The new commission charged with finding solutions for the opioid crisis -- formed by President Trump, and chaired by Gov. Christie -- was a few minutes into its first hearing Friday, when one member reminded the panel what time it is. It is high noon: "We're kidding ourselves if we don't think that what is happening…
In a recent interview with The Guardian, activist, author and branding critic Naomi Klein urged critics of President Donald Trump to not undermine the president's personal brand of idiocy.
Klein -- whose first book, No Logo, offered a critical look at the "branding of public life" by corporations in 2000 -- told Guardian reporter Tim Adams that Trump's ability to roll out his personal brand is a distraction tactic.
“I think he is a showman and that he is aware of the way that shows can distract people,” Klein told Adams. “That is the story of his business. He has always understood that he could distract his investors and bankers, his tenants, his clients from the underlying unsoundness of his business, just by putting on the Trump show. That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.”
Klein went on to tell The Guardian that Trump has "surrounded himself with some of the world’s most expert crisis profiteers," including billionaire and "king of bankruptcy" Wilbur Ross, who made his fortune flipping companies in crisis and now serves as secretary of commerce.
“In any other moment, the very fact that the CEO of Exxon Mobil is now the secretary of state would be the central scandal," Klein told The Guardian. "Here we have a situation where there is so much else to concern us it is barely a footnote.”
According to both The Guardian interview and Klein's new Trump-focused book No Is Not Enough, the media focus on the alleged Trump-Russia collusion story is doing little to convert the president's base against him.
“I am not saying Russia is not important, but Trump’s base is very well defended against that: ‘the liberal media is out to get him’, ‘it’s fake news’, and all the rest," Klein said in the interview. Instead, she believes other questions need to be asked louder: "Is your social security safe? Is your healthcare safe? Are your wages going to be driven down?"
“He benefits so much from that focus away from economics," Klein said.
Read the entire interview about Klein's new book and her anti-Trump doctrine via The Guardian.
If for some reason it wasn’t before, it’s become clear in the weeks since FBI director James Comey’s firing by the president and Comey’s testimony on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to fancy himself the next George Washington, Abe Lincoln or even James Buchanan. No, Trump looks in the mirror in the morning and mistakenly sees Michael Corleone. You know, the version of Michael played by Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part II — suave, smart and ruthless Mafia don.
In truth, only in his wildest narcissistic dreams could Don Donald approach Michael Corleone’s people skills. Unlike The Godfather, Trump fails to keep his promises. He blabs — just can’t keep a secret — gets little done, has few friends and takes things “very, very personal,” as Michael’s late brother Sonny would say.
A Corleone would never tweet, “Frankie Pentangeli is an overrated gangster and a stoolie. SAD.” Trump would, which is why White House staff tried to fill his hours during the day of Comey’s questioning with a speech and other fun activities to keep those twitchy little thumbs away from his iPhone.
In the opening statement that Comey released the day before his Senate testimony, his memory of Trump’s words during their various meetings and phone calls were all too reminiscent of B-movie gangster talk. “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” he told Comey at that odd, two-man dinner in the Green Room. A real mob boss — or chief executive — wouldn’t have to ask.
That was on Jan. 27. On Feb. 14, the day after national security adviser Mike Flynn was forced to resign after lying to Vice President Pence about Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Trump asked Attorney General Sessions and Son-in-Law-Also-Rises Jared Kushner to leave the Oval Office while he and Comey had a private chat alone.
“I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump said, according to Comey. “… He is a good guy and has been through a lot. I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” As in, “I hope you can see your way clear to giving me complete control of your olive oil business, if you get my drift.”
Comey’s final contact with Trump was an April 11 phone call in which he said the president continued complaining about “the cloud” of investigation that was getting in the way of what Comey described as Trump’s “ability to do his job.” He told the FBI chief that he would do as Comey suggested and have his people ask the acting deputy attorney general whether they should announce that he was not personally under investigation.
Then Trump added, “Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.” As in, hey Jimmy, you remember that thing about the thing I asked you to do? Aficionados of organized crime also will recall that in English, Cosa Nostra, once a familiar synonym for the Sicilian Mafia, translates as “Our Thing.”
So okay, Trump does share some attributes with Michael Corleone. He keeps at least some of his family close, although to a far creepier degree, and he does seem to surround himself with a motley assortment of white-collar racketeers and ideological knuckle-draggers. But the crowd he often appears most enamored of is not his own band of miscreants but the gang of crime bosses and kleptocrats who surround Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself the capo di tutti capi, Kremlin-style.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the intelligence committee, described it at Thursday’s hearing as Trump’s “odd and unexplained affection for the Russian dictator.” Comey later agreed with Sen. Angus King that Putin is an “opportunist” and opened up with both barrels when he said — with none of Trump’s tepid equivocation about Russia — that their hacking was very real:
“There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. It was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government… It is a high-confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community and the members of this committee have seen the intelligence. It’s not a close call. That happened. That’s about as unfake as you can possibly get.”
While there was much Comey said he could not discuss in an open session, it was his certainty and candor — or at least an excellent imitation of forthrightness — that came through loud and clear at Thursday’s hearing, especially in contrast to the petulant dissembling we’ve come to expect from Trump’s pallid imitation of leadership. Comey made it no secret that even if Trump was not actively a subject of the investigation of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, the former FBI director believed Trump to be a liar, especially when it came to defaming him and the agency he led.
Comey admitted to leaking one of his memos to The New York Times via a friend, in the hope, he said, of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to dig deeper for the truth of the Russia scandal. And while he may have stumbled every which way when it came to handling the Hillary Clinton personal email server investigation, on Thursday he claimed that it had caused him “a whole lot of personal pain,” expressed reservations about then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and at least fessed up to some of his own failings. He’s the un-Trump.
“I know this is a subject of passionate disagreement but I knew there was no case there,” he said, adding that in the Clinton case calling for the appointment of a special counsel to probe further would have been “brutally unfair.”
This, of course, made no difference to several Republican members of the committee, including a seemingly befuddled John McCain, who continued to try to distract us from Trump’s alleged misdeeds by seeming to insist that Hillary Clinton’s bad email habits remain a scandal equal to or even greater than his. For McCain, this appeared to involve a convoluted thought process jumbling the Clinton investigation with the ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia.
Nor did Donald Trump himself believe that Comey’s words had landed with any clout. In his Orwellian doublethink world, where ignorance is strength and lies are truth, when finally freed to indulge his Twitter compulsion Friday morning, he declared, “total and complete vindication.”
But face it: Russia is the story that won’t go away, at least anytime soon, despite a continuing round of denials and cries to move it along, nothing to see here, from both the White House and Republicans on Capitol Hill. And if Trump wants to keep living his Godfather fantasy, newly minted special counsel Robert Mueller may be planning a future for him less like the movies and more like the sad fate of many, real-life crime bosses.
On Tuesday, Darren Samuelsohn at Politico reported that Mueller
“is assembling a prosecution team with decades of experience going after everything from Watergate to the Mafia to Enron… a potent team whose members have backgrounds handling cases involving politicians, mobsters and others — and who know how to work potential witnesses if it helps them land bigger fish.”
As Mueller’s sleuths dig, chances are their work will lead them in unexpected directions. In Comey’s own words on Thursday, “In any complex investigation, when you start turning over rocks, sometimes you find things that are unrelated to the primary investigation that are criminal in nature.”
Watch this space.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
The annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast is hardly a bipartisan or nonpolitical event. It was founded in 2004 as part of an effort to cement ties between conservative Catholics, the Catholic hierarchy, and the GOP. Among those associated with it are noted right-wing luminaries like Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Austin Ruse of C-FAM, former Senator Rick Santorum, and conservative organizations like the Knights of Columbus and Americans United for Life.
This article is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.
In fact, President George W. Bush, along with various prominent Catholic prelates, headlined the event from 2005 until 2008, including an appearance with Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput in 2004. The first post-Bush breakfast in 2009 featured the conservative Catholic dream team of Justice Antonin Scalia and Cardinal Raymond Burke.
In 2012, when the Catholic bishops were enmeshed in a make-or-break effort to cripple the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act and link it to a larger “religious liberty” effort, Knights of Columbus President Carl Anderson used the breakfast to try and strike fear into the hearts of God-fearing Catholics over their scrambled eggs, telling them, “Never in the lifetime of anyone present here, has the religious liberty of the American people been as threatened as it is today.”
So it’s hardly surprising that at his address to the breakfast Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence, who was introduced by Anderson, played to the crowd, touting the Trump administration’s executive order on “religious liberty” and plans to eviscerate the contraceptive mandate:
President Trump stands for the religious liberty of every American and the right of our people of faith to live out your convictions in the public square. … Just last month, the Little Sisters of the Poor were at the White House, and on that day, I had the high honor to stand as President Trump signed an executive order to restore religious liberty in the public square. I couldn’t have been more proud.
And in case anyone needed reminding, he also vouched for Trump’s anti-abortion bona fides, including a dramatically expanded Mexico City policy and the measure that would allow states to withhold funding from Planned Parenthood:
I couldn’t be more proud to serve as Vice President to a President who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life. … Since day one of this administration, President Donald Trump has been keeping his promise to stand for life, and life is winning in America again.
But Pence’s overriding message was that “American Catholics have an ally in President Donald Trump.” And while he paid lip-service for the need for Catholics to pray, not so much “for a cause as for country,” it was clear that his job was to seek reciprocity for that support by rallying conservative Catholics to the rapidly eroding bastions of the besieged Fort Trump.
Pence’s appearance was, in many ways, a coda to the effort that began in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election to fuse conservative Catholics and evangelicals into a reliable right-wing electoral bloc, delivered, appropriately, by a man who personifies the rise of evangelical Catholics or, in Pence’s case, catholic Evangelicals.
Pence’s appearance, coming after 60 percent of white Catholic cast their vote for Trump, signals the end of anything that could remotely be called a cohesive Catholic laity in America. There are now three distinct American Catholicisms. One is a shadow church of ex-Catholics that’s helped fuel the rise of the “nones.” Many of these former Catholics retain a cultural affinity for Catholicism and an attachment to the social justice values of the church, but no longer identify as Catholics and tend to be Democrats or Independents.
The second is the besieged and shrinking progressive wing of the church—people who still identify as Catholics and attend Mass, at least sometimes, but are seeing their power in the church and the larger culture shrink as progressive Catholicism atrophies due to the aging of the Vatican II generation and the loss of Gen X and Millennial Catholics to “none-ism.” The only growing part of this wing is the Latino Catholic population, but that too is being eroded by disaffiliation and defections to evangelical churches.
Finally, there is the evangelical Catholic wing of the church which the Republican Party has so assiduously cultivated for the past twenty years and dominates the public life of the church, despite the efforts of Pope Francis to push back with the appointment of more moderate and less political prelates like Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich.
This wing of the church is now wholly fused with the political and policy priorities of the Republican Party, ignoring Pope Francis’ entreatments regarding climate change and its effects on the environment, global income disparities, and compassion for immigrants. And, as Michael O’Loughlin noted in America, “The founder of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Joseph Cella, was an early supporter of Mr. Trump and helped organize Catholic support for the G.O.P. nominee.”
These “Cathangelicals” are, for all intents and purposes, today’s Catholic Church—at least in the public square—and Pence is their preacher.
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) is already drafting articles of impeachment related to Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, believing there’s enough evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice to begin an impeachment inquiry (not to mention Trump’s blatant violation of the Constitutions emoluments clause by profiting off his presidency, and much else).
But Democratic leaders are pushing back, warning there aren’t enough facts to justify an impeachment inquiry at this point, and, in any event, such an inquiry would politicize ongoing congressional investigations.
Baloney.
Historically, the three previous impeachment inquiries in the House (involving presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton) rested on less evidence of obstruction of justice than is already publicly known about Trump.
Comey’s testimony to Congress is itself more than enough – confirming that Trump demanded Comey’s loyalty, asked Comey to stop investigating Michael Flynn, repeatedly told Comey the FBI investigation was a “cloud” on his presidency, and asked Comey to declare publicly that Trump wasn’t an object of the investigation
In addition, we have Trump’s interview with Lester Holt on NBC and Trump’s subsequent meeting with Russian officials in the Oval Office. In both instances, Trump connected his firing of Comey with the Russian investigation.
Also bear in mind the obstructions of justice that caused the House to impeach previous presidents concerned issues far less serious than Trump’s possible collusion with a foreign power to win election.
Democratic leaders say they don’t want to talk about impeachment now because they’re worried about politicizing the current congressional investigations, which aren’t impeachment inquiries. Hello? Republicans have already politicized them.
The real reason Democratic leaders don’t want to seek an impeachment now is they know there’s zero chance that Republicans, who now control both houses of Congress, would support such a move. So why engage in a purely symbolic gesture?
Democratic leaders figure that between now and the midterm elections there will be even more revelations from non-partisan sources – future testimony by Trump operatives like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, early reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and leaks to the press – that will build the case, and fuel more public outrage.
That outrage will give Democrats a strong chance of taking back the House and maybe even the Senate. Then they’ll really impeach Trump.
I can’t argue with the political logic of Democratic leaders. And if their strategy will lead to Trump’s ouster sooner than any other way, I’m all for it.
But here’s the problem. It’s not clear America can wait for the midterm elections, followed by what’s likely to be a long and drawn-out impeachment investigation, followed by a trial in the Senate. (Note that none of the presidents listed above was ever convicted by the Senate and thrown out of office.)
With each passing day, Donald Trump becomes a greater danger to America and the world. We don’t have time.
The advantage of introducing a bill of impeachment now – even attempting to do so – is that such an action might itself galvanize the vast majority of Americans who want Trump out of office. It could mobilize and energize people around the most important immediate issue facing the country.
Never underestimate the power of a public aroused to action. It is worth recalling that Nixon resigned of his own accord before the House had even voted out an impeachment resolution. The American public demanded it.
This article was originally published at RobertReich.org
When will the people of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, those stalwart Trump voters who believe he’ll be bringing back coal jobs, finally figure out they’ve been had?
By now the list of people who realize they’ve been played by Donald Trump is longer than a Chinese menu. It includes, of course, the thousands of people who took out loans to pay the tuition at Trump University only to discover their degrees were worthless; bankers who lost millions on over-extended projects through the course of six bankruptcies; contractors who got stiffed on those projects; and many many others, and that's all before he became a politician.
Since his announcement in 2015 that he was running for president he's humiliated both Mitt Romney, who actually thought he might be named secretary of state (a fantasy, if ever there was one), and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who believed his groveling would at least secure him a spot as attorney general before the prize went to Jeff Sessions (Trump reportedly promised Christie the position and then withdrew it). Even Benjamin Netanyahu, who welcomed Trump's election after his bruising battles with Barack Obama, has learned that Trump's not to be trusted (Netanyahu was surprised if not shocked when Trump chided Israel for expanding settlements).
But what about Trump's voters? Nothing less than the fate of the planet rests possibly on their shoulders as well as vital decisions that will determine if millions lose their health insurance and whether refugees from Syria are resettled in the United States. And yet they've by and large stood by Trump. And that's critical. As long as they stick with the president the GOP isn't likely to impeach him or take him on.
Their willingness to turn a blind eye to his many obvious deficiencies is infuriating to liberals, many of whom have already decided that Trump should be impeached, a conclusion multiple liberal city councils have reached. And if that proves impossible, many liberals have demanded that he should be removed from office through the 25th Amendment on the grounds that he's cognitively impaired. The feeling that Trump poses a danger is worldwide. After his disastrous performance at the NATO summit German journalists began calling for regime change in the United States.
Liberals, hang in there! Not all is actually as grim as it seems. Nate Silver reports that the number of Americans who strongly support Trump has fallen from 30 percent to around 22 percent since February. "Far from having unconditional love from his base," Silver observes, "Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support.” Even better, "voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio."
History suggests it's unrealistic to expect people to change their minds quickly. This is a pattern that has held for centuries. In the 1600s the Salem witch trials dragged on for eight long months before townsfolk finally began to realize that they had been caught up in an irrational frenzy. More recently, Americans proved during Watergate that they are reluctant to turn on a president they have just elected despite mounds of evidence incriminating him in scandalous practices. The Watergate burglary took place on June 17, 1972. But it wasn't until April 30, 1973 – eleven months later – that his popularity finally fell below 50 percent. This was long after the Watergate burglars had been tried and convicted and the FBI had confirmed news reports that the Republicans had played dirty tricks on the Democrats during the campaign. Leaked testimony had even showed that former Attorney General John Mitchell knew about the break-in in advance. But not until Nixon fired White House Counsel John Dean and White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resigned did a majority turn against the president. And even at that point Nixon's poll numbers stood higher than Trump's. Nixon: 48 percent; Trump: 42 percent.
It's not just conservative voters who are reluctant to change their minds. So are liberals. After news reports surfaced in the 1970s proving that John Kennedy was a serial philanderer millions of his supporters refused to acknowledge it. A poll in 2013 show a majority of Americans still think of him as a good family man.
Thus far not even many leading Democrats have been willing to come out in favor of Trump's impeachment. Cory Booker, the liberal senator from New Jersey, said this past week it's simply too soon. And if a guy like Booker is not yet prepared to come straight out for impeachment, why should we think Trump voters would be willing to? It is only just in the last few weeks that polls show that a plurality of voters now favor Trump's impeachment. (Twelve percent of self-identified Trump voters share this view, which is remarkable.)
It's no mystery why people are reluctant to change their minds. Social scientists have produced hundreds of studies that explain the phenomenon. Rank partisanship is only part of the answer. Mainly it’s that people don't like to admit they were wrong, which is what they would be doing if they concede that Trump is not up to the job. When Trump voters hear news that puts their leader in an unfavorable light they experience cognitive dissonance. The natural reaction to this is to deny the legitimacy of the source of the news that they find upsetting. This is what explains the harsh attacks on the liberal media. Those stories are literally making Trump voters feel bad. As the Emory University social scientist Drew Westen has demonstrated, people hearing information contrary to their beliefs will cease giving it credence. This is not a decision we make at the conscious level. Our brain makes it for us automatically.
So what leads people to finally change their minds? One of the most convincing explanations is provided by the Theory of Affective Intelligence. This mouthful of a name refers to the tendency of people experiencing cognitive dissonance to feel anxiety when they do so. As social scientist George Marcus has explained, when the burden of hanging onto an existing opinion becomes greater than the cost of changing it, we begin to reconsider our commitments. What's the trigger? Anxiety. When there's a mismatch between our views of the way the world works and reality we grow anxious. This provokes us to make a fresh evaluation.
What this research suggests is that we probably have a ways to go before Trump voters are going to switch their opinions. While some are evidently feeling buyers' remorse, a majority aren't. They're just not anxious enough yet. Liberals need not worry. The very same headlines that are giving them an upset stomach are making it more and more likely Trump voters are also experiencing discomfort. What might push them over the edge? One possibility would be a decision to follow through on his threat to end subsidies to insurance companies under Obamacare, leading to the collapse of the system, and the loss of coverage for millions of Trump voters. That’s become more and more likely since the Senate is apparently unable to pass the repeal and replace measure Trump has been counting on. So liberals just have to wait and watch. Will the story unfold like Watergate? Every day the answer increasingly seems yes.
An optimist would argue that social media will help push people to change their minds faster now than in the past. But social media could also have the opposite effect. People living in a bubble who get their media from biased sources online may be less likely to encounter the contrary views that stimulate reflection than was common, say, in the Nixon years when virtually all Americans watched the mainstream network news shows. Eventually, one supposes, people will catch on no matter how they consume news. Of late even Fox News viewers have heard enough disturbing stories about Trump to begin to reconsider their commitment to him. That is undoubtedly one reason why Nate Silver found that so many Trump voters are reluctant to count themselves among the strongest supporters.
Rick Shenkman is the publisher of the History News Network and the author of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016). You can follow him on Twitter. He blogs at stoneagebrain.
This article was originally published at History News Networks
The tax cut proposals first announced by President Donald Trump this April are, simply put, a fraud. They are about greed and politics, not economic growth or true tax reform. The policy has been proved wrong twice already. As a broadly faithful rerun of the Reaganomics of the early 1980s, Trump’s policies, should they be passed, will end as Reagan’s “voodoo economics” did, a failure by virtually any measure. George W. Bush’s sharp tax cuts in the early 2000s also failed to generate a strong economy, one that was driven by speculation rather than strong investment.
Reaganomics was the name given to the self-serving claims of the wealthy that a huge tax cut for them would pay for itself—by creating incentives to invest and work that would lead to renewed economic growth. Tax revenues would simply rise with a growing economy to plug the revenue hole. Some call it trickle-down economics. John Kenneth Galbraith put it scornfully in The Culture of Contentment: if you give a horse enough to eat, some of the kernels will fall to the ground for the sparrows.
This article was originally published at Washington Spectator
In the summer of 1981, Congress, including a Democratically controlled House, passed the Reagan tax proposal, which reduced the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. Among other measures, it included a tax break for businesses. Reagan’s economists predicted the budget deficit—the size of which, under Jimmy Carter, was a major campaign issue for Reagan—would fall to $45 billion for that coming fiscal year as the economy recovered. Fiscal 1982 ended with the deficit not at $45 billion but at $140 billion.
The economy began to recover when Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker cut interest rates, and to a degree the tax cuts created some Keynesian stimulus. In the real world, growth could not magically rise to the heights needed. Reagan now started raising taxes, including the regressive Social Security tax, to stop the flow of red ink.
It was not enough. When Reagan took office, American debt was $997 billion; when he left, it had reached $2.85 trillion. America became a net debtor nation for the first time in modern history.
Perhaps the debt would have been worth it, but Reaganomics was an abject failure as an economic program. Inflation came down but that was the only achievement. Growth returned but average wages, however measured, stopped growing altogether, whereas they had been growing steadily since the early 1950s. Income inequality started to rise rapidly from early in Reagan’s first term and didn’t stop. The greatest of ironies is that capital investment was tepid and the source of economic growth, productivity, grew only moderately, the opposite of the takeoff that was promised.
George W. Bush reinstated the Reaganomics philosophy with his own major tax cuts, again mostly funneled to the wealthy. The recovery and expansion that followed created the fewest jobs of any expansion since World War II. What economic growth there was had been fueled by the speculation in residential housing that led to the crash of 2008, the year Bush left office.
Trump’s proposed tax cuts are far more radical than those of Bush, and more on a par with Reagan’s. They would be another unjustifiable gift to the wealthy. Some progressives are saying tax cuts never stimulate growth, but this is untrue. They can be a potent Keynesian stimulus from time to time, as were the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts of 1964. Reaganomics was steroidal Keynesianism—not at all what the master economist had ordered.
Unlike Reagan, Trump will try to impose tax cuts not during a severe recession, but in a fairly strong economy that has been growing for several years and in which the unemployment rate is below 5 percent. Reagan took over when the economy was in the midst of its worst recession and the unemployment rate had reached nearly 11 percent. There was slack that warranted fiscal stimulus.
There is still some slack in the economy. Effective stimulus should take the form of public investment or more robust social programs. A modest but not huge tax cut could be temporarily productive.
Trump’s initial tax cut proposal would cut top tax rates from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, but the major tax cut is reserved for business: from 35 percent to 15 percent. The estate tax and the alternative minimum tax would be eliminated, which benefits only the rich. The wealthy would benefit most, though the details of Trump’s slapdash program are too skimpy to estimate accurately by how much.
Analyses suggest the federal government would lose $5 to $7 trillion in tax revenues over 10 years under the initial plan. I think fears of deficits are often exaggerated, but an additional $700 billion a year of financial borrowing would unsettle the financial markets.
Unperturbed by the lessons of history, Trump’s advisers believe if economic growth is raised by one percentage point to 3 percent a year, enough federal revenue will be raised to fill the hole. Trump’s wish is their command. Americans should be aware that a sustained growth rate of 3 percent a year after a long expansion is almost impossible to achieve. It would require a productivity boom, the kind Reagan never got.
Still more disturbing, it would leave no room to invest in infrastructure, which almost everyone agrees America badly needs. It would require heartless cuts in the safety net and economic development programs—which Republicans covet—which would lead to more inequality. This disastrous outcome could be compounded if this wish list somehow improbably gets enacted, by limiting the deduction for state and local taxes. This measure would hurt states that provide generous social policies and economic development programs.
Deregulation also had a part in the failure of Reaganomics. Reagan defanged the Department of Labor, for example, which then couldn’t enforce fair labor standards. Trump is doing the same.
Trump has conned some of the electorate into thinking he knows how to channel their anger constructively by being vindictive himself. There is almost nothing constructive about his early tax plan. These details will change. But the plan reflects a mean-spirited, self-involved, and uninformed mind at work.
Workers beware. Trump’s reckless mimicry of Reaganomics is likely to lead to stagnating wages and growing inequality for another four years, and no recharging of the dynamics of the American economy will ensue.
Jeff Madrick is a fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative.
The United States of America was born in warfare, separating itself from the strongest military power on earth after eight years of fighting. From the beginning it pledged itself to peace but too often found itself in wars and armed conflicts, sometimes of its choosing and sometimes not. The United States has gone to war, declared or undeclared, twice with the United Kingdom, Germany and Iraq, and once with Japan, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Afghanistan, North Korea, North Vietnam and once within the country in the Civil War. . These wars, while bloody and costly, were never fought by enemies that had a realistic chance of destroying America.
True, Japan did attack the territories of Hawaii and Alaska, and British troops burned an unfinished Washington, D.C.. And in our Civil War Americans destroyed a significant part of their own country, but there was never any real danger of German or Italian troops marching through the bombed ruins of our cities. It was as Abraham Lincoln said in an 1838 speech: “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.”
There is one country the United States has faced for decades but never directly fought in a formal war. Russia, in its former state of the Soviet Union or its present form of neo-imperialist state under the de facto dictatorship of Putin, was our opponent in the long struggle of the Cold War and remains our fiercest and most dangerous adversary. What makes Russia different from any foe the United States has ever faced in its history is that Russia alone of all of them could actually destroy America. China and North Korea could inflict damage as the forces of Islamic terrorism already have, but only Russia has the power to destroy us in a conflict.
This reality truly puts the Trump Russian scandal in perspective. This is more than another shady real estate scheme to build another vulgar hotel or apartment building, the architectural equivalents of a black velvet painting. The numerous and expanding pieces of evidence of the Trump camp to pander to Russia and Putin and subvert our laws constitute a real threat to the security of the United States. So far Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner have lied or concealed their contacts with Russian interests. Several have received substantial cash payments from Russia. The Republican Party platform was altered by Trump to remove the condemnation of Russian aggression against the Ukraine. Trump brought the Russian foreign minister and the ambassador/spymaster into the Oval Office and revealed the most secret intelligence to them as the Russian news agency Tass photographed the smile fest while American media were barred from the meeting. In his recent trip to NATO headquarters Trump trashed our allies to their faces, the grabbing and pushing aside the prime minister of Montenegro more than symbolic. And when confronted with the softest of all softball questions ever asked of any president, Trump declined to criticize Putin instead declaring we are no better than the Russians. Little wonder that German Chancellor Merkel declared that Europe could no longer rely on the United States. The weakening of NATO, the alliance that is most responsible for deterring war, is a victory for Russia and a massive return on its investment hacking and manipulating the election in Trump’s favor.
The capper, at least so far in this mile a minute story, is the blatant attempt to cover up the scandal in thinly disguised coercion of the FBI and the intelligence agencies. This has gone beyond bad policy or bad judgment. This is conduct bordering on treason, defined in the Constitution in Article III section 3 as “adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Treason is not a charge to be made lightly but the growing body of evidence makes its case day by day. This is no longer politics. This is not a game. This is a real and substantial threat to the nation. The Trump presidency must be stopped immediately before it is too late.
Greg Bailey, St. Louis journalist and history writer, is the author of the forthcoming “The Herrin Massacre.”
Michael Gerson’s recent piece in the Washington Post on the conspiratorial mindset of conservatives in the Trump era argues that conspiracies, such as those about the death of Seth Rich promoted by Sean Hannity, are symptomatic of a legitimized conspiratorial thinking under the Trump administration.
The following is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.
The following day MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid, wrote an analysis of Gerson’s article, via a Twitter thread.
Reid agrees with Gerson’s conclusion, but argues that the conspiratorial “paranoid style” of the right has been an aspect of the conservative political movement in America for at least a century, astutely pointing to the red scare of 1919, the McCarthy era, and the linking of Communism to the Civil Rights Movement and FDR’s New Deal.
In 1919, after World War I, a series of societal “disasters” led to a resurgence of Americanism and nativism. A brief stock market crash, depression, a widespread fear of a domestic revolt due to unionism, and a rise in the feminist movement, combined with the dramatic increase of immigrants prior to WWI, served to create hostility against minority groups, and a call to stop the moral disintegration of American culture. In response, the era also saw and a surge in radical literature calling for a return to American values, traditional families and roles for men and women. Radicals known as the Hundred Percenters believed that Russians were infiltrating Washington to spread communist ideals to reformers or the lower economic classes.
The battle between Americanism and communism was framed as a battle between good and evil by the radical right but it was also seized upon as an ideological one between progressivism and conservatism. The shifting landscape of unionism and feminism were interpreted as an attack on capitalism and sexual and gender norms. In response, the radical right created a spectre of Bolshevism that was purported to be hidden in the recesses of American institutions, engineering the nation’s moral decline. The Saturday Evening Post, in a November 1919 editorial, stated “History will see our present state of mind as one with that preceding the burning of witches, the children’s crusade, the great tulip craze and other examples of the softening of the world brain.”
Conspiracy theories about communists hiding in the leadership of religious and political institutions also flourished during the McCarthy era, with McCarthy himself having publicly stated in 1951 that Secretaries of State George Marshall and Dean Acheson had conspired to deliver China to the Soviets. He also proclaimed that other American leaders were key characters in a conspiracy against the United States. For those on the radical right, the enemies of America were to be found not only in politics but among the elites of academia.
American society was again facing a series of potential “disasters,” including the fear of a nuclear war, an exceptionally costly arms race, and an ideological battle between communism and capitalist imperialism. Again, the conspiracy was framed as culture war issues via definitions of American morality and values; between atheistic communists and the American Christian (White) Nation. Traditional family roles and values and Christian faith were positioned as an aspect of the ideological armory of America against the atheism attacking it via subversives hidden in every institution.
During the early 1960s anti-communism groups, such as the John Birch Society linked the Civil Rights Movement to communism and the modern version of the Illuminati, “The Insiders,” a global conspiracy of wealthy families and entities with deeply anti-Semitic roots. Founders Robert Welch, Fred Koch, and the JBS promoted the idea that the communists were convincing African Americans to rise up, not because of the systemic lack of equality and violence, but because the communists had “duped” them with promises of financial rewards. In this framing of the movement by the JBS, the Civil Rights Movement and the liberals who supported them were being manipulated to allow martial law to take over America, which would enable the communists to enslave the public.
Conspiracies about progressive movements being controlled by a spectre of evil was a conservative response or rationalization in an attempt to understand the shifting societal changes in America. Conspiracy develops when a group feels marginalized or disenfranchised from the political process; the feeling that your government doesn’t represent you or that you’re unable to affect change in the political process creates a sense of helplessness and haplessness that fosters a feeling of impending disaster. This sensation of disaster allows conspiracy theories to seep into your accepted intellectual response as to why these “disasters” continue to happen.
Reid is correct in her assessment of the historical role of conspiracy in conservatism in America, but both she and Gerson ignore the critical role of a particular interpretation of American Christian Values in the creation of the conservative conspiratorial mindset. In each of the movements noted above the conspiracy undermining the nation was linked to a persecution or the death of God, American Christianity and traditional family roles. Each of these movements was linked to the protection of God, country and family, which was articulated through culture war issues, such as feminism, education, LGBTQ rights, and Civil Rights.
Much of the American right, since the beginning of the 20th century, has been animated by a sense of itself as the definer of “American values” and patriotism. For example, during the anti-communism movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s the Christian anti-communism movements created a voting bloc that believed individuals who had different Christian dogmas were united in their commonly held values against feminism, LGBTQ rights and the “moral decline” of America. This sense of a loss of American values, was linked to communist infiltration in the Church, the National Council of Churches, the government and mainstream media.
The war against mainstream media was met with conservative newsletters and magazines like Human Events and American Opinion, all of which provided the news through a common lens of “American values” and religion. The Moral Majority of the 1970s and 1980s, also used a cohesive conception of Christian values articulated through political policy, regardless of dogma, to mobilize a political bloc. Leaders of the Moral Majority, such as Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson, both linked the liberal takeover of the American political system to the Illuminati to create a New World Order, and asked Christian voters to stand up to the Illuminati with their votes in support of God, American values and their understanding of the American traditional family.
Writing about the culture wars of the late 1960s and of today religion scholar Stephen Prothero observed that:
In the contemporary culture wars, the maw of cultural politics opened wide and nearly swallowed civil society whole. Culture warriors continued to fight over religion, family, sexuality, race, education, and evolution, but now they fought as well over issues that had previously been considered nonpartisan. As the modus operandi of cultural warfare became the MO of politics writ large, Americans were drawn into a Culture War of Everything, which saw liberals and conservatives taking up sides on the arts, sports and foreign policy.”
Indeed, the myriad stories on opposition to LGBTQ rights framed as a grand appeal to the American value of “religious freedom” reveal that many on the right interpret any movement for change as being controlled by a group seeking the elimination of God, country and family. The movement that helped elect Donald Trump didn’t spontaneously erupt during this election cycle, it’s been active for decades, using a distrust in the mainstream media, a narrow interpretation of Christian and American values, and conspiracy to mobilize. To believe that the paranoid style is a recent development or to ignore the deployment of Christian values within the framework of conspiracy theories does a disservice to those hoping to understand the history of conservatism in the United States.
According to Prothero, the articulation of culture war issues are public disputes that extend past economic issues to religious, moral and cultural concerns. They question the meaning of America, who is or isn’t a “true American,” and they contend that one’s enemies are also the enemies of the nation.
In the latest segment of GQ's "The Resistance," host Keith Olbermann apologized to the United Kingdom for President Donald Trump's divisive reactions to the recent London terrorist attacks.
"Donald Trump is not of sound mind," Olbermann began. "We are working to correct the problem as soon as possible."
He went on to make the main point of his segment: that the unique difficulty of removing a president from office creates the type of job security almost no one else in America enjoys.
"Amid all the he creates -- mass confusion, charges of corruption, hints at collusion, there is a stark reality. In almost any other job in this country, assuredly in any other private sector job...Donald Trump would have been fired by now," Olbermann argued.
He cited the president's weekend of controversial tweets, including his that Trump claims he wrote on purpose and his insistence on calling his executive order a "travel ban" despite Justice Department lawyers arguing the exact opposite in defense of it. Those are but a few examples, Olbermann said, of the many fire-able offences Trump has undertaken in his short tenure as president.
"We all know," Olbermann said, that Americans have a president "so incompetent" that if he were in any other office, they would have uttered his "hackneyed television catchphrase" of "you're fired."
Watch the entire segment below, via GQ.
In a Fox News segment, former presidential candidate and current senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) refused to answer questions about whether or not he believes President Donald Trump should be impeached.
When asked by host Neil Cavuto whether he would consider any proven Russian collusion an "impeachable offense," Cruz deflected.
"Every person who has looked at the classified material has said they see no collusion," Cruz said.
"I'm taking it to its' extreme," Cavuto said. "If it's proven that there was some collusion, many have argued that that is not an impeachable offense. Do you think it is?"
"Neil, I'm not gonna go down rabbit holes," Cruz rebutted. "If everyone who's look at the evidence says there's no evidence of collusion, at some point Washington starts to get silly where there's an investigation about an investigation."
"We don't have all the evidence, right?" Cavuto concluded.
Watch the entire segment below via Fox News.
In a segment responding to the resuscitated legal battle over President Donald Trump's executive orders barring travel and refugees from Muslim majority-countries, Fox News host Shep Smith mused over why the president signed the "watered-down" second order if he didn't like it.
Quoting the president's own tweets that called the second travel ban "watered down," Smith noted that Trump "signed this order that he now calls watered down. He signed it."
He went on to note that Trump's own tweets calling the order a travel ban in all caps "may have undermined his own legal defense" which hinges on whether or not the order discriminates against Muslims, which goes against the constitution.
Smith cut to White House correspondent John Roberts, who noted that Press Secretary Sean Spicer initially denied that Trump's first executive order was a travel ban and instead called it a method of "vetting."
"Now the White House is saying 'the president says it's a travel ban, so it's a travel ban,'" Roberts concluded.
Watch the entire segment below via Fox News.
In a series of tweets posted Monday, former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith slammed President Donald Trump's style of governance which he claims has taken the country "far beyond normal."
The senior George W. Bush-era Justice Department official who now teaches at Harvard Law railed against the president's "instability" and how he "infects the legal soundness of everything his administration does."
Since his inauguration, Goldsmith wrote, Trump has taken the country "so far beyond normal that it’s hard to have any faith in executive branch."
From shutting out and "viciously" attacking the press and firing former FBI Director James Comey to spilling "deep secrets to Russians" in the Oval Office, Goldsmith claimed that Trump and the officials who work under him have made even normal executive functioning difficult with their string of scandals.
Like many other commentators, Goldsmith invoked President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal and subsequent resignation in face of impeachment as comparisons to Trump.
"As best I can tell," he wrote, "no president’s actions have ever so adversely affected trust in his administration, including Nixon during Watergate."
Despite being appointed by the Bush administration, Goldsmith served for less than a year before resigning in 2004 in protest of the Justice Department's use of coercive torture. He wrote about his tenure in the administration and his criticisms of it in a memoir titled The Terror Presidency in 2007.
Read Goldsmith's entire thread below.
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