Wednesday, May 1, 2019
A Presidential Primary
Oh had our simple Eve
Seen through the make-believe!
Had she but known the
Pretender he was!
— Ralph Hodgson, Time, You Old Gypsy Man
Who’d have thought it would come from Ukraine? That is a country that has been in various stages of turmoil for many years. It is hard to believe it would provide the inspiration for, and answer to, the question that has perplexed many Republicans contemplating the prospect of the 2020 elections, without a plausible candidate to challenge Donald Trump in a primary. The inspiration offered by Ukraine comes in the form of Volodymyr Zelensky.
As recently as one month ago, few people outside the Ukraine had heard of Mr. Zelensky. He is a 41-year old Ukrainian comedian-actor, and star of the television sitcom, Servant of the People, a show that has aired in Ukraine for the last three years.
Servant of the People is a story about a modest school teacher who becomes an exemplary president of Ukraine, living a life as president without all the trappings that normally accompany that position. In the plotline, he takes advantage of his position to rid the country of corrupted and deceitful bureaucrats, or, as we like to say in the United States, he “drained the swamp.”
The success of Servant of the People was such that Mr. Zelensky, having gotten an albeit fictitious taste of what it was like to be president, (but liking the flavor) decided to try for the real thing. On January 1, 2019, he announced that he was running for president, and began campaigning in earnest to achieve his goal. Shortly before the election, in a debate with the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, he said: “I’m not a politician. I’m just a simple person who came to break the system.” He was more successful than he might have anticipated. The election took place on April 21, 2019. To the surprise of many, Mr. Zelensky handily defeated the incumbent, Mr. Poroshenko, who had been president since 2014.
Mr. Trump, like Mr. Zelensky, is completely unqualified to be president. According to one recent poll, many Republicans would like for there to be a primary challenger to Mr. Trump in 2020, and Mr. Zelensky’s victory has given them heart. Nonetheless, as this is written, only one person has announced his intention to challenge Mr. Trump in the 2020 election on the Republican ticket-William Weld.
Mr. Weld was the governor of Massachusetts almost 30 years ago. As governor he did not get the kind of experience that being on a television show in the Ukraine pretending to be president gave Mr. Zelensky, or that being on a television show in which you fire people, gave Mr. Trump. Furthermore, having been out of public sight for many years, Mr. Weld has neither name nor facial recognition that would help him in a primary against Mr. Trump.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, there is one reason for those looking for a primary opponent for Mr. Trump to take heart. That is because, waiting in the wings, there is someone, until now unidentified, who could prove to be a formidable challenger to Mr. Trump in a primary contest. With Mr. Zelensky as a role model, this person has all the qualifications needed for a successful challenge to Mr. Trump. It is someone who has, like Mr. Zelensky, been on television repeatedly pretending to be president during the last two years. The person who fits the bill perfectly is the well- known actor, Alec Baldwin.
In addition to many other roles he has played over the years, Mr. Baldwin has assumed the mantle of the presidency on repeated occasions on the popular network show, Saturday Night Live. Although Mr. Baldwin’s appearances have always consisted of mimicking the real Mr. Trump, he has done this for more than two years and, in playing that part, has acquired at least as good an idea of what it is like to be president of the United States as Mr. Zelensky got by pretending to be the president of Ukraine. Of course, Mr. Baldwin was not required to be as creative in his portrayal of the president, as Mr. Zelensky had been in creating the fictional president of the Ukraine since he was simply mimicking various things that Mr. Trump had been doing in the intervals between Mr. Baldwin’s appearances on the show.
As one considers Mr. Baldwin’s prospects in a primary, it is important to note that Mr. Baldwin has one significant advantage in a competition with Mr. Trump that Mr. Zelensky did not have in his competition with Mr. Poroshenko. Although Mr. Zelensky won by a landslide, it was not because people confused him with Mr. Poroshenko. He won on his own merits.
If Mr. Baldwin portrays himself in style and manner in primary debates with Mr. Trump, as he does in his appearances on Saturday Night Live, there is an excellent chance that many of Mr. Trump’s less sophisticated supporters will be confused as to which of the candidates is the real Donald Trump and, in their confusion, may vote for Mr. Baldwin by mistake during the primaries. That would be unfortunate for Mr. Trump. It would be fortunate for the rest of us.
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Happy Siblings
— Leo Tolstoi, Anna KareninaHappy families are all alike. . . .
I’m sure Maryanne and Donald have enjoyed some good laughs over it while contemplating how different the outcome would be had their roles been reversed.
Maryanne got rid of any adverse consequences from her past bad conduct by retiring. Donald avoided facing any adverse consequences from his past bad conduct by not retiring. The two of them present a nice study in contrasts arising solely from their respective position in the public sphere. They both got into the perilous positions in which they found themselves, because their moral compasses were not properly set prior to the time they embarked on life’s journey.
Maryanne was, until February 11, 2019, a federal judge on one of the second highest courts in the country. Her career as a federal judge began in 2003 when Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Federal District Court in New Jersey. Prior to her appointment, she had served as a federal prosecutor where she was engaged in prosecuting people for the sorts of conduct that present knowledge suggests she and her siblings engaged in. In 1999 she was elevated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton. There she served until she resigned.
On October 2, 2018, an entire section of the New York Times was devoted to a detailed examination of how Maryanne, Donald, and the rest of the family engaged in what appeared to be criminal tax practices for which they had never been prosecuted or held accountable. Although many parts of the report were devoted to Donald’s activities, several episodes involved all of Donald’s siblings and, in at least one case, a cousin. One involved the creation of a fictitious company, the machinations of which provided large amounts of cash to flow to Donald, Maryanne, their siblings, and a cousin. Thanks to that scheme, the children received significant amounts that, but for that scheme, would have constituted taxable gifts.
In one transfer, certain properties were placed into two trusts that ultimately benefitted the Trump children. For purposes of the gift tax returns that were filed, the properties were valued at $41.4 million. Nine years later in subsequent transactions, those properties were valued at nearly $900 million.
In another transaction a shell company created by the siblings was used to siphon money from their daddy’s pocket into their respective pockets. They used fraudulent figures to justify rent increases for thousands of tenants in Trump owned properties, the fruits of which landed in their pockets.
According to some tax experts, the procedures followed by Maryanne and her siblings, might have constituted tax fraud, since the scheme permitted the transfer of millions of dollars to the beneficiaries of the scheme without the imposition of a gift tax on the amounts transferred, a tax that, if imposed, would have significantly reduced the value of the gifts. Others said if those schemes had come to light earlier, they would have subjected the children to a criminal investigation based on tax fraud, filing false documents, and defrauding tenants.
Following publication of the NYT report, four lawyers filed a complaint against Maryanne based on her status as a federal judge. The complaint was referred to a judicial conduct council and, on February 1, the complainants were notified by a court official that their complaint was “receiving the full attention” of the Council. On February 11, Maryanne, who had presumably heard of the Council’s response to the complainants, retired from the court. That produced a great result from her perspective. Her retirement pay continues. The investigation comes to a halt since the Council lacks jurisdiction over a retired judge. Maryanne was home free.
Meanwhile back at the farm, as it were, the Mueller report was the hot topic. Although subject to different reactions, depending on who the reactor was, there was one thing everyone agreed on. So long as Maryanne’s brother remained in office, he could not be indicted for any criminal conduct, whether it was of the sort that Maryanne was involved with, or whether it pertained to obstruction of justice or anything else in the Mueller report. Here is how it all shakes out.
Maryanne avoided any embarrassment for what may have been her involvement in criminal conduct, by simply announcing her retirement from the Court. Her brother avoided any threat of adverse consequences from any criminal conduct in which he may have engaged, by not resigning from his position. I’m sure the two siblings have gotten a good laugh over how that worked out. Too bad the rest of us don’t find it funny.
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Trump and High Level Intelligence
“The ideal condition, would be, I admit,
That men should be right by instinct; but since we are all likely to go astray, the reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.” — Sophocles,Antigone
Occasionally we are surprised by Mr. Trump when he makes pronouncements that none of us thought to be within his realm of expertise. Of course, those realms are so all inclusive, as we have learned during the course of his presidency, that we should not be surprised. His recent pronouncements on wind, and wind related devices, however, have caused some of us to wonder if there resides within Mr. Trump, a body of scientific knowledge of which we were unaware or, alternatively, is he is simply an ignoramus.
The question presented itself because of an interview he had with one of his admirers, ardent follower, and assistant policy maker, Sean Hannity, of Fox News, followed by public comments made to adoring crowds at rallies and other events.
In an interview with Mr. Hannity (known to some as Sean Inannity for reasons that need no explanation,) Mr. Trump surprised listeners with an observation about a climate phenomenon, and a device used to take advantage of it. It pertained to wind of the non-flatulent sort.
In the interview, Mr. Trump explained to Mr. Hannity, that wind power doesn’t work because wind only blows sometimes. Following up on that cogent observation, in a rally in Michigan shortly after that interview, he said that he “knows a lot about wind, if it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night.”
It is not only the unreliability of wind that troubles Mr. Trump. He is also troubled by the large turbines that are used all over the world to store wind energy. He believes those turbines are a hazard to human health. At the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual spring dinner in Washington on March 28, 2019, he explained to the audience that: “They say the noise [from the windmills] causes cancer.” Those comments were not Mr. Trump’s only encounter with matters environmental.
On November 23, 2018, 13 federal agencies issued a landmark report explaining how damage from global warming is intensifying throughout the country. That report was released more than a year after Mr. Trump had disbanded the 15-person advisory panel for National Climate Assessment. The task of the Advisory Committee had been to provide guidance to policymakers and private-sector officials, based on the Sustained National Climate Assessment. It was reportedly disbanded by Mr. Trump not because of any deficiency in its science, but because of the make-up of the committee. It did not have adequate representation from the energy industry.
The report that was issued on November 23, 2018 by federal agencies, explained how damage from global warming is intensifying throughout the country. Among its findings was that impacts of climate change threaten the natural and social systems we rely on, both within and beyond the nation’s borders.” It observes that the response to climate change has not taken place at the scale needed to avoid substantial “damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades.”
Some might have thought such conclusions from 13 federal agencies would cause Mr. Trump alarm. They needn’t have. Mr. Trump offered the sorts of comforting comments about the report that we have learned to expect from him when confronted with awkward situations. About the report he said: “One of the problems is that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers.”
In an email following his comments, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, responded to Mr. Trump’s comments saying: “Facts aren’t something we need to believe to make them true-we treat them as optional at our peril. And if we’re the president of the United States, we do so at the peril of not just ourselves but the hundreds of millions of people we’re responsible for.”
It is tempting to think that Mr. Trump is making his scientific judgements out of ignorance. He is not. In an October 2018 interview with the Associated Press, the question of Mr. Trump’s familiarity with matters scientific came up. When the topic was whether or not climate change is occurring, Mr. Trump said his Uncle John was a long time professor at MIT and although he and Uncle John never talked about “this particular subject, I have a natural instinct for science and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the issue.”
Mr. Trump’s comments on matters scientific certainly show that he has an instinct. It brings to mind the story of two dogs. One of the dogs says to her companion, that she relies on her instinct to tell her which way to travel. Her companion says his end stinks too, but it doesn’t tell him which way to travel. Mr. Trump is like the second dog except he believes it does tell him what to do.