No, Trump Is NOT Acting In The Best Interest Of Americans-- Nor Will He Ever

OK... What Now? by Nancy Ohanian

Last night we took a brief look-- almost in passing-- at Amy Goodman's important interview this week with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. I'd like to look at his remarks with the seriousness they're due. He started by reminding us that "In the 2008 crisis, Rahm Emanuel, who was the chief of staff of Obama, said, 'You shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste.'" We saw yesterday how the Trumpist Regime is using the current crisis to advance it's extremist right-wing agenda. Stiglitz continued that the moderate Obama adminsistration "did let that crisis go to waste. We needed to reform our financial system. We needed to reform our economy. And we didn’t. The money went to the big banks, and we didn’t get the money to the people who really needed it. So, the question is, as your very-- as your excellent clip from Naomi Klein said, 'What will we do with this crisis? Will this reinforce the ugly tendencies we’ve had for growing inequality, for corporate welfare, or will it actually succeed in reforming our economy?' You know, it’s remarkable. Just a little while ago, people said we couldn’t afford this program helping college students with immense debt, or we couldn’t afford providing healthcare for everyone. And all of a sudden, the president is talking about a $1 trillion, $2 trillion bailout. We always could have afforded these things. It was just our prioritization was wrong."

Stiglitz is a fan of the talk around DC-- everywhere but in Pelosi's office-- of "sending checks to everyone. I think the amounts that they’re talking about are inadequate, and it’s not just a one-time thing. If, as many epidemiologists say, this is going to last for several months, there will have to be a second and third and fourth... If we don’t do that, people whose income is collapsed, people who are left unemployed-- remember, we have the worst unemployment system of any of the advanced countries-- all these people who are not going to be able to pay their bills, and we’ll have a cascade of problems. And while it’s a good thing that the Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to stop evictions and foreclosures, it doesn’t apply to the private sector banks. And their evictions and foreclosures may well go on. And that’s where most of the evictions and foreclosures will occur. So we need to get that money into the system, and we need to get the money to ordinary individuals."

Stiglitz, like all progressive economists took issue with the corporate bailouts the Trumpists are planning, particularly "giving money to the airlines or the cruise ships... [A]irlines had a huge bonanza from the tax bill of 2017. And rather than use that money to build up buffers in times of emergency, they had billions and billions of share buybacks. So, if we give them money, we have to make sure that they satisfy certain conditions, conditions corresponding to the environment, to governance, to labor. And we need warrants. That’s a way of making sure that the American taxpayer is protected against the risk. And then there are whole set of things that the bailout-- that the package doesn’t address. Our state and localities are going to be facing a very difficult time. Their revenues are plummeting. They don’t have the luxury of running deficits. Most of them have what are called balanced budget frameworks. So, if their revenues go down, there’s going to be a cutback in education, in health, in the basic ingredients of making-- that ordinary people need so much. So, a higher priority than bailing out the cruise ship companies is helping the states and localities. So we need a massive revenue-sharing program between the states and localities."

He continued that "the Trump proposal is another instance of trickle-down economics-- give money to the corporations, and maybe, maybe, it will trickle down to ordinary citizens. And we know from the past it’s not going to happen. The 2017 tax bill did not lead to more investment, did not lead to significantly higher wages. It led to bigger-- almost a trillion dollars of share buybacks... [W]e need is a bottoms-up approach... if you give money to these industries, they aren’t going to necessarily behave well. And you see that so clearly in the fight that the big companies fought against paid sick leave. And let me say why that’s really important. It’s not just helping the workers; it’s helping all of us, because if they don’t get sick leave, they’re going to go to work. And if they go to work, it will help transmit the disease. So, we need a system that people can say, 'If I’m sick, I don’t need to go to work.' And the decision of the Trump administration to fight having universal sick leave is another example of their contributing to the spread of the virus and making the pandemic all the worse."

We created economy without resilience. I illustrate that by the cars today that don’t have spare tires. You save a little money in not having a spare tire. The fact is that when you get the flat tire, you realize what a mistake that was. Not having a spare tire makes-- in short run, it looks like you’ve saved a little money; in the long run, you really suffer. And we’ve created a whole economic system that is extraordinarily fragile-- just-in-time production with no inventories. And as we’ve created this system, where you try to squeeze every ounce out of the-- of waste out of the system, you’ve also squeezed ordinary workers. And that is what’s contributed to this growing inequality. And those two are the same-- you know, different sides of the same coin.

So, our growing inequality and our increased fragility are issues that-- hopefully, the lessons that we learn from this crisis is we need to construct a different kind of capitalism, a different kind of economy, that I call in my book “progressive capitalism,” but it recognizes that the market doesn’t work very well in addressing the major problems our society faces-- resilience, inequality, climate change, you name it. They haven’t done a good job on it.

...Why don’t these people at the very top say, “Well, at this moment of crisis, we’re all in it together. I’m going to cut off my multimillion-dollar pay. I’m going to go make a major sacrifice, and I’m going to give everybody paid sick leave, paid family leave. I’m going to show that from the top down. And, of course, I hope that you will be equally generous”? But it should start from the top. And that’s what’s so bad about both the administration and the example that you just gave. Leadership should start from the top by example. And obviously, we’re not getting that in this country.

...Because of the devastation of our administration, of our government, that has occurred in recent years-- you know, they disbanded the White House pandemic task force; they defunded the Centers for Disease Control, which is the basis of getting us information and developing our response to a crisis like this-- we are less able to respond. And that means it’s almost a fantasy to believe that we can get checks out in two weeks.

That’s why some of the other things I talked about are so important. We have to make it absolutely clear that nobody is going to be evicted, there’s going to be no foreclosure, not only on the part of the government, but on the part of the banks, landlords. People can’t have their utilities cut off, because those checks won’t be there, and there’s a lot of Americans living on the edge. Data I talk about it in my book about the fraction of the population, a very large fraction of the population, that has reserves of less than $500 or $1,000. They’re living from paycheck to paycheck. And right now there are no paychecks. So, this inability to respond is going to be a major problem.

And then the other point that you made has gotten a lot of attention more recently, that even companies that have said that they have sick leave policy, when employees ask for the sick leave, they get punished. And so, we have to set up administrative mechanisms that say, “We will hold the companies that don’t grant their workers these benefits-- we’re going to hold him accountable.” Of course, with the president saying, “I’m not responsible,” you might ask, “What does that mean?” But what that means is that there needs to be significant fines on any company that deprives any worker of his basic rights, including the right to sick leave.





The point that this crisis makes clear is that we’re all in it together. The virus doesn’t discriminate. Just like the virus doesn’t have a nationality, the virus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality, of race, of religion. And so we’re all in this together. So this is a moment-- it should be a moment of national unity.

And as Naomi pointed out, there are two directions we can go. We could either exacerbate the divisions, or we can say there’s another direction. One of the reasons I wrote my book, People, Power and Profits, on progressive capitalism, was to lay out that alternative agenda, to make it clear that we-- there are a lot of ideas about how to transform our society into the kind of society that deals with the problems that we’re facing-- the problem of inequality, climate change, the moral turpitude that we’ve seen, so pervasive in the financial sector, Dieselgate, in the drug companies, in the food companies. There is an alternative. And so I actually think we have the ideas with which to respond. And they’ve been articulated in the primary contest, many of these critical ideas.

So, my hope is that as Americans realize how badly things have gone, how the kind-- that this crisis, we didn’t turn to the private sector to solve it. We turned to the government. We realize that we have to do this collectively, that if we’re all on our own, it won’t work. The private sector did not provide the masks, did not provide the tests on its own. And a failed government-- and the Trump administration is a failed government-- didn’t work. But there is a different kind of government that can work, and we’ve seen that in a number of countries, where things are going much better. So, we can see that if we pull together, there is an alternative, and one which will protect us against this disease, but also-- also-- can create a society with greater shared prosperity and address the climate crisis.

...[T]he stock market reflects investors’ expectations about what is going to be happening in years to come. And when Trump became the president and gave this huge tax cut to the corporations, they celebrated. They had a big party. And they focused on the short term, not the long term, not the risks that Trump represented to our economy, to our world. They celebrated the additional money they had in the pocket. And that meant the stock market went way up. It was a shortsighted perspective.

Now that optimism has turned, has flipped into extreme pessimism. They know that the president is incompetent. They know that this is beyond the capabilities of the administration. We’ve seen this incompetence in the areas of testing and the response to the coronavirus. And quite frankly, they’re very worried, and rightly so, as the economy goes down. And one of the things about the stock market is it’s very risk-averse. It always thinks about, when things go bad, the worst possible scenario, just like when things are good, they think about the party going on forever and ever, just like they did before the crisis of 2008. So, what we’re seeing now is, as they focus on the worst-case scenarios, there’s a flight out of the stock market. And interestingly, there was a flight out of the bond market yesterday. People want cash. They’re not sure what’s going to happen to the market. And cash gives them a little bit more security than anything else they can have... here will be follow-on effects from the collapse of the stock market. But the stock market is reflecting a deeper problem. You know, if you go back to the Great Depression, the stock market helped bring on the Great Depression, but the stock market was a reflection of some deeper problems that our economy was facing. So it was both cause and consequence. The same thing is true now. The stock market is going down because the realization that the economy is going to be very constrained. People are not going to work. Businesses are shutting down. And at this point, to a large extent, this stock market is reflecting the economic reality that things are not going well.

But going forward, the fact that so much wealth has been destroyed on people’s balance sheet, people-- retirement accounts have been wiped out-- that will mean that when the economy recovers, when the disease gets under control, people may be not in position to spend in the way that they were before. And so, it could help prolong the economic downturn, unless we take appropriate measures.

And the kind of measures that the Trump administration has proposed are obviously not the right kinds of measures. Let me illustrate. He began by saying, “We ought to have a payroll tax cut.” A payroll tax cut isn’t going to get money into individuals’ pockets. It’s going to put in jeopardy the Social Security program, be underfunded. And so it’s not going to make people more confident about the future. It’s not going to allow them to spend. It just increases the potential of undermining our social safety net, particularly for our elderly. So, it will be undermining the fiber of our economy. So, that’s an example of the wrong kind of economic policy. It doesn’t help now, and it really hurts going forward.

...[W]e are facing a real problem, the spread of disease. Epidemiologists, anybody who understands epidemiology, would have realized two months ago that there was a great risk. And obviously Trump didn’t. He’s not surrounding himself with anybody with the competence to be able to do that. And that’s why he ignored the warnings.

But you don’t have to shut down an economy to bring it under control. Singapore has provided as a very good example where their economy has continued. They do testing. They do tracing. Whenever there’s a source of contagion, they identify it and make sure it’s contained, quarantined. So they’ve shown that you can bring the disease under control without shutting down the economy.

Now, to the extent that you need to restrain the economy to reduce contact, one can-- one needs to address the issue of how are ordinary people going to survive. You know, it’s one thing for a well-off hedge fund to say, “Oh, shut down the economy. I have millions, maybe billions, in my bank account. I’m not gonna worry.” But for ordinary Americans, who have $500 or less in their bank account, no paycheck coming in puts them at great risks. So, I think the answer to that is this proposal of sending everybody a $2,000 check-- the $1,000 is not going to be adequate-- suspending all evictions, suspending all foreclosure, making sure that the credit card companies don’t charge the usury rates that they’ve been charging-- say, going during the period of this pandemic, you can’t charge more than maybe 3, 5% interest rate; after all, the T-bill rate is down to zero-- a suspension of student interest-- interest on student loans. We will have to respond to the exigency, the crisis of the moment, in ways that make sure that those who are the restaurant workers, those who are low-income workers, wherever the sector they’re in, can survive with dignity and don’t have to be excessively stressed by how they’re going to live.

Yesterday, in an essay for The Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This, Adam Serwer showed exactly were responsibility for the virulence of the pandemic in the U.S. lies. Trump, he wrote, "is a menace to public health...The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity... [S]oon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest."

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And-- we’re-- we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s-- going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.

Except Trump was not preparing. He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time. In February, while Trump was lying to the public about being “close to a vaccine” and that “cases were going to be down to zero,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier was telling reporters that Americans should get ready for “significant disruption to our lives.” The day after Trump told the public that “it will go away,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that “we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now." Trump wasn’t trying to maintain firm resolve in the face of a crisis. He was lying to the public about the dangers it was facing in order to preserve his public standing.

Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond. Trump has dealt with the pandemic with all the competence you would expect from someone whose main experience is pretending to be a tough businessman on television. The administration failed to ramp up testing capacity in time to determine the scope of infections, while lying to the public that “millions of tests” were available; it failed to mobilize federal resources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Disaster Medical System, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump declared a state of emergency only on March 13, reportedly concerned that doing so earlier “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” As of Tuesday, according to the New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers was “still awaiting orders.”

In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.

Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.

Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.

The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.

A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”

Trump and the conservative-media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told the Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”

Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgement that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.

It’s true that the media often make mistakes; they are, after all, made up of human beings. Media conventions can be subverted, facts can be misunderstood or misreported, sources can mislead, reporters can succumb to confirmation bias, and editors can fail to see the big picture. For the most part, though, these outlets are trying their best to inform the public.

Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president. Many conservatives don’t distrust the mainstream media because they are biased; they distrust the media because the media do not tell them what they want to hear, and their own outlets have trained them to believe that the truth can only be exactly what they want to hear.

Nor can mainstream media bias explain why many Trumpist media outlets, supposedly so much more committed to the truth than their mainstream counterparts, consciously endangered their audience by disregarding and dismissing public-health warnings. Fox News told its audience that the coronavirus was a minor problem their heroic leader was quickly resolving, while quietly having its staff follow the very precautions its hosts were ridiculing on air. The mainstream press didn’t force Fox News to do that.

The coronavirus pandemic provides a rigorous case study in the priorities of most of the conservative press: Faced with a choice between informing their own audiences about dire threats to public health, and propping up a Republican president, they chose the latter, because informing the public is not their job. The job of outlets like Fox News is to ensure that the conservative masses believe that their leader is infallible, even if it causes them tremendous personal harm.

As cases began flooding into hospitals and medical facilities all over the country, the president shifted his tone, finally recognizing the reality of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that threatens both the health and livelihoods of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump declared that “this is a pandemic,” and that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.

Predictably, Trump drew praise from some cable-news personalities for doing a passable job of portraying a president on television, even as the administration’s failures continued to exacerbate the personal and economic toll of the pandemic. This is somewhat understandable; Americans want to believe that their leaders are competent, engaged, and concerned about their well-being. Recognizing that the presidency is occupied by an incompetent narcissist whose major life accomplishment is parlaying an inherited fortune into reality-show celebrity is rather less comforting, but it is the world we live in.

Yet the incentives for the president and the conservative media have not changed. All that has changed is that it is now in the president’s personal and political interest to cushion the terrible impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a positive development as far as it goes, in that, for the moment, the national interest and Trump’s interests are one and the same. But Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality persists, and where maintaining the image of the infallible leader conflicts with the needs of Americans affected by the pandemic, the former will take precedence. The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.

Having failed to will the coronavirus pandemic into nonexistence, the president, his party, and his propaganda machine will seek to rewrite history to render the false impression that Trump was aware of the threat of the coronavirus pandemic all along, and that he acted decisively to address it. The truth is that, in the weeks and months Trump and the conservative press were busy pumping stocks, juking stats, and misleading the public, valuable time to prepare for the pandemic was lost. Americans, both those who get sick and those whose workplaces and businesses will close as a result, will suffer dearly.

A global pandemic would have been a challenge for any administration, for any government. But the scale of this tragedy was not inevitable. America’s shuttered storefronts, overflowing emergency rooms, and shattered families are the toxic fruit of a political culture in which Donald Trump’s image, as the avatar of the will of the people, matters more than actual people do.

Barrons just reported that "Goldman Sachs is now projecting a massive U.S. economic contraction in the second quarter of the year. The bank is forecasting a 24% decline in economic activity next quarter, compared to their previous forecast for a 5% decline. That’s because U.S. economic data (specifically manufacturing data) have already started to miss economist estimates, even before Americans started to stay home to avoid spreading the coronavirus... If Goldman’s economists are right, that means the U.S. is approaching the sharpest single-quarter decline in gross domestic product since the U.S. started measuring GDP in its current form." And, apparently, Trump's p.r. approach is working-- at least for now. Believe it or not, 55% of respondents approve of Trump’s management of response to the pandemic, while just 43% are savvy enough to disapprove.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

Writing for the New York Times yesterday, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch noted that "the Ukraine scandal now unfolding in congressional impeachment hearings has at its core a Shakespearean twist: President Trump, abetted by his paladins of spin, has trapped himself in an alternate universe. To undermine the well-established fact that Russia corrupted the 2016 vote to help him win, Mr. Trump and his allies have tried to build a fiction that pins those crimes on Ukraine. In so doing, he has confirmed our darkest fears. The president’s bid to solicit foreign help to impugn a domestic political rival in 2019 should wipe away any doubts about his willingness to do the same with Russian help in 2016. Mr. Trump and his enablers-- Rudolph Giuliani foremost among them-- have scrambled all year to do two deeds at once. They want to besmirch Joe Biden, without foundation, for supposedly using his office as vice president to protect his son Hunter, who served until recently on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. And they want to reinvent what happened in 2016 so as to switch the blame for the election meddling from Moscow to Kyiv."

There's may be room to argue that William Barr is the foremost and most toxic of Trump's enablers, but there's no need to quibble at this point. The Wall Street Journal's-- formally Ronald Reagan's-- Peggy Noonan barked-- not without a tinge of regret-- "Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they will assert the president violated. What was said consistently undermined Mr. Trump’s case, but more deadly was what has never been said. In the two months since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry was under way and the two weeks since the Intelligence Committee’s public hearings began, no one, even in the White House, has said anything like, 'He wouldn’t do that!' or 'That would be so unlike him.' His best friends know he would do it and it’s exactly like him."

Wisely, Adam Serwer, wants to make sure everyone knows that Trump's crime against America-- his offense-- is abusing his power to stay in office, not disputing Ukraine policy. "Republicans and Trump defenders," he wrote, "have sought to cast the impeachment inquiry as an effort to criminalize a policy dispute. Trump’s attempt to coerce a foreign country to frame a political rival was 'inappropriate, misguided foreign policy,' in the words of the Texas Republican Will Hurd, but he insisted he had 'not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion.'" But these kinds of weak arguments "obscure the core reason for the impeachment inquiry, which is that the Trump administration was engaged in a conspiracy against American democracy. Fearing that the 2016 election was a fluke in which Trump prevailed only because of a successful Russian hacking and disinformation campaign, and a last-minute intervention on Trump’s behalf by the very national-security state Trump defenders supposedly loathe, Trump and his advisers sought to rig the 2020 election by forcing a foreign country to implicate the then-Democratic front-runner in a crime that did not take place. If the American people could not be trusted to choose Trump on their own, Trump would use his official powers to make the choice for them."

It was, in short, a conspiracy by Trump and his advisers to keep themselves in power, the exact scenario for which the Framers of the Constitution devised the impeachment clause. This scheme was carried out by Trump-appointed officials, and by the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, running a corrupt back channel aimed at, in his words, “meddling in an investigation.” And it came very close to succeeding. As Brian Beutler writes, “Had the whole scheme not come to light in a whistleblower complaint, and Trump not released his hold on aid to Ukraine, we might have awaken [sic] one morning to a blaring CNN exclusive about international corruption allegations against the Democratic presidential frontrunner and his party.”

As the Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified Wednesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.” And as the U.S. official David Holmes told the House Intelligence Committee, Sondland had told him that Trump was merely concerned about “‘big stuff’ that benefits the president, like the, quote-unquote, ‘Biden investigation’ that Mr. Giuliani was pushing.”

This point is crucial. Trump was not concerned about “corruption” in Ukraine-- his own Pentagon and State Department had certified that Ukraine had taken sufficient steps to root out corruption. Nor was Trump particularly interested in an actual investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden-- what he wanted was a public accusation that he could use to cripple a political rival’s aspirations. Trump was not defying the bipartisan war lobby in an effort to extricate the U.S. from foreign entanglements, and he was not engaged in a dispute over policy with unelected bureaucrats pursuing their own agenda, because he was fundamentally uninterested in the policy in question, except in that it might be exploited to benefit him personally.

Trump saw an opportunity to strong-arm a weaker country into helping him win reelection, he abused his presidential authority to coerce it into doing so, and then he and his advisers sought to hide what they had done in order to maximize the public impact of the conspiracy. This plot, spearheaded by Giuliani, had already drawn credulous coverage from sympathetic reporters, and would likely have succeeded had the anonymous whistle-blower not registered a complaint exposing the scheme on September 9, which forced the Trump administration to release the aid to Ukraine on September 11.

...The impeachment inquiry has revealed the president’s personal corruption, but it has uncovered a more abstract one as well. The broken reputations of weak, conniving men litter the Trump era like corpses on a Civil War battlefield. Each of them believed, as some Trump officials currently do, that the president’s racism and corruption might be bent toward legitimate ends, and each of them has paid the price for his folly.

In only one sense have they succeeded: The president’s economic populism and his promises not to destroy the welfare state have been replaced with the traditional Republican agenda of providing low taxes for the wealthy, and freeing corporations from regulations designed to protect the public from their greed. But as the impeachment inquiry shows, it is Trump who has bent the establishment to his will, turning the party of Lincoln into little more than a subsidiary of the Trump Organization, with no higher purpose than executing the president’s corrupt schemes and shielding him from the potential consequences.

The rest of the country, however, should not lose sight of why the president is being impeached, and it is not because of a good-faith dispute over Ukraine policy. Trump and his advisers conspired to rig the 2020 election on his behalf, scheming to defraud the American people of a free and fair election. A genuine republic cannot survive chief executives who utilize their powers to make anyone who might challenge their authority into a criminal by extorting weaker entities into leveling false charges at their political rivals. Indeed, the republic’s Founders foresaw such a circumstance, and created the impeachment clause as a last resort against it. The high crime that the president has committed is not against Ukraine, but against America.

This may have little meaning to the minority of Americans who have decided that Trump is the only legitimate vessel of popular will, and that the only legitimate election is one that ends with Trump’s victory. But it matters to everyone else.

John Kruse is an M.D., a Ph.D., a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist and the author of the book, Recognizing Adult ADHD: What Donald Trump Can Teach Us About Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. With 25 years of psychiatry experience, Dr. Kruse specializes in treating adults with ADHD. Recently he noted that the book by Anonymous, A Warning, describes "wild pronouncements the president had made on Twitter," how he "tunes out intelligence and national security briefings," "is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information," and careens "from one self-inflicted crisis to the next." Kruse delineates 3 signs that Trump has undiagnosed ADHD, which is behind much of his chaotic, confusing, and choleric behavior:

1- Impulsivity: Tweets that compound legal troubles, exacerbate tensions with adversaries, and alienate allies.
2- Inattention: Tuning out information regarding intelligence and security briefings and not learning what the constitution says or means.
3- Hyperactivity: Walking around at summits, debates, and press briefings when others remain seated.

No Men-- Especially No Men In Public Office-- Should Ever Think They Are "Untouchable" When It Comes To Workplace Sexual Harassment

-by Valley Girl

I wrote an email to Howie a few days back saying in part "I totally agreed with your tweet. This is what leadership should be about. It seems that they are not willing to name names because it will hurt their own careers. Howie, you have a lot of connections. Is there any way you could winkle this information out of someone? Get them to name even a few names? My gut feeling is that once even a few names are mentioned, then the floodgates will open."

Howie asked me to do a guest post. I’ve been working on that. Getting into the weeds, as I usually do. I started checking out Barbara Comstock (R-VA), who I didn’t know anything about before, but who now seems to have little record of bravery of any sort. I’ve compiled quite a dossier on her.

And, reminding myself of the details of Jackie Speirs’ history-- 1978 including when she went, as a congressional aide to Leo Ryan, to Jonestown, Guyana. By the end of the trip, Ryan was dead-- the first and only congressman to be assassinated in office-- along with three journalists and one cult defector. Speier and nine others had been shot and left for dead at a remote airstrip; they waited 22 hours for help to arrive.

Yes, she does have a solid history of bravery, courage, and public service. Watch this for context as to what Howie was talking about-- a House hearing:



Also note that this video above leaves out something: via CNN: During the hearing to review the House's sexual harassment policies, Comstock said it was "important that we name names."... exactly what Howie challenged her to do in his tweet.

And, also from the same CNN link, note this, if you follow the link-- "Speier, a Democrat who has gone public with her own allegations of sexual assault while she served as a Hill aide decades ago, testified before the panel Tuesday that two currently sitting members of Congress-- one Democrat, one Republican-- have 'engaged in sexual harassment' but have not yet been reviewed." NO, CNN is wrong on this quote. Speier actually says: two members… one Democrat, one Republican, who have been subject to review, or not have been subject to review, who have engaged in sexual harassment.

Fast forward with the post I’ve been working one-- I’m on EST, so I missed this news by several hours, until I woke up this morning. And ended up ditching most of what I’d already written. Note again Speier’s actual comment above.

The Buzz Feed story blows the lid off one of these two-- John Conyers. Title and subtitle: She Said A Powerful Congressman Harassed Her. Here’s Why You Didn’t Hear Her Story. "When you make private settlements, it doesn’t warn the next woman or the next person going into that situation."

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former employee who alleged she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”

Documents from the complaint obtained by BuzzFeed News include four signed affidavits, three of which are notarized, from former staff members who allege that Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sexual favors, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public. Four people involved with the case verified the documents are authentic.

And the documents also reveal the secret mechanism by which Congress has kept an unknown number of sexual harassment allegations secret: a grinding, closely held process that left the alleged victim feeling, she told BuzzFeed News, that she had no option other than to stay quiet and accept a settlement offered to her.

“I was basically blackballed. There was nowhere I could go,” she said in a phone interview. BuzzFeed News is withholding the woman’s name at her request because she said she fears retribution.

The woman who settled with Conyers launched the complaint with the Office of Compliance in 2014, alleging she was fired for refusing his sexual advances, and ended up facing a daunting process that ended with a confidentiality agreement in exchange for a settlement of more than $27,000. Her settlement, however, came from Conyers’ office budget rather than the designated fund for settlements.

In this case, one of Conyers’ former employees was offered a settlement, in exchange for her silence, that would be paid out of Conyers’ taxpayer-funded office budget. His office would “rehire” the woman as a “temporary employee” despite her being directed not to come into the office or do any actual work, according to the document. The complainant would receive a total payment of $27,111.75 over the three months, after which point she would be removed from the payroll, according to the document.

The process was “disgusting,” said Matthew Peterson, who worked as a law clerk representing the complainant, and who listed as a signatory to some of the documents.

“It is a designed cover-up,” said Peterson, who declined to discuss details of the case but agreed to characterize it in general terms. “You feel like they were betrayed by their government just for coming forward. It’s like being abused twice.”

Two staffers alleged in their signed affidavits that Conyers used congressional resources to fly in women they believed he was having affairs with. Another said she was tasked with driving women to and from Conyers’ apartment and hotel rooms.

In her complaint, the former employee said Conyers repeatedly asked her for sexual favors and often asked her to join him in a hotel room. On one occasion, she alleges that Conyers asked her to work out of his room for the evening, but when she arrived the congressman started talking about his sexual desires. She alleged he then told her she needed to “touch it,” in reference to his penis, or find him a woman who would meet his sexual demands.

She alleged Conyers made her work nights, evenings, and holidays to keep him company.

In another incident, the former employee alleged the congressman insisted she stay in his room while they traveled together for a fundraising event. When she told him that she would not stay with him, she alleged he told her to “just cuddle up with me and caress me before you go.”

“Rep. Conyers strongly postulated that the performing of personal service or favors would be looked upon favorably and lead to salary increases or promotions,” the former employee said in the documents.

Three other staff members provided affidavits submitted to the Office Of Compliance that outlined a pattern of behavior from Conyers that included touching the woman in a sexual manner and growing angry when she brought her husband around.

One affidavit from a former female employee states that she was tasked with flying in women for the congressman. “One of my duties while working for Rep. Conyers was to keep a list of women that I assumed he was having affairs with and call them at his request and, if necessary, have them flown in using Congressional resources,” said her affidavit. (A second staffer alleged in an interview that Conyers used taxpayer resources to fly women to him.)

The employee said in her affidavit that Conyers also made sexual advances toward her: “I was driving the Congressman in my personal car and was resting my hand on the stick shift. Rep. Conyers reached over and began to caress my hand in a sexual manner.”

The woman said she told Conyers she was married and not interested in pursuing a sexual relationship, according to the affidavit. She said she was told many times by constituents that it was well-known that Conyers had sexual relationships with his staff, and said she and other female staffers felt this undermined their credibility.

“I am personally aware of several women who have experienced the same or similar sexual advances made towards them by Rep[.] John Conyers,” she said in her affidavit.

A male employee wrote that he witnessed Rep. Conyers rub the legs and other body parts of the complainant “in what appeared to be a sexual manner” and saw the congressman rub and touch other women “in an inappropriate manner.” The employee said he confronted Conyers about this behavior.

“Rep. Conyers said he needed to be ‘more careful’ because bad publicity would not be helpful as he runs for re-election. He ended the conversation with me by saying he would ‘work on’ his behavior,” the male staffer said in his affidavit.

The male employee said that in 2011 Conyers complained a female staffer was “too old” and said he wanted to let her go. The employee said he set up a meeting in December 2011 to discuss “mistreatment of staff and his misuse of federal resources.” The affidavit says that Conyers “agreed that he would work on making improvements as long as I worked directly with him and stopped writing memos and emails about concerns.”

Another female employee also attested that she witnessed Conyer’s advances, and said she was asked to transport women to him. “I was asked on multiple occasions to pick up women and bring them to Mr. Conyers['] apartment, hotel rooms, etc.”

“I don’t think any allegations should be buried... and that’s for anyone, not just for this particular office, because it doesn’t really allow other people to see who these individuals are,” said the former staffer. “When you make private settlements, it doesn’t warn the next woman or the next person going into that situation.”

Another staffer said Conyers’ reputation made people fearful to speak out against him. Aside from being the longest-serving House member and the ranking member of a powerful committee, Conyers is a civil rights icon. He was lauded by Martin Luther King Jr. and is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

“Your story won’t do shit to him,” said the staffer. “He’s untouchable.”

Jerry Nadler (D-NY) is the second most senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee after Conyers. This was his statement yesterday: "The allegations against Ranking Member Conyers are extremely serious and deeply troubling. Obviously, these allegations must be investigated promptly by the Ethics Committee. There can be no tolerance for behavior that subjects women to the kind of conduct alleged. We also must support efforts to reform the way the House of Representatives handles these matters to make the process easier and more supportive of victims, as well as more transparent."

I'll leave this post with a brief mention of the salience of "political correctness" in the societal explosion we're going through now. I borrowed it from an essay by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: "Political correctness is a vague term, perhaps best defined by the conservative scholar Samuel Goldman. 'What Trump and others seem to mean by political correctness is an extremely dramatic and rapidly changing set of discursive and social laws that, virtually overnight, people are expected to understand, to which they are expected to adhere.' From a different vantage point, what Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalized communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives onto society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power. It is why unpunished murders of black Americans by agents of the state draw less outrage than black football players’ kneeling for the National Anthem in protest against them. It is no coincidence that Trump himself frequently uses the term to belittle what he sees as unnecessary restrictions on state force."

Is There A Central Core To Trumpism-- Aside From Kleptocracy?

I'm still sticking with the theory that there's a mammoth and unstoppable tsunami forming up now and preparing to sweep away the Republican majorities in the House and maybe even the-- nearly impossible-- Senate. This kind of thing-- from a respectable Michigan blogger and party activist-- makes me wonder if it really is unstoppable though. Can this kind of clueless embrace of a Bannon-inspired war of the sexes actually derail a tsunami? Maybe...

I get the feeling that Bannon isn't... the 3 Stooges-- and that he's not going to at least try to turn back the tsunami. I mean, can you imagine what the loss of 50-60 House seats would do to his agenda and Trumopanzee's illegitimate presidency? You can't? Look at that nice Nancy Ohanian painting at the top of the page more closely. Trump 2019.

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer drew a portrait of Bannon's nationalist agenda that helps reminding us what's worth fighting against as we battle not just the specter of vile patriarchy but also against women being made to feel uncomfortable by unreconstructed pigs. "Thirty years ago," he began, reminding us what gravity is, "nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why. It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote."

Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”

What message would those voters have been trying to send by putting a Klansman into office?

“There’s definitely a message bigger than Louisiana here,” Susan Howell, then the director of the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn. These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.”

Duke’s strong showing, however, wasn’t powered merely by poor or working-class whites-- and the poorest demographic in the state, black voters, backed Johnston. Duke “clobbered Johnston in white working-class districts, ran even with him in predominantly white middle-class suburbs, and lost only because black Louisianans, representing one-quarter of the electorate, voted against him in overwhelming numbers,” the Washington Post reported in 1990. Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote. Faced with Duke’s popularity among whites of all income levels, the press framed his strong showing largely as the result of the economic suffering of the white working classes. Louisiana had “one of the least-educated electorates in the nation; and a large working class that has suffered through a long recession,” The Post stated.

By accepting the economic theory of Duke’s success, the media were buying into the candidate’s own vision of himself as a savior of the working class. He had appealed to voters in economic terms: He tore into welfare and foreign aid, affirmative action and outsourcing, and attacked political action committees for subverting the interests of the common man. He even tried to appeal to black voters, buying a 30-minute ad in which he declared, “I’m not your enemy.”

Duke’s candidacy had initially seemed like a joke. He was a former Klan leader who had showed up to public events in a Nazi uniform and lied about having served during the Vietnam War, a cartoonishly vain supervillain whose belief in his own status as a genetic Übermensch was belied by his plastic surgeries. The joke soon soured, as many white Louisiana voters made clear that Duke’s past didn’t bother them.

Many of Duke’s voters steadfastly denied that the former Klan leader was a racist. The St. Petersburg Times reported in 1990 that Duke supporters “are likely to blame the media for making him look like a racist.” The paper quoted G. D. Miller, a “59-year-old oil-and-gas lease buyer,” who said, “The way I understood the Klan, it’s not anti-this or anti-that.”

Duke’s rejoinder to the ads framing him as a racist resonated with his supporters. “Remember,” he told them at rallies, “when they smear me, they are really smearing you.”

The economic explanation carried the day: Duke was a freak creature of the bayou who had managed to tap into the frustrations of a struggling sector of the Louisiana electorate with an abnormally high tolerance for racist messaging.

While the rest of the country gawked at Louisiana and the Duke fiasco, Walker Percy, a Louisiana author, gave a prophetic warning to the New York Times.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not,” Percy said. “He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.

A few days after Duke’s strong showing, the Queens-born businessman Donald Trump appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live.

“It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs. If you look at Louisiana, they’re really in deep trouble,” Trump told King.

Trump later predicted that Duke, if he ran for president, would siphon most of his votes away from the incumbent, George H. W. Bush-- in the process revealing his own understanding of the effectiveness of white-nationalist appeals to the GOP base.

“Whether that be good or bad, David Duke is going to get a lot of votes. Pat Buchanan-- who really has many of the same theories, except it's in a better package-- Pat Buchanan is going to take a lot of votes away from George Bush,” Trump said. “So if you have these two guys running, or even one of them running, I think George Bush could be in big trouble.” Little more than a year later, Buchanan embarrassed Bush by drawing 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary.

In February 2016, Trump was asked by a different CNN host about the former Klan leader’s endorsement of his Republican presidential bid.

“Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. Okay?,” Trump said. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know.”

Less than three weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump declared himself “the least racist person you have ever met.”

Even before he won, the United States was consumed by a debate over the nature of his appeal. Was racism the driving force behind Trump’s candidacy? If so, how could Americans, the vast majority of whom say they oppose racism, back a racist candidate?

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans-- those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue-- had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs-- combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation-- outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety-- to the one staring them in the face. The frequent postelection media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

“I believe that everybody has a right to be in the United States no matter what your color, no matter what your race, your religion, what sex you prefer to be with, so I’m not against that at all, but I think that some of us just say racial statements without even thinking about it,” a customer-care worker named Pam—who like several people I spoke to, declined to give her last name—told me at a rally in Pennsylvania. However, she also defended Trump’s remarks on race and religion explicitly when I asked about them. “I think the other party likes to blow it out of proportion and kind of twist his words, but what he says is what he means, and it’s what a lot of us are thinking.”

Most Trump supporters I spoke with were not people who thought of themselves as racist. Rather, they saw themselves as antiracist, as people who held no hostility toward religious and ethnic minorities whatsoever-- a sentiment they projected onto their candidate.

...The specific dissonance of Trumpism-- advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated-- provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

While other factors also led to Trump’s victory-- the last-minute letter from former FBI Director James Comey, the sexism that rationalized supporting Trump despite his confession of sexual assault, Hillary Clinton’s neglect of the Midwest-- had racism been toxic to the American electorate, Trump’s candidacy would not have been viable.

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump has reneged or faltered on many of his biggest campaign promises-- on renegotiating nafta, punishing China, and replacing the Affordable Care Act with something that preserves all of its popular provisions but with none of its drawbacks. But his commitment to endorsing state violence to remake the country into something resembling an idealized past has not wavered.

He made a farce of his populist campaign by putting bankers in charge of the economy and industry insiders at the head of the federal agencies established to regulate their businesses. But other campaign promises have been more faithfully enacted: his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries; the unleashing of immigration-enforcement agencies against anyone in the country illegally regardless of whether he poses a danger; an attempt to cut legal immigration in half; and an abdication of the Justice Department’s constitutional responsibility to protect black Americans from corrupt or abusive police, discriminatory financial practices, and voter suppression. In his own stumbling manner, Trump has pursued the race-based agenda promoted during his campaign. As the president continues to pursue a program that places the social and political hegemony of white Christians at its core, his supporters have shown few signs of abandoning him.

One hundred thirty-nine years since Reconstruction, and half a century since the tail end of the civil-rights movement, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who explicitly pledged to use the power of the state against people of color and religious minorities, and stood by him as that pledge has been among the few to survive the first year of his presidency. Their support was enough to win the White House, and has solidified a return to a politics of white identity that has been one of the most destructive forces in American history. This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened. That is the story of the 2016 election.

...The plain meaning of Trumpism exists in tandem with denials of its implications; supporters and opponents alike understand that the president’s policies and rhetoric target religious and ethnic minorities, and behave accordingly. But both supporters and opponents usually stop short of calling these policies racist. It is as if there were a pothole in the middle of the street that every driver studiously avoided, but that most insisted did not exist even as they swerved around it.

That this shared understanding is seldom spoken aloud does not prevent people from acting according to its logic. It is the reason why, when Trump’s Muslim ban was first implemented, immigration officials stopped American citizens with Arabic names; why agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol have pursued fathers and mothers outside of schools and churches and deported them, as the administration has insisted that it is prioritizing the deportation of criminals; why Attorney General Jeff Sessions targets drug scofflaws with abandon and has dismantled even cooperative efforts at police accountability; why the president’s voting commission has committed itself to policies that will disenfranchise voters of color; why both schoolchildren and adults know to invoke the president’s name as a taunt against blacks, Latinos, and Muslims; why white supremacists wear hats that say “Make America great again.”

...Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place, and could not take place.

That the legacy of the first black president could be erased by a birther, that the woman who could have been the first female president was foiled by a man who confessed to sexual assault on tape—these were not drawbacks to Trump’s candidacy, but central to understanding how he would wield power, and on whose behalf.

Americans act with the understanding that Trump’s nationalism promises to restore traditional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. The nature of that same nationalism is to deny its essence, the better to salve the conscience and spare the soul.

...Trump defeated Clinton among white voters in every income category, winning by a margin of 57 to 34 among whites making less than $30,000; 56 to 37 among those making less than $50,000; 61 to 33 for those making $50,000 to $100,000; 56 to 39 among those making $100,000 to$200,000; 50 to 45 among those making $200,000 to$250,000; and 48 to 43 among those making more than $250,000. In other words, Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one.

...Those numbers also reveal a much more complicated story than a Trump base made up of struggling working-class Americans turning to Trump as a result of their personal financial difficulties, not their ideological convictions. An avalanche of stories poured forth from mainstream media outlets, all with the same basic thesis: Trump’s appeal was less about racism than it was about hardship-- or, in the euphemism turned running joke, “economic anxiety.” Worse still, euphemisms such as “regular Americans,” typically employed by politicians to refer to white people, were now adopted by political reporters and writers wholesale: To be a regular or working-class American was to be white.

One early use of economic anxiety as an explanation for the Trump phenomenon came from NBC News’s Chuck Todd, in July 2015. “Trump and Sanders supporters are disenchanted with what they see as a broken system, fed up with political correctness and Washington dysfunction,” Todd said. “Economic anxiety is fueling both campaigns, but that’s where the similarities end.”

The idea that economic suffering could lead people to support either Trump or Sanders, two candidates with little in common, illustrates the salience of an ideological frame. Suffering alone doesn’t impel such choices; what does is how the causes of such hardship are understood.

...When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative-- one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.

Political correctness is a vague term, perhaps best defined by the conservative scholar Samuel Goldman. “What Trump and others seem to mean by political correctness is an extremely dramatic and rapidly changing set of discursive and social laws that, virtually overnight, people are expected to understand, to which they are expected to adhere.”

From a different vantage point, what Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalized communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives onto society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power. It is why unpunished murders of black Americans by agents of the state draw less outrage than black football players’ kneeling for the National Anthem in protest against them. It is no coincidence that Trump himself frequently uses the term to belittle what he sees as unnecessary restrictions on state force.

But even as once-acceptable forms of bigotry have become unacceptable to express overtly, white Americans remain politically dominant enough to shape media coverage in a manner that minimizes obvious manifestations of prejudice, such as backing a racist candidate, as something else entirely. The most transgressive political statement of the 2016 election, the one that violated strict societal norms by stating an inconvenient fact that few wanted to acknowledge, the most politically incorrect, was made by the candidate who lost.

...[A] majority of white voters backed a candidate who assured them that they will never have to share this country with people of color as equals. That is the reality that all Americans will have to deal with, and one that most of the country has yet to confront.

Yet at its core, white nationalism has and always will be a hustle, a con, a fraud that cannot deliver the broad-based prosperity it promises, not even to most white people. Perhaps the most persuasive argument against Trumpist nationalism is not one its opponents can make in a way that his supporters will believe. But the failure of Trump’s promises to white America may yet show that both the fruit and the tree are poison.

Nancy Ohanian has a clear vision of the Trumpist base