Under Siege

Posted on March 21, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 20, 2018

“Under siege” is one of those phrases that’s so overused it’s almost a cliché. This week it’s being used by every news outlet to describe the Trump White House. To me, it evokes memories of Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett at the Alamo. (No, I’m not old enough to actually remember it.) Isolated and badly outnumbered, the Texan defenders fought to the end, with Mexican General Santa Anna ordering no quarter in the final battle.

The defenders, who had actually taken the Alamo from the Mexicans months earlier, could have abandoned the fight when it became clear they would lose. Though we lionize the Legend of the Alamo today, it’s really a lesson in what happens when we pursue lost causes in defiance of reason. Is that what’s going on at the White House these days?

Trump seems to be under siege from every direction. One could argue that everyone’s piling on now that they sense he’s vulnerable. But it can also be argued that Trump’s problems are mostly of his own making. Consider: there’s the Mueller investigation, the indiscretions of Trump’s son which fanned the flames when they might have been squelched months ago, the Access Hollywood tape which lends more than a little credibility to the stories of all the women who claim either consensual affairs or sexual assault by Mr. Trump, and finally, the president’s strange affinity for the man who should be his arch enemy, Vladimir Putin.

If he seems isolated, that too is a product of his own actions. His disregard of the norms of governing and his lack of respect for the truth have alienated him from much of his party. Relentless attacks and insults against Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader McConnell, and insults aimed at fellow Republicans John McCain, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and Lindsay Graham as well as key members of his Cabinet have resulted in the wall of silence that stands in place of what would normally be vocal support for the president.

Trump’s well known approach to accusations hurled against him is deny, deny, deny. That worked during the presidential campaign, so why not continue the same way now? Actually there may be good reason to change tactics, as more and more becomes known about what really happened. The recent disclosures by Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who was filmed by British Channel 4 bragging that he met frequently during the 2016 campaign with Trump and helped elect him were the latest revelation.

Now Trump is being sued by three women, a porn star, a former Playboy Playmate of the Month, and a former contestant on The Apprentice, all claiming they had affairs with Trump and were paid hush money to cover them up. One of them, porn star Stormy Daniels has now publicly passed a polygraph test with greater than 99% certainty that she’s telling the truth. Is this piling on or is it more a case where, as the smoke keeps getting thicker it’s more likely something’s on fire?

As Special Counsel Mueller begins to close in on Trump’s financial dealings amid widespread speculation that Trump’s businesses may be in debt by as much as a billion dollars to Russians with close ties to Putin, how does the president react? He rails against his Cabinet and intensifies his attacks on both the Justice Department and the FBI. And while proclaiming his innocence and renewing claims that the probe of his finances is just another witch hunt, he expands his legal team to include television personalities, an impeachment specialist, and experts on nondisclosure agreements.

Again, it might be argued that an innocent man might well do all those things, except for the appalling silence from all the people who should be standing up in his defense. Instead we hear references to the need to uphold the rule of law and allow the Mueller investigation to reach its conclusion without further interference. That sounds more like a warning than a defense of the president. It also sounds like posturing from experienced politicians who see an impending train wreck that could take them down with him.

Just as the 1830s Texan appropriated the Alamo from under General Santa Anna’s nose, Trump stole the Republican Party out from under the Ryans and McConnells, and those people have long memories. As the noose tightens and the wolves close in on their prey, don’t be surprised if they are just as merciless as General Santa Anna was.

On the other hand, as Trump feels more and more cornered, what might this paranoid narcissist do to defend himself? Is anything off the table?

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Faded Magic

Posted on March 15, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 15, 2018

Every year, toy manufacturers come up with a new set of flashy playthings. They’re brightly colored and they promise hours of fun. Our kids see them in TV commercials and on store shelves, and leading up to birthdays and holidays we’re treated to a months long litany of “Daddy, can I have that?” and “Mommy, please buy that for me.”

The promises abound — so easy to assemble a five-year-old could do it; the most challenging and exciting item on the market; so durable your children will play with it for years; and everyone’s favorite – batteries included.

We’ve all experienced the reality, however. The box contains 150 parts, but a few of the critical pieces are missing. The assembly instructions were originally written in Mandarin and translated into English by an Albanian technician whose native language is Turkish, and you wind up throwing them away. When the thing is finally assembled, the kids play with it for a week, when it either breaks or bores them to death. We’ve been had, and we resolve that we won’t let it happen again.

The thing is, that’s not really what happened. We weren’t fooled. Some of us knew all that would happen when we let ourselves be distracted by the flash and flare, like it usually does when we don’t do our homework. But we hadn’t yet learned to not be tempted by the serpent, so we did it anyway.

A collaboration between Abraham Lincoln and W. C. Fields might read: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull, and you’ll sometimes fool everyone.” That’s a pretty good description of the American political scene for the last thirty-two months. Yes, that’s how long we’ve been listening to Donald Trump’s rants and cringing to his tweets. It was flashy and dazzling at first, and in the absence of a candidate that captured the hearts of the majority, the flash and bang won out over the bland and sometimes incompetent.

Many of those who bought all that stuff now realize what a pile of crap they wound up with. They’re the ones Lincoln meant when he (may have) said, “you cannot fool all the people all the time.” The glitter disappears, the brightness dims, and what seemed magical a few months ago is revealed as illusion. When the magic fades we’re left with the tragi-comical little man behind the curtain. And he’s steering the ship.

The fake wizard is still a great showman. When he dons his cape and turns on the cameras he can still throw a mean rally. Like an aging drug-addled rock star, he still fills the arena with screaming fans. They are as loud and raucous as ever, but that obscures a cautionary fact. There’s a noticeable difference in the audience. Every seat is occupied by a true believer and there are fewer in line waiting to get in. The curiosity seekers are gone. So are the disenchanted lost souls who’d been seeking something to believe in because they felt betrayed by the other side. They now know this isn’t what they were looking for. The magic has faded and we are left with what’s real, and for most of the country, it’s a darker reality than they faced a year ago.

With the magic gone, when we look inside the White House we find the same spoiled brat bully whose father had to send him away to military school. But the hoped-for discipline didn’t change him for the better. It didn’t make him any more moral or sensitive to other people. It simply hardened him against the cruel world in which everyone was against him. It made him unable either to trust or be trusted, and it heightened his narcissism and need for adulation.

Let’s hope that next time the parties choose substance over glitz. Conor Lamb showed us that there are a lot of good people out there with both strength and integrity who have no need to raise their voices or intimidate anyone. This isn’t about politics or parties. It’s about being honest with ourselves about how we got we are, and it is definitely not all Donald Trump’s fault. The Democrats rigged their primary and wound up with a hobbled candidate who couldn’t overcome her own missteps.

There are a lot of competent people out there whose principles are strong enough to survive without some radical ideology, who care about public service and understand what making America great again really means. If we can find a few of those who can generate a different sort of magic, we’ll get through this unscathed.

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Pennsylvania’s 18th District

Posted on March 14, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 14, 2018

Before I forget, happy Pi Day.

We’ve already been hearing a lot of nonsense from the so-called pundits about yesterday’s special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th district. As the votes were being counted, various talking heads opined that it really didn’t matter who won – the real message was that the race never should have even been close in a district Trump won by twenty percentage points. While it’s true that the race shouldn’t have come down to absentee ballots, the notion that it doesn’t matter who won is absurd.

The closeness of the election shocked both the Republican establishment and the White House, but without a victory the message would have been hollow. Having Rick Saccone, aka Trump Lite, in the Congress instead of the very centrist Democrat Conor Lamb would have been all that really mattered a month from now. Remember the furor over Kennedy’s contested victory over Nixon and Bush’s chaotic win over Gore that had to be decided in the Supreme Court? Does any of that matter today?

Both Kennedy and Bush turned the country in entirely new directions from their predecessors’, despite the fact the half the country voted against both of them. Even in a district that won’t exist next November, Lamb’s voice and face in House of Representatives will be a constant reminder and rallying cry of what his victory meant.

The other, even worse nonsense that we’ll be hearing from the White House is that this is only one seat in one district. It’s an aberration. It’s insignificant in terms of the November mid-term election. Well, no. It absolutely is significant. It’s of monumental importance, and more than any of the special elections in 2017, it’s a harbinger of what we’re going to see eight months from now.

Let’s look at the numbers. In 2016, Donald Trump received 46.7 percent of the popular vote. I don’t know exactly what the vote count was in Pennsylvania’s 18th, but for the sake of argument, let’s represent Trump’s vaunted twenty percent win as 60-40. This week’s special election was a virtual dead heat, 50-50, in a district that was the quintessential example of those that resulted in Trump’s victory. It couldn’t have been more representative of that part of Trump’s base − coal country, rust belt, mostly white, wealthier than average − that he needs to retain if he expects to win re-election or have a Congress he can work with in 2019 and 2020. The fact that Saccone cast himself as a virtual Trump clone, makes the result of the election a clear repudiation of the president.

If Trump’s base in this district represented sixty percent of the 2016 vote, the fifty percent showing for Saccone suggests that the president has lost the confidence of one-sixth of his base. Let’s project that across the board. If we reduce Trump’s 46.7% in 2016 by the same one sixth, we get 38.9%. Whether or not you have any respect for polls, that number bears a startling similarity to Trump’s current approval rating which has trended downward from the high forties as low as the mid-thirties and now hovers around 40%.

If you don’t believe Lamb’s victory was a rejection of Trumpism, consider how much Trump invested in attempting to salvage this win for the Republican Party. The rafter-shaking buffoonery at the campaign rally he staged wasn’t enough to stem the Democratic tide, even when it was supplemented by personal visits from Vice President Pence and Donald Trump Jr, and the announcement of tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were obviously timed to influence this election.

Lamb’s win also signals possible changes in the Democratic Party leadership. He was clear throughout the campaign that he would not support Nancy Pelosi. There’s no doubt that the Democrats have floundered under her direction, and she has become the Conservatives’ symbol of everything they hate about the progressive movement in this country.

Lamb is being held up as a new kind of Democrat, a model of the sort of candidate that can shift the balance of power away from the Republicans. Of course, if Conor Lamb’s campaign is replicated a few dozen times, and the Democratic Party does retake control of Congress, it will be a very different party from the one that managed to bungle a presidential election that everyone thought was impossible to lose.

Hmmm, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, either for the Democrats or the nation.

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Guns And Nukes

Posted on March 12, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 12, 2018

I learned important lessons about guns and nuclear weapons when I was growing up.

Living across the street from a Brooklyn firehouse as a child, I was frequently awakened in the middle of the night by piercing sirens (with no air conditioning the windows were usually open) convinced that we were about to be incinerated. I rode my bike to Coney Island when I was eleven and was greeted by a billboard left over from World War 2 — “In the event of an air raid, don’t panic. This is not a target area.” The next time I was there with the advent of the Soviet Union’s H-bomb tests, the billboard had been removed.

Remember those duck-and-cover drills in school? They’d been dispensed with by the time my kids were in school because they’d become moot. The reality that we could have been nuked at any moment during the Cold War caused that whole generation of young people to question whether they would live to become adults. And now my grandkids live with the new reality of Iran and North Korea.

No problem facing our country and the world is more serious than the nuclear threat of North Korea, even though it’s Japan and South Korea that are squarely in the crosshairs. Every president from Eisenhower to Obama has been unable to deal successfully with NK’s dynasty of rogue leaders. If that taught us anything, it was that the problem cannot be solved with cavalier bravado.

I, like everyone else, had a moment of elation when I heard that Kim Jong Un had invited President Trump to Pyongyang to negotiate, and that Trump had immediately accepted. The moment lasted until I remembered all the promises broken by Kim’s father and grandfather and the way the latest of the Kim dictators has used the journalistic and social media like his own personal propaganda machines. The latest Kim incarnation is bold and wily, not someone who can be bluffed or intimidated at the negotiating table.

To make matters worse, on our side of the table we’ll have the great deal maker who has failed miserably at everything he couldn’t do by Executive Order except supporting the Republican tax cut tsunami. Our president eschews advice (Secretary of State Tillerson, who should be at the forefront has been silent) and believes he’s capable of Herculean feats no one else would even attempt; he shoots from the hip, prefers insults and hyperbole to substance, and has no respect for truth or facts, except those he invents; and finally, he continually says one thing one day and contradicts himself the next, and believes that’s an effective negotiating tactic because it makes him seem unpredictable.

On one hand the world’s leaders mock him, even those, like Putin who heap false praise on him. On the other they must deal and pay homage to the Commander in Chief of the world’s most deadly military force. But Kim Jong Un is in his own category, and there is no reason to believe that Trump can hold his own with him one-on-one much less outmaneuver him. So my short-lived elation turned to concern because if Trump fails to get an agreement, we’re all in greater jeopardy than we are now.

I learned enough about guns when I was fourteen to make a lasting impression. I was part of a group of teenagers being taught how to use a .22 caliber rifle responsibly. Everyone followed the rules perfectly and the targets were sensibly located on a board fence with nothing behind them except open forest. Yet, when the signal was given to fire, we nearly killed a two-year-old child who had crawled behind the fence unobserved.

The lesson is that no matter how many precautions we take, guns can kill, and rules only work when error-prone humans don’t screw up or deliberately evade them. When our president met with mourning, traumatized high school students and promised that he would lead the fight to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, and keep military-style assault weapons out of the hands of everyone except the military, we all thought, here’s his chance to be the president we hoped he would be.

But just as he has done with immigration and DACA, his words turned out to be empty. He mocked Republican Congresspeople for being terrified of the NRA, but when push came to shove, and the NRA threatened to turn his base against him, our fearless leader caved. Once again, when Donald Trump found himself in a situation where he couldn’t use his money and his lawyers to bully the opposition, he was just another stuffed shirt.

I have a feeling, however, that there’s one group of Americans who we can count on not to cave in to pressure. All those students who will be old enough to vote for the first time next November will turn out in droves, and the politicians who betrayed their trust will pay for their lack of moral courage.

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Chaos Theory

Posted on March 3, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, March 2, 2018

The theory goes, if you’re smarter than everyone else and a genius at tactics, timing, reading the crowd, and knowing where the escape tunnel is, you can juggle dozens of balls at once and no one but you will be able to keep track of them. And if you throw in a few red herrings, tell a bunch of outright lies, and contradict half of what you said today, tomorrow, claiming you never said whatever you contradicted in the first place, the resulting chaff will confuse any incoming missiles from your enemies (i.e., everyone else in the free world,) and the ensuing chaos and confusion will become a distraction that makes them weak and ineffective.

Human nature being what it is, even if a few on the other side, (actually sides, since part of your strategy is to make sure no one ever knows which side you’re really on,) are as smart as you are, they’ll all disagree and spend so much time bickering and figuring out how to undermine each other that by the time they’re ready to act, the train will have left the station with them still on the platform, and they won’t even be able to agree on which way it went.

If the preceding paragraphs sound disjointed, muddled, filled with stupid metaphors and hard to follow (at least they’re not ungrammatical) – you’re beginning to see the point. While you were re-reading it and trying to figure out what I was talking about I picked your pocket and instituted a tariff on your favorite coffee, because as everyone knows, it’s only the elites in blue states who appreciate good coffee. And in the resulting turmoil with every coffee-growing country screaming betrayal, the former British Commonwealth re-united to place a tariff on all tea not grown in India. And while all this was going on, another seven senior staffers in the West Wing were quietly shown the exits, and three cabinet secretaries, none of them Jeff Sessions, resigned due to scandals over falsified purchase orders and travel vouchers.

The unfortunate thing is that this badly scripted grade B movie is the reality we’re all living in. That may explain why no progress is being made in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and crazies, most Americans have no idea how they were screwed by the new tax bill, and we have no coherent plan to deal with either DACA or immigration in general. And of course, North Korea continues working in the shadows to develop a nuclear ICBM that can cross the Pacific in spite of all those tweets that have been hurled at them.

A year ago, with Steve Bannon’s shooting star hovering near its apogee, I and many others noted (Warcraft and Governance, February 20, 2017) his fascination for Sun Tzu’s ancient treatise on military strategy, The Art of War. We all asked the same question back then. Having seen Bannon and Trump apply the Sun Tzu formula of spreading chaos and confusion that worked in managing Trump’s real estate empire to the election campaign, would the same approach work for governing the country? We’ve now had more than a year to answer that question.

No one I know anywhere in the political spectrum can recall seeing a more disorganized, ineffective White House, except during the post-Watergate unraveling of the Nixon administration, and that was short lived thanks to a White House Chief of Staff and a Republican majority in Congress that joined forces to neutralize Nixon and force his resignation. Democratic political strategist Paul Begala addressed the situation today. Directing his remarks to Trump voters, he said (I’m paraphrasing) Trump was a lunatic during the campaign, he was a lunatic in his private life, and now he’s a lunatic trying to govern the country. You got what you asked for. How’s that working out for you?

Inasmuch as Trump’s favorability rating among all voters including Republicans is currently at an all-time low, based on polls taken prior to the Porter and security clearance scandals, most of the country including part of Trump’s vaunted base thinks it’s not working out as well as they’d hoped. Some of us fear that, to coin a phrase, “We ain’t seen anything yet.” Is this White House spiraling out of control like a jetliner with its tail shot off? Even the most skillful pilot couldn’t avert a catastrophe under those circumstances.

Each month we look at the situation and think it couldn’t possibly get worse, and yet it does. We warned you that running the White House like a family business wouldn’t, couldn’t work. We warned you about governing by tweet. And we warned all along that the only entity that might be able to change things for the better, the Republican majority in Congress, was too divided, too concerned with individual self-interest, and too ineffective in general to take action.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m scared.

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Who’s in Charge in the West Wing?

Posted on February 28, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 28, 2018

Among all the difficult jobs in the world, I’d have thought being the Marine General in charge of the U. S. Southern Command after two command combat roles in Iraq would rank pretty high. Who’d have imagined they were a piece of cake compared to managing the staff in the West Wing of the White House? When you consider that the staff contains both the president’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, the idea doesn’t seem so far fetched.

In Kelly’s former jobs the word “command” had a clear definition. People either did their jobs properly and followed the general’s rules and protocols or they were removed. Everyone working for him understood that clearly. What senior military officer would accept a critical command assignment without that virtually absolute authority?

Remember when Kelly accepted the position of Chief of the White House staff? That was back in the days when Steve Bannon had constant access to the president and people like Sebastian Gorka, a right-wing extremist with questionable credentials and an outstanding arrest warrant in Hungary was advising him on terrorism and Islam. Kelly cleaned that mess up quickly, but that was easy compared to keeping a lid on the president’s erratic behavior and temper tantrums.

It was also a lot easier than managing Ivanka and Jared, who knew that daddy would always be there for them no matter what. The reports of Kelly’s disdain for both are too numerous and from too many different sources to be discounted. He has mocked Ivanka as a girl playing government, and his long-simmering mini-war with Kushner came to a head last week when Trump publicly stated that he was delegating all decisions on security clearance to Kelly, and that he was “sure he’d do the right thing.”

That’s exactly what Kelly did. He stripped Kushner’s Top Secret clearance, reportedly along with the clearances of 130 other staffers who had been handling sensitive information on interim clearances for more than a year. All this on the heels of credible reports that four foreign nations, all of which appear in Kushner’s portfolio of responsibilities, have been discussing how to use his inexperience and financial vulnerabilities to leverage policy with the president. And two of those countries, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, are pivotal to Kushner’s efforts to reach Middle East peace accords.

Rumors continue to fly about Kelly’s tenure in the White House. Trump really can’t fire him any more than he can fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or Special Counsel Robert Mueller without bringing down a firestorm of criticism on an administration whose credibility has already been stretched as far as it can be. So Kelly’s future in the West Wing is in his own hands. How long will he be willing to put up with the Trump Family White House?

Kelly’s present lack of command authority isn’t unique to him. When NSA Director, Admiral Mike Rogers was interviewed yesterday by the Senate Intelligence Committee, he revealed that while cyber threats from Russia and elsewhere continue to expand, and his people have the ability to counter them at their sources, he has not been given the authority to act by the president. His frustration as he revealed than on national TV, was evident.

And then there’s the situation surrounding National Security Advisor H.  R. McMaster. He publicly agreed with the findings of every law enforcement and security agency that confirmed Russian cyber attacks and interference in our elections, only to be contradicted by the president the next day because of his baseless refusal to accept reality. That makes three senior military advisers of unquestioned stature and ability who were appointed by this president, who’ve been emasculated by that same president who is totally out of his depth on matters of security.

It seems that our president still has not figured out that the White House is not his own private company. In the past when his shoot-from-the-hip approach to business got him in trouble he simply filed for bankruptcy, fired everyone he could, and took off leaving a pile of debris in his wake. Have you been to Atlantic City, New Jersey recently?

Governing the United States of America doesn’t work that way. The level of chaos that exists in this administration is unprecedented, and there’s a lot more at stake than Trump’s real estate empire. Physical objects that do not have a strong center of gravity can be toppled by a stiff breeze. The Trump administration is the political analog of such an object, a collection of people all traveling in different orbits with no apparent cohesion, the classic definition of a house of cards.

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Guns In Schools

Posted on February 26, 2018 by alanpzendell

February 26, 2018

When Governor Jay Inslee of Washington responded to President Trump’s proposal to arm teachers in our public schools at the National Governors’ Conference, it didn’t take a mind reader or a psychologist to read the president’s body language. Governor Inslee talked about his conversations with teachers and law enforcement professionals who are in the main strongly opposed to the idea.

As Inslee spoke, two things were apparent. The president was struggling mightily to control himself, and he deserves to be acknowledged for keeping his temper in check. On the other hand, it was clear that while he was struggling to present the appearance of listening, he dismissed everything the Governor said.

It’s unfortunate that praising the president this way sounds rather lame, as the bar is so low based on his often demonstrated behavior. If he ultimately influences the Congress to pass meaningful legislation that limits the spread of assault weapons and at least to some degree prevents people who shouldn’t own guns from purchasing them, I will praise him without reservation, but as he so often says, we’ll have to wait and see.

I spend a lot of time in a Florida high school as a volunteer math tutor, and I have been there every day since the Parkland massacre. The experience has been especially poignant because there had been a fatal shooting in which a fourteen year old student who attends that school was killed just a few days earlier. So Parkland occurred against a background of grief and trauma counseling that had already been going on for days.

As a volunteer I got to observe a number of things. First, the students themselves seemed to absorb the shock quite well. I was impressed by their calm demeanor through it all. The only sign I picked up on that anything had changed, was that the group of students I interact with suddenly seemed more involved and committed to succeeding. That means they showed up consistently and on time and were more engaged in what we were doing than I’ve ever seen them. Is there a demonstrable cause and effect between that and Parkland? I’m not qualified to say, but I think so.

Perhaps more important, I have not encountered a single teacher, counselor, or administrator who thinks carrying a gun in school is a good idea. They believe that’s the responsibility of law enforcement, and I agree. Of the many reasons I believe that, I will cite two.

The first is an entirely practical matter. Placing the responsibility for protection on school administrators would be extremely costly. Most school systems are already strapped to meet the basic cost of educating students. If we are serious about “hardening” our schools, whatever measures we take should not be at the mercy of budget politics. Further, if each school was responsible for its own security, resources could not be used efficiently.

School security should be a line item in the budget of every police department. It’s no secret that public safety budgets are easier to defend than school budgets when taxes are debated, especially in states like Florida. We should allow people whose business is security to allocate resources in the best possible way.

Budgets aside, any law enforcement professional will tell you that being trained in the use of firearms doesn’t prepare someone for actually firing at another human being with the intent to kill. Could teachers and administrators pull the trigger if they had to under the stress of an attack? Would their training be enough to make them an effective deterrent? Or would they just get themselves killed and possibly endanger others?

It’s easy for people like the president to make proclamations. I have no idea whether he’s ever fired a gun or whether he understands the first thing about the use of firearms. As far as his public persona goes, the only form of violence he seems to grasp is verbal bullying and legal litigation.

When he said earlier today that he would have personally stormed the school even if he’d been unarmed, comparing himself to the deputies that failed to enter the school, he reached a new high in disingenuous rhetoric. This is the same president who continues to claim that John McCain was not a hero because he was in a POW camp, and he’s the same man who pulled every string imaginable at God knows what cost to avoid serving in the armed forces.

When I hear him say things like that I think, your base may love the tough guy talk, but the rest of us understand it for what it is. As the Parkland students might have said, it’s pure BS.

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Rob Porter’s Security Nonclearance

Posted on February 10, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 10, 2018

Sherlock Holmes (aka, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) famously said, “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Consider the sordid case of Rob Porter’s temporary security clearance.

It’s impossible that while the FBI has been aware of the very credible allegations of spousal (and now girlfriend) abuse for more than a year, no one on the White House Staff found out until this week. It’s impossible that Chief of Staff John Kelly, given his well-known concern for order and security would not have wondered why the FBI hadn’t granted Rob Porter a security clearance in over a year. It’s also impossible that General Kelly wouldn’t have been seriously concerned about that considering Porter’s daily access to highly sensitive information.

Holmes would have approached the issue logically. Members of the White House staff were surely aware of Porter’s checkered past. John Kelly had to have demanded an explanation of the delay in granting him clearance. Kelly understands as well as anyone that if Porter was guilty of the things three women accused him of, he would have been a likely target for blackmail. All his instincts about security would have been setting off alarm bells in his head, yet he not only did not restrict Porter’s access to secret documents, he encouraged him to stand by his denials. And he allowed Hope Hicks, a woman who was romantically involved with Porter to frame the White House’s defense of him to the media.

Holmes would have been certain that was all true, but he wouldn’t have let the matter rest until he understood why Kelly acted as he did and the FBI has allowed Porter’s temporary clearance to stand so long, and we shouldn’t either. Every American should be extremely concerned about the circumstances that would cause someone like Kelly to look the other way. It’s certainly not what we’d expect of a four-star general.

One theory is that he simply liked Porter. Jennifer Willoughby, his second ex-wife, even while describing the bone-chilling details of their abusive marriage, described Porter as smart, personable, and competent – in his work life. She wasn’t surprised that he got on so well at work because no one there saw the other side of his personality. She said he was completely different at home, a very troubled man who was unable to control his flashes of anger in an intimate relationship.

I believe that, but I have to ask, in the highly stressful environment of the West Wing, which if one tenth of what Michael Wolff wrote is true, was an emotional pressure cooker, wouldn’t a man like General Kelly who is supposed to be an expert at assessing his subordinates have noticed something? Surely someone as troubled as Porter apparently is who cannot control his anger and frustration with people he loves would have revealed some aspect of that to the Chief of Staff who heavily relied on him.

Should we believe Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah’s contention that until the photographs of the battered face of Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness appeared, Kelly simply didn’t believe the allegations of abuse? That’s certainly possible, but if that’s true, it’s hard to see Kelly regaining the stature and respect he once had. I think he’d have no choice but to resign. Kelly is, if anything, honorable, so the fact that he didn’t suggests a different explanation.

Holmes would deduce that Porter was a favorite of the president. That’s an easy one, actually. The proof is that he was still there after a year in a position that had him interacting with Trump daily on the most sensitive issues. There’s no way the president would have kept a relatively invisible staffer who most people never heard of around that long if he didn’t really like him, which means, knowing Trump’s history, that Porter was a well-behaved sycophant and yes man around him.

That means he was also the perfect foil for General Kelly, whose principal charge was maintaining order and controlling the flow of information that reached the president. In that context one might see the general weighing priorities. As long as Porter behaved himself in the West Wing, Kelly might have seen him as too valuable to let go, valuable enough in fact to issue glowing statements to the media about what a fine fellow he was.

Of course, there’s a more cynical possibility. Perhaps the president has inadvertently set the tone for situations like this. Perhaps his own treatment of women and his apparent belief that even when charged with the most egregious misconduct, denial is a sufficient defense, has rubbed off on his staff.

There’s also a frighteningly dangerous possibility – the politicization of the security clearance process. When I underwent a security review it was understood that the FBI didn’t play games with their investigations. It was deadly serious business during the Cold War, and we all knew we wouldn’t keep our jobs if we failed the review. Is it possible that things have changed so much since then that the president who cares so much about national security that he wants a border wall would tolerate political pressure to approve security clearances?

I hope not.

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Tottering Financial Markets

Posted on February 6, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 5, 2018

When I heard our president claim that “everyone is in love with our wonderful tax cuts” in Ohio, today, I had to wonder how many more lies have to be told before the working class part of his base figures out that getting a tax cut barely large enough to buy a Costco membership means they’ve been royally screwed. What will they think when those reductions disappear in a few years to pay the interest on the national debt that’s making billionaires richer?

After the worst two days equity markets suffered since early in the Obama administration, Americans who have bet their retirement portfolios on Trump’s economic boom today found their valuations back where they were last Christmas. The last five weeks of sharp increases based on investors’ belief that the new tax law will fatten corporate earnings were wiped out in just two trading days.

The S&P 500 index is down nearly eight-and-a-half percent since last Thursday. Whether this is the beginning of a more serious decline or the markets stabilize later this week, this is a clear warning sign of the fragility of the overall investment climate, which was supposed to be the central pillar of Trump’s economic boom. Interest rates are rising, the value of the dollar relative to the Euro and Asian currencies is down (perhaps by design), and market pros now fear rising inflation.

Every investor knows that the things markets hate most are instability and uncertainty. With the president’s clearly desperate attempts to undermine the investigation into collusion with Russian interference and obstruction of justice, current market instabilities can only worsen.

If that’s not enough, Trump continues to play chicken with North Korea, Iran, Europe, most of the Middle East, the shithole nations of the southern hemisphere, and here at home with anyone who doesn’t take a knee and swear fealty. He called the Democrats’ response to his State of the Union address treasonous, but if reasonable dissent and disagreement by the loyal opposition is treason, how should we label ego-driven rants by a president who shamelessly lies about everything and puts the future of our country on the line with every tweet?

Many Americans are more concerned about North Korea than any of our domestic problems. There are varying opinions about whether Trump’s intemperate Twitter war with Kim Jong Un have increased tensions or pushed North Korea toward normalizing relations with South Korea, Japan, or the United States. But assuming for a moment that Trump’s bellicose threats have been at least partially responsible for the relative thaw in relations between North and South Korea, what possible reason could he have for trying to disrupt that?

North and South Korea have agreed to march in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics as a single team under the banner: “Korea.” And today the women’s Korean hockey team, comprised of players from the North and the South played its first united practice game against Sweden. Who would have imagined either of those things happening a few months ago?

Yet our president has dispatched Vice President Pence to South Korea with the express intention of delegitimizing participation by the North Koreans. The White House says his real mission at the Games is “to apply maximum pressure on the North Korean government, and keep the regime from securing a rapprochement with their more sympathetic southern neighbors.”

What kind of insanity is that? It makes me think he would rather exchange nuclear missiles with Kim than have the two Koreas peacefully reunite unless everyone gives our Narcissist in Chief full credit for making it happen. That may not count as treason, but I don’t think there’s a strong enough word in the English language to describe how cynically irresponsible it is.

While all this is going on, Trump is touting Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes as a great American hero while calling Nunes’ Democratic colleague Adam Schiff a liar who is guilty of criminally leaking sensitive information. Clearly expecting the Republican majority to rally around his attacks on Schiff, Trump must have been shocked when the Committee unanimously voted to support Schiff’s request to release the Democratic response to Nunes’ controversial memo that Trump claims exonerated him from any collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice.

With actions like these, it’s anyone’s guess how the shaky financial markets will react. If history is our guide it could get very messy before things settle down.

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Trump’s Booming Economy

Posted on February 3, 2018 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, February 2, 2018

The President has recently been touting the booming economy, and of course taking full credit for it. Trump points to the roaring stock market and the low unemployment rates as evidence. But is he right?

Let’s look at unemployment first. The following chart is taken directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for people over sixteen years old in percent of available full-time workers for the last ten years:

Unemployment

The sharp rise in unemployment in 2008 reflects the massive banking crisis that nearly toppled the world economy. The increase continued through the first few months of the Obama administration, but as the chart clearly shows, unemployment peaked at around ten percent at the end of the summer of 2009. After leveling off for six months, the unemployment rate began a steady decline that has persisted for eight years, that is, almost seven years of the Obama administration and the first year of Trump’s.

Everyone who studied economics knows that unemployment is a lagging indicator of the policies of any administration. If you enter a dark room you can simply press a switch, and behold, you get light. But market forces don’t work that way – you can’t create jobs instantly. A reduction in the unemployment rate must lag behind the implementation of even the best possible policy by a year or more. Every administration takes the blame for the failures of its predecessor during its first year, and benefits from its successes.

The chart clearly demonstrates that there is no correlation between the declining unemployment rate in 2017 and any policy implemented by the Trump administration.

Keep in mind, too, that the unemployment rate does not take into account people who have been out of work for several months and have stopped looking for a job. It also doesn’t count people who lost their jobs and decided to return to school and people who work part-time.

The unemployment rate reported by BLS always understates the real unemployment rate. By how much? That’s a great question, but no one knows the answer.

The fact that the decline in the unemployment rate as measured by the Department of Labor in 2017 was largely a continuation of the effect of policies put in place before Trump was elected is basic economics. It’s also interesting to note that the unemployment rate in the United Kingdom has tracked almost exactly with the rate in the United States since 2012, and the unemployment rate in Germany has consistently been between 0.6% and 0.9% lower than ours since 2015. Obviously, neither Germany’s nor the UK’s unemployment rate is related to anything Donald Trump has done as president.

Now let’s turn to the stock market. Market prognosticators come in all flavors, and prior to the 2016 election we were told by some that the equity markets would crash if Trump was elected and by others that it would take off and reach record heights. Most of that was just hot air being expelled from talking heads.

Equity markets rise and fall based on expectations of corporate profits. When you strip away speculation and computerized trading programs, it’s really very simple over the long run. What drove investors during 2017 was the expectation of a Republican tax bill that would greatly increase the prospects for corporate earnings. It was no surprise that 80% of all the benefits accruing from the new tax law will be in corporate bottom lines. Thus, the year-long rally in stock prices.

Can Trump claim credit for the rise in the markets? To some extent he can. He supported it, but the law he signed was a far cry from the one he promised. The new tax law was what Republicans have been trying to pass for decades. Its origins date back to when Trump was a Democrat. Trump may have supported it, but the victory belongs to the Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

If you have a financial adviser you’ve probably asked his or her advice about how to protect your investments and retirement savings in 2017. From where I sit, the most common advice was that speculation was likely to drive the market higher for all or part of the year. But savvy advisers understood that they were looking at a very fragile bubble that could burst at the first sign the administration was in serious trouble. And this administration has flirted with disaster from the very beginning.

Most people who follow stock charting theories believe in the cyclic nature of investment futures. In other words, in the world of investing, history tends to repeat itself. On the 30th anniversary of the stock market crash of 1987, CNBC published a fascinating chart that compared the values of the S&P 500 index for 1987 with those of 2017. Have a look.

Stocks1987_2017

Could the same thing happen today? To the extent that market levels reflect investor confidence, what might happen if that confidence suddenly crashed?

This week has seen evidence that the Trump administration is desperately trying to discredit the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Is that just Trump’s obsession with winning or might his administration be in serious jeopardy? No one but Trump’s inner circle know, but if you’re concerned about the psychology of the markets, you surely noticed that the S&P 500 dropped by a whopping 3.7% this week.

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