What is “centrist” or “moderate” about a Democrat who believes Americans should not be guaranteed a living wage for full-time work? Every news outlet I’ve seen refers to conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (Trump won his state by 40 points in 2020, so there’s that) as moderate or centrist. According to Mr. Manchin $440 a week is more than fair pay for an unskilled worker, and, as you’ll hear reported everywhere, it is the position of a moderate centrist.
“Times that $400 by 50 weeks (we’ll give her two weeks vacation, unpaid) and that’s a nice, let’s see… $22,000. NOT BAD for someone without a high school diploma!A nice raise from her current $14,500! I’d like that kind of 30% raise myself!! And, yes, I know you can look on google and find out the median American income last year was around $34,000, but that’s factoring in all those folks making $14,500, so you can kind of throw out those numbers.”
What could be more moderate than that? Particularly when the left wing of your party keeps pointing out that adjusted for the cost of living, the federal minimum wage, (which hasn’t been raised since 2009, when it was increased by 70 cents an hour [1]) should be raised to an outrageous $24 an hour. So, radicals want $24. The president wants $15. The GOP presumably wants to keep it at $7.25. So a moderate centrist proposes a compromise of $11. You see?
I can understand FOX news calling Manchin a “centrist” and a “moderate” or a “voice of reason” since he’s basically a Republican in most things — but the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC? What the fuck? Call the thing what it is.
He’s from West Virginia, an impoverished state that voted for Trump by a 40% margin, even after his disastrous first term, a state that recently had a Ku Klux Klansman as one of its senators. He may be independent, he may be a maverick, he may be as politically shrewd as Mitch McConnell, it may be perfectly understandable that he is enjoying his sudden, outsized power and the way everybody is bowing down to him, but one thing he isn’t is a centrist or a moderate. Words fucking matter.
Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema are invariably called “moderates” for their stances on things like not increasing the federal minimum wage to a living wage and their vows to protect the filibuster, to preserve its “bipartisan” spirit. They are only “moderates” in a senate where half of the members reflexively refuse to debate anything at all proposed by the Democrat [sic] party.
They can be seen as moderates only in a world where not publicly voicing the idea that their fellow Democrats actually do like to have sex with children and drink their blood and that the rigged 2020 election was clearly stolen from the incumbent in a way too obvious to need any so-called “proof” counts as being “reasonable” and “moderate”.
It is the moderation of a wealthy person who believes that someone demanding $600 a week pay is a greedy, entitled, lazy fuck who will destroy the economy with unreasonably selfish demands.
The long-delayed COVID relief bill, The American Rescue Plan, is now finally going to be debated in the Senate, debated, after Democrats agreed to take the $15/hr federal minimum wage out of it, reduced proposed unemployment payments and Vice President Kamala Harris cast the 51st and deciding vote to HAVE A DEBATE on this crucial legislation, anxiously awaited by literally millions of suffering Americans.The Democratic “moderates,” with their indispensable votes, got on board, once the offensive living wage provision (an artificially low wage — though more than twice the current one — which would be phased in over four long years) was removed from legislation favored by more than 75% of Americans.
All fifty Republican Senators voted against debating this wildly popular, sorely overdue relief bill during a time of massive national suffering. The bipartisan party of Lincoln voted, in a unanimous block, to block debate on a relief bill needed by millions, measures favored by 77% of Americans including 60% of Republicans.They took this united stand because, according to their most vocal fringe, fundraising dynamos one and all, Biden, an illegitimate president, is fake — he pretends to want bipartisanism but look at how he’s already acting like a dictator, just like his N-word buddy the Muslim.If they are not obstructing passage of this legislation for that reason, it is for something equally compelling, I’m sure — like the absolute parliamentary right to obstruct a vote on virtually anything without any debate whatsoever.
The Senate Parliamentarian [1], who serves at the pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader (who appoints the parliamentarian) gave the “moderate” Democrats cover by ruling that the $15/hr. minimum wage is not properly within the ambit of a budget bill about to be passed by reconciliation (bypassing the 60 vote threshold imposed by the filibuster). The same parliamentarian had no problem ruling that a provision of Trump’s massive tax cut to the wealthy that allowed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve [2] — clearly had to do with the budget and the economy and so could permissibly be passed by a simple majority.
Leaving aside the fact that Elizabeth MacDonough, our nation’s SIXTH Senate Parliamentarian (do the math), currently serves at the pleasure of Chuck Schumer– her decision is not binding. But abiding by her ruling on the minimum wage allows Manchin and Sinema, and any other “moderates” who find a $600 a week wage too extravagant for people who don’t deserve shit and don’t contribute a dime to their political campaigns, to sign on without abandoning their principles (for lack of a better word).
If moderates Manchin and Sinema won’t vote to get rid of the filibuster (and their votes would be needed overcome the 60 vote filibuster mountain to allow the Biden administration to pass anything at all), here are two ideas from a fine discussion by Norm Ornstein on ways to make the filibuster comport with the purpose Machin and Sinema both claim to support.
Ornstein makes the entirely reasonable point that if the minority party wants to obstruct a bill and prevent debate, it should carry the burden of taking strenuous action to do it, rather than forcing the majority to peel off ten votes from the minority (this could not even be done in the recent open and shut impeachment where numerous Republicans admitted they took refuge in a contrived procedural dodge to acquit their leader without actually ruling on the merits). Ornstein accepts the Manchin/Sinema rationale (for purposes of this argument, at least) that the original intent of the filibuster was not to protect slavery or block voting rights and other civil rights, but to increase bipartisanism in the Senate.
One way to restore the filibuster’s original intent would be requiring at least two-fifths of the full Senate, or 40 senators, to keep debating instead requiring 60 to end debate. The burden would fall to the minority, who’d have to be prepared for several votes, potentially over several days and nights, including weekends and all-night sessions, and if only once they couldn’t muster 40 — the equivalent of cloture — debate would end, making way for a vote on final passage of the bill in question.
If you find that too onerous, Democratic “moderates”, how about this?
Go back to the “present and voting” standard.
A shift to three-fifths of the Senate “present and voting” would similarly require the minority to keep most of its members around the Senate when in session. If, for example, the issue in question were voting rights, a Senate deliberating on the floor, 24 hours a day for several days, would put a sharp spotlight on the issue, forcing Republicans to publicly justify opposition to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of minorities. Weekend Senate sessions would cause Republicans up for reelection in 2022 to remain in Washington instead of freeing them to go home to campaign. In a three-fifths present and voting scenario, if only 80 senators showed up, only 48 votes would be needed to get to cloture. Add to that a requirement that at all times, a member of the minority party would have to be on the floor, actually debating, and the burden would be even greater, while delivering what Manchin and Sinema say they want — more debate.
Fair enough for you, eh, moderates?
Presently, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, or anyone on his side of the aisle, merely has to have somebody send an email to the appropriate person announcing his party’s intention to filibuster and letting Democrats know they have to find ten brave GOP Senators willing to be censured by their party for consorting with the enemy. Then, the bill unrevivably dead before a word of debate in the Senate, they can go about their business, being bipartisan.
With the end, or reasonable limitation, of the filibuster, we might also be spared the sickening spectacle of yesterday’s late afternoon stunt by Ron Johnson, from Wisconsin, forcing clerks to read the 628 page American Rescue Plan bill aloud, over the course of ten hours, in a virtually empty Senate chamber, vacated but for a single Republican (to ensure the clerks’ compliance) and one Democrat (for some reason or another). Seriously? I wonder what the Parliamentarian would have ruled on the permissibility of that one.
[1]
The parliamentarian is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader. Traditionally, the parliamentarian is chosen from senior staff in the parliamentarian office, which helps ensure consistency in the application of the Senate’s complex rules.
Term length: Pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader
Constituting instrument: Standing Rules of the Senate
Same as his old job (outside of the danger of being lynched for cowardice), he’s a paid right-wing “scholar” and celebrity talking point mouthpiece at the influential right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation [1]. News broke yesterday, like a foul wind, that Pence authored an opinion piece in his employer’s news letter that is being called an “op ed” — a thoughtful discussion of “election integrity” published by the prestigious on-line journal Daily Signal, a publication of … whoa! The Heritage Foundation [2]. Every headline tells their story:
Pence’s scholarly theory, and he’s sticking to it, is that even though the short-lived Trump Presidential Advisory Commission for Electoral Integrity he headed with Voter Suppression champion Kris Koback, found virtually no electoral fraud of any kind in 2016 (when Trump claimed millions of Mexican zombies illegally inflated Hillary Clinton’s large victory among American voters) — the PERCEPTION OF WIDESPREAD FRAUD in 2020 and the attendant lack of faith in the integrity of American elections is the real problem for our democracy. Pence stressed that we must clamp down on states illegally trying to let more people vote without the proper supervision because some voters, in fact millions of them are — may I be politically correct here? — N-WORDS and the people who, falsely, believe that such people should be allowed to vote just like old, angry, wealthy (and/or stupid) white people in rural and strategically gerrymandered enclaves.
There is nothing surprising in Pence echoing the lies of his former boss, after all, voter suppression has been a longtime goal of Pence’s party. In fairness to them, their policies (giving tax breaks to the wealthiest, stressing that the poor should shut the fuck up) are widely unpopular. They might be correct in their belief that their only hope for maintaining a stranglehold on power is by trickery, lying, exploiting the raging grievance of masses of evangelized supporters, and cleverly constructed discriminatory voting restrictions to maximize their votes and minimize “DEMOCRAT” [sic] votes. Hell with cleverly constructed voter suppression laws, now that we think of it, even in- your-face ones ought to work with a 6-3 SCOTUS no worries, LOL! They already have the brains of the group, John Roberts, on board!
Is Pence simply calculating and spineless, you ask? The answer is yes, both. Nothing surprising there either– he was one of the heads of Trump’s crack (smoking) White House Corona Virus Task Force, making the announcement last June that his leader had kicked COVID-19 right in the pussy and that the crisis was now over, 400,000 additional US deaths of COVID-19 (and counting) notwithstanding.The real plan, largely successful, was to ignore the uncontrolled spread of the disease to establish herd mentality, as the president stated. They gave it a scientific-sounding rationale by calling their efforts to politicize the infectious air-born pathogen an effort to gain what sticklers call herd IMMUNITY, such as the absolute herd immunity enjoyed by the alpha male in nature who may, even if herbivorous, eat his entire herd for his own survival.In fairness to Pence, science has never been the strong suit of religious bigots.
I keep wondering what would have happened if even more of the Capitol Police force openly sided with the rioters on January 6th. If instead of a hero cop like Eugene Goodman leading guys like Romney and Pence away from the surging, violent mob they’d led the mob to Romney and Pence and others the rioters wanted to fuck up. There might have simply been a good beat down of these cucks and traitors to the Big Lie, there’s no proof that anyone chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” would actually have strung him up. But what if they had? Would anything about the GOP’s continued lockstep march behind Trump’s obscenely naked lie have changed?
I wonder about this the same way I wonder what would happen if the former president who always singles out Black women for special abuse (a two-fer for a misogynistic racist) who angrily called them bitches when denouncing their thug sons who took a knee in protest during the National Anthem, had ever been caught on mic simply saying the word he must have said a million times over the years, to wit: “nigger.” I wonder — would that have been his undoing? Or just another example of Liberal Cancel Culture [3] shutting down God’s Imperfect Vessel merely for giving voice to what everyone of us is constantly thinking. Particularly about spoiled, entitled Black sons of bitch mothers who don’t even have the decency to pretend there’s nothing wrong with unarmed blacks being regularly killed by law enforcement in this country.
What are these enraged son of a bitch maniacs going to do next? Beat cops with flagpoles bearing American flags while chanting “blue lives matter?”
All this said, I have been relieved in recent days at the lack of relevance any of this Big Lie shit seems to have beyond the confines of the Trump/Pence dead-enders ecosphere. Not that his extremist party, strictly speaking, needs him at this point, their fundraising off the Big Lie (stolen election he won in a landslide) is robust. Still, it’s nice that Pence’s master is finally mostly silent.
Even among the extremest of these moneyed fucks, those who attended CPAC’s annual county fair, only 55% percent want Trump to run for president for life in 2024. Even Trump seemed ambivalent about running in 2024. His niece Mary, who seemingly got the brains Trump and his offspring were unfairly denied, predicted that Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 (the election he keeps claiming he won IN A LANDSLIDE) means he will never risk such a humiliation again.
Now we just have to let the many prosecutions and investigations take their courses, and watch to see which ambulance chasers step up to ineptly defend Trump in those suits. The jury in these court cases will unfairly exclude Trump’s co-conspirators and enablers, unlike when he was POTUS. In Georgia, the Extremely Stable Genius’s perfect phone call (his eighteenth try– he doesn’t give up and neither should you!) to his former supporter Brad Raffensberger is being played for a Grand Jury, even as we speak.
Pence? N-word, please!!
[1]
The prestigious right wing think tank has an annual budget of about $80,000,000 (as of 2011) and, though it is a tax exempt non-profit that is not required to disclose its donors, it has a number of right wing luminaries on its board of trustees. These include Rebekah Mercer, Ed Meese and Jim DeMint.Not surprisingly, their position on Climate Change is that it’s bullshit:
The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.[69][70] The Heritage Foundation is one of many climate change denial organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil.[69][71] The Heritage Foundation strongly criticized the Kyoto Agreement, which was intended to curb climate change, saying American participation in the treaty would “result in lower economic growth in every state and nearly every sector of the economy.”[72] The Heritage Foundation projected that the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would result in a cost of $1,870 per family in 2025 and $6,800 by 2035; on the other hand, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that it would only cost the average family $175 in 2020.[73]
and, as for electoral fraud bearing the need for strict measures to prevent:
The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of voter fraud. Hans von Spakovsky who heads the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation has played an influential role in making alarmism about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.[74][75] His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, has been discredited.[76]
For the fiscal year ending December 31, 2011, Charity Watch reported that Edwin Feulner, past president of The Heritage Foundation, received the highest compensation in its top 25 list of compensation received by charity members. According to Charity Watch, Feulner received $2,702,687 in 2013. This sum includes investment earnings of $1,656,230 accrued over a period of 33 years.[90]
Heritage’s total revenue for 2011 was $72,170,983 and its expenses were $80,033,828.[91][92]
[2]
The Daily Signal is a conservative American political media news website founded in June 2014. The publication focuses on politics, policy, and culture and offers political commentary from a conservative perspective. It is published by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.Owner: The Heritage Foundation Editor: Robert Bluey Launched: 2014
[3]
Ask GOP stalwart Liz Cheney, John McCain’s widow, former Senator Jeff Flake and anybody else in the GOP who found inciting a violent attack on the Capitol on the day the final, ceremonial certification of the election to be a high crime for a president to commit, about the fucking libtards and our vicious, zero-sum cancel culture.
I have been wrestling with a difficult issue for many years now, my seemingly all but final estrangement from two people I was always close to. Their loss was a kind of ‘collateral damage’ resulting from the demand to hide someone else’s well-founded feelings of shame.
Seen in the worst light, my constant return to this painful subject is what psychologists call perseverating, self-inflicted pain from regretful preoccupation with an ultimately insoluble tragedy, the neurotic need to constantly relive the past suffering that caused deep wounds.
Seen another way, the way I prefer to see it, I’m searching for an elusive solution to an ongoing tragedy. I’ve been turning the evidence of our estrangement over in my hands, looking at it from every direction, shining light on it from every angle, seeking a creative solution to something important to me, an inventive idea that has been evading me.
Last night I thought of two questions, one for each of them, that sum up my long musings, without divulging anything of underlying shameful events to anyone involved.
They are a sister and brother, the girl a history buff, the guy a poet and a fiction writer. Sadly, I lost touch with them over the last few years. My intermittent attempts to maintain the relationships are finally met with mostly silence. Yesterday, while thinking about something else, I stumbled on a final question I could ask each of them. If I had only one last question to ask, I think it might be these (note the lengthy illustrations to the historian’s question).
To the young historian:
Q: Is history the fact-based inquiry into the nuanced reasons events and trends happen in human society, pursued to give us insight into the challenges of the present and the future?Isn’t the alternative to factual history propaganda, a false narrative supporting a pre-determined outcome?
Historical narratives emerge to make sense of the past. From earliest human history people were strategically erased from memory. In the days of the Pharaohs the new dynasty would send slaves to scrape the faces of their predecessors off the tomb walls, fucking them in the afterlife, erasing them from history. This is an ongoing pattern in human affairs.
When Germany lost the first World War certain Germans came up with an infuriating myth, The Stab in the Back — the victorious German army had been betrayed and humiliated by treacherous enemies who would be made to pay with their lives. The endlessly shifting narratives of history often swing wildly between opposite interpretations. A school of history will hold forth its theory — insist and largely prevail for generations (like the Dunning School at Columbia rewrote the history of the Civil War) inverting the previous understanding. In the case of the Civil War, the revisionist early twentieth century history (influential for decades) held that the Confederacy did not secede over slavery, that in a real way they never lost the glorious war to preserve their way of life, that the people they massacred were the real traitors to the Constitution.
We are watching a historic battle for the soul of history at this fascinating, scary moment in history. The recent riot at the Capitol, the ascendant far-right tells us now, in one voice, was done by leftists posing as Trump supporters, to make Trump look bad after they stole the election from him.
Isn’t inquiry into the facts of what actually happened in the past the crucial work of the historian? Isn’t good history the business of making the often irrational human endeavor understandable by placing carefully uncovered ideas and events into context?
Example:
Senator John Tester (D-Montana) told Bill Maher the other night that the original purpose of the filibuster was to promote bipartisanship by requiring a 3/5 majority vote to hold a legislative debate or a confirmation hearing [1]. Maher had no comment on this origin story, a dubious story Tester offered in passing, one he had no obvious motivation to promote.
Tester’s comment leads to a reasonable question: was the filibuster designed and used to promote bipartisanship in the senate?
Would even a cursory reading of history, or Wikipedia [2], show that John C. Calhoun, our nation’s greatest defender of slavery in the Senate, refined the use of the filibuster to allow the proslavery minority to block legislation that could threaten the viability of the Peculiar Institution? Would we learn that virtually every use of this minority tool during the twentieth century was to oppose legislation that would favor the greater rights for the majority? Does this not strongly suggest that bipartisanship was not the original motivation for this parliamentary device that can instantly disable a majority’s ability to pass laws?
Or, does it make no difference, historically, like whether or not the 2020 Election was actually stolen from the rightful winner by an illegitimate president who was sworn in over the strenuous objection of countless patriots?
In the case of the 2020 election there is a great deal of evidence to suggest this claim of a stolen election is a lie, and no evidence of substantial voter fraud has ever been produced, but couldn’t you say, without being judgmental, that it’s really just a hotly disputed matter of opinion that people of good faith could agree to disagree about?
Or, is there even such a thing as historical fact?
For the young writer:
I was more than forty years old, after solid decades of senseless war with my heavily defended, often aggrieved father, before I got a glimpse of understanding into his desperation, what made him so intent on winning an imaginary war against his children. His mother, it turned out, had whipped him in the face from the time he could stand on his little baby legs. Trying recovering from that primal betrayal.
Learning this, from a relative who’d witnessed it many times and sadly related it to me, flooded me with sudden sympathy for my poor battling old man. I understood, in a flash, the humiliation that led to his desperate lifelong battle against his children. It didn’t fix the years of senseless brutality or reverse the damage he’d done, but it gave me an insight that opened a door I’d never seen. A few years later that insight, and months with a good therapist, enabled me to stand by his deathbed and gently listen to his regrets, help him die as peacefully as he could.
If you are writing about a character who is depressed or angry, or conflicted, or up against it, is it important to show the stress, provocation, abuse and other stresses she underwent that led to her dramatic situation? If you tell the story of an unhappy, angry, anxious character compelled to dramatic action without giving the reader these things, what kind of story are you telling?
Or is all shit simply stuff that just happens? A Zen koan unfolding against unhearable music?
And if someone reaches out to you and you don’t acknowledge it, after a while, shouldn’t that idiot eventually get the message that the continued reaching out is folly? Seems straightforward enough, no?
[1]
I just realized, the filibuster– requiring 3/5 of the Senate to vote to hold a hearing on a bill or confirmation, was our nation’s second 3/5 Compromise (the first being in the Constitution, to increase the power of the less populous plantation states by increasing their populations for Congressional representation by counting 3/5 of each slave towards apportionment in the House).
[2]
Reliance on Wikipedia, in this case, would result in a skewed understanding of the filibuster, which in this telling was first used by Alabama Senator (and future vice president) William Rufus Devane King, and was not the favorite obstruction tool proslavery and later anti-Civil Rights minorities in the Senate, liked the good old boys who blocked anti-lynching legislation for decades during the height of anti-black terrorism in the U.S. Although, you will read:
Giant statue of God Emperor Trump made for the 147th Viareggio Carnival Parade in Italy. Emperor Trump wields a mighty “Gigant Twitter Sword”. Politics aside, thats some mighty fine work imo 🙂
You can almost do the math in your head. $7.25 an hour times forty hours: $290 a week. $15 an hour times 40: $600. Raising the federal minimum wage to a modest living wage, we are told by Trump’s party (and at least two selected Democrats) would somehow be calamitous.
The Senate parliamentarian advised Democrats yesterday that raising the federal minimum wage by reconciliation (which requires 51 votes) as part of their $1.9 trillion pandemic relief/stimulus program is a violation of the Senate’s arcane rules [1]. There was no such ruling, of course, when Trump’s GOP, in a 51-49 vote, gave a similar sum to our richest families, partnerships and corporations in tax give backs in December, 2017. If there was, nobody mentioned it, it derailed nothing.
In the richest country in the world, our lowest paid workers are currently free to work full-time and live in poverty.How is paying workers a modest living wage controversial?
If the real concern is bankrupting small businesses that will be unable to make payroll, there are ways to subsidize those businesses to keep them solvent and profitable. Government support to help small businesses who would be burdened by paying a living wage to their workers would be similar to, and benefit many millions more than, the massive subsidies our government already gives to highly profitable fossil fuel conglomerates and other corporate beneficiaries of taxpayer generosity. But concern for small business is not the real concern here, folks.
It’s a hard to understand the rationale of those who don’t want America’s poorest working people to be able to afford clothing, shelter, healthy food and health care.I don’t understand it as anything more than an expression of disdain by the born-comfortable for anybody who was not prudent enough to be born into reasonable financial circumstances. The children of the poor in America have steeper odds of ever escaping poverty than poor kids in most other wealthy nations, plus they and their parents are routinely vilified as lazy freeloaders who refuse to do the impossible– “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”.
How does the existence of millions of full-time workers who struggle to support themselves and their children, even if they work two 40 hour jobs a week, help anyone? How did slavery help the masses of American workers? Yet, there would be a long, bloody fight to the death to preserve the Peculiar Institution. This fight over a living wage seems to be part of that same struggle, a vicious and well-funded fight to benefit a small group of highly privileged individuals.
The parliamentarian’s ruling yesterday took the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, West Virgina’s Joe Manchin, off the hook, for the moment. His vote is needed to pass any law or confirm any nominee in the divided Senate, even 51-50. Manchin seems to be enjoying his new status as a kingmaker. He announced the other day that he opposes the $15 dollar minimum wage, advocating for a compromise $11 an hour federal minimum wage. Only 4 dollars difference, only $160 a week. Why bitch about $640 a month? Show some class! Let’s show our bipartisan spirit and compromise, y’all. Where I come from, $11 is a lot of money!
Where you’re going, Joe, $11 won’t even buy you a blowjob from one of Satan’s lowliest.
I didn’t forget about Joe Manchin’s fellow conservative Democratic kingmaker, Arizona’s senior senator (in office since 2109), Kyrsten Sinema [2], I just can’t think of anything the staunch defender of the filibuster might try to buy for $11. Maybe a Big Mac, super-sized fries, a giant Coke and a nice dessert from a good bakery.
In other news:
Lynch mob victim and former Senator Al Franken cracked “I like Ted Cruz more than anybody in the Senate does– and I HATE Ted Cruz.” Here’s Ted, doing thirty seconds of standup for his peeps:
[1]
The Senate parliamentarian ruled that a plan to gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 does not fit the complicated rules that govern budget bills in the Senate. House Democrats included the measure in a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that is expected to be the first major legislative act for President Biden.
from: Kyrsten Sinema’s Self-Defeating, Nonsensical Defense of the Filibuster: The Arizona senator is almost single-handedly keeping Democrats from wielding their majority power—and the party may well lose that power as a result.
This year, all around the country, Republican state lawmakers are pushing an alarming array of bills that are designed to make it harder to vote. They’re targeting absentee voting, early voting, voting by mail, and virtually every other means to cast a ballot. Though their stated justification is the illusory threat of voter fraud, the goal is to reduce turnout in ways that suppress Democratic votes. In short, it’s a cynical move against basic tenets of American democracy.
Democrats have an answer to this challenge. For the past two years, they’ve put forward H.R. 1, a sweeping bill to reform American elections. It would enact automatic voter registration nationwide, expand early voting and vote-by-mail, and more. And it doesn’t stand a chance of passage, as long as the Senate filibuster remains intact.
The case against the filibuster has been made ad nauseam lately—including in these pages, by me and others. But there’s a reason the argument has become unavoidable: The filibuster is the most decisive force in American governance and policymaking today. It decides—by virtue of requiring 60 votes to pass most legislation, rather than simply a 51-vote majority—the outcome of countless policy debates before they can even begin.
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall cautioned those who look at skin color as an indication of a person’s views on social justice to remember that a black snake will bite you just as hard as a white snake. Case in point, this extreme right-wing motherfucker:
His warning to his fellow justices, who recently declined to hear appeals of several baseless Trump/RNC hypothetical voting fraud cases, presumably was that since the Supreme Court failed to act there will be millions of votes cast by angry Black people intent on making his side, electorally, the minority party that it is. They will vote by mail, they will march from churches to cast early ballots on Sunday, they will go door to door and organize to bring out a tidal wave of first time voters and even the most surgical GOP gerrymandering in the world, and the strictest voter suppression laws (GOP lawmakers in 43 states have already proposed more than 250 in the first 56 days of 2021) may not prevent majoritarian hoards from voting out Trump loyalist candidates who serve the greater good that Thomas views as the true America. An American meritocracy of color-blind rugged individualism, a nation where a long history of racism has no bearing on the current opportunities for, or grievances of, those long persecuted.
A longer, more detailed and legally-based description of Clarence Thomas’s warning was found in today’s New York Times, in an op-ed entitled The Supreme Court Is Not Finished With Elections [1]. In essence, the most rightwing justices seek to end the ability of state courts (elected statewide, not strictly subject to partisan gerrymandering) to overrule the will of the state legislatures (voted into office in gerrymandered districts) when it comes to state citizens’ right to vote in federal elections. You know, States’ Rights, one of the bedrocks of American conservatism.
On a note related to the many baseless Trump/RNC cases that were dismissed, many after protracted and expensive court battles, I read this late last night and said, aloud, to no-one in particular, “that’s what I’m talking about!”
Georgia lawmakers, too, are advancing measures to slash mail-in voting to protect against voter fraud, even as two counties in the Atlanta area want attorneys’ fees from Trump and the chair of the Georgia Republican Party for frivolous lawsuits designed to overturn the 2020 election. “Given the number of failed lawsuits filed by the former president and his campaign, petitioners apparently believed that they could file their baseless and legally deficient actions with impunity, with no regard for the costs extracted from the taxpayers’ coffers or the consequences to the democratic foundations of our country,” wrote lawyers for Cobb County.
Courts often sanction lawyers for filing lawsuits that are without merit, trumped up cases brought without evidence and with the intent to harass, intimidate or otherwise use the justice system for leverage or sensationalist publicity. These lawsuits are called frivolous and the penalties courts can impose on attorneys who illegally bring such suits not based on evidence include sanctions and fines against the lawyer, subjecting the lawyer to a disciplinary hearing for filing a vexatious frivolous lawsuit and forcing the litigant who used the court as an expensive bludgeon to pay the legal fees for the person he dragged into court without a legally sustainable reason.
I’ve been wondering when one of the dozens of courts who spent valuable time and resources examining and dismissing dozens of baseless Trump/RNCpost-election challenges, and the literally hundreds brought before the election with the intent of making it harder for science believers to vote safely during a pandemic, would sanction someone for subjecting the court, the jurisdiction they were suing and the taxpayers, to the time, anxiety, great expense, of a shameless propaganda spectacle, based in speculation, unsubstantiated allegations and the fear-mongering that these frivolous lawsuits caused. You go, Cobb County!
Hopefully there will be dozens more of these filings, and court-ordered repayment of the massive taxpayer resources wasted to defend against these voter suppression attempts by the most unpopular (and most powerful within his minority party, go figure…) ex-president in American history.
In other news, yesterday President Biden signed an executive order saying, in essence, “I’ve got your ‘anarchist jurisdictions’ right here, asshole.”This order reverses a Trump/Barr policy memo that designated jurisdictions that did not unequivocally support Trump as ‘anarchist’ and attempted to deprive us of federal funds. Presidential in the coolest American sense of the word, particularly during a deadly pandemic, that Memorandum of September 2, 2020 (Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients of Federal Funds That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities).
Jesus, I hope the next Attorney General will not be a partisan hack/attorney/wingman for the president like that goddamned Obama-sycophant Eric Holder!(As one of the GOP Senators, probably Lyin’ Ted, suggested Garland might be). Oh, speaking of Lyin’ Ted, this gave me a chuckle:
Even Republicans who may vote against him praised Garland.
“In two-plus decades on the court, you have built a reputation for integrity and for setting aside partisan interests in following the law,” said Cruz, before noting that the attorney general job is different.
(from “Clinton News Network” report on Merrick Garland confirmation hearing).
Also, time to update, google:
The 84th and current Attorney General is Jeff Sessions, who assumed the office on February 9, 2017. The attorney general serves as a member of the Cabinet of the President of the United States and is the only cabinet officer who does not have the title “Secretary of”..
Remember Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, in which five justices voted to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s handling of a statewide recount? That decision was based on a theory of equal protection so wacky that the majority opinion insisted that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances” — that is to say, don’t dare invoke this poor excuse for an opinion as a precedent.
That didn’t stop Justice Thomas from citing Bush v. Gore in his dissenting opinion on Monday, and he did so in a particularly shameless fashion. The language he cited wasn’t even from the Bush v. Gore majority opinion, but rather from a separate concurring opinion filed in that case by only three of the majority justices, who argued that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution by substituting its will for that of the state Legislature.
Justice Thomas invoked that minority portion of the decision to assert that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was constitutionally out of bounds when, citing both the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Postal Service as its reasons, it added three postelection days for lawful receipt of mailed ballots.
He went on to warn that fraud was “more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” citing as evidence a 1994 Federal District Court case, an article in this newspaper from 2012 and the 2018 Republican ballot-harvesting fraud in North Carolina. Such occurrences, he said, raise “the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.” This was the reason, he argued, that the Supreme Court should have taken and decided the Pennsylvania cases before the next election cycle.
In his inventory of ballot fraud, Justice Thomas of course could not refer to fraud in the 2020 election, because there wasn’t any. Not a problem:
We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud. But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.
In other words, Justice Thomas would have it both ways: If there was fraud, the court needed to intervene, and if there was no fraud, the court needed to intervene because the fraud might simply be undetected. Despite his disclaimer, the entire structure of his opinion, suggesting that something bad had happened even if no one could prove it, is fairly read as validating the essence of the Trump narrative.
It seems too basic to point out here, but it’s worth a thought, I think. Many lies are told primarily to avoid shame.
For example, if I lost my job, due to petty embezzlement that was discovered by my friend Dave who had hired me recently, I’d feel ashamed. My wife would have a shit fit and it would ruin our weekend. So I tell her that Dave was forced to reluctantly downsize on Friday, and since I was the last hired, I had to be let go. The guy hired right before me also got the ax from Dave, who apologized and promised to rehire us as soon as business picks up.
My wife will be sympathetic instead of angry, my firing had nothing to do with me, nothing at all. She might be suspicious, since I lost my last two jobs due to petty embezzlement and lied about each of those, and she’d be within her rights to rage at me for another lie to cover another petty theft from my boss, but I can always convince her of a lie she wants to believe. Her short-term sympathy, gained by this harmless lie, will be worth it, especially since she’ll be mad as hell when she finds out in either case.By the time Dave calls my wife on Monday, snarling about my betrayal (he had done me a solid by hiring me, I did kind of betray him) and threatening to have me prosecuted if my wife doesn’t repay the money I stole, I will have had a peaceful, shame-free weekend basking in my wife’s sympathy. Better than nothing.
If you do something you’re ashamed of, you will often feel a strong need to deny it. There are various ways to do this, but if it takes a straightforward lie, so be it. Lying is better than feeling shame, by a mile. If you’re caught in the lie, well, shit happens. You’ll figure out the next lie as you need it.
I’m sure shame comes into the Big Lies too, especially ones based on national humiliation. Are the lies about a rigged, stolen election, and the $50,000,000 ad budget to promote the lie and a well-planned, well-financed ($3,500,000 that we know of) attempted insurrection based on that infuriating lie, based on shame? I suppose we could say so. If you claim, before and after two elections, that the election (even the one you legally won, in spite of an almost 3,000,000 “popular vote” loss) was marred by massive fraud — and you produce no evidence of fraud, beyond the 1 case out of every 2 million votes found by the Koch-backed Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database — does that indicate shame? After all, you were raised to believe that there are only two kinds of people, winners and losers. You are a winner. The only way you can lose is if some powerful force lies to cheat you. That’s how the victorious German army “lost” the First World War, after all.
If a lie is to gain a foothold in the minds of millions, it must be undeviatingly insisted on. Publicly and privately, it must be repeated over and over. Asked point blank if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won a fair election, supporters of the president’s baseless claim that radical Democrats stole it will point to a swarm of ornate talking points. Ask them on national television: Yes or No, motherfucker, did Biden win a fair election?
You can hear their straight answers to this direct question, from the intellectuals of the GOP, men like Senators Rand Paul, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rep. Steve Scalise, the head of CPAC:
Well, you see, that’s the kind of question you people always ask, and next you’re going to call me a liar, which is all you liars know how to do. But as even you have to admit, the real question is why the signatures of Black inner city voters were not verified as the state laws require, in state after state, city after city, or why millions of ballots, cast by mail– against state law, were accepted DAYS AFTER THE ELECTION. The real question is why illegal ballots were fraudulently harvested and counted, millions and millions of unverified Muslim, Mexican and Transsexual votes– and countless child-blood drinkers’ ballots. The real question is “fuck you, you fucking fuck!”
Yesterday’s hearing about the federal government’s unaccountable failure to mobilize enough police presence to prevent the January 6th insurrectionist riot at the Capitol featured this moving testimony from U.S. Capitol Police Captain Carneysha Mendoza. She describes, among other horrors, the rioters’ release of military grade CS gas, inside the building, mixed with fire extinguisher spray deployed by rioters, that resulted in chemical burns to her face:
Senator Ron Johnson [1], who comes from Wisconsin, reads into the record the alternative fact that it was not Trump supporters who clashed with police, sprayed them with bear spray, overran the barricades, crushed them in doorways, beat the police with flagpoles, carried Trump and Confederate flags into the Capitol, released poison gas, spread feces over paintings and statues of famous Democrats — it was, literally, a false flag operation! The violent ones were all antifa provocateurs! The Trump supporters were all peaceful — it was the outside agitators who made them look like an ugly mob who wanted to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi!!!! Posing as Trump supporters, who were, to a man and woman, as peaceful as baby lambs, even as they trampled one of their own to death, her “Don’t Tread on Me” flag notwithstanding.
Where did Johnson, who had previously argued that the mob was not “armed” because most of them had no firearms (military grade CS gas, bear spray, improvised clubs and spears, brass knuckles, knives, tactical gear– not “arms”, snowflakes…), get this account that he read into the official record? A rightwing website, reporting on a single source who made this extremely far-fetched claim — he read directly from their post.
Prove Johnson knew he was lying. Fucking prove it, you fucking liars!
Is Ron Johnson publicly spreading this lie, on some level, because he’s ashamed? Were the GOP 140 Representatives who voted to block the certification of Biden Electors? Hawley? Cruz? Tuberville? The rest of the Senate Voter Integrity Skeptic caucus? Impossible to say, really. That’s what Ethics Investigations are designed to find out.
I’m trying to turn the page, so to speak, and not tune in on Trump-related news, but it won’t stop for a while (at least until he’s locked up somewhere for any of his numerous crimes) and Sekhnet is addicted to breaking news and follows it daily. So during lunch I got to catch Amy Klobachar and her Republican counterpart at the conclusion of the hearing into why nobody in charge did anything to get reinforcements rushed in while the Capitol was being overrun by heavily armed Q and MAGA maggots (why virtually all 800 beloved, defecation-smearing Trump patriots were allowed to leave peacefully afterwards is still a mystery nobody seems to be touching… I guess the answer is too obvious, the president told them he loved them, and that he felt their pain).
When committee chairperson Klobachar was done with her closing statement, the Republican committee co-chair thanked her and said he enjoyed the bipartisan hearing. He also thanked the witnesses, for appearing voluntarily and answering honestly, as opposed to (I’m thinking) his Congressional colleagues who threatened to be hostile witnesses who’d use litigation to tie up their subpoenas to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial for years and prolong Trump’s “unconstitutional” “partisan” impeachment circus until their leader’s 2024 campaign was fully underway.
Bipartisanism 101. Narcissistic symbiosis…
A friend sent me a great print interview with the brilliant Dr. Bandy Lee, a principled forensic psychiatrist I’ve long admired. Lee’s answers nailed several key points about a dangerously impulsive demagogue and his followers succinctly and clearly enough for anyone but a MAGA believer to understand.
What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?
The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive.The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.
“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure.
The description above also fits any cult, abusive marriage or other one-sided power relationship, for that matter. The leader needs the followers as much as the follower needs the leader, for the deepest and most compelling of psychological reasons. Narcissistic Symbiosis! She lays it out in so few words — inner lack-of self-worth, grandiosity (eternal need for praise) meets injured, stressed yearning for a protective parent.
Also, read Dr. Lee’s great dismissal of the “Goldwater Rule” (shrinks are prohibited from assessing even the craziest public officials unless they’ve first done an in-person evaluation — in which case medical confidentiality rules would seemingly be implicated). The Goldwater (“extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”) Rule is always cited by media pundits and politicians as some holy grail, like a well-settled, universally accepted law that only cranks and criminals try to violate. It’s a rule made by a conservative professional association — not actually binding on anyone but its voluntary members.
Groups like the American Psychiatric Association, promulgators of the Goldwater Rule, always remind me that doctors in Hitler’s Germany were the first professional group to achieve perfect Aryan/Nazi membership, undergleichshaltung [“co-ordination”, the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control. Party membership and an oath of personal loyalty to the leader were required to practice any profession or hold any office, just like in the defunct Trump administration.]
Instead of holding hearings where fine Ever-Trumpers like seditionist Lyin’ Ted Cruz and fist-pumping insurrection-supporter Josh Hawley can pontificate and create soundbytes for extremist media, just set out the details of the long Trump purge, the constant humiliations, vindictive firings and forced resignations, in Trump’s chaotic administration– the replacement of long-time officials of some expertise with ever less qualified loyalists with a proven willingness to do anything their leader demanded. Then, is it really necessary to hold a hearing to figure out why there was no immediate, coordinated response to protect Congress members and their staffs when the Capitol was attacked by a violent, armed crowd waving Trump flags, and Confederate battle flags, and other signs and symbols of resistance to the duly elected government? The president, depressed that a rigged election had been stolen from him (his rigging didn’t work!) was finally enjoying something, live on TV. Seemed like a sin for any of his appointees and other loyal underlings to ruin the poor guy’s fun!
Well, as Biden said the other day at a press conference — five years of Trump on the news every minute of every day is enough, I’m done talking about him. I hope…
Here’s Doctor Bandy Lee, from last month’s Scientific American interview:
The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists
Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it
Tanya Lewis on January 11, 2021 The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.
One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.* Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejectedthe American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline,known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”
Lee recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole. These insights are now taking on renewed importance as a growing number of current and former leaders call for Trump to be impeached. On January 9 Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition put out a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office.
Scientific American asked Lee to comment on the psychology behind Trump’s destructive behavior, what drives some of his followers—and how to free people from his grip when this damaging presidency ends. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?
The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.
“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.
Why does Trump himself seem to gravitate toward violence and destruction?
Destructiveness is a core characteristic of mental pathology, whether directed toward the self or others. First, I wish to clarify that those with mental illness are, as a group, no more dangerous than those without mental illness. When mental pathology is accompanied by criminal-mindedness, however, the combination can make individuals far more dangerous than either alone.In my textbook on violence, I emphasize the symbolic nature of violence and how it is a life impulse gone awry. Briefly, if one cannot have love, one resorts to respect. And when respect is unavailable, one resorts to fear. Trump is now living through an intolerable loss of respect: rejection by a nation in his election defeat. Violence helps compensate for feelings of powerlessness, inadequacy and lack of real productivity.
Do you think Trump is truly exhibiting delusional or psychotic behavior? Or is he simply behaving like an autocrat making a bald-faced attempt to hold onto his power?
I believe it is both. He is certainly of an autocratic disposition because his extreme narcissism does not allow for equality with other human beings, as democracy requires. Psychiatrists generally assess delusions through personal examination, but there is other evidence of their likelihood. First, delusions are more infectious than strategic lies, and so we see, from their sheer spread, that Trump likely truly believes them. Second, his emotional fragility, manifested in extreme intolerance of realities that do not fit his wishful view of the world, predispose him to psychotic spirals. Third, his public record includes numerous hours of interviews and interactions with other people—such as the hour-long one with the Georgia secretary of state—that very nearly confirm delusion, as my colleague and I discovered in a systematic analysis.
Where does the hatred some of his supporters display come from? And what can we do to promote healing?
In Profile of a Nation, I outline the many causes that create his followership. But there is important psychological injury that arises from relative—not absolute—socioeconomic deprivation. Yes, there is great injury, anger and redirectable energy for hatred, which Trump harnessed and stoked for his manipulation and use. The emotional bonds he has created facilitate shared psychosis at a massive scale. It is a natural consequence of the conditions we have set up. For healing, I usually recommend three steps: (1) Removal of the offending agent (the influential person with severe symptoms). (2) Dismantling systems of thought control—common in advertising but now also heavily adopted by politics. And (3) fixing the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to poor collective mental health in the first place.
What do you predict he will do after his presidency?
I again emphasize in Profile of a Nation that we should consider the president, his followers and the nation as an ecology, not in isolation. Hence, what he does after this presidency depends a great deal on us. This is the reason I frantically wrote the book over the summer: we require active intervention to stop him from achieving any number of destructive outcomes for the nation, including the establishment of a shadow presidency. He will have no limit, which is why I have actively advocated for removal and accountability, including prosecution. We need to remember that he is more a follower than a leader, and we need to place constraints from the outside when he cannot place them from within.
What do you think will happen to his supporters?
If we handle the situation appropriately, there will be a lot of disillusionment and trauma. And this is all right—they are healthy reactions to an abnormal situation. We must provide emotional support for healing, and this includes societal support, such as sources of belonging and dignity. Cult members and victims of abuse are often emotionally bonded to the relationship, unable to see the harm that is being done to them. After a while, the magnitude of the deception conspires with their own psychological protections against pain and disappointment. This causes them to avoid seeing the truth. And the situation with Trump supporters is very similar. The danger is that another pathological figure will come around and entice them with a false “solution” that is really a harnessing of this resistance.
How can we avert future insurrection attempts or acts of violence?
Violence is the end product of a long process, so prevention is key. Structural violence, or inequality, is the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence. And reducing inequality in all forms—economic, racial and gender—will help toward preventing violence. For prevention to be effective, knowledge and in-depth understanding cannot be overlooked—so we can anticipate what is coming, much like the pandemic. The silencing of mental health professionals during the Trump era, mainly through a politically driven distortion of an ethical guideline, was catastrophic, in my view, in the nation’s failure to understand, predict and prevent the dangers of this presidency.
Do you have any advice for people who do not support Trump but have supporters of him or “mini-Trumps” in their lives?
This is often very difficult because the relationship between Trump and his supporters is an abusive one, as an author of the 2017 book I edited, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, presciently pointed out. When the mind is hijacked for the benefit of the abuser, it becomes no longer a matter of presenting facts or appealing to logic. Removing Trump from power and influence will be healing in itself. But, I advise, first, not to confront [his supporters’] beliefs, for it will only rouse resistance. Second, persuasion should not be the goal but change of the circumstance that led to their faulty beliefs. Third, one should maintain one’s own bearing and mental health, because people who harbor delusional narratives tend to bulldoze over reality in their attempt to deny that their own narrative is false. As for mini-Trumps, it is important, above all, to set firm boundaries, to limit contact or even to leave the relationship, if possible. Because I specialize in treating violent individuals, I always believe there is something that can be done to treat them, but they seldom present for treatment unless forced.
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