#71: We Know the Stakes are the Future of our Country

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On the matter of racism, do you think Trump and his rally supporters would be yelling “send her back” if the members of Congress had emigrated from Norway and their names were Gudrun and Helga? This is another major episode in the shame fest that has become the Trump presidency.

It further sparks a debate among resisters about the extent to which Donald Trump devises strategies and seeks to execute them. Does he set out in the morning with a plan? The evidence is that he doesn’t decide his next steps in the usual way. Even when he weighs alternatives and decides which action would be most likely to succeed, or (now in dreamland) which is the most likely to be beneficial to the country, that process is fraught from the outset. 

His decision making is heavily influenced by his belief that you always counter-punch. He would disparage a nun, an infant or Mike Pence, or all three in the same sentence, so attacking the “squad” is easy. He also believes that apologizing should be reserved for other persons. Whenever he expresses anything close to regret, he disavows his “apology” less than 24 hours after he makes it, as he just did with the four members of Congress. Plus, it is widely known that he’s not squeamish about prevarication. 

Over and above all of these things, what is hugely important to understand about his actions is that he’s determined to use the same negotiating style over and over. This is to stake out and aggressively defend an extreme position in hopes of moving any ultimate resolution in his direction. That’s why we get his public statements about bombing other countries into oblivion, and his claims regarding the huge economic benefits of trade wars and tariffs, which even he knows are false. These statements are all part of the alleged “art of the deal”. Given the becalmed status of nuclear proliferation talks with North Korea and trade talks with China, it is more accurately the artlessness of no deal.

Similarly, Trump thinks that ICE raids and separating children from the parents at the border will make the Democrats more likely to come to the table on immigration issues. Once, he let slip that he would like to work it out for Dreamers. He stopped that right away because he was afraid that it would diminish his hard line negotiating stance. All this is important to know because understanding his addled sensibilities makes it easier to combat his actions and to predict what’s next.

In Tim Alberta’s American Carnage, Paul Ryan says that Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about how government works. This has not been received in the country as a startling revelation. If Trump knew about government, he would have known how to get his citizenship question in the census without inducing the Supreme Court to block him. Instead, the Trump aides sat around the Commerce Department and White House and settled on what lie to tell to the courts .They decided to say they needed the citizenship question to help them enforce the Voting Rights Act, which was so palpably false that even Chief Justice Roberts found it annoying. So he provided the 5th and deciding vote to block the question.

What Trump doesn’t know includes how much deal making within the branches of the federal government (or between the federal government and a foreign government) differs from a Manhattan real estate deal. In real estate, the push and pull can be about a single transaction. Depending upon their leverage, one party can gain enormous advantage at the expense of the other.

Which leads us to what Nancy Pelosi and Xi Jipeng have in common. Neither is a Manhattan real estate developer who is short of leverage and who Donald Trump can bully and threaten. Both have control over multiple things that Donald Trump needs, and thus have plenty of ways to defend themselves against his bluster. Trump needs Speaker Pelosi’s help to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and pass the new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. He needs Xi Jipeng’s help in dealing with Kim Jong-un.

Making things worse, Trump doesn’t seem to get that Pelosi and Xi-Jipeng and countless other adversaries need to win too. In these governmental negotiations, Trump’s adversaries have got to be able to define what they got out of the deal or they can’t or won’t proceed. If anything, Xi-Jipeng has more at stake politically than does Trump. Nancy Pelosi’s speakership depends on standing up to Trump, which she has done nicely. She is not going to conclude a negotiation and watch Trump spike the ball. Especially in dealing with Congress, Trump tries to turn up the heat, but his claims of the other side’s perfidy are always dramatically overstated and thus do not accomplish their purpose. Besides, with regard to the debt ceiling compromise, the only way he has to turn up the heat is threaten to close the government, which would shave ten percent off the stock market, thus making even him averse.

Finally, Trump employs this same insulting practice of adopting the extreme, bullying position with the best friends we have in the international community. Canada is our number one trading partner and sent its soldiers at our request to Afghanistan. Why do Republican Senators enable Trump to pummel these friends, and why would even a malevolent person like Trump do it in the first place? Because he thinks it puts him in a better negotiating position. Meanwhile, we continue to isolate ourselves in the community of nations.

Certainly some of Trump’s mean-spiritedness contributes to the extreme positions as well. But, once we fully understand that extreme positions are a main ingredient of his negotiating strategy, what do we do about it?

In each instance, we take him at his word. Whatever indefensible extreme he outlines as his position, we address immediately and seek to take advantage of politically. If he says (as he just did) that he is the greatest thing that has happened to Puerto Rico, we emphasize the multiple times he has stalled aid. When John Bolton gets him to talk about full scale war with Iran, we emphasize that two years ago the international community (including Russia and China) had already reached an enforceable nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran, which Trump in his extremism took apart.

We temporarily move our gaze away from debates between those aspiring to be an authentic president and do three things to counter Trump’s most extreme positions.

1) Fight Back Against Food Stamp Cuts
	The expression “there is a special place in hell reserved for...” is put into play way too often. It’s cheeky to determine who among us should or should not be an occupant of a place that may (or may not) exist only metaphorically or metaphysically. Nonetheless, there is a special place in hell reserved for people who would seek to throw 3 million people out of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (food stamps), most for having assets greater than $2,000, while having recently passed $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. The new USDA SNAP rule renews a battle that we won last year in Congress. For bad measure, it also eliminates the eligibility of 300,000 kids for free and reduced lunches, forcing them to re-apply.  What more would you need to know about what kind of people Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue and other Trump minions are? Are they heading home proud of the day they spent at the office? The rule was just published today, so the opposition is just getting started. There’s a sixty-day period for public comment and we’ll go from there. Right now, the best thing to do is ally oneself with the best SNAP advocacy group, the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).
2) Make Trump Hear the Truth about Detention Centers
	Donald Trump says that border detention centers are “clean” and “well run”. The non-muckraking USA Today published a report calling them “nightmarish” and “unfit for children”. Whom to believe? Pass on the USA Today report to your friends, post it on your Facebook page if you still have one, and write a letter to your local newspaper if you still have one.
3) Fuel Mark Sanford’s Efforts to Challenge Trump Within his Party
	It seems clear that John Kasich is not going to contest Trump within the Republican Party, which isn’t so hard to understand. What’s left in the Republican Party is a very uneven collection of Trump supporters. If you were a member of that one-time party of international alliances, free trade and fiscal restraint, you have been gone for some time. And it’s clear that former Massachusetts William Weld is not going to attract any attention at all. Now comes former South Carolina Governor and former member of Congress Mark Sanford. Unlike Kasich and William Weld, Sanford has a lifetime conservative voting record. He felt Trump’s wrath because of differences over fiscal policy, civility and for recognizing human impacts on climate change. Trump did him in during the 2018 primaries, paving the way for Democrats to flip the seat. Mark Sanford running against Trump would be a gift to the country, because it would underscore all the party’s toadying to Trump, and raise again the mystery--- Where has the Republican Party gone? Each Sanford event, interview or article would help reveal that Trump hijacked a party, and hopefully help drive the last of the true Republicans away from Trump.  Sanford is likely to run against Trump. He doesn’t have a campaign site yet, but he has a web page. You can get on his list, encourage him to run, and follow what transpires.

We resisters are continuing to build upon the November 2018 results. As intensive as our efforts have been, we are going to do far, far more between now and November 2020. There is no danger we are going to get distracted. We know what to do, we know the stakes are the future of our country, and thus we will prevail.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#70: Help American Voters Remember their Core Beliefs

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.

It turns out that selecting a President among all candidates not named Trump is going to be a lot of work. Of course, it is well worth the effort.

What’s happened so far is all fine. Rhapsodies over individual candidates might ultimately emerge, but not just yet. No particular outcome is inevitable. There is no team of elite power brokers orchestrating the way it is going to turn out. Its unpredictably is part of its charm. Six months ago, few would have predicted that Mayor Pete would be displacing Beto O’Rourke, or that Elizabeth Warren would be gently pushing Bernie Sanders aside, or even that Kamala Harris would be getting a lot more traction than fellow Senators Gillibrand, Booker and Klobuchar. Months from now our expectations may well have been scrambled again.

Together we have developed unprecedented focus. There is more access to more candidates, more volunteer efforts to engage in, more donations to be made, and more things to dwell on or obsess over. With all of those good things comes two dangers, that we will be conclusion-jumpers, and that we will be captured by someone else’s faulty narrative.

In the first instance, we are prone to wishful thinking. No, Daniel Epstein’s arrest is not going to bring down his former buddy Trump, as much as we may wish it so. With the resignation of British ambassador Kim Darroch for privately informing his government that Trump is incompetent and inept, it would have been fair for us to jump to a conclusion that the secret is finally out. But, to foreign governments and not just a few Republican Senators (in private), it hasn’t been a secret at all. Darroch was stating the obvious. He is an extremely bright, well-educated, well-spoken man. Stupidly and wackily, Trump called Darroch stupid and wacky,

More dangerous than wishful thinking is fully accepting the narrative of any single pundit, AOC’s tweets, or the collective wisdom of one’s Facebook friends. On issues like Medicare for All, what has emerged is overreaching statements like “If that many candidates raised their hands on this issue at the debate, then we can’t win.” But we are just at the start of sorting out these issues together. What we have now in a very predictably messy Democratic way is not a pitched battle between liberalism and progressivism, as suggested by everyone’s favorite faulty narrative. Instead we will have is a fair discussion of how to protect and improve upon the health care guarantees of the Affordable Care Act, and how to keep from diminishing the ways the existing indispensable Medicare program serves seniors.

It’s a faulty narrative because considering all the issues in play, one would be hard pressed to take the Democratic candidates and put them on a moderate to liberal to progressive continuum, except of course for Bernie Sanders. That’s a good thing, and it makes John Hickenlooper’s use of the word socialism even more self-serving and ridiculous and unacceptable. All of these candidates are versed well in their own arguments regarding their electability. Let’s give them a chance to articulate their claims. In the meantime, let’s expect them all to understand every day that among others there are four voter cohorts we need them to attend to, and ways to make certain we don’t leave anyone un-reached.

• The all-important independent voters, who fled Republican Congressional candidates in flocks last November. They are wanting a President who is more like a President. Since they themselves consider both parties a possibility, they don’t like Trump’s daily vilification of the other side. A large number of these voters are suburban women, and rightly or rightly they have concluded that Trump is predatory toward women. The gender gap remains huge. Our candidates must make certain that voters know that the protection of the right to choose will depend entirely on their vote in 2020.

• Latino citizens make up more than 11% of the electorate. This will be the fastest growing cohort for some time, which has led to the resisters giving considerable support to voter registration efforts. Over 70% of these voters vote for the Democratic candidate, which is high but considerably lower than the percentage of African-Americans who vote for Democrats. Still, in the 2018 Congressional elections, nine Republican seats were taken by Democrats in districts where Latinos are at least 10% of the voters. Border issues are important regardless of how politically consequential they are or aren’t,, but even more powerful politically is providing a path to citizenship for Dreamers. We have to make certain our candidates don’t see DACA as yesterday’s issue. It will be back before all of us because the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in November, and it gives our candidates an important chance to spotlight Trump’s intransigence and mean-spiritedness. 

• Young voters aged 18-30 are more open to Medicare for All provisions that would eliminate supplemental coverage than are voters over 65, who have experienced the benefits of such coverage. As stated above, this will need some sorting out. Young voters got the message in 2018 that elections matter, voting at a higher rate in an off-year election than any time since 1954. Reversing Trump on climate change is a huge motivation for these voters, which will not be difficult for our candidates to remember. This is also the cohort that would be happiest to see the Democratic ticket include generational change, which some of candidates can offer and others cannot.

• Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were supposed to save us from Donald Trump in 2016. Obviously, other things were happening like the Russian intervention, but there is no question we slipped among blue collar voters. The more we remember the firewall was breached and rebuild it, the better off we will be in November 2020. The emphasis by our candidates on strengthening the middle class can resonate, but only when the economic message reflects the authentic nature and experience of the candidate, which is something we can check when we are doing our choosing. Happily, we have new leadership in these states which will help us boost our presidential candidates. We took all three Governor’s races in 2018. Tom Wolf won by 840,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer by 400,000 votes in Michigan, and Tony Evers squeaked by incumbent Scott Walker in Wisconsin. All won the blue collar vote.

As missive #69 emphasized, the Democratic position is favored over the Republican position on all of the major issues to be debated in 2020. It’s good to make the candidates dig deeper on these matters. Have we forgotten that deciding what the government is going to do with and for the people is the essence of democracy? But, it’s also good to remember the basics. If permitted, Donald Trump would take away choice from every woman in America, take away Affordable Care Act coverage from 20 million people, leave a million Dreamers subject to deportation, and refuse to defend the planet we all inhabit from climate change. Understanding these simple truths drives us every day, and calls for us to do these three things:

1) Sadly, Give Up on Susan Collins
	We must take back the Senate for dozens of reasons, most urgently to protect the constitutional rights of women in the next Supreme Court nomination. Unfortunately, as hard as Susan Collins has tried to moderate Trump’s worst positions, she twisted herself into a pretzel to back Brett Kavanaugh, even though she herself is pro-choice. She is a vote for Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. We have a much better chance of taking back the Senate if we win Maine, so we need to thank Susan Collins for trying and send her home. Rather than spending the next year waiting out the primaries, we need to boost the best candidate right now, Maine’s Democratic Speaker of the House Sara Gideon. Why not give up coffee for a week, send the money to Sara Gideon, and let the prospect of taking back the Senate keep you awake?
2) Get College Campuses Ready for the Fall
	Registering to vote has been revolutionized. Online registration is possible in almost all states. National organizations like Rock the Vote can tell you everything you need to know about registering.  You can send high school kids the link as an 18th birthday present. You can also pay some attention to what four-year colleges and community colleges are doing institutionally to include voter registration opportunities as a part of the orientation experience of incoming students. Start by identifying the college nearest you. Search online for the name and email of their president and write her or him asking for a description of what they are doing about aiding in registration. Depending on their answer, help them find and utilize the tools they need, or notify the nearest Indivisible group regarding their current shortcomings.
3) Win a State Legislative Majority
	Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi are holding state legislative elections this fall. In all three states, it will be the last legislative election before the post 2020 census redistricting, so the stakes are huge. There are several organizations bent upon flipping the Virginia legislature and making inroads in the other two states, but Sister Districts is a premier effort. If you are out of money, they have multiple other ways you can help. If you have some money, give that to them too. Virginia is an extraordinary opportunity. Republicans hold a 21-19 majority in the Senate and a 51-48 majority in the House. Democrats have benefited from some recent court-mandated redistricting. If you do one thing today, get involved in what will be happening in November 2019 in Virginia.

There are a lot of people trying to figure out what Donald Trump is going to do next and working hard to prevent the worst of it. There is an enormously effective way to put this awful blot on our nation’s history behind us--- a huge victory at the ballot box on November 3, 2020. It can’t come too soon.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington