GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS

 

Today's jury finding in the Donald Trump hush money trial was both surprising and somewhat inevitable: on the one hand, he has become the first former president in American history to be found guilty of a felony (actually, its 34 felony counts, to be exact).  This is truly a historical moment, and proof that our judicial system can work even against the most powerful of people.

On the other hand, its's not shocking to anyone who's been following the trial; the evidence of Trump's illegal payoffs were numerous, from signed checks to recorded conversations discussing them.  Even if the jury were to disregard the testimony of admitted liar and thief Michael Cohen,  Trump's former fixer turned informer, there was just too much evidence to ignore.  As Mitt Romney recently put it, "You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you"!

Because this will be Trump's first conviction and the crime isn't violent,  he probably will be put on probation instead of serving actual jail time when his sentencing arrives in July.  Still, this is a very big moment, as the words "convicted felon" can now be put in front of his name instead of "former president".  And for news media followers like me, it's very satisfying to see a man who has danced on the edge of criminality for years without consequence finally get what's coming to him.  While two other recent financial court decisions against him recently (one for defamation of character, the other for fraud) must have stung, nothing hits harder than a felony conviction.

The big question now is how will this change the presidential race, given that recent polls have Trump beating President Biden in several swing states? I really hope that this conviction will be the final straw for Republicans who will, at long last, turn against his lies and corruption.  But I doubt it.  Not when the right wing media will scream that the whole trial was rigged.  Not when the party has stood by him after the access Hollywood tape in 2016, his 2 impeachments as president and his continued lies about the 2020 election and January 6th.  Trump's son is already trying to spin this as good for his campaign, a frightening thought.

But even if he does hold onto the party base, will swing voters, many of whom have not been paying attention to the campaign or this trial, finally wake up?  I am cautiously optimistic that the majority of Americans not firmly in the Trump camp, the ones who voted him out last time, will realize that even though  Joe Biden is old and on the wrong side of some issues for you, he's no convicted criminal.  

THE TESLA OWNER'S LAMENT

 I first blogged on here about my mixed feelings about buying a Tesla in 2021.  (You can read that post  here and my other post about Elon Musk here .) Although I had misgivings then about the behavior of Elon Musk, I went ahead and bought a Tesla Model 3 anyway a few months later, mainly because of its superior charging infrastructure compared to other electric vehicles.

And then a few months after I got my car, Musk bought Twitter, and the world caved in.  Now I'm in the odd position of driving a car that I love and feeling self conscious about it at the same time.

In the days before the Twitter takeover, the feeling  on Musk was that, despite his erratic, impulsive behavior, Tesla kept making money while he was running it so he was some kind of eccentric genius.  (He has publicly made numerous promises that haven't come true in the past decade). At one point in 2021, Tesla was the most profitable car company in the world.  But recently it has been tanking: the rollout of the long awaited and delayed Cyber truck has been mostly a disaster: first there were production issues, build issues and range issues, and then there was a massive recall needed (the largest in Tesla's history)  for safety reasons.  Speaking of safety, continued investigations of Tesla's so called "full self driving" option have plagued the company.  And a recent  article in the website Jalopnik pointed out that after Tesla let car owners try out FSD for a month for free, only 2% of Tesla owners who tried it out actually purchased it for their cars.  

In a way, that FSD trial shows just what's wrong with the company: while I myself was excited to try it out for a month for free, it made several errors (including trying to turn into an oncoming car!), and it doesn't even work on overcast days.  Even though the cost of FSD was recently  lowered from $12,000 to $8,000, that's still eight grand more than I would ever pay for it.  The whole self driving thing seems to be one of Musk's obsessions, but I don't think the company should bother. Look at how Apple spent billions of dollars and years of research trying to create the ultimate self driving car before just straight up surrendering.  Despite Musk's obsession, truly autonomous self driving cars for the average driver are still a long ways off from being a reality. 

But self driving is just the tip of the iceberg with Musk.  On his social media company X he has posted and reposted numerous conservative messages and he has even appeared to endorse the right wing "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which states that Jewish puppet masters are attempting to replace white Americans with Mexican people.  Not only is this offensive garbage, it's also stupid for him to do from a business standpoint, with his  posts driving potential customers towards other electric vehicle offerings.  (A survey by market intelligence firm Caliber found Tesla's "consideration score" among potential US buyers dropped 8% between January and  February 2024,)  Not surprisingly in polarized America, most EV customers are progressive voters who find the once mostly progressive Musk's current conservative postings offensive.  And while right wingers have started praising Musk's recent conversion to their side, they still aren't rushing out to buy Teslas.

Along with his conservative conversion, Musk has made some other questionable choices as of late: he recently fired all the workers at Tesla in charge of building superchargers, despite the fact that the supercharger network is one of the company's strengths.  And along with his desire for full self driving cars, he's  also determined to make self driving robot taxis a  thing, despite the fact that several already existing self driving taxi companies have been struggling.  He has even envisioned a future in which Tesla owners will allow other people to use their cars as self driving taxis when they aren't using them (hard pass from me on that!).  He has also seemingly abandoned his oft made promise of introducing a Tesla model that would sell for only 25 thousand dollars.  While this would almost surely be profitable and throw down the gauntlet of making an affordable EV to other car manufactures, possibly revolutionizing the entire EV market, he doesn't think affordability is as sexy as robot taxis.

The results of his recent behavior have been devastating for the company, which has seen its value drop from 1.2 trillion dollars in 2021 to 661 billion now while 10% of the company's workforce has been laid off.  And yet despite this, Musk is expecting the Tesla board to  reinstate  a 65 billion dollar pay package for him that was recently rejected by a judge.  Giving a huge pile of money to the CEO of a company with tanking stock value doesn't exactly send the best message!

While it appears that the Tesla board of directors are unable to force Musk out as CEO, they can certainly nudge him towards stepping down, given that he is clearly costing them all money and seems determined to continue doing so.  Perhaps they can suggest that one person shouldn't run so many companies (along with Tesla and X he also has Space X, Neuralink and whatever the hell the Boring company is!) and push him towards moving on.  I would love for the grownups to take over Tesla, so that they can just make good quality cars without worrying about self driving robo taxis and ugly cyber trucks.

THE WORST THING THAT TRUMP WOULD DO

 

When Donald Trump first started polling well against President Joe Biden back in November, the White House was quick to dismiss the numbers as just a snapshot in time.  Surely, they thought, with Trump's legal troubles brewing and the economy improving, the country would turn away from giving him a second term in office.

Well, here we are months later, and Trump's is still beating Biden in most polls.  And with inflation stubbornly hanging on, the conflict in Gaza splitting progressives, and Trump's current legal trial hardly seeming to phase the public, the odds of Trump pulling off another victory seem to be growing.

This terrifying prospect gets even more terrifying give a recent interview Trump gave to Time magazine in which he laid out his plans for a second term.  While his desire to use the justice department to go after his "political enemies" is horrible, and the fact that he will try to roll back every advancement Biden has made in dealing with climate change is equally terrible, to me the worst thing that he would do is to push for even more deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Trump's plans here are pure xenophobic strong man tactics: he wants to use not only Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers but also local law enforcement, and perhaps even the national guard, to aggressively target undocumented immigrants.  Then he plans to have them put into border camps before being swiftly deported.

Morally, this is despicable, as it will result in families being  torn apart and hard working honest people being treated like criminals.  It would also be economically disastrous; there are between 10 and 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US now according to Pew research.  The vast majority of them work, and  pulling millions of workers out of the workforce in a short period of time would have terrible consequences for the economy, with companies scrambling to fill their depleted workforces.  

The history of America's reliance on undocumented Mexican labor is a long and complicated one: back in the 1940's, there was a labor shortage during the war when most of the young men were off fighting.  So in 1942, the US government began the Bracero program in which Mexicans were encouraged to come to America to work.  But then after the war ended, Mexican workers were expected to return to their homes, despite the fact that they were making more money here.  The backlash against migrant workers grew so strong that in 1954 the US government began a deportation program that was actually called Operation Wetback (!).  Not surprisingly, it was controversial, with reports of almost a hundred deported workers dying of dehydration when they were abandoned in the desert.  And even as that was going on, the Bracero program remained, (it would eventually end in 1964) showing just how complicated the whole issue was.

For the next few years, undocumented immigration was mostly ignored as  a political issue, with things like the economy, the cold war and the civil rights movement taking up more of the voter's attention.  The issue had so little resonance that in  1980  when Ronald Reagan spoke about the Mexican border, he said "You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations.” without any blowback from his party. Then 6 years later he signed an amnesty bill that gave citizenship to 3 million undocumented immigrants without any big controversy or outcry.  

So what happened?  Well, in 1994, with the economy doing well, the cold war over and Bill Clinton in the White House, the Republican party was looking for a new group of people to demonize.  Getting tough on crime was becoming popular, so why not crack down on a group of people that could be branded as "illegals"?  So, in the state of California, conservatives came up with proposition 187, a law that would prevent undocumented immigrants from using any public services.  Then California Governor Pete Wilson tied his successful  reecletion campaign to its passage.  Even though the proposition was eventually thrown out by the courts after it passed, it had proved an effective tool for Wilson (who ran political ads in favor of it that showed people pouring over the Mexican border like Trump ads do now).  And census polls in the early part of this century that  projected that white people would no longer make up over 50% of the American population by 2045, only added fuel to the fire.

Now, decades later, its seems unthinkable that the Republican party would ever not demonize undocumented immigrants, with  Trump taking the ball and running with it into openly racist territory. (He's described undocumented immigrants as inhuman and says that they are "poisoning the blood of America"). In many ways, undocumented immigrants have proven to be the perfect enemy for the right; not just because they're both foreign and not white, but also because they lack political power.  Consider that for years the Republican party went after the rights of LGBTQ people, but now that issue is fading for them.  Why? Because the LGTQ rights movement has made great strides over the years, with lobbying groups in congress and wealthy donors backing them.  Undocumented immigrants, on the other hand, are far more vulnerable, as they have no lobbyists or large money donors, and, of course, they can't vote at all.  (And there is no truth to the lie that they are illegally voting).

The change in the Republican party on this issue was made stark in the 2016 election when, while running for the Republican presidential nomination, candidate Jeb Bush said, "The way I look at this is someone who comes to our country because they couldn't come legally, they come to our country because their families,  the dad who loved their children, was worried that their children didn't have food on the table. And they wanted to make sure their family was intact, and they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family. Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony. It's an act of love. It's an act of commitment to your family." Sadly, this reasonable call for understanding was blasted by Trump and his campaign.  (Trump also made racist comments about Bush's wife, because of course he did). 

So, as an essentially powerless group in America, the undocumented, have become an easy target for the right.  Sadly, many of the lies pushed by the right about undocumented immigrants have become ingrained in the American public, with polls showing that most Americans think that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, even though every study done on that subject shows that the opposite is true.  And that easy targeting has lead to terrible excesses like the so called great replacement theory, which posits that rich Jews are attempting to replace white people with Mexicans in the US.  (A theory apparently endorsed by Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world).

To me, the bottom line is this: undocumented immigration occurs because it's a good deal for both the immigrants themselves and the companies that employ them.  As long as that reality exists, they will keep coming here, no matter how many people Trump deports.   Having worker visa programs and allowing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship is just the right thing to do. The old saying may be  a cliche, but it's true, we are a nation of immigrants.