Abandon Hope, All Who Enter Here

That’s what the sign warned Dante at the entrance to Hell. But, as Mephistopheles says in “Dr. Faustus” when asked why he isn’t in hell, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” And so are the rest of us, I’m afraid.

At first, the idea of Trump running for President was a joke. Then he ran, and the idea he would survive the primaries against seasoned, knowledgable Republicans was absurd. His first words off the escalator — Mexican rapists — seemed sure to doom him.

But, mirabile dictu, there apparently was an audience of 60 million Americans for crude, bombastic, uninformed, racist, misogynistic, simplistic, fraudulent populism. He won the nomination despite a history of race bating, corruption, indictments, bankruptcies and illegal business practices.

But surely in the General Election the country would reject the notion of such a creature occupying the position once held by Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Unfortunately, we forget the presidency was also held by Jackson, Buchanan, Arthur, Hayes, Harding, and Nixon. Trump won, despite evidence he was aided by Russian meddling with the election, and the accusations by multiple women that he committed sexual assault or harassment of them, a claim confirmed by his own words on an “Access Hollywood” tape and appearances on Howard Stern.

Since then, he has performed about as one might have expected, endangering our national security, health, welfare and national ideals and identity. He has dedicated himself to being the president not of all the people, but of the fraction that voted for him. And has seemed to view the office as he did his business, an opportunity to enrich himself and increase his celebrity.

And despite protests, editorials, national angst, organizing, and the gnashing of teeth, nothing will change for the next three years. If we survive. The fanciful notion that the forces of light will vanquish the darkness is childish. The Republican majority has formed itself into a praetorian guard to protect the emperor from his own atrocities while they govern, enriching their donors and remaking the government to perpetuate their reign.

What about the 25th Amendment? Let’s get Trump declared mentally incompetent. By whom? Vice President Pence and the Trump cabinet? They are little better than ventriloquist dummies. When Trump isn’t tweeting and golfing, he pulls their strings. And when they try to disagree with him, he tweet-shames them.

So, for instance, he describes a whole continent as being comprised of shithole countries and Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue go deaf. They didn’t hear any such thing. Neither did Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen, nor was she aware that the home of people with her last name, Scandinavia, is populated by white persons.

Very well, then, let’s impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors uncovered everyday by the press and the investigations of Senate, House and Special Prosecutor. But again, a very high bar. Will the Republicans needed to reach two-thirds of the House and Senate vote to remove the man who signs anything they put before him? Fat chance. With him in charge, they are hurrying to enact a decades-old wish list of measures designed to eliminated what they call the “welfare state” or the “regulatory state.” Others call it, “civilization.”

In fact, they are actively colluding themselves. Not to uncover Trump’s malfeasance, incompetence, and corrupt practices, his transgressions of the emoluments clause, obstruction of justice, and cooperation with a foreign power to tamper with an election, but to change the subject to Fake News.

Chris Steele, a former MI6 investigator hired to do oppo research on Trump, turns up alarming traces of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russian attempts to influence the election in his favor. He brings it to the attention of the FBI. Do Republicans like Sen. Charles Grassley seek to give him a medal for service to our country’s security?

They do not. Instead, they ask the FBI to consider a criminal indictment of Steele for lying to the FBI. He’s part of a plot to smear Trump and distract attention from the crimes of Hillary Clinton which fired FBI Director Comey was trying to cover up. They want the Trump Dossier ignored, and the case against Hillary reopened.

According to this conspiracy theory, they are the villains that Americans need to worry about. Not Trump, Sr, Trump, Jr., Kushner, Manafort, Putin, Papadopuolos, Flynn, Assange and additional players to be named later. In other words, the cover up is in full swing. And there aren’t enough votes to stymie it either.

Thus, the Conman-in-Chief will very likely remain in power until voted out in 2020. Until 2024, if he can succeed in branding the truth fake news, can distract attention from what his government is up to, can put more and more toadies in positions of power, pack the courts with judges that will help suppress the vote of minorities. With any luck, he may succeed in giving us El President Don, Jr., or Ivanka in 2028.

There is a slight chance that Democrats may win enough seats in 2018 to disrupt this scenario. They would then be able to conduct meaningful oversight, issue subpoenas and investigate high crimes, but would still lack enough votes to impeach or convict unless a substantial number of Republicans decided to put country above party.

Or, if public opinion on Trump turned so negative that a vote for impeachment began to look like vote for self-preservation. But in a lot of red states, that isn’t going to happen. If everything from a stolen election to Charlottesville to a great, big nuclear button to hush money to porn stars hasn’t soured the base on Trump, what will?

That leaves only the possibility that the fattest president since Taft and the oldest ever elected will flop over and eliminate the threat to the Republic he poses. But according to his doctor, he’s in robust good heath, isn’t crazy, has good genes and no vices, other than his diet, egomania, cruelty, and ignorance. As we know, only the good die young. So, to paraphrase Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” Fasten your seat belts. We’re in for a hell of a ride. Sad.

Ship Of Fools

It is said that all philosophy come out of Plato. Apparently all punditry too, since his allegory of the Ship of Fools seems to perfectly describe today’s Ship of State and the government shutdown engineered by its hapless captain and pigheaded crew.

Plato’s captain of the Ship of Fools is going deaf and blind and has little skill at navigating. His vain sailors crowd around him, each demanding to be given the helm. If the captain chooses one or another, his rivals throw the latest favorite overboard.

The sober-minded, reliable sailors who understand the art of navigation are dismissed as dreamy stargazers. And since the crew can’t cooperate and ignore the able seamen, the ship comes to ruin.

In Washington, our feckless captain boasts of being a master negotiator, but can’t bear for anyone else to get credit, has too feeble a grasp of the intricacies of policy to be able to find a middle ground, fears the wrath of his base if he actually compromises, and therefore listens to the last, most zealous crewman to get his ear. He decides nothing and lets the crew feud while he send mocking tweets from his cabin rather than come up on deck and steer.

His fractious crew is really two crews, made up of Ds and Rs, but the Rs control both Houses of Congress, the engine room and the sails. Still, they need some Democratic votes to pass a budget, and pressing issues such as DACA and CHIP on which time will soon run out.

Clearly, the sane solution is to compromise, but both sides have demonized the other and worry more about any agreement looking like a sign of weakness than about the risk of wrecking the ship. So, instead of settling for half a loaf, they get no loaf at all, and allow the government to shutdown. This is like running a ship onto the rocks rather than cooperate in sailing it safely to port.

For their part, the Ds fraction of the crew feels betrayed. The captain promised that if they sat down with the Rs and negotiated a deal, he’d sign it and take the heat. So, they made such a deal, and he threw it back in their faces, and now is accusing them of sole responsibility for his shutdown, and of risking lives with an unguarded border and an unfunded military.

Captain Trump’s claims are refuted by instant replay showing the Ds did offer the kind of deal he said he’d sign and it was spurned. In part this is because his own R crew’s bickering factions can’t agree on a plan, let alone allow a compromise with the Ds in the crew.

Unable to trust the captain or the Rs, the Ds are now inclined to let the rest of the fools try to solve a problem that requires more votes than they possess, hoping arithmetic will eventually persuade them to cooperate on a solution. But meanwhile, the Ship of State is dead in the water.

This would all be a hilarious commentary on human vanity and folly except for one thing. While the vainglorious President and fractured Congress are bickering, bungling, and calling each other schoolyard names, there are 320 million passengers aboard this particular ship. And it appears neither captain nor crew can be bothered with the fact that they are all lost at sea together and in danger of going down with the ship.

The Second Time Around

President Trump ran as a populist, appealing to the white working class with promises of tax cuts, curbs on foreign competition and Wall Street globalism, more American jobs and infrastructure, less immigrants, and the protection of Social Security and Medicare.

It was a popular pitch. The supply side revolution featuring tax cuts for the well-off championed by Reagan had commenced 35 years of global outsourcing of American jobs, wage stagnation and growing inequality at home. Add to that foreign adventures costing trillions and a Great Recession that never seemed to end, and by 2016 many voters were disenchanted with both parties and in the market for something different.

A year in, though, Trump continues to talk like a populist, even a white supremacist, but he and his party have behaved like the usual tools of the moneyed elite and enemies of the average worker. Eighty percent of the Trump tax cuts go to corporations and the top few percent of individuals.

Since Trump is too lazy or inattentive to deal with legislative details, the design of the tax cut fell not to populists but to two supply side zealots, Paul Ryan in the House and Pat Toomey (R-PA) in the Senate. Toomey’s previous job was heading the propaganda and lobbying home of supply side fiction, the Club for Growth, which preaches a simple gospel — government bad, tax cuts good.

This faith was never embraced by most Pennsylvanians and Toomey only eked out a narrow 1.5% victory in 2016 by keeping his distance from Trump and with the help of millions from the same cabal of billionaires who also financed The Club for Growth. Their idea of public policy is tax cuts for them and nothing for the public.

None of this is new. The previous Gilded Age was characterized by the “religious faith of all financial conservatives in the ‘drip theory’ of the economy.” According to Matthew Josephson that was the 1880s name for the same old supply side nonsense. He wrote classics about the period between the end of the Civil War and the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt. “The Robber Barons,” tells the story of those with the money, and “The Politicos,” describes those who did their biding.

Then, as now, the moneyed interest got richer and the poor poorer with the help of pliant men like Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester Arthur who, Josephson tartly remarks,” had the courage to execute unpopular measures desired exclusively by one class.”

The kingmaker behind the McKinley presidency was Mark Hanna. He made several fortunes in coal, steel, and streetcars, and eventually got himself elected to the Senate to keep his eye on his minions. He expressed the ethos of his class by observing that, “In a business state, someone must rule; the great mass of men must be ruled. Some men must own; the great mass of men must work for those who own.” Today, it seems the great mass of men must have their jobs outsourced or taken over by robots.

There were those who objected, of course. Strikers who were shot down, union leaders who were jailed, and authentic populists like Bryan. He bemoaned “the two nations of the poor and the rich, the haves and the have nots,” and warned against “the money interest of aggregated wealth and capital — imperious, arrogant, compassionless.”

Eventually, the grievances of the many became so apparent that reform could no longer be denied and the Progressive Era of trust busting, labor laws, and the like ameliorated the situation slightly. It should be noted that it wouldn’t have happened if McKinley hadn’t been assassinated and Roosevelt, his vice president, succeeded him. Hanna had opposed the choice of Teddy as running mate because it meant “there’s only one life between that madman and the Presidency.”

In our time, economist Thomas Piketty and others have shown a similar process is underway. Those with capital accumulate wealth faster than the wage economy grows, producing an ever widening inequality that will destabilize society if nothing is done. Beneficiaries of the status quo have pooh-poohed the idea.

To test the hypothesis, a study was undertaken by a Federal Reserve economist. It shows Piketty was too optimistic. Over the last 150 years, in 16 developed countries average annual return on financial assets has been 6.28%. but average economic growth and hence wags for salaried workers, has been less than half as much— 2.82%

Over many years the gap between robust market returns and stagnant wages has hollowed out the middle class and worsened the situation of an already struggling working class. Trump voters, in other words.

Their plight would be even worse if not for the social safety net erected beginning in the Progressive Era and greatly enhanced since the 1930s. Social Security keeps 26.1 million Americans out of poverty. School lunches, food stamps, and other programs help millions more to subsist. Medicare and Medicaid improve millions of lives.

But, in another echo of the Gilded Age, the faux populist Trump and his supply side Congress are not content with lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy. One Republican lawmaker says his “wish list” for 2018 and beyond is to scale back welfare spending and enrollment, healthcare, housing and food stamps for the poor.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan seconds that emotion. He said in December that 2018 would have to be devoted to cutting Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and to Social Security reform in order to solve the deficit problem that his tax cut helped increase by $1.5 trillion. Not that it will trouble his conscience since he’s admitted that it has been his dream to eliminate the social safety net ever since he read Ayn Rand.

All of this suggests that Trump is a populist betrayed by his own Congress, while he was off golfing. So he will surely rise up in righteous wrath and demand his promises be kept to protect workers’ jobs, Medicare and Social Security, and that poor minorities be given the help they need to succeed

Or, more realistically, Trump became president under false pretenses and planned all along to betray his own voters in order to enrich himself and his fellow plutocrats. Either way a real populist backlash, or the rise of a new Progressive Era, may be the result. Those who forget history get to watch it undo their supply side utopia, their thousand year Reich or their people’s revolution.