The heartless Trump

The mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, frustrated by the federal government's inarguably ineffective recovery efforts to date, hurled a damning accusation: "We are dying and you are killing us with the inefficiency". She didn't name names (that I can see), but it's clear that acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke was one target. Duke claimed that the recovery effort from Hurricane Maria was, in many respects, "a good news story", and she has been taking figurative rotten tomatoes for that spectacularly wrong statement ever since.

Yet an attack on a Cabinet secretary is almost always an attack on the current president, too, and if there's one thing we can count on, it's that the unbelievably thin-skinned Dear Leader is always up for an unnecessary fight. In tweets (of course), he suggested the mayor was a Democratic tool, was showing "poor leadership ability", and that the people of Puerto Rico "are not able to get their workers to help" and "want everything to be done for them".

Oh, fuck off, you sorry, short-fingered son of a bitch.

You have no fucking idea what it's like to recover from a disaster.

You have no fucking idea what it's like to be hungry and thirsty and without a place to sleep.

You have no fucking idea what condition Puerto Rico's in or you wouldn't have fucking dared to shoot your tiny fingers off on Twitter.

You are a pampered, privileged, useless fucking waste of space.

The one thing the U.S. President is supposed to be able to do is to see to the needs of victims of disaster. It doesn't require extensive knowledge (thank God, since you have none about anything). It requires only the common decency to be able to put yourself in the victims' shoes, to imagine what it would be like not to be able to secure the most basic of human needs. Then, as President, you just have to make sure the first responders and support staff who do have specialized and extensive knowledge of how to help people can get in and do their job.

The federal government has people who can do the job. A lot of the supplies have reached Puerto Rico.

What the effort lacks is anybody with the authority or will to make shit happen.

Isn't "making shit happen" supposed to be a lifelong businessman's specialty?

What the fuck are you, our vaunted businessman president, doing? You're sure as shit not making anything happen in Puerto Rico. Only in your delusional dreams is aid reaching the people who need it.

But then, why should that surprise me? Puerto Ricans don't look like you and they don't have any money, so of course their fate doesn't matter to you. The fate of ordinary Texans and Floridians didn't, either, but you know a lot of wealthy folks in those states who are important to your political survival. It was nice to hear all those English-speaking Southerners saying nice things about the administration's relief efforts, and the visuals of them on cable news was not just a political boost but an ego boost as well, so, um, yeah, that all worked out. But it was really the rich donors who were on your mind. Puerto Rico's lack of such donors means the island — very much a part of the country you allegedly lead — just doesn't engage your interest.

Doesn't engage your interest, that is, unless somebody dares to tell you in the most public way that you're not doing your job. That gets your attention.

If you were an adult, you'd be more concerned about how well (or badly) the effort was going than what people were saying about you. But you never grew up. You're still four years old, only capable of understanding the world as it relates to you.

This failure to grow up left you emotionally deficient. You have a hole where your heart should be.

And that deficiency has had and will continue to have tragic consequences for the rest of us.

All I need to know about Trump's tax overhaul

Dear Leader had this to say about his tax overhaul proposal:

“Tax reform will protect low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected,” Mr. Trump said, framing a proposal that would affect hundreds of millions of Americans in terms of his own self-interest. “I’m doing the right thing, and it’s not good for me, believe me.”

You've heard of gamblers' tells? "Believe me" is Dear Leader's. When he says that, he's lying.

So his proposal will be good for him if it's enacted. Color me shocked.

Even so, his profiteering — like his corruption, his contempt for law and justice, and instinct for authoritarianism — must be resisted.

Trump doesn't understand patriotism

Dear Leader's attitude toward athletes who kneel or otherwise don't acknowledge the national anthem is of a piece with his shallow understanding of, well, everything.

Al Franken memorably described the difference between how some conservatives understand love of country versus how many liberals do:

We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world. That’s why we liberals want America to do the right thing. We know America is the hope of the world, and we love it and want it to do well.

Here's how the New York Times described Dear Leader's attempt at nuance:

Mr. Trump told reporters that his comments had “nothing to do with race or anything else — this has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”

Of course he thinks his statements are only about "respect for our flag": he cannot comprehend a complex love of country that includes criticism of that country's shortcomings. Moreover, he rejects the idea that race relations today are, at best, fraught.

The idea that Dear Leader's simplemindedness qualifies him to lecture anyone on patriotism is at best asinine. In fact, it's offensive.

Graham-Cassidy ain't dead yet

John McCain came out against Lindsey Graham's and Bill Cassidy's ACA repeal bill. He's the third Republican senator to announce his opposition, meaning that Republicans don't have the fifty votes they need to pass the bill before a 30 September deadline imposes a 60-vote requirement. Cue the jubilation among the Affordable Care Act's supporters, right?

I wouldn't be so sure.

Mitch McConnell announced that a floor vote would take place next Wednesday, the 27th. Granting that five days isn't much time, it's still enough time for McConnell to find an inducement for McCain if the majority leader wants McCain's vote badly enough. It's also enough time for McConnell and others to work on Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, whose opposition to the bill isn't quite as firm as Democrats'.

Bottom line: we've been here before. The Republican zeal to kill the ACA is bottomless. There are also external pressures on the party to follow through on what it has made one of its defining goals for the last eight years.

This zombie keeps coming back, and it won't stop until Republicans stop thinking of repeal as one of their party's core principles.

To speed the party along, I'd like to remind both Republican voters and Republican politicians that you should always be guided by what's best for the country. You have been unable to convince yourselves, much less the rest of us, that your proposals to kill the ACA would be a net boon for the country. You Republican politicians sound like utterly amoral party hacks: "If we do nothing [to repeal the ACA], I think it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections. And whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel." Jesus H. Christ, you want to repeal because it's good for your election prospects, repeal's effects on actual people be damned?

You politicians have lost all perspective. You hold to your principles because a generation of far-right voters have lost their perspective: they deem keeping promises more important than getting anything done. They (and you) have forgotten that not everyone else agrees with them and that sometimes you have to compromise; indeed, they've turned "compromise" into an expletive, an accusation to be shot like a bullet at anyone who dares to seek common ground.

If Democrats finally came to terms with some of Reagan's policies, Republicans can come to terms with some of Obama's. You guys have got to give up on trying to erase the first black president from history. Get over your visceral distaste for him and figure out what else you can do that doesn't alienate over half the country, for crying out loud.

Until that happens, the rest of us will have to keep our axes sharp and shotguns loaded because that damned zombie will keep coming back.

Huckabee, the Trump apologist

In an interview in The Atlantic, Mike Huckabee talks about both religious faith and Donald Trump in ways that highlight his enormous blind spots.

About Dear Leader's relationship to Christianity Huckabee has this to say:

Nobody pretends that he would be an ideal Sunday-school teacher, to be fair. I don’t think he is a person who is deeply acquainted with the Bible and he’s not known to set attendance records at church. But he’s very respectful of people of faith. And that’s really all people in the Christian community want. They don’t care whether or not the guy believes as they do. They just want someone who will respect their beliefs, and not denigrate them, and not try to use the power of government to silence them. And he’s been very adamant and clear that he believes in religious liberty, believes that people’s beliefs should be protected.

So for Huckabee the question is a leader's "respect" for "people of faith". That sounds nice and nondenominational, properly acknowledging the First Amendment's requirement that government neither promote nor suppress any faith. Yet in insisting that "people's beliefs should be protected", he ignores the possibility that the demands of different faiths might conflict with one another. How are such conflicts to be resolved without infringing on what one sect or another regards as its sacred rights?

Being concerned solely with "religious liberty", Huckabee also ignores the rights of those who claim adherence to no religious faith. What rights do the non-religious have in Huckabee's world? I strongly doubt he has ever thought seriously about that, or is in any way worried about it.

Now, about that pesky business of Trump's, um, let's call them moral transgressions — his misogyny and objectification of women, his decided difficulty rejecting white supremacist and neo-Nazi support, his easy embrace of violence in his rhetoric (and his absurd denials that his words amount to incitement), his flagrant profiteering in office (which is winding its way through the courts in little-watched lawsuits), etc. — well, Huckabee is prepared to wave them all off:

To me, character is if you’re the same in public as you are in private, and I think that in many ways, that’s what’s appealing about him. ... But some of the more harsh things that have been attributed to him were things that were said many years ago, and there’s been no indication that during his campaign and during his presidency has he said things that would cause people to just be aghast at what he had said. We’ve had presidents that have done things while they were in the Oval Office that frankly were very destructive and embarrassing. And I don’t think anybody has made those allegations about this president.

Wow. Talk about alternative facts.

Yes, many of the things that outraged people about Trump during the campaign were old statements dug up from years before. You know something? Time did not stale their outrageousness. More to the point, he kept saying outrageous and offensive things during the campaign! He kicked off his campaign by equating Mexicans to rapists, for pity's sake! He repeatedly denigrated the entire religion of Islam! He mocked John McCain for being a prisoner of war! (That would have been offensive even if he had served in the military, but he didn't.)

And nobody has alleged Dear Leader has done "destructive and embarrassing" things while in office? Now we've gone from Denial-ville into Liar-land. Dear Leader shared highly classified intelligence with the diplomatic representatives of a hostile nation, for crying out loud! He fired the head of the FBI for refusing to kill an investigation into allegations of foreign interference with the election! He has admitted doing these things, and they're just the tip of the iceberg!

Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, how stupid do you think we are? Or perhaps the question ought to be, how compromised are your own ethics, since you seem quite comfortable lying on Dear Leader's behalf?

Finally, let's unpack that business of "character". A moderately smart seven-year-old could find the flaw in Huckabee's characterization of "character" as "you’re the same in public as you are in private". I mean, Stalin by all accounts was as cold-blooded and indifferent to the well-being of others in private as he was in public. There is no evidence "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli is any more (or less) of a self-aggrandizing, self-justifying putz in private than in public.

Maybe Huckabee's focused on hypocrisy because it is one of the few vices Dear Leader arguably doesn't evince. Of course, the reason DL doesn't evince it is that hypocrisy requires that you honor a principle publicly but not privately, and DL doesn't honor principle at all: he is purely transactional in his beliefs (in fact, it's hard to say he has any).

Or maybe Huckabee's focused on hypocrisy because organized religion is rife with hypocritical leaders, so the foible is always on his mind. Your mileage may vary.

In any case, pretending that character can be reduced to not being a hypocrite is beyond laughable. That pretense delegitimizes Huckabee as a pundit. He's nothing more than a shill for Dear Leader.

Trump, Pelosi and Schumer

The headline says it all: "Pelosi and Schumer Say They Have Deal With Trump to Replace DACA".

For some reason this story has gotten a lot of attention. People seem to be treating it as a Big Deal (no apologies for the pun).

I'm not holding my breath.

Dear Leader doesn't honor anything he has said if doing so would hurt him. He doesn't even honor the contracts he signs.

Pelosi and Schumer, whatever their failings, aren't stupid enough to take Dear Leader's words at face value. Nor are they stupid enough to try passing off a bare-faced lie themselves: they, unlike Dear Leader, could never get away with it.

So they must have struck a deal they're confident he won't renege on, which means they must have given him something he wants. But what?

All I can imagine is that they promised Democratic support for administration priorities down the line. Tax reform is the most obvious possibility if only because it will be the subject of the last Congressional push of the year, but what could Pelosi and Schumer have promised that would both satisfy Dear Leader and not spark all-out rebellion among progressive members of the party?

Infrastructure spending offers much more room for common ground, but it's hard to see how a Republican-dominated Congress can be forced to tackle this before the midterms next year.

Moreover, any Democratic-supported proposals, whatever the issue, must attract enough support from moderate Republicans, that most endangered species, to overcome the intractable resistance of hardline right-wingers. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell also have to be brought on board and it's hard to see how that will happen if they see themselves being rolled not just by the minority Democrats, but by Dear Leader as well. (Will Dear Leader switch party affiliations while in office? I'm long past thinking anything is beyond him.)

Finally, grass-roots Democrats are a looming threat. They — we — hated W. Our feelings toward Dear Leader, though, are an order of magnitude more hostile. He has been so much more antagonistic to minorities of all stripes, so much more ardent an authoritarian, so much more contemptuous of the rule of law, and so much cozier with bigots and anti-intellectual frauds than W, that he has accomplished the impossible by making 43 look good by comparison. Cutting deals with this most loathed of presidents carries the risk that progressives will mutiny.

Dear Leader is so unprincipled and feckless that it's impossible to imagine any lasting deal with him. He and the Democratic leadership were allies of convenience in the fight to raise the debt ceiling, but that alliance is not a basis for a lasting relationship. If Nancy and Chuck think otherwise, count on Donnie to disappoint them.