IS AMERICA REALLY GOING TO ELECT TRUMP AGAIN?

 

All recent polls of the highly likely rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden show that President Biden may be in big trouble.  In crucial swing states, Trump is beating Biden, with voters trusting Trump more on the economy and thinking that Biden is too old.  Trump even may be eating away at the usual big lead that Democrats have with minority voters.

Now it's still early, the election is more than a year away, and a lot can happen.  But the idea that Americans may be signing on for 4 more years of Trump's chaos and corruption makes me want to bang my head against a wall.  Has the country suffered from collective amnesia?  Do we not remember that shameful day when Trump fired up an angry mob that beat police officers and stormed the nation's capital?  Have we forgotten how horribly he handled the covid crisis? Does the fact that Trump is currently facing 4 criminal indictments mean nothing to them?  What about howTrump's guilt in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, which  means that the jury believed that he did sexually assault her?  (We can now take the word "alleged" away we call Trump a sexual predator).

Look, I get it, the country is in the post pandemic doldrums. and while the economy is strong (unemployment is actually lower now than it was under Trump), there has been  heavy inflation that effects the average person more than economic growth does, and the president, rightly or wrongly, is going to get the blame for those high prices  Meanwhile, the crisis on the border continues, with more refugees seeking solace and conservative Governors bussing those refugees to places like New York City or Martha's Vineyard.  Plus there's a lot of terrible things going on in the world today, what with the war in Ukraine grinding on and  Israel invading Gaza in response to cruel terrorists attacks.  

And yes, Biden is old, the oldest president ever, and I do agree that his stepping down and letting someone else run would be a good thing.  But he's determined to run, and I think he's mentally sharp enough to handle the presidency.  And I'm infuriated that Trump's recent verbal stumbles don't seem to hurt him in this regard, and somehow the fact that he's only 3 years younger than Biden doesn't sink in with the public.  (Much of that has to do with the constant media narrative that focuses more on Biden's age issues than Trump's).

So yes, things are stressful both nationally and globally right now.  But the idea that Trump will somehow calm all of that is absurd (he can say that the invasion of Ukraine and the terrorist attacks in Israel would never have happened if he were president, there's certainly no evidence of that).   Hopefully, the recent interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve will slow the rise of inflation without tipping the country into a recession, and a strong economy will finally be felt by the general public next year, helping Biden's chances.  I certainly hope that that's the case, because another Trump term would be nightmarish for this country, from his denial of climate change to his ending aid to Ukraine that would tip the balance of that conflict to Trump's pal Vladimir Putin, to his calls to purge the federal government of any workers who don't share his vision for the country, to so many other horrible things that he would do, another 4 years of Trump is a terrifying prospect.

THE HOUSE'S CHOICE

 

In the weeks long chaos that it took to finally elect a Republican Speaker of the House, there was a brief, shining moment when the small, sane part of the party might have prevailed.  Jim Jordan, who was roundly endorsed by former President Donald Trump, was shot down by Republican House members who didn't want to vote for someone who denied that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.  Instead, Tom Emmer, a Minnesotan moderate was ready for a vote.  While I certainly don't agree with Emmer on much, he did vote to certify the 2020 election for Biden.  Sadly, that's what did him in, as Trump took to social media and branded Emmer as a "RINO", and his name was withdrawn without a vote (perhaps because an open vote would have allowed Democrats to vote for Emmer, outweighing the conservative votes against him).  Oddly, Trump didn't have enough clout to get Jordan elected, but he did enough to get Emmer tossed.

In any event, after Emmer the House went back to the drawing board and elected someone just as extreme as Jordan.  Oh sure, eventual winner Mike Johnson may not be as outspoken as Jordan, nor does he have Jordan's checkered pre political past (google "Jim Jordan's wrestling coach career  controversy" to read the jaw dropping charges), but when it comes to election denial and conservative views,  he's even worse.  Ignoring the rejection of Jordan, Trump crowed on social media that Johnson should be called "MAGA Mike" because he not only voted against certifying Biden's victory, he has been called one of the chief congressional architects in Trump's attempt to undo the election.

Along with endorsing Trump's election lies, here are some of the other political views that Johnson is well out of the mainstream on:  He's compared abortion to the Holocaust.  Wrote that “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” in 2004.  In 2006 said this about the left:  “In the space of a few decades, they have managed to entrench abortion and homosexual behavior, objectify children into sexual objects, criminalize Christianity in the popular culture, and promote guilt and self-doubt as the foremost qualities of our national character.”  He is on the record as wanting to increase the retirement age and decrease Social Security and Medicare spending along with other social safety net programs.  In 2016 he blamed no fault divorce, abortion and feminism for school shootings.  And he's not just a Christian, he's a fundamentalist who thinks that the earth is only around 6000 years old.

Yes, despite his mild mannered, soft spoken demeanor, Johnson is an extreme right winger who should never have been given the power of being Speaker of the House.  Amazingly, he still may prove to not be extreme enough for some House Republicans, who may wind up resenting any kind of upcoming deal he makes to avoid a government shutdown in the coming weeks.  Yes, the modern Republican party is so ungovernable, with a vocal,  far right wing that thinks that a federal government shutdown is a good thing, that even Johnson may wind up being tossed out like McCarthy was after he "betrayed" the right and cut a deal with the Democrats to keep funding the government.  The best thing that can happen here is that next year all those moderate Republicans serving in districts that Biden won in 2020 will lose and the Democrats will run the house again.  As imperfect as they may be, at least the Democrats don't want to blow up the federal government.

REMEMBERING YITZHAK RABIN

 

The terrorist group Hamas recently lead what was the deadliest attack on the state of Israel in over 50 years.  (Indeed, it appears that the attack was made to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war.)  The attacks were well coordinated and utterly brutal, with civilians, including children, targeted and hostages taken. 

It appears that the group's motive was an attempt to stop a normalization process that is currently being negotiated between Israel and Saudi Arabia.  Also, the recent chaos in the Israeli government, with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing corruption charges while he's also trying to controversially overtake the country's judicial system, may have lead to an image of perceived Israeli weakness.  Of course, the attacks have only unified the Israeli government behind  Netanyahu.

Israel now is readying a full on military assault into the Gaza Strip, and it is already telling civilians to flee away from the northern area of the Strip, where they are preparing to invade.  While I certainly support Israel's right to exist and defend itself, I do fear that the force of the attack may result in such heavy civilian casualties that it will further inflame the hatred of Israel in the Muslim world.  And such a war may not necessarily be easily won, not when Hamas is willing to use both civilians and hostages as human shields.

Given all the sadness and horror going on, it's hard not to reflect on how things might be very different right now if Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin hadn't been assassinated back in 1995.  At that time Rabin had begun a peace process with then Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat known as the Oslo Accords, that would have returned some  territories occupied by Israelis  to the Palestinians.  While the accords were inevitably controversial in both Israel and Palestine, it seemed then that Rabin truly wanted peace and was willing to compromise to get it.  He was even awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

In 1995 Rabin was shot and killed by Yigal Amir,  a right wing Israeli who felt that Rabin was selling out Israel.  The killing was a double tragedy, in that it not only ended Rabin's life, it also pushed Israel to the right politically, with every prime minister since pursuing an aggressive stance with Palestine and the idea of compromise being forgotten.  While there's certainly no way of knowing just what the Middle East would be like now if Rabin had never been assassinated, in the wake of a horrific terrorist attack, it's hard to believe that things could be worse if Rabin had lived.  I see him as truly heroic man who's killing set both the Middle East region and the world backwards.

THE BRIEF REIGN OF KEVIN MCCARTHY

 The Republican party showed just how much it is run by its most extreme members when they booted Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy out of his leadership position just a few days ago.  While I have no sympathy for McCarthy, the difficulty of his position reveals how far to the right the party is today: yes, the man who said that Trump won in 2020, bowed down to him just days after the January 6th riot, and pushed for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden wasn't conservative enough for some House members.  His sin (to them) was his recent willingness to cut a deal with Democrats to keep the government open another 45 days without demanding draconian spending cuts to the budget.  And, because of his bowing to the right, no Democrat was willing to to support him, leaving him a man without enough support in his own party to get the votes to remain speaker.  It's really remarkable, but not surprising, that a minority of the Republican party, which only currently controls only one branch of congress, thinks that they should have undue influence in the running of our government, without making any attempt to compromise, or even accept that they are in the minority. 

It should be pointed out that the voting out of a house speaker is something that has never happened before in the entire history of our country.  Yes, another terrible precedent has been broken by the Donald Trump wing of the government.  And don't kid yourself, Trump was part of this.  He has both privately and publicly stated that he wants Biden impeached, forcing McCarthy to push for an impeachment investigation without evidence.  Trump also seems to think that the house can somehow rescind his two impeachments.  He even posted on social media that he thought that shutting down the government would somehow end the criminal trials that he's facing.  And to top it off, some congresspeople think that Trump himself should be elected speaker, something he hasn't completely dismissed.    And the idea that a one term, twice impeached former president facing multiple felony charges could be voted in as leader  of the House of Representatives, putting him in charge of the phony Biden impeachment investigation, shows just how completely loony tunes our politics have become since Trump entered the scene.

All of this madness comes with the backdrop of recent polls showing Trump tied with or ahead of Biden in next year's presidential election.  Now while those polls are early, and a lot of could happen between now and then (for one thing, Trump's court trials will be taking place), it is horrifying that a corrupt criminal sociopath like him could even get one percent of the vote.    But, as always, the strength of the Trump cult and its hold over a surprisingly significant percentage of the population is seems unbreakable, no matter how many crimes he has obviously committed. 

THE ABSURDITY OF THE BIDEN IMPEACHMENT INVESTIGATION

Ever since he announced his candidacy with a racist speech, Donald Trump has been lowering the standards of American politics both in terms of corruption and basic decent behavior.  The latest thing that he has undone is impeachment proceedings against a sitting president.  Once upon a time in this country, an impeachment investigation against a sitting president (or any elected politician) was seen as a drastic step. one that could only be taken carefully and with definite evidence of wrong doing.  With former presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, there was no doubt that they were lying, and there was also no question of illegality with Trump's two impeachments, despite what he may have said.  But now the Trump enthralled Republican party is pushing for an impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden without any evidence at all.  And make no mistake about it, it may have been Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy that announced the investigation, but it was Trump who was behind it.  He has pushed for the investigation publicly in speeches and on social media and privately in conversations with House Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The investigation is centered about Joe Biden's son Hunter, and his use of his family's name when his father was vice president to make millions for himself, appear,  I will admit, morally dubious. And he has been charged with tax evasion and lying on a form when he purchased a gun.  But there is no proof that Joe Biden himself interfered in his son's business dealings or took any kind of bribes or illegal kickbacks from them, as Republicans are asserting.  Crucially, the recent testimony of Hunter's former business partner Devon Archer,  which Republicans said would blow the lid off the investigation, revealed that Hunter would only occasionally have his father join in brief conversations with them that were never about business.  When asked point blank if he  was "aware of any wrongdoing by Vice President Biden?” Devon replied "No, I'm not aware of any."  Normally this would have ended any kind of impeachment proceedings right there, but the modern Republicans are miles away from the ones that admitted that Richard Nixon was guilty and would have voted to remove him from office if he hadn't resigned.  

Look, Hunter Biden is clearly a troubled man who, even  before his struggles with addiction, had to deal with the death of his mother and sister in an auto accident in 1972  and then had his brother Beau die of brain cancer in 2015.  And yes, it's also clear that Hunter has gotten rich mainly off his father's position.  But how is that news?  Being related to a person with political power can make for a lucrative career, as all of Trump's family know well.  

At the end of the day, this is all pure politics: even the most extreme element of the House Republicans know that there's no way that 60 Senators will vote to remove Biden from office even if the House does impeach him.  But having a long, drawn out investigation in which all manner of allegations will be made against Joe Biden during an election year could hurt Biden and fire up the Republican base while also drawing attention away from Trump's own criminal trials (which, unlike Biden's, actually do have evidence of Trump's criminal behavior).  In other words, get ready for the overblown accusations of extreme right wing House Republicans like Greene and Lauren Bobert to be broadcast all over conservative media, no matter how absurd they may be.  2024 may turn out to be an even uglier campaign than the last two.  Buckle in.

LOSE THE CROWDS

The influence of political candidate debates on election outcomes is hard to gauge: while millions of Americans often watch them, whether or not they actually change the opinions of those voters isn't always clear.  Remember that Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama both had poor showings in their first reecletion debates, but they both still went on to win.  And the rise of televised debates have lead to a certain shallowness in their effect; the first televised presidential debate was in 1960.  Famously, people who just heard the debate thought that the Republican Richard Nixon defeated the Democrat John Kennedy.  But people who watched it thought that Kennedy won, partly because Nixon appeared to have a line of sweat under his upper lip!

And there are too many debates, in my opinion, especially when it comes to the presidential primaries, because then you have candidates who agree on 90% of the issues trying again and again to stand out from the others.  And when there are a high number of candidates, like the 17 that ran for the Republican nomination back in 2015, it becomes hard to tell most of them apart.

All that said, debates are still a good thing for the country, they can effectively sell a new candidate to the public (the debates in 2008 helped turn Barack Obama from upstart to contender), and  issues and differences can be discussed in a more honest format than those annoying political ads.  But there's still a change that I think needs to be made: stop holding the debates in front of live audiences.

 The first Republican primary presidential debate happened two days ago, and it provided a good example of what I'm talking about: at one point, Chris Christie started to criticize Donald Trump, and the chorus of boos that resulted saw him retreat from the subject.  Other moments brought more raucous reactions from the crowd, which got so unruly that the moderators had to tell them to quiet down more than once.  While disruptive crowd responses are nothing new in debates, like everything in politics, things have gotten worse since Trump arrived in 2015.  Since then, braying, booing crowds egging on Trump's worst statements have become the norm, trickling down into a debate that he wasn't even part of.

Personally, I think the best debate I've ever seen was the one between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012 in which the two candidates were seated on chairs next to a table the whole time, with a moderator sitting in between them.  There was no crowd, so there was no playing to them, no attempt to come up with the best zinger or put down, there was just a frank discussion of the issues.  Now part of this is because Obama and Romney are both decent men who understood the concept of taking turns, and I'm not foolish enough to think that Trump wouldn't say anything horrible without a audience, but I still think it would tone down the chaos he brings to everything if there wasn't a crowd there goading him on.

Sadly, I can't imagine that the kind of more serious debate that I'm hoping for will ever become a reality in this country.  The sad fact of the matter is that candidates insulting each other while a crowd cheers is more exciting TV than a more restrained atmosphere.  So for ratings sake. we have to get used to more craziness and less seriousness in our debates pretty much forever.  But I do wish we could lose the crowds.

DONALD TRUMP UNFILTERED

 While I think that former President Donald Trump is a fool, there is one thing that he does that's smart: he never communicates with his political or business associates by email or text.  Like the mob bosses he is so often compared to, Trump realizes that having a trail of his communications with others could lead to revealing possible criminal behavior.  So when former Trump aides and associates repeat things that he may have said that are crazy (like say, using nuclear weapons to stop a tornado) or possibly criminal (suggesting that border patrols shoot  at undocumented immigrants coming over the border), we just have to take their word for it.

There is, however one way  that have heard  Trump's unvarnished opinions in the past few years: secret audio recordings.  Now saying something unwise when you don't know that you're being recorded is not a new problem for politicians: back in 2008 Barack Obama made an offhand comment when he didn't know he was being recorded about midwest voters  holding onto "guns or religion", that may have hurt him politically.  Also, Mitt Romney in 2012 disparaged people in America who pay no income tax at a fund raiser when he didn't know that he was being recorded, which made him look even more out of touch with the average American than he already was.

But it's Trump's secret recordings that really show what kind of man that he is: the first was, of course, the Access Hollywood tape back in 2016 in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it. Somehow he overcame the fallout from that recording to win the presidency, but other recordings may still lead to his downfall.   The second important secret recording of Trump came shortly after the 2020 election when Brad Raffensperger, the former Secretary of State in Georgia, recorded a phone call with Trump in which the then president pushed Raffensperger to "find" him votes.  Trump even implied that  Raffensperger himself could face some kind of legal problem for not finding those votes. (The tone of the call is interesting in that Trump's manner is mostly jovial, but his threatening stance still shines through.)  It should be no surprise that this recording is a part of the criminal charges recently brought against Trump by special council Jack Smith.  The last important Trump recording is about his holding of unclassified documents in his Mar O Lago home in Florida after his presidency.   Here, he clearly states that he is showing someone without security clearance classified documents, even remarking that he could have declassified them as president but didn't.  (Again, the tone is interesting in that he seems to want to impress the young woman that he's talking to in the recording, and they even joke about how Hillary Clinton got in trouble for much the same thing!).  And, as with the call to Raffensperger, this recording has become the basis for criminal charges made against Trump regarding his holding on to those secret documents.  So, putting it bluntly, there are 3 secret recordings of Trump that we have heard, the first of which has him bragging about committing a crime and getting away with, and the other two record the actual moment in which he commits a crime!   It's important to note that Trump is using a freedom of speech defense when it comes to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.  But, as Smith's summary of charges points out, it was perfectly legal for Trump to lie about the election result and challenge it in court.  The crimes comes when he went beyond that by doing things like pressing Raffensperger to find him votes, or setting up an "alternate" set of electors, or trying to persuade then Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral vote count in the Senate, all of which would have illegally disenfranchised the  votes of the over 80 million Americans who went for Joe Biden.

The interesting thing to consider is that, if we have now heard Trump commit crimes on tape, how many other illegal things has he done in his life that we don't know about?  The mind boggles.  And given the fact that 26 different women have accused him of sexual assault or rape, it certainly likely that he has broken laws in the past.  Hopefully, now, for the first time in his life, he may actually be held accountable for his crimes.  We'll see.