While we spend zillions on security at Mar-a-Lago and shuttling Trump children around the world and leaving Melania's son in private school in Manhattan, the President is cutting money to check if we're all swimming in fecal swamps. Yes, his budget would eliminate the funding that pays to test the water at our beaches every week…
President Donald J. Trump’s use of military force in reaction to Syria’s chemical weapons attack against civilians is perplexing for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that President Trump cited the horrific pictures of young children being exposed to deadly chemicals as justification for his action. Trump’s response was basic humanitarian outrage, nothing more. It is strange, even cruel and inhumane that the Trump administration was moved to act in such an emotional manner yet refuses to allow Syrian refugees, many of them children, into the United States. There was a time however, when the leaders of the United States believed that those displaced from their homeland due to the consequences of war deserved a second chance and the opportunity to be free of fear and persecution, even if they had supported the enemy at some point in their past.
Europe, especially Germany, following World War II was full of refugees and displaced persons (DPs) looking to find a new home. Among the mass of displaced humanity were 10 to 12 million Germans who had once called the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and German territory occupied by Poland after the war their home. Much like the Syrians are in 2017, the ethnic German expellees were living in limbo after being expelled by governments looking to make their nations ethnically homogeneous. Unlike other categories of displaced persons the expellees were not eligible to receive aid from relief agencies such as the International Refugee Organization (IRO), whose constitution prohibited such acts, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). This was due to expellees having been supporters of the German Reich, and thus were considered masters of their own miserable fate, and not a priority for relief and placed outside the DP and refugee classifications by the Allies.
Historian Sidney B. Faye assessed that the United States and Great Britain portrayed the expellees as the unnecessary byproduct of the political machinations of great powers and saw them as of little importance immediately after the war. In reality the expellees were part of a larger DP problem facing war torn Europe, a problem that needed a solution. It became quickly apparent that Germany alone could not effectively integrate the entire DP population into its recovering economy. Some of the slack was going to have to be taken up by other nations, including the United States.
For the most part, the media was in favor of the resettlement of DPs to the United States. A March 1, 1946 editorial in the New York Times fervently exclaimed that as a nation “we can speak more convincingly for freedom everywhere when we have done our fair share, even more than our fair share, to bring real freedom to those who have suffered most.” President Harry S. Truman stated the same sentiment in his 1947 State of the Union Message declaring “so far as admitting displaced persons is concerned, I do not feel that the United States has done its part.” He was correct; the United States had only admitted 5,000 since May of 1946. Truman let Congress know that the immigration of DPs to America was a priority regardless of their religious faith and ethnicity.
After much deliberation and opposition by organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the American Legion and a few members of Congress, all of which saw the DPs as not only a threat to spread Communism, but to the economy as well. The Displaced Persons Act was passed by both houses of Congress, and became official on June 25, 1948. It legalized the immigration of 200,000 DPs and 13,685 expellees of German ethnic origin over a two-year period ending in 1950. President Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act with reservations believing it possessed a “pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice.” Echoing Truman, John J. McCloy United States High Commissioner for Germany, voiced the opinion in late December of 1951 that the expellees were a “boon” to the German economy, and would also make a much needed positive impact on the American economy. McCloy stated that the U.S. did need and could use good people,” to fill gaps in the workforce, and urged Congress to amend and extend the Displaced Persons Act so that the U.S. could take “as many expellees as we could get.” Subsequently, in July of 1951 the Displaced Persons Act was amended to allow the immigration of 400,000 DPs and 54,744 German expellees. The United States was now doing its “fair share.”
Having been citizens of an enemy regime, the conditions of the expellee immigration to the United States were regulated more tightly than that of the majority of DPs. The expellees were required to sign an oath that bound them to the terms of employment offered by a sponsor. Sponsors provided employment to the expellees at the prevailing living wage of the time, transportation from their point of entry to their place of settlement in the United States, satisfactory housing, and a guarantee that the expellees would not become government dependents. Following the war DPs and expellees were needed to not only fill the demand for agricultural and mining labor that existed, but to also fill vacancies in medicine, science and higher education. Thus, DPs and expellees played a vital role in the post-war American economy.
Much like the Syrian refugees of today, the German expellees were seen as a threat not to only to the American economy, but democracy and freedom as well. As Syrian refugees are stigmatized as being possible conduits of terror and radical Islam at present, the DPs and expellees of the post-World War II era were thought by many Americans to be possible Communist infiltrators. However, President Truman and both houses of Congress along with other governmental leaders, unlike the Trump administration, knew that leading the world required thoughtful action, not impulsive reaction.
Accepting refugees was risky then, as it always will be. But it’s worth the risk. As John J. McCloy so deftly surmised in 1951 “countries of immigration gain, and countries of emigration suffer.” No truer and wiser words have ever been spoken.
Bradley J. Brewer is a Modern European historian who resides in Leadwood, Mo.
With Steve Bannon on way out, official Washington is jumping for joy that Gary Cohn – the former president of Goldman Sachs who’s now running Trump’s National Economic Council, along with Dina Powell, another influential Goldman Sachs alumnus, – seems to be taking over Trump’s brain.
As CNBC puts it, Cohn will push “more moderate, business-friendly economic policies.” The Washington Post says Cohn is advocating “a centrist vision.” The Post goes on to describe “The growing strength of Cohn and like-minded moderates" as revealed in Trump’s endorsement of government subsidies for exports, and of corporate tax cuts. Says the Post: “The president’s new positions move him much closer to the views of … mainstream Republicans and Democrats.”
In reality, Cohn, Powell, and other Wall Streeters in the Trump White House are pushing Trump closer to the views of Wall Street and big business – views that are reflected in the views of “mainstream” Republicans and Democrats only to the extent the “mainstream” is dependent on the Street and big corporations for campaign money.
These views aren’t “centrist,” and they’re not sustainable. More tax breaks for the rich and more subsidies for big corporations aren’t much better for America than xenophobia.
Wall Street and corporate America seem not to have learned a thing from what’s happened over the past year. Do they really believe the anger, rage, hate, racism, and nationalism that welled up during the 2016 election was a random, passing phenomenon, like a particularly bad hurricane?
If so, they’re wrong. These sentiments came from a shrinking and ever more anxious working class. From millions of people so convinced the game is rigged against them they were prepared to overthrow the established order in order to get fundamental change. From voters whipped up into a fury over tax breaks and subsidies and bailouts for those at the top – socialism for the rich – but who for years have been getting the harsh losing end of the capitalist stick: declining wages, mass firings, less job security, emptying towns and cities, and their children with even lower and fewer prospects.
They came from people who during the Great Recession lost their jobs, homes, and savings, as Wall Street got bailed out for its wanton greed, and not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail.
The so-called “centrist” policies that Wall Street and big corporations are now happily promoting via Gary Cohn and Dina Powell won’t reverse these sentiments. They’ll add to them, because these were same sort of the policies that got us to this point.
There’s a better alternative. It’s to make it easy for people who lose their jobs to get new ones that pay at least as well, through wage insurance; expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and raise the minimum wage so every job pays a living wage; invest in great teachers and great schools, along with a system of lifelong learning, and high-quality early childhood education; and provide Medicare for all.
And pay for all of this with a 2 percent tax on wealth over $1 million and a carbon tax. While we’re at it, get big money out of politics.
Here’s a “centrist” agenda that big business, Wall Street, and the rest of America should agree on because it (or something very much like it) is the only way to move forward without inviting even more inequalities of income, wealth, and political power – and ever more vicious backlashes against such inequities.
If Wall Street and big business used the 2016 election as a teachable moment, they would realize this.
This year Russia celebrates the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in the February Revolution and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. In addition, the 1905 Revolution weakened the Romanovs and created the first legislature in Russian history. The 1991 Revolution led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and loss of half of its population.
Yet, even after four 20th century revolutions, Russia has not achieved the modernizing transformations created by the English Revolution (1640s, 1688), American Revolution (1776-1783) and French Revolution (1789-1814).
These revolutions created democracy in Great Britain (1689), the United States (1789) and France (1871). They made England and France leading capitalist powers in the 19th century and the United States the global capitalist leader by 1891. By contrast, Russia still is not a democracy or capitalist power.
The Western revolutions produced a highly literate, politically engaged and aware citizenry. By 1900 the United States had 88% literacy, Great Britain 95% and France 90%. But, Tsarist Russia in 1897 had a 21% literacy rate and only in the 1930s achieved even 50% literacy under Stalinism.
The Western revolutions ended serfdom in the 11th to 14th centuries. They created large cities as centers for capitalism and the arts. Great Britain began the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s and was joined in the 1820s by France and after the Civil War by the United States.
Russia had serfdom to 1861 and afterwards much good land was owned by the landlords to whom debt was owed until 1906. Russia began to industrialize in the 1890s and seriously only in the 1930s. Russia in 1897 was 13% urbanized while Russian big cities were significantly smaller than the Western ones.
England and France became global powers in the 19th century and the United States followed in the early twentieth century. By contrast Russia became a global power after World War II.
The Western powers were protected by natural boundaries and had not been invaded since 1814 (United States) or 1066 (England) while only France was geographically vulnerable.
Russia lacked natural frontiers for defense. Major invasions included the Mongols (1240-1480) and the Polish-Lithuanian Empire (Time of Troubles 1606-1617). The Crimean Tatars in 1571 burned Moscow, Charles XII of Sweden invaded Russia in 1708, France in 1812, Crimean powers in 1853, Japan in 1904 and Germany in 1915 and 1941.
Unlike France, England or the United States as late as the 1897 census Russians were 44% of the population, with distinct minorities. Only militarily did it become a great power at a cost of 27 million Russians killed in World War II. How can we explain this?
A positive geographic basis is key for a thriving economy. Russia, which is made up of Siberia for 77% of its territory (5.1 million miles), lacks warm water ports, fronts on the Arctic Ocean and has a climate (often tundra and taiga) whose summers are short and winters are long and very cold. The United States has nearly 100 persons per square miles compared to Russia with 21 persons per square mile.
Russian territory receives little precipitation. Having lost the Ukrainian breadbasket in 1991, its main asset is oil and natural gas. Nearly all major petro states are authoritarian regimes.
Transportation with “mud” seasons and up to on week to reach Vladivostok on the Pacific coast is very expensive to build and maintain. There has never been a real Russian consumer or agrarian revolution.
One can thus understand how Russia has a weak economy (less than 10% of American GNP), weak life expectancy (63 years for males), massive emigration (11 million people since 1991) minimal consumer or agricultural exports and no real Silicon Valley. It is powerful with nuclear weapons and defense capabilities and very weak in most other areas.
Jonathan Adelman is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
Years ago, I worked for a wealthy television executive in Washington, DC, who had a posh Georgetown townhouse with a courtyard.
In the center of his courtyard was a small fountain, and he became obsessed with getting hold of a certain dye for it that the National Park Service used in fountains and pools at various historic sites around the capital.
The dye turned the water an opaque black, so murky you couldn’t see to the bottom. The park service claimed it was more aesthetically pleasing.
I think you can see this blunt instrument of a metaphor coming: the waters of Washington intentionally made shadowy and dark, secrets hidden. That’s what is happening right now. The Trump White House and its congressional allies are doing their best to obscure the truth, darkening the waters as black as they can to hide what’s really going on.
On Friday, the White House announced that it would no longer make public the logs of who visits the White House. The Obama administration had a policy, with a few exceptions, of keeping such records open and available. But Donald Trump and his gang don’t want you to know with whom they’re doing business.
They say it’s because of “grave national security risks and privacy concerns.” Bull. They might as well say it’s more aesthetically pleasing. The names are hidden for the same reasons Trump’s tax returns and other financial transactions are hidden. And for the same reasons that when he’s signing legislation or executive orders that are unpopular or especially harmful to the public, he does it behind closed doors instead of at those big ceremonies where he signs with a flourish and holds his seismograph-like signature up for all to see.
He hid out this past Thursday when he signed one law that allows states to withhold federal family planning funding from clinics providing abortions and another eliminating a regulation that allowed the expansion of retirement savings accounts. He did the same with the “revised” travel ban, getting rid of federal guidelines for transgender students using school restrooms and the rule that would keep guns from the mentally disabled.
Nor does Trump want you to know what the military is doing until it’s done and the spin is ready to be spun. He claims it’s because he wants to be “unpredictable” — he doesn’t want to tip his hand to the bad guys. It’s more like this: if he goes ahead and drops something big and explosive without revealing the plan, there’s less time for opposition or dissenting points of views. Or, perhaps more probable, he has no real idea what he’s doing, and action, no matter how impulsive or wrong, feels better to him than stopping and thinking things through.
This has always been the Trump way: flashy, ostentatious displays of self-promotion and conspicuous consumption while behind the scenes, shady deals and connections are made. And it continues today as we watch the new administration and its hires trumpet the most minor accomplishments or take credit for those they did not accomplish or shout foul on someone else to distract the rest of us from whatever nefarious doings really are afoot.
The ongoing tale of Trump and Russia proves this well. He and his crew continue to scream that they have been unfairly besmirched, that they are the innocent parties targeted and tailed by an Obama administration committed to manufacturing dirt and leaking false information.
It’s a three-card monte game designed to divert the eye, but for all their false shuffling of the deck, the evidence continues to build. The Guardian reported on April 13 that in the course of communications surveillance, British intelligence and several other European spy agencies discovered contacts between Russia and Trump campaign staff:
“The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets. Over several months, different agencies targeting the same people began to see a pattern of connections that were flagged to intelligence officials in the US.”
A source told The Guardian:
“They [the European agencies] were saying: ‘There are contacts going on between people close to Mr. Trump and people we believe are Russian intelligence agents. You should be wary of this.’“The message was: ‘Watch out. There’s something not right here.’”
On April 6, Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times wrote that thanks in part to the European intercepts, the CIA had told congressional leaders as early as last summer, “that it had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president, a finding that did not emerge publicly until after Mr. Trump’s victory months later, former government officials say.
“The briefings indicate that intelligence officials had evidence of Russia’s intentions to help Mr. Trump much earlier in the presidential campaign than previously thought. The briefings also reveal a critical split last summer between the CIA and counterparts at the FBI, where a number of senior officials continued to believe through last fall that Russia’s cyberattacks were aimed primarily at disrupting America’s political system, and not at getting Mr. Trump elected, according to interviews.”
In addition to prior reporting that the Foreign Intelligence Secrecy Act (FISA) courts had issued secret orders to allow the monitoring of two banks thought to have connections to Russian intelligence, it now turns out that there also was a FISA warrant that gave the go-ahead to monitor Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.
According to The Washington Post:
“This is the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents…”“The government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.”
When all is said and done, Page may be small potatoes indeed — even one of the Russian agents who first made contact with him said he was an “idiot” — but the FBI and congressional investigations still have a long way to go and much remains unanswered as to how deeply Trump staffers and friends may have been involved assisting in the interference with our election.
There are, too, the many outstanding questions surrounding the apparent financial legerdemain of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Millions that he was paid by a Russian oligarch and pro-Putin politicians in Ukraine allegedly moved through banks in Cyprus and elsewhere, as Manafort was busily creating shell companies and taking out mortgages on real estate properties in a way that experts say smells of money laundering.
And finally, there remain all the questions about Donald Trump’s own connections with Russian oligarchs and in turn their ties to the Russian government and organized crime. Josh Marshall of Taking Points Memo has been vigilant in his pursuit of this side of the story and wonders how much the FBI and CIA knew about Trump and his Russia connections long before he ever considered running for president.
Even without the hacking scandal, Marshall writes, Trump’s contacts with Russia’s kleptocrats “would seem like an extraordinarily big deal. And indeed it is an extraordinarily big deal.
“What that means is that we — as reporters and as a concerned public — should probe these relationships on their own terms just as much as the most logical place to hunt looking for the evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.”
There is an irony here. Trump and his cohorts grumble, moan and shriek about the hidden “Deep State” of intelligence agencies and other government and corporate interests they claim have conspired to undermine and defeat the great Trump agenda. But over the years, they themselves have used the very same apparatus of networks and connections to help make fortunes and grease the way to power and influence.
No wonder they’re so desperate to keep the waters of Washington dark and fathomless.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
What’s the “Trump Doctrine” of foreign policy? At first glance, foreign policy under Trump seems inconsistent, arbitrary, and devoid of principle.
A few weeks ago, even before the airstrike on Syria, Trump communications director Mike Dubke told Trump’s assembled aides that international affairs presented a messaging challenge because the Trump administration lacks a coherent foreign policy. “There is no Trump doctrine,” Dubke declared.
I think Dubke is being grossly unfair. Of course there’s a Trump Doctrine. You just have to know where to look for it.
The Trump Doctrine began to emerge when Trump issued his travel bans (both the first and second) on predominantly Muslim countries.
But he notably excluded predominantly Muslim countries where Trump has business interests.
So under what might be called the First Principle of the Trump Doctrine, people living in a predominantly Muslim country have a chance of entering the United States only if their country contains an edifice with Trump’s name on it.
The Second Principle follows logically from the first. Countries that are potential markets for Trump’s business – nominally run by his two sons, but still filling his pockets – may be eligible for special favors if they allow Trump to make money there.
For example, Trump’s business currently has 157 trademark applications pending in 36 nations, according to the New York Times.
Registered trademarks are giant financial assets for a business like Trump’s, which in recent years has made big money by selling his name rather than by building or making anything.
Soon after he was sworn into office – but only after Trump backed off of his brief flirtation with a “two China” policy – the Chinese government granted Trump preliminary approval of 38 trademarks of his name.
“It was a gift,” said Peter J. Riebling, a trademark lawyer in Washington, of China’s decision. “Getting the exclusive right to use that brand in China against everyone else in the world? It’s like waving a magic wand.”
One potential obstacle for the Second Principle is the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause, which bars U.S. government officials from receiving gifts from foreign powers.
No matter. Apparently the Trump Doctrine, well, trumps the Constitution.
A group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) joined by several prominent law professors, is suing Trump over this.
But the United States – through the U.S. Department of Justice – argues in a legal brief, expected to be filed this month, that the framers of the Constitution meant only to rule out gifts that compensate presidents or other office holders for services they might do for a foreign power, not for public policies they advance that benefit a foreign power.
Interpretations of the U.S. Constitution by the Department of Justice aren’t like the musings of any random defense attorney. They carry special weight. They represent the views and interests of the United States.
Which makes this one official U.S. government policy – and thereby, confirms it as the Second Principle of the Trump Doctrine.
The Third Principle comes down hard on countries that kill their own children with poison gas. They will be bombed.
You may recall Trump had long been opposed to bombing Syria. But, as he recently explained, Syrian dictator Basha al-Assad’s “attack on children … had a big impact on me,“ adding that "my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.” The bombing ensued.
This doesn’t mean endangered children will be given refuge in the United States, though. Recall the First Principle: Nobody gains entrance to the United States from a predominantly Muslim nations unless their country contains a Trump hotel, spa, or golf course.
Which brings us to the Fourth Principle.
Not long after the Syrian bombing, Trump authorized the Pentagon to drop a 22,000-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) on people described as “Islamic State forces” in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
It was the first time the bomb – nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” and one of the largest air-dropped munitions in the U.S. military’s inventory – had ever been used in a combat.
Trump’s rationale? The group was allegedly connected to ISIS.
So under the Fourth Principle of the Trump Doctrine, the United States reserves the right to drop a mother of a bomb on any group seemingly connected with ISIS.
This applies even if the group is not fighting to gain or hold territory claimed by the Islamic State. The group could be thousands of miles away from the Islamic State, anywhere around the world.
Could a mother of a bomb be dropped on such a group if it’s located in a country containing a Trump hotel, or considering a Trump trademark application?
Frankly, I don’t know. That pesky detail hasn’t been worked out yet.
But this one uncertainty doesn’t undermine the overall consistency or clarity of the Trump Doctrine of foreign policy. It’s four major principles are firmly rooted either in making money for Trump, or stopping bad people from doing bad things.
If Mike Dubke had a clearer grasp of Donald Trump’s worldview, he’d surely see this – as would everyone else.
This article was originally published at RobertReich.org
Immediately following Donald Trump's missile strike in Syria, the media, political analysts, pundits, they began telling us that Trump was so moved by those images that he saw on TV of the chemical attack in Syria that he just decided that he had to act. Well, this is a lie. Donald Trump has not suddenly developed…
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said on Saturday that former Breitbart.com CEO turned senior White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon's days were numbered in President Donald Trump's administration from the moment his face appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
"If you’re any student of politics, you saw Steve Bannon on the cover of Time magazine in early February — 'The Great Manipulator,' it called him — and knew to start the countdown then," Bruni wrote. "Dead strategist walking."
Other reports from White House insiders agree, Pres. Trump was deeply annoyed at seeing his adviser on the cover of Time billed as the hand behind the throne.
“That doesn’t just happen," Trump reportedly said when he saw the cover.
"He’d crossed the line that a politician’s advisers mustn’t, to a place and prominence where only the most foolish of them tread," said Bruni. "Or at best he’d failed to prevent the media from tugging him there."
"He was damned the moment he was cast as a puppeteer," he continued. "That means there’s a puppet in the equation, and no politician is going to accept that designation, least of all one who stamps his name in gold on anything that stands still long enough to be stamped. Or whose debate performance included the repartee: 'No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.'”
The notoriously thin-skinned Trump was not about to be upstaged by an adviser he assumed would remain in the background.
"Politics is a tricky business," Bruni explained. "Washington is a treacherous place and Trumplandia is downright brutal. In all three realms, you have to strike the right balance of self-promotion and self-effacement."
Bannon overstepped his bounds, as far as Trump was concerned, hence the president's statements last week publicly distancing himself from the "alt-right" white nationalist in interviews, calling him "a guy who works for me" and claiming not to have known him before the 2016 campaign.
Bruni said it must have stung for Bannon to hear his boss "lumping the lumpy tactician together with the concierges at Trump Tower, the groundskeepers at Mar-a-Loco and the makers of the meatloaf in the White House kitchen."
"Trump’s allegiances are fickle. His attention flits," Bruni wrote. "His compass is popularity, not any fixed philosophy, certainly not the divisive brand of populism and nationalism that Bannon was trying to enforce. Bannon insisted on an ideology when Trump cares more about applause, and what generates it at a campaign rally isn’t what sustains it when you’re actually governing."
Bannon's biggest mistake, Bruni said, was to pick a fight with one of Trump's family members, son-in-law Jared Kushner. Breitbart went on an anti-Kushner tear, publishing a rapid-fire series of articles attacking him, only backing off when Kushner himself complained to the president.
"Consider Trump’s obsession with appearances, then tell me who has the advantage: the guy who looks like a flea market made flesh or the one who seems poised to pose for G.Q.?" Bruni said.
He concluded, "Bannon is still on the job, and Trump may keep him there, because while he has been disruptive inside the White House, he could be pure nitroglycerin outside. He commands acolytes on the alt-right. He has the mouthpiece of Breitbart News. He has means for revenge. He also has a history of it."
Bannon should have borne in mind, said Bruni, that "if you want to be the Svengali, you have to play the sycophant. That was a performance beyond Bannon’s ken. He never had a chance."
It’s been a week now since Donald Trump once again became our president.
Here’s how it happened.
After he unleashed missiles on a Syrian airfield, members of Washington’s national security establishment and elite pundits swooned. Top Democrats and Republicans led the way. Good soldiers all in the military-industrial-political complex, they stood smartly at attention and saluted the commander-in-chief for sending a message to the world, although exactly what the message meant remains far from clear.
The headline above Glenn Greenwald’s story at The Intercept summed up the response: “The Spoils of War — Trump Lavished with Media and Bipartisan Praise for Bombing Syria.” The hawkish Hillary Clinton, who long had been critical of Barack Obama for not bringing Bashar Assad to heel, “appeared at an event” — and this was before the bombing even happened! — “and offered her categorical support for what Trump was planning.”
Up in the choir loft, the media and pundits sang as one from the official hymnal, praising Trump’s “presidential moment” and transforming him from a pathetic dunderhead suffering from narcissistic personality disorder into the Lord of Hosts. It was CNN’s Fareed Zakaria who pronounced the decision to fire away as the “big moment” when “Donald Trump became president of the United States.”
The theatrics were perfect. The Pentagon shopped to the media a video of the missiles as they were lofted up and away. MSNBC’s Brian Williams was among those moved by the aesthetics of violence: “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two Navy vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.’”
When I heard those words, I thought back to that night in 2003 when another president lit up the skies over Baghdad with the “shock and awe” of his air attack on Iraq. Suddenly the press was talking about George W. Bush as if he were George Washington, George Marshall and George Patton rolled into one. A touch of George III came later, as our newly refurbished president donned a flight suit and strutted aboard the aircraft carrier with the banner behind him that read: “Mission Accomplished.” Not quite.
Then a more recent scene and another miraculous moment came to mind, from six weeks ago — Feb. 28, to be exact. Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress. He paused, pointed to the balcony and recognized the widow of the Navy SEAL who was killed during a raid on an alleged terrorist compound in Yemen, the very first military mission dispatched into harm’s way by the brand-new commander-in-chief himself.
That mission went badly, so much so that at least two dozen local civilians, including women and children, were killed. Trump did not mention them. He focused on honoring the grieving widow in the balcony who was trying, unsuccessfully, to hold back her tears as wave after wave of applause rolled across the House chamber and ricocheted from wall to wall.
Time magazine’s White House correspondent tweeted that the speech was the “clearest example Trump is beginning to own and understand the powers of the office.” The next day, The Washington Post’s White House bureau chief tweeted, “This is the best morning of Donald Trump’s presidency. He is basking in positive pundit reviews. All that tumult [of the previous month] feels like yesteryear.” Politico’s man on the scene admiringly described it in a tweet as Trump’s “Reaganesque moment.”
And over at CNN, liberal commentator Van Jones called it
“one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period… And for people who have been hoping that he [Trump] would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment… He did something tonight that you cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States.” [italics mine]
I understand what these people were saying — that although constitutionally Trump had become president when he was inaugurated four weeks earlier, he had not metaphorically made the leap into the persona expected of him. He did not fit the mythical image of a president we prefer over the real thing. Above all, he had yet to put on a sufficiently good show (the crowd at the inauguration was not much larger than his two undersized hands clasped together). Nor had the establishment pundits fully weighed in with any semblance of support, and without their blessing, Trump was obviously just a usurper who could barely read a speech, even with a teleprompter.
But after the dramatic spectacle of that Feb. 28 speech, the white smoke rose from the chimney: America at last had a president who could act the part even if his cronies were ripping out the plumbing, stripping the wiring and carting it all off in Uber cars.
Alas, the euphoria of that night was not to last. Once again it evaporated as fast as the truth on Kellyanne Conway’s lips. Trump quickly returned to governing by anarchy. Chaos again ruled the White House. Wrecking crews installed by Bannon and Priebus at federal agencies continued their bloodbaths. Trump’s state of mind once again became the subject of much speculation. Trump’s health care “reform” went down in flames. His proposed budget exploded on contact with reality. Conflicts of interest littered the city like cow patties in a pasture. The atmosphere stank like a fetid swamp, the one Trump has made no attempt to drain. And his popularity dropped lower than any president so early in the game.
Yet after the bombing a week ago, Trump towers again. Fifty-nine cruise missiles — tomahawks — were all it took.
Mind you, there is little to show for the attack. The airbase was open the very next day. Russia’s Putin and Syria’s Assad may be forced into a tighter embrace as Donald chills on Vladimir — and vice versa.
And really, what was the big deal, anyway? As Glenn Greenwald wrote,
“The CIA has spent more than a billion dollars a year to arm anti-Assad rebels for years, and the US began bombing Syria in 2014 — the seventh predominantly Muslim country bombed by Obama — and never stopped. Trump had already escalated that bombing campaign, culminating in a strike last month that Syrians say destroyed a mosque and killed dozens. What makes this latest attack new is that rather than allegedly targeting terrorist’s sites of ISIS and al-Qaida, it targets the Syrian government — something Obama threatened to do in 2013 but never did.”
Trump will be tempted to do it again, because he likes big booms and especially if such thunderbolts gain him adulation from hard-liners in the national security complex and the press.
There will be opportunities because even if Assad stops using chemical weapons, he will no doubt continue to pummel what remains of Syria’s civilian population. As Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department official, told The Huffington Post: “You’ll see many more pictures of beautiful [Syrian] babies [dying] on TV – specifically to humiliate the United States and show the fecklessness of military action.” In other words, Trump is about to find out why Obama avoided military intervention in Syria.
Meanwhile, here at home, our institutions bend and buckle and approach the breaking point from benign, blind or willful neglect — and above all, from a leadership vacuum.
One example: our transportation infrastructure. A week ago, as Trump & Company plotted the attack on the Syrian airfield, here in the Northeast corridor of America’s vast transportation system a second train derailment in two weeks again plunged hundreds of thousands of commuters into nail-biting, life-upending chaos.
It began as a minor derailment at Penn Station, the hub of our transit network, but like a spider web, everything transit-related is so connected in these parts that the upheaval quickly spread to Long Island and New Jersey and then to the corridor between Boston and Washington, DC. The New York Times called the calamity “another reminder of the decrepit, tenuous state of much of the region’s infrastructure and transit systems.”
You would think this would be a priority of Donald Trump. He grew up in New York. He knows the crucial role of mass transit. He spins a good spiel on infrastructure. Yet for all this, he has rejected an Obama-era program that would have funded long-range improvements to our regional infrastructure, even as he proposes huge tax breaks for builders and real estate developers like himself.
He also wants to increase defense spending by $54 billion and proposes to slash non-military spending by a corresponding amount. This includes slicing funds for Amtrak and transit and commuter rail programs across the country. The National Association of Rail Passengers estimates the cuts of federal funding for Amtrak’s national network of trains would drastically affect service to 23 states and 144 million Americans, many of them in rural towns in the Midwest and the South, including my home town in East Texas which went for Trump by an overwhelming majority — and I mean overwhelming.
How is it Trump seems to care the least for the very folks who voted for him? Not a day passes that he doesn’t betray some of them.
And instead of bombing another country, how about building our own with better bridges, railroads, highways and airports, how about tending to those who need jobs and homes, how about health care that really gets the job done?
Then we might finally achieve the transformative moment when even Donald Trump at last becomes president for real. But don’t hold your breath. It is foolish to expect anything like this from a man-child who plays with America’s destiny as if it were a rag doll in his gilded crib.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
It is pretty amazing how quickly the media and suck-up politicians can transform a mendacious, hypocritical, amateurish, ignorant, incoherent, bigoted buffoon who is way, way out of his depth into a man of courage, which is what they did to President Trump this past weekend. All it takes is some saber rattling and launching a few dozen missiles. Granted, the Trump brand is already so tarnished that he didn’t get the bounce or the adulation that the Bushes, pere and fils, got when they began their wars. According to one poll, only 51 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s action, but given that Trump’s favorability rating has hovered around or even south of 40 percent, this is an improvement.
And don’t think Donald Trump isn’t gloating over the bounce. In fact, don’t think that isn’t exactly why he acted. It is hard to believe he launched those missiles because he was deeply moved by “beautiful babies” gassed in Syria when he was never moved by the beautiful babies dying from conventional weapons or from fleeing the Assad regime. Trump has always been moved by one thing and one thing only: his ego.
Of course, military action is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Demagogues typically use it to rally support, and the public typically falls for it, which makes von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means seem obsolete. Politics, yes. Policy, no. Trump, as detractors were quick to point out, has no policy on Syria or much of anything else. He isn’t a strategic thinker, to say the least. He is a huckster, which isn’t a bad thing to be if you are also a politician. Trump’s sudden pivot from nationalist isolationist to sort-of interventionist was a huckster’s ploy, and by and large it worked. Brian Williams on MSNBC rhapsodized over the attack and quoted Leonard Cohen: “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.”
On CNN, Fareed Zakaria, who is regarded in the media as a very serious man, echoed the hare-brained giddiness we heard in the media after Trump’s address to Congress when he was celebrated for being able to string a few sentences together without talking jabberwocky. Said Zakaria of the Syria attack: “I think Donald Trump actually became president of the United States. I think this was actually a big moment.” Even Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times also wrote approvingly of the action.
Of course, Republicans, the very ones who wouldn’t give President Obama authorization to attack Syria, were beside themselves with joy, but so were many Democrats, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. Trump turned the entire world into a bunch of suckers.
Without debating whether it was the right or wrong thing to do, and without mentioning that it seemed to have had no effect on whatsoever on Assad’s capability to kill civilians,
the ploy was bald, and it was shameless. So why did it work yet again? There is a vast body of literature on the appeal of war, including Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, which describe the ways in which warfare arose from predation and assumed aspects of religion, and Chris Hedges’ impassioned and moving book-length essay, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, which incorporates its thesis into its title. War is pretty hard to resist. Hedges compares it to a drug — an addictive drug.
But while Trump was certainly tapping atavistic and nationalistic nerves, he was also tapping popular culture ones. So let me pose a far less high-minded and far less profound reason both for why Trump decided to launch the missiles and why so many fell for it — a reason that addresses the confluence of modern war, modern politics, modern media and Trump himself: War is great entertainment. More specifically, it is one of the highest forms of reality TV. What Trump did with his launch is give us an exciting episode of the Donald Trump presidential reality show.
The affinity between entertainment and warfare is as old as that between demagogues and warfare. War provides great narratives. (Think of Homer.) It provides heroes and villains. It provides action. It provides a deep rooting interest that gets the blood pumping. In short, it does just about all the things that movies do, and I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that war informs war movies far less than our war movies have come to inform war. It is one reason, I think, Americans usually seem so eager to go to war — even though as a war slogs on, they are less enthusiastic about continuing it. The fact is, war isn’t really very much like the movies, and by movies, I don’t mean just war movies but blockbuster super hero pictures where evil is invariably defeated in a great, ear-splitting Gotterdammerung of destruction. But if real war isn’t a movie or a video game, a quick, antiseptic strike without American casualties can fool you into believing it is.
Donald Trump knows all this. He is as much a creature of the media as Ronald Reagan was. Frankly, so are we all now. The bond between Reagan and the public was largely a function of our mutual assimilation of the media. Reagan internalized the movies. He erased the line between the cinematic and the real, both psychologically (he often confused movie scenes with scenes from real life) and politically. This was, as I have written elsewhere, his great accomplishment. He created a character, affable but with gimlet-eyed strength, that was the very personification of what a movie president would be, and he turned his presidency into a movie, making the audience/public happy by telling them what they wanted to hear. And because he bought his own pitch, he was genuine doing it.
Trump’s form isn’t the movies; it is reality TV. And that makes a huge difference in his behavior as a performer. In the movies, the protagonist serves the narrative, which is what Reagan did as president. In reality TV, the narrative serves the protagonist. Trump was the centerpiece of The Apprentice, the show’s potentate. He snapped his fingers and things happened. He issued his edict, and a contender was fired. He looked decisive. Reagan could invoke lofty movie-like rhetoric to hypnotize his audience. Reality stars have no rhetoric, only bluster. . . and tweets. That is why Reagan could seem to inflate himself, like movie stars, and Trump always seems to diminish himself, like reality stars. Even the Syria attack was smallish, a negligible one-off, soon to be forgotten.
Many of us during the campaign noted how Trump’s reality TV experience affected and even defined that campaign, but far less attention has been paid to how it would affect his presidency. The narcissism, the imperial demeanor, the preening, the necessity of hyping the drama — these are now the hallmarks of his early administration. It makes for good TV and lousy governance. The impulsiveness for which Trump is famous was built into reality TV too, which lurches mindlessly from one scene to another. Indeed, you could accurately describe reality TV as plot without content, which, not at all incidentally, is also a way to describe the Trump presidency.
So, whether it was the right thing to do to strike Assad, it was, by reality show standards, certainly the best thing to do. It got a huge audience. It made Trump look like a man of action. It won him plaudits on cable TV, which likes nothing better than some military action to boost ratings, just as William Randolph Hearst practically started the Spanish-American War to push newspaper circulation. And, not least of all, it did what entertainment is practically designed to do: It provided a distraction from the mess Trump is making of the country.
You don’t usually think of warfare as a distraction; warfare is what you usually get distracted from. But Trump grasped that launching missiles would knock everything else off the front pages at a time when he needed it. And in the short term, he seems to have been right. Talking about Syria means we aren’t talking about the Russian hacking of the election or the failure of health care reform or the Keystone Cops White House staff or the trashing of regulations or the myriad of other disasters in this ongoing reality show that stars the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.”
It is precisely because this new interventionism has had the desired result that we should all begin to worry. If a few missiles in Syria won him hosannas, what about some action against North Korea for the next reality show episode? And what other improvised adventures could our new action hero president embark upon to keep us preoccupied and him winning praise? War may be the force that gives us meaning. But it is also the force that keeps us entertained and distracted. With an entertainer-in-chief in the White House, someone for whom the presidency is a great vanity, that should scare us. That should scare us a lot.
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
As the Trump administration worked to revise its immigration ban, the effects were already becoming apparent in the hospital where I work, where many immigrants seek care. During this time I was called to evaluate the mental health of a man who had tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. I talked with him, through…
The New York Times recently ran a peculiarly pathetic article about yet another victim of the Trump administration that you probably never thought to worry about: the children’s publishing industry. The problem, as the article’s author, Katherine Rosman, repeatedly implies but cannot come out and say, is that Donald Trump is pretty much a walking advertisement for everything we don’t want our children to be. And yet he’s the president. Children are supposed to respect the president. What to do?
Take, for instance the problem of racism. How to explain the fact that not only is Trump a racist, but that racism is a fundamental reason his supporters like him so much? The updated edition of Time Inc.’s Presidents of the United States series explains: “He made controversial remarks about several groups of people, including Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans and women,” and “This led many, including some Republican officials, to back away from him.” Even so, it notes, “Trump continued to receive wide support and thousands of people attended his rallies.”
Like so many journalists who write for grown-ups, the word “controversial” is expected to carry a great deal of freight here. In the above it could mean “racist” or “sexist” or “ignorant” or “violence-promoting” or “rape-friendly.” No less ambiguous are the words applied to Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings. From the Times story:
A True Book: President Donald Trump, released by Scholastic, tells of Mr. Trump’s real estate career, and of public perceptions of his Democratic opponent, Mrs. Clinton. “Clinton was a strong choice for president,” read one paragraph, which concluded, “However, many people did not like Clinton. They felt she was not trustworthy and would not bring enough changes to the government.”
Again, this is a lot like contemporary journalism for presumed adults. The “feeling” that Hillary Clinton was not trustworthy underlaid a significant percentage of the coverage she received. That’s how we came to the ludicrous place where more attention on the network nightly news was focused on Clinton’s use of her email system than was on literally every single other issue combined during the coverage leading from both parties’ conventions to the election itself.
Rosman catches the Scholastic folks red-handed as they rewrite history to try to prettify Trump for their audience. In a prepublication draft of the book, under the heading “Troubling Statements,” its authors initially explained: “Some of Trump’s biggest supporters were white nationalists. Their comments and actions during and after the campaign were racist and often dangerous. Trump did little to speak against them.” But in the final version, we get, instead, a page called “Campaign Statements,” which explains that, “Some of Trump’s critics felt he did not speak out against prejudicial people and groups strongly enough.”
This statement is narrowly true, but its obvious intent is to communicate a falsehood. In the first place, any statement that begins with the words “Some people felt” is true about almost anything. You can try this at home: “Some people felt that Hitler did not go far enough in killing Jews.” “Some people felt that crucifixion was too good for Jesus; he should have been drawn and quartered and his body parts fed to wolves.” The fact is that if you attribute a belief to “some people” without naming, you can say anything you want and nobody can disprove it. It’s a license to lie.
The problem with Trump is not that he did not denounce the racism, much less the fact that some people might have felt this way. It’s that he actively encouraged not merely racism but a particularly violent strain of it; one that helped create an atmosphere of menace toward almost all people of color among his most virulent supporters. What’s more, this racism, according to the best data we can find, was central to his appeal both in the Republican primaries and in the general election. The fact that he is now president of the United States presents an additional ideological problem for children’s book publishers. Not only must they find a way around the fact that their subject is a racist, sexist, ethnocentric, McCarthyite, lying con man, but also that nearly half the country’s voters knew all this and picked him anyway.
To be honest about Trump is to be honest about America, and right now, that is just not the kind of thing children’s publishers are set up to do. It’s not even the kind of thing The New York Times or The Washington Post is set up to do — at least not without blaming “both sides” for whatever crime against democracy, decency or common sense Trump has most recently committed. Joana Costa Knufinke, group editor for nonfiction books in Scholastic’s library publishing division, uses this time-honored excuse when she explains to Rosman, “We make an effort to show both points of view.”
As with so many issues raised by Trump’s election, he is forcing us to face a problem we have felt free to ignore in the past and thrown it up in our faces. After all, Time Inc. recently found the courage to note in its Presidents of the United States series that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. This is presumably in lieu of mentioning that he regularly had sex with his young slave, Sally Hemings, fathering six children with her but forever denying them his patrimony. This, again, is an extreme example, but to be fair to the children’s publishing industry, it would be hard to find a president who did not need a bit of whitewashing to make it into an inspiring children’s story, warts and all.
The challenge regarding Trump, however, is not that he has flaws, as men and all presidents do. The problem is that he is all flaws and that it was these flaws that got him elected president. Without those flaws — the racism, sexism, jingoism, dishonesty, incompetence, ignorance and belligerence — there is nothing left to say about Trump… except perhaps to make fun of his hair. This puts the nice people in the children’s book business in the uncomfortable position of either ignoring the new president or running interference of his destructive qualities and teaching our children to, at best, ignore them, or at worst, emulate them.
Some publishers told Rosman that they had no plans for Trump bios until more could be known about how his presidency turns out. As any overworked grade school teacher (or parent) darn well knows, silence can be golden. Once they are old enough to learn what kind of man he really is, they can then explore the more important and more difficult question: What kind of country are we to allow him to become our president?
This article was originally published at BillMoyers.com
Most presidents have a broad team of advisors whose job it is to carefully weigh domestic and foreign policy decisions. Our current commander in chief prefers watching hours of Fox News and firing off a few missiles in Syria when his favorite anchors report plunging approval ratings. It is, as Paul Krugman writes in Monday's column, governing by publicity stunt—cheap ploys for attention and approval, with no overarching strategy.
The first stunt of the administration came before before Trump was even inaugurated. It seems like a decade in Trump administration years, but it was only a few months ago that he, and worse, the mainstream media, was crowing about how he prevented a Carrier air-conditioning plant from moving 1,100 jobs overseas. In fact, it was more like 700 jobs. But does that really matter when, as Krugman reminds us, "Around 75,000 U.S. workers are laid off or fired every working day, so a few hundred here or there hardly matter for the overall picture. Whatever Mr. Trump did or didn’t achieve with Carrier, the real question was whether he would take steps to make a lasting difference."
The answer is a resounding no. Even corporations and investors, "have decided that the Carrier deal was all show, no substance, that for all his protectionist rhetoric Mr. Trump is a paper tiger in practice." Jobs are still moving to Mexico, the Mexican peso having recovered any post-election losses.
Why confront reality when smoke and mirrors seems to bring better media coverage? This brings us to the Syrian missile strikes, about which Krugman does not hold back: "Showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government’s credibility...The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches."
The worst part is that the U.S. missiles did nothing to weaken the regime Trump blasted in a press conference for using chemical weapons against its own people (never mind that the week before he seemed uninterested in taking any kind of action). In fact, Krugman writes, "A few hours after the attack, Syrian warplanes were taking off from the same airfield, and airstrikes resumed on the town where use of poison gas provoked Mr. Trump into action. No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’s no reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effect on the course of Syria’s civil war."
But one-time actions are Trump's specialty, and the pundits are rewarding him for it. He "becomes president" for simply reading a speech off a teleprompter. He's praised yet again for the missiles, as if a few strikes could compare. This, Krugman admonishes the rest of the media, is a dangerous path: "aside from everything else, think about the incentives this creates. The Trump administration now knows that it can always crowd out reporting about its scandals and failures by bombing someone."
At the beginning of another week in our new reality, Krugman leaves us with this: "Real leadership means devising and carrying out sustained policies that make the world a better place. Publicity stunts may generate a few days of favorable media coverage, but they end up making America weaker, not stronger, because they show the world that we have a government that can’t follow through."
If only anyone in charge were listening.
Read the full column.
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