Category: Presidents

The Last Four Years

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It’s easy to react in the moment, but the Trump Presidency is more than the moment. Now it’s coming to the end, and I want to say a couple of things about it.

First, I’d like to thank the President for being a good President for most of his four years in office.

Dear President Trump,

When I helped elect you in 2016, I hoped that you would be a bulwark against the transformation that eight years of Obama had started, and that seemed destined to continue unchecked under a Clinton administration. I didn’t expect you to be a gracious man, a tactful man, or a conservative chief executive. You were one of those things, and that was enough: you were a conservative President, and you exceeded my expectations.

Thank you, Mr. President, for appointing hundreds of good judges, and giving us a Supreme Court that is likely to show the Constitution some respect.

Thank you, Mr. President, for getting us out of the Paris Accord, and for clearing the way for America to become an energy superpower. Now that we’ve demonstrated that we can do it, perhaps the next President won’t muck it up too much.

Thank you, Mr. President, for presiding over an historic outbreak of peace in the Middle East. Thank you for ending the Iranian deal that would likely have led to that country’s nuclear dominance of the region, with only Israel to keep them in check.

Thank you for expressing love for my country, for not mocking me for speaking only English, for not berating me for being a businessman and building something for myself. Those seem like very low bars, yet the man who preceded you couldn’t clear them — didn’t even try.

Thank you for excoriating a press that is mired in corruption and dishonesty, and that has manipulated and betrayed the citizenry for decades. I think we owe a lot of the current skepticism of the press to your efforts, however rude and sometimes clumsy they were.

Thank you for reminding the Republican party that businesses are both big and small, and that the middle of the country can’t simply learn to code. You promised at your inauguration that you wished to represent all Americans, and you delivered on that promise.

So thank you for four years that were better than I ever expected, four years that stopped and occasionally reversed the damage done by your predecessor. I never thought we’d get a reprieve, but we did and I appreciate it.

I never mistook you for a man of particular dignity and grace, never thought you’d exercise great self-control or restraint. But you suffered an unconscionable amount of abuse, persevered through attacks that would have disheartened most, and continued to work and to stay within the Constitutional boundaries. I never imagined you’d experience the relentless onslaught you did, nor, to be honest, would I have guessed that you’d have handled it as well as you did. I thank you for that as well. You provoked the worst from your opponents; that is probably ultimately a good thing, as we needed to see them clearly.

I think you were cheated out of victory, if not through outright electoral fraud (though I won’t rule that out) then by a unified opposition of liars and censors — mainstream media and tech giants, politicians and institutions. You still have to leave office, and I’d like to see you go with grace and dignity, but as I said I never really expected those things from you and it would be unrealistic to ask you to discover those qualities now. I can accept a graceless and undignified exit now; I require only that you dutifully fulfil the law as you step down.

You did a good job, and you got a raw deal. You spared my country four years of Clinton.

So thank you.
An American

Hat talk: the rest of the story

Posted on | by hr | 3 Comments on Hat talk: the rest of the story

While my night on the town began, as related here, at Starbucks, it didn’t end there — nor did it continue in precisely the same vein of tolerance and understanding.

A few hours after I left the iconic cafe with my bag of free coffee and attended a family dinner, I ended up in a local bar doing what I do in bars: acting as designated driver and herder of tipsy friends. I am widely valued for my public temperance, my modestly imposing physical presence, and my capacious vehicle. (I drink, but only moderately and always at home. )

As I sat at a table watching my friends and the other patrons and nursing my third Diet Coke, a youngish woman appeared at my elbow and began talking. She informed me that she was a nurse, that she saw a lot of early-onset dementia, and that she thought people didn’t appreciate how big a problem it is.

(No, I didn’t take it personally: whatever doubts I may occasionally have about my own grip on reality, I do a pretty good job of keeping my peccadilloes under wraps. She was obviously just making conversation with this rakishly good-looking fellow trying — unsuccessfully, apparently — to keep counsel with his own thoughts amidst the noise of a crowded bar.)

I didn’t say much in response, beyond periodic sympathetic noises and an occasional attempt to soften her more hard-edged observations. She thought people live too long and didn’t approve of that; I suggested that we die too long, but that it seemed understandable that we might cling tenaciously to life for ourselves and encourage our loved ones to do the same. But I agreed that senility and dementia were sad and difficult challenges, whether occurring in the geriatric crowd or among my own relatively youthful cohort.

Despite her incipient intoxication, she noticed that I seemed to have a hard time hearing her, and she commented on the volume in the bar. I told her that I have a slight hearing deficiency (true), the product, I believe, of too many years riding motorcycles, scuba-diving, and shooting guns (also true).

“Do you like guns?” she asked me.

“I love them.”

“Do you have a MAGA hat?” From her tone, I took the question to be intended humorously.

“I do. It’s in the car,” I answered. As, in fact, it was.

That’s when the ugliness of the passionately uninformed revealed itself.

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said, sounding sincerely perplexed. “You listened so politely while I was talking.”

What went through my head at that moment was almost precisely this:

“You little idiot. Sixty million people voted for Donald Trump. Do you think they’re all such mean-spirited intolerant wretches that they can’t listen to someone talk about the challenges of managing dementia in the hospitalized elderly without feeling compelled to give vent to their inherent misogyny and/or fascist tendencies? What kind of bubble do you live in?”

That’s what I thought. What I said was that I didn’t understand why that would surprise her.

I listened to her prattle on for another little bit. She wanted to educate me on the “truth” about abortion law, but I told her I was pretty knowledgeable about it already, and that she and I probably wouldn’t agree. Then she told me about her “ex-boyfriend” who was recently arrested for sexual misconduct, though she thinks he’s been falsely accused. Seriously. She couldn’t have teed it up better if she’d tried, but I let it go: don’t argue with foolish people, and particularly with drunk foolish people. (Friends who know of the incident later assured me that she’s mistaken, and that the fellow in question is pretty awful.) 

I don’t know how many on the left share this silly woman’s bigoted assumptions about the half of America that voted for the Republican. I do know that, when I wear the hat, I make a special effort to be pleasant. I’d like to think that, by being unexpectedly nice, I’m responsible for a little painful cognitive dissonance, a little uncomfortable opening of smug little minds. Certainly, that’s my hope.

Trump2020: A Response to One Objection

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One objection to re-electing President Trump in 2020 is that, because he exhibits so many of the personal traits which conservatives have traditionally condemned, his election by Republicans casts the latter as hypocrites and removes character as a dimension on which future Republicans can differentiate their candidates from those of the Democrats.

While I made this argument during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I think it is no longer relevant. Republicans have already elected Trump; failing to re-elect him will not in any way redeem Republicans. We live in a hostile, left-leaning media environment, and there is no voice on the left that will speak well of Republicans for rejecting President Trump in 2020. That would require a degree of charity the left is completely unwilling to extend.

Whatever damage to the moral standing of Republicans that the election of President Trump can do has been done, and nothing will reverse it or make it significantly worse. Those who think otherwise are crediting the left with more grace than there is any reason to believe it possesses.

I continue to believe that, on balance, the arguments in favor of re-electing President Trump remain compelling.

Mueller: This Should Not Be The End

Posted on | by hr | 1 Comment on Mueller: This Should Not Be The End

Mueller has concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. After two years of concerted attacks by a biased press and a corrupt bureaucracy, the collusion fantasy has been laid to rest.

Now let’s talk about collusion.

In 2016, and for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting administration used the power of federal law enforcement to spy on the opposition party during a presidential election. It justified that spying by citing a fraudulent document (the Steele Dossier), payed for by its own party’s candidate, as the basis for the warrant. The spying was overseen by fiercely partisan officials in the Department of Justice openly contemptuous of the opposition candidate. Other administration officials tried hundreds of times, without explanation or plausible justification, to gain access to confidential information collected during the spying.

If the administration’s party’s candidate had won the election, it seems certain that none of this would ever have come to light: an administration and Department of Justice shot through with corruption would have welcomed its successor, and its misconduct would have been buried forever.

That didn’t happen. Now the lingering corruption of the Obama era must be exposed and removed.


Species of Deception

Posted on | by hr | 2 Comments on Species of Deception

I’ve been thinking about the nature of President Trump’s dishonesty, and about why it seems somehow more acceptable to a large number of people than one might expect.

We are resigned to the idea that politicians lie. We expect them to make promises during their campaigns that they have no intention of trying to keep once elected. We expect them to triangulate, to position themselves during the primaries and then reposition themselves for the general election. We expect them to propose ideas that we all suspect can’t work, and to paint a rosy future that none of us expects will ever materialize. To varying degrees, we see this kind of behavior as normal for politicians and candidates.

We are less sanguine about deeper deceptions. It’s one thing to listen to a candidate promise us the moon, while suspecting that he probably knows he can’t deliver on that promise once in office. It’s a very different thing to believe that he has a secret agenda, and that he is withholding his true intentions because he understands that, if we knew them, he wouldn’t have our vote.

The distinction has to do with the motivation behind the dishonesty. We know the candidate wants to be elected and, once elected, he wants to continue to curry our favor. We understand that. But we do not want to believe that he has political goals that he keeps secret from us, because that would suggest a kind of betrayal that goes beyond simply failing to deliver on the promises he’s made. Lying to us to get into office is not the same as lying about the reason he wants to be in office and the things he intends to do once he gets there. One is salesmanship, the other borders on treachery.

While President Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, his dishonesty seems not to conceal a secret agenda. So far as his political plans and ambitions go, he has been a remarkably transparent President. His general rejection of convention is part of this: he seems not to care if people think him outrageous, and one never has the sense that he’s holding something back — indeed, he seems incapable of it. One may tire of his sometimes absurd overstatements and boastful claims, but one rarely suspects that he is a sinister figure bent on fulfilling his own secret ambitions.

His major goals seem anodyne: a growing economy, fairer trade, more manufacturing jobs, secure borders, less regulation, greater employment. Nothing about his conduct suggests that he has further ambitions which he keeps shrouded in secrecy, or which he reveals only to a small number of like-minded associates.

What all this means is that, while we can’t necessarily trust what the President says, we can generally trust that we know what he’s trying to do. For those of us who generally like what he’s trying to do, that makes the other, less consequential dishonesty easier to accept.

This isn’t a defense of dishonesty, but rather a suggestion that all kinds of dishonesty aren’t equally objectionable.