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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The Court’s Presidential Immunity Decision Changes Everything

Posted on July 2, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 2, 2024

Before yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that presidents performing “official duties” are immune from criminal prosecution, the contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was already starkly evident. Both men have been clear about their ideologies and values. We don’t need another debate to define who they are and how they want to govern.

Joe Biden has been a staunch supporter of labor and the middle class, and of social and economic justice and opportunity. He believes in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As Senator, Vice President, and President, he consistently stressed our need to be united in defense of our allies against military threats from Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Most important, he has always been an unabashed patriot and defender of democracy and the rule of law.

Donald Trump has consistently favored the interests of wealthiest Americans and pandered to right-wing fringe groups, racists, and religious extremists. He has demonstrated disdain and disrespect for our military leaders, and promised to use the Office of the President as a weapon against his political opponents. Playing on the smug ambitions of people like Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, he stacked the Supreme Court with the most conservative, extremist majority it has ever had. He routinely courts favor from murderous dictators while threatening to abandon our allies and dismantle NATO. Most important, he has no respect for either truth or the rule of law and has explicitly asserted that presidents can do anything they wish with complete immunity from criminal prosecution.

As I read the last two paragraphs, the choice for Americans who love their country is so clear, it makes my head spin that so many of us have been taken in by Trump’s self-serving claims of making America great again. No nation has ever been close to perfect, but until Trump came along, few questioned that America was as close to that ideal as any country has ever been, as well as the country most feared by its enemies. Trump has done nothing but tarnish that image and weaken us. To him, making America Great (again?) is simply Orwellian Doublespeak.

The Supreme Court’s decision granting a president full immunity for any action performed during the official duties of the office changes the game completely. The arguments about which president is the greater threat to democracy were rendered meaningless by the Court. Trump is very clear about his intentions to grab and hold as much power as he can, and the Supreme Court has made it far more likely that if he is re-elected, there will be few if any legal barriers to achieving his fascist-style ambitions. Rather than fortify the Constitution, the Court has turned the possibility that another Trump presidency could destroy our democracy into a likelihood.

There has not been such a stark difference in presidential candidates since the Civil War, yet Trump and our profit-oriented media seem to have successfuly made the coming election about which old man will be the last one standing. That’s the choice our flawed political system has given us, but it has little to do with what’s really at stake. Before the decision on presidential immunity, the arguments about the future of our fragile democracy were hypothetical. The Court made them urgent and immediate.

The Supreme Court left the argument over what constitutes the official duties of the president to be worked out by lower courts, after which SCOTUS itself will decide if they got it right. The first obvious conclusion we can draw from that is that we will have no clear definition of presidential duties before Election Day, so we can safely assume that if Trump is re-elected, he will take office with every intention of using his presumed immunity to neutralize his opposition the way Vladimir Putin dealt with Alexei Navalny.

The more sinister conclusion is that if, as many observers believe, the Court’s intention is to help Trump achieve his ends, it will be virtually impossible to convince the right-wing majority that anything Trump does incurs criminal liability. And there’s a particularly nasty irony in that, since in the past, three of the most conservative Justices (Roberts, Alito, and Kavanaugh) wrote that it is a fundamental tenet of our democracy that no one including a president is above the law.

It’s extremely unlikely that either Biden or Trump will drop out of the race. Thus, our choice isn’t about age or hoping Biden is up to the challenge of another term. It is plainly and simply about whether a fringe group of extremists is going to be allowed to trash the legacy of the American dream, and whether our grand experiment in democracy will simply result in scholarly works about The Rise and Fall of America.

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Donald Trump Could Be the Salvation of Biden’s Candidacy

Posted on July 1, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 1, 2024

The country has had ten days to absorb the impact of the train wreck CNN called a debate. The shock, many would say horror of seeing President Biden wilt under the scripted avalanche of lies and dystopian fantasies thrown at him by Donald Trump has eased. At the same time, we’ve come to understand the nature of what Trump did, and that has reinforced our view of how dangerous he is.

The debate was supposed to be about policies and visions of America’s future. If there was a major failure in the Biden camp’s preparation, it was naively assuming that the other side viewed it that way. They should have known better – we all should have, and we have every right to expect more from Biden’s staff and from Biden himself.

The morning after the debate, I, like millions of Biden supporters thought his campaign had suffered a mortal blow. It always feels that way when a tornado tears through your town or the road you take to work is under water from a cataclysmic flood. But then the sun comes out, the insurance adjuster shows up, and we pick ourselves up and get to work rebuilding and restoring. Even after tragic losses, the survivors pick up the pieces and assess their priorities.

That’s where our nation is, especially the part that hoped Biden could handle the monumental tasks of campaigning and serving four more years as president. No one can know with certainty whether he can, but what is coming to the fore is the reality of the alternative. We know exactly who Donald Trump is and what he intends to do.

With a friendly Supreme Court, were he to be re-elected with majorities in both houses of Congress, there is a realistic possibility that he will bring down the institutions on which our country has depended for stability for more than 200 years. He is capable of deconstructing our democracy and undoing the advances we have made in social and economic equality. He wants to pardon the people who attempted to overthrow our government. He wants to legitimize racism and bigotry, and he would relegate women’s rights to where they were in the nineteenth century. His worship of dictators and disdain for our allies could move the Doomsday Clock to midnight as the risk of nuclear war increases.

This is not politics as usual, which itself, can be disturbing to watch. This is a slow-motion revolution whose aim is to change our representative government into an autocratic fascist-like state in which human rights are at the discretion of an insane dictator. If that sounds exaggerated, let me assure you that it’s not. Trump’s debate strategy, demonstrated how far he’s willing to go to achieve his ends. He is a ruthless narcissist with only one goal in mind: his own wealth and power. By contrast, we hear literally thousands of people around the country lauding Biden for his honesty and love of America and its people.

The contrast in personalities, values, morals and ethics isn’t secondary – it’s the point Biden should have been making from the start. We can even read that in Biden’s own words. When he said he only ran for president to protect the nation from Trump in 2020, he meant it. At 81, I ask myself every day why Biden would put himself through this ordeal again. The answer is that the alternative is surrendering to the Devil.

So, Mister President, let me suggest that when you take the debate stage in September, you do what Trump does, only with more class. Apologize to the moderators in advance for ignoring the debate rules. Then, since your staff dropped the ball so badly, let me suggest some opening remarks. Repeat them at every opportunity regardless of what question was asked. Look Trump in the eye and say:

  • You are a despicable human being. You have been found guilty of sexual assault against a helpless woman and fined hundreds of millions of dollars. Your family business has essentially been a criminal operation, for which your CFO, Allan Weiselberg, is now in prison and your company was fined nearly a billion dollars. Your former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, served three years in prison for carrying out your illegal orders.
  • You have personally been convicted of thirty-four felonies. With the Supreme Court failing to grant you blanket immunity, and throwing the case back to the lower courts, you have effectively delayed federal trials which could have you incarcerated for the rest of your miserable life until after the election so you can pardon yourself if you win. I promise you this, Donald. During my second term, if the courts so decree, you will see the inside of a prison cell.
  • Your policies are racist. You think Nazis are fine people. You treat women as if their only purpose in life were to provide you with pleasure. You revere murderous dictators but disdain our allies. You praised Vladimir Putin for a brilliant military operation in Ukraine that was one of the worst failures in history, but slander your own generals and the military leaders of NATO. You have no respect for truth, and worst of all, you have no shame. Of all God’s creatures, only humans are capable of shame. What does that say about you?

Joe Biden is not the man he was at 40 or 50. But Franklin Roosevelt led us through the depression and the second world war while transforming our government from one that served oligarchs to one that cared about people – from a wheelchair.

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The Aftermath of the Debate

Posted on June 29, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 29, 2024

After the horrendous debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, The New York Times editorial board wrote, “To Serve His Country, President Biden should Leave the Race.” The Times wasn’t attacking Biden, it was addressing the greatest fear of the majority Americans – that Biden’s cringeworthy performance at the debate might hand Trump the 2024 election. They and I and hundreds of millions of people in America and nations who have looked to us for leadership since World War 2 believe that would be a disaster for us and the entire world.

What was CNN thinking? Did they imagine the debate would be an airing of serious policies and visions of the future of the United States? We knew from his previous debates that Trump had no interest in such things. He has a unique ability that only a true sociopath could maintain consistently, to twist and distort any forum or attempt to reach a rational conclusion into the sort of chaos he thrives on. The debate proved a number of things, primarily, that it should never have happened. Anyone involved in serious debating knows that debates only work when everyone follows the rules. If the purpose of a debate is to reveal the participants’ ideas and policies, especially when the future of our country depends on them, both parties must take that seriously.

Journalistic media are supposed to disseminate truth, yet they thrive most when someone like Trump is allowed to lie and project his own sick fantasies as reality. Historian Heather Richardson explained that he used a rhetorical technique known as the Gish gallop, “…in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.”

That’s what Trump did last Thursday, and it worked. Trump is masterful at manipulating media and using them to his advantage, because both he and the media are essentially about making money. Trump knows sponsors love him because millions of people find him entertaining in the same way they rubberneck on freeways waiting for a glimpse of the gruesome accident that stopped traffic. Trump is effective because the media have no incentive to stop him, and by including a rule that prohibited the debate moderators from challenging the veracity of what spewed from Trump’s mouth, CNN played into his unscrupulous hands.

Trump was so effective at making the president seem confused and addled that many people failed to notice that everything that came out of Trump’s mouth was a lie, that his only purpose on that stage was to make his opponent look weak. That he did so successfully only reinforced the notion that he is unfit to serve. Nothing he said was supported by facts or vetted data. Nothing he said addressed policies or any vision of the future except Trump’s need for retribution. He worsened our concern that he will never accept the results of the election if he loses, and that the January 6th insurrection was only the opening act of a far more sinister future.

All that said, we must accept the reality of Biden’s profound failure to defend himself against Trump’s vicious attacks. We can rail about how unfair and immoral Trump’s behavior is, but in the real world, Trump’s actions might be taken as surrogates for the tactics used by our most dangerous adversaries. Trump made millions of Americans wonder if Biden can stand up to bad actors like Vladimir Putin who make Trump look like a spoiled child. With just over four months until the election, that is the reality never-Trumpers must deal with.

If The Times is right, where do we go from here? Would Kamala Harris naturally inherit the top spot if Biden withdrew? Would she accept the role as Vice President if the Democratic Convention preferred someone else? What happens if more “independent” candidates emerge to attempt to profit from Trump’s chaos? Most important, would voters put off by Biden’s age and burned out by nine years of Trump-style politics just stay home on Election Day?

Take a step back and remember that our priorities are preserving our democracy and assuring that our country is a place where everyone has a chance to thrive and live without war or conflict. Trump is the antithesis of those things. If voters now believe Biden can’t do the job anymore, even if he thinks he can, individual pride and ambition don’t matter.

Let’s hope the Democrats and centrists who care about America have a Plan B. If they conclude that it’s time to hand the reins of a power to a younger generation, my choice is the same as it has been since 2016. It’s time to look seriously at Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) as the best person to lead our country into the post-Trump years.

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Conscientious Objection

Posted on June 25, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 25, 2024

In the United States, a conscientious objector is defined as anyone who is opposed to serving in the armed forces and/or bearing arms on the grounds of moral or religious principles. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognizes the right to conscientious objection to military service as a legitimate exercise of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. But as is generally the case with attempts to define universal human rights, individual nations are not obligated to abide by them.

The United States recognized conscientious objector status in both world wars, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam. American pacifists and members of religious groups that oppose war who can prove that their ideology is legitimate have always been exempted from being drafted into the military. I remember the controversy over Muhammed Ali’s conscientious objection to fighting in Vietnam for which he was imprisoned until the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. I also recall the irony of a professional fighter refusing to participate in combat because his religion (Islam) opposed violence.

This has always been an emotionally fraught subject inasmuch as it involves things like patriotism, courage, politics, religion, ideology, and fear. It has also been a major issue in Israel throughout its seventy-six year existence. Israel is a nation that nominally requires mandatory military service from all of its citizens, regardless of gender, but from the outset, its government has exempted ultra-orthodox Jews and all Arab citizens of Israel, including Palestinian Israelis, from serving. Israeli courts have a long history of ruling on such cases, but the issue in Israel today has a distinction that makes it very different.

America’s Constitution specifically provided for separation of Church and State. In theory, at least, churches and other religious organizations that apply for tax exempt status cannot be overtly involved in politics, although Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has aligned itself with something called Christian Nationalism. According to Wikipedia, “Politics in Israel are dominated by Zionist parties. They traditionally fall into three camps, the first two being the largest: Labor Zionism, revisionist Zionism, and religious Zionism. There are also several non-Zionist Orthodox religious parties and non-Zionist secular left-wing groups, as well as non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Israeli Arab parties.”

This is a very significant difference from what Americans are familiar with. Zionism is an international movement to create, support, and defend a homeland in Palestine for Jewish people. As such, it involves politics, diplomacy, religious beliefs and military actions. Unlike in America, there is no separation of Church and State in Israel. Quite the opposite – Israeli politics and the government itself are often dominated by religious views and disagreements. This is problematic because the Israeli political parties dominated by orthodox Jews are also its most hawkish, militant, and anti-Palestinian, and it is these smaller parties that keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power. His right-wing Likud Party can only govern with the support of a coalition that is dominated by groups like orthodox Jews who would rather live in a constant state of war with their Arab and Palestinian neighbors than find a solution that guarantees peaceful coexistence.

We may not like that situation, but it is typical of ethnic and political conflicts that exist around the world, except for one very important difference. The orthodox Jewish Zionists, like the Haredi Jews who constantly beat the drums for war in Israel, also claim the right to be conscientious objectors. They fight tooth and nail to send the IDF to fight, but claim that their religious studies of the Torah exempt them from all military responsibilities. Israeli courts have generally granted exemptions to right-wing Zionists who apply on religious grounds, thus allowing politicians and policy-makers to send their fellow countrymen and women off to war while they stay safe at home.

That may change, however, as the Israeli version of our Supreme Court ruled yesterday that orthodox Jews will no longer be exempted from military service. With the departure of opposition leader Benny Gantz from Netanyahu’s war cabinet, it is now dominated by the Zionist religious parties for whom conscientious objection has been a non-negotiable demand. Netanyahu has been trying to force legislation through his legislature to codify military exemptions for their members to enable him to remain in power.

I wonder if the Zionists’ appetite for war will wane when they face the reality of having to do the fighting themselves. They do not represent the views of the majority of Israelis any more than the MAGA movement represents a majority of Americans. The world is waiting to see whether Netanyahu’s coalition can survive the ruling on conscientious objection, and whether a new coalition that truly represents all of Israel will have a different attitude toward its war in Gaza.

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The Danger of Inaccurate Political Polls

Posted on June 15, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 15, 2024

I’ve talked about political polls before, but until Americans understand the way we’re being flummoxed by the media, I’ll continue to talk about them. With four-and-a-half months before the November election, the danger posed by inaccurate polls is extreme, because this generation of Americans is shockingly gullible. If the media consistently tell them candidate A is ahead, that tends to become a self-fulfilling prophesy over time.

In order for polls to be accurate predictors, the people polled must be representative of the voting population. The purpose of polling is to get a sense of how the larger population might vote based on interviewing a small sample of prospective voters. I won’t go into the details of sampling and error rates – all you need to know for this conversation is that statistical analysis works when it’s done right. You can trust that a properly designed sample of a thousand interviewees can tell us how millions of voters are likely to cast their ballots with a likely error of about three or four percent – the key being “properly designed.” The problem with the way predictive polls are being conducted today is that the people polled cannot possibly be a representative sample of the electorate.

To provide context, I’ll discuss polls that can usually be relied on to yield meaningful results. People who analyze how voting trends change over time rely heavily on exit polls from previous elections. An exit poll is exactly what it sounds like. Interviewers intercept people exiting their voting locations and ask who they voted for and why. I tend to trust these polls far more than predictive polls because the only obvious flaw in the sampling is that everyone they approach may not want to be interviewed.

Most pollsters are not politically motivated, though the people who hire them and broadcast their results usually are. Moreover, all professional pollsters understand how to create statistically valid sampling universes. It’s a lot easier than brain surgery and almost as easy as rocket science. But knowing how is not the same as doing it. Exit polls work because people are more likely to accurately tell you who they voted for than who they plan to vote for, and there’s no reason to think that people who are willing to talk to exit pollsters vote any differently on the average than people who refuse to.

When your favorite news network tells you that more people under 45 voted for Trump than Biden in 2020 while the reverse was true for people older than 45, you can believe that with a reasonable degree of certainty. But what happens if the pollsters try to create a sampling universe to ask a similarly diverse group of people who they plan to vote for next November? I assert that it can’t be done using today’s polling methods and technology, and every network that broadcasts poll results knows that. But polls attract viewers, be they knowledgeable or naïve, and sponsors who pay the bills like to attract viewers. It’s very much in their self-interest to treat elections like athletic competitions whether the results are meaningful or not.

In an exit poll, the sample universe is well-defined – it’s all the people streaming out of their voting booths. All the interviewer has to do is find people willing to talk to them in as unbiased a manner as possible. But creating a sampling universe for predictive polling is very different, and in today’s world, virtually impossible. Today’s pollsters rely almost entirely on cell phone interviews and email questionnaires. Ask yourself if you or anyone you know is likely to participate in them. To do so, they’d have to be willing to answer calls from unknown callers or respond to emails from unknown sources who are most likely trolling for contributions.

Maybe you have a 95-year-old grandparent who’s bored and lonely enough to talk to anyone who reaches out to them, but who else do you know who’s likely to? As I’ve asked in previous articles, if pollsters aren’t talking to the vast majority of us who screen our calls and emails, who, exactly, are they polling? Whoever they are, they can’t possibly be representative of the voting population.

The real villains here are the giant media companies. Have you ever heard a polling “expert” cast doubt on the numbers they tout? They don’t care if the polls are accurate as long as people tune in to see them, and that’s incredibly dangerous for a generation of Americans that has largely forgotten how to think for themselves. Between inaccurate polls, internet bots, and virtually unregulated platforms like Facebook and X (Twitter) most Americans have no idea whether what they see and hear is truth or fiction. This year, polls that continually predict Trump leading, despite every logical argument that says he shouldn’t be, are a major part of the problem. But it’s a problem each of us can solve by simply ignoring them and deciding for ourselves.

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Words, Actions, Truth, and Lies

Posted on June 12, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 12, 2024

Ever since his own FBI Director James Comey initiated an investigation over his alleged ties to Russia in 2017, then President Donald Trump has been ranting about a rigged, weaponized justice system he says is being used to undermine his chances of winning in November. That has been his only line of defense as he has been indicted on more than ninety felony charges by two states and the U. S. Department of Justice, and has thus far been convicted of 34 of them. He has been found guilty of sexual assault and fraudulently managing his company by two state courts, for which he has accumulated fines in excess of a billion dollars, while screaming that these events were somehow orchestrated by the Biden family crime syndicate which does not and never has existed.

Trump has spent his entire election campaign charging his opponents with witch hunts and illegally attempting to influence the election, a crime for which he himself has been convicted and is awaiting sentencing. He has spent millions of dollars raised from supporters to pay scores of lawyers to delay his other trials until after the election, because he believes a sitting president is immune from all legal actions. He swore to pardon all the January 6th insurrectionists including himself if he is elected and to purge our justice system of everyone he perceives to be an enemy. Except for his incoherent, irrational rants and threats of revenge, Trump hasn’t uttered a single word of substance concerning the state of our nation’s economy or our status as leader of the free world.

Contrast that to the way President Biden has campaigned, particularly in recent weeks, as his only surviving son, Hunter, was on trial in Delaware, the Bidens’ home state where Hunter’s late brother, Beau, served as Attorney General. In the wake of Trump’s charges of being victimized by the Justice Department at Biden’s behest, Hunter’s federal convictions on three felony counts, which stem from falsely claiming he was not addicted to drugs on an application to purchase a firearm, created an awful dilemma for the president. The irony that Hunter only owned the gun for a few days and never used it only made the situation more poignant.

President Biden has the legal authority to pardon his son. As a parent who is nearly as old as Biden with two sons roughly the same age as Hunter, I feel his pain viscerally. Were Biden the man Trump accuses him of being, in other words, were Biden as venal and self-serving as Trump, pardoning Hunter would be the natural thing to do. But Biden is a man of integrity, and in this situation, integrity meant believing in our justice system and accepting the verdict of the jury in a very blue city in a very blue state. If there were any hint of corruption, this is where it would show up.

Biden announced, days before Hunter’s case went to the jury, that he would accept the outcome of the trial and would not pardon his son if he was convicted. I wish I could claim that level of integrity. If one of my sons was a recovering addict with no prior criminal record who was convicted of a nonviolent crime and possibly faced up to twenty-five years in prison, and I had the power to reverse that, nothing else would matter. Be thankful that President Biden is more principled than I am, than most fathers would be. His selfless act of integrity is the best contrast with his opponent’s complete lack of it.

Against a challenger whose only debate strategy is ranting incomprehensibly and accusing his opponent of everything he himself is guilty of, and who lies shamelessly about everything, the best defense is “actions speak louder than words.” Biden’s action speaks decibels louder than all the combined screams and threats emanating from the Trump campaign. His recent Executive Actions to counter illegal immigration at our border with Mexico and the success of his administration’s pressure on Mexico to do its share are a thundering roar that drowns out Trump’s hypocrisy over the border.

Biden promised he would repair our economy and strengthen our alliances. He has delivered impressively on both, having to overcome a House of Representatives frozen into inaction by an obstructionist MAGA minority. Every important measure of our economic health – inflation, unemployment, wage growth, equity markets – is trumpeting his success. As our most dangerous adversaries, Russia and Iran, pursue wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and Trump continues to try to undermine the president, Biden has not only stood firm but convinced a badly divided Congress to support these efforts in legislation.

Actions always speak louder than words, don’t they? Even that adage is being put to the test as Trump’s ability to create chaos and corrupt facts with his own insane fantasies seem to work with his base. The outcome of that test may well determine the future survival of our country, but Biden will fight on the side of integrity with his last breath.

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Don’t Let the Fog Blind You

Posted on June 11, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 11, 2024

Fifty years ago, I had a life-changing experience that still resonates with me. After visiting there myself in February of 1974, I returned to Seattle in April with my wife, who I hoped would be as charmed and excited by the idea of living there as I was. After two days of wandering around in puddles, mud, dense fog that hid the tops of downtown buildings, and temperatures that never left the low forties, I knew I’d failed. I had thought the piece de resistance would be the dinner I’d planned at the Shilshole Bay Marina on Puget Sound. Surely, the magnificence of the sun setting behind the Olympic Mountains would convince her.

Alas, the fog did me in again. We sat by a plate glass window watching mist and drizzle where we should have been gazing at hundreds of boats, fifteen miles of wavelets on the Sound, and behind it, the greenery of the Olympic Peninsula rising to the snow-capped, 9,000 foot peaks. I’d thought of nothing else for two months, believing she would love this place as I did, but at that moment I felt only despair. And then, the most remarkable thing happened – a genuine, certified epiphany. Expecting her to berate me for dragging her to this dismal rain forest, I was shocked when she took my hand and said, “I see what you mean about this place. I love it here.”

Writing that brought the same tears to my eyes that hearing her words produced fifty years ago, but they only lasted a few seconds, as the fog suddenly dissipated. It seemed miraculous until I realized that a westerly wind had been blowing the fog  toward us, and what we’d seen was really only a few hundred feet of remaining mist obscuring the view. As the fog evaporated before our eyes, we both reacted to incredible sight of the sun appearing to rest atop Mount Olympus as it slowly sank behind it. Utter desolation to heart-bursting joy in a single minute. Six months later, we and our two sons moved into our new house in Bellevue, Washington, where we lived happily for eleven years, but that’s not the point.

We had been fooled by a mere chimera, an accidental combination of factors that created a totally false impression, and we didn’t have enough information to realize our error until after the fact. I believe we’re all caught in a similar trap today as the media would have us believe that despite the obvious threats to our democracy represented by Donald Trump, his re-election seems inevitable. They tout seriously flawed polls that imply Trump leads in critical swing states. They trumpet MAGA claims that the things most of us despise about Trump are actually increasing his popularity and convincing more voters that all the vile things he’s done are just slight-of-hand tricks by soulless liberals and communists.

Even the dimmest among us must sense that there’s something wrong with that picture, and today, in Letters From an American, historian Heather Richardson, spelled out the reality that the smoke and mirrors Trump loyalists constantly juggle to control the news cycle have no more substance than the fog that hid the beauty of the Pacific Northwest from us. Read the list Professor Richardson penned, and it’s difficult to imagine the Trump bubble not exploding in the MAGA crew’s faces.

Add it up. The lies, the incoherence, the sexual assaults on women, the obvious dog whistle nods to neo-Nazis, racists, xenophobes, and White Supremacists. Consider the implications of how his single-minded pandering to right-wing extremists has corrupted the Supreme Court. Re-read Trump’s comments lauding dictators and denigrating our allies, and examine the aftereffects of his disastrous trade war on supply chains and inflation. Look hard at the man who catalyzed the insurrection at the Capitol and attempted to undermine the results of the 2020 election.

The MAGA movement has lost every ballot box test and Trump has lost virtually every court challenge since the 2016 election,. One New York court found him guilty of sexual assault and fined him hundreds of millions of dollars. A second New York Court found that his family business was guilty of fraud for which his CFO, Allen Weisselberg is now imprisoned, as his former fixer, Michael Cohen was for doing his master’s bidding. And now, our former president has been convicted of thirty-four felonies by a third New York Court and is awaiting sentencing.

As Richardson points out, the noise from the MAGA movement about how all these things make Trump a more popular folk hero are belied by their desperate attempts to delay trials for more than fifty additional felonies until after the 2024 election, including conspiracy to commit insurrection and deliberate mishandling of sensitive national security information. Even some of those who’ve been drinking the Trump Kool-Aid should have enough functioning brain cells to see through the MAGA bullshit.

A Trump win in November would make a mockery of the American Dream and support what many cynics believe – that human nature is such that greed and venal self-interest will inevitably destroy every good thing we create. Walter M. Miller made that case convincingly in his award-winning 1961 novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz. I’ve always hoped Miller was wrong, but there’s a chance that Americans could prove him right, after all.

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