Category: Trump

In Summary

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I feel compelled to say something about President Trump and recent events, but realize that I would merely be repeating things I’ve said in my few most recent posts. So I will briefly summarize, and then move on to other things in 2021.

1. The President did not meet any legal definition of incitement.

2. The President’s claim that the election was stolen has not actually been thoroughly investigated, much less disproven. The narrative — that the courts rejected it so it can’t be true — is nonsense: evidence is examined in trial, not in pre-trial review. We simply don’t know the extent of the fraud, and we don’t know that the President is wrong — nor to what extent.

3. I condemn unlawful riots, regardless of the motivation of the rioters. I condemn the 500+ riots of 2020 brought to us by a demonstrably false claim that police disproportionately kill young black men and do so with impunity. I condemn the one riot of 2021 brought to us, I believe, by people who believe the as yet unresolved claim that fraud determined this election.

4. If the President has been “unpresidential,” I can live with that: at no time since his inauguration has he been treated in a presidential fashion. Having never been shown the respect due his office, I won’t fault him for his behavior now.

5. And, finally, I think that there is no sense or justice for impeaching a President for making a claim that hasn’t been disproven and may be true or mostly true, and who has committed no crime.

—–

Powerful institutions silence opposing voices so that they can lie with impunity. The truth can defend itself: being the truth is always its greatest strength, and it will almost always prevail — if it is allowed to speak. This is why tyrants control the press, imprison dissidents, and force confessions.

The gravest injustice this year is not the 501st lawless riot. It is the silencing of so many voices by powerful institutions like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Be wary of anyone who tells you that depriving people of their voice is in everyone’s best interest.

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

Intemperate Speech a Cause for Concern

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I wish our President were a little more self-controlled in his speech, but it seems to me that there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, a man — even a President — who is prone to spouting off ungraciously, and, on the other hand, virtually an entire national press and punditry united in making scurrilous and unfounded accusations against the duly elected President.

One intemperate man is an unfortunate demonstration of flawed character. The nation’s press engaging in a concerted effort to promote a false narrative is something else, and, for those who actually value the idea of democracy, something much more significant. (After all, if the Russians’ modest efforts to influence the election are a serious concern, how much more serious must be concern about the influence of a grossly biased and inaccurate — or even deceptive — mainstream press?)

It is the fashion to erupt in righteous fury with every clumsy, inarticulate, or just plain rude comment from our President. I’m still waiting for the expressions of outrage from the public, and contrition from the press, that should follow two years of false accusations of treasonous complicity with a hostile foreign power.

We strain at boorish gnats, while swallowing the mendacious machinations of a corrupt Fourth Estate. Trump will be gone in five years. The smugly corrupt press and opinion-making elite will still be with us. That is a legitimate reason for some righteous fury.

Hat talk: the rest of the story

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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.

I’m not saying it’s the hat, but…

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I ran out of coffee at home yesterday, so last night while I was in town I stopped at the local Starbucks to pick up a bag of dark roast. As I pulled into my parking spot I noticed an Obama-Biden sticker on the car next to me. I figured that meant overt displays of political affiliation were allowed, so I grabbed my Make America Great Again cap from the dash where it lives, popped it on my head, and went inside.

My favorite gay bartender/barista was on duty, so after nodding a quick hello to him I grabbed a bag of Verona and walked up to the counter, where a young fellow I didn’t recognize, a bearded college-age kid, was waiting to take my order.

I handed him the bag of beans, asked him to grind it for flat-bottom drip, and fished out a Starbucks gift card that, I figured, had enough left on it to complete the transaction. The young fellow rang up my order and turned away to grind my coffee. When he came back and I held out my card, he waved it away and said “we got it, you’re all set.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I have a ton of coffee credits. Employees get them. I put it on mine,” he told me.

I asked if he was serious, and if he really wanted to do that. He said he was, and wished me a nice day. So I thanked him, picked up my bag of ground coffee, and walked out.

I have yet to experience any negative feedback while wearing the Make America Great Again hat. I’ve had a few positive comments, a couple of unexpected but pleasant conversations with strangers during which politics was never mentioned — and, yes, maybe an odd look or two. But free coffee? That’s a first.

Collusion and Obstruction: Two Different Kinds of Crime

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If the President had been found guilty of Russian collusion — that is, of participating in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians to undermine our election — then it would have indicated that he is a particular kind of villain. It takes a particular kind of villain to knowingly work with our enemies to subvert the democratic process. That represents a treasonous betrayal of our country.

On the other hand, being oafish and ignorant of the nuances of executive authority in the context of a legal investigation, while it may arguably appear to meet the legal definition for a charge of obstruction of justice, need not suggest that the President is a villain. Rather, it may simply indicate that he is an amateur on matters of law and politics, and that he is accustomed to speaking his mind without considering the unique legal implications of doing so while the head of federal law enforcement.

I never thought the collusion charges made much sense, and Mueller’s finding that no collusion occurred surprises me not at all.

As to obstruction, I find it much more plausible that the President expressed his frustration at what he rightly considered a relentless and unjustified witch hunt that was undermining his administration, and that he explored various avenues for putting an end to it — but that, finally, he both allowed the investigation to continue and cooperated with it. We know that he resisted the temptation to invoke executive privilege, even when he might plausibly have done so.

I understand his frustration. I appreciate his transparency. I particularly appreciate the people who counseled him to let the investigation run its course.

I think it’s time his critics stepped back and considered the possibility that they’re trying to trap a normal person in a web of legal technicalities in an effort to undo, by hook or by crook, the result of a legitimate election that happens to have led to an outcome they find offensive.

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

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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.


The Mueller Report: A Damning Indictment of… Something

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As we wait more or less breathlessly for the release of the Mueller Report, the assumption appears to be growing that it will be, in the eloquent words of Secretary Clinton, a “nothing-burger.”

But it will not be a nothing-burger, even if it reports no evidence of collusion. Because we’ve spent more than two years obsessing over this, driven by a press that pronounced almost daily the beginning of the end for the Trump administration. If there always was no there there, then someone has some explaining to do. Because many of us thought this was pretty obviously cooked up from the start, to hide either Clinton campaign embarrassment or, worse, Clinton/Obama collusion to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign. And if that’s true, then it should not have been the big story for the last two years.

The ladies and gentlemen of the press fancy themselves the guardians of democracy, the bulwark against ignorance and tyranny. If it turns out, as I suspect it will, that they have wasted most of their time and energy and resources, and our attention, over the past many months on a trumped-up non-story, an improbable bit of misdirection foisted on us by a failed candidate with the assistance of a corrupt former administration, then they have made a further mockery of the fourth estate. Democracy dies in darkness — or by being run over by the mainstream media clown car.

If the whole Russian collusion story is without a basis in fact, America’s journalistic “professionals” should consider finding a job they can do without embarrassing themselves.

Species of Deception

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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.