Category: Trump effect

August 25, 2020

     The specter of Black death haunts us, a dispiriting backdrop that persists in our daily life, regardless of whether the President is an urbane Black liberal or a corrupt, frothing-at-the-mouth racist.  By now, we have all heard the story of Jacob Blake, the 29 year old father of three who was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha, Wisconsin cops in front of his three young children.

     Blake was in the midst of trying to defuse an argument between two women when the police arrived.  Video shows officers shooting him in the back as he tried to enter his S.U.V.  Although Blake has survived thus far, Kenosha erupted in justifiable anger, with some protestors setting fire to buildings and vehicles, (Source:  “Fires in Kenosha Reflect Anger After Police Shooting of Jacob Blake,” by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, 8/25/20).

     Although Democratic Governor Tony Evers condemned the shooting and called for a special legislative session to work on measures to address “use of force by law enforcement,” he also called out the National Guard and imposed an 8:00 p.m. curfew.  These moves led to the depressingly familiar tableau of soldiers in full riot gear facing off against citizens; deploying tear gas and rubber bullets against people principally armed with incandescent, righteous rage.  Rage at knowing how hollow the black squares and yellow murals were.  Rage at the emptiness of belatedly acknowledging Juneteenth, itself a holiday that commemorates enslaved people finally being freed two and one half years after the Emancipation Proclamation (h/t Michael Harriott).  Rage  from recognizing that resistance to de-funding the police comes, not only from gun-toting racists policing their gated community, but from self-described liberals quick to call the police on a Black person who doesn’t “belong” in their leafy suburb or tony high rise, (Source:  “As Mayor of Minneapolis, I Saw How White Liberals Block Change,” by Betsy Hodges, The New York Times, 7/9/20).

       It’s time to face the brutal fact that an organization with roots in slave patrols cannot be reformed to believe that Black Lives Matter, no matter how many Black officers join the force.  It is long past time to take some of the billions given to police forces nationwide and invest in housing, education and social services in the Black and Brown communities suffering from a century of disinvestment, (Source:  “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein, Liveright Publishing, 2017).  And for God’s sake, don’t respond to Black rage by decrying damage to property.  It just reminds us of the sickening truth— our lives don’t matter to you because we no longer are.

August 23, 2020

     After four years of a Trump presidency, our country has been rendered unrecognizable.  We are a failed state, with an economy in tatters, brought low by a pathogen that we refuse to muster the discipline to manage, despite possessing the knowledge and the resources to do so.  Our children can’t go to school safely and those adults lucky enough to still have jobs, can’t go to work safely either.  Rather than reckon with the enduring structural racism that is the legacy of slavery, Trump and most in his party would rather deny the facts of history and brutalize those who point out the truth.

      After four years of seeing children ripped from their parents and put in cages; an entire religion banned from entering the United States; Nazis praised; and environmental regulations shredded, Americans are exhausted and traumatized.  Four years ago, Black women warned this country what a Trump presidency would bring, and nearly 63 million Americans voted for him anyway.  Perhaps some of those 63 million genuinely believed that Trump would shake things up and shift policy to benefit working people (who are Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous and white, btw) who have received short shrift from both parties.  Perhaps some were just too misogynist to vote for a woman, regardless of her peerless qualifications for the job and Trump’s embarrassing lack of them.  We know that more of them than we’d like to admit voted for Trump because of his racism, because of his assurance that in Trump’s America, white people would always be on top and would be the only ones able to claim the mantle of “legitimate” Americans, the Constitution and the law be damned. Continue reading “To catch a predator”

August 16, 2020

     We barely had the time to celebrate the historic selection of Senator Kamala Harris as the first Black and first Asian-American woman Vice Presidential nominee on a major party ticket before we were confronted by a threat to democracy so grave and so immediate that there was no time for Black women to bask in being seen for the first time as leaders, rather than mere workhorses tasked with getting out the vote with $20 and a Kinko’s credit card from the DNC.  There was no time to refute the racists and insecure Hoteps who questioned Kamala’s blackness.  There was no time to pen a painstaking refutation of those who found Harris’s past as a prosecutor disqualifying per se, or to answer critics who distorted her record to depict it as uniformly bad, rather than a mix of positive and disappointing decisions that are almost inevitable in that job.  Jamelle Bouie defended her blackness here.  Public defender, Niki Solis, ably defended her prosecutorial record here and Jacob Rosenberg cautioned us about the risk inherent in pinning our hopes for change even on  those widely acknowledged as progressive prosecutors. Continue reading “The choice is ours”

August 9, 2020

     As the pandemic rages on during the dog days of summer, we are increasingly gripped by a sense of hopelessness.  Spurred by the twin accelerants of Trump’s criminal indifference to American deaths and the toxic selfishness of Americans who refuse to endure the minimal discomfort of wearing masks to save lives, the case count and the death toll keep climbing.

     Those of us in the Northeast who endured months of strict lockdown, only to see it frittered away by corrupt partisan hacks who disdained science, are now facing at least six more months of working remotely, if we’re lucky enough to be able to do so. College students are looking at another entirely virtual semester, evaluating whether sitting in their childhood bedrooms in front of their laptop is worth the thousands of dollars in tuition that schools are still charging.

      Despite the economic devastation caused by this entirely preventable crisis, neither Congressional  Republicans nor The White House has agreed to a recovery package on the scale required to help millions of struggling Americans, (Source:  “As Jobs Report Looms, White House and Congress Say Stark Divisions Remain Over Stimulus Plan,” by Emily Cochrane and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, 8/6/20).  Instead, Trump has pursued a rogue strategy of dubious legality, issuing a raft of executive orders that will do nothing to help small businesses, lower and middle income workers or strapped state governments, (Source:  “Trump’s Go-it-Alone Stimulus Won’t Do Much to Lift the Recovery,” by Jim Tankersley, The New York Times, 8/8/20).

     Our best hope of getting out of this quagmire and setting the country on a path to normalcy is to get rid of Trump and of every Republican elected official, yet, while we are buoyed by polls showing Biden leading Trump nationally and in key battleground states, powerful steps are being taken to thwart the will of the majority and permanently entrench minority rule in this country.  

     On Thursday, the Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center confirmed that, as it did in 2016, Russia is engaging in a “range of measures” aimed at helping Trump to be re-elected, (Source:  “Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says,” by Julian E. Barnes, The New York Times, 8/8/20).  Yet despite this intelligence and the fact that Trump was impeached over his effort to secure foreign help in his reelection bid, Republicans have repeatedly blocked election security measures introduced by Democrats.

       The machinations of Trump-appointed Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, are sabotaging this vital organ of our democracy at a critical time when scores of Americans will be voting by mail in order to safeguard their health.  DeJoy’s elimination of overtime has led to mail delays and his Friday night massacre which “reassigned or displaced” 23 top Postal Service executives make clear that his mandate, like that of every Trump appointee, is to hollow out and cripple the Postal Service from within, (Source:  “Postal Service overhauls leadership as Democrats press for investigation of mail delays,” by Jacob Bogage, The Washington Post, 8/7/20).

     As with all Trump attacks on democracy, these moves are not hidden and they are not subtle.  We cannot afford to be paralyzed by shock or fear.  Our job is to be clear eyed about the array of obstacles being thrown in our path and steely in our determination to overcome them. If the mail is intentionally being delayed, mobilize to get absentee ballots early.  If we have to face long lines to  vote in person, mobilize armies of lawyers to protect those voters, along with volunteers to provide masks, hand sanitizers and water so that people can be as safe as possible.  A lot of us say that we will crawl through broken glass to vote Trump out.  Be ready, because before this is over we just might have to.

     

#VOTE

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July 28, 2020

      Four years ago, in a slim volume entitled “On Tyranny,” Yale History professor, Timothy Snyder, gave Americans a guide to twenty signs that would mark the transformation of our flawed democracy into a full blown fascist state.  One by one, we’ve watched as Trump’s actions have mirrored each chapter in Snyder’s book, as if “On Tyranny” was a checklist, rather than a warning.

      Still, even after all we’ve endured over the last four years, the scenes emerging from Portland, Oregon, were shocking.  As we all know by now, camo-clad anonymous forces began by snatching people off the street into unmarked vans and detaining them for hours.  These forces refused to identify themselves, to tell people what crime they were being arrested for, or to even admit that people had been arrested, (Source:  “Unpacking DHS’s Troubling Explanation of the Portland Van Video,” by Andrew Crespo, lawfareblog.com, 7/25/20). Continue reading “On Tyranny”

July 19, 2020

     It seems impossibly cruel that we would lose both Reverend C.T. Vivian and Congressman John Lewis on the same day. During what feels like the darkest period in this country’s history, it is hard to imagine living in an America without these two moral exemplars. 

      Both men were tutored in the philosophy of nonviolent resistance by the Reverend James Lawson.  Both men were arrested multiple times. Both C.T. Vivian and John Lewis were nearly killed for the “crime” of standing up for the civil rights of Black people.  The famous photos of John Lewis being viciously beaten by a state trooper as he stood at the head of a phalanx of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Continue reading “Never give up”

July 13, 2020

     In a pair of rulings this past week, an unusual alliance of Supreme Court justices reaffirmed that we are a nation of laws not men.  In McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Court forced the United States and the State of Oklahoma to honor the treaties they made and comply with the laws they passed, when dealing with the rights of the Creek Nation.  In McGirt, the Court ruled that the State of Oklahoma had no jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed by Native Americans on Native American territory. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, citing the 1833 United States treaty with the Creek Nation, said that the question presented was whether the “land [the] treaties promised remained an Indian reservation…. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word,” (Source:  McGirt v. Oklahoma, No. 18-9526, U.S., July 9, 2020).

      The McGirt opinion methodically details the many promises broken by the United States in the 187 years since the 1833 Treaty with the Creeks was signed, as well as how consistently the state of Oklahoma asserted jurisdiction over Native citizens in contravention of federal law.  In arguing against upholding the plain words of the statute and the Treaty, both the State of Oklahoma and the four dissenting Justices, urged the Court to look to custom, practice and the changed demographics of the State to grant Oklahoma power over the Creek Nation that it clearly does not have.  The Court declined, stating that to do so would be “the rule of the strong, not the rule of law,” (Source:  McGirt at 28).  This was a decisive victory in the struggle to get the United States to honor its obligations to Native Americans. Continue reading “The price of betrayal”

July 6, 2020

    We wake up the morning after this year’s Independence Day weekend, hungover from a hollowed out, grim echo of Independence Days past.  The rapidly escalating surge of coronavirus cases in thirty-two states,  including California, Texas, Arizona and Florida made barbecues and beach parties the sole province of the reckless.  The rest of us were left grilling for two and suffering through amateur pyrotechnics full of sound and fury, but devoid of spectacle. The dark skies were a metaphor for our national mood.

    On this July 4th, all Americans were trapped within our borders, as a result of the gross mismanagement of this pandemic by a corrupt bully.  We watched with envy as Europeans opened their restaurants and cafes, while we remain unable to escape to even Canada or Mexico, (Source:  “Mexico closes U.S. border in Arizona to stop July 4th visitors, citing COVID-19 fears,” by Mitchell Willetts, Fort Worth Star-Telegram News, 7/5/20).  Thanks to Trump, the only thing America leads the world in is COVID-19 cases and deaths. Continue reading “Independence Day 2020”

June 30, 2020

     “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason,” (Source:  18 U.S.C.§2381).  When Trump was impeached, many of us said that blackmailing a beleaguered ally by withholding military aid to boost his own political fortunes was traitorous conduct.  When we pointed out that a weakened Ukraine helped Russia, our geopolitical foe, wags pointed out that we were not at war with Russia, so Trump’s alarming abdication of duty did not rise to the level of treason.  It was a shockingly low bar for the President of the United States, but every Republican save for Mitt “Black Lives Matter” Romney decided it was sufficient for Trump to remain in office.

      How do they explain Trump’s response to the alarming news that Russia was offering a bounty to Taliban forces for the murder of American troops?  Friday, the news broke that Trump has known of the Russian bounties since at least March and was given a menu of option for how to respond, (Source:  “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S.Troops, Intelligence Says,” by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, The New York Times, 6/26/20).  Trump reacted by claiming ignorance and The New York Times responded by reporting that the intelligence was in the President’s Daily Brief in late February, even earlier than initially thought, (Source:  “Trump Got Written Briefing on Possible Russian Bounties in February, Officials Say,” by Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Nicholas Fandos and Adam Goldman, The New York Times, 6/29/20).

      No amount of scrambling or spinning by Trump and his staff of inveterate professional liars can obscure the facts.  Trump, when confronted with reliable intelligence that Russia was paying for the murder of American troops did…nothing.

      It is hardly surprising.  Trump has never shown a shred of respect for the sacrifices made by American soldiers or a concern for the lives of any human beings. 126,161 dead Americans are the starkest testament to Trump’s deadly combination of amoral sociopathy and criminal negligence.  Faced with these damning revelations, Trump retweeted geriatric racists yelling “white power” from a golf cart and gun-toting wannabe militiamen in powder pink polos, rather than doing the only decent thing and resigning.

       Trump has never possessed a single quality required to be a decent President, or a decent human being, for that matter.  He is, and always has been, a vulgar, corrupt and racist bully; a one trick pony whose only cause was white supremacy.  It is a damning indictment of this country that Trump got any closer to the Oval Office than a White House tour.

       As the pandemic body count rises and more damning proof emerges that Trump has more loyalty to Russia than to the country he swore an oath to protect, it becomes clear why he wants to protect Confederate statues.  They were traitors too.

     In the five days since Trump’s disastrous Tulsa rally, we have all been laughing at what an abject failure it was.  Trump has been mercilessly mocked for being duped by K-Pop fans, for the pitiful 6200 people in attendance, for the unhinged, rambling speech.  Buoyed by the strong showing by progressive candidates in Tuesday’s primaries, gloating over Biden’s widening lead in the polls, we feel as if victory is so close we can taste it.

      Yet, while we were dining out on schadenfreude, we were reaping the bitter harvest of the toxic seeds sown by Donald Trump. Yesterday the Senate confirmed Cory Wilson, the 200th federal judge appointed by Trump (Source:  “Senate confirms Trump’s 200th judicial nominee,” by Devan Cole and Ted Barrett, CNN.com, 6/24/20).  Wilson will serve on the Fifth Circuit, the appellate court with jurisdiction over Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, home to 9 million Black and Latinx Americans.  Wilson is a 50 year old Mississippi lawyer and former state representative, who once called for the “complete and immediate reversal of Roe v. Wade.” Continue reading “Little fires everywhere”