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.

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.

“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.

Grace in victory, ya’ kiddin’ me?

Posted on December 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

For Donald J. Trump, there is no high road

Nearly five years ago, web publisher Elizabeth Spiers wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “Trump is the ultimate sore winner. Now he’ll seek revenge.” This was after then-President Donald J. Trump was acquitted by the GOP-dominated Senate in his first impeachment.

Might he have been gracious in victory? Might he have extended an olive branch to critics? Might he have even shown a touch of shame, contrition and regret?

Fuggadabout it.

Within 48 hours, Trump fired two witnesses who testified in the case, ordering hotel-chain founder Gordon D. Sondland recalled from his post as the ambassador to the European Union and having Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, a decorated Iraq war veteran on the National Security Council staff, marched out of the White House by security guards. He also ousted Vindman’s brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, from the NSC staff.

Trump’s press secretary declared that those who hurt the president “should pay for” it.

So, is it any surprise that president-elect Trump hasn’t even waited until he assumes office to rain hell on his real and perceived critics? Is it any wonder that he has sued Gannett, The Des Moines Register and a pollster over simply reporting a pre-election Iowa poll that showed him as slightly behind Kamala Harris in the state?

In his mind, the pollster was guilty of “brazen election interference,” according to the suit. Reporting the news, to Trump, is interfering with an election, it seems.

This followed an October suit against CBS News in federal court in Texas, in which Trump alleged that “60 Minutes” engaged in deceptive trade practices — an odd charge — when it aired an interview with Kamala Harris. He objected to editing that he claimed made Harris look better.

“It’s clear that Trump is waging war on the press,” Samantha Barbas, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law told The New York Times. “Trump and his lawyers are going to use any legal claim that they think has a chance of sticking. They’ll cast a wide net to carry out this vendetta.”

So don’t expect graciousness in victory from the once and future president. Vindictiveness and intimidation are his longstanding tropes.

“If somebody attacks him, he attacks them back, he says, ten times as hard,” New York Times reporter Peter Baker said. “He’s not about diplomacy. He’s not about negotiation. He is all about the fight.”

Whether slights are big or small, imagined or real, Trump uses whatever levers of power he has to slash anyone who crosses him or might do so. He appears to take to heart a couple of Niccolò Machiavelli’s pieces of advice: “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both” and “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

How petty can the once and future president be?

He once built a hill in front of a cottage in Scotland whose owner had opposed a Trump golf course and hotel development — so the cottage’s yard flooded whenever it rained.

Beyond just owning a thin skin, Trump has a method to his viciousness. Hitting back hard is pure Trump; it’s something he learned from one of his first lawyers, the late disbarred Joe McCarthy errand boy Roy Cohn. As a cousin of the notorious lawyer said, “Roy Cohn showed him that you can turn around a situation just by ignoring the facts and going after your attacker.”

Trump does that either with legal action or verbal savagery, a powerful weapon when wielded by someone in the White House.

Rex Tillerson, his former secretary of state, was “dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.” Adviser Steve Bannon “cried when he got fired and begged for his job.” Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci was a “highly unstable ‘nut job.’ ” Former assistant Omarosa Manigault was “wacky” and “deranged,” “a lowlife.” Former national security adviser John Bolton was “very publicly terminated.”

Making people pay has long been a key to Trump’s approach. Spiers noted that as a casino operator, he invented fake ethical scandals about people who could have exposed him as a terrible businessman. Recall that he drove his casinos into bankruptcy six times (really, what amount of stupidity or, more likely, greed does it take to bankrupt a gaming house?)

He’s especially nasty toward the media, apparently hoping he can cow critical journalists.

The $16 million settlement he won from ABC parent Disney seems to have invigorated him. In his recent press conference, he referred to ongoing lawsuits he has brought against publisher Simon & Schuster over the rights to recorded interviews he gave to journalist Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Prize board for reaffirming awards it gave to The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia.

“It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press,” Trump said. “Our press is very corrupt. Almost as corrupt as our elections.”

While Disney’s surrender has riled many in the media, what’s more troubling is that it may have been a product of fears that a Trumpian judiciary in Florida and beyond, as well as a Trump-friendly jury in the red state, would have backed the former president up.

A federal judge in the state in July denied Disney’s motion to dismiss Trump’s suit. As The New York Times reported: “A reasonable jury could interpret Stephanopoulos’s statements as defamatory,” Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote, and then added an emphasis in italics. “Stephanopoulos stated ten times that a jury — or juries — had found plaintiff liable for rape.”

Beyond Trump’s concerns, his war on the media could have far-reaching effects for others who share his feelings of victimization. Lee Levine, a retired media lawyer, told The Wall Street Journal that the Disney settlement will embolden some media critics. That could potentially chill news outlets’ handling of sensitive stories, the paper reported. It “will definitely have an impact on news coverage going forward,” Levine said.

“You need a fair press,” Trump also said, striking an heroic pose. “I’m doing this not because I want to. I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to.”

Gimme a break. Trump’s litigiousness should be a lesson to anyone in media who believes that capitulating to him will spare them his ire (take note, owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times).

He will use whatever powers are available to him to muzzle or punish critics in journalism and elsewhere. His choice to head the FBI, Kash Patel, said months before the election that he would use his post “to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

And Trump has made it clear he will use his Justice Department to exact vengeance on political opponents, such as former Rep. Liz Cheney, whom House Republicans want investigated criminally for her role in leading the panel that probed the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. A House subcommittee, echoing Trump’s attacks, recommended the investigation in a recently issued report that suggested she tampered with a witness.

“Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI,’” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network.

Trump’s enemies list is a long one. That’s why some, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, have urged President Biden to issue preemptive pardons to, among others, the entire Jan. 6 House investigative panel.

“You know, when Trump talks about sending to jail people who were on that Jan. 6 committee, that sounds like being a tin-pot dictator,” Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “This is what authoritarianism is all about. It’s what dictatorship is all about…. You do not arrest elected officials who disagree with you.”

Would-be appointee Patel seems to think arrests and worse are appropriate and not only for elected officials, but just rank and file government staffers. In a 2023 book, Patel listed 60 people whom he classified as “members of the executive branch deep state” — a “cabal of unelected tyrants” who posed “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.”

And he has since said that the Trump administration must deal with this “deep state,” be it “criminally or civilly.”

At least one potential target on Patel’s list, former Justice Department public affairs office director Sarah Isgur, argues she would prefer a prosecution to a pardon that would be seen as an affirmation of guilt.

“If we broke the law, we should be charged and convicted,” Isgur wrote in a New York Times opinion piece headlined “I Don’t Want a Pardon from Biden. None of Us Should.” “If we didn’t break the law, we should be willing to show that we trust the fairness of the justice system that so many of us have defended. And we shouldn’t give permission to future presidents to pardon political allies who may commit real crimes on their behalf.”

Certainly, Isgur is taking a high-minded approach. She notes, however, that such prosecutions would likely be unpopular with many Americans, including those who voted for Trump.

“If he wants to prosecute everyone on his list, it’s going to require a lot of law enforcement resources,” she writes. “At a time when much of the American public wants the president to focus on inflation, crime and immigration, voters may not be pleased if drug cartels are a lower priority than prosecuting Liz Cheney for treason.”

Of course, for Trump and his toadies, using taxpayer money and resources to browbeat enemies would likely be cost-free. He wouldn’t be paying the bill — we all would — and he would force his targets – whether well-heeled or not – to spend a lot in their defenses.

As The New York Times reported, Trump famously lost a libel case that he brought against the writer Timothy O’Brien for allegedly understating Trump’s net worth. During the 2016 election, Trump told The Washington Post that it was worth it, even with the loss.

“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said of O’Brien and his book publisher. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

If that’s the sort of thing that makes Trump happy, buckle up. If you’ve watched him over time — or, heck, just visited one of his gaudy hotels — you know that grace is not part of his repertoire.

Kowtowing to a new reality

Posted on December 15, 2024 by Joe Weber

Why ABC’s settlement is a problem for the press and us all

Over the years, when major TV networks have displeased Donald J. Trump, he has been quick to respond.

After moderators on ABC fact-checked his false statements during a presidential candidate debate in September, he called the network “dishonest” and railed against it on Fox. “To be honest they are a news organization, they have to be licensed. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” he said on Fox & Friends.

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Then, he took umbrage at CBS for an editing decision in an interview with Kamala Harris, saying it should lose its broadcast license. And, a few weeks before the general election, he went on his Truth Social to expand his targets to include not only CBS, but also “all other Broadcast Licenses.”

The TV-sensitive Trump’s attacks followed those from as far back as 2017, when he tweeted: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for Country!,” followed by “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not far to public!”

So, now that the once and future president will again wield influence over the ostensibly independent Federal Communications Commission, is it any wonder that ABC has kowtowed to him in agreeing to pay $16 million to settle a defamation suit he brought? Indeed, Trump just named a new chair for the commission, Brendan Carr, a Project 2025 contributor who has said networks should be punished for political bias.

Just how much power Trump, Carr and the FCC will have over the networks is in dispute. The networks don’t need licenses to operate, even though local affiliate stations do.

And, while the White House doesn’t control FCC decisions, it does appoint the five commission members. Surely, the other four will be parrots for Carr, who is already firing shots across the bow. The Republican operative and Trump toady just wrote on X that “broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource — our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest.” As chairman, he added, “the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation.”

Brendan Carr, source: Getty Images via Variety

Moreover, Trump’s Department of Justice will have power over corporate media deals. Recall that in his first term Trump tried to block AT&T’s acquisition of CNN’s owner, Time Warner (though Justice’s antitrust division failed in that effort in court). That potent lever could bode ill for ABC and the other networks.

Even while presidents are somewhat hemmed in by longstanding free speech protections, there’s no doubt that Trump, as president again, can make life very tough for broadcast media. Tom Wheeler, FCC chairman from 2013 to 2017, told The New York Times that Trump’s threats could create a “chilling effect” on how news organizations make editorial calls.

“It is hard to yank a license; it is particularly hard to yank a license on the instruction of the president of the United States,” Wheeler said. “But it is not hard to have an impact on decision making.”

So, ABC’s decision, while alarming to believers in a free press, is not surprising. The case at issue turns on politics, lust and semantics.

Anchor George Stephanopoulos last spring repeatedly referred to Trump as being “liable for rape” after a jury found him liable for “sexual abuse” in a mid-1990s assault on writer E. Jean Carroll. Without her consent, Trump had penetrated Carroll with his finger in an assault in a New York department store dressing room. While Trump objected to the term “rape,” the judge in the case acknowledged that the terms were interchangeable in real-world use, even though they were legally distinct.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

Trump still owes Carroll nearly $90 million, plus interest, in the matter. He was found liable for that because he defamed her, according to two juries. Of course, the litigious mogul is appealing and may be hoping a friendly judiciary — one larded with his appointees — will vindicate him.

The facts, and Kaplan’s comments in a binding ruling, suggest that ABC likely would have had a good case, had it stood its ground and fought. Indeed, had Trump lost the election, it’s hard to see how the network would have bent the knee as it has. But, as president, Trump will just have too much power over it, network executives seem to think.

From a purely financial standpoint, moreover, the $16 million is peanuts compared with what litigating the case would cost. And it’s notable that $15 million will not go directly to Trump, but rather to his future presidential foundation and museum ($1 million goes to legal fees). Notably, neither Stephanopoulos nor the network apologized for the comments, saying only that they “regret” them.

It is a far cry from the $787 million that Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems for defaming the company in its dishonest and incorrect reporting. “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” the company’s lawyer said in discussing the settlement.

It’s a bit surprising, in fact, that Trump didn’t press for more money or to have it go directly into his pockets. But it seems likely that he valued the PR effect and his ability to crow about the deal to his followers even more. He also may not have relished the idea of prolonged litigation that drew still more attention to his longstanding sexual depravity.

Is this all appalling, nonetheless? Unquestionably.

Much as the decisions by the owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to kill editorial page endorsements of Kamala Harris, ABC’s action seems like another case of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.” This is where organizations or individuals facing a tyrannical leader rush to yield in hopes he will not crush them.

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

For those counting on the press to act as a guardrail against Trump’s excesses, the ABC decision seems craven, at best. It’s of a piece with the steady stream of major execs rushing to kiss Trump’s, ahem, ring by jetting off to Mar-a-Lago to dine with him and donate to his inaugural fund. Perhaps the most shameful is the $1 million donation by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.

What’s more, it’s not at all clear that ABC’s choice will make any difference over the coming four years. The notoriously thin-skinned Trump may yet threaten its ability to broadcast the truth when something else offends him.

Sadly, we can be sure that the journalists there will second-guess everything they do now to try to avoid irking the king. That’s the way tyrants work. Self-censorship, authoritarians across the world have found, is the best kind.

With a Trumpist Senate, House and judiciary, the incoming president will have extraordinary power to shape the laws and practices we follow. With decisions such as ABC’s, he may also in effect hold sway over the reporting and discussion of any of his efforts, perverting reports to suit his often distorted view of reality.

Will the media be able any longer to shine a light on the truth? Will more print media fall in line behind the Times, Post and ABC? And just how much of a difference will that make, in any case?

As shown by an election in which a bit over 49 percent of voters ignored or dismissed a ceaseless cascade of troublesome headlines and broadcast stories, the media is far less of a counterweight than it once was or should be. In their thrall to a strongman, far too much of the public — though not quite a majority — simply doesn’t seem to care about facts.

It’s hard to find reason for optimism, for hope that things could change for the better with Trump holding the whip hand at the moment. Still, in our electoral system, little is forever. Enough voters may care about reality that things could change with the midterm elections in a couple years. Certainly, that happened in Trump’s first term and in 2020.

In the end, Trump may have just a couple years to cow networks and intimidate journalists. But, as the ABC decision suggests, a tyrant to whom all kneel can do a lot of damage. Will his loathsome handiwork prove to be lasting? We’ll all have to stay tuned for that.

Echoes of the past

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Joe Weber

Visits to Portugal and Spain suggest a rough road for the U.S.

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona; source: author

“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” an old maxim goes. Are we about to see some such sad, even tragic, poetry again?

I’m reminded of the question after spending a few weeks in Portugal, Spain and Germany, visits that gave me some perspective on the president we will inaugurate next month. Recall that this is the same man who vowed to be a dictator for at least a day.

Germany’s ugly history with a tyrant at the helm need not be repeated here. But, for some readers, the experiences in Portugal and Spain may be unfamiliar. They also may be more instructive.

Consider Portugal, where the “Ponte 25 de Abril” rises high above the Tagus River between Lisbon and Almada. When the bridge was built in 1966, dictator António de Oliveira Salazar named it for himself. After his regime fell in the Carnation Revolution in 1974 and his successor, Marcello José das Neves Alves Caetano, was driven out of the country, Portugal’s new leaders renamed the span for the date of the upheaval.

Ponte 25 de Abril, Almada to Lisbon; source: Wikipedia

Lasting 41 years, the Portuguese dictatorship was the longest-lived one in Europe. It beat the rule of Francisco Franco Bahamonde in neighboring Spain, whose regime lasted 36 years. Spain’s tyranny ended with Franco’s death in 1975.

Their tenures had extraordinarily personal effects on the people of the countries.

Portugal’s Women’s Liberation Movement, 1970s; source: Jacobin

Salazar’s control was pervasive. As reported by Daniel Melo of the University of Lisbon, censors battered the press and propaganda abounded. Women were subjugated, largely confined to their homes, except for attending to education and caring functions, as well as providing for Christian sacraments.

The Roman Catholic Church became a tool for the regime’s cultural vision. “First and foremost of these was the retrieval or (re)invention of so-called popular traditions in keeping with the fundamentalist Catholic mother church,” Melo writes. He points to “the ultranationalist cult and the rationale of mass mobilization in conformist cultural activities, appealing to ruralist and traditionalist nostalgia and/or those already enshrined in mass culture, from the emergence of cultural and entertainment industries.”

Christ-King monument, Almada, Portugal, built 1949-59; source: author

Are there echoes there in the irreligious Donald J. Trump’s cynical and opportunistic use of religion? Does suppression of women’s rights to control their own bodies have a precursor in the approach by Salazar, whose links to women have been much disputed? Does the assault on the media by a thrice-married philandering felon and sexual abuser mirror that of the Portuguese dictator?

As for Franco, his authoritarian rule included similar traditional religious tyranny, as well as the establishment of concentration camps and the execution of political and ideological enemies.

Do such prison camps bring to mind Trump’s plans for deportation camps? Certainly, he wouldn’t get away with executing political opponents, but his intention to persecute them is so serious that the Biden Administration is considering pre-emptive pardons. The current president may have to do so for himself, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris, former Vice President Mike Pence and Sens. Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Rep. Liz Cheney, all of whom Trump has singled out for criticism.

To be sure, there are differences between our system and the unbridled power that the Iberian dictators had. For one, there is still an oversight function exercised at times by the Senate and Congress. And even if both are Trumpist, pressure brought to bear by good journalism can have an effect.

So far, such pressure has driven out one of the proposed nominees for the clown car Cabinet, potential Attorney General candidate Matt Gaetz. This came about even as the Trumpists blocked publication of a report that would have detailed his depravity. By contrast, it’s possible that Defense Department head nominee Pete Hegseth will yet survive similar pressure, though the headwinds against him are strong.

But the clown-in-chief’s selection of such bozos suggests just how erratic and problematic governance will be in the coming four years. No doubt, he’ll find others – perhaps more dangerously capable ones, such as Gaetz replacement Pam Bondi and possible Hegseth successor Ron DeSantis – to do his destructive bidding. Their efforts may amount to a reversal of the role of government, as eloquently described by historian Heather Cox Richardson, who points to Trump’s promises “to reject Biden’s economic vision and resurrect the system of the years before 2021 in which a few individuals could amass as much wealth as possible.”

“The change in ideology is clear from Trump’s cabinet picks,” Richardson writes. “While the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million, Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report noted, a week ago she estimated the worth of Trump’s roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries.”

Are such folks going to make life better for ordinary Americans? Do they have even the remotest connection to the working-class folks who elected their leader?

As Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan noted, “the exotic cabinet picks that veer from ‘that’s a stretch’ to ‘that’s insane.’ The more exotic nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth at Defense, Kash Patel at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mehmet Oz at Medicare and Medicaid Services—don’t have backgrounds that fit the jobs. Taken together they look like people who want to blow things up.”

Just give some thought to what The New Yorker had to say about Kennedy, a man who is raving proof of the theory of thinning bloodlines. “Kennedy has indicated that he intends to reëxamine safety data for approved vaccines, advise municipalities not to add fluoride to their water supply, halt infectious-disease research at the N.I.H. and fire six hundred of its employees, and reverse the F.D.A.’s ‘aggressive suppression’ of, among other things, discredited COVID remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine,” the magazine reported.

Source: Monte Wolverton & Columbus Dispatch

“Earlier this year, Kennedy said that he would seek to prosecute medical journals if they didn’t ‘start publishing real science.’ (The Lancet, one of the alleged offenders, recently published a study showing that vaccines have saved more than a hundred and fifty million lives in the past half century, or about six lives a minute.),” The New Yorker continued. “Amid the rising threat of bird flu—this month, a teen-ager in Canada was infected and hospitalized in critical condition—Kennedy has suggested that we should relax restrictions on the sale of raw milk, which, because it is unpasteurized, can potentially spread the virus.

“The pro-Trump editorial board of the New York Post, which met with Kennedy last year, wrote that his views amounted to a ‘head-scratching spaghetti of . . . warped conspiracy theories,’ and concluded that ‘he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.’ Kennedy has insinuated that H.I.V. isn’t the cause of aids, that Wi-Fi induces ‘leaky brain,’ that chemicals in the water are responsible for ‘sexual dysphoria,’ and that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates led a cartel to prolong the covid pandemic and ‘amplify its mortal effects in order to promote their mischievous inoculations.’”

Even lesser Cabinet picks, such as likely Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick of the Cantor Fitzgerald firm must give one pause. He made his rep and his billions pitching shell companies – akin to those valueless penny stock investments that ripped off people decades ago in Colorado. As The Wall Street Journal noted, such “deals made money for Cantor, but many worked out badly for ordinary investors.”

Of course, for the felon-in-chief, someone such as Lutnick is a bird of a feather. Recall that Trump paid a $2 million fine for misusing charitable funds. And remember how his six business bankruptcies screwed over many ordinary folks. Trump is still on the hook for $88.3 million, plus interest, for his assault of E. Jean Carroll.

Portugal, Spain and, of course, Germany survived their tyrannical leaders, though it took a world war and revolutions to do so. The work of brilliant artists, such as architect Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, endured during their terms, even though the Sagrada Familia was damaged during the Spanish Civil War. Such countries emerged as stronger democracies.

But it took decades for them to recover from the dictators who ran them. As we hear so many rhymes of the past today, what will be the fate of the U.S.? Trump will disappear in time, but how much damage can he and his minions do?