Barack Obama was clearly one of the most cerebral and well-spoken presidents that the United States has ever had. But as odd as it may seem, two slips of his tongue may have led to the rise of the two worst dictators so far in the 21^st Century.

In 2011, Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. One of the guests was Donald Trump. Obama showed little mercy when while looking at Trump, he said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama also included a fake video of his birth and an artist’s rendition of what the White House would look like if Trump was president, further embarrassing Trump.

You can see the five-minute video here:

As you might expect, Trump was not pleased by being the butt of the jokes. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said Trump was “pissed off like I’d never seen him before.”

Trump had played around with the idea of running fore president before the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. But the events that evening truly crystallized his hate towards Obama as well as any Democrat who held him in low regard. In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016. He decimated the rest of the Republican field of candidates and then lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million popular votes, but won the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College.

The second faux pas by Obama came in 2014. In March of that year, shortly after Vladimir Putin and Russia had invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, Obama called Russia a “regional power.” Specifically, he said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Obama describes in in more detail in the following 50-second video:

Knowing what we know now about Putin, it is no surprise that he would be humiliated and outraged at the thought of Russia being called a regional power. After all, his dream as president of Russia was to re-establish the old Soviet Union, with all seventeen republics. He felt that Russia and the Soviet Union had a long and proud history of being a global power and he want to reassert what had been lost at the end of the twentieth century when Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated to collapse of the Soviet Union in order to give more autonomy to each of the republics.

We cannot say that Obama’s demeaning remarks about Russia caused Putin to bully and ultimately further invade Ukraine in 2022, but it certainly did not help. Putin was also irritated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who repeatedly criticized Putin and Russia for the lack of fair and democratic elections.

Generally, Barack Obama measures his words as well as anyone. You can see it, particularly in his press conferences, when he often pauses between phrases to make sure that the next thing that he says is precisely what he is thinking and not something that he will later regret.

Life is full of ironies, and the fact that Barack Obama may well have significantly contributed to the rise of dictators Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can be considered unexpected and certainly unfortunate. It is further evidence that we all make mistakes, even when we try our best to avoid them.

The post How Loose Lips from Obama Hurt America and the World appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Earlier this month, Heather Cox Richardson reported that both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran op-eds penned by Republicans or former Republicans urging members of their party who still value democracy to vote Democratic until the authoritarian faction that has taken their party is bled out of it.

Most Democrats would say that if they had a choice between the United States being a well-functioning democratic-republic, or the Democratic Party prevailing in about 50% of elections, they would prefer America to be a democracy.

In 2016, when Donald Trump was selected by the Electoral College to be president, a national conversation began concerning how American democracy was becoming more at risk. With each passing day of his presidency, as he said or did one outrageous thing after another, there became more discussion on how his method of ruling was similar to a dictator. Virtually all Democrats, most independents, and a minority of Republicans knew that America would be in for a rough ride with Trump. But as his outrageous behavior escalated, more came to fear for the preservation of our democracy. This culminated with Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that he had lost the 2020 election, and then the planned assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

On the strength of the 2020 election results, Democrats gained control of the federal executive and legislative branches. Even though Joe Biden won the presidency by more than seven million popular votes, absurdly his victory is still being challenged. In the House, the Democrats actually lost seats in 2020 and have merely a eight-vote margin. Because Democrats won the two January run-off elections in Georgia, the Senate is locked at 50-50, with Vice-President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote. But two of the Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, act like outcasts in the party and are major obstacles to the agenda advocated by most other Democrats.

Progressive Democrats have a very well-crafted agenda designed to effectively move the country forward economically, socially, and promoting human rights. Members of the House like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin, and in the Senate like Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, are positioned to implement a genuine wave of progressive legislation somewhat akin to the New Deal and the Great Society.

But because of the two Senators (Manchin and Sinema), we’re largely at gridlock. However, two good things may happen: (1) democracy will function as two of fifty Democratic senators can stymie the overwhelming will of their colleagues, and (2) something will pass – a watered down compromise which is a far cry better than had we had Republican rule.

Let’s face it, progressives, we’re not going to have the kind of victory that we wanted. We are hamstrung in effecting more progress because of structural problems in our system; ones that go back to our founding fathers and ones that are continuously being developed by activists on the right. They make it very difficult for Democrats to advance a progressive agenda.

A few of the structural problems in our current system include:

1. The U.S. Senate. A key issue among the founders was whether or not to have a bi-cameral legislature, and if so, how each house would be constituted. In the interest of democracy, the House as based on population. At the time that the Constitution was ratified, the only eligible voters were white men who owned property. This naturally benefited the larger states. For that reason, states small in population, such as Rhode Island and Delaware, wanted the second house to have equal representation for each state. Thus the U.S. Senate. Fast forward to today and it means that Wyoming and California each have two members of the Senate, but it’s highly undemocratic because the Wyoming senators represent only one-fifty-seventh of the population of the senators from California.
2. Gerrymandering – the drawing of legislative districts in a fashion that favors one party over another. For example, Missouri, which generally votes of 40% for Democrats has only two of eight members in the House (25%).
3. Corruption – while Trumpsters squawk about fraud and fake elections, it is the Republicans who are pushing all barriers to protecting our democracy. When the term ‘truth’ has no meaning to a large segment of the electorate, we run the risk of losing the people’s connection to democracy.

So, progressives would serve themselves well to harness some of their enthusiasm for immediate enactment of the policies of “The Squad” or even Joe Biden. Instead, the focus should be on protecting our democratic institutions at a time when they are under relentless attack from Trumpsters and others on the far right.

As we work at the governmental level to further protect our democracy, we need to work with our schools to reach out into the electorate in order to optimize a population that is empathetic and has the capabilities of critical thinking.

Only with a more aware electorate and a new generation of logical and compassionate thinkers will we be able to protect our democracy. If we can strengthen those two items, then we can adapt the next leg of the New Deal and the Great Society.

The post Time for Dems to Take a Step Back in order to Move Forward appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In an interview with Madrid’s El País newspaper, published on January 10, Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Anne Applebaum didn’t hold back. “The Trump adventure is over,” she is quoted as saying. “He will spend the rest of his life in court.” Amen to Applebaum’s assessment.

And who is Applebaum? London’s Prospect magazine included her in its list of the world’s top 50 thinkers for the Covid-19 age:

Applebaum, long an authority on the abuses of Communist and post-Communist Eastern Europe, in her new book Twilight of Democracy is unsparing in exposing the moral bankruptcy of Trumpian Republicanism.

El País mentions that her vision and informed judgment have “made her one of the leading global political analysts of recent years.”

Applebaum was a columnist for the Washington Post, and at one time a member of its Editorial Board. Since January 2020, she has been a staff writer at the Atlantic. In a piece entitled What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America published in the Atlantic on January 7, she wrote:

 …and yet by far the most important weapon that the United States of America has ever wielded—in defense of democracy, in defense of political liberty, in defense of universal rights, in defense of the rule of law—was the power of example. In the end, it wasn’t our words, our songs, our diplomacy, or even our money or our military power that mattered. It was rather the things we had achieved: the two and a half centuries of peaceful transitions of power, the slow but massive expansion of the franchise, and the long, seemingly solid traditions of civilized debate.

Applebaum distills us to our essence, the power of example.

We, the United States were for two and a half centuries, a beacon of light for so many others. And then came Trump. And with Trump the lights of democracy flickered not only for many of us here at home, but for America’s partners and admirers abroad. On January 6. Thump definitively showed the world his true colors. “We love you,” he said in a videotaped address to a mob that at that very moment was assaulting the Capitol. He didn’t have the wits about him to address the American public, just his demented followers. The royal we only undermined Trump’s slender connection to reality. The beacon of light, the power of example, came close to being extinguished.

In her El País interview, Applebaum notes that Trump “treated NATO like a mobster would.” And she adds that:

He scared the Europeans so much that they decided to come up with a plan b. They should adopt their own position and voice in security matters and also as sole defenders of democratic values.

In other words, Trump’s lasting legacy will be that he attempted to strip the United States of America of its democratic principles from the beginning of his shameful tenure to its calamitous end. Sadly, he tried to quit us of our democratic pillars of strength, aided and abetted by his family, cohorts within the Republican Party, and supported by millions of Americans.

In the El País piece, Applebaum makes a telling observation of Russia’s Putin, mentioning that he is:

Someone trained to be paranoid, to constantly detect conspiracies around him.That leads him to change the terms and to ensure that there is no opposition …, but a plot of other powers against him. That he must control all those who meet, argue and oppose. Therefore, there is nothing spontaneously articulated or a trace of    honesty, everyone lies, nobody trusts anyone and there is a mixture of deep cynicism     with paranoia. … And so he has largely transferred that to the rest of the country: a lot of cynicism, a lot of immorality and a tremendously conspiratorial environment.

She could just as well have been talking about Trump. Yes, we knew all along that Trump had a strong attachment to Putin, but now we can understand why Trump found his soul mate in the Russian autocrat. They are peas of a pod. And just like Putin before him in Russia, Trump has transferred his paranoia, his cynicism, his lack of morality and his conspiratorial mindset to many citizens of our country.

The man is feckless, depraved and now, if Applebaum’s assessment is correct, about to spend the rest of his days facing prosecution in the courts of our land.

The post Goodbye Washington. Hello Courtroom appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“He based his popularity on his extraordinary charisma, much discretionary   money, and a key and well-tested political message: denouncing the past and  promising a better future for all.”

The Atlantic posted the above quote in 2014, and no they weren’t referring to Trump. The Atlantic was referring to Hugo Chávez, former President of Venezuela. Chávez was a populist president nonpareil who knew just how to manipulate the longings of Venezuela’s working poor in order to recast his country as an ephemeral nirvana. He had the wealth of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and at the time revenue-producing oil exports to help him realign his country’s values and interests. That realignment has cost the Venezuelan people dearly. Because of severe shortages of the very basics, food, water, electricity, gasoline and money, it’s estimated that more than five million Venezuelans have had no choice but to flee the country. Populist policies can have severe negative long-term consequences.

As we approach the 2020 Presidential election, it might be worth asking, “How did Venezuela get itself into its mess?” Well, through a confluence of historical and social events, but mainly through Venezuelan voters’ decision to elect Hugo Chávez as President in 1999. He stayed on as President until his death in 2013, and set in motion the mess that Venezuela is in today.

How did he get elected in the first place? It turns out that he had charisma.

Merriam Webster defines charisma as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure.” Charisma is a kind of magnetism that, for whatever reason, draws people in. Either you’ve got it, or you don’t. Mitch McConnell has zero charisma. Obama has charisma in abundance, Hillary Clinton not so much. Biden not a lot either. Kamala Harris does, and how! Pence zilch.

Charisma, it seems, is essential to being a populist leader, though not all charismatic leaders have the desire or mindset to be populists. Even though it wasn’t always so, these days, populism connotes despotic and authoritarian politics. We have or have had populist leaders on the left, Castro in Cuba and Chávez in Venezuela among them, and those on the right, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Duterte in the Philippines, and our very own authoritarian media-celebrity Trump. And populism is nothing new. Argentina had Perón for a long period of time. Argentina is still reeling in economic havoc from Perón’s populist input in the 1950’s.

Thump, to his followers, is charismatic. No matter that his popularity stems from people’s scattershot knowledge of him as a TV personality, a sort of Kardashian presence in our collective consciousness, he has presence when he speaks in public. He has the ability to embody the charisma of himself as a self-styled outsider. It turns out that that was enough to get him elected. And that was enough to make him the poster boy of the Republican Party. To be a populist leader, you need to be able to convince and impress your followers with preposterous promises. “We will build a wall! We will replace Obamacare! We will make America great again!” Four years in, and what do you know; we still have Obamacare, there is no wall, and Thump’s promise to remake America and upgrade its crumbling infrastructure mess of highways, bridges and airports are just Trumpian words blowing about in the winds of a pandemic.

Populist leaders set themselves up as representing the people versus a vague ill-defined elite. The populist leader is always there at just the right moment to pick up the slack and connect the dots to take advantage of people’s longings for true change. Populist leaders get themselves elected by penciling themselves in as representatives of the disenfranchised. You have to be able to pretend to be able to change the world if you ever want to be a populist leader. Populist followers get caught up in the excitement of the pretend moment. And Trump does pretend really well. Until he doesn’t. Put on the spot, Trump is always eager to place the blame, all blame, any blame, elsewhere. He swallows baseless off-the-wall shadow-world ideas and right-wing theories as if they were nectar of the gods. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it has shown us that our Emperor-in-Chief has no clothes.

Frighten, belittle, and ridicule are essential Trump attributes. To attack your opponents is a given in politics. But much as Chávez in Venezuela, Trump has gone way beyond attack to try to frighten, belittle, and ridicule his opponents. Trump is the king of belittling, calling his opponents, and most especially women, by one word pejoratives, Crazy Hillary, Sneaky Dianne (Feinstein,) Goofy Elizabeth (Warren) and now Phony Kamala. His tactics are already tired, documented, and shameless.

But Trump has something that his populist antecedents never had. Trump has Twitter. The app didn’t exist before 2006. Trump is the king of Twitter attack politics. Trump has almost single-handedly rebranded every news story unflattering to him as fake news. It’s an incredible achievement. It turns out that micro blogging suits Trump’s id to a tee. Micro blogging, the compression of ideas into 140 characters, which doubled in 2017 to 280 characters, is something that somehow fits the Trump worldview perfectly. More than 280 characters, which most ideas and points of view demand, doesn’t seem to work for this President. Trump is, after all, a man of small Twitter thoughts.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take his rants seriously. Other tyrannical despots with bare-bone ideas have done very well for themselves and reduced their countries to shadows and ghosts of their former selves. Look no further than Venezuela, a country just a hop, step and jump to our south, where pensioners now receive less than a dollar per month government assistance to subsist on.

The post Populist bedfellows: Donald Trump and Hugo Chavez appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Three hours before the first presidential “debate” debacle kicked off, as I was blithely sautéing a batch of mushrooms, my kitchen sink inexplicably plunged—with a loud thunk—to the bottom of the cabinet beneath it. Slightly more than a year earlier, the pricey stainless steel sink had been one of the final finishes to a long overdue, professional kitchen renovation. But, somehow, over the course of 12 months, it had worked its way loose from its moorings.

Then I witnessed a much worse disaster: Donald Trump’s off-the-rails performance at the presidential debate. He was unhinged, out of control, unmoored, unglued, unbolted. Just like my kitchen sink. But with vastly more dangerous consequences.

Minutes after the sink sank, I put in a desperate call to the kitchen renovators. They were shocked. This doesn’t happen, they said. We’ll be out to fix it in the morning, they promised. And they were. When they arrived and assessed the situation, they blamed the problem on the original installers, who, they said, didn’t seem to know what they were doing and did a half-assed job.

Again, I was struck by the parallel with Donald Trump’s presidency. Voters apparently didn’t know what they were doing when they installed him. And he has demonstrated repeatedly that he doesn’t know what he is doing as the “leader of the free world.” Also, he’s not a half-ass, he’s the full Monty.  (One aspect of this comparison that doesn’t work is that, unlike the minority of the American electorate who voted for Trump, I didn’t buy a product that was obviously damaged goods from the get-go.)

The repair squad showed up as promised, their truck stocked with every tool, part, and adhesive product they needed to re-instate my sink to its proper condition. It took them a while to figure out what had happened (the sink had not been correctly braced). And they had to jerry-rig a solution (shoring up the sink with wooden supports). But they got the job done, and I feel  confident that my sink is more stable than it was before.

And despite the emotional hangover I was suffering post-debate, I saw another, convenient metaphorical connection. With Donald Trump as America’s know-nothing, incompetent contractor-in-chief, the underpinnings of our democracy are coming undone, falling apart at the seams.

Can Joe Biden do for American democracy what the repair guys did for my kitchen? I hope so. But he damage is already deep. Trump and his cohort of greedy, corrupt, and anti-democracy cronies have subverted our agencies, our institutions, our traditions and even our hopes and expectations. It’s going to take a lot of work, and more than a metaphorical morning, to shore us back up and restore stability. Even if  we manage to elect Biden, take back the Senate, and keep the House majority, we’re going to need a truckload of good ideas and willing workers. We’ll have to throw everything at the job—including the kitchen sink.

The post My kitchen sink: A 2020 Election Metaphor appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The first of the much-anticipated three debates-that-aren’t-debates is now thankfully behind us. And make no mistake. The whole world was watching. The day-after reactions from allies and adversaries alike should render thoughtful Americans not only terrified and outraged but also more determined than ever to turn out the most massive vote in recent memory to oust a man and a party that have debased the presidency, the Constitution, and America’s standing in the world.

Here’s what the world is saying.

Britain

“This dark, horrifying, unwatchable fever dream will surely be the first line of America’s obituary.”

“A national humiliation.”

“The rest of the world – and future historians will presumably look at it and weep.”

India

“Never had American politics sunk so low.”

“U.S. embarrassed itself before the world for 100 minutes.”

France

“Chaotic, childish, grueling.”

Germany

“America sinks lower.”

“Clearest loser was America.

China

“The recession of U.S. national power.”

“ Division, anxiety of U.S. society and the accelerating loss of advantages of the U.S. political system.”

Spain

“Chaotic and virulent.”

Kenya

“This debate would be sheer comedy if it wasn’t such a pitiful and tragic advertisement for U.S. dysfunction.”

Australia

“America faces a dangerous several weeks.”

“A debate swamped by the rancor engulfing America.”

The post The whole world watched the Trump-Biden “debate.” And they were horrified. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In early September, Brandwatch published its list of the most popular people on Twitter based on the number of their followers. Trump’s 3+ years of constant headline-hogging ALL-CAPS barrage of tweets might have led you to think that he is most probably the leader of the pack. Not.

Trump is not even the second or third most followed person on Twitter. As of right now, according to Brandwatch, Trump is well behind Justin Bieber who is 2^nd on the list with 112.4m followers. He is also behind Katy Perry, 3^rd on the list with 108.5m Twitter fans. Trump also trails the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, 4^th, and two other giants of the music business, Rihanna, 5^th, and Taylor Swift, 6^th. Taylor Swift, as of the early September tally, has 87.1m followers; about 1.3m more Twitter followers than Trump.

But here’s the kicker. The most followed person on Twitter, according to Brandwatch, with 122.3m followers is Barack Obama. Obama has 26.8m more Twitter fans than Trump. That must smart a lot in the Trump psyche.

In all of this, other than Obama, Taylor Swift may just be the person most positioned to optimize her success to impact the upcoming election. Swift is enormously popular. Her fans are loyal and devoted. Britain’s Telegraph has called her one of the most powerful women in the world. She has sold well over 50m albums worldwide and more than 150m singles, has won 10 Grammys, has had the number 1 album on iTunes and Billboard for much of this summer with folklore, her 8^th studio album, and the number 1 single with the lyrical cardigan. More than any of that, Swift has found her political voice.

To understand this metamorphosis, take a look at Miss Americana, directed by Anna Boden on Netflix, a documentary that captures Swift’s emerging political awareness and political presence.

In the past, Swift was reluctant to express her political leanings. She made no endorsements in the last general election. That has changed. The shift began in 2018 when Swift came out for the Democratic candidate for Senate, former Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen, in her home state of Tennessee’s midterm elections. Trump, who else, chimed in, telling reporters that he liked Swift’s music about 25% less now. Not a terrible criticism, all told, from America’s Misogynist-in-Chief who has catcalled other women in the public eye with far more insulting and disparaging taunts and jeers. He was 25% less a Swiftie (yes, it’s a word!) but still a fan, it would seem, in 2018. He might just like Swift a lot less now.

Swift’s candidate in Tennessee didn’t win. You can see her disappointment in Miss Americana. However, following her endorsement of Bredesen, voter registrations in Tennessee immediately shot up by 7%, not a small number.

If anything, the setback in Tennessee only served to strengthen Swift’s zeal to advance her foray into politics. She came back. She wrote a song about her experience Only the Young. She became a champion of LGBTQ causes; her 2019 video for You Need to Calm Down aka YNTCD won the MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year. The video is a celebration of LGBTQ figures and features a plea for fans to sign a petition in support of the Equality Act on Change.org.

Fast forward to 2020. Trump’s made his infamous appeal to repression and military might following the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, tweeting

Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.

Swift could no longer hold back. She fired back.

After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November. @realdonaldtrump,” — Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) May 29, 2020.

The stakes were drawn. The stakes are drawn. I’m thinking Trump might be even less of a Swiftie now.

Oh and by the by, as of this writing Taylor Swift has 140m followers on Instagram. There is no breakdown on how many of those fans live in the United States, but even it there were let’s say 80 or 90m, that could be a huge boost to Biden with Swift’s endorsement. Taylor Swift leaves Trump in the dust on Instagram. The man has only 21.9m followers there.

The post Will Trump get Swifted? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Paul Krugman recently posted a piece in the New York Times, The Deadly Delusions of Mad king Donald. It likened our current state of affairs to being trapped on the Titanic. Definitely worth a read. Krugman writes thoughtful pieces, but one of the commenters, Citizen nicely summed things up with a goody making the internet rounds in April, but still worth repeating.

The post Adventures on the Titanic appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Donald Trump is a conservative. That should be an uncontroversial statement with universal agreement, but it’s not. In 2016 most voters described Trump as a moderate candidate and Hillary Clinton as either “liberal” or “too liberal”. Seriously. Of course some of that is gendered, women are seen as more liberal than men but some of it was intentional political strategy. In July around the conventions, 40% of voters described Trump as “a mix of liberal and conservative” and 11% of voters said “liberal on all or most issues”. Only 16% of voters saw Trump as conservative on “almost all issues” compared to 32% of voters viewing Clinton as liberal on the same metric. By October, Trump was still viewed as the most moderate GOP nominee in over a generation with only 47% calling him “conservative” while 58% called Clinton “liberal”. Then on election day, many undecided moderate voters cast their ballots for Trump. You’d be forgiven if this is a new narrative for you since the pundits on MSNBC and CNN love blaming Clinton’s election loss on holdout Sanders voters who deemed her insufficiently progressive. However, most objective analysis shows that this isn’t true and that only 12% of Sanders supporters voted for Trump in 2016 compared to 24% of Clinton supporters voting for McCain in 2008. In the greatest irony of ironies, Donald Trump used the Bill Clinton strategy of triangulation to defeat Hillary Clinton. If Democrats aren’t prepared, he will do it again and it’ll be relatively easy for this President to appear both to the right and the left of Joe Biden. Here’s how he’ll do it:

Criminal Justice (To the Left)

Donald Trump signed the First Step Act into law with bipartisan support which addresses a number of concerns criminal justice advocates have had about the prison industrial complex. It of course doesn’t go nearly far enough, affecting mostly the federal system which is responsible for only a small share of our nation’s prison population, but it represents a sea change in terms of the politics of “tough on crime”. The President has also not been afraid to issue pardons and has released a number of African-American prisoners, notably Alice Marie Johnson who was featured prominently in a Super Bowl ad. Meanwhile Joe Biden authored several key provisions of what has become known simply as “The Crime Bill” which perhaps more than any other piece of legislation has been responsible for our current era of mass incarceration. The President and Biden also both oppose the legalization of marijuana, but the President is likely hopeful that voters will give him undeserved credit for the liberalization of drug laws on the state level. The President is going to attempt to depress black turnout with this issue and at least muddy the waters with college educated white voters and it may work if only because Biden seems to have a terminal case of foot in mouth syndrome. If you’re unsure what I mean, I refer you to his “you ain’t black” comments and the Trump campaigns rapid response.

China (To the Right)

How Americans perceive fault in the coronavirus pandemic will largely determine President Trump’s reelection prospects. If America blames the incompetence of the administration, President Trump will lose. If America blames China and becomes Sino-phobic in its disposition, President Trump will win. That’s why the President calls COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus” and it’s also why he’s recently been mentioning how he took decisive action to close America’s borders. If Biden had held a consistent position on immigration or China, he could perhaps make a moral argument against scapegoating immigrants or the racism obvious in the President’s response. Unfortunately for Biden, as recently as 2006 Biden was saying “I voted for a fence, I voted, unlike most Democrats—and some of you won’t like it—I voted for 700 miles of fence” and has vacillated between being pro-China by voting for normalized trade relations and more critical of China in the last decade. The President will call Biden a flip-flopper with no consistency on the issue of China or Immigration. The President will point to his tariff policy, rejection of the TPP, and “tough talk” that only he understands China.

Trade (To the Left)

The president’s approval rating in the industrial Midwest is much higher than his approval rating nationwide, that is the reason why he remains competitive in this election despite the very likely possibility that he will lose the popular vote. This popularity can be traced to a number of factors, but trade stands head and shoulders above any other policy. Some experts put the number of jobs lost because of NAFTA at over 950,000. The economic despair seen in deindustrialized communities from Kansas City to Pittsburgh is palpable with empty factories scattered across the landscape, rising suicides, rising opioid abuse, and falling populations. Joe Biden voted for NAFTA, Fast-Track trade authority, Normal Trade Relations with China, and says he’d renegotiate TPP. Meanwhile President Trump fought for an inadequate but nonetheless popular repeal of NAFTA which was replaced with the USMCA. Although the AFL-CIO endorsed Biden, their President Richard Trumka lauded the USMCA as a “huge win for working people”. Obama won all union members by 34 points in 2012, while Clinton only won them by 16 points just 4 years later. President Trump will question the efficacy of Biden’s free trade history and it’s likely that his criticism will stick.

Foreign Policy (To the Left)

Is the Iraq War so distant in America’s memory that it won’t matter who believed what in 2002? 18 years is an eternity in politics, there are many voters alive today who do not remember Saddam Hussein or even an America before Iraq. However, there are still scars from that war, thousands of disabled veterans, a continued military presence in the Middle East, and sustained islamophobia in our politics. Joe Biden supported that War, he also supported interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Serbia, Kuwait, etc. Biden is a hawk and doesn’t have many critiques of the Obama-Bush foreign policy doctrine which said drone now and ask questions later. Of course, neither does Donald Trump, he’s on pace with the number of atrocities committed in the last decade and will likely exceed them if given a second term. However, the difference between Trump and Biden is that Trump does not pretend to be a moral authority who cares about human rights. This unfortunately makes him immune to arguments of hypocrisy because he has no standards for himself and voters know this. It also draws greater attention to his few acts of non-interventionism like his negotiations with the Taliban and Kim Jong-un. It does not matter that Trump did not really oppose the Iraq war, that seems to be baked in. What matters is Trump gives the false appearance of non-intervention and Biden has been honest about his bad record. Trump will exploit this and will ask voters to consider why he was able to “make peace” with North Korea.

Gun Control (To the Right)

Beto O’Rourke left no lasting legacy in Congress or in his race for President except for his language about the Second Amendment which will be hung like an albatross around Joe Biden’s neck. During a debate, an ABC moderator asked O’Rourke “Are you proposing taking away their guns? And how would this work?” to which O’Rourke replied “Hell Yes…” there was more after, but it won’t matter because that’s enough to make an ad. Combined with an image of O’Rourke onstage endorsing Biden, it’s the kind of moment the NRA and GOP dream of. A Democrat, confirming the worst fears of millions of voters who have been told for years that Democrats are coming for their guns. The case against Biden will be made easier by the public record of his attacks on Bernie Sanders for his D minus rating from the NRA as somehow insufficiently pro-gun control. Despite their good intentions, the political power of the Bloomberg backed “Everytown For Gun Safety” is extraordinarily limited and their messaging won’t save Biden. One of Biden’s selling points is his “common sense solutions, “ that will be hard to justify when the president claims Biden is for gun confiscation. Again, it won’t matter what the actual truth is.

The president is not above lying, we know this. The president is still an effective communicator to many Americans even when they know he is lying. What is more dangerous is when the president is given the chance to tell the truth which is when he is at his strongest. Consider the 2016 Republican primaries when he attacked the party for supporting the Iraq war and cuts to Social Security. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and others were unable to satisfactorily reply to those attacks because they were true. During the general election campaign, Trump was able to speak to the truth of Americans anxieties about Hillary Clinton and her character. His critiques of her policy were ineffective, what she believed was broadly popular (which is true for the most part with Biden). However, his questions about her paid speeches, foreign donations to the Clinton foundation, the role of the DNC, and of course her private email server were very effective. Joe Biden represents a double edged sword, while he does not inspire the same antipathy as Hillary Clinton for reasons ranging from personality to inherent sexism, he is not nearly as talented a politician in terms of communicating or media manipulation. Joe Biden has a record, it’s inconsistent with his image as a politician, and those inconsistencies can’t really be reconciled in a positive way. The president will take advantage of that and his digital communications team is working overtime to define Joe Biden. If it were not for the coronavirus pandemic, we would likely be seeing the president make this case himself. The president, a master of projection, will attempt to define Biden not only as insufficiently liberal but insufficiently conservative, not only racist but also a cultural Marxist, not only a warmonger but also too willing to make peace with the enemy, and himself as the common sense candidate.

It will be ridiculous, you will be mystified, the media will be unprepared, the party will be unprepared, but I’m telling you now so that you will at least be able to see it coming. As for Joe Biden, if you’re reading this, don’t expect the pandemic or Trump’s idiocy to be enough, it will not be enough.

The post How Trump Will Run Against Biden appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, is reported to be writing a tell-all book. Whether he’ll be writing in in a jail cell or at home is still not clear, as his pandemic-related release from prison was suddenly, unceremoniously, and suspiciously rescinded just days after it was announced in late April 2020.  One thing is certain, though: He’s got the goods on Trump and his circle.

This article first appeared on this site in 2018, just after to the FBI raided Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s office, home and hotel room,  where they found and seized a cache of old cell phones—sixteen cell phones, to be precise.  The parody song at the end of this post could be the theme song for his new book.

You have to wonder why Cohen held onto all of the phones. It is possible, after all, to transfer one’s contacts to a new phone. It’s possible, too, to destroy a phone and its memory, if it contains things you don’t want discovered. One could speculate that he kept them for sentimental reasons, or because he thought that someday a Blackberry would be a valuable collectors’ item. Not likely, though. A more plausible explanation would be that Cohen hung onto his old phones because they house, in their micro-memories, some important things that didn’t transfer over to the next generation of mobile phone. And what might those things be? Could they be saved voice mails and “taped” conversations with people Michael Cohen worked with? Cohen is known to record conversations—perhaps to retain them to play back in the future as embarrassing evidence or leverage, perhaps to use them as gossip fodder, or perhaps to play them for the merriment of his friends.

Whatever his reasons, the seized cell phones are now in the hands of the special master appointed to evaluate the attorney-client privilege-ness of what they and other documents contain. Are they the 21^st century equivalent of the incriminating Nixon tapes? We may never know. Suffice it to say, though, that Cohen is probably sweating—as are all the people he may have talked to over 16-phones-worth of conversations.

So, in honor of the 16-phone seizure, I’ve composed a parody of Tennesse Ernie Ford’s, “16 Tons.

Here is the original 1955 hit. My lyrics follow:

Okay, now you’ve got the melody. Here goes

“16 Phones: A Michael Cohen sing-along”

Some people say my ethics are stuck in the mud,

 I never had to worry: I had Trump as my bud.

I said I’d take the bullet if it came down to just us,

But I’m getting run over by Donald Trump’s bus.

You load 16 phones, and what do you get?

A lot of old recordings and a lot of new sweat.

Mr. Mueller don’t ya call me, and don’t harass,

I’m holed up at home tryin’ to save my own ass.

I was born a fixer, and I’m good at the game.

Bully and Sleazeball are my middle names.

The Boss trusted me with the nastiest jobs,

And I’m consigliere to the Trump family mob.

You load 16 phones, and what do you get?

A lot of old recordings and a lot of new sweat.

Mr. Mueller don’t ya call me, and don’t ask for more:

I’ve sold my soul to the Trump-any store.

I was born on Long Island, just a privileged kid,

I’m working for Trump now, and you know what I did.

I paid off some women and threatened the rest,

And now I’ve been raided, and I’m facing arrest.

You save 16 phones, and what do you get?

A lot of old recordings and a lot of new sweat.

Mr. Mueller don’t ya call me, and don’t harass:

I’m holed up at home tryin’ to save my own ass.

Some people say I’ll flip and just tell it all,

Listen, you assholes, I’m not takin’ the fall.

Shut up for a change, and try to be wise,

‘Cuz I’ve got the goods on all of you guys.

You save 16 phones, and what do you get?

A ton of old recordings and a lot of new sweat.

Mr. Mueller don’t ya call me, and don’t harass:

I’m holed up at home, tryin’ to save my own ass.

Parody lyrics, Copyright 2018, Gloria Shur Bilchik

The post 16 phones: Theme song for Michael Cohen’s tell-all book on Trump and Company appeared first on Occasional Planet.