#64: These are Things Presidents Do Not Do

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When you are trying to save your country, you can’t get anything done without your equilibrium. Reaching an unbalancing level of despair over the Trump presidency is understandable, given its daily wounds to the soul. Still, we understand that every single day we can shake off numbness, use anger to fuel new energy, and turn any personal floundering into a Trump-defeating relentlessness. We have been at this a very long time. But, since flagging has never been an option, let’s stand straight and tall and let’s get to it.

William Barr’s contortions will be paused briefly. Before he starts up again, let’s see where we are. Imagine if the president of the United States was thought by some to be hiding a highly destructive explosive device. When worries about the existence of such a device come up, the president says anyone who even suggests that such a device exists such be prosecuted, that no such device exists, and that it is all a hoax. From that point on, he attacks anyone, anywhere who even hints that such a device should be looked for.

Then he takes it further, going to heretofore unimaginable lengths. He takes ten specific actions to impede anyone and everyone who is either looking for the device or wondering whether he knows where it is. He rages and insults justice for two years. He lies openly and consistently. He makes up things, fires people and asks intelligence officials to break the law in service to him.

At the end, investigators find the device, and they detail the ten ways in which the president willfully obstructed the search for it. And then they say they cannot say for sure that notwithstanding every single lie and posterior-protecting, government-assaulting, evidence-obscuring step that this president ever knew where the device was in the first place! 

So, if that is the legal judgement, so be it, but in no way is it the judgement of the people as to what a president is permitted to do, or what he is excused for doing. Each of Trump’s ten obstructions are unthinkable. Each provides us the opportunity for a referendum on what this country is in danger of becoming, or, better yet, a referendum on how we can prevent such an outcome.
The ten extremely well documented steps of obstruction will be with us for the next 19 months. Hearings will be held, and further disclosures will emerge. While we and the candidates we support attend to an agenda for America’s future, we will not ever set aside these stains on our country. 

These are things that presidents do not do, not now, nor in the past, nor in the future. We will make certain the presentation of this evidence drives us further and harder. It will result in more of everything--- more voter registrations, more support of candidates, more personal involvement in the 2020 election, more voting, and the most gratifying celebration on November 3rd.

With the Mueller report release we will each pledge to do something special this week to signal where we are steering the country. Trump’s now well documented flaunting of the rule of law will grow the resistance.

The report and the situation can’t be summarized better than the effort put forward by the New York Times, first broadly explaining the report and its impact and then providing clear and compelling and mind-bending excerpts. Anyone wondering what it all adds up should treat the Times excerpts as a must read. In the simplest terms, following are the ten obstructions, several of which would even have raised Richard Nixon’s eyebrows. They are also articulated in greater detail by Politico. 

1. Asking FBI director James Comey to end the investigation of Michael Flynn, using the all-important “he’s a good guy” exoneration argument
2. Sitting on Air Force One and drafting a statement saying that Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russians was primarily about adoptions. Would that it had been the case for the 400,000 or so children in Russian orphanages.
3. Firing James Comey. First Trump outrageously claimed that the firing had to do with Comey’s inappropriate announcement about Hilary Clinton a week before the 2016 election. Then he told NBC’s Lester Holt, “I decided to just do it. You know this Russia thing about Trump and Russia is a made up story.”
4. Demanding that White House Counsel Don McGahn fire Robert Mueller, causing McGahn to refuse to do so and to clean out his office. Telling McGahn to claim Mueller had a conflict of interest, which was false.
5. Asking Corey Lewandowski to tell Attorney General Jeff Sessions to announce that the special investigation was “very unfair” and that the president had done nothing wrong. Throughout Sessions’ service, Trump believed that the Attorney General should act as his personal attorney.
6. Demanding that Jeff Sessions “un-recuse” himself so that he could exert influence over Robert Mueller on Trump’s behalf.
7. Asking McGahn and other aides to disavow the account that he sought to fire Mueller, thus telling them to perjure themselves in front of federal investigators.
8. Maintaining publicly that there was no Russian role in the election while privately seeking more Wikileaks disclosures of emails hacked by the Russians.
9. Passing word to attorneys for Michael Flynn of the president’s “warm feelings” toward Flynn after Flynn had agreed to provide information to Mueller. Trump’s personal counsel asked Flynn’s attorney for a “heads up” if Flynn was giving the government incriminating information.
10. Changing from praising Michael Cohen’s conduct when he lied to Congress about a possible Trump Tower in Moscow, to his personal counsel discussing a pardon with Cohen, and finally to calling Cohen a “rat” when he provided testimony to Mueller.

It isn’t as though it is difficult to figure out what to do now. We won back the House of Representatives in part because it would enable us to go beyond Bill Barr would have us do and dig deeper than Donald Trump would have us dig. We know that Jerome Nadler, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings and their committees are accepting this obligation. Even though we have other business to attend to, we are not going to walk away from the details of a 400-page report that details a sitting president’s daily contempt for the law, or from the 14 separate prosecutorial referrals that are being acted upon. We will not forget today’s image of a foolish and immoral man (regrettably, our president) with crumbs on his face and his hand permanently stuck in the cookie jar.

So let’s do these three things, making them especially intensive in recognition of what we learned from Robert Mueller:

1) Put North Carolina Back in Play
	Republicans in North Carolina are more vulnerable than ever now that the Mueller report has been released. The unfortunate collateral damage is being suffered by Senator Richard Burr. Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr had previously been praised by Democrat Mark Warner for reaching across the aisle on the Russia investigation. Now Mueller’s report maintains that Burr passed on to the White House sensitive information from James Comey regarding which White House aides the FBI was investigating. The Raleigh News Observer has already indicated its displeasure. Burr is up for re-election in 2022.  Facing a strong Democratic challenge in 2020 is Republican Senator Thom Tillis. Tillis was very public about his opposition to Trump’s executive order on the wall, since it usurped Congressional power. He was scheduled to vote that way until the last minute, when the Republican Party threatened him with a challenge in the 2020 primary. He caved in. He is an apologist for Trump on Mueller matters.  We can pick up a Senate seat in 2020 (helping to take back the Senate) and again in 2022. Donations to a war chest for the winner of the 2020 Democratic primary are growing. Act Blue has a way you can donate to this fund now. One could decide to donate a dollar for each of Trump’s abuses of his office, but who has that kind of money?
2) Remember the Lawyers
	In fourteen separate instances, the legal action related to the findings of the Mueller investigation will be carried out by federal prosecutors who have received referrals from Robert Mueller. There remains a strong need for lawyers outside of government to step forward and make certain that the public’s interests are protected. The American Civil Liberties Union is an excellent investment in this regard. An uncommon litigator has emerged to expand those interests. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is normally focused on such issues as Facebook violations of consumer privacy. In this case, they have been a valuable proponent for the public release of the report with the fewest possible redactions.
3) Understanding What it May All Come Down To
	Right now, the likelihood is that resisters will emerge victorious on November 3, 2020. Trump’s disapproval rating is mired in the low 40's, and we achieved a great start last November. Further, the Mueller report shows a manic president pushing every obstruction button he could find, and more than a few collusion buttons. Ironically, he is thought to be in a better legal position because aides devised ways to ignore his orders. Even as he sought to collude and obstruct, he couldn’t always get the job done! One more knock on his leadership skills? Maybe the Democratic candidates will ding each other more than necessary and maybe by summer of 2020 the polls get a little closer than we want. We can invest in preventing that situation now. Signing up new voters (especially those in the age group 18-30) is not just a matter of sending a check to an organization. Forty states offer online registration. That means in effect that you can become your own personal registrar. You can make it a habit to ask people you know whether they registered. You can get them their online link and check on them to make sure they got it done.  A number of organizations provide the necessary links for online registration, including Ballotpedia. You can even go one step further, getting large civic minded organizations you know to partner with Rock the Vote to create a customized voter registration page on their websites.

If you are feeling the urge to put this all down for a little while, read the Mueller report excerpts in the New York Times, or read the whole report. We were never in need of a bit more motivation. But just in case we were wondering whether the threats to our country are so huge as to be worthy of our efforts, we just got the depressing but energizing answer.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#63: We are Going to Make It

Thank you for continuing to share these messages with your friends. If you are not already on our mailing list, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, A Path Forward to November 3, 2020, every two weeks, which means there will be a total of 100 missives before the Presidential election of 2020, in which our country will select a whole new course.

No, Donald Trump, you haven’t been the force behind spending $91 billion to respond to the hurricane’s destruction of Puerto Rico. So far, the U.S. government has spent $11 billion, and you still have a hard time remembering Puerto Ricans are citizens.

No, Donald Trump, you did not invent the Veteran’s Choice program, which expands health care choices for those who served. The law was passed in 2014, before you were president. It was advanced by John McCain and Bernie Sanders, among others.

No, Donald Trump, your father Fred was not born in Germany. He was born in New York City. You claimed that he was born in Germany as a part of a lame attempt to bond with Germans after you had clearly misrepresented their natural gas deal with the Russians. Are we wrong to suspect you always knew where your own father was born?

How to explain not just a dance with the truth, but this complete, intentional, perhaps pathological disregard for the truth? One possibility is that when a person is continually lying to seek political advantage he could either go big or go home. An obvious, provable lie stands out when an elected official pledges to earn and maintain your trust. A score of untruths a day, delivered with bluster establishes that the person doing the lying sees himself as having his own set of rules. 

We are in the process of disabusing Donald Trump of the notion that truth ultimately doesn’t matter if you ignore it every day. Why would a Republican Senator or a Trump supporter anywhere in America stand for this, having rejected chronic dishonesty in all other persons? Only 4 of 10 Republicans believe most of Trump’s claims are true. They don’t call him out because they don’t see the alternative. Or. If they do see the alternative, they fear it. They would rather have someone lie on multiple matters and oppose the Affordable Care Act than tell the truth of these same matters and support the Affordable Care Act.

It does help create our huge opening in November 2020, no? Issues that are hugely consequential to voters will turn on which candidate’s claim they believe. They are more apt to vote for the candidate who protects health care for those with preexisting conditions, which Trump hasn’t; to support the candidate who stands up to Russia, which Trump won’t; and to get behind the candidate who will advance the middle class when it comes to tax cuts, which Trump didn’t.

That’s a good start for our candidates, made even better by Trump’s decision to take another run at the Affordable Care Act. The last run helped us take back 40 seats in the House of Representatives. 

To build upon this excellent start, we need to apply some standards to our own candidates. We have lots of candidates, and lots of good candidates, so we can be choosy. Already, our efforts to sort them out are consequential. To qualify for one of twenty! positions in two rounds of summer debates, candidates have to register at least 1% in three polls or get help from 65,000 donors. These conditions are easy to meet, but they are only the first step in narrowing the field. 

What could our selection standards be?

1. Let’s start by preferring a new generation of candidates for both president and vice president. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t select Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, but it would be less likely under this standard. It means that if we can find the right candidates, it would be an excellent time to depend on the next generation, which has already acquitted itself nicely through the presidency of Barrack Obama.
2. We must show our disapproval for any candidate who re-litigates the 2016 battle for the Democratic nomination. This habit of former Clinton or Sanders staffers disparaging each other can be stopped by us withholding support for whichever present day candidate abets that behavior..
3. As discussed in previous missives, let’s go with candidates that have a clear, imaginative, principled policy agenda that reflects Democratic values. One way to check this is by reading their books, already put forward by ten candidates. Even a book that doesn’t say anything compelling will tell you something, in its absence of a vision.
4. Let’s be on the alert for candidates fielding non-substantive criticisms against each other. Obviously Cory Booker is a strong and serious candidate (and Senator) but his criticism of Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for “joking” about their pot use is strained. He says it shows they aren’t focused on past sentencing disparities, but he has to know that they are.
5. We can be discerning about the “take down” articles that appear in the media. As in the recent increase in interest in South Bend mayor Pete Buttifieg (and subsequent criticism of him) let’s see where he stands and what he has done.
6. Even though we aren’t going to insist that our candidates have extensive executive branch experience (as in Governors Hickenlooper and Inslee) let’s not forget that what candidates have done so far matters. That fact that Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker have longer and broader records of service (in both the legislative and executive branches) than Pete Buttifieg and Beto O’Rourke is not inconsequential.
7. Let’s ask candidates not to make broad, unqualified endorsements of sweeping proposals that are addressing critical issues in important ways, but still need work. This includes both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, which several candidates have fully endorsed.
8. The rapid judgements of social media can cause an accusation to get way out in front of any means of determining whether the accusation is warranted. Let’s expect candidates to support due process. That’s what we all had the right to expect from Kirstin Gillibrand in her unacceptable race to judgement on Al Franken.

As we apply these standards, we could use our evaluations to inform making some donations or doing some early stage volunteer work. Allegiances can be shifted or strengthened as the field narrows. Our immediate efforts matter. We do not intend to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory in 2020. One way to keep that happening is to engage now. Here are three specific ways to do just that.

1) Reach Across the Chasm
	We can win in 2020 without converting a single existing Trump supporter. Nonetheless, it is in the long term interest of our democracy for us to devote more time to understanding the positions of those who disagree with us. This seems especially important on economic issues. As we painfully recall, the firewall did not hold in November of 2016 as we lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Certainly those losses were partly due to Russian interference and to James Comey’s momentum-reversing announcement regarding Hillary Clinton’s email. However, in these three states traditional Democratic voters were not fully convinced that Democrats were as focused on the economic security of the middle class as was Donald Trump. (This of course leaves aside the subsequent massive evidence that Trump’s voiced concern for the middle class was a ruse.) Our possible common interests in fighting economic insecurity is reason enough to start new discussions with people who feel differently than we feel. Certainly, many of us can find prospects for new conversations among our neighbors, friends, acquaintances and relatives. If we can’t there are a number of organizations that will help us. Time to look into participating in or hosting an exchange through Make America Dinner Again or Living Room Conversations, which has been promoting gap-closing discussions since before Donald Trump was visited upon us.
2) Pay New Attention to the Democratic Party
	Right after the November 2016 election, the Democratic party was lost. The licking of wounds was interminable. It took them months to formulate any strategy for taking back the House. In this period organizations like Indivisible and Swing Left stepped forward to organize the resistance. Now, Democratic party organizations in several states are on the upswing. Even for resisters who do not crave party ties, it is important to understand what this party is doing state-wide and in your local area. You can start by getting on the mailing list of your state Democratic party, or becoming a member.
3) Take Advantage of Swing Left’s New Tools
	In a timely fashion, Swing Left has devised several tools to make certain that all of us don’t wait too long to engage. These are mostly built around a “super-state” strategy that Swing Left believes will enable us to fight gerrymandering, keep our House majority, win back the Senate, and win the Presidency. These states are Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maine, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia. There is plenty of work to do in other states of course, and work to do in super states in the comfort of your own home wherever you are located. It is definitely worth it to download the strategy and find a way to have Swing Left guide some of your efforts. You can even donate to a fund to provide post-nomination dollars to the Democratic presidential candidate. Of course, that would require you to have full confidence in the results on the nomination process. One of the sad truths is that any conceivable Democrat candidate would be superior to the President we ended up with last time we voted.

Yes, it seems like an eternity to November 2020, when we will be done with Donald Trump. It is comforting that it has been 29 months since he was elected, so we are on the down slope. We’re going to make it.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington