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Does Trump Have The Balls To Throw Out The First Pitch?

Does Trump Have The Balls To Throw Out The First Pitch?

In a recent episode of the TV series Madam Secretary, President Elizabeth McCord (played by actress Tia Leoni) has a nightmare about her scheduled appearance at a Mets-Cubs game to throw out the ceremonial first ball. She dreams that her errant pitch hits the Mr. Met mascot and she’s showered with boos from the fans at Citi Field in New York.

President Donald Trump has no doubt been having similar nightmares. Since becoming president, he’s declined to toss the first pitch on opening day or during the World Series. Trump likes to wear baseball caps adorned with the words “Make America Great Again” across the front. But offered a chance to wear a real major league baseball cap in a real baseball stadium, he’s balked.

In yet another break from tradition, Trump has declined an invitation to throw out the ceremonial first ball at the Washington Nationals’ opening day game in all three years of his presidency. Nor has he followed his predecessors’ custom of tossing the first pitch in the World Series.

Trump prefers to appear before crowds of loyal followers. Since he took office, his few appearances outside the White House have been highly orchestrated affairs where the audiences are vetted by the president’s operatives.

But this year, after much dilly-dallying, he promised to attend the fifth game of the World Series between the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros, which will take place on Sunday at Nationals Park in D.C. Whether he would take the mound to throw out the first pitch was a matter of much chatter and debate. As late as Thursday, he told reporters in the Oval Office that he was not sure if he would throw out the first pitch. Then, on Friday night, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that Trump had again demurred from participating in the first-pitch ritual. Recounting his conversation with Trump, Manfred said that the president would attend the game but had opted out of throwing the first pitch or making an on-field appearance.

“His view,” Manfred explained, “was that in order to make the fan experience as positive as possible, he would arrive at Game 5 sometime after the game began so it wouldn’t interfere with fans getting into the stadium. Quite frankly, we were very grateful for that. We thought it was a great decision on the President’s part.”

With the exception of Jimmy Carter, every president has tossed the first pitch on opening day at least once during their presidencies since William Howard Taft inaugurated the practice in 1910 at the Washington Senators’ Griffith Park. (There was no Major League team in Washington, D.C., when Carter was president, so he chose to throw out the first ball in the 1979 World Series).

These presidential outings have not been without controversy. Herbert Hoover was booed mercilessly when he showed up at Game 3 of the World Series between the visiting St. Louis Cardinals and the home team Philadelphia Athletics in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression.   As reporter Joe Williams reported in the New York World-Telegram, the boos started slowly but then “grow in volume and pretty soon it seems almost everybody in the park is booing. They are booing the President of the United States.” Williams continued: “This must be the first time a President ever has been booed in public, and at a ball game of all places. There is something about a ball game that is supposed to make everybody kin and it’s a high honor to sit in on a ball game where the President becomes a fan, just as you and I.” But, according to baseball historian Marty Appel, neither the New York Times nor the Associated Press mentioned the baseball boo-birds. “All in all, it was a great day for the President,” the Times reported, in a story that one can only describe as fake news.

Trump is no doubt worried that, like Hoover, and like the fictional President Elizabeth McCord, he’d be greeted with a deafening chorus of boos as soon as he stepped onto the mound at Nationals Park. In 2016, 91 percent of Washington, D.C., voters supported Hillary Clinton over Trump. Voters in the suburban counties outside Washington, D.C., also gave Clinton landslide margins — 76 percent in Montgomery County, Maryland, 89 percent in Prince George’s County, Maryland, 76 percent in Arlington County, Virginia, and 63 percent in Fairfax County, Virginia.

In addition to the likely boos, Trump might have also been worried that he’d embarrass himself if he couldn’t hurl the ball from the pitchers’ mound to home plate, 60 feet-six inches away, or if he wound up and wildly flung the ball over the catcher’s head into the backstop. The video of his athletic misadventure would surely go viral. Whom could he blame for the humiliation? The groundskeepers for failing to properly manicure the mound? The workers who sew MLB’s baseballs in a sweatshop owned by Rawlings in Turrialba, Costa Rica?

That would be particularly embarrassing for a president who claims to be in excellent physical shape. As Trump watchers will recall, in December 2015, Trump’s personal physician Dr. Harold Bornstein wrote a letter indicating that “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein later revealed that Trump had “dictated the whole letter.”

Trump was a good athlete at his high school, New York Military Academy, but in typical style for this president, his excessive boasts about his prowess undermine his credibility. Trump bragged to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael D’Antonio, who wrote The Truth About Trump, that he was “the best baseball player in New York when I was young.” On April 3, 2013, Trump tweeted: “I played football and baseball, sorry, but said to be the best baseball player in New York state — ask coach Ted Dobias — said best he ever coached.” Interviewed in 2016 at age 90, Dobias recalled that Trump was a “good athlete,” but didn’t substantiate Trump’s hyperbole about his baseball skills. “I’d give him an 8 1/2 out of 10,” Dobias said.

During his days as a celebrity businessman, Trump threw out the first pitch at several major league games. The last time was in 2006 at Boston’s Fenway Park before a game between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Photos of that event reveal Trump with an awkward grimace, struggling to look athletic. In the 13 years since then, the 73-year old Trump has gained considerable weight. He doesn’t exercise and he follows a strict diet of unhealthy junk food.

Mark Lerner, now the Nationals’ principal owner and a big donor to Democratic candidates, was diplomatic about the president’s potential visit to the Nationals-Astros World Series game.

“Well, he has every right to come,” Lerner told the Washington Post on Friday night. “He’s the president of the United States whether you like him or not. It’s a special event. He should be at it.”

But Lerner disputed Commissioner Manfred’s chronology of events, insisting that he had already picked someone else to throw out the first ball at game five before Trump told Manfred that he wasn’t interested.

“The first pitches are our call, and we felt there are many other candidates that should be considered before [Trump],” Lerner told the Post.

Lerner said that he had already invited chef and humanitarian José Andrés to perform the task. Andrés, who is admired around the world for founding World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that serves meals to victims of natural disasters, has had a long-running feud with Trump. In 2016, he withdrew from plans to open a restaurant in Trump International Hotel in Washington, after then-candidate Trump’s racist comments about Mexican immigrants.

Later that year Andrés spoke at a “get out the vote” rally for Hillary Clinton rally in Tampa, Florida. After Trump took office, Andrés criticized his policies on immigration and his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Earlier this year, he opened a World Central Kitchen on Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the White House, to feed federal workers who were furloughed during the government shutdown.

Lerner also said that once Trump arrives at Nationals Park, the president will sit with league officials rather than with him and other Nationals executives.

Mark Lerner took over control of the Nationals from his father Ted, who owned the team from 2006 until last year. Ted Lerner is a wealthy real estate developer who, like his son, donates to Democrats. Unlike the president, the older Lerner didn’t inherit his business empire. In 2015, accepting an award from the Urban Land Institute, Ted Lerner recalled that as a teenager, he worked as an usher at Griffith Stadium, home of the Washington Senators, the Nationals’ predecessor.

“I never could’ve dreamed of owning a baseball team. And I never could’ve imagined over my life that I would build over 200 million square feet of commercial and residential space and that very few people would know my name. I guess I have a different approach to real-estate development than Donald Trump.”

In Madam Secretary, as President McCord starts walking onto the infield at Citi Field, she’s greeted with a smattering of boos, but reminds her nervous husband that “they’re just exercising their First Amendment rights.” When she gets to the mound, the Mets catcher is standing a few yards in front of home plate in order to make it easier for the president, but McCord – who had been practicing throwing a baseball in a White House hallway — insists that he get behind home plate, then throws a strike into his catcher’s mitt, and the crowd erupts in enthusiastic applause.

Through practice and perseverance, the fictional president turned her nightmare into a better reality. But our real president, too afraid to take the mound and face the fans, has turned our dreams into a nightmare.

 

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame(Nation Books, 2012). His next book, We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism – American Style, co-edited with Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin, will be published by The New Press in January 2020. 

How Nancy Pelosi Can Lead Democrats To Impeachment Victory

How Nancy Pelosi Can Lead Democrats To Impeachment Victory

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Last week, the resistance movement against President Donald Trump and the Trump White House’s continuing obstruction of Congressional oversight finally pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for impeachment hearings against the most corrupt president in U.S. history.

It is now up to Pelosi to orchestrate the hearings so that the American public understands that Trump’s misdeeds and lawlessness not only feathered his own nest but also put the country’s national security and democracy at risk.

Democrats should bluntly call for Trump to resign in order to spare the country the agony and expense of an impeachment trial.  Of course, he won’t quit, but demanding that he do so will rattle him and help frame the debate going forward. Nor will the Republican-controlled Senate convict him after the House votes for impeachment. Even if one or two Senate Republicans join the Democrats in voting to remove him from office, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the GOP’s activist base will make sure that there aren’t the necessary 67 votes to convict.

In other words, Trump will be the Republican candidate for president next year.

For the Democrats, therefore, the goal of the impeachment proceedings is education, not conviction.

The impeachment proceedings will provide many opportunities for televised drama. But the facts of Trump’s corruption won’t just speak for themselves.  As he has repeatedly done, Trump will seek to muddy the waters by claiming that the inquiry is a “witch hunt” and will enlist the help of his fanatic supporters, including Fox News, to defame his accusers, as he did to Hillary Clinton and as he’s now trying to do with Joe Biden and other Democratic rivals. Trump, his henchman Rudy Giuliani, and other enablers have already ranted and raged about conspiracies to undermine the Trump presidency.

Trump and his allies have already started an intensive investigation hoping to discredit the intelligence agency whistleblower who revealed that Trump had sought to rig the 2020 election by pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to undertake a sham investigation to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, using the stick of withholding $391 million in U.S. military aid to the country.

Trump will continue to stonewall any efforts by Congress to obtain records of meetings, phone calls, and emails that could put the president in a bad light.

Some pundits have argued that Trump’s re-election chances will be bolstered if the Senate fails to convict him. “I’ve been exonerated,” Trump will claim.

For sure, Trump’s fanatics will draw that conclusion. But if the Democrats do their job, and as the evidence of his transgressions piles up, Trump and some key Republicans in both the House and Senate who stick by him, will be weakened, and more vulnerable to defeat.  The objective is to help persuade American voters – especially in swing states and purple Congressional districts – that Trump and his Republican enablers are not morally fit to govern the country.

The impeachment proceedings will totally absorb Trump and his inner circle. He will no doubt double down – through Twitter rants, campaign rallies, and statements to the media – on his key themes: The Democrats are engaged in a “witch hunt,” they are all socialists, the country is in better shape than it’s ever been, the media are conspiring against him, and he’s stemmed the “invasion” of immigrants despite his opponents’ best efforts to stop him.

While Trump is raving and ranting, and while the House Democrats pursue the impeachment hearings, it is important that the Democratic candidates for president continue to show the American people that they have a positive agenda — raising the minimum wage, reducing tax cuts for the super-rich, strengthening environmental regulations, expanding health insurance coverage, addressing the housing crisis, reducing student debt, and other popular reforms.  By doing so, they will remind Americans that only by electing a Democratic president, Senate and House will they be able to end the chaos that is the Trump presidency.

There are many reasons for Americans to be outraged by this president.  Some of them involve clear violations of the law, including impeachable offenses, while others are simply offenses against basic human decency – separating children from their parents, neglecting the victims of natural disasters, describing the Nazis who marched on Charlottesville as “fine people,”  and many others.

The big debate among political observers is whether the House Democrats should focus the impeachment proceedings entirely on his efforts to get the Ukrainians to help his re-election campaign, or to include the Ukrainian incident as part of a long list of impeachable offenses for which Trump is already under investigation by six House committees. These include his collusion with Russia, his use of his office to enrich himself and his family, his refusal to provide Congress with his tax returns despite a legal requirement that he do so, his efforts to obstruct the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and others.

Those who support a sole focus on Trump’s Ukrainian controversy make the valid point that it is simple to understand, that Trump has already admitted to asking the Ukrainian president for help and withheld almost $400 million in U.S. military aid as an inducement, and that the American public has a short attention span, especially for scandal.

Since Trump took office almost three years ago, his favorability ratings have remained low, but public opinion polls showed little hunger for impeachment, despite his consistent behavior of violating the law and breaching national security. Immediately after his Ukrainian folly came to light, however, public support for impeachment hearings increased and, after Pelosi made it official, grew even more. So it is understandable why some Democrats want to shine the spotlight solely on Trump’s clear effort to extort a foreign power to interfere with the 2020 election on his own behalf.

But there is no reason why the House Democrats can’t do both. They can initially hold an impeachment inquiry about Trump’s Ukrainian hijinks, and, after the drama of televised hearings and persuasive witnesses (including the intelligence agency staffer who blew the whistle on Trump), vote to send the case to the Senate with a recommendation that he be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. This can take place by early 2020, as the election season is heating up.  Once they have accomplished that historic feat, the House Democrats can proceed with another impeachment inquiry that focuses on Trump’s other offenses. The second phase of the impeachment inquiry should provide the public with the full menu of Trump’s corruptions, to reveal that the Ukrainian incident is simply the latest episode in the ugly reality show called the Trump presidency.

Nobody is better prepared to lead the impeachment inquiry than House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff of California, a former U.S. attorney with a remarkable ability to remain composed while dissecting witnesses. He and Pelosi will surely hire the right lawyer to help the politicians question the witnesses.

We cannot expect the current crop of Republican politicians to do what their counterparts did in 1974, when -– in the wake of the  Watergate hearings and news reports of President Richard Nixon’s cover-up — key GOP leaders told Nixon that his gig was up and that he had to resign from office or he’d be impeached.

But the unfolding impeachment inquiry will put some Senate Republicans in a vulnerable situation. This is particularly true of Maine’s Susan Collins, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Arizona’s Martha McSally, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, and perhaps even Texas’ John Cornyn, who face difficult re-election races next year. They may seek to distance themselves from Trump by making obligatory statements criticizing Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian president without expressing support for impeachment.  Democrats running for those battleground Senate seats will be able to use the GOP incumbents’ unwillingness to hold Trump accountable as a sign of their lack of courage and independence, and their complicity with Trump’s crimes.

Because the Democrats’ goal of the impeachment inquiry should be to educate the American public about Trump’s transgressions, how they orchestrate the hearings is critical.

The Democrats should review the 1973 Watergate hearings.  The Senate Democrats built their case slowly, starting with the least prominent and influential witnesses, and then, when the evidence of Nixon’s crimes and his inner circle’s complicit was obvious to most Americans,  calling those closest to Nixon, expecting that they would turn against him.  The testimony of Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean, saying that there was a “cancer on the presidency,” was the knock-out punch.

The impeachment inquiry about the Ukrainian scandal should be able to catch many Trump insiders in its net. Trump was not acting alone. In May, after Giuliani had met several times with Ukrainian officials, Trump recalled U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer.  This couldn’t have happened without the cooperation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.  Trump’s withholding of U.S. military aid to Ukraine as leverage to get the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens couldn’t have occurred without the complicity of Trump budget director and acting chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney.  The fingerprints of Attorney General William Barr are all over this scandal.  No doubt other members of Trump’s inner circle cooperated in both the campaign to influence Ukrainian officials and the effort to cover it up.

We don’t know if Pompeo, Mulvaney, Barr, or other members of Trump’s inner circle will turn on him – as his lawyer Michael Cohen did when his own freedom was at stake – but the hearings can at least demonstrate that Trump’s administration is littered with see-no-evil sycophants and enablers.

The media have an important role to play to make sure that Trump and his allies don’t hijack the process. They do not need to report on every Trump twitter rant, false accusation against the Democrats, and attacks on witnesses that the president will undertake to deflect attention away from his own crimes and misdemeanors.

Nor should the media fall into the false equivalence trap of permitting Trump to claim that what he did is no better or worse than what Democrats have done. Already, some media outlets are inadvertently abetting Trump by referring to “unproven allegations” against Joe Biden, as if turning over a few more stones might uncover hidden evidence of wrongdoing.  Biden’s son Hunter clearly traded on his father’s name to get himself appointed to a well-paying position on the board of a Ukrainian private gas companies. But there is absolutely no evidence that his father knew about, helped or benefited in any way from his son’s business dealings. By accusing Biden of wrongdoing, Trump is hoping that most Americans won’t understand the distinction between Joe and his son Hunter. And the media, in an effort to be “balanced,” are giving Trump a platform to smear Joe Biden without explaining that Trump is lying. This is not fair to Biden.

The political press should learn a lesson from its mistaken effort during the 2016 election to balance Trump’s long history of corruption with Hillary Clinton’s use of personal emails while conducting State Department business.

The media need to broadcast all the hearings, as the three major TV networks did during the investigation of Nixon’s Watergate cover-up.  If the Democrats strategically interrogate witnesses with the same finesse and drama that occurred during the Watergate hearings, they will make for riveting television.

Pelosi has had a long and successful career as a politician, as well as being a pathbreaker as the first female Speaker in the nation’s history. But nothing that she has ever done before matches the challenge she now faces.

The Founding Fathers, concerned that a popular president might become a lifetime monarch, insisted that the president had to face election every four years. But they also worried that a president could engage in corrupt behavior to keep himself in office by rigging or discrediting the elections, or illegally undermining his opponents.  So they gave Congress the authority to impeach the president as a last resort against tyranny.

Pelosi is about to lead a nationwide seminar on the Constitution and the meaning of democracy.

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College.  He is the author of The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books). His next book, We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism – American Style, co-edited with Michael Kazin and Kate Aronoff, will be published by The New Press in January.

Celebrating Gloria Steinem

Celebrating Gloria Steinem

Reprinted with permission from Publicseminar.org

 

Gloria Steinem, the best-known face of second wave feminism, will turn 85 in March. And while it’s a persistent temptation in our youth-obsessed America to pay more attention to the young than the old, Steinem has not been forgotten. In fact, a new play about Steinem, “Gloria: A Life,” opened in New York in November. And director Julie Taymor has recruited two major stars – Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore – to portray Steinem in an upcoming biopic. Steinem is still in great demand as a speaker and commentator on women’s rights and social justice.

Thanks to the tireless work of Steinem and others who launched the second wave of feminism in the late 1960s, America is today a more inclusive society for women in both attitude and practice. It is a credit to this generation of feminists that Millennials and members of Generation Z now embrace the once-radical goals of second wave feminism. They support women’s reproductive freedom, equal pay for women, government-subsidized child care, paid family leave, and strong protections against sexual harassment and punishment for rape (as reflected in the burgeoning #MeToo movement). They believe that female and male couples should share housework and child care. They don’t think that gender should limit a person’s ability to enter professions once dominated by men, whether that be law or medicine, journalism or engineering. But I worry that too many of these same Millennials and Generations Zers don’t understand what it took to normalize such stances – and as a result take them for granted.

A national survey released in August found that less than half (46%) of women between 18 and 35 said they think of themselves as “feminists.” One can look at this finding and conclude that so many “feminist” ideas are now taken for granted that fewer women feel they need to embrace that label. But this reluctance to identify with feminism can also be a problem. Especially if today’s young women don’t appreciate – or even know about – the struggles that previous generations of women endured.

We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of reformers, radicals, and idealists who challenged the status quo of their day. Unless we know this history we will have little understanding of how far we have come, of how we got here, and of what still needs to change to make America more livable, humane, and democratic. Young people in particular need to understand that bringing about progressive change takes time – but that it is possible – so that they don’t get too impatient, and don’t give up hope.

A good example is women’s participation in high school and intercollegiate sports. In my own teaching, I find that my students are shocked to see charts showing that in 1971, the year before Congress passed Title IX, only 300,000 girls (less than four percent) participated in high school sports. Today, 3.4 million (about 40 percent) do.

Another example is the professional glass ceiling. Watching the documentary “RBG,” my students are stunned to learn that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956, she was one of only nine women in a class of 500. As recently as 1971 women constituted only three percent of American lawyers. In 2016, however, women for the first time outnumbered men in law school classrooms.

A third example is the role of women in politics. My students find it hard to believe that in 1969, only half of all Americans said they would vote for a woman for president. Now, according to a Gallup poll, 92 percent support the idea. At the start of the women’s liberation movement, the idea of woman president felt like a distant dream. Two years ago, we came close. It could happen in 2020.

Indeed, November’s blue wave election is a testament to Steinem’s long-term goal of expanding the number of women in public office. In 1971 Steinem joined a bipartisan group of women – including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Dorothy Height (president of the National Council of Negro Women) – to launch the National Women’s Political Caucus. They believed that by increasing women’s participation in politics, it would be easier to pass legislation to eliminate sex discrimination and to bring about greater legal, economic, and social equality.

In 1969 there were only ten women in the U.S. House of Representatives and one in the U.S. Senate. After this year’s midterm elections, there will be at least 102 women in the House (including 43 women of color) and 25 in the Senate (including four women of color). Both are records.

Nor is this only a phenomenon at the federal level. As of January 2019, nine women will serve as state governors. And another 56 women won other statewide elected executive offices this year. At the start of the new year more than 2,000 women will be serving as state legislators, holding some 27% of the 7,383 seats in the 50 states.

To Steinem’s generation of feminists, these statistics are a sign of progress. On the other hand, and while this might be good news for Millennials and Generation Z, this generation is more likely to see in them a sign of how far we have to go before women achieve equity in political life.

And if there is still far to go, then surely Steinem’s life and legacy can provide valuable lessons about overcoming obstacles and challenging the status quo.

Gloria Steinem was born in 1934 and came of age in the 1950s when women were treated like second-class citizens in almost every aspect of society. She had to overcome many gender barriers to make her way in the world of journalism – a career which helped trigger her evolution as a feminist. Steinem’s work as a writer and activist catalyzed the second wave of the women’s rights movement that began in the late 1960s. She helped popularize feminist ideas. And her frequent articles, speeches, and appearances on TV made her feminism’s most prominent public figure.

Steinem’s father, Leo, was a Jewish itinerant antiques dealer. Her mother, Ruth, was a former journalist born to a Presbyterian family. Gloria was raised without much religious involvement and, ironically, it was her Christian mother who taught her to be proud of her Jewish heritage, educating her daughter about the horrors of the Holocaust and the evils of anti-Semitism. Steinem once said: “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian, but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”

Steinem had a peripatetic childhood, and her family dealt with challenging financial circumstances. After her parents divorced when she was 11, she became caretaker, cook, and housekeeper for her mother, who suffered from depression. Part of what gave her the resilience to persevere was the example of her paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinem. Pauline was president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of theNational Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. In a testimonial to her grandmother, Steinem noted that in her campaign for the school board, “she was elected on a coalition ticket with the socialists and the anarchists.” In the 1930s, Pauline helped rescue many members of her family who lived in Germany from the Nazis. While Pauline died when Gloria was five, she left her what Gloria later called vivid “sense memories” of her strength, courage, and intelligence.

Steinem graduated from Smith College in 1956 and moved to New York City four years later to pursue a career as a journalist. There she worked for a new magazine of political satire, Help!, and contributed short articles to women’s magazines such as Glamour and Ladies’ Home Journal. After writing several pieces for Esquire without being credited, she finally published her first bylined article in the prestigious men’s magazine in 1962. The article, published a year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, was about the then-new contraceptive pill. In it she examined the fact that women often had to choose between a career and marriage. “The only trouble with sexually liberating women,” Steinem ended the article, “is that there aren’t enough sexually liberated men to go around.”

Steinem made a big splash in 1963 with “A Bunny’s Tale,” an article written for Show magazine about working at a Playboy Club. The article exposed the decidedly unglamorous working conditions (including the sexual harassment) faced by the club’s waitresses – called “bunnies” – who were required to wear a corset, rabbit ears, cotton tails, and high heels.

Steinem made a living as a freelance writer, profiling celebrities and writing about popular culture for major publications. But she could not persuade editors to assign her serious political subjects. Eventually she began writing a column for New York magazine, which she helped launch in 1968. There she covered a variety of topics: Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s years living in New York, wounded veterans returning from Vietnam, neighborhood battles over childcare centers, anti-war demonstrations, migrant workers, the New York City mayoral race, and the 1968 presidential campaign. But two articles established her as a feminist spokesperson.

The first was a 1969 article entitled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which profiled the burgeoning women’s movement. The second was a 1970 essay in Time called “What It Would Be Like if Women Win.” There Steinem predicted that feminism would liberate men as well as women. If women could have equal power, she argued, if homosexuals had the right to marry and women could refuse to have sex, then men would no longer be “the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility.”

During her first several decades as a public figure, Steinem had to endure media stereotypes that called her the “pin-up girl of the intelligentsia” or a “willowy beauty, 34-24-34.” And she also had to deal with some feminist leaders who resented her visibility in the media. But more than any other figure she was the public face of modern feminism, a constant presence on college campuses and at union halls, in business meetings and at protests, on TV talk shows and in media profiles.

Steinem was an early advocate of what today’s activists call “intersectionality” – consistently injecting issues of race and class into the women’s movement. Steinem built bridges between feminism’s radical and liberal wings and the women’s and labor movements. She pushed middle-class white feminists to embrace the concerns of working-class women and women of color. Not only was she a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, but is she still today co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. In addition, she has always viewed men as potential allies in the struggle for equality.

“This [feminism] is no simple reform,” Steinem said in her 1971 speech at the founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus. “It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”

Steinem often used outrageous ideas to shake up her readers and audiences. In 1971 she stunned parents and alums at the Smith College graduation by quoting her friend Flo Kennedy’s observation that “there are only a few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina.” She once told an audience of CEOs that a fair society would eliminate all inheritance. She has compared marriage to prostitution and said that unpaid housework “is the definition of women’s work, which is shit work.” In speeches, she frequently drew on the theme of her 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate.”

Although Steinem has written hundreds of articles, five books, and given thousands of speeches, her most significant accomplishments involve the creation of two institutions that became major influences in American culture and politics: Ms. Magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Ms. was the first modern feminist periodical with a national readership. From its start in 1972, Ms. challenged conventional wisdom in articles like “How to Write Your Marriage Contract”, “Can Women Love Women?”, “The Black Family and Feminism”, “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue”, and “Down with Sexist Upbringing.” In its first year, Ms. made history when it published the names of women, including tennis star Billie Jean King, who acknowledged having had abortions when it was still illegal in most of the country, before the US Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. And its 1976 cover story on battered women – which featured a photo of a woman with a bruised faced – was the first major exposé of the problem of domestic violence.

The magazine pioneered investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the wage gap, the glass ceiling, women’s health (and the medical establishment’s sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape. It explained and advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, rated presidential candidates on women’s issues, reported on feminist protests against pornography, exposed the influence of sexist advertising on women’s self-images, and acknowledged race and class differences within the feminist movement. Even more, Ms. injected these issues into the political debate at a time when they were considered too radical for the mainstream media to cover — or at least to cover fairly.

In 1993 Steinem and the Ms. Foundation for Women started Take Our Daughters to Work Day to encourage parents to expose their kids, specifically their daughters, to the wide range of work experiences to which they might look forward. A wildly successful program, this past April close to 40 million parents and kids took part.

Nor is Steinem’s work limited to the United States. She has been an outspoken advocate for peace and human rights around the world. In 1984 she and two other activists were arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. for protesting the country’s racist apartheid regime. In 2010, Steinem and Pramila Jayapal coauthored an article linking women’s and immigrant rights issues. In 2015 she joined a delegation of 30 female peace activists from 15 countries who made a rare crossing of the dangerous demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

In recognition for her many accomplishments, in 2013 President Obama awarded Gloria Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “She awakened a vast and often skeptical public [to] problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, and unfair hiring practices,” Obama said at the White House ceremony. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”

Despite her many successes, Steinem has made some missteps. In 2016, for example, while campaigning for Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries, she made a rare political blunder. When asked why so many young women were supporting Bernie Sanders rather than Clinton, she said “When you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys?” The backlash to this quip was merciless and she quickly apologized.

But such occasional mistakes have not kept her from using her voice for the public good. At the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., for example, she rebuked President Donald Trump for his divisive rhetoric. “The Constitution doesn’t begin with, ‘I, the president’,” she said. “It begins with, ‘We, the people.’ So don’t try to divide us!” Later she blasted Trump’s proposal to force Muslims to register in a government database. “If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims,” Steinem declared. Just last year she both fundraised for Planned Parenthood and joined an effort to save the last abortion clinic in her hometown of Toledo, Ohio. And in a recent interview with The Grio, she praised the cofounders of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, for creating “a more inclusive movement.”

Steinem’s 1970 prediction — “if Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do” — is not yet a reality. But many Americans, including a majority of those under forty, now embrace the once-radical tenets of modern feminism. And that, like Steinem’s life, is a victory worth celebrating.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame.

 

White Districts Elected 9 New Black House Members

White Districts Elected 9 New Black House Members

Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect.

 

The blue wave had some black riders. Every African American Democrat in the House running for re-election in this year’s midterms won his or her race.  In addition, voters sent nine new black members, all Democrats, to Congress. As a result, the number of black House members will grow to an all-time peak of 55, even if, as appears possible, both black Republicans(Utah’s Mia Love and Texas’ Will Hurt) lose their seats.

What’s unusual about the nine new members is that all of them prevailed in predominantly white and mostly suburban districts. Five of the nine are women.

For most of the 20th century, there were few black members of Congress. In 1950, only two African Americans (William Dawson of Chicago’s South Side and Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem) served in the House. The civil rights movement and the 1965 Voting Rights Act led to a significant upsurge of black office holders. By 1970, the number of blacks in the House had grown to ten and by 1990 it reached 25.

Then and now, most black Congress members represent majority-black districts, although some today represent districts where blacks and Latinos form the majority. Of the 47 current Black members in Congress, only six represent districts where whites represent at least half of the population.

Despite the white racism that President Trump has both fostered and uncovered, it is also clear that a growing number of white Americans will support black candidates. In 1958, when the Gallup poll asked Americans if they would vote for a black person for president, only 38 percent said yes. That number grew to 77 percent in 1978 and 96 percent in 1997. Of course, telling that to a pollster is not the same thing as pulling a voting lever for a black candidate. But evidence indicates that more and more white voters are walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

Each of the nine new black Congressional members focused on local issues, but also stressed their opposition to the toxic Trump and ran on the number one issue for Democrats this year—the Republicans’ threat to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Lucy McBath’s victory was perhaps the most stunning upset. She defeated Republican incumbent Karen Handel in Georgia’s Sixth District in the Atlanta suburbs that was once represented by Newt Gingrich and where 61 percent of residents are white and only 14 percent are African American. McBath became a reluctant public figure in 2012 when her 17-year old son Jordan was shot dead at a Florida gas station by a white man who complained about loud music. McBath became a gun control activist, quickly becoming national spokesperson for Moms Demand Action. She decided to run for Congress after the mass shooting at the Parkland, Florida high school in February. In April 2017, Jon Osoff, a little-known Democrat and first-time candidate, laid the groundwork by giving Handel a close race in a special election to represent the district. He lost by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin. McBath won her race —by a 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent margin—in part by improving on Osoff’s outreach to African Americans and by drawing on the anti-Trump sentiment among women.

Almost as shocking was Lauren Underwood’s defeat of four-term Republican incumbent Randy Hultgren in a district once represented by Republican former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. A 32-year-old registered nurse, she had served as a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. She has a pre-existing heart condition and decided to run for office for the first time after Hultgren voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Two years ago Hultgren won with 59 percent of the vote in what was considered a safe Republican district, in Chicago’s affluent suburbs, where 79 percent of residents are white and only 3 percent are black. In what was obviously racially coded language, Hultgren described Underwood as an “outsider,” even though she grew up Naperville in the heart of the district. But Underwood unseated him by a 52 percent to 48 percent margin.

Antonio Delgado, a  Harvard Law School graduate and Rhodes scholar, had to overcome race-baiting efforts to brand him as a “big-city rapper” to win this seat. New York’s 19th Congressional District, which is 85 percent white and only 4.5 percent black, has long been considered a safe Republican bastion in the state’s upstate Hudson Valley and Catskill region. Two years ago, first-time candidate Republican John Faso defeated well-known progressive activist and scholar Zephyr Teachout with 54 percent of the vote, while Trump beat Clinton by 51 percent to 44 percent. This year, Delgado won 50 percent of the vote to Faso’s 47 percent.

George W. Bush’s new Congressman will be Colin Allred. Texas’s 32nd congressional district encompasses Dallas’ northeast suburbs, including Preston Hollow, Bush’s home since he left the White House. Vice President Mike Pence and Donald Trump Jr. traveled to the district to campaign for Republican Representative Pete Sessions, who has served in Congress since 1997 and was chair of the powerful House Rules Committee, but he still lost to Allred, who grew up in Dallas, attended Baylor University, and played linebacker for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. Allred left his football career to earn a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He worked in the Obama White House, at HUD, and in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Maryland, then returned to Dallas to work as voting rights lawyer for Battleground Texas. Whites comprise half of the district’s population and blacks only 13 percent. In 2016, Sessions had no Democratic opponent. This year, Allred defeated Sessions by a 52 percent to 46 percent margin.

Come January, llhan Omar will join Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib as the first Muslim women elected to Congress. She replaces Democrat Keith Ellison, who left Congress to run successfully for Minnesota attorney general. Raised in Somalia, Omar and her family fled the country in 1991 during its civil war and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya. In 1995, when she was 15, they moved to the United States, settling in Minneapolis. She learned English in three months, graduated from high school and college, and began a career in Minneapolis as a community nutrition educator, while helping run several candidates’ campaigns for city council and state legislature. While working for  as Director of Policy & Initiatives for Women Organizing Women Network, which advocates for women from East Africa, she was elected to the state legislature in 2016—the first Somali American legislator in the nation—where she pushed for a $15 minimum wage and subsidizing higher education costs for low-income students, among other progressive issues. Comprising part of Minneapolis and its suburbs, the district’s population is 64 percent white and 17 percent black. The 37-year old Omar won this safe Democratic district with 78 percent of the vote.

Jahana Hayes, the first African American elected to Congress from Connecticut, grew up in public housing projects in Waterbury. In 2016, as a history and government teacher at Kennedy High School in Waterbury, she was named National Teacher of the Year, which drew considerable media attention, including a profile in The Washington Post, an appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show, and an invitation to address the National Educational Association’s annual meeting. Connecticut’s Fifth Congressional district is comprised primarily of affluent suburbs and small towns in the state’s northwestern corner, with 71 percent white residents and only 6.5 percent black. Its voters typically support Democrats for president and Congress. Considered a long shot to win the party primary against a longtime local Democratic politician, Hayes, 46, won the race with support from the Connecticut Education Association and the Working Families Party. She emphasized her tough upbringing, support for single-payer health care, stricter gun control, unions, and standing up to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Hayes beat former Meriden Mayor Manny Santos, a Republican, Marine veteran and strong Trump supporter, for the open seat by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin.

Ayanna Pressley will now be the first black Congresswoman from Massachusetts. In 1994 Pressley left Boston University to take a full-time hotel job to support her mother, then worked for Representative Joe Kennedy and Senator John Kerry. In 2009 she was elected to one of the four at-large seats on the 13-member Boston City Council, the first black women to serve in that body. Running at-large meant that she had to appeal to voters across the city. She topped the ticket when she ran for re-election in 2011 and 2013, and placed second in 2015 and 2017, demonstrating her broad support, with particular strength in Boston’s progressive white neighborhoods and Black and Latino communities. In January of this year she surprised the political world by launching a primary campaign against three-term incumbent Representative Mike Capuano, a liberal Democrat. She shocked pundits even more when she beat Capuano, running to his left in the overwhelmingly Democratic Seventh Congressional District. With the support of the Boston Globe, the hotel workers and the electrical workers unions, and progressive groups, Pressley defeated Capuano by a whopping 59 percent to 41 percent margin, then ran unopposed in the general election. Pressley’s new district is the most diverse and urban of those carried by these nine new members, with a population that’s 41 percent white, 26 percent black, 21 percent Latino, and 10 percent Asian, encompassing half of Boston and several polyglot suburbs.

Joseph Neguse will be the first Eritrean-American elected to Congress and Colorado’s first black Representative. He replaces Democrat Representative Jared Polis, who ran successfully for governor and will become the nation’s first openly gay state chief executive. The Second Congressional District—which includes Boulder and Fort Collins as well as smaller towns in the north-central part of Colorado—is 83 percent white and only 1 percent black. Neguse’s parents immigrated to the United States from Eritrea, met and married while living in California, and moved to Colorado when he was six. In 2006, while a law student at the University of Colorado, he founded New Era Colorado, an organization to get young people involved in politics. He won a seat of the University of Colorado Board of Regents and worked as an aide to an influential state legislator. After losing a close race for Colorado Secretary of State in 2014 he was appointed executive director of the state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies by Democrat Governor John Hickenlooper. In a safely Democratic district where Obama won 58 percent of the vote in 2012 and Clinton beat Trump by a 56 percent to 35 percent margin, Neguse coasted to victory this year, with 60 percent of the vote, against Republican Peter Yu.

Forty-five year old Steve Horsford won back the Congressional seat he lost in 2014. Nevada’s Fourth Congressional district—47 percent white, 29 percent Latino, and 14 percent black—is a quintessential swing district. Created in 2012, it has flipped from Democrat to Republican to Democrat. It stretches from the north Las Vegas suburbs across the central part of the state. Horsford grew up in Las Vegas and was involved in student politics at the University of Nevada. Horsford worked with Las Vegas’s powerful Culinary Workers union on job training programs, then ran the Culinary Training Academy, cosponsored by the union and the hotel industry. With the union’s support, he was elected to the State Senate in 2005 and in 2009 became thefirst African American to serve as Majority Leader. In 2012 he ran for the newly-created congressional seat, defeating Republican Danny Tarkanian (a perennially unsuccessful candidate and son the legendary UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian) by a 50 percent to 42 percent margin. Two years later, Horsford lost his seat to Republican Cresent Hardy, who served one term before losing to Democrat Ruben Kihuen, who did not seek re-election this year. In a rematch, Horsford beat Hardy by 52 percent to 44 percent.

These nine victories reflect the political dynamics that helped the Democrats gain a significant majority in the House this year. Three (McBath, Underwood, and Allred) flipped traditionally GOP districts, two (Delgado and Horsford) won in swing districts, and four (Omar, Hayes, Pressley, and Neguse) prevailed in safe Democratic districts.

This article has been updated. 

Featured image:  AP Photo/Teresa Crawford

Democratic Representative-elect Lauren Underwood, who defeated of four-term Republican incumbent Randy Hultgren on November 6, campaigning in Lindenhurst, Illinois. 

Remembering McCain, America’s Political Elite Rebukes Trump in Unison

Remembering McCain, America’s Political Elite Rebukes Trump in Unison

It is hard to maintain one’s cynical detachment while watching an event like the memorial service for Senator John McCain.

Like almost everyone who watched, I was moved by most of the speeches – including those by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Meghan McCain, and even Joe Lieberman (although not Henry Kissinger’s self-referential spiel), as well as the music (especially Renee Fleming’s rendition of “Danny Boy”).

In planning the service before he died, McCain understood the significance of the imagery of both Bush and Obama delivering eulogies. It required us to think about public service and patriotism. But the bipartisan event was not only a celebration of McCain’s life and legacy. It was also a rebuke to Donald Trump.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen people applaud during what was essentially a state funeral. But there was the assembled gathering of America’s political elite — present and recent past, Republican and Democrat – applauding after Meghan McCain said: “The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold. She is resourceful and confident and secure. She meets her responsibilities. She speaks quietly because she is strong. America does not boast because she has no need. The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

It was a remarkable moment – a rebuke to Trump by McCain’s daughter before both an international TV audience and a crowd of McCain’s friends, family, and colleagues. Their applause was like a wave at a baseball game. It started with a handful of people, but quickly expanded to a much wider group, eventually enveloping the entire audience in the National Cathedral.

The other speakers, including Bush, Obama, and Lieberman, were less overt than Meghan McCain, but they, too, used their eulogies to criticize Trump, whose involuntarily absence was deliberate and conspicuous.

McCain was hardly bipartisan during his political career. He was a conservative Republican who supported the Republican Party-line vote 87 percent of the time. But he was occasionally willing to buck his party on some key issues — including campaign finance reform, the use of torture against political prisoners, immigration reform, the regulation of tobacco, and, mostly famously, his decisive thumbs-down vote in 2017 against Trump’s top priority, the repeal of Obamacare.

Not a single speaker mentioned Trump’s name, but they all found ways to put the differences between the two men in dramatic relief. Unlike Trump, McCain was widely admired and respected, even among those who disagreed with him politically. Unlike Trump, who used his family ties and a phony physical excuse (“bone spurs”) to avoid military service during Vietnam, McCain demonstrated bravery and courage in combat. Unlike Trump, whose character is dominated by racism, selfishness, and an instinct for humiliation, McCain is remembered for his basic decency. Unlike Trump, whose entire life was spent seeking wealth, McCain devoted his life to public service and patriotism.

But when the camera panned on Mitch McConnell, I couldn’t help reminding myself that starting on Tuesday, things go back to normal. McConnell will still do Trump’s bidding on getting federal judges and Kavanagh approved, obstruct investigations into Trump, avoid commenting after Trump threatens to fire Sessions in order to fire Mueller and squash the investigation, and roll over on Trump’s statements and executive orders dealing with trade, immigration, and other issues.

I would like to believe – but strongly doubt – that this televised moment of national unity will persuade even one Republican in the House or Senate to do anything differently.

But perhaps the new Washington Post poll released on Friday — showing that 60% of registered voters disapprove of Trump and that an unprecedented 53 percent STRONGLY disapprove, while only 24 percent STRONGLY approve – will give some Republican politicians pause. Perhaps they will have second thoughts about kowtowing to the racist, neofascist megalomaniac who sits in the Oval Office (when he isn’t on the golf course).

Of course what matters most is what those poll numbers look like in their respective states and districts. But clearly the size of Trump’s following – not the hard core cultists, but other Republicans – as well as those independents and Democrats who voted for him with reservations – is shrinking.

McCain specifically prohibited Trump from attending the service. He knew that the president would be seething in anger, invisible to the global audience, forced to watch the event on TV, wallowing in self-pity.

No doubt Trump’s handlers had to work hard to restrain him from going on a Twitter rant during the ceremony. My friends and I were taking bets on when Trump would release his first Twitter rant and what it would say.

Trump is clearly panicking because he knows the walls are closing in, that many of his former close allies have turned on him and are cooperating with the Mueller investigation, that a blue wave is likely in November that will usher in a Democratic majority in the House (and perhaps the Senate) which will embark on tough hearings and perhaps impeachment proceedings, humiliating him even more.

I imagine that this is what Trump was thinking as he watched John McCain’s memorial service on Fox News from his Virginia golf club.

 

 

2017: A Year Of Reaction And Resistance

2017: A Year Of Reaction And Resistance

Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect.

2017 began with President Trump lying about the size of his inauguration crowd and ended with his lying about the size of the benefits he’ll get from the new tax bill. The year began with the largest protest marches in American history—the five million strong Women’s Marches on January 21—and ended with an upsurge of pent-up anger and activism around sexual assault toward women. It was a year punctuated by an upsurge in hate crimes and a controversial march of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, but also an unprecedented wave of Democratic victories in the Virginia state legislature as well as a commanding win by the Democrats’ candidate for governor. It began with liberals traumatized by the results of the presidential election and ended with a surprising Democratic Senate victory in Alabama, galvanized by a dramatic increase in African American voter turnout, offering hope that the party can win a majority of seats in the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in 2018.

No year in recent memory has so tested the fabric of American democracy. President Trump, a megalomaniac with clear neo-fascist inclinations, has violated every norm of decency and has demonstrated an unparalleled disregard for the rule of law and the protocols of diplomacy. Although many of his Republican colleagues in Congress find Trump personally repugnant, they have been complicit in supporting his right-wing policy agenda of eliminating regulations on business, cutting taxes for the super-rich and big corporations, destroying labor unions, slashing the social safety net, and scapegoating immigrants, Muslims, and people of color.

That Trump has been a dysfunctional and incompetent president, however, has limited his ability to inflict pain and harm in the U.S. and around the world. Even though his own Republican Party controls both houses of Congress, during his first year in office Trump was unable to get Congress to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, adopt an infrastructure plan, build a wall on the Mexican border, or defund Planned Parenthood.  Trump had only one significant legislative accomplishment—a regressive and unpopular tax plan drafted by Wall Street and engineered by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The policy will do severe damage to the economy and hurt the most vulnerable Americans, but it is also likely to galvanize voters in 2018 to oppose the Republicans who voted for it.

Resistance

Over the past decade, efforts like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers immigrant rights movement, the battles against the Keystone pipeline and for marriage equality, and the Fight for $15 (minimum wage) campaign have generated a new wave of activism. But nothing has inspired more protest than Trump’s election.

“Lots of us woke up the morning after the election wondering whether we understood the country as well as we thought we did,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy liberals who support progressive candidates and organizations. “We spent some time trying to absorb it.”

But it didn’t take long for people to recover from the shock. Indeed, Trump’s biggest accomplishment so far has been to galvanize a growing “resistance” movement. It began on January 21, the day after his inauguration, when five million people—the largest one-day protest in American history—participated in women’s marches and rallies in over 600 cities. This was followed by coordinated nationwide protests around climate change, science, immigrant rights, and Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Many of the people marching in the streets had never been to a protest before. Many then became active in local efforts to protest Trump policies and to help elect Democrats to office.

Soon after taking office, Trump issued an executive order limiting travel from six predominately Muslim countries. Immediately, a coalition of religious, immigrant rights, and labor groups led a campaign to fight back. Spontaneously, they protested at airports, filed lawsuits, and then persuaded dozens of universities and churches, mayors of big cities, and California’s political leaders, to resist cooperation with the federal crackdown. Several federal courts blocked Trump’s ban, stopping the president from carrying out one of his top campaign promises.

Soon after Trump announced the nation’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, mayors of major cities and the governor of California pledged to resist Trump’s efforts to reverse environmental progress.

The resistance movement involves many existing liberal groups, including labor unions, environmental and civil rights organizations, women’s and LBGT groups, but also, crucially, an amazing number of newly-formed activist groups. The most successful is Indivisible, started by three former congressional staff persons. Their initial goal was to thwart the Trump agenda. They posted a “how to” guide for neophyte activists on a website. Within a month, their manual had spawned about 6,000 local groups around the country in all 435 congressional districts. They’ve organized protests against Republican politicians and are working to elect liberal Democrats in the upcoming congressional elections.

The anti-Trump resistance has inspired an unprecedented surge of candidates at every level of government, with an unmatched number of women among them, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. At least 354 women—291 Democrats and 63 Republicans—are running for U.S. House seats. The number of women challenging incumbents is almost four times the number of two years ago.

In 2017, many liberal groups—including the ACLU, Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, and MoveOn.org—saw a big uptick of members and funding.

“I can’t overstate how unprecedented the grassroots energy of this resistance is,” said MoveOn.org’s executive director, Anna Galland.

Not Normal

Part of the effort to neutralize Trump involves undermining key pillars of his support while resisting efforts to “normalize” the man and his policies.

Throughout his campaign and since taking office, Trump has waged war on the mainstream media, criticizing its reporting as “fake news” whenever it revealed Trump’s own blunders and lies.

Partly in response to this upsurge of activism, Trump’s mistakes in dealing with foreign leaders, and his disregard for science and facts, in 2017 the mainstream media changed the way they report and frame the president and his advisors. They started using the word “lie” in headlines and news stories to describe many of Trump’s statements—an unprecedented shift in journalistic norms. On January 23, following Trump’s false claim that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton if three million people hadn’t voted illegally, The New York Times ran this front-page headline: “Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers.” In June, the Times published a compendium called “Trump’s Lies” and updated the list on a regular basis. Other newspapers have added reporters and started new columns designed to fact-check Trump’s statements.

On December 28, Trump gave an impromptu half-hour interview with The New York Times. The next day, The Washington Post, reviewing the transcript, identified 24 lies that Trump told the Times reporter—one every 75 seconds.

Trump has become the butt of jokes and ridicule by popular late-night TV talk-show hosts and comedians. Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Alec Baldwin, and Melissa McCarthy mock Trump on television on a regular basis, especially targeting his love affair with Vladimir Putin, his firing of FBI director James Comey (who was investigating Trump’s Russian ties), and his impulsive and bizarre daily tweets. Late night host Jimmy Kimmel has delivered serious, as well as comic, indictments of Trump’s policies. Actress Meryl Streep spent six minutes condemning Trump at the 2017 Golden Globe Award ceremony without mentioning his name.

Opposition to Trump has come from some surprising corners.

Opposition to Trump has come from some surprising corners. Members of two of the nation’s championship teams—the New England Patriots football team and the Golden State Warriors basketball team—refused to meet with Trump at the White House. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s one-man protest against racism by police grew into a national movement by NFL players and other pro athletes after Trump challenged their right to express their anger.

In protest against his racism, several major charitable organizations—including the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross—canceled plans to hold fundraising events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Trump has alienated many other constituencies who might otherwise have been his natural allies.

January’s Super Bowl football championship game – the biggest televised sports event of the year—featured commercials for Coca Cola, Budweiser, and other sponsors that promoted diversity and tolerance—a not-very-subtle dig at Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Muslims, and others. In one ad, a hair-products company warned viewers that we’re “in for four years of awful hair.”

In 2017, many of the nation’s leading conservative columnists—including William Kristol, Charles Sykes, Peggy Noonan, George Will, David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, and Charles Krauthammer—joined the anti-Trump opposition. They want to cleanse the conservative “brand” of its association with Trump. By contrast, the right-wing Fox News network has shown unceasing loyalty to Trump, helping him spread his pernicious fictions.

Trump has also alienated some Republicans in Congress, in part by blaming them for his own failures to persuade the public to support his policy agenda. Slowly, painfully, and without much principle or courage, some Republicans abandoned Trump. Many worried that their association with Trump would hurt their re-election chances. Some were simply appalled at his ineptitude, overt racism and sexism, and erratic behavior. Senator Bob Corker, a conservative Republican from Tennessee, raised questions about Trump’s “competence” and “stability.” In a speech on the Senate floor in October, Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, declared that he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior. Corker and Flake (who aren’t running for re-election) voted with Trump on most issues, including the tax bill, but they nevertheless expressed publicly what many of their Republican colleagues have said privately.

Incompetence

There is a growing consensus among political analysts across the ideological spectrum that Trump is psychologically and emotionally unfit to be president. He is poorly informed about public policy, indifferent to the workings of government, values loyalty over expertise within his inner circle, and is unable to think strategically. He is also impulsive, thin-skinned, addicted to flattery, a megalomaniac, a narcissist, and lacks empathy or a social conscience.

Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” according to reliable sources. When asked, Tillerson refused to deny it.

Given Trump’s business background, some voters thought that the new president would be an effective executive. Despite his boasts, Trump had actually run a relatively small, family-owned real estate and Trump-branding business (like the phony “Trump University”) that was in constant legal and financial trouble, including multiple bankruptcies. Trump exercised dictatorial control over his company. He had no experience with collaboration and compromise, or being held accountable by a board of directors.

Now Trump views the entire federal government as his personal fiefdom and expects complete loyalty to his agenda and to him personally. Never in recent memory has morale among FBI, EPA, Department of Justice, and other federal employees reached such a nadir.

It turns out that Trump has no management skills. Since taking office, his administration has been in chaos. Trump’s White House has been a cesspool of infighting among key staffers, who leak nasty things about each other and about Trump to the media. In his first year as president, he fired his chief of staff, national security advisor, two communications directors, and political strategist Steve Bannon. Several Cabinet members were caught in conflict of interest scandals. One, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, was forced to resign. Trump routinely humiliated his own top advisors, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Tillerson.

Trump completely mishandled his administration’s response to the hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and especially Puerto Rico. To him, these were simply occasions for photo-ops and political score-settling. He showed no compassion for the victims, even blaming Puerto Ricans for their plight. His failure to respond to Puerto Rico’s catastrophe surely cost lives.

Danger Signs

Despite his own ineptitude, and the growing opposition to his presidency by liberals, moderates, and some conservatives, Trump remains a dangerous figure in at least four ways.

The first is Trump’s impulsive war-mongering. With no understanding of geopolitics, Trump views the world entirely in personal terms. With his fear of humiliation and being seen as weak, Trump is a loose cannon in matters of war and peace. In response to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s threats, Trump—without consulting his own top advisers or foreign allies—threatened to unleash “fire and fury” while warning that America’s weapons are “locked and loaded.” Despite Trump’s public threats, the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t raise the ready-to-attack status of the military—an embarrassing rebuke to the president.

Trump, who avoided serving in the Vietnam War, appointed several generals to serve in his Cabinet and inner circle, and picked General John Kelly as his second chief of staff. Ironically, many Americans believe that these military men might be needed to stop Trump from plunging the world into nuclear war.

The second danger is Trump’s ability to appointment justices to the Supreme Court and other federal courts. In 2017 he appointed right-wing zealot Neil Gorsuch to the highest court to replace the troglodyte Antonin Scalia. If Trump gets to name one more justice to the nine-member court, he can shift the balance to a strongly conservative majority that could last for decades and overturn laws and previous rulings on abortion, same-sex marriage, voting rights, the separation of church and state, press freedom, and workers’ rights, among other issues. Many Americans hope that the 84-year-old liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and 81-year-old swing Justice Anthony Kennedy don’t die or resign until a Democratic president can be elected in 2020 and appoint their replacements. Trump also moved quickly to get the Senate to approve his nominations of reactionary lawyers, many with little or no judicial experience, to the federal bench. Some of the nominees have been so outrageously extreme or unprepared (or both) that even Republican senators have opposed their confirmations.

The third danger is Trump’s ability to make policy through executive order rather than legislation. By altering the focus of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, for example, the Trump administration deported more undocumented immigrants who have no criminal or arrest record, which has made millions of immigrants and their families extremely fearful. In June, ignoring advice from several top aides and in opposition to concerns of many business leaders and environmentalists, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris accord on global warming, despite public opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans favor the agreement.

Business lobby groups worked with Trump’s agency directors to weaken regulations on business that protect consumers, workers, public health, and the environment. The Trump administration repealed rules that protect workers from exposure to toxic chemicals that cause lung disease, that limit gas emissions from power plants, that protect drinking water from pollutants, that require safety precautions for engineers on trains and truck drivers, and that protect miners from dangerous workplaces. As of late November, the number of deaths among coal miners was double the number who died in 2016.

A final dangerous aspect of Trump’s presidency is his blatant racism, xenophobia, nativism, sexism, and misogyny, which has unleashed an upsurge of hate crimes and white supremacist activism. Trump’s racial resentments are deeply rooted. His father was arrested during a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York in 1927. During the 1970s, the Department of Justice found that Trump’s company was guilty of racial discrimination in his apartment buildings. In the 1980s, Trump took out full-page ads in newspapers to demand the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white women jogging in Central Park. When it was discovered that they were innocent, Trump refused to apologize. Trump laid the groundwork for his presidential campaign by promoting a racist “birther” conspiracy that challenged President Barack Obama’s citizenship.

Like all demagogues, Trump resorts to scapegoating to divert attention from his own failings.

Like all demagogues, Trump resorts to scapegoating to divert attention from his own failings. During his presidential campaign, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, women, gays and lesbians, immigrants, African Americans, and people with physical disabilities triggered a dramatic increase in hate crimes. Within ten days of Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center tracked 900 new bias-related incidents against minorities. That plague worsened after Trump took office. The number of anti-Muslim groups skyrocketed. Racist and neo-Nazi groups were emboldened. It was on deadly display in the gathering of neo-Nazis and other racists and anti-Semites in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. As Roxane Gay observed in a New York Times column: “It is 2017 and white supremacists no longer feel the need to wear hoods to hide their racism and anti-Semitism.”

Trump’s unwillingness to strongly condemn racist vigilantes encouraged hate groups to escalate their violent marches and acts of intimidation. The surge in hate activism is likely to persist even after Trump leaves office.

Exit Strategy?

Indeed, just when Trump will exit the White House is a matter of growing discussion. In May, over Trump’s objections, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and related matters. Mueller has the authority to indict or prosecute Trump, even while he’s still president. Some political observers now believe that Trump won’t survive his first term if Mueller issues a report filled with damaging charges of Trump’s corrupt and illegal activities around his ties to Russia, his obstruction of justice, and his use of the White House to advance his and his family’s business interests. Should the Democrats retake Congress in the 2018 midterm elections, the likelihood of impeachment proceedings would greatly increase. Even if they don’t, congressional Republicans will be under pressure to initiate either censure or impeachment proceedings—though the odds of that happening are slim unless the Republican base, which has so far stuck with Trump, decides that it’s had enough.

Trump was elected without a mandate. Out of 136 million votes cast, Hillary Clinton had three million more votes. Had she won 77,000 more votes in three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—she would have won the White House.

Trump began his presidency with low levels of public support and quickly squandered much of the good will that Americans grant newly elected presidents. Nine months after Trump took office, 65 percent of Americans said he had accomplished “not much” or “little or nothing,” according to a Washington Post-ABC News survey. A recent Gallup poll revealed that only 38 percent of Americans give Trump a positive rating—the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his presidency. His job performance rating has fallen—slightly, but measurably—even among Republicans.

Most Americans neither like nor agree with Trump. When it comes to key policy areas, including economic fairness, protecting the environment, and the drift toward plutocracy, polls show that a vast majority of Americans depart from Trump by leaning left. Americans are generally upset with widening inequality, the political influence of big business, and declining living standards. Public opinion is generally favorable toward greater government activism to address these and other problems, like climate change and health care. Most Americans worry that government has been captured by the powerful and wealthy.

Trump’s most zealous political base is comprised of white fundamentalist Christians (who accounted for 45 percent of his total vote) and white supremacists (the two groups overlap). Many fundamentalists find Trump’s personal behavior offensive but stick with him because of his pledge to appoint judges who will reverse rulings on gay rights, abortion, and the separation of religion and politics. The white supremacists see in Trump a sympathetic ally who on an almost daily basis goes on Twitter tantrums that espouse bigotry and hatred. They will stick with Trump.

Trump’s unparalleled unpopularity could help the Democrats win back a majority in the House of Representatives in November 2018. A few months ago, that seemed impossible but now it looks increasingly likely. The Democrats currently hold 194 out of 435 seats and need to gain 24 more to take control of that chamber. There are now more than 60 “swing” House districts where Republicans are vulnerable. With Jones’s unanticipated victory in Alabama, it’s now clear that the Senate is very much in play, too.

“We need good candidates who can connect with voters—people who’ve been fighting for better schools, wages, the environment, and health care,” said former Vermont Governor and DNC Chair Howard Dean. “And we can’t just run against Trump. We need a positive optimistic message about the economy.”

If Democrats and liberal groups can coordinate funding, targeting, voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts—and nominate strong candidates—they can win a majority in the lower chamber and possibly the Senate as well.

If that occurs, Trump will not only be neutralized politically, he’ll also be on the defensive. Congressman Adam Schiff, one of Trump’s toughest critics, will become chair of the House Intelligence Committee and Democrats will control the other committees, too. They will hold real hearings on Russia-gate, Trump’s business entanglements, his taxes, and how he used the White House to enrich himself and his family.

Under those circumstances, Trump could resign before his term is over, mostly likely on contrived grounds of poor health. This doesn’t protect him from prosecution unless he pardons himself before he resigns—a legal question now subject to much debate.

If Trump resigns or is impeached, Vice President Mike Pence will become president. Many Americans will feel a sense of relief, thinking that Pence—a former Senator and governor of Indiana—is, compared with Trump, “normal.” True, he’s not as psychologically deranged as Trump. But, as Jane Mayer recently explained in a New Yorker profile, Pence may be even more dangerous, because he’s more ideologically right wing, has a better working relationship with Congress, is more disciplined, and would probably manage the White House in a less chaotic way. (Admittedly, these are all low bars to clear.)

If Trump leaves office after the Democrats control the House or Senate, however, they will be able to thwart Pence from advancing his fierce right-wing views.

Trump is a deranged autocrat. But so far America’s democracy, however imperfect, has hamstrung most of his policy agenda. As the resistance grows, Americans will continue to demonstrate that they are more decent than their president.

 

Why Joe And Mika Owe America An Apology

Why Joe And Mika Owe America An Apology

 Most media reports have portrayed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski as aggrieved victims of Donald Trump’s Thursday Twitter tantrum. It can’t be pleasant to be attacked so personally by the president, but Scarborough and Brzezinski are fighting back. On their MSNBC show Morning Joe on Friday and in an op-ed column in the Washington Post titled “President Trump Is Not Well,” they chastised Trump for his vicious and vulgar attacks on her appearance, for referring to her as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” and him as “Psycho Joe.” They denied Trump’s claim that she had plastic surgery and that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she and Scarborough visited Trump’s private club at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last year. They also levied a serious charge that Trump tried to blackmail them by threatening a negative story about the couple in the National Enquirer unless they asked Trump (who is close to the tabloid’s publisher David Pecker) to have the story killed.

America is aghast but hardly surprised by Trump’s latest social media assault. It is totally consistent with his regular attacks on women, his efforts to bully and intimidate his critics, and his narcissistic need to get revenge on anyone who does not swear uncompromising loyalty to him.

Understandably, Brzezinski and Scarborough are attracting lots of sympathy for being the targets of Trump’s vile comments. Democrats have used this episode to remind Americans about the president’s unhinged personality, his disrespect for women, and how he demeans the office and embarrasses the country with his crude and repugnant remarks. Republicans have been relatively tepid in rebuking Trump. They have sought to distance themselves from his comments against the influential MSNBC co-hosts and particularly his sexist remarks about Brzezinski, but not one Republican so far has proposed a motion in Congress to censure the president for this and other outrageous statements.

On air, Brzezinski said that, “I am very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. It’s strange,” adding, “It does worry me about the country.” Scarborough pointed to the “alarming” pattern of Trump’s insults toward women. And in a tweet directed at Trump, Scarborough wrote, “Why do you keep lying about things that are so easily disproven? What is wrong with you?”

President Donald Trump is continuing his personal attacks on the anchors of Morning Joe. After facing criticism for a spat of Thursday tweets, the president continued to lash out at Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Twitter Saturday. From his New Jersey golf club, Trump wrote:

But Scarborough and Brzezinski are hardly emblems of journalistic integrity or political courage. Let’s not forget that the Morning Joe cohosts, particularly Scarborough (a former Republican Congressman from Florida), are partly responsible for Trump becoming president. They’ve known Trump for over a decade and were once among his biggest fans.

In late 2015 and 2016, when Trump’s campaign was gaining momentum, they defended him against his critics and offered him advice. For example, at an event at New York City’s 92nd Street Y in November 2015, Scarborough proudly recounted how he frequently called Trump to offer political guidance. Returning the bromance favor, in January 2016 Trump talked about Scarborough with Boston talk radio host Howie Carr. “He’s a great guy, and he has a great show … and we have a lot of fun,” Trump said. After Trump won the New Hampshire primary in February 2016, Trump appeared on Morning Joe and told the co-hosts: “You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it.”

A few days later, CNN reported that MSNBC officials were concerned about “Scarborough’s friendship with Trump and his increasingly favorable coverage of the candidate.” According to CNN, MSNBC insiders called Scarborough’s admiration for Trump “over the top” and “unseemly.” The Washington Post observed that Trump received “a tremendous degree of warmth from the show,” and that his appearances on the show, in person and over the phone, often felt like “a cozy social club.”

That coziness was caught on tape during an MSNBC town hall with Trump in New York that Scarborough and Brzezinski hosted in February 2016. An unaired clip of banter between Brzezinski and Trump between segments revealed the two of them colluding about what questions she’d ask him. “Nothing too hard, Mika,” Trump says. “OK,” she responded.

Even after Trump’s most disgusting and troublesome traits were revealed to the entire country throughout the campaign – his abuse of women, his attacks on Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, and people with disabilities, his profound ignorance of basic issues and government policy, and the corruption and scandals surrounding Trump University and the Trump foundation – Scarborough (and to a lesser extent Brzezinski) continued to lend Trump their support.

Trump and Scarborough’s relationship was a bromance of convenience. Trump got sympathetic coverage. Scarborough got inside information and frequent interviews that boosted “Morning Joe’s” ratings. But inevitably the two big egos clashed, with Brzezinski (slightly more liberal but less outspoken than her partner) collateral damage.

During the spring and summer, however, the relationship waxed hot and cold. In June, for example, Scarborough blasted Paul Ryan and other GOP leaders for endorsing Trump despite his “racist statements.” He warned Republicans that if they don’t “back away from those endorsements” they will “lose your standing as a national party.” That month Scarborough also said that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric “sounds a lot like Nazi Germany” and that Trump’s suggestion that Barack Obama was complicit in the shooting at an Orlando gay nightclub was “beyond breathtaking.”

In July, however, Scarborough parroted Trump’s criticism of FBI director James Comey for not recommending criminal charges against Clinton. After Trump gave a speech in Ohio that month, Brzezinski said that the candidate “got his groove back,” while Scarborough claimed that Trump looked “re-energized” and asked, “Is this guy really 70 years old?” On July 27, a week after Trump won the GOP nomination, however, Scarborough slammed Trump’s views on Russia. “He’s been an apologist for Vladimir Putin for a very long time,” he remarked, adding that Trump’s raise of Putin was “disqualifying.” By the end of July, Scarborough was calling on Republican leaders to “cut [Trump] loose.” But in August, reversing course, Scarborough backed Trump’s false claim that he had opposed the Iraq war.

In September, the couple met with the GOP nominee at Trump Tower to “rekindle” their relationship, according to CNN. After that meeting, they fawned over Trump for the next six months. They defended Trump’s call for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service detail to disarm, his ugly comments on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and reports that he misused his charitable foundation to support his private businesses. After polls revealed the Trump lost his first two debates with Clinton, they defended his performance and questioned the polling results. Scarborough argued that Trump’s shouldn’t be judged by normal debate standards. He even declared that debate moderators don’t need to fact-check statements made by the candidates – clearly a defense of Trump’s long-distance relationship with the truth.

At a September press event, Trump falsely claimed that Clinton had “started the birther controversy” (about Obama’s birthplace) but that he (Trump) had “finished it.” On their September 19 show, Brzezinski called on Trump to apologize for his long “birther” crusade but Scarborough quickly dismissed her comment. (This was not the first time that he publicly treated her with disdain and disrespect. He once told her, on air, that her political analysis “means nothing” because she is a Democrat).

In October, after the New York Times reported that Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for almost 20 years, Brzezinski came to his defense, claiming that he was “brilliant” for bragging how he had exploited the tax code to his advantage. Scarborough lashed out at journalists who criticized Trump for refusing to say if would accept the election results if he lost.

After Trump won the election, the duo continued to defend him, while Scarborough continued to give him advice during the transition. When Trump picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier, to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scarborough insisted that “I just know” that Trump “has to believe” in climate science. After Kellyanne Conway got a top White House job, she thanked Brzezinski for her “counsel and friendship.”

The MSNBC couple attended Trump’s New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago. Once Trump took office, he solidified his relationship with them. Scarborough bragged how he and Brzezinski have “known and have been friends with Donald Trump for a decade,” praising him as “the master of many things.”

By April, however, the duo stopped their love affair with the new president. While hardly joining the ranks of the “resistance” movement, their comments became more and more negative. As Trump became increasingly mired in scandal, Scarborough criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris environmental accords, which, he said, risked alienating China, India, and the U.S. business community. In May, Brzezinski bluntly stated, “This presidency is failing day by day by day through lies.” They began questioning Trump’s mental health.

In early June, while discussing Trump’s tweet rampages, including his attack on London’s mayor following a terrorist attack in that city, Scarborough observed, “There is not a sane rational human being who would have tweeted what he tweeted.”

Trump clearly took this about-face as a personal betrayal. Not unexpectedly, he overreacted and began attacking them via Twitter, even while falsely claiming that he rarely watched their show. Thursday’s Twitter tantrum was the latest, most personal, and most vulgar of his rants, but it was hardly out of character.

On Friday, the day after Trump’s attack, Scarborough said, “The guy that’s in the White House now is not the guy we knew two years ago.” Brzezinski agreed: “Not even close.”

That’s a lie.

People who have followed Trump’s career for years have remarked about his megalomania, vanity, need for flattery, hunger for adulation, nasty temper, thirst for revenge, instinct for humiliating his critics, sexist attitudes and abuse of women, racism, insistence on total fidelity, willingness to toss overboard anyone who fails his test of loyalty, and ignorance of history and current events. Scarborough and Brzezinski, who’ve known Trump for over a decade, had to be willfully oblivious to avoid seeing the true Trump.

All of Trump’s traits that they now find so objectionable were clearly on display last year when they embraced him and his campaign. They chose to ignore the obvious. Whether they wanted to get closer to power, out of personal loyalty, or (in Scarborough’s case) partisan allegiance, they helped normalize Trump even while he was violating every standard of decency expected of a presidential candidate and a president, while putting the nation at risk with his chaotic and impulsive behavior and unsteady leadership.

It is good that Scarborough and Brzezinski have finally recognized, or at least publicly admitted, that Trump is unfit to be president. If their recent critiques of Trump are the result of buyer’s remorse, a mea culpa for their previous fealty, atoning for past sins, or simply jumping off a sinking ship – well, better late than never.

But we shouldn’t forget or forgive them for helping this vile man become our nation’s president. We are reaping the consequences of their poor judgement and their unwillingness to speak truth to power. They should apologize to the American people.

Taunting Trump: How The Campaign To ‘Not Normalize’ Donald Is Driving Him Crazy

Taunting Trump: How The Campaign To ‘Not Normalize’ Donald Is Driving Him Crazy

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

“Resistance” comes in many forms. In discussions about how to deal with the fear and alarm ignited by Donald Trump, no word has been used more frequently than “normalize.” Democrats and progressives engage in almost daily protest rallies to defy Trump’s agenda. But perhaps the most successful component of the anti-Trump movement has been its willingness to challenge his legitimacy.

The popular slogan and hashtag “#Not My President” doesn’t mean that people think the November election results were rigged, but that Trump’s Electoral Vote majority doesn’t translate into a popular mandate and that his views and policies don’t reflect the popular will. The anti-Trump movement refuses to “normalize” a president whom they view as an authoritarian, even a neo-fascist, who violates that basic norms of democracy and the rule of law. By poking fun at Trump and exposing his narcissism, conflicts-of-interest, and pathological lies, his opponents are undermining his credibility and destabilizing his presidency as much as any marches and demonstrations.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted February 18-22 found that Trump’s job approval rating stood at just 44 percent — a record low for a newly inaugurated president. Only 34 percent of Americans considered Trump to be honest and trustworthy. Just 18 percent said Trump had the proper temperament to be president, while 55 percent ranked his temperament as poor. A Quinnipiac University Poll conducted March 16-21 found that Trump’s approval rating had dipped even further – to just 37 percent. Particularly worrying for Trump is that is support among his base is slipping. In the past two weeks – in the midst of controversies over Trump’s ties to Russia and his claim that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower — approval among Republicans dropped from 91 to 81 percent. Among white voters it declined from 49 to 44 percent. The support among men dropped from 49 to 43 per cent.

The effort to not normalize Trump isn’t a conspiracy. It involves separate but overlapping components that, when viewed together, reflect a powerful effort to withhold from Trump the things he craves most: public approval and esteem.

Entertainment: Five nights a week, CBS “Late Night” host Stephen Colbert mocks Trump with jokes that depict him as a bumbling buffoon. Comedians Bill Maher, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and John Oliver taunt Trump on a weekly basis, with no pretense to be even-handed. “Saturday Night Live’s” sketches eviscerate Trump each week, none more than Alec Baldwin’s uncanny impersonation and acerbic barbs directed at the Trump.

Trump can’t stand the stings. In December, Trump tweeted: “Just tried watching Saturday Night Live – unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad.” In January, five days before his inauguration, Trump still couldn’t contain himself, tweeting: “@NBCNews is bad but Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!” These reactions expose his inability to laugh at himself, a characteristic of all narcissists.

This year’s Golden Globes, Grammy, and Oscar award shows included fusillades of scorn directed at the 45th president. Meryl Streep’s six minute condemnation of the president at the Sunday night Golden Globe ceremony—without once mentioning his name—so got under Trump’s skin that in a series of tweets before dawn Monday, he called Streep, who has more Academy Award nominations than any other actor in history, “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood”— a gesture that revealed the magnitude of his vanity and the thinness of his skin.

At the Grammy awards, several artists used their time on stage to rebuke Trump. Pop star Katy Perry, not known as a political performer, debuted a new song, “Chained to the Rhythm,” wearing a white pants suit (in honor of Hillary Clinton) and an armband with the word “Persist” on it (in honor of Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to be silenced by Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell), while telling the audience “No hate!” The hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest performed “We the People” while Busta Rhymes said, “I just want to thank President Agent Orange for perpetuating all of the evil that you’ve been perpetuating throughout the United States. I want to thank President Agent Orange for your unsuccessful attempt at the Muslim ban.” While a sign saying “No Wall No Ban” flashed in the background, rapper Q-Tip joined them on stage holding the hand of a young woman wearing a hijab – a straightforward attack on Trump’s anti-Muslim policies.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, the rock band Green Day released its music video for their “Troubled Times.” It features an animated Trump-like figure wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat while spewing hateful rhetoric, images of the Ku Klux Klan, scenes from the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements, and contemporary protesters holding signs that read “Make America Hate Again” and “No Border Wall.” The video ends when someone pushes a red button and the screen morphs into a mushroom cloud.

The Media: In his previous gig as the host of the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, Colbert coined the word “truthiness” not only to mock Fox News’ claim to be “fair and balanced” but also to jab at the mainstream media for trying its traditional “he said/she said” approach to reporting in which all claims are given equal weight, regardless of their validity.

Since Trump took office, the mainstream media have become bolder about calling out his lies and distortions. Now, the media is prepared to challenge Trump’s comments that are outright falsehoods. Rather than simply report what Trump says—making journalists little more than transcribers—the media have increasingly questioned the veracity of president’s statements, starting with his claim that the crowds at his inauguration were the largest in history.

After Trump said (during a January 11 press conference) that the public doesn’t care about his tax records, the media reported on a new Pew poll revealing that two-thirds of Americans want the president to release his returns. When Trump claimed that he had received more electoral votes than any Republican since Ronald Reagan, the media quickly reported that he was wrong.

On January 23, following Trump’s claims that he would have won the popular vote if three million people hadn’t voted illegally, the headline on the New York Times front-page story read: “Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers.” In the past, the Times might have headed the article “Trump Repeats Assertion” or “Trump Repeats Claim” but in an unprecedented move, it called a lie a lie. Having broken that barrier, the Times headline writers were free to tell the unmitigated truth. In March, after Trump tweeted that Obama had ordered a wiretap on Trump Tower, the headline in the next day’s Times read “Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones.” The Washington Post headlined its story, “Trump, citing no evidence, accuses Obama of ‘Nixon/Watergate’ plot to wiretap Trump Tower.”

After the nation’s two leading papers changed the norms of journalism, other news outlets felt more comfortable doing so.

The Chicago Tribune and Washington Post have each initiated regular columns devoted to fact-checking Trump’s statements and exposing his lies. The media watchdog site Politifact has been working overtime to keep track of the validity of Trump’s assertions. It has discovered that through mid-March, 70 percent of Trump’s statements were “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire” outright lies.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the media has ratcheted up its investigative reporting about Trump’s business empire, his ties to Russia, and the right-wing affiliations, regulatory abuses, and outlandish views of many of his cabinet nominees and advisors. NPR, for example, created a team devoted to covering Trump’s conflicts of interest. Media coverage of Trump’s links to Putin and Russian businesses has put the president on the defensive since he took the oath of office.

At a March 13 press briefing, NBC’s Pete Alexander got into a heated exchange with Trump spokesperson Sean Spicer, raising questions about Trump tweeting things without proof “When should Americans trust the president?” Alexander asked Spicer. “Should they trust the president, is it phony or real when he says President Obama was wiretapping him?”

Trump’s twitter tirades reveal that by doing its job, the media are getting under his thin skin. At 6:40 am on February 15, for example, Trump tweeted: “The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!” Forty minutes later, he was back on twitter, proclaiming: “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia.” Two days later he tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” The following week he was still fulminating on the same topic: “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth. A great danger to our country. The failing @nytimes has become a joke. Likewise @CNN. Sad!”

Sports: But it isn’t only the liberal entertainment and media institutions that are challenging Trump’s legitimacy. In February six members of the New England Patriots said they wouldn’t accompany their teammates to the White House later this year, where the Super Bowl champions will be honored by Trump. Also in February, Baltimore Orioles Vice President John Angelos announced that he would refuse to allow Trump to throw out the opening game ball.

This year’s Super Bowl featured commercials promoting diversity and tolerance – a not very subtle criticism of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Muslims, and others. Budweiser’s commercial eulogized its founder, Adolphus Busch, an immigrant from Germany, who was told, upon reaching this country, that he was “not wanted here.” Coca-Cola’s ad revealed a montage of young Americans singing “America the Beautiful” in different languages, with the tagline,. “Together Is Beautiful.” The ad for 84 Lumber, a little-known construction supplies firm, showed a Hispanic mother and daughter making their way north to the U.S. border, where they encountered a large wall. It’s A 10, a hair-product company, warned viewers that we’re “in for four years of awful hair.”

Consumer Boycotts: Some activist groups are directly going after Trump’s corporate allies and even trying to undermine Trump’s own business empire. Last year Color of Change initiated a campaign to persuade corporations not to sponsor the Republican convention. A number of the big firms – including Coca Cola and Microsoft – backed out in response to the pressure campaign.

This year, Color of Change, MoveOn and several other groups launched an anti-Trump social media campaign, #GrabYourWallet, which is urging consumers to boycott corporations with ties to the Trump. Its website listed companies owned by the Trumps or that are actively supporting or doing business with the Trump family. It not only targeted Trump’s golf courses and hotels, but also stores that stocked Trump-branded merchandise, including Ivanka Trump’s line of clothing and shoes and companies that advertise on the Celebrity Apprentice television show, that Trump is still executive producer of. This boycott list includes Amazon, Bed Bath and Beyond, Zappos, Bloomingdales, Bon-Ton, Burlington Coat Factory, Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, Dillards, Neiman Marcus, Sears and T.J. Maxx.

The #GrabYourWallet activists have also targeted the CEOs who sit on Trump’s business advisory council. The first domino to fall was Uber. A separate online petition sponsored by the Independent Drivers Guild, which represents nearly 50,000 Uber drivers in New York City, called on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign, saying that Uber was built on a “foundation of hard work by immigrant workers.” In early February, for the first time in its history, downloads of Uber’s app on iOS were surpassed by those of its chief competitor, Lyft. A few days later, Kalanick resigned from the president’s business advisory council. The group’s next targets include Disney, Tesla, Wal-Mart, and Pepsi, whose CEOs also sit on Trump’s business group.

Yale students, alumni, and faculty are currently pressuring the university to give back a $150 million gift from alumnus Stephen Schwarzman, chair of the private-equity Blackstone Group, who is serving as chair of Trump’s business advisory group.

A new online group, Sleeping Giant, targeted consumer-oriented companies that advertised on Breitbart News, the right-wing white supremacist website run, until last year, by Steve Bannon, who chaired Trump’s campaign and is now his chief political advisor. The tech-savvy Sleeping Giant activists created a Twitter account that allowed consumers to send screenshots to companies who might have been unaware that their ads were appearing next to Breitbart’s offensive content.

Over 1,000 companies – including Allstate, Kellogs, Air Canada, and Nike — dropped their ads on the Breitbart site. So did AARP, Duke University and other advertisers that unwittingly found that their brand was being promoted on the toxic propaganda site.

Closer to Trump’s home, Nordstrom – the nationwide department store – told his daughter Ivanka that it would no longer sell her clothing line. The company claimed that it did so because the brand wasn’t selling, not make a political statement, but the president wasn’t buying it.

“My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom,” Trump tweeted in February. “She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!”

Mental Health Professionals: The comedians’ ridicule, the Super Bowl ads, the criticism by sports figures, and the attacks on Trump’s corporate allies and his daughter’s own business operation not only contribute to Trump’s declining favorability, polls show, but also drives Trump crazy.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the constant ridicule directed at Trump brings to the surface or deepens his existing mental instability. In fact, a growing number of major news outlets, as well as the Columbia Journalism Review, have run columns, new stories, and broadcast segments interviewing psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who raise questions about Trump’s emotional health, sanity, and fitness to serve as president.

In 1964, opponents of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater mocked his slogan, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” with a slogan of their own, “”In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts.” That year, a magazine called Fact published a poll of 2,417 psychiatrists, the majority of whom said that Goldwater was “psychologically unfit” to be president. In addition to the survey, the magazine published 38 pages of psychiatrists’ comments, which including calling Goldwater a dangerous lunatic,” “paranoid” a “counterfeit figure,” and “emotionally too unstable,” as well as saying that he had an “impulsive quality” and a “Godlike self-image.”

In response, the American Psychiatric Association revised its code of ethics, saying that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person. It became known ever since as the “Goldwater rule.”

Since then, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have been wary of diagnosing presidential candidates and presidents. But this year, many of them decided to break the Goldwater rule and talk publicly about the condition of Trump’s mind.

Last month, for example, 33 prominent mental health experts signed an open letter to the New York Times warning that Trump’s mental state “makes him incapable of serving safely as president.” Trump’s “words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize,” they wrote. They noted his tendency to “distort reality” to fit his “personal myth of greatness.” The added that “Trump’s speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions.” Their letter warns that Trump’s “grave emotional instability” makes him “incapable of serving safely as president.”

Explaining why they decided to break from the Goldwater rule, the mental health professions explained that “This silence has resulted in a failure to lend our expertise to worried journalists and members of Congress at this critical time. We fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.”

The letter to the Times reflects the growing willingness of mental health professionals to make public statements, including interviews with the news media, about Trump’s psychological condition and his fitness to be president.

Of course, it is impossible to assess the impact of all this ridicule and lampooning of Trump on public opinion. The accumulation of mockery may simply reinforce existing views of the president rather than change minds. Trump haters enjoy the scorn because it confirms their assessment. Trump supporters ignore the taunts or view them as evidence of the condescension of the bi-coastal liberal elite. But for Americans in the middle, the constant bombardment of anti-Trump satire, investigate reporting about his business failings and corruption, and the exposure of his penchant for lying can only serve to lead them to question Trump’s fitness for the job.

One challenge for the anti-Trump resistance movement is to raise the political costs for Republicans who remain loyal to the president and his unpopular policies. Typically, when a president’s poll numbers plummet, members of his party in Congress seek to distance themselves from his agenda.

In normal times, Trump’s sinking credibility would undermine his ability to advance his policy ideas and inflict harm on Republicans in the House and Senate running for re-election next year. But, as we’re learning about Trump, nothing about him is normal.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

What Dr. Seuss Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

What Dr. Seuss Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

Asked to explain his political views, Theodor Geisel — better known as Dr. Seuss — once said that he was “against people who push other people around.” Were he alive today, he would surely be using his sharp pen to make fun of Donald Trump.

On March 2, tens of millions of children and their parents read Dr. Seuss books as part of Read Across America Day, sponsored by the National Educational Association (NEA) in partnership with local school districts and some businesses. The NEA, which started the program 20 years ago to encourage reading, was smart to tie the program to Dr. Seuss, who remains — 26 years after his death — the world’s most popular writer of modern children’s books.

As kids and as parents, most Americans know all about The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Green Eggs and Ham, and many others of Seuss’s colorful characters and stories. What some may not know is that despite his popular image as a kindly cartoonist for kids, Geisel was also a political progressive whose views permeate his children’s tales. Many of his books use ridicule, satire, wordplay, nonsense words, and wild drawings to take aim at bullies, hypocrites, and demagogues. Trump would have been an easy target for Geisel’s artistic outrage and moralistic mockery.

His popular children’s books included parables about racism, anti-Semitism, the arms race, corporate greed, and the environment. But, equally important, he used his pen to encourage youngsters to challenge bullies and injustice. Many Dr. Seuss books are about the misuse of power — by despots, kings, and other rulers, including the sometimes arbitrary authority of parents.

In a university lecture in 1947 — a decade before the civil rights movement — Geisel urged would-be writers to avoid the racist stereotypes common in children’s books. America “preaches equality but doesn’t always practice it,” he noted. Generations of progressive activists may not trace their political views to their early exposure to Dr. Seuss, but without doubt this shy, brilliant genius played a role in sensitizing them to abuses of power.

In several early books — including The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1938), The King’s Stilts (1939), and Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949) — Geisel made fun of the pretension, foolishness, and arbitrary power of kings.

In 1941, Geisel became an editorial cartoonist for the left-wing New York City daily newspaper PM. Fervently pro-New Deal, PM included sections devoted to unions, women’s issues, and civil rights. Geisel sharpened his political views as well as his artistry and his gift for humor at PM, where he drew over 400 cartoons.

Before many Americans were aware of the calamity confronting Europe’s Jews, Geisel — a Lutheran who grew up in a tight-knit German American community in Springfield, Massachusetts — drew editorial cartoons for PM that warned readers about Hitler and anti-Semitism, and attacked the “America First” isolationists who turned a blind eye to the rise of fascism and the Holocaust. Trump adopted “America First” as one of his campaign themes.

His PM cartoons viciously but humorously attacked Hitler and Mussolini. He bluntly criticized isolationists who opposed American entry into the war, especially the famed aviator (and Hitler booster) Charles Lindbergh, right-wing radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, and Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. Trump has rekindled anti-Semitism, nativism, and isolationism with his bombastic and hateful rhetoric.

Through his PM drawings, Geisel was one of the few editorial voices to decry the U.S. military’s racial segregation policies. He used his cartoons to challenge racism at home against Jews and blacks, union-busting, and corporate greed, which he thought divided the country and hurt the war effort. Geisel would have used his pen to remind his audience about the vicious anti-union campaign that Trump waged at his Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and his campaign comments about lowering America’s minimum wage in order to compete with China and other foreign countries.

After World War II, Geisel occasionally submitted cartoons to publications, such as a 1947 drawing, published in the New Republic, depicting Uncle Sam looking in horror at Americans accusing each other of being communists and disloyal Americans, a clear statement of Geisel’s anger at the nation’s right-wing Red Scare hysteria, which soon spiraled into McCarthyism. Geisel would surely have dipped into his inkwell to lambast Trump’s outrageous “birther” accusations questioning President Obama’s loyalty and American citizenship, which fueled Trump’s campaign for president.

Geisel devoted almost his entire post-war career to writing children’s books and quickly became a well-known and commercially successful author — thanks in part to the post-war baby boom. He was popular with parents, kids, and critics alike.

His 1954 book, Horton Hears a Who!, was written during the McCarthy era. It features Horton the Elephant, who befriends tiny creatures (the “Whos”) whom he can’t see, but whom he can hear, thanks to his large ears. Horton rallies his neighbors to protect the endangered Who community. Horton agrees to protect the Whos, observing, in one of Geisel’s most famous lines, “even though you can’t see or hear them at all, a person’s a person, no matter how small.” The other animals ridicule Horton for believing in something that they can’t see or hear, but he remains loyal to the Whos. Horton urges the Whos to join together to make a big enough sound so that the jungle animals can hear them. That can happen, however, only if Jo-Jo, the “smallest of all” the Whos, speaks out. He has a responsibility to add his voice to save the entire community. Eventually he does so, and the Whos survive.

The book is a parable about protecting the rights of minorities, urging “big” people to resist bigotry and indifference toward “small” people, and the importance of individuals (particularly “small” ones) speaking out against injustice. A reviewer for the Des Moines Register hailed it as a “rhymed lesson in protection of minorities and their rights.” It isn’t difficult to imagine that Geisel would have a lot to say, and draw, about Trump’s track record of discriminating against African Americans in his apartment buildings — a practice that led to a lawsuit filed against Trump by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the federal Fair Housing Act — or his ongoing attacks on immigrants and Muslims.

Geisel’s finest rendition of his progressive views is found in Yertle the Turtle (1958). Yertle, king of the pond, stands atop his subjects in order to reach higher than the moon, indifferent to the suffering of those beneath him. In order to be “ruler of all that I see,” Yertle stacks up his subjects so he can reach higher and higher. Mack, the turtle at the very bottom of the pile, says:

Your Majesty, please / I don’t like to complain

But down here below / We are feeling great pain

I know up on top / You are seeing great sights

But down at the bottom / We, too, should have rights.

Yertle just tells Mack to shut up. Frustrated and angry, Mack burps, shaking the carefully piled turtles, and Yertle falls into the mud. His rule ends and the turtles celebrate their freedom.

The story is clearly about Hitler’s thirst for power. But Geisel is also saying that ordinary people can overthrow unjust rulers if they understand their own power. The story’s final line reflects Geisel’s democratic and anti-authoritarian political outlook:

And turtles, of course … all the turtles are free

As turtles, and maybe, all creatures should be.

Geisel would no doubt make fun of Trump’s lust for fame and power and his climb to the top of his real estate empire on the backs of his employees — waiters, dishwashers, and plumbers, among others — and contractors whom he stiffed by failing to pay them for services they rendered. Geisel would also find much to criticize regarding Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his outrageous megalomania.

The Sneetches (1961), inspired by the Protestant Geisel’s opposition to anti-Semitism, exposes the absurdity of racial and religious bigotry. Sneetches are yellow bird-like creatures. Some Sneetches have a green star on their belly. They are the “in” crowd and they look down on Sneetches who lack a green star, who are the outcasts. One day a “fix-it-up” chap named McBean appears with some strange machines. He offers the star-less Sneetches an opportunity to get a star by going through his “star on” machine, for three dollars each. This angers the star-bellied Sneetches, who no longer have a way to display their superiority. But McBean tells them that for ten dollars, they can use his “star off” machine, ridding themselves of their stars and thus, once again, differentiating themselves from the outcast group.

The competition escalates as McBean persuades each Sneetch group to run from one machine to the other “until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew / Whether this one was that one or that one was this one / Or which one was what one or what one was who.”

Eventually both groups of Sneetches run out of money. After McBean leaves, all the Sneetches realize that neither the plain-belly nor the star-belly Sneetch is superior. The story is an obvious allegory about racism and discrimination, clearly inspired by the yellow stars that the Nazis required Jews to wear on their clothing to identify them as Jewish.

Were he alive now, Geisel would surely object to the similar ideas emanating from Trump during his campaign — including his anti-Semitic tweet depicting a Jewish star surrounded by dollar bills and his inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims, Mexicans, and people with physical disabilities. Nor is it difficult to imagine that Geisel would have a lot to say, and draw, about Trump’s failure to mention Jews when he issued a proclamation about Holocaust Remembrance Day, and his unwillingness to condemn recent hate crimes targeted at Jewish cemeteries, community centers, and day schools until he was pressured to do so.

Geisel’s The Lorax (1971) appeared as the environmental movement was just emerging, less than a year after the first Earth Day. He later called it “straight propaganda”— a polemic against pollution — but it also contains some of his most creative made-up words, like “cruffulous croak” and “smogulous smoke.”

The book opens with a small boy listening to the Once-ler tell the story of how the area was once full of Truffula trees and Bar-ba-loots and was home to the Lorax. But the greedy Once-ler — clearly a symbol of business — cuts down all the trees to make thneeds, which “everyone, everyone, everyone needs.” The lakes and the air become polluted, there is no food for the animals, and it becomes an unlivable place. The fuzzy yellow Lorax (who speaks for the trees, “for the trees have no tongues”) warns the Once-ler about the devastation he’s causing, but his words are ignored.

The Once-ler cares only about making more things and more money. “Businesss is business! / And business must grow,” he says. At the end, surveying the devastation he has caused, the Once-ler shows some remorse, telling the boy: “Unless someone like you / cares a whole awful lot / nothing is going to get better / It’s not.”

The Lorax is an attack on corporate greed — a trait that Geisel would certainly recognize in Donald Trump, along with his denials of global warming, his pledge to expand the use of coal to generate electricity, his attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, and his pledge (during his speech to Congress this week) to weaken environmental regulations.

In 1984, Geisel produced The Butter Battle Book, another strong statement about a pending catastrophe, in this case the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, fueled by President Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric. “I’m not anti-military,” Geisel told a friend at the time, “I’m just anti-crazy.” It is a parable about the dangers of the political strategy of “mutually assured destruction” brought on by the escalation of nuclear weapons.

In this book, Geisel’s satirical gifts are on full display. The cause of the senseless war is a trivial conflict over toast. The battle is between the Yooks and the Zooks, who don’t realize that they are more alike than different, because they live on opposite sides of a long wall. The Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up, while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. They compete to make bigger and better weapons until both sides invent a destructive bomb (the “Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo”) that, if used, will kill both sides. Like The Lorax, there is no happy ending or resolution. As the story ends, the generals on both sides of the wall are poised to drop their bombs. It is hard for even the youngest reader to miss Geisel’s point.

Geisel would surely poke fun at Trump’s cavalier and bombastic attitude toward nuclear weapons as well as his proposal, announced at his speech to Congress this week, to increase the Defense Department budget by $54 billion.

Geisel wrote and illustrated 44 children’s books characterized by memorable rhymes, whimsical characters, and exuberant drawings that encouraged generations of children to love reading and expand their vocabularies. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages and sold over 200 million copies.

His books consistently reveal his sympathy with the weak and the powerless and his fury against bullies and despots. His books teach children to think about how to deal with an unfair world. Rather than instruct them, Geisel invited his young readers to consider what they should do when faced with injustice. Geisel believed children could understand these moral questions, but only rarely did he portray them in overtly political terms. Instead, he wrote, “when we have a moral, we try to tell it sideways.”

Although Trump has been subject to much criticism and satire by columnists, editorial writers, TV pundits, and comedians, as well as Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, no cartoonist has been able to scrutinize and ridicule his bullying and buffoonery the way Geisel dissected the despots and blowhards of his era. We could surely use Geisel’s voice — and his pen — since Trump took office.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College.

IMAGE: Ron Ellis / Shutterstock.com

Another Trump Lie: ‘I’m Smart’

Another Trump Lie: ‘I’m Smart’

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

The only two words Donald Trump has uttered more frequently than “you’re fired” are “I’m smart.”

He did it again Saturday during his visit to CIA headquarters. Trump’s handlers staged the event so he could demonstrate his full support for the agency (despite spending the past year bashing the nation’s intelligence community), and to divert media attention away from the tens of thousands of Americans who had come to Washington, D.C. that day to protest Trump’s presidency. But Trump’s scripted remarks turned into a rambling rant that included attacks on the media and his insistence that as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration (photos revealed no more than 250,000).

In the middle of his tirade, Trump felt the need to tell the nation’s top spies that he is a bright guy.

“Trust me,” Trump said, “I’m, like, a smart person.”

Last month Trump repeated those same words while explaining why he’ll be the first president since Harry Truman to avoid getting daily updates from intelligence professionals about national security threats.

“I’m, like, a smart person,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace.

Trump has repeated that claim many times. Each time, it isn’t clear if he’s trying to convince his interviewer or himself.

In 2004, in an interview with CNN, Trump said, “I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I got very good marks. I was a good student. It’s the best business school in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

In 2011, in an interview with ABC, Trump said: “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country,” referring once again to Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1968.

“I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” he said during a speech in Phoenix in July 2015. “I’m, like, a really smart person.”

In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press in August 2015, Trump described Wharton as “probably the hardest there is to get into.” He added, “Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton.” He also observed: “Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time. The super genius of all time.”

During a CNN-sponsored Republican town hall in Columbia, South Carolina last February, Trump reminded the audience that he had gone to Wharton and then repeated his boast: “Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person.”

Anyone who feels compelled to boast about how smart he is clearly suffers from a profound insecurity about his intelligence and accomplishments. In Trump’s case, he has good reason to have doubts.

Trump has the kind of street smarts (what he calls “gut instinct”) characteristic of con artists and hucksters, but his limited vocabulary, short attention span, ignorance of policy specifics, indifference to scientific evidence, and admitted aversion to reading raise questions about his intellectual abilities; his capacity to absorb and analyze information and ideas.

Many observers have noted that Trump has a difficult time expressing himself and speaking in complete sentences. A linguistic analysis by Politico found that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. A study by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University compared last year’s Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in terms of their vocabulary and grammar. Trump scored at a fifth-grade level, the lowest of all the candidates.

Some might suspect this is not an intellectual shortcoming but instead Trump’s calculated way of communicating with a wide audience. But Tony Schwartz, who spent a great deal of time with the real estate developer while ghostwriting his book The Art of the Deal, noted that Trump has a very limited vocabulary.

It would hardly be surprising if these observations infuriated the vain and insecure Trump. Trump’s persistent insults directed toward anyone who disagrees with him also suggest his deep insecurity. Before, during and since his presidential campaign, Trump has constantly denigrated his opponents and detractors, among them actresses Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, and Meryl Streep, civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis, businessman Mark Cuban, GOP political operatives Karl Rove and Ana Navarro, NBC’s Chuck Todd, Jeb Bush, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and conservative columnist George Will.

Trump considers all of these people “losers.” It turns out that this is one of Trump’s favorite words. An archive of Trump’s Twitter account since 2009 found that he used the word “loser” 234 times. His other favorite insults include “dumb” or “dummy” (222 tweets), “terrible” (202), “stupid” (182), “weak” (154), and “dope” (115).

For example, on May 8, 2013, Trump tweeted: “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”

On Sept. 26, 2014, nine months before he announced his candidacy for the White House, Trump tweeted: “I wonder if I run for PRESIDENT, will the haters and losers vote for me knowing that I will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN? I say they will!”

Last September 17 — after CNN anchors criticized Trump for promising a “big announcement” to get the media to come to an event, only to use the moment to tout his new hotel and then invite several military figures onstage to praise him — Trump had another Twitter tantrum: “CNN just doesn’t get it, and that’s why their ratings are so low — and getting worse. Boring anti-Trump panelists, mostly losers.”

In contrast to his attacks on “losers,” Trump frequently retweets comments from others congratulating him for how “smart” he is.

Only someone who secretly doubts his own intelligence would feel compelled to make these kinds of public statements.

Trump surely knows he didn’t get into Wharton on his own merits. He transferred into Wharton’s undergraduate program after spending two years at Fordham University in New York. According to Gwenda Blair’s 2001 biography, The Trumps, Trump’s grades at Fordham were not good enough to qualify him for a transfer to Wharton. Blair wrote that Trump got into Wharton as a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who knew Trump’s older brother, Freddy. The college’s admissions staff surely knew that Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer and a potential donor.

Moreover, Trump has for years exaggerated his academic accomplishments at Wharton. On at least two occasions in the 1970s, the New York Times reported that Trump “graduated first in his class” at Wharton in 1968. That’s not true. The dean’s list for his graduation year, published in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, doesn’t include Trump’s name. He has refused to release his grade transcripts from his college days.

It is likely that Trump was the original source for that falsehood, but it isn’t entirely clear, since neither Times article attributes it directly to him. But the fabrication that Trump was first in his class has been repeated in many other articles and books about Trump, so he clearly knew it was out there in the public domain and has never bothered to correct it.

“He was not in any kind of leadership. I certainly doubt he was the smartest guy in the class,” Steve Perelman, a classmate of Trump’s at Wharton, told the Daily Pennsylvanian in 2015.

Trump’s insecurity about his accomplishments is also revealed in his efforts to portray himself as a self-made entrepreneur.

“It has not been easy for me,” Trump said at a town hall meeting on October 26, 2015, acknowledging, “My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.”

At a news conference last year, Trump repeated the same story: “I got a very, very small loan from my father many years ago. I built that into a massive empire and I paid my father back that loan.”

An investigation by the Washington Post in March demolished Trump’s claim that he made it on his own. Not only did Trump’s multi-millionaire father Fred provide Donald with a huge inheritance, and set up big-bucks trust accounts to provide his son with a steady income, Fred was also a silent partner in Trump’s first real estate projects. According to the Post:

“Trump’s father — whose name had been besmirched in New York real estate circles after investigations into windfall profits and other abuses in his real estate projects — was an essential silent partner in Trump’s initiative. In effect, the son was the front man, relying on his father’s connections and wealth, while his father stood silently in the background to avoid drawing attention to himself.”

Fred Trump’s real estate fortune was hardly due to his faith in the free market, but instead stemmed from his reliance on government subsidies. He made his money building middle-class apartments financed by the Federal Housing Administration.

In 1954, when Donald was 8 years old, his father was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Banking Committee on allegations that he had ripped off the government to reap windfall profits through his FHA-insured housing developments. At the hearings, the elder Trump was called on the carpet for profiteering off public contracts, including overestimating the construction costs of his projects in order to get larger mortgages from FHA. Under oath, he reluctantly admitted that he had wildly overstated the development costs.

Donald has followed in his father’s corrupt footsteps. Trump’s career is littered with bogus businesses, like Trump University; repeated ripoffs of suppliers, contractors, and employees whom he failed to pay for services rendered; and the misuse of the Trump Foundation to feather his own nest while trying to look like a philanthropist. Six of Trump’s businesses have gone bankrupt. Despite this, on April 18, 2015, Trump tweeted this falsehood: ”For all of the haters and losers out there sorry, I never went Bankrupt.”

Trump has also lied about the size of his wealth, as various business publications have pointed out. Many observers suggest one reason Trump has refused to release his tax returns is that they will show he has repeatedly and wildly exaggerated his wealth and thus his success.

Many observers have noted Trump’s sociopathic, thin-skinned, demagogic, authoritarian, impulsive, and vindictive personality. Although Trump has the self-awareness of an adolescent, it is obvious to many others that his compulsion to constantly boast “I’m smart” and to deride others as “losers” is rooted in his profound sense of insecurity.

Presidents don’t have to be geniuses. But a successful president must recognize his own limitations and be willing to rely on others’ expertise. He has to take constant criticism — from the media, political opponents, and his own advisers — without taking it too personally. Surrounding oneself with yes-men and yes-women who are afraid to tell the president he’s wrong is a recipe for disaster. Most important, an effective president needs good judgement, to be able to hear different viewpoints, weigh evidence, think several steps in advance rather than act impulsively, and be calm under intense pressure. Trump fails each of these tests.

Beneath Trump’s public bravado is a deeply insecure, troubled man who is unfit to be president. This makes him a danger to the country and the world.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College.

IMAGE: DonkeyHotey / Flickr

 

Donald Trump Poses A Never-Before-Seen Threat In American History

Donald Trump Poses A Never-Before-Seen Threat In American History

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

I have watched, listened to, and read many commentaries on the inaugural address but so far none of the mainstream pundits have used the one word that best identifies Donald Trump: fascist.

The United States is not Weimar Germany. Our economic problems are nowhere as bad as those in Depression-era Germany. Nobody in the Trump administration (not even Steven Bannon) is calling for mass genocide (although saber-rattling with nuclear weapons could lead to global war if we’re not careful).

That said, it is useful for Americans to recognize that we are facing something entirely new and different in American history. Certainly none of us in our lifetimes have confronted an American government led by someone like Trump in terms of his sociopathic, demagogic, impulsive, and vindictive personality (not even Nixon came close).

We are witnessing something new in terms of the uniformly right-wing inner circle with whom he’s surrounded himself and appointed to his cabinet. We must adjust our thinking and view with alarm his reactionary and dangerous policy agenda on foreign policy, the economy, the environment, health care, immigration, civil liberties; and poverty. We have to be willing to sweep aside past presidential precedents in order to understand Trump’s willingness to overtly invoke all the worst ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds in order to appeal to the most despicable elements of our society and unleash an upsurge of racism, anti-semitism, sexual assault, and nativism by the KKK and other hate groups. We need to suspend our textbook explanations about the American presidency in order to recognize Trump’s ignorance about our Constitutional principles and the rule of law; and his lack of experience with collaboration and compromise. We’ve never seen a president with so little familiarity with the truth; he is a pathological liar, on matters large and small.

We cannot take solace in the fact that Trump lost the popular vote or that only 25 percent of all eligible voters actually voted for him. Instead, we must face clearly the reality that Trump now presides over a federal government in which all three branches are controlled by right-wing corporate-funded Republicans. We may be lucky to discover that Trump might be an incompetent leader and unable to unite the Republicans, but we shouldn’t count on it.

“From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first,” Trump said. By branding his message “America First,” Trump was echoing and invoking a motto of the isolationist, anti-Semitic crusade in the 1930s that wanted the United States to appease Hitler.

Indeed, Trump’s entire speech was a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland crazy quilt of words that meant the exactly opposite of what was expressed. It was an angry rant, reflecting the personality traits of an insecure bully: narcissistic, thin-skinned, revengeful, and impulsive, lacking empathy or humility.

Fascists claim to speak for “the people,” while pursuing policies that overwhelmingly benefit a handful of the favored – families, cronies, corporations, and loyalists.

“Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, “ Trump said today, “but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people.” Later, he proclaimed: “January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

Like other fascists, Trump claimed to speak for the “forgotten men and women,” whose voice has been ignored, whose job has been exported, whose neighborhood is unsafe, whose living standard has declined.

Fascists always attack current politicians while claiming the mantle of “the people.”

“We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action,” Trump said today, using the same words he used several days earlier to defame Cong. John Lewis, a civil rights icon who, unlike Trump, put his body on the line countless times to make America a more humane and inclusive society.

Fascists seek to unite the country behind a smokescreen of patriotism while scapegoating the weak and powerless.

“We are one nation, and their pain is our pain,” Trump said. “We share one heart, one home and one glorious destiny.”

But his speech was a series of deflections away from the core problem facing the United States: the growing power of a tiny wealthy elite – sometimes called the “1%” but in reality the .001% — over our economy and politics.

Trump has populated his Cabinet and top advisors with some of America’s wealthiest and greediest people, corporate robber barons, militarist zealots, Wall Street titans, right-wing conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and racists, some of them (like Trump) born wealth but who have demonstrated no inclination for public service or even noblesse oblige.

To deflect attention away from the super-rich, Trump – like fascists throughout history – points his fingers at and scapegoats others. In today’s speech, he avoided explicit reference to Mexican immigrants, Muslims, China, Hollywood, the media, unions, and Jews – groups he castigated throughout the campaign. But his address included many dog whistles that his core supporters understand.

“We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” was Trump’s dog whistle to America’s white supremacist “alt right” movement, who want to deport undocumented immigrants while eliminating the social safety net from those who live here and contribute to our society.

Trump personifies the worst aspects of corrupt crony capitalism. He inherited his father’s real estate empire, made possible by federal government housing subsidies. He has curried favor with Democratic and Republican politicians at the local, state and national level by contributing millions of dollars in campaign donations. He has abused the nation’s bankruptcy and tax laws to avoid his responsibility to his lenders, employees, business partners, and the country as a whole.

In his address, Trump pledged that “We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.” But Trump has used undocumented immigrants to construct his glitzy apartment buildings and hotels. Most of the ties, suits, shirts, and other clothing items sold as part of the Donald J. Trump Collection are made in overseas sweatshops.

Like fascists everywhere, Trump’s speech included a list of troubles he intends to fix, without pointing out that they were caused by the policies, people, and principles he embraces.

He described: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. An education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Meanwhile, he’s appointed a corporate mogul as Labor Secretary with a track record of abusing his employees and opposing the minimum wage. He’s named a billionaire Education Secretary who has spent hundreds of millions of her inherited fortune to destroy public education in favor of corporate-backed private charter schools. He’s named as his Commerce Secretary a law-abusing hedge fund manager who has proposed a tax law that will provide huge tax breaks to the very rich and an infrastructure plan designed to enrich the rich while saddling the middle class with higher taxes.

“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes,” Trump said, having named as Treasury Secretary a Wall Street tycoon who made his fortune ripping off consumers, illegally foreclosing on working families, and discriminating against low-income and minority communities and borrowers.

In his speech Trump pledged to “harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow.” But’s nominated to be Secretary of State the head of the nation’s largest oil company, someone who has made billions by polluting the environment, denying the reality of global warming, lobbying against clean energy technologies, and forging an alliance with Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s speech included no mention of human rights. He avoided any reference to police abuses or the epidemic of gun violence made possible our lax gun laws. He said nothing about rising inequality. He ignored the dramatic spike in hate crimes – against Muslims, Latinos, Jews, gays and lesbians, and others – that has plagued the country since his election in November. He evaded any mention of homelessness, climate change, or the plight of refugees around the world.

We should not have expected, and did not get, any remarks about civil rights or civil liberties – tenets which Trump has consistently violated and defamed throughout this career and his campaign.

We must view Trump as a real threat to our institutions, to our democracy, and to our future. The Trump presidency and Trumpism is a new phenomenon in our country’s history. Never before has such an authoritarian personality been president. We’ve had demagogues in the House and Senate, but never in the Oval Office. The best primer to understand what we’re facing is Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, a counter-factual history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh.

We can overcome.

Trump is already the least popular American president in modern memory.

Americans will soon see that Trump’s promises were empty.

Already, opposition movements are in motion, preparing to challenge his appointments, his lies, and his policies, and preparing for the 2018 and 2020 elections, when Trump can be neutralized.

In the not-too-distant future, we can try to translate our progressive policy agenda into actual policies — adopting campaign finance reform, immigration reform, stronger environmental regulations, stricter rules on Wall Street, and greater investment in jobs and anti-poverty programs; turning Election Day into a national holiday, reforming our labor laws, protecting women’s right to choose, expanding LGBT rights, making our tax system more progressive, reforming our racist criminal justice system, investing more public dollars in job-creating infrastructure and clean energy projects; adopting paid family leave, and expanding health insurance to all and limiting the influence of the drug and insurance industry.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College.

IMAGE: Donald J. Trump arrives at the inauguration ceremonies swearing him in as the 45th president of the United States at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Doug Mills/Pool

Donald Trump Is A Serial Anti-Semite

Donald Trump Is A Serial Anti-Semite

When this campaign is over, let’s not forget Donald Trump’s steady use of anti-Semitic stereotypes and images throughout the campaign—ideas we can expect he’ll continue to use when the election is over and he tries to re-invent himself as the leader of a white supremacist nationalist movement and the public face of a new media empire (Trump TV?) with his supporters Roger Ailes (former head of Fox News who has a history of making anti-Semitic comments and was responsible for Fox News’ anti-Semitic crusade against the phony “war on Christmas“), Stephen Bannon (head of Breitbart News known for his own anti-Semitic remarks), and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer (the money behind Breitbart News).

Trump’s anti-Semitism comes in different shapes and sizes.  He verbalizes it, encourages it, enables it, tolerates it, and makes excuses for it.  What he doesn’t do is condemn it.

Trump’s most recent anti-Semitic remarks were in a speech, and a tweet, last week that included this line: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.” Trump didn’t need to use the word “Jew.” The imagery of a global banking cabal will be familiar to anyone who has read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery that has fueled anti-Jewish violence for over a century. These are well-known anti-Semitic code words. The speech, typical of Trump’s paranoid conspiracy theories, was designed to fire up Trump’s white nationalist, anti-Semitic base.

Trump’s chronic anti-Semitism is often overlooked when reporters and others itemize the long laundry list of the GOP candidate’s bigotry and offensive comments, including sexism, racism, and insults directed toward Muslims and the physically disabled. Trump has often retweeted messages from white supremacists and anti-Semites, including the image of Clinton with a Jewish star and $100 bills in the background and the headline “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever.”

In response to Trump’s repeated claim about the election being rigged, the popular right-wing site Daily Stormer wrote that “People aren’t going to quietly go home if the Jews steal this election from us.” Other sites supporting Trump have posted similar slurs.

Anti-Semitic comments on social media have skyrocketed, because Trump is bringing these ugly stereotypes, once relegated to the lunatic fringe of the internet, into the mainstream. A new Anti-Defamation League uncovered more than 2.6 million tweets with anti-Semitic comments and images between August 2015 and July 2016, a huge upsurge from the previous year. Many of them identified themselves as Trump supporters or Clinton haters, and many (including death threats) were directed at Jewish journalists who had been critical of Trump.

Trump’s comment about Clinton’s ties to an international banking conspiracy was not an offhand remark. He has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks, including this comment in a speech during this campaign to the Republican Jewish Coalition (a tiny group): “I know why you’re not going to support me. You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money …Look, I’m a negotiator like you folks, we’re negotiators.”

In an interview where he was asked if he’d read any of Hitler’s speeches, Trump said: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them… My friend Marty Davis from Paramount gave me a copy ofMein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (Davis is not Jewish.)

Trump’s frequent references at his rallies and during the debates to Sidney Blumenthal, George Soros and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz—Jewish supporters of Hillary Clinton—is no accident. This is not random name-dropping; these are dog whistles aimed at his racist and anti-Semitic supporters.

He once tweeted: “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz—I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow. Who, by the way, is totally overrated.” While Stewart has often referred to himself as Jewish, only an anti-Semite would refer to Stewart’s Jewish-sounding real name in this way.

Earlier this year Trump initially refused to condemn and reject support from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the well-known racist and anti-Semite.

One of Trump’s foreign policy advisers, Joseph Schmitz, is accused of bragging that he pushed out Jewish employees when he was Defense Department inspector general a decade ago. He also made comments denying the magnitude of the Holocaust.

When accused of fostering anti-Semitism, Trump often reminds people that his daughter Ivanka is married to a Jew (Jared Kushner) and converted to Judaism. But even members of Kushner’s family have expressed their concern about his excuses for Trump’s ugly remarks.

In most presidential election over the past 50 years, about 70-80 percent of Jews typically vote for the Democratic candidate, higher than any demographic group except African Americans. Don’t be surprised if this year 85-90% of Jews vote for Hillary Clinton.

The likely uptick in Jewish voting for this year’s Democratic candidate is due as much to Jews’ overall liberal views on abortion and women’s rights, environmental and economic policy, and opposition to Trump’s ugly comments about Muslims and others than to their concerns about his repugant anti-Semitism. But Trump’s anti-Semitic remarks surely compounded their opposition to the Republican demagogue.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell initially ignored Trump’s anti-Hillary Jewish star tweet last July until they were embarrassed into denouncing it. But most Republican leaders have not condemned Trump’s persistent anti-Semitism or the upsurge of Jew hatred he has encouraged.

A handful of Jews still support Trump, including Steve Mnuchin, who is a Wall Street banker and hedge fund billionaire as well as Trump’s finance chair, and Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino owner and GOP mega-donor whose newspaper, the Las Vegas Review Journal endorsed Trump this week. When will they come to their senses?

Reprinted with permission from Alternet. 

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Delaware, Ohio, U.S. October 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Despite a Century Of Women’s Rights Progress, Hillary Clinton Still Faces Outrageous Sexism

Despite a Century Of Women’s Rights Progress, Hillary Clinton Still Faces Outrageous Sexism

Published with permission from AlterNet

Fear of a female president is still going strong in 2016.

It has been 100 years since the voters of Montana elected Jeannette Rankin as the first woman in Congress and Margaret Sanger opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn (1916);

96 years since women won the right to vote at the federal level (1920);

95 years since Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. (1921);

88 years since Amelia Earhart became the first woman pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean (1928);

85 years since Jane Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1931);

83 years since President Franklin Roosevelt named Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, the first woman appointed to the Cabinet (1933);

81 years since Mary McLeod Bethune organized the National Council of Negro Women (1935);

79 years since the Supreme Court upheld Washington state’s minimum wage law for women (1937);

73 years since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was founded (1943);.

71 years since President Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as a U.S delegate to the newly established United Nations (1945);

68 years since high jumper Alice Coachman became the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal (1948);

67 years since Mildred “Babe” Didrikson and other women created the Ladies Professional Golf Tour (1949);

61 years since a majority (52%) of Americans first told Gallup pollsters that they would be willing to vote for a “qualified” women for president and Rosa Parks triggered the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to comply with the city’s segregation laws (1955);

56 years since the Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill as safe for women to use (1960);

55 years since President Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (1961);

53 years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique (1963);

52 years since Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, making it illegal for employers to pay a woman less than what a man would receive for the same job, and passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in employment on the basis of race and sex (1964);

51 years since the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut ruling struck down the one remaining state law prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples (1965);

50 years since feminists founded the National Organization for Women (1966);

48 years since the EEOC ruled that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal (1968);

47 years since California became the first state to adopt a “no fault” divorce law (1969);

46 years since 50,000 people marched in New York City for the first Women’s Strike for Equality and feminists published Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women’s Liberation Movement (1970);

45 years since Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and others formed the National Women’s Political Caucus to encourage more women to participate in politics and run for office and a group of Boston feminists published Our Bodies, Ourselves, which put women’s health in a radically new political and social context (1971);

44 years since Ms magazine published its first issue, Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments banning sex discrimination in schools, and Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in the United States (1972);

43 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women have the right to safe and legal abortion and Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in the “battle of the sexes” tennis match in Houston (1973);

42 years since women trade unionists founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women (1974);

38 years since Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act banning employment discrimination against pregnant women (1978);

37 years since women constituted the majority of all college students for the first time (1979);

35 years since Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman Supreme Court Justice (1981);

33 years since astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space (1983);

32 years since feminists founded EMILY’s List to help elect pro-choice women and Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be chosen by a major political party to serve as its vice presidential nominee (1984);

31 years since every state had adopted a “no fault” divorce law (1985);

30 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson that sexual harassment is a form of illegal job discrimination (1986);

29 years since Aretha Franklin became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1987);

22 years since Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act that tightened federal penalties for sex offenders, funded services for victims of rape and domestic violence, and provided special training of police officers (1994);

19 years since Madeleine Albright was appointed the first female secretary of state (1997);

10 years since Katharine Jefferts Schori became the first woman to become presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States (2006);

9 years since Nancy Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House (2007);

7 years since President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which allows victims of pay discrimination to file a complaint with the government against their employer within 180 days of their last paycheck (2009);

6 years since Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director (2010);

3 years since Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the ban on women serving in combat roles would be lifted and the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Windsor that states cannot ban same-sex marriage (2013);

2 years since Michelle Janine Howard became the first female four-star admiral (2014); and

Less than a year since the Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman’s portrait will be featured on the new $20 bill, the first woman so honored.

Despite this progress, Hillary Clinton still faces outrageous sexism by the media, Donald Trump, and many voters, as Peter Beinart discusses in “Fear of a Female President,” in the new issue of The Atlantic magazine.

Clinton will be our next president, adding another milestone to the ongoing battle for women’s equality. But the sexist backlash won’t end once she’s inaugurated. The struggle must continue.

Photo: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton arrives at the airport following a campaign Voter Registration Rally at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, United States, September 6, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Donald Trump And The ‘Banality Of Evil’

Donald Trump And The ‘Banality Of Evil’

Published with permission from AlterNet. 

Donald Trump’s comment on Tuesday about how “Second Amendment people” could stop Hillary Clinton if she gets elected is hardly subtle. This is a clear provocation to shoot his Democratic rival, however he and his handlers may try to spin it.

At a rally in Wilmington, N.C. , Trump told the crowd that “Hillary wants to abolish—essentially abolish the Second Amendment.” Of course, this isn’t true. This is how Trump and his NRA friends refer to people who want tougher gun control laws. But that wasn’t the most inflammatory thing he said.

“And if she gets to pick her judges,” Trump went on. “Nothing you can do, folks.”

Then his lack of impulse control kicked in:

“Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is,” he added.

He was suggesting that “Second Amendment people”—clearly, gun owners—deal with Hillary before she gets to appoint Supreme Court justices who will permit strong gun laws. And he didn’t mean invite her to an NRA meeting.

A week ago, reporters were writing about whether Trump’s invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails was treasonous or otherwise illegal. That was bad enough. But now this. As Ezra Klein pointed out in a Vox column and video last week, there are no words to describe this kind of behavior. “Abnormal” doesn’t do it justice. Nor does “monstrous.”

“Sociopathic” might describe Trump’s condition, but it doesn’t describe our condition as we routinely hear such Trump statements on the campaign trail.

The only thing that comes close is philosopher Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” She coined this phrase in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, in an Israeli courtroom. If someone carries out unspeakable crimes often enough, he or she comes to accept them as “normal.” That was Arendt’s view of Eichmann.

But the “banality of evil” also applies to an entire society. We can get used to outrageous things—slavery, Jim Crow segregation laws, massive homelessness, widespread malnutrition, the frequent killing of Black men by police—until we are provoked to view them as unjust.

This is the dilemma now facing Americans—and particularly American journalists—in thinking about Trump’s presidential campaign. We’ve become so used to his daily outrages—about Mexicans, about women, about Muslims, about NATO, about nuclear weapons, about “Mexican” Judge Curiel, about renegotiating America’s debt with other countries, about getting Mexico to pay for a wall on the border, about Melania Trump’s plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech, about his Trump University con job, about his ignorance of basic issues like Brexit, and many more—that we’re almost numb to them. It is difficult to renew outrage day after day.

Many of his comments are just stupid. But others are dangerous, and some may be illegal. They reflect a temperament and mental instability that makes him unfit to be president.

It is a matter of what kind of words, and what kind of behavior, crosses the line so blatantly, and violates whatever standards of basic decency we have, that it is beyond contempt. But who draws the line? And what do we do to a public figure who crosses it?

New York Times’ media critic Jim Rutenberg–in his analysis in Monday’s paper, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism”—did a good job of examining how difficult it is for the mainstream media, caught in the web of “he said/she said” reporting and admonitions to be “neutral,” to deal with Trump’s campaign and his almost daily outrages. Rutenberg wrote:

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

Reporters don’t want to be glorified tape recorders, just transcribing what Trump (or any other candidate) says without providing context and, if necessary, correction.

Reporters faced this dilemma in 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy began giving speeches accusing the U.S. State Department of harboring Communists. In almost every speech, he used different numbers of alleged “reds” inside the department. Reporters who covered McCarthy knew he was lying, but they couldn’t write that. They couldn’t even say he was “inconsistent.” If they wanted readers to understand that McCarthy had gone overboard with his accusations, they had to find other politicians to say so. They had to be “balanced.” That’s what passed for “objectivity” back then. “He said” versus “she said.”

We’ve made some progress since then—allowing journalists to analyze as well as report—but reporters and editors still find themselves in a journalistic straightjacket when covering Trump on the campaign trail. (I was going to write “someone like Trump,” but although there are many whackos in recent politics — think Sarah Palin — there isn’t anyone else really like Trump, and certainly no one who has won a major party’ s nomination for president).

The stories about Trump’s “Second Amendment” comment reflect this journalistic conundrum. How do you report a story about a candidate for president implying that people with guns might want to consider killing his opponent? Yes, I know, that isn’t what he actually said but it is clearly what he meant or what he wanted his supporters to hear. That was his dog whistle. But you don’t need to be a dog to know what he was saying.

Even so, reporters and headline writers couldn’t report what Trump meant, only what he said. They could call his comment “controversial” or even “inflammatory,” but they did not say what was obvious to everyone in that room and anyone who watched the video.

The headlines about Trump’s comment that appeared on-line within hours of his speech reflect how constrained the media are in reporting such an outrageous beyond-the-pale statement:

  • “Trump Appears To Suggest ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Stop Clinton” (NPR)
  • “Donald Trump Says ‘Second Amendment People’ Can Stop Hillary Clinton From Curbing Gun Rights” (Wall Street Journal)
  • “Trump sparks uproar by saying ‘maybe there is’ a way for ‘2nd Amendment people’ to keep Clinton from naming justices” (Los Angeles Times)
  • “Donald Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Act Against Hillary Clinton” (New York Times)
  • “Trump suggests ‘Second Amendment people’ could stop Clinton” (Chicago Tribune)
  • “What Ever Could Trump Have Meant With This Joke About ‘Second Amendment People’ and Clinton?” (Slate)
  • “Trump ‘Second Amendment’ Quip Seen as Veiled Threat Against Clinton” (NBC)
  • “Donald Trump says ‘Second Amendment people’ may be the only check on Clinton judicial appointments” (Washington Post)
  • “Trump in trouble over ‘Second Amendment’ remark” (Politico)

All these headlines are accurate but misleading. They don’t explain what he meant or put what he said in political context. The subhead on the Politico story—”The campaign says he was referencing gun-rights voter mobilization, but the remark was widely interpreted as a joke about using guns against his Democratic rival”—is about as close as any of them got to explaining the importance—and the outrageousness, and perhaps the criminality—of what Trump said.

Headlines or news reports suggesting that Trump’s “Second Amendment” comment was a “joke” reflect the “banality of evil” problem. A joke? Really?

Where is George Orwell when we need him?

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).