The Alchemist of Bullshit

 

“What can a man do in the face of the world’s injustice? Unite with others seeking non individual means of action.” Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years

Create reality. Stage a “faux” public hearing, with Rudy G center stage, and have Donald Trump call-in. Give Trump space to spew lies about the election outcome, the fraud, the steal, the conspiracy. Get the images and sound bites on Fox, send them to the far corners of the right wing reservation. By force of repetition, make millions of people believe in something that didn’t happen. Trump’s all-in for the game. Whatever he can do to tarnish Joe Biden’s convincing win, cast doubt on it, challenge it on the basis of slogans and opinion, blame Democrats, leftists, Antifa, Hillary Clinton, Hugo Chavez and the Evil Empire, Venezuela. Win the narrative war, turn defeat into victory. 

Trump is a salesman of non-refundable dreams. He can turn any negative into a positive, come up with a counter-accusation every time he is confronted with his failure or stupidity. Lack of shame is one reason Trump is so vile. The worst thing that has ever happened to Trump, the most public rejection he’s ever faced, is losing to Joe Biden by six million votes. This is intolerable to Trump’s fragile psyche. That’s why he’s not conceding his loss, and persistently testing the guardrails for weaknesses. I expect Trump to turn up the rhetorical volume as key dates in the certification and electoral college process draw near. Trump’s not done, he doesn’t realize that he’s trapped by cruel reality. 

Covid, the pandemic Donald Trump turned his back on, quit on, like a golfer who drops his clubs and walks off the course. 

Democracy is fragile. More so than I ever before believed. Think about what Trump is doing -- he’s actively attempting to subvert our democratic election. When he called in to the faux hearing he said, “We have to turn the election over?” How is what he’s doing and saying not an attempted coup? 

Trump’s latest gambit is to ignore the 80 million votes that Biden received and instead declare that since he, Trump, received more popular votes than Ronald Reagan, he should win re-election. Such is the logic of Trump World. Every move Trump makes is part of an effort to transform make-believe into hard reality. 

Trump is an alchemist of bullshit. 

When the DJIA (the stock market index) hit 30,000 this week Trump naturally took credit for it, with Mike Pence at his side. Trump called it a “sacred number.” He didn’t need to reveal who the number was sacred to because that’s obvious: he meant his class of people, those with money to speculate, those who climb up on the backs of other people, those who lie, cheat and swindle, those who equate money with morality, and those who are rarely held accountable for the harm they do. That number doesn’t mean a damn thing to the majority of Americans who work for a living, draw a paycheck, pay their full share of taxes. That the DJIA hit 30,000 -- on the same day the news was full of stories about lines of cars outside food banks all across the country -- was the perfect snapshot of this country at this moment. Grotesque and perverse wealth inequality. It was also the day records for Covid-19 infections and deaths were broken. Covid, the pandemic Donald Trump turned his back on, quit on, like a golfer who drops his clubs and walks off the course. 

A 30,000 Dow simply means that the speculators and money-changers had a good day. It doesn’t shorten the line of cars waiting at the food bank, or calm hungry and anxious people who fear the food might run out before their turn comes. The economic shock caused by the Covid pandemic and Trump’s failed response has only begun -- there’s more to come. We are witnessing the first stage of the pain. Our most vulnerable citizens are the canary in the coal mine. The DJIA hit 30,000 because the Federal Reserve, the institution created to facilitate the needs of our banking system, has created a monster asset bubble. When it comes to matters of capital, labor, speculation, and the financialized economy Americans are woefully uneducated. We don’t understand how thoroughly finance and corporate power have taken over, obliterated the middle class, and brought us closer to fascism than we have ever come before. It’s a Tyranny of Finance. 

The Biden administration will resemble the Obama administration in the same way the Obama administration resembled the Clinton administration: centrist, corporate-friendly, supportive of military adventures and fiscal austerity for working Americans. Biden will rearrange the furniture, toss the gaudy and gauche, but he’ll never change the architecture. If the country is really lucky, Biden will be a maintenance & repair president. Forget transformation, it won’t happen. Our country’s in bad shape. The economic structure is not sustainable. The political system is so broken and riven with partisanship that it cannot respond to the needs of the people. Right now we need sane, sober, steady and serious leadership. 

But January 20, 2021 is still a way’s off, on the far side of a minefield. 

Transforming the Host

“A Republican seizure of power based not on the strength of the party’s ideas but on massive disenfranchisement denies citizens not only their rights, but also the talisman of humanity that voting represents.” Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote

Lazy Sunday afternoon in Santa Barbara town, blue sky and sunshine and a very comfortable seventy-one degrees. My son is in the kitchen behind me, baking cinnamon rolls. He’s twenty-four and never stops eating. My daughter is in her bedroom, door closed against the entry of her brother who pesters her endlessly. My wife is perched on the sofa with her laptop, pecking away at work. Yesterday I watched my steadily improving Chelsea football team beat Newcastle United, 2-0 away at St. James’ Park. Solid win. Tottenham is next on the Premier League schedule, at home. Tottenham beat Manchester City, 2-0 at home yesterday and moved top of the league. City have experienced a rocky start, and against Spurs they struggled to solve Jose Mourinho’s tactical set-up. Midweek there is Champions League group action. The poor players are being run ragged by a compressed fixture schedule and, no surprise, the training room of many clubs are full of players with muscular injuries. Christian Pulisic for Chelsea. Sergio Aguero for Man City. Many others. The injury bug and positive Covid-19 tests have hit Liverpool hard. They lost star defender Virgil van Dijk for the season with an ACL injury. Still, the Reds roll on, cruising past Leicester by a 3-nil margin. Jurgen Klopp has built a winning machine. 

Winners and losers. The presidential election is staggering its way toward certification, though the Trump campaign is slowing the process with lawsuits and demands for recounts. The president, always on alert for another democratic norm to subvert, intervened personally by calling two Trump Party vote canvassers in Michigan; he then invited a delegation of Michigan Trump Party lawmakers to the White House, presumably to coerce them to ignore the will of Michigan voters (who overwhelmingly chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris), and award the state’s electoral college votes to him. Since I didn’t read about or hear a peep of protest, I assume this kind of election interference is legal. It just looks like the kind of thing a mob boss might do. 

Democracy in this country relies on norms, on faith in processes, and on those in power putting the country’s welfare ahead of their own. 

Trump will never concede, never lend a hand to the incoming Biden team, and never stop moaning about voter fraud, fake ballots, and how the election was stolen from him, the greatest US president of all time. That’s the Trump narrative.  Get used to hearing it, or some variation thereof. Maybe Trump will adopt Rudy G’s theory that Hugo Chavez rose from his grave in Venezuela and, along with secret operatives from Cuba and China, financial help from George Soros, and wizardry from Big Tech, rewired voting machines and deviously flipped millions of votes from Trump to Biden.  Until his last breath Trump will repeat, “I won in a landslide.”

Truth. Facts. Logic. Reason. Trump and his minions have stomped on this quartet for four years, almost rendered all four of these vital components of a liberal society irrelevant. It’s an astonishing achievement to make millions of people believe in things that are demonstrably false, like Trump’s fantasy auto plants in Michigan, steel mills in Pennsylvania, and resurgent coal mines in West Virginia. Millions of American voters obviously want very much to believe in the charade Trump has waged on them. In his excellent book, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, investigative journalist Tom Burgis documents how a new breed of global leaders obtain and maintain power by widely disseminating alternate truths. Putin. Bolsonaro. Xi JinPing. Modi. Mohammed bin Salman. Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Trump.  Here’s a quote from Burgis that illuminates the situation: “To hold total power you didn’t need your truth to beat your enemy’s, but to destabilize the very idea of truth, neutering its power to challenge any narrative you might select.”

Undermining the truth is what Trump has done in the United States, and now he’s casting about wildly in an attempt to delegitimize his defeat by Joe Biden. It probably won’t work in the end, but it will do lasting damage to our country. Democracy in this country relies on norms, on faith in processes, and on those in power putting the country’s welfare ahead of their own. Trump, of course, has turned these notions on their head. Here’s another quote from Kleptopia that applies to what Trump has been doing for the past four years: “But the new kleptocrats were subverting the state, using its institutions against itself, to seize for themselves that which rightfully belonged to the commonwealth.”

On his way out the door and into litigation hell, Trump will grab Uncle Sam’s frayed coat and try to drag the old man down with him. Though Trump will be gone, Trumpism will live on. Here’s another quote from Tom Burgis that should give us pause and also make us consider how we can strengthen our laws and institutions to prevent the next Trump from rising out of the swamp: 

“Those who resist them believe that, once they are gone, the institutions they have distorted will snap back to how they were. But like a parasite altering a cell it invades, so kleptocratic power transforms its host. Those who use their public office to steal must hold on to it not just for the chance of further riches but in order to maintain the immunity from prosecution that goes with it. When elections come around, losing is not an option.”

Long Nights in Loserville

“It was outside the realm of what happens, so incongruous and out of touch with the way things are meant to be in the world that people would deny and dismiss and discount anything you said because it didn’t fit with normality.” Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

The White House must resemble a funeral parlor these days. Rank and file staffers tiptoe in the corridors, deathly afraid of causing any commotion that might further upset the Big Baby in the Oval Office. Trump has finally stopped throwing himself on the carpet and screaming “Fraud” at the top of his lungs, but he continues to hurl Big Mac’s and French fries from his gilded high-chair. The defeated Orange Menace has kept a low profile of late, with few public appearances, but he’s as active on Twitter as ever, and his camp is working the grift as hard as they can, hectoring supporters for contributions to fight the fraud and thwart the steal. Most of the money raised will go to retiring the campaign’s debts rather than fund doomed-to-fail legal challenges.

Even though the GOP is utterly Trump’s party, he lost while most Republican candidates fared just fine. That must really gall Trump. It’s a flashing example of how much he is disliked by the majority of American voters. But, and this is a question the Democrats need to answer, what do the results in House and Senate races say about the Democratic Party?  

I’m pretty certain that a Biden administration will not spend much time, if any, probing the many misdeeds committed by Trump and his gang of miscreants. Like Obama before him, who declined to go after the criminal bankers who caused the Great Recession, or George W. Bush administration officials who sanctioned torture in the failed War on Terror, it’s not in Biden’s nature. He’ll call America to turn from the past toward the future, and in so doing perpetuate the gangrene that afflicts the American political and economic system: lack of accountability. In case you haven’t noticed, accountability and punishment in America is reserved for the masses, not the elites. The masses are lucky if they get three strikes before the heavy hand of the law lands on them, and far too many people are put away for a single mistake. Trump deserves to swing for all the damage he has inflicted on our fragile democracy, our standing in the world, the environment, government agencies, the federal courts and race relations. And for playing deadly politics with the Covid pandemic, deceiving the American people about the seriousness of the Coronavirus for months on end. Mocking people for wearing masks. Calling it a hoax. Blaming the Chinese.  But it’s not only Trump. His many enablers deserve punishment, too, starting with Chief Ratfucker, Mitch McConnell. Measure orange jumpsuits for Lindsey Graham, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Doug Collins, Kevin McCarthy, Kelly Loeffler, Louis Dejoy, and Stephen Miller. (Add one of those masks like Hannibal Lecter wore in Silence of the Lambs for Miller. He’s a creepy fucker.) The lot should be chained together and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. 

I’m not holding my breath. 

The Cult of Trump may wither for lack of oxygen once the Orange Menace leaves the big stage, but it won’t disappear entirely because the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump are still present. Cancerous cells don’t disappear of their own accord. The collective anger Trump tapped into in 2016, and spent the last four year stoking, won’t vanish. Millions of Americans are angry, frustrated, scared to death of the future and on the lookout for someone or something to blame. That impulse isn’t going away; it will continue to simmer. The Proud Boys and other groups of that malignant ilk, have enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety, dressing up in their camo gear, lacing up their boots, and dreaming of a country free of people of color.  In their twisted view it can all be made the way it never was -- a white man’s Garden of Eden. They seem to believe that we can return to the time when women stayed in the kitchen and Negroes and Mexicans knew their place, go back to the days when this was a Christian nation, ruled by the good book. Sorry, boys, you cannot unwind the clock. The world’s changed, the colonies look different now, America has competition, our country is already a rainbow, but you refuse to accept it. It messes up your story of victimhood at the hands of women, minorities, and Chinese factory workers. 

I saw a report recently that said that the pandemic has been a boon for billionaires. Since the start of the pandemic, America’s oligarchs have made money hand over fist while millions of working people have struggled to make the rent, buy food, and pay medical expenses. In times good or bad, the wealthy make out fine, but what’s happening now is madness. It’s painfully clear that the economy is completely rigged in favor of the wealthy. Working people are playing with a two-headed coin. The only way the masses win is if the coin lands on its edge, and how often does that happen? It took nearly half a century for the nation to get to this level of wealth inequality. It took gutting the New Deal, easing regulations on big business and putting a boot on the throat of organized labor; it took a reinterpretation of antitrust laws that allowed monopolies to form; it took numerous Supreme Court rulings that benefitted business and weakened the rights of workers, voters, and consumers; and it took massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Ever since Richard Nixon loaded the Supreme Court with business-friendly, conservative justices, working people and consumers have lost ground. 

The anger millions of Americans feel, and that Donald Trump skillfully harnessed against illegal immigrants, NAFTA, liberals, and China, is misdirected. That’s not what did us in; the style of capitalism we play is the culprit. Winner-Take-All. Too Big to Fail. No Monopoly Too Powerful. The Wall Street money guys, with help from Democrats and Republicans, killed the American Dream. 

 

Coup a la Trump?

“The American experiment does not have to work. Empires and nations rise and fall.” Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Review of Books

What does an aspiring strongman need? Collaborators in high places. Dedicated rank & file minions to parrot Dear Leader’s line. Mitch McConnell. Mike Pence. Mike Pompeo. William Barr. Let the record show that these men are collaborators. Traitors to their oath of office and the American people. They are aiding and abetting Donald Trump’s effort to overturn a democratic outcome. It’s happening in plain sight and in corridors of power we can not know about. If you doubt this is their aim, watch the video recording of Pompeo speaking to the media yesterday. With the smirk of a diabolical asshole on his face, Pompeo said the transition to a second Trump administration would be smooth. The sitting Secretary of State flat-out refused to acknowledge the president-elect.  Think about that. None of us have ever seen such outrageous behavior from a Cabinet official. 

Many political analysts and journalists thought it would go down like this: Trump prematurely claiming victory, casting allegations about vote fraud, mounting as many legal challenges as possible, no matter how frivolous, creating chaos and uncertainty in a process that produced its fair outcome, refusing to concede that Biden won the election. If the Democrats rigged the election, they botched the job so badly that they lost seats in the House and failed to flip the Senate. Make no mistake, the election was a referendum on Donald Trump. It wasn’t stolen, Trump lost. The country’s not ready to throw in the towel yet. Too many of us still believe in the American experiment. 

Unfortunately, the finish line still lies ahead and Trump is a master of delay. The longer he fans the flames of doubt, the better for him. He’s got his collaborators and almost all the rank & file of the Republican Party under his thumb. They’re more than willing to go down with Trump, willing to push the limits of the law until they snap the brittle bones of our democracy. This is astounding. I heard Sydney Blumenthal in an interview with Ian Masters, and when the former advisor to Bill and Hillary Clinton warned of the national security secrets Trump will carry out of the White House (no matter how he goes), I stopped what I was doing. I hate to sound paranoid, but this is what life under Trump does to people. We begin to doubt the evidence of our own eyes and ears. We are forced to consider things that have heretofore been unthinkable. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Donald J. Trump would sell America’s secrets to the world for the right price. And with the freight train of litigation that is headed his way when he’s no longer president, plus the millions he owes coming due, Trump will need money, lots of it. 

Over the past two days I’ve listened to or read a number of commentators, legal experts, elected officials, and the majority of them think Trump will back down when this phase of his endgame fails. They believe our systems will hold. I’m not so sure. Who’s going to stop the Trump Gang? The anxiety that drained from me on November 7 has returned. The Trump era will not end until the man is physically out of the White House, stripped of all governing power. 

Pay close attention lovers of liberty, the days ahead will be fraught.  

Trump Meets Reality

 “One must not narrate the present as though it has already passed.” Ricardo Piglia

My wife and I celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary on November 7, the same day it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. Like millions of Americans in cities across the country, we felt a sense of relief, even joy. In the evening, as we watched Kamala Harris and Biden speak to the nation, I cried a little, and felt redeemed in my heart even though the realist in my head warned against getting too excited. Strange for me, I felt no impulse to write about what I saw and felt as it was happening. After four long nightmarish years, I needed to let it all settle. 

I have no doubt that when he talked about healing the nation and bringing people together in common cause, Biden meant it. For all his baggage, and his role in creating the conditions that made a Trump presidency possible, I think the sentiments Biden expressed in his victory speech were genuine. Whether the people who voted for Trump will give Biden a chance is another story, one we will watch play out in the weeks and months ahead. The obstacles in Biden’s path are formidable, starting with Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge reality. This was expected. Trump is a sick man, and the moon will fall from the sky before he acknowledges that he was defeated by Joe Biden. 

A desperate Donald Trump is dangerous. He has the nuclear codes, let’s not forget. 

I’m sure Trump watched Kamala Harris and Joe Biden make their remarks, as I’m sure he saw the spontaneous outpouring of joy right outside the White House. The scenes of jubilation from around the country no doubt singed his fragile ego and fueled his bottomless well of grievance and victimhood. I imagine a fuming, angry, self-pitying Trump. 

For two days I tried to switch my brain off and revel in the fact that Trump will be a one-term president. History will place him next to Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush; history will remind us that Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate in a sham trial; history will record Trump’s abject failure to confront the Covid-19 pandemic. 

But history will also note that Trump received nearly 71 million votes, and won the white vote by a huge margin. 

Trump has 70 days or so to engage in mischief and mayhem. He’s already doing his best to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory. Trump will use all his remaining energy to wrest back control of the national narrative, reframe Biden Won, Trump Lost, to Widespread Fraud, Trump Wins. It’s clear that Trump believes his bacon will somehow be rescued by the Supreme Court. Thus far, plenty of Republicans seem willing to support Trump on this quixotic mission. I still expect Trump to pack his suitcase with grievance and falsehoods and barnstorm MAGA country, where he will dazzle his followers with tall tales of fraudulent ballots in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The conspiracy against him will include the Deep State, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic Party.

A desperate Donald Trump is dangerous. He has the nuclear codes, let’s not forget. Unthinkable? Don’t bet the rent on it. Trump is hurt, cut, and bleeding, he’s in the corner, but until he leaves the White House, either under his own free will or escorted by law enforcement, he remains dangerous. Trump will never go quietly. Democratic norms and unspoken agreements are for suckers and losers.   

A Recipe for Discontent

“A terrifying number of Americans would prefer to see their republic wither than have to share it with Others.” Anand Giridharadas

As I write this, Joe Biden has amassed 253 electoral college votes to Trump’s 213. Biden’s path to victory is wider than Trump’s. Key states are still undecided, among them Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. 

As I predicted a week or so ago that he would, Trump tried to declare victory prematurely. 

Right on cue, Trump’s campaign issued its first legal challenge, in Michigan. More will follow. That’s how Trump plays. 

November 4 was a somber day for me, a tremendous letdown, and a learning experience about election polling that I won’t forget. As was true in 2016, polls this year painted a picture of election day that didn’t materialize. The Blue Wave of 2020 petered out far from shore. The men and women behind the Lincoln Project are experienced, bright, full of purpose, and I relied on their prognostications, but even they read it wrong. Democrats will not take control of the Senate, meaning at least two more years of Mitch McConnell with the gate key in his blackened hand, smirking with delight every time he blocks, impedes, or undermines a Biden legislative proposal. Nor did the Dems fare well in the House, they will have the majority, but there was no expansion. Divided government. Divided nation. In a time of crisis. That’s a recipe for suffering and even deeper discontent.  

Trump can pretend all he wants that the pandemic has disappeared, but the pandemic won’t forget him, and history, I hope, will not forgive him. Because this man deserves to pay a price for his arrogance and stupidity. 

I said it months ago: to avoid a divisive fight about legitimacy, the Democrats had to win overwhelmingly, take the White House, the Senate, expand their majority in the House, pick up some governorships, and do well down the ballot. It didn’t happen. 

The Dems left their best attacking players -- Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Sherrod Brown -- on the bench and went with Joe Biden, the safe choice of the party bigwigs, insuring a campaign that lacked vision and a message with the emotional power to make people dream of a better country.  A vote for Biden was a vote for a known quantity, something to grab hold of as we plunge toward the abyss, something to slow our fall and offer a chance to regain our balance. 

Our American Dreams are nightmares now. Lines are drawn, sides and colors chosen, walls built. 

Never again can the United States lecture another nation about “democracy” and “free and fair” elections. Our voting systems are a travesty. The GOP has made a science of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. 

I can’t believe 60 million of my fellow Americans voted to keep Donald Trump in the White House. I honestly don’t understand what they see when they look at him, listen to him, watch him on TV. I want to understand, but I find it very difficult. A day or two after the 2016 election, still reeling, in shock, I wrote on this blog that Trump and his cronies would do serious damage to our country, its vital institutions, the rule of law; they have succeeded. Trump hasn’t single-handedly shoved our country into the shadows -- he had help from the GOP -- but he bears a ton of responsibility. Trump can pretend all he wants that the pandemic has disappeared, but the pandemic won’t forget him, and history, I hope, will not forgive him. Because this man deserves to pay a price for his arrogance and stupidity. More than 220,000 dead Americans, some due to Trump’s bungled response to Covid, his lying about it, downplaying the severity of it, his war against masks and expert opinion, on science and knowledge. Four years of corruption and lying. Trump pulled down his trousers and pissed on the Constitution, the American flag, and Abe Lincoln’s boots. 

Millions of Americans could care less, they voted for him and his GOP enablers; they voted for an incompetent authoritarian; they voted for a grifter; they voted for magical thinking and make-believe. The election reveals who we are and the depths of depravity many millions of us are willing to tolerate. 

Sad and somber. We may as well lower the flag to half mast, and leave it there.