It's Even Worse

On October 10, Politico reported

when GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence was asked about Trump’s remarks on both appointing the prosecutor and jailing Clinton, the Indiana governor called them one of the highlights of the debate.

“I thought that was one of the better moments of the debate,” Pence said. “I’m old enough to remember a day when a president of the United States erased 18½ minutes and they ran him out of town. She used high technology to erase 33,000 emails. ...[She] really hasn’t been held to account for that. What Donald Trump said is no one is above the law.

Evidently, the big guy wasn't really serious about that. Apparently, some people are believed to be above the law, given that

President-elect Donald Trump conceded Tuesday that he probably won’t make good on his campaign pledge to pursue a new criminal investigation into his political rival, Hillary Clinton.

“It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about,” he said Tuesday afternoon in an on-the-record discussion with reporters from The New York Times.

Trump cast his reversal as a unifying move that, contrary to some of the early backlash, he believes won’t upset his supporters.

“I don't think they will be disappointed. I think I will explain it that we in many ways will save our country,” he said, adding that prosecuting Clinton “would be very, very divisive for the country.”

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, however, tweeted "That's not how this works. In our democracy, the President doesn't decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn't." (Trump's democracy, though, might be different.)

If not the prosecution of Hillary Clinton, at least we'll always have Paris... or at least The Wall.

Except that we may not, because when Lesley Stahl asked the President-elect on Sunday whether there would be "part wall, part fence," Trump responded "yeah, it could be- it could be some fencing."

Nevertheless, all illegal immigrants- or at least all who can be detained- will be deported.

Maybe not, however, for when Stahl asked "what about the pledge to deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants?" Trump responded

What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.

There are constitutional limitations. Yet, if the 45th President will not retaliate against political rivals by throwing them in jail and will stress deporting illegal immigrants who have broken the law- as has the current President- couldn't we merely have kept Barack Obama in office another term and avoided the expense and aggravation of the presidential campaign?

But given that building the wall and prosecuting Clinton were arguably the most assertive (and controversial) promises of the Trump campaign, it shouldn't be surprising that the Liar-in-Chief is starting to walk back those pledges. In its place, however, President Trump is likely to pull what Talking Points Memo contributors identify as a bait-and-switch in which

The Koch policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, union busting, Medicare privatization, business deregulation, and evisceration of environmental and global warming measures is ripe to be rammed through a GOP-dominated Congress and sent to the desk of a president who needs Koch-affiliated personnel, understands very little about policy issues, and will be looking for victorious bills to sign into law. The stage is perfectly set to advance the core Koch ultra-free-market agenda, even though the brothers avoided endorsing Trump and the candidate himself discussed almost none of the relevant policy shifts in his appeals to voters.

As has been expected, Donald Trump will be a radically right-wing President. It's unlikely, however, that it will be in the manner expected and promised, but rather in the mold of the Koch brothers and allies Mike Pence and Paul Ryan.













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Poor, Poor Me

Interviewed by Fox News' Howie Kurtz Sunday, Megyn Kelly maintained

One of the purposes of writing the book was to take issue with this so-called "cupcake generation." That's what I've dubbed them, who believe they're entitled to their safe spaces , they're entitled to never being offended. 

They're all about PC culture and having grown up in a different era. I really have a  problem with this because I believe we are wussifying our children and that does not comport with real life. We're not letting them build the muscles they're going to need to function in real life, where there is upset, there is offense. These are people who behave badly at times . 

They are not encouraged to build the muscles they're going to need to function in real life. Then they get elected President of the United States of America.







Kelly had begun talking about Donald Trump, then transitioned into commenting about his supporters (about whom she is ambivalent). Asked about personal attacks upon her, she criticized young people in general, those "having grown up in a different era," as well as their parents, who are "wussifying children."  As far as we know, she wasn't, but should have been, addressing the President-elect who, The New York Times' Patrick Healy reported Saturday

demanded an apology from the cast (of Hamilton) for making a rare, politically charged appeal from the stage on Friday night to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in the audience, urging him and Mr. Trump to “uphold our American values” and “work on behalf of all of us.” Mr. Trump’s response significantly escalated an unusual protest inside a theater into a furor on social media and cable news.

Mr. Trump, who has stirred bipartisan concern over his habit of attacking those who challenge him, said on Twitter that the actors had “harassed” Mr. Pence, and he issued a battle cry to his supporters by saying that the musical’s cast had criticized “our wonderful future VP Mike Pence.” He continued to assail the show on Twitter on Saturday night, writing that the actors had been “very rude and insulting” to Mr. Pence and claiming that they “couldn’t even memorize lines” — though he offered no evidence and then deleted the message.







Presumably, part of not being "wussified" is to accept (as Kelly says she has) that "there is upset, there is offense" in life and "people who behave badly at times."  But that would not be Donald Trump, who

framed the cast's appeal as a violation of "a safe and special place"- borrowing a favored phrase of the left and of campus protesters; it was not clear whether he  did so derisively or in earnest.

That's a fair analysis but it's not an either/or. Trump probably intended his remark to be both a jab at the "safe zones' movement which his supporters believe is sweeping the nation's campuses and an argument that he is entitled to "a safe and special place."

During the campaign, Robert Kagan noted that Trump had chosen to "denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq" and to "keep it going for four days;" labeled retired Marine General John Allen "a failed general" after Allen criticized him, and fiormer New York mayor Michael Bloomberg "a very little guy" after the latter slammed the candidate.

As a candidate, he denied media credentials to media outlets he does not like and threatened to change the law so that news organizations can be more easily sued for libel. Frightened by coverage, the President-elect has chosen to travel without the press pool.

He is a guy who whines about comedy sketches, called unsupportive GOP officials "traitors," complained about the microphone at a debate, and interjected "what a nasty woman" when Hillary Clinton barely criticized him at another debate.

What a sensitive soul. "Many of Trump's supporters admire him," Kagan acknowledged, "for his bold challenge to political correctness." But in fact, the President-elect, as demonstrated by his recent hysterics about the cast of Hamilton, is far more sensitive than most of those youth Megyn Kelly sees as unable to "build the muscles they're going to need in real life." Donald Trump is not only the most sensitive of any individual elected to the office of President, he is the living, breathing embodiment of the political correctness most of his supporters are convinced they were voting against.







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And The Winner Is: Donald Trump

Once upon a time, presidential candidate Donald J. Trump criticized Judge US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, assigned to handle the federal lawsuit against for Trump's Fraud University. Trump slammed Curiel- who was born in East Chicago, Indiana- for being a Mexican and "a hater of Donald Trump."  He is "a hater," who is "a very hostile judge," Trump contended.

In June, Politics USA observed 

Legal scholars said Trump could face consequences for slamming the judge, although many speculated that Curiel was unlikely to sanction him formally.

“Mr. Trump’s conduct could be subject to sanction for indirect criminal contempt of court,” said Charles Geyh, a legal ethics expert at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.

Sanctions? Trump has gottena hug, a pat on the rear, and an "atta guy" from the man he condemned because of the latter's ethnic heritage.   Judge Curiel recently encouraged the litigants to seek a settlement, and it has paid off, at least for the president-elect. Trump is ordered to pay $21 million to settle the two class action-suits from California and $4 million from the suit filed by New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman, for a total of $25 million to be apportioned to the 7,000 students involved.

The settlement still must be approved by the Court.  However, given that Judge Curiel recently had urged the parties to work matters out and has lauded the agreement as "a healing process that this country very sorely needs," it is a done deal.








In consideration of the implication of  the case, let's fire up the wayback machine and go to 1973 when

The Justice Department sued Donald Trump, his father, Fred, and Trump Management in order to obtain a settlement in which Trump and his father would promise not to discriminate. The case eventually was settled two years later after Trump tried to countersue the Justice Department for $100 million for making false statements. Those allegations were dismissed by the court.

Fred Trump had signed a consent order which, a Trump biographer explained,

required the Trumps to place ads in newspapers saying that they welcomed black applicants. It said that the Trumps would familiarize themselves with the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination. So it also specifically said they don't admit wrongdoing, but they did have to take several measures that the Trumps had fought for two years not to take.

Criticized by his opponent, presidential candidate Trump boasted "We settled the suit with zero, with no admission of guilt."

In separate depositions, a sales executive had labeled the Trump University "a facade, a total lie" and another manager described it as a "fraudulent scheme."  However, Trump's lawyer pointed out the case was settled "without an acknowledgment of fault or liability."

"Let the healing process begin," pleads Judge Curiel. Meanwhile, Mike Pompeo, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon.  Trump wins again.







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No Similarity Whatsoever

In November, 1922, when Adolf Hitler had been Nazi party chairman for a little more than a year but had not yet gained much political power, the New York Times published an article which was re-released in February, 2015. It reported

But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.

A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: "You can't expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them."

Noting that Snopes has confirmed publication of the story, Digby snarked "He (Donald Trump) was just playing a part, right? And even if wants to do the things he says he wants to do, he can't really do them. So relax folks. He's no worse than anyone else."

Really, though, there is little reason to accuse Donald Trump of being another Hitler, especially because his anti-Semitism is quite limited.   In July, his campaign re-tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton awash in dollar bills with the words "most corrupt candidate ever" within a Star of David. However, when it was identified as anti-Semitic, the campaign substituted a tweet with the same message inside a circle instead of within a Jewish star. Further, he does have a Jewish son-in-law married to a daughter who has converted to Judaism, which means little but which at least provides window dressing.

Moreover, Trump has attacked a Judge born in Indiana for being a "Mexican," suggested the possibility of shutting down mosques, maintained the Federal government must "secure and patrol" Muslim neighborhoods (as first proposed by Ted Cruz), falsely contended he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, repeatedly raised the possibility of the President being a Muslim, suggested the possibility of detention camps for Muslim citizens as were used during World War II for Japanese-Americans, and of course, The Wall.  By contrast, the Nazis and Arab Muslims often collaborated with each other and there is no record of Adolf Hitler being particularly anti-hispanic.

Donald Trump was the most fervent birther, even claiming that he "would be revealing some interesting things," having sent an investigator to Kenya to research Barack Obama's birth. He re-tweeted inaccurate and scurrilous statistics wildly inflating the incidence of black-on-white crime, all the while aiming to stir up the emotions of supporters.  Similarly, he charged "our great African-American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and destroying Baltimore," as if there aren't white and hispanic thugs, street crimes elsewhere, and is not- as worded decades ago- "a credit to his race."







Mr. Trump at one time reportedly maintained "laziness is a trait in blacks" and during the campaign channeled slaveholders by pointing out "my African-American over here."  By contrast, Hitler's animus toward blacks was eclipsed by his hostility toward Jews.

The President-elect has criticized veterans with PTSD and demeaned American prisoners of war- such as John McCain- because "I like people who weren't captured." (Later, he bragged about the statement.)   This does not remind anyone of Adolf Hitler.

And women, of who he has said "you have to treat 'em like s_ _ _."   Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her whereever" and for Carly Fiorina "look at that face, would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next President?"    There were not four women who accused Adolf Hitler of assault or attempted assault, nor did he ever advise wealthy men to "grab them by the pussy. You can do anything." No, sir- there is no such record and no evidence Hitler ever did such things.

Some people have noted the similarity between Trump's "we're going to win so much" and Hitler's "Sieg Heil," translated as "hail victory." Nonetheless, the President-elect has never said "heil" anything.

The amateur anthropologist and head of the Third Reich branched out from genocide of Jews to oppression of other minorities, anyone he did not consider the "Aryan" ideal.  Donald Trump's anti-Semitism, though, is minimal compared to bias against other groups. He is no Hitler, and any such comparison is fallacious. Say that over and over again, and you may be as convinced as I that the President-elect doesn't believe any of the things he has said and done.







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But Congratulations On Defeating Hillary Clinton

It'a not as if we weren't warned.  Last November, professor of entrepreneurship and finance Luigi Zingales explained

As a businessman Mr. Trump has a longstanding habit of using his money and power aggressively to obtain special deals from the government. For example, his Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan was built with the benefit of a decades-long tax abatement obtained through government connections.

In 1985, Mr. Trump circumvented New York State campaign-finance laws by making a $30,000 donation, through several Trump companies, to Andrew Stein, the Manhattan borough president who was running for president of the City Council. Mr. Stein was also a member of the New York City Board of Estimate, the body then responsible for land-use decisions in New York.

Finally, Mr. Trump has a long history of promoting eminent-domain abuses to expropriate private land he wanted.

He is, in short, the essence of that commingling of big business and government that goes under the name of crony capitalism.

In short, in long, and in every way.  Yet, in her primary race against Bernie Sanders and even in the general election struggle against Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton was dogged by an alleged attachment to the fiancial industry.  One year ago, those concerns were cleverly crystallized by an uncommitted superdelegate from Florida who remarked "My parents had a saying in Spanish- 'Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres'- which means 'Tell me who you're hanging with and I'll tell you who you are.'"

If the saying is widely applicable, the media should begin speculating about what that tells us about Donald Trump, due to become in two months arguably the most powerful person in that same financial industry. Ben White in Politico magazien reports that the Trump era already is starting to represent

a restoration of Wall Street power — and a potential flip in the way the industry is regulated — perhaps unparalleled in American history.

“You would have to go back to the 1920s to see so much Wall Street influence coming to Washington,” said Charles Geisst, a Wall Street historian at Manhattan College. “It’s the most dramatic turn-around one could imagine. That’s the truly astonishing part.”

Evidence of Wall Street’s improved prospects is everywhere.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bedeviled the industry for years and cost banks untold billions could soon get burned to the ground. Bank stocks are soaring. Trump is going around Manhattan promising to lower rich people’s taxes. And industry critics led by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — long in ascendance — are seeing their populist power deflate.

The anti-banker culture of Washington has been turned on its head in an instant. And the industry can barely believe its good fortune. “Those of us who have been around D.C. for a long time, are we relieved that we are not going to be subpoenaed every week? Of course we are,” said Richard Hunt, head of the Consumer Bankers Association.

The smart guys and gals of Wall Street know who represents their interests as

Bank stocks are up by around 10 percent since Trump’s win, according to the KBW Bank Index, as investors contemplate an agenda tailor-made for the industry including deregulation and potentially higher interest rates sparked by significant deficit spending. Bankers themselves also stand to make a killing.   Massive tax cuts including an elimination of the estate tax and big reductions for top earners seem like slam dunks in Trump’s Washington.

They can barely contain their glee now that the Democratic nominee has gone down swinging:

Wall Street bankers and their Washington lobbyists are quietly celebrating. They went from expecting fresh crackdowns from a Hillary Clinton administration with Warren wielding heavy influence to the cusp of a deregulatory bonanza with Republicans in complete control of Washington.

They may as well be laughing at those blue-collar, working-class Trump voters as

“There is a joke going around here that if I’d have known how good Trump was going to be for Wall Street, I’d have campaigned for him,” said one Goldman Sachs executive who declined to be identified by name speaking about the incoming president. “What people are reacting to is this incredible cultural shift. People thought it might be 10 or 15 years until regulators stopped demanding heads and now all of a sudden you can envision it happening overnight.

Writing in The New Republic after a Clinton-Sanders debate, Elizabeth Bruenig- citing Clinton's effort "to downplay her relationship with Goldman Sachs and to win trust for her (inadequate) plans for Wall Street regulation"- actually questioned her commitment to overturning Citizens United, a court decision HRC is as fond of as Jared Kushner is of Chris Christie. However, we were warned by Zingales, and Bruenig and others should not be surprised, now that the Democratic nominee has been swept aside, that big bankers can barely contain their glee:

Wall Street bankers and their Washington lobbyists are quietly celebrating. They went from expecting fresh crackdowns from a Hillary Clinton administration with Warren wielding heavy influence to the cusp of a deregulatory bonanza with Republicans in complete control of Washington

They may as well be laughing at those blue-collar, working-class Trump voters as

“There is a joke going around here that if I’d have known how good Trump was going to be for Wall Street, I’d have campaigned for him,” said one Goldman Sachs executive who declined to be identified by name speaking about the incoming president. “What people are reacting to is this incredible cultural shift. People thought it might be 10 or 15 years until regulators stopped demanding heads and now all of a sudden you can envision it happening overnight. 

A CEO of a financial reform group notes "candidate Trump understood the American people's disgust with Washington's bipartisan business-as-usual corruption where the biggest corporations nd Wall Street's too-big-to-fail banks in particular buy access and influence to promote their special interests."

Surely, Candidate Trump understood it.  President-elect Trump is just fine with it.












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Resentment, The Real "R Word"

"If you looked only at the exit polls, you might conclude that 2016 was a "change election,'" Vox's Lee Drutman wrote Tuesday.

Those would be the polls and, at least to some extent President Obama, who on the same day claimed "last I checked, a pretty healthy majority of the American people agree with my worldview on a bunch of things." He suggested that Donald Trump was elected because American voters wanted to "shake things up" much as those in the United Kingdom did by opting for the British to exit the European Union.

Emphasis on polls has spread, even to this Washington Post reporter, who actually believes that the 17% of Trump voters who said they approve of the President were being truthful. He probably believes that a full 56% of the American people approve of the job Obama is doing.

Let's review.  It is now widely and legitimately speculated that there was a significant "silent vote" for Trump, in which voters were afraid to admit to pollsters they were going to vote for him.  Pre-election surveys indicated Hillary Clinton would win a majority of the electoral vote and probably out-poll the Republican by 3-4 points. And that was without including the vaunted Clinton voter turnout operation, which could be expected to add approximately one point to her net advantage.

Clinton fell approximately two-and-a-half points behind what should have been expected, implying that not all likely voters were truthful with pollsters. And yet we are to assume that 55-60% like what President Obama is doing and that a large number of  individuals opting for Trump really are quite satisfied with Obama's job performance.  And it is actually less difficult to fib about supporting the President than it is about one's upcoming vote, because in the latter instance the voter would in fact be acting contrary to  her stated wishes.

Maybe, nonetheless, it was primarily a change election.  Drutman notes,  however, that roughly 50 percent of voters in any election will want change because they want the in party to be thrown out. Moreover

Considerable political science evidence shows that voters pick the candidates they like and then decide on the issues that are important to them based on what the candidate prioritizes. The survey might as well have substituted "Can bring needed change" with "Make America Great Again." It would tell us about as much about what voters actually wanted.

"But," he continues, "there's an even larger problem with the 'change election' narrative," which is

that these same voters who allegedly wanted "change" overwhelmingly sent their career politicians a strong "change" message by reelecting them to Washington. That'll teach them!

Of 393 House incumbents who sought reelection, only five lost in the primaries, and only eight lost in the general election. For those of you keeping score at home, that's 97 percent of incumbents reelected. Only two incumbent senators, Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), lost. And Kirk, a Republican in a deep blue state, was always a long shot to win reelection.

Of 466 seats up in both the House and the Senate, 445 stayed in the same party. Again, for those of you keeping score at home, that's 96 percent of congressional seats staying in the same party.

And once all the votes are counted, Hillary Clinton will have won the national popular vote by only a little less than Barack Obama won it in 2012.

For a so-called "change" election, this is a whole lot of status quo.

There are powerful forces which  want us to believe that Hillary Clinton was rejected by an American electorate which is quite happy with the first black President.  It falls to Henry Louis Gates to explain that the President's

54 percent approval rating was completely undermined by the result of the election. Hillary hitched her wagon to him; she clearly identified herself with Obama. But it didn’t work. There was a shocking amount of resentment that a black family had been in the White House for two terms.

I think it would be naive to overlook it — the irony that one of the legacies of Obama’s presidency was an enormous amount of resentment. And not his fault at all. I don’t think a Donald Trump could have emerged without a black president. Donald Trump tapped into and fueled and stoked an enormous amount of racial resentment. And Obama symbolized it.

As Gates understands, this is only part of the explanation for Trump's victory. However, it is largely ignored because if we were generally to acknowledge it, we would be forced to look inside the American psyche and find things considerably disqueting. As one of Albert Camus' characters put it, "For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life. Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy o' nights, mustn't they? Really it would be in shockingly bad taste to linger on such details."






















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An Activist He's Not

Jonathan Chait argues

And so the man who thought he was through with politics has, it turns out, one more essential role left: Beginning next year, Obama needs to rally the opposition, to community-organize his coalition, and to exploit his celebrity to make the case for saving his legacy. His visibility alone would serve a vital function.

He adds

Obama is a powerful symbol of rationalism, thoughtfulness, and pluralism -- the ultimate anti-Trump, both ideologically and symbolically. Women, religious minorities, immigrants and prospective immigrants, transgender people, young Africans with iPhones, the beat-down opposition in places like Russia and China, and the people who bully all the preceding groups and more -- the whole planet, really -- need reminding that Obama’s version of America has prevailed before and will prevail again.

A much more than skeptical Steve M. responds

But we see how Obama is reacting to Trump's election. He's trying to ensure a smooth handover of power -- and I don't believe that's just in order to show that he's a better man than Trump. I think Obama genuinely believes that peaceful transitions are a hallmark of American democracy. I also think he learned a long time ago how not to be the angry man who rocks the boat, and he's reverting to that mode of behavior now.

If Obama is acting this way after the election of a man who's treated him with utter contempt (and whom he clearly despises), why should we expect him to to cast aside the tradition that an ex-president shouldn't criticize a sitting president?

Only time will tell. But wait- we already know.

The "most undercovered story of 2016," Ari Berman tweeted on Election Day, is that "today is 1st presidential election in 50 years without full protections of Voting Rights Act."   Mrs. Clinton reportedly has noted "There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful … our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.” And then there is the matter of the electoral college system.

Meanwhile, back at the office of Please Don't Notice That Mrs. Clinton Ran for a Third Obama Term, the President told reporters

You know, I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points. There are some counties maybe I won that people didn’t expect because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.

"It would be nice to have him leading the battle," Steve M. concludes, "but we really shouldn't count on it."  Not count on it? We can bet the ranch against it.






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