Category: Uncategorized

1858

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”  – Abraham Lincoln, September 2, 1858

One hundred and sixty two years ago, at the crest of another national crisis, Abraham Lincoln described the American people.  It was during the Senatorial election of 1858, and Lincoln was the candidate of the new Republican Party.  Republicans were not quite an “abolitionist” Party, but they tended towards limiting and ultimately ending slavery.  As Lincoln said, only a week after his “fool the people” phrase: 

“I have no doubt that (slavery) would become extinct, for all time to come, if we but re-adopted the policy of the fathers by restricting it to the limits it has already covered–restricting it from the new territories”.

Lincoln was running against his Illinois rival, Stephen Douglas.  “The Little Giant”, standing 5’4” a full 12” shorter than Lincoln, was the incumbent.  He already had served in the United States Senate for eleven years.  During that time, he made his name as a man who could reach the middle.  His best-known legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing the people of the territories themselves to vote to determine whether to be slave or free states, a concept called popular sovereignty.   This altered the almost forty-year old “Missouri Compromise”, the agreement that drew “a line” across the nation:  north free, south slave.  

Who’s the Fool

Lincoln lost the Senate election, and Douglas returned to Washington as the Democratic Senator from Illinois.  But over the next two years “popular sovereignty” created division, the Dred Scott Decision emboldened the South, and the era of compromise finally ended.  Lincoln and Douglas would compete again, this time for the Presidency in 1860.  And this time, it was Lincoln who won.  We know the rest of that story.

So the question is:  were the American voters of the 1850’s, fooled to  vote for compromise, or were the voters who voted for or against slavery the fools? Lincoln would say that in 1860, the American people stopped being fooled.  However, Lincoln earned less than 40% of the popular vote in a four-way election. 

Modern Fools

I believe in another Presidential characterization of American people: the “righteous might” of Franklin Roosevelt.  For the past several years, our citizens have had to learn to deal with a “fire hose” of Internet information, some of it real, and lots of it faked.  What we thought of as “true fact” in 2012; we now understand was faked by those with an axe to grind, a joke to tell, or even by foreign agents.  

It still goes on today.  We are told that “Wayfair” is selling children as furniture on its website, that wearing masks is the ultimate infringement on our First Amendment right to freedom of expression, and that President Obama abandoned testing of COVID-19.  

But there is a change.  The “fake news” is now an Internet “sport”.  We are titillated by the rumors, the marshaling of disparate facts to create a believable argument.  But we don’t really buy it anymore, just as we stopped believing that President Obama was somehow born in Kenya, not Hawaii.  We were fooled “some of the time,” but we are reaching that “all of the time” moment.

Fools of 2016

And in that way a large minority of Americans was “fooled” by Donald Trump.  Some believed that he was a successful businessman.  We now know, that he squandered billions on bad deals, so much so that no American bank would touch him.  Some believed that Trump understood the “common man”.  We know now that Trump’s only interest was in mouthing the words that gained him votes.  The “common men” cheering at the rallies, were only fodder for Trump’s version of “fake news”.

There were those Americans so disenthralled with the concept of Hillary Clinton as President they took whatever alternative was offered.  They are still there, chanting Benghazi and Pizzagate, full-whole fool swallowers of the Internet conspiracies.  Or there are those who cannot imagine that a woman can fill the role.  They aren’t the fools of the Internet, but rather stuck in a misogynistic era of the 1950’s, that Trump likes to harken back to as “the good old days”.  

And finally there were those supporters of the Grand Old Party, who stepped up and supported the “R” on the ticket even though they had doubts.  Now their doubts have been fully justified.  Whatever else that can be said about President Trump, his maladministration of the COVID-19 pandemic has left America broken.  His continued strategy of pretending it’s going away, playing us a fool, simply makes our condition worse.  

Righteous Might

The American people have been “…fooled some of the time”.  A small portion remain fooled now, the “all of the time” crowd.  But all of the American people are not “fooled all of the time”.  The time has come for them to rise up in their “righteous might” to change the course of our nation, and our history.  

Or, as George W. Bush and The Who said:

“We won’t get fooled again”. 

Football

I am not really that much of a football guy.  I coached for forty years:  Cross Country and Track.  Football was my “escape” after a Cross Country meet on Saturday, or my way to recover on Sunday afternoon.  And when the Cincinnati Bengals, my “hometown” NFL team, had their usual disastrous season, I could turn football off.  There were enough frustrations with my own teams on Saturday without more on Sunday. 

Football was also a “part of the job” as a Dean of Students in the local high school.  Friday nights were work nights.  I seldom saw the game:  I was busy making sure that the “fight under the bleachers” didn’t happen, and that the kids smoking dope in the woods got surprised.  Away games were better.  I’d get a chance to see our kids play, and maybe scout out a new “track star” for the spring.

The Buckeyes

But I live near Columbus, Ohio; home to THE (I think that’s copyrighted) OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY.  If you have any knowledge of college football at all, you know that OSU IS FOOTBALL!!!  And if you live here in town, and want to be a part of any random conversation, you better have a clue what’s going on with the BUCKEYES.  Otherwise, you’re doomed to talking about Ohio weather and traffic construction.

So I have a passing knowledge of college football, and a little better understanding of the NFL.  Both are struggling in this year of pandemic:  struggling to find a way to get on the field.  The Buckeyes just suspended their voluntary on-campus workouts for seven sports teams:  football, men’s and women’s basketball, field hockey, men’s and women’s soccer, and women’s volleyball.  An undisclosed number of athletes have tested positive for COVID-19.

The Ivy League has already decided:  no sports in the fall of 2020.  And the Big Ten, the conference for Ohio State, Michigan, and twelve other major schools (I know, that’s fourteen) has called for League games only, without non-league opponents through this fall season.  That puts the start of the college season for them near October, buying time to see what’s going to happen.

Cash Talks

But keep this in mind:  the Ivy League isn’t making money on football.  But for many of the Big Ten schools, Football is cash.  For OSU it was $57 million last year, with over $31 million in ticket sales at their stadium, the Horseshoe.  So for them, this is about football, athletes, fans, and money, money, money.

The NFL doesn’t plan to open summer training until August, and the schedule is still flexible.  They, like the NBA and baseball, will try to put their players in a bubble, and keep COVID out.  They’ll need some luck for that.

The pro sports could make enough money on television revenues to survive playing to empty stadiums.  If, and that’s the BIG IF, they can keep their players, coaches, and other personnel COVID free in their bubble.  But college football doesn’t have the same revenue structure.  There is a whole lot of TV money, but it’s not like ticket sales profits at Ohio State, or Michigan, or Wisconsin, or Penn State.  

So the Athletic Directors need fans in the stands.  And the fans sure would like to be there, as hundreds of thousands fill the Horseshoe, the Big House, Camp Randall, or Beaver Stadium.  We used to call that a great college game day, but right now there’s a new term for it: a super spreader event.

Politics Aside

Gene Smith, the Athletic Director of Ohio State, led his coaches in urging folks to wear masks if they want to see sports in the fall (Eleven Warriors).  All of the political debate about masks aside, Smith is trying to make wearing a mask a sign of Buckeye loyalty.  Scientists are clear: the current rate of infection will prevent fans in the stands, and maybe even teams down on the turf.

The Ohio State University Athletic Department is not trying to make a political statement.  This isn’t about Fauci or Trump, or even really about the COVID-19 virus.  It’s about whether fans, and communities, are willing to put away their little conspiracies and vanities and politics, and wear masks to slow the spread of infection. 

Slow the spread, and athletes can go to practice.  Slow the spread, and fans might be able to be “socially distant” in the stands. And slow the spread, and maybe THE OSU makes $15 million in ticket sales instead of $31.  That’s more than zero.  Wear an OSU mask, do it for the team!!!!!

And for all of those folks who are demanding that public schools open, five days a week, teachers facing kids in class, guess what?  You too can get a mask with your high school logo (oh yes, my old employer, Watkins Memorial has them).  Wear a mask to slow the infection rate so your kid (or kid brother or sister) can go to “real” school.  And, if you won’t wear a mask for that, wear it so you can watch “Football Friday Night!”   Maybe it’ll be on TV.  Or better yet, so I can go to a Cross Country meet on Saturday.  Social distancing is a little bit easier to do in the woods.

John Legend

Aretha Franklin

Howard University Choir

Black National Anthem

In the past couple of weeks, I learned something new. There is a song many call “The Black National Anthem”.  Lift Every Voice and Sing is a beautiful, “old church hymn” type of song, written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson.  Johnson was an early leader of the NAACP, an author, educator and lawyer from Jacksonville, Florida.  Born in 1871, as a young adult he spent a life-altering summer teaching the children of former slaves in backwoods Georgia.

The NAACP adopted Lift Every Voice and Sing as their anthem in 1917. The first line of the song, like many church hymns, is the title:

Lift ev’ry voice and sing
‘Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty

The lyrics describe the trials of black people in the United States.  It speaks of the past:

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past.

And sings of hope for the future:

‘Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

And faith in God that has carried them through:

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

National Football League

This isn’t new; in fact, it’s one hundred and twenty years old.  But for many white Americans, it’s new to them.  That is another sign that there is an entire narrative of American history and culture that is “hidden” and ignored in their education.   But since they didn’t know, it’s “new” and different.  The song represents change in a time when there is a great deal of resistance in our nation.  

In a relatively small reaction to the killing of George Floyd, the National Football League has announced that in the opening games, Lift Every Voice and Sing will be performed along with the Star Spangled Banner.  This had produced an outcry in social media; a backlash from the same folks who demanded the Confederate Battle Flag be returned to NASCAR events.

America the Beautiful, another anthem of the United States, has been performed at football games for years, including at the 2020 Super Bowl.  The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the unofficial anthem of the Union Army in the Civil War, has been altered to become the “fight song” for the University of Georgia football team.  And at every high school and collegiate game, the crowd stands for the playing of that institution’s alma mater. 

So it’s not like we don’t honor other songs besides the Star Spangled Banner at our sporting events.  We do it all the time.  

Black Players, White Audience

Sixty-eight percent of NFL players are black.  It is an important point of contact between blacks players and white spectators in America.  When San Francisco Quarterback Colin Kaepernick, a black man, kneeled during the Star Spangled Banner in 2016, it created a major crisis.  Kaepernick was protesting the deaths of black men at the hands of the police, and doing it on one of the biggest stages in America.  Stopping Kaepernick and other players from kneeling became a dramatic talking point for the Trump campaign.   

At the end of the season, Kaepernick was out of the league.  Despite his qualifications as a Super Bowl quality Quarterback, he was shut out.  Clearly no NFL team was willing to face the criticism of hiring him.  

With the death of George Floyd and the success of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the NFL has apologized to its players for failing to recognize their legitimate concerns.  But there has been no apology to Kaepernick.  Instead, the League is looking for other ways to get “on the right side” of the issue. 

Lift Every Voice and Sing is a small way for the institution of professional football to recognize the movement that is changing America, and the majority of their own players.  The sad part of that is, it will cause some white Americans to miss the point, and turn away in anger.  Like removing Confederate statues, banning the battle flag in NASCAR, and a single black man kneeling during the National Anthem, it is delivering another message they choose not to hear.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

Lift ev’ry voice and sing
‘Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on ’til victory is won

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
‘Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land

Doug Collins

“A Clock and a calendar” was  the term made famous by Republican Congressman Doug Collins during the Donald Trump Impeachment hearings, so long ago (six months in real time).   Collins constantly referred to it, trying to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democratic majority.  “It’s not a fair investigation,” he’d cry, “They (the majority) have denied the minority and the President representation and due process.  They are controlled by a clock and a calendar”.

What he really meant was that the Democrats in the House were well aware that the closer to the 2020 election they came, the less likely (and more unseemly) the impeachment would be.  The only penalty of conviction from impeachment is removal from office.  As the 2020 election approached, that becomes the ultimate power of the voter, not to be usurped by the Congress.  

Doug Collins wasn’t wrong about that part.  As far as representation was concerned, the President’s representatives refused to cooperate enough to earn participation.  The Supreme Court just ruled that their theory of “Absolute Immunity” from subpoena was false, and that was the issue the Democrats in the House held it as key to giving them a say.  And the Republicans in the House certainly got a lot of “say”.  From Jim Jordan to Louie Gohmert to young Matt Gaetz, and of course from Ranking Minority Member Collins himself; we heard from the Republicans aplenty.

Voter’s Choice

The clock was running, and the calendar turning.   Now, no matter what the President might do it is up to the voters.  Whether he grants a commutation of sentence to Roger Stone for lying to the FBI and Congress, throws Michael Cohen back in jail to keep him silent, or “pardons” Vladimir Putin for putting a bounty on American lives in Afghanistan; the decision will be made by ballot, not Senatorial vote.

But the “clock and calendar” are running for the Trump Campaign as well.  They have found an “event” they cannot falsify, spin, or call “fake news”.  The COVID-19 pandemic is relentless.  They can demand what they want, but the virus doesn’t seem to care.  And the infection numbers are growing, in spite of social media obfuscations and the loyalty of Governors in Arizona and Florida.  

Manafort and Stone

And the clock and calendar were definitely running out for Roger Stone.  He was days away from reporting to the Federal prison system, probably a shaky place to be for a sixty-seven year old man with a portrait of Richard Nixon tattooed on his back.  From Trump’s political standpoint, it would have been better to let Stone serve a few months, until after the election.  That’s because while for Trump’s true enthusiasts Roger Stone’s commutation was well deserved, for those less enthralled it might seem a bit too political and friendly.  It might impact the few who haven’t made up their mind about voting for or against Mr. Trump.  But that really didn’t matter.  Roger Stone didn’t want to go to jail, and he had a choice.

Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort, had been “good soldiers” for Trump.  They had stuck to the story, not giving prosecutors anything they could use against the Trump campaign of 2016.   Manafort even pretended to “cooperate” with prosecutors so he could get more information to share with Trump’s attorneys.  And when that came to light, Manafort went to prison, still closed mouth about Trump 2016.

They would say that they are emulating one of their mentors, G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame.  But Manafort was also indebted to Russian oligarchs.  There might well be a separate threat on his life, keeping his mouth closed to reporters and those who could reduce his sentence.  So he did time, and when the first hints of COVID-19 reached the federal prison system, he was released to home confinement.  He too may receive a pardon or commutation, but it can wait until after November.

Going to Jail

But Stone was going to jail.  If the Trump Administration didn’t find a better way to intervene, Stone could talk.  He could talk about his communications with Wikileaks, he could let the world know about his telephone calls with Trump himself.  And it’s Roger Stone:  so if the facts weren’t “juicy” enough to convince prosecutors to keep him out of jail, he would make up something better.  And that would have an impact on the November election:  a Stone admission of cooperation with Wikileaks as the intermediary for the campaign could influence those few undecided votes. 

Stone represented a threat to the Trump 2020 campaign.  So how to give him what he wants, no jail time, and still keep him obligated to silence?   Loyalty to Trump wasn’t enough anymore.  A full pardon would have freed Stone to say whatever he wanted.  Stone could have written a book, timed to come out in October for maximum sales that would have set him financially for life.  It’s not like Stone’s going to work as a political operative anymore.

A full pardon would have relieved Stone of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.  But a commutation isn’t a pardon; it doesn’t clear the verdict of guilty.  It simply removes the penalty.  Stone can’t “confess” to crimes that he could still be charged for, and he can walk into the Grand Jury and demand immunity for any acts he might have done.  Stone’s commutation keeps him out of jail, but still on the hook.  Exactly where Trump wants him.

Time’s Up

Because the clock and the calendar have run out for the Trump campaign.  They are facing a mountain far steeper even than the one they climbed in August of 2016.  And, regardless (or irregardless – it’s in the dictionary now!) of the politics, competence in dealing with COVID will be the ultimate determiner of who wins in November.  The clock has already run out for Trump on that.

Warren G Harding of Ohio

“Return to Normalcy” was the great campaign-rallying cry of Republican Senator Warren G. Harding. A native of Ohio, Harding didn’t leave his front porch in Marion as he campaigned for the Presidency.  He was running against another Ohioan, Democratic Governor James Cox of Dayton.  Neither was the acclaimed nominee of their party. Harding won the nomination on the ninth ballot after a backroom deal was cut:  the origin of the term “smoke filled room”.   Cox’s nomination at the Democratic Convention took forty-four ballots.  

While Harding ultimately won the Presidential election, both Vice Presidential candidates would become President soon.  Calvin Coolidge of Vermont would succeed to the Presidency when Harding died of a heart attack at fifty-seven years old, only two years into his term of office.  And Cox’s running mate was the thirty-nine year old Franklin Roosevelt, twelve years away from his successful Presidential run.

Voter Fatigue

“Return to Normalcy” resonated with the American people.  The past eight years under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson included rapid financial growth, World War I and the Flu Epidemic of 1918 (not 1917 as the current President continues to say). It also saw the growth of American radicalism and anarchism, the creation of a Socialist Party, debate over the new League of Nations, and, probably most importantly to the voters, a post war recession.

“Normalcy”:  back to the “good old days” when things were calmer.  Even activist President Teddy Roosevelt, in office from 1901 to 1909, didn’t stir America up as much as the events of the Wilson Administration.   

Harding let Coolidge do the campaigning across the nation, but he didn’t invent the “front porch campaign”.  Another Ohioan, Republican Governor William McKinley, successfully won the Presidency from his porch in Canton, Ohio in 1896.  In fact, Harding modeled the front of his home after McKinley’s, perhaps foreshadowing his own campaign.

And Harding was careful not to say too much, or the wrong thing.  Famed writer H.L. Mencken grew frustrated with Harding’s statements:

“…(the statement) reminds me of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a kind of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm … of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is balder and dash.”

Harding knew he had a winning formula, and he wasn’t going to be pushed into saying something that might screw it up.  He won with over sixty percent of the popular vote.

Biden’s Porch

Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware has a lovely front porch.  In fact, it has a lovely back porch as well.  Biden has a beautiful home in Wilmington, and another beautiful place in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware on the Atlantic.  It has porches too.

Joe Biden’s campaign slogan isn’t “Return to Normalcy”.  In fact, there isn’t an official slogan for the Biden Campaign yet, but a front-runner is a portion of Biden’s speech announcing his candidacy:  “Restore the Soul of America”.   That certainly is the modern equivalent of “Return to Normalcy”, and Biden is well aware that the election of 2020 is as much a referendum on Donald Trump, as the election of 1920 was about Woodrow Wilson.

Trump’s Failure

The biggest Trump failure is his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Again and again, the President has acted in ways that serve to increase the severity of disease.  Every campaign rally, all the pressure to open schools and the economy, every time the President denigrates the impact of COVID on America, he increases the risk of more illness and death.

So Joe Biden does the opposite.  He refuses to have public rallies, warning of the danger of “super spreader” events.  He religiously wears a mask, not just because of his age and risk, but because it highlights the President’s cavalier disregard.  Biden has laid out plans for a national strategy to combat the epidemic.  He knows how to mobilize the nation to respond to the virus.  But mostly, he sits back and lets Donald Trump shoot himself in the foot.  

Biden knows how to shoot too.  He’s found his own foot, sometimes inserted in his own mouth, plenty of times in his fifty plus year political career.  But Biden knows that if he literally sits on his porch and lets Trump go, he keeps Trump in the spotlight.  And that’s bad for Trump.

Fatigue a Century Later

The voters of 2020 are just as fatigued as the ones a century ago.  It’s not all bad news, but our nation has been on a rollercoaster since the contested election of 2000.  Then, the Presidency was determined by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court.  Since then there’s been 9-11, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and the first African-American President.  We’ve had the Great Recession under Bush, then a gradual recovery under Obama.  

We almost elected a woman to the Presidency.  But instead, we ended up with a Reality TV Star.  We had the great boom under Trump that seemed to impact the stock market, but not the average American.  And all of the craziness of the Trump Administration, characterized by the term “governing through chaos”.  And now, it’s the pandemic.

Americans are tired of the constant upheaval.  They are frustrated with a government that doesn’t seem to work.  We are looking to “Restore the Soul of America”.  It sounds calming:  a “return to normalcy”.  

Joe should stay on the porch.   It’s his clear path to victory.

The 2020 Presidential election was going to be the most consequential choice Americans would make since the election of 1860, the one that preceded the Civil War. America was faced with a clear choice:  endorse Donald Trump, or turn away from his outdated and extreme views.

Laissez Faire

The current President’s philosophy is one that has played through our history.  From William McKinley to Herbert Hoover, Donald Trump has followed their example of laissez faire capitalism, assured in the faith that what’s “good for General Motors” is good for the country.  He’s also used the blunt instrument of tariffs and trade wars to try to bully other nations into line. 

In the Reagan years it was called “trickle down” economics.  Put the money in at the top, to the wealthiest Americans, and like a “drip” coffee pot, eventually it would drip down to the poorest.  It didn’t work in Reagan’s years; but what it did do was start a trend in “income inequality” that results in today’s extremes.  The top one percent of Americans owns more wealth than the entire middle class (Forbes). 

And Mr. Trump has corrupted the Teddy Roosevelt view of “speak softly, but carry a big stick”.  Mr. Trump does everything but speak softly, streaming tweets like vomit from a drunk, and while he brags about his “big stick” (the military), he continually demonstrates his disdain for them, and is unwilling to actually use their power.

Racism

But the perhaps the most significant trend of the Trump Administration is one towards white extremism.  Stephen Miller, a known white supremacist, is a key advisor to the President (NPR).  The policies they have shaped in immigration and civil rights are ones that are more familiar to the America of the “Know Nothings” in the 1850’s, or the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920’s. 

 Mr. Trump is not directly to blame for the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent civil unrest, but his statements, often written by Miller, gave license to police brutality.  And he now is trying to use the unrest to agitate his supporters, spouting Richard Nixon’s dog whistle line of “law and order” as a way to suppress minority rights. 

And this President has made it clear that there are “no rules” or norms that will restrict his behavior.  His campaign sought aid from foreign nations, and he trampled on the independence of his own Justice Department.  He had dismantled the internal checks and balances of many executive departments by firing their Inspector Generals, and brought a “Roy Cohn” in as his Attorney General.  He is a President of the United States who was impeached on clear evidence of using the finances of the United States to further his own personal political goals.  And now, we find he has been silent as the Russian government placed bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

The Oath

All of these issues and many more (health insurance, for example) would have made for a lively Presidential campaign.  But now they pale before the President’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, and the ensuing economic collapse.  

The Presidential oath is sworn in front of the nation at the inauguration, and calls for the President to “…preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”.  To do that, the President must first protect the nation.  Donald Trump, forty-fifth President of the United States, failed in that task like no President has ever done before.  He ignored warnings about the COVID-19 virus from his intelligence and scientific advisors at a time when it might have been possible to control the spread.

And he did it for political reasons.  He didn’t have time for a pandemic; he had an impeachment removal to avoid and an election to win.  And he didn’t have time for problems with China; he was too busy negotiating his “fantastic deal”.   So by the time there was a federal response to the virus, it was too late, and too embedded.

A Clear Failure

COVID-19 was not Donald Trump’s fault.  But the failure of the United States to react and control the disease is at his doorstep.  It only takes looking at other nations in the world to see what might have been. France, Germany, and most of the rest of the European Union have COVID under control.  Even the United Kingdom and Italy, who had a difficult time with the disease, now are reopening carefully.

But here in the United States, the President applied his “laissez faire” philosophy to dealing with disease.  He ignored it, and then after it was too late to control it, passed responsibility for action to state governors.  He then proceeded to hamstring the governor’s responses, causing the disease to have even more opportunity to spread.  His malpractice hasn’t stopped yet:  even yesterday he demanded, yes demanded, that  public schools open.  This even though his own scientists tell him that they could provide a hotbed for COVID transmission in the community.

Campaign 2020

But if schools don’t open, parents can’t go to work.  If they aren’t working, the economy cannot begin to recover before November.  And if the economy isn’t getting better, then Mr. Trump doesn’t think he can win reelection.  So open “the damn” schools; that’s the only choice the Trump Administration wants to offer.

Joe Biden’s not campaigning from his basement.  He’s actually in the “garden room” in his home in Delaware.  And he should stay there.  Donald Trump is so busy shooting himself in the foot Biden doesn’t need to do anything.

Wealthy Chicagoan

One wealthy man in Chicago had his fortune protected from the Stock Market Crash of 1929.  As the economy tanked, many workers lost their jobs.  The banks closed, and savings vanished. Thousands of Chicagoans were left without a way to pay the bills, cover the rent, or even buy food.  

But the wealthy man in Chicago still had money and felt their pain.  He opened up a soup kitchen that served thousands perhaps their only meal of the day.  He also made sure that clothing stores took care of those who couldn’t afford the literal shirts on their backs.  

But there are no statues to this generous and worthy man in Chicago.  Despite the lack of city gratitude, we still all know his name, albeit for a somewhat different reason:  Al Capone. 

His example serves two points.  First, it doesn’t take a monument to remember history. Even the most vicious criminal, who used a baseball bat to kill two associates at a dinner, is not forgotten.  And second:  even evil people sometimes do something worthy of praise.  Capone is remembered in Chicago; in fact, he visage is replicated in the wax museum.  But he’s not handing out meals.  

The Dam Tour 

(The dam video)

Herbert Hoover was a proponent of the Colorado River dam long before he was President of the United States. As Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Commerce, he pressed for the structure, both as a water conservation measure, and as a way to control floods in the California valleys where the river flowed.  It took nine years, and his election to the Presidency to get it done, as well as complex deals with three states and Mexico for the water rights.  

And the dam itself took five more years to build, creating Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States (when its full).  Ninety-six men lost their lives in the construction process. When it was completed, Hebert Hoover was out, a failed Presidency in the light of the Great Depression.  The new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicated the dam on September 30th 1935, with 10,000 spectators there for the ceremony.   But Roosevelt was not interested in honoring his predecessor.  The engineering marvel was called the Boulder Dam for the first twelve years of its existence.

It wasn’t until FDR was gone, and Republicans gained control of the post-war Congress, that the name was changed to the Hoover Dam.  So Hoover’s role wasn’t forgotten.

Call it What?

Mt. McKinley was the highest peak in North America.  While it took until the late 1800’s for humans to know that, it was there for hundreds of thousands of years before.  McKinley peaks at 20,310 feet high, and was named in 1896 by a random gold miner who arrived at its base.  He liked the Governor of Ohio, a Republican candidate for the Presidency.  William McKinley won the election, and the name stuck.

But it’s the highest mountain in North America, so it’s not like it was “discovered” in 1896.  The native peoples of Alaska were well aware of the peak that they called Denali.  Alaskans wanted to restore the original name to the mountain for decades, but Congress blocked the change. Politics being politics, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Congressman Ralph Regula of Canton, Ohio led the campaign for “McKinley”.  President McKinley was a native of Canton; his tomb is located there.  

In 1980 the National Park surrounding the mountain was renamed Denali National Park, but the mountain itself remained Mt. McKinley.  It wasn’t until 2015 during the Obama Administration that the name Denali was restored to the mountain itself.

Erasing

History wasn’t erased by not placing a statue of Al Capone on the Magnificent Mile or down by the “Bean” in Chicago.  And Capone’s good acts could not erase the criminal actions of his life.  No one forgot the role that Herbert Hoover played in the building of the dam that now bears his name.  Politics prevented his immediate recognition, but Hoover lived to see his name placed on the dam he was so instrumental in developing.

And the almost random naming of a mountain in Alaska for the Governor of Ohio running for President took over a hundred years to undo.  But today, it is the ancestral name of Denali now graces the maps, the Park, and the Mountain itself.

Who Writes Your Story

(Hamilton, of course)

Names change, and monuments and statues go up and come down.  They are not history:  they symbolize a view of history.  That’s why it is perfectly appropriate to take a statue of Robert E. Lee down in Richmond, while one remains on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg.  It’s not erasing history, in fact, its laying history bare for all to see.  Lee was a fine soldier, and an honorable man.  But, as modern day General Stanley McChrystal laid out in his essay explaining his own changing view of the Confederate general:

“Lee’s own statements on slavery are conflicting, but his overall record is clear. Although he repeatedly expressed his theoretical opposition to slavery, he in fact reflected the conventional thinking of the society from which he came and actively supported the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Well before joining the Confederacy, Lee loathed abolitionists, and his feelings hardened as the Civil War dragged on” (Atlantic).

Lee’s statue in Richmond and other towns was erected as part of re-writing history in the 1890’s, the revisionist movement to erase the stain of slavery.  But just because it was rewritten in the past, doesn’t mean it can’t be revealed in the present.  McKinley became Denali.  Boulder became Hoover.  And Lee’s statues to racism should come down.  His place in history won’t be erased.  But we can remember him for what he really did.

Pandemic Reality

We are in the middle of a global pandemic.  As much as many American leaders have tried to deny it, the growing number of COVID-19 diagnoses, over three million, and deaths, almost 133,000, tell the tale.  The infection rate is growing, particularly in those states that seemed to try to deny that the virus was serious.  The newest “stat” that helps to reveal the increase: the number of new infections diagnosed in each state per 100,000 people every day (WAPO).  Arizona is the “winner” right now, with fifty-five new cases per 100,000.

By the way, I’ve used the quote from my old boss, Pete Nix, before, “Figures lie and liars figure”.  And yes, I’m figuring.  So do the COVID deniers, who now are boasting on social media that the “death rate” is going down:  “Woo-Hoo”!!!  As more and more folks get infected, yes fewer of them are dying.  But drop by any hospital in Houston or Phoenix.  They are at capacity, and physicians are making life and death treatment choices multiple times a day. Doesn’t sound like a “Woo-Hoo” moment to me. 

We Blew It

The European countries seem to have the virus under control.  So does Canada.  Mexico seems to be in trouble.  But the big world “failure” in COVID-19 control is the United States of America.  How do we know for sure?  Well, for the first time in my memory, Americans can’t travel out of the country in most cases.  Europe doesn’t want us, neither does Canada, and Mexico is moving to block the border as well.  They don’t want Americans, because they don’t want the brushfire of COVID to spread.  Can’t blame them.

But we are desperate to get back to normal.  We want baseball and football; we want to go to restaurants, beaches and bars.  And for many Americans, we absolutely want our kids to go back to school in the fall.

School Bells

There’s good reason for that.  I spent a career as a public school teacher.  Most kids learn better in a classroom in a school.  They need to be around their peers, and taught be professionals, in person. And most parents need their kids to go to school, so they can go to work.  Every good educator can make a strong case that schools work, and kids need to be there.

I had the surprising “honor” of being back in a classroom when the COVID crisis began.  I took on a long-term substitute position, and started on March 9^th.  A week later, we were checking out of the building, and I entered a whole new world of online teaching, Google’s classroom application, and Zoom meetings.  So I have some first hand knowledge of what it’s like to be a “remote” teacher.  And, for most kids, it’s not as good as the real thing in person.  It’s not as good for most teachers either.

So, in a normal world, school bells should be ringing in August.  Parents should be shopping for back-to-school, and teachers getting their classrooms and lesson plans ready for the year.  But it ain’t a normal year.

Egg Crate Incubators

We know that when we put people together in close groups, we dramatically increase the rate of COVID-19 infection.  Most have carefully tried to control their “circles” of exposure, but “normal” school will throw all of that out the window.  Try passing through the hallway of any school at the beginning or the end of the day – there is no such thing as “social distancing” there.  

And our schools “egg-crate” design puts dozens of kids together in relatively small rooms.  Sure there’s the new nursery rhyme: “Your mask helps me, my mask helps you, social distancing helps us both, and staying at home helps us all”.  And teachers are capable of keeping masks on kids, particularly in middle and high school.  We stopped them from chewing gum for years, and the mask won’t stick to the bottom of the desk.

But in the end, it doesn’t seem like just wearing masks will be enough.  We can reduce the number of kids in a building, but by doing so, we are keeping kids at home.  “Educationese” has a new term: “hybrid learning”.  Two days in school, three days online at home:  that’s the proposed new school week.

We can all “rest easy”.  The kids are going to transmit COVID-19, until we have a vaccine there will be no way to avoid it.  No matter the prevention efforts, there are going to be outbreaks.  Any given year’s flu season is evidence of that.  But kids don’t seem to be too impacted by COVID, so it’s OK – right?

The Staff

There are two major issues that make this NOT OK.  Issue one:  kids go home after school.  Sure it’d be all right for most kids to get COVID and get through it.  But when they go home, they’re going to give it to Mom and Dad, and maybe Grandma and Papa.  That’s not going to be OK, as Mom and Dad head to work before they know they are infected, and increase the spread. And while kids normally have good outcomes from COVID, their parents, well not so much, and their grandparents may be facing death sentences.  So there’s that.

Issue two:  what about all of those adults who are standing in front of those kids in class?  What about the teachers, and the custodians, bus drivers, principals, and support personnel?  They are the age of the parents and grandparents.  How much risk are they supposed to assume?

Get a Shot

I know medical personnel have been assuming risk for COVID for months.  So have other “essential workers”.  But few other workers are set into the “hotbed” of a school environment.   As a substitute teacher last year, I got a flu shot for the first time.  I did it for three reasons.  First, I hadn’t been in a school environment for a few years, and I lost my “natural immunity” built up through forty years of hanging out with kids, sick or not.

Second, as an older teacher, I know I’m more vulnerable to the illnesses that I would have ignored in my earlier years.  And third, I have a wife at home, not seasoned by years of exposure.  I needed to protect her from whatever was floating around the building.

But there is no vaccine for COVID.  And all of the risks that convinced me to get the flu shot last year are compounded by the potentially fatal illness, for me, and my family.

So that’s easy for me, don’t substitute until there’s a vaccine.  But what about the other teachers who aren’t retired, and are required to go back to work?  What sacrifices are we asking them to make?

Public Education

It’s public education in the United States.  You know there won’t be the resources to reasonably protect the kids or the adults.  Will there be a new mask for each kid each day?  Or even for the kids who “forgot”?  And when they take kids temperatures at the front door, how are the kids getting off the bus going to get back home?  For parents already stressed by a shaky economy, whose going to leave work because the kid’s at 99.7?

What happened in the “old days” before last March?  Kids went to school with fevers, and when the school personnel found out, the kids hung out in the “clinic” until parents arrive to get them – maybe for hours.  But you can’t do that in a COVID world; they can’t be in the building.  

I don’t have many good answers to all my questions.  What I can say is this.  We better be ready to do online schooling, and we better be ready to do it better than we did before.  Because we didn’t do what Europe did.  We didn’t make the sacrifices to stop the disease.  And the price to pay is that we are going to live with it until the vaccine arrives.

So better get a decent computer and high-speed Internet.  Your kids are going to need it.

Revelation

This is an era of revelation, in the truest sense of the word. We are “revealing” to the world, and to ourselves, the reality of American history. Like any honest reckoning, it is painful, not the childhood story we remember and want it to be. George Washington didn’t chop down the cherry tree, though many “Muricans” want to believe in our historical fairy tales. Now, from those who are descendants of the suffered, we are hearing out loud some of the searing, honest, truth.

President Trump intentionally emphasized these revelations by his actions on Fourth of July weekend.  First, he went to Mt. Rushmore to give a speech and create a spectacle.  It was all summed up in one photo, the President and the First Lady standing on the stage, the monumental faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt staring over the scene. 

Six Grandfathers

Mr. Trump gave a speech defending the Founding Fathers, the mythical story of “Murica,” and defending the “right” of privilege.  And he did it at the “Six Grandfathers”, the Lakota name for the peak renamed “Rushmore” by the men who violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.  The treaty guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux for their exclusive use.  It lasted almost six years, before a brash young Colonel George Custer took his Seventh Cavalry in to “protect” the miners and settlers who were breaking the terms of the agreement.  

We know how that turned out for Custer, but the real tragedy is that the sacred land of the Lakota was soon lost to them forever.  So Mr. Trump’s appearance, driving away the Native American protestors and mandating fireworks in spite of the threat of forest fires, just amplified the point.  ‘Murica is for winners:  the Lakota were the losers, in 1874, and today.  That’s what our “history” should be.

Immigrants

America is a miraculous nation.  There is an immensely positive story to tell of American exceptionalism:  a nation founded by immigrants, searching for a better way of life.  Emma Lazarus defined it well in “The New Colossus”:  

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

Immigrants, both voluntary and involuntary, built our “more perfect union”.   That’s the story we have learned.  But in this recent era of revelation, we are being held to the “lightning flame” of our original sin.  Our nation was built upon the bodies of the aboriginal peoples, the “Indians” as Columbus called them, even though he was far from India.   Thank you, Mr. President, for making that so clear by ignoring it completely at Six Grandfathers.

Slavery 

On this Fourth of July, I watched a 1972 movie about the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  1776 glosses over many of the Founding Fathers imperfections (though their interest in sex was made abundantly clear).  But it does confront the second original sin of “our more perfect union”, slavery.  Benjamin Franklin laid out Founding Fathers choice outright when John Adams threatened to lose the vote for independence over slavery:  “…how dare you risk our revolution”. 

 And John Rutledge, delegate from South Carolina made sure that everyone knew their complicity.  Yes, it’s the men of the South who owned the slaves, but it’s the Boston merchants of the North who make “shillings” in the “Triangle Trade”.  Bibles and rum to Africa, Slaves and Bibles to the West Indies, molasses back to Boston for rum, silver in the pockets of the Northern traders.  The colonies depended on slavery, even from the very start, from South to North.  No region was innocent. (If you’ve got the stomach for raw honesty – here’s the Rutledge song of the Triangle Trade).

Slaves, the “involuntary immigrants”, were as much a part of our “more perfect union” as the Germans, and the Irish, and the Italians and the Chinese.  Their labor built America; slave hands set the bricks of the White House and the Capitol. Their sweat and blood is literally the foundation of our government.

Disrespect

And Washington DC is almost 50% African American.  The mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, a Black woman, is tasked with trying to control the COVID-19 pandemic in her town.  Common sense dictates that in a pandemic, social distancing and masks reduce the spread of the virus.  It’s also commonsense that large crowds should be avoided.  And that’s what the Mayor has said.  

But the President determined that there would be a National Fireworks display on the Mall in Washington, and that there would be crowds for him to speak to.  So there was an air show on the Fourth at the National Mall, and a Presidential speech, and not one but two sets of fireworks.  The fireworks “bracketed” the speech.  I imagine they thought it would give Mr. Trump a better crowd.

Hard to figure who “won”:  the Mayor or the President.  There were fewer people than the normal Fourth of July crowd, and most who came showed up for the second set of fireworks, after the President’s speech.  But it was clear that the President disrespected the Mayor, and the majority-minority city.  He did that with full knowledge of the message it sends.

Good Old Days

Mr. Trump, in both speeches, called for a return to the “good old days” when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America (Trump even remembered it was 1492) and the slaves were happy on the plantations.  That mythology has long passed by:  even back in the 1960’s I learned that as far as Europeans were concerned, Leif Erickson came to North America far before Columbus mislabeled his charts, and that the “Indians” didn’t really sell Manhattan for twenty-four dollars worth of beads and trinkets.  

It is no accident that a portrait of Andrew Jackson now overlooks the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.  Jackson acted without regard for human rights.  He was a slave owner, and the prime mover behind the Indian Removal, only a part of which was the Trail of Tears.  Jackson saw himself as a general in charge of a nation.  When the Supreme Court, led by venerable Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled against him; Jackson said, “John Marshall has made his decision, let him enforce it”.

Trump’s Strategy

Can’t you see Mr. Trump saying the same to John Roberts should they require him to turn over his tax returns?  Or release those held in the border “camps”?  Or demand that he vacate the White House after Joe Biden’s inauguration?

President Trump has determined that his political strategy is that white people want to go back to the 1950’s.  We recognized it in 2016.  In the first month of Trump World  I wrote about it in Trump World and the Beaver.   But in 2020, he is doubling down on that emphasis, willingly giving up any façade of recognizing discrimination and altering “the truth” to embolden his minority base of white people to come out and vote. 

He is encouraging hate, and lies, and privilege:  all in plain sight.  He doesn’t want a multi-cultural America.  That America won’t vote for him.  He’s settling for ‘Murica – because they want Trump.

Politics

The reality of American politics is that sometimes your candidates win, and sometimes your candidates lose.  Get involved and committed, and the wins are incredible.  That same commitment means that the losses are even more devastating.

But the other reality of American politics is that sometimes we have to compromise, to take less than we want, both in our policies and in our candidates.  Bill Clinton was that kind. He was a tremendous disappointment as a Democrat.  Sure, he was better than George Bush Sr., or Bob Dole, or Ross “Can I Finish?” Perot.  But Bill Clinton was as moderate a Democrat as they come, really Republican-lite.  In fact, he helped drive the Republican Party to the “right”, because he absconded with their positions in the center.  

Clinton

And, of course, Bill Clinton “sullied” the Presidency.  Impeachment and removal was definitely too much, especially when driven by three Republican leaders:  one who cheated on his wife with cancer, another who just cheated on his wife, and a third who molested the boys he coached in wrestling.  They were Republicans:  ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, Speaker-elect Bob Livingston who replaced him, and Dennis Hastert, the Speaker who ultimately got the job.  They definitely lived in “glass houses” and shouldn’t have thrown stones.  

And Clinton should have resigned.  It would have been the honorable thing to do.  But he didn’t, and Al Gore, his Vice President and the Democratic candidate in 2000 took “the heat” from the American public.  Gore won the popular vote, but, like Trump in 2016, George W Bush managed to eke out an Electoral College victory.  The Supreme Court, in a party line 5 to 4 vote, stopped the count in Florida giving the election to Bush. 

Bush

So George W Bush became the President of the United States, and perhaps worse, Dick Cheney became the Vice President.  What was “Republican-lite” under Clinton, became hardcore American “might makes right” under Bush-Cheney.  

As a Democrat it was all too much to swallow.  The almost panicked, bug-eyed vote counter in Palm Beach County, searching for “hanging chads” seemed to characterize the whole election.  Bush felt illegitimate, a President by the choice of five Republicans on the Supreme Court, not the American people.

But there was one saving grace.  If you didn’t like the President in the White House, there was a much better one on TV. Martin Sheen played Jed Bartlet, the Democratic President in the The West Wing, and for seven years helped us remember what “big D” Democracy was all about. 

The West Wing

While Bush was banning “partial birth” abortions, giving trillions of dollars to the already rich, and costing senior citizens with the Medicare drug “donut hole”, the cast of The West Wing was pursuing better policies for America.  They too had to compromise, and take only a portion of what they hoped to achieve.  But they, unlike Dick Cheney, listened to America, even the crazies on “Big Block of Cheese” day, and made you feel like the country could be good again.

When 9-11 hit, there were the first hours when Bush was shuttled from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska.  Who was in charge?  Dick Cheney seemed to be running things, from the basement of the White House or some undisclosed location.  It wasn’t until that lone plane with fighter escort passed overhead, that the President returned to take command.  And when he spoke at Ground Zero in New York, and then at the Islamic Center in Washington, we started to have some confidence in our leadership.

The West Wing helped nursed us through the attack as well.  The first show back after the attack, Isaac and Ishmael, helped educate the nation about who really attacked us.  The simple equation:  “Islamic Extremists to Islam = KKK to Christianity,” explained a lot.  I used it in class later on.

Obama

So for six of the long years of George W. Bush, including another heartbreaking defeat with John Kerry in 2004, The West Wing helped get me through.  And when The West Wing left us in 2006,  they did so with the first Hispanic President, Matt Santos and a Republican Secretary of State, Arnold Vinick, the close loser in the Presidential race.  The show also left us with real life sorrow, as the venerable Chief of Staff turned Vice Presidential candidate, Leo McGarry, died in real life of a massive heart attack.  And so he did on the show, on election night.  We mourned both.

Did life imitate art, or art imitate life?  Barack Obama, the first African-American President, won in 2008.  And while the next eight years had frustrations, both with the President, and more often with the Republican led Congress, there wasn’t the need for a theatrical alternative to the reality of the White House.  Yes they compromised, and they made mistakes in the Obama Administration, but like The West Wing, the muddled through in the right direction.

Trump

And then came the world of Donald Trump, and the ugly, bitter, down in the dirt election of 2016.  Like 2000, the vote was so close.  Hillary won the popular vote, Trump the Electoral College.  But for the thumb of Jim Comey on the scale on October 28^th, perhaps we would have had four more years of Democrats.  But Comey did what he did, probably because the investigation would have leaked anyway, and Trump was President.

It wasn’t a TV show that helped me through this political existential crisis.  Instead, it was a Broadway production, a musical of all things, grounded in what American democracy (little ‘d’) might be.  A “hip-hop” version of the life of Alexander Hamilton, with the roles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the all-white founding fathers played indiscriminately by African-American, Hispanic, or white folks.  When I heard that description originally I thought it was a joke, some kind of farce.  

Hamilton

But then I heard the songs, and I caught the spirit of the story.  In a time when immigrants were being locked up at the border, their children ripped away, Hamilton was describing immigrants, “We get the job done,” helping start America.  The Trump Era, when government seemed nothing except a self-serving way to increase the profits of the rich, and most importantly the Trump family, there was the story of the sacrifice “for the Revolution”.

It’s a story of strong women and flawed men.  But most importantly, it’s a story of hope.

Hope is what I sorely needed for the past three years of Trump.  I saw the touring show of Hamilton twice, first in Cleveland, and then later in Columbus.  We were headed back to Cleveland for a third time, when the pandemic changed our plans.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author and original lead in the Broadway show, is very much aware of the impact of his creation.  It is no surprise then, that in the midst of the pandemic, the original cast Broadway version of the movie was released for the Fourth of July.

Friday night, my wife and I had a “pandemic” date night.  We had early drinks, shrimp cocktail, and filet mignon.  Then it was onto Hamilton, a show we know now by heart.  But it was even better.  If immigrants “get the job done”, then the original Broadway cast really does it even better.  We soared, and cried, and were uplifted by their performances, and the message of Hamilton.   It once again helped get us through this tragic political time.

It gave us hope.

I hope we won’t need on the Fourth of July next year.

Another in the “Out My Window” series about life in the COVID-19 pandemic

Shopping

So we ventured forth into Columbus yesterday.  While we haven’t been “hermits” for the past few months, we haven’t gone into the city too often. Recently our trips have been going to some woods or abandoned factories to try to trap lost dogs.  But today, as we travelled through town, we heard the news from Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine.  On a COVID crisis scale of 1 to 4, Franklin County (that’s Columbus and the surrounding suburbs) is at a ‘3’, and seems headed to ‘4’.  Four is the worst, back to the lockdown mode of March.  I don’t know what that means as far as businesses are concerned, but I expect restaurants and bars will be so limited that they are either forced to close by the state, or by the economics.

We were out buying a new hot tub.  For those who remember the days of track team parties and Cross Country winter runs at five in the morning, after twenty-one years my old hot tub finally bit the dust.  There are lots of memories and scars on that thing.  It’s onto a new one, and it will be here on Monday.  But the old standing invitation to use it anytime, even three in the morning or during a snow storm, isn’t in effect.  Not, at least, for a while:  not until COVID-19 is no longer a big part of all of our lives.

Not Normal

And, for only the second time since the fifteenth of March, we ate at a restaurant.  We were outside, on the patio, carefully placed away from others.  It wouldn’t really have mattered; three o’clock isn’t rush hour in most places, and certainly not at Fado’s Irish Pub.  But it still felt good to be out, to be drinking beer from the tap (Harp’s – it’s summer) and eating food someone else made “right there”.   But with the virus growing, it’s probably like that March 15^th meal… the last time out for a while.

One of our favorite places to visit is a little fishing town called Sebastian, Florida.  We liked it so much, we spent the winter camped nearby (camper, not tent!!) a couple of years ago.  The prime nightspot in Sebastian is Captain Hiram’s Hotel and Restaurant, along with the “Sandbar” bar.  Just got an email:  first a restaurant employee was diagnosed with COVID and the restaurants were closed. Now a hotel worker has it too.  Captain Hiram’s Resort is closed for the unforeseeable future.

Figures Don’t Lie

The numbers are staggering:  50,000 new cases of COVID-19 in the United States — every day.  Sure we are testing more people.  But more people are “failing” the tests too.  Statistically speaking if you test more, you should have a lot more negatives.  But that’s not what’s happening.  In places that tried to ignore the first onslaught of COVID, like Florida, and Texas and Arizona, now hospitals are getting maxed out with patients.  And it’s not just a “red state” phenomenon. California is also seeing staggering growth in disease diagnosis.  

2,787,038 Americans have been diagnosed so far.  130,906 have died.  You do the math – but to save time – it’s about 4.6%.   That’s 2300 deaths per 50,000 diagnosed.  And the number diagnosed is growing exponentially (ncov2019.live) (WAPO). 

We are far, far from over the COVID pandemic.  In fact, it seems we are really just beginning. 

Heigh Ho Silver!!

There is some good news.  President Trump yesterday actually said, “…I’m all for masks”.  That’s a sea change from the “I don’t need one” that we’ve heard for the past four months.  Now, he thinks it makes him, “…look like the Lone Ranger”.  That’s fine if it works for him.  And I’ve already seen movement among his devout supporters, who until now have spent paragraphs on social media trying to disprove the value of masks.  All of a sudden, they’re wearing them.  If mask wearing stops being a Red/Blue symbol of ideology, and starts being the “human” thing to do, I guess I don’t care how it happens.

Wearing a mask is the right thing to do, though nowhere near a perfect “preventative”.  Your mask helps me, my mask helps you, social distancing helps us both, and staying at home helps us all.  I know there are folks who can’t tolerate an N-95 mask.  So use a bandana.  And I have a good friend who cannot hear, and reads lips.  Masks cut her off from the spoken world.  Our world needs to accommodate her needs.  Social distancing and pulled down masks can work while we keep her in the conversation.

Play with COVID

We’ve missed the time when we could “stop the virus”.  Now we have to wait until we have a cure, and a vaccine.  And for those who cruelly say, “…well we’re all going to get it anyway, so let’s get it over with”:  I hope it’s not your mother, or wife, or father or son that can’t “beat the odds” and dies.  

And while I’m ranting, stop making fun of the college kids in Tuscaloosa.  They had a “COVID Party”, like the anti-vaxxers “chicken pox parties”.  One person has the virus and everyone paid into the pot.  The next person diagnosed wins the cash.  Let’s hope they don’t win the big “jackpot in the sky”.  The story reeks of “privilege”, the privilege of ignoring science.  That got us in this mess in the first place.  Sure they’re kids and they’re being stupid.  But there are plenty of elders who’ve been just as stupid about this too.  At least someone will get “silver” in this deal.

Home Bound

It’s tough to travel:  how do you stay in a hotel, or eat in a restaurant? Yes, we can haul the camper, but just being “on the road” means we are going to be in more “social contact”.  And if we can’t go into the local pizza place, or the neighborhood bar, or the “Piggly Wiggly” grocery store without worrying, or creating worry, it’s just not as much fun.  

So we’re going to hang here at home.  We’ve got a new “foster” puppy, but the “foster” title fell away pretty quick.  She’s won a place on the bed, and in our hearts.  “Keelie” is the newest member of our pack.  And we keep doing home improvement projects.  The utility room is redone, the garage is insulated and shelved, and the new hot tub is on the way.  The salesman said that seems to be the “way of the world” right now.  Everyone is doing home projects:  what else can they do?  He’s selling hot tubs and outdoor furniture so fast that folks are on waiting lists for months.   

“Months” is probably about the right amount of time.  It will be months until a potential vaccine can begin to put an end to COVID.  Months before we can have a national strategy for dealing with the crisis.  And months before we can even start thinking about “back to normal”.  

Guess we’ll be hanging here at home, playing with Keelie and soaking in the new hot tub.

At the suggestion of a good and old friend, here’s a “what-if” story!!!!  There’s a lot to talk about – you can check out part one here: The Clinton Years – Part One.  So here’s part two: 

In the Year 2020 

Can’t help that this song got stuck in my head (In the Year 2525)

Impeachment

It was towards the end of 2019. The Republican dominated House of Representatives moved to impeach and remove Hillary Clinton from the Presidency.  Congressmen Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz turned down lucrative media offers to stay in the House.  They joined the other “crazies” of the right, Jim Jordan, Mick Mulvaney, Mark Meadows and the rest.  All wanted nothing more than to remove a Clinton from office.

The case against Hillary Clinton was not based on the 2016 campaign. They were unable to find charges against getting aid from foreign powers, or using hush money to pay porn stars (Bill, if he did, was “slick” at it).  The Republican Judiciary Committee brought a single charge against the President: abuse of power.  That charge was based on subversion of the Constitution. They claimed the use of executive orders circumvented the legitimate legislative authority of the Congress.  

The hearings began in the fall of 2019, with the predetermined full vote of the House at the beginning of 2020.  The timing wasn’t about when the alleged abuse occurred, but as an opening gambit to the 2020 Presidential campaign.  

Still in Office

The Republican leadership of the House, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, stood back and let it happen. The impeachment hearings went on just as the Benghazi hearings, ad naseum.  As McCarthy said before the 2016 election:  

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

Hillary Clinton became the third President of the United States to be impeached (and the first Presidential couple to share the dubious honor).   But the Republicans had only a narrow majority in the Senate.   After a long drawn out hearing with multiple witnesses, they could only muster fifty-four votes for removal, far short of the sixty-seven needed. She remained President.  But the Senate did drag Hillary Clinton through the mud, putting dirt on for the 2020 campaign.

Pandemic

The administrative prowess of the first woman President proved important when US intelligence sources reported to her about the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China back in November of 2019.  She immediately put travel bans on China, and demanded that American scientists from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as the World Health Organization, be admitted to the scene.  These early actions gave Europe and America a fair warning of the impending pandemic.  By Christmas world health organizations were tracking the virus, and isolating any cases that spread out of China.

Testing and tracing became commonplace in the United States.  And while there were outbreaks of the disease, quick and decisive quarantines led to limited social upheaval, and controlled the spread.  The United States adapted to a new normal, a world of facemasks, temperature taking and constant testing. Actual infection rates remained low, with hospitals able to handle the additional burdens, and the fatality rate stayed at a “flu like” fifty thousand. 

The economy took “a hit”, with a modest increase in unemployment and a fall in the stock market.  But, with some modifications, most Americans were able to continue their normal lives, jobs, schools, and recreation without too much disruption.  Like the “bird flu” of 2005, or the Ebola outbreak of 2014, the COVID-19 virus was contained and controlled.  

The leading virologists praised the Administration’s efforts.  They spoke of the catastrophe that was avoided, having to shut down the entire country and hundreds of thousands dead.  On “Trump TV” though, the ex-candidate and others were quick see the government action as overreach, making conspiratorial claims that Clinton was trying to assume dictatorial powers.  The ugliness of 2016 was still here.

Violence

Hillary Clinton shared the frustration of Barack Obama when it came to mass shootings.  Unable to pass any meaningful gun restrictions through the Congress, she tried to regulate guns through changes in the administrative codes.  High capacity magazines and bump-stocks were banned, but shootings continued in a nation now even more divided.  The Supreme Court, in spite of the addition of Garland, upheld the Second Amendment right to own weapons, and pro-gun activists joined in organizations even more extreme than the National Rifle Association.  

Law enforcement, aware of the divisions caused by social upheaval, tried to gain control by the use of “broken windows” philosophy.  Small crimes were swiftly and dramatically punished, with the idea that action would prevent more serious behavior.  But the death of several unarmed black men at the hands of the police caused mass demonstrations in the streets.  Clinton agreed with the demonstrators in her famous “Black Lives Matter” speech, but “Trump TV” and other sources encouraged counter “blue lives” and “all lives” demonstrations. There were violent clashes between the forces. The National Guard was back at work, trying to maintain order.

Summer of 2020

Donald Trump chose not to run for President again, saying that he was too old, and so was Hillary. After the declaration, he famously picked up a golf club and teed off on the first hole at Mara-Lago. House Speaker Paul Ryan “reluctantly” accepted the “draft” of “moderate” Republicans to run for President. He was able to overcome more extreme opponents like Rand Paul and Trey Gowdy to gain the nomination.  But the cost of his victory was acceptance of a “pro-Trump” type agenda, putting him firmly on the side of gun and police rights.  

Hillary Clinton ran for a second term, though she dropped moderate Tim Kaine from the ticket.  In solidarity with minorities, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker is the new Democratic candidate for Vice President. As we enter a 2020 election the need for that change demonstrates how divided the nation really is.   

Clinton Report Card

The first term of the Hillary Clinton administration had successes.  She has proven to be an able administrator, and an effective leader of American foreign policy.  The alliance with the European Union and NATO are stronger than ever, even more so with the collapse of the Putin regime in Russia.  It is still unclear what will follow his demise.

The goals of the Paris Accord are slowing being reached.  Only China and India remain as the world’s great polluters, and the combined economic pressure of the European Union and the United States is gradually forcing them into compliance.  There is great hope that the radical climate changes caused by carbon pollution might be avoided after all.

But domestically the nation is torn.  The Republican dominated Congress has done little to aid the racial strife, and the constant friction between Congress and the Presidency is wearying.  That, by the way, is the basis of the Ryan for President campaign slogan:  “Return to Normalcy”.  It should surprise no one that he reached back to Warren Harding to find a theme.  It worked for Harding in similar circumstances.

America’s Choice

The other question to be determined by the American people is whether they are in favor of a divided government, with the Presidency and the Court controlled by moderate forces, and the Congress more conservative ones.  The outcome of the Clinton-Ryan choice is unclear, but just as unclear and important is who will control legislation when the dust clears in November.

So America, 2020 offers a choice.  Vote Republican, for Ryan and the Congress, and get a government that can act as one.  Or vote for Clinton, and change the Congress to do the same.  Or reflect the current state of the nation, and continue a divided government that doesn’t seem to work at all.

At the suggestion of a good and old friend, here’s a “what-if” story!!!!  There’s a lot to talk about – so here’s part one: 

A Nation Divided

January 20, 2017

The view from the Capitol steps was awe-inspiring.  The crowd size rivaled Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural. It packed in from the front of the Capitol back to the Washington Monument and onto the side streets beyond.  Most were dressed in white, in honor of the suffragettes who fought for the vote. They matched the color of the President-elect’s pantsuit.  While the clouds threatened rain early, as midday approached, the sun peaked out.

A little before noon, three former Presidents took their places behind the podium.  Outgoing President Barack Obama, along with the First Lady Michelle, sat beside former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura.  Then former President Bill Clinton emerged from the Capitol, accompanying the incoming forty-fifth President, Hillary Clinton.  They smiled as they shook hands and worked their way down the stairs to meet Chelsea in the front row seats.

The 2016 election was a near thing.  Donald Trump tapped into a vein of extremism in America, and did much better than polls predicted.  And it wasn’t just Trump:  America was still a misogynist nation.  Hillary Clinton faced an uphill battle from the start as the first woman to earn a major party nomination.  

She hadn’t helped herself with the email scandal, dragged out by seven different Republican Congressional investigations.  The FBI cleared her in the summer before the election, but there could have been an “October surprise”. The Bureau discovered more emails on an aide’s computer.  FBI Director James Comey followed Department of Justice policy and kept that discovery a secret. He faced withering criticism after the election. He hadn’t revealed the discovery to Congress, and was forced from office. But no additional information was gained, and Clinton squeaked to victory.

Competence

Hillary Clinton wasn’t a great campaigner.  Her analytical mind didn’t lend itself to the campaign “pep rallying”, and unlike her predecessors, she was unable to empathize with voters.  But the one thing Hillary Clinton had, was competence.  She knew how Washington worked, even from her early days as a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee in the Watergate era.  Her years as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State gave her insight into the system beyond any previous leader.  It was as if William Seward succeeded Abraham Lincoln, instead of Andrew Johnson.

The first test of the new administration was the still open seat on the Supreme Court.  Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow President Obama a final appointment to the Court, hoping that a Republican would gain the Presidency.  But with Clinton’s election, McConnell was faced with the prospect of holding a vacancy for four years.  

Clinton knew that this nominee would set the political tone for the entire first term.  And she was acutely aware that she was replacing Anton Scalia, the archconservative anchor of the right.  So instead of a Ginsburg or Sotomayor type nominee, the new President followed the lead of her predecessor.  She re-nominated moderate Merrick Garland, who was confirmed to the Court by a wide majority of the Senate.  A few Republicans held out. They were led by Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster, but ultimately McConnell allowed the choice to go through.

Legislation

It was the last legislative cooperation for the Hillary Clinton administration.  The Republican House and Senate passed bill after bill, trying to repeal the successes of the Obama Administration.  The Affordable Care Act was on the block multiple times, but neither house was able to reach a veto-proof majority. Americans became comfortable with the protections it provided.

Meanwhile President Clinton continued the Obama trend of governing by Executive Order.  The Dreamers remained protected despite the failure of Democratic backed legislation. And the United States became world leader in repairing the environment, following through on the goals of the Paris Accord.  Emissions standards on vehicles were increased, and the costs of automobiles went up.  The cost of gasoline went up too. Consumers found they were spending more for energy.  

Environmentally dirty energy sources such as fracking and offshore drilling were regulated out of business.  This caused higher unemployment, and strengthened the hand of Republicans going into the 2018 mid-term elections.  House Speaker Paul Ryan led his Party to an even stronger majority in the House and McConnell was able to keep his control of the Senate.  So the US had a divided government, forcing Clinton to nominate moderate judges, and strangling Administration legislative plans.

First Man

A new issue for America was what to do with a “First Man” in the White House.  Bill Clinton had to create a new role, a former President now out of command.  Hillary realized that Bill could best be utilized in foreign policy. The “First Man” spent a great deal of the first years travelling overseas.  His already established relationships with world leaders helped solidify American leadership, but rumors of extra-marital affairs ultimately caused the President to keep him back. He spent the last two years exiled at their Chappaqua, New York home.

Clinton strengthened America’s role as world leader, but also commanded greater US military involvement.  She kept the US out of direct action in Syria, but American troops were committed to protecting the Kurds in the North. A standoff with Turkey and Russian-backed Syrian troops ended in a short but decisive battle.  Russia and Turkey backed away from the confrontation, but the US lost key NATO bases in Turkey, particularly at the Incirlik airfield.  

The Clinton State Department, led by Secretary Jake Sullivan, developed a Western coalition to block continued Russian interference in elections.  With the coerced cooperation of Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders, Russian social media manipulation was cut off.  Additional Russian failures in the Middle East and the failure of the Russian kleptocracy due to strengthened sanctions over Ukraine, led to the collapse of the Putin regime.

Polarization

President Hillary Clinton was an effective administrator, but was unable to “unite” the nation.  It wasn’t helped by the continual House investigations, led by Congressmen Chaffetz and Gowdy. They scoured every Clinton Administration action for possible wrong-doing.  It also didn’t help that Congress was frustrated by Clinton’s avoidance of Congressional power through executive orders.  

Meanwhile former Presidential candidate Donald Trump found a new resonance on “Trump TV”.  The network, founded in the closing days of the 2016 election campaign, gave the New York real estate mogul a new public platform. He spoke from his Trump Tower Boardroom or the eighteenth green at his Mara-Lago resort. His signature signoff line of:  “Hillary, You’re Fired” became an American catch phrase.

The election of Barack Obama as the first African-American President led to racial divisions. The election of Hillary Clinton polarized the nation even more over women’s rights.  Anti-abortion groups grew more militant as they recognized that with Garland on the Supreme Court, abortion rights were secured law.  

Growing protests and even terrorist actions occurred near women’s health clinics. Several state Governors refused to use National Guard troops to protect them, so Clinton nationalized the forces and sent them in.   Social media and television were filled with images of suburban white Americans, even children, standing face-to-face with helmeted and armed soldiers. 

All of this led up to 2020, a year of pandemic, fire, upheaval, and racial tensions. Oh, and by the way, another Presidential election.

Bounty

The New York Times broke the story Friday night.  United States intelligence sources had convincing information that Russian Special Forces were paying Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan a bounty for American soldiers.  Put simply, Russia was paying to kill Americans, and they were doing it with US dollars. The Trump Administration immediately denied this, but reporting by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, the Associated Press, and others have confirmed the story.

Historically that’s nothing new.  During the French and Indian War, the British paid a “reward” for enemy scalps, as much as £130 for male Indian scalps (Hands On).  In a war where much of the fighting was by “proxy”, with both the French and British using varying tribes to pursue their objectives in North America, scalps were a way to guarantee kills.

Real Politk

But why would Russia do this?  The United States has already reached a tentative agreement with the Taliban.  America is to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next eighteen months, though the government of Afghanistan has yet to sign on.  The answer is that the Russians know that the United States is withdrawing to end the loss of “blood and treasure” from the nineteen year Afghan war, the longest in American history.  The driving force for leaving is the pain of that loss, and Russia is making sure that pain continues until the final GI’s are gone.  Then Afghanistan is open to other power persuasion and particularly to Russian influence.

From a pure “world real politik” perspective, perhaps the Russian strategy makes sense.  They are no longer able to “play” as an equal power to the United States, but President Putin can put pressure around the edges of American policy, trying to force acts to Russia’s advantage.  

And from that same “Kissinger-ian” place, the United States should be responding is some proportionate way.  It could be in Russian blood, but it could also be in the form of treasure.  Economic sanctions would work, since it seems that money is the root of Putin’s power and desires.  But, at least publicly, the United States is taking no action at all.  In fact, the US response seems to be denying that the bounties ever happened.

Conspiracy

Here in America, a conspiracy theory holds that Vladimir Putin has some overarching control over Donald Trump, preventing US President from acting against him.  The theory tries to explain Trump’s continual actions towards Putin; perhaps that he’s so indebted to Russian banks that Putin literally “owns” him.  Or, that Putin’s support in the 2016 election was so crucial, that Trump cannot stand against him now.  Or perhaps there is some “Kompromat”, blackmail that the Russian holds over Trump.  

These charges were the basis for the Mueller investigation.  We now know that the former FBI Director was hamstrung in his efforts, and left many stones “unturned”. Charges were never brought against Trump or his family.  Americans were left with a tantalizing “report” that raised hundreds of questions, but failed to “close the deal”, either way.  So when President Trump denies the intelligence information exists, it falls right into the “puppet of Putin” narrative.  

Plausible Deniability

But there is a second, and even more disappointing possibility.  It is well known that President Trump doesn’t want “bad news”; particularly when it comes to Russia and Putin.  It is reported that his aides are often castigated for telling Trump things he doesn’t want to hear and several top advisors, from Bolton to Mattis to Tillerson, left the Administration because of this.  

So it’s possible that no one wanted to tell Trump about the Russian plot.  Even though there was a documented National Security Council meeting last April to discuss the intelligence, perhaps no one could be persuaded to bring it to the President.  Or more insidiously, they could “inform” him without risking his wrath.  President Trump doesn’t like to read. His intelligence briefers have taken to PowerPoint presentations, with graphs and illustrations, to try to keep his interest.  

Maybe they just put the Russian intelligence in writing.  Buried in the PDB, the Presidential Daily Brief, and Trump was “informed” without anyone suffering consequences.  That way when it came out, there was “proof” that Trump was told.  Richard Nixon in the old Watergate days called it “plausible deniability”: maybe the intelligence briefers were looking for similar cover.

Malpractice

Perhaps Donald Trump is “owned” by Putin. Or maybe he’s established an environment so corrosive that his advisors can’t bring him “bad news”.  Or most likely, he simply fails to do the homework necessary to be the President of the United States.  In any case, Donald Trump is demonstrating again, that he is unfit for the office he holds.  

It’s just one more “brick in the wall” of Presidential malfeasance.  Trump himself has said he couldn’t focus on the COVID-19 crisis, because he was being impeached.  After the murder of Floyd George, he has acted to further divide the nation.  And throughout his term he has done nothing to prevent continued foreign interference in the American electoral process.

And now Russia pays dollars to kill American troops.  Trump has launched attacks: but it’s against the New York Times and, his favorite target, the intelligence agencies.   There seems to be no response against Russia.  At worst that’s criminal:  at best, it’s Presidential malpractice.

Sunday Morning

My Sunday mornings are pretty standard.  The dogs are up between six and seven and there’s no going back to sleep, especially now that we’re adopting a new year-old puppy, Keelie.  What used to be a guaranteed post breakfast snooze with “old man” Buddy and three year old Atticus, is puppy playtime – at least for Atticus and Keeley.  So Buddy is now supervisor.  When things get out of control he wades in with barks and growls. Everyone settles down for a few minutes.

So once we’re up, we’re up.  It gives me a chance to drink lots of coffee, and watch an array of Sunday morning news shows.  And this morning I got to watch Velshi on MSNBC, This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Meet the Press with Chuck Todd on NBC, and finally Face the Nation on CBS with Margaret Brennan.  

Headline News

There was lots of talk about COVID-19, from doctors and Secretary Azar, and responses from Governors Cuomo of New York and Hutchinson of Arkansas.  And the breaking news this morning was the New York Times article about Russian Special Operations paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers.  There was a lot to say about that, from Speaker Pelosi to former National Security Advisor John Bolton.

I like to hear the “original” sources, Pelosi, Bolton, Azar and the rest.  I want to hear them respond to questions, even to listen to their dodges.  It tells a lot about what’s going on.  But I also like to her “the panel” talk about the news.  They all seem to have a political “side”.  There are the traditional liberals, the “normal” conservatives, and the “outside of the box” characters on one side or the other.

Talking Points

What stood out to me today was the obvious Trump campaign “talking point”. It must have been passed to all of his supporters this Sunday morning.  Today’s topic:  the radicalization of the Democratic Party.   Everyone managed to work it into their “spiel”: the “Sanders-AOC” Democrats are dragging Joe Biden to the left.   Sara Fagin, on ABC, led the charge with this statement:

“Joe Biden is not the leader of the Democratic Party right now, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are. He put Congressman Ocasio-Cortez in charge of his climate policy”.

Chris Christie, a Trump advisor, former Governor and bridge traffic director from New Jersey added his bit on the same program. He said:

“…The liberal wing, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is very, very suspicious of Joe Biden. They didn’t support him during the primary season. They didn’t want him as the nominee.”

And while Chris Wallace on Fox didn’t specifically reference the radicalization of the Democratic Party, he still did his part. He invited invited Hawk Newsome, a Black Lives Matter leader, to discuss previous comments to Fox News.  Newsome said:

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. I can be speaking figuratively or I could be speaking literally, it’s a matter of interpretation”. 

The President responded by Tweeting that Newsome was speaking of “treason and insurrection”. It all fits well with this weekend’s theme of Democratic radicalization. I guess Chris Wallace got the word.

Hard Left

And, Republican talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who has transited from a Never-Trumper to a Trump apologist (maybe because his son works in the Administration) “discovered” the same theme. His statement on NBC was:

The Democrats have gone hard left, HARD LEFT, and the phantom of Joe Biden on the top of that is not going to cover over the AOC and the Squad’s effect on the Party”.

So this week’s narrative, courtesy of the RNC and Trump 2020, is that Joe Biden is a weak leader, far out of touch with what “real Democrats” want to do.  “Real Democrats”, according to the Trump 2020 talking points, are left, “HARD LEFT,” and Biden somehow just ended up the candidate due to…something that they really don’t explain.

Democrat’s Choice

I can explain it.  Joe Biden became the nominee of the Democratic Party because the Democratic voters, overwhelmingly, chose him.  They voted for him over Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, both candidates of the “harder left” that the Trump campaign wanted to run against.  Democratic voters chose Joe Biden because they trusted him to get elected, and they wanted a return to the decency and honesty that Biden represents.

The Trump narrative is that Donald Trump represents “law and order”, and will put down the chaos of protests and destruction brought on by the death of Floyd George and others.  The flaw in that theory is that most Americans see that it is the lawlessness of the institutions that caused those deaths that is the real problem.

Joe Biden is a man of the center, of decency and civility, of willingness to compromise to solve problems.  He is willing to work with the “hard left” but he is also just as willing to reach across the aisle and work with Republicans.  

The Trump campaign wanted to run with a booming economy, and they wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.  Now they’ve managed to botch the COVID-19 crisis, trash the economy, and they’re dealing with Joe Biden. All Trump 2020 can do is to divide America against itself, using fear of “radicals” as the wedge.  Since Joe Biden doesn’t fit that model, they ignore him and move onto their “dream opponents”.  

The American voter will see through that.

Resign

So let’s dispel some rumors going around.  The first is that Donald Trump is so overwhelmed by the Presidency and his crashing poll numbers that he will cut a deal with Mike Pence and resign from office.  The deal:  a blanket pardon, for anything he may or may not have done, like Nixon got from Gerald Ford.  

Trump certainly seems disappointed by his poll numbers.  But to be overwhelmed by the Presidency, he would have to be aware of his own shortcomings.  Whatever else you think about Donald Trump, self-awareness has never been on the list.  This is the same man whose businesses have gone bankrupt six times. We shouldn’t expect that he would have an epiphany and realize he can’t handle the job.

Polls

And keep in mind that Trump has only a tangential relationship with polls.  He believes in the good ones, he discounts the bad ones.  Trump expects that Fox and other “friendlies” will put out only polls favorable to him. He anticipates that those “mainstream media outlets” CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the like will find the least favorable ones.  He even sent a “cease and desist” letter to CNN for publishing a poll.  But when Fox puts out the bad news, that’s when the President seems crushed.

By the way, Trump has some right to question polling.  After all, he was elected (or chosen by the Electoral College) in spite of months of terrible polling.  That should put into some perspective the incredible impact of the Comey letter on the 2016 electoral results.  From October 6^th to October 28^th, Trump was done.  From October 28^th to November 8^th, Election Day, all of the polling closed to within the margin of error.  The final polls weren’t wrong, just completely reversed from three weeks before.

He’s not leaving.  That would require him to admit failure.

Defeat

The second rumor is that Trump is setting up a rationale to deny electoral defeat.  The constant drone of “fraudulent” mail-in balloting is part of that.  In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox the other night, Trump actually outlined a plan for the Chinese to counterfeit mail-in ballots, discussing the quality of the paper and the layout of balloting materials.  It echoes 2016, “…China, if you’re listening, you need to print mail-in ballots!” (Fox).  

Trump will absolute claim any loss as a “rigged” election.  He was doing the same in 2016, when he refused to tell Chris Wallace in the last debate that he would accept the election results.  This isn’t about some dark plan to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States.  This is all about the number one Trump trait:  victimhood.  He is always the victim, always the wronged individual.  

He was that way as a businessman, refusing the pay contractors because they somehow “wronged” him in their work.  And he was that way with the banks, suing the only bank in the world that would work with him, Deutsche Bank, even while owing them hundreds of millions of dollars.  So he is the victim now, of “Mainstream Media”, “Antifa” and “the Deep State”.   

When he says the election is rigged, he really is just planning his retirement.  It’s “Trump TV” with the former President talking to his twenty percent core about how he was screwed out of office by “the powers” they can’t control.  That’ll bring in enough money to keep Deutsche Bank at bay (Bloomberg), and let the man who made a living as a reality TV star stay in the only limelight where he’s found success.

Military Takeover

And the final, scariest rumor is that the US military will somehow step in, backing Trump’s claims that the election was “rigged”, and maintain him in office after Joe Biden wins. There was a moment, when General Milley was examining the “battle space” walking the streets of Washington, DC, and he and Defense Secretary Esper followed Trump across the pepper sprayed Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, when that seemed real.  But both Esper and Milley, with the admonition of dozens of former Defense Secretaries, Chiefs of Staff and Four Star Generals (NBC), walked that back quickly.  They made it clear that the military had no intention of intervening in American politics.

What is more concerning is Attorney General Bill Barr’s willingness to use the Justice Department to maintain Trump’s power.  Barr too is raising the cry of fraudulent mail-in balloting, despite admitting there is no evidence that it is occurring (NPR).  Barr is also willing to use every asset of the Justice Department to achieve his political goals:  the anonymous black shirted riot “troops” on the streets of Washington are a clear example (Salon).  Were they from the Bureau of Prisons as Barr stated, or were they private mercenaries as others have suggested?  Either way, Barr had his “guys” on the streets.  

That may be the real worry.

Jorgenson

This week the Libertarian Party introduced their candidate for President of the United States on social media, sixty-three year old Dr. Jo Jorgenson.  Dr. Jorgenson is a PhD in Psychology who runs a business-consulting firm in Greenville, South Carolina.  She has no government experience at all, but based on Libertarian principles, that’s probably a good thing.

The Libertarian Party has run candidates for President since 1980, and has been the most visible “third” party since former Republican Congressman Ron Paul became their flag bearer for the 1988 campaign.  Other better-known Presidential candidates were former Congressman Bob Barr and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.  Johnson was the candidate in both 2012 and 2016, when he got greater visibility in 2016 as an “alternative” to Clinton or Trump.  

Platform

The Libertarian Party platform is based on government reform.  They believe about that “big government” caused our current national problems. 

“Big government mandates and programs created these problems. To solve them, we need to make government smaller – much, much smaller”(Jorgenson).

They want to reduce the government, dissolve the Department of Education, and, as they put it, make the United States “…into one Giant Switzerland, armed and neutral.”  And the Libertarian Party advocates free market capitalism.  They want to reduce regulations in health care and other industries, except for energy production, where they take a progressive environmental stand.  

But they are socially liberal.  They support LGBTQ civil rights, and are in favor of legalization of marijuana and the reduction of imprisonment for non-violent crimes.

It seems that the Libertarian Party would be the “perfect” place for the “free market” Republicans, the old “Rockefeller Republicans” of the 1960’s:  socially liberal, but small government conservatives.  The only issue holding them back is what the international role of the United States should be.

It’s also a perfect place for many Millennials, attracted to a platform of less regulation, more independence, and marijuana legalization.  It fits.

Access

The Libertarian Party, like all alternate political parties in the United States, struggles to gain ballot access.  The traditional two-party system has made it difficult for other groups to get on the ballot, though in 2016 Ohio, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and Richard Duncan, an Ohio independent, were listed along with Trump and Clinton.  However, the Libertarian Party was able to get on the ballot in all fifty states for the 2016 election, and gained close to 4.5 million votes nationwide.   

So it’s not ballot access that holds the Libertarian (and the Green Party) back.  Both feel ignored by the “mainstream media” unable to access the “bully pulpit” to reach out and expand their views.  Just a simple Google search for the Libertarian Presidential announcement shows coverage by NPR and Fox, but no other major media company.

Their argument is that media coverage is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The mainstream media doesn’t think that a Libertarian or a Green Party candidate can’t get elected, so they don’t cover them.  Since those candidates don’t get coverage, they don’t get exposure to the American people.  Americans don’t know about them, so they don’t vote for them.  So they can’t get elected.

In 2016 though, media coverage wasn’t necessarily helpful.  Gary Johnson was “stymied” by a question from MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews in 2016, unable to name any living foreign leader he admired.  That didn’t help his candidacy, nor did it encourage voters to take him or his Party seriously.

Fear

There are those who fear that Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein cost Hillary Clinton the Presidential election in 2016.  In the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by less than one percent.  In each of those states, Gary Johnson received three percent of the vote or more, and Stein earned a percent as well.  

But all of that assumes that every Stein voter would have voted for Clinton if Stein wasn’t on the ballot, or that the Johnson voters would have split in Clinton’s favor.  Neither of those assumptions is necessarily true.

The Green Party is certainly “to the left” of the Democratic Party, but they also are disdainful of Democrats.  Green Party voters aren’t “either Green or Democrat”; they are, at least without Bernie Sanders on the ticket, “Green or nothing”.  

And Libertarian Party followers are economic Republicans.  We can see that with the prior Libertarian candidates for President: Johnson, Barr, and Paul, were all former (and some future) Republican candidates for office.  It’s why Justin Amash, the former Republican now Independent Congressman from Michigan, considered a Libertarian Presidential run.   Without a Libertarian choice, those voters are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.

Choice

It’s my knee jerk reaction to respond to Libertarian posts on social media and say:  

“Are you nuts!!!!  You’re playing into Trump’s hands.  There can be NO CHOICE in the 2020 election.  You MUST vote for Biden, not because you support HIM, but because we must get rid of TRUMP!!!!!!”  MAYBE THAT SHOULD BE IN ALL CAPS, MAKING SURE I’M ONLINE YELLING MY ENTIRE MESSAGE!!!!!!!!!!!

But the reality is that Dr. Jorgenson is more likely to take votes from Trump than Biden.  And while my personal view is that the 2020 Trump candidacy is so catastrophic for the nation, that the only viable voting choice is Biden, I do get it.  Jorgenson offers an alternate view, one that allows voters to “wash their hands” of the current system.

I am not a Libertarian.  I don’t agree that the United States should be some giant “Switzerland”, and I do think our government has a huge role in making life in America better.  Capitalism has proven to be cruel and cold for many.  The government has the task of making life better for all, not just the successful few.

But if it’s what you’ve got to do – vote for Jorgenson. It’s sure better than a vote for Trump. Just one caveat: I believe that this election is an existential choice about Trump. If you believe that too, then Jorgenson is not the answer.

Writing Trump World

I started writing essays for “Trump World” in February of 2017.  When I began, it was going to be a once a week thing, essays to try to explain the new Trump Administration from the view of the “Resistance”.  I saw the election of Donald Trump as an attack on the progressive changes made by the Obama administration, and on the values of human and civil rights.  How wrong I was.

It’s been three years and four months.  This is the eight hundredth essay in the series; it turned out that I had more than “once a week” things to say.  There are over sixteen hundred people who read this daily, some get angry about what the President is doing, and some get angry about what I have to say.  Some “learn things” from a different perspective than their own.  It has provoked discussion, debate, and denunciation:  the loss of some friends but the gain of others.  And that is, I guess, what I hoped it would do.

What was I wrong about? 

Making the Man

There is an “accepted” historical view, that, “the Presidency makes the man”.  It is based on Harry Truman, a machine politician from Missouri who gained the Vice Presidency as a political favor.  There are lots of great decisions that President Franklin Roosevelt made, but viewing his own personal mortality wasn’t one of them.  For most of my life I viewed FDR as an “old man” when he died, a man who stayed too long.  Now, at my own “advanced” age, I am older now than Roosevelt was when he died.  Sixty-three doesn’t seem so old, especially when the two candidates for President in 2020 average out at seventy-six.

There were much more qualified Vice Presidential candidates than Harry Truman.  And FDR didn’t really have much confidence in him. Truman was left out of most of the decision-making processes.  So when Roosevelt died of a massive stroke, Truman was unprepared for the Presidency.

The end of World War II in Europe, the beginning of the Cold War, the use of atomic weapons:  all were on Truman’s plate when he took the oath.  Looking back historically, it is generally agreed that Truman rose to the challenge and became a greater President than he ever was a Senator or other office holder.  The Presidency “made him”.

Flooding the Swamp

We are nearing the 2020 Presidential election.  Donald Trump has been President for three years and five months, far long enough for us to have an understanding of what the Presidency has made of him.  “What we see is what we get” is the phrase that comes to mind.  The President said he was going to “drain the swamp”.  What we didn’t know in 2016 was that the phrase meant that anyone who questioned the President’s actions would be fired, vilified, and discredited.   

Mr. Trump has found the perfect tool for attacking his enemies and covering his illegal actions:  the Department of Justice.  William Barr, his second Attorney General, has offered up the motto of his Department:  “Who Prosecutes on Behalf of Justice” (Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur) to now say “Who Stands for the President is Immune, Who Challenges the President is Prosecuted”. 

We heard it again in the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, as career Justice lawyers testified coldly about politically motivated prosecutions and protections.  Trump didn’t like California enforcing emissions standards on vehicles?  The Justice Department began anti-trust action against the auto industry.  The President’s friends get in legal trouble?  The investigators are fired, and the charges are reduced or dropped.  No one really thinks Roger Stone will ever spend a day in jail.  Paul Manafort is already home early from his seven-year sentence.  Michael Flynn is an “innocent” liar, a victim of FBI persecution. 

We have watched the President fire the “watchdogs,” the Inspector Generals who have dared to criticize the actions of the President and his men.  Those charged with overseeing the Intelligence Community, the Transportation Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department all were removed after questioned politically motivated actions (CBS).

Wrong

The reality of the COVID pandemic interferes with the President’s election strategy?  Then ignore the disease, and carry on life as if there was no risk. The Centers for Disease Control says wear masks and socially distance:  the President holds packed rallies (at least one) and openly refuses to wear one.  He denies the truth of the present, and hopes his lies will lead him to control the future.

I was wrong.  Trump is far worse than I thought possible back in the early days of 2017.  It’s all in plain sight, unlike Nixon and Watergate; there is no attempt to cover-up.  Instead, we get it put to us directly.  Russia, if you’re listening, please counterfeit mail-in ballots for this November.  China, please buy more American soybeans so Trump can be re-elected.  Poland, please kowtow to Mr. Trump, and he will move twenty thousand troops to you from Germany.  Angela Merkel won’t come to the US for a G-7 meeting: she must be punished.

Richard Nixon once told interviewer David Frost: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” (Teaching). That statement shocked many, but it fit with Nixon’s actions as President.  William Barr, the man today charged with enforcing the laws of the United States, believes that as well.  So Mr. Trump, and Mr. Barr, with the tacit acceptance of the Republican Party, abuse their authority and commit criminal acts.  

And they do it all in plain sight.

History Teacher

I did a lot of things in my career in public education. I was high school Dean of Students, President of the Teacher’s Union, and a track, cross country, and wrestling coach.  But for the vast majority of my career, I was a social studies teacher.  I taught American Government, American History, World History, Economics, Current Affairs, and even Psychology to sixth graders through seniors over twenty-six years.  

So the word “history” has deep meaning to me.  And I took my mission as a history teacher seriously.  I understood that, for most of my students, this would be the foundation of what they knew about the “American Experience” for the rest of their lives.  They would participate (or not) as citizens, making decisions about the direction of the Nation, based in part on what they learned in “my” history class.  

That didn’t mean that I wanted them to have a specific “political” view.  I wasn’t indoctrinating my students into any particular ideology, including mine.  In fact, many of those students are shocked reading “Trump World” essays today.  They had no idea of my affiliations.  And that’s how it should be.

So when people today talk about “erasing” history, I take that very seriously.

Texas History

I went to school in the 1960’s and 70’s.  There was no such thing as “Black Studies” back then.  Our textbooks were written with few African American participants.  Booker T Washington, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were the apparent extent of Black participation in America.

What I didn’t find out until much later, was that our textbooks were written to the specifications of the Texas State Board of Education.  The entire state of Texas purchased a single American History textbook, a massive sale for any publisher.  So texts were written to appeal to them.  There were more pages on the Texas War of Independence, the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto, than on World War I.  In the 1960’s, Texans weren’t interested in the contributions of African Americans, and so neither were we.

The First Casualty

It wasn’t until college, and my first years as a teacher that I realized the vast contribution of Black Americans to the “American Experience”.  I spent a great deal of time re-learning the American story, this time from the perspective of those brought in chains.  I learned that there was a lot of “erasing” in our history, even before the Revolutionary War.  Take Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution.  He was shot in the “Boston Massacre”, when British troops returned thrown snowballs with musket fire.  

Crispus Attucks was a Black man, a man who escaped slavery. But when Paul Revere engraved the scene of the massacre, he made Attucks white for the prints headed South. The revolutionaries in Boston needed the support of the South; it wouldn’t do for the first martyr of the Revolution to be Black. Erasing history goes back a long way.

Monuments Today

So what about all of the statues and monuments that are in question today?  In the museums and on the battlefields, those monuments make sense.  The figure of Robert E. Lee on horseback, posted on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg should remain.  He forever overlooks his greatest failure with Pickett’s Charge, a fitting fate for the “greatest” general of his time.

But his position in Richmond on Monument Avenue isn’t about his actions.  That statue was erected in 1890, when the history of the Civil War was being “revised” by Southerners into the mythological “lost cause”.  It was part of the regression of the South to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were treated as little more than the slaves they had been.  It was only a few years later, about when the Lee Monument was erected in Charlottesville, that the Ku Klux Klan became a national power for racism and hate.

Many of the Confederate “memorials” that are being attacked today were erected as part of that revisionist history movement.  They were put up to “erase” the history of slavery and rebellion that caused the Civil War.  Memorials are in places like Brandenburg, Kentucky, just down the Ohio River from Louisville, a town that was part of the Union for the entire Civil War.  They celebrate the losing side of the rebellion, and they stand for those who refused to give up their slaves.

American Sin

The incredibly fierce reaction to the removal of monuments is based on one of two things.  The first is the “Santa Claus” effect.  Through perhaps no fault of their own, long cherished beliefs people had about American history are being challenged.  The “noble” Confederates, battling for states’ rights and their homeland, was a story long told to the American people.  

I saw it again in a middle school curriculum this year: “…slavery was not the cause of the Civil War”.  Just like Santa Claus, that’s just not true.  But for slavery there would have been no cause for the Civil War.  No one likes being told that there is no Santa Claus, or that Robert E. Lee, the noble stalwart of the South, was, in fact, a traitor to the nation to which he had devoted his entire adult life.  He chose to defend sin rather than stand against it.

Or there may be a second, and more insidious reason.  To admit the flaws of the United States, a nation that is a long way from reaching the “more perfect” union of our fore fathers goal, is to admit that the nation was built upon evil institutions.  Slavery was a bedrock of the United States economy, and when slavery was no longer available, folks were still abused to maintain that economic system.  And of course, there is the ultimate sin:  that the United States was built upon land stolen away from its original owners.  

Those are the lessons of history that we choose not to remember.  Those are acts that we choose not to take responsibility for.  And that makes us worse than ignorant:  it makes us accomplices in the original sins.

In Its Place

The flag of the Confederacy still deserves to be flown.  Even here in Columbus, Ohio, it has a place.  Camp Chase, located on the west side of town, was a Civil War prison camp.  Two thousand Confederate soldiers died, mostly of smallpox, during their internment.  They are buried there today, and the flag they fought for still waves over their graves.

Museums, battlefields, and cemeteries:  all are suitable places for Confederate symbology and statues.  But their rebellion to maintain slavery should not be celebrated as some “mythic” history created by their apologists after the thunder of the guns stopped and the smoke cleared.  Those writers erased and re-wrote histories for their own political gain. It’s time Americans learn the real story.

Lesson One

I think I was sixteen years old, which would have made it 1973.   I was working on my first official political campaign, Judge Frank Davis for Juvenile Court Judge.  My teacher and first political mentor, Eve Bolton, was managing it.  I don’t think Davis won, but I remember learning a lot from her in my first chance at “getting my hands dirty” in electoral politics.

One of the very first lessons was never, ever, ever let the candidate speak to an empty room.  Empty rooms meant no one cared, and was an absolute failure of political planning.  In fact, make sure the candidate only spoke to packed rooms, with no place left to sit and people crammed in standing against the walls.  That was always the goal.  If you thought one hundred would come, get a room for fifty.  Expecting a thousand, get a room for five hundred.  Outside: make the “audience area” small enough to feel like it was packed.

Energy

It was important to generate the energy in the crowd.  It was important to get the candidate “ginned up” to gain progress in the campaign.  And it was most important so that the cameras caught the feel of a “packed house”.   The television picture of the camera being jostled because there were so many people gets that energy across on the airwaves.  A picture of empty seats and “socially distanced” crowds (a term we never heard of then) sends all the wrong signals.

In all of my forays into campaigns I’ve applied the “venue rule”.  When we had school levy rallies at our high school, we never had them in the “big” gym.  We packed crowds in the cafeteria, or we used the smaller gym at the middle school. The high school gym only looked “packed” with two thousand people or more.  There was no reason to diminish the impact of five hundred or a thousand by putting them in an “empty” room.

The Rally and the Message

Saturday night, the forty-fifth President of the United States held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  As often is the case, the Trump Campaign flew in the face of common sense, holding a mass rally in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Oklahoma’s infection rate is setting records daily and the Trump rally would be the first mass event in the area since the pandemic impacted the United States in March. A “super-spreader event” (another term we never heard of) might be the result, but the Trump campaign can’t care about that. 

Trump’s message is that the pandemic is “over” and we need to “open up”.  It’s a simple campaign calculation:  if the economy doesn’t improve, Trump’s chances for reelection are doomed.  So they have to presume that “life” can start up again, and convince America to do that, even if the death toll from COVID continues to grow.  They are pressing that message in the denigration of “science” on social media, in the President’s stubborn refusal to wear a facemask, and now in their campaign schedule.

And they also want to send a message to their loyalists.  In our current era of “Black Lives Matter” and concern for American institutional oppression, the Trump campaign originally chose Juneteenth for the rally date. They also picked Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the United States’ worse race riot, as the place.  The not so subtle message:  don’t worry, we will soon get back to the “normal – whites in charge” world.  We really don’t have to care about all of this “racial stuff”. 

It Used to Work 

Brad Parscale, the Trump 2020 Campaign Manager, announced that there were over a million requests for tickets.  The venue, the nineteen thousand-seat BOK Center Arena, surely wouldn’t be enough, so the campaign set up a second overflow venue outside, enough for another fifty thousand cheering fans.   Big screens, huge sheets of bullet proof glass, and an outdoor concert-style venue was added.  

The Trump Campaign rally strategy is to offer tickets online that grants the opportunity to stand in line to get in the venue.  Actual admission to the venue is not guaranteed:  it allows the campaign staff to literally select the crowd they want to have.  It also lets them weed out potential protestors or disruptors, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they allow a few to slip in.  It all becomes part of the big “Trump” show, and another foil for the President to riff off of at the lectern.

Never, ever, ever, let the candidate speak to an empty room.  Estimates of the Trump crowd in the BOK center are between six and ten thousand (Forbes).  Roughly half the seats in the arena were empty.  And the big outdoor venue:  they started tearing it down before the President even stepped to the podium.  The camera shots were of empty seats behind the speaker, and the giant bulletproof glass sheets being loaded on trucks.  

What’s the Lesson?

Parscale and the campaign are blaming the “media” for focusing on empty seats and loading trucks.  They’re claiming that fear of “protestors” and COVID kept their crowd away.  I guess the Trump fans are the “snowflakes” after all.  

And then there’s the social media rumor that Parscale was the victim of a “dirty trick”.  Rumor is that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of teenagers requested tickets that they never intended to use.  “Shenanigans” is what MSNBC is calling it. I haven’t checked, but I bet Fox News will have a more sinister term for it.

But here’s the reality check for the reality TV star.  He went to the heart of “Trump Country”, and he couldn’t draw a crowd.  Mr. Trump couldn’t fill a room.  He was literally the only show in town, and they didn’t come to see him.  That might get Parscale fired, and it might get Trump panicked.  But, for a campaign that depends on rallies as their mainline strategy, they might have an even bigger problem.  

Maybe, after four years of chaos and incompetence, “the crowd” is looking for someone else.