Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Pappy’s back in town.

The 100-day mark is fast approaching for the Trump administration, and this week they kicked it into high gear in an attempt to create the impression that they accomplished something over the last three months – namely, something that was on the President’s list of promises he made over the course of his craven campaign last year. With this in mind, they tossed out a few desperate efforts towards meaningful legislation, one of which being a one-page tax break proposal announced by Mnuchin on Wednesday.

This is a clear return to the G.O.P. presidential playbook, in a Trump kind of way. Of course, it smells more like a scam, the sparsely written outline providing very little detail or guidance for what would likely be a contentious legislative drafting process. But the outlines are there, and what it means effectively is that old Pappy Tax Cut is back once again. We haven’t seen Pappy since the days of Dubya Bush and his high-earner tax cut that blew a huge hole in the budget – one that we’re still grappling with, even with the minor clawback Obama extracted from the Republicans.

Shocker: more breaks for the rich.What’s in it? Prepare to be amazed. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations. Reducing the top corporate tax rate to 15% and eliminating the estate tax altogether. If anything resembling this vague framework were to come into effect, it would shower enormous dividends on the most well-heeled people in the United States and cost the U.S. treasury about 2 trillion dollars. Suddenly Republicans aren’t worried about the deficit/debt anymore – astonishing! And why wouldn’t they give a massive break to the only people in the country – the one percent – who did well throughout the financial crisis? No reason at all.

Trump allies in congress were touting a new compromise on the “American Health Care Act” between the right and the extreme right, but that’s probably a non-starter. The act has been changed up to reflect more of the “Freedom Caucus” (i.e. a bunch of white dudes) agenda, including allowing states to make core benefits optional, letting health insurance providers charge a lot more to people with pre-existing conditions, like … I don’t know, pretty much anything that happens to you.

Then there’s impending war with Korea. Don’t even get me started on that. There’s such bad thinking on that issue from both major parties that it’s hard to know where to turn next.

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jp

Just like old times.

This probably isn’t a wise practice, but I sometimes view Morning Joe as a bellwether of establishment opinion, particularly regarding foreign policy. Their panel covers the spectrum from neocons to liberal interventionists – a narrow span to say the least. And they appear to be as happy as the proverbial pig in shit about Trump’s recent cruise missile attack in Syria. Both the liberal interventionist wing and the neocon wing have been highly critical of Obama’s failure to start a unilateral, extra-constitutional war with Syria back in 2013, so this past week was sweet validation for them all. As a group, they seem anxious for evidence that Trump’s administration is “normalizing” and settling in to the usual, conventional insanity, so they tend to jump on every lurch towards the institutional consensus.

Mother of all BullshitAnd clearly, there is a solid, institutional consensus on American foreign policy. It’s a relatively small box that contains, on one end, the Obama approach, then the center-left liberal interventionist school (Clinton, Samantha Power, etc.), followed by the center-right establishment Republicans (James Baker, Kissinger, etc.), the hot-head interventionists (McCain, Graham, Cotton), and the neocons (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Elliot Abrams, etc.). In terms of blowing things up and killing people, there isn’t a lot of distance between any of these groupings, and they all share a common imperial worldview. The encouraging development for the Morning Joe crew is the notion that Trump has now put himself in that box.

If this turns out to be a feature, not a bug, of the Trump Administration, the 2016 general election had no impact on foreign policy at all. Policy-wise, Trump appears to have put himself pretty close to Obama on that score. He maybe has a little more bomb than Obama, but it’s basically the same stuff, and the Morning Joe crowd has little to say about that. I sometimes wonder if these people remember last year, let alone 16 years ago. Do they remember that W. Bush ran a hair to the left of Gore on foreign policy – no “nation building”, right? – then pivoted back to the center-right of the consensus box after a few months (certainly after 9/11).? Obama did something similar. It’s pretty simple: presidents put out pleasing rhetoric during campaigns, then peddle back to the default policies when they win office.

Now Trump has dumped the MOAB super bunker-buster bomb on Afghanistan. What is this routine  now, bomb-drop Thursday? I guess we’ll see … next Thursday.

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jp

Bigfoot.

Another week on foreign policy, mostly because it has been so heinous lately. The gas attack in Syria was particularly upsetting, in part because there was video footage of the aftermath (unlike in the case of the U.S.’s Al Ghayil raid in Yemen that killed a score of civilians, including nine children, or the bombing in Mosul last week). The Syrian regime, once again, is doing the one thing they do in response to a restive population: kill and torture. They literally know nothing else. That said, there seems to be a universal media consensus that the United States should fly its bombers in there and start blowing the place apart, as if that has ever made anything better over the past 50-60 years. (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t. It has made things exponentially worse.)

Trump arrives at a decision.Then there was the missile launch in North Korea. Deliberately provocative, yes, though again, our military rules on that peninsula – we’re constantly running joint exercises with the South Korean military that can only be seen as provocations by Pyongyang. Trump is going to take this up with China this weekend in his cheesy Florida resort getaway, but that just marks a continuation of the same disastrous policy. North Korea wants to talk to us, not China. This only possible way to reduce this massive threat to human existence on the Korean peninsula is provide Pyongyang with some guarantees of non belligerence. That is simply not on the table.

How will the Trump administration react to all of this, aside from blaming everyone else (e.g. their predecessors, the Muslims, the Chinese, immigrants, etc.)? It’s a little hard to say. Either one could blow up in our face on a moment’s notice. It sounds to me like Trump is leaning toward differentiating himself from Obama on Syria – that is, taking a more interventionist stance. That appears to be supported by the jabbering classes, as I mentioned earlier. (I heard a congressman from the GOP hair-gel caucus on Thursday’s Morning Joe urging a “no-fly zone” and suggesting that, if we hit Russian personnel or assets in the process, well, that would be “on them”.) This is how world wars start, so one would hope that whatever money laundering Trump has done for Russian oligarchs over the years, it will give him enough reason to at least adequately de-conflict with the Russian military before going all Lindsay Graham on Damascus.

Korea may be just as problematic, since I don’t think Trump owes a lot to Chinese fixers. They may be crazy enough to lob a bomb over there – we’ll have to see. Scary times.

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jp

P.S.  Spoke too soon. Trump is bombing Syria. This is getting really ugly. The TV commentators all have their “war faces” on, talking to admirals. Trump did a hostage-video style pre-taped announcement last night (strangely, from a podium, reading off of two teleprompters as if there were an audience – the sound quality was horrible). Everyone is beating their chests: American credibility has been restored. (Apparently no one in the world thought we would attack at random anymore, even though we’ve been doing it non-stop for 16 years.) Bigfoot is stomping around.

Nuclear option.

I’m undecided as to whether this is a great time to be a political writer or an abysmal one. There is so much going on every day of this new presidential administration, it’s enough to fill a months worth of posts. It’s hard not to return to the “drinking from a fire hose” cliche, frankly. Even so, I’ll take a whack at some of what happened this week in my wobbly, amateurish way and we’ll see where we end up.

Russia and Germany. Trump’s visit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel was odd and awkward. She had that kind of hostage video look, sitting there with Herr Mr. Hair, asking for a handshake and being rebuffed by the new leader of the “free” world. If she isn’t uneasy about this president, I don’t know what it would take; just listening to the press conference exchanges between Trump and the German press is enough to convince anyone that the man needs professional help. And the rebuff over the handshake will only feed the notion that he is a man who will say or do nothing to offend one V. Putin.

Mr. not-so-nice guyThat’s the stuff conspiracy theories are made of. So … why does he keep fucking doing it? If there turns out to be no serious collusion between Trump’s people and the Russian government, his administration is the most productive conspiratorial smoke machine ever constructed. Major administration advisors had conversations with Russian officials during and after the campaign, lied about it, then fessed up when the lie was exposed. If it’s above board, why don’t they just effing say so? I don’t get it.

Blind Justice. Gorsuch took the stand in his confirmation hearings this week in the U.S. Senate. Big charm offensive, though it’s obvious where he’s coming from both judicially and politically. Still, I count myself among the number who simply oppose Gorsuch because he was nominated by Trump. It they blow up the filibuster, fine … there’s no saving it for later. If when you use it you lose it, then it doesn’t really exist anyway.

It appears as though the Democrats are leaning towards this strategy, based on what Schumer and others are saying. Some of the Democratic senators, like Franken and Whitehouse, delivered some very strong criticism not only of Gorsuch but of the entire right-wing judicial and broader political agenda, so that’s all to the good.

The health insurance went down in flames, so I’ll return to that next week. My guess is that, AHCA or no AHCA, the GOP congress and Trump Administration will do everything in their power to crash the ACA through deregulation, funding cuts, and more. This fight will continue.

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jp

Point made.

I think Sam Seder on the Majority Report said it best this week: the core of what the Republicans are doing is not policy, it’s ideology. It’s obvious every time they open their mouths. The policies they are advancing can only be seen as efforts to implement their extremist ideas, regardless of how negatively they affect large swaths of the population. They try to hide behind bogus concern for the well-being and “freedom” of ordinary people and “businesses”, but that’s a thin disguise. Listen to them talk for more than thirty seconds and the real agenda comes through, loud and clear.

Chief assistant rat bag.Take Speaker Ryan (please). He seems dedicated to souring people on the very idea of insurance. Ryan repeats the claim that 1% of the insured incur 23% of the costs of coverage. Even if his numbers are correct, isn’t that what insurance is supposed to do? The system is based on the notion that everyone doesn’t typically get sick at the same time – everybody pays into the system, and much of those funds are diverted to those who need health care at any given time. Important safety tip: That can be ANYBODY. You may feel great on Wednesday and get a dire diagnosis on Thursday, or get hit by an effing truck. Reality has a way of turning “makers” into “takers”, in Ryan’s parlance.

Another thing our Ayn Rand-admiring Speaker spouts with some frequency is this notion of “rights” without intervention from the state. He claims breezily that we may all have a right to health care, but that doesn’t mean the government should guarantee that right. So … what is this “right” – the right to buy something? By the same token, we all have the right to buy a Mercedes or take a trip to the south of France. Ryan makes it sound as though the government is violating your rights and infringing upon your freedom by, say, providing Medicare when you’re elderly. They MAKE you pay for it, right? That’s force!

I just heard a right-leaning Texas health policy activist on NPR decrying Medicaid expansion because people will be “dragged into it”, as if providing a free health coverage option for people on limited incomes is an attack on their liberty.  Trump’s budget director Mulvaney is justifying their proposed cuts to meals on wheels and after-school nutrition programs by claiming that they are “not showing any results.” On the school nutrition programs, “there’s no evidence they’re helping kids do better in school,” says Mulvaney. Again, from an ideological perspective, this makes perfect sense. Whereas for most sentient human beings it would be enough that we are contributing to the nutrition of the young, the old, the most vulnerable, to these jackals, there has to be some positive, quantifiable value they can take to the bank. Disgusting.

Trump is not the only problem we have, folks. It’s this whole GOP mindset, subscribed to by some Democrats as well, but squarely within the Republican wheelhouse. That’s the real fight.

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jp

For the people.

I live in New York’s 22nd Congressional district, a sprawling, largely rural riding that stretches from the Pennsylvania border to just a stone’s throw from Lake Ontario. On the map, it looks a bit like the silhouette of someone in a Klansman get-up standing on a soapbox with his/her arms out stretched, crucifixion style. In reality, it’s a lot less dramatic than that, though through the decades I have seen more than a small number of confederate flags stuck to bumpers (and one full-size battle flag waving at me from the back of a pickup truck just a few months back). Cook has us as an R+3 district, meaning strong lean-Republican – NY22 went for Trump 55-39% in 2016, which is pretty lopsided even for us, though it suggests a solid 6% independent vote.

Who's intimidating whom?Our current Congress member, Claudia Tenney, won a three-way race with about 47% last Fall. Since her election, she has been a little hard to pin down. It took some weeks to open a district office in the Utica area – she blamed this on the bureaucracy, of course. Up until this week, Tenney has been knocking down any suggestion of holding a town hall-style meeting in the district, having seen what’s been happening to her colleagues. Her big announcement this past Wednesday was that she would call a town hall, though no announced date. Also, she says she’s been receiving threats. Well, welcome to being famous, Claudia. Anyone who raises their head above obscurity in this culture gets threatening emails, Tweets, posts, etc.

Like her colleagues in the House, she does not want to answer directly to constituents for the policies she has supported or plans to support, particularly the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”). When you hold one of these town halls, it’s hard to maintain the fiction that you actually care about what happens to people. And it is plainly that – a fiction. This whole “repeal and replace” line is their way of finessing a very harsh reality; namely that they are taking votes that will result in the loss of coverage for millions of Americans. I don’t just mean people who will be thrown off of their health insurance – I also mean people who will be subscribed to something that’s called “health insurance” but that, in fact, doesn’t cover anything. I had a policy like that, long before the ACA, and it was pretty awful.

Let’s face it: Tenney and her GOP colleagues only see the ACA as a political tool. Flawed as it is, it has, in fact, saved lives, and should be improved upon, not scrapped. If Tenney wants to do something for the people who sent her to Washington, she can start by concentrating on that.

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jp

The fire this time.

Another banner week for the just-born Trump administration, beset by a growing scandal around purported contacts with Russia, rocked by the forced resignation of anti-Muslim National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, scrambled by contradictory messaging from both surrogates and the President himself, and so on. Trump’s truly bizarre Thursday press conference saw him describe his White House as a “running like a fine-tuned machine.” Probably seems that way to someone as deluded as he appears to be. I’m not even including the very public situation room they convened at a restaurant table inside Trump’s Florida resort – a night that saw some crony posing for a photo with the dude who carries the nuclear football. Eek.

Donald J. DumpsterfireLate in last year’ campaign, when the T-man seemed to be burning out of control, I wrote a blog post titled “Burning Man” wherein I suggest that the candidate was like “a crazy-ass Frankenstein’s monster set on fire and spreading his conflagration to everything he touches. Better that he should do it during the campaign than in the oval office, am I right?” It hadn’t occurred to me at that time (a) that Trump would likely win under those circumstances and (b) that, if he did win, he would govern in much the same manner. Clearly both (a) and (b) have turned out to be the case. We’re going to see four years of this, people. Fasten your seat belts.

What can be done? Well, resist, of course. Join or start an Indivisible group in your area. Call or visit your Congress members and demand action out of them, not just to counter the Trump agenda, but to work against the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell program that is threatening every corner of American life, from health care to financial security to environmental sustainability and so on. We need to be active in our own communities, working for real change, but we also have to focus a good bit of our efforts on an electoral strategy that will give us some leverage.  Democrats stand little chance of winning back the Senate in 2018. The House is uphill as well, but it’s likely the only chance we have. That means flipping seats in places like upstate New York.

This will take work, and lots of it. Activism alone won’t hold back this tide of bad policy – we need some political gains at the state and federal level, particularly in advance of the next reapportionment fight in 2020. It’s a thin straw, but it’s the only one we have.

luv u,

jp

Look away!

Break out your banjos; looks like we have a new A.G. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions will now oversee the Justice Department, which includes the FBI, U.S. Attorneys offices across the nation, and (gulp) the Civil Rights Division. (Now I know why the chorus of Dixie goes, “Look away! Look away!”) Dark times indeed, except that this is just part of the story, because we now have anti-public education zealot billionaire Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, former Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, former Breitbart editor and longtime white supremacist Steve Bannon as a permanent member of the National Security Council, retired general and current crackpot Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor …. shall I go on? This just in: elections have consequences.

Look away! Look away!Of course, the most problematic member of the administration is the man himself. Only 20 days into this regime and it feels like forever. In a way, it might as well be three years in. I keep hearing pundits, like sometime Trump adviser Joe Scarborough, saying that he needs to dial back the motor mouth a bit …. as if that is ever going to happen. Why the hell would he? It’s worked very well for him so far. Anyone who has ever worked for a small businessperson knows how that works. The man is going to impugn the judiciary when it goes against him and praise it when it decides in his favor, period. Separation of powers, constitutional laws and traditions – none of that means anything to him. He has dictatorial tendencies, and we have placed him into the most powerful office on the planet. Nice going, people.

Okay, before I descend into a Winnebago Man – like tirade, let me talk about what isn’t different about this administration. One thing is that they hide their bad military decisions behind the soldiers who are killed by those decisions. Previous administrations have done this more artfully, but no less cravenly. I’m referring specifically to the raid in Yemen, which has many troubling implications, but which by all accounts was a Rescue One-level disaster, resulting in the death of a Navy Seal, wounding of others, the destruction of an aircraft, and the killing of perhaps two dozen civilians, including children. Spokeswalrus (sorry, walruses!) Sean Spicer announced that to call this raid anything less than a success is to denigrate the sacrifice of the lost Navy Seal. This jiu jitsu move is well practiced – the deep implication is to deflect blame on the dead guy, while making it sound like you’re outraged that others aren’t properly honoring him. Effing disgusting.

So something old, something new. Either way, it’s going to be a long four years.

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jp

No justice.

Trump has named his nominee to the Supreme Court, with a reality show-like flourish, and we spent a couple of days hearing about how eminently qualified the honorable judge Gorsuch is, how pleasant a man he is, what a great colleague and … and … fuck all. Frankly, his qualifications are irrelevant. Much as the Republicans would like to pretend that time began Tuesday evening at 8:00pm, we all know what happened over the last year after the unexpected passing of Justice Scalia – basically, Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP invented a new obstructionist rule, saying in essence that President Obama had no right to name a replacement justice in the final year of his second term.

I agree with Oregon Senator Jeff Merkely on this. That seat on the Supreme Court was stolen by the Republicans on the then-long chance that they might win the 2016 election. Now they expect everyone to just forget all that and proceed with the swift confirmation of a man who is significantly to the right of the reactionary justice he would be replacing. I am not alone in saying, fuck that. Eight is a nice, round number – let’s just stay there, shall we?

Favorite photoThe notion that the Democrats need to allow this one to go through unchallenged is truly a case of playing by the last decade’s rules. Here’s the argument: Give Mitch McConnell his vote and he won’t blow up the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees. If you don’t, he’ll invoke the “nuclear option” and you won’t have the filibuster should another vacancy – this time perhaps left by a more liberal justice – comes up in Trump’s tenure. That is just magical thinking. If the filibuster can be shot down that easily, what’s to stop them from doing that next time around? The suggestion that they would somehow refrain out of collegiality or gratitude is laughable. At least filibustering Gorsuch would demonstrate to the majority of people that you’re willing to stand for something. Do nothing and not only will their man be seated on the Court, but next time you try to use the filibuster they’ll just toss it out. You gain nothing – and lost much – by being accommodating.

Now for what really irks me. Who knew that the filibuster was so easily disposed of? I had a suspicion when the Republicans threatened the “nuclear option” during the Bush years, but almost all the way through the years of Democratic Senate majority they wouldn’t touch it. You mean to tell me that in 2009-10, all the Dems had to do to get (1) the public option, (2) card check, (3) a bigger stimulus and more was to do a rule change in the Senate? What. the. fuck. That is a titanic political fail, and we are all the losers for it.

luv u,

jp

New year, old story.

Hope you’re all rested and fully recuperated from your holiday festivities. Looks like we have some heavy lifting to do, and it’s not clear to me that we’re going to get a lot of help from the institutional Democratic party. The fact is, we are going to have to push them to do the right thing at least as hard as we push the Republicans (a.k.a. our one-party state) not to do the wrong thing. Nothing new, right? Any time anything useful gets done in America, it’s because there’s an army of activists locking arms and pushing it forward. Progress doesn’t arrive in a sedan chair, eating sweetmeats; it’s dragged kicking and screaming every inch of the way. That’s what we’re looking at, once again, as we work to preserve the remnants of our social safety net, keep ourselves out of devastating overseas conflicts, and protect the most vulnerable among us.

Um ... are you ready?The challenge this time around is being able to move fast enough to make a difference. The GOP-run Congress is going to ram a stack of legislation through over the next few weeks that will disable the ACA (so called “Obamacare”), cut back or restructure (privatize) Medicare and Medicaid, cut Social Security (perhaps privatize as well), and more. We need real-time information on specific legislation that’s being proposed, voted on, etc. Sourcing that will be crucial. We also need to organize on a local, Congressional district level, to apply pressure where it will have the greatest impact.

Some of the organizing work appears to already be in motion, at least as far as setting a template for activists to follow. There’s this new group called Indivisible (http://www.indivisibleguide.com/) that has assembled a kind of activist cookbook for lobbying individual representatives. The group that grew out of the Sanders campaign – Our Revolution – is also pulling some of this together, as well as more longstanding groups like MoveOn.org. I think that part of it is taking shape, but the information component is still a little sketchy. If anyone has any insights on how to get timely, detailed information on pending legislation, let me know (use the comments field on this post).

I hope to work with some neighbors on lobbying our new tea party Congressperson (most reactionary representative we’ve had in my lifetime, I believe). I strongly suggest you do the same. Start today. Aloha.

luv u,

jp