Category: Uncategorized

The Cabinet meeting is about to begin.  Trump kicks it off:

TRUMP:  As is our custom, we will begin with the Pledge of Allegiance.

The group recites the Pledge.

ALL:  I pledge allegiance to you, Donald Trump.  Slayer of Hillary Clinton; builder of walls; omnipotent and omniscient; you alone have made America great again. May your reign last a thousand years, and may your dynasty rule forever.

TRUMP:  Thank you.  Next up is, of course, tributes to me.  Betsy?

DEVOS:  O great and all-knowing Trumpster, you have been assigned by God to banish false beliefs through the land through your support of right-wing religion and charter schools.  You are a modern Moses.  We bow down to your commandments.

TRUMP:  I don’t know who this Moses guy is, but that sounded good.  Jeff?

SESSIONS:  God himself has given you the sword of justice to slay drug users and illegal immigrants.  Your powers are checked by him alone.  May your enemies all end up at Guantanamo Bay.

TRUMP:  Good idea.  Steve?

BANNON:   O great Trumpster, you are truly the alpha and omega.  Earthquakes tremble before you.  The wind roars your praise.  Liberals and the fake media quail before you.  You win so often, it almost gets boring.  Your reign will last forever!

The group applauds his eloquence.

TRUMP:  I know I can always count on you for something special.  Jim?

MATTIS:  You are the tribune of the people, subject only to the checks in the law and the Constitution.  May your cause always prevail.

TRUMP:  Yes, and?

MATTIS:  Yes, and what?

TRUMP:  That’s all?  Surely there’s more, and I don’t like that part about the law and the Constitution.

MATTIS:  You are the leader, under law, of the greatest power in the world.  That has to be enough.

TRUMP:  We’ll talk later.  Next is old business.

PRICE:  We need to do something about Obamacare repeal and replacement.

TRUMP:  That’s so July.  I’m bored with it.  We won.  Let’s move on.

PRICE:  But BCRA didn’t pass! How did we win?

TRUMP:  I’m a winner.  Winners win, by definition.  Everything I do is winning. In this case, we made the Democrats take the blame for Obamacare.   That’s fine with me.

MCMASTER:  What about North Korea?  We don’t have any good options.

TRUMP:  Kim obviously doesn’t understand how great I am.  We need to send an emissary who can explain to him that I’m omnipotent, and that he needs to give up his nukes in order to save his life.  If he trembles before me, he’ll be spared.

MCMASTER:  Who can persuade him of that?

TRUMP:  Dennis Rodman, of course.  New business?

MULVANEY:  What about the tax cut? We don’t have a real plan yet.

TRUMP:  Just do what Reagan did, only quadruple it.  I’m four times the man he was.  Anything else?  Hearing nothing, we’re adjourned.

That was easy!  Now I can go play golf.

Guards come and take Mattis away.  A few days later, a picture of his head on a stick appears in the Oval Office next to the portrait of Andrew Jackson.

 

Following Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump frequently railed about the “rigged” system during the campaign.  After his election, however, he filled his administration with billionaires–some of them from Wall Street.  Even factoring in a healthy splash of opportunism, then, it is fair to ask whether Trump and Sanders, while using the same term, were actually talking about the same thing.

They weren’t.  While Bernie’s program wasn’t actually socialist, he does see the world in fairly Marxist terms;  to him, as a result, the enemy is the big capitalist, and the Wall Street banker in particular.  The “rigged” system simply gives that kind of person too much power.  To Trump and his followers, however, the enemy isn’t Wall Street as much as it is the left-wing cultural/political/intellectual establishment that patronizes and misrules red America.  In their eyes, the system is still “rigged” against them even with Trump as president, and the battle continues to this day.

On the second of Trumps known as Don.

You could call him the President’s spawn.

He lies like his dad.

The whole world will be glad

When father and son are both gone.

There once was a leader named Mitch.

His party ran into a ditch.

He’s run out of plans.

The whole thing’s out of hand.

But health care is really a bitch.

The NYT Magazine ran an article roughly ten days ago about Trump’s relationships with his lawyers.  As you would expect, he likes attorneys who are very aggressive, never appear to back down, and plausibly spin even his defeats as victories.

I actually found this article somewhat encouraging, because if Trump and his agents are that good at persuading himself and the public that his failures are really successes, it gives him some room to back down in a crisis.  Without that kind of ability, I don’t see any way he won’t lead us (and the rest of the world) into one disaster after another, since we know he can’t stand to be viewed as a loser.

It’s March, 2018.  The Republican agenda is completely stuck in the mud as a result of constant infighting between Christian Democrats and Reactionaries. The party is cratering in the polls, and it looks like the Democrats will take control of both houses in November.

Trump’s antics have grown old and tiresome and are clearly doing great damage to the GOP brand, to say nothing of the national interest.  In addition, the great man himself is visibly tired of the job;  in reality, he only ever wanted the perks and prestige of the presidency, not any of its responsibilities.  The Russia investigation is getting on his nerves, and he is lashing out in a more extreme way every day.

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan go to the White House with an offer.  If Trump is given a blanket pardon by President Pence for all actions taken by himself and his family, and if he is given a big parade (complete with tanks and fighters), and if he is permitted to retain an honorary title and many of the perks of office, will he resign for the good of the country and the party?  They advise him that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have already bought off on the plan.  The likely alternative is two years of highly publicized investigations of his business and political activities by a Democratic Congress.  Trump thinks about it, and takes the deal.

And we live at least somewhat more happily ever after.

To my knowledge, Donald Trump doesn’t fish or hunt.  I’m not sure he’s ever attended a NASCAR race.  He never served in the military.  He seems to prefer classic rock to country music.  He grew up and lives in New York City, not a rural area. Finally, his indifference to religion is the stuff of legends.

All of these are staples of rural culture, and yet Trump is extremely popular in red America.  Why?

I think there are two reasons:

1.  It’s all about the swagger:  Trump’s macho, nationalistic posturing has a big audience here, particularly when it is juxtaposed with female Democrats from urban areas.

2.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend:  Trump is a crass barbarian who both envies and despises the cultural establishment.  As such, he has friends in a community that believes (perhaps correctly) that it is constantly patronized by the elite.

There is a message here for the Democrats as they contemplate who should lead them in 2020:  if you pick someone who looks and sounds like Obama or Hillary, you can expect people in red states to close ranks and support Trump regardless of how abysmal his record may be, because they will think he looks more like one of them.  That may not be fair, but that’s the way it is.

A South Korean woman won the US Open, played on one of Trump’s courses in the presence of the man himself, and Asian women generally dominated the leaderboard.

Am I the only one who finds irony in that?  Where’s our protectionist-in-chief when you need him?  The tournament was obviously rigged!

In light of the events of the last few weeks, I wish someone would ask Trump these questions:

1.  What actions, if any, do you plan to take to prevent the Russians, or any other foreign power, from hacking the computers of the Democratic candidate in 2020?
2.  If you are offered “oppo” by the Russians in 2020, will you take it?
3.  Will you consider it OK to use the resources of the federal government to generate “oppo” on your opponent in 2020?
4.  If your opponent accepted “oppo” on you from the North Korean government, would that be OK?

Until proven otherwise, I will assume that Trump believes that all is fair in love, war, and elections–but not for his opponents.

It occurred to me this morning that the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate are going to vote for BCRA for the same reason British soldiers obeyed orders to attack in 1916;  the fear of letting down your people, and facing humiliation for it, is greater than the fear of death.

I predicted weeks ago that McConnell will get exactly 50 votes, and I’m sticking with that.  If he does, Trump will prance and preen and call himself a “winner.” Will the public agree?  I don’t think so, because:

1.  The base isn’t in love with this legislation.   BCRA is the illegitimate child of Obamacare, not its annihilation.

2.  There are no real winners from BCRA.  Even the rich don’t get their big tax cut.  Millions of people lose their insurance in order to reduce the deficit slightly. The public regains its “freedom” to buy worthless “insurance,”  a right it values about as much as its “freedom” to starve or be homeless.  Whoo-hoo!

3.  It’s a victory for McConnell, not Trump.  Only the truly uninformed will believe that the credit for getting 50 votes belongs to Trump.  The job will have been done by peer pressure and legislative bribes.

Did you see the photo of the evangelical leaders laying hands on Donald Trump?  I didn’t know if I should laugh, cry, or throw up.

The association of fundamentalist religion with the Republican Party really began with Reagan.  Prior to that, religious figures generally tried to avoid being partisan figures, presumably because they didn’t think that tying Christianity to particular secular policies (e.g., God demands a larger defense budget) and demonizing half the population was a good long-term marketing tool.  As one would have predicted, they’ve paid the price for their decision;  church attendance is falling significantly, particularly among young people, and the very public connection between Reactionary voters and Christianity has to be part of the reason.

The negative impacts of right-wing Christianity can also be seen in our political system.  The GOP, when forced to choose between science and fundamentalist beliefs, will inevitably lean towards the latter.  The intensity of the partisan divide naturally increased when the Democrats were portrayed as agents of Satan.  As I’ve noted before, American “conservatives” are different than their counterparts everywhere else in the world;  the unique connection between secular ideology and religion is clearly a large factor in that.

For their part, it is very important for the Democrats to avoid being perceived as being hostile to Christianity.  Becoming a purely secular humanist party will cost them millions of otherwise obtainable votes and cut them off from their history; after all, the civil rights movement has deep roots in Christian ethics, not secular humanism.  As with guns, abortion, and rural culture, a little more tolerance and public acceptance would be a really good idea.

The revised Senate bill combines elements of the second and third GOP health care alternatives described in a post earlier in the week.  The Obamacare plans will clearly become an unusual form of high risk pool, while the treatment of the unregulated plans resembles in some respects the catastrophic insurance alternative.

The losers from the new bill, using the old Senate plan as a baseline, would be wealthy people (who are losing their tax cut), people with pre-existing conditions (forced into a high risk pool with rapidly escalating prices), and anyone who picks an unregulated plan and unexpectedly requires lots of expensive medical care.  The winners are healthy young people who can buy cheap unregulated catastrophic plans at a lower cost than before.   People requiring Medicaid are treated like dirt under both the old and the new bill.

Will it pass?  As I projected weeks ago, Collins and Paul will vote no.  McConnell is apparently touting the Medicaid cuts to the conservatives, while telling the moderates that they will never happen in the real world.  If he manages to get 50 votes with that amazingly cynical approach, it will probably be a fitting end to a Kafkaesque story.

Life in the time of Trump.

The Russia thing is true.

The dirt is flying everywhere.

Each day, there’s something new.

Impeachment talk is on our minds

But nothing comes of it.

I don’t believe he’ll ever leave

Unless he’ll up and quit.

As far as I know, there is no real evidence of this to date, but for purposes of argument, assume that we discover that Donald Trump Sr. was aware of, and even authorized, efforts by his associates to solicit information damaging to the Clinton campaign from individuals believed to be agents of the Russian government.  Would that result in impeachment?

I doubt it.  The “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment in the Constitution doesn’t just apply to any old violation of the law, as Bill Clinton could tell you.  I can’t imagine the GOP majorities in Congress pursuing impeachment unless there is also evidence of promises to change our foreign policy in relation to Russia in exchange for assistance with the campaign.  That would effectively make Trump a Russian agent.  Even Paul Ryan would have trouble with that one.

The truth is, the base might forgive him even for that.  Sean Hannity would tell them that it is fake news, and they would believe it.

As I’ve noted previously, Trump was elected without the support of the GOP establishment, so he could have decided to govern as a man above party, and encouraged the Democrats to compete for his favor.  Instead, he decided to embrace the right wing of the Republican Party, and any hope of winning Democratic support is long gone.

This has implications for the GOP as a whole as well as for Trump.  If Trump had operated as a de facto third party, they could have kept their distance from him, and avoided, at least to some extent, being tarnished by his scandals.  That can’t happen now;  he’s one of them, so they’re stuck with him.  They will pay the price for it in 2018 and 2020.

The worst case scenario for the GOP is being associated with Trump without actually accomplishing any of their cherished policy objectives.  That is becoming more likely by the day, because they have not been able to find a way to overcome the ideological differences that I discuss almost on a daily basis.

How can the GOP escape this trap?  They either have to hope that Trump can somehow turn it around, or they have to aggressively take the lead on impeaching him.  Both outcomes are unlikely.