Trump Launches Operation Bannarossa

Donald Trump is surrounded by – and apparently admires and respects – generals. His chief of staff, John Kelly, is a retired four-star Marine general. His Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, is also a retired four-star Marine general. His national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, is an active three-star Army general. And then there’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, who is also a four-star Marine general. He could walk out of any door in the Oval Office and would trip over a general. A couple of them – McMaster and Mattis – are known as intellectuals and students of history.

Since Mr. Trump seems to have some sort of soft spot for fascists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis, he should ask any of those generals about Operation Barbarossa and how it worked out for Germany’s Nazis. Today, with the shit-canning of the lumpy, oatmeal-ish, slovenly Steve Bannon, Trump is making the same strategic blunder. Let’s call it Operation Bannarossa.

Now, please don’t think for a second that 1) I’m unhappy about Mr. Bannon’s departure or 2) that I feel sorry for Mr. Trump that he’s made a decision of such epic stupidity that it compares to the decision that ultimately caused the death of millions, caused Germany to lose the war and led to the division of Europe for almost half a century. I am, actually, almost gleeful (more on that below). Instead, I’m writing today because this marks what may well be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.

For those too lazy to click on the link or who are too far removed from their high school history class, Operation Barbarossa was the name for Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941. It was – and remains – the largest military operation in history, involving 4 million men, an 1,800-mile front, 600,000 motor vehicles and 600,000 to 700,000 horses for non-combat operations. It also opened a second front in Germany’s war, one that ultimately sucked dry the German war machine. The horrific and protracted fighting lasted for four years and directly contributed to the ability of the Allies on the western front to reclaim the countries of western Europe that had been conquered earlier in the war.

There’s some debate among students of history whether Germany had to invade the western part of the Soviet Union as a source of manpower and natural resources, but there’s little debate – at least that I can find – that the actual invasion was incredibly stupid. It was based on overly optimistic assessments of German military effectiveness, the weakness of the Soviet military and the strength of its political leadership. It ignored the lessons learned by one of the great tacticians of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte, who invaded Russia in 1812 with an army of 422,000 soldiers and came home in 1813 with 10,000 men marching behind him (see the graphic below).

What Trump has done today is pretty much the same thing. By firing Steve, he has opened up a new front in his war with…pretty much everyone. Yesterday, his strategic map looked like this:

In the first seven months of his administration, Mr. Trump managed to go to war with almost everyone who wasn’t in his “base.” Whether deliberately or through ineptitude (my leading theory) he has managed to alienate both those he might have persuaded (Independents, moderate Democrats, the intelligence community) and those he should have been able to hold close like Senate Republicans, his only reliable support has been those loyal supporters on the right who – for a variety of reasons – responded to his populist/nationalist message. There are enough of these people to keep Mr. Trump’s rallies full and to enforce a little discipline on Congressional Republicans who are scared that they might be primaried by unhappy Trump voters.

Today, with the launch of Operation Bannarossa, Mr. Trump’s strategic map looks like this:

With this firing, Mr. Trump has opened up another front that will, I believe, cost him a substantial part of his remaining support. He has 1) pissed off and embarrassed Steve Bannon 2) freed him to “let Bannon be Bannon” 3) angered all those who think of Mr. Bannon as their guy inside this White House. High among those are the billionaire Mercer family, which has bankrolled Breitbart and Mr. Bannon and, of course, Breitbart itself. These people believe – with good reason – that they made Donald J. Trump’s unlikely victory and they can, by God, take it away.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating how this move is being perceived by Mr. Bannon’s allies, his former colleagues at Breitbart sent out a one-word Tweet upon hearing the news:

And, lest you think I’m exaggerating the amount of effort Steve Bannon and his Breitbart colleagues poured into promoting Mr. Trump, I highly recommend the just-published Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green that details how Bannon was pushing the Trump candidacy long before joining the campaign in August 2016. Consider, for example, Bannon’s efforts in February 2016 to convince then-Senator Jeff Sessions to endorse Trump:

As Joshua Green wrote in “Devil’s Bargain,” Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, was unsure if Trump could secure the Republican nomination, and knew that being the first senator to endorse Trump could further curtail his political future if Trump, the Republican frontrunner at the time, lost.

The day before Sessions endorsed Trump at a Madison, Alabama rally in February 2016, then-Breitbart News chairman Bannon told Sessions that it was “do or die” time and that “this is the moment” to endorse.

“Trump is a great advocate for our ideas,” Sessions told Bannon. “But can he win?”

“100%,” Bannon said. “If he can stick to your message and personify this stuff, there’s not a doubt in my mind.”

Sessions then noted that the GOP already denied him the chairmanship of the Budget Committee, and that “if I do this endorsement and it doesn’t work, it’s the end of my career in the Republican Party.”

“It’s do or die,” Bannon replied. “This is it. This is the moment.”

That moment was just days before what are known as the “SEC” primaries — a series of primary contests concentrated throughout the South. Bannon told Sessions that his endorsement could push Trump over the hump in many of those contests and essentially seal up the Republican nomination.

“Okay, I’m all-in,” Sessions said. “But if he doesn’t win, it’s over for me.”

And, lest you think I’m exaggerating the importance of Breitbart in setting the agenda of American conservatives and in controlling what they read, watch and listen to, I refer you to a recent study by a Harvard/MIT team which reached the following conclusion:

Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

The research team visualized Breitbart’s impact by looking at how many postings to Facebook come from the various media sources. By far, the largest star in the conservative universe – the one that bends light because of its gravitational field – is Breitbart. Bigger than Fox, bigger than the Daily Caller or any other outlet combined.

And Donald Trump just went to war with them. Good luck with that.

As an aside, if you want an in-depth look at Breitbart, I recommend this week’s New York Times magazine cover story.

Now, some will take issue with the near-glee I feel at the prospect of watching Mr. Trump’s approval ratings go into the 20s (near certain IMHO) and the steady procession of Congressional denouncements (again a near-certainty) and staff and Cabinet resignations (likely but not certain because some will have no place else to go – the spittle-chinned Stephen Miller for example – or are so thoroughly stained – I’m looking at you @kellyannepolls – that there’s no reason to leave). It is unpatriotic to root for our president to fail, they’ll argue, and in general I agree.

But, this isn’t the general case; Donald Trump is the black swan sort of case. After watching the damage he’s done to our country over the last seven months, convinced that he will never, ever, EVER change, I’m convinced that we need him to leave office as soon as possible whether through resignation, impeachment, use of the 25th Amendment or taking him up on his offer to go away for five billion dollars. We cannot survive a full term of this man.

Operation Bannarossa…may it do for Donald Trump what Operation Barbarossa did for the Nazis. Faster.

 

 

Republicans finding something behind them — vestigial spines

The story goes that, in Watergate, Republicans were courageous in helping remove Richard Nixon from office. Most weren’t, in fact. I read one news story recently that said Republican only got serious about impeachment when they lost several special elections, showing that Nixon’s paranoia and lying were threatening their own job security.

The Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee did indeed wrestle with tough choices. Do they send articles of impeachment to the House floor and risk hurting their party or do they turn their back on Nixon’s crimes? Seven Republican House members voted with the Democrats to send at least one of three articles of impeachment to the full House (10 Republicans voted against all three articles). Those seven Republicans acted for the country, not just for their party.

Six months ago, and for most of the days since, many of us have moaned, “Will any Republican leaders find their gonads and stand up to the ignorant irresponsible immature narcissist in the White House?”

But think about where we are today. In the middle of the cascade of daily outrages from Bully Baby Trump, we lose sight of the fact that some amazing things are happening, and may perhaps gain critical mass in the coming months.

These things have happened:

• The deputy attorney general appointed by Donald Trump appoints a special prosecutor to investigate the Russia mess. One of Trump’s own appoints the man who could bring the hustler down.
• In defense of “weak” “beleaguered” Jess Sessions, a Republican senator, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, says he has no time available in his judiciary committee between now and never to consider confirming a new attorney general if Trump bumps Sessions.
• In defense of the special prosecutor, a Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina (pictured above), asks Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat, if he wants to co-author a bill to reappoint a special prosecutor if Trump fires Robert Mueller.
• Trump pumps a bill from Tom Cotton, Arkansas senator, to restrict legal immigration. Republicans in the Senate say “Meh.”
• Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just today did not let the Senate go into recess even though he let everyone go home. He will keep the Senate technically in session so that the president of his own party cannot make a recess appointment of a successor to Sessions if Trump cans him.
• The instances above are surprising. Not as surprising, but wonderfully dramatic, and one of the landmark scenes in the long history of the Senate — John McCain, Republican elder, holding out his hand for several seconds before turning it thumbs down to scuttle Trump’s last hope (probably last) of repealing Obamacare.

What’s going on? Those of us on the left think “not nearly enough.” But … something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

But some Republicans are stirring. In ways six months ago I would never have imagined possible with the party so gleeful at controlling all three branches of government. Too many Republicans are doing the Paul Ryan dance, averting their eyes from their own incompetent president’s appalling behavior and keeping complicit, guilty silence.

But not all of them.

Dare we hope?

— Bruce Benidt

 

 

 

 

 

A Not-So-Implausible Conspiracy Theory

The June 2016 meeting between the Trumps and the Russians is the subject of ongoing scrutiny by the media, the public and – it appears – the special counsel appointed to look into the question of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. Much more effort will likely be expended in this area, trying to suss out what happened in that 20-30 minute meeting.

Those efforts are important, but here’s reality: The moment the Trumps’ visitors stepped off the elevator on the 25^th floor of their tower to sit down with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, the Trumps became pawns of the Russians. It doesn’t matter what was actually said or done.

By way of explanation, consider who was on the field that day: Starting with the visiting team, we have Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian attorney with close ties to the Russian elite, two people, Rob Goldstone and Irakly Kaveladzeare beholden to the Agalarov family, a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer, Rinat Akhmetshin, and a translator, Anatoli Samochornov.

Playing for the home team, we have the aforementioned Trump, Kushner and Manafort.

Now, if I were the kind of guy who was a former intelligence officer who used to catch and run spies for one of the most vicious (and effective) intelligence agencies in the world, the kind of guy who has been in power for nearly two decades and runs his country like a private bank for himself and his friends, the kind of guy whose political opponents serendipitously end up dead – if, in other words, I was Vladimir Putin – I would view this meeting as a lever. I could – with very little effort I suspect – convince the visitors – all of whom are tied to me, my country or my friends – to tell any story I wanted about what was said, what documents were provided, how the home team reacted.

Absolutely anything.

If I were Vladimir Putin’s kind of guy, I could probably get the visitors to swear that Ms. Veselnitskaya promised the Russians would arrange for the release thousands of Clinton campaign e-mails if Don Jr. promised that his dad would look the other way on Ukraine. Or that the Trump organization would wire $100 million to a Cayman Islands bank in exchange for help. Or that he’d pimp out Melania, Ivanka or Tiffany.

Or anything else. Let your imagination run.

Lest you think this is unrealistic, consider this thought experiment: sooner or later, the visiting team is going to be called to testify before Congress. If all five participants come to the witness table and in shaky, tremulous voices describe a more-or-less consistent version of what happened in that meeting, who can rebut them? After a solid year of lying, dissembling, omitting, misdirections, incomplete answers, amended forms and convenient forgetfulness, can anyone honestly claim that Don Jr., Jared and Paul have MORE credibility than five earnest people who haven’t spent all that time lying in public on a near-daily basis?

What if someone on the visiting team happened to record the meeting? Or at least has a recording that purports to be from the meeting? Before you say no way could something like that be faked, read this article.

Of course, the beauty of a lever like this is that you don’t actually have to use it in order to make it effective. All you have to do is let your opponents know that you have the lever and that you’re prepared to use it. You would also offer them a carrot in the form of a “promise” that the visiting team would continue to be helpful in terms of denying anything untoward happened as long as the Trump administration continued to cooperate.

Now, when could the Russians have let the Trumps know of the existence of such a carrot-and-stick arrangement? Could they have told them…

• During the undisclosed conversations between Mike Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak?
• During the undisclosed meetings between Jeff Sessions and Kislyak?
• During the undisclosed meeting between Jared Kushner and Kislyak?
• During the undisclosed meeting between Kushner and Russian banker Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank?
• During President Trump’s unpublicized meeting in the Oval Office with Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov?
• During the 2:15 meeting between President Trump and Putin at the G20?
• During the just-disclosed one-on-one meeting between the two at the G20 dinner?

Those are just a few of the possibilities. Turns out there’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloging the many ways information like this might have flowed to the Trumps.

“The Russians are not our friends,” said Mitch McConnell. Similarly, Vladimir Putin does not admire, respect or want to be friends with Donald Trump. Everything I’ve ever read about the man suggests that people are important to him only to the extent that they’re useful to him. The Trumps, through ineptitude, greed or entitlement, have made themselves extraordinarily useful. As I’m putting the finishing touches on this article, I’m seeing reports that the Trump administration has ended its program to supply arms to anti-Assad rebels in Syria, something long sought by Moscow. As one current official described the decision, “Putin won in Syria.”

See how useful the Trumps can be?

Austin

 

 

Bye Bye Bobby Lee. Can a Stone Wall be Moved?

After 133 years, a statue of Robert E. Lee came down in New Orleans last week. It made me wonder, again, about the portrait of Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson that’s in our bedroom. I’ve been enormously intrigued by Jackson for years, and researched and wrote an historical novel about him (Cross Over The River; Lives of Stonewall Jackson, available on Amazon.com and iUniverse.com) years ago. Jackson, like Lee, fought valiantly to defend the South and its inhuman institution of slavery. Is he to be admired? Why do I have him hanging on my wall?

Herman Melville wrote a poem about Jackson when Stonewall was accidentally killed by his own troops at the battle of Chancellorsville:

The Man who fiercest charged in fight,
Whose sword and prayer were long –
Stonewall!
Even him who stoutly stood for Wrong,
How can we praise? Yet coming days
Shall not forget him with this song.

Dead is the Man whose Cause is dead,
Vainly he died and set his seal –
Stonewall!
Earnest in error, as we feel;
True to the thing he deemed was due,
True as John Brown or steel.

Relentlessly he routed us;
But we relent, for he is low –
Stonewall!
Justly his fame we outlaw; so
We drop a tear on the bold Virginian’s bier,
Because no wreath we owe.

Stoutly stood for wrong. Earnest in error. Melville called him true as John Brown, who fought against slavery in Kansas and Virginia. Each a zealot, each spilling blood both innocent and guilty in his cause. Can one do something admirable, moving, courageous, in a bad cause?

Of course, “bad cause” and “earnest in error” are tepid bits of language for something as abominable as human slavery. But Jackson fought successfully against desperate odds. His 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, when he defeated five armies with his much smaller force and caused Lincoln to pull back troops from Gen. George McClellan’s attack on Richmond, is still studied at West Point. While the Federal armies were getting everything in order, arranging supplies and getting all horses shod, Jackson would move like lightning with only part of his force only half equipped and sweep down on the Federal flanks and rear. At the height of his greatest victory he was killed by friendly fire. If he had not been shot then, it’s very possible we would be two countries, not one, today. Jackson would likely not have hesitated two months later at Gettysburg, as his replacement did, on the day the Confederates almost swept the Federals from the field. And the war might have ended then with a Union defeat. So he’s clearly a powerful and influential figure in history.

On my first visit to New Orleans I was in a cab swinging around a traffic circle, in the middle of which was a statue on a pedestal so tall I couldn’t make out whom the statue depicted. I asked my cab driver, a black woman, who was up there. “That’s Bobby Lee, baby,” she said, as if I was a hopeless rube. She said it with what I heard as pride. I was probably wrong.

I asked a black friend of mine when she came to my house if the portrait of Jackson bothered her. No, she said — I took her to mean she had more current racial battles to worry about.

When I first heard, years ago, of movements to remove Confederate statues, I thought it was a mistake to try to erase history. The first instance I recall was a push to remove a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general, from Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. Forrest was a ferocious, unconventional and successful fighter, like Jackson. After the war he was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. I understood that honoring him in public was at best a moral quagmire. But what about “Bobby Lee, baby”? Lee was a man of grace and honor and storied lineage. He married the daughter of George Washington’s stepson. His father was a colonel in the American Revolution and a governor of Virginia. After Appomattox, when many advocated that the remnants of the Confederate armies head for the hills and conduct guerrilla warfare, Lee told Confederate soldiers to lay down their arms, go home, and obey the law.

Should statues of Robert E. Lee be taken down? Or all the statues of Confederate line soldiers in countless courthouse squares across the South? Or Jackson’s statue at his grave in Lexington in the beautiful Shenandoah?

If I were Jewish, what would I think of finding a statue of Herman Goering in a public park?

I believe Donald Trump, with his denial of global warming and his rescinding of Obama’s environmental regulations, will share responsibility for hundreds of millions of deaths in his children’s and grandchildren’s generations as the seas warm and rise and weather worsens and crops and fish die off. I don’t ever want to encounter a statue to this barbarian.

Slavery is just a word to a well-off white guy like me. But in some of the museums in the South I’ve seen artifacts of slavery that are haunting, like an iron collar with six-inch spikes that clamped around a man’s neck and restricted his ability to do almost anything a human being should be able to do. I’ve lately heard two African American historians and writers explain whey they call their ancestors an “enslaved person” rather than a slave. No one is born a slave, they say. Slavery is something another person did to them. And continued, day after day, to do. Rounding up humans in Africa. Packing them in ships like cordwood, a large percentage of them dying on the passage. Beatings. Selling children away from their parents. Endless rape. Denying the right to read. Denying the right to be respected or even seen as human. Murder for sport. Terrible housing. Disease and death. There’s no way for me to imagine what existence was like as a slave. And the hypocrisy of the whites who said slavery was good for this “childlike race” is staggering.

Jackson and Lee fought to keep the right to keep people enslaved. How can that be admirable, no matter how resourceful and inspirational and successful they were against impossible odds?

Lee and Jackson said they fought because their country was invaded. They believed in the right of a state to secede from the Union it had voluntarily joined, and were appalled that other states would march murderous soldiers into theirs to force them to stay in the fold. They both owned slaves and said, correctly, that the Constitution guaranteed them the right to do so. They considered themselves patriots and opposed secession until it happened, then served to defend their native state.

Part of the answer to all this is unfolding in Charleston, South Carolina, the flashpoint of the Civil War. Like Washington, D.C., Charleston will open in 2019 an International African American Museum on the site of a wharf where perhaps 40% of the Africans enslaved and brought to America landed. The city’s mayor for four decades, Joseph Riley, is one of the people most responsible for the museum’s creation. He hopes the museum helps all Americans learn from the unvarnished truth of our country’s original sin by seeing the horrors of slavery and the heroism of those enslaved. Asked about taking down monuments to Confederates, he has said the answer isn’t less history, but more. Keep the old monuments but tell the whole story by adding new ones such as Charleston’s and D.C.’s museums and programs. That sounds like wisdom to me.

Otherwise, how many more statues will come down? In New Orleans, where Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis were just removed for display in some not-yet-determined, more-appropriate less-public place, a statue in Jackson Square of Andrew Jackson rises on rearing horseback. Our seventh president. Who conceived and carried out a policy of Indian removal that uprooted America’s indigenous civilizations and killed tens of thousands on many Trails of Tears. If Lee’s statue can’t stand — can Jackson’s? Must Jefferson be led away from his gorgeous stone gazebo on the Tidal Basin? Must Washington City be renamed?

So why do I have a portrait of Thomas Jackson on my wall? Stonewall wouldn’t have liked me, a reprobate pantheist. I probably wouldn’t have much liked him, a stern Old-Testament Presbyterian and a college teacher who delivered memorized lectures that allowed for no discussion. But as a father and husband he was tender and, flouting local custom, he taught a Sunday school class to black children. And his daring and decisiveness were breathtaking. The South was vastly outnumbered in everything — population, soldiers, ships, resources, railroad iron, manufacturing, guns, food, fuel, foundries. The only force they had stronger than the Union’s was their generals’ audacity. How quickly Jackson took the measure of his opponents, the chances he took, how he used the beautiful geography and topography of the great Valley of Virginia to hide his moving troops, all make him a fascinating man for me. Yet despite why he said he fought, the result of his fighting, if successful, would have been continued slavery. History is complex and unclear.

In Lexington, Virginia, where Lee served after the war as president of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University, there is a stable next to the president’s house. Lee died in 1870 in Lexington of pneumonia after a ride in the rain on his horse, Traveller, who had served Lee faithfully during the war. A year later Traveller died. The doors to Traveller’s stable are always kept slightly ajar, even today. In case the horse comes home.

One day, perhaps, America will come home. I can still hear George McGovern’s acceptance speech in 1972, late late at night, when the quixotic candidate ran against Richard Nixon in an America as divided as it is now, and almost as divided as it had been one hundred years before — “Come home, America,” was McGovern’s plea. Come home, together, despite conflicting views and values.

I’m fine with Robert E. Lee being taken off his pedestal in New Orleans. We don’t have to hold him up, but we can’t make believe he was never an American. We can’t delete Lee, or either Jackson, from history or from the tangled twisted improbable story of America that is still being told. As we all try to find home.

— Bruce Benidt

The Arrogance of Donald Trump

I’ll leave it to the elephants to trample the grass around the firing of FBI Director James Comey – except to agree with the obvious point that this clearly wasn’t about the Director’s handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail issue – but I do want to call out one telling detail of yesterday’s drama: Mr. Trump sent his longtime bodyguard – Keith Schiller – to hand carry the letter of dismissal to Director Comey’s office. That wasn’t an accident and reveals the petty cruelty and arrogance of Mr. Trump.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Schiller, he has been part of the Trump Organization since 1999 when he signed on as a part-time bodyguard. In 2005, he became Trump’s head of security. If you’ve ever watched a Trump rally, you’ve probably seen Mr. Schiller as he’s rarely far from his boss.

Schiller served in the New York Police Department and in the Navy so he has law enforcement experience, but his primary qualification for his job is his unwavering loyalty to Trump. Sending him to “fire” James Comey – someone who has worked for decades in the highest levels of our nation’s law enforcement – is a calculated insult akin to sending a first-year medical student to pull a neurosurgeon out of an operating room.

In plain language, it’s a dick move by a low-class bully who probably fouled the Oval Office by giggling about how clever he was.

This detail changes nothing about how I feel about Mr. Trump and I suspect that it won’t change anyone’s opinion of the man. If, however, someone tells you about the “warm and gracious” Trump that no one sees on camera, remember this counterpoint. This is the real Donald Trump and these are the people he wants around him.

• Austin

High-Risk Pools, Pre-Existing Conditions and Other Lies: Why Tomorrow’s Health Care Vote Matters

Word this evening is that the House Republican leadership has set a vote for tomorrow on the latest version of “Repeal and Replace.” Insiders and observers are saying that this is a sign Speaker Ryan and his whips have found the requisite number of “yeas” to get the bill out of the House and on to the Senate.

On the one hand, tomorrow’s vote doesn’t really matter. Whatever Frankenbill they cobbled together won’t last a day in the Senate before it gets shredded. And, whatever the Senate sends back to the House will be a non-starter for the lower house. So tomorrow is a little meaningless skirmish in a larger war. It will give the Umber Jackhole residing at 1600 Pennsylvania an empty victory he will claim in Tweet and incoherent interview alike but nothing much else.

On the other hand, the hand I care about this evening, tomorrow’s vote matters a lot. The Republican legislation – to the extent anyone knows what’s actually in it – substantially weakens the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The authors of the bill know this. The administration knows this. Donald Trump doesn’t care what it does as long as it passes.

And yet all of these people are saying just the opposite and are thus perpetrating a fraud on the American people and on that basis, tomorrow’s vote matters very much. It is a test of whether our system still works, an opportunity to say, “Hell no” to this level of mendacity and grifter behavior.

If you’re already convinced on this point, you can skip the rest of this post and simply stop here with this call to action: Please call, email or visit your Congressperson tomorrow. Do it more than once. The main phone number is (202) 224-3121. You can find a list of Congressional offices (most with links to their direct phone numbers and emails) here. Don’t know how your Representative is? Look it up here.  Tweet at them, post on their Facebook pages. Share this with your friends and ask them to do the same. Ask your Representative to reject this legislation.

If, however, you’re unconvinced that tomorrow’s vote is worth your time or if some of your friends need more than just an ask from some random person on their Facebook feed, the rest of this post is for you and them.

At the core of the bill being voted on tomorrow is a set of changes that will allow insurers to return to many of their pre-ACA behaviors including greater price discrimination by age, the promotion of substandard plans, as well as cuts to Medicaid and – as has been much discussed – will create a pathway for the elimination of coverage for pre-existing conditions.

As I understand the proposed legislation, if a state asks the federal government for a waiver, insurers in that state can refuse to cover pre-existing conditions if 1) the insured person lets his or her coverage lapse and 2) the state sets up a “high-risk” pool or reinsurance program as a safety net. This is pretty much the way things worked in the pre-ACA days when – according to the New York Times – 35 states had such mechanisms.

So…let’s contemplate for a second how many Republican governors there are – 33. How many state legislatures are controlled by the GOP – 32. How many of those politicians have pledged their undying, unyielding hatred of Obamacare. Suddenly, that hurdle doesn’t seem so high.

The process for granting a waiver? Under the current Trump administration, I’m guessing that will be something that can be completed on a postcard and approved with a “looks good to me” review.

I’ll leave it to you to contemplate all the ways you can lose coverage in today’s world of economic dislocation. Suffice it to say shit happens.

“But wait! Wait,” the apologists will claim. Even if you’re right, those people will still have access to care. Through the high-risk pools.

Yeah, let’s talk about that idea.

Historically, as the Times article notes, those pools have been wildly underfunded, charged participants much, much higher premiums than the prevailing market, were capped in terms of how many people they would accept and how much they would pay out either in a year or a lifetime. As the Times noted, California had an annual cap of $75,000 per person and across all the plans – in all 35 states – a grand total of 230,000 people were able to get coverage.

230,000 people out of 321,000,000. Less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the population.

Needless to say the number of people with pre-existing conditions is substantially bigger than 1/10th of 1 percent. How much bigger? Try 270 times bigger. And, depending on where you live, a lot bigger.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s actual verified data, the stuff we used to call “facts” in the old days. Based on an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 27 percent of the people under 65 have a pre-existing condition. Add it all up, according to Kaiser, and you come up with more than 52,000,000 people who might find themselves with no coverage, unaffordable coverage or substandard coverage.

And, of course, as you get older, the prevalence of pre-existing conditions increases. The graphic from AARP below illustrates, the percentage of people in the 50-64 age bracket with a pre-existing condition ranges from 32 percent on the low end to 52 percent on the high end.

You might not have a pre-existing condition, but if you live in a family of four chances are someone in your family does. If your block has 12 families on it, three of them might be uninsurable under a loosened standard of coverage and could be bankrupted by the cost of care. As Jimmy Kimmel tearfully noted, even newborns come with pre-existing conditions and a family without insurance – or an insurance plan with a lifetime or annual cap – can find itself have to choose between caring for their newborn or sending him to college, owning a home or a retirement.

In case you’re interested in exactly what constitutes a pre-existing condition, you might be surprised to learn that you could pretty easily fall in that category. Pre-ACA, the list of conditions considered pre-existing included:

 

• AIDS/HIV
• Alcohol and drug abuse
• Alzheimer’s/dementia
• Arthritis (rheumatoid), fibromyalgia, other inflammatory joint disease
• Cancer
• Cerebral palsy
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)/emphysema
• Congestive heart failure
• Coronary artery/heart disease, bypass surgery
• Crohn’s disease/ ulcerative colitis
• Diabetes mellitus
• Epilepsy
• Hemophilia
• Hepatitis
• Kidney disease, renal failure
• Lupus
• Mental disorders (severe, e.g. bipolar, eating disorder)
• Multiple sclerosis
• Muscular dystrophy
• Obesity
• Organ transplant
• Paralysis
• Paraplegia
• Parkinson’s disease
• Pending surgery or hospitalization
• Pneumocystic pneumonia
• Pregnancy or expectant parent
• Sleep apnea
• Stroke
• Transsexualism

Pre-existing conditions could also injuries, previous surgical procedures and more.

I’m not alone in opposing this, of course, and neither is it a liberal thing. The famously conservative American Medical Association? Against it. Also the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Osteopathic Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. So too is the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, JDRF, March of Dimes, the National Organization for Rare Disorders, the National MS Society and others. The American Hospital Association? A no vote. Ditto for the Children’s Hospital Association and AARP. For too many reasons to enumerate, these organizations know the scam that’s being pulled and are screaming about it:

“None of the legislative tweaks under consideration changes the serious harm to patients and the health care delivery system if AHCA passes. Proposed changes to the bill tinker at the edges without remedying the fundamental failing of the bill – that millions of Americans will lose their health insurance as a direct result of this proposal.

“High-risk pools are not a new idea. Prior to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, 35 states operated high-risk pools, and they were not a panacea for Americans with pre-existing medical conditions. The history of high-risk pools demonstrates that Americans with pre-existing conditions will be stuck in second-class health care coverage – if they are able to obtain coverage at all.

“Not only would the AHCA eliminate health insurance coverage for millions of Americans, the legislation would, in many cases, eliminate the ban against charging those with underlying medical conditions vastly more for their coverage.”

– American Medical Association President Andrew W. Gurman, M.D

Again, the authors of this bill also know all this. They know that they’re opening an easy pathway to exclusion of pre-existing conditions. They know the money they’ve set aside to support high-risk pools is inadequate for its intended purpose. They know the extra $8 billion they dramatically added to the bill today does nothing to change these calculations.

And yet they look us in the eye and tell us exactly the opposite. We cannot, should not, let this go unnoticed and unopposed. To the contrary, I hope that every Member of Congress goes to vote tomorrow with the credo of Anonymous echoing in his or her mind: We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

That’s why tomorrow’s vote is important. Spread the word.

• Austin

 

 

 

101 Trumpnations

One hundred and one. But who’s counting? The total is too daunting.

Donald Trump in 100 days hasn’t done as much as we may have feared, and of course he’s done way less than he promised. Lots of commentary about this artificial hundred-day mark, about how Trump’s doing.

What about us? How are we doing?

Still shocked. Still disbelieving. I have friends and family who are watching and reading much less news. Thoreau said that, once you know trains can crash, you don’t need to know every time a train crashes. I’m reading and watching somewhat less. So little of what’s in the headlines and on the air is surprising: Trump guts environmental protections, Trump proposes tax breaks for the rich. We need to know he’s doing this, but I don’t need to punish myself with each detail.

My wife, Lisa, has said for some time that, politically, things have to get worse before they get better. She started saying this when W was “selected” as she says. I hoped eight years of W would be enough to start the “better.” But I guess we need more “worse.” I can’t quite fathom that we have fourteen times as many days of Trump left as we’ve had so far — if he doesn’t quit early, bored and tired of actual work, as I believe he will. At 66 years of age, keeping my head down for four years and hoping things get better doesn’t sound as easy as it might have in 1968, at the beginning of Nixon. Or even at the beginning of Reagan, when I was 30.

Several commentators, including Andrew Sullivan, have said it’s a good thing Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected, if Congress stayed Republican. Congress would have let her accomplish less than Obama, and the right would have gone more crazy, and the Democratic Party would have suffered more in the White House than in the Wilderness, Sullivan says. Maybe there’s a silver lining there.

The hope these writers have is that Trump will screw up enough that there will be a reaction against him in both the midterms and the next presidential election, and we’ll get back to … to what? Republicans and Democrats fractured within their parties, left and right (or right and far right)? Voters who don’t understand or want to understand people who voted for the other side? A country still divided, or splintered, but one with a Democrat in the White House? I guess that’s our hope, faint though it may be.

My hope is that people who voted for Trump will see his con. But they haven’t so far. Ninety-six percent of those who voted for him still support him, some polls say. Those numbers may not yet reflect reaction to his tax plan, which benefits him to the tune of hundreds of millions, and $1.2 billion in estate tax savings, if you believe his boasts about his own wealth. Maybe those numbers will wake up some Trump voters — but are the local media in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, or Anadarko, Texas, showing who benefits and who’s getting screwed in Trump’s plan? Fox News ain’t. What will make Trump voters understand that he ran as a populist and is already governing as a plutocrat?

Trump voters are getting the circus they wanted, but not the bread. Jason Miller, a Trump campaign adviser, told the New York Times today “The 2016 election wasn’t a delicate request to challenge exiting traditions; it was a demand that our next president do things different. And while the professional political class struggles to understand what has happened to their hold on power, supporters of President Trump — the forgotten men and women he referenced in his Inaugural Address — love the change they’re seeing.” So Trump shakes things up and doesn’t follow convention, and I understand how that’s appealing. Too many politicians are to human beings what a postcard is to a real sunset. So Trump is refreshing to people tired of both Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton poll-testing their every breath.

Trouble is, Donald Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about “the forgotten men and women he referenced in his Inaugural Address.” Never has. And is busily working, when he’s not golfing, at screwing them over. Will they see it, or will his flimflam bluster keep them entertained enough to not check their wallets?

Time will tell. But with an aging Supreme Court and the oceans rising … do we have 1,359 more days?

Me, I’m just glad baseball season started. Even reruns of West Wing (our fifth time through) aren’t cheering me up as much as an Evan Longoria homer or rope-line toss from deep at third.

How are you all doing?

— Bruce Benidt

 

WWASD?

“What would Andrew Shepherd do?”

Liberals (or “hyper liberals” as I was recently called) of a certain age have something of a wet dream fantasy about the 1990s movie The American President. For those of you who haven’t seen it or have forgotten it, it’s the gauzy reimagining of the Clinton presidency without the messy bits of scandal and – prominently –  without the First Lady.  With snappier dialogue, better cheekbones and a tragicom plot line of the widowed President Andrew Shepherd raising a daughter and finding love in the Lincoln bedroom, it’s a reliable feel-good movie on a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon. Spoiler alert: turns out it’s possible to be an ethical, honest elected official, speak the truth, fix the economy, settle the debate on gun control, eviscerate the politics of division and get the girl.

Thus, in times of controversy, we liberals of a certain age are prone to ask the question, “What would Andrew Shepherd do?”

Fortunately, Aaron Sorkin anticipated just the sort of event we’ve seen play out this week and it’s an instructional – albeit fictional – bit of content:

INT. THE SITUATION ROOM – NIGHT. SHEPHERD, A.J., the SECRETARY OF STATE, the SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, and about a dozen or so Pentagon, Security Council, and Joint Chiefs OFFICIALS are doing exactly what they’re trained for.

CHAIRMAN (continuing) “…The F-18’s are fired up on the Kimitz and the Kitty Hawk. They’re just waiting for your attack order, Mr. President.”

SHEPHERD “And we’re gonna hit Libyan Intelligence Headquarters?”

MAN “The N.S.A. confirmed they’re the ones who planned the bombing.”

CHIEF OF STAFF “What’s the estimate?”

GENERAL “We’ll level the building.”

SHEPHERD “Libyan I.H.Q’s in the middle of downtown Tripoli — are we gonna hit anything else?”

GENERAL “Only if we miss.”

SHEPHERD “Are we gonna miss?”

GENERAL “No, sir.”

SHEPHERD “How many people work in that building?”

CHAIRMAN “We’ve been all through–”

SHEPHERD “How many people work in the damn building?”

DEPUTY “I’ve got those number here. There are three shifts, so it–”

SHEPHERD “The fewest. What shift puts the fewest people in the building? The night shift, right?”

DEPUTY “By far. Mostly custodial staff and a few–”

SHEPHERD “What time does the night crew go on?”

DEPUTY “They’re on now, sir.”

SHEPHERD “A.J.?”

CHIEF OF STAFF: “It’s immediate, it’s decisive, it’s low risk, and it’s a proportional response.”

SHEPHERD Someday somebody’s going to have to explain to me the virtue of a proportional response.

There’s a SILENCE. SHEPHERD gets up and starts to head out the door.

CHAIRMAN “Mr. President?”

SHEPHERD “Attack.”

CUT TO: INT. OVAL OFFICE – NIGHT

SHEPHERD is with CHIEF OF STAFF and a couple of AIDES, all of whom look as though they’ve been called out of their homes in the middle of the night.

CHIEF OF STAFF “Robin, as soon as our planes have cleared Libyan airspace, you can call the press. I don’t know when we’ll have the full B.D.A.–”

AIDE 1 “General Rork says around O-Eight Hundred.”

AIDE 2 “Sir, what do you think about a national address?”

SHEPHERD “The last thing I want to do is put the Libyans center stage.”

AIDE 3 “I think it’s a great idea, sir. You know Rumson’s gonna be talking about your lack of military service.”

SHEPHERD “This isn’t about Rumson. What I did tonight was not about political gain.”

AIDE 3 “But it can be, sir. What you did tonight was very presidential.”

SHEPHERD “Leon, somewhere in Libyan right now there’s a janitor working the night shift at the Libyan Intelligence Headquarters. He’s going about his job ’cause he has no idea that in about an hour he’s gonna die in a massive explosion. He’s just going about his job ’cause he has no idea that an hour ago I gave an order to have him killed. You just saw me do the least presidential thing I do.”

AIDE 3 “Yes, sir.”

I’ve never been in the White House situation room. I’ve never been a part of a decision like this. I can’t say definitively what President Trump’s decision making process was in terms of if and how we should respond to Syria’s gassing of its citizens. I can only judge by what I can observe from afar, what I know of Mr. Trump by studying him over the last year or so and what’s reported in the not-fake news. Based on those sources, it appears to me that Mr. Trump’s decision to dramatically increase our engagement in one of the most difficult geopolitical issues in the world went something like this:

“”Oh, look at what’s on TV now…That’s terrible…this Assad guy is a bad dude…I want to punch him in the nose…that’ll show him who’s in charge…I’ll tell the generals….oh, look at what’s on TV now…”

I also suspect that President Trump does not see his decision as “the least presidential thing I do” but just the opposite. My profound fear is that he enjoyed this exercise of presidential power – 59 cruise missiles is a pretty substantial mood shifter – and that it felt good. I fear that he’s right now watching television again and seeing people across the political spectrum praise him (or at least not criticize him so robustly as on other issues) and thinking, “That worked…people like it…we have lots of those missiles…nobody likes that North Korean guy…I want to punch him in the nose…that’ll show him who’s in charge…China will respect us…I’ll tell the generals….”

In other words, not an Andrew Shepherd moment.

• Austin

 

The Haberdasher, the General and the Imposter

Harry Truman, commenting about General Dwight Eisenhower succeeding him in the Oval Office, said, “He’s going to sit at this desk and say ‘Do this’ and ‘Do that’ — and nothing’s going to happen.”

As a general, Ike could order people to do things and they’d do them. As president, not so much.

Truman would be amused, but not surprised, watching Donald Trump struggle in the office the haberdasher once occupied. As a businessman, Trump could give orders to his minions and the orders would be followed. Dealing with people now who aren’t on his payroll and who aren’t afraid of him, he’s flopping around, mouth gaping, like a fish tossed on shore.

It’s one more piece of evidence that the notion of running the government like a business is so very wrong. It’s wrong because it doesn’t work, and it’s wrong because, philosophically, it’s way off base. Business exists — especially in the grubby hands of bandits like Trump — for private enrichment. The government exists to advance and protect the common good.

It’s very clear that Trump and his family and his henchmen are blurring the line between running the government to serve others and running it to serve themselves. The ethical conflicts of interest Trump and his family have are so numerous and so glaring that there’s hardly a decision the president can make that doesn’t have a financial impact on him and his family. From pipelines to banks to hotels, Trump is using our tax money and mortgaging our national security to fill his Scrooge McDuck money bins. I think he can’t see any difference between his private pelf and the public good. That moral vacancy is frightening.

Business works to increase efficiency to grow shareholder value. And who are the largest shareholders? The white guys who run the company. The impact of business decisions that increase share prices or increase the sales and value of private companies is often damage to the community and the company’s employees. Government decisions have to take into consideration the impact on the public, on the economy, on the nation’s resources and the environment for decades and centuries to come, and on the nation’s security, values and reputation.

Whether it’s a toll road or a privately-built and -run prison or a school or retirement savings, the model of increasing shareholder value just does not cover all the bases. Even without Trump owning stock in two companies involved in the Dakota Access Pipeline, his coziness with big banks and big energy companies makes his approval of the pipeline  at the least raise questions about his motives — serve the public, protect the environment or backscratch his cronies? A spokesminion claims Trump has sold his stock in the pipeline partners — but with his history of lying and his refusal to release his tax returns, who can know?

Government is not a business. It has very different aims and responsibilities than a business has. Its moral purposes are completely different.

It’s actually refreshing to see Trump fail using his corporate pirate tricks. As a business bully he could get away with not knowing the details of the projects he was hustling. Underlings could marshall the facts and figures while figurehead Donald handled the bluster and the bullshit. When he didn’t know much of anything about the healthcare bill he was pushing, House members were shocked, and mocked him.

Trump said over and over during the campaign that he would make great deals. Snarking about President Obama playing golf, Trump said he would probably never play golf (!!!) as president because he’d just want to stay in the White House and make deals. But a president’s deal-making ability has to be in service of something, as LBJ’s was with Medicaid and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Trump just likes to make deals, and then skips town before his victims can heat up the tar and pluck the feathers. And deal-making is only part of what a president does. Other qualities — leadership, inspiration, fairness, judgment, steadiness in crises, compassion, empathy, vision, diplomacy — are just as important. And absent in the current Oval Office pretender.

Harry Truman must have been smiling wryly if he paid attention, from wherever dead presidents reside, as Trump’s odious consigliere, Steve Bannon, tried to carry The Boss’s orders to vote for the Frankenstein health care bill to the Freedom Caucus in the House. Bannon tried the strong arm, telling them “Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.” Might have worked for LBJ, a master of carrots, sticks, pork and human nature. Didn’t work for the windbag who told us we’d be tired of winning by this time. One Freedom Caucus member — bless his pointed little head — replied to Bannon: “You know, the last time someone ordered me to do something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.”

My friend Dave Kuhn, a fellow recovering journalist, taught me so much about helping senior executives deal effectively with the media. People from the military and business don’t like the press, Dave said, because it’s one of the few things they can’t control. So they’re not very good at handling the challenges journalists throw at them or at letting criticism slide off their backs.

Trump’s efforts at strong-arming the media aren’t any more successful than his orders to the House members of his own party have been. And thank god for that.

— Bruce Benidt

Bad Sci-Fi Movies and Real-World AI

Continuing my theme of doing things other than fret about Donald Trump, I have spent some time fretting about other existential threats to humanity. So, that’s healthy.

Specifically, I’ve spent the last half day thinking about the threat of alien invasions and runaway artificial intelligence. One of them you can consign to the bottom of your worry list; the other probably deserves a higher spot on the list, somewhere below Donald Trump but above death panels and “radical Islamic terrorism.”

The topic of alien invasions is the overt theme of the movie I saw last night: Life, directed by Daniel Espinosa and starring, among others, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds. Without giving away the plot, it explores the question of what happens when humanity encounters a lifeform that turns out to be smarter and more dangerous than it appears. Suffice it to say not all ends well for our gender- and ethnic-balanced crew aboard the International Space Station.

Despite the title of this post, the movie is not actually bad; it’s suspenseful and engaging. As I watched it, though, I was struck by how shitty the science was. As the investigators probed the alien lifeform, they repeatedly demonstrated all sorts of stupid, unrealistic practices. They let a single investigator engage in isolation with the lifeform to the extent he loses perspective. They do not do carefully measured experiments to determine both what sustains the organism and what kills it. When it demonstrates exponential growth and unexpected abilities, the researchers don’t react to this with caution but instead step on the accelerator. And, when things go wrong, they discover that their failsafe mechanisms are either non-existent or simply failures. Any epidemiologist or biologist working with potentially hazardous organisms would have been appalled.

The good news is that we’re not out scooping up biomass from other planets and bringing it back to Earth. There’s also every reason to think that the product of other evolutionary forces would not be particularly compatible with Earth’s. And, finally, there’s the fact that – despite the fact that we’ve been actively looking for decades, there’s very little sign of life – particularly intelligent life – outside of our little blue ball despite the fact that it’s a very, very big universe. This is known as the Fermi Paradox. My best guess is that you can put this issue way, way down on your list of things to worry about.

Which brings me to the other one, the existential threat of runaway artificial intelligence.

As I was driving home from the theater, it occurred to me that the movie was actually a commentary on the how we – not you or me, but some VERY smart people – are approaching the field of AI. As near as I can tell, we are using the same shitty scientific methods – the ones that would make any life science researcher cringe – to develop this technology. We have researchers all across the world laboring in secret, scientists who are less objective researchers and more would-be parents who are enraptured with the idea of strong AI or even the Singularity. Instead of running carefully controlled experiments and building in rigorous “kill steps,” AI is being deployed today in the real world – in Teslas, in fraud detection systems, in your washing machine, writing both press releases and news stories, in your favorite search engine, in the warehouses of your favorite retailer, as robo-calls and a thousand other ways. And, even though these creations are demonstrating unexpectedly rapid growth and ability (an AI-driven computer recent beat the world’s best Go players – widely considered an incredibly hard game – 60 games to none; a computer program performed a similar fear against some of the world’s best poker players), researchers are plowing onward at even faster rates.

This is perhaps not the smartest thing we’ve ever done. And, it’s not just me, your friendly blogger, who thinks so. Smart guys like Bill Gates and Elon Musk are worried about this. So are really smart guys like Stephen Hawking.

By way of fair disclosure, there are plenty of very smart people – Ray Kurzweil perhaps foremost among them – who believe the coming era of big AI will usher in an unprecedented era for humanity, giving us access to pretty much everything and an infinite lifespan to experience it. That seems like a better outcome, but this point of view is a little cultish and perhaps optimistic without hard, objective reasons. Life – whether artificial or otherwise – constantly finds ways to break out of whatever boxes it gets put into. Including the boxes we build.

If you’re inclined to read more on this, Vanity Fair coincidentally published a long interview with Musk on this topic. It is worth the 20 minutes or so it will take you and give you something to worry about instead of Trump.

There. Doesn’t that make you feel better instead of worrying about the latest cluster fuck from the White House? Next week, I’ll write about the threats of pandemics and global warming. Just call me Mr. Good News.

• Austin

 

 

 

Thought for the Week

If for no other reason than my own sanity, I have to occasionally write on something other than the giant smoldering crater that is our president. In that spirit, a thought from one of  my favorite authors – even today – Robert Heinlein. The “science” of his science fiction is mostly lacking but many of his characters taught me lessons worth learning:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I’m still a few skills short, but I’m still learning. What else should be on the list?

• Austin

Minnesota Has Seen This Movie

As I watched the dramatic collapse of Trumpcare today, I was reminded that Minnesotans have seen this Happy Gilmoresque movie before: Before there was “Trump: The President” there was “Ventura: The Governor.”

For those younger than me – approximately all of you – you might not remember that in 1998, sober, sane, proud-of-our-good-government-instincts Minnesota elected a former professional wrestler – surely the forerunners of today’s reality stars – and bit-player actor (“I ain’t got time to bleed.”) as its governor. While this decision looks positively brilliant next to Mr. Trump’s election – Ventura had at least served in the military and had held elective office – it was an electoral exercise in “what-the-fuck” voting as two uninspiring mainstream candidates drove down their turnout and allowed a third party candidate to eke out a narrow victory.

Two things saved Mr. Ventura’s tenure from immediately becoming the smoldering crater that is the Trump Administration after just 64 days. First, and most obviously, is the fact that we elected a buffoon to the Governor’s Office instead of the Oval Office thus limiting the damage that even the most inept office holder can do (though one should never underestimate what a motivated governor can do – I’m looking at you Scott Lets-Gut-Public-Unions Walker and you Rick Let-Them-Drink-Lead Snyder). Second, as MPR notes, Jesse “The Body” Ventura was lucky enough to come into office with a $4 billion tax surplus (which it also notes he turned into a $4.5 billion deficit) and a blessedly quiet period in Minnesota when the most difficult public policy questions consisted of everyone asking, “What should we do with all this extra money?” Even Jesse Ventura – who had the not-very-original-or-smart- but-defensible position of rebating the surplus to taxpayers – could manage not to screw things up too bad in a political environment that marshmallowly.

As an aside, while I was reading the MPR story mentioned above to refresh my memory of what happened – and didn’t – during The Body’s time in office, I was struck by this passage:

Republican House Speaker Steve Sviggum says Ventura’s relationship with key lawmakers was hot and cold.

“There are times he just charmed you tremendously. You know, just very, very charming,” Sviggum said. “And in the next minute, you’ll be shaking your head and saying, ‘you know, I don’t want anything to do with the individual.'”

Gee, who does that remind me of? Wait, wait…it’ll come to me.

Unfortunately, shit got real for Minnesota in the last year or so of Governor Ventura’s term when the money ran out and actually governing and legislating had to be done. Mr. Ventura, after making some nominal efforts to participate in the process, checked out and left it to the legislature to work it out. I seem to recall he spent his time – while in office – being the MC for something called the XFL, junketing to China and Cuba and feuding with the media (the more things change…).

This trip down memory lane is more than just an old fart’s reminiscences; it bears on today’s debacle – and that’s an insult to the other debacles – in terms of what happened today and – more importantly – what’s going to happen next.

Today, Mr. Trump’s efforts at playing the role of President were exposed as the fraud many of us have believed it would be and is. The master negotiator got rolled by two dozen guys in $200 Men’s Wearhouse poly-blend suits. The “closer” discovered he’s a “c” short. The Great Leader turned around and discovered the parade was a bit shorter than he’d promised and that nobody seems terribly worried about crossing him. In short, he got the shit kicked out of him and even if he can’t admit it, looked hopelessly out his depth.

Who knew health care was so complicated? I mean, gee Wally, I guess being a grown up is harder than it looks.

My prediction is that Mr. Trump – who is so thin-skinned he makes Mr. Ventura look positively indifferent to criticism – will do exactly what the governor did back in 2001; he’ll pull back from all this “governing stuff” and leave it to the Congress – and maybe his cabinet members – to deal with. Having suffered a body-blow of a loss, Mr. Trump will retreat to what he likes best – ceremonial photo ops with truckers, bikers, CEOs who announce jobs (real or not), rallies (though I’ll be interested to see how those crowds hold up for a guy who lent his name to a bill supported by 17 percent of voters), Mar-a-Lago and Twitter. The billionaire president is going to be positively cheap when it comes to spending whatever political capital he has left.

We’ll be able to assess the accuracy of my prediction in short order because in just a few weeks Congress will have to vote to increase the debt limit or risk a default by the U.S. government. The adults in the room – reported to be Mnuchin and Cohn when it comes to economics – will start issuing warnings. Speaker Ryan, cindered up to his well-toned biceps from the last 18 days, will be as firm as Jello and mostly ignored. Mitch McConnell will say…something. The Freedom Caucus will announce its unalterable opposition to raising the debt limit (but will back-channel that it can be bought for some draconian price), the Democrats will take the understandable (albeit not very grown up) position that since it’s the Republicans who control both both houses and the White House, it’s their responsibility to lead on the issue.

My guess – based on what I know of Mr. Trump and what the lesson of Jesse Ventura tells me – is  that while the risk of default builds, President Trump will hit the links, meet with Bill Gates (again), Kanye, the border patrol union, seventeen guys in the construction business and a collection of country-and-western stars. He’ll Tweet out stream-of-consciousness thoughts as he watches Fox & Friends and let Congress and his surrogates work it out (though he will never, ever again own their actions). If they’re able to work out a deal, then – and only then – will he show up for work. I suspect he’ll re-create the boardroom set from The Apprentice and make Ryan, McConnell and a player to be named later have to come pitch him to save the country’s credit rating. He’ll do it live. Steve Bannon will get a producer’s credit. The other Steve – the one with the bulging eyes and the spittle – will do the script.

What a profile in courage. What a change agent.  And it’s only two months in. Forty-six more to go.

• Austin

 

 

So You’re Sean Spicer …

It’s easy to lampoon Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s press secretary. He does it himself every day.

But what would you do?

Your boss tells you that you need to go out and spank the media, be tough like he is, and tell them that the crowd at your inauguration was the biggest ever. Period. It’s your first day on the job. It’s a job you really like and want to keep. So you give the president your advice, that saying this about the crowd will make all of you look foolish. The president asks you “Whose side are you on?” If you won’t go out there and straighten the press out he’ll find someone who will. Trump’s decision is made, and you have your marching orders.

So what do you do? Easy to say, those of us who don’t have such cool apex-predator jobs, that we’d resign rather than say something we know is not true. But would we? Would you? You make your case, you lose, the boss tells you what to do. He’s the boss.

What about something not so black and white. The message to be delivered today as the House tinkers with the Trumpcare bill is that, by removing the requirements in Obamacare that 10 essential benefits be covered, consumers will have more choice and their coverage will cost less. The essential benefits are things like prenatal care, mental health and substance abuse care, therapy and devices to help recovery after injuries or for chronic conditions, prescription drug coverage and six more. An older man, say, could chose a plan that doesn’t cover prenatal care. Sounds good, right?

But by letting people pick and choose, costs will go up for the people who do need things like prenatal care. And, if the costs get too high and a mother doesn’t get prenatal care, guess who pays for the ensuing problems her child has once born? Everybody pays, especially when care is sought through emergency rooms by people who can’t afford the coverage after it’s been cherry-picked.

So, what you’re telling people — that choice is good for everybody — simply isn’t true. At least that’s a reasonable argument. But your job is not to present both sides of a case. It’s to support the case you’re advocating for. If you’re selling soda-pop, it’s not your job to point out that a 12-ounce can of soda has 10 teaspoons of sugar in it. But it’s probably also not your job to say that soda-pop is healthy.

Spicer today eagerly and strongly asserted that doing away with the requirement that health plans cover these 10 essential services is better for health-care consumers. If you were told to say that, what would you do?

My easy answer #2 is that I wouldn’t work for someone in the first place who has shown his entire career that he sides with the rich and doesn’t give a damn about the little guy, whom he has consistently stiffed. I wouldn’t work for someone in the first place whose values are based on selfishness — I’ve got mine and you’re on your own to get yours, even when mine is crowding out yours.

But Spicer wanted this job. He’s not just some guy who came out of Trump University with a bubble-gum-card diploma. He has a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College. He’s worked in communication for Congress and for the Republican Party. He’s not a rube or a dupe. I don’t think.

So … the president tells you to go out and say, for example, that Paul Manafort played “a limited role for a very limited time” in the Trump campaign. That’s nonsense, of course, for a man who was campaign chairman.

What do you do? Chime in here, let us know your thoughts.

— Bruce Benidt

 

 

We’re Baaaaaaack!

We’ve spent long enough in the storm cellar. We’ve crawled up and out and by god it seems Donald Trump is actually president. And will be for some time. (Although I predict he’ll resign after the midterm elections at the latest, tired of the criticism and frustrated that not everyone tells him how wonderful he is, as he’s been used to. He’ll declare victory — the country is safe all the jobs have come home we’re all prosperous  there are no bad people coming over the border ISIS is utterly defeated and IBS has been conquered [the only true part of that will be that his constituents, the one percent, are more prosperous] — and say “my work here is done.” And he’ll go.)

Jon Austin and Bruce Benidt, at least, are back. There are just too many lessons to be learned from the Trump kommunications cyclone, and, really now, just too many fish in the barrel to resist.

For example, any of us doing crisis communications work has had attorneys tell us that what’s said in the media can come back to bite you in court. And, ta-da, exhibits A and B are the courts knocking down Trump’s travel bans 1.0 and 2.0 because of what he said on the campaign trail and what his lackeys like Rudy Giuliani said. As crisis counselors we know that what’s said today has to protect the organization’s reputation now and down the road, and has to protect the organization’s legal position now and down the road. But Trump and his minions have made their intention clear, no matter what the language of the executive orders say. And so the courts have done their job.

So, we hope to consider what’s going on in this political carnival not with just dropped jaws and shaking heads but with some thoughtful analysis. And, yes, we’ll vent because, well, just look and listen to what’s out there.

We hope we’ll pull some of our readers back. And we’ll have some fun. Thanks for dropping by now and then.

BB for The Management, such as it is.

What Now? Can We Find Peace Amid Rising Waters, Rising Gorge?

God willing and the creek don’t rise…  I wrote earlier this week about the likely election of Hillary Clinton.

The creek rose. And now so will the seas. And now what do those of us, more than half the country, who think Trump is horrendous do to find some equilibrium? Anger shock and griping isn’t a healthy plan for living.

Donald Trump’s first act as president elect will ensure that his son Baron and Baron’s children will live in a world of horror. You think there are refugee problems now, Mr. Trump? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait until your know-nothing policy on global warming has its effects and tens of millions of poor people who don’t look like your voters flee the rising seas. Trump named Myron Ebel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute to head his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency. The fox has entered the henhouse. “Mr. Ebel has asserted that whatever warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution is modest and could be beneficial,” The New York Times writes today. Bye Bye Paris climate accord. Bye Bye livable earth.

Every day there will be another outrage like this. But these won’t be like Trump’s campaign outrages. Those could have still been addressed by the voters. Too late now. Too many of these new daily outrages will become policy.

Can I stand to be outraged every day? Angry? Depressed? Clinton in her concession speech said we owe the president elect an open mind. I’ll try. I’ll have to or I’ll go crazy. Or I’ll have to go up in the hills and live alone and become a helmet, as Maynard G. Krebs said.

Perhaps this man will grow in the office. He seems not to have fixed convictions, and he’s certainly not an orthodox Republican. So I suspect he’ll sometimes pleasantly surprise us. He may push for government-supported work repairing infrastructure that was the first thing the Republicans blocked President Obama from doing eight years ago. Clips and pictures of him meeting with Obama yesterday showed Trump looking as if he’s realized what deep water he’s in. That, or he was already bored.

I can’t live in anger for four years. People who thought Obama was an abomination and that his policies were ruining the country felt every day for eight years what I’ll feel now for four. Their representatives in Congress did little but bitch and say no. That wasn’t very satisfying or useful. I don’t want to do that.

So I’ll watch and read less news. Try not to wallow in the daily transgressions. Read more books. Write more books. Watch more movies. Talk with Lisa more instead of sitting next to each other watching MSNBC. Bowl. Do something. Actively try to stop some of the worst things Trump and his backers will do. Are already doing. But I can’t be sad or angry every day or the cats will hide under the bed and Lisa will make me live on the screen porch where my black cloud won’t foul the air.

Half the country is crawling out of their cellars these last three days and looking around at what the tornado rearranged. It’s an apt cliche to say we’re in shock. Moving slow. Staring off in the distance. Wishing it weren’t so.

The dark parts of me want to say to Trump voters, “You picked him, you got him, don’t come to us when you realize he’s screwing you.” And the nasty parts of me want to say to Democratic primary voters, “You picked her, a terrible candidate, and look where that got us.” The late great Molly Ivins wrote a book about George W. Bush’s years as governor of Texas to show voters what Bush would be like as president. And he was (sort of) elected anyway and he acted just like Ivins warned he would. She wrote a second book before Bush’s reelection and said in the introduction “If y’all hadda read my first book I wouldn’t have had to write the second one.” If we’d paid attention to Carl Bernstein’s study of Hillary Clinton’s actions and character “A Woman in Charge” we would have put up someone this year who wasn’t so reviled and could have won.

But that didn’t happen. And I have to stop moaning about it all. For my own peace, and so people and small animals don’t flee from me on sight. Pick a few important causes to back and then back away from the daily deluge. Find quiet corners.

We survived eight years of Reagan (the poor didn’t survive very well as income disparity started to skyrocket under this earlier actor who played a president). We survived eight years under Bush (the soldiers and civilians killed and maimed in Bush’s endless wars didn’t survive very well under this earlier front man who didn’t know much). We can probably survive four years of Trump. But the planet and our progeny?

Get thee to a hammock, Bruce. Squeeze a cat pet a dog love the kids. Turn down the temp inside yourself. And send Elizabeth Warren flowers.

— Bruce Benidt

 

How Could You????

The majority of colonists in America either favored staying with King George or at least didn’t support the rebellion. The Revolutionaries who wanted independence were a minority. Status quo has a powerful inertial force.

I think of this as I try to understand how anyone — any one person not related to him — could possibly vote for Donald Trump. (Yes I realize people with the opposite view wonder the same thing about voting for Hillary Clinton. That’s the great divide right there.) I think it’s the economy, stupid, and the way things were. And the fact that we’ve let so many politicians get away with so much bullshit for so many years that we can no longer tell the difference between standard-issue political bullshit that comes from someone with at least some idea of how the real world works and the totally empty policy-free crap that comes from an Olympic-level bullshitter with no knowledge of a world beyond his own mirror.

I’m truly trying not to be reactionary. It’s easy to say many, or most (or half, Hillary?) Trump voters are ignorant or racist or xenophobes. It’s easy to dismiss them from many angles. But there are so many of them. Forty percent of voters polled. That’s a lot of people and they can’t all be ignorant racist xenophobes. Everyone I know is appalled by Trump. But, really, everyone? I bet many people I know are considering pulling the lever for Trump tomorrow, or already have. And just not talking about it, at least with liberal me.

Why would anyone vote for Trump? Many don’t like Obama policies, such as Obamacare, which has been presented to them by conservatives and their media lackeys as poison. Many don’t like Hillary Clinton, don’t trust her, don’t think she’s ethical. I’m among those. But I already voted for her because we agree on almost all policy and issues. And because she has actual knowledge of the world. A lot of veterans and active military support Trump, many because they don’t like how America is being pushed around by foemen not worthy of our steel.

I’ve been reading three memoirs from the South that help explain Trump voters. Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance (he’s been on every interview show there is lately), Dimestore, by Lee Smith, and Finding Grace, by Donna VanLiere. All three talk about small towns withering in the South and about what people who stay are like and what people who get out are like. A common theme is that, as the world and the economy change and jobs disappear, some people change with the flow and some stand pat and drown.  Many who are overwhelmed by change lack agency — they feel as if the world is doing something to them, and as if they have no role to play in adapting or changing. And many of them are mad. At the world. At “them.” Whoever “them” is. In Vance’s book, a guy who lost his job by drinking too much blames his bosses. Vance says having someone to provide kids growing up with stability (for him, grandparents) and a view of larger possibilities can make all the difference between becoming someone who feels angry and helpless and someone who feels he or she can rise higher than their immediate surroundings.

I’ve also recently reread All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, and read It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, and Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg. As the books meander through demagoguery and America First-ism, they all shed some light on the world of Trump. There are clear bad guys in these tales. Bankers, European war leaders, subversives. There’s a “them” to blame. Different for everyone, but someone for everyone.

I recently talked to a Brit I admire who lives in the US,  and I asked if he would have voted for Brexit if he still lived in England. “Absolutely” was his immediate response. And he began talking about immigrants and losing the culture of England. The England he grew up with is changing.

And I think that’s the key. How things used to be. Even if they weren’t all that good, they were what we knew. What we grew up with. It was how the world was. And was supposed to be. Too bad if the way things were was mostly good for straight white men.

Trump promises to turn back the clock. Make things better. Just like that. Flick of a switch. Take us back. Make steel jobs reappear. Make criminals disappear. He identifies the bad guys — them — and says he can fix what they’ve wrecked. Overtly he names the bad guys as immigrants and Muslims. People not like us. Covertly he identifies the bad guys as blacks and hispanics and women and the poor. People not like us.

There are many who feel the pull of Trump’s reactionary make-believe and know he can’t really just snap his fingers on day one and fix it. They know his plans don’t exist. But they buy into Trump’s siren song hoping that some of what’s gone awry can be righted by this guy who at least names the problems. Yes, there are also many who hear Trump’s fantasies and are too ignorant or too irresponsible to pay enough attention to see that Trump’s a charlatan. These people aren’t doing their duty as citizens — and, I believe, are the most likely to be racists and xenophobes and be the kind of people Vance says blame others for their problems. (Much of that blame is reasonable:  companies that move jobs overseas — to meet our demand for cheap stuff — have indeed acted upon their employees in ways that are no fault of the workers. The issue is what do you do with yourself — and what does your upbringing and experience tell you is possible to do — after the job disappears.)

Many news articles lately have shown that the people most likely to fall for Trump are white people with the worst economic prospects. (Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans who’ve been suffering economically for generations aren’t jumping on his bandwagon, because they’re paying attention.) These white folks who’ve lost jobs as the economy and world change hear Trump shout out loudly that there’s someone to blame, someone to beat on, and he’s someone who’ll do it.

The most compassionate viewpoint about Trump voters I’ve heard came from Van Jones, a black social entrepreneur, activist and commentator on CNN. In The New York Times some weeks back he said “When I listen to Trump voters I hear Black Lives Matter people.” Both groups feel ignored, left behind, marginalized, feel like the system is rigged against them.

So, as Trump loses tomorrow, god willing and the creek don’t rise, let’s not scorn those who voted for him. Many are good people who feel they’ve been screwed. And America and her new president need to give them an ear and some hope. Yes, we can.

— Bruce Benidt

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I Voted.” Small sticker, precious step

Today I’m as powerful as Sheldon Adelson, Sean Hannity, Paul Ryan, John Roberts, David Axelrod or Elizabeth Warren.

My vote counts as much as each of theirs. And as I cast my vote today my heart lifted. I could feel it. For too many months I’ve been worrying and griping and moaning and arguing and living in fear of the unthinkable. An hour ago I took action. I feel empowered.

Our country has flaws. Disparity of rich and poor. Gross overconsumption of the planet’s resources. Poor education and a paucity of hope for too many. A system designed by those who already have the most to assure they get more. And our election system is far from perfect. Voter suppression. Hanging chads. Too much influence by the wealthiest. Gerrymandered districts that permit little challenge to incumbents.

But I just cast a vote that counts the same as Barack Obama’s. And it will be counted. The regular citizens who handed me the ballot and watched me slide it in the machine are the volunteer custodians of the dream the founders dreamed. My Uncle Bob died in World War II to protect the vote I cast today. John Lewis had his skull cracked to preserve the right of all of us to not just speak up about where we’re going as a country but to put our hands on the wheel.

There was a man standing at the corner of the street that leads to our local government center where Lisa and I voted. He was showing the world a life-size picture of Hillary Clinton behind bars. I firmly believe he’ll be disappointed a week from today. And as we drove past him I felt less of the despair I’ve been feeling for months, despair that the candidate he supports might actually, how could this possibly be true, win the election. I felt less depressed because I had just taken action. I had voted. To turn away that man’s vision and to bring my own closer to the light.

In a world full of despots I stood up and said to the preposterous, self-absorbed, ignorant, immature poseur who would be president: “I banish thee. Slink back under the foul rock you crawled out from. Begone.” Little old me, a guy of scant power, wealth or influence. But a guy with a vote.

In the car, Lisa and I did a Barack-Michelle fist bump. Is this a great country or what?

— Bruce Benidt

Hillary — Meet the Press, Dammit

Let’s just say it out loud: Hillary Clinton is wrong, selfish, stupid and irresponsible to not hold regular press conferences. Or at least one for goodness sake.

She is either a coward, or her ambition has crowded out her soul and what shreds of ethics she may still keep in a jar by the door.

If you read Carl Bernstein’s book A Woman in Charge, you’ll take this great journalist’s view that her ambition leads her to do whatever it takes to get to where she wants to go. Whatever it takes.

Including spurning much of the media. She hasn’t had a news conference in almost nine months. Yes she does some interviews one-on-one. Yes she calls in to some chosen news shows. Yes she sat down with Chris Wallace of Fox, one of the best, most fair and toughest interviewers out there. And she stuck her foot in her mouth.

But this is part of how you let America see you. You meet the press. This is part of what we voters deserve. To see how you handle tough inquiries from reporters in an uncontrollable scrum. Unruly? Sure. Unpredictable? Yes, thank god. And an important part of democracy. The media is not part of your marketing department, Madame Secretary. I’ve worked with a few public relations clients who felt that way. It’s wrong. It’s cynical.

Listening to Clinton answer journalists like Anderson Cooper’s questions on why she doesn’t hold a press conference is excruciating. If Clinton listens to herself she must shiver like someone tasting spoiled milk, or like John McCain every night when he realizes he’s gone another day without retracting his endorsement of Donald Trump. “Well Anderson I talk to lots of reporters, as I am right now with you, and I have done hundreds of interviews and…” blah blah blah. Answer the question. Answer them all.

Are you a less-skilled communicator than Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale’s VP nominee, who in 1984 took questions from 200 reporters for nearly two hours about shady financial dealings she and her husband were accused of? She stood there and took everything they could throw at her. And here’s Ragan’s PR Daily’s assessment of the outcome, from a 2011 piece on Ferraro’s death:

It helped reverse the narrative that she was not transparent;

It turned her into a more sympathetic figure;

It offered Ferraro a vital opportunity to show her mettle as a female candidate who could endure the intensity of the media’s scrutiny.

Don’t you have Ferraro’s guts, don’t you have what it takes, Madame Secretary? Is that why you’re hiding?

I’m a former daily newspaper reporter and a former college journalism teacher and I believe deeply in the role of the free press in helping us make crucial civic decisions. Those who avoid the press, who seek only to manipulate it and use it for their own ends, are putting their own interests before the best interests of the country. It’s wrong. It’s pathetic. Stop hiding, Hillary. Let us see how you handle tough times. Yes, we’ve seen you stand up to tough questioning before, as with the House Benghazi committee. Get out there again. Regularly.

Your failure to meet the press undermines any criticism you rightly make about Donald Trump’s despicable and willful refusal to release his tax returns. His failure is greater, but it’s on the same scale of cowardly hiding of what the public has a right and duty to know and understand.

Some people in your campaign are saying you’re playing a “run down the clock” campaign now, lying low to not blow your lead. If you are doing that, you risk my vote. I’m very liberal, I agree with you on most policy positions, but your actions are showing deep character flaws. I hope you thank god every night that the idiot Republicans have put up a barbarian to run against you. An actual human being would defeat you. And you’d deserve it.

— Bruce Benidt

Tattered Schools Not Trickle-Down

I preach to my communications clients — “Talk about results, not process. Or at least results before process.” What the hell does that mean? “Your kids’ schools and your roads are falling apart because too many wealthy people and corporations dodge paying the taxes that support the things we all need.”

Tell me what something means in my life before you tell me how it got there.

So here’s Hillary Clinton doing it right. According to The New York Times, Clinton told a crowd in Cleveland Wednesday, “We’re going to tax the wealthy who have made all of the income gains in the last 15 years. The super wealthy, corporations, Wall Street, they’re going to have to invest in education, in skills training, in infrastructure.”

Results not process. Not “let’s change the carried-interest clause,” but “let’s tax the people who’ve made all the money while your income has been stuck or fallen.” And why are we going to tax those who are making the increases? “They’re going to have to invest…” Invest. Pay your fair share to support the things we all use. That seems clear. That seems fair. Voters can get that.

When liberals talk about how trickle-down hasn’t worked, it means something to them but not much to regular human beings. But if you say “The wealthiest aren’t paying their share to support the things all of us, including them, need, and so our schools have no arts programs and barely enough teachers and the roads you drive on are falling apart and our libraries are closed on Saturday afternoons…” people might get it.

Results not process. Hard for a policy wonk like Clinton to not get stuck in the details of what dials she wants to turn to improve things. Hard to say “Here’s what will work better if we turn this dial.”

Clinton can make this work if she talks about results most people would think are needed and fair. Don’t talk about “the common weal” as we Progressives like to do. Talk about the neighborhood school that has 35 kids in a class while Wall Street speculators are lightly taxed on their million-dollar  bonuses, each of which would fund 10 new teachers.

And then she can talk about who pays taxes and who doesn’t. Donald Trump proudly says he works very hard (and spends lotsa dough on expensive lawyers and accountants) to avoid as much tax as possible. He’s proud that he contributes nothing to your local school or police force. Proud of that.

And for those who think The New York Times is liberal and shilling for Hillary, Thursday’s story about her criticism of Trump’s plan to reduce taxes on the rich ends with her saying that Trump doesn’t need a tax cut, and “I don’t need a tax cut.” The story doesn’t mention that Bill and Hillary paid 31 percent in taxes on their income in 2015. Nor does it mention that we don’t know what — if anything, if anything — Trump paid, because he won’t release his returns.

Keep making the tax point about fairness, Hillary, about who’s paying to support the cops and the teachers and the roads we all use. And who isn’t. Don’t focus on the policies. Focus on the schools.

Years ago, when I was still with Shandwick, the global public relations firm, we helped Minnesota and national Indian tribes fight off an attempt by commercial casinos — including Trump’s — to erode the national law that gave tribes the ability to run casinos. Trump et. al. wanted what the Indians had. (Heck, we’ve taken their land, their languages, their religion, their health, their food source, their hope — why not take the economic development tool that’s working for them?) Part of our campaign was showing a picture of a school and a picture of a yacht. Which should public policy support? Another yacht for the wealthy, or a decent school on a poor reservation? Seems pretty clear. And the tribes won that fight.

— Bruce Benidt

 

Hillary’s Perfect “How Not To” Crisis Case Study

“Tell it all, tell it early, tell it yourself.” These are Lanny Davis’s guidelines for crisis communications.

Hillary Clinton has violated all of them. And that’s why the email albatross is still screeching around her neck, making the majority of Americans feel she’s not truthful. Clinton’s email mess and her increasing obfuscation and dodging is the quintessential example of a crisis so poorly handled that it is never allowed to die. She shot herself in the left foot by setting up a private email system, and she continues to shoot off toe after toe on her own right foot with increasingly obtuse loads of bullshit which are crippling her campaign and destroying her credibility.

Lanny Davis helped Bill Clinton through Monica and impeachment, is a partner in a crisis communications firm, and has written a pretty darn good book about handling crises, Crisis Tales. Hillary has been acting for months not only as if she’s never met Davis, but as if she’s never heard the most basic advice a junior account executive in PR would give someone in a crisis — “get the thing over with, get everything out, deal with it and don’t let it drag on.”

Another crisis comm bromide: It you’re explaining, you’re losing. Clinton is still explaining, to Fox News, to the associations of Black and Hispanic Journalists, to anybody who can still stand to listen. Which is almost nobody.

And the final rule in handling crises — have somebody with a finely tuned bullshit detector on your team who will speak truth to power. Somebody needed to sit Clinton down and tell her last week — “No, Hillary, FBI director Comey did NOT say your FBI testimony was consistent with all your public statements. No, Hillary, you did NOT short-circuit your answer with Chris Wallace on Fox, you were NOT talking past each other. What you are saying, Hillary, is NOT TRUE. And people will know it, and they’ll recognize that you’re still spinning and dodging and dancing and they’ll rightly conclude you’re not trustworthy.” Tough stuff to say, but that’s what a smart person needs around her, someone who will tell her the truth. Has anyone? Does she not listen?

As hundreds of observers have said, this whole mess could have been dealt with honestly and openly when the email issue first surfaced and it would have caused much less harm than this dragged-out water torture has.

But what should Hillary do now? I watched Joe Scarborough struggle with this on Morning Joe today, trying to role play what Hillary might say now. It’s not easy. Scarborough stumbled through some straight talk and some obfuscation, went too far, said too much, and ended up promising a Clinton term would be the most ethical in history.

If I were advising Clinton, I’d have her say something like this: “I haven’t been as forthcoming and clear as I need to be about this email mistake I made, and I want to correct that. Having a private server was a mistake in judgment pure and simple, and I’m sorry for it. And how I’ve handled questions about it has caused many people to doubt my honesty, and I regret that. I ask people to judge my character and capability based on my whole record of public service, where my constituents and colleagues have trusted me.”

Something like this could help, even now. What she says has to be short, simple, and has to address head on the elephant in the room — people don’t trust Hillary.

By not stepping up and openly taking the hit, Clinton has caused herself months and months of debilitating atrophy of her reputation and — has increased the possibility that a crude, immature, ignorant huckster might become president. We’re all paying the price for Hillary Clinton’s refusal to deal honestly and forthrightly with a crisis.

— Bruce Benidt

 

 

 

 

How Dare You, Donald Trump?

I spent 20 minutes today on the Massachusetts Turnpike with tears streaming down face.

I was so outraged listening to Donald Trump’s response to Khizr Khan’s speech on Thursday that it brought me to tears. Now that I’m not driving I can use my words:

How dare you, Donald Trump? HOW FUCKING DARE YOU?

How dare you demean and disrespect those AMERICAN parents who understand far better than you the citizenship that is your birthright and that you do not deserve?

How dare you use a mother’s raw pain as another dog whistle insinuation to impugn a religion you neither understand or respect?

How dare you dismiss the sacrifice their son made on behalf of his country and his men? Humayun Khan, an Army captain, died trying to save lives. That moment of bravery counts for more than every second of your 70 years of greed, narcissism and classlessness.

How dare you equate your “sacrifice” with a second of the Khans’ grief and mourning?  The dust on their soles have more claim on our sympathy than you do.

How dare you equate your “sacrifice” to that of any other veteran’s family? For two years, I watched my mother cry every day when the mail came: she cried when a letter from my Marine Corps brother in Vietnam arrived and and she cried when one didn’t. My mother and tens of millions like her – parents whose sons and daughters go to war, wear the uniform of our firefighters and police – know the meaning of “sacrifice.” You know nothing.

Sixty-two years ago, Joseph Welch kicked another petty bully to the curb with words that perfectly express the contempt I feel for you. With apologies to his memory, I paraphrase:

Until this moment, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that people such as the Khans. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

Let us not assassinate this family further, Mr. Trump. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

And to those of you out there who still support this poor excuse of a MAN, please tell me why. Please explain how you can look the other way in the face of such grotesqueness. Are there no standards of decency or humanity left to transgress? How will you explain your support for this monster to your children? How can I explain it to my children? Paul Ryan, can you answer those questions? Mitch McConnell? Reince Prebius?

The simple truth is that you cannot. If you cannot admit this now, then you are damned along with him.

– Austin

 

 

I Need A Mystic Chord of Spirit Touched, Please, Madame Secretary

In 2001 my therapist in Minneapolis said he had many clients who, like me, were suffering a kind of political depression. George Bush was president and things that mattered deeply to me were being ignored.

I feel that same depression now. How is it possible that … oh you know, Donald Trump.

And Hillary Clinton doesn’t lift me out of my slough of despond. Are my reactions to her unfair? Am I guilty of a double standard?

My biggest disappointments about Clinton are that she’s so calculating, and that she lets her ambition and fear overwhelm her decency. I agree with almost every position she takes on the issues, and I admire the lifetime of work for others her husband told us about at the DNC.

But she has consistently lied about the whole email mess, which she created in the first place by being too secretive and protective of her too-managed image.

So. Double standard? I just read JFK’s Last Hundred Days, by Thurston Clarke. It tells about what JFK was growing into, building up to. Opening to Cuba. Getting us out of Vietnam. Pushing for Civil Rights. Oh. And there was that sexual addiction thing. He shared a mistress with a Mafia goon. He slept with a woman who had ties to East Germany. He slept with almost anyone who came near him. And of course he lied about it. Had the German woman deported so she couldn’t be called before Congress. This is a bit of a character flaw, right? Yet I admire JFK, felt deep sadness for what might have been as I stood in Dealey Plaza a few weeks ago.

Why can’t I give Hillary Clinton a break? Is it because she’s a woman? Am I not taking into account, as I react against how calculated and cautious she is, the decades of attacks she’s suffered at least partly because of her gender and her refusal to sit quietly in her place while the boys ran the show? I dislike her ambition and the lengths to which she’ll go to feed it, as shown in Carl Bernstein’s book A Woman in Charge and as exemplified by her saying, when asked in 2008 if Barack Obama was a Christian, “As far as I know he’s a Christian,” rather than challenging the whole notion of questioning his religion.

I know that I’m deeply distressed that she is so compromised by her flaws that an abomination like Donald Trump actually has a chance to be elected.

I’d like to be won over. I’ll vote for her, God knows, although I voted for Bernie Sanders in my Florida primary. But I’d like to see the part of Hillary that Bill talked about two nights ago. Tonight, as she accepts the nomination, I’d like to hear her talk. Not give a speech. Not holler how she’ll fight for me. I don’t want someone fighting for me. I want someone thinking and analyzing and inspiring and standing up for principle. I want to hear what’s in her soul. Including what she thinks of the darkness in there. Does she regret that some of her mistakes have made so many of us doubt her character? Show us. Let us feel that. Let us feel what drives her. David Axelrod said tonight she has to tell us not just what she’ll do as president but why.

I’ll try and relax my double standard, Secretary Clinton. You, please, send home the focus group and open up your heart. I need to feel touched. I know about your experience and competence, and god knows we need those. But I need to feel inspired. Spirit. Inside. Let it out. Draw mine out too. Touch what I felt the night Bill was elected. The night Obama was elected. Call out the better angels of all our natures. Let us see and feel what you’re made of. Please.

— Bruce Benidt

The Trump Train Adds Another Car

Donald Trump likes to boast of how many people are joining the “Trump Train” so I’m sure a Tweet from @realDonald Trump (AKA The Great Conductor) will be forthcoming welcoming David Duke aboard.

For those of you who do not inhabit the fringes of racist politics, Duke is a former Louisiana state representative who has run unsuccessfully for Congress, governor and president. He’s also a convicted felon and has in recent years hosted a radio show where he promotes his point of view that Americans of European descent are the real victims of discrimination.

And, oh yeah, he’s a former leader of the Klu Klux Klan.

It’s no coincidence that Mr. Duke is jumping back into politics now after almost 20 years off the trail. In the New York Times, Mr. Duke credits Donald Trump for making the environment welcoming:

“‘I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I’ve championed for years,’ said Mr. Duke, who had an early foray in politics as a supporter of George Wallace, the Alabama governor whose name remains synonymous with segregation.”

And he’s been an enthusiastic supporter of the Trump campaign:

You might remember that when Mr. Duke and the KKK first jumped on the Trump Train, it took The Great Conductor – AKA Donald J. Trump – a couple of days to decide how he felt about the riders. This caused most of us – who have pretty firm views on the KKK that are easily recalled and expressed – to pause. After an unseemly long time, The Great Conductor said they couldn’t ride. That remains the official position of The Great Conductor as revealed by His Oracle who told the Times that ““Mr. Trump has disavowed David Duke and will continue to do so.”

The problem, though, is that even someone as powerful and dominating as The Great Conductor doesn’t actually get to pick and choose who rides his train. When you lay your tracks right into the dark heart of racism and intolerance, when you spend 14 months stoking the boiler with a powerful mix of dogwhistle code words, encouragements to violence, calls to “take our country back” and to blame people who don’t look like you for all their problems, you can’t credibly claim surprise – or even dismay – when the David Dukes of the world hitch their car to your train.

Welcome to The Great Conductor’s Train, Mr. Duke. You two deserve one another.

– Austin

 

Better Writers Than Me

A couple weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend who also blogs on occasion. We were discussing our free-floating anxiety around Donald Trump and he made the observation that it was hard to find something to say about the Republican nominee that wasn’t already being said – and said better – by others.

He’s right. Everywhere I turn reporters, columnists, editorialists, op-ed authors and others are describing in detail every aspect of Donald Trump’s unsuitability for elected office – any elected office truthfully but most especially the oval one at 1600 Pennsylvania.

As an excellent example of this phenomenon, I offer you today’s Washington Post editorial:

The whole editorial is well worth the two or three minutes it will take to read it. It’s worth sharing with your friends, family and neighbors. It’s worth printing out, highlighting and taking door to door in Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, Elk River or any other place with a high concentration of Republican voters.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.”

“[T]here is nothing on Mr. Trump’s résumé to suggest he could function successfully in Washington. He was staked in the family business by a well-to-do father and has pursued a career marked by some real estate successes, some failures and repeated episodes of saving his own hide while harming people who trusted him.”

“[H]e displays no curiosity, reads no books and appears to believe he needs no advice. In fact, what makes Mr. Trump so unusual is his combination of extreme neediness and unbridled arrogance. He is desperate for affirmation but contemptuous of other views.”

“He also is contemptuous of fact. Throughout the campaign, he has unspooled one lie after another — that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated after 9/11, that his tax-cut plan would not worsen the deficit, that he opposed the Iraq War before it started — and when confronted with contrary evidence, he simply repeats the lie. It is impossible to know whether he convinces himself of his own untruths or knows that he is wrong and does not care. It is also difficult to know which trait would be more frightening in a commander in chief.”

There’s more. Annotated, fact-based, sober in tone and language.

I submit that the best thing you can do for our democracy this evening is share this editorial with everyone you can reach. Send it to your contact list. Post it to Facebook, Tweet it, paste it on construction sites. Don’t just send it to the people who agree with you, send it to your uncle who’s wearing the Trump hat or the coworker who keeps forwarding you the “Hillary for Prison” e-mails. You don’t have to argue, debate or persuade; just ask them to read it.

As the Post notes, Mr. Trump is everyone’s problem now. The Republicans have made their choice – as Paul Ryan noted – and they chose poorly. Now the rest of us have to clean up the mess. There’s two ways to do that: 1) to turn out every possible vote in November for Hillary Clinton and, 2) to give those who might be inclined to support Donald Trump every possible reason to reconsider.

– Austin

 

 

The Incoherency of Donald Trump

The foreign policy world is abuzz today about the latest pronouncement from Donald Trump that casts doubt on his willingness to fulfill our NATO treaty commitments.

The policies Trump puts forward are wildly outside the mainstream of any Republican or Democratic administration in the last 60 years, but what really caught my eye in the transcript of the interview – which was put out because the campaign is now claiming Trump was misquoted – is the basic incoherence of his words. At almost every point, the words Donald Trump speaks literally make no sense.

To wit (emphasis added):

“If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth — you have the tape going on?”

“In the meantime, what have we done? So we’ve kept peace, but in the meantime we’ve let North Korea get stronger and stronger and more nuclear and more nuclear, and you are really saying, “Well, how is that a good thing?” You understand? North Korea now is almost like a boiler. You say we’ve had peace, but that part of Korea, North Korea, is getting more and more crazy. And more and more nuclear. And they are testing missiles all the time.”

“And we’ve got our soldiers sitting there watching missiles go up. And you say to yourself, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Now we’re protecting Japan because Japan is a natural location for North Korea. So we are protecting them, and you say to yourself, ‘Well, what are we getting out of this?'”

“Just so you understand though, totally on the record, this is not 40 years ago. We are not the same country and the world is not the same world. Our country owes right now $19 trillion, going to $21 trillion very quickly because of the omnibus budget that was passed, which is incredible. We don’t have the luxury of doing what we used to do; we don’t have the luxury, and it is a luxury. We need other people to reimburse us much more substantially than they are giving right now because we are only paying for a fraction of the cost.”

“By the way, and I know what I’m talking about is massive. If we ever felt there was a reason to defend the United States, we can always deploy, and it would be a lot less expense.”

“I don’t think so, but I do give great credit to him for turning it around. You know, the first hour, it seemed like it was over. Then all of a sudden, and the amazing thing is the one that won that was the people. They came out on the streets, and the army types didn’t want to drive over them like they did in Tiananmen Square when they sort of drived them over, and that was the end of that.”

“Meetings. If I ever have the opportunity to do it, meaning if I win, we will have meetings, we will have meetings very early on.”

“David, I have statisticians, and I know, like if I went to Pennsylvania, I say, “Give me the statistics on what is going on with respect to manufacturing.” Numbers — 45, 55, 65, I have states that are so bad. New England. Look at New England, what happened.”

“Cyber is absolutely a thing of the future and the present. Look, we’re under cyberattack, forget about them. And we don’t even know where it’s coming from.”

“Because we’re obsolete. Right now, Russia and China in particular and other places.”

“Yes. I am a fan of the future, and cyber is the future.”

“We have nuclear that we don’t even know if it works. We have nuclear where the telephone systems are 40 years old and they have wire that’s so corroded that they can’t call from one station to the next.”

“And I hope you say that I do know my subject. And I do know it. I know it better than, I know it better than the people that do it for ——”

It’s possible to puzzle out of these comments what the reader THINKS Mr. Trump is saying but the reality of the words he speaks are incoherent and nonsensical. He does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. No one should level up his words. He deserves to be judged on the basis of what he actually says and the way he says it.

– Austin

 

The Bullets Coming Back – Didn’t

Many people in the crowd in Dallas the night a crazy man started shooting police were carrying guns. Openly. Strapped to their backs. AR-15 assault rifles. Twenty or 30 people openly carried these guns, ready to go. These guns can fire 45 bullets per minute — some estimates say they can fire 180 per minute. That’s one bullet per second, almost. Or three bullets per second. Per second.

Donald Trump, the expert on courage under fire, has said many times that if people were armed when a crazed gunman starts shooting, they’d take the gunman down. “Bullets coming back the other direction” would at least minimize casualties, Trump said after the Paris shootings.

In an interview this month that ran in Valleurs Actuelles, Trump referenced the November terrorist attack on Paris and said, ‘Do you really think that if there were people in the crowd, who were armed and trained, things would have turned out the same way?’

‘I don’t think so. They would have killed the terrorists. It makes sense,’ he said.

The GOP front-runner for president then declared: ‘I always have a gun on me. I can tell you that if I had been in the Bataclan or in the cafes I would have opened fire.’

In Dallas, no one fired back but police, according to everything I’ve read.

In fact, both the mayor and the police chief of Dallas said having armed people in the crowd made it more confusing and difficult for the police to identify and focus on the shooter. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys and, in the wake of the shooting, “he supported tightening the state’s gun laws to restrict the carrying of rifles and shotguns in public,” according to The New York Times. Police Chief David Brown said that when the shooter started firing at police amid the crowd, the armed civilians ran. And police had to determine if they were part of the crime going down. “Someone is shooting at you from a perched position, and people are running with AR-15s and camo gear and gas masks and bulletproof vests, they are suspects, until we eliminate that,” he told the Times. “Doesn’t make sense to us, but that’s their right in Texas.”

Trump is always happy to tell the world he’s right. After the mass murder in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the master of modesty and human decency tweeted, while victims were still being counted,”Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

What will he say after Dallas, where at least 20 people in the crowd were armed with enough firepower to take down the entire assemblage, not just a single shooter?

Trump is wrong. Trump is a drooling moron. But he won’t tweet that.

— Bruce Benidt

 

“I Believe…”

Parsing the various ways that “establishment” Republicans support their presumptive presidential candidate is a wonderful exercise in linguistics. You can tell that most of them are using talking points that have been honed to within a micron of their rhetorical content. Even the simple word “support” is subject to a range of definitions that have come into play only in the last several months. To some, it means voting for, endorsing, campaigning for. Some say their support means voting for only. Some have yet to tell us what their support means.

A regular feature, though, of all of these tortured pronouncements is a phrase along the lines of, “I believe that Donald Trump believes that…” I’ve seen it used to justify supporting him because of vacancies on the Supreme Court, on gun rights, on abortion, on supporting the family values and religious freedom concerns of the evangelical voters, on immigration, on trade, on foreign policy. Check out Tom Cotton’s use of the phrase in The Atlantic to explain how a classic conservative hawk – someone who believes in a muscular, robust, outward-looking foreign policy – could support a man who has advocated pulling out of NATO, reneging on bilateral treaty commitments in every corner of the world, supporting the spread of nuclear weapons and wants to turn our foreign policy into a series of one-time financial transactions.

These people are deluding themselves. No one, not even Donald Trump, knows what he believes. No one, especially not Donald Trump, considers the candidate bound by anything that comes out of his mouth. Like his approach to foreign policy, Mr. Trump treats every utterance as a one-time transaction in which he will say literally anything to close whatever deal he thinks is in front of him at that very instant.

Honest to God, I think if you could book Donald Trump into back-to-back conventions – say, for example, the White People’s Party annual convention and the National Black Republicans Association – he wouldn’t skip a beat:

“Thank you…thank you…what a great crowd…wow, it’s packed in here and I hear there is a huge line trying to get in. Thank you. What a great bunch of Americans, people who want to take their country back, who want to make America Great Again. And we are going to do that, don’t you worry. You’re going to get so tired of winning, you’ll beg me to stop. We’re going to win on trade, on the military, on our police – aren’t they great? – on immigration. And that includes winning on your issues. There will never be – I guarantee you – a president who’s going to more for your people and the issues you care about than Donald Trump. I will be so good to you. Because I’ll bring back the jobs. I’ve created so many great jobs – including hiring thousands of your people – and built such a great company with the best properties that it’ll be easy. So easy.”

Of course, I am – thankfully  – not in Donald Trump’s head so I can’t say for sure that his calcified brain is wired this way, but I would submit that his entire career and his entire candidacy is built on this mindset: Donald Trump will say whatever he needs to say to get the deal, the loan, the government approval, the wire transfer, the contract, the work done, the item placed on Page Six, the interview, the caucus win, the primary votes and then – when the deal is closed – he’ll do whatever he wants.

Repeat over and over and over for more than 40 years. End up as the Republicans’ nominee.

Sad!

– Austin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad! Trump’s “Crowds” Ain’t What They Used to Be

Poor Donald Trump. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that he’s not as rich as he’s always claimed (my leading theory for why he won’t release his tax returns is that they would confirm this) and now he’s no longer quite as popular – even with the true believers – as he once was.

Exhibit A in this argument is a couple of photos from yesterday’s Trump “rally” in Manchester, NH – in case it’s easier to track his rallies by gaffes rather than geography, it’s the one where he made a joke about the Mexican plane and didn’t take issue with his supporter’s “heebee-jabbies” comment – that shows by my count maybe 100 people in the audience:

What should be even more worrisome for the campaign than bad advance work (really, did the same advance team that did the garbage backdrop do this one too?), is the complete lack of energy the crowd is exhibiting. In the face of a full-on Trumping, his audience responded thusly:

Sad!

– Austin

PS – Photo credits: Top image is a screen grab from CBS, lower image and audience isolates are credited to Brian Snyder/Reuters.

 

You gotta show us you feel our pain

A New York Times story today, about whether the Brexit uprising against the establishment will echo in the U.S. campaign and surprise and hurt Clinton, says, with thundering understatement, “The American electorate has tilted this year toward presidential candidates who make them feel as much as think…”

Precisely why so many of us are fearful that Hillary Clinton could lose what should be a landslide for a compelling Democratic candidate. Clinton conveys all the emotion and warmth of an ATM.

I think her message needs to focus on what the Republicans have been doing that’s harmful and what she and the Democrats have been doing and will do that will help the average American in scary times.

“They’re stealing your money and your future; we’ll help you prosper in a changing, frightening world.”

It takes very little to back up the first assertion — the enormous redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich since Reagan; and the Republicans, owned by fossil fuel moguls, willfully ignoring the global warming that will screw everyone’s children and their children’s children.

Clinton will need to highlight a few specific things she’ll do, and that the Obama administration has done, to back up the second assertion that we’ll help you stay above water as the world changes.

Democrats have to recognize the fear that’s driving people to Bernie and tRump and Brexit. Much of that fear comes from the darkest narrowest places in people — fear of people who don’t look or sound like them. Democrats can’t just dismiss those fears as racist and xenophobic. Those fears are natural, but that doesn’t mean they help the person deal with the world as it is. Clinton has to let people know she knows it’s all scary, but there are ways not just to deal with all that change but to do well amid the change. I don’t know what the policies should be — job retraining, student loans with no interest, federal investment in job-rich industries like solar and wind and rail transportation — Clinton’s the policy wonk, she can come up with a few marquee things that we can all do to ride on the wave of change.

Beyond policy she’s gotta make us feel that she gets why people are scared and that she can lead us through the change to a world where we have work and meaning and safety amid the lively diverse madding crowd.

Frank Luntz, an odious Republican salesman but a smart observer of simple, clear messaging, said Clinton’s “Stronger Together” theme feels bloodless and overly intellectual compared to Brexit’s “Leave” message and tRump’s “Make America Great Again.”

My suggested message is just a first draft — “They’re stealing your money and your future, while we’ll help you prosper in a changing, frightening world.” Smart people, like the readers of this blog, can improve on that. But let’s point out quickly what those other guys are doing to us all and move on to how we’ll help us all keep on truckin’ in heavy traffic.

–Bruce Benidt

 

 

How Trump is Making America Great

It sets my hair on fire that journalists treat Donald Trump like he’s remotely qualified to serve as president of the United States. By casting this election as simply a more extreme or unusual of politics as usual, they make Mr. Trump appear more acceptable and mainstream. He’s neither.

Consider, for example, this lead from The Atlantic:

On Wednesday, Donald Trump gave, by his standards, a restrained and subtle speech.

True, the Republican candidate referred to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “a world-class liar,” “maybe the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency,” and someone whose “decisions spread death, destruction, and terrorism everywhere.” And yes, the speech was full of lies and half-truths. Yet Wednesday’s speech, delivered at an upscale hotel the candidate owns in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, was nonetheless the most focused and cohesive address he has yet given, one that laid out a cogent populist argument without resorting to overt racism or long insult-comedy riffs.

This is how “normalizing” happens. This is how we become desensitized to the awfulness of Mr. Trump’s candidacy. By giving him credit for occasionally not making racist, misogynistic, violence-inciting comments. By being quick to give credit to him for a speech that is – in parts – coherent (which are clearly written by someone else and spoken by Mr. Trump who gives this speechwriter every impression that he’s reading the words for the first time).

Mr. Trump should not be given any credit for “pivoting,” “rebooting” “moderating” or “being disciplined.” All he’s doing is pretending to be something other than he is: a shallow, ignorant, incurious, emotionally immature narcissist who is less qualified to be president than the average person on the street. (I’m not kidding about that, by the way: I think I’d take my chances with a person chosen at random from anywhere in America than Mr. Trump.) All he should be given credit for is a willingness to do anything he thinks will advance his interests at any given moment. That includes reading aloud words written by someone else. Any notion that he understands, agrees with, will be bound by those words is simply wrong.

I’ve buttonholed a couple of journalists on these points and they have uniformly 1) gotten defensive about the media’s efforts to report on the various aspects of Mr. Trump 2) hidden behind the notion that “it’s not their job” to decide who and who isn’t qualified to be president. I’ve also seen in their eyes the panicky look that says they know I’m right (or that I’ve gone stark raving crazy and they’re trapped in a conversation with a lunatic).

In normal elections – i.e. any other election in my lifetime – I would agree with them. Not this one. This election makes a higher claim on all of us to not simply do our jobs but to stand up and be counted. As the saying goes, “When your grandchildren ask you, ‘What did you do to stop Donald Trump?’ what will you say?”

That applies to journalists too.

– Austin