Easy Sunday: Trump's Keystone Kops

Trump's people explain their letter to Harvard:

We sent the letter.

We should not have sent the letter.  

The letter is what we wrote, but it isn't what we meant. 

The letter was what we meant, but it was sent too soon. 

The letter was just a draft for discussion and subject to change, so we didn't really mean it.

We mean what the letter said, but not really, not yet, or maybe we did mean it, just didn't want to say it. 

It was signed and sent by three top officials from a government email account on official letterhead, but Harvard should have known it was sent by mistake.

We demanded Harvard respond, but they shouldn't have responded. They should have called us to ask what we meant. This makes any misunderstanding their error, not ours.

There is no need for me to rewrite this as parody.  Real-life straight news reads like the over-the-top exaggeration of parody. 

Here is a gifted article from The New York Times describing the Trump administration's explanation for their demand letter to Harvard. 

Click: Gifted NYTimes article

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A quick Saturday thought experiment

Question:

If you had to choose between giving up the past century's technology in the area of telecommunications, or the past century's technology in the area of medicine, which would you give up?

I realize it is an impossible choice. The two technologies evolved together and depend upon each other, but think about the choice and what we would give up. 

If we gave up telecommunications, we would have radio, just barely. In 1923, about one percent of U.S. households had radios at home, but there were a few radio stations coming on the air. We had telephones with switchboard operators.  Telegraphs were in operation. Motion pictures existed, but they weren't yet "talkies," not until 1927.

People got by. They didn't know they didn't have the internet. However, in the 1940s the Dick Tracy comic strip imagined portable wireless communication on a wrist.

In an era without wireless digital communication, newspapers with comics existed, as did classified ads, and therefore a robust print news culture. This blog would be inconceivable, although maybe some newspaper would have let me have an opinion column, if I didn't offend advertisers too much. 

I would keep modern health care.

Without modern health care, life would be far more precarious. People use to die of things that are readily treatable now. 

Infectious diseases killed millions of people. Modern plumbing reduced the worst of waterbourne infections, but there was still the MMR suite of diseases (measles, mumps, rubella) plus chicken pox and polio. The Spanish Flu had just killed a surprising group of people: healthy young adults. I remember the ongoing fear my parents projected about polio around swimming pools, for some reason, until the mass polio inoculations when I was in elementary school.

Plus we now have medicines to deal with bacterial and viral infections. Plus cardiovascular interventions. Surgeries of all kinds.

This comes to mind because I was feeling pretty great until a few days ago when I had a cough and fever, and it got worse over two days. I had uncontrollable coughing. I went into urgent care, a physician assistant listened to my lungs, and sent me for an X-ray in the next room. Thanks to modern medical technology they had an instant report. Apparently, I was rapidly moving toward pneumonia. "Pneumonia, the old man's friend," as the old saying went, because people who were otherwise suffering from some painful disease would die quickly from suffocation. They sent a prescription order to my pharmacy, and I was taking six different pills within an hour. Within six hours I was feeling way better. Now, four days later, I feel great again.

President Trump is entering dangerous territory. I am guessing almost everyone has some personal or family story that involves access to the health care world. The U.S. health care payments system is expensive and clunky, but it is lifesaving if you can access it. His attacks on the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), his HHS secretary's muddling the story on vaccinations, and his efforts to reduce access to Medicaid have huge potential to backfire. When you can't breathe you get desperate pretty quickly.

Trump's flagrant authoritarianism worries me deeply, but I stay optimistic that his hubris and overreach, in the area of healthcare and elsewhere, will destroy his popular support. 

He is sowing the seeds of his own destruction. The Trump virus in America won't last forever. I can sit here and take a big, deep sigh of relief at that prospect. Whew.

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Advice to Democrats: Have clean hands

New York State Attorney General Leticia James should have expected that people would be sifting through her life with a fine-toothed comb.

Trump on Truth Social:

“Letitia James, a totally corrupt politician, should resign from her position as New York State Attorney, IMMEDIATELY. Everyone is trying to MAKE NEW YORK GREAT AGAIN, and it can never be done with this wacky crook in office.” 

I am watching both Democrats and Republicans complain about "lawfare." In its meaning today, lawfare is the complaint that opponents use investigations and prosecutions of supposed tiny criminal offenses to hurt an opponent, offenses that might otherwise not be prosecuted. 

Fox headline: "Letitia James reaps what she sows after leveling 'laughable' case at Trump."

Trump and his media and partisan allies call "lawfare" the "hush money" case brought and prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg involving payments to Trump attorney Michael Cohen to reimburse him for payments he made to Stormy Daniels. Trump was charged with making false business records in furtherance of another crime, election interference. The case was tried and Trump was convicted by a unanimous jury.

Trump and his allies also complain that the tax and loan fraud case brought against him by Leticia James was lawfare. The prosecution argued in court that he falsified values, and received loans at lower interest rates than he would have received had he been honest. Trump's defense was that the bank lenders knew full well who Trump was, that they were big boys and could assert their own self-interest in an arm's-length transaction, and that it worked out because they got paid what was owed. So, too, the tax authorities, who were big-boy actors with independent ability to value and tax real estate at a fair value. Therefore, the prosecution was discriminatory.

Now Letitia James is making a parallel argument. While serving as a New York state officeholder, she bought a small house in Virginia and signed one document saying that she and her niece would use it as a "primary residence." (A home that is a primary residence usually qualifies for lower interest rates than a second or investment home because people prioritize being current on their primary home more than on an investment property.) There is also some question about whether James' primary New York home has four or five units. At one point an earlier owner had said it was five. James has always said it was four, but amid the hostile examination taking place now, discrepancies like this -- even if irrelevant -- become fodder for suspicion.

James asserts that subsequent documents submitted to the mortgage company clarify that the Virginia home is not her primary residence. That may or may not stand up to examination, but still, there is a discrepancy. That is her signature on something that is untrue and it may or may not have been clarified.  

Both Letitia James and Donald Trump are calling foul.

I have a different take. I think both Democrats and Republicans should accept the reality that if they enter the political sphere their lives will be examined closely by people with hostile motives. Call it lawfare. Opponents will be looking for something -- anything -- that is out of order and they will publicize it. If it is illegal, opponents will demand it be prosecuted. 

Did Bill Clinton puff a joint of marijuana in college? Did George W. Bush pull strings to get into the Air National Guard to avoid being drafted? Was any of that relevant? Yes. As president, Clinton oversaw a Justice Department that imprisoned people for having marijuana. As president, Bush oversaw a Selective Service system with the power to force people into the military. And as D.A., Leticia James prosecuted Trump for false loan applications. It is hypocritical to prosecute a crime if you did the crime.

Politics is hardball. The best defense is to not have finagled in the first place. If you want a public life, play it straight, because you are charged with the job of creating or enforcing laws thaat others must live up to. You discredit our laws if you break them yourself.

But who really cares about a little mortgage puffery? Isn't this overdone? No. We should all care. Winking at phony mortgage information is what allowed the "liar loans" of 2002-2008 that  got packaged into securities that rating agencies winked at and called AAA-rated, which banks then resold to the public. That process created a bubble that finally burst in 2008, bringing down the economy and causing hardship to tens of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world.

Trump has planted his flag: America needs a swashbuckling, rule-breaking, regulation-flouting, break-the-institutions, break-the-fuddy-duddy Constitution president. He stopped enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Stop being so clean; get business done. That is Trump's policy, behavior, and brand. America knew what it was getting with Trump. We will see how this works.

Democrats have room for a different policy and vibe. How about being Mr. Clean? Don't protest Trump's claim of "lawfare" and unfair prosecution. Don't defend Letitia James or Alvin Bragg if it turns out they broke laws. Be consistent. Defend the law, not Democrats.

Some of what Trump is doing is unambiguously dangerous and autocratic. In a two-party system, the other party needs to represent something different. Democrats need to defend standards of behavior. Don't communicate one expectation for Democrats and another for Trump.  One law. One standard. Trump is saying it is okay -- necessary and good, even -- to ignore the Constitution and establish the president as the sole credible and legitimate voice of the people. Voters will not take seriously Democrats' complaints about Trump's crimes against the Constitution unless Democratic leaders have clean hands.

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What if the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation is good politics for Trump?

Net-net, it probably is a positive. It is popular with the right people.

Readers who don't want a "downer" read, and who want that positive cheerleading we get from MSNBC, can skip today's post. 

I am trying to be realistic.

Trump calls Abrego Garcia "a foreign terrorist." 

While he came here illegally as a 16-year old, an immigration judge in 2019 granted him legal status, finding that he faced gang violence if returned to El Salvador. That finding is the basis for the most recent judicial order that he NOT be deported. The government sent him to El Salvador anyway.

My conclusion that the Abrego Garcia rendition is popular for Trump is based on four premises. 

     ***Partisans are partisan, and Republicans who have gotten accustomed to Trump's lawless and willful style aren't going to abandon him. They like Trump's swashbuckling.

     ***A huge majority of voters across the political spectrum think Biden failed to deal with illegal immigration and they were impatient for somebody stop dithering and to do something. 

 

     ***Native-born Americans aren't personally worried that they are going to be rounded up and sent to prison. 

     ***A majority of Americans don't feel all that sorry for Abrego Garcia. He came here illegally. In 2019 he was legally allowed to remain due to danger from gang violence if he returned to El Salvador -- but a great many Americans don't care much about that detail. He is a foreigner. We hear President Trump say he is a terrorist. Who really knows? And we have busy lives.

Biden let the immigration problem get out of hand. It grew intolerable to a great many people. 

Biden let this happen. It was out of scale.

I personally am pro-immigration, but I saw an emerging political problem, and I urged Democrats to deal with it, and they didn't until it was too late. Americans voted for the guy who said cruel, rough, get-rid-of-them-all things. Sensitive Democrats are dismayed by images of shackled people led off American planes, but a great many voters think this was high time.

Every reader of this post has heard the lament of Pastor Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist. . . 

We hear the early warning. Today it is the lawless rendition of Abrego Garcia and citizen political activists with unpopular points of view. Eventually it could be targeted political opponents like Alexandrea Ocasio-Cortez, Josh Shapiro, and Gavin Newsom. If Trump can do it to Kilmar Abrego Garcia he can do it to anyone. The U.S. Supreme Court said he is immune if it is done as an official act.

Democrats are making the constitutional argument. Follow the Constitution. Remember the rule of law. Hold the line. But we have already learned that the constitutional argument doesn't motivate very many people. It doesn't motivate the people who could put brakes on Trump: Republican representatives and senators who could vote against their popular president to defend Constitutional standards. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger tried that and promptly lost their jobs. Lindsey Graham tried that for one day, got yelled at in an airport, and switched back to being a Trump sycophant. Republicans like their leader more than they care about the niceties of the Constitution. Besides, Trump asserts a pretext: We are in a state of war. Of course, we are not in a state of war, which can only be declared by Congress, but Trump says we are at war. Take his word for it.

Recall that Pastor Niemoller's lament does not presume that people look ahead and act in the face of future peril, even after  trade unionist and Jews are added to those rounded up.  

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Americans can ignore the peril and hope for the best. Trump has gone after law firms, but those are few in number. He has bullied media companies, but they are few. He targets research universities, but they are few. He has targeted former staff, but they are few. He condemns former Vice President Mike Pence and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but they are still free to walk around. So far he is just targeted enemies, and if you aren't an enemy, you are okay. Keep your head down.

Trump is carrying out a profound change in American government and he is getting away with it because so far people are okay with the results. They aren't themselves getting hurt. Not yet.

A recession would change that.

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The Wall Street Journal condemns Trump's attack on Harvard

The Wall Street Journal is showing up as a consistent opponent of Trump's overreach.

The WSJ is Republican. It is conservative. It is pro-big business. It is anti-union. It is for the wealthy and it thinks trickle down is just fine. It isn't populist because it understands that the great masses want a bigger share of the pie. Their pie. 

Click: gifted link

The WSJ wants to put brakes on Trump. They are staffed by worldly, educated people who recognize dangerous authoritarian lawlessness when they see it. They don't like it. It is bad for business. It sets a bad precedent.

Today the WSJ continues their almost-daily criticism of Trump. This time they criticize his demands on Harvard:

 Few Americans will shed tears for the Cambridge crowd, but there are good reasons to oppose this unprecedented attempt by government to micromanage a private university.

That would be a typical construction for the WSJ, starting with a little swipe against an institution coded as liberal. The WSJ editors know they need to put a little sugar in with the medicine. Having made a gesture to their audience they get tougher:

 . . .the Administration runs off the legal rails by ordering Harvard to reduce “governance bloat, duplication, or decentralization.” It also orders the school to review “all existing and prospective faculty . . . for plagiarism” and ensure “viewpoint diversity” in “each department, field, or teaching unit.”

These reforms may be worth pursuing, but the government has no business requiring them. Its biggest overreach is requiring “viewpoint diversity,” which it doesn’t define. Does this mean the English department must hire more Republican faculty or Shakespeare scholars?

President Trump is attempting a multi-generational change in America's role in the world. He has radically changed our foreign policy and therefore the world's. We have switched partnership from Europe, the UK, and Canada and the rules-based world order, to one in which we acknowledge three great regional powers: the U.S., Russia, and China. Trump is attempting to change our economic policy into something much less global. We can be our own island of prosperity, thus protecting workers from competition from low-wage countries. Those are matters of policy that might change from administration to administration. That isn't necessarily permanent. If we avoid nuclear war, we can live through this. Life will go on.

The Wall Street Journal is attacking the third and potentially most permanent change Trump is attempting. Trump is asserting a dramatic change in the form of government: the primacy of Article Two. For two centuries we presumed that Madison v. Marbury validated judicial power to establish the law, making the judiciary a co-equal branch. Trump is openly flouting that. Trump has steamrolled over Congress' laws regarding spending. Congress does nothing. Trump is ignoring enforcement of the TikTok law. Congress does nothing. Congress is letting Trump do whatever he wants on tariffs, even though Trump's tariffs damage constituents in their districts and states. Trump is openly dissolving departments and agencies established by Congress, and Congress is letting him do it. Congress conceded. 

And Trump is asserting presidential power to direct the policies and operations of independent corporations. This is a sensitive point for the WSJ. Harvard is a corporation, the oldest one in North America. Harvard is lawful private property.  Of course, the WSJ realizes the threat. This is the WSJ wheelhouse.

Democrats will never find the WSJ to be a partner in opposition to Trump, but they should not wish for that. The WSJ is more useful as an ally and a bridge to Republicans. There remains a segment of Republicans -- now on the outs and keeping quiet -- who understand and oppose Trump's remaking of the GOP and the the structure of our government. There are Republicans who can look ahead and see that a president who declares the right to manage university policies on personal whim is bad policy and worse precedent. Same with a president who, on personal whim, can pick up citizens without notice and send them to overseas prisons where they can be tortured and killed. It is dangerous policy under Trump and more dangerous as precedent, just in case a Democrat is ever elected president. Better to have the rule of law, run though a slow and disputatious Congress, reviewed by independent courts.

The WSJ is an ally here in the great battle: Will we have a country that operates with three branches of government and that respects the rule of law?

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Good job, Harvard

     "No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue."
               Harvard president Alan Garber

I should explain that the two billion dollars at risk in grant funds that the federal government is threatening to withhold from Harvard is not scholarship money for undergraduates. It isn't "free" money to subsidize Harvard. 

Harvard's various graduate programs in medicine and astrophysics and chemistry do theoretical and practical research under contract with the federal government. The National Institutes of Health have areas of interest they want developed. Harvard's great teaching hospitals -- Mass General, Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and others -- carry out direct patient care in the context of cutting edge research advancing medial science. The government helps fund that research and treatment. The U.S. is a world center for research in large part because of the partnership of government and America's research universities.

In the U.S., research, advanced graduate education, undergraduate education, college football, freshman dorms, studies in literature, history, math, and computer sciences combine with working hospitals and government labs into the modern research university. We created centers of learning that combine very theoretical research with very practical health care, with very visible education of young adults getting a "college experience." It creates a messy stew.

The wing-spreading life-exploration part of the college experience created a problem for universities. Politically engaged and passionate youth trying out methods of political persuasion created tent cities and physical obstructions on behalf of Palestinians. This irritated and inconvenienced some people, and it touched a special nerve with some very wealthy donors to both the universities and to the Trump campaign. Billionaires have become open about leveraging their wealth. The donors thought Harvard was tolerating overt antisemitism, and maybe even condoning it.

Trump saw an opportunity. He gets to parade his support for Israel, for which there is a substantial voting and donor constituency. He also gets to present himself as being anti-elite. Anti-snobby intellectual. Anti-university goals of diversity and inclusion. It is a public attack on woke values and policies.

I donate to Harvard annually, and I made a large (at least for me) gift at the 50th reunion. Why would anybody donate to Harvard money that is meaningful for themselves but a rounding error for Harvard? Harvard keeps track of its endowment by noticing the number of billions. In volatile markets like the ones we have had this month, the endowment must fluctuate two to five billion dollars a day. Wouldn't a similarly-sized gift to my local regional state university, Southern Oregon University, be far more impactful? (Yes. So I give to SOU, too.)

I gave to Harvard for the very reason apparent today. I felt a debt to the institution, and wanted to do my part. I joined a 400-year tradition. I presume that somewhere in the back of the minds of Harvard administrators and lawyers was the knowledge that they weren't just acting in a financial transaction for the current moment. They were representing a 400-year tradition of support and trust and expectation. There is a pattern as we tread through life; students attend school, they go on to various careers and find various financial successes, and those people donate over the years, with bigger gifts at certain milestones. It is a soft expectation. It is a norm, not a requirement. Some don't feel it. I do. And the consequence of people who do join that long train of donors is that Harvard has the money to maintain its independence and integrity. It owes a debt to the people who have donated over the years and who believe that Harvard stands for something.

Harvard brings to the table: the credibility that comes from holding a position of visibility and distinction. Trump can squish underfoot a man like Kilmar Garcia who the federal government has illegally sent to a foreign hell-hole prison. Trump and his cabinet chuckle about it publicly. Trump is doing something popular, at least with his MAGA base, by being cruel and dismissive of a "nobody." (Christians should pause a moment at that. Jesus taught that there are no "nobodies.") Harvard isn't a nobody. It has resources.

Back in 2021, at my 50th reunion, I had no knowledge that Trump would do this, but I considered something like this a possibility. I wanted to be part of the financial foundation of an institution that can stand up to a president who refuses to obey the law. I considered myself one of the "ten thousand men of Harvard" a phrase in a song that gets sung at football games.

Ten thousand men of Harvard want victory today. . .
And when the game ends, we'll sing again. . .
Illegitimum non carborundum.

    [Translation: Don't let the bastards grind you down.]

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Nevermind!"

 "What's all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television?"

          Gilda Radner as the Emily Litella character on Saturday Night Live

Click: just over a minute

 

Readers old enough to have enjoyed the 1970s will know the running gag. Gilda Radner's character would be all upset and indignant about something, but after a minute of ranting she would be informed that she misunderstood some key fact. Learning this, she would say "nevermind."

Misinformed and clueless as her Emily Litella character was, the character had two important advantages over President Donald Trump. She could hear and integrate new information, and she would back down. She didn't continue to argue from a bad premise. 

Trump just said "nevermind," but he was saying nevermind to the course-correction, not the original mistaken idea that we could assemble electronics in huge plants staffed by thousands  of American workers sitting in line soldering connections. He is persisting in his error. I gave Trump too much credit in yesterday's "Easy Sunday" post. I said that he was an erratic, narcissistic, sociopath, but that he had the good sense to adjust his policy when it endangered his popularity, and that he understood what would be unpopular. Both manufacturing electronics in the U.S. and paying a tariff on imported goods would be deeply unpopular and he is ignoring or misreading this. Trump's tariff. Trump's inflation. Trump's crazy-expensive phones. Blame Trump.

Trump called for tariffs on everything from China, then reversed himself on electronics. Then at mid-day Sunday he reversed himself yet again, with a Truth Social post. Nevermind, yet again. Trump's Truth Social posts have the over-the-top, sometimes ALL CAPS rant style of the Emily Litella character.

NOBODY is getting “off the hook” for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers, that other Countries have used against us, especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst! There was no Tariff “exception” announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff “bucket.” The Fake News knows this, but refuses to report it. We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations. What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States, and that we will not be held hostage by other Countries, especially hostile trading Nations like China, which will do everything within its power to disrespect the American People.

Trump resurrected the idea that electronics will be made and assembled in the USA. Trump is selling an obsolete dream, an imagined golden age where blue-collar American men worked a factory floor earning a family-wage job and made a product that was competitive in the world market.

And we are now back to facing $2,000 iPhones, if the phones are to continue to be built in China and the tariff paid. They would be even more expensive if they were manufactured in the U.S., but they won't be. Trump misunderstands the modern economy and the modern American labor force. Eighty percent of Americans think that having factory jobs in the U.S. is a good idea generally, but only 25 percent of Americans say they would personally be better off in a factory instead of their current work, according to the CATO institute. Pew polling and a McKinsey analysis of worker preferences make the same point. Americans want interesting, flexible, jobs, not tedious assembly jobs. The want to live independently, not in bunk beds in 15-story dormitories. They want to be paid enough to live in the USA. If they were paid enough to show up to work, the phones would cost thousands of dollars. We will assemble them overseas and pay the tariff -- if Trump doesn't switch again.

We start this week with indecision, contradiction, and uncertainty about the future of tariffs. No business can make plans for capital allocation in this environment. 

Trump is his own worst enemy, and he is a formidable one.

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