Trump's Legacy of Loss

Mr. Manners: Trump with his wife and son in January

When history looks back on the waking nightmare that is the so-called presidency of Donald Trump, it's quite possible that his term in office will be viewed in terms of loss.

In terms of the Oval Office, loss of civility, loss of ethical boundaries and an unprecedented loss of international prestige have all been markers of this chaotic White House ever since the inauguration on that fateful day back on January 20, 2017.

Loss of class? Check.

To say nothing of a profound loss of moral authority along with a gaping loss of direction for the country he's clearly incapable of leading.

Want to get a sense of the scope of the loss of respect for the law under this presidency?

Take a few minutes to listen to former Watergate prosecutor and legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks on the Brian Lehrer Show earlier this morning sharing her insight on how Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Jared Kushner and Trump may all be seriously compromised as a result of their corrupt business dealings with Russia.

In terms of the people the office of the president is meant to serve and protect, from a historical standpoint this presidency might arguably be viewed in terms of the loss of American lives.

Not just the more than 220,000 people who've been unfairly, and in some cases (like that of Mishawaka, Indiana restaurant owner Roberto Beristain), cruelly deported from the country they call home since Trump took office and turned his xenophobia and bigotry into federal policy.

Heather Heyer and the street renamed in her memory

But innocent Americans whose lives have been lost as a direct result of the kind of virulent ethnic, racial and religious hatred that Trump has actively cultivated and encouraged since announcing his candidacy.

People like 32-year-old Heather D. Heyer, a legal assistant who was killed back in August, 2017 during the Unite the Right rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Heyer lost her life when 20-year-old neo-Nazi James Fields intentionally plowed his car into a group of counter-protesters; killing Heyer and injuring scores of others before being arrested.

Would a large, organized march by members of the KKK, neo-Nazi groups and members of the alt-right have taken place in an American city in 2017 under any other president?

In Charlottesville TV and cell phone cameras rolled as Tiki-torch carrying marchers in white sport shorts chanted "Jews will not replace us!" while some carried flags emblazoned with swastikas - 52-year-old KKK member Richard Wilson Preston fired a handgun into a crowd of counter-protesters after yelling "Hey, nigger!".

Even though his own national security advisor H.R. McMaster called Heyer's death an act of domestic terrorism, in a subsequent press conference that embodied the loss of leadership from the executive branch of the federal government, Trump refused to condemn the march and deadly vehicle attack - and instead suggested that there were "some very fine people on both sides."

Loss of sanity and reason comes to mind.

Blaze Bernstein (center) with his parents Jeanne
and Gideon Bernstein at his HS graduation.

What is encouraging though is seeing how people from across the country are coming together in opposition of the kind of divisiveness and hatred that Trump has made the defining characteristic of his presidency.

Last Sunday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, over 2,000 people gathered to pay tribute to 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein in the same venue where his high school graduation ceremony took place less than two years ago.

Bernstein, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in pre-med, was home in Lake Forest, California for winter break when his body was found in a shallow grave in a park in Orange County on January 9th - seven days after he'd disappeared.

He'd been brutally stabbed more than 20 times and a 20-year-old suspect named Samuel Lincoln Woodward was taken into custody.

Based on Bernstein's social media posts and text messages, police investigators at first suggested some kind of spurned lover's tryst between the two may have been at the root of the violent attack.

But last Friday ProPublica published a story by A.C. Thompson, Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan detailing Woodward's involvement with a violent neo-Nazi group known as Atomwaffen.

It's pretty disturbing but it's worth a read.

ProPublica released disturbing excerpts from encrypted chat logs members of the group used to communicate online, including members celebrating Woodward having violently murdered Bernstein and expressing their admiration for people like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Dylann Roof - the white supremacist who shot and killed nine African-Americans at a bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015.

Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell

The murder of Blaze Bernstein is just one of the many violent killings of racial and ethnic minorities committed by American white supremacists since Trump was elected.

Did you hear about 30-year-old Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell of South Carolina?

As the Charleston Post and Courier reported, he plead guilty to federal weapons charges on Monday after he was arrested in 2017 by the FBI for telling an undercover agent that he wanted to use a gun to commit a killing of non-whites "in the spirit of Dylann Roof." 

In my opinion I don't think it's a reach to hold Trump partially accountable for these kinds of domestic terrorist incidents.

After all, he never condemns them as he does violent attacks by Islamic extremists in other countries.

In doing so, Trump basically offers his tacit approval of such attacks - and only encourages people to commit acts of extreme violence to act out the kind of hate and bigotry he continually stirs up.

It's almost as if Trump is intentionally silent about them, as if he views such attacks as a part of his grand vision for Making America Great Again.

Lest we forget, Nikolas Cruz, the gunman who shot and killed 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida recently was a member of the Republic of Florida Militia, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a white nationalist group.

Cruz was seen in a video wearing one of Trump's signature red "Make America Great Again" hats as he fired shots with a gun.

That's not "fake news" or a liberal plot, it's a violent killer feeling empowered by a president who has made it painfully clear what he thinks about immigrants and non-whites.

In doing so he further erodes the office of the presidency, endangers the lives of innocent people - and further cements his own legacy of loss.

CPAC Blames It On the 'Black Guy'

American Conservative Union communications
director Ian B. Walters speaking at CPAC

Well another year has come and gone for the annual gathering of conservative activists and politicians known as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Co-founded in 1973 by the American Conservative Union, CPAC basically serves as a kind of think-tank platform for a range of conservative issues.

It offers leading conservative thinkers and politicians an opportunity to sound out their policy positions and political views in front of a crowd that embraces a decidedly right-wingy view of America.

It's a multi-day conference that helps to shape the overall message of the Republican Party and influence the legislative agenda of GOP politicians all across America.

For Republican presidential hopefuls, the road to the White House runs through CPAC.

If some of the comments heard there last week are any indication, the Republican Party really doesn't seem too concerned about the broader public perception that it's an organization which is openly unwelcoming to people of color - or even remotely interested in expanding it's membership beyond it's overwhelmingly white voter base.

As Jeffrey Mays reported on Sunday in an article in the New York Times, Ian B. Walters (pictured above), the communications director for the American Conservative Union that hosts CPAC, raised eyebrows at a CPAC dinner on Friday evening while reflecting back on the disillusionment of the Republican Party in 2008 after President Obama's election victory when he observed:

"We elected Mike Steele to be the R.N.C. chair because he's a black guy. That was the wrong thing to do."

According to Mays a number of conservatives, including R.N.C. spokesman Michael Ahrens, quickly distanced themselves from Walters' comments.

Former RNC chair Michael Steele

Comments which can be seen as a not-so-subtle endorsement of the racism and xenophobia of Trump, and his tolerance of white supremacist views evidenced by senior White House advisor Stephen Miller.

The comment also seems to crudely parrot the basis of  Trump's political views - which is to engage in "other-ism" and essentially place blame for the country's problems at the feet of immigrants and non-white Americans.

Steele, the popular ex-Republican lieutenant governor of Maryland from 2003 to 2007, was tapped to lead the R.N.C. after President Obama's 2008 election victory as Republicans tried to come to grips with a brutal election loss.

Bolstered by George W. Bush's unpopularity and anger over the Iraq War, Obama won the African-American vote 95% to Senator John McCain's 5%, the Hispanic vote 67% to 31%, the Asian vote 62% to 35% and the Jewish vote 78% to 21%.

The Republican Party was forced to face the uncomfortable political reality that it had to find a way to expand it's membership and appeal among non-white American voters.

In 2009, Michael Steele represented something of a rarity in an increasingly conservative GOP, a progressive Republican voice who was African-American - one could arguably call him a unicorn.

Pat Buchanan after winning the New Hampshire
primary in 1996

In 1993, he was one of the founding members of the Republican Leadership Council, a political action committee (PAC) that embraced a "fiscally conservative, socially inclusive" political agenda.

The other RLC co-founders included former New Jersey Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Missouri Republican Senator John Danforth and former Massachusetts Republican Governor William Weld.

The RLC PAC was formed after the backlash from right-wing writer Pat Buchanan's divisive speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in the wake of his failed bid for the presidency in which he claimed, in part: "There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America."  

I can still recall listening to that speech on TV and getting an uncomfortable chill when he exalted the R.N.C. crowd to "take back America's cities."

The RLC was an effort to strengthen the voices of moderate Republicans in the mold of former Congressman and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, and reject the rise of the extremist religious zealotry which has now taken root within the GOP.

Now I say all that, in part, because I think Ian B. Walter's comment that the R.N.C. selected Michael Steele as chair in 2009 "because he was a black guy" is a simplistic and incomplete summary of why he was tapped for the position.

It's also an overt attempt to pander to the overt tone of bigotry and dog-whistle racism which Trump has openly cultivated since announcing his candidacy. 

Now I might not personally agree with everything Michael Steele says in the political sense, but he's a pretty shrewd political operator who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes is right - including his criticism of Donald Trump, or his dust-ups with Rush Limbaugh back in 2009.

Michael Steele as R.N.C. chair during the 2011
Winter meeting in National Harbor, Maryland

As a conservative political commentator on MSNBC his comments and insight are always interesting and substantive.

Is it possible that his selection as R.N.C. chair in 1992 was, in part, influenced by a desire on the part of the Republican establishment to change the stiff "country club" perception of their party as an organization for old white Christian guys?

Sure it is, in fact selecting Steele as R.N.C. chair was a pretty savvy move on the part of Republicans in 2009.

When they knew they would run the risk of reinforcing the perception of the party as racist simply for attacking Obama politically as president.

But there's no question that Steele was more than qualified for the position based on his track record as a lawyer in the private sector, and for his extensive work both behind and in front of the scenes on behalf of the Republican Party.

This is a guy who earned his B.A. from Johns Hopkins and his law degree from Georgetown.

He was the first African-American elected to statewide office in Maryland when he became lieutenant governor in 2003 and he made an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 2006, eventually loosing to current Democratic Senator Ben Cardin.

So in my view, Steele is the kind of person that Republicans should embrace, rather than try and vilify as if he was some kind of mistake as Ian B. Walters suggested at the CPAC dinner on Friday night.

But given Trump's views on race, and the Republican Party's acceptance of the de facto head of their party being a philandering bigot, maybe this current iteration of the R.N.C. does see a man like Michael Steele as a mistake - rather than an asset who reflected positively on the GOP.

After all, the CPAC crowd enthusiastically cheered Trump's rambling speech on Friday, even though it clearly contained lies and half-truths that have been fact-checked and he read a story about a snake.

And later that evening at the CPAC dinner, ACU communications director Ian B. Walter looked back nine years ago to cast blame on "the black guy." 

So much for those talked-about but never seen Republican Party "outreach efforts".

NYU's Watermelon-Flavored Controversy

The Weinstein Dining Hall at NYU

Examples of incidents involving racial insensitivity on American college campuses have been the subject of more than a few of my blog posts over the years.

It's not like I plan that, they happen - now and then and I write about them.

What's fascinates me is how often those types of incidents tend to occur around the federal holiday recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, or during Black History Month.

As if there's a weird intentional spike in racial resentment that surfaces during those times of the year when contributions to American society and history by prominent African-Americans are recognized by a federal holiday, events and various types of media programming or entertainment.

Remember the Arizona State chapter of TKE's "Martin Luther King Black Party" back in January of 2014? (And yeah, that was a real thing.)

A recent controversy that erupted over soul food, Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water served at a dining hall on the campus of New York University offers perspective on enduring racial stereotypes, how students of color perceive a climate of racial insensitivity on major American college campuses - and the backlash from those who feel such claims are invalid.

As Tony Marco reported for CNN on Thursday, this latest controversy started when NYU student Kayla Eubanks walked into the Weinstein Passport Dining Hall and noticed a menu posted advertising a special meal in recognition of Black History Month.

NYU students in front of the "Black
History Meal" menu

The food choices included barbecued ribs, collared greens, mac and cheese, mashed yams and corn bread, which is fine - those are all delicious foods (depending on one's taste) commonly recognized as belonging to the broader spectrum of distinctly African-American southern cuisine.

Personally speaking, I don't find those specific food choices listed on the NYU dining hall menu "offensive" in a racial sense - and frankly just writing those down made me hungry. Really.

But it was the beverage choices paired with that menu that really stood out for Eubanks, large containers of red Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water.

Click the link to the CNN article above to see the cell phone video she recorded of the dining hall offerings; the video of the drink display helps put it in perspective.

Eubanks quickly told others about it.


As Maggie Astor's New York Times article notes, 19-year-old NYU sophomore Nia Harris heard about the menu from Eubanks and went over to the dining hall to check it out for herself.

Troubled by what she saw, she spoke with dining hall staff and asked the head chef of the dining hall about the selection of the choices on the special Black History Month menu - including the drinks.

In her now widely-read email, Harris says he told her that the menu choices were not in any way intended to be offensive, and he claimed they'd been created by two African-American cooks on the staff.

Harris wrote an email to NYU officials expressing her concerns, and then posted the email on her Facebook page and the story blew up - NYU President Andrew Hamilton released a statement calling the menu choices "inexcusably insensitive".

Aramark, the huge food service provider that actually handles meal service for the NYU dining hall, quickly released a statement apologizing for the incident and promptly fired the two cooks who supposedly came up with the menu and drink selection.

Was it right to fire two employees who came up with what they felt was an appropriate menu with a Black History Month theme?

Personally speaking I think firing them was a bit extreme.

According to the NYU and Aramark statements, the two fired employees violated policy by not consulting with NYU before creating the menu choices.

For a moment, let's forget whether the two cooks were white, black or Hispanic.

If they sat down and took the time to come up with a menu that would in some way recognize or honor African-American culture, it doesn't seem like they did that out of any kind of malice.

As I said above, I thought the foods on the menu seemed pretty good choices if they were going for soul food.

But I can see where the selection of watermelon-flavored water placed alongside those foods could be perceived as being racially insensitive.

Particularly when viewed in the larger historical context in which degrading imagery portraying African-Americans as having some kind of fetish for watermelon that sends them into some kind of trance.

Images like the one seen above were quite common in the late 19th and early 20th century in America - images with clear racist connotations - and that one is fairly tame.

If you're interested, just go to Google and type in the words "watermelon, racist" to see some of the more degrading visual representations of African-Americans and watermelon.

But to get back to those two fired cooks, let me play devil's advocate for a minute.

What if they just thought that the taste of watermelon would go well with the menu they came up with? (Admittedly, pairing that with the red Kool Aid did make me think, Hmmmm...)

Jamaican bobsled team's watermelon helmets
at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi 

Now obviously there's no "rule" about when you can eat barbecued ribs with corn bread and collard greens.

But those are foods I generally associate with summer when watermelon is in season and people grill outside in warm weather.

As Nia Harris observed in her email to NYU officials, watermelon is not in season, so maybe the choice struck some as odd - but would slices of actual watermelon have made the meal seem racially offensive?

My blog post about the Jamaican two-man bobsled team's watermelon-themed helmets at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi came to mind when I first read the story about the NYU dining hall menu.

Something that some viewers wouldn't have considered as having anything to do with race - but others like me, saw as having a distinctly racial aspect to it in light of the degrading imagery I mentioned above.

Regardless of where one stands on it, the NYU menu dust-up is a pretty interesting look at how race is perceived in America.

NYU student Nia Harris' Facebook photo

Admittedly, I was quite taken aback at some of the many heated replies Nia Harris received on her Facebook page in reply to her posting the email she sent to the NYU officials - a number of people were downright hostile to her.

Some guy called her a "snowflake" for being overly sensitive, another girl fat-shamed her and criticized her for being overweight.

It's not like Nia Harris took over the NYU campus or blew something up.

She just wrote an email expressing how something she saw made her feel as a woman of color on a college campus.



The reaction to the story is an example of how deeply racism circulates within the depths of the collective American psyche.

I honestly don't know if there's a "who's right or who's wrong" to this story.

But it offers insight into how quickly deeply-ingrained prejudices can bubble up to the surface, triggered by seemingly innocent or harmless things (like a menu or a fruit) that can be perceived as being linked to darker, more sinister aspects of this nation's history.

The reactions to her email posted on her Facebook page serve as a reminder that even though we're in the 21st century, it's easy to underestimate the degree to which racism, or prejudiced thinking has permeated American society.

And it shouldn't come as a surprise when we see it on the campuses of institutions of higher learning; after all, what are college campuses but microcosms of our larger society?

Again, I don't think it's fair that Aramark fired the two cooks, but the speed with which they did demonstrates that as a corporation, Aramark clearly learned from the debacle with Chili's back in 2016 when an insensitive manager named Wesley Patrick took away the food of a black U.S. Army veteran in Cedar Hill, Texas simply because an old dude in a Trump t-shirt made a loose accusation.

Perhaps, if this NYU dining hall-incident inspired such spirited debate on social media, maybe that watermelon-flavored water those two cooks made was actually a positive thing overall?

Funny there was no mention of how it actually tasted.

Students Lobby For Gun Control - Republicans Hatch A Conspiracy

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel visits 15 YO
Florida shooting survivor Anthony Borges on Sunday 

Today marks one week since 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz left 17 students and faculty members dead during a deadly shooting rampage - one of 34 mass shootings in the United States in 2018.

While it's been seven days since Cruz fired more than a 100 rounds into classrooms and hallways in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, today marks a monumental shift in the polarizing debate over gun control in America.

For most Americans who listened to some of the emotionally-wrenching testimony and comments earlier today at the White House in what was described as a listening session, it was hard not be affected by their words and the emotion in their voices.


With Republican lawmakers on the national and state level being eviscerated by mainstream popular opinion during the past week because of their willingness to place their slavish obedience to NRA gun money and archaic interpretations of the 2nd Amendment over public safety and reason, GOP leaders were forced to do something Wednesday they rarely do.

Listen to advocates of gun control as well as some of the victims and relatives of victims of the epic gun violence (there were 15,593 gun deaths in America in 2017) that is ripping this country apart.

If you didn't get a chance to hear the anguish and anger of Andrew Pollack, the only parent of one of the 17 killed in Parkland, Florida to attend the White House event earlier yesterday, take a couple minutes to check out Julie Hirschfeld Davis' New York Times article and watch the 27-second clip of him laying Trump out, or read his comments.

Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was one of the 17 killed last Wednesday, asked the question that so many different Americans of different ages, backgrounds, ethnicities and faiths have wanted to ask some of the Republican politicians who now control all three branches of the federal government:

"How many schools, how many children have to get shot?"

Thousands of students rallied outside the state
capitol building in Tallahassee, Florida

18-year-old Samuel Zeif, a student who survived the shooting last week but lost his best friend, asked Trump how it was that someone can still just basically walk into a store in Florida and purchase an AR-15 after the deaths in Columbine and Sandy Hook.

He's one of many Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS students who have appeared on mainstream national news outlets or social media to express outrage and dismay over notoriously lax gun laws.


Intentionally-watered down Florida gun control laws that gave us "Stand Your Ground"  and allowed a disturbed individual like Nikolas Cruz to purchase an AR-15, large amounts of ammunition and tactical vests without any red flags popping up.

According to a source that spoke with CNN, investigators say that Cruz purchased at least 10 different rifles; but his adopted parents claim there was nothing unusual about his behavior.

Sadly what's not unusual is the reaction of many conservative far-right extremists, who've taken to social media in droves to denounce the MSDHS students as part of some kind of liberal plot to strip away the rights of gun owners.

It's actually remarkable to watch the loony "pizza-gate" faction of the right-wing conspiracy troll movement become enraged by high school students who just survived the 9th worst mass shooting in U.S. history exercising their 1st Amendment right to free speech.

Remember, these are the same folks who fetishize the 2nd Amendment as if it was hewn into rock by a deity that sanctions the slaughter of thousands of Americans each year.

Republican Florida political aide Ben Kelly fired
for forwarding right-wing conspiracy theories 

Don't think that kind of right-wing nutbaggery was limited to anonymous trolls hanging around in the murky corners of Reddit conservative conspiracy porn pages either.

As Tampa Bay Times reporter Alex Leary reported yesterday, Benjamin Kelly, the district secretary for Republican Florida state legislator Shawn Harrison, was fired after he claimed that MSDHS students Emma Gonzales and David Hogg were not students at the school but "actors that travel to various crisis when they happen." 

Both students, survivors of the shooting, have appeared on TV frequently in the past few days calling for stiffer gun control laws.

So trolls started the rumor that they were actors paid by left-wing gun control advocates and immediately started demonizing them - sound like a familiar tactic?

Frankly that's is right down there with Alex Jones' wacky claims that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.

If you can stomach it, check out Travis Andrews and Samantha Schmidt's Washington Post article (reprinted in the Chicago Tribune), which offers a sampling of the right-wing sleaze bag all stars who came out of the woodwork to fan the flames of fake conservative conspiracy theories.

Dinesh D'Souza kibittzing with Steve Bannon

Including ex-Fox News serial sexual harasser Bill O'Reilly and the fake-Christian conservative adulterer Dinesh D'Souza.

Whose windbag conservative pseudo-intellectualism has long since been relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party.

Why would a guy with a life-long Ronald Regan fetish take to social media to dance by the fire of a loony 3rd rate conspiracy theory?

Now that there's no Obama for D'Souza to bash, perhaps he was desperate to kick up a fuss and earn some street cred with the Trump-happy alt-right movement that ironically sees him as a dark-skinned foreign threat.

D'Souza had the gall to to use his Twitter account to mock MSDHS high school students who travelled to the Florida state capitol building to spend the day furiously lobbying over 70 different state lawmakers to enact stiffer gun control laws.

In an effort to show who's the adult and who's the child, when the Florida state House voted down a measure to debate a bill that would ban assault weapons, D'Souza gleefully mocked the high school students who had the guts to try and influence the political process. 

Sadly, these shameless conservative attacks on these high school students (who have the nerve not to want to be shot and killed in their own school because of shitty gun control laws) were not to promote a rational policy position or anything, or offer substantive debate on the merits of the 2nd Amendment.

No, it was just to try and paint high school students who witnessed 17 classmates gunned down in cold blood in the halls of their school seven days ago as liars and opportunists.

Ladies and gents, I give you the modern Republican Party; whose tone-deaf actions in Florida over the past couple days probably just recruited a whole new generation of Democrats.

Playing Politics With American Lives

Ghanian immigrant Emmanuel Mensah died saving
four people from a fire in the Bronx in December

Yesterday 23-year-old Private First Class Emmanuel Mensah, a legal permanent resident from the west African nation of Ghana, was laid to rest after a funeral at Our Lady of Mount Caramel Catholic Church in Belmont, NY.

Mensah was a decorated member of the Army National Guard who died on the night of December 28th after repeatedly going back into a raging fire in a Bronx building to save four people.

Started by a child playing with a gas stove, it was the deadliest New York fire in 25 years, a blaze that eventually killed 13 people.

Mensah, who was visiting relatives on the first floor of the building when the fire broke out, could have easily saved himself.

But he went back into the burning building three separate times to rescue others, and eventually collapsed and died of smoke inhalation on the fourth floor of the building while trying to save a fifth person.

He was posthumously awarded the New York State Medal of Valor and the Soldier's Medal - the U.S. Army's highest honor awarded for bravery in non-combat. 

As Rich Shapiro reported for the NY Daily News on Saturday, during his eulogy Cardinal Timothy Dolan observed: 

"In the selfless valor, the instinctive willingness to sacrifice and give his all, Emmanuel was God with us, reminding us of the most noble calling of the human person, to give ourselves in sacrifice and love to others." 

Mensah's courage stands in stark contrast to the Trump administration's almost ceaseless attempts to vilify immigrants to the United States, legal or undocumented, who happen to be people of color, Hispanic or Muslims.

Young immigrants rallying for DACA

Trump's strange near-obsession with trying to unravel the achievements of the Obama administration, regardless of the impact on the American people, the economy, the environment or the nation's reputation overseas, is well documented.

But his poorly-thought out decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy last fall was a misguided and reactionary move to eliminate a fragile but logical temporary fix to the larger immigration issue - one that wasn't perfect, but it worked.

By taking a wrecking ball to DACA, Trump sought to fire up his primary base of support, working class white people who'd been left dismayed and marginalized by an increasingly globalized economy.

Angry people left on the fringes of a shrinking middle-class devastated by a brutal combination of the Great Recession, the mortgage housing crisis, stagnant wages and a decades-long trend of U.S. corporations shifting manufacturing jobs (and the huge range of jobs and small businesses that supported that manufacturing) to overseas countries to take advantage of cheaper labor, favorable tax loopholes and more lax labor laws.

Think about those large numbers of understandably frustrated working class whites who came out in droves in 2015 and 2016 during the presidential campaign to collectively vent their pent up anger at Trump rallies.

People who spent their hard-earned money on Trump's red "Make America Great Again" hats, and cheered as they bought into Trump's con-game that all their problems could be conveniently laid at the feet of legal and undocumented immigrants.

Was it easier for Trump supporters to vent their
fury against immigrants instead of bankers?

You never saw really saw those red-state Trump supporters coming out in the streets to protest the Wall Street con artists, greedy bankers, insurance giants and corrupt rating agencies that conspired to reap trillions of dollars in profits after systematically slicing people's mortgages up into risky financial products before crashing the economy.

Do you recall seeing crowds of Trump supporters marching in the streets or outside the offices of AIG, Goldman-Sachs, Bank of America or Chase?


In fact, Fox News, the primary news source for those Trump's supporters, like other major media outlets, tended to dismiss and even mock the grassroots Occupy Wall Street protests that broke out in 2011 - and as Brian Stelter observed in a 11/20/11 New York Times article, mainstream media analysis as a whole tended to ignore the deeper substantive issues behind the movement.

But five years later, those same Trump supporters were quick to agree when "Mr. Art of the Deal" insisted that immigrants were to blame for all their woes and that building a big-ass wall along the southern border with Mexico would make everything better.

Fast forward to September, 2017.

With his oft-repeated campaign promise that Mexico would pay for the wall now exposed as one of his many lies, and the Republican-controlled Congress nowhere near green-lighting funding to build it, an increasingly frustrated Trump turned his notoriously short attention span to lower hanging fruit on the political tree.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announcing that
DACA is being rescinded in September, 2017  

In an example of poorly-thought out political strategy colored by overt ethnic and racial bias, the Trump administration thought that by rescinding DACA, he could take a swipe at Obama and reassure his impatient base that he was taking aim at hard-working immigrants.

And also absolve himself of any responsibility for the gargantuan bureaucratic mess he made by simply shifting the blame for it onto Congress.

Trump had Attorney General Jeff Sessions announce it on 9/5/17.

So think about that, Trump revokes DACA under the justification that Obama creating it was an overreach of executive authority.

Then he "gives" Congress six months to pass legislation to enact a more permanent fix for one of the most pressing immigration problems that Obama created DACA to address - because Congress had refused to do anything about it for years.

As a reminder of just  how absurd that is, remember that back in June of 2012, after more than ten years of Congress bickering over how to pass legislation that would offer undocumented immigrants a legal pathway to citizenship, President Obama took action.

With a Republican-controlled House of Representatives dominated by a right-wing "Freedom Caucus" that had pledged to oppose anything that he proposed, because well, the president was black, Obama issued an executive order creating DACA.

President Obama announcing the creating of DACA
back in June of 2012

DACA was intended for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children by their parents.

Only those without felonies or serious misdemeanors on their records would be eligible - and as a condition of the program, every two years they would have to have their DACA status renewed.

The only thing DACA does is defer deportation and grant recipients a work permit so they can show up for work (and contribute taxes to the U.S. economy) without fear of being deported.

Despite Republican hysteria over the program, only about 800,000 immigrants were enrolled in DACA as of 2017 - that's 800,000 people out of an approximate total U.S. population of 326,766,748 people.

That's 0.11% of the U.S. population.

Where DACA is concerned, Trump and some of the Republican politicians who currently control the legislative process want to have their political cake and eat it too.

Trump rescinded DACA, then gave the Republican-controlled Congress six months to pass legislation they've been unable or unwilling to pass for almost two decades.

So either Trump is delusional and has no idea how the legislative process actually functions, or he knows it's unlikely Congress can get it's shit together and send a workable bill to the president's desk to be signed into law. 

Obviously it's called "politics" for a reason, but it's getting pretty tiresome watching the Republican-controlled House and Senate ping-pong back and forth over granting the so-called Dreamers a proper pathway to citizenship.

GOP Senators James Lankford (OK) & Tom Cotton
(AK) discussing an immigration bill last Monday

Last week two different versions of bills that would have granted a pathway to citizenship were both voted down in the Senate by margins well below the 60 votes that would have been needed to pass them.

One of the bills would have granted about 1.8 million Dreamers a 10 to 15-year process for citizenship and a staggering $25 billion for Trump's long-coveted wall.

The bills failed to pass the Senate because the White House has signaled that Trump will veto any bill that doesn't contain money to fund his wall.

And by now it's clear that most Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate think such a wall is a total waste of taxpayer money.

Many experts, including researchers and small business owners who live and work along the border areas where the wall would be constructed agree isn't feasible, appropriate for the environment, or needed for a variety of reasons.

Including the simple fact that undocumented migration from Mexico has been shrinking steadily since 2007 according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Left in the middle of all this are millions of undocumented immigrants, of which the Dreamers in the DACA program make up only a small percentage.

Frankly I'm not sure I really like the term "Dreamer" because it comes from the Dream Act which was originally proposed by Congress 17 years ago back in 2001 - calling people Dreamers associates them with Congress' failure to pass comprehensive immigration legislation.

To me, slapping a label on thousands of people who were either born in, or brought here to the United States at an early age by parents who came here as undocumented immigrants, tends to have the effect of making it easier to dehumanize them.

Soldiers carry Pfc. Emmanuel Mensah's casket
after his funeral service in the Bronx on Saturday 

Something that Trump seems to relish and obsess over, like when he made headlines back in December by calling African and South American countries "shitholes" during a meeting at the White House.

Crudely parroting his white supremacist senior adviser Stephen Miller by wondering aloud to shocked Congressional attendees why the U.S. should accept immigrants from those countries.

Immigrants like Pfc. Emmanuel Mensah, who gave his life to save his fellow Americans.

Like it or not, by definition these individuals are Americans, people who live and attend school or work here in the United State - some have even served (or are serving) in the U.S. military.

It's not my job to decide these things, but as an average reasonable-minded American, as far as I'm concerned if you sign up to serve in the military, you're automatically a U.S. citizen.

Maybe the term of service would have to be a little longer than two years in the same sense that graduates of the Naval Academy or West Point must serve a minimum of five years after graduating, but serving Uncle Sam makes you an American in my book - period.

Regardless it's past time Congress stepped up to the plate to pass comprehensive legislation, they've been talking about it for more than twenty years.

Maybe, as some members of Congress have suggested, they need to do this in steps and first pass a clean DACA bill as a first step - there's bipartisan support to make that happen.

However they do it, it's not fair for Trump to hold up DACA legislation because he wants money for his ill-advised pet wall project.

Undocumented immigrants have been a part of the fabric of this nation since it was founded, it's about time Congress start dealing with it like informed adults.

And it's past time that Trump stops playing politics with American lives.

Waiting For Republicans - The Slaughter Continues

Accused killer Nikolas Cruz at his arraignment

Trump's live comments on Thursday in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida seemed like more of the same old useless bunk that most Republican politicians repeat in the wake of the numerous mass shootings that now take place with alarming regularity in America.

Republican lawmakers have controlled the House of Representatives for seven years, and they haven't passed a single piece of legislation that would help to curb the epidemic of gun violence in America.

Not one single law. Not so much as a single bill. Nothing.

Instead of the action outraged Americans from all all over the country are demanding, all we're getting from apathetic Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill is that contrived, mournful shaking of their heads and collective shrugging of their shoulders - like they have no power to do anything.

It's as if they're channeling the characters Vladimir and Estragon, from the influential post-WWII play written by Samuel Beckett back in 1948, Waiting For Godot, wringing their hands in hopeless despair repeating the phrase "Nothing to be done!"

Instead of waiting for Godot, Republican lawmakers, already nervous about the upcoming midterm elections in November, are awkwardly doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association and waiting for the outrage over 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz gunning down 17 innocent people in a Florida High School (with an AR-15 assault rifle he purchased legally) to simply go away.

What's interesting is that both Trump and his sycophant Attorney General-lackey Jeff Sessions both tossed around tough-talking dog-whistle phrases about "having the back of law enforcement" during the 2016 presidential campaign and the subsequent shaky first year in office.

Frequently vilifying President Obama while presenting themselves as saviors of law enforcement.

Trump endorsing police brutality in front of members
of the Long Island PD back in July, 2017

One of Sessions' very first policy statements after his nomination to head the Justice Department was passed by the Senate was to reverse the many consent agreements between the DOJ and local police departments.

Police departments across the country in places like Chicago, Baltimore and Ferguson with proven histories of racially-biased policing practices.

Many cops favored those DOJ consent decrees to enact long-needed reforms.

Even though the DOJ itself had spent time and money compiling data showing that such decrees were needed to reestablish trust between local police departments and the communities they serve, Sessions' bizarre rationale for revoking them was that reversing these agreements, drafted under the Obama administration when Eric Holder was attorney general, would actually make it easier for members of local law enforcement to do their jobs.

As if police departments being held to the standards spelled out in the Constitution was some kind of annoying burden imposed on cops by President Obama out of spite.

Last July, Fake President travelled out to Long Island, New York to trumpet his supposed adoration of cops to try and bolster public support for his irrational xenophobic hatred of immigrants by trying to link them to the El Salvadoran gang MS-13.

Remember Trump standing in front of members of the Long Island Police Department and basically endorsing the use of excessive physical force against suspects in custody?

Trump and Sessions were both big on painting themselves as big supporters of cops and "law and order" as a convenient dog-whistle policy stance to rally their base of hyper-conservative supporters.

But as far as gun control is concerned, are they really supporting members of law enforcement, or the National Rifle Association's pro-gun industry agenda?

Take a look at the detailed list of IACP Policy Priorities For the 115th Congress as clearly spelled out by the International Association of Chiefs of Police founded back in 1893.

Under the section titled "Reduce Firearms Violence and Target Illegal Guns", the IACP states that "A comprehensive approach is needed in order to prevent further gun violence in our communities."

Among the actions steps listed:

"Support legislation that expands background checks, and require background checks for all firearms purchases."   

And "Oppose any legislation that would limit or reduce the ability of U.S. law enforcement agencies to combat the sale of illegal guns."


It's hard to sift through the scores of scandals, firings and tweets, but try and flash back to Trump's first days in office.

One of the very first bills that he signed into law within the first thirty days of his inauguration last February was an NRA-backed law that rolled back an executive order signed by President Obama that would have made it harder for Americans with mental illnesses or those deemed unfit to handle their own finances who receive Social Security checks to obtain firearms.

As Ali Vitali reported for NBC News last February, "President Barack Obama recommended the now-nullified regulation in a 2013 memo following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School which left 20 first graders and six others dead. The measure sought to block some people with severe mental health problems from buying guns."

Yet yesterday, a subdued, almost monotone Trump, obviously reading off a teleprompter, somberly invoked "mental illness" as the culprit in the shooting deaths of 17 innocent people by Nikolas Cruz in Florida.

He didn't even mention the words "gun laws" - like the AR-15 (pictured above) with it's rapid-fire technology and high capacity magazines had nothing to do with it.

In that same NRA-approved statement, Trump made a bunch of totally half-ass empty promises to work with members of federal, state and local officials to tackle the problem of mental illness, blah-blah, blah.

Terrified students comfort one another after being
released from Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS 

What a bunch of contrived, hypocritical horse shit.

Trump is the same spineless clown who's spent three years working with heartless right-wing Republican zealots in congress to vilify and repeal the Affordable Care Act - which mandated that insurance companies provide access to treatment for mental health conditions

Frankly I find it an insult that Trump had the nerve to try and use a press conference to reassure terrified students and teachers in schools across the U.S. that he's working to keep them safe.

Since his inauguration, when he ranted incoherently about "carnage" in America, he's shown himself to be nothing but an ignorant lackey of the NRA lobbyists who pumped millions into his presidential campaign.

Apparently the same K-Street gun lobby bozos who draft the text of his comments whenever another mass shooting takes place - so a contrite Trump can place the blame not on the almost unrestricted access to firearms, but on mental illness. "Nothing to be done!"

As if the guns used in these mass shootings are somehow like an innocent bystander that had nothing to do with anything.

To paraphrase some of the thousands of comments I've read on social media in the past 48 hours, there's no sense even waiting for Republican legislators in Congress to draft laws that would prevent a white supremacist like Nikolas Cruz from walking into a store and buying an AR-15 and a bunch of ammo.

MSD High School assistant football coach Aaron
Feis who died shielding students from gunfire

Thanks to Republican state legislators and the NRA, any 18-year-old in Florida can buy an AR-15 - it's perfectly legal - they can't buy a bottle of vodka but they can purchase the undisputed weapon of choice for mass shooters.

27 people (including shooter Adam Lanza) died at Sandy Hook Elementary and in Newton, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, Republicans who controlled the House did nothing.

49 people were killed on June 12, 2016 when Omar Siddiqui Mateen went on a shooting spree at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Republicans who controlled the House offered "prayers" but did nothing to pass a law restricting firearms access.

58 were killed and almost 500 injured back on October 1, 2017 when Stephen Paddock began firing on concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

In response the Republicans who control the House, the federal legislative body tasked by the U.S. Constitution with writing laws to protect the American people, did nothing.

The only way to mobilize and follow the recommendations of organizations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police to enact reasonable restrictions on dangerous firearms like the AR-15 and components like bump stocks and high-capacity magazines is to be registered to vote in November.

When those who are feeling powerless right now will be empowered to tell lawmakers who've done nothing in the face of the unprecedented gun violence happening in American schools, churches, malls, businesses, streets, concerts and homes, exactly what you think about their apathy, silence and prayers.

In the meantime, just remember there's so sense in waiting for Republican legislators who control which bills get to the floor to be debated or voted on to act.

That's like Waiting For Godot - they'll never show up.

Ugliness in Mendham, NJ - Rick Blood Resigns

Ex-Deputy Mayor Rick Blood faces criticism after
a Mendham Township Committee meeting Monday

It's not easy to be constantly reminded of the insidious trail of slime left behind by the Trump campaign and his subsequent so-called presidency like some kind of toxic hate-filled slug that's dragged it's ugly carcass across the American landscape.

(No offense to actual slugs.)

Garden State politicians, from former Republican governor Chris Christie, to current Democratic U.S. Senator Corey Booker often cite the fact that my current home state of New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in America.

But as an ugly incident in Mendham Township, NJ on Sunday night reminds us, that doesn't make it some kind of Utopia.

Mendham, the home of former NJ governor Chris Christie, is a heavily-Republican suburban community in Morris County - the stronghold of the New Jersey Tea Party base, the latest Census data breaks Mendham demographics down to 85% white, 12% foreign-born and 1% African-American.

As William Westhoven reported in an article for the Daily Record early Tuesday morning, Mendham Township Deputy Mayor Rick Blood (pictured above) resigned in a special closed session at the end of heated 3-hour Mendham Township Committee meeting on Monday evening.

The meeting was dominated by calls for Blood's removal from office in the wake of his decision to post a bizarre, xenophobic, hate-filled article that compared immigrants to "rabid, messy, mean raccoons" on his Facebook page on Sunday night - he tried to delete the post but it's already gone viral.

Anti-racist protesters address the Mendham Township
meeting Monday night

According to Westhoven's article the vile racist rant is apparently something that has been passed back and forth between Trump supporters since 2016.

It justifies Trump's ignorance, bigotry and hatred for immigrants by likening them to coming home and discovering a basement filled with "rabid" raccoons that can only be removed by an "exterminator".

No need to guess who the "exterminator" is.

If you're interested, Rob Jennings' NJ.com article has the text of the neo-Nazi diatribe that Blood posted to his Facebook page - which was obviously written at the height of Trump's anti-immigrant fear rallies during the 2016 presidential campaign.

I first heard about this story during a segment on the Brian Lehrer Show on Tuesday morning, and it's definitely worth a listen as Brian has Mendham Township residents call in, and he also has former "Christie Tracker" journalist Matt Katz on as well.

Katz's wife, who is Jewish, comes from the nearby town of Randolph, and he speaks to some of the anti-Semitic allegations about Mendham Township.

In fact one female caller who said she was Jewish and relocated to the area with her husband claims there's a "quiet understanding" that real estate agents won't show Mendham Township homes to prospective buyers who are Jewish, and instead try and "steer" them to nearby communities.

Another caller described the community as a "conservative cocoon", insulated from other more diverse nearby communities like Morristown.

Democratic Mendham Township Committee
member Amelia Duarte 

It's hard to unpack all that and verify such comments in such a short time, but if you read some of the comments published in the Daily Record article that Mendham Township residents gave at the meeting on Monday night it's clear that a sizable and significant portion of the population were disgusted by Rick Blood's comments, demanded his resignation and emphasized that the words in the post he shared do not represent the entire community.

After blogging about Republican efforts to unfairly rig elections on the state and local level last Friday, I think it's of interest to note that several of the 70-some attendees at the Mendham Township meeting pointed out that Rick Blood, a Republican (in case you didn't guess...) was not actually elected to be Deputy Mayor.

He was appointed to the position on the committee back in December (by a group of Republicans...) a month after loosing a race for an open committee seat to Amelia Duarte (pictured above) - a Democrat whose parents came to this country from the Dominican Republic.

So Blood basically lost a race for a seat in a heavily-Republican town to a Democrat - but Republicans simply appointed him to the committee a month later anyway - talk about sketchy Republican math.

On Monday night Duarte was the one member of the Mendham Township Committee to call on Blood to resign - a move the Republican-majority committee later agreed to in a closed session after hours of testimony by residents outraged over the comments Rick Blood posted online.

I'm not sure if I'd call that Karma, but I do think it's yet another reflection of American voter's repudiation of Trump and his divisive message of hatred, bigotry and "otherism".

Time will tell if this is a snapshot for what's in store for the upcoming mid-term elections.

But the fact remains that the majority of the 70-some residents who came out for that Mendham Township meeting on a Monday night in a heavily-Republican district (including Tamara Harris, the Democratic candidate for the NJ 11th Congressional District), overwhelmingly rejected the extremist pro-Trump claptrap that Rick Blood posted on social media.

And they called for him to be removed from his seat.

That oughta tell you something about how American voters around the country are feeling right now. 

Jennie Willoughby & The Undiminished Truth

Israeli security experts examine the wreckage of
an Israeli F-16 that was shot down on Saturday

Last night I stopped by my local in Lawrenceville, New Jersey to have a couple drinks and pick up a six-pack before heading to dinner at a friend's house over in nearby West Windsor.

My friend Patrick made an interesting observation about Donald Trump that stuck with me.

Pat is a white, married father and small business owner in his early 60's.

He was born in Germany but has been a U.S. citizen for decades.

We often chat about history, current events and books, after I made an off-hand remark about a news item that rolled across the ticker at the bottom of the screen on one of the TV's mounted over the small bar, Patrick shook his head and lamented the fact that so much of the mainstream media's focus these days revolves around Trump.

To the degree that more important stories don't seem to get adequate coverage.

For example, earlier this morning the BBC News reported that an Israeli Air Force F-16 crashed near the Israeli town of Harduf after suffering heavy damage from Syrian anti-aircraft fire (pictured above).

According to the BBC that was the first Israeli fighter jet to crash in combat since 2006.

The warplane was attacking targets inside Syria after Israel claims an Iranian drone crossed the border between the Golan Heights region in northeastern Israel and Syria's southwestern border.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

The Israeli jet took out the Iranian drone before being shot down, and in response to the F-16 being shot down, the Israeli's ordered another airstrike inside Syria to destroy unnamed targets.

An Iranian drone operating from Syria crossing the Israeli border is a troubling escalation in an already-tense conflict where the U.S. and Russia are just some of the players on the ground in a Syria wracked by civil war and a massive humanitarian crisis.

It was just last Saturday that David D. Kirkpatrick's New York Times article shed light on the secret alliance between Israel and Egypt that has allowed unmarked Israeli jets, helicopters and drones to carry out extensive airstrikes against jihadists loyal to the Islamic State in the northern Sinai region of Egypt.

I'm not a defense expert, but ordering airstrikes in response to a drone flying over a border strikes me as more than a bit heavy-handed - and I'm sure it has nothing to do with Israeli police announcing their intent to file corruption charges against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday...

The deadly Israeli airstrikes, more than 100 in the past two years, and the alliance between these two former foes, mark a significant shift in the complex ongoing geopolitical conflicts raging across parts of the Middle East - including Syria, Iran, Egypt and Yemen.

As Seth Harp reported in an eye-opening Rolling Stone article last fall, the U.S. military currently has thousands of personnel stationed in Syria (though they don't like to talk about it), so this escalation on the border between Israel and Syria should be getting more American media attention.

Ex-White House secretary Rob Porter handing
Trump an executive order to sign theatricaly 

But as my friend Pat lamented last night, so much of American mainstream media news coverage seems devoted to the chaos of the Trump presidency, that more important stories are relegated to the proverbial sidelines.

Trump's publicly defending ex-White House secretary Rob Porter in the wake of the latter's resignation over troubling allegations of domestic abuse from two of his ex-wives is just the latest example.

This latest tone-deaf gaffe has once again placed the thrice-married POTUS on the wrong side of the current #MeToo movement - not a bright move from a guy who's been accused of sexual misconduct by no less than sixteen different women.

Not only did he defend the White House keeping Porter on staff for over a year despite the fact that his domestic abuse charges kept him from passing a mandatory FBI background check, 45 also used his Twitter feed to undermine the accusations leveled against Porter as well as the #MeToo movement. 

It's hard to gauge what the 52% of white American women who voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election thought of all this, but senior White House adviser and resident denialist Kellyanne Conway insisted that Trump "shows great compassion" for women during an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on This Week this morning.

Which is kind of like saying that xenophobic white supremacist White House advisor Stephen Miller shows "great compassion" for immigrants.

Was Conway suggesting Trump showed "great compassion" towards his 3rd wife Melania when he was carrying on an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels while wife # 3 was pregnant with their son Barron?

Rob Porter's ex-wife Jennie Willoughby

To her credit (and courage) Porter's ex-wife Jennie Willoughby was quick to push back publicly against Trump's defense of yet another Republican accused of sexual misconduct or domestic abuse.

Willoughby appeared on CNN to insist that despite Trump and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly publicly defending her former husband's character, Porter has some serious issues.


She also wrote a very interesting and thoughtful op-ed piece published on Time.com this morning titled, "President Trump Will Not Diminish My Truth" that is definitely worth a read.

In it Willoughby, an eloquent writer, expresses dismay at having to endure the humiliation of Trump publicly insinuating that she, and Porter's other ex-wife Colbie Holderness (whose photo of a black eye she supposedly got from Porter went public) were liars.

But she doesn't come off as being vindictive, bitter or some kind of "spurned woman" with an axe to grind as Trump and his top White House advisers have tried to paint her.

Willoughby comes of as intelligent, thoughtful and above all "woke" - she clearly knows exactly who she is and exactly what happened to her; and she makes Trump, John Kelly and Kellyanne Conway all look like insensitive, uninformed reactionary idiots for having the nerve to defend Porter as some kind of upstanding citizen who was victimized.

Seriously, click the link above and take a few minutes to read her words.

Willoughby offers some remarkable perspective on the larger issue of society's tendency to cast doubt upon those who level accusations of domestic abuse or sexual misconduct; she also expresses compassion for her ex-husband and recognition that he needs serious help.

Rob Porter's ex-wife Colbie Holderness 

"Everyone wants to talk about how Trump implied I am not to be believed. As if Trump is the model of kindness and forgiveness. As if he readily acknowledges his own shortcomings and shows empathy and concern for others. 

I forgive him. Thankfully, my strength and worth are not dependent on outside belief - the truth exists whether the president accepts it or not." 

As Willoughby writes, we as an American society are afraid of revealing unpleasant secrets that shed light on the reality of who we really are as a people - as she observes:

"It's as if we have a societal blindspot that creates an obstacle to understanding. Society as a whole doesn't acknowledge the reality of abuse."

As my friend Patrick observed last night, it's a real shame that Trump's own ignorance and personal conduct takes up as much of the media's attention as it does.

But in the same vein, as Jennie Willoughby wrote, "the truth exists", and the American media is duty-bound to report the truth of Donald Trump - if they'd done more of that in 2015 - 2016 he might not have been elected in the first place.

The sheer volume of headlines and space on Websites, television news coverage, newspapers and magazines taken up by the never-ending chaos of Trump's existence is staggering in the annals of American history - unprecedented scandal upon scandal on a scale never seen before.

If the press has to cover that non-stop until either the midterm elections or the Russia investigation brings about his removal from office - so be it.

As long as the truth that Jennie Willoughby writes about is not diminished.