The Perils of a Trump Presidency (Part I)

Trump’s election on its own is bad enough, but through a few quirks, narrow down ballot victories and dumb luck timing, the stars are aligned for a major shift in our country that you would think occurred because of massive Republican landslide victories instead of a popular vote defeat at the Presidential level.

Consider the Supreme Court. Senate Republicans took the unprecedented step of blocking President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland and will now rubber stamp a Trump appointment, all but ensuring a return to the 5-4 conservative majority that had existed before Justice Scalia’s death. But it potentially goes much further than that. Justice Ginsberg is 83, Justice Kennedy is 80 and Justice Breyer is 78. All that is stopping Trump and Republicans from securing a 7-2 (!) conservative majority is good health and the collective hope that these three justices care more about the country than handing Trump the power to appoint their replacements. If any one of these three dies or retires in the next four years, the court will lean further right and if all three are replaced, a conservative majority could stretch well into the 2030s, a run of dominance that goes back to the 1980s and would represent one of the longest uninterrupted eras in the Court’s history.

Had Democrats won two more Senate races, they could have at least tempered Trump’s options, but with a Republican majority and the temptation to elevate a 40- or early 50-something conservative justice to the bench, do not be surprised if the filibuster rule is eliminated so such an appointment can take place. Moreover, the 2018 Senate map is very favorable for Republicans, with Democrats defending seats in states like Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, and Missouri. Senate Republicans may seat 58 or 59 senators come January 2019.

Now think about the bedrock pillars of the social safety net – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. A narrow Trump win aided by gerrymandered Congressional districts and that small Senate majority may result in massive changes to these programs. Speaker Ryan’s euphemistic “premium support” plan for Medicare was part of the Romney/Ryan 2012 campaign and would mean offering senior citizens vouchers to pay for private health insurance. If this sounds familiar, Ryan argues against Obamacare, which gives subsidies to people who cannot get health insurance through their employer (or are self-employed) to, yup, you got it, buy health insurance on the private market. 

Putting aside the hypocrisy, tossing seniors to the predations of the health insurance market would be catastrophic for them, but no matter – members of Congress are ensured lifetime health benefits so long as they serve 5 years, so what do they care? Medicaid will most assuredly be “block granted” back to the states which will allow them to trim assistance (just look at the variations in unemployment insurance) and because the media and Republicans have convinced younger people Social Security will not even be around when they retire, a massive boon to Wall Street is in the making in the form of “partial privatization” of Social Security. The pitch will be that younger people should be allowed to invest some of their money themselves, but who but Wall Street brokers can help you navigate the complex financial system?

This does not even speak to what will happen to the Affordable Care Act and the nearly 20 million people who are now covered under it. Whatever “replacement” is offered will surely provide less coverage, bring back tissue thin catastrophic policies that offer little while providing a second boon to health insurers, who got huge boosts under Obamacare with the addition of millions of new customers and will now likely be able to dump the people who need coverage the most, again boosting their corporate bottom lines.

There is also likely to be massive debt spending. I know what you are thinking. Weren’t Republicans screaming about borrowing under Obama and forced “off sets” in government spending if new spending was requested? Yes, but that was different. You see, Obama is a Democrat, Republicans have no qualms about running up the government’s credit card bill when one of their own is in the White House. 

But adding insult to injury will be the inevitable tax cuts that go along with the spending spree. If this movie sounds familiar, we have seen it – twice – and know how it ends. Republicans run up massive debt and deficit and a Democrat comes in and the belt suddenly gets tightened. But unlike the mess Bill Clinton cleaned up or Barack Obama for that matter, our debt is now close to $20 trillion and our annual budget deficit is north of $400 billion. And because our debt continues to accumulate regardless of spending because of the interest we pay on what has already been borrowed, a typical Republican “borrow and spending” spree could actually bankrupt the country this time, but again, Democrats have no power to do anything about it.  

Put it all together, and when Democrats are running for President in 2020 they may be seeking an office neutered of what it once was. Assuming Trump was a one-off and the country comes to its sense, an incoming 46^th President may have no Supreme Court nominations to make and a court that is openly hostile to everything from voting rights to abortion, a social safety net that has been rewoven to funnel billions to Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurers, and a budget and debt burden that crushes any attempt at investing in our nation’s future or paying for anything other than the bare necessities. Dystopian? Sure, but entirely plausible too.

Hillary Got "Gored"

“The biggest problem she has is that a ton of people in the media have Hillary fatigue. I don’t know if the grass-roots Democrats do; eight years ago they did, which is why they looked to Obama. People had Hillary fatigue — really Clinton fatigue — and were looking for a new direction. Now in the grass roots there’s some Clinton nostalgia, especially as Obama’s presidency looks shaky. But the Hillary fatigue in the press corps is going to be a challenge.” (emphasis mine)

If I told you this was a quote from Meet The Press moderator Chuck Todd, I am sure you would not be surprised. What might surprise you is that Mr. Todd said this in November 2014, months before Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for President but a clear harbinger of the type of coverage she would receive once she did.

If this all has a vague whiff of deja vu, it is because we saw this movie once before. In 2000, the mainstream media landed on a narrative about Al Gore that went something like this - he was a earth-tone wearing beta male with a penchant for exaggeration and a bit of a know-it-all. Meanwhile, his opponent was an affable cowboy who you could have a beer with and a solid hang. This framing minimized Gore’s long-standing passion for environmental causes, his forward thinking when it came to information technology, and his role in streamlining government services. At the same time, his opponent’s poor business record, thin executive resume (in Texas, the Governor is a largely ceremonial role) and “fuzzy math” when it came to the few policies he actually spoke about were also turned down because with a last name like Bush and some “adult” supervision from people like Condi Rice or Colin Powell, how bad could the guy screw up?

Back then the stakes did not seem particularly high. The country was at peace, the budget was in surplus, unemployment was below 4 percent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq were flirting with record highs and all was good in the world. It seemed like the country was on auto pilot, raking in tax revenue hand over fist while employers fought over job applicants. And so, even though Bill Clinton had taken office at a time of skyrocketing deficits he converted to surpluses and an economy that was limping along and now running on all cylinders, through dint of five Supreme Court justices, Clinton’s Vice President was denied the Presidency in favor of the son of the man Clinton had defeated for the job. 

In the after action, the press took little responsibility for their caricature of Gore, instead placing fault on him for his weak campaign, refusal to deploy Clinton to help, and of course, the sighing he did during one of his debates with Governor Bush. The consequences of failing to fully vet Bush would become clear quickly, but even after the horror of 9/11 and invasion of Afghanistan, the press credulously pressed the Bush Administration’s case for war in Iraq, a sin we are still paying for to this day. 

So flash forward from 2000 to 2016. Another Democratic President has successfully pulled the country out of economic dire straits created by his Republican predecessor. His potential successor is a well-known commodity who the media have pilloried and harangued for the better part of three decades. Chuck Todd tipped the media’s hand when he lamented “Hillary fatigue” months before she started her run, but the imbalance of coverage she received was the Gore treatment on steroids. 

As has been chronicled by Harvard University, the coverage Hillary received in 2015 was far more negative than anything experienced by any other candidate, while Donald Trump received largely favorable coverage. Clinton was hounded incessantly over her use of a private email server - a story to be sure that deserved some coverage, but not the wall-to-wall reporting it was given. Indeed, as chronicled by Media Matters, the email story received more news coverage on the main nightly news programs than all policy discussion combined - not Hillary’s policies, all candidates’ policies. In the 9 days between the release of FBI Director James Comey’s two letters in late October and early November, the five major newspapers in America ran no less than 100 stories on something that turned out to be much ado about nothing. 

And although the email story largely died down after Comey’s original exoneration in early July, the narrative had been fixed. “Questions had been raised” and the media turned its attention to the Clinton Foundation, turning an organization that helps millions of poor and needy people, mostly in the third world, obtain needed medicine, education, and other basic services, into some sort of quasi-criminal enterprise and slush fund for Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal gain, when of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. 

The result of this was a populace that considered Clinton less trustworthy than Donald Trump, a man who, pick your poison, had bankrupted multiple companies, may have evaded federal taxes (we will never know, he never released any of his tax returns), may have groped or assaulted more than ten women, bragged about the fact he could grope women with impunity, and whose few policy ideas were either patently ridiculous (the vaunted border wall) or vague (getting rid of state “lines” around health care as a substitute for the Affordable Care Act) you would have thought his policy shop was run by a high school dropout. But no mind. Although Clinton had been criticized for not holding “press conferences” (CNN literally had a count UP clock to track the time since her last one), Trump snubbed the press for the entire general election - a time, remember, when so much reporting was finally being done on the Trump Foundation, on his tax returns, on his groping of women - and the press did not say a word about it. What few interviews Trump gave were largely within the friendly confines of Fox News and on the off chance he gave someone else the chance to question him, he would end the interview abruptly if he did not like the subject matter. 

For Clinton, it was a no win situation. Her accessibility was used to ask her about her email issue (even though she had answered questions dozens of times) and the Foundation, never mind her robust and specific policy proposals, all of which went largely ignored by her traveling press corps and surely got no coverage on cable news. Ultimately, the press landed on the idea that the election was a “lesser of two evils” choice even though Hillary had spent her entire adult life in public service and with a record that any fair-minded journalist would have to acknowledge was focused on improving the lives of women, children, and families. Was she perfect, of course not, but by minimizing her career and elevating the narrative that she was deceitful and untrustworthy, the press did her and the country an incredible disservice. Everyone understood Trump was a bigot and a misogynist and worse, but if she was equally bad, just for different reasons, than the permission structure to vote for him became much easier to erect. 

Sadly, this is not 2000. While the economy has recovered, we are still running a budget deficit in excess of $400 billion a year, which will likely spike if the tax cuts and military spending Trump has promised come to fruition. We are no longer on a glide path, as we were when Bill Clinton left office, to pay off all of our debt. Instead, our long-term borrowing will soon hit $20 trillion and will rise regardless, but far faster and to a greater amount if Trump’s proposals, which got minimal coverage during the campaign, are enacted. But do not expect the press to own up to its role in any of this. As they did with Gore and the Iraq War, they will largely absolve themselves of responsibility for the coming catastrophe. If you need any further proof, just look who they helped put in the White House a few short days ago.

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2016 Election Predictions

This election has been dispiriting to say the least. The flood of attacks on Hillary Clinton have been as predictable as they have been erroneous, like flashbacks to the 90s when I saw so much of this up close and personal. She has been forced to engage in a shame walk worthy of Cersei Lannister as tens of thousands of emails have either been leaked or disclosed and then cherry picked to make her look as venal and suspicious as possible. Investigators within our nation’s lead law enforcement agency leak information to cause her political pain and Congressional Republicans are circling like vultures already floating impeachment while threatening to deny her the basic privileges of office like Supreme Court appointments. Her other foe is the media, which long ago was bemoaning “Clinton fatigue” and has worked their magic in turning her family’s charitable foundation into something nefarious instead of a leading light in helping the poor and needy.

Taken together, this loose affiliation of foes may end up denying Clinton the White House, which would be disappointing enough, but it would be done in the service of elevating a racist, xenophobic, misogynist who has been accused of sexual predation by no less than a dozen women to the Presidency. The incalculable damage Donald Trump has already done to the body politic and our stature in the world would be magnified one hundred-fold were he the leader of the free world.

With that said, here are some predictions and thoughts on what I think will happen on Tuesday and a few things I am going to watch:

President of the United States: I have Hillary Clinton becoming our 45th President in a 352-186 electoral vote landslide. I got to this total based on the 2012 map but giving Trump Iowa and Hillary North Carolina and Arizona. I think Ohio is the only other possible state that might flip to Trump, though I think Hillary will win narrowly, while it would not surprise me if Clinton eked out a win in Georgia or lost narrowly in Arizona. Taken together, her electoral college range is between 325 and 375. The two states with congressional district apportionment, Nebraska and Maine, may also flip a lone electoral vote to the other side, but I do not think it will matter, regardless.

U.S. Senate: I have Democratic pick-ups in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Illinois, and North Carolina and a hold in Nevada. I have Republicans keeping Florida. The “x” factor is Missouri. I would love to see Jason Kander pull out a win against Roy Blunt, a quintessential Republican insider who has done absolutely nothing in the Washington, D.C. other than divorce his first wife to marry a tobacco lobbyist.  Chuck Schumer will be Majority Leader and will, I expect, eliminate the filibuster rule for all judicial appointments as one of his first orders of business. 

House of Representatives: I am not Charlie Cook and I do not have the granular-level knowledge to plausibly predict what will happen other than to say I would expect a Democratic pick-up of between 10 and 15 seats, leaving Republicans with a narrower majority and a clear choice. Do they go full obstructionist, toss Paul Ryan overboard and elevate a more overtly partisan into the role of Speaker? Do “moderate” Republicans cut a deal with Democrats to pick a more centrist Speaker? Or do Republicans do what we expect, which is carp a lot about Ryan but ask him to remain. My guess is that if the Republican majority is really narrow, like 5 seats narrow, Ryan quits Congress to focus on running in 2020 while the inmates run the asylum.

Miscellaneous: A couple of things I will be watching for after votes are tallied and we can dig into the data:

• Third party results: Neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein garnered 1% of the vote in 2012, yet polls consistently showed both well above that number this year. In Johnson’s case, he flirted with high single digits/low double digits for a time and Stein topped out around 5%. I have my doubts that either will even come close to these numbers.
• Republican cross-overs: There was some sturm und drang a few days ago when a firm commissioned by the College of William and Mary did what was essentially exit polling over the phone of early voters in Florida. Their results indicated that 28% of registered Republicans had crossed over to vote for Hillary, an enormous number. If Hillary were to get even half that amount in Florida and elsewhere, her victory will be far greater than polls predict. 
• Ticket splitters: Much has been made about the potential for a return to ticket splitting due to Trump’s toxicity in certain parts of states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. The extent of ticket splitting may end up swaying who controls the Senate not just in those states but in places like Missouri, North Carolina, and Indiana where Trump is polling better. 

The last thing I will be curious to see is what, if any, after action reporting is done on how awful the media coverage writ large has been for the last 18 months. While some quality work has been done by people like David Farenthold, so much of what passed for coverage was solely focused on horse race coverage instead of policy. Layered on top of that has been cable news’s willingness to give Trump unfettered access to their airwaves for what amounted in many cases to hour-long infomercials for his campaign via stump speeches. Their collective decision to run stories on emails stolen by a foreign government to embarrass the Clinton team, not to mention the blind eye they largely turned to an FBI Director inserting himself into the race less than two weeks before election day, has been shameful.

Even more disheartening is the expectation that on the off chance Trump does win, media outlets will disclaim responsibility for his victory even though the media’s failure to fully vet Trump during the primaries while also failing to call out his myriad lies were two reasons he was able to steamroll his opposition. The media also conflated Clinton and Trump’s sins in ways that made them seem equally bad even though doing so was like saying the common cold and stage four cancer are the same because they both make you sick. In the balance, they minimized Hillary’s four decades of public service while elevating Trump’s dodgy business career even though the former was exemplary and the latter was littered with bankruptcies and lawsuits. 

Anyway, if Hillary wins focus will quickly turn to the next chapter in this ongoing battle between her and the press and her and her political opponents, with little pause being taken to consider her singular accomplishment or its importance to our democracy. Like everything Hillary has had to endure since she burst on the national scene, she will shrug and get back to work. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy 

Comey's Folly

When FBI Director James Comey sent a vaguely worded three-paragraph letter to Congress on Friday advising Congressmen and Senators that new information had been discovered in the FBI’s investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the effect was swift and predictable. Within hours, her rival, Donald Trump, was calling this “worse than Watergate” (it’s not) and investigative reporters were getting leaks from “senior officials” that filled in the blanks of Comey’s ambiguous statement. Some reports indicated none of the email in question were written by or to Secretary Clinton. Others advised the FBI had not even looked at the email or secured a warrant to do so. 

This is precisely why investigators do not comment on ongoing investigations. Putting aside the presumption of innocence we all have, the damage to a person’s reputation that attends having their name connected with the words “criminal investigation” is incredibly damaging. Prosecutors open thousands of cases every year that never lead anywhere and are closed without the public ever knowing the names, much less the subject matter, of those probes. Public officials do not deserve special treatment, they deserve the same treatment as any citizen if they are investigated and cleared or are the subject of an ongoing investigation - silence from prosecutors unless and until charges are filed. 

Reporters attempting to excuse Comey as being in a difficult position - either providing notice and taking his lumps (as he is) or withholding notice and being criticized for it - misses the mark by a mile. Comey is not some naive newcomer to the ways of Washington. He was the U.S. Attorney in one of the highest profile offices in the country, served as the second-in-command at the Department of Justice and cut his teeth investigating, yes, you guessed it, the Clintons, in the 1990s. Having held a press conference in July that was, to paraphrase John Podesta, light on substance and heavy on editorial comment, all of which was then used to attack Secretary Clinton, the idea Comey was in a “tough spot” here is laughable. He knew exactly what the impact of his letter would be and the drafting of it was so amorphous that it tarred Clinton as guilty - of something - without any evidence or ability to defend herself, which is now being used to impact the election.  

This is precisely why Department of Justice policy is clear that commenting on investigations close to elections should be avoided barring extraordinary circumstances. Comey flouted this policy and, if reports are true, the recommendations of senior officials, including the Attorney General, who counseled against him doing it. Comey’s actions should not just matter to partisan Democrats, but all Americans who believe in the rule of law and the democratic (“little d”) process - the voters are vested with the responsibility of selecting our elected officials, not an FBI Director who is worried about his reputation on Capitol Hill. Our system of government gives both prosecutors and politicians ample tools to address criminal activity, what it does not countenance is an unelected government official inserting himself into an election so close to it. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

Hillary & The Supreme Court

With a possible Clinton landslide in the offing and control of the Senate within reach, Democrats are already speculating about appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. This chatter grew stronger when Senator John McCain mused that Senate Republicans may try to block any nominee Clinton selects, an unprecedented attempt at obstruction that would effectively neuter one of the three branches of government.

But before people muse on the possibility of a second Warren Court, we need to keep a few things in mind. Even if the Democrats retake control of the Senate and even if they eliminated the filibuster rule for Supreme Court nominees, politics may still come into play.

First, it is possible that the Senate may take up the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland before Clinton is inaugurated. Of course, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is eminently qualified and should have been confirmed months ago, but regardless, if he does get a hearing and vote, that may well be the one and only vacancy filled before the 2018 mid-term election, in which case, all the sturm und drang will be rendered moot.

But let us speculate that one or more justices decide to hang up their robes. Justice Ginsburg is 83, Justice Kennedy is 80, and Justice Breyer is 78. And let us further speculate that Senate Majority Leader Schumer does away with the filibuster rule, so now a nominee need only get 51 votes (or 50 + a putative Vice President Kaine) to be appointed.

While the Senate may go Democratic next month, it is unlikely that the Dems will have more than say, 53 seats (and that would be a huge success). That is a very narrow margin to get a nominee through. Moreover, several Democrats, such as Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and Jon Tester are all up for re-election in 2018. If Republicans vote in lockstep against a Clinton nominee, these Democrats will be forced to take a tough vote if the nominee is more “liberal” or “progressive” than the average mid-term voter in a state like North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana, or Montana.

This will put President Clinton in a tough spot. She may have the chance to change the make-up of the Supreme Court for 15-20 years, but at the expense of asking vulnerable Senate Democrats to vote in a way that could increase the chances the Republicans take over the Senate in 2018 or, run the risk of an embarrassing rejection of a nominee at the hands of her own party. Of course, this would be less of a concern if we did not live in such a partisan time and Supreme Court nominees typically received some (if not a lot of) bi-partisan support. But if President Obama’s experience is a guide, President Clinton will not be able to rely on such courtesy.

This conundrum presents one of the subtler forms of check and balance in our system and may result in more centrist nominees. My hope is that should Secretary Clinton be elected, she will pick well-qualified, but left-leaning judges (as is her right) and Democrats will see the bigger picture while realizing they will have to do all they can to save those endangered Senators the next time around. Of course, one person who would be hard to reject is a certain former constitutional law professor and Harvard Law graduate who will be looking for a new gig come January 20^th, 2017.

Hillary's Walk of Shame

As the long slog of election season comes to a close and Hillary Clinton gets ever closer to achieving something never before done in politics, instead of taking a victory lap or even getting a moment to savor her anticipated triumph, she is being dragged through the gutter by Donald Trump and shamed by a mainstream media pre-programmed to dislike her. For reasons unclear to me, Hillary is being subjected to something akin to Cersei’s “walk of shame” at the hands of the High Sparrow. But contra Cersei, whose crime was fornication, Hillary is being humiliated for the temerity of running for President and her punishment is being forced to expose her campaign’s inner workings to the public.

Trump’s shaming has been as bald-faced as it is reprehensible. Tagging Hillary as “crooked” seems quaint now that he brought women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct to a debate, stalked her onstage, and has accused her of everything from being on drugs to lacking the stamina for the job, mocked her physical appearance and threatened to imprison her. And just when you thought he could go no lower, he has now begun ranting about a rigged election that is setting up a situation where millions may simply not accept a Clinton win.

While Trump’s actions are predictable, the media pile on has been equally embarrassing. Has a candidate for high office ever had the inner workings of their office so thoroughly exposed? Reporters practically “Mean Girl”-ed Hillary’s State Department email, culling through thousands of missives to find such plums as what shows the Secretary wanted DVR’d while ignoring an ocean of substantive policy work she engaged in during her time in Foggy Bottom. We are now living through a second round of email shaming with the selective leaking of email from her campaign chairman, John Podesta. Putting aside the fact that we do not even know if these communications have been tampered with, the supposed scandal of these email is really just the 101s of politics – managing the competing interests of groups that support you, cultivating relationships, and assessing the pros and cons of various policy positions.

Hardly the stuff of controversy, but no Presidential candidate has ever had so much information about their internal process so publicly exposed. Indeed, I hazard to guess that the same behind-the-scenes machinations would be found if anyone stole and leaked email from any candidate running for national office, but because it is Hillary, the media narrative gets reinforced that she is somehow duplicitous or scheming, that her actions are in some way nefarious or two-faced. The media can now pick apart the after-action report on an early campaign visit to a Chipotle in Ohio but cannot be bothered to report on a major policy initiative she announced on decreasing poverty in the heat of Trump’s carpet bombing of her.

It is sad, really. What should be a final sprint to the finish line of election day that is filled with equal parts exhilaration and trepidation will instead by a sort of Bataan Death March of gloom and doom, fearing some suspicious email leak even as Trump conditions his most rabid supporters to deny a Clinton victory as some rigged conspiracy between her and the media. Instead of celebrating the accomplishment of electing the first woman President, she is being publicly humiliated and debased, her opponent denying her the fair victory she will win and the media teeing up stories that she will lack a mandate and would have lost but for the uniquely noxious opponent she beat.

Such an outcome is an insult to her millions of supporters, the campaign team that worked tirelessly to elect her, and to Hillary herself. But instead of complaining (and lord knows if she did, she would never hear the end of it from the mainstream media) or shaking her fist at the indignity of her singular accomplishment being minimized and delegitimized, this former First Lady will follow the advice of the current one – when they go low, we go high.

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

Donald Trump - Political Suicide Bomber

Last night, Donald Trump strapped on a political suicide vest and pulled the trigger in front of 80 million people on television. There was no glory in Trump’s despicable acts last night. What he did was live out the fantasy of every right-wing conspiracist who has spent the last quarter century with an unremitting hatred for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Trump gave voice to every ugly rumor, innuendo, and debunked theory trafficked in the underbelly of the Internet, on conservative talk radio, and the echo chamber of Fox News. He put the human manifestations of every lurid belief about Bill Clinton in the audience and slashed Hillary Clinton as “the devil,” a woman who had “hatred in her heart” and would be in jail if he were elected (that last one elicited a lusty applause from the audience). 

Trump went after Bill and Hillary Clinton viciously, personally, and often falsely, but that will matter little to people who have been fed a steady diet of Clinton conspiracies for the last 25 years. If you believe that the Clintons ran drugs in Arkansas, faked Vince Foster’s suicide, or sold cattle futures for huge profits there is a direct through line to believing Hillary deleted incriminating emails off her private server, handed out favors to Clinton Foundation donors, and would be in prison but for the good graces of an FBI Director who served as the number two official in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

Trump’s dissection was done with a butcher’s knife not a scalpel, but it mattered little. He stalked the stage ominously and audibly sucked in air as he leveled one false claim after the other, the politics of personal destruction fed to him by his top campaign officials who have made their careers smearing the Clintons and their work. What little he shared in the policy arena was non-sensical. Merely removing barriers to health insurers will magically replace Obamacare, his tax policy won’t blow a massive long-term hole in the deficit (not to mention what it will do to our debt), and beating ISIS will merely require bombing the shit out of them. 

It is tired pablum uttered by someone who knows little about the issues but a lot about how to foment discontent. Trump’s actions will not win him votes but I fear it will harden opposition to Clinton if she becomes President in a way that will make the Tea Party revolt against Obama look mild in comparison. Trump is creating a lynch mob of such radicalism that no Republican will risk running afoul of it for fear of losing their precious seat in Congress. James Carville famously said that “politics ain’t beanbag,” but you would hope it is not whatever we saw on stage in St. Louis either.

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Three Weeks That Might Have Cost Hillary The Presidency

If Donald Trump wins the Presidency, we will likely look back at the roughly three week period between late August and September 11th as the reason why. As you will see, a confluence of bad reporting and tactical decisions by both candidates conspired to change a race that was heading in the direction of a Clinton landslide to a coin toss proposition.

The weeks following both parties’ conventions were not good to Donald Trump. His was a four-day spectacle of oddballs and charlatans and party officials conspicuous by their absence. Her’s was a murderer’s row of validators along with ordinary Americans who testified to Hillary’s compassion, hard work, and decency. What had been a neck-and-neck race before the two conventions quickly turned in Hillary’s favor and she opened large leads in national polls and battleground states while edging within the margin of error in reliably red states like Arizona and Georgia. On August 19th, Trump’s campaign chairman was pushed out after revelations about millions in off book payments he received from the pro-Putin former President of Ukraine became public and in his place Trump promoted a pollster named Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager and the editor of the alt-right website Breitbart.com, Steve Bannon, as his campaign “CEO.” This was the second major shake up of Trump’s campaign in just a few months. His chances of winning the Presidency hovered in the 10-15 percent range on Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website.

But then the worm started to turn. On August 23th, the Associated Press published a “bombshell” report about the number of donors to the Clinton Foundation who were able to get meetings with Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Never mind that the headline was slanted, the data cherry picked, and some of those donors included Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and U2 singer Bono, this story dominated cable news for days. When emails showed Clinton Foundation staffer Doug Band trying to get various “favors” from the State Department (all of which were denied), the story crystallized - somehow a Foundation getting HIV drugs to poor people in Africa, clean water to Haitians and myriad other philanthropic efforts was being portrayed as some sort of sleazy pay-to-play machine for rich people trying to curry favor with the federal government. 

It would take members of the media a week or more to unwind and fact check these salacious headlines (the AP’s false tweet touting the story was quietly deleted some two weeks later), including one that had to do with Band trying to expedite diplomatic passports for Foundation staffers trying to travel with President Clinton to North Korea to help extricate two Americans being held there. But the damage was already done. Hillary’s schedule was fundraiser-heavy and while she was doing some public events and one-on-one interviews, as the wave of Foundation stories was cresting, reporters started ginning up stories about how long it had been since she had a “formal” press conference. At the exact time the media horde was doubling down on stories that “raised questions” about Hillary’s conduct in public life, she and her team chose not to aggressively knock down the stories. This would prove to be a big mistake.

On the Friday before Labor Day, the FBI released dozens of pages of notes on their interview with Mrs. Clinton regarding her email server. This continued with their highly irregular actions with regard to this investigation that began with a public statement by FBI Director Comey just before the Fourth of July holiday that Clinton would not be prosecuted, but criticizing her actions. Of course, typical procedure is that people who are not indicted for crimes are not publicly excoriated by the FBI, much less have the notes of their interview released publicly, but hey, Hillary, am I right? Another predictable round of media hand wringing ensued and again, she and her team were not nearly as aggressive as they should have been in response. 

The capstone to this was the one-two punch of Hillary calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” followed two days later by her getting dehydrated and having to be helped to her vehicle at a 9/11 ceremony, resulting in her disclosure that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a few days earlier. More “questions were raised” about her secretiveness and her alleged “insult” of Trump supporters (never mind that it was arguably a factual statement but at worst a poor choice of words - “half” as opposed to “some” or “many”). The pneumonia story in particular was too perfect for reporters - it reinforced their belief that she is too secretive (because she did not disclose the illness) and the cell phone video of her wobbling was replayed incessantly on cable news channels. 

While all this was happening, Trump was quietly (for him) retooling his message. Luckily for him, a credulous press corps was ready to throw his insults to a Gold Star family, John McCain, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, all Mexicans, all non-American Muslims, and of course, his birtherism down the memory hole because he decided to do some African-American “outreach” in a largely white suburb of Milwaukee. Trump then made a last-minute visit to Mexico City where because he did not throw up on his shoes at a brief media availability with Mexican President Pena Nieto, the press deemed a success (even “Presidential.”) The “basket of deplorables” comment gave Trump the opportunity to feign outrage at an insult to his supporters and after questioning Hillary’s health in the preceding weeks, the video footage of her stumbling into her motorcade needed no embellishment. 

While there was some investigative reporting being done about Trump and his business dealings, the coverage was dwarfed by the tsunami of coverage given to the Clinton Foundation, the FBI notes, and Hillary coming down with pneumonia. To take the most glaring example, while there was no proof the Clinton Foundation engaged in any illegal (or even unethical) conduct, the Trump Foundation was found to have violated federal law by giving $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi - they even paid a fine! But for some reason, this very apparent act of influence peddling (Bondi’s office dropped an investigation into Trump University several days after the donation was received) was not given nearly the attention paid to the Clinton Foundation, where no quid or quo was even remotely shown. Similarly, Trump continued getting a pass on releasing his tax returns, his health records, or information on his Foundation even as the media portrayed Clinton, who had released 40 years of tax returns, the names of all donors to the Clinton Foundation, had 30,000 emails made public, and released detailed medical information, as the one with the transparency problem. 

How did all of this end up impacting the race? Bigly, as Trump might say. On August 25th, Clinton was leading Trump nationally by amounts ranging from four points (right-leaning Rasmussen) to seven points (Reuters-Ipsos) to ten points (Quinnipiac). Six days later, Hillary’s lead had been cut to one in the Reuters poll and the following day, Rasmussen had Trump ahead by one. On August 29th, Nate Silver gave Trump a 19 percent chance of winning. Today, Trump is a slight underdog at 40 percent. In state polls, Trump has gone from high single digit deficits in places like Florida and Ohio to small single digit leads and he has solidified his standing in those red states that just a month ago appeared to be slipping from his grasp.

The after action report of this time period will be interesting. Much of the hysterical reporting on the Clinton Foundation ended up being much ado about nothing, but it allowed the media to reinforce its preferred narrative - that Hillary is untrustworthy, even though she did nothing wrong. They “Swift Boated” a charitable organization and Hillary erred in the same way John Kerry did when the same thing happened to him in 2004 - she did not respond. Of course, in his case, the attacks were coming from the Republicans. Hillary got done by the very media that is supposed to objectively report on the candidates. At the same time, Trump’s mouth was (mostly) under control and because he continues to refuse to release any information about his business dealings, reporters are left to public records requests to try and piece together how he operates. 

These are not small points, particularly because many in the media refuse to take ownership for their part in normalizing Trump, failing to hold him to the same standard they do Clinton (some reporters do not even bother pretending the two candidates are held to the same standard - they readily admit the two are not), or admitting they do much to drive certain stereotypes that are not actually based in fact. This would not be a big deal but for the fact this is happening in a situation where we are picking the person who will take on the most important job in the world.

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Book Review - American Heiress

The 1970s were not America’s finest hour. From Watergate to the Iran, stagflation to gas rationing, we suffered a decade-long humiliation where interest rates topped out at 20 percent, New York City nearly went bankrupt, and Sixties idealism curdled into nihilism and random acts of domestic terrorism. The cultural touchstones are familiar - the mood ring. Polyester leisure suits. Disco. The people, however, are a bit cloudy in our collective remembrance. Comes now Jeffrey Toobin, fresh off the success of FX’s adaptation of his book about the O.J. Simpson trial, with American Heiress, a gripping and wonderfully written account of the kidnapping of Patricia Heart, the then twenty-year-old heir to a fortune accumulated in newspapers and real estate. 

For those of a certain age, the broad strokes will quickly be remembered. Hearst was taken by a group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and famously captured in an iconic photo with a machine gun at the ready and the SLA’s seven-headed hydra symbol behind her. After most of her comrades were killed in a standoff with police a few months later, Hearst and the remaining members of the group went underground for more than a year, zig zagging the country before being captured in September 1975. At trial for a bank robbery committed shortly after her kidnapping, the then-famous trial lawyer F. Lee Bailey unsuccessfully attempted to argue that Hearst had been brainwashed by the SLA and thus not culpable for her acts. 

Toobin chose his subject well. He has a jeweler’s eye for the fine details as well as the big picture, zooming in to explore the wide range of characters who are part of the tale while also pulling the lens back to put the kidnapping in the broader context of unrest at the time. While many consider the 1960s as a time when the country nearly unraveled in protest over Vietnam, the following decade is largely forgotten in its extensive incidents of domestic terrorism. This may be because many bombings (which were the preferred method of fear mongering) resulted in injury to property as opposed to person, but as Toobin points out, attacks became so commonplace in California, they ceased making news. 

In Toobin’s telling, the SLA is more myth than reality. The entire group was small enough to be transported in a modern-day SUV and while they did commit an egregious murder (of the Superintendent of the Oakland School District), the bank robbery that made Hearst infamous netted less than $10,000 and five of the eight members, including its leader, died shortly thereafter. The SLA’s outsized impact was largely due to Hearst’s presence, but it was only one of a number of groups that fancied themselves as guerrilla warriors fighting against the government. 

As the story picks up speed with Hearst’s conversion to the SLA cause, the standoff that results in most of the group perishing in an inferno, and Hearst and the two remaining members’ months on the run, it is impossible to read Heiress and not sit in surprise that it took the FBI so long to catch them. Toobin digs into all of it with zeal, introducing bit players and off-hand connections (a cameo by Bill Walton is particularly interesting) to illustrate how Hearst and her two comrades eluded capture. A second crime spree that included a bank robbery where a bystander was murdered highlighted the group’s return to the West Coast, but by then, the three SLA castoffs and a couple of their confederates were less revolutionary and more petty criminal. Whatever political message they were asserting had long since lost its thread. 

It is possible Hearst could have remained at-large for far longer were it not for a tip given to law enforcement by the brother of one of those who helped her while she was on the run. Once a few dots were connected, the walls quickly closed in. Ironically, when she was captured, Hearst had settled into a sort of bizarro version of her previous life - living with a boyfriend in suburban quiet, except instead of home making and going to college classes, she was reading feminist tracts and stashing guns and money in her home.

The final section of the book, which examines Hearst’s trial, conviction, and post-incarceration life is its most frustrating. Not because of any fault of Toobin’s, but rather, the shameful way Hearst and her family manipulated their wealth and good name to game the system. Hearst renounced her comrades, perjured herself (an affidavit she admitted was false along with testimony Toobin makes clear was also fabricated), then flipped against them to garner even greater leniency. She was found guilty of the first bank robbery but had her sentence commuted by President Jimmy Carter, getting her out of prison five months before she was eligible for parole. Toobin makes clear that the Hearsts had successfully whitewashed Patty’s eighteen month journey with the SLA as one that was coercive and not complicit, even though all facts were to the contrary. As if this was not extraordinary enough, Hearst received executive clemency from President Bill Clinton on his last day in office. The grant, largely symbolic at that point, made Hearst the first person in American history to receive leniency from two different Presidents. 

The question begged is whether Hearst’s tale of brainwashing is true. We cannot be inside her head; however, Toobin makes a compelling case that she was a willing participant in much of what the SLA and their successors engaged in. Hearst had ample opportunity to escape or turn herself in, yet over and over, she did not do so. At the time of her capture, there was no one monitoring her comings and goings and she could have surrendered at any time. She did not. She was, if nothing else, a chameleon, adapting herself to her surroundings. She fell for an SLA guerrilla just as easily as she did a San Francisco police officer hired to protect her while out on bail. When she was arrested, she reported her occupation as “urban guerrilla” but was back to being a proper heiress, complete with hair, make up and wardrobe by the time of her trial. Ultimately, like many rich people who commit crimes, Hearst successfully leveraged her fame and money to obtain breaks unavailable to her co-conspirators, many of whom ended up doing far more time for the same crimes.

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Trump Pulls The Trigger

Donald Trump once famously said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his supporters. While he has not gunned anyone down on the streets of Manhattan, his campaign-wide pivot of the last week is the metaphorical equivalent of that.

Trump rose to prominence through stream of consciousness rants, attacks on immigrants, and insults hurled willy nilly at everyone from the Pope to crying babies. He mocked the use of Teleprompters, dismissed competitors who relied on corporate campaign donors, and did not spend a dime on polling. He was going to build a wall on the U.S./Mexico border and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He retweeted images posted by anti-semites and feigned ignorance of David Duke.

And all of that was leading him to what was going to be the worst electoral loss in a generation. Trump said he was going to put non-traditional states in play, and it turns out he has – except instead of Democratic strongholds like Wisconsin or Michigan, his singularly awful campaign has given Hillary Clinton openings in Georgia, Arizona, and Missouri.

So Trump has metaphorically taken out that gun and pulled the trigger. His campaign is now run by a pollster who feeds him lines he reads off a Teleprompter. He raises millions of dollars from big ticket contributors at the same closed-door fundraisers who once derided. He has uttered words of conciliation (without specific targets of apology) while claiming sudden interest in the plight of poor African-Americans and Hispanics. Most amazingly, that big wall he was going to build and that deportation force he was going to amass to round up all those awful “illegals” have been replaced with nods to "softening" language and letting people stay in the country if they have been law abiding and tax paying – ideas he once ridiculed.

In short, he is daring his most ardent supporters to rescind their support by disclaiming everything they liked about him and hold dear. He is relying on them to maintain their belief that he is uttering these poll-tested lines because that is what he needs to do to win. That it is ok if he reads off the dreaded Teleprompter. That it does not matter if he is no longer self-funding his campaign and is accepting money from monied interests, because deep down, he still believes Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers, that all Muslims should be banned from visiting America, that Second Amendment people may need to get involved if Hillary appoints Supreme Court justices, and that he alone can make America great again (for white people).  

Donald Trump has become what he once mocked. He has become a politician, and a bad one at that.

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