Trump 3.0, if it had been the real thing, he could have won

By guest columnist Al Rodbell

As part of the Donald Trump pivot, his new Campaign Manager, Kellyanne Conway, was interviewed by Chris Mathews introducing the “New kind and gentle” candidate, previously made famous by leading a mob of acolytes that he boasted, without rebuttal, would support him if he killed an innocent stranger on a busy street.

He is right, as leaders of street gangs or organized crime gain power by ruthlessness that is never met with objections, but rather increased fealty to the leader, be it of a gangster mob or a national dictator. Trump won the Republican nomination with this persona, but realized last week that he not could win the national election, where his “gang members” do not constitute a majority.

Since his gang has nowhere else to go, this consummate performer is taking on a different role, a new persona, one that could grab just enough of those in the middle for him to gain the presidency. His new part is the contrite little boy, who ran away from home and was very very bad, but really loves his mommy and daddy and even his little brother who stutters that he made fun of. He’s a full-blooded spoof of Bart Simpson, as he tried to hold in his tears of embarrassment for being so bad, and convey it with a wan smile.

It only took a few words delivered from a teleprompter (as the lines had to be spoken exactly as written) at a campaign event Thursday night in Charlotte, N.C. His message was: “I meant well, but you know me I sometimes lose control, but now I won’t be like that any more if you just take me back in”.

“Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing, I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.”

Those with pets understand this; that even when the pooch got away and bit a kid, or mauled another dog, we still love the little rascal. Or our son who got into a fight, and he really shouldn’t have started it and then lie, saying it was the other guy, but now he really feels bad, so we will give him a big hug.

This is human nature, and the new Trump machine knows this. He has picked the time to reach out to those people who believe in redemption, oppose capital punishment, and want those who committed felonies to be rehabilitated and have every chance to be accepted by society, those who ascribe to an ethos of redemption, even for those who have done great harm to many people.

Now back to another front on this full thrust of transformation of Donald J. Trump. It started during a Town Hall moderated by Chris Mathews who lives with the contradiction of belonging to a religion that considers abortion a mortal sin, while personally being in favor of it. During this event last May Chris asked the question (full transcript), “What about the mother, should she be punished?” Trump, as he has never really thought through any of the defining issues of the political divide, tried to cover this lack of exploring the issue with this dialogue:

MATTHEWS: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no as a principle?

TRUMP: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.

MATTHEWS: For the woman.

TRUMP: Yeah, there has to be some form.

This was an example of Trump thinking on his feet, and his not incorporating the absurdities of distortion of logic that is part of what political discourse has become. Shortly after this he tried to “walk it back” (a strange locution as if one’s statement could be unsaid). Trump’s initial statement was rational, meaning that abortion by definition means the act of a woman destroying her own fetus. Abortion may or may not require the participation of another person, who may be a licensed physician or someone with a coat hanger and an Oxycontin pill to ease the pain.

Trump didn’t know the Republican party line, articulated by his new campaign manager to Mathews this week, which is a statement about “political speech” which sacrifices logic and facts to the prime motivation of influencing voters. Specifically, it demonstrates what the conservative “pro-life” position means for the definition of “woman”.

If abortion is murder, which is what the pro-life position states, then it would follow that the essential person to commit this homicide is the one who controls the victim, otherwise known as the fetus or unborn human being. The person could be a brute who takes a crowbar to the mothers belly and as such, the woman is one of the two victims of a crime.

This is the logic that underlies the situation in the U.K. In England and Wales, where abortion is legal, (Pro-choice) a women is not penalized. Where it is illegal, (Pro-Life) in Northern Ireland, a woman faces severe punishment. This is where the right and left differ dramatically, and why Trump was initially confused, and was expressing his genuine conclusions of one who embraced the “pro-life” position, but for instrumental purposes only. As such he did not understand the ideological and incongruous fiction, which is that medical doctors who follow a mothers autonomous decision to destroy her fetus are the instigators of murder similar to the man with a crowbar who assaults a mother.

This is what Campaign Manager Conway articulated yesterday when she said that a mother who hires an abortionist is a “victim” and does not deserve any punishment. Of course in any situation other than abortion, a person who hires another to kill someone is, as Trump initially said, committing a crime.

The orthodox “pro-life” position would have been perfectly appropriate a century ago when women could not vote, had limited right to contract, and could only be employed in positions that were closely supervised by their natural superiors, men. It was then part of our culture that women, like children would not be responsible if they did wrong in collaboration with those of higher status.

Once buzz words have become ubiquitous and fraught with emotion, the principles underlying them are never brought to light, and so the right to destroy one’s fetus becomes transformed into “Pro choice” and the antithesis of being “Pro-life.” Donald Trump, when he said women should be punished, had not internalized the twist in assumptions of this position to make it politically acceptable, which is why he had been opposed to it most of his life. Now, his natural desire to “be a winner” has transcended whatever humanity he may have possessed, so it’s woman as infant that he must now endorse.

Donald Trump has ripped off his gangster-thug mask to attempt to come home to the warmth of acceptance of those who will forgive the “prodigal son.” It’s the role of a lifetime to be deeply sorry for having offended anyone, of being a bully for so long. We don’t know how the script will play out. The next scene could be he would reveal that when he was a child he never had the benefit of loving parents who would have helped him be a more decent guy.

I have to admit that Donald Trump is one hell of a performer, whether that’s a qualification for President is another question.

                       Al’s other essays can be found at AlRodbell.com.

Aug 24 2016 | Posted in Politics | Read More »

Changing Presidents: Will Russia or China Move Against Us?

“We move inexorably toward our nation’s moment of maximum vulnerability, when our democracy’s leadership changes hands
January 20th. It is a moment when our adversaries may probe for weakness and will be tempted to test us.”

This quotes from fairly deep in our earlier piece on Donald Trump’s world outlook and the concern that, as we make the transition to a new and inchoate administration, Vladimir Putin might find our moment of disarray irresistible for making his next move.

Or might Kim Jong-un, now that North Korea has finally staged a successful missile flight after several failures landing it close to Japan, a country that the U.S. is sworn to defend, decide to go the extra miles at the moment when the American leadership is changing hands.

And then there’s China, which the earlier piece touched on only briefly. The scenarios for Russia and North Korea are hypothetical, but for China it’s already happening. For two years, China has been turning rocks and coral in the South China Sea into artificial islands and fitting them out with airfields, advanced radar and most recently surface-to-air missile batteries. Will China — enraged at the United Nation’s Court of Arbitration’s resounding ruling in mid-July against its accroachment of the South China Sea, which it calls “a farce directed by Washington” — find the changeover the opportune moment to challenge our ships or overflights of those waters with something more than close encounters to test the new president’s reaction to a serious incident when little of the new government is in place?

forceful rising

What has changed in the last couple of years is that China has reached a point where it no longer believes it need hide behind its theme of “peaceful rising”. Bellicose statements are repeatedly heard from its leadership, its military and China’s media, charged as it is with indoctrinating the public with the government’s policies and propaganda against the U.S. Under the nationalistic leadership of its president, Xi Jinping, the nation openly speaks of the nine-dash line, one of three lines it draws on maps of the seas surrounding China like the widening rings from a stone dropped in water, the first enfolding almost all of the South China Sea, the last extending deep into the Pacific, reaching as far as the Aleutians and Hawaii. These are China’s intended zones of control. Maps in the media are captioned “not one dot less”. Beyond becoming the new hegemon of Asia, China’s plan is to drive the United States from the western Pacific.

China is in now in a hurry. It cannot afford to wait. The reason is that the nation of 1.6 billion faces a baby boom that far dwarfs our own when staggering numbers reach old age in coming years, evident from the middle-aged bulge in this chart.
What the chart also shows is that the boomers will leave behind too few workers to support them. China will soon begin to pay the price of the policy that for almost four decades restricted couples to a single child. That is already felt in the decline of the nation’s workforce. After peaking in 2012, the working-age populace dropped by 4.87 million last year, a pace that quickened from the 3.71 million decrease the year before.

The government finally abandoned the one-child policy the first of this year, but a more sophisticated populace is proving hesitant to answer the government’s call to give birth to tomorrow’s workers; the problem for couples is that they cost money today. In big cities like Shanghai, only 25% of couples plan to grow their families. To keep the economy going, China will have to look for workers outside its borders, said Howard French, a former Shanghai bureau chief for The New York Times on the PBS “NewsHour”. But where would enough be found, given China’s staggering population numbers? “There’s no obvious candidate.”

Which is why we need be concerned that China is in a race to establish its control of the seas now, before what French calls “the biggest aging crisis that the world has ever seen” is upon it, when — with too few earners to carry the load — the Chinese economy will be overwhelmingly burdened with the cost of sustenance and health care of the aged.

Before that vise tightens, China has been ramping up its military with a budget that increases at over 9% a year. With 2 million in uniform, it has the world’s biggest army by far, but its emphasis now is to build a blue water navy to rival the U.S., with a plan for 342 ships by 2020, 78 of them submarines. Its latest subs are armed with multiple-warhead nuclear missiles with a range of 4,500 miles. On the occasion of the launch of a new missile-armed destroyer, the People’s Liberation Army newspaper said the navy will soon commission a “massive number” of destroyers. China is training its pilots to land on aircraft carriers its stealthy JU-15 fighter, thought to be more advanced than our navy’s “Super Hornets”. They are developing an anti-ship missile that the Pentagon fears could sink our carriers. Adm. Gary Roughead, the retired U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, said that China’s naval chief, Adm. Wu Shengli, “doesn’t want to build a navy that’s equivalent to the U.S. He wants to build a navy that surpasses the U.S.”. We covered the subject in greater detail last fall titled “China’s Military Buildup: It’s Aimed at Us”.

a sea of trouble

The South China Sea is no lake; it is ocean by another name, and China is claiming a section of the world’s oceans the size of Mexico as its very own. It claims “indisputable sovereignty” based on “historic rights” that Xi Jinping claims date “since ancient times”.

The nine-dash line — the first that China draws — pushes up against the coastlines of the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, all which also lay claim to the Sea’s shoals and outcroppings of rock, some even below water at high tide, that China has been converting into islands and military bases. In 2012 the Chinese wrested control of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, just 120 nautical miles from the Philippine coast and four times that distance from the nearest point on China’s
mainland. The Chinese have not yet built a base there, but the intent is clear, because Scarborough forms something of a strategic triangle with the long airstrip it has laid on Fiery Cross Reef to its southwest and the missile batteries installed on Woody Island to its northwest.

The Philippines took its complaint to the U.N.’s arbitration court in the Netherlands which in mid-July brought a verdict against China that went well beyond what was expected, striking down China’s every claim, even chastising it for the harm its dredging has done to the aquatic environment.

As are 167 other nations, China is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982 which accords to each party an exclusive economic zone extending 200 miles in all directions for fishing and mining but which is freely navigable by all. A second rule that says nations have the right to disallow incursion without permission into a zone extending 12 miles from their shoreline. The tribunal admonished China that the conventions it had agreed to are land-based, that historic claims “were extinguished” by the treaty, that no feature in the Spratlys is a natural “island” under the convention so there is nothing on which to center an economic zone, that the zones belong to the nearest actual land which, in the case of the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal, is the Philippines.

outlaws

China immediately called it an “illegal” ruling, announced that it would ignore its Convention commitment, continue its program of annexation, and become viewed as an outlaw nation if it follows through on its threat. To show contempt, it immediately landed two civilian planes on one of the artificial islands.

Provocations in the South China Sea have occurred regularly since our round-up of last fall in “Don’t Believe China Is Looking for a Fight?“. On the eve of the court’s ruling, China’s navy was conducting a live-fire exercise in the Sea. In June two Chinese jets intercepted an American surveillance plane in a dangerous fly-by that our crew said came within 50 feet. In March, a Chinese coast guard vessel snapped the tow line to free a Chinese trawler caught fishing in Indonesia’s waters by their patrol boat. China’s trawlers have become quasi-military ships that continually run off the fishing boats of other nations from their own waters.

In the East China Sea, Japan is alarmed by China’s aggressive actions. In June for the first time a Chinese warship was spotted close to the uninhabited, Japan-controlled Senkaku islands. Days ago, two Chinese coast-guard ships entered the territorial waters of the islets. China has 16 oil drilling platforms which are in international waters of the Sea, but Japan has lodged protests over what it claims is a radar installation on one of the rigs. Japan had to scramble its jet fighters 571 times in the year ended in March to deal with Chinese aircraft probing the area.

open seas

The U.S. has declared its resolve to continue the service it has performed for the world for decades, using its navy to ensure that, beyond the 12-mile limits, the seas everywhere are freely navigable for “innocent passage”. United States policy, as expressed by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter last October, is that “the United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, as we do around the world, and the South China Sea will not be an exception”.

So we continue with occasional fly-throughs and just before the court ruling conducted exercises with two carriers, the John C. Stennis and Ronald Reagan, and six accompanying ships, all in all comprising 12,000 sailors and 140 aircraft.

But this show of force was in the seas east of the Philippines, not the South or East China Seas. That’s sensible; conducting those operations
U.S. carriers in an exercise east of the Philippines.
in the South China Sea would have made the U.S. the provocateur. However, meeting with Xi Jinping in Washington in May, President Obama warned China not to move on Scarborough Shoal nor declare the South China Sea to be an air defense zone, forcing civilian airliners to make long detours to avoid confrontations with the Chinese air force. Before Congress at the time, Adm. Harry Harris, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, accused China of “clearly militarizing” the disputed waters. “You’d have to believe in a flat Earth otherwise”. Yet, in a Wall Street Journal interview this August, the admiral revealed the U.S. reluctance to aid its Pacific allies, saying, “I don’t think we have as a mission enforcing tribunal rulings”, while at the same time expressing disappointment that we are losing the initiative by not conducting enough freedom of navigation operations. He has pressed his bosses for more but “so far has been rebuffed”. So China is left with ambiguity over just what the U.S. will do if it does take that next step when we are changing presidents.

Courts Reversing Few Phony Voter Fraud Laws

In rapid order, five federal courts have turned back laws enacted by Republican-controlled legislatures in four states that were designed to
keep targeted groups from the ballot box. Rulings have rejected laws in North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and North Dakota, four of the ten states that have made such changes to voting laws.

To prevent voter fraud is the reason the proponents of the laws hide behind. Officially-issued identification documents with an individual’s photos are needed to combat the problem of voters committing fraud by impersonating someone else — except that every study has shown that the problem is rare to the point of non-existence. We cited overwhelming proof Setback and Further Confusion : A federal appeals court has now reinstated Wisconsin’s voter identification law, overriding the lower court’s determination that the state’s voters need not prove identity with photo-IDs and disagreeing with three other federal court decisions less than three months before the election.
    

before the 2014 elections in “The Republican Campaign that Kept Democrats from the Polls”” where you’ll read of several studies, one being the Brennan Center analyzing 9,078,728 votes and finding only four instances of ineligible persons voting — a factor of 0.00000044%.

More to the point, voter fraud is not just rare but an absurdly ineffectual way to sway an election. Even for a local election with low vote counts, an organizer would need to enlist enough people to make the requisite difference in the vote count, somehow identifying the particular souls who would be willing to take the legal risk and banking on not one of them blowing the whistle to the constabulary. As for each individual, how many would be foolish enough to agree to commit a felony that carries a five year prison term and a $10,000 fine — even deportation, if applicable — once that word got around?

As proof that the photo-id requirements have something other than fraud in mind, the laws curiously do nothing to screen against the loophole of absentee ballots.

But for those not absent, obtaining photo-ids is an obstacle for people on the lower economic rungs who have difficulty obtaining time off from work and sacrificing much-needed hourly income to travel and apply for an approved ID card. That targeting successfully finds its mark with blacks and Hispanics, two groups known to vote predominantly Democratic. Republicans want them to stay home.

That was the case with the Texas ruling. The seven different means of identifying oneself all seem reasonable except that all of them — such as driver licenses and passports — cost money, and if not needed for other purposes amount to a poll tax. Evidence presented in the suit against the state showed that some 600,000 would-be voters would be affected if the law were allowed to stand.

Native Americans successfully challenged the law in North Dakota for much the same reasons. The judge wrote that “No eligible voter, regardless of their station in life, should be denied the opportunity to vote”. In Wisconsin the reasoning for the verdict was much the same. All three states are to loosen the laws to allow for alternative means such as poll workers vouching for members of their community they know personally, or letting voters sign affidavits swearing to their identity.

But then there is North Carolina. The federal court called the set of laws narrowing the right to vote, “the most restrictive voting laws North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow” and “these new provisions target African-Americans with almost surgical precision”. In “First Prize for Nastiest State Goes to…“, this publication wrote about these provisions three years ago when first passed by the Republican-controlled general assembly and senate and signed by the Republican governor right after the Supreme Court crippled the 1968 Voting Rights Act that had held certain southern states in check.

In addition to limiting what can be used as a photo-id, North Carolina’s law bans voter registration on Sunday to disrupt the black tradition of conducting registration drives after church services, shortens the early-voting period to eliminate one “souls to the polls” Sunday when African-American churches provide transportation to the polls after services, ends same-day registration to require an extra trip, invalidates as proof of identity the state IDs issued to those on financial assistance (a high percentage of recipients being black), and in a move that hopes to deter students from voting at all — they tending to be liberal — ends a family’s dependents tax deduction if sons or daughters vote at college instead of at home. And just to make sure, in the 2014 election, the number of voting sites was severely cut in counties with high black populations to make for long lines that discouraged voting.

Republican rule is extremely unpopular in North Carolina, which has again become a battleground state. Fearing those Democratic votes, Governor Pat McCrory is rebelling against the decision by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found “intentional racial discrimination” in the state’s law. With only three months to the election, he wants a Supreme Court review.

the other imagined rigging

And finally we have the fraud of Donald Trump planting in the minds of his idolators that if he loses it is because American elections are rigged. He told Sean Hannity of Fox News that “November 8th, we’d better be careful, because that election’s going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us…I’ve been hearing about it for a long time”.

This prompts wonder if Trump has ever been to a polling place, where on election day we are somehow identified, we sign a register, that signature blocks anyone else who comes along, and multiple persons oversee one another.

But as our companion commentary, “Why Donald Trump’s ‘rigged election’ comment goes right to the heart of our democracy” says, rather than accede defeat with the grace of all losing candidates before him, Trump would has no scruple to keep him from attempting sabotage of the trust Americans have had in the election process for a couple of centuries just to salve his ego.

Intelligence Briefing: How Much to Tell Trump?

Margaret Warner on the PBS “NewsHour”: There’s a huge difference in the level of intelligence that’s given at this stage.…Mike Morell, former deputy director and director temporary of the CIA, had to brief McCain and Palin. And he said, so you walk in with John McCain from Armed Services Committee and Intel Committee, one of the great experts in the Senate. Immediately, it’s going very deep. He knows a lot.

But he said, you know, with a Sarah Palin, he said it’s like national security 101, and it’s very broad and it’s very general, and you have got to give a lot of history. And that will probably apply this time with Trump and Secretary Clinton.

As one said to me, Secretary Clinton, she will probably walk in and say, “So, where were we?”

Aug 7 2016 | Posted in Secrecy & Surveillance | Read More »

Why Donald Trump’s “rigged election” comment goes right to the heart of our democracy

By guest columnist Al Rodbell

When Donald J. Trump made this comment, it was aimed at his largest demographic, those who need constant feeding of their inchoate contempt for this country. Trump is the man who persisted in asserting that President Obama was born in Kenya long after almost all considered it insane; but not all, not those who consume illusions of vast, complex conspiracies because they are inherently un-falsifiable. Certainly, Obama’s mother could have inserted the birth announcement in the local Honolulu newspaper as part of the plan that he would run for president four decades later. It is absurd, but not impossible, and those that buy into it have the satisfaction of being in on something that very few grasp.

Here are his words: “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, to be honest,” And later, when asked about it, he gave an example of a previous election where, “you had precincts where there were practically nobody voting for the Republican”. He added, “I hope the Republicans get out there and watch very closely” during Election Day.

This is the single most damaging example of Trump’s propensity to find a nugget of truth and then send it out to the world. This spontaneity in his utterances betrays his uncaring ignorance of the context or interpretation of what he is saying. This man who has risen to be one of two people who will be elevated to the apex of national government authority, one who will swear to “preserve and protect” the nation’s laws — from federal statutes to our Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court — chooses to cast doubt on the essence of choosing the individual to hold this awesome power. “Rigged” is a word that for him means a conspiratorial illusion just like global warming, evolution, and the birthplace of the current president.

He closes with the suggestion that Republicans pay attention that there is no cheating, as if without his urging they would not think to do this. What this reflects is his rarely or never having gone to a polling place to cast a vote. Each of the thousands of them are outposts of our secular ethos which inherently means that there will be members of both parties challenging the legitimacy of every single vote and following the elaborate laws of their state to prevent what he “is afraid will happen”.

I know a bit about polling from my run for the nomination for N.Y. State Representative in 1993, when my name was on a printed sheet that could only be produced by one company where I had once worked. Each group of voting booths had a different list and they even randomized the order of names within them to negate top of the list advantage, meaning these had the world’s shortest press run, as low as a few copies due to non-overlapping districts and multiple levels of government. It kept alive a typesetting technology from the nineteenth century called a Ludlow machine, soon to be made obsolete by large size computer graphic printers. As a candidate I had the right to personally inspect each machine, and to inspect the mechanism, to verify that a pull of the lever went to the correct counter. For those who know the term “steampunk” this was the real thing, not much different than that of the original invention in 1881.

“Rigged” — by whom? Trump, as is his ingrained wont, has not taken the effort to understand how the polls in the state of Ohio actually operate, what procedures have been implemented to ensure that each vote is counted, and that it is as accurate and uncorrupted as humanly possible. He has not taken the time to learn of the severe penalties in Ohio, and every other state, for tampering with the results of a governmental election. Why understand a body of laws, and the technology and procedures that accompany them, when in a second you can create out of thin air the myth that elections, the solemn rite of a democracy is something other than the effort to refine and protect the sacredness of a citizen’s vote.

Suffrage, the right to vote, is something various groups have fought and died for; even though the process can never be perfect and there are stolen elections in spite of the ongoing effort to limit such criminal acts. Trump’s casual expression that he expects this to happen, without his doing a thing to understand the process in order to limit such vulnerability is what he is, which is why so many from both parties find him to be uniquely contemptible.

                       Al’s other essays can be found at AlRodbell.com.

Aug 6 2016 | Posted in Politics | Read More »

Trump: Soft on Putin, Allies Left in the Wind

Donald Trump’s encouraging Russia to find the 30,000
e-mails that were erased from Hillary Clinton’s server (per her attorneys) has raised legitimate concern that “there’s something going on”, a phrase you might remember Trump leveling at President Obama after Orlando.

Forensic technology has convinced U.S. intelligence that the Wikileaks release of Democratic National Committee e-mails and documents originated with the Russian government. That they expose a corrupt tilt toward Clinton over Sanders by the committee and were released just before the Democratic convention seems beyond coincidence. Is Vladimir Putin, his favorable comments taking advantage of Trump’s susceptibility to flattery, trying to influence the election? And has Trump — easy prey to a compliment — fallen in thrall to Putin?

“He is a very flamboyant man, very talented, no doubt about that”, Putin has said about Trump, and Trump has returned the compliment saying about Putin “at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

The exchange of mutual admiration between the two has been going on since 2007, according to this timeline put together by CNN. Before heading to Moscow with his Miss Universe beauty pageant in 2013 (enough exposure for him to now say, “I know Russia well”), he tweeted the question, “Do you think Putin will be going…if so, will he become my new best friend?”

But now Trump has invited a foreign country to spy on his rival for the presidency:

“Russia, if you’re listening. I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”

Trump has already played into Putin’s hand in several ways. That all signatories would join in common defense if any one of them is attacked is the sacrosanct deterrent basis of NATO, yet in a startling late-June interview with David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, Trump threatened the decades-long stability of NATO by saying he would come to the aid of countries attacked by Russia only after determining that those nations have “fulfilled their obligations to us”. He has called NATO “obsolete”. “When NATO was formed many decades ago we were a different country. There was a different threat”, he said, evidently viewing today’s Russia under Putin as benign.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually got along with Russia?”, Trump asks. That would be welcomed by those who ask just when did we decide that Crimea and Ukraine were vital to our national interest? At various moments Trump has said, “I would get along with Putin; I’ve dealt with Russia”. “I think in terms of leadership, [Putin’s] getting an A”. “He’s actually liked in his country, which is hard to believe, because he is essentially a dictator”. But “he’s respected, unlike our president”.

Putin has said, “Mr Trump has declared that he’s ready for the full restoration of Russian-American relations”, and separately, “What’s wrong with that?”, which drew applause from business executives in his audience yearning for smoother economic relations. “Is there anything bad there? We all welcome this, don’t you?”

Trump has said he would get along “fine” with Russia, would “get along very well” with Vladimir Putin. “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia,”
he told MSNBC. David Rothkopf, CEO & Editor of Foreign Policy magazine said in a television interview, “I think it’s absolutely clear that there is some kind of alignment between Putin and Trump, and Trump is perfectly willing to play along…to accept the support of Putin despite Putin’s record…despite the threat he poses to our top allies in Europe”.

Trump has never met Putin. Hillary Clinton has had direct dealings. She is despised by the Russian president for her accusing his party of fraud in the 2011 parliamentary elections and for — according to him — instigating the huge street protests that erupted against him by signaling the support of the U.S. government. “Putin will eat your lunch,” she said in a speech directed at Trump. If Trump is elected president, it would be like “Christmas in the Kremlin”, she has said.

the vulnerable moment

That’s the backdrop as we move inexorably toward our nation’s moment of maximum vulnerability, when our democracy’s leadership changes hands January 20th. It is a moment when our adversaries may probe for weakness and will be tempted to test us.

Will China challenge our ships or overflights of the South China Sea with more than close encounters to test the new president’s reaction to a serious incident?

If Donald Trump becomes president, will Vladimir Putin surmise that he can make his next move, knowing that our electorate has installed a president utterly inexperienced, extraordinarily ill-prepared for the job, and very much an admirer of Putin. The fear is that Putin, who views the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical

catastrophe of the [20th] century,” might next move to annex the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) in his conjectured step-by-step plan to reassemble that union. In Trump, would he have an America president who will let that happen?

It’s difficult to know. “I’m an intuitive person”, says Trump. He gets what he knows from newspapers and what he calls “the shows”, presumably meaning the Sunday talk shows. Until Paul Manafort and Carter Page came on board — both of whom have have had dealings in Russia — he has had no foreign policy advisors. Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” whom he talks with, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things” — to himself, presumably. “My primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”

And if Hillary Clinton becomes president that day, would Putin find that an irresistible moment to create havoc. In return, we need also to worry about the hawkish Ms Clinton and her history of intemperate personal remarks about the Russian leader, such as equating him with Hitler for his advances into Ukraine and voicing her doubt that George W. Bush had gotten a sense of Putin’s soul because as a former KGB agent he probably didn’t have one. Amid all the hoopla on Inauguration Day, we will need to hold our breath.

Whether we ever should have expanded NATO, pushing up against Russia’s borders — the triumphalist and reckless response to the end of the Cold War begun in the Clinton administration with the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and extended by the still more provocative addition of the Baltic States during the Bush administration — is a moot point, because now we’re stuck with the NATO pledge to defend them all.

it’s money that matters

Mr. Trump does not value NATO for its intrinsic purpose of deterring aggression — irrespective of whether all members are paid up. That’s “outdated”, he says. “We’re spending too much money because these countries are not paying their fair share”, he said to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The Atlantic Alliance, he says, is “unfair, economically, to us, to the United States, because it really helps them more than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share.”

He views our alliances more as deals; they seem for him to be first and foremost financial transactions. “When they don’t pay up, they’ve backed out of their obligations, then we no longer have an obligation to defend them,” he said. “You always have to be prepared to walk from something. I don’t want to get out of NATO. I want the countries of NATO to pay us”. The threat of dishonoring the pledge to NATO is justified as a negotiating tactic to get other nations to foot the bill for their security.

That is his stance globally. “We have been disrespected, mocked and ripped off for many, many years by people that were smarter, shrewder, tougher”, he said to The New York Times. America was “systematically ripped off by everybody. From China to Japan to South Korea to the Middle East, many states in the Middle East, for instance protecting Saudi Arabia and not being properly reimbursed for every penny that we spend.”

That’s not all wrong, of course, and he has stirred the latent resentment of the American taxpayer that we have for so long been picking up the tab for the security of the world. In a country where nothing dissuades the public from thinking that 28% of the national budget goes to foreign aid (actually, 1%), that has great appeal. The dilemma is, what if this position is taken beyond bluff. Would Trump risk dismantling the global security architecture that has maintained the peace in most of the world for decades?

“I alone can fix it” Trump said in his acceptance speech about America’s rigged political system. (“The language of a dictator”, said Hillary in hers). Alone, he also will fix the payment shortfalls of laggard nations: “We can’t be taken for suckers with Germany, Japan, South Korea. They should pay us, pay us substantially, and they will if I ask them. It somebody else asks them, they won’t.”

self-responsibility

The Trump foreign policy goes beyond just getting nations to pay up. He wants to tear up the

1960 U.S.-Japan Treaty whereby the U.S. would come to the defense of Japan if attacked. “We have to immediately go and start World War III, okay? If we get attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us. Somehow that doesn’t sound so fair.” And, “We have 28,000 soldiers on the line in South Korea… We get practically nothing compared to the cost of this”. In fact South Korea agreed to pay $866 million in 2014, “making it arguably cheaper to keep U.S. forces there than on the American mainland”, said The Weekly Standard. And Japan’s budget for this year shows $1.7 billion in direct support of U.S. costs, said The Wall Street Journal.

Our standing ready to defend has made it unnecessary for the two countries to go nuclear, which they would likely have to do, faced with nuclear North Korea and China as neighbors. Which would be fine with Trump.

“You have so many countries already — China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia — you have so many countries right now that have them. Now, wouldn’t you rather, in a certain sense, have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?”

With China growing increasingly aggressive and reviving ancient claims for Japan’s Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, the Trump plan of all four countries facing each other with nuclear weapons would be a high-risk abandonment of the calm the United States has achieved for decades in the region.

Trump would solve the North Korea problem with ease. He would have China assassinate Kim Jong-un. Of course, China won’t even impose sanction of North Korea, so worried is it that the poverty-stricken horde will come across the border. Short of that solution, he has suggested the U.S. bomb North Korean nuclear sites, which would likely be Clinton’s move as well– or Obama’s before that — the moment the supreme leader proves that his missiles can reach Hawaii or the U.S. mainland.

Trump has even countenanced using nuclear weapons in Europe, if a military conflict breaks out, saying, “You don’t want to, say, take everything off the table.”

Like the Obama administration’s irritation with Middle Eastern countries that refuse to put their troops at risk and expect the U.S. to fight their wars, Trump speaks of halting purchases of oil from Arab states that do not either reimburse the U.S. for its war costs or commit troops to the fight. “We defend everybody. When in doubt, come to the United States. We’ll defend you. In some cases free of charge.”

“I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us” if Saudi Arabia had nuclear weapons, Trump has said. “It’s going to happen, anyway. It’s only a question of time. They’re going to start having them, or we have to get rid of them entirely”. He said in an interview with the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, “If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection, I don’t think it would be around.”

And finally, Mr. Trump promises to defeat ISIS “very, very quickly”. He would crush Islamic State and send American troops to “take the oil”. Except he has also said he (first, we’ll assume) “would unleash ISIS” to topple the Assad regime. It is an idea typically lacking altogether in forethought of the consequence, which would be a gift to ISIS of full control of Syria. But Donald assures us, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me”.

Supreme Court Allows Still More Money Into Politics

What are we to make of the Supreme Court’s overturning the conviction of Virginia’s former governor, Bob McDonnell, at the end of June? Kaine on the Take: August 4: Corporations and lobbying firms gave then-Virginia governor Tim Kaine free rides around the country on private jets and gifts worth more than $160,000 at the same time that their business interests were before the state government. So much for the squeaky clean image the Democrats portray of Hillary Clinton’s pick for vice president.
    

unanimous — 8-0. True, the court ruled on grounds specific to this case, saying that the instructions to the convicting jury were overly vague. True also that the court remanded the case to the lower court for that reason, which left open the possibility that McDonnell could be retried. And true as well that >Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, found McDonnell’s actions “distasteful”. But the question is how wide will be the fallout affecting corruption cases now being tried and those in the future.

The decision drew little attention, announced as it was in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. The question was whether it was illegal for McDonnell and wife to accept while in office lavish gifts from the CEO of a food supplement business named Jonnie Williams, absent proof that McDonnell had taken any official action in Williams’ behalf. He wanted the governor to spur the state’s public universities to conduct research on a product that Williams’ company marketed. His hope was that the research would win official confirmation that the tobacco-derived supplement alleviates pain. From the beginning of McDonnell’s term in 2009, the businessman had showered gifts upon the pair: a Rolex watch, a $20,000 shopping spree for wife Maureen’s insatiable fondness for luxury goods, a $120,000 loan, a $10,000 gift to the McDonnell’s daughter when she became engaged. Williams even paid $15,000 for the daughter’s wedding expenses.

McDonnell did prod the universities and even threw a party at the governor’s mansion to promote Williams’ quest, but the justices’ view was that this did not rise to the level of graft. There was not enough of a quo in return for the quid, they decided, despite an e-mail that surfaced in which the governor asked Williams about a $50,000 loan and “six minutes later” e-mailed his staff for an update about that university research request.

Williams’ lawyers and a bipartisan group of former attorneys general filed an amicus brief arguing that the appeals court had “criminalized the routine practice by public officials of giving access to their constituents, including those who have supported the official”. Isn’t it the role of elected officials to represent their constituents, to meet with them, extend help to them?

Well, yes, but aren’t these officials already paid to perform this service? The Court is effectively saying that our elected representatives owe us nothing; in addition to their paycheck we need to pay them indulgences to go to bat for us — and in the case of McDonnell, whopping amounts! So indifferent to swag was Roberts in his opinion that he wrote so explicitly: “Our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes and ball gowns…”. Really?

It is feared that the follow on from the ruling will be open season for politicians to use their offices to produce a second income, so much harder will it be to prove that gifts amount to bribes and corruption. So in need of money are they, thanks to the explosion of money in politics, that won’t they feel free to shake down for gifts those who ask for assistance? And won’t that mean that those unable to pay gratuities to the representatives they vote into office will get less access than ever?

By this action, the Supreme Court has expanded even further the free movement of money into politics, as they did in the horrendous Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited contributions by corporations and unions to super PACs, so long as they (supposedly) had no direct connection to the candidates they support; and then again in McCutcheon, which removed the overall dollar cap restricting how much individuals could donate to parties, candidates and campaigns (while keeping the $2,600 gift limit to any one candidate).

Once again exhibiting a naïveté about how the real world works, the Court seems unmindful that they have likely created a marketplace for influence peddling. In Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy gave us a glimpse of just how remote from political reality a justice can become over long tenure when he wrote that, because free speech by checkbook “may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt”. Nor does it mean that, in their need to amass ever larger campaign chests that owes to this court’s opening the money floodgates, those officials are not pressured by donors to deliver more than just a sympathetic hearing.

The New York Times thought to interview Jack Abramoff about the Court’s naïveté after the decision was handed down. Abramoff should know. He spent almost four years in federal prison for conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion after spreading gifts around Washington in return for votes (all the while swindling their clients, Native American tribes, for which his group was lobbying. “I continue to be concerned by what seems to be a lack of understanding on the part of the justices that a little bit of money can breed corruption”, said Ambramoff.

And Donald Trump helpfully drew back the curtain on how things actually happen when he said about his own donations to candidates that, “When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them”.