Accountability

Posted on January 8, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 8, 2021

After what has been done to it, the United States needs a complete accounting and reckoning if it is to recover its economic and social health and its standing in the world. There are a lot of angry people still willing to do further harm. Some of them are criminals, anarchists, and right-wing agitators, but the great majority are victims of the lies and misinformation they’ve been fed by our president. It’s been five years and eight months since he rode the elevator in Trump Tower spewing lies and hate about immigrants. It’s time we looked at the fruits of all that sickness for what they are.

Now that his enablers have allowed Donald Trump to play out his end game, now that we have seen that the ever more dire predictions about his mental incapacity and incompetence, his immorality and greed, were all on point, now that our eyes are wide open, we need to dissect the Trump horror show and put it to rest. This president has been a one-man criminal enterprise from the day he took office. He must be held accountable.

We’ve had enough hypocrisy to last a lifetime since Trump entered the political scene. Going through the motions of pretending to hold powerful people accountable, as in the foolish and ill-fated attempt to impeach him a year ago represents a massive copout. Applying salves to infections with directly attacking them only allows them to fester.

I dislike empty gestures and show trials, but it’s time to act to remove Trump from office even if the clock on this administration runs out before the legal maneuvers required by invoking the 25th amendment or a second impeachment trial can be completed. Vice President Mike Pence, the Cabinet, and the Congress, all of whom have cowered in fear of Trump’s base must now accept their own roles in this catastrophe and do what is necessary. The nation and the world need to see America admit its failure if we ever expect to regain the moral authority we had both at home and internationally.

I could spend thousands of words recounting Trump’s crimes, but we only need to focus on 2020. His cynicism and blind lust for power which resulted in a pandemic death spiral that epidemiologists now predict could result in more than a million lives lost represent a level of criminal neglect and reckless endangerment, if not outright manslaughter, that we have never seen in a president before. The events of the last two months, which could only have culminated in the coup attempt at the Capitol represent treason, plain and simple.

Until recently, I believed that while viscerally pleasing to his victims, those they left behind, and those of us who have been counting the days until he departed, prosecuting and punishing Trump, was a mistake. We might feel good and righteous the way vigilante films make our hearts race with false pride, but I thought unifying the country was more important. I’d have welcomed pardons for him at every level if he went away and never returned.

But not anymore. Whether it’s Mike Pence or the Congress who acts, a clear message must be sent to every American and every foreign government that the rule of law prevails here. Removing Trump from the White House might seem like a pyrrhic victory, but at this critical time, the symbolic value of the act outweighs everything else. Only strong people and strong nations can admit they were wrong and demonstrate the will to make things right again, and that’s an all or nothing process. Half measures and logic-defying defenses of the indefensible only make things worse.

It’s not only Donald Trump who needs to be accountable. This is America’s Nuremburg moent. Far too late resignations by Cabinet officers, beginning with Attorney General Bill Barr, are acts of cowardice and self-interest. There is nothing noble in Betsy Devos and Elaine Chow pretending to fall on their swords. They’re just fleeing the burning building before it collapse on them, and ducking responsibility. If they stayed another day, they might have to stand up for the 25th Amendment.

As to people in Congress who continued to spread the lies of a rigged election even after Trump’s act of sedition, Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – a pox on them. Hawley, who thought protesting the election would cement his standing with Trump’s base in his quest to lead the post-Trump Republican Party has already seen his political fortunes crash and burn. His mentor and sponsor, John Danforth said helping Hawley win his Senate seat was the worst mistake he ever made, and Simon and Schuster canceled publication of Hawley’s book. There are calls for his recall, but that will be up to Missouri voters, as Cruz’s fate will be determined by Texans.

Rudy Giuliani, who incited Wednesday’s mob to “trial by combat,” must be indicted for treason by a federal grand jury. And Trump’s chief enablers, Kellyanne Conway, Lindsay Graham, Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows, Mitch McConnell, and dozens of others, must be held up to public scrutiny. Their craven commitment to self-interest over their oaths to protect the Constitution cannot be swept under the rug. These people were addicted to their own power and influence. If only there was a twelve-step program for corrupt politicians and government officials.

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Repudiation and Validation

Posted on January 7, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 7, 2021

Almost lost in the furor following the invasion of the U. S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters angry over Biden’s defeat of Trump was the significance of the runoff Senate elections in Georgia. As horrifying as yesterday’s invasion of the Capitol was, the impact of the Georgia elections on American political life will prove far more significant and enduring. It was a total repudiation of Donald Trump, and like the insurrection he incited, it was an inevitable conclusion to his hateful, irrational style of governing.

After two months of listening to Trump’s army of incompetent lawyers accuse Georgia and three other states of rigging the presidential election, the same voters who gave Georgia to President-Elect Biden, threw out its two incumbent Republican Senators. Victorious, in this very red right-leaning state were Raphael Warnock, a black minister whose margin a victory was seven times Biden’s, and Jon Ossoff, a young Jewish activist whose margin of victory was four times Biden’s. Those results show that the behavior of Trump and the incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue, in the weeks since the election pushed Georgia from purple to blue.

The Georgia Senate results flipped the majority in the U.S. Senate to the Democrats, completely changing the landscape for the incoming Biden administration. Biden will not have to endure weeks of obstructive wrangling to obtain Senate approval for his Cabinet nominations, and he will not be facing a Senate majority leader whose entire agenda was preventing progress. Recall that Mitch McConnell’s first words following the inauguration of Barack Obama was that his sole mission was to ensure the failure of Obama’s presidency.

With McConnell now nothing more than a gadfly, Biden has an opportunity to quickly pass landmark legislation. He will stabilize Obamacare by filling in the critical building block of the public option; he should have little trouble passing campaign finance and election reforms, limiting gerrymandering and closing loopholes that allow massive anonymous donations; and he should be able to pass immigration reforms like permanently legitimizing the status of dreamers.

The results in Georgia validate Stacy Abrams’ brilliance and skill at organizing and getting out the vote. Abrams still has not conceded defeat to Governor Brian Kemp, who she accused of suppressing hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes in his role has Secretary of State. She proved her point three times: restoring the voting rights she believes were stolen, flipping Georgia from Trump to Biden, and being the driving force that elected Warnock and Ossoff. In the eight weeks since the November election, she increased the Democratic turnout in the runoff election by more than 100,000.

Georgia’s Supervisor of Elections, Republican Gabriel Sterling, attributed the Democrats’ double win to Stacy Abrams and Donald Trump. He congratulated Abrams on a job well done, contrasting her positive impact on the election with the chaos created by Trump. Sterling said the president “pissed off Georgia voters” and undermined Loeffler and Perdue.

Former Republican Senator Jeff Flake today said the result in Georgia is a fitting coda to the Trump administration. He’s right. The complete victory of facts over lies, of decency over immorality, of unification over divisiveness is almost spiritual. If this were a novel readers might reject it as being too fantastic to be believable. And yet, it happened. The American people’s resiliency stood firm in the face of organized attacks by dozens of fringe right wing groups.

Trumpism was a necessary stress test on the strength of our Constitution and our republic. Stress tests are painful and nerve-wracking, but they’re supposed to be. The only way to assure the soundness of our political system is to stress it to its breaking point, which Trump did in spades. Future historians may thank him for the misery he caused. Today, we can celebrate that it was all worth it. The forces of reason and decency won.

But don’t celebrate too long. Present day historian Heather Cox Richardson reminded her followers yesterday that “democracy is not a spectator sport.” We cannot disengage from the war against COVID, climate change, and the forces of greed and corruption. We cannot sit back and watch. Democrats have to prove that they can do better, or everything they just achieved will be reversed in the 2022 midterms.

To achieve long-term change, we must all remain involved. The only way to counter the lies circulating on the internet is to answer them with truth. The forces of divisiveness won’t rest, and neither can we. I’ll continue to do my part. I started this blog because Donald Trump horrified me four years ago. I’ll keep writing it until we’ve righted the ship of state.

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Are You Surprised?

Posted on January 6, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 6, 2021

If you are surprised by Wednesday’s insurrection in Washington, you shouldn’t be. If, even now, you’re waiting to see if Trump will finally step up and act responsibly, I’ll make it easy for you. He won’t. Not ever. He can’t, because the presidency is about doing the people’s work, not placing self-interest above everything else, and he is literally incapable of caring about anything but himself.

Are you surprised that the same president who rushed to send unidentified federal enforcers to Portland, Oregon to forcibly dispense a crowd of legal protesters who were peacefully demonstrating against police brutality sat on his hands for hours watching mobs in MAGA hats invade the Capitol? Are you surprised that although his justification for using storm troopers in Portland was the need to protect federal property, he didn’t consider the U. S. Capitol and the House and Senate Office buildings under siege worth defending? Are you surprised that our president who claims to be a champion of law enforcement remained silent while Capitol Police were being attacked by his supporters and called traitors? You shouldn’t be.

Are you surprised that when Trump finally, grudgingly released a recorded message to the mob suggesting that they go home so that they can have peace, most of his statement was a continuation of the lies and conspiracy theories he had used to incite the insurrection in the first place? Were you surprised that he told the out-of-control mob he loved them and they were special people?

Were you surprised when Rudy Giuliani rallied the mob to engage in armed combat and Donald Trump Jr. encouraged them to enjoy the havoc and destruction they caused? Did you ever think Donald Trump was capable of accepting defeat allowing a peaceful transfer of power? Did you really not believe today was inevitable, even necessary, the final act in his stress test of our democracy, so that even doubters would understand why someone like Trump can never be allowed to hold the power of the presidency again?

Here’s why you shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. It was the natural consequence of Mitch McConnell’s calculated decision to coddle and enable this president, because not doing so threatened McConnell’s agenda, and possibly even his re-election on the same 2020 ballot as Trump. Trump’s belief that he was untouchable, in which he was entirely correct, removed what limited boundaries he may have possessed when he took office.

After Trump’s refusal to condemn the neo-Nazi march through Charlottesville was cheered by his supporters and Fox News; after Robert Mueller, shackled by an Justice Department opinion that has never been tested in court, failed to recommend criminal charges against the president despite citing a dozen acts which violated the law; after Democrats foolishly impeached him knowing there was no chance McConnell’s caucus would convict him; after spreading ever more outrageous lies and dangerous claims about election fraud and receiving no pushback from even one of his supporters in the Senate, no other outcome was possible. Appeasing wannabe dictators who abuse their power instead of standing up to them always results in bad endings, sometimes including acts of war and genocide.

Trump has escalated his attacks on the fundamental institutions of our republic since he took office. There was never any reason to believe he would relent, never any reason to think enough would ever be enough. Nothing less than absolute control would ever satisfy our severely mentally ill president. As his term approached its end and Trump expected to lose the election, and therefore the legal protection of the presidency, he faced the prospect of dealing with massive debts and multiple jurisdictions gathering the evidence they needed to prosecute him for past crimes. He feels out of control and that makes him extremely dangerous.

The deliberate way the law enforcement agencies that protect D. C. handled the mob was impressive, despite the fact that their actions were described as an insurrection by former President George W. Bush. They reserved the use of force that could turn deadly as a last resort. But it was embarrassing for the world to see the Capitol Police Force so easily overwhelmed and the Capitol itself invaded and occupied by the raging, treasonous mob, and the tragedy of a woman being shot and killed.

The restraint demonstrated by law enforcement won’t last, and it shouldn’t. If the mob returns, especially if some of it is armed (carrying loaded firearms is a felony in the District) they will be met with a well-organized and prepared response. If further blood is shed, it will be on the head of Donald Trump. Added to the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused by refusing to take COVID seriously, what’s a few more deaths? Does anyone think Trump cares?

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Trump’s Smoking Gun

Posted on January 4, 2021 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, January 4, 2021

I wonder how many people will remember the name Brad Raffensperger fifty years from now. I say that because hardly anyone remembers the name Alexander Butterfield, today, despite the fact that he was the inadvertent fulcrum on which the case against President Richard Nixon swung toward his resignation.

In 1973, the country was being torn apart by the Vietnam War and the investigation of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel during the 1972 presidential campaign. Accusations that Nixon had covered up his administration’s role in the break-in had already resulted in the drafting of articles of impeachment, but although the majority of Americans believed Nixon had ordered it, there was no hard evidence of his guilt.

Just when it seemed Nixon would get away with it, his Deputy Chief of Staff, a retired military officer named Alexander Butterfield, testified before the Watergate House committee. Butterfield dropped the bombshell that every conversation Nixon had in the Oval Office between 1971 and 1973 had been taped. On one of those tapes, labeled the smoking gun, Nixon and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldemann were heard planning the criminal cover-up. That was enough for Barry Goldwater, representing the Republican majority in the Senate, to inform Nixon that he would be impeached, and the Senate would convict him.

Yesterday, President Trump called Raffensberger and spent an hour attempting to bully/coerce/threaten him to falsify Georgia’s certified vote count that gave the state’s electoral votes to President-Elect Joe Biden. It’s tempting to think of the recording made by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as déjà vu, but the situations are quite different. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein said the Trump-Raffensperger recording was much worse, because Trump was (and still is) attempting to overturn an election that has been certified by every state. His attempt to convince state officials to commit election fraud was an overt assault on our Constitution.

With sixteen days remaining in Trump’s term, there isn’t time for either a second impeachment or any consideration of legal action against the president. And unlike the Goldwater Senate, many in the present Republican majority have shown themselves to be morally bankrupt and willing to abrogate their responsibility to the American people. The Trump disease of lust for power at any cost has, at last count, infected 140 members of the House of Representatives and twelve Senators.

What is at stake now is not the resignation of the president, though most Americans would welcome such an outcome. Rather, as Bernstein said, it is whether those Trumpers who are willing to risk damaging the future of our democracy to curry favor with Trump’s base will see the Raffensperger tape as 2021’s smoking gun, and cease their baseless protests. How craven and irresponsible does an elected official have to be to continue to challenge the election in the face of Trump’s latest outrage?

What may unfold over the next three days is the final splintering of the Republican party into two factions, one that believes in the conservative principles of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and one that has been seduced by the Trump cult of greed and power. Some Republicans, like Utah Senator Mitt Romney, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan are attempting to pull the Republican Party back to its basic values. While no one believes the current protest will change the election results, the issue of the future of the Party, and perhaps our entire two-party political system are at stake.

There is no doubt that Trump will double down on his efforts to steal the election at his rally in Georgia this evening, but with most Georgia voters already having cast their ballots in tomorrow’s two Senate runoff elections, it’s unclear how much Trump will affect the outcomes. Also unclear is how many Congress people threatening to challenge Wednesday’s certification of the election results will relent. But don’t be taken in. Even if most of them back off, it won’t be because they’ve had a sudden attack of conscience and integrity. It will be because they re-evaluated their self-interest, and now see supporting the president as hurting their own re-election chances.

Today, Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger called Trump’s attempt to bully Raffensperger disgusting and encouraged every American to listen to the tape. He said members of Congress who still support that election protest void any moral authority they may have possessed.

It’s important to remember that Trump’s latest assault on our electoral process comes as he ends two months of turning a deaf ear to the pandemic, during which an additional 100,000 American lives were lost. And in encouraging demonstrations in Washington this week, he is knowingly inciting violence.

Nixon famously told the Nation, “I am not a crook.” Trump brazenly brags about having no respect for law.

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A Different Perspective

Posted on December 30, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 30, 2020

Assuming that you pay any attention to him, these days, do you still shake your head struggling to understand why Donald Trump behaves the way he does? After a year-and-a-half of the most bitter, hate-filled presidential campaign in our lifetimes, after four years of an administration in which incompetence vied with greed and indifference to the problems Americans live and die with, are you still bemused by this hateful caricature of a man? In the midst of doing everything he can to sabotage both the Biden administration and his own Republican Party, did he surprise you when he turned his Twitter wrath on his lapdog Attorney General, Bill Barr, his Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – all for daring to fall out of lockstep?

More than five years of stress and horror have made us all expert witnesses. Any of us could testify to Trump pandering to people’s worst instincts, to enabling and encouraging racists and hate mongers, to savaging anyone who dares to disagree with him. The families of more than a third of a million dead Americans can testify to his criminal neglect in muzzling his public health professionals and deliberately allowing the pandemic to spread, signing their death warrants. We can all testify to his desperate lust for power and his sociopathic nature that would rather see America destroyed than relinquish it. We know what he does, but do we understand why?

For that matter, how often have you asked why his base is so enamored with him. Given everything we’ve seen, how could more than 74 million Americans have voted to keep him in office for another four years, knowing he will only intensify his efforts to undermine Congress and the rule of law? How does he continue to hold in thrall his Republican caucus of rich, fat cat Senators, many of whom possess egos almost as big as his?

A very smart person offered me a different perspective, yesterday. It didn’t change what I knew, but it helped it all make sense. We tend to think of the cultish portion of Trump’s base as dim-witted drones, lemmings willing to jump off a cliff at his command. Are they so in love with him, so entranced by his animal charisma that they can’t think for themselves? No, it’s not that at all. It’s more like the ancient proverb, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Trump’s base loves him because he hates the people they hate, he hurts the people they wish they could hurt, and he does it shamelessly and with impunity.

The Trump cult despises non-white immigrants so intensely, it cheers when he erects a wall to keep them out. Their hatred is so visceral, they thrill at the sight of refugee families being torn apart, children incarcerated and allowed to sicken and die. They are so bigoted against anyone not like them, that they pump their fists in the air when Trump tells them anyone with a Spanish surname is biased and incompetent. They are so paranoid about Socialism, they rail about every tax dollar spent on social programs and “entitlements.”

Progressives are their sworn enemies, because the constituency they fight for are the very people Trump told them to hate, because they’re all cheats and losers.
They have been so brainwashed by people who confuse freedom with irresponsibility, that they take up arms against their own elected officials. They feel so uplifted when others who have even less than they do are kept down by boots on their necks, they forget everything they were taught about decency. They twist and contort their “Christianity” to support intolerance and deprive people they fear and hate of their rights, even their lives, because their leader winks at them, implying black and brown and yellow lives are less precious than theirs.

Among their peers, anyone who has more things or appears to live better must have cheated or stolen from them, because Trump tells them so. Despite their own urgent needs, they hate the idea of all those others receiving stimulus checks at their expense, yet they fail to notice when Trump and his people enrich themselves and con them out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

We don’t yet know whether President Elect Joe Biden will be able to heal our national soul. We don’t know if his message of unity and caring for each other, of putting the lives and welfare of Americans ahead of everything else can repair the divisions Trump exposed and exacerbated. They only thing know for sure is that we’re better off with a president who encourages Americans to love each other, than one who reinforces petty hatreds.

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Management Styles

Posted on December 28, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 28, 2020

Imagine that you work for a large corporation that serves millions of customers. Despite having a resume that has no relationship to the job, you have responsibility for an enormously costly project that will require the best cooperative efforts you can muster. The well-being of millions of people  and the morale and careers of the hundreds of employees who contribute to the project depend on your success.

It’s critical that the person in charge be free of personality traits that might sabotage the outcomes of projects like this one – things like an enormous ego, serious anger management issues, and a complete lack of empathy for the people who rely on you. Yet, your management style has often been criticized as being based on intimidation and inciting infighting among your staff, and sending mixed messages that frequently leave your key people in a quandary.

Worst of all, your tendency to be unpredictable and erratic, and your long history of troubled relationships with peers and subordinates too often leaves the people you most depend on stuck between doing a job properly and catering to your whims and idiosyncrasies. They’re all tops in their fields, people who know how to get results, except when goals and objectives are obscured by misdirection and contradictions. Those closest to you wonder aloud how someone like you could ever have been given responsibility for something so essential.

Somehow, you have avoided catastrophic failures for decades because of your loyal army of thugs and sycophants. But you know that can’t last forever, and when that moment comes and it is readily apparent to everyone, particularly those people who are hurt by your failure, how long would it take your Board to unceremoniously terminate you?

If that happened in business, you’d be immediately escorted off the premises by security, and your access to everything connected with the company would be terminated – ID badges, computer passwords, banks accounts – in case you’re a vindictive sort who might create great havoc if allowed to. But if you happened to be the President of the United States, even after you’ve been clearly dismissed by your constituents, (the voters,) you’d still have unfettered access to enormous power for seventy-eight days. Think of all the harm you could do if you were unscrupulous and driven only by the need to avenge every perceived wrong…

…which brings us to the debacle over the $2.3 trillion bill that provides relief to tens of millions of people suffering because of the pandemic and keeps the government functioning, and Trump’s veto of the Defense Appropriations Act because his racist supporters object to removing the names of Confederate generals from our military bases. Failure to move such vital undertakings across the finish line would end the career of most corporate CEOs. Scuttling the DAA is equivalent to firing corporate security and shutting down the computers that protect a company’s information and employees.

The almost unimaginable stress and hardship caused by Trump’s pique over losing the election and countless other grievances, including his wife being snubbed by fashion magazines that failed to honor her with a cover, was a predictable but unforgiveable epilog to his administration. We survived, this time, but there are twenty-three days left in Trump’s lame duck tenure, which in his mind, is a free pass to do anything he pleases. If I thought it would do any good, I’d pray every day for a miracle that would transform him into a decent human being. Since that’s not going to happen, I can only think about how to prevent this from happening again. This is not about politics or ideology. The question is how to avoid allowing someone as unfit as Trump to ever have so much power in the future.

Many industries require rigorous psychological evaluations for anyone who might have critical responsibilities. Commercial airlines, for example, continuously evaluate flight crews for drug and alcohol use and psychological issues that might endanger passengers. They have no choice; the cost of catastrophic failure is too great to risk. Ask yourself if it makes sense to apply the standards for the person flying your jetliner to the person in whom we invest the power of the presidency.

What if we had a psychological screening program for presidential candidates? I don’t know who would develop and administer it or how it would work, but wouldn’t we all rest easier knowing we could trust the emotional stability of our president? More than half the country believed Donald Trump was unfit to lead, but because of our outdated Electoral College system, that didn’t prevent us from having to endure four years of him.

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Presidential Christmas Messages

Posted on December 25, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 25, 2020

It wasn’t too long ago that the worst thing we had to bear on Christmas was a presidential address filled with empty platitudes. One of the more heartfelt was Harry Truman’s first such address in 1945. “This is the Christmas that a war-weary world has prayed for through long and awful years. With peace comes joy and gladness. The gloom of the war years fades…” Lovely sentiments, except that the Cold War was already underway, the nuclear arms race was beginning to spiral out of control, and the gloom of war had been quickly replaced by paranoia over Communism.

Eight years later we had already emerged from another war, this one in Korea. The first major confrontations of the Cold War, the three-year-long Greek Civil War and the Berlin Airlift were behind us, but hydrogen bombs were being tested in the Soviet Union and the South Pacific. President Eisenhower remarked that “this Christmas is truly a season of good will—and our first peaceful one since 1949.” A literally true statement, but one that ignored the anxious undercurrent in the country. We were entering the fourth year of the Communist conspiracy-driven McCarthy hearings, starring Roy Cohn, who later became a Mafia consigliere and mentor in sleaze training to Donald Trump.

In his 1962 Christmas address, President Kennedy said, “…we greet each other at Christmas with some special sense of the blessings of peace.” Unfortunately, that special sense was the sigh of relief that came from just having dodged a huge bullet, the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. It omitted that we were charging headlong into yet another foreign war in Vietnam which would tear the country apart. Finally, that special sense ignored internal conflicts which released the bullet Kennedy couldn’t dodge, making 1962 his last Christmas.

At his first National Christmas Tree Lighting in 1969, President Nixon promised more television sets, more automobiles, clean air and water, and an end to hunger, concluding that the decade of the seventies would be one “in which we could celebrate our Christmases at peace with all the world.” I can only wonder which delusional alternate reality he inhabited. Far more real and genuine was President Ford’s 1975 Christmas message. At a time when the nation still reeled from Vietnam and the corruption of Watergate, Ford recalled Christmases when “the only thing we had to offer each other … was the love we shared, and the faith that together we could see things through to a better future.” That year, he said, Americans could finally “honor the Prince of Peace in a nation at peace.” And for a while, that they could.

President Clinton’s final Christmas message addressed his hope for America in the twenty-first century. “We must embrace boldly and resolutely that duty to lead—to stand with our allies in word and deed … America cannot lead in the world unless we … treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, and regardless of when they arrived in our country.” He convinced me that day.

President George W. Bush, attempting to emulate the inspirational Christmas messages of Ronald Reagan, offered a message of hope in his 2001 address, three months after nine-eleven. “The year now ending saw a few acts of terrible evil. It also saw many more acts of courage and kindness and love. And these reflect the great hope of Christmas: A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.” Alas, that hope shortly evaporated amid the lies that began our eighteen-year war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Christmas messages from the Obamas, much like those of the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, were always uplifting, stressing American values, diversity, and inclusion. No matter what was happening in the world, any anger they both expressed was directed outward, at nations who failed to respect rights of all their citizens or the sovereignty of their neighbors. For Americans, we heard only love and the hope that the nation would continue to move forward and overcome its internal divisions. Despite having been savaged repeatedly during the 2016 election campaign by his successor, Obama wouldn’t tarnish the dignity of his office. Foreshadowing the negativity and chaos that was to follow, Obama’s final message spoke of “treat[ing] others as we would want to be treated…car[ing] for the sick…feed[ing] the hungry…and welcom[ing] the stranger…no matter where they come from, or how they practice their faith.”

After what we have endured in 2020, it would be wonderful to have a president capable of expressing genuine empathy for the havoc Americans are experiencing this Christmas. But perhaps it’s best if President Trump just plays golf and keeps his mouth shut.

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The White Whale

Posted on December 22, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 22, 2020

No, the title is not a disparaging reference to Donald Trump, though many of his detractors and most stand-up comedians have described him that way. It’s a metaphor for his obsession with power and himself, but you probably guessed that already. There may be no better example of obsession-driven self-destructive madness than Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick. Captain Ahab was a whaling sea-captain whose first encounter with the giant white whale resulted in the loss of one of his legs. From that day forward, Ahab was obsessed with avenging his loss. Nothing would stand in his way, not the safety of his crew or the risk of losing his ship. If you don’t remember your high school literature class, Ahab eventually became completely irrational, and his madness cost him his life. The whale survived.

The idea of Captain Ahab as allegory for Trump has two bases in Moby Dick. Melville compared Ahab to the Greek God Narcissus, who was possessed of a handsome image that could not be matched by mortals. Narcissus’ self-love caused him to be mesmerized by his own reflection in a fountain, into which he ultimately plunged and drowned. Ahab’s obsessive drive for revenge on the whale, which he once viewed as a noble creature of great beauty, but later perceived as an evil enemy out to kill him, represents the psychological need to project his own obsessive characteristics onto his adversary, the whale.

Looked at from this point of view, Ahab’s descent into madness which resulted in his own destruction may well be seen as a parallel for Trump’s recent behavior. Ahab’s blind obsession risked his ship and his crew. Trump’s overriding compulsion to make everyone else pay for his loss risks the ship of state and all the Americans who populate it.

Everyone around him walked on eggshells whenever they had to interact with him. And like Ahab’s crew, they all became Trump enablers, whether willingly or out of fear. As his administration unravels into complete chaos, they are desperately trying to abandon the ship before it drags them down with it, the clearest example being Attorney General Bill Barr.

If we had any doubt that Donald Trump suffers from an extreme Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it was dispelled by the commentary of his niece, Mary Trump, a practicing PhD psychologist. The issue never was whether his mental illness (yes, that’s what it is) was real. The debate was whether it was simply an annoying quirk or something to be feared. I have always believed Trump was a danger to the country, his illness a ticking time bomb. I believe most of the people in his orbit sensed that too, but human nature rarely assumes the worst about someone until the evidence is incontrovertible.

These are not new ideas. In 2017, Yale University Professor of Psychiatry Bandy Lee published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays by concerned psychotherapists. It became an instant bestseller, and ultimately, thirty-seven psychiatrists contributed their assessments describing the “clear and present danger” that US President Donald Trump’s mental health poses to the “nation and individual well-being.”

A year ago, in December 2019, Professor Lee was joined by 350 mental health professionals in drafting a letter to Congress, claiming “Trump’s mental health [was] deteriorating dangerously amid impeachment proceedings.” Last month, seventeen days after Trump lost the election, psychiatrist Kenneth Rosenberg and political scientist Norman Ornstein published: Trump history and behavior suggest destructive mental processes that put America at risk. And two days ago, Peter Wehner, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote Trump is Losing His Mind in The Atlantic.

Trump’s senior advisors and military leaders leak their fears daily to the media. In the West Wing, the Congress and the Pentagon, the people responsible for the stability of our nation continually express concern about what Trump’s deteriorating mental health might cause him to do in the month before President Elect Biden’s inauguration. The election, all Democrats, and every Republican who has been willing to speak out against him have combined to become Trump’s White Whale. All that matters to him now is killing it.

The only way to assure that the ship will not sink along with Trump is for Vice President Pence to step up and activate the 25th amendment. Our safety may depend on ridding ourselves of him before he blows everything up.

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An Out of Control President

Posted on December 19, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 19, 2020

During the past few weeks, America and indeed the entire world have seen a spectacle evolve in the White House that we used to associate with tin horn dictatorships in Third World countries. The only way to describe what Trump and some of his people are doing is attempting to stage a coup. That it never had a chance of succeeding is beside the point. The president’s use of Twitter has aired our nation’s filthy laundry for anyone who can stomach looking at it, and Trump’s lawyers have turned his threats of litigation into a standup comedy routine, if you don’t mind sick humor.

All this is just an extension of how Trump has behaved from the moment he announced his intention to run in 2015. He has been in constant attack mode, insulting and picking fights with everyone that didn’t take a knee in obeisance to him. No matter that most of his loyal opposition displayed incredible restraint in dealing with a president who has no use for courtesy, grace, or political norms, and has been completely unbound and often disgusting in his constant attacks.

With a month to go before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ inauguration, Trump’s behavior is a fitting coda to the worst presidency I have ever witnessed. Our angry, spiteful president has shown us that much like a spoiled child who can’t have his way, he’d rather smash everything than accept his fate. He hasn’t been shy about his motive, one of them, anyway. He wants payback for the way he was treated as president, chief among which were the Mueller probe and being impeached by the House of Representatives.

If Trump’s latest antics are in fact an attempt at payback, I have to ask against whom. The Democrats? He seems to be doing more harm to the Republican Party. It’s really not clear who his intended victim is. Why would he want payback against Biden? The President Elect had no role in either the Russia probe or the impeachment. His only sin from Trump’s point of view, is being a decent moral counterpart to Trump himself. If Trump failed that taste test he has only himself to blame.

The most important issue at this moment is how far Trump will go in his attempts to further divide the country. He pardoned Michael Flynn, who immediately appointed himself the leader of the attempted coup. Flynn has been pushing idea of Trump declaring martial law and holding a new election supervised by the military, which military leaders have flatly said will never happen. Despite that, Trump gave the idea legs again this weekend in an Oval Office meeting that horrified even some of his own advisers.

Trump has been focused entirely on attempting to overturn the election. For almost seven weeks he has ignored the pandemic, which is now claiming three thousand American lives every day, and infecting one-and-a-half million more of us every week. He is also ignoring the fight in Congress over a stimulus bill, despite tens of millions of Americans being out of work, facing eviction from their homes, and unable to feed their families. And in the face of reports this week by dozens of credible sources that Russia is engaged in a massive cyber attack against our government, many of our major corporations, and our power and transportation infrastructures, Trump claimed it was all Fake News. Otherwise, he might have to face up to Vladimir Putin, something he has never been willing to do. Is he holding out for an extradition-free haven from prosecution after January 20th?

Republicans have been in a quandary because of the upcoming Senate elections in Georgia. Fear of losing control of the Senate to Democrats has made them unwilling to speak out against the president’s actions until a few days ago, when the Electoral College declared Biden the winner. Yet, even now, after Mitch McConnell and a number of other Republican leaders have acknowledged Biden’s victory, Trump is again interfering with the transition by shutting Biden’s team out of Defense Department discussions.

In all this, there is only one victim – the American people. Trump has made it clear that he intends to blow up everything he can as he leaves the White House. Can we afford that with thirty-two days to go? Let us remind Vice President Pence once again that he has the power to stop this if he has the will. He knows what’s best for the country, and he has the 25th Amendment in his pocket. Does he have the guts to do the right thing and use it?

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Herd Immunity and Sociopathy – A Fatal Combination

Posted on December 17, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 17, 2020

Several news outlets today reported that the Trump administration, with the overt approval of the president, secretly pursued a strategy of achieving herd immunity to the COVID virus by deliberately allowing it to spread among “non-vulnerable populations.” Part of that strategy was an organized attempt to discredit the views of scientists at the CDC and key members of the president’s Coronavirus Task Force, Drs. Debra Birx and Anthony Fauci.

Herd immunity occurs when a sufficiently large percentage, around two-thirds of the population is immune. When that happens, the virus essentially runs out of enough potential new hosts to allow it to spread. The concept is well known to epidemiologists.

What is radical about the approach adopted by the White House, following earlier, failed attempts in Sweden and Brazil, was to achieve herd immunity by maximizing community spread among children and healthy young adults; that is, by deliberately infecting as many people as possible who were thought to be at low risk of serious illness and death. Before the science of immunology was developed, community spread was the only way herd immunity could be achieved. But since scientists have learned to create vaccines, herd immunity has been achieved by protecting the population from infection until it can be immunized medically.

An article published in the scientific journal Nature last October, The False Promise of Herd Immunity for COVID-19, thoroughly debunked the strategy that had been secretly pursued by the Trump administration since last Spring. The article asserted that “epidemiologists have repeatedly smacked down such ideas.” It quoted Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California: “Such an approach would lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives without necessarily speeding up society’s return to normal. We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering.”

To the surprise of no one except Trump’s mesmerized base of worshippers, that is exactly what happened. Epidemiological computer models developed by university researchers all over the country accurately predicted the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans if CDC guidelines were ignored. Medical professionals spent months wringing their hands, shocked by the administration’s continual undercutting of their proven advice that wearing masks and social distancing would prevent infection and save lives. For months, the scientific community seemed unable to grasp why Trump was behaving that way. Now we know.

The policy of forcing the virus to spread among safe populations while protecting the most vulnerable was always a false choice. Even where the elderly and immune compromised are sequestered in nursing homes and medical facilities, the government couldn’t (or wouldn’t) protect them. The fatality rate among those populations was staggering. Further, the deliberately mixed message coming from the White House which eschewed masks and repeatedly encouraged mass gatherings guaranteed that our most vulnerable citizens could not be protected.

Trump knew this. He always understood the consequences of pursuing herd immunity this way. It’s worth asking – if he knew he was signing the death warrants of at least a half million Americans, why did he continue down this road?

It’s not a mystery. We should have understood from the beginning. It’s often been suggested that a president needn’t be a subject matter expert to manage a crisis. He or she is expected to be surrounded by experts, listen to their competing advice, and be smart and objective enough to distill the best course of action for the nation. But in Trump, we have had a president who disdains experts, whose mental illness makes him believe he always knows better. And rather than immerse himself in the advice qualified medical professionals, he pushed them aside in favor of a bunch of quacks and fringe politicians.

That’s what he did, but it doesn’t explain why Trump couldn’t see what was plain to every other objective observer. The truth was that he did see it. He understood the consequences of his decisions, but the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t matter to him, because he is a sociopath who is incapable of caring the way normal people due. When his side show of incompetent advisors falsely claimed that he could save the economy and assure his re-election by allowing the virus to spread, that was all his narcissism allowed him to process.

There’s a valuable lesson in all this. Most politicians have large egos, but there must come a point at which voters say, “Enough is enough!” When a politician is as narcissistic as Trump, he becomes a danger to the nation. Fortunately, enough Americans figured that out by Election Day. Joe Biden didn’t rig the election. Trump rigged it against himself by not giving a damn about how many of us died.

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