Monday, January 27, 2020

SPECULATING ON WHY TRUMP WILL AVOID IMPEACHMENT HE DESERVES

By Dominique Paul Noth

As much as the impeachment trial does, the nearly two year old recording of Donald Trump at a hotel dinner party reveals his modus operandi -- perhaps more than the public yet realizes. Low cunning rather than intellectual prowess is constantly at work in the president’s behavior, which is why Trump, like a hunted animal, never backs down and circles every territory as if he owns it no matter what happens.


Lev Parnas (right) has provided this 2014 photo with Trump.
In that recording in April 2018 (about a year before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president and immediately shot to the top of national polls)  Lev Parnas discussed aloud with Trump and dinner guests how he hears (since retracted) that the US ambassador to Ukraine is badmouthing Trump.  No one knows her name at this point but Trump leaps in to insist someone fire her, get her out of there – and maybe do worse.

But nothing happened for a year though Parnas, who knew the Trumps for a decade despite denials from the president and was working then on a natural gas deal (only later becoming a key component of Giuliani’s campaign against Biden in Ukraine), recalls Trump talked of firing Marie Yovanovitch – his staff finally learned her name -- several times before it actually happened.

Why?  Let’s speculate how Trump’s constant volatility today may color our view of his volatility then, thinking that dinner in 2018 connects to the events unraveling today.  Over the years he may demand squads of firings for the many people he hears dislike him.  Their numbers have to be legion and his temper tantrums famous. You can see the minions in his social orbit feeding the frenzy.  His aides seem to have become pretty good at holding him off and counting on him forgetting who he was angry at this week.  Plus he tends to wait until it does him some good.  But somewhere in his head the info is lurking until needed, like a bear remembering where the honey tree is.

That old recording at the least gives a flat-out lie to Trump saying he doesn’t know Parnas or Igor Furman, on whose phone the whole thing was recorded. Trump also knew in 2018 how important the military aid was to Ukraine but not discussed was how it was also a big domestic selling point for his new administration, pushed by both Democrats and Republicans. Javelins as part of the military aid was something Obama resisted (despite supporters of Javelins  like Joe Biden) because he feared Soviet reaction so shortly after its invasion of Crimea – and also because corruption was then a continuing problem.  So Trump used Javelins as something else he could do that Obama balked at doing, which really seems to light the fire of his decisions. Plus a natural gas deals translates in his mind to US energy.  So the time wasn’t ripe in 2018 to make a big fuss about Ukraine

A year later, an actual real reformer had taken over the government of Ukraine and Trump was also facing Biden’s entry into the presidential race. He learned there was video of Biden’s role in firing a corrupt Ukraine prosecutor on behalf of the US government. He was also reminded of something on the periphery -- how Hunter Biden got a board job at a Ukraine private company working on improving its reputation with the West. 

So two and two began to make four.  Yovanovitch would stand in the way of his new plan to extort a new government. He knew how important the military aid was to them, so a little coercion seemed in order – to get a friendly White House meeting and play games with the aid unless Ukraine announced an investigation of the Bidens. It had to seem unlikely to the leader of the world’s most powerful government that a little pipsqueak of a new leader would offer any resistance.

It has always struck me as strange that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took weeks to replace Yovanovitch with a respected charge d’affaires Bill Turner, giving just enough time for Trump’s personal lawyer Giuliani and the three amigos to take over the Ukraine planning.  Turner, we should point out, testified twice to the House about what happened and has now departed from his Ukraine post under cloudy circumstances. It sure sounds like he now knows he was a pawn.

It was also striking how Trump, in typical fashion once his plotting unraveled, tried to double down on the lie. Suddenly the phone call was perfect. Suddenly an incomplete summary was called a transcript. Suddenly the Bidens were a legitimate target for investigation (maybe Giuliani will find something under a rock) rather than clearly a violation of the presidential oath the minute he named them as targets

Suddenly the right wing media suggests that Hunter was paid $50,000 a month by Burisma as a board member from 2014 to 2019 even though there is not a record of a single payment, just his New York-based capital management firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai paying far less for his work for dozens of companies.  

How unlikely that Democrats would be begging for
John Bolton to testify.
And now a respected conservative name – John Bolton, a hawk among the hawks who wants to continue influence on the Republican Party – has reportedly said in his new book that Trump indeed tied the military aid to investigating the Bidens, bringing deeper calls for his testimony at the impeachment trial.

Now when you turn this all back to Trump’s continued stubbornness in blocking more witnesses under “executive privilege” exaggerations that will take months to unravel in court, you’ll understand why the Senate Republicans are willing victims to the lowest form of animal cunning named Trump.  The president will refuse to budge an inch and either they go along or face his wrath, which apparently worries them more than the voters’ wrath.

That is why I suspect they won’t do even the minimum job of allowing witnesses. McConnell has three votes to play with and if he can separate any witness requests one from the other, none will move forward. Even if a Republican like Mitt Romney has the temerity to ask for one.  Four will have to unite to ask for the same witness.

The House impeachment managers have taken a clever path.  They don’t doubt that any of the witnesses, powerful conservative names they may be, will further convict the president.  The Republicans may be risking the ire of the voters (some 70% in both parties want witnesses), but they’d rather risk that ire in the future rather than Trump’s more instant rage in primary votes.

The best defense they can muster – what he did was wrong but maybe not impeachable – is silly cover, but Trump won’t even let them take that route to safety.

The bear is circling the tree and no Republican is willing to step down.


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.

Monday, January 6, 2020

MILWAUKEE’S FIERCE CHANGE IN NEWS AND ARTS COVERAGE

By Dominique Paul Noth

A major horror story of the 20th century turning into the 21st was how the nation’s legendary local print newspapers evaporated into nearly invisible ink after serving crucial importance and high circulation numbers.  

Some of the best investigations and commentary on the Internet still stem from people trained by print outlets or from the newspapers themselves, though those articles are often repositioned without credit or compensation. But there isn’t a national lament over the loss of vitality, reliable brands and established avenues of influence.

Rachel Maddow has become the lone lonely champion
of local print newspapers.
The closest we have come to a lament is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. She has led broadcasts with the unlikely heroes of the DC impeachment hearings and the Midwest reaction to the killing of an Iranian superstar general by pointing out how that coverage is playing in local newspaper markets.  She treats as still influential the Page One designs, headlines and color photography that stirred life into print readers in Kansas City, St. Louis, Florida and the Northwest, suggesting that if anything is going to wake up the common citizenry to the dangers of our times it is the full-throated views of newspapers right and left in local markets.

Her view – a bit through rose-colored glasses in my estimation -- was that the depth and power of local coverage was going to change impeachment from a Beltway wonder to the potent national issue it should be.

None of her choices were from Milwaukee, though there were decades dating back to the 1950s when The Milwaukee Journal and even its rival the Sentinel (one moderately liberal, the other flaming Hearst or what passed for conservative in those days) were regarded as eminent leaders in local coverage and The Journal was also the pioneer for the nation in color photography and Pulitzer initiative.

Yet even the newspaper brands outside New York City and D.C. that Maddow chose are in circulation decline.  If she’s right and they still have any impact on their communities, that just emphasizes how far Milwaukee has fallen.

As both writer and senior manager I was eye-witness from the 1960s into the 1990s of that plunge from influence, which does not mean the Milwaukee newspapers were so remarkable before.  But they did have ethical standards that stood out from how advertising is wagging the media dog these days and they had an appeal to consumers that the Internet would take away -- key factors in their doom.  The marketplace for want ads, classifieds, romantic advice, movies and plays, recipes and more as well as news and opinion skipped away from print. The newspapers never adapted.  Their actual choices of change may have sped their plunge. The specific reasons are best left to memoirs.

But there was a remarkable shift from the days when copy and news were written specifically to appear in print.  These weren’t advertorials as is often the case today.  It was news and features that attracted and benefited consumers but were fashioned with an interest in warts and all coverage. 

By the 1980s in Milwaukee, news and feature coverage had been bent away from this approach to emphasize the newspapers’ own marketing concerns rather than the importance to the locals of people coverage or vital issues in print. One method was to create regional pages with advertising sold specifically in the neighborhood and news coverage similarly leveled.  Large part-time staffs were hired for that purpose.

The metro reporters at first thought the development of regional pages would deepen their hard news values, but it was mainly spreading the interference of other floors than the newsroom. It became more important to create area editions based on what could be sold rather than where news was happening.

Features had already seen the changes particularly when it came to radio and TV the same company owned and in the choice of what sort of artists and events to cover and what sort of feisty columns to allow. 

The newsroom made a bigger mistake. Its top editors started promising the corporate leadership their insights would lead to higher circulation numbers and higher suburban penetration, which translated into more cautious treatment of Waukesha and Washington counties where many advertisers were now ensconced and where the newspapers now desperately hunted for readership inroads.

The once familiar slowly evaporating merged logo.
By the time the Journal and Sentinel merged in 1995, the rationale was advertising far more than news coverage. The vain belief was that a short-term hit in circulation numbers would be followed by massive increases.

The promised boost in circulation actually led to a massive fall-off in those numbers.  The Sunday Journal which once boasted half a million subscribers has fallen toward nothing burgers.

For the arts, losing separate voices particularly hurt and it caused a sea change among these arts companies’ own marketing plans. It was also that 1990s time period I left as did hundreds of others, some by choice, some not.

In sum, newspapers are no longer a main artery of arts coverage. Mail and online campaigns are. JS eliminated individual voices for TV, theater and films, much as they had already done to books, architecture and the visual arts.

Today online newspaper sites like Urban Milwaukee -- and even the online sites of print brands -- are more sought for coverage along with Facebook, Twitter and social media in general. 

The common methods for arts groups and even community organizers are a large consumer snail-mail list and email campaigns that provide an echo of the past methods for readers who still like dialog and debate.  Smart performing arts groups not only excerpt from favorable reviews in their posts but also link the readers directly to those reviews on the originating websites, so they get the full taste of what the reviewers said.  Regularly you see this done for Next Act, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Skylight, Renaissance Theaterworks and so forth.

There is one amusing exception. The Milwaukee Rep, which once heavily relied on print coverage, is now controlling its own voice.  It runs similar online ads and email campaigns, but in their emails and lures on Facebook and the like, the one-line quotes are not back to the original sources but to the Rep’s own online site.  The power of outside voices to inform the arts is further diminished.

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.