Dear Mom,
Thank you for your response and sharing your thoughts. I agree with a lot of what you have said. There are some points where I disagree and/or have some further food for thought, so I will try to list those here:
1. Response to Covid19: You asked if I thought Hillary or Biden or Bernie would have done a better job handling it. Yes I do. I think Hillary, or Biden, or Bernie, or Larry, Curly, and Moe, or a skeleton sitting in a broken rocking chair would have handled the pandemic better than Trump. (At least we could have put a mask on the skeleton).
He lied about the seriousness of it for months, he refused to admit wearing masks was something we should do for half a year, he riled people up to try to push states to re-open too quickly, botched testing, lied about testing-availability, downplayed when he should have been raising the alarm, used Coronavirus briefings as his personal political rallies, constantly undermined his own health experts (vilified Fauci and re-tweeted a call for him to be fired), turned wearing masks into a political issue – which he was ultimately on the wrong side of and eventually admitted (by wearing a mask – not by actually admitting he was wrong), he constantly finger-points and deflects (blames the WHO… defunds the WHO… WTF?!), and, in many other ways, botched the response.
The response has been so bad, that it’s left me honestly feeling that Trump is on team-virus. As of now, 150,000 Americans are dead from this, 1000 more are dying each day, and there is no end in sight. Mom, do you think Trump’s response has been good? Or even acceptable? You are the medical professional here, so if you think his response was an example of good handling of a public health emergency, I am not going to argue with you.
2. “Stealth Threats from the Administrative State”: You’re probably right that the “deep state” is something we should be concerned about. It appears to me that Trump has done a great deal of dismantling of the deep state by decapitating the FBI, installing Barr as AG and stacking the justice department with hundreds of judges, gutting the State Department and installing many of his loyalists (like his Ambassador to the UK who tried to pressure the UK into moving the English Open to a Trump golf course), and firing several inspectors general, including the one who was supposed to oversee the $4 trillion Covid19 response fund. I fully understand concern and distrust about the CIA, FBI, and the deep state in general, but some would argue that those organizations act as guardrails for maintaining law, order, and the Republic itself, and weakening them too much may have negative consequences (like allowing a demagogue to run amok. More on that later).
3. Civility in politics: I completely agree with you here. I love your idea to get AOC and Rand Paul together for dinner. I support this initiative whole-heartedly! I know you see Trump as just the culmination of this deterioration of civility, but I see something darker. I see Trump’s rhetoric as an order of magnitude worse than any elected official or mainstream candidate that we’ve seen in recent years. Remember how he dispatched all of the other republicans in the primaries in 2016? Through his bullying and insults? Remember “Lying Ted Cruz”? Well, in my view, Trump has made lying an artform and he blows away anything we’ve seen in recent history in terms of lying and getting away with it. He’s uttered 20,000+ false statements publicly since his election. He is pathological. The lying is so often and so constant, that it’s completely overwhelming to us. Whenever the press calls him out on an untruth, he calls them Fake News, and his supporters accept that. When the press asks a ranking Republican member of the Senate to comment on one of his lies, they dither and refuse to condemn the lie. Only a handful of them (Mitt Romney comes to mind) have begun to finally wake up and call out his BS. I would argue that this lack of respect for the truth is the #1 problem in politics and with our country right now. Without the truth, we have nothing. We will have the “hypernormal” situation they had in Soviet Russia where everybody knows what the government says is lies but nobody has the courage to speak up against it. Scary.
4. Trump / Russians / Afghanistan: I guess more will come out on this eventually, but it definitely stinks. I honestly think Trump is in collusion with Putin. The Mueller report did NOT exonerate Trump, and that is why Bill Barr redacted so much of it. I think Trump is buddying up to Putin, MBS in Saudi Arabia, Kim Jong Un, Duterte in the Philippines and all the other autocratic strong-men type leaders in the world right now, and he is turning his back on our allies. Please watch this 1 minute video on this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNtYb1x6InM
5. Reaction to Protests / Federal intervention vs. Anarchy: I agree with you that there is a balance between Federal overreach and allowing lawlessness and anarchy. In this case, however, what I believe we are seeing is a disproportionate, heavy-handed, wag-the-dog type federal response to the unrest and the threat of anarchy. I think this is a brilliantly diabolical move by Trump to further polarize the nation, stoke violence, and give himself the opportunity to look like a war-time president come election time. Take Portland for example. From my perspective, there were small smoldering protests there that had continued from the George Floyd / BLM protests starting 2 months ago, but that they were largely dying down. A week or two ago, the feds send in a detachment of heavily armed, poorly labeled, gas-mask-and-camo-wearing agents (hereafter referred to as the Federal Goon Squad) with the stated goal of defending federal property and quelling violence, but the resulting reality has been the exact opposite. Since the goon squad started grabbing people off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vans (it’s all on video), the protests have grown by orders of magnitude and the violence has only accelerated. So if the feds aren’t achieving their stated goals, are we to assume they are incompetent, or that their stated goal is not in fact their stated goal? And if Federal troops can be deployed against civilians – without state or local authorization – and without clearly stated goals, don’t we find ourselves on a slippery slope?
6. On Trump using federal troops to insulate himself: You claim that that is not happening and would never happen? I claim it is happening. Here’s a recent photo of the White House with multiple new levels of barriers around it.
Since even before Trump was elected – since before he even had the nomination, people have been saying “Trump would never…” – “Trump could never…” He’ll never get the nomination. He’ll never win the election. He’ll never do anything outwardly illegal or that would hurt real people. Hmmm. You said “[Trump] doesn’t seem to inspire the kind of loyalty in his followers that that would require”. I would argue that he inspires exactly the type of fierce, fervent loyalty in his supporters that would give a would-be dictator the confidence to try and act unilaterally to make the system bend to his will. You “often wondered how Hitler was able to get so many people in his orbit… [and] guess[ed] Hitler had more personal charm than does Trump”. These words are, frankly, almost chilling to me. I think if you would be fully honest with yourself you would admit that there is not really that much difference between us and the everyday Germans of the 1930s. We have problems with racism, political polarization, desire for solutions, frustration with the current situation, and so did they. I recently heard someone describe Nazi Germany as “that time when 1/3 of the country sat by and watched while 1/3 of the country attempted to exterminate the other 1/3”. One moment you think you are supporting Law and Order. You think you are tamping down on crime, on permissiveness, on anarchy, and immorality. Then you wake up 5 years later and realize you were supporting a Fascist regime.
Hopefully I’m being hyperbolic in my comparisons, but I no longer feel that I am, to be quite frank.
Here’s the most important thing that’s on my mind: the way I fear things will go based on how they are proceeding currently: I think Trump is gonna make a play to maintain power at all costs with the upcoming election. I think he will either rig the election, postpone it indefinitely, or he will lose and come up with some pretext for not ceding the presidency (perhaps by declaring a state of emergency). Or, he will win (after all, Biden is not a strong candidate, and I lament this often), but people won’t accept the victory as legit, and the unrest will continue. Again, this could be nothing more than my delusional sense of self-importance wanting to believe I have fore-knowledge of a grand conspiracy, but I strongly fear I am right. Here’s an article about a bi-partisan group that has been gaming out how the coming election is going to go, and it’s scary:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/nation/bipartisan-group-secretly-gathered-game-out-contested-trump-biden-election-it-wasnt-pretty/
If any of this really happens, we are going to find ourselves in a position where we have to make a choice. Do we support the Constitution? The Law? Democracy? America as I have always known it – as a beacon of hope and justice in a dark world? Or do we support a man who would brazenly flaunt the truth and the law – just because we happen to agree with some of his stated political goals? Do we support a snake because he claims to be fighting for us? And if we do, given his track record for lying, what will we do when it’s too late to do anything to stop him?
I was watching a documentary about the American Revolution recently, and it mentioned that Benjamin Franklin was estranged from his son because of their political differences. His son was a loyalist – wanted the USA to remain part of England – and they just couldn’t manage to see eye-to-eye given their differences. This made me sad. I bring it up only to remind us that there is precedent for politics dividing families – and literally pitting brother against brother on the battlefield. We saw it with the revolution, and 85 years later in the Civil War. Mom, you are right to bring up that Jefferson quote about the tree of revolution needing to be watered by the blood of revolution every 20 years – and it may be true that we are overdue. I’m wondering though – what is it that you really think is worth fighting another Civil War to achieve? Because if there is one, it’s going to be costly as all hell. Literally, this country will go through Hell. We’ll all lose whatever wealth we have. Infrastructure will be destroyed. We will lose our position as the leader of the free-world. Millions of Americans will die at the hands of other Americans. Probably the whole world will descend into chaos if America collapses in on itself. What is it that is worth going through that for? To overturn Roe vs Wade? To get tougher on illegal immigrants (most of whom are harder working than American citizens? To make sure some Americans continue to not have healthcare? Because some people take a knee during the national anthem? Let me know, because I just don’t understand it. And the way things are going, I think we will be there in several months.
Again, may God help us all.
Love,
Michael
