Spanish
life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Life
in Spain:-
- Spain's Guardia Civil will now allow you to complete certain processes via the internet, as reported here. Of course, you've long been able to pay your incessant driving fines via your computer. Helpful folk.
- Spain is not a de jure federal state but, as I've occasionally said, it sometimes seem to be a de facto one. My latest discovery is that social security payments differ from region to region. The national average is 23.1% of income but Navarra and Galicia top the list with 24.3 and 23.1%, respectively. And, to add insult to injury, I suspect that benefits are lower in Galicia than elsewhere.
- Another discovery this weekend . . . You can't buy contact lenses in Spanish pharmacies, parapharmacies or supermarkets - as you can do in other parts of the world. Your only port of call is the optica shops which have always seemed rather numerous to me. Now I know why so many of them can operate profitably. Unless they're just money-laundering fronts, of course.
Vast Scandinavian forests are being felled to provide paper for the numerous commentaries on the terrifying farce of the Trump administration. I've collected a few articles together and added them at the end of this post. Some are from right-of-centre UK papers and some from left-of-centre papers. The common ground is large and all of the commentaries seem apt to me. Especially this final para from the final article:- The common factor in all these situations is Trump’s self-induced powerlessness and ignorance, his chronic lack of credibility and presidential authority and consequent perceptions of US and western weakness. And in the case of all three actual or potential adversaries – North Korea, Iran and Russia – these perceptions are highly dangerous. Precisely because US responses, actions and reactions can no longer be relied upon or predicted, by friends and enemies alike, the potential for calamitous miscalculation is growing. This uncertainty, like the chaos in the White House and the extraordinary disarray of the American body politic, stems from Trump’s glaring unfitness for the highest office. As is now becoming ever plainer, this threatens us all.
Tomorrow, I'll post a 5-part guide to the Trump White House. Meanwhile, from the same author, here's a (dis)organisation chart, showing the various factions which are waging their internecine war. Of course, it's changed in the last few days, with the sacking of Reince Priebus and the appointment of Gen. John Kelly as Chief of Staff:-
Meanwhile, back in the real world . . . .
Another day, another
Galician fiesta gastronómica. This time in nearby Moraña, where
3,000 people were expected to attend the annual lamb-roasting
event. Most of whom appeared to have parked their cars on the outskirts of the town:-
We were not down to eat at the main event - which centres on large groups who've won their places by lottery - but easily found a bar which was roasting meat on its terrace:-
And eventually got our 2 raciones of lamb and 1 of octopus. Without snouts, ears, tails or arses:-
Leaving Moraña around 3pm, we immediately met something which I doubt would have been there 15 years ago - a police alcohol checkpoint. Where this slightly surrealistic conversation took place:-
Cop: Have you had any alcohol?
Driver: No.
Cop: OK, on your way.
I can't help wondering if the negative answer would have been accepted if the driver hadn't been female and in a car with Dutch licence plates.
Anyway, shortly after this, I climbed up a roadside grass bank to have a look at these (rather phallic) stones, wondering if they were ancient menhirs:-
But the board next to them suggested they were the work of a local wall-building company. I then carefully clambered back down the grassy slope but twisted my ankle on the not-so-flat tarmac of the road . . .
Finally . . . A conversation between my guest and her teenage son:-
Are you awake, son?
Yes, mum. Could you make me a coffee?
OK
Can you bring it up to me?
No, you lazy Dutch bastard. Come down and get it.
OK, I fabricated a bit of the last line. But nothing strange about this exchange, you might think. Except that it took place via text messages . . .
By the way . . . I sleep between 6 and 7 hours a night; my guest sleeps around 8; but her son, aged 15, has managed 12 every night so far. And even then has to be woken up. In the case of the above conversation, by a phone call . . . . Naturally.
Today's Cartoon:-
Somewhat less amusing:-
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATIION
1. Under
this president, loyalty and populism trump the rule of law
Janet Daley
The White House is run
by crazy people. That’s official. President Trump’s new director
of communications has stated in the most memorably unambiguous
terms,that the man who was until a day ago, the administration’s
chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is a “paranoid schizophrenic”.
Or, to quote him more precisely, a “f------ paranoid
schizophrenic”. The rest of what Mr Scaramucci said in that same
interview about another influential White House adviser, Steve
Bannon, is too scatological to put in print. If this were not
terrifying, it would be funny.
The headline stories
may vary from day to evermore startling day: Scaramucci’s
obscenities and threats, Trump’s own highly personal attempts to
bully Jeff Sessions, his Attorney General, into resigning, and the
failure to pass any piece of legislation that would fulfil the
electoral promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare. But there is a
common factor underlying them all that is testing the limits of
America’s political system – which was, you may
recall, a product of the Age of Reason.
What
the bizarre behaviour of Trump and his acolytes suggests is that
those now governing the country lack a basic understanding of the
Constitution or the rule of law. This exceeds anything we have seen
before even in the desperate lawbreaking of a Richard Nixon or the
famously crude abusiveness of a Lyndon Johnson. This is in another
league: not just thuggish populism or crass bravado but a flouting of
the fundamental principles that have made the United States the most
stable democratic republic in the world.
To take the most
outrageous example: the President is now relentlessly demeaning Jeff
Sessions – a senator who was fiercely loyal to Trump from the
earliest days of his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination. But once Mr Sessions was appointed attorney general –
that is, the chief law officer of the nation – his personal loyalty
to Mr Trump had to be relegated to his duty to the country.
This
is something that Trump and his coterie seem not to grasp. In
fact, not only do they fail to understand it, they regard it as an
infernal impertinence. The President apparently believed that putting
good old reliable Sessions in place was like hiring a mafia
consiglieri whose chief function would be to protect his back.
That
Sessions has, in fact, been very effectively supporting Trump’s
contentious policy on illegal immigration is being ruthlessly
discounted. The unforgivable transgression is that the attorney
general recused himself from that endlessly troublesome Russia
investigation and therefore failed to deliver the quick fix – the
sacking of Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the inquiry –
which might have put the whole grumbling matter to bed. The hapless
Sessions is determined to carry on through the flood of Trump
invective partly because he is receiving considerable support from
conservative Republican figures among whom he is immensely respected.
Even ferociously faithful
Trump allies like Newt Gingrich have
pitched in for Sessions. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican who
admittedly has never been much of a Trump fan, went about as far as
it is possible to go: some of the things the President was saying
about Sessions, he stated in an on-camera interview, “go way beyond
what is acceptable in a rule-of-law nation.”
The
discrediting of Sessions creates a bigger threat to the Trump
presidency than any of the wilder embarrassments that the White House
has survived by maintaining its war cry against the mainstream media.
Because Sessions has impeccable credentials as a committed
conservative stalwart, the President’s vendetta raises the
suspicion among his electoral “base” that Trump is not sincerely
on their side. He isn’t just making a fool of himself in ways that
working class America might accept as deliberate anti-establishment
buffoonery: he is attacking one of their own. This is serious.
Keeping a strong hold on his base has been the Trump insurance plan –
the absolute protection against removal from office or defeat at the
next election either of which would make him, in his own inimitable
terminology, a “loser”.
So
long as he can hang on to the voters who put him in power, he
believes he has nothing to fear from his favourite enemies: the
#failingfakenews merchants. But his approval ratings are now at 36
per cent, a historic low for a
president in what should be the honeymoon first year in office. So
that base on which he has staked everything is shrinking and however
undiminished its fervour might be, the numbers tell an alarming
truth. Which is why he suddenly sprang into action last week
with that startling, unexpected decision to bar transgender people
from the military. Here was a gesture of solidarity to that
conservative working class constituency that might have been
wondering whether Trump – who was until very recently a New York
social liberal – was actually one of them. To appreciate the impact
of this unilateral decision (which caught the joint chiefs of staff
quite unprepared and on which they have no intention of taking
immediate action) it is necessary to understand its symbolic
significance. Gender equality issues in the US are the civil rights
arena de nos jours. So this was a move that took considerable nerve –
and politically incorrect defiance – for which Mr Trump clearly
expects to be rewarded by that indispensable base.
The
question that enlivens Washington conversation now is – who will
get thrown under the bus next? Sean Spicer is gone. Reince Priebus
whom Mr Scaramucci described only days ago as being like “a
brother” (in the “Cain and Abel” sense, he later clarified), is
out too. Trump’s Rasputin figure, Steve Bannon, we know to be also
on the Scaramucci hit list. For Trump, loyalty yesterday counts for
nothing: usefulness today is all that matters. As I said, the US
Constitution embodies the principles of the Age of Reason. Confronted
by an insoluble problem, it responds with temporary paralysis then
recovers. It has survived some outrageous shocks but its most
dangerous enemy is wilful ignorance. I hope it hasn’t met its
match.
2. 'The president is a pyromaniac': The week Trump set fire to the White House
What
went wrong? Take your pick: healthcare, transgender troops, the
fallout from his savaging of Jeff Sessions, the Boy Scouts speech –
it was the worst week in Trump’s short presidency:
David Smith
Donald Trump began the
week by turning a national scout jamboree into something
resembling a youth rally. He ended it in front of more massed ranks
in uniform, telling police officers “please don’t be too nice”
to suspects they arrest in what sounded to many like an endorsement
of police brutality.
And then, amid a
blizzard of stories about White House infighting, chief of
staff Reince Priebus resigned, becoming the shortest-serving occupant
of the post in history. Though he seemed blithely unaware of it, it
was a fitting finale to the worst week of Trump’s short political
career.
In five torrid days,
the US president alienated conservatives by savaging his own
attorney general; earned a rebuke from the Pentagon over a rushed ban
on transgender troops; watched impotently as the Senate dealt a
crushing blow to his legislative agenda with the fall of
healthcare reform; ousted Priebus; and threw a human grenade – the
new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci – into
his already dysfunctional White House.
“This is certainly
the week in which the Trump administration went off the
rails,” said Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton.
“And it’s going to require some heavy lifting equipment to get it
back on the rails and off down the track.”
Where
to start? The most tangible defeat was over healthcare. Trump had
repeatedly promised during his campaign to repeal and replace Barack
Obama’s signature law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But when it
came to the tough part, arm-twisting members of Congress or making
landmark speeches, the self-proclaimed deal-maker was notably absent.
In
the early hours of Friday, after months of wrangling, senators voted
on a bill to undo major parts of the ACA, popularly known as
Obamacare. In a moment of reality TV suspense that Trump might
otherwise have appreciated, John
McCain of Arizona, who had returned to the floor after brain
surgery, was decisive in sinking the bill.
McCain is an old
adversary. The 80-year-old is a decorated navy veteran who was
tortured during more than five years of captivity in the Vietnam war.
Just over two years ago, Trump, who received five draft deferments,
mocked him as “not a war hero”. McCain has become something of a
conscience for his party, and nation, as Trump tramples and trashes
every norm.
His vote – along with
those of Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska –
left a seven-year Republican promise in ruins and Trump with zero
legislative achievements after more than six months in office. The
president had tried to intensify the pressure on Murkowski during
the week, tweeting that she “really let the Republicans, and our
country, down”.
His
interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, phoned Murkowski and her fellow
Alaska senator, Dan Sullivan, with a threat to withhold federal
support for major economic development projects in the state. The
dirty trick failed and Zinke may have cause to regret his actions:
Murkowski is chair of the Senate energy and natural resources
committee, with power over the interior department’s budget.
Meanwhile, poison was
seeping in at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Scaramucci, a
mouthy Wall Street financier, publicly declared war on Priebus and
Trump adviser Steve Bannon in an expletive-laden interview with
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker magazine. He described Priebus as a
“fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac”, and predicted his
imminent demise as chief of staff. Yet far from being punished, “the
Mooch” was vindicated on Friday when Priebus confirmed his exit. He
will be replaced by Gen John Kelly, who moves over from leading
the homeland security department.
The arrival of
Scaramucci was, observers said, the moment the White House went full
reality TV. Galston said: “It’s off the charts. Both the
president and the communications director have really defiled the
temple of our democracy.”
Dangerously for Trump,
the critics of Scaramucci’s invective included loyalists such as
the former House speaker Newt Gingrich, Fox News and Breitbart,
which described the interview as a “rambling rant that was so
outrageous and discordant that reporters wondered whether Scaramucci
drunk-dialed Lizza, was drunk with power, or, reveal[ed] he was
unqualified for his communications director job”.
The Trump base had
another reason to be upset. The president spent several days publicly
humiliating Sessions, his attorney general, over his decision to
recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s
alleged collusion with Russia during last year’s election. Sessions
refused to quit, perhaps consoled by conservative voices of dissent.
Kenneth Starr, a former
US solicitor general who served as independent counsel in the
Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations during the Clinton
administration, wrote in the Washington Post: “Mr President,
please cut it out. Tweet to your heart’s content, but stop the
wildly inappropriate attacks on the attorney general.
“An
honorable man whom I have known since his days as a US attorney in
Alabama, Jeff Sessions has recently become your piñata in one of the
most outrageous – and profoundly misguided – courses of
presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around
the nation’s capital.”
Lindsey
Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, told CNN: “If
Jeff Sessions is fired, there will be holy hell to pay.” If Trump
tries to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, Graham added, he will
be crossing a “red line”. “Any effort to go after Mueller could
be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency unless Mueller
did something wrong.”
Sessions,
a hardliner on criminal justice and immigration, is seen as the most
Trumpist member of the administration. Taking on the former Alabama
senator could prove a huge political miscalculation.
Galston
said: “He has managed to alarm and alienate a substantial element
of his conservative base. Sessions is the conservative standard
bearer in the administration.”
Trump faced blowback on
yet another front. On Wednesday morning he tweeted, out of the blue,
that he plans to reinstate a ban on transgender people from
serving “in any capacity” in the US armed forces. He claimed he
had consulted his “generals” but the Pentagon was blindsided and
a day later it pushed back, insisting the policy would not be
overturned until it received formal direction.
In a sign of how much
America has changed, a decision seemingly calculated to rally the
base played badly in media outlets in socially conservative states.
The TV station WCIV in Charleston, South Carolina, reported:
“Lowcountry transgender veteran ‘stunned’ by President Trump’s
transgender military ban.” The Rapid City Journal in South Dakota
said: “Retired Ellsworth sergeant says transgender ban hurtful.”
There was also rare
defiance from Republicans in Congress. Senator Orrin Hatch,
up for re-election soon in Utah, hardly a liberal bastion, said: “I
don’t think we should be discriminating against anyone. Transgender
people are people, and deserve the best we can do for them.”
After months of bending
over backward to accommodate Trump, Republicans gave other
indications that they had run out of loyalty or fear. The Senate
voted 98-2 to pass a bill increasing sanctions against Russia,
Iran and North Korea, blocking Trump’s ability to cut a deal with
Vladimir Putin. The White House bowed to political reality and
announced that Trump intended to sign the bill.
Ever more isolated,
with even Republicans turning against him, Trump went to feed off the
dark energy of crowds. But his rambling speech at the
National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia was widely condemned as
inappropriate for its overt political content (along with a
reference to a party with “the hottest people in New York”),
prompting an apology from the head of the Boy Scouts of America.
And as all these dramas
unfolded simultaneously, handing Trump a week of unmitigated
disaster, North Korea conducted a new intercontinental ballistic
missile test that landed in the sea off Japan. Experts have
warned that North Korea will have the ability to strike the US
mainland with a nuclear weapon as soon as next year. It was a
sobering reminder of the high stakes facing a White House in
disarray.
Frank Luntz, a
Republican pollster and strategist, said: “It’s fair to say Trump
has lost control of the narrative. What I don’t know is how and
when he can regain it.”
It might have been so
different. Figures showed that US economic growth rebounded to 2.6%
annual rate in the second quarter. Foxconn, an electronics
manufacturer, announced plans to invest at least $7bn in the US and
create between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs with a massive factory in
Wisconsin. Trump buried his own good news.
Charlie
Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “It could have
been one of his best weeks with the Foxconn announcement. But this
has been his worst week ever and everything that has happened has
been self-inflicted.
“You
have a White House in meltdown because the president is a pyromaniac.
The thing that’s got to rattle Republicans is the damage he’s
doing to the administration, to the party and to the country.”
Scaramucci is “Trump’s
id”, Sykes said. “A friend said to me today, in a rational world,
Scaramucci would have been fired for that interview. But in a
rational world, Scaramucci would never have been hired. And in a
rational world, Donald Trumpwould not be the president of the
United States. We’re well past the rational world.”
It
is far from certain whether Trump has actually hit rock-bottom. With
Priebus’s departure, he appears to be severing his links to the
Republican establishment, even though he will have to work with
Congress on tax reform in the hope of a better result than was
achieved on healthcare. The potential for conflict between Kelly, a
career marine, and Scaramucci seems high. And Trump has not yet been
tested by a major international crisis.
Rick
Tyler, a political analyst, warned: “It could get a lot worse.
North Korea just fired off a ballistic missile today that landed 230
miles from Japan. “There
could be a lot of worse things and we’ll be lucky if we survive
them.”
3. Why Trump diehards are blind to reality David Aaronovitch
From
communists to right-wing populists, it is human nature to ignore all
the evidence that your beliefs were wrong
At
what point do
you, I, anyone or any group committed to a certain view admit that we
were wrong?
On
Tuesday, at a rally in Ohio, up to 7,000 people were told by Donald
Trump that “with the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln .
. . I can be more presidential than any president who has ever held
this office!” And they gave him a great cheer.
President
Trump’s point was that he has little time for “being
presidential” (ie dignified, measured and unifying) because he is
too busy actually doing things. But he could be if he wanted to be,
believe him. More than Reagan, more than the Roosevelts, more than
Washington. It was possibly the least presidential thing any American
ever heard uttered by a president. And his audience still cheered.
So
what would stop them applauding him? Obviously not his Twitter
vendettas, nor the absence of any concrete achievement (apart, of
course, from the ban on transgender people serving in the military).
Not his bizarre disavowal of his own attorney-general Jeff Sessions,
nor even the attempts at collusion between his campaign team and
agents of the Russian government. Polling of Trump supporters
suggests that they see all these problems either as part of an
attempt to persecute their hero, or as utterly unimportant. Worse,
the criticism entrenches their view.
So
I invite Trumpites to try out this scenario. Suppose that, last year,
Iranian intelligence had procured information about Trump’s
business deals. Imagine that Chelsea Clinton, her husband and five or
six other Clinton advisers had met an intermediary linked to the
Iranian government to explore what that person could offer by way of
dirt on the Trumps. Would his supporters have (a) dismissed this as
flimflam or (b) demanded immediate punishment?
OK.
It’s a rhetorical question and the example I’ve chosen suits my
prejudices. Some other examples don’t. For a start, I come from a
family that got some very big things spectacularly wrong. My parents
were motivated by a desire for the meek to inherit the earth before
and not after they died. Mum and Dad became communists and communists
understood that the Great October Revolution in Russia, 100 years old
this autumn, had brought a new world into existence.
They
fought for workers’ rights and better conditions and an end to
racism and exploitation and so on. They sacrificed a lot: money,
careers, time. And they embraced some of the biggest lies of the 20th
century. They believed that the show trials of the Thirties and
late-Forties were proper processes and that the purges were a
regrettable necessity. People who said different had been duped by
the “bourgeois press” (these days known as the “mainstream
media”). Then in 1956 the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, told
the world that almost everything the bourgeois press had said about
Uncle Joe Stalin was true and all the stuff the loyal British
communists had been saying was utterly false. And even then some
communists wouldn’t believe it. I had a little red soft spot for
Fidel Castro until the turn of the millennium.
In
her 2010 book Being
Wrong the
American writer Kathryn Schulz examined the problem of admitting
error. There were the usual problems of “confirmation bias”:
actively looking for things that help your argument and dismissing
things that don’t. Take the tendency of partisans to complain that
polls are wrong or even rigged when they go against you, and to cite
them approvingly when they’re favourable.
But
Schulz looked beyond this to the strategies that people devise to
avoid an admission of outright error. Her great example was the fate
of the Millerites, a sect of Christians who convinced themselves that
the world would end on October 22, 1844. So they stopped planting and
harvesting, gave their houses away and prepared to be received into
the bosom of the returning Redeemer. They called what happened next,
ie nothing, the Great Disappointment. But what they did not do was
declare themselves to have been wrong.
Instead
they adopted, says Schulz, five defences. And I invite readers to ask
if any of them seem familiar. The first was the “time-frame”
defence: the Second Coming is still coming so I was just out by a
little in my calculations. Let’s see how it turns out, time will
tell, and so on. I’ve used that myself over the war in Iraq, I’m
afraid.
The
second was the “near-miss” defence. It almost happened as I said
it would, or as Schulz puts it, “if I hadn’t been wrong I would
have been right”. This is a close relative to the third, the
“out-of-left-field” defence. It was going just as I said it would
and then something utterly unexpected happened. But, as Schulz says,
“just about any event can be defined as unforeseeable if you
yourself failed to foresee it”.
Fourth
is the “I was wrong but it’s your fault” defence. I was badly
advised, trusted the wrong people, failed to act on my own best
instincts. And fifth is the “better safe than sorry” defence.
Thinking what I did and seeing what I did, it would have been wrong
for me to act otherwise. You might summarise this as “I did what I
thought was right”. Remind you of anyone?
I’d
add one of my own: the “it would have been just fine if it weren’t
for you” defence. If Brexit fails it will have been the fault of
the naysayers who talked down the country. The saboteurs, uncrushed,
will try to turn my rightness into wrongness.
If
pointing out to someone that they’re wrong merely confirms their
sense of rightness, what are you to do? Tell them they’re right and
make them think that because it’s you saying it they must be wrong?
Nudge them through an affirming niceness into an unnoticed change of
mind?
Perhaps
we shouldn’t be so pessimistic. Often people who are less committed
than my parents were deal with wrongness by deciding that they
weren’t as bothered over the big question as others assumed. So
they ease themselves into a mental accommodation. The historian James
T Patterson likes to point out that John Kennedy received 49.7 per
cent of the vote in the 1960 presidential election. Shortly before
his assassination in 1963, nearly 60 per cent of Americans recalled
voting for him. After his death that climbed to 65 per cent. We can
be obstinate but we can also be agile. I wouldn’t be at all
surprised to discover in a year or two that most of the people at
that rally in Ohio on Tuesday had gone to see Trump out of mere
curiosity.
The
Trump administration, having passed the six-month milestone in
office, kicked off the next phase of his presidency with an explosion
of crazy, spread over the past seven days.
Like sweeps week on The
Apprentice, every day saw some headline-grabbing event to garner
ratings. It started with leaks against his former bosom buddy,
attorney general, Jeff Sessions. President Trump, “sources” said,
was planning to fire him. It moved on to a speech to the Boy Scouts
of America jamboree, where Trump told the story of a property
developer who lost a fortune and was lurking at a New York party with
the “hottest people”. Later, there was a tweet
announcement banning transgender people from the military.
This explosion of crazy
concluded with his new White House chief of communications, Anthony
Scaramucci, calling the New Yorker’s political correspondent
Ryan Lizza to trash virtually everyone in the White House. He
compared himself positively to the president’s dark lord and
special adviser, Stephen Bannon: “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not
trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand
off the fucking strength of the president.”
Doesn’t Scaramucci,
or “the Mooch”, as he was known on Wall Street, have a mother?
Won’t she be ashamed to see him talking like that in public? The
week ended with a big name fired: White House chief of staff, Reince
Priebus.
And
up on Capitol Hill things weren’t a lot less calm. There was the
closed-door interrogation of Jared Kushner, the president’s
son-in-law, on Russian connections to the Trump campaign. Then came
the Republican Senate majority’s inability to repeal the Affordable
Care Act, aka Obamacare, featuring John McCain voting yes, to debate
the bill, then no, to kill it stone dead – until The
Apprentice goes
into reruns.
All
of these events, and a dozen more I don’t have space to mention,
create a picture of utter chaos across the American government. Trump
has ridden roughshod over not just the customs and norms of
presidential behaviour but also basic standards of human decency.
In
doing so, he has forced journalists and the institutions they write
for to change their basic standards of acceptable language. We use
the words crazy and stupid now in our reports because some of the
behaviour and actions of Trump and his team are crazy and stupid. We
debate whether to refer to the Trump administration or
the Trump regime,
with all the pejorative connotations that word carries. The New
York Times is
still the Grey Lady, but it has to print “sucking his own cock”,
because that’s what the president’s top communications official
said.
People
on the outside wonder where the famous checks and balances are that
have made American democracy function for more than 230 years? They
are still there and, up to a point, still working. For example,
presidential power was checked when Trump’s ban on travellers from
seven Muslim nations was halted by the courts. The ban is now mired
in a legal process.
However, what the
madness, abnormality or whatever you want to call it emanating from
the White House does draw attention to is the real problem in
American politics – the Republicans are no longer a
political party but a political faction, a much more dangerous thing.
The danger of factions
was recognised at the foundation of the United States. In The
Federalist Number 10, a highly influential essay on political theory
published in 1787, James Madison defined faction as “a number of
citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole,
who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of
interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the
permanent and aggregate interests of the community”.
Madison
understood the most dangerous thing that can happen in a society is
for a group and its political representatives to act as if their view
alone represents the nation. This leads them to think that they
alone are the
nation and the views of those who disagree with them not worthy of
consideration.
Republican
factionalism has led their elected representatives in Congress to
upend existing constitutional customs as thoroughly as Trump has
destroyed the existing norms of presidential conduct. They have
defamed the design of Madison and Thomas Jefferson by refusing to
co-operate with the Democrats in any meaningful way. In fact, the
idea of a pluralist society is anathema to them and they have been
trying to crush it for decades.
The
design of the Founders balanced the inevitable competing points of
view that would grow in a society where people were free to follow
different religions and debate ideas openly. It was for a society
that encompassed the competing world views of urban dwellers and
farmers. Without respect for these rules the system cannot work.
The
result is that the US has, over the past quarter of a century, become
ungovernable at the national level. Sadly, Madison, having identified
the threat in the 18th century “that either a minority or a
majority” might become a faction, was unable to think of a solution
to the problem that might work in the 21st. The minority in the
country – the Republican faction – is now the majority in both
houses of Congress and in the state governments. It holds the White
House, although neither of the last two Republican presidents gained
office while winning a majority of the popular vote.
Trump’s overall
approval ratings may be historically low but his support in the
Republican faction remains remarkably high. And for a reason –
Trump has delivered for them. He appointed Neil Gorsuch, a
hard-right judge, to the seat on the supreme court the Republican
faction wouldn’t allow President Obama to fill. Immigration from
Mexico has slowed dramatically. And in a wave of executive orders, he
overturned many Obama-era environmental rules and reinstated
the Dakota pipeline project. What’s more, Trump daily drives
liberals absolutely crazy with his politically incorrect tweets. The
base of the Republican faction, roughly 36% of the population, will
stay loyal to him.
Ultimately,
the supreme constitutional checks on presidential behaviour remain
article 1, section 3: impeachment, or the 25th Amendment (which deals
with succession). If the Republicans were a political party as they
were at the time of Watergate, that would have to be a consideration
for Trump and his team. It might moderate the administration’s
behaviour if there were a genuine threat of being constitutionally
removed from office. But there isn’t. The Republicans are a faction
and the president is one of them.
So
Trump carries on in office, unchecked and unbalanced. A majority of
Americans, and most of the planet, watch and say, this can’t go on.
But it can. For a while, at least.
5. 'The
Observer' view on Donald Trump’s unfitness for office
The sense of things
falling apart in Washington is palpable – and a matter of growing,
serious international concern. Donald Trump’s latest asinine act of
gesture politics, the forced resignation of his chief of staff,
Reince Priebus, has shone a spotlight on the extraordinary chaos
inside the White House. Even normally sober, experienced Washington
observers now refer to the West Wing as a viper’s nest of seething
rivalry, bitter feuds, gross incompetence and an unparalleled
leadership vacuum.
Like some kind of
Shakespearean villain-clown, Trump plays not to the gallery but to
the pit. He is a Falstaff without the humour or the self-awareness, a
cowardly, bullying Richard III without a clue. Late-night US
satirists find in this an unending source of high comedy. If they did
not laugh, they would cry. The world is witnessing the dramatic
unfolding of a tragedy whose main victims are a seemingly helpless
American audience, America’s system of balanced governance and its
global reputation as a leading democratic light.
As his partisan,
demeaning and self-admiring speech to the Boy Scouts of America
illustrated, Trump endlessly reruns last year’s presidential
election campaign, rails against the “fake news” media and
appeals to the lowest common denominator in public debate. Not a word
about duty, service, shared purpose or high ideals was to be found in
his gutter-level discourse before a youthful gathering of 30,000 in
West Virginia. Instead, he served up a sad cocktail of paranoia and
narcissism. It was all about him and what he has supposedly achieved
against the odds.
Which, for the record,
is almost precisely nothing. After more than six months in office,
and despite full Republican control of Congress, Trump cannot point
to a single substantial legislative achievement. The bid to repeal
the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, which finally
went down in flames in the Senate last week, was the most spectacular
and telling of Trump’s failures. His executive orders, such as the
racist ban on Muslim travellers and last week’s bigoted attack on
transgender people in the military, have mostly run foul of the
courts or been pre-emptively ignored by those charged with
implementing them.
Trump has instead
squandered the political goodwill that traditionally accompanies a
presidential honeymoon, shocked and outraged many middle-of-the-road
voters who initially gave him the benefit of the doubt, thoroughly
alienated Republican party traditionalists, who had tried in vain to
swallow their doubts, and undermined the authority of the office of
the president. Trump, a supposedly ace chief executive, has now lost
a chief of staff, a deputy chief of staff, a national security
adviser, a communications director and a press secretary in short
order. To lose one or even two of his most senior people might be
excused as unfortunate. To lose all five suggests the fault is his.
Perhaps John Kelly, the
retired general hired to replace Priebus, can restore some semblance
of order to the White House. It looks like a tall order. Kelly has no
political experience beyond his brief tenure at the department of
homeland security. Perhaps he will find an ally in HR McMaster,
another army veteran, who is Trump’s national security adviser. But
there is no good reason to believe the internal feuding, and Trump’s
inability or disinclination to halt it, will end.
Anthony Scaramucci, the
recently appointed, foul-mouthed communications director, has
unfinished business with Steve Bannon, Trump’s top strategist.
Trump seems determined to undermine his attorney general, Jeff
Sessions. Then there is the self-interested leverage exerted by Trump
family lightweights Ivanka Trump, Donald Jr and son-in-law, Jared
Kushner. On top of all that, Kelly must work out how to handle the
ever-expanding investigations of special counsel Robert Mueller into
the Trump campaign’s dealings with Russia. A good start would be to
halt scurrilous White House efforts to dig up dirt on
Mueller and his team.
Yet even if Kelly
succeeds in cracking the whip, curbing the in-fighting and containing
the Russia scandal, he still has to deal with Trump
himself. He has proved far more interested in settling scores,
berating adversaries and showing off than in advancing a coherent
domestic policy agenda. The next prospective car crash, following the
Obamacare pile-up, is a September deadline for a federal budget and
linked tax reforms and increased military spending promised by Trump.
A budget deal proved impossible last spring and may do so again. If
there is no agreement, a government shut-down looms, an outcome in
line with current Washington trends. Lazy, feckless Trump has no
interest in the onerous business of lobbying Congress or working the
phones. He wants quick, easy wins or else he walks away.
This latter is one of
several disturbing truths about Trump absorbed, to varying degrees,
by Washington’s friends and allies in the past six months. Naive,
misguided Theresa May and Liam Fox, the Brexit trade secretary, still
seem to think Trump’s word can be trusted and that he will deliver
a favourable trade deal. It is one of many delusions explaining why
Britain’s government is so disrespected. In sharp contrast, Angela
Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, heads the realist, pragmatic group of
leaders who are learning to deal with a post-Obama world where the
word of the American president cannot be trusted. In this new world,
longstanding US commitments and treaties may not be honoured and
future collaboration on key policies, such as climate change, Russia
and Chinese military expansionism, is held hostage to presidential
whim and the blinkered perspectives of the Ohio bar-room.
Merkel suggested
earlier this year that the US (and Britain) could no longer be
wholly relied upon. While not entirely true, for instance in the case
of Anglo-American security guarantees for Germany and its sheltered
exporters, it was plain what she meant. And this lesson has been
understood by America’s enemies, too. In provocatively firing
off another long-range, possibly nuclear-capable missile last
week, North Korea seems to be testing how far it can go,
geographically and politically. It is counting on Trump proving to be
the blowhard that, until now, he has appeared to be.
Recent months have
produced a litany of Trump threats and boasts over North Korea. There
was no way, he said, that Pyongyang would deploy an ICBM capable of
hitting the mainland US. “It’s not going to happen,” he
tweeted. Wrong again, Donald. It did. By conducting its own satellite
launch last week, ignoring western concerns, Iran has similarly
thumbed its nose at Washington. Iran’s leaders should understand
there would be “very serious” consequences if they pursued their
ballistic missile programme, Trump had warned. Additional hints from
Rex Tillerson, US secretary of state, and Jim Mattis, Pentagon chief,
about regime change in Iran further darkened the strategic horizon.
But guess what? Tehran took no notice at all. It went ahead anyway.
Or take Russia. Having
played Trump to its advantage, Moscow’s open hand is turning into a
clenched fist as it threatens reprisals over a new Congressional
sanctions package. It was not hard to see this tactical switch
coming, once it was clear Trump could not deliver the sort of
concessions on Ukraine Putin craves. Except, in his fecklessness and
blind vanity and courting Putin to the end, Trump didn’t see it
coming at all. You can almost see Putin’s lip curl.
The
common factor in all these situations is Trump’s self-induced
powerlessness and ignorance, his chronic lack of credibility and
presidential authority and consequent perceptions of US and western
weakness. And in the case of all three actual or potential
adversaries – North Korea, Iran and Russia – these
perceptions are highly dangerous. Precisely because US responses,
actions and reactions can no longer be relied upon or predicted, by
friends and enemies alike, the potential for calamitous
miscalculation is growing. This uncertainty, like the chaos in the
White House and the extraordinary disarray of the American body
politic, stems from Trump’s glaring unfitness for the highest
office. As is now becoming ever plainer, this threatens us all.
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