Is Trump Eligible to Serve as President Again?

Posted on August 19, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 19, 2023

With less than fifteen months to go before the 2024 election, we all need to take the process seriously and stop letting Donald Trump dictate the narrative and control the news cycle. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, that’s a dangerous situation for the country. It might help to take a step back to where the daily noise he generates can’t muddy our thoughts. Do that, and our priorities become crystal clear.

Most important is whether Donald Trump is eligible to serve as President again. There’s no doubt that will ultimately be decided by the courts, and given the way Trump approaches legal battles, he will try to stretch this one out until (he thinks) it’s moot. That would be a calamity whose negative impact is impossible to overstate.

We remember the impact FBI Director James Comey had on the 2016 election by announcing he was beginning an investigation into Hilary Clinton’s emails six weeks before the election, despite the fact that he found no evidence of criminal behavior. To have the Supreme Court rule on Trump’s eligibility to serve well into the campaign season would be orders of magnitude worse and make us look like the Italian Parliament of the last century.

Since a Supreme Court ruling on whether Trump’s past behavior disqualifies him from ever serving as president again is inevitable, it’s useful to have an idea of how the process might go. The Constitution grants the power to manage elections to the individual states, and state election officials have a legal responsibility to assess the qualifications of every candidate on their ballot. In a perfect world, that would occur in a nonpartisan, objective manner. In reality, partisan politics is likely to dominate in every state with an overwhelmingly red or blue legislature.

Suppose election officials in any of the states Trump tried to influence (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona) or any other highly motivated blue state decides Trump should not be on their ballot. That would trigger suits and countersuits that would have to travel through the local, appellate, and Supreme Courts of the individual states, federal courts, and ultimately end with Trump appealing to the U. S. Supreme Court, where he believes his three appointed Justices would be “loyal” to the president who put them there.

Let’s make some generous assumptions: one or more of those states rules Trump ineligible to be on the ballot in mid-September, 2023, and with the holiday season looming, the court resolution at each level requires an average of six weeks. At that highly optimistic rate, the earliest an expedited case could reach the Supreme Court is late March, 2024, well after most states have selected their candidates. A more realistic guess is that a final Supreme Court ruling wouldn’t occur until or after the national nominating conventions. A ruling that Trump is ineligible might be the death of the Republican Party and would create unprecedented chaos leading up to the election – exactly what Trump was aiming for.

But that’s not the only problem. If you recall the way Watergate dominated everyone’s attention for months, you get it. As serious as Watergate was, the Courts and the Congress were able to come to agreement on Richard Nixon’s crimes without the pressure of a looming presidential election. The way today’s media behave, Trump-related problems will dominate everything. There will be no time to talk about the real issues facing America, nor will an objective assessment of Biden’s record be possible. Trump’s ability to disrupt normal business has already blinded most Americans to the impact of Biden’s major legislative accomplishments: averting a major recession, getting runaway inflation under control, reducing unemployment to record low levels and providing ongoing confidence to Wall Street and the banking system.

This week, Biden accomplished what no president since World War 2 has, bringing together two nations who have hated each other for more than a century and convincing them to put their differences behind them so the Pacific Alliances Biden forged can stand united against the threat of Chinese expansionism. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida displayed the kind of courage we expect from national leaders – the kind we witnessed as Volodymyr Zelensky rallied Ukraine to hold off a massive invasion by Russia. Both leaders acknowledged that the new alliance is directly the result of “Joe’s” efforts.

Prominent legal scholars with both conservative and liberal backgrounds have recently written that the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone who committed or aided in the commission of a crime leading to insurrection, is disqualified from serving as president. At issue is whether that individual must first have been convicted of a crime, but many highly respected legal minds believe that what is already in the public record is sufficient to disqualify Trump from running again. Their opinions are not unanimous; thus, they will have to be tested in court. They’d better get started as soon as possible.

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Trump’s Election Fraud Report

Posted on August 16, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 16, 2023

This morning, Heather Richardson’s Letter to America began with Donald Trump’s announcement on his Truth Social platform that next Monday, he will present “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia, … [and] based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others—There will be a complete EXONERATION!” The appearance of this statement, the absurd capitalization, makes it look like it was written to appeal to children. I should probably apologize to all the children I know for implying that any of them might be fooled.

In response came this tweet from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp: “The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor.” I should note, for context, that Kemp himself has been accused by Democrats of stealing his own election from Stacy Abrams by manipulating the voter rolls. Whether or not that’s true, he’s certainly not part of a Biden conspiracy to interfere with Trump’s 2024 election campaign.

As for Trump’s promised report, we’ll have to wait and see, but after more than sixty losses in courts all over the country, which mostly dismissed Trump’s claims of election fraud for lack of evidence, it’s doubtful that we’ll see anything beyond the usual lies and distortions. When 150 million votes are cast in more than 175,000 precincts, there are bound to be some errors. But based on post-election audits in every key state, the incidence of errors was so low as to defy statistical expectations. That’s because elections officials understand the importance of what they do, and knowing how much scrutiny the 2020 election would receive, they doubled down on their usually competent efforts to assure that votes were counted accurately.

Nationwide, the number of votes brought into question numbered in the tens and hundreds. If they totaled 10,000 (they didn’t) they would still be less than a hundredth of one percent of the votes cast. Carefully watched audits found no evidence of significant fraud or cheating. This is old news, which makes it all the more confounding that so many Trump supporters seem unable to accept it. By way of explanation, former IL representative Adam Kinzinger noted that in order to admit Trump is lying, his supporters would first have to admit that they’d been suckered into believing his lies and contributing money for his defense for six years. Those years have been a fascinating study in mob psychology.

Professor Richardson addressed that today, describing Trump’s tactics as “political technology.” This benign-sounding phrase was explained by Opendemocracy.net in 2011 as “a term largely unfamiliar in the West – is the euphemism commonly used in the former Soviet states for what is by now a highly developed industry of political manipulation.” Much has been written about Trump modeling his political strategy on the methods used by autocrats to remain in power, but here, we have a clear correlation that no objective reader can refute. In short, just about everything in Georgia’s RICO indictment of Trump for attempting to reverse his election loss is a component of Russia’s political technology.

Some of Trump’s supporters get the connection and love it. There’s no accounting for what some people are willing to do for power and influence. But I’ve been an American long enough to believe that most of us, honestly faced with the reality of autocratic politics, would reject it. The problem, given our fractured, unregulated media, is how to effectively communicate truth. The only solution I can think of is a change in our national mind set from blindly believing whatever we’re told by snake-oil salesman and thinking for ourselves.

I have enough faith in the intelligence and integrity of most Americans to believe that once they are aware of how they’ve been manipulated, of how people skilled in the art of persuasion and misdirection get paid millions of dollars to influence their minds, they will reject that. They’ll realize that if all a candidate has to offer is reasons why you should hate your darker skinned or wealthier or immigrant neighbors, they have no interest in defending the Constitution or helping all of us prosper. If, other than outrageous bragging and lying, a candidate’s main appeal is that he’s being persecuted unfairly because he’s facing criminal indictments from two states and the Department of Justice, maybe all that smoke is hiding a fire hot enough to destroy us if we let it continue to burn.

The reality is that he who yells loudest that everyone else is threatening our freedom is himself its worst enemy.

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When Americans Lose Confidence in Government

Posted on August 14, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 14, 2023

As we enter the most important and potentially catastrophic election season in my lifetime (which is likely considerably longer than yours) two questions stand out. Amid all the hype fostered by both broadcast and social media, very little has been said about either of them, although both portend serious consequences if they are not addressed responsibly. The more general question is what happens when Americans lose confidence in their government. The more specific and directly related one is how we can ever have confidence in and move on from the results of Donald Trump’s criminal trials, however they turn out.

For contrast, I’d ask how we would have survived the Great Depression if not for the confidence Americans had in the Roosevelt administration. I grew up listening to stories about how my parents, aunts, and uncles sat around their radios listening to FDR reassure them about the future. That would never happen today, and this isn’t the first time Americans have a crisis of confidence in our leaders. The lessons of the 1960s and 70s make the point unambiguously. The Vietnam War shattered the faith of a majority of Americans that our government was acting in the best interests of our country, or that our leaders even had the vaguest idea what they were doing.

Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford could not have been more different politically, yet all four failed abysmally in what may have been their most important responsibility: prosecuting an ill-defined war we were ill-equipped to fight with no clear justification or goal, that went on for more than a decade. The conflict resulted in more than 50,000 American military deaths and more than 150,000 injuries, and those numbers don’t reflect the tragic long-term effects on our country. Anti-government protests, riots outside the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the contempt shown to returning war veterans by an angry population all had impacts that foreshadowed the divisiveness we live with today.

If Vietnam wasn’t bad enough, we learned that a sitting president was behind an attempt to rig his re-election that included a massive attempt at covering up his crimes and led to a series of constitutional crises that could have permanently wrecked our government’s ability to function. What saved us, fifty years ago, was the underlying integrity of the federal judiciary and Congressional leaders like Barry Goldwater, who were able to put aside their political differences to act in striking bipartisan fashion to force Richard Nixon’s resignation. As awful and frightening as those years were, what pulled us back from the brink was the recognition by all sides that the future of our nation depended on adhering to our Constitution and the rule of law.

But that was before Roger Ailes and Ruppert Murdoch combined to create Fox News, which was unabashedly dedicated to spinning a politically polarized version of truth, and journalistic integrity be damned. It was before Trump senior advisor Kelly Ann Conway coined the phrase “alternate facts” which seems to have taken over our national discourse. Seriously? What does alternate facts even mean? It was and is as gross a contradiction in logic as Orwellian Doublethink that has exacerbated the divisions stoked by Trump himself. It has also brought us to a crisis that will determine whether our grandchildren’s America looks anything like the one we grew up revering.

Bluntly stated, politics aside, if as a nation we are unable to move past the indictments and upcoming trials of Donald Trump, our stability, our respect internationally, the future of democratic government everywhere, and our steadying influence that has avoided nuclear conflicts since World War 2 are all in jeopardy. All of the above dim prospects for a unified, productive future. Our discourse has become so toxic that reasonable-seeming Republicans at the Iowa State Fair said things during televised interviews like, “Why should we believe anything the government tells us about Donald Trump?”

The short answer is that if we don’t, we might as well be living in Sudan or Cuba. And before we even reach the trials, we’re going to face a crisis of confidence in our jury system. Suppose we apply the latest polling to the jury pools in New York, Florida, Georgia, and DC. Is there anyone left whose views of Trump and his behavior have not been tainted? Can we believe prospective jurors who claim they can be objective? Obviously not, which implies that any jury hearing evidence about Trump is likely to consist of five Trump supporters, five Trump haters, and if we’re lucky, two independent thinkers. What if, like those Iowa Republicans, the jury simply refuses to believe the facts uncovered by the state and federal investigations?

This is not a prediction of doom, but a warning to all of us. We can get this right if we possess the integrity showed by Barry Goldwater forty-nine years ago. Do we?

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Cornered Rats and Hail Marys

Posted on August 8, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 8, 2023

My writer friends would be appalled: two clichés in one title! But clichés play a important role in our communication. They represent extreme, yet all too common examples of human nature and often illuminate situations we’d rather ignore. In this case, the two clichés fit together hand in glove (oops, there’s another one.)

Rats will gnaw their own legs off to escape a trap. When cornered, they will attack almost anything and fight to their last gasps. They display mindless frenzy driven entirely by survival instinct. Implicit in the phrase “cornered rat” is a creature acting without restraint that is incapable of rational thought, reason, or any sense of retreat or compromise.

Humans behave that way either when they are terrified beyond reason or completely lacking in moral or ethical principles. We behave like feral animals for two reasons. In a single event it’s a response to either panic or hopelessness, like a lone soldier who charges a machine-gun nest lobbing grenades. If the behavior is chronic, we’re dealing with a sociopath.

A rational person facing hopeless odds either concedes defeat or resorts to a Hail Mary – a 99-yard pass with one second left on the clock, a half-court shot at the buzzer. As fierce as competition and the drive to win are, when that last-second shot bounces harmlessly off the rim, the game is over. Opponents shake hands, ready to play another day. That’s what reasonable people do, but nothing short of death or restraint by overwhelming force can stop a sociopath. We applaud the competitor who fights to the end, but we applaud loudest the competitor who knows when the game is over and knows the difference between opponents and enemies.

Sociopaths obsessed with power appear in every generation. When they sense vulnerability, they strike. They succeed because most of us are unprepared for no-holds-barred aggression and a take-no-prisoners approach to people who disagree with them. (Yep, two more clichés.) If they try a Hail Mary that fails, they cry foul to extend the game, resorting to every conceivable underhanded trick and tactic until they are forcefully defeated. Negotiation and compromise are not in their vocabulary. Because all they understand is force, the results of their actions are often war, chaos, and destruction.

Americans are about to endure the most horrifying year of our lives, worse than nine-eleven and Vietnam. A man with neither scruples nor compassion for anyone but himself has taken over and redefined one of our major political parties, turning a principled movement based on moral integrity and conservative values into a platform for hate and extremism that respects neither the rule of law nor the Constitution. And somehow, his lies and sickly distorted view of reality have convinced more than a third of the country that he is a martyr acting on their behalf.

Donald Trump will stop at nothing until he is crushed or he destroys everything around him. He is the most serious existential threat our democracy and Constitution have ever faced. Even the Civil War didn’t pose that kind of threat. It was a symptom, not a cause. The Civil War didn’t split our nation in two – we were badly broken before the South seceded.

Trump is an inciter who won’t stop until he achieves his goals or destroys 250 years of progress. He will never quit voluntarily. He will lie and bluster and convince those he dupes into contributing their hard-earned dollars to pay his unprecedented legal fees and fund his divisive campaign to retake the presidency. If the courts or the voters don’t stop him, he will push the United States to the breaking point, and we will all have ringside seats over the next fifteen months. But if we treat this as the crisis it is, we can end it once and for all.

Georgia is about to indict Trump for attempting to defraud the people of that state in the 2020 election. We saw it happen on live television, and now, people like former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, a staunch Republican, are lined up to testify against him. If Georgia includes racketeering in its indictment, Trump could face a minimum five-year prison sentence. Even the self-serving cowards competing with Trump for the 2024 nomination are beginning to speak out. Trump supporters emulate Trump: blind loyalty until he throws them under bus, after which they stab him in the back (two more.)

Remember Mo Brooks, the Alabama House member who stood with Trump in front of the White House helping him spread his lies? Trump refused to support Brooks in the 2022 Alabama Senate race, and Brooks told interviewers, yesterday, that he can’t wait for Jack Smith to call so he can testify against him. For now, we must view every enemy of our enemy as our friend (last one, I promise!) Anyone who helps take Trump down will be forgiven all past sins.

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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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