When a child is born to a ruthless and destructive parent, the kid has two choices growing up — once she recognizes what she is up against (no easy task). The child can follow the path set by the parent — learn to kill like an alpha predator or become prey, a weakling, a “loser” unworthy of love, say — or grow up to repudiate that pernicious worldview. The world is a place of infinite gradation, becoming like or disavowing a destructive parent is one of the few truly black and white choices we are given in this life, though far from an easy one.

It’s hard enough for a child to get a clear view of a parent’s destructiveness. Much of the damage parents do is unintended and passionately justified by love. The hardest injuries to recover from are the subtle ones, the hardest ones to even see. It takes dedicated work, and luck, to see a parent clearly enough to understand the damage they were able to inflict. Children naturally blame themselves when their parents are angry at them. It often takes many years, if ever, to get a more useful adult perspective that can guide you going forward in your own life.

It can become even more complicated to recover from parental abuse when that parent has vast resources to manipulate the kid with. Back in 1948 our current lame duck president, as a two year-old, was effectively given a $4,000 a week (in 2018 dollars) allowance. He was a millionaire by eight, a multi-millionaire by his teen years. He learned from both of his striving parents that there is only one value in life: increasing your fortune by any means possible. A person who was given great wealth and did not tirelessly increase that wealth was a piece of shit, a “loser”, in the Frederick Christ Trump household.

The president’s charismatic older brother, who sought independence from an overbearing and vicious father, ended his alcoholic life heading a janitorial crew in one of his punitive father’s buildings. Drank himself to death, as the saying goes. The lesson was not lost on young Donald. He would not take the risk of defying his iron-willed father, besides, the idea of being the most powerful and envied man in the world appealed to him greatly.

And so it was. In 2016 he became the most powerful man in the world. A petulant, childish most powerful man, but one able to exact terrible revenge on anyone who hurt him with criticism, disloyalty, a perverse insistence on being bound by abstractions like lawfulness and norms. A man who could order the Mother of All (non-nuclear) Bombs to be dropped somewhere in the Middle East, devastating a huge area, for no apparent purpose, with no blowback from anyone. He was hailed all around as “presidential” for this kind of bold, decisive action. As he was, by his loyal base, when he crammed through the rushed, last-minute lifetime appointment of a religious zealot on to the Supreme Court, cementing the anti-abortion majority he’d promised. Coney Barrett promptly provided the decisive vote on a controversial and wrongly decided “religious liberty” case that will cost countless more American lives during the pandemic.

Before he lost the recent election, decisively defeated by a man he called “the worst candidate in history,” Joe Biden, Trump announced, over and over, that any election he lost would be contested in court as fake, the result of a vast conspiracy to rig the election. On election night, as early vote counting showed him ahead and he strongly suggested to his millions of followers that he had, in fact, already won the election, he also spoke of the army of lawyers he was going to unleash to overturn the election results that stole the presidency from him. Coherent messaging is not his thing, nor is it demanded by any of the 73,000,000 who voted for him.

His record in those forty post-election lawsuits was not good. Team Trump and the RNC compiled a losing record, they went 1 and 39, (a winning percentage of .025, for you sports fans). The New York Times, among others, wrote mean sub-headlines like:

A small group of lawyers for Mr. Trump’s campaign has presided over a widely mocked, circuslike legal effort to try to invalidate votes and prevent states from certifying their results

In the end, all of his machinations to evade the law, obstruct justice (the only real through-line of his wildly litigious life) and maintain his power by sheer force of personality (and the considerable power and prestige of his office) failed. Tens of millions love him, but there were not enough millions of violent, well-organized followers who were also willing to die in street battles, fighting the US government, to keep Mr. Trump in power.

All that remains now is Trump’s unslakable will for revenge, to mark the world in his image as much as he can in the last days of his presidency. His loyalists are in place in every government agency to make permanent changes in his incoherent image, lawyers are working tirelessly to change the civil service rules to make it impossible to get rid of his unqualified appointees, his senseless changes to longstanding rules and procedures.

He is hurrying work on The Wall, his legacy, crews are furiously dynamiting remote mountains, destroying habitat, bulldozing indigenous burial grounds to build another 30 miles of WALL before he leaves office. He is currently pursuing 117 lawsuits in states like Arizona to force property owners to allow the wall to be built across their private property. If Biden wants to halt construction after January 20th, he will have to pay enormous cancellation fees on all the contracts Trump handed out, each with a large fee for cancellation written into it.

I recall Trump being interviewed during the campaign and answering forthrightly about several of his campaign slogans. “Lock her up!” the chant that recently pardoned perjurer and undisclosed employee of Turkey Michael Flynn led at the RNC was a no-brainer. They’d branded Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and ran against her as the corrupt, criminal butcher of those poor, betrayed Americans in Benghazi. The interviewer asked candidate Trump about “Build that wall!” He said somebody suggested it, and he didn’t think it was very good, but was amazed at how crowds took to it. Crowds loved chanting that, so he made sure to lead the chant in every speech after that. A gigantic wall went on to become a huge part of his legacy.

Mr. Trump is often called “transactional” which is a nice way of describing a lifelong loser obsessed with being seen a winner [1]. Every encounter is a zero-sum transaction– one winner, one loser. It is a pathetic, damaged way to view the world, which is only saved from destruction by intelligent negotiation and compromise. Compromise is disgrace, in the eyes of a killer. You do not compromise with prey, you tear out its throat, eat its flesh. That’s what winners do.

“Winners”, apparently, will do anything imaginable not to be seen as “losers”.

In the dark of night, a day or two before Christmas, in the waning hours of the Bush-Cheney administration, by voice vote, Congress passed a law to cripple the United States Postal Service by forcing it to fund its retirement plans 75 years in to the future. The draconian law requires the USPS to fully fund the retirement of workers not yet even born. It is the only business in the world subjected to this kind of unfeasible mandate.

When you read about this law you generally see “Congress passed” attached to it, but there’s no hint of the midnight partisan vote in the last days of a presidency that, until Trump’s, was seen as the most disastrous in history. Stay tuned for Trump’s version of this kind of angry loser power-play– Trump is the worst we’ve ever seen, on steroids.

[1]

The problematic NY Times lays it on:

The president’s inability to concede the election is the latest realty-denying moment in a career preoccupied with an epithet

source

The professorial looking madman who auditioned for his position as top law enforcement officer for the most litigious and lawless president in history, lectured his questioner on the definition of the squishy word “corruption.” First, an excerpt from his audition for Attorney General:

This is an expression of Barr’s wildly extreme view of the powers of the Unitary Executive. Presidential accountability for ‘corrupt’ acts committed while in office? Balderdash! Nothing the president does under his limitless Article II powers can be scrutinized for corruption if the president does not want it to be.

During his confirmation hearing, Barr patiently gave Senator Dianne Feinstein one of his trademarked circular lectures on the definition of “corruptly” (while running out the clock on substantive questions, like an expert college basketball team freezing the ball in the old days):

What it means is using it in the nineteenth century sense, it meant ‘to influence in a way that changes something that’s good and fit to something that’s bad and unfit’, namely the ‘corruption of evidence’, or ‘the corruption of a decision maker’. That’s what the word “corruptly” means, because once you dissociate it from that it really means, very hard to discern what it means. It means “bad”… what does “bad” mean?

source

Fair point, Bill. Who among us can really define a word like “bad”? It’s almost meaninglessly vague, like the world “corruptly” itself, as used in the twenty-first century sense. Presumably even the nineteenth century mind would have had trouble comprehending something as abstract as “corruption of the Department of Justice.” It’s all such a matter of opinion!

And so it is with the Law and Order president, who lost thirty legal challenges to the orderly election that decisively ousted him. He will not be thwarted by an election he knows was rigged (he himself did his best to rig it, after all), by mere law as applied by so-called “judges”, when there are “bad” things he can still do to cling to power that he will never be held accountable for.

Michigan, a state he lost by 155,000 votes (15 times Trump’s 2016 margin in Michigan, twice the total 78,000 combined margin that gave him the Electoral College when he narrowly won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) has a process for a final statewide vote certification, after each county certifies the votes (which they’ve already done). No problemo — after you lose in court to stop the counties, which all legally certify their results, here’s what you do:

Fly the Republican members of the Michigan state canvassing board, along with top Republican state legislators, to Washington D.C. where you meet them at the White House, treat them to a lavish meal at the four-star Trump Hotel (the RNC will pay) and unleash the famous charm/terror offensive on them, convince BOTH canvassing board members to “illegally” contest the certification results in every county in Michigan. Stall things, to throw the election results, known to everybody and recounted in several places, into chaos.

After all, as Mr. Barr argues, along with nonpartisan legal geniuses like Alan Dershowitz, the president is the only one with the power to decide, if he honestly (even if delusionally — or delusively, which we learn is a more proper, if more obscure, statement of the same thing) believes something is in the best interests of the nation, whether that thing is, to be crude, “good” or “bad.” Simple, right?

Nothing wrong with wining and dining Republican state officials at your luxurious hotel to influence them to refuse to do their sworn legal duty so you can hopefully throw out an election result, delay, delay, delay the official certification of your corrupt enemy as president and hopefully find a way to game the constitutional system. Article II says so — there’s nothing about a president’s obligation to “obey” so-called election results in there. Nothing!

from Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent “Letters from an American” (for history only, scroll to “headline” font I’ve inserted);

… Meanwhile, the president appears to have lost whatever interest he might have had in actually governing. As the country reels from the coronavirus surge that has now infected more than 10 million of us, killed more than 244,000, and crippled the economy, he is apparently focused exclusively on the past election. He has not gone to a coronavirus task force meeting in at least five months, rarely reads the daily reports on the virus, and is no longer briefed about the crisis by doctors. He has apparently decided simply to let the conflagration burn. At the same time, he is refusing to let his staffers talk to incoming Biden staff about the pandemic.

“The duty of a president is to protect the national security of the United States, and this is the most prominent disease of mass destruction America’s ever faced, and we have a commander in chief who has run away from the problem and has made it worse,” Jack Chow, a U.S. health official under George W. Bush, told reporters from the Washington Post. “We had an opportunity twice over the past eight months to bring it down to safer levels, and we failed. We are on the verge of losing control of this pandemic.”

And yet, most Republican lawmakers are not willing to challenge Trump in public.

Indeed, in his willingness to abandon governance for his own benefit Trump is simply following the lead of Republican lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who has steadfastly refused to take up bills from the Democratic-led House of Representatives, including a coronavirus relief package to address the coronavirus recession. Instead, McConnell has focused on packing the courts with pro-business judges. Excerpts from a new book by former President Barack Obama, due out next week, reveal McConnell’s response to a plea from then-Vice President Biden to pass a worthwhile bill. McConnell answered: “You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.”

Today’s Republican Party has traveled a long way from the party of Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1850s, the Republican Party rose to stand against a small group of wealthy southern white slaveholders who had taken over the government. Those slaveholders made up only about 1% of the American South. They ran the Democratic Party, but they knew their system of human enslavement was unpopular and that they were in a political minority even in the Democratic Party. It was only a question of time until the majority began to hem in their ownership of other human beings.

So when folks started to urge the government to promote infrastructure in the growing nation, building roads or dredging harbors, for example, these southern leaders worried that if the government began to intervene in the economy, the regulation of slavery would be just around the corner. They pushed back by insisting that the government could do nothing that was not expressly written in the Constitution. Even if the vast majority of the people in the country wanted the government to do something, it could not.

As pressure grew for government to promote economic growth for ordinary Americans, the southern slaveholders worked to cement their power. They courted poor white voters, telling them that any attempt to regulate slavery was an effort to lift Black people over them. From their stronghold in the Senate, southern leaders stopped legislation to develop the country and instead pushed laws that spread slavery into the West. When northerners objected, southern leaders packed the Supreme Court and got it to agree that Congress could not stop the spread of southern slavery even across the entire nation. But while they insisted the federal government could not promote the economy for ordinary Americans, they demanded a sweeping federal slave code to protect slavery in the West.

Their system was best for the nation, they explained. Society was made up of a mass of workers, drudges who weren’t terribly smart, but were strong and loyal. They were the “mudsills” of society, akin to the wood hammered into the ground that supported the grand plantation homes above. Directed by their betters, these mudsills produced capital, which accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. There, it did far more good than if it were distributed among those who had produced it, because society’s leaders used their wealth to innovate and build the economy, doing what was best for the workers, who could not understand their own interests. The nation thrived.

To secure this system, though, it was imperative that the mudsills could not vote. If they could, workers would demand more of the wealth they produced. White southerners had enslaved their laborers, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told his northern colleagues in 1858, but northerners had not, and they foolishly allowed them to vote. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond demanded. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Men like Abraham Lincoln organized to overturn the idea that they were mindless workers, doomed to menial labor for life. In 1859, Lincoln articulated a new vision for the nation, putting ordinary men, rather than elite slaveholders, at the heart of national development.

Lincoln’s “Free Labor” theory held that the nation worked best when the government supported ordinary men rather than a wealthy elite. Ordinary men worked more intelligently and innovated more freely than an elite, and when the government used its power to free up resources for them, they built the economy far more efficiently than the enslaved workers who were hampered by the commands of an out-of-touch plantation owner. Rather than shunning economic development, the government should embrace it, they said, spreading free labor, rather than slavery, across the West.

When Lincoln won the 1860 election, southern leaders refused to accept the results of the election. They left the Union to launch a new nation that rejected the idea of human equality and was instead based on human enslavement.

Left in charge of the government, the new Republican Party rebuilt it according to Lincoln’s vision. To pay the enormous cost of the Civil War, they invented our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. Then, to enable people to pay those taxes, they spread opportunity to ordinary men, giving them western land (that we now recognize belonged to indigenous people), establishing our state universities, and building a railroad to take people across the country. Ultimately, they included Black men in their vision, abolishing slavery, establishing Black citizenship, and guaranteeing Black men the right to vote so they could protect their own interests.

Under the leadership of the Republican Party, Americans were, Lincoln reminded them, resolving “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

As I’ve often said, the hugely influential New York Times does some excellent and very important investigative reporting. As I’ve also said:

As much as I respect the Times for some of their invaluable reporting, I also hate them for their sometimes absurdly prissy insistence on an even-handed “respectability” that amounts to non-reporting. 

Case in point:

The Times contacted election officials in all fifty states, to determine whether any of them had seen the kind of fraud and irregularities Trump’s lawsuits keep insisting are widespread and have resulted in a rigged election with a fake result. They ran this unequivocal headline over a fine piece of reporting:

The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud  [1]

The Times then contacted top federal election officials and ran this headline, over another excellent bit of reporting:

Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud 

Then, inexplicably, they ran an article headlined:

Trump Election Results Lawsuits Don’t Have a lot of Good Evidence

containing this grotesque example of the maddening, status quo supporting schizophrenia of the Grey Lady:

While these suits have alleged systemic fraud in at least five states, the evidence they have offered has been different. At least so far, it has been limited, narrow and, according to several judges and experts, unlikely to affect — let alone to overturn — the outcome of the race.

Editor– does that “different” at the end of the first sentence refer to “not systemic” evidence or what? Is “different” really the best word to characterize the “evidence” submitted by Trump’s lawyers? Trump brought these baseless lawsuits in “in at least five states”? I suppose the nonzero number of 40 or 50 states (his army of lawyers brought something like 300 election-related lawsuits nationwide) would fall under “at least five”. Though, in fairness to the Times, the article is about post-election lawsuits, contesting results, of which there have been at least five, but less than the hundreds Trump initiated prior to the election.

Calling no persuasive evidence “limited and narrow” evidence is not as accurate as stating that Trump’s lawyers have presented “virtually no evidence of fraud or irregularities”, as found in lawsuit after dismissed lawsuit, and confirmed by officials in all 50 states and by federal officials — as definitively reported by the New York Times.

“According to several judges and experts” is, one could argue, a high-minded way not to cite the New York Times itself for the propositions noted above, one supposes. It is also like saying “according to several scientists and experts, global warming is exacerbated by human activities”. Would those “several judges” be an overly even-handed reference to every judge who dismissed virtually every Trump election lawsuit nationwide? Would it be fair to assume that the term “experts” includes virtually every lawyer and legal scholar in the country, and internationally, as well as all citizens who read the arguments and decisions in these cases and apply common sense?

“Unlikely to affect– let alone overturn” — goddamn it, you fucking idiot! “Unlikely?” Do you read your own newspaper? It does some excellent investigative reporting, you know.

On the good side, and another reason to look favorably on the Times, they published this fine letter by my cousin yesterday. I almost never read the letters to the editor, or write them, but last night, for whatever reason I did and — wow! Good letter, cousin Marcy!

To the Editor:

Re “Trump Marshals Federal Power to Overturn His Election Defeat” (front page, Nov. 11):

President Trump’s outrageous refusal to accept the election results — and the appalling lack of integrity shown by most Republicans, who are apparently willing to risk what’s left of this country’s democratic traditions by once again failing to stand up to Mr. Trump — is even more troubling when viewed in a historical context.

Until now, all presidential hopefuls have put the country’s institutions, values and stability before their own ambitions. Four years ago, despite winning three million more votes than Mr. Trump, Hillary Clinton graciously conceded. In 2000, Al Gore accepted the ruling by the Supreme Court that installed George W. Bush as president.

It’s bad enough that Mr. Trump won’t concede — no one really expected he would suddenly set aside his autocratic leanings, megalomania and vanity for the good of the nation — but the craven absence of integrity on the part of other Republicans is inexcusable.

Marcy Stamper
Twisp, Wash.

 

[1]