About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

Burn and rave?

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Joe Weber

That’s not Michelle Obama’s style, but it must be that of others

Michelle Obama, source: Getty Images via Deadline

In the wake of World War II, Dylan Thomas wrote one of his most memorable poems. It begins: “Do not go gentle into that good night/Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

When Donald J. Trump is inaugurated on Monday, former First Lady Michelle Obama will not rage or rave, at least not publicly. But she also will not be on hand. Similarly, she was not in the National Cathedral for President Jimmy Carter’s funeral after protocol dictated that she sit next to Trump, something that likely turned her stomach.

Mrs. Obama will make her protest against the once and future president quietly. But her absence will resound. In its own muted way, it will echo the Pussyhat Project, the effort that brought hundreds of thousands of women to Washington after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. Fewer demonstrators are expected this time around, but tens of thousands are still likely to fill the streets.

Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, Mrs. Obama called Trump “an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures.” And remember that at the Democratic National Convention she said: “His limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happened to be Black.”

Give Mrs. Obama credit for consistency. She knows whom she loathes and she sees no reason to pretend otherwise, especially at an inauguration that happens to be slated for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. As a former first lady – and not an elected official, much less a former president – she doesn’t have to make nice.

Of course, former President Barack Obama, a diplomat of the first rank, filled in the seat next to Trump’s at the funeral and they chatted amiably. That Obama likely will be on the dais with the other ex-presidents (and presumably their wives) on Jan. 20, even as the messages they hear will probably nauseate them and, perhaps, the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Trump either last year or in 2016.

Whether one faults Mrs. Obama or not for staying away, one must respect her courage. She is behaving far differently than Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, Apple CEO Tim Cook, TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos – all sucking up to the new king.

She is taking a stand that the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, won’t take. Berman is slated to deliver the benediction on Trump’s big day, following Trump’s address.

YU “once conferred honorary degrees upon Albert Einstein, Nobel laureates, US presidents, and Israeli prime ministers — leaders who embodied the intersection of intellectual and moral excellence,” journalist Mordechai I. Twersky writes. “Yet this president’s inaugural stage is not theirs, nor is it ours. It belongs to a man whose history of divisive rhetoric and actions — against women, minorities, the press, and even Jews — stands in stark contrast to the ethical and spiritual ideals YU was founded to uphold.”

Michelle Obama’s action is reminiscent of the character Bérenger in Eugène Ionesco’s 1960 play, “Rhinoceros.” As Susan Rubin Suleiman, a professor emerita at Harvard University, recently wrote in a piece for The Hill headlined “Don’t become a rhinoceros: Trump’s accession and our new theater of the absurd,” Bérenger resists turning into a rhino when everyone around him does.

At the conclusion, when he alone is still a human, he says: “I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”

Normalizing Trump is not Mrs. Obama’s way. Certainly, she won’t be the last person left who won’t capitulate. There will be others, such as the legislators who have peppered Trump’s unqualified Cabinet nominees with questions of substance.

Pete Hegseth, source: David Freed, Facebook

Consider Tammy Duckworth, the veteran and Senator from Illinois. She quizzed the likely next Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, on basic points, such as three different ways such secretaries negotiate national security or security treaties and he couldn’t name any. He couldn’t name any member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

“He’s so focused on being a culture warrior that he is forgetting what the job is. The job is to really lead a three-million personnel organization with a budget of almost $50 billion. The man has never even led an audit. The last time that he led an organization, he led it — he so badly managed its fiscal lead that they had to bring in forensic accountants,” Duckworth said. “The bottom line is that he’s not competent to lead an organization of this size. And he tried to make today’s hearing about anything but the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s doing and would not know what he was doing as secretary of defense.”

And, despite Bezos’s kowtowing and the browbeating he’s giving The Washington Post, many journalists will hold the once-and-future president’s feet to the fire. They will include such figures as Jennifer Rubin, the former WaPo columnist who recently launched The Contrarian, an online publication that warns about the dangers of a cowed press.

“Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law,” the outlet warned. “The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.”

And they include Los Angeles Times refugee columnist Harry Litman, a former U.S. Attorney who writes the Talking Feds Substack. He recently scalded U.S. Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi for her refusal to concede that Trump lost the 2020 election and her refusal to uphold the independence of the Justice Department.

Also among them are David Brooks, who recently sketched out the terrifying military challenges the U.S. faces against the united forces of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. He noted a RAND Corp. report that argued that “The U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally exceed the means that are available to accomplish those tasks.”

Brooks also pilloried some of Hegseth’s critics who failed to probe him on such weighty matters. Instead, they focused on his drinking problems and alleged sexual abuses.

“We live in a soap opera country,” Brooks wrote. “We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions.”

The thoughtful critics will include Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, who is also a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He mostly faulted the Republican senators who praised rather than probed Hegseth.

“What America and the world saw today was not a serious examination of a serious man,” Nichols wrote. “Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfit nominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune.”

Hegseth’s main qualification, it seems, is that he was a Fox host whose attacks on “woke” culture apparently pleased Trump. This is a far cry from Robert McNamara, who had rebuilt and run Ford after WWII before serving as Defense Secretary throughout the 1960s. Hegseth pales beside Donald Rumsfeld, the four-term congressman who represented the U.S. in NATO and served as White House Chief of Staff, along with running several companies. Rumsfeld led the Defense Department twice, first in the 1970s and then again in the early 2000s.

Of course, Hegseth is just one part of the clown Cabinet and adviser group Trump is assembling. This group includes HHS Secretary-nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vax conspiracy theorist; Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence and a fan of exiled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Russell Vought, the Project 2025 contributor slated to head the Office of Management and Budget.

Trump appears to have assembled his team based not on their qualifications, but on their obeisance to him. He doesn’t want any independent folks, such as retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff who called him a “fascist” and “the most flawed person” he’s ever known or retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who warned that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

Let’s not forget that Trump’s posse includes Musk, the erratic supporter of a far-right German party who is teaming up with other billionaires to attack the U.S. government in Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk and his cronies are at the core of what outgoing President Biden warned about in his farewell address, cautioning about “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”

“Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said.

In that, the president borrowed a page from The New Yorker. In “The Inauguration of Trump’s Oligarchy,” editor David Remnick wrote of Trump: “He will return to the Oval Office with a résumé enhanced by two impeachments, one judgment of liability for sexual abuse, and a plump cluster of felony convictions. He will take the oath of office next week at the scene of his gravest transgression, his incitement of an insurrection on Capitol Hill. Still, Trump soldiers on, as if all the legal accusations against him are badges of merit, further proof of his anti-establishment street cred.”

Trumpers, of course, ignore such failings or, thanks to their paucity of reliable news sources, are ignorant of them.

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation,” President Biden added in a worrying note about the press. “The free press is crumbling [or] disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit…. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time.”

In the future, he said, “it’s going to be up to the president…, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces.”

As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson noted, Biden’s warning “will stand alongside other prescient warnings outgoing presidents have delivered, like President George Washington famously warning about the dangers of foreign entanglements, and President Dwight Eisenhower warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”

Richardson, too, will be among those who are sure to call out Trump’s abuses and follies.

Perhaps those who will be most scorching in coming years will be comedians. Jimmy Kimmel, for instance, has already taken Trump to task for prodding officials to raise flags to full staff for the inauguration, suspending the 30-day half-staff status in honor of Carter. “Trump threw such a tantrum about it, Speaker Mike Johnson ordered all U.S. flags in the Capitol to fly at full-staff on inauguration day for Donald Trump,” Kimmel told his audience. “Which might be the most Donald Trump-y thing Donald Trump has ever done, to be mad that a guy who just died is getting all the attention.”

Michelle Obama’s silent protest befits a woman who famously prefers to take the high road when others go low. Her empty chair will say a lot. Over the coming four years, however, others will have to raise their voices higher if American democracy, a beacon to the world, is to escape its close of day.

Are the king’s knickers showing?

Posted on January 10, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s embarrassments may show his limits

In chess, the king is one of the weakest pieces in the game. He can move only one step in each direction, unlike even his pawns at times. And he depends on others for protection even as he lords his crown over them.

Might that become a metaphor for Donald J. Trump, soon to be inaugurated as the nation’s first felon-in-chief? Might his overheated all-powerful image as the man who won all branches of government just a couple months ago now be facing a chillier reality?

In October, editorialists at The Wall Street Journal attacked the “fascist meme” that Democrats were invoking to try to defeat Trump. This was the idea that the then-candidate would subvert democracy much as tyrants around the world have. “We have confidence that American institutions—the Supreme Court, the military, Congress—would resist any attempt to subvert the Constitution,” the editorialists argued.

A month later, in a WSJ piece headlined “Trump Tests the Constitution’s Limits,” opinion writer William Galston of Brookings lambasted Trump for trying to avoid the Senate, short-circuiting the advise-and-consent process in a rush to get his dubious Cabinet nominees approved. “Mr. Trump appears poised to sidestep the Constitution, and we’ll soon find out whether the other branches of government are prepared to go along with him,” Galston wrote.

Nowadays, the once seemingly invincible Trump is getting some answers from some of those branches that he doesn’t much like.

Most notable, of course, is the 5-4 Supreme Court decision forcing him to face sentencing in his seamy hush-money coverup conviction by a jury in New York state court. This involved the 34 felony counts based on a $130,000 payment he made to a porn star to stay mum about their dalliance. The would-be-puppetmaster here got his comeuppance, it seems:

Instead of toeing the line for Trump, the majority, including Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, upheld the rule of law. The group outvoted Trump toadies Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch, along with right-wing ideologues Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas. While Trump will appeal that 34-count conviction, a jury has already further underlined his lack of personal morality and his disrespect for the law, and for now most of the court sided with those jurors.

The justices’s decision follows a string of rulings they’ve made against Trump, both during and after his first term. In his first administration, The New York Times reported, he or his agencies prevailed only 42 percent of the time in cases before the court, the lowest rate since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.

While he was out of office, the court repeatedly rebuffed him. As NBC News reported, when Trump tried to prevent prosecutors from obtaining his financial records, the court rejected his request. Likewise, when Trump tried to stop a congressional committee from accessing White House documents from his administration, the court set him back.

It did so, too, when he asked for a special master to review classified documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago residence. And when Trump sought to stop his tax returns being disclosed to House Democrats, the court refused to intervene.

The self-styled dealmaker-in-chief may have thought he had bought the court with his three appointees, but his purchase clearly wasn’t complete. “I’m not happy with the Supreme Court,” he said on Jan. 6, 2021, during his speech near the White House. “They love to rule against me.” He suggested his appointees were ingrates. “I picked three people,” he said. “I fought like hell for them.”

And then there was that recalcitrant Congress. Thirty-eight Republicans last month refused to give Trump his way with a debt-limit increase, forcing the leadership to strip that demand out of a bill that avoided a pre-Christmas government shutdown. It was quite the humiliation for the president-elect, who now faces the need to twist arms anew in a new Congress.

As for his efforts to get his Cabinet members through without the normal hearings – hearings that would further shine a light on their lack of qualifications – Trump appears to have lost that battle too. Those sessions are slated to begin next week with the especially inappropriate Defense Department secretary nominee Pete Hegseth teeing them off. Trump was kicked in the teeth with the loss of the disgraced Matt Gaetz, his absurd and morally vile choice for Attorney General, but it would be surprising if Trump doesn’t prevail on his other picks.

But will he ram his agenda through, nonetheless? Most likely, he will get his tax cuts, border security measures, money to deport immigrants, tariffs and efforts to boost oil and gas energy production. But, will he get backing for his designs on Greenland and the Panama Canal, his suggestions for using the military to carry those out? Will he garner support for using “economic force” in his ludicrous talk of absorbing Canada?

Of course, he is doing his best, with a series of private meetings at Mar-A-Lago, to bring legislators in line. Certainly, the obsequious House Speaker Mike Johnson – whose job Trump managed to save – has said he sees his job as the quarterback who carries out the plays his president calls.

During President Jimmy Carter’s touching funeral, there were many suggestions for our leaders to work for peace and harmony, to bring unity to our polarized country. The example of former foes Carter and President Ford becoming dear friends was compelling. Of course, the reminders by President Biden of the importance of character in a president resounded throughout the National Cathedral, perhaps even ringing in Trump’s ears a bit.

Still, it’s doubtful that such admonitions will have any effect on our most narcissistic once-and-future president. He’s been impervious to embarrassment in the past and seems to prefer conflict to conflict-resolution. The thrive-married philanderer, sexual abuser and business cheat long flaunted his immorality and, at 78, he’s hardly likely to change.

But maybe there is reason for hope that the many other chess pieces in this important game will show their value.

Maybe there is reason to hope that the checks and balances the WSJ thinks so fondly of will work, that some guardrails will keep the incoming president from having the full hand he’d like. With the Supreme Court showing the way, we may see a bit more independence, a bit less fealty than the once and future president would like. The spectacle could be redeeming and surely will be worth watching.

Is justice blind?

Posted on January 8, 2025 by Joe Weber

The Supreme Court may soon tell us in a Trump case

In 1857, the Supreme Court made one of the worst decisions in its history, the infamous Dred Scott case. It held that African Americans, whether free men or slaves, could not be considered American citizens. This ruling held until it was undone by the 13^th (1865) and 14^th (1868) amendments to the Constitution, guaranteeing citizenship to those born in the U.S. irrespective of race.

Then there was the “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which upheld segregation. It took until 1954 to undo that one.

Soon, we may see whether the current Court makes another bad decision, one that reflects its conservative political bias or one that upholds both a jury decision and an appeals court one. Donald J. Trump wants his sentencing on 34 felony counts, slated for this Friday, quashed. If Trump wins a postponement, he might avoid being formally deemed a felon, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Even though he was convicted by a jury, in New York state courts a defendant becomes a felon when he is sentenced and a judgment is entered, the paper reported. “It puts the conviction officially on the books,” said Cheryl Bader, a Fordham School of Law professor.

As The New York Times reported, his lawyers filed an emergency application late Tuesday. That came after a New York appeals court rejected the same request on Tuesday. Based on last year’s Supreme Court presidential immunity holding, Trump argues that he is entitled to protection from sentencing now that he is the president-elect.

“The stakes of this skirmish … are enormous,” former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman writes in a Substack. “Through a wildly improbably series of legal and political twists that historians will analyze for decades, Trump now stands at the threshold of erasing a long series of crimes from the record books.”

Just a year ago, Trump was facing the prospect of four criminal trials that could have put him behind bars for years, and hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from civil cases that had been brought against him, as NBC reported. Now the criminal cases are in jeopardy — the two federal prosecutions have already been dismissed, while a state case is stalled — and he could get appeals courts to shrink his hundreds of millions of dollars in civil judgments.

The dismal record shows how Trump is a master at gaming the legal system.

Trump and now-deceased Roy Cohn, source: BBC

As far back as 1973, Trump and his father engineered a deal that spared them of serious consequences from a Justice Department lawsuit that alleged they violated the Fair Housing Act by steering Blacks away from apartments they owned. As Time reported, their later-disbarred lawyer Roy Cohn sued Justice for $100 million, claiming defamation. Two years later, the Trumps agreed to a consent decree that included giving a weekly list of vacancies to the New York Urban League. Trump later boasted that he ended up “making a minor settlement without admitting guilt.”

He learned in that fight that delaying, distorting, appealing and countersuing can be winning strategies. Later in his career, Trump ran casino businesses into the ground, leading to six bankruptcies in which he managed to keep millions even as he cheated creditors and his own employees who had bought his company stock.

“I didn’t realize he was as stupid as he is,” one former Trump Plaza worker told Mother Jones. “Honestly. I thought, way back when, the guy was way brighter than we were. He was running the company, and we were working for him. We thought he was brilliant. When we invested in it, we thought, how could this stock go so low?”

Of course, stupidity is a troubling description for Trump. He is brilliant as a huckster and political manipulator, despite intellectual limitations that were evident even when he was in college. “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!,” one former professor of his at Wharton repeatedly said, according to a close friend quoted by Philadelphia magazine. The friend recalled that the prof “would say that [Trump] came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything, that he was arrogant, and he wasn’t there to learn.”

Trump’s arrogance and disrespect for the law has continued with his repeated pattern of attacking judges he disagrees with or is threatened by. He labeled Judge Juan Merchand, who presided over his conviction in New York in the felony case, a “certified Trump hater,” going so far as to lambast the judge’s adult daughter for working at a digital consulting company whose clients included the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign.

Justice Roberts, source: The New York Times via AP and NPR

Years before, when Trump criticized a U.S. Appeals Court judge in 2018, he so angered Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts that Roberts told the AP that the U.S. doesn’t have “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Roberts added that “The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Trump responded in a tweet saying that the system did indeed have “Obama judges.”

Whether that’s true or not, it’s clear that the system has Trump judges. One, Aileen M. Cannon in Florida, last July gutted a classified-document case against Trump by ruling that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed to his job. “The very definition of an activist judge, she has single-handedly upended three decades of established law historically used fairly and in a bipartisan manner,” Joëlle Anne Moreno, a law professor at Florida International University told The New York Times.

The same judge just blocked Smith from releasing a report on the case. Just how much of Smith’s long investigation will ever come to light now is unclear, since the incoming Trump Justice Department will get to decide whether to pursue actions for disclosure. History may or may not someday get to see all that Smith found in the case.

The question now is whether the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, including Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, will side with Trump on the matter of sentencing in the felonies case. The court has ruled against the former president on several cases involving him since he left office, mainly involving efforts by various official bodies to get Trump records.

The justices had “remarkably little interest in intervening in any of the cases about former President Trump’s personal behavior,” Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, told NBC News.

Indeed, Trump’s conduct in the felony-conviction case was all too personal. He was convicted of falsifying business records while trying to cover up a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election.

With their upcoming decision, the Supreme Court justices will say as much about themselves as they do about Trump. They will also say as much about themselves as prior justices did in such cases as the Dred Scott and Plessy cases. Will these justices go down in history as Trump toadies or as judges who uphold the law over politics? Was Judge Roberts right about the judiciary being independent? We’ll soon find out.

The First Casualty

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Joe Weber

In war — and politics — truth often loses out. Will it again?

Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell; Source: Parade

British writer Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, worked for the BBC during World War II. He produced propaganda focused on the Indian subcontinent, a job that gave him the insights into truth and falsehood that shaped his later work on powerful books including “Animal Farm” and “1984.”

As Orwell, he has become known for searing work that speaks eloquently to our times, even now, more than 75 years on. He expressed some of his wisdom in short lines. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” he wrote in “1984.” Along with that was this thought: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Today, as NPR reported ably about the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, such phrases could easily come to mind. Bowing to the orders of the GOP in control of Congress, tour guides at the building these days omit any mention of the rioting that injured 140 law enforcement people, forced lawmakers into hiding and left several people dead.

This is so even though the FBI labeled the event an act of domestic terrorism, one in which some 2,000 people took part in criminal acts, including using weapons to assault police officers. Visitors won’t hear of that, evidently on orders of a party determined to whitewash it into nonexistence. It is a vital point in history that, for now at least, visitors will have to learn of somewhere other than where it occurred.

“I don’t think that it’s necessary when giving a tour in this building to talk about January 6,” former Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito, who sat on the House committee that oversee the Capitol Visitor Center, told NPR. “This institution carries with it hundreds of years of history and tradition focused on the forward movement of this great country, and I think that should be the focus when touring.”

And some number of Americans seem fine with denying or forgetting the whole thing, a reflection of a peculiar fact of our political culture: a lack of memory. One visitor told NPR that the omission didn’t trouble him. “I was fine because I don’t think anything bad happened on January 6,” he said. “I thought it was a political hit job, you know, it was all made up.”

Despite images that media outlets aired or published at great length at the time and despite an exhaustive bipartisan congressional investigation, some Americans seem to either disbelieve or discount it all. Apparently, for them, two plus two don’t really equal four. And control of the present by some does seem to mean control of the past.

Recall that Donald J. Trump, refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election, had stirred up the mob that besieged the Capitol, the congressional committee found. It even recommended that criminal charges be brought against him (and, in fact, he had been impeached unsuccessfully for his incitement).

Remember that the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump of incitement, even though the body’s leader, Mitch McConnell, declared him “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — a sentiment apparently shared by most Americans at the time. A Quinnipiac poll in 2021 found that nearly 60 percent believed back then that he should never hold office again.

Jan. 6 rioters where Trump will be sworn in; source: NY Times

Now, of course, we are just a couple weeks away from his installation for a second term as president. And the rewriting of history leading up to that has been breathtaking.

For instance, the so-called Loudermilk Committee, a GOP-controlled House committee that reexamined the rioting, rendered Trump blameless for whipping up the mob, instead faulting “numerous security failures” and the “politicization of Capitol security.” Democrats, who had worked with two Republicans (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) for nearly two years to produce a nearly 1,000-page report, had just “cherry-picked” evidence to fit a pre-determined narrative that pointed a finger at Trump, the GOP report argued.

In response, Democrats on the Loudermilk Committee — formally the House Committee on Administration — condemned its efforts to paint over the all-too-real events.

“There is nothing about this that is being done in the public’s interest,” the committee’s ranking member, New York Democratic Rep. Joseph D. Morelle told Roll Call. “The public has every right to know what transpired on Jan. 6… but what’s happened since then has been the continued politicization of this — promoting far-right conspiracy theories, election disinformation and extremism. I’m really angry about this.”

Morelle issued a dissenting report, citing among many other things a damning comment by then Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy. “The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” the former GOP leader said. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” Morelle denounced the Loudermilk effort as based on a “tapestry of lies,” branding it a “work of fiction.”

Trump, for his part, has recast the bloody day as a “day of love.” He used this language even though the mob shouted out demands to hang Vice President Mike Pence for accepting the votes that ousted him and Trump from the White House. It was a day when fearful legislators were chased into secure rooms and some in the House chambers were outfitted with gas masks as law enforcement personnel were besieged by Trump backers.

House Chamber, Jan. 6, 2021; source: AP, via The New York Times

The effort to throw sand in the eyes of history, as The New York Times put it, began early.

Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had “all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation,” the paper reported. Hours later, Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham was telling viewers that “there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.”

Matt Gaetz, the now-disgraced former congressman and onetime Trump nominee for Attorney General, furthered the nonsense. He claimed on the House floor that some rioters “were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”

According to M.I.T. Technology Review, this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the Capitol attack, the Times reported. It was amplified by MAGA influencers, Republican officials and, unsurprisingly, members of Mr. Trump’s family.

When asked recently by the paper whether Trump accepts any responsibility for Jan. 6, his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, instead referred in a statement to the “political losers” who tried to derail his career and insisted that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.” She added, “The American people did not fall for the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th.”

The incoming president has promised to pardon rioters convicted of various insurrection-related crimes, calling them “patriots” and “hostages” and portraying them as political martyrs. Some have even sought to attend the inauguration.

More than 1,500 people have been charged in connection with the insurrection in the biggest prosecution in Justice Department history. According to PBS News, about 250 have been convicted of crimes by a judge or a jury after a trial. Only two people were acquitted of all charges by judges after bench trials. No jury has fully acquitted a Capitol riot defendant. At least 1,020 others had pleaded guilty as of Jan. 1, with more than 1,000 sentenced, including over 700 receiving at least some time behind bars. The rest got some combination of probation, community service, home detention or fines.

Just how successful the GOP and its allies will be in rewriting the history of January 6 seems unclear. Plenty of accounts have been memorialized of that day that give the lie to their efforts.

“My fellow officers and I were punched, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical irritants by a violent mob,” former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell testified to Congress in one such personal account shared by NPR. “I could feel myself losing oxygen and recall thinking to myself: ‘this is how I’m going to die – defending this entrance.'”

Still, Trump’s mastery of deceit was proven beyond doubt in his first term. And it would seem that his many followers – those in the shade under 50 percent of the electorate who voted for him – either swallow his tripe or discount it.

Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have shown that they respect the electoral system that Trump sought unsuccessfully to discredit in 2020. They have turned over the keys of government over to him and his party peacefully – a far cry from Trump’s reaction of four years ago. No calls for riots. No insurrections.

But, now that Trump’s party will control all the major levers of power in Washington, one can only wonder what sort of alternative facts its minions will spread. How much will two and two add up to in the coming four years?

In a 1944 essay, “Freedom of the Press,” Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” A lot of folks don’t want to hear facts nowadays — as others want to bury them — but it falls to the press and to historians to make sure the truth endures.

Finding joy

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Joe Weber

Ugliness is inevitable, but don’t miss the good stuff

Mary Pipher, the gifted writer and psychologist who gave us “Reviving Ophelia” among other insightful titles, in 2023 wrote a most helpful essay for The New York Times in which she said, “I am in the last decades of life, and sometimes I feel that my country and our species are also nearing the end times.”

In “Finding Light In Winter,” Pipher, now 77, referred to dysfunctional government, fentanyl deaths, mass shootings, desperate refugees, wars in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, climactic weather events brought on by climate change and so on – a long list of depressing realities. “If we are empathetic and awake, we share the pain of all the world’s tragedies in our bodies and in our souls,” she wrote.

The Times thought highly enough of her piece to run it again this year, at least online. And it was wise to do so. Of course, this time we can add the recent presidential election to the litany of woes people of intelligence and sensitivity can count.

So, how is this helpful? Well, Pipher – whose home in Lincoln, Nebraska, was one I often passed on walks around a nearby reservoir – offers some useful strategies for dealing with it all. These are techniques that can help us get through the dark and, perhaps, darkening times ahead.

We must look for the light, she wrote. Up early, she watches the moon rise, for instance. She sees the snow sparkling “like a blanket of diamonds.” She watches birds.

And then there are the people in our lives. “Nothing feels more like sunlight than walking into a room full of people who are happy to see me,” Pipher wrote. “We also have the light of young children.”

There are also works of art and the “rituals of spiritual life.” The latter may include sun salutations, morning prayers, meditation and reading. And finally, there are memories – “Deep inside us are the memories of all the people we’ve ever loved.”

Is this a bit Pollyannaish? A bit of putting lipstick on a pig?

Perhaps, but a few thoughts occur to me that suggest that Pipher is onto something. And maybe these are things that can buoy us in the coming year, get us through the gathering darkness. They may let us focus on the physical fact that the literal darkness around us is actually receding now, in this post-solstice time.

For some of us, there are grandchildren to pay attention to. For them, the world is often a wonderful, even magical place. Flowers, trees, Bluey, the challenges of online Scrabble, mastering skiing at age 7 or younger (or, in the case of one 6-year-old lately feeling a bit intimidated, telling us that she has “retired from skiing”) – such things awaken their sense of delight and ours.

Just seeing the world through their eyes can be elevating.

There are spouses to appreciate. Even after decades, new things arise. A new excitement over cooking delectable foods, the discovery of new sisterhood in Mahjong and Canasta players, the challenge and joy of involvement in a religious/social group. All these can be fun to watch (and savor).

For many of us, there are the simple joys of where we live. Some of us are lucky enough to live high in the mountains, where we are blessed with lots of snow in winter and cool, green and alive summers. Evergreen trees grace our view each morning.

And there is extended family. Siblings – some of whom we may disagree with on such matters as politics, and others who are of like minds. All are valuable. Nieces, nephews and their young ones, all of whom descend from long-gone ancestors whom we older folks knew well. Of course, as Pipher suggests, the bolstering memories we have of those ancestors can come to us in times of strain, since some had so much to overcome.

Abraham Lincoln, generally thought to be a sufferer of depression, supposedly said, “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.” There may be truth in that. Certainly, we choose what to look at in our lives and that focus shapes our feelings, for good or ill.

We cannot be ignorant of the many ugly realities in the world, of course. To some degree, we must keep ourselves aware of them, at least the things we can influence to greater or lesser degrees. There is always voting, for instance, and for some of us, writing about various outrages or absurdities. The latter may be more purgative than effective in any way, but that’s not bad.

As for the things we can’t control or even influence, well, it’s pointless to drey a kop over them, as the Yiddish phrase goes. Instead, we can focus on things where we can make even a small difference. For instance, rather than fretting about childhood hunger, one can in volunteer to help in organizations that feed youngsters.

Indeed, for many of us there can be enormous satisfaction in helping people. Just the other day, a fellow volunteer and I helped a good number of folks off spots on ski runs that daunted them. That was a small thing in the larger scheme, for sure, but it helped those folks (and us).

In the coming year, there will be plenty of ugly stuff, of course. As Pipher suggests, being sure to bring the better stuff to mind is a lot healthier for us and the people we are lucky enough to have in our lives.

Desertion and betrayal

Posted on January 2, 2025 by Joe Weber

The costs of art, as “A Complete Unknown” sees them

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in happier times, source: Far Out

In a 2002 play, “Vincent in Brixton,” Vincent Willem van Gogh betrays his early lover, Ursula Loyer. He deserts her, leaving London for Paris. And at one point he announces: “An artist doesn’t care for his wife or children, any more than for the pigeons in the park. He cares for himself and for his work.”

Such words, it seems, could be applied to Bob Dylan, maybe or maybe not in real life, but certainly in the partly fabricated, partly true biopic “A Complete Unknown.” The Dylan in the film comes across as the embodiment of Freud’s theory of selfish infantilism, pure Id that cares only about satisfying himself or herself.

Not a bad person, really, but not a nice one, either. He is honest about life to a fault, despite the mythmaking lies he tells about himself, but is not someone either easy to be around or someone much interested in other people. In short, the film’s Dylan is something of a narcissistic jerk stuck in adolescence.

Of course, he starts out at 19 and moves through his early 20s in the film, so he does a bit of growing up.

But in that process, the Dylan so remarkably portrayed by Timothée Chalamet betrays or deserts many, if not most, of the people who care about him. He betrays his mentor, Pete Seeger, by going electric at the famous 1965 Newport Folk Festival. He betrays his first real lover, called Sylvie Russo (not Suze Rotolo, as in real life), by taking up with Joan Baez. And then he betrays Baez. Ultimately, he marries someone else.

Beyond the broad strokes, just how much is true and how much is movie mythmaking is hard to tell. Still, many of the film’s literal untruths have been documented.

The New York Times, for instance, unpacks some of the facts from what director James Mangold calls a “fable” about Dylan’s early years. Dylan was not the Newport festival’s closing act, for instance. The fan there shouting “Judas” actually did so a year later at a British concert, then spurring Dylan to tell his band to “play loud,” as he did in the movie.

Time also reports that some of the movie’s convenient narrative about Seeger and Dylan’s idol, Woody Guthrie, is at best dubious. “The movie shows Dylan showing up to Guthrie’s hospital room to play him a song, and then Seeger being so impressed by the young man’s playing that he lets him stay with his family,” the magazine reports, noting that this didn’t really happen. While it’s true that both men did visit Guthrie, who was institutionalized with Huntington’s disease, the details are embellished in the film.

A journalist’s sensibilities may be offended by such filmmaking liberties, of course, but the movie employs them to make larger points that seem to be true about Dylan and, perhaps, great artists in general. Much like van Gogh or others who sublimated nearly everything – and perhaps nearly everyone – in their lives to their art, the film’s Dylan (and perhaps the real one) felt he had to betray many, even his fans, to realize his artistic visions.

Dylan has been notorious throughout his career for his peculiar relationship with fame and his fans. That comes across well in the film, where he sticks it to his folk fans by performing searing electric work and turning his back on the crowds. He flees from fans, mostly young women, in the streets of New York and at a bar where he goes, hoping to remain in the background so he can listen to a performer. He spurns sophisticated devotees at an uptown party.

In the five or six concerts of his that I have been lucky to attend over the decades, Dylan rarely interacted with the crowd. Unlike musicians such as Paul McCartney, James Taylor or Paul Simon, he was not a people-pleaser. In the movie he refuses to play audience favorites, insisting over Baez’s objection that it wasn’t a request performance. It was his venue and he would play what he wanted to play.

The last time I saw the now 83-year-old Dylan was at a small venue, Colorado’s Dillon Amphitheater, in July 2022. Musically, the show was pretty bad – discordant at times and canned-sounding the rest. Appropriately, “Things Aren’t What They Were …” was the motto on that three-year world tour, “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”

As a letter-writer to the local paper put it: “His set had no life, energy, pop, rhythm or chemistry and left many in the audience wondering and actually pleading out loud for at least one song from his massive catalog of hits. Instead we got a garbled lounge act that left many feeling cheated! He hid behind his piano box, never once acknowledged the crowd with a simple ‘thank you’ or a painfully obvious play on words that we all had fun with leading up to this performance — ‘It’s great to be Bob Dylan playing in Dillon!’”

At that show, he played without a spotlight, retreating into the background, literally in the dark. This was very much unlike the Dylan I had seen years before at Madison Square Garden and Philadelphia’s Spectrum and in a venue in Toronto. Perhaps that’s because at his age, he may feel he is fading to black. Certainly, he will do so, perhaps all too soon. And so, maybe, he was making a statement.

And yet, for all his odd disdain for fame, Dylan seems driven to perform. He seems to need the rush that crowds and stages provide. He needs that perhaps even more than he needs individuals, such as Baez or his first wife Sara Lowndes, with whom he had four children (along with one Lowndes brought into the marriage, whom he adopted). Dylan, who split with Lowndes after 12 years in 1977, had a sixth child with his second wife, Carolyn Dennis, from whom he divorced in 1992.

In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” Dylan wrote that family was one of the most important aspects of his life, as People reported. “Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on,” he wrote. “Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me.”

Bob and Jakob Dylan, source: Fatherhood Channel

In 2005, Bob’s youngest son, Jakob, spoke to The New York Times about the role his father played in his youth. “When I was a kid, he was a god to me for all the right reasons,” he recalled. “He never missed a single Little League game I had. He’s collected every home run ball I ever hit. And he’s still affectionate to me.”

Jakob’s older brother, Jesse, echoed this in an interview with U.K.’s The Times in 2021. “My dad’s great, he’s a totally kind, wonderful man,” he said. “He’s been nothing but supportive to me and my brothers and sisters.”

Perhaps these familial praises are true, truer than the self-absorbed betrayer Chalamet and Mangold give us in the film. Certainly, the Dylan in the movie was the young artist and post-adolescent just emerging, just defining himself to himself and the world. And it’s true that romantic betrayals are pretty common among folks at that age, so perhaps the real Dylan can be forgiven for at least those.

Still, in some ways the movie’s most interesting character is not the Id-consumed Dylan, but rather Baez. At one point, she tells him “you’re full of shit” when he spins nonsense about working in carnivals. She sees through his mythmaking to the real Bobby Zimmerman, the hungry and ambitious guitarist from Hibbing, Minnesota.

Baez, whom I was also privileged to see in the past, these days shuns the stage. Instead, the soon to be 84-year-old recently released a book of poetry, “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance: Poems. After quitting touring several years before, she said in a 2023 New York Times piece, “I have been in a state of manic creativity: portrait painting, drawing, making prayer sticks, making a documentary and last but not least, finishing up a book of poetry …”

Baez, of course, wrote about her time with Dylan in the elegiac “Diamonds and Rust.” Her lyrics are both pained and scorching:

Well, you burst on the scene/Already a legend/The unwashed phenomenon/The original vagabond/You strayed into my arms/And there you stayed/Temporarily lost at sea/The Madonna was yours for free/Yes, the girl on the half-shell/Could keep you unharmed

Now I see you standing/With brown leaves falling all around/And snow in your hair/Now you’re smiling out the window/Of that crummy hotel/Over Washington Square/Our breath comes out white clouds/Mingles and hangs in the air/Speaking strictly for me/We both could have died then and there

Now you’re telling me/You’re not nostalgic/Then give me another word for it/You who are so good with words/And at keeping things vague/’Cause I need some of that vagueness now/It’s all come back too clearly/Yes, I loved you dearly/And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust/I’ve already paid

Many people around Dylan paid in various ways as he shattered musical conventions and challenged America politically and socially. He helped move us from the era of the sugary likes of Patti Page (“That Doggie in the Window”) into a time when popular music could be relevant. He brought us poetic so-called story songs that had messages that previously only fans of the likes of Woody Guthrie of the folk scene heard.

His work also could be searingly personal.

One the best scenes in the movie is when he and Baez team up to angrily sing “It Ain’t Me Babe,” firing one of his trademark songs at each other like prizefighters landing blows. The film suggests the song was about his turn away from Baez, plumbing the depths of their anger toward one another. In fact, the real 1964 performance at which they sang the song together was a playful affair in which they mangled the lyrics.

And the song was actually about the loss of his first serious love, Rotolo. While Rotolo and Dylan look to be very much in love in the cover image of his 1963 “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album, the song tells a rather different story:

I’m not the one you want, babe/I’m not the one you need/You say you’re lookin’ for someone/Who’s never weak but always strong/To protect you and defend you/Whether you are right or wrong/Someone to open each and every door

But it ain’t me, babe/No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe/It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe

Go lightly from the ledge, babe/Go lightly on the ground/I’m not the one you want, babe/I’ll only let you down/You say you’re lookin’ for someone/Who’ll promise never to part/Someone to close his eyes for you/Someone to close his heart/Someone to die for you and more

But it ain’t me, babe/No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe/It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe

You say you’re lookin’ for someone/To pick you up each time you fall/To gather flowers constantly/And to come each time you call/And will love you for your life/And nothin’ more

Lyrics like those are the sort that earned Dylan the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. And on that point, the film offers a final bit of distortion. In a screen crawl at the end, it says that Dylan didn’t show up to pick up his prize, implying it was yet another middle-finger he raised to the establishment. In fact, Dylan met with members of the Swedish Academy in a private ceremony the following April, with no media present, at which he received his gold medal and diploma.

And in a Nobel lecture posted on the group’s website, Dylan mentions musical giants who influenced him, such as Buddy Holly and Lead Belly. At length, he discusses three books that made deep marks on him: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Homer’s Odyssey.

“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page,” he said. “And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.'”

For all of its inaccuracies and its fictions, though, the movie does capture something about this cultural titan, one who refuses to go quietly into the night, and is well worth seeing. Just hearing those remarkable songs — as performed so ably by Chalamet — is worth the price of admission. We aren’t likely to hear Dylan perform any of them again live, so this reasonable facsimile will have to do. While flawed, the movie is a fascinating take.

An extraordinary man

Posted on December 29, 2024 by Joe Weber

When might we see the equal of Jimmy Carter again?

By most recent accounts, he was a middling president.

In the latest Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr. ranked 22^nd, sandwiched between Andrew Jackson and William Howard Taft, and three spots below George H.W. Bush (No. 19). Caught up in what The New York Times called a “cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran” and what The Wall Street Journal branded a “listless economy and stubborn inflation, squabbles within his party [and] gridlock in Congress,” our 39th president served just a single term from 1977 to 1981.

But Jimmy Carter was a remarkable man. Morally upright as a Sunday School teacher who was genuinely religious, he was committed to peacemaking and democracy at home and across the world. He was devoted to his wife of 77 years, whom he had met when he was 3 and she was just a day old. And, in all that and more, he demonstrated how there could be room in our politics for the high road.

Despite his failures – and circumstances he could not control, such as the prolonged seizure of hostages by Iran, an Arab oil embargo and domestic stagflation – Carter did log extraordinary achievements that sprang from his personal decency and integrity. A 1946 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who left active service as a lieutenant in 1953 and was a reservist until 1961, he proved to be a global peacemaker, bringing together Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978 to forge a peace treaty between their countries that still endures.

Carter knew all too well the risks of war, especially in the nuclear age. As a submarine officer, he had a small hand in helping to develop the nuclear submarine fleet, working with Adm. Hyman Rickover, known as “the father of the nuclear navy.” Between November 1952 and March 1953, Carter served with the Naval Reactors Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C., aiding “in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels.” He often visited the Hanford Works in Washington State, where plutonium was made, and Idaho, where the Nautilus prototype reactor was being built. He helped build a prototype nuclear reactor at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in New York, according to Rear Adm. (Ret.) Sam Cox, who directs the Naval History and Heritage Command.

The Navy named a nuclear submarine for him. The U.S.S. Jimmy Carter is an advanced Seawolf-class submarine, a hunter-killer designed for special missions.

Because of his knowledge of the field, Carter once helped prevent a nuclear disaster. Carter and his team were called in when a power surge at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada, caused fuel rods to melt in a nuclear reactor, damaging its core.

“Carter and his 22 other team members were separated into teams of three and lowered into the reactor for 90-second intervals to clean the site. It was estimated that a minute-and-a-half was the maximum time humans could be exposed to the levels of radiation present in the area,” Military.com reported. “It was still too much, especially by today’s standards. The future president had radioactive urine for months after the cleanup.”

During his presidency, Carter also signed a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union that restrained nuclear weapons expansion. He formalized diplomatic relations with China. And he drove treaties turning over the Panama Canal to Panama.

At home, he was in some ways a precursor to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. A centrist Democrat, he pushed for deregulation of airlines, railroads and other industries, and established the Energy Department to regulate sources of energy and fund research into alternative sources. As historian Heather Cox Richardson noted, Carter tried make the government more representative of the American people: his domestic policy adviser Stuart Eizenstat said that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”

Of course, the longtime peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, is most remembered now for his post-presidency. He built houses for the poor through Habitat for Humanity, an outfit that was born on an interracial Christian farm about 10 miles from where he grew up. He established the Carter Center to promote peace, fight disease, especially Guinea worm, and to combat social inequality. As a freelance diplomat, he traveled the world to promote democracy and peace and earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

A polymath, Carter wrote more than two dozen books. His memoir, “An Hour Before Daylight,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002. He also held forth on religious themes, poetry and even wrote a children’s story. At least three of his works dealt with the Middle East, where he stirred up a tempest in one of by likening Israel’s policies on the West Bank to South African apartheid.

As a new BusinessWeek bureau chief in the late 1980s, I was fortunate enough to discuss his successes and disappointments about the Middle East with him on a private jet flight on one of his post-presidency humanitarian trips. While Carter’s insights no longer remain with me, my overall impression endures. He was soft-spoken, humble enough to be well aware of his shortcomings, and someone patient enough to put up with a young journalist’s sometimes-naive questions.

As we all know all too well, our politics has changed since Carter’s days.

Some nowadays might see common decency and honesty as failings or at least unhelpful traits in a president. Many, albeit a minority of American voters, in our latest election chose a man notorious for his personal and political defects. There’s no need here to list the many well-documented foibles in a man who, ranking 45^th, dead last, in that historians ranking, makes Carter look like an exceptional success.

Let’s just say the two couldn’t be more polar opposites. The gulf between them in a dozen respects is reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. And that gap is, tragically, a sad statement about America.

Despite the circumstances that did him in politically, Carter set a high bar that only a few presidents and former presidents since have come close to. As The New York Times headlined an editorial memorializing the former president, “America Needs More Jimmy Carters.” We’ll not see his like again, certainly not in the coming four years, and perhaps longer. RIP, Mr. President.

Diminished capacities

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Joe Weber

Biden has slipped, but Trump has plummeted

“History is a merciless judge,” author David Grann wrote. “It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”

Just how kind or merciless history will be on President Joe Biden is unclear, of course. It will take years to properly assess his successes and failures.

Still, presidential history specialists last February ranked Biden as our 14^th best president. He placed a couple spots above Ronald Reagan and a bit down the list from such titans as Lincoln, F.D. Roosevelt, Washington and some others. Former President Barack Obama ranked seventh.

As for Donald J. Trump, based on his 2017-2021 tenure, he placed dead last at number 45.

Of course, this ranking was conducted before Biden’s apparently longstanding infirmities came to be widely known. It came well before his disastrous June 27 debate performance against the man he beat in 2020, his regrettably belated July 22 withdrawal from the campaign, and his Dec. 1 pardon of his son, Hunter.

Historians will have to put those developments, along with the Republican three-branch victory of Nov. 6, into perspective over time. It is, nonetheless, sad that these recent events are casting such a dark shadow on Biden’s tenure. If journalism is the first-rough draft of history, it’s been pretty rough lately on the outgoing president.

How unforgiving? Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal mentions the debate, but expands considerably on Biden’s infirmity, what she calls “the scandal of 2024,” or “the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity,” in a piece headlined “The President Who Wasn’t There.” The columnist thunders that Biden’s disability “won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.”

That didn’t stop Noonan from comparing Biden to Woodrow Wilson, a man who had suffered disabling strokes and whose infirmity was long concealed. She writes that this deception “forever colored Wilson’s legacy and darkened the historical reputation of First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson,” who was believed to have led a conspiracy to hide Wilson’s diminishment. Of course, in the early years of the last century, such deceptions were easier to pull off.

Oddly enough, the February ranking of presidents put Wilson at number 15, just behind Biden. Recall that Wilson created the ill-fated but idealistic League of Nations after World War I. He also presided over ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and laws that prohibited child labor and that mandated an eight-hour workday for railroad workers. And he appointed the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Wilson had a long history of strokes and in 1919 suffered from one that incapacitated him until his term ended in 1921, historians say.

As for Biden, rumblings about his slippage had coursed through the media and Washington since at least last February, when Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s sloppiness with some classified documents noted that the president would “present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur found the president to be confused about the timeline of events and unable to respond to some questions about his time as vice president.

Questions about Biden’s lucidity persisted after that, even as the White House pooh-poohed the worries. Officials endeavored to accommodate what WSJ reporters in a Dec. 19 front-page story called the needs of a diminished leader. “Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted,” a subhed summarized.

Still, history judges a president by more than one year. Biden may yet go down in the record for some stunning contributions to the nation’s health, including physically in the early days of his presidency. As Democratic pundit Donna Brazile wrote in The Hill, Biden’s accomplishments include: winning congressional approval for $4.6 trillion in investments to end the coronavirus pandemic with free vaccinations and treatments; stimulus checks of up to $1,400 for individuals, and other programs, and efforts that helped the economy to create more than 16 million jobs and cut the unemployment rate from 6.3 percent when he took office to 4.2 percent in November.

He also reduced health insurance and prescription drug costs for millions of Americans; made efforts to combat climate change while creating clean-energy jobs and manufacturing jobs, and he cut taxes for middle-class and working-class families and some businesses, while imposing a minimum tax on big corporations and cracking down on wealthy tax cheats. 

Signing the infrastructure bill, 2021; source: Reuters

Biden also signed a bill approving $1.2 trillion in investments to improve America’s roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, ports, waterways and energy systems. His policies reduced illegal crossings on the southern border below the level that held when Trump left office. Biden also signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law to invest $53 billion to create semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the U.S., boosted health care benefits for veterans, issued an executive order to protect access to reproductive health care and appointed 233 federal judges confirmed by the Senate, including Kentanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Those were just the headline achievements that historians may take into account.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to distinguish himself in far less praiseworthy ways. Of course, there are his nominees for administration leadership positions or the Clown Cabinet as we might call it. The fight over the exceptionally unqualified Matt Gaetz (a man with morals akin to Trump’s) is over, but others loom.

Perhaps in an effort to take the spotlight off the extraordinary group, Trump issued a Christmas message that, well, departed significantly from past norms. Here, courtesy of The Intelligencer, is his most memorable text:

For his part, Biden asked Americans to find a “stillness” at the heart of the holiday. He also released an extraordinary video tour of the lavishly decorated White House:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HbZcyx7qKDc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

“Really look at each other,” Biden urged, “not as Democrats or Republicans, not as members of ‘Team Red’ or ‘Team Blue,’ but as who we really are: fellow Americans.”

An anodyne sentiment, perhaps? Maybe. But it’s a holiday-time appeal to our better angels (appropriately enough).

It’s certainly an appeal far more worthy of a president than the absurd, inaccurate and angry blather of a 78-year-old whose diminished capacities have been known for far longer than those of Biden. Sadly, those abilities will only slide further in the coming four years. Is it possible for a president to rank lower than last? We may find out.

Throwing the baby out with …

Posted on December 23, 2024 by Joe Weber

Are our economic problems matters of bad theory or bad practice?

David Ricardo, source: The History of Economic Thought

More than two centuries ago, British economist and Parliament member David Ricardo laid siege to the longstanding notion that nations were better off exporting more than they imported, classical mercantilism. His theory of comparative advantage, instead, became the reigning view. The result: enormous growth in trade and globe-wide enrichment.

Now, some on the right want to scrap that theory. Donald J. Trump would bludgeon trade with tariffs and attempt to boost domestic production by pushing other countries to set up factories in the U.S. And well-schooled critics such as Oren Cass would toss out the Ricardo model altogether.

“The theory works great in the classroom, but in reality it wasn’t just T-shirts that ended up going overseas,” Cass says of the notion that countries should specialize in what they do best, thus enriching us all. “The most sophisticated industries have left too. The United States ran consistent trade surpluses in advanced technology products until China joined the World Trade Organization. In 2002, that surplus flipped to a deficit that in 2023 exceeded $200 billion, with the nation importing more than $3 of advanced tech products for every $2 it exported.”

Let’s kill the old order and bring in the new, as the French once said and he seems to be saying. Then we’ll wind up with, what, a new Napoleon? Perhaps more Napoleons (or Trumps) across the globe?

Yes, China – practicing a form of mercantilism – has enriched itself enormously since the 1980s. Its exports have far exceeded its imports, as it has bested much of the world, first in low-price production and, more recently, in many areas of high-tech. There is good reason now that Elon Musk wants to build an AI center in the country — the country’s brainpower is immense.

And it’s clear that much of U.S. manufacturing has suffered as production of everything from Cass’s T-shirts to cars has grown overseas and in neighboring Mexico and Canada. Jobs in the sector peaked at 19.6 million in mid-1979. They now stand at below 12.9 million. (Is it any wonder that Trump, slamming global trade, won so many votes in dead-factory communities, even if his tariffs are likely to deal another blow to such supporters?)

So, comparative advantage brings curses as well as blessings. Well, duh.

Lots of stuff is cheaper worldwide – and there is much more of it – but there’s no doubt that some countries and sectors pay the cost. Indeed, for all the benefits Chinese mercantilism has brought much of the country – and for all the impoverished Chinese villagers who have been helped – China has penalized millions of its citizens by failing to develop a more import-welcoming consumer economy. Yes, the Chinese approach has eliminated extreme poverty, but per capita GDP there at less than $13,000 remains a far cry from the U.S. level of $86,600. China has also developed exceptional income inequality, even as relative poverty hasn’t disappeared.

Cass, in his early 40s, may not recall that we’ve seen parts of this mercantilist movie before. Free-trade advocate Clayton Yeutter, a Republican who opened world markets for Presidents Reagan and Bush, contended with Japanese trade barriers in the 1980s and ‘90s. Protectionism was rife in the U.S. at the time and the great fear was that Japanese tech would hobble us (and well-heeled Japanese would buy up all our real estate). In fact, our trade deficit with Japan has shrunk and Silicon Valley seems to be keeping us pretty competitive in tech.

So, should the U.S. follow the Chinese model? Should it make more T-shirts, as well as cars, solar panels, etc? Would making iPhones in California (or Michigan) really help us overall? And will the self-styled “tariff man’s” threatened 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico help us and them?

To be sure, Cass has a point that the real-world operation of comparative advantage has problems. But that’s because governments, such as that of China (or as that of tariff-happy Trump) don’t want to let free trade flourish. Instead, they meddle with it, creating all sorts of imbalances. Recall the huge farmer bailouts of Trump’s first term, a consequence of his trade war battles.

But does meddling mean that the theory is off? Does it not, in fact, make the theory of frictionless trade even more useful, more compelling? Is it not the proof that we’re better off overall when comparative advantage is our north star and that most of us suffer when it’s tampered with? Indeed, the problem seems to be less one of economics and more one of politics.

Yes, such trade brings costs – often searing human ones — to high production-cost countries, as they see competitors rise. A friend, Peter Coy of The New York Times, bemoans the withering of trade adjustment assistance in the U.S. , which may in part account for the Trumpian successes. We need a robust system of such aid, he argues, because it “compensates workers, firms, farmers and communities for damages related to trade, such as job losses caused by offshoring or competition from cheap imports. Workers, for example, get supplemental unemployment insurance benefits, job training and help with job search and relocation.”

One could argue that such aid to those displaced by trade is meddling of a different sort. But is aid to one’s citizens in need not one of the more useful functions of government? Has that not been a value since at least the New Deal, the program that saved American capitalism?

Indeed, capitalism by its nature creates winners and losers. Outdated technology goes the way of the buggy whip. That’s the nature of a competitive and innovative system in which all players can leap ahead of others, given capital and brainpower. And countries, including the U.S., need to work hard to keep up.

In his New York Times opinion piece, “What Economists Could Learn From George Costanza,” Cass argues that rigidity in economic circles is what is keeping theorists from developing a successor to Ricardo’s views. “Few things are harder to change than the minds of experts who have staked their reputations on a particular theory,” he holds. And it’s no doubt true, as my old economics prof observed, that economics advances from funeral to funeral.

Still, Ricardo’s revolutionary idea has endured for good reason. One has only to look around the globe and see how billions have been helped by trade to find proof of that. For all his criticisms, Cass doesn’t seem to be offering an alternative explanation for such successes. Perhaps that will come in a forthcoming commentary. Or, perhaps there is none.

“Let’s talk of graces, of worms, and epitaphs”

Posted on December 19, 2024 by Joe Weber

Are we seeing Shakespearean drama in action?

In Richard II, Shakespeare’s famous play, the king is loathed for his self-serving and self-deceptive rule. He wastes money, steals land and kills political rivals.

Just after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, Cornell history professor Rachel Weil drew parallels to the then newly anointed president.

“But Trump seems to be falling into the same traps as Richard II,” she wrote. “He takes the idea that he represents the people literally. Witness his unsubstantiated claims about having really won the popular vote, or the odd assertion in his inaugural speech that ‘for the first time in history we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the People.’’’

Of course, Trump did win the popular vote this time around, garnering 77.3 million votes to Kamala Harris’s 75 million, according to the latest Cook Political Report tally. But was that, as he has claimed, a “massive” mandate and “an unprecedented and powerful mandate?”

Or has he swallowed the fiction of what Weil called a king’s “miraculous” qualities in the play, the “superhuman” nature he deludes himself about? Has Trump accepted nonsense about himself and his role and powers much as Shakespeare’s Richard II did? Trump’s self-image now seems to include even a divine mandate.

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness,” he told his supporters after winning the election.

Messianic self-delusion at work?

Perhaps we should look a bit more closely at his “mandate.” Let’s start with two important numbers: 41 percent and 49.8 percent.

The first figure is Trump’s current approval rating, which is 10 percentage points lower than it was in December 2016, just before he took office the first time. That suggests that nearly six in 10 Americans are onto him (indeed, his rating in the Reuters/Ipsos poll has long hovered at around 40 percent, seemingly his base).

And then there’s the second number, 49.8 percent. That’s the share of the popular vote he got, according to the latest Cook report tally. By contrast, Harris took 48.3 percent, suggesting she was clearly not as well-received, but not with much of a shortfall statistically.

Indeed, it’s clear that fewer than half the voters endorsed Trump. Most preferred Harris or someone else. In what world does that amount to a popular mandate, much less a divinely ordained one?

Still, it must be admitted that Trump’s party won domination of all three branches of government and that he controls the GOP. The party of George Bush the elder and Ronald Reagan is now his. Such eloquent and reasonable statesmen are now history, as is their approach to building national unity.

And much of the nation – including most top elected officials – now are under the thumb of a man claiming heavenly anointment. Richard II redux?

Well, perhaps we should refer both to him and to the courtiers who are catering to his every whim. Some, in fact, may be guiding the often-irrational 78-year-old, Rasputin-like.

Even though we are weeks away from his investiture, the new would-be monarch and his influential acolytes are flexing their muscles. Trump and Elon Musk – which some have called a “shadow president” – this week have used the possibility of a government shutdown to begin a process of gutting the government.

They felt no qualms about embarrassing Speaker Mike Johnson, who had negotiated a bipartisan spending deal. They torpedoed it.

Surely, Trump won’t want a shutdown marring his inauguration. So, we likely will see some sort of deal before then, perhaps imminently.

But does the threat of such a closure reflect what most Americans want? Do the spending cuts threatened in the coming four years reflect popular will? Do most of us want at least $2 trillion in spending cut from a government that spent $6.75 trillion in the latest fiscal year, as Musk has suggested? His Department of Government Efficiency, as the odd entity he co-leads is called, is already foreshadowing its efforts with the destruction of the budget deal.

And where will Trump and Musk find the programs to cut? So-called discretionary spending – the stuff that Congress votes on annually — amounts to about $1.8 trillion, as The Wall Street Journal reported. This includes defense spending, such as buying everything from aircraft carriers to mess-hall meals, as the paper reported, to nondefense programs such as NASA, farm and housing programs, and such.

Will they go after Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – even though Trump promised to not touch them? “The government’s big-ticket items provide healthcare for Americans and money for retirees,” the Journal reported. “Social Security benefits cost the government $1.45 trillion in the most recent fiscal year, according to CBO estimates published this month. Medicare and Medicaid were a combined $1.49 trillion.”

Already, some Republicans are renewing attacks on such programs. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, for instance, recently called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme that’s running out of new investors” and “government dependency at its worst.” Musk called Lee’s comments, in an X thread that Musk reposted, “interesting.”

For some billionaires, of course, programs that help folks of far smaller means are abstractions. If they ever knew hunger or want, they’ve apparently long forgotten that. And they are continuing a longstanding GOP resistance to such government efforts, an ideological battle that dates back to the New Deal.

In a sense, Trumpism isn’t all that new in this respect. It’s just another battle in the historic war between wealthy small-government ideologues and most Americans. With at least 13 billionaires in his proposed Cabinet and top offices, that battle clearly is tilted away from most Americans.

Heather Cox Richardson, source: Maine Public Radio

As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote of laws passed in the New Deal that created Social Security and guaranteed various workers’ rights: “A majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system, but the reworking of the government shocked those who had previously dominated the country. As soon as the Social Security Act passed, opponents set out to destroy it along with the rest of the new system.”

The fight joined back then has long endured and it has involved many of the same demagogic tools. Just look at Trump’s campaign dog-whistles about race, religion and women’s rights. They, along with nativism, seem to be reliable standbys for a would-be right-wing president.

“A coalition of Republican businessmen who hated both business regulation and the taxes that paid for social programs, racists who opposed the idea of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, and religious traditionalists—especially Southern Baptists—who opposed the recognition of women’s equal rights, joined together to fight against the New Deal,” Richardson recounted.

So, Trump has vowed to deliver on the promises he made in his campaign. His tariff vows may rekindle inflation. His opposition to diversity and LGBTQ programs may inhibit rights minorities have fought for. His efforts to destroy the Department of Education may scramble our system of federal grants and advance such goals as destroying academic freedom and pursuits such as critical race theory. And, of course, we may see attacks on longstanding health mandates such as vaccination for childhood diseases.

Will taking such unpopular approaches ultimately do in a Trump Administration and guarantee a return of the Senate and House to Democrats in two years and of the White House in four? Of course, none of us can know that. We can’t know whether the extraordinarily dishonest and often incoherent Trump will deliver on his promises.

But, if he does, his fate could be a less violent replay of Richard II’s. In the play, the king is ousted and his main opponent seizes the crown. In the end, Richard is killed.

Our system, thankfully, provides for elections instead of such ugliness. But in the coming years, we may see either the permanent installation of a GOP minority or a renewed cyclical withering. Much will turn on what the once and future monarch decides.

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber