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Here’s another reason I couldn’t work for this president

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The first reason, of course, is that he would never ask me to.  Or more correctly, the deeply cynical and hyper-efficient Christian nationalists, and the vacuous and power-hungry suck-ups who run his administration, would have no use for me since I am not on board with their plans to turn back time to an America where white men alone are in charge of everything, women are meant to serve the men even when they are put in positions that seem to carry authority, and anyone not from their tribe – nationally. ethnically, religiously, or otherwise – knows better than to cause trouble.  (You don’t really think TFG himself came up with all these ideas for government “reforms,” do you?  He’s focused mainly on self-aggrandizement and financial corruption.)  The second reason is I could never keep my mouth shut long enough about the national embarrassment that is the Republican-controlled Congress and their complete abrogation of their responsibility to be a check and/or balance on the Executive branch to win Senate confirmation.

And the third is, it’s got to be just too exhausting, what with all the work they have to do to constantly kiss his ass and to flex for the public to show what big strong masculine manly men they are.  Here are two shining examples from just the past few days.

In more than fifty years of paying attention to the operations of the federal government I never once before saw anything meant to be so stupefyingly ego-massaging, while also as appallingly degrading, as the televised opening of a Trump Cabinet meeting, at which each member is expected to publicly slather the boss up one side and back down the other with excessive praise for some imagined achievement, all as he sits by with a canary-eating grin to feign embarrassment and gratitude for the unsolicited praise.  Imagine, if you will (if you can), how the titans of industry and government who agreed to serve in this administration, even when they had little to no respect for TFG himself, were silently thinking that they now knew what it must have been like for Prometheus to be chained to that rock.  Since then our government leaders have suffered no shortage of sickening superlatives any time they are called upon to describe Trump’s abilities, his wisdom, his patriotism or his leadership.  Now some of them have been called on to measure their praise of the president in another way.  Another, very weird way.

Will Marco Rubio’s humiliations never end? Recent photos show the secretary of state, whom Donald Trump dubbed “Little Marco” at a campaign rally almost exactly one decade ago, clomping around in shoes that are far too large for his feet. They’re black and freshly shined, an otherwise appropriate choice for a political leader a few heartbeats away from the presidency, but with a gap around his heels that could fit a sizable tube of lip gloss in a pinch.

The shoes cut an absurd figure, like a little boy pretending to be a businessman in Daddy’s oxfords. And they’ve got to be hideously uncomfortable. If you’ve ever walked a mile in the stiff leather dress shoes of someone bigger-footed than you, you know the blisters, toe stubs, and awkward gaits that can come as a result.

But a little fashion faux pas and a touch of foot pain are a small price to pay for pleasing the temperamental king of the GOP. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Rubio’s shoes came as a gift from the president, who has taken to bestowing his favorite brand of shoes on Republican lawmakers, right-wing A-listers, and the men who work in his administration. A pair of affordable Florsheims has become Trump’s go-to token of appreciation for his bro gang—or, depending on how you look at it, a mandatory uniform signaling the loyalty of his acolytes.

Having to wear the same stupid shoes to every White House meeting because your self-obsessed boss wanted you guys to be matchy-matchy is embarrassing enough. But the particular circumstances of Rubio’s shoes are downright pathetic. As Vice President J.D. Vance recalled at an event in December, the Journal reported, he was meeting with Trump, Rubio, and an unnamed third politician in the Oval Office when the president accused Vance and Rubio of having “shitty shoes.” Trump asked them all for their shoe size; Vance made sure to put in the record that he’s a size 13, while Rubio claimed to be an 11 and the third man a 7. The president then launched a sideways insult at the guy with the daintiest feet: “You know you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.”

That the “locker-room talk” president would place an inordinate, genital-related premium on a man’s foot size was surely no surprise to Rubio, who has risen in GOP influence in direct proportion to his willingness to contort himself to Trump’s exact desires. It does not seem out of the realm of possibility, then, that Rubio would inflate his own shoe specs to impress Trump with his masculine bulk.

You can imagine the gears in Rubio’s brain whirring as he sat across the Resolute Desk from Trump. If he shared his actual shoe size, the president might scoff at his presumably small penis. If he lied and offered a larger number, he’d end up shuffling around D.C. in Daddy’s big-boy shoes for the rest of time. The correct answer was clear: Rubio’s pee-pee reputation had to remain intact, whatever the cost to his feet.

(snip)

Perversely, Rubio’s gaping shoes might do more to please the president than any pair of ample-sized feet ever could. Humiliation is exactly how Trump prefers to test the fealty of those in his employ. If you want to be in the president’s orbit, you’d better pretend it’s the pinnacle of artistic excellence when Lara Trump belts out a nasal Tom Petty cover at the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party. You’ve got to smile and choke down your Big Mac on Air Force One, even if you’ve made your name as the clean-eating guy. As the vice president, you’re supposed to graciously nod as Trump calls you incompetent, accuses you of being a buttinsky, and says you’ll never be his successor. Every time Trump makes these people lie to themselves or endure a public shaming, he weakens their sense of self and their public image, reducing their worth to their proximity to him.

Regardless of how they used to do things in whatever world they came from, the men of Trump World know they are now expected to be confrontational with the news media.  Aggressively confrontational, whether or not either aggressiveness or confrontation is appropriate.  Always.  It is part of the lesson Trump learned more than fifty years ago from the infamous New York City lawyer Roy Cohn, whose mantra when it came to any dispute was: never apologize, always fight back with greater force, and never admit you were wrong.

Even though he catered to the New York City newspapers in his business career, Trump the politician and president has always accused journalists – all journalists – of being against him.  Unless they are sucking up to him (yes, I’m looking at you, Fox News, Newsmax and some others) and/or inventing new ways to curry favor, any journalist who dares acknowledge provable reality and ask a non-fawning question is “the enemy of the people.”  Now, Trump didn’t invent this strategy, and there are plenty of conservative Americans who don’t believe impartiality is really a thing, who view any negative story as evidence of opposition rather than the result of regular old honest reporting.  We know that all of establishment journalism is not against this president, nor were they nor will they all be against any other president.  It is not their job to be “for” any president or elected official, but to ask questions and report news for the benefit of the readers, listeners and viewers.

That does not mean that there can be no complaints about how a story is covered.  Not all journalism is perfect…most of it is not perfect, probably.  And Trump is only the 47th president ever to complain about stories written about his government.  (I assume.)  In his case, the complaints are usually not that any particular story is inaccurate, but that it is insufficiently flattering of him.  What is different now is that this president accuses those who do not flatter him of committing treason.  And his top broadcasting regulator is busy showing how tough he can be with “the media” but forgetting everything he should have learned about the First Amendment last September.  Back then he was pressuring a television network to discipline a talk show host for expressing an opinion that Trump didn’t like or agree with; now, he is blatantly, unconstitutionally threatening to use the power of the government to put the offenders out of business.

Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”

(snip)

Previous White Houses also complained about domestic news coverage of American intervention in the Middle East. But this administration’s attempts to shame, and in some cases punish, journalists for straightforward reporting on the war has engendered comparisons to the demands of foreign authoritarian leaders.

(snip)

The licensing threat from Mr. Carr, the F.C.C. chairman, raised eyebrows in part because the agency has been traditionally viewed as independent. As a regulator, Mr. Carr has government tools at his disposal to punish media organizations, though the process for revoking a broadcast license is onerous and can take years. On Sunday, the Democratic minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, called his comments “vindictive, fascist stuff.”

Mr. Carr made his remarks on a day when he was seen speaking with Mr. Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., according to CNN. Mr. Carr was criticized last year for implying that he might retaliate against ABC for on-air comments by Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night host, who was then temporarily suspended by the network.

To Trump and Carr, and Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt and all the others crying about their bad press this week: toughen up, snowflake.  (Maybe, don’t do those things that people are criticizing?)  And, seriously, what part of the government “shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” don’t you understand?

Same song, next verse

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

When I was a college student in the capital city of Texas, the mayor once held his regular weekly news conference and was asked to comment on the fact that the state legislature was about to begin another biennial session under the big pink dome.  His immediate reaction was to say “Lock up the kids and dogs.”

America, your legislature is back in business: the House of Representatives has selected Mike Johnson of Louisiana as its new speaker.  Who is that, you ask, and what does he believe in?  Among other things, he

So, we got that going for us…which is not nice.  Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that any sense of relief you might be feeling that a well-known extremist like Jim Jordan was not elected by Republicans in Congress is misplaced.

For Jordan’s shirt sleeves demeanor and wrestler’s pugnacity, substitute a bespectacled, low-key presentation, a law degree and an unswerving commitment to conservative dogma and former president Donald Trump.

This is not an upgrade. It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.

Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind aSpeaker Johnson Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

(snip)

The Johnson brief was a full-throated endorsement of the “independent state legislature” theory, ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Moore v. Harper. The brief asserted that under the terms of the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any review by state courts or involvement of other state parties — have power to set rules for choosing presidential electors. “The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties,” the brief argued.

(snip)

The Texas episode was of a piece with Johnson’s conservative worldview. Before being elected to Congress, he was a senior lawyer and national spokesman for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights.

Running for Congress in 2016, he described himself as “a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order, and I think that order is important.” Johnson said he had been “called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”

We shall see how well Johnson does in leading the House, or at least its too-small-for-comfort Republican majority, in handling upcoming issues like a possible government shutdown in three weeks, or requests for more aid to Israel and Ukraine, or any of the other normal kinds of business which members of Congress are supposed to take care of on our behalf.  But given his still-declared support of Trump, it’s unlikely Johnson will be much of a leader when it comes to the reality of the need to work with Democrats to get things done: as David Frum wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, “The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it had to accept reality.  Reality is just too awkward.”

In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.

Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. So [then-Speaker Kevin] McCarthy just had to press ahead, acting as if he commanded a majority when he did not; insulting and demeaning the minority, even though he had to know that he might need their help at any minute.

That minute came. McCarthy sought Democratic votes to save him from his own refractory members, and in return he offered nothing. Not even politeness.

That proposition did not produce the desired results, and so here we are.

Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.

The only way to produce a stable majority in the House is for the next Republican leader to reach a working agreement with the Democrats to bypass the nihilists in the GOP caucus. But that agreement will have to be unspoken and even denied—because making agreements that show any respect for the other side will be seen by Republican partisans as betrayal. The price of GOP leadership is delivering delusions and fantasies: the delusion and fantasy that Trump won in 2020, the delusion and fantasy that the Republicans did not lose in 2022.

“Delusion and fantasy” might well stand as a new motto for the remnants of a once proud GOP: in the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual American Values Survey, one-third of Republicans believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” almost half think we need a strong leader who is willing to break some rules to get things done, and 29% are strong believers in the QAnon conspiracy movement. In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin writes:

Most frightening is how many Republicans buy into white Christian nationalism, a racist ideology that rejects the basic premise of our democracy: “All men are created equal.” One-third of Americans but 52 percent of Republicans agree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The number is even higher among White evangelical Protestants (54 percent). Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism are more than twice as likely as other Americans to say true patriots might have to resort to violence to save the country.

In a related question, 75 percent of Republicans think the Founders wanted America to be a Christian nation with Western European values.

Rubin also identifies a “positive sign of public sanity” across the ideological spectrum.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”

Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.

(snip)

Taking a step back, the overall picture here is a country that is inclusive, respectful of religious differences, pro-democracy and supportive of women’s rights — except when it comes to the largely Republican, mostly White evangelical Christians who reject these fundamental ideas.

When a sizable portion of one of the major political parties, aided by a right-wing propaganda machine and infused with religious fervor, rejects the basis for multiracial, multicultural democracy, we face a severe crisis. Even if Trump does not return to the White House, this radicalized segment will not disappear. How we reintegrate millions of Americans into reality-based, pro-democracy politics in a diverse country remains the great challenge of our time.

I’ve never been prouder

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It should be exquisitely clear to all of us by now that our president will never understand.  He thinks he was elected king of America, and that we owe him fealty.  We do not.  We owe respect to the office and to the person who holds it, when that person’s actions show he or she is deserving of that respect (just ask any of the Obama haters!), but we are allowed to disagree with the opinions and positions held or expressed by that person without fear of government retribution.  In fact, as free people we have a duty and responsibility to stand up for our rights, and for what’s right.

Most people understand that the athletes who have knelt or otherwise protested during the national anthem at their games have NOT been protesting the national anthem; they have chosen a high-visibility opportunity to express their opinion on other issues, and done so with the understanding that they could suffer adverse opinion of some of their fellow citizens, which many have.  But that’s the deal: the First Amendment gives each of us the right to speak our minds, and to react and respond to the opinions of others as we choose.  The government doesn’t have to like what we say, but it cannot take action to stop us from speaking our piece.

Most people understand this…not all.

So, from this…fertilizer…spread by the president this weekend–

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911654184918880260

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911655987857281024

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911718138747727872

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/911911385176723457

…arose these blooms, among many:

https://twitter.com/koopa_kinte/status/911715150507454464

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/911743595799044097

https://twitter.com/JaneMLB/status/911811852274778113

https://twitter.com/TheRealDratch/status/911577578040897537

https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/911637710242062339

https://twitter.com/Mitch_Harris2/status/911943991813443584

https://twitter.com/Robert_K_Kraft/status/911940868944343040

https://twitter.com/matt_slotnick/status/911742335226044416

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/911983433295024129

https://twitter.com/JasonKander/status/911981529286529024

Thank you, my fellow Americans, for speaking up.

This is harder on me than it is on you, even though you really wouldn’t think that’d be the case

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

If you’re employed somewhere you’ve probably seen the memo: the stilted and awkward announcement that one of your co-workers is about to become one of your former co-workers, thanks to the right-sizing of the organization.  It’s almost as if bosses get special training in how to transmogrify what should be a simple and direct conveyance of a bit of office news into a hideous and/or hilarious trip to Freaktown.

A couple of years ago Chicago newsman Steve Daley, who died on Sunday at 62, authored the essential takeoff of the genre.  Read the whole thing at the Columbia Journalism Review.

John came to us (four years ago; in 1981; last month) from (the Bugle; the London School of Economics; a think tank in Phoenix). He arrived here with a reputation as (a sociopath; a member of the team of twenty-seven reporters that won a 1991 Polk award for the Bugle series on alternate street parking; a friend of the former executive editor).

John’s contributions to this paper have not gone without notice. He’s a (deft writer; diligent copy editor; pain in the neck), a man who is passionate about (the First Amendment; gerunds; the Bass Ale at Costello’s Taproom) and a newsroom leader who has (become obsessed with Google maps; not generated a single sexual harassment complaint; inspired legions of young reporters to consider teaching American Studies out at the junior college).

(snip)

So it is with (mixed emotions; ill-disguised glee; a disturbing sense that I have now written about seventy-five of these tortured memos) that we bid farewell to our colleague. Moving forward, it is possible the number of voluntary buyout applications may be limited by (pure malice; Sarbanes-Oxley; the guy in the Crocs on 7). Only then will we know if the Involuntary Severance Program (“Opportunity 2009”) will be extended.