How to come out of a punch drunk moment

Erudite Partner is out with a new essay for this moment, here available, among many outlets, from Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment. 

Half of us got kicked in our heads and guts by the re-election of Donnie the dimwitted and his merry band of cowards and grifters. We're going to have to figure out how to live through and beyond this unmitigated disaster for the American republic.

Survival and hope will depend on learning to see and live in the gaps ...

Finding Hope in the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era

... What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

Go read it all.  

For myself, I'm coming out of the numbed phase and reconnecting with appropriate rage at the injustice, cruelty, greed and foolishness that characterize what appears to be on offer from the new regime. Let's figure out how to kick these dopes where it hurts -- in their bank accounts and in their over-valued balls (figuratively of course).

Trump hastens imperial decline

We're having gale force winds and intermittent outages this morning, so I am not going to try to write anything that requires coherent attention. Here I share a piece to ponder for the new year.

Author Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who specializes in Southeast Asia. Juan Cole passed this along by way of TomDispatch.

The End of the American Century

... let’s face it, Donald Trump’s second term is likely to mark the end of America’s near-century as the world’s preeminent superpower. After 80 years of near-global hegemony, there are arguably five crucial elements necessary for the preservation of U.S. world leadership: robust military alliances in Asia and Europe, healthy capital markets, the dollar’s role as the globe’s reserve currency, a competitive energy infrastructure, and an agile national security apparatus.

 However, surrounded by sycophants and suffering the cognitive decline that accompanies aging, Trump seems determined to exercise his untrammeled will above all else. That, in turn, essentially guarantees the infliction of damage in each of those areas, even if in different ways and to varying degrees.

America’s unipolar power at the end of the Cold War era has, of course, already given way to a multipolar world. Previous administrations carefully tended the NATO alliance in Europe, as well as six overlapping bilateral and multilateral defense pacts in the sprawling Indo-Pacific region. With his vocal hostility toward NATO, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, Trump is likely to leave that alliance significantly damaged, if not eviscerated.

In Asia, he prefers to cozy up to autocrats like China’s Xi or North Korea’s Kim Jong-un instead of cultivating democratic allies like Australia or South Korea. Add to that his conviction that such allies are freeloaders who need to pay up and America’s crucial Indo-Pacific alliances are unlikely to prosper, possibly prompting South Korea and Japan to leave the U.S. nuclear umbrella and become thoroughly independent powers.

Convinced above all else of his own “genius,” Trump seems destined to damage the key economic components of U.S. global power. With his inclination to play favorites with tariff exemptions and corporate regulation, his second term could give the term “crony capitalism” new meaning, while degrading capital markets. His planned tax cuts will add significantly to the federal deficit and national debt, while degrading the dollar’s global clout, which has already dropped significantly in the past four years.

In defiance of reality, he remains wedded to those legacy energy sources, coal, oil, and natural gas. In recent years, however, the cost of electricity from solar and wind power has dropped to half that of fossil fuels and is still falling. For the past 500 years, global power has been synonymous with energy efficiency. As Trump tries to stall America’s transition to green energy, he’ll cripple the country’s competitiveness in countless ways, while doing ever more damage to the planet.

Nor do his choices for key national security posts bode well for U.S. global power. If confirmed as defense secretary, Peter Hegseth, a Fox News commentator with a track record of maladministration, lacks the experience to begin to manage the massive Pentagon budget. Similarly, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has no experience in that highly technical field and seems prone to the sort of conspiracy theories that will cloud her judgment when it comes to accurate intelligence assessments.

Finally, the nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already promising to punish the president’s domestic critics rather than pursue foreign agents through counterintelligence, the bureau’s critical responsibility.

By the time Trump retires (undoubtedly to accolades from his devoted followers), he will have compressed two decades of slow imperial decline into a single presidential term, effectively ending Washington’s world leadership significantly before its time.

If US imperial decline would be good for most Americans or most other peoples, one could applaud. But that's hard for me to believe, even though I've spent a life fighting American imperial impositions on the rest of the world. The imperial ambitions of the Russia, China, North Korea and Iran axis don't look benign. Hard times ahead and Mr. Trump is a fire accelerator.

An introductory penalty for mass folly

Josh Marshall's observation on the national shit show tickled my curiosity. Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and the Republican Congressional majority are giving the American people an early taste for this Christmas of what it is like to flunk governing. Marshall, grounded in history as usual, observes:

Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber [river]. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while.

I had a dim notion of the ancient execution practice Marshall is referencing here, but it seemed worth a little superficial research. Fortunately, Wikipedia is strong on this one; it's the sort of topic on which some devoted volunteer editor produces extensive, probably reasonably accurate, history.

Apparently the Poena cullei  (Latin, 'penalty of the sack') was a punishment  for parricide, murder of the father, in the Roman-influenced world. A variant was still practiced all the way up until the mid-18th in a few German city states

The punishment consisted of being sewn up in a leather sack, with an assortment of live animals including a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster, and then being thrown into water. 

The variation that included a cat seems a late addition; the viper and a chicken seems to have been a more prominent early version. 

Hell of a way to go and possessed of a dramatic cruelty that suits the cruelty of these men who are playing at being a government. 

Meanwhile, somehow, funding for children needing cancer treatment got stripped from the pending legislation. Thanks Elon.

How long will they ride hide?

Welcome to our latest Gilded Age. The Trump regime implants its oligarchs. 

 

As of December 6, the plutocrats are being put in place. Does the wider society have the imagination and boldness to unseat them? 

The next installment of the American adventure ... A corrupt oligarchy is not stable; things could get worse or better. Here we go.

From South Korea to the home front

The Verge Editor Sarah Jeong just happened to be in Seoul, out drinking, when the president declared martial law in a coup attempt this week. This wasn't a reporting assignment, but how could a journalist miss the history that was unfolding?

She rushed to the protests, catching the flavor of an instinctive, momentarily successful, popular uprising, combining high tech youth in this super-modern country with old time progressive campaigners who remembered overthrowing a dictator to install democracy. It's fascinating ... here are some excerpts:

... the presence of political protests is not unusual in South Korea: this is a nation that lionizes the protesters who opposed the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and teaches young schoolchildren to revere the 1919 protests against the Japanese colonial occupation. But it’s not just rote opposition politics — even relatively conservative newspapers are criticizing Yoon, and his popularity is in the toilet. It’s against this backdrop that Yoon Suk Yeol made the late-night surprise announcement that the country was now under martial law, in order to stop “shameless pro-North anti-state forces that plunder the freedom and happiness of our people.” All political activities — including those of the National Assembly, the parliamentary body that can legally block his martial law order — were suspended.

[So she took a train to where the action was, outside the National Assembly.] ... The sudden vibe shift starts with a middle-aged auntie sitting on a platform bench waiting for the other train who shouts “Fighting!” at the crowd that packs the escalator and the stairs. Another woman in a motorized wheelchair yells political slogans as she zips ahead to the exit, fist in the air.

When I emerge into the freezing night air, the first thing I see is military uniforms. My heart races and I take out my phone, before realizing that the two young men in full-body tactical camo look frightened. The soldiers are surrounded by furious ahjussis pushing and shoving and cursing at them. [Ahjussis are older working and middle class men who may well remember their student protests that won Korean democracy, however stodgy they may now appear.]

... Before I can even really process it, I can no longer see soldiers on the street. There is still camouflage here and there, but these are a smattering of protesters wearing it head-to-toe, possibly vestiges of their own time doing mandatory military service. Hordes of riot police with shields and neon green vests are marching through the streets. The protesters are ignoring them.

An unidentified man gets on a microphone and begins narrating updates; he starts by asking the crowd to surround him and protect him from having the mic taken by the police. The protesters oblige in an orderly fashion. 

It’s freezing out, and people are mostly bundled up in puffer coats. I wonder if anyone else can tell how drunk I am; I wonder, also, how drunk other people are. On television, politicians who sprinted to the National Assembly to stop the fall of democracy are blinking slowly and slurring their words. They appear to have been enjoying their Tuesday night in very much the same fashion I had been. 

At 1:02AM, the man on the microphone announces that the Assembly has voted to block the declaration of martial law; a heartfelt cheer goes through the crowd. The loudspeakers begin to play some truly awful music, a tinny version of a cheesy protest song that sounds like it was recorded by literal children. The crowd sings along; the ahjussis seem to know all the words by heart. I look up the lyrics later; they roughly translate to: The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic. The power of the Republic of Korea stems from its people.

The chants switch to “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” and “The people are victorious!” The crowd presses against the fences that barricade them from the National Assembly building. Most of them are on their phones, following the events happening inside; some of the older men have their phones pressed against their ears, listening to news broadcasts. 

One kid with an open beer slurs, “Death to Yoon Suk Yeol!” and is ignored. People are standing on top of tall decorative planters, on top of walls, on top of piles of unassembled police barricades that have been abandoned. The people standing on the walls are a mix of young men and ahjussis; I am starting to see selfie sticks and GoPros and livestreamers enter the crowd. An ahjussi yells at great length about how much he loves his friends for coming out with him to protest.

... When I finally catch a cab, the gray-haired driver asks me if I was at the protests. When I answer in the affirmative, he thanks me. I am embarrassed; my Korean is not good enough to explain to him that I am a journalist, that I am an American, that I am supposed to be an impartial observer of history. The ahjussi goes on to tell me he’s always hated Yoon and complains about being called a commie for saying that Yoon was going to ruin the country. ...

I think about the GoPros and livestreamers; I think about the kids asking to have their picture taken, so they can tell their families that they were there on that important day. Politics is being intermediated so smoothly through technology that it has become almost unnoticeable, embedded into the fabric of life for the young and the old alike. ... 

Yoon tried to take power with soldiers, police, and helicopters — to take the country back to the 1980s. But these aren’t the 1980s. He should have seized cell service first.

Go read it all.

My friend  Christine Ahn is mobilizing for Korean democracy still. This event is in Honolulu.

Like many in my age cohort, young and active between 1965 and 1975, I can identify with those people in those crowds. I know what it is to surround a building while facing police, to make loud demands. We did that sort of thing a lot back in the day. (I kept doing it many years longer, but that's another story.) Looking forward to the Trump regime, I think many of my age group wonder whether we could do it again. 

The outpouring of young people to work and canvass for the election just past is reassuring. We didn't win, but it wasn't for lack of volunteers who cared. I don't think Trump's narrow victory will keep them from continuing to care and to turn out for their hopeful vision of the country if they have to.

•  •  •

Jay Kuo, multi-talented human rights lawyer and digital whiz, has some takes on what South Korean events might mean in our context.

Presidents like Yoon or Trump do not feel constrained by laws or even common sense or decency. To stop them from seizing complete power, it takes people willing to mobilize in the streets, press willing to defy censorship orders, unions willing to call for general strikes, legislators ready to risk their safety, and a military prepared to stand down in order to stop a determined takeover of the government by a dictator.

The chances are not negligible that Trump will attempt such a decree at some point during his tenure. After all, he has already said he wants to be a Day One dictator, and he has toyed in the past with invoking the Insurrection Act, thwarted only by cooler heads who will not be present this second time around.

... Nor does the U.S. Constitution or any federal law provide a clear mechanism for undoing martial law once decreed, other than to seek a court order to overturn it. But based on recent rulings, if the final decision rests with this Supreme Court, the fate of the Republic is shaky at best.

That means there likely is no quick way out of an unlawful or pretextual decree by Trump under the Insurrection Act, or some other kind of emergency powers declaration, under which he assumes full control of the government and can silence all dissent. In light of the South Korean example, civic leaders, union officials, legislators and ordinary citizens must begin to ask an important question: What will they actually do if Trump seeks to end our democracy by decree? How far would they go and how would they try to stop him?

This is no longer some abstract thought experiment. Through these events in South Korea, we have now been duly warned of the risks of autocratic takeover. The future of our democracy may very well depend on whether we can match the kind of response we just witnessed. We must take the South Koreans’ complete rejection of military dictatorship as an inspiring example and pledge to defend democracy with equal passion, resolve and action.

I'm inspired again and I'm with Kuo.

Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.

Erudite Partner's postelection account of working in Nevada to elect Democrats channels the rage of so many women on the morning after ...

... all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.

In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised to “protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He’d claimed that handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, “Life after Roe.” No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.

Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.… There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something missing” was a penis. ... Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.

Several weeks on, I think we would do well to remember our rage, our burning awareness that women's humanity scarcely exists for so many, mostly men, that we live among and who delight in power over us. Read it all here.

Besides our rage, surviving the next iteration of American imperial and democratic decline will take smarts, building unlikely connections, determination, generosity and kindness. But let's not forget the rage ...

It's still COVID!

When an election turns on very small margins, everyone who thinks they know why a shift in voter preferences happened can plausibly make a case for their opinion. And Donald Trump's victory over the Harris-Walz ticket was small:

Trump’s margins — both in raw votes and in percentages — were small by historical standards, even for the past quarter century, when close elections have been the rule, including the 2000 Florida recount election and Trump’s previous two races in 2016 and 2020. ... PBS

Sure, there was some movement away from Dems everywhere -- but also Dem candidates, especially for the U.S. Senate, did well in even in battleground states and the lower House of Congress remains almost evenly split.

So observers are still largely in "pick your poison" mode for explanations.

And I'm sticking to mine: the experience of COVID and COVID polarization somehow tossed many Americans off-center and we're still addled by a lingering awareness that our trust in how the world works could be upended by a germ -- or something else unknown and unforeseen.

David Wallace-Wells has chronicled how COVID and COVID politics have shaped our memories of living through the pandemic. His account might surprise you:

The story is this. When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.

You may be laughing, but this is actually a pretty good description of what genuinely happened in the spring and summer of 2020, despite how you may remember those days now. Back then, the president was a lightning rod who seemed to polarize the country’s response all by himself, although he had rhetorical help from podcasters and radio hosts, governors and members of local school boards. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too. ...

Present divisions came along later, with the development of vaccines (delivered to arms, though not invented, during the Biden term) and the higher mortality, especially in red states, in the pandemic's second year.

And from there, we got to where we are now, with Donald Trump appointing health authorities whose prominence was raised by distress about COVID. Here's David Wallace-Wells again.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] owes his current selection to pandemic backlash and the intuition, in Trump world, that Covid contrarians should be drafted into a broad insurgency against the institutions of science. ... the others named for top public health posts, though not transparent cranks, are also Covid contrarians whose most important qualification for these positions are their crusades against the public health establishment during the pandemic period: Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, and Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary to run the Food and Drug Administration. Dave Weldon, Trump’s pick to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a vocal vaccine skeptic long before the pandemic.

... Democrats have grown increasingly invested in, and identified with, the management style and worldview of the credentialed elite — with the Republicans, once the party of the country’s establishment, growing a lot more unruly as a party and a coalition.

But there are a few things that are nevertheless strange about what Benjamin Mazer called “The COVID-Revenge Administration” and the way its are united primarily by a “lasting rage” about the initial handling of the pandemic.

The first is that the federal pandemic response was actually supervised by Trump and many of those whom he appointed, the first time around. Americans often tell the story of Covid now as though our pandemic response was run by safetyist liberals in an unreasonable panic. But while Trump was remarkably indifferent to Covid in 2020, he was also, for the entire period we now remember erroneously as “lockdown,” in charge. (Americans often remember that period as stretching for multiple years; in fact, all but one state withdrew its stay-at-home orders within three months.)

The second is that, nearly five years on from the first reported Covid case, it’s not clear to what extent the public as a whole really did hate the country’s initial response to Covid. America exited the pandemic emergency into a period of post-pandemic exhaustion and frustration, one that undoubtedly contributed to public irritation with those liberals many Americans understood to be in charge....

Click to enlarge.Via Kevin Drum

... And the third is that, early in the pandemic, many of the leading Covid contrarians, including some of those now at the top of Trump’s short list, were among the most inaccurate voices making claims about what were then probably the two simplest and most important questions facing anyone trying to right-size the pandemic response. Namely, how bad things could get and how long it might last.

... at the outset, many of the most outspoken contrarians — today claiming vindication, complaining about censorship even after building huge social-media followings during the pandemic, were telling us that the most important thing to know about the pandemic was that it was simply not a big deal.

Over the course of the pandemic, many continued to argue against restrictions, even as they’d lessened considerably, and even as the disease made a mockery of their predictions about its ultimate toll. In time, the American public has in some ways grown more sympathetic — forgetting the panic of the initial months, taking somewhat for granted that the death toll would land near where it did and assessing the wisdom of those mitigation measures as though they had no effect on mortality at all. (As it happens, some research suggests that those measures could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.)

But to suggest that mitigation was pointless because the measures were ineffective in preventing mass death is functionally the opposite of arguing that it was pointless because so few lives were at stake. ...

“The problem with pandemics is that people want to forget them,” Michael Lewis wrote last spring in the foreword to “We Want Them Infected.” Of course, many people do want to forget, and understandably. But others want to litigate and relitigate and relitigate, and in some ways the imbalance of motives may be a bigger problem than pandemic amnesia itself, allowing those with the sharper critiques to furnish the frameworks that the otherwise indifferent grasp for when trying to make sense of their own experience. ...

We're all a little nuts when it comes to the pandemic and, for the moment, the anti-expertise side of various arguments is getting a turn in the sun. Let's hope we don't come to grief during their ascendancy.

 Dr. Leana S. Wen responded to the questions raised by seeing RFK implanted on top of U.S. health policy in "Should I get my vaccines while I can? Your questions, answered." (gift article) She's not entirely alarmist, but she suggests you make sure your vaccines are up to date if possible by January 20.

Christian nationalism in churches

I don't usually write here about books which I found grossly unsatisfying. Books with which I disagree? Often. Problematical? Sure. But badly constructed, argued without historical context, and poorly thought out? Very seldom.

These last thoughts were my reactions to Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism by Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister, and Beau Underwood, a Disciples of Christ pastor, who run something called Words and Way.  

As anyone who reads here knows, the history and practices through which we express our encounters with whatever we take as God or Ultimate Concern is one of my themes there. Because we are human, these are all within, and manifestations of, our cultures and societies. Therefore, our religious practices and institutions reflect our cultures; it would never occur to me to assume that they sprung full-formed like the goddess Athena from the head of a Zeus nor from the tablets of the law brought from the mountain by Moses. We make what we can with what we've received and do our best to treat it as sacred.

Kaylor and Underwood write with good intent. They seem to believe they are exposing novelties. But so many others, only glancingly acknowledged here, have mined this territory, often more deeply: scanning my own wanderings in this literature on this blog, I found such names of Robert P. Jones, Katherine Stewart, Randall Balmer, Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Sarah Posner, Daniel Schultz, David A. Hollinger, Jemar Tisby, Esau McCaulley, Eddie Glaude, Kevin M. Kruse ...

Okay, this book wasn't written for me. I simply had read too many of its sources. Here's some of the blurb for Baptizing America:

How can Mainline Protestants spot [Christian nationalist] practices in their own activities? ... Christian Nationalism ... exists in sanctuaries where an American flag has been displayed for decades, when we pledge allegiance to one nation “Under God,” or when the U.S. is called a Christian nation. Baptizing America critiques the concept of civil religion, arguing that such expressions are far more dangerous than we realize. Mainline Protestant congregations will likely recognize themselves in the overlooked expressions of Christian Nationalism that pop up in the activities of both church and state.

And little as I like this book, the reaction of my church book reflection group to it taught me a lesson. Everyone doesn't notice that the words "under God" in the national pledge of allegiance, flags in the sanctuary, and patriotic hymns are not intrinsically Christian. Some were taken aback to see the secular nationalism of church customs called out. This book helped them to see habitual practices a little differently. That helps all of us focus more on whatever the message of Jesus' life and death might mean. 

To me the Christian nationalist trappings of American Protestantism are simply the cultural detritus of the middle of the last century within mainline churches, a relic of when American empire was riding high. That time is long gone.

• • •

Donald Trump's first presidential inauguration in 2017 evoked a solid protest against Christian nationalism from the Rev. Gary Hall, the retired dean of what Episcopalians deem "the National Cathedral" which as been accustomed to figure in the festivities.

For more than a century, the cathedral has tried to stand in two worlds at once, attempting to be both a practicing Christian church and a gathering place for American civic expression. As the cathedral’s former dean, I believe that fidelity to the former role now requires rejecting the latter.

For much of its life, the cathedral experienced the tension inherent in playing two roles as creative but not potentially destructive.

But much has changed in American religious life over the past 110 years, and the cathedral has found it increasingly difficult to have it both ways.

After World War II, Christians began seriously to reflect on their relations with the prevailing culture. How could our religion square its validation of oppressive regimes (Protestants and Catholics in Nazi Germany, mainline Christians supporting segregation in the American South) with the principles of love and justice exemplified and articulated by Jesus.

Over the course of the past 75 years, it became impossible to see the church’s mission as compatible with its traditional role of endorsing the status quo. We began to see ourselves less as “Christendom” and more like the early church that stood up to Rome.

... I believe Trump’s election has proved that the cathedral’s attempt to continue this religious/civic balancing act is no longer tenable.

In his words and actions, Trump has shown himself to be outside the bounds of all mainstream norms of Christian faith and practice. His often-expressed xenophobia and misogyny, not to mention his mocking of the disabled and admission of abusive behavior, place him well outside the values of compassion and respect for human dignity that mark historic Christianity at its best. It is simply inappropriate to use a precious institution such as Washington National Cathedral to suggest that the church bestows its blessing on a leader so obviously beyond the pale of Christian thought.

The cathedral’s dilemma exemplifies this watershed moment in the Christian church’s role in American public life. The community that claims to follow Jesus must choose between its role as what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls “the Jesus Movement” and its long-standing practice as the validator of the status quo. With Trump’s election we cannot, with any integrity, be both.

If the church is going to be faithful to Jesus, we must (as he did) stand as a force of resistance to unjust and oppressive civil authority. We cannot use the words, symbols and images of our faith to provide a religious gloss to an autocrat. ... I simply do not believe that the most visible symbol of compassionate faith in America should lend itself to endorsing or espousing their shrunken, fearful vision of our national life.

That was then. How much more so now. I doubt Trump will want to take his circus to that historic church this time, but who knows? A cursory search does not reveal plans.

Muscle memory kicks in; "we already know how to do this"

On Bluesky, Rebecca Traister, journalist and chronicler of women's persisting demands for our freedom and full humanity observes: 

New generations waking up to fury and grief is how we move forward and extend centuries worth of (often circular, often maddening, often unsuccessful) work to make this country a more just and equitable place for more of the people who live in it. (Re Naomi Beinart's oped in the New York Times - gift.)

Traister's reflections for New York Magazine on the Trump election win are deep; I don't know how to share as a gift article so here are some instructive fragments:

The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?

The women who set out to bury Donald Trump are doing things differently now. ...

... derision of the merchandized detritus of first-stage resistance organizing often worked to obscure the seriousness of what was happening among many Americans who had never before been politically active and who had been both appalled and galvanized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The first big public gathering, the Women’s March [of 2017], wasn’t just an Instagrammable party. It was spiky and contentious, bringing together Hillary heads and Berners, leftists and moderates, hard-core activists and wide-eyed newbies, as well as the grifters and profiteers who adhere to any mass movement. ...

... From there, women broke in a dizzying array of organizing directions. Some helped drive the wildcat teachers’ strikes that spread in 2018 across Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. Others disrupted Republican-lawmaker town halls, helping to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal in Trump’s first year in office, and harried administration officials responsible for the family-separation policy.

The shared fury of women led to the Me Too movement, which resulted in powerful and abusive figures losing positions of institutional authority, and to sexual-harassment walkouts at companies including McDonald’s and Google. A historic number of women ran for office, flooding candidate-training groups like Emerge and Higher Heights. Others got to work organizing on their behalf in municipal and local races, creating Democratic infrastructure in places that the party had left unattended for generations. 

This organizing produced material results all over the country. This iteration of the resistance was the force that flipped the House to Democratic control in 2018, staved off a red wave in 2022, and won majorities in Michigan and Minnesota, where laws were subsequently passed to protect abortion access and LGBTQ rights and ensure free school lunches. It helped secure State Supreme Court seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and a streak of ballot referenda on abortion rights post-Dobbs, including in blood-red Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas — ensuring that, for a while at least, tens of millions more Americans have had access to health care they would otherwise not have had. ...

... The urge to demonize and dismiss these women, despite their impact, is strong from both party and press, neither of which has ever been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women, unless they are of the right-wing Moms for Liberty variety.

There has been little acknowledgment that the almost entirely volunteer efforts of regular-degular women in communities around the country — not just the recent exertions of previously disengaged white women but the electoral labor performed unrelentingly by Black women for generations — has done more to preserve and repair the broken Democratic Party at state and local levels than the efforts of the well-paid, expensively dressed, smooth-brained Democratic consultant class or the political press, both of which tend to obsess over the shiny highest offices, forget local- and state-power building, fly quadrennially into local communities about which they know nothing, and advise candidates against embracing issues that turn out to be more popular with voters than the candidates who listen to consultants’ advice.

... Leah Greenberg [from Indivisible] said that she doesn’t mind watching the resistance being written off as dead, at least for now: “It is a very funny instance of overwhelmingly D.C./male pundits and reporters rushing to declare that things they aren’t personally paying attention to are not happening, while the actual work happens in a thousand homes across the country.” She acknowledged that there are real questions about strategy moving forward. “But our folks ... They don’t give up.”

The legacy of the past eight years is not simply a gutting presidential loss. There are tools and mechanisms in place: shield laws and sanctuary states. People new to engagement now have had practice at losing and getting back up again; that is crucial. 

“The muscle memory has kicked back in as the grief and shock has worn off,” Amanda Litman [from Run for Something which processed 7000 inquiries after Trump triumphed two weeks ago] told me. “It feels more clear-eyed about how hard this will be. But there is also a history of winning against him.”

The Resistance has now experienced both the overturn of Roe and the electoral victories that followed in its wake; they have learned about abortion funds, read Project 2025, and have some idea of what might be coming next. Nothing has to be the same this time because we are not the same.

“I think the 2016 resistance is dead and that’s a good thing,” said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party. “That style of resistance was an on-ramp for a lot of people, and a lot of people took it. Now, it is more like, Let’s get to work.... There’s an advocacy infrastructure that’s grown, an electoral infrastructure, a legal infrastructure.”

Or as Litman put it, “This time we can all jump right in without building the plane while we fly it.”

And it's not only activated women that already know how to stand up and stand together against the budding autocracy. 

When Erudite Partner went off to Nevada to work to hold that battleground state for the Dems, I stayed home, knowing I was physically too limited to work in the center of the campaign, though I could and did work the UniteHERE union phonebank. I could be confident that this would be what I call a "hot-and-cold-running-volunteers" election, drawing from the multiple activist bases that people built in the Trump years. It was; the E.P. trained 1400 canvassing volunteers in that tiny corner of the national effort. The Harris-Walz campaign did not lack for people; it lacked for a way to overcome the generalized discontent and distrust of a population thrown off center by the pandemic and the failure -- over a couple of decades -- of governments to deliver.

These activist volunteers come out of the vast infrastructure that, often, began with the 2017 #resistance and has matured into para-campaigns like Seed the Vote, the rare effective Democratic Party like Ben Wikler's WisDems, some NGOs -- and of course the more effectual parts of organized labor like UniteHERE and the United Auto Workers. 

How much of this will survive the current authoritarian challenge we don't know. But what comes now is almost certainly more widespread, more hardened, more inventive, and more durable than oblivious pundits can imagine.

"New occasions teach new duties ..."

The headline refers to James Russell Lowell's essay The Present Crisis and hymn lyrics from the America of the 1840s. That crisis was the nation's enthrallment to human bondage, to organizing itself around holding millions of humans in chattel slavery. Lowell saw clearly that this crisis would not be resolved without disruptions and death -- as the slave system was death in life.

Yesterday a small crowd gathered at Manny's in the Mission to hear and meet Marshall Ganz, practitioner and theorist of organizing of the latter part of the last century. (Like me, but teaching at Harvard.) Marshall has a new book.

I love what the man has done and built and inspired. He was vital to Cesar Chavez in the best days of the United Farm Workers Union and movement in the 1960s/70s. He's taught many organizers. 

But I couldn't help feeling he was out of touch with too much that is contemporary in the best of current organizing ... mostly led by women, almost always prominently Black women. 

The terrible Trump regime ahead is a new occasion and the fight back will be new. That's what I know these days.

Ukraine thrown to Putin's mercies

Unlike many of my friends on the generally progressive side of things, I've long believed that US support for the flawed, but democratically legitimate, Ukrainian state was a right action. This is the first US intervention I've supported in a lifetime of rejection of US imperialism, yet support for Ukraine feels the natural continuation of a long trajectory. Russia's war is an imperial war, seeking to subjugate and absorb a people who want the freedom to define their own way. Yes, I'm something of a quasi-pacifist -- but Russia's crimes against an occupied population are heinous and should not be minimized.

The election of Donald Trump presumably means that Ukrainians are to be thrown to Putin's mercies. Europe is unprepared to step up and replace us. This is a crime much akin to western democracies' abandonment in the 1930s of the Second Spanish Republic to Hitler and Mussolini's pet local strongman, Francisco Franco. That betrayal did not slake the appetite of that era's fascists -- this abandonment won't today either. And we in the United States are even less prepared or even able to recover from our folly than we were then. Bad times indeed. 

• • •

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army. He writes a substack of military analysis.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?: The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

... when the combined wealth of NATO’s five biggest members (U.S. Germany, UK, France and Canada) is twenty times that of Russia, and their military outstrips Russia in technology, size and capability, is a searing indictment about the strategic thinking, execution and will in what is currently known as ‘the west’.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

There is an old Chinese saying: strangle the chicken and frighten the monkey. It is a saying that a PLA General used with a friend of mine one time. In essence, if you wish to shape the behavior of a big competitor, attack and destroy a small ally of the competitor.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO ‘strategy’ for Ukraine over the past three years, as well as their strategic impatience and inclination to enter into negotiations with a Russia that has the strategic initiative, means that the West instead has ‘fed the chicken and encouraged the monkey’.

We will regret this. And so, eventually, will our citizens.

• • •

In 2015, the British journalist Tim Judah, veteran observer of too many wars including the agony in the Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s, published In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. This is a little book of vignettes from the early stages of the war between Ukrainians engaged in forming their European national identity and others who supported the continuation of life within the Russian imperial sphere. Long before the Russian invasion of 2022, Judah shed light on the creativity and resilience of so many in this benighted part of the world.

Despite being such a big country, Ukraine, for most of us who live the western part of the continent, is, or was, somewhere not very important. ...The aim of this book is not to record a blow-by-blow account of the events that led to the Maidan revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, or the war that followed. ...

What I thought was that between journalism and academic books there was not much that explained Ukraine, that made it a vibrant place full of people who have something to say and tell us. Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy people were to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think. Often when they started to talk, you could hardly stop them. If we listen to people who can understand why they think what they do, and act the way they do.

In Ukraine ... people have been taken for granted for so long, as voters or taxpayers or bribe payers, that when finally the rotten ship of state springs leaks and begins to list, everyone is shocked. But they should not have been. ... This book is about what I saw, what people told me and also those parts of history that we need to know in order to understand what is happening in Ukraine ...

Judah might not find the same openness to conversation today, two years into a devastating, existential war. Or perhaps he might. Ukraine has long surprised us. We do not know yet how the next chapter plays out.

We have been here before ...

Let's not forget Ukraine. I can't. I see a people who made the mistake of aspiring to become a European democratic society while located next to an oligarchic tyranny whose ruler cannot abide their example. So they must die. If there is such a thing as a just war, Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion qualifies.

I present here excerpts from Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum's address on being awarded the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize in Frankfurt, Germany. The citation named her “indispensable contribution to the preservation of democracy.” As well as being a journalist, she's an historian and a part time resident of Poland where her husband is Foreign Minister in the current, pro-democracy government. 

The Case Against Pessimism: The West has to believe that democracy will prevail.

... When, in the 1990s, I was researching the history of the Gulag in the Soviet archives, I assumed that the story belonged to the distant past. When, a few years later, I wrote about the Soviet assault on Eastern Europe, I also thought that I was describing an era that had ended. And when I studied the history of the Ukrainian famine, the tragedy at the center of Stalin’s attempt to eradicate Ukraine as a nation, I did not imagine that this same kind of story could repeat itself in my lifetime. ...

... After 2014, and then again after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, cruelly familiar patterns repeated themselves. Russian soldiers treated ordinary Ukrainians as enemies and spies. They used random violence to terrorize people. They imprisoned civilians for minor offenses—the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle, for example—or sometimes for no reason at all. They built torture chambers as well as filtration camps, which we could also call concentration camps. They transformed cultural institutions, schools, and universities to suit the nationalist, imperialist ideology of the new regime. They kidnapped children, took them to Russia, and changed their identities. They stripped Ukrainians of everything that made them human, that made them vital, that made them unique.

... In 2014, Russia was already on the way to becoming a totalitarian society, having launched two brutal wars in Chechnya, having murdered journalists and arrested critics. But after 2014, that process accelerated. The Russian experience of occupation in Ukraine paved the way for harsher politics inside Russia itself. In the years after the Crimean invasion, opposition was repressed further; independent institutions were completely banned.

... In the early, emotional days of the war in Ukraine, many did join the chorus of support. In 2022, as in 2014, Europeans again turned on their televisions to see scenes of a kind they knew only from history books: women and children huddled at train stations, tanks rolling across fields, bombed-out cities. In that moment, many things suddenly felt clear. Words quickly became actions. More than 50 countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed. In Kyiv, Odesa, and Kherson, I witnessed the effect of food aid, military aid, and other European support. It felt miraculous.

... Since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically, in both Europe and America. ... Now, faced with the greatest challenge to our values and our interests in our time, the democratic world is starting to wobble. Many wish the fighting in Ukraine would somehow, magically, stop. Others want to change the subject to the Middle East—another horrific, tragic conflict, but one where Europeans have almost no ability to shape events. A Hobbesian world makes many claims upon our resources of solidarity. A deeper engagement with one tragedy does not denote indifference to other tragedies. We must do what we can where our actions will make a difference.

... Slowly, another group is gaining traction, too, especially in Germany. These are the people who do not support or condemn Vladimir Putin’s aggression but rather pretend to stand above the argument and declare “I want peace.” ...

... In 1938, the German writer Thomas Mann, then already in exile, horrified by the situation in his country and by the complacency of the liberal democracies, denounced the “pacifism that brings about war instead of banishing it.”

During World War II, George Orwell condemned his compatriots who called upon Britain to stop fighting. “Pacifism,” he wrote, “is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

In 1983, Manés Sperber, the recipient of that year’s German Peace Prize, also argued against the false morality of his era’s pacifists, who at that time wanted to disarm Germany and Europe in the face of the Soviet threat: “Anyone,” he declared, “who believes and wants to make others believe that a Europe without weapons, neutral and capitulating, can ensure peace for the foreseeable future is mistaken and is misleading others.”

... But let me repeat again: Mann loathed the war, as well as the regime that promoted it. Orwell hated militarism. Sperber and his family were themselves refugees from war. Yet it was because they hated war with such passion, and because they understood the link between war and dictatorship, that they argued in favor of defending the liberal societies they treasured.

We have been here before, which is why the words of our liberal democratic predecessors speak to us. European liberal societies have been confronted by aggressive dictatorships before. We have fought against them before. We can do so again. ... To prevent the Russians from spreading their autocratic political system further, we must help the Ukrainians achieve victory, and not only for the sake of Ukraine. If there is even a small chance that military defeat could help end this horrific cult of violence in Russia, just as military defeat once brought an end to the cult of violence in Germany, we should take it....

The challenge is not only military. This is also a battle against hopelessness, against pessimism, and even against the creeping appeal of autocratic rule, which is also sometimes disguised beneath the false language of “peace.” The idea that autocracy is safe and stable, that democracies cause war; that autocracies protect some form of traditional values while democracies are degenerate—this language is also coming from Russia and the broader autocratic world, as well as from those inside our own societies who are prepared to accept as inevitable the blood and destruction inflicted by the Russian state.

Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders.

... All of us in the democratic world, not just Germans, have been trained to be critical and skeptical of our own leaders and of our own societies, so it can feel awkward when we are asked to defend our most fundamental principles. But we can’t let skepticism decline into nihilism.

In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship in Europe, we in the democratic world are natural comrades. Our principles and ideals, and the alliances we have built around them, are our most powerful weapons. We must act upon our shared beliefs—that the future can be better; the war can be won; that authoritarianism can be defeated once again; that freedom is possible; and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world.

It seems essential to post this on the weekend when Donald Trump returns to Madison Square Garden to re-enact the Nazi rally of 1938 during which people who called themselves "America Firsters" celebrated Hitler's regime. They thought to bring it across the ocean. Have we come full circle? 

Will we turn the US government over to an admirer of Putin and Hitler? Yes, this does seem to be the choice before us.

Old dude needs a job

Over the weekend Donald Trump decided he would gain cred by pretending to work at a McDonalds drive-up window. The restaurant was closed; the cars driving through had to rehearse. The upshot on Xitter:

#TrumpIsAGlobalLaughingStock @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/0gDHA7ztIx

— Pissed off American Voter💙💙💙🌊🌊🌊🌊 (@JanetLei5) October 21, 2024

A winner meets a loser

As my friends know, for me there are two seasons, Football and Not-Football. Unfortunately, every two years election season intrudes on Football, but somehow I get through it.

I'm happy to see our presidential candidate getting into the spirit of the season:

Now that does my seasonal heart good. This played during the Georgia v. Alabama slugfest yesterday.

Time to push this guy into our past

Trump is crumbling. What he speaks to, the id of our society, is going strong.* But Kamala Harris unmasked his increasing personal weakness. 

Some of my favorite summations of what happened to that whining man on Tuesday: 

Anita Chabria, Los Angeles Times:  

What struck me most about Trump was how tired he looked — and acted. Seriously. Not being snarky here. I’ve been noticing this when watching his campaign stops.

Something of the raging fire that helped ignite the Jan. 6 insurrection is just gone. Yes, he’s got his well-worked lines and his delivery retains his huckster polish. But he seems deflated, almost like he’s bored with it. Like the only time he really cared was when it turned personal.

Tuesday night, he was hunched over, scowling, easily led into traps by Harris that devolved into rants when he felt slighted.

At one point, after she baited him that world leaders were laughing at him, he came back with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban (who has cracked down on freedom of the press, LGBTQ+ rights and immigration) as proof that wasn’t true.

“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said, ‘The most respected, the most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

It wasn’t a dumpster fire performance. But it seemed sad, a refreshing change from scary.

Charlie Warzel, tech and media reporter, The Atlantic:

What Harris’s campaign and debate style propose, however, is a different view of Trump, not as the central figure in American politics but as a vestigial element of a movement that’s so curdled by grievance and enmeshed in an alternate reality that it is becoming not just culturally irrelevant, but something far worse: pitiable.

David French, New York Times columnist on Xitter:

It's like she's debating MAGA Twitter come to life. Victor Orban, dead pets, Ashli Babbitt, "J6." She's debating Catturd.

Josh Marshall called it before the debate even began:

... I do think there’s a decent chance a lot of people will get a wake up call tonight not only about how weird Donald Trump is but about how much he’s deteriorated. It’s been many years since he’s shared a debate stage with anyone who could be called a young and dynamic figure. But if you’re really sensitive to signs that Donald Trump is a sundowning degenerate freak, you wouldn’t be a swing voter. Tonight’s about Kamala Harris. That means risk but also opportunity. ...

•  The DOJ has indicted a fly-by-night "media company" for funneling millions in Russian money to right wing media personalities to stir up that American id.

Mr. Clueless runs for President

 

As Johnathan V. Last points out at the Bulwark, the man is ghoul.

 

We knew that, but he keeps reinforcing it.

Has it ever occurred to him that some animals kick back?

Migrant lives are on the line in November

Mexican journalist and TV news anchor Leon Krauze is asking what I think is the right question: What would Donald Trump (and his evil sidekick Stephen Miller) deporting 15 million undocumented immigrants look like?

Trump’s plans to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history are no secret — he refers to them frequently in stump speeches. And the outlines of the plan have been amply documented. ...These vulnerable millions know no other country but this one. If they are forced to leave everything they have behind overnight, their anguish will make the hideous stories of family separations we heard during the first Trump term pale in comparison.

I struggle to fully understand some Hispanic voters’ enduring support for Trump today, given his racist rhetoric and terrifying policy proposals. While Latinos are generally more moderate on immigration policy than the average American, a considerable number appear to favor punitive measures. In a recent poll, 53 percent of Hispanic voters said they would support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, with 50 percent supporting “large detention centers” for those awaiting possible deportation.

One possibility is that the sheer scale of Trump’s proposed immigration policies is making it hard for people to comprehend the human toll.

... If carried out, Trump’s planned mass deportation would leave nearly 4½ million children in the United States partially or wholly orphaned. The impact of mass deportation on families would be profound. In Florida, nearly 2 million U.S. citizens or non-undocumented residents live in households with at least one undocumented person; in California, it’s more than 4 million.

The sudden disappearance of a parent or a main provider will be devastating: It is estimated that more than 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen will fall below the poverty line if the undocumented breadwinners in these families are deported. ...

For years I have tried to explain to Anglos that the absurdities of U.S. immigration law mean, at least here in California, that most immigrant families live in what's called "mixed status." Because of history, because the border has at times been close to fictional, because there is often no way to migrate "the right way, the legal way," ordinary people often live "out of status." 

If it is not the two parents, it's Auntie Isabel who is undocumented, but looks after the kids while the parents work. For a long time, it was a friend of mine whose immigrant family came "legally"; but they had a lot of kids and somehow they never got around to doing the paper work for him. There are hundreds of variations of immigration anomalies, so as there are millions of long term US residents, our neighbors, who live in legal limbo.

Since 1986 (!) Congress has not been able to pass and a president sign any major reform to our convoluted immigration laws. Republicans have largely decided that inciting hostility to migrants serves their interests. Democrats too have sometimes been hostile to immigration law reform. Presidents have attempted adjustments by way of executive orders, but those create precarious situations for people, as did President Obama's creation of the "Dreamer" category of quasi-legalization.

The most recent effort to enact major immigration reform was attempted by a coalition spearheaded by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma in February 2024. Democratic Senators signaled they'd vote for it, however reluctantly. But Donald Trump preferred to keep immigration alive as a complaint against Dems, so that reform died.

If Trump is elected, he bellows that mass deportations will follow; if we elect Kamala Harris (and a cooperative House and Senate), perhaps there might be a genuine immigration reform law thirty years after the last one. The world has changed; human displacement only increases. It's time to bring a broken system up to date as humanely as we are able.

No wonder violence came for Donald

Still out of the country for another two weeks, but able to get online for a brief comment.

Again he dominates our heads. 

Donald Trump traffics in delight in violence. A convenient list via Jay Kuo.

• Trump urged supporters at rallies to beat up protestors. 

• He called for Black Lives Matter rioters to be shot.  

• He used racist language to inflame hate and hate-based attacks against Asian American during the pandemic.  

• He made fun of the brutal attack upon Nancy Pelosi’s husband.  

• He mocked the notion that radicals had plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.  

• His words helped inspire racist mass shooters in Buffalo and El Paso.  

• He approved of chants to “Hang Mike Pence.”  And he incited the violent January 6 attack upon the Capitol.

No wonder violence came for him. That's how the world works. We quite often get what we live by.

The MAGAs work to enable every idiot in the country to run around with weapons of war and then wonder why people, including their Orange Totem, get shot.

I guess I'm glad this incident didn't kill him, but if that broken boy's aim had been better, I'd still think Trump got what he asked for.

Too many MAGAs have put American democracy, the rule of law, and human decency in their gun sites. Most of us aren't among the gun-obsessed nor do we wish to stomp on the freedoms, and the people themselves, with whom we coexist, however uncomfortably at times. 

We still have the choice to practice diligent voting and compassionate justice activism.

And we can be kind to each other, seeking to sow better fruit and a better future. That is all.

• • •

Meanwhile there were the inadvertent casualties, the spectators killed and maimed as forced participants in a spectacle. The frolics of cruelty leave their victims.

• • •

I came of age in 1968, during the last era of directly political American violence. We've forgotten how good we've had it.

Our once and future king?

So says the Supreme Court majority. 

Are we going to put up with these black-robed partisans anointing a monarch? That's not our tradition.

I will now resume my vacation, writing from London where they set some precedents about what to do about kings who care only for themselves. Doubt that DJT knows about that. That was a messy process... not something anyone wants to live.

The test ahead

George Conway [@gtconway3d] used to be married to Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's ubiquitous liar to media, she of the "alternative facts."

In consequence, he found himself spending time in proximity to the Orange Madman in 2016 and '17 (that was before his divorce.)

He's a surprisingly complicated observer. Here arehis thoughts on our challenge in this season of tough choices: 

Source unknown; someone's Twitter

... Trump embodies the worst in *all* of us. For we are all human.

Trump revels in and glorifies our worst human traits: self-absorption, greed, mendacity, vindictiveness, ignorance, and so much else. He embodies all that we should aspire, and teach our children, not to be.

Worse yet, he gives permission for others to be their worst selves. And that is the ultimate danger he poses. He’s a threat to truth, honor, reason, and decency.

And that’s mostly without regard to policy—remember, Trump’s party is the party without a policy platform—although it does have implications for policy. But those are secondary.

First and foremost, Trump and Trumpism pose a moral test, not a political test. I hope and pray and believe that our nation will pass and survive it.

We know what we have to do; opportunities to work on the election will be many. This soul-trying moment demands our all.