Kewl beenz, me too. Guess I should have linked that (so I will, and here too).
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February 3, 2020 (Monday)
As I write tonight, Twitter is consumed by the fact that there are no results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses since, apparently, the app the organizers were using to tabulate results is not working. The Iowa Democratic Party has said it “found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results. …The underlying data and paper trail is sound and will simply take time to further report the result." It is suggesting they’ll have numbers by tomorrow.
This is shocking. Not that the caucus has turned into a technological quagmire, but that this focus on what is, in the scheme of things, a small event in the upcoming election (sorry, Iowa) has crowded off the stage the fact that the country is still, right now, in the midst of a profound political crisis.
The impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump is not over.
Today the House impeachment managers and the president’s defense gave their closing arguments. The defense hammered the same themes it has hit all along, arguing that the House did not go about the impeachment properly and that the impulse for the impeachment was based in the desire to overturn the 2016 election (although if Trump were removed from office, his vice president, Michael Pence would take the office, and there is, of course, the other logical answer to this: the Democratic victories in the 2018 election suggest that voters wanted Trump reined in). The only answer, they said, was to leave the question of Trump’s future in the hands of voters in 2020.
Still, the honors of the day went to chief House manager Adam Schiff, who gave a passionate 25-minute speech in which he laid out the dangers of an unchecked President Trump. Schiff went for broke in a speech that will be remembered as one of the great speeches in American history because, like them, Schiff’s speech appealed to our nation’s fundamental principles and charged senators to uphold them. “Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs?" Schiff asked. "The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.” He begged the Republicans to say “enough.”
Republicans are in a hard spot, since a number of them have admitted they know he’s guilty, but are trying to argue his conduct is not an impeachable offense. Some that are willing to admit that he tried to cheat in the 2020 election, like Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Joni Ernst (R-IA), took refuge today in the argument that surely his impeachment and the subsequent trial will have chastened him, and he will not do anything like it again.
Hahahahahaha!!!
This is delusional. It’s not that Trump will not stop; it’s that he cannot stop. He must constantly up the ante because that is how he convinces himself he is powerful. By letting him off the hook, Republicans have given him license to keep pushing. Even while the trial was going on, he tweeted “I hope Republicans & the American people realize that the totally partisan Impeachment Hoax is exacty that, a Hoax. Read the Transcripts, listen to what the President & Foreign Minister of Ukraine said (“No Pressure”). Nothing will ever satisfy the Do Nothing, Radical Left Dems!” and “Where’s the Whistleblower? Where’s the second Whistleblower? Where’s the Informer? Why did Corrupt politician Schiff MAKE UP my conversation with the Ukrainian President??? Why didn’t the House do its job? And sooo much more!”
And he is, indeed, upping the ante. Just today, Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman said he had talked to Republicans in Washington who said that Trump is planning revenge against those who crossed him in the impeachment trial, with congressmen Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, Mitt Romney, and former National Security advisor John Bolton, whose forthcoming book ties Trump directly to the Ukraine Scandal, at the top of the list. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.” According to these sources, Trump wants Bolton to be criminally investigated.
His supporters seem more and more not to care. Today fallout from the Super Bowl showed the divorce between the reality of Trump himself and the image his followers believe. For years, we heard how Trump and his supporters were offended by the disrespect that protesters like African American football player Colin Kaepernick showed for our nation by taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence against people of color. Today video emerged of Trump at Mar-a-Lago during the Super Bowl national anthem, fidgeting, pretending to be conducting the music, and then jumping for his chair while his wife Melania and the other guests stand with their hands over their hearts. The video was shared to Instagram by, as the Miami Herald put it, “a real estate agent for a Russian-American firm who frequents Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties and events.”
On Twitter, Trump congratulated the Kansas City Chiefs, who beat the San Francisco 49ers 20-31 last night to win the Super Bowl, “on a great game, and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure. You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA, so very well. Our Country is PROUD OF YOU.” The Kansas City Chiefs are, of course, from Missouri.
The reason this error matters is because of the instant attempt of Trump supporters to argue that his error was, in fact, right. Truthfully, this kind of slip is incredibly easy to make. We all do it, sometimes because we misspeak, sometimes because we’re just idiots. (I once thought Joseph Stalin, who I read was born in Georgia, was from the American South.) But when we make mistakes like that, we ‘fess up, and correct our errors to bring them into line with reality. In this case, someone in the White House corrected the Tweet quickly, but Matt Schlapp, the chair of the American Conservative Union, tried to turn Trump’s error into its own reality. He tweeted: “Dear East coast establishment: Kansas City, Kansas is in Kansas.” There is a Kansas City, Kansas, of course, but it’s not where the Chiefs are based. The attempt to fall in line behind Trump over something as stupid and obviously wrong as this is not a good indication of his followers’ increasingly tenuous relationship to the truth.
And now a word about Iowa. Iowa is roughly 90% white, and is old and rural. The US is only 65% white, and the Democratic party is only 60% white. Iowa is not representative of much of anything in the upcoming election, so the idea that it is a bellwether (which, by the way, is named for the castrated male sheep that led the rest of the flock and thus wore a bell) for the rest of the Democratic election season is misleading. Further, the snafu (which is a term from WWII, and means “Situation Normal, All F***ed Up”) in the tallies for the caucuses, while unfortunate, does not necessarily mean much.
Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale called the caucus mess “the sloppiest train wreck in history. It would be natural for people to doubt the fairness of the process.” This is a deliberate attempt to undermine faith in the democratic process. The caucuses are run by parties, not by states, and they are not overseen by state machinery. Nor are the votes at the Iowa caucus taken by machines; they are tallied on paper. So the mess here seems likely to be an honest error, rather than some nefarious scheme. Now, that being said, there is zero excuse for our unprotected election machinery. We need paper ballots and records to trust our voting systems. But we need that in general, not because the Democratic Party in Iowa has made a hash of its technology.
Tomorrow the impeachment trial is quiet before Trump addresses the nation in the State of the Union address. There is lots of talk about how he will be unhinged and taking a victory lap; personally, I suspect he will be exceedingly well behaved as, among other things, he offers up some key benefits for wavering evangelical voters. We’ll see.
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What can we learn from this? DO NOT RELY ON AN APP WORKING PROPERLY FOR CRITICAL STUFF LIKE THIS.
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Yeah. And it’s worse than just Shadow, Inc.'s shitty app.
Who needs Republicans when Democratic elites (also) act like this?
Shadow Inc. was launched by a major Democratic dark money nonprofit called Acronym, which also gave birth to a $7.7 million Super PAC known as Pacronym.
According to Sludge, Pacronym’s largest donor is Seth Klarman. A billionaire hedge funder, Klarman also happens to be a top donor to Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Though he has attracted some attention for his role in the campaign, Klarman’s prolific funding of the pro-settler Israel lobby and Islamophobic initiatives has gone almost entirely unmentioned.
Seth Klarman is the founder of the Boston-based Baupost Group hedge fund and a longtime donor to corporate Republican candidates. After Donald Trump called for forgiving Puerto Rico’s debt, Klarman – the owner of $911 million of the island’s bonds – flipped and began funding Trump’s opponents.
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February 4, 2020 (Tuesday)
If I were trying to define where America is in 2020, I would use tonight’s State of the Union address. I am not going to talk about the pieces of it: plenty of pundits are tearing apart Trump’s economic statistics even as I write. But the speech, taken as a moment, illustrated the Trump presidency with chilling accuracy.
The speech was fictional, made for television.
Trump began by touting the successes of his administration, but it was all lies. I mean, it was gobsmacking lies. He talked, for example, of how he had turned the economy around from the devastation of his predecessor President Barack Obama, when, in fact, he inherited a growing economy from Obama that has, under him, slowed. And he talked of how the Republicans are determined to protect healthcare and coverage for preexisting conditions, even while they are literally in court right now to destroy those things. It was like Opposite Day.
Within that framework, Trump quite openly promised giveaways to crucial constituencies he needs for reelection. To evangelicals he offered anti-abortion legislation and the ability to use tax dollars for religious schools. To African Americans he touted all the gains for which he believed they should honor him: jobs, education, and so on. To wage laborers, he promised that his tariffs had brought thousands of jobs back to America. To women, he claimed to have provided parental leave. To all Americans, he promised he was protecting health care, social security, and Medicare. It was a piecemeal menu of why each constituency should support this president. It was also largely fictional.
The overall speech was a compellingly crafted narrative, with Trump as the all-powerful fictional hero. Traditionally, the State of the Union is a tad dull, to be honest. It’s supposed to tell Americans what has changed over the past twelve months. (Actually, historians love it because cabinet officers used to write their own sections, so it’s a terrific short synopsis of finances, foreign affairs and so on, but it ain’t exactly compelling reading in general.) But tonight, Trump used it as a campaign rally. He presented a portrait of a nation that had been on the verge of catastrophe before he swept in to save it. It was a theme that ties into American mythology: the cowboy who saves the villagers from destruction.
Trump did not stop with the general myth, though. He went on to play the game show host turned autocratic ruler. In the course of the speech, he developed the theme that he, the president, could raise hurting individuals up to glory. He promoted an older African American veteran to General. He awarded a scholarship to a child who had previously been unable to get one. He had Melania award the Medal of Freedom to talk show host Rush Limbaugh, a man ill with cancer (who obligingly pretended to be surprised and overwhelmed, although he had done interviews before the speech in which he indicated he was aware of what was about to happen). He reunited a military family. Contrived though all these scenarios were, they made him the catalyst for improving the lives of individuals in ways to which we all can relate. It was reality TV: false, scripted, and effective.
More than that, it was designed to demonstrate Trump’s power and, as communications scholar Michael Socolow pointed out on Twitter, it mirrored the performances of Hitler, who worked similar transformations on individuals during speeches to demonstrate that he had an almost magical power to change lives.
And then there were the attacks on the “other;” undocumented individuals, for example, who, in Trumps telling, became vicious criminals (although studies overwhelmingly show that immigrants commit crimes far more rarely than native born Americans). There were also more subtle clues for who belongs in America: Trump offered the Medal of Freedom to hate-monger Rush Limbaugh, who has gone out of his way to attack “feminazis,” people of color, and “socialists.”
Rather than being a review of the past year and a preview of the next year’s policies, the 2020 State of the Union was almost a religious speech, with the good guys, who were pure good, lining up against the bad guys, who were pure evil. And the leader of the good guys—Trump-- had done everything right, and could raise up his suffering supporters to bliss, simply with a wave of his hand. It will play well to True Believers.
It was, of course, complete fiction. But it was an interesting fiction, I thought. Trump repeatedly claimed to be doing the opposite of what the GOP really is doing, in an attempt to attract voters. That is, even he knows that the American people want something different than he is delivering, but rather than adjust his policies he is simply lying.
Nonetheless, Republican congress people, who surely knew what they were hearing was completely divorced from reality, continually jumped to their feet to applaud it. I found their slavish toadying more chilling even than the president’s speech. It is Trump’s party now, to do with as he wishes.
For their part, Democrats tried to demonstrate their disapproval while still showing respect for the House chamber. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) mimicked a wall falling down as Trump boasted of his border wall (a section of which blew over last week), and Democratic women, dressed in white to honor suffragists, called out “HR 3!”—the bill the House has passed in honor of the late Representative Elijah Cummings for lower drug prices, a bill that sits unaddressed on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk—while Trump vowed to lower drug prices. Most on point, though, was Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who, as Trump went on, simply sat quietly reading the Constitution.
But as Trump finished, the final word went to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who pointedly and obviously tore up Trump’s speech for the cameras. Ever since, media has been on fire over her demonstration, which we have to think was precisely her intention. Her action stole all of Trump’s thunder, which will defang his speech as well as infuriate him. As a long-time observer of political leaders, I am in awe of her ability to read and dominate a situation, even situations in which she appears to have a losing hand.
After the State of the Union and The Great Tearing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer delivered the Democratic response, while Representative Veronica Escobar (D-TX) delivered a separate response in Spanish. Both focused on Democratic policies to make American’s lives better. Whitmer’s speech, anyway (I did not watch Escobar’s) was lucid and calm. It played as a dramatic contrast to Trump’s, offering a fact-based, undramatic American future. It was a powerful contrast that might offer respite to voters who are just… tired.
I will speak another day to the Iowa caucuses (and I apologize to those who thought my dismissal of them yesterday was ageist—I was simply noting demographics and the changing Democratic make up, but I did put it more frivolously than it warranted), and to the fact that tomorrow’s impeachment vote will likely liberate Trump. I will write about his apparent desire to jail John Bolton, and about how the caucus and primary systems have evolved.
But tonight, America’s main story is that the president is in a full-out fight for his political survival, and to win the next election he is peddling a fictional narrative in which he is the autocratic hero who can lift us all to a better life. His narrative sounds dangerously like that of a dictator… and Republican leaders seem to be on board with that.
But the rest of us are not. And in a wastebasket in the House of Representatives, there’s a torn-up speech to prove it.
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February 5, 2020 (Wednesday)
As expected, today the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of the charges of which he was accused in the articles of impeachment passed by the House of Representatives. The Senate rejected the first article, abuse of power, by a vote of 48 to 52, as Utah Senator Mitt Romney crossed the aisle to vote with the Democratic minority. On the second article, obstruction of Congress, the vote was 47 to 53. “The president did in fact pressure a foreign government to corrupt our election process,” Romney told reporter McKay Coppins. “And really, corrupting an election process in a democratic republic is about as abusive and egregious an act against the Constitution—and one’s oath—that I can imagine. It’s what autocrats do.”
"The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a ‘high crime and misdemeanor,’ Romney said. “Yes, he did.”
The fact that Romney voted yes on one of the articles was really the only surprising news of the day. And it was significant. It robbed Trump of a pure party-line vote, thus enabling him to argue that impeachment was a partisan “witch hunt.” Trump surrogates found a way around that problem quickly: they simply said that Romney wasn’t a Republican. Donald Trump Jr. called Romney a “pussy” and tweeted that Romney is “now officially a member of the resistance & should be expelled from the GOP.” On her show on the Fox News Channel, Laura Ingraham said Romney should resign because he “committed a fraud on the people of Utah, on the Republican Party, on the Constitution.”
The Republican Party is now the Trump Party, and there is a reason that, for all their bullying, its leaders are nervous. The 48 Senators who voted to convict Trump represent 18 million more Americans than the 52 Republicans who voted to acquit. It is increasingly obvious a minority is gaming the system against a majority, and their only hope for retaining power is to repress that majority.
They redoubled their efforts to do that as soon as the Senate voted. Maine Senator Susan Collins tried to argue that Trump had learned his lesson and would “be much more cautious in the future,” but Trump insisted to reporters on Tuesday that there was nothing to learn because he had done nothing wrong. “It was a perfect call.” Privately, according to Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, Republican senators “agree that the president is reckless and unfit. They admit his lies. And they acknowledge what he did was wrong. They know this president has done things Richard Nixon never did. And they know that more damning evidence is likely to come out. But they are afraid to stand up to him. They have no answer for how they will stop him from getting worse in the wake of acquittal.”
It is something to which they should have given some thought.
After the vote, Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary, asked about Adam Schiff, who led the impeachment effort: “Will there be no retribution?” And, after former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be censured for ripping up Trump’s speech, tonight Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) announced that he is filing an ethics complaint against Pelosi. He claims she might have violated the law against mutilating a government record. “Nobody is above the law,” he tweeted. “She must be held accountable.”
This afternoon, Republican Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) began an investigation into Hunter Biden.
And, in retaliation for the fact that New York has refused to turn DMV records over to ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Homeland Security today suspended the ability for residents of New York to enroll or renew their status in the Global Entry or Trusted Traveler programs, something that will hobble New Yorkers who often travel internationally.
Today, Attorney General William Barr gave the Trump campaign cover for 2020. He issued an order that the FBI cannot investigate any political candidate or that candidate’s senior advisors before the 2020 election without him signing off on it. So, if Trump does receive help from a foreign country as he did in 2016 and tried to do in 2020, the FBI cannot investigate it unless Barr says it’s okay. Barr, you will remember, is deeply implicated in the Ukraine Scandal.
I read today an exchange between a historian and one of his friends, who was taking him to task for blowing Trump’s actions out of proportion and acting like the sky is falling when, he said, every administration upsets its opponents and Trump’s is no different. A second historian chimed in to note that this might be a really good time to listen to historians, since we’re the ones who study the rise of authoritarians.
So here’s my two cents. This is not normal political behavior. This is not normal partisanship. While, as you must know by now, I believe that the future always remains unwritten, and we can always change the outcome until it is, the steps Trump takes are consistent with the rise of a dictator. And now with him freed from the cloud of impeachment, we appear to be entering a new phase of escalation. It looks like he is beginning to single out his opponents for punishment, justifying it with the argument that those opponents are hurting America.
While it is not time to panic, it is definitely time to keep up pressure on your senators and representatives, to take up oxygen defending the rule of law, to demand hand marked paper ballots in the 2020 election, and to work for candidates of your choice not only for the presidency but also for the House and Senate, candidates who will defend our democracy. And if you find it all too much to face, remember that refusing to let this administration throw you off track and instead going about your day is an act of resistance. And so, in this era, is simply being kind and honest, when so many people are trading on hatred and lies.
Trump will make an announcement about his acquittal Thursday at noon.
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Say it loud:
But then, although that’s about Republicans, the same can be said about the corporate-funded establishment wing of the Democratic Party.
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Unequal representation, i.e. gerrymandering is the PRIME issue.
It starts at a local level, with local boards restricting the number and function of voting precincts in order to play with voter turnout and skew those elections. And then, at the state level, legislators who were unfairly elected in the first place redistrict their state: they shunt all the D’s into one area and spread out the R’s to attain 51% in as many districts as possible.
And not without a few forms of federal assistance. The results of the 10 year census play into this gerrymandering effort to push minorities aside. And the Supreme Court refuses to reduce corporate influence and only tepidly addresses gerrymandering cases when they rarely come up.
If we (bigger we, as in “libs/left/sane people”) are unsuccessful in November, it is because of at least three things that I can see right now:
- We were unable to fix the unequal representation adequately at the local level, this time around.
- The goddamned electoral college, which favors the flyover states.
- Democrats remain disorganized, vulnerable to tampering and unable to form a solid coalition within ranks.
Unequal representation is the prime issue in the USA. It plays out absurdly. The racial majority is the ideological minority yet holds the ideological majority hostage to its every whim, year after year. Republicans mainly, but also corporate Democrats are maintaining this status quo.
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If we needed any more proof that Collins is a coward, a fool, or both, her trying to claim that Trump had learned anything, let alone something positive, should be enough.
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It’s great ammunition for anyone running against her.
I have some hope that the impeachment, and especially the Republican cowardice and self-serving it exposed, could get the Senate back in Dem hands.
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I think that’s been their primary political goal with this all the time. Trump getting booted out was always a very, very low-probability thing, even before the GOP senators decided that no crime is too obvious, and no defense too stupid, to preserve Trump and avoid getting his mad mob of deplorables turned against them.
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Investigate Eric Prince, force him to testify under oath to the House Intelligence Cmte. Use the Sergeant at Arms to arrest him if he defies a subpoena - he can’t use executive priviledge as a shield, since he isn’t a member of the administration. Impeach Trump again when the pieces finally come together showing the direct tie to Russian interference in 2016.
Keep the pressure up, and force these assholes to go full tyrant. It’s going to take a lot of courage from opposition politicians - probably more than they’ve ever summoned before in their lives - but the only way to prevail is to make them show their true selves.
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February 6, 2020 (Thursday)
With the focus of impeachment over, we are back to news cycles that feel scattershot. Today’s many stories added up to an angry and badly spooked president.
First of all, Trump feels vindicated by the Senate’s refusal to convict him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and is taking a victory lap. But it is not the victory lap of a leader who feels so secure in his win that he can afford to be magnanimous. At this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast, designed to bring politicians and religious leaders together in a shared faith, the featured speaker, conservative columnist Arthur Brooks, reminded the bipartisan audience to “love your enemies” and put aside anger, sarcasm, and derision with love, and to “ask God to take political contempt from your heart.” When Trump took the microphone, he said “I don’t know if I agree with you. I don’t know if Arthur is going to like what I’m going to say.” He then attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was sitting nearby, disparaging the idea she prays for him, and jabbed at Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who voted in favor of his conviction on the article of impeachment that charged him with abuse of power.
Then, for more than an hour this afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Trump unloaded on his perceived enemies. “This is a day of celebration because we went through hell,” he said. The July 25 phone call between him and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfect,” and he was now totally acquitted. Impeachment was “a phony, rotten deal” thought up by “very evil and sick people.” Every Democrat who voted for it was “vicious as hell.” “It was evil. It was corrupt. It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars.” The only people to whom he apologized were his family, apologizing that “some very evil and very sick people” put them through a “phony, rotten” ordeal. Of the Russia investigation, he announced, “It’s all bullshit.”
There was an unexpected and unfortunate outcome of the Senate impeachment trial. With his lawyer arguing Trump could pretty much do whatever he wishes, and the Senate signing on to that, Trump clearly feels no constraints. The Trump White House is openly retaliating against the president’s perceived enemies. Most notably, news broke tonight that Trump intends to punish Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council aide who testified against Trump during the impeachment hearings, by forcing him out of the White House.
As was expected, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who joined the Democrats to vote yes on the impeachment article accusing Trump of abuse of power, bore the brunt of Trump supporters’ hatred today. On the Fox News Channel, Brian Kilmeade attacked Romney for saying he had followed his faith to vote yes. “’My faith makes me do this’? Are you kidding? What about your faith and this case meld together? That is unbelievable for him to bring religion into this. ‘His faith.’” (Remember, these are people who have claimed that a person’s faith means they do not have to follow laws.)
More direct, Trump tweeted out a video attacking Romney as the “Democrats’ secret asset” who was only “posing as a Republican.” Romney, of course, was the 2012 Republican candidate for president, and is the son of George Romney, former Governor of Michigan and a Republican leader in the last generation. As a Utah senator, he has voted with Trump 80% of the time. But now, because of his vote against Trump on one article of impeachment, he is suddenly a Democrat. Across Twitter and the Fox News Channel, attacks on Romney were non-stop.
The fact Trump’s people felt it necessary to slam Romney, and to make and then send out the video suggests they are nervous. Romney is garnering praise for his principled stand, with the Washington Post, and the Utah Salt Lake Tribune, among others, saluting his “profile in courage.” And, we learned today, nationally, 60% of American women disapprove of Trump while only 38% approve. We also heard that the Fox News Channel’s research unit warned presenters against taking the top commentators’ claims about Ukraine at face value. Contributor John Solomon (who wrote articles for The Hill attacking Marie Yovanovitch), Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Trump lawyers Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova are, the unit warned, “spreading disinformation.”
The vicious attacks on Romney are a desperate attempt to warn other Republicans of what will happen if they, too, jump ship. It smacks of fear, which strikes me as an interesting emotion just as Trump should be feeling at his strongest. Perhaps he has some idea of the news that will be dropping in the coming weeks.
Or perhaps he is afraid of women like popular former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was chased out of Ukraine by Giuliani and his henchmen as she tried to battle corruption and defend democracy. In an op-ed in the Washington Post today, she took on Trump and his enablers, saying, “I have seen dictatorships around the world, where blind obedience is the norm and truth-tellers are threatened with punishment or death. We must not allow the United States to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act.” With sentiments that Senator Romney might appreciate, she said, “It has been shocking to experience the storm of criticism, lies and malicious conspiracies that have preceded and followed my public testimony, but I have no regrets. I did — we did — what our conscience called us to do. We did what the gift of U.S. citizenship requires us to do.”
Ambassador Yovanovitch reflected that it is time to defend our democratic institutions at home. “These are turbulent times, perhaps the most challenging that I have witnessed,” wrote the woman who served our country in war zones. “But… like my parents before me, I remain optimistic about our future. The events of the past year, while deeply disturbing, show that even though our institutions and our fellow citizens are being challenged in ways that few of us ever expected, we will endure, we will persist and we will prevail.”
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February 7, 2020 (Friday)
Today Trump began to retaliate against those who testified unflatteringly about his behavior in the Ukraine Scandal. First up was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was dismissed from his post on the National Security Council, where he was an expert on Russia and Ukraine. Vindman was on the infamous July 25 call and alerted the chief lawyer to the NSC, John Eisenberg, to its problematic content immediately afterward. He testified before the House Intelligence Committee under subpoena, telling it that Eisenberg told him not to talk about the call, and that Eisenberg put the transcript of the call onto a high security server, where national security secrets are held. Vindman also told investigators that the readout that Trump provided the public did not contain key parts of the conversation: Trump had explicitly mentioned both Burisma and the Bidens.
Trump also ordered the ouster of Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny (Eugene) Vindman, an Army officer on the NSC staff. Later in the day, he also recalled Gordon Sondland, a hotel chain founder whom Trump had appointed Ambassador to the European Union after Sondland donated a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee. Sondland had enthusiastically advanced Trump’s goal of getting Ukraine leaders to announce an investigation into the Bidens from his post at the E.U. (Ukraine is not in the E.U.). But he, too, looped Trump into the scheme in testimony before the House. Trump loyalists apparently asked Sondland to resign as soon as the Senate impeachment trial was over, but Sondland refused, saying they must fire him amid what was clearly a purge of those who had testified. So they did.
These moves are within Trump’s rights. The Vindmans are both Army officers; they are simply being reassigned. And ambassadors serve at the will of the president. But these firings—including of Vindman’s brother, who had nothing to do with congressional testimony—look like the sort of revenge a dictator would take on those willing to question him. While some people close to the White House at first tried to suggest that Alexander Vindman’s firing was part of general cuts at NSC, the fact that he was escorted off the White House grounds proved it was personal. Don Jr, also helpfully tweeted his thanks to Democratic impeachment leader Adam Schiff for making it easier to figure out whom to fire.
Three things strike me about these retaliations. First of all, they are a clear warning to others that crossing Trump will bring retribution. You are loyal to Trump—not to America—or you are in trouble. New York Republican Representative Lee Zeldin tweeted that “Vindman should not be inside the National Security Council any longer. It’s not about retaliation. It’s because he cannot be trusted, he disagrees with the President’s policies, & his term there is coming to an end regardless.” Foreign policy specialist Kate Brannen responded: “Name the policy with which he disagrees.” Vindman was advancing U.S. policies precisely, as was U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, and special envoy William Taylor, who replaced her, and Russia specialist Fiona Hill. It was the president and his people who were pursuing their own private goals. Had Vindman broken his oath to America and looked the other way when Trump broke the law, he and his brother would still be at the NSC.
The purging of all but Trump loyalists from key positions also means that we are losing our experts, especially experts on Russia. We have lost Yovanovitch and Taylor, Hill and now Lt. Col. Vindman, all people with decades of experience in dealing with Russia. They are being replaced on the NSC by people like Kashyap Patel, a former staffer for Devin Nunes (R-CA), who communicated with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and insisted that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that attacked us in 2016. This is a lie, remember; it’s Russian propaganda, denied by our intelligence services and the Republican Senate’s own investigation.
Even more troubling to me is the immediate effort to assassinate Vindman’s character. His words to his father, an immigrant from the USSR, telling him not to worry about his son’s testimony against the president because in America it is fine to tell the truth, played very well to viewers. “This is America,” Vindman told his father. “Here, right matters.” Retaliating against him, especially when he was due to leave the NSC soon anyway, was petty, at best, and it will disgust reasonable Americans. Trump is desperate to win reelection (not least because the Department of Justice currently maintains that a sitting president cannot be indicted). So, immediately, Trump surrogates began to flood the media with attacks on Vindman. Trollbots stated tweeting about “Alexander Vindman” and their vile commentary started trending on Twitter.
This instant assault on Vindman encapsulates the Republican plan to stay in power: flood voters with disinformation. Vindman is a decorated soldier who got an impressive education, has dedicated his life to this country, has been wounded in its service, and testified in response to a congressional subpoena… all things we should honor. But by flooding media with other information-- he was about to leave anyway; he was disloyal; the NSC was downsizing—they can shift the narrative around the president’s behavior, turning what is pettiness at best into something fuzzy enough that it’s hard for a voter who is not paying extremely close attention to make a clear judgment about it.
This, we know, is exactly what the Trump campaign and Russian operatives did in the 2016 election. They flooded social media, especially, with subtle information that shifted people’s understanding of the candidates and blurred the narrative.
Because media outlets, Facebook especially, has collected so much personal information on each of us, they could help the Trump campaign “micro-target” voters. People often make the mistake of thinking that advertising to us is the product that the media sells, but it’s actually the opposite. WE are the product. By learning how we behave, an entity like Facebook or the Fox News Channel or CBS (which pioneered the system back in the 1930s) can divide us into packages that they can sell to an advertiser with certainty that a certain number of us will buy a certain product. It worked thirty years ago for canned soup and appliances. Today’s algorithms are far more sophisticated—remember all those games to see which dog you are most like and which is your favorite Beatle?-- and now that same system is being used for political advertising. Then operatives and bots amplify the message until we are all overwhelmed, and arguing with each other whether or not it’s really true that a candidate was a deadbeat dad, or yelled at an employee. The narrative blurs, and we stop caring.
Control the narrative and you control the nation.
The most effective disinformation is that which makes us believe that no one is telling the truth and that nothing matters. But it does. In America, right now, we are being asked to choose between two versions of government. On the one hand we have those who think that a few, wealthy, well-connected individuals—mostly white men—should govern the rest of us, and that their wisdom and abilities are so strong that challenging them means you are unAmerican. On the other hand, we have those who believe that we should all be equal before the law, and that society moves forward most efficiently when we all have a voice in hashing out national policies based on fact-based argument and adherence to democratic principles.
When disinformation starts to make the candidates and their policies blur, keep Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s distinction in mind: “This is America. Here, right matters.”
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I’m not so sure about that. The Federal Whistleblower law contains a provision that one does not have to be a formal whistleblower in order to enjoy protection from retribution. Since there is documentation that these actions against Vindmand (and his brother, for chrissakes!) were retribution, they fall under that prohibition, which is against all federal employees and officers. That includes the president.
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Oh well, toss it on the uncountable pile of other illegal Trumpian actions. I can’t see who or what is going to hold him to account for any of them.
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The voters, hopefully.
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February 8, 2020 (Saturday)
On Monday, Trump will release his 2021 budget. It contains $800 billion worth of cuts in Medicaid over the next decade. On January 22, in an interview on CNBC when he was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when pressed on the enormous budget deficits his policies have created—he has added almost $3 trillion to the national debt-- he suggested that he is considering cutting Social Security and Medicare in his second term. “That’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look,” he said. And despite his pledge at the State of the Union to protect health insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions, his administration is currently asking the courts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) entirely, a decision the Supreme Court has put off until after the 2020 election.
One of the reasons the nation’s deficit and debt is soaring is that Trump’s 2017 tax cut slashed tax revenues. And rather than helping regular Americans, “the plumbers, the carpenters, the cops, the teachers, the truck drivers, the pipe-fitters, the people that like me best,” as Trump put it, 60% of the tax savings went to people whose incomes were in the top 20%.
These cuts to both social programs and taxes are the end game of a movement that started in the 1930s. It is designed to take American government back to the 1920s, when Republicans led by Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge turned the government over to businessmen in the belief that they alone truly knew what was best for the country. For eight years, it seemed like this system was the best ever designed as the economy appeared to boom and some men became very rich indeed.
But the Roaring Twenties came to a crashing end in 1929, and in the introspection that followed, Americans discovered that some businessmen and financiers had been cheating, while even those who were trying to live within the law were gambling with customers’ money or taking advantage of risky schemes. Meanwhile, the economic growth of the era had not translated to higher wages for workers or better pay for farmers; all the profits from the booming businesses had gone to those at the top of economy.
Republican President Hoover assured Americans that the economy simply needed a self-correction. He refused any large-scale government programs to steady the nation, insisting that such government activism would destroy the “rugged individualism” that lay at the heart of the national character.
His Democratic opponent in the 1932 election disagreed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered a “New Deal” to the American people, who had had their world yanked out from under them through no fault of their own. FDR maintained that the government must step in to regulate the economy to keep businessmen from cheating and to protect workers. It must provide a basic social safety net so that Americans did not starve, and it should promote infrastructure both to develop resources and to enable all Americans to share access to the modern world. In the long Depression that followed the Great Crash, Americans embraced the New Deal programs that helped them find work, offered new Social Security for the elderly and disabled, and built new roads, schools, airports, libraries, roads, and bridges all over the country. When this newly active government went on to fight and win against the Axis Powers in WWII, popular support for the new government system was cemented.
So secure was it, in fact, that Republicans themselves adopted it. When Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, he offered his own version of the New Deal, calling it the “Middle Way” and launching the largest public works project in American history: the interstate highways. Most Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, loved the active government. It had pulled the nation out of the Depression, won a world war, and presided over a booming postwar economy.
But some Hoover Republicans resented government regulation of their businesses, and insisted that the new system was simply a redistribution of wealth. The bureaucrats necessary for enforcing regulations and providing a social safety net would cost tax dollars, forcing wealthy men to pay for government programs that benefited poorer Americans. This system infringed on their liberty, they insisted. It was socialism.
It was not socialism, of course; socialism is a system in which the government owns the means of production. The new US system was regulated capitalism, designed to stabilize the traditional economy so it did not self-destruct again. But, calling themselves “Movement Conservatives,” these men organized to attack the New Deal government.
They had little luck convincing voters to join them in destroying the popular system. But in 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision requiring the desegregation of public schools enabled them to harness racism to their argument. Movement Conservatives harped on the idea that an activist government was using its muscle to protect African Americans. Desegregation and the programs it required to enforce, they said, cost tax dollars. Those tax dollars would come from hardworking white taxpayers to benefit African Americans. It was a redistribution of wealth that hurt white people to help African Americans.
With this appeal to racism, Movement Conservatives broke what had become known as the “liberal consensus.” Voters began to swing behind the Republican Party, with its promises to lower taxes and cut programs that sucked money from the nation’s “makers” to give it to the “takers.” Now, two generations later, the heirs of those Movement Conservatives have taken over the Republican Party, and they are in control of the government.
Because our government has regulated business, provided a social safety net, and promoted infrastructure since the 1930s, most Americans make the mistake of thinking that this system is here to stay. The New Deal government remains enormously popular. Americans like decent wages, and clean air and water, and bridges that don’t fall down, and roads without potholes. We like Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid. Most Americans cannot fathom that anyone really wants to get rid of these things, and think Republicans and Democrats are both simply arguing over how the system is implemented.
But the opposition to this activist government is not a question of degree; it is ideological. Those currently in control of the Republican Party believe that government regulation destroys the liberty of men to run their businesses as they wish, and that a social safety net and infrastructure investment redistributes wealth, so, they believe, it is socialism. This system, they think, has turned Americans into “takers,” rather than “makers,” and that it’s destroying us.
Since he has been in office, Trump has advanced the goals of this ideological contingent, a practice that has surely helped to keep Republican leaders behind him. He has slashed business regulations and the government, leaving key positions unfilled and decimating departments. Now, his new budget takes on Medicaid, and his comments about Social Security, Medicare, and the administration’s lawsuit about the Affordable Care Act suggest they, too, might soon be on the chopping block.
At long last, it seems, the dreams of the Movement Conservatives are on the verge of coming true. Trump is already saying he will make “socialism” the centerpiece of his reelection campaign. But our American system is not socialism; it is the regulated capitalism that has stabilized our economy for almost a century.
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February 9, 2020 (Sunday)
I get a lot of messages these days from people who say they are frightened, that they feel helpless in the face of Trump’s rising authoritarianism. The hatred on social media makes them want to hide from the world, and they cannot see a way out of the current mess America is in. They feel hopeless.
It is worth remembering that one of the goals of disinformation, especially the disinformation seeded by Russian intelligence, is to discourage voters and convince them to give up so an autocrat can take over.
People ask me what they can do. You can call your senators and representatives, give money to a candidate, knock on doors, insist on hand-marked paper ballots, and work to get out the vote.
But here’s a larger perspective.
After 35 years of studying politics, I have come to believe that what changes society is ideas, and that politics, especially, changes according to popular beliefs. We have the current leaders we do because they were able to convince voters to cast ballots for them, based on the narrative they offered.
We got to this point, where we have a party in power that is deliberately creating a false narrative, because, after World War II, so many Americans believed in the new, activist New Deal state, the “liberal consensus,” that politicians could not motivate voters with sweeping stories of what it meant to be an American: almost all Americans agreed on those basic principles. So political scientists concluded that there was no longer any real defining ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats. In a famous book published in 1960, The American Voter, political scientist Philip Converse said that Americans were not particularly ideological, but rather voted based on their understanding of what benefits a party could offer to their particular group.
On the heels of this study, both Republicans and Democrats turned away from the idea of attracting voters with arguments about principle. Instead, they focused on nailing together coalitions, in a kind of transactional politics that erased the larger meaning of what it meant to participate in constructing a government.
In 1969, after Republican President Richard M. Nixon had successfully pulled together a coalition to win the White House despite the fact more Americans had voted for other candidates than had voted for him, political operative Kevin Philips applied Converse’s idea to the fortunes of the Republican Party. In The Emerging Republican Majority, Philips argued that Republicans could win for the foreseeable future if only they kept following Converse’s advice. The Democrats followed suit, and both traditional parties began to concentrate on messaging and the mechanics of getting people out to vote.
But the men who hated the liberal consensus and wanted to destroy it, men known as Movement Conservatives, did not follow Converse’s plan. They did not try to hammer together coalitions, because their plan to destroy the New Deal state was not popular with virtually anyone but their core supporters. So instead of following the new political science, they were the only group that offered to voters a clear narrative. And their narrative tied into western and American mythology. They talked of an individual American man, usually uneducated, but close to the land and to God, who fought back against an empire trying to destroy his way of life. It was a powerful image that tied into everything from the Biblical story of David and Goliath to the modern story of Luke Skywalker and the Empire. Star Wars: A New Hope came out in 1977, and three years later, the Movement Conservative spokesman Ronald Reagan won the White House.
Voters want to know that their votes matter. And since Reagan, Movement Conservatives have assured voters that they are playing a part in a war of good and evil, in which their votes are preserving America from what Movement Conservatives call socialism, or communism. That narrative has decimated traditional Republicans at the national level, and kept the Democrats on the ropes.
But we are in a new political moment, in which people’s ballots matter for the survival of American democracy. Now is the time to reject the idea of politics as transactional and instead talk about principles, and what matters to us as Americans. The Trump campaign is aware that he is unlikely to win a majority of voters, so his operatives are hoping to eke out a win by depressing the vote. They hope to discourage his opponents enough that they stay home. They are pouring resources into social media to convince opponents that nothing matters, at the same time that they are spurring on supporters with a social media campaign to convince them that they must get out and vote.
It all comes down to the narrative.
Trump and his operatives would not be working so hard to skew the narrative if it were not important. But while they are trying desperately to create a false narrative, based on lies, to sell a pretty package to their base, Trump’s opponents have an extraordinary advantage. A true narrative of democracy is based on reality, and it includes everyone. It is complicated, and compelling. It is the story of the first fisherman who came to these shores and the native peoples who greeted them; it is the story of women who reared children in the wilderness. It is the story of the Civil War, and industrial expansion, and two world wars and the rise of the West after World War II. It is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman.
It is the story of human self-determination, and the epic tale of how Americans have struggled to create a government that gives us all access to that fundamental human dream.
To people who want to find a way to make a difference, speak up, to your local officials, your friends, your neighbors. What do you hope for the future? Why does it matter that we continue to be a nation of laws? Our voices are only unimportant if we decline to exercise them. And, taken together, they have the power to redefine America from the “carnage” that Trump sees, to the land of hope and possibility it has been in the past… and can be again.
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February 10, 2020 (Monday)
The last few days have felt like the calm before the storm, although exactly what the storm is going to look like is impossible to tell.
There were some news items today. We learned that the casualties from the Iranian missile attack on the Iraqi bases after the US raid that killed Qassem Soleimani are now numbered at 109. Seventy-six of the wounded soldiers have returned to duty.
Today Trump released his 2021 budget, which is essentially his wish list. He will not get it all, as Congress wrangles over it, but it is significant because it shows his actual priorities rather than his verbal promises. As I wrote on Saturday, it shows his adherence to the Movement Conservative ideology of destroying the New Deal government. Two days ago, Trump tweeted “We will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget. Only the Democrats will destroy them by destroying our Country’s greatest ever Economy!” But his budget calls for significant cuts from Social Security and from Medicare and Medicaid, as well as cuts from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, NASA, and ARPA-E, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a government agency established under President Obama to research and develop advanced energy technologies. That last one faces cuts of 173%… it is not only eliminated; it must return $311 million to the Treasury.
Also today, there was a new post-impeachment poll. Lots of people have been freaking out that Trump seemed more popular after the impeachment acquittal, but today’s Quinnipiac poll has him back to his old levels, with the top six Democrats in the race currently beating him in 2020. (It is WAY too early to put any faith in polls, by the way.)
If there is an inkling of what the “storm” might be, it seems worth noting that yesterday, on Face the Nation, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham reported that he had just spoken with Attorney General William Barr and that “The Department of Justice is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from Rudy [Giuliani, Trump’s private lawyer].” Barr “told me that they’ve created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.” Today, Barr confirmed that the Justice Department has “established an intake process” for information on the Bidens that Giuliani gathered in Ukraine. It is, of course, deeply problematic for the president’s private lawyer to be feeding dirt on one of the president’s political rivals to the Department of Justice. Worse, Giuliani is currently under investigation by the Justice Department, in the same case that netted campaign finance charges against Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked with Giuliani in Ukraine to smear the Bidens. (Parnas, you will remember, gave Russian money to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, among others.)
Remember, too, Barr appointed his own investigator to examine the roots of the FBI’s Russia investigation, despite the fact that the FBI’s independent inspector general also investigated and found that while there were serious lapses in wiretap applications for surveilling former Trump advisor Carter Page, the bureau was correct to open an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Barr wanted his own investigation, overseen by his own appointee, John Durham. Durham’s investigation quietly became a criminal investigation last October. That gave him the power to subpoena witnesses, to convene a grand jury, and to file criminal charges. Since then he has interviewed at least two dozen former and current FBI officials. Barr has already said in public that the FBI “launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.” And, of course, on February 6, Barr announced that in 2020, federal agents could not open investigations of presidential candidates, their campaigns, or their advisors without his written approval.
And there is more. As I mentioned a few days ago, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IO) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) announced last week that they had opened a review of “potential conflicts of interest posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden and his associates during the Obama administration.” (There is no evidence that Biden committed wrongdoing.) It turns out they had started this investigation back in November, asking the Treasury Department for information on Burisma and Ukraine. They asked for any “suspicious activity reports,” or SARs, secret documents filed by a financial institution for transactions over $10,000 or transactions that indicate they “might signal criminal activity.” Four days ago, the Treasury Department complied.
All of this looks rather as if the government is engaging in opposition research for Trump against Joe Biden. To say that is deeply problematic badly understates the case.
Barr is also in the news today for his announcement that the Department of Justice will immediately file multiple lawsuits against so-called sanctuary cities for unconstitutionally interfering with federal immigration enforcement. Trump plans to make immigration a key issue again in 2020, and here, too, it looks as if Barr is using the Justice Department to help Trump’s reelection. Remember, the Justice Department is supposed to be impartial.
As I sit quietly in this calm, surveying the post-impeachment scene, I think the thunder I hear on the horizon is that we have not heard the last of the Ukraine Scandal and attacks on Biden. Trump will likely continue to hammer on this because, as we know from the constant reiteration that his inaugural crowd was huge, or the sharpie-altered hurricane map, he will insist that his version of events is correct, despite the overwhelming evidence that Russia, not Ukraine, attacked us in 2016; that Joe Biden appropriately led an international coalition to oust Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was corrupt; and that Hunter Biden did not engage in wrongdoing in Ukraine. I also think Barr is going to start stealing headlines for his inappropriate role in the upcoming election.
For now, though, I’m going to be in bed before 1:30, for a change, and am planning to sleep very deeply indeed. I suspect I’m going to need it.
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