THANK YOU MR. PRESIDENT

You don’t hear it much anymore, but there is a saying that every cloud has a silver lining. I’ve been thinking that perhaps that’s true even of the shameful events that we have just witnessed in the United States, where, for the first time in history, a sitting president sought to use violence, sedition and insurrection as a means of rejecting a peaceful transfer of power after he lost an election.

After giving it a lot of thought and, as the Spanish expression goes, consulting the matter with my pillow, I have decided that small-d democrats owe Donald J. Trump a debt of gratitude, so let me just say thank you for a few things that he has done.

Thank you, Mr. President:

 - For demonstrating clearly from Day One that your sole “policy” was to destroy every achievement accomplished by the previous administration, while taking credit for the economic recovery that it had fostered after the worst crash since the Great Depression. And, once that was underway, for also showing a complete and utter lack of respect for every basic American tradition and institution.

- For making it clear from the outset that you bought into everything that diminishes an erstwhile democratic country’s leadership and greatness: xenophobia, isolationism, radical nationalism, racism, religious discrimination, inequality, disrespect for science and education, and scorn for the rule of law.

 - For showing a crystal clear lack of any and all empathy by means of demonstrative actions such as separating migrant and refuge-seeking parents from their children for the “crime” of daring to seek a better life in a nation once known as the melting pot of the world and as a country that once took pride in being a nation of immigrants. And, furthermore, by locking those children in cages, often deporting their parents without them, then losing track entirely of the family ties between one and the other so that many, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those minors had to be placed in foster care, with a full five hundred forty-five of them being lost—yes, lost!—without a trace, as only had previously happened in some of the world’s worst dictatorships.

 - For never even pretending to be honest. Telling lies one on top of the other, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, lies so blatant and so provably false that they have actually been collected for posterity by fact-check nerds.

- For never making any attempt at disguising the fact that you didn’t believe in democracy or the rule of law. For praising some of the world’s worst dictators and considering them “strong” compared to democratic leaders whom you always sought to cast as “weak”.

 - For further underscoring your love of bad actors on the world stage, by not only praising and treating them with deference, but also by insulting and alienating practically all of our traditional allies, including the very closest ones, who have stood by us in the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance since World War II.

 - For providing proof positive of your contempt for urgent international efforts to keep the global environment from becoming uninhabitable in our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s lifetimes by pulling us out of the greatest climate accord ever developed and in the creation of which, the United States was instrumental. (See item one).

 -  For clearly expressing your disdain for world peace in general and in peacemaking in the Middle East in particular, by acting as if a nuclear treaty with Iran that was impeccably engineered, carefully negotiated, painstakingly debated and internationally orchestrated among numerous countries was just so much toilet paper stuck on your shoe, and scraping it off, leaving the rest of the world community to deal with the results. For empowering your friends in Saudi Arabia’s murderous dictatorial regime to foster the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen. For handing Syria over to Russia and its bloody puppet regime, whose leader, Bashar al-Assad, has slaughtered, jailed and tortured hundreds of thousands of his own people and created the world’s worst refugee crisis. Also for showing your true colors by first using courageous Kurdish fighters to help defeat the ISIS Islamic terror organization along the Syrian border and then abandoning them to their fate when your Turkish dictator friend  Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked them ruthlessly in the void you left.

 - For blithely ignoring the COVID-19 crisis, seeking only to find “a silver bullet” vaccine before election campaign season began, but suppressing vital information, failing to provide timely distribution of medical equipment, ignoring the need for a national strategy to deal with the worst pandemic in a century, treating it only as an inconvenience for the success of your presidency and convincing your base that it was “fake news”, in the process rendering the US the worst-hit nation on earth, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, and then downplaying the incredible achievement of two viable vaccines in just nine months—a world record—because they didn’t arrive in time to be useful to you in your run for a second term.

 - For warning us time and again that you would refuse to leave if you didn’t win a second term. That you would, in effect, cling to the power that you believed to be yours rather than that of the office entrusted to you. That you were willing to do whatever it took to remain—lie, cheat, steal, organize your own army of white supremacist fanatics. That even after a second term you might go for a third or even—like the Russian, Chinese and North Korean authoritarians you so admire—go for president for life.  (Bless our naïve hearts, we thought you were kidding)!

 - For trying to incite a populist coup by calling in your fanatics from all over the country and sicking them on the two houses of Congress that were in session to certify the election that you clearly and unequivocally lost by seven million popular votes and seventy-four electoral votes, thinking that you could halt the democratic process by force and that that would be enough for you to remain in power—that and a little help from a handful of autocrats in the Senate and a few dozen undemocratic interlopers in the House. For sparking, thus, the first invasion of the hallowed halls of Congress since the early eighteen hundreds when the British thought they could take back their lost colonies by terrorizing the American Legislature and adding a new Day of Infamy to the history of the United States of America.

 - For making clear your deep feelings for domestic terrorists springing from their mindless loyalty to you over their country—a senseless mob, who faced off with overwhelmed law-enforcement and held US representatives and senators hostage while ransacking the halls and offices of the Capitol Building, the most sacred and living symbol of American democracy—by telling them that you “loved them” and that they were “very special” to you. Just as you did during the Charlottesville riots, where you referred to them as “very fine people”.

 - In short, within your complete general lack of honesty, for never having been dishonest about who and what you were: a sociopath, a narcissist, a man who never has had an unselfish thought, a person with a twisted and broken inner child, an unprincipled, self-serving, undemocratic, un-American, autocratic, misogynistic, racist misanthrope who has given new and sad meaning to the idea that anyone can become the president of the United States.

Thank you for all of this, Mr. President, because perhaps the people of the United States, or at least the majority of us, have learned some valuable lessons springing from the Era of Trump:

 - That democracy cannot be taken for granted.   

- That while our institutions may be highly resilient, they are also vulnerable, and only as good as the people who exercise them.

 - That character matters in political candidates and the facts weigh more than “beliefs”.

 - That democracy and populist personality cults are opposites.

 - That no matter how the players and names may change the system must remain strong and inviolate.

 - That the office of the presidency can only be respected if the person exercising it respects it and is respectable.

 - That if the people we elect to office do not believe in America’s founding principles then we have misplaced our vote and our trust and they must be voted out of office or impeached for violating those sacred principles.

 - That appeasement breeds tyranny.

 - That checks and balances work as long as the people exercising them believe in them and enforce them.

 - That a military that is loyal to the Constitution and a Supreme Court that is firmly grounded in the rule of law are the last line of defense for democracy.

And, finally, that no matter how far-fetched a notion it may have seemed four years ago, the establishment of an authoritarian regime in the United States of America is only impossible if those whom we choose to lead us are unequivocally determined to protect us against it and to defend the Constitution in both letter and spirit.

 

THE BARR LETTER—NOT WHAT YOU KNOW BUT WHAT YOU CAN PROVE

Special Counsel Robert Mueller

There is a saying in law and law enforcement that, in court, it isn’t what you know, but what you can prove. This is the same rule I applied many years ago as a newspaper editor in deciding what would go into the paper and what wouldn’t—or would, perhaps, if I thought it was newsworthy, but with all of the “allegedlys” and “reportedlys” and sourced quotes necessary to piece a story together without stating it as fact unless we had hard evidence that it was. I still apply that rule to all of my non-fiction writing and opinion pieces.

That’s why I think that, no matter on which side of the deeply partisan US divide we might be, both sides need to admit that Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein are both serious public servants who have done their best in a highly conflictive climate to be firmly impartial and to preserve the rule of law, resisting tremendous pressure from all quarters to abandon their best instincts.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein

That said, this is the same kind of impartiality that Attorney General William Barr should apply to his handling of the report that Special Counsel Robert Mueller handed him last weekend. So far, all we have is a brief four-page summary that Barr released after reading the Mueller Report. And the attorney general is still in the process of deciding just how much of the information contained in the report he will release to Congress and to the American people.

Already in his summary, however, Barr has caused surprise by inserting himself into the discussion, making judgments about the level of guilt or innocence of the president and his aides that, according to his own admission, Mueller never articulated in his report. Specifically, Barr says that, “...Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” In other words, Barr would appear to be arriving at a conclusion that the report itself did not, as far as we know. 

Nor is President Trump’s assertion that the report “completely exonerates” him accurate. On the contrary, according to the attorney general, the Mueller Report says specifically that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

This is an important distinction since it leaves the door open to prosecution of questionable actions in other venues—such as the Southern District of New York. And, as the report indicates, the Special Counsel himself has, according to Barr, “referred several matters to other offices for further action” even though the report makes no recommendation for further indictments within the limits of Mueller’s investigation itself.

Disgraced National Security Advisor Michael Flynn
pled guilty to a one-count felony and told all.

It is important to make a distinction too between exoneration of the current administration (and its entourage) from all wrong-doing and simply finding insufficient evidence to lay charges—again, it’s not what you know but what you can prove. Be that as it may, Democrats were quick to quote the rule of law when the Republicans cried foul after the FBI announced that there was insufficient evidence to charge then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her private email escapades. They will need to remember that now, when the GOP cites the Mueller Report as finding insufficient evidence to accuse the president and his associates of conspiracy with Russia to affect the outcome of the 2016 elections or of obstructing justice by firing former FBI Director James Comey.

And a further distinction to be made is between not having sufficient evidence to prosecute and the power of Congress to impeach a president when his misdeeds warrant it, based on political and ethical rather than legal considerations. Nor should public perception be seen as bearing any resemblance to the limitations of legal justice. According to Washington Post legal analyst Henry Olsen, “This evidence could have a quite different effect on public opinion than it would in a legal proceeding. Criminal prosecutions require proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ and Mueller clearly saw a strong case against Trump under that standard. While Barr decided he did not, reasonable observers could conclude differently. They could also conclude, perhaps, that they have reasonable doubts but think Trump did obstruct justice under the more lenient ‘clear and convincing evidence’ or ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standards. Prosecutors would not look at a criminal case through those lenses, but politicians and pundits are sure to do so.”

Olsen goes on to suggest that “the matter of the president’s intent is key, as a prosecutor would have to prove that such a crime was committed with ‘a corrupt intent.’ Barr writes that the special counsel’s finding that the president was not involved in an underlying crime bore ‘upon the President’s intent’ regarding obstruction. In plain English, that suggests there is evidence that people could conclude constitutes criminal obstruction, but that Trump’s saving grace in the law is that he also could not be proven to have colluded with the Russians. Political observers could disagree.”

George and Kellyanne Conway

That point of view appears to be succincty expressed in an op-ed that appeared earlier this week, also in the Washington Post. It’s author was relenteless Trump critic and New York attorney George Conway, who is famously married to one of the president’s closest aides, Kellyanne Conway. According to Attorney Conway, “As for whether the president obstructed justice, that question was always dicey. No one should have been surprised that it raised, as Attorney General William P. Barr’s letter put it, quoting Mueller, ‘difficult issues of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.’ On the law, Barr was probably not wrong to suggest, as he did as a private citizen, that there’s a difference under the statutes between a president destroying evidence or encouraging a witness to lie and a presidential directive saying, ‘Don’t waste your time investigating that.’ But that doesn’t mean the latter can’t be an impeachable offense.”

Conway added that Mueller was a guy who “plays by the rules, every step of the way.” He went on to say that “if (Mueller’s) report doesn’t exonerate the president, there must be something pretty damning in it about him, even if it might not suffice to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.” Beyond the idea of whether or not there is evidence to accuse the president or any of his unindicted associates of anything, Conway indicated that one thing seemed clear:  “If the charge were unfitness for office, the verdict would already be in: guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The fact that the investigation was unable to establish criminal conspiracy with the Russians has been taken in pro-Trump quarters as signifying that the whole Mueller probe was a monumental waste of time and tax-payer money—that, in short, it was, as the president repeated ad nauseam, a witch hunt. But nothing could be further from the truth.

To start with, the investigation indeed established that there was significant Russian espionage and intervention in the 2016 election process. Barr describes the Mueller Report as outlining “the Russian effort to influence the election and documents crimes committed by persons associated with the Russian government in connection with those efforts.” Barr goes on to say that “the Special Counsel’s investigation determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.”

Donald Trump pictured with disgraced collaborators 

Michael Cohen (left) and Paul Manafort

One of these was spearheaded by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA), apparently an intelligence front, which conducted disinformation and social media operations in the US that were “designed to sow discord”—mission accomplished! The other was a hacking operation “designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election.” According to Barr, “the Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.”

Whether there was collusion or not is clearly of paramount importance, but shouldn’t we be at least as concerned about the fact that the Kremlin managed to infiltrate US data systems and achieve a significant measure of success in influencing the election process, or at the very least, the campaigns as such? On that count, the Mueller probe was clearly a great success, managing to identify and indict a number of Russian operatives, including military intelligence officers. It also established that, if there was insufficient evidence to charge collusion, there were indeed “multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.” This raises the question of why organizers of that campaign didn’t bother to report these offers to the FBI, considering that they were being made by a hostile foreign power that was clearly seeking to influence the outcome of a US presidential election process.

There was indeed a “there-there” in the investigation. It rendered the indictment of 34 people including 13 Russians and three companies, as well as gleaning a number of guilty pleas, convictions and useful testimony, some of which included top advisers to President Trump, on charges ranging from interference in the 2016 election and hacking emails to perjury and witness-tampering.  Collusion or no, this is a very big deal.

Obviously, having access to the full report rather than to the attorney general’s four-page interpretation of it would clear up a lot of what remains a mystery to the people of the United States and their congressional representatives right now. Considering the tremendous weight that this information and the investigation have brought to bear on the US political scene and on the hearts and minds of citizens as a whole for the past two years, perhaps the head of the Justice Department should—except for any redaction necessary to preserve the rights of the innocent and the rule of law—consider the possibility that whether or not the rest of the report should be made public isn’t his decision to make. Morally, he should consider it his duty to the people of the United States to provide the highest degree of transparency possible within the law and to lead by taking the stellar example of his two subordinants, exercising the same kind of impeccable ethics and impartiality that they have demonstrated.

It remains to be seen whether that is what he will do. But the president, at least in public, has said that it is solely the attorney general’s decision and that he, Trump, is willing to release the report to the public. In terms of allaying suspicions and doubts regarding this topic among Americans of all political stripes, it is of crucial importance that William Barr do exactly that.

A NATIONAL EMERGENCY

The United States is facing a national emergency. But it’s not the one that President Donald Trump just declared. Indeed, Donald Trump is the first and last name of the emergency, one that has nothing to do with illegal immigration, the incidence of which is at an all-time low, but with the president’s consistent efforts to circumvent and undermine democracy while trafficking in lies and titillating his most reactionary base.

Finding ways to duck under and around the rules is not something alien to Trump’s modus operandi. He has turned profiting from bankruptcy loopholes, skirting taxes and non-payment of providers into a sort of cottage industry that has been, perhaps, as much of a core activity in his business dealings as real estate, construction, hotels and casinos have. But it is, clearly, alien to the office of the presidency of the United States. True, not all presidents in living memory have been the choir boy type. But all of them have understood the gravity of the post and responsibilities bestowed on them and the need to govern for all Americans, not just a small proportion of them.

Past presidents have, in short, bowed to the checks and balances imposed by every properly functioning democratic system and by the US Constitution. Trump has not. Just as in his businesses where he has sought to slip past state, local and federal legal codes, as president, he is intent on finding ways around the highest law of the land. And he has further sought to ridicule and vilify the liberal democratic system as a whole in the minds of his most blindly loyal base.

In this sense, the current president of the United States is a clear and present danger to democracy. And his latest attempt to bypass the Legislative Branch by declaring a “national emergency” on the US southern border (an emergency that only exists in his mind and in those of his most xenophobic followers) is a patent example of the disdain with which he views the democratic process and of the invented dread with which he manipulates and indoctrinates the simplest among his constituents. Furthermore, this is a dog-eared page from the playbook of would-be tyrants of every color around the world.

Speaking of tyrants, on numerous occasions, Donald Trump has openly expressed his admiration for, friendship with and trust in the authoritarian leaders of other nations, who should arguably be viewed as potential or effective enemies of the United States, and surely as enemies of democracy. He has demonstrated this bizarre attitude with regard to every dictator from Kim Jong Un (the murderous absolute ruler of North Korea who literally views himself as a god and who has threatened to nuke the Unites States), to ruthless Filipino leader Rodrigo Duterte, who has dispensed “justice” in his country from the barrel of a gun—sometimes wielded by Duterte himself—with a number of other universally condemned dictators in between also being inducted, unsolicited, into the Trump gratuitous admiration society.

Of Kim Jong Un (after first insulting him as “little rocket man” and threatening him with the mass destruction of North Korea) Trump would eventually come full circle and say, “You gotta give him credit. How many young guys—he was, like, 26 or 25 when his father died—take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden ... he goes in, he takes over, and he's the boss. It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn't play games. And we can't play games with him.” In other words, killing the competition seemed to Trump to be an admirable and respect-worthy leadership trait. This would seem to give new meaning to Trump’s campaign statement—an expression of desire?—that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.”

Trump said he had “a great relationship” with Rodrigo Duterte, who heads up The Philippines’ current “thugocracy”, which makes former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal kleptocracy look almost tame by comparison. Trump blithely ignored the worldwide discussion swirling around Duterte’s abominable human rights record which includes literally thousands upon thousands of extrajudicial killings carried out by his government with not only the Filipino strongman’s overt approval but also with his self-confessed participation.

On a state visit to Manila, the US president ignored the issue of human rights altogether and chose to concentrate on his favorite subject: himself.  “It was red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever received,” Trump said. “And that really is a sign of respect, perhaps for me a little, but really for our county. And I’m really proud of that.” It might be noted that the way to show respect for the United States is by emulating its liberal democratic tenets and the rule of law, not by imposing or praising a bloody dictatorship. And receiving an extraordinarily warm welcome from a sitting tyrant is something that the leader of the world’s largest democracy should, perhaps, take with suspicion or at least with a grain of salt. But it seems apparent that the advancement of democracy does not form part of the current president’s core beliefs.

Trump has also had words of praise for Syrian dictator Bashad al-Assad, comparing him favorably against by then lame duck US President Barack Obama. “I think in terms of leadership,” Trump said, “he's getting an A and our president (Obama) is not doing so well.”

A staunch ally and virtual dependent of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, Assad is perhaps the most universally condemned authoritarian leader among Western democracies. He is maintained in power (which he inherited from his autocratic father) by Russian military and political backing, despite being directly responsible for the deaths, incarceration and torture of tens of thousands of his own people as well as for triggering the worst civil (and proxy) war in recent memory—a war which has claimed the lives of more than half a million Syrians and has sparked the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. Recently, Trump announced that US troops would be pulled out of Syria entirely, thus abdicating American resistance to Russia’s geopolitical advancement in that part of the Middle East, and giving Assad a freer hand to crush all opposition to his historically bloody dictatorial regime.

Another authoritarian leader that Trump has praised is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to Trump, “Frankly, he’s getting very high marks. He’s also been working with the United States. We have a great friendship and the (two) countries—I think we’re right now as close as we’ve ever been.” He went on to say that “a lot of that has to do with a personal relationship.”

Trump made these statements right after Erdogan’s harshest crackdown yet on his opponents, the media and civil society as a whole. Ever since he first came to power, Erdogan has sought to gradually choke the life out of Turkish democracy. Parallel to this, he has taken Turkey from being a staunch NATO ally on the doorstep of the Middle East to sidling up to Vladimir Putin next door to the country in which Russia is exercising its greatest Middle East influence.

In the Syrian War, Erdogan has played both sides against the middle, pretending to be on the side of the US-led coalition fighting ISIL, but continuing his bitter war against that coalition’s Kurdish allies who have provided the most effective ground-fighting of any combat group against ISIL and other pro-Assad forces. The thanks that Trump has given to the Kurds is to announce US withdrawal and to abandon them to their fate in the face of Erdogan’s vow to wipe them out.

There are persistent reports that, within his delusions of grandeur, Erdogan is even entertaining the dream of seeking to recapture some of the past glory and unbridled expansionism of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire, which ruled a vast part of the world from the 14^th to the early 20^th centuries.

Regarding Egyptian authoritarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Trump has said, “We agree on so many things. I just want to let everybody know in case there was any doubt that we are very much behind President el-Sisi. He’s done a fantastic job in a very difficult situation.”

El-Sisi seized power in Egypt by means of a military coup following the country’s fleeting romance with democracy resulting from the Arab Spring uprisings. Trump’s own Department of State has accused el-Sisi of “excessive use of force by security forces, deficiencies in due process, and the suppression of civil liberties.” The civil liberties advocacy group Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, reports that el-Sisi’s regime has “maintained its zero-tolerance policy towards dissent,” adding that it has encouraged “near-absolute impunity for abuses by security forces under the pretext of fighting ‘terrorism.’”

Even China’s so-called “paramount leader”, Xi Jinping, has gotten a shout-out from Trump, despite the trade war that the US president has sparked between the world’s two most powerful economies. Last year, CNN reported obtaining a recording of Trump’s comments during a Mar a Lago gathering praising the Chinese strongman, in which he said, among other things, “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

Everywhere else in the Western world and in much of China itself, Xi’s chairman-for-life power grab within the country’s all-powerful Communist Party (shades of Stalin and Mao) was seen as a highly negative authoritarian trend that drew sharp and widespread criticism. The fact that Trump alone saw it as positive and even “something we’ll have to give a shot someday” is telling...and chilling.

But Trump’s greatest praise and deference have been consistently reserved for Vladimir Putin, who, with the help of his straw man Dimitry Medvedev, has managed to perpetuate his position as the supreme leader of the Russian Federation for nearly two decades, with no sign of giving up that seat any time soon. His regime’s suppression of resistance in Georgia, it’s annexation of Crimea and its military action against Ukraine, as well as its aggressive role in the Syrian (proxy) War in favor of the anti-Western Assad regime have all put America’s Western allies on red alert since Putin has made no secret of his desire to return Russia to the height of its power and hegemony under the Czarist empire and the Soviet Union.

Trump, meanwhile, has famously never had any criticism for Putin’s regime. In fact he has praised it on multiple occasions. For instance:

Just prior to the 2018 US-Russia Helsinki summit, “I'd have a very good relationship with President Putin if we spend time together.” And also in the run-up to the summit, "Hopefully someday, maybe he’ll be a friend. It could happen...”

He also said, “You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.” And when former Fox News superstar Bill O’Reilly reminded Trump that Putin was a dictator and “a killer,” Trump fired back, “There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?”

The cruelest cut of all was when 13 US intelligence agencies told Trump that there was little if any  doubt that Putin would have had to have been involved in the plot to hack the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 election campaign and instead of taking his own intelligence chiefs’ word as fact, he stood on a stage in Helsinki in the company of Putin and said,  "Every time he (Putin) sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe…he means it.”

Also during that campaign he compared then-US President Barack Obama to Putin saying, "He is a strong leader, unlike what we have."

Sometimes his admiration for Putin almost verges on a “boy crush”, like when he said, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow. If so, will he become my new best friend?"

It seems clear, then, that Trump’s attempt to elude the checks and balances provided by a three-branch system by declaring a phony state of emergency must be viewed against the backdrop of his often repeated admiration for (and tacit envy of) authoritarian leaders. He is a president who clearly seeks by any means necessary to have the prerogatives of an absolute monarch.

But at the same time, it is a no less phony political ploy. He has made it clear that he knows perfectly well that his emergency declaration will face an uphill battle in Congress where even many Republicans think it’s a bad idea. The fear is that if Trump sets a precedent of arbitrary declarations of national emergencies any time he doesn’t like the results of political negotiations, Democrats could invoke “the Trump precedent” to do the same on issues that the GOP, and especially the Trump-usurped GOP, have resisted tooth and nail, like climate change and medical-coverage-for-all legislation.

So in the end, it’s a win-win proposition for Trump, since his “national emergency” will either stand or be challenged and shot down in Congress and the courts. In the first case, he will get his way and energize his base. In the second, he will be able to tell his followers that he tried to “make America great again", but was shot down by the opposition, thus gaining supporter sympathy.

Be that as it may, both major parties should realize that there is a lot more at stake here than immigration, Trump’s wall, or the precedent that a phony national emergency sets for the future. What is at stake is no less than the system of checks and balances that, since the earliest days of the republic, has ensured that no one branch of the government and especially the Executive, ever concentrates a monopoly on power. In short, what is at stake is the essence of democracy itself. And as history has shown again and again, democracy dies by the hand of apathy, vested interests and appeasement.

SARAH AND THE LITTLE RED HEN

Little Red Hen found a grain of wheat. “Who will plant this?” she asked. “Not I,” said the cat. “Not I,” said the goose. “Not I,” said the rat. “Then I will,” said Little Red Hen...

The owner of a Lexington, Virginia, family restaurant may have planted the seed of a trend this past week, when she made national headlines by politely and privately asking Presidential Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party to leave the premises. The owner of the Red Hen Restaurant, Stephanie Wilkinson, has described herself as “not a huge fan of confrontation.”

Red Hen Restaurant

“I have a business, and I want the business to thrive,” she explained after the incident. But somehow, she just didn’t feel she could countenance Sarah Sanders’ presence on her property. It wasn’t a snap decision. Nor was it a command decision. She briefly talked it over with her employees, who, she indicates, expressed their disgust with the Trump administration’s stance against transgender people who want to serve in the country’s armed forces, and, more particularly, with Trump’s family separation policy regarding undocumented immigrants.

Based on her own convictions and those of her employees, Wilkinson asked the White House press secretary to step into the patio, and privately explained to Sanders that her business had “certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation,” and that she felt Sarah Huckabee Sanders clearly didn’t meet those standards. Therefore, she was asking Sanders to leave.

The conversations that Wilkinson has had with the media since the incident seem to make it fairly clear that this wasn’t the sort of situation or action that she was particularly comfortable with. She could have let it pass, not said anything, served Huckabee Sanders and her group of seven diners and simply hoped, in her heart of hearts, that this major presidential spokesperson never came back again. But, in the end, the restaurant owner didn’t feel she could do that in good faith.

Stephanie Wilkinson

Said Wilkinson, “This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

As a liberal democratic thinker, I have squirmed a little over my feelings about this incident. The devil inside me dances a jig to see almost any complicit Trumpian defender—but particularly Lying Sarah—getting a hard time. But the justice-seeker and rights-defender in me is leery of situations in which anything like discrimination gets a pass.

Right away, I start thinking of baseball great Jackie Robinson eating in the kitchen or sleeping on the bus while his white teammates ate in restaurants and slept on hotel sheets. I also recall the barber in Yellow Springs, Ohio, when I was a boy, who refused service to African Americans because he “didn’t know how to cut Negro hair.” I see drinking fountains with signs that say “colored”, tired African Americans riding in the back of the public transport bus, restrooms marked  Men, Women and Colored. I also see Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, two African American men who were arrested earlier this year in a Starbucks coffee shop for loitering, when they told the management they were waiting for friends. (That incident, at least, had a happy ending: Nelson and Robinson sued and settled for one dollar each and two hundred thousand dollars for the setting up of a program for young entrepreneurs: clearly, in their case, it was about the principle, not the money).

Sarah Huckabee Sanders

But then I ask myself, is this the same thing? And the answer is, I don’t think so. This is more of a political statement, I feel, a First Amendment kind of question. It’s about a restaurant owner reserving the right of entry to the premises of a private business on moral and political grounds. The message is, you are defending the indefensible. You are taking money to relate unconscionable lies to the American public. You are the chief broadcaster of nefarious, unethical and undemocratic policies that defy the spirit and letter of American tradition and law and, as such, we’re refusing you service. Not because you are white, a Republican, a woman, a conservative or a government employee, but because you are complicit with and a promoter of policies and actions that we find morally and politically repugnant.

Is it legal to refuse service? That depends on what state laws and local ordinances say. Although under federal law, the Civil Rights Act prohibits the withholding of service due to race—and President Trump knows this since he has had more than one complaint brought against his real estate business under federal law for skirting rental of his properties to blacks. And then too, we’ve heard of business owners on the right who have gotten away with turning away same sex couples who wanted to buy a wedding cake, and of Kentucky clerk of courts Kim Davis who defied a federal order to issue a marriage license to a gay couple because it would be offensive to her religious beliefs. (Kentucky had to pay a quarter-million-dollar settlement, but Davis subsequently kept her job and became a hero to many Evangelicals). There have also been cases of gun range owners who have refused service to Muslims—one, Jan Morgan of Arkansas, proudly declaring the indoor shooting range she owns “a Muslim-free zone”.

The truth is that while a rather large minority of Americans support President Trump and find his most controversial policies almost refreshingly authoritarian, the vast majority of people in the United States are shocked, upset, frustrated and fearful of the trend that the US is taking under Donald Trump—a far-right trend that challenges the Constitution, engenders racism and religious discrimination, openly targets Muslims (even achieving conservative Supreme Court backing for a clearly discriminatory travel ban) and generally eroding the two and a half century old democratic foundations of the country. And as Red Hen owner Stephanie Wilkinson indicates, those who see and feel the demise of democracy and the onset of autocracy in the US are past passive worry and are seeking innovative and decisive actions to show that they are standing up to be counted rather than being complicit through silence.

The question remains, will such definitive actions serve any purpose other than making those who implement them feel they are taking a stand? And won’t the reaction that is bound to come from the other side only worsen the divisions that are already threatening to tear the fabric of the United States in two?

I’m thinking, no, to the first, and, yes, to the second. But I’m also thinking that there is little that can be done to change the outcome. The reality is that the United States is on the brink of an ideological confrontation that could have previously unthinkable consequences as its people become more and more polarized along political, racial and religious lines. Perhaps the most polarized that they have been since the Civil War.

THE WIZARD OF LIES TAKES ON IMMIGRATION

US President Donald Trump may contradict himself constantly and change policies like he changes socks, but where he can be counted on to remain ever consistent is when it comes to his complete opposition to truth.

This week he is again appealing to falsehoods as a means of defending the indefensible: his failed “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Tweeting and speaking in perpetual campaign mode to his base—who, let’s face it, have proven they will believe anything as long as it comes from the royal palomino’s mouth—he has offered up a multiple array of misconceptions and utter falsehoods about immigration and the law. These are lies that go beyond the realm of mere skewed viewpoints and minor prevarication and enter the territory of unconstitutionality.

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One of the first things that would-be despots and village tyrants in other parts of the world have done to consolidate power and play to their non-democratic base has been to infiltrate, elude or shut down the courts. The extent to which Trump has sought to do this is already apparent from his record-setting appointment of far-right judges to the US justice system. And since federal judges are appointed to their posts to serve “during good behavior”—another way of saying for life or until they voluntarily retire from office—their influence, and Trump’s, promises to carry over long after the current president is voted out of office or is no longer eligible to run.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, explained earlier this year just how important it was that Trump was seeking to paper the federal court system with as many far-right judges as he could (according to the GOP itself, more than ever before in the country’s nearly two and a half centuries of history). According to Feinstein, “The Supreme Court hears between 100 and 150 cases each year out of the more than 7,000 it’s asked to review. But in 2015 alone, more than 55,000 cases were filed in federal appeals courts.” The significance of this was, she explained, that “in a way, circuit courts serve as the de facto Supreme Court to the vast majority of individuals who bring cases. They are the last word.”

She described as “stunning” the speed with which Trump was appointing judges and the GOP congressional majority was ramming approval of these appointments through Congress.

But in some of his latest tweets, Trump has suggested that, when it comes to immigrants, he wants to circumvent the court system entirely. In other words, he would like to institute a kind of “hanging-judge” lawlessness on the border, where law enforcement officials would be able to act directly, in his name, and at their discretion, without the intervention of any immigration court at all. This too is what every despot has wanted and, if they were able to consolidate enough power, it has been exactly what they’ve done, set themselves up as judge, jury and executioner, given themselves a monopoly on rights, made the will of the people subordinate to their own and rendered the rights of the minority non-existent.

A Dana Ellyn painting...worth a thousand words

The president backs his call for absolute White House control of the border by employing falsehoods galore. Among them, that the border is being constantly permeated by terrorists. His claim in seeking ever tougher treatment of would-be immigrants has been that “Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities. They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.” And polls indicate that nearly half of the US population believes him.

But the facts don’t back his claim up. Studies show that while immigrant populations have been growing quickly over the last several decades, violent crime in the United States has been dropping steadily since 1980. A University of Buffalo study that was later expanded by The Marshall Project and that looked at statistics from over 135 urban areas across the US indicated that in almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. And in the ten urban areas that saw the largest absolute increases in immigrants, crime levels were significantly lower in 2016 than in 1980.

Trump has also stated, irresponsibly and without any grounds in truth, that “they” (whoever “they” are) want to add 5,000 new immigration judges to handle what he tries to portray as an enormous influx of illegal immigrants. The fact is that the most salient proposal for finding a more effective way of handling illegal immigration cases has come from within his own party and was suggested by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Cruz has called for the doubling of immigration judges from 334 to about 750. That’s a far cry from 5,000.

Furthermore, in order to wield the kind of discretionary power that Trump wants the Executive Branch to have on US borders, he would necessarily have to violate the Constitution, international treaties and US legal precedents and regulations. Experts consulted by The Washington Post, for instance, indicate that there is an entire body of statutes and precedents that govern the due process afforded to asylum-seekers. They add that these are further underscored by such major international treaties as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

And then there’s the Constitution. As retired University of Texas law professor Barbara Hines told Washington Post fact-checkers, “The Constitution and the immigration laws, other than expedited removal, administrative removal and other limited exceptions, do not provide for deportation without an administrative hearing before an immigration judge. That would violate due process.”

And even then, the federal government already wields enormous discretionary power through the kind of exceptional cases that Professor Hines quotes, in which law enforcement can detain and remove immigrants with no due process whatsoever.

There are mounting calls from the opposition, as Trump seeks ever increasing powers, to do away with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency instituted under the Bush administration in 2003, in the wave of panic and paranoia that followed the 911 tragedy. The catch-all agency’s detractors accuse ICE of being an immigration shock force that has proven abusive and even cruel in carrying out its actions. Some people in the Trump administration have suggested that this is a virtue and what ICE was created for, to go where no other law enforcement group dares to tread and to operate only marginally within the law.

Before the advent of the Trump era, it would have been easy to conclude that the president is merely bloviating when he talks about handling immigration from the Oval Office and casting aside justice and the highest laws in the land to do it. But we’re quickly being cured under this administration of our naïve belief in the sanctity of the law and of human and civil rights. The feeling is growing that, under Trump, anything is possible, as long as its result is the erosion of high principles for which the United States was once known throughout the world.

Meanwhile, American Airlines, Frontier, Southwest and United Airlines are all now refusing to be accomplices to the government’s anti-immigrant campaign by affirming that they will no longer provide service to the federal government for transporting immigrant children separated from parents. The move came after flight attendants shared their experiences transporting immigrant infants, toddlers, and children separated from their parents by the government. Most indicated that they had been traumatized by the feeling of being complicit in the pain and confusion felt by their unwilling child passengers.

An American Airlines statement said: “We have no desire to be associated with separating families, or worse, to profit from it. We have every expectation the government will comply with our request (to refrain from booking detained migrant children on its flights) and we thank them for doing so.”

Clearly, the family separation policy could never work without the complicity of individuals and businesses outside of the government. American Airlines has taken the lead in bringing this fact to the fore. Hopefully it will maintain its line, and other businesses will follow the airline’s example in not lending themselves to this and other pernicious policies that the administration seeks to invoke.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MELANIA’S JACKET

By now, it has become famous—or infamous, depending on your viewpoint. Whatever your point of view might be, it wasn’t “just a jacket” as her spokespeople tried to convince us when they sought to backpedal, but a “fashion statement” that painted the Trump Regime from head to toe (almost).

I’m talking, of course, about Melania Trump’s field jacket, the one she wore to the US-Mexico border in what can only be seen as a failed attempt at a forced damage control mission after her husband enacted a nefarious policy that ended up with government-caged child hostages and migrant families separated with no real assurance of being reunited. The jacket was a common enough army green field jacket (marketed by Zara at about US$40), but on the back was emblazoned a strange message considering that she was heading to a place where there was real suffering going on—suffering for which her husband was entirely to blame: “I DON’T REALLY CARE, DO U?

There were numerous theories as to why Melania had worn the jacket. Few of them were naïve enough to express a belief that she wasn’t sending a message, or that she just grabbed the first thing off the coat rack by the kitchen door.

A London tabloid thought that “it must, MUST, be a hoax.” But no, her staff immediately jumped to the defense of her “fashion” choice. Melania’s spokesperson, Stephanie Grisham offered a “no theory theory.” It was just a jacket. There was no hidden massage. The president tweeted a (fake) theory of his own. It was, he said, a message “to the Fake News Media. Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares!” Perhaps the kindest theory of all was the one who had poor little rich girl Melania sending a private message to her mean old husband: It was a way of telling her husband: “I really don’t care” about how much you want to crack down on the borders; this isn’t fair to children. Another theory was that it was a message to The Don about their own personal relationship. Since the stories about porn star Stormy Daniels having gone to bed with Trump, Melania has been conspicuous by her absence from many events where she might be expected to accompany her husband. But then again, she’s been capricious about accompanying him ever since his presidency began. Still others thought the message was precisely about that, her absence from the scene and media speculation about where she was. This one seemed to me particularly far-fetched. The harshest theory was that it was a message to the migrants themselves, telling them, in short, that if they came into the country illegally and had their kids taken from them, then they deserved it and she didn’t care about their plight.

I have a theory of my own—which is no better or worse than anybody else’s—and since we may never know whether Melania was really trying to tell somebody something or she's just such an air-head that she put on a stupid, trendy jacket without even stopping to think what it said on the back, here goes: I think that Trump, in his usual contradictory way, put a policy in place without weighing the consequences. Typical executive that he is, he wanted to blame someone else for the immediate fallout. So when he decided to backtrack and try to fob the blame off on Democrats, he wanted to underscore the move by having his wife show the same kind of dismay and empathy displayed by Republican former First Lady Laura Bush. I submit that he very likely ordered Melania to go to the region where migrants and their children were being detained and she balked. Eventually, he or his staff talked her into it, but she wasn’t happy about going, so she decided to send her husband a message through the TV screen, which is where most of his focus is most of the day. The message: I’m going but only because you’re making me, And frankly, Donald, I don’t give a damn.  

Certain people on both sides of the running political war in the US seek consistently to justify Melania and to give her a break. The left, because she has several times shown contempt for and disagreement with her husband, more through body language than anything else, and without translating her rebellion into public statements. And the right because, in their eyes, Melania is an extension of Trump, and for them, Trump can do no wrong. But the only way not to be complicit with someone as monstrously insensitive, authoritarian, racist, isolationist, misogynistic and hateful as the current US president is by taking clear distance from him, and the First Lady (in point of fact The Third Lady, if you don’t count Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who clearly takes priority over his latest wife) continues to serve his purposes, no matter what might happen between them in private or what pranks she plays on him in public.

Whatever the case may be, the message on Melania’s jacket can’t be explained away. It was, at best, a childish, vulgar display of defiance toward the mission she was being sent on by her husband. At worst, it was a symptom of the contempt in which the Trumps and their regime hold human rights and the suffering of others.

In short, the American public and the world have no reason to have to interpret the allegedly minute nuances of an overtly crass and callous message displayed as if on a billboard across the US First Lady’s back. People take it at face value and at face value, it is a slap in the face to all of those who are suffering injustice at the hands of the current administration and to any decent person who believes in the feelings of others and in the sanctity and legitimacy of human rights.