Two stories that show the Presidential election dilemma with convicted felon Donald Trump as the Republican Presidential nominee

For those who think that Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon of Richard Nixon was a serious blow to Presidential accountability and the rule of law, and one that was a major step toward even worse neglect of meaningful Presidential accountability, this is a good moment, caught in this Reuters story¹:

Since Trump is promising to aggressively go after the “Biden crime family” (as the convicted felon Trump calls them) legally if he becomes President again and declared last December, "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,"² it’s especially good to see him convicted of 34 felonies in a legitimate trial on legitimate charges.

And we also have this story³:)

The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

“The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

If this was an authorized leak from the White House, the timing seems klutzy from a political viewpoint. But it shows once again how the Biden Administration, stuck in many ways in the politics of the 1980s, stumbles again and again in trying to capitalize on Trump’s sleazy demagoguery and outright criminality.

Because just as the spectacular news of Trump’s conviction is announced, here’s Biden’s face on a story that for an awful lot of American voters, as well as people abroad, will provoke the question, “Oh, are we going to war with Russia, now?”

Why vote for a criminal?

I’ve always criticized the Obama Administration for not doing a serious criminal investigation of the Cheney-Bush Administration over criminal acts in connection with the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror (as the Cheneyists grandiosely labelled it), and especially the torture crimes. What Bush and Cheney could do was set the precedent they did. What they couldn’t do for themselves was to have a subsequent Democratic administration come to office and decline to prosecute them, or even to make a serious show of contemplating doing so, e.g., by appointing a special prosecutor.

Human Rights Watch in 2011 said in a summary of their report on the topic:

Human Rights Watch believes there is sufficient basis for the US government to order a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes committed in connection with the torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the CIA secret detention program, and the rendition of detainees to torture. Such an investigation would necessarily focus on alleged criminal conduct by the following four senior officials—former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. …

Such an investigation should also include examination of the roles played by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as the lawyers who crafted the legal “justifications” for torture, including Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC). …

Thorough, impartial, and genuinely independent investigation is needed into the programs of illegal detention, coerced interrogation, and rendition to torture—and the role of top government officials. Those who authorized, ordered, and oversaw torture and other serious violations of international law, as well as those implicated as a matter of command responsibility, should be investigated and prosecuted if evidence warrants.⁴

The Democrats and the Republicans during the Cold War all too often violated the law and good sense and a sensible understanding of US national interests, in foreign policy, in various regime-change attempts (some of them successful), and often in repressive actions against domestic dissenters, e.g., the FBI’s COINTELPRO project.

But the Republican Party has encouraged an especially successful tendency to authoritarian governance. The domestic political espionage and criminal conspiracies that came to be known collectively as “Watergate” didn’t go unpunished. Numerous senior officials including two former Attorneys General were convicted of felonies in connection to it.

But not Dick Nixon, who then went on to be publicly rehabilitated so he could go on David Frost’s show and declare, “when the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”⁵

The trend continued when the Iran-Contra scandal broke. The mainstream media – and that was pretty much all there was in the 1980s! – were gun-shy about having another major scandal that could bring down a President. Plus, Reagan’s changes to media regulation and his celebrity cultivation of media figures was also have its desired effects on major media. One of the key dubious figures in the criminal operation, Col. Oliver North, became a Republican folk hero because he was perceived as breaking the law on Reagan’s behalf. (North wasn’t foolish enough himself to make that argument in his own legal defense; he claimed he never did anything illegal.)

The minority report of the House investigation of Iran-Contra was directed by Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney elaborated the concept of what critics called the “unilateral Presidency,” basically a formalized version of Nixon’s “when the President does it” position, which Trump recently tried to get the Supreme Court to approve in the form of blanket Presidential exemption from the laws.

Then came the Clinton Administration and the Whitewater pseudo-scandal, which Republicans saw as their revenge for the Watergate scandal. Here Presidential accountability was used as the excuse for the bizarre investigations of the thoroughly unscrupulous Kenneth Starr, a self-righteous prick who made Monica Lewinsky famous and who then went on to cover up rape accusations against football players as President of the Baptist Baylor University.

This is how we wound up with the Cheney-Bush Administration’s lies about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and the torture program. When the Obama Administration gave the Bush Administration figures de facto immunity for those crimes, the stage was set for what became the Trump Administration, in which a crass authoritarian like Donald Trump, for whom the law is nothing but a tool to be used against his political enemies and others he hates, particularly black people and undocumented immigrants. ("We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.")

There are other factors at work, of course, to make the Republican Party willing to follow an erratic crook with a gangster mentality – and Trump is now officially a convicted criminal – not least of them the fragmentation of the US media landscape with a strong, well-financed, highly partisan rightwing media with lot of oligarchic backing while there is scarcely anything comparable on the left end of the US political spectrum.

Digby has a theory – and her theories are typically very good

Pundits who are not hopeless Trumpistas are puzzled at the situation that Digby Parton recently described:

The American economy is the envy of the world right now, the only industrialized country that's actually doing well. But Americans are so mired in negativity that they believe it's terrible. At least they think it's terrible for people other than themselves. Survey after survey shows they actually feel pretty good about their own finances and when asked how they think their local economy is faring they say it's doing well. It's the rest of the country that's in a recession.

Consumer spending is way up. AAA said this week that they predict this is going to be the busiest Memorial Day travel weekend since 2005 and tourism is booming. So while 72% of respondents in that Harris poll said inflation is increasing (even though it's fallen sharply in the past year) it isn't stopping people from spending. And there's a good reason for that. Higher wages have outstripped inflation and have put more money in people's pockets.

This phenomenon even has a name: vibecession.⁶

I’m not sure that “vibecession” will catch on as a label, but who knows? I’ve been particularly amazed by one of the factors she mentions, which is low unemployment, aka, high levels of employment. Since 1968, the US official definition of full employment has been 96% of the workforce actually having jobs. The idea being that 4% or so unemployment would be occurring even in a completely healthy job market as people are changing jobs, individual companies make cutbacks or their businesses fail, etc.

I’ve never been a fan of the kind of superficial economic determinism of economists who try to predict the outcomes of elections based on economic statistics. But by any conventional political assumption, employment being at or above full employment should be a strong factor in favor of the incumbent Presidential Administration.

There are some qualifying considerations. If full employment means you have to work two or three jobs to have an acceptable living standard, that’s not necessarily an acceptable situation with everyone. Housing prices in the US are high, which would be a good sign for homeowners but a frustration for younger people who can’t afford them. Plus, interest rates have been high, which also makes homebuying more of a challenge. And the lax business regulations of the neo-liberal era has allowed hedge-funds to buy up large amounts of residential property in cities like Los Angeles to convert them to high-end residential properties, increasing the squeeze on both rental and owner-occupied home prices.

Digby compares some major economic measures to those in 1984, when Ronald Reagan won re-election by a strong margin, and notes that Joe Biden’s poll numbers tend to look weak even those same measures are much better than they were in 1984. But she also notes:

People's beliefs about the economy are based on vibes, not reality. And the vibe is that the economy is terrible, we have out-of-control inflation, job losses and a general economic crisis. This seems odd considering that we actually went through a real economic crisis that lasted for years just recently with the Great Recession of 2008, but people's memories are short. [my emphasis]

I wouldn’t phrase it quite that way, but she’s right. She actually making a good Kantian point that people react to their perception of reality not to reality itself. (Which to Kant was objectively unknowable for humans; but it seems bizarre on the face of it to talk about Kant in the context of Donald Trump’s popularity!)

She notes the often-sloppy reporting on polls and economic statistics by the corporate media: “the media coverage of the economy … has been relentlessly negative far beyond the point where it was justified.” And she points to media fragmentation and in particular to “toxic social media,” on which Trumpistas generally rely even more so than other voters.

But she comes up with an interesting diagnosis of the current situation:

The whole [American] culture is caught in a negativity spiral that isn't really about the economy at all. It's about impotence. The public sees a whole host of institutions, norms, rules and laws disintegrating before its eyes and feels like there are no mechanisms that work to hold people accountable or reform the system, creating pessimism and apathy.

But mostly, it's just Trump.

His followers hear nothing but a non-stop litany of lies, angry grievances, denunciations and resentments so it's no wonder they're enraged about everything. And Democrats are simply worn out. The effort it takes to oppose him is overwhelming and watching the entire Republican establishment willfully deny reality and supplicate themselves to this con man in order to achieve power for themselves is profoundly dispiriting.

He was supposed to be vanquished three and half years ago. And yet, like a zombie, he simply won't go down. For all of Biden's successes, he couldn't put an end to the single biggest problem we face and a lot of people hold him responsible for that failure, however unrealistic it may have been. [Turmp’s] in charge [of the national political conversation] and this abominable presence just looms over American society spreading poison day in and day out. [my emphasis]

Digby’s Zombie Theory is a good one!

The war factor

Of course, there are specific issues that do affect the Democrats’ inability to overcome the zombie effect.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are two of them. The end-of-history neocons and the liberal interventionists argued that democracies don’t go to war with each other. Historically, that’s a tricky argument to make. For one thing, democracies can be very susceptible to public outrage over attacks by a foreign enemy, e.g., the 9/11 attacks in the US.

But it is also true that normal people generally hate war. This is an extremely healthy instinct. Though obviously humanity has found an awful lot of reasons they found convincing over the last several millennia (or even many millennia) to wage wars and lesser violent conflicts.

And in the absence of a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, American voters get grumpy about wars and worry about the negative consequences. And Biden’s foreign policy is heavily concerned with two wars, the Russo-Ukraine War and Israel’s brutal war against the civilians of Gaza. And while there is wide sympathy among Democrats for assisting Ukraine in its current war, there just isn’t any enthusiasm for the US to get directly involved in a war with nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine, which isn’t a NATO member.

And there is the Gaza war, which is incredibly unpopular among the Democratic base voters. Not many critics of Biden’s essentially open-ended support of Netanyahu’s war policies are likely to think that Trump’s uncritical support of crackpot Christian Zionist positions is better than Biden’s position. But their enthusiasm for voting for Biden, much less actively working to turn out votes for him, is definitely being affected.

The huge “culture-war” issue that works in the Democrats favor

That’s abortion rights, of course. The Republican position on this is intensely unpopular. And we’ve already seen that it has electoral costs for the Republicans.

The standard left critique of neoliberal policies and politics argues that the various effects of neoliberal economics – ever greater concentrations of wealth, the starving of vital public services, the massive corruption of politics by campaign donations from the wealthiest people, neglect of vital government programs like schools – causes potential left and center-left voters to be discouraged and indifferent to politics, which works to the favor of the conservatives and far right. And that critique is basically correct.

It often comes coupled with the criticism of the center-left, and specifically of establishment liberals in the US, that the attempt to substitute forms of “identity politics” (feminism, racial equality, gender equity, opposition to xenophobia) is a ploy to duck the economic issues that might displease their donors. And that is also basically true.

But that doesn’t mean those liberty-and-equality issues are generally unimportant and/or ineffective in campaigns.  The abortion rights issue in the US is a prime example of this. The Christian Right dogmatic hostility to abortion, which has morphed into a really weird concept of zygotes as equivalent to full-blown human beings, and the really cruel policies consequences of that fanatical view, are a major vulnerability for Trump and the Republicans in 2024. And that could actually be decisive in the Presidential race, despite Trump’s considerable demagogic skills.

1. Cohen, Luc & Queen, Jack & Sullivan, Andy (2024): Donald Trump becomes first US president convicted of a crime. Reuters 05/31/2024. <https://www.reuters.com/legal/jurors-begin-second-day-deliberations-trump-hush-money-trial-2024-05-30/> (Accessed: 2024-31-05).

2. Kurtzleben, Danielle (2024): Why Trump's authoritarian language about 'vermin' matters. NPR 11/17/2023. <https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary> (Accessed: 2024-31-05).

3. Banco, Erin & Ward, Alexander & Seligman, Lara (2024): Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons. Politico 05/30/2024. <https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/biden-ukraine-weapons-strike-russia-00160731> (Accessed: 2024-31-05).

4. Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees (2011). Human Rights Watch 07/11/2011. <https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/07/12/getting-away-torture/bush-administration-and-mistreatment-detainees> (Accessed: 2024-31-05).

5. Nixon - "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal". This is the President YouTube channel 02/28/2024. (Accessed: 2024-31-05).

6. Parton,.Heather Digby (2024): The zombie Trump effect. Salon 05/24/2024. <https://www.salon.com/2024/05/24/the-zombie-effect/> (Accessed: 2024-31-05).