read? Or if you’re more inclined to go electronic, do you read the online versions of those papers, or Politico, or AP, or other reputable Web sites? In other words, how much quality daily journalism do you read?

It is almost universally agreed that democracy cannot flourish without freedom of the press. But that freedom implies an imperative on the citizenry to exercise a commitment to seeking out knowledge. Regrettably, in today’s political realm, both the populous and too many of its leaders are not dedicated to the proper exercise of a vigilant and truthful press.

The American people have just elected a president whose whole campaign was based on distortions, falsehoods and the failure to acknowledge his own prior statements. Lies repeated over and over became accepted as truth. 

Instead of relying on traditional media for news and analysis, large swaths of the public have turned to bogus news sites posting fake news stories they, at worse, believe or, at the very least, help shape negative opinions of politicians and groups that do not share their values. 

In this vortex of negativity, I am getting to the point where I can hardly read anymore about Trump. It’s too painful. (Paradoxically, as much as I try to break away from writing about him, I persist, thus exposing you, my reader, to even more Trumpish blasts.) I am even limiting my viewership of late night talk shows that lampoon him. 

And that, in a nutshell, is one of the dangers of Trumpdom, that the population that cares about the dangers he poses will be silenced by ennui as much as by the fake news that he and his acolytes disseminate.

Trump views no news cycle as complete without him in it. As president, even as president-elect, that’s to be expected, but his continued reliance on Twitter to roil the waters whenever he is criticized is troubling. He has yet to show that he cares that his tweets can have international repercussions, that his comments could move stock prices. 

For years one of my work-related buddies now retired from a technology company would include me in an email blitz of negative stories about liberals and President Obama. More often than not I’d check out their veracity through snopes.com and alert him to their falsehood. I’d admonish him to check Snopes before sending out his blasts, but he rarely took the time. It was frustrating and disappointing to observe this intelligent former executive contribute to the dummification of society simply because he was anti-Democrats. 

Fake News proliferated during the election campaign, with Facebook becoming an unwitting accomplice. Facebook finally is taking some measures to limit the transmission of false and bigoted messages. But the damage to our democracy may not be easily repaired.

Last week, Fresh Air on NPR interviewed Craig Silverman, media editor of BuzzFeed News, about his research into fake news and its impact on the election. Silverman studied the response to the top 20 news stories from mainstream media and fake media on Facebook. 

He found that “three months before the election, that critical time, we actually saw the fake news spike. And we saw the mainstream news engagement on Facebook for those top 20 stories decline.”

What does it mean? “When we look at some of the data about the impact of misinformation, it’s really significant,” said Silverman. “So we at BuzzFeed partnered with Ipsos to do a survey of 3,000 Americans. And one of the things we wanted to find out was their familiarity with fake news headlines about the election. And what we found in the end after testing a group of five fake news headlines that went really big during the election and six real news headlines that went really big during the election is that 75 percent of the time, the Americans who were shown a fake news headline and had remembered it from the election believed it to be accurate.

“And that’s a really shocking thing. It’s impossible to go the next step and say, well, they voted because of that. But I think one of the things this election has shown is that people will believe fake news, misinformation will spread and people will believe it and it will become part of their worldview.” http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505547295/fake-news-expert-on-how-false-stories-spread-and-why-people-believe-them?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20161215&utm_campaign=npr_email_a_friend&utm_term=storyshare

Oh, how our democracy is in trouble given Trump’s penchant for dissembling and disseminating fake news.

Bread and Circuses: He has yet to officially take office but we can discern from the last two years how Trump will conduct business as president. 

It will be an imperial presidency. Woe to the person or organization that challenges the leader. 

Expect mass rallies as Trump fulfills his ego need for public approval. Though he did not win a majority of votes, he claims a mandate because of his Electoral College win. He will seek to reinforce his ego electronically through Twitter and physically through rallies of his faithful.

It will be an administration of “bread and circuses,” as in Ancient Rome, most aptly described by Wikipedia: “Bread and circuses” (or bread and games; from Latin: panem et circenses) is metonymic for a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the generation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace,  as an offered ‘palliative.’ Its originator, Juvenal, used the phrase to decry the selfishness of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase also implies the erosion or ignorance of civic duty amongst the concerns of the commoner.”

Democratic Party resistance mostly will be ineffectual at the national level given GOP control of the Senate and House. Democrats will try to emulate the successful Republican strategy of resistance at the local level. But it may be too late in many states. Look what happened in North Carolina last week where a Republican legislature passed laws to neuter the incoming Democratic governor. If the laws are not overturned in court, expect similar actions in other states should Democrats wrest control of governor mansions in future elections.

As Trump finalizes on his cabinet and White House appointments, it’s proper to ask, should we really have expected anything different? Were we being Pollyanna-ish in hoping, nay assuming, Trump would assemble a team of broad-minded advisors and cabinet secretaries instead of the close-minded reactionaries he has named whose bona fides include climate change deniers, minimum wage deniers, and fake news propagandists?

How rich are the men and woman who will sit around his cabinet table? Their collective wealth is $14.7 billion. It exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom third of American households, 43 million family units, The Daily Mail reported (http://dailym.ai/2hOt7aT).  

As to why Trump made those picks despite campaigning on as an anti-elite, pro-worker candidate, here’s one explanation from a Politico article on the 10 key decisions of the election campaign, “Trump only really listens to rich guys.”

Trump Place in Your Face: Residents of Trump Place on Riverside Drive in Manhattan expressed their disapproval of the president-elect by having his name removed from their building. But one of the residents is showing allegiance to The Donald. He or she, as the case may be, has arranged Christmas lights from their balcony to spell out “Trump.”

Circulation Booster: Liberals seem to be turned on by Trump’s negative tweets about alleged circulation dips at The Times and Vanity Fair. Both publications reported that contrary to what Trump tweeted their subscription numbers have gone up since his election. 

http://www.foliomag.com/fact-check-vanity-fairs-numbers-not-way-big-trouble-dead/?hq_e=el&hq_m=3318124&hq_l=8&hq_v=a766c3eda3

But that is not a long term defense against bombastic unfounded statements. Trump and his followers are practicing a strategy of the big lie repeated often enough until it gets absorbed as truth.

Hearing Loss: There’s good news on the factory closing front and I don’t mean Trump’s initiative to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

No, the good news might signal an improvement in marital relationships. It seems hearing loss among Americans is declining. One reason hypothesized is there are fewer plants operating where the din of machinery takes its toll on workers’ hearing (http://nyti.ms/2hK87SI).

So there goes the excuse all those laid-off workers had for not hearing what their spouses said. Of course, if Trump does manage to get more factories opened, he would be wise to have hearing ailments covered in his “terrific” replacement for Obamacare.

Patriot Games: Loyal Opposition or Upside Down Flag Waver

What type of patriot should I be? Should Democrats be?

It is not an idle question in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president and what it would mean to the majesty and character of the United States as a beacon of freedom, tolerance and equal opportunity, no matter how imperfect our execution of those values are. 

Should I endorse the combative stance of Charles Blow who, writing in The New York Times, defiantly rejected Donald Trump’e election (http://nyti.ms/2ghhIeO), a position echoed by the following statement found on the Internet and sent to me by one of my best friends:

I listened as they called my President a Muslim.

I listened as they called him and his family a pack of monkeys.

I listened as they said he wasn’t born here.

I watched as they blocked every single path to progress that they could.

I saw the pictures of him as Hitler.

I watched them shut down the government and hurt the entire nation twice.

I watched them turn their backs on every opportunity to open worthwhile dialog.

I watched them say that they would not even listen to any choice for Supreme Court no matter who the nominee was.

I listened as they openly said that they will oppose him at every turn.

I watched as they did just that.

I listened.

I watched.

I paid attention.

Now, I’m being called on to be tolerant.

To move forward.

To denounce protesters.

To “Get over it.”

To accept this...

I will not.

I will do my part to make sure this great American mistake becomes the embarrassing footnote of our history that it deserves to be.

I will do this as quickly as possible every chance I get.

I will do my part to limit the damage that this man can do to my country.

I will watch his every move and point out every single mistake and misdeed in a loud and proud voice.

I will let you know in a loud voice every time this man backs away from a promise he made to them.

Them. The people who voted for him.

The ones who sold their souls and prayed for him to win.

I will do this so that they never forget.

And they will hear me.

They will see it in my eyes when I look at them.

They will hear it in my voice when I talk to them.

They will know that I know who they are.

They will know that I know what they are.

Do not call for my tolerance. I’ve tolerated all I can.

Now it’s their turn to tolerate ridicule.

Be aware, make no mistake about it, every single thing that goes wrong in our country from this day 

forward is now Trump’s fault just as much as they thought it was Obama’s.

I find it unreasonable for them to expect from me what they were entirely unwilling to give.

Or should I assume the attitude of “This too shall pass,” and take comfort that the nation survived eight years of Ronald Reagan plus another four years of George H.W. Bush, only to survive eight years of George W. Bush? Unfortunately, that trial balloon was burst by Jeff Greenfield’s article in Politico’s magazine that maintains a Trump administration tied to a Republican Congress and Supreme Court would be more destructive to progressive causes than Reagan (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/how-trump-can-change-washington-214475).

Should the loyal opposition work with Trump to improve our infrastructure and get more domestic manufacturing jobs? Or should Democrats resist giving him any victories, for surely he would not waste a moment to claim them as his and his alone? 

Should they let Trump and his dark knights tear apart the social safety net and let the working class and middle class voters who abandoned the Democrats find out what it’s like to live in a country that doesn’t care if they’re insured, that reduces the certainty of retirement benefits, that provides huge tax cuts to the wealthy but little to them, that wants to privatize national parks, that doesn’t push for higher minimum wages, that doesn’t enforce or pass worker safety laws or regulations for clean air, and safe foods and drugs?

When Trump first proposed to loosen the libel laws it was thought to be a potential minefield for legitimate media. Upon reflection, I believe the most vulnerable media would be those websites and papers that print scurrilous lies and distortions, the type of media that aided and abetted the election of The Donald. 

With Stephen Bannon as one of his closest advisors, whose Breitbart News often treaded dangerously on the borderline of libel, it is no wonder Trump has refined and softened his stance on the mainstream media. 

Of course, satirical shows such as The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (who is really coming into his own), would not have to worry as their content is protected speech, but let’s not discount the damage and threat repeated denunciations from the commander-in-chief might precipitate, perhaps including physical retaliation by some of Trump’s supporters or pressure on advertisers to withdraw support of the “offending” telecasts.

It would be foolish to count on Trump to modulate his positions. Someone who spreads falsehoods and deals with unfounded accusations, such as his latest outcry that he lost the popular vote because millions of votes were cast illegally for Hillary Clinton, reinforces the notion that reacting to Trump is a no-win proposition.

Instead, Democrats must aggressively attack his expected actions and those of Congress. They need to be proactive, not reactive.

For instance, to preserve the benefits of Obamacare, they need to run ads that defend the Affordable Care Act (ACA), ads that would outline the type of people who would be vulnerable if it were repealed and how insurance companies would take advantage of them. Focus on examples of the 22 million who are covered by Obamacare and how it has changed their lives for the better. 

Republicans have been wanting to alter Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security since they were passed by Democrats. To fend off radical changes, ads must target those who would be most affected—working class families and the elderly, two groups that opted for Trump. They need to be shown how GOP policies would hurt them.

His nominee for Treasury secretary wants to gut the Dodd-Frank Act that was passed in response to the investment community shenanigans that caused the housing crisis and the great recession of 2008.

As he assembles his cabinet and key advisors it has become obvious that Trump’s inner circle will not be a cushion, softening his campaign rhetoric. Rather, it is shaping up as a more regressive force. His designated Health and Human Services secretary, for example, wants to gut the ACA and eliminate insurance mandates for pre-existing conditions and cut back Medicare coverage. So much for Trump’s 60 Minutes statement to the contrary. 

Indeed, Trump is a master at playing the American public, hinting at his openness and compassion but wielding a harsh scepter of benefits denial.

Why do I say this? Because it is becoming clearer that while he listens to several advisors, he tends to follow the advice of the last person who had his ear. Too often that will be Bannon or vice president-elect Mike Pence, a hard core conservative. 

This and previous elections have shown that national direction is decided at the state level. Progressives have been koched and kicked by the Koch brothers and their ilk who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars securing state houses and gubernatorial mansions across the country. 

The time to build a state by state ground game is long past. But it is doable, especially if the populist agenda Trump campaigned on does not come to fruition and he has to defend a record that was passed in conjunction with a Republican Congress. 

So to answer the question at the top of this blog, I’ll be a discerning patriot, not ready to turn the American flag on my porch upside down as a sign of distress, but not willing to give our president-elect a free pass. His actions and their consequences will determine the outcome.

Trump's Attack Tactic: What Have I Got to Lose?

A few weeks ago Donald Trump’s closing argument in his appeal to Afro-Americans for their vote was, “What have you got to lose?” After years of not achieving a better life under Democratic presidents, he reasoned, blacks should switch allegiance and vote Republican. “What have you got to lose?” 

Apparently Trump is intent on taking his own counsel when it comes to confronting his latest setback, the release Friday of an inflammatory, sexist, degrading 2005 tape of his comments and behavior toward women. Already lagging in their support, particularly from suburban housewives in key battleground states, Trump seems poised to blast away at Hillary and Bill Clinton for the former president’s infidelities and his wife’s aggressive defense of him and attack on his accusers, some of whom, in the end, proved to be aggrieved parties. 

Trump is casting Hillary as a bully who attacked, shamed and intimidated her husband’s “victims.” He might well level those charges against her during their debate Sunday night.

It’s a risky tactic, given his low ratings among female voters. But Trump might reason he has nothing to lose by sharpening his assault on the moral code of the Clintons at a time when his own compass has been tossed topsy-turvy beyond what he has already said during his campaign about Megyn Kelly, Rosie O’Donnell, Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz’s wife, Gold Star mother Ghazala Khan and former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. 

Trump might further reason that his Republican base doesn’t want him to retreat. A poll released by Politico Sunday morning found “just 12 percent of Republicans — and 13 percent of female Republicans — agree. 

“As of now, GOP voters largely want the party to stand behind Trump. Nearly three-quarters of Republican voters, 74 percent, surveyed on Saturday said party officials should continue to support Trump. Only 13 percent think the party shouldn’t back him.” http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/politico-morning-consult-poll-229394

It’s not uncommon for viewership of presidential debates to drop off after the first one (the initial debate was the most-watched in history—some 84 million tuned in). Given the exposure of Trump’s powderkeg tape, which obscured the release by WikiLeaks Friday of troubling Clinton emails, the audience for the second debate could equal, if not top, the first.  

They’ll be tuning in to see how far Trump will go over the line of decency and, equally intriguing, how Clinton will respond. It makes for “must-see TV,” but not on NBC (which originated that phrase back in the 1990s) because the peacock network will be televising the football game between the New York Giants and host Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin, one of the battleground states. For the sake of most marriages, not just among fans of both teams, I hope households have more than one TV or will do as I do—DVR the football game for later viewing. 

Trump Channels Nation's Founders

A recent article by Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsh argued that far from being a boorish yahoo with extreme un-American views Donald Trump really is channeling the thoughts of the nation’s founders and some of its greatest presidents in their advocacy of few if any foreign entanglements (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/founding-fathers-2016-donald-trump-america-first-foreign-policy-isolationist-213873). 

It’s a piece replete with citations quoting Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams and John Quincy Adams to buttress the idea that foreign ventures would ensnare the country in affairs best left to people on the other side of the Atlantic, the Pacific, of course, being no point of reference to their late 18th and early 19th century minds.

Since the start of World War II, however, the United States has been globally engaged, first fighting the Axis Powers, then confronting Communist Soviet Union, China and Cuba in a Cold War, followed by a patchwork of alliances and adventures in the Middle East, the most recent being our tragic years-upon-years involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and our arms-length position vis-a-vis Syria.  

“But it is fair to ask, as Trump is, why we are simply continuing, through inertia and with little change, a system that was built up to thwart a set of threats that no longer exist,” wrote Hirsh. “Maybe this vast, expensive global order was necessary against Hitler, and later Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—the very real threats of tyranny, totalitarianism and international communism in the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s—but is Putin’s Russia, or Xi Jinping's China, really enough of a threat to justify the same expense and effort? It’s also fair to ask—as Trump does, in his blunt way—whether U.S. allies have grown a bit spoiled and barely notice any longer who’s holding that defense umbrella over their heads, allowing them to continue massive spending on their welfare states.”

Trump’s advocacy of a reimagined United States relationship with our allies, and by extension our adversaries, has tapped a reservoir of innate American isolationism made all the more potent by a failed war in Vietnam (though the feared Domino Effect never transpired) and the twin disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

In the end, though, it should come down not to the electorate’s knowledge of historical admonitions but rather to the confidence Americans have in the knowledge, leadership and diplomatic skills they want in their next president. Trump has displayed little of those skills as he has rampaged through the Republican primary process, flipping positions as quickly as one changes gears in a sports car. He is not thought highly of in most foreign capitals. If he’s elected, heads of state will have to deal with him but they might never be confident his word would be his bond.

The closest we have to a Republican head of state is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the second in line to be president should tragedy strike the chief executive and the vice president. Ryan has yet to endorse the presumptive nominee of his party, but with each passing day Republican office holders appear to be swallowing their scruples and lining up, however reluctantly, behind Trump. It’s only a matter of time before Ryan caves, and without extracting any implementable concessions.

It seems they are all more interested in winning than in protecting the principles of the republic and their party. Their professed animosity toward Hillary Clinton trumps (pun intended) the reality that The Donald is unfit to be president of the mightiest country in the world, a country that has been a symbol of equality and decency throughout the world but under Trump would be willing to discriminate against Muslims and would sanction torture. The damage to American prestige would be incalculable.

No criticism is more pointed than from within one’s family, so here’s an excerpt from Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist of The New York Times, describing the factionalism of the Republican party that led to Trump’s rise and his own failure to foresee his appeal: 

“So to catalog my wrongness: I overestimated the real commitment of both factions’ leaders to their stated principles and favored policies. (Even though I didn’t agree with many of those policies myself, I assumed from the party’s longstanding resistance to change that someone did!) I overestimated their ability to put those principles ahead of personal resentments. And yes, since to acquiesce to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, I overestimated their basic sense of honor.” (http://nyti.ms/1rZxgcB)