March 10, 2018
The thud you hear is the collective sound of thousands of heads hitting their desks as we try to process the increasingly tawdry and bizarre news coming out of this administration. This week we had to endure the news of Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit against Trump asserting that the NDA she received $130000 for signing was null and void because Trump had failed to sign it.
The Daniels’ litigation seems to be nothing more than fodder for late night comedians; an opportunity for schadenfreude as we watched the blisteringly stupid Michael Cohen be outmaneuvered by the lawyer for a porn star. In reality though, it is forcing disclosure of evidence that the payment was in violation of campaign finance law, (Source: “Stormy Daniels Lawsuit Opens Door to Further Trouble for Trump,” by Jim Rutenberg and Mike McIntire, The New York Times, 3/8/18). The entire episode would have been unthinkable with any other President in the last 100 years, yet we look on wearily, knowing that Trump is unlikely to face any civil or criminal penalties for this flagrant disregard of the law.
Then on Thursday, desperate to turn the page from news of the secret meeting on an Indian Ocean archipelago between his war profiteer emissary and a Kremlin representative, for the purpose of establishing a back channel between himself and Putin, Trump announced that he had accepted an invitation to meet with Kim Jong Un. Everything about the announcement was consistent with what we know about Trump. It was an impulsive, unilateral decision made without notifying Japan, a key ally in the region, or his own Secretary of State. Trump alone orchestrated the theatrical photo op in the White House driveway with the South Korean National Security Advisor. In the words of Christopher Hill, who led the U.S. delegation in talks with North Korea during the Bush administration, “This is not the art of a deal here—it is the art of a teaser,” (Source: “In Trump’s decision on North Korea, the world glimpses a president who is his own diplomat, negotiator and strategist,” by David Nakamura and Anne Gearan, The Washington Post, 3/9/18). Given the cartoonish nature of both men, the complete lack of preparation predating Trump’s announcement, and the recent departure of North Korean envoy, Joseph Yun, (a thirty year veteran of the State Department), it is hard to envision this summit accomplishing anything other than bolstering Kim’s stature on the global stage.
We cannot afford to allow Trump’s high-wire theatrics to blind us to the more immediate and devastating impact of policies and legislation that doesn’t grab the headlines. Buried in banking legislation passed this week to loosen requirements under Dodd Frank was a provision exempting institutions that provide fewer than 500 mortgages per year from the obligation to collect demographic information on their applicants, (Source: “A Provision Hidden in the Banking Bill Could Hurt Black Homeowners,” by Annie Lowrey,TheAtlantic.com, 3/9/18). Recent studies have shown the stubborn persistence of discrimination against Black and Latino borrowers fifty years after passage of the Fair Housing Act. The result of this discrimination is a vast wealth gap between Black and White Americans with Black Americans on average having one tenth of the wealth of white Americans, (Source: “Systemic Inequality. How America’s Structural Racism Helped Create the Black-White Wealth Gap,” by Angela Hanks, Danyelle Solomon and Christian E. Weller, Center for American Progress, AmericanProgress.org, 2/21/18).
Today’s New York Times details the reprehensible rollback of safety rules by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, exposing the Gulf Coast to another Deepwater Horizon type disaster (Source: “Trump Rollbacks Target Offshore Rules ‘Written in Human Blood’” by Eric Lipton, 3/10/18). Even if we retake Congress next year, the damage wrought by this administration’s ceaseless abrogation of every law protecting our environment, our equal rights and our basic safety is going to take years to reverse. We need to arm Democratic legislators with model policies so that they are ready on Day One. Integrity and common decency can no longer be assumed. We will have to legislate it.
#Bluewave
#StormyDaniels
#Readyondayone