Monthly Archives: February 2019

Donald Trump, Tribalism

Michael Cohen elicits Rashômon-effect on House Oversight Committee

“You said all these bad things about the president during that last thirty minutes, and yet you worked for him for ten years?

All those bad things, I mean – if it’s that bad, I can see you working for him for ten days, maybe ten weeks, maybe even ten months, but you worked with him for ten years.” (C-Span video beginning at 1:08:03)

So said Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH)—Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus—expressing concern with Michael Cohen’s truthfulness this morning. Meanwhile, Jordan continues to work furiously on behalf of President Trump—a crusade that has certainly extended beyond ten days, ten weeks, or ten months. Of course Jordan has asserted, in response to persistent questioning, that he is unaware of Donald Trump telling even a single lie.

On the other hand, what are we to make of this, from Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)?

 “Thank you very much for your testimony and, Mr. Chairman, this is a story of redemption.” (1:26:54)

Let’s hope that more skeptical Democrats, who wish to restore credible Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch, are searching for corroborating evidence for anything Mr. Cohen has to say.

Donald Trump, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

“We are going to get to the bottom of this.” – Congressman Adam Schiff

George Stephanopoulos: You say the Justice Department will have to live by that precedent, but what if they don’t? What if they simply say, “No, we’re not going to release the underlying evidence.” What options do you have?

Adam Schiff: Well, we will obviously subpoena the report. We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress. We will take it to court if necessary. And in the end, I think, the Department understands, they’re going to have to make this public. I think Barr will ultimately understand that as well. . . .

George Stephanopoulos: When you’re talking about public pressure, are you prepared to take the Administration to court?

Adam Schiff: Absolutely. We are going to get to the bottom of this.

[Editor’s note: quoted exchange begins at 4:11.]

Republicans, Tribalism

Horrors! Brit Hume is embarrassed by presidential campaign coverage

The occasion? Senator Kamala Harris, while campaigning in South Carolina, purchased a colorful sequined jacket.

Robin Abcarian notes that “manly” endeavors, such as Brit Hume’s skydiving with Bush 41, a publicity stunt for the campaign of the former president’s son, apparently do not count as embarrassing. Nor did Hume display any discomfiture about pitching softball questions after the jump to the candidate’s father about W’s campaign.

Abacarian chalks this up as sexism and a double standard. Maybe so, but I’ll offer another theory: it is shameless partisanship by a TV personality working for a cable channel, Fox News, that is bound at the hip to the Republican Party.

Sean Hannity serves as a co-host with Trump at his campaign rallies and acts as a presidential advisor by phone, while offering fawning coverage on the air. Nothing new here.

Tucker Carlson erupts, when confronted with a point of view (millionaires and billionaires should pay higher taxes) that’s the polar opposite of the Republican Party’s prime directive and then told that, in his role at Fox, he is “not meant to say these things.” Of course he’s not, nor does he need to be told.

Bret Hume, never doubt for a moment, is as much in the corner of the Republican Party as anyone at the conservative network. It’s not vintage ’80s clothing, or journalistic standards, or the peculiar way campaigns are run that’s agitating Hume. It’s simpler than that. This woman is running to replace Donald Trump in the White House. Oh, my.

March 2, 2019 update: Let’s add another Fox News on-air personality to the Republican hack list: Jeanine Pirro, whose starring role at Trumpetts USA events – yes, this is a thing and it enriches the President of the United States – was featured in a recent Erik Wemple column, which concluded that “the race to the bottom at Fox News has hit the homestretch. So long as Hannity has set the standard for ethical corruption with direct support to Trump World, how can the network even consider stopping someone like Pirro from speaking at an event from which the president profits?”


Income Inequality, Republicans, Tribalism

News Flash: Fox News doesn’t force Tucker Carlson to oppose higher taxes on the rich

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recently offered his view to the attendees at Davos, “It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water, right? … Just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes … We can invite Bono once more, but we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”

When he was booked on Fox News, he told Tucker Carlson:

“The vast majority of Americans, for years and years now, according to the polls – including Fox News viewers and including Republicans – are in favor of higher taxes on the rich. Higher inheritance taxes, higher top marginal tax rates, higher wealth taxes. It’s all really mainstream.

But no one’s saying it at Davos, just as no one’s saying it on Fox News, right?

And I think the explanation for that is quite simple, is that most of the people in Davos, but also here on this channel, have been bought by the billionaire class. You know? You’re not meant to say these things.

So I just went there, and I thought, you know what, I’m just going to say it, just as I’m saying it right here on this channel.”

But Bregman didn’t get to say it on that channel. Carlson took exception with what he had to say and replied with insults. (“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, you tiny brain. And I hope this gets picked up, because you’re a moron. I tried to give you a hearing, but you were too fucking annoying.”)

After the video emerged, Carlson clarified the indulgence of his employer: “Whatever my faults or those of this channel, nobody in management has ever told us what positions to take on the air. Never. Not one time. We have total freedom here and we’re grateful for that.” 

Good to know that Fox News Channel’s rich on-air personalities are permitted to oppose higher marginal tax rates of their own volition.

Democracy, Donald Trump

Can a weak president steer democracy in an authoritarian direction?

Corey Robin, a political theorist at Brooklyn College, implies that the answer is, ‘No,’ without apparently ever considering the question (in a post titled, “Why Has It Taken Us So Long to See Trump’s Weakness?“).

First of all, political scientists – following Richard Neustadt’s analytic framework in “Presidential Power” – have commented on Donald Trump’s weakness as a president for more than two years. Jonathan Bernstein, who has made this a recurring theme of his column, began doing so as early as January 2017 (several days before Trump took office). Matthew Dickinson is teaching Trump’s weaknesses to his undergraduate students at Middlebury.

Professor Robin pretends that commentators have only recently recognized this fact; that Trump’s weakness is, as he puts it, “a secret that’s been hiding in plain sight for two years. Why has it taken pundits so long to see it?” The answer, of course, is that it hasn’t. It has been widely commented upon.

Yet even if this were a recently discovered insight, there is no contradiction between the assertion i. that Trump is an historically weak president and ii. that he has aggressively pushed the country in an authoritarian direction (and with numerous complicit allies, among them: the Republican Congress, Fox News Channel, and Vladimir Putin). The result is damage to our democratic institutions – the guardrails that protect us from tyranny.

A quick Google search reveals numerous commentators who have contemplated without contradiction both Trump’s remarkable weakness and the threat he represents, including Heather Digby Parton, Jeet Heer, and Jonathan Chait.

Not only is there no contradiction, in some respects Trump’s ignorance and incompetence (which, as the Neustadt framework suggests, represent a diminished skill-set and loss of influence; that is: presidential weakness) actually heighten the threat to democracy. As Bernstein put it, “What’s really scary is that Trump’s ineptitude at his job means that the normal constraints that keep presidents from doing terrible things may simply not apply. Normal presidents care about their professional reputation among those they work with, and about their popularity among the nation at large, and so they attempt to do the sorts of things that would enhance their reputations and make voters like them. Because he’s unable to even try to do those things — because he has apparently has no sense at all of how the job works — Trump doesn’t see the clear warning signs and then back off things that damage himself and the nation.”

Robin begins with a false claim (that Trump’s weakness has only been recognized recently), which even if true, would hardly refute the idea that Trump’s presidency represents an “authoritarian or fascist turn of American politics.” Robin concludes, “For two years, America was on the verge of authoritarianism; now it’s not.” This is (as Joe Biden might put it) malarkey. It’s an example of a straw man argument: unsupported, in spite of a flurry of links to books and articles, which the author shows little evidence of having read.

The post concludes with an appeal to the critical role of the scholar (who must “resist the tyranny of now,” rather than “offer her expertise to fit the needs of the pundit class”). Unfortunately, this piece falls short factually and logically. It is a muddle, not a template for anything we might reasonably hope to gain from academic research or scholarly wisdom.

(Photo from TNR.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Just another data point or two regarding our off the rails president

[Editor’s note: Donald Trump’s prodigious number of lies; his ignorance of policies, as well as the positions and interests of others (allies and opponents), which cripple his ability to strategize – exposing the foundational lie that he is a good dealmaker; his self-serving corruption; his inability and disinterest in the Constitution, the law, democratic institutions, or the broader public interest; and his deliberate efforts to sow disunity in the country – all of this is well known and, perhaps, is more significant than his bonkers press conference declaring a national emergency or non sequiturs uttered at his rally in El Paso. But, from time to time, when I watch him, I am gobsmacked by what I’ve witnessed, as this post relates.]

After watching a few minutes of Donald Trump’s meandering, bewildering stream of nouns and verbs at the beginning of his press conference this morning, I remarked that if the text were a movie script featuring a U.S. president, the context would be a situation where the character’s mind had been damaged through catastrophic accident, illness, or attack by an enemy of the state.

Earlier this week, I happened to see a brief clip of his rally in El Paso. He has been spreading lies about the border – of drugs, human trafficking, and criminal gangs – to justify building his wall. Below is an excerpt, which followed a paragraph where he remarked on caravans, bad laws, asylum seekers, the backlog of immigration cases, and “the system put in place by really dumb people or people that did not have the best interest of our country at heart.”

In this passage he essentially appeals to the crowd to adjudicate the veracity of the stories he has been telling about El Paso, pre-wall, having one of the highest crime rates in the country. Through their enthusiastic applause and cheers, he finds vindication – proof of the claims, unmoored to any basis in fact, that he is spreading.  

I have provided the text, which leaves out the clapping and shouting that follow many of his remarks. You can watch and listen at the link beginning at 00:54:15.

“And there’s no better place to talk about border security, whether they like it or not. Because I’ve been hearing a lot of things. ‘Oh, the wall didn’t make that much of a difference.’ You know where it made a difference? Right here in El Paso.
And I’ve been watching, where they’ve been trying to say, ‘Oh, the wall didn’t make that much’ – You take a look at what they did with their past crimes and how they made them from serious to much less serious. You take a look at what the real system is. I spoke to people who have been here a long time. They said when that wall went up, it’s a whole different ballgame.  I mean, is that a correct statement?
A whole different ballgame.
I’ll give you another example. And I don’t care if a mayor is a Republican or a Democrat. They’re full of crap when they say it hasn’t made a big difference.
I heard the same thing from the fake news. They said, ‘Oh, crime actually stayed the same.’ Didn’t stay the same! It went way down. And look at what they did to their past crimes and look at how they reported those past crimes. Went way, way down.
These people. You know, you’d think they’d want to get to the bottom of a problem and solve a problem, not try and pull the wool over everybody’s eyes. So, for those few people who are out there on television saying, ‘Oh, it didn’t make too much of a difference ’– It made a tremendous difference.
People from El Paso, am I right?”

Affirming applause. Which has taken the place of facts, evidence, and truth.

Today at the White House, Trump recalled that scene (at 6:33):

“When you look and when you listen to politicians, in particular certain Democrats, they say it all comes through the port of entry. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie. They say walls don’t work. Walls work a hundred percent. Whether it’s El Paso – I really was smiling because the other night I was in El Paso. We had a tremendous crowd and – tremendous crowd – and I asked the people, many of whom were from El Paso, but they came from all over Texas. And I asked them, I said, ‘Let me ask you the – as a crowd, when the wall went up, was it better?’ You were there, some of you.

It was not only better, it was like a hundred percent better. You know what they did.”

Was it better? Facts don’t matter to this president. The crowd – the cheers of his base – that’s what matters.

P.S. I wasn’t the only one nonplused by Trump’s press conference this morning. I recommend a post by Kevin Drum, who offers, via tweets from journalists and commentators, a string that “captures the spirit of Trump’s remarks better than any normal media story you’ll read.”

Democrats, Donald Trump, Income Inequality

The Howard Schultz campaign is already helping Donald Trump

“After this week’s CNN town hall, it’s more and more clear that any money Howard Schultz might spend on an independent presidential bid would function as an in-kind campaign contribution to Donald Trump.” – Ronald Brownstein

“To win a majority of electoral college votes, which Schultz says would be his goal, he would have to ultimately replace the Democratic nominee as the favored choice of voters who do not want Trump to win a second term.” – Michael Scherer

Schultz has praised the “thoughtful analysis” of a conservative commentator who fears the Democrats will nominate a “hard-left” candidate and – in the course of the column – demeans Kamala Harris (“shrill … quasi-socialist promising pie in the sky”), Elizabeth Warren (“Fauxcahontas … playing a game of socialist one-upmanship”), and “supposedly centrist” Joe Biden. The critic also name-checks Bernie Sanders and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

Schultz, who claims to be a “lifelong Democrat” – but not a very attentive one (“Schultz voted in just 11 of 38 elections dating back to 2005”), took back the praise he had offered after folks actually read the “thoughtful analysis” he was promoting;  he deleted the tweet when he was asked about it by the Washington Post, and blamed someone else for posting the link on his personal Twitter account.

Nonetheless, he embraces the conservative views expressed in the deleted column. It’s the “hard-left,” “quasi-socialist” Democrats that Schultz fears and, most scary and objectionable of all, the proposal (broached by conservatives’ favorite new Democratic Member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez) to raise the marginal tax rate for incomes over $10 million to 70% (the level in the United States in 1980).

When asked at his CNN Town Hall what he thinks his personal income tax rate – as a billionaire – should be, Schutz concedes that he “should pay more taxes,” but tap dances for more than a minute (with platitudes about corporate taxes, the Republican tax bill, comprehensive tax reform, as well as personal income tax rates for millionaires) without giving an answer, at which point the moderator Poppy Harlow reminds him of the question and asks, “Give me a sense. Are you talking about you should pay 2% higher? Ten percent higher, twenty percent higher federal income tax?”

He stammers and says, “I don’t – Poppy, I don’t know what the number is….”

“Ballpark it for people,” she asks.

He won’t. He finally gets to the heart of his concern, “I think that what’s being proposed at 70% is a punitive number. And I think there are better ways to do this.”

Better ways. In other words, instead of significant increases in the personal tax rates of billionaires, we should seek revenue increases somewhere else.

Brownstein notes that on issue after issue, Schultz’s positions align with Democrats, while alienating Trump’s Republican base.

“To obscure his tilt toward the Democrats on almost all issues, Schultz has quickly settled on a strategy of loudly criticizing ideas popular on the party’s far-left flank.”

Brownstein perceives in Schultz’s strategy echoes of the (now defunct) centrist group, the Democratic Leadership Council, which Bill Clinton embraced in his trek to the White House.  But there’s a huge difference in the two strategies. The DLC and Clinton worked for years “inside the Democratic Party.” Regardless of what you think of Clinton or his policies, he sought to “rebuild a political majority that would allow Democrats to regain control of the national agenda from the increasingly militant conservatism within the GOP.”

Schultz seeks to do the opposite: to split the Democrats and peel off Democratic voters to his independent campaign.

‘Exaggerating the power of the left in the Democratic coalition, he’s portraying the party as beyond redemption for anyone holding centrist views. To make that case, Schultz is echoing claims from Trump and other Republicans that Democrats have become radical. At times, Schultz has even called some of the Democratic ideas he opposes “un-American” or “not American,” not to mention “punitive” and “ridiculous.”

By validating the Republican efforts to portray Democrats as outside the mainstream, Schultz is helping Trump already.’

Democrats, Donald Trump

State of Trump’s Union 2019

1. “No one has benefitted more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the new jobs created in the last year. ”

[Cue celebration by Democratic women in the House]

“You were not supposed to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before. Don’t sit yet. You are going to like this.

And exactly one century after the Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in the Congress than ever before.

That’s great. Very great. And congratulations.” – Donald Trump, SOTU 2019

Let’s give credit where credit is due. Trump’s campaign, election, and tenure in the White House inspired those women to run – and fueled their victories.

2. “An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations. If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”

A threat? Wishful thinking? Bargaining by the reality-television dealmaker?

Nixon’s proclamation in his 1974 SOTU, “One year of Watergate is enough,” didn’t get him off the hook. I don’t expect Congress – or Mueller – to turn tail and run this time either. Those newly elected women (and men) in the new majority in Congress, as well as returning Democrats, didn’t come to town to ignore, excuse, lie, and cover up like Paul Ryan’s crew did.

3. “But we must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution – and embrace the boundless potential of cooperation, compromise, and the common good.”

4. Stacey Abrams provided the Democratic response to Trump’s SOTU address. Here’s hoping we’ll see her in the U.S. Senate before long.