Thoughts on George HW Bush

There have been enough eulogies of Bush Senior that there is not much left for me to add, but let me put in a few comments shaped by the others. 

Bush Senior has been compared to Eisenhower, both in the sense of being a moderate Republican and in that he was an eminently competent but never really got the chance to shine because he presided over good times.  But there is also a sense that, as with Eisenhower, Bush, Sr. deserved more credit for the good times than he got.

Eisenhower got us out of the war in Korea and resisted pressure to join the war in Vietnam, so he deserves credit for presiding over peace.

Bush, Sr. came into office just about a third of the nation's savings and loans were failing, the country had experienced two old-style bank runs, and people began to fear about the health of ordinary commercial banks.  The crisis was overrunning our ordinary ability to close banks and cover deposits.  The Bush Administration cleaned up the mess, prosecuted offenders, restored confidence in the financial system, and avoided serious economic fallout.*

He also undertook the last significant environmental initiative by a Republican -- measures to curb acid rain.  Sulfur emissions were acidifying rain and causing subtle but real environmental damage. As with global warming now, the relevant industries insisted that acid rain wasn't happening, that if it was happening it wasn't man-made, and that if it was man-made, it was beneficial, and besides, it couldn't happen because it was against their principles.  Bush, Sr. was ultimately convinced that acid rain was real but rejected direct regulations to curb sulfur emissions in favor of a cap and trade system that limited total emissions and allowed companies to decide how to limit emissions and permitted trading of "pollution units."  Once companies made cutting sulfur emissions a priority, it proved to be cheaper and easier than anyone had hoped, and an environmental crisis was averted.

But it was in foreign policy that Bush, Sr. most distinguished himself. 

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush, Sr. assembled a broad international coalition to drive the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a war that (once again) proved much quicker and easier than anyone had hoped.  He then decided not to go all the way and remove Saddam from power.  I have seen some eulogies that saw this as his critical mistake, one that paved the way for his son's disastrous Iraqi invasion.  I disagree.  The disaster of the Iraq War proves just the opposite, that we should salute the senior Bush's wisdom in deciding not to go all the way.  Yet HW did make a serious mistake at the end of the war.  Instead of recognizing that Saddam was sufficiently weakened by his defeat not to be a menace, he committed himself to a policy of regime change, saying that Saddam was an intolerable menace no matter how much he was weakened.  It was that, and not the decision to leave Saddam in power, that paved the way for the future war.  This is not to deny that even a weakened Saddam would have been an adversary and a bad guy.  But we have lived with adversaries in power before and can do so in the future as well.

Bush Senior's greatest triumph was in his management of the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism.  It has been commented that his skilled management of the fall of Communism made both his predecessor and his successor look better than they otherwise would have.  The meaning of this is clear for Clinton.  He benefited from a peaceful and secure time after the fall of Communism.  How can Bush, Sr. retroactively make his predecessor look better?  One can debate how much credit Ronald Reagan deserves for bringing down the Soviet Union and Communism.  But assuming he deserves full credit, it would look like an empty accomplishment if Eastern Europe had imploded into war and chaos.  That the end of the Cold War was followed, instead, by Eastern Europe democratizing and joining NATO makes the victory well worth winning.

And now to more controversial matters.  Many Democrats never forgave HW for the nastiness of the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis.  Many Republicans say that HW should have won in 1992 and that the polarization that followed is the result of Democrats playing dirty and winning.

What does it mean to say that Bush, Sr. "should" have won?  If it means that he would have made a better President, that is normal and perfectly acceptable partisan politics.  It may or may not be true. 

Certainly it seems fair to say that our problems with Russia today are the result of our failure to integrate Russia into the post-Cold War order.  That, in turn, is the result of the failure of the Washington Consensus, backed by Bill Clinton, on restructuring the Russian economy.  The Washington Consensus approach to ex-Communist countries was the assumption of the more pain, the more gain -- that we should shut down as much of the Russian economy as possible as quickly as possible and trust that something better would take its place.  The end of Communism was triumph for the US, a revival of hope for Eastern Europe -- and a disaster for the former Soviet Union.  Only by understanding just how great that disaster was can we understand why Vladimir Putin is the man he is and why he is so hostile to us. 

Bill Clinton supported the Washington Consensus that inflicted this disaster.  Two questions pose themselves.  One is, would Bush, Sr. have done otherwise.  Presumably he had some sort of plans and the people who worked with him in managing the transition know what they were.  So I am open to persuasion one way or the other whether Bush, Sr. would have acted otherwise.  The other question is whether Soviet society was so rotten that nothing good could possibly have emerged no matter how the fall of Communism was handled.  And that, I believe, is one of those counterfactuals that can never be answered.

And then there is the claim by some Bush, Sr. supporters that the ever-escalating polarization we have seen since 1992 is an understandable reaction by Republicans to the trauma of their defeat in 1992.  I concede that the ever-escalating polarization that troubles our country did become visible with the Clinton win in 1992.  And I am slightly more sympathetic than before of Republicans' claim that the loss was unfair and/or traumatic.  After winning the Gulf War, Bush, Sr. did, indeed, look invincible for the next election.  To see his overwhelming lead melt away in so short a time, all because of a minor recession must have been quite shocking.  And Democrats really had controlled Congress longer than was healthy for one party.  Republicans may has felt they had a stable equilibrium with Democrats controlling Congress and Republicans the Presidency.  To lose the Presidency as well carried the specter or being shut out of power altogether.

 But it doesn't quite hold.  The Reagan Administration began with a severe recession -- a painful but necessary measure to break the inflationary spiral that had reached 14%.  Once the inflationary spiral was broken, the Fed let up on the breaks and the economy bounced back.  There was an implied contract there -- endure the severe recession and double digit inflation will be gone permanently.  But many Americans saw another contract -- endure the severe recession and there will never be another.  When it turned out that the business cycle was still with us, many people felt that a promise was broken.  As for being locked out of Congress, in those less polarized times the Congressional minority was by no means as powerless as it is now and could expect to have its wishes taken into account.

Some Republicans seem to complain that it was particularly unfair to deny Bush, Sr. a second term, particularly given that he had been so successful in his first.  The implication here is that if only the Democrats had shown the decency to wait until 1996 to win, Republicans would not have felt the need to freak out. 

Look, to state the obvious, losing elections is partisan politics as usual.  Yes, granted, since the New Deal two term Presidencies have been the rule and one term the exception and usually the result of a particularly bad performance (see Jimmy Carter).  But that is just a generalization.  There is no particular norm that says in incumbent President must be reelected unless he has done something specifically wrong, otherwise we would not have serious reelection bids. 

Besides, if we are going to argue that defeating a successful incumbent President violates a norm, then it should be pointed out that the general rule since the end of WWII has been eight years of one party in power followed by eight years of the other.  If the Democrats violated a norm by winning in 1992 and should have waited until 1996, then Republicans violated a norm by winning a third consecutive Presidential term in 1988 -- the only time one party has won three consecutive Presidencies since WWII. 

And that is when we come to the unpleasant side of Bush, Sr.  At the outset of the 1988 election, it looked as though the country would, indeed, revert to the mean and switch parties after two terms.  This led to a complete freakout on the Republican side and all those lowdown, nasty ads that ultimately defeated Dukakis.  It showed an ugliness in the Republicans that hadn't been seen since Nixon's day.  It suggested that they wanted to replace the old norm -- each party holds power for two terms and then the other takes over -- with a new one -- only Republicans get to be President.  And if that is so, then it would follow that Republicans would not accept a Democratic victory in 1996 any more than they did in 1992.  Indeed, the longer Republicans held the Presidency, the more they would see it as a birthright and any Democrat as illegitimate. 

Certainly there was no sign of any of this in the way Bush, Sr. governed.  But there were other signs during the Bush, Sr. Presidency of the polarization that would follow.  Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, and Rush Limbaugh, three major drivers of the polarization, were on their way up.  We cannot know how well Dukakis would have handled the savings and loan crisis, acid rain, the fall of Communism, or the invasion of Kuwait.  Certainly he would be hard-pressed to do as well as Bush, Sr. did.  But the argument that Bush, Sr.'s defeat in 1992 was so outside the norm and so traumatic as to lead to all the polarization we have seen since is simply not convincing.  The seeds of polarization were there.  If the Democrats had won in 1988, it would have started four years earlier.  If they had won in 1996, it would have started four years later.  The underlying problem -- a party unwilling to accept defeat as legitimate -- remains regardless of the names at the top.

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*There was a mild recession in 1991 which cost Bush, Sr. the election, but it is by no means clear that it was related to the savings and loans.

Another Way of Putting It

So, to follow up on my last post, I concluded by saying:

Disagreements about policy are normal and will always be with us. But there ought to be areas that liberals and conservatives agree on, as well as disagree. The things I have cited above go to our whole system of government, law, and loyalty. And when they stop being priority, we have a very serious problem.

This article puts it much better that I could and offers a framework of understanding.  It offers the concepts of "common political knowledge" and "contested political knowledge."  "Common political knowledge" are that things that everyone agrees on.  "Contested political knowledge" are areas of disagreement.  The authors argue that every political system has both common and contested political knowledge.  No system can survive if everything is in dispute, nor can any system ever clamp down hard enough to erase all disagreement.  Rather, the stability of the system depends on what is common and what is contested knowledge.

As examples of "common political knowledge" in a democracy, the authors offer "how elections work: how districts are created and defined, how candidates are chosen, and that their votes count—even if only roughly and imperfectly."  "Contested political knowledge" means the policy disputes that drives elections and legislative debates, "how much of a role the government should play in the economy, what the tax rules should be, what sorts of regulations are beneficial and what sorts are harmful, and so on."  They go on to suggest that "common political knowledge" in a democracy is not just the basic framework of elections and government and the legitimacy of majority rule, but also common knowledge about who the political actors are, what the individuals and parties stand for, and the like.

The authors contrast this with autocracy, in which it is very much contested political knowledge who the adversaries of the government are, where they are, and how they can be contacted.  Turning this into common political knowledge is destabilizing to autocracies.  Democracy, by contrast, is undermined by turning common political knowledge -- such as the legitimacy of elections, the accuracy of the census, or the difference between real and fake news.

Which is another way of explaining the dangers that Donald Trump poses to democracy, why in a healthy system liberals and conservatives would agree that the danger transcends mere policy disputes, and why it is so alarming that many conservatives do not see it that way.

Simply put, we are seeing what is "common political knowledge" and what is "contested political knowledge" shift.  Traditionally we have had certain areas of consensus, i.e., "common political knowledge" between liberals and conservatives.  These areas have included:

• The losers of an election should concede to the winners
• The winners should respect the rights of the losers to contest the next election
• Changing the relations between difference branches of government is permitted, but a big deal not to be done lightly
• You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts
• It is not legitimate to use one's office for personal enrichment
• Competence matters
• Foreign meddling in our domestic politics is deeply alarming

Within such a framework, there is ample room for policy debates.  

But right now we are seeking "common political knowledge" become contested and demands for contested political knowledge to become common.

To a hardcore economic royalist, there is no room for debate over "how much of a role the government should play in the economy, what the tax rules should be, what sorts of regulations are beneficial and what sorts are harmful, and so on."  The proper answer is, there is no legitimate role for government in the economy, there should be no redistributive taxes, and no economic regulations.  How best to achieve these goals is open for dispute -- including whether to respect democratic elections if the winner wants to extend the role of government in the economy.  And growing numbers of Republicans appear to believe that large sections of the population are not "authentic real Americans" and that their vote therefore does not count.*

And so Republicans at the national level split between the ones who are willing to support a President who neither knows nor cares anything about governing, with innumerable conflicts of interest and a career based on fraud, who sees the Justice Department as his private goon squad, and who has alarming ties to a hostile foreign power because he shares their economic royalist policies or their white rural identity -- and ones who are not.  Or, put differently, some see basic democratic norms as "contested political knowledge" and the success of their policies or dominance of their group as properly considered "common political knowledge."  Others see preserving the basic democratic framework as important enough to accept losing at least some of the time.**

These are the stakes.  There is no other way to put it.

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*And, incidentally, I do not think our side is entirely blameless.  We have tried to move same sex marriage and transgender rights from "contested" to "common" knowledge when they are deeply contested.  I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with advocating for such views, merely  that we should accept that such views are controversial and that people of good will may disagree.

**And we are seeing the same thing played out at the state level in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where Republicans dismiss their defeat as illegitimate and respond by rigging the system.

Reasons for Conservative to Oppose Trump Even If He is an Economic Royalist

I want to revisit my past post on why some conservatives have warmed up to Trump and others have not.

This column explains why some Never Trumpers opposing him during the primaries and have changed their minds.  They feared that Trump was not an economic royalist.  It turned out that he was.  All reason to oppose him vanished.

In my personal opinion, fear that Trump was not an economic royalist is the silliest possible reason to oppose him.  Of course Trump is an economic royalist.  What else would he be?  No other ideology could possibly justify Trump, or allow him to pursue the career he has followed.  Of course he wants to remove all constraints on profit-making.  His whole life and being has been about worship of the almighty dollar.

But there are other eminently reasonable reasons for conservatives to oppose Trump, either before the election or now, even if he is an economic royalist.

Conservatives might fear Trump is not a social conservative.  (He isn't, but is willing to play one on TV for political advantage).

Or they might have feared that he would appoint someone like Judge Jeanine to the Supreme Court.  That particular fear did not pan out.  Trump has been completely orthodox in his judicial picks, but it was reasonable to fear that he might not.

Or they might have taken is talk about non-interventionism seriously.

Those were reasons to oppose Trump in the primaries, fears that he might not be a good Republican even if he was an economic royalist.  But there are other reasons conservatives might oppose Trump even after he won the nomination, and even to this day.

There are the reasons I gave before:

• That  he knew absolutely nothing about government or policy and showed no interest in learning.
• That he saw facts and evidence as things he could make up as he pleased, on the fly.
• That he had the attention span and impulse control of a small child.
• That his entire career was built on fraud.
• That he seemed to have no concept of the rule of law, or of the public good aside from his own personal interests
• That he appeared to think that if he won the federal government would be his own private property.
• That  he was blatantly appealing to hate and celebrating base impulses as "authenticity."
• His threats to use libel and anti-trust laws to silence his critics
• His encouragement of violence at his rallies.
• The prospect of such a man having his finger on the nuclear button.

And I can add other reasons that have come up since the election for conservatives to oppose Trump:

• His sons running his business empire while he runs the country.
• His appointment of his daughter and son-in-law to important positions of power that they showed no qualification for.
• The possibility that his foreign investments might create conflicts of interest.
• His apparent belief that the Justice Department is a tool to protect his allies and harass his opponents.
• The flagrant corruption of many of his nominees.
• His positive delight in alienating democracies and befriending dictators.
• The complete amorality of his foreign policy.
• His unwillingness to do any of the work involved in being a President.
• His disregard of the information resources available in favor of what he sees on TV.
• His lax approach to security.
• The whole disturbing Russia business.

Wait a minute, some conservatives may say.  Those the reasons that liberals oppose Trump.  Why should conservatives agree.

And I agree.  Those are reasons liberals oppose Trump.  They are also good reasons for conservatives to oppose him.  Liberals have other reasons to oppose Trump as well that conservatives do not share.  For instance:

• He is deconstructing the administrative state (as Steve Bannon puts it), otherwise known as wrecking the regulatory agencies by corruption and incompetence.
• His health plan, if it had gone through, could have stripped some 20 million people of their health insurance.
• He is still working at undermining Obamacare and stripping as many people of insurance as he can.
• His tax cuts are absurdly skewed to the top.
• His tax cuts threaten to precipitate a fiscal crisis and undermine Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
• He is stacking the federal bench with economc royalist judges.
• He wants to deport Dreamers and deny refuge to asylum seekers.
• He scapegoats immigrants and treats them with pointless cruelty.

But I get that to conservatives these (except perhaps that last) are reasons to support Trump.  They are policy matters.  Disagreements about policy are normal and will always be with us.  But there ought to be areas that liberals and conservatives agree on, as well as disagree.  The things I have cited above go to our whole system of government, law, and loyalty.  And when they stop being priority, we have a very serious problem.

A Note to the People of the Florida Panhandle

A note to the good people of the Florida panhandle.  As the good people of Louisiana could tell you:  If you are going to have a natural disaster, don't have it in the run-up to an election.  The elite media will be too distracted by the election to call attention to your situation, so help will not be on its way.

And a note to our elite media:  Come on guys!  I don't buy the argument that people in the New York to Washington corridor are less authentic and "real American" than the rest of us, but the rest of us really do exist and you have an unfortunate tendency to forget that fact.  Until you can remember it on a regular basis, and not just to scratch your heads over why Trump was elected, the rest of us will have legitimate grievances about you.

PS:  That does not mean that our elite media ignoring the hurricane is why Donald Trump was elected.  That would make sense only if he cared more about the hurricane than our elite media does, which I see no evidence to support.  In fact, Trump seems aware that the country exists at all only to the extent that it appears of Fox News.

How Much Are Crises a Choice?

With the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, we may get a chance to see to extent to which crises are a choice.

Khashoggi is/was a Saudi citizen, a legal US resident, and a contributor to the Washington Post.  On October 2, he walked into the Saudi consulate in Turkey to pick up some divorce papers and has not been seen since.  Since he has given no evidence since of being alive and free, the only question can now be whether he is being held captive at the consulate, whether he has been forcibly taken to Saudi Arabia, or whether he has been killed.  The more time goes by without evidence that Khashoggi is alive, the stronger the suspicion that he was killed.

In other words, our putative allies, the Saudis at best kidnapped and more likely killed a US resident under our protection and contributor to a major US newspaper.  Under any other President, a diplomatic crisis would be underway.  Trump, who loves the Saudi government and hates the Washington Post, is doing his best to ignore the whole thing.

But our political and media establishment are in an uproar.  Members of Congress in both parties are demanding action.  Newspapers are publishing ever more embarrassing articles.  The pressure to have a crisis is growing.  We will see whether Trump can brazen it out or not.

What if Kavanaugh Had Gone the Contrition Route?

I get why Republicans are applauding Trump for not withdrawing the Kavanaugh nomination.  They see it as standing up for bullies (a thing that would be more admirable if they didn't so often express admiration of Trump for being a bully).  They also feared that any replacement would walk into the same buzz saw.  And they are certainly right the Democrats would have been even more outraged -- and even some Republicans might have disassociated themselves from him -- if Kavanaugh had directly attacked Christine Ford right after her compelling testimony.  (That has not stopped some from doing so as the memory of her testimony becomes more distant).  And I have considerable sympathy with the view that the statute of limitations has run on youthful indiscretions, and that if we make a spotless adolescence a requirement for office we are going to shrink the pool of candidates inordinately.

I suppose I should also give Kavanaugh a little grudging respect for knowing not to go too far.  Saying:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit fueled with apparent pent-up anger about president trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque, character assassination will dissuade confident and good people of all political persuasions from serving our country and as we all know in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.

is utterly inappropriate in a Supreme Court nominee, but it fires up the Republican base.  If he had thrown in comments about Soros or the Deep State, some moderate Republicans might have seen belief in paranoid conspiracy theories as disqualifying.

But Republicans are wrong to say that attacking the Democrats, attaching Ford, or withdrawing from the nomination were the only options.  Another option is what might be called the Clarence Thomas option -- same anger, but minus the partisanship.  Can't find the link, but that appears to have been what the first draft of Kavanaugh's speech did.  He later reworked it to make it more partisan.  Would Democratic reaction have been any different if Kavanaugh had expressed the anger minus the partisanship?  I'd guess the outrage volume would have been a little lower, but not a lot.

What if he had gone the contrition route?  What if he admitted the obvious, that he did binge drink in high school and college, and that he did engage in the sort of rowdy behavior that binge drinking is mostly an excuse for?  What if he acknowledged that his drunken rowdiness did involve sexual horseplay of the kind Christine Ford and Deborah Ramirez described, and that it was most certainly in bad taste, but never malicious and, so far as he was aware until Dr. Ford came forward, always consensual.  What if he had described -- in extremely delicate terms so as not to seem to be victim-blaming -- the sort of women who were regular parts of that scene, and who thought horseplay of that kind was harmless fun.  Acknowledge that it was juvenile and selfish never to consider that there might be women who did not see his horseplay in such terms.  Emphatically deny any attempt to harm or coerce anyone and offer profound apologies if any women mistook his intentions.*  Unleash all his understandable anger on Michael Avenatti for promoting outrageous lies.  (That probably wouldn't alienate Democrats too much; many of them have been quite critical of Avenatti as well).

Then explain that he came to recognize how juvenile and offensive his behavior had been, even if he did not realize it had actually harmed anyone.  Explain that he made up for it by showing extra respect for women during his mature career.  Point out that there are zero complaints about his behavior as a lawyer or judge.  Angrily declare that the statute of limitations has run on youthful indiscretions and that stigmatizing forever anyhow who engaged in them is too harsh and unforgiving a standard for one whose adult conduct has been exemplary.

What would have happened in that case?  Well, Kavenaugh would have been confirmed.  I have no doubt that it would have secured the vote of every Republican in the Senate, along with Joe Manchin and probably several other red state Democrats.  The confirmation margin would have been narrow but respectable.  This is not to say that all Democrats would have been satisfied.  Many would have expressed outrage that Kavanaugh couldn't tell consensual from non-consensual horseplay and some would accuse him of blaming the victim.  But I have no doubt he would have been confirmed, with more Democratic votes that he got now.

But that wouldn't polarize and inflame partisan tensions the way Kavanaugh's actual speech did.  Which I assume is the real point.

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*And I will add here that I do think this is the most likely explanation of what happened.  Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were stronger than Christine Blasey and they outnumbered her two to one.  If they had really meant business, I don't think she would have gotten away so easily.  But if she was 15 and not used to that scene she might very well have thought they meant business.  Kavanaugh's failure to remember this episode is probably not so much an alcoholic blackout as simply that similar horseplay incidents were so common -- and usually consensual -- that he can't be expected to remember them all.  That his memory was clouded by alcohol was probably also a factor.

Hope and Despair in the Age of Trump

Not so much the Kavanaugh appointment as Republicans' reaction to it has left me despairing about our future more than anything else.

On the one hand, there is cause for optimism.  It appears that the country can survive a Trump presidency.  The economy is booming, international crises have (mostly) been avoided, trade wars can be averted by putting a few tweaks on old agreements, and even Obamacare is limping along.

Granted, this is partly because in the early phases of his Presidency Trump had to be saved from himself.  He wanted to blow up NAFTA, destroy the healthcare system Obamacare created, and possibly start a war with North Korea.  Cooler head prevailed.  And Trump and his circle appear to have matured enough to avoid such disasters in the future.

So why despair?

Well, for one thing, Trump is a bully, and a major reason he has been successful is that his bullying tactics have worked.  For people who like me who oppose bullying tactics, this is rather depressing.

But above all, because it is increasingly obvious that the Republican Party, Never Trumpers included, love these bullying tactics when applied to domestic policy.  Right now Republican are applauding Trump for making the Kavanaugh nomination unabashedly partisan and really more about defeating liberals than anything else.  They are proudly proclaiming that finally we have a President who is standing up to those Democratic bullies and character assassins who have so intimidated Republicans up till now. 

And now we have Republicans declaring Democrats to be an intolerable threat to liberty and the rule of law, Republicans calling protesters paid Soros shills, and even Rudy Giuliani retweeting a call to freeze Soros' assets.  Republicans have been trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party for some time, but this latest outburst ramps it up many-fold.

The real value of Democrats winning the mid-term elections is not legislation.  There is no possibility of Democrats winning enough votes to beat a Senate filibuster, let alone override a Trump veto.  And Republicans seem to have given up on passing any seriously controversial legislation, so there is no real need to block them.  The real value in Democrats winning one or another chamber of Congress is to hold real investigations of what Trump has been up to.  But the events surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination are making clear that no matter what such an investigation reveals, Republicans will simply dismiss it as persecution.  Republicans wouldn't turn against Trump if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.  Indeed, I am reaching the point that it wouldn't surprise me for Trump to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue just to piss off liberals and therefore rally his base around him.

And so here is where my despair really comes from.  Donald Trump is increasingly applying his bullying tactics to domestic politics.  The evidence thus far seems to indicate that bullying tactics work.  The nation and the world can survive Trump's bullying tactics.  But democracy and the rule of law can't.