Category: Digital Article

My blog site. It went down – only now to be now resurrected.

I, on the other hand, did not go down. I was a lady in waiting.

So, here I am, ready, willing, and eager to pick up where I left off!

Increasingly Russiagate is being compared to Watergate. Just yesterday none other than Republican Senator John McCain told a group, “We’ve seen this movie before.” The White House under siege is “reaching Watergate size and scale.”

At this point, there is little expectation that Russiagate and everything that it includes and implies will go away. In fact, at this point, there is growing consensus that the president’s political (and legal) problems are likely to get worse, not better.

Assuming the present scandal does reach the epic proportions of Watergate, comparisons will inevitably be made between the two men at the center, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. On a personal level are important similarities: 1) tendency to oddity; 2) tendency to paranoia; 3) tendency to friendlessness; and 4) tendency to personal as well as political isolation. Among other things, both men were remarkably detached from their immediate families, including their wives.

But, both men also had a single source of emotional sustenance: daughters to whom they were closer than to anyone else on the planet. Daughters who stood by them when nearly no one else did. What I am saying is that should Russiagate continue to get worse, Ivanka Trump is likely to play the same critical role as did Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

The Nixons had two daughters. But Julie, younger than her sister Tricia, was always someone special in the Nixon family. From an early age, she was a star: pretty, clever, and lively, and when she married the only grandson of five star General and, later, President Dwight David Eisenhower, she married into one of America’s most highly esteemed political families.

When Watergate hit, it was Julie who from beginning to end stood steadfastly, privately and publicly, by her father. She was his ballast – by far his most important source of support. In my book, All the President’s Kin, I wrote: “Before too long she was the chief spokesperson for the entire Nixon family on the hot topic of Watergate. She was capable of putting in as many as six appearance in different parts of the country in one week. And she had guts…. [Throughout a series of difficult interviews] she maintained her composure and insisted on her father’s innocence.” In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that he did not want his younger daughter to take the brunt of Watergate, but that “she could not bear the fact that there did not seem to be anyone else who would speak out for me. Whenever I suggested that she not become so involved, she always replied, ‘But Daddy, we have to fight.’”

It’s not clear that Ivanka is as emotionally close to her father as was Julie to hers. But, given the isolation of the incumbent president, and given her own political poise, it’s likely that Ivanka will follow where Julie led.

The newspaper industry was said to be dead and buried – a victim of technology. But, since the election of Donald Trump as president, two “huge” things have happened.

First, the industry itself has been revived. The numbers are striking. A recent study found that more than 169 million U. S. adults now read newspapers every month, in print, online or mobile. That’s nearly 70% of the population. Moreover, newspapers such as the New York Times have made stunning strides in increasing their circulation. The Times added 276,000 net digital-only subscriptions in the final three months of 2016. We can assume that since Trump took up residence in the White House, these numbers have escalated still further.

This is not to say that newspapers are out of the financial woods. Digital success is not yet offsetting a severe slump in print advertising, which historically has been the biggest source of industry revenue. Moreover, Donald Trump is not the only reason that people are returning to reading the papers. Public distaste for ubiquitous ads is another contributor. Still, the public’s appetite for “fake news” is demonstrably higher than it’s been in years.

This sharply increased interest in news is mirrored, not incidentally, on cable channels. During the first three months of 2017 Fox News had its highest rated quarter ever. During this same period, CNN had its most-watched quarter since 2003. And MSNBC registered its largest total audience ever, becoming in the early months of 2017 the fastest growing of the cable networks.

But the second thing that has happened to revive the newspaper industry is much, much more important. It is that the press – in particular, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now also the Wall Street Journal – has been nearly single-handedly responsible for digging up and daring to disclose the truths of this administration. Journalists such as Robert Costa of the Post, and Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush of the Times, are just three examples of a small army of reporters who, with the obvious support of their superiors, have changed the narrative of American politics.

The press is not, constitutionally, one of the pillars of American government. But, when the history of this period is written, if the Republic is to be saved, it will be the press that will be credited with saving it.

I do not usually post blogs other than my own. But, “Serving in the Trump Administration,” written by my friend and colleague Deborah Rhode, Professor at Stanford Law School, is so on point, and so strongly argued, it merits an exception to my general rule.

Rhode writes in part: “Yet the only way ethically responsible lawyers can ethically serve in this administration is if they are prepared to resign when resistance is ineffective and the moral stakes are substantial.”

For her compelling piece in full, click on the link below.

https://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/serving-in-the-trump-administration

People are scratching their heads. Pundits are at a loss. The most politically savvy among us are reduced to admitting that they cannot say for sure why Donald Trump remained joined to the deeply suspect Mike Flynn until the president was, in effect, forced by the Washington Post to cut him loose.

The multiplicity of motivations for Trump’s behavior vis-a-vis his former National Security Adviser is as confusing as confounding. But the bottom line is this. It was bad leadership.

Bad leadership is, curiously, deceptively simple to define. Leadership is bad when it is ineffective. Leadership is bad when it is unethical. And leadership is bad when it is, simultaneously, ineffective and unethical.

So here’s where we are now. We do not know for sure why Trump’s leadership with regard Flynn was bad. Was the president being mindlessly ineffective? Was he being deliberately unethical? Or was he somehow being both? What we do know for sure is that good leadership it was not. Which is why Flynn at least – there may be others – will continue to haunt the White House so long as Trump is in residence.

How long has it been since France was fashionable? On the cutting edge? Let’s just say it’s been long – a long, long time.

Today though, in a single stroke, France is once again at the forefront. At the forefront of Europe – and of liberal democracy. With the electric election of boy wonder Emmanuel Macron as their President, and with the decisive defeat of his opponent, right-wing, anti-Europe, pro-Russia Marine Le Pen, the French have stood strong against the nationalism and populism that recently threatened the West generally, and Europe particularly.

For all his youth – he is not yet 40 – Macron is a Renaissance man. A pianist of the first rank, highly literate, brilliant in economics and finance, a self-made man of considerable wealth, he is as bold as he is brilliant. To signal his break with the past, a year ago Macron ditched the prevailing party system. He simply started his own political party – En Marche; Forward in English – and proceeded to use it as a platform from which to launch his campaign for president.

Of course, this story of stunning electoral success is not only about the leader, but the followers. In this case French voters, who, unlike their British counterparts, chose in no uncertain terms to gamble on a favored European future rather than to retreat to an imagined, isolated, past.

Of course, France faces formidable challenges, and for all his abundant gifts, Macron is no magician. Still, he is, the overwhelming majority of French voters fortunately, felicitously, decided, the man for this season.

Leadership and followership typically proceed along an historical trajectory. Since they are twinned, and since they change over time, they were different in the early 19th and 20th centuries from what they are now, early in the 21st. Still, the Western trajectory has tended consistent at least since the Enlightenment. Power and influence have devolved away from those at the top, and toward those in the middle and at the bottom.

In the last few years, however, some have wondered: How far and fast can this devolution go? How much political power can leaders lose and followers gain without inciting instability?

A case in point is what’s been happening on some of America’s most prestigious college campuses. While most Americans support students’ right to protest, when such protests turn virulent to the point of being violent – as happened recently in Berkeley, California – the authorities feel obliged if not obligated to step in. Authority takes over when inmates overtake the asylum – when followers overwhelm leaders.

More than anything else the rise of the threatening follower at the expense of the threatened leader explains the reemergence of authoritarianism – leadership more dictatorial than democratic. Putin clamped down when Russians got restive. Erdogan clamped down when Turks got defiant. El-Sisi clamped down in the wake of the Arab spring. And Xi Jinping clamped down in response to the growing number of Chinese activists.

Additionally are strongmen in other countries that previously were liberal and democratic, such as Hungary. Additionally are would-be strongmen, such as Donald Trump, who would like nothing so much as to highjack precisely those institutions that preclude his becoming an autocrat. And, additionally is a significant percentage of the electorate that itself opts for order over disorder, for the illusion of reversion over the encroachment of change.

Which raises this question: How far will the pendulum swing? Will followers in liberal Western democracies continue to feel unmoored? Continue in consequence to revert to populism and authoritarianism? Or will the trajectory of history prove immutable – and the regression to autocracy more an aberration than a rule?

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Note: I’m hitting the road. So, no new blogs for at least the next two weeks.

According to Pew Research, views on gender and political leadership tend to be stable across major demographic groups. Moreover, strong majorities of women and men say that women and men make equally good political leaders.*

There is, however, on this matter a partisan divide. Of those who do see a gender difference, Republicans (22%) are much more likely than Democrats (9%) to say that men make better leaders than women. The skew is even greater when gender and partisanship are both factored in. Among Republican men, 27 % say that men make better leaders than women, while only 1% say that women make better leaders than men. (Among Democrats the gender gap is smaller.)

Framed differently, of Americans who most strongly supported Trump for president, nearly one quarter believed that being a man and being a leader is, or it should be, equated. As one Democratic pollster put it before last year’s election, “You have a certain group of voters who like the masculinity, the muscularity…. Most are men, particularly older men, particularly blue-collar men, white men.”**

Of course, the idea that real men are he-men – masculine and muscular – is not confined to a particular demographic. A survey of roughly 1300 men ages 18 to 30 revealed that many of not most American men live in “what some sociologists call the Man Box, constricted by a concept of manhood that includes aggression, hypersexuality, supreme authority and utter self-sufficiency.”*** Therefore, the fact that Donald Trump still feels constantly compelled to flout his putative masculinity should not be surprising. It not only reflects who he is, it reflects, to a degree anyway, who we are.

Some of this stuff is funny. It’s funny when a man who so prides himself on being manly sports a foolish combover suggesting nothing so much as too much time under a hair dryer. But some of this stuff is distinctly unfunny. Too much public drooling over certain sorts of women. Too much belittling of other men. Too much embracing of generals and military hardware. Too much contemplating a future in which America is all about hard power, and not at all about soft power.

Least funny of all is Trump’s tendency to grand illusion. Either to sell himself to us, or to sell himself to himself, or maybe both, Trump’s hyperbolic assessment of who he is and what he has accomplished is distorted at best, and dangerous at worst. Describing his first three months in office, Trump recently told an interviewer,” “We freed up so much and we’re getting great, great credit for it. We have done so much for so many people. I don’t think that there is a presidential period of time in the first 100 days where anyone has done nearly what we’ve been able to do.”

To say that this is ahistorical to the point of being delusional is to understate it. But, by flying in the face of what is, Trump’s rhetoric does underscore his overweening need to be on top.

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*Pew Research Center, Social and Demographic Trends, January 14, 2015.
** Danielle Kurtzleben, “Trump and the Testosterone Takeover of 2016,” NPR, October 1, 2016.
***Frank Bruni, “Manhood in the Age of Trump, New York Times, April 2. 2017.

To say that Donald Trump holds different standards for men than he does for women is to understate it. For example, men are more likely by him to be presumed innocent, while women are more likely by him to be presumed guilty.

I mean guilty even as in guilty of criminal activity. During the presidential campaign, Trump’s opponents for the nomination, mostly men such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, were repeatedly derided for their flaccidity. (Though Carly Fiorina, his sole female opponent, was mocked for her appearance. “Look at that face!” Trump exclaimed. “Would anyone vote for that?!”) But his opponent for the election, Hillary Clinton, was accused of being a crook, a criminal, a felon. Numberless times Trump egged on his supporters, urging them to chant, to shout at the top of their lungs, “Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up!”

This distinction came to mind again recently when, in the space of just a couple of days, Trump held out one standard for women and another for men. Citing no evidence whatsoever, Trump claimed that Susan Rice, national security adviser to President Obama, could have committed a crime by uncovering the identities of Trump associates who had been swept up in the surveillance of foreign officials. When he was asked about his evidence for making such a charge, Trump replied that he would reveal his sources “at the right time.” This was 12 days ago – when this time would come was never made clear.

During the same week, Trump gave his crony, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, a complete pass, even after we learned that he had been accused over the years by different women in Fox’s employ of sexual harassment. Though public outrage was swift, and though dozens of advertisers almost immediately withdrew their support, Trump did not. Trump chose to speak loudly and clearly in O’Reilly’s defense. Trump said he was a “good person,” and then added “I don’t think Bill did anything wrong.”

No surprise, I suppose, that someone with Trump’s record of objectifying women failed to find O’Reilly’s behavior objectionable. This is the same man who told MSNBC that for women who have an abortion, “there has to be some form of punishment.”

Yesterday President Trump signed legislation intended to cut off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform abortions. He thereby nullified a rule signed by President Obama that barred state and local governments from withholding federal funds for family planning services that performed abortions.

The new legislation is in keeping not only with Trump’s particular priority of restricting abortions; it is also in keeping with his general priority of building a budget that strongly favors hard power over soft power. As New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out, Trump’s proposed budget aims to cut if not decimate those parts of government that seem to him “soft and nurturing” (like poverty programs), or “emotional and airy-fairy” ((like the National Endowment for the Arts), or “smart and nerdy (like the National Institute for Health).* In contrast, it aims to beef up funding for those parts of government that seem to him “manly, hard, muscular and ripped” – most obviously those associated with the military and national security.

Trump’s budgetary priorities are evident in these numbers:
• On the one hand, he proposes to slash federal funding for the Department of State and the Agency for International Development by over one quarter – 28%.
• On the other hand, he proposes to boost federal funding for the Department of Defense by 10% – in the coming fiscal year alone. (Similar increases are slated for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Nuclear Security Agency.)

Trump’s budget is not yet etched in stone. But the president’s preferences are clear. As Mick Mulvaney put it – he was Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget – “There is no question this is a hard-power budget. It is not a soft-power budget. This is a hard-power budget. And that was done intentionally.”**

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Trump’s budget is like Trump himself – all man.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/let-bannon-be-bannon.html
** http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520305293/trump-to-unveil-hard-power-budget-that-boosts-military-spending