Are the Heedless Dems Giving Trumpty Dumpty a Path to Become America’s FÜHRER?

BY RALPH NADER

 JUNE 24, 2024
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Image by Jon Tyson.

In the last several months, the chips have been falling in Trump’s favor to a level that probably astonishes this convicted felon. Consider the following:

1. Three of the four serious state and federal criminal lawsuits have been delayed by Trump’s lawyers and judges, so it is unlikely there will be trials until after the November election. The one case in New York where the jury pronounced him guilty of 34 felonies is awaiting the presiding judge’s sentence on July 11th. The betting in legal circles is that he won’t even sentence Trump to a short prison term.

At the same time, Trump used his conviction to motivate his loyal supporters to send his campaign over 52 million dollars within 24 hours after the verdict. In his ego driven, long and repetitive speeches, Trump takes no responsibility for his crimes and mocks the rule of law.

2. Month after month, Trump is leading Biden in the six swing states, except Wisconsin. The Biden campaign, still vulnerable to another Electoral College defeat despite winning a majority of votes nationally, is facing the risk of a dangerously large number of voters staying home on election day. Trump attacks Biden daily, slanderously and with the usual nickname “crooked Joe Biden,” repeated and reliably reported by the mass media. Where are the Democrats’ nicknames for Der Führer, the dangerous, unstable, lying, convicted felon a.k.a. Donald Trump? Biden once did use “Sleepy Don” to describe Trump’s drowsy state during the trial in New York.

Joe Biden and Democratic operatives need to re-double their meager efforts in the name game. Trumpty Dumpty gets a free ride: there are no “lock him up” chants at Democratic rallies.

So rare is anyone high on the Democratic Party ladder giving blowhard bully Donald his own medicine that when one politician, Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, does just that, he is featured in the New York Times as an outspoken maverick. (See New York Times, June 13, 2024, “This Top Democrat Is Leading His Party’s Attack on Trump as a Felon”.)

3. Fox News, which Trump castigated for not being Trumpian enough, has fallen fully back in line. The rest of the mainstream media reports his lies (often corrected to no avail) and repeats his bombastic, delusional self-evaluations and grandiose promises.

The “Trump Media & Technology Group” (DJT stock), which features, Truth Social the social media platform, is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. DJT is the ultimate meme stock with tiny revenues, huge debts, propped up by his fan investors, giving him a share value of some 2-4 billion dollars (though restricted for another four months from sale.)

4. Trump pays no political price for his omnicidal “drill baby drill” cry for coal, oil and gas interests to further the present and coming climate violence. He’s gone so far as to ask a group meeting of energy barons for a billion dollars in campaign contributions as a payoff.

5. The labor unions continue, with few exceptions, to lie low, fearing the third of their members who are Trump supporters. The deafening silence of labor leaders continues, not withstanding Trump’s active hatred of labor unions and multiple anti-labor policies as a failed businessman and as president, including freezing the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage and corporatizing OSHA, the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board.

6. Hoping for a repeat of Trump’s 2016 Electoral College presidential campaign victory, several big money contributors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, including some big bankers are lining up to support Trump. Worse, Trump is picking up small extra percentages in the polls from Black and Hispanic voters who have been devastated by Trump policies and largely excluded from Trump’s government appointments during his tenure as president.

7. Last week insurrectionist Trump returned to Capitol Hill to a triumphant display of obsequious hand-kissing including from Republicans who were stand-offish and sharply critical of the Presidential outlaw and inciting election-denier. Among them were sleazy Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

8. It is worth noting that not all Republican voters are MAGA Trumpsters. A large number are traditional Republicans going back generations who would vote for any Republican nominee, even if he were, as Michael Bloomberg once said, Leon Trotsky. So inbred is their hatred of the Democrats, that, in his worst moments, Trump could not provoke them to defect from the GOP nominee.

9. Despite Trump’s ongoing shafting of all Americans in their roles as workers, consumers, parents, students, patients, children, women, seniors, and targeted voters he wants blocked from voting, Trumpty Dumpty’s base, still in the minority of likely voters nationally, sticks with him, as he adds more new adherents.

When asked why? The answers come fast and furious. “He is a strong leader,” “He’s rich so he can’t be bought,” (but he could be sold) “I like his stand against abortion.” Other conservative voters like his tax cuts for upper income people and big corporations, never mind the massive deficits piling up as a result on their descendants. “He wants to protect our borders from hordes of immigrants.” “He will fight inflation.” Really? According to ProPublica, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.”

Have they forgotten his disastrous mocking inaction early in the Covid-19 pandemic that cost over 350,000 American lives?

Women who support Trump forgive or don’t care about his serial abuse of women, his infidelities, or his anti-women economic policies. “I don’t support Trump to learn my family values,” said one fervid woman backer, neglecting to recognize how Trump destroys family values.

Much of the business community likes Trump’s relentless tax-cutting, advantageous to his own family of course, and his radical deregulation of critical consumer, labor and environmental protections. Big Business CEOs want their profits even as more of them experience the ravages of megahurricanes, uncontrollable wildfires, rising sea levels, and unbearable heat waves. They want Trump’s rubber-stamp approval of corporate mergers and they want to “defund” the federal cops on the corporate crime, fraud and abuse beat. They also want to muzzle agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

Trump boastfully rejects the rule of Law. He repeatedly said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” This often-repeated dictatorial declaration doesn’t bother his supporters who say all presidents break the law. Many presidents have broken the law, but none have broken as many laws, including obstruction of justice and defiance of Congressional subpoenas, as often as Trump. And none have been indicted on felony charges for working to overturn the results of a presidential election. Remember, Trump encouraged the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and tried to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

So, it will all come down to two things: One, who gets the most non-voters (there are estimated to be as many as 100 million non-voters this year) to the polls, especially in the six or so swing states and two, who will motivate their voting base to show up in big numbers.

Instead of wasting huge amounts of money on unmemorable TV and radio ads, which net their corporate-conflicted media consultants a rich fifteen percent commission, the Democratic Party leaders would be well advised to read Bishop William Barber’s just published book WHITE POVERTY and learn how his ground game can get out more votes from low-wage workers.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

AMERIKA

Tuesday’s Jamaal Bowman Primary Hits Close to Home for Me

BY PETE TUCKER

 JUNE 24, 2024
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Photograph Source: U.S. Department of Defense – Public Domain

I grew up in northern Westchester County, New York. Nearly twenty years ago I came to DC, thinking it’d be for just a few months. Instead, I got swept up in DC’s activist scene and haven’t left the area.

First as an activist, then as a journalist, my focus was on the city’s local power structure, the DC Council in particular. But with Congress right here, I’d occasionally visit the Capitol and sit in on random committee hearings.

No hearings frustrated me more than those of the House Foreign Relations Committee, where the panel’s top Democrat, Congressman Eliot Engel, seemed to back every war, while opposing diplomatic advances like President Obama’s Iran deal.

But what made me angriest about Engel was that he represented, in addition to a sliver of the Bronx, the southern half of my home county of Westchester. And I knew that most of Engel’s constituents had no idea that he was misusing his powerful post to push for more war.

So in 2020, when Engel drew a serious primary challenge, I was thrilled. Even if the first-time candidate, a Black middle school principal named Jamaal Bowman, had no chance of winning, at least Engel wouldn’t waltz into his seventeenth term without a fight. Then the impossible happened, and Bowman won.

In the ensuing three-and-a-half years, Bowman has proven to be every bit as peaceful on foreign policy as Engel was bellicose. And for that, Bowman is a marked man – particularly by AIPAC and its right-wing donors.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been around over 60 years, but it only began intervening in Democratic primaries in a big way last election cycle. AIPAC’s move came on the heels of a string of corporate Democrats losing primary contests to progressive “Squad” members, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, and Bowman two years later.

To stop this trend, AIPAC – backed by millions from Republican donors – quickly became the top outside spender in Democratic primaries, dropping $26 million in 2022. This year, AIPAC plans to spend a cool $100 million, and the group’s top target is Bowman, whose primary is Tuesday, June 25.

“[I]n barely a month, an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC has spent $14.5 million — up to $17,000 an hour — on the race, filling television screens, stuffing mailboxes and clogging phone lines with caustic attacks,” the New York Times reported. “With days to go, the expenditures have already eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race.”

Tellingly, AIPAC’s ads rarely mention Bowman’s views on Israel, which are thoughtful and nuanced, and supported by many progressive Jews. “Calling for cease-fire does not mean we support Hamas, does not mean we support the killing of Israelis or Jews, does not mean we support antisemitism,” Bowman said at a protest outside the White House late last year. “We are calling for cease-fire because we don’t want anyone else to die.”

Of course, Bowman isn’t perfect. He infamously pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol Building, reportedly to delay a vote, which led to his censure. And he follows a wide array of folks on social media, including some conspiracy theorists. AIPAC, however, isn’t targeting him for these reasons, but because of his views on Israel and Palestine.

While too much airtime has been given to Bowman’s imperfections, not enough has been given to those of his opponent, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who AIPAC helped recruit to run.

Latimer’s cheating on his wife with his longtime girlfriend “has been an open secret in Westchester politics for years,” Talk of the Sound, a local blog, reported in 2021, and 2017. While that’s Latimer’s personal business, he made it the county’s when he quietly gave his girlfriend a six-figure job in his administration. Just imagine the salacious headlines we’d be reading right now if Bowman had tried to pull that off.

And that’s not all. When Latimer’s unpaid parking tickets grew so numerous that he was prohibited from driving his own car, he borrowed a subordinate’s. We know this because Latimer proceeded to crash his staffer’s car, injuring another driver in a 2017 accident.

During this period when Latimer was legally barred from driving his car, he thumbed his nose at the law and did so anyway. Questioned about this by The Journal News, Latimer claimed he’d only taken the car on a quick “loop” to keep the engine healthy – and get some coffee.

There’s been radio silence in the media about these incidents, which wouldn’t be the case if Bowman was the scofflaw in question. But as concerning as these transgressions are, it’s Latimer’s earlier political choices that trouble me more.

Yonkers

I was just a kid when my Uncle Len issued his landmark 1985 ruling. The only impact it had on me was that, when visiting Uncle Len and Aunt Ann for a swim in their delightfully cool pool, I now might see US Marshalls in the driveway, which seemed pretty cool at the time.

When my great uncle wasn’t poolside, it turned out he was a federal judge. And Judge Leonard Sand had managed to piss off a lot of people when he required the city of Yonkers to desegregate its housing. (HBO’s mini-series Show Me a Hero dramatizes these events.)

While this may seem like ancient history, it didn’t feel that way as I read Branko Marcetic’s recent story for Jacobin, “George Latimer’s History of Slow-Walking Desegregation.”

Yonkers, after years of foot-dragging, finally came around to the idea of building substantial amounts of affordable housing, as Uncle Len’s ruling required. Only to do so, the city sought to use four-and-a-half acres of local parkland – but Latimer, an up-and-coming legislator at the time, was determined to prevent this.

“Latimer was one of the eight county legislators who narrowly defeated a push in March 1997 to hand the parkland over to the city for housing,” Marcetic wrote. “A month later, he was on the losing end of a 12–3 vote to transfer the parkland, voting alongside two Republicans on the majority-GOP board.”

For several years after that, including as board chairman, Latimer still carried on his fight. “Latimer fought the city’s attempt to abide by a federal desegregation order to the bitter end,” wrote Marcetic, “even when it put him to the right of his own party leadership and much of the New York political establishment, Republicans included.”

Close to home

There’s a final reason why the Bowman-Latimer race hits close to home for me. As a Jew, it’s infuriating to watch AIPAC unleash millions of dollars in attack ads against yet another progressive Black candidate.

While AIPAC boasts of being the top donor to Congressional Black Caucus members, the fact remains that nothing animates the group quite like taking out Black progressives.

I watched this up close two years ago, when AIPAC’s super PAC spent $6 million to stop former congresswoman Donna Edwards from representing her Maryland district abutting DC. And after AIPAC is through with Bowman, its next target is Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush, whose primary is August 6.

“‘Shut up or else’ is the message [AIPAC]… is sending to Black lawmakers in America who are critical of what’s happening in Gaza,” Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah wrote in regards to the onslaught Bowman is facing.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Bowman vs. Latimer showdown for progressives… it is a test of how far America’s right wing will go to crush progressive movements. No one should be surprised that a Black politician is the canary in the coal mine.”

Pete Tucker is a journalist based in DC. He writes at petetucker.substack.com