Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Political Rants

Donald’s law.

Based on their rhetoric of late, it seems clear that, with the economy in very rough shape, the Trump administration is opting for a law-and-order driven campaign for re-election. Trump has always been fond of “tough on crime” rhetoric, partly because he likes to present himself as “tough”, but also because he is very much a product of his 70s, 80s, and 90s heyday when political careers were made and broken on the issue of crime and harsh punishment. He has a base, very rudimentary mentality, and one that is laser focused on visceral political issues. His rally speeches are like fascistic comedy routines during which he trots out tried and true laugh lines that pull directly from his generously proportioned sack of prejudices – the same exclusionary and self-aggrandizing posturing that resonated so deeply with his base in 2016.

Can that work in today’s America? I don’t freaking know. It seems like perhaps not, but maybe it can. All I know is that Trump is simply the most prominent standard bearer of this militarist approach to what’s called “public safety”, not its author. And while the Republican party seems most heavily invested in this madness, it is not their sole province; many Democrats have made their political bones on the …. well, bones of generations of young black, brown, and poor white men and women who populate our prisons and wear the chains of the carceral state after they’re released. Joe Biden is one of them. So is Amy Klobuchar. There are many more.

I recently re-listened to an interview of the well-known advocated for prison abolition Mariame Kaba on Chris Hayes’s podcast, and frankly she blew me away. Her critique of our current mess of a system – a system that fails nearly everyone – is spot-on, in my opinion, and she offers both a vision of a better alternative and a theory of change – in effect, a pathway to the vision. We pour $170 million into law enforcement, almost zero into alternatives to incarceration or community investment, and somehow expect things to improve on their own. And as she points out, it’s a system that does not even succeed on its own terms. Severe punishment for murder is meaningless when only 13% of those who murder are serving time, as is the case in Chicago. And policy built from trauma is almost definitionally bad. That’s how political careers are made – developing laws that punish whole classes of people on the basis of a single crime. That’s what Trump will leverage this fall – count on it.

We need to send Trump back to his shabby golden tower. But we can’t stop there. We have to follow through with what he’s telling his Klan rally audiences is the crazy agenda of the far left: building towards an alternative vision of public safety that provides for minimal application of force and maximal investment in under-served communities. That’s the path to a more just society.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Donnie in Nixonland.

Our president offered a little fascist theater performance this week. The resulting spectacle was simultaneously ludicrous and terrifying, as most reality television tends to be (at least for anyone who is sane). Pumped up by his most reactionary advisors – Barr, Stephen Miller, etc. – the Cheeseburgler-in-Chief waddled out to the microphone to deliver a Miller-esque train wreck of a statement, then waddled over to St. John’s Church, freshly cleared by the 82nd Airborne, to have his photo taken while awkwardly clasping a bible. (Not clear that he was happy with the tome they handed him, perhaps preferring an edition with “Holy Bible” written in enormous gold letters on the cover.) This sorry spectacle was had at the cost of gassing, pelting, and beating thousands of peaceful protesters, journalists, and bystanders in an effort to drive them back from the vicinity of the White House.

What did the president gain from this effort? A badly produced propaganda video featuring scenes from his baby elephant walk to the church. (And I mean really bad, like every video they’ve ever made, starting with that laughable intro reel they ran at the 2016 GOP Convention.) He obviously wants to take advantage of the national anti-racist uprising to push a law and order narrative similar to the one used by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. This sounds a bit like the work of Steve Bannon, though perhaps not clever enough … more Miller’s or Barr’s speed. Honestly, they have little else to run on this year. They obviously blew the COVID-19 crisis, the economy is in the toilet, and Trump shows no interest in expanding his appeal beyond people in white hoods.

Here’s the problem with the 1968 strategy: It’s not 1968. At that time, the ruling party had been in power for eight years. The Vietnam war, vastly expanded by LBJ, was at its peak of violence, and young people in particular were in open revolt over the killing, the draft, etc. It was a much more openly, deeply racist country back then as well, and many Black Americans were only just beginning to get the franchise. What’s more, Nixon was the challenger, not the president. The “I’m going to clean up this mess” gambit doesn’t work if you’re the incumbent. For that to fly, you need to be calling out a party in power whose coalition is divided and hostile to their office holders. That’s not to say that the law and order tactic won’t work – nothing is beyond the scope of possibility these days. But if Trump is once again walking in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, he might want to be careful where he steps.

More than seven hundred billion dollars appropriated this year to spend on the U.S. military, and Trump uses them to liberate Lafayette Park. Worth it?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Time running out.

While you were looking over there, Donald Trump, our racist five-year-old drunken Twitter-troll of a President, pulled out of yet another arms control treaty with the Russians. Signed in 1992 by then president George H.W. Bush, the Open Skies Treaty allowed for short-notice, unarmed reconnaissance flights as a way of verifying compliance with other arms control treaties. As he always does when announcing the end of an international agreement, Trump breezily claimed that the Russians were not adhering to the treaty, and that by pulling out we will eventually end up with a new agreement that’s better than the current one.

This announcement comes in the context of:

  • Withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which removed extremely destabilizing and dangerous medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe;
  • Trump’s reluctance to renew the New START treaty next February when it expires. The accord provides for inspection of nuclear forces in by both parties, and is the final remaining pillar of the U.S.-Russian arms control regime.

This madness is another case of Trump’s key role as a rubber stamp for the most extreme elements in the right-wing political grouping that is currently running the country through him. I am certain Trump did not wake up in the middle of the night and say. “We must toss out all of our arms control agreements with Russia!” My guess is that the president’s strongest negative feeling might be reserved for New START, as that was signed by Obama in 2010, but otherwise this planet-saving series of treaties is probably of very little interest to him. Sure, there is some posing involved here, Trump trying to appear “tough”, trying to please daddy, etc., but why even bother getting into that? The man’s only ideology is himself. He is a uniquely valueless human being – the perfect vessel for a resurgent militarist right.

The administration’s rhetoric points to prompting a new arms race that will spend both China and Russia into a hole. Set aside for a moment the blatant insanity of such a policy (recall the dark days of the early 1980s) – it appears to be based on a popular misconception of what happened in the last arms race. We didn’t spend the Soviet Union into oblivion; empires decay, that’s what they do. We nearly spent ourselves into oblivion, investing trillions of dollars in the production of waste (useless military hardware) instead of putting those dollars into building a better society. Soviet military spending was pretty much flat through the 1980s. A renewed nuclear arms race puts humanity at risk, pure and simple – there’s no upside.

What is presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s position on this issue? Good question. I can’t find anything about it on his web site. For some more discussion about the lack of evidence of a Biden foreign policy, see the current episode of Strange Sound, our new podcast.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.