A Heroic Attempt at a Fourth of July Break From Politics Gets Political

My first thought was to highlight this tale of plans for extraterrestrial communication as a holiday breather from business as usual — a little cosmic perspective for us all beyond the usual valiant grappling with American politics.  But alas, as we read the article in its entirety, we realized, with touches of both awe and dread, that talking to life on other planets is arguably a deeply political question, despite the fact that to date, scientists and science fiction writers have had the run of the debate.  At the risk of being all Trump all the time, we could speculate that in an age of such strong political conflict, it shouldn't be surprising that our fears of the other would be reflected in theoretical debates about the wisdom of making our presence known to other civilizations in the universe.

So what am I on about?  Well, it turns out that there’s a project underway, called Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (METI), that aims to begin transmitting messages of mankind’s presence to relatively nearby stars.  But the idea has provoked controversy and opposition from those who warn of the risks of drawing the attention of possible other civilizations, even if they’re many light years away; they argue that we inevitably run the risk of contacting a hostile civilization, and point to the likelihood if we contact anyone, they’re likely to be far more technologically advanced that ourselves.  These opponents have to point no further than Cortes’ arrival in Mexico to make their point of how badly the meeting of a more technologically advanced civilization with a less advanced one can go.

The article delves into fascinating discussions of the likely nature of other civilizations, and what we can infer based on the data we have so far.  The two glaring data points are the increasing number of possibly life-supporting planets that astronomers have begun detecting over the last decade, and the fact that we ourselves have yet to detect any evidence of advanced life on other planets.  The first issue is more concretely embedded in the Drake Equation, which is an attempt to calculate the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy.  As you might suppose, the equation mostly consists of highly speculative variables, such as how often life evolves on planets, how often such life leads to intelligent life, and how long such civilizations endure. 

The article turns as well to heretofore neglected question of who exactly on Earth should be able to make a decision on extraterrestrial communication that could potentially lead to the extinction of our species.  It is hard not to see a certain arrogance in a small group of scientists and richie-riches like Elon Musk making this decision all on their lonesome, even if it’s based on scientific curiosity and a fundamental optimism about the nature of advanced life.  It doesn’t seem like a bad idea for more people to start contemplating these mind-blowing ideas of civilizational contact and thinking of ourselves as a single species that needs to exercise caution in the face of a vast and unknown universe. 

Apart from the ethical questions it raises, this piece is also a great examination of human ingenuity and creativity in terms of communication and attempts to grapple with ideas that tease the limits of our knowledge and perhaps comprehension.  The most intriguing read I've had for a while.

The President's Disgusting Tweets Are Providing a Valuable Public Service

Over at Slate, Michelle Goldberg notes that, as counterintuitive as it may seem, Donald Trump HAS exercised discipline on at least one front since taking office — restraining his personal statements of hatred and disparagement against women.  This quiescent phase has of course now come to a revolting and troubling end, as the president unleashed tweets this past week against MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski that revisited familiar Trumpian flash points around the subject of females.  Far more than delivering insults to his unfortunate target, Trump has subjected all of us anew to unsettling insights into his psychology and temperamental unfitness for office.

Apparently offended by Brzezinski’s on-air critiques of his presidency, Trump chose not to refute, or engage, or persuade, but to attack this commentator as unintelligent, crazy, and “bleeding badly from a face-lift.”  In Trump’s mind, women who challenge him aren’t just a priori dumb and crazy; they’re also physically disgusting, a point he drives home with blood references that are impossible not to associate with menstruation (and that harken back to his previous attack on Megyn Kelley having “blood coming out of her whatever").  Indeed, Goldberg notes that Trump “instinctively projects his own revulsion toward menstruation onto women who threaten him.”  (And Donald Trump's references to women's bleeding becomes even more psychologically telling when you consider that Brzezinski and co-host (and fiance) Joe Scarborough have offered evidence that Brzezinski did not indeed have a face lift.)

Josh Marshall takes this analysis a step further, tying Trump’s blood references to Trump’s overall psychology of dominance and submission, wherein blood is a symbol of a humiliation that Trump must always work to inflict on others, and never suffer himself:  “Whether it is the ‘disgusting-ness’ of the intimate acts of women’s bodies — menstruation, a woman urinating — or this more general shame and humiliation of being seen bleeding or injured it comes back to the same thing: Trump’s focus on humiliation, the shame of being among the dominated as opposed to those doing the dominating. For Trump, the entire economy of human relations is reduced to this dichotomy. It is a snapshot of the brutal and abusive whirlwind the whole country is caught up in.”

It is, to put it mildly, less than optimal to have as president a bad hombre with such uncontrollable and unexamined impulses that they lead him to attempt to bully and humiliate others; but The Hot Screen thinks Goldberg is on to something when she asserts that it is ultimately in the interests of the country for Trump to keep showing us who he really is: “If there is the barest sliver of consolation, it’s that Trump appears almost as miserable and anxiety-ridden as we are. He’s losing the tiny bit of control he had. It’s better for Trump to show us all who he really is than to let his lackeys pretend he’s remotely worthy of his office. Every time he tweets, he reveals his presidency as a disgusting farce. Let’s hope he keeps doing it.”

Trump’s grotesque remarks demean the presidency and our country’s political dialogue, but they also do us the service of diminishing Trump’s personal standing and power with the public and in Washington.  When even Republicans say he needs to stop, this is a glaring clue that the opposition shouldn’t mind too much if they keep on going.  It’s always better for a vile person to show their true colors for all the world to see than to hide behind niceties and false conscientiousness.  We also need to remember that Trump’s anti-women words are paralleled by real-world actions that do great harm to females; Goldberg notes his expansion of the global gag rule, undermining of federal family planning programs, and erosion of enforcing laws against gender discrimination in education.  If his tweets help to remind us that he’s already implemented his own substantive war on women, and rouse more people to resistance, so much the better.

CNN Continues to Peddle Misleading Storyline of Sour "Relationship" Between Trump and Obama

A few weeks ago, CNN posted a story that desperately and mistakenly tried to create the impression that Donald Trump and Barack Obama share roughly equal blame for their poor relationship.  As we tried to show in this article, the idea that Barack Obama has anything resembling the culpability of Donald Trump in damaging relations between the two men is an utter joke.  A fair reading of the facts demonstrates that Trump has been the instigator of bad feelings between the two, beginning with Trump’s accusations years ago that President Obama lacked a birth certificate and wasn’t an American citizen.

Now CNN is out with a new article on the same theme, revisiting many of the original piece's false assumptions.  Perhaps it’s just the passage of time, but the offensiveness of the bizarre attempt at balance is even more striking to The Hot Screen this time around, and we’ve got a few ideas why.

As in the first article, this fresh CNN piece speaks in terms of a two-way fight between the former and current president, terming it “the nastiest public dispute in modern presidential history.”  Though it does acknowledge that “the acrimony is largely one-sided” — a point well supported by the evidence it presents - the article’s frame of a “dispute” or a bad “relationship” is a misleading perspective on the facts.  Of course it is true the two men don’t get along.  But the far bigger story is that Donald Trump, as president, has at this point accused his predecessor of various crimes, including illegal spying (in the form of alleged surveillance of the Trump campaign), collusion with the Russians, and obstruction of justice (these latter two via a tweet just this week).  To say they are in a "dispute" at this point is like writing about a robbery exclusively in terms of the ensuing “really bad relationship” between the victim and assailant — talk about burying the lead!  

Saying that Trump and Obama have a bad relationship suggests a parity between the men, but the fact that one man is the current president and is using his power and prestige to accuse his predecessor of crimes is hugely relevant to describing what is going on here — what is, in fact, the far more important news.  This fact makes a world of difference in terms of their power differential, and more importantly, the implications of one's animosity toward the other.  To speak of a sort of tit-for-tat between the two men serves to obscure the shocking and vitally important fact that, for the first time in modern memory, a president is seeking without evidence to criminalize his predecessor.

As we've stated before, we believe that if and when articles of impeachment are drawn up against President Trump, they need to include his dangerous slander against Barack Obama, for the inciting effects it has on his supporters and the potential destabilization it carries for the peaceful transfer of power in our country.  We can't allow Trump to normalize the idea that a new president can use the power of his office to falsely accuse his predecessor of criminal behavior: this is the gateway to a state of affairs where the justice system is used as a political weapon, as it is in many an authoritarian regime and banana republic.

Signs of Hope and Caution in Democrats' Georgia Special Election Loss

This past Tuesday, the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district came to a disappointing conclusion, with Republican Karen Handel beating Democrat John Ossoff by 52% to 48% of the vote.  It was the most expensive House race in U.S. history, with a total of $60 million spent between the two parties.  Republicans have held the seat for decades, but when Donald Trump chose Representative Tom Price as his secretary of Health and Human Services, the Democrats saw an opportunity in this district where Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton by just the barest of margins.  Ossoff won 48% of the vote in the first round, missing the 50% threshold needed to win outright, and leading to a runoff against Handel.  

This article gives a taste of some of the intra-party recriminations that have followed Ossoff’s loss; but it seems to The Hot Screen that the notion that Ossoff’s loss proves the Democrats are permanent losers is to put too heavy a burden of symbolism on a single race.  Yes, a loss is a loss; but we still have the remarkable fact that a Democrat nearly took a deep red Republican seat.

First, this seems to provide some pretty solid evidence that Donald Trump is creating a serious drag on the Republican Party; again, yes, close is not the same as winning, except it can still be quite meaningful.  In this case, it would seem incredible not to attribute the swing in the direction of a Democratic candidate to the unpopularity of Trump among so many Democrats and moderates.  And though Democrats did spend a tremendous amount of money in this race, so did the Republicans, which to our mind would seem to mean this election was something of a wash in terms of advertising.

We should also not ignore the fact that Ossoff had at least medium-sized baggage that could not have helped in such a media-blitzed race as this.  He wasn’t a resident of the district he sought to represent, and it seems probable that all the outsider money pouring in only accentuated perceptions that he was a sort of carpetbagger.  We would feel much more worried about Democrats' future prospects if he had been an amazing candidate.  We also can’t help feeling that many Democrats have a misperception that having spent so much money, they had earned a victory — that, needless to say, is not the way the world works, and also seems to misunderstand what money can and should do in an election, at least if you’re from a progressive movement that holds as one of its fundamental beliefs the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Ossoff ran as a moderate Democrat; as Robert Borosage writes at The Nation, “He presented himself as a centrist, speaking boldly against government waste and federal deficits, and talking, as his opponent put it, ‘like a Republican.’ He championed civility and decried partisan division. He explicitly opposed Medicare for All and tax hikes on the rich.  He wouldn’t even commit to voting for Nancy Pelosi as the leader of his party. He chose not to make the election a referendum on Trump.”  Andrew O’Hehir more provocatively savages Ossoff as a candidate, though we don’t agree with his dark conclusions about what this means for the future of the Democratic Party (our post is in fact partly a response to some of the points O’Hehir makes, and we invite folks to check out for themselves whether his points have more validity than we believe).

So yes, Ossoff’s loss suggests that the moderate-center Democratic playbook may not be sufficient to appeal to disgruntled voters, including moderate Republicans — but to say this automatically means it’s time to put on our dancing shoes and boogie over the Democratic Party’s grave is silly.  The Hot Screen is all in for an unabashedly populist Democratic party that puts the fight against economic inequality front and center; but it's also possible that a candidate who fielded such views would not have fared as well as Ossoff in what is, after all, a district that is doing well economically overall, and that has been, it bears repeating, in Republican hands for many years.  Indeed, as milquetoast as he may have been, and as much as we want to see Democrats pushing left, Ossoff's platform doesn't seem to have been nuts given his particular context.

But because he did indeed lose on positions that were more Clinton than Sanders, and even though it was close, I don't see how this loss doesn't strengthen the hand of those who are arguing for a more populist direction for the Democrats overall (and we recommend the Borosage article for its overall argument that favors this point of view).  Again, though, this raises the important point that this was just one race, in one specific district; Ossoff's loss is suggestive, but does not provide clear and decisive evidence for any particular viewpoint.  In our opinion, the case that Democrats need to generally embrace an egalitarian populism is overwhelming, and we see nothing in this race that refutes this.  

Significantly, the outcome in Georgia corroborates results in other special elections to fill the seats of representatives who have joined the Trump administration.  In the race to replace then representative, now CIA director Mike Pompeo, the Democratic candidate lost by a far smaller margin in Kansas' 4th Congressional District than in previous elections, despite very limited Democratic resources put into the race.  Even more intriguingly to The Hot Screen, on the same day that Ossoff was edged out, a Democrat managed to come even closer to taking South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, losing 48% to 51% — and this in a district Donald Trump won by more than 18 points, and where the Republican incumbent had won re-election in 2016 by a 20-point margin.

It sucks rotten eggs that the Democrats were not able to win these special elections; but then again, as Talking Points Memo notes, Donald Trump picked representatives for posts in his administration who were not coincidentally from strongly Republican districts.  That the Democrats were not able to pick amazing candidates on relatively short notice, or didn't spend more money in races where it might have made a big difference (in the Kansas and South Carolina races), are hardly signs of a doomed party.

But there is one great cautionary lesson to draw from the Georgia results.  Despite the very real energization of Democratic voters in opposition to Trump, the feral and proto-authoritarian pro-Trump movement remains very much alive, and perhaps equally energized by Trump’s victory and his determined unsettling of the American political order.  You need look no further than Virginia, where a couple weeks ago both parties held their gubernatorial primaries, and where a Trumpian figure named Corey Stewart just barely lost to establishment Republican Ed Gillespie.  Among other things, Stewart riled up supporters by defending monuments to the Confederacy, memorably tweeting that “Politicians who are for destroying the statues, monuments and other artifacts of history are just like ISIS” (to which we have to respond: "Sort of like," sure, we could see that — but “just like”?  We Yankees cry foul, Mr. Stewart, oh, we do cry foul!).  In their enthusiasm for the sordid Dixie dog-whistling of this vile candidate, Virginia Republicans uttered a primal scream all too reminiscent of the nationwide one we all heard back in November.

Is Firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller the President's Inevitable Next Step?

The single biggest piece of political news this past week was the revelation, broken by The Washington Post, that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating President Trump for possible obstruction of justice.  In the first place, this a victory for our basic sense of a shared reality.  Donald Trump, after all, did tell an interviewer on national TV that he fired FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation; everyone witnessed (or can witness, through the glories of YouTube) his statement, unlike, say, Comey’s allegations that the president asked him to call off the probe against General Michael Flynn.  The way that Trump’s corruption is often in plain view is one of the most disorienting things about our current political crisis — and it’s a relief that a formal response is taking shape under the aegis of Mueller’s investigation.

But we here at The Hot Screen share a belief with many others that the president will not allow the wheels of justice to spin to their proper conclusion.  Stopping the investigation into Russian election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign was important enough to Donald Trump to take the political risk of firing James Comey (although there is evidence that he did not see the move as overly risky, for instance thinking that Democratic animus towards Comey would give him some cover).  In light of the second-most important political news of the week — that Mueller’s investigation is exploring lines of inquiry that are likely to spell serious trouble for Trump allies — the president has more reason than ever to quash the Russia investigation.  

Already, Trump is attacking Mueller (as is the right-wing media) with a clear interest in discrediting whatever results the investigation might bring.  These attacks by Trump seem to be another variant of obstruction of justice — what else do you call it when a president seeks to preemptively undermine the results of an investigation against himself?  But beyond these initial attacks on Mueller, Trump has already shown with the Comey firing that he’s willing to break political norms in order to protect himself, even if it means creating severe problems for himself down the road.

But here’s the thing — as a general principle, Donald Trump’s entire candidacy and presidency, apart from the Russia angle, have been one relentless breaking of political norms, from calling for Hilary Clinton to be jailed, to inciting violence against protestors at campaign rallies, to attempting to implement a ban against Muslims from entering the country.  The heightened stakes around the Russia investigation are due to the fact that we are no longer just talking about questions of political culture, but about whether, to use the dramatic, familiar phrasing, the president is above the law.   

Based on what we’ve been reading, there would be nothing outright illegal about Donald Trump ordering Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein to fire Robert Mueller.  But first and foremost, as Josh Marshall points out, firing Mueller would mean unequivocally that Trump “will not allow any investigation of Russia and his campaign to go forward.”  Calling this obstruction of justice would be to hide the gravity of such a move: firing the special counsel would be tantamount to the president asserting he is above the law, since he would have stopped an investigation of himself.  And as Marshall concludes, the logical next step under our system of government would be for Congress to look into impeaching and convicting Donald Trump.  Marshall doesn’t say it explicitly, but it’s clear that the reason Congress should at such a point take the step of impeachment is that our system of government clearly can’t exist as intended if one branch of government can operate beyond the law, or, in plainer words, can do whatever the hell it wants in the manner of any tinpot dictatorship.

Here’s the reality of the situation, though: given the choice between Robert Mueller having enough time to identify specific laws that Trump and his team may have broken, and having the current Republican Congress decide whether to impeach the president for effectively declaring himself above the law as a general principle, it seems naive in the extreme to think that Donald Trump’s decision here is not foreordained.  Republican members of the House will not turn on a president who still enjoys high approval ratings from Republican voters; they will neither consider nor vote on impeachment.  Indeed, this basic fact — that we seem on the precipice of requiring impeachment of the president, without any prospect of this happening — seems to be quickly looming as the most basic point of our political crisis, and is a point explored in various detail both in Marshall's piece and in this latest post by Andrew Sullivan.  There is no doubt in our minds that, as with everything else the president has done to date, fellow Republicans would seek to defend and exculpate the president from his anti-democratic actions, once again defining presidential deviance down.  And if Donald Trump is able to stop the Russia investigation, then he will likely feel totally unshackled, as he will have, by design or side effect, established the essential lawlessness of his administration.

So it is probably the understatement of the year to say that the Democrats need to start playing offense, and be ready for Trump’s next move.  This is not politics as usual.  This is not a matter of waiting for the president and the Republicans to overreach, and then reaping the benefits of a backlash in the next election.  They need to be actively laying the groundwork for Trump’s removal, based on the mounting evidence of his unfitness for office, and to be making the case that the Republican Party as a whole is implicated in this unfitness by dint of their unwavering support for the president.  Along these lines, we strongly encourage everyone to read this piece by Brian Beutler, which makes the case that the Democrats must make it clear immediately that they would consider the firing of Robert Mueller to be an impeachable offense.

The Democrats need to define without ambiguity what the stakes are, both on the broader level of the rule of law versus a de facto authoritarian presidency, and on the practical, visible effects, such as a presidency unwilling to respond to Russian hacking of the past election.  Even if there is close to zero likelihood Republicans will explore the possibility of impeachment, the Democrats must keep in full view of the public a reality-based, democratic, pro-rule of law narrative that counters the derangements of the Oval Office and the president’s Republican enablers.  They cannot simply wait for the Republicans to overreach; they need to be telling a compelling, accurate story of how the Republicans are overreaching and why Americans need to oppose this.  

In a conflict between lawlessness and the rule of law, The Hot Screen patriotically believes and fervently hopes that the latter will prevail in the U.S., given the strength and continuity of our traditions.  But clearly something has gone terribly wrong for the U.S. to have elected a president as unqualified and authoritarian as Donald Trump in the first place.  One of the twists to this convoluted situation is that, to protect the rule of law, the opposition cannot look to the law alone, not when any lawbreaking by the president must be dealt with by an aiding and abetting Congress.  Instead, this is ultimately a political battle — one that has at its forefront the basics of government accountability, competence and lawfulness, but is a political battle nonetheless — over what sort of country we want this to be.

This struggle is being conducted in a political environment that has been severely disrupted by Donald Trump’s media savvy and blatant untruthfulness.  But it is also being conducted over some very basic, easy-to-grasp issues that we believe will play out in increasingly destructive ways for the president and his party, if the opposition works to keep them front and center in the public dialogue.  After all, the investigation that is at the heart of our current state of affairs concerns another country — Russia, no less! — attempting to subvert our electoral process in favor of a particular candidate.  Donald Trump has made a decision that this is not a matter that needs to be looked into.  A majority of American disagree with this assessment.

In staking his presidency on an issue that appears so black and white to so many Americans, Donald Trump has given the opposition incredibly solid grounds for making its case.  He has created a space for Americans to remember and renew a fundamental, inspiring, and uniting patriotism based on the basic fact that we’re the greatest democracy on earth and will not countenance anyone fucking with it.  To our minds, there is a clear line between Republican indifference to assessing Russian interference in our democratic processes and Republican efforts to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters through bogus voter ID laws and other such measures.  At the base of both is a fundamental opposition to the democratic spirit of our country, and the case of Russia makes it clear how this can easily be defined as an essential un-Americanness, a lack of the most basic patriotism.

Donald Trump’s Efforts to Undermine NATO Continue

As we noted recently, Donald Trump’s assault on our country’s alliances and allies is one of the most hidden-in-plain-view impending disasters of this presidency.  This issue got renewed attention when, during his visit to NATO headquarters last month, he dropped language from his speech that would have re-affirmed the U.S.’ commitment to defend its NATO allies.  President Trump finally re-iterated this commitment last week, but as Talking Points Memo points out, he also included remarks that seem to be laying the groundwork for further disparagement and attacks on the organization; as TPM puts it, he seems to be continually moving the goalposts in a way that NATO members will not be able to meet and that seem intended to sow conflict with the organization.  The idea of the United States working to break apart an alliance that is ultimately very much in our interests is deeply unsettling, and should be used by the opposition both to pummel Trump and a Republican Party that seems no longer to believe that the U.S. should find common cause with other democracies.

Taking Stock of Comey's Testimony

Whether or not you consider James Comey to have dropped any bombshells in his testimony before the Senate last week, the former FBI director provided details of his interactions with Donald Trump that should disturb all Americans.  Indeed, as various observers have been pointing out, the ever-escalating outrages perpetrated by this president are making it difficult for many to fully comprehend the seriousness of Comey’s testimony.  In various ways, Comey’s testimony dramatized and embodied the confrontation between our system of laws and Donald Trump’s tendencies towards lawlessness.  The setting itself, an open Senate proceeding, contrasts sharply with the series of interactions that Comey described, in which the president sought, in one-on-one sessions, to pressure Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president and abandon FBI investigations.  And Comey’s sworn and precisely worded testimony couldn’t be further from the contradictory lies and story lines that the president has tweeted and otherwise uttered about the events in question.  

Indeed, the sense that Comey is telling the truth is only enhanced by Trump’s self-serving responses to his testimony.  In the way that Team Trump has declared itself vindicated by what the Comey said, they’ve engaged in a form of obvious cherry-picking.  On the one hand, Trump has said that Comey lied in his testimony; on the other, Trump is relying on certain statements by Comey to support Trump’s own positions.  But by the president’s logic, of course, how can we trust anything Comey has said?  And how then does it make any sort of logical sense that the president’s attorneys are going to file a complaint about Comey’s leak of his own memos about his conversations with the president, when the president himself says that what Comey wrote in the memos are lies?

You can see more clearly than ever the two fields of struggle where the question over Donald Trump’s fitness for office is being played out.  There is the legal inquiry into whether Trump or people around him broke any laws; in the case of the president, Comey’s testimony highlighted whether Trump has engaged in obstruction of justice.  But there is also the political realm, where Trump clearly would prefer to battle things out.  Among other things, politics is the realm where appearances matter, and so it’s important for Trump to claim vindication from the Comey testimony even when the testimony clearly raised the possibility of real legal risk for the president.  This is also the realm where Trump can use the power of his bully pulpit to disparage and otherwise malign the former FBI director.  And short of charges actually being brought against the president (which many experts say the Justice Department would never do), whether this president is removed from office will be a political judgment made by Congress, in a decision whether to impeach and convict the president based on the facts the investigations have brought and will continue to bring to light.

Our gut feeling at this point is that the president and his team know they are likely to lose the legal fight, and so are determined to play this out on the political battlefield.  But this only shows the weakness of their position.  The investigations are truly a ticking time bomb for this administration, and if enough damning facts come to light, their ability to spin them away will become increasingly fraught.  Indeed, there may come a point when spin in the face of undeniable reality becomes transparently self-serving and self-destructive.

It is also worth noting that at a basic level of legal competence, the president appears to be relying on lawyers who are loyal and known to him at the expense of lawyers who might be better suited to the particular legal peril he finds himself in.  And this piece raises the possibility that in his relentless push to protect numero uno, Trump may end up alienating members of his administration in ways that could come back to haunt him.  This can be contrasted with the legal team special counsel Robert Mueller is putting together, which appears to be a formidable collection of expertise and experience.

CNN Whiffs Story on Trump-Obama Relationship

This opinion piece by Kevin Liptak at the CNN website this weekend is a great example of the way that Donald Trump’s malfeasance makes nonsense out of attempts at journalistic balance.  While the preponderance of incidents and details in the article makes it clear that Trump has been the main actor in freezing relations between the current and preceding presidents, Liptak finds himself unable to say this outright, or to give the proper label of perniciousness to Trump’s actions towards Obama.  Attempting to summarize the downward spiral from the high point of Obama’s efforts to welcome Trump and Trump’s description of their “warm” ties, he writes that “Once Trump was installed in office, however, things progressively soured, culminating in Trump’s March tweets accusing Obama of ordering surveillance of Trump Tower.”  But to say that “things progressively soured” is like describing Germany’s invasions of its European neighbors during World War II by saying “a lack of peace progressively spread across the continent."  As the actual details in the CNN article make clear, there was one person doing the souring, and that was Donald Trump.

And of course “soured” turns out to be the key miswording here, because it serves to downplay the unprecedented and frighteningly serious main event: that Donald Trump accused Barack Obama, without a shred of proof, of wiretapping his campaign.  Whatever tensions may have existed between the two men up to that time, Trump’s unfounded accusation of an arguably impeachable offense was an obvious attempt to sully and degrade his predecessor’s reputation; was, in fact, a de facto declaration of war against Barack Obama.  So when the article notes that “Neither has made any real attempt to reconcile after Trump accused Obama of ordering wiretaps at his skyscraper in New York,” we’re left to scratch our heads in wonder.  How, exactly, might there be reconciliation?  Donald Trump has accused Barack Obama of a tremendous crime, and has refused to back down.  How on earth could they “reconcile” while this slander stands?  “Reconcile” suggests that some of the onus is on Obama to reach out to Donald Trump, but nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, this grave lie leveled against Obama makes it necessary for Obama to have absolutely no relationship to Trump, because to do so would suggest that there is something normal or non-shocking about Trump’s lie that might still allow space for a relationship between the two.

So when the article ponders that “it’s unprecedented for a sitting president and his predecessor to eschew the faintest of ties,” it hammers home a cluelessness about its topic, and the fact that the deterioration in relations has been orchestrated by one particular party in the relationship.  In point of fact, the decisive “unprecedented” event is for a sitting president to accuse a former president of high crimes and misdemeanors, without evidence and with clear intent to distract from his own personal wrongdoing.  After such an event, the lack of relations can better be described as “obvious” or “a no-brainer.”  We need look no further than Trump’s conversations with former FBI Director James Comey to comprehend the peril of deceit and slander in which anyone who speaks to Trump places him- or herself.  And now that Trump faces the increasing possibility of legal peril based on the Russia investigation, it seems like common sense would call for Obama to steer clear of giving Trump advice or counsel, even were the president to ask him, out of the risk of having even the most tangential association with this tainted presidency.

And to be totally clear: even before Trump made his decisive accusation against Obama, Trump had not contacted Obama since Trump’s inauguration, and it is obviously on the sitting president to reach out to a predecessor, not for the predecessor to rush forward to offer unwanted advice to his successor.  The article notes that Trump has in fact not reached out to any other former presidents since taking office, which points to a larger isolation and arrogance that, again, is less about the Trump-Obama conflict and more about the character of the Oval Office’s current occupant.

Finally, the article notes the “long and bitter history” between Obama and Trump, but without making clear that it’s Trump who years ago started the tension between the two men, with another unprecedented act: accusing then-president Obama of not being an American citizen.  Trump’s self-appointment at the head of the birther movement was a racist, despicable action.  I can barely imagine the equanimity and self-control that kept Barack Obama from expressing anger at Trump’s denigrating birther slander, though he clearly did enjoy insulting Trump at the 2011 White House correspondent’s dinner.  But that decisive evening of Trump-roasting only proves the point: Trump started a fight against Obama, not the other way around — a fight that from the very beginning was built on a foundation of racism and lies, and likely continues now because the reality is that Obama represents a competence, intelligence, and commitment to our democracy that serves as a daily reminder of Trump’s incompetence, recklessness, and authoritarian inclinations. 

In a larger sense, this CNN piece is another example of how Trump tends to corrupt everything he touches, including news coverage.  In our opinion, the article fails to take into account the seriousness of Trump's past and present accusations against Obama, which leads to an inaccurate, pox-on-both-their-houses spin on the two men's relationship.  An honest, clear-eyed article would have taken the reality of Trump's basic culpability as its premise, and would also have acknowledged another basic point that should be obvious to all by now: Trump really doesn't seem to have relationships with anyone, if a relationship is understood to involve some sort of give and take and some acknowledgment of commonality.  Rather, Trump seeks to dominate everyone he meets; and those he can't dominate, like Obama, become the enemy.  This is a difficult place for journalism to be, not to mention a hideous pass for our country.  But it's a disservice to the public to act like this president isn't as abnormal as he truly is.

That Not-Funny Feeling of Being Stuck in a Racist Fever Dream

The Hot Screen highly recommends this recent article by Jamie Bouelle over at Slate.  Addressing the killing of two men by a white supremacist in Portland, he fits this horror into a longer string of recent racist attacks and killings.  He points out that President Trump’s own rhetoric as a candidate and as a president has helped unleash such violence, by sending a message of its acceptability.

But Bouelle’s broader concern in this piece is how our current moment is a manifestation of a broader historical pattern in which racism espoused by politicians is paralleled by acts of violence in the real world.  He writes: 

Key to all of this is the interplay between racism in culture, in politics, and in public life. Each reinforced the other, creating an atmosphere of hostility and violence that wasn’t otherwise inevitable, even as it had its antecedents. Put differently, racist violence isn’t spontaneous; it creeps up from fertile ground, feeding on hate and intolerance in the public sphere [. . .] Today, the rising pace of hate crimes is tied to a political style that has harnessed and weaponized white resentment by way of an ethno-nationalist movement that sees America in narrow, racially exclusionary terms.

The Age of Trump has its own particulars, but we are experiencing a new iteration of a very old American dynamic.  When we recognize the racist elements of Trump’s appeals, we are reminded that a fight against Trump is also a fight against the darkest strains of our history, and of our present.  When we see the recrudescence of an ancient violence, we must all rise to the challenge of answering it with solidarity, non-violence, and a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes.

Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to Our Alliances with Democracies

It’s bad enough that President Trump poses the greatest threat to American democracy that most of us have seen in our lifetimes, from his lies about millions of illegal voters who cost him the popular vote and subsequent support of a commission to “fix” this fictitious problem (all in the name of disenfranchising likely Democratic voters), to his firing of the FBI director for the admitted reason that the president didn’t want the Russia investigations to continue (obstruction of justice, anyone?).

But the danger in which this president is placing the United States’ fundamental alliance with the democracies of Europe is also deeply distressing, as it’s paired with growing authoritarianism and right-wing strength around the globe, whether already well established as in Russia, just now coming into full murderous bloom in the Philippines, or in the strong showing of the National Front in France’s recent elections.  Almost needless to say, Trump's attitude toward our European allies is one strain of a broader incompetent foreign policy that encompasses everything from the president’s dangerous bluster over North Korea to his refusal to accept the reality of global warming.

The Hot Screen is well aware that not everyone shares our nerdy and occasionally bombastic interest in foreign relations and the grand clashing tides of capitalism, democracy, authoritarianism, etc. — and that’s OK!  But though these international issues can feel deeply abstract compared to the nitty gritty of national politics, where what happens in Washington can have an immediate, profound affect on our daily lives (such as whether we have access to health care or suddenly find our non-white friends living with increased apprehension over their everyday safety), we believe there is an overwhelming case for bringing these foreign policy threats more fully into public consciousness and into the political dialogue about why Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency.  

It makes zero sense to alienate long-term allies with which we share a wealth of political and cultural ties.  Whether it’s as mutual adherents to the cause of democracy or as allies in fighting terrorism, our ties to Europe have been fused into place by our participation in two world wars and the decades-long Cold War.  The democratic state of modern Europe owes everything to the thousands of servicemen who fought and died to save Europe, as well as to an overall U.S. commitment to promote democracy on the continent.  

Talking Points Memo has been doing the most pointed job I’ve seen of calling out this president’s radical about-face on how the U.S. treats its long-standing alliances, and a consonance between Trump’s goals and those of Vladimir Putin’s Russia that should raise alarm bells for our citizenry (that the president is acting in a way that benefits the Russians is of course a real live wire and an issue in and of itself, given our steadily expanding understanding of the links between Russia and the Trump campaign).

In his visit to Europe last week, Trump seemed to use criticism of European nations’ financial contributions to NATO as a cloak for undermining the alliance more generally — a point most chillingly driven home when he refused to endorse the principle of mutual defense that’s the heart of the organization’s purpose and power.  As TPM elaborates, the financial criticisms are tendentious and mostly lies, and it must be clear to our European allies that Trump is quite deliberately picking a fight with them.  Indeed, we saw this past week that both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have made strong comments about the already-shifted nature of U.S. - European relations, with Merkel essentially signaling that the Europe can no longer count on the United States.  TPM points out that European leaders seem to be realizing that “it’s not just that Trump is greedy or impulsive or unreliable, indifferent to the North Atlantic alliance but that he is positively against it.”

It may be that Donald Trump’s visit to Europe will catalyze coverage and broaden Americans’ consciousness of the catastrophic damage he’s perpetrating on our country’s most fundamental partnerships.  Today brings two relevant articles: here, Brian Beutler at New Republic provides an overview of how long-term harm from Trump’s attempts to restructure our foreign policy is made possible by Republican complicity; and here, the New York Times reports on the startling efforts that Russia is making to pull Italy — yes, ITALY! — out of its close ties to the U.S. and nearer to itself.

This President is No Christian: Andrew Sullivan Writes the Takedown We've Been Needing

Over at New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan has written a searing post on Donald Trump as the antithesis of Christian ideals.  Of all the lies surrounding Donald Trump, his claims of religious belief are perhaps the most staggering; Sullivan's article makes crystal clear why they should stagger all of us.  Here's a taste of the piece and its thesis:

Trump is not an atheist, confident yet humble in the search for a God-free morality. He is not an agnostic, genuinely doubtful as to the meaning of existence but always open to revelation should it arrive. He is not even a wayward Christian, as he sometimes claims to be, beset by doubt and failing to live up to ideals he nonetheless holds. The ideals he holds are, in fact, the antithesis of Christianity — and his life proves it. He is neither religious nor irreligious. He is pre-religious. He is a pagan. He makes much more sense as a character in Game of Thrones, a medieval world bereft of the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, than as a president of a modern, Western country.

The Hot Screen believes in the absolute necessity of building bridges to Trump voters, both for the sake of persuading them to turn against the president and in building an American politics based on a broader common ground.  We profess no particular religion here at The Hot Screen (and for the record, no, our flaming logo is not a subliminal endorsement of Lucifer or his lifestyle); however, we do see our current political moments as a crossroads of our political faith, a grand historical reckoning wherein Americans face a stark choice between an authoritarian, sectarian nightmare of a future, or a renewed, expanded commitment to shared democratic vows.  Connecting with people of faith, particularly Christians, about why Donald Trump represents a repudiation of the most basic Christian beliefs, is key to moving our country past this current administration of moral turpitude and creeping authoritarianism.

Memo to Oregon Politicians: White Supremacists Are Public Enemy #1, and It's Time to Act Like It

In the first days and weeks after Donald Trump’s election, for me one of the most heartening signs of immediate grassroots opposition to the president and his foul agenda was the number of people who made it clear that they would not stand idly by while Muslims in our country were harassed and demonized, whether by government actions or by individual assholes.  Many resolved to intervene to deescalate and defend if they were ever to witness such harassment in person.

In Portland yesterday, three men stepped to the defense of a pair of girls, one of whom was Muslim, who were being threatened by a man who has turned out to be a white supremacist.  Two of those men’s bravery cost them their lives; the other man received serious injuries.

I don’t know if these three were among those who had previously given thought to how they’d respond if they saw Muslims specifically threatened, or whether they simply acted out of a basic, instinctual human decency; this matters not a whit in judging their bravery, as they did the right thing in the moment.

The simple fact of their right action when faced with an existential choice is a reminder that the ongoing threat to Muslims is a threat to all Americans, regardless of race or religion, because conscience, common humanity, and adherence to our country’s core values means that Americans don’t stand idly by when others are threatened by hate.

We all need to get really clear on something really fast: attacks like the one we’ve just witnessed here in Portland are the tip of the spear of a right-wing, white nationalist movement that has its roots in the darkest passages of American history, finds its foot soldiers in fools like yesterday’s killer, and whose most potent enabler is the current occupant of the White House, for whom anti-Muslim hatred is part of a larger package of racial and Christianist supremacy.  Let us never forget that Donald Trump named as his chief advisor Steve Bannon, a central figure in mainstreaming the vile white nationalist movement.  A less overtly violent strain of this movement has overtaken the Republican Party, whose electoral strategy is based on gerrymandering and voter restrictions that disproportionately affect people of color to ensure that majority rule in our country is deferred indefinitely.

What we saw in Portland yesterday reminds us that what might seem like violent outliers are the inevitable byproduct of a world view that essentially breaks us down into those who are fully citizens and those who are not, and by extension those who are fully human and those who are not.  As a glaring example: how can anyone look at efforts in states like Texas and North Carolina to restrict voting rights in ways that obviously target African-Americans, and not see a clear line back to the three-fifths compromise embedded in the U.S. Constitution, whereby certain human beings were deemed not to count as fully human at all?

As Dan Rather has pointed out this morning, Donald Trump has not yet voiced (or even tweeted) his recognition of the two American heroes who died here in Portland.  Frankly, I don’t expect that he will, and here is the chilling reason why: to Donald Trump, the victims of this incident were not real Americans — neither the two girls (one African-American and the other Muslim), nor the three casualties of the attack, who proved their un-Americanness by acting heroically against a man motivated, directly or indirectly, by hatreds promoted from the highest office in the land.

For Trump, and increasingly for the Republican Party as a whole, real Americans are the thirty-five or forty-percent of overwhelmingly white citizens who unquestioningly support Donald Trump, who are in fact far along the road to embracing a racist identity politics fused with a cult of personality based on Donald Trump himself, so that in the end the only real American is one who unswervingly accepts whatever insane actions and words that are vomited out by this deranged administration.

Violence and political repression are symbols of the right wing’s weakness, not strength.  Simply put, you don’t resort to violence when you have a popular agenda that can win fair elections.  That a party ostentatiously committed to law and order is increasingly winking and nodding as violence is inflicted on those they perceive as their enemies — the press, protestors at Trump rallies — is a scary subset of this fact: when forced to choose between maintaining power at the expense of giving up its unpopular policies in order to gain new voters (aka normal politics in a democracy), and maintaining power by undemocratic, anti-American means (gerrymandering, opposing stricter accountability for police departments inflicting injustice on African-American communities, supporting and enabling a president who has by this point committed gross abuses of power), they have chosen power over all.  We are at the point where it doesn’t seem an exaggeration to say that the Republican Party as a whole has begun to forfeit its claim to be a legitimate American political party, if legitimacy is measured by a commitment to actual rule of law and equal political rights for all Americans.

At the Oregon state and local level, it’s reassuring that politicians have overwhelmingly called out the hatred and violence of this attack.  But it's hardly enough to stop there, not by a long shot.  A white supremacist movement, thriving in an atmosphere created by one of our two major political parties, has effectively declared war on our free and open society, insinuating the possibility of violence into as mundane an activity as taking mass transit to get to work or go shopping.

We need to make it clear to our elected officials that we expect the full power of our law enforcement agencies to come down like a hammer on these right-wing extremists — to ascertain whether the killer was acting alone or had accomplices, to determine whether he is part of a larger cell, and to infiltrate and dismantle this violent movement before its adherents shed more blood.

We need to broadcast the connections between the G.O.P. and this resurgent bigotry and violence, and to force that party to disown and reform itself, or face electoral destruction.

We need to impress upon Democratic politicians that voters have a zero tolerance policy for enablers of violence, and that we expect them to fight the Republicans every step of the way where voting rights, religious protections, racism, and the free press are concerned. 

And in our cities and towns, we need to make it clear to each other — to our friends, to our neighbors, to people of different faiths and races from ourselves — that we have each other’s backs.

Catching Our Breath Before the Next Deluge

Simply because there have been no gut-punch Trump corruption stories in the last 48 hours or so, it feels as if we’ve entered a respite of sorts.  But anyone paying attention to our politics is still reckoning and piecing together all that has happened and been reported over the past week.  Here’s a rough outline of stunning stories that we’ve pulled from a helpful CNN rundown: Donald Trump fires FBI Director James Comey; Trump reveals in an interview that he did so because of the Russia investigations; Trump threatens Comey against speaking out; stories break of Trump having shared highly classified information with top Russian diplomats at a still-otherwise-disturbing Oval Office meeting; there are reports that Trump met with Comey one-on-one to ask that he drop the investigation of General Michael Flynn (on top of various other stories about Comey's concern that Trump was trying to compromise his independence, and this on top of an earlier story that Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president); Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel for the Russia campaign interference/Trump campaign collusion investigation; news breaks that at the fateful Trump-Russian diplomat Oval Office meeting, Trump bragged of firing Comey, referred to him as a “nut job,” and talked about how the pressure over Russian had been “taken off” by Comey's dismissal; and, last but not least, reports that a current advisor to the president is under criminal investigation  

And let’s not forget that we also learned this past Friday that James Comey will be giving Senate testimony, in public, at some soonish date.

It’s not just that Donald Trump himself has, both in the public eye and out of it, engaged in behavior that looks very much like obstruction of justice to cover up what seems like corrupt actions by himself and/or his advisors in relation to Russian interference in the election, though this alone would be deeply disturbing.  There’s also the way other details about Trumpworld have been emerging, which make it increasingly clear this administration has a Turkey problem in addition to the more well-known Russia issues (as a big for instance, there is the fact of Flynn’s paid engagement by the Turkish government while he made crucial decisions about U.S. dealings with the Kurds).  And maybe most importantly of all for helping us understand the gravity of the various threads, we are starting to understand the relation of one story to another, and to put together timelines that present an increasingly damning perspective on the behavior of Trump and his political intimates.

In the face of this seething vastness of political crisis and possibly criminal malfeasance, The Hot Screen feels the constraint of an understandable but inappropriate cognitive paralysis — what to talk about?  Where, in the name of all that is holy, to start, when if ever there were a time not to be overwhelmed, this is it?

So we’re letting the gut lead us forward, and our gut is saying one thing above all else: Donald Trump is an amazingly self-incriminating, self-sabotaging monster, and no matter what bad acts he may or may not have committed during the campaign, his clumsy efforts to protect himself now are providing his opposition with cudgels that will continue to do political damage to him as long as he remains in office.  This president seems to be doing everything he can to assure that the escalating resistance to his misrule will be rightly seen as a fight between defenders of our democracy, and an illiberal, intemperate, anti-democratic wrecking ball of a former reality show host.

How to Clean the Trumpian Stables

As we’ve noted before, The Hot Screen has a predilection for fire and brimstone.  But look at who we’ve got in the White House — can you blame us, really?  A couple of recent articles by Michelle Goldberg of Slate, though, have got us thinking about the most methodical, effective politics for raining holy hell upon Donald Trump and the Republican Party to ensure that nothing like we’re currently experiencing happens again for — well, for as long as humanly possible.  

We’re writing hours after the New York Times broke today’s huge news that back in February, President Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to back off the investigation into Michael Flynn.  Part and parcel of this story is that Comey apparently memorialized their conversation in a memo, and also shared it with a few colleagues at the time.  The White House is denying that such a request occurred, which seems to have backed Team Trump into a pretty undesirable corner, given that in the opposite side of the ring is a man dedicated to the legend of his own probity who, let us repeat, memorialized the conversation.  

The Hot Screen is confident to a high degree of certainty that only one man is telling the truth about the conversation between the president and the FBI director, and that it’s not Donald Trump.  The Hot Screen is also of the opinion that we are now well on our way to a fight over impeaching and removing the president from office.

As we stand at the cusp at how the body politic responds to Trump’s corruption, Goldberg’s essay titled “Democrats Must Investigate Every Trump Scandal, Even If It Takes Decades” provides a broader context for how the opposition party should think about taking on Trump's malfeasance.  She makes the case that Trump has continued, on a larger scale, a pattern of corruption that has become institutionalized by the Republican Party over the past several decades: not only major events like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the bogus arguments for the invasion of Iraq, but the pressing of fake scandals against Democratic presidents, such as Whitewater and the Benghazi imbroglio.  “Every day, Trump shows us what politics look like when the rules only apply to one party,” Goldberg writes.  “Already, because of Trump, America is a more cynical, corrupt, lawless place than it was 100 days ago.”

The solution she suggests: once they’ve gotten back the House, Senate, or both, Democrats and the left should investigate the living shit out of Trump, as a means of restoring transparency and balance to our political system.  The Hot Screen couldn’t agree more, and believes that accountability must be the name of the game for Democrats going forward.  But along with this must be a relentless effort to trace the ways that Trump’s behavior indeed fits a larger Republican pattern, and how his specific corruption has been aided and abetted by the party at large.  Since his election, after all, the G.O.P. has largely chosen to look the other way as an avalanche of evidence has continued to pile up regarding possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, all in the name of pushing through a Republican agenda very much at odds with majority opinion in the country.  The Republicans have chosen tax cuts for the rich over extirpating the influence of a foreign power from our politics, and they need to pay a maximal price for their staggeringly immoral and unpatriotic choice.

The other piece by Goldberg that's caught our eye today is a not-entirely tongue in cheek cajoling of Trump advisors to speak out against their feared leader, not simply for the good of the country, but because they have a decent chance of scoring some sweet tell-all book deals.  This is far better, she writes, than sticking around too long and getting irrevocably mired in the scandals sure to come.  The Hot Screen finds this perspective welcome and refreshing; we’re persuaded that in the case of this deranged presidency, the profit motive might do some good when folks see a choice between big bucks and obeisance to a twisted man-child.  

But just as it’s important for Democrats to investigate and expose Trump’s deeds for all voters to see, it’s also crucial to balance rewards for those who speak out against Trump with appropriate shaming and career punishment of those who stick by him.  Lickspittles like Sean Spicer should receive a message that their services in the public sphere are no longer required or respected.  They need to be shunned in such a way as to create a deterrent effect for anyone who might consider serving in a future Trump-like administration.  The same goes for the politicians who have stood close to him, like Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions and frankly anyone else who was willing to join his cabinet.

Quote of the (Comey Memo) Day

"There is no need to document the conversations with people who are truthful or situations that are routine. It's when you have situations that are not routine and people who are not truthful, you would write a memo to file," the source said. "There have been other occasions where he has done this but not everyday."

Comey had Trump's number.  There's no way this ends well for the president.