gracchusdixit

With summer well underway, several million American tourists will visiting Europe, more than a few for the first time.  Many will return in slack-jawed wonder, awed by the immaculate roads, the fast and efficient trains and trams, the sprawling parks, the vast public spaces, and the magnificent monuments and museums that adorn the great cities of the continent.  They will come home, asking themselves why we, who live in the richest country on earth, cannot achieve something similar?

Why are our roads and bridges crumbling?  Why are we condemned to waste hundreds of hours stuck in traffic on highways riddled with potholes?  Why are the few trains we have little more than slow, lumbering hulks that lurch their way along miles of decrepit and dangerous track?  Why are so many of our largest cities blighted by trash, mile upon mile of cheap strip malls, and sheer ugliness?

There are other, less obvious, questions that might be asked, about the wretched state of our social as well as our physical assets. Why, for example, does the United States of America have the most expensive healthcare system in the world but some of the worst health statistics?  Why does the quality of our educational system lag behind nearly every major European country, not to mention Asian dynamos like Singapore? Why do the Europeans, and particularly the Scandinavians, appear to be so much happier and satisfied by their lives?

These are complex and vexing questions, of course, and simplistic answers would be misleading.  Nonetheless, one of the principal answers is a subject that we Americans are reluctant to discuss.  That answer is taxation.

We are constantly told that we pay some of the highest taxes in the world, that our tax dollars are being wasted, that cutting taxes would unleash entrepreneurial energy and lead to an economic boom, that such a boom would not only provide greater prosperity for everyone but solve much of what seems to ail the country.

Right-wing ideologues have been spinning this fairly tale for at least 30 years.  Indeed, the major rationale for the disastrous health care proposal now on offer in the Senate is that tax cuts for the richest Americans will somehow unfetter the free market, improve healthcare, lower medical costs, and drive down insurance premiums.  How all this is supposed to work in the real world is never explained.  Rather, it is asserted as a self-evident truth.

Every time this fairy tale has been put into practice, however, it has proved to be hopelessly and disastrously wrong.  There is little historical evidence that lower taxes fuel economic growth, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the free market is capable of providing quality health care at an affordable price.  If that were the case, then such a system would now be at work somewhere in the world.  No such system exists.

Although Republicans are correct when they say that our three principal “entitlement” programs—Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security—may someday become unsustainable, the problem doesn’t lie with the programs themselves.  It lies with the shop-worn “solutions” Republicans invariably propose:  (1) cut benefits to “rein in spending”; (2) cut taxes to “boost the economy”; (3) privatize government programs to produce more “efficiency”.  The heretical thought never seems to occur to these ideologues that a simpler, far more “efficient” solution would simply be to raise taxes and generate more revenue.

The main reason our physical and social infrastructure is such bad shape is that, far from paying some of the highest taxes in the world, we pay some of the lowest.  The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—OECD, for short—is a body of the 35 most advanced economies in the world, of which we are one.  The average tax burden in those countries—including all national, state, regional, and local taxes—is 36 percent of GDP.  The tax burden in the United States is 27 percent.  The only countries with lower tax burdens are Turkey, Chile, and Mexico, which scarcely qualify as models to be emulated.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, with a total tax burden of 50 percent, is Denmark.  Despite this “burden,” per capita wealth in Denmark is considerably higher than in the United States, that wealth is distributed more equitably, and in study after study, the egalitarian Danes declare themselves to be far more satisfied with the quality of their lives.

It is not my intention to suggest that a small, homogenous country of scarcely six million people at the northern edge of Europe can fairly be compared with a nation of more than three hundred million sprawling across an entire continent.   Denmark is not the United States of America.

But neither is the United States of America in any sense “normal”.   On the contrary, our fixation with cutting taxes at the expense of the most basic public investments is decidedly abnormal when compared with other advanced nations.  If we raised our taxes, not to the level of Denmark, but merely to the OCED average, we would produce an additional two trillion dollars a year:  enough to slash the national debt, balance the budget, rebuild our physical infrastructure, and secure the future of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We can continue to bemoan the fact that our crumbling infrastructure and inadequate public services resemble those of backward and underdeveloped nations, all the while we refuse to invest in them.   We can continue to lament the fact that we are financially underwater, all the while we refuse to pay down our deficits and debts.   We can continue to pretend that we are overtaxed, all the while we are woefully undertaxed.

As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.  As long as we refuse to pay the price of living in a modern, decent society, we will get what we deserve.  Which is exactly nothing.

As the nightmare of Donald Trump’s demented presidency drags on, one increasingly painful day at a time, we are constantly confronted by evidence of the fractious polarization of our society: political and informational “bubbles” that not only divide one part of the nation from another but alter their very perceptions of reality; social and economic enclaves that pit haves against have-nots; not merely disagreement, but outright hostility, between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, white Americans and everyone else.

All of this has been made worse by a corrosive cynicism about government and a sweeping distrust of those in charge.  No one is any longer immune from this distrust: not the media; not professional public servants; not even dispassionate and non-partisan scientists.  It is as if our most fundamental principles and norms are coming apart, as if the underpinnings of our civil society are crumbling.

As abnormal as this crisis may sometimes seem, it is by no means a new phenomenon in our public life, nor is it the outcome of the singularly strange presidency of Donald J. Trump.  On the contrary, the “United States of America” have never truly been united.  Our present problems are merely the latest manifestation of deep fissures that have divided us from the very beginning of the republic—fissures that are moral and political, racial and economic, cultural and religious. To imagine that these divisions are in any way new or abnormal is to ignore the awful reality of our history.

Our union was cobbled together by means of a fragile and sulfurous bargain: between those who benefitted from slavery and those who opposed it; between those who defined “freedom” as the right to exploit the land and those who sought to protect it; between those who insisted that states’ rights superseded human rights and those who believed that human rights were universal.  It was only a matter of time before this bargain would begin to come apart.  And it didn’t take long.

A mere 73 years after the Constitution was adopted, the so-called “Confederacy” decided to break our constitutional bargain and secede—a decision solely intended to preserve and expand the cruel institution of slavery.  Four years of almost incomprehensible carnage followed.  At least 600,000 died; countless more were wounded, maimed, and crippled; large swathes of land and property were pillaged and burned.  The slave states were finally brought back into the union—but only by brute force.  They did not come willingly, nor did they ever surrender their self-righteous sense of victimhood.

The Civil War was followed by the era of Reconstruction, which sought to undo the legacy of slavery.  That effort was brought to a halt in 1877, when Southern politicians regained their hold over Congress.  Thereafter, an unrepentant South used the institution of “Jim Crow” to reestablish the status quo antebellum.  Chattel slavery was no longer the law of the land, but the de facto suppression of black Americans was reinstated.  Legalized segregation took the place of slavery.

To be black in the South became, once again, not only demeaning and dehumanizing, but dangerous.  Between 1877 and 1950, at least 4,000 black citizens of this country—men, women, and children—were lynched by mobs of white racists.  These innocent people were lynched without regard for law or due process, justice or common decency.  They were murdered, simply because they were black and because the law had been perverted to protect their murderers.

You may be asking yourself what all this has to do with our current predicament.  The answer is:  Everything.  What divides us today is precisely the same set of prejudices that has divided us for nearly three hundred years.

The white, Christian, heterosexual Americans, who live in the so-called “heartland” and voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, believe themselves to be uniquely privileged.  They see themselves as the sole embodiment of what it means to be “American”.  In their view, the rest of us—brown or black; Muslim or Jew, Hindu or Sikh, agnostic or atheist; gay or transgender or simply ambivalent—are suspicious “others,” who must be rejected, suppressed, or expelled.

The problem, of course, is these “others” are on the verge of becoming a majority of the population.  Which means that Trump voters may soon lose the privileged status to which they believe themselves to be uniquely entitled.  This is what accounts for their primordial and visceral anger against cosmopolitan elites, the press, and liberals in general, who not only tolerate but celebrate such a transformation.  What unites Trump voters, and separates them from the rest of us, isn’t a slavish adoration of Donald Trump himself (though there is plenty of that); it is their rabid hatred of anyone who threatens their privileged status.

We are, as we have always been, a divided and conflicted nation, and there is no way to sugarcoat that awful reality.  Fundamental questions continue to divide us— questions of right and wrong, of prejudice versus tolerance, of decency versus evil.  Little more than 150 years ago, we fought a bloody and calamitous civil war to settle these questions.  It failed in that purpose.  Here we are, 150 years later, divided again.  Whether we stand or fall remains an open question.

After weeks of secret scheming, hidden away from the public, the press, and their Democratic colleagues, Senate Republicans just released an outline of their proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act.  They are calling their bill the “Better Care Reconciliation Act”.  It is impossible to imagine a more ironic and deeply cynical title.

Like the bill passed several weeks ago in the House of Representatives,  this legislation won’t provide “better care” for anyone.  On the contrary, it will deny health coverage to millions, claw back coverage for millions more, and raise premiums and deductibles for nearly everyone—all to provide a tax cut of nearly $1 trillion to the wealthiest Americans.  The public backlash to the original House bill was furious.  The backlash to the Senate bill is likely to be even worse.

Which leads to the question:  What can they be thinking?  In moral terms, why would Republican politicians wish to enact a law that is so cruel and will do so much damage to so many of their constituents?  And even if they don’t give a hoot about morality, why, in purely political terms, would they so deliberately thumb their noses at millions of voters, thereby courting the possibility of electoral disaster?

There are three reasons.

The first is that it is not at all clear that even a bill this dreadful would pose a serious threat to Republican electoral chances.  For all the incompetent and scandal-riven five first months of the Trump presidency, Republican voters seem to be standing by their man.  As a result, Democrats were unable to win even one of the recent special elections held to replace congressional seats vacated by Trump cabinet appointees.  In the Senate, the 2018 electoral map heavily favors Republicans, and in the House, hundreds of congressional districts across the country have been gerrymandered to all but guarantee Republican control.   Ominously, the Supreme Court has decided to take up what could become a landmark case concerning partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin.  With Neil Gorsuch (a partisan conservative, if ever there was one) now on the bench, the odds are better than even that the court will uphold what Wisconsin’s Republican legislature has done, encouraging other states to do more of the same.   In sum, Republicans are betting that they can weather the storm of public protest, wait for the anger to exhaust itself, and ultimately hang onto their seats.  They may well turn out to be right.

The second reason is money—especially big money—and no one is more beholden to big money than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.   In 1895, the notoriously corrupt Senator from Ohio, Mark Hanna, quipped:  “There are two things that are important in politics.  The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”  Mitch McConnell learned this lesson early on.   And so far, events have proved him right.   Despite abysmal approval ratings in his home state, McConnell keeps getting reelected.  Why?  Money.  During the 2014 electoral cycle, the average Senatorial candidate raised about $4 million; McConnell raised $21 million, two-thirds of which came from large individual donors.  McConnell used all that money to crush his otherwise promising Democratic opponent.  McConnell is now moving forward with the “Better Care Reconciliation Act,” not because it will help his constituents, lower costs, or improve upon “Obamacare, but rather, because his big donors want their taxes cut, and he wants their money.  Neither he nor they care that millions of ordinary Americans will get hurt along the way.

The third, final, and by far most consequential reason is ideology.  Over the course of the last 30 years, the Republican Party has been transformed—one might even say, hijacked—by a particularly cruel libertarian creed.

The intellectual roots of this transformation go back more than half a century: to the Austrian political philosopher, Friedrich Hayek; to the American economist, Milton Friedman; to the Russian-born novelist, screen writer, and would-be philosopher, Ayn Rand.  In their various ways, these figures cast aside many of the central tenets of old-fashioned conservatism: respect for established institutions, for long-standing social traditions, and for the obligations of individuals to community and country.  They replaced that old-fashioned conservatism with a new political creed that idolized the unfettered individual, the so-called “free market,” and the absolute right of private property and self-interest against any claim of overriding public interest.

The political face of this transformation appeared in the 1980s, with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.   It was Reagan who proclaimed:  “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  It was Thatcher who declared:  “There is no such thing as society.  There are individual men and women, and there are families.  And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”  In other words, if you’re poor, out of work, or sick, you’re on your own.  You can sink or you can swim, but don’t expect government or your luckier fellow citizens to offer you a helping hand.

The culmination of this toxic thinking came to a head in 2009, with the formation of the so-called “tea party”.  Billed as a “grassroots movement,” the tea party was actually orchestrated and funded by Charles and David Koch, who inherited their libertarian ideology from their father, an early and enthusiastic member of the unapologetically racist John Birch Society.  Since then, a handful of like-minded billionaires—the Walton heirs, hedge-fund tycoon Robert Mercer, gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, the DeVos family with their Amway fortune—have tightened their grip on the Republican Party to such an extent that it has become entirely their instrument.

The ultimate avatar of this new Republican ideology is Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Ryan is a true believer in the dog-eat-dog political and social worldview of Ayn Rand, in which there is a stark divide between purportedly talented and industrious “makers” and lazy, parasitic “takers”.  This worldview takes no account—indeed, it contemptuously dismisses—the corrosive consequences of social and economic inequality, racial prejudice, and simple bad luck.  People like Ryan deny that government should have any role in leveling the playing field.  For decades, such people have been longing for an opportunity to tear down the social safety net fashioned by Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression and subsequently expanded by presidents both Democratic and Republican.

Now, with Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of congress, their opportunity has finally arrived.  As Paul Ryan put it:  “This is our chance.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”  Nothing—no amount of public protest; no amount of cruelty, pain, and suffering; not even the prospect of electoral catastrophe—will prevent them from seizing it.

If the storm of scandal swirling around Donald J. Trump ever leads to the downfall of his presidency, the week just ended will be remembered as the moment in time when the storm clouds burst.  The first thunderclap came Tuesday, when the Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sputtering with outrage, he condemned as an “appalling and detestable lie” any suggestion that he might have had something to do with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.  Apart from this hissy-fit and pompous pronouncements about his personal “honor,” Sessions served up no credible defense for his previous lies.  He declined to answer straightforward questions about his interactions with president on the flimsy ground that Trump might someday wish to invoke “executive privilege”.  When that excuse ran out of gas, he slunk behind the arras of faulty memory, invoking the phrase, “I can’t recall,” more than 25 times.

Sessions was too dim-witted to realize that this is the oldest, and most transparent, dodge in the world.  When a person can’t respond to a “yes” or “no” question with a simple “yes” or “no” answer, you can be reasonably certain that person is hiding something.  During several hours of dodgy testimony,  Sessions revealed all too clearly that he has plenty to hide.  It is now all but certain that he, the chief law enforcement official in the land, will become a witness in, or even a target of, the FBI’s investigation.

Scarcely 48 hours after Sessions’ testimony, we confronted the stunning news that Donald Trump is himself under investigation for possible criminal obstruction of justice.  Not only did this revelation completely upend Trump’s claim that, no matter what his “satellites” may or may not have done, he is squeaky-clean; it also raised the possibility that anyone associated with Trump, his campaign, and his administration might soon be implicated.  It took less than a day for that prospect to become a reality.

Soon after hearing that Trump was being investigated, we learned that the FBI is also looking into the financial transactions of Trump associates and family members, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.  This turn of events may prove to be the most serious of the numerous threats to Trump’s presidency and his personal future.  He and his children have a long history of dubious financial connections—with Russian gangsters, the Mafia, and foreign banks suspected of illegal money laundering.  That, almost certainly, is why he has so stubbornly refused to release his tax returns.  Buried deep in all that paperwork must be thousands of clues and red flags.  Now, we know that the FBI will be examining each and every one.

Then, at week’s end, came the news that half a dozen Trump associates are “lawyering up,” anticipating that they will soon be drawn into the thicket of the FBI’s investigation.  Foremost among them is the Vice President of the United States, the Honorable (and always grinning) Mike Pence.  This can only mean that Pence believes himself to be in legal jeopardy.

The jeopardy isn’t going to stop with Pence.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has a brother, Eric Prince, who made a fortune by supplying private mercenaries to the Department of Defense.  Before Trump was sworn in, Prince arranged a secret meeting in the Seychelles to establish a “back channel” by which Trump and his minions could communicate with the Russian government without public scrutiny.  It is inevitable that Eric Prince and Betsy DeVos will be drawn into the FBI’s investigation.  They, too, will soon need to “lawyer up”.

In 2014, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross bought a controlling interest in the Bank of Cyprus, an institution that was, and is, notorious for laundering Russian money.  Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, once had more than a dozen accounts at this bank, chock full of money from God knows where.  As president of the bank, Ross installed the former head of Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann.  During Ackermann’s reign, Deutsche Bank was fined $630 million for—you guessed it—laundering massive amounts of Russian money.  It was also the only major financial institution willing to lend Trump money in the wake of the 2009 economic collapse, when his businesses were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  By all accounts, Trump still owes Deutsche Bank several hundred million dollars.  All of this, of course, may be coincidental and utterly innocent; it’s also possible that the tooth fairy will someday run for president.  Inevitably, Wilbur Ross will be drawn into the FBI’s investigation.  Like Betsy DeVos and her brother Eric, Ross will soon need to “lawyer up”.

Facing this unrelenting drumbeat of bad news, Donald Trump himself has responded like a cornered and wounded animal:  snarling, snapping, and lashing out.  His rage is palpable, and the sheer fury of his frustration is everywhere evident:  on Twitter, in his rare encounters with the press, in the ranting speeches he delivers at highly choreographed events with his still-adoring but dwindling “base”.  He complains about “witch hunts”.  He claims to be the victim of a conspiracy by the so-called “deep state”.  He demands to know why the FBI isn’t investigating his one-time opponent, Hillary Clinton, as if anybody any longer cared.

However psychologically blinkered and contorted he may be, Donald Trump must surely realize that reality is finally catching up with his fantasy world, that he is at long last going to pay a price for his behavior, that the noose is tightening.  It may take many months or even years, but the day is going to come when the metaphorical hangman presses the knot against Donald Trump’s throat and opens the trapdoor beneath his feet.   For the nation’s sake, that day cannot come soon enough.

Amidst all the chaos and incompetence roiling the White House, it is all too easy to lose sight of the enormous damage that Donald Trump and his minions are all too effectively bringing about behind the scenes.  It seems likely, for example, that Trump will soon issue an executive order rolling back a central pillar of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—the requirement that employer-funded health insurance plans provide a uniform package of basic preventive services to their employees.

The motive behind this executive order is not a generalized hatred of “Obamacare,” let alone hatred of Obama himself.  The reason is that one of the preventive services mandated by the law is contraception—which, to intellectually febrile Christian conservatives in “the heartland” and their slavish representatives in Congress, is nothing less than an abomination.

To please the rabid sentiments of this small part of electorate, Trump intends to give businesses wide latitude to opt out of their obligation to cover contraception, on the grounds that it may offend their moral or religious sensibilities. The rationale for this blatant discrimination against women and their right to make their own reproductive decisions is a purported desire to protect “religious freedom.”   The only “freedom” that seems to count in this case, however, is that of employers, rather than employees.

It is tempting to blame this moral abomination solely on Trump and his flunkies, but the original sin lies elsewhere.  It lies with the Supreme Court of the United States.  The Trump White House would not now be bold enough even to be considering this action, if it were not for two of the worst decisions the court has ever made.

The first, Citizens United v. FEC, was handed down in January 2010.  It was the first time in our legal history that “corporations” were judged to have the same constitutional rights as “persons.”  Although Citizens United applied narrowly to the First Amendment right to free speech, it opened the door to the more pernicious possibility that corporations might someday lay claim to other “personal” rights as well.

It didn’t take long for that to occur.

In June 2014, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the conservative majority on the court ruled that privately held companies have the right to withhold medical coverage that offends the religious sensibilities of their owners.  Citing the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, the court empowered Hobby Lobby to deny contraceptive coverage, solely because its owners believed—or pretended to believe—that several of the contraceptives mandated by law were “abortifacients.”  The court did not bother to establish whether those contraceptives were in fact “abortifacients” (they were not), nor did it question the sincerity of the company’s owners (which was dubious), and it certainly did not consult the wishes of the company’s employees.  Instead, the court chose to defer to the purported beliefs of Hobby Lobby’s evangelical owners.

The problem with these two decisions is that they are illogical, constitutionally untenable, and philosophically absurd.

Not only are corporations not “persons” in any ordinary sense of the word, they cannot be “persons” in a constitutional sense, since the constitution never mentions corporations, let alone the notion that corporations have the equivalent of personal “rights.”  Corporations are manifestly not persons; they are artificial legal constructs, created by government to stimulate commerce.  Whatever legal protections or benefits they receive (which are numerous and considerable) derive from legislative decisions, not fundamental constitutional protections.  To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.

Far more importantly, the notion that corporations can discriminate against their employees in the name of “religious freedom” is a legal and philosophical error of the most fundamental sort.  The religious freedom enshrined in our constitution is what philosophers call a “negative freedom.”  It does not empower those who hold specific religious beliefs to impose their beliefs on others.  Rather, it does the opposite.  All the while it gives the owners of Hobby Lobby the right to believe whatever they wish, it also prohibits them from imposing their beliefs on those who believe otherwise.  That is what “freedom” means under our constitutional arrangements.

Among the most influential voices on this question was the English thinker, John Stuart Mill, whose foundational essay, On Liberty, was published in 1859.  In that work, Mill had much to say about the interplay between religion and freedom, and about the aggrieved sensibilities of people like the owners of Hobby Lobby:

A religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregarded his feeling, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed.  But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it.

The desire of Hobby Lobby’s “offended” owners to deny contraceptive coverage to their employees, like the desire of the Trump administration to deny such benefits to others in the name of “religious freedom,” is little more than a theft—and a persecution—perpetrated in the name of religious freedom.

The same John Stuart Mill put it best when he observed:

The notion that it is one man’s duty that another should be religious, was the foundation of all the religious persecutions ever perpetrated. 

What the Trump administration is now contemplating has nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom.  It is religious persecution.

Of all the deplorable things Donald Trump has done in his utterly despicable personal and public life—the incessant lying, the serial marital infidelities, the predatory sexual misbehavior, the bankruptcies and shady business dealings, the hateful rhetoric of his presidential campaign—his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, announced just a few hours ago, is by far the most shameful and consequential.

This decision isolates the United States from the rest of the world and cements the perception that our word, and the word of our president, cannot be trusted.  It surrenders to China and Europe technological and economic leadership in the inevitable effort to combat climate change.  Worse than any of that, it condemns generations of Americans, and many others, to a dark and dismal future—a future of storms and famines, droughts and pestilence, environmental catastrophe and economic collapse.

Trump’s excuses for taking this inexcusable step are three:

First, that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese to disadvantage American industry.

Second, that the Paris Climate Accord is specifically “unfair” to the United States and a “job killer.”

Third, that withdrawal from the accord, as well as rolling back environmental regulations in general, will unfetter American business, unleash our economy, and restore millions of jobs.

None of these contemptible excuses is even remotely close to being true.  The only “hoax” in all of this is Donald Trump pretending that such excuses resemble reality.

Climate change deniers—like Trump himself, Scott Pruitt, his new head of the EPA, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, and countless other cowardly Republican politicians—can splice and dice the facts all they want, but the scientific evidence regarding the causes and dangers of climate change has been incontestably obvious for decades.  When even Exxon Mobile admits to the reality of this evidence, only idiots or fools would continue to deny it.  The Trump administration, however, seems to be populated by plenty of both.

The Paris Accord is in no way “unfair” to the United States.  Its stipulations are voluntary, the targets set by individual countries are up to them, and, under its terms, all nations are completely free, without penalty, to change the targets they have set for themselves.  If there is any “unfairness” in the agreement, it is that the United States of America gets, if not a free, then a heavily discounted ride.  Despite all the progress we have made, we are still the most egregious polluter on the planet.  On a per capita basis, we use more energy than any other nation, our CO2 emissions are second only to Canada’s, and Americans consume more of the planet’s natural resources, by far, than anyone else.   If the Paris Accord actually placed a disproportionate burden on the United States—which it does not—such a burden would, by any reasonable moral calculus, be “fair.”

Finally, the claim that our withdrawal from the Paris Accord will free American business from a Procrustean bed of “job killing” environmental regulations, thereby unleashing a “job creating” economic boom, is ludicrous on its face.  Not only is the accord not a job killer, it is a job creator.  The number of clean-energy jobs in the United States is already five times larger than the number of the jobs in the fossil fuel industry, and that gap would inevitably widen, as it has elsewhere in the world, if we stayed the course.

The Europeans are well ahead of us in developing alternative energy technologies, the Chinese are plunging in, and even the Indians, who, despite their tremendous coal reserves, are belatedly beginning to catch up.  No matter what Trump and his sycophants may say or wish us to believe, the future does not reside in dirty sources of energy that destroy the environment and endanger the planet.  Most of the other nations in the world have chosen another, cleaner course, precisely because any other choice is unsustainable.

We must therefore ask ourselves why Donald Trump, in our name but without our consent, has chosen otherwise.  It is certainly not because of the excuses mentioned earlier, which are plainly bogus.  So, there must be another reason, and to discover that reason, we don’t have to look very far.

Trump’s decision is merely the latest corrupt act by a President whose personal corruption is all but unprecedented in our history.   His  decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord is nothing more than a pay-back to major Republican donors—in particular, to Charles and David Koch and to Trump’s own Secretary of the Treasury, Wilbur Ross, whose enormous personal wealth is tied to coal.

These astonishingly wealthy people, whose influence on Republican politics is limitless, are sitting on assets that will inevitably lose value as the world moves away from fossil fuels.  Although these people are fundamentally evil, they are not stupid.  They can see quite clearly what the future holds.  To extract every last penny of profit from the assets that undergird their wealth, they must stretch the life expectancy of those assets.  Every day a cancer-causing coal mine stays open, every day a planet-polluting oil well continues to pump, is a day people like the Koch brothers and Wilbur Ross get richer.

That is what lies behind Donald Trump’s decision.  It isn’t about making America great or first.  It’s about putting the interests of ordinary Americans last—after the interests of a few, very rich Republicans have been served.

Toward the end of his long, eventful, and momentous public life, Great Britain’s greatest prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, made this observation:  “To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years.  To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”  Little more than a day ago, such an act—an act that threatens to destroy the slow and laborious task of years—was committed by Donald J. Trump.

After a carefully stage-managed visit to Saudi Arabia, where he all but curtsied to an authoritarian king and obsequiously greeted a room packed with autocrats and dictators as if they were members of his own family, Trump stopped briefly in Israel, and then flew on to Brussels to meet the leaders of the 28 member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  These men and women were not fawning autocrats, dictators, or keffiyeh-wearing kings.  They were the democratically elected presidents and prime ministers of our most enduring allies—the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, to name but a few.  Instead of treating these leaders as the friends they are and with the respect they deserve, Trump lectured and hectored them like unruly, insubordinate children.

He chastised our closest allies for not contributing enough to NATO’s budget and for “chronic underpayments.”  He claimed that many of them “owe massive amounts of money” to NATO and to American taxpayers.

He refused to affirm American support for Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which declares an attack on any member state to be an attack on all.  This, despite the fact that NATO members, invoking that article for the first time in the organization’s history, rushed to our defense after the twin towers fell.

When it came time for the “group photograph” that capped off the meeting, Trump dismissively shoved aside the prime minister of NATO’s newest and one of its smallest member states, so that he, with his Mussolini chin jutting up in the air, could take center stage.

Worse than any of that, Trump uttered not a word about the aggressive machinations of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which the members of NATO rightly believe to be the greatest threat to their security, their independence, and their liberties.

It was as if, for Donald Trump, Russia either doesn’t exist or can do no wrong.  It was as if, for Donald Trump, NATO, not Russia, is the enemy.

As to what other member states may “owe” to NATO itself or to American taxpayers, Donald Trump once again demonstrated his deep ignorance—or duplicity.  In scolding our closest allies, he conflated NATO’s budget with national defense spending.  The budget  itself amounts to less than $2 billion, and each member state contributes its share, according to a formula that absurdly favors the United States.  Our share of NATO’s budget is only 22 percent, even though our economy is $2 trillion larger than the combined economies of all the other NATO members put together,  That’s more a bargain; that’s chump change.

Nonetheless, Trump would like us to believe that poor, overburdened American taxpayers are being hoodwinked by wily, free-loading Europeans.  He used national military spending to support that insinuation.  That’s ludicrous.  NATO’s target for the national military spending of its members is two percent of GDP.  While it’s true that most members don’t spend that much, the target itself is entirely voluntary.  To suggest that Spain or Greece, which are coping with intractable economic depressions, are somehow derelict by not buying more guns and bombs at the expense of basic social and human services, is worse than disingenuous, it is immoral.

Trump also ignores the fact that we choose to spend more on defense than any other nation on earth—not out of generosity or a sense of obligation, but to pursue our own far-flung economic, strategic, and geopolitical interests.  We could cut our military spending in half and still outspend the next five nations put together.   The blunt truth is, we have chosen to spend our money to protect the interests of Exxon and GE.

Far more consequential than Trump’s fiscal obfuscation is the damage he has done to our oldest and most important military and diplomatic alliance.  To call NATO “obsolete,” as he did during the election campaign, is not simply wrong, it is absurd and dangerous. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War.  Its purpose was to prevent another such war and to protect both the United States and Western Europe against the aggressive post-war expansion of the Soviet Union.  NATO not only achieved those objectives, it helped to launch an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.  It may well be the most successful military and political alliance in history.

Those achievements, and that legacy, are now in jeopardy.

Having been insulted by Trump in Brussels, who among the 27 NATO presidents and prime ministers, will ever trust him—or us—again?  Having been forced to listen to his condescending gibberish, which of those leaders can help wondering whether Donald Trump is out of his mind?  Which prudent NATO member government isn’t now considering the possibility that it may, at some not-distant future date, have to fend for itself and defend its citizens without the backing and support of the United States of America?

It was the United States of America that created NATO in the first place.  It is the United States that has primarily benefitted from its existence.  It may soon be the case, however, that Vladimir Putin’s Russia will be the primary beneficiary of NATO’s disarray and disintegration.  If that calamity someday comes, it will be owed to “the thoughtless act of a single day,” a thoughtless act committed by Donald J. Trump.

In 1927, the British novelist E. M. Forster delivered a renowned series of literary lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, which were ultimately published under the title, Aspects of the Novel. His fifth lecture, called “The Plot,” described the basic structure of fiction as a logical sequence of causes and effects—necessary for any novel to make sense but also potentially deadening to the creation of interesting and unpredictable characters.

To illustrate this tension, Forster paraphrased an anecdote from a novel by the French writer, André Gide.  Gide told of an old woman who simply could not understand the purpose or workings of logic.  When, after much struggling, she finally got the hang of it, she exclaimed contemptuously:  “Logic!  Good gracious!  What rubbish!  How can I tell what I think, till I see what I say?”

That final sentence—“How can I tell what I think, till I see what I say?”—quickly became not only one of E. M. Forster’s best-known quotes but a lapidary expression of the interaction between, and the interchangeability of, language and thought.

It is commonly assumed that language is the antecedent of thought, that thinking comes first, whereas speech comes later and merely communicates thought.  The frustrated old woman in Gide’s anecdote understood that the reality is otherwise.  Language is far more than a mere mechanism for communicating our thinking.  It is the very armature of thought itself.  When we write or read, we are thinking in silence.  When we think in silence, we are speaking to ourselves.  When we speak to others, we are “thinking out loud,” and the quality of our thinking can be judged by what we say and how we say it.

Grammar, syntax, and verbal precision are not the stuffy niceties of the classroom; they are the structural underpinnings of reason and logic. The words in a sentence must stand in their proper relationships to one another.  The sentences in a paragraph must be properly ordered to illustrate, amplify, or prove a premise.  Without clear and rigorous language, clear and rigorous thinking is impossible.  Not only does the one depend upon the other, the two are inseparable.  They are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

The interaction between language and thought is all the more important in the political realm, because the most important political ideas—liberty and freedom, rights and duties, justice and fairness—are abstract words that cry out for clear thinking and careful definition.  Plenty of both are required from those who hope to advance political ideas or to govern successfully.

Which brings us to the man who now occupies the White House.

Much has been said about Donald Trump’s mendacity, about his seeming inability to separate fact from fiction, about his innumerable evasions and outright lies.  Comparatively little, however, has been said about the way he uses, or abuses, language and what that abuse may say about his ability to think clearly.

Whatever else we may demand of our presidents—whether we view them as heroes or villains, whether we support them or oppose them, whether we agree or disagree with their political philosophies—we expect them to be able to think and reason clearly.  Indeed, it would be impossible to agree or disagree with their views if we did not understand the views we were agreeing or disagreeing with.

In the case of Donald Trump, this is all but impossible.  Because his language is so fundamentally incoherent, it is difficult to tell what he actually thinks.  Indeed, it is questionable whether he is capable of thinking at all.

During a recent press conference, Trump was asked whether he has ever wondered if anything he has done might be worthy of criminal charges or impeachment.  It took him 650 words and nearly five minutes to reply.  Don’t worry.  I’m not going belabor you with his entire meandering rant.  The first and last paragraphs will suffice:

 I think it’s totally ridiculous.  Everybody thinks so.  And again, we have to get back to working our country properly so that we can take care of the problems that we have.  We have plenty of problems.  We’ve done a fantastic job.  We have a tremendous group of people.  Millions and millions of people out there that are looking at what you had just said, and said, “What are they doing?”

You look at the tremendous number of jobs that are being announced in so many different fields.  That’s what I’m proud of, and that’s what we want to focus our energy on.  The other is something I can only tell you:  There was no collusion.  And everybody — even my enemies have said—there is no collusion. So we want to get back and keep on the track that we’re on.  Because the track that we’re on is record-setting, and that’s what we want to do, is we want to break very positive records.

In calling these verbal jambalayas “paragraphs,” I am speaking metaphorically, since there is nothing about them that meets the literal definition of what a paragraph actually is.  Trump’s utterances are the equivalent of the jumbled debris in the toy box of a child: half the Lego pieces are missing, the dolls lack arms or legs, the stuffed animals are coming apart at the seams.

Our previous presidents have had a wide range of verbal and intellectual skills.  Some—Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Barack Obama—were keen thinkers and inspiring orators.  Others—Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Younger Bush—were less intellectually quick but more homespun.  All understood the connection between words and thoughts, and could, in a pinch, express themselves with clarity.  They could, in short, “think out loud.”

The current President of the United States appears to lack that capacity.  His language rarely makes sense, and, as a result, his thinking almost never makes sense.  When Donald Trump “thinks out loud,” the result is a deafening silence.

Three times this week, I have begun this essay, only to stop and start over, because new events popped up out of nowhere.  It is becoming all but impossible to keep up, let alone cope with, the crescendo of chaos swirling around, and within, the White House—or to see how it all will end.

Exactly one week after Donald J. Trump stunned the nation by firing the director of the FBI and then admitting, on television, that he had done so to derail the bureau’s investigation into his Russian entanglements, he put those entanglements on full display.  Not only did he meet with Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to the United States—a case of bad “optics,” if ever there was one, since the ambassador is a major figure in the investigation—he revealed top secret information that could compromise an ally and jeopardize the lives of valuable intelligence sources.

And it didn’t stop there.  Less than 12 hours later, we learned that Trump had tried to influence then FBI Director James Comey to drop the bureau’s investigation of one-time National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for his Russian ties.

To top it all off, one day later came the news that the Assistant Attorney General had appointed an independent special counsel to head up the ongoing investigation of Russian meddling in our election, possible collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and Trump’s murky financial affairs.

The administration’s response to this series of colossal snafus and scandals has followed a pattern that we have seen before, over and over.

First comes the revelation that Trump has, once again, done something stupid, reckless, or even illegal.  Then, his spokespeople provide a cover story that is flagrantly untrue.  Next, Trump himself contradicts the cover story, exposing the underlying untruth and humiliating his staff and surrogates.  Finally, both Trump and his entourage try to dismiss their initial lies as inconsequential, asserting that what he did was either unremarkable, or entirely normal, or “decisive.”

It is tempting to dismiss the most recent examples of this pattern as merely the latest among many unusual acts by an unconventional president.  But they are far more serious than that.

Not only has Trump has lost any last shred of personal credibility—which wasn’t much, to begin with—he has damaged the reputations and destroyed the credibility of the few, supposedly “serious” people left in his administration.  It is one thing for paid political flacks like Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders to embarrass themselves by peddling outright lies; it is quite another for people like H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor to the President, to do the same.

How do we account for this monumental and self-destructive confusion, ethical compromise, and political chaos?  How do we explain a president whose administration appears to be coming apart at the seams after fewer than 120 days in office?

There are three possible answers to those questions.

The first is that Donald Trump is a clueless and incompetent dunce, who, for all his rhetorical bravado on the campaign trail, has no idea what he is doing and now finds himself flailing and failing, as he confronts real-world complexities that he is incapable of dealing with.

There is much to be said for this theory of the case.  By all accounts, Trump knows nothing about our constitution, the history of the nation, or world affairs.   He is lazy, does not read, and gets his news from Fox News Channel and the front pages of trash-talk tabloids like the National Inquirer.  His daily intelligence briefings have been reduced to “bullet points” to accommodate his limited attention span, and, even then, he cannot focus longer than a few minutes before wandering off on tangents and distractions. He seems incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, embracing conspiracy theories peddled by lunatic right-wing websites and rejecting any information that doesn’t agree with his prejudices.

What’s more, Trump’s much-touted skills as a manager and negotiator have turned out to be nothing more than hot air.  The White House is rife with back-biting and infighting.  Hundreds of top-level jobs in the executive branch remain unfilled.  Rumors abound that a major “shake-up” of the president’s staff is about to take place.  If so, where on earth does he expect to find any experienced or credible replacements?  Which qualified and professional public servant in his right mind would now be prepared to work for Donald Trump?

The first possible explanation for Trump’s troubles, therefore, is that he is simply not equipped, intellectually or temperamentally, to be President of the United States.

The second possibility is that Trump is afflicted by some psychological or emotional disorder—narcissism, paranoia, the list of possibilities is long—that makes him incapable of exercising his public responsibilities.  Several distinguished psychiatrists have broken with a long-standing taboo against diagnosing public figures to say that Donald Trump’s behavior is clinically abnormal, that he suffers from discernible mental problems, which compromise his ability to function.

I have no idea whether any of that is true, but there is abundant evidence of Trump’s strange public and private behavior.  We’ve all seen the public lunacy:  the blatant lying, the on-stage temper tantrums, the manic tweets.  Accounts of his private behavior are equally strange.  He is increasingly isolated.  He doesn’t sleep.  He watches cable news obsessively and rants at what he sees.  He throws things at the television set and hurtles insults at his staff.  He ignores their advice, refuses to learn from experience, and insists that his own vision of reality is the only reality.

Whether or not any of this means that Donald Trump is “crazy” in a clinical sense, his behavior is certainly not “normal” in any ordinary sense.  It is not the sort of behavior we want from our presidents.

A third, and much simpler, possibility is that Donald J. Trump is corrupt and that, for him, the presidency was and is nothing more than a money-making opportunity to enrich himself and his family.  The evidence for this possibility grows by the day.

Trump continues, not only to hide his tax returns, but to deny any financial connections with Russia, a denial that is absurd on its face.  The law firm that set up his so-called “blind trust”—which is not a “trust” in any meaningful sense, certainly isn’t “blind,” and does nothing to separate Trump from his innumerable conflicts of interest—has deep ties to Russia.  A recent documentary by Dutch investigative journalists reveals that Trump and his family have deep and long-standing financial connections to a host of unsavory characters:  Russian oligarchs, diamond smugglers, organized crime, innumerable gangsters here and abroad.  Many of his highest-profile real estate projects, including Trump Tower in New York, appear to be little more than shells for money-laundering. And just today, we learned that a state-owned Russian bank, where Vladimir Putin sits on the board of directors, was a major investor in one of those projects.

So, what in the end explains the calamity of the Trump presidency?  Is he clueless, is he crazy, or is he corrupt?  Tragically, the answer seems to be:  all three.

The most fundamental principle of our system of justice is that anyone who is accused of a crime must be presumed innocent until proved guilty.  Donald J. Trump’s behavior has turned this principle on its head.  Trump began lying to the American people from the day he entered the race to become President of the United States.  After he became president, many hoped that his lies would stop.  They did not.  On the contrary, they escalated, and they escalated at a breathtaking pace.  It is no longer possible to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, to presume that he is innocent until he is proved to be guilty.  Too much is at stake.  For the sake of our republic, we must now presume that Donald Trump is guilty until he is able or willing to prove otherwise.

One reason for this reversal of presumptions, and by far the most important, is that it has become inescapably clear that the Trump administration is engaged in a far-reaching, albeit stunningly incompetent, cover-up.  We do not yet know precisely what is being covered up.  Collusion with the Russians, financial conflicts of interest, outright bribery, or money laundering on behalf of gangsters are but a few of the possibilities.  We do know, however, that the Trump administration is trying to cover up something, and the urgent intensity of its effort suggests that the “something” is consequential, compromising, and perhaps criminal.

Indeed, the cover-up itself just transgressed the boundary separating presidential prerogatives from criminality.  After less than 24 hours of flatly lying about the reasons for the firing of the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Trump administration’s smokescreen simply evaporated. No one outside the White House any longer even pretends to believe that Comey was fired for his mishandling of the Clinton email investigation.  He was fired, because his examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election—as well as the financial entanglements of Trump and his family—was getting too close for comfort.  Trump and his minions have insisted for months that “there’s no there there.”  James Comey obviously thought otherwise.  That is why he had to go.

The termination of James Comey therefore qualifies as an obstruction of justice, a willful interference in a lawful investigation by the most important law enforcement agency in the land.  This means that the President of the United States is guilty of a felony.  It was precisely this crime that brought down Richard Nixon.  It may be the crime that eventually brings down Donald Trump.

If that day comes, Trump will not be the only one to fall.

The Republican Party’s “Plan B” in the event of a Trump catastrophe has always been Mike Pence, a former congressman and governor of Indiana, viewed by Republican legislators as “one of their own” and therefore shielded by, if nothing else, tribal loyalty.

Pence publicly defended Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, when he got into hot water for cozying up to the Russians.  It was the assertion that Flynn lied to Pence that ultimately got him fired.  Republicans rallied around that claim, insisting that Pence had been an innocent victim.

Putting aside the fact that Mike Pence is an unctuous sycophant whose sanctimonious pronouncements are about as convincing as a sermon by Elmer Gantry, the claim that he was  an “innocent victim” who had been lied to was never credible.  He had been running Trump’s transition team for months.  Flynn was a part of that team.  The very idea that Pence was unaware of Flynn’s cohabitations with the Russians was, and is, preposterous.

Now we know that Pence’s claim to be innocent or unaware is more than preposterous.  It is a lie.  Not only was Pence aware of the actual motivations behind the decision to fire James Comey, he lobbied for it.  Until or unless Mike Pence can prove otherwise, we must presume that he, like Donald Trump, is guilty of obstruction of justice.

Nor does it stop with Mike Pence.  The Attorney General of the United States, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, after recusing himself from any involvement in the FBI’s investigation of the connections between Trump and the Russians, nevertheless intervened to recommend the termination of Director Comey, and he did so at the behest of the man who is the primary target of that investigation.  Until or unless Jeff Sessions can prove otherwise, we must presume that he is guilty of obstruction of justice.

It goes even further.  Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus; his “special counselor,” Steve Bannon; even his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—all knew of, participated in, or argued for the decision to fire James Comey in the midst of an FBI investigation regarding possible collusion between the Trump administration and the Russians.    Until or unless these people can establish their innocence, we must presume them to be guilty of obstruction of justice.

Worst than all of that is the complicity of the Republican Party’s leaders in Congress.  Despite all the evidence, in the face of all the warning signs, against all sense of right and wrong, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have chosen to ignore the lies and defend the crimes.  Until or unless they can demonstrate their innocence, we must presume them to be guilty of obstructing justice.

When Trump finally comes tumbling down, as I believe he will, many lives and careers will come tumbling after him.  His fall will not be that of a single man; it will be the fall of a presidential administration.  It may even be the fall of an entire political party.