Saturday, December 7, 2024

WELCOME TO GESTAPO POLITICS – Part One

Matt Gaetz
 There is a theory, to which I tend to subscribe, that President-elect Donald Trump’s first cabinet pick—the  naming of former Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general—was coldly calculated. A guy facing credible charges of paid sexual relationships with underaged girls—credible enough that he resigned from Congress in an attempt to ensure that an investigation into his antics was buried—and with possible vulnerability to accusations of human and drug trafficking ties, was going to be dead in the water from the outset. That was especially true considering that Gaetz was, arguably, the most hated personality in his own party, after he led a hostile takeover, with the backing of several other fanatical MAGA representatives, to oust former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy from office.

It seems pretty obvious  that Gaetz was supposed to be a lightning rod, a name that would explode on the political and media horizon like a gigantic Roman candle, and draw all attention to it. Meanwhile, Trump would flesh out the rest of his cabinet with other mostly controversial and inexperienced characters that would, nevertheless, pale by comparison to Gaetz, but who would pledge loyalty to Trump—a paramount requirement for joining the president-elect’s inner circle this time around—rather than to the Constitution.

The level of confidence (or lack thereof) that Trump has in the moral and ethical rectitude of members of what is virtually his “shadow cabinet” seems clear from his attempts to forego any sort of investigation of the candidates’ backgrounds. The question that seems to loom is, what might a thorough probe turn up in such a veritable clown car of nominations?

Fox "talent" Pete Hegseth
This is, then, a test of Senate Republicans and, fortunately, Trump is beginning to meet resistance, since the Gaetz lightning rod was insufficient to mask the glaring skeletons in at least one other cabinet candidate’s see-through closet. I’m referring, of course to Pete Hegseth, a Fox News anchor whom Trump has tapped for defense secretary. These vulnerabilities include reports of general misconduct (including often  being drunk on the job) and questionable financial practices in other organizations with which he has been associated. And then, more important still,  there are strong allegations of on-the-job sexual harassment, and at least one report of sexual assault—which was settled out of court in California with money and a non-disclosure agreement, but the long shadow of which persists.

Perhaps one man’s questionable moral and ethical standing might serve as an expendable distraction for controversial cabinet picks, but can two? That’s the question more than a handful of GOP senators are asking themselves right now. Moreover, it seems to become more obvious all the time that some Republican senators have finally caught on to the fact that Trump isn’t a man who works within any sort of rule structure, and, at least for now, a few of them are willing to push back. Perhaps their idea is to show Trump from the outset that they take their official advise-and-approve role seriously. In other words, some of them have no plans to let the president become a king.

The refusal of Trump to subject his cabinet picks to traditional background checks—if he indeed gets away with it completely—is so far proving to be a pyric victory over traditional norms. Such checks before the candidates were actually announced could have saved him the embarrassment of having Gaetz and Hegseth’s dirty laundry being aired in public. At least in the case of Gaetz, however, there are some compelling questions as to whether Trump would have wanted to avoid such public revelations, if the theory is correct about his using the former MAGA representative as a diversionary prop.

But was that also the case with Hegseth? Not likely. What happened, then, was that, even if Trump and the Senate were going to shirk their background check duties, the media weren’t. In other words, if a secret vetting was ruled out, then the cabinet candidates were pretty much bound to be vetted publicly by the press. This was a fact that caused Hegseth to lose his cool this week and shout at journalists waiting for him in the halls of Congress that he didn’t answer to the media, “not to that camera, and not to any of you.” Which seemed like a contradictory sentiment from a guy who has been making five million dollars a year as a Fox News “talent”. (Even they don’t call them journalists).

That said, however, after what the GOP has considered—erroneously—a “landslide victory”, it is doubtful that the party’s Senate leadership is going to want to give any more black eyes to their chief executive than they absolutely have to. And there’s the rub. While they stood their ground against Gaetz in Justice, and could very well do the same against Hegseth in Defense, it seems pretty likely that other questionable nominations might well get through the confirmation process unscathed.

That, in the view of no few observers, could be a real problem. There are a couple of cases in point that it makes sense to look at in studying this Era of Trump phenomenon. One is Kashyap Patel (for FBI chief) and the other is Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s leave “Kash” for later and, today, start with Gabbard, Trump’s pick to head national intelligence.

Tulsi Gabbard with Trump and Fox conspiracy theorist
and Putin supporter Tucker Carlson

The forty-three-year-old Gabbard has an honorable seventeen-year career record in the military. As an enlisted woman, she reached the rank of Spec-4 in the Hawaii National Guard. She was attached to the Twenty-Ninth Medical Brigade, in which her MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was as a medical instrument repairer. During that time (2004-2005) she was deployed to Iraq in that MOS.  In 2005, she was awarded a Combat Medical Badge for “participation in combat operations under enemy hostile fire.”

When she returned to the US, she entered Officer Candidate School, accelerated out at the top of her class, and was granted a commission as a second lieutenant. As she moved through the officer ranks, Gabbard did a variety of jobs, including serving as a military police platoon leader. That was while she was stationed in Kuwait in 2008 and 2009. By 2015, Gabbard had risen to the rank of major in the Hawaii National Guard. She transferred five years later to the Army Reserve, and, the following year (2021) was promoted to lieutenant colonel while serving in Africa.

Lt. Colonel Tulsi Gabbard

Parallel to her military career, in 2013, Gabbard won a seat in the US Congress as the representative for Hawaii’s Second District, becoming the first Samoan-American ever to serve in Congress. Gabbard ran as a Democrat. She held that seat from 2013 to 2021 and served from 2013 to 2016 as vice-chair of the Democratic National Convention. In 2022, Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an Independent. In 2024, she took a further step to the right and joined the Republican Party.

Clearly, hers is a straightforward and transparent record that is far removed from the shadowy pasts of a Gaetz or a Hegseth. However, Trump’s nominating her to head the nation’s intelligence apparatus is fraught with controversy.  For one thing, she has no background to speak of in intelligence operations. For another, like Hegseth, she is a Fox News alumna, often appearing as a consultant on the Murdoch infotainment network, a major contributor to  the propagation of myriad debunked conspiracy theories that it continues to champion despite numerous lawsuits and a 787-million-dollar loss to a voting machine manufacturer that it slandered in falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Acting as a mere stringer on the dominant mock-news far-right propaganda channel (sometimes referred to by its detractors as “Faux News”) wouldn’t be such a big deal. But Gabbard has even occasionally stood in as a replacement host for top primetime Fox anchor Tucker Carlson—arguably the most nefarious conspiracy theorist on cable, and a staunch supporter of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

But of much greater concern, in this case, are Gabbard’s own links to Russia. The most glaring of these was laid out in a 2017 memo she penned while serving in the House of Representatives. The wording was so extreme that it put her at odds with her own (then-Democratic) party. According to ABC News, which obtained a copy of the memo, Gabbard blamed the West and NATO for Putin’s invasion of Ukrainian territories. It wasn’t a new conspiracy theory, especially not among the far-right and far-left fringes of European politics. But it was certainly an uncommon stance in the US and especially in the Democratic Party.

Gabbard using Tucker Carlson's primetime slot on
Fox News to push her pro-Russia arguments

Had this always been her position, it would not have been nearly as curious or shocking as it was—though clearly just as controversial. But earlier, in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, Gabbard had supported sanctions against the Russian government, saying specifically that the US should not be “standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” The one-eighty that she executed without a hitch three years later couldn’t have come in sharper contrast to her apparent thinking in 2014. In the 2017 memo, according to ABC, she  wrote that the “Russian people are a proud people, and they don't want the US and our allies trying to control them and their government.” (This flies in the face of the inescapable fact that, in Russia, nobody’s position matters but Putin’s, since he is as powerful as Stalin or the Russian czars once were; therefore, what’s happening in Ukraine has precious little to do with the “pride of the Russian people”).

She also blamed the US and NATO directly for the annexation of Crimea, saying that is was Western hostility toward Putin that had forced him to invade Ukrainian territory. “There certainly isn't any guarantee to Putin that we won't try to overthrow Russia's government,” she wrote. “In fact, I'm pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that.”

Both positions were not only contrary to her stance of a few years before, but smacked of the style and wording of Putin’s propaganda playbook, as espoused by RT (formerly Russia Today), an international publication widely believed to front for the Kremlin and Putin’s disinformation mill. According to allegations by staffers in  Congress, it is also a publication that Gabbard has frequently cited and mentioned as a source.

Since then, Gabbard has doubled down repeatedly on pro-Russian stances. On Fox News she has gone as far as to posit that US leaders are “knowingly provoking Putin,” a notion that echoes Putin’s self-justification for threatening any country in the West that aids Ukraine in its use of long-range missiles to drive back advancing Russian forces with possible nuclear attack. Despite this kind of saber-rattling by the Putin regime, Gabbard has more than once suggested that instead of remaining at odds with the Russian strongman, the US should extend a hand of friendship to him.  

Gabbard has made her enthusiastic support for Putin and Russia extensive to Putin’s now freshly embattled ally, Bashar Al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who has slaughtered an estimated five to seven hundred thousand of his own people (often by the cruelest of means including aerial barrel bombs stuffed with nails and poison gasses banned by Western rules of engagement, to say nothing of the fifteen thousand people he is estimated to have tortured to death and the one hundred fifty thousand held without charges or trial in his prisons). Nor does that take into account the more than ten million Syrians now either internally displaced or living in foreign exile as a result of the grinding civil war.

Rebels drive into Homs after retaking the city from
Assad's Russian-backed troops in Syria

The only “crime” of the Syrian people—even more distinct from Assad than the Russian people from Putin—has been to rise up since the Arab Spring of 2011, and demand a democratic opening and an end to the fifty years of tyranny imposed by Bashar Al-Assad and his father before him. That long and costly war in human sacrifice is now apparently paying off. The rebels, taking advantage of the fact that Russia is throwing all of its resources at its war with Ukraine, have, in the last few days, turned the tables on Assad and recaptured major Syrian cities, including the crucial Homs and Aleppo.

Children were among the most highly affected victims
of  Al-Assad's chlorine gas attacks on his own people.
Tulsi Gabbard’s sympathies have not been with the noble cause of a coalition of democracy-prone rebels seeking to shrug off the chains of tyranny. The fact is that she visited Syria just days before a horrific  chemical attack, one of Assad’s worst atrocities of the war, in which he gassed an entire town in the early hours of the morning causing scores of people, including children, to immediately fall to the ground gasping for breath and foaming at the mouth before dying. After her naïvely amiable talks with the Assad regime, the then-US representative declared the dictator “not an enemy of the United States.”

Even then-President Trump, the man who has now tapped her to head up US intelligence, disagreed, and ordered retaliatory airstrikes against sites deemed to be the ones from which Assad had launched the fratricidal attack. But Gabbard, at the time, pushed back against Trump, calling his decision to retaliate  “dangerous, rash and unconstitutional.”

It is important to note that Gabbard’s trip to Damascus, in which she met face-to-face with Al-Assad, was sponsored by none other than the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The SSNP is a fanatically pro-Assad organization that is virulently antisemitic. It basically represents Syrian Nazism. Even its party symbol, the zawbaa, is reminiscent of the Nazi swastika.

Since then she has continued to offer an impassioned defense of Assad, echoing the Kremlin’s argument justifying the actions taken against the Syrian dictator’s  people as being part of an effort to wipe out terrorist organizations that are a threat to the world. Well, speaking of terrorist organizations, it should be noted that a staunch ally of both Assad and Russia in the Syrian Civil War has been the rabidly anti-American, pro-Iranian terror group Hezbollah.  Hezbollah has long been an ally of the Al-Assad family’s Ba'ath regime. In providing anti-rebel fighters to the Syrian dictatorship, Hezbollah has framed its participation as vital to its own position, since, in the terrorist organization’s eyes, the rebellion against Assad is part of "a plot to destroy Hezbollah’s alliance with al-Assad against Israel" (its sworn enemy and America’s staunchest ally in the region).

Gabbard met twice with Bashar Al-Assad during a 
controversial trip she made to Syria while she was a 
US representative. She returned home insisting he was 
"not an enemy of the US," despite his close ties to Putin and
his reputation as one of the world's most ruthless dictators.

But none of that leads to the conclusion that Gabbard has been fronting for Assad. No. She has been fronting for Putin. Or at least that can be conjectured from her open backing of the actions of the Putin regime and Putin’s intimate relationship with Assad.

The truth is that Assad could not have been as successful as he has been until right now in crushing the rebellion against him without enormous Russian aid. And Putin has given that to him, both financially and materially, with Russian fighter pilots and Russian planes running hundreds of bombing missions against the pro-democracy rebels. At the height of the war, there were also Russian troops on the ground in Syria. And still today, Putin has been supplying Assad with military advisers and trainers, as well as military police units to help the dictator try and keep his country locked down.

So, is this all just a love affair between Putin and Al-Assad—with Tulsi Gabbard, possibly the next chief intelligence officer of the United States, as their cheerleader? Of course not. Assad and the permanence of his regime are key to Russian  military and geopolitical interests in the Middle East.

In the post-World War II era known as the Cold War (1947–1991)—a period of bipolar global power in which the world was pretty neatly divided between East and West, with Soviet Russia heading the East and the US the West—Syria sided with Russia. Between 1955 and 1958, Russia provided two hundred ninety-four million dollars in military aid to Syria, equivalent to about 3.2 billion dollars today. Russia was instrumental in aiding Syria during the Suez War (1955-1958) and those relations only deepened as the Syrian Ba’ath Party gained strength. The Ba’ath movement was the big winner in the Syrian Revolution in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and it was in this period that Bashar Al-Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad came to power.

The material and financial support lent to the regime by Russia led to an agreement with the elder Al-Assad to permit the Russians to open a powerful naval military base in Syria at the port of Tartus. In exchange, the Assads continued to receive military and financial aid from Russia, and thousands of Syrian military officers have received professional education and training in Russia from the seventies into the twenty-first century.

Syria has since become the Kremlin’s closest strategic ally in the Middle East, providing it with rapid naval response capabilities by perceived threats from the US and Western allies in the region. And as mentioned before, Assad’s Syria—and hence Russia—is a major threat to US regional allies including Israel.

When we have a president-elect who, in the past, has shown himself to be a sort of dictator groupie, who has spoken admiringly of Putin, it may be hard for some of his most fanatical supporters to keep track of who the bad guys are in Western relations. But let’s keep it simple. Like it or not, as long as Russia is being ruled by Vladimir Putin, it is not America’s friend or ally. On the contrary, Putin’s ultimate plan is to take back everything the former Soviet Union lost with the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. And, make no mistake, Ukraine is where he’s kicking off that campaign. How far he gets will depend on how much appeasement the US and the West afford him.

Some detractors have gone as far as to suggest that Tulsi Gabbard might actually be an agent of Russia. Perhaps, perhaps not, at least in any official sense. But if she is not a double agent, then, she is at least a “useful idiot” for the Putin regime, and as such, far too naïve about who Putin is to head up American intelligence operations, which in large measure, should be targeted squarely on the threat that Russia and Putin pose to the US and to the West as a whole.

 

Friday, November 29, 2024

AND NOW, A WORD FROM THE PRESIDENTS

Thanksgiving time, that most American of holidays, is a good time to reflect and find perspective. It would be nice if we could all commit to trying to treat one another with more humanity and understanding. It would be great if that attitude progressed over time, and we could evolve as a society toward a human race ever more united and rooted in peace and comprehension.

It would be wonderful, but it may be a long time coming. Consider the perspectives of past and future in leadership of the society we share in these Thanksgiving Day messages from the outgoing US president and the incoming chief executive.

President Joe Biden on  X:

"Happy Thanksgiving, America. May we use this moment to take time from our busy lives and focus on what matters most: our families, our friends, our neighbors, and the fact that we've been blessed to live in America, the greatest country on Earth."

President-elect Donald Trump on Truth Social:

"Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed."

We can at least be grateful to both presidents for showing us clearly who they both are.

Tuesday, November 26, 2024

IT’S NOT AS BIG AS HE SAYS IT IS

 

The Electoral College—that controversial, if constitutional, invention to ensure that there is never "too much democracy"—has once again, as it did in 2016, done much to bolster the hype about Donald Trump's election win. Everyone, it seems—the GOP, the media, and even blame-seeking Democrats—bill Trump’s 2024 election victory as "a landslide". But if US democracy were delivered on a one-person-one-vote platform, in popular terms, Trump won by an even narrower margin than Hillary Clinton won it (but lost the election thanks to the EC) in 2016.

Democrats and liberal independents are feeling a lot more downtrodden and hopeless than they deserve to. And while members of the governing party’s  snapping at each other and claiming they “lost the working class” and “didn’t identify enough with the everyday American” may find some basis in fact that they need to work on before the midterm elections in 2026 and the new presidential election in 2028, they should just stop wringing their hands and listening to the hype about how “disastrous” the Harris-Walz ticket was for them.

The fact is that in terms of the popular vote, Donald Trump’s victory was slim. Hillary Clinton, for instance, won the 2016 popular vote by about 2.9 million ballots (a fact that has driven Trump bonkers ever since), whereas Trump, this time, won it against Kamala Harris by about 2.5 million. In other words, in popular terms, “the landslide” that he and his party keep crowing about adds up to some four hundred thousand fewer votes than Hillary won by in 2016, when she lost the election in the EC. And with the last few votes being tallied, Trump’s popular-vote win has shrunk to a scant 50 percent (actually 49.94%), while Harris took 48.4 percent of the votes. That’s only 1.54 percentage points. Hardly a “landslide”, then, for Trump, and hardly the crushing defeat for Harris that too many people have been quick to qualify it as.

Where the Democratic Party (rather than Harris) did take a veritable shellacking was in the seven swing states. And as everyone knows, those are the states that make or break an election in the Electoral College.  Trump won them all, which indicates that the Biden administration, no matter how it strove to reestablish democracy and decency following the political and institutional chaos wrought by the earlier Trump regime, was castigated for micro-issues that anonymous Americans thought were more important.

What the winning votes boiled down to in those states was precisely the question Trump asked repeatedly at his rallies. Are you better off now than you were four years ago? The half of the population who answered that question with their negative ballots did so, not based on the macro-performance of the US overall—which improved on nearly all fronts other than inflation—did so, if we cut to the chase, on the basis of the price of eggs and gasoline. With a second consideration being the fears stoked by Team Trump about an “alien takeover”.

According to a study by the Associated press, the ranking of issues voted on was headed up by “the economy” (39%) and immigration (20%), for a fifty-nine percent influence on voter motive. Abortion (actually women’s reproductive rights), on which the Harris team campaigned so hard (on the apparently false notion that the majority of women actually cared) only garnered eleven percent. Health care—which is apt to become an endangered species under the Trump administration—was only eight percent. Sadder still, climate change, which should be at the top of the mind of anyone who wants to see their children and grandchildren even survive, let alone thrive in the future on  Planet Earth, came in at a measly seven percent. Other important societal issues like crime and gun control didn’t make a blip on the radar. And racism and foreign policy— two other important issues in terms of their effect on the future of American society and the world—were of negligible importance to swing-state voters.    

While many even in her own party and the media have been quick to hammer Kamala Harris for a “shoddy performance”, the truth is that, considering what she was up against in her own camp, her election showing was nothing short of amazing. Basically, a political miracle.
Here’s why. She was an incumbent vice president to a president who, despite having achieved some major accomplishments in a difficult environment, had been totally discredited and his popularity ratings were plummeting. The president’s exceedingly late and pressured decision not to enter the 2024 race didn’t allow time to, first, put together a Democratic primary, and then, to mount a successful campaign. Harris was, then, basically tapped as a shoo-in to be the candidate, which passed on to her the ”no other choice” status of her boss, rendered her somehow illegitimate in the eyes of some who wanted a primary come hell or high water, and  the same horse by a different name in those of others, despite her extraordinary qualifications for the job of chief executive.

Furthermore, the vice president was left with only one hundred seven days in which to mount a strategy, while already on the road campaigning, having also had to deal with President Biden’s personal hands-on approach to governing, which had kept her in the shadows for nearly four years. That meant she had to start from scratch to tell people who she was and make them believe in her, all in about three months. Add to that the fact that, as an incumbent vice president—and a person of impeccable ethics—she had to separate herself from the Biden administration while not throwing the president under the bus (clearly, an impossible task, unless, like her opponent, you’re willing to throw anybody and everybody under the bus).

Seen in this way, it seems almost incredible that she pulled off a near popular win, and that little of what affected her in the EC was her fault. Rather, it was the failure of the Biden administration to see just how important the micro-economy is to winning an election. The administration was punished by white women, Latinos and black men, all groups with everything to lose under Trump, but who either voted with their pocketbook or with their anti-female prejudice. Harris merely did her very best and took one for the team, which basically let her take the fall.

But let’s look further at Trump’s “historic landslide”. The only thing historic about it, and let’s be fair on this point, was that he won big for a non-incumbent.  By historical standards for candidates running against the governing party, there have only been a half-dozen other non-incumbent candidates since the 1930s who took  a larger chunk of the popular votes—namely, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020. But then again, Trump wasn't your normal garden-variety non-incumbent. Like only one other election winner in history, Grover Cleveland, Trump had been president before, skipped a term, and then made a comeback. So, sort of a semi-incumbent, if you will. 

That said, while the media and the GOP alike talk in glowing terms about Trump’s “huge win” in the EC, it wasn’t really all that big, and if there had been any variance at all in the swing states, in terms of the sweep he made of their electoral delegates, Harris might well have beaten him in the same way that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite losing the popular vote by a relatively small margin. Again, it was the punishment vote against the Biden administration due to the inflation and immigration issues that sank Harris in those states as far as EC votes went.

However, by no stretch of the imagination was Trump’s Electoral College victory “historic”, “a landslide”, or proof of the “historic mandate” he claims to have been given by the American people. True, his 312 electoral votes bested the 306 he got in 2016 and the same number that Biden got when he beat Trump in 2020. But his EC performance paled by comparison with Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012. Nor was it anywhere close to the 370 that Bill Clinton got in 1992.

In further terms of the popular vote, if we place Harris’s loss in context with popular vote percentages in other elections, by losing at 48.4%, she outperformed Trump’s popular vote tallies in his two previous elections,  2016 (48.2%) and 2020 (46.8%), and she surpassed other historical popular votes as well: Mitt Romney in 2012 (47.2%), John McCain in 2008 (45.7%), George W. Bush in 2000 (47.9%), Bob Dole in 1996 (40.7%), George H.W. Bush in 1992 (37.4%), Michael Dukakis in 1988 (45.6%), Walter Mondale in 1984 (40.6%), Jimmy Carter in 1980 (41%), and Gerald Ford in 1976 (48%).

Nor was Trump’s razor-thin almost-fifty-percent enough to talk about anything like a popular mandate. In popular terms, he barely squeaked by in a performance that lagged in comparison to that of numerous others, like these percentages: Biden 2020 (51.3), Obama 2012 (51.1), Obama 2008 (52.9), George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (53.2), Ronald Reagan in 1984 (58.8), Reagan in 1980 (50.7), or Jimmy Carter in 1976 (50.1). The presidents who were seen as having especially powerful popular backing were, for instance, Richard Nixon 1972 (60.7)—and just look what happened to him—Lyndon Johnson 1964 (61.1), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the longest-serving president of all time, with 60.8 percent. Trump’s popular vote percentage has, then, actually underperformed that of the majority of presidents elected in the past century.

So why is rehashing all of these election figures important when Trump’s popular-vote win was adequate, and his EC victory was sound and decisive?

First of all, to establish that Kamala Harris deserves praise rather than condemnation for her performance under the most difficult and dire of circumstances, while the Democratic Party itself has a lot of questions to answer about its lack of decisiveness and preparedness in the face of, perhaps, the most consequential election in American history. She can’t help but feel sadness, but should feel no personal shame for her party’s failure to coalesce far earlier behind a winning strategy for 2024 (starting with knowing what the average, non-MAGA voter was demanding, instead of being tone-deaf to their complaints). She gave it her all, after being thrown to the lions on the spur of the moment.

Second, the half of the country that didn’t vote for Trump—if you add third party candidate Jill Stein’s votes—needs to be very vocal and active in dissuading Donald Trump and his hijacked GOP of the apocryphal notion that he has been given “an historic mandate” to do (as he would say) whatever the hell he wants, in the name of the American people. He needs to govern as if he were the president of all Americans, not just the ones who virtually worship him and praise his name as if he were a modern day Caesar. Otherwise, the phrase “not my president” will take on new and legitimate meaning.

There is no special (or divine) mandate, and there was nothing special about this election—except its likely consequences.

 

Sunday, November 24, 2024

LAWLESS

Considering that, in light of the election results, the current AG's office has decided to put the brakes on its special counsel's investigation and on the charges against Donald Trump for leading an insurrection and seeking to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election, and his gross mishandling and illicit hoarding of highly-sensitive classified material—as if none of it ever happened—and with the 34 felony counts on which he has already been convicted being utterly ignored because he now has a get-out-of-jail-free card, not to mention his promise to weaponize the new AG's office as a tool to take vengeance on everybody he has a grudge against, the US can pretty much kiss the concept of “the rule of law” goodbye. And without the rule of law, a country and any autocrat running it become, in a word, "lawless".



Monday, November 18, 2024

TRUMP, THE GOP, AND THE MORLOCK FACTOR

 

In 1895, when he was twenty-nine years old, the “father of science fiction”, H.G. Wells, celebrated a couple of major events. Having left his first wife—his cousin Isabel, whom he had married four years earlier—he was re-married to his former student, Amy Robbins, and then, he promptly published his first work of fiction. It was a novella that he titled The Time Machine. It was that book that made him decide to become a serious writer. Fifty more titles would follow before his death in 1946, a number of them in this genre known today as sci-fi.

While The Time Machine is seen by sci-fic buffs mostly as an early reference to time travel and to the dream-adventure of being a time traveler, it is also, on a deeper level, a darkly dystopian story about class struggle and culture wars. Wells pictures the far distant future—802,701 AD—as a place that, on the surface, appears idyllic, a land of peace, love and plenty. But it is also a world that belies a dark and dangerous secret. That world is, of course, visited by the protagonist of the story,  a Victorian-era English scientist known only as the “Time Traveller”.

The Time Traveller tells his academic colleagues that he has built a machine on which one can literally travel into the future. The machine moves through time rather than space and can take one to the same spot on which it stands at any point time. He carries out his experiments in time travel privately. He sits in the strange machine, throws its levers and, voilà, the images of future times pass by his sides in a blur, his home and laboratory collapsing and being replaced by a sometimes frightening, sometime inspiring  landscape.

When the Time Traveller sees the most attractive landscape  of all, a lush, green, Garden of Eden-type image in that far-distant future, he activates the machine’s levers again and stops. It is indeed a beautiful, almost heavenly place.

H.G. Wells

Long story short, the Time Traveller comes across a small civilization in the forest, a people Wells calls the Eloi. They live in a benign climate and seem not to have a care in the world. They are immune to stress and are unencumbered by intellectual curiosity or cultural development. They are just content to live in this beautiful place, this Eden, in small peaceful villages. It is a place of love and beauty, where the inhabitants apparently want for nothing, a place ostensibly untouched by violence, in which they live entirely on the plentiful fruits that grow everywhere.

The Time Traveller is introduced to this idyllic humanoid non-culture by a beautiful Eloi named Weena. He quickly becomes infatuated with her but knows he will eventually have to return to his world. He toys with the idea of taking Weena back with him to his own era. But when he hikes back to the place where he has hidden his time machine, it is gone. In searching for it, he enters one of a number of strategically located, deep dry wells, and it is there that he encounters the cave world of the Morlocks. The Morlocks are a simian-like race which, on the one hand, is in charge of maintaining all of the underworld machinery that creates the heavenly environment in which the Eloi blithely live, but, on the other, depends on the flesh of the Eloi for its own survival. 

Never has the gist of the social principle involved been better explained than by actor Gary Sinise in the 1996 film, Ransom.  Sinise plays the part of a rogue New York City police detective, Jimmy Shaker, who has formed an underground gang that kidnaps and holds for ransom the young son of multimillionaire airline owner Tom Mullen (Mel Gibson). Mullen decides to ignore FBI protocol and pay the ransom Shaker’s gang is demanding. He has gone to great lengths to lose his FBI tail and is  going alone to the meet. As then scene opens, he is receiving instructions by car phone from Shaker as he drives.

 The dialogue goes like this:

Shaker tells Mullen about Morlocks

Det. Jimmy Shaker:
[talking as they are both driving in separate cars and out of sight of one another]

You a movie fan, Tom? Ever seen that movie, The Time Machine?


Tom Mullen:
No.



Det. Shaker:

It’s the land of the future, right? There are only two kinds of people left in the world now, the Morlocks and the Eloi…

Mullen:
Okay.

Det. Shaker:
The Eloi, they live above ground... they wear togas, they're all blond.  They eat grapes and shit like that.  It’s like the Garden of Eden out there, I mean basically everybody just plays around.

Mullen:

How do I get my boy back?

Det. Shaker:
The Morlocks, they live underground, all right? Big hairy ugly suckers, like you wouldn't wish on an ape.  Down there with all this machinery, they're doing all the labor, they're making sure that the Eloi have enough food and togas...

Mullen:

Are you gonna answer me?

Det. Shaker:
Oh, great deal if you are an Eloi, right?  There’s only one thing—every once in a while, a Morlock comes up to the surface and snatches an Eloi, takes him down there...

Mullen:
All right, I’m done driving until you tell me what I want to know!

Det. Shaker:

The Morlocks, they don't eat grapes... They're cannibals. They eat Eloi.  So when I think of The Time Machine, it kind of reminds me of New York City, you know? See, you’re an Eloi. You and all your friends walking around like zombies with no fucking idea of the shit going on down below. So…does this make me a Morlock? I don’t like to think of myself like…(pauses) I guess it does.  And every once in a while, one of you gets snatched.

Chilling.

But, okay, so why am I telling you this story about H.G. Wells, and Mel Gibson, and Gary Sinise, and the Eloi and the Morlocks, and all that?

Well, because, in a sense, we’re living it. And we’re living the chilling plots of a lot of other dystopian novels as well. The story just struck me when I was trying to explain our current climate to myself. And I can’t promise it will be the last time I’ll make references to the clairvoyance of dystopian writers. Indeed, I can guarantee you that I will be referring to other such stories, because a number of them are coming true, all at once, right before our eyes.

But for today, let’s look at the evidence for this comparison.

Prior to January 6, 2021, the Republican Party—or at least the most traditional segments of it—still had the deluded notion that the party belonged to them. Indeed, many in the GOP leadership felt that they were using Trump. They, like many Americans, thought the checks and balances, so carefully crafted into the Constitution by the framers, would take care of any populist authoritarian tendencies Trump, or any other candidate, might have. They trusted a long and, until then, sacred history of democracy and tradition, of separation of powers. They trusted in the peaceful transfer of power that had always characterized the American way of life and of politics.

They were slow learners and believed their own nonsense about Trump having a peculiar way of talking, but that it was “just his style.” They still thought of him as, in the end, rational and, in spite of everything, innately American. They ignored the fact that he referred to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-American “militias” as “very fine people” or that he had told the Proud Boys to “stand down and stand by.” They didn’t find it the least bit insane that he talked about biker gangs as having his back. Or that he had repeatedly hinted that martial law was a presidential option.  

As members of Congress, they had, they presumed, the frying pan by the handle. They were willing to go to unusual lengths to win elections. Even to that of allowing a man known to be bereft of conscience, principles, honesty, sincerity, government experience, ethics, scruples or historical and political knowledge (a man known more for being crafty than for being intelligent) to represent them—as long as he brought his sizable following with him. Besides, if things did go awry, it would be the Democrats on the receiving end, and hey, who cared?

They thought of the MAGA folks as an amorphous if critical mass of unsophisticated votes. They had that in common with the Democrats. It was that attitude, by both parties, which permitted the rise of Trump and MAGA. Trump and his team got it. They were strategic. They simply played on the fact that there was a very large segment of the population that would follow this reality show host and grifter no matter where he led them—an ignored and disenfranchised segment who feared becoming even more invisible in the future, and who were willing to follow anybody who could come along and convince them that he was going to take vengeance for them, that he was a superhero, and that he was  going to blow it all up. They were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. The GOP leadership didn’t understand what made those people tick—Trump did—but they knew there were a hell of a lot of them and that Trump could bring their votes to “the party”.

But then, Trump lost. Just as he had lost the by-elections for the party in 2022.  In the face of that defeat, a large part of the Republican elite was thinking that they’d had four years, and the loss was bad for the party, but maybe now they could take the party back from this guy and send him home. There was just too much drama with him in government. Surely, in the end, he would accept the election result, come to heel, follow the long-held democratic tradition, shake hands with the victor and go home. For good.

Not Donald Trump. He kicked and screamed and fought and shouted fraud. He disputed the election results in the courts, and when his campaign’s cases were found to be without merit, when his own attorney general said there was no fraud, he sought to pressure state officials, anyway he could, to rig the results and snatch the victory out of his opponent’s hands. He falsely accused poll workers and voting machine makers. He stubbornly refused to concede, and tried to get his own vice president and MAGA members of Congress to back up his story of a rigged election and refuse to certify the election results. And when none of that looked as if it would be enough to return him to office, he scraped the bottom of the lowest reaches of his movement for the most violent elements he could find. 

In other words, Trump gave his very own Morlocks permission to rise up from the dark, disenfranchised, violent underworld. And this time they had permission from their leader—indeed, for many, from their god—to remain on the surface and to wreak havoc. Their mission was to devour the Eloi in Congress. And it was on that day that fat, complacent, millionaire Republicans perennials in Congress realized for the first time that when the crap hit the fan, they too were in the line of fire. Being an Eloi wasn’t exclusive to their political opponents. They too were Eloi, and the Morlocks were coming for them.

So that day we witnessed Trump’s own vice president running for his life, GOP members cowering in the chamber next to their Democrat counterparts. Even MAGA mouthpiece Josh Hawley who had given a raised-fist salute to the Morlocks outside was now filmed booking through the halls of Congress to escape the Morlock advance. The Morlocks, it was clear, knew no authority but their own, the leader whose bidding they were doing. Whoever got in their way was going down—as attested by the policeman they killed and the one hundred forty they injured. And their king, their god, watched it all on TV and never lifted a finger to stop it.

That was the day that the GOP officially ceased to exist and became the Party of Trump. Despite pseudo-patriotic speeches by the traditional old white guys in the former Republican leadership (clearly, they were no longer in charge no matter what their nameplates said) about how this was the last straw, and they were done backing Trump, in their frightened arrhythmic hearts, they realized that Sergeant Jimmy  Shaker was right: They were Eloi. Them and all of their fat, privileged, entitled friends, “walking around like zombies with no fucking idea of the shit going on down below.” And in a matter of hours, they had all changed their soiled trousers, and their tunes, and were kissing the ring of their new party leader.

It was a Morlock-eat-Eloi world, and, clearly, if you were in the Party of Trump, you were either with him all the way, or the Morlocks were dragging you down to the underworld for lunch. 



Sunday, November 10, 2024

DEMOCRACY'S LOSS: AN ELECTION POST MORTEM

 

More than forty-eight percent of Americans who bothered to cast votes in the presidential election last Tuesday are in varying stages of shock, mourning, anger and dismay. And yes, the US remains pretty much a fifty-fifty country in terms of the split between those backing Donald Trump and everyone else. This was clearly a punishment vote against the Biden administration and in keeping with people’s perception (as opposed to the actual fundamentals) of the economy. But it was also, I can’t help thinking, about racism and sexism.

That said, this was obviously no ordinary election between two normal everyday candidates with somewhat different points of view about policy. This was, and remains, the most consequential election since the Civil War, when democracy triumphed over sedition. Unfortunately, the result is just the opposite this time. The candidate placed in charge by the will of the majority is a man who violated the Constitution, sought to subvert a former electoral process and refused to submit to a peaceful transfer of power—for the first time in American history. Obviously, with the backing of a hijacked Republican Party, he is now being rewarded for his consistently bad behavior. And you can bet that these next four years will be even worse than anything we have ever seen from him before. Be advised: It will cost democracy and Americans dearly.

But perhaps democracy isn’t anything the majority cares about any more. This was, unquestionably, a free, fair and democratic election. But the result has placed a repeatedly confessed autocrat in charge. So, maybe this will be the last free and fair election the United States ever has.

Perhaps people just care more about the price of gasoline and eggs than they do their inalienable rights. Maybe they care more about controlling what other people do with their bodies and whom they love than they do about guaranteeing individual rights (everyone else’s, but, in the end, their own as well) and the sanctity of the rule of law. Maybe they care more about their children’s “education” being based on their own subjective “beliefs” than they do about their learning the proven facts and science of how the world and the beings and systems in it function. And almost certainly, it is more important to them to have a white male chauvinist in charge, no matter how morally and ethically flawed he might be, than to embrace the sexual and ethnic diversity that is, whether they like it or not, the United States of America.

That said, each person votes his or her conscience, or, perhaps, better said, his or her immediate to short-term convenience, and that is the general idea behind representative democracy—even when the outcome may well damage democracy beyond repair. What the majority seems to have failed to do in this case is vote with the future of the US as we know it in mind.

A survey run by the Associated Press seems to bear this out. While six in ten of the one hundred twenty thousand people surveyed indicated they were fearful of what Trump might do in a second term with no guardrails, many of them said they were voting for him anyway. Indeed, more than half indicated that, while they were hoping to keep drama to the minimum, they were also bent on seeing substantial change in the way the country was being governed. More telling still,  three out of ten—not coincidentally, I surmise, about the proportion of the population made up of Donald Trump’s most fanatical cult-followers—said they were hoping to see “total upheaval” in the way the country is run.

But from a strictly liberal independent viewpoint, there’s a lot of accountability to go around for Tuesday’s presidential election outcome. And here, I take full responsibility for the theories that I’m about to posit. They are, indeed, mine, and the product of my own critical thoughts and ponderings.

The person least to blame for this election outcome is Kamala Harris. The vice president did an astonishing job, in just one hundred seven days, of galvanizing Democratic support, uniting left and center in the party, raising record funding, exciting the Democratic base, choosing a vice presidential candidate with wide popular appeal, and introducing herself to an American public for whom she was a largely unknown figure. She also went on an incredibly brief and inhumanly extenuating journey of both battleground and other key states in order to carry her message of domestic peace and democracy directly to the people. For any unprejudiced observer, it was hard not to see her performance as nothing short of extraordinary. And hopefully she will not disappear from the leadership of the party once her term in office ends.

The person most to blame for this election outcome is Joe Biden. From the outset, after snatching the primary from a highly competitive Independent, Bernie Sanders, Biden had said that he would be a transitional leader. And yet, he failed to seize propitious opportunities to make it clear that he would be a four-year president. Many in his party insisted that he was “the only Democrat who could beat Trump” (again). In hindsight, that belief on their part was exactly that, “a belief” with no real basis in fact, since, by the midterms, his popularity was already languishing, and by shortly afterward, very real concerns were arising about his physical fitness and his mental acuity.
The mid-terms, or slightly thereafter, would have been the time for him to announce that he wouldn’t stand for another term, thus permitting the party to run a primary race and establish a public consensus for choosing a candidate. I blame both the party and First Lady Jill Biden for pushing him to go for another term when both she and the party leadership couldn’t help but see, early on, what became public knowledge during the president’s absolutely disastrous performance in his only debate with Donald Trump.

But still, even after that, he dragged his feet, hunkered down and refused to go until the party made it clear that he had to, for the good of the movement. To his credit, he resigned the race with patriotism and understanding. But it was too little, way too late.   

The Democratic Party basically threw Kamala Harris to the lions. Democratic leaders sent her on a kamikaze mission, on which, it must be said, she did incredibly well. Indeed, putting aside the perennial vagaries of a controversial Electoral College system, Harris has swept better than forty-eight percent of the popular vote with little left to report. This was true despite the inescapable handicap of being an incumbent VP, who had to try to convince people that she was her own woman without challenging the authority of her boss or disavowing any of his policies. A VP with the character of a Donald Trump would have thrown the president under the bus during such a campaign. It speaks very highly of her ethics and respect for the office of the presidency that she refused to do that. But apparently, in today’s world, ethics are a liability that costs one dearly.

Women and minorities must live with the fact that they voted against their best interests. Or didn’t vote at all. Democrats and, in particular, Joe Biden, have generally done well with African American voters. In Biden’s case, this is not only because of his career-long work in the field of civil rights and justice, but also because he was vice president to the country’s first black president—and one of its most popular presidents in US history. Black voters were a big help to Biden in defeating Trump in 2020.

But that trend didn’t carry over to this race. At least not with men. Despite the fact that Kamala Harris would have been the second black and first woman president of the United States, Trump managed to double his support among African Americans this time around. It appears that this was due, almost entirely, to young African American males trending toward the so-called “bromance”—men’s preference for a flawed old white guy over a woman, and especially a black woman—that the Trump campaign enjoyed.

In other words, a large contingent of black, and especially young black,  men preferred to vote for an aging white man with questionable mental acuity, and with provable ties to and sentiments toward white nationalist and white supremacist groups than to vote for a dynamic woman of color of a younger generation who clearly had their best interests, their history, and their struggles in mind. I can only conjecture that this is a question of sexism, the choosing of a male, even against their better interests, over an empathic female. Perhaps many of these black male voters (along with their fellow white bromance voters) cast their ballots in a conscious effort to ensure that women, their women, were not further empowered or inspired to greater militancy in favor of women’s causes. Perhaps the Handmaid’s Tale nature of Trumpian politics and its goal of very apparently disenfranchising women seemed appealing to them. Indeed, they may well have liked the idea of “protecting” women “whether they like it or not.”

But they weren’t the only ones  voting against their better interests. Trump made significant gains as well among Hispanic voters. Part of that was, of course, based on fears fueled by the Trump campaign of a sharp swing toward the left. A segment of Latino voters, made up of the Hispanic diaspora from so-called “socialist” countries such as Cuba or Venezuela are vulnerable to buzzwords like “socialist”, “communist”, “leftist”, etc. That’s understandable. Their families suffered hunger, penury, prison and torture in countries claiming to be socialist.

It is very hard—believe me, I’ve tried—to get people from those origins to focus on the success of liberal politics throughout the West. Theirs is a kneejerk reaction that knows no middle of the road. Left is bad. Right is good. They often fail to understand, for obvious reasons, that the Castros, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro were never socialists. They were always totalitarians, dictators, despots who wrapped themselves in a red flag, in the same way that other former Latin American strongmen like Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla wrapped themselves in the flag of capitalism and Western Christianity. So those folks are pretty much always a lost cause for Democrats.

But this time, Harris bled votes among other Hispanic populations as well. And particularly among Hispanic males. Why did so many Latinos break with the Democrats? A number of pundits seem bent on trying to convince us that, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But having my own hands-on half-century of insight into Latin America, I think it’s more than that. The economy may be a factor, or at least an excuse. But I can’t help thinking that much of the shift came when it became clear that the Democratic candidate would be a woman. In other words, never underestimate the power of machismo among Latin males.

Meanwhile, the “macho man” to whom they lent their support is the same one who has referred repeatedly to Latin Americans pejoratively—with the latest offense being a reference from his campaign (which he failed to chastise) to Puerto Rico as a “a floating island of garbage”. But this was nothing new. Trump has long generally referred to Mexican migrants as “rapists, criminals and drug traffickers”, and to Hispanic migrants in general as coming from “shithole countries”, and as “poisoning the blood of our nation.”

Under his first administration, Hispanic migrant families were separated at the border, children were caged and later put into foster care in far-flung regions of the US. Significant numbers of those children were simply lost by the administration, and even after being deported, it took some of their desperate parents months to be reunited with those kids.

Now, one of Trump’s major campaign promises is that “from Day One” he will mount the “largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.” The president-elect has vowed that he will deport a million people—the great majority Hispanics. Experts say that to reach that massive number, the next Trump administration will necessarily have to go after people for whom Kamala Harris supported providing a path to citizenship. That is to say, people who have long been established in the Unites States and have been making a useful contribution to American society. Among others, this would include the so-called “Dreamers”—people brought to the US by their migrant parents when they were still infants or children, and who have basically spent their entire lives in American society, but who never had American citizenship or visas.

What a critical mass of Latinos for Trump have voted for, then, are situations in which members of their communities, their friends, their relatives, will face the tragedy of deportation, no matter how long they have lived, worked and thrived in American society. Their votes have given Trump a weapon that he will turn on people they know, people with whom they share cultural and ethnic ties, even people they love.

They share this dubious distinction with a segment of the Muslim community that could think of no better way to protest the admitted lack of decision by the Biden administration in taking Israel to serious task for its genocidal military operations in Gaza. In other words, Muslims who “punished” Harris—who had made it clear that her administration would take a new tack regarding the Israeli-Palestinian war, and that she would push for a two-state solution—did so by helping elect Israeli leader Bibi Netanyahu’s closest American ally, and a man who initiated his former administration, in 2016, by declaring “a complete and total ban” on Muslim immigration to the US. A ban that remained in place until Democrats sued, taking the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was finally shot down.

But none of these other betrayals can hold a candle to the one Kamala Harris suffered at the hands of voters of her own gender, both the ones who voted for Trump and the ones who stayed home. The potential for a second term for Donald Trump should have been, just out of sheer self-respect, a clarion call to every gender-conscious woman to make sure that never happened. But that only emerged among African American women, who traditionally vote Democrat as a majority, but who this time came out in force and voted eighty-five percent for Kamala Harris.

Latinas, meanwhile, let her down. Although Harris still got a traditional Democratic majority of Hispanic women’s votes, she did so by about five percentage points fewer than Joe Biden did in 2020. In such a consequential election for women’s rights and Latin American migrant families, this outcome can only be seen as illogical and counterintuitive. Did that sliver of Latinas simply join their male partners in defecting to Trump? It seems likely, but we’ll never know.

White women are quite often split fifty-fifty in American elections between Republicans and Democrats. But again, this was no common everyday election. This was an election that would have given women their first president in history. Nor was that the only consideration. The female candidate in question is a campaigner for women’s rights, an advocate for the reproductive rights of which women have already been stripped by Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about doing so. More shocking still, Trump improved his election performance this time around young white women, the ones with the most to lose in the future from an administration bent on sending women back to the dark ages of nineteen-fifties American sexism. 

Blame must also be laid at the door of women who, at least in such a consequential election for their own interests, simply didn’t get off their couch and go vote. In what is a decidedly apathetic electorate, in which a sixty-six percent turnout is considered “a great success”, if non-voting women were ever going to vote, this should have been the year.

Well, in this election, roughly ninety-nine million potential voters just couldn’t be bothered—even when absentee and mail-in voting makes it possible to cast a ballot from the comfort of one’s own home. Of those, it’s safe to say that roughly half were women. And, logically, half of those were very likely liberal-leaning, if not potential Democrats. That means there were probably well more than twenty million Democratic women’s votes that were withheld. Even a fraction of those would have provided for the razor-close race the US was supposed to have had. Half might well have handed Kamala Harris a resounding victory despite the Electoral College. But those women simply could not be bothered to do their part.

As a candidate, Kamala Harris was a woman who was challenging a former president who has proven repeatedly to be a misogynist. A man for whom women are broken down into body parts, a man who once said,  “You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”  A father who, in a public interview with controversial radio personality Howard Stern, said it was okay for Stern to refer to the former president's own daughter Ivanka as  “a piece of ass” and discussed with Stern whether or not Ivanka had had breast implants (“I would know,” he said).  A man who also said of Ivanka that he would “probably be dating her” if he weren’t her father.   

 

This is a man who has demeaned and insulted women in every way possible, a court-certified sexual predator. One who had to pay millions of dollars in damages to a woman he sexually assaulted and later libeled, one who paid a hundred thirty thousand dollars to a porn star so she wouldn’t talk about their one-night stand, and, in the process of doing so, committed thirty-four felonies. The same guy who said, of young women in beauty pageants that he sponsored, that he could do whatever he wanted to them, even “grab them by the pussy,” because “he was a star.”

But these haven’t been the only occasions on which he has shown his contempt for women. Among other things, he has said:

-         “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America.”

-         To a female contestant on his show, Celebrity Apprentice, three years before he took office,  “It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

-         Of himself, "All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me — consciously or unconsciously.”

-         Of then-Fox anchor Megyn Kelly when she was a debate moderator and took him to task, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

-         Of his 2015 Republican primary rival Carly Fiorina, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”

-         And once again, to shock-jock Howard Stern, “A person who’s flat-chested is very hard to be 'a ten', OK?”

This is the man who packed the Supreme Court with radical right-wing justices strategically placed there to overturn a half-century-old legal precedent that gave women control over their own bodies and their reproduction rights, and got the government out of their bedrooms and marriages. A man whose own wife regularly refuses to appear in public with him. This is the man women voted for over a female candidate with nothing but empathy for their struggle and their causes, one who had promised to fight for them against a far-right plan (Project 2025) to introduce a process that defies the bounds of dystopian fiction.

All I can say is, congratulations! If Trumpian women’s goal was to place their own basic interests directly in harm’s way, you couldn’t have chosen better.