Prosecutor Versus Felon

Posted on July 23, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 23, 2024

For all the hand-wringing and angst that preceded President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2020 election, for all the times we’ve heard “woe-is-me” and “what-will-we-do now,” the Democrats and the country may have found a real diamond in the rough. The very things that worried some of us about Vice President Harris may now be exactly what we need to defeat Trump.

As politicians go, Ms. Harris has always been a little rough around the edges. In the past, she was tough and demanding and not always easy to work for. But that was the past, and with the opportunities President Biden gave her to prove her mettle, she has grown into a far more polished politician and campaigner. There is suddenly so much energy among Democrats who felt everything slipping away two weeks ago.

The mood is almost euphoric, and it should be. Ms. Harris had a record-breaking first day, raising more than any candidate in history. Even more significant, the New York Times reported that 62% of the people donating to her campaign were first-timers. That must have Donald Trump’s people wetting themselves. Right out of the box, Harris is widening the Democratic base. The hope was that she would re-energize younger voters who hated the idea of two octogenarians running for President, and that she would catalyze women’s anger at Trump and firm up Democratic support among nonwhite voters. The initial indication is that she may already be doing just that.

As to her alleged roughness, I love her new image; her likability is infectious. And in light of who her opponent is and the threat he poses to our future, this time around her tough exterior is an asset the entire country will come to love. Joe Biden’s gentle, man-of-the-people style was exactly what the country needed in 2020. But in 2024, Trump has changed. He is the same amoral sociopath he was then, but now he’s gone feral, almost rabid. In 2020, he had a narcissistic need for power and adulation. In 2024, he’s added a desperate need to stay out of prison to his motivation, and the Supreme Court has already assured that if he wins re-election, he will never face any consequences for his crimes.

The old Trump was profane, bullying, misogynistic, and racist. The new, unhinged Trump is all those things, only more so. He has never been shy about lying, insulting, and slandering his opponents, but this year, there will be no gloves, and Trump has no filters at all. His acceptance speech at the Republican Convention showed us what the campaign will be like. His staff desperately wanted him to project a softer image and pull back on some of the extreme rhetoric of Project 2025. But after thirty minutes of reading from a teleprompter, Trump couldn’t control himself. The next hour was a litany of largely incoherent rants about everything he hates. He was completely off the rails, much scarier than Biden looked in his disastrous debate performance.

Biden was unprepared for Trump’s calculated assault. Harris won’t be. Harris won’t make the mistake of trying to campaign on issues, because since 2016, Trump has proved that campaigning on issues and past accomplishments doesn’t work. In 2016, he showed that lies, false accusations, and appealing to the fears and prejudices of his base was enough to win. In 2020, that didn’t work as well, and Trump’s campaign knew it from the outset. That’s why they said the election was rigged before it started.

Harris will remind African Americans that their employment and income numbers have never been better, assure young people that she hears them, and remind immigrants that America knows what it owes them. She will not sit back and let Trump attack her. Nor will she waste time defending herself against lies and nonsense. She knows that the way to take down a bully is to confront him face-to-face. She has made it clear that she intends to prosecute Trump in the only court that really matters in light of the Supreme Court shielding him from justice. Her court will be in session every time she holds a microphone or stands in front of a television camera, and she will recite every vile or criminal thing Trump has done every chance she gets.

Trump will not be able to withstand that kind of campaigning. He will erupt, and she will keep hitting him until it’s clear to everyone who can still think clearly that he is nothing more than an empty shell, albeit, one with the power to destroy our democracy if he isn’t stopped. It’s becoming clearer every hour that Kamala Harris is the one to stop him. It took her only one day to capture enough delegates to win the nomination. Imagine what she can do in a hundred days of campaigning.

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Fighting Inevitability is a Losing Battle

Posted on July 21, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 21, 2024

One day, when my mother was 88, she drove down a gentle hill that terminated at a stop sign. I don’t know whether she saw the sign, but she hit the rear end of an eighteen-wheeler that was passing through the intersection. She claimed the truck had hit her car, which was absurd. The incident was witnessed by an ophthalmologist who told me, afterward, that my mother had a perception problem that he could diagnose just by watching her drive. Her insurance agent put it more graphically: “Every time we see her car coming, we duck.”

I had no choice. I knew it would hurt her, because at her age retaining her independence was more important than anything. As the oldest of her offspring, I had to take her car away from her and help my sister get her into assisted living. She fought and protested until the very end, but by that point it was obvious to everyone who knew her that her time had come. For the remainder of her life, every time she saw me, the first thing she said was, “You ruined my life.” That always hurt, but I knew I’d done the right thing – for all of us.

My sister and I had accepted the inevitable. Putting it off would have endangered my mother and everyone in her path, and accomplished nothing except deferring a very unpleasant task until it was too late. As a nation, we face a different inevitability that might have catastrophic consequences. President Biden is at the wheel of the ship of state. As president of the United States, he holds what is still the most powerful and influential office in the entire world.

No one knows if Biden is up to serving as president for four more years, but it’s become clear that he may not be up to the job of both running the country and campaigning for fifteen weeks. My feelings are similar to when I had to deal with my mother. She’d lived a long, often hard life, and she had earned the right to end it with pride and dignity. Because she couldn’t accept her situation, I wound up taking those from her.

I hate the idea that America seems to be doing that to a president who sincerely loves this country and who has saved us, at least for now, from disaster. But there’s far more at stake than there was in my mother’s case. I love Joe Biden, but the future of our country is more important than his feelings. America has three priorities between now and Election Day: preventing the Middle East from exploding, keeping Ukraine in the fight against Russian aggression, and by far most important, guaranteeing that Donald Trump never sets foot in the White House again.

Looking at the next election as the defining moment for the survival of our democracy and our Constitution is not an exaggeration. The only way to assure that Trump doesn’t win is to attack him with the same ruthless energy he uses against every opponent. Whether it was his advisors or Biden himself who set their previous course, he has not done that. He wasn’t prepared for Trump’s onslaught during the so-called debate, and I’m not sure he was equipped to fight back even if he had been. It is that uncertainty that has caused young people and many of his peers to lose confidence in him, and there’s far too much at stake to risk losing.

To win, Democrats must wage a campaign as cold and hard as Trump’s. They needn’t reiterate Biden’s record – his supporters know it already, and rehashing the past won’t overcome the doubts of voters who have lost confidence in him. Democrats must bash Trump with his own words and deeds, repeatedly hammering home who this sociopath is and what his values are. Biden might not be able to do that effectively for more than three months – but Kamala Harris can.

Vice President Harris would be a controversial, risky candidate. The recent history of American politics says she’d start with two strikes against her – she’s a woman and she’s not white. But Harris has shown herself to be very much up to the task leading the charge for women’s rights in the wake of damaging decisions by a revisionist Supreme Court, and she’s young and energetic enough to appeal generations X and Y. I had my doubts, but a new vision has crystalized in my mind.

Picture Kamala Harris, the hard-nosed prosecutor and Attorney General at the campaign microphone. Imagine a dark-skinned woman going nose-to-nose with a blustering old white bully who sounds like a raving lunatic when he’s not in front of a teleprompter. She’ll eat him alive, and in doing so she’ll win the hearts and minds of millions of voters who have been telling us for months that they hate both of their November choices.

Team her up with someone like Andy Beshear, who is serving his second term as Governor of bright red Kentucky, and the Democrats will have a team that can address all of America, and most important, defeat Donald Trump.

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Time to Say Goodbye

Posted on July 18, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 18, 2024

I love you, Joe, and I wish I didn’t have to say this – but it’s time. There’s not much left, and every day that passes makes the situation more urgent. You’ve been an outstanding president, the perfect man for his time. You held off the first wave of MAGA Fascism like no one else could have. You fixed our economy and rebuilt NATO. You brought inflation to its knees and put people to work in jobs that didn’t de-humanize them. You showed exactly the right strength and fortitude when Russia invaded Ukraine, and you have kept the lid on the most explosive situation that has existed in the Middle East in fifty years.

Fifty years – that’s about the length of time I have admired you for your service and basic decency and honesty. Your genuineness has gotten you into trouble in the past, but I always thought “Gaffe Machine” was a term of affection. You simply told the truth too much. To those in the Trump Republican party, that’s a worse crime than assaulting women or instigating insurrection, and we love you for it.

But let’s be realistic. I’m six months younger than you. I still have all my marbles and I can analyze and argue as well as ever. But when people see my obvious physical problems, they don’t see someone they want to entrust their future to. I believe you’re up to the job, just as I’m sure Hillary Clinton was, and would have been a far better and more empathetic president than Trump was. But the voters didn’t see it that way, because the qualifications for being a presidential candidate have very little to do with the qualifications for being president. With an opponent like Trump, and helpful public servants like James Comey, she never stood chance against the onslaught of lies and slander spewing from right-wing media.

This time, it’s even worse. The only way to defeat Trump is to be as mean and vicious as he is, at least until Election Day. You can’t fight sewer rats without getting down in the filth. He needs to be hit hard every time you or VP Harris is near a microphone. Voters need to be reminded in his own words and all the videos he loved starring in of the sociopath he is. Every voter who hasn’t already overdosed on MAGA Kool Aid needs to see and hear it every day until the election. You could do that, but it’s really not in your nature. It is very much in your Vice President’s, however.

You have said for four years that she’s ready to step in and be president any time she needs to, and this may be her moment. Imagine Kamala Harris, a dark-skinned woman going head-to-head with the bullying white misogynist, Trump. Imagine her with her no-holds-barred prosecutor’s hat on, trying him in the court of public opinion using everything he’s said and done against him, complete with audio and video confirmation from Trump himself.

Throughout your career, I only seriously disagreed with you once, when you failed to defend Anita Hill against Senate Republicans during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. And look what happened as a result? That one misstep put a nasty, corrupt Justice on the Supreme Court for life, and we’re all paying a price for that. We can’t afford another misstep now, because the result could be Donald Trump in office long enough to destroy everything you hold dear.

Whether your supporters, those of us who have revered you for decades are willing to gamble on your ability to continue, the problem is that undecided voters, particularly those who are too young to understand the trade-off between advancing age and wisdom, don’t. They will never unsee your occasional lapses and moments of frailty, just like my friends and family can’t unsee mine.

Joe, it’s a tragedy that it’s come to this. You deserve the legacy of a great American leader, to have the history books refer to you as the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, holding back the forces of hate and Fascism until younger, stronger reinforcements could take over. It’s time to retire with grace and dignity, basking in the love and adoration of the nation and party you have served for so long.

Whether you pass the nomination on to Kamala Harris, or your party holds an open convention, the result will be a far better one for America than one that sees you defeated, with your legacy tarnished. We still need you, but as an advisor and commentator, a beloved, avuncular old friend with a voice worth listening to. Stay at the wheel and steer us safely home until January, and let someone else carry the load of campaigning.

I can’t sing it as well as Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, but It’s Time To Say Goodbye. Play that in the background when you go, and feel it’s triumphant climax.

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Trump’s Flirtation with God

Posted on July 16, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 16, 2024

Apparently, the theme of the Republican Convention and for now, the Trump campaign, is that Donald Trump was chosen by God to save America. That sudden switch in tactics may have been entirely a result of Saturday’s failed assassination attempt. Powerful MAGA Republicans like Tim Scott (R-SC) and J. D. Vance, who is Trump’s running mate, claimed that God directly stepped in and made the assassin miss. I find that horrifying, not only because it supports the idea that Trump intends to turn America into a Christian oligarchy of billionaires and clerics, but because Trump himself, as Pope Francis told us in 2016, couldn’t be less Christian or more immoral.

For devout Christians who truly believe that belief in Jesus Christ can forgive even the most venal of sins, that probably makes sense. If I were a political strategist who believed that the majority of Americans believed in God and interpreted the Bible literally, I might propose just such a strategy. Who, after all, is less deserving of forgiveness than Trump? Americans love underdogs and repentant sinners, but casting Donald Trump as the second coming of Mary Magdalene is comical.

Yet, the Republicans, who have shamelessly pandered to Christian Evangelists since Ronald Reagan’s election, believe this will carry the day. Tim Scott as much as said The Devil sent the assassin and God stopped him. What a change from 1960 when Republicans attacked John F. Kennedy’s candidacy by asking voters if they wanted the Pope making decisions in the White House. What an even more profound change from our Founders, and most of the earliest Americans, for whom religious freedom was what drove them to cross the Atlantic.

I don’t think it will work for two reasons. First, religious extremists, most right-wing extremists, for that matter, always overreach when they smell power, and it always backfires. More to the point, the vast majority of Americans won’t buy it. Gallup has been asking Americans if they believe in God and if the Bible is God’s word for decades. His surveys usually report that at least 80% of Americans say yes to the first and more than half do to the second. But – and this is a huge but – if Republicans actually believe that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d love to sell them.

There are some questions that invariably cause most people to lie. Did you eat the last cookie? Were you speeding? Do you cheat on your partner? I believe more people lie when asked about their religious convictions than on any other subject. It’s possible that the circles I travel in are atypical, but most of the people I know are either some version of agnostic or atheistic. Some of my friends are devoutly religious, and obviously sincere in their beliefs, but I’d bet my life that not one of them thinks the failed assassination of Trump had anything to do with God – in fact, they think of him as the Antichrist.

If this is what Trump’s handlers meant by a gentler version of himself, it makes me laugh. I can’t imagine anything more cynical and ridiculous. If you were walking through the woods and you met a wolf dressed like a sheep, would you be fooled? If I told you that a man who’s had no respect for law or religion throughout his life was our savior anointed by God, my guess is you’d avoid me from then on.

This is no joke. The MAGA Republicans have driven themselves right onto the cusp of absurdity, which is a far worse outcome than simply getting trapped in a cul-de-sac. If the Democrats get their act together, whether they force Biden to step aside or not, they can and should win this election. They need to remind voters of what Trump really is at every opportunity, and he has given them more ammunition than they could ever use. His love of the television camera and his even bigger love for adoring crowds, combined with having fewer filters than a charging bull have left his opponents with hours of self-damning videos and speeches. President Biden keeps telling us that the election is an existential crisis for our democracy, and he’s right. His talented campaign staff need to step up and act like it is.

If I were writing Biden’s speeches – don’t laugh, I have a nephew who wrote speeches for Hillary Clinton – every one of them would be a direct attack on Trump’s actions and character using his own words and gestures. Voters will see an unending stream of Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors, and in the end they will convict him where the Senate could not. And after he loses, there will no longer be any time sensitivity to pursuing his indictments and trials. Defeat him in November and justice will eventually prevail.

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The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump

Posted on July 15, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 15, 2024

Assassinations are among the worst things humans can do. They tend to occur during periods of anger and divisiveness when tensions are already high – clichés about tinderboxes come to mind. In an unstable situation with persons of good will attempting to find common ground and a peaceful path forward, an assassination, either foiled or successful can tip the balance into chaos and massive bloodshed. I refer you to World War 1, which was triggered by the assassination of the Austrian Arch Duke and set the tone for all the death and destruction in the first half of the twentieth century.

Do you wonder what would cause a twenty-year-old kid with a fascination for guns and explosives to attempt to kill a presidential candidate? He had to know he’d be killed instantly by the Secret Service or local law enforcement. If he thought he’d die a martyr, he was wrong. Either young Mr. Crooks, the deceased assassin, was mentally ill, or he was obsessed with a deeply ingrained movement that is a real threat to our country.

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, who might be announced as Donald Trump’s running mate this week, took to social media: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

That’s a fascinating statement, one that Fox News began promulgating immediately after the shooting. Let’s try to parse it, together, and let’s try to put our biases aside and be objective. Vance’s first sentence is correct, although he meant to apply it to the level of anger that exists between the Biden and Trump campaigns, and I would prefer to apply it to the epidemic of mass shootings that have occurred in the United States. The anger in the campaigns was the catalyst for what Crooks did, but the culture that believes gun ownership should be completely unrestricted and that enables people on the fringes to feel entitled to use their guns any way they want to, is the more credible explanation.

Similarly, the issue of mental illness and the scarcity of health care resources which might have helped Mr. Crooks. And equally important, the destabilizing effect of unregulated social media. We live in a country in which for years, someone like Alex Jones was able to perpetrate the lie that the Sandy Hook shooting that killed twenty six people – teachers and children as young as six – was a hoax, until the courts finally caught up with him.

Vance also claimed that the central theme of the Biden campaign is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. Vance is right about that, but what he left out is that Trump has defined himself that way. Trump doesn’t have to call himself a Fascist or an autocrat directly when his actions speak for themselves.

Trump supporters don’t deny that’s what he is, and his most loyal supporters revel in the image of a strong leader unfettered by the Constitution or the Rule of Law. The most dangerous of them do things like surround state houses in Michigan and Kentucky and threaten Democratic Governors and their families. They also staged an insurrection at the Capitol, and told us afterwards that they believed they were following Donald Trump’s instructions.

That Mr. Vance’s statement is wholly disingenuous should not surprise us. After all, he wants to be Donald Trump’s Vice President. What better qualification could he have than practicing the Doublespeak his master is so adept at?
Vance is also correct that the rhetoric in the campaign undoubtedly affected the shooter’s view of the world. But you can look it up yourselves. It’s all documented in nine years of nonstop media coverage.

Only one candidate has been unrelentingly belligerent. Only one candidate campaigns with slanderous insults. Only one candidate pumps his fist in the air and screams fight. Only one candidate always fights to assure that no restricitions are placed on gun ownership and use. And only one candidate continuously advocates cutting back on mental health care benefits, especially Medicaid, which people of limited means depend on.

Every time we reel from the aftereffects of gun violence, the MAGA crew blames mental illness. But the same people have rejected every attempt by Congress to provide help for the people who continue to murder and maim. Trump pledged to increase mental health care funding after every shooting but went back on his word every time, just as he has always fought against restrictions on automatic and semi-automatic weapons like the one used to attempt to assassinate him.

We’re being told that as a result of his nearly being killed, Trump will present a softer gentler version of himself at the Republican Convention. Let’s see if he can pull that off for four days, but more important, how long it takes for him to revert to form.

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The New York Times on Trump

Posted on July 13, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 13, 2024

After his disastrous debate performance, the Times Editorial Board praised President Biden’s record, but urged him to drop out of the race for re-election and pass the baton to a younger generation. The Board said, “Mr. Biden has been an admirable president. Under his leadership, the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal. But the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.”

The Times editorial said that despite his outstanding accomplishments in the last three-and-a-half years, the only compelling reason to believe that Biden is the best candidate to defeat Trump is that he beat him in 2020, but that Biden is not the man he was in 2020. They noted that Biden has correctly identified that what is at stake in November is nothing less than the survival of our Constitution and our democracy. They supported that goal, but concluded that the public perception of the president’s frailty after the debate made it likely that Biden would lose this time.

Yesterday, the Times dropped the other shoe. If Biden is no longer the man he was in 2020, Trump hasn’t changed except to feel emboldened and entitled to wreak havoc on anyone he perceives as an enemy – which equates to anyone who doesn’t take a knee and praise him. The Times made it clear that asking Biden to step aside was in no way an endorsement of Donald Trump. Rather it was an attempt to increase the chances that Trump would be defeated.

At the opening of yesterday’s Op-Ed, the Board spoke in simple direct terms:

HE IS DANGEROUS
IN WORD, DEED AND ACTION

HE PUTS SELF OVER
COUNTRY

HE LOATHES THE LAWS
WE LIVE BY

DONALD TRUMP IS UNFIT TO SERVE

The Times supported its opinion so perfectly, I’ll just repeat what they said, here. “Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.”

Ther is no doubt that Donald Trump is unfit to lead, and I’ll go further.

Donald Trump is not fit to run a business that impacts the lives of other people. His company has already been convicted of decades of fraudulent practices, and his history shows that he will always maximize his own profit at the expense of everyone else, even if it leaves them in financial ruin. I refer you to Atlantic City, New Jersey and the people who enrolled in Trump University.

He is not fit to be around women unless they are armed or accompanied by a bodyguard because of his documented record of sexual assault and his complete disregard for women’s health.

He is not fit to be a husband unless you believe sleeping with a porn star while his wife is home caring for a newborn child is acceptable or you believe his remarks on the infamous Access Hollywood tape about openly molesting women qualifies him.

He is not fit to lead the United States or any other nation because he is a severely mentally ill sociopath with no moral compass and no regard for either the people or the oath he takes to defend the Constitution. Oaths and promises mean nothing to Trump unless they suit his convenience.

The only thing Donald Trump is fit for is a prison cell.

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Should Biden Quit?

Posted on July 12, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 12, 2024

President Joe Biden is 81 and suffers from neuropathy, which is the reason he looks stiff when he walks. Neuropathy can greatly reduce sensation in legs and feet. I’m 81 too, and I also suffer from neuropathy. Some days, if you saw me walking, you might think I was a feeble old man about to collapse. The fact that you’re reading this demonstrates that that has nothing to do with my cognitive ability.

Until they reach eighty, most people have no idea what aging is really like. Put ten octogenarians in a room, and each of them will likely report that some part of their body doesn’t work the way it should. They’ll also likely tell you that everything else works just fine. I was as horrified as everyone else when Biden appeared to lose himself at the debate with Donald Trump. But two weeks later, the polls reflecting Biden’s worst moments haven’t really changed, and as I’ve contended for months, there’s no reason to have confidence in them, anyway.

I’ve followed Biden’s career for fifty years, and always admired his commitment to public service and all Americans in the lower 99 percent. But even I was on the fence about whether he should quit. Simply put, nothing, not Joe Biden’s legacy, not Kamala Harris’ ambition, not whether Biden occasionally trips over a word (I did it twice, today) matters more than preventing Donald Trump from destroying our country.

As Biden said at his press conference Thursday night, show him evidence that he can’t beat Trump and someone else can and he’ll retire. His first term has been a marvel of accomplishment. When the history of the aborted MAGA era is written, people will look back on Biden the way my generation revered Harry Truman. All the noise and bluster from Trump can’t negate Biden’s obvious successes. Every significant economic measure and index is soaring, with equity markets at record levels and unemployment still at twenty year lows.

Ignore the pundits for a while – they don’t matter, because the only two people who could convince Biden to step aside are his wife and Nancy Pelosi, who is older than he is. The Democrats who have said he shouldn’t run have told us they’ve been listening to their constituents, which means they were afraid Biden might cost them their own seats. Wait a few days until those same constituents weigh in about Thursday night and see if some of those nervous House members change their minds.

In the meantime, here are a few things to reflect on. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has spent his entire time in office governing from a wheelchair. President Franklin Roosevelt governed us through the Great Depression and World War 2 from a wheelchair. Senator John McCain served with one arm disabled. Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth has no legs. Biden isn’t what he used to be – neither am I – are you? The leaders of the nearly forty countries who attended this week’s NATO conference laud Biden and consider the possibility of another Trump presidency an existential crisis. Did any of them suggest that he shouldn’t run?

Biden’s campaign is in crisis, but his press conference convinced me of two things: he’s up to the job, and if at some point in the next four years he feels he isn’t any longer, Kamala Harris will be a more than adequate steward of his legacy. I wonder if Harry Truman is watching from the great beyond.

The media are so obsessed with their feeding frenzy, they’re overlooking the elephant in the room. Americans have not yet fully assimilated what it means to have a candidate running for president who is a convicted felon and who has been found by two courts to have been running his business as a criminal enterprise. Millions of voters held their noses and voted for Trump because they knew Republican majorities in Congress would pass a huge tax cut, and Trump would sign it. They knew he was an immoral sociopath, but they just couldn’t vote for another Clinton. Next time around, the stench was too great, and he lost.

When the fury over the debate dies down, if Biden continues to do what he did at his press conference, and videos of Trump inciting insurrection flood the airways with excerpts from Project 2025, voters will grasp the danger and reject him soundly. Millions of people let themselves be seduced by a con man, but faced with the reality of what Trump intends, Americans will realize what a sick romance they got involved in.

I understand why Biden won’t quit, and I commend him for it. I also believe he will save the country from Trump – again. You may not love Biden, but at least you don’t have to wear a HAZMAT suit when you’re near him.

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Donald Trump’s Mental Health

Posted on July 6, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 6, 2024

The past couple of weeks have seen a media frenzy around President Biden’s mental fitness to serve a second term. It stemmed from his awful debate performance during which he often seemed confused and unable to speak coherently. It was chilling, and the attention paid to Biden’s mental acuity is not unreasonable.

On the other hand, the days of scrutiny over the health of Biden’s brain also illustrates another, subtly sinister issue. There were two people on that debate stage, neither of whom performed like someone we want leading our country, but Donald Trump got a free pass. What makes that so concerning is that it is part of a pervasive pattern that has existed for nine years.

From the moment he walked down the escalator in Trump Tower, Trump was a media sensation. He had always craved being a celebrity, and he loved nothing more than huge audiences paying obeisance to him. He was good for ratings, so every news network that relied on happy sponsors gave him as much air time as they could. The public is so used to Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior, the media just treat it as normal – but it’s not.

The Biden-Trump debate demonstrated two aspects of Donald Trump’s mental health that we’re so used to, most people now take them for granted. That has to stop, and the media must accept responsibility for creating at least part of the Trump monster who threatens our future today.

One is a very serious mental health condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD.) The other is mental acuity. As I’ve noted in earlier posts, the American Psychological Association’s website defines NPD in terms any lay person can understand. It also lists the nine most common symptoms of NPD. People who suffer from NPD:

    • Have a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerate achievements and talents).
    • Are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
    • Believe that they are “special” and can only be understood by other special or high-status people.
    • Require excessive admiration.
    • Have a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment).
    • Take advantage of others to achieve their own ends.
    • Lack empathy or are unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
    • Are often envious of others or believe that others are envious of them.
    • Show arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Can you think of a better description of Donald Trump? His niece, clinical psychologist, Mary Trump has frequently asserted that her uncle Donald is severely mentally ill, and that should concern all of us. Recently, she also told the media that his claims of physical fitness and health are lies, and that if the public knew how unhealthy he really was, they would be shocked.

PSD symptoms are more than just personality traits. Recent research has linked them to a number of psychotic behaviors, finding that NPD sufferers have “a cognitive bias in which individuals tend to attribute the causes of events or outcomes to external factors or circumstances rather than internal factors related to themselves.” That might explain why Trump cannot let go of the fantasy that he won the 2020 election.

The researchers also linked NPD to other psychotic behaviors including “the need to control thoughts, subjective cognitive complaints, and the use of fantasizing as an emotional regulation strategy.” Donald Trump is mentally ill.

Trump also exhibits serious symptoms of cognitive decline. They’re not as striking as the problems Biden exhibited because Trump is skilled at making them seem like part of his act. Trump cannot string ten words together if he’s not reading from a teleprompter – he seems unable to construct a complete English sentence. He forgets people’s names, confuses countries with each other, and he rambles incoherently. He also invents idiocies like swallowing bleach to cure COVID, and he lies so consistently, it’s not clear he even knows what the truth is.

Check out the links above and draw your own conclusions. All this leaves me with one question. Would you rather be led by someone who sometimes trips over words but has been respected by his peers in Congress and by foreign leaders around the world for fifty years, or someone like Trump who has no respect for the rule of law and marks every negative box on the mental health checklist?

It’s time the media started covering Trump responsibly. In a very real way, they have been drawn into Trump’s transactional fantasy world, in which everything is evaluated in terms of money and power. And it’s not just right-wing media – even gold standards like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are guilty of it. That’s because they all answer to the same breed of corporate masters who fill Trump’s coffers and supply the $$ that keep the media solvent. It’s an unholy partnership that may destroy us.

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Has It Already Begun?

Posted on July 5, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 5, 2024

If you haven’t heard of Project 2025, it’s in your interest to learn about it. The brainchild of the ultra-Conservative Heritage Foundation, it lays out a blueprint for a Trump administration whose objective is to transform America into a “Christian Democracy” using Viktor Orban’s re-making of Hungary as a model. It’s a thousand-page document that lays out how Conservatives will govern America. Donald Trump claimed, yesterday, that he knows nothing about Project 2025. Raise your hand if you believe that.

Project 2025 builds on the usual Conservative tropes: family values, individual rights, defending our sovereignty, and destroying the administrative state. It sounds benign enough until you read between the lines. Family values means marriage only between a man and a woman and the repeal of any recognition of LBGTQ rights, removing all references to non-binary genders from educational materials, statutes, and regulations. Individual rights is probably the most disingenuous subtitle in Project 2025 because it focuses mostly on the rights of fetuses, (outlawing abortion,) and the right to own and use any kind of weapon you want to.

Sovereignty is a code word for our southern border and includes every slander ever uttered by Donald Trump about immigrants and refugees. Finally, destroying the administrative state means firing a large percentage of the two million people who work for the federal government, who are covered by the Hatch Act which requires their actions to be nonpartisan. Project 2025 would replace those who remain entirely with loyalists, which sounds a lot like the origins of the Gestapo to me.

I omitted religious values above because I want to focus on them here. I happened to be in Budapest the day in 2015, four months after Donald Trump’s escalator ride, when thousands of Syrian refugees arrived and were held captive at the Budapest railway station. That day, Orban addressed his nation to justify his action, declaring that Muslims were not welcome in Hungary, which he intended to transform into a white, Christian nation. The local press referred to him as “the Hungarian Donald Trump.”

We’ve seen the beginning of that trend already in the United States as MAGA-dominated legislatures have begun passing laws that were likely drafted by the Heritage Foundation. Florida has a new law that requires all references to gay or transgender issues removed from all regulations and official documents. Louisiana now requires the Ten Commandments to be posted and taught in all elementary schools. A few years ago, I would have said we have to wait until the Supreme Court weighs in on whether that’s constitutional, but the Court we inherited from Trump is likely to rubber stamp it. And twenty red states have essentially outlawed abortion.

It’s understandable that with all the turmoil and divisiveness Trump has created, if you don’t live in either of those states, you might not want to get involved, but those actions represent an ominous trend that we must take seriously, and something I saw yesterday sent a chill up my spine that’s still there today.

My wife loves fireworks, so we spent Independence Day evening channel surfing to see which network had the best presentation. PBS did its usually creditable job producing A Capital Fourth, a live, patriotic musical show from the Capital Mall in Washington, not exactly my thing, but well-done and appropriate. CNN bounced from city to city showing viewers how the Fourth was celebrated around the country – rich in pop culture but not so much on fireworks. So we fell back on the old standard: NBC’s production of the Macy’s firework show over the Hudson River in New York.

As always, the fireworks were accompanied by a musical review, this one atop a New York skyscraper. The fireworks were spectacular, lighting the sky between New York and New Jersey – for about five minutes. Apparently, NBC thought that millions of viewers who tuned in looking for fireworks would rather listen to a concert. The band was outstanding and many of the performers, like Alex Newell, were brilliant, but after a few musical numbers, they started performing Christian hymns.

Performed well, Amazing Grace is an impressive piece of music, but it was absolutely inappropriate as a celebration of Independence Day. Even more so were the hymns that followed it. It was outrageous and offensive. Not a hint of the traditional patriotic songs emanating from Washington on PBS, with John Philip Sousa nowhere to be found.

I don’t know whether Macy’s or NBC was responsible, but my question to both of them is: “What the hell were you thinking?” I learned a long time ago that most of the time when we suspect someone of having an ulterior motive, it turns out they were just stupid or incompetent. But I can’t help but wonder – was NBC or Macy’s anticipating a Trump victory and deciding to present the appearance of being on board with Project 2025?

If that’s true, we’re doomed.

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Not Your Parents’ Independence Day

Posted on July 4, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 4, 2024

My father was one of the last men to be drafted and one of the last to return from combat in France. He missed the famous celebration in Times Square and he never appeared in a newsreel kissing a pretty girl after disembarking from his ship in 1946. The flush of victory had passed, and America was dealing with a vast restructuring of its workforce, while wrestling with our new role as leader of the Free World. We had been an isolationist nation before the war, but now, we were about to take on the mantle of savior of our allies who suffered far more destruction during the war than we did.

My first memory of seeing my father was when he secured a weekend pass from Fort Dix to surprise me at my third birthday party. My next memory was standing with him and seeing him tear up on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn watching his battalion march in the Independence Day parade. I didn’t grasp the symbolism of seeing the troops and bands marching to Grand Army Plaza, which was modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but I felt the enormous pride and exultation of the crowd, and I knew I was experiencing something special.

I didn’t understand that he and millions of his fellow veterans had come back to a serious economic recession. He pumped gas for two years to put food on our table. By the time I was five, every kid in America knew children in Europe were still starving. Our parents told us so every day and instilled in us the need to conserve and never waste a crumb. I didn’t understand the politics that resulted in the Marshall Plan, but I knew we were feeding the nations of Europe until they recovered from the devastation of the war.

That’s what Independence Day meant to me, then. We no longer have to feed our allies, but the basic idea of our leadership in a world that had almost been destroyed by the war has lived with me ever since. The year the Berlin Airlift began, the nation of Israel was created, and was immediately at war with neighbors who vastly outnumbered it and vowed to wipe it off the face of the earth. The following year, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb and the Cold War began.

My father and I watched the parade every year. By the time we entered the Korean conflict, I was a patriotic American who believed our nation was unique in history and the best hope for a world in which everyone could live in peace and prosperity. That sounds hopelessly naïve, but I was only eight, and that’s what everyone told me.

Seventy years later, I look at the world and see frightening echoes of the past. The brutality of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler’s lust to dominate Europe while murdering millions of innocent civilians resonate with Vladimir Putin’s obsession to recreate the Soviet Union. And the war between Israel and its neighbors still rages after seventy-six years, as dangerous today as ever.

More chilling is the political change we’re seeing around the world. In America, the decades since World War 2 witnessed a steady increase in human rights and the ability of millions to escape poverty and live the American dream. In 2008, we elected a black president! We thought we’d turned a corner in maturing as a nation, but many of us became complacent and forgot that liberty and democracy are not free. We ignored the cries of those who still felt oppressed and looked the other way when our veterans were largely abandoned by our government. We pretended that survivalist armies living off the grid and neo-Nazi and White Supremacy groups were just fringe elements that made good subjects for Hollywood screenplays.

We were wrong. It turned out that America had not become the kinder, gentler place we thought it had. All we’d accomplished was driving the forces of division and dissolution underground, festering and smoldering, awaiting the arrival of a demagogue to unite and enable them. History has proved that whenever a power vacuum exists, either a savior or a destroyer will show up to fill it. We forgot that the trappings of modern civilization didn’t replace but simply papered over the law of the jungle we evolved from. We let our guard down, and now fascist movements are growing all over the world.

You thought it couldn’t happen here? You thought Donald Trump was all bluster? Did you, like the rest of us, assume that our democracy and our Constitution were sacrosanct? Today is July 4, 2024, a critical time to reflect on what that means. It’s not just burgers, hot dogs, ribs, and watermelon as my friend Stan remarked, yesterday.

Everything we fought and died for in 1776 is at risk today. I hope Joe Biden can still do the job he was elected to do in a second term, but if he can’t, we must realize that defeating Trump is as serious an existential crisis as the Civil War was. Think hard about Independence Day, because this could be the last one that reflects life as we know it in America.

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