General John Kelly on Trump

Posted on October 23, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 23, 2024

Retired Marine General John Kelly served as Homeland Security Secretary under Donald Trump, after which he was Trump’s only Chief of Staff who served as long as eighteen months before Trump’s behavior as president convinced him he had to resign. He became Chief of Staff late in 2017 because senior Republicans were afraid Trump was going off the rails. They hoped that forcing him to accept someone like Kelly, a no-nonsense leader who had led the U. S. Southern Command and was firmly committed to upholding the rule of law and the Constitution would bring some discipline to the White House.

Republicans hoped Kelly could provide the guardrails Trump obviously lacked, but it became clear over time that that was an impossible task. Trump lived in a fantasy world in which he had ultimate power to do anything he wanted without respect for law, diplomatic norms, or the men and women in our military. Like others in similar positions of responsibility, Kelly was wont to speak out in the midst of a presidential election campaign, because he believes military leaders must be nonpolitical. But as Trump has become more erratic and his stated intentions for a second term caused Kelly to fear for the country, he decided to sit for interviews with the New York Times.

Beginning with a dictionary definition of Fascism, Kelly echoed what former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had said earlier, that the definition accurately described Mr. Trump. Kelly said Trump admired Adolf Hitler, expressed contempt for disabled veterans and characterized those who died on battlefields as “losers and suckers.” This is a very big deal. When two of the most respected military leaders in our country, both of whom were elevated to powerful positions by Trump speak out against him out of principle, we ignore them at our peril.

Kelly says Trump could not accept that he wasn’t the most powerful person in the world, that he expected to run the government the way he ran his businesses, and we know that he ran his businesses dictatorially with no regard for laws or regulations. His company was found guilty of decades of fraudulent activity by a New York Court and fined nearly a billion dollars. But it was Trump’s recent comments about “the enemy within” that so troubled Kelly, he felt he had to speak out. Trump has been telling his rallies that these enemies, among whom he included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her husband, and California representative Adam Schiff, should be arrested, and that they should be executed. Moreover, the U. S. military should be employed to root out people like them who are destroying our country.

The idea that a president would use American soldiers against American citizens, something that is clearly unconstitutional, was the breaking point for Kelly. He characterized Trump as “the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about.” What Kelly most fears is Trump’s refusal to accept that senior government officials and military leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. Trump believes their loyalty should be to him, personally, and Kelly who dealt with third world dictators for much of his career, believes Trump would attempt to govern the way they do. He believes Trump has no understanding of either history or our Constitution and is completely lacking in empathy.

If you have experience with the military, you know how strongly General Kelly had to feel about the danger Trump poses to the country to break with protocols that have guided him throughout his professional life. For people like him and  Milley to believe it’s necessary to speak out against a former president who is attempting to return to office is astonishing. It makes the well-publicized feud between General Douglas MacArthur and President Truman look like a difference of opinion about the weather.

Those of us who understand the patterns of history and respect the integrity of our military leaders must take Kelly and Milley seriously. Yet, the chaos Trump has used to overwhelm truth seems to have blinded many people to the reality of the threat he poses. When CNN interviewed Ford employees in Michigan yesterday, I was shocked to hear an apparently intelligent, eloquent worker tell the reporter that Trump doesn’t really mean the things he says – it’s just his act.

I understand why someone might think that. As my writer friends have said, if the last nine years of Trump were a novel, no one would believe it. It boggles the minds of average citizens that someone running for president could be as venal and dangerous as Trump, thus many people conclude he couldn’t possibly be what he really is. If that view prevails over the next few weeks, I fear for our country in a way I never have before.

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Sometimes, It Takes a Historian

Posted on October 22, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 22, 2024

In 2016, many factors combined to enable Donald Trump to defeat Hilary Clinton. In light of all that’s happened since Barack Obama was elected in 2008, an important factor that has critical importance today has been largely overlooked.

The thing that most defined Clinton’s campaign was her adage, “It takes a village,” a message that is the epitome of people working together and cooperating for the common good. It implies a social structure best characterized by the Israeli kibbutz system, wherein villages short on resources but long on responsibilities optimize their effectiveness by thinking and acting communally.

Trump calls this Communism, because it’s the polar opposite of his populism that’s based on dividing people and pitting them against each other. It’s important to understand, as we near the end of the 2024 election, that the hate and fear being generated in this campaign are not incidental side effects of Trump’s antics, but a deliberately intended outcome. He thrives on chaos and discord. He has understood since his days of hobnobbing with mobsters and his mentor, Roy Cohn, that truth is a fragile, malleable thing that is usually the first casualty of chaos.

Reinventing truth is the most common tool used by wannabe dictators and autocrats, as George Orwell brilliantly illustrated in his classic, 1984. It was used by fascists in the 1930s to bring Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to power. It was used by Josef Stalin to crush the liberal aftereffects of the Russian Revolution and by Vladimir Putin to try to reassemble the Soviet Union, and it is the favorite tool of Kim Jong Un.

Clinton’s and Trump’s contrasting styles truly represented the ongoing struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, between people exercising free will and being subjugated. These things awaken basic atavistic tendencies in all of us, which is why our present circumstances are so shocking to Americans who grew up believing in our Constitution and the basic values that caused our predecessors to revolt against a vicious monarchy.

Trump wants to make this election about personal grievances. He plays on the envy of the Have-Nots for the wealthy, on class struggles and bigotry, and on a basic human need to protect what’s theirs against people who would take it away. Thus, the demonization of immigrants and the odd combination of increased anti-Semitism and fearmongering aimed at Muslims. But the fear and anger that results causes most people to ignore the greater threat. Trump has told us in the clearest possible terms that he is the greatest threat to American democracy since the British tried to take it back in 1812.

I and many others have written about the striking contrast between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the tactics Hitler used to turn the struggling Weimar Republic into a Nazi dictatorship that nearly destroyed Europe and resulted in the deaths of 75 million people. I thought as I was writing, that the parallels were so clear, I didn’t need to be a historian to understand or communicate them. But that was before I discovered Heather Richardson, a Boston College professor of history whose career has been focused on the evolution of the Republican Party, beginning with Abraham Lincoln.

When I read Richardson’s posting in today’s Letters from an American, I realized that it does take a skilled historian to lay all this out properly so that every American can clearly see the danger posed by Donald Trump. I urge every American, especially those who are still undecided about who to vote for, to read it. Told through the eyes of Dorothy Thompson, a pioneering American journalist who resided in Berlin during Hitler’s ascendancy, it explains why Donald Trump is so dangerous.

We’ve all sat through history lectures that tortuously attempted to make an event that happened centuries ago seem relevant to us. But Richardson’s presentation today is so striking it can’t be ignored. Her comparison of Hitler’s rise to power and his ability to destroy every pillar of a democratic republic in a mere four months in office will shock you, because Hitler’s own words about his intentions sound exactly like Donald Trump’s. Perhaps that’s why Trump’s appointed leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, describes Trump as a Fascist to his core.

As entertaining as pundit James Carville can be, he’s wrong this election cycle. It’s not “about the economy, stupid.” It’s also not about the lies about what caused our massive inflation, the importance of NATO or whether we can pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to show humanity toward Palestinian civilians. This election is about one thing: the rule of law and survival of our democratic republic. In seventeen weeks, Hitler abolished his Parliament, destroyed the free press, emasculated Germany’s courts, and outlawed opposition political parties. Anyone Hitler perceived as an enemy was deported, arrested, murdered, or sent to concentration camps.

Please click on the link and read Richardson’s column, then review Trump’s own words which he repeats daily to arouse his base, and form your own conclusions. An occasional dose of real history can be very enlightening.

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Americans’ Changed Temperaments

Posted on October 21, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 21, 2024

People who are seriously concerned about the prospects of another Trump presidency are in woe-is-me mode as they watch Trump’s antics on the campaign trail become more erratic, profane, and deranged. Yet, the other half of the country thinks Trump is great entertainment. With fifteen days until the election ends (it’s already going on in several states,) it’s urgent that Kamala Harris’s campaign staff get their own heads on straight.

Trump is mentally ill and failing physically, but I don’t buy the hype that his bizarre behavior means he’s cognitively impaired. All the hand-wringing and lamenting over his inappropriate behavior isn’t doing Harris or her supporters any good. In fact, it’s helping Trump. Every time his words or actions stir up a media frenzy, (in other words, every day between now and November 5th,) it drowns out the serious message Harris offers.

We don’t know whether Trump is deranged or this is merely an extension of his ability to create chaos, and that only matters if it helps Harris find a path through the madness. That doesn’t address the question of why nearly half the country seems poised to vote for Trump. It’s an issue that will generate hundreds of scholarly books, as “experts” in human behavior seeking a new career path seize on analyzing Trump. But that will all occur long after this election has been decided, assuming Trump is unable to appoint a book-banning czar.

Whichever interpretation is correct, Trump is getting what he wants. He was crude and offensive at the Al Smith dinner, but despite all the criticism, he walked away with a photograph of himself and the Cardinal who hosted the event that he can display whenever he targets church groups. For nine years, the broadcast media have fallen for this trap, either deliberately or inadvertently enabling Trump’s chaos.

Albert Einstein said that continuing to do something that always leads to failure is the definition of insanity. Yet, that’s exactly what Harris’s campaign staff and all the rest of us have been doing. Calling Trump unfit and unhinged may be accurate, but it only seems to make his antics more entertaining. Forget about Trump’s and Harris’s bases for a moment. What are the few centrists and independents who have yet to make up their minds to think?

A discussion of Arnold Palmer’s penis won’t influence them any more than hearing Harris repeatedly tell them Trump is dangerous, no matter how true that is. More likely, Trump’s constant litany of apparent craziness will convince them to stay home on election day, which is precisely what Trump wants. Low turnout = Trump victory.

The urgent matter at hand is understanding Trump’s appeal and finding a way to counter it before it’s too late. Trump has shown himself to be a despicable human being who always puts himself first and has no concept of morality or decency. Foreign leaders are in two camps, one consisting of people like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orban, and Kim Jong Un, who cozy up to Trump because they know they can manipulate him to their advantage. The other is the one where most of our allies sit. They are horrified by Trump, and as mystified as we are about how America got here.

How do we break through to voters who are still listening? Many of them will watch CNN’s Town Hall Wednesday evening. Harris’s team needs to prepare differently. When the inevitable question about inflation is asked, they must remember that her target audience is the well-educated center. She should play the videos from 2020, during the COVID lockdown, in which farmers told us that with markets closed they were having to destroy their herds and crops. They explained that everything would be dirt cheap in 2020, but in the following years they would have to replant and rebuild their herds from scratch.

With supply chain shortages, food and other vital commodities would be scarce and very expensive. Next, she could reprise videos of economists explaining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created a critical energy shortage that caused gasoline prices in America to exceed $5.00 a gallon. She should invite a reputable economist to explain why it takes time to counter runaway inflation, and how Biden/Harris’s policies brought inflation back to normal, while averting a recession. Record low unemployment, record high equity markets, lowering interest rates – that’s what voters care about.

When the January 6th insurrection comes up, Harris should replay the statements of Trump supporters like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and MAGA Republicans running for the Senate who publicly lambasted Trump on January 7th, but now hope voters have forgotten. Finally, she should read choice excerpts from Project 2025, and identify which of Trump’s key allies wrote them. No noise, no hype, just a respectful discussion with people whose minds are still open.

The change in Americans’ temperaments that made so many of them adore Trump must remain a mystery for now. Harris and her supporters must reach the relatively sane middle, every day until November 5th.

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Making Fries at McDonald’s

Posted on October 20, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 20, 2024

As if this election season couldn’t get any stranger, the center point of the presidential campaign has turned to McDonald’s. I understand why people were concerned when Tim Walz appeared to imply that he had carried a weapon in a combat zone, but I’m still scratching my head over why Donald Trump seems obsessed with whether Kamala Harris really worked at McDonald’s in 1983 while she was a college student.

Accusing her of lying and demanding that she produce evidence that she once made fries at McDonald’s is truly bizarre. He’s treating this nonsense the same way he carried on about whether Barack Obama was an American citizen. Anyone else who said such things would be ridiculed. Trump is being ridiculed, but he doesn’t care. Is that part of his ongoing crazy act or is he really losing it?

It’s a complicated question. Trump has always enjoyed portraying himself as eccentric and willing to say things others wouldn’t, always treading the fine line between good taste and outrageous lies and name-calling. It’s central to his brand. Is he doing it because he thinks his base loves it or because he understands how effective it is in keeping the chaos pot boiling? Or are his critics right? Everyone not already planning to vote for Trump finds new reasons every day to claim he’s unhinged, and his behavior seems to feed those criticisms.

If that were all there was, I’d be on the fence about whether Trump is really losing it, but there’s much more to this pattern. Why would someone attend an iconic Catholic event hosted by the Archbishop of New York, tell the audience that Kamala Harris was born stupid and suggest that her husband is likely to hit on white house pages if she’s elected? Why would this man who treats the English language like his own polluted playground, while struggling to read from his notes, suggest that Harris is incapable of “stringing two coherent sentences together?” If anything is clear to voters about Harris, it’s that she is an accomplished orator and debater.

Why would anyone, with seventeen days remaining before the election spend time at a rally telling the crowd how impressive (he thinks) Arnold Palmer’s penis was? We might argue about whether he’s becoming more unstable every day or that’s just part of his weird act. But when we consider that in the context of hundreds of Republicans, including the most influential members of his own cabinet and his Vice President telling us that he is unfit to serve, we really have to wonder. Could all those impressive people who worked closely with or for Trump and all give us the same message be wrong or part of some mythical deep state conspiracy?

Ever since Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump has steadily turned up the volume on his weird behavior. We might attribute that to stress in the final days leading up to an election. But there are literally thousands of people running for office. Except for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, do you hear any serious candidate spout the crazy things that come out of Trump’s mouth?

There’s a much better, defensible reason for Trump sounding more irrational and desperate every day. His likely fate if he loses the election would unhinge anyone, and for someone like Trump who can never be wrong and who suffers from a serious psychiatric disorder, anything the rest of us might do in his situation is greatly exaggerated. Intentional or not, his words and actions are those of someone who has no filters or guardrails. Any discerning observer can see that much of his behavior is unintentional – he’s simply out of control. I can’t imagine a quality that would terrify me more in a president.

When you have to make a critical decision, would you let unbridled emotion overwhelm your ability to think rationally? Thousands of people are being killed in two serious wars right now. In one case, Trump’s response is influenced by his need to think Valdimir Putin respects him, while most of us see that Putin manipulates Trump the way a pedophile uses candy. In the other, Trump’s need to undermine the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war in the Middle East and feel loved by Benjamin Netanyahu take precedence over the future of hundreds of millions of people in the region.

Donald Trump knows that if he loses the election, his legacy will be destroyed. His trials will move forward, and he will almost certainly be convicted of very serious felonies that make his fraud convictions in the Stormy Daniels case look a friendly disagreement. The only way he will avoid spending time in prison is if sympathetic judges consider his mental health and decide that locking him up isn’t worth the problems it would cause.

Does Trump’s behavior make more sense now?

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The Bushes are AWOL

Posted on October 15, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 15, 2024

Real Conservative Republicans, the ones Donald Trump, in a classic reverse projection, calls RINOs have been standing up in droves to denounce Trump and endorse Kamala Harris. I subscribe to former Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s definition of Conservative in his Conscience of a Conservative. Former Senator Jeff Flake, also an Arizona Republican and Goldwater’s protégé, published his own version that speaks directly to the lie that the MAGA movement has anything to do with Conservatism.

According to Goldwater and Flake, Conservatives cannot coexist with lies, immoral behavior, and criminal acts. They prefer low taxes for all Americans and balanced budgets. They believe that entitlement programs are necessary, but are sometimes ineffiient and counterproductive, and they value integrity and adherence to the Constitution. Is there anything in that definition that sounds like Donald Trump? When I read Flake’s book, I was surprised that I agreed with almost everything he wrote, my only real disagreements being where to draw the line on government spending.

President Ronald Reagan was a Goldwater Conservative. His Vice President, George H. W. Bush, was another. Fifty years ago, when Reagan first touted trickle-down economics, Bush referred to it as “Voodoo economics,” but as happens in politics, he was persuaded to embrace it, which he continued to do when he succeeded Reagan as president in 1988. Despite Republicans traditionally supporting the wealthiest Americans, that is the only similarity between Reagan/Bush Conservatism and MAGA’s distorted definition.

Neither Reagan nor Bush would have supported Trump. Nor would Bush’s sons Jeb and George W. We know because the two most powerful people in the younger Bush’s cabinet, policy gurus Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, both told us. Cheney told the media that in our 248-year history there has never been a candidate as dangerous as Trump, and his daughter, Liz, donning her father’s mantle as protector of Conservative values, voted to impeach Trump and has joined the Harris campaign.

In recent months, an unprecedented number of prominent Republicans at all levels of federal, state, and local governments have endorsed Harris over Trump. The list includes 238 former staffers of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and John McCain, and senior officials who served under Reagan and both Bushes. It includes Trump’s ultra-loyal Vice President, Mike Pence, former Secretaries of Defense and National Security Advisors, military leaders, national security advisors, aides and analysts, and more than 100 former Republican House and Senate members. The very long list also includes General Mark Milley, who Trump appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Conspicuously missing from the above are former President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, a former Florida Governor. If you remember back to Trump’s first campaign, at a time when Americans had never before met such a shameless, slanderous, immoral candidate for a major party’s nomination for president, you’ll recall that the one of Trump’s opponents was Jeb Bush. You’ll also recall that Trump savaged Bush at his rallies and on the debate stage.

He referred to Jeb and his brother, the former president, as weak and stupid, and W as one of the worst presidents in our history. I thought W made some terrible decisions as president, like ignoring the fact that almost all of the nine-eleven terrorists were Saudis, and the attack that day was funded by Saudi oil money. But because of his family’s relationship with the Saudi royal family, he used faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. I disagreed with much of what the Bushes did in office, but as politicians go, they were honorable, decent men.

Today’s Republican Party bears little resemblance to the party of Reagan and the Bushes. For anyone in the Bush family to claim party loyalty as a reason to not campaign against Trump is inexplicable, but it is especially so for W. He was president for eight years that included the worst attack executed on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Whether or not he was a great president, he possessed a conscience and a sense of decency. Unlike Trump he is neither a racist nor a xenophobe. Most important, he, like his father and his most prominent appointees all revered our Constitution.

I have to ask – why, President Bush, haven’t you added your voice to the anti-Trump uproar? What could possibly justify remaining silent at a time when most of your colleagues and allies have had the courage to speak out against the gross unfitness of the man who openly craves unlimited power and an end to constitutional law?

George W. Bush’s voice could tip undecided voters away from Trump and toward Harris. Surely, he knows this, yet we haven’t heard a peep out of him. Maybe I’m expecting too much from a man who prematurely declared victory aboard an aircraft carrier as he was getting us dragged into a misguided eighteen-year conflict.

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Senior Health Care

Posted on October 12, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 12, 2024

Promises made by presidential candidates are usually nothing more than statements of desire. Most Americans seem to have forgotten their seventh grade civics. The only things presidents can do on their own is appoint judges, including Supreme Court justices, and command military actions. Even in those cases, a president requires a cooperative Senate, and everything else they promise us is the responsibility of Congress. Presidents can propose legislation and veto bills they don’t like, but without Congressional approval, they must resort to Executive Actions that can be reversed by their successors.

That’s especially true for virtually everything Donald Trump has promised this year. Most of his promises involve attacking, incarcerating, or deporting people he doesn’t like. His occasional suggestion about a new, niche-targeted tax break likewise falls under the powers granted to Congress in our Constitution. He does seem to have broken new ground, however, proving that no one can stop a sitting or former president from cozying up to autocrats and people who wish us harm. The only protection we have against that is impeachment, which has become so politicized in recent years, it’s purely symbolic.

Kamala Harris has made a number of innovative proposals in her quest for votes. The things she has proposed are generally very popular with voters, but there’s little chance, realistically, that any MAGA-dominated house of Congress would approve raising taxes on billionaires to provide down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers. Similarly, it’s difficult to imagine how she would go about punishing price gougers, even if she had the power to do so. During World War 2, the FDR administration was very concerned about price gouging, with many popular commodities like gasoline, sugar, and meat in short supply and being rationed. The only workable alternative was price controls, which everyone hated.

That being said, Harris proposed something this week that got my attention. If you’re not close to retirement age, you might not think it’s urgent, but the idea that Medicare would cover Home Health visits is ground-breaking. It would totally transform retirement planning and financing for most Americans. As president, Harris would have to convince Congress it was a good idea before a penny of tax revenue could be spent. But this idea might have better sailing in Congress, because it would so fundamentally impact the lives of seniors, who vote more consistently than any other subgroup of voters.

Long term care insurance for seniors, especially nursing home and rehabilitation center care is so expensive, it’s beyond the means of most Americans, and applicants can be rejected due to pre-existing conditions. Nursing home care is the most expensive category of Medicaid-covered services, and Medicare offers such coverage only on a short-term basis. People who can afford to purchase private long-term care insurance represent a minority of Americans.

Most people cringe at the idea of spending their final years in a nursing home. Given a choice, they would rather live at home and hire health care professionals to help out. Home Health care is far less costly than nursing home care, too. Even so, paying for visiting nurses and therapists out of pocket would devastate most people’s savings fairly quickly. Considering the age distribution of our population, meeting the long-term care needs of seniors is something Congress would have a difficult time rejecting.

The caveat in all that is that Harris would likely require a voting majority in both the House and the Senate to expand Medicare coverage to Home Health Services. But this proposal would have such a revolutionary impact on seniors, it’s a great pitch to vote for both Harris and Congressional candidates who would support the idea.

It would be expensive, and it would require raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, simply because no one else could afford to fund such a program. But there would be compensating effects. Poverty among seniors would be greatly reduced, as would the greatest source of stress faced by most seniors. As such, Medicare coverage of Home Health care is a family values issue that right-wing politicians would ignore at their peril.

Experts often compare our health care system with Canada’s, which MAGA people refer to as socialism. But Canada’s health care system doesn’t pay for long-term care, either. In the United States, people who require long-term care but can’t afford it can only resort to charity, family assistance, or Medicaid, with its negative stigma. In Canada, they can appeal to a rate-reduction board for assistance.

If a Harris administration could pull it off, having Medicare cover long-term Home Health Care might be the most impactful action since the Medicare legislation was past in 1965.

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Atonement

Posted on October 11, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 11, 2024

October 12th is the Day of Atonement Jews call Yom Kippur. There’s so much irony in that, it’s hard to know where to begin. Perhaps most striking is that it occurs five days after the anniversary of Hamas’ attack that killed more than 1,200 Israeli civilians, including children and young people attending a concert. The terrorists committed gruesome acts of savagery like rapes, beheadings, and mutilations. Neither Hamas, it’s sponsor, Iran, nor its counterparts in Lebanon and Yemen, Hezbolah and the Houthis feel any need to atone for those acts. Rather, they rejoice at the deaths of innocents.

The people who plotted the October 7th, 2023 attack did it as much to bait Israel into become embroiled in a multi-front war with its neighbors as to satisfy their lust for killing Jews. The world knows well how these terrorist organizations embed themselves in civilian infrastructure. We used to accuse them of using their own civilian populations as human shields, but this time they used the Palestinian people as cannon fodder, forcing Israel to attack their cities. Part of the terrorists’ plan was to see their own people killed, maimed, and starved, the more the better if it led to world condemnation of Israel.

Some of my military friends tell me that anything Israel does in its quest to destroy Hamas, and now, Hezbolah, is acceptable because anything less will eventually destroy Israel. They believe leaving any Hamas terrorists alive and functioning is like failing to kill every cancer cell in a sick patient. It’s easy to view metastasizing cancer cells in the same light as Hamas survivors rebuilding their organization when the fighting stops, but that only addresses one aspect of the problem.

As an American Jew, I have to ask when enough is enough. Israel does not have the manpower or the resources to extinguish Hamas without unleashing the kind of mass destruction on the Palestinian people that the Nazis used against Jews eighty years ago. To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Holocaust is sufficient justification to do whatever is necessary to protect his people.

That sounds frighteningly Trumpian. I don’t doubt that Netanyahu wants to protect Israel, but like Trump, he is desperate to stay in office to avoid dealing with his criminal indictments. It’s been almost five years since he was indicted for breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, and his trial is still ongoing.

Netanyahu has a serious conflict of interest. Many Israelis believe he is playing the hostage crisis for his own benefit to keep prosecuting a war that has almost no chance of destroying Israel’s enemies but is certain to continue killing thousands of noncombatants and destroy the homes of millions. It is also certain to either isolate Israel from its allies or plunge the entire Middle East into a major war that no one will win.

No one talks about it, but Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. Would Netanyahu use them? That’s like asking if Trump would carry out his threats to destroy our democracy and Constitution. If ever there was a time for a Jew to look at himself in a mirror and atone for his actions, tomorrow is that time for Netanyahu.

Regardless of what faith you practice, or even if religion is not your cup of tea, a day of introspection and atonement would serve all of us well. We make New Year’s resolutions, and look back on our lives on birthdays and anniversaries. If we’re honest with ourselves, there are always things we wish we’d done better or not done at all. Without such an annual self-examination, we can truly lose our way.

Most of us are not evil. Very few of us are so sociopathic that we completely lack empathy or a basic understanding of what other people feel and need. That kind of narcissistic view of the world is the province of people like Donald Trump. For the rest of us who have healthy, active consciences, a regular assessment of our own actions is necessary to keep us from going astray, especially when we’re faced with constant stress and threats.

It does us good to scrutinize our actions during the past year as we embark on a new one. It’s like sending astronauts to the moon. They take off from Earth on a precise trajectory, but if they don’t constantly re-evaluate their path and make course corrections, they’ll never reach their destination. It’s like that with our daily lives. We strive to be true to our principles and values, but sometimes that can be a challenge. We may not have to atone for anything, but if we don’t measure our actions against our expectations this year, we may not recognize ourselves next year.

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Human Nature

Posted on October 6, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 6, 2024

Donald Trump has shown the world that he has no leadership skills, unless you confuse leadership with a dizzyingly effective combination of bullying and pandering. His ramblings and idiotic statements often make him seem ignorant and incompetent. His growing anger and frustration and his worsening incoherence make him look irrational, as if he’s losing contact with reality and slowly sinking into delusional dementia. His narcissism, particularly his susceptibility to flattery makes him dangerously manipulable. Sometimes the nonsense that comes out of his mouth tempts us to conclude that he’s not very smart, but that’s a dangerous error. He simply lacks any sense of shame or self-awareness.

All of the above is true. Even his supporters don’t deny these things – they just don’t seem to care. Those of us who do care, when we’re not desperately worrying about the future of our country should Trump win, scratch our heads trying to understand why he’s even remotely competitive. When I talk to people about this, more and more I hear that it’s about our seriously flawed human nature. Many smart, well-educated people believe our basic natures compel us to repeat cycles of violence and self-destruction. They believe we’re helpless to break out of that pattern as if failure and devastation were our destiny, and we lack the free will to escape it.

I’m not a historian, theologian, or sociologist, but I wonder about the same things. A hundred years ago, people described the first world war as the “war to end wars.” The death and devastation, the wanton destruction of Europe, the introduction of horrors like poison gas and aerial bombardment were so terrible, surely we’d never be that foolish again. Yet, the only two things that were consistent in the aftermath of the Great War were economic devastation and laying the seeds for a second world war that was orders of magnitude worse. We’re about to find out if the subsequent eighty years were nothing but a setup for a third that destroys civilization, or if we avoid blowing each other up, wrecking the world’s economy and allowing fascism and autocracy to flourish everywhere.

There’s enough compelling evidence to concern us. In the entirety of human history, every civilization, every empire, every “enlightened” nation has ultimately failed. Success and advances in our ability to control our environment have invariably led to decay and decadence, which ultimately destroyed most of what had been gained and built, and each crash was followed by generations dark ages.

Yesterday, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting Trump and the Project 2025 agenda, warned us that if Trump doesn’t win this election it will be the last presidential election ever held in the United States. Of course, that’s just an example of the Trump chaos machine continually projecting his failings and unsavory behavior onto everyone else. No serious person imagines that a Kamala Harris presidency would spell the end of democracy, but a Trump presidency shows every sign of having that intention. It’s Orwellian Doublespeak at its worst, and it’s typical of everything the Trump campaign does.

One of my favorite novels, which I re-read whenever it seems relevant, is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle For Liebowitz. Published in 1959, as the Cold War was ramping up and the fear of nuclear war gripped most of the country, Miller created a haunting vision of humanity as doomed to destroy itself every time it developed the capacity to do so. He did so with such skill, such ironic dark humor, the reader doesn’t realize they’re being sucked down the rabbit hole of pre-destined cycles of destruction until the chilling conclusion. It’s about human nature and the question of whether knowledge, enlightenment, and spiritual growth give us the tools to exercise free will and end the awful cycle.

After nine years of watching the Trump saga play out with ever increasing violence and threats to the foundations of our Constitution, one might conclude that Miller was right. Why would a country as rich as ours, that in many ways has shown itself to be the most enlightened, generous nation that ever existed, be tearing itself apart the way we are? The answer isn’t complicated.

Trump is a charismatic demigod with a unique ability to tap into the worst, darkest instincts of human nature, and his extreme narcissism, lack of concern for anything but his own wealth and power, and inability to feel shame have brought us to the brink. That his running mate, a highly intelligent, Yale-educated man who decried Trump as an abomination could have been corrupted by him is clear testimony to the destructive power of one man. Trump is the embodiment of the Old Testament serpent that enabled the destruction of humanity’s innocence. If you believe the words in Genesis, you might conclude that Miller was right, that we’re flawed and lack the free will to break out of this cyclical trap.

I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that rational, decent Americans will allow this agent of Satan to destroy our country. No, I don’t believe in either Satan or the snake in the garden, but the metaphor is too apt to ignore. We must, we can, we will exile the Trump demon back to where he belongs, either a prison cell or the snake pit of his own mind.

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Winds of Change

Posted on October 4, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 4, 2024

We’re told every day that the 2024 presidential race is too close to predict a clear winner. As far as the news media are concerned, the race will stay too close to call until Election Day because that’s in their self-interest. Pundits write articles decrying the unlikely, and probably wrong conclusion that things are so baked in, we’re trapped in stasis, and nothing seems able to budge. Daily, no matter what happens, be it a revelation about Trump’s private words and actions on January 6th, a new celebrity endorsement, a slick debate performance, or a claim that murderous illegal immigrants took over a zoo so they could barbecue a lion, all I hear is “that’s not likely to move the needle.”

I’m skeptical. If we buy into the notion that everyone’s mind is made up, what’s the point of spending billions of dollars on TV ads and rallies? The idea that minds can’t be changed is utter nonsense. Just ask corporations that spend fortunes on mass advertising and mailings. Most will tell you a positive one percent return makes it worthwhile even if the other ninety-nine percent ignore them.

I couldn’t care less who Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen thinks should win in November, but hundreds of thousands of Swifties running out to register to vote because Taylor told them to is very significant, and it’s something that’s not likely to show up in polls. On the other hand, when literally hundreds of Republicans who never supported a Democrat in their lifetimes wait in line every week to pick up a microphone and tell their fellow Americans why, from their direct experience with Trump, they believe he is a terrible danger to the country, I take that seriously.

The election will turn on what a small percentage of self-proclaimed independent or undecided voters in a handful of states do on November 4th. That means all the ads and rallies have two purposes. One is keeping each side’s base engaged to increase turnout. The other, obviously, is to help undecided voters make up their minds.

What do we know about those supposedly undecided people? We know they’re thoughtful and they do their own thinking and fact-checking. We know they’re educated, serious people. We also know that they’re not followers looking for someone else to tell them what they should believe. When someone like Liz Cheney stands next to Kamala Harris and tells the world that Donald Trump should never be allowed to wield power again, and he responds on his pet network that Cheney and Harris are both stupid, how are those independent, smart thinkers likely to react?

Consider the vice-presidential debate. The initial response by TV commentators was that JD Vance was slick, and clearly won on debate points, while Tim Walz’s answers weren’t as smooth or polished. Conclusion: not likely to move the needle. But by the next day, commentators had generally changed their tune. Now it was Vance was clearly well-prepared and the more talented debater, but he lied almost every time he opened his mouth, and his refusal to give a clear answer about whether Trump lost the 2020 election had undermined his debate performance. Suddenly, Walz’s common man, imperfect debating style was homey and likable.

Neither Trump’s nor Harris’s base were likely to be moved by any of that. But what about the million or so voters who watched and listened with their brains engaged? I believe those things matter very much to undecided voters, and they’re part of a rising trend toward valuing truth and the rule of law over lies and hateful personal attacks that lack substance. The reason these people are undecided is that they care very much about their country. If they were into the kind of craziness and chaos that is the MAGA movement’s primary asset, they wouldn’t be undecided.

Seeing and hearing Cheney, yesterday, felt like a refreshing breeze. That she is but one of thousands by now, if you’ve been counting, makes that breeze a gradually rising wind that in the end will decide who our president is. That wind is blowing in only one direction. There is no group called Democrats for Trump out there at his rallies, only Elon Musk, a black-sheep Kennedy, and a nutcase who makes pillows. If all the Republicans who privately despise and fear Trump grow a pair and stand up the way Cheney, Adam Kinsinger, and the vast majority of people who know Trump well or worked for him did, all of those independent or disaffected voters will notice, and Harris will win by a margin that shocks everyone (except me and a few close friends.)

Are you listening, Mitch? Imagine what a spectacle it would be to hear Mitch McConnell endorse Harris, though I doubt he has the integrity to do it.

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Unfit, Unqualified, and Batshit Crazy

Posted on October 1, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 1, 2024

Yesterday, The New York Times endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump for president, declaring that Trump was unfit to lead and an extreme danger to the country. Harris was lauded as “the only patriotic choice” in the presidential election. The Times praised her policies, qualifications, and record as a prosecutor and California Attorney General, but their endorsement had more to do with Trump’s negatives than Harris herself. In our polarized nation, for many Harris voters, her most important quality as a candidate is that she sounds like a skilled prosecutor whenever she lists his transgressions.

Given Trump’s long-standing animus toward The Times, no one was surprised by the endorsement, but unlike previous endorsements motivated by policy and politics, this one was backed up by a long list of Republicans, former Trump associates and employees, and members of his family. Today, The Times published statements by ninety-one of them who explained whyTrump is unfit to serve a president again.

Since the conventions, there have been a myriad of lists of people willing to put their names on record, some at great risk to their careers, warning about the dangers of Trump returning to the White House. They include Trump’s senior Cabinet officers, former and current congressional Republicans, Republican state officials, and his close associates and relatives. These messages are based on Trump’s own words and actions and hold him accountable for his failures in office, like the politically motivated delay of his response to COVID that resulted in the avoidable deaths of a half million Americans.

Perhaps more ominous, many Republicans and others who know Trump best warn that he would be a far worse president than he was the first time. Much of that concern comes from Trump himself, who publicly declared war on his opponents, on immigrants, and the mythical deep state he fantasizes about. He stated unequivocally that he will use the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who stands against him. Yesterday, he added a new wrinkle.

In the midst of lying about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene, (he was contradicted by four southern governors, three of whom are Republicans,) he advocated that police should be allowed a day of unfettered violence – in effect, a suspension of the Constitution – to deal with people he describes as lowlifes, rapists, and murderers, after which, in his delusion, there would be no more crime. If he could get away with it, Trump would create his own Gestapo and secret police, modeled after what two of his idols, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin created.

Trump’s campaign has gone down so many rabbit holes, many of his supporters worry about him going completely off the rails. His obvious lack of guardrails, boundaries, and self-discipline have Republicans worried that he will lose and take the House and Senate down with him. Trump’s life-long mental illness may finally be overwhelming his ability to function rationally. I’ve heard the term “bat-shit crazy” a dozen times this week during media interviews with Republicans.

On the same Times editorial page, was a column that addressed a question tens of millions of Americans are asking: with all of this damning evidence against him, not to mention his indictments and felony convictions, why isn’t Harris killing him in the polls? That might be the most compelling mystery of our time, destined to be studied by generations of psychologists and sociologists.

But there’s another possibility. What if she really is way ahead, but no one is telling us? That’s not a conspiracy theory, just common sense. There’s good reason to suspect that the polls aren’t accurate – how could they be when they’re largely based on cell phone and email interviews? Who do you know who answers political calls or responds to polling emails? But even if pollsters somehow, against all logic, have polling samples that are representative of likely voters, we’re victims of seriously biased media.

Broadcast and streaming media all love polls, because their sponsors, the people who pay their bills love them. Polls turn elections into sporting events. Having an election without polls would be like watching a football game without a scoreboard. Social media are worse, because they submit to no vetting authority to help us distinguish truth from fiction. Yet, this deception contains a grain of truth that lends it credibility: the dreaded margin of error.

A phrase I often hear is “no clear leader within the margin of error.” On its face, if you believe the numbers they report, it’s a true statement. A poll based on a sample size of a thousand “likely voters” will typically have a margin of error of about four percent. That means that any result that has the candidates within four percentage points of each other qualifies as having no clear leader, but that can be extremely misleading.

I check 538.com, the highly trusted website that presents all respected poll results next to each other, every day. What I see is Harris leading Trump by between two and six points in all the most recent polls. That kind of trend is far more significant than “no clear leader,” but sponsors of athletic events love close games, and elections are no different. My conclusion is that Americans understand how dangerous Trump is far better the media would have us believe. We know he’s unfit, and we’ll demonstrate that on Election Day.

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