An evening’s revelation

Modern political campaigns are run like hurriedly incorporated companies. The American economy is littered with failed ones. Trump, I suspect, knew how to master such a genre. He was a bustout artist going back to Atlantic City days. He knew the political virtue of promising without consequence. Your bigotry was his policy. Anybody with a modicum of personal ethics wouldn’t be able to beat him. Most current politicians have a modicum, and just that much. It was game over because of one side’s inability to whore. Trump wasn’t Mussolini. He was Eva Peron. Love him or hate him, you’re going to see his show.

I considered this proposition while listening to Margaret Hoover and Jennifer Palmieri speak at the Elsie Hillman Women in Politics lecture at Chatham University. My father once went there for some sort of union training seminar in the late 1950s, just after it had ceased to be the Pennsylvania College for Women. He brought home a sweatshirt which he wore with great sense of irony. I have waited more than 60 years to tell that story. My father also had a memory of one of the speakers’ great grandfather. When Herbert Hoover was seeking his second term in 1932, my father and a few friends went to the train station in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The great man’s train pulled in and he went to the platform on the caboose and peered into an almost empty lot. In those days, when you despised a candidate, you simply stayed home. As I recall my father’s story, Hoover went ahead, gave his speech, and departed for an electoral concussion at the hands of Franklin Delano Roosevent.

Thinking of that rout, I wondered at the resiliency of Donald Trump’s surreal second term and considered the mutual predictions made by the guests. They foresee a shellacking for Republicans in this year’s midterms. At that point, Article I of The Constitution will kick back in and Congress will reassert itself. True, the Republicans of the 119th Congress have been sidekick-level subservient to Trump. It would be hard to replicate their toadying under the Democrats, but the Democrats have to get there and the party’s capacity for self-harm was sitting in evidence. Jennifer Palmieri was communications director for, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Never had stupidity and smug self-satisfaction found a better home than in that campaign. So here they were: the great granddaughter of a good man tossed on history’s trash heap, and the advisor to an equally good woman who jumped onto it. It would be unfair to expect too many surprises from Palmieri’s remarks. She is the James Schlesinger of the current Democrats: summoned to serve in administrations and campaigns to absolutely no one’s surprise.

'There is no way of knowing

what he is doing

in iran by listening

to what he says’

Hoover, who hosts “Firing Line,” the public broadcasting program made famous by William F. Buckley, is a rare case. For most people, membership in a political party is a chosen thing. For Hoover it is more of a genetic defect. She does not sound like a Republican of our time. She despises Trump, supports the right to abortion, and thinks her party just now is a mess. She is openly in favor of LGBTQIA+ rights, which is a good thing given that an acronym that long might collapse under its own weight. Simply put: she’s a libertarian and, as a Republican in the Age of Trump, audaciously heads up something called The American Unity Fund. I have no idea what it is but put the word “unity” in your name and it’s going to unnerve today’s Republican. If they wanted unity, they wouldn’t have seceded from reality. It would be fair to surmise that her Republicanism is rooted in the free-market, tory conservatism of her ancestor. That is to say, she is fine with government helping the needy so long as they find a way to stop needing. And then she’d help them anyway.

The evening’s questions dwelt deeply on the Iran War and what Trump thought he was doing by attacking it."There is no way of knowing what he is doing in Iran by listening to what he says,” Hoover remarked. It was the key to understanding Trump. To grasp his meaning and fathom his actions demands an animal level of thinking. He’s a walking impulse guided in his journey by the likes of Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi. He’s that kid from the Twilight Zone episode who was possessed of psychic powers so dangerous that people toadied and manipulated in the most debasing ways. If not handled properly, he will lash out and wish you into the cornfield. Otherwise, keep him pacified, bend to his every impulse and marvel at the majesty he exerts over the American electorate. To listen to what Trump says is meaningless, because he’ll say something new every time. That’s why Hegseth succeeds with Trump: he’s a rolling frat party who plays well with the manly men who follow Trump wherever he goes, including in a direction opposite their own desires.

Referring to one of Hegseth’s many testosterone-filled quotes, Palmieri assured the audience, “We’re so much better than this,” to which I reply, “she simply hasn’t met enough of us.” She’s the VIP in the room, but the event banned purses and guests were wanded for weapons on their way in. We’re all suspect and we ought to be.

Americans are experts at turning an inability to decide into a marketable virtue. “That’s the number that count,” Palmieri noted when poll numbers showed Trump losing their approval. The dilemma, and they pointed this out, was that deeply committed zealots turn out to nominate ideologically extreme candidates, then they fight it out for the middle ground – the undecideds. Handing the keys to the kingdom to voters who don’t quite know what they believe is how you end up with a government more fit for Gomorrah than the District of Columbia.

The forum is held in the campus’s old chapel and the woman behind me provided the evangelical fervor, all but shouting out “preach!” as the room reached a consensus that Trump has done a hippopotamus stomp across American values. Given their level of refinement and social orbit, I am not confident Hoover and Palmieri are reading the electorate or the Democratic Party correctly. Donald Trump became president because Americans have become base and greedy. Someone who’ll blame immigrants and minorities for their problems is a stiff draft of rum to those of us buried under the avalanche of our failures. These include people who belonged to the Democratic Party when I was growing up. They felt cheated in life, abhorred abortion, attended church and loved guns better than they did minorities. These people have not gone away. The Democrats stopped putting up with them, starting around 1972. They became the Reagan Republicans and their children became MAGA followers. It is a horrible thing to say, but the Democrats need their votes and they won’t get them with their current message, even though it is one grounded in morality and idealism.

The speakers seem to have more faith in the American public than I do. Partly, it is because the ascendency of the Executive to something more than a coequal branch of government has been in play since Andrew Jackson and picked up steam when members of Congress began to value their sinecures more than their obligations. A career-ending vote can be a great capstone to a life well-lived. No political consultant will ever tell that to a paying client. The other reason for the misunderstanding of the electorate by the political class is that they came to know politics through its institutions and were educated in pluralist values and were taught that’s reality. They are what we used to call school-smart and real-life stupid. The Democrats will get into heaven, but at this rate, not the White House.

They Knew

For the past 13 days, Donald Trump has done a clumsy two-step around an atrocity that will stain American history. In the opening salvos of an unsanctioned attack on Iran, an American cruise missile struck a girls school in that country’s south, killing more than 170 people, most of them children. U.S. responsibility for these deaths was hard to doubt. Certainly, our own side had to have known almost from the moment the missile struck.

These are weapons fired with precision. Cruise missiles aren’t just pointed; they ate programmed. Our side knew the coordinates of every shot. They simply did not know what stood on that ground. It was apparent from the very start that this was not the misfiring of an Iranian missile if only because these places were hit first and by surprise. The Iranians appear to have gotten nothing into the air from that spot. It was ours and the administration had to have known it well before Trump and company tried to deflect and, in the case of the habitual liar at the top, made up implausible stories about the Iranians blowing up their own children. The mullahs in charge of Iran are wicked men, capable of horrible things and then lying about them. Somehow, we have outdone those monsters.

It has been painful to witness the denials and evasions by Trump and his handlers. The president lied about Iran having cruise missiles, going so far as to say they got them from us. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. The only cruise missiles Iran ever received from the United States were delivered by air and detonated upon arrival. Pete Hegseth piously said the only side that targets civilians is Iran. Defending his own ineptitude will not raise the dead. Also, has the Secretary of Defense not heard about Hiroshima? Karoline Leavitt complained that The New York Times was harassing the administration with questions about the attack. The spokeswoman for the vain and ridiculous men whose ineptitude killed more than 100 schoolgirls complained that her boss was being harassed by the very questions that halted a coverup so insulting to common decency as to short-circuit the dialogue about this indefensible war.

Lists

Fifty years ago, a signup sheet was posted in Krebs Hall at the University of Pittsburgh’s Johnstown campus, asking Jewish students to kindly provide their names.

A friend of mine was a recent arrival at the campus. She saw the sheet, and phoned home to Wilkes-Barre. She told her mother about it. Together, they speculated on what it could mean. It was the mid-70s. They decided this was no time for Jews to be signing lists. It never led to anything good.

This story came to mind this week when I read a headline in The New York Times: “Judge Is Skeptical of Penn’s Argument Against Trump Demand for List of Jews.”

The Trump Administration had sought a list of Jewish faculty and staff employed at The University of Pennsylvania. The demand is part of a government investigation into allegations of antisemitism on college campuses. Trump has been at war with academia, especially the Ivies. They gave him an opening during the war in Gaza.

One would be hard-pressed to disagree that antisemitism abounds at colleges under the mask of sympathy for the Palestinian people. Many protesters replaced “Jew” with “Zionist” as cover for their bloody-minded disdain for an entire people. Some used terms such as “genocide,” and applied it to Israel, possibly ignorant of the grotesque mockery they were employing. He word emerged in 1946 to describe the Holocaust. Israel’s establishment in 1947 was precisely because Jews need a homeland. Fifteen-hundred years of inquisitions, purges and pogroms had taught them as much.

Yet, at Penn it is the Jewish faculty and students who are resisting this list. If lists were a genre of literature, “Lists of Jews” would be found in the history section, next to Third Reich memoirs. Part of the disquiet might stem from disagreement among Jewish Americans over who is right in the Gaza conflict. College is where such arguments are loudest. Yet, in this case, both sides appear to agree on something: unhappiness over who’s doing the asking and what might come of it.

Donald Trump is, if nothing else, a staunch ally of Israel. His daughter is Jewish and his son-in-law has been dispatched on important diplomatic missions. His inability to tell the truth and his unmasked disdain for minorities of color reflect not just Donald Trump, but Donald Trump’s enablers. An unsavory swath of Trump’s core supporters were homegrown fascists of the sort that chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” while ostensibly defending a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. These were Trump’s “many good people” and it’s a good bet that a few of them joined in the siege of the Capitol on January sixth.

They are the bridge between Trump’s population of MAGA Christian immigrant-baiters and old-fashioned Jew-haters. Trump’s orbit employs, or has hosted, enough of them for any careful observer to dislike the assembling of this list at this time by this administration. Jewish students and faculty at Penn are right to be nervous, but this time the fault lies with the same left that is home base to Trump’s biggest critics.

The judge hearing this case is Gerald J. Pappert, a Republican appointed to the federal bench by Barack Obama. His career has been a study in restraint and fairness and, most of all, respect for process. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is conducting a workplace discrimination investigation and enough of Penn’s protesters crossed the line needed for a closer look. It is one of the many ways the political left has made things worse for their cause. Pappert understands that the EEOC can’t conduct discrimination investigations without the names of those who might have been discriminated against. To weaken its powers to gather information would weaken a system designed to do good, even though it is currently under the thumb of an arguably bad man.

There is, though, the question of why the University of Pennsylvania, or any institution of that sort, would have such a list to hand over. I do not recall any academic employment forms that request an applicant’s religion. Other than going by stereotypical names, how precisely would the administrators at Penn know? Will they request that Jewish employees self-report? The options sound uglier by the moment.

Judge Pappert made it clear: his role is not to decide the case but rule on whether the government has brought one. It has. Nobody has to like it, but the government has brought a case and the law gives the EEOC the right to subpoena evidence. It will be entirely something else for the government to prove that Penn discriminated against those employees because student demonstrators behaved like jerks. 

Oh, about that list from 50 years ago: a Jewish psychology professor and advisor to the campus Hillel Society, was hosting Rosh Hashana for students who couldn’t get home for the high holidays. He didn’t want to overlook anyone. It seems a bit silly in retrospect. It seems an entirely other thing when the federal government is asking for names on behalf of a president whose movement has welcomed Tiki Torch fascists into its ranks.

perhaps They were planning To Hit back first all along

I do not wish to sound like a cynic, but it is hard to avoid such a thing when discussing Donald Trump. He is so cynical that one cannot examine him without at least learning the same language. So, it was easy to doubt his announcement that other excuses had passed their expiration date, and that it is now his position that the U.S. and Israel started bombing because they thought Iran was going to strike first. This challenges even the most naïve among us to accept such a premise. There are several reasons and I shall offer them up.

It beggars belief that Iran was planning to strike at a superpower two oceans away and on guard in the extreme against terrorist actions. Such American bases or institutions that might be in place abroad enjoyed the umbrella assurance that, if hit, the U.S. would obliterate their installations in much the way they are currently doing. Capping the head-of-state is a pretty thought-out strategy. Possibly they had information that the late lamented Ayatollah was going to flee his residence.

Likewise, it is hard to imagine that – especially with the west already on a war footing – the Iranian leaders would have sought to defend their efforts to assemble nuclear weapons by attacking Israel, a missile-range neighbor that already has them. Note that Iran’s occasional missile into Israel has usually been aimed well off the target in a show of solidarity with other Muslim states, but nothing more. The Iranians and like theocracies know that if they ever came close to their dream of destroying Israel, their victim would go out shooting. 

The Iranians had more to gain by diplomacy, especially the stalling-for-time part. They would not be able to resume development without it being detected. The “Islamic Bomb” they sought is already in the possession of Pakistan. The Iranians were attempting to join the MAD club, as in Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s the theory that whoever has The Bomb isn’t going to risk firing it at an equal nuke power. Iran wanted to make sure it could never be safe to attack. Trump’s cutthroat business mindset would tell him to make it impossible for an opponent ever to rise. It is not an endeavor in which the stronger side seeks equality. Much the way Trump hits on women while married because he can, he attacked Iran because he could. He has a libido for everything. That is what makes so many statesmen dangerous. History is full of this type of man from every ideological stripe. We just landed with one who probably didn’t realize he was in training to become an autocrat. The world has suffered such fools before. Not all of them were bad, but their worldviews did demand the occasional wicked deed. With Trump, we get the 120-proof vintage.

Stupid Hands

Donald Trump just oversaw the ultimate school shooting: scores of girls at an Iranian academy obliterated with a smart bomb guided by stupid hands.

Throughout the day, the administration did what it could to explain itself. Iran’s citizens needed our intervention in order to rise up and overthrow a monstrous government. Iran was making progress developing the nuclear capability that Trump insisted we had obliterated last year. I am reminded of the story my first father-in-law told me about Tokyo Rose who broadcast the announcement that the Japanese had sunk the American fleet and then warned that if they came back, the Japanese would sink them again. 

By the middle of Saturday, we were told that Iran had planned “a preemptive strike.” This is one of those moments when it is so important that we be able to believe our leaders. To do that, though, we need believable leaders and Donald Trump has been such a serial liar that nothing from the White House can be trusted anymore.

One recalls that Israel launched a preemptive strike against the Arab states in 1967, an action that was readily justified by the fact that the Arab states had already made war on the Jewish state and vowed its eradication. The threat was quite real. Saturday’s attack on Iran had a level of the surreal, presided over by two men – Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu – whose conduct has been suspect from the get-go. Netanyahu needs a war to remain in power. Israel has a tradition of rallying behind the leader when their troops are in combat. Trump has done little to earn the confidence of his citizens if only because he has a tradition of placing troops on our streets, rounding up minorities, and mulcting the taxpayers with reckless spending, self-enrichment and disregard for the Constitution. Donald Trump just lost his tariff case in the Supreme Court and public opinion has turned against him over the unspeakable terror campaign he is conducting against immigrants and minorities. There is no polite way to put it. He has alienated the country and, while his base continues to justify almost any depredation he commits, that base is far from a majority. Within hours, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia madwoman who once embodied Trump’s agenda, was denouncing the attack. Trump has lost a constituency no politician can risk losing. He has lost the gullible. 

There is no war I have heard of that was won solely by aerial attack. From the days of Robert Lovett, who largely created the Air Force during World War II, Americans have sought the means to win a war with boots on the ground replaced by bombs from the sky. The only instance in which a war was ended by bombing was the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even that victory required American occupation and tied us to an endless obligation to provide military defense for Japan. If the current adventure in the Persian Gulf takes that route, God help us all. 

There is, too, the question of the advisability of turning war into a series of mutual killings of the heads of state. In 1943, American forces, acting on intercepted messages, targeted the airplane carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and shot it down. The action remained a matter of ethical debate for decades. Today, with armed kidnappings and aerial killings on the high seas a part of the process, ethical disquiet seems to be quaint, an artifact of the days when generals sent their personal surgeons to attend to their wounded counterparts. Chivalry has been replaced with meaningless diplomacy, whether by Trump’s son-in-law or the comically powerless United Nations. The Security Council held an emergency meeting late Saturday. Much concern was expressed. The expression of indignation by the Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya was especially delicious, an example of one agent of lawlessness chastising another. Trump will not be reined in by the United Nations. He has called on Iranians to take to the streets to oust their tyrants. That is how tyrants fall. Like the Russian delegate, Trump should heed his own warnings.

Что делать?

When an organization’s reach exceeds its competence things are going to happen. They are going to shoot down their own drones. They are going to drop ailing blind men off on freezing street corners. They are going to enter into trade wars with no idea as to how, if ever, to conduct them. William Butler Yeats was spot on when he wrote “the center cannot hold,” and we are now spinning into a confederation of competing anarchies.

It would be easy, and somewhat comforting, to attribute this entropy to Donald Trump and the citizenry that elected him. Trump has earned his place in history’s basement, but he will be keeping company there with a roster of chancers and rapscallions who set the scene. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness so much as it wilts under the glare of pious ambitions pushed by men who want to be important. Agendas serve as both curtains and the choreographed shows that will be offered once they lift.

We can go back to Woodrow Wilson who sought to elevate and ennoble the entire world so long as that world was white. The man who died fighting for a League of Nations and self-determination for Europe’s small nations also resegregated the American government and proved himself a true son of the confederacy who showed a Ku Klux Klan movie at the White House. He was Teddy Roosevelt – domestic reformer, international racist – without the bellicosity, opting for golf over shooting elephants. To Wilson, diplomacy was high art, ennobling in its very practice, but meant to benefit its practitioners and not those who lived with the results. A quiz: what is the difference between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Kissinger? Answer: good question.

The dangers of shifting power from bureaucracy to even the most well-meaning of executives is evident. Jimmy Carter came into office in 1976 pledging to reduce red tape and put order into the chaos of big government. The Washington Post published a two-page spread listing every federal agency under the stark headline: “Carter’s Augean Stables.” A generation earlier, The Baltimore Sun had done the same thing under a different president. Within four years the man from Plains, Georgia, had drowned himself in detail by attempting to manage so much that he managed nothing. 

Reform, whatever guise it wears, be it Jimmy Carter’s wack-a-mole efforts at micromanaging or Donald Trump’s performative fascism, inevitably finds itself overwhelmed by historical forces. The world is, after all, continuing on its course without the guiding hand of the United States. Our computers are now able to outthink us and trade and military alliances can be done by algorithm more effectively than diplomacy. Against the background of the Epstein scandal, paramilitary roundups of immigrants, erasure of Black history, and taxpayer-funded junkets reminiscent of Caligula moral indignation now seems comical. Truth to tell, the most trenchant insights into Trump’s depredations are now provided by late-night comedians. This is not because people don’t want to know what can be done. It is because we now know that, short of civil disruption – the least intellectual of enterprises – nothing can be done.

The trump show

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was akin to being stopped at a crossing as an endless train of empty cars clattered past.  He had almost nothing identifiable as policy to offer. He lavished praise upon himself for not knowing the basic mathematics of tariffs and who pays them. He reached into the worst recesses of his fetid soul and denounced Somalis as a race of monsters. The only useful message viewers derived was that he’s going to keep doing what he’s doing until someone stops him. I am starting to think we lack the national will to do so. We are all helpless passengers in the hijacked train of history, half-exhilarated, half-terrified and unable to stop the  banner-hanging madman so in love with himself that if reincarnation is true, Donald Trump will come back as himself again, wholly unimproved.

It is worth noting that an angry congressman, Al Green, was thrown out of the event early for holding up a sign that reads, “Black people aren't apes.” It was a breach of decorum at a time decorum is being defined by racists. Forget the sign and consider the reason: the President of the United States posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The only person penalized in connection with that despicable act was a congressman who felt the need to point out the casual racism of the current president. When someone has to risk ejection from the House chamber for defending the humanity of an entire race we are in profound trouble.

Along with gross lies about “eliminating” tax on social security, tips and overtime, Trump pumped up economic investment figures by casually doubling the estimate of his own White House from $9.7 trillion to $18 trillion by counting vague pledges and previously announced commitments. He claimed to have increased construction jobs by 70,000 when The New York Times was quickly able to point out that the number was 14,000 and suppressed by his own tariffs, which made much construction unfeasible by raising the cost of building supplies. In all, it was a hootenanny of rants, raves and baiting. I was reminded at points of the old television show “This Is Your Life,” in which unsuspecting people were brought on stage and reminded of things they had done by people they weren’t expecting to see.

Details of policy largely absent, Trump had to rely on spectacle. He handed out military decorations to three men, including E. Royce Williams, a centenarian who shot down four Mig fighters in Korea. That was during the presidency of Harry Truman. The medals awarded for events tied to Trump felt a bit off. A Medal of Honor went to a helicopter pilot wounded in a sneak attack that killed 32 Cuban soldiers and snatched up the president of Venezuela. There is precedent for this sort of thing. Nineteen soldiers who participated in the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 were given the same award. The Purple Heart was awarded to a National Guardsman attacked while occupying the streets of Washington in a Trumpian show-of-force. It is hard to know how deserving of awards two of these men were; certainly, it is hard to argue they were doing the Lord’s work, unless one holds Trump to be an irreproachable god. The Presidential Medal of Freedom was given to a hockey goalie for blocking 41 shots. Such is the state of our union.

The court tells trump no

It is possible that on Friday the Supreme Court accidentally declared war on Iran. Donald Trump lost bigly there. By a vote of six-to-three, the court ruled that the president cannot impose trade tariffs by fiat via a fictional national crisis.

Trump responded in two ways: he denounced the court as a collection of ninnies and he had the military surround Iran. Government-by-distraction is not new. But, much like the forward pass, nobody expected it to catch on the way it has. So, if not Iran, we shall soon find our attention diverted to some distant land we just couldn’t help but bomb.

The news here is less about tariffs than it is about Trump’s responses that combine vulgarity and elan. Presidents have lost Supreme Court cases before. Mostly, they have issued subdued statements. They are “disappointed,” or “disagree with the Court.” Trump denounced the six justices as “fools” and “lap dogs.” The Executive Branch just said it was ashamed of the Judicial Branch. 

Then, the president immediately cited some other spell from the Federal Rules of Practical Magick and announced a new 10 percent tariff. Possibly the most edifying aspect of this debacle is the insight it offers into the spaghetti tangle of federal regulations. It now turns out that when one law doesn’t suffice, there’s always another. Think about how federal prosecutors use the mail fraud statute when they can’t otherwise make a case.

Trump aimed higher. Instead of using a garbage statute to make a worthwhile case, he debased a law written with a noble purpose. Trump imposed his tariffs under the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. It’s a post-Watergate law intended to limit executive powers and prevent the very abuses Trump committed. Brett Kavanaugh, acting less like a jurist than a White House staffer, graciously catalogued a list of other laws the president might use to impose tariffs and resume playing hell with the economy. Trump cited one of them hours after Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion was published and announced a fresh 10 percent tariff. The clock starts again. Trump governs in a permanent state of overtime. 

The legal aspects of this dispute are beside the point. Trump recognizes no lawful limit to his powers. He sees the Constitution as a sort of Rubik’s cube that, once figured out, grants him powers previously reserved for Caligula. The tangle of federal laws — especially those written by commercial lobbyists — will make it possible for him to drag things out for years. He is a murderous despot, but his real evil lies in his talent for doing evil lawfully.

racist-in-chief

Donald Trump’s hateful impulses took a new twist in February when he posted an online video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence. I was born at a time when, however imperfectly, America was making racism morally unacceptable or, at the very least, declassee. Things have changed. Trump no longer hides his racism because it won’t cost him anything. He can blame an errant staffer for the post, but he will never apologize, be it for carelessness or for establishing a regime in which racial and ethnic hatred seeps from the gap in every office door. His hypocrisy is vivid. He is depicting two other people as apes, but Trump is the one throwing his feces.

Distressing as Trump’s post was, it was the metrics below it threw a sliver of light on what we have become or, God forbid, always been. Before Trump could hurriedly delete the post, it gained a few thousand “likes” and a couple hundred reposts from readers. In other words, it was building a following right away. This fits a pattern. There was always a base of racists down at the bottom of Trump’s pond, but the people who probably are not openly racist are constructing a language to exonerate the boss. It’s a short hop from enabler to participant. His core is hardening.

Ordinarily, a politician

panders to his base.

In Trump’s case

His base panders to him.

Whatever Trump does finds an ardent and supportive constituency, be they members of Congress or men leaning on shovels over a ditch. If Trump does something, a legion of weasels forms up behind him squealing praise. Killing people in boats by drone strikes or gunning them down on the streets of Minneapolis have all found loudmouths ready to cheer him on and functionaries ready to justify him.

This is an inversion of political norm. Ordinarily, a politician panders to his base. In Trump’s case, his base panders to him. His support comes almost entirely from people who want something from him and are willing to strip naked in public to get it. Shame has ceased to exist among senators and the assorted town drunks and dogmatists we elect to the lower congressional chamber. Among the populace, a combination of indifference and delight have empowered a monster.

From dread of FBI raids to the fear of job loss, or just plain old wanting to fit in with family, the MAGA legion will tell Trump anything they think he wants to hear. I watch any press conference with Karoline Leavitt just to prove to myself that there’s someone willing to actually say Trump’s lines without breaking. She’s like a Wallenda without a net on a windy day. It’s going to happen and I want to be there to watch it live, but I’m still waiting.

Leavitt held to form, dissembling all over the floor on behalf of Trump. The video, she said, was from a longer meme that, ala “The Lion King,” depicted the president as King of the Jungle and other characters as various other animals. The video was received from a Trump-allied source. Could Donald Trump truly have viewed it and not known it was racist? His father was in the Klan, so surely he’d have heard that ugly trope at some point in his life.  Possibly, someone in MAGA will go a bit deeper into the Disney filmography and make the Obamas the jive-singing crows from “Dumbo.” The only lesson they have learned from this episode is that there’s a great new way to poison the atmosphere.

Trump’s supporters are not uniformly racist. There is a weakness of soul involved as well. Tim Scott, a black senator from South Carolina, Tweeted that he was praying that the ape posting was fake, “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.” Let’s parse that. Sen. Scott called the post “the most racist thing,” he’d seen from Trump’s administration. What were the other, less racist posts? Also, it is worth noting that Scott’s prayer was insincere, because he said the President should take it down. Now, either Scott was feigning his shock or he assumes Trump’s powers extend to removing the social media posts of others by fiat. This is not inconceivable. He’s already removing entire families. Still, a person in possession of their faculties can see that Scott’s reaction was political fear, not personal indignation.

Trump’s conduct would have earned a place in the annals of depravity in any other political era. The problem is that the ethical ground has shifted. Americans have become, as it were, Europeans without the veneer. A German will tell you racism is wrong while still holding a soft spot in his heart for his grandfather in Argentina. A Frenchman will insist he is not a racist while helping Marine LePen and her goons outperform the polls. Truth to tell, many of us hold deep grievances in search of a parking spot. I personally would like some explanation absolving me of responsibility for my life’s failures and a credible scapegoat would be much appreciated. Too many are incapable of this level of introspection and it is to those groundlings Trump has thrown a bone, while his enablers aggrandize themselves of power and as much of the treasury as they can fit in the trunks of their limousines.

The CEOs currently kissing Trump’s ass know that his ruthless sweep of immigrants, even the shooting of the occasional protester, is going to inconvenience them. Show me anyone’s IT department and you’re taking me on a tour of Asia. Those punitively priced H1B visas are going to cost them a slave-catcher’s bounty. But they didn’t get rich without also understanding another bit of realpolitik: The people who elected Trump demand visible action. They long ago moved from “Make America Great Again” to “Take That!” as their policy credo. The street combat played nightly on the television is Trump’s proof to his surly followers that he’s doing something. The cult of action is a fundamental piece of Trump’s political style. A recutting excuse offered by his voters is that “at least he has a plan.” That’s stupid, but stupidity is a condition without a choice. The politicians and tech bros sucking up to Trump are guilty of cynicism on a level that proves that capitalism produces capitalists worth hanging. Nothing delighted racist motel owners during the Civil Rights era more than their ability to say they were just following the law. Someday, that excuse won’t sell.

The Arc de Trump

On a day ICE agents once again shot and killed a protester, then all but indicted the corpse for terrorism, Minneapolis sat at the edge of riot. The rest of the nation suddenly became concerned about the weather.

Despite the televised buildup told in Old Testament style, the snow will come, inconvenience us, and then pass. It’s weather. That’s what it does. What it cannot do is change the country in a useful way.  Snowed in or sunburned, we remain an exercise in egregious bloody mindedness.

There is latent in the American character a level of pure contrarianism that affects all levels of the social strata. The problem is that one of those strata locked onto a line of argument spectacularly lacking in reality, common sense, and compassion. That’s how we got Trump.

Trump appeals to people that don't know much but who are willing to listen to anything hinting at some sort of special knowledge or code that explains their life's failures as the work of someone else. If he hadn't run for president he might have started a militia. This does not account for the full universe of those who are drawn to Trump, but it represents enough of the people who used to vote for Democrats because their parents did but gave up when party stalwarts and intellectual leaders stopped sounding like their mom and dad.

So, for all the gauzy view of democracy and Marshall Plan sentimentality, we’ve become a bigoted, murderous lot. Congress has added cowardice to the mix. But Congress and the supine Supreme Court cannot shoulder even most of the blame. There can be no doubt about it: we suck. A nation that once rhapsodized about its immigrant origins, and which set the gold standard for democratic governance, now rounds up strangers, sprays gas in the faces of anyone who objects, and sends masked agents of the state into streets and homes as if the Fourth Amendment never existed. This is the government we installed.

Our foreign policy consists of insulting other nations, kidnapping a head of state for a narco show trial, while declaring our plans to swallow up Canada and Greenland by whatever means we can get away with.

Does anyone in their right mind believe that Europe will forgive us after Trump is gone? Any thoughts on whether trade with the world will ever return to its default setting? Can we build enough bombers and tanks to replace the NATO alliance?

By returning Trump to office, corrupt, convicted and ragingly authoritarian, we said something about ourselves. Either we don’t care about bigoted imperialism, or we don’t care enough to abstain from enabling it. Each of us has given Trump the final victory of emulating his ethos: I’ve got mine, so why all the fuss. move on,

The only thing that might tilt the game is that now ICE is killing white people. I speak for all white people when I say we hate that sort of thing, and damned if people don’t pay a bit of attention to what we think. It’s not a game-changer in itself, but the optics are awfully bad. Indifference is still the standard reaction so long as the economy holds. We long ago stopped being the country that wouldn’t put up with troops on our streets so long as there was cash in our pockets.

donald trump behaves

like the President-for-life

of some central american

regime we forgot

to overthrow

Yet if the failure to do what is transparently the right thing to do is a collective burden, think of how the names of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Greg Bovino will fall on the ears of school children in 50 years.

As a citizenry, we’ll drown our guilt the way we always do – revising our own family stories about who voted for whom. Introspection is not our forte. We're more likely to deviate into a public dispute over the correct use of "whom."

Bovino, Trump, Miller and Noem have etched their names into the history of this moment. ICE and its enablers will be remembered as Donald Trump’s Tontons Macoutes and Trump its bellicose Papa Doc.

With his delusional behavior and grandiose, filibuster-length speeches, Donald Tump behaves like the President-for-Life of some Central American regime we forgot to overthrow. Anything that impedes him is either conspiracy or treason.  The Department of Justice exists as an agency of legal punishment for the political crime of defying Donald Trump. I would give even odds that at some point he will shout, “seize him, you fools!”

Little wonder that each cabinet meeting begins with an obligatory round of fawning over Trump before they proceed to the business of driving the United States toward a cliff. Who wants to get on the wrong side of a boss who can sic the FBI on them?

The sans culottes loved Trump because they needed to be lied to in ways that made them feel good, which is to say he aped their simpleton beliefs. This was the first, most alarming digression from anything resembling traditional conservatism. Susan Sontag once said that communism was incipient fascism. Well, guess what, else is: fascism. Harkening to a lost time that we can somehow get back by force is pure Mussolini. It worked on an Italian populace that was equally ready to elect a socialist so long as something got done that made them feel the least bit empowered. Wars of conquest, both foreign and domestic, are the perfect unifier. Anyone’s kids can don the uniform and be called a hero.

This constituency has been putty in the hands of Trump’s handlers. From the fringy policy wonks of the nativist right to the conniving greedheads of the money world, every administration insider knew the secret language: abject self-debasement at the feet of the angry god in the Oval Office.

In the process, the adventurers and their true believers have assumed control of the Republican Party and ruined the cause of the conservative intellectual movement.

Much like Weimar Germany, the stage had to be set for a character on the order of Trump. Years of demonizing liberalism as a disease rather than a necessary political counterweight made the term “liberal” bad marketing. This disrespect for process dates to the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush. His son, Bush minor, disregarded Constitutional principles, establishing an extrajudicial prison in Guantanamo Bay, water boarded the Constitution, used so-called “signing statements” to evade the will on Congress, and generally acted much the way one would expect the dauphin upon his ascension to king.

This kiss-my-ass style of politics was evident as well in the world of Barack Obama, a man out-of-touch with middle America (remember how us hillbillies “cling to their guns and religion”?) He was what a gentleman would call “a smooth operator.”

Obama was so smooth that nobody noticed all the deportations during his watch. Possibly he was ashamed. The capacity to feel shame was one of his human qualities. What he didn’t do was make a self-promoting spectacle of the process. It remained for Trump to bring the oily muscle and the pathological fascination with force to the practice.

Too many speculate on the grand designs of Trump’s conduct. The violent burlesque of his reign suggests  that Donald Trump has no grand design. He has a grand impulse, one he cannot himself control. That’s quite enough to destroy a country.

the fascist Aesthetics of ICE

Sometimes, pictures are for people whose heads ache at the very thought of thinking. A school of art can be unifying for people of shared sentiment. The fascists of the prior century understood this well. They knew that where complex thought failed, unencumbered impulse could triumph.

The Trump administration and its enablers have offered proof of this villainous idea in the Department of Homeland Security’s mélange of memes and illustrations seeking to recruit not merely new hires, but the kind of new hires demanded for the accelerating roundup of immigrants. Here are a few examples pulled from the DHS Facebook page:

From white settlers trekking across the plains overseen by an alabaster guardian angel, to the Death’s Head imagery calling on young men to join the hunt for any immigrants that lack a hovering spiritual guardian, DHS and its cosplaying director Kristi Noem employ graphic arts in a way that would have been familiar to the political artisans of Mussolini’s Italy. They are doing this in an almost Proustian way: attempting to recapture the lost past through vivid sensation and force of will.

We cannot know if Jonathan Ross ever saw these images. We do know that the ICE he joined was shaped by the ethos that produced these recruitment ads. He went on to fire three shots into a car driven by a Minneapolis woman during an ICE raid that her spouse was protesting. The adolescent braggadocio of Noem's agency translated into a firearms death for disobedience.

Much of the art is not new. That’s almost the point. Those settlers are from an 1872 painting by – yikes – an immigrant painter named John Gast. Called “American Progress,” it was inspired by the Manifest Destiny movement that displaced native American tribes as we moved from one coast to the other.

Uncle Sam meme has been around for a while, too. His iteration in the accompanying illustration comes from the account of a self-described Christian nationalist. It is no mystery that a number of the ICE videos showing helmeted agents sweeping across the landscape include Biblical verses on the screen. This is an exercise in going back.

***

Consider the vintage postcards displayed on the DHS site, depicting iconic Washington locales in the 1940s. That is to say, they are showing the nation’s capital city not only in the pre-homeless encampment days, but also in the pre-integration days. The southbound travelers from the Union Station imagined in these cards would have ended up in towns where stations had segregated waiting rooms.

Another card offers the view from The Hotel Continental, accompanied by the DHS message, “We Can Return.” The view from the Hotel Continental, by the way, looks grand because it is a painting and reflects the sort of unrealistically idealized Washington to which the current administration aspires. “We Can Return” is a dispiriting choice of slogan for an illustration dating to the days when Washington’s schools and many of its other institutions, including its armed forces, were segregated.

The unifying theme is a rejection of the modern, an appeal to simpler times, if not in the real world, then in the imaginary one where established norms are unchanging, the flag has 48 stars and all the kids are white.

Cults of tradition need a touchstone. Those postcards are a veritable Rock of Gibraltar on which we can mind-graffiti any needed slogan.

The impulse to act has displaced the need to discern. One need only read Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” to comprehend how the least merciful elements of the current regime are employing art in the service of unifying cruelty. The willingness of Trump’s acolytes to embrace the denunciation of those they hate was on display July 31 in the Beaver County borough of Ambridge. After a massive sweep across the town, stopping brown-skinned motorists, invading a Latino grocery, and arresting anyone who dared protest, a group of officers was walking away as angry onlookers cried, “fascist.” One of the officers threw up what can only be described as a dismissively half-assed Nazi salute.[1] The regime is no longer afraid of being seen as cruel. They embrace it and they have the pictures to attest to their devotion.

This fusing of bro culture with political ideology is not merely a tidy fit. It’s a means of justifying the least noble impulses of humans by inverting the language of morality. Think of Gordon Gekko’s famous “Greed is Good” speech in the movie “Wall Street.” Nobody thought it would make a great recruitment ad for a stock brokerage. Yet, that’s the message we’re getting from the graphics of DHS. You speak to your target audience. The one Kristi Noem and her posse are recruiting might someday find themselves deleting their Internet search histories while awaiting a knock at their own doors.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/reel/3932245497036189

Brigitte Bardot

Exits Stage Right

Brigitte Bardot threw off centuries of convention about how women should behave, became an icon of desire and then amassed a late-life record as a bigoted xenophobe whose once avant-garde views soured in the martini glass of a lost time.

Her death at 91 has occasioned clumsy and sometimes retracted words of praise.

Conservatives, who denounced her sexually liberated movies of the 50s and 60s, praised her as an embodiment of French patriotism. The left, which embraced her, suddenly found themselves confronted with a national icon whose views failed to evolve from a time when shedding one’s clothes on screen was revolution enough.

Bardot’s breakthrough movie, “And God Created Woman,” seems tame by today’s standards, but only because it was in that role that Bardot challenged standards about how a woman was expected to behave.

She played Juliette Hardy, an 18-year-old orphan who scandalizes the fishing village of Saint-Tropez with her rebellious sexuality. The movie starts with her nude and ends with a drunken dance so teasing that literal gunfire follows.

Bardot moves through the film like a cat: prowling, sensual, indifferent to the reactions of those around her. Bardot wasn’t acting. This was her. She went on to prove it, with four marriages and so many affairs it seemed she was in a polygamous relationship with all of Europe.

Bardot’s staggering beauty and unstudied vivacity made her the scandal we all wanted to witness. Her acting was less interesting than the reasons for her enduring celebrity. That is to say, no one could quite explain why she continued to fascinate to the point that the rich and louche hastened to Saint-Tropez, turning it into a sort of Jet Set holy land.

Yachts crowd the docks and stars crowd the Five Star hotels and Michelin rated restaurants. In her twilight years, she denounced this gluttony and overdevelopment. The town’s mayor responded by inviting her to reflect on “who brought vice and lawlessness here.”

Along the dock where much of the movie was made rests a gold statue of a nude Bardot. In almost every government lobby is a statue of Marianne, the Lady Liberty of France, and Charles DeGaulle personally chose Bardot’s face as the model, calling her the greatest French export since Renault automobiles.

Bardot threw off acting in 1973 to devote her remaining years to animal welfare. It was a Greta Garbo act with a wonderful twist: she exited the world of movies and reappeared like a scolding apparition in that of politics. Absent from the screen, she held press conferences demanding an end to seal hunting and bull fighting.

Bardot also thought it entirely normal to bemoan an influx of Muslims. She complained that gays were “circus freaks,” and called the inhabitants of Reunion Island, a French territory off the coast of Africa, “savages.” Women who complained of sexual harassment were, to her, termagants who made too much of the occasional pinch on the bottom from a leering casting director.

If she was hurt and surprised by the five cases lodged against her for inciting hatred it was because she hadn’t really changed. France’s enduring racism dates back to the slave plantations of Haiti and the antisemites of the Dreyfus affair.

One is reminded of how George H.W. Bush campaigned for Congress while opposing the Civil Rights Act, but asked a guest to leave a party at his house after telling a racist joke. Bardot would have wondered what the fuss was about because, to a woman who feels more deeply than she thinks, this sort of thing is normal.

Her marriage to a former aide to French far-right, anti-immigrant leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and embrace of his party dispelled any doubt about whether these opinions were not momentary outbursts by a doddering old woman.

Bardot was demanding a return to the very France she had done so much to change. The climactic scene in “And God Created Woman,” involves Bardot’s character doing an erotically charged dance around a roomful of African musicians. Having struck up the band, she now wanted the nightclub shut down.

French President Emanuel Macron praised her artistry and pioneering free spirit. Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, not exactly a hotbed of antifeminism, lavished praise on Bardot for her animal rights activism. Closer to home, younger celebrities found themselves walking back earlier praise when someone advised them to Google the woman.

Singer-songwriter Chappell Roan posted a statement saying, “She was my inspiration for red wine supernova,” a track from Roan’s debut album. “Rest in peace, Ms. Bardot.”

After what must have been countless hits on reply buttons around the globe, Roan said she was surprised to learn about Bardot’s other activities. “I did not know all that insane **** Ms. Bardot stood for obvs I do not condone this.” Similar expressions of surprise came from actresses Apple Martin and Odessa A’zion.

Obviously none of these celebrities bothered to read any of the countless obituaries that chronicled Bardot’s sins, both of the flesh and of the zeitgeist. Simply put: Brigitte Bardot was the pivot around which a part of the culture changed direction, not its director.

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in writing about Bardot almost 70 years ago, pointed out that, until husband-of-the-moment Roger Vadim corrected her, Bardot believed that mice laid eggs.

That a woman could change the culture around sexuality and lack a fundamental understanding of the reproductive system of mammals should have been a clue. Bardot wasn’t acting so much as getting lauded for being herself. Sometimes that was a good thing, but only sometimes.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

December 31, 2025