Last week in my two-part interview with “Mr. X,” a veteran Democratic consultant, we saw how centrist panic among opponents of Trump led to a brief, not-so-shining moment for Mike Bloomberg as the only man who could save us (he’s rich!), which was quickly dispelled in favor of the premature coronation of Bernie Sanders as the unlikely but “inevitable” nominee (everyone says so!), which was quickly dispelled by a resurrection of a sort not seen since 33 A.D. (holy shit!).

Now the conventional wisdom has it that the nomination is Joe Biden’s to lose, which was sort of where we started last summer, innit?

But last week also saw the heartbreaking end of the road for the most inspiring and best qualified candidate from either party, and with it, the latest affirmation that Margaret Atwood knows what the fuck she’s talking about.

THE FIREGLASS CEILING

The last 72 hours have seen so many eloquent elegies for the campaign of Elizabeth Warren that I’m not sure what I can add. But this was such a special campaign, and its end such a frustrating and depressing statement about America, that it deserves every requiem it can get.

Let’s start with the patently obvious. Elizabeth Warren is a brilliant and accomplished woman with an inspiring personal story, up from poverty in Oklahoma to become a Harvard law professor and one of the most admired Americans alive today. (Not coincidentally, also one of the most vilified—an equal honor.) At once a Washington outsider and an experienced United States Senator, she offered not just a vague, platitude-heavy vision for a more progressive America, but one backed up with detailed plans for every goddam thing. She is a champion of the people who scares the moneyed class witless, a passionate orator and scorching debater whose intellectual firepower is astonishing, and a charismatic leader who put together the most impressive campaign of all the Democratic hopefuls. In the words of Stacey Abrams, she gave “form to brainy, compassionate, determined, indefatigable leadership.”

From smarts to empathy to competence, one can hardly imagine a candidate more opposite to Donald Trump in every conceivable way. The only way Elizabeth Warren could be a more perfect “anti-Trump” is if she had served with distinction in Vietnam. (Are we sure she didn’t?)

Yet now she is out of the race.

I am aware that not everyone shares my opinion that Warren was a great candidate. I know many conservatives are snickering and eyerolling over the melodramatic eulogizing taking place along the Brooklyn-Berkeley axis. But with their frat boy behavior these folks only demonstrate the exact phenomenon in question. They are like people trapped in a burning building cheering for the fire.

I also know that for many right of center on the ideological spectrum, Warren’s progressivism was problematic. “She’s too liberal,” is the usual complaint. Many of those people feel the same way about Bernie Sanders, yet somehow it’s not accompanied by the same impassioned Salem-in-1692 level of anathema.

To that end, I would argue that much of this opposition is not really on substantive grounds, nor supported by facts, and would wither under point-by-point scrutiny. That is to say, it is not really policy driven at all.

We know that the vast majority of American voters choose their presidential candidates not on policy, or hardnosed assessment of qualifications, or even campaign promises (blue sky or otherwise), but on pure emotion. Which candidate makes us feel good, and hopeful, and proud; which one seems strong and smart (but not too smart!) and “presidential,” whatever that means. Which one feels like the right head-of-state for the given moment? And that is true not just for low information voters: for all the wonks who backed her because of policy positions, a great many of Warren’s supporters—like all candidates’—were undeniably motivated by those same abstractions. And so were a great many of her detractors.

De gustibus non disputandum est, as the Romans would say. (But what have they ever done for us?) Still, it feels like there is something uglier at play here with the opposition to the senior Senator from Massachusetts.

The usual complaints were that Warren sounded like a know-it-all, that she was prone to lecturing, that she’s shrill, or “schoolmarmish.” (“Professorial” is the kinder way it was sometimes put…..which, like lecturing, should not comes as a surprise, given that she was in fact a professor. As for being a know-it-all, is that not refreshing after three-plus years of a know-nothing?) And I’m not talking about just the response of red-hatted MAGA types, or even more mainstream right-of-center Republicans. I heard this stuff from centrist (or “moderate,” if you prefer) Democrats, and even some decidedly left-of-center progressives—some of them women.

I personally didn’t feel any of that, though again, I understand it’s all very subjective. But it’s worth noting, as Mr. X said last week, that “Shrill and schoolmarmish are criticisms applied exclusively to women.”

Meanwhile, Bernie’s whole brand is Angry Old Man Yelling At You.

Frankly, the pushback against Warren reminded me of all those conservatives who expressed disdain for Barack Obama, but couldn’t coherently articulate any legitimate policy disagreements, at least not without massive hypocrisy, or ever quite tell me what it was about him that bugged them so much.

Gee, I wonder what it could have been.

ELECT THIS, MFer

In case anyone doubted it, 2016 made it painfully clear that a vicious, almost-medieval loathing of the female of the species remains a strong strain in the United States of America, no matter how much we kid ourselves otherwise.

2020 is making the point again.

Please don’t besiege me with stories of Hillary’s shortcomings. Some are valid, others anything but. But even if all the things people say about her were true, short of Comet Ping Pong, I dare you to disagree with this statement: If that exact same candidate had a penis and not a vagina, Donald Trump would be hawking his vodka, steaks, and Chinese-made ties on QVC for a living instead of being followed around by a military aide carrying the nuclear codes.

Elizabeth Warren proves the point. Warren had none of the baggage that—allegedly—sunk Hillary. And yet, she is gone from contention even before the Democratic convention, as is every other female candidate (and candidate of color, too, for that matter).

Here’s a Warren supporter named Jeff Yang, a 52-year-old journalist for CNN Opinion and co-host of the podcast “They Call Us Bruce,” quoted in Salon:

“(A)ll the excuses we heard about not electing Hillary—that she was a mainstay of the establishment….that we need somebody who’s not a career politician….that she was too middle-of-the-road centrist…..that we need somebody who’s progressive….that she’s somebody whose ideas are old……that we need something disruptive. 

We had all that this time, right? And it looks like America is not going to elect her, which really comes down to me, to a recognition that whatever we want to claim, gender is at the core of this. It may not be deliberate. It may not be that people outright say they cannot imagine supporting a woman or having a woman president. But when the going gets tough, when there’s concern about electability, when there is a push-comes-to-shove around priority, things still seem to line up the same way. And that soft bigotry, that soft filtering, that consistently I think serves as the toughest of glass ceilings for women to raise.

I have always liked Elizabeth Warren, but even before she announced her candidacy just over a year ago, I was skeptical that she had a prayer. I’d heard far too many people—mostly men, but not all—launch into angry diatribes over how much they loathed her.

I was far from alone in that concern, even among others who actively liked her. As I listened to friends and family and colleagues express their intense negative reaction to her, it both depressed and disturbed me. “Depressed” because even now I am surprised (though I shouldn’t be) by how much irrational fervor is stirred up by the mere thought of this brilliant, principled woman irrespective of her policies. “Disturbed” because it made me worry that, no matter how terrific her ideas, how detailed her plans, how persuasive her speeches and debate performances, she wouldn’t be able to win because a crucial segment of voters simply would not vote for her.

I also understood very well that these fears could constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I have written before about the canard of “electability.” In short, electability is as electability does. The myth that Warren is not electable is just that—a myth, one that could be proven definitively wrong. But misogyny is no myth, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about underestimating the meatheaded woman-hating quotient of this country. After all, we’ve seen it in action before.

I am deliberating use the word “misogyny” to describe this state of affairs, and not mere “sexism,” as sexism is far too tame and forgiving and fails to capture the depth of the hate.

Giving up on Warren even before she got started also would have meant voluntarily forfeiting perhaps the most formidable candidate we had. We can argue about what constitutes “formidable” (which is another way of saying “electable”), though the irrational hatred of Warren certainly couldn’t be discounted in that calculation, no matter how unfair it was. But succumbing to those fears meant surrendering to the lowest common denominator as defined by our foe and fighting on his terms (male possessive pronoun very much intentional), which is both strategically worrisome and just plain galling. In short, I was worried we could not win.

What changed my mind was watching Warren conduct her campaign.

THE ARC OF HERSTORY

Last September two (male) friends and I attended the Warren rally that drew 20,000 people into Washington Square Park. It had the electricity of a rock concert crossed with a tent revival, and for anyone who cared to listen, obliterated a lot of the false assumptions about Elizabeth (see above). I began to believe that she could win, and to have faith that substance could overcome spin and gender bias. I became an unabashed supporter, ready to fight our corner. Apparently many others agreed, as she surged in the polls on the strength of her demonstrable excellence.

Over the months that followed, Warren showed that she could silence the doubters and the naysayers, overturn the conventional wisdom, and (wait for it) persist and even prevail. From the start of her presidential campaign, when the self-described experts scoffed and predicted that she’d been out by Christmas, she slowly but surely solidified herself, continuing to defy expectations and prove her toughness and viability.

In fact, she was so strong and did so well, that then came that moment early this winter when that optimism suddenly—bizarrely—lurched into its opposite. There seemed to be a palpable panic among the Democratic electorate that she would actually be the nominee.

The other Democratic hopefuls began attacking her, as the presumptive frontrunner. She made some missteps—principally, a clumsy explanation of how she would pay for her Medicare-for-all. But, again, as Mr. X noted last week, only Warren was even asked that question; it has been Bernie’s signature proposal for years, and yet no one dared ask him for details. Whether that was sexism, or fear of backlash from Bernie bros (as Mr. X argues), or what have you, it damn sure wasn’t fair. Warren got no points for having an actual answer, complex and pragmatic as it was. (Who knew healthcare was so complicated, as a very stable genius once said?)

Of course, even the question is skewed, reflecting the baked-in bias of the allegedly liberal media. As Colonel (Ret.) Andrew Bacevich, now a Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University, has said:

We live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there’s remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost, even though the costs almost inevitably end up being orders of magnitude larger than anybody projected at the outcome. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist people who are suffering, then suddenly we come very cost-conscious.

But Elizabeth’s demise was never really about unhappiness with her policy proposals.

When a Warren candidacy moved from beautiful fantasy to plausible reality, even people who really liked her seemed to have a PTSD-like freakout. The idea of running a brainy female candidate against Trump a second time was too much for many voters to contemplate—especially if that candidate has superficial similarities to Hillary Clinton, notwithstanding enormous, possibly gamechanging differences, and could be readily demonized, however unfairly, as a hectoring smarty pants. The Democratic electorate suffered a collective anxiety attack.

After that, it was stick-a-fork-in-her time. My original fear proved to be correct, even if it was that very fear and doubt that brought on her defeat.

AND THEN THERE WERE TWO

The case against Elizabeth Warren cannot be made on the merits.

Oh, she was too liberal? Bernie is the currently the co-front runner, I would remind you. Too angry? I refer you again to the senator from Vermont.

The best her foes could do was the issue of her Native American heritage or minuscule presence thereof. Trump, of course, with his preternatural schoolyard bully’s mentality, tagged her with the nickname “Pocahontas,” a dig both juvenile and racist. (A Trump twofer. Check your bingo card.)

But even in its least generous interpretation—that she repeated family lore for personal advantage without factchecking it—that’s pretty weak beer, especially if that’s the worst they can say about her, and enough for right wingers to reject her. (Did a brainiac like Elizabeth Warren really need the affirmative action of Native American ancestry to get ahead?) It goes without saying that Donald J. Trump lies as easily as he breathes, yet all is forgiven and even applauded. (The god-emperor creates his own reality!) Even Biden regularly demonstrates a less sinister but still worrying Reaganaesque tendency to conflate fact with fiction.

Here’s the real thing that did her in:

As recently as last November, Forbes reported that almost half of American men said they would be uncomfortable with a female president. And that number is likely higher, as some men who feel that way were surely embarrassed to admit it to a pollster.

I was reminded of that when Hillary began appearing in the press recently to promote Nanette Burstein’s mesmerizing new four-part documentary series on Hulu “Hillary.” The bile being spewed on social media was scalding, to included frequent (I was gonna say “liberal”) use of the “b” and “c” words, and wishes for her to crawl away and die. (And that was from the left. I didn’t even bother to read what MAGA Nation was saying.) I have read similar vitriol aimed at Warren, especially attacks for being not supportive enough of Bernie and/or insufficiently anti-corporate or progressive. (Memo to the haters: what planet are you on?)

So misogyny is not solely the province of the far right, although they definitely have a timeshare there.

In a snide piece for Commentary called “Stop Blaming Sexism for Warren’s Failure,” Christine Rosen paints Warren as a darling of educated elites, and blames her for failing to connect with outside the chattering classes. She’s not wrong about that, though her contemptuous tone detracts from her credibility. (The same point was made minus the venom by Matthew Iglesias in Vox.)

In the rest of her piece, Rosen—author of an affectionate memoir about growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family—betrays her real agenda, which is her general scorn for progressivism, leaning on one lonely psychology paper to make the giant leap that sexism isn’t a factor in American politics.

Yes—and coronavirus is all a hoax.

When history looks back on American politics in the early 21^st century, and in particular, the HRC and Warren campaigns of ’16 and ’20 respectively, the claim that sexism was not in play is going to have aged about as well as OJ’s quest for the real killers.

PRAISE BE

I hope that I have sufficiently mansplained the fate of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign.  There’s some sort of irony in there, but it’s too complicated for me to figure out.

Feminism (and sexism, and misogyny) have been a frequent topic of this blog, from its very first post in May 2017, Bette and Joan and Mary and Offred (and Hillary). See also Nevertheless They Persist, an interview with the founders of Persisticon, Oh, How Our Standards Have Fallen, on the lingering effects of hating on Hillary, Sending Don Spelunking, about Nancy Pelosi, “She Worked for Me,” about Aretha Franklin, “Blessed Be the Fruit”—Patriarchy, Tyranny, and the Supreme Court, about Kavanaugh on the Court, and a two-part interview with Second Wave feminist icon Alix Kates Shulman, Feminism in the Age of Monsters and A Spark Is Lit.

That was not by design, but reflects the turbulent times in which we live, times in which we are being made to reckon with an oppression of the female of the species that is as old as humanity.

There’s a reason that The Handmaid’s Tale is freshly relevant and having “a moment,” as they say in showbiz. Margaret Atwood herself has noted that every horror in her book, from the obliteration of one’s name to ritualized rape and forced childbearing, is taken from a real world example. (Even as sometimes these ideas are played for laughs, as in Dr. Strangelove’s “mineshaft gap.”) As Laura Miller wrote in Slate, the misogyny of the novel—and its newly released sequel, The Testaments (I’m still in the middle of it)—is not science fiction: in fact, its world is the world that most women have known in most cultures throughout human history, more so than the relatively egalitarian one we know in Western democracy. And ours is still super fucked up.

So it’s with a heavy heart that I salute Senator Warren and her campaign for lighting a path for the future, and in the process, illuminating some of the darkness in which we continue to dwell.

I am deeply ashamed that I live in a country that would make Donald Trump president. But I’m nearly as ashamed that I live in a country that’s afraid to give Elizabeth Warren that job.

*******

Painting: “Golden Silence” (2002) by the genius Isabel Samaras.

(Parody of “Judith with the Head of Holofernes,” circa 1537, by Lucas Cranach the Elder.)

In part two of my interview with a veteran Democratic operative, currently a consultant for one of the remaining presidential hopefuls, Mr. X discusses what the party has to do to energize the American people, the chances Trump won’t yield power, and whether the republic will still be standing in 2021. (See part one here if you missed it.)

WHAT IF THEY THREW A PARTY AND IT TURNED INTO A CULT?

THE KING’S NECKTIE: It’s become a truism, but it bears repeating: when it comes to Trump, what at first looked like a bug is really a feature. For me, it started long before he was the presumptive nominee, or even taken it seriously as a candidate, when he said, “I like guys who don’t get captured.” And I thought (wipes hands): “Done. Done!” I remember thinking it’s a shame he’s done, because his candidacy was entertaining, right?

It took me a long time to realize what we all understand now all too painfully now: that that kind of horrific behavior is precisely what his fans like about him.

MR. X: Yeah, when he was in the GOP primaries, I remember thinking to myself, I want Trump to stay in long enough to derail this person or that person. But he tapped into something that is beyond politics and goes into culture. These people who are turning out for him with their Trump flags and the like: as you well know, that swastika flag was not the flag of Germany at the time. That was the party flag. This is a cult of personality that’s all him.

He’s gotta be loving this. He literally is right about standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shooting someone.

TKN: He is absolutely right about that. And the Senate just told him he can do it.

MR. X: And they said “Go further, man.”

TKN: And he immediately began doing it. Everything that’s happened in the couple of weeks since the acquittal has born it out and it’s all been even worse than we predicted it would be. Comma, Susan Collins.

MR. X: Yes, she was going to rein him in with her vote to let him off. Jesus. I mean, the guy is shameless. And so is she.

TKN: And why shouldn’t he be? They be told him he can be!

MR. X: After the 2016 election and before his inauguration, I thought these powerful Republican leaders were going to walk into his office and say, “Clever. You’ve got yourself elected. Now here’s what you’re gonna do….” That has not happened. I mean, they’ve certainly gotten everything on the Republican wishlist from him because he has no values, but that’s not them running the show.

TKN: You often hear, and I say it myself all the time, “Oh, these cowardly Republicans! These supine Republicans!” Yeah, that’s true in a way, in that they sold out all their alleged values. But really it’s the opposite. I think Chauncey Devega in Salon was the first person I read who pointed that out. As you say, the Republicans have gotten everything they ever wanted. People say, “Why don’t the Republicans stand up to Trump?” It’s the wrong question. They don’t want to stand up to him! He is the best thing that ever happened to them!

MR. X: We’ve also been also horrible about election security—and we know why—and we’ve basically overturned the Civil Rights Act with Shelby County v. Holder, and been horrible with civil rights and voting rights, and lastly, we’ve been horrible with our education system.

TKN: A trifecta.

MR. X: A trifecta. Forty years of underfunding education leads to people who can’t get good jobs, who are uneducated about government and have no clue about civics, and who think that the president is the king for four years.

TKN: And do you know who else thinks that? The president does.

MR. X: He’s the chief law enforcement officer.

TKN: He loves the poorly educated.

MR. X: So the system that we’ve created and the choices that we’ve made over time have left us in this horrible lurch. If you were to plan it out, this would be exactly what you do if you wanted to destroy your democracy from within.

TKN: That is grim.

THE BLACK MAN’S BURDEN

TKN: This gets back to those low information voters you talked about last week, the people who just want a nihilist who will blow up the system, whether it’s Trump or Bernie or whoever.  

And I don’t want to give the guy credit for anything, even accidentally, but It may end up that that has been accomplished. The system has been irretrievably altered. So if we survive, Trump’s success has opened up this new world of possibilities. It’s arguably opened up the possibility that a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn who’s not even a member of one of the two major parties might win the presidency. That’s a big deal.

MR. X: It is a big deal. People are talking about how Bernie’s winning these primary elections. But he’s winning these elections with a limited set of people, people who are self-selecting as left of center and, oh look, the most leftist person is winning those races! He’s not going to win the general election without building a coalition that’s much, much bigger and vaster than I’ve seen so far. I’m working with people who are trying to build these coalitions and he may be the beneficiary of them.

We’ve only seen four states, but given the opportunity to show up for him, it hasn’t been this incredible turnout. He’s won pluralities in places that are surprising, and got more of a wider range of Democrats, but in order to win in November, you’ve got to bring all the Democrats home—and Democrats typically come home when it comes to the general election, I’ll give you that. But then you also have to expand so you can win more than Hillary did. Hillary had three million more votes than Trump, it’s true. But those were on the West Coast, where she ran up numbers in places that she won anyway. Democrats do have a tendency to win “wasted votes,” as we call them. If you win New York by an extra 200,000 votes it doesn’t give you any more electoral votes than winning it by seven.

TKN: That’s where we get to my feeling that if we lose, we only have ourselves to blame. Because first of all, if we couldn’t get it together to nominate a slam dunk candidate…..I don’t know that there’s one out there, but this would be a good time for us to have a young Bill Clinton, or an Obama—some sort of transformational rock star nominee. This would be a good time for that.

MR. X: You’re right. We don’t have that. Elizabeth Warren could have been that.

TKN: To you and me and others, she is that, yes. But unfortunately, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this too, the level of irrational hatred toward Warren is astounding….and not just from Republicans and centrist Democrats, but even from smart people on the left who I know and respect.

MR. X: What do they hate about her? I’m just curious.

TKN: She “bugs” them. They think she’s shrill. They think she’s schoolmarmish. I’m like, “Shrill??? Bernie’s whole brand is ‘Angry Old Man!’ He has one gear!”

MR. X: Take note: shrill and schoolmarmish are labels only used for women. And that’s horrendous.

But if you’re looking for that rock star candidate, it’s amazing Cory Booker couldn’t get to a primary. Kamala Harris was supposed to be this political athlete of the highest order. Couldn’t make it to a primary. Julian Castro couldn’t make it to a primary.

TKN: But he did very well in the debates, Castro, and I know they say debates don’t matter, but every time I heard him open his mouth, except the one time when he attacked Biden, which was a cheap shot, I thought to myself, “That guy is pretty fucking smart.”

MR. X: Well, the only way to be a member of Congress or a Cabinet officer is to be fairly smart—

TKN: In the old days, yes, but now you could be Ben Carson. Or Rick Perry. Or Betsy DeVos. Or absolutely anyone else in this Cabinet.

MR. X: And this is the richest Cabinet in history….

TKN: Wilbur Ross. I could go on.

MR. X: Proving that really being rich and being smart are not necessarily the same thing. I do wish that we had a deeper bench. It was amazing that the black candidates fell out well before the first caucus. And those are US senators from two huge money-churning states, New Jersey and California. I couldn’t believe that Cory Booker couldn’t raise any money.

TKN: Why couldn’t they? Besides the obvious legacy-of-the-Confederacy reasons.

MR. X: Well, I think Kamala could. I think they were blowing through it, and her team was horrible, which is tragic because I really loved her. Just on a demographic level, I thought she would be the perfect candidate in 2020, and instead she was out of it before it even got started. Having said that, she picked that horrible team. And if you can’t manage the 3000 people in your campaign, you can’t manage the 300,000 people who are in the executive branch.

TKN: But why couldn’t Cory mount a stronger campaign? 

MR. X: I think at one point there were 26 of them in the race, and when you have 26 candidates to choose from, or even if you have only eight, you get to pick and choose amongst them. I think people were like, “Oh, Joe’s in your lane.” But they weren’t giving to Joe Biden either.

TKN: And the result is, now we have a lilywhite field. What does it say that all the candidates of color were forced out of the race as early as they were?

MR. X: Well, every candidate isn’t just an amalgam of their traits or else Kamala Harris would be running at like 45% and everyone would be in her dust.

Yang went much farther than one would expect—another person of color we don’t usually talk about that way. Booker I think didn’t want to be embarrassed because he had no traction, and dropped out. Why did you have no traction? Was he talking about the right things? His “conspiracy of love” and bringing people together may not have been the argument to be making in 2020. Castro was coming from being Housing Secretary, which isn’t exactly where you jump right to the presidency or anything like that.

TKN: You mean like being Mayor of South Bend?

MR. X: Right. They all had issues. They all needed to run good races and Kamala did not run a good race. Obama had a team that was like him; David Axelrod is really smart and Dave Plouffe can make the trains run on time. They were terrific. When I was working for Hillary, she had people who screamed a lot because that’s where she comes from. It wasn’t fun.

It’s obviously easier to raise money as a white guy… certainly as someone who has run for president before, as both Biden and Bernie have, Bernie much more successfully for what it’s worth. If you’re a billionaire you don’t have to worry about it, and billionaires tend to be white guys more often than not, unless you’re Oprah, who bowed out of this race.

But it is a problem, because the engine for this party is African-American women. They’re the most reliable base for the Democratic Party. So to not have someone who represents that huge swath of the demographic is an issue. By the way, also very important are Jews who vote about 70/30 for Democrats, and there are three of them still up there, until recently. Well, two and a half—Steyer is half Jewish.

TKN: Somebody said to me that you don’t have to worry about African-American women voting. They vote. You gotta get African-American men to the polls. So who on this slate does that?

MR. X: You’ve got to give people something that they care about. If people are not turning out, it’s because they feel like what you’re offering them is bullshit. You’ve got to offer people something that’s real.

The truth is that there are huge swaths of this country that are totally, totally underserved. It doesn’t matter what party’s in power, nobody’s serving them and haven’t for a long time. The tragedy perhaps of the Obama years is that we could have had a War on Poverty slash New Deal coming out of the economic crisis of ’08-’09 and re-thought what it means to be connected to your government and how we can rebuild. Instead of saving the banks.

There’s been poverty and no route out for a long time in huge chunks of America, and that’s what politics was supposed to do to some degree—to address that. And if the Democratic Party is not doing that, because Bill Clinton said we’re all about the middle class and we’re not going to be the party of the poor anymore, then those people aren’t gonna turn out for you. They don’t owe the party anything. The party, and the country, owe them something—to pull them out of this morass that we’ve forced them into through 400 years of slavery, racism, economic injustice, environmental injustice, and educational disparity. So how do you make folks who’ve suffered through that turn out to vote? In a world where they don’t matter, don’t ask them to pull white folk out of the fire. Create a world where they matter.

TKN: Very good answer.

BATTLE OF THE BERNIE BROS

TKN: I had this argument last week online with some Bernie supporters when somebody posted something about superdelegates, and I said, “Irrespective of the merits or demerits of the issue, criticizing the party’s process is a weak battlefield for Bernie to fight on because he ain’t a member of the party.”

MR. X: And also, he wrote those rules! The Bernie people wrote these rules in 2016. They were like, we got screwed, and the party said, “Anything you want, Bernie,” and these rules are his rules, so he can shut up.

TKN: Well, that’s really why I bring up this issue, not to argue about superdelegates, which I didn’t want to argue about with the people on the web either. All I’m saying, and it’s a fact, is that Bernie is not a member of the party whose nomination he is trying to win and whose rules he is complaining about. It’d be like me complaining to the Vatican that it won’t make me Pope, even though I’m not Catholic. And in response to that very simple point I got that crazy Bernie bro assault.

MR. X: It’s ridiculous. This is where they’re like Trump people. They’re victims of everything. 

They were lamenting Hillary and her angles to shut them out in ways and in places where she got shut out in 2008, first of all. That’s called politics. You use your strength to knock people out of the race or cut them off or beat them in whatever way you can, and you should give her a lot of credit for that kind of power politics, for packing the DNC with people who were supportive of her, and also for being a party member for 40 years, for being a First Lady, being a Senator, being Secretary of State, etc., paying her dues, doing everything she possibly could. That benefit is what comes to you from doing the legwork of being part of this political game. It’s the soft primary that’s attached to the hard primary. You can get as many people as you can to vote for you, but then there’s also this DC circuit that you also have to win over.

There are people who just don’t understand that, while idealism is great, politics is the art of the possible. And Bernie Sanders is not operating in the realm of what’s possible because no one is attacking him at all. He gets to operate in the incense and peppermints zone.

TKN: For now.

THE PRE-2016 MINDSET

TKN: So we’ve been talking very inside baseball here. And when we do that, I always have this fear that we’re in a pre-2016 mindset where we’re discussing electability and vote-counting and that sort of thing, while the other side has told us very clearly they’re not even going to pretend to conduct a fair election, and they have no intention of surrendering power.

MR. X: Yes. So what is your question? (laughs)

TKN: Do you think that fear is justified? Or is it alarmist?

MR. X: I do think that it’s justified, and I think that this is when the rule of law, hopefully, has some power.

I will say this about the Republicans, although I have no insight into them whatsoever, but to be de-yoked from Trump would actually be of value to them because right now they have to speak out of two sides of their face, often changing their line every 25 minutes. Lindsey Graham has basically eaten his own testicles a way that can’t be pleasant for Lindsey Graham.

TKN: I don’t think those are the first testicles he’s had in his mouth. Not there’s not anything wrong with it.

MR. X: (laughs) It’s fine, unless you’re a self-hater.

We have a military that has been shamed and insulted by this president, and while some of them may be wackos like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove who want to ride a nuclear bomb straight to Moscow, I think that they love this country and have a feeling that, before and after Trump, there is some value to living by the rule of law. And so I have to believe that things will work out. I’m an optimist. That’s why I work in politics. (laughter)

Yes, there is every expectation that the GOP will run the most ratfucking, gloves-off, ass-ripping, face-biting race of all time. But should the votes be counted and they not have a majority in the Electoral College, I do think they’ll leave, because of those pressures.

TKN: What about a situation like you’ve just described, but where the result is not so definitive and where Donald Trump—who we can count on to do this—will call the legitimacy of the vote into question. What does Mitch McConnell do then?

MR. X: We’ve already seen that in 2000. They will have another Brooks Brothers riot and that’s when we will become a banana republic and there’ll be different factions marching in the street.

TKN: That’s what really worries me. I’m not worried about a fair election where Trump’s soundly beaten and then the Secret Service and US Marshals have to pull him off a door jamb in the West Wing by his fingernails. I agree with you about the unlikeliness of that. But I am worried about a more sophisticated way of stealing the election where it’s close enough, and they try to ratfuck it and change votes and do whatever they have to do, or just sow doubt as a pretext for nullifying the whole thing.

Because I think the election is going to be close no matter who we run. And if it’s close, there is no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump is going to say either “I won,” regardless of what the vote count says, or “It wasn’t a fair election—I’m not leaving,” or some variation on that. And I don’t think Mitch McConnell will march into the Oval Office and tell him, “You’ve got to go.”

MR. X: It’s a place that I hope never to be in. It’s so scary. Being Democrats, we bring a petition to a gun fight. We have these guardrails that have allowed us to be a democracy for 240 years. This would no longer be a democracy and it wouldn’t be the America as we know it. And that’s unfathomable.

TKN: But so is having a guy in the Oval Office who’s a demonstrable asset of a foreign power. And yet he’s there.  

MR. X: Totally true. It keeps me up at night. I have no answers for what that would mean. And who does? Even marching in the streets, what would that bring us?

TKN: This country doesn’t have the stomach for that. I mean, last week you had the President of the United States shutting down the intelligence community for saying—correctly—that a foreign power is assisting him and trying to keep him in office. If the American people don’t get out in the streets over that, they’re not going to get in the streets over anything. If “American Idol” gets canceled again, then they’ll be out in the streets.

MR. X: Maybe it could move to CBS this time, which would be fitting….

TKN: (laughs) Yes: the graveyard of all television.

MR. X: But when the economy craters, then they’ll be out.

TKN: Well, that’s true. And we see the economy doing scary things right now, over the coronavirus, and fears that this administration is botching the response, which is no shock. So it could happen. Not that I’m wishing for it, of course, but it could change the game.

Plus you’ve got, whatever the number is, 65 million Americans who actively like this nightmare. Who think it’s great.

MR. X: And they have guns.

HOW TO KEEP A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY FROM SELF-FULFILLING

TKN: As we talk about the pitfalls of Bernie in the baggage department, I’m a little worried about a self-fulfilling prophecy. We just got done saying that if he’s going to be the nominee, we’re going to get behind him. So how do we speak truthfully about Bernie without creating the very problem that we’re worried about?

MR. X: Well, you know, we’re Democrats, so we are a big tent, right? Unlike the Republicans, who are an old white people’s party for white people, our party is one of dozens of interests that have come together because working together we can achieve something that benefits us all. The thing about Bernie is that his most strident supporters don’t see it that way. But it is true.

So this is about work. It’s about the blocking and tackling that will be politics. It’s about showing college students what he’s offering and the value there. It’s about showing environmentalists what he’s offering and the value there. It’s about showing young people who are looking for jobs how the Green New Deal does that, and showing people in unions how his pan-unionism will be beneficial to them, and showing people how they’ll save money on healthcare, or have better care. And then it’s also him having that weird charisma that I guess he has, to get people to believe in him.

TKN: The problem is, apart from the charisma piece, you’re describing a campaign of ideas and facts up against one of lies and libel.

What are the odds of a Corbynesque wipeout happening here?  

MR. X: I think there’s a strong chance, unfortunately. You could go back to other times in American history, not that long ago. You look at Mondale in ‘84, or McGovern in ‘72, and in both cases they were running against incumbents, which is hard anyway. So you’re asking for it if you nominate a socialist in an otherwise winnable election.

I don’t think Bernie’s democratic socialist parlance really speaks to people, or that there’s a class consciousness in America the way that Bernie thinks there is. His view is all about the “working class.” But nobody in America sees themselves like that. They all see themselves as middle class, so you’re not even talking to anybody. That said, if you’re working from paycheck to paycheck, it doesn’t matter what it’s calling you if his message speaks to you. Maybe it works. Will it be enough? I mean, if we could have Bill Clinton’s connectivity and Bernie’s politics, it’d be one thing.

It’s just a hard lift to be like, “Yeah, I’m a socialist— everything you’ve hated.”

Look at Lloyd Blankfein, who just recently said, “I don’t like Trump, but given the choice between Bernie and Trump, Trump’s gonna look awful good.” I don’t really care what people like Lloyd Blankfein believe, but those are votes. We do have this thing in America, this sort of Horatio Alger idea where we all believe that there’s this mobility and we shouldn’t demonize the rich, because I could be rich someday too. That kind of mobility has been proven to be a total lie, but the story still exists. There are these sort of like quasi-lotteries that we’ve set up to make it seem like there’s this mobility, which doesn’t exist in America anymore, sadly, but they make excoriating the rich problematic, politically speaking.

TKN: Without that democratic socialist label, I feel like you could peel off some of those Trump voters from 2016: those disaffected, nihilistic white people who just want to burn the system down. But with it, as you say, you’re fighting generations of knee-jerk conditioning, regardless of the facts.

MR. X: I mean, Bernie’s not Jeremy Corbyn. He doesn’t have this anti-Semitism problem that’s current in leftist politics in Britain and Europe, and which I think was a small part of what allowed people to not vote for Labour. But he unfortunately has this other thing, which is “Semitism,” which makes a large number of Americans not want to vote for him.

TKN: But we’re never going to get those people anyway. Aren’t they already baked into the other side? I don’t think we’re going to get the Nazi vote.

MR. X: (laughs) True. But you want to put your opponents on the defensive so they have to shore up their side. It’s all this game of states. If we’re like scraping by trying to get to that 270th electoral vote, we’re gonna be in trouble because they’re gonna have a lot of money and do a lot of ratfucking. But if we’re feeling comfortable about 300 electoral votes and are pushing them on 15 more—or they think we are—then they have to pour money into those states and we sort of bleed them that way.

That’s why it’s so scary. When you’re thinking we’re gonna be fighting in just three states, you know it’s a concern. You want to expand the map so that it makes them unsure where and how it all plays out. But the guy who is against fracking is going to be a tough sell in Pennsylvania. Wisconsin may be gone and we’re worried about other states. On the other hand, Arizona and Colorado, may be bluer now, and with a 1.8 million former felons voting in Florida, maybe that shades more purple. That’s enough to move an election. But just like we were saying about turnout, are they all gonna vote Democratic?

TKN: Some of them could be white supremacist neo-Nazis…..

MR. X: (laughs) Coming out of Florida prisons, I would assume a good chunk are. But then Georgia said they registered 225,000 new voters or something like that….

TKN: Georgia? With Brian Kemp? Come on! That’s the poster state for voter suppression!

MR. X: Well, North Carolina is up there, too. And, frankly, Wisconsin is pretty good at it….

But if you think abortion is killing babies, and women are secondary to men, then you’re probably not gonna vote Democrat anyway, right? If you feel that you’ve had a personal relationship with Jesus, you’re probably not to vote Democratic either. That’s probably 40% of America, unfortunately.

TKN: Which is a shame because Jesus is definitely a Democrat.

MR. X: Oh, a socialist.

TKN: God is a Republican.

MR. X: The great thing about Bernie frankly, is that he stays on message. That’s key. And Trump stays on message. His message, weirdly, always changes, but it all comes down to “You’re going to be so sick of winning.”

TKN: McLuhanesque, Trump is the message in his campaign.

MR. X: He is McLuhanesque…. from being created on television, to being a caricature of himself. He’s like, “I’m a billboard for myself, even though myself doesn’t exist.” He is the postmodern candidate.

My dream in ’16, and it remains this, is that someone will break their nondisclosure agreement and talk about the abortions that Trump paid for.

TKN: Right. Because you know he’s paid for—or as Samantha Bee says, promised to pay for—a bunch of them. There is no way he has not. Surely there’s some private eye out there, trying to find these people.  

But do you think that would do it? I think his cult is so deep in the Kool Aid that even if five women came out and said, “I got pregnant by Donald Trump and he paid for the abortion, or he encouraged me to have one, or knew I had one and he was relieved about it,” I don’t think would change things.

MR. X: I think that abortion is the Republicans’ Kryptonite, or their third rail, or whatever. They may not turn, but they would certainly stay home, and he needs an army of those people to do what he’s doing. It’s not about the South. He’ll win the South. It’s about the 100,000 of those voters in Wisconsin, and the 200,000 of them in Michigan, and the half a million of them in Pennsylvania.

TKN: Maybe. But I think they’d say, as they’ve said about all the terrible shit in his past, “Oh, he’s repented and God loves a penitent sinner.”

MR. X: Abortion, I believe, is unique. I think it would be a bridge too far for those people.

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

TKN: So notwithstanding Trump trying to steal the election and install a dictatorship….or more correctly, within the context of that, how do we proceed? How do we win with Bernie? I know his supporters are confident, and I hope they’re right, but for the rest of us who are concerned about it, regardless of how much we might personally like Bernie and/or his policies: How do we win?

MR. X: For Bernie to win, you have to build out those places where those non-voters are. July or whenever the convention is is too late to do that. My assumption is that over the last four years plus people have been doing this work. If they haven’t, I’d be surprised and that would be a disservice to the people they say they’re representing. I’m not talking about elected officials, although hopefully they play a part in it. I’m talking about groups that do this voter turnout stuff and engagement and mobilizing people and policy work and racial justice to get people involved in and caring about their electoral future. Those are people that should be actively involved in their future, and feel that they have agency in it, just as much as you and I do. Those people’s futures depend on this, as all of ours do, and if they feel like it’s all just the same and there’s no benefit in voting Democratic, then the party has not done its job.

There’s always been oppression in America. The question is, where the line? Thus far the line has been at the underclass: they are suppressed and the middle class isn’t. But then the line moved up and there were people who voted for Trump—even though it was against their interest—because they suddenly felt outside of the protected group. They were like, “Forget this, I’m not getting anywhere, not getting ahead. I’m going to go for someone who’s going to shake this up.”

Now with Trump, the line comes at the middle class people and intelligentsia. Are we going to say, “That’s a problem” and throw off the yoke? Or are we gonna be like, “Oh forget it. The system just doesn’t work for us. Goodbye. Good night.” If we do, then we don’t deserve a democracy, because a democracy demands people who are involved in a polis.

The other side of that is that our institutions have been denuded and stripped and proven themselves not worth our support. That is a huge problem. It’s what turns people off to civics. And it may be a political party, or the Boy Scouts, or the church, or your local Kiwanis Club or whatever, but that interconnectivity that we used to feel is missing from America today. And those people are isolated and the proof is, first, that they voted for Trump, and second, that they’re turning to opioids, and three, that the suicide and death rate for white Americans is skyrocketing. These people have no future.

(Beat. Funereal silence.)

Sorry, is that an analysis you haven’t heard before?

TKN: No. It’s just well put and completely accurate. That’s kind of the end of that story right there.

*******

Photos: Bernie—Sean Rayford/Getty Images; Biden— Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters

 

For this week’s blog, I reached out to a friend who is a veteran Democratic operative with more than 20 years on national political campaigns, and currently a consultant for one of the remaining presidential hopefuls. In an anonymous interview, he offered an insider’s candid view of the race, billionaires, socialists, sexism, racism, and the relative odds of victory, wipeout, and the end of American democracy, among other things.

Here is part one of two….

DODGING THE PENDULUM

THE KING’S NECKTIE: Last week I had the exact same argument twice in a row. First—and I’m sure you experienced it even more heavily than I did—a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was suddenly shouting, “Bloomberg’s the great centrist hope!” And in response there was this kind of mass hysteria from the left wing of the party, and the Bernie folks were furious, saying things like, “I’d vote for most of these nominees, but I would never vote for Bloomberg!”

MR. X: That was a moment when Bloomberg had to prove himself. He put in all his chips—$350 million at that point, and now it’s about $500 million—and he looked strong and was polling well, and the Bernie people set their hair on fire because their view was that the nomination was being stolen by an oligarch. But we all know who Bloomberg is, which is a Republican in sheep’s clothing.

TKN: Right. But then, just as quickly, it was over—at least the delusion that he was going to be the hero who saved the party, for some—because he got clobbered in the debate.

MR. X: The idea that he actually went onto that debate stage struck me as the worst strategy of campaign thus far, period.

TKN: You think it was bad that he even went onstage, or just that he did poorly?

MR. X: I think you have to expect to do poorly. Basically he was called up from the minors in the middle of a pennant race and told, “It’s bottom of the ninth—hit a home run for us.” There was no way that debate stage was going to be his friend. If you remember, in 2016, Trump found ways to avoid debates he didn’t want to be in. Bloomberg absolutely could have skipped that one. And should have. He wasn’t even in the Nevada primary.

The other side of it is that the people he’s paying to prep him are never going to be as good as his actual adversaries. I mean, I’ve been in debate prep with senators and the like, and you’re just not as powerful as their opponent who has a vested interest in tearing them down. After all, as a staff member, your vested interest is making them pay you. I’m sure every time he wanted a break his staff said, “Sure, sir.” And when someone hit him too hard he could go, “Oh, that’s not fair.” And they’d say, “Oh, you’re right.” And no doubt that phenomenon is even more pronounced with a billionaire who isn’t accustomed to ever being told no.

TKN: I would like to think that if I were preparing for a debate, I would get my staff to crucify me.

MR. X: Yes, a murder board. I’m sure that Elizabeth Warren has gone through that time and time again. She’s also a law professor; she’s a phenomenal debater. Buttigieg also holds his own, I think. And while I don’t like the way she operates, Klobuchar has skills. Let’s leave Biden out of this for now. Even Bernie stays on message—deeply. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but his strength in the debate is that everything turns on that message and he never deviates from it. It’s a huge political strength to have that kind of discipline.

Bloomberg last debated in 2009 or something like that, and from an incumbent’s position of strength back then. He was like the Wizard of Oz, and they pulled back the curtain and there was this five foot six guy with an accent who rolls his eyes and huffs and puffs when he doesn’t get the fealty that one expects when you’re a billionaire.

TKN: So the very next day, the exact same mass hysteria and panic happened. It was like Groundhog Day…..except this time the roles were reversed. Now suddenly Bernie was the presumptive nominee, especially after the Nevada primary, and the centrists set their hair on fire.

MR. X: I don’t want to count out Bloomberg, who’s going on the attack against Bernie. I’m not sure if that will work or not—he’s certainly the wrong person to do it. When you hit someone in a multi-candidate race, you never win. But he could put $150 million in those Super Tuesday states against Bernie and rip his face off. If he wants to go down in flames with a scorched earth strategy, he will do his side of the Democratic Party a huge favor.

TKN: Let’s say he does that and it succeeds. He’s just thrown himself on the hand grenade that is Bernie Sanders to clear the way for who?

MR. X: Well, the only person would be Biden.

TKN: Bloomberg can’t do that and survive and be the candidate?

MR. X: No, he could. Because he’s got enough money, he could go two tracks and possibly run a huge amount of positive media at the same time he’s running a huge amount of anti-Bernie media. But that’s really hard. People love negative ads: it moves people, it changes people’s votes or keeps them at home. But they also hate the people who do them.

TKN: (laughs) What could be more American?

MR. X: In a dyad kind of race it works well because they’ve got nowhere to go but you. But in a multi-candidate race, the person who throws that punch ends up with a foot in their face.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD (TEXTBOOK EDITION)

TKN: Is that part of what happened with Warren? I know that all the candidates attacked Bloomberg in Las Vegas, but she really led the charge…..clearing the way for Bernie, not for herself!

MR. X: I don’t know what’s the story with her voters, because she reportedly had this terrific turnout engine, this amazing team in Iowa, and she came in nowhere. And then she’s in the state next to hers and she comes in effectively nowhere, given that she’s from Massachusetts. Dukakis was basically handed New Hampshire in ‘88, but of course he wasn’t running against someone from Vermont. I just don’t understand it. She’s terrific in the debates. She’s had enough money to do the job. She’s supposedly had this amazing field machine, and she’s done this really interesting stuff in her campaign, like the selfie cycle. So is it what Michelle Wolf said at the end of 2016, that what this proved in the end is, we’re far more sexist then racist?

TKN: But by the time Iowa happened her campaign had already faded. And as a layman, I can only ascribe it to misogyny.  

Initially when she announced I think there was a lot of skepticism….a sense of, “Oh, Warren is Hillary 2.0,” just because she’s a smart blond woman. Then she proved she had all those things you just described, proved she had this ground game, proved she was smart as a whip, proved she’s nothing like Hillary personality-wise. And last summer she was rising fast, as you know, and people were saying Bernie was toast, Warren had taken over his space. When Ukrainegate broke there were even headlines like, “Warren just secured the nomination.”

And then I felt like there was a moment of collective PTSD on the left, like, “Oh God, are we going to do this again? Is she going to be the nominee?” Both because she is superficially reminiscent of Hillary, and because she’s too progressive for lots of folks. And after that it she was done, for no good reason.

MR. X: I think it’s actually more complex than that, and it actually is policy-driven, shockingly enough. Everyone gave Bernie a total pass on Medicare for all. But they attacked her and they attacked her and they attacked her. “How are you gonna pay for all this?” Someone said at one point in one of these debates, “At least Bernie is honest, he’s not telling us anything!”

TKN: It’s the opposite though! Warren is answering the question that Bernie is evading, or not being asked at all. How is that more “honest” on his part?

MR. X: Exactly. So she said, “Wait, so here’s the deal. We’ll have to step this thing. Maybe we’ll have an interim,” which is basically Kamala Harris’s plan, to be fair. And the left went, “Oh, you’re not for us? I’m burning my Elizabeth Warren shirt and swag!”

Warren puts out an interim when she’d been pressed and pressed and pressed by every single other candidate—especially everyone’s favorite, Pete Buttigieg—to explain how she’d pay for this thing. By the way, Republicans never have to explain how they’d pay for anything. So she did that, and all of her support evaporated. The left no longer saw her as this pie-in-the-sky dream machine that they had in the summer of ‘19. It was the same thing that AOC did a week ago or so when she said, we’ll take what we can get from the Congress and call it a win and then move forward. But it took the air out of Warren’s balloon.

TKN: So are you saying that Bernie’s very lack of specificity, the kind of outrageousness of his proposals without any armature supporting it, is the very thing that’s appealing to people?

MR. X: Because no one is willing to attack Bernie Sanders, he doesn’t have to support or bracket his policies with the stuff that you have to churn out when people are attacking you.

TKN: But why don’t they attack him?

MR. X: Because they see his supporters like the Republicans saw Trump supporters in ’16. They’re all so scared of the Bernie bros not turning out for them if they’re the nominee that they’re unwilling to attack him. So they’ve given him a pass, which has allowed him to steamroll in the same way that Trump did in ‘16. And it’s going be disaster……

(laughs) Of course, I’m arguing it was a disaster for the Republican Party, but the Republican Party won, so I guess it’s doable. But to stop it, someone needs to do this Bloomberg thing, which is to be willing to jump on the hand grenade by going after Bernie, and be willing to die that day.

TRIUMPH OF THE EXTREMES

TKN: So what happens in the general election when Republicans are not afraid of alienating the Bernie bros, because they have no illusions about winning them over, and they will attack Bernie on all those specifics?

MR. X: You mean like he honeymooned in Moscow?

TKN: Yes, for sure. All that baggage. But also in a more substantive way of saying: defend your positions.

MR. X: When Bernie’s the candidate, he only has to respond to Trump, and Trump won’t do that, exactly. It’ll be in the water, though, like Bush and his minions did to Kerry.

But every Democratic Senate candidate will be attacked in this way, and that’s a concern downballot. Because if you’re running for Senate in Kansas, they’ll say, “Your party’s leader honeymooned in Moscow, and believes in democratic socialism, and wants to give everyone free college tuition: where do you stand on that?” And then they’re going to be up against a wall, which is going to be hellish.

TKN: I will say as an aside though, that I don’t think Donald Trump and his fans have any room to complain about the other guy cozying up to Russia. I know he’ll do it anyway, I know we’re in Bizarro World and doesn’t matter, but I just want to say that.

MR. X: But to be tarnished on that from the left is very different. Trump can sort of be Nixon in China. “I’m a Republican!” In fact, this week when the DNI said the Russians are busy infiltrating the Trump campaign, Republicans were like, “What? No! He’s tough on Russia!” So they’ve drunk the Kool Aid.

Although Bernie was on “60 Minutes” this weekend, and he makes this great point when he’s asked about it, saying that Castro did some fine things. He gave a spiel like, “I also said he did some bad things. You don’t see me writing to love letters to Kim Jong-un or cozying up to Putin.“ So he’s got his response to that issue.

As a strategist you have to say, most of Bernie’s positions—Medicare for all, free college, reparations— don’t get a majority of support. You can’t run on all minority support issues. To then add, “And I’m a socialist Jew” is a good way to put a pin in your candidacy. We’ve not seen a Jewish person run for president. We haven’t seen a socialist run for president since Eugene Debs. And he did it from jail.

TKN: But he wasn’t a major party candidate.

MR. X: He was not. But he got eight million votes, largest third party candidate support until Perot.

We’ve been conditioned as Americans, if you’re over the age of 42, to believe socialism and communism are the biggest anathema in the world. America is an engine to fight that. So to me, the idea of crossing that Rubicon, “Oh, I’ll vote for a socialist for president,” is maybe just a bridge a little too far and on a political strategy level, that’s scary.

TKN: Of course I share those same concerns. But then there’s a little part of me that thinks, well, the entire game has been changed. Nobody thought Trump could win. It’s absurd that he did win. But now we’re in a different world.

MR. X: But when it came to the tough issues that everyone hates Republicans for—the Paul Ryan issues, like gutting Medicare, Social Security and these things—Trump was like, “Oh, we won’t do that. Health care? I’m gonna give you the best healthcare in the world! How? Who knows?” But he made those promises during the race and then went full draconian Ryan/McConnell Republican after he was in office. This time we can pick apart Trump’s record, but before, he talked like Huey Long.

TKN: Recently a friend of mine was saying that the whole concept of electability has inverted. What we used to think of as a conventionally electable candidate is the exact thing that you cannot get elected with now……which is to say, a sort of reasonable person with actual policies, who speaks carefully and runs the risk of seeming inauthentic to the electorate. Whereas a radical, whether it’s Bernie or Trump—and I’m not equating them, but somebody who’s extreme—is perceived as authentic precisely because of their extremity.

MR. X: Authenticity is vitally important, but in these cases, it’s not their authenticity, but the moderation that I think is the story. Things are so bad and so disrupted that it’s not just the Trump voters who are like, “Things have to change,” but also part of the Democratic base. These Bernie people, if they’re young, are probably looking at a society where their parents had it better off than their parents did before them, and their parents’ parents’ before that. Even more so than in 2016, the rage now is huge. Whether you’re an angry white man, or a recent graduate drowning in college debt. It’s so bad that I don’t think Obama could be elected in 2020. Maybe he could as an African-American person, that kind of change. But he was a moderate.

TKN: Though a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama—even though he wasn’t a “rage” candidate—defies traditional ideas of “electability.” So that makes two norm-breaking presidents in a row.

The question is, is it possible that this rage that you’re describing—which is palpable, we all feel it—is it possible that that could translate into something that would propel Bernie to victory even with all his baggage?

MR. X: Yes. I’m not saying Bernie can’t win. But swing voters are not moderates. Moderates are moderates. Every moderate is really a secret Republican or a secret Democrat, but they’re not swing voters necessarily. True swing voters are people who are low information voters who are willing to go with whoever sells. Anyone who can swing from Obama in ‘12 to Trump in ‘16 doesn’t have a political agenda, OK?

So what that means is, to get those people to swing your direction is not about tacking to the center necessarily. On the contrary: these are people who apt to say, “Fuck this bullshit. I want to change this.” Does Bernie offer change when you’ve already got a change agent in the White House?

TKN: Maybe, if the thing you most urgently want to change is that guy in the White House.

MR. X: Yes. But typically you beat someone with their antithesis. So to replace angry, I’m-going-to-tear-everything-down Trump with angry, I’m-going-to-tear-everything-down Bernie traditionally hasn’t happened. But what’s traditional in politics today is dead.

TKN: I hear you in terms of, typically you’d go from Bush to Obama to Trump. But here the pendulum would be swinging in a different way if you went from a right wing demagogue like Trump to a socialist of a sort that we’ve never had ever, like Bernie. Ideologically that would be a radical reversal.

MR. X: But ideology is not what the presidency is about. Democrats run on ideology somewhat, but Republicans never run on ideology. There’s abortion and the religious right, and they will speak to that, but it’s not ideological per se. That’s why, to me, conservatism is so backward looking. It’s a cultural thing and Trump’s politics are certainly cultural politics, not one based on policies.

BERNIE’S PATH TO PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

TKN: So let’s say Bernie is the candidate—

MR. X: The only way he can’t be is if Biden wins in South Carolina and somehow comes up with parity on Super Tuesday. Does he have the money to compete in those states? The money’s not gonna come in and make a difference in three days. There are Super Tuesday states that look a lot like South Carolina from a primary perspective, which can benefit Biden. There’s also California.

TKN: What about a brokered convention, or the Democratic powers-that-be saying, “We just can’t let Bernie be nominee”?

MR. X: The powers-that-be are not going to do that. They know that would be a net loss. They’d rather go down in flames with their guy. If we do end up with Bernie, or frankly whoever it is, my only hope is that the party says, “Let’s give it everything we’ve got.”

The good news is, Bernie has the opportunity to do what Trump did, which is turn out these people who weren’t voting before. The bad news is that old people are like, “Oh, I’m mad! I’m gonna vote.” Young people are like, “I’m mad. I’m gonna start an organic butcher shop!”

The people Bernie’s relying on are non-voters and young people….and those people don’t vote! It’s like saying, “I’ve got this great football team with me. I just don’t have any players.” It’s hard to win when they don’t show up on the field. And to count on them is a big, dangerous mistake. But that’s what it comes down to for him: getting those people to finally show up and vote.

I will say this: Bloomberg was never, ever gonna make those people say, “Yeah! I want to vote!” But Bernie might. He’s certainly doesn’t look like them, but he’s got a lot to offer to those people, and talking about stuff—the same stuff that Elizabeth Warren is talking about—that speaks to Latinx and black parts of the electorate. Democrats have spent every cycle courting these demographics, but they have to follow through. You know, Black Lives Matter—yeah, for the three hours when we are at the polls. Other than that, forget it.

Also, higher turnout doesn’t necessarily mean we win, by the way. Those people who never voted before 2016 and who are now standing in line overnight to see Trump at a rally are the scariest part of American politics in my opinion.

The interesting question is who will be Bernie’s running mate. Bernie’s been saying the same thing since 1985. Great. It’s working for him right now and that’s terrific. But when it comes to the nuts and bolts of winning a national campaign, he needs to find the right partner. You’ve gotta balance the ticket.

TKN: So who is his ideal VP?

MR. X: Maybe it’s Kamala Harris. She’s quasi African-American and she’s from California, totally another part of the country. She speaks to a different demographic. Also Julian or Joaquin Castro would be an interesting choice; a Latino running mate would make a big difference for him. For Trump, Pence really shored up that wavering religious right. The religious right loves Trump now, but back then, a three time divorcee picking a guy who won’t eat lunch without his wife there certainly helped.

Because he himself is so unconventional, Bernie needs a Tim Kaine. It’s the opposite of what Hillary needed. If she’d picked someone a little more outside the box, she’d be president right now.

TKN: (laughs) Are you blaming Tim Kaine for 2016? Because, I have to tell you, I have not heard that before….

MR. X: (laughs) No, I’m not blaming Tim Kaine. But I’m saying if Hillary had done something that excited people, it would have been different. It was only 70,000 votes in three states—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—that decided the election. Trump had an inside straight that no one’s ever seen before. I mean, if the border of Illinois was, I think it’s like 400 yards farther north, then he would not have won. If she’d had someone who inspired African-American people in Milwaukee, she’d be president.

TKN: But this is Michael Lewis’s Undoing Project, where you ask those “if only” questions that are 11^th hour things that come to mind, but we don’t go back and question bigger things, like “If Donald Trump had been born with a vagina, he wouldn’t be president.”

MR. X: I am with you all the way. I am just making the case that whoever the Democratic nominee is, they have to be very careful and pick someone who really adds to the ticket, because all of the Democrats have holes. Anyone who’s not Bernie can very easily pick Stacey Abrams and be done.

TKN: You don’t think Stacey would be a good running mate for Bernie?

MR. X: She’s too far left for Bernie. And he would be showing his willingness to compromise with who he picks as a running mate. He doesn’t have to compromise on any of his values; he just has to pick someone who is moderate. If you want to win, that is the easiest compromise to make, and the smartest one. You’re not compromising any of your values. You’re parking somebody, even though you’re giving them a leg up in the next election. The vice presidency means as much or as little as you want it to mean. In this current administration, I think it means very little. In the Bush years it was everything.

TKN: So for Bernie, Kamala certainly comes to mind right off the bat, as you say. It would help me, for sure, just on a visceral level. But do you think he would do that? Pick her?

MR. X: Yes.

TKN: Do you think Kamala would do it?

MR. X: In a heartbeat. God, it’s a step! And she’s a career politician, bless her heart. As John Nance Gardner said, the vice presidency isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, and it’s true… unless the president dies. Kamala and Gavin Newsom are competing to see who gets the presidency first. That would be a ladder, in “Chutes and Ladders.” She’d be the heir apparent and also have the chance to put some gravitas underneath her sails.

TKN: What about a really out-of-the-box VP choice? I would think—and this is just my bias—but if it was Bernie Sanders and Admiral Bill McRaven, an American military hero credentialed to the hilt and a staunch critic of Trump….

MR. X: That would be incredible. I also think that Steve Bullock would be another good one. But two white guys is problematic. I think that if you want to have this turnout thing, you need to show people that you get them, and that means someone of color.

TKN: How about Deval Patrick?

MR. X: Well, the problem is now you’re stuck in the Northeast.

TKN: What about—don’t laugh—Bernie/Bloomberg?

MR. X: Who would be at the top of that ticket?

TKN: I understand it would be a major ego come-down for Mike Bloomberg….

MR. X: Oh, Bloomberg is at the bottom of that ticket? Not in a million years is that going to happen.

TKN: Because Bloomberg wouldn’t do it, or because Bernie wouldn’t do it?

MR. X: Bloomberg wouldn’t do it AND Bernie wouldn’t do it.

TKN: And it’s still two white guys, and two Jewish guys to boot. But Bloomberg has said, and I take him at his word, that he’s going to put his fortune into this no matter who the nominee is. He can be the war chest that the Democrats need to fight the Republican war chest.

MR. X: But the difference is, if he’s the nominee, he’ll put $1 billion in on top of anything. And if it’s not him, he’ll put $100 million in, which is not nothing….

TKN: But now Bernie’s saying he won’t take the money, and Bloomberg’s saying, well then, I’m not gonna offer it. As if we haven’t voluntarily saddled ourselves with enough disadvantages.

JOE’S SLOW FAREWELL

TKN: You predicted Biden’s collapse months ago.

MR. X: I think the reason they kept him in this Rose Garden strategy for so long was because Biden isn’t Biden anymore. He used to be verbose but fast-talking, thought he was smarter than everybody else in the room, etc. Now he just seems superannuated in a way that Bernie doesn’t. Bernie’s that old guy that’s like, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” but he’s still making some good points. Joe can’t finish a sentence without it being a run-on, and then having three subordinate clauses that go nowhere.

The thing I would say, though, is that he’d still be a fine president! (laughs) Debate is a unique situation, both formal and improvisational, and it’s not something that happens often. If you’re worried about a president saying stupid things off-the-cuff to foreign leaders, we have one already, so it’d be a fair trade.

Biden’s just not raising money, which he could’ve done, his organization is obviously shoddy, and the ads are not that great. Put all those things together and you’ve got a problem.

Amy’s ads are terrible. Bennett’s ads were horrible. Buttigieg’s are like Hillary’s in ’08, him at a rally saying supposedly highfalutin things that make you want to salute the flag. But the only things that come out of Pete’s mouth are highfalutin things.

TKN: So you’re down on Pete? I don’t mean that in an attacking way. I’m just curious.

MR. X: I agree with everything Elizabeth Warren says about him. When she attacked Pete as being a McKinsey consultant, teleprompter reading, rehash-giving automaton, I think that was really right. He is great at slashing attacks with a smile on his face, like Alfred E. Neuman, or maybe Alfred E. Neuman crossed with Pee Wee. But I think that his positions are lackluster. He’s a moderate and he sounded really good in the spring of 2019 when we were looking for someone. I’d date him, but when it’s time to get married, when you really vote, that’s not what I’m looking for.

He’s also so young and he’s done so little. He’s a guy who’s led a town of 100,000 people. And I don’t have the facts, mind you, but firing the first black police commissioner and the black fire commissioner… there’s something horribly wrong going on in that town.

TKN: There are definitely people who feel like Pete embodies a certain kind of white male privilege.

MR. X: African-American people look at him and see a guy who’s literally gotten every privilege. If you’re a black person and you see a 37-year-old guy running for president from a tiny town, you say, “This is like every asshole who’s cut in front of me ‘cause they’re white, in every shape and every form,“ and you just hate that.

TKN: I suspect it’s a little like being a woman and watching the most qualified candidate for president in American history lose to the least qualified candidate in American history in large part because of her gender.

MR. X: Yes, but you were talking before about authenticity. I worked for her, and Hillary Clinton is, for all her great strengths, really the least authentic person to walk the earth.

TKN: Yeah. But she was beaten by a guy who’s only authentic in being an asshole.

MR. X: True. But if you’re saying, “Oh, all he had to offer was assholedom,” maybe that’s what America is more like than you realize.

TKN: Oh, I’m learning that.   

THE AFTERMATH OF UKRAINEGATE

TKN: Turning back to Joe Biden, David Frum had a tweet recently saying that Trump’s Ukraine scam paid off because it destroyed Biden’s campaign.

MR. X: You know, I was worried about that, but Biden’s candidacy wasn’t destroyed by that. If Biden had raised 40 million bucks he would have knocked people out and scared people away and the like. But he was a weak frontrunner to begin with. To run for president you gotta raise a lot of money and you gotta be out there stumping. If you watch those debates, afterward all the other candidates go and talk to Chris Matthews or CNN or whoever. When I fell in love with Warren was when she was on after the second debate, I think it was, and she was literally still debating with all five of them from the panel on CNN. And I thought, that is really impressive. Joe didn’t do any of those things. His campaign tried to play this sort of above the fray thing.

I think it was a wash. It didn’t help Joe Biden to be the center of this Ukraine thing, although it did give him some great lines at a couple debates, like, “Trump is scared of me. That’s why he’s trying to destroy me.” And, “If anyone has a right to be pissed at Republicans, it’s me.” I think that that’s a pretty sticky wicket for Trump: “Let me possibly lose my presidency trying to smear a rival.” In the end it strengthened his presidency, as we saw, but it certainly did not necessarily have to go that way—

TKN: You think impeachment strengthened his presidency?

MR. X: Well, look where his numbers are now.

TKN: But I don’t think it matters. This is a completely different interview by the way, but I think the downside of not holding him to account was much worse.

MR. X: Absolutely true. But his emboldened nature from being exonerated by the lackeys in his party is troubling.

TKN: Yes, I agree with you by that definition. It’s “strengthened” his presidency in the sense that now he is positive that no one in Congress—which is to say the GOP—is going to hold him accountable and he can behave in an even more unconscionable way, which is exactly what he has done since that day. But I think he was gonna go there anyway. There was no way that he was going to be a good boy, a la Susan Collins, no matter what. He was going to find something to gin up those crazies: if it wasn’t impeachment, it’d be something else. So I think impeachment was the right thing to do, and If there’s an America left in 2021, history will judge us kindly.

MR. X: Impeachment was absolutely the right thing to do. There is no doubt about that. And Nancy Pelosi was great, and she also sort of field tested it, saw that Jerry Nadler was not the guy to do it and turned to Adam Schiff, and he did a phenomenal job. It was certainly possible that Bolton could have testified and the roof would have blown off this thing and the Senate would have been forced to act. I don’t think he would have been voted out of office anyway, but I think that probably a group of twelve Republican Senators would have walked into the Oval Office and said, “Donald, it’s time for you to go.”

TKN: You mean like in 1974?

MR. X: Right.

TKN: But it didn’t happen. Barry Goldwater’s dead. Can you believe that Barry Goldwater now looks like the voice of reason?

********** 

In part two, Mr. X discusses what the Democratic Party has to do in order to turn out the African-American vote, the chances Trump won’t yield power, and whether the republic will still be standing in 2021.

Illustration: Steve Bernstein

Last Friday, news broke that the US Intelligence Community had, again, as it did in 2017, determined that the Russian government was interfering in an American presidential election with the goal of helping elect Donald Trump.

But unlike the 2017 assessment, which was a post-mortem, this one was an active red alert: the IC was warning that Russia was in the process of attacking our democracy as we speak. It was as if a radio message came in during the wee hours after midnight on December 7^th, 1941 saying “Uh, Japanese planes are headed toward Pearl Harbor.” Or if on the morning of September 11^th, 2001 an observant flight attendant walking out of an Au Bon Pain at Newark’s Terminal B had noted, “Hey, four guys are getting on this plane carrying boxcutters.”

But President Donald J. Trump, upon hearing about this assessment, which had been briefed to the House Intelligence Committee on February 13, did not raise the alarm, get on the red phone to Vladimir Putin and tell him to cut that shit out or else, or lift even one of his tiny little fingers to stop the Russian actions.

Nope.

Instead, he flew into a rage at the very suggestion that Russia was working to help him, denied it was true, and did everything he could to bury the news, to include firing his acting Director of National Intelligence for allowing the briefing in the first place, and replaced him with a former Internet troll.

So to be clear, here’s the situation, which would be eye-rollingly bad if it were the plot of an airport spy novel:

The President of the United States is a notoriously shady businessman with extensive financial connections in the land of one of our most vicious enemies, connections he lied about during his campaign for office, giving that enemy vast leverage over him. He openly accepted the help of that enemy in order to win the election, and since taking power he has repeatedly, brazenly served its ends at the expense of our own. (See the Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak, Helsinki, the quashing of the Mueller probe, Syria, and more.) He has refused to harden our electoral system against future attacks of the sort that aided him, and for obvious reasons, as he is yet again accepting that enemy’s help, and using the full power of his presidency to cover it up, along with his complicity in it.

Do I really need to say that this state of affairs is a five alarm housefire of a crisis without precedent in American history?

It was a dazzling intelligence coup by a regional power (albeit a conniving and ruthless one) over a superpower—one in the grip of a self-destructive mass hysteria, aided by an often naive media, and beset by deep vulnerabilities in its democratic institutions. Every patriotic American ought to be infuriated by what’s going on. Yet it is the most ostentatiously flag-waving right wingers who have been most thoroughly hoodwinked by this effort, and most adamantly insist it is not happening.

In the Kremlin they must be howling with laughter.

WHAT, US WORRY?

We have known for more than three years that the Russians (and others) intended to attack our electoral system again. Numerous defense and intelligence officials and private sector experts have frantically rung the fire bell in an effort to rouse the government to action, only to be shut down by a livid White House and a shamelessly unbothered Mitch McConnell. Most pointedly, special counsel Robert Mueller, having already indicted a dozen Russian intelligence operatives for the 2016 attacks, warned Congress of this very thing on national television last July.

Now we see it happening before our eyes, and Trump and his Republican protectors actively abetting it.

The story was a bombshell, but not as big a bomb as it should have been. It should have obliterated all other news. It should have resulted in a national emergency, mass protests (and resignations) in the Departments of State and Defense and Homeland Security, a general strike in the CIA, DIA, FBI, and the rest of the Intelligence Community, angry rallies in the streets, barricades going up, Senators and Congressmen on the floor of the US Capitol building demanding the president’s resignation.

Did I miss that while watching Week 3 of the XFL?

Folks, we are allowing a demonstrable asset of a hostile foreign state to sit in the Oval Office, using the full range of presidential authority to maintain a chokehold on power, serving the interests those enemies at the expense of the United States, refusing to admit what he is doing, let alone put a stop (and why he should he when it helps him so?), and blocking every effort to expose the truth.

To be fair, plenty of profoundly outraged veterans of the national security and intelligence apparatus raised the alarm. Here’s a tweet from former CIA Director John Brennan (whom Trump vindictively stripped of his security clearance):

We are now in a full-blown national security crisis. By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.

And Sally Yates, former acting US Attorney General (whom Trump fired):

This is a screaming red siren, but in the daily barrage of crazy, can we hear it?Trump is not only trying to rewrite history of Russia’s intervention in 2016, he is now using the power of the presidency to conceal their 2020 scheme to re-elect him.

And Admiral (Ret.) Bill McRaven, the Navy SEAL who oversaw the 2011 Bin Laden raid as commander of US Special Operations Command (who Trump dismissed as a “Hillary lover”):

As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.

But these howls of indignation are not enough.

As an abuse of power, getting in bed with the enemy to maintain one’s position atop the government is about as abuse-of-powery as it gets. As Trump himself would say, we used to shoot people who did that sort of thing.

THE BEST PEOPLE

Trump learned of the February 13^th House briefing because the greasy little excuse for a human being that is Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) went running to the White House to tattle about it. Apparently, during the briefing Nunes and other Republicans refused to accept what the intel experts were telling them, attacking it as Democratic Party disinformation, part of their tinfoil hat fantasy about a “Deep State” conspiracy against the President. A theory that conveniently disregards the fact that it was the President’s own appointees presenting the facts.

(Subsequent attempts by administration to downplay and discredit the contents of the briefing—credulously regurgitated by the likes of CNN—smack of transparently weak damage control.)

Of course, “tattle” is not really the right word, as there was nothing clandestine about the briefing, conducted by Shelby Pierson, the IC’s lead official on election interference. On the contrary: it is the job of the Intelligence Community to provide critical analysis to the US government, especially, uh, people like the House Intelligence Committee. But that is the very point: Trump is subverting the entire purpose of the IC to protect his own ass, and by extension, serving the ends of Vladimir Putin.

Donald’s typically rage-a-holic and hamhanded response was to throw a temper tantrum, and to fire acting DNI Joseph Maguire, who—and you’ll be shocked to hear this—has been on Trump’s shit list ever since he testified before the House in the Ukraine scandal last fall. (Prompting the angry op-ed from Maguire’s fellow SEAL and longtime comrade, Admiral McRaven.)

True to form, Trump’s choice for new DNI, Richard Grenell, currently the US Ambassador to Germany, has zero intelligence experience or any other qualifications that remotely recommend him for the job, save one: he is a vocal and fanatical devotee for Trump. Grenell—a man with a severe case of Resting Douchebag Face—is so hated by the German government and public in his present job (for which he is equally unqualified), that some in Berlin took the unprecedented step of demanding that he be recalled.

What could go wrong?

And so we see Donald Trump suppressing and destroying the very raison d’etre of an intelligence apparatus: to provide truthful, fact-based analysis to facilitate informed decision-making at the highest levels. By so doing, he is not only perverting his office, but doing untold damage to the security of the United States.

AUTOCRACY IS AS AUTOCRACY DOES

This latest scandal dwarfs even Ukrainegate, though it is related in terms of sheer corruption, international skullduggery, and connection to the original sin of the Trump administration, which is its fealty to Moscow. I reported last week that Trump, newly emboldened after the travesty of his “acquittal” by Senate Republicans, is on a deathquest to obliterate the 2017 conclusion of the IC regarding Russian ratfucking on his behalf……reflecting his even more fundamental obsession, the notion that such Russian aid delegitimizes his “victory.”

And so we see further evidence that Post-Impeachment Trump feels absolutely unshackled in his belief that he can break any rule he wants, and with absolute impunity. Lesson learned, right, Susan Collins?

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent:

When the Senate acquitted President Trump of the high crimes he committed against our country, Republicans and Democrats alike fell back on a convenient fiction: No, Trump has not really placed himself beyond the law and accountability entirely—for he can always be held accountable in the next election.

Republicans adopted this fiction to obscure Trump’s crimes—that his Ukraine shakedown was all about corrupting that same election. Democrats adopted it to diffuse pressure to sustain the investigative war footing that protecting the country demands.

The news that intelligence officials warned House lawmakers that Russia is again trying to sabotage our election for Trump, and that this disclosure angered him, shatters that fiction entirely.

These revelations are already getting shrouded in euphemism. One CNN analysis insists “America” is “blundering” into another crisis of electoral legitimacy, and that the “partisan divide” is hampering the US response to it. This notion that the country writ large is stumbling helplessly into this crisis, when in fact one party is inviting it in a manner the other simply is not, and its companion idea that “partisanship” will paralyze our response to it, will be ubiquitous.

So let’s not mince words: Trump and his GOP defenders appear to be actively abetting an attack on our country. By contrast, Democrats can be accused only of passivity—a serious abdication, but not remotely comparable to what Trump and his defenders are orchestrating.

To Sargent’s point about false equivalence, the IC also concluded that the Kremlin is interfering to help Bernie Sanders. The difference was in Sanders’ response, even if he didn’t make it publicly until forced to comment: “I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president. My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.” (Bernie also suggested that some of the more virulent and divisive rhetoric attributed to some of his supporters might actually be coming from Russian trolls.)

DEAR GREAT GRANDCHILDREN: WE SUCKED

A word from the foggy past that deserves a lot more airplay these days is “quisling,” meaning a treasonous collaborator with an enemy invader or occupier, particularly one who participates in an puppet government. The name comes from Vidkun Quisling, the compliant leader of Norway under the Nazi occupation. (His family must be so proud.)

Henceforth, I suspect, American “quislings” will be rebranded as “trumps.” The guys in marketing are very excited about it.

When the history of this period in American life is written, our generation will be covered in shame for what we allowed to happen and just shrugged off as we went about our daily business. I have long wondered how far Trump would have to go to rouse the ire of a sufficient number of Americans to force his ouster.

It is to our great national humiliation that we ain’t found that limit yet.

**********

Illustration: Santa Monica Daily Press

Well, that didn’t take long, did it?

Trump had barely been acquitted by his bootlicking GOP minions in the US Senate before he began making fools of those very lickers, at least the ones who had told us with a straight face that he’d “learned his lesson” after being branded with the scarlet “I” of impeachment, and would be more careful going forward.

His (non)acquittal wasn’t even four hours old when he and his allies began weaponizing the power of the federal government to persecute his political opponents, just as they do in an authoritarian regime like the ones Trump so openly admires, and which we now arguably are. That very evening Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced a Senate investigation into Hunter Biden, and the Treasury Department said that it would comply with requests to provide pertinent records, even as it continues to shield Trump’s own financial records from public view.

The next day, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) proposed a Constitutional amendment to make impeachment harder by requiring a three-fifths vote of the House rather than a simple majority. (Didn’t we just learn how fucking hard it already is?)

In fact, this purge began even before the final vote, as soon as the notion of, ya know, like, hearing testimony or evidence from witnesses was shot down and it was clear that the denouement was at hand. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News that Trump believed there should be retribution for the Democrats who spearheaded his impeachment, noting “how horribly he was treated, and maybe people should pay for that.” The WaPo reported that Lindsey Graham, speaking to Fox News on the Sunday after the vote on witnesses, stated that “a “sweeping GOP counterattack” was in the works, and “outlined a plan that would include an investigation of former vice president Joe Biden, who is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and a pursuit of the whistleblower whose account triggered the probe into Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine.”

Once he was formally acquitted, Trump himself immediately began calling for criminal prosecution of those who had dared question his conduct. He fired Gordon Sondland, and had not just LTC Alexander Vindman but also his twin brother frogmarched out of the White House, then called for the Army to punish him. Of course, as George Conway pointed out (seconded by Adam Schiff), “punishing witnesses for complying with subpoenas and giving truthful testimony about presidential misconduct” are themselves high crimes and misdemeanors, leading to suggestions that “we may have to impeach him again.”

But Donald was just getting started. In the days that followed he successfully pressured the DOJ to reduce its sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a man who had been convicted of (wait for it) obstructing justice, witness tampering, and lying to Congress to protect Trump. He then threatened the federal judge hearing that case, Amy Berman Jackson (who previously gave Paul Manafort a very light sentence, lest we forget), called for Stone to get a new trial, and suggested that the federal prosecutors who won the conviction should apologize to this real-life Batman villain. (They all quit instead.)

Needless to say, this is brazen Mob-like intimidation of the judicial system more suited to the Sicily of legend, or a Third World banana republic. But Trump now feels completely free to engage in this wantonly imperial behavior, and why shouldn’t he? It was reported that Trump administration officials are “terrified that their careers will be ruined by a vindictive president if they report anything unethical.” And that is the exact intent. Autocracy functions by cowing resistance and rewarding toadies, all pegged to pleasing or displeasing the Dear Leader.

With his newly recharged sense of immunity, Trump is only going to get worse. “SNL” joked recently about Jeanine Pirro replacing RBG on the Supreme Court. Don’t laugh.

Folks, this is what an authoritarian one-party state looks like. Get used to it. (Or—and here’s a novel idea—get up on your feet and do something about it.)

In short, does anyone in America look more foolish right now than Susan Collins (Dishonorable mention: Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, and 48 others.)

Yeah, Trump learned a lesson from his impeachment all right: he learned he really can do whatever the fuck he wants.

THE NIGHTMARE OF KAKISTOCRACY

This entire presidency has been like a “Black Mirror” episode.

Trump wants to throw people like Colonel Vindman and Andrew McCabe and John Brennan in jail, but pardons the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, Joe Arpaio, and Rod Blagojevich? He makes a wanton ignoramus and avowed enemy of book learnin’ like Betsy DeVos the Secretary of Education, and Rick Perry the secretary of a department he can’t even name (and wants to dismantle), while purging the government of anyone who is actually competent in their job? He attacks NATO and praises the Kremlin, puts a man credibly accused of rape on the Supreme Court, and gives the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh?

Somewhere, Anthony Burgess is consumed with envy that he didn’t ever invent anything this sadistically baroque.

Meanwhile Uday and Qusay Trump remain on a tear, howling about nepotism, lack of qualifications, and trading on the family name by Hunter Biden, and with no shame or fear (or sense of irony) about doing so, because they—correctly—expect no pushback from the right wing cult that enables them, a cult includes not only red-hatted rank-and-file frothing at the mouth about Mexican rapists, but also the senior leadership of the RNC.

Kafka, Pirandello, Orwell, Ionesco—no absurdist or surrealist could top our current “reality.”

Their dad himself, with characteristically infantile fury and lust for revenge, recently raged that if he weren’t president, he’d be suing everyone all over the place.” (As if having the power of the presidency at your disposal is not rather more useful.) That was certainly his lifelong strategy as a private businessman and hyper-litigious wannabe celebrity. But the real bottom line is, if he weren’t president, he’d be in jail.

Susan Glasser in the New Yorker:

In his post-impeachment rage, Trump wanted vengeance, and he wanted us to know it. There was no one inside his Administration to stop him. A month ago, Congress had at least the theoretical power to do something about his overreaching. Today, thanks to the Senate’s very clear vote, it does not. So, although the President himself is unchanged, the context around him is very much altered. In the history of the Trump Presidency, there will be a before impeachment and an after. It’s too late for lessons learned, and it’s most definitely too late for Bill Barr to complain about the President’s tweets.

Next up, bet your bottom dollar: a pardon for Roger Stone, fittingly, the living connection between Tricky Dick-era Republican criminality and its Trumpist descendant. You know he’s gonna do it, right? In a tweet (of course), he literally told us he’s going to use his power to save Roger’s saggy white ass. And I literally mean literally, cryptic quotation marks, capitalization, and butt-covering question marks notwithstanding:

I have known Roger Stone (and his Very beautiful wife Nydia) for a very long time. A great patriot, Roger (and many others) will never ever “serve time” as long as I am in office (long time?). Time to change the laws?

Judge Jackson ultimately gave Stone a little over three years—less than the seven to nine that federal prosecutors asked for, but no doubt a bid that will still enrage Trump. Pardons or commutations for Manafort and Flynn wouldn’t surprise me either.

It’s no surprise that the crimes for which he pardoned this recent batch of rogues (Kerik and DeBartolo along with former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant Blagojevich)—bribery, graft, and the like—are Trump’s own specialty. (Shitbirds of a feather, amirite?) What Trump is after, as the WaPo’s Paul Waldman succinctly put it, “is the normalization of corruption.” He truly sees nothing wrong with the sort of thing all these men were imprisoned for, and which he himself does as naturally as he breathes or grabs pussy.

But more specifically, Trump is also laying the groundwork for shielding his accomplices in Russiagate, which along with a certain black guy from Hawaii, remains his chief obsession. Newly emboldened by a compliant US Senate, and more confident than ever in his absolute authority, Trump is trying to erase the fact of Russia’s interference on his behalf in 2016, which has long stuck in his craw as tainting his electoral “victory.” (And of course doing nothing to stop Russian interference again in 2020.)

And now we learn that Julian Assange will allege that Trump—via longtime Kremlin water-carrier Dana Rohrabacher—dangled a pardon if Assange would agree to clear Russia in that matter, the exact same form of bribery Trump employed with Kyiv. Assange is pond scum, but if true (and it sure rings true) that would be an atomic bomb….in any sane time.

And how is the press reporting this sort of thing? There are alarmed opinion pieces to be sure—many of them quite brilliant. But the straight news departments of our best newspapers continue to say things like, “Trump Takes On Judge Amy Berman Ahead of Stone Sentencing.”

Really? “Takes on” is a bit mild, if you ask me. More like “threatens in a mobster-like way.” (And for extra irony, the piece carries a photo of Judge Berman with her colleague Merrick Garland.) This would be an outrage, a scandal, and an impeachable offense if Donald Trump had not just been assured by Moscow Mitch and the Republican-controlled US Senate that he will never be impeached no matter what he does.

From now on, would it not be easier just to keep track of the things Trump does that are NOT an abuse of power?

The only thing that gives me any comfort is the fact that Donald Trump is the king of own goals.

Trump has always been his own worst enemy, needlessly committing unforced errors and bringing on trouble because he’s a sociopath who doesn’t understand right from wrong, or that you shouldn’t say the quiet part out loud. (See: publicly calling on Russia to hack the DNC server, firing Jim Comey, explicitly telling Lester Holt he did it to stop the Russia investigation, releasing the readout of the Zelenskyy call, etc.) And he repeatedly does himself the most harm when the external danger has, miraculously, passed. Recall that, although Ukrainegate was well underway by summer 2019, it reached its critical moment of self-incrimination with “The Hollow Men”-like whimper that marked the end of the Mueller probe and emboldened Trump to make his infamous July 25^th call to Zelenskyy the very next day

So it is now, with the danger of impeachment past, that the unfettered (and unhinged) Trump, on a blood quest for vengeance, is apt to do something really insane and self-destructive. Not that anything he has yet done has been insane and self-destructive enough to hurt him. But we are surely now entering into new and even darker waters.

KNOW YOUR ENEMA

I want to stop a moment to offer an instructive example of that segment of our nation that, far from being put off by the rise of American fascism, thrills to Trump and his monstrousness.

Here’s Mollie Hemingway, from the right wing rag The Federalist, singing the praises of what she calls Trump’s “epic” State of the Union address, with special attention to a certain someone he chose to honor:

Smack dab in the middle of the speech, President Trump thanked conservative hero Rush Limbaugh for “decades of tireless devotion” to the country. In recognition of his work and the inspiration he has provided millions of Americans, Trump announced the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had Melania Trump immediately present the honor in front of the assembled crowd.

While it is beyond common for liberal heroes and liberal celebrities to receive awards, Republican leaders acted over the course of decades almost as if it was okay for conservatives to be treated as second-class citizens in this regard. President Trump recognizes that the half of the country that is not liberal also likes to honor its celebrities and heroes.

Limbaugh has taught millions of Americans about conservative ideology, emphasizing the Constitution and the country’s founding ideals, and suffered attacks from the left as a result. He is a folk hero who is beloved in part because he defends tens of millions of Americans against attacks.

No other previous Republican president or nominee would have had the courage to bestow this award on such a deserving American.

I don’t know where to begin having a rational conversation with someone who thinks that a shock jock whose stock in trade is racism, misogyny, homophobia, and general hatemongering, who thought nothing of going on the air and advocating for harsh prison terms for drug addicts even as he was illegally scoring oxy, is a “deserving American,” a “beloved folk hero,” or a great educator and defender of “the country’s founding ideals.” (I guess that’s true if you count slavery.) Indeed, short of Trump himself, there may not be any living American who has done more in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries to spew poison into the public conversation. But that is the mentality we are up against.

Please note that The Federalist fancies itself a legitimate journalistic organ, not a sewer-dweller like Breitbart or InfoWars (not that it’s easy to tell). For her part, Hemingway is a journalism fellow at the Washington DC campus of Hillsdale College, an evangelical Christian school in Michigan that is alma mater to Erik Prince, Betsy DeVos’s brother and the founder of Blackwater, who is himself implicated in Trumpian skullduggery and currently at risk of being charged with perjury for lying to Congress. So consider the source.

I mentioned “Black Mirror” already, right?

WILL THE SHEEPLE RISE?

Remember when the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted? In many parts of the world, the nakedly corrupt acquittal of the head of state by his political allies would have prompted a similar uprising.

Let me be clear: I’m not calling for us to burn the country down. (Trump is already on top of that.) But I am calling for us to do more than watch “The Masked Singer.”

Speaking to Business Insider, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, said “the system is enabling Trump” as we watch behavior “straight from the literature on authoritarianism.”

“The Republican Party is betraying democracy, and these are historical times. Someone has got to push back”…. Stanley said there should have been mass protests in the streets after the vote against witnesses, warning that the absence of significant public outcry served as “a further sign to the party in power that they can go ahead and do what they want.”

So that boat has sailed.

With Trump’s trial behind us (the first one, at least—see Assange), progressive hopes are now pinned on the election, and rightly so. It would have been far better if we were going into that effort having publicly registered our collective unhappiness over the miscarriage of justice that was his acquittal, but here we are. So with that in mind, let’s try to look ahead and not make another big mistake. To wit:

We have to get out of the pre-2016 mindset and recognize what the GOP has been brazenly broadcasting for the past three years, and never louder than with Senate Republicans’ shameful excusal of Trump’s attempts to fix the election:

They do not intend to hold a fair vote.

The sooner we acknowledge that and find a way to fight back, instead of arguing amongst ourselves over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, the better off we will be. It’s the only way.

But how? That is the $64,000 question, of course. (Dating myself.) I don’t pretend to have the answer. But step one is for us to recognize that Trump and his GOP enablers have blatantly announced that they are going to cheat, and therefore we ought to stop deluding ourselves that this is a routine election like those of the past. If a Democratic candidate would bluntly point that out on national television, it would immediately change the conversation. (Of course, they would immediately be accused of pre-emptively undermining the legitimacy of the election….which Trump himself did in 2016, and the GOP cheered.)

But watching the fractiousness of the Democratic presidential field, I am worried. Charlie Sykes described last night’s debate as “a murder-suicide worthy of an Agatha Christie novel. The one where everyone ends up dead.” Listening to the candidates rip into each other, I could see the Trump campaign ads practically writing themselves. Sykes:

Consider that Trump’s impeachment trial was just last month; that he has launched a revenge tour that includes daily attacks on the rule of law; is in open conflict with his attorney general; and that he had just handed out pardons to a bunch of sleazy cronies… and no one even mentioned it. None of seemed to register, or even seemed relevant. It was as if the Democratic debate took place in an alternative non-Trump universe.

We already squandered a crucial opportunity with our tepid reaction to Trump’s escape from impeachment. If we fail to come together now, to recognize that the perfect is the enemy of the good candidate-wise, and to set aside ultimately minor intramural differences in interest of our common goal of putting out the greasefire raging at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we’ll deserve what we get.

Even if we unite behind a strong candidate instead of self-harming like a pre-teen with body issues we still face an uphill battle, and right now we show no signs of getting to that stage of unity.

As Professor Stanley says, “The deeply worrying moment is when you start to become a one-party state,” a perilous point at which we are now perched, because “the Republican Party has shown that it has no interest in multi-party democracy.”

In an Atlantic piece bluntly titled “Trump Is Going to Cheat,” former Obama speechwriter Sarada Peri detailed the GOP’s plan terrifyingly well. Let me quote her at length:

How can Democrats run against a candidate who will simply deny his unpopular positions and make up nonexistent accomplishments? No amount of fact-checking can counter his constant stream of mendacity, which has become white noise in our political culture.

Lying, of course, is only one challenge. The Democratic nominee will also have to contend with cheating….(Trump) and the whole Republican Party seem intent on using the power of government to assist in the president’s reelection. Republican senators have already announced that they plan to look into the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, despite absolutely no evidence that Hunter Biden committed a crime or that the former vice president did anything but carry out U.S. foreign policy. Anyone who thinks these investigations are sincere should note that there is no comparable probe planned into the blatant corruption of sitting president Trump and his children.

Trump and members of the White House staff, meanwhile, are violating with impunity the Hatch Act, which prohibits executive-branch employees from using their position to influence an election. The president uses his personal Twitter account both for official business and as an arm of his political campaign; nobody bats an eye….

Trump’s reelection campaign, abetted by right-wing media and companies like Facebook that have absolved themselves of any democratic responsibility, is waging a disinformation war modeled on the efforts of dictators and unprecedented in its scale. As reported by this magazine, the campaign is prepared to spend $1 billion to harness digital media to the president’s advantage, including bot attacks, viral conspiracy theories, doctored videos, and microtargeted ads that distort reality.  

The Trump campaign’s efforts are also bolstered by foreign actors…..They could be as subtle as social-media accounts that stoke partisan differences or as blunt as software attacks on voter databases….

At the same time, his campaign is fomenting distrust in the very system he is undermining. Using guerrilla tactics, his supporters jammed up the Iowa Democratic Party hotline on caucus night to sow chaos. Then, when the results indeed yielded chaos, Republican trolls, including Don Jr., tweeted out conspiracy theories about a rigged election. Worst of all, congressional Republicans are shamelessly blocking election-security bills, including two that would specifically fight foreign interference in American elections.   

Should the lying and cheating fail—should the Democrat manage to win the 2020 election—Trump will have one more trick up his sleeve. Before the 2016 election, he suggested that he might not accept a defeat. So who’s to say that he will accept one in 2020? You don’t have to squint hard to see the clues: He retweeted Jerry Falwell Jr.’s suggestion that he ought to have two years added to his term and “joked” about staying in office longer than eight years. If he loses in November, the litigious showman might claim that the election was rigged against him and theatrically contest the results in court.

Goddam!

This electoral treachery by the right wing did not begin with Trump. Just as Donald did not turn the GOP into a party of racist authoritarian plutocrats but is merely its logical next step, neither did Republican ratfucking begin with Russiagate and Ukraine (though Trump has boosted it to new levels of audacity and shamelessness). Voter suppression and disenfranchisement, the lie of “voter fraud,” uber-gerrymandering, Putinist disinformation, racebaiting, xenophobic fearmongering, etc etc are all part and parcel of a longstanding effort to hang on to power by a party that knows it is in a demographic death spiral. But the rise of MAGA Nation and the Jonestown-like cult of personality that surrounds Trump and that forgives (indeed, applauds) everything he does, no matter how illegal or despicable, has given the GOP a once-in-a-generation chance to carry out this highway robbery.

So let there be no mistake. As I have written time and time again, the Republican Party has no intention of giving up power, and therefore no intention of participating in a fair election and risking that outcome. They have shamelessly announced their intention to cheat. If we let them do so, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame.

It’s easy to see in retrospect where we made critical errors that changed the game. (The most gutting recent example: letting McConnell’s indefensible blockage of Merrick Garland slide because we thought Hillary was a lock to win.) This moment is another one….except that there is still time to play it smarter. Let us go into the election fighting tooth and nail to win, yes, but also raising the alarm that the other side is not even pretending to obey the law.

I don’t mean to de defeatist—on the contrary. Now is the call to arms. (NB: metaphor.) Unlike the impeachment, where we were at mercy of 52 careerist cowards—a pass to Mitt Romney—in the election the power to defeat this cretin is in our hands, even with the reality of Republican cheating, but only if we are smart and tough and bold, and above all, don’t sabotage ourselves.

Let’s end with Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare, writing in The Atlantic:

The country has a long slog ahead of it; how long, nobody knows. It is easy to be cynical. But surviving the slog, without stepping away from it and bowing to the idea that nothing matters, is the only way to live through the short term. The frustrations resulting from failed or incomplete efforts to prevent wrongdoing are also part of that task. This doesn’t mean they’re necessary hurdles to be surmounted on the way to an inevitable victory; there’s no such thing. It’s just that this labor is, as Weber put it, what it means to have “measured up to the world.”

 

 

Remember when we used to ponder if and when a constitutional crisis might arrive?

Good times.

“Trump acquitted” read the matching headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post on Wednesday, and for once I agree with the cry of “fake news!” regarding our two leading newspapers. As Nancy Pelosi said even before the fait accompli of the sham verdict was announced, “There can be no acquittal without a trial, and there is no trial without witnesses, documents and evidence.”

I reported that quote last week but it bears repeating as we review the Bert Lahr-like behavior of Trump’s GOP allies in delivering unto us that travesty of justice.

It was stomach-churning to watch Senate Republicans cravenly abdicating their constitutional duty—their patriotic duty—in ignoring an avalanche of evidence and objective reality itself for the sake of partisan power and their own sorry asses. But as the comedian Michael Che said on “SNL”’s Weekend Update, “What better way to start Black History Month than by being failed by the justice system?”

It was a mockery of jurisprudence and the rule of law, of course, but worse, it promises to have terrible repercussions for presidential abuse of power and the further debasement of our represented democracy, opening the door to full-blown autocracy at a level never before see in the United States.

And so the first line of 52 obituaries got written this week, all of which will make a bunch of as-yet-unborn great-grandchildren go red-faced with shame someday. The sins of Nixon’s dead-enders look trifling by comparison.

Meanwhile, the implications of the catastrophe these bastards have wrought are just beginning to unfold.

“THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?”

Among the most howlingly ludicrous rationalizations for excusing Trump’s actions was Susan Collins’ assertion that she believed he had learned his lesson. (In that regard she was echoing Lamar Alexander, who had said a similarly idiotic thing.) That was either world-beating naiveté or contemptible dishonesty; in either case, there is not an iota of evidence from Trump’s 73 years on this Earth to support that hypothesis. True to form, Donald wasted no time in making a fool of Susie by announcing that he had learned no such thing. And STILL, even after the humiliation of his response, she voted for acquittal.

Since then, Collins has had the gall to go on Fox News (natch) and smile, saying, “Well, I may not be correct on that. It’s more aspirational on my part.”

Aspirational. Wow. You know, I have some aspirations too, and they are encapsulated by UCLA Law School professor Jonathan Zasloff, who wrote: “Pine Tree Staters: either your senior Senator is a blithering idiot, or she thinks you are. Either one is a reason to throw her out of office this November.”

Word, as the kids say.

Parroting Collins and Alexander’s nonsensical position, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) defended her acquittal vote with an extra dollop of AYFKM by decrying “rank partisanship,” which was, to say the least, rich. (Bye Felicia.) A number of other weasely Republicans followed Lamar, Susie, and Lisa’s lead down the “wrong but not impeachable” road (like Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse, the GOP’s very own Eddie Haskell), even as Trump rejected that approach, instead demanding unqualified affirmation of his papal-ike infallibility. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia called their bluff with his motion for censure, which would have at least acknowledged Trump’s wrongdoing. Needless to say, that proposal died on the vine, with the GOP caucus shunning it like vampires faced with a crucifix, holy water, and an order of garlic knots from Olive Garden.

Of course, the whole notion that it isn’t a serious offense to pressure a foreign power to interfere in our elections is risible.

Then there was the utterly despicable and deceitful Rand Paul, who had a doozy of a followup to last week’s stunt of trying to get John Roberts to name the whistleblower (and then doing so himself at a press conference). This week Paul went a step further and named the man right on Senate floor. As Axios reports:

Paul defended his decision to CNN’s Manu Raju, arguing that he did not single out the alleged whistleblower with his floor speech: “I would say the chief justice did that. By not allowing the question, he’s sort of confirming to the public who it is. I have no idea who it is.”

Did I call Rand utterly despicable and deceitful already? (Just double checking.) I hope his neighbor comes over the beats the snot out of him again.

And that’s just a brief survey of the profiles in cowardice that define the modern GOP at its highest levels.

Writing in the Atlantic, Lawfare editors Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic laid out a blistering 23 point rebuttal to all those who think Trump did nothing wrong, or if he did, it was no big deal. Among their points:

It is not an impeachable offense for the president of the United States to condition aid to a foreign government on the delivery of personal favors to himself……(nor) to demand that a foreign head of state dish dirt on the president’s political opponents—or demand that he make dirt up if none is available to dish…..(nor) to push a foreign law-enforcement agency to investigate a US citizen for conduct no US law-enforcement agency has found to warrant an investigation. 

Abuse of power is not an impeachable offense. The oath he swears to “faithfully execute” his duties and “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” notwithstanding, the president is generally free to use his powers under Article II of the Constitution to benefit himself and harm those he disfavors.

None of this moved the Senate GOP caucus an whit, of course. Here’s Paul Krugman, in a piece called “How Zombies Are the GOP’s Soul,” on what he aptly calls the Walking Dead:

(E)veryone in Washington understands perfectly well that Donald Trump abused the powers of his office in an attempt to rig this year’s presidential election. But Senate Republicans are nonetheless about to acquit him without even pretending to look at the evidence, thereby encouraging further abuses of power…..

I guess you might have hoped that there would be some limits to what these apparatchiks would accept, that even they would draw the line at gross abuses of power and collusion with foreign autocrats. What we’ve learned, however—and perhaps more important, what Trump has learned—is that there is no line. If Trump wants to dismantle democracy and rule of law (which he does), his party will stand with him all the way.

Seconding that thought, Krugman’s Times colleague David Leonhardt wrote of the simple reason Trump does what he does: “Because he can.”

(T)he current Republican Party cares more about holding on to power than anything else. In service of this goal, the party has even fought democracy, be it preventing American citizens from voting, changing the rules for Supreme Court nominations, stripping authority from incoming governors or running an impeachment trial unconcerned with facts…..

The country is left with a president who has spent decades doing whatever he thinks is in his self-interest—and a political party willing to protect that president. Staying in power trumps all. That, of course, is the ideology of autocracy.

In his eloquent closing statement, lead House manager Adam Schiff plaintively asked of these zombie Republicans: “Every single vote, even a single vote by a single member, can change the course of history…..It is said that a single man or woman of courage makes a majority. Is there one among you, who will say, Enough?’”

There was one, and only one.

“BELIEVE IN AMERICA”

Here is Mitt Romney his speech on the Senate floor, explaining his courageous decision to buck Donald Trump, Moscow Mitch, and the entire flaming cesspool that is MAGA Nation in order to do the right goddam thing (sorry—Lord’s name in vain):

The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Yes, he did.

The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.

The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.

The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.

The President’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect”—No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.

Impressive. I have long disagreed with many of Romney’s ideological positions, but his courage and integrity here are beyond a doubt, particularly given the vitriol that was immediately unleashed on him from his right flank.

Reportedly Mitt’s act of courage caught Trump off guard—as he’s unfamiliar with the concept—causing the White House to cancel a scheduled Rose Garden appearance with Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido. (Or maybe Juan just refused to go to a mike and announce an investigation into the Bidens.) Mitt also robbed Trump of his expected chance to crow about absolute party solidarity, just as the steadfastness of red state Democratic Senators Jones and Manchin robbed Trump of the chance to claim “bipartisan exoneration.”

That Mitt stands alone as a hero for recognizing that’s wrong to try to steal an election shows just how far and how low the GOP has fallen.

That is not to minimize his bravery. Romney is already paying the price in the vicious, vituperative verbal attacks from Trump himself, his spokespeople, children, other Republicans, as well as the larger corpus of mouthbreathing troglodytes who drink deep from the Kool Aid trough. Physical threats are sure to follow, if they have not already. Just yesterday that great Republican stalwart Donald Trump Jr. called from Mitt’s expulsion from the party, which is like Carrot Top calling for Richard Pryor’s expulsion from the Comedy Hall of Fame. Junior also re-posted a meme calling Romney a “pussy” (raising the question: did his dad try to grab him?), reflecting the sub-juvenile level of political discourse from the kakistocrats who are our ruling family.

(Can I get some props for being, I am quite sure, the first person ever to compare Mitt Romney to Richard Pryor?)

So everything you need to know about the descent of the Republican Party into the sewer is there in Mitt Romney’s fall from GOP standard bearer and presidential candidate in 2008 to pariah in 2020. Romney represents a kind of respectable, reasonable Republicanism that is pretty much dead, its other prominent practitioners (Kristol, Jolly, Boot, Rubin, Wilson, Steele, among others) having already fled the party. As one social media post succinctly put it, “I didn’t vote for him in 2012, but I didn’t fear a President Romney.”

This week he earned his proud place in history just as surely as every last one of his 52 colleagues earned theirs in infamy.

WELCOME TO THE AUTOCRACY

Back in the jaundiced land of yellow-bellied bootlickers, the folly of Collins’ absurd faith in Donald Trump’s inherent goodness was exposed immediately, not only with Trump’s sneering rebuke of her, but with statements that starting coming out of the White House and from senior GOP officials as soon as the “no witnesses” vote passed last Friday. Trump’s (non)acquittal hadn’t even happened yet when his allies began weaponizing the power of the federal government to persecute his political opponents—just like they do in an authoritarian regime like the ones Trump so openly admires. Which we now arguably are.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News that there should be retribution for Democrats and others who pursued impeachment (e.g., Schiff, Nadler, Romney, Pelosi, Bolton, et al,) and that in his upcoming speech to the nation Trump would speak about “how horribly he was treated, and maybe people should pay for that.” Chuck Grassley announced a Senate investigation into Hunter Biden. The loathsome Lindsey Graham announced that the Senate would investigate the whistleblower. (Ah, their obsession.) There were reports that Trump wants John Bolton criminally prosecuted for mishandling classified material—one of the greatest hits from Trump’s 2016 bag of tricks, even as it’s the height of irony.

Today the White House fired Gordon Sondland as US Ambassador to the EU and made a show of pushing out LTC Alexander Vindman, who was due for normal reassignment, but whose transfer is being showcased as part of Trump’s purge. Both Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny, also an Army lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council staff, were escorted out of the White House by security officers—a spectacle as chilling and ironic as it was petty. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) proposed changing the Constitution to make impeachment harder by requiring require a three-fifth vote of the House rather than a simple majority. (Uh, didn’t we just learn how fucking hard it already is? Scott Matthews suggested the addendum that Democrats only count as three-fifths of a person.) That would track with newly converted presidential power fan Ken Starr’s pearl-clutching fear that impeachment is becoming a partisan tool. Perish the thought!

Of course, if anyone knows about being a partisan tool, it’s Ken Starr.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is precisely the kind of vindictive persecution of his enemies, unshackled from any worry of Congressional or judicial oversight, that critics feared and predicted would ensue were the Senate to excuse Trump’s behavior in Ukrainegate. Was there ever any doubt that it would happen? Or did Trump’s gentle, forgiving, Christ-like personality and lifelong devotion to humility and common decency make you think otherwise?

Remember, Trump made the infamous July 25, 2019 Zelenskyy call THE VERY NEXT DAY AFTER the special counsel probe was laid to rest with Mueller’s anti-climactic House testimony. Now, emboldened even further after skating away from this second existential threat, he and his surrogates have brazenly announced that he is out for revenge for those who challenged him, and will use the full power of the presidency—indeed the unfettered power of a despot—to obtain it. He has also made it clear that he will continue doing the exact thing that got him impeached.

Because the GOP just told him that he can.

And it’s only just beginning. This slippery slope to autocracy is likely the most alarming part of the whole Senate charade.

The editorial board of the New York Times:

Even before the acquittal, the State of the Union address made clear that Mr. Trump—enabled, as in his business life, by his exceptional shamelessness—intends to deploy every power available to a president in pursuit of his re-election. If there remained any doubts on that score, they were dispelled when Melania Trump hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Rush Limbaugh’s neck…..

He can do whatever it takes to win re-election, and the Republican Party will have his back.

I would add that “whatever it takes to win re-election” is not an anodyne sports cliché in this case, and certainly not confined to only what is legal. The shameful GOP ranks-closing in acquitting Trump of his illegal attempts to cheat in the 2020 election—atop its years of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and spreading of disinformation about voter fraud—is a blaring claxon announcing that the Republican Party actively intends to steal the election by any means necessary.

Don’t say we weren’t warned.

CALIGULA WITH THE BOMB

Republicans obviously don’t give a damn about the damage to the rule of law, to our system of government, or to anything else. As Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, that may come back to bite them in the ass, if the republic survives at all and they are ever evicted from power. Then again, democracy may have died in darkness long before that can come to pass, as they clearly have no intention of surrendering power.

Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt offered the grim observation that Donald Trump is now more powerful than any US president in history, including Washington, Lincoln, and FDR……and he ain’t exactly shy and retiring about using it. If he can order an investigation of the last Vice President (shades of Edge of Democracy, and Brazil’s Lula/Dilma/Bolsonaro nightmare), he can order it of any American, using the DOJ, FBI, IRS, CBP, and the rest of the federal alphabet soup.

Schmidt was referring to political power, given that Trump has a compliant Republican Party and GOP-controlled Senate behind him that will submissively bow to his every whim, no matter how illegal or simply batshit, as well as an increasingly right wing federal judiciary, including a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court (featuring two justices who owe him their seats). If he wins a second term he is likely to have a 7-2 right wing SCOTUS majority, four of whom he put there.

At the federal level, only the House is a brake on him, and as we saw this week, not a very powerful one. (And only as long as the Democrats can hold it.)

But Trump is also insanely—and I do mean insanely—powerful in sheer physical terms. Thanks to his control of the nuclear arsenal—which he can launch without any consultation with the other branches of government or the US military—he literally has more power than any human being who has ever lived, including all the Caesars, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, and Hitler. (Quibble: it’s a dead heat with his man-crush Vlad Putin, whose nuclear arsenal is smaller, but whose ironclad one-man rule is undeniably even more ironclady.)

That sounds right, doesn’t it? The most unqualified, proudly ignorant, morally bankrupt, dumbass lucky and undeserving motherfucker ever to sit behind the Resolute Desk is of course the one who has grabbed the most power. And now, at last, he has the go-ahead to use it with impunity.

To that end, Susan Glasser writing in the New Yorker is a helluva lot smarter than Susan Collins sitting in the US Senate.

From here on, there can be no more illusions.

Until the voters render their verdict in November, Trump will be the President he has always wanted to be: inescapable, all-powerful, and completely unaccountable.

LET US PREY

I just heard that Trump is going to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Ivanka.

Not true, but for a moment you thought it might be, didn’t you? Because none of us would be shocked if it happened.

It was fitting that on the eve of his escape from justice, Trump staged the State of the Union address as gauche reality TV spectacle. As a Twitter user called A. Sharon wrote, “It just perfectly encapsulates the Trump administration’s massive and absolute incompetence when Rush Limbaugh and a 100-year-old Tuskegee Airman are in the same room and Rush Limbaugh is the one going home with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

That’s like giving Jeffrey Epstein an award for mentoring young girls.

The medal for Limbaugh is an obscenity all by itself, but consider this: This past fall Trump gave a lesser award to Rick Rescorla, whom I was privileged to know, a Vietnam War hero who saved the lives of 6000 Morgan Stanley Dean Witter employees on 9/11, before perishing himself when he went back into the towers to search for stragglers.

Res ipsa loquitur.

At the end of the SOTU Nancy Pelosi calmly tore her copy of Trump‘s speech in half after, causing Don Jr—again—to sink to the occasion and suggest she should be jailed. (Boys, these guys sure have a fetish for locking up powerful women, don’t they?) He’s half right: someone definitely belongs in jail, but it damn sure ain’t her. Meanwhile Matt Gaetz—of course!—acted on the boy prince’s suggestion, filing an ethics complaint against the Speaker. I say again, an ethics complaint. From Matt Gaetz. On behalf of Donald Trump. And with No Discernible Irony.

Even so, many, even on the left, fell back on their fainting couches and scolded the Speaker for sinking to Senior’s level. (Many of them the same pundits who lament that the Democrats have not successfully figured out how to fight on the new political battlefield that Trump created.) But without the speech-tearing-up, the story the next morning would have been all about how he “owned” her with that handshake snub. Instead she deftly flipped the script when she ripped the script. (YSWIDT?)

But as we know, when a Republican (especially a man) does something aggressive he’s praised as an alpha. When a Democrat (especially a woman) does it, even just in self-defense, she’s attacked for being rude, if not worse. Much worse.

But as usual, Nancy cannily eviscerated the fake outrage over her gesture:

“I don’t need any lessons from anybody, especially the president of the United States, about dignity. It’s appalling the things that he says. And then you say to me: ‘Tearing up his falsehoods, isn’t that the wrong message?’ No, it isn’t,” she said, adding: “I feel very liberated. I feel that I’ve extended every possible courtesy. I’ve shown every level of respect.”

The next day came Don’s appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast, where the existence of God was disproven when he didn’t burst into flame the moment he walked into the room. Trump’s speech there was a masterpiece of projection and dishonesty for the ages, worthy of the worst fascist despot you care to name. (The Onion headline read, “ Trump Spends National Prayer Breakfast Attacking God for Allowing Impeachment to Even Happen.” Distance between satire and reality: about one millimeter.)

But everything Trump does beggars the most outrageous satire. The prayer breakfast atrocity was just the logical extension of a vicious Republican perversion of truth that goes back at least to McCarthy. A prominent signpost: the Swift Boating of war hero John Kerry by draft dodger George W. Bush. Up is down, night is day, war is peace, freedom is slavery.

What’s really fascinating is that Trump’s speeches of the last few days, like his pronouncements after dodging the Russiagate scandal, are less triumphant than they are merely livid.

Before his (non)acquittal, I read the word “gloat” a lot in reference to how he was expected to act once McConnell gave him his get-out-of-jail-free card. He hasn’t disappointed. But truly, what does he have to gloat about? Not that he was cleared in a fair trial—only that he exerts such Simon Legree-like command of his servile minions that he demanded this unquestioning obedience and they meekly complied.

Trump himself seems to recognize this, if only subconsciously. Following the prayer breakfast, he gave a speech from the East Room of the White House that Charlie Sykes, writing in the Bulwark, called a “Festival of Grievances.” Here again he less crowed over his triumph than fulminated that he had to go through this ordeal at all. (Poor baby. A word of advice, in order to avoid this in the future: maybe don’t commit so many crimes.)

Sykes:

Trump described his enemies as evil, corrupt, leakers, liars, lowlifes, sleazebags, and dirty cops. “Adam Schiff is a vicious, horrible person,” Trump told his eager minions. “Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person.” It was a pure Trumpian stream of consciousness: self pity, bitterness, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, sniffs, anger, mockery, self pity, James Comey, sniffs, the dossier, Hillary, Obama, conspiracy theories, Russia, self pity, Mitt Romney, payback, Hunter Biden, sniffs, insults, Robert Mueller, the FBI, bullshit, self pity… 

Through it all ran the theme of Trump as Victim. No one had ever been treated as badly as he had been. He didn’t know “if other presidents would have been able to take it.”

But by all means, let’s excoriate Nancy Pelosi for tearing up a piece of paper.

What America saw….was Trump in full. There was no expression of regret, no grace notes, no appeals to the better angels of our nature. Instead we got a raw, bitter, unhinged rant of crazy. Two of them, in fact. And it was all perfectly on brand.

Trump is a man unconstrained by the demands of decency or conscience, logic or consistency, and he clearly revels in the license these freedoms afford him. However feckless some of his former aides may have been, it is clear that Trump now occupies a world in which no one tells him no, or cautions him against improprieties, or urges graciousness, or pleads with him to be presidential, or responsible, or even coherent.

As these eyepopping performances demonstrated, Donald Trump is not a happy boy. For a man who has enjoyed seven and a half decades of outrageous and undeserved good luck and privilege, who has been coddled and protected and shielded from consequence even as he engaged in the most despicable behavior his whole life long, who improbably rose to the highest office in the land without a shred of the necessary qualifications, he is nonetheless a roiling ball of rage and resentment 24/7. (Look at his signature, graphologists.) As I noted a week or so ago, that is one of the few things about his reign that gives me any solace. But of course it is really a tragedy for him and for us both.

We long ago learned that this infantile behavior, which would have sunk any previous American politician, let alone a presidential candidate, is exactly what his slavish disciples relish about him. They don’t love him in spite of it—they love him because of it. Sykes again:

Trump’s casual cruelty and off-the-cuff vindictiveness is no longer a bug; it is the product differentiator, the special sauce, the killer app of Trumpism. It is precisely what his admirers cling to most fervently. Many of them no longer even try to pretend that they are loyal to his policies, rather than his person.

Many a graduate dissertation will surely be written about how millions of Americans came to a point of nihilism that obsidian. But in the mean time, they are damn hard to reason with.

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE DEMOCRACY DOWN

So was the impeachment worth it? I have long argued that it would be regardless of the result, and I stand by that.

Yeah, I know Trump’s approval went up a little, due largely to increased fervor of his rabid base. But you don’t beat a bully by being too timid to fight back and too afraid of making him or his followers angry. Going into November Trump was gonna gyrate them into a mouth-foaming fury with one thing or another……if not with this, then with something else.

The Democratic Party stood up for the rule of law, laid down a marker for behavior that America (at least some of it) will not tolerate, and did it all knowing that they would not win in the Senate. Schiff’s aforementioned closing statement, which is already being called the “Midnight in Washington” speech, was profound and epic. For generations to come, when the name “Donald Trump” is nothing more than an obscenity whose origins are lost in time, schoolchildren will still be reading it. (Hopefully not in a textbook called “The Collapse of American Democracy.”) A close second to Schiff’s eloquence was Hakeem Jefferies’ “America is in the wilderness…..and the eyes of history are watching.”

In a New York Times op-ed, Neal Katyal and Joshua Geltzer write:

The Democrats were told constantly that impeachment would hurt them in November. Mr. Trump himself has boasted that it will, and what’s more he has relished the chance to claim exoneration and to take a victory lap at the same time as Democratic hopefuls began duking it out in earnest in the primaries. The Democrats knew all this, and what’s more, they knew they faced an uphill battle: That’s what the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds Senate majority to convict imposes from the beginning.

But they still did the right thing. They called out impropriety so glaring that it could not be suffered in silence. And they reminded all of us that a political party can pursue what’s right over what’s expedient.

Looping back to Michael Che’s joke, Trump’s (non)acquittal was very reminiscent of OJ’s, an analogy I made before when Bob Mueller declined to make a determination about Donny’s conduct in Russiagate. Truly, these two rich and privileged men—friends, I hasten to note—are the two least deserving beneficiaries of a broken justice system one can imagine. They even had the same disreputable lawyer.

But now that it’s over, where do we go from here?

We are constantly being told—especially by Republicans—that the election is the best remedy for addressing Trump’s unfitness, should one hold that view of him. But by excusing his actions—which concerned rigging an election—the GOP is bluntly announcing that it does not intend to hold a fair election at all.

As the author Michael Gruber argues, it is clear that the Republican Party not only condones foreign interference in US elections (on its behalf only), but actively desires it, as that is one of the few ways that the GOP can continue to win elections in this country with demographics that are increasingly trending against them, clinging to an ever-diminishing base of aging white people, Christian evangelicals, gun nuts, racists, and other John Birch-y fellow travelers.

And now they have codified that plan, and given it the stamp of Congressional approval.

If I were Bernie, I’d immediately call on Russia, China, Israel & Saudi Arabia to release any info they have about Donald Trump’s finances & to open investigations into Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka & Tiffany. After all, the Senate just affirmed that it’s totally OK to do that. Right?

We’re heading into some pitch black darkness, my friends, and I am not confident in the ability of the American people or our institutions to come out in any recognizable form on the other side. We best gird ourselves for a fight, on multiple fronts, and not underestimate the fervor, venality, or underhandedness of our foe.

Let’s give Mitt Romney the final word. He deserves it:

I acknowledge that my verdict will not remove the President from office. The results of this Senate Court will in fact be appealed to a higher court: the judgment of the American people. Voters will make the final decision, just as the President’s lawyers have implored. My vote will likely be in the minority in the Senate. But irrespective of these things, with my vote, I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me. I will only be one name among many, no more or less, to future generations of Americans who look at the record of this trial. They will note merely that I was among the senators who determined that what the President did was wrong, grievously wrong.

We’re all footnotes at best in the annals of history. But in the most powerful nation on earth, the nation conceived in liberty and justice, that is distinction enough for any citizen.

**********

Hat tip to Guy Maddin.

Painting, Jacques-Louis David, 1808: “Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, December 2, 1804.” Oil on canvas, the Louvre.

 

 

Why are we not out in the streets?

We really are a nation of sheep. I don’t wanna sound like a xenophile, but I can hardly think of another Western country where the people would take an outrage like this lying down.

Our ruling political party just shamelessly whitewashed the most egregious imaginable corruption by its leader, demonstrating a contempt for the rule of law that is truly gobsmacking. In fact, they went even further than that: on the way, they argued for near-absolute, unfettered power for that leader. And as the kicker, all of it involves their attempts to undermine the fundamental fairness of the one mechanism they claim is our recourse, which is free elections, that they would turn into a sham.

And here among the engaged segment of citizenry there is moaning and lamentations and wringing of hands as we ponder what we ought to do. But what we won’t do—not yet anyway—is let our wrath be felt by putting these gargoyles on notice, by harnessing the power of public dissent and making it known that that we will not stand for this bullshit.

But by all means enjoy the Super Bowl…..

ACQUITTAL WITHOUT EXONERATION, OR EVEN ACQUITTAL

As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote, “The Senate can stop pretending now.”

Over the first ten days of Donald Trump’s trial, and particularly in the three consecutive days that the House managers had to make their case uninterrupted, the Democrats mounted a professional, proficient, methodical argument for his removal from power. The fact the craven Republican Party refused to acknowledge the evidence and even objective reality is an act that will stain its members forever.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois noted that this White House could not find even one witness who would stand up under oath and defend what Trump did. But there were loads of them—Trump’s own staffers and appointees—lined up to testify under oath about his misdeeds. Which is why the White House was so desperate to block that.

In a scathing editorial, the New York Times wrote:

(Senate Republicans) didn’t refuse to hold a fair trial so much as they refused to hold any trial at all. Of course, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader for whom bipartisanship is a dirty word, had promised no less. He announced in December that he planned to work in complete coordination with the White House in protecting the president from any accountability, and that he had no intention of honoring the oath he would take to be an impartial juror.

The irony is stifling. For months, Mr. McConnell and other Republicans complained that the impeachment process was being rushed, that the president was being denied basic procedural protections, and that there was no testimony from those with the most direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions and motivations. Then they refused to hear from a single witness and refused to demand a single document from the White House…..

I’m beginning to think the Republican Party might be slightly hypocritical.

The vote…..brings the nation face to face with the reality that the Senate has become nothing more than an arena for the most base and brutal—and stupid—power politics. Faced with credible evidence that a president was abusing his powers, it would not muster the institutional self-respect to even investigate….

Chuck Schumer referred to the “permanent asterisk” that would be by Trump’s name in the history books. With characteristic élan, Nancy Pelosi went further, saying Trump won’t be acquitted at all. “You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial,” she said. “And you don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation.”

I am going to adopt Nancy’s attitude, and I encourage you all to do the same. Previously my position was that we were going to have “acquittal without exoneration.” But truly, this is not even acquittal by any reasonable definition of the word.

HEADY LAMAR

The man who delivered the coup de grace, longtime Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), took the absurd position that the House managers had more than proved their case; he just didn’t think it was a big deal. (On the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress, Alexander was even more appallingly dismissive.) But as I noted last week, this is not a position the White House defense team argued, opting instead for their boss’s preferred argument, “I am a king.”

In explaining his decision, Alexander argued that Trump’s removal ought to be settled in the next election. But the WaPo’s Greg Sargent blisteringly dismantled that irrational position, which he describes as “self-refuting”:

What Alexander fails to acknowledge is that Trump’s own conduct was both an effort to solicit foreign help in rigging that very election and a clear sign Trump believes it’s absolutely within his authority to continue using his official powers to do just that…..

Alexander’s position—that Trump did solicit foreign help in the election, but it’s up to voters to impose accountability for it—refutes itself. While acknowledging the corruption Trump is capable of, it clearly tells Trump he can continue corrupting that very mechanism of accountability with impunity….

A vote against witnesses—especially when paired with an acknowledgment of Trump’s corruption—can only be a vote to carry through Trump’s own coverup to completion, leaving the country exposed, adrift and in the dark, unable to know precisely what Trump is prepared to inflict on us.

The last point is especially true given that it was clear that there was a mountain of relevant evidence that the ostrich-like Senate refused to examine, let alone reveal to the public. As Garry Kasparov puts it:

Trump’s actions were not an attack on Ukraine or on Biden, but on the integrity of the presidency, US elections and American democracy. And it was surely just the tip of the iceberg. Alexander admitting that and not caring is doubly cowardly.

Alexander, of course, is retiring and has nothing to lose by standing up to Trump, making it all the more disheartening that he chose not to do so. If any Republican in the Senate could take a stand on “principle,” it’s him. So watching him cast the deciding vote that not only sealed Trump’s (fake) acquittal, but protected him from further public exposure of his crimes, ought to disabuse us all of the notion that Republicans are somehow holding their noses when they support and abet this bastard. They have no principles to compromise, apart from maintaining their own power, lining their pockets, and serving the venal interests of their own kind. They are active, enthusiastic accomplices to Trump’s ongoing corruption.

So is Trump using the GOP or is the GOP using Trump, or is it both? And which is worse?

GRAND OLD PARTY

And so, with the announcement of his vote, Alexander put an end to this kabuki.

But what of the other Republicans?

Walter Sujansky writes that many of them “were contorting into pretzels to explain their votes, but Marco Rubio took the prize with the most mealy-mouthed and self-contradictory rationalization”:

(Rubio said), “Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a President from office.” That’s like a juror saying “the evidence convinced me that he committed a serious crime, but I think we should let him go free because he’s my boss and I might lose my job if he’s not around to run the business.”

And watch: that will not be good enough for Trump, who demands not just a defense of “wrong but not impeachable” (per Alexander), or “impeachable but never mind” (Rubio), but affirmation of no wrongdoing at all—a Dershowitzean decree of l’etat c’est him. Look for Little Marco to get bitch-slapped by the White House and quiveringly backpedal on even this initial statement, embracing instead the “perfect call” stance. Somebody get him a glass of water.

In fact, as I also wrote last week, Trump’s legal team—especially the vile Mr. Dershowitz— went much further even than that, offering what Amy Davidson Sorkin of the New Yorker called “a pseudo-intellectual scaffold for Trump’s self-delusion.”

Dershowitz was arguing that, as Schiff said on Thursday, if the President believes that a deal is in his political interest, “then it doesn’t matter how corrupt that quid pro quo is.” Schiff was not exaggerating when he called this argument “a descent into constitutional madness”……

(B)y Dershowitz’s logic, a President could not only seek foreign assistance in a campaign; he could unleash any number of investigations into his political opponents, declare spurious emergencies to prevent their parties’ political gatherings, engage in surveillance, or take measures to limit access to polling stations—suppressing, rather than amplifying, voters’ voices.

As Jamil Smith wrote in Rolling Stone, leave it to Trump to use even impeachment to grab even MORE power.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul disgraced himself by trying to get Chief Justice Roberts to name the original Ukrainegate whistleblower…..and when Roberts refused, did it himself at a press conference.

Kentucky might have the worst two senators in the country which is saying something.

Speaking of which, once he knew he had the votes to block witnesses, the senior Senator from the Bluegrass State, Mr. McConnell, gave Susan Collins a “hall pass” (in the worlds of Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes) so she could vote “yes” for witnesses, purely to help her on Election Day in purplish Maine, where she rightly faces an electorate furious at her cowardice on Kavanaugh and throughout this administration in general. (No US Senator is less popular in their home state.)

Yes vote last week or no, she still richly deserves to be chucked out of office, and rob Moscow Mitch of one more seat in his caucus.

And lastly there is Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Susan’s pal, once thought to be a likely “yes” vote on witnesses, whom the New York Times described as engaging in “a suffocating tautology” when she announced she was voting no:

Ms. Murkowski was saying that because the trial would be unfair, she would vote to prevent witnesses, ensuring that the trial would be unfair. On the other hand, her statement was such a searing indictment of the institution’s capacity to perform a critical constitutional function that one wonders how she can bear to work there.

FEBRUARY SPAWNED A MONSTER

We all knew this was coming of course, but to be on the verge of actually watching it happen is still grim and depressing. Is it any comfort to know that we are on the side of the angels and that history will remember these Republican men and women as the cowards, quislings, co-conspirators, accomplices, and in some cases outright traitors that they are? I don’t know, but it’s all we got.

It’s strange how we talk of the acquittal being “set for” Wednesday, like a scheduled C-section. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to look upon the Rosemary’s baby it promises to bring forth. At least Trump has been denied the full force of trumpeting his latest Houdini-like escape during the Super Bowl and the State of the Union, though he’ll do his best of course. Throughout this ordeal it was often said that if Nixon had had Fox News, he wouldn’t have been forced to resign. I guess that’s been proved true.

And so Trump’s lifelong run of vastly undeserved good luck continues, proving that there is no God.

The comedy writer Peter Mehlman of “Seinfeld” fame (the “shrinkage” episode, the “yada yada yada” episode, among many many others) tells an anecdote about being a young man working for Howard Cosell in the 1980s, and being present when Cosell interviewed the young-ish up-and-coming Trump, who back then was just a brash and crass and relentlessly self-promoting New York real estate developer and running punchline in Spy magazine, not a potential Mussolini.

Afterward, Mehlman reports, Cosell remarked privately, “That’s the dumbest, luckiest SOB I ever met.”

I miss Howard.

As we come to terms with Trump’s (non-)acquittal, we all know what will happen next. He will surely be further emboldened by his latest escape from justice, having gotten away with yet another epic set of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Going forward Trump will no doubt behave in an even more brazenly criminal and unfettered way with even less fear of being held accountable—if you can conceive of that. He will also surely act vindictively to punish those who attempted to do so.

The implications are terrifying. As Sargent writes, “There is zero doubt Trump will continue to abuse his powers in any way he sees fit to solicit more foreign interference—or potentially to wield the government against his 2020 opponents in more grave ways.”

Steve Almond again:

The moment he’s acquitted, we know Trump will immediately crow about his glorious exoneration, because his entire brand is based on impunity—the idea that he is powerful enough to say and do whatever he wants without consequence.

This exoneration, in turn, will establish a new precedent: for Trump himself, and all future presidents. They’ll forever more be able to pressure a foreign government to dig up dirt on opponents, freely subvert our elections and block Congress from investigating them. This behavior will no longer be abuse of power. It will become standard operating procedure.

And former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal:

If Trump is acquitted, he can call on foreign governments tomorrow to investigate every Democrat in our nation (and do so in secret). He can ask DOJ to target every Democrat as well, too. And his legal argument, voiced by his lawyer, is that there is nothing wrong with this. Buyer beware.

Of course, this is a one-way street, one affixed with tire puncturing spikes, as the author Michael Gruber writes:

Let us also note that any Democrat who approaches a foreign power with an offer of special help if elected, in return for, say, hacking Trump’s financials, will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY THE SAME

Of course, the GOP can’t keep the truth from drip drip dripping out—or even gush gush gushing. What will happen when it does? Needless to say, MAGA Nation won’t care, and the Republican leadership will try to ignore it, but the further airing of evidence promises to make their craven actions even more blatantly shameful, for those who give a shit.

Bolton’s book has already made fools of the GOP, not that it derailed the 9:15 Acquittal Special, making stops on Capitol Hill, Mar-a-Lago, and Trump Tower Moscow. Then, within hours of Senate Republicans voting to end the trial without hearing from Bolton or anyone else, or considering any evidence, the Trump administration admitted in federal court that it was withholding two dozen crucial emails containing precisely the kind of the information germane to the proceeding: Trump’s orders regarding the withholding of military aid to Ukraine.

Yet Senate Republicans still stubbornly crossed their arms and insisted, “Nope, we don’t need to see any of that.”

And now we have just learned that White House counsel Pat Cipolline was in the goddam room when Donald Trump directed John Bolton to withhold aid to Ukraine, and Bolton refused. And yet there Cipolline stood, for days, in front of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and all 100 assembled members of the United States Senate, the “greatest deliberative body in the world” (stop, stop—it hurts when I laugh) insisting that there was no evidence whatsoever that Trump knew anything about the scheme, which Cipolline knew firsthand was a bald-faced lie.

That all by itself is a world-beating scandal, or should be. That it isn’t is a terrible indictment of how cynical and numb to corruption we have become in the past 300 years since Trump took office.

Cipolline is a material witness to this impeachable offense and ought to be subpoenaed to testify before Congress, and disbarred, or worse.

STORM WARNING

What the United States look like on the other side of this debacle remains to be seen, but it doesn’t look promising.

It’s true that Trump will be tarred forever with the stain of impeachment, which he clearly knows, and which clearly eats at him. But he will not have been truly held to account, not by a long shot.

Impeachment has loomed so large over this entire presidency since day one (per the right wing complaint) that it’s hard to imagine what life will be like when it is over. I realize that Trump can be impeached again, and will surely do things to deserve it, very possibly things even worse than he’s already done. I’m not at all against a second impeachment (or a third, or a fourth), although I think they stand even less chance of helping our cause, thanks to sheer fatigue, and the danger that they would feed Republican spin about so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome. Continued investigation, on the other hand, is a certainty, especially as more facts come out. But its objective will be aimed primarily at the ballot box.

So for all practical purposes, what we will be left with is the election. That will be a brave new world, and perhaps the forced focus on that will be a good thing.

I would like to believe that the American people will display enough collective common sense to throw every last Republican bum out in a sweeping cleaning of house in November, chucking not only Trump but also McConnell, Graham, Collins, and all the rest out on their ears. However I am not convinced that that will happen, given the demonstrated willingness of millions of our fellow Americans not only to put up with this bullshit, but to actively cheer it, and of millions of others to be too apathetic to get off their fat asses and vote.

A significant section of American people just don’t give a shit—not a majority, but enough to allow others to put a chokehold on our government, given its counter-majoritarian mechanisms. Barring a national awakening, I have little optimism that those disastrous institutional flaws will ever be rectified. On the contrary, under continued Republican control they are apt to get worse.

Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the GOP does not intend to participate in a fair vote in 2020, or ever again, and that Trump will not willingly leave office regardless of the results. Hell, this entire impeachment was about trying to cheat in the next election! And by letting Trump skate—indeed, arguing that he was within his authority in what he did—the Republican Party has bluntly announced that it is going to cheat in 2020! We can’t say we weren’t warned.

If Trump does manage to win in November, legally or illegally, God knows what the next four years and beyond will look like. It remains possible, as many warned, that the impeachment hearings will galvanize his fanatic base and prove a boon to him. That has always been a danger, no matter what. But we had no choice. Absent impeachment, the GOP would have manufactured something else with which to whip those folks into a foaming-mouthed fury. They may yet do so.

But as I’ve argued numerous times, impeachment was the right thing to do not only on principle, but tactically as well. Even without a conviction, the process aired many of Trump’s worst crimes and made the case against him to voters. The House managers cogently laid out an impressive case publicly airing the evidence of his unfitness for office and his removal therefrom. It is inconceivable that these proceedings have not done damage to Trump. He certainly thinks so. The Senate Republicans certainly think so, based on their transparently desperate efforts to stop it. Some have even copped to it on the record. Even the faux acquittal has done so. Whether that translates into electoral victory in November, notwithstanding foreign interference, Republican ratfucking, and other skullduggery and attempts to rig the election, I don’t know.

If this thorough public accounting of Trump’s wrongdoing and unfitness does not sufficiently move the electorate, that will be a truly depressing verdict on the moral courage of the American people or lack thereof. And if it makes his followers and undecided voters like him more, we’ve got bigger problems than just tactics.

In the words of Adam Schiff:

If right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is,” Schiff said. “It doesn’t matter how brilliant the framers were. Doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is. Doesn’t matter how well written the oath of impartiality is. If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost….

You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to. This is why if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed.

WHAT CAN A POOR BOY DO?

As I’ve written many times, how pathetic is it that the American experiment, this glorious republic, should come to an end at the hands of a D-list game show host? But as Bill Maher says, “We’re officially living in a dictatorship….and not even one with good rail service.” For all the talk of liberal hysteria, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and violations of Godwin’s Law, this is no longer a hypothetical.

Steve Almond again:

The transformation of Trump from party pariah—a man Lindsay Graham called “a kook” a “loser” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot”—to a de facto monarch is the inevitable culmination of this moral rot. “Any time you ignore what could become an evil force,” Graham observed four short years ago, “you wind up regretting it.” These days, Graham isn’t ignoring that force. He’s become its loudest defender.

Now Trump’s Republicans will be on the record for all of eternity.

And for what? To prop up a corrupt and cruel grifter whom most of them despise and mistrust. The only thing greater than their shame, apparently, is their shamelessness. They needed Trump to find that shamelessness. That’s what he’s given them—and all it cost them was our constitutional democracy.

The only remaining remedy is the 2020 election, an election already besieged by voter suppression, gerrymandering and the perverse math of the Electoral College and, thanks to Mitch McConnell, foreign subversion, too.

The only way to repudiate this culture of sociopathic nihilism and lawlessness is for citizens of good faith to become more politically active. We can, and should, watch what’s happening on the floor of the Senate in despair and outrage.

“Citizens of good faith” he is calling upon. That’s us, folks. Bob Mueller’s not gonna save us, and Mitt Romney’s not gonna save us, and John Bolton is not gonna save us. Only we can save us.

Let us again heed Garry Kasparov, who ought to know:

Don’t be surprised, be angry. Show all of these GOP Senators treating Trump like a king that American democracy still works by voting them out. Every last one of them.

The result is bad and the methods are worse. The GOP is saying the president can do whatever he wants. They are a pack of docile reprobates bringing shame on this great nation.

Trump’s pathetic defenders deserve to be grilled every day as further evidence of his abuses comes out. They are also complicit in his every act going forward. They know what he is and what he did, and that now he will do more. The 2020 election is under assault.

Is it possible that Obama will be our last president under a system that bears any resemblance to American representative democracy as we once knew it?

He might be, if we don’t do something about it.

Go Niners.

********

Photo by Samuel Corum / Getty, for the New Yorker

 

 

Do you think Donald Trump is sleeping at all?

Of course not.

Do you think he’s able to concentrate on matters of state (just kidding!), or his golf game, or grabbing pussy, or squeezing pennies out of the gnarled hands of destitute old age pensioners who are behind on their rent, or any of the other things he loves to do?

Look at his Twitter feed. He is consumed night and day with his impeachment, a fuming maniac wandering the halls of the West Wing in an enraged state that would make Nixon look like the Buddha. Even I am not that obsessed with the impeachment, contrary to the impression you might get from the steady flow of these essays.

Very weird behavior for a guy who is guaranteed to beat the rap.

In fact, the thought of a permanently apoplectic, haunted Trump is about the only part of this whole horrific affair that gives me any pleasure.

DON’T WAIT, CALL EIGHT

At the end of last week, prior to the beginning of the bizarre and antiquated ceremony of written questions, the White House lawyers presented their defense of the president, such as it was. Tellingly, for their leadoff on Friday they used only two of their available eight hours, which speaks to the fact that they really have no credible case to make.

WBUR’s Steve Almond writes:

McConnell, and his merry band of quislings, know that Trump is guilty. That’s why they want this proceeding over as quickly as possible. To call it a “trial,” as I’ve argued, is disinformation. This is a show trial, pure and simple, in which Republicans’ stated goal is to exonerate the defendant.

The House managers prosecuting the articles of impeachment against Trump— charging that he abused the power of the presidency to cheat in the 2020 election, then obstructed Congress’s investigation of the same—are engaged in, or are attempting to engage in, an actual trial.

You know: evidence, witnesses, facts.

The president’s defense team is performing for Fox News and other conservative media outlets. There is no discussion of evidence, witnesses or facts, just a recitation of blustery talking points, grade-school deflections, legalistic doublespeak and Trumpian conspiracies….

It is even more telling that the defense has not even bothered to contest the facts that the Democrats laid out. It wasn’t that long ago that many people thought they would make the argument the Trump’s behavior was wrong but not impeachable. That’s a position with which I strongly disagree, but at least it would have made some sense legally speaking. But of course the GOP can’t do that, because that is not what Trump demands. Instead, Republicans have saluted, barked “Three bags full!”, and gone all in with Trump’s pathological insistence that he did nothing wrong whatsoever, that his actions were completely within his authority, and that his behavior was “perfect.” (Pope Francis, white courtesy phone).

This is madness, of course, and Adam Schiff  & Co. beautifully explained why. It is an insane, outrageous, and specious claim that only the most Kool-Aid drunk of these Republican senators could possibly believe. The other, more conniving ones are engaging in an absolutely nihilistic charade, which is worse. (Though not as scary.) Yet that is the argument that Trump’s lawyers—Sekulow, Cipolline, Philbin, Bondi, Starr, and Dershowitz above all—are making. No thinking person can possibly be convinced by it, but then again, that description lets out all of Trump’s followers and the entire leadership of the Republican Party.

A key Republican defense is that Trump did nothing wrong because he was legitimately fighting corruption in Ukraine. As I’ve written in previous blog posts, this is risible. But no lie, no fairytale, no fish story is too outrageous for MAGA Nation to clutch to its collective bosom and defend to its dying breath, which can’t come too soon, if you ask me. (I refer to the movement of course, not any individual humans. Like Nancy Pelosi, I love all people, and I’m not even Catholic.)

But all you really need to understand in order to obliterate that defense is that Trump and his people actively tried to cover up his actions….frantically so, in fact. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, if he did nothing wrong and everything is above board, why so desperate the need to hide it?

Another outrageous howler—and one that totally elides the substance of the charges—is the contention that these impeachment proceedings overturn the last election. Needless to say, nothing could be further from the truth. Impeachment is a mechanism built into United States Constitution by our Founders for this very purpose, that of removing a criminally unfit president. For the GOP to ignore that—and worse, deny it—and claim instead that this trial is some sort of coup is dishonesty of the worst sort. I know that’s not surprising in the least, coming from these swine.

But if the Founders devised impeachment as the constitutional remedy for a cancerous presidency, this one is like getting chemotherapy from William S. Burroughs’ Dr. Benway.

It is also the height of irony that Republicans go on and on about the Democrats trying to “steal” an election when that is the very thing that Trump—with their help—is on trial for, and worse, continues to be engaged in even as we speak. But then again, as I like to say, that is Fascism 101: accuse your enemies of your own crimes.

The White House defense team has also screamed that that the House inquiry was incomplete, unfair, didn’t call the right witnesses, and didn’t offer the administration a chance to make its case. That’s the same House inquiry that the White House flatly refused to cooperate with, blocked the appearance of witnesses at, defied subpoenas from, and otherwise obstructed to an extent that would have made Bob Haldeman blanch. They further claim that since the House “didn’t do its job,” there’s no reason for the Senate to do so now.

Is anyone fooled by this whose brain is not rotting from the red dye in their Chinese-made MAGA hat seeping into their gray matter?

Catch Pat Philbin next month in a performance of Kafka’s “The Trial” at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter, FL.

DREAM TEAM

Just having Alan Dershowitz on your legal team looks bad, as SNL noted with the return of the great Jon Lovitz. Even so, Dershowitz’s much ballyhooed appearance proved one of the week’s more insane moments, as he argued that, since all politicians believe their election—and re-election—is always in the public interest, Trump’s shakedown of Kyiv is perfectly acceptable. In fact, anything they want to define as “in the public interest” justifies anything at all they want to do. It was the ultimate manifestation of Nixon’s famous statement to David Frost, that “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” (Not to mention the thinking of a certain French monarch.) In short, it is a rejection of democracy full stop in favor of rule by divine right.

Because that’s what America has been all about since 1776, right?

But it was also Dersh being too clever by half, with a thought experiment that he clearly believed was intellectually bold, but actually just made him sound like a lunatic and brought down an avalanche of ridicule. It is destined to be a sad coda to his already sordid history of defending wife murderers and pedophiles, if that is possible.

Ken Starr, meanwhile, looked like he was acting in Pirandello play, so absurd was his outrage at the very idea of impeaching a president! As Ben Wittes quipped, quoting a colleague, “Does Ken Starr know he’s Ken Starr?”

Here’s Susan Glasser on Starr, a man who, after giving us Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress, was fired as president of Baylor University for failing to properly handle a campus-wide sexual assault scandal:

Certainly, it was a bizarre spectacle: the man who brought us the last impeachment of a President lecturing the Senate on the dangerous evils of impeachment.

I’m old enough to remember when, in 1998, Starr produced the most X-rated document ever to be printed under congressional seal, in service of lobbying for an impeachment. The document, which will forever be known as the Starr report, detailed Bill Clinton’s Oval Office trysts in painfully graphic detail. (Google “Starr report” and “cigar” if you don’t remember.) Now, in 2020, the author of that report is acting as the sanctimonious guardian of congressional dignity, lecturing us all on the floor of the Senate about the unfair, improper charges against Donald Trump? Within seconds of opening his mouth on the Senate floor, Starr had his liberal critics—and lots of non-liberals, too—sputtering with outrage.

In his remarks as a member of Trump’s legal team, Starr inveighed against what he called the “Age of Impeachment,” saying that it is happening “too frequently” and is “inherently destabilizing” and “acrimonious.” He reserved particularly scathing words for the “runaway House” and its conduct during Trump’s impeachment, which he called “dripping with fundamental process violations.” Starr seemed especially upset about the partisan nature of the Trump proceedings by the Democratic-controlled House. “Like war, impeachment is hell,” he said. Remember, this is the man who advocated for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, by a Republican-controlled House, for lying under oath about an extramarital affair. Irony is dead. Very, very dead.

With all due respect to Dershowitz, Starr, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe LLP, Trump would be in infinitely better hands with Cellino & Barnes. But that doesn’t mean he won’t still win, because Senate Republicans have made it clear that they are going to close ranks and protect him no matter what his legal reps do or fail to do.

BIDEN MY TIME

On MSNBC Brian Williams quipped that the White House lawyers made a helluva case for impeaching Hunter Biden.

Given the way Bill Barr functions like Tom Hagen to Trump’s Don Corleone, you can bet that if Hunter had done anything even remotely illegal he would already be strapped to a backboard a la Hannibal Lecter and on his way to the Supermax federal prison in Florence, CO. (Or more likely, left a free man for now, the better to serve as a whipping boy during the campaign, as the target of a lengthy and drawn-out criminal prosecution that would play out till November. “Lock him up!”)

Moreover, it almost doesn’t bear repeating that when it comes to trading on a powerful parent, Hunter Biden is a piker compared to the Trump kids, which makes Donald’s focus on him both the height of chutzpah and a measure of his own malignantly narcissistic sociopathology, characterized by a world-beating sense of entitlement and inability to recognize his own hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, we ought not to forget that, notwithstanding the fact that he is being impeached, in many ways Trump’s entire Ukraine scam has worked beautifully, as here we are talking about corruption and Joe Biden.

REVENGE OF THE MAD BOMBER

So to what extent has Bolton’s bombshell altered the calculus of all this? Five days in now, we are getting a picture.

Clearly, it’s mixed.

Bolton has undoubtedly put pressure on the GOP and cast a glaring light on the fundamental dishonesty of the Senate trial. As I wrote earlier this week, I deeply dislike the man on ideological grounds, but I have to admire his tradecraft in doing as much damage to Trump as he could possibly do, even if it does not ultimately lead to his eviction from Pennsylvania Avenue.

In the New Yorker, John Cassidy writes:

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when Pat Cipollone, the lead member of Trump’s legal team, learned about the Times scoop. Rather than arguing that their client’s misdeeds didn’t rise to the level of impeachable offenses, he and his colleagues have, with straight faces, echoed the President’s claim that he didn’t demand a quid pro quo from Ukraine and, indeed, did nothing wrong at all. They’ve also argued that there is no firsthand evidence to show that he did.

Bolton has now blown that defense out of the water, giving Adam Schiff the priceless opportunity to play humiliating clips of Cipolline and Sekulow themselves making that now-debunked argument in the Senate last week. It’s not a good look for the accused when the prosecution is able to use his own lawyers’ words against him.

(Schiff also made the “imagine if Obama” argument, a staple of progressive conversation for the past three years. It was a joy to hear it on the floor of the Senate. When Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz then foolishly submitted a written question that sought to “gotcha!” him, Schiff deftly turned their disingenuous query and its skewed premise on its head and beat them to a bloody pulp with it, metaphorically speaking.)

What’s even more headspinning is that the White House has had Bolton’s book since December 30…..meaning Trump knew his former NSA intended to expose that lie. Yet he and his team still brazenly made this argument, a measure of the contempt they have for the entire impeachment process, and the rule of law full stop, not to mention their cocksure confidence of how tightly they have the Republican Party by the short hairs.

Cassidy goes on to describe the rock and a hard place between which JB has stuck his own party:

To be sure, there isn’t much more to be said about Trump’s perfidy, and, in the grand scheme of things, even the spectacle of Bolton providing a firsthand account of the President’s lying and venality may not do him much further damage. We all recall his quote about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Many of his supporters revel in his status as a Washington pariah. But the former national-security adviser showing up on Capitol Hill and telling his damaging tale (evidently, the Ukraine material isn’t the only revelation in Bolton’s book) would certainly reflect badly on the Republicans who tried to prevent him from appearing. These senators already look like patsies and enablers. If Bolton repeated what is reportedly in the book for all the world to see and hear, it would make them look like blithering idiots as well. Who else would have agreed to countenance Trump’s preposterous defense—that his real concern was corruption inside Ukraine?

Well put. It’s not hard to understand why it would be awful for the GOP if Bolton were to testify.

But of course, here’s the kicker: if Senate Republicans block him from testifying, they’ll look even worse. As Laurence Tribe noted, the GOP position boils down to “Trump didn’t do what Bolton said, but we don’t wanna hear from Bolton.” Or as Philip Bump writes in the WaPo, “Trump’s effort to block Bolton’s testimony makes little sense—unless he’s guilty.” Could it be any simpler?

Jonathan Chait, in New York magazine:

Initially, even Trump’s staunchest supporters conceded that pressuring Ukraine to investigate Trump’s rivals would be, if true, unacceptable. (Lindsey Graham: “very disturbing”; Steve Doocy: “off-the-rails-wrong.”) As evidence of guilt accumulated, their denial that this unacceptable conduct took place narrowed to a tiny, highly specific claim: No witness testified that Trump personally ordered them to carry out a quid pro quo.

But now Bolton has done precisely that, which, Chait argues, is why the GOP has fallen back to its Masada-like, die-in-place Dershowitzean position of “So what?”

So in many ways, Bolton’s revelations have not changed the game much at all, a testament to just how debased and desiccated the Republican Party has become, and just how pathetic its fealty to Donald J. Trump.

JUST THE FACTS (NOT)

The majority of Senate Republicans have already announced that they intend to pretend John Bolton and The Room Where It Happened don’t exist. That strikes me as a childish case of wishful thinking and short term gratification, but whatever. It remains to be seen if Romney and three others will override them. (But Cory Gardner of Colorado, apparently, ain’t gonna be one of them. Good luck looking for a new job come the morning of November 4, Cory.)

Here’s Susan Glasser again, on how the GOP has turned goalpost-moving into an art form:

At any other moment in Washington in my lifetime, I would have predicted with absolute confidence that the Bolton revelation would force Republican senators to switch their position and support witnesses. And not just a few, but almost all of them. But this is now, and the unthinkable and inconceivable have become increasingly routine. Here it was, the proverbial smoking gun, right in the middle of the trial, crucial evidence that Trump, his advisers, his lawyers, and his enablers on Capitol Hill knew about and were trying to suppress. Just last week, Trump’s legal team told senators that “not a single witness with actual knowledge ever testified that the President suggested any connection between announcing investigations and security assistance”…..

But we have had so many smoking-gun moments in the last few years. This is the post–“Access Hollywood” tape GOP, which elected as President of the United States a man who bragged of grabbing women by their genitals on tape, just a few weeks after the recording came to light. In the Ukraine scandal, we have seen this process repeat itself. Facts emerge that show the President’s actions to be inappropriate, outrageous, and clearly, straightforwardly wrong. At first, even Republicans on the Hill seem to waver. But again and again and again they find a way to accommodate themselves to the unpleasant new information, to rationalize and to justify….

The post-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party will be largely the same as the pre-Bolton-bombshell Republican Party.

Even if we do get the four necessary Republican votes to compel witnesses, and even if Bolton and others testify and evidence is aired, the idea that the Republican majority might actually convict Trump is like betting on the Washington Generals to beat the Globetrotters.

But here’s the thing:

Counter-intuitively, suppressing the facts in order to acquit Trump is not the formulation here, but rather, quite the opposite. The acquittal is all but a foregone conclusion. The GOP’s real concern is hurrying to that conclusion in order to avoid the further airing of facts.

They know that with each passing day more and more (and more and more damning) evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing will come out. That is the real threat to the party—that the public will hear that evidence, and the unavoidable recognition of Trump’s criminality and unfitness will chip away at GOP support going into November 2020. The steady drip drip drip of revelations of the complicity of various other Republican politicians in the Ukraine scheme—Pence, Pompeo, Barr, Nunes, Mulvaney, Ron Johnson, and others—only turbocharges their desperation. How far and deep and it goes we don’t know….and they don’t want us to.

Therefore the Republican Party will do anything to avoid that turn of events. Even the danger of public backlash at an obvious coverup is less worrying to them than letting the truth be aired, and the backlash that would entail.

The author Michael Gruber has often noted that the Republican Party is behaving as if it will never have to face a fair election again. That may very well be its intention. The Republican embrace of the unitary executive theory only makes sense for them if they can keep Republican presidents in power.

So do these self-evident GOP fears of public backlash contradict Gruber’s theory of Republican confidence in one-party rule?

On the contrary. They bolster it.

In an autocracy, the ruling party’s grip on power is dependent on maintaining control of the narrative. The removal of legitimate popular elections does not mean that they can entirely ignore the will of people (though it sure makes it easier). Ask Ceaușescu, Marcos, the Shah. For the public to become sufficiently enraged and galvanized to action by the airing of irrefutable evidence of Trump’s corruption, as well as that of the GOP at large, represents a threat every bit as real as a flipped district in Wisconsin.

ACQUITTAL WITHOUT EXONERATION

The consensus in the punditocracy is that Trump badly wants his acquittal before Super Bowl Sunday, when his interview with Hannity and a million dollar ad are scheduled to run. (Former RNC chairman turned Never Trumper Michael Steele confidently opines that the ad is surely built around the whole idea of Donald trumpeting his victory.) Not to mention the State of the Union looming next Tuesday.

How’s that for a charmed life: he not only gets to skip merrily way from his high crimes, but even gets to demand the timing of that impunity’s arrival.

But the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne crystallized the ultimate irony that many observers have already noted: the willingness of McConnell and the Republicans to turn this trial into the most blatantly possible sham you can imagine is robbing Trump of the thing he wants the most, which is plausible exoneration that he can wave like a flag during the upcoming general election.

Of course he will do that anyway. (He would do that even if they found him guilty.) But the more obvious the farcical nature of the trial, the harder it will be.

Therefore, what we are about to have as an acquittal without exoneration.

Dionne:

By working with Trump to rig the trial by admitting as little evidence as possible, McConnell robbed the proceeding of any legitimacy as a fair adjudication of Trump’s behavior. Instead of being able to claim that Trump was “cleared” by a searching and serious process, Republican senators will now be on the defensive for their complicity in the Trump coverup.

John Cassidy makes a similar point:

(I)f McConnell somehow succeeds in preventing Bolton from testifying after all this, there can no longer be even any pretense that the trial is on the level, or that an acquittal along party lines is anything other than an abject display of political cowardice and self-abasement by the current generation of Republican senators.

And Chait as well:

McConnell’s desired process of muscling through a wildly unpopular vote to suppress all evidence, followed by a vote to acquit, would rob the outcome of much of the legitimacy Republicans crave. It would instead be widely and accurately seen as a cover-up.

Mitch McConnell is not known for giving a flying fuck how bad his blunt machinations look, so long as they work. (Right, Merrick Garland?) But he is nonetheless a savvier operator than Trump. Knowing that his majority is going to acquit the president regardless, why hasn’t he put on at least the veneer of a fair trial? Would that not have been smarter public relations, and therefore politics, as Dionne, Cassidy, and Chait all note?

I’ll tell you why not:

Because, per above, the Republicans fear the facts and evidence coming out—on live TV no less—much more than they fear being accused of holding a sham trial. Since an acquittal is a near-certainty, the real goal of the Republicans is to limit the amount of damaging information about Trump’s behavior (and theirs) that will come out—ideally, to zero. That is how guilty the GOP knows he is, and how terrified it is of the details being made public. They would rather risk a backlash over a farcical trial than risk people hearing the truth.

But Adam Schiff has made the salient point that eventually the facts will come out, sooner or later, one way or another, and they promise to be even worse than what we already know. (Damn near every shoe-drop thus far has been.) The Republicans, consumed with short term survival and fearing for their political lives—and maybe their actual lives, depending on whether you take Trump’s mobby “head-on-a-pike” and “take-her-out” and “paid-the price” threats literally or just seriously—are obviously gambling that the public will have lost interest and moved on by then.

Ironically, Democrats might benefit politically from a rushed trial where GOP perfidy is blatant more than they would from a seemingly legitimate trial with witnesses and evidence that still ends in acquittal. In fact, the anti-Trump conservative writer Jonathan V. Last has suggested that the Democrats embrace that idea and stop even trying to call witnesses…..ignoring the obvious fact that the GOP would use that against them, much as they instructed witnesses in the House inquiry to defy subpoenas, and now criticize House Democrats for not spending years in court fighting to enforce them.

So what looks worse: a sham trial that blatantly blocks witnesses in order to excuse the accused, or one that allows them to speak and give airtight evidence and still excuses him? Neither reflects well on the GOP.

If only we lived in a country where people cared.

To that end, I am not so naïve as to think any of this will make an iota of difference to MAGA Nation come November. But either way, witnesses or not, in trying to crow about his alleged “exoneration,” Trump will not have the benefit of an even a halfway-convincing trial to bolster his claim. Any thinking person cannot seriously look at this charade and conclude that it was just…..and that includes the crucial “centrist” Republicans who are on the fence, soccer moms in the Philadelphia suburbs, and Obama/Trump switch hitters who are undecided about how to vote this time, among others. Given Trump’s razor thin margin of victory in 2016 (even with foreign interference), and his abysmal approval ratings outside his cult-like  base, those are voters he cannot afford to lose.

It also suggests a roadmap for how to proceed in the post-impeachment world. As Aaron Blake writes in the Washington Post, “The nightmare scenario for the GOP is that they give Trump the quick and witness-free acquittal that he apparently desires, but then information like Bolton’s keeps coming out.” Which we all know it will.

Jonathan Chait one last time:

Such an outcome would, in turn, legitimize House Democratic efforts to continue the investigation. They can continue to press for Bolton’s testimony, and continue prying loose the documents Trump has withheld. To the extent a Senate trial was perceived as thorough and fair, it would have made additional investigations look like sore-loser-ism. Republicans will say it anyway, but the national media will be far more likely to take such probes seriously in the wake of an overt cover-up.

If impeachment is about exacting a price for Trump’s misconduct, perhaps the highest price will come by letting his enablers reveal exactly how far they are willing to go.

GOODNIGHT DON

As I write this, the written questions phase of the trial has just ended. Susan Collins has announced she will vote yes to allow witnesses and Lamar Alexander has announced he will vote no. albeit on the Trump-defying grounds of “wrong but not impeachable.” (Two cheers for Lamar.) Murkowski has said she’ll announce her decision in the morning and Romney has been silent so far. There is speculation about John Roberts having to cast a tiebreaking vote, or abstain, which would be a de facto vote for the GOP position. What tomorrow will bring, I don’t know—none of us do—but it’s possible it could be the day that this all ends and Trump is acquitted.

And somewhere, right now, Donald Trump is wide awake, fuming about it all.

*********

Next time, more on whatever insane bullshit rolls down the pike next.

Photo: Business Insider

 

Oy. Where to begin?

How about at the beginning, which is to say, at the end….

Barring a deus ex machina, we all pretty much know how this is going to play out. Senate Republicans began this trial by voting 53 to 47 along strict party lines (with one exception, 52 to 48) to block every Democratic motion concerning its conduct, eleven motions in all, including those to subpoena White House officials, demand Defense Department documents, forbid the selective submission of evidence, and everything else resembling the accoutrements of a fair trial as we understand the term.

Notwithstanding the revelations that recently emerged from behind John Bolton’s mustache, this week those same public servants (cough cough) are likely to do the same and block the calling of witnesses, to be followed by a swift acquittal of this cretinous pretender to the presidency. That will be a shameful and disgraceful day for the Republican Party, which no longer resembles anything like a legitimate political organization, but rather a cult of personality comprised of zombies, cynics, quislings, neo-fascists, and low-level mobsters living in terror of their deranged capo.

But it will also be a terrible and disgraceful day for our entire country, marking another steep step down into the abyss of full-blown autocracy.

Of course, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but let’s not be naive. The conduct of the trial so far has been even more risible than most observers expected—which is saying something—and promises to be a dark harbinger of where it’s headed.

On the bright side, the 49ers are in the Super Bowl. Niners GM John Lynch deserves to be NFL Executive of the Year, don’t you think?

TRIAL AND TERROR

The Republicans are in a jawdroppingly frantic rush to shut their ears and eyes to the evidence and hurry through this trial to its inevitable verdict of Trump’s perfection as a president and Olympian model of a human being—nay, demigod.

We started with the farcical spectacle of Republican senators like McConnell and Graham swearing to be impartial after announcing that they had already made up their minds and consider the whole thing illegitimate. (Try that next time you have jury duty.) Moscow Mitch then sprung his rules for the trial on the world without any consultation with Chuck Schumer, a howling breach of the “Clinton rules” he dishonestly claimed to be following. No surprise, those rules are a mockery of justice, in keeping with McConnell’s other preemptive announcement that he—in effect, the foreman of a jury—was going to coordinate his every action and take all his directives from the accused.

Because that’s how trials usually work, right?

Soon after, McConnell further showed his hand with his request for Schumer to “stack his motions,” thus openly admitting that the Republican majority intended to vote down every single one without any serious consideration of any of them. Schumer, rightly sick of the majority leader’s games and wielding what little power he has, admirably refused, icily telling McConnell that “there will be a good number of votes.” By so doing, Chuck forced his Republican colleagues to announce one by one, over and over again, their shameless participation in this blatant obstruction of justice.

They didn’t seem too bothered about doing so.

The House managers went on to lay out a powerful, compelling, meticulously detailed case that was about as ironclad as it could be. The Trump defense team, by contrast, offered arguments filled with misdirection, ad hominem attacks, and outright lies. This is not a Rashomon matter of two equally valid interpretations of events, and saying otherwise is a perfect example of the dangerous false equivalence has bedeviled us throughout the Age of Trump. One side is arguing the facts, hard as those might be for right wing ears to hear. The other side is playing with its own feces.

The defense’s presentation was so weak that even a troglodyte like SCIF-storming Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida dismissed it as embarrassing even by the standards of an eighth grade book report. Doubt it? Witness Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow humiliating himself by publicly demonstrating that he doesn’t know what a FOIA lawsuit is.

Like many on the left, I marveled at the eloquent and powerful performance of lead House manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who has already cemented in his place in American history as a kind of present day Mr. Smith meets Atticus Finch meets Joe Welch. I know conservatives are eyerollingly sick of the praise heaped on Schiff from dazzled liberals, sneering that we don’t realize it matters not a whit to half of America. But for those who believe—not without good reason—that the Democratic case, no matter how well presented, is pointless given the GOP’s obvious intransigence, it’s worth noting that not a few of these Republican senators, who normally dine only on Fox News, were being confronted and forced to hear some of these facts for the first time. Even Republicans like the Oxford-educated Foghorn Leghorn impersonator Sen. John N. Kennedy of Louisiana had to give Schiff props. Over on Fox itself, retired judge Andrew Napolitano also spoke the truth in lauding the strength of the Democratic case. (Watch for Andy to be looking for a new gig very soon.)

Another personal favorite of mine was the superb Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) quoting Biggie Smalls as he eviscerated Jay Sekulow’s snide question of why they were there are at all:

We are here, sir, because President Trump abused his power and then he tried to cover it up. And we are here, sir, to follow the facts, follow the law, be guided by the Constitution, and present the truth to the American people. That is why we are here, Mr. Sekulow.

And if you don’t know…..now you know.

(No doubt Ari Melber was as hard as a rock.)

But you really have to hear Mr. Jeffries say it: the printed word does not do it justice. How fitting in a moment when very little justice is being done.

Jerry Nadler had his moments too. Here’s Jennifer Rubin:

Nadler explained that it makes no sense to argue you can neither prosecute a sitting president nor remove him when he poses a danger to the country. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact. It does not leave us stuck with presidents who abuse their power in unforeseen ways that threaten our security and democracy,” he said, invoking the famous phrase uttered by the late Justice Robert H. Jackson. Nadler added dryly, “Until recently, it did not occur to me that our president would call a foreign leader and demand a sham investigation meant to kneecap his political opponents, all in exchange for releasing vital military aid that the president was already required by law to provide.”

The Democrats’ use of multimedia was similarly inspired, particularly the damning clips from the not-so-distant past of Lindsey Graham and fame whore/serial scumbag defender Alan Dershowitz, both vehemently arguing then the exact opposite of what they are arguing equally vehemently now.

Memo to boomers: on the Internet, everything lives forever.

HOW DARE THEE!

So far the Republicans’ unwillingness to do their constitutional duty has been shocking in its sheer brazenness. We have seen them nodding off, doing crossword puzzles, ducking out for extended “bathroom breaks,” and in the case of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), not only reading a book from the right wing bestseller list during the trial, but even nipping over to give an interview to Fox News while she was supposed to be seated in the Senate listening to testimony. Why John Roberts didn’t complain about that I don’t know.

As Chris Hayes put it on MSNBC (and on Twitter), I’m sorry that these Republican senators are so inconvenienced by being asked to do their goddam job. (Profanity mine.)

Ted Cruz apparently thinks this whole thing is so hilarious that he made a joke about a drinking game. I’m glad he’s enjoying himself, but I would humbly suggest that the people of Texas ask themselves whether they want a man with so little regard for the gravity of these proceedings representing them in the United States Senate. As if that is Ted’s only flaw.

Meanwhile, those who were paying attention got their skivvies in a bunch over precisely the wrong things. The odious Susan Collins was so aghast at Jerry Nadler‘s verbiage that she had to pass a note to Chief Justice Roberts, middle school style. (“I like you…..do you like me?”) So what exactly did Nadler say that so offended Susan and prompted her to whip out her quill and write to the grand poobah of the United States Supreme Court? This:

NADLER: So far, I’m sad to say, I see a lot of senators voting for a coverup, voting to deny witnesses—an absolutely indefensible vote, obviously a treacherous vote. Either you want the truth, and you must permit the witnesses, or you want a shameful coverup. History will judge and so will the electorate.

He clearly hit a nerve. But the fact is, unless you want to quibble over whether by “treacherous” he literally meant “guilty of treason” or merely “fraught,” every single thing Nadler said was 100% correct. That is what so enraged the Republicans.

UCLA law professor Jonathan Zasloff writes:

(Collins) wasn’t stunned by Pat Cipollone’s lying about the House impeachment proceedings. She wasn’t stunned by Jay Sekulow mendaciously accusing Val Demings about “lawyer lawsuits.” She wasn’t stunned by #MoscowMitch putting on a show trial. But when Jerry Nadler pointed out accurately that the Senate could be an accomplice to cover-up, THEN she fell on her fainting couch.

She is really a complete fraud. But you knew that.

Collins is emblematic of the haughty attitude Senate Republicans, who have made a histrionic Sarah Bernhardt-like spectacle of how offended they are at the mere suggestion that maybe, just maybe they’ve been letting a con man-cum-wannabe dictator run roughshod over them. They damn near have the vapors! How we got to the point where the fragile feelings of our senators is more important than their duty to the Constitution, I don’t know. (Snowflakes.) Their offense-taking is ridiculous, of course, but nevertheless may provide enough of a handhold for them as they seek a rationalization, any rationalization at all, for further protecting this asshole.

MISTER ROBERTS

More to the point, for Roberts to act on Collins’s complaint and rebuke Nadler (and Jay Sekulow for his angry reply) speaks to the cruel hoax at the heart of this pitiful excuse for a trial. Much like our eggshell-skinned senators, what does it say that the lone moment that stirs the presiding judge to umbrage is when one of the prosecutors dares speak the plain truth?

The author Steven Beschloss notes that the demand for “civility” is often a weapon deployed by the powerful to control and suppress those who dare question their rule, the American civil rights movement being a prime example:

Civility deployed this way is not about improving the quality of our body politic and public discourse, but aimed at keeping critics quiet.

It is worth noting that Trump, throughout his career, has exploited the civil process of US courts and the general civility of those who refuse to assume the worst. The societal expectation of civility (and the disbelief toward the utter lack of it) has made it easier for him to get away with so much—tearing apart migrant families and losing track of the children’s whereabouts, for example, or covering for Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and the Saudis after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi….

But if you believe your house is on fire and your family faces death and destruction, is it appropriate to engage in pleasant and polite tones when speaking to the alleged arsonist and his accomplices? Is that not the time to speak and act with clarity to spur action and put out the fire?

Speaking of the Chief Justice, in a piece titled “John Roberts Comes Face to Face with the Mess He Made,” Dana Milbank notes the bitter irony that Roberts should be forced to sit almost powerlessly and watch this charade:

Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the US political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see…..

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it—and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

But Roberts is not as powerless as he has chosen to be, which makes him not merely a witness to this travesty but a willing accomplice to it. Roberts’ only substantive act so far has been that scolding of “both sides“ (each of which features some very fine people, I’m sure). Meanwhile, he didn’t say boo when the Republicans spewed outright lies, or when Marsha Blackburn ran over to do an interview on Fox, or any other time. Ruth Marcus has written that he is doing the right thing on that first point, and that senators are to be smart enough to decide for themselves what is true and untrue. Fair enough, though she has more faith in the collective intelligence and integrity of the US Senate than I do. However, many others have noted that Roberts has in effect put his thumb on the scale on behalf of his fellow Republicans with his inaction, and further, by loaning the majesty and imprimatur of the Supreme Court to this laughable show trial without complaint.

For a man who is reportedly so concerned with his legacy, this performance may not go down into posterity very well. Marcus ends her piece applauding Roberts’ discretion with a reference to the Chief Justice in Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, the unfortunately named Salmon Chase, who was openly in Johnson’s pocket, and how unseemly that was. No doubt. But the true analogy here is with McConnell’s GOP caucus, which in this case is the party brazenly league with the accused. Roberts’ failure to account for that in any appreciable way is undeniable, and represents his real culpability, and his real kinship with his 19^th century predecessor.

Should this pattern continue, rather than being remembered as an honest broker, or an umpire who just called balls and strikes, as SCOTUS nominees like to portray themselves during their confirmation hearings (exception: Brett Kavanaugh), Roberts—contra Schiff—may well be remembered as a craven collaborator in this farce.

JOHN BOLTON’S APACHE DANCE

So all in all it was a helluva Week 1.

And then came Mr. Bolton.

Word of what is in John Bolton’s soon-to-be published kiss-and-tell memoir, uncovered and printed by the New York Times Sunday afternoon, has thrown a juicy plot twist into this otherwise predictable story. It was certainly a strategic leak, and its timing—smack in the middle of the White House’s presentation of its defense (such as it is) and ahead of a vote on hearing from witnesses—was impeccable.

For those Trumpkins who are furious about that, please note that Bolton’s book leaked only because the White House itself recklessly made multiple copies of the single advance manuscript it was given. (D’oh!) Even better, the book apparently is called The Room Where It Happened, raising the unlikely possibility that John might rival Ari and Hakeem as a hip hop aficionado.

In any event, the man is clearly not throwing away his shot.

The account of events in Bolton’s manuscript obliterates a chief pillar of the White House defense, implicates multiple administration officials as well as Trump himself in the illegal withholding of aid to Kyiv, and fills in several other holes in the Ukrainian whodunit. For Republican senators to now continue to claim that there is no need to hear from this man, or from any other witnesses, will be a Herculean task of denial and dishonesty, not that that aren’t up to it. Dozens of them will continue to cling to that absurd and shameful position, but going forward it will be much harder for the handful who have been on the fence—Romney, Murkowski, Portman, Collins, et al—to remain perched there. Romney has already stated outright that he supports a subpoena for the former National Security Advisor-turned-coldblooded political assassin, for which he inevitably has earned the ire of some of his more vile GOP colleagues.

As a New York Times editorial noted, Bolton’s detailed description of the Ukrainegate mess—a “drug deal,” in his words—and Trump’s centrality to it not only rattles the Republican defense, but throws a glaring 10,000 kW Klieg light on the hypocrisy of his Senate defenders……like—surprise!—a certain someone from the Palmetto State:

The most galling part is that Republicans have already admitted how bad the president’s behavior was. Back in September, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders, said: “What would’ve been wrong is if the president had suggested to the Ukrainian government that if you don’t do what I want you to do regarding the Bidens, we’re not going to give you the aid. That was the accusation; that did not remotely happen.” 

Except that it did, as Mr. Bolton is apparently willing to say under oath.

Bolton is an unlikely hero in this increasingly Shakespearean saga. Let’s leave aside for now his long history as a chickenhawk, a rabid jingoist, and an advocate for aggressive US military intervention almost everywhere on Earth. His bellicosity was a perfect fit in this idiotic administration, but also at odds with its America Firstism (an already pre-existing contradiction in Trumpworld of which Bolton was merely the most extreme manifestation). He and Trump were destined to clash, and they did, and John left—“I quit, no you’re fired” style—swearing vengeance.

Of course, that very hawkishness is precisely what makes Bolton such an especially credible witness for conservative viewers, and such an existential threat to Trump. John Kelly’s endorsement of Bolton this afternoon suggests that a revenge of the Deep State might be building. Ironically, despite the Fox News conspiracy mongering, there was no such cabal until Trump alienated the entire bureaucratic class. Now his habitual mistreatment of his top staff is karmically coming back to bite him in his big fat white ass.

Could there be a more fitting role for a man whose whole brand is the love of dropping bombs?

The coy, will-he-or-won’t-he of Bolton’s testimony has been a bit of a farce within this larger farce. If he wanted to take revenge on Trump—or, less plausibly, act on principle and just do the right thing—he could have done so at any time. He was under no legal obligation to keep silent. He could have volunteered to testify before the House during its impeachment proceedings. He could have held a press conference. For his lawyers to announce, as they did on January 6th, that he would obey a Senate subpoena, if issued, was welcome, but also a bit frustrating and disingenuous.

Obviously, one reason he has kept quiet until now is that he wants to drive up interest in (and sales of) his forthcoming book. In noting that profit motive, it must be said, Team Trump is correct. But Old Testament-style vengeance, even more than love of filthy lucre, seems to be the motivating force here. In any event, Bolton’s self-aggrandizement does not change the substance of what he has to say in the slightest, nor its import. He would hardly be the first lowlife gangster to turn on his former family and aid the prosecution and the public it serves, whatever his motives.

In purely practical terms, a live TV appearance before the Senate would likely be the best advertising for his book for which John Bolton and his publishers could ever hope. Graeme Wood of the Atlantic writes that Bolton is an ice cold motherfucker who has patiently bided his time, waiting for the moment when he can do maximum damage to Trump, while still maintaining his right wing cred, with an eye on his position in the post-Trumpian Republican world, should one ever come to be.

OK with me. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and if Bolton’s bruised ego causes him to become an improbable John Dean and bring Trump down, God bless him. We can return to enmity another day.

One last note:

Reportedly, several GOP senators are furious with the White House, having now learned that it has known the contents of Bolton’s book since late December, and put them in this extremely awkward position. And it gets worse. At the time of the January 3^rd drone strike on Qasem Suleimani, I was among many to half-joke that Trump was trying to buy Bolton’s silence with this high-risk step toward Johnny’s longtime dream of a shooting war with Iran. (“Might Trump even have privately offered to start that war in exchange for Bolton’s cooperation? Does Brett Kavanaugh like beer?”) Now we find that that is not such a joke after all. Laurence Tribe notes that the White House was given its advance copy of Bolton’s book on December 30, and killed Suleimani three days later.

Just in case you thought there was anything that was beneath this insane clown president and his grotesque collective of business-suited henchmen.

NOT NOW JOHN

Bolton’s bombshell may or may not force the Senate to hear from witnesses. Even in the wake of these revelations, I would not be at all surprised to see the GOP stick to its “move along, folks, nothing to see here” stance. In fact, they might need to dig in even further, given the growing threat. Going on four years now, I have not yet overestimated their venality.

For the time being the GOP remains sickeningly servile to the monstrous leader with whom it has made its Faustian bargain. Trump’s alleged comment that any Republican who votes against him will have his or her “head on a pike” (you know, the way the accused talks to a jury?) sure rings true, despite the inevitable White House denials. I’m sure Donald is privately proud of it and how well it’s worked. This is the language of a mob boss, as many have noted. To watch the Republican senators tremble in such fear of this has-been game show host is appalling to behold. Does not one of them have a single working vertebra?

We are about to find out.

**********

In part two of this essay, we’ll look at what effect the Bolton Bombshell is likely to have, the GOP’s flimsy defense of Trump, and gaze into the crystal ball to imagine what the post-Trump world might look like, should it ever arrive…..

Photo: Evan Vucci/AP Images

And so the long overdue trial of President Donald John Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors has at last begun. We pretty much know where it’s going to go, but if there’s one thing the past four years ought to have taught us, it’s that even the most outrageous surprises and shocks ought not to surprise or shock us. So buckle the fuck up.

Already it’s been head-spinning.

For starters, the past week saw the Senate open its impeachment proceedings with momentarily reassuring solemnity and ceremony……until one realized that this is precisely the kind of charade that the GOP wants, a veneer of gravitas and seriousness that masks the utter depravity of the highway robbery actually about to go on.

The tip off was the surreal spectacle of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham raising their right hands and swearing an oath that they would be impartial jurors, after bragging to the press (and the President, and their voters back home) that they were going to be anything but. Predictions that someone, anyone on the Democratic side would say boo in objection proved laughable.

As if to make the point, even as that farce was unfolding, last week also saw stunning new evidence of Trump’s complicity in Rudy Giuliani’s “drug deal” (John Bolton’s words, not mine), and a jawdropping TV interview in which Lev Parnas calmly implicated just about every swinging richard in the administration in the crudest kind of political gangsterism imaginable.

(The president’s defenders immediately attacked Parnas as a disreputable thug and indicted felon out only  to save his own skin—much like they once attacked Michael Cohen on the same grounds. And as with Michael Cohen, I feel compelled to point out that Trump hired this guy.)

Last week also gave us an except from Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker’s new book A Very Stable Genius which details a 2017 incident in a classified Pentagon briefing room in which a draft-dodging ex-game show host and serial grifter–cum-Russian stooge berated decorated four-star generals who’d devoted their lives to serving this country, calling them “dopes and babies.” It saw the mainstream media behaving like TMZ in breathlessly manufacturing a fight between Bernie and Elizabeth Warren….Susan Collins continue to disgrace herself…..Trump poaching Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team (perfect!)…..and the emergence of the newest member of the rogues’ gallery of Trump associates, the grotesque Robert F. Hyde, congressional candidate and amateur US ambassador-stalker. (Can I just ask: what the hell is up with that guy?)

And then there was Republican Senator Martha McSally of Arizona, who made news with a sneering, contrived putdown of CNN reporter Manu Raju calculated to thrill the right wing electorate.

Dig it: When McSally ran for the Senate in November 2018, she lost to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. (I repeat. She lost to a Democrat. In Arizona.) She is only in the Senate now because Arizona’s Republican governor appointed her to fill the seat being vacated by retiring Senator Jon Kyl, who himself had stepped in only temporarily after John McCain died. Now McSally is locked in a desperate fight to stay in office, with threats both from her right flank in the upcoming GOP primary, and from the left in the subsequent general election, in the person of her popular Democratic opponent, former astronaut Mark Kelly (also Gabby Giffords’ husband, by the by).

In that context, it is generally assumed that McSally’s performance was a deliberate ploy aimed at shoring up the mouthbreather vote, rather than a genuine expression of her contempt for the widely respected Mr. Raju as a “liberal hack.” Which raises the question: if you’re only pretending to be a troglodyte in order to win over the troglodytes, at what point does that behavior actually make you a troglodyte?

The ever-incisive Greg Sargent wrote in the Washington Post:

In a perverse way, it’s fitting that this episode is going viral at exactly the moment when President Trump’s impeachment trial is getting underway—that is, when Trump’s defenders in the Senate are set to put on a great show of pretending to give serious consideration to the case against Trump, before voting to acquit him. McSally’s vile little performance puts the lie to that notion as effectively as anything possibly could.

PRO WRESTLING IN THE CAPITOL

So now the main event is about to begin, even if the fix is clearly in.

For its opening stages, the first questions are whether the GOP will vote to dismiss right off the bat, and whether any witnesses are going to be called before Moscow Mitch pronounces Trump sinless as Jesus Christ and twice as good on camera.

Dismissal seems unlikely, if only for tactical reasons. For once, Team Trump may be smart enough to avoid asking for an embarrassing losing vote, while McConnell knows there’s no need to be even more brazen than usual when he can just as easily arrange an acquittal in a couple weeks’ time. (Then again, no one has yet overestimated either one’s arrogance, so let’s wait and see.)

When it comes to the latter question, Charlie Sykes noted in the Bulwark that Trump’s repeated, histrionic calls for the Senate to hear witnesses will of course soon be revealed as “bullshit, as the president will make every effort to block any witnesses from testifying at the trial.”

And no wonder. We are getting a fuller picture of the cloud of sleaze, corruption, and sheer stupidity that surrounds his presidency and his dealings with Ukraine. As David French notes, the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his “team” (including Lev Parnas) were a virtual traveling Mos Eisley cantina of crooks, grifters, and amateurs…..

But on that point of just how kangarooish this trial is going to be, the most pertinent thing I read all week was satire from the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri, in a piece called “Sure, Whatever, Let’s Have Witnesses. Maybe That’ll Finally Convince Me Trump Is Guilty”:

I thought I was at a point where no fact, however compelling, could possibly break through my blissful fog of ignorant support for President Trump, but—I’d love to be proved wrong!….

So, why not have witnesses! Sure, let’s hear from John Bolton! Let’s hear from Lev Parnas! Maybe reading a note on some Ritz-Carlton stationery describing the president’s involvement in withholding aid in exchange for the announcement of an investigation into his political rival will turn out to be the thing that changes my mind.

Ouch. She’s dead right, of course. Nothing is going to open the hermetically sealed minds of MAGA Nation, not even a time-stamped video of Donald dressed like a French maid and giving Vlad Putin a Robert Kraft-style happy ending.

Don’t get me wrong. There are numerous very good reasons why the Senate ought to hear from fact witnesses: in order to discharge its constitutional duty, to let the truth be known, and to demonstrate to the country and the world the manifest criminality that Senate Republicans are about to shamelessly excuse. Indeed, there are no good reasons it should not hear witnesses.

But Petri’s point—that nothing is going to change the minds of Trump’s faithful, least of all facts, no matter how irrefutable—speaks to the broader truth at the core of this entire national nightmare, one that I’ve written about over and over: millions of Americans simply do not care about Trump’s crimes, or his shocking unfitness for the presidency, or the danger he poses to the republic and the world.

And that is only a subset of a larger and even more alarming fact: that belief in objective reality itself—truth, as it quaintly used to be called—is vanishing. But it is not vanishing of its own accord. It is vanishing because it is under relentless attack by forces that benefit from its obliteration.

Guess who.

THE TRIUMPH OF TRUTHINESS

The destruction of objective reality as a commonly accepted metric has been widely remarked upon as probably the most dangerous aspect of Trump’s reign, one that promises to have lasting and deleterious consequences long after this oranged-hued pustule of an alleged human being has been lanced.

To understand why, and how it came to be, let’s look to Russia, global leader in ballet, ice hockey, and radioactive teacups.

Unlike old-fashioned dictators, Vladimir Putin has pioneered the art of despotism that gives the illusion of freedom, making it all the more insidious. Freedom of speech exists in Putin’s Russia, but is toothless. The mass of the Russian people willingly, even eagerly, submit to his authoritarian reign (a la À Nous la Liberté), having been beaten into a state of collective cynicism. For Putin, the preferred mindset of his loyal subjects is that all politicians are corrupt and dishonest, the truth is unknowable, and liberal democracy is just as much a sham as post-Soviet autocracy.

To achieve this state of intellectual paralysis and submission, Vlad has mounted a war on the very idea of truth itself. As Dave Roberts wrote in Vox last November:

As Putin and other modern autocrats have realized, in the modern media environment—a chaotic Wild West where traditional gatekeepers are in decline—it is not necessary for a repressive regime to construct its own coherent account of events. There are no broadly respected, nonpartisan referees left to hold it to account for consistency or accuracy. All it needs, to get away with whatever it wants, is for the information environment to be so polluted that no one can figure out what’s true and what isn’t, or what’s really going on.

Or as Garry Kasparov famously said (and he oughta know): “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

I have written previously about this, in Rudy Giuliani: Post-Modern Philosopher (August 20, 2018), The Death of Hypocrisy (October 22, 2018), The Right Wing Loop of Malicious Ignorance (March 1, 2019), and The End of Outrage (June 20, 2019). But the most exhaustive exploration of the topic to my knowledge is British filmmaker Adam Curtis’s stunning documentary HyperNormalisation, available for free on his preferred platform, YouTube. Curtis’s movie explores the origins of this effort in (not kidding) Russian avant garde theater, and its weaponization by Putin to neutralize meaningful dissent and political opposition. And it’s a model he is successfully exporting to his client state the USA even as we speak.

More recently there was a brilliant deconstruction of this phenomenon by Sean Illing, also in Vox. Let me quote from it at length:

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism. The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable….

What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable….

Illing goes on to quote the smug and insufferable (but not wrong) Steve Bannon, who in 2018 notoriously said that, “The Democrats don’t matter; the real opposition is the media.” In other words, the Republicans’ true enemy are facts themselves, and those who would point them out. Bannon’s solution, which he proudly touts, has been “to flood the zone with shit”…..that is, to apply those Russian-pioneered and tested principles detailed in HyperNormalisation. Illing again:

We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment has done very little to move public opinion….

(Zone-flooding) produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative.

Illing goes on to quote Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic and the author of a book on the subject, who contends that Putin’s aim “wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that ‘the truth is unknowable’ and that the only sensible choice is ‘to follow a strong leader.’”

That terrifying epistemological void represents the exact dynamics described in Erich Fromm’s seminal 1941 book Escape from Freedom…..which is to say, the human impulse to trade freedom for security, accounting for the otherwise mysterious appeal of a tyrant.

Though Illing refers above to an informational “fog” (even Petri uses that term in her satire), it’s actually something much more sinister than that naturally occurring phenomenon, with its benign Sandburgian associations. It’s more like smog: a toxic miasma, one deliberately produced by folks with ill intent, meant to obscure and choke.

The evidence suggests it is working depressingly well.

INK-STAINED WRETCHES AND UNWITTING ACCOMPLICES

Like a frivolous lawsuit, this Putin/Bannon-style disinformation does not have to have any credibility to achieve its goal: just sowing doubt is enough. Inserting into the media bloodstream an unfounded rumor—sometimes called a “lie”—or scurrilous innuendo, or outright slander, poisons the informational system by definition. It doesn’t matter if it’s untrue, or easily disproven: its mere existence creates at least some believers, and enough confusion to achieve its intended, malicious effect. The goal is simply to create a false equivalence in which an absurd contention—the earth is flat, climate change is a hoax, Trump understands the nuclear triad—is given just as much credence and weight as a demonstrably true one.

The media’s inherent impulse toward “objectivity” only exacerbates the problem. In another Vox piece called “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology,” published early in the Trump administration, the aforementioned David Roberts argued that “journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible.” Yet even after being played for suckers in 2016, the mainstream US media continues to treat Trump like an ordinary politician, not the dangerous, lie-spewing psychopath he is. A prime example was the response to Trump’s  batshit six-page letter of last December 17, which was reported with headlines like “Trump Savages Impeachment Proceedings in Letter to Pelosi” (from Politico), and “Trump Slams Impeachment as an ‘Illegal, Partisan Attempted Coup’” (CNBC), and not the more accurate and appropriate “Trump Goes on Unhinged Rant; SWAT Team of Psychiatrists Called In.”

But even when pushing back, as they occasionally do, presents journalists with a dilemma which speaks to the difficulty of reporting on a player operating in bad faith. Illing cites UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff on the “framing effect,” which holds that the more a lie is repeated—even in the process of debunking it—the more we begin to believe it, as the sheer repetition inevitably cements it in the mind and gives it the halo of truth.

That puts Trump’s critics in a real bind. As Illing writes:

Debunking it is still useful, of course, but there’s a cost to dignifying it in the first place…. There are too many claims to debunk and too many conflicting narratives. And the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it and, in some cases, normalize it.

Another toxic effect of “flooding the zone” is that it dishonestly tars legitimate news organizations as being no better than their underhanded and untruthful rivals:

The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it’s still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.

As a recent book by three Harvard researchers explains, this just isn’t true of the right. American conservative media functions like a closed system, with Fox News at the center. Right-wing outlets are less tethered to conventional journalistic ethics and exist mostly to propagate the bullshit they produce.

Ironically, Trump’s supporters viciously distrust the media—but only the legitimate media, while eagerly ingesting “news” from a wanton disinformation machine like Fox. But that is the very point: that these fellow Americans of ours are in a Bizarro World where up is down, right is wrong, and day is night, projecting on the other side (and especially the “other side’s” media, as they view it) their own side’s most grievous sins.

In addition to the debasement of traditional journalism, the rise of social media and technological developments in just the last ten years have turbocharged this already dangerous situation, as Illing alluded to above:

One major reason for the (Bannon) strategy’s success, both in the US and Russia, is that it coincided with a moment when the technological and political conditions were in place for it to thrive. Media fragmentation, the explosion of the internet, political polarization, curated timelines, and echo chambers—all of this allows a “flood the zone with shit” strategy to work.

Today, gatekeepers still matter in terms of setting a baseline for political knowledge, but there’s much more competition for clicks and audiences, and that alters the incentives for what’s declared newsworthy in the first place. At the same time, traditional media outlets remain committed to a set of norms that are ill adapted to the modern environment.

To that end, the scariest horror movie of the past year might have been the feature documentary The Great Hack by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, detailing how Cambridge Analytica ratfucked the 2016 election, and how the exponential growth of data mining is feeding a vast global campaign of meticulously specific and targeted disinformation, with a sophistication never before possible in human history.

WHAT, ME WORRY?

In some ways, though, this story is not all that alarming. After all, we’re not talking about covert manipulation of voting machines. (We should be, but we’re not.) In the end, no matter how intense or sophisticated this disinformation may be, what it comes down to is nothing more than trying to change people’s minds. No one is forcing anyone to vote for Trump, or surreptitiously changing their vote (as far as we know). All they’re doing is barraging us 24/7 with propaganda and lies that browbeat, deceive, and otherwise manipulate us into supporting political positions that are in opposition to the facts, our own true interests, and anything approaching defensible morality.

Yeah. That’s all.

It’s true that millions of thoughtful Americans have proven resistant to the firehose of bullshit that is aimed at them every day. Critical thinking remains the hazmat suit that protects against such venomous informational warfare.

Even so, it goes without saying that it is not healthy for a representative democracy to be under this kind of malicious, non-stop, psychological assault. Even if you personally are clear-thinking enough to see through the propaganda, not everyone is. We all know (and many of us are related to) otherwise intelligent, educated people—some of them very intelligent and very well-educated—who for one reason or another have been taken in by the con artistry of the current moment. And we flatter ourselves even to think that we ourselves are immune to it. Brainwashing works, and Stockholm syndrome is real; sufficient repetition of a lie will eventually crack even the most rational mind and the strongest will. The smog machine is a severe threat to democracy that we ignore at our peril.

Now the good news: I am told by professionals in the field that we can use this law of informational physics for our own purposes as well, to counter dark propaganda and obliterate the lies. It ain’t easy. But if we continue to hammer our own message—which has the advantage of being true—small cracks will begin to appear in the red wall of ignorance and slavish blind faith that feeds the Trumpian cult of personality. And once those cracks appear, they can be widened. People do leave cults, after all.

Of course, others drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and die.

CUI BONO

Illing explains how this dynamic has played out in the impeachment saga:

The Trump administration has been remarkably successful at muddying the waters on Ukraine and impeachment, and Republicans in Congress have helped by parroting the administration’s talking points.

The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals. And we know this because of the witnesses who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and because Trump’s own White House released a record of the call proving it.

Yet all the polling data we have suggests that public opinion on Trump and Ukraine has basically held steady. Again, some of this is pure partisan recalcitrance. But there’s good reason to believe that the right’s muddying of the waters—making the story about Ukraine and Hunter Biden, pushing out conspiracy theories, repeatedly trumpeting Trump’s own version of events, etc.—has played a role.

The issue is that the coverage of the trials, in both the mainstream press and right-wing outlets, ensures that these counternarratives are part of the public conversation. It adds to the general atmosphere of doubt and confusion. And that’s why zone flooding presents a near-insoluble problem for the press.

Roberts again: “This is what Republicans need more than anything on impeachment: for the general public to see it as just another round of partisan squabbling, another illustration of how ‘Washington’ is broken.”

But in truth, any reasonable, clear-eyed evaluation of the simple facts of Ukrainegate blows that “both sides have a point”-ism right out of the water. And that’s just what we know. Lev Parnas’s TV appearances last week made it very clear that there is still a helluva lot we don’t know, and none of it is likely very good news for Trump.

But will any of it matter?

In his Vox piece from last November, David Roberts wondered “what would happen if Robert Mueller offered clear, incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt. Would Republicans be able to prevent supporters from ever finding out? What if the truth was revealed but it had no power, no effect at all, because half the country had been walled off from it? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that can overcome our polarization?”

Now, with Ukrainegate, that scenario looks like it is about to come to pass.

This is the point I have been hammering on about for months: that we would not be in this fix if millions of Americans were not totally onboard with this monstrosity of a US presidency. Even though they are in the minority, their political clout is sufficient to empower the venal Republican leadership to keep a chokehold on the republic.

Another way to look at it is that the rest of America—the majority, that is—has been insufficiently militant in getting to our feet and making our voices heard that we will not stand for this shit.

As impeachment remains unlikely to evict Trump, and exercise of the 25^th Amendment is hopeless, the ballot box remains our last best hope to save the United States as we once knew it. Last week the WaPo ran article titled, “Poll Finds Black Americans Determined to Limit Trump to One Term.” Oh let it be so, for we all know that the African-American vote is critical to getting this sonofabitch out of office. So let’s translate that anger into levers pulled and boxes checked and chads punched at the polls in November.

But oh the irony that we are counting on black Americans to save the republic. After all it’s done for them.

STARR CHAMBER

All of which brings us back to Trump’s trial itself. As the author Erick Kelemen writes, Ken Starr couldn’t get a conviction in the last impeachment; maybe he’ll do better this time.

Jonathan Chait has already pre-emptively destroyed the GOP’s absurd defense, per Starr’s colleague Alan Dershowitz, which seems to hinge on the monarchist notion that a US president cannot be removed for abuse of power, an absolutely ass-backwards inversion of the entire impeachment clause.

Trump believes profoundly that a president can use the government exactly as he sees fit. In his mind, “abuse of power” is an oxymoron. To charge him with “abusing” the presidency makes no more sense than charging him with abusing the Trump Organization for personal gain. And now the authoritarian conviction that Trump believes as a matter of instinct has been sanctified as a formal legal theory, endorsed by presidential lawyers.

As my friend Susan Koppenhaver writes, let’s try swapping “Obama” for “Trump” in this above-the-law defense and see how long Republicans stick with that theory.

Dershowitz is arguing that the Founders didn’t really mean “high crimes and misdemeanors” when they wrote “high crimes and misdemeanors”….they meant ordinary crimes, like robbing a bank, or shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. (Ahem.)

Two problems with that.

First, as Chait points out, the GAO just publicly announced its conclusion that Trump did commit a literal crime in withholding aid to Ukraine. And second, it didn’t take long for the press to dig up video of Dersh telling CNN exactly the opposite in 1998:

It certainly doesn’t have to be a crime, if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president, and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don’t need a technical crime.

But even as risible and utterly without merit as this defense is, it may well be enough of a fig leaf—more than enough, in fact—for Republicans to hold in front of their tiny tiny testicles as they vote to acquit (and thereby further embolden) Donald Trump. Even less credible is the Republican argument that we ought to leave it to the next election to decide what we should do about a president who is trying to steal that election.

Charlie Sykes again:

It would almost be funny, if the stakes were not so high. We are, after all, watching a bad reality television show with nuclear weapons and a president whose contempt for the rule of law will be unleashed by the near-inevitable vote to acquit.

The conduct involved is serious enough, but this is what makes this trial unique: it involves an ongoing high crime and misdemeanor. The key difference between this investigation and the Mueller probe is that his misconduct in Ukraine is prospective—it involves attempts to meddle with the upcoming election, not the last one. His presidency remains an active crime scene….

(Republicans’) eventual vote to acquit Trump will be even more dangerous because “exoneration” will further embolden a president who already runs his government like a gangster. How might he react? What might he do? Never forget: This Ukraine adventure began literally the day after Robert Mueller testified before Congress and Trump thought that he had been let off the hook for obstructing justice.

So tomorrow, when the impeachment trial begins in earnest, the effect of this epistemological shitshow will be on full display. Every indication is that the Republicans will make an absolute sham of it. But their ability to do so, and get away with it, will be predicated on the willingness of millions of Americans to ignore indisputable evidence in favor of immersion in counter-factual fantasy and post-modern rejection of the very concept of objective reality.

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Illustration: National Geographic