MARCH MADNESS

This is the time of the annual ritual of the college level basketball championship, the NCAA basketball tournament, better known as ‘the big dance’. A big deal it is indeed with large swaths of the American population filling out their brackets in the hope that this time their favorite college basketball team comes out on top, filling the heart with pride and putting some reward money in the pocket of the ones who picked the correct winner. With legalized on-line betting a lot of money will be won or lost before it is all over with the Final Four getting played on April 6 and the Final on April 8. Most Americans hate paying taxes and for politicians lowering taxes is the favorite path to electoral success, but the same people don’t think twice about spending hard earned money on betting, gambling, and the lottery all enabled by the same politicians looking for sources of income to offset their tax reductions. But I digress. Most of the tournament is played during the month of March, which is why the tournament named ‘the big dance’ is also known as March Madness because it gets people riled up and is always full of surprises. After a long season that started in November, the field has finally dwindled down to 64 at the start of the tournament and with two rounds played over four days, there are now only 16 surviving teams, affectionally known as the Sweet Sixteen. This year all eight of the #1 and #2 ranked teams made it into the Sweet Sixteen, which mitigates the madness for this year, but two blue ribbon teams, Kentucky and Kansas, made an early exit and thus spoiled the hopes and the brackets of a lot of betters. It is a time of ups and downs, highs and lows, as 64 teams are elated to make it to the big dance, while in the end all but one are hit by elimination. It is one of the iconic sporting events in America and one that dominates for many days the TV screens and leaves few sports fans untouched. For the weeks between the start of the tournament on March 21 and the final on April 8, it provides a welcome distraction from the other madness that plays itself out in American life.

At the time of this writing both the political campaign and the legal battles the former President is involved in are in full swing. It is clear by now that Trump’s campaign will be fought primarily at the steps in front of the various court houses where his cases are getting heard. The guy has an uncanny capacity to turn a negative into a positive, at least in the eyes of the public. Yes, he is getting litigated in civil and criminal courts, but chances are slim that he will get verdicts against him that can be executed before the November elections and, if he wins, all the charges against him will evaporate, or, if not, he will pardon himself and go after all judges and attorneys general that have dared to challenge him. In the meantime, his campaign doesn’t have to pay for expensive rally venues or the expense of flying around the country, because he gets free national coverage in the media while entering and exiting the several court venues and by playing the card of the unjustly persecuted political adversary, he avails himself of excellent fund-raising opportunities.

In the light of all this, it is becoming increasingly clear that in contemporary America there is no equal justice under the law. If you are rich enough to hire every willing lawyer available and keep paying them (with money you collect from your political sympathizers) and influential enough to drive politics, you’re treated with velvet gloves and given all the breaks. No regular guy in America could afford to keep appealing every ruling issued against him and keep coming up with one motion after another for case dismissal, case delays, and other legal maneuvers, frivolous or not, and get away with that. And no other litigant than the former President could get away with baseless attacks on and ridicule of judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and jurors, without getting slammed for contempt of court, witness tampering, or getting penalized for defamation.

We are now years away from the times that the alleged misdeeds of the former President were perpetrated, and he has not been held accountable for any of it, causing the current scenario where the court appearances coincide with the Presidential election campaign. In no small part is this due to the DOJ being very late getting out of the starting box in its zeal to avoid any appearance of politicizing the judicial process. Whatever one may think of the merits of the cases against the former President, it is hard to see how any of them can be resolved in only weeks or days from the November 5 election, without having an undue and undesirable impact of the outcome of the election.

It is hard to determine if the velvet glove treatment of the former President by the courts to date is the result of the ideological bent of the judges making the decisions, out of deference of one branch of government for another, or out of fear for the public outcry that is sure to follow any ruling for or against the former President.

We are reminded every day of the huge impact that bench appointments pushed by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation and executed at times of Republican control of the White House and the Senate have on the delivery of justice, not just at the level of the Supreme Court but also at the federal district courts and the appellate courts. No better proof of this than in the Supreme Court reversal of the ruling by the Supreme Court of Colorado that the former President is disqualified from being on the ballot under section 3 of the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution. A decision that in effect renders section 3 of the 14^th Amendment null and void for (former) Presidents of the United States. With Biden in the White House and Democratic control of the Senate, a more diverse selection has replenished the bench, but it is unnerving that the staffing of the judicial branch has so much become a political matter.

If the former President manages to get re-elected to the White House, in spite of the fact that he was impeached and indicted for fomenting an insurrection against the Constitution, and in spite of all of his character flaws and civil misconduct, it will only be because of imperfections in our democratic system, including the insertion of the Electoral College in the process of electing our top executive. It is scary to think that a Presidency can be decided by only a few thousand votes in a handful of battlefield States, even if the overwhelming popular vote favors the losing candidate. If that happens March Madness will pale in comparison with what follows then.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

I can no longer hide it. It’s been getting personal. I’m in my rapidly passing ‘golden years’ and yet I’m finding myself utterly incapable of living in the moment, just enjoying the many blessings bestowed on me and my family. And the reason is Donald Trump and what he has done to the Republican Party and the American political system. It has inflicted colossal collateral damage. My days are being spent fretting over the question if and when he will be held to account for the damage he has wrecked on the functioning of the American republican democracy and if and when the members of what once was the Grand Old Party will confess to the errors of their ways and revert back to their traditional conservative beliefs.

In my 2014 book “Neither Here nor There, a First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism” (available on Amazon.com) I wrote about my coming to America that ‘given my experience with socialism in Europe and my evaluation of the origins of American democracy, I found myself more at home with the basic credo of the Republican Party than the platform of the Democratic Party.’ How the world has changed! And, at the risk of sounding cliché, I proclaim that I did not change so much as the party has changed.

Nowadays, from the time I wake up in the morning until I retire for the night, I keep my I-phone within reach and check on every ping to see if any court has ruled in any way on one of the many court battles involving Trump or his co-conspirators, to read everything written about section 3 of the 14^th Amendment, and follow every election that reflects on the balance of power between a degenerate Republican Party and the Democrats and Independents who form the bulwark against a slide of our democratic governance system into authoritarianism. It is not that I want it to be so, but I just can’t shake the sense that the fate of the great American experiment will be decided by what happens now, in the run-up to the November elections, by how the voters will judge the culpability of Trump, and ultimately by how the losing side will respond to the verdict of the final arbiter, the American electorate. And I don’t want to be caught unawares.

Admittedly, in retirement I may have too much time on my hand to fret about these things, but clearly, I’m not the only one affected. Trump has managed to alter the social landscape in that people have given up on normal political discourse and have entrenched in their camps, informed only by Fox News and Newsmax on one side and CNN and MSNBC on the other. I blame Trump, and the blind and dumb masses that follow this pied piper, for the fact that I have become a single-issue socialite. It is collateral damage from a criminally corrupt assault on Republican democracy by a thug who should have been cast out of the running before he even started but wasn’t.     

I find myself in the despicable position that in every conversation, live, by phone, or other media, with family, friends, and chance connections alike, my mind keeps wandering off to the only topic that matters to me now: ‘How do we get out of this mess and block the populist autocrats from ruling the roost.’ It is that important, and alarming, to me. Even though I would probably not have to live long with the consequences, I shudder to think what the world would look like after a win for Trump in November. Others have already been painting that scenario in vivid colors. It is not that we have not been forewarned. Thankfully, Trump’s campaign message is so outrageous, incoherent, and false that I have to think that he has been digging his own grave, in fact a mass-grave for him and all his lackeys in the MAGA realm, and that the rational voters in November will unambiguously reject him. But even in that case the threat will not be entirely averted. It will be near impossible for the Democrats to hold on to their majority in the Senate in November and the Trump faction will remain amply represented there. And we can rule out that Trump and his voters will concede defeat, even if the numbers will show him losing the electoral college vote and the popular vote. The question then becomes (again) if the institutions protecting democracy will hold against all the shenanigans we can expect from legislators, in Congress and the State legislatures, who have pledged fealty to the pied piper. One thing will be in democracy’s favor this time: the pied piper will not have the power of the White House behind him, and the Vice President will not be on his side. For protection of our democracy, it will be extraordinarily important that the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives to assure that, at a minimum, one half of the three branches of government will be protected from a slide into authoritarianism.

In the meantime, it would be helpful if the Supreme Court, in its upcoming rulings about Trump’s disqualification under section 3 of the 14^th Amendment and the immunity claim, makes it abundantly clear that America is a nation of laws and that nobody, not even a (former) President is above the law. In the process, the Supreme Court should allow the court system to bring the major Trump litigations to a verdict prior to November 5, so that the voters have indisputable guidance on the (lack of) qualification of the Presidential candidates for office.

With so much to be decided in the coming months, and so much riding on the outcomes, I’m afraid that my single focus obsession with what happens next will not be interrupted anytime soon. Call it collateral damage, caused by misguided missiles or, rather, a malicious misfit.

NOT SO FAST (CORRECTED)

The first two primary elections of the year are behind us, the Republican caucus in Iowa, and the primary election in New Hampshire and both have resulted in large, double digit, victories for Donald Trump. The next primary will be held in South Carolina on February 3, where polls indicate that Trump has a 63% lead, with Nevada, where Trump will run virtually uncontested, following on February 6. If not before, the Republican primary contest is likely to be decided on March 5, Super Tuesday, when 17 State primaries will be held, including the major ones in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. With the Republican primary reduced to a two-candidate race, Donald Trump versus Nikki Haley, Trump has a 45-point advantage over his remaining opponent in the remaining State primaries and, at this time, it appears that all Trump must do to secure the Republican nomination is staying alive and out of jail.

Counterintuitively, the overwhelming appearance of dominance and inevitability of a Trump victory in the primaries does not translate in a repeat pattern for the general election in November. A look into the numbers behind Trump’s big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire provides the first reason why the predictive value of these wins for the Presidential election in November is minimal, if not zero.

If we look at the Iowa caucus first, we see that Trump only collected 56,260 votes from 752,200 registered Republican voters in the State. The vast majority of Republicans stayed home (the weather was nasty) and of the 110,298 voters who came out, Trump collected only 51% of their votes. In other words, 49% of the Republican voters in the Iowa caucus preferred someone else than Trump as their nominee for the presidency.

In New Hampshire the results for Trump were not much better. While among registered Republicans Trump trounced Nikki Haley by 74% versus 25%, with registered Independents the roles were reversed with Haley collecting 64% of the votes against Trump with 35%. As much as Trump ended up winning the New Hampshire Republican primary by 54% of the vote, the numbers show that 25% of Republican voters refused to vote for him and that among registered Independents he was trounced by Nikki Haley. Independents represented 44% of the votes cast in the New Hampshire primary. According to the exit polls, 6% of the voters were self-declared Democrats and 95% of them voted for Haley. 35% of the Haley voters said that they would not vote for Trump in the general election.

We need to keep in mind that we were witnessing Republican pre-elections here and that Trumps opponents in these contests were other Republican candidates. Democrats are essentially out of the picture, other than that in a number of States they are allowed to vote in Republican primaries. But there are no Democrats to vote for in these elections.

The way to look at the results in Iowa and New Hampshire is that ten months ahead of the general election Trump has the uncontested support of only 50-75% of Republican voters and no more than 35% of Independent voters.

Donald Trump collected roughly 74 million votes in his 2020 race against Joe Biden, who collected roughly 81 million votes. In the likely repeat contest for 2024 he cannot afford to lose any part of the electorate that came out for him in 2020. In that election only 6% of Registered Republicans voted against him. Even though many Republican voters who voted against him in the primaries may vote for him when their choice is between Trump or Biden, he really cannot afford to lose any of them (by staying home or voting for someone else) if he wants to do better against Biden in 2024 than he did in 2020. Similarly, he cannot afford to lose the support of any of the 41% of Independents who voted for him in 2020.

That’s why I’m saying: Not So Fast! Trump has surely conquered any Republican opposition. He has consolidated his base and his vise grip on the Republican party. But, to what avail?

If you, like I do, believe that a resounding Trump defeat in the 2024 Presidential election is required to preserve the constitutional republican democracy in America, you can find solace in the numbers beneath the primary results and in the following facts and likelihoods:

·      Trump on top of the Republican ticket has yet to prove a winning proposition. He would most likely not have made it to the White House in 2016 if Hillary Clinton had seriously campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, Jim Comey had not made a last-minute about face and Russia had not interfered in our elections.

·        He has centered his campaign on revenge and retribution, ingratiating his MAGA base but alienating about everybody else. He does not seem to realize that he starts off with a 7 million vote deficit and would need to expand his support base.

·        His legal challenges, including one or more possible criminal convictions ahead of Election Day, will impact his chances negatively.

·        His record and campaign rhetoric will cast the upcoming election as a contest between constitutional republican democracy and populist authoritarianism and only fools bet against deep seated democratic values instilled in the American voting public.

·        Wild cards are the age, health, and cognitive capacities of the contenders who are both well over the age of prime performance and, relatedly, the turnout of the young vote.