License to Steal

Posted on May 11, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 11, 2015

Since it’s been reliably reported that Donald Trump doesn’t even read his daily security briefings most days, we can reasonably conclude that he doesn’t spend much time studying history, either. But the people who wrote Project 2025 do, and many of them are quite intelligent and talented. Whether you despise Project 2025 or subscribe to its ideology, we can all recognize what a brilliant manifesto it is.

What it proposes is hateful, but the strategy it describes is masterful. It’s based on an updated version of the playbook Adolf Hitler used to seize and hold power, combined with everything organized crime figures know about evading the law. It was also cleverly worded. Compare the phrase “Christian Nationalism” with Bernie Sanders’ “Democratic Socialism.” Which is more likely to turn off average Americans?

Sanders chose an unfortunate way to describe his brand of progressivism. The authors of Project 2025, however, understood that Christian Nationalism sounds a lot better than Fascist Oligarchy, although It should be clear to every American that that is exactly where Trump wants to take our country. More Americans hate that than love it, yet the Trump machine at times looks unstoppable. How that can happen in a democracy?

In a real democracy, it can’t. No matter who tells you otherwise, the United States is not a democracy. It’s a broken republic that’s been hijacked by a  minority of right-wing zealots. It’s those zealots who are running things, not Trump. That should be obvious from the fact that this administration’s most obvious attribute is chaos. The people who wrote Project 2025 understood from the start that Trump was the perfect front man for their plans.

They salve his ego. They feed his narcissism. They support the illusion that he’s as powerful as he fantasizes he is, but what makes the sinister symbiosis work is that they showed him how to use the presidency to enrich himself. Trump doesn’t give a damn about the presidency. He doesn’t give a damn about the United States or the Constitution, either, except that if it all implodes, he stands to lose billions.

The truth is that Trump administration-2 is already the most corrupt presidency in the history of our country. It’s also an object lesson in shell games, because that’s what Trump has always been about. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. He brags about it all the time.

He lies, exaggerates, and makes up insane fantasies, knowing that his base thinks it’s great entertainment. But as his base loses millions of jobs, as the government services they depend on evaporate, as tariffs destroy their businesses and make everyday life so expensive, they have to choose between food and doctors, how do you think they’ll react when they see how much Trump has stolen? We don’t know the extent of his crimes yet, but three-and-a-half months in, the list is impressive.

Access to the president has become a commodity, and the White House sets the prices. Anyone who wants to influence Trump’s policy decisions can join the Executive Branch, a private club set up by Donald Trump, Jr. All it takes is a $500,000 entry fee. More than a hundred people have already joined, putting millions in the Trump family’s pockets. Then there are the million-dollar-a-plate dinners with the president, the understanding among foreign leaders that a great way to get Trump’s attention is to book a $10,000-a-night suite at one of his properties while they’re in town, sales of Trump-endorsed bibles, and coins with his face on them. The government of Qatar, as a prelude to trade negotiations, offered to build Trump a $4.5 bllion golf resort and want to gift Trumpa $400 million airplane. But those are peanuts.

The real money is in other currency. Trump’s crypto business, a wonderful vehicle for laundering money, has reportedly earned the Trump family more than 1.5 billion dollars since he’s been in office, while most of the people who were persuaded to invest in the venture are losing money. But perhaps the worst of his crimes is helping his friends and family profit from the volatility of our financial markets.

Trump can make markets crash or boom just by opening his mouth. In the midst of chaos, when no one is sure what’s real, if he tells his billionaire friends he’s going to increase tariffs tomorrow, would you be surprised if they shorted the markets? Trillions of dollars can change hands in a single day, and the people behind Project 2025 know exactly how to manipulate that to their advantage.

Insider trading is a felony under federal law. If Trump’s cronies in the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI, or the Congress chose to investigate, there’d be a ton of evidence. It’s even possible that some of Trump’s friends would go to jail. But you know who wouldn’t? Donald Trump, because the Supreme Court gave him a license to steal as long as he’s in office.

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How Precarious is Our Economy?

Posted on May 1, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 1, 2025

Everyone’s talking about how chaotic and unprecedented Donald Trump’s first hundred days were. That’s a good thing. People who are terrified of the future Trump’s leading us to need to know they’re not alone, that almost everyone feels that way. Even some of Trump’s base – they may not turn on him until things get much worse, but they feel the pain and they know who caused it.

Trump’s base will be obediently patient waiting for things to turn around, but they can’t deal with lost income and trashed retirement savings indefinitely, and when those run out, they’ll come face-to-face with MAGA’s destruction of our social service support network. What happens when farmers go bankrupt and their kids need medical care? Will Medicaid still exist by then?

The first quarter 2025 economic numbers came out this week. The one pundits like to focus on is GDP growth, which was negative at -0.3%, compared to the forecast of +2.4%. Another quarter like that or worse is the economics technical definition of a Recession, but why assume it will stop there? Trump is experimenting with radical changes to every aspect of American life, and the continuous body blows his tariffs keep delivering to our economy are so unprecedented, economists have no basis for forecasting how badly it will be hurt. Every researcher knows that experimenting in real time with untested theories considered irresponsible by most experts is insane.

Theories should to be tested in laboratory settings, not risking the lives and health of 350 million people. The Great Depression transformed America virtually overnight. In 1931, the Hoover administration assured Americans that the 1929 disaster was over, and things were recovering. But the underpinnings of the economy had been badly weakened, and when markets crashed even worse later that year, it didn’t take long for Americans to be waiting in bread lines. No one imagined that in 1932, but once bitten, as the saying goes. What Trump is doing could easily spiral out of control, with America on the losing end.

CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald addressed this issue this morning. She explained that the contraction of 0.3% in our GDP may be greatly understated, and our economy might be far weaker than the numbers imply. The first quarter ended on March 31st, so the decline in GDP didn’t count April, when when financial market were out of control. Buchwald points out that Trump telegraphed his intentions the day he was inaugurated, although no one, not even Trump knew how large the tariffs would be. The result was stocking up, a euphemism for panic buying used by economists.

Trump’s tariffs, if they’re not rescinded, will not only trigger a new open-ended course of inflation, but many corporations predict that if Trump doesn’t immediately change course, the country will see COVID-like supply chain failures within weeks. Even the dimmest Americans remember what it was like to run out of toilet paper, so both individual consumers and corporate buyers “stocked up” in anticipation of both price hikes and supply shortages.

As a result of both factors, imports rose 51% in the first quarter. That’s a remarkable number, mostly because it’s as artificial as its positive impact on GDP growth – thus the conclusion that things may be much worse than they appear. We didn’t increase our imports by half. We bought well ahead of demand out of concern that we would be importing far less after tariffs took effect. Buchwald quoted Ernst & Young’s Chief Economist Gregory Daco, who said the data was largely emblematic of “an artificial pull-forward in demand — and what often lies beyond these pull-forward effects is a cliff.”

It’s too early to scream, “The sky is falling,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t. In 1931, no one predicted the depth of the Great Depression that followed the second crash. No one’s predicting it now, but no one imagined the assassination of an Austrian Duke could trigger a world war, and possibly two. We’d be fools to ignore the warning klaxons going off everywhere. It’s not just America’s economy that’s at stake. If Trump doesn’t find an off-ramp for his insane policies, the worst case will be another world-wide Depression; the best case is that China will sign trade deals with our former allies (whom we’re also screwing) that will leave us with whatever is leftover when the dust settles.

Who will ever trust America again after this? When the most powerful country in the world is governed by people who have no respect for truth of the rule of law, why would any country make a significant investment in whether we keep our promises, because that’s what treaties and trade agreement are – promises. I trust everyone I meet until they show me I can’t. If the world views us that way, we’re in serious trouble.

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Democrats Finally Have the Leader They Desparately Need

Posted on April 29, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 29, 2025

Ever since Donald Trump began his second term, Democrats have been treading water, (some people would say drowning,) hoping a leader would come along to throw them a lifeline. If it were only the Democratic Party’s future that was at stake, I’d say it was time for a complete makeover. The only positive thing about Democrats is that they’re not MAGA Republicans. For Democrats to point fingers at gutless Republicans who won’t stand up to Trump is to ignore the fact that they themselves have been completely impotent in the face of Trump’s race toward Oligarchy and Fascism.

Both parties have failed us badly. Except for the madman at  the helm, neither party has a viable leader. The Democrats don’t deserve another chance, but there’s far more at stake than their political future. The survival of our democracy depends on Democrats getting their act together and unifying into a force Americans can relate to. Since the disastrous cover-up of President Biden’s declining health, Democrats have been like an ocean liner without either a Captain or a steering mechanism floundering in a storm.

When comedian Bill Maher asked Democratic activist George Clooney, who some people believe was responsible for ending the Biden cover-up, who should lead the Democratic Party, Clooney pointed to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Maryland Governor Wes Moore. I admire both of them, but Clooney was wrong. A Governor from a state Trump won by a two-to-one margin can’t lead the Democratic Party, and Moore, brilliant, caring, and eloquent as he is, simply isn’t white enough. Americans made it clear that they’re not ready for another Obama when they chose Trump over Kamala Harris.

Others have pointed to California Governor Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But Newsom is too much of a flake for the rest of the country, and my initial reaction to Shapiro was that he was too Jewish. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is too, and he has done little to rally opposition to Trump. If he got under Trump’s skin a tenth as much as Mitch McConnell got under Biden’s, Trump’s stampede would be meeting opposition, but the resistance to date has been from institutions and blue states fighting against Trump’s attacks on their own, without unified support. When CNN’s Kaitlin Collins asked California Congressman Robert Garcia who he thought should lead his Party, he couldn’t answer, but finally opined that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez would be his pick. One of the most radical progressives in the House? Absolutely not!

And then, along came Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. His rallying cry over the weekend converted me instantly. After hearing him speak about massive demonstrations and fighting every day against MAGA and Trump, urging us to give Republicans no moment of peace until they stand up to Trump, I realized that his courage and leadership easily transcend the fact that he, too, is Jewish. He’s also a billionaire, the heir of the Hyatt Hotel empire, but he’s not one who flaunts his wealth or disdains working people and the middle class. His entire rallying cry was about caring for the needs of average Americans and preserving Constitutional guarantees for everyone.

I also realized that my concern that Americans are not ready to elect a Jewish president were irrelevant. Pritzker laughed when asked if he planned to run in 2028. He is the leader we need to rally the nation to flip the Congress in 2026. His speech last Sunday was fiery, direct, and forceful, calling out Trump for what he is, a madman drunk on power driven solely by ego and lust for revenge against everyone who ever opposed him. And he was very clear about what every American has to lose if Trump isn’t stopped.

Pritzker called for nonstop, nonviolent resistance to MAGA and Trump. Yet, one of Trump’s most despicable attack dogs, Stephen Miller, who loudly supported the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, called his words “dangerous.” That tells me that the thing Trump most fears is a revitalized Democratic Party ready to fight him at every turn, and Pritzker can be the one to make that happen. My favorite line from Pritzker’s speech was, “Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the MOST EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN SLOGAN IN HISTORY.”

I also found myself thinking about how Trump himself might respond to Pritzker. Trump has been casting himself in the role of a leader fighting against anti-Semitism, something about which he couldn’t care less. I wonder how the pretend defender of American Jews will respond when a Jewish Governor who is more eloquent, smarter, and undeniably more likable than he is emerges as a leader capable of bringing him down.

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Oligarchy

Posted on April 28, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 28, 2025

Oligarchy is a word that’s been thrown around a lot since there was so much attention paid to Russia and Ukraine. The dictionary definition is a government controlled by a small group of people or clique. The definition doesn’t say so, but to have that kind of influence on the governance of an entire nation, they’d have to be extremely wealthy and powerful in their own right.

In medieval times, such a clique might have been people who could read and write, like priests, when no one else could. Today, oligarchies are all about money buying influence and power. We mostly hear about Russian oligarchs, that clique of symbiont billionaires who nurse at Putin’s treasury and provide the support he needs to remain in power. Together, they control most of Russia’s economy, and if you control a country’s economy, you can buy legislators and judges who’ll pass the laws you need to stay in power. It’s corruption in its purest form, right out in the open.

It was enlightening for me to watch the Netflix series Servant of the People, in which Volodymyr Zelensky, at the time Ukraine’s most popular comedic actor, played a populist president swept into office by millions of people who were tired of being controlled by oligarchs. I had no idea, until I watched it, that oligarchs were a systemic problem throughout the former Soviet Union, not just in Russia.

The series was made between 2015 and 2017, after Russia illegally invaded and occupied Crimea, and its extreme popularity offers a candid look at how Ukrainian citizens viewed both Russia and their own oligarchs. They fiercely hated both. A repeated theme on the show is a violent brawl among legislators and oligarchs on the floor of  Parliament which only comes to a halt when Zelensky shouts, “Putin is dead!”

Russia is an example of what happens when a clique of billionaires support a dictator, and the dictator, in turn feeds their coffers. If you think that can’t happen in America, you’re wrong. It won’t be a coup – it requires only what we see all over the country today: millions of Americans caught in a paralytic ennui, shocked and awed by the MAGA assault. If they don’t wake up soon, it might be too late.

The process began fifteen years ago, and has been underway ever since. Project 2025 is its blueprint, and Trump is following it to the letter. When the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United ruling that gave billionaire’s a way to buy elections, the die was cast. Democrats, who in the face of MAGA have shown an impressive lack of fight and imagination, have spent all this time spectating, as Russell Vought and his cohorts built the necessary infrastructure.

Vought is in his second term as Director of the Executive Office of Management and Budget. Most Americans have no idea that tiny (by government standards) EOMB is the most powerful organ of government. It handles the flow of money authorized by Congress to the Executive Branch agencies tasked to enforce laws and regulations, including the ability to interdict funds at the behest of the President.

If you’re not anxious about the direction Vought and the President are taking our country, the latest development should do the trick. Yesterday, Donald Trump’s sons, Don Junior and Eric, launched a new club, but it’s not one any of us are likely to join. It requires an initiation fee of $500,000, and only billionaire donors to Trump are allowed to buy their way in. Expectations are that the club will host more than a hundred billionaires who will be given exclusive access to White House policy staffers.

The math is simple – at the outset, if 100 billionaires each ante up a half million dollars to join, Trump and his sons immediately pocket $50 million. After that, Trump’s staff will receive regular guidance from club members on pending legislation and recommendations for cutting tax-supported programs to enable further massive tax cuts. That’s a tight feedback loop that will become the foundation of an American oligarchy unless the rest of us fight back. I’m not the one to tell anyone how to fight, but I’m certain that if we don’t, Trump will have rebuilt his fantasy of a new McKinley administration with a new crop of robber barons.

The goal, according to Politico, “is to create the highest-end private club that Washington has ever had, and cater to the business and tech moguls who are looking to nurture their relationships with the Trump administration.” The Politico article includes a photograph of five people grinning broadly, anticipating watching the billions roll in: Vivek Ramaswamy, Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), megadonor Omeed Malik, Vice President JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr.

Sounds like a budding oligarchy to me. It definitely can happen here, and it will if we all just sit back and watch.

PS: One day after I posted this, on April 28th, two major polls reported Trump’s approval rating had dropped to 39%. We ignore Jim Carville at our peril.

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Trump’s Plummeting Approval Numbers

Posted on April 27, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 27, 2025

At the beginning of March, James Carville, who made his reputation helping Bill Clinton win the presidency with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” wrote an OpEd in the New York Times advising Democrats on how to defend the country against Trump’s excesses. At the time, he predicted that Trump’s approval rating would fall into the thirties quickly, probably by the end of April, but certainly by the end of May. He advised Democrats to step aside for a while and let Trump hang himself.

Today, April 27th, Trump’s approval rating stands at 41%, down from 53% when he was inaugurated. Moreover, it’s down 3% from Trump’s own approval rating at the same point in his first term, and it’s the lowest hundred-day presidential approval number since the Korean War. Far more significant is that voters who identify as Independents disapprove of Trump’s actions by more than three to one.

That’s critical because Republicans hold only a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives that depends on a couple of dozen Republicans who won in vulnerable swing districts. In those districts, it’s Independents who make the difference, and that will likely derail Trump’s agenda.

In today’s money-driven politics of self-interest, swing state Republicans will have Trump’s agenda on a short leash, because they value getting re-elected next year more than they care about MAGA. To make things worse for Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, Axios reported that at least three prominent House MAGA Republicans seem poised to quit the House and run for higher office, and in the two special elections to fill House seats vacated by Trump’s Cabinet members, Democrats reduced the Republicans’ margin of victory in deeply red states by more than half. Those results had nothing to do with a Democratic Party that appears to be comatose – they were entirely about Trump’s actions.

Carville’s point was that once they see Trump’s approval rating drop below 40%, swing district Republicans will fear backlash from voters more than they fear Trump’s retribution. Carville’s right – you can bet your mortgage on it. But there’s a lot of money backing Trump and many of his MAGA supporters. Even massive dissent will not bring down the MAGA agenda easily or quickly. The best the nation can hope for is a gradual, accelerating trend of defections. This administration will inevitably unravel, but it will occur in slow motion like an approaching avalanche.

A lot of Americans, at least half of the country, have been living in a paralyzed state of disbelief since Trump was re-elected. They feel helpless watching their beloved country decompose into something unrecognizable. I haven’t seen America in this state since the days when it looked like Richard Nixon might get away with covering up Watergate. We were saved, then, by senior Congressional Republicans led by Barry Goldwater, who informed Nixon that he was not above the law and would be impeached and removed from office if he didn’t resign.

That won’t happen to Trump unless and until he has done so much damage to our economy, our people, and our standing in the world that everyone but hard-core MAGA advocates vote him into oblivion, much less a third term. I now believe that collateral damage is the most serious threat we face. Carville’s forecast that Trump will crash and burn will come to pass. But how many people will die, go hungry, or sicken, or lose their homes and livelihoods before he’s stopped? How much carnage will be done to small businesses that survive on the labor of immigrant workers, whether or not they’re here legally?

Maybe Trump’s gross misconduct will finally enable Americans to see that our problem with undocumented immigrants is very similar to  our problems with fentanyl and heroin addiction. Our immigration system and our approach to stopping the smuggling of dangerous drugs across our border are equally wrong  and broken, but they will never be fixed either by Executive Order or congressional action as long as there is intense demand for both among American citizens. Perhaps as Americans wake up to those realities, they will see that the MAGA agenda has never been about fixing problems. Trump simply uses them as an excuse to seize power and wealth, and undermine our Constitutional liberties.

As Trump’s numbers tank, and they will continue to as people wake up to the fact that he has accomplished absolutely nothing in a hundred days except degrade our economy, our strength, and our alliances, his vulnerability will become obvious to everyone. Americans who have been hunkering down in their shelters will feel free to come out again and speak their minds. That time is coming, sooner than a lot of people thought. When three-fourths of us say “NO MORE!” to Trump, we’ll go back to being America again.

The hundred-day approval thing is a surrogate for comparing each new president’s performance to the accomplishments of the Roosevelt administration in 1933. FDR, in his first hundred days, put the essential pieces of the New Deal in place. In the throes of the Great Depression, tens of millions of Americans were unemployed, homeless, or hungry. FDR’s first 100 days were about providing for average Americans in need, and assuring they would never have to stand in bread lines again.

PS – Two major polls released after I posted this showed Trump’s approval rating at 39%. We disbelieve Jim Carville at our peril.

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Trump, Ukraine, and Russia

Posted on April 25, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 25, 2025

Disingenuous: lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; false; hypocritical; insincere. The way Dictionary.com describes it, disingenuous is the perfect word to describe Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Some people I respect believe we don’t have a dog in that fight. They argue that the time is long past when we should be spending billions of dollars policing Europe and risking our own military there. That’s a point worth debating, but one I strongly disagree with. If failing to stop Hitler in Czechoslovakia and Poland led to World War 2, there’s good reason to fear that failing to contain Putin’s ambitions for Russia might lead to World War 3. That must be our most important consideration, though there are some who believe confronting Putin directly will lead to World War 3.

Whichever of those arguments is correct, it’s clear that Donald Trump’s approach is wrong, and riskier than any of the others. It’s dishonest, and it’s time our other elected representatives said so. Trump, probably inadvertently, gave us a clue yesterday, when he said he wants to be remembered for expanding American territory. Not since Andrew Jackson have we had a president with so little regard for other nations’ sovereignty. Perhaps that explains why Trump sounds so sympathetic to Putin’s ambition to reconstruct the Soviet Union.

Historically, when Ukraine was part of Russia, it represented a large portion of Russia’s industrial capability, food production, and access to warm water ports in the Black Sea. It’s easy to see why Putin wants all that back, but the fact the he believes Russia needs those things doesn’t justify his aggression. Moreover, when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight, Ukraine was promised guarantees of its sovereignty in exchange for giving up its stockpile of Russian nuclear missiles. If countries are allowed to break treaties whenever it suits them, and no one stands up to them, the rule of law is worthless.

Trump said, yesterday, that his motivation for wanting to end the war is to stop the killing of 5,000 young soldiers a day. It’s appalling that he values the lives of Russian soldiers attacking a peaceful neighbor equally with those defending their homeland, and more than the thousands of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian bombs and missiles. I also find it odd that Trump expects us to believe he gives a damn how many soldiers die in Ukraine. This is the same president who killed USAID, placing the lives of millions of innocent children in Africa at risk, the same president who wants to kill FEMA and rely entirely on states for disaster recovery, the same president who is willing to cut Medicaid and Food and Nutrition services to millions of American children who depend on them, the same president who put someone who doesn’t believe in either vaccines or  medical research in charge of funding both, and the same president who prefers to ignore the long-term dangers of climate change and other environmental threats because all those actions together enrich his wealthy donors. Trump is also the only president who called the thousands of Allied troops who died fighting to take Europe back from the Nazis suckers and losers.

Even worse, there remains a significant Congressional majority in favor of supporting Ukraine to the end. If not for Trump’s personal need to dominate world events, and his unique ability to terrify everyone around him, we wouldn’t be having this debate. Let’s call a spade a spade – the time for polite sugar-coating is long past. Putin and Trump are not buddies, despite the fact that Trump’s proposed peace plan would reward Russia by allowing it to retain all the territory they captured, including Crimea. Putin considers Trump a clown, no matter how much Trump wants us to believe he can influence him. Putin has been laughing at Trump, and his ramped up attacks since pretending to be considering Trump’s peace proposal have killed more civilians and destroyed more neighborhoods in Ukraine than in the past six months combined.

The sucker and loser in this picture is Trump. Like everything else he does, Trump’s position on Russia and Ukraine is entirely driven by his narcissism. Suck up to his buddy Vlad who laughs at him behind his back, but show how tough he is by ambushing a Ukrainian president under siege and attempting to publicly humiliate him before the world. That’s Donald Trump in a nutshell. He won’t be impeached because there are enough MAGA people in Congress to keep him in office, no matter that he represents the most dangerous existential threat to America in recent history.

Our founders never counted on the level of cowardice and self-interest that presently resides in Congress. We can only hope that oversight doesn’t kill what they created.

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The Real Art of the Deal

Posted on April 24, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 24, 2025

Courses in effective negotiation stress that the most successful outcomes are those in which both parties walk away feeling like they won something. That’s the true Art of the Deal, regardless of anything Tony Schwartz (Donald Trump’s ghostwriter) said in the book Trump didn’t write. Achieving a win-win in a negotiation is simple in principle. Assuming both parties negotiate in good faith, the most important tasks of a negotiator are to actively listen to the other side’s needs and desires, treat each other with respect, and build trust so each side believes the other wants a fair outcome.

Effective good-faith negotiators avoid anxiety producing interactions, because it’s well established that anxious people are likely to make bad decisions. You might convince an anxious opponent to accept a deal they hate, but that usually leads to trouble down the road. Remember how well the Treaty of Versaille worked? It’s much healthier and more effective to build the foundations for a long-term relationship based on trust and mutual courtesy and respect. That requires each negotiator to expect and accept compromise. It’s okay to specify certain things as non-negotiable deal breakers, but they should be exceptions, not the basis of a final agreement.

Negotiation training often spends more time on “Don’ts” than “Dos.” Most of the Don’ts are obvious. Don’t trash talk behind the other side’s back. Don’t be arrogant or supercilious. Don’t be rude. Don’t insult your negotiating partners. Don’t make demands you know are unacceptable to the other side. Don’t allow emotion to drive a negotiating position. Don’t try to embarrass or intimidate your opponent. Don’t argue your case in the social or broadcast media.

An important corollary of all the above is motivation. To achieve an acceptable agreement each side must understand the other’s motivation, which brings us to Donald Trump’s trade war. Very few Americans favor trade agreements that take advantage of America. They understand that many of the trade imbalances we see today began as deliberate, generous attempts to help our allies recover from the devastation of World War 2.

As our allies grew stronger, previous administrations probably should have been constantly renegotiating our trade agreements, but it doesn’t usually work that way. What more typically happens, even when parties act in good faith, is that unbalanced agreements remain in effect until anger and resentment cause one side to act precipitously and inappropriately.

Even when that happens, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Some countries, specifically China, have no regard for rules and international law. China regularly pirates intellectual property and does virtually anything short of armed conflict to achieve its economic goals. Combining that with the profit motives of American manufacturers who move their factories and assembly lines to countries that don’t care whether their workers earn a living wage, results in the situation that exists today.

We would all love to see the Trump administration negotiate deals that strengthen our manufacturing and lower prices for Americans, but as Trump’s first hundred days rush to an end, his efforts have come to naught, and the reason is clear. Trump is not motivated by a good faith desire to score a win-win. In Trump’s universe, only his side can win. If Trump’s people really wanted fairer trade agreements, they, and Trump specifically wouldn’t be violating every item on the Don’ts list and ignoring the Dos.

As with everything he does, Trump’s trade war is the ultimate expression of his narcissism. For him, a successful negotiation ends with everyone else vanquished and crawling back to him in supplication. But he failed to heed the first lesson learned by Lemuel Gulliver in his famous travels. No matter how  big and tough you are, you can’t take on the entire world and expect everyone to cave in to your demands. Trump has always played the divide and conquer game, but this time, he seems to have badly miscalculated. Instead of falling like dominoes, the nations attacked by Trump’s tariffs are banding together in defiance.

Bullying, flinging insults, and ambushing allies on worldwide television are the worst possible ways to achieve what Trump claims to want. What he really wants is something else entirely. Trump desperately needs the entire world to bow to him, and that is not going to happen. If Congressional Republicans don’t start standing up and stop rubber-stamping his actions, Americans will be the ultimate losers in this unnecessary war.

Trump’s billionaire supporters and well-respected Conservative corporate leaders are sounding the alarm, just in case the volatility of the world’s financial markets escaped our attention. Who knows what assurances Trump offers in private, or how much he’s helping his wealthy friends profit from that volatility? His public statements have produced chaos, confusion, and losses as high as twenty percent in Americans’ retirement savings without showing a single successful outcome. The final carnage will depend on how long it takes for a few of Trump’s key people to jump ship.

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A Transparency Shell Game

Posted on April 22, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 22, 2025

Throughout Donald Trump’s business and political careers, his hallmark style has been  to create chaos and confusion. One thing Trump is masterful at is manipulating our legal system, and the most effective way to do that is to assure that reasonable doubt always exists. He learned this from his lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, and his association with organized crime figures who had been evading the law for decades.

Trump has always treated laws and regulations as mere inconveniences. He understands that even when he lies or defrauds or defames someone his liability is limited because lawsuits are expensive. He has always spent millions on lawyers, knowing that a formidable team of highly-paid litigators will intimidate most opponents. When that doesn’t happen, and cases go to trial, he often loses, because a fair-minded jurist won’t allow laws to be flouted.

The key phrase, above, is “fair-minded.” That’s what our founders intended when they created three co-equal branches of government. But human nature being what it is, and power and wealth being as seductive as they are, when powerful people lose in court, they do what any ruthless sociopath would do: rig the courts with extremist judges with a wink toward future rewards based on loyalty, and for those judges who retain their integrity, threats, harassment, and calls for their impeachment become the rule.

But there’s a more sinister side to the chaos and confusion: lack of transparency. Given how much it cost for hundreds of MAGA people to create Project 2025, and Trump’s attempt to disavow any knowledge of it, we should have known his campaign promises were more than bluffs. Actually, most of us did, and many of those in the middle, who have no ideological axe to grind, are beginning to see it, too.

It works like this: at one level, Trump and his supporters are completely open about what they intend. Could they have used any blunter image than a madly grinning Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw? Unless you’re cutting firewood, chainsaws are about mayhem and destruction. But the image was also comical, and so inappropriate, it was easy to take it as a joke. That’s a very sophisticated way to replace transparency with opacity.

Start with the obvious fact that the federal government, like all huge bureaucracies, is fat and inefficient. Then use that as an excuse to decimate programs you don’t like while somehow failing to notice the waste everywhere else. And if you look closely, you’ll see a pattern. The programs being cut tend to serve the poor and working class among us and are considered a nuisance by business leaders and extremists. They also transfer wealth from billionaires to the rest of us which is their death knell. On one hand Trump communicates an extremely transparent intent to change America into a fascist MAGA nation, which is too outlandish for most people to take seriously, while at the detail level, very dangerous things are occurring out of our sight.

Musk seems to be mining data from every federal agency and feeding it  into a massive AI-activated database, and for the average person, there’s a good deal of appeal to that idea. We see it in crime and spy dramas, as computer experts and hackers manipulate data to solve crimes and avert international crises. But always lurking in the background is the question – what if they knew everything about all of us? In the hands of a power-mad, unscrupulous leader, that same capability would ensure the end of our personal liberties. We’ve tested our balance on slippery slopes before and so far avoided catastrophes. But will we this time? Have we ever faced a fifth-column effort within our own ranks that is as rabid and well-funded as MAGA?

At a deeper level, Trump has surrounded himself with committed loyalists. Indications are that an essential element of their loyalty to Trump is adopting his cavalier approach to rules, laws, and standards of behavior. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seems to treat our national security laws the same way Trump does. By discussing imminent plans to attack terrorists in Yemen on unsecured lines, he and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz showed such complete contempt for national security and the lives of our military personnel as to make Colin Powell and Hilary Clinton’s inadvertent mishandling of emails trivial by comparison.

Everything we’ve seen in three months smacks of a rogue administration bent on power and control, with no cohesive plan for our economy, our relationships with our allies, or how to end two wars that could escalate into nuclear conflicts at any time. When it comes to the true beliefs and intentions, assuming any but personal greed exist, of the people in the Trump administration, opacity is the rule.

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A Profound Lack of Humility

Posted on April 20, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 20, 2025

Have you ever heard an American president say, “I was wrong?” Kennedy never said it after badly mishandling our relationship with Cuba and committing troops on the ground in Vietnam. Johnson came close, acknowledging that his expansion of the Vietnam War left him unable to govern effectively and causing him to withdraw from the 1968 election. Nixon never admitted he was wrong, either about Vietnam or Watergate, asserting instead that if the president does something, that makes it legal. Ford never said he was wrong, but his brief stewardship of the Oval Office was as error-free as any president’s.

Carter never said he was wrong, despite freezing our economy with record high interest rates and inflation. Reagan, who ushered in the era of supply side economics never admitted that is was a fraud designed to enrich the wealthy even further, although he did accept responsibility for Iran Contra. Bush Senior never admitted he was out of touch with average Americans on the economy – he may not have even known until the 1992 election results. Bill Clinton never admitted he did anything wrong, despite testimony by police who witnessed his sexual peccadillos as Governor of Arkansas and the disclosures about Monica Lewinsky. Bush Junior never recanted declaring victory on that aircraft carrier, while dragging us into a twenty-year war with Iraq and Afghanistan, nor did he acknowledge that his family’s relationship with the Saudi royal family blinded him as to who was really guilty of nine-eleven.

Obama never admitted he was wrong to allow Russia to annex Crimea without taking a stronger stand against Putin, or that attempting to appear even-handed in the Middle East made him appear to diminish our support for Israel and offer legitimacy to Hamas. Joe Biden, despite having saved our post-COVID economy, hasn’t admitted perpetuating the lie that his physical and mental health were up to the job of another term as president, thus conceding a second term to Donald Trump.

The acclaimed winner of the “I’m never wrong” sweepstakes is Trump himself. Semantically, Trump is either always wrong or never wrong, a consequence of pathologically lying and regularly contradicting himself and impulsively changing direction on critical policies without forewarning or explanation. He demeans and slanders anyone who disagrees with him. He ignores advice and counsel from experts, unless they all support his views – but advisors who support everything he says and does simply enable his narcissistic need to always be right.

Our former presidents’ inability to acknowledge their errors have cost the lives of tens of thousands of American military personnel and trillions of dollars that could have been spent shoring up our factories and infrastructure, and providing health care and energy security for all of us. But no president, until now, has declared a no prisoners economic war on every nation we trade with. No president has ever sided with America’s enemy when they invaded one of our allies and systematically dismantled the fabric of their country. No president has deliberately and systematically dissed our allies while praising our adversaries. And no president has ever played a nonnegotiable hard-line game of chicken with the entire world.

When Trump admitted, shortly after he was inaugurated, that his promises about bringing prices down were lies, he claimed it was necessary to lie in the cause of getting elected, because in his view, he needed to be President to save us from our progressive, fair-minded natures. He’s still lying about tariffs not being a tax on all Americans, just as he’s still lying about who benefits from his tax cuts. He still lies about their sole motivation being the greatest upward transfer of wealth in America’s history, as he continues to push to make his 2017 tax cuts that mostly enriched billionaires permanent.

All this should be a warning, accompanied by clanging bells and flashing red lights. His narcissism and sociopathy make it impossible for Trump to ever admit he was wrong, because to him, winning and power are everything. To Trump, winning justifies his means no matter how much chaos and disruption they cause in the lives of all Americans. If you or I insist that we’re always right, we chalk it up to a lack of humility. With Trump however, doubling and tripling down against all opposition, threatening anyone who disagrees with him, weaponizing the courts and the federal justice system to effectively outlaw dissent – these things are not about lack of humility. They’re about a mentally ill man whose lust for power and wealth know no limits or boundaries.

With a president who believes humility is a sign of weakness, who intimidates everyone around him, lacks basic morality, and continually launches missiles of intimidation and bullying in every direction, every day brings the world closer to economic catastrophe and nuclear war.

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Competent Crisis Management

Posted on April 13, 2025 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, April 13, 2025

In 1962, as a college junior, I needed an elective to fill out my program. Given the state of the world and the Cold War, I thought Americans ought to be learning Russian, so I registered for Russian 101. I had already studied Spanish and German, both of which are similar to English in important ways, particularly in the use of tenses. Russian, however is different from English in subtle but important ways.

To a beginning student Russian is deceptively easy. The Cyrillic alphabet is similar enough to both Greek and Hebrew that what looks impossible to some people felt like fun, breaking a secret code. What makes the early stages of learning Russian relatively easy is that there are no irregular verbs in Russian when they’re used in past tense. That eliminates a ton of complications that drove me crazy in Spanish and German. But my professor warned us not to get cocky – the hard stuff was yet to come. It came quickly when he explained that past tense is a misnomer in Russian, because the language does not use tenses as we know them. Instead, it uses “aspects” which are subtly different from tenses, but similar enough to be dangerous if a student, or, say, a diplomat doesn’t pay close attention.

John F. Kennedy was president. I was seventeen when he was elected, and as a  Freshman at an Ivy League school, I was overly impressed with silly things like the absurd competition among the Ivies over which was best. Rankers usually picked Yale or Harvard, which infuriated Columbia. (I would have picked Princeton since Albert Einstein was there.) In that context, Kennedy’s Cabinet picks made a lasting impression. His predecessors had relied on established diplomats and professionals with impressive real-world experience,  but Kennedy selected a Cabinet of Harvard academics.

A lot of people, mostly academics, thought that was wonderful, but experienced critics warned that lack of real-world experience would ultimately be a problem. In 1962, as tensions between Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev rose precipitously, my Russian professor spent our lecture sessions ranting about the lack of anyone in Kennedy’s Cabinet who could speak fluent Russian or was an expert on the Soviet Union. He said in the shrillest terms, as the Cuban Missile Crisis worsened, that Kennedy’s people were overmatched by the Russians. But having better, more knowledgeable diplomats isn’t enough if the other side is incompetent.

Effective diplomacy, which means knowing how to resolve differences without dropping bombs, requires that both sides understand each other clearly, in terms of  both language and cultural norms. If you’ve ever tried to debate someone who is either uninformed or not very smart, you understand the danger. If two sides armed with nuclear missiles miss the subtle differences in their languages, or simply don’t understand how their opposite numbers think, the result could be the end of civilization. Ask someone who was there in 1962 – we all thought we were going to be nuked.

I’m concerned that Trump may have made a similar error with respect to both Russia and China. The way he campaigned that he  would end the war in Ukraine in one day suggested he really believed he and Vladimir Putin were buds, and he could easily wrest a cease-fire agreement that would end the war without leaving Europe exposed. When he essentailly threw Volodymir Zelensky out of the White House, humiliating him in front of the world, and Zelensky was forced to come  back and accept Trump’s plan, Trump strutted around, fully expecting his friend Vlad to go along with it. Instead, however, Putin broke off truce talks and increased attacks on Ukraine, and those attacks are more successful every day because we’ve withheld arms shipment to Kyiv. Nice work, Donald!

The jeopardy with respect to China may be more extreme. Not only do Trump’s tariff warriors not speak Chinese, Trump doesn’t seem to understand the Chinese psyche. In his transactional way of doing business, everything is a short-term give and take. But Trump, who has repeatedly shown a lack of understanding of history, clearly misread the playing field with China. Playing chicken with Xi Jinping is not a good idea, because Xi will never back down. Trump fails to understand the Mandarin philosophy that has dominated Chinese leaders for millennia. Xi is more than willing to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of millions of his citizens, as his forbears always have been. China takes a thousand-year view, while Trump cares only about his own remaining years on Earth.

If getting China to cave is the lynch pin to Trump’s trade war, we’re in for a long confrontation that will have catastrophic consequences for the world economy and greatly increase the risk of major military confrontations. If saner, more well-informed heads don’t start guiding policy, Trump’s legacy will be one of destruction.

 

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