Keith Olbermann continues leading The Resistance against the failure in the White House, with another epic edition detailing “some” of the individuals and organizations who have called it quits on Trump!
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Year: 2017
An outspoken critic of Donald Trump spoke in a recent interview and called #45 a “flat-out blatant racist!”
Robert De Niro tore into President Trump in an interview published this week, calling him a “flat-out blatant racist.”
“If he was smart, he’d be even more dangerous. He’s dangerous as it is,” the “Wizard of Lies” actor told Deadline.
“He’s terrible, and a flat-out blatant racist and doubling down on that, and it’s good that he does because he’s going to sink himself.”
Trump has become increasingly isolated since he concluded last Tuesday, that decent Americans protesting racism are the same as the KKK, White Supremacists and Nazis. Americans of all political persuasion have correctly denounced the man in the White House, some even saying that he “lacks the moral decency” necessary to lead the country.
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Why Are We Debating Hate?
Finally, the president has united much of the country. Unfortunately for him, most of the country opposes what he stands for.
Yes, there are still many people who support the president and believe that his equating violence on both sides was appropriate, but a larger majority sees the danger in his saying that the Nazis and the counter-protesters in Charlottesville were morally similar. That the opposition to his words came from around the world and across the political spectrum tells you that this was no victory for Trump. And his decision to stay away from the Kennedy Center Honors program this year is not just a tactical retreat; it’s a rout. He’s not the first president to skip the ceremony, but the reason is different from why other presidents didn’t go: because his appearance would be a major distraction.
At this point, the president has been rebuked by corporate leaders, members of his arts council, and even James Murdoch, who is so afraid that American Jews, and even Israel, will see the president’s words as doing major damage, that he threw a million dollars at the Anti-Defamation League to stanch the bleeding. And where is Benjamin Netanyahu? The right-wing protector of Israeli and Jewish values has been remarkably silent on Trump’s atrocious choice of words. The company you keep, you know.
The point is that Charlottesville will likely be one of those turning points in our history. It will lead to major changes across the political spectrum and in the way that ordinary people view and talk about race. They will have to do this without moral leadership from the White House unless Trump decides that he needs to be more magnanimous and makes a prime-time speech calling for a more united country. OK, I’ll wait until you stop laughing. But I do really wish it would happen.
It is clear that we cannot expect President Trump to act presidential or to stand up and defend all of the citizens of this great country. In such a leadership vacuum, we run the risk that other noxious voices will try to fill the silence. And we also run the risk that violence will be seen as the tactic of choice.
Don’t let that happen. Be the moral voice that says the right words, the courageous words, the words that embrace instead of repel. Do not equivocate. And of course, agitate, agitate, agitate.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
With all that Charlottesville means now and will mean in the future, this much is clear: Donald Trump is probably the most genuine president we’ve ever had.
- He is a genuine racist.
- He is genuinely ignorant of United States History.
- He genuinely believes that there is a moral equivalency between those who hate and those who want to stop the hate.
- He is genuinely a terrible businessman.
- He genuinely thinks that he, and only he, can have a correct opinion on an issue.
- He has genuinely done damage to the office of the president of the United States.
But we should have known, shouldn’t we? After all, Trump ran on a white nationalist platform that blamed the country’s troubles on President Obama, immigrants, foreign countries, multiculturalism, political correctness and amorphous values that it’s clear Trump does not value. The far right-wing groups that include members of the KKK and Nazis are lauding his remarks from Saturday and Tuesday, remarks that placed equal blame for the violence on civil rights, justice and anti-hate groups. He claims to have seen footage and watched it closer “than anybody else,” (I’m not sure how you do that), then determined that it showed an equivalence that ignored reality.
Because people walking down a street chanting “Jews will not replace us” is that same as…people walking down the street in 1935 saying the same thing. In German.
And that brings up another trope of the Trump catastrophe. He says that he’s not racist or anti-Semitic because his daughter married Jared Kushner, who is Jewish and Orthodox, and then she converted. This is, and please pardon the disconnection, hogwash. I married into a Catholic family and while both parents seem(ed) to like me, they both harbor(ed) terrifically ugly anti-Semitic attitudes. They both deny(ied) their prejudice, but it was there just below the pleasant surface. So when Trump talks about his bona-fides, I don’t believe him for a second. And clearly, he has little regard for Kushner’s feelings as evidenced by his refusal to paint racist hate group violence for what it is.
As for history, the president seems to think that Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Stonewall Jackson are morally equal to George Washington because, after all, they all owned slaves. Never mind that the first three allied themselves, as treason, with a government that wanted to break up the United States, enshrine slavery as a constitutional right, and to rip up the laws that George Washington fought to establish and then helped to create. And after the Civil War was over, Forrest and others decided that they could not live in a country where the freed slaves had the same rights as white men. They then created a legal system that ignored the constitution and brutally killed African-Americans for more than a century.
The consequences are already unfolding. CEOs, you know, the people Trump said would help him rebuild the economy, have already left the Manufacturing Council and the Policy Forum as a protest over his remarks. And I’m sure more will follow.
But the real damage he’s done is embolden some frightening sociopaths who want to do damage to me, my relatives, and my friends and acquaintances, who encompass a multitude of races, religions, ethnicities, genders and sexual choices. He’s said that Nazi ideology is equivalent to civil rights activists.
The President of the United States believes all of this. Think about that!
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
At this point, the main difference between President Trump’s (shudder) relationship with Kim Jong-un and Mitch McConnell is that Trump has asked only McConnell to resign. Kim just gets the bluster treatment. Of the two, McConnell is in the biggest trouble.
Here in New Jersey, and only about 10 miles from the president’s retreat in Bedminster, there is calm. The area is primarily Republican, so most of the population either supports Trump or would never think of voting Democratic no matter who’s on the ballot. In fact, Bedminster, one of the horsiest places in the state, is fast becoming more Democratic due to the building of a huge condominium development, the Hills, back in the 1980s. Prior to that, the area was solidly GOP when the party was sensible. The Hills included the demon seed of New Jersey politics, affordable housing, which brought in moderate income people like me, and just like that, Democrats began being elected in the land of Malcolm Forbes.
There’s a reason that wealthy towns in New Jersey fight tooth and nail not to have to build affordable housing, or prefer to sell their housing credits to more, ahem, modest towns. Of course, you’ll never hear Trump talk about affordable housing or how the neighborhood surrounding his golf club is changing. That’s for losers. Not winners like him who’ve signed major legislation to…to…so sad!
It is in this context that our chief executive has taken to his Twitter account, threatening fiery death, destruction, ruin and an eternity in hell to…Mitch McConnell, whom the president blames for not getting a terrible, horrible, hellfire health care bill through Congress, a Congress that finally realized the political peril of throwing 22 million people off their healthcare. That’s not good enough for our once and future dear leader. He was absolutely no help in the process, mainly because he knows nothing about health care policy, and focused on threatening Senators who have stouter backbones than he does and who do not fear his empty suit.
Now Trump wants tax reform and infrastructure, but these will fail for the same reasons that repeal and replace failed; because the president does not know enough to lead on these issues and cannot speak in more than 140 character bursts. Tax reform is also looking more and more like reform to make wealthier people even more wealthy, while here in New Jersey we might lose the state tax deduction, which will result in the savaging of the middle class taxpayer.
Infrastructure will also go badly because the plan is for the government to spend $200 billion and private industry to spend $800 billion. But if there’s no profit, why would private concerns pony up that kind of money? It’s pretty obvious that we, the people, will end up paying more in fees and tolls to reimburse the private concerns, who might cut corners if their projects turn out to be too costly. Say what you will about public works projects; most of them last if you maintain them.
All this will be moot if we get into a nuclear war with North Korea, which we won’t. And without a coherent policy, or an actual diplomat in South Korea to carry our messages – which we don’t actually have – this will remain a war of words which we can’t win. And our allies and China should now be convinced that our man in the White House cannot be trusted to confer with them or to behave diplomatically. Trump figures he can yell at them like he did the plumbers and spackle guys in his towers when they didn’t do the job as he expected. Then he stiffed them.
What Trump did with North Korea is the diplomatic equivalent of stiffing a contractor. We, the people, unfortunately, will get stuck paying the invoice with our souls.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Thank goodness for government leaks and the leakers who leak them.
From the Pentagon Papers to the transcripts of President Trump’s (shudder) conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia, leaks of government information have overwhelmingly benefited the country. They serve the interests of democracy. They uncover that which the ruling class would like to keep covered. They embarrass those who, on balance, should be embarrassed. And they lay bare the conceit that the public cannot handle certain information.
After all, think of what we’ve learned about Michael Flynn and Russia and Jared Kushner and Mike Pence and James Comey and Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump. We’ve learned that each and every one of these people had something to hide. We learned that they lied, sometimes under oath. We learned that they did not follow the letter of the law or treat all examples of wrongdoing equally. And we learned that the president simply is not prepared intellectually or temperamentally for his job.
So now the president has a new Chief of Staff, John Kelly, who is renowned for not smiling much and for being a military guy who will bring order and discipline to the White House. He got rid of Anthony Scaramucci, which was not just a low-hanging-fruit moment, it was Kelly picking up a rotten apple and flinging it into the Potomac. Next up will be investigations, extreme vetting of current and potential executive branch hirings, and firings of those who are adjudged as insufficiently kowtow-ish.
What he, or any other White House employee, will not stop are the leaks. The simple truth is that there are just too many people in government who see the danger that Trump represents. It’s one thing to oppose policy, whether it’s about Vietnam, the Cold War, missile defenses, Israel, bugging, or a military man who sets up a shadow government in the bowels of the White House. It’s quite another to have a president who doesn’t know the limits the constitution puts on his power. We’ve already seen cabinet members express their personal fealty to Donald Trump, not to the constitution or the American people. We’ve heard the president complain that Jeff Sessions did not have his back when Sessions correctly recused himself from the Russia investigation. We’ve also heard him talk about other government officials who don’t support him personally.
Under these circumstances, it is incumbent upon those who can uncover circumspect, illegal and immoral actions to uncover them. To publish them. To post them. To shout them.
So leakers, please keep taking leaks. Especially with this crew in the White House.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Everyone is concerned. They want to know what New Jersey governor Chris Christie said to the fan at a Milwaukee Brewers game in Wisconsin. But I’m not. I don’t care about that. I want to know about the skills Christie demonstrated in his left hand.
A bowl filled with nachos and cheese and the like, or a loaded hot dog as some are reporting, managed to stay perfectly perched, resting in comfort as the New Jersey governor bend awkwardly over to scold the fan. I wanna know about the kind of balance required to pull of such a feat!
But for those who insist on knowing about the one-sided conversation, reports say Christie asked the man whether he wanted to “act like a big shot” and then told him to “be careful.”
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At #Cubs #Brewers game. #ChrisChristie was getting razzed by fans, so he got in the face of one of them. 5:30 on @WISN12News pic.twitter.com/sx8euMgFy2
— Ben Hutchison (@BennyHutch) July 30, 2017
American Heroes Week is firmly in the rear-view mirror. But as we celebrate our heroes – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John McCain and every Senate Democrat – it’s important to remember that every American can be a hero every day simply by living a positive, moral, thinking, compassionate, empathetic, reflective life and acting on those values every day. Even a child knows that these behaviors are in everybody’s interests.
And then there’s the current administration in Washington. They talk about those values, but most of the time they fail to live up to them. This past week is a prime example.
The Republican healthcare crash and burn (or maybe not) should not surprise anyone who understand how insurance works and how much having health coverage affects other life decisions. A bill that would take coverage away from upwards of 22 million people or that would allow states to let insurance companies sell ‘cut-rate’ policies that cover… well… nothing, or have sky-high deductibles is not a bill that should even be written, much less voted on.
And yet.
The clear, unequivocal truth is that after 7 years of bleating and babbling, the Republican Party still had no idea how to solve or improve the health insurance issue in this country. And the president (shudder) showed that he doesn’t have any political or persuasive skills he can call on to get legislation done. All he knows is to threaten, and tweet-shame, and complain to Boy Scouts that it’s everybody else’s fault except his. His ignorance of policy and his drive to get anything passed simply to say it’s been passed is dangerous, as last week showed. His leadership skills are likewise impotent and very few, if any, legislators fear his wrath.
But that’s what happens when a minority of people elect an unqualified outsider who doesn’t know how to do the job of being this country’s leader.
That would be a full week for most presidents, but the palace intrigue that resulted in both Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus exiting the administration because of Anthony Scaramucci’s appointment is the stuff of farce. I have some respect for Spice now because after reading Scaramucci’s rant against Priebus it looks like old Sean has a good grasp of Scaramucci’s character. We will see more people exiting the administration only to be replaced by sycophants and fringe know-nothings whose only qualification is that they’re loyal to, and love Trump.
Of course, the irony of Trump speaking in front of the Boy Scouts and appointing a foul, vile, self-obsessed capo in the same week is rather tasty. Scaramucci threatening to kill leakers adds another merit badge to the mix, yes?
None of this is a real surprise given that I’ve lived in Chris Christie’s New Jersey for the past 8 years. He’s set the tone for Trump and his ilk by demonizing the people and groups who oppose him, and flaunting laws that should apply to everyone but not to him. Beach photos anyone?
At some point, and we might have reached it, the Republican Party will need to make critical decision: Do they keep supporting the president or do they barrel forward on their own. For Democrats, this is not an appealing choice. But for the good of the country Congress will need to make sure basic American institutions survive a man who clearly has not read the Constitution and has no interest in doing so.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
If the past six months is any guide, then most politicians – corporate executives and foreign leaders – have little to fear from Donald Trump. He has turned out to be a wildly ineffective manager, deal maker and communicator, and with turnover in his administration expected to be high over the coming months (Sean Spicer is just the beginning), the president (shudder) will find it even more difficult to project an image of competence and efficiency.
Are you surprised?
You shouldn’t be. Despite running, and being perceived, as the great business executive who would bring a corporate approach to the sprawling wildness of government, Donald Trump has turned out to be a terrible administrator. Yes, he does tweet on a regular basis and I’m sure his fans find it reassuring that the country is deporting millions of undocumented people, undermining environmental laws and generally blaming the free press for his troubles, but this is no way to get any of the big things we need accomplished in a timely manner.
Even if the health care bill comes back from the dead this week, I really can’t see enough GOP support for a measure that has a 32-million-people-losing-insurance-price-tag on it passing, although I have underestimates the cruelty and blind ignorance of the Republican Party before.
The bigger problem is that Donald Trump doesn’t know how to sell policy or to focus his administration’s message on passing a solid piece of legislation. Of course, it’s very difficult to sell a law that you probably haven’t read and even if you did you don’t really understand it, which likely describes Trump’s role in this process. Add in the fact that it contradicts his campaign promise that he would get a bill that covers everybody cheaply and get it fast.
Strike three, no?
But the real issue is that not a lot of stakeholders in Washington or otherwise actually fear Donald Trump, and with good reason. He was leading from the rear on health care, entering the fray only in the last couple of days when it was clear that most Americans hated the new law and many GOP Senators could not bring themselves to vote for it. He has removed the United States from any meaningful leadership position on climate, and by extension, jobs, by taking us out of the Paris Climate Accords. He nixed the Pacific Trade Agreement and his threats to Mexico and Canada about renegotiating NAFTA are meeting the reality that those other countries actually have national interests of their own that Trump cannot just dismiss.
And, you know, there is the very sensitive issue of the fact that Donald Trump did not receive a majority of popular votes in the 2016 election. If most people don’t vote for you, it’s difficult to rally the will of the American people around your agenda when your agenda is basically…Donald Trump and his interests. The investigation into potential, OK, nonexistent voter fraud in the election has led to a severe backlash from Republican and Democratic state officials who are rightly balking at handing over voter rolls and Social Security numbers to Trump’s crack(pot) investigator who believes that voter fraud is rampant.
In fact, the only fear I have this week is that Trump or one of his minions will fire Robert Mueller because he’s edging a bit closer to saying that the president has to turn over his tax returns which, I am convinced, is the real motivating factor behind Trump trying to forestall the Russia investigation. I’m sure he’s been told that if the Benghazi investigation can lead to the discovery of Hillary Clinton’s home email server, then there’s no reason why Mueller can’t go a little far afield of Russia and focus on Trump’s financial dealings.
Now the president is also talking about issuing pardons to those people who are under investigation, and is even asking if he can pardon himself.
Does Trump understand that in order to receive a pardon, the person must admit to having committed a crime? My sense is that he doesn’t. And I really can’t see Trump admitting to obstruction of justice or any other high crime or misdemeanor. What he really wants is to end the investigations, but pardons won’t do that. This is going to get as ugly as most other issues have since January 20.
In the meantime, we have a blustery executive with no real policy knowledge and even less intellectual discipline trying to tell all of the Republicans in Congress that he’ll crack the whip if they don’t vote for bills he wants. This is folly. I’m more than happy to have the country do nothing than to do something awful in the name of party discipline.
And I think that’s exactly what will happen. What a waste.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
I’m curious.
Just how many people have to lose their health insurance before the Republicans in Congress shout, “Eureka! We have done it?”
Obviously 22 million people is too many. But what happens if the Congressional Budget Office comes back this week and says that the new, not-really-improved Trumpcare bill will only result in 19 million or 15 million or 11 million people losing their health insurance? Is that number small enough for the GOP to claim success in their quest to not-really-repeal-but-just-do-something-so-the-base-thinks-that-Obamacare-is-dead?
It speaks volumes about the state of the right wing in this country that they will sacrifice so many Americans in the name of…what? Fiscal prudence, as if saving some money off the deficit will make up for the ruined lives? The promise to repeal the ACA even though the GOP STILL hasn’t quite thought through the ramification of their actions? The misguided, indeed immoral, view that many conservatives have of the poor as undeserving couch potatoes who have no innate responsibility and are addicted to government programs? Never mind that millions of the people who will lose insurance voted for the president (shudder) and/or live in states where the opioid epidemic is raging through both city and farm. Cutting Medicaid would be a disaster for those people.
And if you think it’s just the poor who will lose, then please think again. If you plan on growing old, then you need to read all of the articles by Ron Lieber about how the Medicaid debate will affect you later in life. Medicaid is not just for those we generally think of when we think of the poor. It also pays for elderly people who, oddly enough, don’t believe they will suffer from dementia, or contract a debilitating illness, or fall and break their hip or just plain run out of money because they didn’t save quite enough through a retirement plan.
Add this to the fact that Medicaid also covers millions of children who will lose their coverage if this Senate bill passes. And even without the Trumpcare cuts, the president’s budget proposal would reduce health insurance coverage for CHIP. These are children that we see in our public schools who need far more support than just learning how to read. They come to school without the guarantee that if something happens to them, they’ll be covered. Further cuts to school lunch and nutrition programs will complete this cruel turn the GOP thinks will help the country.
The Republican dream of turning Medicaid into a state grant program is also seriously and fatally misguided. States will likely use the money to shore up finances in other programs since, unlike the federal government, they must balance their budgets. And the GOP plan forces states to make choices that they should not have to make concerning who gets aid and who doesn’t. Medicaid was created to cover all people who qualified for it. Changing that will produce winners and losers, which of course means those who live and those who don’t.
In the end, the Senate and House plans will create lower cost health insurance pl;ans, but what people will get for their money will cost them far more when they actually need care. Sky-high deductibles will negate the low premiums as people will be forced to pay full price until their deductible kicks in. And allowing insurance companies to sell policies that don’t include maternity care, mental health insurance or drug treatment coverage will make the cost of those options go up for those that do need it.
As business savvy as the Republican Party, and the president, think they are, they still haven’t learned that insurance is all about spreading the risk so that those who don’t make many claims pay for those who do, which evens out the cost. Having an a la carte health care system is a recipe for higher costs and lower outcomes as those who can pay will, and those who can’t, won’t get care.
The GOP seems oblivious to this, but they do have a number. This week we’ll learn what that is.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest
Everyone should know by now that Donald Trump lies, and he lies a lot! So when he walked away from the G-20 Summit calling it “a great success,” well, everyone already knew he was lying.
Enter Chris Uhlmann, the political editor for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He had a totally different and quite frankly, more believable take on Trump’s G-20 visit than Trump and his minions at the White House.
“We learned that Donald Trump has pressed fast-forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader,” Uhlmann said on air in a segment that has gone viral. “He managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies, and to diminish America.”
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What did we learn about @realDonaldTrump at this #G20? @CUhlmann explains. #Insiders pic.twitter.com/TGOXdiFWhB
— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) July 8, 2017
If you care deeply about social and racial justice, value equal opportunity, detest discrimination and believe that this country needs to focus on its core values of tolerance, compromise, equality and democracy, then fear not.
America’s educators have got your back.
I returned from the National Education Association (NEA) convention in Boston last week feeling a great deal better about this country’s direction than I get from watching or reading the news these days. The 7,000 strong NEA Representative Assembly, made up of educators, and the largest deliberative democratic body in the world when it meets, voted decisively in favor of making sure that if nowhere else, this country’s teachers, educational support personnel, children and young adults would be valued, protected, empowered and educated in America’s public schools. We also plan to use the power of solidarity and numbers to move what we consider to be the country’s vital interests forward through the political process, protests and community action.
It was interesting to listen to colleagues who described their states and school districts in glowing terms, but also with a sense that the new administration in Washington is not looking out for our children. Some described ICE raids on their schools and workplaces that create fear and suspicion in their communities. They also described the dire effects that poverty, hunger, disease and psychological issues have on our students. The RA also learned about the deleterious effects of state and national budget cuts on our schools and on our ability to solve the pressing problems that schools and students face today.
By the end of the RA, though, I felt a bit brighter. As a democratic body, we affirmed the NEA’s place in our society as a beacon of justice and a protector for those who desperately need it. We approved policies that will use the voice of millions of educational professionals across the country to pressure states and local governments to address educational equity, reduce the time that children spend on taking standardized tests, to gather and disseminate information on racial, gender, sexual and economic inequality, to publicize educational programs that work in schools and to reaffirm the power of a unified association in a country that seems to have lost its sense that unions are a vital, pulsating, guiding force for now and for our future.
Education must continue to be a bulwark against the high tide of intolerance and ignorance that can negatively affect children. We are here to lead that fight and to defend our country’s values.
For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest