Just because Donald Trump, only the fourth president in 100 years to lose his re-election bid, is devoting his limited energy and attention span to subverting our democracy doesn’t mean his minions aren’t busy elevating his and their customary cruelty to a new level. Trump’s stooges are feverishly at work screwing the most vulnerable among us. Here’s just a few of the malevolent things they are doing on their way out the door into a well-deserved oblivion:
 
Continuing the Immigration Assault
 
For four years, the Trump administration has vandalized immigration. They have made getting into this country legally almost impossible. Their guiding principles have been malice, racism, lies and contempt for international law and human decency.  They don’t even try to hide it. Now they are at it again in a last ditch attempt to destroy the few human lives their viciousness has not yet touched.
 
In September we learned that an ICE prison in Georgia was sending immigrant women for unnecessary hysterectomies that the women didn’t consent to or even realize were happening. Congress’s attempt to investigate this criminal outrage is being stymied because those victims who have agreed to testify are suddenly being deported.
 
Similarly, Cameroonian asylum seekers who allege they were physically assaulted, pepper-sprayed and threatened into signing their own deportation orders are being fast-tracked for deportation so that they too cannot be called to testify about what they have suffered at the hands of Trump’s immigration goons.
 
Not to be outdone in vindictiveness by ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently announced that it is making it harder to become a naturalized citizen, effective December 1. The new citizenship test has 128 questions vs. 70 on the old one. Many of the new questions are more difficult than the current ones. I challenge members of Congress, especially Republicans, to answer them correctly. As Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) recently stated: “Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government — You know, the House, the Senate, and the executive.” Sheesh!
 
One More Kick in Disabled People’s Teeth
 
It isn’t enough that candidate Trump back in 2016 mocked a disabled reporter for his disability or that millions of coronavirus survivors are likely to have lasting disabilities. The Trump toadies at the Social Security Administration have just issued final rules making it much harder for disabled individuals to receive Social Security Disability Income (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits and to put in jeopardy the SSDI and SSI benefits of people currently receiving them.
 
They are replacing the impartial, independent corps of administrative law judges (ALJs) who decide these cases with internal agency lawyers who are Social Security Administration employees beholden to their bosses’ edicts. Expect the number of needy, deserving people who will be denied these essential benefits to skyrocket.
 
The second rule increases the number and frequency of "continuing disability reviews" (during which beneficiaries must prove they're still disabled). This new rule is intended to make it easier for the government to throw people off the disability rolls.
 
Both rules will go into effect in December.
 
As with everything Trump and his cronies do, the result in all these cases is callous cruelty. The viciousness of these reprobates knows no bounds. Expect more of the same before they’re gone.
 
Dick Hermann
November 27, 2020

“It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.”
--Bishop Berkeley, 1750
 
What a sad, repulsive, classless, no character man is Donald Trump. The man-baby in the White House cannot accept that the American people resoundingly rejected him at the polls in a free, fair and honest election marred only by massive Republican voter suppression of minority voters nationwide. Every time one thinks Trump cannot go lower, a new bottom calls out to him like a mythological siren. For Trump there is no bottom.
 
His final repellant acts as president violate the oath he took as well as common decency, honor and humanity. Having abandoned any pretense of performing his presidential duties, he stages coups d’état at the Defense and Homeland Security Departments, installing unqualified bootlickers in place of the people he fired by tweet. He spouts wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and alleges a stolen election rampant with nonexistent voter fraud—laughable given that the alleged wrongdoing only affected him and no other Republicans down-ballot. Some conspiracy! He launches clown car election lawsuits, unsupported by any evidence, that get laughed out of court.
 
The worst elements of this awful man’s scorched-earth approach to his final days are:

1. his disinterest in and lack of any action whatsoever to tackle a pandemic raging out of control in the country he swore to protect. Despite the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths surging, all he cares about is wreaking vengeance and havoc on his government and his people. It falls to the President-elect to behave responsibly while the lame-duck incumbent wallows in self-pity and false accusations. His execrable conduct will be rightly condemned by history, but that is small recompense for the millions of Americans suffering now because of his behavior;
2. the threat to national security of Trump’s refusal to allow a transition to the new administration. The 9/11 Commission noted that the 2000 transition delay contributed to the delayed intelligence that might have helped us obtain an early warning of Al Qaeda’s plans to attack us. Trump’s advisers had to talk him down from launching a military attack on Iran. His decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan opens up that country to becoming a terrorist haven once again;
3. his wholesale adoption of two Nazi tactics that aroused the German public and paved their way to power and dictatorship: the “stab in the back,” i.e. that corrupt politicians were guilty of sabotaging the army in the field at the end of World War I, turning a sure victory into defeat. Trump has adapted that to his rigged election falsehood; and “the Big Lie,” a Joseph Goebbels invention that in its Trumpian manifestation asserts that the election was rigged and Trump really won. Both, of course, are total twaddle. The problem is that Trump’s followers believe this poppycock to the detriment of our fragile democracy and the rule of law. His contamination of our democracy is not something we will easily correct; and
4. his all-out assault on democracy represented by his effort, after all else (lies, conspiracy theories, distortion, disinformation) failed, to overturn the election through subversion, namely attempts to persuade Republican state legislatures to pick their own slate of electors in defiance of the popular will. The incalculable damage this sabotage does to America will long outlast Trump.

 
Trump has four goals in mind with his indecent conduct: (1) to delegitimize a legitimate election. Sadly and inexplicably, his supporters actually believe this nonsense; (2) to make President-elect Biden’s job more difficult; (3) to desperately cling to office because come January 20, 2021, he loses his protection against the 10 criminal and civil investigations and cases awaiting him; and (4) to bring the country down in flames with him if he doesn’t get his way.
 
Equally vulgar is the way senior Republicans have once again fallen in line behind this reprehensible man masquerading as a president. Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, stooges all who have bought into Trump’s con/coup, deserve the condemnation of all Americans and of history for their disgraceful conduct. They dishonor the oath they took to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and they run roughshod over the rule of law and democratic ideals for which so many Americans have fought and died. Of course these patsies know better, but they cower in fear of being tweeted against by the autocrat they chose to follow and his loyal base. They are beneath contempt.
 
I supported President Ford’s blanket pardon of Richard Nixon. I believed the country had been through enough and did not need to countenance the prospect of more Nixonian anguish. This time, however, is different. Trump and his enablers need to face justice for their criminal and treasonous conduct. A reckoning must be had. Accountability is as American as apple pie.
 
Dick Hermann
November 21, 2020

The 2020 election is not only the most consequential since at least 1860, but is also the one generating the most reverberating observations:

• The most stunning outcome of the 2020 election is that almost 50 percent of Americans, despite observing four years of criminality, lives lost, children torn from parents, a disregard for the rule of law, the attempted destruction of our delicate democracy and abysmal behavior, still voted for Donald Trump. The takeaway? While Trump may be gone, Trumpism is not and will continue to be a powerful voice of unreason on the right. Unless a way around it is found, it will be extremely difficult to govern, given a divided Congress and a Senate whose Republican members will continue to be dependent on conspiracy-obsessed constituents for re-election and thus disinclined to reach across the aisle to get productive things done.
• Mitch McConnell will not change his spots just because Donald Trump is history. He will be just as obstructionist as ever. Dems, however, do have a strategy they can pursue: cultivate the handful of GOP Senators who pass for “moderate:” Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and perhaps Ben Sasse. If they can persuade two or three of them, then aspirational policies like tackling climate change, infrastructure and immigration reform might have a shot.
• Trump’s ridiculous claims of a vast Democratic conspiracy to steal the election is belied by the party’s failure to flip the Senate and its loss of seats in the House. In one sense, Trump is just about the only Republican who lost.
• Biden had no coattails. In fact, he had negative coattails resulting in a potentially hostile Senate, a reduced House majority and antediluvian state legislatures that will continue to dominate redistricting for the next decade.
• The polls could not have been more off the mark.
• The pundits whose superficial analyses demonstrated a depth of cluelessness should be consigned to history’s also-rans.
• Voting overhaul. There is no excuse for long lines. There is no logic in disallowing the counting of mail-in and early-voted ballots until election day. Counts need to begin earlier so that results don’t have to wait ad nauseum. The need for a reinvigorated Voting Rights Act is acute. It should reinstitute and expand Justice Department pre-clearance reviews of any proposed registration and voting changes by any state.
• Disinformation is formidable. Republicans used it with great effectiveness in Miami-Dade County, Florida and it made the difference in carrying the state. Democrats had no answer to the hysteria Republicans raised about socialism coming to America if Joe Biden were elected. The appeal to anti-Castro Cubans, anti-Maduro Venezuelans and anti-Ortega Nicaraguans who came to these shores to escape socialist oppression was powerful.
• Social Media needs some controls. It was used to great effect by Republicans hawking conspiracy theories and lies.
• Playing by the rules disadvantages Democrats and incentivizes Republicans to continue to lie, cheat and steal elections and court seats. I am not advocating that Dems sully themselves by stooping to play in the GOP moshpit, but some strategic rethinking of how to counter this vileness needs to occur.
• Russia should not go unpunished after it once again attempted, this time with far less success, to intervene and interfere in our democratic process. This is war and we have unilaterally disarmed. That has to change. We need to go on offense.
• Kudos to the federal and state agencies tasked with election security. They did a terrific job. The lessons of 2016 really resonated. And a pat on the head to state and local election administrators and volunteers who performed a thankless task under extreme duress magnificently.
• The U.S. Postal Service slow-walked ballots to many counting locations. It needs to be depoliticized. Never again should a president and postmaster general be allowed to subvert it in an attempt to steal an election. A bipartisan commission should select the postmaster general. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night [nor Louis DeJoy] should stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

 
Dick Hermann
November 6, 2020