Think You Know Who Trump Is? Michael Cohen Thinks There's A Lot More You Need To Know: Disloyal, The Book

After Michael Cohen announced people could read the foreward of his new, apparently self-published book, Disloyal, online, the website was so overwhelmed with requests for access that it crashed-- and stayed crashed. Maybe it's back up now. Give it a try.  (All the bolded words and phrases are Cohen's. I picked the art and videos for your edification.)

I finally got the page to open. If you didn't, please enjoy:

The President of the United States wanted me dead.

Or, let me say it the way Donald Trump would: He wouldn’t mind if I was dead. That was how Trump talked. Like a mob boss, using language carefully calibrated to convey his desires and demands, while at the same time employing deliberate indirection to insulate himself and avoid actually ordering a hit on his former personal attorney, confidant, consigliere, and, at least in my heart, adopted son.

Driving south from New York City to Washington, DC on 1-95 on the cold, gray winter morning of February 24th, 2019, en route to testify against President Trump before both Houses of Congress, I knew he wanted me gone before I could tell the nation what I know about him. Not the billionaire celebrity savior of the country or lying lunatic, not the tabloid tycoon or self-anointed Chosen One, not the avatar @realdonaldtrump of Twitter fame, but the real real Donald Trump-- the man very, very, very few people know.

If that sounds overly dramatic, consider the powers Trump possessed and imagine how you might feel if he threatened you personally. Heading south, I wondered if my prospects for survival were also going in that direction. I was acutely aware of the magnitude of Trump’s fury aimed directly at my alleged betrayal. I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and I kept the speedometer at eighty, avoiding the glances of other drivers. Trump’s theory of life, business and politics revolved around threats and the prospect of destruction-- financial, electoral, personal, physical-- as a weapon. I knew how he worked because I had frequently been the one screaming threats on his behalf as Trump’s fixer and designated thug.

Ever since I had flipped and agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller and the Special Counsel’s Office, the death threats had come by the hundreds. On my cell phone, by email, snail mail, in tweets, on Facebook, enraged Trump supporters vowed to kill me, and I took those threats very seriously. The President called me a rat and tweeted angry accusations at me, as well as my family. All rats deserve to die, I was told. I was a lowlife Judas they were going to hunt down. I was driving because I couldn’t fly or take the train to Washington. If I had, I was sure I would be mobbed or attacked. For weeks, walking the streets of Manhattan, I was convinced that someone was going to ram me with their car. I was exactly the person Trump was talking about when he said he could shoot and kill someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it.

My mind was spinning as I sped towards DC. For more than a decade, I had been at the center of Trump’s innermost circle. When he came to my son’s bar mitzvah, a generous gesture that I found touching, he told my then thirteen-year-old boy that his Dad was the greatest and that, if he wanted to work at the Trump Organization when he grew up, there would always be a position for him.

“You’re family,” Trump said to my son and I.

And I fucking believed him!

Pulling over at a service plaza, I gassed up and headed inside for a coffee, black no sugar. I looked around to see if I was under surveillance or being followed; a sense of dread consuming my thoughts. Who was that FBI-type in the gray coat or the muscle-bound dude a few paces behind me? The notion that I was being followed or stalked may have seemed crazy; but it was also perfectly logical. I wasn’t just famous-- I was perhaps the most infamous person in the country at the time, seen by millions upon millions as a traitor. President Trump controlled all the levers of the Commander in Chief and all the overt and covert powers that come with the highest office in the country. He also possessed a cult-like hold over his supporters, some of them demonstrably unhinged and willing to do anything to please or protect the President. I knew how committed these fanatics were because I’d been one of them: an acolyte obsessed with Donald J. Trump, a demented follower willing to do anything for him, including, as I vowed once to a reporter, to take a bullet.

On the eve of my public testimony, lying in the still of the night in my hotel room, taking a bullet assumed a completely different meaning. That was the level of ruination I had brought upon myself- complete and total destruction. I closed my eyes, wishing the nightmare would end. When I started working for Trump I had been a multi-millionaire lawyer and businessman, and now I was broke and broken; a convicted, disgraced and disbarred former attorney about to testify against the President on live television before an audience of more than 15 million Americans.

“Hey, Michael Cohen, do your wife and father-in-law know about your girlfriends?” GOP Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted at me that night, to cite just one example of the juvenile idiocy and menace aimed in my direction. “I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

Sitting in the green room on the morning of my testimony before the House Oversight Committee, I began to feel the enormous weight of what was about to happen. For some reason, after all that I’d been through, and all I’d put my family and the country through, waiting in that room was the moment when the gravity of what was about to happen truly hit home. The United States was being torn apart, its political and cultural and mental well-being threatened by a clear and present danger named Donald Trump, and I had played a central role in creating this new reality. To half of Americans, it seemed like Trump was effectively a Russian-controlled fraud who had lied and cheated his way to the White House; to the other half of Americans, to Trump’s supporters, the entire Russian scandal was a witch hunt invented by Democrats still unable to accept the fact that Hillary Clinton had lost fair and square in the most surprising upset in the history of American presidential elections.

Both sides were wrong. I knew that the reality was much more complicated and dangerous. Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by his detractors. I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch-hunt. Trump had cheated in the election, with Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything-- and I mean anything-- to “win” has always been his business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of President Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, “there’s no Russian collusion, I have no dealings with Russia…there’s no Russia.”

The time to testify nearing, I asked the sergeant-at-arms for a few minutes of privacy and the room was cleared. Sitting alone, my thoughts and heart racing, I had the first panic attack of my life. I struggled to breathe and stand. The pressure was too much; I had contemplated suicide in recent weeks, as a way to escape the unrelenting insanity. Reaching for a seat, I started to cry, a flood of emotions overwhelming me: fear, anger, dread, anxiety, relief, terror. It felt something like when I was in the hospital awaiting the birth of my daughter and son, with so many powerful and unprecedented emotions welling up in anticipation. Only now I was that child being born and all of the pain and blood were part of the birth of my new life and identity.

Trying to pull myself together, I went to the private bathroom and checked my eyes to see if they were bloodshot or puffy. To my relief, they weren’t. I splashed my face with cold water and felt a calm coming over me, and then a surge of confidence and adrenaline. I had pled guilty to multiple federal crimes, including lying to Congress, but I was there to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I knew that Trump and the Republican House members would want me to hesitate, falter, show weakness, even break down. They wanted me to look unreliable, shifty, and uncertain about the truth and myself. This was blood sport and they wanted me to cower. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction, I decided. I was going to nail it.

“Showtime,” the sergeant-at-arms called out, opening the door. “You’re on Mr. Cohen.”

One deep breath and I stepped into the hallway, into a crush of photographers and TV cameras and the craziness of wall-to-wall national obsession. I made my way alone through the jostle and shove of the surging crowd as I experienced the out-of-body sensation of seeing myself on television screens walking in to testify. It was truly bizarre to be at the epicenter of American history at that moment, to personify so many fears and resentments, to be the villain or savior, depending on your point of view, to speak truth to power in an age when truth itself was on trial. There I was, watching myself on TV, the Michael Cohen everyone had an opinion about: liar, snitch, idiot, bully, sycophant, convicted criminal, the least reliable narrator on the planet.





So, please permit me to reintroduce myself in these pages. The one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever you may have heard or thought about me, you don’t know me or my story or the Donald Trump that I know. For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand. Our cell phones had the same address books, our contacts so entwined, overlapping and intimate that part of my job was to deal with the endless queries and requests, however large or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaintances. I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as if they were talking directly to Trump.

Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.

There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me. I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them. I was the one who most encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy. When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise-- I was an active and eager participant.

To underscore that last crucial point, let me say now that I had agency in my relationship with Trump. I made choices along the way-- terrible, heartless, stupid, cruel, dishonest, destructive choices, but they were mine and constituted my reality and life. During my years with Trump, to give one example, I fell out of touch with my sisters and younger brother, as I imagined myself becoming a big shot. I’d made my fortune out of taxi medallions, a business viewed as sketchy if not lower class. On Park Avenue, where I lived, I was definitely nouveau riche, but I had big plans that didn’t include being excluded from the elite. I had a narrative: I wanted to climb the highest mountains of Manhattan’s skyscraping ambition, to inhabit the world from the vantage point of private jets and billion-dollar deals, and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there. Then there was my own considerable ego, short temper, and willingness to deceive to get ahead, regardless of the consequences.

As you read my story, you will no doubt ask yourself if you like me, or if you would act as I did, and the answer will frequently be no to both of those questions. But permit me to make a point: If you only read stories written by people you like, you will never be able to understand Donald Trump or the current state of the American soul. More than that, it’s only by actually understanding my decisions and actions that you can get inside Trump’s mind and understand his worldview. As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, it’s only gangsters who can reveal the secrets of organized crime. If you want to know how the mob really works, you’ve got to talk to the bad guys. I was one of Trump’s bad guys. In his world, I was one hundred percent a made man.

Before I could read my opening statement to the Oversight Committee on the day of my public testimony, the Republicans started to play procedural games. It was clearly an attempt to rattle me, I thought, a spectacle that only demeaned them and the institution itself. As I started to answer questions, it was evident that the Republicans didn’t want to hear a word I had to say, no matter how true or how critical to the future of the country. For all the hard truths I spoke about Trump, I wasn’t entirely critical of him, nor will I be in these pages. I said I know Trump as a human being, not a cartoon character on television, and that means I know he’s full of contradictions.

“Mr. Trump is an enigma,” I testified to the committee. “He is complicated, as am I. He does both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” one of the Republicans taunted me, perfectly expressing the stupidity and lunacy of his party’s antics. To drive this point home, they actually made a sign with a picture of me on it. In bold letters, the sign proclaimed, “Liar, Liar Pants on Fire.”

I recognized the childish games, replete with a Trump-like slogan, because I had played them myself. In the pitiful sight of Republicans throwing aside their dignity and duty in an effort to grovel at Trump’s feet, I saw myself and understood their motives. My insatiable desire to please Trump to gain power for myself, the fatal flaw that led to my ruination, was a Faustian bargain: I would do anything to accumulate, wield, maintain, exert, exploit power. In this way, Donald Trump and I were the most alike; in this naked lust for power, the President and I were soul mates. I was so vulnerable to his magnetic force because he offered an intoxicating cocktail of power, strength, celebrity, and a complete disregard for the rules and realities that govern our lives. To Trump, life was a game and all that mattered was winning. In these dangerous days, I see the Republican Party and Trump’s followers threatening the constitution-- which is in far greater peril than is commonly understood-- and following one of the worst impulses of humankind: the desire for power at all costs.

“To those who support the President and his rhetoric, as I once did, I pray the country doesn’t make the same mistakes as I have made or pay the heavy price that my family and I are paying,” I testified to Congress, exhorting them to learn from my example.

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” I concluded. “This is why I agreed to appear before you today.”

Representative Elijah Cummings had the final word, as chair of the Oversight Committee. I sat in silence, listening to this now deceased man with decades of experience in the civil rights movement and other forms of public service, who as a lawyer had represented disgraced lawyers like me. He understood that even the least of us deserve the opportunity to seek penance, redemption and a second chance in life. Cummings was the lone politician I encountered in all my travails who took an interest in me as a human being. When I reported to serve my sentence, he even took steps to ensure my security in prison. It was a selfless act of kindness for which I will always be grateful.

“I know this has been hard,” Cummings said to me and the nation, his words hitting me like a kick in the gut. “I know you’ve faced a lot. I know that you are worried about your family. But this is a part of your destiny. And hopefully this portion of your destiny will lead to a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better United States of America, and a better world. And I mean that from the depths of my heart.”

Representative Cummings concluded by saying, “We are better than this.”

Amen, I thought.

Now, sitting alone in an upstate New York prison, wearing my green government-issued uniform, I’ve begun writing this story longhand on a yellow legal pad. I often wrote before dawn so not to be disturbed in my thoughts when my fellow inmates awoke. I had to report to the sewage treatment plant where some of us worked for a wage of $8 a month. As the months passed by and I thought about the man I knew so well, I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully. The types of scandals that have surfaced in recent months will only continue to emerge with greater and greater levels of treachery and deceit. If Trump wins another four years, these scandals will prove to only be the tip of the iceberg. I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!” But that is the Trump I know in a nutshell. He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well. Whoever follows Trump into the White House, if the President doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he has started to joke about-- and Trump never actually jokes- will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.

Watching Trump on the evening news in the prison rec room, I almost feel sorry for him. I know him so well and I know his facial tics and tells; I see the cornered look in his eyes as he flails and rants and raves, searching for a protector and advocate, someone willing to fight dirty and destroy his enemies. I see the men who have replaced me and continue to forfeit their reputations by doing the President’s bidding, no matter how dishonest or sleazy or unlawful. Rudy Guiliani, William Barr, Jared Kushner and Mike Pompeo are Trump’s new wannabe fixers, sycophants willing to distort the truth and break the law in the service of the Boss. All this will be to no avail. Trump doesn’t want to hear this, and he will certainly deny it, but he’s lost without his original bulldog lawyer Roy Cohn, or his other former pitbull and personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

During my testimony, Republican House members repeatedly asked me to promise that I wouldn’t write a book. I refused, repeatedly. It was another way of saying I shouldn’t be permitted to tell my story, in essence giving up my First Amendment rights. It was a clear sign of desperation and fear. I have lost many things as a consequence of my decisions and mistakes, including my freedom, but I still retain the right to tell this story about the true threat to our nation and the urgent message for the country it contains.

One last thing I can say with great confidence, as you turn the page and meet the real real Donald Trump for the first time: This is a book the President of the United States does not want you to read.

Odd that Trump and various golden showers stories keep popping up. Michael Isikoff and David Corn also confirmed another incident of Trump paying people to pee on him. It's difficult to even think about.

We Shouted Out, "Who Killed Democracy?" When After All, It Was You And Me

-by Bruce Mulkey

As of April 28, I’ve now been on the planet for 74 rotations around the sun, almost three-quarters of a century, 30 percent of the time our country has been a nation. And I’ve seen a lot of changes during this time, personal, cultural, and political. The change nearest and dearest to my heart was my personal transformation.

Yes, there was a dark night of the soul, a bottoming out as they say in 12-step programs. I’d been sleepwalking through life for 40-some-odd years. And, of course, I’d gotten my wake-up calls-- wrecking my car while intoxicated, being called on my sexist bullshit, personal and business bankruptcy, divorce, among others-- but I’d ignored them even as they continued to intensify. Until one morning I woke up hung-over on a mattress on the floor of a friend’s home outside of Baton Rouge-- no job, no friends, estranged from my daughter, stuck in a region that seemed two or three decades behind the times. And, in that moment, I could ignore the messages life was sending me no more. It finally dawned on me: Rather than trying to change outside circumstances-- locales, mates, drugs of choice, drinking pals, etcetera-- if I truly wanted a more satisfying life, what must change was the asshole staring back at me in the mirror. And, in fits and starts, over the next several years, I made a dramatic turn away from immaturity, irresponsibility, recklessness, and my ultra-macho façade toward greater accountability, honesty, integrity, vulnerability, and authenticity.

Similar to my personal somnolence, I believe we, the citizens of this nation, have been asleep for the past several decades. We began to pay more attention to our TV shows, our favorite celebrities, our sports teams, our fancy cars, our iPhones, and making money to buy more stuff than we did to our communities and the fabric of our nation. Most of us demonstrated little concern as powerful corporations and the financial elite bought greater and greater influence in Washington, D.C. and our state capitols, and career politicians of both major political parties began to shamelessly serve the needs of wealthy campaign donors and lobbyists rather than those who elected them.

We sat by complacently as income inequality grew so great that, in 2014, members of the bottom 90 percent in this country earned $33,000 per year while those in the top 1 percent raked in $1,260,000. We sat on our hands, while in the midst of great wealth, more than 20 percent of the nation’s children lived in poverty. In a foreshadowing of things to come, we paid more attention to The Apprentice than a two-tiered justice system that insured justice would, to a great extent, evade the working class and people of color, while the wealthy would frequently escape punishment for their misdeeds through the efforts of high-paid attorneys.

There was hardly a whimper when our civil liberties were curtailed out of rampant fear of terrorism, an apprehension stoked by opportunistic politicians and the mainstream media. We were, for the most part, silent as our young men and women were sent off to senseless wars, then were essentially forgotten when (if) they returned home. Only a few protested as Band-Aid solutions to climate change, an existential threat to the entire human race, were proposed that did little to effectively address the issue. All the while, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and other human rights issues went unacknowledged and, thus, largely unaddressed.

As our nation gradually devolved from democratic republic to oligarchy, we the people of this nation received many wake-up calls along the way—a growing number of bankruptcies by men and women overwhelmed by their hospital bills, skyrocketing costs of some essential prescription drugs, unarmed black men shot down by militarized police forces, children murdered in their classrooms, the deaths and injuries from the never-ending war in the Middle East, veteran suicides, a bloated military budget that is larger than the next seven nations combined, the increasing number of deaths of despair, one in nine of the country's bridges rated as structurally deficient, an infant mortality rate higher than 27 other wealthy countries, increasingly warmer weather, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But most of us ignored these harbingers, even as they became louder and more frequent.

Consequently, we now get to deal with an enormous wake-up call to our nation-- an ineffective, dishonest, immoral, narcissistic carnival barker of a president who represents the worst impulses of the American people, a man who tells a radio shock jock that it’s OK to refer to his daughter as a “piece of ass,” a man who mocks the disabled, who asserts that our military men and women do not fight to win, who demonizes people of color, who promotes fear and divisiveness to his own ends, who is interested in fulfilling his wants and needs regardless of the cost to our country.

There has been much discussion about who’s to blame for the election of Donald Trump-- people who voted third party, those who refused to vote at all, the DNC’s clumsy maneuvers to fix the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign’s shortcomings, the Republicans’ unwillingness to halt Trump, the media’s free publicity for his campaign, a frustrated white working class, the FBI’s last minute tactics, Russians interference in the election, and on and on. But, if you want to find the person who’s actually culpable, merely take a look in the mirror. Donald Trump is the natural consequence of our indolence and apathy. And this time the wake-up call is so immense, so threatening, that it cannot be ignored.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, however, Trump’s election may, in fact, serve the greater purpose of those of us who desire a more compassionate, just, and sustainable society. For it is clear that, since his election, we the people have been awakened. Millions across the nation marched in the Women’s March, the Tax Day March, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, and others. Elected representatives are receiving phone calls and post cards from constituents at a rate never seen before. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have turned out at town halls and rallies. Democratic Party precinct meetings in many states have overflowed with participants who have never been politically active before. Our Revolution, Indivisible, The Resistance School, and others are supporting thousands upon thousands of concerned citizens to move into action.

A powerful cultural shift is afoot, though you’ll likely not see it reported on CNN or in the New York Times. And Trump and his fellow travelers do us a great service in supporting this shift. For now, our national disgraces-- white supremacy, patriarchy, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, xenophobia, wealth disparity, oligarchy, and others-- are brought into full focus. Now we have the opportunity to clearly perceive these injustices, and then channel the frustration, anger, and despair that many of us are feeling toward reconciliation, equality, justice, and the acknowledgment that there is much more that connects us than separates us.

Bruce Mulkey is an essayist and author from Asheville, North Carolina. He's a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, Elephant Journal, and The Good Men Project. He currently spends much of his time writing his memoir (A Tale of Two Fathers: The Memoir of One Man and His Two Daughters Born 42 Years Apart), playing handball, trail running with his wife Shonnie, and doing his best to keep up with a high-spirited six-year-old on the meandering footpaths of the Appalachians. You can learn more at brucemulkey.com.

I'm Not Ready To Give Up On All The Trump Voters

A group of American students on a Spring Break cruise broke into a chant of "Build the Wall!" off the coast of Cancun. That's not going over real well in the country they're visiting.

This is just one of the many blameworthy behaviors that young spring breakers have shown recently in Cancun and that are described as acts of xenophobia and discrimination against Mexicans within their own country, which is (or should be) totally unacceptable.

...Several Mexican tourists on board the ship expressed their annoyance, but the Americans did not stop at all and continued singing the racist hymn.

This situation is far from being an isolated incident, and it adds to the growing number of complaints from tourism sector workers, who point out that in recent days many Spring Breakers have been offensive, rude and haughty towards Mexican people.

This is what David Leonhardt's OpEd, All the President's Lies, in yesterday's NY Times had to say about their leader, the one who makes this kind of behavior permissible. "The current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about-- among many other things-- Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women."

Trump sets out to deceive people. As he has put it, “I play to people’s fantasies.”

Caveat emptor: When Donald Trump says something happened, it should not change anyone’s estimation of whether the event actually happened. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. His claim doesn’t change the odds.

...Our president is a liar, and we need to find out how serious his latest lies are.

I want to admit something-- a guilty pleasure. Sometimes I fantasize that in the tuture someone wanting to vote take a lie detector test. "Did you vote for Donald Trump in 2016?" Those who say yes-- or who set off the alarm bells-- can't vote until they complete a basic civics course. I know; it's a horrible thought. It's just a fantasy. That's not who I am. I understand solidarity-- which is why, when when of my oldest friends (the daughter of a communist no less) e-mailed me (from an outdoor cafe in Barcelona) Frank Rich's column , No Sympathy for the Hillbilly. She wrote in her e-mail: "Waste of time for Dems to pursue them... I have been saying no sympathy for them, useless. They should be accountable for their votes." I've known her since 1966 and I'm pretty sure she's of two minds on this, like many of us are. I don't know about solidarity with those spoiled brats on the Cancun cruise chanting "Build the Wall," but... Well, let's look at what Rich had to say first:

Why did white working-class voters reject Hillary Clinton and the Democrats? Why did they fall for a billionaire con man? Why do they hate us?

There were, of course, many other culprits in the election’s outcome. Comey, the Kremlin, the cable-news networks that beamed Trump 24/7, Jill Stein, a Clinton campaign that (among other blunders) ignored frantic on-the-ground pleas for help in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the candidate herself have all come in for deserved public flogging. But the attitude among some liberals toward the actual voters who pulled the trigger on Election Day has been more indulgent, equivocal, and forgiving. Perhaps those white voters without a college degree who preferred Trump by 39 percentage points-- the most lopsided margin in the sector pollsters define as “white working class” since the 1980 Ronald Reagan landslide -- are not “deplorables” who “cling to guns and religion” after all. Perhaps, as Joe Biden enthused, “these are good people, man!” who “aren’t racist” and “aren’t sexist.” Perhaps, as Mark Lilla argued in an influential essay in the New York Times, they were turned off mostly by the Democrats’ identity politics and rightfully felt excluded from Clinton’s stump strategy of name-checking every ethnicity, race, and gender in the party’s coalition except garden-variety whites. Perhaps they should hate us.

While many, if not most, of those in #TheResistance of the Democratic base remain furious at these voters, the party’s political class and the liberal media Establishment are making a concerted effort to convert that rage into empathy. “Democrats Hold Lessons on How to Talk to Real People” was the headline of a Politico account of the postelection retreat of the party’s senators, who had convened in the pointedly un-Brooklyn redoubt of Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Democrats must heed the rural white enclaves, repeatedly instructs the former Pennsylvania governor and MSNBC regular Ed Rendell. Nicholas Kristof has pleaded with his readers to understand that “Trump voters are not the enemy,” a theme shared by the anti-Trump conservative David Brooks. “We’re Driving to the Inauguration With a Trump Supporter” was the “Kumbaya”-tinged teaser on the Times' mobile app for a roundup of on-the-ground chronicles of these exotic folk invading Washington. Even before Trump’s victory, commentators were poring through fortuitously timed books like Nancy Isenberg’s sociocultural history White Trash and J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, seeking to comprehend and perhaps find common ground with the Trumpentariat. As measured by book sales and his appeal to much the same NPR-ish audience, Vance has become his people’s explainer-in-chief, the Ta-Nehisi Coates, if you will, of White Lives Matter.

...[I]t’s one thing for the Democratic Party to drain its own swamp of special interests and another for it to waste time and energy chasing unreachable voters in the base of Trump’s electorate. For all her failings, Clinton received 3 million more votes than Trump and lost the Electoral College by the mere 77,744 votes that cost her the previously blue states of Michigan (which she lost by .2 of a percentage point), Wisconsin (.8 point), and Pennsylvania (.7 point). Of the 208 counties in America that voted for Obama twice and tipped to Trump in 2016, more than three-quarters were in states Clinton won anyway (some by a landslide, like New York) or states that have long been solidly red.

The centrist think tank Third Way is focusing on the Rust Belt in a $20 million campaign that its president, a former Clinton White House aide, says will address the question of how “you restore Democrats as a national party that can win everywhere.” Here is one answer that costs nothing: You can’t, and you don’t. The party is a wreck. Post-Obama-Clinton, its most admired national leaders (Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) are of Social Security age. It rules no branch of federal government, holds only 16 governorships, and controls only 14 state legislatures. The Democrats must set priorities. In a presidential election, a revamped economic program and a new generation of un-Clinton leaders may well win back the genuine swing voters who voted for Trump, whether Democratic defectors in the Rust Belt or upscale suburbanites who just couldn’t abide Hillary. But that’s a small minority of Trump’s electorate. Otherwise, the Trump vote is overwhelmingly synonymous with the Republican Party as a whole.

That makes it all the more a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. They will stick with him even though the numbers say that they will take a bigger financial hit than Clinton voters under the Republican health-care plan. As Trump himself has said, in a rare instance of accuracy, they won’t waver even if he stands in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoots somebody. While you can’t blame our new president for loving “the poorly educated” who gave him that blank check, the rest of us are entitled to abstain. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.

...You need not take a liberal’s word for this. The toughest critics of white blue-collar Trump voters are conservatives. Witness Kevin D. Williamson, who skewered “the white working class’s descent into dysfunction” in National Review as Trump was piling up his victories in the GOP primaries last March. Raised in working-class West Texas, Williamson had no interest in emulating the efforts of coastal liberals to scale empathy walls. Instead, he condemns Trump voters for being “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.” He chastises them for embracing victimhood by blaming their plight on “outside forces” like globalization, the Establishment, China, Washington, immigrants-- and “the Man” who “closed the factories down.” He concludes: “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”

Though some in Williamson’s ideological camp recoiled from his blunt language, he’s no outlier among conservatives. The popular blogger Erick Erickson tweeted last year that “a lot of Trump voters have failed at life and blame others for their own poor decisions.” His and Williamson’s line of attack echoes the conservative sociologist Charles Murray, most recently famous for being shouted down at Middlebury College in Vermont, where some remembered his co-authorship of The Bell Curve, a Clinton-era slab of spurious science positing that racial genetics play a role in limiting blacks’ performance on I.Q. tests. In a 2012 Obama-era sequel titled Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010, Murray switched his focus to whites and reprimanded those in the lower strata for abandoning family values and civic virtues. (This time, the culprit was not the genetic code but the anything-goes social mores wrought by leftist 1960s counterculture.)

...The conservative contempt for Trump voters-- omnipresent among the party’s Establishment until the Election Day results persuaded all but the most adamant NeverTrumpers to fall into line-- would seem to give the Democrats a big opening to win them over. Bemoaning how his blue native state of West Virginia turned red well before Trump beat Clinton by 42 percentage points, the veteran liberal editor and author Charles Peters was hopeful the tide could be reversed with time and, yes, empathy: “If we don’t listen, how can we persuade?” he implored readers of the Times. Those who want to start that listening now can download an “Escape Your Bubble” browser extension to sweep opposing views into their Facebook feeds; both MSNBC and CNN have stepped up their efforts to expose their audiences to Trumpist voices. But getting out of one’s bubble can’t be a one-way proposition. It won’t make any difference if MSNBC viewers hear from the right while Fox News viewers remain locked in their echo chamber. Nor will it matter if hipsters-- or Democratic politicians-- migrate from the Bay Area and Brooklyn to Louisiana and Iowa to listen to white working-class voters if those voters don’t listen back. There’s zero evidence that they will. The dug-in Trump base shows no signs of varying its exclusive diet of right-wing media telling it that anyone who contradicts Trump, Rush, or Breitbart is peddling “fake news.” When Bernie Sanders visits West Virginia to tell his faithful that they are being raped and pillaged by Trump-administration policies that will make the Trump University scam look like amateur hour, he is being covered by MSNBC, not Fox News, whose passing interest in Sanders during primary season was attributable to his attacks on Clinton.

The most insistent message of right-wing media hasn’t changed since the Barry Goldwater era: Government is inherently worthless, if not evil, and those who preach government activism, i.e., liberals and Democrats, are subverting America. Facts on the ground, as Hochschild saw in Louisiana, do nothing to counter this bias. In his definitive recent book on the Rust Belt drug plague, Dreamland, the journalist Sam Quinones observes that “other than addicts and traffickers,” most of the people he encountered in his reporting were government workers. “They were the only ones I saw fighting this scourge,” he writes. “We’ve seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous 30 years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market’s worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees.” In that category he includes local police, prosecutors, federal agents, coroners, nurses, Centers for Disease Control scientists, judges, state pharmacists, and epidemiologists. Yet even now, Reagan’s old dictum remains gospel on the right (Vance included): “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” In Portsmouth, Ohio, the epicenter of opiate-pill mills and of Quinones’s book, Trump won by a landslide. As he did in Ohio’s Butler County, where Vance grew up and which now ranks eighth among all American counties in the increase in the rate of drug-related deaths between 2004 (when opioid fatalities first spiked) and 2014.

As polls uniformly indicate, nothing that has happened since November 8 has shaken that support. And what are Trump’s voters getting in exchange for their loyalty? For starters, there’s Ryan-Trumpcare, which, on top of its other indignities, eliminates the requirement that Medicaid offer addiction treatment, which over the past two years has increased exponentially in opioid-decimated communities where it is desperately needed. Meanwhile, Trump’s White House circle of billionaires is busily catering to its own constituency, prioritizing tax cuts for the fabulously wealthy while pushing to eliminate rural-development agencies that aid Trump voters.

The go-to explanation for the steadfastness of Trump’s base was formulated by the conservative pundit Salena Zito during the campaign: The press takes Trump “literally but not seriously” while “his supporters take him seriously but not literally.” If this is true, then presumably his base will remain onboard when he fails to deliver literally on his most alluring promises: “insurance for everybody” providing “great health care for a fraction of the price”; the revival of coal mining; a trillion-dollar infrastructure mobilization producing “millions of new jobs” and accompanied by “massive tax relief” for all; and the wall that will shield America from both illegal immigration and the lethal Mexican heroin that has joined OxyContin as the working-class drugs of choice.

There’s no way liberals can counter these voters’ blind faith in a huckster who’s sold them this snake oil. The notion that they can be won over by some sort of new New Deal-- “domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance),” as Mark Lilla puts it-- is wishful thinking. These voters are so adamantly opposed to government programs that in some cases they refuse to accept the fact that aid they already receive comes from Washington-- witness the “Keep Government Out of My Medicare!” placards at the early tea-party protests.

Perhaps it’s a smarter idea to just let the GOP own these intractable voters. Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility. Let Trump’s white working-class base take responsibility for its own votes-- or in some cases failure to vote-- and live with the election’s consequences. If, as polls tell us, many voters who vilify Obamacare haven’t yet figured out that it’s another name for the Affordable Care Act that’s benefiting them-- or if they do know and still want the Trump alternative-- then let them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests. That they will sabotage other needy Americans along with them is unavoidable in any case now-- at least until voters stage an intervention in an election to come.

Trump voters should also be reminded that the elite of the party they’ve put in power is as dismissive of them as Democratic elites can be condescending. “Forget your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap,” Kevin Williamson wrote of the white working class in National Review. “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.” He was only saying in public what other Republicans like Mitt Romney say about the “47 percent” in private when they think only well-heeled donors are listening. Besides, if National Review says that their towns deserve to die, who are Democrats to stand in the way of Trump voters who used their ballots to commit assisted suicide?

So hold the empathy and hold on to the anger. If Trump delivers on his promises to the “poorly educated” despite all indications to the contrary, then good for them. Once again, all the Trump naysayers will be proved wrong. But if his administration crashes into an iceberg, leaving his base trapped in America’s steerage with no lifeboats, those who survive may at last be ready to burst out of their own bubble and listen to an alternative. Or not: Maybe, like Hochschild’s new friends in Louisiana’s oil country, they’ll keep voting against their own interests until the industrial poisons left unregulated by their favored politicians finish them off altogether. Either way, the best course for Democrats may be to respect their right to choose.

I'll pass on--like in refrain from participating in-- Rich's orgy of guilty pleasure. Iowa's first congressional district-- Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo-- went for Obama 56.2% to 42.5% in 2012. Last year it flipped to Trump 48.7% to 45.2%. If TrumpCare passes 44,991 people will lose their health insurance in the district, and their far right multimillionaire congressman, Rod Blum is waving the TrumpCare flag-- but only if Ryan makes it even more restrictive and harmful. This is the last kind of district in the country I would want to abandon to the Republicans, let alone the Trumpists. Of the 20 counties in the district, the population base is in 4 and this 4 decide the elections. Here's how they voted in last year's Iowa Caucuses

• Black Hawk Co.- Bernie- 3,647 (52.9%), Trump- 1,360 (23.0%)
• Dubuque Co.- Bernie- 2,276 (47.4%), Trump- 1,087 (27.3%)
• Linn Co.- Bernie- 6,331 (52.3%), Trump- 2,344 (20.2%)
• Marshall Co.- Bernie- 960 (53.4%), Trump- 608 (26.1%)

Yep... Bernie would have won. His message would have won. Hillary was the wrong candidate for this district. And to make it worse, the DCCC forced a sack of garbage on the district as the nominee, a rich, clueless "ex"-Republican named Monica Vernon who, of course, EMILY's List was pushing. And Schumer and the DSCC insisted on another crap corporate pile of shit candidate, Patty Judge. There was no reason for any Democrat-- except a blue zombie-- to vote for either one of them. Sure plenty of people went dot vote against Blum and against Grassley, but the DCCC and DSCC lesser of two evils strategy failed and failed miserably. Judge got wiped out completely, losing the bluest counties in the district. In fact, she only won one small county in the entire state. She was the worst Democratic Senate candidate in a plausible race anywhere in the country and Schumer wouldn't hear of anyone else being the candidate but her. Judge got 23.7% of the vote statewide. She did't even break 40% in Dubuque or Marshall counties. She offered absolutely nothing to any voters other than she an unconvincing assertion that she wasn't as bad as Grassely. Vernon got her ass kicked as well. The wretched GOP extremist was reelected 206,273 (53.9%) to 175,447 (46.1%) primarily because Vernon had nothing to offer anyone in this D+5 district but an EMILY's List cookie. No, I'm not giving up on these people; I'd give up on the Democratic Party first.

Besides, there IS the RedNeckRevolt, which we should all be tuned into: "The history of the white working class is one full of resistance, collectively and individually, against the rich elite that hold power over all of our lives. From massive armed uprisings like the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, to the resistance to coal mining in predominately white rural Appalachia today, white working people have been in conflict with those that uphold predatory economic, political, and social systems. The history of the white working class is also one filled with collaboration with those same rich elite power holders. White working people have played the role of foot soldiers for the political and economic elite, participating in genocide and the enslavement of other peoples, and overall protectors of the ruling class. White working class participation in state and paramilitary organizations and formations like the Ku Klux Klan, the Minutemen, the U.S. Armed Forces, and the Council of Conservative Citizens has undermined the struggle for freedom among all people. It is with these conflicting histories in mind that we hope to incite a movement amongst white working people that works toward the total liberation of all working people, regardless of skin color, religious background, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, or any other division that bosses and politicians have used to fragment movements for social, political, and economic freedom."

What Hillary Won't Agree To On May Day... Or Any Other Day

Let's put Adolph Reed's quote-- "Ideology is the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to hold and what gets you paid"-- aside for a moment and look at what Bernie would like to accomplish within the confines of the Democratic Party at this point. During a speech Thursday in Springfield, Oregon he said said the party should go back to Howard Dean's 50-state strategy-- shit-canned by Rahm Emanuel, Tim Kaine and Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- as well as towards open primaries and automatic voter registration. "All over this country we have Republican governors trying to make it harder for people to vote," he reminded his supporters. "Our job is make it easier. Bring more people into the system and that means if you are 18 years of age you are registered to vote, end of discussion." Aside from the process reforms, there are specific policy proposals he would like to see the party adopt-- from free public university education, a $15 minimum wage tied to inflation, significant improvements to Obamacare in the direction of Medicare-for-all, and a real commitment to fighting climate change to equal pay for equal work for women, far more muscular Wall Street reform, expanded Social Security and a fairer tax system.

Hillary's unlikely to go along with any of this-- other than equal pay for women-- and her supporters insist that Bernie has already pushed her too far to the left in a way that will risk her general election victory. This is absurd for a number of reasons. First of all Bernie's proposals are extremely popular among Democrats and independents and the only groups who don't like them are die-hard Republicans and the wealthy Clinton financiers who have captured her career. If the general election is between Hillary and Trump-- as looks likely-- it will be an ugly, bitter, divisive lesser-of-two-evils contest in which policy nuances will not play a decisive role.

One of her conservaDem Missouri surrogates, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City, sounds a lot like the official Clinton line: "I don’t know what’s left to extract," claiming Bernie has pushed her "farther to the left than most moderate Democrats would like to see. Some would say it even endangers a victory in November because the further you go to the left or right, the further you frustrate independents." First off, Cleaver uses Beltway-speak that substitutes "moderate" for "corrupt conservative." Second, it wrongly pre-supposes that independent voters (40% of the electorate now) are between the 2 corrupted Beltway professional parties instead of against them, a concept Beltway politicians find impossible to grasp.

In the new issue of Jacobin, Samir Chopra makes a compelling case that "Clinton's record suggests she’ll wield power to undermine progressive goals-- not advance them." His critique stems from her "political opportunism, her reflexive secrecy, her frequent patronage of friends and cronies, her belligerent approach to foreign policy, her scant legislative record in the Senate, and her unimpressive tenure as secretary of state." His point is that "her identification with, and championing of the interests of, the powerful and wealthy American elite that makes her an unworthy candidate."

The Clintons are card-carrying members of that elite: Bill Clinton’s wealth has been estimated at is $55 million; Hillary’s at $32 million. They defend the powerful and the structures that maintain that power, they pay lip service to caring for the not-so-fortunate, and under cover of doing so, find ways to increase their wealth and political power (as the close ties between their Clinton Foundation and its corporate allies show)... Clinton’s record has repeatedly demonstrated: her desire to cozy up to power and her disinclination to rock political boats; her commitment to expediency above any political principle; and her trafficking in greed of several flavors.

In Arkansas, during her pre-Washington days, Clinton served on Walmart’s board for six years and never spoke up against its anti-union activities or against its discrimination against women, and in her Senate campaign, Clinton supported the death penalty, welfare restrictions, and a balanced budget.

Once in the Senate, she voted for the Iraq war-- without, as Henwood notes, even reading the intelligence report on Iraq-- while opposing the 2001 bankruptcy reform bill, which made it harder for ordinary Americans to file for bankruptcy, more often than not caused by unaffordable medical bills.

Overall, Clinton’s legislative record was scant, and as [My Turn: Hillary Clinton Takes Aim At The Presidency author Doug] Henwood caustically concludes, purely nominal-- the equivalent of “opposing cancer.” In this regard, Clinton is in no way unique among career politicians, but she’s certainly no transformational outsider either.

...Clinton’s lack of progressive ideals is especially visible in her work as secretary of state-- a record that Henwood subjects to especially withering analysis-- where she oversaw a belligerent foreign policy: she backed an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, supported intervention in Libya, called for strikes in Syria, urged an ongoing military role in Iraq, and enthusiastically supported Israel’s policies in Gaza.

As secretary of state, Clinton supposedly worked on issues like “empowerment of women, gay rights, Third World development, health and internet freedoms,” but there is little tangible impact to report in those domains. She did help impose tough sanctions on Iran and negotiated neoliberal free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. She also dispensed plenty of patronage to friends, ensuring waiver of the usual background scrutiny for those she hired to well-paid positions at the Department of State.

In a classic instance of neocolonial appropriation of nationalized industries, Clinton actively worked to open up Mexican oil and gas to American corporations, and joined a long and dishonorable tradition of American foreign policy by supporting a coup in Honduras against the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya.

Henwood’s account of the Clinton State Department is damning in other respects as well. He argues that the position was extremely lucrative for the Clintons: in a rather transparent quid pro quo Clinton dispensed favors in international business deals to her corporate allies who in turn donated to the Clinton philanthropies-- business elites got contracts and in turn gave funds to the foundation, which were siphoned off for luxurious travel and sundry expenses.

During her tenure as secretary of state, Bill Clinton gave ten of his thirteen speeches-- between 2001 and 2012-- that have netted him over half a million dollars each; “many of those speeches were sponsored by groups with interests before the state department.” As Henwood notes, journalists can only go so far in charging the Clintons with corruption; legal investigation is needed to make these charges stick.

Whatever factors motivated Clinton’s retreat from the positions she once held, she has now had ample opportunity-- as first lady, as US senator, as secretary of state-- to demonstrate how she will wield power once she gets it; it is implausible to suggest the real, more progressive politician will emerge once the demands of the campaign are behind her.

Henwood’s critique of Clinton is, however, more than just a long recitation of charges to be laid at her door. He reminds us real political change will only be achieved by unglamorous work, by racking up, slowly, the small victories of the kind that Clinton, in her battles against ACORN in Arkansas, did a great deal to undermine.

It will not be enough to crown a new ruler; militant political mobilization and worker organizing remain the only sure way to challenge entrenched corporate power.

In the immortal words of Bob Marley, Get Up, Stand Up. Let's support the candidates who are doing just that in their congressional campaigns, who don't believe in ever giving up the fight... here at the thermometer:

A LITTLE LATE NIGHT MUSIC FROM LAIBACH

See you in the morning