Eclipses, Ignorance, and Donald Trump

Posted on April 8, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 8, 2024

In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the protagonist, Hank Porter, suffers a head injury and somehow wakes up in 6th century England. When he is brought to King Arthur’s court as a prisoner, the court magician, Merlin, decrees that Porter must be burned at the stake. As an engineer in 1887, Porter was well educated in a world that even then was still steeped in ignorance, fear, and superstition. In 528 A. D., in the court of King Arthur, Porter realizes he is probably the smartest, most knowledgeable person in the world.

Fortunately, Porter knows from his study of history and science, that there was a full solar eclipse that year, and as best he can reckon, it is about to occur. He uses his knowledge to proclaim that he has the power to control the sun, and the combination of superstition and the eclipse saves him from being burned alive.

Twain’s story, like most of his works, was a parody of the ignorance, politics, and social values of his time, made sharper by the enormous gulf of knowledge that separated the 6th and 19th centuries. Fast forward to 2024, and the contrast is even more stark. We knew the times and places today’s eclipse would occur to within seconds and fractions of a mile, and rather than greeting it with fear, millions of people, businesses, and media are celebrating it like a once in a lifetime event.

The public’s reaction to the eclipse tells me two things. One is that we no longer live in an age of scientific ignorance. The average American, today, understands that the eclipse is simply an astronomical accident, an unusual moment when a straight line can be drawn between the positions of Earth, the moon, and the sun. I find it uplifting to realize that at least in this area, truth and science have overcome fear and ignorance.

But back to Mark Twain’s perception of America in 1887, it makes me wonder if the joyous celebration of four minutes of darkness just after noon means we’ve actually evolved past the cult-like ignorance of the past. Sadly, when the calendar flips to April 9th, the bonding excitement of the eclipse will be in the past, and we’ll be back in our 2024 reality. Looked at objectively, that reality is almost as frightening as what Twain’s Porter found in the 6th century.

We may have learned that the sky is not the home of vindictive, sociopathic gods that spend their days toying with us mere humans. We may have learned that the only things up there are billions, perhaps trillions of stars, planets, moons, asteroids and a virtually infinite volume of empty space, but look at what we have forgotten.

What we seem most to have forgotten is that in a world with no absolute standards and values, everything eventually comes apart. That’s true in the physical world – the Second Law of Thermodynamics tell us that everything tends to randomness if we fail to enforce order. It’s equally true in the world of human interaction. In the absence of truth and facts that everyone can believe in, the only possible outcome is chaos and devastation.

It’s a cliché that “everything is relative.” That notion is effective in alerting us to different aspects and points of view. But in reality, taken to its limits, the lack of absolute truths we all believe in is as frightening a proposition as the idea of burning someone at the stake because they’re different from us.

Our nation is presently caught in a very dangerous trap. We appear to be forever stuck in divisiveness and impasse, because of a relatively small group of angry extremists. These people found a leader who understood that if you corrupt truth and replace belief in science with cult-like nonsense, when you’re successful, as Kellyanne Conway was, in convincing people that “alternative facts” are as relevant as real ones, it’s possible to undermine and destroy institutions and values that have defined us for 250 years.

This can only occur when we forget that everything we’ve fought for as a nation requires constant vigilance. Look away for a moment, and someone like Donald Trump will always emerge to fill the vacuum left when we’re too tired or lazy to fight to preserve our legacy.

Today’s eclipse is a wonderful, exciting moment in time that in a very real way represents the exact opposite of the world Donald Trump foresees. He wants to govern our nation as an autocrat, based on whatever prejudice or hateful thing occurs to him at each moment. He has no respect for the millions of people who have sacrificed to preserve the legacy we inherited. He can only win if we all throw in the towel and conclude that it’s no longer worth fighting for.

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NATO

Posted on April 5, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 5, 2024

As a student, and later, as a young man, my hero was President Harry Truman. Imagine if you can, what it must have been like for the brash Senator from Missouri, who became Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944 because then Vice President Henry Wallace was unacceptable to Democratic Party leaders. With Roosevelt’s health failing, it seemed likely that his Vice President during his fourth term would ascend to the presidency before the 1948 election. Thus, Truman, a high school graduate, farmer, piano player, and haberdasher became VP in March, 1945.

While Roosevelt was not expected to survive a fourth term, no one expected him to die five weeks after his inauguration. With World War 2 finally nearing its end, Truman became our thirty-third president on April 12, 1945. It was left to him to negotiate post-war treaties and to shepherd the America-led Allies into a future in which Europe was threatened by Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. But before he could do that, he had to make a decision that dramatically impacted the entire world.

Germany had surrendered unconditionally in May, but Japan vowed to hold out until the bitter end, and Truman’s military advisors told him that invading the Japanese homeland could cost tens of thousands of American lives, a prospect few could stomach after the U. S. military had already suffered over a million casualties. The alternative – use our two atomic bombs to destroy Japan’s ability to resist. Despite misgivings, Truman made that choice, which weighed heavily on him for the rest of his life. I had the unique good fortune to hear that directly from the lips of his widow, Bess Truman, years after his death.

Truman went on to be a driving force behind the Marshall Plan, which enabled Europe to recover from the devastation of the world war with remarkable speed, but looking back on his record today, his championing of a new western alliance to defend against Soviet expansion is what stands out most prominently. The new alliance united Europe, with the startling result, that after fighting two world wars among themselves in the space of thirty years, all the countries of western Europe have been united and at peace with each other since 1945. After decades of war and strife, the feature of the alliance that is most important today, is that every member nation pledged to defend every other member if it was invaded or attacked.

That alliance, which began with twelve nations and has now grown to a membership of thirty-three, is NATO, which came into existence on April 5, 1949. If you haven’t checked your calendar, today is NATO’s 75th anniversary. NATO has kept the world safe from nuclear war during all that time, and with its political counterpart, the EU, has fostered prosperity among the member nations and mutual respect for the rule of law. In 2024, as extremists fight over abortion rights and hypocritically attack each other over border security and defense of our democracy, the issue that will have the greatest impact on our children and grandchildren going forward is the health of NATO.

In terms of our coming election, we see a clear choice among our candidates. President Biden considers support for NATO critical to our future, while Donald Trump would withdraw us from the alliance. The issue of NATO by itself is enough to make me fear for our future if Donald Trump is re-elected. It’s time Americans starting prioritizing issues. Nothing in this year’s presidential campaign is more important than preserving and supporting NATO.

With that said, it’s worth comparing Truman as a president with the choices we face today. Truman, for all his direct, in-your-face approach to politics would be horrified by Donald Trump. The things for which Truman is best remembered have one thing in common – they were all forward-looking efforts to create a positive, peaceful future for all Americans and the allies whose blood was shed alongside ours. As politicians go, Truman was a humble man, much like our current president, the polar opposite of his narcissistic, self-serving opponent who has no respect for the rule of law.

Almost fifty years ago, three years after Truman’s death, our nation mourned his loss in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s cover-up (which Trump says should not have ended Nixon’s presidency.) The nostalgia for Truman was immortalized by the band Chicago in their hit song, aptly titled, Harry Truman. You can find the original Chicago rendition on U-tube. I listened to it five times while I was writing this, and I haven’t felt so uplifted in months.

The lyrics are as appropriate today as they were in 1975. See if you agree.

America needs you
Harry Truman
Harry could you please come home


Things are looking bad
I know you would be mad
To see what kind of men
Prevail upon the land you love

America’s wondering
How we got here
Harry all we get is lies
We’re gettin’ safer cars
Rocket ships to mars
From men who’d sell us out
To get themselves a piece of power

We’d love to hear you speak your mind
In plain and simple ways
Call a spade a spade
Like you did back in the day
You would play piano
Each morning walk a mile
Speak of what was going down
With honesty and style

America’s calling
Harry Truman
Harry you know what to do
The world is turnin’ round and losin’ lots of ground

Oh Harry is there something we can do to save the land we love

Oh woah woah woah
America’s calling
Harry Truman
Harry you know what to do
The world is turnin’ round
And losin’ lots of ground
So Harry is there something we can do to save the land we love

Oh
Harry is there something we can do to save the land we love
Harry
Harry is there something we can do to save the land we love

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Trump’s Shadow Government

Posted on April 4, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 4, 2024

A source I trust and frequently troll for ideas is historian Heather Richardson’s Letters From an American. She thoroughly researches and fact checks everything she writes and discusses current events in a historical context. Yesterday’s Letter sent a chill up my spine.

A majority of Americans strongly disapprove of Donald Trump ‘s behavior. We know that because he has never come close to fifty percent in polls or actual vote counts, and exit polls and voter interviews show that a sizable share of people who voted for him metaphorically held their noses as they cast their votes. His profane, amoral, no-holds-barred approach to politics allowed him to destroy the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, not by appealing to a majority, but by undermining it with lies, threats, and innuendo.

He wins by pandering to extremists and hatemongers, encouraging voter suppression in states controlled by his MAGA movement, and filling court dockets with lies and spurious challenges. Recalling the old Bob Newhart comedy sketches, I sometimes imagine trying to explain the phenomenon of his success to a Martian. How could I explain that although most of Trump’s extreme views are remarkably unpopular with Americans, he seems relatively unaffected by their disapproval?

Three-quarters of Americans believe a woman has a right to manage her own body and determine if and when she wants to have children. Two-thirds of Americans understand that allowing Russia to defeat Ukraine could be a re-run of the lead-up to World War 2 with nuclear weapons. The vast majority of Americans, while supporting Israel in its war against Hamas (and by implication, Iran,) are horrified by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s callous disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians. Yet, Netanyahu, who has for decades undermined efforts to achieve lasting peace with Israel’s neighbors, continues to have Trump’s unqualified support.

For three months, Trump’s hypocrisy over our southern border has been on display. A bipartisan bill containing most of the provisions demanded by Trump, passed in the Senate with seventy Yes votes, and knowing the bill would easily pass in the House, Trump forced Speaker Mike Johnson to prevent it from coming to a vote. Perhaps most important, Richardson reported that recent polls show ninety-eight percent of Americans support our Constitution and the right of every American to vote. In what other place and time could a candidate like Trump survive when most voters see his policies as undermining our democracy and the rule of law, and destabilizing the world order that has prevented a nuclear holocaust?

See why my Martian friend is confused?

Despite all the above, what got my attention, yesterday, is that Trump is running a shadow foreign policy that undermines the Biden administration’s attempts to protect our alliances and suppress the efforts of our adversaries. Think about that. Not only has Trump’s MAGA movement infiltrated state legislatures and used friendly judges to upend decades of legal precedent, he is attempting to do the same thing to America’s diplomacy and foreign policy. Richardson quoted foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum, who summed the situation up perfectly: “we have an out-of-power ex-president who is in effect dictating American foreign policy on behalf of a foreign dictator or with the interests of a foreign dictator in mind.”

The agent of this tactic is Trump’s former acting head of National Intelligence, Richard Grennell. The Washington Post reported that Grenell “is openly laying the groundwork for a president who will make common cause with authoritarian leaders and destroy partnerships with democratic allies.” Grennel appears to be Trump’s choice for Secretary of State if he wins the election.

Imagine that if while running for president in 1968, Richard Nixon had used campaign funds to send Henry Kissinger around the world assuring our enemies that if they helped him defeat the Democrats he would pull us out of Vietnam and leave our alliances in tatters. By any definition, that would have been viewed as treason. Yet, that is exactly what Trump is attempting to do now. He would assure Vladimir Putin that a Trump win would spell the end of NATO. He would assure Benjamin Netanyahu (an old family friend of his son-in-law Jared Kushner) that he would use all his influence to help him remain in power and scuttle Biden’s support for a two-state solution.

When will enough be enough? Donald Trump has told America what he intends to do if he is elected. He attempted to do everything he said he would when he was president, and his failure to mold the country in his own image was due to Congressional opposition. In 2024, Trump has made it clear that destroying our democracy is his highest priority, because democracy is not in the interest of a candidate who cannot appeal to the majority. His love for autocrats and his expressed desire to become a dictator on his first day in office are the real defining elements of his campaign.

Believe what Trump says, not the right-wing mouthpieces who claim he says those things only to anger his opponents. Trump means every word of it, and if he becomes president, we will be led by a mentally ill narcissist who will do everything in his power to destroy the America we know

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A New Inflection Point

Posted on March 23, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 23, 2024

When President Biden first uttered the phrase inflection point, I wondered how many Americans knew what it meant. I’d only heard it used in mathematics, where it is described as the point on a curve that separates concavity from convexity, where its second derivative is zero, or where curvature changes from falling to rising or rising to falling. None of those was what Biden meant.

He was acknowledging that when he took office, with COVID still a fearsome threat and our economy reeling from the pandemic induced shutdown, Americans feared for their health and quality of life. He intended to change their outlook from pessimism to optimism, a goal he achieved more effectively and quickly than even his most ardent supporters anticipated. In a typical election year, rising consumer confidence, record low unemployment, wages increasing faster than inflation, and soaring equity markets almost assure an incumbent president’s re-election. But this election is anything but typical.

This year, the incumbent president is running against a twice-impeached predecessor who is under indictment for more than ninety felonies and has been found guilty of fraud and sexual assault by New York Courts, for which he faces fines of over a billion dollars. Biden is running against a man who supports Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet Empire, whose threats have enabled a minority of extremists in Congress to prevent vital legislation from being passed, and who openly intends to attack our democracy and the separation of powers required by our Constitution.

Trump’s complete takeover of the former Republican Party is a model for the autocracy he plans to create, in his own words, with himself as dictator “on day one.” The Party is using campaign funds to pay his legal fees, which have thus far exceeded $8 million. More importantly, he has made the U.S. House of Representatives a dysfunctional laughing stock in which Republicans held captive by Trump have been clinging to a slim majority that threatens border security, our support for NATO and Ukraine, and our ability to support Israel and mitigate its deadly advance into Gaza.

With Trump overwhelmingly winning the Republican nomination for president, the trends felt ominous for Biden’s re-election and, in the minds of a majority of Americans, the future of our country. Despite that clear majority, Trump’s MAGA movement has proved adept at capitalizing on the flaws in our Constitution, which have allowed rampant gerrymandering, voter suppression laws, and most importantly, an Electoral College system that makes a mockery of democracy. All of the above enable an angry, aggressive minority to rule over the majority.

Things looked hand-wringingly bleak a couple of days ago, the trends definitely negative. The threat Trump poses to our democracy is real – he warns of a bloodbath if he loses the election. Even Hollywood joined the fray, rushing a new film, Civil War, for release right in the middle of an election year. I watched the trailer a couple of days ago – the film portrays our worst fears with terrifying credibility.  If ever the country needed an inflection point!

But wait. With another government shutdown looming, the House of Representatives passed its appropriation bill last night. In order to do so, a strongly bipartisan majority of House members scuttled poison pill amendments attached to the bill by MAGA extremists, and the bill passed with more than half the Republicans voting against it and 85% of Democrats supporting it. Immediately, one of Trump’s most extreme supporters, Marjorie Greene (R-GA) introduced a resolution to remove Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA.)

At the same time, two moderate Republicans, Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Ken Buck (R-CO) announced that they’re stepping down early, leaving Republicans with a majority of only one seat for the remainder of this Congressional session. Their timing was not coincidental. On his departure, Representative Buck threw his lot in with Democrats who filed a Discharge Petition to override Speaker Johnson’s refusal to bring aid to Ukraine and Israel to a vote. The Petition so far has 191 signatures. And yesterday, Trump’s rage over having to come up with more than $550 million dollars by March 25th to avoid having his properties seized by the State of New York exploded onto his Truth Social network.

We’re told it’s always darkest before dawn, another way of saying nighttime always leads to an inflection point at which things start getting brighter. We’re at that point now. The future of America may depend on the integrity of a few remaining genuine Republicans in the House. If two more of them sign on to the Discharge Petition, Trump’s hold on the House will be shattered. Democrats will support a bipartisan Johnson speakership if Representative Greene forces an ouster vote.

We can only be sure we’ve passed an inflection point in retrospect, so we’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to be sure.

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Trump Needs More than His Rabid Base to Win

Posted on March 16, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 16, 2024

This week, the media have been trumpeting Donald Trump’s clinching the Republican nomination for president in 2024, and his complete takeover of the Republican Party. What they’re leaving out is that the Republican Party, like the Old Gray Mare, just ain’t what it used to be. It was never the majority party by popular vote, and today’s iteration of it is greatly diminished.

Three of the forty-nine Republicans in the Senate are on record refusing to support Trump, and there are surely more – it’s hard to imagine James Lankford (R-OK) supporting Trump after he scuttled Lankford’s hard-won border bill. Our present political climate in which the leader of the Party routinely threatens his rivals doesn’t foster openness. Thus, prominent centrist Republicans in the House, rather than fighting against the MAGA crew that took over their chamber, are running for the exits as fast as they can. All of the above means one thing: Conservative Republicans with a moral conscience who believe in our Constitution are no longer part of Trump’s Republican Party.

Even more striking is the number of former Trump Cabinet officers and senior advisors who have publicly said he is unfit for office and should never be allowed near the Oval Office again. When individual Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kissinger spoke out, people discounted them because they served on the House Panel that impeached Trump twice. But when CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip compiled a list in a video report, yesterday, it was difficult not to believe Trump has rough sailing ahead.

He’s defied expectations and logic before, when most of us had no idea how many angry Americans there were. Whether they were down on their luck, struggling with taxes, xenophobes, racists, misogynists, or fearful of change and too lazy to think for themselves, Trump skillfully pandered to all their hatreds and complaints. We were shocked to learn that about one in three Americans were in that mix.

Have a look at Ms. Phillips’ list and hear their own words on the video in the link:

  • Former Vice President and ultra-conservative Mike Pence, who believes Trump is a fake Conservative
  • Former Attorney General and long-time Conservative Bill Barr
  • Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was consider too right-wing for the Bush administration
  • Former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, who is highly respected throughout the military and diplomatic communities.
  • Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
  • Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis
  • Former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, who characterizes Trump as having no idea what America and public service are about
  • Former OMB Director and Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who was a vocal Trump supporter for five years and who now believes Trump is guilty of insurrection
  • Former Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Mark Milley, who describes Trump as a wannabe dictator who has no respect for the Constitution.

When Trump chased away traditional Conservatives, women who resent being told what they can do with their own bodies, and diplomats and military leaders who are terrified of Trump’s ignorance about foreign affairs and his worship of dictators, he was left with the same one-third of Americans who comprised his base from the start. By themselves, they’re not enough to elect him, even with the MAGA movement’s gerrymandering and voter suppression laws in effect.

My crystal ball doesn’t work any better than yours, CNN’s or Fox News’, but we don’t need one to see what’s ahead. First, an incumbent who, at 81, is susceptible to every vicious attack MAGA is capable of. He walks stiffly at times like most people his age, and he occasionally trips over a word during a long, passionate speech, more a reflection of his life-long stuttering affliction than evidence of dementia. His basic decency, compared to Trump’s sociopathic behavior, makes him look weak to some people, compared to his savage opponent who knows no limits. But his record speaks for itself – no American president since Franklin Roosevelt has been more productive or commanded more respect from foreign leaders, especially our allies.

In the other corner is Trump. There’s nothing to say about him that you haven’t heard or read ad nauseum. If Trump manages to win again, despite being on trial for 91 felony indictments, historians will beat their heads against a wall until they’re unconscious. The choice between Biden and Trump couldn’t be clearer. Before you cast a vote for Trump, imagine you’re a German in 1932, living under conditions far worse than any American is today. If you could look ahead fifteen years and see everything we now know, would that raging, Jew-hating populist with his absurd mustache still have your vote?

That’s the real choice we’ll face next November. Get it wrong, again, and it may be our republic’s last gasp.

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Israel’s Critical Decision

Posted on March 15, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 15, 2024

The current conflict between Israel and Hamas, a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, has serious implications for the entire world. History will view it as a critical turning point for Israel, the Middle East, and the elephant in the room – the nuclear powers’ use of conflicts in the Middle East as surrogates for their own brinksmanship.

What makes this conflict so complex and dangerous is that in some manner, it touches everyone. It affects the world’s energy supply and international shipping, foments intense anger on all sides and spins off terrorist acts like funnel clouds on the edge of a hurricane. It involves generations-old deep-seated grievances and grudges, a two-thousand-year-old world-encompassing family feud. Multi-generational enmity isn’t new. The centuries-long conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, England and both Scotland and Northern Ireland, Japan and Korea, India and Pakistan prove the point.

But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different and more complicated and confounding than the others. It involves two peoples who have been victimized by their neighbors for their entire existence. Antisemitism has existed since the time of Christ, and the Palestinians have been betrayed and abandoned by their Muslim neighbors for more than a century. An objective observer looking at the last seventy-five years would shake their head in dismay. The establishment of Israel as an independent nation was so badly executed by the fledgling United Nations, one might think it was deliberately set up to fail.

Only British imperialism could have conceived such an arrangement. Take a million or so Jews who lived in the “Holy Land” all their lives, throw in another five million refugees and survivors of the Nazi holocaust, and ensconce them on a piece land that looks strangely like New Jersey, surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who want to kill them. Stir in Cold War politics and the world’s thirst for oil and we had a recipe for disaster.

Yet, it is not the case that all Israelis and Palestinians hate each other. As in many such situations, the vast majority of people on both sides are decent people being driven by extremist elements with their own agendas. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has always devoted more of its meager resources to the destruction of Israel than to caring for its own people. Israel, on the other hand, was founded by people who had been persecuted most of their lives and were constantly under attack, so it was natural that many Israelis would appear to be right-wing militants to the rest of the world.  

After decades of conflict, younger Israelis craved peaceful coexistence. By 1990, Israel was evenly split between people who swore never to compromise and those who wanted to negotiate peace with their neighbors. That was the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu’s career in Israeli politics. He spoke English fluently, sounding like he was from Philadelphia, where he spent much of his childhood, effectively cementing Israel’s wardship with the United States. He charmed us, especially Jewish Americans like my family who felt a kinship to Israel. We didn’t realize all the cheerleading on behalf of the defense of Israel masked a right-wing zealot with a lust for power that sometimes took precedence over what was best for Israel.

The Israeli peace movement might have prevailed, but for the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed three million Jews who’d lived under Communist subjugation and were as militant as the original Israelis of 1948, to emigrate to Israel. Netanyahu, a populist politician with Trump-like instincts, recognized his opportunity and took over the right-wing Likud Party which has dominated Israel’s coalition governments for thirty years. Whether or not Netanyahu really believes that risking making Israel a pariah to the rest of the world in his quest to eradicate Hamas is best for Israel, it’s his best chance to remain in power and avert criminal prosecution. It’s not a coincidence that he’s employing the same tactics as Donald Trump to remain in power and out of prison.

Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 was more destructive, proportionally, to Israel than nine-eleven was to the United States. That it was one of the most despicable acts since World War 2 isn’t up for debate. The issue is whether Netanyahu’s quest to destroy Gaza can be allowed to go unchecked with no regard for the lives of over a million civilians. Many people argue that there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, just as Americans were propagandized to believe every German in the 1940s was a racist murderer. Netanyahu may believe that, but a growing majority of Israelis do not.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jew in our government, addressed the world, demanding that Netanyahu call for a new election to let the Israeli population decide who they want to lead them through this crisis. It was a courageous act, the kind of thing a great stateman committed to responsible governing does. Moreover, he was correct. Netanyahu is as toxic to the future of Israel as Trump is to the future of the United Staes.

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Insurrection and the 14th Amendment

Posted on March 5, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 5, 2024

On March 4th, the United States Supreme Court demonstrated that it is almost as dysfunctional as our Congress. Two unanimous rulings would normally signal unity and agreement, but the only point on which the Justices were agreed was being unwilling to be seen as the instrument that undid Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Its decisions were accompanied by three supporting opinions that sharply contradicted and attacked each other.

The Court unanimously decided that states cannot remove a candidate from a presidential ballot based on the Insurrectionist Clause (Section 3) of the 14th Amendment because the Constitution assigns the power to enforce the Amendment to Congress. The problem with that conclusion is that nowhere in the Amendment or elsewhere in the Constitution is that delegation to Congress explicitly stated.

The Court denied Trump’s arguments that he was not an officer of the government at the time of the January 6th insurrection and that he did not engage in the insurrection. Rather, their second unanimous decision was to accept without comment the Colorado Supreme Court’s finding that Trump is guilty of leading the insurrection.

The Court had no trouble agreeing on its decision. Its problem was finding a legal justification for it. If Congress is the only entity empowered to disqualify a candidate under the Amendment, disqualification can never occur in real time while the question is relevant. Unlike the Court, which can act expeditiously in emergencies, Congress could only rule a candidate ineligible by passing legislation to correct what it considers a violation of the Amendment after the fact. If said candidate had already won the election and been inaugurated, Congress’ only recourse would be impeachment, which is a political process bearing little resemblance to a legal proceeding. The Founders considered impeachment an emergency measure to save the country from a corrupt president, but Congress turned it into a political weapon.

In an Op-ed, today, respected University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha wrote: “Section 3 does not call for Congress to enforce disqualification for participating or aiding in an insurrection. It only gives Congress the power to remove that disqualification by a two-thirds majority of each house.” Conservative attorney George Conway told CNN that none of the three opinions defending the decision “make any sense whatsoever.” The Court implicitly agreed that Trump committed insurrection, but ruled that his guilt doesn’t disqualify him. In Conway’s words, Trump “remains an adjudicated insurrectionist” because the Court accepted Colorado’s conclusion that he was guilty.

Americans have always naively seen the Supreme Court as the last line of defense in enforcing laws that translate our Constitution into rules of order. Every attempt to stack the Court toward any extreme ideology has been met with huge outcries from  legal scholars on all sides. But Trump and then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in one of the few areas in which their interests were aligned, created a politicized Court that found itself unable to reach a rational conclusion on an issue that has potentially catastrophic implications for our democracy. It effectively refused to engage in arguments over the long-term interests of the United States, and in doing so reneged on its role as a Branch of Government co-equal to the Executive.

When I step back from the politics and the vitriolic pronouncements on all sides, I’m left with genuine concern for America’s future. Donald Trump has found dozens of ways to challenge our innocence, our blind trust that America rested on a sound foundation and the Supreme Court could always be relied on to rise above pettiness and power games. That made me compare the Court to the United Nations.

The UN was a bold, brave attempt to create the illusion of world unity, but it only works when all the permanent members of the Security Council are in agreement. Situations like Ukraine and Gaza, which challenge the individual interests of the great powers invariably end in stalemate. I can’t help but look at the Court that way. It has demonstrated a willingness to strike unprecedented ground when its action is in line with a powerful political minority, but finding itself in a unique position to depoliticize an issue of critical importance to our democracy, it lacked the will.

Yet, in putting its dysfunction on display, the Court managed to reach the right conclusion. Part of me would love to see Donald Trump disqualified, his political career and financial empire in ruins, his future spent fighting to stay out of prison. But given the divisions in the country and the lies Trump effectively promulgated, disqualifying him would leave his supporters more enraged and dangerous than they were when he whined that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The only way to silence Trump and the MAGA movement is for them to be soundly, convincingly defeated in November. The voters are us, and in America, we’re supposed to be the ones who determine our future.

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Trump is Dead Wrong on Ukraine

Posted on February 26, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 26, 2024

It’s a cliché that experience is the best teacher. As a tutor, I tell kids that learning from their mistakes is the best way to improve their skills. Every important scientific discovery was preceded by countless failed attempts. When the stakes are high, when the cost of failure is intolerable, those truisms usually spell the difference between success and catastrophe.

The elephant in the room is the two-sided coin of isolationism versus building alliances. America tried isolation after World War 1. Our soldiers returned home victorious to a country physically unscathed by war but mourning the deaths of more than 100,000 of its young men, and the survivors came back with horror stories of what they’d seen overseas. Given the devastation in Europe, and those big oceans that separated us from the rest of the world, it’s easy to see why Americans wanted to be rid of Europe’s problems, especially the millions of immigrants who’d recently fled Europe to settle here.

In the 1920s, isolationism went hand-in-hand with rising nationalism and reckless economic policies. Historians still debate how much isolationism contributed to the Great Depression, but there’s no doubt that twenty years of isolationism left most Americans eager to look the other way when Adolf Hitler turned the Weimar Republic into a Nazi war machine. Had we stood strong with our Allies in the 1930s and recognized the need for war preparedness, we might still have been involved in the second war, but with our Pacific Fleet still intact. Have we learned anything from that?

Almost a century later, those huge oceans no longer feel like protective moats. For seventy-five years, only Mutually Assured Destruction and world leaders on all sides who behaved sanely during crises kept the world from nuclear war. But the same M. A. D. that averted war left the world with a legacy of thousands of intercontinental nuclear missiles. We like to console ourselves by assuming that no sane leader would ever launch them, and therein lies the problem.

Should Donald Trump win the 2024 election, the two most powerfully armed countries in the world will be ruled by power-mad narcissists who have no regard for the people they govern. How do we know? Donald Trump thought sacrificing a half million Americans to COVID was a fair price to avoid any potential threat to our economy and the wealth of his benefactors. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has cost nearly a half million Russian lives to fight a war whose only potential benefit is an expansion of Putin’s power. A pittance compared to the seven million Russians sacrificed by Josef Stalin, but a clear measure of the kind of adversary we face in Putin.

Europeans recognize Putin as this century’s Hitler, and not by coincidence, the thirty-one nations that comprise NATO have never been more united, militarily and economically. That remarkable fact by itself should be enough to define the threat Putin poses. Could anything else possibly result in the unity of the nations of western and central Europe? Unlike the people who like to talk tough and make threats on this side of the pond, Europeans have been killing each other since the Greek and Roman Empires. They understand the causes of war better than anyone, and collectively, they learned the lesson of appeasement the led to World War 2.

Joe Biden did a remarkable job of pulling NATO back together after Trump shattered our allies’ confidence in the United States, but it was the easily recognized threat of Russia that made his success possible. The handwriting on the wall couldn’t be clearer. Turning our backs on Europe and allowing Russia to crush Ukraine will have the same long-term result as failing to stop Germany from destroying Czechoslovakia did in 1938. Poland clearly sees it that way.

Why, then, you might ask, would the MAGA extremists in our Congress refuse to aid Ukraine after they’ve held off massive Russian attacks for two years? The MAGA movement has become a complex power cult. Like most cults, it’s comprised of a few people willing to do anything to increase their own wealth and power, and a large number of followers who seem to have lost the ability to think for themselves and recognize their real self-interest. Witness the nearly 500 people serving prison sentences for attacking the Capitol who only now realize how they were deceived by Trump.

The most dangerous aspect of the MAGA movement’s attempt to dominate America’s future is its blind loyalty to an amoral sociopath who is mentally ill, unwilling to learn from the experience and errors of people far smarter and more qualified to lead than he is, and worst of all, who is in Vladimir Putin’s thrall. If it’s not clear, I’m talking about Donald Trump. A Trump victory in November would put Europe, America, and the entire world at risk.

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$1.3 Billion

Posted on February 17, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 17, 2024

One and a third billion dollars! That’s the total amount Donald Trump has been fined, to date, by two different New York courts. Think about the implications of that number. If you graduated from college at age twenty-one, your average annual earnings for the next forty-nine years were $150,000, and you retired at seventy, your total earnings during your working life would have been $7,350,000. That is about one half of one percent of the amount Trump must pay for defamation and decades of business fraud.

All this after decades in which Trump’s fraudulent business practices have placed him in constant conflict with our legal system and resulted in bankruptcies and being banned from receiving loans by every major American commercial bank. And this is before any of his criminal trials on more than ninety felony charges begins. He’s being prosecuted by one red state, one blue state, and the U. S. Department of Justice, all of which, Trump tells us is part of a vast conspiracy to keep him from becoming president again orchestrated by current president Joe Biden. Trump believes average Americans aren’t smart enough to know the difference between prosecution and persecution.

CNN journalist Stephen Collinson summed up what the judge’s findings in the New York business fraud case tell us about Trump perfectly:

  • “Trump thinks rules are for other people. He will always break them in seeking more wealth, more attention, or more votes.
  • If reality doesn’t get the ex-president what he wants, he conjures a new one.
  • Trump is compelled always to fight — even when stepping back would be smarter.
  • And when accountability finally arrives, he sees justice as an act of persecution by his enemies.”

This is the man who wants to be president again, and that is the role model he presents for the rest of us. If you’re caught with your hand in the cookie jar, or in Trump’s case when it’s been lodged deep in the jar during his entire life, just scream “witch hunt!” How much sympathy do you think you’d get if you embezzled money from your employer and screamed persecution when you were caught? How would your reputation fare if thirteen women independently accused you of sexual assault, and it was proved that some received payoffs to remain silent and one received a court ruling that you had, in fact, sexually assaulted and defamed her? What would your life expectancy be if the entire world had seen you lead an insurrection on live television?

Trump intends to ride the persecution pony straight into his campaign rallies. He stands before judges accused of major crimes, and calls them corrupt to their faces. He rails against a rigged legal system and rigged elections. The person he most sounds like is Alexey Navalny, who was persecuted for years by Trump’s hero, Vladimir Putin, who has harassed, deported, imprisoned, and after several failed attempts, finally poisoned him. It’s darkly ironic, that if Trump were a Russian who accused Putin of the things he accuses Biden of, he’d be lying dead in a cell today. But in America, with its principle of free speech, someone like Trump can threaten all of its institutions, divide its people based envy and lies, and still be a viable candidate for president.

How can this be? According to Collinson, it’s because of “Trump’s political super skill — his capacity to identify and harness the frustration of Americans who feel themselves rejected and condescended to by East Coast political, economic and media elites.” Trump acts like some kind of twisted Robin Hood character, except that Robin Hood stole from the rich to feed the poor, while Trump enriches the already powerful and obscenely wealthy (and himself) at the expense of everyone else.

Great nations that claim to live according to idealistic pronouncements are all eventually tested. Critics of America’s unique system of individual protections and freedoms warn repeatedly that they make us vulnerable to power-mad populists like Trump. Without an absolute authority to assert what is true and what is fiction, and without the internal security forces that keep dictators in place, our system allows its citizens to make their own judgments about who will lead them. Trump is proving how remarkably courageous our Founders were when they drafted our Constitution. They gambled on democracy, in effect placing all their confidence in the ability of Americans to see through fluff, lies, and demagoguery and make the right choices.

I think of Trump as a stress test for America’s heart. If it fails, the America we know dies. If we pass, we vindicate the revolution that created us.

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An Unhinged Trump Threatens All of Us

Posted on February 14, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 14, 2024

My wife summed up yesterday’s news perfectly: Trump intends to divide the world in half with himself and Valdimir Putin in complete control of their shares. She may have erred in excluding China’s Xi Jinping, who would prefer that the world be divided in three parts, but she was essentially correct. It’s obvious to anyone who has watched Trump over the last few years that he actually believes in that fantasy, and that if it came to pass, he would trust Putin to honor whatever lines they agreed to. Trump’s naïve worship of autocrats can only result in direct conflict with Russia and China in the long run, and that places our entire planet at risk of annihilation.

At the end of the second world war, America had to choose. We could return to the isolationism of the 1930s, which may have made that conflict inevitable, or as the strongest surviving nation with a commitment to democracy and decency, accept the mantle of leadership. We chose the latter, as a pragmatic attempt to lay the foundations for lasting peace and equally important, to fulfill the moral commitment embodied in our national values. We were the driving force behind the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan that accelerated the recovery, not only of our allies, but of our defeated enemies as well.

We created NATO, not only as defense against the aggressive expansionism of the Soviet Union, but as the best way to ensure the security and prosperity of all nations. My generation grew up believing in those things. They made us feel secure, but they also made us proud to be Americans. The message I heard most often as a child was that kids in Europe were starving, and it was our duty to save them. Our commitments to protect Taiwan from China, South Korea from North Korea, and Israel from its hostile neighbors may not have had the same clarity of purpose as our commitment to NATO, but together they defined the America we knew until Donald Trump came along.

Trump would return us to isolation from the rest of the world, but it would be a different kind of isolation than the xenophobes of the 1930s sought. In a world without nuclear weapons and huge powerful missiles and aircraft capable of destroying civilization, isolation was viewed as defensive, as insulating us from the conflicts of European and Asian imperialism. It was an absurdly foolish notion, but given the mess the world in when the first world war ended and the Great Depression that followed a decade of irresponsible leadership, it’s easy to see why that message appealed to people.

Today that message is entirely different. We can’t run and hide, because no one on Earth is safe from the repercussions of failed leadership. And that is exactly what we got and will continue to get from Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t care about the things we grew up believing in. The world is just a stage for his massive ego. He couldn’t care less about democracy or our Constitution, because neither contributes to his wealth and power, and those are the only two things that motivate him.

Trump is the antithesis of democracy and national security. We see the former in his approach to politics. Divide and conquer. Use every unscrupulous tactic to assure the dominance of a small minority of extremists. Pander to every fringe group, no matter how heinous. Attack the integrity of our justice system when it can’t be bent to his will. Lie, cheat, steal, and defame, because those are the only tactics that can achieve his objectives.

As despicable as that is however, tearing apart our alliances and placing our national security at risk for future generations is nothing less than treason. The notion of failing to defend our allies against aggressors and dictators to gain their personal favor is a crime against America and all of humanity. It’s something that only someone as unhinged and mentally ill as Donald Trump would contemplate.

None of that is surprising. The world knows who Donald Trump is and what he represents, and decent people everywhere are horrified by the possibility that he could return to power. Perhaps more horrifying is that unless his next attempt at coup and insurrection succeeds, the outcome we fear can only occur if he wins the election next November. Given that the archaic way we elect a President is vulnerable to every kind of manipulation and voter suppression, it’s still the case that at least two out of five Americans would have to vote for Trump for him to win.

Did you ever imagine that forty percent of America could be taken in by this charlatan and that many of them would be obsessively devoted to his sick brand of politics? Our worst nightmare could come to pass if we don’t wake up and do what’s necessary to prevent it. We can start by convincing the majority of responsible Republicans in the House that Speaker Mike Johnson’s loyalty to Trump cannot be allowed to scuttle military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

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