Some Feuds Never Die

There’s a lot going on in the world that requires presidential attention these days, but President Donald Trump somehow still finds time to engage in petty wars of words with his critics. On Wednesday, he resumed his scathing rhetoric about Republican Sen. John McCain.

Trump’s die-hard fans love that “at least he fights” and “punches back ten times harder,” and cheer his every schoolyard taunt, but it doesn’t look at all courageous when he strikes at McCain, who died last August and was mourned as a bona fide war hero and principled public servant by Americans of all political persuasions.

The feud with McCain goes back to the early days of the ’16 election, when McCain expressed doubts about Trump’s fitness for high office, and at no point has it made Trump look good. On his 23rd combat mission in Vietnam then-naval aviator McCain was shot down and severely wounded and then endured two years of severe torture, then and endured another three years when he refused an early release offered because of family connections rather than abandon the men under his command and hand the enemy a propaganda, and Trump, who avoided service in Vietnam because of bone spurs that didn’t seem to interfere with his golf game or nightclub womanizing, famously told a stunned audience that “McCain’s only a war hero because he got captured — I have to tell you, but I like a guy who didn’t get captured, OK?” Trump still somehow wound up following McCain as the Republican party’s presidential nominee, while also insulting four of the party’s previous five nominees, and he’s felt free to insult McCain ever since, and the die-hard fans have always loved it.

To the rest of the country it’s been a tawdry spectacle all along, though, and Trump’s most recent complaint that he never got a “thank you” from McCain for the funeral that Trump generously “approved” doesn’t look any better. Trump made the remark at a photo opportunity in General Dynamics tank factory in Ohio, where the assembled workers, including many veterans, didn’t respond with the sorts of gleeful cheers that McCain-bashing gets at a typical Trump campaign rally. All of the Republicans and Democrats who served with McCain in the Senate made statements attesting to his character and service, although several of the Republicans were careful not to mention Trump, and except for the die-hard fans the gripe about McCain’s ingratitude was not well received.

Trump also found time continue a spat with George Conway, the husband of White House senior advisor and die-hard loyalist Kellyanne Conway, calling the respected conservative lawyer a “whack job” and “stone cold loser.” The thrice-married Trump, who had boasted to the New York tabloids about his infidelities during his first two marriages, and seems have conspired with a supermarket tabloid to cover up his infidelities during his third marriage, also called Conway a “husband from hell.” The distaff Conway took Trump’s side, of course, explaining her boss had to fight back.

The president is also threatening tariffs that would make Americans pay thousands of dollars more for European automobiles, his idiot namesake son is annoying the United Kingdom by saying it’s Tory Prime Minister should have heeded his dad’s advice on how to handle its complicated “Brexit” from the European Union, and Trump’s close friendships with the dictators of China and North Korea aren’t yet yielding the great deals he promised the campaign rallies. At least Trump is no longer feuding with the Federal Reserve Board chairman he appointed, as the Fed has announce it won’t be raising interest rates after lowering their forecast for gross domestic product growth between now and the next election, but he probably laments the loss of a scapegoat for any economic bad news that might come along.

Trump also continues his ongoing feuds with the congressional and special council and southern district of New York of the Department of Justice investigations into all sorts of suspicious things, but all of those will play out in courts of law and according to constitutional rules that aren’t swayed by the even the pithiest insults. Given everything that’s going on, and what a small and petty man the president is, we can see why Trump might prefer to fight with the dead and honorably buried.

— Bud Norman

Mulling the Matter of Mueller and Trump

President Donald Trump and his lawyers and all his unpaid supporters in congress and the Trump-friendly media seem quite cocky that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the past presidential election will completely vindicate Trump of any wrongdoing, but just in case they also want you to know that Mueller fellow can’t be trusted.

There’s an obviously coordinated effort by Trump administration and family members and the more loyal congressional Republicans and Fox News and several prominent talk radio hosts afoot to discredit Mueller and his staff, and it’s lately intensified. Donald Trump Jr. recently warned the “USA Student Action Summit” of college-aged Republicans that “there are people at the highest levels of America who don’t want America to be America.” Some Republican congressmen are calling for a special counsel to investigate Mueller’s special counsel investigation, citing some leaked e-mails and other evidence they believe prove it’s all what Trump himself often calls a “witch hunt.” The Fox Network’s “Judge” Jeanine Pirro wants unnamed-but-Mueller-affiliated peopled hauled off “in cuffs,” and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin have lately spent most of their combined nine hours of broadcasts on a local talk radio station casting further aspersions on Mueller and his fellow investigators.

They always note that several members of Mueller’s team have given generous campaign donations to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, which is undeniably true and worth noting, but they never note that so did Trump’s top lawyer Ty Cobb and favorite daughter Ivanka Trump and that idiot husband of her’s who’s somehow a top senior advisor to the White House in charge of solving everything from America’s opioid crisis to Middle East peace, and that Trump himself was once a generous funder of Clinton’s senatorial campaigns and the Clinton family foundation that his supporters now want to investigate. They relish in the suspiciously leaked e-mails between a couple of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who were having an adulterous sexual relationship and sharing sharply anti-Trump sentiments, but they rarely acknowledge they also shared anti-Clinton and anti-Bernie Sanders and anti-pretty-much-everyone-else sentiments, and that Mueller reassigned both of those bitter agents as soon as he got wind of their outspoken political opinions.

The Trump apologists have some outraged and undeniably true allegations about the past administration’s tapped phones calls of Trump campaign and administration officials, but they don’t mention that the phones being tapped belonged to Russian officials, which Republicans and other conservatives have always wanted tapped. They might have some plausible legal arguments that the Americans on other side of those conversations shouldn’t have been “unmasked,” in the legal jargon, but they’d just wind up making the argument that it’s a bigger scandal that attempts to track a political nominee’s possible collusion with a Russian plot to affect an American presidential election is more abhorrent than the plot itself.

We’ve been Republicans long enough that we still feel the pain of President Richard Nixon going down for his ultimately undeniable misdeeds, and we assess the current situation accordingly. Given how complicated this is, our instinct is to take measure of both Trump and Mueller by some blind test of the two Republicans.

One of the two is a life-long Republican. He was born into a fairly well-to-do family as the son of a high-ranking DuPont executive, and excelled as a student and athlete at the rigorous prep school he was able to attend, and his high marks earned hi admission to Princeton, where he graduated with honors and bachelor’s degree in political science while starring on the lacrosse team. After earning a master’s degree in international relations from New York University he volunteered for service in the Marine Corps and won numerous combats medals including the Purple Heart for his service in the Vietnam War.

After Vietnam subject A earned a law degree from the University of Virginia, and after three years of distinguished service to a prestigious law firm in San Francisco commend a distinguished career of public service as a U.S. attorney in northern California. In the Reagan year of 1982 he was moved over to the Massachusetts district, where he enhanced his reputation by uncovering all sorts of Democratic misbehavior there. After another brief but noteworthy stint in Boston’s private sector he was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was unanimously confirmed the senate, and served another two years in the post at the request of Democratic President Barack Obama.

He’s also been a lifelong Republican all along, and been married to the same woman, and is not only an Eagle Scout but generously endows a college scholarship for other Eagle Scouts, and as lifelong Republicans and improbable Eagle Scouts we can’t help but like the guy.

Subject B was a Democrat and an independent and Reform Party candidate before becoming the winning nominee and putative leader of the Republican party. He’s the son of a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who was once arrested in a Ku Klux Klan riot, and he was such a proudly defiant punk his father sent off to a military school, where he did well enough in sports but was such a middling student that he wound up at Fordham University for two years. His rich dad made enough contributions to the low-level Ivy League University of Pennsylvania that he was admitted there, and would always lie that he graduated from it’s more prestigious master’-level Wharton School of Business. After that a doctor found some bone spurs that prevented him serving in the Vietnam War but didn’t seem interfere with his much bragged-about-golf game, and he went on to a much-bragged about fortune in real estate and reality television that he freely brags was facilitated by political bribes, and survived several bankruptcies and lawsuits about his penchant for not paying bills and currently has an undeniably odd relationship with his third wife and a penchant for gratuitous insults to fellow Republicans.

Even the blind know by now that Subject B is the President of the United States and the putative leader of our Republican party, but if it comes down to who you’re gonna believe we can’t help a certain affinity for Subject A in our blind test. We’ll let them sort out their arguments in the court of public opinion and the inevitable courts of law and hope that some semblance of our old-fashioned Republicanism survives this awful mess.

— Bud Norman

Another Jacksonian Age, For Better or Worse

President Andrew Jackson is back in the news again, despite being dead the past 172 years, this time around because of President Donald Trump. Jackson’s portrait has been given a prominent place in Trump’s Oval Office, Trump took the opportunity of a trip to Nashville this week to lay a wreath at Jackson’s home, and the current president frequently makes a point of comparing himself to his rough-hewn and populist predecessor.

The last time Jackson was in the news was when he was demoted from his place on the $20 bill in favor of the anti-slavery and civil rights heroine Harriet Tubman. Originally the idea was to demote former Revolutionary War hero and first Treasury Secretary and all around Founding Father Alexander Hamilton from his spot on the ten-spot, probably because Jackson was the founding father of the Democratic Party and Hamilton had views that sounded suspiciously like what the later Republican Party would espouse, but Hamilton’s reputation was somehow rescued by a big hip-hop Broadway musical that noted his illegitimate birth and immigrant status and his life-long impeccable anti-slavery credentials and a vision of an urbanized America where a meritocratic elite was allowed to flourish, and all that budget-balancing small government stuff and red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism that Hamilton espoused was forgotten. Around the same time even the Democrats were admitting that Jackson was an enthusiastic slave-holder who had waged avowedly genocidal wars against various Indian tribes and forced a mass relocation of other tribes that left at least 4,000 Cherokees dead along the infamous Trail of Tears, and that his crackpot economic theories which so closely resemble the most Democratic Party’s didn’t exactly work out for him, and thus Jackson wound up with the currency demotion.

All of which makes Jackson an odd choice for a modern Republican president to tout as his favorite, but then again Trump is an odd sort of modern Republican president. and one can easily see the reasons for his Jacksonian affinity. Jackson was an undeniably colorful character, and even Trump’s most strident critics will acknowledge that he is as well, and he ran as a pugnacious and proudly crude outsider who would defend his fellow common men from the nefarious machinations of a nebulous elite, which is pretty much the same storyline that Trump is peddling, and he was so beloved by the poorly educated of his time that his picture wound up on money, which is probably what Trump is aiming for.

There was other comparisons, too. Jackson was the first president who had not been born to the colonial aristocracy that had fomented the War of Independence and crafted the Constitution and tended the already-globalized economy, just as the self-proclaimed billionaire Trump proudly wears a chip on his shoulder that he had to make big campaign contributions to get the Clintons to come to his third wedding and is still hated by the older-money smart set. Jackson followed the mixed-results administration of John Quincy Adams, the son of a previous president who had been educated at the best schools and spoke several languages been involved in high-level diplomacy from a young and whose intellectual credentials were impressive by any standards, and had won the presidency with what Jackson called a “corrupt bargain,” just as Trump defeated a previous president’s son in the primaries and then succeeded President Barack Obama, who pretended to have Adams’ intellectual credentials and whose legitimacy Trump had challenged with a similarly fact-free conspiracy theory. Both men were mean old score-settling scorched-earth types, too, which in both cases endeared them to their many ardent admirers.

Such eerie similarities do little to comfort our old-fashioned Republican souls, though, and we can’t imagine they will make any self-respecting Democrat any more favorably inclined to either Trump or their own party’s founder. It might not matter much to Trump’s most ardent fans, but Jackson’s unapologetic-to-the-end pro-slavery stand and all that entirely unnecessary slaughter of peaceable and culturally integrated American Indians still rankles our Lincolnian sensibilities, and we’re sure that by now most Democrats would even agree, and anyone who bothers to read up on it will find that Jackson’s populist economics didn’t work out. The friend of the common man’s distrust of financial elites was such that he provoked the Panic of 1837, the nation’s worst financial crisis until the Great Depression, and Jackson’s dealings with the central banks of his time is eerily similar to the confrontation that’s brewing between Trump and the Federal Reserve Board, and although Trump is closer to self-described socialist and thorough Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders on the issue we suppose that this time around the Republicans will take all the blame.

At least Jackson fought, as his admirers said, just as Trump’s admirers say, but the comparison isn’t friendly to Trump. Jackson literally fought, first as a pre-teen soldier in the Continental Army, when he was captured by British troops and took a permanent facial scar by defying his captors’ orders, later in numerous battles with his state militia in the Creek campaign, most famously as the commander of the pirates and escaped slaves and swamp Indian and backwoods brawlers who won the Battle of New Orleans, followed by numerous pistol duels and sword fights and slaps across the cheek over matters of honor, and in his lattermost years he was known to strike out at any insult with the cane he was forced to use. Say what you want about his outdated racial sensibilities or cockamamie economic ideas, “Old Hickory” was undeniably a badass even by the most up-to-date hip-hop standards.

Trump, on the other hand, insists on being taken seriously but not literally, and that’s how he fights. He dismissed such heroic American prisoners of war as Jackson and Sen. John McCain by saying “I prefer a guy who didn’t get caught,” but a series of educational deferments and some bone spurs a family doctor attested to kept Trump out of the Vietnam War, and except for that time he body-slammed Vince Mcmahon and shaved his head in one of World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Wrestlemania” extravaganzas his fighting has been limited to lawsuits and press conference taunts and insulting “tweets.” Despite those momentarily pesky bone spurs Trump was apparently an above-average high school athlete, and apparently remains a competitive golfer with the help of a notoriously enterprising caddy, but we doubt he’d be dissing the looks of a political opponent’s wife so freely if that sort of thing were still being settled by pistol or sword duel.

Our man Hamilton died in such a duel, at the hand of the famously self-interested demagogue Aaron Burr, and we guess that makes him a loser in Trump’s book. In the history books and the latest Broadway shows Hamilton still looms large, though, and we’d like to think that his sound notions about small government and balanced budgets and letting the meritocracy rise and not unnecessarily slaughtering the darker folks will persist. We’re glad Hamilton will at least continue to smile at from our ten dollar bills, and wryly enjoy his current status as a hip-hop star, and although we don’t like this Taliban-like tendency of the modern left to blast away at the relics of history at least it’s a gun-toting and Bible-believing Republican and badass-in-her-own-right black woman such as Harriet Tubman who’s forcing Jackson into the corner of twenty. For now Jackson’s ghost can enjoy his moment back in the presidential sun, but the comparisons won’t do his reputation any good over the long run.

— Bud Norman