gracchusdixit

In the years leading up to the Civil War and in the decades that followed it, the phrase “white trash” was a commonly used insult in the American South, eventually becoming the white man’s equivalent of the “n-word”.  This slur was not, of course, a racial insult, since it was used by certain white people to express their disdain for other white people.  It was, rather, a withering statement of class snobbery in a society that liked to pretend, and still likes to pretend, that it is immune to such things.

The phrase “white trash” was originally used by the Southern landed gentry to describe poor, uneducated whites, the tenant farmers and share croppers who weren’t rich enough to own land or slaves, lacked social graces, and were ignorant and culturally backward.  During the period of Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution, the term expanded to include the nouveau riche—opportunistic parvenus who accumulated money, often lots of money, but little social refinement and even less intellectual capacity.

Nobody understood this slice of American society better than the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who grew up in rural and small-town Texas, a part of the country that has always incubated more than its fair share of “white trash”.  Regarding such people, Johnson famously observed:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

That bitter quip describes, in a nutshell, not only the “white trash” mentality, but the strategy of politicians, who, for generations, have exploited and manipulated their mean-spirited insecurities.  Standing close to the bottom rung of the social ladder, their only hope of status, their only way to feel superior, has been to make sure that somebody else is forever standing one rung below them and to demonize the “elites” who stand above them. 

In terms of domestic politics, this has meant the branding of black and brown people as undeserving parasites and the smearing of social and intellectual elites as inauthentically American.  Projected to the world stage, it has led to a flag-waving, chest-thumping, aggressive nationalism, which has nothing whatever to do with genuine patriotism but everything to do with the desperate need of America’s “white trash” to feel superior to somebody, anybody—in this case, to foreigners and immigrants.

Politicians, particularly Southern politicians, have been manipulating this pathology for generations, and no one has done it more effectively or ruthlessly than Mitch McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader of the United States Senate.  McConnell’s home state of Kentucky may well be the “white trash” epicenter of America.  Its high school graduation rate is 45th in the country; its college graduation rate is 47th.  Five of its counties are among the poorest in the land.  Average household income in Kentucky is $10,000 below the national average, and in its poorest counties, the disparity is twice that.  As Ethiopia is to Europe, Kentucky is to the United States of America.

Although he has done absolutely nothing to ameliorate the endemic problems that ail his state, McConnell continues to be reelected, artfully playing on the fears and prejudices of his “white trash” electorate.  All the while, he has pocketed millions in contributions from the coal industry and the big donors who dominate his party.

It is tempting to lay the blame for all this at the feet of politicians like McConnell.  But that would be too easy, because the victims of this scam have been fully complicit in their own victimhood.  For example, no state has benefitted more from the “Obamacare” than Kentucky, yet a majority of its citizens profess to be opposed to the very program they signed up for in droves. Donald Trump won the state by more than 30 points, and a large majority of Kentuckians still support him, despite the fact that he has done nothing whatsoever to improve their circumstances.  They are bound to him, not by logic, not even for economic self-interest, but entirely out of spite and imagined social grievance.  

Such are the people who populate Trump rallies.  Such are the people who hoot and holler at his every word, cheer his lies, and threaten the journalists at back of the room.  

Since Trump’s election, there has been a concerted effort—ironically, by liberals far more than conservatives—to empathize with, and even romanticize, those who used to be called “white trash”.  They are depicted as victims of a social and economic system that has uprooted their lives, depriving them of the dignity they supposedly once possessed.  There are countless calls for the Democratic Party to “win them back” by attending to their grievances.  There is a demand that the phrase “white trash” along with its various synonyms—“hillbillies,” “hicks,” rubes,” “rednecks,” “trailer trash,” and so on—be expunged from our public discourse, because it is somehow insulting and thus politically incorrect.   No wonder, then, that Hillary Clinton was immediately pilloried when she used the word “deplorable’s” to describe a certain tranche of Trump voters.  The only surprise was that the critical voices on the left were even louder than those on the right.

All this hand-wringing about “white trash” Americans is hogwash.  

Far from shunning the phrase “white trash,” we should resurrect and affirm it, because it describes to a tee deeply unpleasant truths about a not insignificant slice of American society.  It speaks to their ignorance, their toxic insecurities, and their racism.

“White trash” Americans can complain all they want about victimhood and grievances, but that does not excuse their genuinely deplorable behavior.  Whatever their economic plight may or may not be, nothing required them to embrace a liar, a philanderer, and a criminal as their political hero.  Nothing required them to blame hapless immigrants for the bleak circumstances of their own lives.  Nothing required them to extract their own sense of dignity from the demonization of other human beings.  These are the deplorable choices made by “white trash” Americans, and they must answer for them.  

Contrast those choices with those made by black Americans.  Having suffered three centuries of slavery, discrimination, and enduring prejudice, black Americans have far more to complain about, and their grievances are infinitely more substantial.  Despite all that, black Americans have made very different moral choices.  Despite all their suffering, despite all the humiliation and intimidation they confront on a daily basis, despite all their frustrated attempts to win the equal place in our society which they deserve, black Americans have never embraced a racist demagogue as their spiritual or political leader.  Instead, they turned to the likes of Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.

Who between the two, I ask you, occupies the moral high ground?  It certainly isn’t “white trash” Americans and their “white trash” president.

In the days following Donald Trump’s disgraceful “summit” with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, there was, for the first time, widespread and explicit talk of “treason,” not simply from partisan voices on the left, but also from more cautious, mainstream observers.  One even suggested the possibility that Trump may have been a Russian “mole” for decades, recruited in the 1980s when his financial empire was collapsing, he was in desperate need of cash, and no reputable bank was willing to lend him a penny.

A host of former security and diplomatic officials, including many who have been highly critical of Trump, instantly pushed back.  Their argument was a curious one.  They did not try to defend Trump himself but, rather, the canniness of the Russians.  Trump cannot possibly be a Russian agent, they said, because the Russians are too smart to allow one of their agents to expose himself as flagrantly as Trump has done.  On the contrary, the argument goes, the Russians would have done exactly the reverse, ordering Trump to masking his true intentions, pretending to berate Vladimir Putin in public, all the while he was enacting Putin’s agenda in secret.

I do not pretend to have the slightest degree of knowledge about the shadowy world of spies and espionage, but it seems to me that this push-back completely misses the obvious, and, in doing so, illustrates a singular lack of imagination in our thinking about the Trump presidency.  Time after time, we have tied ourselves into knots comparing Trump’s behavior against historical norms and precedents.  As a result, we fail to comprehend the clear and utter abnormality that is staring us in the face.

This particular failure of imagination is the assumption that, for Trump to be useful to Putin, his behavior must be clandestine, as if he were a “spy” in the common sense, sneaking information to his masters covertly, like some character in a novel by Graham Greene or John Le Carré.  Isn’t that the way Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss, and the Cambridge Five all played the game?

But what if that isn’t the game Putin is playing?  What if the part assigned to Trump is to embrace Putin and Russia openly and to convince the American electorate that this embrace is legitimate and just?  What if the goal is not to undermine America’s traditional alliances and commitments one, secret step at a time, but to do so publicly and all at once?  What if the ultimate purpose is for an American president to bow his knee in full view, humiliating not only himself but the United States, and thereby elevating Vladimir Putin on the world stage?

There are a lot of “what if’s” in this theory of the case, of course, but the underlying facts suggest that such a theory is far from implausible.  

Begin with the fact that, after his invasion and subsequent annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin became a global pariah.  Russia was expelled from the G-8; it was subjected to crippling sanctions; and it saw its territorial ambitions hemmed in by the forward deployment of NATO troops and missile systems to Russia’s border in Eastern Europe.  Putin has been desperate to reverse this trajectory.

In addition, the country he leads is a social and economic shipwreck.  Its GDP is smaller than Italy’s.  Other than fossil fuels, minerals, and armaments, it produces nothing the rest of the world has the slightest interest in buying: no cars or trucks, no planes or trains, no industrial machines, no technology or software, not even agricultural goods.  The life expectancy of its citizens is 10 years less than in neighboring Finland; it has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, particularly among men; and every year, thousands upon thousands of Russians simply drink themselves to death.  Such conditions cannot go on forever without eventually endangering Putin’s grip on power.

More important than all of that may be Putin’s own financial vulnerability.  His personal fortune, illegally acquired and by some accounts the largest in the world, is worthless unless it can be converted into hard currency, stashed away in foreign banks, or monetized in the form of foreign assets that have real value.  All these money-laundering avenues have been threatened by the Magnitsky Act, which was passed by the United States Congress in 2012 and allows the financial assets of Putin and the oligarchs who surround him to be frozen or, in some cases, confiscated.  Five other nations have passed similar laws, and more are on the way.

To ward off these assorted threats, to cling to power, to defend himself and the criminal oligarchs who prop up his regime, Putin has resorted to the oldest tricks in the autocrat’s handbook: pugnacious appeals to nationalism, promises to restore national pride by “making Russia great again,” and attacks on those his regime brands as “enemies of the state”—a category that includes journalists, Jews, gays, and anyone who broadly opposes Putin’s conflation of his personal power with the interests of the Russian people.  

That is what Putin’s military build-up is about.  That is what the invasions of the Crimea and Ukraine were about.  That is what the winter Olympics were about.  That is what the World Cup was about.  And that may well be what Putin’s public humiliation of Donald Trump is about.  

For Putin to survive, he must seem to be invincible and victorious.  To sustain that illusion, he must be able to trot out weak, compliant, and defeated foes, dragging them in metaphorical chains behind his metaphorical chariot like some ancient Roman conqueror celebrating a triumph.  Our chump-in-chief is playing his part in this stage play to a tee.  After declining to accept an invitation to visit the White House in the fall, Putin artfully turned the tables and invited Trump to pay homage to him in Moscow, an invitation the White House now seems all too eager to accept.  It truly is even worse than we thought.

Ever obedient to the demands of his Russian handler and former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has been waging a steady war of attrition against the greatest and most important of our military and political alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  NATO was originally constituted in the aftermath of the Second World War to insulate both Western Europe and the United States against the enormous threat then posed by the Soviet Union, a communist behemoth armed with nuclear weapons, occupying vast swaths of Eastern Europe, and intent on exporting its political system throughout the globe.  In this, NATO proved to be fabulously successful.   The ambitions of the Soviet Union were largely contained, until it collapsed in 1989 and the Russian Federation took its place.

Donald Trump would now like us to believe that NATO is obsolete and, even worse, some kind of geopolitical and financial fraud, in which the United States is being bilked by slippery European slackers.  Several months ago, he made the following claim, which he has repeated incessantly ever since:

We pay so much disproportionately more for NATO.  We are getting ripped off by every other country in NATO, where they pay virtually nothing, most of them.  And we’re paying a majority of the costs.

This, like so many of Trump’s assertions, is a shameless falsehood.  Nonetheless, he is unfortunately making progress in convincing a large chunk of the American public otherwise.  In recent polling, nearly half of Americans agreed with the proposition that the United States should decline to defend its NATO allies unless or until they “pay their fair share”.  What these people do not realize is that our NATO allies already pay their “fair share,” and then some.

Americans themselves are partly to blame for the success of Trump’s deception.  A quarter of our fellow citizens think that the sun revolves around the earth, and more than 70 percent believe in angels.  Why should we expect such people to understand the ins and outs of NATO funding or, for that matter, any other question that requires more than a modicum of rudimentary knowledge? It is the job of political leaders, particularly the President of the United States, to explain and clarify such questions and to do so honestly.  Our current president prefers to obfuscate, mislead, and lie.

Let’s consider the lies, one at a time:

To begin with, the United States does not pay “disproportionately more” for NATO.  Quite to the contrary, we pay considerably less than we reasonably should.  We pay 22 percent of NATO’s annual budget, despite the fact that the size of our economy is as large as all the other NATO countries put together. 

Trump’s claim that other NATO countries “pay virtually nothing” is worse than wrong; it is a deliberate deceit.  Every NATO country, even the smallest, contributes to the budget of the alliance, and each does so according to a formula, which the United States engineered to its own advantage.  For example, the three leading members of NATO, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, pay 35 percent of alliance’s budget against our 22 percent.  If their contributions were truly “proportionate,” they would be paying about 10 percent of the bill, since the combined size of their economies is less than half the size of ours.  If anybody is being “ripped off,” it isn’t the United States, it is the Germans, the French, and the the Brits.

The most outrageous falsehood in Trump’s claim is that we pay a “majority” of NATO’s costs.  This is arrant nonsense.  Our military presence in Europe costs roughly $30 billion, a mere five percent of our total military budget.  The other NATO nations spend more than $200 billion on their combined military budgets.

No less outrageous is Trump’s insinuation that we bear the brunt of Europe’s defense and get nothing in return.

The United States deploys roughly 50,000 troops in Europe, which amounts to fewer than four percent of our 1.3 million military personnel, the vast majority of whom are stationed right here in the good, old US-of-A.  Why our country, bordered by two vast oceans and two utterly non-threatening neighbors, needs such a military establishment is a question in its own right.  Be that as it may, the American military presence in Europe is a drop in the bucket when compared with the combined military forces of the other NATO nations, who number 1.9 million.

What’s more, most of the 50,000 troops we deploy in Europe are located in Germany and Italy, where we have army, navy and air bases, which are designed, not to the protect the countries in which they are situated, but our own strategic interests.  Our air bases in Ramstein, Germany, and Aviano, Italy, for example, played major roles in the 1991 Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, neither of which had anything to do with defending Europe, let alone Germany or Italy.  Our massive naval base in the Bay of Naples is home to the 6th Fleet, which isn’t there to protect Italy but to give the United States effective naval and air control of the Mediterranean.  Despite all this, Germany and Italy pay a not insignificant part of the costs of maintaining these and the numerous other American military installations in their countries.

The only remotely substantive fact underpinning Trump’s complaints is the question of the total military spending of our NATO allies.  In 2014—under the Obama administration—those allies agreed to a goal of increasing their military spending to the equivalent of two percent of their national GDPs.  Since then, several have reached that goal and nearly all have moved closer.  This apparently isn’t enough for Donald Trump, who is now demanding that the goal-post be raised to four percent and reached immediately. 

The original, entirely voluntary goal of two percent was arbitrary and nonsensical enough.  A goal of four percent, which exceeds the level of our own military spending, is utterly absurd.  It might be one thing for Poland and the Baltic states to spend that much on defense, since Russia sits on their borders and has invaded and occupied them in the past; it would be quite another for a country like Spain, which shares its one and only border with France and is 4,000 miles away from the nearest Russian troops.

In the end, Trump’s bullying mendacity has nothing to do with logic, fairness, or military necessity.  His entire purpose, and Vladimir Putin’s, is to undermine the alliance that has kept Russian ambitions in check for nearly 70 years.  Far from being a “rip-off,” NATO is one of the greatest bargains in history.  As a guarantor of American interests and national security, it is, and always has been, worth every penny.    

The title of the last of these commentaries was “Hiding in Plain Sight”.  Its theme was that those who profess to bewilderment at Donald Trump’s incessant defense and protection of Vladimir Putin and Putin’s Russia should open their eyes to his real motives, which are obvious to anyone who is willing to see them for what they are—a betrayal of the nation he was elected to lead.  

Today, Trump himself dropped all pretense.  His treachery is no longer hidden.  It is on full display, exposed to the clear light of day.

Seventy-two hours ago, Robert Swan Mueller III, the special counsel appointed to investigate Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, filed a stunningly specific indictment against 12 Russian spies, who work for the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian military.  The indictment outlined in detail how these Russian agents stole documents and data from the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and Hillary Clinton herself.  It described how that information was “weaponized” to defeat Clinton and elect Donald Trump.  Although the indictment did not charge Vladimir Putin himself, it is impossible to imagine that this far-ranging attack occurred without his explicit consent.  

And, although no Americans were charged with crimes, the indictment clearly laid the groundwork for charges yet to come.  It made clear that Roger Stone, a long-time Trump booster and confidant, is in the special counsel’s crosshairs.  It also pointed to a “candidate for the U. S. Congress,” who asked for and received stolen documents relating to an opponent in the 2016 election.  Whoever this candidate may be, he or she committed a crime that Mueller will almost certainly prosecute.  The indictment further described an “organization” that acted as a go-between that Russian agents used to disseminate the information they stole.  That “organization” is in all likelihood Wikileaks.  It, too, may soon find itself a target of the special counsel.

Despite all this, despite the exhaustive detail of the indictment, despite the unanimous judgment of our intelligence agencies that Russia attacked the 2016 election, despite a clear warning issued just two days ago by the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coates, that Russia is attacking our political institutions “every day,” Donald Trump emerged from his so-called “summit” in Helsinki, intent on defending Putin and Putin’s Russia once again.   

“President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump insisted.  “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”  He went on, for the hundredth time, to smear the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt” designed to sour relations between Russia and the United States, demanding to know why the FBI isn’t doing more to investigate “Hillary Clinton’s email server,” as if that had anything to do with anything.

Putin, for his part, was simultaneously more brazen and more coy.  While admitting that he preferred the election of Trump, in the hope of “normalizing” relations between Russia and the United States, he went on to deny that Russia would ever interfere with the domestic politics of another nation.  This assertion is so transparently false that even Joseph Goebbels would be left speechless.  

It is indisputable that Russia tried with varying success to hack elections in Germany, France, and the Netherlands; it had more success in hacking the most recent election in Italy; and, as we are learning day by day, it almost certainly succeeded in hacking the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.  None of which includes Russia’s even more nefarious  interventions in Ukraine, where the object was, not simply to influence elections, but to topple democratically elected governments.  In short, when Putin joined Trump at the podium in Helsinki, he did what he always does—lie.

That, of course, is not the principal problem, because no one in his right mind would ever take Putin at his word.  The principal problem is Donald Trump.

It is no longer plausible to believe that Trump’s slavish submission to Putin, his lavish sycophancy, and his unrepentant and pugnacious defense of an authoritarian thug is merely the result of an insecure and warped personality in the psychological thrall of an adversary of the United States.  As a diagnosis for behavior on the world stage, narcissism will only take you so far.   The more plausible explanation for Trump’s behavior is that he has been politically and personally compromised.  Either he is being paid off by the Russians, or he is being blackmailed.  

When Republican Senators like Lindsay Graham or Ben Sasse complain that Donald Trump “missed an opportunity” to confront Putin in Helsinki, they are missing the point.  The President of the United States didn’t “miss an opportunity,” he seized one.  He seized the opportunity to prove, once and for all, that he is Putin’s faithful puppet.   

If there was any doubt that our Commander in Chief has betrayed the nation, the “summit” in Helsinki has proved it. We have a traitor at the top, and his treachery is hiding no more. 

It is a sign of how grim our times have become that it is no longer possible to be shocked by anything Donald Trump does, no matter how cruel, shameful, or vindictive.  His decision to assail and humiliate our closest allies at the opening meeting of the annual NATO summit in Brussels was therefore generally greeted, not with shock, but with a sense of weary, woeful resignation.  

Not that expectations were high.  Most thoughtful people on both sides of the Atlantic merely hoped that Trump might restrain his worst instincts and try to behave in a civil way.  Their hopes were dashed the moment he arrived in Brussels.

Trump had scarcely taken his seat around the conference table when he unleashed a fact-free tirade against NATO members in general and Germany in particular.  He asserted that other NATO nations are “delinquent” in the payments they “owe” the United States for years of defending Europe against Russian aggression.  He accused Germany of being “the captive” of Russia, because a German company has built a pipeline under the Baltic to import Russian natural gas.  He completely misrepresented the way NATO is funded, either because he doesn’t understand it or doesn’t want to.  All in all, his vitriolic attack on what is incontestably the most successful military and diplomatic alliance of modern times—an alliance created by the United States to serve its own military, political, and economic interests—was stunning.

If there is any consolation in this deplorable episode, it is this:  we can now stop pretending that there is any doubt about what Trump is up to.

For the better part of two years, journalists, commentators, former government officials, and Trump opponents at both ends of the political spectrum have been shaking their heads in bewilderment at his persistent defense of Russia and Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin.  Against all evidence, against the unanimous conclusion of our intelligence agencies, against the no less unanimous affirmation provided by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump has denied that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to benefit him, choosing, instead, to accept Putin’s denials as “sincere”.   When the United States Senate voted for strict sanctions on Russia because of its interference in our elections, Trump delayed and backpedaled.  When a Russian defector in the United Kingdom was assassinated with a neurotoxic chemical agent manufactured in Russia, Trump had to be dragged screaming and kicking to retaliate and made no secret of his displeasure in having been forced to do so.  Whenever Russia or Putin are criticized, he goes out of his way to defend, and even praise, them.  

To all of this, the pundit class has rolled its eyes and professed its astonishment, claiming to be dumbfounded by what Trump’s motives might be.  Some have chalked it up to Trump’s bottomless narcissism, suggesting that he feels comfortable only with those, like Putin, who praise him lavishly.  Others have advanced the argument that he is an insecure bully, who gravitates toward other bullies on the world stage, because he sees his own reflection in their mirror.  Still others have argued that he bears a grudge against the established political and economic elite, the suave and cosmopolitan Europeans most of all, because they have never admitted him to their club; thus, the argument goes, Trump embraces thuggish outsiders like Putin out of grievance and spite.

It’s time to end this charade.  All these theories of the case are tortured circumlocutions, diverting our eyes from what has been unspeakably obvious from the day Donald J. Trump descended the escalator in the faux-gold atrium of Trump Tower to declare his candidacy:  the President of the United States is in the pocket of the Russian government, either because he is being paid or because he is being blackmailed, and we do not need to wait for the outcome of Robert Mueller’s investigation to see what is staring us in the face.

Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is sitting in jail, awaiting trial for money laundering and illegal lobbying.  All the while he was running Trump’s campaign, he was deeply in debt to one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, a close-friend of Putin.  He was paid millions of dollars to advance the cause of Ukraine’s former autocrat, who is now living in exile in Russia under Putin’s protection.  Add to all of which, Manafort’s long-time business partner in Ukraine was an agent for Russian military intelligence.  

As Trump was running for president, his one-time lawyer, Michael Cohen was conniving with a Russian-born mobster named Felix Sater to build a hotel in Moscow, a project that would have required Putin’s personal approval and financing by Russian banks controlled by Putin.

There were at least 46 undisclosed meetings between Russians and members of the Trump campaign and the Trump administration that were denied or lied about, in some cases under oath, most infamously by the current Attorney General of the United States, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.  

There were numerous attempts to set up secret back-channels by which members of the Trump campaign and administration could communicate with the Russians secretly, without the knowledge of the State Department or our intelligence agencies.  Spearheading these attempts were Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Eric Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy Devos, who is the founder of a shady firm that provides private military contractors—a.k.a., mercenaries—to the Defense Department.  

Finally, there was the infamous meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016, in which Donald Trump Jr. eagerly embraced an offer by agents of the Russian government to provide information that might be damaging to Hillary Clinton, a meeting that was first denied, then misrepresented, by none other than Donald Trump himself.

Even before this week’s disastrous NATO summit in Brussels, to have imagined that these, and dozens of other compromising and conspiratorial acts were coincidences, accidents, or inconsequential errors of judgment required more than credulity—it required that we close our eyes, plug our ears, and crawl under a rock.  

Such comforting evasions are no longer possible.  Donald Trump’s betrayal of our nation’s fundamental interests is now openly on display.  Hillary Clinton was right.  Trump is Putin’s puppet.  His treachery is hiding in plain sight.  

The documentary film maker and liberal firebrand, Michael Moore, recently issued a passionate warning and exhortation to the American people.  He warned that our democracy is in imminent danger.  He exhorted us take to the streets, not merely in protest, but in active civil disobedience, even at the risk of arrest, to stop the Trump administration in its tracks before it is too late.  

Let it be said that Moore was one of the few on the left who foresaw the election of Donald Trump, all the while the pundit class took it for granted that Hillary Clinton was going to win.  He was right then.  Is he right now?  Since Moore is political, polemical and filled with passionate intensity, it is fair to ask whether his passion has, in this case, turned into hysterical hyperbole.   

I believe the answer to that question is:  no.

For anyone with open eyes, it is no longer possible to ignore the awful truth that our democracy has been hijacked by what amounts to a right-wing coup d’état.  Donald Trump became president with the connivance of a hostile foreign power, despite losing to Hillary Clinton by three million votes.  Republicans kept their grip on the Senate, after a majority of Americans voted for Democrats. All three branches of the federal government and a majority of the states are now in the hands of radical conservatives, not because they were able to win fair elections, but because of gerrymandering and voter suppression. 

The perpetrators of this coup d’état are intent on imposing their retrograde agenda on an unwilling nation, regardless of public opinion or the popular will.  Virtually everything these right-wing bolsheviks stand for—extravagant tax cuts for the rich, the abolition of health care protections for those with pre-existing conditions, the unfettered ability of corporations and billionaires to buy elections, the wholesale right of gun fetishists to buy any sort of obscene military weapon they choose—is opposed by large majorities of the American people.  Yet none of this matters to those now in charge.  They are intent on advancing their agenda, if need be, by silencing, intimidating, and quashing those who oppose or even question them.

Thus far at least, this coup has been non-violent, but it is by no means certain that its perpetrators will not eventually resort to violence if they don’t get their way.  In the name of “law and order,” the President and Attorney General of the United States have shown themselves to be more than willing to violate constitutional protections and fundamental human rights.  Why should we expect them to be squeamish about using force to protect themselves, preserve their power, and impose their diktats on the rest of us?   If ICE agents can round up helpless immigrants in the dead of night and jail or deport them without due process, Trump’s stormtroopers can someday come looking for the likes of you and me.

If that sounds a bit shrill, consider what happened last week, when Trump’s henchmen in the House of Representatives let loose on the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Assistant Attorney General of the United States in a scandalous display of mendacity, partisan venom, and intimidation.  Like spittle-spewing Nazi judges, they pummeled and humiliated two life-long civil servants, men of integrity and Republicans to boot.  The sole purpose of this shameful display—a true “witch hunt” if ever there was one—was to provide cover to the political gangster they serve.

To make matters worse, our last institutional bulwark, the Supreme Court of the United States, is on the verge of crumbling.  The first crack in the dike came in 2000, when conservatives on the Court abandoned all sense of impartiality by installing George W. Bush as president, despite the fact that Al Gore had won the popular vote.  The crack widened in 2016, when Mitch McConnell stole a seat on the Supreme Court by stonewalling Barack Obama’s appointment of Merritt Garland, violating all precedents and political norms.  Justice Anthony Kennedy’s suspiciously convenient decision to retire before the November election, has widened the crack to a gaping hole, through which the flood waters will soon rush in. 

Many have romanticized Kennedy as a “moderate” voice on the court.  Despite occasional and quixotic departures from right-wing theology, he is and always was a conservative through and through.  We have Kennedy to thank for Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, Masterpiece Bakers, and the validation of Trump’s Muslim ban.  His replacement will be even worse, which means that Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, voter rights, what remains of the Affordable Care Act, environmental protections, and the freedom of workers to organize will all soon be on the chopping block.  More dark money from corporations and billionaires will pour into Republican coffers, with the purpose of making their political control permanent.  It will take decades, perhaps generations, for us to dig ourselves out of this hole, if we ever do.

If we are to have any hope of that happening, we must stop pretending that this coup d’état is in any way part of a normal political process and, instead, recognize it for what it is:  the hostile take-over of our government by a hateful minority.  We must ignore those who say that calls for Donald Trump’s impeachment come from malcontents and sore losers, simply because they refuse to accept his election.  We must turn a deaf ear to those who sanctimoniously demand “civility” for members of the Trump administration, each and every one of whom lies for a living and willingly serves a criminal.  We must fiercely insist that neither Trump nor his party have any legitimate or lawful right to govern the country.

I am 69 years old, and I have led a fortunate life, thanks in large part to an America that is disappearing before my eyes.  Like many others, my wife and I made the mistake of thinking that the trajectory of our lives would continue on its course, largely untouched by the vagaries of history.  It is inescapably clear that lives such as ours can no longer be led, or expected, in this country of ours.  History has caught up with us all, and it cannot be ignored.

For the first time in his tumultuous presidency, Donald Trump has faced a level of resistance and public furor that has forced him, if not to back down, then at least to backtrack.  Until now, he has nimbly sidestepped each of his many atrocities by deflecting and distracting public attention.  Not this time.  His decision to impose “zero tolerance” on would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, thereby criminalizing and forcibly separating parents from their guiltless children, seems to have crossed an emotional and political Rubicon. This decision ignited an uproar, as the images and sounds of weeping, terrified children filled television screens in homes all across the land.  When the mounting indignation finally became too thunderous to ignore, Trump reluctantly signed an “executive order”—in reality, an empty memorandum—supposedly designed to bring the policy to an end.  Whether it will actually do so is questionable at best.  Partly for legal reasons and partly because the Trump administration is almost incomprehensibly incompetent, it may be utterly unable to implement a change of course that it never contemplated, let alone planned for.

Added to all this is the unremitting duplicity of Trump himself.  In the few days that have elapsed since he reluctantly signed his “executive order,” Trump has done nothing but defend the original policy that order is supposed to stop.  In a campaign-style rally in Michigan, he railed against the criminality of immigrants.  In a speech to an organization representing small businesses, he proclaimed:  “Democrats are the problem.  They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country, like Ms-13.”  A mere 48 hours ago, he hosted a gathering of so-called “Angel Families” at the White House, during which he claimed that 63,000 Americans have been murdered by undocumented immigrants since the attack on the World Trade Center—a claim that is total rubbish.  And now, he is “doubling down,” by proposing to turn away immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees without due process or judicial review, a proposal that is almost certainly illegal and unconstitutional.

Trump has used various arguments to justify his animus toward immigrants.  The most infamous is the charge that they are “criminals and rapists” and a threat to the security of American citizens, a claim that launched his presidential campaign two years ago.  There is no evidence whatsoever to support this charge, and it would be laughable if it weren’t coming from the President of the United States.  

Another of his arguments is that lax immigration policies are responsible for an epidemic of violence perpetrated by the street gang, MS-13. As violent as this gang undoubtedly is, its activities don’t come close to being an epidemic, and its existence has nothing whatever to do with immigration.  On the contrary, MS-13 originated in Los Angeles and exported its activities from the United States to Central America—not vice versa.  

Trump also contends that immigrants and refugees cost us “billions,” draining jobs and resources from American citizens.  There are no facts to support this calumny.  On the contrary, every bit of credible evidence indicates that immigrants and refugees make a substantial net contribution to our economy.

Finally, there is Trump’s claim that “without strong borders, we don’t have a country,” an assertion that is impossible to square with the actual history of our country.  Between 1850 (the first year we began collecting immigration statistics) and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, more than 30 million European immigrants poured into this country with next-to-no regulation or control.  For three quarters of a century, we had, in effect, no borders at all.  And what happened?  The population of white Protestants already in place predictably howled at the prospect of losing their privileged status, as millions of German, Irish, and Italian Catholics landed on our shores.  In the end, however, the country not only survived this influx of new Americans, it thrived.  It turned out that we didn’t need “strong borders” to have a strong country.  Open borders made us stronger than we could ever have imagined.

Let us therefore be clear.  Donald Trump’s vicious attack against immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees has nothing to do with protecting us against crime, bolstering our economy, or making our country stronger.  It is not even an expression of simple, old-fashioned prejudice.  It is a deliberate attempt to rid our country of people whom he and his minions—Attorney General Jeff Sessions and speechwriter Stephen Miller foremost among them—deem to be, not merely inferior, but subhuman.  The targets of this attack include all who are black or brown rather than white, Muslim rather than Christian, Hispanic, Asian, or African rather than European.   Trump made his agenda all too plain when he railed against immigrants from “shit hole” countries and proposed that we need more immigrants from “Norway”.   He and his gang of thugs are far worse than bigots, racists, and bullies.  They are intent on nothing less than an utterly evil act of ethnic cleansing.  

Within hours of Donald Trump returning from his much-vaunted “summit” with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un, which amounted to little more than a handshake and a photo-op, the chattering classes converged on a narrative that quickly congealed into conventional wisdom.  This narrative holds that, although the self-adulatory gab-fest between Trump and Kim produced next to nothing of substance, the mere fact that the two countries are talking is a step forward, with the result that we are safer today than we were six months ago, when Trump and Kim were trading bellicose, brink-of-war threats, each bragging about whose “button” was bigger than whose.  This theory of the case is complete nonsense.  Worse than that, it is a dangerous misrepresentation of what Donald Trump has actually done.  Far from being safer today, we are at much greater risk.

To begin with, the credence given to the Twitter war that Trump and Kim were waging six months ago was always far greater than it deserved.  It should be obvious that Trump is a bag of wind, so puffed up with his own bullying grandiosity that he cannot contain himself.  When he doesn’t get his way or perceives some slight to his fragile ego, he will threaten anyone and everyone—usually from a distance and well out of harm’s way.  In any personal encounter, on the other hand, he invariably cowers and caves.  That is because Donald Trump is fundamentally a coward.  All his talk about “fire and fury,” all his jibes about “little rocket man,” were delivered from the safety of the White House or the warm cocoon of his Twitter account.  When he eventually came face to face with Kim in Singapore, he was capable of nothing but oohing and aahing.   

Kim himself is more opaque.  Like the country he rules, he is a cipher, and no sensible person would claim to know what he is really up to.  Nonetheless, the three-generation history of the Kim regime suggests that the current incarnation of the dynasty is, like his predecessors, interested in survival above all else.  He is a murderous dictator, to be sure, but he does not appear to be either a fool or an idiot.  Precipitating a war with the United States would be worse than folly and idiocy; it would be armageddon.  It is reasonable to assume that Kim knows that.  It is no less reasonable to assume that his war of words with Trump was a tactical calculation rather than an existential threat.

If we were not on the brink of war six months ago, as I very much doubt we were, we are left with the question of what was accomplished in Singapore to justify Trump’s claim that we now are safer than we were.  The only honest answer is:  Absolutely nothing.  Quite to the contrary, the “summit” between Trump and Kim was an unmitigated disaster for the security of the United States and our allies.

First, the “agreement” signed by the two leaders committed North Korea to nothing beyond the vague goal of “denuclearizing” the Korean Peninsula.  What that actually means was not defined, and it is by no means clear that Kim’s understanding of the term coincides with ours.  Apart from the question of definition, no timetable was agreed to, no promises were made regarding the elimination of specific nuclear materials or weapons, and no mechanism of verification was even mentioned.  After the “summit” was concluded, Trump made the bold claim that “many, many” people would soon be on the ground in North Korea to verify denuclearization.  There is nothing in the agreement itself to substantiate that claim, nor has the North Korean government said a word about it since Trump and Kim left Singapore.  When recently asked about the issue of verification, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bristled, slamming the question as “insulting and ridiculous”.  Whenever someone evades a question by attacking the question itself, you know you’ve touched a nerve.

Second and far more importantly, Trump made needless concessions to North Korea that undermine our credibility, our security, and the security of our allies.  He unilaterally decided to end American participation in military exercises with South Korea and Japan, without so much as a call to alert those allies of his intentions.  He sent a clear signal to Russia and China that the United States would do nothing if they eased sanctions on North Korea, which they promptly did.  He announced that he would happily invite Kim Jung Un to the White House.  

Linger on that for a moment.  Donald J. Trump wants to welcome to “the People’s House” a murderous dictator who has starved and terrorized his own people, a man who has been condemned for committing crimes against humanity.  This is the man Trump now praises as “talented” and “tough”.  This is the man Trump suggests may someday sleep in the bedroom once occupied by Abraham Lincoln.  The mere thought is an obscenity.

And what did we get, what did the world get, for this obscenity, for all Trump’s concessions and lavish praise of one of the most brutal dictators on the planet?  Zilch.

The obvious question is why, and the answer is abundantly clear.  The answer is that Donald Trump, far from being the “tough guy” he plays on television, is in reality a weak and desperate man.  As a result, he needed the “optics” of summitry far more than Kim Jung Un and was ready to give away the store even before the doors of the store opened.  The “great negotiator” replayed the script of the endless bankruptcies and failures that have defined his business career:  promise more than you can possibly deliver, renege on your promises, try to bully your way out of failure, and in the end, cave, accepting whatever lifeline is offered.  

When Trump returned from Singapore, he announced—via Twitter, of course—that Americans could “sleep well tonight”.  That was a lie, merely the latest in a lifetime of lies.  None of us should “sleep well tonight” or tomorrow night or the many nights that lie ahead.  Thanks to Donald Trump, we are in greater danger than ever.  Until this monster leaves the White House, none of us should “sleep well”.  

After a decades-long string of legally tenuous and sometimes logically absurd decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States, a new low was reached last week when the court handed down its ruling in a case called—I’m not kidding—Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.  At issue was the question of whether an Evangelical Christian baker could deny his services to a same-sex couple on religious and free speech grounds.  The court decided that he could.  Given the court’s recent history, the decision itself wasn’t surprising.  What was surprising was the fact that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate of the court’s conservatives, a frequent swing vote, and a major voice supporting same-sex marriage, wrote the majority opinion.  Even more surprising was that two liberal justices signed onto that opinion.

The background is as follows:

In 2012, a same-sex couple walked into a Colorado bakery run by Jack Phillips, an Evangelical Christian.  They had recently been married and wanted to buy a wedding cake to celebrate the occasion.  Jack Phillips refused.  They were told they could buy donuts or fudge, but not a wedding cake.  The same-sex couple thereupon filed a complaint with Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission. Since Colorado law prohibits discrimination based on various grounds, including sexual orientation, the commission found probable cause that the Evangelical baker had violated the law.  The case was handed over to a judge, who agreed.  The baker appealed to a higher court, which denied the appeal and upheld the original finding.  Not satisfied, the baker, by now backed and funded by a legion of right-wing political and religious organizations, asked the Supreme Court to review the case.  Since the Supreme Court rarely interferes with lower court decisions unless egregious and obvious legal mistakes have been made, we should have known from day one that “the fix was in” when the court decided to hear what the baker had to say.

And so it proved.

The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop claimed the following: (1) because his religion disapproves of same-sex marriage, and because his religious convictions are sincere, he should not be compelled to sell a wedding cake to same-sex couples; (2) because baking is a form of artistic expression, protected under the free speech provisions of the First Amendment, he cannot be compelled to bake or sell a cake celebrating an occasion he disapproves of, even if there is nothing about the cake—no inscription or imagery—that signifies approval; according to Phillips’ argument, the mere fact that the same-sex couple wanted to buy a wedding cake was transgressive enough.  That second, novel argument—which equated baking with artistic expression and therefore with protected speech—was added to the original case by Phillips’ attorneys, because they feared a simple claim of religious freedom would not be sufficient to justify discriminatory behavior.  As it turned out, they got it backwards.  The court largely ignored the second claim, which (no offense to bakers) is ridiculous on its face, in favor of the first.

Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission has been called a “narrow” decision, not because the vote was close but because the ruling focused on procedural rather than broad constitutional claims.   Justice Kennedy’s opinion kicked things off by stating:

The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression.  While it is unexceptional that Colorado law can protect gay persons in acquiring products and services on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public, the law must be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.

It went on to say:  

The State’s interest could have been weighed against Phillips’ sincere religious objections in a way consistent with the requisite religious neutrality that must be strictly observed.  But the official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments were inconsistent with that requirement.

There is little doubt that Justice Kennedy, by focusing on the question of “requisite religious neutrality,” was trying—if you will pardon such an obvious pun—to have his cake and eat it too.  This allowed him to rule in favor of the “sincere” religious beliefs of the Evangelical baker and still allow that gay Americans “can, and in some instances must” be protected against the discriminatory results of such beliefs.  The problem with that language is its slippery tentativeness.  “Can, and in some instances must” is very different from saying “should, and in all instances must”.  For the Supreme Court of the United States to equivocate on a fundamental question of discrimination is shameful.

In the final analysis, to call this ruling “narrow” misses the all-important point that, once you open the lid of Pandora’s Box even a crack, all sorts of evils come spilling out.  One of those evils is Justice Kennedy’s definition of what it means to be “neutral toward religion,” which amounts to saying nothing critical of religion at all, no matter how factual or justified that criticism may be.  

Of the seven members who sat on Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission, only two expressed opinions regarding religion.  One offered up the observation that religion has been “used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust, and to me, it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use…to use their religion to hurt others”.  

There is no evidence that Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission based its decision on those comments, let alone a general animus toward religion.  What’s more, even those comments cannot reasonably be construed as a denunciation of religion per se.  They merely point to historical facts that are indisputably true.  Religious beliefs were used to justify slavery and ideas of racial inferiority.  They were used to excuse the Holocaust.   They were—and still are—used to defend the subordination of women to men, of the poor to the privileged, of the powerless to the powerful.   

Does Justice Kennedy truly want us to deny such realities in the name of “neutrality” toward religion?  Does he truly want to protect bigotry in the name of religious freedom?  Does he truly suppose that “sincere” belief is a sufficient defense against prejudice and discrimination?  Where does argument end?  Can a conservative Catholic restaurant owner now decline to serve a person who has been divorced, because he “sincerely” believes divorce to be a sin?  Can an Evangelical hotel owner decline to accommodate a Jew, because he “sincerely” believes that the Jews killed Christ?  These are not academic or theoretical questions.  Southern racists invoked “sincere” religious beliefs, not eons ago but in my lifetime, to justify segregation and the suppression of African-Americans, and to deny them their civil rights.

A legal standard demanding complete “neutrality” regarding religious beliefs is utterly absurd, when those beliefs are themselves incapable of being “neutral”.   To believe, no matter how sincerely, in the inherent inferiority or wickedness of other human beings, and to discriminate against them as a result, is not a “religious freedom” that deserves protection under our constitution.  It is a plain-and-simple prejudice that deserves nothing but condemnation.  

Consumed as Americans have been by the ongoing tumult emanating from the Trump White House, few have paid much attention to recent events on the other side of the Atlantic that are, in some ways, more significant.  Two months ago, the citizens of Italy went to the polls in a national election, voting out their country’s “centrist” government.  Not only that, but a large majority voted for populist and explicitly anti-establishment parties.

To most Americans, this may seem trivial, even quaint, since the chaotic nature of Italian politics has long been something of a cliché bordering on a joke, either sad or funny, depending upon one’s point of view.  The results of this election, however, are neither trivial nor quaint, and they certainly don’t qualify as funny.

After last year’s French and Dutch elections, in which right-wing parties and their demagogic leaders were solidly trounced, many Europeans breathed a collective sigh of relief loud enough to be heard on both sides of the Atlantic.  The hope was that a tidal wave of populist anger, culminating in Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union and the shocking election of Donald Trump in the United States, had spent itself.  

Thanks to the Italian election, we now know that this hope, however comforting it may have been at the time, was a pipe dream.  The big winners were Cinque Stelle (the “Five Star Movement”) and Lega Nord (the “Northern League”).  Both are relative newcomers to the Italian political scene, and their philosophies are too eclectic to be readily pigeonholed.  But they have one thing in common:  a profound skepticism of the European Union, neoliberal economics, and global capitalism.  

In voting for these parties, Italians proclaimed, in effect, that they have had enough of the current system—a system that prioritizes banks and bondholders over human beings; a system designed to benefit corporations rather than citizens; a system that, under the rubrics of “free trade” and “open borders,” allows cheap labor to migrate effortlessly from one country to another and capital to move wherever it chooses in pursuit of profit. 

Italy’s president, a card-carrying member of Europe’s political and economic elite, has refused to confirm the formation of a new coalition government, judging the views of the proposed finance minister in that government to be “anti-European”.   The panjandrums of the European Union are hoping this temporary reprieve will give Italians time “to come to their senses” before another election is held.  They are deceiving themselves.  It is all but certain that this blatantly undemocratic sleight of hand will produce the opposite result.

Something similar happened in Greece in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.  Facing bankruptcy, the Greeks voted in an avowedly left-wing government that asked the EU for relief.  The poor Greeks got exactly nowhere, because their country and their economy were simply too small to matter.  In the end, the all-powerful “troika” that runs Europe—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—bullied the Greeks into submission.

Italy is a different kettle of fish.  Its economy is the third largest in the EU, ten times larger than that of Greece and larger than Russia’s.  As a practical matter, the EU cannot ignore the Italians, as it so contemptuously ignored the hat-in-hand Greeks.  To do so would run the risk of fueling a political and economic firestorm that is spreading throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, and even to France, where Emanuel Macron’s embrace of the EU’s neoliberal theology is facing massive resistance from the trade unions and ordinary French voters.

All this is happening for two reasons.

First, it is no longer possible to explain away the reality that global capitalism has betrayed countless millions, destroying jobs, uprooting communities, and upending traditional ways of life.  The billionaires, oligarchs, and financial institutions that have gained the most from this system have spent decades trying to obscure these inconvenient facts, by conflating the “free market” with personal and political freedom.  This rhetorical house of cards is collapsing.  

Those who have borne the brunt of the system’s failures feel lied to and left behind, exploited and hopeless.  Whatever one may think of the often blinkered prejudices of such people—their animosity toward immigrants, their racism, and their embrace of demagogues and would-be dictators—it is impossible to deny the profound social and human disruption they are suffering.  It is not in the least surprising that they are turning their backs on traditional politicians and political parties, which persist in defending an increasingly unsustainable status quo.  

Second, the neoliberal political and economic establishment that, for the moment at least, governs the world, appears to be tone-deaf and utterly clueless.  Either its members are delusional, or they lack the imagination to conceive of any alternative to the system that enriches them but fails so many others.  Like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, they appear to be unable to distinguish between shadows and the glaring light of reality.  

This shouldn’t surprise us.  The first wave of global capitalism, ignited by the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Britain, produced a string of global economic depressions, spanning generations and leading directly to the rise of fascism and two catastrophic world wars.  All along the way, the beneficiaries of the system tut-tutted, wagged their fingers at the improvidence of the “lower classes,” and assured themselves that all would be right in the end, because their privileged vision of the world was both inevitable and just.  Like the elites of today, like Plato’s prisoners, they failed to see Armageddon coming. 

If we are to survive the awfulness embodied by demagogues and would-be fascists like Donald Trump, if western democracy itself hopes to survive, we have to wake up.  We must  shed the shadows and shake off the myths of a social and economic system that no longer works.  The “free market” is incapable of saving us, and pretending otherwise is suicidal.  We need another answer.