CAN ONLY CONSERVATIVES STOP TRUMP?

 Recently, Fox News interviewer and host Brett Baier did something that is almost never seen on that network: an honest interview with Donald Trump in which he asked real questions, came prepared with notes and pointed out Trump's own contradictions in his policies.  In other words, the kind of interview that he should have had to go through years ago, but rarely has.  At one point Baier pointed out that in 2016 Trump  said that new would surround himself with the "best people", and then read off a list of 12 different people that he once chose to work for him that he has now broken with (often by using an immature nickname for them).  It was a devastating moment showing how much complete loyalty he expects while providing so little in return. (Although it barely scratched the surface of people who had fallen out with him after working with him, such a list would be very long,  stretching back decades!).  While it remains to be seen if this interview will have any actual effect on Trump and the polls (some foolish comments he made may well be used against him in his missing documents trial), the fact that it happened at all is surprising.  Usually, Trump's visits to Fox involve fawning hosts asking him puffball questions, and the fact that he looked genuinely flustered at one point shows that he certainly didn't expect the kind of grilling from Baier that he got.  While this interview may be an anomaly, it could portend a possible break with Trump for the network.  We'll see.

This tough interview with Baier coincides with the entrance of former Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie into the presidential race.  Christie has had an odd political career: his term as Governor from 2010-2018 saw him go from a 77% approval rating for his handling of Hurricane Sandy to a measly  15% in the wake a scandal about unnecessary traffic stoppages that caused big traffic jams.  In 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for the Republican Presidential nomination, and later was one of the first Republicans to endorse Trump.  Although he never had an official role in the Trump administration, he did often advise the former president, especially regarding his presidential debate with the  candidate Joe Biden.  Christie, who's bullying personal nature has often been seen publicly, advised Trump to interrupt Biden as a way to bring out his former stutter.  So it's Christie we have to blame for Trump's behavior in that utterly shameful first presidential debate in which Trump barely let Biden start a sentence.  (It was an example of a big bully advising an even bigger bully to be a super bully!)

But it was in that preparation for that debate that the seeds of Christie's falling out with Trump were sown.  Shortly after that meeting, Christie got a case of covid so bad that he was near death.  He is convinced that it was Trump himself who gave it to him, saying that the former president was the only person that he knew was infected that he came in contact with without a mask. Christie had assumed that Trump was negative because he was not told about Trump's positive test, (and, of course, Christie wasn't the only person that Trump dangerously exposed) and to make matters worse, Trump called Christie while he was sick and asked him if he was going to tell people that he was the one who gave it to him.  

So, yes, for Christie, opposing Trump for the nomination is really more personal than political.  So far, Christie poll numbers have been lousy, but he still is doing something that no other Republican running against Trump is doing: calling him out by name.  While other candidates like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott seem to be angling to be Trump's vice president pick by mostly saying nice things about him, Christie is laying down the truth.  He's called Trump  "a petulant child.”, said  his behavior was "vanity run amuck" and called the charges against him in the missing documents case "devastating". (And I for one must admit that I love seeing a bully get bullied!) Now Christie certainly isn't the first Republican to take on Trump (remember Mitt Romney's sad attempt to pull back his party in 2016?), he is the first who used to be a professional prosecutor who isn't afraid to get down in the muck that Trump lives in.  Hopefully, Christie's verbal attacks will wound Trump in the primaries, even if Christie himself doesn't benefit from them.  (He could be Ron DeSantis's best friend).  Christie knows that the best place to attack Trump will be on stage at the Republican primary debates, but whether or not he will get there is another question, given that he needs 15% approval in the polls to qualify to be there.  Even then, the cowardly Trump may just refuse to join in the debate because he will probably be way ahead of the nearest contender, so all it could do is hurt him.  (He's probably right about that).

Still, Christie will be able to spread his attacks against Trump into areas that most Republican voters caught in their conservative media bubble won't be able to ignore.  And with Fox News possibly starting to turn on Trump, not to mention the criminal charges piling up against him, it's possible that America may finally be through with the man who has been trashing American politics, and  the office of the presidency, since 2015.

STUPID?

“I do whine, because I want to win, and I’m not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win.” (Trump: CNN, August 11, 2015)

 Now that former President Donald Trump has been formally indicted with 37 criminal charges by Special Council Jack Smith concerning the former president's holding on to classified documents, one thing is clear: the absurd idea that Trump is a smart man must be abandoned by anyone with any level of honesty.  Because Trump is about to face criminal charges for crimes that he appears to have committed for no reason other than plain stupidity and a complete lack of understanding of just what the office of the presidency is and how our government works.  And the important thing to understand here is that these documents were classified for a a reason; some of them contain the names of American agents in hostile foreign countries whose lives would be in danger if the wrong people were to see them.  In other words, files that shouldn't be stored in a bathroom.

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Trump: Washington Post, 27/2/17

Remember the timeline here: Mar-o-Largo was raided back in August of last year, and at first it seemed to have come out of nowhere.  But over time we were told that Trump had been contacted repeatedly by the government concerning the classified documents that he took out of the White House after he left.  And we now know that he only returned some of the documents and appears to have lied about what he held on to.  And in new information that has come out, we have discovered that he kept the documents in random places in Mar-o-Lago, like in a bathroom, and  a ball room.   Along with Trump, his aide, Walt Nauta, has also been charged for moving boxes of documents around  and later lying about it to investigators (it sounds like he was seen  moving them on a security camera before saying he didn't).

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)

The question that arises here is simple: why did he do this?  What reason did he have to hang on to classified documents when he could have very easily  returned them?  While it is possible that he held on to them for nefarious reasons, like selling them to a foreign government, the more likely reason seems to be that he just likes having them to show off to people, to remind them that he used to be president and  got important briefings.  Like a small child, Trump assumes that every document he ever got while he was in office is his to do whatever he wants with forever.  He's a grown man shouting "MINE! MINE!"

“I’m speaking with myself, No. 1, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. … My primary consultant is myself.” (Trump: MSNBC, March 16, 2016)

Is this kind of behavior really so unexpected?  To me Trump is worst kind of fool: one who is utterly convinced of his own intelligence, and who was lucky enough to be born into a family of enormous wealth and raised around people who never told him he was wrong,    So, to him it makes sense that he can call himself a smart businessman while stumbling into 6 bankruptcies and being bailed out by his father to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid loans.  A list of his failed business ideas include steaks, vodka, bottled water, a magazine, vitamins, an airline, a board game and, of course, a so called university that was such a blatant con that he had to pay a 25 million dollar class action settlement to people who had been scammed by it.   A list of Trump's stupid ideas would be a long one, here's some of them: that the sound from windmills cause cancer, that climate change is a Chinese hoax to destroy the American economy, that joking about sex parties he used to go to was a good topic to bring up at a Boy Scouts Jamboree, that we could prevent forest fires by raking the forest floor, that injecting bleach is a way to cure covid, and, he may have even possibly suggested that nuking a hurricane could be a good way to stop it!  He also appeared to once crudely use a marker to alter a weather map to conform to a tweet he earlier made, and then proudly held it up for the TV cameras to show that he was right. And more seriously, he completely mishandled the outbreak of covid and held a masks optional  rally in Tulsa Oklahoma during the height of the pandemic. And now, it appears that Trump not only held on to classified documents after being told to return them, he allegedly openly showed them to visitors without any kind of security clearance.   A transcript of a recording has been released in which Trump once held up a secret document to some visitors and said , "This is secret information! Look!  Look at this!"   On that same recording he even admitted that the document was still classified because he didn't declassify it as president.  In other words, this fool of a man admitted to committing a crime while being recorded.  That's going to be hard to defend in court.

"Testing is a double-edged sword. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people ‘slow the testing down please’."(Trump: speech, June 2020)

Yes, Trump's life is the perfect example of one of the worst things about America: that it's better to be born rich than smart or talented.  I only hope that he may finally have found the one thing he can't get away with, no matter how much money he has.

"My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars."- Trump Campaign speech, 2015.

THE DEBT CEILING DANCE

 President Joe Biden negotiating and then signing the debt ceiling today after it was passed by congress gives credence to his 2016 campaign's assertion that  Biden was going to be a good deal maker with congress, given his decades of experience in the Senate.  And while I'm glad that the deal was passed and the government can go back to its usual gridlock without the global economy being threatened, the whole debt ceiling drama is a manufactured, absurd dance.  

The debt ceiling is, basically, the amount of money that the country can borrow to pay off its debts; without it, government bonds, salaries, and payments to contractors would not be honored, with dire consequences for both the nation's economy and the world's.  The national debt really began to grow in the late '80's, after years of massive defense spending and tax cuts for the rich under Ronald Reagan found the nation falling into debt.  The number really climbed during the early part of the 20th century, as then President George W Bush fought two wars and created the Department of Homeland Security without raising taxes or cutting enough other spending to cover those costs. 

At the time congress passed the debt ceiling with little to no serious discussion.  But then when the Tea Party movement saw Republicans win the majority of The House of Representatives in 2010, they seized on it as a political issue, threatening then President Barack Obama with economic calamity if he didn't overturn his signature piece of legislation, The Affordable Care Act. Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, gave interviews in which they claimed that they were only concerned about reducing the deficit calling it an existential threat. The essential dishonestly of that stand was shown a few years later when Republicans not only voted to pass the debt ceiling when Donald Trump was President, they also, led by Ryan himself, eagerly passed Trump's massive corporate tax cut that added more to the same deficit they were so worried about when Obama was President.

While the debt ceiling that was just signed was passed by a congressional bi partisan vote, with both right and left wing politicians disappointed in it, the only reason it was a problem in the first place was Republican obstinacy; you would think that a party that only bare won the House and lost seats in the Senate in the midterms would not have been so brazen, but that's what happened.  And if they really supported lowering the deficit, they would at least consider raising taxes on the rich or lowering defense spending, but of course those possibilities were never even discussed by them.   

Now that this manufactured crisis is behind us, the question arises as to how to handle the debt ceiling in the future. Many pundits have said that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned", could be interpreted to mean that Congress cannot actually suspend the debt limit. But if Biden had tried that approach and basically done nothing about the debt, the validity of that argument would have inevitably been settled by a conservative Supreme Court who very well may have ruled against Biden, even if economic chaos was the result.  So, in the name of avoiding an unnecessary economic crash, Biden negotiated a deal, with the debt ceiling issue put off until 2025 and who knows what congress and The White House will be like by then?  Either way, the debt has been kicked down the road again, and that's mostly a good thing, although the country still needs to get serious about raising taxes on the rich in my opinion.

WILL 2024 BE ANOTHER 2016?

 After the Republican party had a weak mid term showing in 2022, it looked like perhaps the party was ready to move on from Donald Trump, given that his hand picked candidates faired poorly and his overall influence on the party hurt them in the election.  That poor showing, combined with the then ascendant rise of Florida Governor Ron De Santis as a 2024 candidate, seemed to indicate a possible change in the future of the party.

What a difference half a year can make!  The criminal charges brought against the former president regarding his Stormy Daniels pays off before the 2016 election rallied the party faithful around him, and made his primary opponents have to issue statements of support for him against the charges.  Meanwhile De Santis was in the tough position of somehow beating Trump in the primary without losing the support of his loyal base, while Trump could hammer away at him with impunity.("Ron Desanctimonious" is the typically childish and stupid nickname that Trump has picked for the governor), The result has been a huge drop in support for  De Santis in the past few months.  While he is still likely to announce his candidacy sometime soon, it already appears that De Santis's chances of winning the nomination are slim to none.  

Personally, I feel a bit torn about the whole De Santis Vs Trump thing; on the one hand, as much as I despise De Santis's politics, I think he would be a better president than Trump, given that he's not a wildly  corrupt sexual predator like Trump is.  So part of me wants De Santis to win just to put Trump in the country's rear view mirror.  But on the other hand, I think De Santis would be a stronger opponent to President Biden than Trump, given that De Santis is only 44, and he could hammer Biden on the age issue, which clearly is on the mind of voters (even a majority of Democrat voters think that Biden is too old to run again).  So part of me wants Trump to win the primary, given that Biden beat him before and should be able to  do so again.  But, that was also my thinking back in 2016 when Trump was mowing down his Republican opponents in the primaries; oh sure, I thought, the Republicans may love this guy, but there's no way he'll win in the general election.  Obviously, I was wrong, and Trump somehow winning in a 2024  Biden Vs Trump rematch certainly isn't an impossibility, especially given the Republican advantage in the Electoral College. 

Recent events have shown that there's just no limit to how low Trump can go and how much the Republican base love him for it.  Just watch his deplorable recent town hall meeting on CNN, in which the crowd cheered Trump's every lie and deflection, even as he repeatedly insulted E. Jean Carrol, the woman who had just won a 5 million dollar suit against him for defamation of character after he denied her allegations that he raped her in a dressing room back in the 90's.  (His comments were so vile that Carrol is considering suing him again!).  Although the town hall's moderator, Kaitlan Collins, vainly tried to fact correct him, the jeering crowd of his supporters helped him bully her into submission, and the night appeared to be mostly a win for Trump, who now seems to be inevitably barreling his way into the Republican nomination.  Somehow,  a twice impeached one term president facing multiple criminal charges (with more likely on the way) could be president again.  And that's a true national disgrace.

EVEN FOX NEWS HAS A BREAKING POINT

 

It took paying out a settlement for $787 million dollars and a host of damaging private messages, but Fox News finally did the right thing and fired their most popular TV host, Tucker Carlson.  While there are any number of good reasons why Carlson should have been fired in the past few years, from his racist, xenophobic comments (he once said that immigrants make America "dirtier") to his crazy, seemingly contradictory conspiracy theories (he recently edited footage of the January 6th riot to make it look the protestors were peaceful, this after previously implying that the whole thing was a false flag operation by the FBI!), to one of his top writers being fired for posting racist, sexist and homophobic comments  for years online under a pseudonym, Carlson clearly played up to white supremacist ideas without actually endorsing white supremacist groups, who got the message and flocked to his show.

He's not the first Fox News on air personality to be suddenly fired; Bill O'Reilly, who, like Carlson, was the host on the network with the highest ratings, was forced out in 2017 because of a large payment made by the network to women he had sexually harassed.  Glenn Beck, another popular host, was let go in 2015 after he called then President Barack Obama a "racist" and once joked about poisoning Nancy Pelosi.  

Still, Carlson's firing was sudden, given that he wasn't even given a chance to say goodbye on his show.  Now I wish that his firing was in reaction to his horrible comments, or the allegedly misogynistic  work environment that fostered on the show, but it really sounds like the breaking point was that, during the recent legal case that Fox was in with the Dominion voting machine company, private messages of Carlson's were revealed to the world that showed a lack of respect for Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and other network leaders.  Carlson clearly thought that, as the number one host on the network, he could express negative views about his bosses to his coworkers without risk.  Obviously, he was wrong.  I think his mistake was assuming that conservative audiences cared more about personalities than content.   Carlson was the number one host on Fox News because he was the one who pushed his hateful rhetoric to the brink of acceptability. (The New York Times ran a heavily researched study of his show in April of 2022 that revealed that many of his stories got their start in white supremacist chat rooms).  Who he was didn't really matter to the viewers, it was what he said.

Now while I would love nothing more than for Fox News to change its tone and do more actual reporting and less crazy commentary about the dangers of "woke" M and M's, I'm not getting my hopes up.  Yes, I'm happy that Carlson got the boot, just as I was happy when O'Reilly and Beck did too, but did those two earlier firings change the nature of Fox News?  No.  The simple truth of right wing media is that there will always be someone who will tell their mostly white, mostly old and mostly male audience what they want to hear along with conspiracy theories and ideas that will make them mad, even when those ideas don't make sense.  (A right wing relative of mine once assured me that the Green New Deal would have banned airplanes!).  In other words, Carlson may be gone, but the sexism, bigotry, homophobia and xenophobia he spewed can always be spewed by somebody else.

Hating the One Percent

“Gender-affirming care is medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.”-The American Medical Association

 It was one of the more defining moments of Trump's 2016 campaign: during a question and answer period with an audience, one middle aged white man stood up and said that "we have a problem in this country called Muslims", he then accused then President Barack Obama of being one, and then went even further by saying that there are "training camps growing, where they want to kill us."  In typical Trump fashion, he failed to correct the man about his crazed conspiratorial beliefs, and instead remarked  that "A lot of people are saying that."  While his inability to correct this man was deplorable, why was he asking such an extreme question in the first place?  

Because during  Obama's presidency, the right wing media, building on beliefs that the president himself was a Muslim, began spreading lies about how Muslim Americans were going to impose Muslim Sharia law in the US.  These fears were fanned by the conservative think tank the Center for Security Policy, which promoted lies about Muslims "infiltrating" the US government and imposing their beliefs on the rest of us.  

The was, not surprisingly, based on an  argument that clearly misunderstood what  Sharia law is (as New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott put it in a 2011 interview, "One of the key points that is missing in this debate is that for Muslims living in non-Muslim countries like the United States, there is a broad agreement that Shariah requires them to abide by the laws of the land in exchange for the right to worship freely."),  but none of that mattered.  Sharia law was a scary sounding term that could whip up the conservative base into a frenzy when it was repeated on right wing media outlets and that's what happened.

The result of that frenzy was a spate of anti Sharia laws that, by 2014, were passed in Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee.  Along with that fact that there were no Muslim officials ready to go on the record as saying that America must abide by Sharia law, there was another ridiculous part of this whole thing: Muslims only make up one percent of the country.  The idea that somehow one percent of the country is going to pass laws that the other ninety nine percent don't want is, of course, absurd, but then fear is often irrational.  

Having dealt with that "threat", the right wing media recently turned their gaze to a new enemy: trans people.  It's hard to say exactly when conservatives decided to single out trans people, but demonizing them has become the new animating force on the right. And once again, the fear of trans people "taking over" has been absurdly exaggerated, with trans people only making up around one percent of the population. More importantly, polls have shown that the vast majority of trans people are glad to have transitioned despite all the hatred and discrimination coming their way.  They are, simply, just trying to live their best lives. 

And while things like puberty blockers may be new, the concept of people not falling into societal gender norms is thousands of years old; as rabbi Elliot Kukla pointed out in a recent New York Times editorial, ancient  writings in Judaism spoke of four different genders.  While in the modern world, The American Academy of Family Physicians  states that it "recognizes that diversity in gender identity and expression is a normal part of the human existence and does not represent pathology. The AAFP supports access to gender-affirming care for gender-diverse patients, including children and adolescents."

 While those anti Sharia state laws from the last decade were terrible, they were also purely symbolic; taking a stand against something that didn't even exist as a way to score political points.  The current anti Trans bills however, which have been passed in 10 states recently, are hurting real people.  Often, the same Republicans who cry for parent's rights when it comes to banning books in schools, are all for taking away the rights of parents who support their children's desire to use puberty blockers and other gender affirming care.  Sadly, this is in a community where suicide rates are higher than normal.

The crucial element in the success of this fear mongering is that the right wing media and politicians are spreading fear of groups of people that most Americans have never met.  Put simply, it's easy to demonize people that you don't know.  And most people (especially people  in rural areas) have never met a Muslim or trans person.  So when right wing media figures spread hatred of them, it's sadly easy for them to believe it.

While most polls show most Americans support equal rights for trans people, and that, along with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association  also support gender affirming care,  but this issue excites the Republican base.   And that goes double for  Fundamentalist Christians who are still smarting from losing on gay marriage 8 years ago, and that  means that it will not go away as a political issue any time soon. Unfortunately , it appears that the spinning wheel of conservative hatred is now set on trans people, and it will stay there until there is another one percent of the population for to spread hatred of.

THE FIRST TRUMP INDICTMENT

 

Well, it's official!  Today, for the first time ever, criminal indictment charges were made against Donald Trump, making him the first ex president to ever be indicted in American history.  And the amazing thing is that there are probably more on the way.

There's a certain inevitably to this: anyone who has read honest media reports about Trump for the past decade knows that he is a man who has always lived on the edge of legality, who acts (and talks!) more like a mob boss than a businessman or politician.  And like a mob boss who avoids prison while his underlings take the fall for him, Trump is surrounded by criminals who often have been caught committing crimes on his behalf.  From Trump's former lawyer and convicted criminal Micheal Cohen, who's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election started this whole mess for Trump, to former campaign advisor George Papadopoulos who was convicted of lying to the FBI, to Trump's long time accountant Allen Weisselberg who was recently convicted of tax fraud, some of the closest people to Trump have broken the law.  It's hard to believe that he himself would never  face some kind of charges.

The interesting thing about this indictment is that it may be the weakest of the 4 potential criminal charges that may be brought against him.  To get a felony conviction here, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will have to prove to a jury that Trump both falsified business records while violating campaign finance laws. While this may be difficult, clearly Bragg thinks that he has enough evidence to make a case.  We'll see.

The second possible criminal charge against Trump, (and the one that seems to be the  strongest),  is the one coming from the state of Georgia.  As we all now know from a recorded conversation, after losing the election, Trump called former Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find" him votes.  He even implied that Raffensperger himself might face some kind of charge if he didn't find those votes.  The fact that this call came after the state had already recounted the votes twice without changing the outcome meant nothing to Trump, and his behavior certainly seems criminal here, even if was still the president when he made that call.

Then there's a Justice Department investigation over whether Trump's stirring up of the mob on January 6th counts as a criminal incite to riot.  This is a bit tricky, since freedom of speech is important and Trump did use the word "peacefully" while addressing the crowd.  On the other hand, he had the power to stop the riot while it was going on and he delayed doing that for hours.  He even sent out a tweet condemning Mike Pence as the riot was taking place, further inflaming the crowd.  Plus there was testimony during the House of Representatives's January 6th investigation that said that he wanted metal detectors removed from the rally because the protestors were  "not there to hurt me.”

Finally, there's the stolen document scandal, in which Trump's refusal to turn over classified documents after leaving the White House prompted an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that resulted in over a hundred secret documents being found.  The crazy thing about this possible crime is that it reveals just how immature and downright stupid Trump is: he was told that he needed to turn over all the secret documents he had taken with him after leaving the White House, and he only returned some of them, leaving the rest in a closet in his resort/home.  All he had to do was hand them over, but, like a small child crying finders keepers, he refused, seeming to believe that any document he got as president was his forever.  If this is the crime that finally nails Trump, he'll be guilty of criminal stupidity.   

Inevitably, there's some worry in the media that this unprecedented step will galvanize Trump's supporters into some kind of violence, and while that fear is understandable, there is no doubt that it  right thing to do.  Every American who commits a crime should face charges for it, no matter who they are.