A BIG BOOST FOR THE BAD MAN

Donald Trump has lead a charmed life: Born into a wealthy family, when he was a child, his father found ways to avoid taxes and divert funds making his son a  millionaire by age eight.  After mysteriously avoiding the draft with a supposed bone spur, Trump entered the family business, and his father found ways to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars more to him, even as he wound up declaring bankruptcy five times.  Despite his reliance on  his father's money, due to his enormous ego and love of media attention, Trump was able to cultivate an image as a self made tycoon.  Eventually this image led to an entire reality show built around him appearing as an almost god like figure deciding the fate of others.  All while he put his name on dishonest money making con jobs, like Trump University, or subpar products like Trump Steaks.   And then, somehow, he managed to win the presidency, despite his lack of experience and while running a chaotic campaign based on bigotry, lies, childish boasts, and misogyny. Not even the release of his repulsive comments about sexually assaulting women on the leaked public access tape couldn't stop him.   His victory itself was a fluke, as he got just the right number of votes in the right states to win the electoral college while losing the popular vote by millions.
Which takes us to the recently released Robert Mueller report on whether or not his campaign conspired with Russia to give him an electoral advantage.    For two years now progressives have been hoping that this report will deliver a knock out blow to Trump, outlining outright criminal behavior on his part.  Instead, it states that no one in the Trump administration openly worked with the Russians.  Somewhat amazingly, it even let Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr off the hook for their infamous meeting with a Russian operative in Trump tower.  As an article in Slate magazine so aptly put it, "It sure looked like at least Trump Jr. and perhaps others at that meeting committed a crime. Federal law makes it a potential crime for any person to 'solicit' (that is, expressly or impliedly ask for) the contribution of 'anything of value' from a foreign citizen."  Sadly, this seemingly obvious crime committed by Donald Trump's son and son in law will go unpunished.
Even though the report does not expressly say that Trump did not engage in criminal obstruction of the investigation itself, it's been mostly seen as a vindication, something that he has, of course, trumpeted to the hills.  And this perception of  innocence leads to a truly depressing fact:  he now has a better than even chance of winning reelection.  I know, I know, Trump has never had an approval rating over 50%, and there's a huge swath of Democrats ready to run against him, but the power of incumbency is very strong.
Remember that in 2004, George W Bush was running for reelection while the Iraq war that he started was crumbling into a disaster, and the economy was not doing well.  Yet he not only won, he did better in 2004, than he did in the previous election, winning the popular vote after losing it in 2000.  Trump will probably have more advantages than Bush did: the economy has been strong for the past three years, and while it appears that there are signs of a slow down, it probably won't turn into an outright recession.   Trump's other advantage is the thing that so many many Americans have feared the most: normalization.  The country has just gotten used to having a president who lies, attacks and brags constantly.  Every time Trump says something that seems outrageous even by his standards, (like say, defending people at a Klan rally or attacking Senator John McCain months after his death), his approval ratings hardly ever budge.  He has set the bar so low that he can't sink any lower before the election, which means nothing he says will really hurt him by then. 
Oh sure, the Democratic base hate Trump just as much as the Republican base loves him,  but those two groups of voters will mostly cancel each other out in 2020, leaving things up the people who always have decided presidential elections in this century: swing voters in swing states.  A lot of these people are the kind of voters who mostly ignore political media coverage until right before the election, and then make their decision based on how the economy is doing and whether they feel a big need for change.  While I sincerely hope that the reluctant Trump voters that put him in office will turn on him, they certainly can't be counted on.
So is Trump's victory in 2020 a  lock?  Of course not.  Remember that there are other investigations of his potential criminal actions going on in congress, not to mention that the Democrats haven't even picked their candidate yet.  A lot can happen in a year.  But right now, to the deep abiding shame of this nation, Trump has the advantage.

OLD WHITE GUYS

With the 2020 election approaching and Donald Trump's approval rating stubbornly stuck in the fortieth percentile, there has been a veritable stampede of Democratic candidates who are eager to run against a man who's administration has been chaotic and corrupt since day one.  The two top contenders right now are Senator Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden (who hasn't officially entered the race, but appears to be leaning that way).   Although political issues are an important factor to Democratic voters, the ability to beat Trump is understandably their number one priority.   And to many people, electibility means nominating an old white guy, like Sanders (age 77), or Biden (age 76) to match the old white guy (Trump is 72) in the White House.
Personally, I don't get this: Firstly, I do think that both Biden and Sanders are bit too old to be president.  Is that ageist?  I should mention that my mother, who's 79, agrees with me.  The fact of the matter is that  being president and  making decisions that often affect the entire planet is extremely stressful.  Just look at these pictures of Barack Obama at his two inaugurations in  2008 and 2012:



It's really hard to believe that that's only four years later!  Even Donald Trump has complained about the difficulty of the job, and this is a president who spends most of his time watching TV, playing golf, holding rallies and ignoring cabinet meetings.  Is it wrong for me to think that being leader of the free world is something that should be left to people under 70?  I don't think so, I just think it's common sense (although if Biden or Sanders get the nomination, I'll certainly vote for either of them over Trump).
Part of the prevailing wisdom is that the Democrats must run a white male to attempt to lure some 2016 Trump voters over to their side.  Again, I don't quite get this; white people in this country have been voting majority Republican for decades now, blatantly playing  the race card with a candidate is probably not going to change that.  A quick Google search reveals that Bill Clinton did not win a majority of the white vote in either of his victories.  Neither did Obama, although his  44.2% of the white vote  in 2008 bested both of Clinton's elections.
My point is, why should the Democrats chase after a demographic that has rejected them for years?  Bill Clinton and Obama's victories show that Democrats can win with different coalitions of voters.  Remember this, Hillary Clinton lost because of a number of reasons: from Trump being given enormous amounts of free media coverage right from the start, to her overblown email scandal, to Russian hacking, to Green Party candidate Jill Stein siphoning off votes,  and, perhaps most importantly,  James Comey's memo to congress ten days before the election.  And even with all that working against her, she still got three million more votes, with Trump winning because of a crazy Electoral College bank shot accumulation of votes in just the right states.
At the end of the day, while I personally like Biden and Sanders (I particularly admire Sanders), I still think that the future of the party lies with younger candidates who can bring the same energy and appeal to younger voters that Obama did back in 2008.  And I really think that someone who isn't an old white guy, like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, can win.

OUR SINGLE MINDED PRESIDENT

Recently, the Trump administration has been defunding Planned Parenthood while the president himself has been repeating (and tweeting) the lie that Democrats now support abortions that will kill newborn babies.  This is all coming from a man who once described himself as "very pro choice".  He also once refused to give a straight answer to columnist Maureen Dowd when she asked him if he had ever paid for a woman's abortion.
Also, a recent New York Times article revealed that Trump's boasts of building a wall on the border during the campaign was really just a simple mnemonic device developed by his campaign team to keep him on track during his rambling speeches.  Now the president has declared a state of emergency after shutting down the government in an attempt to build that mnemonic device.  This is happening even as some of his own properties are being exposed for hiring undocumented immigrants.
Trump's recent conversions on these two beliefs are not the result of a carefully examined reimagining of his moral ideas, because it appears that the president does not have any.  He does, however, have one simple guiding principle that appears to have formed at his birth: that he, Donald Trump is a epic, near godlike figure who must be given constant adulation and loyalty.  And he is perfectly willing to abandon any previous feelings he may have had to get that adulation.  This single minded desire to be worshipped has changed the modern Republican party to the cult of Trump, in which fealty to him no matter what is the only requirement.
There is no better example of this than in his upcoming meeting with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un; after initially criticizing Jong-un, Trump has now decided that they fell in love, because, of course, Jong-un started showing Trump the respect he thinks he deserves.  No matter how the talks go, Trump will come away bragging of a major breakthrough and taking credit for making the world safer.  Because now it's not enough for him to be president, he also thinks that he deserves to win a Nobel Peace Prize.  This is mainly because Barack Obama was given one when he was president, and Trump's childish game of one upmanship demands that he be given one too.  Yes, it's not enough for Trump to have promoted the lie that Obama was Kenyan for years, and then attempt to counteract everything Obama did as president, he thinks that he also deserves the same award too.  He wants the award so much  that he even recently boasted that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wrote a letter promoting him for the prize, which Abe is now refusing to comment on.
The sad part of this all is that Trump's single minded desire to be worshipped and awarded means that he will probably except any concession from Jong-un no matter how token or meaningless it will be, so long as Trump can claim a victory.  Meanwhile, North Korea will almost certainly hang on to all of its nuclear and chemical weapons and continue to be a horribly repressive government.  Ironically, Trump's desire for a peace prize may actually make the world less safe.
This is the danger that America has lived with for almost three years now; that a messianic egotistical leader who only cares about himself is running the country with no concern for anything other than his own self promotion.   How scary is this?  A recent CNN headline asked a serious question:  "What if Trump refuses to accept defeat in 2020?', the fact that we are wondering about this in a democracy illustrates just how much trouble we're in.

FOOTBALL IS WRONG

By now nearly everyone in America knows that the National Football League has lied for decades about how dangerous their sport is.   Cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain condition caused by concussions that can result in memory loss, erratic behavior and even suicidal depression,  runs rampart through the ranks of the players.  While the league has finally admitted the danger and taken a few steps  towards trying to make the game safer, at the end of the day, bone crushing, body and brain damaging tackles are such an intrinsic part of the sport that there's really no way to disentangle them from it.
Now banning the most popular sport in the nation  is an impossibility, but I certainly think that it's perfectly reasonable to say that tackle football should be banned for all children below the age of 18.  The fact that there are boys as young as 12 engaging in a violent contact sport is appalling.  As a recent Vox magazine article pointed out, a 2015 study found that former NFL players who began football before age 12 fared worse on cognitive assessments than those who started later in their teens. And this held true even controlling for number of years played.  Putting it plainly, young boys with brains still  far from developed, should not play a game that runs the risk of concussions.  Let them learn the basics of the game through touch or flag play, and then switch to tackle when they are old enough to vote or join the military.
And it's not just CTE, recent articles in The New York Times have illustrated that NFL players run a much higher risk of being addicted to pain killing opioids than the general public, and line men are encouraged to beef up by having incredibly unhealthy eating habits that can lead to serious health issues.

Another problem is the stadiums that teams play in.  Today's modern teams expect huge stadiums with multiple instant replay screens and luxury lounges.  The problem is that they usually expect the taxplayers to help foot the bill for all these features.  In a despicable move, the owners of NFL teams, who are often themselves billionaires, will threaten to leave a city unless taxpayer funds are used to help build a stadium, essentially holding the team hostage.  So, cities that are often strapped for cash will waste precious taxpayer dollars to "save" the team. Yet nearly all the money that the team generates in those stadiums goes to them and not to the city.   The argument that teams draw in fans who spend money in the local economy ignores the fact that there are only eight regular season games played in the stadiums, which means they draw no one for the vast majority of the year.  And with seating, parking and concession prices rising constantly, they drain money away from spending fans might have done elsewhere.  As a 2017 article in The Washington Times pointed out, according to economist Michael Farren, the $750 million in public funds Nevada will use to build a new stadium for the Raiders could have provided a year’s worth of education to nearly 100,000 public school students or funded all state highway rehabilitation costs for the next 6.5 years.
In many ways, the NFL is a perfect example of everything wrong with American capitalism: it's wealthy owners push the players to be more and more successful, ignoring the health risks, and then demand taxpayers help pay for their modern stadiums, which often have ticket prices so high that the average fan can't afford to go.  Yes. the owners sit in their luxury boxes and watch the game while literally looking down at the people seated below them, who's taxes helped fund their overpriced lounges.  The rich just keep getting richer in America, and the NFL is just another example of it.

HEALTHCARE CAPITALISM

Every American now knows that the country is currently in the throes of a horrible wave of opioid overdoses, with tens of thousands of people dying every year.  The numbers are so bad that a recent study found that the average American lifespan actually decreased in 2018, partly due to the sheer volume of overdose deaths, which stands at somewhere over seventy two thousand a year. 
While the scourge of drug use is certainly nothing new in this country, this epidemic is different because it can't be traced back to some new form of street drug like crack, instead it has its roots in corporate malfeasance.   A recent court finding found that the owners of Purdue, a pharmaceutical company, lied for years about how addictive their drug oxycontin was.  There are even internal memos detailing how former president of the company Richard Sackler wrote in an email back in 2001  that the company should deal with people addicted to their drugs by saying "We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”  This was all part of the company's plan to promote oxycontin with outright lies about the nature of its addictive qualities, and the enormous success they had in doing that is why we have such a terrible problem with opioids now.  As the New York Times recently pointed out, Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids.
While corporate indifference to human life is nothing new in this country (how long did tobacco companies lie about their product?), these revelations highlight what is a serious problem in this country: the danger of healthcare and prescription drugs companies running as free market companies.   In many ways, America's healthcare problems are symptomatic of the whole country: we have some of the best medical technology and procedures available in the world, but we have to pay more to have access to them.  And while competition among pharmaceutical companies can spur innovation, they can also easily create problems like our current opioid troubles. While there is nothing wrong with the free market determining the sale of things like TVs and cars, healthcare is another thing entirely.  The fact of the matter is that for healthcare companies to please their stock holders, they need to provide as little actual service to its members as possible.  So nearly every healthcare plan is a crazy patchwork of what medical procedures are and are not covered, based entirely on the company's profitability.  And while Obamacare was a good first step (and despite Republican attempts, it's still mostly hanging in there), universal coverage to all American citizens is still necessary.

The good news is that the American public are getting wise to this terrible system, with healthcare being the number one issue for voters in the recent Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives.  (Even President Trump himself claimed during the campaign that he wanted to create some kind of universal healthcare program, although that was just another one of his may lies.) The Democratic party has cleverly created a catch phrase for future healthcare in this country:  Medicare for all, a smart way to piggyback onto one of the most popular government programs in existence.  There will be inevitable pushback from the corporate system, and the transition may be jarring (personally I think a slow approach, with an expansion of Medicaid eligibility, combined with a gradual lowering of the age for Medicare eligibility, is the way to go), but the possibility that sometime in the near future a Democratic president will finally usher a new age of universal healthcare for this country is not crazy.  It can't happen soon enough for me.

A NEW LOW

It's now official, another precedent has been broken by our corrupt, dictatorial president: he's created the longest government shutdown in American history.  Add that to the fact that Donald Trump is the first president ever to win while losing the popular vote by millions, and that he is also the first to  have never held elected office before or served in the military before being elected, and not forgetting his refusal to shut down his businesses while in the White House, or release his tax returns, and you can see what an insane choice this country made two years ago, and what a horrifying and surreal experience it has been to be an American nowadays.
Trump has allowed the government to shut down for one simple reason: the wall.  His refusal to sign any budget bill that doesn't have at least five billion in spending for his wall, and the Democrats refusal to spend that money has led to the longest government shutdown ever.  Yes, eight hundred thousand government workers are going without pay, national parks are getting filthy and food is often going to market with out proper safety checks, all so that our toddler in chief can have money for a wall that he repeatedly claimed that Mexico would be paying for. 
It's obvious that, despite what Trump says, the wall that he and his supporters love isn't needed  because of any actual effectiveness it might have, (most undocumented immigrants arrive her legally by plane and overstay their visas) but because of the message it sends.   It's a powerful metaphor for the preservation of white America, the fear that the country is being overrun by "the other".  This means that any and all logical arguments against the wall will never change the mind of the President and his followers because it isn't really about keeping people out as it is telling them to stay out.  Although Trump and his supporters will often throw in a few words about supporting legal immigration, it's obvious that this all about more than people coming over the border from Mexico; if Trump and his followers had their way, the whole country would be sealed off to any nonwhite immigrants.  Remember when Trump  was reported to have asked "why do we have to take so many people from shit hole countries?",  reflecting his true attitude towards legal immigration?  As offensive as that was, it was also one of his few honest statements as president.
With the situation getting worse daily, the possible end to the impasse is essentially a nuclear option: Trump is threatening to declare a national emergency at the border and use military spending dollars to build his wall, allowing him to reopen the government and still get what he wants.  The legality of this option is debatable, with strong arguments being written both for and against this presidential power.  The absurdity of declaring a national emergency at a time when illegal crossing is, according to the New York Times, is at a forty six year low, is not going to phase a man so determined to waste government tax dollars on a symbol of hatred.  But if he does make such a declaration, he will be setting a precedent for future presidents that could lead to an almost imperial style of governing in which the president could call almost anything (people lacking healthcare?  climate change?) a national emergency and bypass congress to get funding.  Is this kind of authoritarian leader what the founding fathers of our country wanted?  I certainly don't think so, but we may end up in such a situation.  Quite frankly, the election of a man like Trump has divided our country more deeply than anything since the buildup to the Civil War.  Let's hope this doesn't end the same way.

TRUMP AT TWO YEARS

The Trump presidency has now lasted two years, which is appropriate marker for a grown man who has the temperament of a toddler.  For over seven hundred and thirty days our country has been lead by an erratic, dishonest, bigoted, self obsessed braggart.  Here are some things to look back on:

-He has, according to the Washington Post, made false or misleading claims over six thousand times.  He has repeated some lies so often that fact checkers had to add a new rating (The Bottomless Pinocchio!).

-He has flagrantly disregarded the emoluments clause of the Constitution, allowing his global businesses to continue while engaging in foreign policy.  His self named hotel near the White House has become a convenient way for foreign leaders to funnel money to his corporate interests.

-Has had over forty administration members fired, pushed out or resign.  These include such winners as Scott Pruitt, pushed out for numerous ethics violations, and Anthony Scaramucci, who's reign as White House Communications Director lasted only ten days.  Many of these people who have left described his White House as chaotic and out of control.  Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson admitted that Trump ignored briefings and advice and often had to be told that what he wanted to do was  illegal.   The chaotic nature of his administration was reaffirmed by two tell all books:  Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and Bob Woodward's  Fear: Trump in the White House.

-Gave prominent political positions to family members with no experience, including putting son in law Jared Kushner in charge of Middle East peace agreements, solving the opioid crisis, and justice reform, among other things.

-He has shown admiration for brutal dictators like Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte.

-He fired James Comey as head of the FBI and admitted that it was because of the investigation of Russian conspiracy in his campaign. Since then, he  has continually called Bob Mueller's Russia investigation a witch hunt, even as Mueller has racked up thirty three indictments or guilty pleas, including former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, former campaign chair Paul Manafort, and former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, who plead guilty to crimes made during the campaign, some of which he says Trump directed him to do.  He also repeatedly belittled and eventually fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself in the Russia investigation.  He topped this off by privately meeting with Russian leader Vladamir Putin and then announcing that he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies concerning Russian interference in the election. 

-Time and time again he has attacked any negative coverage of him as fake news, at one speech he intoned “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”  At one point the New York Times reported that he tried to raise the postage rate for the company Amazon because its owner also owns the Washington Post.

-He threw out the Iran deal, the Transpacific Trade Partnership and the Paris Climate Accord without any negotiation or plans to replace them.

-Refused to criticize white supremacists after a rally in Charlottesville North Carolina turned violent, with one woman dying after an avowed bigot ran his car into a group of counter protestors.  As one post on the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer put it "Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us....
He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate … on both sides!"

-He started a trade war with China and several American allies, bragged that trade wars are easy to win, and when China responded with tariffs on American farmers from red states, gave twelve billion dollars to them in subsidies.

-Had a border policy that caused the separation of families, including a breast feeding mother, and then tried to blame it on the Democrats, even as his then Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the policy as biblical.

-Rolled back numerous environmental protections and discredited a study on the dangers of climate change from his own administration.  He continued to do so even as unprecedented natural disasters occurred.  After forest fires ravaged the state of California, he claimed it was because of the state's own mismanagement, and bizarrely added that the president of Finland told him about the need to rake forests as a way to prevent such fires. 

-Signed a tax cut that enormously favors the wealthy and corporations, and added over a trillion and half dollars to the national deficit.

-Appointed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and defended him even as Christine Blasey Ford forcefully testified in congress that he had once sexually assaulted her.  He also defended Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore after credible accusations of him sexually pursuing under age girls emerged.

-Pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, the bigoted sheriff who ordered his men to carry out racial profiling in defiance of the law, compared his prisons to concentration camps and cost his state millions in legal fees.

-In his two years as president, hate crimes against Muslims, Jews and immigrants have risen, with some attackers even chanting "Trump!  Trump!" during the attacks.  He has done nothing to address this, and has doubled down on his verbal assaults on immigrants, documented or not.  He was once quoted as asking why the US had to take people from "shit hole" countries.

-Recently the New York Attorney General charged his charitable Trump organization with outright crimes, saying that it  “used charitable assets to pay off the legal obligations of entities he controlled to promote Trump hotels, to purchase personal items and to support his presidential election campaign.’’

-As president he spends hours every day watching TV and has played golf one hundred and sixty seven times, after previously criticizing then president Barack Obama for doing the same.  As a candidate he once said "I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.”  He has also described himself as a "stable genius" and says he deserves an "A plus.  Can I go any higher?".

-He has taken marching orders from Fox News personalities and other right wing media bloviators. This has lead him to shut down the government to demand tax dollar spending for his wall with Mexico, the same wall that he repeatedly said that Mexico would pay for.

The one piece of good news in all this is that the high profile nature of the office of the presidency means there are currently investigations into  nearly every aspect of Trump's businesses,  with previously unknown crimes possibly (perhaps even likely) to appear sometime soon.   And while there is some debate as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, it's possible that he might have a well deserved jail cell waiting for him once he leaves the White House.