Trump Supporters

As we have discussed previously I do not think that every last single person who voted for Donald Trump as President is a snarling Neanderthal racist. Although it is tempting to think so sometimes, if that were really the case then people who did not and do not support Trump would be giving up on the possibility of ever convincing Trump supporters to vote for non-racist candidates. And given that Presidential elections are decided by winning a majority of state electoral votes and not by winning the raw majority of voters, a Democratic Presidential candidate must figure out how to at least staunch the Democratic vote losses among whites, particularly in the Midwest and South and maximize voter turnout among Blacks and Hispanics Often those goals seem to be impossible to reach at the same time. The problem is that some unknowable portion of the people who voted for Trump indeed are snarling Neanderthal racists or nihilists who are perfectly happy to drill holes in the hull of the ship and drown as long as their hated liberal rivals also drown with them. 

Neither of these types can be reached by reasoned debate or political horse trading. And on some level it's dangerous to try. After all their issues are not so much political as they are cultural and racial. They do not really accept the legitimacy of the political system or the legitimacy of non-white citizenship. I was reminded of these two subgroups of Trump voters by two separate incidents.The first involved a North Carolina Klan Leader, Chris Barker.

Trump, Kim Jong Un, North Korea and Nuclear War

As you may have noticed President Trump and North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un have been trading insults and threats over the past few weeks about just how bad they're going to curb stomp the other country. Kim has made threats to attack Guam while Trump has said that any North Korean bad behavior will be met by fire and fury the likes of which the world hasn't seen. Trump says that the US military is locked, loaded and ready to go. Many people, both intelligent and not, attacked Trump's statements as unpresidential. They were. But at the same time if someone is threatening your country you're probably going to threaten them back. There tends to be an expectation among some experts that whatever Trump says will be wrong. That's usually a pretty good expectation. But in the case of the North Korean regime there has been a decades long bipartisan failure to prevent what the U.S. sees as bad behavior by North Korea. North Korea has nukes. North Korea isn't giving up its nukes. North Korea has been continuing to test missiles. Those missiles have been getting better and better. This is simply not a problem that Trump created though he is certainly capable of making things worse.

There may have been, sixty years ago, a small window to settle the North Korean question militarily on terms favorable to the United States, as Douglas MacArthur would have told you (and did tell other people), but in the current day with a nuclear armed Russia and China, that window has likely closed.

Trump Supporter, Foreigners and Housing Discrimination

The libertarian or traditionalist conservative would say that this is a white man's country that a man ought to have the right to do as he pleases with his own property. Although that is indeed an important value there are other values and goals which society has decided are equally important or even more important than the right to control your own property in every aspect. One of those values is anti-discrimination. 

There are limits on how the state or even private entities can treat you based on immutable characteristics such as your race, age, sex, nationality and occasionally even religion or sexuality or sexual identity. The law has been trending that way for at least the past seventy years or so. Why? Because there are unfortunately a lot of people who, given half a chance, would indeed discriminate against their fellow Americans or others based on some or all of the traits I just mentioned. One such man is Iraq war vet and former shady used car dealer, James Prater, a Mason, Michigan resident who has decided to put his house up for sale. There's just one caveat. Mr. Prater doesn't want to sell to anyone who is not a true blue American. Apparently he has a special dislike for people of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. But rather than leave it up to the individual to figure out if they were sufficiently non-Middle Eastern/South Asian Prater decided to make it easy for everyone by stating "No foreigners". Nice and simple.

Trump, Priebus and Scaramucci

Donald Trump, despite his immense wealth, success and power is a profoundly insecure man. Perhaps this goes back to bad experiences during his toilet training phase. Maybe he knows that he's not really a self-made man in the true sense of the word. Maybe he struggles to comprehend how being President can be so tough if the black guy did it. I don't know. I do know that he's a bully who has so far not shown any ability either to run the executive branch effectively or failing that, empower people who really do know how to administer executive branch. Maybe this will change. But really how many people change in their seventies? You pretty much are who you are at that point. Trump mistakes conflict and brashness for strength. This "state of nature" approach trickles down to everyone who works for Trump. We saw this this week where Trump's new White House Communications Director and would be mini-me Anthony Scaramucci, gave a rather odd interview in which he profanely boasted of being willing to fire everyone, accused White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus of leaking information, and charged White House Advisor Steve Bannon of being so enamored of himself that he tried to commit oral sex upon himself.

Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own ****,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the f****** strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon declined to comment.) He reiterated that Priebus would resign soon, and he noted that he told Trump that he expected Priebus to launch a campaign against him.

Now politics is a contact sport. But even by those standards going on the record with such filth was pretty low indeed. But Scaramucci did not apologize in any meaningful way. And apparently Trump wasn't bothered as much by Scaramucci's language and public criticism of other Administration members as he was by Priebus' lack of public response. 

Republicans Fail to Repeal or Replace ObamaCare

The Republicans control the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Democrats can use procedural tricks,Senate tradition and appeals to the judiciary branch to slow down portions of the Republican agenda, but by and large Democrats can't stop anything that Republicans are bound and determined to get. The PPACA was passed without any Republican votes. Republicans swore that once they had the power to repeal it the PPACA or ObamaCare was dead meat. During the Obama Administration, the Republicans voted time and time and time again to kill ObamaCare. Some said they would replace it with something better but just about all of them agreed that ObamaCare had to go. Like yesterday if not before. But a funny thing happened over the years that ObamaCare was the law. A noticeable portion of the Republican constituency found that even as they hated ObamaCare and of course Obama, they loved the PPACA. Many of these people were so stupid that they didn't realize that the PPACA and ObamaCare were the same thing. 

Once Trump won the White House and had Republican majorities in the House and Senate ObamaCare should have been easy to repeal. But we saw this week that when it really came down to it Republicans, at least in the Senate, were people who, as James Brown might have said, just liked talking loud while saying nothing.  At this time the Senate could not bring itself to modify the PPACA or to remove it.

Donald Trump Jr. and Fredo Corleone

You may have heard that Donald Trump's oldest son, Donald Jr. has changed his story multiple times about meeting with a Kremlin linked Russian lawyer to discuss damaging negative information on Hillary Clinton and how best the Trump Campaign could use it. This contradicts both President Trump's statements about possible collusion between his campaign and Russians as well as other definitive statements made by various Trump surrogates. As previously stated though, it is up to the Republican House and Senate whether to impeach and convict President Trump. To say the least that seems extremely unlikely. Even so, it's probably a pretty fair bet that other powerful people within the Trump Administration/Organization aren't too happy with Donald Jr. right about now. With apologies to Francis Ford Coppola perhaps the discussion among the Trump siblings went a little something like this.

Donald Jr. : “I didn’t know the media and DOJ would use this info about my Russia meeting to hurt Dad. I swear to God I didn’t know. Believe me.”

Ivanka: “Just tell us what happened, Donnie.”

Donald Jr. : “I ran into Natalia on a hunting trip in South Africa. She said that Dad was having some trouble with Hillary, that Hillary was being really tough, that Dad might need some help in the general election. She said I could help out Dad and that there might be something in it for me. On my own. And it would be good for the entire family.”

Eric: “And you believed that?”

Trump and Mika Brzezinski

If I were a foreign agent or diplomat observing the President of the United States I would certainly be taking copious notes on how easily the President can be baited into saying or doing something silly or nasty. Over and over again the President finds it necessary to engage in puerile insults or get into back-and-forth with media personalities. He also has a two-year-old's attention span and need for validation. And he has extreme sensitivity to anything that hints that he's not the most virile and ahem..largest man ever. Not for Trump anything that implies that he's not always right, not always heh-heh, ready to go, and not necessarily swinging the biggest bat in town. This is information which could be of interest and use to foreign decision makers at some point down the line, if it hasn't been already. 

For someone who claims to disdain the mainstream media Trump seems remarkably well informed of what they are saying about him. It's apparent, that far from dismissing the media and so-called intelligentsia, Trump desperately craves their approval and adulation. He needs it. He must have it. And when he doesn't get it, like the two-year-old he resembles he throws temper tantrums.

A segment on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" in which co-host Mika Brzezinski said President Donald Trump was "destroying the country" might have been what led Trump to attack her viciously on Twitter on Thursday morning.

The segment took aim at a fake Time magazine cover featuring Trump that reportedly hangs at a number of Trump's golf clubs and properties, according to The Washington Post.

"Nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself, lying every day, and destroying the country," Brzezinski said. Brzezinski also noted that on the fake Time cover, Trump was covering his hands "because they're teensy.

Congressional Black Caucus and Donald Trump

Politics is full of emotion. That's understandable. It's always been the case. But politics is also about reaching your goals and advancing your interest. Sometimes emotion can get in the way of doing that. For example, the Congressional Black Caucus recently declined to have a second meeting with President Trump out of the belief that Trump was so opposed to the CBC's agenda that any meeting would merely be a photo op for Trump. If you are so inclined you can read the whole statement here.

Some highlights:

Through an objective assessment, we see no evidence that your administration acted on our calls for action, and we have in fact witnessed steps that will affirmatively hurt black communities," While we agreed to explore possible future discussions when we first met, it has become abundantly clear that a conversation with the entire CBC would not be entirely productive, given the actions taken by your Administration since our first meeting. While you can solicit the engagement of individual members of our caucus, the CBC as a caucus declines your invitation to meet at this time.

As you are well aware, when the leadership of the CBC met with you on March 22, 2017, we presented you with a 130-page policy document because we recognized the opportunity to educate both you and your Administration on the difficult history of Black people in this country, the history of the CBC, and solutions to advance Black families in the 21st Century. Your Administration has yet to provide a response to the policies we presented. Additionally, your Administration has not followed through on a pledge you made to us to facilitate meetings with relevant Cabinet officials.

Chaldeans Blame Trump for Deportations

As you probably know if you've read any prior posts here I don't have a tremendous amount of sympathy for resident adult non-citizens who break the law in any serious way and then receive a deportation order. I have even less sympathy for a group of people who voted for Trump and are shocked when he turns on them. It's what he is. It's what he does. Perhaps for the next election people might consider looking a little more deeply into a candidate's background and history or maybe even think about voting for something greater than their own narrow perceived self-interest. You can't or rather shouldn't identify as a "conservative" and then get p*****d off when someone enforces the law against you. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Stop resisting. Follow the rules and you'll have nothing to worry about. Obey the law. Isn't that what self-righteous conservatives tell blacks other people who complain about selective, harsh, or inflexible law enforcement? Well okay then. When he talked about immigrants who were breaking the law with impunity and causing havoc across the land President Trump apparently wasn't, despite what some Chaldean immigrants thought, only talking about Mexicans.

Standing in the living room of her brother's home in Sterling Heights, Lina Denha wipes away tears with a tissue as she recalls how federal agents arrested him early one Sunday morning this month. 
"To just come and grab him in front of his kids and family — that's not right," she said of the June 11 detention of Haydar Butris, 38, one of 114 Iraqi immigrants with criminal records arrested in Michigan.  "He's been here most of his life. He did a mistake. He paid for it. Now, he is a good father, has kids, a family. He works, pays taxes and everything. And you just come knock on the door, come out of nowhere and grab him? That's not right."

Denha's sadness turns to frustration as she expresses disappointment with President Donald Trump, whom she and some other Iraqi-American Christians in Michigan had supported. Denha's sense of betrayal is echoed across metro Detroit among some Iraqi-American Christians who voted for Trump because they hoped he would be sympathetic to their community abroad, where they are a religious minority, and in the U.S. "We voted for Trump," Denha said. "That's what we get from him? ... Obama is better than him, 100 times."

CNN Fires Reza Aslan for Insulting President Trump

Once again, although we theoretically have free speech in this country it is important to remember that the concept really only limits the government and what it can do to you. Generally speaking the government can't imprison you for what you say nor can it prevent you from speaking because it doesn't like the content. Corporations are not governments. And although corporations can not put you in prison, they certainly can separate you from a stream of income. CNN just fired host Reza Aslan, who made profane statements in regards to President Trump citing his travel ban in regards to the recent terror attacks in Great Britain.
After Trump tweeted about his travel ban following the London terror attack, Aslan responded, “This piece of s*** is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.”
He later took down that tweet and apologized.
But there was still pressure for the network to drop Aslan. The Media Research Center in particular spearheaded some of those efforts:

Kathy Griffin, Ted Nugent, Free Speech and Double Standards

I never found Kathy Griffin to be very funny. But I'm not in her primary target audience. Everyone has their own sense of humor. So when I saw the photograph of her holding a replica of Donald Trump's severed head I didn't find it amusing. I thought that the picture from the video was in bad taste and not funny. I thought it was an excellent example of how the Trump Presidency has unhinged some people. I also thought that it wouldn't be long before there would be a backlash. The thing I've noticed about the Right after all these years is that they have no problem dishing it out. They're really good at that. But taking it? No that's not what they do. Suddenly they turn into sensitive little snowflakes. The very same people who were angered about the Griffin picture were evidently laughing it up when Ted Nugent told Obama to suck on his machine gun, called Hillary Clinton a "toxic c***" , called Obama a subhuman mongrel or said that if Obama were re-elected that he (Nugent) would be either dead or in jail (because you know what he'd have to do). Trump didn't have a problem with Nugent's statements. He invited him to the White House. Of course when you came to prominence peddling racist birther stories, why would you have a problem with a racist like Ted Nugent? Birds of a feather.

The same people bemoaning the ugliness shown to Trump apparently had no issue at all with President Obama being burned or hanged in effigy, being called every single sort of racial slur imaginable, being called a skinny ghetto crackhead, being threatened with assassination, having Senators pray for his death or obviously getting the monthly run of the mill monkey-ape-gorilla comparisons. That was all just fine with conservatives. They had no problem making incredibly ugly hateful and threatening statements about President Obama, his wife, his daughters, his mother, his father and anyone associated with him. But when someone of a different political faction plays in the same dirty sewer conservatives have a problem? What changed? I have little use for selective outrage. 

Mr. Trump Goes To Washington

You may recall that the issues that won Donald Trump the Republican nomination and ultimately the Presidency were things that more or less had simplicity and economic nationalism in common. Trump wove a story of feckless elite American leadership that was either compromised by, intimidated by or in bed with foreign interests.Trump was going to change all this by putting America first. Now people who bothered to look at Trump's business history and that of his family knew that this was at best unlikely. But what the Democrats and their candidate didn't understand was that there was a hunger for the narrative that Trump was selling, that America needed to put its own economic and military interests first and stop dancing to the tune called by others. There is obviously a very strong racist and anti-Semitic undertone to some of this. But as I've written elsewhere in and of itself nationalism is not always a bad thing. Many of Trump's most fervent supporters were drawn to his oft simplistic, yet  generally nationalist stances on trade, immigration, jobs, foreign policy and infrastructure. Well the Presidency has a way of changing people. There were plenty of indications of this even before the latest news but over the past ten days or so the President has gone out of his way to reverse himself on many of his statements prior to becoming President.  

ObamaCare Lives Another Day

In case you somehow hadn't heard the Republican members of the House of Representatives could not come together to support the American Health Care Act (AHCA). I don't have a lot to write on this at the moment both because (1) I've already written at length why I think that the law (PPACA or ObamaCare) that the AHCA was designed to replace is destined for a slow ignominious demise and (2) my Day Job supervisor has made it crystal clear what my true priorities are during quarter close. And they aren't blogging. But I do just want to say that I think that both the defenders and detractors of ObamaCare are missing some critical points by getting lost in the partisan weeds of denying President Trump a win or trying to ascertain who is up and who is down in the Byzantine politics of Washington D.C.

Numbers don't lie. PPACA is a bad deal for younger healthier people. It doesn't reflect their expected value or risk. It's mispriced. They will, all else equal, continue to avoid enrolling in the expected or promised numbers. That's not going to change. The other thing which isn't going to change is that some of the very people who for the past seven years ran around spitting at ObamaCare, waving "Obama is a monkey" signs and voting for people who swore blood oaths to rip up the PPACA root and branch, turned out to have a different feeling about ObamaCare when Uncle Bud was covered for the cancer meds he needed or Cousin Sherri finally got enrolled in a program to help with opioid addiction. There are relatively few people who will, if push comes to shove, place their ideology over their survival. They won't brag about this. It's not the stuff of heroic stories. But it is human nature. And even a lot of big bad Republicans who wanted to kill Obamacare still flinched away from taking away popular benefits.

Now that there is Republican control of the executive branch with all of the awesome discretionary prerogatives of that come with it, Trump and his minions could accidentally on purpose help along ObamaCare to an early grave. And there wouldn't be too much that Democrats could do about it. Or given Trump's desperate need for acclamation, he could attempt to reshape the PPACA via executive fiat and administrative choice into something that keeps coverage for many voters but slows skyrocketing premium and deductible growth. I don't think this will work even if Trump were a detail oriented policy wonk, which he is most assuredly not. So the most likely scenario is that the PPACA continues to limp along until the next midterms and then the one after that and so on. It's never going to be unpopular enough to kill. But it will never be popular enough to fix either. 

Maddow and Trump Tax Returns

And then suddenly, nothing happened.

I find Rachel Maddow's voice to be about as engaging as a dentist's drill so I didn't watch her MSNBC show last night which she breathlessly and shamelessly hyped as having the low down scoop on Trump's tax returns. So this morning when I awoke, I wondered if I had missed anything of import. No. No I didn't. Maddow didn't have Trump's current tax returns. She didn't have any evidence of nefarious tax evasion by Trump or investigation of Trump by the IRS or other ominous government agencies with a reputation for not playing around. She didn't have evidence of secret ties to Russian oligarchs or Trump owned dachas on the Black Sea. No, what Ms. Maddow had was two pages from Trump's 2005 federal income tax return that showed that Trump paid $38 million in taxes on an income of about $150 million. Please try to hide your shock. This juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Ultimately, the reporting that Ms. Maddow eventually aired on Tuesday night’s show — two pages from a single, decade-old federal tax return — was less groundbreaking than the mere fact that a portion of the president’s records had surfaced at all. The journalist who obtained the records, David Cay Johnston, a former tax reporter for The New York Times, said that the documents arrived “over the transom” in his mailbox. Mr. Johnston even speculated on-air that Mr. Trump had sent the documents himself.
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Border Searches, Privacy and Profiling

I've written before on seeming or actual violations of civil liberties under the Obama Administration. For the most part it's fair to say that progressives didn't care too much about such violations. They decided that they had bigger fish to fry. And with a few honorably consistent exceptions the conservatives who criticized the Obama Administration's civil liberties record were quiet as church mice when it came to local police violations of the civil/constitutional rights of black American citizens. So conservative critiques about the Obama Administration's hostility to freedom of the press or separation of powers or due process generally fell on deaf ears. Many conservatives were themselves oft indifferent to or opposed to expansive interpretations of civil liberties (that is after all why they were conservatives in the first place). Others were just using civil liberties as a convenient club with which to bludgeon President Obama. They would drop this club just as soon as a conservative President took office. There are two recent incidents that occurred under President Trump that are receiving some attention. They both occurred at the border. I'm no lawyer. It is my understanding however that the authorities have been given more leeway than normal to conduct questioning and searches at or near the border. This may especially be the case where the object of official interest is not an American citizen who has never been to the United States before. So far there is no right for such a person to travel to the United States. But in both of these recent cases the object of the additional and to my mind disturbing state actions was an American citizen returning home. Unfortunately the two citizens did not have the right skin tone, correct European styled name or especially, religion. And this could be what triggered the additional state scrutiny, regardless of their citizenship. 

President Trump and Lies

You may or may not have seen the President's most recent news conference in which he asserted and repeated statements that weren't true. Trump lies so much that it's hard to keep up. Most of his lies seem to be variations on the theme of how he's the biggest and the best at everything. This seems to indicate some pretty deep insecurities about his life and who he is. Nobody hits a home run every time they step up to the plate. Nobody wins all the time. There's always someone younger, stronger, smarter, better looking, richer, etc. But Trump doesn't seem to be able to publicly acknowledge that he's less than perfect in every way. Why is that? Who knows. What is important is that by saying so many things that are not only not true but demonstrably untrue, Trump is showing that he lives in a relativist post-truth world. Trump isn't just making statements which are open to interpretation depending on your partisanship. He's not just picking the most favorable understanding of an event or fact, as the previous President was wont to do. No. Trump insists upon saying that 2+2 = 5. He then takes offense when someone points out that no, actually 2+2 =4. At best Trump will mumble "Well that's what I heard" and move on to another untruth. It is interesting and ironic to see the press, which has occasionally fallen into a somnolent loyal opposition or establishment balance mode decide to return to more of a watchdog style. As Trump has admitted elsewhere he's a carny barker who is prone to making exaggerated claims to get people to buy what he's selling. Apparently that approach has worked for him in the real estate and branding business, though since he's refused to share his tax returns we have no idea of how well it's worked. But being the President of the United States is a different job than hawking Chinese made menswear. The skill sets are different.

Neil Gorsuch: Should Democrats Fight or Roll Over?

President Donald Trump, and it still feels funny writing that, nominated Neil M. Gorsuch, Appeals court judge from the 10th Circuit, to serve on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch would replace the late Antonin Scalia and restore the Supreme Court to its full roster of nine justices. Gorsuch, is by the estimates of most of those who work or teach in the legal filed, or observe it closely, quite qualified. He has the requisite Ivy League education, pedigree and connections, clerkships, experience and judicial decisions that many would agree that you want in someone who is being considered to serve on the Supreme Court. Most people on the conservative side are predictably thrilled. They see Gorsuch as someone with the intellectual chops of Scalia and the same dedication to conservative outcomes. Of course they would claim that Gorsuch is only correctly applying the law as written. Even some liberal legal scholars are singing the praises of Gorsuch, stating that he's beyond reproach and actually someone even people who may not politically agree with Trump should nonetheless support.

Just as predictably some people on the left are saying that Gorsuch is a bad choice. And they can point to opinions or statements which would certainly back up their stance. In some respects this is all neither here nor there. Trump was not going to nominate a liberal justice. The only concern that many conservatives have is that Gorsuch doesn't turn into a David Souter-i.e. someone nominated and supported by conservatives who reveals himself on the bench to be a less than reliable conservative vote. Most conservatives seem to think that that won't be the case. Under normal conditions it would probably not be worth having a fight over Gorsuch, especially since he's replacing a conservative voice on the Supreme Court, not a liberal one.