We may wish that he would long be gone, but he’s hard to erase. The damage he has done to our national psyche is enormous. We elected a common real estate broker with a limited belief in democracy to be the leader of our land, and nothing will ever be the same again. He has impacted our institutions of governance in a way that should never be forgotten. If we are lucky, or at least peripherally vigilant, we won’t make the mistake of electing such a personage to be our President ever again.

Already, I digress.

He is not in this story at all, except for the long shadow that he has been able to cast over our previous concept of democracy, a notion that goes back to the Colonies in New England in the early 1600’s. We’ve had centuries of practice in democracy. We honed to, discussed it, fought over it, legislated it; the overwhelming majority of us based our lives on its tenets. We thought we were good. We came to love the hypothesis that we were all created equal, and we utterly believed that our vote, once we were all awarded it, counted. We learned that nobody was above the law.

The property-owning huckster begged to differ.

God knows what image of himself he fell in love with in front of his mirrorball; however he did it, he fell for a self-inflated ego the likes of which has rarely been seen across the land. He thought omnipotence, he thought all-powerful, he thought Ayatollah; he cosied up to Kim Jong Un. Things got out of hand. He ended up questioning the operation of democracy in multiple states, and pushed in Georgia for imaginary votes to materialize.

This man has, as far as I can tell, never encountered humility.

Confucious once said Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues. Without a solid foundation in life, where are you? Well, possibly in a Barbiland place called MAR-A-LAGO, about as far away from reality as you can get and still be in the United States.

Do we care?

Yes, and no. We don’t want him back in the White House, so we have to constantly keep an eye out and an ear cocked for erratic and half-baked truths that might again threaten our foundations of self-government. Let him busy himself on his apparently multitudinous golf courses; we don’t really have to give a second thought to his golf escapades unless, of course, he’s hiding highly sensitive and classified documents on nuclear programs in his golf course bathrooms. Then, we might need to be concerned.

We elected Biden. We were ready to move on, but our loser-in-chief resident of Inflated Ego Tower in New York, doesn’t want to let us go. He keeps dragging us, desperately, back, repeating his false claims and hurt feelings ad nauseum. His desire for headlines swamps us, even now, daily. Many of those headlines date back to his time in office, and many involve prosecutions and lawsuits that appear to be reproducing like rabbits. A date in 2024 has been set for a trial involving the man’s fetish for hoarding official government documents at his residences; the Justice Department has brought 37 counts against him for his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House. It doesn’t end there. New York is charging him with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. A jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million. This is only a partial list of accusations. Bubbling just under the surface is Georgia’s 2020 election meddling case; the Grand Jury has already submitted their report there.

Perhaps most serious of all is the January 6 insurrection case in Washington. Did the con man actually direct an assault on our Capitol? This past week, he received a letter of concern from Justice Department prosecutor, Jack Smith, informing him that he is a target in Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The potential charges against our former loony-in-chief are obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government, incitement of an insurrection and conspiracy to violate civil rights.

None of it looks good.

Where is Trump? Out on the campaign trail for 2024, where else, disinforming and continuing with his usual bragger and swagger, and now being threatening too. To understand that more, just take a gander at Robert Reich’s instinctive column today, Trump is gearing up for his ‘final battle’. So should we:

A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.

It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.

Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.

Let’s just hope. As Reich reminds us:

We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.

Here I was thinking that I was going to write a piece on the nascent concept of Bidenomics, much in the news these past few weeks.

What do you know? The elephant in the room trumpeted (ah ha, that’s what elephants do!), growled, squeaked, and snorted. The churning of the legal battles of the man who held the most prestigious office in the land not even 4 years ago, got in the way. The most damning legal struggles of our President from 2017 to 2021 seem to be getting underway at a moment when Biden’s economic initiatives are clicking into place.

As someone once said. That’s politics.

There was never going to be a Trump in this headline. There never should be. There never should have been.

But there you go.

Life is full of surprises. It will continue to stymie us until we can never be stymied again, or until justice is served.

Fingers crossed.

The post The Elephant in the Room (or There Is No Trump in this headline) appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Can one person change the course of life for millions of others?

Radically.

We have Putin as our most conspicuous contemporary example.

Just a few moments ago in our elastic present-day concept of time here at home, we had the hotel magnate, Trump, as our elected leader, influencing our daily lives like a twin Putin autocrat.

Thanks to that very same hotelier, we now have Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett firmly ensconced on our Highest Court, pretending to be impartial, damaging lives left, right and center.

So let me reframe the question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Right away, all of the above are disqualified.

Putin, apparently whimsically – and just because as a simple Russian bureaucrat elevated to the highest post of his land well beyond his abilities – misunderstood the zeitgeist and ordered Russian troops to invade and decimate neighboring Ukraine. Unwittingly, he relegated Russia to minor player status on the world stage going forward.

His US counterpart, Trump, tried to upend the real world here at home and declare his opponent’s election invalid. Unlike in Nicaragua, where a Trump think-alike, Ortega, has been able to maintain and enhance his power through manipulating elections since 1979, Trump failed to falsify Biden’s Presidential triumph. At least for now. Fingers crossed.

There are now six Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, 6 out of 9. That might be par for the course in Italy or France; not here in the United States. Immigration from largely Catholic Latin America has given us a Catholic population in our 50 states of about 20%. Yet according to the Pew Research Center, we identify ourselves as a country predominently Protestant, 43%, unaffiliated, 26% and Jewish, 2%. Six Catholics on the highest Court of the land is way out of proportion to our religous identity as a nation.

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the most recent Catholic arrivals to the Supreme Court, gave us ample reason to doubt their true personas in their Congressional hearings. A psychology professor, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault years before. Our elected Republican senators shut their ears. They voted him in anyway. OK, they seemed to say, Boys will be boys. They were fast to overlook the implications of his traditional conservative Catholicism, or perhaps eager to espouse it.

In 2020, the Washington Post reported that, while in law school, Coney Barrett

lived at the South Bend home of People of Praise’s influential co-founder Kevin Ranaghan and his wife, Dorothy, who together helped establish the group’s male-dominated hierarchy and view of gender roles.

In June of this year, London’s Guardian had this to say on the very same People of Praise co-founder:

… the People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group that counts the supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, was described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s as exerting almost total control over one of the group’s female members, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships.

Were our elected Republican senators interested in any of this? Did they care? Not at all. Coney Barret was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice on Oct 26, 2020 with 52 of 53 Republicans voting in favor. Maine’s Susan Collins was the sole dissenting Republican.

Could we now, just possibly, be seeing People of Praise influencing a Supreme Court decision on abortion? Yes, we could.

You are totally within your rights to shout out loud about that right now. As Marcellus once said in in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Back to the original question.

Can one person change the course of life for the good of millions of others?

Lest we forget, the answer is yes, yes and yes again.

There are still some Americans who might fit the bill. Franklin D. Roosevelt comes to mind. How about our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln? Or our 44th, Barack Obama?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our 32nd President, was elected to the office four times, something no longer possible. He led us through the Great Depression and World War 2. He launched the New Deal, a transformation of American society that included the creation of the Social Security Administration, which today continues to provide essential daily benefits for more than 70 million Americans.

Abraham Lincoln was our President during our first and only – up to now – Civil War. Not only did he preserve our Union – an achievement that continues to reverberate for all 330 million + of us living in the United States today, but he also just happens to be the President who abolished slavery. At the time, the ending of slavery immediately affected the lives of four million African-Americans living in servitude. Since then, the abolition of slavery has daily touched the lives of millions and millions of others, as a constant reminder of our need, and necessity, to acknowledge and embrace each other, and to celebrate our similarities and differences.

So how many lives did Abraham Lincoln impact for the good? The number in incalculable and uncountable.

Oh and by the way, Abraham Lincoln was something called a moderate Republican, a species now apparently extinct.

Barack Obama served as our President from 2009 to 2017. In our lifetime, we have been witness to Obama’s supreme gift to our nation, the establishment of Obamacare. Thanks to Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reports that we have:

35 Million People enrolled in Coverage Related to the Affordable Care Act, with a historic number of 21 Million people enrolled in Medicaid Expansion Coverage.

In terms of doing good for the greater benefit of society, that counts.

It would seem that we are in a constant back-and-forth between those who want to do good to the benefit of all of us alive on earth, and those who are equipped with an aberrant gene that is programmed to do us harm.

Unfortunately for those of us living in the United States today, we are confronted with, and confounded by, a hotelier equipped with the aberrant gene, a hotelier who would seem to be planning further assaults on our democracy.

See fingers crossed above.

Our DT, our Wizard of Doom to democracy, is still with us.

At any moment, he could rise from the ashes.  At any moment, he could still consume us, devour us, and swallow our collective notion of peaceful coexistence in one night-sweat gulp.

The post Doing the world a world of good appeared first on Occasional Planet.

(* Entities and characters alluded to here are entirely fictional, and are here imagined for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to actual events or persons alive or dead is entirely coincidental.)

In a flurry of activity, the US Taliban, once known as the Supreme Court of Our Lands, has announced another in of its nation-altering faith-based decisions. Rock and roll will no longer be tolerated.

Rock and roll has been on shaky ground ever since Colonel Parker signed Elvis back in the mid-1950’s. For context, see Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, currently in cinemas. Elvis shook his hips and the country went bananas.

Chuck Berry and Little Richard, back in the day, pushed those boundaries further. Would it be possible to be black and equal with Elvis, under the law, they posited?

The country’s highest courts at the time didn’t deem it the moment to weigh in on rock and roll, just yet. There was enough going on with the assassination of President Kennedy and the ever-opening chasm in our national schism called the Vietnam War.

Our courts’ decisions then, or non-decisions in fact, meant that we had to bear with Elvis through a decline in his powers until he became a pastiche of what he once was. Over time, his bellbottoms grew wider, his sideburns broader, his metal-studded belts wider and his waist – well broader again. Under Elvis’s reign, rock and roll took a tumble. And so the superstar Las Vegas show came to be.

On the other hand, Elvis’s decline opened the door for the British Invasion of American popular music. The Beatles came in, the Rolling Stones came in, Gerry and the Pacemakers came in. (Is it Pacemakers or Peacemakers – YouTube is still divided.)

The Supreme Court of our Lands hadn’t figured on that, truly.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Detroit loomed large in popular music. We had the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Martha and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight & The Pips and Marvin Gaye.

Our top courts eyed intervention with this large presence of Motown in our popular imagination. It was tricky there for a while until, with the arrival of Lionel Richie, the danger subsided.

Lionel Richie gave the Talibanists here at home time to regroup.

And so, for decades, popular music enthusiasts in the US thought they were home scot-free. Rock and roll morphed and splintered, and gave rise to an enormous myriad of forms, southern rock, country rock, disco, house, heavy metal, soft rock, independent, hiphop, rap, electronic … well, the whole shebang of popular music that has been our life since the boy from Tupelo’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan’s influential TV music show way back when.

Turns out, in the past decades, we were lulled into thinking that rock and roll was our right.

We rocked, bopped and discoed to the Doors, Bruce Springstein, John Melenkamp, the imported Rolling Stones, David Bowie (another import,) Bon Jovi, Prince, Carlos Santana, Donna Summer, Sister Sledge, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Jackson and the Village People.

We could never have enough music in our lives, we thought. Little did we know that we were, in fact, living in a rock and roll golden age.

Ominously, unnoticed, a misogynist real-estate upstart with an oversized ego announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee on Larry King live in October 1999. How many rock and rollers were watching Larry King in October of that year? Not many.

The real-estate upstart-in-question never dreamed of winning the presidential election. But surely, he thought, he could attract attention to his business ventures with a populist-based political message that went something along the line of Drain the Bayou. At his first attempt at the presidency, nothing. On his second try, bingo!

Whoever could have imagined that this bloated egocentric parvenu would one day mean the end of rock and roll?

Somehow, this nouveau riche wannbe convinced enough people to vote for him, and he was elected the president of the land.

Once President, he was confused, having never anticipating winning, unsure of his charge, and wide open to the influence of his followers on the far right. Under their direction, he – through another twist of fate – came to be be in a position to load the Supreme Court of Our Lands with faith-based fellow adherents. Faith-based fellow adherents is not entirely accurate as our US, democratically elected Supreme Ruler had no principles at all, as far as could be noted.

Thus, we – the United States – left the middle road behind.

And here we are.

Just this past week, we allowed our newly imposed Supreme Leader’s chosen religious leaders to rule that we would no longer have rock and roll in our lives.

I guess our moment of pseudo-freedom was good while it lasted.

All of those songs erased in an instance from YouTube is shocking. The immediate disappearance of rock and roll from our playlists is unprecedented. Now, it appears that we will be prosecuted if we attempt to cross state lines to hear the rock and roll that was once embedded in our lives. Nashville is closing its doors. L.A. will no longer be L.A. without its music industry.

Without precedent, rock and roll is now, at seemingly just a moment’s notice, gone from our lives, Our lives are so hugely different from what they were just weeks ago that it’s hard to fathom. Will we ever return to what we once were? As of this writing, that is completely unsure. Will we ever be able to hear a rock and roll song again? As of this writing, I honestly don’t know.

The post In life-altering decision for the nation, the US Taliban bans rock and roll * appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1949, George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four to warn of the dangers of totalitarian governments — the sort that he saw cropping up in Spain and Russia during that period. He wrote of a harsh world where truth becomes fungible. The all-powerful, all-seeing Big Brother controls everything. Thought police weed out dissension. Facts and history are altered to meet the needs of the party in power.

Little did Orwell know he might be describing the United States in the second decade of the 21st century.

Over the course of the past year, the Republican party has chosen to downplay the events of January 6. A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found about two-thirds of Republicans viewed the attack as not violent or only somewhat violent. Yet overall, about two-thirds of Americans described the day as violent or very violent.

Immediately after January 6, Republican leaders denounced the insurrection. On January 19th, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the President and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.” House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said, “The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.”

But before long, the back-pedaling began. The landscape of reality for Republicans quickly began to change. Impeachment efforts were blocked. So were attempts to establish a bi-partisan commission to investigate the attack. McCarthy is now refusing to testify before the January 6 commission, despite previously having agreed to do so.

Throughout 2021, Republican members of Congress downplayed the events of January 6. For example, Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde (R) characterized the attack as a “normal tourist visit.” And now the Big Lie — the claim of a stolen election — continues to gain traction. Of course, the former President is beating the drum the loudest. But plenty of others are joining the parade.

Republican legislatures are working hard to limit voting rights, all under the guise of preventing another “stolen” election. According to a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, 30 percent of Americans say there is solid evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Among Trump supporters, 69 percent say Biden’s election was not legitimate. Numerous court cases and state election audits have proven otherwise.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell dives deep into the nature of truth and how a party in power can change it. A substitute language, Newspeak, is created to stamp out the truth of what is happening.

“There is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. “

Orwell saw a society in which the party was all-powerful. History was altered to support that.

“…the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it… All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.”

In a Washington Post opinion piece, Ellie Silverman notes the deep divides in America. She cites remarks by Cassie Miller of the Southern Poverty Law Center: “It suggests that we’ve actually moved beyond just partisanship. Americans are living in two wildly different realities and are viewing each other increasingly as enemies that they have to contend with.”

The bending of truth is nothing new to Trump world. Think back to remarks by Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, defending false statements about Trump’s inaugural crowd. She termed the lies “alternative facts.”

One would think the blatant alteration of facts would backfire. But it doesn’t. The facts don’t matter. It’s the emotion that counts. In a Washington Post essay, Philip Bump uses as example NPR host Steve Inskeep’s challenge to Trump regarding the audit of the vote in Arizona.

“Put succinctly, you can’t combat irrationality with reason.
When Trump defended his position by mentioning the vote result in Arizona, Inskeep pointed out that the partisan review of ballots in that state’s Maricopa County had not changed the actual result.
To a rational person, this is damning: Trump’s allies pushed for an “audit,” got one, and Trump still lost. How can you rebut that? But the point of the audit was always to codify doubt. The audit accomplished what it was intended to accomplish: Give Trump and his allies something full of “questions” to which he could point as evidence that something sketchy happened.”

Codify doubt. Create confusion. Fuel conspiracy theory. That’s the real purpose of alternative facts. This blurring of reality happens at all levels — think local school boards, social media, conversations around the family table. And now, the Republican National Committee has cast the violent January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political discourse.”

Thomas Friedman recently wrote in The New York Times about the crisis we now face. He fears we are headed for a very dark place because once “there is no more truth, only versions, and no more trust, only polarization — getting them back is almost impossible.”

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four did not end well for its protagonist, Winston Smith. Let’s hope our ending is better.

(Updated February 8. 2022)

The post The truth is expendable appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Oh boy, were we ready for a change.

Biden and Harris came in with stratospherically high expectations. Lady Gaga sang the national anthem at the inauguration, and a new day was about to begin. Our newly elected White House Democrats were going to replace night for day, chaos for reason, and restructure dystopia with a clear path leading us forward toward order. And they were going to do all of that within their first year in office, if possible (that’s what we dreamed, hoped, thought – okay, what I dreamed, hoped, imagined!) Oh, foolish me. Oh, foolish us. After DT, were we ever ready for change! We were on pins and needles, waiting for our new day to begin. Kamala was dispatched to the Mexican border, and Joe would take care of the rest.

Of course, we were still in the middle of a pandemic, and caught up in pandemic-related worldwide distribution issues that ultimately contributed to an inflation rate not seen in 40 years. Higher gas prices do not happy campers make! Biden didn’t create the pandemic or inflation. Biden didn’t set up Chinese dominance of production and its tumbling dice of ocean misuse to get us our iPhones when we want them. For that, we have to go back through years of policy making and bipartisan culpability in Washington. And yes, we might even have to reassess our love affair with Apple. Perish the thought! But yeah, we just might. Suffice it to say, there is enough inflation blame to go a long way round – and a long way back. Biden just happens to be the President in place right now, so he’s our fall guy.

Biden didn’t create gun violence either. Gun violence came with the job. Gun violence comes with the country that we are. We are consistently deaf to our nation-defining lessons on death by guns and automatic weapons. We are unwilling to leave the curse of our bloody need to kill one another behind us for once and for all. We are, seemingly, just incapable of doing that. We prefer the guns for everybody Don’t Worry Be Happy approach. As Bobby McFerrin once sang:

“In every life we have some trouble
But when you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy.”

And incapable of bringing about real change, we need someone to blame for our morass. That’s why we elect a new President every four years, right?

This time round, we elected Joe Biden.

And surprise, surprise, in an ABC News-Ipsos poll released in December, even though a majority of Americans (53%) still approve of Biden (not a big majority by any means), Biden’s favorability has slipped far from the 72% support that he had just in March. Scapegoat, maybe? And guess what, in recent polls, gun violence, inflation and Covid-response are the major barometers in Biden’s declining poll numbers. Gun violence and inflation, as already mentioned, are beyond any President’s control.

Covid came out of the clear blue sky. Biden’s Covid response is like night and day compared to Trump’s. But a virus is a virus, not controlled by any president anywhere in the world. The delta variant morphed to an omicron variant whether we like it or not. And Biden, despite his power, has no say in that. But yeah, if we’re going to blame someone for the fast-increasing number of Covid infections across the country, let’s blame the guy in office right now. That would be Biden.

Can we fall back on Harris? Not really.

Harris, not often seen or reported on in our media, has percentages that line up pretty much 53% for, and 40% against, not dissimilar to Biden’s. She is not resonating broadly. She faux-pas’s big time recently by saying the delta and omicron variants had caught the current administration off-guard. Fauci, never failing, came to the rescue. Her comments were taken ‘out of context,’  he reassured us.

And so and just because, I thought we might look at how the previous power brokers in the kingdom are doing. They may yet come back to haunt us. A note to Microsoft’s Word’s spellcheck programming people; even now, Word doesn’t recognize Melania as a legitimate name. Come on Microsoft – you’re the most valuable internet-focused company on the planet, get it together and catch up! Melania was here and gone!

Is Melania’s step-daughter, Ivanka, doing so much better than the current occupants of the White House?

I am sad to report that no, she is not.

I found on YouGovAmerica that Ivanka is not doing well at all. The site tells us that Ivanka’s popularity is now at an all-time low of 34%. Welcome to the club, Ivanka! We’re here for you.

How about Melania herself?

It turns out that there is enough disconnect to go round. Melania – unrecognized by Microsoft – left office with the worst final popularity rating for a First Lady ever. But empathy begins from those abandoned en masse by society, so all is not lost. However, after she left the White House, nobody much seemed to care about how our former First Lady was doing. There are no recent poll statistics that I have been able to find on Melania at all.

Melania news was sparse until FoxBusiness recently reported that you can now own a digital watercolor painting of our former First Lady’s eyes in exchange for 1 Solana, a cryptocurrency token. This is not some nutcase hacker trying to make a buck off of Melania. I am not making this up. This is Melania herself selling an NFT. The SOL token involved is, as of this writing, valued at somewhere around $175. Well, you sell a thousand, that’s small change. You sell 50 thousand, you’re looking at almost 9 million dollars! Melania is cashing in. And apparently she is planning to dedicate more of her energy to her new business going forward. According to AlJazeera … Melania Trump will release NFTs “in regular intervals” on her website … with a portion of the proceeds going to foster children. It’s unclear what percentage of the proceeds will be donated, or whether the donations will be given to specific foster child-related charities.

Melania has moved on.

So, there you go!

Oops, not so fast.

Our 45th President, DT, the man himself, seems to think that Melania still has pending, how to put it, responsibilities, duties, (advantages for DT himself?) going forward. He believes that she, despite her current NFT endeavors (she just posted a new one today and is now called crypto queen by London’s Guardian) – , can win the rest of America over for another flyby at the presidency. Well, dreams have to start somewhere.

How is DT, the man himself, doing in the polls these days? As of Dec 15th, FiveThirtyEight tells us that, unfortunately for him and fortunately for us, not so great either. DT had a 52% disapproval rating as of mid-December. The scales seem to have tipped to his detriment. The man lives, still fuming like a discarded cigarette butt, in a luxurious club-like situation in Palm Beach, Florida. He is slow-burning his final years forward, in exile, like some once-upon-a-time Russian oligarch in erstwhile Paris.

So, who wants to be America most? Who loves us the most right now?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Somewhat facetiously, I thought of nominating Lana Del Rey.

Lana Del Rey is a self-made enthusiast for American symbolism and a lover of America’s past. Del Rey, sometimes, knows us better than we know ourselves. She knows our ins and outs, our cultural highs and lows, perhaps more than anybody. She knows our doubts, our inadequacies, our blemishes and our flaws. She knows out inherent attractions, and she understands why we are the country that we are.

Lana knows us like the back of our hand.

Alas, Lana Del Rey is not our answer. She is a singer who has no interest in politics.

So, hurtling on toward November 5, 2024, we are left with the same coterie of names as before, the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Obamas, the Reagans, the Clintons, the Trumps, and now the Bidens.

The Obamas were the breakthrough family on that list. But they have come and gone, just like Melania. The list is getting thinner by the day. There are no new Regans going forward, no new Bushes (that I know of), no Clintons, no new Kennedys and no new Obamas.

But are there still future Trumps out there, lesser or greater Trumps, in our future?

Hell yeah, there are many new future Trumps – sharing his surname or not – just waiting in line, ready to sabotage our democracy all over again. The grand lesson of DT for his acolytes worldwide is that you can lie, bluff, confuse and bluster … and you can get away with it. You can build a fake persona, just like you can build fake news. QED.

Lesson learned.

Get yourself a bullhorn, align yourself with our most base instincts that negate difference, diversity, multiculturalism, human decency and democracy. And then start to prattle, jabber and vent – the more outrageous and farfetched your positions the better.

Then – and just then – some segments of America may start to believe that you have legitimacy. And just then, some segments of America may begin to believe that you love them most.

Oops! Sorry.

That you love America most.

The post Who loves America most? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What a bizarre month this has been.

We’ve had Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) ask if the National Forest Service might change Earth’s orbit around the sun to alter the effects of climate change. An Ohio doctor pushes the idea that the vaccines can magnetize people and make them susceptible to government monitoring — an idea readily accepted by Republican legislators there.

Now comes Rep. Ann Wagner, (R-Missouri) proposing a bill that would hold China accountable for “deliberate, reckless action that allowed the coronavirus to spread, killing millions worldwide.”

She recently warned constituents that the government must pass this legislation, “to make sure China pays for their reckless actions.”

Talk about reckless actions, I bet she can’t wait to read “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” a new book by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta that captures the Trump administration’s dysfunctional response to the unfolding pandemic.

The book details some of the inner workings of Trump world early on in the pandemic. We knew he wanted to block cruise ship passengers from re-entering the country. But did we know he also wanted to bar infected Americans returning from abroad? His solution: send them to Guantanamo. All to keep the COVID numbers down in the U.S.A.

The book is not without its ironic moments…

“Testing is killing me!” Trump reportedly exclaimed in a phone call to then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 18, yelling so loudly that Azar’s aides overheard every word. “I’m going to lose the election because of testing! What idiot had the federal government do testing?”
“Uh, do you mean Jared?” Azar responded, citing the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
– Washington Post

Trump fired key people to stifle sound scientific commentary. And, of course, he espoused ideas like using hydroxychloroquine and bleach injection. He repeatedly claimed the whole pandemic was all a hoax. He downplayed the need for masks and he failed to encourage widespread vaccination.

Crazy, right? We laughed. But Abutaleb and Paletta take a more somber view.

“One of the biggest flaws in the Trump administration’s response is that no one was in charge of the response… Was it Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force until he wasn’t? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync?… Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless”

Yeah, Ann Wagner, people need to be held responsible for making the pandemic much worse than it needed to be.

The post Strange times, reckless behavior, nightmare scenarios appeared first on Occasional Planet.

By the time you’re reading this, barring some unforeseen disaster, the Electoral College will have officially elected Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States of America. I’ve started to wonder about this era and what history will remember and how we will be defined and by what. After 4 years it is clear that the defining political figure of this generation was not George Bush, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, or perhaps even Barack Obama. It has been Donald Trump, this is his era and like Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt before him, he has redefined American social and political life and new political coalitions have formed that seemed previously unimaginable.

The big question of the last 4 years has been “What does the Trump presidency say about America?”. I think it says quite a lot, but first I want to address the election of Joe Biden which I believe is actually a confirmation of the cornerstone of American identity. Denialism.

In America we have a penchant for historical revisionism and erasing or “re-imaging” the parts of our culture that make us uncomfortable. The civil war is now about “states’ rights” as opposed to the obvious, slavery. We declared “Manifest Destiny” because “Genocide” didn’t have the same ring to it. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a left-wing anti-war and anti-racist radical who was deeply unpopular in white America yet even he, who existed in living memory, has been retaught as a popular conciliatory moderate. With Joe Biden we are attempting to pretend that we aren’t exactly the country that we know we are. We are being presented with a message that Biden and Kamala Harris represent the beginning of a racial democracy in America. 81 million Americans voted for Biden and Harris, therefore we are renewed and transformed and ready to move away from our old divisions. That’s a message that ignores that Biden was the least “woke” of all candidates in the Democratic primaries. Biden never said “Latinx”, Biden was a frequent target of social justice movements (most notably #MeToo and Black Lives Matter), and Biden had too many gaffes to count whether it was about the decency of Strom Thurmond or “You Ain’t Black”. Yet, he was overwhelmingly the choice of the liberal party. We could, but it’s not even necessary to touch on Harris’ complicated record on race in California as Attorney General and San Francisco District Attorney. This is all to say that Biden and Harris do not represent a move towards racial democracy in any literal or symbolic way, yet America continues to tell itself that story. Biden is not Donald Trump, but his record is also a racist one despite serving as the Vice President of the first Black President and now having selected a Black woman to occupy his former office. It’s that incongruity that is American as well, to be able to have these contrasting identities without acknowledging the cognitive dissonance. Which brings us to our outgoing President, Donald J. Trump.

What made Donald Trump different from any American politician that we’ve encountered in this century or the last was his complete irreverence for norms and institutions. Donald Trump never pretended to care about the legitimacy of courts or federalism or the separation of powers or precedent or internationalism or democracy. It’s not clear whether this was because he was opposed to these concepts, or indifferent to them, or simply did not understand them. It’s also not clear that it matters. Because what has become increasingly clear is that these values of the republic were from the top down, lauded by members of government, media, and academia but unfamiliar to ordinary people. Americans thrive in conspiracy, we are distrustful of our government, we are skeptical of new information and we are dreadfully terrified of one another. This is something that goes unsaid in politics because it diminishes the image of an indomitable and virtuous people. It perhaps also goes unsaid because politicians are often so detached from reality that they can’t see what’s in front of them. Regardless, the American people are almost unified in their desire for material prosperity which manifests itself in many different ways. For some it means a clean environment, for others it means economic opportunity in terms of jobs or avoiding debt, and for many of us it simply means having confidence that tomorrow will be easier.

They are unmoored by ideology, which isn’t to say Americans have no strong beliefs. Most Americans are religious, and that faith informs their politics in different ways, as does class and race more often than not. But they are not rigid and are willing to constantly transform themselves to survive. The small government, deficit hawk, free-traders of 10 years ago are now protectionists and have no taste for austerity. Conversely the immigration skeptic, entitlement reformer, doves now see themselves defending an indefensible war abroad and demanding a more generous welfare state at home. This is true of Donald Trump whose politics are self-serving, conceived to maximally benefit himself while minimally disturbing his own prejudices. Is Donald Trump, a man who almost certainly has paid for an abortion, genuinely pro-life? Is Donald Trump, an alleged multi-billionaire from Manhattan, genuinely concerned with Midwestern farmers? Is Donald Trump, a man who donated to Hillary Clinton, genuinely a Republican? There are likely few things Donald Trump is genuinely passionate about, except of course racism and wealth. His willingness to abandon old allies and identities and hold so many idiosyncratic views was part of his appeal.

The slogan Make America Great Again elicited reactions that were appropriate, questions of when was America great and how would Trump restore this alleged greatness. There were some who countered that America is already great because of its diversity or standard of living or high minded ideals. But fundamentally, what Donald Trump did was partly acknowledge that America is a nation in decline. We are not a great country, millions are imprisoned, millions more have been languishing in poverty for generations, the ghettos and the countryside are consumed with addiction, our children have no guarantees of future prosperity, and our infrastructure fails to meet the needs of our population. Of course, Trump was implying a return to a great white America where many were left behind, including a great deal of his voters, but that relevance became increasingly fleeting as the years went on.

Maybe it was our own nihilism that led to Trump because most voters didn’t think he was honest, moral, or trustworthy. But then again it was that he was so very deeply flawed that imbued upon him a level of humanity that he was undeserving of but was nevertheless familiar to so many of us. His many insecurities were laid bare in front of all of us and he was unintentionally vulnerable displaying his neurosis on an international stage. Many of us were embarrassed but many more were amused because to have Donald Trump as President of the United States was the ultimate statement on the ludicrousness of politics in general. Donald Trump is simply the worst manifestation of the ubiquitous frustrations that grip the American people. It is no more ridiculous that any human being, especially Jeff Bezos, should have $200 billion than it is that Donald Trump should be President. It is no more insane that America should be fighting the same war in Afghanistan for 19 years than it is that Donald Trump should be President. It is no more absurd that 60 million people in the richest country in the history of the world are exposed to unsafe tap water than it is that Donald Trump should be President. Americans understand that our shared reality is senseless and so it only stands to reason that we’d abandon all pretense and have a government to match.

Donald Trump will leave the White House next month but what he’s unleashed in America will be with us for the foreseeable future, for better or for worse. Because of Donald Trump all illusions of American Exceptionalism are gone, I don’t pretend to know what that will mean going forward. The best we can hope for is a politics based in the reality of the need to address enormous human suffering. The worst we should hope to avoid is an even more cynical and hopeless continuation of Trumpism which effectively has become a death cult. What I think is most important to acknowledge is that we (as in all of us) made Donald Trump happen. When we didn’t question our political order, it made it that much easier for a demagogue to exploit it’s obvious decencies and bring us closer to authoritarianism than we’ve been in living memory. That’s on all of us and the effects were globalized because when we made Donald Trump a legitimate political figure, it made it that much easier for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Johnson in the UK, Kurz in Austria, Modi in India, and Erdogan in Turkey to maintain power. It will take a long time to even begin to atone for this national sin, but it begins with continuing to question our myths and to scrutinize President Biden.

In the meantime, we’re going to have to wrestle with Donald Trump and recognizing that part of why he so arouses our disgust is because we see him in ourselves. If we don’t like what we see, it’s up to each of us to change it.

The post Donald Trump wasn’t an aberration; he was our most American President appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’m a glutton for punishment. From time to time, I dip into Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed just to see what kind of insanity is on the menu. Recently, it seems like every time I did, there was a rash of rage about the election he lost and how unfair the world is to him.

How bad was Trump’s obsession with his election loss? Mother Jones just published a revealing tally of all his tweets since election day and the numbers are mind-boggling. Not including re-tweets, from November 3 to December 16, Trump posted 506 original tweets about his lost election. There are probably about half that many more re-tweet postings. In a recent sampling, about half of Trump’s election-related postings were flagged by Twitter as being factually disputed. A glance at the chart below paints the picture.

Contrast those 500 plus election fraud tweets to the mere 13 he has posted about the virus that has cost more than 300,000 American lives. No tweets were posted about the COVID-19 death toll.  There were only 32 tweets about the vaccine that we so desperately need.

I guess the man has his priorities, but they’re likely different than yours or mine.

The post Trump’s obsession with grievance appeared first on Occasional Planet.

About 6 months into the Trump Presidency, I was ready for it to end. Well actually I was ready for it to end before it even began, but in July of 2017 I started thinking about what that end might look like. I remarked on what seemed like the 12 most plausible endings for Trump’s 1st term. You can read that piece here. A lot has happened in between now and then, the Mueller report came and went, there was the impeachment that wasn’t, we discovered only Trump could go to Korea, and Democrats won the House. However even with so much uncertainty, made worse by a global pandemic, it would seem that there are still a few plausible endings left and it’s worth exploring them further.

“4. Democrats Nominate a “Bad” Candidate: Everyone by now acknowledges the role that Russian interference played in 2016’s presidential election, and had it not been for James Comey’s last minute letter to Congress, Hillary Clinton would almost certainly be President. Now that that’s out of the way…. there’s no excuse for there having been so many undecided voters and Hillary Clinton failing to reach 50% in polling averages at any point after winning the nomination. Maybe it was sexism which ultimately kept Clinton from breaking that highest glass ceiling, but maybe it was something else. I supported Hillary Clinton, but even she would acknowledge that even if she was right on the issues, perhaps she wasn’t the strongest candidate because of perception problems alone. The Democrats have a bad tendency to either over-correct or change nothing when faced with defeats. If the party over-corrects, and takes hard left positions and nominates a candidate who sounds like Eugene Debs, then they’ll end up losing mainstream Democrats. If the party changes nothing, and recreates an Obama era platform and nominates a corporate backed third-way Democrat (I’m looking at you Cuomo), then so-called “Berniecrats” will once again either vote third party or not at all. If he can rely on a continued split in the Democratic Party and lack of loyalty among liberal leaning voters, then re-election is more likely than we’re willing to admit.”

At the moment, Joe Biden appears poised to lead Democrats into the general election (although I’ve still got my eye on Cuomo in case Biden falters). It is apparently bad politics to comment on Biden’s presentation, but politics is mostly presentation as voters are incongruous in their policy preferences. It would seem Biden has lost a step and his disappearing act during the first days of the pandemic was not exactly a profile in courage. When voters challenge him on his policy record he’s called them “fat”, “a lying dog faced pony soldier”, “full of shit”, and told them to “vote for Trump”. Maybe that doesn’t matter and it’s part of his appeal, for some it absolutely is. There are millions of partisan voters who will vote for anyone not named Trump and maybe that will be enough. However maybe it won’t be, in an upcoming piece I’ll explain how Trump will run against Biden and how it could be effective. Regardless, it at least seems plausible especially given rising approval numbers for the President in the face of a national crisis that Biden might not be the candidate for the moment.

“5. Trump Continues to Divide the Country, and it Works: Thanks to an archaic system from the 18th century, Donald Trump doesn’t need to win a majority of votes to be re-elected. Trump’s base has shrunk somewhat from election day until now. The number of Americans who “strongly support” the President has seen a not so insignificant decline. But Trump, for all of his shocking inadequacies not just as a President but like as a human being, has captured the American id. When given an effective foil he’s able to motivate his supporters, whether it was “Low Energy Jeb”, “Little Marco”, “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”, and ultimately “Fake News”. Donald Trump doesn’t have to accomplish his legislative agenda (it’s so unpopular that perhaps he’s better off if he doesn’t), he can blame all of his failures on the media or Democrats. Let’s also assume that Trump’s support for voter suppression is at least moderately successful, and the restrictions from 2016 are either kept or expanded, that only helps him. It won’t matter if Democrats win in Congress or if the destructive GOP health care becomes law, because Trump is independent of the GOP. Trump doesn’t claim failures, he puts them off on Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell, and his voters are okay with that. If Trump can manage to continue on his current paths, with no serious deterioration from the present, then he’ll survive another 4 years.”

As of the writing of this article, President Trump’s approval rating according to fivethirtyeight is 45.8% and in the days after his inauguration it was 45.5%. That’s remarkably steady and has been consistent throughout this term, his best approval numbers and his worst are separated by less than 10 points. For context, for Obama and Clinton it was more than 20, for Bush it was more than 40. The President could very well lose the popular vote, perhaps by a larger margin than in 2016, but it may not fundamentally matter. The President is still competitive in the upper Midwest against both Sanders and Biden. Florida seems to be burdened with a less than effective state Democratic party and the great Sunbelt hopes of Arizona and Texas may once again fail to materialize. Voters know how they feel about Trump and it’s mostly static. There has been some cross-over, many well educated and well to do white voters who voted for Romney voted for Democrats in 2018 and a likely equal number of working class voters, especially whites but also Latinos, have put their faith in the President. If nothing has fundamentally changed with voters, then we shouldn’t be surprised if our election results don’t change either.

“7. Republicans Enact Their Agenda, It Goes as Expected: You don’t have to be Larry Sabato to predict what would happen if 22 million people suddenly lost their healthcare. Whether you believe that voters are more receptive to a progressive message or a conservative message is largely irrelevant, because in regard to policy, too much movement in either direction will result in pretty spectacular backlash. Voters don’t want a border wall, they don’t want Medicaid cuts, they don’t want Social Security cuts, they don’t want tax cuts for the rich, they don’t want to cut the EPA, and they don’t want to roll back women’s reproductive freedoms. If Trump goes along signing and supporting every part of the GOP agenda, he’s going to end up motivating democratic voters and demoralizing his would-be voters (literally killing them in the case of the ‘health care’ bill). This assumes Ryan and McConnell are able to whip votes effectively in their respective chambers, which so far they’ve been able to do. The AHCA didn’t actually fail, it was pulled from the floor, and then passed. If the same happens with the Senate version, then we have no reason to believe that this won’t be the expected route of all bills for the next four years.”

The fundamentals of the economy were weak before the pandemic and the pittance that is being billed as relief will not be enough for nearly anyone. This crisis will end, and millions of Americans will be left to pick up the pieces of their lives and wonder how things got so bad. This crisis has exposed the failures of the Trump administration in a tangible way that voters can see with their own eyes. Most people don’t sit down every evening and have Rachel Maddow talk at them for an hour while some former civil liberty abusing intelligence type turned resistance hero gives them “expert analysis”. They spend their waking hours making a living, going to school, or raising a family. That has been disrupted, millions are unemployed, schools are online, and the country is social distancing. People lack access to affordable healthcare now when they need it most and the social safety net has been cut. Will voters blame Trump and the Republicans? It’s hard not to after Trump has taken credit for what was until very recently, positive economic growth. It’s not hard to imagine Trump being punished electorally for the misery of the American people as Hoover, Carter, and Bush sr. were.

“12. President Trump Plunges America into Authoritarianism After a Terrorist Attack: On September 10th, 2001 President George W. Bush’s approval rating sat at 51%. Just a week later his approval rating soared above 80%. In between those two polling periods 9/11 happened and nearly 3,000 Americans died at the hands of radical jihadists. Bush’s approval didn’t dip below 50% for nearly 900 days after the attacks, and during that period Congress passed the USA PATRIOT ACT as well as a number of laws aimed at curbing civil liberties, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and the President was given the authority to go to war in Iraq. America has never been the same, and strangely enough the only thing that might have prevented the country from spiraling into outright authoritarianism was that the people in government, as corrupt and power hungry as they might have been, still had respect for our institutions as well as some principled view of what America should be. That does not exist within the Trump administration. If an attack on the United States occurred on the scale of 9/11, and Trump was able to harness the energy from the rally around the flag effect that would surely follow, dark times would follow. The free press could cease to exist, people could be rounded up and put into camps, Congress might give Trump sweeping authority, and who knows what else. This is a constant threat and we can’t gauge the odds of it happening because terrorism is itself fairly unpredictable. But if it did happen, God help us.”

Coronavirus was the unknown unknown. What is happening in this country is without precedent and our norms are being tested. Postponing an election was impossible until it happened. Halting the machines of industry and purposely challenging capitalism in America was unfathomable, and then it happened. States ordering their citizens to stay in their homes seemed like a scenario possible in some faraway land, and then stay at home orders became more common than not. We are witnessing a massive expansion of executive power that will have consequences. The President has said that he wants the economy to reopen and a return to normalcy (whatever that meant in the Trump era), however this is almost certainly the end of the beginning and not the beginning of the end. The economy is in free fall and infections are increasing at an exponential rate, what would the government do to save the country it governs? I imagine they might do quite a lot and we’ve seen how fear can materialize into policy during war time. President Trump has some authoritarian tendencies, this crisis may bring them to the surface and the country might be forever changed.

A lot can and will happen between now and November, we should be prepared for everything.

The post Revisiting “12 Possible Endings for Trump’s 1st Term” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It never occurred to me until recently that the Democrats might have a candidate who generates something akin to the blind loyalty of Trump supporters.

Yes, I knew that Bernie supporters were fervent, but I did not fully sense how many in his base follow the mantra of “Bernie or Bust.” My awareness of this increased in recent days, first when my thirty-six-year-old niece said that she had switched from Elizabeth to Bernie because she was so impressed with the energy and commitment of her peers’ support of Bernie. It was not the transitory type that Elizabeth had, but rather more of the “to-the-very-end” type that Bernie has. Later, another relative told me that much of her life was on hold while she was immersed door-knocking for Bernie in her home state of California, which wisely this year moved its primary from June up to Super Tuesday (March 3).

It is hard to imagine Joe Biden generating deep loyalty and, as good as Pete Buttigieg might be, he seems to have a knack for saying things that gratuitously piss other people off. If Amy Klobuchar gets the momentum that she has earned and deserves, then she may too develop followers who will go to the mat for her.

But as things stand now, Bernie is the one Democrat who has something akin to a cult following, one in which it is virtually impossibly to pry away supporters. Does that sound familiar? Well yes, the fact that Donald Trump’s popularity with his base actually increased during the impeachment process shows two clear things: (1) it is virtually impossible to get his base to waver, and (2) these things called facts don’t mean a whole lot, if anything, to his base.

This is where there is a fundamental difference between the Bernie Cult and the Trump Cult. There is a rational foundation to why Bernie has such a strong following. We can see it in two dynamics:

1. 1. Bernie’s policies are based on reason and empathy. Trump’s are based on insecurity and fear. Bernie wants to finish the work on the social and economic safety net for Americans that Teddy Roosevelt began, his cousin Franklin Roosevelt institutionalized, and Lyndon Johnson expanded. But the United States is unlike other industrialized democracies because there are enough Americans who resent the idea of “security for all.” For an excellent explanation why, I suggest reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine. In a nutshell, it is that many white Americans do not favor extending equality to people of color and other minorities. It might be helpful to watch a recent guest appearance of Hannah-Jones on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

1. Unlike Trump supporters, Bernie supporters will not give their candidate a blank check to do whatever he wants. While Trump is all over the map, Bernie is consistent, perhaps to a fault. What you see is what you get. In fact, what you see is essentially what you’ve seen from him for the past forty years, with the one exception of gun control, where in his early years he [had to] pander to his gun-loving Vermont constituents. Bernie’s supporters’ commitment extends beyond him personally and stretches to the concept of a fair and just society. If he should waver in his commitments, his base would begin to unravel. If Bernie was one percent as corrupt as Trump, he would offend many in his base, and they would likely leave the reservation.

Last Friday evening, Bill Maher said on “Real Time” that Donald Trump had just had his finest week (in terms of popularity). Maher and others are becoming more scared that the dreaded “four more years” might happen.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democratic Party does not have a candidate who can go toe-to-toe with Trump. I don’t believe that. I think that the intensity of Bernie’s base support gives him a far stronger foundation than other Democratic candidates. Should it become likely that he will win the nomination, the fervor of his support could grow exponentially. It will have to, because the nastiness of his opponents will also multiply. While I have my reservations about Bernie (I don’t like being yelled at), I still think that he is our best bet (along with possibly Klobuchar).

Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, these are the cult leaders who can scare anyone who has the ability to engage in rational thinking. Trump may not have reached their levels, but he’s scary and unhinged. But perhaps in this unique moment of 2020, we have a leader who has a semi-cult following who wants to truly improve the quality of life for Americans and all global citizens. It’s odd that things have developed this way, but for the time being, we may want to go with our “semi-cult leader,” Bernie.

This post is cross-published on the Political Introverts blog.

The post Will 2020 be a battle between a rational cult (Bernie) and an irrational one (Trump)? appeared first on Occasional Planet.