The Post Office in Trump’s Mind

Suddenly the Post Office makes news. Ordinarily it quietly keeps America humming, delivering nearly 500 million pieces of mail a day, in the densest parts of great cities and to the tiniest towns scattered across the country. I’m living in one of those tiny towns, Springbrook, Wisconsin, population about 75. The post arrives every day but Sunday: letters, newspapers, packages, postcards, and all the other kinds of mail that connect us across great distances. The mail deliverer is the most visible, but most ignored representative of the government in our daily lives.

 

I am happy to say that I worked for the US Postal Service for a college summer in 1967, delivering mail in my own small suburban town. I had a wonderful time working at a leisurely pace, seeing neighbors I knew and got to know, enjoying the Long Island summer sun, and walking miles each day alone with my bag. I recognized that the pace required was too leisurely – even without the constant running characteristic of today’s UPS drivers, we could have covered a longer route.

 

The hullabaloo about the mail these days is not really about the Post Office, but about the integrity of our elections. The Post Office plays only a supporting role in a variety of Trump actions, but the place of the Post Office in Trump’s mind reveals the fundamental dishonesty of his entire presidency.

 

Trump’s effort, now through his newly appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, to disable the Post Office’s ability to handle mail-in balloting began immediately after his election. Trump always hated government agencies that interfered with his business tactics, but said little about the Post Office. Within 3 weeks of his election in November 2016, Trump claimed a bigger victory than he had actually achieved: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Later that day, Siobhan Noble replied with a still relevant comment: “Calm down, Sir. Take a deep breath, get off twitter, and focus on real issues. America expects you to work not tweet.”

 

But Trump’s inability to calm down about an election loss had already been revealed when he tweeted after losing the Iowa caucuses to Ted Cruz in February 2016, “Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it.” Trump then demanded a new election. The actual dishonesty by Cruz’s Iowa campaign is worth remembering, however, as evidence for the wider dishonesty of Republican election strategy.

 

According to reporting in the “Washington Post”, after November “Allies coddled Trump by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud.” Right after his inauguration, the intersection of his overpowering ego, his grasping at any story that proves he’s always a winner, and his willingness to misuse the presidency for his own personal ends, led him to announce a new government body, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, headed by the most vociferous critic of American elections and political hater of immigrants, Kris Kobach, in order to find those millions of fraudulent ballots. The Commission was created by an executive order on May 11, 2017.

 

Just after Trump announced he would create the Commission, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, wrote an email intended for Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General, expressing alarm that the Commission might include “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics”, or worse, Democrats, or anyone other than the “real experts on the conservative side of this issue”. Spakovsky had made a career of claiming extensive voter fraud in American elections. The “New Yorker” called him the source of “the voter-fraud myth”. The sources he cited as evidence turned out to show no such thing. He was appointed to the Commission, which was nominally headed by Vice President Pence, but actually run by Kobach, and included an 8 to 5 Republican dominance.

 

Kobach’s support for Trump’s birther fable about Obama and his also debunked tales about voter fraud in 2016 have been extensively documented, as well as the Commission’s efforts to obtain personal information about all American voters. Spakovsky’s worries about “mainstream Republican officials” were vindicated when one of the Commission members, Republican Secretary of State of Indiana, Connie Lawson, said that there had been no fraud in Indiana elections and she would not comply with the Commission’s request for personal data of voters. So much for Spakovsky’s and Trump’s “real experts on the conservative side”.

 

Kobach refused to share Commission documents with its Democratic members, and their lawsuit to get access was supported by a federal judge in December 2016. Trump then disbanded the Commission two weeks later. No electoral fraud was documented.

 

That attempt to rewrite election history with a rigged government commission failed. Trump returned to the Post Office in March 2018, when he asserted that Amazon was ripping off the Post Office by getting a “sweetheart deal” on rates delivering its packages. The real problem for Trump was not Post Office policy, but the truthful reporting by the “Washington Post”, owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. Here the Post Office became collateral damage in Trump’s war on those media which keep revealing his lying and corruption.

 

DeJoy was appointed Postmaster General in June based on his million-dollar donations to Trump’s campaigns. His efforts to save money by reducing service came under immediate fire, and he promised to do nothing to impede the delivery of mail-in ballots when he testified before the House. Little notice has been given to the report by the Post Office Board of Governors, appointed by Trump, that the Post Office makes money on its contracts with Amazon and other companies.

 

In the aftermath of widespread backlash over Trump’s attempts through DeJoy to hobble the Post Office, he has returned this month to his attacks on Amazon as the cause of Post Office deficits. DeJoy has been careful not to say that Trump’s statements have no basis.

 

So Trump’s campaign strategy of saying in advance that the November election will be rigged by mail-in voting and then trying to rig the election by reducing the ability of the Post Office to deliver mail-in ballots fits squarely into the wider pattern of his corruption of the presidency. Attacks on the free press. Use of executive powers to benefit himself. Repeating false narratives forever, even when his own lackeys can’t find any evidence. Finding corrupt accomplices who will run his scams. Ignoring the real interests of most Americans. Destroying democracy if it gets in his way.

 

Nothing he does is free from the fundamental dishonesty which is now being paraded every night before the American public as the true face of the Republican Party.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

August 25, 2020

The Evangelical Error

The latest Pew Research poll shows that 72% of white evangelical Protestants approved of Donald Trump’s work as president in June, and 59% strongly approved. That number was slightly lower than his approval earlier in the year. But about 82% of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump, even higher than the proportion who did vote for him in 2016. 35% say that Trump has been a “great President” and 34% say he has been “good”. No other religious subgroup rates Trump positively.

 

His pronounced support for the evangelical political agenda has been obvious since he became a candidate. In January 2016, he told Iowa evangelicals at Dordt University, a Christian college in Sioux Center, in his typically egotistical phrasing, “We don’t exert the power that we should have. Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else.”

 

Why didn’t an irreligious and publicly immoral candidate present moral difficulties to a religious group which has traditionally emphasized the close connection of faith and character? Many skilled researchers and analysts have tried to understand how people who profess such devotion to Jesus and the Bible could see Trump as their prophet. I have no better explanation than anyone else.

 

Matthew Avery Sutton in the “New Republic” explained the Christian nationalism behind the evangelical political program, embodying “assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at Calvin University, minimizes any contradiction between evangelical Christianity and Trump. In her book, “Jesus and John Wayne”, she similarly argues that evangelicals embrace a militantly white patriarchy. Thus the revelations of Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tapes in 2016 made only a ripple among his evangelical supporters.

 

My own reading of many evangelical statements of support for Trump is that they universally deny his personal moral failings, by focusing, for example, on hoping that he would tweet less, rather than paying attention to his long-standing behavioral patterns and policy initiatives.

 

I believe that evangelicals have become increasingly desperate, as their more appropriate religious and political leaders failed to preserve the white Christian world they imagine is their birthright. Public opinion polls show that the evangelical agenda continues to lose popular support in America. One political scientist estimates that the “public mood” in 2018 was the most liberal since 1961. That measurement from two years ago does not reflect the further shift towards the left in 2020. On issues of race, gender, government regulation, and taxation, evangelicals have become an even smaller minority. That might explain why they are so eager to attach themselves to a leader with authoritarian tendencies who is systematically dismantling our traditional democratic processes and norms. Democracy has not been favorable to hatred of homosexuals, white supremacy, and traditional gender norms.

 

But let’s put side for the moment the conflict between the white evangelical political agenda and the narrowness of the white evangelical understanding of how to be a good Christian and a good person. Even in their own self-interest, I see the white evangelical community’s political strategy as a major error. Their “victories” during Trump’s presidency and their continued adulation of Trump as their political savior come at great costs they have not reckoned with.

 

If this minority ever really believed in their own moral transcendence, they have given that argument away by hitching themselves to a remarkably amoral and immoral personality. Their defense of Trump reveals how many supposedly bedrock Christian principles they willingly sacrifice to achieve their political agenda. The self-proclaimed “Moral Majority” has become a frankly political minority, a partisan interest group shorn of the trappings of ethical righteousness.

 

I never accepted the Christian right’s claims to the moral superiority of their religious teachings. My family’s immersion in and escape from the Holocaust, my young life in a still Christian supremacist society, and my close study of the past thousand years of white Christian persecution of Jews, made me skeptical of Christian contentions that they practiced a unique path to grace. But that was a powerful internal argument for all believers, perhaps the fundamental argument for them.

 

If loving someone of your own sex is so sinful that the practice must be forbidden, what should one think of a man who loves and grabs and insults random members of the other sex? The concept of sin itself has been so politicized that it can only be transmitted to the next generation as dogma, despite Jesus and the Bible.

 

Separating white right-wing Christian political ideology from their theology will forever impair their incessant proselytizing, even among their own children. While 26% of Americans older than 65 were white evangelicals in 2017, that was true of only 14% of 30- to 49-year-olds, and 8% of 18- to 29-year olds.

 

Externally, this evangelical error threatens the very nature of American politics and society, in which such an ideological minority could flourish. White evangelicals have tolerated the undemocratic politics of the Republican Party for decades, but kept some distance from it. In these last weeks, Trump has escalated his open warfare on the traditional American political system, the system that evangelicals have so vociferously defended against the modern willingness to talk about white supremacy instead of American exceptionalism. All the basic lessons of middle school civics courses and high school history textbooks are being violated in public by the man of whom they so overwhelmingly approve. Proclaiming hypocrisy is beside my point: if their champion wins, the democratic structure they count on may be damaged beyond repair. Unless most evangelicals actually believe that our nation and our world are about to go up in smoke and that Jesus will smile on their part in destroying it, their short-term strategy of taking whatever Trump gives them may doom them in the long run.

 

I hope the white evangelical political program fails. I look forward to an America where race and gender are no longer political categories; where religion is a personal choice, not a national prescription; where particular interpretations of ancient texts do not damage the lives of people who do not accept them.

 

My understanding of American politics during my lifetime encourages that hope. The conventional thinking I grew up with about racial differences and gender norms based on centuries of Christian teaching is no longer dominant. I’m sad that so many Americans choose to hate homosexuals, shun people with different skin color, and condemn other kinds of believers to eternal damnation. My allegiance to personal and political freedom in our democracy is stronger, though. I would defend their right to believe as they wish.

 

The white evangelical subculture appears to me to be drifting into outer space, as QAnon spreads its nonsensical “discoveries”. It is possible that more evangelicals believe in QAnon than in mainstream media. They are not America at its best, yet America at its best protects their rights.

 

Trump is trying to destroy that America in his own interest. His allegiance to the evangelical cause is purely transactional. If white evangelicals do not recognize the difference between waving a Bible and believing in it, their long-term future will be just as dire as ours.

 

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

August 18, 2020

Dumb, Lazy Americans

The $600 per week unemployment payment to more than 20 million Americans suffering the worst economic crisis of our time is over. Everyone knew it would end on July 31, but only the Democratic House has developed a plan to prevent those millions from falling further downwards. They passed their bill in May and have been waiting for Republicans to get their act together.

Republicans acted like they believed Trump’s dreams about recovery, so did nothing. Now they have broken into three factions: ultraconservatives who don’t want to give those families anything; moderate conservatives who think $600 a week is much too much; and Trump who wants to spend millions to rebuild the FBI building near his hotel, so another hotel doesn’t appear there. But they all agree on one thing. $600 a week is so much money that many Americans will happily collect it, sit at home, and do nothing, instead of getting a job. That would slow down the economic recovery, which is necessary for Republicans to have any chance in November. Lazy Americans need to be forced to go to work.

The dumb part is a bit more subtle. At whatever level Democrats and Republicans agree on, these government payments will run out soon. Unemployment is over 10%. The job market is not likely to get much better for months. It will be hard to get a job, not just like the one from before the crisis, but any job. A job now, even if it pays less than $600 a week, $30,000 a year, would be much preferable to a few more weeks of “vacation” with no prospects in sight. A Brookings paper from June stated: “We find no evidence so far in support of the view that high UI replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring substantially.” Republican politicians ignore the research and believe that those lazy Americans are too dumb to figure that out.

This is peculiar, because everyone also knows that white non-college working (or recently working) families are the most faithful Republican voters. Yet Republican leaders don’t worry that calling them dumb and lazy, as well as screwing them financially, will alienate them. There is nothing new about this Republican attitude toward unemployed and underemployed and poorly paid Americans. I guess they know best what appeals to their base.

But I think it’s ironic that the best place to look for dumb, lazy Americans is not on Main Street but in the White House. How else to explain that our President, as his election prospects vanish because of his inability to deal seriously with the corona crisis, takes center stage to advocate the medical advice of Dr. Stella Immanuel, whose videos teach us that gynecological illnesses are caused by sex dreams with demons? When asked about her medical qualifications, he responded, “I don’t know anything about her.”

How dumb and lazy is that? This is what the White House knows, with the greatest arsenal of information gatherers the world has ever seen? This is the quality of work we can expect from the President and his staff?

Immanuel broke into online consciousness on Monday, July 27, by standing in front of the Supreme Court with some people posing in white coats who called themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors”, promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for coronavirus, and saying, “You don’t need masks”. That was enough information for Trump and his son Donald Trump, Jr., to promote the video on their Twitter accounts. That night, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter deleted the video from their platforms as misinformation about the coronavirus. The big hitters on FOX, Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham all immediately came to Immanuel’s defense on Tuesday with lies about her critics, but silence on aliens and demons.

When a reporter asked Trump on Tuesday about this, he said her “voice was an important voice” for all of us to hear. He seemed to play dumb: “I don’t know why they took her off.” Trump had to run off the stage when confronted with his claim that Immanuel is “spectacular”. After a day to absorb the universal scorn of media around the world, Trump repeated on Wednesday that he was “very impressed” by Immanuel. Maybe he wasn’t playing.

It took me less than five minutes to find out that Dr. Immanuel has announced that extraterrestrials run our government and their DNA is used in medical treatments, that the Illuminati are using witches to destroy the world through abortion, gay marriage, and Harry Potter, and that she is a Tea Party fan. She also warns us that some doctors, presumably the ones who say she is a dangerous fake, are trying to create a vaccine to make people immune from becoming religious. It took a few more minutes to find out that “America’s Frontline Doctors” include a variety of practitioners and former practitioners with little documented experience treating COVID-19, but sharing far-right political ideologies and support for Trump.

Slicing up the safety net for the unemployed, promoting ineffective drugs against the pandemic, praising nutty doctors who tout unproven results, and never retreating from previous stupid statements appear to be Trump’s campaign strategy, cheered on by his fellow geniuses in right-wing media.

That seems dumb and lazy to me. Maybe paying someone else to take his SAT’s was the smartest thing Trump could do.

Because you can’t fix stupid.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

August 4, 2020