Notes on a World Without Trump

by Thomas Neuburger

I’m working on a book-length project that includes a look at our soon-to-be post-Trump world. These are preliminary notes for that part of the project.

1. The World Without Trump won’t be a world without Trump. (For the exception, see below.) 

Trump will not go away. He'll persist as a pest that’s driven from the desk but not from the room he’s in. His most likely course of action is to go loudly into that good night, keep frothing and fomenting his base, selling his products and shtick, cashing his cachet as former U.S. president, and roiling the Democrat-controlled government to the greatest extent he can.

Trump will be a thorn in the nation’s side — and a profit center for mainstream media — until he dies, at which point his state funeral will be something indeed to behold. 

Trump will always be with us. I would not underestimate his effect. It will pull any Democratic government to the right for as long as his presence persists and the elite media promotes it.

Exception: The only way this won’t be true is if the Democratic Party cuts a no-prosecution deal with Trump that Democratic state attorneys general decide honor — in which case Trump will go tweetless for the rest of his life. 

If the Democratic Party doesn’t cut a no-prosecution deal with Trump, yet no prosecutions emerge anyway because Democrats continue to be members of the “elites don’t prosecute elites” club, Trump is home free. As I wrote when George H.W. Bush died:

Those who run the world we merely inhabit have nothing but respect for each other. And why not? They may pick each other off from time to time (both Saddam Hussein and Moamar Khaddafi were once in high favor), but over the long haul, keeping each member of the ruling circle in a reverential spotlight keeps them all — keeps the circle itself — in reverence as well. Since the circle operates as a system, the system is honored each time its members, no matter how deadly, are honored. And the system sees that the system is always honored.

If this is true, Trump may continue to be hated (Trump hate is still the Democratic Party brand and the media’s cash cow), but he won’t be prosecuted, for the same reasons that arguable-mass-murderer George W. Bush, who turned Iraq into a slaughterhouse, was never impeached in office, never indicted for war crimes after leaving it, and was eventually reborn and embraced by Democratic elites as one of their own as soon as his sins were safely “misremembered.”

2. The regime of soft censorship that kept Biden’s reputation afloat during the 2020 general election will continue. 

Matt Taibbi has been writing about this subject for a while. For example:

The flow of information in the United States has become so politicized -- bottlenecked by an increasingly brazen union of corporate press and tech platforms -- that it’s become impossible for American audiences to see news about certain topics absent thickets of propagandistic contextualizing. Try to look up anything about Burisma, Joe Biden, or Hunter Biden in English, and you’re likely to be shown a pile of “fact-checks” and explainers ahead of the raw information:

Other true information has been scrubbed or de-ranked, either by platforms or by a confederation of press outlets whose loyalty to the Democratic Party far now overshadows its obligations to inform.

Obviously, Fox is not much better, in terms of its willingness to report negative information about Trump and Republicans, but Fox doesn’t have the reach that this emerging partnership between mass media, law enforcement, and tech platforms does. That group’s reaction to the New York Post story is formalizing a decision to abandon the media’s old true/untrue standard for a different test that involves other, more politicized questions, like provenance and editorial intent.

The post-Trump media world will not, as I see it now, fundamentally alter the pattern it set in the soon-to-pass Never Trump era. Big tech platforms and media will continue to see that their loyalty to leaders of the Democratic Party trumps (to borrow a phrase) their obligation to inform the public. Having gone down the censorship road, what would cause them to turn back, especially if Trump, the expressed source of their concern, continues to bleat, media-enhanced, in the never-ending background?

The truth about Biden’s history is as “nuanced” and troubling as the truth about Trump’s. Having acquired the habit of burying it, why would they dig it back up? 

I would not underestimate the effect of this one either. Obama was protected by being Obama. Biden has been protected by everyone unconnected to Fox News and right-wing media. I expect this to continue — the Biden untouchability effect, if you will — for quite some time.

3. The madness that inflicts both political parties — their use of popular anger around identity and cultural issues to deflect from economic issues — will continue.

Let’s not be confused: The nation desperately needs to have a discussion about identity and cultural issues. Our history of violence, physical and economic, against the (usually impoverished) “other” needs urgent addressing, or the country will simply come apart. But that conversation cannot come as a substitute for addressing the underlying structural economic conditions that maintain our impoverishment. The next Trump rides to power on that wave of silence, just as the last one did.

My cynical self believes that mainstream Democratic power brokers are far less committed to actual identity issues (”Hillary-only feminism” is a prime example; more here and here) than they are committed to keeping their donors happy and thus keeping structural changes off the table. An insincere or semi-sincere commitment to addressing the nation’s real identity and cultural problems serves that purpose perfectly.

The same problem exists on the Republican side. The nation does need a serious discussion about immigration policy. For example, should global corporations be allowed to use the H1B visa program to replace well-paid American workers with lower-wage, imported intellectual workers whose visa status often makes them indentured servants of the corporations that employ them?

Mainstream Republican power brokers, however, are using immigration, as well as other identity issues, to keep race-hate and social anger high among their voting base, thus distracting supporters from the party’s fealty to its donor base. This fealty leads to policies similar to the Democratic Party’s policies — both produce more wealth for the global elites who fund them and less wealth for supporters that keep each party in power.

“Free trade” is a perfect example of a policy with bipartisan elite support, yet is never voluntarily discussed by each party’s movers and shakers. It’s not by accident that only Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump made “free trade” a cornerstone of their 2016 campaigns.

4. As we’ve been promised, “nothing will fundamentally change.”

It’s possible that Biden will prove fundamentally different than his 40-plus-year history of corporate allegiance would imply, that Biden will transform himself and “meet the moment.” Some writers certainly think so, and many of my progressive friends have grown quite hopeful.

Yet as I wrote the last time we took a look ahead, “In none of these cases will much of anything change after the election, at least not once Covid has run most of its course. The need for a radical restructured economy will be waved away — by the corporate Republicans as too much 'government interference'; by corporate Democrats, who control the post-Sanders Party, as 'irresponsible' and 'unaffordable' given the glut of spending on the virus crisis itself. ... Trump, if president, will do what Trump will do, or something worse. The Democrat, if president, will do what the Party always does, serve its donors while trying to placate workers they've abandoned. In neither case will workers see relief.”

Will Biden part the wealthy from their wealth? I just don’t see how, even if he’s magically transformed, Biden becomes Sanders or the next FDR — or if he does, how the Party won't simply block his every move. The Party spent the last 30 years frustrating and defeating progressives at every turn. If Biden becomes one — and though I’d love to see it, I think I’d be a fool to expect it — the Party will simply add him to the list of those whose policies they’ll die trying to defeat.

5. The rebellion against both parties’ corruption will continue as before — or as it would have done had the virus not taken its interrupting course. And as before, the soft censorship mentioned above will consign any real resistance to the crazy bin. 

If past is prologue, resistance not grounded in Party-favored identity issues will be painted as eccentric, or worse, a danger to the republic — with all that implies about populist promises broken, billionaire bailouts purchased and passed, and the clash of the newly-desperate against the muscular force of state and judicial machines, all charged with keeping the “peace” at the expense of progress.

6. Finally, the non-electoral portion of the evening (to steal a line from My Favorite Year) — of our decade-long, confused revolt against those who know better than the people what the people really need — I think that will begin in earnest.

With Sanders gone, or self-exiled, as an “existential threat” to Party elites, there’s no one of his stature to take that place, which leaves the ravaged with no good choice at all. If they choose to act anyway, the corporate state will do what it will do, what entrenched power always does when faced with a rebellion — bring in the thugs, many of whom wear badges. At some point that may not be enough and the nation will break. At another point, it could be way too much and the nation will break again, but in a different way. 

Thus the world without Trump begins to take shape. These are just first thoughts, and they only treat the opening part of the path we're starting on. The rest of that path may be just as predictable, but it’s going to take some time and thought to discern it.

  

Did Donald Trump Know He Was Symptomatic on Monday, September 28?

Capitol reporter Jamie Dupree's tweet referencing the Sept. 28 White House event pictured above: "Two days after the crowded Rose Garden announcement for Amy Coney Barrett, the White House was suddenly using separate speaking spots for the President and other speakers."

by Thomas Neuburger

What did Trump know and when did he know it? I think it's almost certain that Trump and at least some on his team knew he was contagious on Monday, Sept 28. From a tweet by Capitol reporter Jamie Dupree:

I keep circling back to my tweets from last Monday. Two days after the crowded Rose Garden announcement for Amy Coney Barrett, the White House was suddenly using separate speaking spots for the President and other speakers.

Consider the image above, taken on Monday, September 28. According to Dupree, this distancing of podiums is new for Trump.

Consider two points. First, September 28 was just two days after:

• The Saturday Amy Coney Barrett super-spreader event at the Rose Garden, at which Sen. Mike Lee, Sen. Thom Tillis, Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, and Fr. John Jenkins appear to have caught the Covid-19 virus;

• An event in Middleton PA that same Saturday, where Trump was accompanied by, among others, Hope Hicks, who would later test positive.

• Several sessions of debate prep on Saturday and Sunday with, among others, Chris Christie, now in the ICU, and Bill Stepien, who has since tested positive, were exposed to the virus;

• A Sunday Gold Star Veterans event at the White House attended by Coast Guard Admiral Charles Ray, who would test positive a week later, as well as by Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Army Gen. James McConville and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who are so far negative.

What prompted Trump's sudden Monday morning self-distancing? Did he know he was symptomatic on September 28? If he did, it's likely he was infected before the Coney Barrett event and may even have been mildly symptomatic during it.

Second, after Trump's voluntary self-distancing on Monday, he nonetheless took part in the these events:

• A Tuesday evening debate with Joe Biden;

• A Wednesday trip to Duluth Minnesota, on a day that started with Hope Hicks experiencing symptoms of Covid-19 and ended with her self-isolating on the return trip on Air Force One.

• A Trump fundraising event with supporters on Thursday in Bedminster NJ, which occurred after Hope Hicks announced she had tested positive.

Why did he go on these trips, especially the New Jersey fundraiser, which occurred after Hope Hicks was revealed to have tested positive? 

Did He Know as Early as September 28 That He Was a Carrier?

It's likely that at least a few of his advisors, and if so, his doctor as well, knew Donald Trump was symptomatic on Sunday night or Monday morning of the last week of September, if not sooner. This is not certain, of course; it will remain for forensic analysis of the last two weeks of September — who was in contact with whom? who was symptomatic when? what information was withheld from whom? — for any of this to be known for sure.

It's especially important for the following to be determined:

• How often was President Trump being tested, and on what days? 
• When did he become symptomatic? 
• Whom did he tell, if anyone, that he was experiencing symptoms?

But the facts as stated above are clear, and Trump's change in behavior at the White House event on Sept. 28 seems compelling. If he didn't think he was a risk or at risk, why the change in podium arrangements?

 

Civil War? What Civil War?

Boogaloo Boys. Are these people any match for the hegemonic state?

by Thomas Neuburger

"When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you can't use the word 'liberty.' That's the relationship between a master and a slave."
—Chris Hedges, speaking with Juliana Forlano

There's more in Julianna Forlano's Act.tv interview with Chris Hedges than I can do justice to in a short piece, but I will say he has all the answers; he's figured it out.

Forlano's questions are brilliant and she asks the right ones, from the meaning of the Assange extradition hearing to whether there will be a revolution in the U.S., what it will look like, and what the elite response will look like. His thoughts on the Sanders campaigns (both of them) are more nuanced than you might think based on Hedges' oft-played soundbites, and they make perfect sense.

Context is everything, and Chris Hedges comes to his analyses from the right set of contexts. If you stand on the earth and look at the planets, their motion makes no sense at all. If you stand on the sun, what the planets are doing is obvious.

The same with Hedges. When you start from his starting point, what you see around you soon becomes perfectly clear.

A New Totalitarian State or the One We Have Already?

But let's focus briefly on just one of the questions he was asked, about the possible emergence of a new, Trump-led totalitarian state, a possibility liberals and other Biden supporters are making much noise about these days. And like Hedges, let's start from the right starting point, which is this:

Biden is the candidate of the elites, of almost everyone who counts in America. For them, Trump is an aberration, a mole that must be removed.

If that isn't obvious, it should be — the evidence is everywhere, from all the non-Fox news sources, to the behavior most of our public figures, even to the behavior of a great many Republican leaders.

Given this as context, let's look at the possibility of a "descent into Trump-led totalitarianism" during and immediately following the next election. In short, will Trump seize power, dictator-like, to win and rule like Mussolini?

This is the Big Fear in Democratic eyes, the one we've been hearing about, week after week after week. It's possible, of course. But consider:

1. Trump doesn't have the backing of the military; they've made that perfectly clear. Without the military, the only possible coup will have to come from the courts.

2. Trump may have the instincts of a dictator, but he doesn't have the skills or the desire to put in the work. Frankly, if he really wanted to be a dictator, he'd be one already.

He's an egocentric, relatively mindless, easily distracted, lazy, unbright narcissist whose monomania is simply himself — the incoming adoration he basks in minute-to-minute; the minute-to-minute state of his pleasure; the joy he takes in disrupting any room he's in before he leaves it.

Sure he's a person like the rest of us in many ways — he's functional, or his kids would put him away — and he has a feral understanding of interpersonal dominance.

But he does wake up each day asking, "How can I be more like Mussolini?" It doesn't seem so. From all appearances, instead he wakes up asking, "How can I enjoy myself today? Where's my fun going to come from? Let's start with a couple hours of Fox, and see where things go from there."

3. Finally, as noted above, Trump is not the candidate of the oligarchy, of the American hegemonic state and most of its "private" organs like CNN and the mainstream press. Biden is their candidate, and it's been obvious since forever.

The oligarchy wants Trump gone, and wants it badly. The military wants him gone, the CIA wants him gone, the press wants him gone, the diplomatic service wants him gone, and most of the billionaires want him gone. Yes, some are neutral and a few, like Sheldon Adelson, are rabid supporters, but most of the rest — CEOs of Google, Apple, military and security companies like Raytheon and Boeing, and any business doing business in China — are truly set against him.

Bankers are perhaps agnostic about his election, but if they have pro-Trump preferences they can easily surrender them. After all, the bankers will make bundles either way. Same with the energy giants. Biden is talking a decent climate-change game, but his actions send messages everyone understands: "Fossil fuel profits are safe in my administration."

The risk that the Democratic Party will disrupt the Establishment game has been dispatched. They kicked Sanders and his people off the Interstate months ago. Let them complain; it's back roads for all of them now. As an alternative to Trump, the Party now offers a new Ronald Reagan, their sleepy iteration anyway, and they're begging Reagan voters to vote for him.

Who among those who matter could complain about that?

Battles in the Courts, Not in the Streets

With this new context in mind, let's look at the terror-porn fantasy, war in the streets with a Nazi Germany outcome, by considering these four cases.

• First, if Trump wins in a landslide, or at least by a comfortable margin, he's in. Democratic voters will take to the streets (they should), but it won't change the outcome. There will be hell to pay afterward — the country may well come apart — but that's a different story. (There will be hell to pay after this election no matter who wins it.)

• If Biden wins in a landslide, he's in and nothing can unseat him. The Boogaloo Boys may take to the streets, and if so, the cops will coddle them. But if protest turns into a battle between Boogaloos and Biden supporters, the state will eventually shut the whole thing down and let it die off, as it did with the left-inspired George Floyd protests.

• If Trump wins narrowly — by less than the number of disqualified ballots, for example — there will be disruption for a while, but then it will go to the courts, probably a whole series of them, state and federal. Public life will be messy and uncomfortable for a while and people will take to the streets.

But when the courts decide the outcome, it will be over. Someone, most likely not Trump, will be president, though a Trump win is possible.

Keep in mind, Trump is not the candidate of the oligarchy, of the small clutch of people who actually run the country. Biden is.

So Biden has the edge. If the presidency can be handed to Biden it will be. If it has to be handed to Trump, it will be, but not because the Boogaloos and their fascist cop friends let the streets run red with anger. It will be handed to Trump because Trump's case is too strong to overturn, even for the oligarchs.

And if you fear a Supreme Court coup like the one in 2000, ask yourself: Who was the candidate of the oligarchy in that election? Clearly it was Bush; even the mainstream press hated Gore, assigning his worst critics to cover his campaign. So of course when the Supreme Court decided in Bush's favor, there wasn't much fuss and enough affirmation that even the public stood down.

Yes, the Roberts Court is a right-wing court, but would even John Roberts, who sees as his primary mission "to protect the Court's legitimacy," let the Court rule for Trump if Biden's case was strong enough to go with and all the elites were solidly on his side?

It's possible, but I don't think so. Remember, most of the Republican powerful hate Trump as well, and the oligarchy's candidate is Biden. Republicans can take another shot in 2024, not that far away, and Biden in the meantime could prove useful.

In addition, a narrow Trump win will be questionable at best — it's already looking a bit rigged — and easy to overturn if one is inclined to. If the Court does decide against Biden, the reasons will have to be solid, since oligarchic thumbs, many on Republican hands, will be tilting scales toward Biden throughout the process.

Bottom line: Roberts is a Republican. Which Republican powers will he listen to?

• Finally, if Biden wins narrowly, he's in for sure. Again, it will take a bunch of court cases to sort it out, and the nation will look a bit of a mess for a while. But in the end, the candidate of the elites — the people with real power — just won't be denied, especially if the alternative is four more years of that "moron" Trump's sobriquet among most of them, including many who serve ostensibly work for him.

Yes, a close Biden win will spark a kind of war in the streets, at least for a while. But do you think the guardians of the state will let street punks, even their own street punks, put "that moron" back in power, when they have Joe Biden teed up and ready to go?

For the reasons noted above, I think even Justice Roberts will go along.

After Biden Wins

Biden was almost created for just this moment, to be the able caretaker of our predatory state at a time when most of the country would elect a stuffed doll just to be rid of Trump. In the short run at least, voters and elites alike just want someone to get the machine rolling again, regardless of what it does. With Biden in charge, the machine can shift back into high and return to course.

After our Trumpian nightmare, Biden looks like a dream. But not for long. Biden could bring his own nightmare. It's after Biden wins and rules for a while — shows his own destructive inclinations — that a real war could begin.

I'll make a prediction. After Biden takes power on behalf of the people he really represents — predatory elites who care only about themselves and will gladly let people sicken and die in droves so long as their profits are safe — the battle won't be oligarchs versus Trump. That day is done; our lazy, incompetent captain of the hegemonic ship will be gone for good.

Instead, the combatants will be Biden and the ruling elite ... against almost everyone else whose lives they control, citizens of a nation whose hurt they will never heal.

If you truly fear a modern civil war, fear it after the oligarchs retake control.

(Today's title, "Civil War? What Civil War?" echoes the title of this Nicole Sandler interview — "Crisis? What Crisis?" — in which Nicole and I discuss many of these same subjects. If you click to listen, the interview starts at the 26-minute mark.)
  
  

What Will the Real American Resistance Look Like — Chaotic Rebellion or Organized General Strikes?

Click to enlarge. Suitable for framing.

by Thomas Neuburger

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
—Jay Gould, 1886

It's normally a bad idea to denigrate the other side's supporters in a fight, especially in a political fight like the one we're currently engaged in, and especially when the game being played is the oligarch's version of Eric Berne's "Let's You and Him Fight" — the one where the rich get the poor to kill each other, while they steal both of them blind.

So don't consider this piece to be about the other side's supporters, whichever side the "other side" is to you, so much as it is an indictment of us all, and a call for all of us to change our ways.

The Real Surrender Monkeys

The indictment comes from Juan Cole, writing at Informed Comment. Two notes before we begin. First, I'm going to quote at some length, so forgive me; his point is stronger that way.

Second, despite its headline, the point is not about resistance to Trump alone, but far more general than that. Is America's broken state the fault of Republicans, or do the corrupted leaders of both parties have a hand in what we suffer?

Here's Cole:

How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots Election Fraud

Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the coronavirus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized basis last quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.

Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on Trump’s say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office, on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off poisoning us. I don’t think the neutering of the EPA has even been reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on MSNBC have at least brought it up.

Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo “Rugged individualism works best when we obey.”

In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege. ...

The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In 1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn’t vote for Mondale because he was a “panty-waist.” Reagan took away their right to strike and took away government services by running up the deficit and cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government couldn’t provide the services the people had paid for because it is broke.

Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people don’t realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and they often won’t actually get any golden years.

What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.

Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can’t understand why. France has persistently high unemployment as it is.

In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was interrupted. Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on for months, and were very inconvenient. ...

Macron backed down on raising the retirement age.

In the 2000s, Americans ridiculed the French as "surrender monkeys" for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing (to Commit War Crimes in Iraq)."

That was particularly rich coming from a nation that, in 2000, had just witnessed its presidency stolen by a blatantly partisan Supreme Court — and lifted not a single finger to stop it. The French (and Germans, and Italians) would have been in the streets had that happened to them, burning cars and reputations until the wrong was redressed.

The 2000 election was a constitutional coup — two of them if you count the one attempted by George Bush's brother Jeb in Florida, whose own coup attempt was made moot by the U.S. Supreme Court's. Yet for almost every American, it happened on television only, a game show to be watched between dessert and the late-night comics.

Cole writes about how the French are not only willing to "throw a first class fit when the servants of the rich in government come after their lifestyles," but also how all of the unions and most of the working class had each other's backs during these actions.

For contrast, in the U.S. the United Food and Commercial Workers union recently filed a lone-wolf lawsuit against the Dept. of Agriculture for allowing poultry manufacturers to speed up production lines, and no other union joined with them. In France, according to Cole, "it wouldn’t have been one union filing a lawsuit. ... It would have been a massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes."

A massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes. Surrender monkeys indeed.

Civil War or Civil Chaos?

Now for the call to change our ways: At the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, Americans face a crossroads. For everyone who isn't either independently wealthy (like most of the donors who make up the real Republican base), or comfortably tucked into the professional managerial class (whose interests the Democratic Party seems most to serve), daily life is a both horror show now and collapsing fast to something even worse.

If there were ever a time to rise up, it's today. And rise up Americans will, I'm sure of it. With Covid deaths high (1,000 a day as I write this), incomes insecure for all but work-at-home professionals, and evictions just one or two missed paychecks away, even for the pre-Covid comfortable — with all this at the door, why would they not?

The question isn't will they rise up, but how will they revolt?

Will Americans rebel in an organized, focused way — like colonial Americans, for example, rose against British taxes, with planned resistance and coordinated action?

Or will the next rebellion devolve to the kind of battle that Jay Gould contemplated more than a century ago, a civil war where half of the suffering class attacks the other half, a chaotic free-for-all that allows the muscular security state to bootstomp in and "restore order" — all while our modern Jay Goulds (Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, our hedge fund kings and queens, our CEOs of Google, Disney and Comcast), sail blindly off to their private-jet cocktail sunset, feeding on caviar and broken hearts?

Will Americans rise up effectively, with targets in mind — Medicare for All, Student Debt Forgiveness, Free Public Colleges and Universities, an actual End to Police Violence and Murder — and fight the misery descended upon them all?

Or will they rise up chaotically, their legitimate protests hijacked by Boogaloo Boys and FBI provocateurs, a faux-revolt where fascists battle anti-fascists, the former aided by violent, racist police, until the nation, getting nowhere, yearns for the security of a rapid but "managed" decline over the insecurity of a state-funded free fall to despair?

The time to decide all this is now, before the real first spark, the one that starts the American Arab Spring, is lit. If a General Strike seems frightening, consider the alternative, a five-way civil war with armed cops permanently stationed in the streets and skirmishes everywhere.

The French learned their lesson in 1789 and the century that followed their world-historical revolt, though it took them six generations to get things right.

"America, rise, or you will surely fall" is a lesson this generation has yet to learn. The task is not only to rise from five decades of sleep, but in rising, to act in a way that dispels the nightmare, and doesn't deepen it.
   

The Resistance to Sanders Is Led by Cable News Anchors

Click through to the source for the video

by Thomas Neuburger

There are growing signs that the resistance to [Sanders'] campaign will be led by cable news anchors.
—Alex Shepherd, The New Republic

The "Resistance" has been almost clichéd to death these days, bludgeoned into meaninglessness. Nancy Pelosi has been leading a "resistance" to Donald Trump that includes approving all of his spending and expanding all of his war and domestic spying powers.

"Every single day,"she wrote via Twitter, "I find myself asking: what do the Russians have on @realDonaldTrump personally, financially, & politically?" But that doesn't stop her and the rest of Democratic Party leadership from giving him almost all the money and power he wants, stopping only at approving the worst of his policy choices, such as war with Iran.

"Wow!" [Trump] said on Twitter. "All of our priorities have made it into the final NDAA: Pay Raise for our Troops, Rebuilding our Military, Paid Parental Leave, Border Security, and Space Force! Congress – don't delay this anymore! I will sign this historic defense legislation immediately!"

The establishment of the U.S. Space Force as the sixth Armed Service of the United States, under the Air Force, fulfills one of Trump's most high-profile requests.

Despite broad bipartisan support, a handful of left-leaning Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans opposed the measure because it did not include policy planks that would have restrained Trump's war powers, including a ban on support for Saudi Arabia's air campaign in Yemen.

Some "Resistance" to the man Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called "the most dangerous and worst man in the presidency we have ever had in the history of this nation."

The Real "Resistance"

The real resistance by Democratic leaders, of course, is to its own base of anti-Establishment voters, candidates and office-holders, a resistance that's been too well documented to be repeated here. One of those candidates, Bernie Sanders, is right now making a credible threat to take over the Party in the name of that anti-Establishment base — an outcome that all donor-defending Democrats look upon with horror.

But what can they do, aside from the odd and opportune tilting of the balance? If they declare outright war — instead of the obvious but pretend-covert war they're now waging — they risk making a mockery of their own battle cries, Blue No Matter Who and Unity Unity Unity.

Enter the next line of defense, the Party-supporting mainstream press, including and especially cable news channels CNN and MSNBC. The real resistance for now against the Sanders-led revolt against the swamp in which they all swim has been handed off to Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and all the colleagues and "analysts" who occupy million-dollar seats on TV's cable news stations.

Alex Shepherd is by far the only person to have spotted this, but he's one of the few mainstream writers to point it out. In a piece for The New Republic, Shepherd says:

Bernie Sanders Has an MSNBC Problem

Cable news networks, particularly the "liberal" one, are a growing barrier to his surging campaign.

...Sanders has framed himself as an outsider, taking on the political establishment as a democratic socialist. But as he has surged in the polls—he now leads Biden with all voters—he is increasingly running up against another establishment: the media, and particularly cable news.

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was aided by a coup at Fox News. After some early turbulence, Fox quickly got in line and has become something like state TV, an echo chamber for the president’s point of view. Sanders has fewer natural allies in cable TV. In fact, the supposedly liberal network, MSNBC, has become a serious obstacle, pumping out Republican anti-Sanders talking points with increasing frequency.

After last Friday’s Democratic debate, Chris Matthews waxed apoplectic about what electing a socialist could mean for America. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro,” he said. “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, OK?” Matthews’s colleagues pointed out that Sanders was more of a Danish type of socialist than a Castro type of socialist, but to little avail.

Two days later, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former campaign guru, went on Morning Joe to rant about how a Sanders nomination would bring about the apocalypse. Literally. “The only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party,” he said. “That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days.” The same day, Chuck Todd, who also hosts NBC’s Meet the Press, read from an article from the right-wing website The Bulwark comparing supporters of Sanders, who is Jewish, to “brownshirts.”

And in the lead-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Lawrence O’Donnell argued that the real story was that Bernie was losing momentum because his poll numbers were down from the last Democratic primary—even though he is now facing more than a half-dozen opponents, compared to 2016, when he faced one. “The story of the Sanders campaign so far this year is how much ground he’s lost from four years ago,” O’Donnell said. He also ignored the fact that Sanders is leading nationally, which wasn’t the case in 2016.

This is not a new phenomenon....

The Sanders surge is real. Most polling sites give him a greater chance to win the Democratic primary than any of his competitors, prognostications that have been validated by Sanders' clear win in New Hampshire, his arguable win in Iowa despite the obvious and questionable machinations of the Iowa Democratic Party (see "Orwell Goes to Iowa" for more), and the likelihood, as I write today, of his winning most of the Super Tuesday contests, including the one in delegate-rich California.

But as the Sanders campaign ups its game, the Cable News Resistance is upping theirs. Most recently, Chuck Todd has likened Sanders supporters to actual Nazis ("brownshirts"), and Chris Matthews, as Shepherd notes above, publicly fears being hung by the neck by Sanders-supporting "socialists" from a tree in Central Park, America's Place de la Concorde apparently.

The battle is clearly on. Who will win this "primary within the primary," this war of insiders against insurgents? Establishment-defending media, or the mass of voters (the actual real Resistance) who are putting their trust in Sanders to drain the DC swamp of creatures like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and yes, Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews?

Smart money is on Sanders to win the nomination (even David Plouffe agrees with that). If he does, how far will Establishment and donor defenders in the mainstream press, people like Chuck Todd, go to stop him in the general election?

Smart money is sitting that one out.
  

In the Shadow of Impeachment, Neoliberal Democrats Hand Trump a Victory

Donald Trump discussing the new NAFTA trade deal (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

If Trump gets re-elected, if Big Tech continues to evade accountability, if imperial adventures continue abroad, if migrant farmworkers cannot feed their families, you can trace it back to this Tuesday, and the actions a House Speaker took while nobody was paying attention.
—David Dayen, The American Prospect (emphasis added)

As the Impeachment Drama lumbers to a 2020 conclusion, morphing into its variant selves and sucking life from every other story the media most folks attend to are inclined to tell, unwatched things are happening in its shadow.

Nancy Pelosi has used end-of-year urgency and the impeachment distraction to pass four pieces of major legislation, three of which will become law, all on the same day.

NAFTA 2.0 is one of them. Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, agreed under pressure to approve Pelosi's House version of NAFTA 2.0, rebranded "USMCA," or United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, for obvious reasons. This is a deal he should never have made, yet he made it.

Consider who Trumka is — a bridge between the neoliberal mainstream of the Democratic Party and the (presumably further left) labor movement that supports and sustains it. In other words, he's the person who blesses neoliberal policies as "progressive" (thus retaining mainstream Democratic Party approval) while modifying those policies in the margins to be less terrible (thus retaining the approval of progressives, who want to think of him as opposed to neoliberalist policies).

He's the person, in other words, who makes the labor movement look less like a puppy of the Democratic Party establishment to progressives, while keeping the labor movement (and himself) firmly in the Party establishment tent. The drama of "Will Trumka approve USMCA?" we recently witnessed exemplified this role.

To anyone with two cells in their brain, it was obvious as soon as the question was asked that he would approve USMCA. The stage was set; his arrival on it announced; the spotlight was ready and bright. Would he really walk onto this stage at this late date and say no to Party leaders? Of course not.

Would he have been able to stay in his lofty perch if he had? His job was to bless the cake after it had been baked, not to unbake it.

What pressure was Trumka under? First, obviously, from the Democratic Party and its billionaire donors, to give them what they and the Republicans — and Donald Trump — all wanted, a neoliberal-lite trade deal that could become in Nancy Pelosi's words "a template for future trade agreements ... a good template."

Second, Trumka was under pressure from his union base itself (so say some, including David Dayen in the piece linked below), many of whom are Trump supporters, to give President Trump a signature first-term victory, just in time for the start of his second-term campaign.

Do I believe this latter explanation? No, but I believe Trumka believes it. And if indeed it is true that Trumka has to serve Trump, at least in part, in order to serve his own base, it's further evidence of the careerism of his actions, in contrast to behavior from actual labor-movement principles.

Here's Dayen on this sordid tale (emphasis added):

Pelosi got AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka to sign off on the U.S.–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), handing Trump a political victory on one of his signature issues. Predictably, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham immediately gushed, calling USMCA “the biggest and best trade agreement in the history of the world.”

It’s, um, not that. Economically, USMCA is a nothingburger; even the most rose-colored analysis with doubtful assumptions built in shows GDP growth of only 0.06 percent per year. There’s one good provision: the elimination of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision that allowed corporations to sue governments in secret tribunals over trade violations. There’s one bad provision: the extension of legal immunity for tech platforms over user-generated content, put into a trade deal for the first time. This will make the immunity shield, codified in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, much harder to alter in the future. Pelosi has called this deal a “template” for future agreements, though trade reformers have called it a bare minimum floor.

Pelosi tried to remove the immunity shield, but abandoned the request. She did succeed in removing a provision for Big Pharma that extended exclusivity periods for biologics. The Sierra Club has termed the deal an “environmental failure” that will not have binding standards on clean air and water or climate goals. But the threshold question on the USMCA was always going to be labor enforcement: would the labor laws imposed on Mexico hold, improving their lot while giving U.S. manufacturing workers a chance to compete? There was also the open question of why the U.S. would reward Mexico with a trade deal update when trade unionists in the country continue to be kidnapped and killed.

In his statement, Trumka lauds the labor enforcement, noting provisions that make it easier to prove violations (including violence against workers), rules of evidence for disputes, and inspections of Mexican facilities, a key win. But I’ve been told that the AFL-CIO did not see the details of the text before signing off, which is unforgivable, especially on trade where details matter. There was no vote by union leaders, just a briefing from the AFL-CIO.

At least one union, the Machinists, remains opposed, and others were noncommittal until they see text. The Economic Policy Institute, which is strongly tied to labor, called the agreement “weak tea at best,” a tiny advance on the status quo that will not reverse decades of outsourcing of U.S. jobs.

Meanwhile, back at the Trump re-election ranch:

While the economics are negligible (and potentially harmful on tech policy), on the politics activists are losing their mind at the prospect of a Trump signing ceremony, with labor by his side, on a deal that he will construe as keeping promises to Midwest voters. “Any corporate Democrat who pushed to get this agreement passed that thinks Donald Trump is going to share the credit for those improvements is dangerously gullible,” said Yvette Simpson, CEO of Democracy for America, in a statement. Only a small handful of Democratic centrists were pushing for a USMCA vote, based mostly on the idea that they had to “do something” to show that they could get things done in Congress. Now they’ve got it, and they’ll have to live with the consequences.

I guess helping re-elect the "most dangerous president ever" pales in comparison to passing bipartisan-approved neoliberal trade deals.

One of Richard Trumka's jobs, if he wants to stay employed, is to make sure neoliberal Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi are happy and well served while simultaneously keeping progressives thinking that Big Labor is still in their corner even on issues the donor class most cares about.

At that he does very well, and did so here.
 

The Self-Set Impeachment Trap

Krystal Ball: This is the hill that Democratic leaders chose to die on?

by Thomas Neuburger

A note about the coming and much-cheered impeachment of Donald Trump. Of course impeachment was always the right thing to do. But having waited so long to do it, and having chosen Joe Biden's integrity as the hill to die on, the decision to impeach Donald Trump now may be a trap for Democrats — in fact, several of them.

If so, they did it to themselves. Let me explain.

First, impeachment is without doubt the right thing for Congress to do — or would have been when cause was first given for doing it. Impeachment is the correct and only constitutional tool the Founders gave the government for removing a president guilty of the kinds of official sins Donald Trump has been decried for since his inauguration. Impeachment is the Founders' gift to a people that, just a few generations earlier, had seen the English Parliament use the only tool it had for removing a head of state — by removing the life from his body.

Impeachment is the Constitution's version of the English Civil War, minus the war.

Congress could, and should, have impeached Donald Trump in 2018, for example, when ICE was caught keeping immigrant children in cages, some of whom later died. He could, and should, have been impeached in 2017 when Puerto Rico was left, after Hurricane Maria had devastated the island, to fend for itself because it wasn't white enough, Republican enough or American enough (Puerto Rico is a possession, not a state) to merit Trump-controlled federal relief.

Congress could have written articles of impeachment early in 2017, and should have, based on Trump's violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They could, if they chose, have written them decrying his repeated calls for rightwing violence, calls that started during the campaign.

They could have impeached Donald Trump in any year of his presidency for any number of harms. Instead they didn't, saying as late as August 2019 in Nancy Pelosi's words, "The public isn't there on impeachment."

In other words, the rightness of impeachment was never a consideration for Democratic Party leaders.

Democratic Leadership: Impeachment Is a Partisan Political Decision

Pelosi's statement that "the public isn't there" signals with no confusion that impeaching Donald Trump is viewed by Party leaders as a political choice and not a constitutional duty. It says that Party leaders see impeachment as a bare calculation in which the benefit to the Party — electoral victory — must be served before the benefit to the nation — drawing a line in the sand that says "No president should ever do this again" — is even considered.

If Democrats are this naked and open about saying the act of impeachment, even of Donald Trump, is justified only if there's a political benefit, why should the nation not say the same of them, that all they seek is a political benefit, just as nakedly and openly?

Of course Republicans will say that. But what will the larger nation think? What have Democratic leaders led them to think?

(Nancy Pelosi now asserts, of course, that her turnaround is principled, a result of Trump's "betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections." But Ryan Grim of The Intercept offers plenty of evidence that part of what changed was the mood and politics of her House caucus and not her views on Congress's constitutional duty.)

So that's trap one, that the Party's turnaround on impeachment both is merely political and will be seen as political, since a principled position would have been acted on years ago. The nation needed better than that from Democratic leaders, needed them to act from a stronger, more defensible position. The nation didn't get what it needed, and both Democrats and the nation may soon pay a price for their failure.

Is Joe Biden's Integrity the Hill the Party Wants Die On?

The second trap is this, that the impeachment inquiry will be Joe Biden–specific — narrowly drawn around the four corners of Trump's alleged attempt to get the president of Ukraine to help him find re-election dirt on one of his political rivals.

In other words, none of the other matters mentioned above — the ICE detentions, the deaths of children and other detainees, the post-Maria destruction-by-inaction of Puerto Rico, or any of a hundred other deeds (remember the Muslim ban?) — will figure into the inquiry or the articles of impeachment the House will vote on. None of those principles of presidential behavior will be adjudicated.

Instead, the entire drama will turn on two questions only: Did Donald Trump attempt to blackmail the government of Ukraine into aiding his re-election campaign? Did Joe Biden, as President Obama's VP, blackmail the government of Ukraine into feathering his son's nest, or keeping it feathered?

Both questions will be examined — endlessly — before the public in the next few months. Those questions and only those.

About the first, though the evidence is not yet in, it's likely true that Trump did indeed attempt to bully the president of Ukraine into helping his campaign. Even Reason magazine has its doubts about Trump's innocence.

But if so, is that electoral use of "a foreign power," though more brutish and overt, different in kind than any of the other intrusions-by-invitation into our electoral process?

For one, the Fusion GPS material was developed with the aid of assets or ex-assets (is there a difference?) of British intelligence and deployed by the Clinton campaign before it was deployed by the FBI. Further, I'd be shocked if Israel and Saudi Arabia hasn't helped a number of our electoral campaigns, given the money and geopolitical power at stake in these elections, their ties to leaders of both parties, and the financial and intelligence assets available to do the work.

That's one part of the discussion the Party and the nation are headed for. Buckle up.

The other discussion will be around Biden's actual dealings with the Ukraine government as Obama's VP, actions which were sanctioned, let's not forget, by President Obama himself.

Were Biden's dealings corrupt? Again, the evidence is not in.

The Hill's John Solomon, who it must be added leans decidedly right, has written that he was told by several Ukrainian law enforcement officials, including a deputy head in the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office, that they have "[f]inancial records showing a Ukrainian natural gas company routed more than $3 million to American accounts tied to Hunter Biden, younger son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed U.S.-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration".

On the other hand, Lanny Davis, who it must be added leans decidedly centrist, has written that he "couldn’t find a single fact in the [Washington] Post story about anything improper by Hunter Biden due to his service on the Burisma board, much less anything criminal."

If there's no smoking gun in the Biden-Ukraine case, is that evidence of innocence when the facts of the case suggest on their surface otherwise? After all, did Hunter Biden not receive a great deal of money for being on the Burisma board? Is he not Joe Biden's son? Was the prosecutor, corrupt as he may be, not investigating Burisma? And is this not part of a pattern of suspicion about the Biden family in general?

"We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden," said Biden's brother James according to this Politico story about how the Biden family cashes in on their well-placed relative.

That's the other part of the discussion the Party and the nation are in for. Buckle up twice.

Two Traps for the Party as the Next Election Looms

These are the discussions the Democratic Party's belated decision, and its reason for delaying it, will spawn. If Trump was always this corrupt, why now? What does that say about the principles that drive Democratic Party leadership?

If Biden is innocent of corruption, why does it look like he's not? What does that say about the nature of corruption itself in the entire DC establishment?

Two traps for a party that much of the nation depends on to rid them of the man the last election elevated to power. Two reasons for independent voters — those not Party loyalists, not blue-no-matter-who, not Never-Trumpers, voters who never turn out for elections or rarely do — to not turn out for this one, when their voice and vote is needed most in this greatest of watershed years.

What’s decided now, in this year and the next, will set the course of the nation and the world for a dozen years to come — or a dozen millennia if the chaos predicted by the most pessimistic among us takes root and grows. After all, social and political chaos is a breeding ground for authoritarian "solutions." We don't need any of those, and this may be the last electoral chance to avoid them.

The nation needs the Democratic Party to be on top of its game, not behind every eight ball it can find — and certainly not stumbling into pits and traps its leaders have created to catch only themselves.
 

A Taste of What Waits for Candidate Biden In the General Election

What will happen when these two meet on the debate stage?

by Thomas Neuburger

After the third Democratic primary debate, Julián Castro was widely criticized for suggesting that Joe Biden might be disturbingly forgetful — "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago? Are you forgetting already what you said two minutes ago?" he asked in a thinly veiled reference to the rumors that Biden is becoming senile.

Here's that moment (trimmed for brevity):

The negative response was immediate, putting Castro on the defensive and forcing him to claim the remarks weren't "personal." (Of course they were; there's no other way to take them.)

But the problem with criticizing Castro for these comments is that Trump will do so much worse to Biden if Biden becomes the candidate. In another context, when Pete Buttigieg criticized other candidates for using debates to score points against each other, Castro responded, "That's called an election!"

True enough. What charges will come from Trump, and in what form, if Biden is the Democratic nominee? Can Biden withstand them?

The GOP Attack

We now have a preview of what Trump's attack might look like. This is from a YouTube channel called "GOP War Room," and as strident as it is, it's nothing compared to what's really coming Biden's way.

Imagine the effect that flooding the nation with this kind of material will have in the general election. Imagine what the actual Donald Trump will do with this line of attack when he faces Biden directly. I'm not sure Biden will keep his old name "Sleepy Joe" — Trump may well change it out for something much more biting, much more "on the nose."

If I were Biden, I would expect nothing less from the Trump campaign than a vicious, constant and all-out attack on my mental faculties. If Biden verbally stumbles in the polite confines of the recent Democratic debate stage — as indeed he did — how will he behave in a two-hour cage match with Donald Trump, or a two-month blood feud with his campaign?

The Electability Question

It's often asserted that Biden is the most electable of all the Democratic candidates. Don't believe it. Given his mass of vulnerabilities — including and especially his tendency to verbally wilt in public when under no pressure at all — Biden may well be the most likely to lose to Trump, and by the greatest margin.

Something to consider if you're a pro-Biden Democratic operative, or simply a voter looking to rid herself of the current White House resident. It may simply not be true that "any D will do." Some Ds may not do at all.
 

Is John Bolton About to Be Fired?

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

by Thomas Neuburger

It's been clear for while that John Bolton and Donald Trump are not on the same foreign policy page.

CNN, for example, recently reported that Trump announced publicly that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un had "kept his word" on nuclear and missile testing, "contradicting his own national security adviser, John Bolton, who just hours earlier had accused Pyongyang of failing to follow through on its commitments."

Earlier we saw reports like this one in The Week which said "Trump looks to avoid Iran war as Bolton reportedly pressures him otherwise." The same article also reported that as a result of administration "infighting," Trump has been "calling out to other advisers to complain about Bolton."

Most people in the world, including many in the U.S., want no part of a war with Iran or North Korea, but tales of these disagreements don't necessarily indicate he will be.

The following, however, looks more promising. Writing at Consortium News, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou reports that according to his (unnamed) sources, Bolton is indeed on his way out:

I’m one of those people—not at all unique in Washington—who has contacts and friends all over the political spectrum, including in the Trump Administration. After work and over drinks, they like to vent. What they are telling me privately is what other Washington insiders are telling the conservative press. The White House, and especially the National Security Council, are in disarray. And Bolton will soon be fired.

...

Here’s what my friends are saying. Trump is concerned, like any president is near the end of his term, about his legacy. He said during the campaign that he wanted to be the president who pulled the country out of its two longest wars. He wanted to declare victory and bring the troops back from Afghanistan and Iraq. He hasn’t done that, largely at the insistence of Bolton. Here we are three years later and we’re still stuck in both of those countries.

Second, my friends say that Trump wants to end U.S. involvement in the Yemen war, but that Bolton has been insistent that the only way to guarantee the closeness of the U.S. relationships with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is to keep providing those countries with weapons, aerial refueling planes, and intelligence support.

All of this has made Trump angry. ... Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, has very quietly and discreetly begun informal meetings with a list of a half-dozen possible replacements for Bolton.

Though Kiriakou is certainly connected, this is yet another story based on secret sources, like so many others these days. Still, one can hope.
     

If Swamp Guy Tries To Break Into The House Tuesday Evening . . .

Swamp Guy's bound to flip his lid, wouldn't you think?

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in a letter that the House will not consider a concurrent resolution authorizing the president's address in the House chamber until the government has opened.

"Pelosi's response came shortly after President Trump said he would show up at the House for the prime-time speech on Tuesday.

“ 'Again, I look forward to welcoming you to the House on a mutually agreeable date for this address when government has been opened,' Pelosi said."

-- washingtonpost.com, Wednesday afternoon

by Ken

Here's the scenario as I imagine it. It seems pretty tight to me.

• Swamp Guy shows up at the House Tuesday evening, Coked up on Diet C. He behaves so utterly trumpishly, demanding admission to the (empty) House chamber, where his two surviving brain cells are convinced applause awaits him, that the assorted security forces in the zone (House cops, D.C. gendarmes, FBI, Homeland Security enforcement agents, whoever), while squabbling over jurisdiction, agree on one point: This swamp creature needs to be detained.

• In due course Swamp Guy is brought before some sort of magistrate, judge, or other arraignment-type official for processing. After a minute or two of psychotic Swamp Guy babbling, it's hard to imagine any magistrate, judge, or other arraignment-type official in the country -- well, in the D.C. area, at least -- not ordering that the detainee remain in custody, by whatever means necessary, for proper psychological evaluation.

• It's hard to imagine any psychological evaluator who's not directly in Swamp Guy's chain of command not recommending in the strongest terms that the creature be bound over -- in the highest-level security facility possible -- for full psychological testing.

• Are you going to tell me that any competent psychological or psychiatric professional is not going to recommend that the subject, in whom not a single sanely functioning brain cell can be found, be remanded immediately to a maximum-security facility for treatment, again under the highest level of security possible?

• Surely no competent psychological or judicial adjudicator would ever allow Swamp Guy to resume slithering the earth free.

• Ideally, the Unspeakable Pence can be grandfathered in, on the ground that what sane person could possibly commit to four if not eight years (two of them already served) of wedging his head that far up the smelly, toxic butt of a creature like Swamp Guy?

• Which means: Over to you, President Pelosi. A grateful nation thanks you for your service.

Works for me.


YESTERDAY'S NEW YORKER "DAILY CARTOON,"
BY IVAN EHLERS

"This is the perfect location to deliver
my State of the Union address."

#

Feel sorry for "Miss Mitch" McConnell? Huh? Well, maybe if he's standing in the path of the Falling Anvil of Orange

If Looks Could Kill Dept.: Naturally in the above photo it's the World's Blowsiest Blowhard bloviating, while Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell, er, sits silently by -- of course it could be that he's just thinking about the fun of going home to the company of Transportation Sec'y Mrs. Miss Mitch. (Note: If you have a suitably Photoshoppish imagination, feel free to visualize Miss Mitch with a hatchet buried in that odious head. Either odious head, actually.)

by Ken

Miss Mitch is one of the last people on the planet I would normally expect to be sticking up for. Nevertheless, that's kinda what I found myself doing the other day.

It all started when I noticed this link in a DailyKos roundup:

NYT: Trump yelled at McConnell for not protecting him from Russia investigations

That's not when I found myself feeling sorry, kinda, for Miss Mitch. Not yet. Oh, I suppose I was commiserating with him, kinda, but mostly I found myself seeing Trump, and maybe even kinda sorta feeling sorry, or something, for a poor horrendously damaged boy buried under infinite layers of crud. I dashed off an e-note I to the gang, in which I took care to note first:

I've never bothered to inform myself about our Donald's family history, since I've never wanted to know any more about those hateful people. I've always wanted to know LESS about them -- really, as little as possible. Just hoping they would all go away and I wouldn't have to think about them any more.

So I was surprised when The Donald not long ago rambled publicly about his druggie brother Fred. Then today I noticed this link in a DailyKos e-mail.

"Suddenly," I went on to explain:

this image of Trump yelling at McConnell gave me an image of Little Donnie growing up being persistently abused verbally by Big Fred. In the pictures of Fred I've seen he looks like a total wienie, but even the wimpiest guy wouldn't have much trouble bullying his kid for at least a certain number of years. And then, just maybe, there's a fleeting image of Little Donnie being abused who-knows-how by Young Fred.

I realize this isn't a deep thought, and of course merely a speculation rather than a fact. And even if it were an established fac, it wouldn't be an especially surprising one, since we know that men who engage in domestic abuse are overwhelmingly likely to have been victims of abuse. Still, for me something clicked into place here.

This is pure thumb-sucking, of course. I have no inside knowledge, no particular expertise, just a heap of instincts piled on by grizzled experience -- activated, I suppose, by some morbid curiosity as to how a human mind becomes this perverted.

Some of the response, though, targeted Miss Mitch, and included some skepticism about a possibly staged feud between these two pillars of the revered, harmoniously functioning U.S. federal government. What follows is a somewhat cleaned-up version of my reply. Again, it's all pure thumb-sucking.

A SOMEWHAT CLEANED-UP AND REJIGGERED
AND AMPLIFIED VERSION OF WHAT I WROTE

It's all so preposterous and unbelievable, I'm pretty much speechless. [Okay, the "pretty much speechless" part proved a faulty prediction. Is anyone really surprised? -- Ed.]

I don't have much trouble, though, believing that Trump is screwing with Miss Mitch, partly because showing people who think they're hot stuff that he can screw with them to his heart's content is one of the things he most loves to do and partly because, as people are noting, the Trump Faithful are so clueless that at least on the surface -- which is as far as Trump sees, and as we know he doesn't see that very well -- it looks like a winning face-saving strategy to trick them into believing that it's McConnell and Ryan who've betrayed them and not their messiah.

In my understanding of the situation, Miss Mitch surely understands exactly what Our Leader is doing to him but can't see a play for himself. Miss M, since achieving real power, has taken pride in being a pragmatist, working in the trenches with a good deal of success to make reality align with his wishes and goals. Then along comes Trump, who simply doesn't acknowledge reality, and Mitchie's whole history leaves him bereft of tools with which to counter.

Think back to January 2017, when Mitchie knew he was probably facing two years (at least) of hell, trying to "lead" a majority that had to look completely unleadable, even if the new president behaved sensibly. His "majority," already increasingly hard to deal with in the last Congress, was giving him pretty clear signals that he couldn't count on them for anything if it made the poor dears unhappy, and given the chasm that had opened up in the Republican Party, there were hardly any issues on which he could expect to make 50 of the buggers happy -- let alone find 60 votes where needed.

And then Trump turns out to be . . . TRUMP! All the things Mitchie has spent so many years learning about how the Senate works, and Congress as a whole, and Congress and the president -- it's all out the window, because Trump doesn't care. Fuck reality! Leaving Mitchie in need of some kind of play, any kind of play, and I assume he's discovered that he doesn't have any. By "a play" I mean something, anything, that in some way, shape, or form brings him even the tiniest bit closer to a good outcome for Mitchie -- and there isn't one.

Publicly oppose the president? What does that get him? Except a one-way ticket out of the circles of power. Consult the numerous variants of the proposition: If you try to kill the king, you better make sure he's dead. It's especially true, surely, with this particular imperial wizard.

Do we imagine that Mitchie has forgotten what happened to poor "Sunny John" Boehner, the ex-House speaker, when he merely tried to get the Tea Party crazies in his House GOP conference to be, you know, a little reasonable? Now Mitchie not only has this problem in spades in his conference (after all, his crazies are senators, and each of them knows better than anyone how much more powerful a single senator is than a whole wolfpack of House GOP crazies).

It's not a matter of "policy" as such. Beyond a general far-right agenda, after all, Miss Mitch has no policy, no principles to speak of except what's good for Mitchie. You'd think this might make him just the fellow to deal with Trump, who after all has no principles to speak of except what's good for Donnie, and certainly no policy; he's had so many positions on so many policies that he couldn't keep track of them if he cared. The thing is, though, that "what's good for Donnie" is good only for Donnie and his nearest and dearest. For most everyone else it's a living nightmare.

Take Obamacare repeal-and-replacement. As began to become clear with the dawn of the new administration, Obamacare repeal was going to be a vastly different feat to accomplish than it had appeared in those years when Republicans could ritually vote for repeal, knowing President Obama would veto any such bill. Once Obamacare repeal became a real, live issue, it became clear that it would have been hard enough to manage if all that Mitchie had to deal with was: (a) the House Republican crazies, and (b) the Senate Republican crazies. But Trump showed not the slightest understanding of that process, or seem to feel any more need to than he had any interest in what was actually in any repeal bill.

The one and only thing he cared about was being able to sign a bill that could be called "Obamacare repeal" because of the intense political pressure he felt to not break yet another campaign promise, especially one he'd make such a fetish of promising it to the voters who came to worship him, voters to whom he had lied so persistently and shamelessly. And throughout the process, he did nothing but make it even harder -- whether he was injecting himself into the process or withdrawing from it, lobbing grenades or sulking in his tent, cajoling and hectoring or ignoring and snubbing, everything he did was strategically wrong.

If you're Mitchie, you entered the Obamacare-repeal derby with a legislative position that was impossible, and at every twist and turn Trump did everything in his power to make it harder. At each of those twists and turns Mitchie kept coming up with new stratagems to make the thing doable, and each time Trump managed to make it, if you will, impossibler.

A few months into the Trump presidency, as the Man of Orange made it more and more abundantly clear that yes, this was how he planned to "govern," my sense formed that no, he's not going to be impeached but I also don't see how he serves out his full term. The only course I saw was that eventually enough DC Republicans -- and the people who bankroll them -- might come to come to the realization that the son of a bitch is killing us!!! He's so nuts and so inept that he's going to cost us our positions and whatever finger position we have on the levers of government. At that point the Trump exit I imagined would happen through behind-the-scenes persuasion: having him hear from all the people he trusts that the only way out for Donnie is to get the hell out of that damned White House. This I suspected, and still suspect, may be more possible than it seemed/seems, because by all accounts he's not having the fun time he was expecting.

Which wasn't/isn't an especially glad prospect for me, because it simply leaves us at the mercy of the Unspeakable Pence, who unlike Trump and Mitchie has a whole political agenda he believes deeply in. I've heard people say that a President Unspeakable would occupy the office in a weak position, I think that's nuts. Look how much the Right is accomplishing in Washington changing the nature and structure of the U.S. government even in these times of legislative stasis. Take Trump out of the equation, and I think Pence, in league with all those frothing-at-the-mouth loonies who chair the relevant House and Senate committees, is in a position to set in motion an orgy of legislative craziness.

So yeah, I feel kinda bad for Miss Mitch. It doesn't really matter what exactly the president is yelling at him about. The notion that there's something Mitchie could have done to shield his master from Special Counsel Mueller's investigations is totally nuts to everyone who has even the teeniest-tiniest contact with reality, but that number doesn't include POTUS. It might be suggested that Miss Mitch really doesn't have much to lose at this point, considering that right now the Senate majority leader's powers are pretty much zip, especially if he's going to find himself in the president's crosshairs as designated scapegoat.

Nevertheless, what can Mitchie do? I don't think he can even dare to offer the president a confidential opinion that he'd do well to get going while the going is still good. However incompetent Trump may be at actual constructive achievements, would you want to challenge his ability to make your life a living hell?

PS: IS IT POSSIBLE MUELLER'S INVESTIGATIONS
MAY ACTUALLY PROLONG TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY?

I didn't go into this in my original e-mail, but I've been thinking about it as I reread and tinkered with what I did write.

Remember when I wrote that "I suspected, and still suspect" that persuading Donnie to get the hell out of the White House "may be more possible than it seemed/seems"? Ironically, the apparently growing momentum of Special Counsel Mueller's investigations, with all those grand juries he's had impaneled, may make this persuasion harder, and harder still if Mueller shows signs of having the goods on Donnie.

Donnie, after all, knows why he take the monumental risk of resolutely refusing under any circumstances to release those tax returns. And Donnie surely has a pretty good idea of what looking into his business dealings can turn up. And it's not just the humiliation of being revealed as a lifelong fraud -- far from a master dealmaker and entrepreneur, a bumbling business halfwit who had certain public-relations talents but proceeded to fuck up every deal he touched and would have been a bankrupt and pauper if he hadn't gotten the inspired idea to start courting the world's sleaziest superrich scumbags to keep him afloat in exchange for aiding and abetting their international money-laundering and other fraudulent and/or illegal enterprises.

As desperately as Trump has been trying to sling mud at Special Counsel Mueller and his associates (who include a large number of lawyers and other investigators with a track record of investigating and prosecuting the very kinds of enterprises their current mandate calls for them to get to the bottom of), I can't help feeling that his real terror is that Mueller appears to be -- can you believe it? -- an honest man! And a competent one.

The legal point remains unresolved as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, and nobody has yet pressed the point. An ex-president seems like a whole other president, which could mean that Donnie has a special interest in not being pried out of the White House.

But he has to leave sometime. Doesn't he?


EPiLOGUE: 
NOAH'S VISION FOR THE FATE OF MISS MITCH

I would be remiss if I signed off without sharing Noah's vision of what's to come for our beloved Senate majority leader, shared as we were kicking this around via e-mail. "My version," he ventured, "would have Mitch ending up killing himself but taking out a few people with him at the W.H."

Later he clarified: "Of course my Viking ancestors cry out for the Blood Eagle treatment for all of these lowlifes." And he added this "PS":

According to a new Vanity Fair article, Buffy and Biffy Kushner are very depressed in Washington and feel their self esteem is under assault. I feel soooooo bad for them. It just makes me cry, I tell ya.

Now that's a note I feel utterly comfortable leaving on.

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