Epic Mar-a-No-No: Al Franken 2020?

Mika Brzezinski's Twitter response
to Trump's buffoonery

After reading about Donald Trump's remarkably juvenile insults earlier this morning aimed at MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, I'm officially turning my focus to the 2020 presidential race.    

It's a bit early, sure, but why not?

America's resident liar-in-chief stunned political observers by holding a $35,000-a-plate campaign funding event on Wednesday evening just over four months into his so-called presidency.

An event Norm Eisen, who served as the top ethics lawyer under President Obama, called a clear violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution because it was held at a Trump-owned hotel located in a building he leases from the U.S. government.

Maybe Republicans define "Making America Great Again" as totally ignoring laws that govern ethics?

If you're reading this you've likely heard that Trump's trite misogynistic comments were widely criticized by leading Republican and Democratic politicians - and Brzezinski herself shot back with a tweet (pictured above) featuring a box of Cheerios that served as a not-so-subtle shot at 45's notoriously tiny hands.

The whole debacle was made worse by Scarborough and Brzezinski's revelation this morning that Trump's politically-inexperienced lackey-son-in-law Jared Kushner personally relayed his delusional father-in-law's threat to use his ties with David Pecker, the owner of the company that owns the sleazy grocery store gossip rag National Inquirer, to prevent a piece trashing the MSNBC duo from being published if they would publicly apologize to the astonishingly thin-skinned president.

While most people would consider it beneath the dignity of the office of the president to engage in crass blackmail, is hardly a surprising tactic for Trump.

And for all the outrage Trump's latest tweet has generated, there's little question it was intended to do one thing only - to distract.

Especially given the bombshell report by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday about a May interview in which former conservative political operative Peter W. Smith admitted working with Russian hackers to try and hack Hillary Clinton's email server in order to give the information to Michael Flynn - who was serving as the national security adviser for the Trump campaign.

"Opposition researcher" Peter W. Smith

Political wonks may recall Smith, described by Wall Street Journal reporter Shane Harris as "a private equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics",  as one of the ideological sleaze-bags responsible for dredging up unproven accusations by former Arkansas State Troopers of marital infidelity by former President Bill Clinton in the 90's.

Did Smith really sink to the same level of partisan obsession to try and actively work with Russian hackers (during the 2016 presidential campaign no less) in order to try and illegally access Hilary Clinton's private emails in order to intentionally torpedo her chances of being elected?

The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch and hardly a bastion of liberal political perspective, certainly thinks so based on Harris' article published on Thursday.

I'm ready to get behind a candidate now.

And based on the political calendar, the 2020 presidential race isn't actually that far off.

Considering the disaster that befell the American people last November and the terrifying ramifications of the loony political agenda of the current Republican-majority House and Senate, 2020 is quickly shaping up to be one of the most important presidential elections for the Democratic Party in decades.

One of the more interesting political profiles I've read lately was Mark Binelli's piece on the progressive Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken in the June 15th issue of Rolling Stone.

From my perspective, the former Saturday Night Live writer and occasional cast-member is quickly shaping up to be the progressive front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Think that's far-fetched?

Remember one of the normal prerequisites of any American presidential candidate (the afore-mentioned Trump excepted) is the publication of a memoir that reveals something substantive about who they are, where they come from, and what their vision for the country is.

Democratic Senator Al Franken

Franken has already checked that box having lately been out and about promoting his appropriately irreverently-titled new memoir Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.

The other morning Franken was interviewed on the Brian Lehrer Show to share his insights on the pending Republican healthcare bill, why voters are attracted to Trump and his reflections on the bedrock values of the Democratic Party.

I think this guy is the kind of president this country needs now more than ever.


Franken is a well-informed intellectual progressive policy-wonk who has acknowledged the former Democratic Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone as a political mentor and who knows and understands the minutiae of the policy that lies behind political legislation.

As his deft handling of the questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee during recent hearings on Russian influence in the 2016 presidential elections demonstrates, this guy can hold his own in complex investigations on Capitol Hill.

From a progressive political standpoint this guy is the real deal.

During the Republican-engineered government shutdown in 2013, he donated his Senate salary to a Minnesota-based hunger relief organization called Second Harvest Heartland.

As Mark Binelli wrote in his June 15th Rolling Stone piece, Franken has effectively utilized his more than ten years as a comedy writer for SNL to help "shape the modern comedic voice of lefty dissent - pointed fact-checking as mocking entertainment - that would become de rigueur on shows like The Daily Show and its many spawn."  

From a progressive standpoint he can arguably be called a visionary of 21st century politics.

But more importantly, this is a guy who stands up for the common man, not because he's checking off some box, but because it's the right thing to do, it's what he believes in, and because that's the kind of man he is.

So let me close out the month of June by saying that Al Franken is the kind of man that Americans could get behind as the Democratic candidate for president in 2020 - and for what it's worth I don't say that lightly.

In my next blog, I'll share a story about a personal encounter I had with him in New York City that illustrates his natural inclination to stand up for the little guy.

The Asterisk President

Well I can't say that I grinned, but I did manage to bear the entirety of Donald Trump's inaugural speech earlier today.

It wasn't the longest inaugural speech in history, William Henry Harrison spoke for a grueling one hour and 45 minutes on March 4, 1841.

Nor was it the shortest, that honor goes to George Washington's two paragraph speech for his second inaugural address.

After all of Trump's divisive campaign rhetoric and alienation of large segments of the American populace, many were expecting to hear something that at least remotely resembled a call for national unity from today's inaugural address.

But his roughly 20-minute speech turned out to be little more than a pitch to his base (the 38% of Americans who approve of him), a pitch that we've heard before.

From my perspective, it was mostly an unremarkable repetition of the exact same lofty campaign promises that Trump has used over and over during his campaign rallies.

And just like his often rambling speaking style, today's speech was laced with simplistic kinds of pie-in-the-sky promises and devoid of any kinds of policy specifics - lot's of colorful frosting but very little cake. 

There was no shortage of the vague platitudes or blatant hypocrisy that have become his hallmarks.

Kellyanne Conway rocks retro-Republican chic

On the one hand he opened the speech with lofty, almost pious assurances about power being returned to the people.

He talked about bringing back jobs, reigniting hopes and dreams and repeated the same promises he's made to his support base in the rust belt and rural regions of the country.

Trump assured the crowd that, "We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, and never do anything about it."

But then just hours after making those comments, as Alan Pyke reported for ThinkProgress.org Trump sat down with congressional leaders and promptly revoked a cut in fee rates for mortgages that the Department of Housing and Urban Development passed eleven days ago.

The cut in fee rates would have saved mostly poor homeowners with loans insured through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) up to $500 a year and would have made it easier for homeowners with poor credit to obtain mortgages.

How many of the millions of Americans who have FHA-insured mortgages voted for Trump?

And remember folks, he did that just hours after taking office; try to imagine what next week is going to be like.

During the speech he also spoke of building roads, bridges and infrastructure, but how's he planning to do that with a do-nothing Republican congress that vilifies any type of government spending that isn't related to tax cuts for the 1%, military spending, or tax-payer funded subsidies for fossil fuel companies?

Is he aware that he's inheriting THE most unproductive congress in American history? The same one that totally rejected President Obama's proposals to pass a huge infrastructure spending bill (to do the same things Trump promised) and put Americans to work? 

Trump supporters cheer as Republican congressman
prepare to try and gut their Social Security

Instead of offering up an optimistic view of the country, he went back to his vision of a nation on the verge of sinking into the abyss.

The unemployment rate is the lowest in 40 years, the economy has been steadily growing and crime is the lowest it's been in decades, but as he did in his frightening speech at the RNC convention, he once again painted a dark and bleak picture of America.

As he spoke of crime, drugs and inner cities on the verge of the Apocalypse, Trump channeled his inner Dirty Harry and boasted, "This American carnage stops right here."

Remember that's from the same guy who pledged to revoke the federal ban on guns in school zones.

Oh and speaking of "American carnage", according to statistics and data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, in 2016 there were 385 mass shootings in the U.S. and 15,039 deaths related to firearms.

Over the course of the campaign, as Trump sought to push the buttons that energize the Republican voter base, he's been little more than a spineless lackey to the NRA - so I'm curious what his plan to stop the "carnage" is going to be.

As for the 3,780 American children between 0 - 17 years of age who were injured or killed by firearms in 2016, perhaps he's depending on a divine intervention; after all during the speech today he did say, "Most importantly we will be protected by God."

Let's hope so. We certainly won't be protected by this Republican congress who are essentially bought and paid for by the NRA; same congress who've killed over 100 pieces of gun control legislation introduced despite over 400,000 Americans losing their lives to firearms since 911

Nazi salutes were a common sign at Trump rallies

In the wake of Trump unleashing his inner Roy Cohn on Georgia Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis over the Martin Luther King holiday recently, one would have thought today's inauguration speech would've been an ideal opportunity for him to express some kind of desire for racial reconciliation or unity.

Instead he offered up a single vague sentence.

"When you open your heart to patriotism there's no room for prejudice." 

Maybe the white nationalists and Neo-Nazis who gave Nazi salutes at an alt-right conference in Washington back in November to celebrate Trump's election (or the Klan members who marched in celebration) will take that into consideration.

Trump neglected to mention the more than 800 incidents of hate and hate crimes that took place across the U.S. after he was elected; but perhaps the patriotism he repeatedly mentioned during the speech today will take care of that.

Speaking of patriotism there were some pretty strange authoritarian tones in the speech too, he exhorted the crowd to "Buy American and hire American." - despite the fact that the clothes that both he and his daughter Ivanka sell are made in other countries.

How all this is going to play out in a global economy remains to be seen.

Protesters in Washington, D.C. [Photo - Getty Images]

But it's clear that on the domestic front we're going to see varying degrees of chaos in the coming days - 95 people were arrested in D.C. during anti-Trump protests that rocked pockets of the city.

Trump's one day honeymoon is pretty much over, tomorrow hundreds of thousands of people in cities across America and the globe will be taking part in various extensions of the Women's March on Washington - including your's truly.

The mobilization of a sustained, nationwide progressive opposition to Trump and the Republican Party really starts tomorrow morning.

It's been a long week at work and I really wanted to sleep in on Saturday, instead I'm getting up at 7am to meet up with my mother, sister, niece and friends of the family to head into Trenton to march.

As President Obama reminded us, Democracy isn't easy, it's hard; and it's going to take hard work to unravel what's taken root in Washington and in state legislatures across the country.

For thousands of Americans, Saturday is a work day - I'll let you know how it goes in Trenton.

But regardless, the tone of the Republican campaign, the flood of fake news, the interference in our electoral process by Vladimir Putin and Comey's release of an FBI letter days before the election alleging evidence about Hillary Clinton's emails that turned out to have been nothing leave a dark cloud of illegitimacy over the man who was sworn into office today.

And as former White House ethics lawyers Richard Painter and Norm Eisen discussed on an episode of NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross the other night, Trump's conflicts of interests related to his businesses are so extensive and unknown that he could very well find his time in office marred by investigations or charges related to violations of the Constitution.

He is, in the minds of many, a president with a large asterisk.