by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
In November and December 2023, America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) co-produced a three-part miniseries on the life and political career of Julius Caesar. Called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, it was re-run in April 2024. I’m convinced that the filmmakers, including producer/director Emma Frank, at least partially intended audiences to see a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Though Frank and her writers avoided using Trump’s name, they obviously intended us to see Caesar and Trump as comparable. Both were leaders who used populist appeals to destroy a long-established republic and set themselves up as absolute dictators – though in Trump’s case his rise was short-circuited and won’t be completed unless and until he wins back the Presidency on November 5, 2024.
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On Tuesday, April 2 I watched a couple of quite interesting shows on PBS, though I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t put on the next episode of the fascinating documentary mini-series The Invisible Shield about public health in America. Instead they aired the first in a three-part mini-series about the life of Julius Caesar (Andonis Anthony) called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m beginning to wonder if PBS has started showing only the first episodes of mini-series like this on air as a loss leader to get us to pay for their “Passport” streaming subscription service, which we’ll need to watch the rest of the episodes. (I also find it ironic that three of the four big network streaming services all have names beginning with “P”: NBC’s “Peacock,” CBS’s “Paramount Plus” and PBS’s “Passport.” The only one that doesn’t is ABC, since they’re owned by the Walt Disney Company and so their streaming service is “Disney Plus.”) The creators of “High Priest,” the first episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator (the show’s directors are Emma Frank and Richard Pearson but no writers are credited on imdb.com), don’t go overboard on the obvious parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they’re unmistakably there. Both were men who went out of their way to destroy an existing republic to further their own personal and political ambitions. Both did so by appeals to “the people”; Caesar by embracing the causes of commoners who weren’t sharing in the riches the Roman Republic was acquiring, and in particular the veterans who were fighting Rome’s wars and weren’t getting jack for it in compensation.
One of Caesar’s big strategies in winning popular favor was putting on the biggest round of gladiatorial contests Rome had ever seen, and bolstering the appeal of his games by offering huge banquet tables filled with food. Since admission to the games was free (the ancient Roman formula for keeping the people happy and content with their lot was “Panem et circenses” – “bread and circuses”), the food was also free, and Caesar of course made sure to publicize his involvement in providing it big-time so the people would remember just who had fed them so generously and they’d vote for him in upcoming elections. The show begins with Caesar determined to win the title of Pontifex Maximus, the head of Rome’s official religion, who was elected by popular vote, even though he was only 37 when the title fell vacant and the other two candidates were both older. To fund his games and his Pontifex Maximus candidacy he’d borrowed money from Crassus (Carlo Spano), then the richest man in Rome and a notorious creditor from hell who wasn’t above sending goon squads to assault physically people who owed him money and fell behind on their payments. Caesar had at least one determined opponent in the Roman Senate: Cato (Orlando Brooke), a traditionalist defender of the Roman Republic and its constitution against Caesar’s power grabs. After an attempted coup d’état led by Catiline collapsed in 62 B.C., Caesar called for the permanent imprisonment of the conspirators instead of their execution, but as this documentary points out Rome didn’t have a prison system at the time and the only punishment for crime short of execution was house arrest. Cato opposed this, called for the execution of Catiline’s men and hinted that Caesar had been part of the plot.
When Caesar allied himself with the Roman general Pompey (Antony Gabriel) and supported Pompey’s call to give his principal soldiers land grants, Cato regarded this as a violation of the Roman constitution and mounted an early version of the filibuster, speaking for hours against the bill so it could not be voted on. Caesar was eventually elected consul, the head of state under the Roman Republic, but he didn’t serve alone: there were actually two consuls, each supposedly there to check the power of the other, and Caesar’s running mate for the other consulship, Lucius Lucceius, lost to one of Caesar’s bitterest political enemies, Marcus Calpurnius Biblius. When Biblius joined Cato in opposing Pompey’s bill to grant land to his veterans, Caesar had thugs beat him up on the Senate floor and drag him away. Caesar next announced that he and two other men, Pompey and Crassus, would rule Rome as a so-called “Triumvirate,” effectively blocking his opposition by including two men who were known to hate each other. He also solidified his position by arranging a marriage between Pompey and Caesar’s daughter Julia. Then he was appointed to command a Roman army intent on the conquest of Gaul (modern-day France), and that’s where this episode ended. Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is one of those tacky half-documentaries, half-dramatizations the History Channel is big on: we see actors playing the various characters of ancient Rome but don’t actually hear them. Instead we hear from various British talking heads, including historians Tom Holland, Shashama Malik, Andrew Frederic Wallace-Hadrill and Federico Santangelo, as well as former British Member of Parliament Rory Stewart, who seems to be there mainly to talk about Caesar as a politician and compare him to modern-day leaders.
What most Americans don’t realize is that the Framers of the Constitution never intended for the United States to be a democracy; they created a republic and consciously modeled it on the Roman Republic. James Madison made the distinction clear in No. 10 of the Federalist Papers (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp), in which he wrote, “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” As Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator makes clear, this was a debate carried out in ancient Rome as well: the Roman government in Caesar’s time was divided between the Populares, who sought to reach past the official organs of government (particularly the Roman Senate) and appeal directly to the people for support; and the Optimates, who believed in a hierarchy of elites and particularly in a Senate that, in Madison’s words, would “refine and enlarge the public views” and serve as the “medium” that would keep political conflict within legitimate bounds and limit the power of the people.
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On Tuesday, April 9 I watched the second episodes of two PBS mini-series that at first I had feared they wouldn’t show over the air but just make you subscribe to their streaming service, “Passport,” to be able to watch. One was “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” the second show in the three-part miniseries on the life and political and military career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’m not sure how much the original producers (Evih Efue, Emma Frank, Helen Hunt, Alexander Leith and Adam Turner), directors (Emma Frank and Richard Pearson) and writers of this show were motivated by the parallels between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but they are clear and unmistakable. Both Caesar and Trump were utterly unscrupulous, both were motivated by political ambition and greed, both were secular and highly licentious individuals who cloaked themselves in the guise of religiosity (before he was elected Consul, one of the two executives at the head of the Roman Republic, Caesar first ran for and won the office of Pontifex Maximus, essentially the pope of Rome’s multitheistic religion), and both systematically upended and ultimately destroyed republics that had lasted for centuries. In Rome’s case the Republic had lasted for 500 years – twice as long as America’s experiment in representative government – until Caesar came along to wreck it. Part one of this series, “High Priest,” ended with Caesar’s first term as Consul (the Consulship lasted only one year and there were two of them, ostensibly to check each other’s power; the framers of the U.S. Constitution copied much of it from the Roman Republic but decided to make the President just one person and give him a four-year term; Alexander Hamilton wanted the President elected for life, but that was the biggest battle he lost at the Constitutional Convention because George Washington, who was obviously going to be the first President, wanted a periodic chance to decide whether he still wanted the gig) and his appointment as governor of Gaul (modern-day France).
Part two was called “Veni, Vidi, Vici” after the famous message Caesar sent to the Roman Senate at the conclusion of his conquest of Gaul – it meant, “I came, I saw, I conquered” – and his successful resistance to the efforts of members of the Senate in general and his main political enemy, Cato, in particular. One point Frank, Pearson and whoever wrote the narration for the show made was that both as consul and as a provincial governor, Caesar was immune for prosecution for any crimes he might commit in those offices – he essentially had what Trump is currently seeking from the U.S. Supreme Court – and so the only way his enemies in the Senate could stop him was if they could first strip him of his Gallic command. That posed a problem for them because Caesar was regularly sending letters to Rome detailing how well his war was going. Later he collected these into a book called Commentary on the Gallic Wars (the bane of Latin students ever since) in which he wrote about himself in the third person so people hearing the tales (remember this was not only before the age of printing but before most people could read, so they relied on town criers to tell them what was in the book: essentially the audio books of their time) would forget that the portrait of the great hero Julius Caesar had been created by Caesar himself. Caesar’s conquests in Gaul made him one of the most popular political figures in Rome, and he aligned himself with the Populares, the faction in Rome’s government which sought to undercut the authority of the Senate by presenting as many issues as possible directly to the people by vote. Caesar also aligned himself with another Roman general, Pompey, and his principal financial backer, Crassus, to form what became known as the First Triumvirate.
Each of the three got themselves appointed to govern a Roman province: Caesar got Gaul, Pompey got Spain (though he ruled it by remote control and stayed in Rome, which seems to me would have been a lot more difficult then than it is now) and Crassus got Parthia (ancient Mesopotamia and modern-day Iran). Unfortunately for Crassus, while Caesar was sweeping to victory in Gaul (albeit by committing war crimes; one of the things his enemies in the Senate wanted to remove him for was breaking a treaty with one of the Gallic tribes and massacring 400,000 of them), Crassus got his ass kicked by the Parthians. They literally beheaded him, and though Caesar had got Pompey and Crassus elected as co-consuls to succeed him, Crassus’s death unraveled Caesar’s political position in Rome. As the only surviving consul, Pompey decided his political future lay in allying himself with the anti-Caesar faction in the Senate. Pompey had previously married Caesar’s daughter Julia to cement the alliance between them, but Julia got pregnant, had a miscarriage and not only died herself but took the baby with her. Caesar tried to keep Pompey on board with their alliance by offering him his grand-niece as a second wife, but Pompey essentially said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode ends with Caesar about to break one of the main laws of the Roman Republic: the ban on taking one’s own private army into Rome. Things get complicated when one of Caesar’s agents, Clodius – one of the 10 “Tribunes of the People,” an office created during an earlier period of instability in the Roman Republic to ensure that the people had a voice in their government in case the consuls and the Senate got too powerful and flouted the popular will – decides to strike out on his own.
Historian Tom Holland said in the show, “Clodius, for years, had served as Caesar's agent, enforcing Caesar's interests in Rome, and Clodius learnt from Caesar that power can come directly from the people. Clodius elevates this to a whole new level. Political order in the streets of the capital rapidly starts to collapse.” When Clodius is assassinated brutally by a lynch mob, his widow Fulvia decides to stage his funeral in front of the Senate. She builds a pyre and burns his body, and the fire spreads to the Senate building, destroying it. Caesar is able to stop the Senate’s latest attempt to end his provincial governorship of Gaul by bribing another tribune to block it; or, failing that, to pass a bill stripping both Caesar and Pompey of their armies. The show ends with Caesar literally at the Rubicon River, which marked the boundary between Gaul and Rome. Already his enemies in the Senate had essentially declared him a political exile and threatened to prosecute him if he marched his army into Rome, but he did anyway, kicking off a new civil war that would ultimately lead to Caesar’s appointment as a permanent dictator (Dictator perpetuo) in 45 B.C. and his assassination a year later. The “Veni, Vidi, Vici” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator is a grim and all too timely warning of how fragile a republic can be in the face of an authoritarian – a Caesar, a Hitler, a Putin, a Trump – determined to destroy it and with enough popular support to be able to pull it off.
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On Tuesday, April 16 PBS showed “Ides of March,” the last in a three-part mini-series on the life and career of Julius Caesar called Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator. I’ve long suspected the producers of this show (the BBC in association with PBS and various other companies) were deliberately out to make a parallel between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump. Both Caesar and Trump essentially slammed their way into absolute political power and overthrew long-established republics (500 years in Caesar’s case, 250 years in Trump’s) by total unscrupulousness and utter indifference to social norms, as well as direct appeals to “the people” against the “elites” who were supposedly ham-stringing the political system so it could not deliver what “the people” really wanted. Of course, Caesar’s playbook has been used time and time again by both Right-wing and Left-wing demagogues in various countries ever since: in France by Robespierre and later Napoleon, in Germany by the Kaiser (whose title, like “Czar,” derives from “Caesar”) and then by Hitler, in Russia by Lenin, Stalin and eventually Putin, along with other modern-day tyrants like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (until he lost power seeking re-election and, like Trump, claimed that the election had been “stolen” from him and staged a coup to try to retain power), Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy (representing a party that’s the lineal descendant of the first Fascists led by Benito Mussolini in 1922) and others around the world. The PBS.org home page for “Ides of March,” https://www.pbs.org/video/ides-of-march-xkgyxs/, describes it thusly: “As Caesar takes control of Rome and consolidates his grip over the Republic, his ambition turns to tyranny. A handful of senators plot to end his rule in the only way they can: by taking his life. But will it be enough to save the Republic?”
The first two episodes, “High Priest” and “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (Latin for “I came, I saw, I conquered,” his slogan upon winning the war in Gaul – modern-day France – that cemented his position as the most powerful man in Rome), told a story of how a man with no particular sense of morality made and then broke alliances with others to pursue his own path to power. I remember a history book I studied from in grade school which presented Caesar as an altogether positive figure – it had chapter headings reading “The Sickness of Rome” and “The Physician: Julius Caesar” – but that’s decidedly not how this show, produced and directed by Emma Frank, sees him. The ancient Roman constitution (which, like the current British constitution, was unwritten and relied mostly on an agreed-upon set of political and social norms which Caesar deliberately upended) provided for an office called Dictator in which the Roman Senate could appoint someone and give them absolute power. But it was only supposed to be for a limited time, at most six months. The Dictator was only appointed in case of a national emergency – usually an attack from an enemy – and was supposed to relinquish power and hand it back to the elected officials as soon as the emergency was over. Not for Caesar: he first demanded an appointment as Dictator for ten years – which the Senate reluctantly gave him with the proviso that it would have to come up for renewal every year – and then he demanded to be made Dictator for life. Caesar also demanded that he sit at the head of the Senate, between the two elected Consuls that were the Roman heads of state – essentially declaring himself above the law and the ultimate authority over Rome. Among the powers he took for himself was the ability to appoint the magistrates, who served under the consuls and essentially ran the Senate, instead of allowing them to be elected directly. Caesar also had made for himself a gold version of the laurel wreath Roman consuls traditionally wore around their heads as a symbol of their authority, and to many observers it looked like a crown.
This was an especially sore point among many Romans because originally Rome had been ruled by kings, only the seventh and last one, Tyrannus Superbus (whose name has entered the language as the word “tyrant,” meaning an unscrupulous and evil absolute ruler) was deposed in a coup led by a direct ancestor of Brutus, who in 44 B.C. had wormed his way into Caesar’s inner circle. “It's a quite extraordinary thing, a really, really explicit contravention of Roman customary practice,” says retired history professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on the program about Caesar’s demand to be made dictator for life. “The entire idea of the non-monarchical state is that no one has power in perpetuity.” Another historian interviewed for the program, Tom Holland, says, “Caesar's preponderance has made the traditional function of the Senate, the role of the helmsman guiding the ship of state, essentially irrelevant. Caesar is too impatient, too unsubtle not to let his fellow senators know that he knows this.” Holland mentions Brutus’s role in the plot to kill Caesar. The Roman Senators who want to get rid of him know they have to do that by March 15 – the so-called “Ides of March” holiday – because right after that Caesar is scheduled to leave on another military campaign against the Parthian empire (mostly in modern-day Iran, though at its height it stretched from Turkey to Afghanistan and Pakistan and encompassed the so-called “Fertile Crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq as well). Caesar, says Holland, “sees Brutus as if he's a son who he's looked after, cherished, and promoted. Now, Caesar promises Brutus fantastic things. He's gonna get a key appointment this year, and this will all put him on track for a consulship in the future as well. It’s a really bittersweet moment for Brutus. On the one hand, he is climbing that ladder of offices. The consulship is in reach. But at the same time, he doesn't like the fact that Caesar is centralizing all of this power around himself. But in the end, he's able to shrug it off because at the moment, he's benefiting from the system.”
Caesar tests the waters of whether the Roman people are ready to accept him as, essentially, a king by staging an elaborate ceremony in which his loyal and trusted assistant, Mark Antony, will offer him a diadem – essentially a crown – instead of the gold replica of a laurel wreath he’s been wearing. But when he notices that the audience reacts negatively at the sight of Caesar being offered a crown, he gets the message and pushes the damned thing away. Caesar gets at least two warnings of his impending assassination, one from a priest named Spurinna and one from his wife, Calpurnia, who’s had a dream about him being assassinated in the Senate and pleads with him not to go. But one of the conspirators against him, Decimus – a long-standing ally of Caesar but one who, like Brutus and fellow conspirators Cassius and Cicero, has got disillusioned with him – goes to Caesar to convince him to attend the latest session of the Senate after all. “Decimus says to Caesar, ‘This is behavior unbecoming of you,’” Holland explains. “‘What – what am I supposed to go and tell the Senate? That you're scared of shadows, that you're obedient to a woman's importunities? This is not behavior appropriate to Caesar.’” So Caesar goes to the Senate and gets knifed to death by 20 to 30 people, each of whom decided to take a role in the assassination so it could not be blamed on any one person. Unfortunately, the death of Caesar does not restore the Roman Republic; after yet another Roman civil war Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian takes absolute power and declares himself Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. The Roman Empire, like the Republic, lasts for 500 years in the West (and another 1,000 in the East as the Byzantine Empire, which splits off from its parent and holds out until 1453, when it’s conquered by the Ottoman Turks), and Rome becomes the paradigmatic historical example of a self-governing society that collapsed through the greed and hunger for power of a single determined individual.
The historians interviewed for the “Ides of March” episode of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator make this point explicitly in the closing minutes of the documentary. Tom Holland says, “I think the tragedy of the Roman Republic is that its greatest man, the man who in so many ways exemplified all its qualities to an absolute pitch of achievement, those achievements brought the Roman Republic crashing down into rubble.” Classics professor Jeffrey Tatum says, “When Julius Caesar commenced his political career, he could never have imagined that the Roman Republic would come to an end, and he certainly couldn't have imagined that he would be the agent that brought that about. And yet, that's what happened in a very short time. What are the lessons for modern representational systems that are not nearly so old? Could modern democracy collapse? Perhaps we simply take our political norms for granted.” Rory Stewart, a former British cabinet member, says, “There was a moment where the Roman Republic seemed the most perfect political state on earth. Then it had got itself into trouble. And this reminds us a bit of our own period. From about 1989, democracy was on the rise. The number of democracies in the world doubled, and then a period of deep, deep uncertainty began, including the rise of populism. And it's in that environment authoritarianism thrives, that strong men come forward to challenge democracy.” British constitutional lawyer and scholar Shami Chakrabarti says, “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call. Democracy has to be constantly fought for. If we take it for granted, a new Caesar will come.” And it seems quite likely, given his ability to overcome obstacles that would have sunk the political careers of lesser men and the almost god-like adulation he receives from millions of Americans, that the new Caesar has indeed arrived and his name is Donald Trump.
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
"Frontline" Hosts "Children of Ukraine" Documentary About Russia Kidnapping, Brainwashing Ukrainian Children In Wartime
It’s something the U.S. government used to do, too, to Native American children.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
After the third and last part of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, PBS showed a new episode of its long-running Frontline documentary series called “Children of Ukraine,” about how up to 150,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken out of Ukraine into Russia. There they’re sent into “camps” and essentially brainwashed into denying or forgetting their former identity as Ukrainians and accepting a new one as Russians, including being forced to sing patriotic songs about Russia and ultimately being adopted by Russian families. “Basically, they try to erase our identity as Ukrainians,” said one of the parents of these children. “They try to impose their distorted version of history. We're still hoping to bring them back home. They are still our children.” Some of the “children” involved are actually teenage boys who are worrying that they may soon be drafted in the Russian Army and forced to fight against their countrymen. “Russia has said it's been relocating Ukrainian children as part of a mass humanitarian effort,” said Frontline’s familiar narrator, Will Lyman. “A year into the war, President Vladimir Putin held a televised rally featuring children thanking Russian soldiers for rescuing them. … In a statement, the Russian government told us that Ukrainian children have been relocated to ensure their safety and to provide medical care and education.” The relocation effort to move Ukrainian children to Russia is under the direction of Maria Lvova-Belova, who’s shown in the documentary. She says she has adopted five children herself, including one from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was gutted and essentially destroyed by Russian attacks.
The “Children of Ukraine” documentary opens with a scene at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands in which arrest warrants were sworn out against Lvova-Belova and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges the Russian government called “outrageous.” “A team of Ukrainian investigators is now collecting evidence they are hoping will be used for the International Criminal Court case,” Lyman explained. “They work for a human rights group, the IPHR [International Partnership for Human Rights], and are traveling through recently liberated territories across Ukraine.” IPHR’s Web site is https://iphronline.org, and though they claim to have “cooperated with civil society groups in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus,” virtually all the Web tabs linked to on IPHR’s home page are for sites in the former Soviet Union. “Our mission is to find families whose children are missing till this day,” an IPHR spokesperson told Frontline. “And we're trying to collect all the evidence and information about such cases so that our lawyers could qualify it after, whether it was a war crime or a crime against humanity.” They’re shown in the documentary working with another group called Save Ukraine (https://www.saveukraineua.org), and their Web page includes a link to a CBS-TV 60 Minutes story from November 19, 2023, also about the alleged abductions of Ukrainian children and their indoctrination into Russian identity and culture before they’re adopted by Russian parents (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukrainians-accuse-russia-of-abducting-indoctrinating-children-60-minutes-transcript/).
One of the cases shown in the documentary is Maxim, a four-year-old boy whose grandmother tried to place him with older relatives after his mom was killed in a Russian attack on their car. Maxim’s mother was killed in the assault, but his two older siblings – a brother and a sister – survived. But Maxim was taken and later his surviving relatives saw a photo of someone who looked like him in a Russian catalog of young children available for adoption. A teenage boy named Arkem had a particularly harrowing experience in Russian custody, According to the show, he was taken to the Perevalsk Special Correctional Boarding School in Luhansk, a Russian-controlled area of eastern Ukraine. There his cell phone was confiscated so he couldn’t call his parents and tell them where he was, and he was forced to sing the Russian national anthem and wear uniforms with the letter “Z,” a symbol of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “The Russian government said in its statement that Artem and his fellow students had been relocated to protect them from Ukrainian shelling, and that Russia had tried to contact the children’s families,” narrator Lyman explained. “They said it’s ‘hardly surprising’ that a Russian school would have ‘due regard for national symbols, including the country's flag and anthem.’” Six months after he was captured, Artem – who in the meantime was scared he would be drafted into Russia’s military and forced to fight against his fellow Ukrainians – was reunited with his mother after she took a long, circuitous journey through Poland and Belarus before finally rendezvousing with her son in Crimea in Russian-occupied south Ukraine.
Among the ironies of this show was the sheer number of people in it who were wearing T-shirts with English logos and other writing, including the sporting-goods maker The North Face; and the fact that the U.S. and Canada did something similar in the 1890’s and for decades afterwards. After major Native American resistance to U.S. occupation ended with the December 29, 1890 Native defeat at the battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. government adopted a policy called “forced assimilation.” Native children were rounded up and sent to special “Indian schools” where they were forcibly indoctrinated into the ways of white American culture and, like the Ukrainian children held hostage by Russians, were punished severely if they spoke their native language or tried to hold on to their people’s traditional customs. In another PBS documentary (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/buffy-saintemarie-carry-it-on-eagle.html), Canadian Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie recalled being subjected to this abuse, including being kidnapped from her parents and adopted by a white family where she was subjected to physical, including sexual, abuse that lasted until she was old enough to go to college. The stated rationale behind this program was to “kill the Indian to save the man.”
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
After the third and last part of Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, PBS showed a new episode of its long-running Frontline documentary series called “Children of Ukraine,” about how up to 150,000 Ukrainian children have been kidnapped and taken out of Ukraine into Russia. There they’re sent into “camps” and essentially brainwashed into denying or forgetting their former identity as Ukrainians and accepting a new one as Russians, including being forced to sing patriotic songs about Russia and ultimately being adopted by Russian families. “Basically, they try to erase our identity as Ukrainians,” said one of the parents of these children. “They try to impose their distorted version of history. We're still hoping to bring them back home. They are still our children.” Some of the “children” involved are actually teenage boys who are worrying that they may soon be drafted in the Russian Army and forced to fight against their countrymen. “Russia has said it's been relocating Ukrainian children as part of a mass humanitarian effort,” said Frontline’s familiar narrator, Will Lyman. “A year into the war, President Vladimir Putin held a televised rally featuring children thanking Russian soldiers for rescuing them. … In a statement, the Russian government told us that Ukrainian children have been relocated to ensure their safety and to provide medical care and education.” The relocation effort to move Ukrainian children to Russia is under the direction of Maria Lvova-Belova, who’s shown in the documentary. She says she has adopted five children herself, including one from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was gutted and essentially destroyed by Russian attacks.
The “Children of Ukraine” documentary opens with a scene at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands in which arrest warrants were sworn out against Lvova-Belova and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges the Russian government called “outrageous.” “A team of Ukrainian investigators is now collecting evidence they are hoping will be used for the International Criminal Court case,” Lyman explained. “They work for a human rights group, the IPHR [International Partnership for Human Rights], and are traveling through recently liberated territories across Ukraine.” IPHR’s Web site is https://iphronline.org, and though they claim to have “cooperated with civil society groups in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus,” virtually all the Web tabs linked to on IPHR’s home page are for sites in the former Soviet Union. “Our mission is to find families whose children are missing till this day,” an IPHR spokesperson told Frontline. “And we're trying to collect all the evidence and information about such cases so that our lawyers could qualify it after, whether it was a war crime or a crime against humanity.” They’re shown in the documentary working with another group called Save Ukraine (https://www.saveukraineua.org), and their Web page includes a link to a CBS-TV 60 Minutes story from November 19, 2023, also about the alleged abductions of Ukrainian children and their indoctrination into Russian identity and culture before they’re adopted by Russian parents (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukrainians-accuse-russia-of-abducting-indoctrinating-children-60-minutes-transcript/).
One of the cases shown in the documentary is Maxim, a four-year-old boy whose grandmother tried to place him with older relatives after his mom was killed in a Russian attack on their car. Maxim’s mother was killed in the assault, but his two older siblings – a brother and a sister – survived. But Maxim was taken and later his surviving relatives saw a photo of someone who looked like him in a Russian catalog of young children available for adoption. A teenage boy named Arkem had a particularly harrowing experience in Russian custody, According to the show, he was taken to the Perevalsk Special Correctional Boarding School in Luhansk, a Russian-controlled area of eastern Ukraine. There his cell phone was confiscated so he couldn’t call his parents and tell them where he was, and he was forced to sing the Russian national anthem and wear uniforms with the letter “Z,” a symbol of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “The Russian government said in its statement that Artem and his fellow students had been relocated to protect them from Ukrainian shelling, and that Russia had tried to contact the children’s families,” narrator Lyman explained. “They said it’s ‘hardly surprising’ that a Russian school would have ‘due regard for national symbols, including the country's flag and anthem.’” Six months after he was captured, Artem – who in the meantime was scared he would be drafted into Russia’s military and forced to fight against his fellow Ukrainians – was reunited with his mother after she took a long, circuitous journey through Poland and Belarus before finally rendezvousing with her son in Crimea in Russian-occupied south Ukraine.
Among the ironies of this show was the sheer number of people in it who were wearing T-shirts with English logos and other writing, including the sporting-goods maker The North Face; and the fact that the U.S. and Canada did something similar in the 1890’s and for decades afterwards. After major Native American resistance to U.S. occupation ended with the December 29, 1890 Native defeat at the battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the U.S. government adopted a policy called “forced assimilation.” Native children were rounded up and sent to special “Indian schools” where they were forcibly indoctrinated into the ways of white American culture and, like the Ukrainian children held hostage by Russians, were punished severely if they spoke their native language or tried to hold on to their people’s traditional customs. In another PBS documentary (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/buffy-saintemarie-carry-it-on-eagle.html), Canadian Cree Indian folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie recalled being subjected to this abuse, including being kidnapped from her parents and adopted by a white family where she was subjected to physical, including sexual, abuse that lasted until she was old enough to go to college. The stated rationale behind this program was to “kill the Indian to save the man.”
Saturday, March 30, 2024
Racism, Sexism, Individualism and Public Health: Two PBS Documentaries Explore Their Deadly Clashes
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On Tuesday, March 26, PBS showed two quite compelling documentaries on public health campaigns that provided an interesting then-and-now comparison and also showed how racism, sexism and America’s cult of the individual interfered with our nation’s ability to survive and respond effectively to major health crises. The first was an episode of PBS’s long-running series American Experience called “The Cancer Detectives,” about Dr. George N. Papanicolaou’s invention of the PAP Smear for detecting cervical cancer in the 1920’s and his 35-year struggle to get his test approved and routinely used.
The second, shown immediately afterwards, was the first episode of a four-part mini-series called The Invisible Shield, about public health in the U.S. and how it’s been hamstrung by an early decision to leave the responsibility for protecting the public health to individual states rather than at the federal level. Though there is such an organization as the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), it arose largely from the system of U.S. military hospitals created by Congress in 1798 – the same year it passed the law giving states, not the federal government, overall responsibility for protecting the public health – and its Wikipedia page describes it thusly:
“PHS had its origins in the system of marine hospitals that originated in 1798. In 1871 these were consolidated into the Marine Hospital Service, and shortly afterwards the position of Surgeon General and the PHS Commissioned Corps [PHSCC] were established. As the system's scope grew to include quarantine authority and research, it was renamed the Public Health Service in 1912. A series of reorganizations in 1966–1973 began a shift where PHS’s divisions were promoted into departmental operating agencies. PHS was established as a thin layer of hierarchy above them rather than an operating agency in its own right.”
Both “The Cancer Detectives” and “The Old Playbook,” first episode in the four-part mini-series The Invisible Shield, show how Americans’ ability to protect their collective health has been affected by various outside factors, including racist and sexist prejudices as well as America’s deep suspicion of collective actions of all kinds. “The Cancer Detectives” is an unlikely tale of a dedicated, determined Greek-born medical researcher; his wife, also of Greek extraction, who emigrated with him and became his first research subject; a Japanese immigrant artist; and a Black woman doctor in Philadelphia whose father had escaped from slavery and who had overcome racism and sexism to make it through medical school and set up a practice among largely poor inner-city patients.
The Greek-born medical researcher was George Papanicolaou, who settled in the U.S. in 1913 with his wife, Mary Mavroyeni. He arrived bilingual in Greek and German but knowing almost no English, though he was able to get hired by Cornell University in 1914. The person who hired him was Dr. Charles Stockard, an anatomist and zoologist who was also a prominent activist in the eugenics movement. Eugenics was a racist pseudo-science that not only believed in the innate superiority of whites over people of color, but argued that people should select their mates according to who should pair with whom to produce the most talented, intelligent and otherwise desirable offspring.
Eugenics lost most of its credibility when the Nazis adopted it and cited it as one of their justifications for the Holocaust, but before then it was quite popular and influential. Eugenic principles were used not only to encourage the supposedly “superior” people to have more children but to forcibly sterilize the supposedly “inferior” to keep them from reproducing at all. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 8 to 1, authorized the forced sterilization of women like the plaintiff in the case, Carrie Buck. In an opinion written by the usually progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court held, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
George Papanicolaou began examining the vaginal fluid first of research animals, including guinea pigs, and then his wife, using a tool called the speculum. It had been invented in the 1840’s by a researcher with his own contacts with racism: James Marion Sims. He had done his research on enslaved African-American women, who of course had no legal right not to consent to being his test subjects. For Dr. Papanicolaou, the speculum gave him the ability to examine the cells of women without having to do a biopsy – a highly invasive surgical procedure – to obtain them. Ultimately he observed that certain cells showed signs of becoming cancerous, and he realized that his test offered the chance of detecting cervical cancer well before it advanced to the stage of being untreatable.
Dr. Papanicolaou first began his researches on human women in 1925 at the Women’s Hospital of the City of New York. By 1928 he felt he’d obtained enough data to present his findings, Unfortunately, he chose to do this at a eugenics conference, the so-called “Race Betterment Conference,” in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1928. Though his presentation didn’t have anything to do with scientific racism, he presented anyway but got nowhere. Partly that had to do with the poor quality of the slides he presented, but also, according to historian Leah Hazard, the doctors there regarded biopsies as the gold standard of cervical cancer diagnosis and didn’t “understand why it would be appealing to switch from the biopsy, a painful, invasive diagnostic, to one that was arguably uncomfortable, but not painful. There probably wasn’t really a recognition that the woman's comfort and the patient’s preference would be in any way a deciding factor.”
Undaunted, Dr. Papanicolaou continued with his research, and ultimately he hooked up with a Japanese-American artist named Hashime Muriyama. Born in Japan and trained at the art school in Kyoto, Muriyama had emigrated to the U.S. and got a job at Cornell doing artists’ renderings for medical researchers. Muriyama’s skills enabled Dr. Papanicolaou to collect images that could educate doctors in just what abnormalities to look for in women’s uterine cells to indicate whether or not they’d get cancer. Unfortunately, just as the two were nearly finished with the book the doctor was writing and Muriyama was illustrating, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Muriyama escaped internment for a bit over a year, but in March 1943 he was arrested and taken to one of the camps, ironically enough on Ellis Island, which had been the entry point for European immigrants in the late 19th century.
Fortunately, Hashime Muriyama had powerful friends most of the Japanese-American internees didn’t. Dr. Papanicolaou wrote extensive letters to everyone he could think of in the U.S. government to request Muriyama’s release. So did a lot of other prominent people. Eventually in August 1943 U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, just about the only person in the federal government willing to express misgivings about the internment policy in general (the U.S. military had insisted on it as a necessity and President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t think he should second-guess the military on how to fight the war; later documents were released that revealed racism, not military considerations, had been the motive behind the policy), ordered Muriyama to be freed, and he went back to work with Dr. Papanicolaou on the text that was finally published in 1946 explaining how the PAP Smear worked and what diagnosticians should be looking for to diagnose cervical cancer.
A Black Light in the White Darkness
One of the physicians who read the Papanicolaou/Muriyama book was an African-American woman doctor named Helen Dickens. She had graduated from medical school at the University of Illinois in 1934 and had settled in Philadelphia. She’d endured the racist taunts of her fellow medical students and adopted an unusual strategy to deal with them: she’d always sit in the front row of the classroom, where she couldn’t see the white men taunting her and if they wanted a clear view of the blackboard, they’d have to sit next to her. Resistance to racial oppression ran in her family; her father had escaped slavery in Kentucky, taught himself to read and write, and had abandoned his slave name and called himself Charles Dickens, after his favorite author.
“The Cancer Detectives” included an archived audio interview with Dr. Helen Dickens herself as well as reminiscences from her daughter, Dr. Jayne Henderson Brown. Dr. Dickens had got a job at the Aspiranto birthing home for Black mothers, where she was mentored by another Black woman doctor, Virginia Alexander, “The patients came to us,” Dr. Dickens recalled. “She had two rooms in her house for patients and one little room where you delivered patients. Oh, it was different. The O.B. patients stayed in nine days. Most of them were poor. People weren't able to pay, they weren't expected to pay a lot.” Dr. Dickens also did direct outreach to women in the Black community of North Philadelphia. “Going in the middle of the night, and you were going into all kinds of communities,” she said. “You were going into the homes, you were seeing all these people. You were taking responsibility for taking care of people.”
When information about the PAP Smear became available, Dr. Dickens was determined to reach out to Black women and get them to take the tests. She ran into a lot of opposition, suspicion and outright hatred from her would-be patients for the medical community in general. Part of that was a legacy of the eugenics movement; under the laws allowing forcible sterilization which the U.S. Supreme Court had O.K.’d in 1927, Black women had frequently been sterilized without their consent or foreknowledge. The procedures acquired the dark nickname, “Mississippi appendectomies.” Dickens opened a clinic to do PAP Smears at Mercy Hospital in Philadelphia, where she’d been appointed to run the cancer center in 1953 despite the stereotype that Black people didn’t need to worry about cancer because they would die from something else before they had a chance to get cancer.
Meanwhile, the first mass test of the PAP Smear as a diagnostic tool for cervical cancer was going on in Memphis, Tennessee from 1952 to 1957. It was called the Memphis Cancer Survey Project and it operated not only from established clinics but from old buses converted into mobile testing labs. “You took a van and went out to the churches in various places, and invited women in to have a PAP Smear done,” Dr. Dickens recalled of the early years when she expanded the testing program to Philadelphia. With the aid of the American Cancer Society, originally the American Society for the Control of Cancer until philanthropist Mary Lasker took it over in the 1950’s and rebranded it, raised more money for it and expanded its outreach, PAP Smears became a standard practice in women’s health. In 1958 Dr. Papanicolaou and his wife Mary were invited to the White House for a dinner with President Dwight Eisenhower. “The PAP Smear changed the landscape for cancer, for its detection, its diagnosis, management, and treatment,” Leah Hazard said at the end of “The Cancer Detectives.” “Suddenly we could envision a time when we could screen healthy people, and we could all be thriving in a new and quite exciting way.”
Public Health: Where the Victories Are Invisible
“The Old Playbook,” first out of four episodes of a mini-series on American public health called The Invisible Shield which PBS showed right after “The Cancer Detectives,” was largely centered around the fact that the triumphs of public health campaigns are invisible. They’re measured in intangibles: how many people don’t get sick, what giant outbreaks of disease don’t happen. Though “The Old Playbook” touches on the entire history of U.S. government responses to disease and real or threatened epidemics, it focused largely on the response to COVID-19 from 2020 to date and the bizarre political and social divisions that arose in response to the threat and the various ways individuals in government, medicine and science responded to it.
It brought to mind my own reactions to COVID-19, especially after the mass government-ordered lockdowns began in March 2020. In a post to the Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog on March 23, 2020, “SARS-CoV-2 and the Rush to Judgment” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/03/sars-cov-2-and-rush-to-judgment.html), I wrote, “The advent of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic it is causing has hit the human race like a whirlwind. Less than two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) identified it as a global health threat (though they hung back from calling it a ‘pandemic’ — a worldwide epidemic — for another month after that), nations, states and cities are taking drastic actions to stop it that countries usually don’t take unless they’ve been directly attacked in a war. I started writing this article about a week ago — March 16, 2020 — and already the state of California has taken actions I would have considered unthinkable then. On Thursday, March 19 California Governor Gavin Newsom essentially declared public life illegal in this state.”
Two months later, in a post called “Life During Wartime” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/05/life-during-wartime.html), I had calmed down just a little. I began the post with a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Song of the Flea,” a satire about how a lowly flea gets elevated by the Russian Czar and the other nobles are afraid to scratch themselves for fear of killing the Czar’s new favorite, to indicate how “[t]his submicroscopic package of RNA, proteins and a lipid coat has done what the armed forces of Germany and Japan were unable to do to the U.S. in two world wars: end professional sports and live concerts, shut down the Broadway theatres and make millions of Americans essentially prisoners in their own homes. It has caused almost all the world’s advanced industrial countries to bring their economies to a skidding halt and zoomed the U.S.’s unemployment rate from 3.4 to 14.7 percent in just one month (from February to March 2020). It threatens to start a long-lasting worldwide depression rivaling the one from the 1930’s.”
Ironically, my husband Charles and I were not among the millions who were made “essentially prisoners in their own homes.” He was (and still is) a grocery clerk and I, until a health crisis entirely unrelated to COVID-19 forced me to retire in December 2021, two years earlier than I’d hoped to, was an in-home caregiver. Both were considered “essential occupations” under the terms of the lockdown orders, so we went on working throughout the worst of the pandemic, albeit under some level of anxiety and a few dirty looks as we used the buses to go to work (I’ve never learned to drive and Charles has a driver’s license but not a car) and wore face masks as instructed. In fact, both of us still wear masks on the buses even though they’re no longer required. And fortunately the U.S. and the rest of the world have largely, if not totally, recovered from the economic effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the fears of “a long-lasting worldwide depression rivaling the one from the 1930’s” haven’t materialized.
In my “Life During Wartime” post, I unwittingly pointed out the same problem public-health authorities have in general, a dilemma made in The Invisible Shield: no one remembers the epidemics that don’t happen. “For the last 50 years epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming their little heads off about one virus or another that was supposed to cause a pandemic and kill millions of people worldwide,” I wrote. “Remember Legionnaire’s Disease? Swine flu? Swine fever? SARS? MERS? Ebola? Zika? None of these materialized as pandemics. Even AIDS, as devastating as it was to the Gay male community and the other so-called ‘risk groups,’ never became a general threat in the developed world, either because the virus was so weakly transmissible (according to the HIV/AIDS mainstream, your likelihood of getting infected from a single unprotected sexual contact is one in 500) or, as I’ve believed all along, because it was never a viral disease at all.”
There’s no way we can run a controlled experiment on whether the interventions we made to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, actually worked. Nor would we want to. What’s certain is that the interventions themselves – particularly the lockdowns – created a massive backlash that led in some cases to physical threats against individuals in elective office and appointed positions. One of the worst effects of Donald Trump’s Presidency and his continuing campaign to regain the office is the extent to which they’ve legitimized political violence in general, and violence against people perceived by Right-wing extremists as being in the way of their so-called “freedom” in particular.
According to director Jason Kliot and the other people behind The Invisible Shield, the collapse of America’s confidence in its public health system began with Ronald Reagan and his election as President in 1980. Reagan explicitly challenged the notion that individuals had any responsibility to come together for collective action to solve the nation’s dilemmas. The show included the famous clip from early in Reagan’s Presidency when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” It was an ethos that trashed the whole idea of collective responses to anything, including public health. It was what was behind Reagan’s fabled unwillingness even to mention AIDS from the White House (or anywhere else) until 1987, just one year before his second term expired.
One of the arguments made in The Invisible Shield is that America has done a decent job of responding to public health emergencies once they occur but a thoroughly lousy effort to maintain the capacities to deal with them before they happen. It seems that the U.S. mobilizes to deal with each new epidemic and then forgets the lessons we learned and lets those capabilities go. Ironically, it’s what we used to do with our military as well: we’d build it up to fight each new war and then let it go to pieces, shrinking the war budget and letting go both the people and the industrial capacities we’d built up to fight and win the last war. We stopped doing that with the military after World War II, when the rise of the Soviet Union, the Communist takeover of China and other factors kicked off the Cold War and led to the creation of a permanent military-industrial complex that has made the U.S. the country that spends more on its military than the next 25 nations in the world combined.
But we’ve never similarly prioritized public health. When Ronald Reagan took office, his officials looked for things they could cut in the domestic budget to fund his desired expansion of the military and tax cuts for the rich, and one of the things he zeroed in on was the “War on Cancer” Richard Nixon and Congress had declared in 1969. As a result, the nation’s cancer virologists zeroed in on AIDS and attributed it to a virus they’d previously been studying as a potential cause of cancer so they could keep their labs funded. In the later years of Barack Obama’s Presidency, he’d set up a task force in the White House to develop ways to fight a new, emerging virus that might cause an epidemic, or even a pandemic. When Donald Trump succeeded him, he immediately disbanded that task force, so America was left essentially defenseless when SARS-CoV-2 hit and the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The reason the first episode of The Invisible Shield was called “The Old Playbook” was because, suddenly confronted with the threat of COVID-19, public health officials and state and local governments reached for measures that had been in place to fight previous viral epidemics. One of the most fascinating reports during the height of the COVID crisis was one on 60 Minutes showing what medieval governments had done to fight plague – including requiring people to wear face masks outdoors (the masks back then were quite a bit fancier than the ones now, including giant nose covers that looked like beaks) and stay at least six feet apart from each other. People were encouraged to carry long sticks so they could push away anyone else who came too close to them. It struck me that even in an era where no one had any idea that germs even existed, much less that they could cause disease, humans still intuited that diseases were transmitted between people based on proximity, and one way to minimize your risk is to keep others at a distance.
At the height of the COVID pandemic, Turner Classic Movies showed a 1950 film called The Killer That Stalked New York (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-killer-that-stalked-new-york.html). At least loosely based on a true story, it dealt with the threat of a smallpox epidemic unwittingly sparked in New York City by a lounge singer whose husband was a crook. I posted about this movie to my moviemagg blog on February 7, 2021, and one of the things that most impressed me was it showed the mayor of New York publicly getting inoculated with the smallpox vaccine as an example to the rest of the city’s residents to do so as well.
“One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is the one in which the mayor summons the CEO’s of the leading pharmaceutical companies and essentially demands that they drop everything else during the present emergency and just produce smallpox vaccine – and his shame campaign works.” I wrote. “There’s also a brief acknowledgment of an anti-vaccine campaign similar to the ones we’ve seen around COVID – though unlike today’s anti-vaxxers, the ones in the movie stop at legal demonstrations and don’t actually try to disrupt the vaccinations. Though the New York vaccine campaign – both as depicted in this film and the real one that occurred in 1947 – had several advantages over the one today (they were only trying to vaccinate a city, not an entire country; and the smallpox vaccine was an established product that companies knew how to produce, and it required only one vaccine dose instead of the two needed for COVID), the biggest difference between then and now was an aggressive government response that grabbed the emergency by the proverbial tail and did not allow the disease to become a political football.
“If today’s health crisis is virtually an object lesson in how not to respond to a public-health emergency – especially in the contemptible response of ex-President Trump and his consistent belittling of the threat and anyone who wanted to take it seriously – the depiction of one in The Killer That Stalked New York is an example of how to deal with one,” I added. Unfortunately, the political polarization we saw emerge over COVID-19 has only increased even as the immediate threat has receded. Donald Trump found that out to his cost when one of his usually ultra-faithful rally audiences actually booed him when he urged them to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Ironically, rushing the vaccine through development under what he called “Operation Warp Speed” was one of the few things about COVID Trump actually got right (though it took Joe Biden’s administration to distribute it effectively), but so many B.S. conspiracy theories got floated around the vaccine and so many of Trump’s supporters believed them that vaccination against COVID became yet another victim of America’s intense political polarization.
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Is a Second Donald Trump Presidency Inevitable?
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
My feelings about the 2024 Presidential election were summed up by Joy-Ann Reid, MS-NBC host and biographer of the late civil-rights martyr Medgar Evers and his widow Myrlie, when she appeared to promote her book on the February 6 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWnUgSvwVXo). She described her feelings about the 2020 Presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump as “confident” that Biden would win and a state of normality would return to America’s body politic. This year, she said, she’s “terrified” of a Trump victory and return to the White House.
So am I. Just as Trump eked out a victory in the Electoral College in 2016 and launched his tumultuous four years as President, he appears poised to carry the day in 2024 as well. In 2016 Trump had the good fortune to be running against Hillary Clinton, one of the most reviled figures in American political history and the target of a decades-long political smear campaign. In 2024 Trump is running against Joe Biden, whom the Republican propaganda machine has been able to depict as a doddering old man barely capable of tying his shoes in the morning, much less delivering a speech or leading the country.
Democratic strategists watch helplessly as Trump himself and his minions in politics and the Right-wing media project an image of Trump (who is only three years younger than Biden, remember?) as a man of youth and vigor, an energetic crusader for “Making America Great Again.” Though Biden has a record of accomplishment to draw on, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and an economy that is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic faster and stronger than any other in the world, he gets almost no public credit for any of it.
Two major opinion polls released in early February 2024 showed just how much of an uphill battle Biden faces if he wants to be re-elected. One was from NBC News (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-trump-economy-presidential-race-rcna136834) and one was from National Public Radio (https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/1229500337/poll-2024-election-biden-trump-immigration-democracy). According to Mark Murray of NBC News, “Biden trails GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump on major policy and personal comparisons, including by more than 20 points on which candidate would better handle the economy. And Biden’s deficit versus Trump on handling immigration and the border is greater than 30 points.”
In a recently released Monmouth University poll (https://www.newsweek.com/americans-poll-donald-trump-border-wall-1873707), 53 percent of American respondents now favor Trump’s proposal to build a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and 46 percent oppose it. During Trump’s actual Presidency, 56 percent of respondents opposed the border wall and only 42 percent supported it. It’s an indication of how much Americans’ attitude towards immigration in general and the U.S.-Mexico border in particular have shifted in a hard-line direction. According to the NPR poll, 41 percent of respondents want increased border security and only 28 percent would prioritize creating a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the so-called “Dreamers,” people brought to the U.S. as children by their undocumented immigrant parents.
NBC News’s poll, as reported by Mark Murray in the above-cited article, has still more troubling news for Biden and the Democrats. “Trump has the edge on securing the border and controlling immigration (35 points over Biden), on having the necessary mental and physical health to be president (+23), on dealing with crime and violence (+21), on being competent and effective (+16), and on improving America’s standing in the world (+11),” Murray wrote. And, despite Biden’s attempts to make protecting American democracy a major theme of his campaign – while Trump is promising to be “a dictator on day one” of his second term – the two men are essentially tied on the issue of protecting democracy, with 43% of voters picking Biden and 41% preferring Trump.
Biden’s overall job approval rating remains low – 38 percent in the NBC poll and 40 percent in NPR’s – while Trump’s is 49 percent, ironically higher than he ever got while he was President. Just 29 percent of respondents in the NPR poll gave Biden positive marks for handling immigration and border issues, which explains why Republicans in both houses of Congress tanked a border security deal that would have given the President sweeping new powers to enforce immigration laws. And they were quite honest about why they were doing this. As Congressmember Troy Nehls (R-Texas) said, “I'm not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden's approval rating. … Why would I?”
Biden’s Coalition Is Disintegrating
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by narrow margins in six key “battleground states” – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia – that, in America’s cockamamie way of electing its national leader, play an outsized role in determining the next President. Trump is currently leading in all six, as well as winning the nationwide popular vote – something he didn’t do either in 2016 or 2020. Starting in the 1968 election and continuing through Ronald Reagan’s wins in 1980 and 1984, the Republicans were able to capture most of the white working-class vote (particularly its men) by emphasizing racial and cultural issues, and now they’re making inroads over groups the Democrats have historically counted on as well.
According to a February 27 report by Mark Murray on the NBC News site (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/union-households-favor-biden-closer-margin-2020-poll-finds-rcna140569#:~:text=The%20combined%20NBC%20News%20polling,approve%2C%2059%25%20disapprove), in 2020 Biden carried 56 percent of voters from households headed by a member of a labor union, to 40 percent for Trump. This year, polls show Biden still leading Trump among union households, but by a much narrower margin: 50 percent for Biden to 41 percent for Trump. In the same polls, Trump leads among all voters, 47 to 43 percent in NPR’s poll and 47 to 42 percent in NBC’s.
Astonishingly, Trump is also making inroads against Biden among people of color. Democrats have for decades counted on heavily winning communities of color, especially African-Americans and Latinos, to make up for having long since lost much of the white male vote to Republicans. But Trump’s share of the African-American vote actually increased from 8 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2020. And according to an NBC News dispatch from November 21, 2023 (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/eyes-2024-black-voters-sour-biden-rcna126124), “Biden’s net-approval rating among Black voters has dropped nearly 20 points over the course of this year, from plus-46 points throughout the year to plus-27 points this month. The latest survey finds 61% of Black voters approve of Biden, versus 34% who say they disapprove of the president.”
Even more amazingly, Latino voters have so strongly soured on Biden that Trump actually leads among them in polls, according to USA Today and the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/trump-biden-latino-voters-poll). According to a poll by USA Today and Suffolk University, Trump led Biden 39 to 35 percent among Latinos in a survey taken at the end of 2023. A similar poll from CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/trump-wipes-out-bidens-lead-with-latino-voters-in-2024-cnbc-survey-.html) showed that between October and December 2023, Latino voters swung from a five-point lead for Biden to a seven-point lead for Trump.
Part of the reason may be economic. I remember a warning I got from a Mexican-American friend of mine who told me in 2016 that a lot of Latino U.S. citizens were going to vote for Trump because they were worried that undocumented immigrants were taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to them. Part of it also may be due to a long-term strategy by Republican activists who seek to win over voters of color, especially Latinos and African-Americans, with the same racist, sexist and homophobic cultural appeals they used successfully to pull the white working class away from the Democrats in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Whatever the strategy is, it seems at this stage to be working in the Republicans’ favor.
Biden is also hemorrhaging support among voters under 34, a key demographic in his 2020 election victory. In 2020, Biden carried young voters by 24 points; today, according to the USA Today/Suffolk University poll, Trump leads among young voters by four points. And he’s also losing support among Arab-American voters, at least partly due to his overall backing of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza. In the Michigan Presidential primary on February 27, 2024, more than 100,000 Democratic voters marked their ballots as “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, responding to an insurgent campaign by Palestinian-American activists to call on Biden to support a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war.
In a dispatch from the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68427304), Sarah Smith reported that Michigan “is home to America's largest Arab-American population, most of whom are deeply upset by the devastation they see in Gaza. President Biden can't afford to ignore their demands that he call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza – rather than the temporary one that the White House has been pushing for. He did not mention the war or the protest vote in his statement following his victory, but his campaign team will have surely heard the message loud and clear.” Biden has publicly, though mildly, warned Netanyahu that some of his actions – including targeting the Nasser hospital in Gaza and threatening a ground invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city to which the Israeli government earlier urged Gazans to move to on the promise that they’d be safe – are “over the top,” but that hasn’t been enough to discourage Arab-Americans from opposing Biden for his efforts to win Congressional funding for Israel’s war machine.
Leyla Elabed, one of the organizers of the “uncommitted” protest vote, angrily disagreed with Sarah Smith’s comment that her campaign might only help Trump. “If Biden doesn't act now, and listen to the 80 percent of Democrats and the 66 percent of Americans that want a permanent cease-fire right now, it is going to be Biden, his administration and the Democratic Party that are going to be accountable for handing the White House to Trump in November,” Elabed told Smith.
Smith also reported that some of the young people she interviewed had other concerns about Biden besides his tacit support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza. “Each of these students said they wished Mr. Biden had stood aside and allowed another candidate to get the Democratic nomination this year,” Smith said. “They think that at 81, he is too old to understand the concerns of their generation, and that he hasn't been aggressive enough on climate change or on forgiving student loan debt.” Biden has actually done quite a lot to reduce student loan debt – as much as he could given his defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court and the reluctance of Congress to act on the issue – but it’s not enough for students who are facing crippling long-term student loan debts their entire lives.
Smith also reported on “the concerns I tend to hear from undecided voters who are considering backing Donald Trump. Those moderate voters – whom I've met in the wine bars of Atlanta, the sandwich shops of Philadelphia and the rural outposts of Iowa – often help decide who wins the White House. They've told me they felt much better off when Donald Trump was in office. And they're not convinced yet by the Biden administration's attempts to persuade Americans the economy is improving.”
It’s occurred to me that at least part of that might be due to nostalgia for the pre-COVID era; the economy may have looked better because COVID-19 hadn’t hit yet. It’s also possible that a lot of American voters have overall memories of the first Trump Presidency that are a lot more rose-colored than they thought at the time; that could be why Trump’s approval ratings are higher now than they were at any time during his term. Some pundits have coined the term “vibeonomics” to deal with the frustrating fact, if you’re a Democrat supporting Biden, that though the economic statistics right now look good (especially low unemployment and a slowly but steadily declining rate of inflation), people aren’t giving Biden credit for the parts of the economy that are working and are blaming him for the parts that aren’t, including stubbornly high grocery prices.
Biden won the Presidency in the first place by putting together a broad coalition of voters, and now he’s alienating many of the groups that were crucial to his victory. In the 1920’s Will Rogers famously joked, “I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Recently MS-NBC hosts and guests have suggested that actually applies to modern-day Republicans, especially given the open civil war between various factions of the Michigan Republican Party over who is entitled to lead it. But as we move closer to November 5, 2024 (the nominal election day, though given the multiplicity of vote-by-mail and absentee-voting options that’s more of a deadline than an actual date), it’s the Republicans that (with only a handful of exceptions) are solidly behind Trump while the Democrats are fragmenting.
Indeed, the 2024 Presidential election is looking more and more like a repeat of 1980. The Republicans are going in with an impressive degree of unity around a controversial but highly charismatic apostle of the Right, while the Democrats are splitting and some of them are flirting either with not voting at all or voting for an alternative-party or independent candidate – which under America’s system of winner-take-all elections amounts to the same thing. Either Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be the U.S. President from 2025 to 2029 – and unless you vote for Joe Biden, you’ll be helping Donald Trump win. It’s that simple.
The Modern Antaeus: Trump’s Superpower
During Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign I posted an article at https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2016/08/trump-modern-antaeus.html comparing Trump to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology. Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in ordinary combat because every time an enemy knocked him down, Gaia would replenish his strength and he would get up again and vanquish his foe. Antaeus was finally killed by the hero Herakles – though you probably know him by his Roman name, Hercules – who used one arm to stab Antaeus to death while his other arm held the giant up and kept him from reconnecting with his earth mother and regaining his strength.
In that article, and in a further blog post called “mmm … peach … mint” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2019/12/mmm-peach-mint.html) published on the eve of President Trump’s first impeachment (for attempting to extort derogatory information on then-candidate Biden and his son Hunter from Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky), I detailed the multiple ways Trump had screwed up and escaped accountability in a way denied to lesser mortals. As I wrote in 2019, “He did it in 1991, when the banks who had loaned him money to build casinos in Atlantic City were about to foreclose on him and force him into bankruptcy — until they realized that the casinos would be worth more with Trump’s name on them than without it. So they cut a deal by which he could keep his name on the casinos and collect a royalty from [them], but without having anything to do with running them. The deal energized Trump’s businesses; realizing he could make money merely by leasing his name without the bother of actually building or owning anything, he did many more such deals and raked in huge amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing.
“Trump snatched victory from the jaws of defeat again in 2016, when the release of his conversation with Billy Bush on the set of Access Hollywood — with Trump’s proud boast that he could have his way with any woman he wanted because ‘when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything’ — one month before the election caused panic within the Republican Party. Veteran GOP professionals and strategists panicked, thinking there was no way the American people would elect a President who had openly and proudly boasted of committing rape on national TV. There was even talk of taking Trump off the ticket and putting up his running mate, Mike Pence, for President. Instead, Trump stayed on the ticket and ultimately won the presidency in the Electoral College despite getting three million fewer votes than his principal opponent.”
And Trump’s extraordinary streak of good fortune has continued even after he lost the 2020 election. So far he’s been able to escape responsibility for his attempt to overthrow his electoral defeat through force and violence by summoning a mob of his supporters to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 and exhorting them to storm the Capitol because, as he said, “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” (https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial.) Initially Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy objected and called out Trump for the violence that ensued that day, but they quickly returned to slavish devotion to him. Today McCarthy is out of electoral politics and McConnell has announced he’s stepping down from his leadership post after November.
Trump’s conduct before, during and after his Presidency has led to four separate jurisdictions – the feds in Washington, D.C. and Florida and state prosecutors in New York and Georgia – filing indictments against him on 91 felony counts. But, again, what would be a career-ender for any other politician actually boosted Trump. He was able to convince the party faithful that the indictments against him were part of a political hit job from Joe Biden and his administration to savage him and render him unelectable. They gave him the leverage to destroy every other Republican who wanted to run against him for the 2024 nomination and add them to the many heads on his trophy wall of Republicans who tried to defy him, including former Senators and Congressmembers like Mitt Romney, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Either they fell victim to Trump-endorsed primary challengers, or they realized that would happen so they retired.
Democrats and vaguely Left-of-center media pundits have taken a false sense of optimism from polls that allegedly show up to 35 percent of people who voted against Trump in Republican primaries won’t vote for him in November if he’s the nominee. They also believe the polls that show many Republicans and Trump-leaning independents won’t vote for Trump if he’s actually convicted of a crime before the November election. But Trump and his attorneys have worked industriously to make sure that none of his cases come to trial before the election. Of the four, only one has a currently scheduled trial date early enough to finish before the election – and it’s the least significant of them: the New York state case alleging “falsification of business records” to conceal his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t go public in 2016 with her allegations of a one-night stand with Trump.
Don’t believe a word of those polls. Most Republicans live in a so-called “media bubble” in which the only news they get is from Right-wing propaganda sources like AM talk radio, Fox News and the various Web sites (Newsmax, One America News and the like) which built up audiences disgusted with Fox for accurately reporting the 2020 election results in Arizona. They’ve heard the line about the “Biden crime family” bringing “socialism” to America so often there’s no way they won’t vote for Trump, even if they come to see him as the lesser of two evils. It’s true that this works in the other direction as well – a lot of Democrats currently unhappy with Biden for many reasons, including his support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza, will probably come around and vote for him anyway – but I suspect that more Democratic voters will defect from Biden than Republicans will from Trump.
As for the other three cases against Trump, they’re all in ruins right now. Special prosecutor Jack Smith – who in an unconscionable delay wasn’t even appointed until two years after January 6, 2021, mainly because neither President Biden nor his attorney general, Merrick Garland, really wanted to prosecute Trump unless they absolutely had to – has had to put the big case against Trump for inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection on hold pending resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court of Trump’s claim of absolute Presidential immunity from prosecution for any crimes he may have committed in office. Smith’s case in Florida accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents after he left the White House has been slow-walked by a blatantly pro-Trump judge, Aileen Cannon.
And the case against him in Georgia – potentially the most dangerous one because it’s a state case and therefore he can’t just order it dismissed the way he can with the federal cases if and when he becomes President again – has been sandbagged by exposure of the affair between Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. Willis and Wade both declared that their sexual relationship didn’t start until 2021, after Willis hired Wade to work on the case, but at least two witnesses have come forward and testified it began as early as 2019. Since both Willis and Wade made their statements in legal filings under penalty of perjury, if it turns out they were lying about the affair, not only will Willis be removed from the Trump prosecution but she could find herself in prison for perjury.
So the likelihood that Donald Trump will be tried and convicted on a major charge before the 2024 election is virtually nil. And the odds of that happening became even smaller on February 27, when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that they would hear Trump’s appeal on the doctrine of absolute Presidential immunity. What’s more, instead of fast-tracking the case the way they did with the Colorado Supreme Court decision ruling Trump off that state’s primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for having incited the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the Court didn’t set oral argument until late April and will likely not issue a final decision until late June, when their current term ends. Even if the Court doesn’t rule in favor of Trump’s claim of absolute immunity, that still probably won’t allow for the trial to finish before the election.
What’s more, Trump has openly declared that it’s heads he wins, tails Biden loses. Either the Supreme Court says Presidents have lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, in which case the charges against Trump in all jurisdictions magically go away; or it doesn’t, in which case Trump will undoubtedly order his attorney general to prosecute Biden for anything they can cook up against him. Trump already tried that in October 2020, when he ordered then-Attorney General Bill Barr to indict Biden, former President Barack Obama and former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Barr tried to explain to Trump that he wouldn’t just willy-nilly indict people absent probable cause to believe they’d committed a crime, but his refusal to cook up cases against Trump’s political rivals at Trump’s behest led to a falling-out that only worsened after the 2020 election, when Barr announced that he’d investigated Trump’s claim of “massive election fraud” and bluntly said they were “bullshit.”
If Trump wins the 2024 election – as seems more certain day after day – we may see the spectacle of Biden looking around the world for a country willing to give him asylum and risk alienating President Trump to do so!
And Now for the (Maybe) Good News
As dire as the above reports make prospects for Biden and the Democrats look, there are a couple of confounding factors that might just allow Biden to squeak through to a narrow re-election. One is the ways people have actually been voting – not answering pollsters’ questions, but casting real ballots – in the last three years. Voters re-elected a popular Democratic governor in Kentucky and flipped both houses of the legislature in Virginia. In every single state that has voted on access to abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court’s despicable reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the pro-choice position has won.
And the so-called “red tsunami” that a lot of people (including me) predicted for the 2022 midterms turned out to be more of a red ripple. The Republicans gained a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives instead of the 40-, 50- or 60-seat sweep they were banking on (though, ironically, that just strengthened the hand of the radical Right wing of the party), but the Democrats actually gained a seat in the U.S. Senate. More recently, special elections in 2023 and 2024 have pretty much gone the Democrats’ way, including Democrat Tom Suozzi’s victory in the February 2024 election in Long Island and Queens to replace disgraced and expelled Republican Congressmember George Santos (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/migrant-crisis-fear-mongering-wasnt-enough-to-hold-george-santoss-old-seat).
The other thing that just might save the Democrats in 2024 is that, however strong the hand the Republicans are holding, they may well be overplaying it. The immigration bill is a good case in point. Joe Biden was willing to go along with a highly punitive border bill in exchange for what he really wanted from Congress – more military aid for Ukraine in its existential war with Russia – and he signed on to a proposal that did nothing to improve immigrants’ rights. It didn’t contain a pathway to citizenship, or even long-term legal status, for the “Dreamers.” Instead, it made it considerably harder for people allegedly fleeing persecution in their home countries to seek asylum, and it dramatically expanded funding for Border Patrol agents at a time when the Border Patrol was already the largest police force in the U.S.
Had the Republicans taken the deal Biden was offering, they could have almost certainly sunk Biden’s already slim re-election chances then and there. A lot of progressive Latinos and others would have hated the bill and excoriated Biden for pushing it through. Instead, at the behest of Führer Donald Trump, they trashed their own bill as “open-border legislation” (which it decidedly wasn’t) and refused to schedule it for a vote. One way Tom Suozzi was able to finesse the immigration issue to win the Long Island/Queens special election was to say that if he’d been in Congress when that bill came to the floor for a vote, he’d have supported it. He was thus able not only to neutralize the typical Republican propaganda denouncing him as “Open-Border Suozzi” but condemn the Republicans as hypocrites for killing a bill that gave them 90 percent of what they’d said they wanted on immigration policy.
Another issue on which the Republicans have overextended themselves is reproductive rights in general and abortion in particular. The Alabama Supreme Court added to the Republicans’ woes on this topic by issuing a ruling declaring frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to be “children” under the law and thereby protected by the state’s Wrongful Death Act. This led to a horrified reaction from some Republicans, including Trump, who rushed to assure voters that he wouldn’t allow a ban on IVF to become law.
After all, IVF is an elaborate technology used mostly by affluent white couples to have children when they can’t conceive or bring a pregnancy to term on their own, and rich white people are among the Republicans’ core constituencies. But when Democratic Senators tried to pass a bill to protect IVF, Republicans pulled together to keep the Senate from voting on it. States with strong anti-abortion laws like Georgia and Florida have had to contend with anti-choice activists filing their own lawsuits against IVF and citing the Alabama decision as precedent.
What’s worse, the Alabama Supreme Court not only made a decision that effectively bans IVF, they based their opinion largely on theological grounds. As Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, “[E]ven before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.” This just adds to the fear that a second Trump Presidency will bring an attempt to impose so-called “Christian nationalism” – a belief that American law should be based on a strict interpretation of the Bible as read by anti-choice, anti-Queer, anti-science ultra-Right-wing “Christians” – on the U.S.
It’s the very unpopularity of their overall politics, not only on women’s reproductive rights but on social acceptance of Queer people and steps to avoid or minimize human-caused climate change, that have led many Republicans not only to embrace Trump but to deny democracy and call for a dictatorial takeover of the U.S. One chilling set of interviews on YouTube of people attending a Trump rally showed just how strong the authoritarian mind-set is among Trump supporters. A middle-aged man in the audience summed it up when he was asked if he would prefer dictator Trump to small-d democrat Biden, and he said yes because “America needs a spanking.”
Those are chilling words for me because I’m well aware that I’m one of the Americans these people believe deserve to be spanked (or worse). I’m an openly Gay man married to another man. I’m a socialist. I’m also one-quarter Jewish, and I take a perverse sort of pride in the fact that any one of those three things would have made me a target of the Nazi Holocaust. Donald Trump’s likely return to the White House puts me squarely in the cross-hairs of his supporters – I meant that metaphorically, but from the moment I put those words down I realized that some of Trump’s nuttier supporters could take them literally as well.
If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, it will likely be the last free and fair election the United States of America ever has. If Trump wins, the U.S. will be remodeled into a hard, mean dictatorship the way countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Narendra Modi’s India and others already have been. There will be huge concentration camps for immigrants and mass deportations of millions, thereby decimating the U.S. economy. And there will be an end to even the most feeble attempts to deal with human-caused climate change.
Trump and his supporters will run roughshod over the judicial system, the media and any other agency in the country that could get in his way or offer any criticism of him. Trump will take complete control of the Department of Justice and use it as an instrument of personal revenge against any of the myriad “enemies” he feels have slighted him. Under Trump, the U.S.’s 250-year experiment in being a self-governing republic will come to a thudding end, and the so-called “immigration crisis” will also come to an end because people around the world will see the U.S. as a cesspool they want no part of, not a haven for civil rights and economic freedom. That is the kind of country Donald Trump is offering his supporters, and that is the kind his return to the Presidency will give him the chance to create.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
PBS's "Frontline" Documentary "Democracy on Trial" Raises Issue of Who Is a True "Conservative"
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (Tuesday, January 30) PBS ran a 2 ½-hour episode of their long-running documentary series Frontline called “Democracy on Trial,” directed by Michael Kirk and co-written by him and Mike Wiser. It purported to be the whole story of the indictments against former President Donald J. Trump but it was pretty much a rehash of the hearings last summer of the House Select Committee on January 6, 2021. Most of the archival film clips were from the committee’s televised hearings, and a lot of the interviewees were participants in the hearings, including former Congressmember Adam Kinzinger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Bowers was voted out of office by the voters in his legislative district and Kinzinger voluntarily chose not to run for re-election because he realized it wasn’t worth the bother – two more heads on Donald Trump’s trophy wall of Republicans who disagreed with him and tried to hold him accountable. One of the people I felt sorriest for in the show was Robert Ray, a former Trump attorney, who tried to present the case for Trump’s defense in a calm, reasonable and relatively emotionless fashion – which may explain why Ray is a former Trump attorney. Last Monday, when Rachel Maddow interviewed E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump sexually assaulted in the mid-1990’s and who sued him for defamation and won two judgments against him – the first for over $5 million and the second for a whopping $83.3 million) and her two attorneys, Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, one of the attorneys mentioned that Trump’s principal counsel in the case, Alina Habba, behaved very differently whether or not Trump was in the courtroom. When he wasn’t, she was a professional, reliable attorney who avoided histrionics; when he was, she went off the deep end with him and, among other things, insulted the judge to his face.
Though the show didn’t mention it, Fox News chose not to cover the House hearings on January 6 and, when asked why, the people in charge of Rubert Murdoch’s “news” network said bluntly that it was because their audiences weren’t interested in seeing it. It’s yet more evidence that the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was wrong when he said, “Every man is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own set of facts.” America’s media landscape has become so fragmented that people are entitled to their own sets of facts, since the modern age of multiple TV networks and Web sites allows them to absorb only information that agrees with their preconceived notions of what is “true.” It’s been said that had Fox News existed during Watergate, Richard Nixon would have survived politically and served out his full Presidential term. One development since the House committee hearings on January 6 that the show mentioned was Trump’s (and his attorneys’) attempt to get the whole case against him thrown out on the idea that a former President is absolutely immune from any criminal charges against him for things he allegedly did while in office unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and convicted and removed from office by the Senate for the same offenses. In this, as in so much else, Trump is following the precedent set by Richard Nixon, who in 1977 matter-of-factly told interviewer David Frost, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Nixon was effectively arguing for an American version of the Führerprinzip (“Leader Principle”), the Nazi doctrine that the will of the leader was the ultimate law and he could make anything he wanted to do legal just on his own say-so. Trump is also very much of this mind-set; early on in his Presidency he fired FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to pledge “loyalty” – “loyalty” not to the United States Constitution and the laws he was pledged to enforce, but personal loyalty to Donald Trump. And it was Nixon’s hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, who established the precedent that former Presidents cannot be prosecuted for things they did in office when he gave Nixon a blanket pardon for everything he did as President just one month after Nixon resigned the Presidency. Every time I hear how unprecedented it is to indict a former President for crimes allegedly committed while in office – including on this show, in which narrator Will Lyman said, “For the first time in American history, a president [was] charged with crimes in office” – I once again curse Gerald Ford and hope he is rotting in hell for the Nixon pardon.
One of the most interesting aspects of this Frontline episode, at least to me, was the sheer number of people who were identified as “conservative” in the chyrons announcing who they were as they made statements critical of Trump: David French, Bill Kristol (once an iconic figure on the American Right), Mona Charen, Gabriel Sterling (the Florida elections official who first warned that Trump’s statements about the 2020 election were going to trigger violence), Charlie Sykes, and perhaps Trump’s most significant critic on the Right: retired judge J. Michael Luttig. It was Luttig, along with former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who convinced Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, that he did not have the loony-tunes “power” Trump and his attorneys, notably John Eastman, said he had to reverse the outcome of the Presidential electors by throwing out slates of electors who’d voted for Joe Biden and replacing them with electors pledged to Trump. In her 1974 book The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits, Mary McCarthy said that among other things, Watergate had been a test to determine who is truly “conservative” – “conservative” in the Edmund Burke sense of believing in the rule of law and in social traditions that should not be reversed lightly or arbitrarily based on the idea that we could do better by radically changing course – and who isn’t. As I’ve read in these pages before, the current six-member majority on the United States Supreme Court is not “conservative”; the six justices, three of them appointed by Donald Trump, are Right-wing revolutionaries committed to making radical social changes in American society (most of which, above all the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not supported by majorities of the American people).
It’s become obvious that most Americans, especially most Republicans, are not “conservative” in the Burkean sense either; they are committed to a radical restructuring of American society aimed at reversing the liberal gains of the 20th century (the 1930’s and 1960’s in particular) and remaking America into a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. Among the voices of true conservatism on this program was Bill Kristol’s analysis of the dilemma Mike Pence faced on the eve of January 6, 2021: “Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do. I think he'd managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years. Not always, in my view, the right way. But this was such a blatant transgression.” Another voice for true conservatism on this show came from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – one of the few Republican politicians who has defied Trump and got away with it, repelling the primary opponent Trump put up against him and being renominated and re-elected – who explained his reaction to the phone call he got from Trump on January 2, 2021 pleading with him to “find” the 11,780 votes that would have “flipped” Georgia from Biden to Trump. “What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find,” Raffensperger recalled. “We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find.”
Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers also spoke for true conservatism against the cult of Trump when he said, after Trump appealed to him in on the basis of party loyalty, “For someone to ask me to deny my oath and just let the courts figure it out, or punt it to someone else, is not something I will do. … We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people. It’s my oath.” And Gabriel Sterling, who recalled that he had been a Republican since age 9 during Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984, said, “I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked in the state senators' eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America, and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.” But given the thug-like behavior of the Trump cultists and the fact that anyone, no matter how low on the totem pole – like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who were personally called out by President Trump and his then-attorney, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on ridiculous charges that they altered the Georgia election results – gets not only vituperative insults but out-and-out death threats, it takes real personal courage to stand up to the Trump thugocracy, and that kind of courage is in tragically short supply in today’s Republican Party.
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