A Postmodern Take on The Last Supper at Mar-a-Lago

Amid so many grotesque outrages already committed by this young administration, how is it possible that new and original ones keep getting pumped out?  Maybe this is where the president's truest talent lies, in the imaginative production of increasingly audacious violations of decency?  At any rate, the spectacle that Donald Trump consciously created on a Mar-a-Lago dining patio yesterday, as his team huddled in response to a North Korean missile test, is in some ways the most visually amazing event so far.  Photos taken by nearby diners reveal a setting that may in retrospect be viewed as Donald Trump's very own Last Supper, at which his idiocy and lack of the most basic understanding of his new job's gravity was revealed for all the world to see, as momentous affairs of state were conducted in the Florida night for all to see or overhear.

In a New York Times article by Elizabeth Williamson titled "The 'Caddyshack' President," she writes that "The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look." 

And now, of course, tonight, flashlight holder Mike Flynn has resigned, as allegations of his possibly illegal pre-inauguration conversations with the Russian ambassador have finally gained too much gravity to ignore.

One thing, obvious but needing to be made explicit: after all the hounding of Hillary Clinton about her goddamn email server, Trump just up and conducts classified business for all to see and hear, showing off to all the guests willing to pony up $200,000 for club membership.  We have truly entered a debauched, Bacchanalian era where national security is concerned.

American Id

Two articles out this week offer a pair of crucial complementary perspectives on the state of emergency we find ourselves in.  In this piece, Salon's Andrew O’Hehir argues for the importance of accepting that, rather than being an utter anomaly, Donald Trump may as well be stamped with the words “Made in America.”  He writes, “Donald Trump is the culmination of a long historical process in which all those things and many more — all the flaws and contradictions of American democracy and American society — have crystallized in a single figure. In a sense, we have to accept him before we can move past him. He is our creation, an accurate if gruesome reflection of the state of our nation.”  O’Hehir’s formulation is left open-ended in this article, but should be seen in the context of his many acute articles over the course of the election season in which he elaborates on Donald Trump’s existence as a media entity, his status as America’s first “white president,” and the many ways in which Donald Trump was able to exploit the festering weaknesses and conflicts of our politics and society.

I’ve come to think of Donald Trump as a figure who embodies an unleashing of the white American id.  His blatant racism, his undisguised misogyny, the sheer lowest-common-denominator nature of his practice of power (bullying, lying, humiliating), his apparent disregard for contemplation or introspection, his refusal to acknowledge mistakes.  There’s a consciencelessness to the man that can’t be ignored — he comes across as pure want, pure need, without an eye to whether these assertions might come back to haunt him later (as I believe they will).  Various pieces of reporting have observed the way he riffed off crowd reactions during the campaign, as if absorbing and internalizing the rawest feelings of his audience — though I have no doubt that there was not always a great distance between what excited the crowds and what excited him.

So what does it mean, then, if we also accept Andrew Sullivan’s assertion that Donald Trump suffers from a verifiable form of mental derangement, that he is, to put it crudely, mad?  Trump supporters push back that at worst, the president is merely crazy like a fox, always cannily working towards a purpose.  Obviously Donald Trump is a narcissistic, egomaniacal personality — but is he clinical?  Does he truly suffer from a mental illness?  Without an actual diagnosis — which we will never get, as it would require Trump’s cooperation — we are only left with speculation amid inconclusive evidence.  But for the sake of building an opposition to Trump, the more important fact is the following: actions that may or may not reflect the existence of mental instability are actually virtually indistinguishable from the actions of a power-obsessed president with authoritarian inclinations.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what motivates Trump so long as we are clearly able to assess his actions — and to date, he has acted in ways that are a repudiation of basic American principles.  When he says that millions of people voted illegally in the last election, costing him the popular vote, does he really believe this?  There is no way for us to know (and to be honest, for me, it is less chilling to believe that he is self-deluded than that he would knowingly speak such a democracy-corroding falsehood), but what we know for sure is that these words are a lie that lays the groundwork for further voting restrictions.

Sullivan also takes up another topic that bears further contemplation.  He writes, “With someone like this barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind [. . .] One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago.”

His first observation hit me in the gut, because this is indeed what has been happening to all of us — Trump has essentially gotten inside our heads, forcing us to contend with him on an ongoing basis.  Since the election I’ve been thinking that it’s far better that people are upset by Trump than accept him as normal — but it’s disturbing to realize that in dominating the national psyche, he’s already achieved a sort of authoritarian victory.

But while I agree with Sullivan’s second point in theory — that a free society means being able to be free of politics for long stretches at a time — I have to register a pretty hefty dissent on the grounds of reality.  For as long as I’ve been on this earth, it seems to me that at no point has there been a moment when Americans could afford not to think about politics for much of the time.  From Watergate, to the retrograde Reagan administration, to the hollow successes of the Clinton administration and absurd Republican impeachment efforts, to 9/11 and the financial crisis, not to mention a Cold War that kept the specter of nuclear annihilation hovering over civilization for many of those years, we have continuously experienced an urgent need to be aware of politics.

Now, I don’t want to totally overstate my point, because Sullivan is making a solid observation here — we truly are in a state of affairs where, out of a combination of fear and outrage, you don’t want to miss a day of news, and that really is no good at all.  It’s actually kind of scary.  I love politics, and even I have reached a point where there is too much of it; it does not really make me happy that everyone now seems as interested in politics as myself, because the situation is so dire.  But, to bring things back around to the O’Hehir piece, our current crisis has been long in the making, and Trump has fed off existing conflicts and weaknesses in our nation; one of the big ones is a society that has been all-too depoliticized over the years, accepting things like the evisceration of the working and middle class, resegregation of American society, and an unending war on terror with not nearly the appropriate levels of outrage and resistance, much less public articulation of these enormous problems staring us all in the face.  The price we are paying for not thinking about politics enough before is having to think about it all the time now; it’s a price we’d better be willing to pay.

Head Games

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to grasp that not in recent memory has the state of our country been so intertwined with the particular psychology of a single individual.  As a general proposition, there’s no excuse pretending we don’t know what Donald Trump is like — we’ve had nonstop coverage of him for the last year and a half.  He’s petty, vindictive, belligerent, incurious, illiberal, egomaniacal, narcissistic, and otherwise temperamentally unqualified to hold a position of public power — and now he holds the most powerful position in the world.  Apart from the last days of Nixon, we haven’t been in an analogous situation in the nuclear age.  And as we’re reminded in this article, don’t go thinking Trump is going to change.  I’ve thought a few times recently whether the election wasn’t decided so much on politics, as on voters’ basic ability to perceive whether a candidate was an unstable personality (or was a con man). . . 

Speaking of the challenge of dealing with such a deranged personality, though, here’s something that’s been building at the edge of my consciousness since Trump’s inauguration, and that’s finally heaved itself up from the tidal pools of early mentation into the full light of what the fuck: how remarkable it is that a president acting as an America-first authoritarian nationalist is indistinguishable from a deranged egomaniac power-tripping his way through his first days in office.  What we’ve seen so far is an injudicious, destabilizing, self-aggrandizing assertion of power, whether it’s on the part of the presidency or on behalf of the United States operating as a global power.  So although this may be the mode of governing to which Trump’s personality takes him, it’s also a fundamentally knowable one — an authoritarian, demagoguing, self-serving approach to power.  I’m hoping that some of the things that make Trump so dangerous — his lack of restraint and discipline, his need to assert himself against all threats — will ultimately weaken him through overextension and making enemies of too many people in our country.

Melissa McCarthy Drags Sean Spicer Down

Melissa McCarthy was born to do many things, but clearly one of them was to dress in drag and eviscerate Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live.  McCarthy was able to spoof Spicer so effectively because he’s basically acting like the propaganda mouthpiece of a third-rate dictator, something that’s intrinsically amusing and an open invitation to ruthless parody.  This Politico piece indicates that Donald Trump was bothered by the portrayal, which is pretty funny considering Spicer is so lampoon-able precisely because he works so unflaggingly to do exactly what Donald Trump wants him to do. But this line jumped out at me:

“More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him.”

It’s yet sign of Donald Trump’s virulent misogyny that to him, Spicer’s sin isn’t that he’s a soulless hack, but that a woman was able to lampoon him - as if that’s the worst fate imaginable.  Pathetic.

Donald Trump Has Shock and Awed Himself in the Foot

I want to highlight two articles from the last couple days that provide some vital insights into what we are seeing in the Trump phenomenon.  I realize some people may be getting fatigued from all the political strife, and so I also want to note the underlying hope that is the flip side of the darkness that Trump has brought.  In this article, Josh Marshall makes the very important argument that Trump far more represents a rancid nationalism than a little-man’s populism.  In making this point, he highlights a fact that should be central to popping the misconception that Trump is somehow working for working class Americans - his lack of support for basics like unions, inequality, and retirement security.  I describe these points as hopeful because the anti-democratic, anti-worker agenda is pretty much laid bare at this point, and Trump lacks the discipline to dissemble further.  The contradictions lay him open to a powerful counterattack on the grounds of his betrayal of those he promised to help.

This article by Brian Beutler at The New Republic is also my choice for required weekend reading.  Other people had been making similar observations prior to Trump’s inauguration, but Beutler demonstrates how a white supremacist agenda has motivated several key actions of the new administration.  Depressing and scary as hell- but this is an agenda that the great majority of Americans find reprehensible.  Calling it out is a key part of catalyzing a broad-based opposition to Trump.  We are not nearly such a fucked-up country as Trump is counting on.

Both articles reinforce a point that is really beginning to gain strength among the quickly-coalescing Trump resistance - that this situation doesn’t just call for stopping Trump, but for advancing a counter-agenda that moves the country forward by embracing equality, economic fairness, and a super-charged commitment to democratic participation.  Let’s face it - as much of a black swan event as his election was, we were bound to get a would-be dictator sooner or later.  This isn’t to say that there aren’t some dark strains of our current economic and social situation that led to his election - far from it - but that human nature and chance being what they are, someone like Trump was bound to happen.  On the one hand, our form of government essentially counted on this, by instituting the system of checks and balances that we all (or at least most of us) know and love.  Our system reflects a pessimistic view of human nature and the corrupting properties of power; while I agree more with the former point than the latter, these were founding perspectives that currently work in our favor.

We have more than enough tools and forces at our disposal to defeat Trumpism, with its ugly nationalism and white supremacism.  Team Trump proposes to implement what amounts to a pro-rich, pro-white, pro-conservative Christian agenda that flies in the face of America’s ever-increasing diversity and economic inequality.  This is an agenda that takes as a given its permanent minority status; otherwise, why would they need to implement it via “shock and awe?”  And while I’m on the topic, let’s recognize the twisted crudeness of the Trump team employing a phrase originally associated with the U.S.’s illegal invasion of Iraq to describe a political tactic used against the American body politic.  The phrase is useful in one respect, though, in that it highlights how the Trump team’s strategy aims to disorient its opposition.  We need to fully recognize this, and stop being shocked, or disoriented.  Here’s the orienting principle I’ve adopted as something of my personal mantra - anyone who tries to “shock and awe” American society, to disregard majority opinion to implement retrograde and dangerous ideas, is a clear threat to that society who must be stopped by all peaceful means.

My response to shock and awe is to embrace of the idea that we must “shock and awe” the Trump administration right back.So while we need to pursue long-term goals like re-building our economy and political institutions to make a recurrence of someone like Trump as unlikely as possible, we need to embrace the overwhelming objective of ensuring that Trump does not serve out a full four-year term.  Because we have already seen enough to know that, left unchecked, this presidency will end very, very badly, not for Donald Trump, but for our country.  This is a man who has already antagonized multiple allies, falsely claimed millions of people voted illegally in the last election, signaled leniency toward ACTUAL white supremacist groups, attacked a judge who happened to rule in a way he didn’t like, and indicated that the laws put in place to prevent a recurrence of the 2008 financial meltdown have got to go.  Donald Trump doesn’t believe in our democracy?  Well, as awful as this is, we have plenty of remedies, because the fact of the matter is, most of us don’t believe in Donald Trump - not in his fitness to serve or his rancid ideas or his inability to distinguish friend (g’day, Australia) from foe (Russia?!).  While I believe in playing the long game, the Democrats need to internalize the fact that their job is to force Trump from power as soon as possible, whether through impeachment in 2019, leading a charge to force his resignation, or support of an invocation of the 25th amendment to the Constitution.  This may seem like an extreme position, but we are in a dangerous, unprecedented situation.  Donald Trump is not playing by the ordinary rules of our political system, and we shouldn’t either, as long as the rules we DO follow are always grounded in democratic accountability and commitment to the rule of law (both of which groundings Donald Trump has abandoned).  

Finally, in the name of articulating grounds for hope, let’s remember how very dangerous a game most Republican Party members are playing by either embracing Trump or not criticizing his various offenses.  In not standing up to him now, they make themselves vulnerable to the coming backlash; every day that goes by, the Republican Party is seen more and more as the party of Trump, with all the baggage that carries.

State-Sponsored Sadism, Down Under Edition

If anyone would like some added context for Donald Trump’s rough treatment of the Australian prime minister during their conversation this week, I’d urge you to read this deeply disturbing and (rightly) morally outraged article by Roger Cohen about the specific refugees the United States has pledged to take in.  Their desperate plight encapsulates some of the major global disorders that every citizen needs to engage with.  These are people fleeing war torn areas of the world, whose desperation has led them as far as Australia.  Australia, in turn, has instituted a policy of relocating these refugees on two distant islands called Manus and Nauru and keeping them under horrendous and hopeless conditions, basically as a deterrent to other people considering making similar flights to the land down under.  The word “hellish” is not too extreme a description for their plight; to giver you a flavor of their suffering, take this one paragraph:

"The toll among Burmese, Sudanese, Somali, Lebanese, Pakistani, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Iranian and other migrants is devastating: self-immolation, overdoses, death from septicemia as a result of medical negligence, sexual abuse and rampant despair.  A recent United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report by three medical experts found that 88 percent of the 181 asylum seekers and refugees examined on Manus were suffering from depressive disorders, including, in some cases, psychosis."

The refugees have even been attacked by native islanders, leaving at least one of their number killed, prompting one refugee to wonder if he was actually back in Darfur.  This is a clear-cut situation of state-sponsored sadism.  

When Donald Trump attacks the deal that ends this madness, he shows that he’s either ignorant of their plight, or that he’s aware of it and is not moved by it: an incompetent or a monster, take your pick.  And when he tweets that they are “illegal immigrants” and complains to Turnbull that they contain the next “Boston Bombers,” he shows the adoption of a paranoid, immoral vision of the world in which those who flee wars and those who flee for a better life are the same, and that neither deserve basic human decency.  In saying “this is the worst deal ever,” he signals that he cares more about his reputation for anti-foreigner toughness than the United States acting in a moral fashion.   But this isn’t just about morality; it’s good international politics.  Even from a realpolitik perspective, it makes us look beneficent, relieves a deeply immoral situation that is burning out the Australian nation’s soul, and removes a recruiting godsend for extremists.  For Trump not to comprehend these things is frightening indeed.

Moving Toward a Big Picture Understanding and Response to Trumpism

This article by Brian Beutler addresses head on a question that’s been rattling around in my mind these last weeks - what’s the real dynamic between Trump and Congressional Republicans?  Refreshingly, he points out that, rather than implementing some sort of wild Trump-originated agenda, much of what Trump is doing is implementing Republican policies.  He also hits on what I think is a key element of what is going on - the sheer unpopularity of the agenda, and how Republicans see this as their grand opportunity to shove it down the country’s throat.  Beutler strikes on the metaphor of the Republicans being on a suicide mission with Trump, one that he describes as self-reinforcing - they have more incentive to support Trump, since he’s at least supporting their agenda, than to oppose him, which would arguably be the right thing, but which could mean giving up their last, best chance to push through unpopular measures.

I think Beutler is basically right here, except for one crucial bit - I don’t think any political party ever willingly embraces its own self-destruction.  What should worries us all is that the Republican incentive to support Trump wherever he goes may well lead to dark, anti-democratic efforts at self-preservation.  Possible forms these might take are restrictions on voting rights, implementation of new illegal surveillance programs to spy on Trump’s opposition, or manipulation of a new terror attack into a broad attack on civil liberties and political opponents.

I would LOVE to think that the Republicans are destroying themselves, but this is an idea that has been disproved time and again over the past decade and a half.  It will take a democratically renewed Democratic Party to end the current Republican hegemony in American politics, not the actions of a party increasingly untethered to democratic norms.

As important as steadfastly opposing Trump, the Democrats need to clearly and vigorously articulate an economic vision that puts jobs for all, reduction of inequality, and real economic development at the heart of its party platform, right beside advocacy for equal rights for all.  Why?  Because our economic disparities are the root of Trumpism - he has risen to power by feeding off the despair that so many Americans feel, a despair that was clearly not addressed during the eight years of the Obama administration.   And while there are strong racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim sentiments in many of his supporters, these sentiments draw their sustenance from the economic travails of these Americans.  Let me put it this way: well-paid, happily employed people who are able to live their lives with dignity, meaning, and initiative will simply not care if they perceive that people who are different from them are also doing well.  Or I can put it even more crudely: Just because you’re racist, or a misogynist, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a job.

The way that we’re going to fully reject Trumpism and ensure we never have to experience such a national nightmare again is to convince those who voted for him, and who voted for the complicit Republican party, that Trump and Republican policies largely harm rather than benefit most Americans.  As heartened as I’ve been by the defiant energy of the women’s march and the furious opposition to Trump’s immigration orders, two basic things need to happen in the coming weeks and months, complementary to the opposition: we need to oppose a polarization that reinforces the energies of Trump supporters and increases their ranks, and we need to advocate an economic vision that will actually help those who need an economic revival.

To the first point - we need to make sure that in opposing Trump, we don’t seem to be opposing the economic relief he has promised to bring to many Americans.  As an example, look at the widespread and appropriate opposition to his moves to build a wall on the southern border and to restrict immigration from Muslim countries.  Going after immigrants is a particularly devious move, because it causes the Trump opposition to spend its energy defending non-Americans.  The opposition is defending American values - our openness to people of all nations and faiths, our willingness to take in refugees - which is absolutely the right thing to do.  But we need to be aware that this is terrain that will possibly drive away Trump voters, if handled without a response to people’s exaggerated but very real concerns about terrorism.  Likewise, opposition to the wall needs to be coupled with a strategy for addressing the fact that, yes, illegal immigrants do take some American jobs.  For me, the crucial problem here is not the illegal immigrants, but those who hire them, creating an incentive for them to come to our country, effectively depressing wages in our country and creating a vulnerable, easily exploited workforce not protected by basic wage and safety restrictions.  Surely no progressives want workers, no matter their nationality, to face fear and exploitation?  Yet such is the plight of millions of illegal immigrants in this country today. 

The hideousness of the Trump-Republican agenda, and our righteous response to it, shouldn’t ever let us forget that though Hillary Clinton got a lot of votes, Donald Trump got a hell of a lot of votes, too, despite many of these same voters’ reservations about him.  As articles like this one suggest, the ability of demagogues to divide people is their strongest weapon.  Let’s remember that the way forward is bring people together, and addressing people’s real concerns.

Trump Hands Islamic Extremists an Inauguration Present

The biggest political news of the past few days, with one important caveat that I'll get to in a minute, is President Trump's issuance of restrictions on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.  Under the pretense of protecting the United States from terrorists, the president has made overt the anti-Muslim prejudice of the G.O.P.  There is a reason no president of either party has implemented such a ban in the post-war era - it's because no president, and no party, have been so ignorant, so inclined to self-defeating policies, as President Trump and the current Republican Party.  This ban has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, and everything to do with expressing a vengeful, petty attitude towards the larger Muslim community, and to offering what seems like an easy way to make his supporters feel safe, even while it confirms that they have reason to be fearful of people of Muslim faith.

In the restrictions against taking in refugees from Syria and other Muslim countries, Trump is targeting terrorism's victims, not its perpetrators.  We can look at this from another perspective, too: unable to determine a policy that would actually combat terrorism by draining away its social, economic, and political roots, Donald Trump is embarking on a superficial, counterproductive approach that literally blames the victims.

Another thing to note - the partial nature of the ban.  If Trump is serious, why not ban immigration from all Muslim nations with terrorist activity?  As this NYT article notes, "There was a random quality to the list of countries: It excluded Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where the founders of Al Qaeda and many other jihadist groups have originated. Also excluded are Pakistan and Afghanistan, where persistent extremism and decades of war have produced militants who have occasionally reached the United States. Notably, perhaps, the list avoided Muslim countries where Mr. Trump has major business ventures.”

Substantively, this act will do almost nothing to fight terrorism.  Symbolically, it seems far more likely to feed the fever swamps that give rise to Islamic extremism, providing more evidence to recruiters that the United States is engaged on a crusade against the Muslim world.  This is an overreaction that betrays American values and suggests that Muslims are both inherently violent and less worthy of being saved; and so far-right thinking pursues its symbiotic relationship with Islamic extremism, providing still more fuel for their propaganda.  It's not just that what Trump has done can be interepreted or twisted: it IS an overt declaration of contempt for Muslims around the world.  This a hideous introduction of religious prejudice into American foreign policy and into the U.S. body politic more generally.  

The other big news of the last few days that I want to highlight is Trump’s revisiting of the lie that he would have won the popular vote were it not for millions of illegal votes.  Tellingly, the Republican party is remaining mostly mum on this point, and I fear that talk of an investigation presages a full-court press to restrict voting rights on the basis of these phantom illegals (who were smart enough to vote en masse without their conspiracy being revealed, yet inept enough not to vote enough in the right states - even in his lies, we see, Trump manages to mix in an extra dose of racism!).

Whitelash, Meet Majoritylash

I don't think I've ever felt such a whiplash between grimness and hope in the realm of politics as I have in the space of January 20 and January 21.  Inauguration day lacked the gut-punching surprise of election night, but it carried a heavier burden, as Trump's ascension to power moved from potential to actual.  After a transition that included Trump's full embrace of plutocrats and generals for leading roles in his administration, unceasingly aggressive tweets that demean the office of the presidency, and no attempts to reach out to those who voted against him, his inaugural address seemed confirmation that Trump will govern from a position of dark aggression and paranoid beliefs about our nation.

But the next day, America showed that Trump's narrative of a sweeping mandate and a benighted people owing him fealty and gratitude is a scam spun by a con man, as record-breaking crowds showed up in dozens of cities for women's marches.  Rather than grim resistance, we saw a joyful, humorous, diverse explosion of grassroots democracy that reaffirmed a basic reality: many, many people thunderously oppose Trump and his policies.  More than this: women are asserting a range of concerns that have been substantively and symbolically dismissed by Trump's election.  These levels of contempt and ridicule for the chief executive seem unprecedented at the start of a presidency, and yet here we are.

I don't think it's too early to say that Trump's illiberal, authoritarian, and misogynistic campaign and election, after summoning forth a minority of voters to push him over the top of the electoral college count, have provoked a powerful backlash.  If Trump's victory signaled a change in the laws of political physics (e.g., any of a number of missteps by Trump would have sunk any other candidate), then we may be beginning to discover that the change isn't confined to Trump alone, but extends to the broader political universe, and that we don't know what all these rules are yet.  And now that I've mentioned alternative political, it does seem like underlying it all is at least one basic continuity between pre- and post-Trumpian physics: actions provoke reactions.  The question of our time is, has Trump unleashed a movement that will end up blocking and even overwhelming his own?

Trump has put together a powerful coalition that draws on explicitly white resentment, economic suffering, and cultural dislocation.  It is not a majority coalition, but it was close enough to one to win him the electoral college, with a little help from Vladimir Putin and James Comey.  However much Trump's authoritarian style can be traced back to his own disturbed personality, there is a clear link between this approach and the fact that his political strategy continues to burn any bridge to the possibility of a majority coalition.  In alienating a majority of women, minorities, gays, and believers in a scientific worldview, Donald Trump's strategy essentially requires an attack not only on democratic norms, but the idea of democracy itself.  This is a project that was begun long ago by the Republican Party, which with Trump has completed its conversion into the party of white supremacy and white nationalism.   But what we are beginning to discover is that while you can win for a while without a majority of the population, whether it's through gerrymandering or election assistance from the FBI, you cannot evade the most fundamental facts of life in a democracy - numbers matter.

Beyond this, we are discovering something else - that a majority of Americans actually do believe in a free society, a society of laws not men, a society where all people should be considered equal, whether man or woman, African-American or white, gay or straight.  It is instructive that while the majority was finding its way back to empowerment this weekend, the Trump administration squandered its first days in power by clumsily attempted to propagate lies about how many people attended the inauguration.  We are truly entered into a clash between democratic reality and authoritarian deception.  I know which one I'm betting on.

Rex Tillerson, the Wrong Choice for the Foreign Policy Tiller

This write-up in The Nation about the Rex Tillerson hearings raises yet more questions about the coherence and direction of President-elect Trump's foreign policy.  But what I've been reading about him up to now, including in a January 9 Wall Street Journal article that is unfortunately for subscribers only (lucked into a copy of the actual paper at a cafe), has already convinced me this man is a tragically bad choice for Secretary of State.  Climate change is the preeminent challenge of our time; to state what will be an obvious point to many, one of the most prominent oil company leaders in the world is the last person you can trust to lead international efforts to head off this looming catastrophe.  Big oil is exhibit number one for anyone wanting to make the case that mankind's greed and short-sightedness is hard-wired into the species and will lead us to an early extinction.  But it's not just abstract corporations that are the problem in this case, although a corporation is an amazing structure for diffusing critical thought and moral responsibility.  Ultimately, oil companies are led by men (and I am guessing a few women at this point) who either practice willful ignorance or a deliberate disregard to climate change.  

Yes, yes, I know that our entire civilization runs on oil, we're all implicated, yadda yadda yadda.  But big oil has done disproportionate damage to efforts to keep the planet healthy, sowing doubts about climate change and spending untold riches on greenwashing efforts that would be far better spent actually helping move the economy to a renewable and sustainable energy future.  And yes, I understand the case that these CEOs have a responsibility to shareholders to make money.  But it's not necessary to fully resolve the question of relative culpability and moral turpitude to conclude that there are many better choices than an oil company CEO to be secretary of state at this critical juncture of human civilization.

At any rate, we're not just dealing with some abstract nominee, but a particular man.  If the absurdity of an oil executive as secretary of state at this time of environmental crisis doesn't move you, then maybe Tillerson's coziness with Vladimir Putin will.  As the WSJ article describes, Exxon has, under Tillerson, made investments in Russia that have substantially aided Putin's grip on power.  And during a time when the U.S. and Russia have been in conflict on various foreign policy fronts, Tillerson has nonetheless steered his company's money to the development of Russia's energy resources - hardly the actions of a patriot who puts American interests first and foremost. 

This man has spent his career serving private profit, not the public interest, helping befoul the environment, cloud our planetary future, and provide material support to an authoritarian antagonist of the U.S.  I fear that the general and widespread craziness that Trump is forcing us to contend with is distracting a lot of people from just how outrageous the Tillerson pick is. 

Seeing Red

I’ve been trying to articulate to myself the particular strangeness of this political moment, when U.S. intelligence agencies have released a collective assessment reflecting their belief that the Russian government engaged in cyberattacks to influence the presidential election; this in itself would be an unprecedented, unsettling event.  But it’s inseparable from the overall shock and grotesquerie of Donald Trump’s election, and his sordid reaction to the news of Russian interference.

Part of the strangeness is that it comes after an election that has been alternately bitter, surreal, frightening, and heartbreaking, in which one of the two major parties' candidates was a cartoonish, reality show figure whose most extensive political involvement before running for president was his racist demand that President Obama produce his birth certificate, because African-American man.  In his authoritarian appeals, blatant racism, and horrific misogyny, Donald Trump was indeed a nightmare figure for many of us; the conjured id of a nativist backlash, vindictive and harboring a latent violence.  The warning signs of his victory were always there; he kept coming back from things that would have ended the candidacy of a mere mortal.  This includes the Russian cyberattack allegations; these were already known and pretty well established during the campaign, and the fact that we are still grappling with them is part of the surrealness I am feeling now.  It is like the 2016 campaign never ended.

I’m guessing that most Americans have arrived at the following conclusion: whether or not the Russians interfered with our election process (and it seems a near-certainty they did), and however they feel about this fact, there seems to be no absolute way of knowing whether or not it was this interference that caused Donald Trump to win, rather than the half dozen or more other major contenders for explaining his victory.  In a depressing way, the intelligence community's confirmation of Russian intervention to assist Trump, without any evident repercussions possible for Trump himself, seems like yet more evidence of the man’s tragic unstoppability.

Partly this illustrates the Democrats’ adherence to the rule of law versus the feral gang that the Republican Party has increasingly become.  For a partly fun, partly frightening exercise, imagine if the positions were reversed, and it turned out that Hillary Clinton had received extensive Russian support in her election.  Is there any doubt as to how the Republican Party would have responded?  Is there any doubt that they would deny that president’s legitimacy, with or without a thorough investigation of the extent of the Russian meddling?  The Republicans are playing by a different set of rules than the Democrats, one that I don’t want the Democrats to replicate, but which allows the Republicans to gain advantage after advantage without political cost.

But back to reality, or rather, the air of unreality, of the Russian factor.  I would argue that Donald Trump’s consistent dismissal of the fact of the attacks, up to yesterday’s acknowledgment that perhaps something happened, but that it absolutely did not affect the election results, has been a fact as outrageous for our country as the actual Russian interference.  His rejection out of hand of the facts that the intelligence community has given him is so obviously self-serving, I have trouble believing anyone could not see it.  Of course he doesn’t want to find out that he may owe his presidency to the Russians!  What president would?  But this self-serving action is absolutely un-presidential.  Even before Trump is actually inaugurated, we’ve received confirmation that he puts his own needs ahead of the country, in the most blatant, self-serving way possible.

Part of what is dizzying is that Donald Trump is in fact acting exactly like a president would in some alternative reality where he really was, not just the preferred candidate of the Russians, but their actual agent.  He denies the Russians interfered as much as he can, he praises Vladimir Putin, he proclaims a desire to work closely with the Russians.  I’m not saying he is a Russian agent, or that it’s a bad thing to want better relations with Russia - in fact, I think the U.S. failed massively after the end of the Cold War to effectively turn Russian in a more democratic direction, and has played with fire by pressing deeply into Russia's sphere of influence - but these elements must still be counted among the surreal elements of the whole spectacle.

Then, there’s the whole question of who the public at large really can trust here.  If the Russian interference is as extensive as the intelligence consensus is saying, then why on God’s green earth didn’t they stop it, or make a bigger fuss?  Of course, looking back to the election, the Russian element was already politicized, with Trump denying the whole thing back then.  But as with 9/11, it seems like the intelligence agencies were largely asleep at the wheel, indifferent to actual threats to American security.

Finally, there’s the depressing partisan angle.  It still feels amazing to me that Trump supporters would rather look the other way than confront the reality that their man received significant support from the Russians - don’t a lot of these people consider themselves patriots and “real” Americans?  So it also seems that another victim of this election is basic patriotism, although this may be more in the manner of a final nail in a coffin that probably began to be constructed in earnest during the Vietnam War.

The Devil in the (Security) Details

Over the past few weeks, I’ve read a couple articles about Trump wanting to continue using a private security detail once he becomes president, including this one.  I was struck by the arrogance and insularity of this wish.  It seems foolish not to fully rely on the expertise and resources of the Secret Service, and it seems another sign of Trump’s tendency to rely on a group of loyalist insiders as he makes his way in the world, even when better options are available to him now that he’s president.  It also hints at a basic incompetence to this inbred approach, perhaps best illustrated by his personal bodyguard's dilatory response to a possible threat at a rally during the campaign.

Most of all, I was struck by the imperial thuggishness of the idea - a security group not accountable to the public or the presidency, but with personal loyalty to this particular president.  During the campaign, of course, Trump used his security to throw out people he didn't want at his rallies, or, rather, to throw out people once he'd harangued and otherwise used them to rile up the anger and hate of his supporters.  I think we have to assume that Trump intends for such bullying and un-presidential behavior to be the norm for his presidency as well.  Given the campaign history of his security team, and the president-elect's authoritarian tendencies, I also can't help thinking of them as the enforcers that any good autocrat keeps at his beck and call to intimidate his enemies.  There is a combination of buffoonery and menace to a private security detail that is quintessentially Trump -- but as we learned from his campaign and unfortunate victory, the buffoonery doesn't make the menace any less real or dangerous.  

This story posted on CNN raises a couple other significant angles on Trump wanting a private security team.  Author Jon D. Michaels notes an implicit message that the Secret Service isn't good enough to do the job, which is of a piece with Trump's - and I would add, with the Republican party's - larger ideological war against competent government.  It's another way to undermine the idea that government is good for anything.  In an analogous vein, Michaels points out the larger implications of a president who relies on private funds to potentially run his own essentially privatized government, which would be immune from Congress' balancing control over funding the executive relies on.  He uses the theoretical example of a wealthy Homeland Security head who uses personal funds to pay for workers to implement anti-immigrant measures despite Congressional restrictions on the budget the department has to work with.  This might sound outlandish, but there are laws in place to prevent this sort of thing, which means it's a threat that has already been considered worth addressing; and if you think the Trump presidency isn't going to be about aggrandizement of presidential power and the challenging of political norms across the board, then you haven't been paying attention for the last year and a half.

Again, I'm reminded that one of the central challenges of opposing Trump is choosing where to make a stand when his assault on our values and security is so tremendously broad.  I agree with Michaels' assessment - it might not seem like a big deal compared to other issues, but there are important principles at stake.  And from a political angle, calling it out is an effective way to link Trump's narcissism, rejection of expertise, and denigration of long-established political norms in a way that can resonate with the public; it neatly encapsulates concerns that so many people have about his basic competence, judgment, and commitment to our traditions.

Crony Capitalism Hitting Its Stride

This NYT editorial contains some vital points about the dangers of crony capitalism to be found in Donald Trump’s approach to economics.  Shrewd corporations can gain political advantage by presenting job decisions as responsive to Trump’s “keep jobs in America” rhetoric, which can then allow them cover for more substantial moves that actually threaten far more jobs than were saved, not to mention stiff consumers.  We saw a similar cronyism in the Carrier deal, which saves far less jobs than advertised, was made possible by the expenditure of Indiana taxpayer dollars, and which should be viewed through the lense of the parent company, United Technologies, wanting to curry favor with Trump in order to preserve its business with the federal government.

Making the Trumpocalypse More Than a Metaphor

As if we needed still more evidence that this man is unfit for the presidency and is a danger to our democracy, Donald Trump has now tweeted his support for the U.S. expanding its nuclear weapons capabilities.  Worse than this, and despite advisors' attempts to spin his comments as being anti-proliferation, Trump doubled down the next days, telling an interviewer "Let it be an arms race."  I don't know how it could be made more clear to us that the abolition of nuclear weapons should be a far higher priority than it's been over the past several administrations.  We are now cursed with a president whose clear lack of judgment and experience makes it more possible than ever that these weapons might be used; and these recent comments of his only feed these worries.  A reversal of decades of U.S. nuclear policy changes announced via Twitter?  Is this a bad dream?  Donald Trump's casual bluster about weapons of apocalypse may be the strongest reason yet to oppose and defeat this monster at every opportunity.

President Obama's Fatal Misappraisal of the GOP

With all due respect and deference to President Obama's handling of a very difficult political situation over the past 8 years, some of his recent comments to the press have driven home for me both the consistency in his political thinking and its fatal flaws.  In his final press conference Friday, he discussed what the Republican response to the Russian election hacking means about that party and American politics more generally.

Speaking about widespread Republican voter support for Vladimir Putin - 37% approval in a recent poll, Obama said, "How did that happen? It happened in part because, for too long everything that happens in this town, everything that's said is seen through the lens of does this help or hurt us relative to Democrats or relative to President Obama?  And unless that changes, we're going to continue to be vulnerable to foreign influence because we've lost track of what it is that we're about and what we stand for.”  He also said, “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us.  But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values. Mr. Putin can weaken us, just like he's trying to weaken Europe, if we start buying into notions that it's okay to intimidate the press. Or lock up dissidents. Or discriminate against people because of their faith or what they look like.”

I'm all for Obama calling out Republicans for their absurd lionization of Putin and drawing connections between the illiberal attitudes of Republicans and the Russian leader.  But even as he bemoans Republican opposition to everything the Democrats do as being their guiding light, Obama suggests that this attitude might change.  Unfortunately, if there's one thing the Obama presidency has taught us, it's that the absolutism of the Republican Party only trends in one direction.  This did not change through his entire presidency, and it is not going to change now that the Republicans have control of all three branches of the federal government.  This is who they are.  

Over the years, President Obama has often employed the metaphor of a right-wing fever gripping the GOP, and talked of how this fever needed to break in order for Republicans to return to the norms and niceties of American politics.  This fever analogy has proved accurate, but unfortunately not in the way Obama intended.  The fever did not break; rather, the fever has broken the GOP.   We can see now that the infection has run its course -- but the underlying disease has transformed the Republicans, and has left them in a permanently altered and monstrous state: a major American political party firmly rooted in white supremacism, dedicated to the continued enrichment of the upper reaches of the upper 1%, and necessarily anti-democratic as it seeks to impose an agenda that flies in the face of the economic needs and basic decency of the majority of the American people.  The new president and his team have a sophisticated understanding of the new media and communications environment in which our politics increasingly reach the public, but the ends to which this understanding is aimed are age-old and crude - ever more wealth for those who already have more than enough, and an amoral exploitation of the common good for narrow private ends.  

For too long, President Obama has acted like the GOP is a normal political party, even as it consistently sought to delegitimize his presidency.  For him to suggest that the Republican Party is copying Putin's policies is laughable: the Republicans found their way to authoritarianism all on their lonesome.  With a party like this, you don't negotiate and cross your fingers hoping that they'll eventually see the light.  The only way forward, as it's always been, is to fight them, and beat them.