A Nation Starving for Justice

 

“Trump failed to steal the election because he and his legal team are incompetent criminals, not because our democratic institutions defeated him.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

In some ways the fall of Trump is like a Greek tragedy. The con man and his crime family flew too near the sun, and now their black wings are melting and their talons and teeth are disintegrating. 

Serves Trump right. Let it continue. What I’m watching for now is accountability from the politicians. It starts with removing Trump. I’m a lifelong, active Democrat, but I’m not a fan of Nancy Pelosi. She’s obviously very smart -- whip smart, and pretty formidable as a personality -- but I think she’s too much of a centrist and too often on the side of corporate power and enormous, immoral military expenditures. I don’t trust her to lead a legislative charge to reform the criminal justice system, end mass incarceration, make meaningful investments to confront the coming climate crisis, or begin a transition to Medicare for All. 

Today, as words and images and headlines about the insurrection of January 6, 2021 zipped around my brain, I thought back to the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. It was a little more than a year ago when Pelosi and her team drafted the articles of impeachment. Will Pelosi go narrow and shallow or wide and deep? Will she go big or small? I asked these questions on this blog. Pelosi and the Democrats, their eyes looking forward to the 2020 general election, went small, restricting their articles to the crimes identified in the Mueller Report. If our political machinery functioned with any measure of accountability, or justice, those narrow articles would still have been sufficient to take Trump down. They didn’t because Trump by then had cowed the GOP, taken it over, and pissed all over it to mark it as his; they didn’t work because the GOP is deeply cynical and obsessed with holding the intoxicating power of minority rule. Mitch McConnel, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, the detestable Josh Hawley, and so many more, put fealty to Trump (and their own ambition) ahead of fealty to the Constitution and the good of the nation. There’s no getting around that. Too little too late Betsy DeVos. Same goes for you Elaine Chao. You’re no champions of justice, and you do not even have the honor to go down with your captain. Don’t start making sense now Bill Barr. Have the heavy scales fallen from your eyes? Please. You’re marked like former Nazis were in the years after World War II. Don’t tell me you didn’t know, because you did, you noted the political winds and the opportunity for personal gain and made your choice. 

The point I was staggering towards was that had Pelosi gone big, brought the kitchen sink, the corrupt GOP would still have acquitted him, but it would have placed all of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors in the book, on the record. That might have been a cause worth fighting for. In any case, regardless of how few days remain in Trump’s disastrous and traitorous term, the Democrats must make the GOP go on the record, face again a choice: support Trump or the country. 

Ironically, the destroyer of the Republican Party isn’t even a Republican, not in the Party of Lincoln sense. Trump used the Republican Party like an inflatable sex toy, and he fucked it sideways and upside down, and thrice on Sundays. I despised George W. Bush with incredible intensity. I thought he was the nadir. W earns no pass from me. But say what you will about Bush, he was a decent man at heart, dumb but not crazy, and he respected most of our basic institutions enough not to deliberately destroy them. 

You can’t run a moderate and just government with lackeys and grifters in every key position. Expertise matters. Facts matter. Language matters a lot -- look what Trump’s words incited on January 6. Look at the seeds his words spread over the last four years, seeds of  hate and distrust, cruelty and revenge, incompetence and greed. 

Trump is for Trump and only Trump. So many of us told you this from the very beginning of this terrible era. I predicted serious damage. Look around. Covid-19 has us on the mat because there has been NO federal leadership. You can’t fight a pandemic with 50 different approaches. The president cannot delegate responsibility for fighting a pandemic to the individual states to sort out. Pandemic’s don’t work that way. You can’t defeat a pandemic when you deliberately pit states and regions against one another for needed resources, favoring those groups you like and starving those you don’t. That’s not simply unjust, it’s cruel and stupid. A pandemic is like a war. A reasonable level of command and control is necessary. People have to make sacrifices, be inconvenienced, for the good of the whole.

We knew how this was going to turn out from the beginning. Trump’s future was written in his past. The man was a serial failure, a reverse-Midas; look at the records of his bankruptcies, at his history of cheating the society of his fair share of taxes, his failed marriages, his racism and misogyny, stupidity and cruelty. It was all there, only the consequences of his failure are many times worse. The more power a man like Trump gets, the more he craves. There is no end. I imagine it’s like a heroin  addiction. 

How many days did it take Mitch McConnell to ram Amy Comey Barrett down America’s throat? I think it was 8. Do not tell me that Donald J. Trump cannot be impeached in the time remaining. He can, and must be. We need to construct strong guardrails of precedent right now, at this moment of crisis. The entire American experiment in self-government turns on belief in the rule of law justly applied to all, the high as well as the low; on the peaceful transfer of power after democratic elections; and on two things that have become rare this century: moderation and justice. America is a nation starving for justice, for a sense of essential fairness. We fight among ourselves while the economic screws are applied by billionaires, hedge funds richer than some countries, Citibank and Bank of America, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, ATT and Verizon. One reason MAGA nation is so angry is that they have lived through decades where the elites commit massive crimes, drag us into endless foreign conflicts, cheat the system, rip people off, and walk away with no consequences and no accountability. 

Democrats must bring articles of impeachment to the floor immediately, and they must drag those Republicans who are no longer afraid of Trump with them. This is a guardrail that must be set in stone. For there to be any hope of reconciliation, there must be justice. 

The Waning Nights of Count Trumpula

“From the very first wave of the virus, Trump and his entourage of quacks and enablers have failed the most basic tests of governance and leadership.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

The waning days of December. Here on the central coast of California the weather is gorgeous, clear skies and sunshine. It’s almost enough to make one forget the pandemic and the economic misery faced by so many in places where the sky isn’t filled with light. It’s winter now, according to the calendar, the winter of American discontent. Congress (at least the half that flies under the Trump Party banner) dithered for months while both the pandemic and the economy worsened. Then, at the eleventh hour, the benevolent servants of the people agreed to dole out a measly $600 for those eligible. That’s what people are worth to this Congress, with its tame Democrats and ideologically stunted Republicans, some of whom had the gall to complain that giving more relief to citizens would expand the deficit. Let’s be clear: Republicans gave not two shits about the deficit when they lavished tax cuts on their wealthy donors and corporate sponsors. The hypocrisy never ends. 

State and local governments got left out of the relief package, which surely portends deep cuts in public services at a time when the public needs those services more than ever. Such is the logic of our cruel capitalism. The rich get tax breaks, the poor get austerity. Trickle down economics means the same thing today that it meant in 1980: the rich piss on the poor from ever greater heights. 

Mercifully, Donald Trump has been dragged from the spotlight where he loves to twirl and preen, but this can only be a temporary lull. The deluded president, prodded by a small cadre of extremists, continues to claim that he won the election in a landslide. This isn’t even in the same zip code with the truth -- Trump lost, and he lost badly. What he cannot accept is that more than 80 million people voted against him, rejected him, fired him. Trump’s fragile ego and fear of being exposed for what he is -- a broken little boy who could never win the love of his mommy and daddy -- cannot handle such a public rebuke. Trump is the worst kind of rich punk because he’s also an asshole, and a cruel one at that. This frightened little man can’t bring himself to offer even a sentence of empathy about the more than 320,000 Americans dead of Covid-19. He doesn’t care, it’s just a number, an abstract idea. 

We will pay dearly for the damage of the Trump years. He has amplified differences and a perverse brand of patriotism. Fear rules in TrumpLand and the ranks of threatening “others” grows all the time. It’s you or them. Choose your side, there’s no middle ground. But once you start demonizing people as “others” where does it end? Where do you draw the line? Who decides who is in and who must be expelled? 

What’s to become of a country indifferent to the deaths of some 320,000 of its citizens? How many of these deaths were preventable? How many were sped along because so many Americans lack access to affordable health care? How many can we lay at the feet of our Market God, who demanded that commerce continue even if it meant that millions of people would be exposed to Covid-19? 

Count Trumpula roams the White House after midnight, looking under beds for conspiracies, tugging at the corners of rugs in search of fake ballots, listening for the ghost of Hugo Chavez. What’s his exit plan? How can a strong man leave the stage voluntarily without appearing weak? The notions from the Fever Swamp become more unhinged: Declare martial law and re-run the election, says retired Army general, and convicted and pardoned felon, Michael Flynn. Seize the voting machines! Stop the steal! It was a landslide and we won! If the Secretary of Defense was a public servant instead of a Trump toady, Flynn would be recalled to active service and court-martialed for sedition. Flynn, whose retirement is paid by American taxpayers, is only too happy to subvert the will of the voters, and piss on the Constitution he swore to uphold and defend. 

The nearer we draw to January 20, the more erratic Trump will become. His only instinct is self-preservation. In his mind, nothing came before him, and nothing will come after. He is the sun and the moon and the stars. He is thunder and lightning, hurricane and flood, fire and ash; he is Death. 

Will We Forget?

 “They will, at last, realize themselves that there cannot be enough freedom and bread for everybody, for they will never, never be able to let everyone have his fair share!” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

This infernal year of plague and death and strife, trapped in the grip of greed and arrogance, careening for the abyss at top speed. It’s hard to decide where to begin. Should I begin with the photographs I took of downtown SB in March, during the first lockdown, when store shelves were bare and the streets were eerily quiet, deserted? When toilet paper was as good as money? Or do I start with the criminal negligence of the Trump Crime Family (TCF)? 

Remember Trump’s statements, day after day, about a few people coming in from China, how Covid would one day go away like a miracle, and that in any case it was no worse than the seasonal flu? 

Will we forget Liberate Michigan?

Human nature being what it is, I fear we will forget what has happened this year, misunderstand its deeper meaning, and how dangerous the game we’re playing with our limited democratic freedoms is. I’m afraid we will forget what an utter disaster Donald Trump has been. That with the passage of only a little time, we will forget the more than 300,000 Americans who have died on Trump’s watch, forget the millions more who lost their economic footing because Trump’s response to the pandemic was so inept, ignorant, incompetent, and indifferent to the reality of the situation. While Trump denied science and commonsense -- and babbled about miracle cures, ingesting bleach and disinfectants, herd immunity, and packed churches on Easter Sunday -- Americans suffered and died. 

Writing in the Nation magazine recently, Elie Mystal noted the following: “And yet, somehow, even all of this -- the bleach, the rallies, the unconscionable disregard for life -- fails to capture the full scope of the harm he’s done to this country. Trump’s anti-science sociopathy has been embraced by many other political actors. His messaging, his attitude, his culture-war mongering have filtered down throughout our country, to our national shame.”

I’m afraid that neither Trump or any of his many, many enablers will be held accountable for the damage they’ve done, or for how casually many of them betrayed their oath of office. Was that taste of power worth it? 

We must never forget the 18 state attorney generals and 126 Republican members of the US House of Representatives who supported the corrupt Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, and the bogus legal claim he mounted in an effort to overturn the results of the election and cancel out the legal votes of millions of Americans. 

Will we forget the ranks of silent Republican senators, who stood by while Trump mounted one laughable legal challenge after another in state and federal courts? Who said nothing when Trump claimed the election was rigged and that he’d never accept the result? Will we forget this wholesale absence of principle and courage? 

William Barr, good riddance doughboy, you sold your soul to Donald Trump, so no mercy will be shown to you. Your trangressions are many, but none more repugnant than reinstating the death penalty for certain federal crimes, and then executing condemned people in record numbers, including Orlando Hall and Brandon Bernard. 

One lesson to be learned from 2020 is that mercy is hard to come by in America, particularly for the poor and marginalized. Perhaps we never had mercy in us to give. Americans have always killed to gain land, territory, minerals, and wealth, or to terrorize people deemed a threat.  

I’m afraid we will forget George Floyd, Breeona Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, just to name a few. 

But Kyle Rittenhouse, a sad, deluded white kid who murdered two people protesting police brutality, will be considered a hero in many quarters. Will we forget hate groups like the Proud Boys, who crawled from the shadows to stand in Trump’s malign spotlight?

Will we forget uniformed but unidentified federal agents plucking people off the streets of Portland, Oregon? Or those federal goons under the direction of William Barr, who drove peaceful protesters out of Lafeyette Square with pepper bombs, rubber bullets, batons and shields, all so Donald Trump could make a triumphant march across the street to the church -- where the idiot held the good book upside down.  

As Donald Trump rants and raves about massive voter fraud, let’s not forget all the efforts by the Republican Party to cripple the US Mail service, reduce the number of polling places and ballot drop boxes. Voter suppression is the real election fraud in America, and it is engineered by a Republican Party that is openly hostile to democracy. 

Will we forget politics by stunt? 

We would be wise to think hard about the divisions, fissures, and fractures the Trump years and this deadly pandemic have revealed about our country, its insidious racism, militarism, and wealth inequality. 

When Donald Trump talked about “American carnage” in his inauguration speech in January 2017, I don’t think many people understood what he meant. Trump made it seem that America was at war with itself. It wasn’t true on that day, but it is true now. 

Rebuild the Guardrails, America

“But if such a thing as legal objectivity ever existed, it was obliterated 20 years ago with Bush v. Gore. It was then that the Supreme Court proved by a 5-4 vote, that it was a purely political branch.” Elie Mystal, The Nation

For Halloween to fall two days before the election is one haunted house too many, an added torture, another crack of the psychological whip, as the country votes and votes and votes, and begins to hold its breath. The big turnout that is essential to a Biden victory looks as if it’s happening, but after the Shock of 2016,  I am ever skeptical. This is the United States of America, a crumbling, bumbling, empire that is in the hands of a crime family, and all manner of election fuckery is possible. 

Someone should ask stone faced Mike Pence this question: Mr. Vice President, If you trust the American people as much as you say you do, why does your party make voting so hard for so many people? How do you square that circle, Mr. Vice President? 

After exposing my brain to news reports and podcasts over the past few days, I’m feeling  anxious, testy, and nervous. I got to thinking about guardrails.  Like many others across the country, I’m trying to game out the various ways Trump can lose, and still hold his office. These are numerous and unsettling. If Trump’s time in office has taught us anything it should be this: the guardrails failed. From the start, four years ago, Trump has been testing the limits on his power. The American “system”, once thought so stable and secure, hasn’t stopped him. For all its flaws, the Mueller Report was conclusive about Trump’s obstruction of justice, a charge for which he should have been impeached. But the Senate, elected to office by a minority of the population, with the absurdity of populous California and under-populated Wyoming having equal power, is in the hands of a far-right GOP which refuses to play by established rules and norms. When every GOP senator, with the exception of Mitt Romney, voted to acquit Trump, a guardrail fell.  

Trump landed Marine 1 on the Emoluments Clause. Trump and his crime family have diverted millions of taxpayer dollars to the Trump Organization. Totally without shame, the Trump Gang will never meet a profitable conflict of interest they won’t embrace. Trump should have hit a guardrail the first time he dipped his beak in the public till, but he didn’t. A few Democrats grumbled about it, some media outlets reported on it, but there wasn’t a groundswell of outrage from the public. 

What protection do we have against demagoguery? When the Democratic-controlled House sent the White House a subpoena, Trump either sued or flat-out refused to comply, and he demanded that other federal agencies do the same. His party turned a blind eye and deaf ear every time. The founders feared majority rule, so they built in a few circuit breakers, the Electoral College being the kingpin. Trump can lose the popular vote by a pretty wide margin and still win the Electoral College. Every analyst I’ve listened to or article I’ve read points out that 2020 is not 2016. Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. Trump isn’t the brash challenger, he’s the president, and more than 220,000 Americans have died through his incompetence and malice. His party, with very few exceptions, has aided and abetted Trump in his ill-fated effort to outwit Covid-19. If Trump’s not held accountable -- if the solid majority of us who think competence in government is a good thing, an important social benefit, can’t hold him accountable -- who or what institution will? 

I think of Highway 1 in California, the twists and turns, the many bridges, and how almost every time I’ve driven Highway 1, some stretch of it has been under construction. Our democracy should be like that, always being maintained at some key junction, shored up, rebuilt, inspected with critical eyes. The Federal Courts need reform. We have to fix our chaotic voting system. It’s time to ditch the Electoral College. We’re not living in the 18th century, and the Founding Fathers were not gods. They were white men, mostly of wealth, who created a system that spreads power around, with three co-equal branches designed to contain the others’ power. These white men understood the tyranny of kings. A system in some kind of balance was the idea, right? It was the best hope for a stable government and society that could expand and prosper; a government that is constantly falling apart can’t do those things. We can thank the Founders for the basic framework, imperfect though it is, commend them for an admirable run at self-government, but we have to make some repairs, restore balance to the system so that we have a chance to face and survive the massive climate challenge that is already here. The road we’re driving cannot get us where we need to go.