Trump's Charisma

Giotto, The Road to Calvary, c.1305

Max Weber defined “charisma” as a personal quality but I prefer to regard it as the attribute of an office rather than as a personal quality because of the derivation of the term “charisma” as referring to people being invested with an aura like power by higher authority as happens when there is a laying down of hands in a church congregation or empowered by regulations in Catholic Church so that one is made a priest or a bishop. Hebrew rabbis earned their charisma by the number of their followers. In a modern secular world, political figures get their charisma through election into office, Donald Trump thinking that a President has the right to kill his political opponents, so universal is the power of the charisma of that office. That is very different from the popular version of charisma where the term refers to personal charm and attractiveness, which applies to movie stars and pop singers and may indeed be part of what leads some people, such as Ronald Reagan, to be elevated to the Presidency.

More formally put and more up to date is to define charisma as a role in that it has a body of attributes that make it recognizable as having a distinctive set of activities, such as being a bus driver or a physician or a father who is called upon to do the things that are part of those roles or to be found lacking in that role, so it can be said some people are bad parents or inept at repairing a computer glitch even if they pretend to be otherwise.  Roland Wulbert has suggested to me that a person  is charismatic if they are never contrite, just as Jesus was never contrite and Donald Trump was criticized for not being contrite even though not being so was at the heart of his being and so violated normal behavior. But he was being what he was, which was charismatic, and there are oyster attributes to be added as the qualities of charisma, including incisiveness that sees farther than ordinary people do, or confidence despite what ordinary people may think, or as Trump points out, being a stable genius, even if he is not eloquent, as Hitler was, and so may mangle or exaggerate or even lie, the truth underlying his words an expression of his charisma. 

Here are some other attributes of the role of the charismatic. Such a person has authority to declare meanings as legitimate, as when supreme court justices decide whether separate but equal is fair at the turn into the Twentieth Century and is a contradiction half a century later. Charismatics endure slander against them, as is the case with Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trump. Charismatics draw their followers to themselves, which is the case with Luther and Lenin and Trump. Why do their followers do so? That seems the most central power and so is taken to be a magic like enchantment of the charismatic person by the followers, as if they were indeed pop stars. But the basis of charismatic following can be tawdry and unholy. Gandhi pedaled a retrogressive economic policy but adopted a garb  and a demeanor and attracted publicity that made contributions to Indian independence. Trump was an inherited real estate mogul who bankrupted his own casinos  but had an afterlife as a celebrity selling the idea of being a mogul on television who dreamed of being trich and respected, which was every Ralph Kramden’s dream, and that led him into a political venture he expected to lose and wound up the possession of a gigantic following. Barnum would be proud. Nothing very impressive is needed to get one’s credentials as a charismatic person. That is why Weber thought charisma introduced something new into the social mix but was unreliable because it was untethered. FDR had charm and he did win over the American people, but Al Smith thought there wasn’t much to be said for a cripple who would die soon, and instead persevered for thirteen years as President.

So if personal charm is not the key to being charismatic, unlike movie stars who have to fill the screens with their magnetism,.what is it that people make of Trump that gives him his hold on them? People interviewed about Trump, including both ordinary voters and people like Lindsay Graham, who seems to just admit accepting to the fact that Trump has his loyal supporters and that is reason enough to make his peace with him, is that he expresses himself crudely towards women, or with exaggeration, though not quite willing to say he lies, because Trump apparently evokes a deeper sense of what is wrong with American politics. Yes, Trump is a braggart and a loudmouth and always mean and angry but maybe people feel liberated by having someone voice feelings and ideas that they themselves would be ashamed to voice. Trump is naughty and that makes respectable people feel glad about it even if they say tsk tsk to his more outrageous claims or secretly sympathize with his racist thoughts to, for example, reinstate an Arab ban on immigration, only letting Europeans in. Trump expresses their darkest angels. That doesn’t mean he is not likable. It is that supporters either feign likeability, as with Graham (who early on despised him) or have transmuted unlikeability into its opposite, seeing the virtue of being at odds with everything in  government they find objectionable as one Trump supporter in 2016 who was against government intervention but demanded saving her Social Security, as if that weren't a government program.

 It is a good question whether Trump found an audience looking for him or whether his support was generated out of the shambles of the 2016 Republican primary battle, where no opponent seemed  to be able to deal with his demeaning jokes about his contenders. They still thought candidates should maintain some dignity and he didn’t or treated their opponents with it.

Weber thought that charismatics brought innovation into social life because that was the only alternative to custom and law as forms of social control, custom being the time immemorial way to do things, and law and bureaucracy, by which Weber meant the same thing, as having begun to prosper in the late Medieval period with the development of joint stock companies. But innovation is only a universal claim by charismatics that they are doing so. In fact, charismatics use innovation to establish retrogression. Jesus announced a new dispensation of being kind to people when, in fact, the Prophets had said the same while introducing the retrograde idea of miracles and pagan mythology. Hitler announced the innovations of technology, such as planes and cars and weaponry, but was reviving an older spirit of family values and ethnic warfare. Stalin was ushering in a new age of economic organization when he was establishing himself as the most bloodthirsty of the Czars. In general, it is incorrect to agree with “Ideology and Utopia” and think the cutting division is between past and future mindedness.

Trump is also a charismatic who pretends progress but engages in retrogression. He says he will be revolutionary by dismantling “the deep state”, suspend parts of the Constitution and creating detention centers for hundreds of thousand illegal aliens, but what he actually proposes is an old fashioned border wall, the self same restoration of Fifties family values, and punitive forms of law and order, a platform adopted from traditional Republicans so as to get their support when, pre-political, he had been open on social issues, as might be expected of most New Yorkers. Trump has joined a Know Nothing nativist party, though he may not mean he knows only Americanism but that he really doesn’t know very much about anything.

Weber misunderstood the innovativeness and potency of custom and law. Custom does not mean mores of very ancient times but only practices that seem to have ever been and forever to be even if they last only for a brief period of time. So the double standard whereby sexual chastity  was expected for only women existed for hundreds and hundreds of years or maybe for thousands but was suspended a genera tion or two back and now it seems natural for women to have sexual relations as they please. That is the new natural and an amnesia sts upon what was the natural previously. Similarly, law also seems to suspend time in that what a law does is make edicts stated in the past binding in the future. But laws can be modified. The Founding Fathers developed the Constitution as an original form of government as that was expressed in a set of intersecting fundamental laws that emphasized the balance of power and Supreme Court rulings are able to create rights and abolish them, as when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Roe v. Wade and abolished the right of abortion fifty years later. Law is flexible and those who make it and administer it are also flexible, rather than an iron rule of delegated authority responsible only to an original charismatic. Weber was being too Lutheran in thinking that the sole freedom of a person or a society was to submit, to engage in free will, to be obedient to God or some other charismatic, and that applies to custom as well, whereby people adopt and dispense with hula hoops, the moon walk, Taylor Swift and hiding under student desks so as to train for an atomic invasion.

Another cardinal characteristic of a charismatic person is not to take their words too seriously. The allegiance of the follower to the charismatic is formed by the strength of the personality of the charismatic, the follower trying to gauge the subtleties of the emotions conveyed even if not clear on the character underlying the personality. The charismatic remains an enigma, obscured from others even as followers try to grasp his meanings or being. Jesus remains enigmatic, his personality obscure, seen mostly from the outside, and his sayings enigmatic, deliberately confounding his listeners, though those who wrote down and edited his sayings were developed well enough to constitute a literature, in that people have pondered their meanings for thousands of years. Moses was charismatic even though and maybe because he stuttered and had a temper, and smote a person, as did Billy Budd. Washington was not charismatic, even though he was tall and dignified, because he stated what he said clearly and neither was Lincoln charismatic in that he was eloquent, even though both figures are retrospectively regarded as central iconic figures. Hitler’s strong suit was his emotional fervor, not the strength of his reasoning. He was fascinating rather than taken as wise.

Jesus is understood as charismatic and has been recognized as such for a very long time, whatever He was in life. Giotto painting “Jesus at Calvary”, from 1305, makes that clear by having his face turned to the viewer while the other figures are part of the mise en scene. Jesus is without expression, an icon of a figure, rather than realistic and so Giotto is bringing a Medieval representation of Jesus into Giotgto’s realistic setting. Jesus is different from other people and also silent  and expressionless while other people bustle about, whatever His other concerns might be, about heaven or His Father or the plight of mankind, speculations where Jesus’ consciousness is never plumbed. His charisma is for the ages rather than the property of the historical Jesus.

Donald Trump should therefore not be expected to offer wisdom but rather his fierce meanness, as I have suggested, which gives him his allure, and it is his followers to explain that as an attractive feature, just as why the early followers of Jesus are to find attractive an itinerant preacher who was crucified, whatever was the evolving church structure that sustained him. Maybe Trump’s hold on people will dissipate if he is convicted of multiple felonies, but maybe, then again, not. Alive or dead, he may remain appealing to a figure who garners resentments both those real and imagined. Mankind is not likely to be rid of resentment.

Advocacy and Analysis

 Being reasonable is always the uphill climb.

The academic world has been replete with the clash between advocacy and analysis, particularly in the clash between Palestine supporters and Israel supporters. Advocates stand by their beliefs and deny the claims of the opposite side even if I think the arguments unequal in that the historical evidence supports Israel’s history and the Palestinian argument is that relative suffering makes you right on the merits. It just depends on when you start your grievances: the expulsion of the Jews to Persia or the Nakba, the withdrawal and removal of Palestinians from Palestine during the Israeli War of Independence. In academic terms, and preceding for decades the present war, advocacy meant promoting a conclusion so as to consult only the evidence that suits you and framing the terms as inevitable while analysis meant going where the facts and ideas will lead-- new facts, clarified ideas-- so as to find out something new. Academic life consisted of honing arguments so that it was more analytic rather than just advocated. So students who argued that the United States was a colonialist could indeed cite the results of tube Spanish American War but had to stretch the term to include the Marshall Plan which reinvigorated Western Europe and colonialism had to be transformed into a Cold War between the only two superpowers, which is a kind of warfare rather than the exploitation of the poor rather than the rich, however much subsidiary people like Katanga or Vietnam became embroiled in that conflict. The entire academic enterprise is endangered, so the argument goes, if people don’t attend to complexities, to make distinctions, rather than marshall only the arguments on one's own point of view. Rationality is itself at stake, as it always has been as when American Firsters could make a case that the United States could avoid entanglement with Europe but could no longer do so after Pearl Harbor, while George Wallace could defend “Segregation Now and Forever” because Americans of African descent seemed inevitably backwards. African-Americans were inevitably tainted by their origins, but that was advocacy rather than analysis because Wallace was not facing up to African American advancement, that nurture overcame what seemed to be nature.

Closer to home and in a political rather than an academic setting, was the debate on Fox News a few nights ago between Gov. Desantis of Florida and Gov. Newsom of California . Their fireworks provided some entertainment, though the Liberal media panned the event as so vituperative as to diminish both debaters, which is what happens in most recent debates, where Nikki Haley seems reasonable by comparison even if she is largely a trimmer. Look with some care at part of the Desantis-Newsom debate just so as to clarify the difference between advocacy and analysis and why that is important.

Sean Hannity started the debate by claiming he would be an impartial moderator and then offered as his first question a gotcha one aimed at playing to the Conservative playbook. He asked Newsom why it was that so many Californians in the last two years had left California while so many people were moving to red state Florida?  Hannity pointed to the fact that taxes were higher in California than in Florida. Newsom’s answer was rather lame or so fatuous that he had not prepared an answer. He said more people were leaving Florida for California than Californians going to Florida which was beside the point about the overall trend. Newsom also vaunted the educational and economic preeminence of California, which did not go to the point of why people were leaving. 

Hannity had leveled a logically flawed advocacy argument to make his point. He had asserted a fact  and then inferred whatever he might offer as the explanation of that fact without detailing the fact or the connection to the inference. If I had been the analyst I would have asked about the fact. A two year finding is hardly much of a trend in demographics. Second, were there any studies of interviews of emigres to examine why they left California? Without those, there are only suppositions that are not evidence but predilections already believed in, which is that taxes rather than other matters is the main issue. As an analyst, I would look more largely as to why people move from their home state. People have been moving south ever since air conditioning and the end of legal segregation. California is spreading to satellite states like Nevada and Utah. My own family moved to Utah just three years ago because it was their ancestral home and because, yes, they found the political climate more amenable. But does that mean that going was a sign that Utahns are more insular rather than willing to intermix with people of different persuasions? That would put leaving California a bad trait rather than the good one of leaving a high tax state. As an analyst, forget whether the outcome is good or bad, only why it is happening, just part of the reasons people do thighs. Just look at the factoid bauble and don’t justify a fact with a premeditated directive but engage in facts as Newsom tried to do when he said only rich people in California had high tax rates. Analysts look at complexity not simplicity. 

I am afraid that media and public discourse very much engages in the flawed reasoning I pointed out in areas other than that of Californians going East. You take an uncertain fact and then deduce the premise that makes the fact acceptable. That reasoning leads to very extreme conclusions. Trumpists assert the fact that Jan. 6th was a lark in the park because they do not want to believe Trump was trying to overturn the government and when press footage showed otherwise it was possible to consistently say the footage had been doctored, which meant there was a vast conspiracy afoot to mislead  Trump. Facts will not get in the way of the original premise however outlandish the inference required to keep the proposition true. Analysts, on the other hand, are free to go where they will go unburdened by having to reach a set conclusion. Analysts who examined civil rights could still admit not as a concession but just as a fact that inner city gang violence was a problem  for Black advancement.

Conservatives seem particularly inclined to posit some fact, however dubious, and then infer as obvious any pet policy they may already favor.  Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is intelligent and articulate but not very sophisticated about social life, worked that in a committee hearing recently when he insisted that his witnesses answer whether there were two sexes or four or six? He was flabbergasted to find the experts could not answer that simple question. It did not occur to him that sex was a sliding scale or that biology, being what it was, would not occasionally have mismatches between sexual identity and sexual anatomy and that was as natural even if much more rare than the  usual association, and to be managed as best doctors can without adding the inference that helping people to adjust to that situation was horrific rather than humane. After all, only a minority of people are lactose intolerant and rather than blame them for that condition or try to convince them to change their minds, milk companies provide lactose free milk. Conservatives tend to say that whatever is uncustomary is unnatural.

For their part, contemporary Progressives engage in a similar short circuiting of reasoning but with a different concept than nature. They regard as a fact that minority and poor people are exploited, the rich receiving their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor and the minorities. Black slave labor allowed capitalism to flourish, some people say, and so the present day injustice is how much wealthier the rich have become rather than how just crumbs more in taxes on the rich would allow providing generous entitlements to the poor and the minorities. The inferences or compensations offered by Progressives are far afield and have to do with pet projects like reparations or District of Columbia statehood or voting rights legislation rather than looking at them on their individual merits. Why isn’t D. C. absorbed into Maryland? Why not bring back the full Voting Rights Act of the Sixties? Who would qualify for reparations? Kamala Harris? An octoroon?

Sometimes the reasoning is so short-circuited that there is no way for two sides to argue. Pro-Palestinians will say that the slaughter on Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis or that Palestinians had the right to kill women and children because of the indignities in Gaza.Then there is no alternative than war to settle the matter and the Israel-Hamas War is inevitable and very long lasting, for decades or centuries. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans seems almost as deep a cleavage in  that both Biden and Trump regard the other as anti-democracy. But advocacy can still be modified by analysis by most citizens, I like to think and I find it difficult to imagine how the two sides would engage in military combat however many Ultraconservatives imagine themselves as the descendants of Minutemen and Confederates. Just defeating Trump in 2024 would ease the advocacy, voters  forced to choose between an  insurrectionist and an institutionalist, no ifs and buts about it. A binary ballot cuts through the qualifications, the specious facts and the dubious inferences.  

Rationality is always at stake always and not only in demented times. Marcuse claimed that modern capitalism was irrational as could  be evidenced by listening to the nonsense of jingles and the insatiable consumer demands foisted by the advertisers even though rich Romans also engaged in baubles like nightingale tongues. Are they also capitalist? And why are multiple brands of bbq chicken wings so terrible? Or buying a car that shows your career accomplishment? Rather, the eclipse of reason is ever av available and cooler heads have to prevail, as Jefferson did when he explained why the Colonies needed to sever themselves from Great Britain as opposed to voicing a slogan such as “Give me liberty or give me death” just as centuries later people voiced “Better dead than Red “ in advocating against the Soviets rather than figuring a way through that. Stay calm and carry on being analytic even in bad times.

The New Speaker

Herblock, the political cartoonist of the Forties through the Seventies  who severely criticized  Richard Nixon, said that even Nixon would get a clean shave after Nixon  became President and so Nixon would be judged on the basis of what he did after he was elevated to that office. I approached Jim Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, in the same light, giving him the benefit of the doubt when, in his inaugural speech, Johnson was filled with high sounding religious invocations. Johnson said that in the Declaration of Independence God had created men as equal rather, I suppose, than that rights are a human creation, but Christians are often unfamiliar with or find it incomprehensible that Jefferson was a Deist who thought the rules of nature are the only things that apply. Johnson also said that public officials have been anointed by God, which I took to mean that when elected officials had a supernatural mandate, they should meet the highest moral standards in their legislative crafting, eschewing petty matters,so as to be Godly. So Johnson’s opposition to same sex marriage and abortion could be read as taking seriously the most important and fundamental matters and so to be respected even if I disagree with him.

My willingness to be respectful to Johnson lasted all of twenty four hours. It ended when he said that his only response to the mass murder in Lewiston, Maine was that it should be addressed with prayer concerning the evil amidst people. No legislation required. Johnson certainly doesn’t think only prayers should be addressed to the evils of abortion. He wants laws concerning it enacted. But no laws on gun control or even just quicker interventions to take away guns from mentally ill and dangerous people. So Johnson is just the same old MAGA Conservative, with Trump credentials, rather than one of the high minded religious sorts. His religion is not independent of the shibboleths of the Right about gun control, which believes that people have a right to bear arms so as to protect the people from a national army. But if that was the case, they would not stop at allowing people to have assault rifles rather than the rifles carried in the Revolutionary War. They should allow citizens to arm themselves with tanks and howitzers so as to attack the Pentagon, should that be needed. But I doubt many gun owners would accept that, and so what are the limits of gun control? As far as I have heard, Johnson doesn’t say.

Johnson is now second in line after the President, and he does not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election and so would disrupt the orderly succession of power that has existed up to then since the time of the Constitution. Representative Matt Gaetz says that the other side should recognize the Republicans are the party of Trump. I am willing to recognize that such is the case, however sad that might be to acknowledge. The “moderate” Republican members of the House are said to have caved into the extreme of the party because they are indecisive and cowardly and confused and exhausted but I think they think of party over nation and so cannot go to Jeffries and get elected a Republican Speaker who will do limited things like money for Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan and the southern border and a continuing resolution until the next year and nothing much else until the 2024 election, however unprecedented it would be to have coalition government in the House, even if constitutional, but because the Republicans could not organize themselves except under the leadership of an  extremist. Who said Trump wasn’t in charge? The GOP doesn’t need tweaking; it needs an overhaul if it is to be regarded as a legitimate party.

Faulty Indictment Arguments

Don’t expect some bombshell facts to be revealed in the indictment of Trump for the events concerning January 6th. Sometimes something new arises in a cause celebre where so many facts and strands of possible history are assembled, as when years later the real espionage was revealed that cleared Dryfuss of his name. Looking into the details of a political cause celebre usually ends in nothing, as when Jim Garrison tried to figure out who killed JFK and what happened on the grassy knoll in Dallas. We never did find out why Nixon had gone along with the Watergate cover up. Maybe it was his bad demons overcoming his statesman-like alternative instincts, as bloody as he required it to be in dealing with Vietnam. What can be said about the indictments of Trump is that they reveal just the facts covered by the House Jan. 6th Committee with added on details that a political junkie might relish.  Of more interest and moment is how arcane and contrary to ordinary psychology are the legal proceedings themselves and those will not be addressed, except here, much less reformed.

Distinguished commentators on the law, ex judicial officials themselves, say that the reason for offering up those people who worked at Mar a Lago is to show he had a guilty intent in that he was covering up his having government documents and so must have known it was wrong to take those papers. Jurors might be inclined to think that Trump must have known he had no right to those papers, quite aside from his admission that the one he flaunted around was still unclassified in that as an exPresident he could no longer do so. But we don’t know what he was showing around. Maybe it was just  boasting and there would have to be witnesses to testify that they had read the plans to invade Iran. Maybe just Joe McCarthy shuffling papers about the non existent names of those State Department Reds. 

Anyway, that is false psychology. A person can truly believe that they are in the right and therefore feel free to hide their doings so as to protect what they think is their right as happens when Huck schemes with Tom Sawyer to free Jim. The legal claim that evasion is evidence of guilt is just an assertion that is useful just so as to incriminate someone. Lawyers offer a reason so as to treat it as a proof. That does not mean there is no way to assess whether Trump was allowed to have secret papers in his possession. He could make the case that he could indeed declassify papers simply with a mental act to do so, but no lawyer is willing to say so in a court of law. Or he could explain why he needed these documents and offer proof that the Defense Department were warmongers against Iran but as an aside rather than as an explanation in a report or address that he was a whistleblower doing his duty as an ex-President, but he hasn't done that. The lack of an excuse is not an excuse and so his retaining the secrets is either vain or slovenly orf to sell for money or for any other number of reasons to which one can speculate, none of them legitimate or to be tested as legitimate.

The same false psychology and the more palatable reasons for thinking Trump criminally liable are also operative in the central case having to do with the insurrection that was regarded as justified because the election had been stolen from him. Prosecutors may offer witnesses that show experts and key politicians told Trump that he had legitimately lost the election and conclude that Trump lied about the election results. But that would just mean that Trump should have known that he rightly lost. It does not prove he believed he had lost, whether for vanity or an inherent conspiratorial nature. Most people would follow the experts, but it will be Trump on trial and so it is necessary to prove in a particular case rather than as a general practice people in such circumstances are liars. Moreover, even if prosecutors can show that Trump admitted the election was not rigged, that would not settle the matter because Trump is a notorious liar and so might be lying at some occasion for lying that the election was legit, Trump has the liar’s defense, which is that you can’t trust anything he says. Checkmate. But not quite. If he believed the election was rigged, then he might not assert that as a fact but offer the reasons for thinking so in  a statement or an interview, which he never has. You might think him incapable of the rational thought required to prepare or read such a report, but that may well be the ultimate defense, which is Trump’s mental incapacity to think through thoughts, something clear since he announced in 2015, and then the national electorate is to be chastised for ever having voted for so damaged a person, but that means Trump can and should be defeated by an electorate rather than a judiciary that would put him in an asylum rather than a jail but left off because he is harmless so long as he does not run for public office, Michael Cohen to have been blamed for his own troubles because he did not shy away from the guy as soon as getting wind of him.

Rather than the recondite aspects of the indictment, look at what is obvious on the face of it as its central features however many years it takes for a person to become aware of what is obvious and therefore undeniable and conclusive. It isn't that the meeting at the Willard Hotel of conspiratorial figures doesn’t show that the attack on the Capital was planned rather than just a protest that got out of hand, but that even better evidence of Trump’s malign intent is available on tape out of his own mouth for all to see. Jack Smith has avoided these issues so as not to be open to the accusation that what Trump did was an expression of free speech, but I will dig into that because it is the heart of the matter. Trump in his speech to the crowd on Jan. 6th was inciting riot if you pay attention to the rhetoric of his words even if he did not say explicitly that the followers should riot. He said that they should be strong. Maybe that is a reference to be clear in their determinations, to be resolved that their beliefs were proper, but it is also to say that they are determined to prevail in preventing the certification of the electoral vote, and what else were they doing milling about except to do just that when he was told to. Being just short of incendiary words does not make the words incendiary. 

Further, when Trump finally asked the rioters to go home, to cease rioting after having Trump for hours watching on tv that they had been rioting, Trump says to them that he loves them. “Loves them” for what? For merely being partisan? No, an easy inference is that he was endorsing what they had done, which was to threaten the elected Senators and Congresspeople. That is the clear meaning of the language and that is his crime, to egg on and afterwards praise an insurrection. Not just unstatesmanlike but also criminal. That is the gist of the case even if Alan Dershkowitz thinks Trump was just letting off blather. Moments count. They reveal the real motive. Words tell you what people say in their Jack Smith pile up the illegal activities Trump and his associates engaged in. What Trump said is something about which he did not lie and places him as what he was: a destroyer of the Constitution. hearts and that is enough. 

Prosecute Trump. I want him shamed though he likely won’t live long enough to go through the appeals process so that he will ever have jail time. Nixon tried to rehabilitate himself during the eternity between resignation and his death. Trump will not try rehabilitation because he will be a martyr to his cause, himself. We will just be rid of him if even his supporters decide he is too sullied to be dealt with. So I am already bored and passed beyond the indictment or future indictments to the 2024 election because the Constitution cannot protect thbed people if thbe people have gone sedriously astray.

The Politics of Drag Queens

There would seem to be a rage for drag queen events such as Drag Queen Story Time where Michelle Tea, in drag, tells stories to young people which tell them to be kind to people who are different and disclaim that the children aged three to eleven are not being groomed for sexual activities. And there are drag queen shows where families bring their children, though I don’t think I would have found that back then, but Republicans are supposed to believe that families should decide how they should conduct their children, but escorting children to drag shows was apparently a bridge too far. I do not know if such exhibitions have any impact on the children but the Republican Congress is outraged at the events, quizzing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at a committee hearing about whether they are taking place at military bases, he responding that no government money was being used, while avoiding the question of whether these events were facilitated by the military and whether soldiers retained the right to engage in free speech when off duty. Even so august a figure as a defense secretary goes out of his way to be as non confrontational as possible with Congresspeople lest he chide them for their grandstand plays, which is what I suspect they are. I sometimes wish witnesses at congressional hearings would talk back and call the Congresspeople outlandish and ridiculous rather than allow them to mouth off, always reclaiming their own time so as not to let witnesses answer the largely rhetorical questions. Ah well, the purpose of committees is, after all, to bloviate rather than develop information.

A suspicion that  politicians are out to engage in false rather than true outrage, that theory are lambasting gays because that is a group their constituents think they will like to be picked on, is evidenced to me by the long ago time when Gerald Ford, then a Michigan congressman, tried to get Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to be impeached because he had included a serious article within the pages of “Playboy”, a way for Hugh Hefner to claim it was not just a magazine of girlie pictures. I remember on camera a colleague telling Ford not to expose the pictures that were next to the Douglas article because they were so raw, however outraged Ford might be inclined to do so. But I knew Ford had been a ballet dancer as well as a football player and so probably not a prude but just hypocritical, faux angry at what would later be called a cultural issue.

But what if the current politicians are as honest as they can be about being outraged at displays of drag queen theatrics, especially including children, is not only seen as a danger to the children but also to the moral fabric of the nation? I would think then that there had indeed become a sea change in morals in that this generation had become within conservative precincts to have become much more prudish about sex since, let us say, when  women bobbed their hair and wore short skirts following the First World War. Consider a point in World War II when it seems men and women were copulating like crazy before men got shipped off to war. There was a film of 1941, just before that, called “All American Coed” starring Frances Langford about a slightly misspelled Princeton which included a drag team as part of its extracurricular activities showing off their skills, to comic effect, set to compete with an all female review of beauty queens out to strut their stuff as ringers employed by a girl college, a misspelled Bryn Mawr. Being in drag was good humored fun and children were allowed to see the movie because no qualitative ratings system had arrived. Would that movie today not be allowed? Is this today a serious enough issue on which to engage Congress?

Let us raise the ante and treat this as dealing with an issue about the morality of voting. An acquaintance of mine recently told me that she voted for the best candidate regardless of party which seemed to show that she was objective and therefore not swayed by political rhetoric. I certainly do require character and competence as bedrock or minimal standards for voting, though I remark that Republicans are more apt than Democrats to nominate questionable figures as their standard bearers. But there is also the question of the party agenda, its issues and programs, that are in a current election and persist over decades as their visions of the world. Stick to the party, I say, that has the point of view I espouse, and so be partisan. Sure, there are fringes of a party that I find I object to. After all, I came up with a party dominated by segregationists, though the Republicans were not very forward minded at the time on civil rights and that the squad of four, even though I disagree with Ilhan Omar and AOC on one or another of issues, these are serious people while Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green are not, and though I disagree with some of the Democratic agenda which seem to me wrongheaded, such as with regard to climate change, on the whole I can endorse the Democratic view, while the Republican view is anathema, as in the present instant, sincere or not, as opposing gay and transgender groups, exhibiting a meanspiritedness not likely to earn my support, not a likely prospect, even should a more moderate standard bearer emerge.  Republicans are rightly not looking to court my vote but to court the acquaintance of mine who will let and see the qualities of the person nominated. I, on the other hand, will foreclose candidates who don’t just excoriate Trump but also excoriate those who malign the minority communities that now include drag queens, who are also just human beings even if a bit quirky in how they prance around. Is it really all that difficult?

The Mer A Lago Indictment

There was already last night remarks from cable commentators on the Trump indictment regarding purloined secret documents. MSNBC pundits agree of the enormity of having an ex-President indicted for violations, among other things, of the Espionage Act, no other President ever having been accused of subverting the nation. It is a sad day that we've found ourselves in this situation, distasteful to think of anything similar to the authoritarian regimes that regularly throw in jail their defeated political opponents, which was the case in Russia and recently in Pakistan. Here is a response and a few comments on what has been said in the past day since the event of the indictment.

Lawrence O’Donnell said last night on MSNBC  that the indictment would have been less unsettling if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Nixon, allowing Nixon instead to have been indicted, and so a precedent for the idea that no one was above the law. But that context was very different. Nixon was disgraced and sorrowful of his own misdeeds. He said that he did wrong things even if his opponents had piled up on him. That was a lame excuse. Trump is unremorseful and running again for President and many of his supporters don’t care or disregard whatever he does. Commentators can find a number of people to blame for the present predicament but demur from blaming the electorate for having elected the scoundrel in the first place.  

Which leads to my own observation. The electorate for the 2024 election are not subject to the rule of law, including that Trump is innocent until convicted as guilty, when they make up their minds as to whether to nominate him again as President. They can use whatever evidence they want to use for judging a candidate, just a rumor or a bit of charm or a political disposition, or thinking that Hillary was haughty. And so there is enough evidence that Trump is a bad dude without waiting for the trial to proceed. Noone is entitled to be President even if everyone is entitled to a fair trial. So a public judgment can be made before the trial takes place. It is all up to the people again, they  having the final verdict on Trump’s political  fate.

The details of the indictment today also reveals the motive for the outrageous affronts committed by Trump to the nation. It was a simple and petty case of vanity. You would think that people who had been President were beyond this, but Trump, ever a petty man, wanted to show secret documents to political operatives only so he could show them off as in his own possession, which would have made him merely venal and amoral. Maybe he wasn’t planning to sell them to the highest bidder. How superficial can Trump be? That explains a lot of him.

The Republican leaders, for their part, are liars about the facts and, worse, unpatriotic in that they are craven to their constituents, unwilling to tell their constituents the truth, that being a higher calling than merely remaining electable, their higher calling being to lead a crisis through rather than obfuscate. It was ignoble for Trump as President to avoid what was happening with Covid, his excuse that he was shielding the people, when his duty was to speak the painful truth and many of his Republicans avoid the enormity of what Trump has done and claim, as did Nixon supporters, that everyone in politics did such shenanigans, which was not true, and as in presently the case where important Republican Trump defenders, do the same thing by conflating Trump’s appropriation of secret documents with Pence and Biden cooperating when documents were found inadvertently to have been sent to their homes.  Shame on the Republicans and don’t trust whatever they say about anything. This is the litmus test.

Bob Woodward on CNN today echoed Ben Bradley’s instruction after Nixon resigned of no gloating, and applied it to Trump. He is right in that even a Trump conviction would be just a recognition of a tragedy rather than  revenge satisfied. But don’t anticipate. Trump has weaseled out before from a lot of things managing just fines for Trump University and E. Jean Carroll. There is a long way before a  conviction much less a sentencing which I hope leaves him out of jail to live out his life without the remorse Nixon felt. That absence of humanity is on Trump.

Another observation of mine. In my generation, we turned on the television set to see if some additional major political figure had just been assassinated. Now, we await breaking news as to when Trump will be indicted in a different inquiry. Is this not progress rather than devolution?