Election Rigging 101
Donald Trump was right. The election was rigged. What Trump got wrong (and, boy, does he get things wrong) is that the rigging worked in his favor. The manipulations took three monumental forms: Russian cyber-sabotage; FBI meddling; and systematic Republican efforts, especially in swing states, to prevent minority citizens from casting votes. The cumulative effect...
Read MoreIn case you hadn’t noticed, someone recently loosed a satirist in American politics. Let me give you an example. You remember FBI Director James Comey, who gained a certain notoriety by stepping into the limelight 11 days before the recent presidential election via a very publicly dispatched letter to the Congressional leadership. It focused on...
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History After “the End of History”
The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year’s U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments? Answering that question is essential to understanding how Donald Trump became president and where...
Read MoreThe Election That Changed Everything and Could Prove History’s Deal-Breaker
For decades, Washington had a habit of using the Central Intelligence Agency to deep-six governments of the people, by the people, and for the people that weren’t to its taste and replacing them with governments of the [take your choice: military junta, shah, autocrat, dictator] across the planet. There was the infamous 1953 CIA- and...
Read MoreAt 72, I experienced election night with a 103-degree temperature, so it was literally a fever-dream for me. And in a certain sense, it’s remained so ever since. Now that a white supremacist has just been made the next president’s closest White House adviser, and the president-elect has called conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars...
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Night Terrors and Daytime Hopes
The night after the election, this long-time pacifist dreamed she shot a big white man carrying an arsenal of guns. He was wandering around a room full of people, waving a pistol and threatening to fire. Someone pushed a gun into my hand and said, “Shoot now, while his back is turned!” I shot. Blood...
Read MoreIt wasn’t to be, but had it been, Hillary Clinton would have become not only the first woman president, but the first president to enter the Oval Office as a lame duck. For Republicans in (and out) of a Congress they totally controlled, it would have been scorched-earth tactics all the way. Not a law,...
Read MoreRebirth of a Nation?
“So is he going to win?” The question washed over me as I slumped in my hard plastic chair. I had passed the day walking through a town where most homes lay in ruins and human remains were strewn across a field, a day spent looking over my shoulder for soldiers and melting in the...
Read MoreWith President Trump, Is the American Experiment Over?
The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination. So here’s the confounding thing about the American version of empire in the years when this country was often referred to as “the sole superpower,” when it was...
Read MorePlaying a Game of Chicken with Nuclear Strategy
Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes” -- the secret...
Read MoreI was born on July 20, 1944, the day of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler. That means I preceded the official dawning of the nuclear age by exactly 369 days, which makes me part of the last generation to do so. I’m speaking not of the obliteration of two Japanese cities by America’s...
Read MoreRecently, the New York Times produced a veritable thesaurus of Trumpian twittery -- every insulting tweet of The Donald’s that their researchers could find since he declared his candidacy. It’s quite a collection in which he goes after 282 people, places, and things in his uniquely abusive fashion. (Don’t even get me started on his...
Read MoreDonald Trump, the Greatest Victim in the History of the World
Donald Trump grabbed a new lifeline. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 15th, he raised a hand as if to take an oath and declared: “I am a victim!” The great business tycoon, the one and only man who could fix America and make the place great again (trust me, folks),...
Read MoreDonald Trump has long campaigned on the promise of running the country the way he's run his businesses. On that basis, we essentially already know what it would mean if he entered the Oval Office and applied his personal business acumen to this nation (and the rest of the world). There's a surprisingly full record...
Read MoreOr Why Fighting for Justice Is Like Surfing
In these dismal days of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope. How can that be? Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers who have been “rebuilding” for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough...
Read MoreConsider it justice (of a sort): he who lives by the media dies by the media. I’m talking -- as if you had a scintilla of doubt -- about Donald Trump. If the Washington Post’s release of avideo of his lewd conversation with Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush (that family again!) on his way to the...
Read MoreEvangelicals, Survivalists, the Alt-Right, and Hurricane Donald
The world according to Donald Trump is very dark indeed. The American economy has tanked. Mexico has sent a horde of criminals over the border to steal jobs and rape women. The Islamic State, cofounded by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, is taking over the globe. “Our country’s going to hell,” he declared during the...
Read MoreAnd Truly, This Is Not About Donald Trump...
This is not about Donald Trump. And I mean it. From the moment the first scribe etched a paean of praise to Nebuchadnezzar into a stone tablet, it’s reasonable to conclude that never in history has the media covered a single human being as it has Donald Trump. For more than a year now, unless...
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Donald and Hillary Take a No-First-Use Pledge on Relevant Information
You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking outSeinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt posed a seemingly straightforward but cunningly devised...
Read MoreLast month, near the end of the first presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton laid a masterful trap for her Republican rival. Reminding viewers of Donald Trump’s frequent crude comments about women, she mentioned “a woman in a beauty contest,” and then unpacked the story of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. “And he called this...
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How Trump’s Conflicts of Interest Could Become Ours
Imagine for a moment that it’s January 2009. Bernie Madoff, America’s poster-child fraudster, has yet to be caught. The 2007-2008 financial crisis never happened. The markets didn’t tank to reveal the emptiness beneath his schemes. We still don’t know what’s lurking in his tax returns because he’s never released them, but we know that he’s...
Read MoreThink of American politics today as a tale of two Donalds. First, there’s Donald Trump, political provocateur, a man with his eye on the Oval Office who’s ready to say just about anything to get into it. That includes insisting, in his “America First” campaign, that he -- and he alone -- will bring back...
Read MoreYou might not care to admit it, but there’s a little bit of Donald Trump in all of us. Yes, his curiously insinuating, allusive, and always inflammatory comments -- from his invocation of gun owners as the force to deal with a Hillary Clinton presidential victory to his dubbing of “Barack Hussein Obama” as the...
Read MoreImagine that across the planet, back in the early months of 2003, millions of people marchedin the streets of global cities and small towns, protesting, toting handmade signs, making their voices heard in every way they could to indicate that the prospective Bush administration invasion of Iraq would be an immoral disaster (and no matter...
Read MoreThe Enemies of My Enemy May Be War Criminals
It’s not every day that Republicans publish an open letter announcing that their presidential candidate is unfit for office. But lately this sort of thing has been happening more and more frequently. The most recent example: we justheard from 50 representatives of the national security apparatus, men -- and a few women -- who served...
Read MoreHow Billions of Words, Tweets, Insults, and Polls Blot Out Reality in Campaign 2016
Yep, it finally happened. In early May, after a long, long run, the elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were ushered into retirement in Florida where they will finish their days aiding cancer research. The Greatest Show on Earth was done with its pachyderms. The same might be said about the...
Read MoreIf you’re of a certain age (as I am), there’s something that should have startled you recently and yet, as far as I know, no one has bothered to mention it: anytime in the last seven decades, any American politician running for any position from dogcatcher to president who had called on Russia’s leaders for...
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An Ode to Ike and Adlai
My earliest recollection of national politics dates back exactly 60 years to the moment, in the summer of 1956, when I watched the political conventions in the company of that wondrous new addition to our family, television. My parents were supporting President Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term and that was good enough for...
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The Insider Posing as an Outsider Trying to Get Back on the Inside
“Establishment: A group in a society exercising power and influence over matters of policy, opinion, or taste, and seen as resisting change.” -- Oxford Dictionary Early on in his presidential bid, Donald Trump began touting his anti-establishment credentials. When it worked, he ran with it. It was a posture that proved pure gold in the...
Read MoreGive the guy credit. Donald Trump makes perspective -- on him at least -- almost inconceivable, and that’s no small accomplishment. Is he heading up or down? Polling well or poorly? Going to win or lose? Who knows? Take Nate Silver whose FiveThirtyEight website recently launched its poll of polls with The Donald having only...
Read MoreI’m no stranger to shakedowns. I’ve experienced them, in one form or another, from Asia to Africa. Sometimes the corruption is subtle. Sometimes it’s naked. Sometimes you press folded currency into someone’s palm. Sometimes there’s a more official procedure. Sometimes a payment is demanded outright. (A weapon might even be involved.) Other times, it’s up...
Read MoreCircus, carnival, comedy hour, joke: it’s been a festival of insults, charges, racist slams,bizarre proposals, and raging narcissism. I’m talking, of course, about the season of Trump in American politics. When no one gave him a second thought or a chance in hell, he soared and a Trump presidency came into view. As he reached...
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(Is Not This Year)
The voters vowed to take their revenge at the polls. They’d missed out on the country’s vaunted prosperity. They were disgusted with the liberal direction of the previous administration. They were anti-abortion and pro-religion. They were suspicious of immigrants, haughty intellectuals, and intrusive international institutions. And they very much wanted to make their nation great...
Read MoreWhat is it with casinos and the presidency these days? I’m thinking, of course, about the version of casino capitalism being played out in American politics at the moment by two men who made fortunes in the casino business. One is running for president on the Republican ticket as the Billionaire Populist, while the other,...
Read MoreMillions of Women See Through Him, Even If the Media Don’t
Last fall, when presidential wannabe Donald Trump famously boasted on CNN that he would “be the best thing that ever happened to women,” some may have fallen for it. Millions of women, however, reacted with laughter, irritation, disgust, and no little nausea. For while the media generate a daily fog of Trumpisms, speculating upon the...
Read MoreClass of 2016, Tell Us Who We Are
Graduates of 2016, don’t be fooled by this glorious day. As you leave campus for the last time, many of you already deeply in debt and with a lifetime of payments to look forward to, you head into a world that’s anything but sunny. In fact, through those gates that have done little enough to...
Read MoreSomeday, these may be seen as the decades when the United States started hollowing out. First, good working-class jobs fled the country, while the “rust” spread through belts of industrial production, towns emptied, and the good times headed elsewhere. Then,infrastructure -- from bridges and highways to subways and dams -- began to fray. More recently,...
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An American Version of Class Struggle
Arising from the shadows of the American repressed, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been sending chills through the corridors of establishment power. Who would have thunk it? Two men, both outliers, though in starkly different ways, seem to be leading rebellions against the masters of our fate in both parties; this, after decades in...
Read MoreHere’s a riddle for you: What do Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have in common? And no, it’s not that if Donald Trump were a woman he’d garner less than 5% of the vote. And it’s not that Hillary rolls her eyes just like Mary Pat Christie when she hears The Donald going after women....
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There’s a pile of money hiding offshore. It’s true that jobs are also leaving the United States because American companies find it convenient to cut labor costs by moving manufacturing abroad, the economic issue you’re hearingmost about in this election season. But the stunning amount of money that continues to flow across American borders (and...
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He’s a Sign of American Decline (Just Not in the Way You Think)
"Low-energy Jeb." "Little Marco." "Lyin’ Ted." "Crooked Hillary." Give Donald Trump credit. He has a memorable way with insults. His have a way of etching themselves on the brain. And they’ve garnered media coverage, analysis, and commentary almost beyond imagining. Memorable as they might be, however, they won’t be what last of Trump’s 2016 election...
Read More(And If You Believe That, You’ll Believe Anything)
Think of the 2016 presidential campaign as the political equivalent of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. It’s loud; there are plenty of abusive special effects; the critics hate it, but the crowds turn out; a media company or three rake in the dough; and foreigners can’t get enough of this new vision of the...
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Taking The Donald to Toddler Town
So far, I’ve dealt with Donald Trump’s bid for the White House as performance art: a clever, full-body, self-marketing scheme in the fashion of actor Joaquin Phoenix restyling himself as a hip hop artist to promote his mockumentary I’m Still Here. You remember that odd media moment from a few years back, right? When the...
Read MoreThere had never been a “concession” statement like it. It was short, to the point, and in addition to the usual accusations of “lyin’” leveled at Ted Cruz, compared his victorious measures to the ruse the Greeks used to destroy Troy, accused him of outright illegal acts, as well as election thievery, and claimed that...
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How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich"
[This piece has been adapted from Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books).] When you press Democrats on their uninspiring deeds -- their lousy free trade deals, for example, or their flaccid response to Wall Street misbehavior -- when you press them on any...
Read MoreReading Thomas Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, I was reminded of the snapshot that Oxfam offered us early this year: 62 billionaires now have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the global population, while the richest 1% own more than the other 99% combined....
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Are We in a New American World?
The other week, feeling sick, I spent a day on my couch with the TV on and was reminded of an odd fact of American life. More than seven months before Election Day, you can watch the 2016 campaign for the presidency at any moment of your choosing, and that’s been true since at least...
Read MoreFive Questions That Weren't Asked During the 2012 Presidential Debates and Are Unlikely to Be Asked in 2016
The nuances of foreign policy do not feature heavily in the ongoing presidential campaign. Every candidate intends to “destroy” the Islamic State; each has concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea, and China; every one of them will defend Israel; and no one wants to talk much about anything else -- except, in the...
Read MoreYou must have noticed the Hitler comparisons, right? Amid the recent “Nazi” controversy(over whether those right hands raised in a pledge to vote for Donald Trump at his “movement” rallies are actually copycat Sieg Heils), a bevy of pundits, commentators, and other figures, including the Mexican president and Anne Frank’s stepsister, have been comparing The...
Read MoreTrump’s Storm Troopers and the Possibility of American Fascism
Can it happen here? That’s the question circulating now that Donald Trump, the nativist, rabble-rousing xenophobe, and billionaire, is threatening to capture the Republican nomination for president of the United States -- and it’s a question that isn’t being asked only on the left. It’s been raised by a New York Times editorial, which claimed...
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