From the White House to the Big House?

A pro-Trump billboard in a largely Hispanic neighborhood of Houston was defaced this week. Its new message: “Take Trump to Prison.”

“Vote for Change. Vote for Her.”

From News and Guts: “A powerful new ad by the Lincoln Project looks at Donald Trump’s treatment of women through the eyes of young girls. Sarah Lenti, executive director of the Lincoln Project wrote, ‘As a nation, we’ve been blessed to have amazing women as role models in both parties, but only one ever one president who treats our gender writ large with such disdain.’”​

“Rough Night?” “Rough Four Years.”

What a Mess Trump Has Made of America!

Two new ads remind us of what has been lost. First, the Lincoln Project imagines what it would be like to wake up from a coma in 2020:



Second, check out this too-honest Trump parody ad from Juice Media:

“What the Hell Are You Doing Here?”

This beautiful clip from a February 2000 episode of The West Wing, “Take This Sabbath Day,” often comes to mind when I hear about Trump’s multiplying failures, scandals, and incompetent acts.

Since January 2017, the United States has had to endure presidential corruption, payoffs to porn stars, impeachment, escalating White House-coddled racism and white nationalism, a pandemic, mass unemployment, a rising recession, tear-gassing of protestors, federal forces invading our cities, and LIES, LIES, LIES, and more LIES. How many signs do we need of Trump’s unfitness for office and authoritarian bent before we save ourselves and get rid of him?

The “Wartime” President Surrenders

Trump narrates the Lincoln Project’s new attack ad, which presents a brutal timeline of his response to the coronavirus pandemic, beginning with his statement on January 22: “We have it totally under control. One person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

The Cover America Most Wants to See

“You Know You Can’t Trust This President to Do What’s Right for This Country. You Can Trust He Will Do What’s Right for Donald Trump.”

U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-California) delivered eloquent closing arguments during Day 3 of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. As Esquire magazine’s Jack Holmes wrote:

Schiff's speech was brilliant because it didn't spend additional time on the established facts of the case, which no one seriously disputes, and got to the more essential issue: Donald Trump will never prioritize the interests of the United States—as he pledged to in his oath of office—over his personal interests. He is not capable of it. The evidence lies in his repeated calls for foreign countries to attack our democracy for his personal gain. The evidence lies in the bribe palaces he's running in hotels across the world, where some have started buying up huge blocs of rooms and not even bothering to stay in many of them. The Constitution is worth nothing to him because it does not benefit him personally. Neither is anything we might recognize as our national idea. Neither is the truth. He must be removed before his pathological self-interest can do any more damage than it already has.

No less impressed was The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who observes that “Representative Adam B. Schiff, the former federal prosecutor who has steered the House impeachment investigation into President Trump, secured his place as a liberal rock star—and villain to conservatives—with the fiery closing argument he delivered Thursday night, imploring senators to convict and remove Mr. Trump because ‘you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country.’ By Friday morning, the phrase #RightMatters—from the last line of Mr. Schiff’s speech—was trending as a hashtag on Twitter, which was lighting up with reaction from across the philosophical spectrum.”

Walter Dellinger, a former acting U.S. solicitor general and a professor emeritus of law at Duke University, declared on Twitter that Schiff was “not just good,” but that he gave “one of the most impressive performances by a lawyer I have ever seen.”

None of this, however, guarantees that Republicans in the Senate will ultimately find courage enough to put their country before their petty partisanship and vote to remove Trump from the White House. None of this can stop Trump from lying to his cult-like followers, whining to them about how he’s been the victim of a “witch hunt” and is completely innocent of using his public power for private gain. (Do even those Republican senators likely to acquit Trump in this impeachment trial really believe he’s done nothing wrong here? Probably not.) And none of the powerful arguments put forth by Schiff and his fellow Democratic impeachment managers for Trump’s inglorious removal from office can ensure that the majority of Americans will vote for the Democratic presidential nominee in November, to rid the nation of a narcissistic chief executive with aspirations to become a dictator.

But at least for this moment, amid the powerful cadences of Adam Schiff’s Thursday night address, Americans living free of the Trump cult can know that their low opinions of Trump’s behavior, intelligence, and character; their fears about what damage he might yet do to the nation’s moral standing, international reputation, and strength as a democratic republic; and their increasing anger at Trump’s efforts to position himself above the law have been given voice.

That’s no small matter.

READ MORE: “Schiff Closes With a ‘Love Letter to Truth and Democracy,’” by Nancy LeTourneau (Washington Monthly).

A Historic Condemnation

Yesterday added a sad but necessary event to America’s timeline: the impeachment of Donald John Trump. Sad, because the office of the U.S. president is traditionally due respect, but Trump’s corrupt and unconstitutional efforts to pressure a foreign country (Ukraine) to interfere in the 2020 presidential campaign for his personal gain, and then his going to extraordinary lengths to cover up that perfidy, brings shame upon the office. Necessary, because as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-New York) put it, “We cannot rely on the next election as a remedy for presidential misconduct when the president threatens the very integrity of that election. He has shown us he will continue to put his selfish interests above the good of the country. We must act without delay.”

I didn’t vote for Republican Trump in 2016, and I never shall; I don’t believe he’s fit, either emotionally or intellectually, to fill the position he holds. What I have learned about him over the last few years—that he’s a bigot, a misogynist, a narcissist, and a serial sex abuser; that he cheats on his wives and demands loyalty from others, but will turn on anyone when the going gets tough; that he’s a braggart and a bully, a whiner and a con man; that he’s petty and paranoia, driven by grievance and a sucker for conspiracy theories; that he’s a habitual liar—none of those characteristics commends him as a leader or a role model, or even as a man.

Trump’s mendacity is particularly pernicious. It drew special attention earlier this week, when The Washington Post counted the lies he’s told over the last three years, and came up with 7,688. One of those became Politifact’s 2019 Lie of the Year: his assertion that the still-anonymous whistle-blower who first drew public attention to Trump’s Ukraine scandal was “almost completely wrong.” A more honorable, more thoughtful, and more experienced president would not be due such denunciations.

READ MORE: “‘We’ve Seen Enough’: More Than a Dozen Editorial Boards Call for Trump’s Impeachment,” by Hannah Knowles (The Washington Post); “More Than 700 Scholars Pen Letter Urging House to Impeach Trump,” by Felicia Sonmez (The Washington Post): “Impeachment Is a Permanent Stain on Trump’s Presidency,” by Lili Loofbourow (Slate); “Opinion: Impeached Trump Forever Branded a Constitutional Criminal,” by Adalia Woodbury (PoliticusUSA).

Robert Mueller’s Indictment Song

To start your week off on a regrettable but still hopeful note! From The Late Late Show with James Corden:

Only One Party Is Committed to Democracy

Illustration for Washington Monthly by SmartBoy10.

From “Winning Is Not Enough,” editor-in-chief Paul Glastris’ article in the July/August 2018 issue of Washington Monthly:

There was a time when divided government didn’t have to mean bad government. That time has passed. If the Obama years showed anything, it is that, when in opposition, the modern Republican Party has no goal beyond blocking the Democratic agenda, whatever that may be, and will transgress hitherto undisputed democratic norms to do so. Operationally, the GOP’s governing objectives have devolved to two base goals: transferring wealth upward, and staying in power. Because the former goal is unpopular, achieving the latter increasingly requires the party to rely on anti-democratic means: voter ID laws and voter roll purges designed to suppress minority and youth turnout; hyper-partisan gerrymandering; filling the federal judiciary with ideological conservatives committed to weakening the power of unions and enhancing that of corporations; and so on. (That’s all on top of constitutional features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, that give the GOP representation that is out of proportion to its votes.)

The election of Donald Trump has pushed the Republican Party even further in this direction, to the point where it is now openly enabling corruption and autocracy. Republican leaders have tried to stymie the Russia investigation. They have supported Trump’s effort to get the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. They have refused to investigate his brazen violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution (from, among other things, foreign governments spending lavishly at Trump hotels). They have barely raised a word of protest, much less taken meaningful action, when Trump undermines relationships with America’s democratic allies, does favors for authoritarian adversaries, and says nice things about white nationalists here and abroad. Republican lawmakers uncomfortable with their party’s drift are being forced either to fall in line or leave office, because base GOP voters, fed by right-wing media, demand nothing less. Under such circumstances, no good—and a lot of harm—can come from Democrats losing Congress in 2022 and sharing power with the Republicans.

The fact that America now has only one party committed to small-d democracy changes everything. It’s no longer acceptable for Democrats to look at politics as a way to win the next election so as to jam through a bunch of their preferred policies before the Republicans inevitably take back power. They must instead see the purpose of politics as building sustained power for Democrats, period—but, unlike the other side, they must do this in part by strengthening the democratic process, not by undermining it. If passing this or that liberal policy helps in that effort, fine, pass it. If not, don’t. The overriding aim has to be getting and holding power—not for its own sake, but to keep the flame of democratic self-government alive unless and until the Republican Party abandons its authoritarian ways or is replaced by a new, small-d democratic party. Indeed, such a transition, which many committed conservatives and lifelong Republicans are now desperate to see happen, is only likely to come about if the Republican Party is locked out of power for several cycles in a row.

You can read all of Glastris’ piece here.

Rank Disapproval of Trump

This is Presidents Day here in the United States. What better occasion could there be to release a brand-new ranking of the best and worst chief executives in this nation’s history? The New York Times recently asked the 170 members of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section for their best assessments of all 44 men who have held America’s highest elected office. “Since our previous survey in 2014,” the paper observes, “some presidential legacies have soared (Barack Obama’s stock has climbed into the Top 10), while others have fallen (Andrew Jackson toppled to 15, out of the Top 10).” Meanwhile, “James Buchanan, who was at the helm as the United States careened into civil war, was dislodged from his position as our nation’s worst president by our current president, Trump.”

Here are the 10 presidents winning top honors, in order:

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Thomas Jefferson
6. Harry Truman
7. Dwight Eisenhower
8. Barack Obama
9. Ronald Reagan
10. Lyndon B. Johnson

At the other end of the list, these are the lowest-ranked 10:

35. Zachary Taylor
36. Herbert Hoover
37. John Tyler
38. Millard Fillmore
39. Warren G. Harding
40. Andrew Johnson
41. Franklin Pierce
42. William Henry Harrison
43. James Buchanan
44. Donald Trump

In his report on this Times survey, The Maddow Blog’s Steve Benen notes that low opinions of Trump’s performance in office are shared across the board by APSA members, regardless of their political leanings. “When the scholars are broken down by party affiliation,” Benen explains, “Trump ranks #44 among Democratic scholars, #43 among independents, and #40 among Republican scholars. In other words, according to scholars of every stripe, our current president is off to a truly abysmal start and is well on his way to historical ignominy.”

Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll of U.S. voters finds that Trump’s approval rating has fallen yet again. Only 37 percent of respondents have a favorable opinion of him, compared with 59 percent who harbor negative opinions of that mendacious former real-estate mogul.

READ MORE: “Donald Trump Is America’s Worst, 2nd Worst, or 5th Worst President,” by Kevin Drum (Mother Jones).

The Increasing Unfitness of Donald Trump

From The New Yorker, by David Remnick:

“A new book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, amplifies, in lurid anecdote and quotation, what we have been learning elsewhere every day for the past year: Trump believed that he would lose the election, but would multiply his fame, his fortune, and his standing in American life. To near-universal shock, however, he won. And the consequences followed. Trump has no comprehension of policy and cares about it less. He surrounds himself with aides who are either wildly incompetent or utterly defeated in their attempts to domesticate the mulish and bizarre object of their attention. There are no lingering illusions about the President’s capacities: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump ‘a fucking moron’ and spared us a denial. Wolff’s book, which leans heavily on interviews with Steve Bannon, makes it plain that pretty much everyone in the President’s circle agrees that he is, in terms of character and intellect, fantastically limited. There is no loyalty or deliberation in the White House, only a savage ‘Lord of the Flies’ sort of chaos. Each day is at once preposterous, poisonous, and dangerous. ...

“In the meantime, there is little doubt about who Donald Trump is, the harm he has done already, and the greater harm he threatens. He is unfit to hold any public office, much less the highest in the land. This is not merely an orthodoxy of the opposition; his panicked courtiers have been leaking word of it from his first weeks in office. The President of the United States has become a leading security threat to the United States.”

Can You Spot the Pattern Here?

Ben Jennings, The Guardian


“Blowhard,” by David Plunkert—The New Yorker,
August 28, 2017


The Economist, August 19-25, 2017


Der Spiegel, August 19, 2017

Yes, They Went There!

The New York Daily News is mocking Trump in a very big way for his support of right-wing congressional legislation that calls for cutting legal immigration in half, by accepting applicants only on a merit-based system for their job skills, education, and ability to speak English.



READ MORE: “Trump Supports Plan to Cut Legal Immigration by Half,” by Peter Baker (The New York Times).

Life in Trump’s America

“The End of a Once-Great Era” of U.S. Leadership

MSNBC political blogger Steve Benen, remarking on Donald
Trump’s decision today to pull the United States out of the two-year-old Paris Agreement on global climate change:

When the Paris accords were reached, the world looked to the United States to help lead the way, and the Obama administration was eager to carry the mantle. We vowed to work cooperatively with international partners, and in the process, we persuaded developing nations – many of which have economic incentives to pollute more, not less – to do the right thing. So many countries signed on to the agreement precisely because they saw American leadership at work.

Today, Trump told the world that ours is a country that won’t honor its commitments, won’t make decisions based on reason or evidence, and won’t even try to serve as a global leader anymore.

Let’s say Americans tire of Trump’s ridiculousness and elect a new president in 2020. It’s easy to imagine, in early 2021, that new president turning to the global community with fresh and heartfelt assurances. “Don’t worry, Trump is gone,” he or she will say. “You can trust the United States once more.”

But at that point, many around the world will choose not to listen – in part because they’ll have just seen an ignorant American president who thumbed his nose at 195 countries, deliberately abandoning our unique responsibilities, and in part because they’ll have no way of knowing when the American electorate might again elect someone of Trump’s ilk.

We’ve taken great pride in the modern era of our president being the Leader of the Free World, and today effectively marked the end of a once-great era. Donald J. Trump has managed to betray the climate, the world, America’s standing, and his own legacy in one fell swoop.

History will not be kind.

READ MORE: “The World Is Better Off If We Leave the Paris
Agreement,” by Susan Matthews (Slate); “Everything Conservatives Said About the Paris Climate Agreement Is Already Wrong,” by Jonathan Chait (New York).

Well, This Says It All

READ MORE: “Donald Trump Isn’t Going to Like This Magazine Cover,” by Ryan Grenoble (The Huffington Post); “European Magazines Go Dark with Their Trump Covers,” by Chas Danner (New York).

Too Late Already

I, for one, am tired of hearing people say we should give Trump a chance as president. Sorry, but ... no. I don’t base my opposition to Trump merely on the fact that I believe he will be a lousy, corrupt politician. I base it on the fact that he’s already proven himself to be a poor excuse for a man. He’s bigoted, homophobic, misogynistic, and a serial sex predator; he’s a greedy, bullying would-be autocrat with a narcissist complex; he’s a congenital liar, a con man, and he thinks Americans are too stupid to realize that he’s pulling the wool over their eyes, that he has no intention of doing anything he promises. I wouldn’t want Trump in MY house, much less the White House. So, no, I won’t give him a chance. In my book, he’s already shown himself unworthy of one.

What Every Trump Voter Should Hear

“I tried to be polite, but now I just don’t give a damn. Because let’s be honest, we don’t live in polite America anymore. We live in grab-’em-by-the-pussy America now. So thank you for that.”