Journalism in the Age of Trump

I came of age professionally at the dawn of the Watergate era. While studying for a master’s degree in newspaper journalism, my Syracuse University classmates and I met with Jeb Magruder, president Richard Nixon’s re-election committee head in early 1972, just months before the Watergate break-in, two years before Magruder would plead guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, to defraud the United States, and to illegally eavesdrop on the Democratic Party national headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

During our first summer of matrimony, in 1973, Gilda spent most of her days watching the Senate Watergate hearings. Lowell Weicker Jr. of Connecticut gained national prominence during the hearings as a Republican critic of Nixon. I interviewed Weicker at his Greenwich home on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. We made national news when I quoted him asserting he would not try to capitalize on his new-found prominence by running for president in 1976, though he did try to mount a presidential bid in 1980.

In the years following Watergate and the bravura reporting of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, not to mention their celluloid alter-egos Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, it seemed every young person graduating college wanted to be an investigative reporter, someone who toppled the high and mighty. It didn’t matter if their chosen targets presided in Washington or Podunk, Indiana. What mattered was the press had to show that it was supreme.

For the most part the nation benefitted from such zeal, though excesses did occur, such as the intrusive, destructive coverage of Gary Hart and his non affair with Donna Rice, which submarined his presidential hopes in 1988.

Relations between the press and presidents (and would-be presidents) are rarely absent of acrimony. Reporters are a skeptical, cynical lot, always looking for the real story behind any presidential action. They bristle at any attempt to corral their activity. Administrations, on the other hand, are the ultimate public relations practitioners. Media access is to be restricted and managed.

Which brings us to media coverage in the age of Trump. The Internet has vastly expanded the number of bodies able to disseminate news, real and fake. The biggest body of all belongs to Donald J. Trump and his peripatetic fingers.

The twit-in-chief has upended traditional news distribution routes. His team has hinted of changes to the daily briefings in the White House press room. Indeed, the very room itself may become extinct.

It is a strategy to bypass traditional media that Trump believes is biased against him. He may be right about the bias claim, but he is fooling himself if he seriously believes upsetting the press room applecart will stifle critical reporting and analysis of his administration. If anything, it will galvanize real reporters to probe deeper.

The contretemps over Buzzfeed’s publishing the contents of a questionably accurate dossier of behavior by Trump while in Russia several years ago is the latest example of the press pushing the limits of journalistic decorum.

Yet, it is the height of chutzpah for a president-elect who uses Twitter bullying tactics, the retweeting of falsehoods and innuendo and near total disregard for the truth to complain about his coverage and portrayal in the media.

I suspect Trump is not very well read, but he probably knows the saying, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

He might also be acquainted with another proverb journalists embrace: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Celebrating a Father's Birthday With Memories

Today is my father’s 106th birthday. Or maybe his 105th. My brother, sister and I were never sure. He died 18 years ago.

His death certificate records his birthday as January 5, 1911. Dad usually said he was a year younger, one annum subtracted as was the custom for boys in Ottynia, a shtetl in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian empire, so he would not be drafted into the army when he turned 18. Back then recruits remained in the military for some two decades, making avoiding the draft by any means no small accomplishment. On his tombstone we inscribed his birth year as 1912.

Of course, by the time our father, Kopel Fuersetzer, turned 18 the empire had been long dissolved after its defeat in what we now call World War I. Ottynia became part of southeastern Poland (today it is part of Ukraine). When he was 16 Kopel ventured far away from Ottynia to the northwest “Free City of Danzig,” now called Gdansk, on the edge of the Baltic Sea. There he lived the life of a traveling salesman until he left Europe for good, arriving in New York in January 1939.

He married our mother three years later. Working together in their lingerie factory in lower Manhattan while living in Brooklyn they raised three children, of which I am the youngest. By any standard they were successful.

He was not a perfect man or father. He was no Alan Thicke of Growing Pains, no Robert Young of Father Knows Best. Nor was he a Carroll O’Connor/Archie Bunker of All in the Family. He was human, which means he made mistakes. He screamed. He got angry. He was, like my brother’s nickname for him, the “Boss,” at work and at home.

But I learned from him the value of tzedakah, charity. Of communal responsibility and service. Of treating workers fairly and with dignity. Of being a good story teller. 

He liked to tell of the time in the 1950s when he accompanied one of his salesmen to the headquarters of C. R. Anthony, a junior department store chain based in Oklahoma City. They met with Mr. Anthony himself. By the end of the visit Mr. Anthony playfully admonished the salesman that if he wanted any repeat business he would have to bring along the storyteller again to close the deal. I think that pleased our father almost, if not more, than getting the order.

As much as some people romanticize life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, Ottynia, near the Carpathian Mountains on the train line between Kolomaya and Stanislav, was not a place our father longed to be in. His ambitions, his drive, his quest for independence led him to seek a more fulfilling way of life, first in Danzig, then in New York. 

From Danzig he would return now and then to his parents’ home—one of my favorite pictures is of him dressed in peasant pants and shirt, almost like pajamas, lying on the oversized fender of a large car in Ottynia. Yet, neither he nor his brother Willy, sole immediate family survivor of the Holocaust, talked much about Ottynia, or Danzig, where Willy lived as well for a short time. They preferred to look forward, not backward. 

Much of what I know about Ottynia comes from a video tape of the two my brother and I conducted some 25 years ago and from writings from some of his landtsmen, fellow immigrants and their descendants from Ottynia. We always were skeptical of our father’s claim to have walked miles to school and back. But our cousin, Norman Latner, in a monograph on life in Ottynia some years back, confirmed that children had to walk several miles to get to school. Instruction lasted through sixth grade. 

Norman also provided an explanation why Dad said they’d have to walk through deep snow. Ottynia, he noted, is “located at 49 degree latitude, which puts it about as far north as Winnipeg, Canada. Winters were quite cold and the summer were hot.”

Our father was active in the Young Men’s Benevolent Association of Ottynia, becoming president of the “society” for many years. He also became president of our synagogue in Brooklyn. When New York University moved to evict small apparel manufacturers from their leased lofts along Broadway, my father led an ultimately unsuccessful city hall protest.

Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, to me, the Ottynia society often meant keeping track of phone calls. My father never liked to see anyone on the phone in our house. But he had no qualms using it to talk to his society brethren.

To my brother Bernie, my sister Lee, and me, Ottynia meant a tight knit group of couples that formed a monthly floating poker game, men in one room, women in another. The stakes were nickel, dime, quarter. I don’t know many Yiddish words, I am not even sure it is Yiddish—it could be Polish or Ukrainian—but one of the first foreign words I learned was from Harry Brooks. Whenever he’d need a special card to fill, say, an inside straight, before he was dealt a card, he’d call out, “Chei-cha.” I think it means, give me good luck.

During these card games I learned how to mix highballs for the players. When I was around 10, they would let me sit in for a few hands whenever my mother or father would take a break from the game. It was a lot rougher playing with the women. They took their poker very seriously. The men would coddle me. The women were after my nickels.

Poker aside, what Ottynia meant to Kopel Forseter was continuity. It meant commitment to family and friends. Ottynia meant helping those in need. It meant remembering one’s traditions and roots. 

To Bernie, Lee and me it also meant an impossible to follow melody when reading the Passover Haggadah as Willy and Dad droned on and on. 

For all its simple, peasant-like charm, if I might use that word to describe Ottynia, Ottynia must have had qualities that imbued in my father and scores of others a set of values that have served them well.  

“Today in Ukraine,” my cousin ended his monograph, “there is still a town called Ottynia, but it is not the Ottynia of the Kletters (or Forseters). All traces of a Jewish presence are gone. There are no shuls, no cheder (Hebrew school), no Hebrew texts and no chulent warming on the stove … All that remains of the Ottynia of the past, a place of hardship and a place of joy, lives on in the hearts and the memory of the few survivors, and in us, and our children if we too try to preserve these memories of the past.”

Some Non Trump News on Apnea, Overtime, Ponytails and Slow Cooking

Enough about Donald Trump, already! You’d think the world revolves around him (okay, he believes that but there’s no reason for the rest of us to acquiesce in his egotism). 

So here’s a few of my non-Trumpian thoughts. 

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream: I dream a lot. A person dreams during shallow sleep prior to waking up. Which means I wake up a lot at night, for two reasons, one being an aging man’s health issue and, second, I suffer from sleep apnea.

Some may recall a blog post from two years ago about my visiting a specialist on sleep apnea testing at Mount Sinai Hospital. I never followed through on remedial treatment. Naturally, my condition worsened. As a result, I am perpetually tired while awake.

“Sleep apnea,” according to the National Institutes of Health, “is a common disorder in which you have one or more pauses in breathing or shallow breaths while you sleep. Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes. They may occur 30 times or more an hour. Typically, normal breathing then starts again, sometimes with a loud snort or choking sound.

“Sleep apnea usually is a chronic (ongoing) condition that disrupts your sleep. When your breathing pauses or becomes shallow, you’ll often move out of deep sleep and into light sleep. As a result, the quality of your sleep is poor, which makes you tired during the day. Sleep apnea is a leading cause of excessive daytime sleepiness.”

My recent apnea test revealed that while sleeping on my back I experienced about 48 interruptions in an hour, waaaay more than acceptable.

Sleeping on one’s back also contributes to snoring, of which I am a champion practitioner. 

So what’s the upshot? My new sleep doctor specialist prescribed I sleep on my side. That’s how I usually start out, I told him, but I eventually end up on my back. He suggested I pin a bag of tennis balls to the back of my night shirt. The discomfort of landing on the tennis balls would startle me into returning to my side position. 

It worked but was quite awkward so I opted for a different Rube Goldberg approach—I placed a laaarge, firm pillow between Gilda and me to prevent my rolling over (it prevents more than that, but that’s another story altogether). Gilda reports my snoring has dramatically decreased, I am now sleeping in three to four hour bursts before awakening, roughly double my previous time periods, and I’m not as tired as before.

Next week I’m to meet my doctor to review my progress. He doesn’t recommend another alternative, wearing an appliance in my mouth to project my lower jaw forward to create a wider airway. But he might suggest a CPAP machine to blow air into my nose while I sleep. A friend who has used one for several years says he now finds it hard to sleep without it.

You might be wondering why I have told you about my apnea status. It’s because The New York Times ran a story Thursday on several initiatives to combat insomnia (http://nyti.ms/2htwUZM). Interestingly, though it noted “insomnia and other temporary and recurring sleep disorders affect 50 million to 70 million Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health, and the effects only worsen as people grow older,” not once did the article make specific reference to apnea. 

As The Donald would say, “So sad.”

Death by Overtime: The Business section of The Times was chock full of articles I identified with Thursday, including one on “karoshi,” what the Japanese call “death from overwork.”

When our family visited Japan back in 1991, we heard about “karoshi.” The Japanese economy was booming. Workers paid the price. They labored long hours. It was not unusual for workers to die in their tracks, while walking or driving to work. Passersby would simply shake their heads from side to side and whisper knowingly, “Ah, karoshi.” 

The economy in the Land of the Rising Sun is not as vibrant as back then, yet companies still demand excessive hours from their workers, often without added pay. A woman employee of Dentsu, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, committed suicide last Christmas, ostensibly from working more than 100 hours of overtime each month. On Wednesday the president and chief executive of Dentsu accepted responsibility for her death and the corporate work environment. He said he would resign in January (http://nyti.ms/2iEH73l). 

Here in America, overtime pay for salaried employees has become a political football. President Obama signed an executive order that raised the salary threshold for most salaried workers to receive overtime from $23,660 to $47,476 per year. But a federal court stayed the December 1 implementation of the rule, which Trump may well rescind especially since his designate to be secretary of labor is a fast food tycoon and many of those who would benefit from the rule work in retail and the foodservice industries.   

Pony Up: My wife wants me to grow a ponytail. It wouldn’t be the first time Gilda influenced my hair style. Some 40 years ago she convinced me to let my naturally kinky hair grow out into an afro.

Now, after watching one of the lead mobsters in the really absorbing Italian TV series Gomorrah sport a ponytail, she is lobbying for one for my unruly follicles. She is undeterred by my argument that the actor had jet black straight hair.

So if you see me looking rather unkempt do not think my extreme look is due to financial hardship. It is just another manifestation of my love. Or insanity.

Slow Cooking: Help! Anybody out there use a slow cooker crock pot? I’m looking for some kosher meat recipes.

I cashed in some hotel loyalty points before they expired for a 6-qt. crock pot. I love stew. Gilda doesn’t. So I’m more or less on my own. If you’ve got a winning recipe, send it to me. 

Donald Trump Provides Whole New Meaning to the Phrase "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas"

Twenty-five more days until the opening line of the classic song “White Christmas” takes on a significance way beyond the meteorological meaning Irving Berlin could have imagined when he wrote “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas just like the one I used to know.”

In Donald Trump’s America, any skin shade but white (except his own orange tone) represents a divergence with the norm. 

Consider how his election has emboldened racism, bigotry and prejudice across the land, a most repugnant example of which came forth last week from Carl Paladino, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York, co-chair of Trump’s New York state campaign and currently s member of Buffalo’s school board.

As one of many asked by a Buffalo media outlet Artvoice, a weekly newspaper, to respond to four questions including what they want most in 2017, Paladino displayed racial bigotry heretofore reserved for white supremacist outlets, rants so offensive I refuse to reproduce them but will provide a link: http://artvoice.com/2016/12/23/want-2017-lot-different-opinions/

It was a no-brainer for Team Trump to disavow Paladino’s comments but the man himself was not rebuked. Moreover, a president-elect who has taken the time to chastise via Twitter Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin, the cast of Hamilton, among others, has yet to send out 140 characters admonishing Paladino.

In Donald Trump’s America, white will be the dominant color upon which success may be assured. His exhortation of “Merry Christmas” is a bellicose rejection of the multicultural, religiously diverse “Happy Holidays.”

Is Trump truly a racist? Hard to say definitively, but it would be naive to believe he does not recognize the bigotry that has burst into the open because of his candidacy and election. Whether he accepts their support or not, Trump has made it acceptable to openly hate, to openly oppose civil rights advances of the last half century, to openly question the legitimacy of legal immigrants and their constitutional rights.

Carl Paladino exposed the racist underbelly of many of Trump’s supporters. Unless the next president forcefully rejects this cancer of hate, not once, not twice but every time it rears its ugly, divisive head, Donald Trump will not be upholding the oath of office he will swear to at noon on January 20, 2017.

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.

Reality Politics Under Trump and the GOP: Nepotism Is in, Fair Play Is out

There’ve been lots of ink spilt and bytes clicked over the upcoming vote December 19 by the Electoral College for the 45th president of the United States. The pros and cons of voting for the choice of the plurality of each state’s electorate or choosing, as David Pozen put it in Thursday’s New York Times, “Hillary Clinton or an establishment Republican,” have been hotly debated, mostly because of antipathy toward Donald Trump (http://nyti.ms/2hIy98J).

But here’s the reality—Hillary won’t be selected and even if the electors wanted to choose “an establishment Republican” there ain’t any of them around anymore. In the Grand Old Party there are no more Jacob Javitses, Edward Brookeses, Everett Dirksens, Charles Percys or Howard Bakers—the likes of senators willing to compromise and work with Democrats. Not even Ronald Reagan would qualify as a doctrinaire Republican these days. He, after all, worked with Tip O’Neill’s Democratic Congress.

Perhaps the euphoria of recapturing the three branches of government (once a conservative Supreme Court nominee is confirmed) has fractured the backbone of Republicans. They seem willing to abandon truth, constitutional principles and personal conscience in their eagerness to not become targets of Trump’s Twitter darts, public threats and humiliations (Trump keeps threatening Speaker of the House Paul Ryan if he doesn’t support him without reservation while his dangling of Mitt Romney as a potential secretary of state was mean-spirited. But to be fair, Romney’s willingness to represent to the world a man he considered unfit to be president made him unworthy of any sympathy.).

The height of Republican disdain for democratic principles, and Democrats, is playing out these days in North Carolina. For those not aware of how a Republican-controlled legislature can thwart the electorate’s will, take a few moments to read how GOP lawmakers are racing at breakneck speed to turn the newly elected Democratic governor into an impotent executive: http://nyti.ms/2hL1QX4.

The double standard Republicans are demonstrating vis-a-vis Trump and their treatment of Hillary Clinton is equally egregious. They smooth over his obvious business conflicts of interest, they don’t bat an eyelash at the intrusion of his children and son-in-law into affairs of state in violation of nepotism and conflict of interest protocols, they fail to strongly challenge Trump’s rejection of the intelligence community’s assertion that Russia was behind the hacking of Clinton’s and the Democratic Party’s emails, they paper over Trump’s repeated lies, the latest being his contention that the Obama administration did not cite Russian hacking before the election, to name just a few of their tolerances for the disruption of government as we know it and the accountability of elected officials.

Let me share with you an analysis of Trump’s meeting with technology executives earlier this week that illuminates the quagmire of ethics and absurdity we have entered into: 

https://bothsidesofthetable.com/let-me-point-out-to-you-how-ridiculous-the-trump-tech-meeting-was-14c318986244#.15ticgqoz 

(For those who chose not to read the link, the central point  by Mark Suster was the meeting at Trump Tower included 25 people. “25 people. 4 of them — FOUR — are the president-elect’s children (sic—actually three children and one son-in-law). That is 16% of everybody in the room or put differently if I include Donald Trump the meeting consists of 20% family members. This is the definition of nepotism that we would condemn from the least democratic nations in the world.”

Oy! A Common Refrain In the Age of Trump

Oy.

Oy vey.

Oy-yoy-yoy. 

Oy—a Yiddish exclamation of chagrin, dismay, exasperation or pain.

It looks like it will be worse than expected. It looks like Donald Trump will systematically destroy the foundations of our country while a vast majority of the Republican Party shows itself to be a spineless entity only interested in staying in office with no regard for truth, justice and the tenets of their sainted Ronald Reagan.

Oy vey—Yiddish for “Oh, how terrible things are.”

Let’s start with some basic agreements. First ISIS and al Queda are terrorist organizations. They can attack us and kill scores at a time but they are not existential threats to America, at least not in a physical sense. They do no more physical damage than Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., or Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va.

The danger from Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernadino, Calif., or a Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood, Texas, is that we will overreact and start to dismantle constitutional protections. We should fear the loss of liberties we all take for granted.

We are in no danger of sharia law overtaking our judicial system.

Second thing to agree on, existential threats may come from governments with the power to undermine our democracy, our safety and our economic system. Those threats can come from two countries—Russia and China.

Or they may come from within, from politicians who issue falsehoods while denying the truth, who divide to conquer, who fail to see real existential threats while promoting false ones, who undermine belief in our country’s principles and institutions by substituting their own misguided values and by not sharply rebuking and disavowing the bigoted rants of fringe groups, thereby giving them undeserved legitimacy.

OY-YOY-YOY: Yiddish for an exclamation of sorrow and lamentation.

It is widely believed by intelligence experts inside and outside our government that Russia tried to influence our recent election by hacking into Democratic Party and officials’ computers.

Donald Trump doesn’t believe that. But then Donald Trump believes it is okay to retweet falsehoods as legitimate news. So does his choice to be national security advisor, retired general Mike Flynn. So does his choice to be chief strategist, Stephen Bannon.

But as troubling as those individuals are with their careless and carefree regard for the truth it pales in comparison to the hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Republican politicians and voters who are not protesting their insanity.

Now that the election is over, GOP senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham, especially the former, now seem ready to fight for the integrity of the government rather than for the in-the-moment-victory of a Republican presidential candidate no matter how flawed he might be or how crass his behavior toward them was during the last 18 months. 

Under the existing rules of our electoral system, Trump won the election, though not a mandate, as he claims, as close to three million more voters opted for someone besides him to lead America. He won the Electoral College vote, but that shouldn’t mean all truth and logic gets dissolved in his acidic view of reality. The optimal word in that last sentence is “shouldn’t.” 

Oy.

Trump is creating an alternative universe where intelligence does not exist if it doesn’t match his gut instincts and his desire to make a buck. He has mastered the art of the sham and the public diss. How exquisitely perverse was his dangling interest in Al Gore’s explanation of climate change and environmental vigilance only to rebuff it quickly by nominating an Environmental Protection Agency chief who rejects it all and has no appreciation of the link between fracking and the thousands of earthquakes that have shook his home state of Oklahoma.

Cabinet departments were established to further the benefits of their disciplines and constituencies. Yet Trump has chosen a labor secretary who doesn’t believe in a minimum wage and who is anti-union. Trump has chosen a housing secretary with no prior experience in public housing other than the fabrication (by others) that he grew up in public housing rather than near it. He’s chosen as United Nations ambassador someone with no foreign relations experience. During the campaign Trump blasted Hillary Clinton for being close to Goldman Sachs, yet he picked three current or former Goldman Sachs bankers as teammates (Steve Mnuchin as Treasury secretary, Bannon and Gary Cohn, the current Goldman president, as director of the National Economic Council).

The Bill of Rights was adopted to protect and enshrine freedom of speech, religion and assembly. Yet Trump disparages—bullies, actually—those who make fun of him, those who burn the flag as a protest, those who adhere to Islam, those who assemble peacefully. 

Republican values are being torn down by Trump. From Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon such values included stewardship of the land and natural resources. Yet Trump surrounds himself with fossil fuel advocates and climate change deniers even as the oceans rise, the polar cap melts, residents of cities like Beijing and New Delhi choke under pollution from coal and fossil fuel exhausts. Do we really want to return to the days of smog in Los Angeles when children, seniors and those with respiratory ailments were advised to stay indoors? Is that how Trump will make America great again? 

Abraham Lincoln is revered for fighting for racial equality. Yet Trump and his minions want to roll back laws that have advanced voting rights of minorities. 

Reagan was the consummate anti-Russian. Yet Trump rejects such Republican orthodoxy. He sees Russia only through the eyes of an entrepreneur, as a market to exploit, failing to see how Vladimir Putin has aggressively sought to undermine Western values and democracies. 

Trump lacks a world view commensurate with the responsibilities of the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth. There is one silver lining in his leadership. He is a teetotaler, so there’s no danger of his being drunk and ordering some dangerous military adventure as Nixon’s top staff worried in the days before his resignation. Of course, our last experience with a non drinker would not instill such confidence. Abstainer-in-chief George W. Bush got us into two wars in the Mideast in which we are still engaged. 

Trump also poses a downside risk—he says he gets just four hours of sleep a night. Last week AAA said driving on four hours’ sleep is as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. Driving on 4-5 hours’ sleep increases the chance of an accident by 400%. Less than four hours increases the crash risk by 12 times.

Teenagers, older adults and those who have sleep debt are among the group with the most risk of an accident, according to AAA.

So how comfortable should we feel about the decision making skills of a 70-year-old future president who boasts he gets just four hours sleep a night?

Oy vey!