FOR HOLIDAYS, PELOSI GIVES MITCH A LUMP OF COAL

By Dominique Paul Noth

It is one of the most obvious cases in history of presidential wrongdoing. It jumped into rank criminality the minute Trump asked another country’s leader to investigate Joe Biden. Yet Sen. Mitch McConnell describes Nancy Pelosi as full of fear to bring him “so shoddy a case.” Similarly his House GOP counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, describes her as embarrassed to move impeachment forward.

The American public may not know much but they know Pelosi doesn’t operate out of fear or embarrassment.  The feeble nature of the GOP’s excuses has elevated the Speaker of the House into a prime role though legally she doesn’t have much influence into the doings of the Senate.

Yet now as her Christmas present to the nation she represents a firm roadblock, since she will not move the articles of impeachment forward or name the House managers (prosecutors) until after New Year’s.  She will be accused of playing politics but she is merely pitting Trump, who desperately wants the trial to proceed, against McConnell, who claims he doesn’t care if it never gets to his chambers.

Trump hoped for swift vindication by the Senate. Well, acquittal is still likely given the two-thirds for conviction rule.  But swift is gone. And it only takes a simple majority to set the rules of the road. The Republicans hold 53 seats; the Democrats and independents 47.

There is as yet no real delay, so Republicans can’t claim that Pelosi was stalling the desired effort of the House to get Trump out of Dodge before sundown.  No, McConnell had always indicated the Senate wouldn’t take up the trial until January.  He was lackadaisical from the start. So he now has given Pelosi the entire holiday season to delay putting him in control.  And that leaves the president twisting in the wind about when she will do the deed.

All she’s saying to McConnell, after the House invested its blood into its impeachment process, that the representatives have a right to know the outlines of the Senate process.  So she’s waiting on him before sending over the articles and picking the managers as the process requires.  “When we see what they have, we will know who and how many we will send over,” she said. 

She pointedly added in case Mitch didn’t get the message: “I don’t think anybody expected that we would have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.”

The clever lady has imposed some interesting wrinkles on the Senate.  Public polls indicate Republican supporters want to see witnesses (they are certainly being pressured in that direction) or else it’s hard to call it a trial. Trump wants to see the Bidens plus Schiff and even Pelosi, though what they have to do with the actual case (except as objects of insults) is unclear. 

Sen. Charles Schumer and the Democrats want to see Mulvaney, Bolton and some other direct witnesses, while I and others in the public would like to hear from Pompeo who was on the call and the White House lawyer who weirdly moved the still unreleased recording (Trump mislabels his  account as a transcript) to a key-code protected server.

Expect Trump’s actual henchmen to do some twisty legalistic maneuvering to refuse a call to testify at the Senate, which could actually come not just through a vote of the majority but through the presiding justice, Supreme Court chief John Roberts.  Unless these henchmen have exculpatory evidence (Pelosi carefully explained to the sometimes illiterate Trump that exculpatory meant evidence that would clear him) they don’t want to testify, and no one thinks they have any such thing.   So refusal just underlines the obstruction of justice charge in the articles of impeachment.

It’s a box of poisoned cookies though Mitch thinks he holds the antidote. Traditionally the majority leader sets the rules, but is Roberts’ rules of order only ceremonial? It was in the past, but the chief justice could change things if he insists. 

Mitch is in charge only as long as he controls the majority. The senators who have now gone home for the holidays traditionally hear a little bit directly of what people are thinking. If the people are loudly thinking they would like to hear testimony, the pressure on the senators puts pressure on Mitch.  He will seek to ignore all that, convincing the impetuous president to listen to him while doing the same dance with the senators.

He may not ditch his master plan, but Pelosi has made sure the decision is no longer his alone. She has set him up for a nightmare holiday season.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

OUT DAMN SPOT? EVEN MITCH CAN’T WASH AWAY STAIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Catholics can leave on their foreheads for a few days or immediately wash off the black carbon smudged there on Ash Wednesday. Donald J. Trump will forever wear “impeachment” on his forehead once the House acts as expected this week. Internet wags will probably add it as a digital tattoo to his image.

The permanence of the blemish, and the likelihood that the Republicans in the Senate will stand by him despite the evidence, raises some interesting speculations about the partisan farce emerging from the serious punishment envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Shakespeare was talking about murder not impeachment (the enlightened American framers removed bodily injury as one of the historic punishments for impeachment).  But if “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” for Lady Macbeth, how much impact can Mitch McConnell and his Republican henchmen have on Trump’s little hand?

Yet Mitch is sure trying to make the agony of impeachment a triviality. Though the law requires every senator to take a special oath affirming they will act as “impartial” jurists, Mitch assured Trump that he would work in “total coordination” with the White House on how to proceed.

He told Sean Hannity at FOX: “There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position … there’s no chance the president will be removed from office.”  

Understand – this is no procedural nicety. The Senate majority leader has pledged to work hand in hand, cheek to jowl, pelvis to pelvis with Trump’s lawyers – negating the expectation of the Constitution that the Senate will function as a fair nonpartisan jury weighing the issues.  So much for “separation of powers.”  Even Fox contributor Jessica Tarlov spelled it out: “McConnell has made it perfectly clear, we can stop fantasizing about Republicans finding some moral courage. Their actions are profiles in cowardice.”

Mitch’s effort could backfire.  He’s trying to make this seem the most partisan impeachment in the nation’s annals, but his refusal to take the Constitution seriously seems to be stirring up the Democrats.  The more he tries to explain this as a case of the Democrats in the House going mad the more we remember that he and the Senate continue to blockade (some 275 bills, many quite nonpartisan in intent).  This is, after all, the same GOP control that refused to give President Obama a Supreme Court nomination.

In reality Moscow Mitch has imposed his judgment ahead of the framers of the Constitution and has no qualms if a short-term political gain is all he can expect. With one motion he has likely doomed the Senate to Democratic control in 2020.  More citizens are likely to be appalled by the GOP indifference than bolstered in their support for Trump.

His action requires dragging along a majority of 51 to set up the rules.  He has to prevent the Senate from  operating as an impeachment jury – and he also has to talk  Trump away from his press conference dream of a showcase Soviet style trial with the Bidens, Schiff and Pelosi dragged in.  Mitch desperately wants the trial he is not even calling a trial to be short, swift and in his mind exonerating.

He can’t quite impose that. The Republicans in the Senate will never vote 25 stronger than now to  achieve a two-thirds impeachment vote, but they may balk 5 to 10 strong against Mitch’s rules.

Some may seek to hear from people actually vital to the Ukraine event – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who was on the call, budget director Mike Mulvaney, energy secretary at the time Rick Perry, former national security adviser John Bolton and I would add John Eisenberg, the White House counsel who moved Trump’s Ukrainian call into a password protected hiding place.  All have been blocked by Trump under an interpretation of “executive privilege” that has been consistently losing in court.  We are about to learn if the Senate believes in Trump as a monarch as much as Trump does.

Some progressives are still blindly hoping a bolt of God’s lightning will strike the Republican senators, or at least some of them, to do their duty. But, except for former governors, the GOP seems married to the view that the president did nothing wrong – or the view Trump denies, that what he did was wrong but didn’t rise to the level of impeachability.  You have to twist your body into knots in either scenario, but the Republicans of the House and Senate are a new brand of pretzel.

The most likely disrupter of Mitch’s scheming is Trump himself and his unhinged ways.  There is no way to know what he can tweet, rethink and regurgitate in the three or more weeks between the House impeachment and the Senate trial. There is no way to know what the media will uncover in that time frame.

Imagine how many times he can change his mind in three weeks.  Imagine how many investigative reports may reveal that Ukraine was just one stop in his foreign magical misbehavior tour with Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel and on and on.  The bad news has come thick and fast despite the enormous levers of dissembling the president commands.

The main thing the public doesn’t understand is how the Democrats came down to just two articles of impeachment when many pundits were suggesting eight or ten.

The House limited their articles to the truths that seemed to jump off the page – mammoth interference with congressional oversight and Ukraine. It left aside – or mainly as examples of pattern -- the multiple moments of misbehavior in Trump’s inflammatory past. The Democrats figured the public – and maybe the Senate -- would be more responsive to how he was trying to destroy the future of democracy in 2020, with the clear inference that he did it before in 2016 and was reviving the playbook.

That requires seeing how 1 and 1 makes 2. Yet even that simple math hasn’t budged the Republicans, who can’t be forced into a confessional, more’s the pity.  Mitch has done this before, but now a bunch of other senators are equally willing to fall off the sobriety wagon.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

THE NEXT PRESIDENT IS UP TO DEBATE

By Dominique Paul Noth

Tom Steyer is an intriguing presidential candidate – an articulate billionaire who came out early in favor of impeaching Trump and embraces a progressive scheme other rich people object to, the wealth tax.  At the last televised debate Nov. 20, Steyer announced a new centerpiece of his campaign -- a plea for term limits as an essential cure to the nation’s election ills.

John Lewis embraced by colleagues as the voting bill passed the House.

Talk about bad timing! Right after that another candidate in front of the Atlanta audience, Cory Booker – whose lack of poll numbers has weirdly shrunk him off the December TV debate stage – praised the beloved icon attending, John Lewis.

That brought warm applause and shortly thereafter historical significance as Rep. Lewis, often called the conscience of the House, continued to influence his colleagues. He was hugged as they passed – and sent along to the death camp known as the GOP Senate – a restoration of the voting rights act. This was another forward-looking  bill (more than 275) passed by the Democratic House and left  to wither by Mitch McConnell and the  GOP.

Need I mention that Lewis is in his 17th term in the House?  Another blow to term limits is Nancy Pelosi, also in her 17th term. I believe that Lewis photo includes (at far right) another veteran, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, now in his eighth six-year term and sometimes called the Senate’s “last Watergate baby.”

Now Steyer has a point. Long incumbency often hurts democracy, since incumbents wield abnormal campaign power (nearly impossible to unseat) and can represent complacency and potential corruption.  But sometimes exceptions make the rule. Steyer couldn’t have timed his switch in emphasis worse. The nation clearly has other priorities in this race for the highest office.

Kamala Harris becomes the gone girl

Several pundits were more bothered by the early exit of a dynamic senator, Kamala Harris – leaving ahead of Tulsi Gabbard (why is she still there?) and even ahead of two minority compatriots who don’t have the poll numbers for TV, Julian Castro and the aforementioned Booker. 

The TV stakes are now all white faces, including billionaires Steyer and Andrew Wang, whose money can keep them going a long time.  Hanging on is Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a common sense Midwesterner who is counting on a miracle in Iowa, which her naturalistic manner may bring off (she is slightly rising in the polls). Newly in the race but not on the TV podiums are Deval Patrick, former Massachusetts governor, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has more billions than anyone else in the contest and is already spending $27 million on ads to make up for lost time.

Bloomberg has the most prominent track record to tout but a long flirtation with Republican roots and a take-charge manner that reminds many of the dictatorial streak we’re trying to avoid this time.  His choice of descriptive phrases has also gotten him in trouble since what is forgiven in a Joe Biden is not as easily forgiven in a Bloomberg.

Is Bloomberg in danger of looking like
the big money bully?

Steyer’s political acumen does not impress me though his personality does, but he reminds many Democrats of the successful money-makers with an intelligent empathetic vision of their place in society, the sort of now-enlightened capitalist the winning campaign needs to attract.

Wang is the futurist and something of a slap-in-the-face realist by asking America to look around the corner at automation and artificial intelligence. But there are hefty problems already on the public’s mind such as climate change and gun safety so that his appeal is more intellectually engaging than a throat grabber. And there is a danger that his platform sounds like a money giveaway – a sort of “Queen for the Day” gift of $2,000 to every adult.

Two other candidates gaining in the Iowa polls, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, have been sniping at each other about who is more transparent with money figures.  I am sometimes bothered by Warren’s “I have a solution for that”  answer to everything and to Buttigieg’s simplistic view – an old GOP trope – about the Democrats not paying enough attention to the deficit (while only Bill Clinton and Barack Obama really attacked the runaway debt). But both candidates seem strongly reflective of a positive direction for the voters. Their beating each other up on what rich people support them seems petty.

Frankly, while I strongly disagree with Bloomberg’s attitude that this is a weak field of candidates, I am not blown away by the debate process, which I think does more to elevate the DNC than the candidates.  The Democratic National Committee may not have wanted Bernie Sanders in 2016 but it is a gross exaggeration that they “did in” his campaign, which I think was on the road to self-destruction because of his unwillingness to bend in rhetoric as he had done in reality during his Senate career.

The 2016 DNC tampering has  become a rallying cry for Bernie supporters  this time around.  Now the DNC is trying to look more even-handed but they are tilting the playing field by setting boundaries that reward money more than voting power and poll numbers more than the actual living room and Internet debates that are taking place. (This time they may actually be helping Bernie stay in!)  People need time to assess the players. And the key issue hovering in the background is whether the US can really wait a year to get rid of Trump or impeach him now before he does more damage.

What people have so far determined is that they know Biden and agree with Trump’s fear of him.  It seems to me we are heading for a repeat of 2016, with Biden substituting for Hillary to go against Trump (with Bernie aced out again by super Tuesdays).  But this time the voters are better armed.  So well armed that they are already looking past the primaries.

Trump keeps saying that impeachment is designed to undo the people’s choice in 2016.  Let’s be clear about that fallacy.  By three million votes, the people’s choice was Hillary.  You could argue that the American people are trying to rectify a minority victory in 2016, conditioned by Electoral College games they were largely unaware of. 

The TV debates themselves seem sidetracked into personality disputes, magnified by the media, which always enjoys a fight.  I don’t think many of these policy nuances mean all that much since everyone is moving in the same direction on the big issues.  There is a danger of making an absolute promise that is not deliverable – and then being castigated by those who voted for you who don’t understand the nature of compromise to get things done.

And sometimes the disputes are just silly.  Take the departed Kamala, picking a debate fight with Biden over school bussing, which worked great for her as a child and which, to oversimplify, he supported on the local level but opposed as a federal mandate. Bussing was a noble effort at integration that, in Milwaukee, led my family to bus our children into the inner city.  But meanwhile there were black parents forced to bus their children to outlying schools where the kids felt unprotected. If there had been seven black women rather than one on that TV debate stage, there would have been seven different stories about integration via bussing.

This is also the problem of appealing to the voters on racial lines. It’s not like we’re all members of some private political club.

Similarly, Warren has the most detailed domestic agenda and recently brought more people into her camp by suggesting Medicare for All may take several years to implement and that supporting Obamacare in the first rounds was not  off the table. Yet to the Bernie people, such pragmatism confirmed their view that she was a capitalist more than a progressive.

Bloomberg is flat wrong that this is a weak field.  Objections to Trump are growing to the point that any of these opponents can make a good case.  Particularly with an electorate that understands where the candidates are heading more than getting hung up on how they get there.  Basically though, I was impressed by the quality of candidates past and present. I remain tolerant – though the tendency to exaggerate will affect my vote -- of how they get themselves in media trouble by over-stating to make an impression. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.

THE OLD DEMOCRATS SHOW THEIR METTLE

By Dominique Paul Noth

The "don't mess with me" moment.

December 4-5 – eleven months before the presidential election – were great days for the Democrats to erupt in feistiness. The bookends were Nancy Pelosi, 79, and Joe Biden, 77.

Pelosi’s moments were historically more consequential, the first invoking the Founding Fathers as she announced her committee chairmen – and they are hers – were writing up articles of impeachment and the other her abrupt stride back to the podium when a right-wing reporter from Sinclair Broadcasting asked if she “hated” the president -- picking up on a constant GOP talking point about her underlying motives.

Her “don’t mess with me” response was crystal clarification about the difference between opposing his policies and doing her duty to preserve the Constitution.  The president may not believe she prays for him, but no one else who heard her doubted it. Certainly not anyone raised in Catholic principles.

Nor had many previously weighed why she arrived so cautiously and then so efficiently at impeachment.  Listeners were seeing Pelosi in three dimensions – a savvy political engineer and a woman of duty to her conscience, her faith and the Constitution. It was a moment that should have made transparent to her foes why those Sinclair type of sneers will never  touch the heart of her dignity and character whether you agree with her politics or not.

The other moments – one quickly calculated, the other totally impromptu – were Biden’s.  The first was a commercial hastily patched together showing foreign leaders at the NATO gathering the same week joking and chuckling about Trump and adding the reminder moment at the United Nations when the general assembly spontaneously laughed at him.  Amazingly it was Biden who went right after Trump’s throat (and ego) with this commercial, reminding US voters how the world regards our president as a joke dragging down the US role as indispensable leader.

It was a smart move, making our international reputation rise to the top of election issues, where Biden has more credentials than anyone else in the race.

But it was also a daring insight into American attitudes of self-worth. Any president’s foreign maneuvers are usually ignored in a domestic political context, much for the reasons Pelosi gave at a climate forum in Madrid when she declined to get into questions about Trump. Ukraine has thrown that history out the window, since we now realize this president is leveraging his foreign entanglements for his own self-interest.  Biden’s team made the connection to how Trump’s foreign behavior is now a hot button issue for the American electorate.

The other moment risked a campaign no-no, attacking as a “damn liar” the remarks of a voter.  It called to mind the late John McCain running for president in 2008 gently shushing a female voter who called Obama “an Arab.” That has been called McCain’s moment of campaign bravery. In 2019 the mantle of even more aggressive bravery fell to Biden when accused of sending his son to Ukraine to get dirt on the president, something even the GOP hasn’t dared say but commentators on Fox have (though the voter tried to disguise where he had heard it as “MSNBC”). 

 Biden never lost control but his anger was low voiced and measured even when he challenged the voter to pushups.  He was also miffed by the mention of his age. Commentators suggested he needed to have an answer ready about his son’s work in Ukraine, but this is turning into what Trump hoped it would – a “when did you last beat your wife” question.

Let’s be honest. Age – particularly Biden’s age -- has been circling the Democratic field like vultures in an old Western.  Perhaps it is a needed correction when some of the most audacious punches are being landed by Pelosi and Biden, who have both suffered the arrows of being too old and old-fashioned to lead a charge into the future. But perhaps this moment focuses what the age issue should really be about.

For Biden, part of his appeal is that he been around for a long time and handled a lot of things, some quite well.  For others in the race, he is the hand of the past holding them back, to the point that they dismiss some hard-earned gains and even misread history.  Several TV debates have faltered on simplifications of the past.

Many still recall Biden as one of the handsomest and younger senators who survived personal tragedies and worked strong alliances across the aisles in Congress and then as Obama’s much used vice president. That he is still physically fit and energetic is an annoyance to old timers like me who are the same age but in nowhere near the same condition.

But Biden also differs from the even older Bernie Sanders (78) who has looked and acted older –ruddy, hair unkempt, hands gesticulating wildly and shoulders leaning forward – for decades when his passion, rhetoric or positions haven’t changed.  Consistency is a big part of his appeal.

Biden is more like the well groomed grandfather model in the advertising brochure, soft-spoken and down-home in speaking style. He is known for conversational gaffes mixed with bursts of inspirational rhetoric.  Genetics and regimen mean his skin is stretched tight over his face, a distinct contrast to others on the debate stage.   Should that matter? Well, apparently it does because there is a presumption he is too set in his ways to represent a nation brimming with youthful ideas and needing energetic solutions to the environment, immigration, the economy and more.

To this point Biden has mainly represented stability – the known quantity most likely to take Trump out without raising doubts about his record. Some of the other candidates have to prove their personality and record, which also means manufacturing bold strokes to get the recognition he automatically commands. He may be helped by the reality that Trump was so worried about him that he has been playing foreign games with Rudy for months to bring Joe down. 

At the least, Pelosi and Biden have brought a new thoughtfulness to the Democratic issue of the place of older politicians in the 2020 initiatives.  You could say they have brought some needed maturity to the debate.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

IT’S TOUGH THESE DAYS TO BE A REPUBLICAN

By Dominique Paul Noth

A wave of national pity, a sympathetic intervention seems required for Republicans in the party appropriated by Trump. Support of him allows no hesitation, for your own safety.  That reality now extends to local contests. It is the first question – do you stand by Trump? -- though the president’s behavior may not directly relate to the office sought.  Even in the supposedly non-partisan April 7 election, it’s fascinating to watch candidates duck and dodge.

Once upon a time, it was a privilege to pose for a photo with the president.  Today, be prepared for a president who emphasizes he doesn’t know you, particularly if your behavior lands you in court or in unsavory headlines.

Assuredly, the mental price of being a Trump Republican is far higher than being a Democrat or even being a Republican was in the recent past.

When Clinton was president, even some Democrats could say aloud they wished he could keep it in his pants yet could still support him as president.  They could openly disagree with Obama on many of his policies without fear of being drummed out of the party or primaried when seeking re-election.

Even George Bush had to endure jokes from his own camp about his language gaffes or indifference to reading or strange remoteness from the needs of everyday people.  You could chuckle at him without fear of facing a firing squad.

But Trump?  Hey it’s got to be whole hog or the Donald will get mad.  He may even tweet about you. If you’re a candidate, he will definitely sabotage your chances if he suspects you will vote against him on anything! You can’t get away with it unless your name is Mitt Romney and you’ve got your own built-in following. 

You can’t pretend that Trump made any mistakes in his Ukraine behavior – it was all about his hatred of corruption, wasn’t it? You have to accept his reasons for going after the Bidens though they had done nothing wrong except in his mind. Instead you have to assure the public he was chosen by God to lead us through the briar patches of his own making.

Don’t like the way he boasts, lies or pretends to fake orgasms at his rallies?  Well, be careful. Only snicker up your sleeve or in the backroom far from the cameras. But in public let him have his own way. Play mum or pretend you haven’t researched it.  If you don’t, if you agree to provide documents to Congress or even worse testify, you cannot claim the mantle of Republican – by definition of his tweets.

Be prepared to accept animal grunts as just his sense of humor, not his penchant for cruelty and self-inflated ego. Pretend he doesn’t sneer at his own supporters as much as he sneers at the other party. If you are one of those Republicans who in the past showed a touch of admiration for Schiff or Pelosi, stifle! Even though polls show young Republicans believe in climate change, you don’t find any of their elders who were once big believers speaking out today, because Trump questions the science and he has a big brain.

The kiss of death would be to say you don’t mind the impeachment hearings moving forward because the timeline is interesting.  No, even if you don’t intend to vote against Trump, just to exercise some free will would be verboten!  Any hint in that direction spells doom.

Paying off mistresses?  Proclaiming a personal greatness at press conferences?  Heck he wasn’t under oath, was he?  Can’t you let a guy have his fun? 

Why does the media keep mentioning how many times he has been in bankruptcy, has shafted his own hires, can’t keep a cabinet together?   Give him credit for the economy even though he inherited a good one and presidents have minor impact in the first place.

Show the superhuman patience of our farmers who have lived through droughts before and believe Trump must have a good reason for the suffering he has created. Yes, his heart is in the right place. And what a head!

Oh, it’s damn difficult to be a Republican these days.  There are so many candidates out there who tie themselves to him believing that is the way to show they care about you.  Any public resistance will cost them votes regardless of ethical beliefs.  If deep down you don’t believe all that tripe he’s hustling, keep it to yourself.  Don’t tell your neighbors. Imagine if they wound up voting for someone better!  Trump would be so angry.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.