I’m guessing TH Luhrmann was trying to be reassuring. In a piece published Tuesday in The Atlantic, the Stanford professor of anthropology argued that Amy Coney Barrett, as the next justice on the US Supreme Court, will be less predictable than her critics contend. This is because of “the possibility that she will interpret God as speaking in ways that she, and the broader conservative world, might not have anticipated.”

Amy Coney Barrett is a woman who has lived out a radical critique of the modern world. She will be less vulnerable to the peer pressure of other judges than many might be, because she has a powerful moral compass, developed out of her own experience in prayer. Yes, she will likely oppose Roe v. Wade if the opportunity arises. Yes, she will likely take conservative positions. But she has a radical streak and an intensely personal God, and we should expect some surprises from her.

Like I said, I’m sure Luhrmann means well, but she isn’t skeptical enough. It’s one thing to say Barrett comes from People of Praise, “one of many communities formed in the heady days of the late 1960s and early ’70s, when many Americans became hippies and then Christians, drawn by a radical critique of the mainstream world and the sense that by living differently together, they could bring change into the world.”

It’s another thing to presume that will matter to a 48-year-old woman who will help shape American jurisprudence for two generations. Power has a way of changing people.

In Luhrmann’s piece I detect moreover a specter that haunts the public square when it comes to the Christian faith. How can Christians of all people be all right with taking health care away from 20 million Americans? How can Christians condone taking babies away from emigrating mothers? How can Christians tolerate banning Islam? How can these people, who profess to believe in love and kindness, do such things?

The answer comes in two simple parts. One, Christians can be terrible people. Two, Christians can be terrible Christians. Who they say they are might not be the same thing as who they really are. Faith, as we Unitarian-Universalists like to say, doesn’t mean much till it’s in practice. Only then can we assess whether it’s good or bad.

Fact is, for lots of Christians, especially the anarchic sort with whom Barrett has chosen to associate, loving God isn’t the point so much as fearing Him. God, they believe, will damn them to an eternity of pain and suffering if they don’t do as He says. This version of God is petty, vindictive and mean — and an outrage to anyone of any faith worshiping a loving God — but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is obedience. To obey is to be good. To disobey is to be bad. Love is fear. Morality is authority. “A powerful moral compass,” as Luhrmann said it, sounds great, but on whose authority?

Since Donald Trump was elected, Barrett has been talked of as a potential Supreme Court pick, and there’s a very good reason for that. She’d be the final step in a decades’ long series of steps not only to overturn Roe but also establish a de facto state religion.

I’m obviously taking a liberal view of conservative Christian theology, but as it happens, it’s a popular one. Most Christians, and most religious Americans, do not and will not worship a vindictive God. They worship one who calls on them to act in love.

This theological schism — between worshiping a God of the past prepared to punish you forever and worshiping a God of the present prepared to love you no matter what — is critical to bear in mind. One is pre-modern. One is modern.

The entire point of People of Praise, and other separatist groups, is standing in opposition to modernity, which is to say, taking a political position against democratic politics.

As Luhrmann said, “Barrett is a woman who has lived out a radical critique of the modern world.” That’s the problem.

Her religious background makes her predictable.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 October 2020

Word Count: 681

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The Senate Democrats avoided Monday the subject of religion. During the first day of Appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, they focused on health care and how Donald Trump’s third nominee might rule after the US Supreme Court hears oral arguments next month on the Affordable Care Act. Avoiding religion was probably wise given the Republicans’ level of fake outrage over fake “religious bigotry.” The rest of us, however, don’t need to play along. Barrett’s Catholicism is fair game.

Yes, I know. Highly influential liberal pundits, and some liberal pundits striving mightily to become influential, argue that religion should be off limits. First, they say, because a person of sincerely held religious beliefs can adjudicate impartially. Second, there’s enough to talk about without bringing up Barrett’s faith. While I presume these liberals mean well (to be clear, in presuming this, I’m being generous), they’re wrong.

They assume, for one thing, that religion and politics can be disentangled. Sometimes they can be. Sometimes they can’t be. For another, these liberals behave as if politics is somehow taking religion hostage. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote last night: “When politicians use faith as an excuse to pass and uphold laws that seize control of people’s bodies but not guarantee them healthcare, feed the poor, shelter the homeless, or welcome the stranger, you have to wonder if it’s really about faith at all.”

No, you don’t have to wonder. It’s about their faith, full stop. Millions in this country — white evangelical Protestants and conservative white Catholics chief among them — root their genuinely held religious beliefs in opposition to modernity, which is to say, in politics. There is, therefore, no appreciable difference between them.

The more our society moves in the direction of greater freedom, equity and justice for all people, the more these revanchists believe their faith is under siege; and the more they feel their faith is under siege, the more prepared they are to go to war over “religious freedom.”

I don’t know if Barrett intends to help reverse Roe any more than you do. I do know — and you know — that that’s why Donald Trump picked her. That’s why she accepted his illegitimate nomination. Overturning Roe, or at least gutting it in order to permit the states to outlaw abortion, has been the goal for decades. The Republicans are so close to the prize, they’re willing to sacrifice the presidency, the Senate and the court’s credibility.

The more our society moves in the direction of greater freedom, equity and justice for all people — the more American women enjoy a monopoly over their own bodies — the more the revanchists demand an minoritarian veto. They are demanding, and getting, an autocratic usurpation of the majority’s will in the name of religion.

Not just any religion, though. A very specific strain of conservative white Christianity. This strain believes that one person has a right to use another person, without her content, in order to stay alive. The person being used by another person to stay alive has a moral obligation to forfeit the monopoly over her body, such that her body isn’t private property so much as public property jointly owned by members of their shared faith.

Importantly, if the person being used by another person to stay alive refuses, she is subject to various punishments, including, if the court overturns Roe, legal ones. There’s a reason Republicans want to make Barrett’s religion off limits. They don’t want a majority to see outlawing abortion as the establishment of a state religion.

You can’t see violations of the First Amendment if you insist that religion is off limits. What’s more, you can’t see the treasonous bad faith of the revanchists. They don’t care about babies. If they did, they’d be up in arms over news of the president’s treatment for Covid-19.

He was injected with an “antibody cocktail” tested on stem cells derived from a baby aborted nearly half a century ago. White evangelical Protestants and white conservative Catholics usually say “fetal tissue,” even in life-saving drug treatments, is a grave offense to God, but not this time.

According to Business Insider, anti-abortion groups said it’s OK, because the president wasn’t involved in the original abortion. That’s bullshit, but at least they’re dropping the charade. What they want to say but fear saying — because saying it out loud for everyone to hear would be too gothic and horrifying for mainstream America — is what they really mean.

What they really mean is that it’s OK for one person to use another person’s body without his or her consent. The president, using remnants of the body of an aborted baby, didn’t do anything wrong. He was exercising the God given right that babies (men) have access to another person’s body (a woman’s). This right isn’t just political. It’s political and religious. Ignoring that means ignoring the parasitic ramifications of the anti-Roe project.

So don’t ignore religion. It is central. None of this makes sense when it’s not.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 October 2020

Word Count: 830

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I don’t care for mantras generally, but I do live by one. When it comes to paying attention to politics, most people most of the time will find something better to do. That goes double for matters of law. They’d rather open a vein than talk about it.

I’m not scolding anyone. In fact, it’s healthy. Most people trust their representatives to work things out, whatever the problem is, even if the outcome is the status quo. Most people will leave it to attorneys, prosecutors, judges and professors to understand statutory law, constitutional law and whatever the hell stare decisis means.

Trust is central to a republic’s healthy functioning, and most people have that much faith.

Faith, however, depends on fairness, specifically a fair process. You don’t need to know anything about Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s choice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US Supreme Court, to know the process of confirming her is hinky. You don’t need to know anything about her record as a federal appellate judge to know the Republicans are ramming her through before Election Day. (Indeed, Americans have already voted, by mail or in-person, in some states to decide the next president.)

You don’t need to know much to know what the Republicans are doing is wrong. Your sense of wrongness might even be doubled by the fact that no one can stop them.

The Republicans know what most people know, and they fear it. They fear the majority losing faith in the GOP. They fear how it might retaliate when given a chance to (on Election Day). That’s why they spent considerable energy drawing attention away from what they are doing toward what the Democrats might end up doing.

The effort began Wednesday during the vice presidential debate and continued through the weekend. They hope to create conditions in which court-packing is fair when they do it but unfair when it’s the Democrats. “We need to preserve a Supreme Court that has 9 justices,” wrote US Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, on Twitter.

Here are a few facts. First, the US Constitution does not say how many justices should sit on the Supreme Court. That’s up to the US Congress. (The court started with seven.) Second, court-packing has been done in the past. Third, the court could have 11 or 111 justices. Big numbers like that probably don’t matter except that they might nominally reflect the views of the majority. Fourth, the Republicans themselves were prepared to downsize the court if Hillary Clinton had won.

The late John McCain was especially clear: “I promise you that Republicans will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Clinton would put up.” All things being equal, if Ginsburg had died during Clinton’s first term, the court would probably have to carry on with seven.

At root, adding or subtracting justices is about norm-busting. The norm right now is nine. Expanding that number is a deviation, hence a violation, arguably, of the norm. The Democrats can’t stop the Republicans from installing Barrett, securing a 6-3 conservative supermajority. The Republicans, however, can’t stop the Democrats from retaliating after returning to power. That’s why the Republicans want you to see court-packing as dangerous.

This gambit depends, however, on your forgetting that court-related norms were vaporized the day the Senate Republicans sabotaged Merrick Garland, Barack Obama’s last nominee. If the Democrats under a President Biden end up packing the Supreme Court (assuming they have control of the Senate), they will not be setting a court-packing precedent. They will be following one already set.

Mike Pence thought he had Kamala Harris against the ropes when he demanded during last week’s debate that she admit to a court-packing plan. He didn’t. She pivoted masterfully to what the Republicans have been doing since Donald Trump took office: confirming anyone who can fog a mirror to the federal bench.

Biden is doing the same. Rather than talk about the possibility of court-packing, he’s giving voice to a truth obvious to anyone with a sense of fairness. The Republicans fear Trump will lose the election. They are therefore scrambling to install a justice before the people have had their say. That’s court packing. That’s a gross violation of popular sovereignty. That’s a grave injustice that demands an equal and opposite reaction.

You don’t have to know much about much else to know that.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 October 2020

Word Count: 731

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The worst outcome of the election is so obvious, it’s scarcely worth mentioning. The second worst, however, far from obvious. If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump, the temptation in the Washington press corps, and hence the rest of the electorate, might be to conclude extremism on “both sides” was defeated and “centrism” triumphed.

If that happens, and there’s no guarantee it will, but if it does, we will have succumbed to extremism. We will have given it a second chance at life, letting it go underground, where it will wait to reemerge.

We will have given the Republican Party, moreover, an opportunity to revive its lexicon of coded rhetoric, which it used successfully for 40 years to make extremely unpopular policy goals seem super-duper jim-dandy. We will not have ended our long national nightmare. We will have merely kicked dirt over it.

Biden’s victory, especially if it’s a landslide, might encourage Americans to think the Trump presidency was an anomaly, a deviation from conservative-liberal politics-as-usual, and that Republican Party and the Washington press corps did not in fact play pivotal roles in the rise of fascism. Trump’s defeat may end up helping super-white elites trying to dodge accountability for four years of sadism from being held accountable.

A wave election might encourage Americans to think our democratic republic and its institutions held up after all. Calls for reform, therefore, might sound overblown. Worse, it might encourage white liberals pained by daily reminders of their whiteness to deny their whiteness had anything at all to do with Donald Trump.

The present is a product of the past. Trump did not take over his party. The party made room for him because it saw it as an opportunity, although leaders in 2016 expressed some misgivings. Turns out they protested too much.

The president is a political masochist, as I said Wednesday. He will mutilate himself to mutilate enemies, real and imagined. Mitch McConnell and others have exploited that weakness to get more out of him than they ever got from previous GOP presidents unwilling to die on every hill.

The senate leader now seems ready to cut Trump loose. Indeed, he seems to be laying the groundwork for saying thank God that bastard’s gone. Let’s get back to normal.

Without a doubt, that would be the worst outcome, second only to the president’s reelection. Normal would mean Republicans continuing to pretend they are a reasonable party intent on governing in the greatest interest of the greatest number of people when they are in fact bent on reversing the New Deal (i.e., Social Security), reversing the Great Society (i.e., Medicare), reversing Obamacare, and reversing the expansion of the franchise.

When Mike Lee says that, “we’re not a democracy,” he’s not engaging in an ennobling debate over principle. What he’s saying without making his intentions quite clear is his party, if need be, reserves the right to commit treason.

If the Democrats have unified control of the government, they must change the system to prevent the system from being conducive later to the reemergence of homegrown fascism. Reforms up for debate should include abolishing the Senate filibuster; adding Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states; expanding the number of justices of the US Supreme Court; expanding the lower courts, codifying into statutory law Roe (reproductive rights) and Obergefell (marriage rights); passing a 21st-century Voting Rights Act; and of course, taxing the living hell out of the very, very rich, including outlawing dynastic wealth by banning individual inheritance over, say, $1 million.

The rest of us, meanwhile, must understand Trumpism is something we let happen. Yes, we. Remember: the present is a product of the past. Today’s fascist politics is the direct result of a conservative political regime, established almost four decades ago to the day when Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter, that we have allowed to decline and decay, either by complicity with it, indifference to it or an unthinking faith that it would never metastasize into a political (and sometimes armed) insurgency.

To defeat extremism, we must create a new normal. We must work to establish a regime in which “conservatism” is bankrupt and liberalism — and its privileging of know-how, process, tolerance, duty and equity—is the new vital center.

“Movement conservatism” went mainstream when it was seen as a sensible alternative to the decline and decay (real and imagined) of the liberal consensus that led to the political and economic crises of the 1970s. Perhaps something like “movement liberalism” (a terrible name; don’t use it!) will eventually be seen as a sensible alternative to the conservative consensus that led to the political and economic as well as climatic and public health crises we now face.

Contrary to popular belief, Election Day will not mark the end of our nightmare. It can mark, however, the end’s beginning.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 October 2020

Word Count: 808

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I don’t think Wednesday’s debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris is going to change voters’ minds. The only practical outcome I can imagine is the vice president having energized Donald Trump’s critics even more. For one thing, “Pence the Pious Patriarch” is a shtick so insufferable as to be maddening. For another, Harris had no truck with that tired white-man-of-faith persona, interrupting Pence’s entitled interruptions by reminding him, with a smile, that “I’m speaking, I’m speaking.”

In a sense, the pundit corps’ reaction is more interesting. On the one hand are traditional pol watchers who noted blandly the difference from last week’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It was civil. It was substantive. It was policy-oriented. It was all things in near-total absence last time when our authoritarian president became unglued in the presence of a male opponent as super-white as he is.

On the other hand are new pol watchers who found many points of interest that weren’t boring at all. A white man, for instance, broke the debate rules regularly while a biracial woman did not.

Pence did not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Harris did not say whether Biden planned to pack the US Supreme Court. Pence alleged that Biden would raise taxes. Harris corrected him. He doubled down. She corrected him again. And so on.

Harris, moreover, hinted at a rationale for court-packing, saying the Senate Republicans had already established the precedent. (She meant lower courts of the federal judiciary, of course, but the GOP’s “precedent” could apply to the highest court, too.)

The reaction among pundits, in other words, seems to reflect divisions in the pundit corps itself. There are those who want a return to boring old politics and there are those who don’t want to see such a return. That’s what led us to where we are now.

There are those who pine for a return to the normal politics of the regime established by Ronald Reagan and there are those pining for a new regime modeled after Barack Obama’s presidency. While some pundits, mostly white men, have difficulty imagining dynamics of power that do not bend in their direction, other pundits understand that reality implicitly.

While some pundits are aghast at the sadism on display, other pundits have seen it all along, even when it was cloaked in decorum and civility. Last night’s debate was a case in point. Pence sounded civil, but his words were barbarous.

Take abortion, for example. The sanctity, sanctity, sanctity! Of life, life, life! Everyone thinks they know what that mantra means but they really don’t. Here’s what it means: The Republicans and their evangelical confederates want state governments to not only regulate women’s bodies. They want to make it legal for one person to use another person’s body to stay alive. Conversely, they want to make it illegal for one person to say no to another person who wants to use her body to stay alive.

Pence & Co. sound so very civilized. The sanctity of life! Despoliation is more like it. There’s no sanctity in turning a woman, as the late George Carlin put it, into “a broodmare for the state.”

Harris, meanwhile, was clear about her stance on abortion. If I’m not mistaken, the way she did it was new. She didn’t qualify it. She didn’t call it sad, tragic, a necessary evil, or some such nonsense. That’s what Democrats of yore did when pinned between competing factions.

Harris, however, identifies as Black. She no doubt views abortion in the context of American history — when Black bodies used to be property and white men used to do whatever they wanted to Black bodies.

Though Black evangelicals generally oppose abortion, they don’t oppose Roe, the court precedent legalizing it. Doing that would be doing the unthinkable: standing with anti-Black white power. In a very real sense, Harris’ pro-abortion politics reflects a politics of Black solidarity.

Which is the say, her politics is civilized while Pence’s is barbarous. The old guard of the pundit corps usually doesn’t see that. It’s generally more sympathetic to fetuses than to grown women whose treatment by law and society is made more gothic by its “holy” rationalizations.

The new guard, however, tends to see with clear eyes. More generally, I think, the new guard detected in last night’s debate signs of a future to come. It wasn’t just black versus white, though that’s important.

It was a clash of epochs in which the 20th century finally came to an end and the 21st truly began.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 October 2020

Word Count: 760

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No one knows why the president all of a sudden Tuesday put the kibosh on stimulus talks. Maybe it’s the meds Donald Trump is on. Maybe he’s crazy. Maybe he’s stupid. Maybe he’s bad at politics. Maybe he’s going to take the country down with him. Maybe, as the wags on Twitter often say, it’s a combination of all the above.

One thing’s for sure, everyone’s puzzled. The Washington press corps is expressing bemusement openly.

Axios’ Jonathan Swan said that, “I truly don’t understand this, and nor do a number of people who advise the president. It’s like he’s trying to lose.”

NBC News’ Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt said that, “I will never understand how a president who has time and time again demonstrated that he acts first in his own self interest is refusing to accept an offer to spend $2.2 trillion boosting the economy weeks before facing voters in his reelection bid. It makes no sense.”

The Hill’s Krystal Ball is not a serious journalist but instead a terrible pundit. Even so, she got this much right when she said the Democrats “literally wanted to help Trump give out money to millions of Americans just before the election and he said no.”

Jacob T. Levy is a professor of political theory at McGill University in Montreal. He gave voice to Trump’s thinking about how to practice “the art of the deal.”

“He’s telling us quite clearly what he’s doing: holding the stimulus hostage to his reelection,” Levy said. “‘Vote for me and you’ll get $1.6 trillion; don’t, and you’ll get nothing for months to come.’ I’m not saying it’s a good strategy, but it’s the kind of thing Trump thinks powerful people do in negotiations: ‘You have more to lose than I do, and I’m ready to walk away.’ The counter-party being, not the Democrats, but the whole electorate.”

I think this is close to being right. The president has demonstrated time and again the extortionist gestalt of his criminal mind. Quid pro quo is his go-to. Give me what I want and I’ll reopen the federal government. Give me what I want and I’ll give Ukraine the money it needs to fight Russia. Give me what I want and I’ll give cities and states the personal protective gear they need to fight the covid pandemic. Give me what I want or the road to a traditional peaceful transfer of power will be paved with bodies.

It doesn’t work. It never, ever works. For whatever reason, Trump has not learned people do not like being forced into deals. Every time he’s tried forcing US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into one, she’s handed his ass to him.

Anyway, this gambit doesn’t explain why he’d say no to money right now, just before the election, as Kasie Hunt said, when it would most help him politically. It’s here I think we must turn to something I’ve found quite helpful in this epoch of Trump: political psychology.

First, agreeing with the Democrats would give his enemies something they want. Pelosi wants billions for cities and states facing a double dilemma. They must spend to combat the new coronavirus but they are losing revenues doing so. Trump doesn’t want to help “blue states,” because that would make him look weak. (Bear in mind he probably believes, literally, that only Democrats live in “blue states.”)

More important is the president’s need for someone to blame. This is his mess. He must clean it up, or get out of the way. He won’t get out of the way, of course, but to stay in power, he must manufacture at least a cartoon image of a scapegoat.

Hence, all the talk about “badly run cities” looking for a government bailout, a talking point in keeping with the GOP’s traditional dog whistling in which “cities” is a byword for “Black.” The president is willing to hurt himself politically if it takes that to hurt the Democrats in kind.

In other words, it’s masochism. This is, after all, the same president who made himself sick trying to prove the covid pandemic is nothing to worry about. His are, after all, the same supporters who deny themselves free money to pay for better health care (the Affordable Care Act, in other words), even as the pandemic rampages through their communities.

Masochism is the ego state of suicide bombers, literal and political. It is a phenomenon nearly everyone understands but ignores collectively until it’s too late.

Masochism is also exploitable. Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans have been trying for three months to figure out Trump’s chances of winning reelection, and thus figure out the best use of their time before Election Day.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death answered that question, and the president has all but acquiesced. White House advisor Larry Kudlow this morning told the Washington Post:

We’ve only got four weeks to the election, and we have a justice of the Supreme Court to get passed. It’s too close to the election — not enough time to get stuff done at this stage in the game.

McConnell would rather not bother with a stimulus, perhaps because he’s protecting his conference from being primaried. Jonathan Bernstein said that, “Most mainstream conservatives, even those who think (along with virtually all economists) that government spending would boost the economy and therefore help Trump and his party in November, are more worried about being dismissed as sell-out RINOs by accepting a deal with” Pelosi.

Or perhaps because he’s helping lay the ideological groundwork for a new Democratic administration. If they are going to resist his fiscal demands, and Joe Biden is planning to demand trillions, now’s the time to pretend the Republicans never wanted to explode the national debt. It was all Trump’s fault.

McConnell’s chore is made easier by a president willing to hurt himself if that’s what it takes to “win.” Of course, he isn’t — unless by “winning,” you mean “losing.”

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 October 2020

Word Count: 993

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The president returned from the hospital Monday evening. He climbed the stairs to the White House’s southern portico. There, he stood for photographs with his mask off. Anyone paying attention could see he was struggling to breathe. Anyone could see on his face the slight pangs of panic that attend such struggle.

Even so, some people continue to say Donald Trump is faking it. He isn’t sick with the covid, they say.

In a sense, such skepticism is healthy. This president has told scores of thousands of lies. He has betrayed his country, incited violence, extorted the republic into voting for him or else. He dissembled again after entering the White House last night (mask off, of course).

In a campaign video, he exhorted viewers not to let the covid “dominate” you, as if normal people have access to the health care he does, as if the 215,000 Americans now dead and buried permitted the new coronavirus to dominate them.

None of us has seen a president piss on so many graves. I don’t blame anyone for being suspicious.

It’s clear he’s sick, though. What’s more, he’s very sick. Doctors do not administer dexamethasone to someone who is not. The steroid makes patients feel like they have energy to spare while tamping down their immune systems, the AP reports. Trump is no doubt correct in saying he feels better than he has in 20 years.

That didn’t prevent his chest from visibly heaving, though. And watch out when the drug wears off. It’s common knowledge covid patients feel better before they crash for the worse. The next week is going to be the most important week of this president’s mortal life.

Skeptics maintain he’s faking it to avoid facing Joe Biden a second time. Again, that’s understandable. While giving a rather so-so performance himself, Biden still managed to make the president appear smaller than he’s looked in four years. The debate was unlike most in fact. Its impact has been lasting.

Trump didn’t just fail to win new voters, he lost old voters, and he lost them because he seemed, when standing next to a former vice president speaking from his heart, petty and weak.

Skeptics, however, forget something important. You don’t avoid looking weak by pretending to be weaker. Getting sick a month before Election Day is this president’s very worst nightmare.

Recall a time before the president’s infection. On Sept. 18, he was campaigning in Minnesota, addressing a nearly all-white (mask-less) audience. There, he gave voice to what is his only serious worldview. “You have good genes, you know that, right?” he said. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? It’s the racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Biographer Michael D’Antonio explained what that means, according to The Forward. “The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” he told PBS “Frontline.” “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

In other words, eugenics. In other words, any ideology privileging an in-group for reasons totally made up, any rightwing movement rationalizing an out-group’s pain, suffering and murder. Praising white Minnesotan’s “good genes” was in keeping with despots the world over who wrongly believe they are infallible by dint of being who they are.

Truth and morality are not afforded deference, because affording them deference would mean submitting to their authority, which is unthinkable. The mighty do not genuflect to authority not of their own making. The mighty are always right.

This is why getting sick is Trump’s worst nightmare. Even if he recovers, he cannot credibly maintain (among people who find it credible) his image of infallibility — the idea he’s invincible.

Yes, allies are trying mightily to portray him as some kind of Rambo, some kind of grotesque super-white superhero who can crush the covid with his bare hands. (That venomous smurf Ben Shapiro is representative in this regard. This morning he tweeted: “Wait until Trump develops the anti-covid serum, using his own anti-bodies like Will Smith in ‘I Am Legend,’ and then wins 50 states.” Never mind that Smith’s character kills himself after realizing he’s the bane of the world.) But we are rapidly approaching a tipping point after which these efforts are going to backfire. Indeed, we may already be there. The president’s campaign is crunched for cash.

To be sure, some will always be skeptical. But the rest of us should remember the whole truth. The point of Trump’s project, in the eyes of his hardest supporters, is the power to instill fear in the eyes of their enemies (and taking pleasure in seeing that fear).

If enemies do not fear this president, there’s no point to this president. You don’t instill fear when you’re struggling to breathe. You don’t instill fear when you’re dead.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 October 2020

Word Count: 827

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It’s safe to say we have an answer to the question. Is it true the president could stand in the middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue, shoot someone and not lose one supporter?

Yes, it seemed for a long time — given nothing moved his approval numbers. No matter what he does (commit treason, for instance), and no matter what he says (for instance, extort the republic into voting for him or else), around 40 percent stands by him.

But a presumption lurked behind the question: that Donald Trump would be shooting live ammunition. What if he were shooting harmless blanks, though? What if his victim were paid to pretend to be dead? What if the whole thing were staged so a “billionaire outsider” only looked like he could break the rules, deny consequences and get away with murder?

What if the power he had over his most hard-shelled supporters were predicated on an image of being untouchable — a super-white invincibility serving “real Americans” while punishing everyone else they believed deserved punishment?

When put like that, the question isn’t whether he’d lose supporters. It’s whether his hypothetical show of power were based on reality.

Most of us already knew it wasn’t. Most already knew Trump’s pathetic life has been one long con job punctuated by lawsuits, bankruptcy and misery. But for a lots of people — those drawn to a glamorous image made for NBC’s “The Apprentice,” perhaps — Trump appeared to be a savior, an Übermensch chosen to do for them what they could not do for themselves, a führer fated to restore RealAmerica’s glory while bringing despair to its enemies.

After last week, though, who can doubt that beneath his crusty orange exterior lies soft white flesh?

First, it was the New York Times report on his tax returns. It showed not only that he’s a serial tax avoider, an exemplar of everything rotten about the United States tax code, but an embarrassment of a businessman indebted by hundreds of millions of dollars and chained to failing properties. He’s a winner’s winner, he says, but in fact he’s losing.

Then it was last Tuesday’s debate against Joe Biden. Trump never shares the limelight with critics, much less a rival. He demonstrated how fearful he is of the former vice president. He prattled constantly, trying to overpower Biden, even to the point of insulting Biden’s dead serviceman son and living recovering-addict son.

Whenever he spoke directly into the TV camera, which he did often, Biden managed to shrink the president’s stage presence down to that of a toddler throwing a tantrum. Trump was already a small, trivial man. Next to Biden, however, he looked downright lilliputian.

Then came the news we’ve all been talking about. The president was hospitalized Friday night after testing positive for Covid the night before.

The Washington press corps has been scrambling to establish a timeline — when he was diagnosed, when he was given oxygen (twice, it turns out), why doctors are pumping him with (in one case) experimental and otherwise powerful drugs, when he was in contact with others and if that’s the reason more than a dozen senators, senior officials and journalists are now sick.

The White House has been trying to cover up the timeline as much as possible for the most important reason possible. If Trump’s supporters see his weakness, it’s over.

To liberals, this can’t be right. Weakness isn’t why you should vote against him. You should vote against him because he’s a lying, thieving, philandering sadist.

I agree, but think about it from the view of “real Americans” who believe they are strong, because Trump is strong; who believe they are winners, because Trump is a winner; who believe they are feared, because Trump is feared. It’s one thing to cheer a bull charging through the china shop of Washington’s elite. It’s quite another to cheer a spent despot waving meekly from his Chevy Suburban.

Trumpism is about super-white dominance so powerful it acts contemptuously toward facemasks “as a sign of weakness,” according to the Times. A sick Trump is a weak Trump. A weak Trump is nothing to fear, and that’s the end.

If enemies do not fear this president, there’s no point to this president.

To be sure, the president is going to try desperately to leave Walter Reed sooner so he can get back to appearing like a strong man. But the spell is broken. Just getting sick did him in. Trump’s allies, meanwhile, will try ginning up sympathy, but there’s no sympathy for a man seeing it as weakness, seeing decency as weakness, seeing all value systems as weakness.

Morality isn’t about right and wrong for Trump, but instead a con played by losers cursed with bad genes to protect themselves from winners blessed with good genes. Nothing matters but power. That’s what was amazing about the idea of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.

There was nothing to get away with in the first place, though. Like all would-be tyrants, Trump is weak. His power is built on sand.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 October 2020

Word Count: 841

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The last thing any of us should want is the president becoming some kind of QAnon martyr. Other than that, however, I reserve the right to feel however I want to feel about the president and his wife coming down with a case of Covid-19.

My life and your life have been turned upside down — and we’re the lucky ones. Some of us are out of work. Some of us are getting sick or sicker. Some have buried mothers, uncles, cousins and sons. All of us have felt the empurpled rage of being lied to endlessly.

I’m writing this in a co-working space where I have to sign in every day (for contact tracing purposes), where I have to disinfect my desk every day, and where I have to wear a mask every day. I don’t shake hands anymore. I don’t hug anymore. My family’s income is rockier because universities are reeling and arts nonprofits are walking dead. We don’t invite friends over anymore. We are not invited over anymore.

Our fourth-grader can’t go to school physically. She has to zoom into class six and half hours a day. She often curses the pandemic, painfully reminding her mother and me how powerless we are.

My mother-in-law — more mother than my mother — is overcoming Covid. She’s asymptomatic, so far, thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

All of the above is a picture of good fortune by comparison. Nearly 213,000 Americans are never coming back, per Worldometer. More than 7.5 million more are infected. The economy will not return to normal until the new coronavirus is contained, and given how bad things are right now, it’s not going to be contained for a long, long time. One in four working-age Americans has filed for unemployment benefits, according to the New York Times. That’s 40,000,000 people.

Public spaces have been turned into hot zones — churches, synagogues and mosques, theaters and concert halls, museums and nightclubs, restaurants and bars, sporting arenas, any place indoors where more than 20 people gather. Revenues are drying up, businesses going under, dignity being lost.

Amid all this, we’re bracing ourselves for bloodshed made inevitable when a president won’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power — when he refuses to condemn white-power vigilante groups, indeed orders them to “stand back and stand by,” and when he repeatedly extorts the American republic, saying “either I win or something real bad happens.”

Amid all this, he repeatedly blames the sick and the dead for being sick and dead, or tells us we’re making up all this suffering, that it’s a hoax by the fake news trying to make him look bad, and that everything is for real super-duper jim-dandy.

That’s why I reserve the right to feel however I want to feel about the president’s health. The insult added to injury is too profound for me to tolerate exhortations by otherwise well-meaning people that no one say he had it coming to him.

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump had it coming. The president deserves to get sick. He deserves to suffer for all the suffering he has caused millions of people knowing full well that millions of people were going to suffer. He lied, and he lied, and he lied, because nothing is more important than his desiccated fetish for winning, which isn’t winning at all. It’s the wounded pride of an empty man who can afford to deny for a lifetime he’s weak.

This is the same man who mocked the disabled, women, people of color, Black people, anyone he considers beneath him, even people of integrity and honor doing the noble work of public service and trying to prevent the spread of a lethal virus. This is the same president who kidnapped babes-in-arms, banned Muslims, insulted war heroes, and pretended he was a big-shot when in reality he’s up to his eyeballs in debt.

Why should I avoid taking a little pleasure in seeing what comes around going around?

That said, I hope he makes a full recovery. (I will not say the same for the hundreds of degenerates who have enabled him, turned an opportunistic blind eye, or tried grabbing as much as they can while they can; they all deserve the worst of the fate awaiting them.)

I hope the president makes a full recovery. Too many Americans already believe the coronavirus plays a role in a conspiracy by radical leftists, under the influence of an international cabal of rich Jews, to prey on children sexually, even drink their blood, in an effort to bring down Donald Trump.

It’s one thing to say he should suffer. It’s another to want him dead. If you thought Trumpism would be with us long after Election Day, wait till the president is a sainted martyr for the heavily armed white Christian nationalists prepared to sacrifice themselves — and who are already sacrificing themselves to the pandemic — to save “the real America.”

Most of all, I hope he makes a full recovery so voters can sit in judgment of him, so a majority of the people can stuff democratic consequences into his orange face, and so law and order with justice can be administered in the name of God and country.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 October 2020

Word Count: 869

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I wrote Wednesday that Joe Biden demonstrated ways of saving the republic from the mistake of electing a demi-despotic goon like Donald Trump. During the first of three scheduled debates, the president was a fire-hose of bullying, pouting and puling, rarely giving the former vice president a couple of quiet minutes to speak. He tested his rival until Biden decided at last to stop tolerating the intolerable: “Will you shut up, man?”

Then something amazing happened. As I was writing Wednesday’s edition, the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan nonprofit that organizes the debates and set the rules, said “that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues,” according to the Washington Post.

Implicit in this change was a remarkable consensus: Trump is to blame for the chaos. Changes include cutting off the candidates’ microphones while the other speaks. The commission, in so many words, will be forcing the president to shut up.

Later on the same day, something else amazing happened. CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was a subject of Wednesday’s Editorial Board, followed suit. His guest was Trump campaign Director of Communication Tim Murtaugh. In a clip shared widely, Tapper asked why the president refuses to condemn armed white-power groups.

Murtaugh answered with accusations that Biden “palled around with” segregationists decades ago. It’s a maneuver aiming to “prove” the president is no more racist than his opponent. Tapper grew impatient with the nonsense. Murtaugh increased the volume, running over Tapper followups until he signaled to the camera operator to shut Murtaugh up.

Telling authoritarians to shut up isn’t the only way, or even the best way, of dealing with them. But it’s one of the tools the rest of us can use on confederates who have told us who they are when they exploit the rights and privileges of a free and open society to undermine a free and open society, even destroy it.

Don’t argue with them. Don’t reason with them. Don’t debate with them. Debating them civilly is making room at the table of civilization for renegades ready to flip the table over if they don’t get their way. They will never respect you. Therefore, be sparing with your respect in return. The only thing they truly respect is a majority flexing its democratic power.

For the same reasons, we should be exceedingly wary of what I’ll call the Nice Undecided Voters (NUVs). The NUVs are almost always super-white. They are almost always rural. They are almost always middle class and up. They get a lot of attention from the press corps in light of a vast majority of Americans making up their minds about 2020 way back in 2017. (This is why the president’s aggregated job approval rating has rarely changed since he took office.)

To reporters, the NUVs appear to be deeply concerned about the fate of the nation, conflicted about the decision facing them, and symbolic of the divisions riving the United States. Most importantly, the NUVs are people who care about their reputations in their communities, and appear to be searching for ways forward in accordance with their genuinely held principles.

Truth is, the NUVs are dangerous radicals. No other serious conclusion can be drawn from the Post’s Wednesday report on the NUVs’ reaction to the debate. The president encouraged white-power vigilantes to “stand back and stand by.” He repeatedly tried extorting the electorate, musing about bad trouble if he loses.

This is what someone says when he sits at the head of the table of American civilization, expects everyone else to behave according to a set of established rules, but reserves the absolute right to hold himself above the law in case he needs to flip the table over to get his way.

Trump was telling us clearly who he is, but the NUVs interviewed by the Post either refused to see the truth, accepted the truth secretly, or lied about accepting the truth. In all cases, seeing evil but ignoring it or joining it is another form of evil made more sinister by the appearance of being nice, respectable, concerned, and patriotic undecided voters.

The NUVs are not undecided. They are undeclared. They fear making their preference for fascism known. They fear it will get in way of their nice respectable lives at the office, at church, at the bowling alley.

This fear of social sanction is more powerful than their fear of fellow Americans being taken out and shot. Or they want the freedom to dominate those they believe deserve domination without being held responsible for their behavior. They want to punch down without the possibility of being punched back.

They cannot get what they want, however, if the rest of us deny them what they need to get it. If you revoke your respect, if you take back your welcome to participate into the public square of a free and open society — if that happens, you in effect shut them down. The intolerant are only as strong as our willingness to tolerate them.

So don’t.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 October 2020

Word Count: 849

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