Author: mccoysnoise

The Resentment That Never Sleeps

Someone very close to us forwarded me a link to the attached enlightening and disquieting December 9, 2020, piece by New York Times Columnist Thomas B. Edsall.  Mr. Edsall cites authorities that assert that “‘social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior,’” and he observes, “[I]n politics, status competition has … [prompted] a collection of emotions including envy, jealousy and resentment that have spurred ever more intractable conflicts between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.”   

Hopefully, all reviewing this note that wish to access Mr. Edsall’s column have the means to do so.  It is compelling, if not pleasant, reading. 

Our Next Greatest Danger

“The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

  • attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to Winston Churchill

Not long after we retired in 2015, a conservative friend added me to a conservative email chain; soon thereafter, I received an email circulated by the group sharply criticizing then-President Barack Obama for having “the lack of respect to not honor our fighting forces,” stating, “In the 69 years since D-Day, there are four occasions when the President of the United States chose not to visit the D-Day Monument that honors the soldiers killed during the Invasion,” listing four years in which President Obama had not traveled to Normandy:  2010 – 2013.

I was surprised by the email.  Even if not stated explicitly, it left the impression that President Obama had never traveled to Normandy to honor our D-Day fallen.  I seemed to recall that Mr. Obama had spoken at Normandy D-Day Commemorations during his time in office.  In an internet search taking literally less than 30 seconds, I found that during his presidency Mr. Obama had spoken on the Normandy shores not once, but twice, in 2009 and 2014.  I emailed our friend my search results, along with supporting links.  Our friend sent a very gracious thanks for my disproving the message’s totally inaccurate and disparaging impression of Mr. Obama.

Not long after, I was removed from the circle.  [It was almost certainly for the best  ;).]

As these pages have made pretty clear, my greatest fear for the American way of life prior to Election Day was the likelihood that President Trump’s obvious dictatorial – at times, seemingly fascist – tendencies would cause our descent into autocracy if he was re-elected.  Now that such risk is arguably behind us (although I will breathe most easily on this score once President-Elect Joe Biden is sworn into office), the once seemingly-unimaginable reactions of so many of our people to the unsubstantiated malevolent claims of election fraud spread during the last month by Mr. Trump and his enablers have brought home to me what I would suggest may be the next greatest danger confronting our American democratic experiment:

Not Mr. Trump’s increasingly unbalanced narcissism and pathological lying;

Not national Republicans’ continued gutless subservience to the President, a despicable dereliction of their Constitutional responsibilities undertaken solely to preserve their own political careers;  

Not the alt-right media’s promotion of ever-more-outrageous conspiracy theories to inflame their followers, broadcast purely to jack up their own profits;

Surprisingly, not even that segment of Americans who are affirmatively racist, misogynist, nativist, homophobic, or religiously biased – many of whom, alarmingly, apparently don’t care that Mr. Trump lost the election, and are merely intent on keeping him in power – only because I believe – hopefully not mistakenly — that this segment, whose sentiments pose a poisonous threat to our republic, is relatively small.

It is the indication that many millions of our people, who do believe in democracy, with accurate information readily obtainable through the slightest of effort, are either negligently or willfully choosing to give credence to manifest falsehoods.

Republican election officials in Arizona and Georgia that personally opposed Mr. Biden have declared that there was no fraud in their electoral processes and that, alas, Mr. Biden won their states.  Former Republican WI Gov. Scott Walker, perhaps as venomously partisan as any state official in this country, sent a tweet soon after Wisconsin’s votes were tabulated, in effect signaling that Wisconsin’s processes were clean and that, alas, a recount would not unseat Mr. Biden’s victory in the state. U.S. Attorney General William Barr, arguably Mr. Trump’s more important defender and enabler, has declared that, alas, the Department of Justice has uncovered no evidence of fraud that would overturn Mr. Biden’s victory.  So many identifiably or de facto Republican judges have thrown out the Trump Campaign’s specious attacks on various states’ electoral processes that I have lost count.

I always paid greater heed to Fox News’ Shepard Smith’s debunking of Mr. Trump’s lies than I did to that of CNN or MSNBC commentators specifically because Mr. Smith was at Fox News.  (Mr. Smith is now at CNBC.)

I’d wager a fair sum that any of Mr. Trump’s supporters visiting a car dealership this past weekend were appropriately skeptical of any salesman’s claim that a given car “was a great deal.”  Yet, despite a Rocky Mountain Range of indications that Mr. Trump’s blatantly self-serving claims about election fraud are entirely baseless, these supporters remain determined to believe him.  If enough of our people are unwilling for a long enough period to face facts that are, in a saying favored by my sainted mother, “as plain as the nose on your face,” our experiment in democracy will not survive.  Now that we have at least for the present escaped the overt danger of totalitarianism, let us hope that after Mr. Trump leaves office – and despite his inevitable efforts to the contrary — a significant percentage of those now giving any level of heed to his lies “awaken,” and reassume their civic responsibility to investigate and reflect upon the issues facing our nation with a level of reason and dispassion.

“This Constitution can only end in despotism…when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

  • Benjamin Franklin, at the conclusion of the 1787 Constitutional Convention

Political Prognostications

I would submit that it can be fairly inferred from our recent electoral results that our politics for the rest of this decade will be up for grabs.  For liberals reassured by President-Elect Joe Biden’s 80 million votes and impressive-looking (projected) 306 projected Electoral College votes, I would observe that facing our most despicable and undemocratic President in at least 120 years, Mr. Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes, Georgia by about 12,000 votes, and Arizona by about 10,000 votes.  For those sources – including these pages – that have spent the last four years bemoaning Mr. Trump’s narrow 2016 victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin over Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, it should be noted that Mr. Trump carried those three Upper Midwest states by a combined total of about 77,000 votes – approaching twice the combined margin by which Mr. Biden carried Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia.  If Mr. Trump had won Wisconsin’s, Arizona’s, and Georgia’s combined 37 Electoral College votes, the presidential race would have ended in an Electoral College tie.  Congressional results – again, in a year in which Mr. Trump’s conduct of the presidency drove the highest percentage of voter turnout in about a century — yielded not a blue wave but a vaguely pink backdraft.

And more:  liberals should not be overly heartened by pundits’ proclamations that Mr. Biden rebuilt the upper Midwest “Blue Wall” that President Trump successfully scaled in defeating Ms. Clinton.  Mr. Biden may simply have been the perfect candidate to temporarily plug the “Wall’s” gaps.  In Wisconsin, both Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump and Democratic WI Gov. Tony Evers’ 2018 victory over former Republican WI Gov. Scott Walker were exceedingly narrow – arguably achieved by inoffensive personalities because of the deep antipathy Messrs. Trump and Walker stirred in the voters opposing them.  Mr. Biden’s Pennsylvania victory was likely a product of his Scranton roots, his staunch record of safeguarding union rights, and his undisputable lifelong support of black rights against the most unabashedly racist President in modern times.  Ditto the President-Elect’s fortunes in Michigan, where he arguably received an additional boost from auto workers’ memory of his efforts to save the American auto industry during the Great Recession.  These assets may not readily transfer to the next Democratic presidential candidate.

And yet more:  can liberals still be certain that all demographic trends favor them?  While the young seem to be generally more amenable to progressive than conservative views, the theory that our growing ethnic minorities will unite to provide an enduring multi-complexioned Democratic monolith seems to be springing leaks in practice.  It turns out that our citizens of non-European ethnicities are beginning to manifest views … as diverse as those of European descent.  Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, given their experiences and those of their forebears in Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, apparently don’t like anything that hints at socialism.  Some Southwest Latino Americans seemingly disfavor policies designed to assist those from their former countries entering the U.S. illegally.  Some Latino Americans working in the Texas oil fields were clearly more troubled by Mr. Biden’s expressed intent to transition the U.S. from the oil industry than they were by Mr. Trump’s blatantly anti-Brown rhetoric.  Many Asian Americans don’t like racial preference policies, which in practice harm their prospects.  Surveys reportedly indicate that many Black Americans, while united against racism, tend to be more traditional – indeed, conservative – on other issues.

The emerging disparate attitudes among our ethnic minorities is obviously a good thing.  Our democracy becomes stronger the more all of our people think as individuals, not as herd members.  That said, Democrats would appear to need to do a better job listening, and understanding and accommodating diverging views, or their anticipated demographic leviathan will become a mirage.

At the same time, Republicans have their own problems.  On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this week, the panel was casting about for appropriate comparisons to Mr. Trump’s presidency, and suggesting that one-term presidents are rarely remembered as notable figures unless they do something significant in their post presidencies.  I think they were but half right.  I predict that historians will conclude that Mr. Trump spread enough toxin in a single term to be marked as a unique blot upon the American Dream; but what Mr. Trump is likely to attempt in his post-presidency – to divide the nation for his own gratification – might indeed prove as significantly corrosive as his presidency.  Even so, what seems to me to be the greater likelihood – and what I would assume is of immediate concern to Republican strategists – is that Mr. Trump’s narcissistic efforts will hopelessly divide the Republican Party.  The parallel I see is not to any of our one-term presidents, but to one of our great two-term Presidents:  Theodore Roosevelt. 

The Republican Mr. Roosevelt, the youngest person to serve as president in our history, bowed to the two-term tradition later discarded by his cousin and left office in 1909, still vital at the age of 50.  His anointed successor, Republican William Howard Taft, was an uninspiring conservative who soon disappointed him.  By 1912, Mr. Roosevelt sought to reclaim the presidency.  The majority of party regulars – who had benefited from Mr. Roosevelt’s electoral success, but were more conservative than he, and didn’t want him back – awarded Mr. Taft the nomination.  Mr. Roosevelt responded by running under his own banner (literally named, the “Progressive Party,” although commonly known as the Bull Moose Party).  Messrs. Roosevelt and Taft split 50% of the 1912 presidential vote, handing the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who polled but 42%.

Although this observation hints at my notions regarding the future of the American political process, I would submit that it defies belief that a bunch of ambitious Republicans are going to let Mr. Trump hold their party hostage – as he clearly intends – for much of the coming decade.  They refused to stand up to Mr. Trump during the last four years specifically because they were ambitious – placing a higher priority on their own careers than on what was good for the nation.  While they’ve ridden the Trump wave, traditional Republicans don’t agree with Mr. Trump on a number of core issues.  I think they’ll want their party back, setting up a clash with Mr. Trump, who will maintain a cult-like hold on a segment of our electorate and is manifestly psychologically incapable of abandoning the spotlight.  This confrontation has, as was the case in 1912, the prospect of cleaving those currently sharing the Republican mantle.  We’re seeing the earliest indications of the potential rift in the current feud among Georgia Republicans.  The beneficiaries of such a GOP schism will obviously be Democrats.

So — to borrow a phrase from Mr. Trump — we’ll see what happens …

A President Should Pay His Debts … When He Can

As President-Elect Joe Biden has begun to name his Cabinet – so far, by all accounts competent moderates being greeted with respective sighs of relief in the foreign policy, intelligence and (given the selection of former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary) financial communities — I’m disappointed that I have not seen two names more frequently mentioned:  U.S. MN Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, IN, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Mr. Biden’s choice of Vice President Elect Kamala Harris as his running mate proved, despite my oft-expressed severe misgivings about naming her, a smart pick.  It’s a long road ahead, but early handicapping would understandably assign her the inside track on the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in either 2024 or 2028.  Fair enough; but she never presented a serious challenge to Mr. Biden’s quest for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

On the other hand, if Sen. Klobuchar and former Mayor Buttigieg, who had significant support against Mr. Biden in the centrist lane of the Democratic race, hadn’t withdrawn their candidacies and endorsed Mr. Biden when they did, the likely continued division of the Democratic moderate vote would have in effect handed the Democratic nomination to U.S. VT Sen. Bernie Sanders – which, given what we have now seen from the November vote totals, almost certainly would have resulted in President Trump’s re-election.

A President should pay his debts … when he can.

During their presidential candidacies, both Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Buttigieg were at least as strong with white Democratic moderates as Mr. Biden; what ultimately doomed their prospects was their inability to gain support from African American Democrats. 

Subject to the caveat below, I would nominate Sen. Klobuchar to be the United States Attorney General if she wanted the position.  She is a former prosecutor, but since the Biden Administration Department of Justice is certainly going to be involved on the side of minorities in any civil rights cases, Ms. Klobuchar’s high visibility in those efforts, and her necessarily sympathetic interaction with black leaders across the country, will enable her to establish positive relationships in the African American community that might facilitate a future presidential run.  The big caveat:  Minnesota Senatorial prospects.  In a state that is more conservative than generally thought, before making such a selection Mr. Biden would need to conclude that the Democrat appointed to replace Ms. Klobuchar would be able to hold the Minnesota Senate seat against a Republican challenge in 2022.  If the odds aren’t right, nominating Ms. Klobuchar isn’t feasible.

By the same token, I would nominate Mr. Buttigieg for Secretary of U.S. Housing and Urban Development.  I have heard his name mentioned as a potential Director of Veterans Affairs, but VA is a political landmine and doesn’t seem to provide a boost for a prospective presidential candidate.  Mr. Buttigieg is well-known – “Mayor Pete” – and since the Biden Administration HUD is certainly going to be sympathetic to minority concerns, Mr. Buttigieg would have ample opportunity as HUD Secretary – as Ms. Klobuchar would at Justice – to establish relationships with the African American community across the nation that would facilitate a future presidential run. 

It is clear that Mr. Biden would not have won the Democratic presidential nomination without the enthusiastic support of U.S. SC Rep. James Clyburn, who is reportedly concerned that not enough African Americans have yet been named to the Biden Cabinet and has suggested a candidate for HUD.  Mr. Clyburn’s sentiments need to be among those carrying the greatest weight with the President-Elect; that said, Mr. Clyburn’s preferences appear more general and can presumably be addressed through other appointments without slighting Mr. Buttigieg.

Progressives are reportedly increasingly concerned about the moderate nature of Mr. Biden’s first named nominees.  Their interests need to be addressed; Mr. Biden would not have won the presidency without progressives’ active support, even if their enthusiasm arose much more from loathing for Mr. Trump than regard for Mr. Biden.  I have heard Sen. Sanders say he would accept a position as Labor Secretary in the Biden Administration.  I would suggest that nominating Mr. Sanders to the Cabinet is too risky a step for Mr. Biden; no president can hire somebody he can’t control and can’t politically fire.  That said, Mr. Biden’s nominee for Labor Secretary should be someone that Sen. Sanders will enthusiastically support.

Although former GA Rep. Stacey Abrams’ expressed desire to be the President-Elect’s running mate was a pipe dream, Mr. Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia, which has given him breathing room during the Trump Conspiracy’s treasonous efforts to undercut the election, is a result of the organization that Ms. Abrams built in her 2018 run for the Georgia governorship.  She deserves something high profile in the Biden Administration to position her for another gubernatorial campaign against unpopular GA Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022.

A concluding lament about former U.S. U.N. Amb. Susan Rice, whom I considered the most qualified to be president of the three women ultimately listed as finalists to be Mr. Biden’s running mate.  Amb. Rice accepted being passed over with good grace, and deserved to be nominated for Secretary of State.  That said, given her misinformed remarks about the 2012 attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya — although subsequent Congressional investigation found no evidence that she had intentionally misrepresented the circumstances surrounding the attack — Mr. Biden, wisely in my view, elected not to nominate her in order to avoid what certainly would have been a hyper-partisan Senate confirmation process.  While I am confident that Mr. Biden is pleased with his choice of Antony Blinken to be Secretary of State, I hope he feels more than a pang of regret for Ms. Rice.  I do.

On the Advantage to Mr. Biden of Mr. Trump’s Pardons

No one that has read these pages for any length of time can doubt the antipathy I have for President Trump and his hoard; I consider him to have taken us to the brink of authoritarianism, and despite current indications that his treasonous activities to undermine our democracy are losing steam, I frankly won’t breathe entirely easily until I see President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr., actually take the oath of office in January.  That said, despite the understandable outrage now felt by anyone with a shred of interest in justice about Mr. Trump’s recent pardon of former Trump Administration National Security Adviser Michael Flynn – and the prospect of a steady stream of pardons in the coming weeks of  Trump collaborators including his wife, his children, Trump Organization executives, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone (this time a full pardon), etc., etc., etc., probably ultimately culminating in an attempt by the President to pardon himself – I would suggest that if Mr. Trump makes promiscuous use of his pardon power, he may be unwittingly assisting Mr. Biden’s attempts to tone down our current hyper-partisan atmosphere.

Given our nation’s need to uphold the rule of law, the depth of hostility that perhaps the majority of Mr. Biden’s supporters feel about Mr. Trump, and the fact that Mr. Trump obviously has no intent to retire from the world stage when he leaves the White House, I don’t see how, unless Mr. Trump makes broad untoward use of his pardon power, the Biden Administration will have any choice but to thoroughly investigate the activities of and if appropriate pursue criminal convictions against various members of the Trump cohort including Mr. Trump himself.  At the same time, such activities, however justified, will carry the tinge of political persecution and require establishment Republicans to close ranks behind Mr. Trump when they are probably quietly thrilled at the prospect of seeing his outsize influence within their party gradually dissipate.  Mr. Biden has pledged to try to unify our nation, and as perhaps as unlikely as that might be in a hyper-partisan environment stoked not only by Mr. Trump but an alt-right media complex whose profits are driven by broadcasting ever-more-outlandish conspiracy theories, any prosecutions of Trump principals by the Biden Administration will undoubtedly merely serve to aggravate the divisions among our citizens and cripple Mr. Biden’s attempts to effect moderate change that the majority of Americans, if they can be made to look at policy through other than a rancorous partisan lens, might support.

So if advising Mr. Biden, I would actually counsel:  let’s hope Trump actually does a broad and thorough job of pardoning his entire band.  Let’s hope he actually tries to pardon himself.  He’s doing you a favor.  The more justification your Administration has for ignoring Trump – for not letting him hold center stage – the better for your presidency and the nation.  Let the natural survival instincts of establishment Republicans – some of whom harbor their own presidential ambitions, and want their party back – and Fox News – which undoubtedly realizes that the more it pumps Trump, the more it is assisting an undoubted media competitor — kick in:  they want Trump to fade.  After January 20, Trump will hold perhaps half of the 70 million people that voted for him for a while; and while 35 million people is far from nothing, it still only amounts to about 10% of the population – which is about the percentage of crazies we have always had with us.  As Mr. Trump ages, his ardent following – demonstrably having short and easily-distracted attention spans – may well become attracted to some other shiny bauble.

A President cannot pardon those who are convicted of state and local offenses.  It seems highly likely that the Attorney General of the State of New York will chase Mr. Trump.  Let the then-former president be distracted by challenges not attributable to the Biden Administration as the Administration seeks to address the myriad of daunting challenges facing our nation.  If nothing else, the recent election results demonstrate that the country is not as liberal as progressives proclaim, and that some of the growing demographic constituencies that Democrats have been projecting to sustain them in the future are not as monolithic as they had supposed.  The Democrats’ best hope to hold the White House in 2024 is for Mr. Trump’s continued machinations to ultimately divide the Republican Party between its establishment and its crazies.

The Limits of the Presidential Pardon Power

Inasmuch as the death throes of the Trump Administration will undoubtedly include the President’s granting a number of distasteful pardons – perhaps including an attempt to pardon himself – this seems an appropriate time to recall the Constitutional law instruction of our greatest fictional President, regarding the limits of his Article II pardon power. 

Have a wonderful and safe Holiday.  

Leaving an American Munich

As part of the Armistice that ended World War I in 1918, Germany agreed to sharply curtail its military establishment.  Over the years following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, he undertook a military buildup in flagrant violation of Germany’s WWI agreements, correctly calculating that neither England nor France – each having the military might to easily stop Germany’s unauthorized buildup in its early stages — would have the will to do so.  And then … it was too late.

To historians the world over, the word, “Munich,” is synonymous with, “appeasement” – an agreement concluded in Munich in September, 1938, by Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France that provided for “cessation” of part of another sovereign nation, Czechoslovakia, to Germany.  It was an attempt by the U.K. and France to avoid a war with a now militarily-muscular Germany by appeasing Adolf Hitler.  While widely acclaimed at the time, Winston Churchill called it, “… a most grievous consequence of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years – five years of futile good intentions, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power ….”  Nazi Germany invaded Poland within a year, commencing World War II.

It is has been reported by multiple sources that Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and Michigan Republican Chair Laura Cox have written Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, urging the Board to delay Michigan’s certification of its presidential election results – scheduled for today — for 14 days, to allow a full audit and investigation of “numerical anomalies” and “procedural irregularities.”  A Republican state canvasser has reportedly indicated that he is considering supporting the delay. 

This is poppycock.  On Friday, after an extraordinarily inappropriate White House meeting instigated by President Trump, the Michigan Senate Majority Leader and House Speaker – both Republicans – stated straightforwardly that they knew of nothing that would change Michigan’s election outcome.

I am heartened by the Michigan legislators’ statement, and some media accounts reassuringly report that despite the national and state Republican parties’ antics, Michigan’s governing statute provides that the state election canvassers have little choice but to certify its election results, and if they don’t, certification will nonetheless quickly occur through either the authority of Democratic MI Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or order of a Michigan appellate court.  That said, I remain uneasy.  The Republican efforts are a blatant attempt to provide Mr. Trump time to build momentum.  I’m finally there:  the Trump Conspiracy is about more than undermining President-Elect Joe Biden’s legitimacy and sowing distrust in our electoral processes to enhance future media ratings among the Trump cult; it is to stage a coup.

[The irony lost on the Trump Cult amid all these thrashings:  Mr. Trump manifestly doesn’t even want the job.  While he had time to entertain the Michigan legislators Friday in his traitorous quest, on Saturday – with U.S. Coronavirus deaths at the highest levels since last summer – he chose to play golf rather than attend a G20 “Pandemic Preparedness” event.]

Something that it took me some time to realize in the miasma of Mr. Biden’s mounting vote totals and victories, Mr. Trump’s malevolent lies, mounting Coronavirus cases, and a blizzard of state dates:  the Trump Conspiracy is effectively over unless it can delay vote certification in either Michigan or Pennsylvania this week.  (Note:  the Conspiracy suffered a notable loss Saturday when a federal court dismissed its lawsuit to block Pennsylvania’s certification, but will presumably appeal to the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals and thereafter to the U.S. Supreme Court.)  When adding Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes to Mr. Biden (given its Friday certification of his victory) to the 232 Electoral College votes that will ultimately be allotted to him from the “2016 Clinton States” he won, Mr. Biden’s Electoral College vote total seemingly now stands at a de facto 248.  While neither Michigan’s nor Pennsylvania’s respective certifications will individually put Mr. Biden over the top, both states’ certifications will garner him 36 additional Electoral College votes, and mean that Mr. Trump has de facto lost.  The President’s only remaining recourses would then appear to be to seditiously attempt to overturn certifications — unlikely without evidence that the Conspiracy obviously lacks — persuade Republican-controlled legislatures in states won by Mr. Biden to overturn the expressed will of their electorates by sending their states’ Trump slates to the Electoral College – seemingly a politically suicidal step that no state politician will relish — or persuade a sufficient number of Biden electors to vote for him – an incredible reach, since if all states currently “called” for Mr. Biden so certify their vote totals, the President will need 38 Biden electors to be “faithless” — and even then, such “faithless” votes might well be overturned in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although the preceding paragraph provides some comfort, I would submit that the time for temperate responses to the President’s machinations has passed.  If he can somehow delay certifications in Pennsylvania and/or Michigan – states Mr. Biden won by relatively wide margins – it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that with momentum, he may well be able to obtain certification delays in Arizona and Wisconsin, states Mr. Biden won more narrowly with Republican-controlled legislatures in which Mr. Trump is already challenging the voting processes.

While I have lauded Mr. Biden’s even response to Mr. Trump’s histrionics thus far, believing strongly that Mr. Trump wants a fight to rally his supporters, I fear that national Republicans’ approach of appeasement has enabled Mr. Trump to get up a head of steam.  They keep thinking that Mr. Trump will “come around,” will “do the right thing.”  He never will.  Mr. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, called it in her book, Too Much and Never Enough:

“[Mr. Trump engages in] [w]orking the refs, lying, cheating … [He will] [c]laim that a failure is a tremendous victory, and the shameless grandiosity will retroactively make it so. … Donald takes any rebuke as a challenge and doubles down on the behavior that drew fire in the first place, as if the criticism is permission to do worse. … The deafening silence in response to [Mr. Trump’s] blatant display of sociopathic [behavior during his presidency] … fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.”

For years after World War II, public policy and military scholars lamented that they had not paid more attention to Mein Kampf; in it, Adolf Hitler told the world exactly what he intended to do.  We have only recently gained the benefit of Dr. Trump’s insights into the president, but in this new, post-election phase of the Trump presidency, I fear that we ignore her warnings at our peril.  It’s time to use all legal means to stop him.  The time for reasoning with Mr. Trump and his supplicants has passed.  If there is any delay in Michigan’s certification process today, Gov. Whitmer, with the behind-the-scenes support of the Biden Transition Team, should move aggressively to promptly effect the certification through her power or in the Michigan courts.  Equally energetic efforts should be undertaken in Pennsylvania if such become necessary.  It is time to leave this American Munich.

Before it’s too late.

America’s Twilight Zone

The link below attaches to clips from a famous Twilight Zone episode that recently came to mind.  While the appeals for physical violence in one of the scenes, a remnant of an earlier time in American sensibilities, are to be condemned, the episode’s depiction of cowardly failure to confront iniquity has direct parallels today. 

Yesterday, President-Elect Biden called Mr. Trump’s recalcitrance in accepting his defeat and obstructing the transition to the next Administration “irresponsible” – exactly the term and tone I would have suggested if advising him.  Since I’m not advising him, I myself am free to characterize the recent activities of the President and his cohort – among them, Mr. Trump calling Republican Wayne County (Detroit), MI, election canvass board members and sufficiently exerting the pressure of his office on them to cause them to seek to rescind their votes certifying the County’s (heavily Democratic) election results; Mr. Trump being reported by multiple sources to have invited the Michigan state Republican Senate Majority Leader and the Michigan state House Speaker to Washington today, in an apparent effort to have the state’s legislature override Mr. Biden’s 150,000 vote victory in the state by sending Trump electors to the Electoral College; Trump clown lawyer Rudolf Giuliani’s grotesque, unsubstantiated, and patently ridiculous claims of a multi-state widespread conspiracy to steal the election from Mr. Trump – for what they are: treasonous. These activities by the President and his minions have nothing to do with vote count verification; they are efforts consciously undertaken to undo the expressed will of the American people and undermine our people’s faith in the very process that has sustained us throughout our history.  These activities alone warrant Mr. Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.

By making no meaningful effort to counter the coercive activities and the spread of scurrilous disinformation designed to undermine our electoral processes, leaders of a major American political party are cravenly betraying the millions of Americans who have died over almost 250 years to protect our Republic.  That said, the manner in which Republican officeholders have cowered in the face of Mr. Trump’s abhorrent behavior has, however unwittingly, brought into undeniable relief what has perhaps become the glaring weakness in our society:  virtually every one of our elected officials (I am willing to make an exception for U.S. UT Sen. Mitt Romney) now care almost entirely about maintaining their own standing and precious little about our people or our system of government.  Everybody knows that getting re-elected is a very high priority for a politician; but until observing Republicans’ silent acquiescence to – and in some instances, active enablement of — Mr. Trump’s destructive petulance, we – at least I – didn’t believe that we had reached the point that political survival was seemingly most national politicians’ only real priority.  This is a nonpartisan comment; I have no illusions that if a Democratic demagogue arises in the future, Democratic officeholders will respond any better than Republicans are today. 

Although Mr. Trump will not be immediately impeached and removed from office as he should be, and while it still appears that we are overwhelmingly likely to survive Mr. Trump and his cohort’s seditious schemes, we remain in a Twilight Zone of political ambition, poisonous partisanship and propaganda profiteers.  We as citizens should ponder what, if anything, we can do about it.   

Winning America’s Two-Front Domestic War

Not long after the United States’ entry into World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, in consultation with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, decided upon a “Europe First” strategy:  that the United States would concentrate its efforts, in concert with its British and Russian allies, upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, while it maintained a “holding action” against the Japanese Empire in the Pacific theater.  Although some of the heaviest American casualties came on Pacific islands while the war waged in Europe, America only turned its full attention to the Pacific after victory over Germany was achieved.

I would submit that today, we are again engaged in a two-front war, at home:  against our internal divisive hyper-partisanship and the Coronavirus.  I think President-Elect Biden is pursuing an effective war strategy.  Although perhaps as driven by practical realities as President Roosevelt arguably was in 1942, Mr. Biden seems focused on tacitly addressing our divisiveness by (at least outwardly) exhibiting a calm inevitability while doing what he can regarding the Coronavirus.

On the Divisiveness Front, I would suggest that Election Day was much akin to D-Day in 1944.  Although the war raged for months afterward, D-Day marked the turning point of the war in Europe.  My personal greatest fear – that America might descend into autocracy due to the continuation of President Trump’s constitutional powers combined with his dictatorial tendencies — is now seemingly abating.  All but the most oblivious Trump supporters understand that Mr. Trump lost.  I have yet to find a definitive count of the number of Trump supporters at the Washington, D.C. rally this past weekend; Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski mentioned 20,000.  Let’s say it was 35,000.  This would amount to approximately 1 percent of the votes Mr. Trump garnered within about two hours’ drive of D.C.  Although Mr. Trump’s maimed psyche is currently being supported by the greedy and the cowardly – the alt-right media that profit by feeding sugar to the gullible, and the feckless Republican officials more interested in their political careers than in what is good for our nation – the Trump rally turnout hardly constituted a groundswell of rebellion.  The mainstream media is turning off the Trump Show.  The President’s electoral antics haven’t merited an actual front-page story in the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal for days.  That said, winning on the Divisiveness front has arguably moved from achieving Mr. Trump’s departure to obtaining the grudging acquiescence of the majority of Mr. Trump’s less extreme supporters.  By maintaining his poise in the face of the President’s irrational provocations, Mr. Biden is enabling the air to continue to seep out of the Baby Trump balloon.

If advising Mr. Biden, I’d have only one suggestion on this front:  when he speaks, continue to condemn violence on all sides.  Reports of Saturday’s rally indicate that some anti-Trump groups went seemingly seeking confrontation.  Mr. Biden should declare that all Americans are entitled to peacefully demonstrate, and that those that oppose the President should avoid going to pro-Trump rallies.  Mr. Trump needs a fight to maintain relevance – and if none is offered, his avid support will continue its shrivel to the fringes.

On the Coronavirus Front:  In all other realms of national security aside from the virus response, I’d be very surprised if Mr. Biden isn’t informally getting virtually all of the information in the President’s Daily Brief:  members of the intelligence community sharing a repast with old friends outside the Administration, who in turn visit with members of the incoming Administration, and … there you have it.  And/or:  in addition to the fact that Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris gets briefed as a member of the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, have U.S. VA Sen. Mark Warner and U.S. CA Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic heads of the two Congressional intelligence committees, stopped by to … er … congratulate Mr. Biden in person?  Maybe.  Would any information passed to Mr. Biden through these avenues constitute a violation of federal law?  Probably.  Any likelihood of detection and consequences?  Little … and none.

As to the Coronavirus response itself:  while noting in his news conference yesterday that “We are a war with the virus,” when asked about the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to work with his team, Mr. Biden prodded Mr. Trump by warning that “More people may die if we don’t coordinate” and “You’d think he’d at least want to go off on a positive note,” but acknowledged that if necessary, the Biden team will “try to pull together a serious and consistent plan so we’re ready on Day 1.”  It is apparent that Mr. Trump is so locked up in his own narcissistic malaise that no entreaty will move him.  My guess:  the drug companies and health equipment manufacturers are already sharing at least as much detail regarding their current status and projections with Biden representatives as they are with the Trump Administration.  Since Mr. Trump seems intent on inaction, no meaningful federal progress will be made until Inauguration Day even if/when the Trump Administration provides all of its data and plans to the Biden Transition Team.  Given comments by Dr. Anthony Fauci, I have hope that the Administration may actually have workable plans.

As Mr. Biden also noted yesterday, things are going to get “much tougher before they get easier” on COVID during the coming months.  That said, we can all help ourselves.  Let’s end where we started, with WWII:  in December, 1944, six months after D-Day, German forces that had been in retreat staged a massive counter-offensive, resulting in what became known as the “Battle of the Bulge.”  American forces in Bastogne, Belgium, were outnumbered, outgunned, and short of supplies.  The Germans demanded American surrender.  The American commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, responded:  “Nuts.”  Despite being surrounded and ill-equipped, the Americans held on against the German assault until reinforcements arrived.  For the good of our families, our fellow citizens, and ourselves, we likewise have to do our best to hold on.  The key to prevailing on the Coronavirus front is within our control – by wearing masks and limiting if not avoiding indoor social gatherings – as we wait for federal reinforcements to arrive as soon as feasible after Inauguration Day.