Will Trade War End Up Sparking GOP Civil War?

Will Donald Trump’s escalating imposition of tariffs on America’s trading partners finally break his solid backing by Republican GOP congressmen and senators, not to mention his voter base?  Amazingly, where likely collusion with a foreign power, gross human rights violations at the border, and incitement of violence against journalists have failed to stir them, there are signs that Trump’s war on free trade has finally got the frozen hearts of many a Republican a-pumping with the spirit of resistance.

I’m not the only one who’s wondered how the GOP would continue to square its official support for the free market with the president’s willingness to take a wrecking ball to trading regimes built up over decades to benefit and secure American wealth.  Donald Trump may have zeroed in on the destruction wrought by de-industrialization and his role as rescuer of the working man as his primary electoral identity, but the trading system has benefitted the richest of the rich, who see little need to tweak a system that has padded their portfolios, opened up foreign markets, and allowed them to use labor more easily exploited and paid far less than American workers.

Two particular areas of dissent have appeared.  First, the president’s contemplation of hitting foreign automobiles with a 25% tariff appears to be a bridge too far.  My sense is that among Republican elected officials, this is a case of ideological opposition to the president, combined with a growing awareness among Republicans that he may be willing to do real damage to the economy as he pursues an escalating trade war with the world.  One angle that may have the Republicans up in arms is that trade policy falls well within the purview of Congress, making them complicit in Trump’s policies — a complicity that opponents will be able to highlight.  

The second major area of growing GOP dissent is the tariffs the president has imposed on agricultural imports, which have prompted China and Mexico to retaliate with their own tariffs on American agricultural products.  This retaliation is already causing economic pain among America’s farmers, which in turn led to the Trump administration this week proposing a $12 billion bailout package for those affected.  Intriguingly, the perceived need for a bailout seems to have been the spark that moved the agricultural industry itself into a fuller opposition to the president’s policies; according to reporting by Politico, many in the industry interpret it to mean that there’s no end in sight to the trade war over agriculture, that the president has no strategy for ending the dispute he started, or quite possibly both.

Particularly with agricultural tariffs, you can see how Trump’s blustering attitudes and baseline Republican realities have collided, and will continue to collide, in unpredictable ways.  At the highest level, the reality of Trump’s willingness to risk existing trade agreements, in combination with compensation to some of those hurt by the trade war, has run into at least a superficial buzz-saw of Republican belief in free trade and free markets.  My guess, though, is that the GOP and other elements of the farm lobby are not able to separate these abstract ideas from the way they’ve been applied to policy over the years: trade arrangements with other nations that, more often than not, allow American businesses to make money selling goods to those countries.  The result is that many Republicans strongly believe in free trade as a principle, particularly because in reality they tacitly understand it’s an arrangement, when implemented in the real world, that makes them money.  Trump, in promising better arrangements, is upsetting a system that is already working pretty well for them; accusing Trump of retreating on free trade allows them to make a principled argument when their main concern is that they’re going to lose money.  

The fact that their actual business is under threat is of course another major point of conflict between Trump and the agricultural industry, indeed the central one.  The fact that the industry as a whole is pretty much turning up its nose at the $12 billion bailout (which apparently would hardly make most businesses whole from the losses they’ve suffered) suggests that the president has misjudged the nature of this economic sector.  Unlike the steel industry, which has long been beleaguered, or individual steel workers who are willing to suffer some pain in the present for hope of long-term gain, the agricultural industry is a lot healthier, and so has more to lose.  Additionally, though the industry as a whole has done much to obscure this fact, it is hardly the plucky conglomeration of simple family farmers that it would like us to believe.  The agricultural industry has undergone heavy consolidation for more than a generation, yet part of me wonders if Trump has made the catastrophic mistake of thinking he’s dealing with a rabble of hog farmers and corn shuckers, rather than a highly sophisticated industry.  This sophistication includes a keen collective knowledge of how trade policy works and how it affects their profit margins, a point currently reflected by the quick response of major farm trade organizations in opposition to the ongoing escalation of tariffs.

The conflict between Trumpian attitudes and Republican realities offers the possibility of a world of troubles for GOP politicians caught in the middle.  Politico observes that in their planned meeting with President Trump in Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds and Representative Rod Blum “are walking a tightrope — they must express their concerns about the local economic impact of tariffs while stopping short of criticizing the president.”  This seems a particularly difficult tightrope to walk when their constituents are savvy about the tariff issues and well understand the president’s role in creating them.  

Politico also notes that Democrats are seeing opportunity in the unease over the president’s trade policies in Iowa and other farming regions.  Brendan Kelly, who’s running to unseat Representative Mike Bost in Illinois’ 12th Congressional District, seems to be pursuing a smart line — acknowledging there are problems to be fixed, but that “This all-out barroom brawl with everybody — just throwing fists and not sure where the target is going to be — is just going to end up hurting everybody.”  An argument that Donald Trump essentially has no strategy for fixing things has the benefit of being accurate description of reality, one that Republicans are starting to countenance.  This might seem like the most basic thing in the world, but pointing out the disparity between people's lived experiences and Trump’s words is a powerful tool for Democrats, particularly since painting a deranged, tendentious view of the world is the cornerstone of Trump’s approach to politics.  Harm to the pocketbook is a hard thing for a person to deny for very long; at least in the agricultural industry, Trump may have shot himself in the foot by inflicting economic pain on people who were doing well enough before he got involved.  Additionally, any area in which Republicans are provoked to criticize the president weakens him across the board; doubts in one area will feed doubts in others, a dynamic that is likely key to eroding his base both prior to the midterms and the 2020 election.

Recent Studies Suggest Progressives Need a Nuanced Strategy on Immigration

Two recent New York Times editorials provide deeply contradictory takes on the role played by immigration in the 2016 election and beyond.  While the perspectives they raise may be irreconcilable, together they nonetheless point to key questions progressives need to be asking about an issue that Donald Trump clearly sees as key to his re-election strategy.

“What if Trump’s Nativism Actually Hurts Him?”, written by a pair of University of Minnesota political scientists, explores the possibility raised by its title: that Donald Trump has miscalculated the role that his anti-immigration message played in his election, and that it was actually Hillary Clinton who benefitted the most from the foregrounding of immigration in the 2016 election.  Their case rests on evidence that anti-immigration voters were already in Trump’s camp anyway, while people more moderate on immigration voted for Hillary Clinton in far higher numbers than they did for Barack Obama in 2012.  They also cite figures that immigration did not result in getting more Trump voters to the polls than Clinton supporters.

Based on this analysis, the authors speculate that playing up racism and xenophobia may no longer work as a political strategy for Republicans.  The possible reasons include the fact that most anti-immigrant white voters are already in the Republican camp, and that further highlighting of the issue will send more centrist voters to the Democratic Party.  They also point out that Donald Trump’s embrace of a bullhorn rather than a traditional Republican dog whistle on issues of immigration may continue to provoke a supercharged reaction on the left.

A year and a half into the Trump presidency, and months after his child separation policy put immigration more front-and-center than ever in the public eye, it seems undeniable that immigration issues are indeed driving an enormous amount of activism and electoral excitement on the left, even as polls show high support for Trump’s cruel policies among his base voters.  As the “Nativism” article suggests, though, whether this energy on both sides will ultimately tilt in Trump’s favor depends on how middle-of-the-road voters respond.

Unfortunately for those hoping for a bit of quick good news in these dark times (though fortunately for those who thrive on complex and ambiguous situations!), Washington Post columnist Thomas Edsall has written a piece that counsels a great deal of caution in interpreting the data and considering the politics around immigration.  Surveying recent research on American attitudes around immigration and racism, Edsall makes a case that the left’s response to Trump’s anti-immigrant incitement requires careful sifting of the full dynamics at play.

The first layer of caution concerns the reliability of the social science research that yielded optimistic results like the ones we saw in the “Nativism” article.  Edsall highlights recent studies showing that traditional polling may have failed to keep up with shifts in actual public sentiment around immigration.  Some respondents may be hesitant about defying social expectations around this issue, suggesting that the data relied on in the “Nativism” article should be taken with a grain of salt (an attitude that also seems in order when a study confirms exactly what you want to hear).

Edsall has steadily preached a policy of never underestimating Donald Trump, and his exploration of recent research on shifting views in the ties between immigration and perceptions of racism backs up this cautious attitude.  After reminding us that part of Trump’s immigration strategy is to invite a backlash in which progressives accuse him and his supporters of racism, Edsall runs through recent studies showing a fundamental divide on whether American voters view immigration restrictions as racist.  While 73% of Clinton voters said it was racist to reduce immigration in order to maintain the white share of the population, only 11% of Trump supporters said this was the case.  In other words, in the context of immigration, “the very definition of racism is deeply contested.”

Such findings become still more fraught in light of other recent research on the self-perception of whites around accusations of racism.  First, increasing numbers of whites hold views that, while empirically racist (such as believing that the white proportion of the U.S. population should be mantained as is) are not believed to be racist by the holders of that view.  This intersects with a second observation: accusations of racism appear to be creating a backlash in white Americans who do not consider themselves racist; as one researcher quoted in the article puts it:

[S]uch accusations are now tantamount to ‘crying wolf’ and have the opposite of their intended effect — whites are subsequently more likely to express racially conservative policy preferences or to condone the target of the accusation [. . .] when they’re accused of being “racist,” some whites either see the accusation as disingenuous, or they see it as a personal, unfounded attack, and they become defensive.”

You don’t need to accept this research uncritically to see the underlying truth of the psychological dynamics it suggests.  When a person is accused of something that they don’t want to admit about themselves, it’s common for the person to double-down on their denial about that characteristic.  That this behavior would obtain around something as socially and morally problematic as racism should not be surprising.  It also seems clear that the question of how to address racism at both an individual and societal level becomes more complicated when a central cultural model for addressing racism — calling it out directly — begins to encounter white resentment that, as it becomes more widespread and commonly accepted, also begins to mutually reinforce this resentment.

These observations have profound implications both for how to counter Donald Trump, and, more generally, for addressing what is either a resurgence of racist attitudes in the United States or, at a minimum, an easing of taboos around expression of such attitudes.  On the second topic, some research indicates that fighting racism in a way that people are “freely choosing to be non-prejudiced” can be effective, while simply urging people to comply with social norms around non-prejudice can actually backfire by stoking reflexive or defensive reactions.  This is highly abstract social science research, yet the general ideas behind it offer important clues to how to respond to the clear “white backlash” (a term used in a couple of the articles cited in the Edsall piece) we are experiencing.

Given all this, it seems worth asking the question of whether calling out Donald Trump’s racism on the immigration front is helping or hurting the cause of protecting undocumented immigrants from ICE-inflicted cruelties, as well as aiding in the larger cause of allowing legal immigration into the United States.  This is not to say that the president shouldn’t be held to account for his racism; but we need to assess, in a dispassionate way, whether the ground has essentially shifted beneath our feet, so that white Americans are less susceptible to direct social pressure as a way to check racist thinking, and may even be encouraged in their mindset by such a direct critique.  As Edsall suggests, that the president thinks he has a winning strategy should provoke his opponents to careful consideration of what might be the most effective response. 

Obviously, those who oppose Trump’s policies on immigration aren’t standing in front of cameras or sitting down at keyboards, and simply shouting and typing “Donald Trump and his supporters are racist!” in a manner akin to Jack Nicholson holed up in the Overlook Hotel.  Yet it does seem as if the issue of how we treat undocumented immigrants, and what our attitude should be toward immigration more generally, has been framed by the president as a combined referendum on race, culture, and economics in a way that has set the terms of the debate.  This framing is, needless to say, highly unfavorable to Democrats and progressives.  It is a framing in which the racial, cultural, and economic slurs against undocumented immigrants, and by extension, against all immigrants, each reinforce and give cover to each other.  For instance, if undocumented workers are stealing American jobs, then it helps justify racist sentiment against them; and if a white American has racist sentiment towards Latinos, it make them more susceptible to the idea that they’re stealing American jobs.

Donald Trump’s racism is evil, but there is a difference between highlighting an evil and a successful election strategy.  Progressives must always remember that when they make undocumented immigration a key battleground for challenging the president’s reign, they’re fighting him on terrain friendly to the president.  They risk reinforcing accusations that they care more about foreigners than American citizens; they risk seeming not to care about American job losses; they risk criticism that they do not care about enforcing American laws.  As I’ve noted before, the president has forced this battle on progressives, as no progressivism worth its salt would allow such human rights abuses to be carried out in our collective name; yet there is no reason for progressives to fight the battle on terms set by the president.

If we have no choice but to engage on immigration, then we must do so in a way that maximizes the political benefit to us and maximizes the political damage to Donald Trump.  The president seeks to conflate legal and undocumented immigrants to help propagate a false narrative about the role of immigration in America's economic challenges.   While defending undocumented immigrants from the cruelty of family separation policies, progressives need to keep the economic benefits of legal immigration front and center in any response.  This argument has the benefit of being true, and of appealing to the self-interest of all Americans — who wouldn’t want our country to get richer through the hard work of newcomers?  

In an age of economic anxiety, immigrants are an easy scapegoat for Trump and the Republican right.   Making the case that Trump's overall economic policies will only weaken the economy and exacerbate insecurity, and presenting an alternative vision for an economically healthy America, will put the battle over immigration in its proper context.  Trump would have us blame immigrants for our economic woes; it's time to put the spotlight back on Trump's role in exacerbating our real economic problems, like massive inequality, monopolies that strangle the economy, and laws that deprive workers of their right to organize.

Progressives also need to fully internalize the contradiction between liberal ideals and a population of millions of undocumented immigrants who are both vulnerable to economic exploitation and not fully protected by our legal system.  Even if they are performing jobs American citizens don’t want, this doesn’t mean that they should have to work in dangerous or otherwise exploitative conditions: this violates our most basic understanding of human rights and decency.  Any defense of undocumented immigrants from the depredations of ICE needs to be paired with a realistic vision of how immigrants’ rights should be protected.  The progressive vision on immigration needs to be coherent, humane, and just.  It makes little sense to fight against family separation policies, but then not rise to the challenge of protecting workers from exploitation.

Demonizing immigrants and stoking the fires of racism are of extreme importance to Donald Trump, an empty soul who must provide cover fire for his larger project of the looting of this country by his family and others of already-obscene wealth.  Given the role immigration will have in the survival or failure of his presidency, progressives must counter with a strategy that defeats him on his own turf.  Acknowledging shifts in attitudes towards immigration and race doesn't mean accepting them, but making better arguments for winning Americans over to our side.  The point of politics is not to tell people that they're bad; the point of politics is to persuade sufficient numbers of people to join your cause.

Something Deeply Rotten is Happening in Denmark

Denmark, known to many Americans as the land of renewable energy and the feminist political thriller Borgen, is in the midst of passing a set of legal measures so clearly and nauseatingly racist and authoritarian as to demolish whatever impressions of progressivism Denmark had managed to create in our collective consciousness.  But the dangers these laws reveal are hardly limited to Denmark: they illuminate how President Trump’s own racist demagoguery weakens the position of the United States to credibly respond to clear violations of human rights even in a close ally.

The situation is this: in response to higher crime rates and concerns that recent, mostly Muslim immigrants are not integrating sufficiently into Danish society, Denmark is passing a series of punitive laws that single out populations of so-called “ghetto” neighborhoods.  In other words, where you live, not simply your immigration status, now places you in a separate category in the eyes of the law.  Backers say the laws are meant to control crime, teach immigrants Danish values, and make sure the country’s generous welfare system is not abused; but a clearer eye might see laws that punish people for their religion and country of origin, and whose larger intent is to teach newer arrivals to Denmark that the country’s commitment to a free society is giving way to a Danish brand of illiberalism.  

The measures include: separation of so-called “ghetto children” from their families for 25 hours a week so that they can be taught “Danish values” (this training begins at the tender age of 1); doubling punishments for crimes based on whether the perpetrator lives in a “ghetto” and based on income, employment, education, and “non-Western background”; and prison time for parents who dare send their children on extended trips to their home countries.

If you’re thinking to yourself that placing people in ghettos based on their race and religion, and subjecting them to punitive laws, sounds like a grotesque echo of Nazi policies — well, so do clear-minded Danes.  Member of parliament Yildiz Akdogan notes that, “Danes had become so desensitized to harsh rhetoric about immigrants that they no longer register the negative connotation of the word ‘ghetto’ and its echoes of Nazi Germany’s separation of Jews.”

We will grant that the Danes have an obvious right to fight crime, and the right as well to encourage newcomers to adapt to the country’s existing social fabric.  But the notion that the best or only way to deal with such challenges is via measures so patently racist, anti-Muslim, and antithetical to Western values is totally absurd.  The Danes are looking to govern their society in ways that make it that much less of a society worth protecting; in unleashing majority power against a politically weak minority, they abuse democracy and help discredit, via a damning display of open racism, their own stated goals of a culturally homogenous society.

A disturbing question hovers over what’s going on in Denmark: if the Danes are unable to see the cruelty and evil of their ways, who possesses the standing to point this out to them?  It’s unclear to me that the laws they’ve passed violate any European Union rules on human rights, although it seems preposterous that they would not.  It is sickening to realize that, due to our president’s immoral and un-American sadism on the southern border, the United States cannot speak of immigrant rights on the world stage without being accused, justifiably, of rank hypocrisy.  And in this awful situation, you begin to see how human rights abuses in enough places begin to be self-perpetuating: if everyone is doing it, who’s to say that it’s wrong?  

Rather than using the stick of punishment for real and imagined offenses, why don’t the Danes try the carrot of enticement and engagement?  Such as encouraging immigrants to participate in the political system, creating non-coercive opportunities for natives and new arrivals to get to know each other, and allowing opportunities for Danes to learn more about the newly arrived cultures?  It is easy to guess the reason why: because this would reveal the lies of the racists that the new arrivals are violent, lazy, and irredeemably alien.  As in the United States, the sense that a minority population might threaten the national culture at large bespeaks a deeply pessimistic lack of faith in the vitality of the majority culture.  

The Danes should have a little more faith in themselves.  A country that leads the world in fighting climate change is clearly a country that thinks about its impact on the greater world.  These shameful events in Denmark should prompt public reflection and a debate about what that country’s deepest values are.  Surely treating new arrivals like second-class citizens isn’t one of them.

As frustrating as it is to contemplate how our current president undercuts the United States’ ability to put moral pressure on allies like Denmark to change their illiberal ways, what is happening in Denmark has made me think a little more optimistically about America’s ability to navigate our current crisis.  Despite the anti-Muslim policies of this administration, the concept of religious freedom is hard-wired into our country, and millions of Americans share a basic belief that whatever god one chooses to worship (or not) is a private matter, beyond the realm of politics.  I believe this view will prevail, if only because the implications of living otherwise threaten too many of our heterodox faiths.  

Similarly, the repugnance I feel when I see a country like Denmark identify itself at least partly on the superiority of a certain ethnic identity, and then act on that identity to treat newcomers as second-class citizens, is balanced by what I see as America’s fundamental commitment to a race-neutral existence.  Certainly, this idea is contested, most notably by a Republican Party that has gone all-in on a white supremacist vision of this country.  But this vision is already faltering, and sooner or later, it will fail, because it is a mindset that can only be perpetuated by anti-democratic and ultimately anti-human measures.

For Both Trump and the GOP, It's Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Collusion Fire

The biggest news on the Trump-Russia front today, in this week of blockbuster news, is a New York Times piece detailing the briefing Donald Trump received from national security officials two weeks before his inauguration: a briefing in which the president-elect was provided with explicit evidence that Vladimir Putin had directed Russian assets to interfere with the 2016 election.  I suspect that this is a deep-burrowing bombshell that will continue to reverberate in the weeks ahead, as it builds on an awareness that began to reach a point of critical mass with the Helsinki Surrender Summit: that aside from questions of whether Donald Trump actively colluded with the Russians to sabotage the 2016 election, since that time he has effectively acted to prevent the American people from understanding the scope of Russian perfidy.  He has, in other words, taken the side of Russia against the interests of the United States.  Whether you call it collusion or treason, it is undeniably a profound and disqualifying betrayal of this country.

Up to this last week, Donald Trump’s strategy has been to combine two critical questions into one, and to answer them with a resounding “no”: Did the Russians conducted cyberwarfare against the United States to assist in Trump’s election, and did Trump and/or his campaign collude with such an effort?  For reasons that remain obscure even as explanatory theories abound, the president has insisted that neither happened, even as information providing an irrefutable “yes” to the first question has cascaded into public view for going on two years.  Whatever his reasoning, we can easily see how denying Russian interference takes care of the question of collusion: without interference, there could be no possibility of Trump working with the Russians to interfere.

But in hewing so vehemently to his denial of Russian interference, Donald Trump has effectively opened himself up to a devastating second front on the collusion question: that his policy of denying the fact of Russian interference would at some point be recognized as itself a form of collusion, regardless of whether he colluded with the Russians during the election, once the gap between his denials and reality became wide enough.  The extremity of his denials reached chasm dimensions when he repeated them standing next to the president of the country that had attacked the United States.  And now, to read that Trump has known for a year and a half that the U.S. government had proof not only of Russian interference, but of Putin’s imprimatur on the interference, only heightens the impression that the president has, at least since the election, been actively protecting Russia from the consequences of its actions.

We have also arrived at the point where we can no longer avoid the fact that this has never just been a Trump-Russia story, but a Republican Party-Russia story as well.  As Greg Sargent at The Washington Post explains, the GOP strategy all along has been to provide Donald Trump a specious “escape hatch” via a corrupt bargain: if he would just admit that Russia interfered with the election and contribute to the impression of a “tough-on-Russia” GOP consensus, then Republicans in Congress would work to defend him on the collusion front by delegitimizing Robert Mueller’s investigation.  Sargent goes on to explain the implications of the New York Times story for this arrangement:

But the new revelations from the Times fundamentally change the situation.  The question is no longer:  Why won’t Trump accept the intelligence services’ verdict on what happened, and act accordingly?  That question can be easily answered, by, say, the idea that Trump’s ego won’t let him publicly admit to anything that diminishes the greatness of his victory.  But the question now is a lot harder:  Why did Trump continue actively trying to deceive America into believing that Russian sabotage didn’t happen at all, after having been comprehensively briefed to a previously unknown extent on Putin’s direct involvement in that sabotage effort?

But the problem isn’t limited to the GOP’s preferred damage control strategy on the Trump-Russia front being blown up.  Public awareness that Trump appears to have been colluding with Russia since the election casts a damning light on GOP efforts to protect Trump from the Mueller investigation, since it essentially makes the Republican Party, at a minimum, unwitting accessories to Trump’s collusion.

We can’t lose sight of the basic fact that a horrifying crime was perpetrated against American democracy, and that Donald Trump has worked over the last year to obscure both the basic existence of this crime and our country’s ability to answer legitimate questions about his possible involvement in it.  (The president’s efforts on this front have included, but are not limited to, the following: firing the head of the FBI; attacking journalists as “the enemy of the people”; attacking Democratic politicians who insisted on learning the truth; and attacking U.S. national security agencies).  In providing cover for the president, the GOP has made itself party to actions that strike at the heart of this country’s essence: self-determination and a government that serves the people’s interests.

Now is the time for a relentless dismantling of the increasingly desperate arguments being made by the president and the GOP.  From Donald Trump tweeting that we risk nuclear war with Russia if we continue to accuse it of election interference, to the GOP’s discredited argument that Donald Trump did not collude but is merely afraid of exposing his election as illegitimate, distractions need to be swatted down and focus kept on big questions like these: why does Donald Trump continue to provide cover for Russian crimes against America, and why is it so hard for the GOP to take America’s side?

Have We Undercut Our Response to Trump By Downplaying Worst Case-Scenarios?

In a recent New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait assembles evidence for the most extreme and disastrous possibility lurking in the Trump-Russia story: that Donald Trump has been under the influence of Soviet and Russian intelligence for the last 30 years.  As the subtitle of the story puts it, it’s “a plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.”

This article provides three great services.  First, it delivers one of the most concise and comprehensive summaries of the Trump-Russia connections that I've found.  Second, it opens the door on a possibility that, as I’ll discuss below, is far more possible than most people believe.  And third, it effectively makes the argument that even if the most extreme possibility turns out not to be true, the Russian effort to influence the election and Donald Trump has been met with a chilling and damning receptivity by the president.

Chait’s article also works as a remedy to the issue I discussed yesterday: the general lack of a commonly-understood and -propagated narrative explaining the already-damning state of knowledge around the Trump-Russia scandal.  Chait identifies this problem right off the bat, and homes in on an obstacle to constructing such a narrative: that attempts to grapple with and fit together the known facts have tended to exclude the darkest possibilities about Trump’s ties to Russia.  The implication is that this has led certain facts to be ignored or downplayed, and contributed to the difficulty in arriving at a coherent explanation of the reality of the situation.

One great strength is that the piece clearly presents its evidence as supporting a theory about Trump’s corruption, not the final truth of his long-time subordination to Russian interests.  It doesn’t matter to our current predicament whether Donald Trump has been subject to Russian influence and blackmail for 30 years or 3 years; either way, it’s a disaster for our country, and the political scandal of the century.  What struck me, though, was that in assembling the evidence for long-term ties, Chait paints a deeply disturbing picture regardless of the degree of Donald Trump’s complicity.  This is a situation where if even a fraction of the possibilites are true — and it’s pretty clear at this point that things like Donald Trump’s knowledge that he was effectively laundering dirty Russian money through his real estate business and willingness to accept Russian help during the campaign are irrefutable — then he is too compromised to serve as our chief executive.  Even if the overall theory turns out not to hold water, it does, as Chait implies at the outset, clarify our ability to better understand and see connections between the known facts.

I want to focus on a few particular points that drew my attention.  First, Chait draws a tantalizing line between Trump’s initial political utterances on the national stage and a visit he made to Moscow in 1987.  It’s not simply that 1987 was the year he signaled political aspirations, but the form they took: a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that attacked Japan for relying on the U.S. for its defense.  Sound familiar?  Chait goes on to note that Trump’s ads “avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from.”  Breaking up American alliances has been a perennial goal of both the Soviet Union and Russia from that time to the present; the continuity between Trump’s apparent blindness to any legitimate U.S. interest in protecting other countries as a national security matter, and turning a blind eye to the threat posed by the USSR or Russia, strikes me as remarkable. 

A related point also leaps out at me — I’ve seen it discussed before, but Donald Trump’s enormous vulnerability to blackmail by Russian intelligence emerges as a glaring possibility.  It’s a general technique employed by the Russians, and the possibility that it’s being used against Trump has been obscured by people thinking of blackmail as involving something extremely embarrassing, such as the activities contained in the alleged pee tape.  Though far less salacious, Trump’s business dealings with Russian interests over the last decade and a half likely contain enough shadiness and outright illegality to provide leverage to anyone willing to use it; and as Chait’s article makes clear, it would have been a no-brainer for Russian intelligence to gather such useful materials.

The article also clarifies the sinister and damning role of Paul Manafort’s connection to the Trump campaign.  For me, this was a case of having read and heard so much about Manafort that I had begun to miss the forest for the trees.  Here, Chait lays out not only Manafort’s clear connections to oligarchs closely tied to Putin (and thus his de facto service to Vladimir Putin himself) but his work as a political consultant in Ukraine in a campaign that strongly echoes what we saw in the U.S. in 2016.  Chait writes:

This much was clear in March 2016: The person who managed the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine was now also managing the campaign of a pro-Russian candidate in the United States. And Trump’s campaign certainly looked like the same play Putin had run many times before: Trump inflamed internal ethnic division, assailed the corruption of the elite, attacked Western allies while calling for cooperation with Russia, and sowed distrust in the fairness of the vote count.

While it’s true that a man as immoral and anti-democratic as Trump could have been open to such a playbook from multiple sources, the role of Manafort in his campaign, along with the bounty of other Russian contacts, casts a harsh light on what I had generally assumed was the home-grown nasty nativism of his 2016 campaign.

It’s not central to his article, but Chait makes an observation near the end that captures something that hasn’t gotten enough attention: the fact that Trump has pretty much stopped acting like the Russia investigation will find him innocent.  “He acts like a man with a great deal to hide,” writes Chait, and adds, “Trump’s behavior toward Russia looks nothing like that of a leader of a country it attacked and exactly like that of an accessory after the fact.”  Critically, Chait pairs this with the observation that Trump continually seeks to please Putin in ways that keep alive suspicion that Trump is somehow under Putin’s thumb.  This article was published before the Helsinki summit, but the horrifying press conference in which Trump cleared Russia of blame for election interference may be the most striking example to date of this behavior.  There is an almost uncanny, compulsive quality to Trump’s spouting of pro-Russian positions that only strengthens suspicions of something along the lines of blackmail.

As I’ve weighed the persuasiveness of the case Chait makes, I’ve begun to think there’s a sort of all-or-nothing quality to the general question of Donald Trump’s collusion with Russian interests in the 2016 election.  The more evidence there is that Donald Trump has benefitted from Russian influence and cash — whether it be dirty money that helped fund his real estate ventures or the hacking of Democratic email accounts that embarrassed the Clinton campaign — the more persuasive the arguments that he did so knowingly, because at a basic level the ignorance we are to assume on his part increasingly begins to defy belief.  Similarly, the more evidence there is that he knowingly colluded with Russian interests in the present and recent past, the more persuasive are arguments that this is a long- term arrangement with the Russian government.  This latter point is given particular strength by the fact that we are talking about not just any old criminality, but a criminality that is so heinous — treasonous behavior — that it seems obvious that anyone who would be willing to engage in it now would also be the type of person to have engaged in it years ago.  The nature of the crime points to a debased character that did not come into existence overnight, but that is a long-standing reality.  After all we have collectively observed of Donald Trump's character over the years, can we really say that treason would be a bridge too far for him?

Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together in Explaining Trump-Russia Scandal to the American People

As the sense builds that we may have reached some new tipping point in public awareness and political outrage over Donald Trump’s eagerness to absolve Russia from its crimes against American democracy, I’m feeling wary optimism but also a nagging fear that some dark lessons of the last year and a half have not yet been internalized by opponents of this presidency.

First, I’m thinking of the point Mother Jones reporter David Corn makes in “Donald Trump is Getting Away With the Biggest Scandal in American History,” where he flags the disturbing contrast between the president's easily digested take on the Russia story and the lack of a framing narrative on the part of his critics.  While the president describes the scandal as a “witch hunt” with no basis in reality seemingly every day, those covering and talking about the reality of the story have tended to get bogged down in its vast amount of detail and manifold interconnecting threads.  While Trump essentially repeats that there’s no scandal, no organized force is similarly hammering home the basic fact that Trump and his campaign’s complicity with Russian efforts to subvert the 2016 election are incontrovertible facts through which all further developments should be understood.

Corn’s critique encompasses the media, commentators, and the Democratic Party for falling down on this basic issue of framing —  but from The Hot Screen’s perspective, it’s the Democrats who have had the primary responsibility to provide this, and who have badly failed thus far.  Corn suggests that early on, the Democrats may have shied away from more aggressively discussing the Trump-Russia ties for fear of seeming like sore losers and due to an overall state of disorientation due to the election outcome.  But it seems that the Democrats failed to grasp that Donald Trump’s continued and compulsive need to defend himself and attack all inquiries into what transpired in the course of the election opened a path for the Democrats to put the Russia scandal more firmly in front of the American people.  And as Corn indicates, Democrats also failed to respond in an organized fashion and in a way that insisted on the basic facts of the situation.  My sense is that this extreme caution was heightened by the existence of the Mueller probe.  If the probe ended up exposing damning behavior on the part of Trump, they’d act then; in the meantime, seeming to politicize the investigation could potentially discredit the otherwise game-changing findings of the Mueller investigation.

The imbalance between the president’s ceaseless “Witch hunt!” rhetoric and a scattershot Trump-Russia narrative by Democrats tempers my hope that even Trump’s abject submission to Vladimir Putin at the “Putting the Hell Back in Helsinki” summit will persuade significant numbers of citizens that something was rotten in the state of Finland.  My fears seem borne out even as I write this, as the president is claiming to have simply misspoken one line about the role of Russia in attacking the 2016 election; he is relying on confusion and evasion to save himself, just as he has over the last year and a half.

But I’ve got a more troubling concern about what effect Trump’s behavior in Helsinki will have on his presidency.  Just as the fight against Trump has been hobbled by poor framing of the Russia scandal in general, discussions of how the scandal (and Trump’s other misbehavior) will be countered have largely rested on an unspoken and largely unquestioned premise that there is a breaking point at which the president will lose the support of his own party, and that this will lead to some sort of reckoning for the Trump administration.  However, the GOP response to this abomination of a summit throws that premise into serious doubt.  Although there have been a few strongly worded condemnations of the president’s Helsinki rhetoric, the House and Senate leadership has largely engaged in a two-step critique in which they assert the reality of the Russian attack, yet refuse to engage in any strengthened oversight or investigation of the president’s complicity with that attack.  As this CNN piece puts it, “Republicans are grumbling but seem resigned to inaction.”

While incompetence is a possible explanation for this abdication, we already see some Republican politicians suggesting a bold alternative direction for the party: to fall back and accept the Russian interference, while presenting it as something that every country does to every other.  On the maximalist end of things, Brian Beutler at Crooked.com has been pointing out how the Republicans have effectively been giving the Russians cover by attacking the Mueller probe, even when they’re well aware of the reality of Russian interference; in his latest post, Beutler suggests that many members of the GOP are in fact comfortable with Russian election interference, so long as it targets Democrats. 

While this possibility is nauseating and shocking, here’s what I keep coming back to: in the absence of any substantial Republican pushback, let alone credible expressions of concern, regarding Donald Trump’s ties to Russia and clear subordination to Vladimir Putin, the possibility that this is indeed the GOP’s default position needs to be taken seriously.  Of course it’s not something any Republican official would say out loud; but their steady defense of the president this last year and a half has had the effect not only of slowing efforts to determine the extent of the Trump-Russia ties, but the extent of known Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The question then becomes, has the GOP, without necessarily making a conscious decision to do so, wound up taking the de facto position that election interference isn’t so bad so long as it helps them?  This argument gains more weight when you consider the role of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in vetoing President Obama’s effort in 2016 to issue a bipartisan statement on Russia's election sabotage.  McConnell, as Machiavellian and soulless a figure as you will find in Washington, has made clear during his time in the Republican leadership that a quest for power trumps all other concerns: it is more important than justice, more important than the country’s economic health, more important than democracy itself.  If the ends justify the means in all cases, then why would a hand-up from the Russians be any different for him?

But you don’t have to accept that the GOP tacitly or explicitly supports Russian interference on its behalf in order to see that the assumption that Republicans will at some point oppose Trump on the basis of revelations about his behavior is not a sound one.  To the degree that the Democratic strategy for holding Donald Trump to account for his Russia ties rests on this assumption, then, it seems that the Democrats would be wise to choose a new strategy.  Now, in their defense, many Democrats have been making the basic point that the solution to our mess is to elect as many Democrats as possible to the House and Senate in the 2018 elections.  This argument makes sense in many ways, including the fact that it allows them to campaign on a positive platform of change alongside their critique of Donald Trump’s misdeeds.  However, as I’ve argued before, it fails to relieve Democrats of their responsibility to do whatever it takes to hold Donald Trump to account in the present.  And in a broader sense, they risk letting slip a once-in-a-generation opportunity to permanently identify the Democrats as the party that protects democracy, and the GOP as the party that doesn't give a flying f*** so long as they can gut health care and cut taxes for the rich. 

Labeling Treasonous Behavior as "Norm-Breaking" Pushes Language to the Point of Nonsense

The criticism and perspective Mark Landler offers in this New York Times analysis of the Trump-Putin Helsinki conference put on full display the blinders too often encountered in mainstream press coverage of the ongoing Trump-Russia crisis.  On the one hand, props to Landler for zeroing in some of the most outrageous moments of this deeply troubling tete-a-tete: he points out that Trump made clear he trusts Putin over the U.S. intelligence community, and that the president shockingly attacked the Justice Department and FBI from abroad.

But in describing Trump’s behavior as “rule-breaking,” Lander minimizes presidential rhetoric and policy that is more obviously described as “treasonous” or “anti-American.”  To call the idea of siding with a country that attacked your own "breaking a norm" is true only in the most anodyne and misleading sense.  To attack your own branch of government in favor of the statements of a murderous autocrat is so far past a simple description of “rule-breaking” as to be borderline nonsense.

Lander’s unwillingness to state the obvious emerges in what on its surface is a powerful observation — his linkage of Trump’s response to the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville last year and his behavior at the Helsinki summit.  He writes:

In the fiery, disruptive, rules-breaking arc of Mr. Trump’s statecraft, the president’s remarks in Helsinki on Monday marked an entirely new milestone, the foreign policy equivalent of Charlottesville.

Just as Mr. Trump flouted the most deeply held traditions of the American presidency in equating the torch-wielding marchers and the leftist activists who fought them in Virginia last summer, he shredded all conventional notions of how a president should conduct himself abroad. Rather than defend America against those who would threaten it, he attacked his own citizens and institutions while hailing the leader of a hostile power.

As avid readers of The Hot Screen will be quick to point out, this website drew a similar parallel between Charlottesville and Trump’s behavior towards the world last month, in the wake of the catastrophic G-7 meeting.  But the nature of the connection between those events, as between Charlottesville and Trump’s subservience to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, is not that both times Trump broke norms, but that he has thrown his lot in with enemies of American democracy.  The problem with his reaction to Charlottesville wasn’t equating both sides, but that in doing so he lent legitimacy and, more subtly, presidential approbation, to a side that opposes the actual existence of the United States.  He has now done the same thing with Russia, saying that the U.S. is equally to blame for problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship, and in doing so effectively endorsing a whole host of pernicious behavior by Russia against American interests.

Lander also badly misses the mark by suggesting that the connections between Trump’s behavior around Charlottesville and at the Helsinki summit are predominantly matters of temperament, encapsulated in some vague notion of norm-breaking and acting outside traditional presidential behavior.  Rather, in both cases, the president has chosen to side with anti-democratic, anti-American forces who see violence as a legitimate form of conducting politics.  Moreover, there are deep connections between the Christian-fascist ideology that Vladimir Putin has developed to maintain power, and the ideology of the white supremacists at Charlottesville.  These connections are substantial, meaningful, and deeply disturbing to anyone who views the United States as a country that seeks to transcend divisions of race and religion.  Indeed, you might say that they are the antithesis and the repudiation not only of our country’s highest aspirations, but of the actual common life that hundreds of millions of Americans make together every day.

Washington Post Editorialist Makes Key Point About Ongoing Trump-Russia Collusion

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post has a short piece up today that makes a couple key points about the Russia-Trump relationship that are both important in themselves and hint at a larger development in this overall story.  Sargent argues that no matter whether or not collusion existed between the Trump campaign and Russia, Donald Trump’s behavior at the Helsinki meeting constitutes a de facto rewarding of Vladimir Putin for Russia’s role in helping Trump’s candidacy.  Trump accomplished this both by choosing not to press the matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election in any meaningful way, and by making statements and issuing tweets that absolve the Russians of any blame.

But Sargent also makes a narrower point that may be the fulcrum of the case to be made about Donald Trump’s failure to defend the United States against foreign attack:

He’s also giving a gift to Putin, by signaling that he will continue to do all he can to delegitimize efforts to establish the full truth about Russian interference, which in turn telegraphs that Russia can continue such efforts in the future (which U.S. intelligence officials have warned will happen in the 2018 elections). In a sense, by doing this, Trump is colluding with such efforts right now.

Denying the reality of past Russian interference means that President Trump has made himself complicit with ongoing and future Russian sabotage against the United States.  Sargent hedges the phrasing by saying “in a sense” Trump is colluding with Russia, but whatever term one chooses to use, the underlying reality is that Donald Trump is enabling the actions of a hostile power against the United States in the present day [UPDATE: Sargent has a follow-up tweet that removes any doubt that he's calling out Trump's behavior as collusion].  According to the president’s own director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, the scope of Russian sabotage goes well past election interference to clear evidence that it’s currently attacking U.S. digital infrastructure.  

Finally — as you look at Sargent’s narrower point about collusion and his larger point that the Helsinki meeting constituted payback for Russia’s assistance with Trump’s election, we can make a broader observation that’s been increasingly reflected in coverage of the Trump-Russia story: that no matter what the full story of the connections between Trump and Russia may turn out to be, we are at a point where Trump’s behavior, both toward Russia and toward allegations of Russian attacks on the United States, simply cannot be explained as reasonable or innocent behavior by a president of the United States.

Trump would deny the existence of any context for his behavior toward Russia beyond the idea that the relationship with the United States is unnecessarily bad, that this is a crisis, and that he alone can resolve it.  Of course, the larger context for the Helsinki meeting is, first, that Russia has acted in ways deeply hostile to the United States and its interests in recent years; and second, that Trump has expended great efforts throughout his presidency, and glaringly in the week prior to the meeting, attacking both NATO and the European Union, the dissolution of both being a primary Russian goal.  In other words, everywhere you look into Trump’s behavior towards long-time U.S. interests, you find rhetoric and actions that make no sense in terms of American power or values, and complete sense in terms of What Would Russia Do?  Simply put, we now have a full year and a half of Trump’s presidential malfeasance in the matter of Russia by which to judge him, and it is looking very damning indeed.

President Trump's Rhetoric at Helsinki Meeting Highlights Deceptive Russia Policy

Any American who is paying attention today and has even a token ability to think critically can see that a frightening and unprecedented turn of the historical screw is upon our country.  Donald Trump is using his public appearances and statements around his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to essentially clear the Russians of any wrong-doing in both the 2016 election and in the world at large.  The single most chilling incident may have been his use of a joint appearance with Putin to attack special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation only days after it indicted a dozen Russian military operatives for interference in the 2016 election, calling the probe “a disaster for our country.”  To state this as clearly as possible: Donald Trump has just assailed an American investigation that has uncovered and is responding to a Russian attack on our elections while standing next to the man who almost doubtless ordered that attack.

Less chilling but equally revealing are Donald Trump’s assertions today that the U.S.-Russia relationship “has never been worse,” while claiming to have turned that situation around by his meeting with Putin.  The idea that there are high levels of tension between the two countries, and that the most important thing is to tamp down those tensions, is a key sleight-of-hand that Trump is employing.  First, he has effectively defined this level of tension as the main crisis between the countries, and has put himself forward as the one who can fix it.  Second, having defined the crisis as an abstract matter of “bad relations,” he gives himself enormous room for maneuver in dealing with Russia, since the overriding problem from his perspective is the bad relationship between the countries. 

This approach is found throughout Trump's remarks today.  He said that both the United States and Russia were responsible for the deterioration in relations between them, but also tweeted that the “foolishness” and “stupidity” of prior presidents were to blame as well. 

But all this emphasis on the U.S. and Russia having bad relations in need of remedy is aimed at sweeping under the rug the actual reasons that the Obama administration, and currently congressional Democrats, have taken a hard line against Russia in the first place: Russia not only interfered with the 2016 election, but has engaged in violent, destabilizing behavior that threatens global stability.  These actions include Russian’s invasion of Ukraine and Crimea, assassination of civilians living in the United Kingdom, military involvement in Syria to prop up the murderous Assad regime, and attacks on European elections similar to the interference against the United States.

In stressing an “all sides are to blame” approach, the president is simultaneously delegitimizing the U.S. brief against Russia, and legitimizing the bad behavior by Russia that led the U.S., at least under Obama, to see Russia as a problem.  Trump’s rhetorical approach is like saying that the problem in a marriage is that a couple’s relationship is deteriorating, not the fact that the husband beats the wife.  Donald Trump points to America's bad relationship with Russia as the crisis of the moment, when the true crisis lies in the many dangerous reasons Russia has given us to be fully on guard against that country, and in the unresolved question of why Donald Trump has chosen to subordinate his constitutional duty to protect the United States to the aggrandizement of Vladimir Putin’s power.

Washington Post Exposé Spotlights Exploitative Consumer Installment Lending Companies

The Washington Post published an investigative report last week that highlights troubling continuities between the pre-2008 financial crisis economy and today.  In it, reporter Peter Whoriskey details the activities of Mariner Finance, one of the largest “consumer installment lending” companies in the United States.  Companies like Mariner are in the business of offering extremely high-interest loans — with interest rates as high as 36% — to economically-strapped, credit-compromised individuals.  While this industry presents itself as providing a vital service to people otherwise unable to obtain loans, and so filling a necessary niche in the economy, the article clarifies how such a service is inextricably linked to a predatory and immoral business model.  

In the case of Mariner, we see that the business model is not simply to reap outsize interest from people living at the financial edge, but to drive such people into default on these exorbitant loans.  Ex-employees of the company describe efforts to push further loans on people already unable to pay back the original money, in an obvious effort to get them to default so as to stick them with even more fees.  Adding insult to injury, the fine print of the loan contracts requires defaulting customers to pay the company’s legal expenses; in a telling detail, Mariner defends this practice by stating that it is the lawyers, not Mariner, that make money off this arrangement, as if the fact of the customer being screwed is somehow mitigated by haziness around which corporation is doing the screwing.

The individual stories told here shock the conscience.  A woman in the midst of a medical crisis and a non-native English speaker are among the victims of the hardball tactics of Mariner employees.

The final layer of merde in this shit sandwich of a scam is that the president of the private equity fund that owns Mariner is none other than Timothy Geithner, former treasury secretary under President Obama, who in his former role opposed such predatory lending.  Geithner’s willingness to profit off such behavior in the present offers yet more fuel for the already well-grounded case that the Obama officials in charge of dealing with the financial crisis were ultimately more sympathetic to the needs of big finance than the public at large, the consequences of which we continue to grapple with. 

But it’s when you pull back from the sleazy tactics to contemplate the broader picture that the story of Mariner and its ilk grows even more disturbing.  Consumer installment lending companies engage in bottom-feeding and exploitative behavior, but these companies in turn have become darlings of private equity funds that invest the money of the wealthiest strata of American society; the Post notes that “three of the largest companies in consumer installment lending are owned to a significant extent by private equity funds.”  Stated as plainly as possible: this is a way that the richest people in the United States not only make money off the poorest people in America, but in a way that makes them even poorer.  Pretending to alleviate the ravages of inequality, in reality they seek to profit off of it. This is a blinding instance of class warfare perpetrated by those awash in riches against those barely afloat or already underwater.  As one former Mariner employee remarks, “It’s basically a way of monetizing poor people.”

But along with such stark revelations, the story of Mariner steers us headlong into some of the most powerful questions and mysteries of American life today.  The central one may be how a democratic society can find itself trapped in a spiral of increasing inequality for the great majority of its population, including the increasing immiseration of a large percentage of those people.

The Post story provides some tantalizing leads.  One is Mariner’s justification for its practices: essentially, that the company is providing a loan service to people otherwise not served by the credit industry, and that in doing so they are helping this population.  Put a little more abstractly, Mariner has in effect both discovered and created a market, and asserts that this creation of a market is synonymous with serving a public good.  Yet this apparently virtuous connection between serving a market and serving a public good would have us ignore the reason why these folks can’t get loans through the banking system in the first place: because they have a high risk of not being able to pay back the money back.  The fact that Mariner’s lending practices are so thoroughly exploitative suggests that there is a mismatch between the crisis these people are in and the notion that there’s a market solution to the problem.  If your solution is the same as making people’s problems worse, that’s not a solution; it’s making yourself part of the problem.

The notion that every problem can be solved by a profit-seeking corporation ignores the ethical and political dimensions of millions of Americans being on the edge of destitution.  Essentially, companies like Mariner see their customers not as citizens deserving of compassion and respect, but as marks to be taken advantage of; they substitute the morality of the casino for the morality of a democracy.

That corporations would prefer the cold logic of profit over the humane and ethical standards of democratic fraternity is hardly a shocker, but it seems critical that we fully grasp the degree to which the U.S. has deferred to such thinking on fundamentally moral questions such as how to offer assistance to the poorest segments of American society.  But this arrangement couldn’t survive were it not for a complementary mindset lurking in the American population: that people in dire financial straits deserve what they get.  This judgmental moralism seems like a prime candidate for why the exploitation of the already down-and-out doesn’t provoke widespread outrage.  If you deserve to be poor, then you deserve to be poorer.  In a tortuous maneuver, Americans seem indifferent to the purely economic logic that if there’s money to be made, these people should be exploited, yet endorse the parallel logic that because they’re poor, they deserve to be exploited.  This thought process has the additional advantage of placing those who engage in it outside the realm of the exploited.  I’m not arguing that all of this is a wholly or even partly-conscious line of reasoning for most people, but the idea that what people get is what they deserve feels like a key piece of how we justify to ourselves a situation of extreme inequality.  In such a claustrophobic and self-perpetuating scenario, empathy begins to seem downright revolutionary.

Venezuela Invasion Talk Suggests Confluence of Belligerence and Interest in Boosting President's Domestic Standing

At Vox, Alex Ward is arguing for the importance of the latest reports about President Trump’s repeated inquiries into invading Venezuela last year.  Ward raises two points that I wish I’d highlighted in my post on this subject.  First, even if this catastrophic idea was never implemented, Donald Trump’s public references to the idea — both to Latin American leaders and to the press — provided a massive propaganda coup to Venezuela’s dictator/president, Nicolas Maduro.  The prospect of U.S. intervention in that country is an idea Maduro had used in the past to consolidate support, and he did so again when these reports came out last year.  Second, Trump’s discussion of this idiocy with Latin American leaders surely did harm to America’s relationship to our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere.  Our president may be ignorant of the long and terrible history of American imperialism in Latin America, but the leaders of those countries are surely not.

Ward also importantly puts Trump’s discussions with his advisors about invasion in the context of contemporaneous events.  Significantly, these talks occurred within days of his “fire and fury” comments regarding North Korea and a general atmosphere of increased nuclear tensions.  As Ward puts it, “So, in the middle of all of that, Trump apparently thought, “You know what would be a great idea right now? Launching a military invasion in South America.”  

That his advisors appear to have steered President Trump away from this hideous path must be weighed against the fact that the president had such incompetent and destructive inclinations to begin with.  As a fuller picture has emerged over the extent of his inquiries around a Venezuela invasion, those who feared the darkest possibilities of a Trump presidency regrettably find their fears confirmed.  And like I noted yesterday, it is little comfort that the invasions that the president referenced in his discussions with staff — Grenada and Panama — were themselves politically-motivated stunts meant to boost the domestic standing of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, respectively.  His Venezuela musings should only increase our concern that as his presidency continues to flounder, Donald Trump will not hesitate to look abroad for ways to distract and rally the public under the banner of military action.

Donald Trump’s Fixation on Invading Venezuela Betrays “America First” Promises to His Supporters

Aspects of this story were reported last year, but a new Associated Press piece reveals more starkly President’s Trump’s interest in invading the sovereign nation of Venezuela in response to its turmoil under President Nicolas Maduro.  It turns out that Trump directly asked advisors why the United States couldn’t invade the South American country; his advisors, to their credit, tried to re-direct him:  

In an exchange that lasted around five minutes, [national security advisor H.R.] McMaster and others took turns explaining to Trump how military action could backfire and risk losing hard-won support among Latin American governments to punish President Nicolas Maduro for taking Venezuela down the path of dictatorship, according to the official.  The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.

But Trump pushed back. Although he gave no indication he was about to order up military plans, he pointed to what he considered past cases of successful gunboat diplomacy in the region, according to the official, like the invasions of Panama and Grenada in the 1980s.

It’s telling that the two previous U.S. military interventions in Latin American countries that Trump referenced were from the recent-ish past, as this scarily shows the limits of his basic historical knowledge.  It’s also notable that he harkened back to the precedents set by fellow Republican presidents whose actions, in retrospect, had far more to do with boosting their approval ratings than protecting national security.

But even if Trump is shockingly unaware of the longer, shameful U.S. history of intervention in Latin American affairs that predates those two invasions, his remarks put him squarely in this discredited tradition of seeing Latin America sovereignty as subordinate to the whims of American power — a tradition that ranges from a U.S.-backed coup in Chile to the abetting of genocide in Guatemala, crimes that only appear more sordid and unforgivable with the passage of time.

Apart from inevitably setting back relations with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere —some of whose leaders learned of Trump’s thinking when he told them himself — and putting aside questions of morality, Trump’s reckless consideration of invading Venezuela reveals a disturbing ignorance as to the limits and costs of war.  For any American politician to have witnessed the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade and a half, only to consider invasion a tool of U.S. foreign policy, should immediately raise questions as to his or her basic fitness for office.

Of course, since we’re talking about Donald Trump, the supply of such questions has begun to approach the infinite — so why, you might ask, is this latest revelation worth a second glance?

Well, for anyone opposed to the presidency of Donald Trump and the return of progressive, pro-democracy governance in the United States, any revelations of Donald Trump’s belligerence in matters of war and peace are important because they undercut the “America First” message that was key to his electoral appeal.  During the 2016 campaign, it was startling to hear Donald Trump repudiate the Iraq invasion as a massive waste of money that would have been better spent at home — partly because he had previously supported the war, but mostly because this critique had seemed off-limits to any major Republican presidential candidate.  Equally startling, his line of attack seems to have found a receptive audience in his voting base.

Rather than just one more scandalous incident among many, Trump’s repeated interest in military intervention in Venezuela gives the lie to his “America First” rhetoric.  His inquiries to his advisors on this matter give the impression of an ignoramus who has just been given the world’s biggest hammer (in the form of the U.S. military) and is disposed to see every challenge he faces as a nail; it is as if he bears no relationship to the man on the campaign trail who decried our wasteful wars in the Middle East.  It is, in a nutshell, awfully nutty.

One of the most important things opponents of Trump can be doing is peeling off members of his base into neutrality or opposition to the president, highlighting the fact that he’s saying one thing to supporters in public and another thing to advisors in private — this is just politics 101.  Trump interrogating his team about invasion isn’t just Trump being Trump; it’s Trump being someone quite different than what he’d have his base believe.  We’re not talking one-day missile strikes against Syria that make everyone feel like America is powerful; we’re talking about the president considering actions that would result in the loss of American life for no reason but the man's ignorance. 

It’s significant, then, that in the midst of the Associated Press piece, the reporter observes of Trump’s invasion fixation that, “[C]ritics say it also underscores how his “America First” foreign policy at times can seem outright reckless, providing ammunition to America’s adversaries.”  It’s telling that no actual critics are quoted to this effect; while critics may indeed say that Trump's “America First” foreign policy is reckless, what’s remarkable about these Venezuela revelations is that they fall outside our previous understanding of his “America First” policy. 

Thus far, when applied to foreign affairs, “America First” has primarily had an economic meaning, such as imposing tariffs on allies in order to correct alleged trade abuses.  In a non-economic arena, such as the effort to check North Korea’s nuclear program, there is at least some relation to U.S. security; for example, in the rational fear that North Korean nuclear weapons might be targeted against the United States.  No such “America First” connection exists in the case of Venezuela; to use that term means to make it indistinguishable from the worst strains of traditional American interventionist policy.  Trying to fit these latest revelations in a familiar box, the author inadvertently ends up highlighting the degree to which Trump has departed from his public emphasis on prioritizing U.S. interests at home.  

It’s clear that making a big deal out of this Venezuela news alone won’t be enough to change perceptions of the Trump presidency.  But this information, contradicting Trump’s claims to prioritize the economy and to shun foreign entanglements, seems like a wedge worth considering to help peel away those of Trump’s supporters who already have their doubts.  It’s also an opening for progressives to articulate a foreign policy that takes militarism off the table as an acceptable tool, while using an unpopular and ignorant president as their foil.  

Uphill Supreme Court Battle Will Require Progressives to Keep an Eye on the Long Game

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell broke precedent in a dangerous and destabilizing way when he denied a hearing to President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016; Democrats cannot now do an about-face and say they embrace his flawed reasoning without effectively endorsing McConnell's democracy-corroding gambit.  That said, McConnell did open the door to the idea that some extreme circumstances might require legitimate opposition to the president’s ability to appoint a Supreme Court justice.  As is argued in this editorial by Paul Schiff Berman and elsewhere, a strong case can be made that Donald Trump should not be allowed to appoint a new justice until Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation is over.  The reasoning?  That the president is effectively in a position to choose someone who will very likely be weighing in on a case against him personally.  As Berman puts it, "It is no exaggeration to say that never before has the selection of a Supreme Court nominee been so thoroughly compromised by the president’s profound personal interest in appointing a judge he can count on to protect him."

Others have argued that, given Donald Trump’s repeated behavior with other officials, there is a decent likelihood that he will attempt to extract some form of loyalty pledge from his nominee — an idea unthinkable before this presidency, but one that is now well within the realm of possibility.  Regardless, the stakes for the fate of the United States couldn’t be higher.  Obviously, a Supreme Court that, however narrowly, decides that the president can pardon himself of any crimes he might commit would be licensing a tyranny that effectively ends the American constitutional and democratic order.  Disturbingly, we saw plenty of examples over the past few weeks of the right-leaning Supreme Court ruling in ways that offer political assistance to the GOP, from supporting the president’s Muslim ban to upholding racially-motivated gerrymandering.  The first ruling essentially chose an expansive view of presidential power over the primacy of America’s religious first principles; the second turned a blind eye to the anti-democratic and racist motivations of rigged districts.

The reasons the opposition chooses to highlight for its opposition to Donald Trump’s Supreme Court choice are critical, not because they will heighten the chances of victory — which seems an extremely remote possibility, given the Democrats’ minority position and the failure of any Republican senators to consistently stand up to this president — but because of the way they contribute to constructing a larger critique of Donald Trump that will help persuade Americans to reject his party in 2018 and the president himself in 2020.  Democrats and others would do well to oppose the nominee on grounds that go to the heart of why they oppose Donald Trump and the ever-further-right GOP.  The idea that the nominee could not be trusted to rule fairly on cases involving the man who appoints him or her is a close cousin to the idea that the Supreme Court should not be a friend to the powerful business interests who give untold amounts of money to the election campaigns of the Senators entrusted to confirm the new justice.  And so opposition to this pick will also be a valuable opportunity to argue about what type of Supreme Court justice Democrats would support, as a way of highlighting the stark divide between far-right justices who place the power of business and government power above all else, and justices who understand the straitened circumstances of so many Americans and are sympathetic to righting the massive imbalances of power and wealth in our country, not driving them even further into feudal and profoundly undemocratic territories.

The bitterness and danger of this moment can’t be overstated.  The GOP, having stolen a Supreme Court seat in the last year of the Obama presidency, now gets to confirm a second appointment in less than two years, based on a choice made by a president whose legitimacy remains an open question, and whose ultimate loyalties are not to the Constitution, or a democratic America, but to the aggrandizement of numero uno.  But the peril of our moment means that careful strategizing and a view to the long game of essentially re-booting democracy in America must always be in the forefront of our thinking.  I’ve called repeatedly for a cold ruthlessness in defending our country from the authoritarian tide, and that mindset is appropriate here.  There are good arguments being made that if Democrats do manage to delay this nomination until after the mid-terms, it will only serve to rile up conservative voters to turn out and vote in order to assure that Trump’s nominee is eventually confirmed.

An increasingly conservative Supreme Court is a disaster, even a nightmare, for our country, but we also must bear in mind that there are limits to its power.  Ultimately, a Supreme Court that rules repeatedly in ways that fly in the face of societal and political consensus risks its legitimacy.  Let’s worry more about what we can control — building a majority to take back Congress and take back the presidency.  We should have a little faith that we’re on the right side of history and that we can build a movement that will eventually bend even a recalcitrant Supreme Court in the direction of democracy. 

ICE, ICE, Baby Torture

During his year and a half in office, Donald Trump has successfully managed not to improve the lives of millions of Americans in any meaningful way.  His substantial domestic achievements — and there have been achievements, just not good ones — have all tended in a single direction: towards the aggrandizement of the already-rich and powerful, at the expense of those who work for a living.  From regulation rollbacks at the EPA that will cause death and disease due to more poisons in our air and water, to a tax bill that throws crumbs to ordinary Americans but hearty loaves to gazillionaires, to the rollback of financial regulations that will allow big banks to make still more money at the price of endangering our collective economy, he’s overseen a plutocratic agenda that views government as the servant of the 1%.   

This is why, apart from his own personal enthusiasms, President Trump’s willingness to press forward with divisive, inhumane, and fundamentally racist immigration policies appears only to have strengthened despite weeks of mounting resistance and deeply critical and damning press coverage.  Any fair-minded reading of the facts shows that there is no actual immigration crisis at the southern border.  I’ve been following the story closely, and even I was shocked to see how much less current immigration is compared to the last few decades.  Throw in the fact that many of these people are primarily here to seek asylum from violence and other reasons, and you begin to get a sense of how artificial this purported emergency really is.

What on its surface seems like this week's defeat — with the president copping to his own lie that he couldn’t do anything to remedy the child separation policy, yet then ending it with the stroke of a pen — may well be one further ratchet up the spiral of this crisis of his own making.  There is no clear strategy to rectify the family separations that have already occurred, and plans are being laid for further mass warehousing of children through the summer.  If getting tough on immigrants excites his base, and he has no other ideas, what on earth is to stop the president from continuing such practices in more and more extreme fashion?

But getting tough on immigrants is ultimately a proxy fight for promulgating a white supremacist vision that Trump, and much of the GOP, sees as both a central political identity and method of retaining political power.  The appeal of this vision is fueled by demographic change in America, with our country well on its way to whites no longer being a majority.  Whether white Americans fully admit it or not, being the majority group has provided all sorts of benefits, and there is fear of losing economic and social status.  For too many, the solution is to put down non-whites and embrace the darkest strains of America’s divided past.

But white fears around demographic change are intentionally being amplified by politicians who see playing up racial division as essential to distracting voters from the basic truth I noted at the start — that Trump and the GOP really have nothing to offer the ordinary voter who earns less than six figures a year.  And so distraction of the lowest and most hateful kind has become the order of the day.  The basic underlying message to white voters is minimalist and tribal: we will do nothing for you, except ensure that you are at least kept above all other groups in our country.  (In accepting this bargain, white Americans ironically embody the contradictory accusations of laziness and cunning leveled at groups like Mexicans and African-Americans — rather than fight such condescending and self-serving politicians and economic interests, they sit back and blame other people for their troubles, while claiming to be the only group in American society deserving of the full benefits of government power; rather than doing the hard and empathetic work of fighting for justice for all, they place their faith in and delegate their democratic responsibilities to a single authoritarian leader.)

The war on immigrants may have started as a symbolic fight in the larger struggle to keep America white and Americans distracted from their real, collective challenges, but in the past months it has become more akin to an actual war over America’s meaning and soul.  When children are tortured — for what else are we to call the infliction of unbearable psychological pain and long-term damage on kids in the name of political advantage? — then we are well past the point where the debate is in any way abstract or without the deepest consequence.  It is no surprise that Donald Trump swiftly followed his purported retreat on child separations with a doubling-down on the idea that immigrants are murderers and otherwise evil people, arguing that the separations of children from parents at the border are nothing compared to the “permanent separation” that occurs when an immigrant kills an American citizen.  Such defamation is racism in its purest form; delivered by a president who has exhibited no qualms about abusing children for political purposes, there is no looking away from this evil.

The cruelty of the situation is compounded by the basic truth that Latin American immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, have contributed far more to this country than they’ve received.  Look no further than the thousands upon thousands of American business owners, from grape growers to slaughterhouse operators, who have been more than happy to overwork and underpay undocumented workers in order to increase their profits.  (As a fun exercise, ask yourself how vocal these employers have been in defending people they know to be hard and reliable workers against the aspersions of the Trump administration).  It has not been a just system by any stretch of the imagination — no arrangement that requires people to live in the shadows without full political rights can ever be viewed as just — but the assertion that such immigrants have been a net harm to the United States is a position that the behavior of thousands of Republican-voting business owners easily refutes.  You would not be wrong to say that one of the central tensions of Republicanism over the past few decades has been between whether it is better to fuck over immigrants by expelling them or to fuck them over by exploiting them.

The national backlash to Trump's child separation policy shows that a large majority of Americans retains a strong moral compass on issues of right and wrong.  But the president's apparent decision to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment as the primary way to fight the 2018 midterms means that he is effectively choosing the terrain on which those elections will be held, terrain which he views as favorable to himself.  In one sense, he’s correct, in that stoking hatred against Latin Americans has widespread approval among core Republican voters.  One possibility is that, as I fear and suspect, he will double down on his child separation and detention policies, so that by the time of the midterms we witness tens of thousands of Latino immigrants being held in inhumane conditions as a sadistic bid to show he’s tough on immigration and fighting for his base.

The most critical danger in this scenario is the massive human rights abuses this would entail, resulting in mass human suffering.  Politically, the danger is that it would up the stakes for the Democrats, as there would be no avoiding an escalated fight to end such un-American practices.   As I noted last week, Trump is not entirely incorrect in believing that forcing the Democrats’ main issue to be advocacy for non-citizens is not ideal for the opposition.  But even if the president chooses to water down his policies in a bid for more centrist voters, there is no doubt that he intends to maintain the boil of self-imposed crisis at the border.  

If Trump is able to make immigration the central issue of the midterm elections, then anyone who opposes Trump must make it a priority to redefine the meaning of this issue.  The president would define it as a fight over the economic and national security of country, as well as a question of cultural survival for the white majority.  I see no path forward but to make explicit what the president would still prefer to keep slightly hidden about his message.  We need to make the full definition of Trump’s immigration agenda plain in all its nativist, ignorant, sadistic squalor.

To do so, I see a pressing need to find a way forward between two big ideas that are currently in tension for many people.  On the one hand, there is no avoiding a fight on the meaning of immigration to our country.  It is clear to me that we are a nation of immigrants, that this is our country’s strength and origin, and that any attempts to deny this will result in both substantial damage to our nation and empowerment of the white supremacist thinking at the root of current opposition to immigration.  On the other hand, stoking fears of immigration is Donald Trump’s main way to distract Americans from more pressing issues, including the epic bout of plunder and graft occurring in his administration.  It’s essential that Democrats make the case that he wants us to talk about immigration so we don’t talk about all the ways he and the GOP are working to take away health care, not to mention the curious way he seems to have subordinated American foreign policy to Vladimir Putin’s wish list.  More than anything, we need to make the case that stoking racist fears is how he distracts people from a host of substantive issues, many of which are economic, on which he has nothing to offer, and the solutions to which would involve raising up all Americans.  

In other words, we can’t avoid pushing back against Trump's anti-immigrant, racist vision of America; but we also can’t let it suck all the oxygen from a fight from all the other issues on which progressives hold a winning hand, from health care to voting rights, and from environmental protection to securing our electronic borders against future election interference.  There needs to be a strategy to make this into a single, unified fight.

Child Separation Policy Is Logical Endpoint of Trump and Sessions' Stunted Notion of American "Greatness"

Recently, in defending U.S. immigration policy under the Trump administration, Jeff Sessions made an assertion which I strongly suspect he views as a silver bullet to refute any and all criticisms of the restrictive and punitive policies he has taken against immigrants.  He essentially stated that the United States is a political entity that is fully within its rights to patrol its own borders and act in defense of its own sovereignty.  But beneath the anodyne obviousness of his point, with which few would argue, is a welter of subtexts and assumptions that sprout from a benighted and racist view of what type of country the United States is and should be.  Sessions’ long record and current advocacy show that he believes the United States is under threat because the relative number of white people is declining: a racist view which has led inexorably to cruel and inhuman practices against immigrants who, per the logic of racism, are less than human and threaten the racial purity of our country, and so are deserving of whatever draconian practices are enacted against them.

Sessions’ statement also embodies the “Basta!” cry of so many Trump voters who perceive the United States to be under the assault of a combined cultural and economic wave of foreigners stealing American jobs and altering American culture in ways with which they are deeply uncomfortable; who believe that too much more of this means that America will cease to be America.  Sessions' words may be out of a political science textbook, but his more moralistic suggestion that we need to restrict immigration to protect our general way of life runs through his words.

Yet a basic contradiction at the heart of Sessions’ argument points up the smallness of the man and the vision of which he has become the chief legal enforcer.  His argument, at its base, is that the United States should be viewed as indistinguishable from any other country that needs to patrol its borders; we are one nation among many, and just want to assert the rights that all other countries rightly claim.  At the same time, though, he clearly believes that what the United States embodies is precious and well worth defending.  What he seeks to obscure is in fact the reality that the United States is a great country precisely because we are the sum of so many nations and so many immigrants who have come here.  Save for Native Americans, all our ancestors are relatively recent arrivals to these shores (though, obviously, not all arrived here of their own free will).  Sessions says that the United States is nothing if it cannot enforce its borders; but the deeper truth is that if the United States were not a nation of immigrants, then it truly would be nothing.

There’s an even deeper contradiction buried in his words, though.  Sessions would have us believe that the United States is an ordinary country asserting ordinary rights, when in fact the United States is the most powerful country ever to exist on Earth.  Yes Sessions needs us to believe in our ordinariness, even in a sense of our weakness, in order for his argument that we are beset by foreigners to make any sense.  The reality, of course, is that the immigrants at our southern border are vulnerable people from mostly poor countries.  Most are coming here for work, though many for asylum from violence; and if the United States were truly worried that they are stealing American jobs, then we would punish employers that hired undocumented immigrants as a key element of ending this migration.  Needless to say, such is not the policy of this administration.

Instead, the primary concern is not to save jobs worked by undocumented immigrants — most of which are labor-intensive, low-pay positions that citizens themselves don’t want to work — but to scapegoat a vulnerable population as the cause of our country's ills.  So we have the spectacle of a gargantuan border patrol bureaucracy inflicting immoral cruelty on these immigrants, including those who seek asylum by the proper procedures, by removing their children from them.  Again, if the United States were serious about deterrence, we would enforce laws that every employer verify the Social Security numbers of every employee, and so be done with it.  But this is clearly not the point of the anti-immigrant frenzy.  Rather, the point is for an extremely powerful country to flex its muscles against the most vulnerable people imaginable, in an effort to embody the fundamental racism and xenophobia of this administration, and of many of the president’s supporters.

The United States is powerful enough, and has sufficient resources, to treat all immigrants crossing our border with dignity and respect.  To continuously fall back on the assertion that they have committed illegal acts and ergo they are criminals is to intentionally ignore all context for their actions, or even what their actions are.  It is the same mindset that says a starving man who steals a loaf of bread is as much a criminal as a man who heads up a concentration camp; technically true, but morally, an abominable equivalence that should cast suspicion on the motives of the person making such a comparison.

The point of all the ICE raids on long-time but undocumented families living in America, all the way up to the separation of children from their parents at the border, is not to protect American jobs or enforce our sovereignty, but to exert power against the vulnerable in a way that maximizes the political payoff to the president: by acting cruelly, even sadistically, in a play to feed and placate the rage and resentments of the Trump base.

Trump and his advisors see another win in this ugly situation: it forces the Democrats to stand up for non-citizens, and so allows the Republicans to make the argument that Democrats care more about foreigners than Americans.  Think back to the Trump supporter who, criticizing attempts to protect Americans brought here as children by their parents, asserted that many Americans are dreamers, too.  This zero-sum, America-first mindset is clearly viewed as a decisive wedge issue to slander anyone who stands up for human rights or disagrees with the Trumpian assertion that the only true America is a white America.

A couple weeks ago, I argued that Democrats need to be careful not to respond to Trump’s moves on immigration by playing his game, such as by impotently calling on him to change U.S. policy in ways he never would, and by all means to avoid reinforcing the slander that they've abandoned Americans in favor of non-citizens.  Instead, the most important thing is to make sure Americans are made aware of what is being done in our name, and how there is no reasonable connection between such cruelty and keeping American safe and economically healthy.

Yet the last few weeks have illustrated the bind in which Trump’s willingness to act in inhumane ways puts both Democrats and all other decent Americans.  When U.S. policy is to inflict what amounts to torture against young children, then there is no choice but to respond.  I could not be prouder of our Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley visiting a child detention facility and being at the forefront of the fight against these immoral policies, and the ways that he and other Democrats are essentially taking this fight to the streets; these moves seem like a healthy refusal to play by Trump’s rules.  Visiting the facilities behind whose walls this state-sponsored sadism is perpetrated serves to ground our opposition in the tangible reality of what is being done in our collective name.  Donald Trump’s repeated lie that he is simply enacting a Democratic policy turns more cowardly and obscene by the day.  This is a man who lacks the courage of his own cruel convictions, and who embodies the moral obscenity in the hearts of too many of his backers.  We are seeing how pushing back on his overreach puts him on the defensive, and exposes his deceit and bad faith for all to see (even if not all are yet ready to believe it).

There is an opening here large enough to drive a progressive Democratic party through.  The Trumpian nationalist vision, taken to its extreme logic — as it has been with the child separation policy — reveals an idea of the United States not as great or exemplary, but as small and craven, a betrayal of the common humanity and values that makes this country unique and a beacon to the world.  Trump-Republican nationalism says that we are weak, and can only improve ourselves through cruelty and conflict.  We see this not only with immigration, but in the trade wars the president is needlessly starting on flimsy pretexts; in his claims that loyal allies only drag us down; in an economic policy that says that the richest among us are the ones truly deserving of government largesse in the form of massive tax cuts.

Democrats would do well to connect their defense of immigrants to a larger vision of American power and possibility, to a defense of values that benefit all of us, and to refute Trump’s vision of America that turns reality upside-down and paints immigration as a drain, and our economic problems as the fault of malicious foreigners.  In the absence of a decisively progressive vision, the field is left open for Trump’s phony MAGA appeals that in reality abandon America’s greatness for the petty aspirations of our grifter in chief.  And in a broader sense, when we defend our common humanity, we defend people of all nations who are potential allies in a shared democratic project that will protect the world against future Trumps, both in the U.S. and abroad.