The New Federalism

Posted on November 9, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 9, 2024

The struggle to find the right balance between federal power and states’ rights dates back to the years preceding the first American Revolution. In 1787, our Founders drafted the Constitution, based “on a new theory of federalism, a system of shared sovereignty that delegates some powers to the federal government and reserves other powers for the states.”  The federal government could maintain an army, levy taxes, manage interstate commerce, and create currency, and the Tenth Amendment limited the power of the federal government to those things explicitly granted to it in the Constitution.

That sounds simple enough, but federalists and states’ rights advocates have been fighting to define state and federal power for two hundred fifty years. In our modern, post WW2 era, Democrats have generally been viewed as advocating a large, powerful federal government, while Republicans have cast themselves in the role of defending the powers of the individual states. Every piece of landmark legislation and related Court ruling in the thirty years after the war ended reflected this fight: desegregating public schools, the social security system, welfare programs, health care systems, legaliization of medical cannabis, and Roe vs Wade. To add to the fun, in what may turn out to be an extended fight in the Supreme Court, Article 6 defines the supremacy of federal law over state statutes wherever they conflict.

The struggle to define state and federal power intensified during the Biden administration. When the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision, effectively reversing Roe vs Wade, it said decisions regarding abortion should be the province of the states. When States like Texas and Florida tired of the federal government’s inability to pass a new immigration law, they began enforcing their own policies in defiance of federal law. Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act have been a constant battle since the inception of those programs with states implementing their own conditions and modifications. The one constant in all of that was Conservatives (Republicans) attempting to weaken or repeal federal programs, while Progressives (Democrats) were fighting to strengthen them.

One of the first reactions to Trump’s re-election was the immediate reversal of the federalist/states’ rights roles of the major parties. Trump has not been shy about declaring himself a strong leader who prefers an authoritarian central government with him in charge wielding absolute power. It appears that the first test of his power will be his plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, which instantly shaped up as the first of many new skirmishes in the war between federalism and state autonomy. The difference is that now, the blue states, those dominated by Democrats will be fighting to expand states’ rights.

California Governor Gavin Newsom fired the first salvo in the coming conflict when he convened a special session of the State Legislature to begin on December 5, 2024, “ahead of another Trump presidency to safeguard the state’s progressive policies. Meanwhile, attorneys general in blue states across the country announced they were also gearing up for a legal fight.” In Newsom’s words, the states intend to “Trump-proof” their own laws. That means a new army of lawyers working for the states. We can only hope the states cooperate and pool their resources.

Trump promised that he would completely upend and rework the federal government, floating the idea that his new strongest ally, Elon Musk, will be given the responsibility and authority to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, which could decimate entire government agencies and leave the recipients of the programs they manage high and dry. That would also have an enormous impact on state governments, which would have to decide whether to extend those programs at state expense.

However this turns out, Trump has already scored a huge “success” within two days of winning the election. He completely reversed the course of federalism and the battle for states’ rights, implicitly enshrining the blue states as the champions of programs that are popular with at least two-thirds of Americans. That kind of success probably wasn’t what he had in mind, and it’s an important reminder that undermining American democracy may not be as easy as he thinks – or as half the country fears.

If, like me, you needed a while to get over the shock of Trump’s victory, it’s time to wake up and shake off the malaise. Even with both houses of Congress in Republican hands, the battle is far from over. The talking is done, and now the MAGA people have to govern. Since the economic impact of most of Trump’s proposals would be devastating, he may have triggered an inhouse brawl among his own party. The fight hasn’t begun yet. This is the wrong time to throw in the towel.

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Trump Told America We Were a Failed Nation, So We Elected Him President

Posted on November 8, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 8, 2024

Every time Donald Trump referred to America as a failed nation, many of us cringed and yelled, “We are not!” When he coined his signature phrase, “Make America Great Again,” we screamed, “Again? We’re already a great nation!” It infuriated us, but a broader historical perspective suggests that in a way, Trump was right in both cases.

The fact that his presentation was entirely a collection of lies, exaggerations, and fantasies blinded us to an underlying truth. We hoped Trump would lose and fade away, but we made an essential error. Trump isn’t the cause of the problems America faces – he’s a symptom.

Roger Ailes, who created what is now Fox News, recognized the truth long before Trump came down the escalator. He understood the implications of generations of income and wealth disparity, of racial attitudes and the stark regional contrasts in family, education, and religious priorities, and the sharp differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles. Moreover, he understood that the broadcast and streaming media, which largely reflect the cultures of the northeast and the west coast, almost completely ignored that vast middle of our country.

Part of Ailes’ genius was recognizing that the country was ripe for a demagogue who could identify all the things that divide Americans and exacerbate them. Such a person would have to be completely amoral and value power and wealth above everything else. It was essential that they also be almost psychotically narcissistic, because only someone like that is capable of believing their own lies. The one thing cult leaders and ultra-nationalists can never do is waver. They must be true believers in their own bullshit, never back down, and never compromise their message.

The other essential part of Ailes’ genius was recognizing that Donald Trump fit the bill perfectly. Trump didn’t start his movement. He was the unifying, darkly charismatic glue that united elements that were already festering. Ailes recognized that several seemingly very different groups of Americans had one important thing in common. Whether they were greedy billionaires, hard-working people struggling to make ends meet, religious extremists, racists, misogynists, white supremacists, or just people who felt left out or ignored, they were all angry and needing someone to blame for their unhappiness.

The rest of us, the millions of highly educated middle class “progressive thinkers,” had no idea that literally half of all Americans were angry enough to burn it all down, but Roger Ailes knew, and he molded Trump into a revolutionary instrument of change, a Hegelian Hero in every sense of the term. Every great nation has gone through this. They grew and prospered and fooled themselves into thinking they were somehow different from all the ones that preceded them, every one of which peaked and immediately began a slide into decadence and decline.

That’s what America is today. Donald Trump is the inevitable outcome of what we have become. It’s entirely possible that in four years he could dismantle the building blocks of our democracy and replace it with – God only knows what. Fascism? Autocracy? Most likely an extended period of discord and internal struggle that will diminish our standing in the world and reshape our economy in a way that enriches the kleptocracy of hangers on and sycophants while seriously hurting millions of vulnerable Americans. But as any revolutionary will tell you, you have to expect some collateral damage when you tear down a society that’s been around for a few centuries. If you self-righteously believe you’ve been ordained with the power and right to determine how everyone else should live, that damage is a cheap price to pay.

That’s the road America is about to embark on. We’re in this place because we misread the tea leaves and believed the propaganda that America was the greatest nation in the history of the world, and possessed the inherent right to spread its philosophy to the rest of the planet. Except that we hadn’t put our invention to the test of time, and now that it’s here, we can either fight through Trump’s second term to preserve that dream or watch it erode out from under us.

The American dream wasn’t wrong. It was just a lot harder and more complicated than we realized. When we elected Barack Obama and the country fell in love with Michelle, we were so proud of how far we’d evolved. When Trump beat Hilary Clinton, we wrote it off as James Comey’s October surprise. But Trump defeated Kamala Harris mostly because white American women refused to elect a woman of color. The percentages of white men and white women who voted for Trump imply that the polls were wrong about the gender gap.

If we expect to survive this, America needs to have a clearer understanding of who we are.

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The Great American Experiment

Posted on November 3, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 3, 2024

As we approach the moment of truth, if such a thing still exists, what is on the line in next Tuesday’s election is whether the system of government and the way of life our founders envisioned can survive. That’s not just political rhetoric. Viewed from the perspective of history, it’s something that would have a discouraging betting line in Las Vegas. Throughout human history no other system survived the test of time.

Every society that reached a level of success and enlightenment in the last few millennia no longer exists. Either they were conquered in war or, more likely, they rotted from within. When Donald Trump refers to “the enemy within,” he’s onto something, but it’s not what he says it is. Every civilization that evolved to the point where its people weren’t constantly in survival mode or defending themselves, thus allowing things like philosophy, religion, and industry to flourish and grow, ultimately forgot that the relatively comfortable life style it achieved comes with a price.

It’s like families that struggle, work hard, and prosper enough to own their dream homes. They build beautiful, crime-free neighborhoods, enroll their kids in Little League and the best schools. Everyone takes pride in what they accomplished, but look at those neighborhoods a few decades later. How many people who live there understood what it would cost to maintain that quality of life? How many prepared for it, and when things started to break down or decay, how many accepted the effort needed to preserve what they had built?

When we’re too comfortable, most of us get lazy. Football and vacations become more important than paying attention to what’s happening around us. We become complacent that we’ve reached a plateau of security, but the moment we start to believe we don’t have to continue to struggle to maintain what we built, we’re doomed to the same fate as Rome, Greece, the Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, and all the ancient peoples in Asia and the Middle East.

The shameless destruction of truth perpetrated by Trump’s MAGA movement, enabled by an unregulated Internet that allows anyone with a talent for communicating to promulgate any sort of nonsense that occurs to them has brought us to the worst existential crisis since the Civil War. That crisis is exacerbated by our two-party system. Our early leaders didn’t understand that a two-party system only works well when people on both sides are committed to upholding the principles on which their society was based.

In our case, that’s the Constitution. Our politics has always been nasty, as one would expect when people compete for power and the wealth that accompanies it. But for the last 180 years, the sharp divisions among our leaders never resulted in doing away with the rule of law or the growth of a major political party whose principal objective was undermining our democracy.

That’s why this election so critical. The Republican Party that once stood for true Conservative values and adherence to the spirit of the Constitution has become the tool of a madman who craves absolute power. He would take us back to a version of the American dream in which rights, opportunities and the pursuit of happiness were the province of white men with the means to own property, when women and non-whites were at best, second-class citizens under the domination of those white men.

It’s really that simple. If that’s the America you want for your children and grandchildren, vote straight Republican. If it’s not, don’t let anyone influence your vote, including me. I have enough respect for Americans to trust you to make the right decision. For the next two days, let’s ignore all the phone calls, texts, and emails from billionaire PACS. Turn off social media and ignore the pundits and what passes for news these days. Just this once, it’s okay to watch football and indulge in all the wrong foods with friends and family. When it’s time to vote, remember – your vote belongs to you alone, and it’s a secret ballot.

Above all, ignore the polls. At this point they’re irrelevant, unless you believe what I predicted in August – that Harris would not only win, but she would do surprisingly well in red states, especially Iowa (wink.) If you are a woman, of Puerto Rican descent, part of an immigrant family, or non-white, have a look at Project 2025 and think really hard about what it means for your family.

This isn’t hype. If we allow a power-crazed minority to nullify our Constitution, we will all suffer. My sharpest memory of visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam was the photograph of Nazi troops marching in the streets outside her window. If you think that can’t happen here, think again.

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A Few Words to Young Voters

Posted on November 1, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 1, 2024

Early voting statistics have told us that with five days left until Election Day half the people who already voted were over 65, and that fraction gets smaller as we look at younger age categories. The last number I saw for people under 30 was that they made up only 9% of the early voters. That probably correlates fairly well with where we can find the few remaining “undecideds.” Today, I’d like to address young people in as nonpartisan a manner as possible. Think of it as friendly advice from someone old enough to be your grandfather.

If this is the first year you’re eligible to vote, you were between 10 and 14 when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. My guess is you thought you had a lot more interesting things to do back then, than pay attention to the election. None of us knew that election might result in actions that profoundly affected your right to have your vote mean something in the future. You probably didn’t know the word “gerrymandering,” although the Congressional district your Electors represent was probably shaped by it. You probably lived in a state that encouraged as many people as possible to vote in 2016 – not so much in 2024, when many states strongly influenced by Trump have new laws that make voting more difficult.

If you cared about elections, you were probably like me at that age, naively assuming that everything would work itself out, and the peaceful transfer of power prescribed by our Constitution would proceed as expected. Your American history textbooks had continually delivered the message that America is where the good guys live and our free, democratic elections were the envy of the civilized world. Maybe you still believe that, or maybe you still don’t care. In either case, it’s time someone grabbed you by your lapels and explained reality to you.

Reality is that in a few years, I and my generation will be gone. Your parents’ generation will be in charge, and you will be working your butt off to raise and support a family. You won’t have the luxury of not caring about the future or whether you live in a country that has stripped its most vulnerable citizens of the freedoms defined in the Bill of Rights. Remember those?

In America, we get to say what we want to, as long as we don’t yell, “Fire!” to cause a panic. We get to worship, or not, as we please, as long as we’re not part of some radicalized cult that believes in drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. (Are you old enough to remember that?) We get to choose our leaders, and we get to fire them when their term is up if they don’t do a good job. We get to run our own businesses, join labor unions, and have opportunities to plan for retirement. We send our children to schools and if we work hard and play by the rules, we expect our government to protect us when we can’t fend for ourselves.

We also have the right to demand truth and moral and ethical standards from those who seek our votes. You are now old enough to understand and care about that, because the leaders you elect next week can have a profound impact on the rest of your lives. People were skeptical about everything our parents, teachers, and government told us when I was your age. If I could offer your generation a gift, it would be to return you to a time and place where truth and values were things we could codify and use as standards against which to evaluate all the noise you hear every day.

If you care about your future, you MUST get off your ass and vote. If you’re still not sure who to vote for, I have a few suggestions. If you feel like you don’t know enough about Kamala Harris, do what I did – talk to people you trust who know more about her than you do. Don’t we all have family members or friends who live in California? I was ambivalent about Harris until I had a long conversation with my adult son who has lived in San Diego for thirty years. Since I trust and respect him, his opinion made a huge difference.

If you need to know more about Trump, I’d suggest that you ignore everything put out by the Republican and Democratic Parties. Just surf the internet, (not social media,) and you’ll find thousands of hours of videos in which you can see and hear Trump in his own words. Start with the Access Hollywood tape. Hear him discuss grabbing women by their pussies and gloating about how he gets away with anything he wants to do. Listen to him demonize women, immigrants, and the two-thirds of our country that doesn’t bend a knee to his every request. Make up your own mind. The only wrong answer here is doing nothing and failing to cast your vote.

If you dont, and you wake up one day to find friends and relatives deported or in concentration camps, remember – I warned you.

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The Nazi Rally at the Garden

Posted on October 28, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 28, 2024

Anyone who imagines everything that happened at Madison Square Garden in New York, yesterday, wasn’t intentional is beyond naïve. Normally, I’d say, “feel free to bury your head in the sand,” but there’s too much at stake. Last week, Michelle Obama asked Americans if they were willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations to save America from another Trump presidency. I know you’re as tired of all this as I am. If you could press a button and enter suspended animation until the election is resolved, would you do it? I wish I could, but we can’t run from this fight.

We’re conditioned to believe that nothing Trump says can hurt him, because his base loves his antics. He does outrageous things they wish they could do, and he seems to get away with them.  They can only fantasize doing those things, so instead they created a cult hero. To everyone who feels left out or envious of anyone who has more than they do, Donald Trump is Robin Hood.

Except, he’s not. The Robin Hood of legend robbed from the rich to feed the poor. Trump thinks poor people are repulsive. He also thinks anyone not as rapacious as he is, is a loser and a sucker, especially the millions of Americans who’ve lost their lives defending our country. Speaking of which, Trump made a serious error last night.

My father fought in World War 2 and came home with a Purple Heart and a PTSD-blasted nervous system. I’d guess that more than half of all Americans living today are either directly descended from or related to someone who was either killed or maimed for life by the war. Maybe Trump was assuming that his base is so enthralled by him, nothing could change that. But if you had a father, uncle, or grandfather who fought the Fascists, you have to have felt at least a spark of reaction to the rally at the Garden.

It was designed to evoke images of the Nazi rally in the old Madison Square Garden in 1939, which was funded by German Nazis as Hitler was preparing the blitzkrieg over Poland. Is anyone so dense that they missed the parallel with Vladimir Putin intent on destroying Ukraine, whence he, too, can stare ominously across the border into Poland? I graduated from high school fifteen years after the war, so our American history classes were all about Neville Chamberlain and the rest of Europe learning that appeasement is the worst way to deal with a threatening bully.

Trump’s people are either too uninformed or too stupid to understand that letting Putin have Ukraine will have the same effect as ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. Showing Hitler weakness only emboldened him, something most people my age understand, although younger people seem not to care. Our fathers and grandfathers would have been horrified by yesterday’s events.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump may have badly miscalculated this time. When Hurricane Maria smashed Puerto Rico in 2017, eight months into Trump’s presidency, and destroyed the island’s antiquated power grid, Trump couldn’t have cared less about the plight of 3.5 million people. Despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are Ameriacn citizens, Trump saw them as losers from a shithole country.

As a result of receiving almost no disaster aid from the Trump administration, a half million Puerto Ricans relocated to Florida, where they would be able to vote. Pundits predicted their fury at Trump trashing their homeland (Puerto Ricans are proud nationalists,) would cause them to turn Florida blue when he ran for re-election. But they didn’t, and as a result, Trump considers them weak and inconsequential. Why not trash them again if it charges up his racist base?

Stephen Miller and the other xenophobic racists Trump listens to screwed up this time. They didn’t count on pop culture stars, among whom are Puerto Rican idols Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, and Jennifer Lopez, who have literally hundreds of millions of followers on Instagram and other platforms. They all released a tsunami of anger after yesterday at Madison Square Garden, and eight days before the remaining ballots are cast, there’s plenty of time to stoke up the righteous anger Trump deserves, but not enough time for Trump to distract them until they forget.

This time, they won’t be so distracted putting their homes back together that they can’t focus on who trashed them three years later. There are more than enough Puerto Rican Americans in the battleground states to turn the election into a landslide for Harris – if they are united and they care enough. The following chart makes this clear.

Puerto Rican Americans now join women, Blacks, and immigrants as having every reason to vote Trump into oblivion. Will they?

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General John Kelly on Trump

Posted on October 23, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 23, 2024

Retired Marine General John Kelly served as Homeland Security Secretary under Donald Trump, after which he was Trump’s only Chief of Staff who served as long as eighteen months before Trump’s behavior as president convinced him he had to resign. He became Chief of Staff late in 2017 because senior Republicans were afraid Trump was going off the rails. They hoped that forcing him to accept someone like Kelly, a no-nonsense leader who had led the U. S. Southern Command and was firmly committed to upholding the rule of law and the Constitution would bring some discipline to the White House.

Republicans hoped Kelly could provide the guardrails Trump obviously lacked, but it became clear over time that that was an impossible task. Trump lived in a fantasy world in which he had ultimate power to do anything he wanted without respect for law, diplomatic norms, or the men and women in our military. Like others in similar positions of responsibility, Kelly was wont to speak out in the midst of a presidential election campaign, because he believes military leaders must be nonpolitical. But as Trump has become more erratic and his stated intentions for a second term caused Kelly to fear for the country, he decided to sit for interviews with the New York Times.

Beginning with a dictionary definition of Fascism, Kelly echoed what former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had said earlier, that the definition accurately described Mr. Trump. Kelly said Trump admired Adolf Hitler, expressed contempt for disabled veterans and characterized those who died on battlefields as “losers and suckers.” This is a very big deal. When two of the most respected military leaders in our country, both of whom were elevated to powerful positions by Trump speak out against him out of principle, we ignore them at our peril.

Kelly says Trump could not accept that he wasn’t the most powerful person in the world, that he expected to run the government the way he ran his businesses, and we know that he ran his businesses dictatorially with no regard for laws or regulations. His company was found guilty of decades of fraudulent activity by a New York Court and fined nearly a billion dollars. But it was Trump’s recent comments about “the enemy within” that so troubled Kelly, he felt he had to speak out. Trump has been telling his rallies that these enemies, among whom he included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her husband, and California representative Adam Schiff, should be arrested, and that they should be executed. Moreover, the U. S. military should be employed to root out people like them who are destroying our country.

The idea that a president would use American soldiers against American citizens, something that is clearly unconstitutional, was the breaking point for Kelly. He characterized Trump as “the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about.” What Kelly most fears is Trump’s refusal to accept that senior government officials and military leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. Trump believes their loyalty should be to him, personally, and Kelly who dealt with third world dictators for much of his career, believes Trump would attempt to govern the way they do. He believes Trump has no understanding of either history or our Constitution and is completely lacking in empathy.

If you have experience with the military, you know how strongly General Kelly had to feel about the danger Trump poses to the country to break with protocols that have guided him throughout his professional life. For people like him and  Milley to believe it’s necessary to speak out against a former president who is attempting to return to office is astonishing. It makes the well-publicized feud between General Douglas MacArthur and President Truman look like a difference of opinion about the weather.

Those of us who understand the patterns of history and respect the integrity of our military leaders must take Kelly and Milley seriously. Yet, the chaos Trump has used to overwhelm truth seems to have blinded many people to the reality of the threat he poses. When CNN interviewed Ford employees in Michigan yesterday, I was shocked to hear an apparently intelligent, eloquent worker tell the reporter that Trump doesn’t really mean the things he says – it’s just his act.

I understand why someone might think that. As my writer friends have said, if the last nine years of Trump were a novel, no one would believe it. It boggles the minds of average citizens that someone running for president could be as venal and dangerous as Trump, thus many people conclude he couldn’t possibly be what he really is. If that view prevails over the next few weeks, I fear for our country in a way I never have before.

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Sometimes, It Takes a Historian

Posted on October 22, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 22, 2024

In 2016, many factors combined to enable Donald Trump to defeat Hilary Clinton. In light of all that’s happened since Barack Obama was elected in 2008, an important factor that has critical importance today has been largely overlooked.

The thing that most defined Clinton’s campaign was her adage, “It takes a village,” a message that is the epitome of people working together and cooperating for the common good. It implies a social structure best characterized by the Israeli kibbutz system, wherein villages short on resources but long on responsibilities optimize their effectiveness by thinking and acting communally.

Trump calls this Communism, because it’s the polar opposite of his populism that’s based on dividing people and pitting them against each other. It’s important to understand, as we near the end of the 2024 election, that the hate and fear being generated in this campaign are not incidental side effects of Trump’s antics, but a deliberately intended outcome. He thrives on chaos and discord. He has understood since his days of hobnobbing with mobsters and his mentor, Roy Cohn, that truth is a fragile, malleable thing that is usually the first casualty of chaos.

Reinventing truth is the most common tool used by wannabe dictators and autocrats, as George Orwell brilliantly illustrated in his classic, 1984. It was used by fascists in the 1930s to bring Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to power. It was used by Josef Stalin to crush the liberal aftereffects of the Russian Revolution and by Vladimir Putin to try to reassemble the Soviet Union, and it is the favorite tool of Kim Jong Un.

Clinton’s and Trump’s contrasting styles truly represented the ongoing struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, between people exercising free will and being subjugated. These things awaken basic atavistic tendencies in all of us, which is why our present circumstances are so shocking to Americans who grew up believing in our Constitution and the basic values that caused our predecessors to revolt against a vicious monarchy.

Trump wants to make this election about personal grievances. He plays on the envy of the Have-Nots for the wealthy, on class struggles and bigotry, and on a basic human need to protect what’s theirs against people who would take it away. Thus, the demonization of immigrants and the odd combination of increased anti-Semitism and fearmongering aimed at Muslims. But the fear and anger that results causes most people to ignore the greater threat. Trump has told us in the clearest possible terms that he is the greatest threat to American democracy since the British tried to take it back in 1812.

I and many others have written about the striking contrast between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the tactics Hitler used to turn the struggling Weimar Republic into a Nazi dictatorship that nearly destroyed Europe and resulted in the deaths of 75 million people. I thought as I was writing, that the parallels were so clear, I didn’t need to be a historian to understand or communicate them. But that was before I discovered Heather Richardson, a Boston College professor of history whose career has been focused on the evolution of the Republican Party, beginning with Abraham Lincoln.

When I read Richardson’s posting in today’s Letters from an American, I realized that it does take a skilled historian to lay all this out properly so that every American can clearly see the danger posed by Donald Trump. I urge every American, especially those who are still undecided about who to vote for, to read it. Told through the eyes of Dorothy Thompson, a pioneering American journalist who resided in Berlin during Hitler’s ascendancy, it explains why Donald Trump is so dangerous.

We’ve all sat through history lectures that tortuously attempted to make an event that happened centuries ago seem relevant to us. But Richardson’s presentation today is so striking it can’t be ignored. Her comparison of Hitler’s rise to power and his ability to destroy every pillar of a democratic republic in a mere four months in office will shock you, because Hitler’s own words about his intentions sound exactly like Donald Trump’s. Perhaps that’s why Trump’s appointed leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, describes Trump as a Fascist to his core.

As entertaining as pundit James Carville can be, he’s wrong this election cycle. It’s not “about the economy, stupid.” It’s also not about the lies about what caused our massive inflation, the importance of NATO or whether we can pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to show humanity toward Palestinian civilians. This election is about one thing: the rule of law and survival of our democratic republic. In seventeen weeks, Hitler abolished his Parliament, destroyed the free press, emasculated Germany’s courts, and outlawed opposition political parties. Anyone Hitler perceived as an enemy was deported, arrested, murdered, or sent to concentration camps.

Please click on the link and read Richardson’s column, then review Trump’s own words which he repeats daily to arouse his base, and form your own conclusions. An occasional dose of real history can be very enlightening.

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Americans’ Changed Temperaments

Posted on October 21, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 21, 2024

People who are seriously concerned about the prospects of another Trump presidency are in woe-is-me mode as they watch Trump’s antics on the campaign trail become more erratic, profane, and deranged. Yet, the other half of the country thinks Trump is great entertainment. With fifteen days until the election ends (it’s already going on in several states,) it’s urgent that Kamala Harris’s campaign staff get their own heads on straight.

Trump is mentally ill and failing physically, but I don’t buy the hype that his bizarre behavior means he’s cognitively impaired. All the hand-wringing and lamenting over his inappropriate behavior isn’t doing Harris or her supporters any good. In fact, it’s helping Trump. Every time his words or actions stir up a media frenzy, (in other words, every day between now and November 5th,) it drowns out the serious message Harris offers.

We don’t know whether Trump is deranged or this is merely an extension of his ability to create chaos, and that only matters if it helps Harris find a path through the madness. That doesn’t address the question of why nearly half the country seems poised to vote for Trump. It’s an issue that will generate hundreds of scholarly books, as “experts” in human behavior seeking a new career path seize on analyzing Trump. But that will all occur long after this election has been decided, assuming Trump is unable to appoint a book-banning czar.

Whichever interpretation is correct, Trump is getting what he wants. He was crude and offensive at the Al Smith dinner, but despite all the criticism, he walked away with a photograph of himself and the Cardinal who hosted the event that he can display whenever he targets church groups. For nine years, the broadcast media have fallen for this trap, either deliberately or inadvertently enabling Trump’s chaos.

Albert Einstein said that continuing to do something that always leads to failure is the definition of insanity. Yet, that’s exactly what Harris’s campaign staff and all the rest of us have been doing. Calling Trump unfit and unhinged may be accurate, but it only seems to make his antics more entertaining. Forget about Trump’s and Harris’s bases for a moment. What are the few centrists and independents who have yet to make up their minds to think?

A discussion of Arnold Palmer’s penis won’t influence them any more than hearing Harris repeatedly tell them Trump is dangerous, no matter how true that is. More likely, Trump’s constant litany of apparent craziness will convince them to stay home on election day, which is precisely what Trump wants. Low turnout = Trump victory.

The urgent matter at hand is understanding Trump’s appeal and finding a way to counter it before it’s too late. Trump has shown himself to be a despicable human being who always puts himself first and has no concept of morality or decency. Foreign leaders are in two camps, one consisting of people like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orban, and Kim Jong Un, who cozy up to Trump because they know they can manipulate him to their advantage. The other is the one where most of our allies sit. They are horrified by Trump, and as mystified as we are about how America got here.

How do we break through to voters who are still listening? Many of them will watch CNN’s Town Hall Wednesday evening. Harris’s team needs to prepare differently. When the inevitable question about inflation is asked, they must remember that her target audience is the well-educated center. She should play the videos from 2020, during the COVID lockdown, in which farmers told us that with markets closed they were having to destroy their herds and crops. They explained that everything would be dirt cheap in 2020, but in the following years they would have to replant and rebuild their herds from scratch.

With supply chain shortages, food and other vital commodities would be scarce and very expensive. Next, she could reprise videos of economists explaining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created a critical energy shortage that caused gasoline prices in America to exceed $5.00 a gallon. She should invite a reputable economist to explain why it takes time to counter runaway inflation, and how Biden/Harris’s policies brought inflation back to normal, while averting a recession. Record low unemployment, record high equity markets, lowering interest rates – that’s what voters care about.

When the January 6th insurrection comes up, Harris should replay the statements of Trump supporters like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and MAGA Republicans running for the Senate who publicly lambasted Trump on January 7th, but now hope voters have forgotten. Finally, she should read choice excerpts from Project 2025, and identify which of Trump’s key allies wrote them. No noise, no hype, just a respectful discussion with people whose minds are still open.

The change in Americans’ temperaments that made so many of them adore Trump must remain a mystery for now. Harris and her supporters must reach the relatively sane middle, every day until November 5th.

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Making Fries at McDonald’s

Posted on October 20, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 20, 2024

As if this election season couldn’t get any stranger, the center point of the presidential campaign has turned to McDonald’s. I understand why people were concerned when Tim Walz appeared to imply that he had carried a weapon in a combat zone, but I’m still scratching my head over why Donald Trump seems obsessed with whether Kamala Harris really worked at McDonald’s in 1983 while she was a college student.

Accusing her of lying and demanding that she produce evidence that she once made fries at McDonald’s is truly bizarre. He’s treating this nonsense the same way he carried on about whether Barack Obama was an American citizen. Anyone else who said such things would be ridiculed. Trump is being ridiculed, but he doesn’t care. Is that part of his ongoing crazy act or is he really losing it?

It’s a complicated question. Trump has always enjoyed portraying himself as eccentric and willing to say things others wouldn’t, always treading the fine line between good taste and outrageous lies and name-calling. It’s central to his brand. Is he doing it because he thinks his base loves it or because he understands how effective it is in keeping the chaos pot boiling? Or are his critics right? Everyone not already planning to vote for Trump finds new reasons every day to claim he’s unhinged, and his behavior seems to feed those criticisms.

If that were all there was, I’d be on the fence about whether Trump is really losing it, but there’s much more to this pattern. Why would someone attend an iconic Catholic event hosted by the Archbishop of New York, tell the audience that Kamala Harris was born stupid and suggest that her husband is likely to hit on white house pages if she’s elected? Why would this man who treats the English language like his own polluted playground, while struggling to read from his notes, suggest that Harris is incapable of “stringing two coherent sentences together?” If anything is clear to voters about Harris, it’s that she is an accomplished orator and debater.

Why would anyone, with seventeen days remaining before the election spend time at a rally telling the crowd how impressive (he thinks) Arnold Palmer’s penis was? We might argue about whether he’s becoming more unstable every day or that’s just part of his weird act. But when we consider that in the context of hundreds of Republicans, including the most influential members of his own cabinet and his Vice President telling us that he is unfit to serve, we really have to wonder. Could all those impressive people who worked closely with or for Trump and all give us the same message be wrong or part of some mythical deep state conspiracy?

Ever since Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump has steadily turned up the volume on his weird behavior. We might attribute that to stress in the final days leading up to an election. But there are literally thousands of people running for office. Except for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, do you hear any serious candidate spout the crazy things that come out of Trump’s mouth?

There’s a much better, defensible reason for Trump sounding more irrational and desperate every day. His likely fate if he loses the election would unhinge anyone, and for someone like Trump who can never be wrong and who suffers from a serious psychiatric disorder, anything the rest of us might do in his situation is greatly exaggerated. Intentional or not, his words and actions are those of someone who has no filters or guardrails. Any discerning observer can see that much of his behavior is unintentional – he’s simply out of control. I can’t imagine a quality that would terrify me more in a president.

When you have to make a critical decision, would you let unbridled emotion overwhelm your ability to think rationally? Thousands of people are being killed in two serious wars right now. In one case, Trump’s response is influenced by his need to think Valdimir Putin respects him, while most of us see that Putin manipulates Trump the way a pedophile uses candy. In the other, Trump’s need to undermine the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the war in the Middle East and feel loved by Benjamin Netanyahu take precedence over the future of hundreds of millions of people in the region.

Donald Trump knows that if he loses the election, his legacy will be destroyed. His trials will move forward, and he will almost certainly be convicted of very serious felonies that make his fraud convictions in the Stormy Daniels case look a friendly disagreement. The only way he will avoid spending time in prison is if sympathetic judges consider his mental health and decide that locking him up isn’t worth the problems it would cause.

Does Trump’s behavior make more sense now?

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The Bushes are AWOL

Posted on October 15, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 15, 2024

Real Conservative Republicans, the ones Donald Trump, in a classic reverse projection, calls RINOs have been standing up in droves to denounce Trump and endorse Kamala Harris. I subscribe to former Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s definition of Conservative in his Conscience of a Conservative. Former Senator Jeff Flake, also an Arizona Republican and Goldwater’s protégé, published his own version that speaks directly to the lie that the MAGA movement has anything to do with Conservatism.

According to Goldwater and Flake, Conservatives cannot coexist with lies, immoral behavior, and criminal acts. They prefer low taxes for all Americans and balanced budgets. They believe that entitlement programs are necessary, but are sometimes ineffiient and counterproductive, and they value integrity and adherence to the Constitution. Is there anything in that definition that sounds like Donald Trump? When I read Flake’s book, I was surprised that I agreed with almost everything he wrote, my only real disagreements being where to draw the line on government spending.

President Ronald Reagan was a Goldwater Conservative. His Vice President, George H. W. Bush, was another. Fifty years ago, when Reagan first touted trickle-down economics, Bush referred to it as “Voodoo economics,” but as happens in politics, he was persuaded to embrace it, which he continued to do when he succeeded Reagan as president in 1988. Despite Republicans traditionally supporting the wealthiest Americans, that is the only similarity between Reagan/Bush Conservatism and MAGA’s distorted definition.

Neither Reagan nor Bush would have supported Trump. Nor would Bush’s sons Jeb and George W. We know because the two most powerful people in the younger Bush’s cabinet, policy gurus Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, both told us. Cheney told the media that in our 248-year history there has never been a candidate as dangerous as Trump, and his daughter, Liz, donning her father’s mantle as protector of Conservative values, voted to impeach Trump and has joined the Harris campaign.

In recent months, an unprecedented number of prominent Republicans at all levels of federal, state, and local governments have endorsed Harris over Trump. The list includes 238 former staffers of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and John McCain, and senior officials who served under Reagan and both Bushes. It includes Trump’s ultra-loyal Vice President, Mike Pence, former Secretaries of Defense and National Security Advisors, military leaders, national security advisors, aides and analysts, and more than 100 former Republican House and Senate members. The very long list also includes General Mark Milley, who Trump appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Conspicuously missing from the above are former President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, a former Florida Governor. If you remember back to Trump’s first campaign, at a time when Americans had never before met such a shameless, slanderous, immoral candidate for a major party’s nomination for president, you’ll recall that the one of Trump’s opponents was Jeb Bush. You’ll also recall that Trump savaged Bush at his rallies and on the debate stage.

He referred to Jeb and his brother, the former president, as weak and stupid, and W as one of the worst presidents in our history. I thought W made some terrible decisions as president, like ignoring the fact that almost all of the nine-eleven terrorists were Saudis, and the attack that day was funded by Saudi oil money. But because of his family’s relationship with the Saudi royal family, he used faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. I disagreed with much of what the Bushes did in office, but as politicians go, they were honorable, decent men.

Today’s Republican Party bears little resemblance to the party of Reagan and the Bushes. For anyone in the Bush family to claim party loyalty as a reason to not campaign against Trump is inexplicable, but it is especially so for W. He was president for eight years that included the worst attack executed on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Whether or not he was a great president, he possessed a conscience and a sense of decency. Unlike Trump he is neither a racist nor a xenophobe. Most important, he, like his father and his most prominent appointees all revered our Constitution.

I have to ask – why, President Bush, haven’t you added your voice to the anti-Trump uproar? What could possibly justify remaining silent at a time when most of your colleagues and allies have had the courage to speak out against the gross unfitness of the man who openly craves unlimited power and an end to constitutional law?

George W. Bush’s voice could tip undecided voters away from Trump and toward Harris. Surely, he knows this, yet we haven’t heard a peep out of him. Maybe I’m expecting too much from a man who prematurely declared victory aboard an aircraft carrier as he was getting us dragged into a misguided eighteen-year conflict.

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