Impeachment Today

When I wrote for the Journal-Courier, I had to send in my columns by Sunday evening for Tuesday publishing. I was not able to broadcast breaking news. I’m not a reporter, that’s their job. My job was to put together some writing that synthesized as much breaking news as I could. The heat was dissipating, it was time for light.

I believe that’s the opinion writer’s job. But often I could not say anything about what had changed since Sunday. If my synthesis was good, it would blend well with and partly explain the latest bombshell. Or perhaps my synthesis was already outdated.

Because I’m now self-published, but no longer printed, I enjoy many new degrees of freedom. It’s Tuesday, this is going out later today, and I can be almost up-to-the-minute about impeachment. The evidence is easy to find. Wikipedia has a lengthy narrative about “Impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump”. The Washington Post put together a timeline through last week.

During last week’s hearing, I thought the most effective defense mounted by the forever-Trumpers was that nothing happened. Whatever may have been said or done, in the end President Zelensky did not announce an investigation of the Bidens and the military aid was released. No harm, no foul. I didn’t buy it for a second, because the facts we have learned already are so overwhelming that I’ve made up my mind. But if someone retains some positive view of Trump, for whatever reason, such an overview of events is greatly reassuring.

That defense was bogus, and the last few days of news are killing it, because in fact a lot happened. Anyone, especially someone both politically astute and internationally vulnerable like Zelensky, would understand from the July 25 phone call that Trump offered a meeting only if he got something specific in return. If anyone could doubt that Trump was demanding specifically a Biden investigation, yesterday’s evidence about Gordon Sondland’s mobile phone call from a Kiev restaurant on July 26 demonstrates Trump’s overriding focus on investigations.

But the key sequence of events began much earlier. Zelensky was elected on April 21. On April 23, Rudy Giuliani tweeted: “Now Ukraine is investigating Hillary campaign and DNC conspiracy with foreign operatives including Ukrainian and others to affect 2016 election. And there's no Comey to fix the result.” That wasn’t truth, it was pressure.

Less than 3 weeks later, Zelensky and his advisers met on May 7 to talk about the Trump-Giuliani pressure to open investigations and avoiding entanglement in the American elections. He hadn’t yet been inaugurated, which happened on May 20.

Fiona Hill, a top deputy at the National Security Council inside the White House, explained to Congress about discussions in the White House in May, showing they already knew that Zelensky was feeling pressure to investigate the leading Democratic candidate.

Zelensky and his top advisors continued talking among themselves about the pressure that was being exerted on them and what to do about it. They realized that the life-saving military aid was included in the deal Trump was offering even before August 28, when Politico published an article about it. Top Ukrainian officials knew already in early August. William Taylor, new acting ambassador to Ukraine after Marie Yovanovitch was fired, characterized Ukraine’s defense minister afterwards as “desperate”.

Trump and Mulvaney and Pompeo and who knows who else decided to release the aid on September 11, only after Democrats in Congress threatened to investigate. The whistleblower spilled the beans to Congress on September 25 and to the public the next day about why it had been withheld.

We know now that Zelensky was preparing to go TV, in particular on Fareed Zakharia’s show on CNN, with a statement about Trump’s investigations. As soon as military aid was resumed, he cancelled the interview, because he had never wanted to do that.

So we already know what happened, and it wasn’t nothing. President Zelensky was desperate for a meeting with Trump and for good reasons. Trump said, “only if you do this favor”. In Ukraine, that message was being pounded home by people who said they were direct representatives of Trump – Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, Gordon Sondland. The American face in front of our efforts to help those Ukrainians trying to reduce corruption had been sent home, Ambassador Yovanovitch, accomplished by the Giuliani-Trump team.

Zelensky’s official communications with Americans displayed the heavy weight he put on a meeting with Trump. After the aid was released, the pressure continued. On October 3, Trump said on the White House lawn: “I would say, President Zelensky, if it was me, I would start an investigation into the Bidens,” and added the Chinese for good measure.

But Zelensky wasn’t going to do what Trump demanded, an announcement to the world that the Ukrainian government was investigating the Bidens. The Congressional Republican overview is false, because like Trump, they don’t care about Ukraine. President-elect and then President Zelensky refused for 4 months to do anything in response to Trump’s insistence on investigations, even though he desperately desired a meeting with Trump. When he found out that military aid was being withheld, he still refused for a month to become entangled in our election.

The Trump-Giuliani team caused great anxiety in the Ukrainian government. But with the highest stakes involved, the political neophyte Volodomyr Zelensky said “no” to corruption.

Later today there will be more news, and for many days to come. No facts have come to light that cast any part of this story into doubt. The timeline gets longer and more intense with each revelation.

I don’t know how many people the Republican sleight-of-hand can fool. I don’t know if the elections last week point to any turn against Trump among Southern voters. I don’t know what tomorrow’s headlines will be.

But I know corruption when I see it.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 19, 2019

Podcast #1

Dear Friends and Family,

I have had trouble sending this, so I am using my normal method to do this. I’m sorry if the difficulties with sending to a large list is causing inconvenience.

I wanted to say this in person, not in writing. It expresses more deeply held feelings than most of what I write. Maybe it just expresses more emotion than my more disciplined writing.

I couldn’t do it myself and my son-in-law Ben Bruno did everything beyond me talking. I can say that this turned out exactly as I wanted.

For me this is a fundamental message. I want people I don’t know to see me saying what I believe. If you would like to help spread it, please use whatever social media you like to pass along this link. I have no idea if this is the right time for what I say. I had been thinking about this for a long time. It just happens to be ready now.

https://youtu.be/Um7R9QEQ91A

Best, Steve

Polls Worry Me

A NYT article on Monday by Nate Silver, the guru of understanding polls, frightened me: he said that Trump could win in 2020. The main evidence is a poll showing Trump running neck-and-neck with the leading Democrats in certain arbitrarily selected “key” states, every race very close. I have been relying for my sanity on Trump’s approval rating in many polls, which is down near 40%. How could he beat anybody? Maybe I need to revise my understanding of approval. Perhaps enough people disapprove of Trump, but are willing to vote for him.

I don’t think that polls a year ahead of time mean much about what will happen, especially if they are close. There are other polls, though, which cause me more anxiety about the state of our nation. Whether Trump wins next year or not, the views of the minority of Americans who populate his “base” are troubling.

In the most recent head-to-head polls, white working-class respondents preferred Trump by 25%, just the same percentage as they preferred him in 2016 against Clinton. College-educated whites gave the nod to Democrats, but only by 6 - 10%. Those Americans, who are as a whole less interested in real political information, still like Trump, after all he has done. A large minority of those who have been trained to understand that information still pick Trump.

Some aspects of the general approval polls offer more and maybe more unpleasant information. The tracking of Trump’s approval ratings by the Washington Post and ABC News during his whole presidency shows both remarkable stability and, maybe, the beginning of a serious downturn in the wake of impeachment, as his approval among Republicans dropped to 74%. There will be lots more points on this graph, so little weight should be put on this point. More notable is the lack of change among his most fervent supporters, those who “strongly approve of him”, which has stayed between 60% and 70%.

Those squishy approval polls are now being directed at the state level to help predict the 2020 decision in the Electoral College. It’s possible to be heartened by the latest poll, just before impeachment began. More approve of him than disapprove in only 17 states, mostly states in the South or next to it. More disapprove than approve in all the states that the NYT article isolated as “key”. One year ago, his approval ratings were positive in 24 states.

Fox News reported that their two polls this October showed that more people want Trump to be impeached and removed than oppose it, 50% to 41%. But here’s the scary part. Among those who oppose impeachment, 57% say new evidence cannot change their minds. That adds up to about one quarter of those surveyed. They probably all belong in the category of those who think the whole impeachment inquiry is “bogus”, 39%.

Recent polls show that Republicans who are regular viewers of FOX News are much more likely to be hard-core Trump supporters. Over half of Republicans who support the president and watch Fox News say there is “virtually nothing he could do to make them stop supporting him.” A different poll two years ago shows the same thing. In August 2017, 61% who approved of Trump said they couldn’t think of anything he could do that would make them disapprove of his job as President.

For me, the scariest segment of the American electorate has been identified by some political scientists as “chaos-seekers”. They are so disaffected from our political system, that they want to undermine it, even destroy it. They use social media to share outlandish stories, such as the “Pizzagate” rumor, the false story about Obama’s birth, and Alex Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting being faked. They don’t necessarily believe them to be true. “For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc.” The political scientists conducted thousands of interviews, and found a significant minority of people who agreed with statements like the following. “I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over.” “I think society should be burned to the ground.” Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things.” These people tended to be Trump supporters.

A study from 2018 found that Trump supporters tended to “take a belligerent, combative approach toward people they find threatening.” The kind of authoritarianism that Trump’s most fervent supporters embody is “the wish to support a strong and determined authority who will 'crush evil and take us back to our true path.’” The Guardian recently listed 52 Trump supporters who carried out or threatened acts of violence since his campaign began. Since Congressman Adam Schiff became the leader of the House impeachment inquiry, he has been subject to violent threats on social media, often approvingly quoting Trump’s comments about him.

A video portraying Trump shooting his critics inside a church was played at a conference for his supporters at Trump’s National Doral Miami resort in early October. The pastor who gave the benediction at the 2016 Republican National Convention told the crowd there, “We’ve come to declare war!” Conference-goers roared back: “War! War!”

Trump himself uses careful language to encourage violent supporters and threaten wider violence against his opponents. In an interview in March, he said, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Are we near that point now? What if Trump loses the election?

Today, the only important polls will be taken, the elections in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi. They will provide hints about 2020. Then we have only 12 months left to worry.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 5, 2019

Take Back Our Lives

There is evil in our land. Men with power, put in office to protect us, lie and scheme to benefit themselves. They conspire to pollute our air and our water and our food, to put poisons in the products we use every day. They ignore the law, and use their money and power to corrupt our court system. They attack the tellers of truth, the reporters of reality, and substitute fictions for the facts of their deeds. They pervert our democracy to keep themselves in power. They seek out sycophants to do their dirty work, never lacking for toadies who sing their praises, embellish their lies, defend their attacks on the general welfare, and pretend that heaven blesses their immorality. Every day brings new evidence of their malice toward the people they have sworn to serve, their disdain for those who do not join them. They rely on distractions, count on our apathy, and believe they can exhaust us.

They are powerful and clever, but we can stop them. We cannot wait for others to defeat them, we must take action now. We must defend the virtues they scorn – solidarity, empathy, honesty, kindness, charity, justice.

Use the laws to confront their dishonesty. Use the press to uncover and trumpet their corruption. Use our speech to protest loudly and repeatedly. Object to their actions each day in every way we can. We must employ the gifts that our democratic system provides to defeat them, or that system itself will be debased.

They will fight back, lying about anyone who exposes them, attacking our truthfulness, our patriotism, our families. There is no limit to their viciousness. They have billions of dollars, but we have millions of voices. Use them.

By resisting their evil, we will rediscover our nation and ourselves.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
October 29, 2019

As I See China

China has become America’s great rival for world leadership. Since the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union nearly 30 years ago, China has become the second superpower. For the first time, China’s government is trying to extend its power across the globe, notably with its Belt and Road initiative to accomplish infrastructure projects in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and even Latin America. I am spending two weeks in China in connection with my research and writing about Jewish refugees from the Nazis who survived in Shanghai, so perhaps it’s useful to write some superficial impressions of what I see here. I emphasize superficial, because I am not equipped to write about China as an expert. I have not studied Chinese history, and can say only “hello” and “thank you”. I can write about what I see on the surface of life in the two great eastern Chinese cities I am visiting, Shanghai and Nanjing.

China used to fall into the category of “less developed countries”, but no more. Technologically, China has moved past the US in many ways, benefitting from later development. That is apparent in everything connected with transportation. Both Nanjing and Shanghai have highly modern subway systems, putting to shame the antiquated subways in New York and Boston that I know well. Everything underground is sleek and new. The subway trains are clean and comfortable, with electronic maps in each car displaying your movement through the stops on the particular subway line. Like many internal airport train systems, a barrier separates passengers from the tracks and double sets of doors open when the train stops. The ride is smooth. The unavoidable video screens which characterize 21st-century life advertise things I don’t understand in every car.

Between cities, high-speed trains criss-cross the country. Our train from Shanghai to Nanjing reached 180 miles per hour, more than four times the speed of the St. Louis to Chicago train that I know well. Even more than in America, the cell phone dominates daily life. The Chinese use their phones to pay for many, possibly most transactions.

One of the most important elements of modern Chinese development has been the construction of housing for a population of over 1.4 billion. While clusters of high-rise apartment buildings have gone out of style in America, they dominate the urban skylines here. Groups of 10 to 15 narrow buildings, between 10 and 20 stories high are everywhere in Chinese cities. As we whizzed past many cities on the train, we also saw many clusters of smaller residential buildings, 2 to 4 stores high, many appearing older. In the space of a generation, hundreds of millions of people have moved from rural poverty to modern urban apartments, and construction of thousands of such complexes continues at an amazing pace. I cannot comment on the quality of these buildings or the dwellings within them.

Certainly life is much less technologically advanced in vast rural stretches of China, but that is true in America as well.

Advanced technology enables advanced surveillance, and the Chinese government is extremely security conscious. As we made our way from the airport to our hotel, we were photographed many times. TSA-like security systems checked tickets and luggage at the train station, and all packages and handbags are scanned as one enters the subway. Uniformed guards patrol each subway station and tourist site. There are cameras everywhere.

The attempt to observe and control everyone’s movements is enforced by the requirement to apply for a visa to enter China. We had to apply for visas for this trip, which are available only at the few American cities with Chinese consulates, and only in person. In practice, this means that most people acquire visas by delegating the task to a handful of companies which collect applications and passports by mail, get the visas, and mail them back. That cost us over $500, split between the consulate and the company. Considering that millions of people visit China every year, this might be a big money-maker, but it also requires enormous bureaucratic investment to process every application. I would guess it’s more about control than revenue.

This article lacks some specifics, because I could not easily access Google’s search engine while in China. The government blocks Google and other international websites as a means of controlling the information that its people can see. News about the protests in Hong Kong does not show up on the screens which are everywhere. The Chinese government is creating what might be the world’s most ubiquitous and advanced surveillance society.

On the train, recorded announcements warned of the rules against smoking, with the threat of black marks on a person’s “credit”, which might prevent future use of the train system. We could understand these announcements because English translations are provided everywhere in urban China. Ads in shops, menus, museum exhibits, food labels, street signs, and public announcements are offered in English, not always grammatically correct, but easily understood. No other language is offered. As in many countries, English words appear on articles of clothing favored by young and old alike, as well as familiar logos, like the NY for the New York Yankees. Only a minority of people can speak English, even in big hotels and other tourist sites, but it is usually possible to get around without understanding any Chinese.

As in every authoritarian society, national pride and strength are dominant themes of public life. Our visit coincided with the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, so we experienced a heightened display of nationalism, as was true in America in July 1976. A gigantic banner celebrating the 70th anniversary dominated the central waiting hall of the Shanghai train station, and Chinese flags were displayed outside every shop in the station. Video screens on the airport train moving passengers among the terminals show many images of well-scrubbed adults and children waving flags.

Chinese nationalism is closely connected with the cult of the leader, a continuous theme of Chinese history. In Nanjing, the capital of various Chinese dynasties, enormous mausoleums of long-dead emperors are scattered on the Purple Mountain on the edge of town. Many of these structures took much longer to build than the reigns of the emperors they housed. Looming above them all is a remarkable tribute to the man who led China into the more democratic modern age in the early 20th century, Dr. Sun Yat-sen: hundreds of steps lead up to his mausoleum from a theme park at the base of the hill. Mao Tse-tung used a personality cult to inculcate a Chinese form of communism over decades of his rule. Those who followed him at the head of the Chinese Communist Party have not tried to recreate the veneration of Mao as all-wise and all-knowing, but the current leader Xi Jinping is presented through modern media as everyone’s kindly, if stern, father figure.

The immense improvement of daily life during my lifetime in a gigantic country renowned for poverty when the Communists took over has created deep reservoirs of patriotism and allegiance to an undemocratic political system. As a tourist, the lack of democracy is not noticeable. People here seem happy and free to travel, work, and consume. Their living standards are far beyond what older Chinese experienced when they were young, and continue to improve.

On the surface, Chinese urban society flourishes. People are pleasant, friendly, and seemingly happy. The streets are clean and crime does not seem to be a problem. The lack of democracy and the restrictions on freedom are not apparent to the superficial visitor. I would need to know much more to understand what this means to the average Chinese citizen.

Steve Hochstadt
Nanjing, China
October 22, 2019