The Final Shoe to Drop May Be the Most Impactful

Posted on August 4, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 4, 2023

The latest litmus test in the closely watched race for the 2024 Republican nomination for president is whether a candidate would pardon Donald Trump if he is convicted of federal crimes. Vivek Ramaswamy (whoever he is) pledged that he would pardon Trump on his first day as president and suggested that every candidate sign a pledge to that effect. Trump’s United Nations Ambassador, and former SC Governor Nikki Haley called Trump’s behavior reckless but said she was inclined toward pardoning him if she’s elected.

Former NJ Governor Chris Christie, who for months in 2017 embarrassed himself as Trump’s lapdog, said he would never pardon Trump, because a pardon requires the recipient to acknowledge his guilt, something Trump has never done and never will do. Former TX Congressman Will Hurd said he would not pardon Trump, and former AR Governor Asa Hutchinson said pardoning Trump should not be an issue in the campaign. The other major contenders have so far refused to answer the question directly, although FL Governor Ron DeSantis said his priority would be to act in the best interest of the country.

That’s what Gerald Ford had to decide when he became president after Richard Nixon was forced to resign over his Watergate crimes. Nixon never admitted guilt, but he was told by his own party leaders that if he were impeached, the Senate would vote to convict him. Ford agonized over the issue, ultimately deciding that after the disruptions caused by Vietnam and Watergate, the country needed healing much more than it needed to imprison Richard Nixon. His writings, at the time, make a convincing argument for pardoning his predecessor, although he took a lot of heat for doing it, and many people believe it cost him the 1976 election.

That’s why all eyes will be on Fulton County, GA District Attorney Fani Willis, this week. Willis has been conducting an investigation of Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020 for more than two years. When asked if she intends to indict the former president, she said her job was to seek justice for the people of Fulton County when anyone breaks their laws, “and that’s exactly what I intend to do.” Plans to erect security barriers around the Atlanta courthouse this week suggest that an indictment from Ms. Willis is forthcoming. It would be the last shoe to drop in the saga of the attempts to undermine the 2020 election, and possibly the most impactful one.

One reason is that a president does not have the authority to pardon anyone convicted of a state felony. That applies to Trump’s criminal convictions in New York over hush money payments to a porn star as well, but most voters don’t seem to think the New York convictions are important. Not so with Georgia. That state’s Republicans are furious over the public pressure campaign Trump waged after the election, and they’re proud that their leaders stood up to him and upheld the law. If Trump were tried and convicted of attempting to invalidate the votes of the citizens of Georgia, only GA Governor Brian Kemp could pardon him. Given the way Trump has viciously attacked Kemp, his Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, and his Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, there’s not likely to be much solace for him in Georgia.

A Georgia indictment could have an even greater impact because of rules concerning televised trials. As forty Congressional Democrats wrote in their letter to the Justice Department, requesting that Trump’s trials over classified documents and the January 6th insurrection be televised, the most important consideration, in the end, will be healing the divisions Trump created and exacerbated. The only way to gain the support of a majority of Americans for a jury verdict in any trial of Trump is for everyone to be able see how the government presents its case, and to determine for themselves if his defense rises to level of reasonable doubt.

It’s impossible to predict whether the DC Federal Court will waive its standing rules against television cameras in courtrooms, but no such prohibition exists in Georgia. There, the reverse is true. Cameras are typically permitted unless a strong case can be made that they would inhibit the court’s ability to conduct a fair trial.

An indictment by Ms. Willis and a televised trial in Georgia may be the best possible solution for the country. Far right politicians are paying lip service to letting the voters decide Trump’s fate. If they’re serious, the best way to do that is to let all Americans see the trial with their own eyes. Whatever fate awaits Trump, the course America plots in his aftermath is far more important. An open, televised trial in Georgia might be our best chance to move on from the mess Trump left us with.

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The Trump Conundrum

Posted on August 3, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 3, 2023

However Donald Trump’s legal problems and the 2024 election turn out, he will have achieved a couple of things that no other American has. He has sucked all the air out of every political discussion since his famous escalator descent in 2015, and he has corrupted our national belief in truth and the principles on which our Constitution was founded. He’s not the first politician to have done so, but he is the first since the Civil War to bring the United States of America to a national crisis of confidence that threatens our democracy and our future as a world leader.

We’ve seen his playbook before. Adolf Hitler used it to come to power in 1932, much like Trump did in 2016. Hitler won office in a country whose economy had been destroyed in a fit of revenge by the rest of Europe for the devastation caused by World War 1. The Weimar Republic was founded on democratic principles, but it was weak and impoverished, and the German people were suffering from massive unemployment and near starvation. Hitler understood that the key to victory was providing them with a scapegoat. He was able to use The Big Lie that all his nation’s problems were caused by traitorous Jews, to destroy its fledgling free press, undermine its constitution, castrate its legal system, and turn its legislature into a rubber stamp.

It’s been clear from the outset that Trump’s ambitions mirrored Hitler’s, but the American republic has a lot more staying power than the one Hitler decimated. Hitler accomplished in four months what Trump couldn’t in four years, though he came dangerously close. And now we’re about to witness his endgame, but we’re not just spectators. The stakes for all of us are as high as they can be – only the prospect of nuclear war has greater potential to destroy our country.

It’s easy to understand how Hitler succeeded. Conditions in Germany were abysmal, and it was easy to control the flow of news and information in Hitler’s Germany. What is shocking to many Americans is that in spite of what we have all experienced with our own eyes and ears, two-thirds of Republicans still believe Trump’s Big Lies. Trump may be the most dangerous criminal in our history, yet he has managed to convince a third of the country that he is the victim of a widespread conspiracy and persecution. The most rabid among his base see him as a martyr.

With classic Orwellian and Nietschian logic, Trump has changed the meanings of words, claimed that everyone else is guilty of what they accuse him of doing, and whined publicly as if he were about to be crucified. That has to be the ultimate Big Lie. Is there a public figure in America less Christ-like than Donald Trump? Are all those Christian warriors who would give their souls to pass a national ban on abortion blind to the fact that Trump has no moral principles or belief system, that he only uses them to pander to others to accrue power and wealth?

That’s the conundrum Trump has created. We live in a world that is more controlled every day by a massive, unregulated database of information. The Internet, which has revised almost every aspect of our lives in a single generation, has also given us the tools of our own self-destruction. Anyone with the desire and the financial wherewithal to use it, can influence the minds of millions of people, and there are no truth or accuracy filters to protect us. The AI nightmare that brought us the Terminator stories is already in use today. Didn’t some sage (British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton) once say the pen is mightier than the sword?

It turns out that words can do more damage than sticks and stones no matter what our first-grade teachers told us. In the hands of an unscrupulous, shameless power-mad politician with the gift to tap into people’s worst natures, words might as well be plague viruses. There’s no vaccine to protect us from the Trump virus. The only way to keep from being infected is to turn off our self-serving social media and go back to thinking for ourselves.

According to some of our best legal experts, Trump’s best defense against the dozens of felonies he’s been indicted for may be that he really believed the lies he spread, and he thought he was acting in the best interests of the country when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, although countless people close to Trump, most recently his Vice President, Mike Pence, and his Attorney General, Bill Barr, have told DOJ investigators that he fully understood that he had lost, and his actions were criminal. Trump is the very definition of a cancer eating away at everything we value. If he cannot be excised by our justice system, it will be up to the voters in fifteen months. This is our country, not Trump’s. If we want to keep it that way, we all must rise above the noise and chaos that are Trump’s most powerful allies and do the job ourselves.

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In Our National Interest

Posted on July 28, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 28, 2023

After being informed that Donald Trump was a target in the January 6th investigation by the Justice Department, his new lawyers asked for a meeting with DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith. Trump had just shaken up his legal team again, as another group of prominent attorneys threw in the towel. So much about the ongoing investigations and indictments of former President Trump is unprecedented, it’s impossible to predict an outcome, and the situation is as serious as it can be.

What is at stake is the viability of our Constitution, the rule of law, and the survival of our democracy. All of our American ideals and values are on trial, along with the myths we grew up believing about America. That last item may turn out to be most critical – if as a nation we lose faith in the ideas that define our identity as Americans, we will become the latest addition to the scrapheap of failed empires and civilizations.

Mr. Trump believes, as he has demonstrated throughout his life, that lies, obfuscation, and the use of every possible legal stratagem to delay judgment are his most effective means of defense. It’s not a coincidence that those are the same tactics used by every major gangster and organized crime figure since Prohibition and the Great Depression made crime, racketeering, and black marketing a national pastime. It’s also worth noting that these tactics allowed mobsters to evade the law for decades, but in the end, most of them wound up spending the rest of their lives in federal prisons.

The comparison doesn’t end there. Many of America’s organized crime figures attained a Robin Hood-like status as folk heroes. When times are tough and millions of people are hurting, it’s human nature that many will cheer anyone who seems able to beat the system, ignore the rules, and thumb their nose at established authority. When a politician does it, it’s called populism, standing up for the little guys who are being crushed by the system or falling through the cracks. Whatever it’s called, it invariably results in divisiveness and the re-opening of old wounds around racism, wealth, and social status.

All of that is on display today, and because Trump is a former president who has taken control of one of our major parties, everything is magnified, including the cult-like status of his MAGA movement. People who understand what Trump is and recognize the danger he poses to our future shake their heads in dismay, seeing that as much as a third of the country seems unmoved by the obvious facts that demonstrate Trump’s sociopathic nature. That’s why the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been for our future.

Like the master criminals who preceded him, Trump has finally been tripped up in his own web of lies and unlawful behavior. Since the prosecution of Donald Trump, who never admits guilt or compromises, will almost certainly result in the most important criminal trials in our nation’s history, the meeting between Trump’s attorneys and Jack Smith had everyone’s attention. We might have expected the best, brightest, and most ambitious defense attorneys to line up around the block, eager for a chance to take part.

But the revolving door of attorneys who preceded them found Trump to be an incorrigible client who ignored their advice and continually undermined their efforts to defend him. Over the past thirty months, they have lost virtually every legal battle they fought, and the evidence against their client continued to mount. We saw the result yesterday, when, instead of discussing the facts and merits of the government’s January 6th case, the best argument Trump’s new attorneys could make was that it would be bad for the country if Trump were indicted.

I absolutely agree. The spectacle of a former president behaving like an organized crime boss is not something I want broadcast around the world. The only thing worse would be letting Trump get away with his crimes. If he is able to avoid or delay prosecution until after the 2024 election and win re-election, we will all bear witness to the full measure of his narcissistic sociopathy. He will believe he is untouchable, and given what we know about his supporters’ plans to weaken the government and transfer more power to the presidency, that could spell the end of everything we hold dear.

The media wonder if voters suffer from fatigue over all of Trump’s legal issues, and whether they will simply ignore them. A lot of people tell me they’re sick of all this, and they do their best to tune it out, but I’m betting that’s just a metaphor for being sick of Trump. When they step into the voting booth, it will mark the end of his political career (assuming he’s on the ballot.)

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Doddering Old Men

Posted on July 13, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 13, 2023

I was playing duplicate bridge the other day, a game with stringent rules of decorum. No one talks out loud when people are playing. Even the bidding is silent, using flashcards. Yet, such are the times we live in, that people at the next table couldn’t resist arguing about President Biden, his accomplishments during thirty months in office and the perception that he’s an ineffectual “doddering old man.”

Aside from being distracted from making a tough contract, I felt my ire rise. I’ve heard this argument before. I looked up doddering in my dictionary app. and found: “shaky, feeble or infirm…,” an interesting definition, because those words describe three very different conditions. I know from experience, because I’m the same age as Biden. Let’s take them one at a time.

Shaky – a fair comment. Biden walks stiffly, sometimes appearing to be in pain, and at times his voice shakes. But anyone who has followed his career knows that his speech impediment is a holdover from stuttering in his youth. As to his walking, I wish I walked as well as he does. Watching him climb the stairs to Air Force One with relative ease makes me envious. If you saw me walk you might think I was in pain, but that would be a misperception. The way our gait changes with age often has nothing to do with pain. Wait until you’re eighty before you judge.

Feeble – definitely not a fair description. My gait may be unsteady, but no one who knows me would call me feeble, and as someone who’s the same age, I can assure you that neither is President Biden.

Infirm – the White House Physician, Kevin O’Connor who is prohibited by law from misrepresenting the president’s state of health, reports that Biden is in excellent health. I almost added “for his age,” but that would be misleading. During my own recent physical, my internist continually used superlatives about my health. It made me laugh, and I finally asked him how he could say I was in perfect health when I carry a walking stick to feel more secure. He said the two things have nothing to do with each other. At my age, doctors worry about heart and lung disease, blood pressure, cholesterol, kidney and liver health, and early signs of dementia. My doctor said that based on those measures I am perfectly healthy, and so is our president, who has been completely transparent about his health.

Compare that with Donald Trump’s apparent health. Despite bizarre comments by his former physician, Ronny Jackson, lauding Trump’s health, he is seriously overweight for someone his age, (that phrase, again,) he has been reported to suffer from heart disease and seriously high cholesterol, and his unhealthy eating habits are well-documented. Three years younger than Biden, he doesn’t rate nearly the clean bill of health Biden gets.

When I hear people call Biden a doddering old man, I want to ask them how a shaky, feeble, infirm man of eighty could have accomplished all he has while in office. His travel schedule alone would exhaust a younger person. And what of his performance?

While in office, Trump was routinely mocked by foreign leaders, not our enemies, but our allies. Our most aggressive adversaries, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, did nothing but praise him. But I’ve been paying close attention, and I don’t recall hearing anything but praise for Biden’s performance by our principal allies (the EU, NATO, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and of course, Ukraine.) Even a serious policy disagreement with French President Emmanuel Macron, was smoothed over without any personal recriminations.

I don’t have room to list everything Biden has achieved, but here’s a brief summary: re-uniting NATO after Trump did his best to undermine the alliance; the American Rescue Plan, which provided funding to families and businesses during the COVID pandemic, all of which came straight back into our economy and prevented a recession, as people used it to feed and house their families; cracking the back of the worst inflation the world has seen in decades due to COVID, damaged supply chains, and the war in Ukraine, and doing so faster than every other advanced nation; leading the multinational effort to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, and as it now appears, seriously weakening Putin’s political power; making major investments in American manufacturing and infrastructure; passing federal gun control legislation; and taking significant strides to mitigate the effects of climate change.

I don’t like the way President Biden walks because it reminds me too much of me. But that’s a damn impressive list of accomplishments with razor-thin majorities in Congress. Biden’s no doddering old man any more than I am, and if you’re reading this, you know I’m not.

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A New High in Hypocrisy?

Posted on July 3, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 3, 2023

As celebrate the 247th anniversary of our independence from the British monarchy, let’s look at the state of our nation. We’re seven months away from the first primary election in the 2024 presidential campaign, over a year from the major party conventions, and sixteen months from the election. Yet, in the ongoing circus that our political process has become, we already have fifteen announced candidates in the two major parties. We also may be approaching a new high in campaign hypocrisy.

Twelve candidates are Republicans, and three, including incumbent President Joe Biden, are Democrats. Given the legal jeopardy Donald Trump is facing, it’s significant that only one candidate in the field has addressed his problems directly. That candidate is on record saying a president facing a federal indictment on felony charges would cripple the operation of our government and result in an unprecedented constitutional crisis. The same person warned of an impending catastrophe if the nation elected someone under a federal indictment that resulted in a criminal trial of a sitting president and suggested that anyone guilty of mishandling classified documents should be sentenced to a long prison term.

No one who is familiar with my feelings about Donald Trump will be surprised that I heartily agree with those statements. What’s most interesting is that the candidate who made those statements to cheering supporters was not Joe Biden, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, or even Chris Christie, who in his latest incarnation is belatedly focusing on why Trump is unfit to run again. The person who uttered them was Donald Trump himself, running against Hilary Clinton in 2016, while he was egging crowds on to chant, “Lock her up!”

On this issue alone, the hypocrisy coming from the Trump campaign is likely to grow in magnitude and importance. Thus far this year, in addition to his federal indictment for refusing to return and illegally exposing highly sensitive government documents, a New York civil court ordered Trump to pay five million dollars to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault and defamation, and his company was convicted of fraud and tax felonies. And the worst is yet to come, as the State of Georgia appears on the verge of charging him with attempting to undermine the result of the 2020 election, and the Department of Justice is wrapping up its investigation of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U. S. Capitol and giving every appearance that an indictment for seditious conspiracy will soon follow.

You want more hypocrisy? Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence, is campaigning on two issues. One is his commitment to outlaw abortion everywhere in the United States, and the other is that he stood up to defend the Constitution on January 6th, despite pressure and threats from Trump and his supporters. Pence deserves full credit for certifying the results of the 2020 election as the Constitution required, but note that he did so only after prominent conservative attorneys like Michael Luttig advised him that any other course would be a violation of federal law that could land him in prison. And the sharp disapproval he presently expresses about Trump’s actions as President only began with fourteen days left in Trump’s term. He was a submissive lapdog during the first 1,448 days Trump was president.

Speaking of lapdogs, I give you former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who sucked up to Trump from the moment he announced his candidacy on 2015, and carried his water despite continually being pushed aside and ultimately shut out of Trump’s administration. Has he only seen the light about Trump’s true nature in the last couple of months? Why weren’t he and Pence speaking out when Trump suggested we ingest bleach to protect us against COVID, or when he repeatedly undermined our commitment to NATO and our traditional allies? Why did they remain silent when Trump read love letters from Kim Jong Un and spoke of Vladimir Putin in adoring terms, even calling his disastrous invasion of Ukraine an act of genius?

Why did the candidates who profess to be devoted Christians not speak out when Trump used the bible as a prop in an attempt to stop protests against police violence in the District of Columbia? Why did former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley not stand up for NATO and the EU while she was part of Trump’s administration? And how can Ron DeSantis, who described the war in Ukraine as a regional dispute we should stay out of while Biden was in Kyiv meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky now claim he supports defending Ukraine?

We’ve always known candidates often don’t tell the whole truth, but in this age when everything is recorded, when every outrageous comment made by a politician can be found on You Tube and the archives of every media organization, we may drown in hypocrisy before we ever get to vote.

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Divisiveness is Slowing Destroying America

Posted on June 29, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 29, 2023

Recently, I’ve been reaching out to people with differing points of view. It’s been enlightening. I’ve found general agreement on two points. One is how badly divided we are as a nation. The other, surprisingly, given the wide range of views I sampled, was that America is likely past its peak as both a thriving nation and a world power. Although I didn’t anticipate the second point, it makes perfect sense because the two are closely inter-related.

Looked at from the perspective of today, our sharply divided politics have resulted in two drastically different outcomes, which seem contradictory until you look more closely. Legislatively, our country was stuck in ever-worsening gridlock since the Bush-Gore election of 2000, until President Biden was able to break the logjam, getting his Bidenomics legislation approved with a razor-thin majority in both the Senate and the House. With the majority in the House flipping last year, the gridlock has become worse than ever.

Judicially, while Congress has largely been delinquent in codifying laws supported by large majorities of Americans, the cumulative effect of right-wing efforts to pack the courts at all levels has been the revocation of many things Americans have taken for granted for decades. We’ve seen this happen across the board, in women’s health, abortion policy, campaign financing, disregard for well-established rules of ethics, gerrymandered elections, a pullback in voting rights in more than half the country, and today, the end of the era of affirmative action.

The courts, including the U. S. Supreme Court, do not make laws. Their greatest impact comes from providing interpretations of areas of existing laws that are vague or deliberately gray, or that have existed for so long that their original intent may no longer be relevant. Particularly with respect to issues like gun control, abortion, freedom of speech and religion, LGBTQ rights, and entitlements, the Court’s positions in rolling back provisions based on decades of precedent, have basically been a rehash of the centuries-long debate over federalism. The Court has consistently said, in recent years, that those issues should be decided by individual states rather than having a national policy governing all.

States with extreme political views, especially those that achieved legislative supermajorities through gerrymandering and restricting the voting rights of minorities, have jumped into the void left by the Court invalidating long-standing precedents. At the same time, Congress remained frozen with respect to codifying the rights being lost into federal law. As a result, the process of checks and balances which are the core of our Constitution no longer work effectively, if at all. We are seeing an avalanche of laws and policies, a stampede from progressivism to elitism, from inclusion to exclusion, and from providing for the general welfare of Americans, as the Constitution clearly states, to concern for preserving the wealth and power of a very few – in short, from defending democracy to drifting toward authoritarianism.

How did we get here? The simple answer is that Americans have lost focus on the things that really matter if our nation is to survive. One is education. Math and reading scores for American children have declined steadily for many years and are now at dangerously low levels. But within those poor performance numbers are a different story. Throughout our school systems, the children who work hardest and learn best are immigrants, largely Asians, yet we are daily bombarded with propaganda aimed at restricting immigration to people who “look like us.” This negative outcome, too, is a symptom of how divisiveness is slowly destroying us.

If it’s not clear yet, this is all occurring because we are victims of two relatively recent developments: the sociopathy of Donald Trump and his ability to tap into every negative emotion of his supporters, and an out-of-control technology that enables them to replace truth and facts with lies and alternate realities. Recently publicized fears over the growth of artificial intelligence mask the real dangers we face. With no regulation of internet content, or more specifically, the flood of information on social media, combined with a frightening change from fact-based reporting to influence-peddling among our major corporate media, we no longer have generally accepted standards for evaluating what we see and hear.

It’s not surprising that there is so much agreement among people who normally don’t see eye-to-eye on anything that America is in decline. It’s also not surprising that there is so much disagreement about why. If Americans want our democracy to thrive it’s time we all got our priorities straight. An excellent first step would be exposing Donald Trump for what he is in terms no reasonable person can ignore, and assuring that his influence on our politics and our lives ends as abruptly as it began.

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Art As Allegory

Posted on June 19, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 19, 2023

Author Diana Gabaldon began writing her Outlander books thirty-two years ago. She has completed nine of them, almost 8,000 pages of prose that have a diverse, devoted following that’s almost cult-like. Their success stems from many things – outstanding writing, an incredibly intense love story that spans 250 years, depending on how you count, elements of both science fiction and mysticism, and a unique view of how our nation came to exist that brilliantly blends fact and fiction. I find the combination irresistible.

I’ve read all nine books and began watching season 7 of the video version that recently dropped on Starz. Probably entirely by coincidence, they are a poignant allegory for the state of our nation today. The two protagonists are Claire, a British combat nurse who returns from World War 2 to join her husband for a long-delayed honeymoon in Scotland, and Jamie, the Laird (lord) of a Scottish clan during the uprising of the 1740s. How they find each other is the stuff of magic and romance, but beyond suspending disbelief over the basic premise, the rest resonates with everything we know and feel.

Gabaldon brings a number of disparate elements together to create a narrative that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Claire is a woman with the skills of a Harvard trained surgeon, and values typical of modern-day Brits and Americans, whose love for Jamie drives her to make an incredible choice: to trade her life in Boston, circa 1970, for a far more primitive one in the eighteenth century. If you want to know how she manages that feat, you’ll have to read the books or subscribe to Starz or Netflix.

Starting in Book 4, Jamie and Claire find themselves in the Colony of North Carolina in 1772. Claire, of course, knows how the Revolutionary War turns out, and having lived for twenty years in New England, her sentiments are with the Americans. Jamie, who fought the tyrannical Engish in Scotland and was imprisoned by them for a decade, is badly conflicted. In North Carolina, he’s a British subject, but he knows what Claire knows, and he despises slavery and racism as much as she does. Co-opted by the Governor, Jamie is forced to work for the Redcoats, and we see his gradual conversion to the cause of the Revolution.

In the process, I learned that most of what I knew about it was either wrong or incomplete. We meet Benjamin Franklin, who is not quite the patriotic hero I thought he was. He spent most of the years of unrest before 1776 in France, and remained a loyal British subject almost until the end. We meet George Washington and see the Revolution from his perspective and in a wonderful twist, Claire comes to know Benedict Arnold, who was a loyal subordinate general to Washington until his perceived betrayal by Washington made him a turncoat. To add flavor, we also meet the French General Lafayette and the Mohawk and Cherokee leaders who played pivotal roles in the fighting, and develop a real understanding of how the Revolution affected native Americans.

Altogether, these characters and situations form a tableau that’s eerily suggestive of what we are experiencing today in America. I’m sure it’s coincidental that the Revolution reaches its climax in Outlander in the midst of perhaps the worst crisis our democracy has ever faced. We see the hardship and suffering, the loss and death, and the personal struggles with conflicting loyalties. More subtly, we also see the fundamental clash between the tyranny of the English King George III and the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and all the patriots who put their lives on the line when they signed the Declaration of Independence. The revolutionaries are by no means angels – within their ranks are thugs and criminals, pirates, smugglers, and opportunists, bigots and superstitious fools. Yet, somehow, this collection of misfits overcome enormous odds to gain the right to govern themselves in a land of opportunity.

Today, we have the ironically named Freedom Caucus, which is the antithesis of everything we fought for in the 1770s. It’s all there in Outlander. First, greed – the idea of enslaving and practicing genocide on millions of people for the sake of profit; the reality of a time when women’s rights were virtually non-existent, when a woman like Claire is viewed by many as a witch; the contrast between the opulent lifestyles of the nobility and everyone else; and perhaps most disturbing, the concept of blind loyalty to a demagogue whose interests have nothing in common with the needs of the people who serve him.

Whether Ms Gabaldon or Starz intended to lay all this before us when so many Americans seem to be disavowing the ideals of our Constitution, I’m glad they did. I hope everyone who watches or reads these stories gets the underlying message.

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How Serious are the Charges Against Donald Trump?

Posted on June 15, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 15, 2023

In the polarized world of American politics, it’s not easy to have a calm, rational discussion when the subject is Donald Trump’s behavior. His indictment on thirty-seven counts of knowingly mishandling national security information and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim its property has become the focal point for one of the most partisan battles in recent years. But the case is really pretty simple. No one is disputing the obvious fact that Trump committed the crimes he’s charged with or that he incorrectly believed he had the absolute right to do whatever he pleased with highly classified documents after he left the White House.

Thus, we have the fascinating spectacle of far-right extremists in the Republican Party defending Trump with arguments that completely ignore the relevant facts. Legal experts have declared with near unanimity that Trump’s oft-repeated public assertions about what he can and cannot do with documents related to national security are totally without merit. Trump himself is heard on tape discussing them with people with whom he illegally shared them, decrying the fact that as a former president he doesn’t have the right to either de-classify or possess them.

His defenders ignore the shell game Trump engaged in to hide the documents from federal law enforcement officials although a federal judge and grand jury found that there was probable cause to believe Trump and his co-defendant repeatedly lied to them. They ignore the evidence, which, by now, almost everyone has seen and heard because much of it comes from statements Trump uttered on live television. Anyone else who said those things would have been convicting himself, but Trump’s idea of a legal defense is to lie and claim he’s being politically persecuted.

The two main defenses being aired on right-wing networks are that the entire case is a political witch hunt and that there’s no evidence of harm resulting from Trump’s illegal actions. Let’s look at those arguments.

Is there bias on the part of President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Special Prosecutor Jack Smith? Probably – they wouldn’t be human if they weren’t disgusted with Trump’s behavior over the past eight years. That question arises often in our justice system at all levels because law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and juries are not robots. Prosecutors often have strong negative feelings about the criminals they indict, but that doesn’t invalidate the evidence they present. If people who despise Donald Trump and what he stands for dance with joy at his indictment, that in no way diminishes his guilt.

The argument that there’s no evidence that our country was damaged militarily or with respect to intelligence gathering is even more absurd. If your teenager was arrested for driving recklessly at a hundred miles an hour, would you claim they shouldn’t be held accountable because they didn’t kill anyone? Do we acquit people charged attempted murder because they failed to kill their intended victims?

I talked at length about this with someone I respect whose military and national security career spanned more than forty years. He raised an argument I hadn’t thought of, specifically that it doesn’t matter what Trump did because our system of national security and intelligence doesn’t prevent our enemies from knowing all our secrets. He believes our entire security apparatus is a sham that supports a lucrative industry that makes a lot of people rich. He has access to sources I don’t, but I have trouble with that view. Remember Edward Snowden and Julian Assange? Remember the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?

I also have my own experience with national security. My work required me to hold Top Secret clearance for many years. For all that time, I was continually reminded, if not threatened outright, with all the ways the government could send me to prison for the rest of my life if I violated the same Espionage Act that Trump has run afoul of.

This is not a game, and in the real world, it’s not in the least political. People who hold such clearances take them very seriously, because aside from caring about the security of our country, their jobs and livelihoods require them to. Even if I supported Donald Trump, I would be outraged by his handling of sensitive material that could put our field operatives and our entire nation at risk, and I’m not the only one. In our divided House of Representatives, members with backgrounds in the military or national security are not speaking up to defend Trump. Some are even speaking out against him.

The charges against Trump are extremely serious. Step away from the politics and ask yourself how you would vote on his jury if he were anyone but Donald Trump. His identity should have nothing to do with his guilt or innocence.

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No One is Above the Law

Posted on June 10, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 10, 2023

The federal indictment against former president Donald Trump that was made public, yesterday, by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith signaled the beginning of the end game for the most critical test our democracy has faced since the Civil War. Trump himself said, repeatedly, during his 2016 presidential campaign that no one is above the law, as he went on to promise voters that his administration would enforce every national security law in the U. S. Code indiscriminately.

Trump’s critics have long predicted that his love of television cameras and social media, his lack of respect for truth, and his inability to control his narcissistic personality disorder would eventually be his undoing. Demagogues like Trump survive by keeping their supporters angry, convincing them that everyone but him is corrupt and out to get them. They all have the same dangerously charismatic ability to lie convincingly without flinching.

From day one, historians and responsible journalists have credibly compared Trump’s rise to power with Adolf Hitler’s. Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power by promulgating The Big Lie that their country was being undermined and sabotaged by foreigners and immigrants, notably Jews. They succeeded in dismantling the free press and the Constitution of the Weimar Republic by exacerbating the terrible economic conditions and unemployment that followed the First World War.

We defeated the Fascists, but not before they came dangerously close to destroying Europe and isolating America from the rest of the world. Yet, only a decade later, prominent American politicians were using the same tactics in their paranoid obsession to root out Communist conspirators. The playbook for that effort was the brainchild of the infamous Roy Cohn, who served as the Senate’s prosecutor for the Communist witch hunt of the 1950s. It used baseless lies and insinuations, fear-mongering in the media, and a hate-based alternate reality to supplant facts.

Cohn went on to become consigliere for some of the worst organized crime families of the post-war era, which put him in contact with a young, morally challenged businessman named Donald Trump. He explained to Trump how the Fascist playbook that brought Hitler to power and kept our most violent criminals out of prison applied to him. Trump had always gravitated toward lies, denials, and intimidation, but Cohn shaped them into a coherent philosophy.

Such tactics only succeed when people of principle succumb. The economic chaos in Germany in the 1930s enabled the Nazis to overthrow their nation’s justice system, but here in America, we have committed people in federal law enforcement who took down everyone from Al Capone to Trump’s friend, John Gotte, including Cohn, who was disbarred and died in federal prison.

That brings us full circle to the Trump indictment. The false 2016 promises about enforcing all defense and security laws stemmed from Trump’s attacks on Hilary Clinton’s sloppy use of a private email server. His rants about perceived security breaches caused former FBI Director James Comey to launch an investigation of Clinton’s actions only a month before the 2016 election, which, despite finding no evidence of either unlawful intent or harm, was instrumental in enabling Trump to defeat her. That was the same FBI Trump’s defenders are accusing of being out to get him and serving as a political foil of the Biden administration.

To distance the charges against Trump from politics, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Prosecutor Jack Smith to direct the investigation which resulted in yesterday’s thirty-seven count indictment. The indictment resulted from the deliberations of a grand jury comprised of average Americans residing in south Florida that was randomly drawn from a population that won Trump a majority in Florida in 2016 and 2020. In that context, it’s impossible to defend Trump’s charge that the indictments are solely motivated by an attempt to keep him from winning in 2024. Based on what the investigation found, the prosecutors clearly believe Trump is unfit to serve as president again, but that’s because of his criminal behavior.

Trump’s attitude, words, and behavior clearly mimic those of the dictators and crime bosses he has worshipped all his life. The people prosecuting the case against Trump understand that they will be attacked and lied about. Their lives will be scrutinized and dragged through the mud, and there are already signs that Trump supporters are attempting to foment a second insurrection outside the courthouse where Trump will be arraigned. But make no mistake. The people attempting to bring Trump to justice are heroes on the front lines of the battle to preserve our Constitution and our nation. If Trump is allowed to escape punishment, if even worse, he somehow regains the presidency, that will portend a dark future for America.

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The 2024 Primaries Will Not Be a Repeat of 2016

Posted on June 8, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 8, 2023

Political pundits, who rarely get it right more often than you or I, have told us for months that the 2024 Republican primaries would be a repeat of 2016. Remember when there were sixteen Republicans vying for the presidential nomination? Remember how Trump’s shameless, belligerent, offensive style intimidated his opponents, forcing them to drop out one by one? That happened because the others were all professional politicians, who, for all their hypocrisy and misleading promises, were following a well-established set of rules for political campaigns.

Trump, who doesn’t believe rules apply to him, was so outrageous, so profane, so effective at blending lies and truth until most people couldn’t tell them apart, that his opponents reacted like deer caught in headlights. It made me wonder at the time how these people reacted to schoolyard bullies, they seemed so helpless and unable to defend themselves. Like those kids in a schoolyard, it never occurred to them that they could have brought Trump down simply by uniting. They (and we) were all victims of their personal blind ambition. They threw around words like “sacrifice,” but not one of them was willing to cede his place in line until it was too late.

I have good news for everyone who believes Trump is a threat to our country, to basic decency, and to that mythical world order which is based on the rule of law. The pundits are wrong. Last evening, before CNN broadcast a Town Hall with newly announced candidate Mike Pence, they had a fascinating panel discussion. The person who most impressed me was Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor from 2019 to 2023. More than anyone I can think of, he and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, illustrate the fractured condition of the Republican Party that Trump left in his wake.

Duncan and Raffensberger were in the midst of the firestorm created by Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. To the surprise and relief of everyone who believes in our Constitution, they were the only two senior elected Republicans in the entire country who stood up to Trump’s lies and intimidation, despite enormous risks to their careers. Lifelong Conservatives, they both declared on national television that Georgia’s election results would not be tampered with. Last night, before a large TV audience, Duncan declared, “Trump is definitely going down!”

He was referring both to Trump’s attempt to gain the 2024 Republican nomination, and state and federal justice systems that have spent more than two years investigating whether Trump is guilty of serious crimes. New York courts have already found Trump’s company criminally guilty of fraudulent business practices and Trump himself guilty of sexual misconduct and bribery in a civil trial. The Department of Justice appears to be on the verge of indicting him for serious felonies concerning his illegal retention of Top Secret national security documents and his instigation of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

For his part, Pence, Trump’s former vice president, declared that Trump’s actions around January 6th and his continuing refusal to accept his 2020 defeat make him unfit to serve as president again. If, as I do, you believe the same thing, that should be cheering news, because Pence is positioning himself to take a large chunk of evangelical votes away from his former boss. The far-right Christian movement was willing to look the other way when Trump acted like an immoral pig, because he promised them an all-out war against abortion and women’s rights to control their own health. He delivered on that promise, but evangelists know that everything Trump did was transactional. Pence, on the other hand, is (or pretends to be) a true Christian evangelist who said, last night, that he favors a national ban on abortion.

While I find Pence creepy at best, and I cringe at the notion of him in the White House, he gave some very good answers in his Town Hall. About trans-gender individuals, he said he had no problem with adults making whatever gender choices they were comfortable with, but that chemical or surgical procedures that make irreversible changes to their bodies should be outlawed for people under eighteen, a slap at Trump but more so at Ron DeSantis. With respect to Ukraine, Pence distanced himself from Trump and DeSantis, stating that defending Ukraine against Russian aggression is our highest priority. Otherwise, he warned, Putin will keep going until NATO is directly involved militarily, and any weakness we show standing up to Russia will enable China’s expansionist goals.

The news that Trump will almost surely fail in his attempt to regain the presidency is very good. It’s possible that whoever replaces him might be worse, but the thought of saying good-bye to Trump once and for all makes the risk worth taking.

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