Faculty lounge thinking

"Oligarchy" is more precise,

"King" is simpler.

Elissa Slotkin, a U.S. senator from Michigan, is in the news for having offered up political advice to Democrats generally and to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically. Use language that motivates people, she said. Don't try to give a political science lecture.

She was referring to the "oligarchy rallies." Accuse Trump of trying to be king, not the leader of a new political system, oligarchy.

It isn't an issue of dumbing things down, she argues. It is a matter of using simple, clear language that connects with people emotionally, especially the non-college voters of all races and ethnicities who have been abandoning Democrats. We decide that we don't want a government run by a wealthy and connected class of people mixing private and governmental power, an oligarchy. We feel resentful of an all-powerful king.  

Go with the emotional connection.

Slotkin's advice parallels that of Democratic strategist pundit James Carville who says that Democrats should abandon the language, tastes, and policies of university faculty lounges. He argues that Democrats are led by advocacy nonprofit groups, by congressional staffers, by media pundits, by privileged elitists who defend positions that are out of touch with most Americans. They defend positions -- now swept into the idea of "woke" -- that come across as theoretical and extreme.

A gender theory professor might assert that sex is exclusively a cultural artifact, a social convention, and therefore biology-based distinctions based on the false notion of "sex" are profoundly mistaken and discriminatory. Most people, in their general experience, think sex is pretty darned real.

Similarly, people might understand the distinction between "equity" and "equality" in a Power Point slide deck in a DEI training presentation, but home from the seminar, wonder if maybe the organization shouldn't just hire the person who can best do the job.

I had that experience personally. I was a multi-decade member of the board of my Southwest Oregon Planned Parenthood affiliate. We had a three-hour DEI training on equity hiring. After the presentation the director of operations said she had misgivings about a recent hire. One candidate for a maintenance position was Black, had several years of experience, and good recommendations and work history. He was hired instead of a second candidate, a Hispanic, with limited work experience and a troubled job history with time missing from drug and alcohol use and lack of reliable housing. She semi-apologized for having hired the Black man, who was a victim of racial prejudice, sure, but he did not have as many problems as did the man with substance problems and unsettled living conditions that contributed to his lack of work experience. The second person, she said, needed the extra consideration to give him equity in hiring. That got murmurs of assent and praise.

I sat silently wondering if maybe the operations manager's real task wasn't to hire the person who could best help the organization carry out its own mission.

I was later gently asked to leave that board by the board president and CEO. Planned Parenthood is the "tip of the spear" in progressive advocacy, they explained, and I wasn't keeping up.

On issues of abortion, gender, immigration, racial equity, climate, rights of people to camp on sidewalks, gun rights, land use planning, protection of endangered species, plastic straws, microaggressions, and similar issues, Democrats have a set of orthodox, acceptable positions. Those positions are enforced by policy advocates who pounce on apostasy. 

Democrats need not admire or respect Trump. I certainly do not. He is endangering American democracy. But Democrats can observe and learn from him what works politically. He abandons GOP orthodoxy when it is unpopular. He is credited for his courage and independence for doing so. He told anti-abortion extremists that he would not ban all abortions; he told trickle-down free-trade Republicans that he disagreed with them; he said he would not cut Medicare or Medicaid.

Policy advocates brag about "holding politicians' feet to the fire." The result is politicians with damaged feet. They appear to be agents, not principals. They look obedient and weak, pushed around by people with extreme views in their own party. Who can trust such a person? Trump looks crazy and opinionated, but he doesn't look like he lets his party push him around. It makes him look like a strong leader.

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It isn't all politics. We've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

"I really can't stay
     Baby, it's cold outside
I've got to go away
     Baby, it's cold outside"
            Frank Loesser, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," 1944

"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden."
          Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock Song," 1970

Life goes on. 

Even amid today's too-consuming political news, the business of life continues. Babies get fed, people go to work, crops get planted. And I try to protect the fragile grape buds from freezing.

I don't fret about the weather or the farm. There are tasks to do, yes, but some things are just out of my control.

My vineyard is on nearly flat ground bordering the Rogue River and gently sloping toward it. It is below the higher ground of the two Table Rocks on either side of the farm. The river itself is at the lowest elevation in the area, of course, because water seeks that lowest elevation. So does cold air.

Cold air hugs the ground over my vineyard, and freezes buds. I deal with it by stirring up the air. This is why I am out here observing the fans at 4:30 a.m. The "A" in the photo below signifies that this is the ambient air temperature on the control panel at the base of the fan: 33 degrees. The fan just above this control panel is on full blast, turning fast and loud in the pre-dawn morning.

I needed two fans to protect the eight acres, because of the spread-out configuration of the vineyard. At this temperature, one fan, the fan nearer the river, had come on by the time I arrived. The control panel on the fan 250 yards away, the one farther from the river, showed an ambient temperature of 34.4 degrees. It was not on at 4:40 a.m. but it came on shortly after I took this photo. The fans are set to precise temperatures because the difference of just a half a degree one way or the other is important.

The fans are set to come on before the frost comes, and there is a degree or two of difference between the temperature four feet off the ground and along the ground. I am trying to give the grapes a margin of safety,

Here are the fans at 5:00 a.m. on full blast, both illuminated by a spotlight at the base of the fan tower.

Over the course of a minute the direction the fan faces rotates 360 degrees, providing air-mixing on all sides of the fan.

The fans worked this morning. The temperatures were the same this morning as they were back on April 13, when the photo below was taken. Then the fans had been set to come on at 32.5 degrees, which, in hindsight, was too close to the frost point. They did not come on in time, and as can be seen in the photo, the ground frosted before the fans got to work stirring up the air.

The fans run on propane, and I am told to assume they cost about $30/hour to run. This morning they each ran for about two hours. 

Here is a Cabernet Sauvignon plant directly below the south fan, looking healthy in the morning sun, protected from the frost.

The plant is nearly ready for the May pruning cycle, when the lower leaves and root sprouts are pulled off and the plant growth is directed toward the cane wire at 31 inches. It is best to wait on that pruning until all risk of frost is gone. It is the nature of this area to have cooler nights than in the more marine climate of the Willamette Valley. There are pluses and minuses for that for getting the high quality that Willamette Valley pinot noirs are known for, but a minus is the need to protect against that hour or two of pre-dawn frost, even on a day with an expected high temperature of 77 degrees.

I spent a full minute looking at that Cabernet Sauvignon plant in the photo above. It made me happy to look at it. It looks so healthy and green and natural and alive in the morning sun. We need to take care of ourselves.

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Easy Sunday: Stunning, mind-blowing ignorance

Donald Trump "Truthed" the following:
 

The United States' contribution to the war effort was consequential and ultimately decisive in shaping the resolution of the war and the shape of the postwar world. But it wasn't mostly us. American schoolchildren may not learn it this way, but about three quarters of the overall effort to stop Nazi Germany took place on the Eastern Front. 

A Soviet epigram put the war effort simply: 

The British gave it time, the Americans gave it money, and the Soviets gave it blood.

The landing at Normandy, the Western Front, and the Battle of the Bulge took place in the last 11 months of the war. The Soviet Union lost 24 million people in the war. The Chinese lost 15 million -- don't forget them. Poland lost 5 million. The United States lost 415,000.

Ignorance matters. Americans cannot understand the current Russian effort to re-unify with a Ukraine that has been part of Russia for centuries (and should always remain such, as Putin sees it) without understanding the sacrifice the Soviet Union made to keep this giant battleground area part of the greater Slavic people, i.e. Russian-facing.

I write this as an opponent of Russia's invasion and as someone who would prefer that Ukraine look westward toward Europe and NATO, now centered by Germany, rather than east toward Moscow. Still, it is important for Americans to know the history. Russians know it. Russians bled to keep that land. 

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Guest Post: A look back at Hitler

Trump supporters scoff: 

"There you go again, with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Another lib claiming Trump is Hitler. Or a Hitler wannabe. Or early-stage Hitler." 

There is a reason MAGA people hear the Hitler comparisons, Trump is doing things that parallel Hitler during the time that he consolidated authoritarian power in Germany in the early 1930s.  Hitler -- the idea of Hitler in the popular American mind -- is shaped by the Hitler of the war years and the holocaust. That was late-stage Hitler, and easy to condemn. The Hitler who consolidated power looked less frightening. The takeover was gradual. Germans -- good Germans -- let it happen.

Jack Mullen spent his youth playing sports and reading history in Medford, Oregon in the 1960s, that Golden Age for young healthy White youth. We picked and thinned pears together in local orchards in our teens, and then both worked as aides to a Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Weaver in our 20s. Jack lives in Washington, D.C.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

Like many Americans, I see a comparison between the first months of the Trump administration and Germany in the early 1930s.

Both American and German societies are steeped in enlightened reason. Long before Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, the Prussian government contributed to the Age of Enlightenment, embodying the thoughts John Locke, Emmanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great, modernized Prussia in the mid-18th century by promoting reason and intellectual exchange. He reformed the judicial system, allowed a free press to flourish, encouraged scientific inquiries, and promoted the arts and music.

Frederick’s influence on German history was two-fold. He set the table for a future enlightened democracy. He also nurtured the martial ethos that became emblematic of Prussia, the proto-state for 20th century Germany. He led wars of territorial expansion into Silesia and Poland, turning the enlarged Prussia into one of Europe's Great Powers.

It was this highly-militarized Prussia that was described not as a state with an army, but an army with a state.

Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

Kaiser Wilhem II, the last Prussian leader, abdicated after the World War I Armistice. In a time of political instability, Germany emerged as a parliamentary democracy known as the Weimar Republic. The first national assembly was held in Weimar, giving the republic its name in history books.

 

After the 1921-22 period of hyper-inflation subsided, so did of much of onerous burdens of the Versailles Treaty. Berlin matched Paris and London as the 1920s cultural center of Western Europe. Still, certain WWI veterans and hyper-nationalists felt their government let them down by settling for a stalemate in the Great War, not all-out victory. They wanted Germany returned to its former greatness.

Mass unemployment during the Great Depression provided fertile ground for a rising nativist, xenophobic, white supremacist National Socialist Party. This Nazi party, which garnered only 2.5 percent of the vote in the 1928 elections, increased its electoral presence to over 30 percent in the 1932 elections. This set the stage for the National Socialist leader, Adolf Hitler, to become chancellor, upon the death of war hero Paul von Hindenburg. 

How an authoritarian takes over.

There are eerie parallels between the present and 1930s Germany.

1. Both Hitler and Trump had failed coup attempts, but continued undaunted with the same nationalist, nativist message. Hitler’s failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch and Trump’s failed January 6 coup resulted in disdain for courts and his country’s justice system. By having survived the coup setbacks -- and in Trump's case the assassination attempt --  each became a symbol of indomitable will, which drew popular admiration. 

2. Both were successors to very old men, and therefore represented strength and vitality by comparison. President Paul von Hindenburg was a beloved 86-year-old World War I war hero who led the German Army in the 1914 defeat of the Russians in Battle of Tanneberg. When von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler became President. The June debate with President Biden set Trump up as the energetic, forceful leader by comparison.

3. Trump appeals to white Christian nationalist prejudices in much the same way Hitler and the conservative German right felt about non-Christian minorities. Trump flouts the rights of disfavored immigrants and defends it as a necessary war power. In Germany conservative industrialists allied with Hitler. In the U.S., the tech industry, out of a mix of ideology, business necessity, and fear of offending Trump allied with Trump. 

4. Hitler and Trump invoked selected past glories to inspire patriotism. Hitler pointed to Charlemagne’s First Reich as a sign of Germanic past glory. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” new hero is William McKinley, not a leader in the same vein as Charlemagne, but a leader Trump believes made America a world power by use of tariffs and territorial expansion from the Caribbean to the Philippines.

4. Both Hitler and Trump favored government run by executive fiat, with little regard for their respective legislative and judicial branches. Both simply ignore old rules and norms and dare anyone to stop them.

I often think of the great German boxer, Mac Schmeling, the Muhammed Ali of his day, when asked years later if he knew what was going on in his country during Hitler’s reign. He said he did, so did his friends, who sat in outdoor cafes sipping beer and decided to just let it all slide. Muhammed Ali stood up for what he thought was right. Max Schmeling and so many other Germans did not.

Essential to an authoritarian takeover was the willingness of people to go  along, to "obey in advance" as laws were broken. Keep your head down. Maybe he will target someone else. Trump, like Hitler, is using personal and arbitrary state power to generate shock and awe. Many Americans celebrated the psychological and moral effect of unexpected military violence when it targeted the Iraqi military. We are seeing it now, targeting political opponents of Trump in the courts, law firms, universities, the press, businesses, and people in disfavored groups.

Who will stand up to stop Trump, in this, the early stages of centralized authoritarian power? Congress lacks spine. Will our courts stand up? 

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Barbie dolls under the tree

"Call me irresponsible
Call me unreliable
Throw in undependable too."
        Bobby Darin, "Call Me Irresponsible," 1964

 

Trump: 

     "Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally."

Barbie dolls sell for about $10 retail in the U.S.

The labor component for the Chinese workers to assemble the doll is about 35 cents. This raises the question: What are Americans complaining about? If that is too much, would Americans complain if they were totally free, like manna from heaven? The margin on a Barbie doll, in excess of its labor costs to manufacture is some $9.65 out of $10.00. Isn't that enough for the American share? Does anyone think that squeezing new margin out of that 35 cents is the place to find the big bucks?

Chinese labor is only part of the cost of making a Barbie Doll. China Daily, an English language outlet for the  Chinese government, claimed that the total cost to Mattel for creating Barbie dolls, packaged in ready-to-sell cardboard and cellophane boxes, was 50 cents. It is probably more than that. Other sources say that the total cost of the ready-for-sale Chinese products, with profit for the manufacturers at each step, delivered to the port of Long Beach, California, is closer to 20 percent of their final retail prices: $2. Electric toothbrushes that sell for $10 to $15 have an all-in manufacturing cost, including procuring components, of about a dollar, and cost $2 wholesale, delivered to Long Beach. Electric hair dryers that retail for $30 cost about $2.50 to manufacture and wholesale for $4. 

Even a full 140 percent tariff on Barbie dolls would not mean a doll need rise in price from $10 to $25 dollars. There would be gamesmanship in a Barbie doll's value at the point of entry -- a chronic and inevitable problem with customs duties -- but the value of a box containing a Barbie doll would be declared to be valued at something well under $2. That would mean a net price, with full 145 percent tariff paid, of perhaps $4. If Mattel, and then Walmart, kept the existing retail margins over wholesale, the price of a Barbie doll would rise from $10 to $12, not $25.

However a tariff on Barbie dolls could be the excuse for a price increase. Consumers might expect the dolls to double in price, so a rise from $10 to "only" $15 might look like sacrificial pricing by Mattel and the retailer, when in fact their margins, calculated in dollars, not percentage of wholesale, would have risen.

One way to react to the cost of manufacturing simple goods from China is to despair. How can Americans possibly manufacture a Barbie doll cheaper than can the Chinese? The other way to look at it is: "Why bother." Why fight to get inside the 35 cents? The real margin and value is in the branding and intellectual property owned by Americans. 

There are good reasons for Americans to keep on-shore manufacture of items critical to our national security. Steel. Aluminum. Weapons. Computers and computer parts. Aerospace technology. Energy. Food. The U.S. is fortunate. We can manage this without tariffs.

In the past two weeks the stock market has rebounded. It reflects investors' expectation that Trump is bluffing, or ready to retreat on tariffs, or in some other way abandon the whole tariff "misunderstanding." I don't expect significant tariffs to be in effect in six months. That is the future the U.S. stock market is looking toward. 

This tariff moment will have lasting consequences. Trump damaged the American brand. The U.S. threatened our allies and trading partners. I liken us to a well-known, well-loved dog that for some reason went on a biting spree, leaving tooth marks on neighborhood children. No one forgets that. The dog will always be perceived differently. We have become unreliable and possibly dangerous. That isn't a misunderstanding. 

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Lessons from Canada on how to stop Trump and win elections.

It wasn't enough to be anti-Trump.

You needed to be effective, popular, and patriotic. 

Plus anti-Trump.

Three months ago things looked bad for the Liberal Party in Canada. It had worn out its welcome under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The party's favorability rating was in the 20s.  People expected a landslide defeat for them.

Their situation was similar to that of the U.S.'s Democratic Party, but even worse. YouGov calculates Democratic favorability as underwater at 37 percent favorable and 59 percent unfavorable. Unhappy as people are with Trump, Americans don't translate that into thinking Democrats are the solution. The Democratic brand is as low as it has ever been.

Trump being an abusive, clueless, threatening jerk to Canada turned things around for the Canadian Liberal Party. The party replaced its leader -- a giant symbol of change -- with Mark Carney, an economist/banker with a reputation for effectiveness. Carney became a better representative of Canadian patriotism, Canadian pride, and Canadian sovereignty. He was the anti-Trump candidate. American headlines have a simple response: Trump is so toxic that he got Carney elected. 

It is more than that.  

     ***Mark Carney brought a reputation for effective governance. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. He was prominent as the former central banker who led Canada through the 2008-2013 mortgage crisis, and managed the UK's central bank, guiding it through Brexit. He wasn't just an anti-Trump spokesperson. 

     ***Carney immediately eliminated the carbon tax on Canadians. The tax had become unpopular. It was a tax-and-rebate system intended to be revenue neutral. It was a complicated market-based way to shape citizen behavior. It incentivized people to use less fossil fuel by raising its price, with the tax revenue redistributed to people who used less than average amounts of carbon. Clever, right?

A Guardian headline six months ago

Economists, political scientists, and government policy-makers liked it. The progressive Guardian headlined that it was popular with the public -- but it wasn't. It was intrusive and complicated. It raised energy prices, for the good cause of the climate, but people didn't trust it. Families would pay extra then get money back. People questioned whether they would. It came across as a do-gooder, liberal, intrusion of questionable value.

It was a symbol of the culture wars inside Canada. Carney's opponent, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, opposed the tax. It was a political albatross for Liberals. Mark Carney reversed the Liberal position on the carbon tax and ended it. 

It symbolized something about Carney. He wasn't going to push unpopular programs just because his liberal/progressive party members liked them.

     ****Carney was patriotic. He tweaked the brand of the Liberal Party from the global-friendly, world-of-nations, soft-edged brand under Justin Trudeau, into the party that was the superior defender of Canada. Officially, for the record, the Democratic Party is thoroughly patriotic. No Democrat would admit to the opposite. But in the reality of nuanced branding, the Republican Party has better seized that brand identity. They are the country music "God Bless the USA," flag-waving party. "America First" is something Republicans would say. Democrats would be the we-lead-the world party.

Democrats are the party more willing to acknowledge past injustices, some of which have long term effects that continue into the present. Meanwhile, Trump is whitewashing American history, with the support of his party. Trump said to forget Jackie Robinson. His entry into baseball was no milestone, because there wasn't anything in the prior condition to acknowledge. Same with the Tuskegee Airmen. There was no prior condition of segregation worthy of acknowledgement, and therefore nothing special about pilots of any color flying aircraft. In an America of glass-half-empty or glass-half-full, Democrats are the ones who acknowledge the empty parts. Republicans accuse Democrats who do so of shaming America and by implication its White majority. Republicans therefore focus on the glass-half-full. Or now, under Trump, totally full and it always has been, and don't imply otherwise or you will be fired or have your funding cut.

Carney brought aggressiveness to the Liberal Party brand. Carney is not positioning Canada as a country trying to wheedle back into Trump's good graces, pretty please with sugar on it. Instead, he puts Canada into the role of the woman scorned, the angry wife who walks out of the house of the abusive husband. 

“Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. The system of open global trade anchored by the United States, a system that Canada has relied on since the Second World War, a system that, while not perfect, has helped deliver prosperity for our country for decades, is over."

Let the U.S. say "pretty please." 

American Democrats cannot duplicate the Carney formula, but they can learn from it. Carney was not just anti-Trump. Carney added three things: he had a reputation for effectiveness; he dropped an unpopular policy position over the objection of some in his party; and he seized the brand of being a strong, decisive patriotic leader.

That is the lesson to be learned. Democrats could do that.

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A look back at Nixon.

     "People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got."

              President Richard Nixon

 

We each experience our own era. We awaken into our own status quo, our own era's initial condition.  People in my age cohort were introduced to government by watching Douglas Edwards and Walter Cronkite and the Apollo missions. We heard the soaring language of JFK's idealism, civil rights progress under Lyndon Johnson, then Nixon, Watergate, and then squeaky clean Jimmy Carter's reaction to Watergate. 

I was elected Jackson County commissioner in 1980, as the Jimmy Carter era closed out, but its values were still intact. It was the era of conspicuously clean hands. At no point in four years in office did anyone offer to buy me lunch. Or coffee. Or get me in on some development project that just needed a favorable land use decision to get going. Or contribute to a future campaign. That kind of thing wasn't done here.

Generation Z -- people born between about 1997 and 2012 -- people who are now in their formative young adult years are seeing an entirely different status quo from the one I experienced. Trump's first term was the era of "alternative facts," as one of his aides put it. This was no mere "credibility gap." Trump asserted his own reality and did so with joyous confidence; he claimed that he won the 2020 election by a landslide

Imagine what members of Gen Z saw when they looked at President Joe Biden. He was hopelessly old, older than any teacher they had had in school. As old or older than their grandparents. If their parents had Fox News on television, they heard about Hunter Biden's laptop. They heard President Biden be called the head of a "crime family" by Fox anchors. They learned that Hunter Biden had some sort of deal with Burisma, a Ukrainian oil company. They heard he earned money by dashing off paintings that rich friends of his father bought for $500,000 -- a sweet deal, and legal.

Their eyes opened up to politics in a world with news that members of Congress traded stocks based on information they got in committees -- something members of both parties did, and defended as OK. It is their status quo. 

Their eyes awakened to a political world in which Trump is the center-stage actor. Trump is normal. His merchandise, his hotel grift, his business deals with the Saudis, his meme-coin legal bribery, and his pay-to-play are all the status quo, the initial condition. Trump is simply better at self-serving grift than prior grifters, doing it at a hundred times Biden's scale, and proudly announcing it. It is the way things are. Extort law firms to do free legal work? Sure. Extract pay-to-play contributions for businesses with pending regulatory issues. Sure. Create a cryptocurrency that gives nearly dollar-for-dollar income to Trump? Sure. Invite those largest "investors" to announce themselves at Mar-a-Lago? Of course. Why else buy the created-from-thin-air crypto coin if not to show Trump who his friends are?

This is the world young people are seeing. As Walter Cronkite put it at the end of each night's broadcast, "That's the way it is." 

I was reminded of the extent of change when looking at this YouTube video of Richard Nixon's farewell speech to his staff. No need to watch it all. But click at minute 7:30 and watch two minutes of it. Observe the notion of public service. Observe Nixon's understanding of America's role in the world.  For people without the time and inclination to click, a transcript is below:

Click

As I pointed out last night, sure, we’ve done some things wrong in this administration, and the top man always takes the responsibility and I never got to, but I want to say one thing: No man or no woman came into this administration and left it with more of this world’s goods than when he came in. No man or no woman ever profited at the public expense or the public till. 

That tells something about you. Mistakes, yes, but for personal gain, never. You did what you believe in. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong. And I only wish that I were a wealthy man.  [Resigned laugh] At the present time I've got to find a way to pay my taxes. And if I were, I’d like to recompense you for the sacrifices you have made to serve in government. But you are getting something in government — and I want you to tell your children — and the nation’s children will hear it, too. Something in government service that is far more important than money. It’s a cause bigger than yourself. It’s the cause of making this the greatest nation in the world, the leader of the world. Because without our leadership, the world will know nothing but war, possibly starvation, or worse, in the years ahead. With our leadership it will know peace. It will know plenty. We have been generous, and we will be more generous in the future as we are able to. 

But most important, we will be strong here, strong in our hearts, strong in our souls, strong in our belief and strong in our willingness to sacrifice, as you have been willing to sacrifice in a pecuniary way to serve in government.

I have spent a lifetime thinking the worst of Nixon. In the context of a Trump presidency, he looks good. Honorable. Honest. He possesses some self-understanding and humility. I had underestimated him. 

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