Tag: Donald Trump

SENSE AND NONSENSE

By Terence Smith

   Of all the extraordinary numbers that came out of the comedy show/debacle that was the 2024 Presidential election, one obscure statistic caught my eye: 20 percent of Americans — one-in-five, get their news these days from digital news influencers, according to the Pew Research Center.

   Think about that. One in five of us drinking the fire hose of unverified, misleading, frequently vicious, occasionally racist, accidentally comical, sometimes accurate reporting that proliferates online. Much of this appears on the social platform X. Very little of it holds up to scrutiny. But 20 percent of us get our news that way and did so during this election.

   Add to that the hugely popular podcasts like Joe Rogan’s self-indulgent, near-endless ramblings and you can see that the media landscape today bears little or no resemblance to what it was a decade or two ago. Some 47-million Americans listened to all or part of Donald Trump’s three-hour star turn on the Joe Rogan show shortly before voting. Kamala Harris spent hundreds of millions on advertising during her 107-day campaign, and did some social media, but chose to skip Joe Rogan and others. Understandable, but self-defeating when it comes to attracting the votes of younger men.

   So, ours is a world today where Elon Musk on X and others too numerous to mention provide the “facts.” Not The New York Times, not PBS, but influencers. The net result is that the burden of sorting truth from fiction falls upon the the viewer or listener. They become their own “gatekeepers,” responsible for sorting out facts from nonsense. Sometimes they get it right — common sense helps — but not always.

   The consequences can be enormous, as the Pew Research Center and others have concluded.

Herewith, a droll set of reasons to vote for Donald Trump (or Not!)

by Phillip Kopper, author and publisher

Ten Best Reasons to Vote for Trump (or Not)

1) Approaching 80, if he dies in office (or succumbs to the 25th Amendment) he will be succeeded by a graduate of the Yale Law School.

2) Claiming abuse by Biden’s pesky Justice Department, he will bring the DoJ to heel and show how prosecutory persecution is done.

3) He will pardon the thousand-plus “patriots” convicted of storming the Capitol in order to reduce federal spending (in Bureau of Prison outlays at least).

4) To shrink the federal bureaucracy, he will appoint Elon Musk to disband the regulatory agencies that inhibit his operations.

5) He will impose tariffs in order to grow the GNP by raising prices across the board.

6) He will run the government “like  a business,” applying his own experience as a businessman whose acumen is proved by his six bankruptcies.

          7) Rather than follow the complex “rule of law” dating from 1789, he will simplify governance by suspending the Constitution.

          8) With the economy growing at 3.2%, wages rising faster than inflation, and the stock market soaring, he says America is in decline and boasts “I can fix it.”

9) Speaking in opaque generalities, sentence fragments and random rambles, he continues to relieve listeners from having to pay attention.

10) He will expand presidential power exponentially to compensate for Congress’s dysfunction (thanks especially to the House Republican Caucus).

Bonus) Since America’s motto E Pluribus Unum is in a foreign language, he will replace it with the pithy “So what?”

MONDAY MONDAY MORNING MEDIA XVIII

   In the midst of a busy, newsy week full of shootings, assassinations and resignations, The New York Times’s redoubtable Michael S. Schmidt had a remarkable page one piece on Thursday, July 7, about one of the great “coincidences” of the Trump Era: how two of his perceived enemies suddenly found themselves being audited by the IRS.

James B. Comey, the FBI director Donald Trump fired in 2017, and Comey’s Deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, whom Trump fired later, were subsequently selected for the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the IRS, an audit referred to as “an autopsy without benefit of death.” Neither incurred much tax liability as a result; Comey even got a modest refund.

A coincidence? A one-in-30,000 happenstance? Hardly, even though the taxmen insisted that politics and presidential vengeance had nothing to do with the audits. Of course, their boss, the 45th President, Donald  J. Trump, had railed privately and publicly about both men accusing them of treason and calling for their prosecution.

Schmidt’s thoroughly-documented piece brought back the memory of another “coincidence” decades ago in the Vietnam War era when I was the New York Times’ Saigon Bureau Chief and later Diplomatic Correspondent covering Richard Nixon’s foreign policy from Washington. I wrote several pieces criticizing the conduct of the war and Nixon’s diplomatic strategy, articles that annoyed the President repeatedly. He rails against them, and me, in the famous Watergate Tapes.

Then — surprise —I was audited by the IRS three years running. Then, as now, no political motive or presidential recrimination was ever publicly suggested.  I didn’t even make the famous Nixon “enemies list” as far as I know. Instead, the government poured over my reporter’s salary and modest income looking for…who knows what? The undeniable fact was the three consecutive audits followed my articles that annoyed the President.

Sheer coincidence? All in the interest in protecting the U.S. treasury from fraud, no matter how minor? That’s a stretch. Every bit as coincidental as the audits of Comey and McCabe, I’d say.  

            Footnote: The three years of audits concluded with me having to pay a few hundred dollars in additional tax because the IRS determined that the considerable moving costs paid by The Times to ship me and my family to the Middle East and Far East and home had to be considered income to me. The Times legal department objected to that conclusion, but lost. 

MONDAY MORNING MEDIA VI

   True confession: I actually watched most of Donald Trump’s rambling, repetitious parody of himself before the CPAC conference yesterday afternoon. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion: dreadful, but impossible to look away as it is happening.

   I had to search to find it live. Neither CNN nor MSNBC carried it in real time, showing more news judgement than they did during Trump’s 2016 campaign, when his self-indulgent rallies consistently boosted their ratings. Fox, of course, featured it yesterday, along with C-SPAN, Newsmax TV, BBC News 24, BBC World and the Murdochian Sky News.

   The New York Times had a straight-ahead report of the speech on page A14 of this morning’s print edition, along with a sidebar noting that Trump had won the support of “only 68%” of the slavishly loyal CPAC attendees for another run for the brass ring in 2024. 

   The Washington Post led its Monday edition with a one-column “news” story noting that Trump had ruled out a third party, sought to cement control of the GOP and – surprise – hinted at a 2024 comeback. As for the speech itself, the estimable E.J. Dionne Jr. got it right when he wrote: “The act was old. The self-involvement was as intense as ever.”

   Even more so, I’d say. The obvious purpose of the speech was to generate contributions to the two new PACs Trump has created ostensibly to finance his political reincarnation (and cover his day-to-day expenses,) and to remind the Fox News regulars that he is not going away. The 45th president showed up an hour late and went on for nearly two hours reading from a teleprompter and ad-libbing his golden oldies.

   It was a pathetic performance, as you might expect. CNN and MSNBC got it exactly right with their measured, arms-length treatment. As did The Post’s editorial page headline over E.J. Dionne’s column: “The GOP: Trapped in Trump’s Rendezvous with Yesterday.”

Bibi and The Donald

It is hard, these days, to miss the striking similarities between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and President Donald “The Donald” Trump.
It goes well beyond their nicknames.
Both of these embattled leaders are facing multiple investigations, both have launched relentless assaults on the media, both use the megaphones of their offices to push a nationalist, autocratic approach to power and both, of course, are running for re-election, Bibi in April and The Donald, presumably, in 2020.
Bibi is currently under the Israeli state prosecutor’s microscope; The Donald is a featured player in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Recent reports from Israel suggest that Bibi will be indicted for bribery in a month or so, before his April 9 re-election bid to become the longest-serving Prime Minister in Israeli history; The Donald, aka “Individual 1,” has already been depicted as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Michael Cohen case and could well be the subject of a sealed indictment from the Southern District of New York, now universally described on cable news as SDNY.
Both men have dismissed the investigations as groundless witch hunts mounted by their respective “deep states.”
And both leaders are curiously close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Bibi has traveled repeatedly to Moscow to confer with Putin on the growing Iranian presence in Syria; The Donald has met the Russian leader five times and had nothing but kind words for him since his 2016 campaign. One major difference: Bibi has not, as far as is known, been negotiating behind the scenes to build a Netanyahu Tower in Moscow.
When it comes to attacking the media, both men have launched full-scale campaigns. Bibi has complained early and often about his treatment in the feisty Israeli press and broadcast networks. His Likud Party recently unveiled a splashy election billboard featuring huge pictures of four leading Israeli journalists with the slogan: “They won’t Decide.”
The Donald, of course, has repeatedly denounced the U.S. media as “fake news” and “enemies of the people.” Over the weekend, the President celebrated the staff cuts at numerous news operations. One minor difference: Bibi is not known to spend hours each day watching cable news and tweeting his reactions.
The two men have been and remain politically close: Bibi has applauded The Donald at every opportunity, Trump has taken page after page from the Israeli playbook by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, an empty, but symbolic move that Bibi has sought for years. If there is anything else Bibi wants from The Donald, apparently he just has to ask.
Both men are adept at manufacturing crises, real and imagined, to distract attention from other problems. The Donald has conjured caravans of drug dealers and criminals assaulting the southern border in order to build support for his Wall; Bibi has repeatedly and dramatically pointed to Iran as an existential threat to Israel, launched multiple attacks on Hamas forces in Gaza, confronted Hezbollah along the Lebanese border and mounted hundreds of air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria. Many of these threats to Israel are real; confronting them aggressively tends to divert the public’s attention from other, politically awkward headlines.
Finally, both men are gifted political operators: Bibi became Israel’s youngest prime minister when he served in the late 1990’s, returned to office in 2009 and has beaten back repeated challenges over the last decade; Trump pulled off an amazing political upset in 2016 and has dominated the headlines and airwaves ever since.
At this point, the public opinion polls in Israel favor Bibi’s re-election, albeit by a narrow margin; Trump’s prospects are less promising. The President’s standing in the polls descended to new lows after the abortive government shutdown. But it is too early to count him out for a second term. No appealing Democratic candidate has emerged from the growing crowd of declared and undeclared, and the 2020 election is a political lifetime away.

Putin’s Delight

Even in the midst of a cold Moscow winter, Vladimir Putin must be feeling warm and satisfied as he reads the headlines these days from Europe and the United States.
I suspect he smiles to himself as he watches Britain’s Brexit debacle, Emanuel Macron’s desperate “listening tour,” Germany’s sagging economy and the nationalist, anti-immigrant, right-wing rumblings coming from Italy, Hungary, Poland and beyond. Yes, he must say to himself, yes, indeed.
And he no doubt feasts his eyes on the chaos in Washington: a shuttered government, a paralyzed Congress, daily Trumpian tantrums, trade wars, counter-intelligence investigations and roiling markets. Yes, yes indeed. It is all going according to plan, Putin says to his aides and cyberwarfare specialists.
Putin knew it would be a long-term project to destabilize the West; he never thought the wheels would start coming off so soon. He certainly never dreamed that Trump would suddenly pull U.S. troops from Syria, creating an inviting vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill. It’s simply too much to hope for.
So, now the stage is set for more Russian adventures in Ukraine, increased pressure on the Baltic states and more mischief in Syria and Afghanistan.
What a happy new year it is turning out to be!

Where You Stand is Where You Sit on Trump

The first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration seems a good time to take stock of the first full year of the most chaotic, disruptive, unpredictable presidency ever.
Our “very stable genius” in the Oval Office assures us repeatedly on Twitter that he is “the greatest” and that no president before him has achieved so much in so short a time. Neither assertion is demonstrably true, but candid self-analysis has never been our leader’s strong suit. Self-absorption, yes; self-criticism, not so much.
Sui generis was one of the first latin phrases the nuns taught me in St. Raymond’s School in Lynbrook, Long Island. It means singular, unique, nothing quite like it. I’ll give President Trump that much. He is sui generis. None of the 44 presidents before him compares and I doubt any that follow — not even a President Oprah — will seem the same.
None is likely to match his loose relationship with the truth, with facts, with the constitution and the English language, even though he tells us that he “is, like, really smart.” None of his predecessors, not even George W. Bush, who struggled with “strategery,” is his equal as a stream-of-consciousness phrase-maker. None would refer to Haiti and parts of Africa as “shithole countries.”
Now comes Michael Wolff, whose new book, “Fire and Fury Inside the Trump White House,” reports that the President’s closest aides consider him to be an overgrown child who is hopelessly unequipped for his job and a candidate for removal under the 25th amendment because they believe he is “losing it.”
Wolff, whom I have known for years, is not to be taken literally. He has a checkered history of first ingratiating himself with prominent sources (i.e. Rupert Murdoch and others) and then burning them between hard covers. It’s a profitable line of work, but his reporting hardly qualifies as even the first draft of history.
That said, the quotes in his book from Steve Bannon and others about the President and the Trump inner sanctum have the ring of truth. Bannon himself is a relentless, self-promoting loose cannon, but it is worth noting that while he apologized for his comments about the President and his family, he did not deny them.
A far better, more revealing book about Trump and what makes him tick is “The Trumps, Three Generations of Builders and a President,” by Gwenda Blair.
It is a portrait of Trump’s immigrant grandfather, Frederick Trump, who came from Germany and prospered in the Klondike gold rush; his late father, Fred, who capitalized on government subsidies and loopholes to become a major builder in New York’s outer boroughs, and of the President himself and his swaggering career as a Manhattan developer and playboy.
Read it and you’ll understand how, for Trump, life is one “deal” after another and “winning” is not the important thing, but the only thing.
He is taking the same approach to running the country. In each case, he has pushed himself relentlessly, played fast and loose with the truth and claimed credit for the accomplishments of others. His gutter language is just the topper.
Of course, his supporters applaud his performance. They look at Trump’s first year and they see tax cuts, reduced regulation, more money for the military, Justice Neil Gorsuch and other conservatives appointed to the Federal bench, a tough line against North Korea, Jerusalem recognized as Israel’s capital and a relentless assault against the “fake news” media.
What’s not to like? asks the base, that 38 per cent that supports Trump in the polls, gets their news from Fox and would vote for him again in a heartbeat.
His critics look at the same record and see more income inequality, discarded environmental protections, wasteful spending, right-wing judges, heightened danger of a nuclear confrontation with North Korea, setbacks to the already troubled Middle East peace process and a frontal assault on the first amendment. They also are offended by the President’s style: the bragging, the bullying, the thinly-veiled bigotry and the outright lying.
So, where you stand at the end of the first year of the Trump presidency depends on where you sit. You either see the President as fulfilling his campaign promise to upset the Washington apple cart, or as tearing down the structure and integrity of government.
Take your pick. Your next opportunity to express your opinion of Trump comes in November.

Trump’s Secret

For months now, actually the last two years, I have been puzzled by a persistent, troubling question:
What is Donald Trump hiding?
Through the tumult of the first six months of the Trump White House, through all the resignations and firings, from National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to the spectacular flameout of Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, aka “The Mooch,” I have asked myself:
What is Donald Trump keeping from us?
I first started to wonder at the outset of his presidential campaign when he refused to release his income tax returns.
What was in there that was so damaging?
Was he simply not as rich as he claimed? Or, would his returns demonstrate, contrary to what he has said publicly, that he is or has been deeply indebted to Russian creditors with connections to the Kremlin? Would the returns reveal that the Trump real estate empire is a house of cards, staggering under mountains of debt? Or, more embarrassing politically, would we discover that the real estate mogul has paid few if any taxes over the years?
Obviously, there had to be sensitive material in his income tax returns. Why else would he stubbornly refuse to release them?
The same fundamental question — what is he hiding? — came to mind again and again as Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, tweeted out his fury at the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor and railed against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the probe into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians.
The whole “Russia thing,” as the President derisively describes it, has clearly gotten under his skin. Why?
There is, after all, no hard, public evidence so far that Donald Trump personally colluded with the Russians during or after the campaign.
His family is a different matter. His son, Don Jr., clearly colluded when he famously met with the Russian lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may well have had improper conversations with the Russian Ambassador and a Kremlin-connected Russian banker.
But again, it is not clear yet that a specific, prosecutable crime was committed. President Trump may or may not be guilty of obstruction of justice, but that is up to Special Counselor Mueller to determine with his investigation.
What explains the President’s furious reaction when reports emerged that Mueller was looking into his past financial transactions? Why did President Trump angrily declare that whole area of his life out of bounds?
The President is clearly, deeply worried about something . Worried to the point of musing aloud about firing Sessions and Mueller and considering pardoning his aides and family members and even himself, if that is legally possible.
Who would even consider such high-risk options that are guaranteed to create a political firestorm and could easily prompt calls for his impeachment? Only a President who feels his back is against the wall. Only a President who fears that the Mueller investigation could bring him or his family members down.
In recent days, we have learned that the Special Counsel has empanelled multiple grand juries that are looking into Trump’s financial dealings and any and all contacts his campaign had with Russians before, during and after the campaign. So stay tuned. We may finally get some answers.

Chesapeake Bay in Trump’s Crosshairs

The Chesapeake Bay had a good week last week.

The annual report card on the Bay’s overall health from the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) showed significant improvement, one-design sailboats from around the nation had a rollicking regatta in the waters off Annapolis, and just days before that, Congress preserved funds for the Chesapeake Bay Program for the balance of the fiscal year.

Nothing in Washington is permanent, of course, so the budget battle will resume in September for FY2018 and the Trump Administration is still threatening to zero-out the $73 million annual appropriation for the Chesapeake Bay Program, which is headquartered in Annapolis.

The White House has other environmental programs in its budget crosshairs as well. It is calling for substantial reductions in funding for the E.P.A, NOAA and the intricate network of federal agencies that together allocate more than $500 million a year to the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay’s waters and fisheries.  Congressional members from Maryland and Virginia will do what they can to preserve the federal funds, but some sort of a fiscal haircut seems likely come September.

The painful irony is that this assault on the nation’s environmental programs comes just as the Bay and its tributaries seem to be turning the corner. The UMCES report found that, after decades of work, the largest estuary in the nation is making a steady, measurable recovery.

The Bay earned an overall grade of C on the 2016 UMCES report card: not dean’s list, perhaps, but one of the highest scores recorded in years.  (Unfortunately, Anne Arundel County’s sluggish rivers lagged behind with a D+.)  The Fisheries Index, made up of blue crab, striped bass and bay anchovies, rebounded to an A, a dramatic sign that the restoration effort is working.

The Trump Administration took no notice, however, and promised to redouble its budget-cutting efforts. The Trump formula: billions more for rebuilding the military and national security, sharp reductions in “discretionary” spending, including the environment.

“I do not think Donald Trump connects with the environment if he cannot play golf on it, or own it,’ said Dr. Thomas Miller, the director of the  Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, an arm of UMCES in Solomons Island. “I sense a profound lack of interest in environmental issues as president and personally throughout his career as a developer.”

Miller worries that if the Chesapeake Bay Program is eliminated or even substantially trimmed, it will no longer be able to monitor the progress being made by the six states and District of Columbia that make up the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed. Under the terms of the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement, the states committed themselves to make major progress towards cleaning up the Bay by 2025. It is the Chesapeake Bay Program that coordinates and monitors their efforts to insure that they live up to their commitments.

Tom Horton, the Eastern Shore journalist and author that many regard as the bard of the Bay, is concerned that if the federal funds supporting this effort are cut, the individual states will not make up the difference.  “You can’t assume that the states will pick up the slack,” he said, “Pennsylvania is already struggling to find the money to do what it is committed to do.”

Horton doubts that the Trump Administration, despite its threats, will succeed in eliminating the Chesapeake Bay Program in 2018, but, he said,  “even a modest cut sends a signal that says: ‘don’t bother about the Bay.’”

One statistic might give the Trump budget-cutters pause: a healthy Chesapeake Bay is an economic engine that generates over 5,000 seafood industry jobs and an annual income of $56 million. Altogether, the watershed’s regional economy provides 8.3 million jobs and an annual income of almost $400 billion.

Real money, as they say, even in today’s Washington.


Media in the Age of Trump

For news organizations, the early months of the Age of Trump have been, perversely, the best of times and the worst of times.
The worst, because of the 45th President’s vitriolic assault on the media as dishonest, disloyal “enemies of the people.”
The best, oddly, because the chaos surrounding the Trump ascension has given birth to some remarkable investigative reporting. The New York Times, the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, especially, have been topping each other repeatedly with penetrating reports about the inner workings, conflicts and contradictions of the new Administration and — get this — people are paying for it. It is an on-going newspaper war in the best sense of the word.
And not just newspapers. The New Yorker magazine, renowned for its prose and commentary, has been breaking news about the curious and continuing Trump-Russian connections. The venerable Atlantic magazine, a monthly, has published an in-depth look at what it calls the autocratic aspects of Trumpism.
Most major organizations have beefed up their Washington and investigative staffs since election day. The New York Times has assigned six top reporters to cover the White House full-time. (When I was The Times’ chief White House correspondent in the 1970’s, I was “chief” of myself and one deputy.)
The Washington Post and CNN have added to the collective reporting muscle by building new investigative teams.
It is the best of times, as well, because readers and viewers have responded to the tumultuous times by forking over cash for subscriptions to the most reliable of the “lamestream” media, as Sarah Palin once dubbed them.
The Times, which has been struggling financially in recent years from a crippling loss of print advertising, is experiencing a remarkable surge. The Grey Lady added 300,000 new digital subscriptions since election day. The Washington Post has topped 300,000 paid digital subscriptions for the first time. The New Yorker has picked up 250,000 subscribers in the last three months. Subscriptions to The Atlantic were up 210 per cent in January over the same month the year before.
The timing is hardly coincidental.
These new readers are not just reacting to Trump’s attacks on the press; they are hungry for reliable journalism in an uncertain world. And they are paying for it. Stephen Colbert once dubbed it “truthiness,” and people want it.
The cable news networks, all of which have tasted Trump’s wrath at one time or another, are enjoying an across-the-board
ratings boost. Fox, Trump’s favorite, leads the pack, but even CNN, which the President has labeled “fake news,” is up sharply. Jeff Zucker, CNN’s worldwide president, calls it a “renaissance in American Journalism.”
Have there been mistakes and excesses in the coverage? Of course. But you will get a clearer picture of the Administration in the media than from Kelly Anne Conway and the other Trump spokespeople.
Incidentally, the other great beneficiaries of the Trump Bump have been Colbert, John Oliver and, of course, Saturday Night Live. Late night television satire has never been better — or more popular.
Meanwhile, the normally adversarial relationship between the press and the White House has descended into daily hostilities between Sean Spicer, the beleaguered press secretary, and the reporters who question him. The televised battles have become a daytime hit as Spicer gamely tries to defend his boss’s twitter outbursts.
It is hard at this point to see where all this chaos leads us. David Brooks doubts that Trump can last a year. But the President’s base seems solidly behind him and largely satisfied that he is fulfilling his campaign promises. The Republicans in Congress will not challenge him as long as they believe he will sign their agenda into law.
In the main, reporters have been keeping their heads down, doing their jobs, digging for the truth and, fortunately, not taking the Presidential attacks personally. Most realize it is not about them. This is not a popularity contest, which is a good thing, since neither side would win. But it is reminder that, as the old saying goes, “politics ain’t beanbag.”