MAKING AMERICA GRATE AGAIN . . .

I think we have enough to get started.

In my last piece I refused to enter the prediction lottery simply because you can never take anything Trumpian at face value. It’s all subject to back-pedaling, withdrawal, denial and change -- not to mention the gross exaggeration and outright lying. Is the war in Ukraine actually over already? Did prices drop on “day one”? Has any other promise been honored? What we do have is dozens of executive pronouncements ranging from the almost outrageously funny to the downright horrible. We know he hasn’t read them -- he doesn’t -- and don’t know if he knows what his amanuenses actually put in them; the fact that he already partially backpedaled a couple suggests he doesn’t.

Many of you probably saw George Will’s column reprinted in West Hawaii Today on the 22^nd: “ . . .30 minutes into his term [Trump] announced two more presidency-aggrandizing ‘emergencies’ (the 44th and 45th existing concurrently). The 45th, his energy ‘emergency,’ arrived when Monday’s average price of a gallon of gasoline ($3.12) was less than it was 70 years ago ($3.41, which is 29 cents in 1955, adjusted for inflation).” (Emphasis added, probably needlessly.) Sadly we will never be able to quantify exactly how many electoral votes ended up in the Donald’s regal column because of the public misperception of the 2024 price of gasoline. Ositra Nwanevu writing in The Guardian this week, “ it’s unclear how much of Trump’s stated agenda will manifest itself as real or within stunts designed to dazzle the most gullible voters in the electorate.”

While I rarely find myself in agreement with George Will (oh how even liberals like us do miss the civil wit and scholarship of classic conservative William F Buckley Jr), it struck a chord with me when he noted as part of our present national division, “[e]ach group abhors the other’s politics and, perhaps as important, their manners.” Might we just find it easier to swallow the Trump manure diet if it could be served politely instead of with such stunning immaturity and viciousness?

Also from The Guardian this week, Martina Hyde opened with an interesting and most provocative observation: “Full American democracy is barely 60 years old, yet seems to be in an advanced state of cognitive decline.” She presumably is referencing civil rights and voting rights laws of the 1960s which truly did extend American democracy to millions previously left out, only to be eroded under Trump by the least admirable Supreme Court perhaps ever. Clearly the implicit message of MAGA and what now passes for the Republican agenda is to return to the pre-Vietnam era, fewer voters, less thinking politics. Reflecting back, our presidential history before the last mid-century was replete with examples of anti-democratic autocratic leadership and events: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in states where civil courts were operating until a contrary Supreme Court brought him up short. Without even a semblance of due process, FDR imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese descent, 80,000 of whom were U.S. citizens, and his toady Supreme Court meekly went along with it. More recently Nixon, assuredly not a law-abiding citizen, was caught on recordings using the “N” word meanly and derisively to minimize millions of Americans. We’ve had undeclared wars and unpopular laws foisted upon us. So we tend to forget what a watershed of democracy was the administration of -- wait for it -- Lyndon Baines Johnson who may in fact have stolen his way to the presidency. (I refer not to the controversy around how he came to be selected as Kennedy’s vice president but to the 1948 Texas Senate election where six days after polls closed 202 additional votes, strangely identified in alphabetical order and written in the same handwriting, were mysteriously added to his totals in a crucial precinct.)

From this perspective it is easier to appreciate that the newer real American democracy may be considerably more fragile than the 250 year old Constitution we so proudly hail. Nwanevu in The Guardian again: “Needless to say, a nation capable of sending a man like Donald Trump to the White House twice is not well. . . . .Ten years into the Trump era and due for at least another four, we’ve been humbled into near-impotence, a victory for the only ideology Trump has ever been committed to, which is humiliation.”

Why, for example, are we debating whether Elon did or didn’t give a Nazi salute. Of course he did, whether he intended it at the moment or not. No person in public life should ever deliberately or carelessly make that postural mistake -- there are so many other ways to show enthusiasm to your adoring crowd. But the salute aside, of course co-President Musk is a Nazi at heart. He hates free speech, favors dictatorial edicts, has praised virtually every national potentate currently in power (except China?), opposes free elections, and at the top of the chain believes that wealth rules uber alles. Nazi, nazi, nazi, how much more evidence do we need. We’re letting a small pack of hyper-wealthy narrow-thinking engineers cozy up to our money-grubbing tool of a president and run the world -- and get richer and richer by the day, almost a carbon copy of the coterie of rich industrialists like Thyssen or Krupp who like so many of Trump’s rich allies today first opposed the fuhrer then couldn’t wait to embrace him in 1933, naively believing that since he was their man they would control him. Trump does not possess nearly the intelligence as did Hitler, nor fortunately is he as methodical; whether he is as evil at heart, I truly cannot say, but given his currently escalating, seemingly out of control vengefulness the omens are not good.

Is it then safe to begin talking about what is happening, rather than what might just happen? I think so. Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense attorney in recent criminal proceedings and now suddenly the acting deputy Attorney General of the United States, according to A.P. and the Washington Post has directed prosecutors nationwide to investigate and potentially bring criminal charges against state and local officials in “sanctuary” jurisdictions for “harboring” undocumented immigrants or withholding immigration information from federal authorities. “Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands,” wrote Bove. His thesis is a debatable proposition at best since federal criminal prosecutors have no established authority to issue commands to local law enforcement regarding immigration policy in particular, and local law enforcement has no obligation actively to enforce immigration law absent any other criminal activity. No, this constitutes a blatant attempt to weaponize the federal law enforcement system in Trump’s likeness. Unless this too is part of contemporary history the Donald will erase with a wave of his hand, we shortly are due for some tense confrontations regarding undocumented residents.

Plus thanks to the Orange Menace we also now have literally hundreds of convicted felons roaming the streets of Washington D.C. in the form of the violent thugs who tried to storm the U.S. capitol barely four years ago, one obscenely bragging that he intends to amass guns by the boatload (not his word, but sort of like it) . To their credit, but in my humble opinion not enough to earn redemption, the largest police unions in the US, which endorsed Donald Trump during his campaign, now say Trump’s decision to pardon more than 1,500 people convicted over the January 6 insurrection “sends a dangerous message”. The International Association of Chiefs of Police and Fraternal Order of Police both are “deeply discouraged” by the pardons given to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers. “Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety – they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law.” Whoops, just a little too late to preach about the rule of law, Officers; you should have thought of that before the election, like when Mr T announced his first act would be to pardon those criminals “on day one.” Need we remind the suddenly honorable coppers’ unions that about 140 police officers from the US Capitol police and DC police were injured on January 6, and the attack has been linked to nine deaths. Even mini-Trump JD Vance said a week ago that people responsible for the violence during the Capitol riot “obviously” should not be pardoned.

So a clearer picture begins to emerge from which we can perhaps get a better understanding of what to expect from Trump II. When he promises to produce the good -- for example by somehow lowering prices, ending a war, well that’s just a wink-wink-nudge-nudge sound bite. When he promises something truly evil like freeing dozens of clearly dangerous criminal buddies or weaponizing federal law enforcement to punish his enemies or shredding the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, well we better take him at his word.

I can’t leave you today without briefly revisiting another point I tried to make in an earlier essay (“Justice Alito, Oxymoron”, May 22, 2024) since it also ties in with our theme today, the moral emptiness of Donald Trump. It seems he and his buddy Sam Alito felt it was perfectly OK a few weeks back to have a private phone conversation while Trump has pending and announced future business before the Court. So now we are to understand it is ethical for a judge before whom a defendant has both criminal and civil cases pending to call up and have a friendly chat with the defendant. Nothing about case strategy or process, of course, just a chat about a job applicant -- of course nothing sinister about that and no need to disclose the specifics. Bullpucky! Any lower court judge who did that would immediately be removed from office, no discussion, no questions asked -- but NOT if you happen to be Samuel Alito, for whom there are no ethical constraints on conduct, and you can consort freely ex parte (for the non-lawyers, that means in the absence of the opposing party or his representative) with the similarly ethically challenged Donald Trump. Great way to restore confidence in the current excuse for a Supreme Court, Sam.

People, Democrats need to find a way to stop rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Evil is amongst us. For me, all I know to do is to continue to speak out in protest and I invite you to join in. Please do pass this along to like-minded friends and ask them to join the conversation. Little by little, let’s expand our circle and keep the conversation going at least until the next election -- assuming there is one.