Category Archives: All Politics Is Local

Return to Political Patronage?

James A. Garfield served the shortest term of any U.S. president. Sworn in on March 4, 1881, he was assassinated a few months after taking office by a disappointed seeker for a political job. The assassin was one of many seeking a government job, not because of any expertise, but because of simple loyalty to a politician.

Garfield’s tragic death led to a movement resulting in our modern civil service. Our government seeks to hire employees because of ability, not because of loyalty to an individual.

Max Stier (“Opinion: The Patronage System Was Corrupt. It’s Threatening a Comeback,” Politico, August 2, 2022) writes: “Today, our nation’s 2 million career civil servants swear loyalty to the Constitution, not fealty to an individual president. They’re hired based on their ability and skills and cannot be fired for partisan or non-merit reasons. These protections provide civil servants with the latitude to offer unvarnished advice, to execute important policies and report illegal activity and misconduct without fear of retribution.”

Yet, some are calling for a return to the corrupt ridden patronage system. Presumably, if the patronage system were returned, civil servants, to avoid losing their jobs, would be tempted to report only news the president wanted.

Remember when former President Trump tried to overcome a weather report about a hurricane? He insisted that his incorrect statements about Alabama having been in the possible path of Hurricane Dorian were true , even altering a forecast map with a permanent marker. Government forecasters, not fearing for the loss of their jobs, stuck to the true forecast.

One of the stark differences between democracies and dictatorships is the freedom democratic sources are given to deal with facts and truth

Without unbiased government reporting on numerous subjects from foreign affairs to unemployment, presidents could hide any facts damaging to their power.

Writes Stier: “The arbitrary firing of tens of thousands of civil servants by a new administration could not only put the nation at risk, but potentially hamper the government’s ability to effectively deliver important services, from veterans’ benefits and Social Security to farm programs and ensuring military readiness.”

Do we want truth from government reports or political propaganda pieces?

Stopping Before the Water’s Edge?

Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator from Michigan (1928-1951), is credited with saying that American politics “stops at the water’s edge.”

We take this to mean that although U.S. political parties may favor different directions for the country domestically, we are united in our international policies. In other words, we care for our country too much to be divided in dealing with the rest of the world.

Though not always (Vietnam comes to mind), Americans do tend to support international policies of whoever is governing. The problem usually is with our national policies. Here agin, however, it’s not simple disagreement. We do not simply disagree on direction for our schools, or on the amount of attention paid to our racial history, or on police actions, or on abortion, or on a host of other matters. Now we are tempted to believe that our side must win even if it means ignoring democratic principles.

Some of us don’t really believe in elected governments. Some of us would cheerfully override constitutional checks if we think we can get away with it.

Our country isn’t a pure democracy, of course. The states have more power than individual voters because our constitution allows two senators for each state, regardless of that’s state’s population. The division of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial also is in constant flux.

However, the danger comes when we advocate forceful overthrow of our government by small armed groups, as the events of January 6, 2021, demonstrated.

Rule by popular government is far from perfect. It certainly does not always elect the best leaders. However, allowing a small group to oversee our government is far more dangerous. The temptation to dictatorship, to the use of government for our own selfish purposes, is always present if only a small group governs. In a democracy, we can change peacefully.

At least we can, if we will individually allow the other side the right to win.

Primary Election 2022

The voters’ pamphlet for our 2022 Washington state primary election arrived in our mailbox. The election is to be held August 2.

I opened it up and was surprised to see eighteen people running for the position now held by Senator Patty Murray, including Senator Murray. I cannot recall when this many candidates were contending. It seems a bit much.

The various parties for which the candidates have declared include the usual Democratic and Republican parties, but also: Socialist Workers Party, no party preference, JFK Republican Party, Independent Party, and Trump Republican Party.

The candidates for our representative to the U.S. House include these parties: Democratic, Republican, MAGA Republican Party, no Party Preference, and Conservative Party.

Is the large number of both candidates and parties an attempt to muddy the water so we will give up and not vote? Or perhaps the idea is to spread out the candidates so that current office holders will be overwhelmed and thrust out of office, overtaken by some unknown candidate?

I confess I don’t know, but after listening to this past Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the January 6 2021 riots, I’m more concerned than ever for our serious involvement in voting.

All Politics Is Local

Grace Olmstead left her community in small-town Idaho for a job elsewhere, as did many, perhaps most, of her school mates. She now lives with her husband and family in Virginia. Her book (Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind) is a very personal study of the movement, of which she is a part, that so threatens the farms and small town communities of rural America.

From her childhood, she remembers small farms growing a variety of fruits and vegetables, surrounded by supporting small towns. Today, many of those towns have emptied out or become suburbs. Farms are larger and grow more monocultural crops. Monoculture is the sowing of one homogeneous crop instead of a healthy mixture of crops and orchards and tillage.

I sympathized with her writing. I grew up in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. My father and my mother’s father were part of the movement from the rural Southeast that left similarly challenged small towns and rural areas in that part of the United States.

One of my aunts owned a farm in middle Tennessee. She sold mineral rights to a phosphate company. I’m not sure how much she knew about business dealings. At any rate, the company mined the phosphate, but did not restore her land.

Olmstead interviewed many families in her hometown and elsewhere, attempting to understand what is at stake if America becomes a land of faceless suburbs and monocultural farming.

Her conclusions have to do with community. Toward the end of her book, she realizes that lack of community is one reason the farmers and small towns were unable to band together to protect their interests.

Even her own kin, she finally realizes, were not willing to exchange independence for community. Because of their unwillingness to stand together against vested interests of large agribusinesses, they eventually lost the battle.

The result, she writes, is that “for all of its libertarian claims of freedom and autonomy, Idaho and its resources are often chained to the whims and demands of vast economic interests and powers.”

Even governmental help in the form of economic handouts, she says, “emphasizes individual farming families without looking at their larger context and communities.”

In these days, when a pandemic has driven us even more into our own private enclaves, we might profit by taking a look into our devastating lack of community.

Russia’s Pet Poodle?

“The polarization of American society has become a national security threat.”

So writes Fiona Hill in “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory,” (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021.) Hill served as an intelligence officer dealing with Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In time, Hill writes, the United States has moved surprisingly close to Russia “as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy.”

Especially under President Donald Trump, the country moved in the direction of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Trump, according to Hill, admired Putin, who “adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin.”

Trump desired to do the same thing, she writes. “He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at his disposal.”

Americans must defeat the corruption of the American political system as well as deny Putin the ability to exploit America’s current dangerous divisions. Politicians should cooperate with the private sector, Hill says, “to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms.”

She suggests the importance of investing in people to tackle “inequality, corruption, and polarization.”

Keeping a democracy in this age of social media takes discipline: to read newspapers instead of tweets, to read a book instead of depending on visual media.

Democracy without discipline dies. It’s much easier to follow a Hitler or a Putin or a Trump, loud voices untethered to any life lived in the service of others.

I am God Politics

Recently, during a local election in our normally quiet small town, political fighting has turned ugly. Election signs have been vandalized and hateful words exchanged.

Why?

Most of us say we believe in a peaceful exchange of power according to what the voters decide. Traditionally, the candidates campaign, the voters cast ballots, the votes are counted, and the one with the most votes wins. While the electoral college may cause problems in the presidential election, simple rule by majority is normally the case in local elections.

This November we are electing members of the local school board and our city officials. The vindictiveness of national politics has affected even these elections.

The idea of the gracious loser is an American tradition. John McCain, in his concession speech on losing the election to Barack Obama in 2008, gallantly wished Obama his support and praised the system that elected him and dealt McCain his loss.

Recently, too many of us have spurned his example, nationally and locally. Instead, we’ve chosen to act like those who support charlatans like Putin in Russia or dictators like Lukashenko in Belarus. Some of it is a clinging to power, but some of it, I think, is an arrogance that presumes we have complete truth.

We choose democracy precisely because no one has complete truth. The best we can do is let the majority rule. We have freedom of expression to state ideas peacefully challenging the majority. In the extreme, if one disagrees with the majority, one may offer civil disobedience, but even this should be peaceful, not a presumption that we have eternal truth. We are all imperfect human beings.

It is supreme arrogance to disrespectfully treat those with whom we disagree. We are all imperfect human beings.

Fighting Reality

One rainy day when my oldest son was a preschooler, I told him he wouldn’t be able to go outside to play because of the weather.
Me: “It’s raining.”
Small son: “No it’s not.”

My son wished to overcome a reality he did not like by pretending that the reality did not exist. I am reminded of this episode when I read of those who question Donald Trump’s losing the U.S. presidential election in 2020.

Despite numerous court decisions upholding Joe Biden’s win, some of Trump’s followers insist: “No, he didn’t.”

Normally in a supposed democracy like the United States, the winner, as directed by the Constitution, takes office. The losers may grit their teeth, but they follow the usual concession of power.

Not this year.

Just as we mortal beings sometimes fight the reality of dying, some Americans fight the death of the America they knew in years past.

Trump’s win in 2016 was perfectly legal, but it was an electoral college win. The majority of voters favored Hillary Clinton.

Nevertheless, those unhappy at a changed America, and in favor of a country more like that of the one they knew in years past, were encouraged by Trump’s win. However, in 2020, the majority of votes for Biden was sufficient to also win the electoral college vote and bring in his presidency.

Regardless of election outcomes, however, the America of years past is not coming back. Americans have changed. That one may cheer those changes or despise them does not alter the changes.

We may be tempted to power—to try to force our way—when we are losing. We may be tempted to support democracy only when the votes come our way.

The question is whether we really want to wrest our way by undemocratic means, even by lies which have no basis in reality.

Democracy only works when democratic rules are followed. If your side loses, you can choose legal means to regain power next time: perhaps better organizing voters of your political persuasion, spending money for your candidates, or writing opinion pieces on public forums.

To refuse the reality of your loss, however, is to betray all the efforts of the United States during the Cold War to lead nations to accept democratic rule.

That Distribution of Wealth Thing

Why should the wealthy give up money they have accumulated (though not necessarily worked for) only for the money to be enjoyed by those who didn’t earn it? The dreaded “S” word, socialism, haunts these discussions.

But what about our systems of public education? Aren’t free schools a distribution of wealth? We pay for them through taxes whether we have children or not, whether we send our children to them or, instead, pay for our children to receive a private education. Children of the poor may attend them as well as children of the more affluent.

We have decided that our communities and our nation as a whole will benefit from educated citizens.

Most of us believe roads and bridges and infrastructure should be maintained by our taxes. We believe this even though a poor person who pays little or no taxes (except perhaps sales taxes) can use the roads and sidewalks. We all benefit from cheaper goods facilitated by an efficient transportation system.

What about health care? Won’t the nation benefit from more productive citizens if they are in good health? To be sure, preventive care should be a major part of any health care system, not simply paying hospital bills. Obviously, some systems of health care are more efficient than others, as are systems of education, but the aim is a healthy population that will benefit the nation. Proper health care is an investment, like schools and roads.

The best investments yield gains in the long term. Some distribution of wealth is an investment.

Abortion Babies and Yemeni Babies

Some voters for Donald Trump in 2016 were “single value” voters. That is, they may not have liked Trump, but only one value was important to them in that election. Anti abortionists were one such group.

However, in voting for Trump because he would appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, they elected someone who devalued life in other ways.

Trump went against the will of the U.S. Congress in selling weapons used in the war between Saudi Arabia and the country of Yemen. Saudi Arabia and Yemen have been locked in a power struggle involving Iran for years. The war has resulted in horrific starvation for Yemeni civilians.

The horror led both houses of Congress, including Democrats and Republicans, to vote against selling American weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.

Trump claimed that the need for Saudis to have weapons for the war in Yemen was an emergency, though Congress plainly did not think so. Further, Trump said, American arms manufacturers needed the money. In declaring an emergency, Trump overrode the will of Congress.

Saudi Arabia used American weapons to bomb hospitals and marketplaces in Yemen and to cut off food supplies to that country. Yemen now is suffering mass starvation.

The question: Are babies killed in Yemen by American weapons less important than babies killed in abortion?

That is the problem with assuming one issue as the only one in a campaign. Moral issues are never simple. Believing one can be solved by one election can lead to horrific consequences.

Trump Vote: Thumb in Your Eye

Trump has enthusiastic support among some Americans. They wear MAGA hats and cheer wildly at his rallies. They make up the true believers decrying a “fraudulent” election.

Why go against all evidence and support a man who has stolen from his own charities, failed in business, constantly lies, loves to insult and belittle, and shows concern only for himself?

I think many of Trump’s supporters cheer him because the country’s more favored citizens have abandoned them. Trump appears to accept them.

Many Americans lost out when our traditional manufacturing culture shifted to a more tech oriented society. Some also are suffering whiplash from a changed society in which more young Americans leave organized religion.

These, the disdained, find their champion in one who sneers at the rules and thumbs his nose at the politically correct. He rails against liberal media who appear to his followers as opposed to their beliefs and way of life.

In her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Russell Hochschild writes of Republican voters who dislike the party’s favoritism of big business. Nevertheless, they vote Republican because they believe this party favors God and family.

Trump, the personification of the spoiled rich grifter, provided rallies for those pushed out of the mainstream to vent against the America they believe has turned its back on them. They equated his behavior as opposition to the system that failed them.

Trump was a disaster and was voted out of office. Those who decry false accusations of a “stolen” election must accept one of the most certain election results in U.S. history

The winners, however, cannot ignore those who put Trump in office in 2016, many of whom voted for him a second time. Come January, we may experience a very divided government: president of one party, congressional power split, Supreme Court with a majority appointed by the other party.

If the government is going to function with such divisions, we must begin by respecting those who differ from us. That is to say, greatly differ: over everything from gender rights to police power.

The only way we will survive the possibility of stalled governing when we face such great divisions is by accepting that each side will win sometimes and lose other times—even lose on issues dear to them.

We must lose in good grace, then work to change the situation through persuasion and the next election.

In addition, worker training, fairer wages, basic healthcare, and a host of other issues must be
addressed soon.

Creaky Democracy

We sometimes forget that our American democracy is the beta test for modern democracies, the early model.

The U.S. Constitution was ratified in the last decade of the 18th century. Men were still wearing waistcoats and breeches. Women wore long dresses and caps.

The idea of the people completely ruling themselves still wasn’t trusted even by the writers of the Constitution. They appeared to hedge their bets on this new form of government, with straitjackets that still constrain us today.

The direct election of senators wasn’t allowed by the Constitution until 1913. Women couldn’t vote until 1920.

Many of us have been shocked in the past few elections to learn that we the people do not directly elect our president and vice-president. The person sitting in the oval office directing our domestic and foreign affairs may rule by favor of a minority of voting Americans.

Writes Larry Diamond: “Our election systems were not built for the modern era.” (“When It Comes to Democracy, the U.S. Is Showing Its Age,” The New York Times, 1 Nov 20)

How do we move to a more democratic form of government? How develop a judicial system freer from political favoritism?

These are questions we must wrestle with if we want a truer democracy in the coming years. How do the people obtain the power when a minority will have to cede that power?

That Abortion Question

Many evangelical Christian voters would never consider voting for Donald Trump if he hadn’t taken them hostage with the abortion question. Many of them otherwise despise much in his personal life and in his administration.

Now he’s appointed a judge to the Supreme Court who may upend the decision many evangelicals hate: Roe v. Wade.

However, even a judiciary sworn to overturn all abortion will not stop abortion any more than the 18th amendment (the only amendment to be repealed) stopped the drinking of alcoholic beverages.

Abortion is becoming easier. Soon an abortion pill or two, guided by advice over the telephone may mean the end of abortion clinics with marchers attempting to shut them down.

Abortion pills can be passed to those desiring them much easier than bootleg liquor was passed to those overcoming the prohibition of alcohol.

Jesus, whom evangelicals profess to follow, refused to accept the political way of bringing in his kingdom. He refused the crown. He chose the much harder path of discipline and sacrifice.

Throughout the centuries, when Christians have chosen to use state powers to advance their religion, this choice has led to the corruption of Christianity and its loss of both followers and moral power to change society.

Evangelical Christians have chosen to fight abortion too late in the game—after a baby has been conceived.

Young women and men have been lured by our current self-centered entertainment trap. Sexual decisions are governed by the same lifestyle that gives us the obesity trap: eat all you want of whatever you want.

Discipline of physical desires is not the condemnation of physical desires but the better use of them.

Passing through the school of self discipline is not a belief in “someday you will enjoy a mate and have it all,” but something far more meaningful. A few are called to be celibate for life; most are not. All young people, however, need a period of learning and growth and discipline.

Young women, especially, need to find their directions in life irrespective of their relationship with men.

Just the Facts

“When it comes to disinformation, 2020 will not be a replay of 2016. It will be far worse.”

So writes Alina Polyakova. (“The Kremlin’s Plot Against Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2020)

That Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections is not in doubt. Why wouldn’t they attempt the same in the 2020 elections?

This time around, additional forces favor the kinds of disinformation sown by Putin’s Russia. They include pandemic, racial unrest, and climate catastrophes. All provide opportunities beloved by those whose stock in trade are bursts of disinformation, tossed around on the internet for the gullible.

Too many of us substitute tempting social media claptrap for deep reading of reliable news sources. However, investigative news stories cost money. Newspapers have folded across the country, especially the local ones, for lack of support. Readers have fallen away, tempted by lurid headlines put out by dubious sources.

What are our options?

We can take time to actually read researched news: for example, those news sources winning Pulitzer prizes in 2019. They include more than liberal behemoths like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

They include The Advocate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They include the British based Reuters and the Associated Press. Others: ProPublica and The St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Or you might try magazines like The Economist, a weekly British publication.

Resist the lurid rumors and take the time to read and, yes, pay for, our researched news.

Wandering Jews and Christians

Polls tell us that fewer and fewer people today, especially young people, identify as religious, including as Christians.

Christianity has lost its majority following before, usually after too many people calling themselves Christians followed gods other than Christ. Nazi Germany is one example.

Wesley Hill is a professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry. He uses Chaim Potok’s books about Jews in America, struggling to keep their faith, as an example for American Christians. (“Chaim Potok’s Wandering Jews, Holding to Faith in a Critical Age,” Plough Quarterly, Autumn 2020.)

Hill writes: “A religiously observant life is less and less accessible or intelligible to modern Westerners, yet many of us remain haunted by its possibility.”

Despite many who leave organized Christianity, others, like Hill, continue in the faith, perhaps in altered form from their childhood.

“Like Potok’s characters,” Hill writes, “I went away to university and experienced something of the wider world beyond the confines of my Baptist, Republican childhood. . . . I am now a member of the Episcopal Church, which, to my childhood eyes, was barely a church at all.”

And so he remains, as do many of us. “. . . “I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want sill, very much to be a Christian.”

But isn’t that the story of the Christian church? Over and over again, dying, then finding rebirth as a more humble but risen faith?

Will a Russian Bot Steal My Vote?

Stacey Abrams, a black woman, ran for the governor’s office in Georgia in 2018. She lost by less than 55,000 votes.

However, the man who won was Georgia’s secretary of state. He had purged over 300,000 voters from Georgia’s voting rolls, the majority of whom were black.

In an article in Sojourners (“Unafraid to Hope,” Sept/Oct 2020), Abrams writes: “There are nine states where you can lose your right to vote simply because you didn’t use it. When I don’t go hunting on Saturday, no one tells me that I’ve lost my Second Amendment right, so why is it that I can lose my right to vote simply for not using it?”

The Voting Rights Act of 1969 prohibited racial discrimination in voting in the United States. But those who don’t wish certain classes of people to vote never give up.

Knocking people who are registered to vote off the registration lists simply because they missed a vote is one way.

An additional fault line for this year’s presidential election centers on voting by absentee and voting by mail. Wild claims are made about fraud in both cases. It’s alleged that foreign interests will inundate elections with fraudulent ballots.

Fifty states have charge of voting. In addition, the states include over 3,000 counties and local municipalities. In Washington state, I vote by mail in Island County. Ballots are received and counted in this county.

It would be difficult for an enemy, domestic or foreign, to cause much damage to the process itself, given the large numbers of municipalities they would have to deal with, although voting by machines is not as safe as voting by paper ballots.

Voting by mail and/or absentee also means the ballots are available for recounts and close scrutiny.

Yet, in an age of pandemic, some are trying to use the uncertainties of mingling in public places to attack voting by mail and/or absentee.

We should make it extremely hard to win public office by fraudulent means. That includes unfairly manipulating the vote registration process, as well as the vote itself.

Shadow Network

In her book Shadow Network; Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Anne Nelson writes in excruciating detail about a naked power play for American followers of Jesus of Nazareth. She writes convincingly of how some of them have been used cynically by an economic-political cabal.

American Christians, as do all Christians, supposedly follow a Jesus who gave his life in love for his followers. He rejected, according to the books and letters written about him, worldly power, riches, or fame. He chose, instead, the much harder path of love and caring and compassion.

Yet, writes Nelson: “. . . I discovered the rapidly evolving ties connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives.”

If democratic practices stood in the way of their desire for power, they would abandon democracy. If they could win by playing unfairly, they would play unfairly.

Voters became objects to be manipulated by masters of computer generated slices of the electorate.

Eventually, leaders were elected who set up a tax system favorable to the rich and who fought attempts at affordable health care.

In a final summing up, Nelson writes: “But the 2016 election clearly demonstrated how the mechanics of democracy could be manipulated to produce antidemocratic results.”

Perhaps in the coming years, American Christians will decide if the Jesus they claim to follow can be trusted on his own teachings—-or, instead, choose the standards of the world that crucified him.

Delay Vote: Hong Kong and US?

Recently, President Donald Trump has suggested delaying the November election in the United States. He tweeted: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

Trump claims to be concerned about mail-in voting. Could it actually be that he is just afraid he might lose the election if more people vote?

Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State, recently faulted the Hong Kong government for postponing legislative elections scheduled there for September 6. Apparently, China, who influences the government, is afraid the election might not go the way it wishes.

On August 1, Pompeo stated: “The United States condemns the Hong Kong government’s decision to postpone by one year upcoming Legislative Council elections originally scheduled for September 6.”

Something about the pot calling the kettle black?

Free to Vote

I loved the traditional “going to the polls” routine. After moving to our small town in Washington state several years ago and registering as voters, my husband and I would cross the street to our precinct’s voting place on election day. We would mingle with friends, mark our paper ballots in a voting booth, then drop them in the official box.

You can understand my feelings the year my state announced the change to an all mail voting process. I certainly didn’t greet the change with joy. I would miss the local voting day camaraderie, the pride when I stuck the “I Voted. Have You?” sticker on my coat.

Now? I have come to bless that day when we went to all mail voting. Our presidential primary last spring, just as the virus began taking a toll, went off without a hitch.

For our current local primary and the coming November election, we have no fears of catching the virus in a long polling place line. We will not have to worry about enough poll workers or places to vote.

In an election, the mailed ballots in my county are received at the county offices and stored in a locked room, under camera surveillance, to be tabulated after “the polls” close on election day.

Before mailing my ballot, I wrote my required signature on the outside envelope. It will be compared with the signature on the registered voter list.

Should any question arise as to the validity of the final vote count, the paper ballots are available for reexamination.

I pray for a free and fair election this November. I pray for the ability to vote by mail for all who wish it. And I pray that our constitutionally mandated postal service will not be harmed by partisan politics.

Choose A Stable Genius

John Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir has been available for pre order for some time. Reviews are prominent.

I don’t plan to read it. Bolton has been accused of holding back for a money-making book what he should have shared during the impeachment hearings for President Trump.

Instead, I recommend A Very Stable Genius, Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. Both are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists from The Washington Post and have extensive experience in covering American politics.

The book is detailed and frank, full of expletives and failed characters and a few courageous ones. Reading it during the Covid-19 lock down was not the most joyous activity I could have chosen. The insight I gained was worth the journey.

According to the book, Trump’s decision to plunge into a government shutdown just before Christmas in 2018 exemplifies the president’s style: Said one of his advisers: “It was done based on impulse and emotion and dogmatism and a visceral reaction rather than a strategic calculation. That’s indicative of a lot of the presidency and who he is.”

Another telling comment: “He was a president entirely unrestrained, free from the shackles of seasoned advisers who sought to teach him to put duty to country above self and to follow protocols. He concluded he was above the law . . .. He had grown so confident of his own power and cocksure that Republicans in Congress would have never dare break with him, that he thought he could do almost anything.”

That remark encapsulates the whole tragedy: American voters and politicians allowed Trump to believe he could copy the style of a dictator and do anything he wanted without restraint.

Why Are the Inspectors Being Fired?

Steve Linick, an inspector general for the U.S. State Department, was recently fired by President Donald Trump, apparently as requested by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

It seems Linick was investigating allegations against Pompeo. One related to Pompeo’s use of staff for personal errands.

However, the more serious investigation apparently related to Trump’s overriding the vote of Congress to deny selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. In the past, Saudi Arabia has used such weapons to bomb civilians in its war against Yemen.

Pompeo apparently persuaded Trump to use emergency powers to sell the weapons anyway. Linick was investigating whether this was, in fact, justified.

The larger question is why the inspector was fired when he was attempting to do his job. Pompeo has said he lost confidence in Linick.

Since Pompeo provided no evidence of why he lost confidence, it’s tempting to assume that the firing was political to protect Pompeo’s job.

Inspectors are set up in government departments to keep the departments accountable. They promote integrity and efficiency.

In fact, Linick is only one of several inspectors fired in recent months by the Trump administration.

Why this war on those who would keep the government accountable and honest?