Well, that was quite a week. But of course, not that much stranger than many other weeks in the past six months, which is the truly astonishing part.

Just to recap a few highlights:

A day player from The Sopranos became White House communications director and used the words “suck my own cock” on the record with a reporter in his first week on the job….Our insane clown president gave a speech at a Boy Scout jamboree that was more like a toast at a bachelor party in a strip club….The White House Chief of Staff got fired, pausing on his way out to lick his tormentor’s boots one last time….Jared Kushner tried to blame his treason on his secretary….The so-called President relentlessly attacked his own Attorney General on Twitter (he does know he can just fire him, right?), part of an impeachment-worthy panic attack aimed at stopping a federal inquiry barreling down on him….. This same alleged leader of the Free World blindsided the military and gave the lie to the idea that, while he may be a racist and a misogynist, at least he’s LGBTQ-friendly (Log Cabin Republicans, how do you like him now?)….Benito Cheeto (h/t Greg Proops and Richard Berge) followed that with two other speeches—one at a campaign-style rally in Ohio where he graciously conceded that Lincoln (but only Lincoln) was more presidential than he, the other to police officers on Long Island where he lobbied for more aggressive police brutality…..And last but not least, a former POW with brain cancer flew across the country to stick a dagger into Trumpcare, joining two brave female Senators who were the only other Republicans to stand up against this travesty, thus ensuring that the GOP again failed to do the one thing that for the past seven years they’ve been hysterically screaming that they would do if put in power.

But I’m sure all will be fine next week. Good luck General Kelly!

HELLO CLEVELAND

Reince Priebus joins Sean Spicer—and perhaps presages Jeff Sessions—in the category of people I shed no tears for: quislings who emasculated themselves and enabled their former boss’s shameful agenda. And their reward for such slobbering subservience? Humiliation and dismissal. With Trump, loyalty is a one way street on which you are certain to get run the fuck over. They deserved what they got.

That said, the more chaos that ensues in the West Wing and the more rats who leave that sinking ship, the faster it will go down. Given how much debasement and abuse Priebus and Spicer were subjected to (remember when Trump wouldn’t let Spicey meet the Pope?), I hope they both take their revenge and tell everything they know. But so far they seem disinclined to do so—Priebus especially. In his pathetic farewell statement to CNN, the artist formerly known as Reince—obsequious to the very end—even praised Trump’s decision to fire him (“he was right to hit the reset button”) and endorsed the comical notion that President just “wanted to go in a different direction.”

As my friend, the great piano player/bandleader/composer Joe McGinty says, “I look forward to his jazz-rock fusion ensemble.”

(Priebus already sounds like the name of a prog rock band. I loved their early stuff, before they went all commercial.)

But Reince always was a sniveling little punk, one who bears more blame than most for the rise of Trump in the first place. As chairman of the RNC, he could have stood up to this absurd fake politician during the primaries and possibly derailed his candidacy (a candidacy to which it was very clear he and the rest of the GOP mandarins were staunchly opposed), or at least laid down the law and created some parameters for continued RNC support. Instead he coddled the Donald, prefiguring the now-standard GOP policy of cowering before the almighty “base,” and eventually migrated from being Trump’s equal within the party—or even his superior—to his slavering minion and whipping boy as chief of staff. So it’s no surprise that the way he went out smacked of his trademark cowardice. (“Thank you sir, may I have another?”)

Even on a purely pragmatic, self-serving level I’m not sure what Reince is hoping to gain by continuing to stand—or more accurately, kneel—by Trump’s side. His political career is in cinders after yoking himself to this cretin. In the short term he’s radioactive to the GOP while Trump remains in power; when the Donald goes out, he’ll be permanently tarred by his association with him. In the very long term he’ll be forever linked with a man who is sure to go down in history as an almost unfathomable abomination. All nothing less than Priebus so richly deserves.

Other enablers, take note.

BLAME IT ON RIO, OR WHOEVER

As bad as Priebus was, he is hardly to blame for the dysfunction of this administration. The notion is laughable, in fact. Trump notoriously blames everyone but himself for all his problems, of which he is so obviously the chief cause. Kindergarteners are better schooled in personal responsibility.

Can John Kelly get control of this chaotic Three Stooges sketch that calls itself a White House? Notwithstanding the disciplinary and organizational skills of a four-star Marine general, it seems doubtful, given that the wellspring of the chaos is Trump himself. Trump has never shown any ability to listen to the wisdom of qualified advisors, nor let them do what they have to do for his own good. I have no doubt that Kelly will run a tighter ship than Reince, but unless he physically wrenches Trump’s smartphone from his tiny hands, I don’t foresee a sea change.

Among the sins that cost Priebus his job, reportedly, was his inability to muster the political forces necessary to pass Trumpcare, or at the very least repeal Obamacare. Really? Again, it’s laughable. Trump did almost nothing to help the GOP get their would-be signature legislation through Congress, or sell it to the public, and often actively hurt the cause. His efforts consisted primarily of insulting and bullying Senators and Congressmen, demeaning the very bills they were trying to pass, promising the American public the moon, and complaining that Chuck Schumer and the opposing team were not volunteering to help torpedo their own hard-won legislation. Predictably, Trump spent the weekend following this humiliating failure stewing at one of his golf resorts and generating another vindictive tweetstorm, complete with rants about filibuster rules that had nothing to do with Trumpcare’s collapse, further cementing the impression that he doesn’t have any idea what was in the bill, or even how the US government works. Please get this man a video of Schoolhouse Rock, stat.

It seems like Trump, not McCain, is the one with the brain tumor. Good Lord, what if the White House doctors were to find that that was the case, and remove it, and Donny woke up tomorrow after the surgery and went on TV to say, “Oh my God, I can’t believe all the things I’ve said and done for the past 71 years. I’m so sorry!”

THEN his base would turn on him.

WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO?

And thus we welcome to the national stage the fiction-beggaring Anthony Scaramucci, another member of the “Characters No Self-Respecting Screenwriter Would Dare Dream Up” Club.

Much as I will miss Shouty Spice (and even more so, Melissa McCarthy), the Mooch is a fantastic new character in the gothic soap opera that is Trump’s presidency. In that regard, he is probably the best such addition to already unmissable programming since Saul Goodman or David Puddy (high five). We’ll see how long he lasts. Perhaps when he is inevitably fired, he will be spun off into his own reality TV show on Bravo.

(For his part—SPOILER ALERT—Trump himself is poised to wind up like the protagonists of those same shows: in prison—Seinfeld —or gunned down by neo-Nazis—Breaking Bad. Maybe by Steve Bannon.)

As others have noted, the addition of the on-the-nose and over-the-top Scaramucci to The Trump Show is like a sitcom that’s slipping in the ratings and tries to generate some sparks by adding a new character ….typically, a baby. It’s always a sign of desperation, the ne plus ultra being The Flintstones’ headscratching addition of the Great Gazoo. (One could almost see Hanna-Barbera panicking that they had a show about cavemen at a time when the Space Age was all the rage. Not content with dreaming up The Jetsons, they inexplicably added a Martian to Bedrock as well. Bill Bixby and Ray Walston should have been furious.)

But I digress….

Scaramucci certainly looks like a similarly desperate move by people—one person in particular—who have no fucking idea what they’re doing. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson—in the guise of his alter ego, Raoul Duke—in one of his most famous formulations. I must confess I never fully understood what that meant, but like a lot of Hunter’s stuff it didn’t matter because it really sang and that was all that counted.

The hiring of Scaramucci certainly qualifies as weird, but he is anything but a pro when it comes to communications, of all things to put him in charge of—more evidence of the hapless amateur hour that is this administration and its uncanny ability to step on its own metaphorical dick. Yeah, the Mooch was slick as a talking head on CNN, and I have no doubt that Trump loves a guy who talks pretty much just like he does, and gives him a public handjob every chance he gets, and is nearly as tan. (My particular favorite is their mutual propensity to refer to themselves in the third person—another Seinfeldian touch.) I’m sure the “base” loves it too, since watching Team Trump serve flaming turds to an aghast Establishment is their favorite spectator sport.

But as out of his depth as Spicer was, Scaramucci is a much much bigger disaster, albeit it in a vastly different way. (Note to nitpickers: I know Mooch’s actual predecessor was Mike Dubke, but he vanished like a dissident in Pinochet’s Chile, leaving no impression and indeed little hard evidence that he was ever really there.) Word is that not only Spicer—who quit over it—but Priebus and even Bannon all vehemently opposed Mooch’s appointment as an enormous tactical mistake. If even three shitheads like that knew it was a bad idea, what does that tell you?

Well, it ought to be entertaining, at least.

Hang on: just now learning that Trump retains rights to the name “Priebus.” Band will be forced to re-name itself Reince & the Nothing-Burgers.

WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN

Per above, Confederate General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III may be the next contestant kicked off the island. I won’t shed any tears for him either. But it stunned me this week to see Republican Senators finally up in arms about something….and that something being Trump’s shocking mistreatment of his own AG, their former Senate colleague. Really? After all the other godawful things the fake president has done, that’s the bridge too far? Really shows you where their priorities are, don’t it?

I’m told that Sessions is very popular in the Senate, even among his erstwhile Democratic colleagues, having served there for twenty years, so I presume that’s the source of some of this outrage. But I find it hard to swallow, given his execrable history of civil rights abuses, voter suppression, and general channeling of the ghost of Bull Connor. (To say nothing of a bizarre fixation on hassling stoners. What a buzzkill.)

That said, I’m glad the Senate is standing up at all, no matter how unworthy the beneficiary. It would be ironic if Sessions does indeed get fired and that is the thing that finally precipitates a GOP revolt and begins the endgame of Trump’s downfall. If so, it would be the first good thing Jeff Sessions has ever done for his country.

Apart from defending Jeff, and the beautiful healthcare mutiny by Collins, Murkowski, and McCain (their best work since Woodstock, right after Neil Young left the band) the GOP continues to carry Trump’s water, particularly when it comes to Russiagate.

In a judiciary hearing last week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) claimed that there “are few things I take more seriously than the allegations of foreign interference in the 2016 election.” Is that so, Orrin? In the same breath he claimed that “many of these allegations have been truly outrageous” and “politically motivated.”

I agree that the allegations are outrageous, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true, or at least bear investigating, given the disturbing amount of smoke here suggesting a fire. As for being politically motivated, that is a convenient charge, but a specious one. Everything in Washington is politically motivated, and the GOP has no room to bitch—as in none, zero, zilch—about partisan witchhunts in the guise of public service. Ask Kevin McCarthy and the other architects of the neverending Benghazi circus.

Hatch went on, possibly setting a new world record for chutzpah and malpractice as an alleged servant of the public good: “If we are going to get to the bottom of this, we need to investigate the whole story. That means looking at more than just foreign influence over the Trump campaign. It includes looking at serious allegations of foreign influence over the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee as well.”

Yes, and while we’re at it, let’s help OJ find the real killers, too.

And Orrin Hatch is not even close to the most absurd and egregious member of the GOP when it comes to this stuff. But he’s a helluva rock star in his own right.

Lastly, and speaking of amateur hour and self-destructiveness, the new policy on transgender servicemembers came out of nowhere and created a political firestorm where there was absolutely no need. The only plausible explanation, apart from the aforementioned brain tumor, is that Trump is looking for domestic enemies to attack in order distract from his other troubles, and homos and drag queens make perfect targets in the eyes of his base. (Reportedly, Trump has also ordered all Bowie, New York Dolls, and Transformer-era Lou Reed stricken from the White House Spotify account.) Expect more of this as the vise of Russiagate continues to close on him, and further demonization of foreign enemies as well. My greatest fear remains a suspiciously convenient Gulf of Tonkin-style international crisis as Trump becomes more and more besieged and seeks ways to fight back in his inimitable cornered rat style.

But it is just as likely that the bizarre attacks on the LGBTQ front were randomly generated by his febrile, scattershot mind. In slight contrast to the transgender ban that Trump launched on Twitter (!), the DOJ’s argument that civil rights laws don’t apply to sexual orientation seems more like a consciously planned maneuver. But its timing too is suspect, except as part of the administration’s general crusade to turn the clock back to 1951. Just in case you, like the United States Senate, were beginning to feel any sympathy for Jeff Sessions.

Sigh. Trying to catch my breath from all this. What jawdropping absurdities will this week bring? Who knows. But I look forward to hearing the Mooch explain it….

Beginning with the 1991 Gulf War, our society’s adoration of the military has begun to border on fetishization. But that hero worship falls apart a little bit when it comes to the brass.

When matters of national security are portrayed in American pop culture, the usual caricature is that of the warmongering generals restrained by cooler civilian heads. It’s a cliché that could hardly be more trite and hackneyed. It’s the nature of comedy to depict authority figures as pompous and out of touch, but the strict regimentation and hierarchy of military culture—right down to wardrobe and costume jewelry—makes generals and admirals especially ripe for ridicule.

No one did it better than Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick to blackly comic effect in Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). But when it comes to fictional coups d’etat and/or accidental nuclear wars, there has also been Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, Twilight’s Last Gleaming (strangely, Burt Lancaster’s second turn as a rogue Air Force general), and lesser others. Indeed, the loose cannon military martinet is among the laziest of tropes.

Which doesn’t mean it is always untrue.

BANGS AND WHIMPERS

We now know that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Kennedy’s calm, restrained response saved the world from the global apocalypse that would have ensued had he followed the bellicose advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff. (“These brass hats have one great advantage,” an appalled Kennedy memorably told an aide. “If we do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”) It was bold of the young president to defy them, and not easy to do at a time when his foreign policy bonafides were wobbly after being embarrassed by Khrushchev in Vienna, launching the Bay of Pigs debacle, and getting mixed reviews on a series of crises in Berlin. But JFK’s clear-eyed thinking and rock-ribbed courage saved our bacon in that dark October.

Of course, Kennedy had been a warrior himself, famously saving the lives of his crew on the PT-109 as a young Navy lieutenant in the South Pacific in World War II. Perhaps he had already been disabused of any unearned awe at the pronouncements of flag officers.

In his superb and epic 2007 book House of War, author James Carroll tells another a chilling story that took place a year before the Cuban crisis. In early 1961, newly installed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asked to see the Pentagon’s top secret plan for waging nuclear war, contained in a pair of documents known as the SIOP (Single Integrated Operating Plan) and the even more comprehensive J-SCAP (Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan), prepared by the Air Force and Navy, as custodians of the US nuclear arsenal. Incredibly, the Pentagon brass informed McNamara—their superior—that he didn’t have a high enough security clearance to see the plan.

In fact, for the preceding ten years USAF General Curtis LeMay, the godfather of the Strategic Air Command, had refused to show the plan for how we would fight a nuclear war (then called the “Basic War Plan”) to anyone, even the Joint Chiefs, all of whom outranked him. LeMay and his bomber staff showed the White House and their other superiors only what they felt like. (Ironically, McNamara had been one of LeMay’s subordinates as a junior staff officer during the bombing of Germany. Perhaps LeMay didn’t notice that their positions had reversed.)

In the popular imagination McNamara has been vilified, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, and rarely given credit for his occasional shining moments. But this was one of them. The outraged SecDef rightly insisted on being briefed on the goddam plan. What he was shown astonished him. As Carroll writes, the Pentagon plan was no plan at all. It called for an all-out orgasmic strike on every single city in the Soviet Union, its satellite nations, and China, using every last warhead in the American arsenal, with enemy dead conservatively predicted to be more than 400 million. Moreover, in order for this scheme to work, SAC needed to initiate the US nuclear “response” at the slightest hint of provocation by Moscow, before any Soviet missiles hit the US, a system which required an immediate unilateral decision by the SAC commander—not even the head of the Air Force—with no time to obtain permission from the White House.

In short, it was Strangelove come true. LeMay—the real life, cigar-chomping inspiration for Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper—had secretly usurped the president’s prerogative as the sole individual who could authorize the use of nuclear weapons. When Kubrick’s film came out some three years after the McNamara incident, Daniel Ellsberg was a still-unknown analyst for the RAND Corporation, privy to the top secret inner workings of the American nuclear machine, including the J-SCAP, which he was the first civilian to read. Walking out of the theater after seeing the film, he reportedly marveled to a friend, “That was a documentary!”

REINING IN OUR MANCHILD SOVEREIGN

Weirdly, the United States now has precisely the opposite situation. An ignorant, impulsive bully of a president—totally unschooled in even the basics of military affairs, security policy, and national defense, and needless to say with no military experience of his own—appears to be restrained from blowing up the planet only by the calm, steadying hand of a few military professionals: chiefly, Marine General (Ret.) James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the current SecDef, and active duty Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor. (And lest we forget, there is also retired Marine General John Kelly, head of the Department of Homeland Security, which is now very much a part of the national security state.)

Anyone with brainwave activity ought to be shitting their pants that a man like Trump is in possession of the nuclear codes. We have a president (I’m using the term loosely) who, while running for office, recklessly advocated war crimes like torture, killing the family members of suspected terrorists, and wantonly stealing the resources of conquered enemies…..who openly pondered why we have nuclear weapons if we never get to use them….who suggested that it might be a good idea to have more, not less, nuclear proliferation, to include encouraging Saudi Arabia and Japan to acquire their own nuclear arsenals…..and who since taking office has done more damage to US security and global stability than most of our enemies could have hoped to cause themselves.

The American people have inexplicably given a D-list TV celebrity and real estate con man command of the most powerful military force in human history (along with the right to reshape the Supreme Court for the next thirty years, and almost unlimited power to pardon all his associates for crimes all the way up to and including treason). What could go wrong? So it is a rich irony that politically progressive Americans now find themselves thanking god for Mattis and McMaster as stabilizing influences on this monstrous head of state.

When a man whose nickname is “Mad Dog” is seen as the sanest dude in the administration, you know we’re in uncharted waters.

PURITY OF ESSENCE

It’s hard to know how successful these generals have been thus far in controlling our fake president. We haven’t yet gotten into a thermonuclear war with North Korea—or Australia, or Gabon—so that’s encouraging. I also found it heartening that during the pathetic circle jerk of a Cabinet meeting wherein Trump demanded that his minions lavish him with public praise, Jim Mattis alone found a way to salvage his dignity (without submitting his resignation) by deftly pivoting to praise the men and women of the Defense Department, rather than His Royal Highness the Emperor Pussy Grabber. If Trump noticed the Jedi mind trick, he either didn’t take offense or was too intimidated by the fabled Warrior Monk to complain.

But a few events on the geopolitical front in the past six months have caused a cold chill to go down my spine, and I’m not even talking about when Trump gave top secret codeword intel to the Russians on a silver platter. One was when Donald Trump nonchalantly ordered a commando raid in Yemen that the Obama administration had deemed too risky, one that resulted in the deaths of a US Navy SEAL and numerous innocent children. Another was when he ordered a Tomahawk missile strike on Syria, the exact kind of largely symbolic, operationally ineffectual reaction for which he used to excoriate Barack Obama. A third was when Trump—by delegating the authority to the local ground commander—effectively assented to dropping a MOAB, the largest non-nuclear piece of ordnance in the US arsenal, on ISIS elements in Afghanistan. I don’t object to the use of that weapon in principle, or even to that delegation of authority. But in light of Trump’s overall jingoism, it speaks to his casualness with regard to the use of force, the slippery slope of escalation, and a worrying reinforcement of the dumbass mentality that all we need is bigger bombs. Not to mention the despicable glee of his supporters over its use.

All of these occasions made me stop in my tracks and remember that Donald J. Trump is now legally allowed to order the killing of human beings virtually at will, a privilege that he exercises on a regular basis, and apparently with no more introspection than he tweets. That is a stunning and deeply depressing reality of the Twilight Zone in which we now live.

It’s unquestionably good that we have men like Mattis and McMaster—the so-called “Axis of Adults”—as curbs on Trump’s ignorance, impulsiveness, and general (no pun intended) belligerence. God help us if we did not. The CIA and other elements of the US Intelligence Community—members of the so-called “Deep State”—are in a similar role as unlikely defenders of democracy to whom the left is looking hopefully.

But it’s worth remembering that it’s not an ideal situation. The Founders established absolute civilian control of the military for good reason. (Yes, Jim Mattis is technically a civilian, but the man spent 44 years in the Marine Corps. His nominal status as a retired general rather than an active duty one does not materially change his military-oriented perspective and approach. Any jarhead will tell you that there is no such thing as an ex-Marine.) Our current situation is unique, but untenable as a permanent state of affairs. A country in which the military must be relied on to check the worst impulses of its venal civilian leaders is not a a country that’s going to remain a democracy for very long.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

So what are the dangers of the status quo?

Many years ago, as a teenager, I read a rare fictional piece in one of my father’s professional journals about a military coup in the United States. Written as a cautionary tale, its premise was that the Pentagon brass grew tired of being tasked with more and more responsibilities beyond their normal purview of warfighting and finally decided that if the American people were going to ask that much of them, they might as well just take over the government full stop. It was a warning against “mission creep” at a time when the armed forces almost alone among public institutions in the post-Watergate era retained and even increased its standing among the American people.

If that was true in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, even in the wake of Vietnam, it is infinitely more true now.

Since the end of the draft in 1975 and the subsequent rise of the “all-volunteer force,” there has been an ever-widening chasm between that tiny sliver of Americans who carry out the deadly business of defending this nation, and the rest of the country that benefits from their labors. The many dangers of that unjust system is a complex topic for another day. But one aspect pertinent to this discussion is the collective guilt it has inspired, and the insidious ways that guilt manifests itself.

The over-the-top valorization of those who serve or have served in uniform is now endemic in our society, from F-16 flyovers at the Super Bowl to the endless, hollow exhortations to “support the troops,” reflecting the unease—conscious or otherwise—many Americans feel for how little they must sacrifice for their own security.

An even more dangerous effect is how the civilian population regularly prostrates itself before our military, afraid to offer even the slightest criticism or dissent. Even our political leaders often submissively defer to the judgment of military professionals when they should not, and sometimes even when they are duty-bound to do otherwise. Allegedly this was the great lesson of Vietnam: that the craven politicians “didn’t let” our soldiers win. It’s considerably more complicated than that, of course. The hubris and errors of our civilian leadership in that era (and since) are undeniable, as is the value of drawing on the expert advice of career military officers. But the military is by no means infallible. By. No. Means. Any warrior who pretends otherwise is full of shit.

In the most galling recent example, Trump—who during the campaign famously bragged that he knew “more about ISIS than the generals”—has largely abdicated responsibility for huge chunks of military decision-making that rightly belong to the president alone (such as troop levels in Afghanistan), and instead given Mattis full authority to make those calls. That is not admirable respect for the military; it’s shitty leadership. The president is supposed to be leading this country. If he is incapable of doing so, the answer is not to pass the buck to uniformed subordinates, but to get a president who can do the job.

I’m sure she’s out there.

Asked recently about Trump’s fitness to serve as commander-in-chief, retired General Dave Petraeus replied that it is “immaterial” because the national security team around Trump is so outstanding. Think about that for a moment. That is a stunning assertion. It is nothing new for general officers to think they “know better” and try to manipulate their civilian leaders. But to bluntly argue that the fitness of the president is immaterial is an outlandish position…..one that speaks to how unfit this commander-in-chief truly is that one of our most famous, accomplished, and respected military leaders—retired or otherwise—would feel comfortable speaking of him this way.

Dave Petraeus is rightly regarded as one of the smartest military thinkers of his generation. But even Petraeus can make mistakes, as we know. And on this point he has made an enormous one. Like all military men, he knows very well that leadership flows from the top. If the Pentagon is forced to work around the president as a matter of course, that is a major problem. (Did I just have to write that?) At best, it is a difficult and unwieldy way to do business. At worst, the military leadership may find itself unable to manipulate the president, or simply overruled. Given Trump’s impulsiveness, paper thin skin, quickness to anger, resistance to advice, and history of hasty, ill-considered decisions, the latter seems more likely than the former.

Notwithstanding the fact that a third world war has not (yet) broken out, there is disturbing evidence that this dynamic is playing out even now. Politico recently reported on General McMaster’s difficulties in selling the President and others in the White House on his plans for Afghanistan:

To close observers of the machinations of Trump world, it’s yet another indication that McMaster—a three-star general widely hailed as a brilliant choice when Trump picked him to replace the ousted Michael Flynn amid the escalating Russian scandal—is increasingly a national security adviser out of sync with his mercurial president. On key policy issues from Russia and NATO to the Iran deal, McMaster has recommended a more stay-the-course approach, only to find fierce pushback from Trump himself. The fight over what to do in Afghanistan has received far less attention than any of those controversies, but the months-long backstage battle suggests the same immovable object for McMaster on this as the other issues: a president who simply isn’t on board.

Thus we may be seeing precisely this dark scenario play out, one in which the generals find themselves unable to outmaneuver the idiot president, belying our faith in Mattis and McMaster as democracy’s last best hope.

COUNTERWEIGHTS VS. ENABLERS

It’s very possible that in taking their current jobs Mattis and McMaster felt a heavy obligation to keep the country—and the world—safe from Trump. (Others in non-military roles in the administration may feel the same.) In that sense, they are virtually the only members of Team Trump who get a pass from the many critics of this administration. Indeed, they get hearty, sweaty-palmed gratitude.

Will there come a point when Mattis and McMaster feel they can no longer in good conscience serve this pitiful excuse for a president? A point at which duty demands not that they continue to try to mitigate his awfulness but instead resign in protest? If they were to do so, I suspect it might cause some damage to the heretofore solid wall of Republican support for this White House, especially within the military community and among other hawks. Of course, Trump’s hardcore base has been very creative in its ability to rationalize a vicious reversal on anyone, no matter how heroic or patriotic (paging John McCain) who dares defy the moron-king. To the rest of America, however—the part that is sentient—the resignations of these two generals would speak volumes, and—one hopes—help hasten the demise of the man they are now boxing in.

But it’s equally possible that that interpretation is a liberal fantasy. For all we know, Mattis and McMaster might privately be enthusiastic Trump supporters, even if they disagree with some of his policies or methods, which they plainly do. Or they might be grudgingly pro-Trump but in the lesser-of-two evils camp, much as I find it impossible to believe any thinking person could objectively look at the evidence and feel that way. (Call me partisan.)

It’s been widely documented that both men, like a fair number of US flag officers, were frustrated with what they saw as an insufficiently muscular foreign policy under the Obama administration (and its reported micromanagement of the Pentagon) and welcomed the chance to craft a more aggressive projection of US force overseas. Undoubtedly they see the Trump regime as a means to do that. Of course, a large number of people have made a similar utilitarian calculation in their unholy alliances with Trump: anti-abortion activists, the petroleum industry, plutocrats seeking tax cuts for the rich, and the GOP as a whole for that matter, to name just a few. In that context, a pair of men whose chief responsibility is defending American security might have one of the stronger arguments on that count.

(Then again, to critics of American power who see its application as largely malevolent, the opposite is true. To those observers, even if Mattis and McMaster are themselves men of intelligence and integrity, siding with Trump in order to pursue more robust US military adventurism is not a matter of a noble end justifying dirty means, but of one evil going hand in hand with another.)

It‘s often forgotten that McMaster is still an active duty US Army officer. When Trump tapped him to be National Security Advisor, perhaps General McMaster felt it was his duty to take the job and that he could not justifiably say no….and not just because he wanted to stay on to earn a fourth star. He may well have felt he had an absolute obligation as a commissioned officer to serve in the role that the Commander-in-Chief asked of him. Per above, he may have (privately) felt that Trump was a public danger and that it was incumbent on generals like himself to act as a firewall. Or conversely, he may have liked and admired Trump. He may have felt all those things, or pieces and variation of them, all at the same time. I don’t know. What I do know is that, regardless, his service in this White House has not burnished his image.

H.R. McMaster, USMA Class of ’84, is of my generation, just one year ahead of my year group. I didn’t know him personally when I was in the Army but I certainly knew him by reputation, and his reputation was sterling: as a leader, as a thinker, and as an iconoclast. I was surprised that he survived and made general, as those last two qualities are often career-enders at the highest level. I was very encouraged—deeply relieved even—when he took over as National Security Advisor after the firing of the short-lived and demonstrably cuckoo Mike Flynn, another three-star Army general (retired in his case). I told all my non-military friends that picking McMaster was the first smart thing Trump had done, and suggested that how long he lasted would be a bellwether of this administration’s ability to conduct itself in a rational manner.

But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been more than a little disappointed at how his tenure has played out thus far.

McMaster’s vaunted credibility has taken a severe body blow, and he has no one to blame but himself. His public defense of Trump’s jawdropping, apparently ad hoc disclosure of top secret codeword intel to Russian Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Lavrov IN PERSON, FACE TO FACE, IN THE OVAL OFFICE, WITH ONLY RUSSIAN MEDIA PRESENT (along with the chummy assurance to those Kremlin officials that he’d stopped the probe of Russiagate by firing that “nutjob” Comey) was shameful. The most generous interpretation is that he was doing damage control, trying to downplay the egregiousness of what Trump had done in order to tamp down justifiable alarm among our allies.

Likewise, McMaster recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, co-authored with National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, in which they offered a stark, Manichean vision of geopolitics as a zero sum game with only winners and losers and no place for mutually beneficial cooperation. In a different administration that might have passed for hard-nosed Nixonian realpolitik—admirable even, in its flinty-eyed toughness. But in the context of Trump and his dimwitted, fuck-you-I-got-mine, America First Know Nothingism, his insulting contempt for NATO, and his general arrogance in both private and public life, it just read as bullheaded, belligerent, and needlessly alienating to the rest of the world. Trump has earned no benefit of the doubt in such matters, and that extends to his underlings as well, no matter how impressive their CVs before boarding his death ship.

The Kislyak/Lavrov meeting alone was enough to destroy McMaster’s reputation with many people. I am willing to give him a lot more slack, but I was bitterly disappointed by that incident and am very uneasy going forward. Very soon there may come a time when McMaster can better serve his country by handing in his stars. That will be for him to decide. If and when he does, it will be a powerful statement, though of course we can expect Trump and his myrmidons to slander HR like they slander anyone who has outlived his or her usefulness to the Donald, let alone had the temerity to openly defy him.

Famously part of the McMaster legend is his book Dereliction of Duty, written as part of his doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina, in which he boldly called out the Vietnam-era US military leadership, particularly the JCS, for not standing up to the civilian leadership of the time. It took courage to publish that, and might well have ended his career. So it’s a cruel irony that a warrior whose reputation is built in good part on such an analysis might now go down in history as a toady of a civilian leader far worse than any of those who led us during Vietnam.

“I’M NOT SAYING WE WOULDN’T GET OUR HAIR MUSSED”

Lastly, for the sake of argument, let’s consider the unlikely possibility that we have this exactly backwards. Mattis and McMaster are accomplished, brilliant, thoughtful public servants of proven ability and unimpeachable integrity. Trump is an ass clown. But it is possible that the generals represent a dangerous agenda and Trump—if only accidentally—might be a useful brake.

When it came to foreign policy, Trump campaigned on an irrational, head-spinning mix of white nationalist neo-isolationism and faux macho jingoistic bluster. He was at once going to keep the US out of messy foreign wars (like Iraq, which he was for before he was against it) but also bomb the shit out of anyone who got in our way, and then take their oil.

Mattis and McMaster advocate a much more traditionally hawkish Republican approach to force projection, one that is at odds with at least some of Trump’s agenda, such as it is. Needless to say, the Bannonite faction inside the West Wing is particularly hostile to the generals’ goals. Bannon is a racist, an anti-Semite, and a neo-fascist troglodyte, but his desire for the United States not to be the world’s policeman is not without merit. He goes way too far, IMHO, and his Lindbergh-harkening America First 2.0 philosophy is clearly driven by shameful ethno-nationalism and xenophobia more than by anything resembling morality, democracy, or even simple decency. But not getting involved in stupid wars is not the worst guiding principle I ever heard.

By some accounts, there are even questions about the extent to which Mattis and McMaster share a common agenda, or even get along. Just because two dudes are both generals doesn’t mean they’re going to be BFFs. In fact, exactly the opposite is often the case.

A case in point is McMaster’s aforementioned push for an expanded war in Afghanistan, which apparently has gotten no more traction than his efforts to steer Trump toward a more collaborative attitude regarding NATO, or a tougher one toward Russia, or a more pragmatic one toward Iran and its nuclear ambitions. No serious military strategist or Southwest Asia area expert believes the United States can “win” in Afghanistan by the usual definition of the word. Not even McMaster seems to believe that. He is merely looking for the least terrible option, which he apparently feels involves a US troop surge and an ongoing American commitment for the foreseeable future. (Many other informed thinkers disagree.)

Trump, typically, has no stomach for a hard dilemma like that which offers no good options, only degrees of failure. Hence the Trump administration’s active solicitation of a batshit plan to privatize the war and fight it with mercenaries, as proposed by Christian supremacist zealot cum fugitive war criminal and brother of Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince, the infamous founder of Blackwater. (Along with Stephen A. Feinberg the billionaire CEO of Dyncorp, another giant private military contractor conglomerate.) For Prince, this insane proposal is a two-fer: a chance to indulge the Republican impulse to privatize every fucking thing on the planet, and at the same time further line his pockets with additional billions of US taxpayer dollars. (Meanwhile, Trump has also asked Feinberg to conduct a review of US intelligence agencies, with whom Donald is of course at war, a clear-cut case of asking Dracula to inventory the bloodbank.)

No surprise, it was Bannon who commissioned that absurd and unconscionable proposal, with help from Jared “Flak Vest” Kushner. Steve-o, you see, isn’t against killing people—especially brown people. He just doesn’t want good old red-blooded all-American white kids to have to go do it. To his credit, Jim Mattis refused to include the Prince/Feinberg proposal in the survey of Afghanistan options he and McMaster were preparing for the president. And no surprise, Trump ultimately shot down the options Mattis and McMaster eventually presented, as none fit his infantile desire for a quick fix that required no expenditure of political capital.

If Trump manages to keep us out of needless wars, even by accident, that may be the only good thing he ever accomplishes as President. Then again, he might just as easily get us into one, equally by accident.

ELECT A CLOWN, EXPECT A CIRCUS

If Trump is indeed restraining his military leaders from ill-advised foreign entanglements, it is quite clear that it is not out of wisdom. Occasionally, greed and shameless self-interest have the purely coincidental effect of doing some collateral good. But by and large we are surely watching a rare inversion of the usual military-civilian dynamic described at the top of this piece.

So here we are, in a bizarro world where—for better or worse—we are relying on the military to save us from ourselves. Whether they will succeed is an open question. Only one thing is clear: the security and safety of our country and indeed the whole world has never been at greater risk, because the United States has recklessly put a malignant ignoramus with no respect for the truth, for advice, or for the rule of law into the most powerful position on earth.

Whoda thunk it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the tragicomic Shakespearean farce that is the reign of our insane clown president, there may be no more puzzling or frustrating figure than John McCain.

The following essay was written before tonight’s announcement that Senator McCain has brain cancer. That revelation alone might answer many of the questions below, or render them moot. If so, that will be a tragedy of a different kind.

Heroism is a term thrown around very recklessly in our culture. But by any standard, everyone other than Donald Trump can see that John McCain is a genuine American hero. As a naval aviator and prisoner of war, McCain sacrificed more for his country than most of can even fathom. But the aged senator into whom that young pilot morphed has been maddeningly quiet at a time when his country needs him again, more than ever, inasmuch as he is one of very few Americans best positioned to stop this madness.

As if scripted, McCain’s story cleaves neatly into three distinct acts. What remains to be written is how that story will end, and whether Johnny Mac will muster one final moment of courage and glory on behalf of his country, or go out a pale shadow of the towering figure he once was, or—as tonight’s news portends—be taken from us precisely at the moment we need him most.

ACT ONE

THE PRISONER

I count myself among that large majority of Americans who are not worthy to carry John McCain’s jockstrap. The kind of moral and physical courage, tenacity, and sheer selflessness that he showed as a POW in Vietnam is beyond the ken of most mere mortals. It is the fundamental formative experience at the core of his public persona, the bedrock on which his subsequent political career was built, and—even now—still the source of his enormous moral authority. And rightly so.

But early on there were precious few signs that his military career would play out that way. Indulge me in a brief recap, as it’s germane to what follows.

McCain was born into naval aristocracy, the son and grandson of four-star admirals, but that pedigree appeared to have weighed heavily on him—not an unheard of paradigm. He graduated near the bottom of his class at Annapolis thanks to a reputation as an incorrigible rebel often at war with his superiors. (A maverick, if you will.) Despite that low class ranking, he managed to squeak into a coveted spot in naval aviation and became an A-4E attack pilot.

What happened next is the best-known part of his story. Deployed to Southeast Asia, Lieutenant Commander McCain was shot down over Hanoi, beginning a harrowing five-and-a-half year odyssey as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Ejecting from a high performance military jet inflight is so dangerous that it’s sometimes called “committing suicide to avoid killing yourself”…..not to mention when it’s on fire and plummeting to the earth over enemy territory. McCain broke both arms and a leg when punching out, then landed in a lake where he almost drowned. His captors beat and bayoneted him (to be fair, he had been dropping bombs on them), then indefensibly denied him medical treatment, eventually providing only rudimentary care that left him with severe lifelong injuries.

During his brutal captivity—much of it in Hỏa Lò prison, the infamous “Hanoi Hilton”—McCain suffered horrific torture, deprivation, and other inhuman hardships. By all accounts he was an inspirational leader to his fellow POWs, and a pain in the ass to his jailers, echoing in much more severe circumstances his behavior at the Naval Academy. Knowing their prisoner’s history (by 1968 McCain’s father was Commander in Chief, Pacific Command—CINCPAC—in command of all US forces in Southeast Asia), his captors offered to release him as a “goodwill gesture” / slash propaganda ploy / slash / negotiating chip. McCain bluntly refused, insisting that he would not go home before any of his fellow prisoners who had been captured earlier than he had.

Think about that for a moment. That is a kind of integrity that is almost unimaginable in our soft-bellied, self-serving culture. It’s true that that was the high standard demanded by the US military’s Code of Conduct, and McCain would likely have been pilloried within the Navy if he had accepted clemency. But that hardly diminishes the enormity of his courageous act. I invite you to look in the mirror and ask if you could have met that standard. I’m afraid to.

ACT TWO

THE POLITICIAN

John McCain spent five more agonizing years in prison after refusing early repatriation and was regularly tortured for his defiance. He was not released from captivity until 1973, as part of the Paris Peace Accords, along with the rest of the hundreds of US POWs that Hanoi was still holding. His injuries remain debilitating to this day. (Even before being shot down he had already suffered shrapnel wounds—and demonstrated remarkable bravery—during a hellish fire on the USS Forrestal.) He went on to serve another eight years in the Navy—including an influential tour as the naval attaché to the Senate—before retiring in order to run for Congress.

From the time he first won a House seat in 1983 McCain was a press darling, thanks in large part to his reputation for integrity and candor—qualities in short supply in the District of Columbia—along with a penchant for salty language and self-deprecating humor. He seemed to genuinely like journalists and enjoy talking to them, which was reciprocated. Consistent with his history, he was also a constant thorn in the side of the Republican leadership during two terms in the House and the five that followed in the Senate, where he was unafraid to defy party leaders and stand up for what he thought was right, even after he became a senior party leader himself. (The North Vietnamese could have told the GOP leadership that.) It was all of a piece with the bravery and selflessness at the heart of the McCain legend.

Not surprisingly, he was a foreign policy hawk from the get-go. Tellingly, however, he has always been adamant in his opposition to torture on both moral and practical grounds; it’s only the chickenhawks like Cheney and Trump who are eager to waterboard people. He even became an unlikely villain to some in the POW/MIA community for co-chairing (with John Kerry) a congressional inquiry that dashed the families’ desperate hopes that their loved ones might still be alive in Southeast Asia. Campaign finance reform also became a McCain obsession, one that gravely threatened the grimy pols that form the bulk of America’s political class and earned him more enemies. Ultimately that crusade would prove a bitter defeat in the age of Citizens United, a sure sign that McCain was not going to succeed in singlehandedly changing the political culture.

From the earliest days of his political career McCain looked like appealing presidential timber to a great many Republicans, independents, and even some Democrats. To many of us in the military he was the ideal candidate: a man who defied the hateful Washington stereotype, who was one of us, and who bore the most unimpeachable credential of public service possible, short of a Medal of Honor.

But McCain’s record was not spotless by any means. He cheated on his first wife Carol, who had loyally endured his captivity in Vietnam, and who during his imprisonment suffered her own grievous, permanent injuries in a car accident, necessitating innumerable surgeries and hospitalizations. (Ross Perot paid for her medical care.) McCain subsequently left her for a younger woman who happened to be a beautiful, politically well connected heiress to an Arizona brewing fortune. Yet even Carol remained warm toward him and an endorser of his political career, which only further burnished his image. Later, as a senator, McCain was glancingly implicated in the savings & loan scandal of the 1980s, though cleared of any serious wrongdoing. But Johnny Mac had never portrayed himself as a saint, as he would be the first to admit. He is a flawed human being, but one who has always taken full responsibility for his actions in all these situations. In the cesspool that is Washington DC, John McCain—warts and all—still stood as an exemplar of the best of America, and of our political leaders in particular.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (PHASE 1)

McCain made his first run for the presidency in 2000. He named his bus the Straight Talk Express, and its popularity with the reporters was legendary. Jealous rivals painted the degree of devotion among members of the usually jaded press corps as cultlike. But that admiration spoke to just how otherwise distasteful national politics were (to say nothing of the people who practiced them), and what a special individual John McCain was in such an environment.

McCain’s chief rival for the GOP nomination was George W. Bush, whose career in military aviation was, uh, considerably less impressive. But Bush’s forbearers—a Senator and a President—outranked even John’s, and his campaign was certainly not averse to the use of bare knuckles. Team Bush showed its viciousness in the South Carolina primary, where it ratfucked McCain with a classic dirty trick that smacked of Nixon operatives like Donald Segretti: it spread a scurrilous rumor that McCain had fathered an illegitimate child who was —gasp!—black. (I did say this was South Carolina, didn’t I?) The rumor likely had it origins in McCain’s daughter Bridget, whom he and his second wife had adopted from Bangladesh.

That the Bush campaign would do this at all speaks to its moral bankruptcy. That it would do it to a fellow Republican was even more shocking. But it worked. McCain lost the primary and eventually dropped out of the race, paving the way for Bush’s nomination in the contested 2000 election. Per Michael Lewis and “The Undoing Project” it’s pointless to engage in butterfly effect speculation about what might have been, but I’ll do it anyway. Had a President McCain been inaugurated in January 2001, we would likely have never heard of hanging chads, the Axis of Evil, or Abu Ghraib. Even allowing for his consistent hawkishness, it’s impossible to imagine McCain being buffaloed and manipulated by the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al the way the pliable and complaint Dubya was.

It always stunned me that McCain forgave Bush for South Carolina enough to support him in the years that followed. Perhaps that went hand in hand with his ability to put country above self (which presumes that he considered Bush and his agenda good for America, or at least better than his fellow Vietnam veterans Gore and Kerry). But in retrospect, it may also have demonstrated a disturbing loyalty to party above country.

Another rumor that dogged McCain throughout the 2000 primaries (and after) was much more baroque: the notion that he was an actual Manchurian candidate. The most benign version of this whisper campaign was that he was too damaged by his years in captivity to serve as president. The most extreme was that while a POW McCain had been actively brainwashed to be a sleeper agent who later could be “activated” to destroy the US presidency from within. But in all forms it was absurd and insulting and despicable …..especially coming from members of a party that huffed and puffed about their patriotism, making an absolute fetish of military service in particular. But the idea of a “Manchurian” presidential candidate controlled by one of America’s enemies would prove bitterly ironic some sixteen years hence.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (PHASE 2)

By 2008 McCain had worked his way to the top of the GOP batting order. It was “his turn” to be the party’s nominee, according to the hidebound order of succession that both major parties (mostly) live by. Even under ordinary circumstances McCain’s task would have been difficult, given the natural pendulum swing after eight years of a Republican White House. But public unhappiness with the war in Iraq made the task even harder, not to mention the bad luck of facing a transformational, once-in-a-generation political figure in the person of Barack Obama. And that was before the global economy imploded on the eve of the election.

Thus we come to a pivotal moment in the tragedy of John McCain.

Looking for a proverbial gamechanger and knowing he had little to lose, McCain cast caution to the winds and chose as his running mate little-known Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

The moment still sticks in my mind for its weirdness. McCain was obviously trying for a surprising, even radical choice that would shake up the race, seize the high ground on diversity—not the GOP’s strong suit—and woo independents and others who would not ordinarily vote Republican. At the same time he was undeniably bowing to the rightward shift his party had made over the preceding thirty years. On paper, it was a bold idea, one that tried to court diametrically opposing factions with a single stroke. But by most accounts, McCain picked Palin impulsively and without consulting his top advisors, or—crucially—conducting the usual vetting process. Hence the revelation, within days after the announcement that she was his pick, that Palin had a daughter who was pregnant out of wedlock…..not necessarily a disqualifier, but definitely the sort of thing that a campaign would typically have uncovered and chewed on before putting someone on the ticket. (McCain and his team claimed that they had done so, but the way it was sprung on the American public made it feel like they had not, which was just as bad.) Ironically, in the end that detail would not even make the list of top ten things that ought to have disqualified Palin to be vice president.

The choice of Sarah Palin was an unmitigated disaster on almost every count. It soon became apparent that she was a blithering idiot unable to string together a coherent sentence, an ungrateful opportunist, a loose cannon, and a purveyor of despicable right wing nonsense. Rather than securing two very different demographics, McCain was perceived as pandering twice over, both to the right wing of the GOP that had always distrusted and disliked him (an effort that made him look bad to independents and other free-thinkers) and to women in what seemed like the ultimate case of transparent tokenism. More importantly, McCain’s own judgment was called into question for having chosen someone so shockingly unfit, and for having made that choice in way that seemed reckless. For the first time, the “maverick” label that he had worn proudly and justifiably throughout his career looked hollow, especially as it was shamelessly co-opted by Palin. So did the GOP’s slogan of “Country First,” as voters contemplated Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Yet a certain segment of the American public took an instant, passionate, and almost creepy liking to Palin­ seemingly because of those very traits—a harbinger of even worse things to come in presidential politics.

Of course, McCain himself soon encountered great difficulties with his rogue running mate. (Julianne Moore won the Emmy for playing Sarah Palin, but everyone knows it was Tina Fey’s lacerating impression and fortuitous physical resemblance that helped destroy Sarah Barracuda….or more accurately, simply abetted the process as Palin destroyed herself.) Yet thanks to McCain thrusting her onto the national stage, she was now poised to be a permanent fixture of American life for years to come.

I cursed John McCain for having plucked this wackjob from local politics on the edge of the Arctic Circle and inflicted her on the American public at large. Seeing that she was only 44 at the time, just a little younger than me, I remember thinking, “Good God, we’re going to have to deal with this monster for the rest of my natural life.” I did not anticipate that Palin would prove such a dilettante that she would drop out of politics altogether within the year, and content herself with being a star in the ghetto of right wing media and home shopping channels in order to make as much money as she possibly could. (Which certainly proved she was a Republican.) I breathed a sigh of relief as I watched that happen. I had no idea that a much more chilling and dangerous ogre would emerge that would make me long for the days when Sarah Palin was the worst reactionary demagogue we had to contend with.

But while the Palin debacle looms largest, during the 2008 campaign McCain also generated one memorable, deeply poignant moment when he politely but definitively slapped down a supporter who made the mistake of saying—to his face—that Barack Obama is “an Arab” (an even more ignorant variation of the insidious right wing fever dream that Obama was Muslim, or born in Kenya). “No, ma’am. No ma’am,” McCain interrupted her firmly, shaking his head in frustration. “No ma’am, no ma’am”—he said it four times—“he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

McCain took some heat for not going further—as if an Arab could not be a decent family man—but that criticism missed the point. Even allowing for semantics, it’s clear that his intent was wholly admirable in unambiguously rejecting the right wing’s whole racist, sectarian line about Obama full stop. More to the point, thinking of that exchange now, in light of what American presidential politics has become, McCain’s integrity and honesty—his sportsmanship, at the risk of being flip about it—is almost heartbreaking. Can anyone imagine the current leader of the Republican Party—the alleged erstwhile leader of the Free World—bypassing a layup to school a supporter and stand up for the truth like that? On the contrary: Trump famously began his whole presidential career by shamelessly propagating the vile lie of birtherism, which even now he refuses to fully recant.

Looking back, it’s shocking to remember how kinder and gentler presidential politics were just nine short years ago. Not that they were particularly kind and gentle, but compared to what has transpired since, it was a day at the roller rink.

ACT THREE

After his loss to Obama, McCain returned to the Senate where he remained one of its most powerful and popular members. But it was a new world. With the rise of the Tea Party (which adored Palin, of course) and the concomitant sharp turn of the GOP into hysterical anti-Obama obstructionism, even John McCain was forced to make concessions to the party’s far right wing.

Strike that. He was not forced to do so. He chose to do so. He could have said, “This brave new political world is not for me and I’m not going to bend to it.” In other words, he could have retired from elective office.

It’s fair to assume then that McCain wanted to continue to be a US Senator and serve his country as such, and do good as he saw it, which required practical adjustments in order to stay in office…..compromises, one might say. It was a utilitarian calculation of what he was willing to do to avoid being primaried or otherwise overtaken on his right flank. It was also a dynamic that we had seen before, in his willingness to support Bush despite the ghost of South Carolina, and that we would see again in years to come.

Here is it instructive to remember that John McCain is the senior senator for Arizona, land of Goldwater (whose seat in the Senate he took over), a state that is eccentrically right wing even by the standards of Western US libertarianism, with its open carry laws, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, stubborn resistance to a Martin Luther King holiday, and even to daylight savings time. I lived there for a year and found it a fascinating place, although it took some time to get used to seeing little old ladies wearing holsters in the supermarket.

But if the rise of the Tea Party forced McCain to tilt right, an even bigger challenge awaited. The steep downward trajectory of the Republican Party is neatly embodied in the descent from its presidential nominee in 2008 to its presidential nominee in 2016.

THE TARGET

Two years ago this month at a GOP primary forum in Iowa, Donald Trump, speaking off the cuff (does he speak any other way?), said scornfully of John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” (Fittingly, the video link here is from Russia Today.) At the time, just a month after entering the race, Trump was still considered a joke by most observers and far from the front runner. After that jawdropping remark, I was among the many who assumed it was all over for Trump. Done. Game over. Hasta la vista baby. I thought, “Well, it was fun while it lasted but now the clown car portion of the primaries is finished.” Like many many people, I did not yet realize—and wouldn’t for months to come—that such behavior was precisely what Trump’s supporters liked.

It’s too hard to count the ways in which that comment by Trump was vomit-inducing, but I’ll offer a few. Trump—much more a child of privilege than even an admiral’s son—avoided service in Vietnam by virtue of four student deferments, and when those ran out, a permanent medical wavier for alleged bone spurs in his foot. (Even though he was perfectly able to play prep school football, and later could not even remember which foot he had this debilitating injury.) On the radio with Howard Stern in 1997, bragging about his cocksmanship in the Eighties, he jokingly called his avoidance of venereal disease his “personal Vietnam” and said “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” As recently as 2015 he told a biographer—with a straight face this time—that he “always felt that I was in the military” because of the high-priced military boarding school to which his parents shipped him in the eighth grade after years of disciplinary problems at his previous prep school. He went on to opine that it gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” Both comments ought to endear him to men and women who actually risked their lives in Southeast Asia, or the families who lost loved ones there. More to the point, such comments reflect his repulsive tone deafness and general contempt for the profession of arms and the sacrifices made by those in it.

The McCain comment (in the same forum Trump also called him a “loser”) would be only the first of many instances of Trump insulting the military as he rose to claim the GOP nomination and then the presidency, to include (just a sampling): attacking the Gold Star Khan family, demeaning veterans with PTSD, treating a Purple Heart like a party favor, claiming that he knows more about ISIS than our generals, describing the US military as a disaster…..I could go on. And these are merely the personal insults to the US military. His moronic and self-incriminating pronouncements on defense policy—advocating war crimes, torture, carpetbombing, impossibly simplistic and unworkable ideas about strategy and conquest, and the like—are a completely separate category of horrors. That Trump still has (or ever had) significant support among military people and veterans will always mystify me. But such is the nature of the con artist.

It should surprise no one that Trump’s ignorance of all things military has born bitter fruit since he became president. Almost without exception on national security and foreign affairs he is pursuing policies—to the extent that this dog’s breakfast can credibly even be called “policy”—that are disastrous for America, from personally handing top secret codeword intel to the Russians, to recklessly offending our staunchest allies and rattling seventy years of NATO solidarity, to serving as the best recruiting sergeant global jihadism could ask for, and in his spare time selling wolf tickets about armadas without knowing where they really are. (It is a bitter irony that McCain’s hardnosed foreign policy philosophy is actually far more in tune with Hillary’s.) In his six short months in office (or 8000 years, as WaPo satirist Alexandra Petri describes it), Trump has done enough damage to the United States to make Leonid Brezhnev, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden green with envy, if they were not already decomposing. And that is without even taking into account the possibility that Trump and/or his surrogates actively colluded with the despotic rulers of a foreign power—Russia, no less—to install him as president of the United States. Which I hasten to repeat, would be the greatest scandal in American history, approaching outright treason at the very highest level.

Which at long last bring us to the question at the heart of this long-winded essay:

Why is John McCain not opposing Trump more vigorously? Tonight’s news may have given us the answer. But it’s worth examining the circumstances before we knew that.

THE ENIGMA

John McCain is not going to run for president again. He is probably not going to run for another term in the Senate when he is up for re-election in 2022 (when he will be 86). He is at the end of his long political career and beholden to no one. He has nothing to lose by standing up to Trump but everything to lose in terms of his legacy by not doing so. By contrast, he could go down in history as an epic American hero—dwarfing even his courage in Vietnam—if he leads the charge against the human colostomy bag currently occupying the Oval Office.

So why has he not been doing that?

We are all painfully aware that, short of a dramatic reversal in the composition of Congress in the 2018 midterms, the only people in America would really have the power to stop Donald Trump for the foreseeable future are the Republican leadership. (I am not even entertaining the possibility that Trump’s base, that twentysomething percent of the electorate of which the GOP mandarins are so fucking terrified, will turn on him.) And John McCain is the number one Republican Senator whose reputation for integrity, courage, and free thinking would give us hope that he would lead the charge.

Yet so far he has not.

Per above, Trump is a suicide vest strapped to the torso of American foreign policy, Senator McCain’s most treasured area of interest. One would think McCain would be vocally furious. He surely knows what an absolute abomination Trump is and the existential danger he poses to American credibility and influence worldwide, if not to American democracy full stop. Even beyond questions of national security, Trump’s person, values, and general behavior presumably turn Johnny Mac’s stomach, antithetical as they are to everything he was raised to believe in. To say nothing of Trump’s personal attacks on him.

Why then does he not do more to oppose and unseat this monster? Having foisted Palin on us—in retrospect, the proto-Trump, a stalking horse for the nightmare candidate to come—McCain ought to feel a special responsibility for stopping this exponential acceleration of that Know Nothing phenomenon.

He has huffed some, though less than he did during the campaign. Along with Lindsey Graham, he has been the GOP’s most staunch critic of Trump on matters of foreign policy. But even his statements have fallen short of real condemnation, let alone a definitive break with the White House that might inspire similar bravery in other Republican leaders. The bitterest irony of all is that with his silence McCain is lending credence to Trump’s shameful dig that he is no hero. Does he want to go down in history as having condoned and therefore tacitly abetted the most manifestly unfit and destructive president the United States has ever seen?

Maybe he is doing things behind the scenes that are more useful than making a public stand just yet. Maybe he is keeping his powder dry for the critical moment when it is needed the most. Maybe he is waiting for Mueller to build a case and then lend his influence to pressuring the GOP when it can do the most good. We shall see.

Maybe McCain is just old. His incoherent questioning of Jim Comey during the newly-fired FBI director’s Senate testimony last month certainly lent credence to that theory. (Characteristically, McCain owned up to his fumbling with self-deprecating humor after the fact. But it was still sad to watch.) In the 2008 presidential campaign McCain’s age—72 at the time—was an enormous point of contention. Yet Trump was 70 when he ran in 2016 and there was nary a peep about health issues, unless they were Hillary’s (a complete fabrication of right wing trolls) or Trump’s crazy doctor attesting that he could beat Superman in arm wrestling.

Or—and this is a depressing thought—maybe John McCain is simply not all that upset about Donald Trump. That is a hard proposition to imagine, given how horrific Trump is on national security, and on Russia in particular. But it’s worth remembering that McCain is a Republican after all, despite the tendency of independents and even some on the left to idealize him. He voted to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. He did not oppose any of Trump’s Cabinet nominees (voting yes on all and abstaining on Scott Pruitt for the EPA). He voted to confirm all but two of Trump’s sub-Cabinet nominees (the exceptions being Mick Mulvaney for director of the OMB and Robert Lighthizer to be US trade representative.) He has indicated that he would vote for some version of Trumpcare.

McCain may yet prove heroic in opposing Trump. He has faced down far badder hombres than this fat-assed, soft-bellied, loudmouthed bully. But it is fair to say that his legacy may ultimately determined by what he does right now, in the twilight of his political career.

I am not putting the responsibility for saving the republic on John McCain’s shoulders. We all have a part to play in that effort. (I do my part mainly by hyperventilating in this blog every week, and by fuming at my television.) And one might well say that John McCain has already done enough for his country and we have no business asking more of him. Fair enough. But Senator McCain is among the very few Americans in the unique position of being able to do something truly impactful…..and among those very few, he is virtually the only one with a record of courage that suggests he might do so.

So for now we are left to ponder the ponder why arguably the bravest man in postwar American politics is largely absent at this crucial juncture. Here we wade into the murky waters of philosophy of mind and whether there is a continuous Self. (Spoiler alert: there isn’t.) We have to ask whether the John McCain before us now is literally a different person than the John McCain of 1968. And yes, I am using the word literally literally.

Now comes the news that he has a cancerous brain tumor which surgeons have just removed. That may explain much of what we have discussed here, including what looked like senior moments, and his heretofore puzzling moderation in opposing this pathetic excuse for a commander-in-chief. It may also mean that McCain will be physically incapable of participating—or worse, departed from this mortal coil—as the denouement of the Trump saga plays out. More’s the pity. Then again, at the risk of being morbid, perhaps this looming specter will prompt Senator McCain to rise up and point his finger and all the moral weight behind it at Donald Trump and bellow on behalf of all of America: “No more.”

We like our heroes to be of a piece. Conveniently monolithic. But McCain is and always has been a complicated, flawed figure capable of astonishing courage and integrity, but also of moments of weakness and error. Most of us are only capable of the latter. Heroes are distinguished by their timing: by their ability to rise to the occasion when the occasion demands it. No one needs heroes when things are going swimmingly. John S. McCain III rose to the occasion in spades in the Hanoi Hilton. Now, if his health permits, is the time for him to be a hero once again. If so, he will end his career with a glorious and inspiring coda that will resonate for generations. If not, his story will indeed be an American tragedy. And if it is his health (rather than his will) that prevents it, America will be robbed of a potential champion at the cruelest possible time.

Senator, I wish you a speedy recovery, for your own sake and—selfishly—for our own. We really need you right now.

************

Next week in The King’s Necktie: “Strangelove in Reverse: The Dangers of Mattis and McMaster as the Last Line of Defense.”

Bottom line up front. Donald Trump is not the real problem. The real problem is that the Republican Party is mounting a slow motion authoritarian coup in the United States.

Facing fatal demographics that would otherwise doom it, it is clear that the GOP is attempting to destroy the fundamental democratic norms and institutions of the United States in order to establish permanent control of our government while it still can.

Do you doubt it? Think it’s liberal hysteria? Read on….

GET WITH THE REPUBLICAN PROGRAM

It’s not a new theory that the Republican mainstream is using Trump as cover to advance its agenda. But what I am talking about goes well beyond the regular pasting that the GOP has taken for enabling and excusing Trump. You know the mantra, the one that goes, ”McConnell and Ryan are kind of worse than Trump, because they are adults and are supposed to know better.” That’s true, and I engaged in that very discourse in these pages just a few weeks ago. But that formulation casts Trump as the core of the problem and the GOP in a mere supporting role. I am arguing that it’s the other way around.

Over the past ten years, Republicans have gerrymandered the electoral map to give themselves disproportionate representation regardless of the will of the people, creating a near lock on numerous Congressional districts and—unless things change—a good shot at permanent control of the legislative branch. They have, thanks to Citizens United, poured obscene amounts of anonymous money into our political system. (Yes, Democrats have too, but it is an arms race that the right wing initiated and has pursued with an unmatched vengeance.) They have cleverly focused on local politics and methodically taken control of state legislatures (admittedly through entirely legal means). If that continues through the 2018 midterms, it will—crucially—allow them to control the upcoming 2020 census, which will reapportion seats in the US House of Representatives for the next ten years. They have violated every possible interpretation of the spirit—and arguably the letter—of the Constitution to steal a seat on the Supreme Court and keep it stacked in their favor. They have labored mightily to destroy public faith in journalism and replace it with blatant propaganda masquerading as objective reportage, undermining the commonality of truth as a standard to which we all look—with Donald Trump, the logical conclusion of that strategy. They have redoubled their focus on wedge issues, incubating in their base a foaming hatred of the Democratic Party that goes far beyond ordinary political rivalry, often using outright lies to do so. And in what might be their most blatantly anti-democratic gambit—and it’s a very competitive field—they have engaged in a systematic effort to disenfranchise huge segments of the American electorate that are unfriendly to them, and to gin up the myth of massive voter fraud to justify further unconscionable restrictions to keep the American public from voting them out of power.

All that was before Trump.

You may say that all those things are perfectly legal. But that does not make them healthy for the republic or in any way defensible.

And collectively their effect has been tectonic. If Democrats did even one of those things, Fox News would never stop howling about it and Republicans would be out in the streets with torches and pitchforks. By comparison, the Democrats’ tepid objection to the GOP’s actions has been the equivalent of a polite throatclearing.

Then came 2016. Last year the Republican Party ran a presidential candidate who campaigned on shameless bigotry, outrageous lies, and general neo-fascism. He was installed in office despite losing the popular vote by three million votes. (The existence of the Electoral College does not make this result any more democratic.) As part of that process, a foreign power brazenly monkeywrenched with the election, possibly with the collusion of that candidate and his team. (The evidence is certainly mounting.) Since taking office, he has shamelessly abused the power of the presidency to squash investigations into those possible crimes and others, committing acts which may well constitute impeachable offenses….principally, obstruction of justice, corruption, and abuse of his office for personal gain. Yet the craven GOP leadership has hypocritically stood by this demagogue so long as he carries out its loathsome agenda, cynically refusing to put country above party and ensure a proper inquiry into those allegations, all the while sanctimoniously proclaiming their own patriotism.

Can we all now open our eyes and acknowledge that the United States has suffered a right wing coup d’etat? We are, quite simply, no longer a democracy by any reasonable definition of the word.

THE ACCIDENTAL DESPOT

I can already hear people on the right scornfully dismissing this argument as sour grapes—crybaby whining from the hapless side that lost the election and is looking for excuses. Call it what you will, and the American Right is certainly adept at playground insults. But that doesn’t mean it’s inaccurate.

Could the Democrats do better? Certainly. Some of the GOP’s success can be blamed on Democratic incompetence, fecklessness, and other mistakes, though by no means all. But we may be approaching a point where ordinary politics are no longer sufficient to stop the Republican-led movement toward autocracy. If you think we are still operating in politics as usual, that it’s just a matter of better robocalls, you either tragically mistaken or a Republican operative trying to keep the opposition docile and deluded.

I’m not suggesting that the top officials of the RNC had a secret meeting at Bohemian Grove some time around 1992 and all pledged their souls to Satan. (I can’t prove that anyway.) But I do think that over the past 25 years the Republican Party has slowly, bit by bit, almost imperceptibly slid into an acceptance–and then an embrace—of increasingly ruthless anti-democratic practices that are now the party’s norm. Trump did not initiate that; far from it. But he conveniently came along at a pivotal moment and accelerated it like nitroglycerin added to the engine of the GOP stock car.

As the party’s initial opposition to Trump during the primaries made plain, the GOP was not consciously looking for a demagogue to send its authoritarian crusade into hyperdrive—at least not this particular demagogue. His success was a happy coincidence, one that the GOP at first failed to realize and even actively resisted, the silly boys. But once Trump was more or less forced on them, the party’s leaders quickly recognized their luck, and are now capitalizing on their unlikely but fortuitous control of both houses of Congress and the presidency to finalize this anti-democratic takeover of the US government that has been years on the slow boil.

A certain segment of the right was looking for such a frontman, of course. Steve Bannon and the Mercers have openly—brazenly even—said as much. Bannon has famously described himself as a “Leninist” (lopping the “Marxist-” part off the usual formation) who wants to destroy the state. That the Republican Party is cool with that is yet another head-shaker, akin to its sudden warmth toward Moscow. I guess all things Russian are in vogue with the American right at the moment.

Certainly Trump himself has hastened autocracy in myriad ways, from brazenly refusing to release his tax returns, to installing unqualified family members in positions of authority, to encouraging violence against protestors and journalists, to illegally enriching himself through his office, to trying to declare his Inauguration as a “Day of Patriotic Devotion” complete with tanks and missile launchers and parade—all hallmarks of banana republics ruled by tinhorn despots. Even his habit of engaging in petty Twitter feuds that demean the office contributes in its way to the coarsening of American politics by lowering the bar for presidential behavior….the beclowning of the executive branch, as I find myself repeating week after week. (No other phrase has yet proven as succinct or accurate at encompassing the sheer awfulness of this administration.)

But as appalling as each of those actions are, they were merely gross public manifestations of—not the impetus for, nor the heartbeat of—a Republican attack on democracy already in progress. (Talk about your pre-existing conditions.) Despite the nonstop media coverage that would lead you to think otherwise, Trump is not the engineer on this death train, even though that’s exactly how the Republicans want it to look. The truth is that he is just a useful idiot tool serving the broader, long-term GOP attempt to undermine our democracy and secure itself in irrevocable power before America’s shifting demographics make that impossible, and render the Republican Party irrelevant full stop.

MISDIRECTION IN ACTION

Witness how this dynamic has played out very recently. This past two weeks Trump has descended to a new level of juvenility and shamefulness that even an exhausted American public did not think possible. In no particular order (and not even a comprehensive list):

He launched another in his series of misogynistic attacks on the physical appearance of female journalists who have dared criticize him. Even amid the bipartisan outrage over that (well, kind of bipartisan—the Republican response was characteristically timid and equivocal), he doubled down with further insults, even reviving his ancient feud with Rosie O’Donnell. (Very presidential.)

In conjunction with that tantrum, both in person at a rally and on Twitter, he threw himself on the floor, kicking his legs and screaming “I won the election! I did, I did, I did! I am the president! I am, I am, I am!”

He further poisoned the public’s confidence in the press and reminded us that he was an actual pro wrestling villain, decrying—with no discernible irony—a legitimate journalistic organization—CNN—as “fake news” by invoking a fake sport. In the process, he arguably incited physical violence against reporters, just as he did during the campaign, to a base that is already predisposed to such behavior. (Oh, you say it wasn’t an incitement, not even implicitly? This on the heels of Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte literally bodyslamming a reporter just as Trump did in the WWE video? Imagine what the right would have said if Obama had done something like that, as difficult as that is to imagine from a reasonable chief executive like 44.)

And lastly, the alleged leader of the free world and his Secretary of State met privately with Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov and—by the Russians’ account—accepted at face value Putin’s assertion that the Kremlin didn’t meddle in the 2016 presidential election…..in short, taking Moscow’s word over the unanimous conclusion of the entire US intelligence community, which to any thinking person only further cements the belief that the accusation is true. Then he suggested that Putin should be part of a joint effort to improve the cybersecurity of our elections.

The mind reels. And yet, from the GOP leadership—crickets.

With each new atrocity that our insane clown president commits, the punditocracy asks, “What will it take for the Republicans to stand up to Trump? What will finally be a bridge too far for them?” But with each passing day of meek silence it becomes more and more obvious that they not only never will, but that they actively don’t want to.

Consider the fact that during the same two weeks that this cretinous behavior by the POTUS dominated the news cycle, the GOP continued its barbaric and senseless attack on Americans’ access to affordable health care, which is but a prelude to its true dream of a change in the tax code to benefit the richest among us; the EPA—now headed by a climate change denier—began a massive rollback of Obama-era protections of our air and water; the shameful Muslim ban went into partial effect, pending a very worrying final say from a polarized Supreme Court; the GOP-controlled House of Representatives went full Margaret Atwood and prohibited women—not only its own staff, but reporters as well—from wearing sleeveless attire in the Speaker’s lobby (praise be) ; Hans Von Spakovsky, the man behind the voter fraud myth, was appointed to the new federal commission to advance the Republican cause of voter suppression, a central pillar of its effort to secure a permanent majority; and that same commission made an outrageous demand for crucial personal information about voters from the states, an act that ought to send a chill down the spines of all Americans regardless of party. And I’m limiting myself here just to domestic political skullduggery…we won’t even get into the fact that while all this unfolded we faced a dramatic escalation in nuclear tensions with North Korea, to which the Republican-led US government responded with pointless saber rattling, or the sad spectacle of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, where America’s sudden decline was on full display.

These events got some play in the media, but not on the level that they should have, not when the dumpster fire that is President Donald J. Trump is irresistible column inch bait.

Rather useful camouflage for a party that has a vastly unpopular agenda that it wishes to foist on the helpless public.

THE IMPEACHMENT ILLUSION

The resistance is understandably focused on removing this horrific, vastly unqualified human wrecking machine from the Oval Office. I am guardedly optimistic that it will happen, one way or another, before his term is up. Resignation strikes me as the most likely, if Trump tires of this miserable life, and faces possible criminal prosecution and/or exposure of the vast nefarious dealings of his business empire. True, it’s hard to imagine a monstrous narcissist like him giving up the biggest spotlight in the world, and his reputation is not exactly one of strategic withdrawal. But that reputation is misleading. In his business career Trump has often settled when he knew he was cornered, while baldly denying that he was doing so. Moreover, the self-destructive lengths to which he has gone to hide whatever it is he’s hiding regarding Russia suggest that there exists a sufficient degree of existential threat that would entice him to skedaddle. I could see him resigning if and when he is really up against it and can depart while claiming “victory.” Which of course he will.

But imagine that happens. Even as we breath a collective sigh of relief, I fear that it will not stop the tidal wave of authoritarianism that is sweeping across America. It may be harder for the GOP to advance that cause without Donny as frontman, but it’s difficult to imagine that they will willingly surrender any ground without being forced to do so. Authoritarianism is like a ratchet that way.

It isn’t just about “President Pence.” As many have noted, the removal of Trump would still leave us with this nauseating right wing Christian zealot, a man whose moral bankruptcy is evident in his willingness to totally shitcan his alleged religious values for a spot on this ticket, and his craven bootlicking once in office. As a chief executive himself Pence is potentially worse than Trump in that he is more professionally capable of actually carrying out a reactionary agenda. But for that same reason he is the kind of conventional politician that we have the time-tested weapons to fight. Trump, by contrast, represents a whole new kind of monster, which is precisely why the GOP is standing by him. The base loves Trump in a way they never have—and never will—love an ordinary politician, and that is an invaluable advantage for the GOP. Trump has accidentally energized this newly passionate segment of the electorate, which includes (but is not limited to) white nationalists, previously apathetic non-voters who thrill to a reactionary bombthrower, and various others. Pence could never inspire the same level of devotion, nor any other politician I can imagine. And thank god for that.

So, yes, I would take President Pence in heartbeat and welcome the chance to shift this fight to a new phase. If my options are boola-boola or death by boola-boola, that’s no choice at all. Of course, it is quite likely that Pence will be brought down in the same fecal avalanche that brings down Trump. As head of the transition team, he was surely embroiled in whatever dirty business was going on, despite the fiction that it was Flynn’s lie to the VP that precipitated his sacking. We may be faced with President Ryan, or whatever other toady manages to escape prosecution and is in next in line. But make no mistake: Even when Trump is gone, and Pence or no Pence, the GOP will continue to try to tighten its chokehold on the American political system.

And yes, we will hang the albatross of the monstrous Trump presidency around the GOP’s collective neck and never let any Republican candidate forget (nor the voting public) that he or she is a member of the party that foisted this motherfucker upon us and then indefensibly stood by him. But considering how they currently behave like Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun (“Nothing to see here folks!”), I am confident that the moment Trump is out of office they will instantly shrug and act like they never had anything to do with all that. Their shamelessness and chutzpah knows no bounds.

But all that presumes that democracy as we know it is still functioning by that time. Which is why it is imperative that we fight the entire Republican movement and not put all our energy just into opposing Trump as an individual, as if he is the sole problem. Sadly, he ain’t.

THE NON-TIPPING POINT

It is often said that the GOP will not turn on Trump until his falling numbers reach the point where he does them more harm than good electorally. But that calculation has nothing to do with Trump’s base, which represents the last gasp of white “Christian” America animated mostly by racist panic. (Let’s not pussyfoot.) That is why those voters threw in with the Donald in the first place, given that—like Pence—he otherwise represents an absolute insult to their alleged values. That demographic won’t abandon him unless he does something that he never will….which is to say, something good, like acknowledge that America is a nation of immigrants, or assert the vital importance of a vigorous free press, or pull the US back from wanton military adventurism that hurts us as much as our enemies.

No, the GOP will only turn on Trump if and when he loses enough of that small but crucial middle ground of independent swing voters who make all the difference, considering how immovably the hardline pro- and anti-Trump forces have calcified. And it’s true that his numbers with that group are plummeting.

But here’s the rub. The Republicans will only exercise that self-serving option IF THEY CANNOT MAINTAIN POWER WITHOUT IT. But if their authoritarian efforts succeed in suppressing the opposition vote, in locking down control of enough statehouses, in creating enough gerrymandered congressional districts, and in turning the courts into rubber stamps for their agenda, then the support of their base will be sufficient. Elections will become irrelevant, and then god help us all. That will be the fulfillment of a genuine coup d’etat in America. Then that small minority of white, pseudo-Christian right wing fanatics will be able to enforce its will on the rest of the country, democracy be damned. You scoff? They just did so during the 2016 election, thanks in large part to the apathy of the rest of us (among other things). If they are able to continue on that path, then apathy—or lack thereof—won’t make any difference, not even if it turns to righteous outrage, because by then the system will be totally compromised.

This returns us to the issue of impeachment, and the hope that removing Trump from office will halt this slide into autocracy. But it may already be too late.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Bob Mueller and his intrepid team find that Trump or his associates colluded with the Kremlin, and/or obstructed the investigation into that collusion, or that Trump is so inextricably entangled with dirty Russian money that he is Moscow’s de facto puppet, or that he is indisputably violating the emoluments clause and shamelessly using the office of the Presidency to enrich himself and his family, or some combination of any or all of the above. Ecce pistola fumare! Behold the smoking gun! That will be the ignominious end of that bastard Trump! Right??

Wrong. I fully expect that the GOP and its devotees will say, “So what?”

They’re already doing it. As if anticipating trouble, the Republican Party lately appears to be trying to preempt such incriminating news by pivoting to a new mantra, one that abandons the argument that there was no collusion and says instead: “So what if there was?” (Yeah. What’s so bad about treason anyway?) Witness Reince Priebus’s “nothing burger,” on which I hope he chokes.

The hypocrisy and immorality of this position needs no comment. But it speaks to how low the GOP has sunk, and just how much it now prizes power over any semblance of morality, integrity, true patriotism, or any other honorable value.

And such a Republican reaction is more likely than not. Do you really think they will accept a finding like that from Mueller and dutifully surrender their advantage, as a more honorable era of Republicans did with Nixon? There is not a shred of evidence or precedent to suggest that today’s GOP would show that sort of integrity. Then we will see if the rest of America has the fortitude to rise up and DEMAND that Republican politicians do their constitutional duty and act on such evidence, and what will happen if they refuse.

HOW REPUBLICS DIE

Not long after John McCain topped the 2008 GOP ticket with the slogan “Country First,” then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly proclaimed that the Republicans’ number one goal was ensuring that Barack Obama was a one-term president. Ponder that a moment. That was the Republicans’ top priority—blocking the Democrats and making Obama fail at every opportunity. Not creating jobs, not ensuring national security, not fighting terrorism. Wow. Yet somehow that did not raise hackles with the GOP constitutency; on the contrary, they applauded it. Principles and genuine patriotism had been replaced by a blind lust for victory at any cost.

To that end, the GOP demonized Obama to a degree not seen in US presidential politics since the 19^th Century, tacitly (and sometimes openly) fomenting virulent racism in order to do so. As part and parcel, it incubated the rise of the Tea Party, which embraced and spread the vile lie of birtherism, which—not coincidentally—is the very issue that the pandering, pathologically dishonest Donald Trump used as a springboard for his own electoral ambitions. McConnell was true to his shameful word, and later said that his scorched earth campaign that kept Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court was one of his proudest moments as an—ahem—public servant.

These were the warning signs of a sickness in the American political soul.

Republics don’t always or even necessarily die by force, in coups and invasions. They are often brought down bit by bit, like the frog in boiling water, in the political equivalent of a hostile takeover by corporate raiders who become majority shareholders or otherwise take control of a board of directors from within. And some republics commit suicide by voting in leaders who brazenly have no intention of honoring the democratic system by which they took power.

In 1932, a then-famous American foreign correspondent named Dorothy Thompson got a rare interview with Adolf Hitler, who had just begun to rise in Germany. (Godwin’s Law remains in abeyance until further notice.)

“When you come to power,” she asked, “will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?”

“I will get into power legally,” Hitler answered. “I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.”

Thompson, who was not impressed by the fuehrer-in-the-making, thinking him a buffoon, wrote incredulously: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” Two years later she became the first foreign journalist expelled from Nazi Germany. Soon after, she reconsidered her assessment of the Nazi leader, and authoritarianism in general, writing: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship….When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

Of course, Nazi Germany is the ultimate dark fate we fear. But we need not go that far for a tragedy to befall the American experiment. We could become an autocracy like Franco’s Spain, or Peron’s Argentina, or—more apropos, the best modern example—Putin’s Russia, the most insidious kind of police state, one that insists it is not one and hides behind the illusion of freedom.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

So here we are. To quote Stevie Bannon’s hero, V.I. Lenin: shto delat? What is to be done?

In saying that we are beyond ordinary politics, I am not advocating violent revolution, or even a non-violent one. (Depending on how one defines “revolution.” I’d be all for a Vaclav Havel-style bloodless housecleaning.) The GOP can be stopped by democratic means. One only has to look at the way the courts, the intelligence community, some of the press, and other engaged private citizens are pushing back against Trump and succeeding in hampering him, as the law demands. But it’s a battle, and one that the Republicans are savvy enough to recognize and fight their corner with a vengeance.

Indeed, they have systemically attacked the resistance on each front. The right has tried to crack down on dissent by ordinary citizens, attempting restrict the freedom to assemble, to exercise free speech, and to protest. Trump’s constant and indefensible attacks on the free press—echoed more and more by other Republicans—shriek for themselves. And perhaps most crucially, the GOP is making an unapologetic attempt to pack the courts at every level, much as they packed the statehouses, given the key role of the judicial branch in hemming Trump in thus far. The most high profile of these efforts, of course, has been the importance they placed on the Supreme Court—as noted above, enough to mount an unconscionable anti-democratic campaign against Merrick Garland. And with Kennedy and Ginsburg both in their 80s, that battlefront is far from settled. Even short of the SCOTUS, with a record number of vacancies to be filled on the federal bench, the right wing is practically salivating at the possibility of gaining control of the judiciary for decades to come.

Opposing the despicable GOP agenda and getting Trump out of office remain twin imperatives of equal importance, intertwined goals that we must pursue simultaneously. But the long game will be fighting this insidious Republican attempt to subvert and destroy democracy in America, in which Trump is but a role player. It is no exaggeration to say that the very foundations of our democracy are being tested. Let’s not fool ourselves that the Republican Party’s efforts will end or even abate if and when we get this fake president out of office. They will not. They might even increase their efforts to compensate for the loss of such a useful tool. But we are on to their game. For they are the real architects of American autocracy.

 

Last week I wrote about what to me is the core absurdity in the Age of the Beclowned Presidency: that we are all at mercy of an utter buffoon who does not even rise to the level of a respectable villain. The corollary to that—and another aspect of the current situation that is surely central to many Americans’ angst—is the shock of realizing that millions of our countrymen see Trump so radically differently than we do…..which is to say, positively. That is a worldview that so vastly does not compute that it makes my head vibrate and emit sparks, and my heart despair for the future of our country.

That Russia meddled in our election is settled science. Only the extent of that interference is still being sorted out. (Unless you are a brain-dead Trump supporter, holding your breath and stamping your feet to avoid the steady stream of facts that daily emerge.) Even without actually tampering with the vote count, the Kremlin’s cyber-warfare, dissemination of so-called fake news (eagerly abetted by Trump himself), and other skullduggery had an undeniable effect. The whole of the US intelligence community has concluded as much. If the Trump campaign or others in the GOP colluded with that effort—and there is a hell of a lot of smoke suggesting just that—we are talking about the worst political scandal in American history. I pray Bob Mueller gets to the bottom of it, which is saying a lot because I am an atheist.

But appealing as it would be psychologically, it would be an enormous mistake to lay Trump’s victory on Moscow’s doorstep.

The fact of the matter is, folks: we did this to ourselves.

ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM

Almost 63 million Americans voted for Trump, just about three million fewer than voted for Hillary. (Yes, let’s not forget that she did win the popular vote, which means that in a fair system—a democracy, for example—she would have been the victor. That’s an topic for another time.) To me, it is deeply unnerving that it was even that close. But the fact remains that 63 million of our countrymen thought Trump was the better choice, and that is a shockingly high number given that a rotten cheese rind would have been a more qualified candidate for the job.

Short of actual vote tampering, which seems unlikely, Russian interference amounted chiefly to a grander and more sophisticated version of the exact same thing Trump was engaged in as his electoral bread-and-butter. Disinformation. Lies. The spreading of false stories, rumors, and other acts of deception in order to get people to vote for him, or at least not vote for Hillary. That is what PSYOPS—psychological operations, in military parlance—is. And all evidence suggests that they did a hell of a good job.

But PSYOPS, like con artistry, or hypnosis, doesn’t force its victim to do anything. The victim inflicts the damage on himself. He willingly complies. It’s true that that compliance may be based on the gullible acceptance of outright lies, but it’s voluntary nonetheless. All those millions of people who voted for Trump—a minority of the US electorate, but a significant enough number that they swung the election—did so of their own free will. They were obviously convinced by what Trump said, even if much of it was shameless bullshit, bolstered by false narratives cooked up by the Kremlin and its co-conspirators. And that is a very hard thing to accept about our fellow Americans.

Trump’s was a campaign of wanton racism, misogyny, xenophobia, jingoism, empty promises, inflammatory rhetoric, and appeals to the worst angels of our nature and the basest instincts of humanity. It included promises to commit war crimes, gleeful ridicule of the disabled, disparagement of former POWs and veterans suffering from PTSD, scorn for grieving families of fallen warriors, petty feuds with former beauty queens, schoolyard-level ad hominem attacks on opponents and the press, brazen self-aggrandizement, refusal to honor longstanding norms about disclosure of personal finances and acknowledgement of potential conflicts of interest, tragicomic misstatements on policy, jawdropping demonstrations of ignorance and unfitness for office….I could go on.

And yet millions of our fellow Americans were totally cool with that, or cool enough that they preferred that guy to Hillary Clinton, at least in the way that her foes painted her. And now, after five months of Trump in office, those voters thus far show little inclination to abandon their monstrous champion, despite the accumulated evidence of the last 150 days, which amounts to the most gobsmacking shitshow in American political history.

Wow.

So it would certainly make a lot of us feel better to believe that this swinish presidential pretender was foisted on us from without, by mustache-twirling vodka-sipping Cold War-era villains sitting in Red Square. But laying all the blame on Putin (or even the lion’s share of it) is simply not an accurate depiction of what happened…..and it does further damage to our already reeling republic by refusing to take responsibility for what we have done to ourselves.

Like they say in AA, the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one.

TRUMP BRAND™ KOOL-AID

There is a sickness in the American soul, and until we own that fact we aren’t going to be able to fix it. It didn’t start with Trump, but his election damn sure brought it to the surface, with a vengeance. We need to acknowledge our own collective culpability for Trump and all he represents, irrespective of Russian misbehavior.

Trump’s supporters and enablers—to include virtually the entire Republican Party—are not put off by any of our fake president’s many outrages, failures, or hypocrisies, at least not sufficiently to matter. In fact, many of those folks openly cheer those very things. To cite a rather petty but extremely emblematic example, these people were furious at the (relatively few) number of times Barack Obama played golf while in office, but are fine with Trump playing far more, and at exponentially greater cost to the American taxpayer. (Obama played once in his first hundred days; Trump played 19 times.) And this after Trump himself repeatedly howled over Obama’s fondness for the links and swore that if he were president he would be far too busy to ever play golf.

Yeah…..right.

At the other end of the crimes-against-humanity spectrum, polls suggest that most Trump supporters a) don’t believe that Trump or his people actively collaborated with the Kremlin to rig the election, and b) even more astonishingly, many of them many of them would not be bothered if he had.

Think about that for a moment. This from Republicans, historically the most Russophobic segment of the US population, and the most sanctimoniously hawkish on national security. So that’s the level of mass psychosis at play in the American public right now.

It’s a popular canard that economics is at the root of Trump’s support, but the facts don’t support that. Retrograde attitudes on race and gender and a predilection for authoritarianism are the most significant markers of support for Trump. The backbone of his fanbase is middle and even upper middle class white people who are driven by the usual right/left culture war issues and—gasp!—identity politics of their own, even as they consistently accuse Democrats of exploiting the same.

These people are the Afrikaners of American life, desperately clinging by their fingernails to their position of privilege as they watch a tide of black, brown, and yellow enveloping them. Trump ascended in direct reaction to Obama, as the logical extension of the Tea Party movement which—despite its straight-faced claim—was less concerned with taxation than with the horror of a black guy in the Oval Office. Those tax issues had been around for years, but the Tea Party didn’t coalesce until January 2009—rather suspicious timing to say the least. There goes the neighborhood indeed.

On the heels of Barack, the prospect of a female president was more than the reactionary right could bear, and it didn’t even make any real effort to hide that fact. As NRA president and human colostomy bag Wayne LaPierre tellingly said, “Eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.”

I will not make the sweeping statement that all Trump voters are racists, to name just one thing about them that comes up on the Family Feud board. We progressives are told not to be so insulting toward such a big swath of the American electorate, people who we ostensibly we need to “win over.” Whenever I hear that, I am reminded of Zero Mostel telling Gene Wilder to be polite and not to offend the Nazi playwright who authored “Springtime for Germany” as they attempt to option his play.

I am not in the business of accommodating people who have sold their souls to the devil.

But by the same token, I genuinely do not believe that all Trump voters are racists….or fascists, or rapacious gangster kleptocrats. But to vote for Trump was to demonstrate a disturbing level of comfort with those aspects of the man and his campaign. It meant that none of that stuff bothered you enough to vote otherwise, or even just stay home. No one can seriously argue that Trump’s many personal sins, weaknesses, hypocrisies, and lack of qualifications could legitimately be ignored. Indeed, per above, many of his voters actively admired all those qualities. Those Americans who had reservations about Trump—reservations??!!—but “held their nose” and voted for him were engaged in a kind of willful denial (and still are, to the extent that they remain supportive). And if you’re comfortable enough with Trump’s racism to overlook it, at a certain point, yeah, you are a racist.

Some of these people rationalized their vote on the alleged grounds that “the alternative was worse”—which is to say, Hillary and the Democrats. Accepting that argument requires a degree of irrational intellectual acrobatics that beggars the imagination. Others—so-called single issue voters—said it was all about seats on the Supreme Court, or in the federal judiciary at large, or abortion, or Israel, or what have you. None of those arguments hold water either. Given the vast range and scope of the damage Trump can do as president, and is in fact doing, it’s difficult to credibly claim that any single issue was so paramount that it could justify putting this reckless, unfit cretin in the most powerful office in the free world.

But we did.

BUYERS’ REMORSE FOR BUNCO VICTIMS: A PRACTICAL GUIDE

There have been endless predictions that when Trump voters begin to feel the pain of the GOP policies for which they inexplicably voted, they will mutiny. They will wake up to the fact that they’ve been conned and turn on their orangutan-hued standard bearer, taking to the streets (or at least the polls) with torches and pitchforks.

It’s a rational argument, and certainly an appealing one. After all, a lot of these people are under-educated (“I love the poorly educated!”), many of them in dying industries that cannot be brought back to life no matter how much smoke is blown up their collective ass, and often dependent on government programs like Medicaid and others that Ryan & Company are positively giddy at the prospect of slashing (with Trump’s doltish approval, despite his transparent campaign promises that he would never do such a thing).

Yeah, those people may eventually turn on Trump. But millions of Americans have been voting against their own economic self-interest for decades, at least since the Southern Strategy brought them into the GOP in droves. Generally speaking, human beings are loath to admit they’ve been conned, especially when a huge chunk of their core self-image is invested in the scam. These otherwise decent people have been sold so much snake oil over the past fifty years that they practically hiss. They have been voting for policies that hurt them and benefit millionaires and billionaires for so long—taking food out of the mouths of their children to further line the pockets of the already obscenely rich—that it no longer even registers. In that regard, Trump is nothing new, just the latest and most extreme example of supply side trickle down economics taken to its most immeasurably cruel extreme. And there is less reason than ever to believe that the victims of that Robin Hood-in-reverse scheme will suddenly wake up now and challenge it.

The hypocrisy and patent cruelty of Trumpcare is a perfect example. Crafted in almost occult secrecy, not only without a single public hearing but without giving even Republican senators a fair chance to read and digest it, it represents not just an astonishingly naked effort to brutalize the most vulnerable among us in order to make the rich richer, but does so without even the fig leaf of public accountability. (And of course, that is after the GOP spent years howling that the Obamacare, which had months of open debate and hundreds of public hearings, had been “jammed down the throats of the American people.”)

Does Mitch McConnell not think we’ll eventually notice? Does he not think that sooner or later there will be blowback if and when Trumpcare goes into effect and the American people—those who voted for his party even more than most—begun to suffer from its horrors? Maybe the Republicans are gambling that by then it will be too late and they will have already gotten away with it, especially if they continue to control both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Maybe they’re betting they can weather the storm of outrage, or even—yes—somehow blame it on the Democrats. Do you doubt it? After draft-dodging George Bush succeeded in painting Silver Star-winning John Kerry as a coward and a traitor….after Donald Trump succeeded in portraying Hillary Clinton as the crooked one? We are in “Alice in Wonderland” territory, folks. Anything is possible.

IN MY TRIBE

Less than six months into Trump’s unique reign of terror by incompetence, tribalism in America remains shockingly powerful. I am beginning to wonder if it will ever crumble of its own accord, short of a total collapse of American democracy that might take decades to unfold and even longer to repair, if repair is even possible.

There have been four special Congressional elections since Trump took office and the Republicans have won all four. Clearly Trump’s toxicity has not yet reached the level where he is alienating enough right wing voters to make a difference. To switch metaphors to one popular on cable news, the seawall seems to be holding—for now.

In Montana, the Republican candidate—a multimillionaire, naturally—physically beat the shit out of a reporter who dared ask him about Trumpcare on the eve of the election, in front of numerous other reporters no less, and still won the next day. Admittedly, a lot of early votes had already been cast, and Montana is a deep deep shade of crimson, practically ground zero for nutjob right wing libertarianism. Still, it wasn’t a result that made Republicans think they were under any obligation to begin behaving like decent human beings. Yes, Jon Ossoff came close in Georgia’s 6th district, though I’m not sure what that means, harbinger wise. Is it cause for progressive optimism, as that is a bright red district that Romney won by 23 points, yet last week the Republican candidate Karen Handel squeaked by with less than 10,000 votes? Or is it depressing to think that the sixth most highly educated district in the country still voted for a candidate tethered to the worst troglodyte ever to sit behind the Resolute desk? (See above re the fairy tale that Trumpkins are all dirt poor dumbass rednecks.) Or was the whole Georgia race irrelevant because of the obscene amount of money both sides poured in for the only fight on the card, a situation that won’t be duplicated during the regular midterms eighteen months from now?

Ultimately, “almost a victory” is pointless on the horseshoes-and-hand grenades scale. If Democrats “almost” win every race in 2018 they will still be on the outside of the Capitol building looking in. And this cannot be chalked to blithe ignorance or naiveté, like some of the Trump votes back in November. These voters have seen what Trump is about, and the shamefulness of the GOP in sticking by him, and yet they are still onboard.

But Georgia does speak to the vast ground the GOP has lost due to Trump, and perhaps the Democrats can further exploit that in the months to come. Maybe it’s simply too early for the aforementioned seawall—which is indisputably leaking—to completely collapse. Even tribalism has its limits. Trump has only been in office roughly 150 days, and already has record lows in approval ratings. He may yet drag his party down.

Or maybe not.

WAVE OF MUTILATION

We are not alone in this current wave of neo-fascism, of course. I don’t believe in American exceptionalism as it is usually defined, and since I won’t accept the hosannas that we are a nation chosen by God to rule the world, neither will I accept the condemnation that we are uniquely evil. Trump’s win was of course preceded by Brexit, which reflects a virulent right wing nationalism that has been at work in Europe for decades, even in the famously civilized Scandinavian countries, with their enviable cradle-to-the-grave social welfare systems, high cheekbones, and morose art films. Going further back in recent history, we’ve seen dictatorships triumphant in Italy and Spain and Greece, to say nothing of police states behind the Iron Curtain. During the war we saw appalling collaborationism from the Low Countries to the Balkans and everywhere in between. Few countries can claim never to have suffered from a brush with autocracy; many have dealt with it chronically. And just for the sake of completism, let’s repeat the old but still valid chestnut that Germany was the most civilized country in Europe when it succumbed to the worst incarnation of fascism in human history, the country of Goethe and Kant and Beethoven that is now permanently stained with the mark of the twisted cross and the poisonous legacy of the Wannsee Conference.

It’s a hopeful sign that since Trump that trend seems to have halted abroad, or at the very least slowed. In every national European election since November, the far right parties have been turned back—most notably, in Austria (!) and France. Maybe what happened in the US scared the piss out of the voters of the erstwhile EU. It certainly scared the piss out of me.

The United States’ own tradition of Know Nothing nativism speaks for itself, even if the extent and degree of its latest resurgence caught most of us off guard. But it shouldn’t have. Just confining ourselves to the last two centuries, the reactionary right in the USA has given us Joe McCarthy, John Birch, the Red Menace, Nixon, Bush 43, and now Trump. The Kremlin didn’t invent disinformation; long before it began meddling in the 2016 election the GOP—through its subsidiary, Fox News (or is it the other way around?—had been poisoning the American public with a non-stop stream of lies, fearmongering, and divisiveness.

In the The New Yorker, Stephen Metcalf opined that the recently departed Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder and Trump’s good friend, did more to damage American society than anyone since McCarthy, and it’s hard to argue with that (at least until Trump gets done shitting the bed). Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone called Ailes “one of the worst Americans ever.” With his death and the attendant retrospectives of his career, it’s been widely reported that Ailes designed Fox deliberately as a money-making machine predicated on scaring old white people with the usual bogeymen, and feeding them a toxic stew of resentment, racism, and other reactionary bullshit. Uh, it worked. That Ailes himself genuinely subscribed to that loathsome ideology seemed just a bonus, and distinct from his cynicism. But his greed and his politics were perfect companions. Oh yeah—and he was a sexual predator, the Fox trifecta.

There are lots of guilty parties complicit in the destruction of journalistic credibility in America, but by sheer virtue of its size and reach Fox is first among equals. Despite its fierce protests to the contrary, it indisputably functions as a propaganda department for the right wing, specializing in distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods in order to attack opponents of the plutocratic agenda. In a bitter irony, Fox itself claims of course to be the only reliable source of TV news in America, making an article of faith of the idea that it is the rest of the “mainstream media” that is biased. Joe Goebbels would be proud.

NOW IS OUR TIME

Apropos of last week’s essay, I would argue that Trump is not worthy of all this attention, but it’s not about him. He’s merely a macguffin. What is worthy of our attention, epically so, is this moment of crisis that he is accidentally central to, like a pigeon sucked into the jet engine of a 747 and threatening to bring it down. (Metaphor alert: in this analogy, the 747 is democracy. That was clear, right? The part of Sully Sullenberger will be played by Robert Mueller.)

So what do we do? Once we have accepted the hard truth that we brought this plague upon ourselves, how do we find a way forward?

I don’t know. I can’t do everything, people. Isn’t it enough that I spew all this vitriol every week? Someone smarter than me is gonna have to figure that one out. But this is surely a pivotal moment in American history, the kind we will all have to look back on one day and answer to the question: “Gramps, what did you do during that dark night of the soul?”

The challenges of the present political moment are self-evident, but they also offer a rare opportunity for we the people to stand up and make a decisive change for the good. I will not go so far as to hope there will be a silver lining to the Trump presidency, and I remain skeptical of the hardcore left-wing that—as a kind of consolation prize for Bernie’s defeat—openly preferred Trump to Hillary, imagining that he would hasten la revolucion. But I do think that out of this current madness there is a chance to truly build a real progressive movement for America, one that has teeth.

To that end, one of the most defiantly optimistic—yet pragmatic—viewpoints I’ve recently heard was this one from the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, chairman of the NAACP’s Legislative Political Action Committee and president of its North Carolina chapter. I’ll quote him below, but please click on this link. You really have to hear him say it:

Sometimes you have to look at what your enemy did to defeat you to find your strength….

(If) in order to win they had to lie almost every other ten minutes; they had to find a way to put pornographic sums of money into the electoral pot; they had to spend years pushing voter suppression; they had to use fear against Muslims, against immigrants; they had to be helped by the media that played too long with Trump and gave him too much free press; and then they had to go all the way over to Russia and get help.

If somebody cheats you, they don’t cheat you because you’re weak. People only cheat you when they can’t beat you in a fair fight. Then that says that we are stronger than we realize. And this is not the worst thing we’ve ever faced! People made it through slavery; people made it through the denial of women’s rights; people made it through the Depression in this country; people made it through apartheid and Jim Crow. It‘s our time to stand up and be the moral dissenters, the moral defibrillators, and the moral dreamers and to make it through this moment and use it to change the course of history, to change America, and—in some ways, if we work together—to change the world.

Preach.

********

THE KING’S NECKTIE will be on hiatus next week for the Fourth of July. Happy birthday America. When we return on July 13th, a sobering assessment of the even broader evil currently in play….

Photo at top, in tribute to NEA martyr Andres Serrano
#pisstrump
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pisstrump

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering why Donald Trump inspires in me such revulsion. Much of that time could have been devoted to work, or spending time with my family, or watching paint dry, all of which would have been infinitely more enjoyable. Sure, there are lots of very obvious and well-founded reasons. But I feel a particular loathing for Trump that I don’t feel for indisputably worse human beings (and yes, there are people who are actually worse than Donald Trump; more on that in a bit).

So after all that thought, I’m beginning to think I know why. I can only speak for myself of course, but I suspect there are a great many Americans who feel the same way, which accounts for the palpable groundswell of very personal and well-deserved hostility toward Trump, which feels so different from politics in the recent past, even at their most poisonous.

It’s his complete and utter insignificance.

I’m not saying that we are not living through deeply important, unprecedented, and massively impactful times. We are. It’s just that the figure at the center of them is an absolute cretin of earthshaking proportions, and that is hard to come to grips with.

PREDATORS AND PRETENDERS

Much as I abhor him, Trump is far from the most coldblooded and terrifying ogre on the global scene. We can start with Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Bashar al-Assad, and Robert Mugabe, just for an appetizer. For all his many faults, our so-called president has yet to behave as badly as those boys, though I’m not ruling it out over the long run. (Liberal hysteria, you say? Who in June 2015 thought Trump would even win the GOP nomination?) And that’s just the present day; if we want to go into the past, there are of course the usual genocidal all-stars who need no introduction. Again, my hostility toward Donny Boy does not blind me to the fact that he is a piker in comparison with such amoral, mass murdering monsters.

But here’s the thing about all those guys. They were at least proper villains: formidable, serious individuals who had earned their place as despots to be reckoned with. Trump, by contrast, is an unmitigated buffoon. The mere fact that this bozo is our head of state, commander-in-chief , and in control of the nuclear codes is gobsmacking. When I look into my heart, that is the thing about Trump that hits me on a very visceral level, in a way that far more capable and accomplished villains never have or ever could. In that sense, WaPo writer Dan Drezner’s phrase the “beclowning of the presidency” could not be more apt.

I am enraged that we have to devote so much time and energy to this blithering nincompoop. “What does Donald Trump think about the Paris Accord?….What does Donald Trump think about healthcare?…..What does Donald Trump’s latest tweet mean?” It makes me furious on a daily basis that I have to worry what Donald fucking Trump thinks about ANYTHING. And yet that is what the collective brainpower of the entire American punditocracy—indeed, the thinking class of much of the world—is forced to do. We have willingly saddled ourselves with a deranged toddler king, and thus spend much of our time desperately parsing and predicting and wringing our hands over what His Royal Fatuousness believes at any given moment.

Don’t get me wrong: Trump is terrifying, no doubt. I am not dismissing him as a joke unworthy of our attention. On the contrary: the very fact that he is so unqualified, so clueless, so out of his depth, is the heart of the problem, especially since his ignorance is yoked to a despicable and dangerous right wing agenda. (No surprise, really. I suppose a naïf might theoretically arise in the service of a benevolent ideology, but the crude simplicity of reactionary politics more readily lends itself to a simpleton standard bearer.)

I’m not saying every dictator throughout history was some sort of genius. Saddam Hussein, for example, was an uneducated killer who had hardly ever been out of Iraq, but he was still a savvy and ruthless warlord who rose to power within the vicious Baath Party. Tsarist pretensions aside, Putin is a coldblooded KGB apparatchik more than a global visionary, but no one rises to the top of that organization by accident or luck. Trump has no such CV. He is a dimwit who blundered into the Presidency almost by accident with the help of millions of Americans who were at best woefully misguided (I’m being generous) and millions of others who abetted him with their apathy, not to mention a myopic media, a craven Republican Party, and possibly Russia, to a name just a few of his accomplices.

Even those benighted far-off kingdoms and ancient empires that have historically suffered under monstrous child-kings had the excuse of being hereditary states. Kim Jong-un is bedfellows with Trump as an erratic dunce apt to install his horse as a member of parliament, but North Koreans can at least comfort themselves that he was born into the job. By shameful contrast, the United States willingly installed our infantile tyrant-in-chief.

It goes without saying that the Hitlers, Stalins, and Kims of the world deserve a special place in hell, along with all the other mass murderers, pedophiles, child abusers, and people who talk on their cellphones in public toilet stalls. Trump doesn’t meet that elite criteria (though a Hades-adjacent condo is surely awaiting him). But he is uniquely infuriating in his combination of unearned arrogance, cartoonish megalomania, prideful ignorance, malignant narcissism, despicable values, and willingness to spread poisonous bile into our collective cultural bloodstream. And so we are all forced to deal with Trump all day every day, whether we want to or not.

Donald ought to be in his glory with this state of affairs. His infantile, all-consuming mission in life—his prime directive—is to be at the center of attention at all times. And Lordy (as Jim Comey might say) has he gotten his wish…..and it does seem that the gods are punishing him by granting it. As we speak, Trump is arguably the most mocked human being on earth, on pace to secure that title for all time. It’s a fitting fate for a man with a pathological dread of being ridiculed. (Note the number of times that he has referenced what he clearly considers the ultimate nightmare of “being laughed at.”) All evidence suggests that he is mostly miserable as President, which warms my heart and serves him right. It’s very possible that he blithely began this quixotic foray into presidential politics as a mere marketing ploy, then found it spinning out of control to the point where he couldn’t stop it, and is now trapped in a job that he doesn’t remotely want and is ludicrously ill-equipped to do. We are all paying the price for that bad joke gone terribly awry, but it’s mildly mollifying to know that Trump hates his life too.

THE RIGHTFUL STATE OF THINGS

There has always been lots of loose talk in America that what this country needs is a leader who’s not a politician. Fran Lebowitz, with characteristic wit, pointed out the fatal flaw in that facile argument on The Tonight Show, as did Louis CK in a memorable appearance on Conan. (Both bits were pre-election and both depressingly prescient.) I think when making that wish people imagine Kevin Kline’s Dave, or even Jay Bulworth, not the troll currently occupying the Oval Office. Perhaps they should have been more specific.

I’d like to remind everyone that two short years ago, when Trump descended the royal escalator at his gold-plated castle on Fifth Avenue, he was an utter joke, and had been for three decades. He was a D-list reality TV celebrity, which was itself a surprising second act in a professional life of fraud, failure, and malfeasance. He wasn’t a real estate mogul, but he played one on TV. His primary business was licensing his name to crap: apartment buildings, casinos, and golf courses, but also steaks, vodka, neckties made in China, second-rate pro football leagues, fake universities, and a string of ridiculous, ghostwritten autobiographies. He was a walking punchline for the New York press that rightly knew him as a pompous windbag and shameless wannabe desperate to be allowed into the club with the cool kids. He had staked his entire public image (and self-image) on being a billionaire, but his business career had been a string of serial bankruptcies and byzantine lawsuits starring unhappy former partners and stiffed vendors. Everyone in New York City was on to his game, no one would loan him money, and he was generally regarded as a boor and a joke by serious real estate developers and other wealthy people. He crowed endlessly about his financial acumen, but as many economics experts have pointed out, if Donald had merely taken the millions he inherited from his father and parked it in the S&P 500 he would have made more money than he did with his numerous, oft-disastrous business ventures. He was a Richie Rich cartoon come to life….a poor person’s comically distorted idea of a rich person. Late night talk show hosts openly praised the comedy gods for putting Trump in the presidential race, and pleaded with him on camera not to drop out, and deprive them of A-plus comedic material.

Who’s laughing now, as they say.

But that was the proper state of affairs, the absolutely appropriate response to Trump as an aspiring politician. Now, through sheer daily, mind-numbing repetition, we are inevitably becoming accustomed to the words “President Trump.” (It still makes me queasy every time I hear it.) It’s like having to hear the words “President Carrot Top.” “What does Carrot Top think about Iran’s nuclear ambitions?….What does Carrot Top think about immigration policy?” The presidency is unavoidably conferring upon Trump a certain gravitas—unearned, it goes without saying. But seeing him amid the trappings of the office is slowly, bit by bit, desensitizing us to how very very wrong that is. But now we are all enrolled in Trump University.

THE SLIDING SCALE OF REPUBLICAN AWFULNESS

I actively disliked Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush to varying degrees, but at least they worked their way into national politics through elected office at the state level, among other achievements. Yes, Reagan was dismissed as a lightweight—an actor, no less!—but by the time he ran for the presidency he had already transformed into a serious public figure, and been president of the Screen Actors Guild and governor of California (paving the way for the Terminator). No one ever seriously wondered if he could in fact even read. Bush 43 was similarly scorned as a birdbrain and a dilettante, but he had at least been an Air National Guard pilot (sort of), a graduate of both Yale and Harvard (nepotism and the gentleman’s C notwithstanding), and the governor of Texas. When he was in the White House I was wont to call him “The Evil Chauncey Gardiner,” but now that comparison is beyond obsolete. Compared to Trump, Bush was Winston goddam Churchill.

Schwarzenegger ought to hold the crown as least likely national-level politician, but he was a self-made man and then some. Improbably, he rose from being a champion bodybuilder with a Prince Valiant haircut and an impenetrable, ridicule-ready Austrian accent to become—first—the biggest movie star in the world (which was already pretty surprising) and then the well-regarded if flawed governor of our most populous state, one that would be the sixth largest economy in the world were the Bear Republic an independent country.  (He even laid out that hilarious-at-the-time plan on camera in the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron.) I didn’t think Mitt Romney was the best man to lead America, and I damn sure wouldn’t let him babysit my dog, but I didn’t feel physical repulsion at the idea that he might occupy the Lincoln Bedroom, or fear for the Constitution, or lay awake nights worrying that he might start a thermonuclear war in a fit of pique. I wouldn’t piss down Ted Cruz’s throat if his heart was on fire, but even he is not quite as repulsive as Trump. His politics are abhorrent, his personality (such as it is) makes my skin crawl, and I’m not among those who are bowled over by his alleged smarts either. A Princeton pedigree and a talent for debating begin to lose their weight as intellectual credentials when deployed in the service of ideals as vile and openly hypocritical as his. (Not unlike Newt Gingrich.) But Ted Cruz is still at least a douchebag on the spectrum of the reality-based community….which was why even Lyin’ Ted was vanquished in the primaries by Trump’s schoolyard insults. When a candidate emerges that makes even Ted Cruz look normative, you know we’re in uncharted waters.

AMERICAN IDIOT

Trump is not uniquely awful. Sure, there was a lot to be furious about in how he campaigned for the presidency: his pandering to the most vile, base instincts of humankind; his racism, xenophobia, and jingoism; his shameless lies, ad hominem attacks, and empty promises. But there have been plenty of demagogues in history, many of them trafficking in the same neo-fascism to which such behavior lends itself. But most of them at least had the common decency to be mustache-twirling villains who were aware of the cons they were running. I really don’t think Trump is.

In addition to Being There, another frequent cinematic comparison during the campaign was A Face In the Crowd, Budd Schulberg’s brilliant story of a drunken ne’er-do-well who is elevated to national prominence only to become a demagogic monster. (Directed by the morally compromised Elia Kazan, and starring a astonishing Andy Griffith in far and away his best ever performance. Judging by that one film, Griffith could well have had an amazing career as a dramatic actor. But I won’t quibble with the comforts of Mayberry RFD, which run through my childhood like Pop Tarts and Tang.) Face has become a ready touchstone in American cultural life, applied to everyone from Will Rogers to Bill Clinton to Oprah with varying degrees of accuracy (and sometimes completely inaccurately). But it has never felt more on target than with Donald J. Trump.

But Lonesome Rhodes—Griffith’s character—at least had skills. Yes, Trump is a con man too, plain and simple, like Lonesome: that is the one thing he indisputably does well. But even there he seems to be a kind of idiot savant. He is less like a conniving, brilliantly devious grifter who delights in fleecing the rubes than a wanton sociopath who believes his own bullshit.

I am tired of hearing that Trump is smart, or that we underestimated him, or that we continue to do so. What we underestimated was the gullibility and moral vacuousness of the American people. He is not smart. In fact, he seems to be actively stupid. All he has is the animal cunning and instinct for the jugular of a schoolyard bully, albeit in spades. That served him very well in the campaign; in office, not so much.

The added fact that he won—ahem—the presidency over an infinitely more qualified candidate only makes matters more infuriating…..and that that candidate was a woman introduces the likewise crazy-making issue of misogyny about which I have already written at length in this blog. Regardless of what one thinks of Hillary Clinton, even her harshest critics have to admit that she had the experience and qualifications to be President. (I refer you again to Fran Lebowitz and the White Pages under “plumbing.”) In fact, for some of those critics—the Bannonite “smash the state” faction—that very experience was part of the problem. For others, the main problem was simply her vagina.

KAKISTOCRACY ÜBER ALLES

The fact that Trump is an utter tool, a psychological trainwreck, barely literate, and wildly unqualified to be a detention hall monitor let alone President of the United States remains maddening and unfathomable to me. I’m not saying I would prefer a brilliant, evil genius in the White House. I wouldn’t. But at least that would not make me livid at the universe for the incomprehensible injustice that this man is somehow our leader.

Under Trump we are now indisputably a kakistocracy, as Michelle Goldberg has sagely written: ruled by the very worst and least qualified. Fittingly, he assembled a Cabinet that seemed to belong in dystopian science fiction, each officer seemingly the very worst person imaginable to head their respective departments. A climate change denier for head of the EPA. A Christian fundamentalist anti-public education zealot to head the Department of Education. An oil industry apologist to head Energy. A Goldman Sachs vampire squid to fill Alexander Hamilton’s seat at Treasury (who, as a bonus, is entangled with Kremlin money laundering, as I noted last week). I was actually weirdly relieved to hear Steve Bannon admit—brag, in fact—that those Cabinet members were chosen for that very reason, the likelihood that they would eviscerate their respective departments, part of his avowed Leninist campaign to destroy the US government. It would have depressed me more to think that Trump & Co. genuinely believed these were the best people for the job.

Once even people on the right largely disparaged Trump as a joke not worthy of serious consideration. Remember during the primaries when there was talk that Trump would destroy the Republican Party as we know it, that the Grand Old Party might split into a white nationalist party with him at the head and a more mainstream Conservative Party that reflected traditional GOP mores? How naïve that view now looks, and how unjustifiably generous toward American conservatism. Instead of splitting in two and salvaging its semi-reasonable wing, the American right—in a Faustian bargain—went all in with this despicable snake oil salesman and purveyor of racist bile, even as he violated in person and policy every tenet of its alleged philosophy. A thrice married, proudly unfaithful serial philanderer and inveterate Manhattan sybarite with no discernible religious belief (let alone record of churchgoing); a former Democrat who is all over the map on trade, taxes, fiscal policy, and numerous other once doctrinaire Republican positions; a man who on foreign policy swings from Know Nothing “America First” isolationism to jingoistic Curt LeMay “Bomb them into the Stone Age” misadventurism at the drop of a red trucker hat: this is the beast to whom the former Party of Lincoln sold what remains of its soul.

Almost six months into the Clown King’s chaotic reign, rationality and reason would suggest that the right ought to dump Trump post haste, for numerous reasons. Instead they appear to be doubling down. Tribalism in American today is such that the right (with a few notable exceptions) has closed ranks around Trump as its last best hope, covering its collective ears and shouting la-la-la-la to drown out the pitiful cries of its conscience, for those conservatives who still have one. We all know that Trump did and said numerous things that would have sunk any other presidential candidate—one strike and you’re out, as Ed Muskie or Howard Dean could tell you. (Oh, but they’re Democrats.) But once he became the last Republican standing, Trump benefited from the ruthless messaging of the Republican machine. Trump is a human wedge issue. Like abortion, gay marriage, or gun control, he has become a binary, in-or-out litmus test on which there is precious little middle ground, if any.

Ironically, by winning the election, Trump may wind up destroying the GOP much more thoroughly than if he had lost. It will depend largely on when—and if—the Republican Party ever decides to cut its losses and jettison this toxic, golden-combed-over albatross. That, of course, is what some on the left openly hoped for: the Susan Sarandon segment of the Bernie Sanders movement who argued that a Trump victory would be better in the long run than a Clinton one because it would hasten the revolution. We shall see. But there is no denying that along the way Trump is doing possibly irreparable damage, none of which is made up for by the promise of a possible revolutionary victory on the distant horizon.

During the campaign, many many people—especially in Republican circles but on the far left as well—floated the lazy, disingenuous idea that “both candidates are bad,” implying that they were equally so and therefore did it really matter who won? How can anyone possibly look at the flaming shitstorm that has been the last 150 days and still believe that? Trump’s hardcore followers do, of course, which is a Salem witch trials-level of mass hysteria. As an admirer of Hillary Clinton, warts and all, I have always rejected that false equivalency full stop. But for those who had severe criticisms of her, during the race I used to say, “OK, for the sake of argument, let’s say both candidates are bad….but one is bad like acne and the other is bad like leprosy.” So we chose our illness, and we are all infected now.

It is somewhat comforting to think that Trump may well go down in history as the worst, most vilified, most justifiably ridiculed US president ever…..a fate worthy of O. Henry, or Roald Dahl, or Greek mythology. My fear is simply that he takes all of us in and the whole of Planet Earth down with him.

 

Jim Comey’s dramatic testimony last week significantly ratcheted up the intensity of the greasefire engulfing Donald J. Trump, whom it still pains me to describe as the President of the United States. Yesterday’s tap dance recital by Confederate General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and the astonishing rumors that Trump is contemplating firing special counsel Robert Mueller have only added fuel to those noxious flames.

For those who dislike Trump but have been skeptical of any skullduggery with Russia, the shift to obstruction of justice as the likely grounds on which Trump will find the locks changed on the Lincoln Bedroom is very welcome. “The coverup is always worse than the crime” as the cliché goes, although in this case the potential crime—conspiring with a foreign power to throw a presidential election—is actually a fuckload worse than any coverup. (What they really mean is that the coverup is usually the thing that gets you caught.) Regardless, Trump is tailor-made to create more problems for himself with his predilection for Mob-like tactics to intimidate investigators and squash an honest inquiry. Even if there ultimately proves to be no there there on Russia (and that’s a big “if”), Trump is creating reasons to justify his removal with an almost kamikaze-like determination.

So for that very reason we have to ask: WHY IS HE DOING THAT? Why take such extreme measures to block an investigation at every turn—and at such risk to his presidency—if the allegations regarding Russia are false? It certainly does not convince anyone that he has nothing to hide, not even those predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt (a group largely limited to Klan rallies and sexual predator chat rooms).

Some on the left—notably Glenn Greenwald—have scorned the progressive fixation on possible Trump collusion with Russia as wishful thinking, a left wing indulgence in tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory more characteristic of the right wing lunatic fringe, and a waste of valuable energy better spent fighting the loathsome Trump agenda. In its most critical version, Russiagate is a liberal analogue to birtherism, a handhold for an enraged opposition party desperate for a reason to declare a hated presidency illegitimate.

(The analogy is imperfect at best, of course. Birtherism was a racist fantasy without the slightest basis in reality. Russiagate is at least plausible—highly plausible, in fact—even if it is eventually disproven. We shall see. But the right’s unconvincing attempt to depict it as a “fairytale” smacks of a carefully coordinated media strategy, to include a directive to use that term, judging by the suspicious frequency with which it pops out of the mouths of Trump apologists.)

But I do understand the criticism. It’s almost too much to hope that this horrific administration did something so criminal, so self-destructive, so blatantly treasonous that it would bring about its own downfall. But the other equally believable way of looking it this phenomenon is that the two threads are inherently connected. OF COURSE an administration as venal, immoral, self-aggrandizing, and contemptible as Trump’s would be involved in such crimes. It would be more surprising if they were not. This is an administration (and a campaign before that) whose stock-in-trade is lies, greed, xenophobia, racism, divisiveness, and wanton corruption on a scale never before seen in presidential politics, which is saying something. Are we surprised that such people might make secret deals with our enemies to gain power in exchange for favors and fealty to be named later?

So in that sense Russiagate is not an aberration or the fulfillment of liberal magical thinking at all, but the logical conclusion of a leader and an administration this abominable. Admittedly, the scope and scale of the crimes of which Team Trump is accused are so outlandish that they would embarrass the worst airport spy novelist. But there you have it.

RUSSIAN ROULETTE WITH SIX CHAMBERS FILLED

So let’s stop for a moment to take a quick survey of what we know about Russiagate thus far. Obviously, our information is very very incomplete. I remain confident that the truth will come out as result of Bob Mueller’s inquiry—unless Trump fires him—along with the efforts of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and to a lesser extent its counterpart in the House (compromised by its chairman, the oleaginous Trump toady Devin Nunes), and we may yet see an independent commission as well. What Congress does about the conclusions those entities come to is another matter. But even the incomplete, raw facts we already know are rather damning when viewed by anyone with a shred of objectivity.

The Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election with the express purpose of helping Donald Trump win. That is not in dispute by any serious observer. Trump himself actively encouraged Russia to hack into the computers of his Democratic rival, which it did. Unwittingly or not, Trump also personally helped spread disinformation—“fake news”—that had been generated by Russia to hurt Hillary Clinton. And both during the campaign and in the transition period, Trump associates had improper contacts with Russian officials, including intelligence officers. All seventeen US intelligence agencies concurred on the issue of Russian interference, which was corroborated by independent reporting by the most respected journalistic organizations in the country, as well as allied intelligence agencies who were the first to warn the US government of what was going on. Only Trump’s most fanatic followers believe otherwise, and of course Trump himself, who evidently is so insecure about the legitimacy of his presidency that he lives in dread fear of anything that suggests he did not win with a North Korean-like 100% of the vote.

None of that looks good for Trump. And that stuff doesn’t even rise to the level of active collusion, which would be an actual act of treason. So at a bare minimum one might be justifiably outraged at Trump’s relationship with Russia even without believing he or his people are outright traitors.

But do we think Trump and his people actually even further? Again, let’s look at the record. Cui bono, as they say. Who benefits?

The Trump administration’s eagerness to do favors for Russia while getting nothing in return (that we know of) is eyebrow-raising to say the least. Among the gifts: lifting sanctions imposed by the Obama administration, prevailing on the GOP to change its platform on Ukraine and Crimea, and returning to the Kremlin a pair of mansions in Long Island—openly known to be spy facilities—that Obama took away in retaliation for Russian misbehavior. The capper—thus far—has been Trump’s jawdropping decision to hand over to Moscow top secret compartmentalized information passed to the US by Israel, without Tel Aviv’s consent or foreknowledge, not to mention that of anyone in the US intelligence community. That unfathomable action may well have been a function of Trump’s well-known eagerness to brag and impress, rather than of any duties as a Russian stooge. But it speaks to his level of comfort with the Kremlin and his ignorance both of diplomacy and the basics of handling classified material, to say nothing of general idiocy and unfitness for office.

Trump’s behavior during the recent NATO summit, in which he excoriated our oldest and staunchest allies while refusing to reaffirm Article 5 mandating collective defense was a wet dream for Putin. As many noted, Trump may or may not be a Russian asset, but in Brussels he behaved exactly as the Kremlin would have wanted a Russian asset to behave. In shaking confidence in a mutual defense pact that has kept Europe secure for more than seventy years, Trump’s performance could not have better served Russian interests if the Kremlin itself had scripted it. Hmmmm.

Of course, an affinity for Russia is pervasive in Trumpworld. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was a paid flack for Russian political interests, which was why he was forced to resign. Steve Bannon and the so-called “alt-right” (let’s just call them what they are: neo-Nazi white supremacists) are deeply enamored of Russia for their own twisted quasi-eugenic reasons. And Trump himself famously has never had a bad word to say about Vladimir Putin: this from a man who has picked fights with the Pope, a Gold Star familiy, beauty queens, Meryl Streep, the cast of Hamilton, and the prime minister of Australia, just to name a few. Yes, it could be that Trump merely admires a preening bully like Putin, which would be of a piece with Trump’s own self-image and man-crushes on various other so-called strongmen, from Duterte to Kim Jong-un to the Saudi royal family. But the weirdness, consistency, and intensity of his Russophilia is highly suspect. It’s hard to believe that there aren’t more concrete motives in play.

WHAT’S MY MOTIVATION?

So what can we conclude from all this? Again, lawyers, investigators, and Congressmen will deliver the evidence, but as private citizens we are within our rights to speculate.

The most extreme and baroque scenario, of course, is that Trump is being blackmailed by the Kremlin and as a result is their clandestine agent. (Not very clandestine, actually, but that’s the idea.) The possibility that the Kremlin has compromising salacious information on Trump as alleged in the Steele Dossier (one of my favorite Ludlum novels) seems farfetched, although Trump’s adolescent fixation on his sexual escapades does not help his argument. Apparently in his many meetings and conversations with Comey, Trump was far more agitated about the alleged “golden shower” tape than anything else.

What is not farfetched at all is the possibility that Trump’s business interests are heavily entangled with the octopus of Russian organized crime, government, and security services (which for all practical purposes are merely separate tentacles of the same rapacious beast), incentivizing him to act favorably toward Moscow without being an actual controlled “asset” in the strict sense of the word. Of course, since Trump won’t release his taxes—and the Republican Party and rank-and-file are acting like that’s acceptable—we don’t know. Perhaps the emoluments suit recently filed by the Attorneys General of Maryland and the District of Columbia will force his taxes to light.

Trump has claimed he has no business ties to Russia, which we know to be patently false. His own sons have bragged about all the money the Trump family businesses get from Russia. Again, tax returns would be helpful in sorting out truth from Pinocchio-isms, which is precisely why Trump won’t release them.

Rachel Maddow has extensively documented Trump’s involvement in real estate sales tied to his massive debt to Deutsche Bank, which extends to laundering illicit Russian money through a sketchy Cypriot bank run by associates of Putin (which is to say, by Putin). One of the chief officers of that bank—and this is almost beyond belief—is the man who is now the United States Secretary of Treasury under Trump, Wilbur Ross. In normal times that would be a front page international scandal, but in the current climate it’s just Tuesday.

So short of water sports with Russian hookers and/or a Manchurian candidate brainwashing, the most plausible scenario seems to be that Trump simply does not want to piss off people who have great financial leverage over him, or through whom he makes a lot of money , or both. Not very titillating, but very very believable. And that is the most charitable interpretation that the facts allow. For Trump, it only gets worse from there.

WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE?

Perhaps the most damning and suspicious point of all is this simple question: If all of the Trump team’s contacts with the Russians were innocent, why do the White House and members of Trump’s inner circle keep lying about those contacts? That dog quite plainly does not hunt. Which brings us back to the original question. Why so desperately try to dodge and undermine the Russiagate investigation unless there is something incriminating to hide?

Jeff Sessions lied under oath, claiming he had never had any contacts with the Russians as a Trump surrogate, then was exposed as having had at least two clandestine meetings with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, the Kremlin’s top spy in the US. Mike Flynn and Jared Kushner similarly failed to disclose such contacts with Russian officials. Flynn also failed to mention that he was a paid agent of a foreign power—Turkey—and had even intervened on Ankara’s behalf to halt long-planned US military operations against ISIS that the Turks opposed. (This from a retired three-star general and career intelligence officer who during the campaign self-righteously railed over Hillary Clinton’s possible carelessness with classified material, memorably leading bloodthirsty chants of “Lock her up.”) Kushner floated a proposal to the Russians so startling that even they were caught off guard: that the Trump team use Russia’s own secure secret communications network for a backchannel to the Kremlin to prevent US intelligence from listening in. Kislyak, Lavrov, & Co. didn’t realize that they would soon be getting top secret compartmentalized information handed to them on a silver platter from the President himself during a face to face meeting in the Oval Office.

It is hard to believe that Sessions, Flynn, and especially a callow neophyte like Kushner undertook those actions on their own initiative and without Trump’s knowledge. It’s far more likely that they did so at his direction. Obviously, that is an explosive conclusion  and one that Mueller and the other prosecutors will have to prove, if they can. But purely as a matter of common sense, it is difficult to believe that Trump was not involved. Why has Trump been so desperate to stop the investigation into Michael Flynn’s actions, to the point of sacking the director of the FBI over it? Is it just because he is so loyal to Flynn, a man he also summarily fired? Uh, maybe. But far more likely is the simplest and most obvious explanation of all: Because he ordered Flynn to take those actions.

“I’M AS SORRY AS YOU ARE, DMITRI”

Needless to say, there is some irony in Americans expressing shock and outrage at Russian meddling in our election, given the long history of American meddling in foreign elections (and by “meddling” I’m including covert CIA attempts to overthrow foreign governments by force). Governments try to influence foreign elections all the time, sometimes in benign ways and sometimes more maliciously. We don’t have to like it or tolerate it, but it’s naïve to be shocked by it.

What is genuinely outrageous, however, is the idea that American citizens would collaborate with such efforts, or condone others doing so, which is what the overwhelming majority of Republicans are brazenly doing. Polls show that tribalism in America is so extreme at the moment—at least on the right—that few Republican voters say they would be bothered even if hard evidence emerged that Trump did in fact conspire with the Kremlin.

Let’s stop and take that in a moment. Wow.

The reasons given are usually on the order of “Ah, all politicians do that sort of thing,” or “Hillary’s done/would do worse,” or “Whatever it took to keep Hillary out of office, I’m fine with it.” Such thinking does not deserve to be dignified with a response, but you can imagine for yourself what those same voters would likely have said if the roles were reversed and Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were suspected of conspiring with Vladimir Putin to throw the election. Hell, the Tea Party wanted to lynch Barack just for putting his feet up on his desk. (OK, to be fair, they wanted to lynch him because he’s black. But they got pretty upset about the desk thing.)

In his testimony, Jim Comey made plain that Russia executed a shocking, extensive, and well-planned act of war against the United States and other Western democracies and will continue to do so. To much less public fanfare, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recently testified that the possibility of Trump/Russia collusion dwarfs Watergate, making it arguably the worst scandal in American history. The Russian effort represents a far more serious threat to American sovereignty and democracy than ISIS. But we have been conditioned to freak out over “terrorism,” especially when carried out by brown people of a different religion, to the point where it even beats out decades of ingrained Russophobia. (A Russophobia that, historically, was led by the Republican Party.)

Trump himself has shown zero interest in investigating Russian interference in the election—not even lip service. On the contrary, in fact: Trump bragged of shutting down the investigation, both to NBC’s Lester Holt on national television, and more shockingly, to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister face to face in the Oval Office. (Come on, guy, at least try to act innocent.) After Comey’s testimony, MSNBC anchor and former Bush White House communications chief Nicole Wallace sagely pointed out that Donald Trump spoke with Jim Comey in person or by phone NINE times in the four months. Obama spoke with Comey only twice in three YEARS. Not ONCE in any of those nine conversations did the President of the United States Donald Trump appear concerned about such Russian action, or even inquire about the progress of the investigation into it. Does that sound like the behavior of a man who really wants to get to the bottom of any such interference….or for that matter, the behavior of a man who is supposed to be in charge of the security and defense of the United States of America?

So yes, the perfect, almost mathematical symmetry of Russiagate is almost too good to be true. But it only makes sense. Of course Trump would do such a shocking thing, and of course he would then try to squash the inquiry into it, and of course the venal and loathsome beast that is the modern Republican Party would stand by him and pretend it’s all OK. But the comeuppance that appears to be on the way (I’m not holding my breath) is, in the end, a matter of karma, if one believes in that sort of thing. Trump is a despicable, poisonous cretin with a long history of immoral, illegal, and unconscionable behavior in both his personal and professional lives. He is jawdroppingly unqualified for the presidency and should never have come within a mile of winning the Oval Office if there was anything resembling justice in this world. But he did. And as the cosmic scales now give signs of righting themselves, he may well get frogmarched out of that office in chains because of that very sort of behavior.

Inshallah.

Nixon/Trump mashup illustration; artist unknown

 

Last time, we examined how Donald J. Trump has carved out a dangerous, almost unfathomably low watermark for dishonesty in public life, putting at risk the very bedrock of our democracy. That high-pitched shrieking you are now hearing is conservatives insisting that this is a gross exaggeration. Liberal hysteria! Trump Derangement Syndrome! But I would say that the opposite view is willful naiveté, if not shameless deceit in its own right.

So let us now look at his co-conspirators, who if anything, are even more culpable than the fake president they serve.

RISE OF THE INVERTEBRATES

In abetting Trump’s Orwellian war on demonstrable reality, the Republican Party has exhibited a level of hypocrisy, spinelessness, and opportunism that is gobsmacking even by the conventional standards of politics. In the past, a politician who engaged in the sort of relentless mendacity that Trump does would have been shitcanned in short order. But the GOP has shrugged and rubbed its neck and essentially said, “Lies? What lies?” If the Republican “leadership” (sorry—just threw up in my mouth a little) stood up and denounced Trump at any of the many opportunities he has given them over the past two years, he would have been finished. You may have noticed that that has not happened.

Some have tried to excuse this fecklessness on the grounds of the GOP’s alleged helplessness before the awesome power of Trump’s “base.” Hard to know, given the mysteriousness of that group, one so elusive that the New York Times can only find the same handful of small business owners in Ohio to interview over and over. That said, it’s true that Trump could wipe his ass with the American flag on live TV and his hardcore supporters would find a way to defend and even celebrate it. (His own example, famously, was that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not pay any political price. My formulation, frankly, is better because it involves behavior that his troglodytic minions would otherwise be upset about. Generally, they’re fine with shooting people.)

But Trumpkins represent only a small sliver of the American electorate….admittedly, one that turned out as never before last November, having been presented with a white power candidate on a major party presidential ticket for the first time in their lives. These autocrat-friendly Americans only determine the direction of our country so long as the Republican leadership is willing to let them do so. Trump’s deadenders and their blind loyalty cannot prop up their hero unless the GOP mandarins allow it, which is precisely what they have done. The leaders of the Republican Party are not the helpless victims of a faux populism. They are willful partners in it for their own partisan gain, the public good be damned.

Please try to stifle your yawns. Everyone who knows anything at all about politics in America is well aware of this. Trump is a soulless monster, but one so deranged that he seems not even to recognize the horrors he perpetrates as instinctively as breathing. (Which hardly excuses him, but still.) By contrast, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the rest of the Vichy Republicans are in some ways more culpable than the buffoon-in-chief, because they know what a grotesque and dangerous pretender to the throne Trump is. But McConnell, Ryan, et al are willing to enable and defend him so long as he gives them cover to implement their own appalling agenda, which boils down to the simplest of goals: further enriching the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the poor and the middle class.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, failing to call Trump out is a gross abdication of their duty as elected officials, of their alleged patriotism—about which they are always so quick to crow— and ultimately of sheer morality. But did we really expect any better from people whose lifelong dream is to take food out of the mouths of hungry children to give billionaires a tax cut?

FAHRENBALANST

Of course, the Republican Party began this process of distancing itself from the reality-based community years ago by convincing millions of Americans that the “mainstream media” was untrustworthy and biased against them. Unable to refute objective, well-researched and sourced stories in highly respected news outlets, the GOP simply tried to kill the messenger. This poisonous process of discrediting legitimate journalism was intensified with the creation and eventual triumph of Fox News, which eventually became—as it likes to brag—the most watched TV news network in America and the broadcast channel from which more of our fellow citizens get their news than any other. Fox has grown so powerful, in fact, that many have wondered whether it is properly described as an arm of the Republican party or if it’s the other way around. (Not coincidentally, the rise of Fox parallels the situation in—surprise!—Russia, where the illusion of a free press rests on print journalism so lacking in influence that the Kremlin doesn’t even bother to suppress it, while the vast majority of the public gets its news from government-controlled television. In Russia, however, there is no question about which is the dog and which the tail.)

It’s only fitting that Fox was the brainchild of the late Roger Ailes, a sexual predator whom Donald Trump very recently lauded as “a very, very good person,” and for decades had as its biggest star Bill O’Reilly, another sexual predator whom Trump called “a good person” who “didn’t do anything wrong.” (After all, the three of them have so much in common.)

To add insult to injury, Fox famously took the slogan “Fair and balanced.” (And George Orwell rolled over in his grave). When an individual engages in that sort of gainsaying, that is what psychologists call—Krauthammer, correct me if I’m wrong—“projection.” (“I’m not the puppet—you’re the puppet!”) When institutions, TV networks, and political parties do it it’s called “fascism.”

We have now reached a point where tens of millions of Americans have wholeheartedly bought into this right wing propaganda, and an entire shadow media—Breitbart, InfoWars, Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, WorldNetDaily, and all the rest— has arisen devoted to disinformation and conspiracy theory. Donald Trump is the logical extension of that long, slow debasement of the truth, the final charlatan waiting with a broad, rapacious grin at the bottom of our collective descent into irrationality, confirmation bias, and gleeful self-delusion.

Ironically, and in contravention of Fox’s loathsome claim, the so-called mainstream media is in fact balanced to a fault—almost comically so. Paul Krugman ‏nailed it once and forever when he quipped that if the GOP claimed the Earth was flat, the US press would report, “Parties Differ on Shape of Planet.” He deserves the Nobel Prize for that alone. And that was more than sixteen long years ago! (Even if the way the phrase has passed into our collective consciousness is one of those crowd-sourced improvements on what he actually said, the same way that Bogart never literally said “Play it again, Sam,” and Cary Grant never said “Judy Judy Judy”).

The problem is, the American press is congenitally ill-equipped to deal with flat-out liars. As the Republican Party and its amen corner in the right wing media have drifted further and further into rejection of objective facts in favor of blatant propaganda, the legitimate press continued to maintain an almost absurd obeisance to “objectivity,” even after reality had long since rendered it dangerously self-defeating. The 2016 presidential campaign revealed that absurdity in spades, as Trump exploited American journalism’s commitment to evenhandedness and made a mockery of it, all the way into the Oval Office. Forget knife to a gunfight; the mainstream press brought a feather duster to a flamethrower fight. Belatedly—like, on November 8th, 2016—the press seemed to awaken to that fact, and has been improving over the past few months, out of necessity. But it is still not at the robust level a Trump regime requires.

That is why a better demagogue still worries me. I know that particular fear may sound less than urgent right now when we have the more pressing problem of the current demagogue with which to contend. But I worry that Trump has done so much damage to the quaint concept of truth that American politics has been forever defiled. Will we ever be able to go back to a culture in which we can confidently challenge a liar on the basis of the facts, or have we lost that common moral and logical basis forever? The optimistic view is that Trump is a unique figure, a fluke, a perfect storm of political ill winds that is not likely to recur any time soon, a sui generis monster whose success will be difficult if not impossible for almost any other politician to replicate. One can only hope. Personally, I am not willing to roll the dice.

CHEMOTHERAPY FOR A DISEASED DEMOCRACY

We can stop this madness now and prevent the debasement of truth from becoming the new normal. The only way to do so if the American people stand up and say “NO.” We cannot depend on the press or our political leaders to take the lead; they have to follow ours. We must declare that we will not allow Trump to trample the truth into oblivion…..we will not allow him to spew his hateful lies and get away with them….we will not allow him to pollute political discourse in this country (and the world) any further than he already has.…we will not allow him to wantonly mislead, deceive, and outright swindle us, denying us recourse to the ultimate arbiter of empirical fact.

Once again, the group of people who hold the most potential power in this effort are the so-called leaders of the Republican Party, and it is on them that we should focus the concentrated power of public pressure. So far, of course, McConnell, Ryan, and the rest of the GOP have shown not a whit of backbone and not the slightest indication that they ever will develop one. It is quite clear that they lack the courage to stand up and call Trump out for his pathological dishonesty and hold him accountable in the interest of a healthy democracy and the well-being of the United States and the world. That may change, as many have predicted, if and when they believe they have arrived at a tipping point where Trump becomes more of a liability than an asset. (We should never delude ourselves that they will ever do so because it is the right and moral thing to do.) After all, they have yoked themselves to this ogre only because they believe he will help them enact their long-sought policies. As part of that Faustian bargain they have been willing to countenance—indeed, to overtly defend—some of the most appalling behavior ever seen from a President of the United States. But thus far they have precious little to show for it. If Trump’s pattern of self-inflicted wounds continues to hamper and hinder the Republicans’ legislative agenda, to say nothing of actively hurting them in the midterms, or blowing back on them should criminal charges and/or impeachment proceedings be brought, the GOP may reconsider whether this unholy alliance really benefits it.

In theory, there is another pragmatic reason for the Republican Party to stand up for the truth, even beyond the simple arithmetic of Trump’s freefalling poll numbers and the rising specter of scandal and removal from office. (How sad is it that we even have to look for a reason for the GOP to do the right thing?) The triumph of disinformation is non-partisan and ostensibly could be turned against conservatives just as easily as against liberals. But demagoguery by definition lends itself more readily to simple-minded reactionaryism than to the nuanced positions of progressivism. Hence the GOP’s willingness to embrace it. But they are playing with fire.

Republicans: if your leaders won’t show sufficient backbone, you can stand up and force them to. That applies to ordinary rank-and-file voters just as much as to backbenchers and state and local officials. It’s your party and it is disintegrating before our eyes as any kind of respectable democratic entity. Demand that your leaders do their duty and defend the integrity of the American political system, not cravenly enable this scorched earth campaign against the very concept of honesty. The Republican leadership’s own cowardice presents a lever to do so. The more toxic Trump becomes, the more they can be cajoled into abandoning him. (I would say “shamed into,” but I don’t think that’s possible.) And there is every reason to believe Trump will only get more and more toxic with each passing day; it is far less likely that he will suddenly turn statesmanlike. (A Reichstag fire scenario that allows him to slither out from under scrutiny is a different matter, and a terrifying one.) That kind of severance from Republican support would be a blow that Trump could not withstand, not even with the continued fealty of his hardcore myrmidons, who—at the risk or repeating myself—are only a small minority of Americans. And it can work. Witness Rod Rosenstein, who was forced to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel in the Russiagate investigation only because of his mortification over the damage to his reputation in the Comey firing.

Let’s make the Republicans’ own selfishness work for us. If they refuse, they are only writing their own death warrant as a political party. By not acknowledging and condemning Trump’s fundamental dishonesty, the Republican Party is fast making it plain that it is not interested in democracy at all, but in autocracy. With such cowardice and venality are these quislings courting history’s harshest judgment. But we can force them to be courageous.

 

Let’s recap for a minute. We are in the midst of a political dumpster fire the likes of which no living American has ever experienced. Before the election, when I expressed to my conservative friends my concerns about the damage Donald Trump could do to this country as president, they dismissed those concerns as a gross overreaction, mere liberal alarmism. These people were not Trump supporters but they were vehemently anti-Hillary in that tedious Republican way, and when it came down to a race between the two, were not too bothered by Donald’s excesses and rather sanguine about the risks he posed. I’m very curious how they feel now, but I don’t know because last summer we stopped talking.

No serious person can now argue that we are living in normal times, but some have tried. In a recent Washington Post column, the conservative pundit and psychiatrist-turned-person-in-need-of-such-care Charles Krauthammer described Trump’s first hundred days as “well within the bounds of normalcy.” I would like some of whatever psychotropic drug Dr. K is clearly prescribing for himself. Ironically, that assessment came in a column mostly critical of Trump, a lamentation over his recent fortnight horribilis that nonetheless argued against invoking the 25^th Amendment for fear of setting a terrible precedent. (Krauthammer’s WaPo colleague and fellow conservative Jennifer Rubin had actually made the same case a lot more cogently in those same pages the day before. Rubin has consistently been one of the sharpest and most astute critics of this administration…..and coming from the right as she does, one of the most credible.)

Krauthammer aside, as we survey the shitshow that comprises Trump’s administration thus far, it’s instructive to remember what quasi-normal politics in this country looked like just a few short months ago. Even if that feels like a lifetime….

* * * * *

Like the majority of Americans—even most Republicans—I was confident that Hillary Clinton would win the election. My chief fear in those days was that once Hillary was in office, the GOP would continue to engage in unconscionable McConnell-style obstructionism, refusing for example even to consider her nominee(s) for the Supreme Court. How innocent and naïve such worries now look.

My other big fear was that Donald Trump, despite being defeated, would have laid out a worrisome blueprint for the next Republican candidate to follow. For years—since Nixon’s Southern Strategy at the very least—the GOP had been dog-whistling to racists for the sake of electoral advantage. Shockingly, Trump showed there was no need to dog-whistle; a bullhorn worked even better. Who’da thunk that the party of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms was actually being too timid in its cultivation of America’s racists and bigots?

Trump demonstrated very clearly that a right wing candidate could be very successful—vanquishing all his primary rivals, energizing the base, and winning the nomination—by trafficking in openly racist rhetoric and xenophobic fearmongering, spewing shameless lies and utter nonsense in lieu of actual policy, encouraging mob violence at his rallies and war crimes abroad, attacking the credibility of the press in ways heretofore unthinkable even in the most toxic times, and generally disregarding anything remotely resembling the truth. In other words, Trump pursued a textbook fascist program. (To say nothing of ridiculing the handicapped, bragging about sexual assault, and casting aspersions on American soldiers who had died for their country.) It scared me, but I remained confident that the American people would never reward such a man with the White House. What worried me was the idea that, after seeing Trump do so well—though of course falling short in the general election—a better Republican demagogue would emerge in the future: someone just as willing to mount a despicable campaign, but with more self-discipline, smarts, and political savvy. We would all be fucked then.

Um, needless to say, I was a bit off the mark. Turns out, the Republican electorate was fine with a demagogue who not only said and did the things Trump did, but exercised no self-discipline or intellectual rigor whatsoever, instead chaotically veering from crisis to crisis like a rabid weasel fleeing Animal Control. Indeed, that lack of discipline seemed to be precisely what Trump Nation liked. A more polished, controlled, and coherent candidate would likely have been of no interest to them.

When in July of 2015 Trump dismissed John McCain as not heroic for his actions in Vietnam (“I like people who weren’t captured”), I—like many observers—assumed Trump was done. Far lesser gaffes had decisively ended the runs of many a  presidential candidate. But I was wrong. As a seemingly endless series of similarly outrageous comments issued forth from Trump’s cakehole over the weeks and months that followed, it became clear that the normal rules were not in effect, at least not for Donny. It took me a long time to realize (and I was not alone) that Trump’s supporters actually liked those things….that every so-called “gaffe” only made them more enthusiastic. They wanted an openly bigoted demagogue who pandered to their resentments and fantasies and promised them the moon. The very thing that was so attractive to them—to paraphrase John Oliver—was watching an obnoxious drunk climb up on the table at a wedding banquet, drop his pants, and take a dump on the bride’s dinner plate.

* * * * *

Trump managed to get elected with his carnival barker-cum-snake oil salesman shtick. But that is the nature of elections: they are literally popularity contests. Governing, however, is a different matter altogether.

(Notwithstanding the fact—lest we ever forget—that Hillary beat Donald soundly in the popular vote. This is not liberal whining; it is a statement of fact about our democracy and the will of the people. For all the criticism of her as “unlikable” and a poor candidate, three million more Americans actually voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. As has been widely noted, it took the entirety of the GOP machine, the unforgivable double standard of the American media, the stubbornness of unyielding Bernie bros, Susan Sarandon, the Russians, Jim Comey, and the anachronism of the Electoral College to defeat her. Thus did Trump manage to ooze into office under the rules of our woefully outdated anti-democratic system—a topic for a different time.)

So, yes, a con man can convince people to vote for him. But bullshit and bloviating will only carry a politician so far; once in office one is expected to actually do at least some of the things promised on the campaign trail. And this disconnect is exactly what we are seeing a mere 130 odd days into our so-called president‘s term.

Trump’s inability to implement any significant portion of his horrific agenda is entirely his own fault. Failure to fill vacant positions in the federal bureaucracy, sloppy staffing and rollout of policies like the Muslim ban, the ludicrous and venal charade that is Trumpcare, and on and on…. these are all wounds that Team Trump has inflicted on itself. We are fortunate that this administration—taking its cue from its leader—is not only monstrous in its ideology (such as it is) but incompetent in its execution.

But what if it wasn’t?

Throughout the campaign, hopeful conservatives kept predicting that Trump would “pivot,” which is to say, become more “presidential.” This is akin to hoping that the heroin user, alcoholic, or degenerate gambler that you inexplicably married is going to suddenly wake up one morning and change of their own accord. Maybe they will, but the odds don’t favor it. We continually kept hearing about this imminent, mythological pivot Trump was about to execute: in the primaries, after he won the nomination, following the inauguration, after a few weeks in office, zzzzzzzzz. But it never happened, and going forward there is no reason to believe it ever will. A 70-year-old megalomaniac who has been catered and kowtowed to his entire life is simply not going to change his spots at this point, especially when it’s worked for him thus far. Trump was a violently chaotic, wildly unprepared, stunningly ignorant presidential candidate. Did we really expect that his presidency would be any different? As the meme goes, “Elect a clown, expect a circus.” A malevolent John Wayne Gacy-style clown and a hellish circus that is more horrifying than entertaining, but a clown and a circus nonetheless.

So I still fear that a better organized, better disciplined demagogue than Trump might follow his same playbook to electoral victory, but once in office demonstrate the necessary discipline to carry out a hateful agenda more successfully. Even with the existing level of incompetence, the amount of damage Donald Trump and his enablers in the GOP have managed to do during his brief tenure is crushing to behold. Imagine if they’d had their ducks in a row! And that doesn’t even include the numerous grotesque things he’s proposed—Trumpcare, a Robin Hood–in-reverse tax policy, an unimaginably cruel budget that wouldn’t pass muster in a basic economics class—that haven’t yet passed and with any luck never will.

But the way that Trump has most damaged American democracy, and the one that worries me most in terms of candidates to come, is by obliterating the common language that liberals and conservatives alike once used to carry out political discourse. That is to say, he has savagely devalued the currency of truth.

Until now, politicians have traditionally had to hide their malfeasance, corruption, and deceit. Trump—spoiled manchild that he is—has no time for that. He simply breaks the rules, spews lies as naturally as he draws breath, slanders the spoilsport goody-two-shoes who have the temerity to point out his perfidy, and goes on his merry way. Ultimately there is no sense in pointing out his infinite hypocrisies, self-contradictions, and outright Pinocchio-isms because he simply leapfrogs over the facts by claiming that that they aren’t really facts, or that you can’t trust the people in possession of the facts, or that they’re fat losers anyway. This dynamic makes political discourse and debate—democracy, in other words—impossible. You can’t discuss mathematics with someone who insists that two plus two is five. (And who, even if you agree for the sake of argument, will then turn around and insist that it actually equals three.)

Sure, politics by its very nature is rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and distortions. But Trump has taken that routine kind of dishonesty to new and heretofore unthinkable levels. Let us not forget that Trump’s entire political career was launched on the back of one of the biggest lies of them all, birtherism. As some have pointed out, Trump lies as a matter of course, naturally and instinctively, and what’s worse, to no logical end. He lies about things that are demonstrably false. He lies about things that can be easily exposed with a simple Google search. He lies about things he just said, on camera, only moments before. He lies about tiny little things that don’t benefit him in any way, and about gigantic things that call his very fitness to lead into question, to the point of opening up impeachment and/or removal under the 25^th Amendment as legitimate topics of discussion. (Ask Dr. Krauthammer.) He lies so readily—and apparently without even the slightest consideration of the consequences—that some have speculated that what he does can’t really be called lying at all, but is better described as simple bullshitting. (News flash: That’s not really any better for the republic.)

Some informed parties have speculated that Trump has a pathological compulsion to bend reality to whatever shape fits the needs of his ego at any given moment, regardless of its disprovability, or how it might contradict readily observable and verifiable facts. Whether or not this pattern supports the theory that Donald Trump is mentally ill according to the clinical definition is a question best left to the shrinks. (Not Chuck Krauthammer, though. Did I mention how much I dislike him?) But Trump has been able to get away with this behavior throughout his whole absurdly privileged life, providing little incentive for him to change at this late date…..especially when he rode that psychopathic behavior all the way into the White House, where he is now surrounded by bootlicking sycophants and craven opportunists who are terrified to tell him he’s naked.

Trump’s relationship with the truth—which strongly resembles a baby’s relationship with a diaper—has not gone unnoticed. The Oxford English Dictionary declared its 2016 Word of the Year to be “post-truth” (adj., “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”) This comically peeved Stephen Colbert, who more than twelve years ago, in his mock right wing bloviator persona, coined the term “truthiness,” which he defined as “something that seems like truth; the truth we want to exist.” (Or at least that some people want to exist.) Truthiness itself earned “word of the year” honors as far back as 2005 and 2006, from the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster respectively. But both of these terms give a man like Trump more credit that he deserves. The stream of self-serving nonsense that issues forth from his face bears no relationship to truth in any form. One might just as well argue that Trump is engaged in a post-modern Foucaultian deconstruction of the very concept of objective reality. He may be, but only in some future PhD thesis. I suspect Donny is as blissfully unaware of critical theory as he is of the components of the nuclear triad or the laws against sexual assault.

So apart from his mother and father, who is to blame for Trump’s wanton desecration of the common standard of “truth” as we once knew it?

Three guesses.

Next time: The Republican Party’s complicity in the war on truth….

I’m told that we’re in a new golden age of television, and the evidence is undeniable. Quality programming abounds, as do the relentless recommendations of passionate friends eager to tell me what I must watch. I have enough guilt from all the books I’m not reading; now I have to feel guilty about not watching television too?

But there have been a few programs lately that strike me as very pertinent to one of the most pressing issues of our time, something we used to bloodlessly call “sexism,” but is more accurately called what is, and that is misogyny.

PAST AND FUTURE, IMPERFECT

Let’s start with a depiction of decades past. FX’s Bette and Joan does an admirable job of portraying the appalling chauvinism and sexism of its time while conveying the cruel truth that women in show business today—actresses especially—have it only marginally better. It might be argued that the show sometimes traffics in the same prurient glorification of catfighting that it decries, an impressive feat of cake-eating-and-having. But that is all but unavoidable with this subject matter, and on balance the series is certainly on the side of the angels.

Its mirror image is The Handmaid’s Tale. Had Donald Trump not been elected, this new TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel might have been dismissed as just another entry in the long parade of dystopian science fiction, chilling and well-crafted though it may be, but still just a baroque thought experiment in extremism. I don’t at all subscribe to that position, but that would certainly have been the knock on it. But in the Age of the Great Pussy Grabber, the story takes on a much more ominous tone and a much more powerful punch, leaving its detractors on shakier ground in trying to marginalize it. Trump’s ascent to the highest office in the land has made even the most unthinkable scenarios thinkable. Specific to Atwood’s dystopia, we have been disabused of the notion that we are a truly civilized, gender-blind society, as we watched the presidential candidate of a major party brag about sexual assault and still win the Oval Office, in large part on a wave of hysterical, unfounded demonization of his far-better qualified female opponent. Is it a long stretch from that to Gilead, the Red Center, and the “Ceremony”? Sure. But after November, not as far as we would have imagined or liked.

Trump’s win pulled the lid off the garbage can of misogyny in this country, much as Obama’s victory did with the still virulent racism that we briefly flattered ourselves to believe had been vanquished on a November night eight years earlier. (Of course, the polarity is reversed in these two examples. Obama ignited the resentments of the racist Tea Party who were furious at the idea of a black president; Trump emboldened those same forces and their retrograde allies through the triumph of an overt bigot and proudly arrogant sexual predator.)

After Trump, it is hard to argue that the grisly turn of events Atwood depicts could never come to pass, given the right circumstances. Do you doubt it? Certainly the novel and its various adaptations—a feature film, an opera, and now a TV series—represent an extreme vision of institutionalized misogyny and ritualized rape, but not an unbelievable one. We just witnessed millions of our fellow citizens fall in lockstep with neo-fascist demagoguery, to include the jawdropping willingness of American evangelicals to embrace a leader who—short of vowing allegiance to Satan on live television—could not possibly be more antithetical to the values they claim to hold dear. (The perversion of Christianity and its ostensible ideals of mercy, kindness, and forgiveness into a religion of avarice, war, and exclusion is a separate matter.) In my Brooklyn neighborhood there are not one but two large Islamic private schools, where the female students—even the very youngest, years away from puberty—are dressed in robes and hijabs, a standard even more severe than in many Middle Eastern countries. After watching an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, it is jarring to go outside and see these veiled and cloistered women at the Duane Reade. But no religion has a monopoly on misogyny; on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few things on which the world’s major faiths can agree. Cheek by jowl with these Islamic communities in Brooklyn, I daily see the members of nearby Orthodox and Hasidic communities with their own restrictive codes of dress and strict separation of the sexes, not to mention Dominican nuns in their brown robes and habits, equally incongruous in this bastion of secular humanism. (It is not an accident that Atwood’s dystopia is a Christian one.)

Republics sometimes die suddenly in coups and revolutions and foreign invasions; other times they commit suicide or are overtaken by the cancer of authoritarianism. Accordingly, while The Handmaid’s Tale paints an inspired portrait of a brutal, quasi-Puritanical American theocracy, even more chilling to me are the flashbacks giving us glimpses of how the open, liberal society in which the characters once lived—easily recognizable as our own—was slowly consumed by the nightmare of the series’ present tense. (Women finding their bank accounts frozen and the assets transferred to husbands and fathers, fired from their jobs en masse, and so forth.) That slow descent into madness—a war of attrition lost inch by inch—can be so gradual that it is almost imperceptible while it is happening, and by extension more insidious. But once it has happened, it’s astonishing to look back and see the arc from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

Who in Germany in 1933 saw the road that nation would eventually go down, all the way to the chimneys, even if one had read and taken seriously the farfetched blueprint its architect had laid down in Mein Kampf? (I know I am in violation of Godwin’s Law here, but I think Godwin’s Law is suspended until further notice while we have an administration that is actively following the fascist playbook.) More than eighty years later, it’s worth recalling that Donald Trump was once a walking punchline as a public figure, let alone a political candidate, a buffoonish object of such derision that late night talk show hosts were openly thrilled to have him in the race as comic relief. Now we are slowly becoming inured to (what should be) the epoch-shattering cognitive dissonance of the words “President Trump.”

Which bring us to Mary Tyler Moore. As all things do.

MTM

This past winter my six-year-old daughter got interested in Mary after seeing her in a colorized Christmas special rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show. So my wife and I decided to show her some old episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is justifiably remembered as a watershed of smart, influential, early Seventies TV comedy. The show holds up (not all classics do), even if its rhythms feel ancient and otherworldly by the standards of contemporary sitcoms, even to someone who grew up on them. I can imagine that to kids today the show feels as fossilized as The Honeymooners did to me when I was a boy, even as it is part of the DNA for what TV as we now know it went on to become.

But the most surprising and alarming aspect of revisiting the show is the blatant sexism of the time. (Its first season aired in 1970.) Witness the first words of the theme song, burned into the minds of a generation: “How will you make it on your own?” It’s hard to explain to my little daughter why it’s a big deal that Mary is hired as a producer and not a secretary in the pilot episode….why the floor manager in the newsroom dismissively calls her “honey”…..why it’s at all novel in the first place to follow the adventures of a single woman living on her own and pursuing a career rather than a husband. (Not that Mary’s lovelife isn’t a recurring theme, along with other now-cringeworthy anachronisms like Rhoda’s self-deprecating shtick about her weight or her looks. She looks pretty great to me. But then as now, even the “ugly” sidekicks in TV comedies are still empirically pretty girls.) In some ways, of course, my daughter’s puzzlement is itself a sign of progress. But it is also painful to watch a child’s innocence be slowly eroded by exposure to the hard realities of injustices past, especially when they reflect injustices with which we are still struggling.

Arguably The Mary Tyler Moore Show owed a debt in premise and theme to the much less celebrated That Girl, whose star and creative engine Marlo Thomas was an early and brave feminist advocate at a time when that was far from a popular position. That Girl—which ended its run about the time Mary Tyler Moore started—was a much more conventional comedy, but it did break ground for others to follow. When the show went off the air in 1971, Thomas famously insisted that it not end as many people assumed it would, and wanted (the network included): with her character getting married to her achingly dull longtime boyfriend, Donald. (Ahem.) I remember my mother tut-tutting over such radical “women’s lib” thinking. (Needless to say, Free To Be You and Me was not in heavy rotation in our house either.) As part of this revisiting of the television landmarks of my childhood, I also recently watched a few episodes of Bewitched, another female-centered show I remembered fondly, if not nearly in a class with Mary or even Marlo. What a horror. Most of the episodes turn on the heroine’s infantile, feet-stamping mortal husband insisting that his wife not use her supernatural powers. Insert your own feminist extrapolation here.

But so what? It isn’t at all surprising that any artifact of the past reflects the culture of its times for good or ill. It’s only surprising to be starkly confronted with how much things have changed, or have not. Long forgotten TV shows from the 1960s might seem frivolous in a discussion of sexual equality, discrimination, and misogyny, but pop culture remains a prime battleground for this ideological war. Look no further than Manchester, where an arena full of Ariana Grande fans—heavily weighted toward her young female followers—was surely no random target for homicidal religious extremists but one specifically chosen for its symbolism.

HRC

All this of course leads back, inevitably, to Hillary. How can it not? The presidential election threw into shocking relief the appalling misogyny that still undergirds American life in the early 21st century. To call it mere sexism is far too mild and generous, from the “trump that bitch” chants at Republican rallies to the shocking double standard to which the press held the two candidates. And that newfound awareness of old-found misogyny now hangs over American culture like a black cloud.

I have no doubt that future historians will look back on the election of 2016 and shake their collective head in amazement that anyone ever thought misogyny was not the driving factor in Hillary’s defeat. (Just as racism was surely the chief impetus behind the hysterical opposition to Obama during his eight years in office.) It is fashionable to pooh pooh that claim as simplistic, or mere sour grapes. But Occam’s razor is in effect. Even those who don’t believe it was the decisive factor will generally admit that it was a factor, which alone is unconscionable at this point in Western civilization.

I am not discounting the numerous other elements in play, and this is not the place for a thorough postmortem on the debacle that went down on November 8th, 2016. We have neither the time, the bandwidth, or the perspective (yet). Certainly there were crucial mistakes by the Democratic Party and the Democratic candidate and her team, not to mention monkeywrenching from outside parties, the natural swing of the pendulum, and the sheer sickening power of con artistry (not necessarily in that order). But when the history of our era is written, I am certain Donald Trump’s wildly improbable victory will be seen above all as a triumph of misogyny in a society that flattered itself to think otherwise.

People talk, for instance, about Hillary’s “unlikability,” ignoring the obvious possibility that that too has a sexist component. A man with the same qualities for which she is often pilloried—toughness, tenacity, ambition—would be praised and admired for those very character traits. Please consider: the most experienced and qualified candidate ever to run for the Presidency of the United States lost to the most monstrously unqualified, inexperienced, ill-equipped, psychologically and temperamentally unfit candidate in modern times, who happened to be a man. Does anyone doubt that Trump would not have won if Hillary—with exactly the same characteristics, personality, and strategy—had simply been male?

During the campaign many people noted that the contest was a perfect model of the dilemma that smart, highly capable women routinely face in the job market: that is, the need to work ten times as hard just to beat a grossly less qualified male competitor. But during the race it was usually said with a kind of grim satisfaction that a female champion was finally going to triumph. After November 8th, that observation took on a considerably more morbid tone.

My daughter and her kindergarten classmates are inevitably aware of the politics currently roiling America, no matter how much we try to shield them from it or transform it into an age-appropriate teaching point. They know how Donald Trump treats women, even if they are not aware of his specific, graphic acts and the accompanying stomach-turning braggadocio. How do I explain to her that we as a people saw fit to make this man President of the United States?

And so, as we grapple with the cruel joke of a presidency that we have inflicted upon ourselves, everything around me seems to resonate with reminders of how far we yet have to go before we have rid ourselves of the curse of sexual discrimination. It is not merely a matter of justice but also of pragmatic self-interest as a people. Can there be a better or more stark illustration of the self-destructive effects of this sex-based bigotry than the appalling reign of Donald Trump, which every day causes more and more damage to our country?  A former boss of mine—a man with vast experience in the US intelligence community—once told me that the Third World would never pull itself out of its terrible cycle of political corruption, poverty, and oppression until it began to treat women as the equals of men. This assessment came not from a Berkeley bleeding heart but from a US Army officer with unimpeachable conservative and national security credentials. His point applies in the First World as well. It is not hyperbole to say that misogyny is a disease very much at the heart of injustice and the abuse of power across the globe, and in the United States as well. Humanity will never be able to count itself truly civilized until we eradicate it like polio. As a wise woman once said, human rights are women’s right and women’s rights are human rights.

What a shame a person like that never ran for president.