Trumpist Contemplates Trump's Rejection By The Voters: "Sometimes You Own The Libs; Sometimes The Libs Own You"

 

Lame Duck by Nancy Ohanian

Today everyone is writing about how depressed Trump is and how bleak his mood is. Awwwww.... The NY Times reported that Señor Trumpanzee "has spent his days toggling between his White House residence and the Oval Office, watching television coverage about the final weeks of his presidency. His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters. But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president." Whew.

The Washington Post's David Nakamura noted that Trump Is In Hiding. He wrote that yesterday, "six American service members were killed in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission in Egypt. Tropical Storm Eta made landfall in North Florida, contributing to severe flooding. The number of Americans infected with the novel coronavirus continued at a record-setting pace, sending the stock market tumbling. At the White House, President Trump spent the day as he has most others this week-- sequestered from public view, tweeting grievances, falsehoods and misinformation about the election results and about Fox News’s coverage of him. Neither he nor his aides briefed reporters on the news of the day or reacted to Democratic leaders who accused Republicans of imperiling the pandemic response by 'refusing to accept reality' over the election results."

In her Times column, The Post-Presidency of a Con Man, Michelle Goldberg took comfort "in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect-- by initiating new grifts. Trump has been sending out frantic fund-raising requests to 'defend the election,' but as the New York Times reports, most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that 'will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.' Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal. These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office... But there are reasons to think that when he is finally ejected from the White House, he will become a significantly diminished figure."

Once Trump is no longer president, he is likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to patronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could complete the transition from Trump’s enabler to his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish self-abasement, Republicans with presidential aspirations will have an incentive to help take him down.

“His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attorney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I have to assume that, given the amount of civil litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s going to be at a completely new dimension.”

...It’s too much to expect any sudden exposure of Trump. There will be no cathartic moment when everyone realizes that the emperor was always naked. But the question isn’t whether Trump’s support will evaporate. It’s whether it will erode, especially once he loses the ability to make Republican dreams come true.

Besides, the threats to Trump are not only to his reputation, such as it is. In Bob Woodward’s book Fear, he wrote that Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd implored the president not to testify in Robert Mueller’s probe because he believed him to be an inveterate liar. (Dowd has denied this.) Should Trump face depositions in these civil cases, however, he’ll have no choice about submitting to interviews.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s former deputy, told me he expects Trump to pardon himself for any federal crimes he might have committed. That would mean that even if a Biden Department of Justice wanted to take the extraordinary step of prosecuting a former president, it would also have to litigate the constitutionality of self-pardons, a complicated, time-consuming process.

But he might face state charges that he can’t pardon his way out of. New York State Attorney General Letitia James has a civil investigation into possible financial chicanery by the Trump Organization. Trump is under criminal investigation by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance. While the scope of the probe is unknown, his office’s filings suggest Vance could be looking at tax fraud, insurance fraud and falsification of business records.

The “Manhattan DA’s office is a really good office, and they’ve done a lot of white-collar cases,” said Weissmann. “If they were to prove-- this is now hypothetical-- but if they were to prove tens of millions of dollars in tax fraud or bank fraud, people go to jail for that.”

Let’s say Trump, ever the escape artist, avoids prison, setting himself up as the warlord of MAGA-world at Mar-a-Lago. His post-presidency still won’t be easy. As The Times has reported, he’s personally on the hook for $421 million in debt, most of it coming due in the next four years. If a long fight with the I.R.S. goes against him, he could owe at least $100 million more.

“Mr. Trump still has assets to sell,” The Times reported. “But doing so could take its own toll, both financial and to Mr. Trump’s desire to always be seen as a winner.”

Trump is already trying to profit off his avid base, and he will surely continue. But it’s an open question whether, without the intoxicating aura of presidential power, he can sustain their devotion. There are several examples of once-formidable right-wing leaders reduced to footnotes after leaving office.

As Republican House majority leader, Tom DeLay was frequently described as the most powerful man in Congress. Then, in 2005, he was indicted on a charge of campaign money laundering. Though his 2010 conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, the last time he had any significant public profile was when he appeared on Dancing With the Stars in 2009.

Sarah Palin, too, was once a Republican icon; in many ways she presaged Trump. “Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party,” said a New York Times headline just before the 2008 election. It quoted right-wing activist Brent Bozell: “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proved that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.”

But since resigning as Alaska’s governor in 2009, Palin has lost her luster. Once a likely presidential prospect, she recently made headlines for wearing a pink and purple bear costume on the Fox reality show The Masked Singer.

Trump is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

After all that, could he be back in 2024? Of course. Trump is, if nothing else, relentless. But this election was just the latest reminder that he is far from invincible. When he is no longer in office, there will be many more.

One of my favorite of today's Trump woe-is-me tails was a "re-release" of Jane Mayer's Nov. 1 column: Why Trump Can't Afford To Lose. Can you imagine this scene of Trumpanzee despondency the day before the election?

Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options. He wasn’t especially religious, but, as daylight faded outside the rapidly emptying White House, he fell to his knees and prayed out loud, sobbing as he smashed his fist into the carpet. “What have I done?” he said. “What has happened?” When the President noted that the military could make it easy for him by leaving a pistol in a desk drawer, the chief of staff called the President’s doctors and ordered that all sleeping pills and tranquillizers be taken away from him, to insure that he wouldn’t have the means to kill himself.

No? Me either... besides, it was Nixon, not Trump. Still, Mayer notes that "No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses... the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, 'If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.' Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden."

She notes that the Financial Times estimates that, "in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets-- or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties-- especially his hotels and resorts-- have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. 'It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,' Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me."

Last winter, a Cabinet secretary told me Trump had confided that he couldn’t imagine returning to his former life as a real-estate developer. As the Cabinet secretary recalled, the two men were gliding along in a motorcade, surrounded by throngs of adoring supporters, when Trump remarked, “Isn’t this incredible? After this, I could never return to ordering windows. It would be so boring.”

Throughout the 2020 campaign, Trump’s national poll numbers have lagged behind Biden’s, and two sources who have spoken to the President in the past month described him as being in a foul mood. He has testily insisted that he won both Presidential debates, contrary to even his own family’s assessment of the first one. And he has raged not just at the polls and the media but also at some people in charge of his reëlection campaign, blaming them for squandering money and allowing Biden’s team to have a significant financial advantage. Trump’s bad temper was visible on October 20th, when he cut short a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl. A longtime observer who spent time with him recently told me that he’d never seen Trump so angry.

The President’s niece Mary Trump-- a psychologist and the author of the tell-all memoir Too Much and Never Enough-- told me that his fury “speaks to his desperation,” adding, “He knows that if he doesn’t manage to stay in office he’s in serious trouble. I believe he’ll be prosecuted, because it seems almost undeniable how extensive and long his criminality is. If it doesn’t happen at the federal level, it has to happen at the state level.” She described the “narcissistic injury” that Trump will suffer if he is rejected at the polls. Within the Trump family, she said, “losing was a death sentence-- literally and figuratively.” Her father, Fred Trump, Jr., the President’s older brother, “was essentially destroyed” by her grandfather’s judgment that Fred was not “a winner.” (Fred died in 1981, of complications from alcoholism.) As the President ponders potential political defeat, she believes, he is “a terrified little boy.”

Barbara Res, whose new book, Tower of Lies, draws on the eighteen years that she spent, off and on, developing and managing construction projects for Trump, also thinks that the President is not just running for a second term-- he is running from the law. “One of the reasons he’s so crazily intent on winning is all the speculation that prosecutors will go after him,” she said. “It would be a very scary spectre.” She calculated that, if Trump loses, “he’ll never, ever acknowledge it-- he’ll leave the country.” Res noted that, at a recent rally, Trump mused to the crowd about fleeing, ad-libbing, “Could you imagine if I lose? I’m not going to feel so good. Maybe I’ll have to leave the country-- I don’t know.” It’s questionable how realistic such talk is, but Res pointed out that Trump could go “live in one of his buildings in another country,” adding, “He can do business from anywhere.”

It turns out that, in 2016, Trump in fact made plans to leave the United States right after the vote. Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump supporter who served briefly as the White House communications director, was with him in the hours before the polls closed. Scaramucci told me that Trump and virtually everyone in his circle had expected Hillary Clinton to win. According to Scaramucci, as he and Trump milled around Trump Tower, Trump asked him, “What are you doing tomorrow?” When Scaramucci said that he had no plans, Trump confided that he had ordered his private plane to be readied for takeoff at John F. Kennedy International Airport, so that the next morning he could fly to Scotland, to play golf at his Turnberry resort. Trump’s posture, Scaramucci told me, was to shrug off the expected defeat. “It was, like, O.K., he did it for the publicity. And it was over. He was fine. It was a waste of time and money, but move on.” Scaramucci said that, if 2016 is any guide, Trump would treat a loss to Biden more matter-of-factly than many people expect: “He’ll go down easier than most people think. Nothing crushes this guy.”

Mary Trump, like Res, suspects that her uncle is considering leaving the U.S. if he loses the election (a result that she regards as far from assured). If Biden wins, she suggested, Trump will “describe himself as the best thing that ever happened to this country and say, ‘It doesn’t deserve me-- I’m going to do something really important, like build the Trump Tower in Moscow.’”

The notion that a former American President would go into exile-- like a disgraced king or a deposed despot-- sounds almost absurd, even in this heightened moment, and many close observers of the President, including Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s first best-seller, The Art of the Deal, dismiss the idea. “I’m sure he’s terrified,” Schwartz told me. “But I don’t think he’ll leave the country. Where the hell would he go?” However, Snyder, the Yale professor, whose specialty is antidemocratic regimes in Eastern Europe, believes that Trump might well abscond to a foreign country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S. “Unless you’re an idiot, you have that flight plan ready,” Snyder said. “Everyone’s telling me he’ll have a show on Fox News. I think he’ll have a show on RT”-- the Russian state television network.

...Schwartz agreed that Trump “will do anything to make the case he didn’t lose,” and noted that one of Trump’s strengths has been his refusal to admit failure, which means that “when he wins he wins, and when he loses he also wins.” But if Trump loses by a landslide, Schwartz said, “he’ll have many fewer cards to play. He won’t be able to play the election-was-stolen-from-me card-- and that’s a big one.”

But my favorite of all was Olivia Nuzzi's The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency for New York. She wrote that by Election Day, Señor T understood that losing was inevitable. "He accepted, even if he had no plans to concede, that his presidency was over. Nevertheless, in the residence, surrounded by senior advisers and family, he was furious. About everything. He was angry things weren’t going his way. He was angry Fox had called Arizona for Biden. He was angry that Biden had gone out on TV first. Everyone was offering him different ideas about what to say to the nation, to fight or to be measured or to say this or that, contradicting each other as the president grew angrier and angrier, throwing up one hand to silence people as he reviewed notes in the other. He was unhappy with the notes. He was unhappy with everything. And then he went out and ignored everybody who had tried to help.

[T]he campaign mounted half-assed legal fights in states they thought he still had a chance to win-- not because they thought it would bring them the election but because there wasn’t much else to do but fight. The New York Times reported that the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said he was looking for a James Baker–type figure. Instead, they got Rudy Giuliani, Pam Bondi, Corey Lewandowski, and Dave Bossie. “That’s not a legal team,” one of the president’s friends told me. “It’s all so bizarre.”

This person, who speaks to the president often-- or, more accurately, who listens and says uh-huh as the president speaks-- said that Trump is not just done for, but done. “He wants to lose. He’s out of money. He worries about being arrested. He worried about being assassinated,” they said. “It hasn’t been a great experience for him. He likes showing people around the White House, but the actual day-to-day business of being president? It’s been pretty unpleasant for him.”

“A lot of what Trump says is the opposite of what he means. That’s true of all of us, to some extent,” the president’s friend said. But when Trump said he didn’t mind losing to Biden, even though he famously hates losers of any ilk, his friend believed him. “He doesn’t believe losing is shameful-- quitting is bad. Losing isn’t,” this person said. “He’s afraid. He’s the most insecure, afraid person ever. He’s too afraid to be president. He’s afraid to exercise power. He’s afraid to do the job. It’s why he’s overbearing and crazy-- he sabotages himself constantly because he hates himself and wants out. He’s always trying to hurt himself. That guy commits more self-harm than anyone I’ve ever encountered.”





...In the weeks leading up to the election, certain White House officials and people close to the president were busy laying the groundwork for a post-Trump reputational and relationship recovery tour. Trump may be holding rallies and refusing to admit Biden is a legitimately elected president on prime-time Trump TV, but the anti-professional class of operators who assumed power on his coattails know that they’ll have to shape-shift if they want to survive. I received messages from multiple staffers who said they were counting down the days until freedom from the environment they entered, and stayed in, willingly. That they had so much to tell me now that it was too late to matter very much. That they were not the same as the others around them, the people who didn’t see the place, the presidency, for what it really was.

Others didn’t feel they had anything to explain or defend. “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened,” a former White House official told me. “Live. Laugh. Love.” This person added, “Sometimes you own the libs; sometimes the libs own you.”

Trump Never Hires Good People-- Never Has And Never Will

Yesterday, Face the Nation featured Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the nation's most trusted voice on the pandemic. Fauci told the audience that "this is going to be a bad week... unfortunately, if you look at the projection of the curves, of the kinetics of the curves, we're going to continue to see an escalation. Also, we should hope that within a week, maybe a little bit more, we'll start to see a flattening out of the curve and coming down. The mitigation that we're talking about that you just mentioned is absolutely key to the success of that. So on the one hand, things are going to get bad and we need to be prepared for that. It is going to be shocking to some. It certainly is-- is really disturbing to see that. But that's what's going to happen before it turns around. So we'll just buckle down, continue to mitigate, continue to do the physical separation because we got to get through this week that's coming up because it is going to be a bad week... I will not say we have it under control, Margaret. That would be a false statement. We are struggling to get it under control, and that's the issue that's at hand right now. The thing that's important is that what you see is increases in new cases, which then start to flatten out."

He added that "Unless we get this globally under control, there's a very good chance that it will assume a seasonal nature in the sense that even if we, and I-- and I hope it's not just if but when we get it down to the point where it really is at a very low level, we need to be prepared that since it unlikely will be completely eradicated from the planet, that as we get into next season, we may see the beginning of a resurgence. And that's the reason why we're pushing so hard and getting our preparedness much better than it was, but importantly, pushing on a vaccine and doing clinical trials for therapeutic interventions so that hopefully if in fact we do see that resurgence, we will have interventions that we did not have in the beginning of the situation that we're in right now."

CBS turned to Fauci. As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her column, the second dumbest man in government turned to the dumbest man in government. "Heaven help us," she wrote, "we’re at the mercy of the Slim Suit crowd." She began with a story illustrating how George W Bush was revealed as "a man who had been winging it for the first half of his life, playing and swaggering around while he relied on his daddy and daddy’s friends to prop him up... Now we have another pampered scion in the Oval, propped up by his daddy for half his life, accustomed to winging it and swaggering around. And he, too, is utterly unprepared to lead us through the storm. Like W., he is resorting to clinical states’ rights arguments, leaving the states to chaotically compete with one another and the federal government for precious medical equipment."

Donald Trump is trying to build a campaign message around his image as a wartime president. But as a commander in chief, Cadet Bone Spurs is bringing up the rear.

“I would leave it up to the governors,” Trump said Friday, when asked about his government’s sclerotic response. Trouble is, when you leave it to the governors, you have scenes like we did in Florida with the open beaches-- not to mention a swath in the middle of the country that, as of Friday night, still had not ordered residents to stay home.

The Los Angeles Times reported that two months before the virus spread through Wuhan, the Trump administration halted a $200 million early-warning program to train scientists in China and elsewhere to deal with a pandemic. The name of the program? “PREDICT.”

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, but this virus loves it.

At Thursday’s briefing, Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who barely two weeks ago became the head of the administration’s supply-chain task force, added to the confusion when he defended the government’s decision to send the supplies governors are pleading for to the private sector first.

“I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain,” the admiral said.

Trump was elected to disrupt things. So disrupt.

The president seems oblivious to the fact that his own clown car of an administration bungled the priceless lead time we had to get ready for the pandemic.

With the death toll in this country soaring past 7,000, Trump is focused on the same thing he is always focused on: himself. He proudly told reporters Wednesday, “Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook? I just found out I was No. 1 on Facebook. I thought that was very nice for whatever it means.” Our doom, perhaps?

Trump’s most defining qualities have been on display in this fight: He has been mercurial, vindictive, deceptive, narcissistic, blame-shifting and nepotistic.

At the Thursday briefing, the president brought out another wealthy, uninformed man-child who loves to play boss: Jared Kushner. Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Surely Trump did not think giving Kushner a lead role would inspire confidence. This is the very same adviser who told his father-in-law early on that the virus was being overplayed by the press and also urged him to tout a Google website guiding people to testing sites that turned out to be, um, still under construction.

Now he is leading a group, mocked within the government as “the Slim Suit crowd,” that is providing one more layer of confusion-- and inane consultant argot-- to the laggardly, disorganized response.

From the lectern, Kushner drilled down on his role as the annoying, spoiled kid in every teen movie ever made. “And the notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Our stockpile?

That’s the way the Trump-Kushner dynasty has approached this whole presidency, conflating what belongs to the people with what is theirs. Trump acts like he has the right to dole out “favors,” based on which governor is most assiduous about kissing up to him.

On Friday, the administration changed the wording on the Department of Health and Human Services website about the stockpile to be matchy-matchy with Kushner’s cavalier dismissal of the states.

It was typical of Trump’s muddled message that on Friday, as the C.D.C. issued new guidelines to wear masks, the president said: “You can wear ’em. You don’t have to wear ’em,” adding he had no intention of wearing one because “Somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute desk, the great Resolute desk, I think wearing a face mask” did not gel with his image of greeting “prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”

A couple of days earlier, another Times columnist I'm not a fan of, Michelle Goldberg, got there first: Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness. Perhaps she's speaking for most Americans-- I think she is-- when she writes that "it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant... Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors-- his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians-- have been failures. Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees... This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy."

People I know who have known Kushner at various times in his life-- some very well-- all agree with the assessment Dowd used author Andrea Bernstein to make. Bernstein told Goldberg that Kushner "really sees himself as a disrupter." Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he "believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about."

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion-- a record, at the time-- for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-- for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books-- have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

...Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”

Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As the Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing-- outside of that they all report up to Kushner,” reported Politico.

White Supremists Don't Fight Against Anti-Semitism-- White Supremicism IS Anti-Semitism

German Nazis in black and white; North Carolina Nazis in color

Watching Trump's ugly fascist supporters howling for Ilhan's blood in North Carolina this week, sent a shiver up my spine. By birth I'm a Jew. What would it take to turn that mob against me and American Jews? Ten words from Trump? Five? I was watching authoritarian and fascistic-oriented Americans in that audience. And to hear a neo-Nazi like Trump using some bullshit against AOC, Ilhan, Ayanna and Rashida as "anti-Semitic" was flat-out galling, sickening. I've been involved with an organization called Young Elected Officials (YEO) for many years, and long before either ran for Congress, I've seen the spectacular work Ilhan and Rashida have done as state legislators on behalf of their constituents and their communities in Minneapolis and Detroit. They were both elected to open seats last year because of how their constituents-- not Trump (detested in both cities)-- viewed their records and because of the quality of the their ideas and of their characters. Neither is remotely anti-Semitic, unless you define refusing to pledge allegiance to Benjamin Netanyahu as the definition of anti-Semitism... which would make a majority of American Jews anti-semites.

Yesterday, in her NY Times column, Michelle Goldberg, seems to have noted the same stunning hypocrisy and the "increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken," not just among North Carolina rednecks but throughout the regime of a cunning and indisputably racist president.

She began by talking about Trump's actual in-house Nazi, Hungarian fascist Sebastian Gorka routinely accusing Jewish intellectuals and activists of anti-Semitism and Jew-hating. "If this were just Gorka," she wrote, "you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.

Republicans routinely defend Trump's racist taunts as having something to do with "protecting Jews." I'd feel a lot better if he were protecting Jews from Confederate racists than from The Squad. But, as Goldberg wrote, "This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel 'your country' and Benjamin Netanyahu 'your prime minister,' suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does."

Is far right Montana Senator Steve Daines a Nazi?

I don't know if Montana Senator Steve Daines is a neo-Nazi or not but he seems to be behaving like one, tweeting his solidarity with Trump by proclaiming that "Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals." That sounds like a Nazi to my Jewish ears. And it did to the Montana Association of Rabbis as well, who sent Daines an open letter stating that the rabbis in Billings,  Bozeman,  Missoula, and Whitefish are "unanimously appalled by the ongoing torrent of racist incitement and personal attacks that President Trump continues to direct against Democratic women of color in Congress" and by Daines' complicity. "Montana," they wrote, "deserves and expects more from its representatives. It is not the Montana way to personally attack others for their political viewpoints or positions. It is not the Montana way to promote bigotry or hatred, as the senator himself stated with his fellow representatives on December 27, 2016:  “We stand firmly together to send a clear message that ignorance, hatred and threats of violence are unacceptable and have no place…in Montana or across this nation. Collectively, as Montana’s rabbis, we are the experts on antisemitism in Montana; we have studied it, lived it, and know it when we see it. We refuse to allow the real threat of antisemitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and antisemitic violence in this country. Accusing these representatives of antisemitism is no justification for telling them 'to go back to where they came from' or inciting violence against them. In a direct affront to Montana’s Jewish communities and Jewish leaders, Senator Daines has decided to join in the president’s rhetoric of hate, a rhetoric which presents a serious threat to Jewish communities. We do not feel safer or supported by Senator Daines’ comments, rather we fear the legitimization the president and the senator are giving to racism, xenophobia, misogyny and hatred."

Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Omar and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields, pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League-- the Anti-Defamation League!-- of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a Hebrew denunciation-- “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue”-- at the Jewish civil rights organization.

Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.

When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.

Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”

...It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United States.

The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots-- and those politically aligned with them-- feel entitled to use their backing of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.

“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” said Ben-Ami. It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom.

ABC News interviewed Rabbi Avi Olitzky of Beth El Synagogue in the middle of Ilhan's Minneapolis district. He had the same feelings any sentient Jew hearing those chants of the North Carolina Trumpists. In an OpEd he wrote for the Times of Israel he warned that "We cannot fall victim to the political tricks that rely on racism, and the meme of antisemitism, to bolster both sides, while still doing immense communal harm... even if [Ilhan] disagrees with the policies of the current Israeli government, I cannot stay silent today. I stand fully beside her-- and her colleagues-- and support her in the face of the recent racist tweets of the president. This is not how we engage in civil dialogue. This is not how we do business and politics in this country. We are and have been better than this. We need to be better than this," And he told ABC's Briefing Room that "this is a very eerie wave of similar situations in history, be that Nazi Germany or elsewhere," noting that the Trumpists seem to have some kind of permission to be "publicly hateful and publicly loud.

"And from the pastors of my favorite evangelical group, Vote Common Good... a t-shirt all Americans should be proud to wear:

Another NY Times Republican columnist yesterday, David Brooks, seemed as disturbed as Goldberg about Trump's fascist rantings. "The real American idea," he wrote in a column titled Donald Trump Hates America, "is not xenophobic, nostalgic or racist; it is pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one-- e pluribus unum. Trump’s campaign is an attack on that dream. The right response is to double down on that ideal. The task before us is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet-- a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear."


Tony Schwartz wrote The Art of The Deal. No one understands Trump and Trumpism better than he does.