Fear Rules the Midterms

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still, what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.”

— O’Brien to Winston Smith in 1984, by George Orwell

Even before the explosive — in both senses — news that broke on October 24 that a person or persons unknown had sent bombs to a number of President Donald Trump’s most prominent critics, the November 6, 2018 midterm elections had been dominated by fear. Among Democrats, the fear is that if Republicans keep control over both the House of Representatives and the Senate, President Trump will be free from the last potential shackles of accountability and able to make himself a virtual dictator, ruling either by decree or with the consent of a supine, powerless Congress the way his idol, Vladimir Putin of Russia, does.

Among Republicans, the carefully stoked fears are of anyone who’s “different” — who isn’t white, isn’t either male or a properly submissive female, isn’t heterosexual or cisgender (a word most Republicans probably wouldn’t recognize even if they tripped over it), and who isn’t U.S.-born. Trump has made himself the latest and most shameless spokesperson of a Republican campaign of fear that has been going on for at least 50 years, aimed at manipulating voters into supporting an agenda that is bad for them economically and socially by carefully throwing them scapegoat after scapegoat — immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, “uppity” women, Queers,[1] Muslims, whoever — and organizing them to vote accordingly.

We’ve all heard the plaints of the dwindling number of commentators who attempt to be “impartial” that American politics are increasingly polarized and this is a bad thing. When the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) said, “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts,” he was wrong. In today’s hyper-polarized political and media climate, where the rise of the Internet and social media have enabled just about any American to customize their sources of information so tightly they literally never see, hear or read anything that doesn’t already agree with their preconceptions, people feel they are entitled to their own facts.

The facts — the real, objective “facts” — about the bomb incidents are that between Monday, October 22, and Wednesday, October 24, suspicious packages containing crude but still potentially deadly pipe bombs were received at the homes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, Obama’s vice-president Joe Biden, and financier and Democratic donor George Soros. Similar packages were received at the offices of Congressmembers Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) and the New York newsroom of Cable News Network (CNN).

Wasserman Schultz’ name (the latter misspelled “Shultz”) and office were the return addresses on all the packages, and one came to her office because it was addressed to former attorney general Eric Holder but was returned to sender. CNN got their package as an apparent mistake because it was addressed to former CIA director John Brennan — who works at NBC News, not CNN — and in a grim bit of irony it arrived when they were in the middle of delivering a news report about the other bombs. None of the bomb packages actually exploded, and no one was physically injured by them. All the intended recipients had security details in place — the Obamas, Clintons and Bidens still enjoy Secret Service protection as former Presidents or Vice-Presidents — that intercepted the bombs and turned them over to police intact.

The bombs themselves were made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe, explosive powder from fireworks, and either nails or ground glass to serve as shrapnel and make them more deadly. The bomb sent to CNN also contained white powder, but it turned out to be harmless. They also contained delayed-action timers made from digital alarm clocks, unusual in mail bombs because mail bombs are usually set to go off immediately once someone opens the package that contains them. Delayed-action timers are more common in bombs personally planted by the bomber, who naturally wants a chance to set off the bomb remotely so s/he isn’t injured when the bomb goes off — and at least two of the bombs in the current cycle (the ones to Soros and CNN) were personally planted because, though like the rest of the packages they had six U.S. Postal Service “Forever” stamps attached, the stamps were not cancelled the way they were in the packages that were mailed.

Catastrophe Through a Partisan Lens

Those are the basic facts about the bombing attacks as we knew them on Thursday morning, October 25. Two other major things have happened since: on Friday, October 26 the FBI announced that they had arrested a suspect in the case: Cesar Sayoc, a part-Italian, part-Filipino resident of Boca Raton, Florida who drove a white van, which he was apparently living out of, that was decorated with photos of President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence as well as pictures of Hillary Clinton with target-style crosshairs over her head. The van was also decorated with a graphic showing the CNN logo with the word “Sucks” under it.

The following day, Sayoc’s 15 minutes of fame suddenly ended when someone else allegedly perpetrated an even more ghastly crime. The suspect’s name was Robert Bowers, and he’s in police custody in a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania under arrest for shooting up a synagogue and killing 11 people. Unlike Sayoc, who had Facebook and Twitter pages on which he regularly posted messages supporting Trump but whose social media presence went no farther than that, Bowers regularly participated on a Web site called Gab, to which he posted typical anti-Semitic hate propaganda. Also unlike Sayoc, Bowers declared himself farther Right than President Trump, whom he called a “globalist” and apparently mistrusted because Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is Jewish.

Everything else about the bombings — the ones we knew about on Thursday as well as bombs sent to other targets, including U.S. Senators Kamala Harris (D-California) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and former director of national intelligence James Clapper — is speculation, perhaps inevitable speculation, but still speculation. The inevitable speculation is fueled by the fact that, as John Cassidy pointed out on The New Yorker’s Web site October 24, “[A]ll of the targets were people whom Donald Trump has lambasted in his campaign rallies and outpourings on Twitter. They are also people who have been subjected to hateful abuse online by Trump supporters and alt-right groups. (In the case of Soros, as my colleague Eric Lach pointed out earlier, the attacks aren’t limited to the United States, and they go back years.)”

Partisan Democrats and progressives in general — including me — leaped to the assumption that the bomber or bombers were out to help Trump and the Republicans win the midterms by silencing prominent voices on our side of the political debate. Republicans and Right-wingers in general equally quickly leaped to the conclusion that the bomb attacks were a “false flag” operation conducted by Democrats. As veteran Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh put it on October 24:

“Republicans just don’t do this kind of thing, even though every event like mass shootings, remember, every mass shooting there is, Democrats and the media try to make everybody think right off the bat that some Tea Partier did it, or some talk radio fan did it, or some Fox News viewer did it — turns out it’s never, ever the case. Not one of these bombs went off and if a Democrat operative’s purpose here is to make it look like, ‘Hey, you know there are mobs everywhere… not just Democrat mobs.’”

So the bomb attempts — or whatever they were — against prominent Democrats and their supporters probably won’t have much effect on the midterm elections at all. Both Left and Right think that their side is preserving American democracy and the other side is destroying it. That will continue. Voters will filter the actual facts of the attacks through their finely honed partisan perceptions and believe what they want to believe. Either you’ll conclude that Trump’s nasty rhetoric and heated denunciations of all the people targeted by the mystery bombers have poisoned the political discourse so much that a few Right-wing crazies decided to kill the people Trump has told them to hate, or you’ll believe that the Democrats are so unscrupulous they’ll send fake bombs to themselves just to get more Americans to hate the Republicans.

President Trump’s own reaction is indicative of the man we’ve come to know from his over 30 years in public life and over three years in politics. He went ahead with a previously scheduled campaign rally in Wisconsin to support Leah Bukmir, the Republican opponent to incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin (the first openly Queer person ever elected to the House or the Senate) and, using a rhetorical device he’s fond of called paralipsis — saying something by saying you’re not going to say it — he said sotto voce that Baldwin is a socialist who’s out to destroy Medicare. Then he said that if he weren’t trying to be nice and a voice of unity after the bomb attacks, Trump said he’d yell that Baldwin was a socialist who’s out to destroy Medicare —which he proceeded to do.

Trump did say a few of the right things after the bomb attacks. He pledged that the federal government will do its utmost to bring the people who sent the bombs to justice. He told his Wisconsin audience, “We want all sides to come together in peace and harmony. Any acts or threats of political violence are an attack on our democracy itself.” The man who’s famously given his political opponents nasty, vicious nicknames like “Crooked Hillary,” “Pocohontas” (referring to Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and her claim to have partial Native American ancestry), and “Lyin’ Ted” — one he just had to walk back now that he’s endorsing Ted Cruz’s re-election bid for the U.S. Senate from Texas — said people in politics must “stop treating political opponents as being morally defective.”

But then, as it does so often with Donald Trump, the real Donald Trump started coming out. Later in the Wisconsin speech he started blaming the mainstream media in general and CNN — one of the bomb targets — in particular. “The media also has [sic] a responsibly to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories.” He raised the ante against the media the next morning on his favorite medium, Twitter, writing, “"A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”

In other words, if the media would just stop reporting anything bad about Trump and his administration — if they’d stop prattling on about that “witch hunt” investigation into his alleged ties to Russia, if they’d stop publishing lists of alleged Trump “lies,” if they’d no longer broadcast video clips of Trump saying something months ago that now he says he never said — we’d have “unity” and we wouldn’t have political violence or the threat of it. It’s yet more evidence, in case we needed it, that Donald Trump does not and never has wanted to be a United States President, powerful but still constrained by constitutional limits and the rights of its people. He wants to be a dictator, and just as he wants a Congress which will rubber-stamp everything he wants to do, he wants a media system that will ignore or cover up his failings and give the people of America and the world an endless stream of propaganda hailing the Great Leader and proclaiming the perfect, eternal wisdom, foresight and sagacity of Donald Trump.

Tyranny of the Minority

And if the Republican Party retains control of both houses of Congress in the November 6 midterms — which is looking more and more like the most likely outcome — Trump will probably get his wish. With continued Republican control of the U.S. Senate, which is virtually certain now that in almost every state with a closely contested Senate race the momentum is on the Republican side, Trump and Mitch McConnell will continue to be able to “pack” not only the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary with Federalist Society clones who will enact the priorities of the Republican Party — pro-corporate, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-people of color, anti-women, anti-Queer and pro-“religious freedom,” which in their view means the unfettered power of Right-wing Christianity to determine the values and mores the rest of us must live by — into not only case law but Constitutional law.

And if the Republicans keep the House of Representatives as well, there goes the last possible check on the Trump administration’s ability to do whatever it wants, no matter how sleazy, corrupt or technically illegal. A President Trump with a Republican Congress in 2019 will be able to act with impunity. He will have cowed the Justice Department into silence. He will be able to fire attorney general Jeff Sessions and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and replace them with faithful lapdogs who will in turn fire special counsel Robert Mueller and order an end to any and all prosecutions based on allegations of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia in 2016 or since. He will be able to launch spurious “investigations” of Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats while his faithful minions in Congress sweep the rug under the crimes of Trump and his administration.

In the 2018 midterms the Republicans are very close to turning the carefully structured republic created by the U.S. Constitution into a tyranny of the minority: a blueprint for perpetual Republican Party rule. A number of factors have helped them get close to this goal, and one of them is the structure of the Constitution itself. As James Madison made clear in Federalist #10, the United States was intended from the first to be a republic, not a democracy, because:

[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

By contrast, Madison wrote, a republic based on representative government would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” What that meant in practice was a system in which the highest office elected directly by the people would be their member of the House of Representatives. The President would be chosen by an Electoral College and the Senate, at least in the original constitutional design, would be chosen by state legislatures. (That wasn’t changed until 1913.) What’s more, each state, no matter its size, would have two U.S. Senators — a compromise that has become significantly more undemocratic now than it was then. When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the largest state, Virginia, had nine times as many people as the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 250 times as many people as the smallest, Wyoming.

The authors of the Constitution did something else that has become especially relevant this year: they gave state governments virtually absolute power not only to draw U.S. Congressional districts but to determine who may vote and under what circumstances. Technically barred by the 15^th Amendment from actually passing laws that said Blacks couldn’t vote, most of the Southern states in the late 19^th century adopted various tactics — literacy tests, poll taxes, ID requirements, and sometimes outright extra-legal intimidation by groups like the Ku Klux Klan — to prevent African-Americans from voting. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was designed to end this, but it was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 and as a result modern-day Southern Republicans (and Republicans in other states as well) have revived the tactics of their Democratic forebears to rig elections by making it impossible for people who would vote against them to be able to vote at all.

Much of the Republican Party’s success over the last 50 years has come from their skill at exploiting the undemocratic features of the United States Constitution — the Electoral College, the Senate and the powers of state legislatures to determine who may vote — to their advantage. But the key factor that brought the Republicans to power in 1968 and has, with a few minor exceptions, kept them there to this day is the political and social ferment of the 1960’s. The cataclysmic events of the 1960’s reversed the two major parties’ historical positions on civil rights: the Democrats, once the party of slavery, secession, segregation and the Klan, became identified with the equality struggles of African-Americans and the other oppressed groups — other people of color, women, Queers — who rose up in their wake and pursued similar strategies to win equality.

In the 1960’s the Republicans seized on this and in turn flipped their historical position on civil rights and social equality. The “Party of Lincoln” cut a deal with Southern racists — it was negotiated between Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond (Democrat turned independent turned Republican Senator from South Carolina and a hard-core racist and segregationist who also fathered a Black child) and was called the “Southern Strategy.” Though initially intended as an ad hoc response to the independent Presidential candidacy of racist Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968 and the fear that Wallace might split the potential Republican vote and throw an otherwise winnable election to the Democrats, the “Southern Strategy” worked for the Republicans not only in the South but nationwide.

Stoking the fears of working-class white voters that gains for African-Americans and other people of color would mean economic losses for them, the Republicans were able to break the fabled “New Deal coalition” that had made the Democrats the majority party from 1932 to 1968. They were able to pull the white working class away from the Democrats and align it solidly with the Republicans. The process took decades, but the 2016 election essentially completed it — the “Nixon Democrats” who had been the “Reagan Democrats” finally re-registered and became Trump Republicans. They provided the deciding votes in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin — states whose economies had suffered from the globalist policies of Democratic Presidents like Clinton and Obama and the export of virtually all American manufacturing to Third World countries like Mexico and China — that made Donald Trump President in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote by three million.

Another key factor in establishing Republican supremacy in American politics was the rise of a Right-wing media propaganda machine and its growing influence and power. This began in 1987, when President Reagan’s appointees at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the 38-year-old “Fairness Doctrine” which required broadcasters to represent various political views equally. As a result, the AM radio band became almost exclusively devoted to Right-wing talk radio. Not only did nationwide broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh become superstars, the talk radio message was coordinated by weekly meetings organized by Right-wing activist and financier Grover Norquist who distributed talking points to radio hosts nationwide and made sure they all “stayed on the same page” and became part of a unified propaganda machine of devastating effectiveness.

The Right-wing media machine created on AM radio after the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987 came to TV with the launch of the Fox News Channel in 1996. Fox quickly surpassed the moderate CNN as the number one cable news channel in ratings — a status it has never lost — and between them talk radio and Fox News literally determined how many millions of Americans would think about politics, and would vote. Talk radio and Fox News achieved their power largely by mobilizing the two big issues that had been at the heart of Republican cultural appeals since 1968 — stopping (or, better yet, reversing) the gains of the civil rights movements and upholding mainstream American culture, including the religious values of Right-wing Christianity, against attack from the so-called “counter-culture.” In 1968 that mainly meant being against the hippies; today it mostly means being against Queer people and also opposing any further expansion of the rights and overall autonomy of women.

One other factor that has ensured continued Right-wing dominance of American politics is that the South remains the key “swing” region of American politics. As someone old enough to remember when the “Solid South” was solidly Democratic instead of solidly Republican, it’s been depressing to see the South become the bulwark of a Right-wing coalition instead of (as it was during Franklin Roosevelt’s time) a sort of accidental, cranky junior partner in an economically progressive one. The fact remains that as long as the Republicans can hold the South, they can keep the Presidency.

The three Democrats elected President since 1968 — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — all made substantial inroads into the South and carried some Southern states. Carter and Clinton did this by being white Southerners themselves and Obama did it by being Black, and thereby mobilizing African-American voters to turn out for him in even greater numbers than they usually did for Democrats, overcoming the overwhelming advantage Republicans have among Southern whites. George W. Bush carried all 11 of the former Confederate states — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Florida — in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and Trump carried them all except Virginia (largely because Hillary Clinton chose Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate).

And it’s not just the South. Throughout the country, the continuing propaganda assault by the Republican Party and the Right-wing media machine that supports it have created a cadre of voters who are so addicted to the Kool-Aid they will never vote for a Democrat for anything. In her book What Happened Hillary Clinton recalled that she got this message loud and clear in 2014, when she went to a town-hall meeting in Arkansas and found that, while most Arkansans still liked their then-Senator, Democrat Mark Pryor, they were ready to vote him out of office and replace him with a Republican (which they did). One person at the meeting told Clinton, “The Democrats are going to take my guns away and make me attend Gay weddings.”

Throughout 2017 and 2018, the Democrats came heartbreakingly close to winning one special election for Congress after another — but couldn’t quite seal the deal. They boasted that they were able to cut down the margin by which the Republicans carried certain House districts from 25 to 1 percent —but they still lost. And in America’s single-member district, winner-take-all political system, winning by 1 percent is just as good as winning by 25 percent.

The Democrats are in the frustrating position of a salesman who can get a potential customer to look at a product, perhaps even test it, but can’t get the customer actually to sign on the dotted line. All the carefully constructed racial and cultural prejudices millions of Americans, especially ones who don’t live on the East or West Coasts, have been conditioned to have against the Democratic Party have struck again and again, in election after election, and are coming to the fore now as virtually all the supposedly “tossup” U.S. Senate seats are going strongly Republican in the latest polls.

This unholy combination — an aggressive Republican Party that is able to mobilize people with racial and cultural appeals to vote against their economic self-interest, a media network that keeps people in line by giving them only those “facts” that fit the Republican view of the world, a constitutional structure that gives disproportionate power to small states ruled by politically and culturally Right-wing white majorities, and a U.S. tradition of internal migration by which politically and culturally liberal people tend to concentrate in the coastal states and leave their Middle American homelands — has created a tyranny of the Republican minority that appears likely to continue after 2018.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how it will ever end, barring either an overwhelming catastrophe at the level of the 1930’s Great Depression that broke the power of the Republican Party the last time it had this level of control over American politics, or some concerted effort on the part of the Democratic Party and progressives in general to break the stranglehold the Republican political and media propaganda machines have over so many of the American people. Even the last big U.S. catastrophe — the meltdown of the financial system in late 2008 — produced only a temporary two-year respite from Republican hegemony.

What’s worse, the Republicans have a clear-cut ideology which they are pursuing with relentless determination. It includes cutting, and eventually ending, the big so-called “entitlement” programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act — and ending virtually all regulation of corporations. It means an end to protections for workers, consumers and the environment. It means a reversal of the civil-rights gains African-Americans have made over the past 60 years and the more recent ones by women, other people of color, and Queers. It contains a seeming internal contradiction — it calls for an end to government regulation of private business while also demanding an increase in government regulation of people’s personal lives, especially their sex lives — but one which the Republicans have somehow been able to finesse for at least the last 38 years, since the so-called “Christian Right” emerged as a major partner in the coalition that has elected Ronald Reagan and every Republican President since.

The Democrats, by contrast, are still riven by the ideological divide that has split them whenever they’ve been out of power since 1896. Should they be a forthrightly progressive party aimed at appealing to the economic and social have-nots, curbing corporate power, protecting workers’ rights (including the right to organize and form unions) and creating, protecting and expanding the social safety net? Or should they become Republicans Lite, appealing to corporate funders while still posing as the friends of the 99 percent? All the great clashes over the Democratic Presidential nomination of the last 120 years — between Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Bryan in 1896, William Gibbs McAdoo and Al Smith in 1924, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in 1984, Howard Dean and John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016 — have been manifestations of this great, still unsettled debate.

Mark’s Predictions for the Midterms (and Beyond)

• The Republican Party will not only hold on to their current U.S. Senate majority, they will gain seats as Democratic incumbents in small states Trump carrled — Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Jon Tester in Montana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri — fall to the Republican juggernaut. Even Nevada Senator Dean Heller, the biggest target for Democrats since he’s the only Republican Senator running for re-election in a state Hillary Clinton carried over Donald Trump, will win.

• The Republicans will also hold on to their majority in the House of Representatives. They will lose 10 to 15 seats, a significant drop but not enough to cost them the chamber.

• More Americans will actually vote for Democrats than Republicans to represent them in both the House and Senate, but under the rules of the Constitution that won’t matter — just as it didn’t matter that in November 2016 three million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton to be President than for Donald Trump.

• With Republicans still in control of both houses of Congress, and with such mildly Trump-critical Senators as Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the late John McCain (R-Arizona) replaced by Trump loyalists, Trump will be emboldened to “clean house” at the Justice Department, replacing Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, firing Robert Mueller and ending all investigations into his campaign, his Russian connections and his personal and business finances.

• Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will end the legislative filibuster so Republicans can pass bills without any Democratic input or support. He’s already ended the filibuster for judicial nominations (which is how Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh got on the Supreme Court), and he wanted to end the legislative filibuster in 2017 but was blocked by John McCain and Orrin Hatch. Now that Hatch will be out of the Senate and McCain is dead, he’ll have the votes to get rid of the filibuster once and for all.

• Once they get rid of the legislative filibuster, the Republicans in Congress will repeal all or most of the Affordable Care Act and pass the big cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid they need in order to pay for the 2017 tax cuts (so clearly skewed towards the richest Americans they aren’t supported by a majority in polls) and the “phantom” middle-class tax cut Trump promised in the later stages of the 2018 campaign.

• Though Democrats may make some gains in state governor’s and legislative races, most state governments will remain under Republican control. That means Republicans will continue and intensify the gimmicks with which they have maintained minority control, including gerrymandered Congressional and legislative districts and elaborate voter-suppression laws so people who wouldn’t vote Republican won’t be able to vote at all.

• Donald Trump will get re-elected President in 2020 the same way he got elected in 2016: he’ll lose the popular vote but will amass enough state victories he’ll win the Electoral College anyway.

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[1] — I use the term “Queer” as an inclusive term for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender people because I reject the sham inclusionism of that ghastly set of initials, “LGBT people.”

We Need to Get Rid of the Goddamned Guns

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“So many guns, and so few brains behind ’em.”

—   Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

On Saturday, October 27, 11 members of the ironically named Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania became the latest victims of the U.S. government’s failure at all levels — federal, state and local — to protect its citizens against nuts with guns. A 46-year-old man named Robert Bowers with a history of making anti-Semitic comments on a social media Web site called Gab decided to translate his words into action and randomly kill 11 people whose only “crime” was being Jewish.

We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

According to the charges federal authorities have filed against him, Bowers entered the synagogue about 10 a.m. Eastern time (7 a.m. Pacific time) armed with an AR-15 military-grade assault rifle and three handguns, and started shooting people. When police arrived, according to media reports, Bowers came out of the synagogue and engaged fire. By the time it was over, 11 people were dead and six others — two Tree of Life congregants and four police officers — were wounded.

We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

Politicians, community leaders, media commentators and the people left to pick up the pieces after mass shootings are fond of saying we can’t “normalize” these events. The truth is we already have. The rabbi at Tree of Life has said he considered putting his congregation through a drill to practice what they should do if a mass shooter attacked their building. Other congregations in other religions already have. We’ve already locked down schools, airports, concerts and even political rallies because of the omnipresent threats of mass violence and terrorism. Now we’re being told that the price of the New Order will be armed guards at our churches — and no doubt metal detectors and other “security” devices as we enter the doors of a house of faith to worship whatever God we believe in.

We’ve become unwilling combatants in an ongoing war. In Pittsburgh, the police had to adopt military-style tactics — “going to ground” and crawling their way to the shooter to try to stay out of his line of fire — and the doctor who supervises the emergency ward at the hospital where the six wounded victims were taken said on TV he was using tactics he learned in the military to try to save their lives. We all live in a permanent war zone because we’ve subcontracted our entire national policy on firearms to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and even crazier gun nuts like Gun Owners of America, who’ve held the political system hostage to a few well-mobilized voters who think there’s some sacred “right” under the Second Amendment for which so many real, living, innocent Americans have to sacrifice their lives.

We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

This particular nut was driven by anti-Semitism. Another one shot up an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina because he hated Blacks. The two kids who committed mass murder at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado were doing it to express all too typical adolescent alienation. A shooter in Santa Barbara went on a killing spree because he couldn’t get laid. A man in Colorado shot up a movie theater that was showing a Batman film and dressed up as the Joker, a villain in the Batman mythos. A Pakistani-American couple in San Bernardino shot up a social-service office because they thought that would make them part of a jihad sponsored by ISIS. The U.S.-born son of Afghan-American parents shot up a Gay disco in Orlando, Florida. Another shooter in Sandy Hook, Connecticut shot up an elementary school and killed kids just after he’d killed his mother, and since he died in the incident we’ll never know what his motive was.

It doesn’t matter why these awful people do what they do. What matters is how easy the U.S. makes it for them to do it. We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

President Trump, predictably, emerged from his well-sheltered, well-secured White House on his way to a campaign rally in Indianapolis (where he spoke before an audience whose every member had to be searched by Secret Service agents on their way in) to say that gun laws would have done “little” to stop the Pittsburgh shooting. He said that the Tree of Life Synagogue should have hired an “armed guard” — as some synagogues and other religious institutions already have — and that would have stopped the rampage.

Never mind that a lot of these “armed guards” have about the level of training and experience of Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Never mind that a sufficiently powerful and sophisticated shooter — especially one who’d been in the military and did have training — could easily overpower the kind of security-service rent-a-cops who usually take jobs like this. Never mind that the more “security” we put on people every time they go somewhere to learn, to worship, to hear live music or participate in a political rally makes them wonder if the trouble of being searched at the door — and potentially hassled over a letter opener or a can of hair spray — makes attending the event no longer worth it.

What President Trump is saying, in essence, is that the government is not going to protect you against mass shooters. You need to protect you against mass shooters. If you run a church — especially a synagogue, an African-American church, a U.S. mosque or any other sort of religious enterprise that triggers prejudice and hatred among a fair number of Americans — you have to hire an “armed guard” to protect your members against attack. You have to pay for their security. If your perimeter is actually breached — if someone shows up and starts shooting you — then law enforcement will involve themselves and intervene to kill or capture the shooter. But until then, you’re on your own.

We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

We know how this happened. Every American does. It began with the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Actually it began earlier than that, when the first white settlers came to the New World in the 1500’s and 1600’s. They had firearms and the Native American populations didn’t. As feminist and Native American historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has argued, those “well-regulated militias” were formed to mobilize the entire white American population to fight back just in case the dispossessed Natives tried to conquer back the land that was rightfully theirs. They were also used to suppress any attempts by Black American slaves to revolt and win their freedom.

However problematic the Second Amendment’s application to “well-regulated militias” may have been, at least historically it wasn’t interpreted to grant every individual American a right to “keep and bear” whatever sort of weapon s/he wanted. That changed in 2007, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ghastly decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which threw out a Washington, D.C. law regulating gun ownership and for the first time established that the Second Amendment did grant an individual right to own guns.

This decision was largely the result of the NRA’s slow, steady takeover of the American political system, and specifically the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election. Ignore most of what you’ve heard about why, despite losing the popular vote, George W. Bush became President and Al Gore didn’t. Gore didn’t lose because of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Secretary of State, or Ralph Nader. He lost because the NRA mounted independent campaigns against him in the key states of Tennessee and West Virginia, which mobilized enough gun-rights supporters to carry those states for Bush.

This is significant because, in what was otherwise a razor-close election, Gore became the first major-party Presidential nominee since George McGovern in 1972 to lose his home state, Tennessee. Had Gore carried Tennessee, he would have won the Electoral College and Florida wouldn’t have mattered. And every politician in America — Democrat as well as Republican, blue-state as well as red-state — got the message loud and clear. Don’t talk about regulating guns. Even when the body count mounts from mass shooting after mass shooting, offer only “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their families.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a country that entertains itself almost exclusively with violence should be so prone to outbursts of real violence. A huge proportion of American movies, including virtually all the biggest blockbuster hits, are celebrations of violence by “good guys” against “bad guys,” and the plots of major films are getting more and more beside the point. All most movie writers have to do today is figure out how to get the story from one big action scene to the next, to “give the people what they really want” — the vicarious thrill of seeing people kill each other. It shouldn’t be surprising that a country that entertains itself that way produces more than a few people demented enough not to be satisfied with vicarious violence, but to seek out the real thing.

The result is that we have a government that has willfully ignored its most basic duty: to keep its citizens alive and safe. Thanks to our failure to do anything to prevent the crazies who commit mass shootings from acquiring the weapons to do so means that the U.S. government at all levels — federal, state, local — is abrogating its responsibility, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, to secure the people’s “unalienable Right” to “Life.” Every victim of every mass shooting in America, especially each one where the shooter uses a military-grade weapon whose only function is to kill a large number of humans in a short time, is a silent witness to our government’s failure to secure us this most basic right to survive. And as the Declaration goes on to say:

[W[henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is time for the ordinary people who aren’t part of the gun lobby or ideologically enthralled to it to rise up and take back our right to life. It is time for us to become a more powerful voting bloc than the NRA and its cronies. It is time to insist, by any legal means necessary — including, if necessary, a Constitutional amendment clarifying the issue — that the Second Amendment does not confer an absolute right of individuals to bear high-powered firearms, especially ones whose only purpose is mass killing of humans. It is time for us to rise up and end the tyranny of the National Rifle Association and the mass shooters enabled by the policies they have foisted on government — including President Trump’s executive order, signed shortly after he took office, that made it easier for mentally ill people to get guns — and instead put sane restrictions on gun ownership that are necessary to protect our people’s lives.

Yes, NRA members, we are coming for your guns. Our nation cannot survive if we continue to allow it to be held hostage by a few gun nuts and the politicians they have bought and paid for. We need to be as single-minded in our voting as the NRA’s members and supporters are. We need to withhold our votes from any politician, no matter how much we may agree with them on other issues, if they don’t or won’t vote for sane laws on guns. If we want the bloodbath in America to stop, we must use our political power to vote, organize and mobilize to stop it.

We need to get rid of the goddamned guns.

The Kavanaugh Kontroversy

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It seemed weirdly appropriate that when I first heard the name Christine Blasey Ford and the basics of her sexual assault allegations against then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee, and now duly confirmed and sworn associate justice, Brett Kavanaugh, I was in the middle of reading a novel called The Murderer’s Daughter by well-known mystery writer and former child psychiatrist Jonathan Kellerman. It was appropriate because the essence of Blasey Ford’s story sounded like something Kellerman could have made up: a high-school girl goes to a drunken party, gets hit on and nearly raped by a prep-school kid from a family of power and privilege, manages to put the incident behind her and go on to a brilliant academic career — only to have it all brought back to her when the name of her assailant is revealed as a potential appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the same time I had my doubts about whether the Blasey Ford revelations, or the accounts of other alleged victims of Kavanaugh’s wanton ways in his heavy-drinking teen years, would derail Kavanaugh’s confirmation and eventual service on the Supreme Court. The Democrats had tried the same tactic 27 years ago against Clarence Thomas: unable to defeat a Republican nominee on the ideological and judicial grounds on which he deserved defeat, they dredged up a sexual-harassment allegation against him at the last minute and tried to knock him off the court that way. I remember that my reaction when Anita Hill came forward with her bizarre accusations against Thomas — including laying pubic hairs across her Coke can and boasting about the on-screen exploits of porn star “Long Dong Silver” (who, it turned out, made only two movies, both of which were Gay) — was I didn’t believe her.

I didn’t disbelieve her, either. Frankly, I didn’t know what to think. I had thought that male bosses who sexually exploited women working for them did so in more obvious, blatant ways, waving motel keys in their faces and saying, “Meet me at the No-Tell Motel at 9 o’clock tonight or don’t bother coming in to work tomorrow morning.” Like most of the rest of America, I know a lot more about sexual harassment in the workplace now than I did then. I’ve heard stories that seemed even weirder than the ones Hill told about Thomas. I’ve read about the ludicrous exploits of people like Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves and the other big-name executives in the entertainment industry who’ve been brought down low after decades in which they seem to have been running their enterprises just to attract women they could sexually exploit and demean.

And I’ve seen the downfall of political figures I used to admire — including former Congressmember and San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who was driven out of office by his fellow Democrats in 2013 — four years before the so-called “#MeToo” movement started. I’ve learned terms like “creating a hostile work environment” and come to understand that women can be made to feel unwelcome in an office even if they aren’t the targets of overt, unprofessional and decidedly unwanted advances from the men they work for. Indeed, it occurs to me that, just as Susan Brownmiller wrote in the 1970’s that rapists were “the shock troops of the patriarchy” — they enforce the social restrictions on where women can go, what they can wear and whom they can associate with, especially after dark, by subjecting them to the fear of rape at all times — much of what’s come to be called “sexual harassment” in work environments isn’t so much one man hitting on one woman as all men using their sexuality to stake out a claim of superiority over all women.

So when Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her allegation that 36 years ago Brett Kavanaugh, then a 17-year-old student at the exclusive and all-male Georgetown Preparatory School, sexually assaulted and nearly raped her at a party in a private home in Maryland while she was a 15-year-old student at a nearby all-women’s high school, I believed her. I believed her because her story had the ring of truth about it. She remembered the incident quite vividly, and while there were a few details she didn’t recall, those actually added to her credibility because they made it far less likely that she was making up the story to discredit Kavanaugh. I particularly believed her because of one detail she did remember in her story, one that showed who Brett Kavanaugh was at 17 and who he still is 36 years later.

Throughout the assault, Blasey Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, whom she says didn’t participate in it but was present, laughed. They laughed at the predicament they had put her in. They laughed at her pathetic attempts to fight off Kavanaugh. They laughed as Kavanaugh put his arm across her neck with such force she thought he would accidentally strangle her. They laughed as Blasey Ford was likely saved from a near-certain rape only because she’d come to that party from a swimming practice, she still had her one-piece bathing suit on under her other clothes, and the drunken, fumbling Kavanaugh couldn’t get it off her.

That laughter was the laughter of privilege. It was the laughter of boys belonging to what the late sociologist C. Wright Mills called “the power elite,” the sons of rich men trained from birth to rule over the rest of us. They didn’t have to articulate in words their utter contempt for Christine Blasey Ford’s humanity, autonomy or independence. They told it to her by laughing while Kavanaugh assaulted her and Judge looked on and cheered from the sidelines. Their laughter said, “We are the power elite. We are destined to run the country. We can pick out any woman we want and treat her as a piece of meat, and not only can she not do anything about it, neither can anyone else. We have complete impunity. We can do whatever we like, and no one can or will derail us from the position of power that is our destiny from birth.”

And, judging from Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice and the likelihood that for the next 20, 30, 40 or 50 years he will be one of the nine people who decide what the Constitution of the United States means and which individuals (and which racial, ethnic, gender and social classes) it protects, he was right when he laughed.

A Referendum on “#MeToo”

It’s a matter of how fast the news cycle flies that as of this writing (October 18, 2018, 12 days after I wrote the first four paragraphs of this article), Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation amid the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct against him already seems like ancient history. He hasn’t even heard an actual case as a Supreme Court justice yet, and already the moving finger of the media have moved on to another child of privilege with a last name beginning with “K” — Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian expatriate and dissident journalist who two weeks ago was allegedly lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey and tortured, murdered and dismembered by a 15-person hit squad including Saudi Arabia’s leading forensic surgeon, who came armed with a bone saw.

The Khashoggi incident has shocked the world, not only because it’s ripped off the “reformer” façade from Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known colloquially by his initials MBS, which makes him sound like a bank rather than a person) but because it’s been yet another exposé of President Donald Trump’s utter moral bankruptcy. Other Presidents at least pretended to believe in a world of equal justice and human rights, and in America’s unique standing as the country that would call repressive dictators out on their abuses against their citizens. They didn’t always do that — the U.S. participated in covert operations that brought down democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973, and other countries as well, and during the Cold War the U.S. was often quick to blast Left-wing dictators while coddling Right-wing ones — but at least they played the game.

Trump is wide-open about what his priorities are. He wants a world in which leaders are free to rule over their countries’ populations whatever the people might want. He wants U.S. foreign policy to be guided by what will be good for America’s richest individuals and corporations in general, and Donald Trump in particular. From the moment the authorities in Turkey started selectively releasing the evidence that Khashoggi was murdered in their country by 15 assassins on the orders of the government of his country of origin, Trump has said that his real priority is maintaining the $120 billion arms deal the Saudis have promised America and in particular its biggest defense contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Indeed, it was Donald Trump who first linked Khashoggi with Kavanaugh when he was interviewed by Associated Press reporters Catherine Lucey, Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire on October 16. Asked about the Turkish allegations that Khashoggi was killed by a 15-member hit squad sent by the Saudi government, Trump said, “You know, here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way. So I was unconcerned.”

“Guilty until proven innocent” has become a mantra for Republicans in dismissing the allegations against Kavanaugh. It’s a strange thing to come out of the mouth of Donald Trump, who in every public statement he’s made on the so-called “Central Park Five” — five young African-Americans who were accused and convicted of beating a white jogger in Central Park on April 19, 1989 — insisted that they were guilty and deserved the death penalty even after they were proven innocent by DNA evidence. But then Donald Trump has always behaved like the ruling Inner Party of George Orwell’s 1984, choosing what “facts” he wishes to believe and showing the same dexterity in performing what Orwell called doublethink — holding two contradictory positions in his mind at once and believing both of them.

Trump told the Associated Press reporters and also 60 Minutes interviewer Lesley Stahl that his toughness on the Kavanaugh nomination, and particularly his sneering mockery of Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony in his rallies, turned the midterm elections around for the Republicans and energized their voter base. “That fight has had an impact on energy, and it’s had an impact on the Republican Party, a very positive one in terms of getting out and voting. I think,” he told the AP. He told Stahl that his attack on Blasey Ford turned the tide and got Kavanaugh approved, and in his public comments not only in these interviews but his speeches Trump seems to be carrying the torch for male privilege against the so-called “#MeToo” movement and its call to end the social tolerance of sexual harassments and assaults against women (and men too!) by powerful males.

For Donald Trump, as for Brett Kavanaugh, being able to treat women’s bodies like meat is just one of the perks of wealth and power. He said so himself when he told Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood tape in 2006 that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” because “when you’re a star, they let you do anything.” When Trump owned the Miss Universe contest, he reportedly strolled into the women’s dressing room any time he pleased to catch glimpses of the contestants in various stages of undress. He’s been personally accused of sexual harassment or assault by at least 16 women — whom he’s called liars and participants in a plot to embarrass him and bring him down politically — and when Kavanaugh was publicly denounced by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez as having sexually assaulted them, Trump identified with Kavanaugh and they bonded even more closely than they had before because Trump saw Kavanaugh as a fellow victim of predatory women out to bring down powerful men.

In this, as in virtually every other aspect of his politics, Trump is a reactionary in the most literal sense. He reaches out to an embattled and shrinking white majority by proclaiming himself anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Black and anxious to put women back in their “place” as the homemakers, child rearers and sexual outlets for their men. Trump has become the latest avatar of the Republican Party’s racial and cultural politics that emerged in 1968 when Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond cooked up the so-called “Southern Strategy” to neutralize the Right-wing third-party campaign of racist Alabama Governor George Wallace.

What was originally a short-term expedient has become a bulwark of Republicans’ hold on power as what political scientist Walter DeVries called the “sun party” of American politics. DeVries argued that throughout American history one of the two major parties was the “sun party” whose supporters dominated the electorate and whose ideology was the main force in political policymaking, while the other was the “moon party” which occasionally won elections but mostly played a subservient role. From 1800 to 1860 the Democrats were the “sun party.” Then after the Lincoln presidency, the Civil War, the end of slavery and the change in America’s ruling class from a landed aristocracy to a tightly integrated network of corporations, the Republicans became the “sun party” and remained so until the Great Depression of the 1930’s brought the Democrats to power.

The Democrats remained the “sun party” until 1968, when Republicans seized on racial resentments from white Democratic voters, especially working-class ethnics, to pull apart the New Deal coalition on which the Democratic “sun party” period had been based. If the Democrats, historically the party of slavery, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, were reinventing themselves as the party of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in general the inclusion of people of color, women and (eventually) Queers as equals in American life, the Republicans essentially said, “Fine. Then we’ll take over as the party of racial, gender, sexual and cultural resentment, and that will make us the majority party.”

Donald Trump, the Republicans in the Senate and GOP candidates generally have ridden these resentments to victory in election after election. Not every election, of course, but enough that the ideas of the Republican Party — slashing taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations; ending government protections of workers, consumers and the environment; wiping out organized labor as a social and political force; putting brakes on the civil rights of people of color; supporting law enforcement and actively repressing minority communities; and reversing the relatively liberal immigration policies put in place in the 1960’s in order to Make America White Again — have continued to dominate American political discourse. Trump is waving Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the nation’s — and especially his political base’s — faces not only as someone who will use his power as a Supreme Court justice to enforce his party’s anti-people of color, anti-woman, anti-Queer, anti-worker, anti-consumer and anti-environment ideology, but as someone who personally symbolizes the fight to discredit the “#MeToo” movement and return men to their “natural right” to dominate women and exploit them sexually.

And Trump’s transformation of Brett Kavanaugh into a symbol of male power and privilege got a major boost from an unexpected source: Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine). Through a nauseating, schoolmarmish 45-minute performance on the Senate floor, Collins proclaimed herself a supporter of the “presumption of innocence” — as if Kavanaugh were being prosecuted for attempted rape instead of given what amounted to a job interview for the Supreme Court. (If someone were tried for embezzlement, even if they were acquitted, that would be a legitimate reason for the personnel director of a bank not to hire them.) She said there was “no corroboration” of Blasey Ford’s allegations — based on a five-day sham “investigation” conducted by FBI agents constrained by orders from the White House to limit both the number of people they could interview and the scope of questions they could ask.

Collins said she couldn’t even say it was “more likely than not” that Kavanaugh assaulted Blasey Ford as she claimed — and in a 60 Minutes interview she twisted the knife in further by endorsing the preposterous Republican propaganda machine theory that Blasey Ford was indeed assaulted, but by someone other than Kavanaugh. Whatever her motivation for this eruption of gaseous rhetoric, the message Collins sent was a direct assault on every woman who makes a claim of sexual harassment or assault against a powerful man. In blunt terms, Susan Collins told the people of America — both the men who want to keep the sexist status quo the way it is and the women who have experienced sexual harassment and assault and kept quiet about it because of the intense pressure on them to do so — “I’m a woman, and I don’t ‘believe the women’ either!”

Kavanaugh On the Court

The extent to which Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation became a battle in the culture war over America’s attitude towards women and the ability of powerful men to keep treating women as sexual conveniences took the attention away from where it should have been: just what will Brett Kavanaugh do on the Supreme Court? He offered some chilling hints during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the same day as Blasey Ford’s testimony, when he said, “What goes around comes around” and told the committee’s Democrats, “You have sown the wind … ”

Certainly Donald Trump was hardly likely to appoint a progressive, a liberal or even a thoughtful, independent conservative like the justice Kavanaugh will replace, Anthony Kennedy, to the Supreme Court. In my lifetime some of the most progressive Supreme Court justices have been the appointees of Republican Presidents — Earl Warren and William Brennan by Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Blackmun by Richard Nixon, John Paul Stevens by Gerald Ford, David Souter by George H. W. Bush — but that ended when an increasingly ideological Republican Party outsourced its judicial appointments, not only for the Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary, to the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

In his Associated Press interview, Trump boasted that he has got more federal judges nominated and confirmed than any President since George Washington — and he may be right. The person he has the most to thank for that is the Senate President pro tempore and Senate Republican Party leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky). During Barack Obama’s presidency McConnell cooked up a scheme to keep as many federal judgeships vacant as possible so the next Republican President, whoever that may be, could fill them with cookie-cutter clones of the Federalist Society’s judicial ideal: judges who would give businesses unfettered power over workers, consumers and the environment; who would put strict limitations on the ability of women, people of color, Queers and other traditionally disadvantaged groups to achieve justice through the court system; who would grant Republican Presidents broad power to govern by executive orders without congressional action (while denying the same power to Democratic Presidents!); and who would enforce the odd but surprisingly durable ideology of the current Republican Party, which is to get government out of the boardrooms and into the bedrooms.

Thanks to the efforts of Trump, McConnell and a Republican Senate delegation that has ruthlessly used its power to ram through Trump’s nominees by sheer force of their majority, the American judicial system is reverting to what it was between the 1880’s and the 1930’s: a bulwark for corporations and the rich, an upholder and enforcer of growing economic inequality, and a weapon against civil rights. The likelihood that even if someday the Democratic Party regains the Presidency and both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court will put huge constraints on their actions — just as Franklin Roosevelt was bedeviled in his first term by a Supreme Court which threw out just about everything he got through Congress to try to help end the Depression. Indeed, Roosevelt got so frustrated with the Court he launched a failed attempt to expand it from nine to 15 members, and though Congress voted it down Roosevelt eventually got the court he wanted simply by attrition: he served over 12 years (longer than any other President has, or ever will unless the 22^nd Amendment is repealed) and the Nine Old Men who had torpedoed his economic agenda either retired or died.

One of the big issues liberal America in general and the Democratic Party in particular has been concerned about with Kavanaugh on the court is the fate of abortion rights and women’s control over reproduction in general. Reportedly Susan Collins extracted from Kavanaugh a promise that he would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Court decision (written by Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun!) upholding women’s right to reproductive choice. The dark secret — though it’s really not that secret at all — is that Kavanaugh doesn’t need to vote to overturn Roe. The Court’s current majority has already started the process of gutting it. It began when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote an opinion that said states could regulate women’s access to abortion as long as they didn’t put “undue restrictions” on the procedure.

This ruling begat a joke around the legal community: “What’s an ‘undue restriction’ on abortion?” “Whatever Sandra Day O’Connor says it is.” After O’Connor retired, that became, “Whatever Anthony Kennedy says it is.” Now it will be, “Whatever Brett Kavanaugh says it is” — and Brett Kavanaugh, a hard-core Roman Catholic as well as an ideological Right-winger, is likely to uphold just about any state restriction on abortion as not “undue.” In his last year on the court Kennedy cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 decision striking down a series of elaborate restrictions the Texas state government had passed to make it virtually impossible for a woman in Texas to get a safe, legal abortion. If the Texas legislature tries it again, it’s likely Kavanaugh will cast the deciding vote to uphold their restrictions — continuing the “death of a thousand cuts” the abortion rights supposedly guaranteed by Roe have been suggested to by decades of Republican Court majorities.

The situation for Queer people is likely even more dire. While the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to so dramatically reverse Roe as to make abortion illegal nationwide — liberal “blue” states will still be able to guarantee their women safe, legal access to the procedure — Kavanaugh is likely to expand the Court’s recent trend towards granting government officials, business owners and individual private-sector workers the power to refuse service to Queers on the basis of “deeply held religious objections” to homosexuality and Queer civil rights. One can expect Kavanaugh to build on the precedent of the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, which upheld the right of a baker to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a Gay male couple, and effectively nullify all legal protections for Queer people by saying that the right of a baker, a government clerk, a pharmacist or anyone else to refuse to serve Queers on the basis of religious “free exercise” under the First Amendment trumps any state legal protections against anti-Queer discrimination. States won’t be able to protect their own Queer populations from this sort of “constitutionally protected” religiously-based discrimination!

Perhaps an even more dire consequence of Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court will be the destruction of the regulatory state. Since Congress passed the Railway Act of 1908 (signed into law by progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt), administrative agencies of the federal government have had the power to issue so-called “rules” that, though they aren’t voted into law by Congress, have the power of law. Most of the advances in protecting workers’ health and safety, protecting consumers from unsafe products or deceptive sales and advertising practices, and protecting the environment from exploitation and destruction, have occurred because federal agencies had this rule-making power.

But Brett Kavanaugh, in his previous gig as a justice on the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, is on record as saying the entire “rule-making” process is unconstitutional and agencies shouldn’t be able to enact rules until Congress approves them. Congress already has the power to veto a rule within 120 days after an agency enacted — which Trump and the Republican leaders in both houses of Congress used to wipe out rules enacted in the waning days of the Obama administration — but Kavanaugh is likely to provide the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to render the entire “rule-making” process unconstitutional and leave the rights of workers, consumers and the environment to the untender mercies of a corporate-controlled, Republican-dominated Congress.

One other issue on which Kavanaugh has staked out a far-Right position — and one which has been widely rumored to be the reason Trump appointed him rather than one of the others on his short list — is Presidential accountability. Though Kavanaugh served on special counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton — which began as a probe of a failed Arkansas real-estate development and ended with Clinton’s impeachment for lying about a sexual affair — he has since changed his mind and decided that Presidents should be immune from all legal proceedings while they are in office. This means that Donald Trump has at least one sure vote on the Court to keep him from being indicted by Robert Mueller if Mueller finds he was part of a conspiracy with Trump campaign officials and Russian government operatives to influence the 2016 Presidential election in Trump’s favor.

The issue of whether Presidents have to respond to subpoenas for evidence from special prosecutors investigating them was supposedly settled in the 1974 case U.S. v. Nixon, in which the Supreme Court (by an 8-0 vote, including three of Richard Nixon’s own appointees) ruled that he had to turn over the recordings of Presidential meetings sought by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski. The recordings revealed that Nixon had directly intervened to cover up his campaign’s involvement in the 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office-hotel complex by telling the CIA to order the FBI to back off its investigation on false grounds of “national security.” Overnight Nixon’s remaining support in Congress evaporated and he resigned a week later.

But Brett Kavanaugh is on record as saying that U.S. v. Nixon was “wrongly decided” and he would have ruled that Nixon had a right to keep his recordings secret at least until the end of his Presidential term, and possibly forever. It’s likely that if Mueller attempts to subpoena Trump to testify before his investigation, Kavanaugh will draw some sort of specious distinction between what Nixon was ordered to do (turn over physical evidence) and what Trump would be ordered to do (testify personally to a grand jury under oath). He’d be working around not only the U.S. v. Nixon case but also the ruling Starr got against Clinton that he had to give testimony in the lawsuit filed by Paula Jones against him, which ultimately led to his impeachment and narrow escape from being removed from office in disgrace when Republicans couldn’t muster the two-thirds Senate majority needed for conviction on an impeachment.

But Kavanaugh’s fertile mind will no doubt come up with some specious reasoning that even though previous Supreme Court decisions have required Presidents to submit physical evidence in a criminal trial, and provide personal testimony in a civil lawsuit against them, requiring a President to provide personal testimony in a criminal prosecution against his current or former staff — and possibly against the President himself — would be unconstitutional because it would divert the President’s attention when he needs to be fully focused on the task of running the country.

As long as Republicans remain in control of both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency and the Supreme Court — and Kavanaugh’s appointment has ensured them likely dominance of the Court for the next 25 to 50 years — Trump will have nothing to fear from Robert Mueller or any other investigator with actual subpoena power. Indeed, I’m convinced that Trump is only waiting for the midterm elections to fire attorney general Jeff Sessions and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and replace them with officials who will in turn fire Mueller and end the special counsel’s investigation of his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia once and for all.

Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the United States Supreme Court is a disaster for the country — for workers, consumers, the environment, people of color, women, Queers and everyone else in the cross-hairs of Republican orthodoxy. If there’s a silver lining in it, one would hope that it would be the final straw that convinces the idiots in what I’ve taken to calling the “alt-Left” — those who still insist, against all evidence and reason, that there is “no difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties. Kavanaugh is yet one more piece of living proof that, even they are both committed to maintaining the capitalist system and are influenced by the priorities of the corporate elite (I think Bernie Sanders got the distinction right when he said the Republicans are “controlled” by the 1 percent and the Democrats are “influenced” by it), there are still profound differences between the Republican and Democratic parties and the only way to restore America’s democracy (however limited) and protect it against the authoritarian agenda of Trump and the modern-day Republicans is to vote for Democrats for every elective office.

“Frontline”’s Documentary on Donald Trump, Robert Mueller and the Russia Investigation

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s episode of the long-running PBS series Frontline was called “Trump’s Showdown” and was ostensibly about special counsel Robert Mueller and his long-running (so far, almost a year and a half) investigation into whether the government of Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and whether members of Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with them to influence the election in Trump’s direction. The show is actually more than half over before Mueller makes his appearance, and the first hour starts in the heady days of the “transition” between Obama and Trump, and in particular the meeting the heads of the U.S. intelligence agencies sought and got with Trump in December 2016 to tell him about the evidence that Russia had interfered with the election. “There was no equivocation in our language. And we were very direct and very, very clear in terms of what it is that we knew and assessed,” said then-CIA director John Brennan (against whom Trump would take a bizarre revenge a year and a half later by revoking his security clearance), and then-national intelligence director James Clapper added, “There was no pushback because … the evidence that we laid out at the high, highly-classified level was pretty, pretty compelling.” Trump regarded the revelation of Russian interference in the election as an attack on the legitimacy of his Presidency — a position he’s held to this day and, no matter how his Presidency ends, will probably go to his grave holding — and was particularly incensed when then-FBI director James Comey took him aside and told him of the existence of the now-infamous Christopher Steele “dossier,” the compilation of 16 reports former British MI-6 (their equivalent of the CIA and the fictional James Bond’s employer) agent Steele had compiled as a private security agent working for, among other people, the Democratic National Campaign Committee (DNCC) on Trump’s background. Comey regarded his telling Trump about the dossier as an attempt to warn him that this information existed and could be used against him; Trump regarded it as blackmail and seems to have decided then and there to fire Comey, though he didn’t do that until May 2017. 

The film then goes into a flashback to tell a capsule version of the story of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, the one degree of separation between Trump and the notorious Red-baiter Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin). Cohn “made his bones” as a Communist witch-hunter leading the espionage prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 and then became McCarthy’s chief of staff when the Republicans gained control of the U.S. Senate in the 1952 election and McCarthy was appointed head of the government oversight committee. When McCarthy got censured by the U.S. Senate in November 1954 (in a lame-duck session since the Republicans had already lost their Senate majority in the 1954 midterm election — we can hope that history repeats itself!!!!!) Cohn went into a private law practice in New York City and got hired by Donald Trump to mastermind his ascension from his father’s real-estate business in New York’s outer boroughs to the brass ring of Manhattan. Trump biographer and Vanity Fair reporter Marie Brenner said, “Trump was created by the politics of intimidation, taught to him by his mentor Roy Cohn, who really was his alter ego. He was his confidant. He was a, he was an ersatz father. He was the person who Trump went to with any kind of a problem.” Indeed, it would not be far wrong to say that the two people who most influenced Trump and shaped the kind of person he would become was his actual father, Fred Trump (who, a New York Times special report revealed yesterday, gave Donald a lot more money than the “little loan of $1 million, which I had to pay back with interest” which Donald had always said was the only help he got business-wise from his dad: in fact, Trump’s father apparently gave Donald $60 million — $417 million in 2018 dollars — as part of an elaborate tax-avoidance scheme to leave his money to his kids without having to pay federal taxes on it; according to the New York Times, thanks to his dad’s machinations Donald was a multi-millionaire at age three!), and Roy Cohn. 

Another Trump biographer, Gwenda Blair (who also wrote about the late NBC news reporter Jessica Savitch and Princess Diana), said, “Roy Cohn had 20 years of being a really aggressive, no holds barred, go for the jugular, fight back, anybody says something to you, throw it back at them, guy. He was famous for that behavior.” (The show does not also mention that Cohn was both a notorious homophobe and a closeted Gay man who was disbarred in New York in 1986 just a few months before he died of AIDS-related complications — a duality which led Tony Kushner to make Cohn the principal villain of his play Angels in America.) Trump was so enamored of Cohn’s style that apparently during his Presidency he’s actually asked staff people, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” — which led one commentator to say that the attorney Trump really wanted to represent him in the Russia investigation had been dead for 30 years — and one gets the impression he was hoping to groom Cohn’s near-namesake Michael Cohen as Cohn’s replacement, a combination attorney and “fixer” who could be counted on to bribe porn stars and other people presenting Trump with the threat of inconvenient revelations. (Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford makes a cameo appearance even though her case really doesn’t fit into the broad scope of the Russia investigation.) One of Trump’s problems was that Cohen was a match for Cohn’s unscrupulousness and venom (this show includes a replay of the famous conversation in which Cohen tried to stop an anti-Trump story from appearing on the Daily Beast Web site by threatening the reporter, Tim Mak, on the phone — “I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. Do you understand me? Don't think you can hide behind your pen because it's not going to happen. … I'm more than happy to discuss it with your attorney and with your legal counsel because, motherfucker, you're going to need it”) but not for Cohn’s street smarts. 

Though almost none of the information on this program is new, the portrait of Trump that emerges is of a man honed by his years in the New York real-estate business to a deep unscrupulousness and suspicion of everyone else’s motives: he really believes that everyone else in the world is as vicious, self-centered and egomaniacal as he is. So when he had to deal with former FBI director Comey, who lives by a sense of self-righteousness and sanctimony (the principal negative descriptions of Comey by almost everyone who’s ever criticized him) in which he frequently believes himself to be, as the show put it, “the only honest person in the room,” sparks were bound to fly. I suspected (and wrote at the time) that when Comey did his sensational last-minute revelation 11 days before the 2016 election that he was re-opening the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails (a decision a lot of people, including Clinton herself, are convinced was the deciding factor that threw the election to Trump), he was doing so because he feared that Clinton would win the election and by helping Trump he was ensuring that his directorship of the FBI would survive a Trump presidency. (Comey’s own explanation is that he expected Clinton to win but the Republicans to keep control of Congress, and if he had sat on the information the Republicans would have investigated him and the FBI over it for the duration of Clinton’s presidency.) If Comey hoped that helping Trump win would get him to keep his job, he woefully misread Trump: Trump saw Comey as the sort of self-righteous stuffed shirt who’d already screwed former President George W. Bush on the issue of wireless surveillance of Americans and would screw him, too, if he had the chance. So Trump and Comey were on a collision course from day one and Trump was determined to fire him as soon as he had a pretext, though as he admitted to NBC News’ Lester Holt in an interview (which I’d just read about in Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book Unhinged — she recalled carefully briefing him to prepare for this interview and then watched as Trump totally forgot about everything he’d been briefed on and gave a damaging interview — Omarosa says it was a common experience in the White House to be tackled on the one-yard line by someone who was supposed to be on your team) in which he said he really fired Comey over “the Russia thing.” 

The Frontline program also shows the bizarre meeting Trump had in the Oval Office the day after he fired Comey with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Sergei Kislyak, in which he basically boasted that by firing Comey he’d made the FBI’s Russia investigation go away — a meeting whose existence was carefully kept secret from the U.S. media but which we found out about anyway because the Russian media sent an official photographer to record it and published the story in a propagandistic context. Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung wrote a story quoting Trump as having essentially said to these two high-ranking Russian officials, “We’re going to have a great relationship. There’s this investigation. It’s just become a total irritant for me. … Jim Comey’s firing lifted a great weight from me. The guy was a nut job.” The Comey firing led to the bizarre period of a week and a half in which, according to a recent New York Times article, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein (left in charge of the FBI’s Russia investigation by attorney general Jeff Sessions’ recusal — a “sin” for which Trump has never forgiven him and which he’s obsessed about ever since — and who was resentful that his letter critiquing Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation was used as the pretext to fire Comey), mused about remedies like secretly recording his conversations with Trump and lobbying the Cabinet to invoke Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment to remove Trump from office and install Mike Pence as “Acting President.” Instead of doing either of those things (though the Times’ revelation would certainly give Trump the pretext to fire Rosenstein, as I’m convinced he intends to do just after the midterms, especially if the Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress and Trump therefore won’t have to worry about impeachment if he does the general house-cleaning he so clearly wants — firing both Sessions and Rosenstein and telling his new attorney general to fire Mueller and close down all Justice Department investigations of his campaign and Russia) Rosenstein chose the route of appointing a special counsel, and picking Mueller — until this appointment a highly regarded Washington veteran, a Republican who’d served under both Republican and Democratic Presidents and been the FBI director for 12 years, longer than anyone else except J. Edgar Hoover — as the counsel. 

What’s been virtually forgotten given the success of the Republican witch hunt (I probably shouldn’t use their term for the Mueller investigation, but it’s irresistible) against Mueller and his probe is that originally his selection by Rosenstein as special counsel was heralded by leaders on both sides of the partisan divide. Even Republican bomb-thrower Newt Gingrich (who masterminded the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives after 42 consecutive years of Democratic control and did a lot to establish the current no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, win-at-all-costs political climate) hailed Mueller as a basically fair person who would conduct an impartial investigation and let the chips fall where they may. The Frontline documentary’s second half chronicles the three phases of President Trump’ approach to the investigation. At first he stalked the halls of the White House, demanding, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” — upset at even the hint of defiance from Jeff Sessions, his sense that Sessions (like Comey) had some sort of abstract devotion to the rule of law or the independence of the Justice Department or something else that got in the way of offering the blood oath of “loyalty” Trump demands of his subordinates as President the way he did as owner and CEO of the Trump Organization. Trump was ready to fire Sessions in the late summer of 2017, with the idea that with a new Attorney General in place, one who wouldn’t be bound by Sessions’ recusal and who would fire both Rosenstein and Mueller — but it didn’t happen because Sessions, a former U.S. Senator from Alabama, still had some powerful friends in the Senate, including Republican leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who dropped the message on Trump that the Senate would be too busy for the rest of the year to consider confirming a new Attorney General. (Since then the Senate Republicans have caved to Trump on the issue of Jeff Sessions’ tenure, as they have on absolutely everything else: Lindsey Graham is now saying things like, “The President is entitled to have an Attorney General he can trust.”) 

When that didn’t work, Trump hired two experienced Washington, D.C.-based attorneys, John Dowd and Ty Cobb, and instructed them to cooperate with the Mueller investigation and in particular to provide them all the documents they requested and to allow them to interview White House staff members. As this show documents, Trump took what Richard Nixon called “the hang-out road” based on the promise Dowd and Cobb made him that if he cooperated, the Mueller investigation would end soon — by Thanksgiving 2017, and when that didn’t happen by the new year. When the new year arrived and Mueller was still investigating — and indicting key people in Trump’s campaign like former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign manager Paul Manafort — Trump’s attitude took a 180° turn back to his own basic (and basest) instincts and the lessons Roy Cohn had taught him all those years ago. Dowd and Cobb left the case (the Frontline documentary does not mention the accusation in Bob Woodward’s recent book Fear: Trump in the White House that Dowd ran a mock interrogation of Trump as a practice session in case Trump sat down for an interview with Mueller, and Trump claimed he was “a great witness” when Dowd felt he did so poorly that Dowd concluded the case was unwinnable and quit the next day) and their replacement was former New York U.S. Attorney (in which capacity he had sworn in James Comey as one of his assistant) and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. A lot of people have joked that Trump hired Giuliani less to be his lawyer than to play his lawyer on TV, on Trump’s favorite network Fox News in particular. The Frontline show contains a film clip of Giuliani’s first TV appearance as Trump’s lawyer, in which he practically screams in that New York screech we’ve become all too familiar with, “The president has done nothing wrong. Read my lips: Nothing wrong!” 

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and former civil liberties lawyer turned Right-wing hero and to-the-death Trump defender, was interviewed by Frontline as part of their attempt to make a fair-minded documentary and noted that Giuliani’s tactic was less a legal strategy than a public-relations one to try the case in the court of public opinion and undercut any ability by the Democrats or Trump’s political enemies to make the case for impeaching Trump and removing him from office. The show quotes Giuliani as saying, “Our jury, as it should be, is the American people. And the American people, yes, are Republicans, largely, independents, pretty substantially, and even some Democrats now question the legitimacy of it” — the Mueller investigation. Frontline also claims that one of the things that got under Trump’s skin was when the Mueller investigators started looking into the private finances of the Trump Organization, which Trump had once said was a “red line” that in his mind would justify firing Mueller. Trump got the message that Mueller meant business regarding his private finances when the FBI did a pre-dawn “no-knock” raid on Michael Cohen’s home, office and a hotel room he was staying in when his home was being remodeled. “No-knock” raids are part of the overall assault on the Constitution in general and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in particular motivated by the so-called “War on Drugs,” in which people accused of drug-related crimes have had their Constitutional protections of due process systematically stripped away. The theory behind “no-knock” raids was that you wanted to catch these dastardly drug dealers by surprise before they could flush the drugs down the toilet or otherwise dispose of them as best as they could if the cops actually knocked on their doors, and according to the investigators in their legal documents Cohen was targeted for a “no-knock” raid because they feared if they knocked, he’d destroy the documents they were after — including, it turned out, the secret tape recordings he made of his meetings and phone calls with Trump. Cohen eventually pleaded guilty to eight felonies, at least two of which (relating to hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to keep quiet about their alleged sexual experiences with Trump) he said in his plea that he committed because Donald Trump, his employer and now President of the United States, ordered him to as part of his job. 

The Frontline documentary ends open-endedly because the task of writing the end to the story has basically fallen to the American electorate, or at least that section of it that bothers to vote in the 2018 midterm elections. If Democrats regain control of at least one house of Congress (and right now, according to Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com Web site, they have a 75 percent chance of taking the House but only a 2 in 7 chance of winning the Senate), there will at least be serious Congressional investigations of Trump, his Russia connections, his finances and everything else that’s been rotten, underhanded and corrupt about his Presidency (and his life in the private sector before that), not so much because the Democrats are determined to throw that kind of dirt around but because they know the only chance they have of defeating Trump for re-election in 2020 is to blacken his name enough that the Democrats can mobilize their fickle base and vote him out with a candidate who is likely to have almost none of the flash and charismatic larger-than-life appeal of Trump. If the Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress, it’s all over: Trump will be able to install a new attorney general and can shut down the Mueller investigation root and branch, firing not only Mueller but also all the U.S. attorneys to whom Mueller, in an apparent attempt to protect the investigation even if he gets fired and his office of special counsel is closed, has parceled out bits of it. The greatest lesson of the Trump-Mueller “showdown” is that it’s yet another piece of evidence of how much, contrary to the late New York Democratic politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous comment that “everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own set of facts,” in today’s America, with a polarized political system and a polarized media system producing a polarized electorate, everyone is entitled to their own set of facts, and in particular which of the two dominant narratives — the one peddled by the legacy media like the national broadcast networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the competing narrative of Right-wing talk radio, Fox News and the local TV stations under the ideological control of owners like Liberty and Sinclair — they patronize and believe. 

In George Orwell’s 1984 one of the ways the Inner Party, the ruling class of Orwell’s dystopian dictatorship, kept in power was by literally manipulating the media and the historical record so the only “truth” the people could obtain was whichever one the Party wanted them to believe at any given time. “The mutability of the past is a central tenet of Ingsoc,[1]” Orwell wrote. “Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.” Donald Trump obviously does not have the kind of total control over either the written (and audio-visual) records of the past or of the minds of the American people the Inner Party did in 1984. For one thing, he doesn’t have an entire department of the Ministry of Truth (the Inner Party’s propaganda agency) devoted to destroying records that contradict whatever he now says he said at any given juncture. (Ironically, given how many modern-day records are stored on computers as digital files instead of on more relatively permanent media like paper or film, the repeated destruction of records that contradict the official view of truth at any given moment, and their replacement by records that supported the new official “truth,” would be far easier now than it was in Orwell’s time.) When Trump says that he always said X or never said Y, pesky reporters and media outlets often have a way of turning up video footage or printouts from his Twitter feed or other documentary evidence that he did indeed say what he now says he never said. 

What Trump does have, however, is a well-trained segment of about 40 percent of the American people who will willingly believe everything he says regardless of the documentary evidence against this. We’ve seen this in polls about the Mueller investigation and more recently in the ongoing controversy over Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a fact that Kavanaugh and Dr Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused him of attempting to rape her when they were both high-school students in 1982, spoke before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, September 27, 2018 and said certain things that were documented and recorded. But what people made of that hearing has fallen along the all too predictable political fault lines, with the cadre of the American people who are convicted and conditioned to believe everything Trump, the Republican Party, talk radio and Fox News tell them about the world saw Brett Kavanaugh as an honest truth-teller righteously calling out the forces of political correctness — the Democrats, the accusers against him and a vast Left-wing conspiracy headed by Bill and Hillary Clinton — to defend himself and his name against an unfair charge cooked up by his nefarious political enemies. Meanwhile, people on the other side of the political divide would watch the same hearing — the same footage of the same people saying the same things — and conclude that Dr. Ford was telling the truth and Kavanaugh was a vicious, lying scumbag as well as a highly partisan figure who shouldn’t be a judge on the highest court in the land. 

American politics have become so polarized that people no longer just disagree about the meaning of a common, agreed-upon set of facts, or the public policies that should follow from those realities. They disagree on what the facts are, and like the Inner Party in 1984 Trump and his staff have gone out of their way to deny even the idea of an objective “truth” uncolored by the red or blue glasses through which people observe it. That’s how early on in the Trump administration Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway were able to defend Trump’s claim that the crowd watching his inauguration was the largest in history against the photographic evidence that far more people had attended Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 than Trump’s in 2017 by citing “alternative facts.” It’s also what Rudolph Giuliani meant when he told an NBC news panel that “truth isn’t truth” — the full context in which he said that was that James Comey had one story about why Trump fired him, Trump had another, and because Robert Mueller and James Comey were friends Mueller was going to believe Comey’s story over Trump’s and possibly prosecute Trump for perjury simply because he had an alternative narrative he wished to present under oath.

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[1] — The official name, short for “English Socialism,” of the ideology under which the ruling party of 1984 claimed to rule.