PBS FRONTLINE Documentary "American Voices 2024" Shows That the Division Between Americans Doesn't Always Work Out the Way You'd Think

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last Tuesday, October 29, KPBS showed a Frontline presentation called “American Voices 2024,” which had an interesting derivation. The original “American Voices: A Nation in Turmoil” was made by filmmakers and journalists Mike Shum, Qinling Li and Arthur Nazaryan and shown just before the 2020 election. The 2020 version focused on the COVID-19 pandemic; the surge of “Black Lives Matter” protests following the murder of unarmed African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin; and the Presidential election between then-incumbent Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden. According to Mike Shum (who’s credited as director, while Li and Nazaryan are two of the four credited producers), the 2024 incarnation came about as a result of a conversation with two other members of the team in which they said, “[W]hat if we revisited each of the people we had been following in 2020 for this coming election? And, for me at least, it was a natural ‘yes.’ There was a natural curiosity about where everyone was at. To be able to engage with them in this capacity was something that I was very much interested in doing. It just flows with the mission and the mandate that we started with of creating this wider tapestry of individuals across the country facing a collective unknown.”

The team had recruited a fascinatingly diverse group of people in various locations for the 2020 original, including Cary K. Gordon, senior pastor of the Cornerstone World Outreach mega-church in Sioux City, Iowa; Bryant Moore, African-American barber from Portland, Oregon; Rod and Rosie Borba, co-owners of a flower shop in Cool, California; Carran Lewis, a Black woman community activist from North Chesterfield, Virginia; Amy Garner from Utah, whose brother committed suicide in the early days of COVID-19; Dr. Christine Eady Mann, a family practitioner in Cedar Park, Texas; Mayra Ramirez from Chicago, an early victim of COVID-19 who went through two lung transplants in an effort to keep her alive; Tayo Daniel, Black activist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota, who helped organize protests against the police over the George Floyd killing; Royce White, an African-American pro-Trump U.S. Senate candidate in Minnesota; Mark Curtis, construction company owner and father of four in Richmond, Virginia; and Jason Tolentino and his Asian-born wife Jaime, co-owners of a beauty parlor in Oakland, California. If there’s a message in this show, it’s that the divisions within America’s electorate don’t always shake out the way you’d think they would. Rosie Borba said in 2020 that her feeling about the Black Lives Matter movement was, “All lives matter. Not just Black, not pink, white or purple. It's not just one race.” “All lives matter” had become a talking point among American Rightists who wanted to diminish the significance of centuries of slavery, segregation and violence against African-Americans. But Rosie immediately insisted that that wasn’t her intent at all; she added, “I think it's wrong, basically, what the officer did. I think he should pay a price for what he did. But I look back in history. I had a great-great-grandfather that helped with the slaves. He helped run the Underground Railroad. He was ambushed by white people who felt the slaves should stay slaves. So when they sit there and say every white person is racist or bad, I'm not racist. I'm not bad. I'm a human being. I respect them, I expect to be respected back.”

Rosie Barba was also expressing doubts about Joe Biden’s age in 2020, before he took office and well before his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024 that led to a groundswell of opposition within the Democratic Party that ultimately drove him from the Presidential race four weeks later. (It still strikes me as odd that people dwell on Biden’s age but not on Trump’s; Trump is just three years younger and his increasingly incoherent public statements are raising doubts in the reality-based community about his level of cognition and sanity.) Mark Curtis, who in many ways was the most interesting of their interviewees, is shown becoming gradually more disillusioned with America’s political system and the choices it offers. In 2024 he decided to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate rather than either Trump or Biden and said, “I'm tired of people voting for the lesser of two evils—voting Democrat because it's not Trump or voting Republican because it's not Biden. Wouldn't really matter who got into office, I feel like they're one and the same. I think our culture’s going to stay divided. The division that has been created here recently is something that we've regressed to that’s going to take generations to recover. I think our culture is going to be horribly scarred by this. And I don’t know what it’s going to be blamed on in the end or how it's going to be spun, but I think that our culture on the whole has gone down a deep, dark hole.” Pastor Cary Gordon, who in 2020 was sounding off against “Marxists” and their growing influence in American politics, also decided that he could not in good conscience vote for either Biden or Trump. “I will sleep good tonight because someday, as a Christian, I believe Christ will return and all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail,” Gordon told his parishioners. “And my job is to keep speaking the truth as a minister.” The Tolentinos were ambiguous as to whom they voted for in 2020; Jason said, “I would rather not say who I voted for. I just want everything to come back to normal, that's all I'm praying for, really. People will be surprised, but I don't want to say who I voted for.” Jaime said, “I just vote for myself. Or I vote for the lady. No, I vote for the lady! I don't know who she is, but it seems like she's the only lady, so I vote for the lady. I vote for the woman!” – which led me to guess that in 2020 Jason voted for Trump and Jaime for Biden because he’d put Kamala Harris on his ticket.

Dr. Christine Mann, who seemed to have been radicalized by the Right-wing opposition to common-sense public-health measures to deal with COVID-19, said her first choice for President in 2020 had been Kamala Harris, “who thankfully is the vice presidential candidate, soon to be the vice president.” In 2024 she’s shown walking her precinct for the Harris-Walz ticket and encountering scads of Trump yard signs as she goes through her neighborhood. Mark Curtis is shown in a video with his son Hudson, who’d just joined Junior ROTC, but his pride in his son is tempered by his growing disillusionment with politics in general. “There's a bit of inner turmoil with Hudson being in the JROTC program as well as my distrust in the government,” Curtis said. “I love the values that he's going to learn going through this program, as well as the values that he could be taught in the military. I think he wants to follow in the footsteps of people who've done great things for our country, for our freedoms. I very much worry that he has great potential of being in the military and being pulled into an endless war that costs American lives, costs billions of American dollars, and to what gain?” The filmmakers organized a watch party with some of the interviewees for the September 10, 2024 debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and when Trump made his now-infamous statement about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the pets. They're eating – They're eating the pets of the people that live there” – Black activist Tayo Daniel said, “Now, that’s bullshit.” Jason Tolentino said, “I just can’t believe he said that thing about the dogs. [Laughs] They’re eating dogs. I don't know what to believe, honestly, on that one.”

At the same time, Mark Curtis expressed outrage at Harris’s proposals for tax credits for new mothers and small-business startups, “So we're giving away more money,” he said. “When do I get that $50,000 for having a small business?” When Trump made his bizarre claim that “under Roe v. Wade you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month and probably after birth,” Dr. Mann said, “Why is he such a liar?” And when Harris said that “people start leaving [Trump’s] rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Amy Garner’s husband Matthew said, “That’s rich for her to say that,” which made me wonder if he’s one of the Right-wing space cases who believes the photos of Harris’s rallies were created with artificial intelligence. As I’ve been pointing out regularly in my journal, the statement Lawrence O’Donnell keeps quoting from his former boss, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), that “everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts,” is no longer true. Today the media landscape is so fragmented that everyone is entitled to their own set of facts. Those of us on the Left side of the political spectrum flock to media outlets like MS-NBC (while lamenting that as a part of the corporate media, it isn’t and can’t be even remotely as progressive as we’d like), while people on the Right watch Fox News or even more radical-Right Web sites like Newsmax and One America News. And the basically decent people who were interviewed for American Voices both in 2020 and 2024 – the only people who didn’t make the cut were Mayra Ramirez, who died of long-term complications from COVID-19 in 2022, and Rod and Rosie Borba; since Rod died in 2023, Rosie sold their flower shop and moved to parts unknown – are caught in the middle and lament that their own goals for themselves and their society don’t always fit neatly into the prescribed “Left” and “Right” categories or the choices America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system gives them for who should lead the nation.

"Downwinders and the Radioactive West," a 2022 Documentary from PBS Utah, Shows How Little Power Americans Have to Keep Their Government from Poisoning Them

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 21) I watched a quite challenging documentary on PBS, Downwinders and the Radioactive West, made by PBS Utah in 2022 and focused on the effect America’s above-ground nuclear tests from 1951 to 1963 and the underground tests that continued there until 1992 had on the surrounding populations. Narrated by Peter Coyote (whose smooth voice graces most of Ken Burns’s recent documentaries as well) and produced by John Howe (a filmmaker I can’t find a listing for on imdb.com; there are two people named John Howe listed, a director who died in 2008 and an art director/production designer on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings cycle and King Kong), Downwinders and the Radioactive West tells a chilling tale of how Americans were used by their own government as unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment to determine just how much atomic radiation people could stand. The documentary includes a thumbnail sketch of America’s history with atomic weapons, which began with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939 warning that recent experiments in splitting uranium atoms could pose a threat to the U.S.’s national security because “this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs.” Einstein was picked to write this letter, based on the researches of physicist Leo Szilard and others, because as the only nuclear physicist most Americans had actually heard of, his name on the letter would garner the best chance of a reaction in the upper levels of U.S. power. In 1942 the U.S. Congress authorized a program called the Manhattan Engineering District, whose actual purpose – to design and create an atomic bomb – was carefully concealed from virtually everyone, including Roosevelt’s last Vice-President, Harry S. Truman. Truman succeeded Roosevelt when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and only then did Secretary of War Harry Stimson tell him that the U.S. had an A-bomb which they would test in three months’ time. (Truman was so appalled at how little he had been told about basic government functions, especially regarding the war, that he started the tradition of having the candidates for President in the next election receiving secret briefings about the major issues that would face them if they got elected.)

When the first explosion of an atomic weapon – the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 – occurred, Truman was in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill (who in the middle of the conference lost his election and was replaced by his successor, Clement Attlee), anxiously awaiting word of the bomb test. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities – Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later – and Japan surrendered on August 15. For the rest of the 1940’s the U.S. continued to stage atomic bomb tests on atolls in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. They relocated the indigenous inhabitants of the Marshalls but allowed them to come back to their former homes – at least the ones that still existed on islands that hadn’t been utterly destroyed, like Elugelab in the Enewetak chain, site of the world’s first hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952 – with the result that a lot of them got cancer and other diseases due to the lingering effects of radiation and fallout (solid material made radioactive, left behind by the tests and carried by wind through the air). In November 1950, out of fear that such a remote testing location could be the subject of espionage, President Truman ordered the creation of the Nevada Test Site in the southeastern corner of Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles from Las Vegas. (Las Vegas casino-hotels often advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists and locals could watch the A-bomb blasts.) In a 1951 test called “Operation Buster-Jangle” (the cutesy-poo names of the tests are among the weirdest aspects of the story), the U.S. Army anesthetized dogs and put them in the middle of the blast to see what would happen to them.

On May 19, 1953 a test called “Upshot Knothole Harry” created havoc when the winds shifted and blew the fallout in a different direction from the one the people in charge of the test had predicted. It was the first of many tests that would drench the small town of St. George, Utah in radioactive waste and fallout. The residents of St. George first noticed the effects when the sheep they raised started getting sick and dying en masse. “I remember handling them in the corrals,” said sheepherder Mel Clark. “You'd grab hold of one to pull it into the corral or move it into a little pen, and their hide, the wool, the skin, everything just pulled right off from them.” Then they gradually noticed the effect on the human population as well. Mary Dickson, who became a playwright and wrote a play called Exposed about the plight of the Downwinders (as they came to call themselves), got thyroid cancer at age 29. Various populations in the St. George area showed much higher rates of cancer than epidemiologists expected. So did U.S. soldiers who were ordered to march into radioactive test sites, dig trenches and prepare for combat in hopes that the U.S. could use so-called “tactical nuclear weapons” in battle. And so, in one of the weirdest twists of this bizarre story, did the makers of the 1955 film The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes for RKO and starring John Wayne as Mongol leader Genghis Khan. To stand in for the Mongolian desert, producer Hughes and director Dick Powell picked a location near the Nevada Test Site – with the result that two-thirds of the people involved in making the movie, including director Powell and the four major stars (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead), died of cancer.

Among the interviewees on the show was Jon Huntsman, son of a former Utah Governor from the 1950’s who himself was elected Governor from 2005 to 2009. “When my dad was governor and he got more and more evidence about the incidence of cancer deaths in Southern Utah being so high, that really piqued his interest,” Huntsman said. “As governor, he was part of an effort to get a lot of documents declassified at the Pentagon. The importance of that was those documents indicated that the government only did the testing when the wind blew the fallout to the least populated direction which was Southern Utah. So in the 1950’s the government said, don’t worry, this is all safe. But the release of these documents in the Pentagon show that the government actually knew there was risk. And that’s why they had the testing take place, only when it blew in Southern Utah.” By 1955 the Downwinders started seeking redress in the courts, but they faced three major obstacles. One was the widespread belief, fostered by decades of government propaganda, that the atomic bomb tests were “necessary” for “national security,” and therefore whatever health effects they were facing were for the greater good. Another was the scientific near-impossibility of proving that any particular case of cancer was caused by a particular sort of exposure to carcinogens. Epidemiologists can and do say that a particular cluster of cancer cases, in numbers well above what would be expected in that population from normal exposure, indicates an environmental factor that raises the risk of people in that area getting cancer, but not that a particular case of cancer came from that exposure. The third obstacle was the old doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which states that the government can basically do whatever it wants to its citizens and they have no legal recourse in the courts.

The first legal action was brought by the sheep ranchers in 1956 and was heard by Judge Benjamin Christensen, who found for the government. Later, in 1982, he re-heard the case and this time found for the plaintiffs after newly declassified government documents revealed that the government had known all along that fallout posed a risk to the sheep. “I think the stories about the impact on sheep from the nuclear fallout are quite compelling,” said Judge Christensen. “The courts found that there was a connection between the fallout and the damage to the sheep herds. And I think that was the right outcome.” But later he was reversed by the Court of Appeals. A much larger case dealing with the human cost of the tests was heard by Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in 1979. The case was brought by Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President John F. Kennedy, who brought suit on behalf not only of the Downwinders but the Navajo miners who had dug for the uranium needed to produce America’s atomic arsenal in the first place. Judge Jenkins found for the plaintiffs, but like Judge Christensen, his ruling was reversed by the Court of Appeals. “Sorry I'm saying it, [but] it came with the discretion of the function on the part of the United States to do what they did,” Judge Jenkins said of the Court of Appeals’ ruling. He called it “a fairly shallow opinion,” and the show’s narration noted that it did not dispute Judge Jenkins’s findings of fact in the case.

In 1990 Congress passed a law, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), sponsored by then-Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Representative Wayne Owens (R-Utah) that set up a fund for partial compensation for the Downwinders: $50,000 to individuals with disease who resided near the Nevada test site or worked there, $75,000 is defined for test site workers, and $100,000 for uranium miners. In the documentary, Mary Dickson denounced the paltriness of the awards: “My dad’s life is worth so much more than $50,000. It was the only thing, tangible thing, that I could get back a little bit from what they had taken away from me.” And in 2022 RECA was scheduled to expire anyway, leading one Downwinder to complain in the documentary that the government is just waiting for them all to die. Watching this documentary in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which one of the major-party candidates, himself a former President, is declaring near-authoritarian powers to destroy media outlets that publish stories that displease him and pledging to be “a dictator on day one” to enact a draconian anti-immigration policy and plunder the environment for increased energy production, proved especially timely. The fact is that even in a country that loudly proclaims itself to be a “democracy” (which it isn’t, and never has been; the framers of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a republic, not a democracy, and were quite explicit about the difference), the government can do pretty much whatever it wants, including poisoning large numbers of its citizens, and there’s no way to hold it to account.

New PBS FRONTLINE Documentary "A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians" Captures the True Horror of Hamas's October 7, 2023 Attack and Israel's Genocidal Response

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The complete Frontline documentary A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians can be viewed online at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/a-year-of-war-israelis-and-palestinians/

Last night (Wednesday, October 15) I watched a quite good documentary on PBS’s long-running Frontline series to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the disgusting Hamas attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and the massive retaliation ordered by the Israeli government and its Trump-like prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The show was called A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians, though the title was a bit ironic because there have been literally thousands of years of war between the Israelites and whoever else happened to be occupying that narrow strip of land on the Eastern Mediterranean. I was reminded of this when I recently reviewed a new recording of Georg Friedrich Handel’s last oratorio, Jephtha (1751), about an incident in Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges depicting a war between the Israelites and the Ammonites in which Jephtha promises God to sacrifice the first being he sees when he returns victorious – only the first person he sees when he gets back is his own daughter. A Year of War was produced, directed and photographed by Robin Barnwell – whose Web site doesn’t specify their gender, but who has an impressive list of credits including a film about the Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol which he happened to be shooting when the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas happened. Barnwell gave an interview for the PBS Web site at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/year-of-war-filmmaker-humanity-israelis-palestinians/ in which he said that as soon as he heard of the attacks, “I wanted to tell the stories of the Oct. 7 victims, to document the savagery of the event and to give a voice to those affected,” Barnwell said. “The last year has been the most violent of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it felt right to feature victims of the war on both sides and to reflect a range of views. The film took around seven months to make — interviewing people and gathering footage in Israel and Gaza.”

Barnwell made a couple of basic decisions early on that ensured he would end up with a great and genuinely emotionally moving film. First, he decided not to use a narrator – “The people in it are ordinary victims who have been deeply emotionally impacted by events,” he said in the PBS interview – and second, he decided not to shoot in Gaza due to the Israeli governments’ severe restrictions on foreign journalists attempting to cover their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere). “[M]ore than one year into the war, there is still no free and unfettered access inside Gaza for foreign media,” Barnwell explained. “Given the extreme dangers of filming in Gaza and the high number of deaths of local journalists, we decided to look for Gazan contributors who had already been recording their lives during the war instead of commissioning people. The first challenge was to find potential contributors and camera people who had already filmed footage that was mostly unseen. Gaza currently has weak Internet, so we had to conduct searches online from the U.K. to identify potential candidates, so that our local producers could then meet them in person. We, of course, spent a lot of time vetting the footage and making sure the contributors were telling the truth and had no hidden agendas. We selected a group of participants whose wide range of experiences accurately reflect the intensity and horror of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing war in Gaza. These Israeli and Palestinian victims have collectively suffered terror, loss, detention, displacement and mental anguish; some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict.”

Barnwell mostly achieved his goal of being even-handed to both sides – an extraordinarily difficult task given the intensity of feeling on both ends of the conflict and the bizarre competing victim narratives of both Israelis and Palestinians (for Israelis it’s the Holocaust and for Palestinians it’s the Nakba, the forced removal from their homes to make room for Jewish settlers after World War II and the formal creation of the state of Israel) – and among other things his film is a testament to the fundamental evil of war itself. Through most of human history war was something that involved only a handful of professional soldiers on both sides, and most people weren’t directly involved until the war ended, one way or the other, and they had to figure out how to live with the outcome. There were exceptions, of course, and many of them involved the ancestors of modern-day Jews; the Old Testament is full of genocidal wars fought by the Israelites against their real or perceived enemies, and God Himself keeps giving the Israelites permission for their genocidal activities. But it was only with the development of modern-day weapons – first the long-range cannons of the 19th century, then machine guns and airplanes capable of dropping bombs on large numbers of people at once in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and guided missiles in the mid-20th century – that war became a total assault on an enemy’s population and the line between “military” and “civilian” first became blurred and then ended completely.

Also, one of the regrettable results of both the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel and the resulting Israeli overreaction has been it’s hardened attitudes on both sides and made people who previously supported peaceful solutions to the Israel/Palestine crisis much more bitter. Barnwell’s rather anodyne statement that “some have changed their views about the other side, developing new perspectives on the conflict” is rather at odds with the actual content of the film. People, both Israelis and Palestinians, who once supported a two-state solution have backed away from that, and in particular Palestinians who once prided themselves on being able to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Israelis now proudly proclaim themselves not only anti-Israeli but anti-Jewish. At the same time the film also underlines the absurdity of Zionism, and particularly their belief that by plunking themselves into the middle of an already occupied country and displacing its inhabitants by force, they could create a “safe space” for the world’s Jews to come together and avoid being the victims of another Holocaust. A heavy-set woman named Gali told Barnwell’s interviewers that both her father and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, and she had settled in Israel precisely because she and her family saw it as a “safe space” – only her husband Tsachi was captured by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and their teenage daughter Ma’ayan was killed. Not surprisingly, Gali said the experience of her family’s victimization has turned her against the two-state solution and hardened her heart against all Palestinians – just as the Palestinians whom Barnwell included in his film, including a quite compelling young man named Ibrahim and Dr. Mohammed El-Ran, who worked at the Indonesian Hospital and then at another medical facility until both were destroyed by Israeli bombing raids, are far more bitter against Israelis and Jews in general than they used to be.

It’s the sort of thing that leads to decades – or even centuries – of war, especially when the atrocities committed against both sides lead to eons of bitterness between them. One recalls grimly how long (30 years) the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland continued – and that was between two groups who shared a similar ethnic and cultural background and were of different sects within the same religion. Some of the Palestinian interviewees recall joining in the cheers in the streets of Gaza’s cities after the Hamas attacks, often before the true horror of what Hamas’s fighters had done reached them, and one young Palestinian noted that since Hamas took control of Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal of military occupation in 2005 (in a free and fair election, by the way, though in the nearly two decades since they haven’t allowed another one that might vote them out of power), they’ve set up a dictatorship of their own in which no public criticism of Hamas, its leaders or its policies, has been allowed. It also remains maddeningly unclear just why Hamas ordered the attacks on Israel when they did and what they hoped to achieve by them (just as the world, or at least this individual in it, remains stumped by what Osama bin Laden and his minions at al-Qaeda hoped to accomplish with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon).

I suspect that part of the motivation was the leaders of Hamas were worried that as more and more Arab countries normalized relations with Israel and signed the so-called “Abraham Accords,” the Palestinian cause would lose support from moderate Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves would be left without any allies in the region (aside from Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in northern Palestine and southern Lebanon which the Israelis are also now targeting). So they staged the attacks on the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Muslim terrorists in particular are big on anniversaries; the September 11, 2001 attacks took place on the anniversary of an earlier terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 which failed dismally) to get the world to take notice and say, “We are still here.” Along with Barnwell’s interview, another article on the PBS Web site by Patrice Taddonio (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/gaza-israel-october-7-israeli-palestinian-hamas-war-documentary-excerpt/) uses material from the film to profile two young women caught up in the conflict on each side. “I’ve forgotten who Ghada was and how I used to live,” says a 23-year-old Palestinian woman named Ghada. “If I want to remind myself, I go back to my phone and look at photos. My dream was to start a solar energy company. To be honest, my dream now is for my family and I to make it out alive.” Another woman, a 17-year-old Israeli hostage named Agam, said, “I can only remember a sort of sigh of relief as I was about to die. After five hours of being scared to death, it’s finally happening. I certainly didn’t think they would kidnap us. It didn’t cross my mind. … I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my life is now in the hands of a terrorist organization: From now on, I have to rely on Hamas. Of course, I didn’t trust them. I was dying from fear. Their control over me was total.” Agam told Taddonio, “I thought, in another universe, we might live together,” but now she believes “the gap is so deep” and “the opportunity is gone.” Likewise Ghada said, “My family, or I, could die at any moment. There’s no future at all.”

J. D. Vance, Tim Walz Vice-Presidential Debate a Draw

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I started writing this just after I watched the October 1 debate between the two major-party candidates for Vice-President, Senator J. D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Governor Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), held at CBS Television Center in New York City with Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan as moderators. If the first Presidential debate this year on June 27 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was a clear victory for Trump – so much so that within a month Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats, ended his campaign for re-election and endorsed his sitting Vice-President, Kamala Harris, instead – and the second between Trump and Harris September 10 was an equally clear win for Harris, the Vance-Walz debate turned out to be a draw.

The J. D. Vance who showed up wasn’t the crazy we’ve been hearing about in scattered news reports, the one who said the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies” and the only reason post-menopausal women exist is to take care of their grandchildren. (Vance himself was raised by his grandmother after his mom flamed out on drugs, and he credits his grandma – whom he calls by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Mamaw,” pronounced “ma’am-awe” – with saving his life.) Nor was it the acolyte of Silicon Valley multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, who’s publicly questioned whether America should remain a republic and has given money to the man Vance names as his intellectual mentor, Curtis Yarvin, who has openly proclaimed that Americans need to get over their “dictator phobia” and accept one-man rule.

It was Vance, not Walz, who used the word “weird” in the debate (twice). Though Walz became known throughout America for having described the ideas and behavior of Trump and Vance as “weird,” he kept that statement in his sheath. For the most part, Vance and Walz came off as two well-meaning politicians who both want what is best for this country. There were a few fireworks, notably about women’s right to reproductive choice – on which Vance has definitively (at least for now) abandoned his former support for a nationwide ban on abortion and adopted Trump’s position that abortion legislation should be left to individual states – as well as on the Right’s allegation that Left-leaning Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are censoring Right-wing voices on social media.

One thing Vance did that was very savvy was blame Kamala Harris for every thing he thinks is wrong about the Biden administration and its policies. To hear Vance tell it, it was Harris who personally canceled all of Trump’s restrictions on immigration and opened the border to 25 million “illegal aliens.” It was Harris who made possible the explosion of fentanyl in the U.S. It was Harris who single-handedly drove up the price of housing in America by letting in all those “illegals” whom he and Trump will save the nation by deporting en masse. It was Harris who canceled Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” energy policy (even though the U.S. is producing and exporting more fossil fuels than at any time in its history, as Walz correctly pointed out) and thereby drove up the cost of everything in the U.S.

Vance ably zeroed in on one of the bizarre weaknesses of Harris’s candidacy. Like Hubert Humphrey, who ran for the Presidency in 1968 after unpopular incumbent Lyndon Johnson withdrew from his re-election bid, as the sitting Vice-President Harris has had to answer for everything Americans don’t like about the current administration while having had virtually no power to change it. Vance said time and time again that if Harris were really concerned about all the issues she’s been raising on the campaign trail, she could have been working on them from day one.

That ignores the fact that, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once put it, the Vice-President of the United States has only one real function: to wait for the President of the United States to die. The first Vice-President, John Adams, called it “the most insignificant office the mind of man has ever created.” Whether they’re Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore or Kamala Harris, Vice-Presidents who run for the Presidency immediately to succeed the President they served under have the dual burden of being blamed for everything the people don’t like about the current administration while not being credited for the things people do like. (There’s a reason no sitting Vice-President won a Presidential election between Van Buren in 1836 and the first Bush in 1988.)

Vice-Presidents have only as much authority as the Presidents they serve under give them – as George W. Bush did with Dick Cheney or Barack Obama did with Biden. Absent a major grant of power from their President, a Vice-President has no independent authority at all – though in the first two years of Biden’s Presidency, with the U.S. Senate equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, Harris had to cast more tie-breaking votes on major pieces of legislation than any Vice-President in U.S. history. Republicans like to blame Harris for the situation on the U.S. border; they claim that Biden made Harris the “border czar,” and Harris blew the job.

Biden actually gave Harris far less authority on border issues than that. He tasked her with going to Latin American countries that send a lot of immigrants to the U.S. and doing what she could to discourage them from doing that. There’s some room for debate as to whether she did a good job even with that limited authority. The recent PBS Frontline documentary on Harris and Trump showed footage of an embarrassing speech Harris gave in Guatemala telling would-be immigrants, “Do not come,” and an even lamer interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt in which he cross-examined her about whether she’d ever visited the U.S.-Mexico border. (She hadn’t, but she’s been there since, most recently on a September 27, 2024 campaign stop in Arizona.) But it wasn’t the sweeping power to allow or block all immigration that Republicans have claimed Biden gave her.

As for Walz, he reminded me uncomfortably of fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey in more ways than one. In his book The Selling of the President 1968, Joe McGinniss wrote about Humphrey (I’m quoting from memory here), “His excesses – he talked too loud and too fervently – were just annoying in person but became fatal on TV. A person on TV is a guest in your home. It is impolite for him to shout. Humphrey vomited on the rug.” Though Walz didn’t do quite as badly as that, there were still all too many portions of the debate where Vance kept his cool, while Walz at times visibly lost his temper and screeched at the audience.

Instead of the affable high-school teacher and football coach that’s come through in his social-media posts and the public speeches and TV appearances he gives alone, Walz came off as querulous, impatient, almost angry. If the purpose of a Vice-Presidential debate is to showcase which of these people should American voters trust if they have to take over the Presidency if the incumbent dies (a bigger risk with Vance than with Walz because Donald Trump is visibly old and infirm, as well as showing increasing signs of mental derangement), frankly Vance did a much better job on that score than Walz. That’s true even though Walz actually has executive experience as the governor of Minnesota and Vance, who’s been a U.S. Senator for less than two years, does not.

Walz was able to parry at least some of Vance’s most effective thrusts. When Vance claimed that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and former Hawai’i Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard had endorsed Trump, Walz came back with a list of Harris’s endorsers that ranged from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney – and threw in Taylor Swift’s name for good measure. (Swift posted her endorsement of Harris on social media and signed it, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”)

Rachel Maddow’s Quite Different J. D. Vance Story

The J. D. Vance who appeared at the October 1 Vice-Presidential debate was a quite different character than the one MS-NBC host Rachel Maddow had profiled the night before on her regular weekly program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeVhHNSe9Ks). She began her story, after an apologia explaining that she hadn’t been sure she wanted to do it at all but decided to go with it on the eve of the debate with Walz, with one of her long introductions about Charles Walgreen, founder of the Walgreens’ drugstore chain, who in 1934 became convinced that the University of Chicago, where his daughter was a student, was indoctrinating her in Communism and “free love.” He launched a campaign to defund the university, and got a hearing before the Illinois legislature where his principal witness against the university was Right-wing author Elizabeth Dilling. Dilling went around the country in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s denouncing various public universities as hotbeds of Communism and free love, and according to Maddow her rhetoric lives on in Vance’s.

Maddow’s main source for Vance’s real views was a September 17, 2021 interview Vance gave to Right-wing podcaster Jack Murphy, whose full black beard makes him look like a malevolent Santa Claus. Vance told Murphy, “Our leaders now are so corrupt, so vile, that if you assimilate into their culture, you’re assimilating into garbage liberal culture. You’re not assimilating into traditional American culture. … You can’t teach that we live in a great country if the leaders are actively aligned against it. … Step one in the process is to totally replace – rip out, like a tumor – the American leadership class, and then reinstall a sense of an American political religion.”

“You said something that I should like to zero in on,” Murphy responded. “How do we effectively rip out the disgusting leadership class? … Because let me expand on that just for a second. It’s not just – obviously, elections. That’s one thing. But unfortunately, this evil leadership class has already taken over all of our institutions. … Aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? If these institutions are rotted and corrupted to the core, this elite ideology is everywhere and in all these things, what other options do we have besides voting them out, which we’re seeing is ineffectual?”

Vance answered, “This is a tough question, but it is maybe the question that confronts us right now.” He mentions Curtis Yarvin, anti-democratic Right-wing author and blogger, as his inspiration. Maddow then cuts to a clip of Yarvin himself giving a speech in front of a banner reading “RAGE” – which he explains is an acronym for “Retire All Government Employees.” As he mentions what RAGE means, his audience laughs approvingly.

“The problem with this is, why have you never heard of this before?” Yarvin says, “Why has no one suggested this before? … You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. And what is a government? A government is just a corporation running a country, nothing more, nothing less. It just so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed, and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what all corporations have found. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that for over 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale.”

Yarvin went on to explain, “The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can’t say the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is the system, actually? And it includes a lot of things, including things that are called universities, that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system, and it also must be destroyed. Fortunately, there are a lot of very talented Americans who actually know how to run things and make things work, and they are generalists. You need to get these people, put them in a position of responsibility, and have them do their thing. And finally, you need a CEO, and a national CEO is what is called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they have to get over their dictator phobia.”

The world heard that argument before in the 1930’s, when ideologues on both the Right and the Left claimed that democracy had reached the limits of its political capability and the future belonged to dictators: Hitler and Mussolini on the Right, Stalin on the Left. It seemed to have ended with the Allied victory in World War II – though in order to achieve that, the republics of Great Britain and the United States had to ally themselves with the Left-wing dictatorship of Stalin to beat the Right-wing dictatorship of Hitler. But as capitalist democracy reaches its limits, and as societies all over the world seemingly inexorably move towards a redistribution of wealth and income in favor of the already-haves over the have-nots, more and more people throughout the world are being seduced by the arguments of phony “populists” like Donald Trump, J. D. Vance and their counterparts in other countries that the “elites” are out to get them and only by smashing the system and substituting absolute one-man rule can their lives be made better.

America Gets Affable Vance, Not Dictator-Loving Vance

But the J. D. Vance (or “JD Vance,” as he rather oddly spells his name, evoking the old 1950’s and 1960’s abbreviation for “juvenile delinquent”) America got to see on October 1 was not the acolyte of fascist-loving Curtis Yarvin. It was the affable author of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir that got seized on by much of America’s liberal community in search of explanations for how Donald Trump had been able to win the Presidency. Vance did a much better job of keeping his cool than Walz did, though there were a few issues on which the fangs got bared.

One was the now-notorious story both Trump and Vance have told on the campaign trail of how Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are allegedly stealing people’s pet dogs and cats so they can eat them. On a previous appearance with Dana Bash on CNN, Vance had given a bizarre defense of this story that more or less acknowledged it wasn’t true but said it was necessary to make up stories like that to get the media to cover the “suffering” of the American people. When Vance brought that up, CBS’s co-moderator, Margaret Brennan, explained that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally under so-called “temporary protected status,” thanks to a program enacted and signed into law in 1990 by Republican President George H. W. Bush.

Vance immediately reacted as if Brennan had slapped him. He accused Brennan of violating the agreed-upon rule that the moderators would not “fact-check” the candidates. That was a rule put into place at the Republican Party’s insistence after the Trump-Harris debate, at which Trump claimed it had been “three against one” because the moderators were calling him on some of his lies and therefore, in Trump’s mind, joining Harris on the attack against him. Brennan called her remark a “clarification” rather than a “fact-check,” and for the only time all evening, the moderators used their agreed-upon power to cut off the candidates’ microphones, essentially telling the candidates to stop talking because nobody could hear them. Only we could still hear them, albeit with echo and at a lower volume, lending an oddly surreal touch to the moment.

Vance also claimed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” had been failing when Trump took over and he “rescued” it. Walz correctly pointed out that Trump had promised to repeal the ACA on day one of his Presidency. He’d even signed an executive order to that effect, though the courts struck it down. Walz also described the dramatic moment when one of the many Republican attempts to repeal the ACA went down to defeat on the Senate floor after the late John McCain (R-Arizona) cast his famous thumbs-down vote against it. (This was the so-called “skinny repeal,” a bill no one – including the people who voted for it – wanted to become law. Its only objective was to get the issue before a so-called “conference committee,” in which House and Senate Republicans could have quietly negotiated a bill to take the ACA’s place.)

One of the most bizarre moments of the debate was when Vance claimed that Harris’s alleged “open border” policies had led Mexican drug cartels to make money by selling illegal guns to the United States. “Thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel … then the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago,” Vance said.

The truth, as is well known by people who’ve actually studied the issue, is the other way around. Mexican drug cartels routinely send their hit people across the border into the U.S. to buy guns and other weapons because Mexico has common-sense gun regulations and the U.S. doesn’t. As Michael Williams of CNN explained in a post-debate fact check, “An estimated 200,000 guns are trafficked from the U.S. into Mexico each year, the Mexican Foreign Ministry has said — an average of nearly 550 per day. In 2021, Mexico sued several U.S.-based gun manufacturers, claiming they ‘design, market, distribute and sell guns in ways’ that arm cartels in Mexico. Mexico strictly controls the sale of firearms. There is only one gun store in Mexico, and it’s controlled by the army. That makes the large-scale smuggling of guns from Mexico into the U.S., where laws are laxer and gun stores plentiful, unfeasible.”

Walz did step in it a few times during the debate. In explaining why he changed his position on a ban on AR-15’s, AK-47’s and other so-called “assault weapons” often used by mass shooters in the U.S., he said he had met with family members of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting and they had convinced him to support a ban on these weapons. But he misspoke and said he had “befriended school shooters” – and Trump seized on his gaffe in posts to his social-media site, Truth Social. Walz also said he’d been in Hong Kong when the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen Square in Beijing happened. He wasn’t, though he visited China in August 1989, two months after the protests and their brutal suppression by the Chinese military.

Mostly, though, the debate went surprisingly smoothly, especially given the rancor of the previous debates that included Donald Trump. Vance and Walz not only made a point of shaking hands at the start – something Trump hadn’t wanted to do before his debate with Harris, only she basically forced him into it – but did so at the finish. They even introduced their wives to each other at the end of the debate. The instant polls taken after the debate indicated that both men’s favorability ratings went up, and one online commentator called the debate refreshingly “normal” – to the extent that any event involving the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, especially with a part-Black, part-Asian woman running against him, could be “normal.”

PBS’s September 24 “Frontline” Special “The Choice” Compares Kamala Harris, Donald Trump

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Every Presidential election year for the last 30 years or so, PBS’s long-running documentary series Frontline has done a two-hour program, a month and a half before the election, comparing and contrasting the backgrounds of the Democratic and Republican candidates. They call it “The Choice,” and this year’s “Choice,” aired September 24, 2024, is especially significant because the Republican candidate has already served as President and been his party’s nominee for the third straight election cycle.

The Democrat, in turn, is the incumbent Vice-President who got thrust to the top of the ticket when the incumbent President, Joe Biden, flamed out spectacularly in his June 27 debate with Republican Donald Trump. In fact, he did so badly that for the next month or so, various Democrats in the party’s upper leadership called for him to withdraw from the race, lest his poor showing not only cost him the election but drag the whole party down with him. As happened in 1968, when an incumbent Democratic President abandoned a faltering re-election bid, his Vice-President stepped into the breach.

More than usual among major-party Presidential opponents, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris represent quite different lifestyle paths and parts of the mosaic of America. Trump was born into money, though not the élite, aristocratic “old money” of Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, was a real-estate tycoon who made his money in the outer boroughs, particularly Queens (where the Trumps lived) and Brooklyn. Fred Trump was also an outspoken racist. In 1927 he joined the New York branch of the Ku Klux Klan and was arrested at a Klan rally along with seven others.

Fred Trump, son of German immigrants to the U.S. whose family name was originally “Drumpf,” married Scotswoman Mary Anne McLeod in the 1930’s and the couple had five children. Fred at first groomed the oldest, son Fred Trump, Jr., to take over the Trump real-estate business, but according to Trump family biographer Gwenda Blair, Fred, Jr. “wasn’t a killer. His father told the boys to be killers, but Freddie was never a killer. He wasn’t hyper-aggressive, he wasn’t hyper-competitive.” Instead of staying in the family business, he trained to be an airline pilot. Later he became an alcoholic and died in 1981 at age 42, 18 years before Fred Trump, Sr.’s death.

“My grandfather treated him so poorly, with such little respect, and made his life miserable,” said Mary Trump, Fred, Jr.’s daughter and a clinical psychologist. “Donald was able to watch what my grandfather considered the mistakes that my dad made. He took that lesson to heart and became the killer, the tough guy, the person who would do anything in his power to be the winner. Could never be wrong, could never admit a mistake, and avoided being kind, because all of those things, in my grandfather’s universe, spoke to an unforgivable weakness. And my grandfather finally started to see in him the son he wanted.”

Asked by talk-show host Rona Barrett in a 1980 interview whether one has to have a “killer instinct” to succeed in business, Donald Trump said, “I think you have to have some, to a large extent. I think you do have to have at least a winning instinct. I think that the world is made up of people either with killer instincts or without killer instincts. And the people that seem to emerge are the people that are competitive and driven and with a certain instinct to win.” In another TV interview, with Barbara Walters, Trump said, “I learned a lot of things from Fred [Jr.], but I did learn for myself that I don’t want to be open. I don’t want to make myself vulnerable.”

During Donald Trump’s childhood, according to biographer Marie Brenner, “Donald was always the kid in the family who would start throwing birthday cake at all the parties. That you would build up a tower of blocks, he would come knock your blocks down.” In order to discipline him, Fred Trump sent his rambunctious, authority-challenging son off to military school – where, unlike a lot of similarly rebellious kids, he actually liked it. Confronted for the first – and almost certainly only – time in his life with strict institutional rules and enforcement mechanisms, Donald thrived in the structured environment. He rose to be a student cadet corps leader and got to march in front of his troop in a big parade in Manhattan.

For decades Manhattan had been the elusive goal of the Trump family company. As Fred gradually stepped back from day-to-day control in the early 1970’s and Donald took over – with cash infusions from his dad whose size has been estimated from $1 million (Donald’s own figure) to $65 million, $200 million and even $400 million (the number Kamala Harris cited when she debated Donald on CNN on September 10) – Donald built Trump Tower, an elaborate skyscraper in Manhattan with gold fixtures and an overall air of gilded tackiness.

The Trump Tower project also showcased Trump’s airy disregard for objective reality and anything that gets in the way of his dreams. “When he built Trump Tower, he got a whopping tax abatement that was intended for poor areas of town,” said Gwenda Blair. “His building was built a block away from Tiffany's. That was a deteriorating area of town? I don't think so. You can get away with almost everything. And Donald took that to heart. That's the only metric that counts.”

“The rules don’t apply to him,” said another Trump biographer, Jonathan Karl. “Even the number of floors in Trump Tower is essentially a fraud. From the lower floors, he skips a bunch of numbers so that it has more floors than any other building of the same height. You go in the elevator, you can't go to the 7th, 8th, 9th or 10th floor, because they don't exist.”

But years before Trump Tower opened, the Trump Organization (as Donald insisted on renaming the family business when he took over) hit a snag. Two civil-rights organizations reported them to the authorities for systematically discriminating against Black people in renting their apartments. The complaints reached the U.S. Department of Justice, who filed a lawsuit alleging that the Trump Organization illegally made business decisions out of racism. Trump’s regular attorneys advised him to settle the case quietly, admit guilt, sin no more and move on. That was the last thing Trump wanted to hear.

Instead Trump went looking for a new lawyer, and he found him in Roy Cohn. One of the most notorious figures in American history, Cohn had prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 for stealing the so-called “secret of the atomic bomb.” In 1953 he had become chief of staff for the notorious Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin). McCarthy fell from power in 1954 and died in 1957, but Cohn had a Plan B. He relocated to New York and became a high-priced consigliere, advancing his clients’ interests with such flagrant disregard for the law that in 1986 he was disbarred. A year later Cohn, a closeted Gay man who prided himself on defeating all attempts in New York City to pass laws protecting the civil rights of Queer people, died of complications from AIDS – a contradiction which led author Tony Kushner to make him the principal villain of his play Angels in America (1991).

David Marcus, Roy Cohn’s cousin, was extensively interviewed for the Frontline show. He recalled, “When they met, Roy said to him, ‘You might be guilty. It doesn’t matter. Go after the Justice Department. Don’t ever admit guilt.’ … That was a defining moment for Donald Trump. Donald Trump was on the ropes. There was no doubt they had discriminated. There was no doubt there was wrongdoing. And yet, Roy Cohn showed him that you can turn around a situation just by ignoring the facts and going after your attacker. Trump countersued the Justice Department for $100 million. … His countersuit didn’t work, and in fact he did end up quietly settling out of court, but Roy went on the offensive and said this is a victory — Trump was vindicated. He knew before anybody else did that the court of public opinion is often more important than a court of law. The lesson [Trump learned] from Roy Cohn was don’t go the way the establishment does. Don’t play by the rules.”

Kamala Harris: Growing Up Biracial in Berkeley

While Donald Trump was born into money and trained by a no-nonsense father to be ruthless and uncompassionate, Kamala Harris came from a mixed-race middle-class family. Her father, Donald Harris, was a Black immigrant from Jamaica; her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was (East) Indian and also an immigrant. The two met at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a development economist and she a researcher in endocrinology. Among other things, she discovered a gene implicated in breast cancer. The Harrises met in 1962 and married in 1963. Kamala was born October 20, 1964 and her sister Maya was born January 30, 1967.

In 1966 the Harrises left Berkeley for academic positions in Illinois and Wisconsin. By 1970 Donald’s and Shyamala’s marriage had broken up, and Shyamala was forced to raise Kamala and Maya as a single mother. Shyamala and the Harris girls moved back to Berkeley, and the girls went to the Shelton School, a combination day-care center and elementary school catering to African-American women. “Mrs. Shelton would quickly become a second mother to Maya and me,” Kamala would recall in her memoir, The Truths We Hold. Stymied when a professional position she thought she deserved went to someone else, Shyamala moved herself and her children to Montréal, Canada to teach at McGill University.

The culture shock was severe on the Harris children. All of a sudden they were in a colder climate than they were used to, cut off from their friends and in a predominantly French-speaking area where there were very few other people of color. “She talked about the life she left behind a lot,” said Wanda Kagan, Kamala’s best friend in Canada. “That was another commonality we had; my family was in America. That’s actually what was so nice about our friendship, seeing how she and myself navigated ourselves to fit in to that world, two different worlds, and bridge the gap between them.”

Wanda Kagan harbored a deep, dark secret, and Kamala ultimately wormed it out of her. “I was being abused at home, both physically and sexually,” she recalled. “I didn’t seem myself some days. Once I was confronted with her out-and-out asking me. I decided to tell her that I was being molested and abused at home. Her first reaction was, ‘How long have you been going through this, Wanda?’ Once I talked about it with her, then she [said], ‘Well, you’re just going to have to come and stay with us.’ I was really emotional and heartfelt when they said I could come and stay with them. It wasn’t just that I went to live with her. I saw that passion and that compassion in her. Basically she was taking a stand and fighting for my rights back then, 40 years ago, to be able to do what I wanted with my body. She was a child, too, 15, 16 years old, with such a powerful voice and fighting for what’s right.”

In 1982 Kamala Harris returned to the U.S. and went to the historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C. Named after Oliver Otis Howard, the white man who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War to help newly freed ex-slaves adjust, Howard was best known for its law school. Its graduates, including Thurgood Marshall, Spottiswood Robinson and Robert Carter, had been the leading attorneys in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

Though Harris did not attend Howard’s law school – she returned to California and got her law degree at Hastings in San Francisco – she thrived there. She joined a Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. One of her sorority sisters, Jill Louis, recalled, “Our womanhood was celebrated in Alpha Kappa Alpha. It was a celebration of women and their capability. It was enough just trying to be a Black person in America in the 1980’s. Women were still being boxed out of a lot of opportunities and a lot of serious jobs, and so you had to come with extra credibility. You had to come with extra preparation.”

Harris also used Howard’s proximity to the national capital to build her political contacts. She interned with U.S. Senator Alan Cranston (D-California), a liberal icon. Harris also worked at the Federal Trade Commission and the National Archives (ironically enough, since the Archives would launch an investigation into Donald Trump’s allegedly illegal retention of classified documents when he left the Presidency in 2021). When she got back to the Bay Area and graduated from Hastings, she shocked her family by taking a job as a prosecutor with the Alameda County District Attorney’s office.

“She’s becoming a prosecutor at a time when Black communities are literally under siege,” said Jamilah King of Mother Jones magazine. “Specifically in Oakland and Alameda County in the 1980’s, it is literally ground zero for the crack cocaine epidemic. You have tremendous amounts of violence in Black communities. You have overpolicing. So it was a controversial decision in her family and her community. … Ultimately I think her argument was that, ‘Look, in order for us to change the system, we have to have people within it who are willing to open the doors, who are willing to listen, who are willing to sit at the table.’ And that’s what she did.”

In the early 1990’s Kamala Harris started a sexual relationship with a man 30 years her senior: Willie Brown, then Speaker of the California State Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco. Her Right-wing opponents have seized on this, using it to portray Harris as an untalented bimbo who slept her way to the top. As Speaker, Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later to the California Medical Assistance Commission. In 2002 Harris decided to make her first run for political office, declaring her candidacy for District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco.

It was a longshot. It meant running against her boss, long-time San Francisco liberal icon Terrence “K.O.” Hallinan, who had recruited her for the San Francisco D.A.’s office and put her in charge of the Career Criminal Division. “The coalition she put together is a very rare one in San Francisco,” said Joe Garofoli, senior political affairs reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “She had the rich people in Pacific Heights, with folks in the Bay View, the Black neighborhood, and then the Castro, the LGBTQ neighborhood. It’s a very unusual triangle of power there. Because of who she is, how she grew up, the diversity of experiences she had, she does feel comfortable walking into any room.”

Ironically, one of her tactics against Hallinan was also a favorite of Trump’s: paralipsis, meaning saying something by saying you’re not going to say it. “She stands up behind Hallinan and says, ‘I’m not going to be like Terrence Hallinan and talk about the lawyers in his office having sex on the desks. I’m not going to behave in that way and bring up these type of things,’” Garofoli recalled. “The room erupts in applause, and that kind of defanged it after that.”

Trump Gets Bitten by the Presidential Bug

Donald Trump had been thinking of running for President ever since 1980, when he did the pioneering interview with Rona Barrett that led off the Frontline show via a clip. “Trump is actively thinking about politics by the late 1980’s,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Oprah actually asked him, ‘Are you going to run for president someday?’”

Trump’s answer was, “Probably not, but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.”

Gingrich also suggested that Trump’s desire to be President came at least in part from the established 1-percenters in New York City looking down at him because his family had made their fortune in the outer boroughs instead of Manhattan, “There’s a sense in the back of his head that if you want to prove to the Manhattanites that you made it, and they won’t let you prove inside their world, well, what if you just become president of the whole country?” Gingrich said.

During the 1980’s Trump became a national celebrity by co-writing an alleged autobiography, The Art of the Deal. The book was actually written by its named co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz. Though Schwartz was interviewed for the Frontline program, his most revealing comments on Trump’s book project were made when Jane Mayer spoke to him for an article in The New Yorker published in July 2016, when the thought of Trump as President was more a bizarre dream than a conceivable reality (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all). The normal way a ghost-written autobiography is created is the ghostwriter interviews the subject, gets a rough account of his or her life in their own words, edits it and puts it into readable form for a book.

But Schwartz soon found that he couldn’t do it that way with Trump because, as Schwartz told Mayer, Trump “has no attention span.” Schwartz recalled trying to interview Trump, only Trump would look fidgety, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Schwartz told Mayer, “Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood. It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit — or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then … . If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.”

Schwartz’s most revealing comment about Trump was his observation about Trump’s dubious – to say the least – relationship with the truth. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” As I pointed out in my Zenger’s blog post after the June 27, 2024 debate in which Trump wiped the floor with Biden, “When I read that article, I immediately thought of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and in particular his concept of doublethink. It’s impossible, I think, to understand both the sheer scale, scope and audacity of Trump’s lying and the reason he’s been so successful at it without understanding Orwell’s idea of doublethink, which he explained as follows:

“‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. …

“‘[T]he essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.’”

Time and time again, Donald Trump has engaged in doublethink. Privately, in conversations with his aides or friendly podcasters, he agrees that he really lost the 2020 election, but publicly he still insists he “really” won and it was “stolen” from him. When he and Harris debated on CNN in Philadelphia September 10, reality-based observers said Harris clearly won – but Trump insisted that he won and cited a lot of unscientific B.S. “polls” from ultra-Right-wing outlets like Newsmax to “prove” it.

He’s insisted that his administration did a great job managing the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 when the reality-based world scored his response as terrible. Indeed, the Frontline filmmakers included footage of some of Trump’s shambolic COVID press briefings but not the worst one of all: the one in which he mused publicly that maybe you could kill the virus by drinking or injecting bleach. I vividly remember the body language of a real scientist in the room, Dr. Deborah Birx, who looked stricken by the possibility that she and her colleagues would have to divert themselves from work that might actually help solve the crisis to disprove Trump’s toxic fantasies about bleach.

Trump’s people have also repeatedly tried to explain to him how tariffs work. Tariffs are just taxes, imposed by the American government and paid for by the American people. The only difference between tariffs and other sorts of taxes is they’re imposed on goods imported from foreign countries. Trump hasn’t listened to them; for some reason he still insists that tariffs are somehow paid by foreign countries that create the goods or services they’re imposed on. When his first-term economic advisor, Gary Cohn, tried to explain to Trump that tariffs are paid by American consumers (and therefore the huge tariffs Trump is pledging to impose if he gets back into the White House would only spark inflation big-time), Trump wouldn’t believe him. Cohn left that meeting muttering under his breath, “What a fucking moron.”

Trump’s ignorance and know-it-all attitude has hurt him not only politically but in his businesses as well. His Wunderkind reputation flamed out in the late 1980’s when six of Trump’s businesses ran out of money and declared bankruptcy. (Trump maintains that he’s never personally declared bankruptcy, which is technically true, but six companies he owned or controlled have.) What bailed him out was, ironically, his TV show The Apprentice. Under the tutelage of producer Mark Burnett, Trump got 14 years’ worth of showcases that presented him as the most intelligent and successful capitalist of all time – and thanks to a really advantageous deal he made to host the show, he also earned enough money from it to pay off the losses on everything else he was involved in.

Harris Stumbles Into the Vice-Presidency

Kamala Harris’s term as District Attorney of San Francisco hit a major speed bump just four months into her tenure, when she was faced with having to prosecute the killer of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza. To the disgust of virtually everyone in the San Francisco Police Department – and of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, former Mayor of San Francisco and the most powerful woman politician in California – Harris chose to stick with her campaign pledge not to seek the death penalty against Espinoza’s killer. At Espinoza’s funeral Feinstein openly called for the execution of Espinoza’s murderer, to roaring cheers from just about all the police officers in attendance – and Harris sat in the back of the room, trying not to be noticed.

Nonetheless, after eight years as San Francisco’s District Attorney, in 2010 Harris decided to run for Attorney General of California. The race was so close that some media outlets actually called it for Harris’s Republican opponent, L. A. District Attorney Steve Cooley – but she squeaked through to victory after all. As Attorney General, she went after medical organizations that charged excessive fees for treating Medicare and Medi-Cal patients; fought back against banks and home lenders that she said had exploited California home buyers; won a settlement against the high-tech industry forcing them to disclose just what information they were demanding from their customers and what they were doing with it; and refused to defend Proposition 8, the initiative to ban same-sex marriage, in state court.

Harris won a bid for the U.S. Senate in 2016 – ironically making her a junior colleague of Feinstein. The Frontline documentary vividly dramatizes the bizarre quandary she found herself in of having to celebrate her own win the night Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the Presidency. She tore up her prepared victory speech, spoke from the heart, and said, “I intend to fight. I intend to fight for Black Lives Matter! I intend to fight for truth and transparency and trust! I intend to fight! I intend to fight for a woman’s access to health care and reproductive health rights! … I believe we’re at an inflection point. I believe we are at a place that is similar to that place and time when my parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the '60’s and active in the Civil Rights Movement. … Do not despair. Do not be overwhelmed. Do not throw up our hands when it is time to roll up our sleeves and fight for who we are!”

As a Senator, Harris became known nationally mainly for her prosecutor-style cross-examinations of Trump’s appointees, including his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She achieved enough political credibility that in 2020 Harris declared herself a candidate for President – but her campaign went nowhere, despite a spectacular moment in which she challenged the eventual winner, Joe Biden, over his former opposition to busing schoolchildren to achieve school integration. Addressing Biden directly, Harris said, “[T]here was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me.”

But Harris’s 2020 Presidential campaign flamed out before it ever got to a primary or caucus state. Partly that was due to press reports that she mishandled her staff and frequently rode them too hard, Also, as Los Angeles Times reporter Noah Bierman told Frontline, “For all the excitement she has, it starts to fizzle because she fundamentally does have trouble defining herself. She’s not an ideological person, and in a primary campaign, people want to know what your ideology is, because you’re choosing among Democrats. So everybody knows Bernie Sanders stands here, Elizabeth Warren stands here, Biden stands here, Pete Buttigieg stands here. Where is she? And they don’t know, and she doesn’t do a good job of defining that, and she seems to be unsure of where she is.”

Nonetheless, Biden ultimately chose her as his running mate. Actually she wasn’t his first choice; by some reports that was Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), who had had much the same political trajectory as Harris: county prosecutor, state attorney general, U.S. Senator. But Klobuchar was not liked by the Black community because they blamed her for the death of George Floyd, choked to death by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and three colleagues. The reason for the Black opposition to Klobuchar is as both county attorney and state attorney general, she’d had the opportunity to prosecute Chauvin for previous complaints of police brutality 17 times – and she hadn’t. Klobuchar ultimately withdrew from consideration as Biden’s Vice-President and recommended he pick a person of color instead. He chose Harris – to the public consternation of Donald Trump, who was amazed that Biden would pick a running mate who had made such a dramatic public statement against him. (Later, in 2024, Trump would pick Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, who had once said Trump “could be America’s Hitler.”)

Trump’s “Strange Messenger” Support Among Evangelicals

One of the oddest aspects of Trump’s rise in popularity, his ability to win the White House once and his strong chance of getting back into power this year, is the extraordinary alliance he’s built up with evangelical Christians. The Frontline documentary introduced me to a woman who had more to do with that than any other single individual: Paula White. A self-proclaimed evangelist without any degree or formal ordination as a minister, White set up shop with her then-husband Randy White as the Without Walls Church in Tampa, Florida in 1991. She bailed on that church in the early 2000’s and allegedly stole equipment from it to set up her new church, New Destiny Christian Center, in Apopka, Florida. Paula White divorced Randy and remarried to a member of the rock band Journey, and she started a TV show in 2001 that attracted Trump’s attention.

The Frontline documentary features a bizarre scene in which Paula White literally conducts a laying-on-of-hands blessing of Donald Trump. “He knows that I don’t play when it comes to things of God,” White tells Trump. “I secure his children. I secure his calling and his mantle in Jesus’ name, Amen. I tell him, ‘You wear a mantle that you don’t fully understand.’ He receives that and takes that in. He trusts me. He trusts my voice. You see, I don’t believe anything is coincidence. I believe there is such a thing as destiny. And I believe that God will raise up a man for such a time as this.”

A number of people have questioned how Donald Trump, who is so many things the evangelical Christian community claims to hate – a serial adulterer, sexual predator, casino owner, urbanite – has become their favorite. Part of it is in the concept of “strange messengers”: the belief that God sometimes summons chosen ones precisely from the most unlikely places and gives them a divine mission to do His will on earth. Trump also cemented his standing with the evangelical community by giving them a big win on the most important political issue to them: abortion. As he likes to brag, it was Trump who put three new justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that created the six-justice majority that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and allowed states – and, ultimately perhaps, the federal government – to ban abortion.

Trump served a tumultuous four years as President from 2017 to 2021. He started his term with a ban on immigrants from 10 nations, nine of them majority Muslim countries. His minions detained migrants in outdoor centers in unspeakable conditions, and separated children from their parents. Trump also tried to extort the newly elected Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to start a specious investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in exchange for military aid Congress had already authorized for Ukraine – which led to the first of Trump’s two impeachment trials. He stonewalled Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation of alleged Russian collusion in his 2016 win and appointed a new Attorney General, William Barr, who sandbagged Mueller’s report with a wildly inaccurate “summary” of it.

Nonetheless, Trump and his people were expecting a landslide re-election victory – until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. According to Brad Parscale, who directed the digital side of Trump’s campaign until Trump summarily fired him, “By February of 2020 you see Trump’s popularity skyrocket. We come into a poll, I show him in the Oval, and he was winning in a landslide. He had a battle map that no one had seen since Reagan. That is February of 2020. And I remember going home that night and seeing the pictures coming out of China, and Italy, and other places, of COVID.”

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the November 2020 Presidential election, but Trump refused to admit that he’d lost. Instead, he followed Roy Cohn’s old playbook: insist that the “defeat” was actually a victory, that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost, and lobby state officials like Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him votes that would swing the election in those states to Trump. After filing 60 lawsuits in various courts and losing all of them – even before judges he’d appointed – Trump made one final play aimed at disrupting the certification of Biden’s Electoral College win on January 6, 2021.

Trump sent out a message on Twitter calling his followers to come to Washington, D.C. on January 6. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6. Be there, will be wild!” Trump’s message said. Trump followed it up with a speech to his assembled followers on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on January 6, telling them to march on the U.S. Capitol and promising, “I will be there with you.” Though he wasn’t – the U.S. Secret Service detail told him they couldn’t guarantee his security if he marched with the crowd – Trump seemed to be emulating the 1922 March on Rome in which Benito Mussolini took absolute power in Italy and set up the first fascist dictatorship.

Ultimately the January 6, 2021 rioters broke into the Capitol, smashed things and defecated on the floors, clubbed Capitol Police officers with flagpoles flying U.S. flags, and carried the Confederate flag on the Capitol floors – something the real Confederates during the Civil War had never been able to do. Five people died as a result of the riot, and Trump watched the whole thing on television for over three hours, resisting any attempts – even from his own children – to get the crowd to stop. When he finally did issue a stand-down order, it was one in which he said he loved the rioters, blessed them and said, “Remember this day.”

As has happened so often before, the aftermath of January 6, 2021 looked bleak for Trump – but he rebounded. When Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy initially denounced him as morally responsible for the riot, Trump’s huge base of support within the Republican Party snapped them both back in line within days. The Democrats launched a second attempt to impeach Trump, but McConnell sandbagged it first by not scheduling the trial until after Biden took office and then saying the criminal justice system could prosecute Trump. Later in June 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court gave Trump a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card when they created a whole new doctrine of Presidential immunity that virtually ensures Trump will never see the inside of a jail, even if he loses the 2024 election.

Harris Muffs the VP Gig, but Finds Her Voice on Abortion

Meanwhile, in the reality-based world in which Joe Biden was President and Kamala Harris Vice-President, Harris muffed her first big assignment. It was to go to Central American countries like Guatemala and lobby them to develop their own economies so their people wouldn’t feel the urge to migrate to the United States. Unfortunately, Harris stuck her foot in her mouth big-time when she made a speech in Guatemala saying, “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border. Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.”

She put her foot even farther down her mouth when she gave an interview to NBC News anchor Lester Holt. When Holt tried to question her credentials on dealing with border issues by saying she’d never actually been to the U.S.-Mexico border, she got defensive and said, “I’m here in Guatemala today. At some point, you know, it — We are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border.” When Holt insisted that Harris had not been to the border, Harris replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. [Laughs] I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” Her non-response not only fed Republican propaganda that Biden had made her his “border czar” and she’d failed, it scared her off one-on-one interviews with TV reporters. Even when she finally gave one with CNN’s Dana Bash on August 29, she brought along her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

What saved Harris’s political career was, ironically, Donald Trump’s biggest policy win for the radical Christian Right: the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center which reversed Roe v. Wade. As she had on the night she won her U.S. Senate seat but Donald Trump won the Presidency, Harris tore up her prepared speech before EMILY’s List, a political action committee to raise money for pro-choice women candidates, and spoke from the heart: “Well, we say, ‘How dare they! How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body. How dare they! How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future. How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms.’ … So to all here I say, let us fight for our country with everything we have got. God bless you, and God bless America.”

The events of the 2024 Presidential campaign have been so galvanic they have whipsawed the country. Joe Biden flames out in the June 27 debate with Donald Trump, and multiple Democrats demand that he step down. Donald Trump is the victim of two assassination attempts, one on July 13 just before the Republican convention – which he attends wearing a pillow-shaped bandage on his ear – and another one September 15. After a month hemming and hawing, Biden finally realizes the inevitable and ends his re-election bid on July 21. Harris picks Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential nominee August 6 over the initial favorite, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who’s considered a problematic choice because Shapiro is too strong a supporter of Israel to win back Arab-Americans and other voters concerned about the fate of the Palestinians.

Through it all, the race has stayed literally too close to call. The initial polls taken both before and after the September 10 CNN debate are tightly locked within the margin of error. It seems utterly insane that anyone could see the two major-party candidates on television and not realize that Kamala Harris is a competent, professional administrator who within the limits of the system will do her best to help Americans, while Donald Trump is a psychopathic windbag obsessed with his own petty grievances and a desire to take America back to a racist, sexist, wealth-worshipping, environment-destroying past. America’s – and the world’s – future is literally on the line. Political cynics like to joke that before every election, pundits claim that this is “the most important election in American history” – but this time, the pundits who say that just may be right.

MS-NBC Documentary "From Russia with Lev" Promises Startling New Revelations – But Delivers Just One More Story of Donald Trump's Psychopathology

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 20) I watched a new documentary on MS-NBC called From Russia with Lev, a pun on the title of Ian Fleming’s 1957 James Bond novel From Russia, with Love (note the comma in the title; the film version, made in 1963 and the second Bond movie with Sean Connery, omitted it). This was heavily promoted by MS-NBC in general and Rachel Maddow, who co-produced it through her company Surprise Inside, in particular. Maddow made a rare appearance hosting the 5 p.m. MS-NBC hour to push the movie (normally she just does Mondays at 6 p.m.), which was billed as a real-life James Bond story. Actually, if there’s a fictional secret agent Lev Parnas resembled, it was more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. Lev Parnas was born February 6, 1972 in Odesa, which was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now part of Russian-occupied Crimea in what is nominally the territory of the independent Republic of Ukraine. His parents moved the Parnas family to the U.S. in 1975 and briefly lived in Detroit before settling in Brooklyn. As Parnas himself tells it, while other Ukrainian émigrés he knew got educations and aimed for above-board careers, Parnas became a “hustler,” though in 1995 he was supposedly involved in finance as a broker. Parnas’s first contact with Donald Trump – or at least his businesses – came in the early 1990’s when he sold co-op apartments for the Trump Organization as a salesperson for Kings Highway Realty.

Over the next 20 years Parnas was involved in a number of shady business enterprises – Parnas Holdings, Global Energy Producers, and the charmingly if oxymoronically named Fraud Guarantee – until he and Igor Fruman, his partner in Global Energy Producers, hooked up with Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. When Trump won he invited Parnas and Fruman to the Inaugural events and put them in touch with Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Trump gave Giuliani the assignment to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, Trump’s most likely – and most feared – opponent in his 2020 re-election bid. Giuliani in turn gave the job to Parnas and Fruman, covering their expenses as they traveled through vacation hot-spots in places like Vienna and Paris. At the time Ukraine had a pro-Russian President, Petr Poroshenko, and a state prosecutor (their equivalent of an attorney general) named Viktor Shokin who was widely rumored to be involved in Ukraine’s chronic government corruption. Parnas and Fruman lobbied Shokin to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who had just been appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite having no prior experience in the energy business. Then Poroshenko lost his re-election bid in a landslide to Volodomyr Zelensky, a comedian who had previously played Ukraine’s President in a TV sitcom and pledged to launch an anti-corruption drive. Even before he lost his re-election campaign, Poroshenko had fired Shokin after pressure from other countries – including the U.S., represented by Biden, then the sitting vice-president – demanded his ouster as a sign Ukraine was dealing with its corruption problem seriously.

Trump arranged for his own vice-president, Mike Pence, to go to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration, but withdrew the Pence appearance after Zelensky turned down his demand that he do Trump the “favor” of investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump also used Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovich, fired because she’d refused to be part of the administration’s campaign to get the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of the Bidens. Parnas soon learned the consequences of his failure to do Trump’s bidding when he was arrested in October 2019 for allegedly planning to direct funds from foreign governments in an attempt to influence U.S. relations with Ukraine. Along the way Parnas dumped his Trump-supporting attorney, John Dowd, and hired his own counsel, Joseph Bondy (who was extensively interviewed in the film), who sent word to the U.S. House of Representatives that Parnas would be willing to testify against Trump in impeachment hearings relating to the so-called “perfect phone call” Trump had made to Zelensky, seeking his announcement that he was investigating the Bidens in exchange for weapons the U.S. Congress had already promised Ukraine. (Other former members of Trump’s inner circle, including personal attorney Michael Cohen and staff member Cassidy Hutchinson, also turned state’s evidence against Trump after they fired their Trump-hired counsel and hired their own attorneys.) According to Parnas, that prompted the U.S. Justice Department, under the control of Trump appointee William Barr, to switch out the charges against Parnas and instead try him on campaign finance law violations. The idea was that if Parnas would go before Congress as a convicted felon on charges unrelated to Ukraine, his credibility as a witness against Trump would be reduced.

In May 2021, Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy wrote a letter to Judge J. Paul Oetken relating to the case. It read, “The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, [Trump attorney] Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump.” While Oetken refused Bondy’s motion to dismiss the case, calling Bondy’s letter a “conspiracy theory,” evidence exists of a network between the FBI, Fox News on-air personality Sean Hannity, Right-wing journalist John Solomon and others to obtain privileged information about the case. In the final scene of From Russia with Lev, Parnas and Hunter Biden meet for the first time and Hunter Biden is startled when Parnas calmly informs him they had his personal bank records, leaked to them by a source in the FBI. Parnas himself says now that being arrested was the best thing that could have happened to him because it finally broke him free from the Trump cult.

MS-NBC hyped From Russia with Lev as a revelatory case study in how Donald Trump operates, but it’s really an all too familiar story of how Trump exploits people for what they can do for him and then coldly dumps them once he’s sucked them dry. Trump publicly denied that he’d ever known Parnas, and when he was confronted with photos of the two of them together, said, “I get my picture taken with everybody.” (He pulled the same trick with E. Jean Carroll, the woman he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting in the mid-1990’s in an elevator at New York’s high-end Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion store.) In the end, all From Russia with Lev proves is that Donald Trump is a narcissistic egomaniac who will do anything to anybody in order to safeguard and increase his own power – and at least half of the country knows that about him already. The other half believes he’s a Messiah who can literally do no wrong, and that’s why the 2024 Presidential election is so maddeningly close in the polls, and if the pattern from 2016 and 2020 that Trump consistently does five percent better in the actual election than he does in the polls holds this year, he will be President again.