reflectivepundit

After Trump’s Call for the Suspension of the US Constitution…

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that former president Donald Trump used his social media platform last weekend to call for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution. He wants to scrap laws and constitutional articles that are the foundation of our democratic system because he still claims falsely that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favor of the winning candidate.

Obviously, he does not want to wait for voters to decide in November 2024 but rather tries to sell the idea of a second coup to his hardcore supporters. Many of them, most of all the QAnon conspiracists, believe all along that he must and will return to power well before the next elections.

Although Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the US Senate, had a few critical words for Trump’s attack on constitutional democracy, the bulk of GOP officials responded once again by remaining silent.

A shocking silence and proof that the power-hungry master of Mar-a-Lago continues to hold his grip on the GOP, if only, because the GOP’s elected officials fear the influence of the MAGA movement in their party’s primaries.

By now it is crystal clear: For the GOP, Trump cannot go too far with even the most extremist words and actions that were unthinkable for presidents or ex-presidents until this performance artist moved into the political arena.

Trump does not hide his hostility to democracy and his preference for strong-man rule. He publicizes his outrageous ideas and acts on them.

More recently, he displayed his preference of far-right extremism in several cases.

• He does not make a secret of his support for the organized terrorists and MAGA insurrectionists who supported his coup attempt on January 6, 2021 (1/6) by an unprecedented violent attack on the US Capitol. And he has promised the convicted 1/6 participants pardons once he returns to power. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, a Trump disciple, plans GOP hearings into the Department of Justice’s “unfair” treatment of violent 1/6 offenders once her party takes over in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• He hosted the White Supremacist, neo-Nazi, and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the anti-Semite Kanye West for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. If that was not a clear message of support to far-right extremists, among them violent ones, what would be? While Trump signaled his support for these elements among his supporters before, his get-together will Fuentes and West was an overt embrace and brought Trump a blast of the media attention he seeks.

Can the Midterm Election Results Derail the Trump Train?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Although the GOP will likely become the majority party in the House of Representatives and perhaps in the US Senate as well, the results of this week’s midterm election were the first signs of hope that the leader of the MAGA movement is not invincible. That there are limits to contemporary extremism and pure craziness in American politics. That enough Americans have not succumbed to rhetorical and actual political violence.

Of course, hope is not reality. Perhaps signal changes to come.

Donald Trump and his minions were not the only ones to predict a landslide victory for the Republican Party and their hand-picked line-up of far-right candidates. Pollsters and pundits and reporters in the field confirmed the coming shellacking of the Democratic Party and their candidates.

They all were wrong. Again.

Their predictions were far removed from what actually happened and still unfolds in undecided races in three states and two dozen congressional districts.

Democrats won clear victories in a number of swing states, among them Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. And they won against GOP candidates who were so extreme that they were rejected by enough Independents and even some Republicans. The Democrats’ unexpected good showing included gubernatorial victories and majorities in state legislatures matched finally previous sweeps of the GOP in state-wide elections.

If the senatorial races in Arizona and Nevada are ultimately won by the Democratic candidates, the Democrats would remain in the driver's seat in the US Senate because Vice President Harris would break likely 50-50 ties. If the Republicans end up winning the senatorial seats in those two western states, they will be in charge in the upper chamber of the Congress. In either case, a win in the run-off in Georgia on December 6 between the sitting Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and the Trump-handpicked former football star Hershel Walker would be gravy for either Democrats or Republicans.

Today, the big question is this:  Can this week’s mid-term election results finally derail the Trump MAGA train?  

Rupert Murdoch’s far-right New York Post celebrated Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the front page of its Wednesday edition calling him “young GOP star” and “DeFuture”—a slap in Donald Trump’s face and plan to announce his third run for the presidency next week. Worse yet, on Thursday, the New York Post’s front page showed “TRUMPTY DUMPTY” and the following verse:

"Don (who couldn’t build a wall)

Had a great fall—

Can all the GOP’s men

Put the party back together again?"

 

Perhaps it does not take “all the GOP’s men” but only some courageous GOP men and women a la Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to “put the party back together.”

The Horror of Putin’s Nuclear Threat and Biden’s Armageddon Warning

By Brigitte L. Nacos

While many parts of the world suffer deadly or life-changing effects of all kinds of natural disasters--lethal storms, floods, draughts, and pandemics, there are plenty of man-made catastrophes—civil wars, deadly oppression of political dissenters, senseless mass shootings. But the probably most horrific threat today was described by President Joe Biden the other day as the most serious “prospect of Armageddon” since the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago. Biden’s assessment of President Vladimir Putin’s repeated warnings of using the nuclear option in Russia’s war against Ukraine should be taken as seriously as Putin’s nuclear threats.

This, then, is the time to remember that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev found a way to end an existential crisis. Faced with an ultimatum and a blockade of Cuba by the U.S., the Soviet Union blinked. But Khrushchev’s agreement to remove the missiles from the island came with Kennedy’s promise to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. Obviously, Kennedy and his advisers understood that the Kremlin needed a face-saving give-and-take deal. Never mind that the missiles in Turkey were considered close to obsolete at the time.

Whether Putin’s nuclear threat is understood as the use of tactical weapons of mass destruction in the Ukrainian theater of war or as all-out nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West does not matter now. The potential of the deployment of any nuclear weapons calls for all sides—Russian, Ukrainian, and American leaders--to think and talk about ways to end the disastrous war for both the Russian and Ukrainian people.

It would be naïve to believe this to be an easy task. The Ukrainians, on a roll in the Eastern provinces that Russia forcefully annexed and progressing even in the South, are not in the mood for a cease fire and peace negotiations. Washington’s revelation that Ukraine was responsible for the recent assassination of the daughter of one of President Putin’s allies was probably meant to warn President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly to refrain from further hostile actions on Russian territory.

Putin, increasingly criticized openly by war hawks among his longtime allies because of the failure of the Russian military, cannot and will not accept defeat. Therefore, his nuclear threat cannot be ignored.

For all the support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, the Ukrainian people, and Ukrainian leaders, Washington, along with European allies, must take the lead in getting Russians and Ukrainians to the negotiating table.

If there is any chance for an agreement, the peaceful end of the Cuban Missile Crisis provides an example that President Zelensky must understand: Without a face-saving deal for Putin—perhaps Russia keeping the long-disputed Crimean Peninsula and access to the Black Sea—there will not be peace but more suffering on both sides.

America’s Fanatic Anti-Abortion Enforcers Copy ISIS Women’s Cruelty

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The incredible sage of the 10-year-old pregnant girl, a rape victim, who had to be brought from her home in Ohio to Indiana in order to get an abortion, laid bare the horrific consequences of the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the new legal reality’s implementations by GOP-dominated states.

Ohio’s categorical ban of abortions, in place when the case unfolded, and the Indiana Attorney General’s defamation of the female physician, who treated the little girl before the state could outlaw the procedures, were strikingly similar to the Islamic State’s abusive treatment of young girls under the terrorist organization’s interpretation of Sharia law.

In early 2015, ISIS’s all-female al-Khansaa Brigade posted the tract “Women of the Islamic State: A Manifesto on Women” on several social media sites. According to the manifesto, “the fundamental function for women is in the house with her husband and children.” In tune with this, al-Khansa prescribed a rudimentary education for women built around their obligations to please their husbands and bear children raising boys and girls to become future jihadists and wives respectively.

In what I thought was the most shocking passage, the guidelines stated that “it is considered legitimate for a girl to be married by the age of nine” [emphasis added].

Obviously, this passage would not shock the army of fanatic GOP antiabortion legislators and enforcers. If you are firm in dictating that a 10-year-old child, impregnated by a rapist, must give birth to a baby and become a mother, you must be perfectly okay with ISIS-women’s edict that marriages of nine-year-old girls are legitimate.

That’s what you get, when religious zealots are at work. Whether they call themselves  Muslims in ISIS or Christians in Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere in America.

The Evil Goal of a Supreme Court Justice: Make Liberals’ Lives Miserable

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Clarence Thomas, an intellectual lightweight, had according to one of his own clerks one overriding mission, when he entered the Supreme Court: “The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years,” he said, “and I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years." Last week, on two consecutive days, he accomplished that and some more: Within 24 dramatic hours, the highest court increased and decreased the authority of states significantly pointing in both cases to the U.S. Constitution as they (1) took away the states’ power to protect Americans’ lives by striking down modest gun-control measures and (2) gave states the control over women’s reproductive decisions by overruling the nearly 50-year-old Roe vs. Wade decision. The Court claimed to rely in both these contrary decisions on the US Constitution. Incredible.

Thomas, the most radical among his reactionary peers, left no doubt that he wants to make liberals even more miserable: He signaled in a concurrent opinion that he wants the SCOTUS majority to outlaw any birth control measures, consensual relation between gay persons, and, for sure, gay marriage. The three-judge minority dissented “in sorrow” as they put it. Many women share that sorrow.

In her column in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd  describes the line-up of male characters who gained power during the years “by trading away something that meant little to them compared with their own stature: the rights of women." This road put Thomas, now the most influential Supreme Court Justice, into his current power position on the Court. All this began with his nomination by President George H.W. Bush. It was no secret that Thomas was an arch-conservative. But Bush disregarded the long pro-choice position of his family to please pro-life conservatives in his party and win African-American support for nominating a Black to the highest court. His son, George W. Bush, appointed Justice Samuel Alito, who has been a life-long Pro-Life fanatic. And in an unimaginable irony, it was left to Donald Trump to put three (!!!) super-conservatives onto the Court—of course, with the machinations of GOP majority leader Mitch McConnell who conned the Democrats and the American people. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the Democrats more than once let him get away with—and much more.

During Thomas’s confirmation hearings, Joe Biden, then chairing the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee, presided over the destruction of Anita Hill who testified—in the view of many women credibly--that her former boss Clearance Thomas had, as Dowd puts it, tormented her “with unwanted attention and dirty talk about the pornographic films he liked to watch.” In other words, the one-time sex-harasser and pornography addict is now part of the SCOTUS majority that dictates morality according to the standards of the Middle Ages from which Justice Samuel Alito draws repeatedly in his sub-standard opinion.

Several of the justices in the majority lied to the Senate’s Judiciary Committee and to individual Senators, among them Susan Collins and Joe Manchin, when asked about Roe vs. Wade. Perhaps that is not surprising, since they were appointed by the liar-in-chief Donald Trump. But it is nevertheless mind-boggling that among the highest and most influential guardians of our laws and the US Constitution here are several justices who swore to tell the truth in their confirmation hearings—and once they got on the Court--they lied!

If America wants to stop Thomas and his fellow radicals from making their lives more miserable, they need to be just as relentless advocates of their rights as Thomas and Co. are determined to take those rights away from them.

Protesting peaceful, relentlessly, and voting for local, state, and federal candidates committed to repeal SCOTUS decisions via contrary legislation are the right ways to fight back.

First the Post-Massacre Playbook; Then the Do-Nothing Nation

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Not all of the ten victims of the Buffalo mass shooting were buried, when an 18-year-old gunman killed at least nineteen children and two of their teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Since lethal incidents like those in Buffalo and Uvalde have become as American as apple pie, they are by now followed automatically by the same post-massacre playbook: Flags are flown at half-mast, solemn prayer are services are held, make-shift memorials are established and buried under mountains of flowers, calls to pray for the victims and their families are issued, prominent people visit the venues of grief, shock and anger are expressed.

While the last chapter of the playbook is still open in the aftermath of Buffalo, the first chapter is now devoted to the events in Uvalde. Yes, our hearts and souls hurt. Yes, we are praying for the victims and survivors. Yes, we are angry that within two weeks two 18-year-old adolescents killed a total of thirty-one human beings. And, yes, we are frustrated that both killed with assault weapons, weapons of war, semi-automatic rifles that allowed them to kill a multitude of persons in record time.

The gun lobby and their supporters have a standard slogan: Guns do not kill—people do. What a tragic joke! For the idea that reasonable people with guns can stop crazy people with guns was once again disproven in Buffalo and in Uvalde: In the first case, bullets from the gun of a guard in Tops Friendly Market could not stop the mass-shooter because the latter wore body armor. In the second case, two police officers encountered the shooter before he entered the school but, again, their shots were deflected by perpetrator’s body armor.

No other country in the world makes it as easy as this country to purchase assault weapons and magazines that guarantee the largest number of people killed in the shortest possible time. In the United States, the number of handguns is significantly larger than the total population size. And no other country has as many mass shootings and people killed by handguns than the United States.

Again and again, public figures and regular people will say in response to catastrophic shootings, “This is not what we are!”

Unfortunately, this is what we are.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and the Weak Links in the Western Bloc

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The much-praised unity of the European-North American bloc since the Russian invasion of Ukraine has in reality weak links. The weakest is Hungary, a member of both the EU and NATO. The country’s newly reelected Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a long-time admirer of Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin and a constant critic of EU and NATO leaders in Brussels.

Emboldened by his election victory last Sunday, Orban used his acceptance speech for a rhetorical slap in the direction of Brussels. And three days later, this Wednesday, he broke with the EU’s refusal to pay for Russian gas and oil with rubles. “If the Russians ask for it, we will pay in rubles,” he told reporters. While other neighbors of Ukraine facilitate NATO weapon transports into the embattled country, Hungary has refused to cooperate.

One wonders, whether Hungary is such an important part of EU and NATO that Orban can violate the European Union’s agreements, laws, and court rulings designed to strengthen democracy. After all, Orban destroyed Hungary’s developing democracy and replaced it with so-called illiberal democracy, a benign code for autocracy. While the democratic institutions are still in place, they are completely controlled by Orban and his Fidesz party.

Yet, along with Poland, which was before the Ukraine invasion moving to become a full illiberal democracy as well, Hungary receives the highest payments from the European Union.

As for the United States and NATO, things are not going well either: 63 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday, Tuesday, against a non-binding resolution in support of NATO. And that in the face of the horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine.

These are the main points of the resolution.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) reaffirms its unequivocal support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as an alliance founded on democratic principles;

(2) calls on the President to use the voice and vote of the United States to adopt a new Strategic Concept for NATO that is clear about its support for shared democratic values and committed to enhancing NATO’s capacity to strengthen democratic institutions within NATO member, partner, and aspirant countries; and

(3) calls on the President to use the voice and vote of the United States to establish a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO headquarters.

Why in heaven did close to one third of the GOP conference vote “no?”

They took exception to the following provision in the resolution’s full text:

“Whereas democracies across the alliance face external threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and internal threats from proponents of illiberalism [emphasis added]…”

The naysayers, close to one third of the GOP conference, rejected the highlighted part of the above sentence because they perceived it as a criticism of Hungary and Poland by the Liberal Left. After all, hard-core Trumpian GOPers admire those countries’ illiberal democracies and strive to introduce their authoritarian models right here at home.

These GOPers are fans of strongmen. And, of course, of one particular would-be strongman who does not support NATO and endorsed Orban's latest candidacy.

NATO and EU should enlist Ex-Chancellor Merkel as Peace-Maker

By Brigitte L. Nacos

As the Ukrainian military and civil defense units fight the invading Russian military effectively, Vladimir Putin’s decision to place his military’s nuclear forces on high alert heightens the threat of his use of nuclear weapons in the Ukrainian theater of war—and perhaps beyond. In this critical situation, all efforts must be made to find a peaceful solution. And the best person to enlist for what seems a mission impossible is in my view Germany’s ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, She  speaks Russian fluently und knows Putin better than any other Western politician. Her ability to reason like the trained scientist she is would be a good basis of discussions with the usually rational but more recently highly emotional Russian leader.  

The unity displayed by NATO and EU and allies in other parts of the globe in their swift opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine must have come as an unprecedented shock to Putin. The Russian president must have underestimated how effective President Biden’s repair of the U.S.-European relationship has been. He reversed his predecessor’s efforts to destroy NATO as we know it and weaken the EU and thereby strengthened Western democracies so that they now can resist Russian expansionism forcefully without direct participation in the military hostilities.

Two weeks into this war, the Ukrainian military and civilian Territorial Defense Forces have stalled Russia’s plan to occupy its neighbor. The unprecedented sanctions against Russia have isolated the country cutting it mostly off the global markets. This has already resulted in hardship for the Russian public.

As Thomas Friedman writes in today’s New York Times, “Russia has no good way out [of this war]…” And that is the problem. Not only for Putin but for the Western alliance against him. Strongman do not want to accept defeat, cannot accept a loss. That’s bad enough, as we learned following the 2020 presidential election in the U.S., in a country in which the institutions of government still work as supposed. But in an autocracy with a sole ruler on top there are no built-in restrains. Thus, the danger of Putin’s end game that may include the deployment to weapons of mass destruction.

The frequent and long phone conversations between Putin and various Western leaders are signs that there may be room for actual negotiations. But that would need a most skilled negotiator.

Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel would be the best possible choice!

The goal must be to find a solution that guarantees Ukraine’s independence but at the same time offers Putin a way out with the ability of justifying the war and its end result as something positive to his people  

For Trump’s GOP Violence is “Political Discourse”

When it comes to violence, we know for a long time that Donald Trump is like the emperor without cloths: he does not hide his love of brutal force for the sake of his own power. He does not hide most of his illegal actions but describes and celebrates them in public. He is naked, when it comes to any shame. He is an empty vessel, when it comes to a moral compass.  

And now, the Republican Party, already on bended knees, has revealed its complete surrender to its fascist leader and his complete disregard of the legal anchor of this nation: The Republican National Committee censored their members Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger for participating in the congressional investigation of the January 6^th events. They charged the only two Republicans courageous enough to stand up for democracy for taking part in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

However incredible it is: One of the two major political parties in the oldest continuous democracy declared today openly that terrorist and insurgent violence is “legitimate political discourse” among “ordinary citizens.” Obviously, the leading GOP party hacks felt the urgent need to second Donald Trump’s promise to January 6^th terrorists, insurgents, and fellow-plotters in the White House and elsewhere that he might pardon them all, when back in power.

50 years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote about violent movements,

If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. …The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

That’s exactly what we are experiencing now: When Trump and his MAGA movement failed to overturn the election and keep him in office on January 6^th, 2021, violence became part of body politic in America.

Neo-Nazis march now openly in American streets, display swastikas, and attack Jewish Americans. The violent Far Right and its organized groups have friends in high places claiming to provide security.

Violence as political discourse has no place in democracy. Embracing violence as is a giant step to fascism.

Especially, when it becomes the doctrine of a major political party.

Democrats in Need of Soundbite Messages

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In today’s print edition of the New York Times a full-page column by Ezra Klein is headed by the headline, “Can Democrats Find A Winning Message?” (The online version has a different title). This is a pressing question for those who still hope that Donald Trump’s handiwork in favor of illiberal democracy and authoritarian rule can be stopped. Klein’s opinion piece analyzes the dire predictions of election analyst David Shor, who foresees for the near future massive losses for Democrats in the U.S. Congress, most of all the U.S. Senate. That is not only based on the undemocratic electoral process set up by the U.S. Constitution, but also on the disability of the Democratic Party and its leaders to translate even the most attractive and most publicly supported features of their and President Biden’s agenda into compelling soundbites understood by the American public at large.

These are the terms that Americans hear from Democrats in Washington day-in and day-out—not only in their conversations in the halls of Congress and the White House but also in their appearances in television and radio, in their tweets, and in their coverage by the press: reconciliation bill, filibuster, John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and so on.

Go out and meet regular people and ask them about the purpose of the voting rights advancement act. Or the filibuster controversy and the content of the reconciliation bill that Democrats are fighting about. Or the filibuster controversy.

Compare that to Trumpian soundbites:

Stop the Steal, Save America, Make America Great Again, America First. These are simple, catchy phrases.

Go out and ask regular Americans what is meant with MAGA and the other slogans above. Most know.

It is not enough for the fighting so-called liberals and progressives within the Democratic camp to get onto the same message. Although that is a precondition at a time, when democracy is under attack from the former president, his supporters, and those who disagree but fear to say so publicly.

Democrats needs to translate their bureaucratic messages into simple words that every American can understand. Soundbites that bite.

Soundbites that speak to the hopes and fears and anger that drives red and blue America further apart yet. At Trump’s rally last night in Iowa, one of his female supporters told a reporter with emphasis that the “civil war” was coming. Must come. Just one illustration of dangerous polarization in our country.

More than two decades ago, Jeffrey Scheuer wrote in his book “Soundbite Society: Television and the American Mind” that TV news was “filtering out complex ideas in favor of blunt emotional messages that appeal to the self and to narrower moral-political impulses.”

According to Scheuer, this obvious bias in favor of simple messages was not the result of intentional slants but rather the nature of the medium—TV with limited air time.

For the Right, there was and still is typically the choice between right or wrong, good or evil. Perfect for short soundbites. For Liberal, these differences were and still are far more complex to press into a meaningful soundbite.

The TV soundbite society of then has long expanded to an overall soundbite society—and not only because of Twitter’s limited text requirement.

In the last decade, but especially since Donald Trump appeared on the political stage in a starring role, aggressive, violent, shocking, insulting, threatening soundbites have become the most-used propaganda weapons of Trump’s Republicans.

Democrats must not copy the viciousness of Trumpian soundbites. But they need to quickly translate the policies they want to enact into simple, effective messages.

That’s not an easy task.

But without making it an urgent effort and succeeding, David Shor’s disheartening predictions may well come true in 2022, 2024 and beyond.