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It’s Beyond Parody How Beyond Parody Trump Is

It’s Beyond Parody How Beyond Parody Trump Is

“You can’t make this stuff up!” is an all-purpose punch line to point out something in reality that’s so absurd that a punch line would shrivel in comparison. And it’s become a sort of a mantra for observers of the Trump Administration who are having trouble coming up with a punch line as ridiculous as the Secret Service spending $35,000 on golf carts to babysit the 70-year old president in about three months as Trump’s budget would gut federal funding for hungry seniors on Meals on Wheels.

Of course, all of this was not only predictable, it was predicted.

We were told that Trump could be baited, possibly into a nuclear war, with a tweet. We’d been warned that his campaign’s strange ties and allegiances with Russia, already codified with a change to the GOP platform in Putin’s favor, likely indicated something more nefarious. His policies always read like a George W. Bush-redux but with extra strength racism, misogyny and Islamophobia. And Trump’s rank incompetence and ability to dance from failure to failure sucking in gains while ripping off everyone in his wake was obvious in his business record, which included a class action lawsuit he settled for $25 million right before taking office.

But nothing prepared me for Trump’s schtick about his first 100 days.

Yes, a president’s first 100 days is an arbitrary marker we’ve inherited from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who swept into office after years of the Great Depression determined to make his personal optimism manifest in legislation and executive action.

It was “unlike anything known to American history,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote.

Lyndon Johnson’s 100 days intentionally summoned FDR’s spirit to similar effect and in his first 100 days, Barack Obama took steps to prevent a Greater Depression, to rescue and renew the American auto industry, and to create a green energy revolution that will pay dividends in Teslas and better solar panels for generations. (Obama, unlike Trump, also played no golf in his first 100 days.)

In that spirit, as his campaign floundered last October, Trump went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to lay out “Donald Trump’s Contract With The American Voter,” which stated his “100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.”.

Anyone who knows Donald Trump’s record expects him to welch on any contract he makes, but — hey — at that point, before James Comey got his closeup, did even Don expect Don to win?

And Trump’s first 100 days have gone even worse, legislatively at least, than anyone expected.

He hasn’t jammed Democrats on any significant issues and his only “victories” are a series of reversals of Obama policies that include enabling oil companies to take money from foreign governments, coal companies to pollute rivers, and Internet service providers to track and sell your browsing history. These bills only required Republican votes in both Houses of Congress and were often signed in private because they would have shown the public that he stands entirely “with the Republican establishment he lampooned during his campaign,” as Politico Magazine‘s Mike Grunwald explains.

Yes, Trump is doing untold damage to our environment and the climate while assailing our tourism industry and terrorizing law-abiding undocumented immigrants who, unlike him, would love to pay taxes. And yes, he’s put together a cabinet that is simultaneously the richest and least qualified for public service in American history.

But there isn’t one promise in his 100-day contract he’s fulfilled.

In fact, his only accomplishments worth boasting about were some good jobs numbers and a Supreme Court appointment. Accomplishments, as the Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel pointed out, he inherited from Barack Obama.

Trump’s only talent, it seems, is inheriting things he doesn’t deserve, which makes him apoplectic when it’s time for his success to be compared against people who actually earned theirs.

Yes, there’s a Trump tweet that contradicts everything Trump says or does. The Daily Show‘s Dan Amira noted that “if Trump randomly, like, tripped on a squirrel or something we’d find an old tweet of his saying only fat losers trip on squirrels.”

But I have to say that Trump’s sudden whining about “the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days” was precious beyond my ability to hold water in my mouth, provoking the first unintentional spit take of my life.

This happened when CNN showed a clip of Trump introducing his 100-day plan in Gettysburg by saying, “It is a contract between myself and the American voter — and begins with restoring honesty, accountability, and change to Washington.”

Talk about a ridiculous standard. And never forget how that very speech began with him promising to sue all the women who had accused him of harassment and/or assault after the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape — another promise he flaked on.

All of this is beyond parody. And it’s beyond parody’s power to stop it.

If pointing out Trump’s rank ridiculousness, contradictory tweets, and the hypocrisy of Bible-theme slot machine had sufficient effect on withering Trump’s core support or compelling Republicans into doing even basic oversight, he would never have gotten past his failed Reform Party run for president in 2000.

Alec Baldwin has called Trump “the first satire-resistant president.” If this is true it’s because Trump is far more effective at bending reality, as With Friends Like These‘s Ana Marie Cox keeps saying, than any American politician that has come before him. This comes from his unrelenting combination of the dog-whistle racist demagoguery combined with the subliminal salesman schtick Trump mastered from decades of learning how to rip off people who should know better

No, satire and parody won’t be enough to stop this guy. Our only option is to take the risks he poses to our democracy seriously, deadly seriously. We overestimated the immune system of our society and suppressed the knowledge that the land of the free only truly began extending its full freedoms to minorities, women, and LGBTQ people in the last few decades.

Only by taking Trump absolutely seriously — by contesting every step of his agenda in marches, in town halls, in our reps offices, on the phones, and everywhere we can — have we kept him somewhat in check. Resisting Trump’s agenda relentlessly must be followed by proposing a better one that frame how division weakens us all and strengthens the ruling class. Still, the powers of the presidency are awesome and he likely has at least a baker’s dozen more 100 days left for him to undo the progress we’ve taken for granted here, and in other democracies.

Only an unrelenting, positive resistance will do, because that’s something you can’t just make up.

 

Weekend Reader: ‘Bill Of The Century: The Epic Battle For The Civil Rights Act’

Weekend Reader: ‘Bill Of The Century: The Epic Battle For The Civil Rights Act’

Today the Weekend Reader brings you Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen, editor of The New York Times op-ed section. Bill of the Centurydetails the arduous mission of civil rights leaders to pass a bill that granted equal rights to millions of Americans regardless of race, sex, or religion. Risen explores the long list of other important contributors  who drafted the bill and pushed it through Congress, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy, and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

You can purchase the book here.

While in Birmingham, [Assistant Attorney General Burke] Marshall had spent some time talking with Dick Gregory, a black comedian and outspoken civil rights activist. Gregory said that part of the administration’s problem was that the Kennedys never actually talked with black people. Marshall relayed the suggestion to Robert Kennedy. The attorney general asked if Marshall could set up a meeting with the author James Baldwin, whose essay “Letter from a Region of My Mind” he had read in the New Yorker. Marshall got in touch with Baldwin, who agreed to come to Washington to meet Kennedy on May 23.

When the day arrived, though, Baldwin’s plane was delayed, and by the time he got to Kennedy’s northern Virginia home, the attorney general had only twenty minutes to talk. Kennedy began by admitting that the proposals under consideration were focused on issues facing Southern blacks and would do little to help those in the Northern cities. What, he asked Baldwin, should be done? Baldwin offered to assemble a group of black activists and intellectuals for Kennedy to meet with. By chance, Kennedy said, he was going to be in New York the next day—why not set up a get-together that afternoon?

The next morning, Kennedy, Marshall, and Oberdorfer flew to New York for a meeting with the heads of several major five and dimes, theaters, and department stores—Woolworth’s, Kress, J. C. Penney, McCrory, Sears—to discuss what they could do to desegregate their branches in the South. Kennedy came away with noncommittal responses, assurances that the chains would do the best they could but that they could not promise anything that would undermine their profits, which in the South, they insisted, meant acceding to customers’ demands that they remain segregated.

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Kennedy and his aides then headed to his father’s apartment at 24 Central Park West for the meeting with Baldwin’s hastily assembled focus group. If not a who’s who of the black community in New York, it was a good cross-section: Kenneth Clark, the eminent psychologist from the City College of New York; the singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne; the playwright Lorraine Hansberry; Jerome Smith, a twenty-four-year-old veteran of the Freedom Rides; Baldwin’s brother David and a friend of his, Thais Aubrey; Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, Clarence Jones; and the Urban League activist Edwin C. Berry. (The white actor Rip Torn, who was active in civil rights, was also there.)

Clark and Berry were supposed to set an intellectual, measured tone for the meeting, but it derailed almost immediately. “In that moment, with the situation in Birmingham the way it was,” said Horne later, “none of us wanted to hear figures and percentages and all that stuff. Nobody even cared about expressions of goodwill.”

Smith, a passionate man with a pronounced stammer, began by saying, “Mr. Kennedy, I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you or your brother.” He said it was obvious that the Kennedys did not care about Southern protesters. In fact, he said, just being in the same room as the attorney general made him sick to his stomach.

Kennedy was visibly offended, but rather than engage with Smith, he tried to ignore him. He began addressing Baldwin, but Hansberry cut him off. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” she said, pointing at Smith. The young Freedom Rider began explaining what he had lived through in the South, emphasizing how little the federal government had done to help him.

Eventually Kennedy interrupted him. “Just let me say something,” he said.

“Okay,” said Smith, “but this time say something that means something. So far you haven’t said a thing!”

Kennedy tried to explain the bills, but Smith just scoffed. The situation was far too dire. He was a nonviolent man, he said, but he was unsure for how long. “When I pull the trigger, kiss it goodbye!”

Trying to inject some balance to the conversation, Baldwin asked Smith if he would ever fight for his country. “Never!” Smith said.

That drove Kennedy over the edge. He had been just a few years too young to fight in World War II, the war that had killed one of his brothers and made a hero of another. “How could you say that?” he demanded. “Bobby got redder and redder and redder, and in a sense accused Jerome of treason,” recalled Clark.

Kennedy asked for ideas. Baldwin said the president should personally escort students into the University of Alabama who were being blocked by Governor Wallace. He should get rid of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. The Department of Justice should be more aggressive in Birmingham. The attorney general insisted that he was working closely with King, which brought forth peals of cynical laughter.

Eventually Kennedy ran out of the energy to both respond to the attacks and keep his anger in check, and he just sat there quietly as Baldwin’s panel took turns berating him, his brother, and the federal government. “It became really one of the most violent, emotional, verbal assaults that I had ever witnessed before or since,” said Clark. Finally, after three hours, the meeting broke up.

The encounter had a profound effect on Kennedy. At first he was just angry. When Belafonte apologized afterward for the group’s hostility and said he agreed with Kennedy, the attorney general glared at him and said, “How could you just sit there and not say anything?” After returning to Washington, he sat down for a debriefing with Schlesinger. “They don’t know anything,” he said. “They don’t know what the laws are—they don’t know what the facts are. They don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do. You couldn’t talk to them as you can to Roy Wilkins or Martin Luther King. They didn’t want to talk that way. It was all emotion. Hysteria. They stood up and orated. They accused. Some of them wept and walked out of the room.”

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But over the next several days and weeks, Kennedy began to change. As his own anger faded, he found that the evident passion and stinging sense of injustice he has witnessed in Baldwin’s group had left an impression on him. “The more I saw him after this,” Belafonte recalled, “the more he no longer had questions that were just about the specifics of federal government intervention, or the civil rights strategy of the moment. He began to move to broader philosophical areas, began to know more about cause and effect and why.” Asked later to illustrate Kennedy’s education in civil rights, Marshall shot his hand straight up. Ed Guthman saw it, too. “After a day or two, Bob’s attitude about the meeting began to shift. He had never heard an American citizen say he would not defend the country and it troubled him. Instead of repeating, as he had, ‘Imagine anyone saying that,’ he said, ‘I guess if I were in his shoes, if I had gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country.’”

On May 29, Robert Kennedy paid a surprise visit to Johnson’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. Kennedy sat quietly for a few minutes as NASA administrator James Webb gave a presentation of his agency’s progress. Then Kennedy began to cross-examine Webb, quickly establishing that NASA, which handled billions of dollars in contracts annually, had just two people—or one and a half, since one of them was Webb, who had other duties—making sure that the companies it did business with did not discriminate. “I don’t think this gentleman over here that spent a year and a half on this program—if he has, evidently, some other responsibilities, I don’t think he is going to get that job done,” Kennedy said. “He has got $3.9 billion worth of contracts.”

Webb meekly tried to defend himself. “I would like to have you take enough time to see precisely what we do.”

But Kennedy blew past him. “I am trying to ask some questions. I don’t think I am able to get the answers, to tell you the truth.”

At that point Johnson stepped in to defend Webb. “Do you have any other questions?” he asked Kennedy.

“That is all for me,” said the attorney general, and he stalked from the room.

Kennedy’s performance served many purposes, including venting steam from his encounter in New York as well as getting in some sucker punches against his nemesis, Lyndon Johnson. But it was also typical of the way Kennedy came to a new passion—intensely, with something to prove, enemies to make, and battles to be won. “Racial justice was no longer an issue in the middle distance,” wrote Schlesinger. “Robert Kennedy now saw it face to face, and he was on fire.”

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can purchase the full book here.

From Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for The Civil Rights Act by Clay Risen, Copyright © 2014 by Clay Risen. Published by Bloomsbury Press. Reprinted with permission.

LBJ’s Civil Rights Act Irrevocably Changed U.S. Landscape

LBJ’s Civil Rights Act Irrevocably Changed U.S. Landscape

Last week, President Obama and civil rights luminaries went to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. That legislation, signed in July 1964, was a stunning achievement, a herald of a dramatic transformation in the nation’s social and cultural landscape.

Yet the anniversary comes at a confusing moment in America’s racial journey. While a generation is growing up associating presidential power with a black man, evidence of a pernicious, race-infused backlash is inescapable. And bigotry played a role in the unjust shootings of two young black men, Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, who were almost certainly victims of racial profiling.

Few suggest, anymore, that the election of President Obama is evidence of a “post-racial” America in which no one notices skin color or takes into account racial and ethnic heritage. In fact, Obama’s rise has fueled the fears and hatred of a small but vocal minority who believe their America — a country run by and for white heterosexual Christians — is disappearing. If you think I’m exaggerating, just read Pat Buchanan’s 2011 screed, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

It is easy enough to be pessimistic. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who has conducted research on diverse communities, told me he was surprised that Obama’s election had seemed to revive racism rather than quelling it. That revival plays itself out quite vividly in our national politics, where a retrograde faction of the Republican Party dedicates itself to the notion that, if racism still exists, white people are its victims.

Still, it would be foolishly myopic to argue that little has changed in the half-century since President Johnson arm-twisted the Civil Rights Act into history. I’m old enough to remember a landscape that was much more hostile to black Americans, that conspired to limit us in ways too myriad to count. Black and brown millennials don’t know what it means to be refused service in a restaurant, to be shoved to the back to the bus, to be turned away at a hotel because of skin color, to be ushered to a separate (and often filthy) restroom. And their white counterparts would rightly find such policies absurd.

The America that elected Obama is a very different place from the nation over which Johnson presided. Not only do black Americans eat in any restaurant they can afford, but they also star as celebrity chefs on TV. Black men and women preside over corporate boardrooms, head major non-profit institutions and reign as single-name cultural icons.

Yes, there are still major disparities in health and wealth, incarceration rates and even school suspensions. Much work remains before full equality is more than a distant mountain peak. But we ought to be able to discuss the road ahead without pretending that we’ve not made any progress at all. To do that would be to disparage the work of our civil rights heroes and to deny ourselves the inspiration we need to keep plodding along.

Besides, pessimism breeds defeat. It infects its victims with a self-limiting lethargy that fails to take big risks, to reach for the skies, to dream big dreams.

Last month, for example, USA Today profiled high-school senior Kwasi Enin, a first-generation Ghanaian-American who was accepted by all eight Ivy League colleges, an extremely rare accomplishment. Enin has a lot on the ball, but the fact that his parents, as immigrants, likely focused on America’s opportunities — not its race-based limitations — undoubtedly played a role in his remarkable story. That didn’t shield him from any racism prompted by the color of his skin, but it certainly gave him the confidence and the gumption to think he could succeed.

A half-century after Johnson pushed through a law that helped to transform a nation, racism is hardly dead. But it’s a shadow of its former self, a limited force no longer able to define the lives of the nation’s citizens of color. That’s change we can believe in.

(Cynthia Tucker, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.)

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

Ex-President George W. Bush Calls For Equal Education In Speech At LBJ Library

Ex-President George W. Bush Calls For Equal Education In Speech At LBJ Library

By Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

AUSTIN, Texas—Former Texas governor and President George W. Bush wrapped up the three-day Civil Rights Summit at the LBJ Presidential Library on Thursday with brief remarks arguing that equal education for all is a civil right and that progress toward that goal is an advancement of Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda.

Speaking in the 10th-floor atrium of the library before a dinner gathering — not in the auditorium as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama earlier had — Bush said he feared “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” a phrase he used in advancing his No Child Left Behind initiative, had returned.

“Education in America is no longer legally separate, but it is not effectively equal,” he said, adding that “without accountability, it is poor and minority children who will suffer the most. When we invest taxpayer dollars, it is only right to expect results. Education is the continuing work of the civil rights movement.”

In his 15 minutes at the podium, Bush also noted that Johnson mobilized Congress to pass the stalled Civil Rights Act in the months following John F. Kennedy’s assassination and in doing so “turned a nation’s grief to a great national purpose.” He also reminded the crowd that LBJ’s demonstrable compassion toward minorities and the poor dated at least to the days of his teaching at a Mexican-American school in Cotulla.

“Can you imagine being an 11-year-old child and trying to explain to Lyndon Johnson that you forgot to do your homework?” Bush asked to appreciative laughs.

Bush also noted that, as president in 2007, he signed into law a resolution designating the U.S. Education Department’s headquarters the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building and praised the entire Johnson family, including the late Lady Bird Johnson, whom he called “one of the great ladies in Texas history.” That comment spurred LBJ daughter Luci Baines Johnson to blow Bush a kiss from her seat.

The former president was his usual comfortable, wisecracking self, at one point making a joke that recalled LBJ’s often loamy sense of humor.

After praising library Director Mark Updegrove for recent renovations and upgrades at the facility, Bush said, “Former presidents compare their libraries the way other men compare their, well, I wonder how LBJ would have handled that.”

In his introductory remarks, Updegrove, at the request of the 43rd president, said a few words about former President George H.W. Bush. Updegrove reminded those gathered that the elder Bush refused to make a campaign issue of rival Ralph Yarborough’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act in Bush’s unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate that same year — although he might have gained politically in doing so — and that, much later, George H.W. Bush re-signed the Civil Rights Act as well as the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Photo by “amarine88” via Flickr.com